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.