The fucking laptop is doing an update as I begin this, so occasionally there is this pending expulsion of letters from behind the cursor; I keep typing, but the system just collects the words, like a chipmunk with…or a squirrel with acorns in its cheeks, before it finally catches up. How’s that for some opening lyricism?

I was in your neck of the woods this weekend, as I thought, formulated before I… What I mean to say is that I was thinking about what I would start with today and that sentence was it. I was down with Burt and myself, visiting mom and Bill and friends and…just…also seeing Mordecai Rame, the orthodox Jew teacher I had in junior high, who has since become a law professor and has burst out of the closet with a vengeance. Man, is that weird. And just fucking awesome. Weird because (as I was trying to tell him) you know you get these, especially when you know someone for a long time as a kid, these indelible impressions of who someone is, and all the contact and updating in the world isn’t enough to undo those impressions. So I still picture Mordecai Rame the junior high, the gifted junior high teacher, throwing chalk at students and being an inspiration for little pubescent boys over the course of…what?...over a decade. Anyway…

I didn’t think of you! I thought of you as we were landing at the airport, and then again tonight, but I really didn’t have the urge to drive by your place, throw someone…I meant 'something,' but that came out…at your windows, and squeal off. Or lurk at the top of the hill and spy down at you. Resisted that impulse…not really. As I said, I didn’t even have it. But for some reason I wanted you to know that I was close to you.

So going back to Platte is no longer a really positive experience. In fact, it pretty much reminds me of everything that I don’t have up here: friendship, family…and insofar as it is a time out from my life and thus offers the opportunity to sit back (yuck, [cliché]) and ponder, consider the shape of my trajectory, my current trajectory…it reminds me that I don’t have a great deal of professional…what?...heft. My friend Marco says that all that matters is that I’m writing every day, and I suppose he’s right, but I would much rather have that time to sit back and ponder my trajectory after I’ve accumulated that few pages a day into something of substance, of closure and completeness. I told Persis today that right now I feel like I’m in the middle of building something, and so I don’t want to be distracted with weekends and vacations and the like to “consider and reflect.” I just want the fucking week to go on and on so that I can write every day and not have these alternative expectations every six and seventh day. See, the reason God could rest on the seventh day is that he was already finished. Can you imagine, “And on the third day, God was dead tired from his labors, so he rested and considered the incompleteness of his creation. Then on the fourth day he began again.” Just doesn’t work.

All that said, I am seriously considering going back to work as an editor on a documentary project that my friend Kevin has gotten me…[or rather,] suggested me for and to me. A thing with the same guy who helmed the reality/docu show that I cut a couple of summers ago. And there are all kinds of alarms that go off in my head as I think about this, primarily the one that says, “But you’re just getting into a rhythm with your writing and now you’re going to throw it all away.” And then there’s the, “You will scar your beloved son for life if you do this, taking away his primary caregiver for thirteen weeks or so except for weekends.” I don’t have any good answer to that except, “Well, it sounds like a good project, and the fact of the matter is I have to figure out what it’s like sooner or later getting back to work.” And it’s a shame that it’s probably going to be cutting on location (i.e., not in Ecksville), but I’m definitely going to see what the flexibility is on that. Anyway, the big frustration is that Persis, similar to what she did when I first told her about and we first talked in depth about the blog idea (which she still doesn’t know is an actuality), she expressed provisional support for the idea at first but then after talking it through with me decided that it’s not a good idea. And I sat in the car tonight listening to her tell me about how hard it would be for Burt to lose me for that time, for five days a week, and I thought about all those – not even 'all' those, but [just] those specific women that I was talking about with Bill this weekend, those women that he knows who have essentially given up career and any apparent intellectual development to be moms and homemakers. And that is a choice that I respect even if I cannot fathom ever making it myself. And I see Persis sitting in the front of the car driving, and essentially telling me that she thinks that I should stay at home and not take this job because of what it will do to the children. And of course that goes right to my Boston Cream filling middle that’s just all mushy and sweet and that has no defense against the idea that I would be harming my child whom I love by doing this thing that would be an interesting opportunity, not just (as I’ve already said) because of what it’s about, but also because it offers us the opportunity to see what it would be like to have me working on a short project while trying to juggle childcare and all that. And of course I can’t write off the fact that it would be paying about… probably just under $3000 a week, and that it would essentially pay back all of the money that I’ve siphoned from our savings this past year, since the summer, since we moved.

I don’t know. I feel the same sort of hope that I don’t get it because that would make my whole world so much easier, so much less problematic. No change. What a nice idea. And to think about the upset, the upending that my going away for that period would entail. I get this almost heartburning sensation in my…you know, the solar plexus thing…and I recognize that impulse, that reaction that, when I pay attention to it (which sadly is most of the time), keeps me from doing anything “out there,” keeps me safe and comfortable and stable. And I’m at the point now where I feel like opportunities like this may not come around for me all that often, and the change notwithstanding, I have to follow this where it goes. I don’t think I would consider, like, doing something that would take me away for an entire year or more, but this is a 17-week (which probably means between 20 and 25) project that… Anyway, a good test case.

So…





In other news…what? I had far fewer complaints about my mom this weekend than I thought I would. I told Reinhardt on Thursday morning that I was really anxious about the visit (and certainly we can attribute most of that to my growing distaste for change as I get older) because my relationship with my mom has become a little attenuated since getting married and certainly since moving. I feel like she’s always probing and trying to get at what she thinks is there in me, rather than just talking to me. I feel like she’s such a stranger in those moments when it’s like she’s playing therapist on me. I don’t feel like she’s trying to know me as a son, but rather as a patient. And she has this stupid way of asking leading questions, like when she inquired about Burt’s drooping eyelid and said something like, “Have you talked about what to…”, or maybe it was, “Are you going to do anything about Burt’s eyelid?” Which set me off – I snapped back some response to her – because it sounded like she was assuming that there was something wrong with his eyelid beside the fact that it did not conform to the typical. I mean, sure, I look at his eyelid all the time…but, it’s interesting: when I do, there is a shadow of fear, of worry that it is a symptom of something bad, or something that he will be teased about. But honestly: I love that drooping eyelid. It is so cute and it makes his face so loveable and human. Like a puppy with a droopy ear. And even at the same time, I know that it is not - okay, I’m sorry, I have to use this word because it’s convenient - normal in the sense that you would notice it as a distinguishing feature of his face, and that there is therefore an impulse, an inclination as a parent to worry that maybe it is something that requires correction. But the thought of submitting Burt to surgery to correct a problem that is merely a distinguishing feature and not something that is harmful to him (should it ever get in the way of his eyesight, of course, that’s another issue)…I am resisting making a really…well, the truth is that I look at his face, and in fact, his drooping eyelid is because…or it seems to be because of a lack in one eye of the epicanthian fold. [Pardon me. I guess ‘epicanthic’ is the right term, and it’s its presence, not lack, that distinguishes that eye…though when I looked at it again later that actually wasn’t exactly the issue. Oh well.] And so that eye looks quite asian, as people have said that my eyes look. Maybe it’s just that Burt has one eye from me and one from Persis. And so I look at his eye and…you know, as a stupid white guy, I sometimes look at asian eyes and wonder (oh, I’m so ashamed) if their eyesight is ever impaired by it. (This is not new; I was tempted to throw this little aside out as a joke, but in the effort to be taken seriously, even in my…well, I don’t know…maybe it’s stupid to wonder those kind of things…anyway). So anyway, I don’t see Burt’s eye drooping and obscuring his vision any more than the lack [presence] of the fold obscures vision in an asian person’s eye, so… So anyway, I can’t…

I’m trying to articulate a feeling that I have about this that I haven’t quite gotten out. And it is this combo feeling of intense love tinged with sadness, and the love is for Burt exactly as he is, and the sadness is the simultaneous recognition that ‘as he is’ may cause him pain or embarrassment at some point in his life. I mean, I am virtually certain that he will at some point be teased about this feature, that kids or a doctor or even he will look at his eyelid and wonder what is wrong with it, treat it as if it is something wrong, and try or want to fix it or suggest that it needs to be fixed. And if he ever came to me…well, not ‘ever’…see, my fantasy is that he will, as his Bar Mitzvah approaches, come to me and ask to be…what?…circumcised…joined into the covenant…become party to the covenant between God and Abraham. And that that will make me so, so happy. That was a fantasy that I spun almost in order to become okay with the idea of not circumcising him. And I recognize that that may come and bite me in the ass once his thirteenth birthday approaches and he declares himself in love with his noble uncircumcised penis (I think about his little erections, and how I can see the head there beneath the foreskin, and I imagine what it would look like circumcised, ordinary but unproblematic.) And of course…well, what I was about to say was that I have this idea that I will not let him alter his body until after his Bar Mitzvah, seeing that as the point at which his body becomes his to alter (circumcise) as he wishes. And that if, after this thirteenth birthday, he desired to conform one eyelid to the other, I would not stop him, though I would have some serious conversations with him about that. So the love is there with this awareness that here is this quality about him that I love but that some stupid fucking hick eight-year-old will make fun of him for and that he will come home to me crying about why did God make him this way and all I will be able to tell him is how gloriously beautiful he is to me and to his mother and simply mouth those inept words that parent upon parent has mouthed fruitlessly to try to erase the sting of shame from a body part or body aspect that someone has heartlessly…you get it.

I love that eyelid. And I wish that…it’s like his cheeks and his eyes. I look at them and I see how beautiful they are and I imagine that all the world would think them beautiful and so I never really… But the eyelid. It makes him…makes me want to scoop him up in my arms and kiss him all over…but it also makes me want to protect him from other people rather than show him to them. That’s a key difference there.

Anyway, so my mom made this casual and…you can tell that there’s some baggage here, so in her defense, I don’t think she knew what she was walking into. But she makes these kinds of comments or asks these questions that assume a particular perspective or answer, and when she does that I just feel like staring her in the face until she is embarrassed by the question she has asked and that [so] she has to sit back and parse the question to find out exactly what in it gave offense.

But that didn’t happen this weekend because she was so busy monopolizing Burt that she and I didn’t really have much of a chance to talk. I talked to Bill instead, and that is almost always good.

I’m really glad that she and Burt are getting a chance to have such a close relationship. But part of me…I don’t know. I see what she does and imagine how I would do it differently, and I just make the decision to not say anything. I’ve learned from Persis the, that it’s a dead end trying to make anyone, and especially your parents, parent like you do. Persis never resists that impulse to talk though. Honestly, I don’t know if she ever resists any impulse to talk. That was low, sorry.

So what else? Good times with Marco and Charlie. Though I got really embarrassed because I … [Perhaps I have some distance from this now, so I can complete this thought. I put the kibosh on it because…well, because I knew Charlie would be reading, and it involved a comment I made to him and his reaction to it. I don’t want to take the time to trace the whole situation – it is complicated both in terms of what happened and the feelings it invokes in me – but suffice it to say that it involved my proposing the choir that I recently joined as a target for a charitable donation and then instantly regretting having done so. More perhaps another day…] They, my conversations with them prompted me to wonder whether I’m so addicted to understatement that I just naturally self-deprecate and describe my situation up here as more depressing than it is, and that maybe I do that with you, too.

Thank you for sending me to Reinhardt. She is very different from you (and here I am addressing, …well, yes, I’m addressing a concern I’ve had now for a bit [after] reading past posts, feeling that you, Garth Goldberg, have receded from the picture), but she is a lot of what I need, and the truth is I wonder whether if it is what I have always needed, or if I am just now taking advantage of a potential that was there even in you but that I never sought to avail myself of…and that is involvement. Sometimes I wonder why she wants to be an analyst, as if (and maybe this is the case, I don’t know) every analyst practices in the same way. She is not what I would tend to call ‘analytical’: she is very involved, and because she is also learning I have the opportunity to weigh in on procedural…I want to say because I know better how this is ‘supposed’ to work, that I am able to instruct her. A sort [of]…what?...bigheaded thing to say, but it’s there. I don’t know, maybe I do [not] know how it is ‘supposed’ to work, but there is an interaction that has become possible with her, whom I do not regard as an untouchable expert in what she does, the way I regarded you as such. This does not mean to say that I do not think she is very good. That is what I’m trying to say here. She is helping me a lot. But she is involved, leaning over me in a way that I don’t think (and this is what I am also saying) you ever could have been, simply by virtue of your style. I can’t see you being ‘her’ with anyone is what I’m saying, and while at times I allow myself the stupid pastime of imagining what might have happened had I been in therapy with someone like her all along, and thinking that maybe I would not have…I want to say ‘languished,’ though I think that that is a misrepresentation…as long as I have with you. Though I know I have not really languished. But I feel like I am making real progress, in just a few short weeks of four times a week. Of course, that is a variable that also was not and could never have been (given your fees and my time constraints in and the geography of Platte) under the terms of our working together. Anyway, putting aside all of the what-ifs, I wanted to thank you for sending me to her because there are things happening that I am finding very helpful.

Like seventeen. When I was seventeen…I know I’ve described to you the comment that Ron Leicht made to me at the end of the synagogue youth group that I was a part of, [he (Ron Leicht) being the adult facilitator of said youth group,] telling me that I was [very] fragile. And how that has stuck with me in a very hurtful way ever since then. She and I (Reinhardt) have been talking about that, around that this past week, and it turns out[, as my journal of the event reveals,] that much of the weight I attached to that event was illusory in the sense that my recollection of what happened there was very inaccurate in a self-serving way, and not a good self-serving way. My misremembering of the totality of what Ron Leicht said on that night has allowed me to convict myself all along of (or at least in the last…since I came back from Africa) being fragile and a giver-upper. Now I see that I was not that then, and though who knows what I will turn out to be now, I see that what I was really saying…or I don’t know about ‘really,’ but at least it is one cogent interpretation of it…is that I wanted to go back and be the person that I was at seventeen but am no longer [I think this bears some explanation. First of all, although Ron did say he thought I was fragile, it was in the context of a larger comment whose purpose was to suggest how I might make myself less so. It was unquestionably constructive, only I conveniently remembered a version in which Ron not only made no such constructive suggestions but also used body language that implied he thought my case was hopeless. And by thus distorting Ron’s comment I was able to invent a moment at which the ‘truth’ about me had been told to me, and which supposed truth I regarded subsequently as a sentence or a curse. Accordingly, I have used that comment to explain what I have perceived to be my failures, and as proof of my inevitable continued failure. But in the process, the comment itself has become a fetishistic substitute for those events that have constituted my failure. It is almost as if I were saying, “Had that comment not been made to me, I would not have failed as I have, and I would not be doomed as I am.” And I have implicitly imagined a time prior to the comment when I was somebody not fragile, nor doomed to failure, and to which time I have longed to return.]; I mean in terms of energy and optimism and resilience. Immediately after the journal entry in which I talk almost in passing about the whole tough-love (but definitely love) comment that Ron made to me, I refer to a rejection that I received on a paper that I wrote for a UCLA [film] class in my senior year of high school on the similarities between Blue Velvet and The Wizard of Oz…refer to a rejection that I received from the film quarterly American Film, where I had sent the paper for publication. [In my journal,] I write something like, “On to (fill in the blank of another film magazine)! The first of many [rejections] in a long distinguished career.” I don’t have that sense [anymore] of a career out there waiting for me. In all, I feel like my career has been desperate and short, certainly where writing is concerned, and I now find myself making this last ditch of an attempt to wrangle my juices and put something out there that will stick. I have hopes from [for] this script. I am afraid no one else does. I am afraid the fact that I have written about it here, and Roger Vann told me he is all about me getting my book done means that he really does not see any potential in the script idea. When I thought about that shortly after he made the comment to me [and] not long after the blog went online, I felt depressed. Now I am getting through the script at a slow pace of about 2.5 pages a day, excepting those days when I am not in a position to write. This week I had a little setback, as I have been stuck on one particular scene, but I think I have worked that out and will be able to catch up to my target pace and move forward. That is this week. But I am feeling tight in the ole solar plexus again, and I have not been in a very good mood since falling behind. I am sad that I never transform overnight into someone else, but always have to work through the same old ruts and weaknesses and characterological liabilities that I have always had to. And if I am ever to succeed or at least post some modest gain worthy of pride in this craft it will be not in triumph over those liabilities but simply out of [a] momentary holding of them in check long enough to push out something of meaning and value.

I hate afternoons. I was just out on the deck having a couple of cigarettes (Burt and Persis have gone off to some big ethnic festival that they hold here in Ecksville every year) and, like I was yesterday, I was sitting and feeling a feeling that I have always felt about mid-afternoons, especially on weekends. In those moments, as the sun is rich in the latter half of the sky, I look at myself and my life and see nothing but dull shadows. I feel bored and hopeless, and like the day is dying, another day, another day like the finite number of which I have until I die. And I think about how…it’s not even meaningless or worthless…this is a distinction I have tried to make before. I think about how just blah I am, my world is; nothing that arises to great tragedy or anything great; just blah. And when I try to go back and think about where this feeling about mid-afternoons comes from I always wind up back with myself [as a kid] in the living room, watching bad horror movies that I am afraid of but long to see (like Burt and his new fear of Santa Claus, the specific Santa Claus plastic guy that they put up in the home improvement center in Ecksville). My mom has forbidden me to watch them, or maybe allowed me just this one time, and it is a warm day after we have come home from the frolic of the beach, and I am sandy and not yet clean or ready to do anything else, and my mom (it is a Sunday) and I guess my dad (though he doesn’t figure prominently in this tableau) have retreated to their bedroom for a nap, the luscious nap of adults, and I am alone in the living room waiting for them to wake up, doing nothing for a while, aware that the movies that I want to watch on Channel 5 (what [which movies] we termed ‘the yucky stuff’; ‘we’ meaning me and my mom) are bad. And I even remember getting to the end of one, so that I was no longer scared of what was being shown on the TV, but rather was left with nothing to do, the day still light out, my mom asleep, with no clear idea of when she would wake up. And I imagine I felt alone and dependent and unentertained, and even (and this is me now freely riffing on what I imagine this five-or-whatever-year-old must have felt (I probably was older, a little)) feeling like the very real emotions I felt at the beginning or middle of these ‘yucky stuff’ movies were shams because the films that they were felt about simply came to their own mediocre ends after a couple hours. I am surely combining…this was not one single occurrence, but is probably an amalgam of memories that took place over a period of time. So I am bored, lonely, feeling like my feelings are unreliable, and mostly I can’t wait for the evening to begin (when they wake up) and I am excited and entertained and loved again through the evening and night until I go to bed. Once it is dark – and now I am back to now – it is okay, there is a new world of night out there to be taken advantage of. But before then, while the day wanes and dies, I feel sad and empty and whatever the generic and unromantic word for ‘hopeless’ is. That’s what I always feel around weekend afternoons. And it makes me want to go to sleep (the best solution) or watch a movie, a good one, to just pass the time away until night falls and I can begin again. Tonight, I look forward to a dinner with my family and MP’s (our neighbors [the McPhillips’s] who are becoming an increasingly permanent and good feature of our lives here) followed by the ritual bath, Burt’s mikvah, and then some time to myself, which tonight…gee, the world is my oyster: I can pay bills, watch a piece of a movie, get ahead on taxes…

I have a hankering to just tell you all of the things I am doing these days – the obsessive drive to watch all of the movies nominated for Independent Spirit Awards so that I can vote knowledgably on them on Tuesday (I can’t wait until this drive ends, because order and our finances are suffering my lack of attention)…what else? I don’t know. I could rattle off some things. Choir. Trips. Things that have little to do with my psyche and more instead to do with just catching you up on details, since I have not (and this is a good thing) spent that much time relating them to you. The fact that I am driven to dwell on details is also good, because it suggests, as I was hinting at last week, that there are not any great dramas to whine about. Of course, there are always the conflicts with Persis, the dislike of parenting (in the particular sense that I dislike it: following the kid around), the wondering when I am going to make myself useful to the world again. But even that last one is aided by this sense that I am moving forward with therapy and entering another chapter of me, returning to me that sense (though I fear, I am so afraid – and this is what I did not have as a seventeen year old – that this sense is illusory) that something great or at least good is coming for me and that all of this floundering will some day have been worth, if not ‘it,’ then at least something. Again, that is what I most miss about being a late teenager: the sense that I was entering the rest of my life with a great leap, a bound forward whose energy would determine its outcome. The sense that there was no end for any practical purpose, and that all I was was potential and that it was just a matter of time (not work, or change, or effort, mind you; those might have been part…or at least I would not have ruled those out as part of it but nor would I have foreseen them as efforts to gain [conditions to gaining] the upper hand over obstacles to my bound…they were…would just have been part of the inevitable glorious journey in my eyes) before that potential was transformed into glorious light for all the world to see. Now I mourn that energy and that outlook. I do not feel that energy, that sense of hope or looming triumph. I feel like the opposite is true: this sense that unless I expend effort, do work that I am not naturally inclined to do or very good at, and change about me those parts that have never been inclined to change, that I will stay where I am, that nothing good will happen to me. I have lost the sense of inevitability and instead it has been replaced with not just evitability but unlik--…improbability. And…what?...nineteen years later: ‘Seventeen’ is to ‘thirty-six’ what ‘inevitable’ is to ‘improbable’. That’s the SAT question I was always taught the wrong answer to. When I was seventeen I might have answered that: ’Seventeen’ is to ‘thirty-six’ what ‘inevitable’ is to ‘achieved.’ That is the sad lachrymose truth of my life as I currently relate to it in a few short sentences. I could stop writing this now and leave your office, because it’s not going to get more pithy than that.

I don’t want to feel this way for the rest of my life, and I honestly don’t know what to do, what I have to do in order to change that. One might say that it is just a matter of perspective, and that I have in fact achieved a great deal, though perhaps not what I had fantasized as a seventeen year old. But who among us does? That counsel would be greeted – that’s actually the kind of thing that I imagine you might say, that I would find to be wholly inadequate to the task of steeling myself for the journey of whatever-the-average-life-exepctancy-for-my-demographic-minus-thirty-six years ahead. What would Reinhardt say? Something to give me hope. Something to help me see that I have always triumphed eventually, even if it was to take on other challenges that made me feel like I was back at the bottom of the hill again. Maybe I should just get to the top of the next hill and kill myself, except that’s the devil in the glory of triumph: you never feel like ending it all because in that moment you imagine that it [i.e. the triumph] will continue forever.

My mom’s best friend’s husband died this morning as a result of…“as a result of”…hmm, why does that sound funny to me?…as a result of a long, though not long actually [~six months], bout with pancreatic cancer. You perhaps know him, since her [my mom’s] friend, Elizabeth Strong, was in my mom’s circle of therapists, and I don’t know if she was close, is close with Ruth Weir (cool that you guys ran into each other at that party!), but anyway… And I have been envisioning what it would be – wait…see, he did not die as a result of the bout. That was always preordained. The death. The bout did not result in the death; the bout preceded the death. Perhaps that is why people say “after” a long bout, and perhaps I just misspoke and should have said “as a result of pancreatic cancer.” But it is not “a” result; it is “the” result. As if the death came unexpectedly “as a result” of the cancer. “My mom’s best friend’s husband died this morning after…” Well, he died after a lot of things: being born, having kids, making some money and maybe losing some, helping a lot of people. Being a good guy, apparently, though I never had much of a rapport with him. “My mom’s best friend’s husband died this morning after being a generally good guy.” “My mom’s best friend’s husband died this morning as a result of being a generally good guy.” Who can disprove that? Yes, he had pancreatic cancer that appeared rather suddenly and at a very inauspicious time…as if there is an auspicious time to get cancer. Talking about this is very difficult, as you see, but I think it is important that it is engaging my vision of how a life progresses and then ends. Because it has made me think about how my life will end, how it will feel to die when I do, assuming that it is not untimely or sudden. (He was in his seventies; that doesn’t count as untimely to me.) “My mom’s best friend’s husband died this morning, having been diagnosed less than a year ago with pancreatic cancer.” Perhaps that is a little more acceptable, but still suggests a non sequitur. What if a brick had fallen on him and killed him this morning? The sentence would be no less true.


I mean, here we report these factoids of someone’s death and try to tie a bow on it by citing the cause: a brick, a tumor, a car accident. That somehow makes it less threatening. When the truth is, “My mom’s best friend’s husband died this morning after having been born seventy-odd years ago.” And one could certainly argue that he died as a result of that. The birth, the sine qua non. Everything else that has happened to him could have not happened and he still would have died…except the being born. If that did not happen he would not have died today, and since that is the only thing that, if changed, would have prevented his death, perhaps I should, we should settle on that as the cause.

So what to do in the meantime?

Time’s up. And Persis and Burt are home. How fortuitous that I do not have to come up with an answer to that question today.

Take care of yourself.

I‘m in love with an evangelical Christian woman. And she’s married. And I haven’t even met her. At least she used to be Jewish, though. That’s probably the biggest thing that I got out of this past week’s trip for my abstinence training…[abstinence] education training, that is. Abstinence [itself] is coming naturally enough right now. I bookended the weekend reading this book that was recommended by a professor I had heard interviewed on this great radio show that I think I told you about called Speaking of Faith. I wrote him and asked if he…I was looking for an eloquent critique of pornography from the Christian perspective, to match the various and sundry critiques that are extant from a secular perspective. Anyway, he came back with a couple of titles, one of which turns out to be a classic of the genre, called…Sex for Christians. The other is called Real Sex:…and has some subtitle that has to do with chastity. By this woman Lauren F. Winner. And as it turns out, she’s this intensely Christian, intensely smart, beautiful woman (check out her photo on the dust jacket…at the…this is the one I’m talking about). And I look at her and it’s like, man, this is who I should be married to. Except for the Christian, Jewish apostasy thing. Anyway, I’ve been fantasizing about her – though predictably, not sexually. Just what it would be like to live with her, be in a relationship with her. And I guess what I’m leading up to is that reading her book – which has a take on pornography, but not quite the incisive one that I was hoping for; smart, to be sure, but basically the standard j--…take on it from the Christian perspective and the more typical feminist one: it’s [pornography is] bad, it objectifies, it gets in the way of a relationship with a real person. She quotes Naomi Wolf, and I remember reading Wolf’s justification or rather critique of it and thinking how…I don’t know. I don’t think that a woman is…this is awful to say, and harder even to justify after Hard Core; has become the classic study that it has. But some guy is going to have to stand up and tell all these chicks that they’re…they’ve got their…never mind…not gonna say anything crude here…but that they’re wrong. I guess I could do it here, but that’s not what this is about. Anyway. I’m wanting to say, to point out how much solid relationship advice I’ve gotten unpredictably from these Christian books on sex: first the hysterical Focus on the Family book that I talked about for a while last year, now this one (which is, by the way, nothing like the…what’s it called?…uh…An Affair of the Mind; Real Sex is actually…there is actually a mind behind it; you get the feeling that, though it arises from the perspective of faith, that its author has genuinely come around to faith from a path of doubt. Rather than the Affair of the Mind woman who sounds like she has come to faith from a path of fear.). Anyway, why should that be? It’s also true that a great deal of the abstinence training was about relationship training…and this is one of the taglines of the movement, that abstinence education is marriage education. Of course, I don’t buy the marriage part; and I don’t want to waste time here mounting a sortie against it because you know how I feel and I don’t need to explain myself, to…

Burt crying for me like the sky is falling. Both painful and wonderful. Want to run downstairs and sweep him up in my arms. Yesterday, when I got home from the trip, he was sleeping, and after talking with Persis for a while I lay down next to him while he was sleeping and just lay there. Next to him, while he slept. And I scooped him up a little so that he was lying on my shoulder (we co-sleep, remember, so this happens every day; but that refueling of him, that reuniting with him while he was sleeping was just so heavenly. To drift off to a nap with him resting on my shoulder, my ribs, curled into my hip. Is just. God, what a great feeling…) Persis has shut him and herself into the room where he will nap. I am more at ease because I cannot hear him.

Anyway. So all this relationship…this sound, satisfying relationship advice coming from Christian books on sex. And maybe more important than why that is is why that should surprise me. Certainly because part of me – and this is especially true about the Affair of the Mind book – doesn’t really believe that anything that could speak to me might come from that perspective. I imagine that anyone who would cling to that worldview must be shallow and uninsightful about relationships. Obviously that is not true, but that’s my stereotype. And it turns out that – at least this is what I’m coming to believe – that what makes relationships work is…what am I trying to say?…well what I want to say is that it is quite simple. And where I go astray is that I get caught up in the complicated web of interpersonal, interfamilial, interpsyche interactions that form the fabric of a relationship, rather than the simple worldly truth of how I might treat my partner if I really wanted to make peace with her, and have a relationship of love. Coming back to the (God I feel like this whole entry is sounding so…new-agey: “a relationship of love.” Shoot me now.)…to Ecksville [after the abstinence training], I felt a new clarity about what it would take to make my marriage work, and last night, as I snapped at Persis about something as I went upstairs (I was angry at her because…uhhhhhh, long not particularly interesting backstory….there was this festival to benefit the public radio station in town last night and I wanted to go after Burt went to bed, but I needed to be the one responsible for Burt because Persis had been doing it for three nights [while I was gone] and so I left the house after he was asleep, and I didn’t get ten minutes from the house when she called me back because Burt was crying for me, so I just got into bed with him with all the things I had to do and I was actually looking up Lauren Winner on the web and looking at the pictures of her and Googling her husband and listening to my iPod and in the middle of this Persis came in and wanted me to get up and give Scram his fluids (you remember: cat, kidney failure, needs IV fluids, like, daily) and I got snappy at her because….and it was kind of funny because nominally I was…I hate it when I’m listening to my iPod while doing chores (which is often what I do to pass the time) and Persis tries to talk to me; means I have to take the…no, unlock the iPod, take off the phones…no, pause the audiobook, take off the phones, answer…stop whatever I’m in the middle of of course, answer or address whatever she has to say to me or ask, then reverse the whole procedure…you see what I mean. And last night in was in my underwear in bed, comfortable, and after (there was this little tiff we had about the fact that she didn’t do any laundry while I was gone, letting it instead pile up on top of the already large pile of unfolded dry laundry, whereas I always make sure to wash dishes (her job) while she’s out of town) she hadn’t…so in any case, I didn’t feel like getting up and going to give the cat fluids, but the really funny thing about this was that the thing I was most irritated about (which of course I couldn’t tell her, but realized the irony of immediately) was that I was really angry because I was sitting in bed fantasizing about Lauren F. Winner, and here my wife comes in and tells me to go medicate the cat. “Goddammit, Persis, what do I have to do to be able to fantasize in peace about my imaginary married evangelical Christian girlfriend?!?”), anyway, so as I was going upstairs, I started to think about, “Well, what would Lauren F. Winner do, or say?” Sounds like a South Park episode. And as I was stomping upstairs, I stopped, reversed course, went to Persis, and said I had come back down to be nice.

I think about the Forum, and how much I think…feel like that helped my relationships while I was putting it into practice. Same thing. The question of what would so-and-so do. What would the loving thing to do be? Or as the Forum would say, getting off it. Those all have to do with adopting a course of action that is not dictated by what one feels but rather by what one’s principles are (I subsume doing what one imagines someone else would do into the same category); this is, of course, exactly what the essence of the Forum is: acting out of one’s commitments rather than one’s thoughts or feelings or opinions. And of course – though I hesitate to lay claim so blithely to this rich body of knowledge, especially with the possibility that Lauren F. Winner is reading – …and here I hesitate, Reinhardt would tell me to not be so …anyway, so what if I’m wrong?…acting in a relationship according to one’s declaration of faith in God, which presumably is unchanging, is essentially the same. But those are all essentially superficial acts: not that faith, or one’s commitments are superficial; but rather to act “as if” is fundamentally to suspend one’s analysis, invariably complicated, of a situation that has resulted in one becoming upset, and instead to just act as if…something else. I don’t know. In a way it’s disappointing, because I imagine this intense and fruitful love arising out of two complicated people who put their heads together and analyze the shit out of themselves and their relationship and why they’re together, when in fact, I’m beginning to feel that contentment in a relationship, my relationship anyway, is a result of suspending all that introspection and analysis and instead just kind of doing what Brian Boitano would do, so to speak. Maybe that’s the case for living as an individual, too; if that’s the case though, than I really am fucked.

So anyway, what else. Therapy continues well. Writing is okay. I’m enjoying singing. I don’t know. Call me stupid, but I kind of think that if something I was doing was bringing in a little money right now, I kind of might actually be a little bit content.






See? How boring is that? I mean, who the fuck cares, really, if I’m content?






My back hurts, that’s something. I’ve been doing well at saying no to foods that don’t help me when I bend over the sink to brush my teeth. (I am imagining Lauren F. Winner reading this. I imagine that she will Google herself and find this page. I imagine that…BTW we have the Same! Blog! Template! Yes! On Blogger! See? We were made for each other. I can think of no one else that I’d rather spend my life not having sex with. Perhaps, if I link this to her blog, she will see, and will be directed here. Would she be flattered…




I’m going to stop this. This is not about therapy, but mugging. My apologies.




Anyway.




I’m sitting here looking around my office trying to find something to complain about.





My office is a mess. When will I finally be able to make order stick?






I know there was something. Oh! On Friday, I had this…Joshua Yalom told me that he and Manna were pregnant with numero tres, and then Raven (Joshua’s sister, with whom I was staying during the abstinence trip) told me she and Harish were expecting their second and I practically…I mean, I know I’m supposed to be happy for people in that position, but what I really wanted to say was…“You idiots. Can’t you keep your holes in your pants? I mean, how can you guys think you can just run ahead of the pace (I associate here to the fact that the pacer in a marathon is called a rabbit, who is …which is also the gold standard for fertility…interesting) when I’m not ready yet? You call me a friend, and you just go ahead and have another…get pregnant again without consulting me? I’m Not Ready Yet! And beyond that, I May Never Be Ready! I May Never Want To Have Another Kid, and you pushing me like this makes me feel pressure to do so and next time I really wish you would consult me first rather than just springing it on me like that. I know I’m supposed to be happy for you, but I’m not. I’m sad…not sad, angry…angry at you, frustrated, or…th--…I don’t know…sad? For me? Am I sad for me? That I feel like my life has come to this airport conveyor belt of pushing kids out…this is it: this happiness that I’m supposed to feel for you is just the wallpapering over the fact that you fucking little mindless rabbits have, give no thought to it. Of course you’re going to have another kid; that’s what your species does. Your species. Not my species. My species waits and evaluates and considers and decides. And you speak to me like I am one of you? I am not one of you. I will never be one of you, one of those people who pretends to make an informed and thoughtful decision about having a child, but whose very sham of a thought process is just what the unconscious…it’s just the routine, the skit that the unconscious mind puts on to make the conscious mind think that it’s actually thinking. You do not think. Yes, you are both smart, and successful, and your futures are assured, should you continue to do what you are doing now (all those Friday nights laying [lying, I mean] together on the couch channel surfing because you have time to do things that mean nothing to you whereas I don’t have [even] enough time to do those things that are meaningful to me), you will live your lives and heal your patients and have your kids and be happy and grow old and die. But that is not me. I do not have such a future waiting for me, not now. I am actually thinking. I am actually in my subconsc--…I think about that story you told me, Joshua, that your second kid came six months earlier than you would have wanted it to because Manna “jumped you,” and you had sex without protection. What were you thinking? If Persis were to do that to me, I would…it would be a nail in the coffin.”

I want to do something to break out of the rut that this format (even the mention of this as a “format” suggests that it has ossified into a…a…tradition, a…I don’t know, a practice; rather than something that arises. I want to shake it up a bit. Instead of starting with some meaningless aside on something that’s going on and expecting that it will segue into what is real. Even though that is my sense of how therapy unravels [I initially pounded out ‘unreavels’ which suggests ‘unreveals’; make of that what you will.], but it is precisely that “sense” that makes it stale; because “sense” is what I know, and what I know is already…has already occurred. I am feeling stifled physically, like there is not enough air in the room. I would like to get out and go for a walk, even though I just came about an hour ago from …perhaps it was the two pints of beer that is making me feel sluggish and stale. I am drinking more beer than usual. And not…well, yes, I like the fact that it has alcohol. But I just really like beer here. And it’s definitely an Ecksville thing. In Platte I’d be drinking gin and fruit juice, maybe. Here it’s lots of beer. So much beer that you can have a different…five different kinds every day and not repeat yourself until you have already forgotten how the first one tasted. That is not stale. The beer is always new.

Last night Persis had us have a dinner party. With people I liked. And they spent most of the time…these were married professors…talking shop and I was just a Burt placeholder. Made me wish I could just go upstairs and watch the movies I’m watching as part of the Film Independent…the Independent Spirit awards viewing that I’ve been participating in via Netflix. I’m getting to see – and I have an excuse to do so, so that makes it all the more compulsive…or gives me a reason to be compulsive about it (there’s a time limit) – independent films that I probably wouldn’t see even if I were still in Platte. It’s nice to feel connected to the rest of the world. I don’t feel that much these days. A single phone call from William asking a question about editing (together with a couple of cigarettes that I have indulged in a pack of this week) was enough to send me into a…spasm of excitement. Maybe it was the nicotine.

Coming home to Persis is excruciating because of Burt. If he weren’t in the picture I could just come home and ignore her, or there wouldn’t be any repercussions for blowing her off for the evening. But this childcare thing, having to negotiate with each other about every minute that we spend apart, and even about every minute that we spend together. How I cannot wait, however our relationship shapes up, until that day that I do not have to consult her when I want to disappear for an evening. That’s perhaps the worst thing about being a father: having to deal with the mother. You recognize why…at least you understand why…or rather you understand on a visceral level how raising the kid is not an evolutionarily mandated activity. Once the kid is in the world the species is already on the road to reproducing itself. So evolution suggests that…[Hmm. Let me try again. You recognize that, inasmuch as present fathers have not been strictly necessary for the proliferation of the species, natural selection has not gotten around to evolving out of us men the desire to leave at the first convenient opportunity.]…well, not to say that the father sticking with the young has [doesn’t have] its evolutionary advantages. But Persis and I display the example that only one parent really needs to be involved actively in childrearing. Thus this arrangement whereby we are always singlehanding it while the other one goes off and does things that are supposedly necessary. Anyway. If I did not have to check with Persis or care about what would happen, care about the equit--…the fairness of shutting myself in the room in front of a movie whenever I wanted, our fights would be nowhere near as severe. The fact that she is a motherfucking control freak wouldn’t matter as much. I could tell her to go off and control her…I don’t know…whatever…while I did exactly what the… This is well trodden ground at this point.

Aren’t you proud of me for kicking it up a notch to four times a week? This was my second week at it, and while I’m enjoying it, enjoying the luxury of going every day, I also still experience those sessions that appear devoid of direction, appear to be aberrations, not related to anything. Persis… I made the decision to do so, to go up to four times a week, after having brought it up with Persis and then having the subject disappear. Just like she hasn’t brought up the blog since I showed her those first couple of months’ worth of stuff earlier…late last year. I don’t know what she thinks; if she thinks that just because I’m not talking about the things with her that they are not continuing to develop as subjects in my mind…? This is one of those things that really kills me about her; the solipsism of her being able to just forget that certain subject matters exist and never even asking about what I’m thinking about it. That’s the only way I can explain to myself her lack of interest or inquiry into the blog thing. If she were truly as paranoid about it as she appeared to be when we talked about it, one would think that the subject wouldn’t have just disappeared from her consciousness. But I haven’t brought it up. I haven’t showed her any more of these sessions. What is she thinking about them? That I have put the idea to rest because she was not in favor of it? That I have been distracted by other things, that I have continued to be typical of me, a flake, about the idea and not followed through on it? Anyway, that’s kind of how she was about the therapy issue. And so I just quietly went from two days a week to three and then the next week four.

Writing these is becoming so pro forma. And I know that if I did not have the blog I would probably leave off doing them. I checked out a site meter that enables me to see if anyone, and if so how many people have logged on to the blog. It was principally so I could see if anyone was showing up (I anticipate that no one is any more, but then again, that is my default setting) and so to decide whether it was really worth it to me to continue doing this. Of course, I haven’t made a huge effort to get the word out, but then I’ve seen this go from an important run of a few months to a sort of unimportant regular addition to the shitpile of internet literature to a mere habit that is of as much importance to my person as wiping my ass: sure, it serves a purpose, but is hardly part of my higher functioning. Now I feel like I was silly for ever thinking that these could be compiled without significant additions into a book, and could form anything more than an interesting commentary on the true meat of the ostensible book. It kind of parallels my time here in Ecksville, which has transitioned from a miserable struggle to a dull existence with the possibility of future development but by no means the demand or insistence or necessity. I’ve been writing more regularly, having determined to get off two and a half pages per day during the work week, which I’m determined to keep up with. So far, so good: 7.5 pages that is actually nine, and I’m feeling okay about them. This week will be the challenge, when I go to the abstinence-education training. These things are always more fun in the anticipation; when they come around I kind of dread them. I especially dread staying with friends; what seemed like a good way to save some money is actually recipe for distraction. It will be important for me to get some writing in those days after the training, an hour of this kind of mind emptying free form that will I hope enable [me] to get some of my thoughts down in a way that I wasn’t able to after the last conference. And I don’t think that that will be an imposition on my hosts for me to say that I’ll want to disappear for a while each day. But the problem is that I won’t be able to do any more than that. No room to watch a movie. No room to actually do some script writing if I want to. Having to put in the requisite visit time. Of course, I know that if someone wanted to come stay with me that way that it wouldn’t be a tragedy. But I worry about keeping up the pace with these various trips comings up: Denver, Platte in a couple of weeks, Phoenix in March. Then Idaho. 2.5 pages is not a lot, but “given to me every hour, forty hours every week…” it adds up. That’s the idea anyway.

I mostly feel like my physical body is a drag. I wish I were exercising more. I feel not so much pleasure except when I’m singing, masturbating, drinking beer or booze, watching movies, and occasionally when I write. I guess shitting is okay sometimes. And of course smoking cigarettes. I start to understand why people mutilate themselves in order to feel anything at all. I have a psychiatrist appt. this Wed. Will I tell him this? I suppose this is important: going to see a new meds guy here in Ecksville. I won’t feel as much compulsion to share my treatment with Bill, and I suppose I will feel more inclined to try things that I think he might not approve of. I hope this doctor is good. I hope he is able to give me some ideas that I have not had. My fear is that he will show up and basically say, “Yeah, you pretty much don’t have any other options than what you’re already doing, and if you think that’s bleak, think of how people felt even before the invention of antidepressants.” I want him to give me hope for more energy, a more positive frame of mind. I want him to suggest the other meds that I might have tried with Persis. Perhaps I should suggest them to him, if I still have them. I want him to suggest stimulants, which Bill finally suggested after Laila did. I want something other than time that’s going to help me out of this rut. Why is it that I don’t necessarily feel as bad the rest of the time as I do when I’m writing these. I have started thinking of this writing time as the time I mine my stores of acrid thoughts, since I don’t have much cause to go there the rest of the time. There are actually moments of relative contentment since I started going to therapy more frequently, since I started writing steadily this last Wednesday. Do they get reflected here? No, because it’s simply in the nature of this beast to be bleak. This is…I mean this is what people talk about when they think that it’s the process itself, the…what?…reflexively reflective posture that causes all this bad stuff. It’s as if I were to be, like, sitting on a tack and wondering why I am always so physically uncomfortable when I come back and sit on the tack. There just isn’t any way around this. This is The Way I do these sessions. And yet that’s the flip side to the ‘I hope the doc will have something that will cure me.’ I feel like there are alternating moments of hope and despair. The despair is never crippling; it’s just a quiet knowledge that I will have to live with the blahs that I currently have probably for the rest of my life, and that they will never get better until I choose to take myself out of situations in which I am encouraged to indulge in them. That is that part of me that would counsel me to stop writing these, since I get enough therapy during the week, and it is often much different in tone than what I write here. No, in addition to taking on a…what was the word I used?…a format, this process has taken on a tone, and that tone is one of a bleak, dull, gray resignation, father rather than the sense of aggressive searching that goes on in therapy.

I’m learning how to be an asshole better. The Asshole is a voice that has emerged in contradistinction to The Critic and The General (who has not been given enough attention I think). The Asshole, The General, and The Critic: these appear to be the three primary voices right now (insofar as I am aware of no other voices yet, have distinguished no others) that are at war over my psyche. The Asshole is the guy who expresses his needs and feelings with complete disregard for anyone else’s needs and feelings…a useful guy, to be sure, but with whom I have a very ambivalent relationship, since I have been raised to believe that The Asshole is an asshole. Persis is an asshole, only she appears not to have any compunction about it.