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.”