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.