A rushed beginning. Again I demonstrate my endless capacity for procrastination by using the time that Persis has bequeathed me by taking Burt on a bike ride by the river to instead of write to you (as I have been dreading all week; see, you are now a source of dread, a burden) to figure out how to download the audio version of Death in Venice that I just seized as part of my free trial for [of] an audiobook company that, unfortunately, sucks. Oh well, I got Death in Venice and The Fountainhead out of it. And Persis just printed out this article from the New York Times on the best novels (American) of the last 25 years. And of course, me being the sucker for lists of any kind, I now feel that I should read them all (surprisingly (why [surprisingly]?…I don’t know…perhaps because I like to think of myself as relatively well read; but in fact that’s horseshit: being a childraiser and being well read are, like, matter and antimatter) [I’ve read only 7 of 27).] Anyway, so I’m determined to read as many of them as I can find on audio. These, of course, are all unabridged versions. I’m not white trash.

Onward.

So the girl next door took offense, or was embarrassed rather, when last weekend I dealt with Burt’s tendency to have innocently roving hands (he does it with me all the time; the irritating habit of his being that he will not just pass his gentle hands all over my back and chest; he will, with his index finger, finger concentratedly selected moles on my back, and sometimes my nipples. This eventually sends me…well, rather it leads me gradually into a state where I would like to grab his hands and cut them off, but instead I just gently tell him that what he is doing doesn’t feel very good, or that I would prefer he touch me somewhere else, or that my nipple is getting sensitive (or ‘overstimulated’ is the word I should probably use with him), or that I don’t want him fingering my moles like that. And if he doesn’t respond within a half a second, I grab his hands and throw them away, swat them off of me like the pests they are. I am feeling as you can see a good deal of hostility toward that precious little morsel right now. More on that later.) Anyway, so Burt’s hands have started to pass over Melissa toward her breasts (oh, those breasts; I don’t blame Burt one bit) and occasionally down toward and perhaps under her waistband (that kid has…what?...good instincts), and she has gently and gigglingly pushed his hand away, which I probably should just have left alone, but instead I wanted to make sure that he wasn’t getting the wrong message (he is doing it innocently, after all), but also that Melissa have something that she knows she can tell him. So I said that if he ever starts trying to touch her anywhere that she feels uncomfortable [about], she can just say, “Burt, I would prefer it if you didn’t touch me there.” Anyway, she said, “Thanks, Josh,” sort of sarcastically, but since I couldn’t understand what I might have done that she would have resented, I just assumed she was, if not sincere, then at least not actually resentful, I don’t know. I guess I suspected that there might have been something going on, because later I asked her, in front of Persis, if she would mind if I told Persis what I had told her [(Melissa)] earlier about the touching. And she, with her knees folded up to her chest (we were sitting on a blanket in a park), said yes. And I said, “You do mind?” And she said “Yes.” That bitch. Anyway, Persis wandered away, and I said to Melissa, looking at her quickly so as not to put her…or make her feel further exposed…I said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable.” But inside I was resenting her…prudery…no, that’s not fair…her embarrassment. I mean…well, let me just add that after that episode with Persis, Melissa decided that she was so embarrassed…or, I didn’t know what she was feeling at the time…all I knew was that a minute later she went and sat behind a tree…and it certainly seemed like she was hiding. So later after I had left, Persis checked in with her and found that, yes, she was very embarrassed by what I had said, and that those were things apparently that she didn’t, or perhaps I should say ‘wasn’t to,’ talk with guys about. And Persis brought up that she…pointed out that which didn’t need pointing out…that she was being raised Catholic, going to a Catholic school, and that this wasn’t a topic that she felt comfortable discussing. But what really makes me burn is that – and this is going to sound terrible, but bear with me, because I don’t feel like I’m being that unreasonable – judging by the clothes she wears (oof, I cringe saying that), exposing her nascent cleavage, the high regions of her lanky latte thighs (I have not yet sneaked…well, I’ve sneaked a glance, but what I mean to say is that I have not caught yet a glimpse of those lucky panties)…I should chime in here about Tracy Green in junior high, and how I would sit across from her in Spanish class in the library and find excuses to drop things and so look up her skirt and see all the way up under that institutional uniform skirt to the one and only pussy of Tracy Green, covered of course with a thin layer of white (generally; I think once or twice there was a pattern; and what an amusing, whimsical thing to see up there: a little girly pattern bedecking that womanly, hairy pussy of hers. And I say hairy not because I had to fantasize what was under that thin layer of cotton. In fact, the whole reason I would look up there was because she evidently was so overwhelmed by the volume of her pubic hair that she could not keep it inside of her underwear (I supposed she could have shaved, but per—…I wonder why she didn’t, why she let it grow like weeds in a field down her nice Jewish alabaster thighs))…and the sight of her buzzing (that was the psychic texture of the sight of her bounteous pubic hair – a buzz – as if the very sight of it was so vivid, so impoating [I have no clue what this word was supposed to be.], so real, that it not only was projected onto my retinae but actually materialized inside my head and ears, causing a buzzing as it grew, a buzzing, a muffled “whish” as those individual lucky, perhaps clean from her morning shower, perhaps glazed with…well, perhaps I am getting a little indulgent here. Let’s just leave it at that…(not that I’m afraid of getting indulgent…let me just say it, that maybe they were glazed with her secretions, maybe they got there because she had masturbated the night before, because I certainly would not be able to keep my hands off my pussy if I were her, and so fascinated (as I was [by hers]) by my public hair (I keep writing ‘public’ hair…I think I’ve discoursed on that before)))…anyway, this is all just a fantasy on my desire there in the Spanish class as I spied like an explorer in the desert happening upon a lush verdant jungle the twin thatches of her emergent pubic hair fanning, buzzing, exploding, puffing out of the two sides of her exiguous cotton veil. I didn’t always see them – and that’s what made them so precious to me, those two thatches – it was periodic reinforcement, and so I would try all the more and occasionally catch a glimpse… I want to get back to Melissa. But let me just for a moment describe (let me first leave the library with an aside about how some other guys in that class got in on the game, dropping things to look up that grey skirt, and that I have since come to feel very badly for Tracy, who probably just didn’t know what to do with her pubic hair except cross her legs and hope that her sniffing suitors went away. Poor Tracy. Much as I wish I could go back and run those panties down her legs and do a triple gainer into that lush pussy, much as I desire that, I feel for her and wish I could take her in my arms and tell her that it was no fault of hers the rude excesses of these little boys, that she was beautiful and that that was the ultimate cause of her oppression – her beauty – and that these poor boys were so (unfortunately, her most beautiful aspect was that pubic hair, but she deserved to feel beautiful and desirable nonetheless) immature because they did not know how to express pure appreciation for beauty, and that some of them (like me) would never be able to do it and that instead of feeling oppressed by them, she should feel sorry for them, that they were enduring such torture at the hands, or should I say the strands, of her pubic hair. She should feel proud, cross her legs or not, as she wished, and dismiss these sniveling horny twelve-year-old boys.)

But the first sight of Tracy (and is this synecdoche…(I saw Akeelah and the Bee last night because Reinhardt told me I should because…she said it wasn’t a perfect movie but that the message was one that I should…what?...soak in. And the message was blah blah blah we are not afraid that we are inadequate; we are actually afraid that we are powerful beyond measure)…anyway, one of the words that was spelled by Akeelah (incorrectly as it happened) was ‘synecdoche’ (I’m not giving anything away; she misspelled it in a casual…or unimportant moment). Anyway I wonder if saying ‘Tracy’ when I mean ‘Tracy’s underwear [pubic hair]’…(it’s like you could imagine a bow tie, and the two wings of the bow tie are these thatches of pubic hair, and the little roundabout holding them together was her underwear….wouldn’t that be awesome, to wear a bow tie that looked like that?) Anyway, is the whole of Tracy standing in for her pubic hair display synecdoche or…fuck, come on…what’s that other part-for-whole word that I’ve never learned to distinguish from synecdoche?…it’ll come to me…anyway, is ‘Tracy’ as in “the first sight of Tracy” when what I mean [by ‘Tracy’] is “the first sight of Tracy’s underwear with that amazingly shocking and wonderful burst of pubic hair blasting out either side” synecdoche or that other word I can’t remember?) was on the concrete overlooking the playground, where she was sitting having lunch, no chair, butt on the concrete, and she went to get up, and clearly she hadn’t learned yet (she was probably twelve at the time, or thirteen) to rise from the ground like the horses she loved, graceful and unrevealing, legs together and to the side, right?...she hadn’t learned to do that, so what she did instead was to plant each hand just behind her and then her feet just in front of her and push up like that, which would have been fine if she were wearing pants, but since all she had was that hated uniform skirt, when she pushed up to rise, her knees parted, and the hem of the dress was no match for them and it rose, and she gave me the sight of my life, a sight I will never forget and the thrill of which I despair of ever experiencing again. And in my recollection, I looked at it (it of course didn’t last long, but I swear, for the impression it made on me she might as well be there still, on that concrete lunch area, rising from a seating [seated] position in that awkward thirteen-year-old way, pussy draping out there for the world to see; she might as well still be frozen there until I die), that beautiful sight, and then glanced up at her face which was looking at me. And her expression is one of…well, much as I want to imagine that she was inviting me, saying “How’d you like that? That was for you.” Instead I think she just sort of caught me looking and registered that and probably didn’t feel much of anything except maybe thinking that I was a bit of a letch. But my God, if she knew what that sight did to my head, she would have, should have been embarrassed indeed.)

So Melissa. I’ve forgot where I left off, but…I think I was about to go off on how I de--…oh yes, what she was wearing. You know, her clothes are pretty revealing. And it’s not like...you know, some young girls (see Sally Mann’s book of photographs called At Twelve. I’ve never actually bought it because, as opposed to Immediate Family, which is one of those works of art that will stay with me forever and has shaped who I am, At Twelve makes me profoundly uneasy because of the failed, failing pretension of those poor deluded innocent and ugly girls in those photographs. It reminds me perhaps of my failure, my being endlessly frozen in a state of professional twelveyearoldness, being essentially innocent and yet sexually impotent but aspiring to power. But I’m never going to get there is the only thing, like Tracy there frozen on the launching pad (it [Tracy’s stage] wasn’t actually that space that was called ‘the launching pad,’ which was where parents drove up to pick up their kids, but it was just opposite the launching pad and made of the same white smooth concrete, so I might as well call it that since ‘launching pad’ is more evocative than ‘concrete lunching area’), pudendum exposed [hinted at] for the world to see but never actually amounting to anything, always just two thatches of promising but ultimately snuffled, stifled pubic hair.), some girls wear their innocence on their nonexistent sleeves, but not Melissa. She owns her body, at least that’s her carriage. And so when I try to be respectful and forthright about how she can respect and guard her body, to talk about it directly and simply, and to give my son not a message of shame, but one merely of preference, a simple limit rather then a condemnation, so when I go there and she goes and hides behind a tree, I have such contempt for the implicit hypocrisy of that. I know she’s only twelve (she is in fact ‘at twelve’), but you know, if she doesn’t want mature people (Am I mature? Are mature people branded still [at thirty-six] by their first glance of real live pubic hair?) to notice and address her body, then she should damn well cover it up. I’m not saying she owes me anything for her relative nakedness. I’m just saying that if she goes out in the world naked, she should be prepared to be able to have her relative nakedness pointed out to her without her having to afterwards go hide behind a fucking Douglas Fir.

So here I am, having made time during the…, to actually make up a session, instead of letting my deficit accumulate until…

I must thank again the su--…those close to me for their support. Today, I spent my therapy session basically outlining the story of my screenplay for my ther--…for Reinhardt, and she broke the therapeutic fourth wall (and felt very guilty for it) by saying…well, to comment on the complexity of the characters. Which was like manna from heaven for me, who longs for some kind of support, good feedback, dick sucking, but who is so hesitant to share anything with anyone until it (the whole) is finished and polished (cf. the episode from several weeks ago with my uncle). But today for the first time I think, I saw the whole thing, more or less. I could look down on the story and see both the beginning and the end (sort of). Much of the detail of the end is still foggy, but…

Which brings me to the question that I ended therapy on today. It was so helpful just articulating aloud my thoughts about the story that I wondered why I didn’t get off my fucking ass and get a partner. I mean, I have so hated the idea of working with someone…and it’s no secret why: because 1) my…well, vanity: a desire to claim all of the glory for myself; and 2) a fear that I will alienate that person with The Asshole.

Have I discussed The Asshole here? The Asshole is a correlate to The General, whom I think I first distinguished in your office. I’m talking now about the strands of sound in my head that make up the noise, single voices within the cacophonic chorus of my thoughts and inclinations. So The General…no…yes…The General was the first one. And early on in my sessions with Reinhardt, I started distinguishing a couple more voices. Now, I want to take a moment and distinguish (that word again) what I’m talking about from, like, Sybil. I’m not talking about fuckin’ split personality shit, whatever. I think you get what I mean. I mean…well, talking about these various colors to the thoughts in my head as personalities is helpful, much as referring to God is helpful (cf. my painfully brilliant analysis of…my stellar ideas about the nature of God a couple weeks ago). So there’s…and the names, as I’m sure does not surprise you, are pretty self-explanatory. The General, as you know, gives orders. But not just orders. He’s fuckin’ yelling from the helm of some big old tank in the fury of battle. I mean his orders are barked, shouted, bullets flying, “on your…”…no…like…“You will go over that hill, soldier!” I don’t know. It’s kind of necessary to describe not only the personality of the…what?…voice, but also of the soldier on the ground, to whom I, I now realize, am always giving short shrift. I mean, that soldier there is cowering…

NO! It was The Critic, wasn’t it? That was the first one to be described. And so reimagine the soldier caught between one voice that is giving, barking in a horrendously loud and booming and insisting voice piercing through the cacophony of war and bullets whizzing, barking orders; and the other voice that is mercilessly, with constrained tight high-pitched and disgusted tone criticizing the poor soldier’s every footstep, every twitch of every muscle, every decision. Picture that situation and you’ll pretty much have me to a ‘T’ with respect to my work.

But The Asshole. The Asshole is in many ways the most authentic ‘me’, that part of me that wants what it wants and doesn’t care who I fuck over in order to get it, doesn’t care about who I offend or hurt, who I yell at or for what stupid and unpredictable reason I do the yelling. The Asshole is an asshole. But you probably also get that, in the very naming of that voice, I have posited a countervoice, which corresponds to the ‘me’ that most of the world sees, that part of me that is trying to funnel the desires and impulses and the uncaring expression thereof through the lens of custom and acceptability. I’m sure there are probably some very basic psychobabblical terms for all this, but you can shove those right up your stinking asshole.

That was The Asshole talking. See?

So The Asshole. The Asshole is very much a presence in my life with Persis, and at the risk of drastically oversimplifying what is undeniably a complex situation, The Asshole is one of the reasons why we live such a relatively embattled life together. Me and Persis, that is. Because I allow to be expressed with her things that I would never let out on, say, a friend that I cared for. Why would I subject someone I love to such abuse? And yet that is one huge marker of my intimacy with Persis, my ability to take off all the masks with her. In some ways. As I said, this is complicated; because the presence of each other’s Asshole, I think, makes it very difficult for us to be intimate around each other in other ways. Obviously, with two Assholes in the room, there is no space for vulnerability or tenderness. There is, however, undeniably an honesty that, for my part, exists nowhere else or with anyone else in my world. A mixed blessing. Is it a blessing? I don’t know.

But I hesitated for a long time bringing The Asshole out in therapy, and indeed I am still unable to allow him to be absolutely present. It is because I like Reinhardt too much, and I feel like, even if this perception might be the first one to be challenged…well, I feel like her liking me is important to the positive course of my therapy. And of course you would say, “Why does …”, “What does whether or not I like you (or she likes you) have to do with why you are here?” And my answer to that is that she and I now and you and I then were engaged in a collaborative exploration into what makes me tick. And I really feel like that is a shared journey (Oh God, I’m sounding so newagey tonight, it’s making me want to barf), one that whether or not…

Thinking…

…whether or not I actively enlist the support of the therapist, is taken together. So I can have a therapist who is having to work very hard at keeping the countertransference out of the room, or converting it real time into some useful refined product; or I can have a therapist that is really desiring the best for me because he or she genuinely wants the best for me. Now, I am battling the critical part…The Critic…who is assaulting this very touchy-feely, innocent, ingenuous part of me by saying, “…

Well, basically I feel like this thing that I’ve just said is something that I could spend a whole session pulling apart (not in a destructive way, but an analytical way), because I’m not sure that I have accurately stated the role or the…I’m not sure that a good therapist would actually fit neatly into this either-or situation. But the important thing to get is that this either-or is real for me and is a big reason why I actually fear the appearance, the emergence of The Asshole in therapy: because I am afraid that I will so alienate the therapist that I will be left all alone with no one to help me.

And of course this is what I fear about having a partner. Besides the glory issue. I’m afraid…because remember: my Critic is very strong. That Critic has very clear points of view and very strong feelings about why what he thinks is best is best. In many ways, the functions of The Critic and The Asshole overlap, the only difference being that…

How to put this?


The Asshole is almost always speaking in the context of a frustrated desire, or a desire that, but for the actions of the Asshole, is threatened to be frustrated. So, like, he…well, “Pass the salt, Goddammit!” The assumption is that if he didn’t ask that way that the salt wouldn’t get passed.

But The Critic, though he may well speak in a voice that is similar to the Asshole’s, his goal is not the attainment of a desire; it is the…the fulfillment of a standard? The attainment of a particular grade of perfection? … Hard to parse. The Critic insists on perfection. The Asshole insists on satisfaction.

So I’m…

And I should say one other thing, which is that I am really a great collaborator. I know from my experience directing, editing, wherever I have had to (and that ‘had to’ is crucial) cooperate with people to achieve a shared end, I know from these experiences that I know how to inspire the highest contribution and to elicit the most honest conversation about…well, obviously the creative role of a director and an editor are different, but I feel like I’m exceptionally sensitive to the role requirements in a creative endeavor such that I am able, whatever my own personal role, to maximize my contribution to a high quality end product.

But again the distinction here is in the ‘had to.’ Because when I’m writing, I don’t envision myself as ‘having to’ work with anyone in order to achieve a shared goal. No one shares my goals, and fuck anyone who claims to. It’s My goal. Who is anyone else to come in and tell me, or presume to have even an opinion on why I should do this or that before I’ve sent the product out the door?

And so I worry about joining together in a sort of creative marriage with someone because I feel like I will have to sacrifice the ability to express either The Asshole or The Critic. No, that’s not what I mean. I mean that if I allow myself…and this perhaps gets at another part of my personality, The…what’s the name of that reptile that changes colors? Shit, I don’t know…I’m blocking it. Chameleon! The Chameleon. It’s that part of me that has no voice but just enables me to meld into whatever situation I’m in and fulfill my particular role. Anyway, I cannot both be a Chameleon and an Asshole, so I will either have to sacrifice what I want to the greater good of the creative community (the partnership) or risk destroying the creative community in order to achieve and express exactly what I want to without regard for another person’s feelings or perspective.

Now, the voice in the back of my head (let’s leave it uncharacterized and just take that as a cliché) is saying, “Wait a sec. There is always sacrifice for the sake of the creative community. There is never any getting away from it once the work is shared with anyone.” And that’s true, of course, if one intends to do anything with anything that is not destined for a desk drawer or the top shelf of the closet. But isn’t there something to be said for a phase of the process where the artist, the craftsman, satisfies himself? Without regard for considerations of the market or civility? I don’t know. Maybe Roger Vann would say there isn’t. And I think of him because I think of that day that we (he and I) had lunch at the mall and he kind of pitched me his idea for a TV show based on a kind of American School in some third-world country, or something, and I had the sense that he was sort of proposing that we work on it together, sort of an overture to a partnership (this was before he had anything like a script or an agent to show; this was like at the very beginning), and my response to it, insofar as I remember it correctly, was not even at the level of liking the idea (and it’s hard not to bring to bear the things that I have since learned about the requirements of television) or not; it was about whether I wanted to work on it with him. And it wasn’t even about him. It was about whether I wanted to work on anything with anybody. And I didn’t. I absolutely didn’t want to have a…, to work with a partner.

And now I look back on that and I wonder if I was a fool, and I think that maybe, given my experience articulating my story this morning in therapy to someone, anyone, having a partner to bounce things off of on a regular basis in an atmosphere of mutual trust and support would be the absolute best possible thing that could happen to me right now. The only tricky part is that it would have to be someone whose work I respected enough that I would not have fears of dissolving the relationship by virtue of my honest response to his work, because I could not censor myself that way and really feel like I was being myself in the relationship. I’m not saying there’s no place for constructive phrasing. But I am saying that I would never want to work with someone whose instincts and tastes I so distrusted that in order to seem not to be an Asshole I should have to be a liar.

Anyway. This all evolves. My time’s up. This has felt like a particularly trite session. Good-bye.

Okay, okay, okay. I’m just so…I’ve been grousing (as I wrote to Onyx today…see, she’s more faithful than you are; she tells me that she’s still reading, a voice from the void; you, on the other hand, stay silent. How like you. If only you could see me with Reinhardt, her talking, like…well, a lot) about having to write you (having, I say) and not feeling like it, feeling like I wish I could just give up (and if there weren’t other people depending on it, maybe I would, I said that last time). I just don’t feel like there’s that much wrong these days. Though that feels like a paltry excuse. It’s this four times a week thing. Writing to you has always been the fifth, and now four has even started to feel excessive. Forget about taking an hour on Sunday; it’s just too much. Can’t I have a three-day weekend from this?

So. What to drag out and tell you about that I haven’t been talking to Reinhardt about? What that’s not just a repetition of what goes on with her? I could tell you about Burt’s new thing: as we’re going to sleep, he wants me to lie on my stomach (he has already asked me to take my shirt off) and he then just lies on top of my back and falls asleep. It’s the most wonderful thing ever. I could tell you about the Verdi concert, how the choir has become this huge great thing and I can’t get enough of singing, and two weeks ago I volunteered to sing at a master class (at which the soloists who were singing in the concert gave notes on our amateur presentations), and that at that class some guy came and had…anyway, I was introduced to the soloist and right behind him was this carrot-topped guy who said, “Are you the Joel Geller who was editor on All Hands?” It was so random. Anyway, this guy tracked me down by googling me; I suppose he got my name through the people/person who I was…see, I don’t know how much you’re missing at this point. Here are some background pointers:

1. My agent told me that someone was looking for an editor to work on a small independent film in Ecksville.
2. I went after [pursued] that[ opportunity], read the script (lame), met the director (lame), and [now] figure that the project is going to get stuck in casting, but then again, you never know. As crappy as it’s likely to be, I would jump at the chance to do this.

So this guy Carrottop Fred tracks me down at this master class (my name was on the program that was posted on the Ecksville Choir website) and offers to introduce me around at the studio complex up here, and I go and I meet with the people (person) over there. And get this: the guy I’m meeting with, who’s the gatekeeper at this studio complex, is this Indian man with I’d say about 80% fluency in English, heavy accent, utterly humorless as far as I can tell, and he tells me very early on in our meeting and without a jot of irony that at one time he (who is dressed in a crisp white shirt and a tie) owned all of the doughnut stores in town, and he adds that he got out of that business, but that he now owns one remaining store out on Highway 86. And he gives me, at the end of the tour/meeting, a small piece of paper with two email addresses and about six contact numbers on it, the last of which is the number of his doughnut shop. And he says that I can use that as a last resort, that I should be able to get ahold of him at any time, but if that for some reason I can’t, I can just leave a message for him at the doughnut shop. Now, putting aside the interaction of…well, how best to say this?… I mean, he’s this Indian man talking about owning – indeed, having a monopoly on – doughnut stores throughout the city; my stereotype bells are going off like crazy. But putting that aside, I wonder whether it bodes well or ill for the film industry here that the head of the production facility can, as a last resort, be reached if necessary by leaving word at his lone remaining doughnut shop out on Highway 86. I don’t know.

Anyway, that’s the story of the week around here. And that’s about the most significant thing I can tell you.

(I feel like this is one of those episodes of The West Wing that takes place almost entirely in flashback.)

Or I could tell you about how that episode [my memory of] when I was…I know I’ve told you about this. I must have been about five, and I was in my room, and for some reason I decided that I wanted to make a BM on my floor (it was carpeted), and not only that, but to do it in, like, four separate piles. And so I do it, four congruent piles (in retrospect they are on the big side – I mean, I don’t know how little five-year-old me had this much shit in him) on the rug, in one line parallel to the front of the house, a kind of drizzling of breadcrumbs to help some lost traveler find his way from one door of my room to the other. And as I finish, or some time shortly thereafter, I…well, I don’t know, maybe I stood there admiring my handiwork, so to speak, or maybe I decided that I was going to let my sculpture sit for a while, but I remember it as being just as I was finishing the last pile, at that moment, my dad comes home. And my room is right inside the front door, and I know that my dad’s first move when he gets in the house is going to be to come into my room. And he doesn’t even knock. He enters, pokes his head in, and I remember myself as trying to stand, like, such that…well, between him and the piles, so that he cannot see them. But in retrospect, I feel like I cannot have been tall enough to keep him from seeing the piles furthest away from him. Anyway, so I’m standing there, and I say hi to him, and I’m rooted to the spot, and he says hi to me and he says, just before popping his head back out of my room, he says, [with a benignly curious updrift in his voice, as if he were musing entirely incidentally to what was going on in the room,] “Something smells like BM in here.” (That word, that term causes me such embarrassment, for a variety of reasons. I guess the first is that it is so nonstandard. Whereas it was the way I was brought up to talk about shit. Not poop. Not pooh. Not ca-ca. BM. Only it doesn’t, didn’t, occur to me as an abbreviation, since as I was learning the term [‘BM’, the uncompressed] ‘bowel movement’ was beyond my lexical capacity. No, instead of ‘BM,’ I think I must have thought of it as beeyem, or beyem, biem, biyem. Maybe biyéme. I don’t know. As a word in its own right. But more specifically, the sound of that word came to represent for me the sound of the very act. If you say it, for example, in going from the ‘ee’ to the ‘yem’, the tongue retreats back slightly in the mouth, pulling on the salivary seal between the tongue and the cheek, causing little bubbles and crackles. And I associate this sound with the bubbles and crackles that happen as the BM emerges from the butthole, and the skin of the anus (from the turd’s perspective) retreats around it and causes that same sort of…how to describe that sound?…wet yet solid…you get what I’m saying[…that bubbly, crackly, moist and sticky shit sound]. And not only that, but the brightness of the ‘ee’ followed by the deep and echoey ‘yem’ suggests to me the emergence of the turd and then its shooting down into the water, a ten-point dive, and banking against the ceramic gullet of the toilet with that deep watery metallic sound that ceramic makes when something impacts against it while it’s under water. “beeee-YEM(n)” It’s the sound a diver makes when breaking the surface if you’re listening from inside the pool, underwater, like. – In any case, the word embarrasses me because it is nonstandard and because whenever I say it in adult company, I feel like I am a little boy again, one who does not know how to talk about his beeyems.)

So my dad says that, about something smelling like BM, and then he leaves. Just like that. Now, you would think that I would have breathed a huge sigh of relief. But, see, the problem is that I have never believed that my dad did not see the piles. And I could go into the whole long chain of association that this situation has produced in conference with Reinhardt (and since I, upon looking at my watch, discover that I still have fifteen minutes left, perhaps you will yet learn of some of those associations), but… Well. So I have always, on some level, believed that my dad saw the piles and either chose to ignore them, or more likely knowing my dad, simply did not know how to deal with the fact that he had walked in on his young son as he was just finishing up shitting in a few demure piles on the floor. And [I am not exaggerating when I say that] that shit, that discovery, that dissimulation, the shame and relief, the fascination and the…well, perhaps I should say the curiosity and then the killing of the cat…that episode, those images have proven to be among the richest and most potent of my entire therapeutic life. I mean, without belaboring each link, I’ll say that there is a quality of the artist present in that little boy, a quality of the rebel whose roots are in simple questioning but who is forced through the rigidity of custom to assume a posture of defiance, a desire for connection with other people, a shirking of mortality… All of these have arisen in my consideration with Reinhardt of those little piles of shit, and my dad’s oblique reference to them, his evasion of them.

Part of me wants to go deeper with you here, but I am going to put this on hold, partially because I do not want this to be, as I said before, a mere recounting of This Week In Joel’s Therapy. We’ll see if I get anywhere else, or if this is what I have to return to.

Anyway.

I guess I’m just saying again what I think I must have said last time, which is that there doesn’t quite seem enough wrong with my life these days that I need that fifth day of therapy. There was once. But now, between therapy and medication and adjusting, things are okay.

Except for this: one of the other things that came up today around the shit was this…well, let me see if I can reconstruct this (I have been having a very difficult time of late reconstructing where I’ve left off in therapy, even the day before)…the upshot of it was a feeling that I needed to get out of Ecksville, and I think that had something to do with…well, maybe it was the shit, maybe it wasn’t, I don’t know, but I might as well just come out and tell you… I went to the annual potluck that my choir has at the end of its season and it was just a bunch of older middle aged men and women thanking the people who had volunteered this year and announcing who would be volunteering next year… I mean, it just felt like this total…whatever…Kiwanis Club, Elk Lodge, old people in small town stuff, and it just made me want to run screaming from the state.

I don’t know. There are times when things feel like they are moving forward, that I am making the best of a suboptimal situation (like this weekend, when I passed my real estate license exam); and there are other times when it just feels like I am making the best of a situation that will always be bad and that the end result of that making-the-best-of will only be my making myself feel just kind of okay somewhere that I will spend the rest of my life being stifled by. Lots of prepositions floating around in there, but you get the picture I think.

Anyway, a minute left. I have been spurred on by Onyx to try and make up some of the lost sessions with you. It’s good to know that someone is out there, even if you’re not.