Too much clutter. Who ever knew that bills could be so seductive, so distracting. There’s stuff all over my office floor, which if I hadn’t dragged all of the flarn (a term coined I think by Quinn to connote, denote (I forget the difference) rubbish and clutter in one’s life) on my… now I’ve forgotten the train… Anyway, my floor is like my mind. Too cluttered with stuff to function. My floor functions, I guess, but it’s…anyway. I wish I had more space in my head than I do.

So what’s next? There’s always this desperate…no, not always, sometimes it’s clear what I’m going to write, sometimes I don’t even think about it, but increasingly I worry about what I should start with, like I was saying the other day. What is the teaser? It’s like an episode of television. Here’s where you start, but…

What difference does it make? Like I was saying last week, or the week before, whatever.

I’m feeling pretty good today, not that that really matters. But it just means that I don’t have much to complain about. Though I’ll undoubtedly dig up something before our session is over.

Persis got back last night from a trip to DC. A long one. Tuesday to Saturday, and by the end of it I really felt like a dad, really got into the rhythm of things. This has happened before. Not that it means that I like being the sole parent, but in some ways it’s easier. Persis came home as I said (stupid me) (why do I hate repeating myself…? I am always afraid that… You know that indulgent intellectual or…discursive posture you get toward someone who is unknowingly telling you something that he has already told you, that kind of…you know, it’s really, like, when…and he does it all the time…[when] Charlie [Hah, I have done it! I actually used the pseudonym in the original. Censorship is infecting me!] tells me stories or details about his life or our mutual friends that he’s already told me, it actually hurts me. It’s like, if I was important enough to him to…if I was i--…as important to him as he is to me, he would remember what he tells me, even across the time and space. Motherfucker.) And so Burt and Persis and I went out for breakfast this morning, and all of a sudden it was like, “Does he need a coat, does he need a sippy cup or a fork?” Rha, rha, rha…and by that I mean that crow-like caw that has a glottal stop at the end of each syllable. When she is not here I do not need to ask these questions and delay myself. Everything just happens. Not quickly, but it does.

Neurontin, man. What a gift. I’m interrupting my flow of why I’m feeling so ok, why I’m feeling positively toward Persis, which is so rarely reported here…

But I mean, really…and I haven’t forgotten about Neurontin…who the fuck cares if I’m getting along with my wife? And I’m not saying this because--…although I have decided that I really need to stop involving her in this. I have not showed her any more, but I really am distressed by the fact that even just showing her the first two months has had such a constraining effect on my expression here. I mean, of what greater purpose can this…uh-oh, now I’m thinking metathoughts again, thoughts about this as a blog, instead of a conversation, jeremiad to you…it must happen; this is important. If this blog is to serve any higher purpose (listen to you you selfimportant little narcissistic turd), what greater purpose can it have than to reflect authentically the subjective experience of a marriage? I mean, and maybe it’s a bad marriage, maybe it’s not, we’ve been over this, but I really think more and more that the world, the social world – and maybe it’s sad vanity for me to articulate this as any sort of discovery – but the social world that we experience is the worst kind of lie: one that is designed to prevent people from coming in contact with each other in an authentic manner, and instead to represent ourselves as members of a social order in which a very narrow range of expressions are permitted. I mean, look: “How are you?” Everybody knows that that question is only rarely and at great peril to be answered in any way other than, “Fine.” And who do you do that with? With people with whom you are trying to break through the social barriers that we all voluntarily – Yes! Voluntarily! – erect around ourselves (Erect… Went to the zoo with Burt yesterday and there was this ape, a mandrill, that had this erection. And it was like, he was sitting, squatting back against a wall, looking at the swollen, red,…vermilion pudendum of his mate, and he had this like horizontal…must have been about 8 inches long (can you believe I was comparing my own endowment to that of an ape?) but rail thin. Not very attractive at all. I really wanted to stick around and see if he would fuck the chick, but we were on our way out, and what the hell would I have said to Burt (ah, the resistance to the imparting of information begins…arises out of an inability, a lack of desire to try to express that which one feels is outside of another’s ability to understand…)…anyway, erection. We erect these walls, we get married, we form the insular families, and then we develop (well, not all of us here, but many of those around us) this culture that is devoted to upholding, defending, making easier --- FUCK! I just took a sec to look at my watch, and I find that, again, I have pushed the wrong button on the stopwatch, and so I do not have a good indicator of how long our session has gone. This has been a tendency recently, and I wonder if it is not a desire actually to break down this particular wall of time between us. I mean, that’s a hard case to make since you are not actually bound by it, but maybe now that I can, now that I do not have to respect your fucking little, stupid, paltry and embarrassing to you because they show you to be a member of this class of minor minds that reinforce these stupid barriers that people…(I am typing very hard right now!)…and that I am taking advantage of this new freedom to expand beyond those walls, to show you that I don’t care anymore about your stupid rules, that I am above them, that I expand outside of them, that my erection is too big for your erection, that I am gaining weight and will, like I expanded out of the supposedly large oscar the grouch shirt that I bought for me at the children’s museum across the street from the zoo, that I am expanding outside of your barriers. I am better than them.)

I am better than marriage. And now I am typing very carefully, methodically. I am better than these strictures that the little people use. Instead of let them eat cake, I would say let them get married. Let them have kids.

I had a playdate with asian woman yesterday. She is… I’m reading this very cool book called The Surrender, which Reinhardt…throughout I have found myself tempted to use pseudonyms here in the original, to save myself the trouble of changing them later…referred me to (and for which she has earned my undying respect)…it’s about anal sex, how it is a transcendent sexual act, how it transformed the author. Anyway, she [the author, Toni Bentley…not Reinhardt or the asian woman] talks a lot about how…well, cunnilingus is put on a pedestal. And I would… I mean… I would really not mind it if I could go up to women and say, “Do [Would] you mind if I ate your pussy for you? I just want to watch you come and be on my way. No reciprocation necessary.” Would that be such a…

I mean, here perhaps is core of it. I want to have…no I don’t necessarily want to have sex with other women. I mean, that would be okay, but I don’t really need that. I get off perfectly well on my own, thank you. But I really like seeing women come. I just want to watch them, help them have an orgasm, and I want to do it from between their legs. And I don’t…Toni Bentley rags on men who simply desire to please rather than those who just love pussy… And I don’t really want to watch them come from any sense of obligation or subservience. I don’t really care that they enjoy it, though it gratifies me that they would… I would just like to participate… I just love…

What moment is more essentially antisocial that orgasm? I mean…and this is that scene in (oh god, I disgust myself) When Harry Met Sally, the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ scene. The orgasm is the most remote, the most protected, the most…unmentionable…act, experience in “polite society.” And I want to knock all that down. I want to go where I am not allowed to go. Did I ever tell you that I have this fantasy that (and it excites me to be writing this…that’s a no-no, it is exhibitionism, but here we are, and I am thinking of it)…this fantasy that…and it began I think in school, grade school, and so I envision a room of people, sitting down. And I could ask a question in my head, say [for example], “Who here masturbates?” And all of the people who…and of course, I was only interested in the girls…masturbate would levitate, arise from their chairs, unembarrassed, even unaware, perhaps that I was asking the question, because I asked it in my head and simply had this power to make truth manifest in the levitation of another person. Who has public hair [Let me take this opportunity to discourse on the delicious proximity of the words ‘public’ and ‘pubic’, the tendency for them to represent each other in my subaccurate and subconscious typing. As a general matter, I think it a very interesting orthographic phenomenon that two things that socially couldn’t be more remote from each other are forced into such uncomfortable and inconvenient proximity in our language. I do not really think my substitution of one for the other here qualifies as a true parapraxis since my common substitution of ‘public’ for ‘pubic’ (and it never happens the other way around) is a result of the fact that I often type the first word and more rarely the second and that my fingers have as a result come to expect the presence of the ‘l’ despite what my head might intend for them to render. Though I am of course totally open to, and in fact welcome giddily, the interpretation that that substitution represents my desire, well documented in this session, that the pubic become public. The substitution occurred several times over the course of this session, but lest the joke get old, I will pay tribute to it here and correct the subsequent occurrences.]? Pubic hair was my big interest in junior high, and it still…like, I don’t understand what the appeal of these calvic (that was from the spanish word), bald-pubed women making these piglike faces and snorting is to porn audiences. I mean, I love pubic hair, seeing it, especially for the first time on a woman I like…I once wrote in a draft of a scene for a script that preceded the one that I’m working on now and which script I often think about returning to (assuming I don’t completely abandon creative writing before this script is done), and was…and Leo once read this and underlined it as… anyway, it’s like, for me, seeing pubic hair… and the…

Okay, a women’s pants are coming off. And there’s this endless moment as they edge down her belly toward the line of her pubic hair and at first, it’s like I want to preserve that moment of suspense indefinitely. And I have this (and let me assure you that I masturbated shortly before coming to write this, so I am not, like – hold on, must answer phone – so I am not horny, or not starved, anyway –

So the women has…is--

Goddammit you bitch…I’m trying to write!!! Persis is calling me…

Okay…


Don’t know why…It’s naked exhibitionism. But I want to tell this to you.

She is, and my head is below her waist, looking up at her. And she is edging her pants, jeans down (I remember the first time I went to New York City, walking by the porn theaters and seeing the ads, I had not yet seen a porn, and the sign of a man and a woman in the poster in casual clothes, he goring her mouth with his tongue and edging his hand down her pants…man, that was one of the formative moments of my life, seeing that poster. I have fantasized many times about that poster…though not recently.) And she edges her pants down, and she knows what her pubic hair means to me. It is confirmation of her…her sexuality, her plump ripeness, her… I imagine that having pubic hair, seeing one’s pubic hair for the first time is to recognize one’s genitals as sexual objects. And so to see pubic hair, the ontology of pubic hair…no, the epis--…oh fuck that…to know that a girl has pubic hair is also to know that she is a sexual being with new… I stop on that word… Pubic hair meant sexuality to me in grade school. I have always masturbated, as you know, so I guess there was no…I needed some symbol to recognize in other people, in girls, the same feelings that I had always had but was taught that I could not express in public (oh the stories I could tell you that my mom has related to me, telling me to stop masturbating outside--… I am exaggerating…wasn’t that extreme…but suffice it to say that my tendencies to arouse myself and talk about said arousal in public as a child needed some gentle restraint…and I know that it never was more than gentle but that the message got across, and that ever since I have been trying to create a forum for myself in which I could talk about these things, display these things. So knowing about pubic hair – oh, looking under the table at Tracy Green’s overflowing hairy pussy, hair splaying out from around the edges of her plain white underpants. That was one of the formative images of my sexual life – was equivalent to knowing about sexual desire in another for me. And for some reason, I have been frozen in time… There was a party, a Bar Mitzvah party, I think, at Jonathan Moss’s house. And at it, behind the tent where people, the very people, girls I was talking about were dancing, partying… Shauna…what’s her last name?…black, uh…forgot it…anyway, Shauna Blackgirl and I were talking…talking where perhaps in a movie we would have been making out, preternaturally exploring each other’s bodies. And what we were talking about was… I was going down the list in my mind of all the girls in my class (and other classes… all the girls I was interested in, anyway) and asking Shauna if they had had their periods or if they had had p--…if they had pubic hair. And I will never forget…this conversation excited me so much: FINALLY! A way to know about the existence of pubic hair in the girls I saw every day but could never know… but whose pudenda I could never know. How lopsided a situation this was for me.

And then I remember now a time when my mom was…or when…I don’t know if I heard the conversation itself, or heard the conversation related to me. But it was around the time Rachel was…what? 11, 12, 13?…and my mom was relating to someone that she [Rachel, of course] was starting to grow breasts. And then there was a comment, probably a casual but pleasantly surprised, or not surprised, but…impressed…drawn out, “Oh,” and then my mom added as an afterthought, “And pubic hair.” And the way she said it, the way…or the way I…anyway, the way it occurs in my memory, real or false, is that she says it with a little bit of a scrunch, a scrunch that says…almost as if a nun were to say it, a little scrunch that betrays not a whiff of excitement or sexuality, but even maybe a little disgust at the awkward burgeoning sexual maturity in who otherwise is a little girl and has no sexual feelings at all (this is my interpretation of the expression, not necessarily my estimation of the truth). It is a tone of belittling…it belittles Rachel for having the…what?…awkwardness to grow pubic hair…? ‘Pubic hair.’ Like ‘masturbation’, such an ugly word. What would I call it?… Well, before that: my mom. So here she was talking about pubic hair in about the most unsexual way she possibly could, in a way that endowed Rachel with no sexual feelings. And I really felt a disjuncture here: it was an experience of the idea, the words, the image of pubic hair on a girl that did not at the same time bring with it a connotation of sexual feelings. It was disappointing. Even a little disgusting. But what would I call pubic hair: bear with me. Angel’s locks. Slurp moss. Orgasm threads. Good fur. Lusc… Maybe “good fur.” Generic, yet positive. Soft. Suggestive of positive feeling. Why is the fur good? What would make it good?…

My clock suggests I should stop, and perhaps I am just off on a tangent here…

How to close, as I put on my shoes and prepare to exit your office, with my back to you… I love pubic hair, and I would be happy if women would just let me roll around in it for a bit and be on my way.