I suppose it’s just as well that I haven’t gotten the time to update you since my trip to Platte last week. I was planning on sitting down at my parents’ house last Sunday, but not surprisingly the time just never materialized; and then all week I was planning on catching up but then that time never materialized, and now I’m one behind, owing you a session if I’m to make my…this is how I think of it…perfect year of missives. Not that I intend to stop there, but it would be nice to have averaged one a week for a year to see where I’ve come and where I’ve come from.

So it was just as well because now the acrid (I thought of that word before I sat down; maybe that makes it trite) taste of my time in Platte [has mellowed a bit.] I always forget how hard it is to step out of my life and see what I’m missing here, at the same time realizing what I have [gained], but what really killed me about this visit was that every advantage seemed like…as if I were getting a heart transplant from someone fifteen years younger. “Hey, I’m gonna have a heart that’s younger than I am!” Cold comfort. Like the traffic and the parking. Cold comfort for the loss of friends and family and that life I lived there. I was especially…it was after a breakfast with my friends William and Charlie, and we got into this big thing about elementary schools and the things that Charlie was telling me about them were harrowing, made me despise those institutions…but strangely every log that he piled on the fire of my fury at Platte elementary school admissions procedures, instead of making me grateful that I didn’t have to experience them, made me miss being in Platte even more. As if what I wanted most in the world was to be able to be in Platte and just go through the admissions process with Burt, just so I could get the opportunity to tell all those supposed educators how fucked up they were. So that I could take out my anger at them. And somehow the feeling that I didn’t have to go through that process made me feel like I wasn’t good enough to go through the process, that moving to Ecksville had made me less tough, less cutting-edge, that God moved me there because he thought I couldn’t handle it [(i.e., life in Platte)]. That’s good [I mean that that is a good articulation of what I was feeling, not that it is good that I was feeling that.]. I felt throughout the whole thing, just as I feel when I hear Charlie or William talk about the meshugas they go through in their jobs, or Roger Vann…this is exactly it…when I hear them talk about their meshugas, I feel like, “God, I wish I had such problems,” and I am reminded of my feeling that God has turned his back on me (a feeling which is now outdated, obsolete, for reasons that I hope to get to today…so much has happened), but in this case he hasn’t turned his back on me, he’s just thrown in the towel on my part, realized that his Chosen One couldn’t handle the stress of succeeding in Platte, but instead had to be moved out to pasture in peaceful, quiet, beautiful, white Ecksville. I mean, with a name like Ecksville, it’s gotta be anodyne to the core. It’s like my dad moving into…Woody…God, I’ve forgotten his last name, too…Bill’s friend, the wine guy I love, who wishes I was his son…I keep thinking of Woody Adelsheim the billionnaire, but this is precisely my point…anyway I was going to say that Woody asked me what the name of my dad’s retirement community was and I had forgotten it amazingly (all I could come up with was Saturnine Swamp, which you may recall from an earlier post…er…session)…and now I can’t remember Woody’s last name but instead want to give him the last name of someone who is “in the thick of it”…that’s what I want to be. “I want to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep to find I’m king of the hill, top of the heap.” That sums it up, too. Anyway, I feel contempt perhaps (although not only for this reason) for my dad’s moving into that R.C. because I feel like it is an analogous movement of me to Ecksville. Where does Ecksville get its name, anyway? From Mr. Eck? It makes me think always always of the really nerdy guy at Miramar named Eugene Ek. Just Ek, E-K. It’s such an ugly name, Ecksville. It’s like moving to a town whose name is Booger, or Armpit. I am ashamed by its very name, independent of the fact that I have broadcast to the world my unsuitedness to city life and competition by moving here and that I am ashamed of that and think that that is what everyone thinks of me when I tell them that that is what I have done.

Anyway, so so much for the [elementary] school thing. That was bothering me for quite a while. I couldn’t figure out why the hell I actually wanted to go through all that, aside from my fantasy of making the admissions people at those schools feel shame for their misguided…their having wandered astray from the path of education and instead having gone down a path of mammon worship.

But what I referred to earlier about the being angry at God that I talked about last time…not that I can’t summon up those feelings…but I realized that those feelings…well, I don’t know about ‘realized,’ but felt at my core for maybe the first time…those feelings of having been the Chosen One abandoned by he who chose him was a projection of those expectations that had been placed in me by really well meaning and basically benign sources…like my mom’s encouragement, my parents’ encouragement, my teachers’ encouragement. And support. I think of…well, I’m hesitant to spend all this time rehashing what has already come up and out in Reinhardt’s office, but one of my key images about my sense of myself as a writer is the appearance of my poems in the Miramar Talisman when I was in early grade school. This was one of those creative writing compendiums that everyone gets something in, or almost everyone, and I remember how proud I was and my mom was of me that…proud of the stuff I had written, and how my mom has always told me what I great writer I was, and it has rather naturally instilled in me this sense that I am a great writer and thus an idea that maybe I could actually be one. But this is then tempered by the fact that I recognize, somewhere inside me, that my image of myself as a writer is still based on an image that was created when I was, like, seven years old. And that when I say I am a writer and I get this aching knot inside me at the absurdity and presumption of that statement it is because I see myself saying, “Yes, I, Joel Geller, thirty-six years of age, am a writer; and if you doubt me, just look at this poem that I wrote when I was seven,” and sensing precisely the absurdity and presumption of that statement. This is interesting. Despite the fact that I have produced any number of things since then – not perhaps as much as some of my peers, but still – my image of myself as a writer is still based on the printing of those poems in the school creative writing compendium. It doesn’t help that I haven’t really had a significant job as a writer, though even that is not entirely true, my having made five thousand bucks to write a script that was…or at least I imagined the people who paid me ultimately thought that it was a waste of money. Anyway. So part of me is this little seven-year-old who is really proud of my writing and wanting to be a writer, and part of me is this merciless critic who pounces on the very idea of a seven-year-old thinking that he is a “real writer.” This is kind of twisted. I wonder where I got this from. I remember once when I was younger having a list of…I kept this list on a legal pad…it was a list all of maybe a page or two long…of one-line or two-line description of movie ideas. And one …I’m trying to remember it…and it’s making me sweat just thinking about it, actually. Anyway, let me preface this by saying that I shared one of these ideas with my uncle at a family party at my house, and I remember him responding to it by poking a hole in it, suggesting some angle that I hadn’t thought of but needed to if the idea were to be viable. And I remember…it’s weird, I don’t remember feeling terrible at the time, other than maybe a little ashamed, but not anything earth shattering. But that is one of the things, moments, I think of when I think of the critic in me, and where it was given its voice…I don’t know. I don’t associate it with my mom, although it sounds (the critic voice) like that tight strained quality her voice gets when she yells. But my uncle. Come to think of it, I have several not very positive associations with him, though I am always trying to get back to…I’m glossing over a lot because I feel this is irrelevant strangely, my relationship with my uncle? I mean who really cares? I’m not that close to him, though I feel bad about this. And I feel bad about the fact that he and my mom (they are the siblings) are really not even in touch anymore. I’d like to be in touch with my cousins, his kids, but then again there are a lot of people I’d like to be in touch with. Anyway, he’s the person I supposedly, at least my mom tells me, I supposedly take after with respect to my irritability and depression. And she is always saying how he needs medication but has never had it. And I think she has referred to him as critical…I don’t really know. It’s weird. My relationship with him is, like, in the penumbra of my life, of my set of relationships with people, and that’s why I’m actually a little embarrassed about talking about him, because I feel like…what is it?…“Oh, come on, Joel. He’s your uncle. He’s not anyone significant. You’ve barely had any contact with him over the course of your life.” And yet I have very strong feelings about him. I remember him fondly. I think of his warm fuzzy hugs when I was little…at least that’s where I imagine I get that image from. I think of that cardboard picture poster my mom had of him and Sheila when they were young, she while she was still young and thin with long straight hair, and him looking like someone painted him with glue and then rolled him around on the floor of a barber who caters to black people. I mean this guy was fuzzy. And they both had these big smiles (him and Sheila) on their faces. And every time I think of him or see him I long for that smile, that fuzzy warmth, that big deep joyful laugh that I somehow associate with him. But I have not had that I think since I was a kid, before I could form images in my head, specific ones, that would last. I only have this sense of him, vague and yet peculiarly specific in certain ways, that ever since I could think really, or relate to people and keep track of a relationship with specific snapshots, has never come back. And that makes me sad. Instead, he is the person who cut down my script idea, who made a negative comment about Muslims based on having read the Koran and [having] been repelled, who yelled at me when I accidentally pointed the air pressure-operated rocket I was learning how to use and which he had bought me when I went to visit him for a week in Chicago…when I accidentally pointed it at his face. I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t mean to hurt him. [I didn’t hurt him; the rocket didn’t go off or anything. I’m just saying that its pointing at his face was inadvertent and not out of any desire to injure him.] But he yelled at me. And that same trip having let Darrell [my cousin, his son] fall down the stairs in their house (Darrell is about five years younger than me…maybe seven?...and I think I was about ten at the time.) And I remember him having told me to wash in my crack when I was taking a bath, and that’s the first time I ever remember having washed there. And he didn’t say it nicely. He said it like I was stupid for not having done it. There are a lot of memories I have of him, specific memories, as not being a really nice guy. And yet my essential picture of him is...not picture, but feeling about him…is of the fuzzy bear hug and the deep world engulfing laugh. Sad.

So what else?

There were a bunch of things that came up as I was writing about the elementary school thing, but they seemed to have slipped my mind.





I’m curious about what this connection with uncle means. Why he should come up so strongly as I’m thinking about my sense of myself as a writer. I mean, there’s that time he…this was the idea, as far as I could remember it: well, one of the ideas was that…oh this is stupid. It’s not that I’m not willing to tell you, it’s just that…I don’t think the ideas actually have anything to do with my psyche. They’re just interesting details.

Oh well. Now I have to tell you them, because otherwise I’ll feel like I’m withholding, ashamed of them, giving into my critic. [I also wanted to talk about them out of a sense that, theoretically, my labeling them as irrelevant even though they were on my mind might have been an instrument of repression; and out of a desire to resist that repression, if it was being brought to bear on those memories.]

One of the ideas was for a movie called Changing Times, and it was based on the idea…or an assumption rather…that evolution occurred in discrete moments of time…that, say, Man would go along, and he would suddenly evolve…or any species. And that Man was in a period of not…it had been a while since it had happened. And all of a sudden, it happens again. Man begins to evolve and it creates these two humanoid species who end up not liking each other very much. But on top of that, what scientists discover is that the intervals between these evolutions is shrinking, historically speaking, and that there’s some…I don’t know…crisis generated by the fact that Man begins to evolve at a faster rate than he had before. Thus (and this was something that I was proud of) Changing Times was a double entendre for both the fact that times were changing in the Bob Dylan sense, but also that the time, in the sense of ‘interval,’ between evolutions was changing. Get it? Huh? Huh? Get it?

But that wasn’t the idea my uncle shat on. The one my uncle shat on I’m having a very difficult time reconstructing; perhaps I’ve repressed it. It was about a boy who could cause things to come into being. Like, you know…I don’t know…telekinesis except it’s…what?...teleontosis. And maybe he discovers that he has this power, and that’s part of the movie. And then…and this is the image that I have of the story, the image that I think of when I think of my uncle’s reaction…it’s a scene where our hero causes a plane to come into being high up in the sky. He’s…I even envision the place that he is: on the corner of El Camino and Manson, like, crossing the street from Wiltshire Presbyterian to Wiltshire Elementary…and he blips a plane (ostensibly full of passengers) into existence. And suddenly he sees another plane in the sky, one that wasn’t there before, one that he and we somehow know was also blipped into existence, and the two hocus-pocus planes crash into each other head-on and there’s this huge explosion and all these people are ostensibly killed and our hero is surprised, to say the least. And the thing I can’t remember is if it turned out that there was another boy, a bad seed, who had developed the same powers, and he and our hero become, like, superhero enemies. Or if…and come to think of it, maybe this is it…our hero ends up not being able to control his ability to create things and he starts, like, fucking things up but is unable to stop himself. And then, I don’t know, he goes into therapy or something; I didn’t really have that part mapped out I think. But what my uncle said, and I remember his criticism very clearly, even if I don’t remember the exact words with which I communicated to him this idea…(and my time is up, but getting this all out is important)…I seem to recall that this was one of my first times, if not the first time, sharing an idea with anyone. Maybe that’s not true. Maybe I had shared them before but other people were just more polite. Anyway, but this feels to me [now] like it felt like a significant moment [then]. Like we were at a family party, getting food off the table (bagels and lox, I think), serving ourselves, and I mentioned maybe that I was writing down some ideas for movies, and maybe Uncle Frank asked me what they were. Or maybe I volunteered it, I don’t know, because I was proud of it (and these two that I’ve shared I was proud of – actually the other one that I had, or another one of the several, was to turn Ray Bradbury’s short story “A Sound of Thunder” into a movie, which has since been done, albeit with apparently terrible results (see, they should have come to me)), and when I told him the idea he told me that I hadn’t considered, or needed to think about, or something like that, the responsibility that would come with having that kind of power. And it wasn’t, like, Yoda telling Luke Skywalker that being a Jedi Knight brings with it responsibility, or something like that. It was a guy telling me that my idea was incomplete, unformed, inadequate because I had not considered or incorporated this aspect, this consideration.

Anyway, that’s I think why I decided never to share an idea with anyone ever again until it was finished.

Goodness, now I could go on with what actually trying to be a writer has done to [reinforce] that feeling, but that’ll have to wait until next week. Tune in next time to see Joel retreat into his hole and basically never come out.