I’m writing from my newly reconfigured office. I can’t tell you how good it feels to get all this crap out of my way. It is as if…and I’ve said this before – all the stuff on my office floor reflects itself somehow into my head, and my entire personage feels cluttered and stuck and dusty and messy. But when I get the floor cleaned up, put some space back into the place, get everything neat and nice looking and easier to live in, my world becomes brighter. I don’t know whether I allow my room to get that way as a punishment, as a corporal (really, because that’s what it feels like) punishment for being a failure. But that’s another topic, not one that I need to harp on right now, although…did I mention that Mary Vache…a really nice woman and a friend…has achieved phenomenal success (as far as I’m concerned), that she deserves it, and that I feel as a result like I should just put a bullet in my brain. It’s like I’ve…I told Reinhardt this week that I feel like God has abandoned me. That he was traveling with me through my early teen years, and once I got to the Ivy League, he began to realize that I was not his chosen one…or maybe he put me on probation, and by the end of that time, especially around the time that I started up therapy with you, he decided that I was not what he thought I was, and like all male mentors that I have sought out, abandoned me with best wishes and a consolation prize of a life. That’s another locution, expression that came out in Reinhardt this week, that I’m living a consolation prize of a life. That I am doing things that are ‘important’: raising a child is ‘important’: “It’s one of the most important things you can do in your life.” But it isn’t the prize. The prize is raising yourself; it’s not working and toiling through intellectual stagnation so that this little person can grow up to be just plain normal and that maybe, maybe he’ll get his shot at being The One. No, that’s not the prize at all: that is the consolation prize: “Ohhhhh, I’m sorry Joel, you missed the grand prize and you’ll have to go home with…no, no, we’re not going to leave you with nothing, we’re actually going to give you a son, and in about twenty years, he’ll have the chance at the big spin. Isn’t that wonderful? ‘You get to go home with the consolation prize of the possibility of being the winning coach,’ is what I’m saying. Good luck to you. Sorry things didn’t work out.” But when God says that to me, he doesn’t…he just turns his back and walks away, that motherfucker. He doesn’t give me the chance to tear up [i.e. cry] with rage and tell him how mad I am at him for having groomed me for this and putting me (he says he’s sorry; doesn’t he know that with all this high placement and…well, grooming, for the championship, I form emotional connections with certain outcomes? Doesn’t he know that I am now wanting, cannot stop wanting that thing that he…well he never promised me it, but he made me, made me, want it, and now I can’t stop wanting it, but instead of letting me lay into him about how inconsiderate, how inhumane and unfair he has been, he just says he’s sorry with a game-show-host eyebrow wrinkle of feigned sorrow, he says he’s sorry and then turns his back on me without giving me the chance to answer him. And I want to yell after him, “YOU CAN’T DO THIS TO ME! WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO DO NOW THAT YOU HAVE MADE ME WANT THIS AND NOW I WILL NEVER GET IT. You can’t just send me back to the heartland of normal human achievement, like midwesterners on The Price Is Right, you can’t just send me back there and expect me to raise my family, grow corn for the rest of the world, provide continuity of the species and no more, you can’t expect me to go back there and be happy!” This is my Salieri moment, I guess. This is where I now…you know, I would love it if there was…I think God is a heartless game show host, who spends his afternoons in tanning machines and doesn’t really care about the prizes he doles out to some and denies to others because they are nothing to him. He does not have to worry about having or not, like Bob Barker…you know, it would be great if they made game show host salaries dependent on the good outcomes of their players, so that when players lose, the host loses. That’s…I wish that God would lose too, now that I have lost. I wish he could feel pain, have a handicap, a…what’s one of those…I remember my…one day I was running at the airport, and I had a cramp, and my grandmother told me not to run with a cramp because I would get a hernia…this was like one of those abdominal cramps. And somehow I have…I think I asked her what a hernia was…or somehow I got the idea that it had something to do with the spleen. I wish God would get a hernia, or a busted spleen because of my failure. Because I have depended on him and instead of delivering me to where I believe he had promised me that I would--, instead he has delivered me to here, and as a result…and because he has then abandoned me with a little shrug and turned away to go groom the next big thing, because…I wish as he turned he would get a pain in his side that never goes away, that as long as he lives he will remember the pain that he got when Joel Geller…when he failed to deliver on his promise to Joel Geller. I hope he remembers me when his intestines hang into his scrotum, and all of his shit now has to pass through his genetive [generative] area. That would be nice and symbolic: that the rest of humanity was tainted because God turned his back on me.

Deep breath.

I had – and this is something that I have thought about whether I would tell anyone…and by anyone I mean you and Reinhardt, and by you I mean you and everyone I know who is reading. It seemed to me significant because it…well, you know, usually when I masturbate (I’ve probably told you this already) I’m really concerned about mess. Isn’t that sad? I mean, I…masturbation for me has become this relatively routine activity that I do much as I would taking a shit. It’s an urge that builds up and then has to be expiated on occasion, at irregular intervals. Sometimes it’s a couple of times a day – fairly rarely, though I do seem to go through rashes – and sometimes there will be a week or more gap. And this at this point has nothing to do with whether I have sex with Persis, because as you know that has not happened in a while, though we’ve been…well, I’ve been making advances, asking her every so often if she wants to have sex. Most recently she’s been having her period, and though if we were totally hot for each other that might not get in the way, but when it becomes an issue of finding the time when the two-year-old isn’t around, mess looms large as a consideration because…well, it’s become this “thing” that time has to be made for. Anyway, so it occurs with somewhat random frequency, this masturbation impulse. And I envision it as this…(truly, I do; though I know it is not this, though I wonder what it could be based on the way it builds up and is then expiated, like I said)…I envision it as this fluid that is created somewhere in me, and the sexual urge, horniness, is in my blood, or is a chemical within my brain, and it just kind of builds up and eventually I have to do something about it because… I know that when I start fantasizing actively about people…and it is always one of a couple of people whom I know, friends of mine, never anyone in Ecksville…(I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a place that feels as devoid of eroticism for me as this little town.)…and when I have the opportunity, I go to the bathroom…sometimes it’s before bed because expiating the urge will help me sleep. Or sometimes it’s during my writing sessions so that I can concentrate on writing better, or just kill some time. And I’ll go to the bathroom and masturbate and ejaculate into the toilet with a minimum of mess – a couple of sheets of toilet paper better be all that it takes – and if the timing is right, I’ll even pee and wash out the track that way, and then I’ll pull up my pants (though they are never that far down[, if it’s during the day]) and go about my…whatever…business, so to speak. And it’s actually kind of important that you get the picture of my picture of my horniness right now being this…not really a burden, but kind of a physiological appendix, something there that may once upon a time have served some function but right now is just this ancillary structure that serves none other [purpose] than to flare up and get in the way now and then and that on such occasions has to be removed, figuratively speaking. And when it is removed, it should be done in a place that’s convenient and sterile and that disturbs nobody and leaves no trace behind. It’s a little sad when I write it that way, because I have clearly…what?...developed?...evolved?...this role of eroticism in my life that is well contained. Never a problem. Never impacts anyone. Sustainable orgasm, in the environmental sense.

Anyway, I bring all this up, because the other day, on Thursday afternoon, I hadn’t masturbated in a while, and as sometimes happens when the urge returns to me after a long absence, I am tempted to involve other things. Porn, typically, because that is not messy; and like ejaculate in the toilet, it can be put away neatly with a minimum of effort. But when I’m really getting aroused, what I think of are my dildos, one of which is a nice small carrot size that is entirely manageable, and one of which is this…it was really funny, the…when I ordered this out of the Good Vibrations catalog…I already had my one dildo, the small one, that worked just fine (and this was years ago), and yet I had the desire to feel something larger in me…and just so we know what we’re talking about here, not that there’s any real question about it, but by ‘in me’ I mean in my ass. And so…it’s kind of hard, as you can imagine…or, I don’t know, maybe you’ve gone through the same process…kind of hard to, like… Furniture you can measure, and then you can accurately measure the space it’s supposed to go in to see if it will fit as you imagine. Not so with an anus. You know, when you read these measurements – 1”, 1½”, 2” – it’s very difficult to picture what those would feel like, beyond having something that size to try on…but of course, if you had that you wouldn’t need to order one. I suppose you could, like, measure some carrots…but that’s ridiculous. Anyway, so I knew I wanted something larger, but I didn’t know how large, and since I was ordering a silicone dildo, and silicone is an expensive material, I didn’t want to get it too small. I wanted to err on the size of largeness, and so I ordered this thing that, based on my experience with the smaller dildo, I thought would be about the right dimensions to satisfy my craving.

Well, so the box comes, and I open it, and I take this thing out, and I swear, I remember it as if ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ was playing in the background, out and up comes this huge pink translucent cock that takes my breath away. I mean, I was almost scared of this thing. It was very amusing. And getting it in was not at all the totally pleasurable thing that I imagined, but it did present itself as a challenge, one that I was able ultimately to meet, and which has since given me a good amount of pleasure, though not as much still as the smaller one, about which I want to talk more and from which this little story of the big pink silicone cock is a little diversion.

So the other day, I had this urge to involve other things. And I had this idea that I wanted to use the smaller dildo (I hate that word. I want to use another word, and ‘wand’ has come to mind. ‘Dildo’ is another one of those…so many ugly words to describe sex: masturbation, dildo, what else?…just about everything…) Anyway so I wanted to use the smaller ‘wand,’ and I wanted to use it with no mess…which is hard because the wands take lube and lube is messy and it gets all over your hands and your ass, and if you’re looking to be clean, it’s a very very ill advised way to go (maybe I don’t need to tell you this). But I have this idea of, “What if I tried to put the small wand in, with a little lube, but not so much that it would get all over the place, and I were to put my pants back on and then, instead of being in the bathroom, go back to my office and sit down in my chair?” And I could masturbate there, my pants down as little as possible, with the wand up my ass and moving around nicely because of the lube, but me just kind of being there. It has the feeling for me of self-fellating, which I could do once upon a time, when I was in high school. There’s this idea of having your cake and eating it, too; and I’m going to resist the temptation to make some pun on that. It’s like having your dick sucked is always dependent on finding someone else to do it, but if it turns out you can do it yourself…it feels like flying in a dream. Maybe that’s why flying in a dream is always interpreted as sex…I don’t know. But masturbation, self-fellating, doing what I did the other day (because it was both indulgent in a ‘pleasure, found-object’ sense, but also clean [What I mean is that it was able to give me pleasure and to satisfy that yen of mine for involving objects after a long no-jerk-off interval, both without the mess that that typically entails.])…they’re all infused with this quality of bonus! (and it’s interesting that that word should come up again in this section…didn’t I use it to describe what it was I didn’t get in God’s game show?). Somehow, when you can do something on your own that you previously thought you needed someone else to do, or put more generally, when you can do something without the sacrifice that you thought you would have to make for it, it’s this huge thrill that always harkens back to masturbation and self-fellating for me.

Anyway, this is all leading up to the simple fact that I was able to do that[, that ‘what-if’ I had hypothesized]… And it was absolutely exquisite. It was unquestionably the best sexual experience I’ve had in a very long time, and here were the elements that made it great:

1) clean, yet involving the dildo…excuse me…wand
2) contained

…oh, I’m ditching this little joke. I could have this experience of sitting on the wand, moving back and forth and stimulating myself that way, [while at the same time] being contained in my pants, [and on top of which,] having it be clean because I had used only a little lube in my ass and had washed all the excess off my hands. And I was sitting in my chair…and get this…I was doing a sudoku puzzle on my computer. You know sudoku, this stupid puzzle rage that’s sweeping the nation. A 9-x-9 grid divided into a coarser grid of [that’s] a 3-x-3 of nine 3-x-3 grids. And you have to put the numbers 1-9 in the little squares so that each of the nine rows, columns, and 3-x-3 squares has the numbers 1-9 in them with no one number being repeated in any row, column, or square. Anyway. So I was sitting on my wand, my penis out of my pants and in my free hands…but my pants other than being open at the fly still around my waist (this was very civil; you could have walked in on me and I hardly would have been embarrassed), and I would arouse myself…and then I would turn and play some sudoku. And it was like I was teasing myself, making this experience longer, drawing it out to maximize my pleasure, which by the way was so much greater as a result of the involvement of the wand. Perhaps some day I can aspire to that holy grail of penisless orgasm…that is, orgasm achieved through anal (or prostate) stimulation by itself…but you’re a savvy guy, I’m sure you’ve heard of this before…although in truth I can’t imagine you having attained it yourself, given the way you schedule your patients. Anyway, I really wanted to talk about this and to say how exciting it was to have a sexual experience that felt creative and like a little adventure. And maybe it’s sad that I also wish I could have had it--…that instead of this being a burden it occurs to me as a lack…I wish I could have had it with another person…could have some adventure like that again with another person, where I feel like I am doing something that I haven’t done before and that, as a result of my having experienced it, makes me feel larger, freer, and more complete.

I only hope I can stay awake through this whole thing. I have contracted to spend the next fifty minutes, until the wee hour…

Oh, this is starting out bad.

What I‘ve wanted to say to you for several days now, maybe a week, is that I am disgusted with myself (not that I haven’t said that before) about how little you matter anymore, how you have become this literary trope rather than the person to whom I was supposedly going to continue to write in order to stay in touch with myself. Of course, last week’s entry I started by reporting (almost proudly) that you no longer mattered, but this time I am talking about the fact that these entries have become more about the people behind the curtain, my unmentioned friends to whom I have masturbatorily created this…whom I have told about this little non-blog (because, after all…although… I was going to say that no one ever sees it except for these few people I have told about it, but I wish I could post for you… I have this… I’ve told you this already, this counter that allows me to see how many people (not, again, the specifics of who they are…though even this factoid I am including in order to assuage the…whatever…of those friends of mine who may not want to be ‘known’ in their frequenting of my site (how self-absorbed this is))…I’ve lost count of the parentheses…anyway, I was going to say that there… Some people get to my site through a Google search, and my counter allows me to see what the search terms were that got them there. Very amusing, some of them. Perhaps I’ll share next time, if I have the presence of mind to compile them before I sit down to free associate.

Well, that’s a good place to go off from, the idea of free associating, because I’ve become…what?…aware?…convinced?…that I don’t free associate any more. If I did, I would tell you some things about some people whom I am afraid might be reading. Or I might tell you some really juicy things about, say, Persis. Not that I’ve toned down the disgruntled husband rhetoric all that much, but I’m acutely aware of an audience here, and part of me wishes I could go back in my shell and be writing only to you for the next year, and then tell my friends about it. I mean, on the one hand I feel very alone here, and I want to know that there are people out there who care about me who are sticking with me as I go through this year, this life. On the other hand, I want to feel like I am compiling something of value here, and having brought those friends of mine in on the secret makes me feel like I have sucked the value right out of it.

For example. This is about therapy, no? And one of the thoughts I have had in the last few weeks, months has been about a friend of mine whose particulars I will…

Well, before I get into that, let me just say that all this arose because – and I know these are all concerns that I’ve voiced here before – I was driving one day and thinking about you and I started to think about how long it had been since I really wrote to you. And I mean that your face occurred to me as a stranger’s…while here I had supposedly been writing to you all along. And that’s when I realized that you had become this figurehead, this excuse for me to show off to some of my friends. And by show off I don’t mean to say (because I know they’re reading) that I have been exaggerating or being purposefully dishonest (except insofar as omission is concerned); but rather that I have been doing this for them, so that they could see what a Great Writer, and Sad Lost Soul I am, here in Ecksville. And I thought about how…what was I going to say?...


…um…


And I also feel like there are a lot of things that I don’t purposefully omit but which are omitted anyway. Sexual fantasies that might be relevant. I don’t know. Things that I used to tell you about but don’t really anymore. (Reinhardt and I have started talking about my sexual fantasies about her, by the way. Kind of cool doing that with a woman.)

Anyway, so I have been fearing that I have gone astray, and the fact that I am no longer who I was in my notes to you, and that I have introduced this little eddy of self-reference with having told my friends about it, those facts have conspired to delete any historical, personal, psychological value from what I’m writing here.

So there.

I am tired. I am physically uncomfortable. I wish I could stop writing now, but I have thirty-five more minutes to go. I’ve had therapy sessions like this, when I just want to get out of the office. And it has always seemed like there has been something to get at that I am avoiding. And I suppose one of those things is this specific stuff that I have not been talking about because it might implicate some of the people who are reading. And some of that feeling is just being a little rusty. I have now had the second break between sessions in a row of over a week, and my deficit is widening. Now I have to make sure I both write and post this Sunday, and that I post this one by S…well, tonight would be ideal, but I’m not gonna be able to do that. Anyway, and to think I used to try to stay a month behind. No more.

So I’m out of practice, and I’m having trouble getting back into it, and that stuff always feels mundane and unimportant when it’s coming out on the couch. I wish I could just jump right to the meaty stuff, the stuff that feels important.

So anyway. This particular stuff that I have been withholding feels important today because it has ended up being, along with some things that I could say about Persis, some of the stuff that has made me feel good about being in therapy. And here I must apologize to you for not being able to be absolutely forthright about the specifics of who I am talking about, nor absolutely specific about the details that this person has shared with me. Let’s pretend that my friends are my patients; and that even if I wanted to, my canon of ethics precludes me from divulging…from betraying their confidences to anyone. I guess that feels like a suitable analogy. I hope it is suitable to them.

Anyway, one of the things that I was saying to Reinhardt last week was that I really felt like therapy helped me to maintain my bifurcated head (conscious-unconscious) in a relatively stable emulsion. That’s a good analogy. Because they tend to separate, don’t they? They tend to go two different directions, and the…especially with someone like me, who spends so much time in his head that…well, I don’t know how I would finish that sentence, but suffice it to say that I genuinely think there are people who probably…I don’t know, maybe this is elitist ultimately…but I tend to think that, as great as psychotherapy would be for everyone, some people need it more than others. And that the people who don’t really need it that much just aren’t very interesting. But that it can in fact be said about those people that maybe they wouldn’t get so much out of therapy. I mean, I’m sure they would get something. But I think of people…see, this is where I betray my elitism…I tend to think of it in nakedly socioeconomic terms…I picture an autoworker. His father was an autoworker, and whether or not he goes into therapy, his son will be an autoworker. And I think that that’s probably someone who…I don’t know. I think about being that person’s therapist. And it’s hard for me to imagine getting really really jazzed about that person coming into my office. This is terrible. I am ashamed. But there it is.

And the funny thing about all this is that I am about to totally contradict myself by saying that sometimes maybe it’s the people who seem like they need it least, who are the least complicated souls or so it seems, who are in fact tragically divided amongst them/him/herselves…whatever. And by tragically I don’t mean like I’m thinking about anyone who would self-destruct without therapy…at least I hope not…

But perhaps I could put it this way. And this is very hard for me to write. I don’t know starting this paragraph if I will be able to complete it.




I am pausing. I am thinking about how I will get through this…trying to. Trying to chart my way through these treacherous waters. Not wanting to make someone I love angry, but also wanting to express something that I think is important. Also of course not wanting to betray a confidence, not wanting to…

See, here’s the hard part. I think about what if I say something about someone with whom I really like having intense detailed private and unguarded conversations. And even if what I say is not attributable by anyone who knows me and my friends to a specific person, even if the betrayed friend is not personally embarrassed or worried about other people he or she knows being party to a conversation that would not have been had were those other people actually present in the room…the seeing of that person’s words, thoughts on a website might make him or her less likely to want to have those conversations with me in the future, might make…let’s just say ‘her’ for the sake of ease…might put her in the same position that I am now in relative to myself: that is, unavoidably aware that people are listening and so unlikely to divulge those things that might be divulged if I truly knew that what I was writing was in confidence to a therapist. If I cannot keep myself from succumbing to this kind of forced circumspection, how can I expect someone who is not me and so doesn’t even have the kind of, the intense conflict of interest that I have, the same pressure that I have to actually have those kinds of…that kind of freedom of disclosure?

Anyway…





So it appears that I haven’t gotten very far.





Basically what I want to say is that I know people whose left hand, whose psychological left hand I would like to introduce to their psychological right hand.

Does that make any sense?

And that I feel like it is the work, the benefit of therapy for me that it is able to at least keep those two hands of mine within flicking distance of each other.

Because the thing that I worry about is that…let’s take my dad. A … he’s a pretty straightforward guy. He says that about himself, and I think you’d think that about him were you to meet him. And yet, [his] mom dies when he’s sixteen, he claims not to remember much of anything about her, father is a celebrated judge, an autocrat, not a very nice family man apparently, his first wife has an affair on him and he runs away from her and his children to his second wife who is a real stick in the mud… One could surmise that there is some subterrain there, and one might even further be interested in digging into it. And yet one of my…and I’ve talked about this here, too…one of my fears, preoccupations about my dad is that he acts like he has no subconscious, unconscious. And yet you know that it must be there somewhere. You wonder…well, he’s a good example of the person who proves the rule of the unconscious in that…you spend time with him and you kind of wonder without much real interest what it could contain. I mean much of me feels like, you know, there probably isn’t anything that bad or interesting in there. And yet another part of me says, “No, it’s that dullness that is precisely the evidence that suggests that there are big bad wolves in there; and that it is those people whose wolves are out roaming the earth who are the most well integrated people in the world.” And yet it sort of flies in the face of this idea of people who need therapy being disordered and in trouble. I don’t know. I realize I’m talking around what it was that I wanted to come out and say, but this stuff is actually important to me, if a little arcane to the rest of the world. But here again: Persis thinks that she is objectively more functional than I am. And I think that her “functionality” is adaptive and very context specific. Which is to say that her functionality is sufficiently limited that in a context much different from the one she has found and in which she appears to be flourishing (and I am talking about academia, and I don’t think anyone with a positive view of therapy would suggest that academics are not often in serious need of therapy) she would not be able to see herself as being as functional as she supposedly is. Whereas I think that I would be equally dysfunctional in any milieu in which you found me and that this makes me basically healthy.

That was a joke.

But what I do mean to say is that…

Well, let me get back to my dad.


I don’t know that anything will ever happen to him that will be the kind of poetic psychological justice I hope for all those people I think should be in therapy but aren’t. He will probably die happy. He won’t have the best relationship he could possibly have with his son, and maybe that’s the justice I’m talking about. I just wish it didn’t have to involve anyone but him.

But the phenomenon I was wanting to observe, that would have involved talking too specifically about a friend, is one in which my dad’s rumbling unconscious finds a way to express itself…say, a belief in the death penalty, a desire to visit bodily harm on those people who offend his moral sense…I was wanting to observe the occurrence of situations tike that, where more or less mild mannered people who would disavow their unconsciouses are shown to have deep uncontrolled and only narrowly kept at bay or projected destructive forces within them.

This is difficult, getting started again after two weeks of not writing. It was not intentional, but you have to understand that you are assuming an…a lesser importance in the scheme of things. This week it was getting ready for my choir performance last night, which performance was much less fun, I thought, than the rehearsals. It’s funny: when I told Persis that, she said it was so like me to not enjoy…to enjoy the rehearsals more than the performances, and I think she’s right, but it's also the first time that has happened. Usually, I really enjoy performing. But in this case it tells me that I’m doing the right thing with my time, if I enjoy the process of working on something, getting better at it, the analysis rather than the synthesis, as I have been differentiating the two states of my creative process in with Reinhardt…that was a jumbled sentence. I hope it all came out all right. The other thing I was doing this week was going to Dallas to see my friend Craig, from my singing group, which trip I was really glad to have made, even though my mom came through in spades by monopolizing the time with my friend whom I had gone across the country to see. She made up for it by taking Burt for all of Thursday, so I was able to get some good work done, good writing. I’m getting to the point in the script that I haven’t yet written, and every sign points to my having difficulties doing that as quickly as I have been [able to get through] the rest of it. I’m approaching fifty pages of what I have to consider a first draft, which is to say that it’s actual Stuff. This is good. But I dread the next fifty pages, which I will really have to dig deep for, both in terms of inspiration and perspiration.

My mom. I was talking a lot about my mom with Reinhardt this week, this short week, because I left town with Burt on Wed. to go to Dallas. So I only got in three meetings with her this week, but they focused exclusively on two dreams that I had two nights apart, each of which was textually distinct from the other but thematically identical as far as I could tell, of course with some little additions and subtractions here and there. And there were two things going on, one of which was…well, in the dream, I was…in each case, there was a woman[, different in each dream, whom] I was in love with (not Persis, [though] Persis was present in both) and whom I really wanted to be with, but in each case I was prevented from being with her; in one case because of Persis and in the other case because this [the] woman [featured in that dream], my friend Serena Case, with whom I have one of those nagging uncompleted (sexual) relationships that I think about all the time…because this woman had gotten together with…well the fact that it was Benjamin Yalom, whom you have heard of probably, father of my friend Joshua, whom I have talked about here a lot, long time friend of both my parents…suffice…oh, happily (one suspects) married to Esther forever…suffice it to say that this is not a person I would have expected Serena to ligate herself to…anyway, so there was the issue surface-wise of my wanting to be with a woman that I really desired, but then there…the other feature of the dream was that in both cases they took place in a house that was being torn down, remodeled[; and in each case the house was one that I used to live in or that I was about to move out of]. And Reinhardt chimed in at the end about how the house is a symbol for the self, and that certainly works, but I really related to it as a reference…or at least I associated it to the fact that I had left Platte, and literally…well, and Charlie will catch me on this…not ‘literally’ but in fact ‘figuratively,’ tearing my house down and building one, a different one…think of the house instead as The Home, tearing down one Home and building one up in another place. Well, this then led me to the idea that this woman whom I so strongly desired was my mother, the original object of desire, and about whom I have not really given voice to the sadness that has befallen me as a result of my having left, and of her strained relationship with Persis. For the first time this week, thanks to Reinhardt giving voice to it, I was really able to articulate how difficult, how unfair, really, it is that Persis and my mom should…that Persis (because I really do blame Persis for it; I think my mom, despite her eccentricities, would be able to make it work if she had as her doppelganger someone who had the merest iota of social skills) should create such an unbreachable divide between her and my mom and thus the rest of my family. It is hard for me to even…because there is no place for this feeling to go: this feeling that I am in so much pain as a result of the alienation from my family forged as a result of my union with Persis. On the one hand, I can’t just tear down the house, The Home, that I am in just so I can move back in with my parents – now I am speaking figuratively – but on the other hand, I feel so broken as a result of simply being with this woman who cannot bring herself to be a part of my family (Persis; that is, Persis cannot bring herself to be a part of my extended biological family). And that truth just sort of hangs in the air and makes me ache. I don’t know what to do with it. It is like that big eternal wish of getting some good nookie before I die, only this is stronger. Or be reunited with my family once more.

I really do feel…it’s interesting that I’m saying all this, because I do not at all mean to hold my mom up as this great ideal of mature,…what?…philanthropic?…no…what’s that word?…I don’t know…conduct. In fact, I started this thread so that I could talk about how incorrigibly intrusive she is, and to muse about the fact that there are certain patterns of behaviors that we get into that I now want to get out of, but I realize that what was once upon a time a symbiotic relationship has become a little bit more entrenched and difficult to dislodge, or impossible to dislodge simply because I would like to. But now I’ve gotten, come around to saying how I feel, like when I go visit my mom in Dallas with Burt, and let her have the day with her grandson, that I really am sneaking away from Persis and essentially having an affair with her [(my mom)], one that is done with her [(Persis's)] implicit consent. And for this I must give Persis credit; she at least is aware that the best way to deal with the situation is just to let me and Burt go visit my mom and to just stay out of it altogether. Which is clearly preferable to her (Persis) being involved in it at all, though that’s certainly sad. So at least Persis doesn’t try to prevent me unreasonably from going with Burt, so that both he and I can spend time with mom and Bill. But I really feel like my relationship with them is…it’s almost like I’m smuggling him away, smuggling Burt, and delivering him to them so that they can get their fill. I…There are situations that arise in my head associatively: getting drugs for the Noteworthies so that they can enjoy them [( I have never actually done this, but the group – this is my singing group in college – has a post whose title is ‘Trashbag,’ and it is the Trashbag’s responsibility to procure whatever substances might be required for the group’s pleasure. As I said, I never had this post, but I should add that it was a transformative moment in my relationship with my mother when I found her smoking pot in the back room of our house with some members of the group. It was over one spring break when the Worthies came to Platte for their annual tour; a number were staying at my house, and my mom had asked them to keep me from coming into the room where they were smoking. I don’t know why it was I had to go back there – maybe I was just looking for my mom – and the guys did their best to distract me, but there she was. I was not smoking pot at the time – it was before my 21st birthday at which point my dad had pledged to give me $1000 if I abstained until then – and I had an extremely strong reaction, both good and bad. I think I was kind of thrilled that I turned out to have a mom who smoked pot. But, as I’ll get to in more detail below, the knowledge that she had asked my friends to keep me away so that she could party with them has never left me.)], a German smuggling food or delicacies to, like, Anne Frank while she lies in hiding away from the hostile Nazis…that’s the kind of feeling I have about it. And that’s really, really sad. I’m glad that I am able to deliver Burt to them, but sad that it has to feel like it’s something that’s done by braving the odds, avoiding the authorities, being secretive. So it’s really put me and Persis in an oppositional relationship that is astonishingly wide reaching. I wouldn’t be surprised if it colors the entirety of our interactions. It certainly colors my relationship with her parents, which I endeavor to keep as superficial as possible. I do not want to talk to them. I do not really care what happens to them…but most important, I refrain from caring. I intentionally, as a show of tit-for-tat, avoid cultivating a relationship with them. That is sad, too; though at the same time, I guess I don’t really see how I could possibly fit into her family culture. The only difference between Persis’s situation with respect to my family is that I do not foam at the mouth every time they come around (in fact, it’s often Persis foaming at the mouth about her own family; that seems to be her default setting with respect to family), and I have not (other than a moment of our (Ted, Persis’s father) and I digging in our heels over wedding issues) had any overt conflict with them. (And I apologized about that, by the way.) So I feel very broken where my family is concerned, and - here it is again - isolated up here in the woods.

But being here is forcing me to pay attention to a situation that might have been papered over had…were we still in Platte. It is the distance from my mom right now that really makes me realize the dynamics with respect to her in my relationship with Persis, and it is also the distance which makes me realize how much friends mean to me, even if I do not see them.

So that, in a nutshell, is the issue about Persis and my mom that arose through these two dreams. But I need to go and tell you about how my mom and I have always worked together to learn information about my friends. My mom tells me that when I was little, I would invite friends over, then I would get tired of them and want to go play alone in my room. And at a certain point, she and I fell into this pattern (which may or may not be related to the previous observation) that we would be sitting at a table with my friend, and she would ask him or her all the questions and I would just listen, feeling too…what?...considerate to ask the questions that she was asking but still reaping the benefits of knowing. Because I was always interested in them. It’s just that many of the questions that she would ask, and that she would get away with, I would have felt…I couldn’t have asked them because they would have felt intrusive to me. And I feel this way about most questions of substance that I would ask anybody. It is rare, I think, for me to engage in personal conversation with someone with whom I do not already have an established relationship that could sustain such a conversation. So my mom would ask these questions, and there was almost this unspoken understanding (at least in my head; and I sort of presumed that it was somehow, maybe subconsciously, in hers) that she knew that I was too shy or whatever to ask these questions and so she was asking them for me. And I participated because the truth was that I was too shy to ask those questions and yet I was really interested in the answers. (This brings up the idea that knowledge about someone always takes on for me a highly sexualized overtone. That is the primary reason why I’m so ashamed of asking people personal questions: because I am afraid that the question itself will suggest or reveal hidden sexual motives and desire.) And I can think of this working much of the time, each of us getting what we both wanted, (I'm not suggesting, by the way, that my mom had intentionally chosen to do the inquisitive work for me; she was genuinely interested in these people, and she probably (I remember…well, she’s always asking me these very specific questions, often about people I’ve just recently met…


….uh… [Brain fuzzy; lost my train of thought.]

Anyway, she’s always asking these specific questions that I cannot answer because I haven’t dredged for that kind of information. And I’ve sensed a kind of…someone (probably not my mom, maybe Persis) once expressed disbelief that I didn’t know certain elemental facts about someone whom I was friends with…disdain, disapproval, scorn…mused scorn…for my not knowing these things when she asked them of me. And so getting…having her answer [solicit the answers to] the questions accomplishes this end and also allows her to satisfy her genuine curiosity and enjoyment of the people I’ve tended to be associated with. […and this last point is crucial, too, since her interest in and enjoyment of my friends made me proud of them, made me feel like she liked the people I liked, which all made me feel very right in the world.]

But now we’ve come to a point in my life where there are people that I genuinely want to spend time with and have conversations with, especially when I make trips away from Ecksville (generally to Platte), and yet I want to be able to invite them over to my parents’ house[...when I'm in Platte, after all, it is also my house, or at least my pad, and it's so much easier than having to meet people at some commercial establishment, or out in public]…but like last time I went down there, they ended up talking with Marco about their experience with surrogate parenting. And I know it was a conversation that they both really enjoyed…but I wasn’t enjoying it. I wanted to talk to my friend about how he was and tell him how I was, and their presence in the kitchen was…well, not their presence, but their monopolizing the conversation made me really frustrated. So I asked if he wanted to go for a walk. And then again, in Dallas, when the three of us went over to Craig’s house, amazingly, she practically monopolized him. I barely said one word to him the whole time I was there, and instead spend the time talking to his wife (who…I don’t know…I get a weird feeling about them…but their kids seem cool) and following Burt around their back yard. And I couldn’t believe the gall of her, sitting in the living room, engaging my friend animatedly in intense personal conversation, while I am outside, behind a closed glass door, with Burt and Karena, wishing I could come in and be the one sitting on the stool talking to Craig. She had the good grace to apologize for it the next morning, after she asked me if I got a chance to talk with him and I answered with a very pointed, "No, I barely said one word to him all night. What did he have to say?" But the other thing, the thing that is perhaps harder for me to let in than the idea that my mom tries to monopolize my friends, is the idea that my friends care more about talking to her than they do about talking to me. After all, Craig is a big boy; he can express preferences. He didn’t need to be sitting in there talking so excitedly to her. She was the first one he hugged when he came in our hotel room the night before… She just seems so totally unconscious of how in the way and intrusive she is. And yet Craig went along with her.

I need to stop. The bell has rung, and besides, I am exceedingly tired. Have lost the mentor [surely I meant 'meaning' here, but...have you ever been writing as you’re falling asleep, and your dream state dribbles out on the page? Kind of cool. Perhaps that was what happened here. In any case, it bears some reflection.] of certain sentences…in the middle of writing them. But this idea that my friends like talking to my mom better than they like talking to me is painful. It feels unfair that I am, have been, only trying to be considerate of them [that is, by inviting them to my “home,” where they can relax, and not heavyhandedly steering the conversation or interaction with my parents, blah blah blah…]; and yet they and my mom as a result form a bond whose mission (sorry for the mixed metaphor) is to throw me out of the circle, keep me on the edge, the outside looking in at my own relative inability to relate to my friends, and to show me that she (my mom) is so much better at making friends than I am that she can even take the friends that I currently have away from me.