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.