Hesitant return

I'm back. Am I back? Let's try writing. I've set up life for it all day...

or for three months

and with a lot of analysis

I mean that I finally have a carpet. It's beautiful, and importantly it is 5 x 8 feet of space on the floor I can sit on, or lie on.  I haven't had this in many months.  It's been a slog through ennui and avoidance, boredom, moving one thing after another to where it ought to go.  Making space for the vacuum, sleeping 'til noon, making space to actually vacuum, getting it all into piles on the periphery.

And just like that my psychoanalyst wants to get down to it then. My Question: What am I supposed to be doing?  Her answer: That's the question. Right there.

If you think it's easy, you're crazy.

So my state of being, right now, is something like "half-alright"  which is very close to alright, surprisingly close to all alright.

Discoveries are banal but I am psychoanalysis' big proponent now, albeit warily: by which I mean, She makes the sessions count - I lose all focus, don't have an answer to a question, and then she makes that last fifteen minutes work, the genius, - she ends on: "You mean you don't deserve it?" .... me: "I guess that's another way of saying that."  Her: "Let's end there."

Thinking about what I want, what would be gratifying, I think perhaps part of my thinking goes: I've tried haven't I?  I've done the wanting part.  I want to be in a collaborative artistic environment. I want that.  I don't have it. So I've done my part. Wanted it. Haven't gotten it. So I WANT my work to be learning to live without it.  But instead, oh heaven, that's a dead end, and the prognosis is more like to keep working, keep trying, keep reading, keep having sex once in a blue moon for god sake, keep trying, and actually write sometimes for god's sake won't you? won't you?  You won't?  You want to obsess about, GODDAM, Facebook? technology? high school?  Well why not on paper you fool.  Oh because I was trying to just think it in my head and realize it doesn't matter and I tried as hard as I could didn't I? I wanted to come back to that conclusion, didn't I?

I cry before her passive sweater dressed cruel-kindness that says "why do you think that is?"  and I say, "Sometimes, ... these 'why' questions - I can't find the answer; there isn't an answer." and she agrees and says, "So let me rephrase that then - is there anything else it makes you think of?"  Can you imagine this profession?

Well, it's been a while. I've been moving and going to psychoanalysis so...

Well, I have to get out the door in 30 minutes, meeting mywonderfulfriendHol... Who would come out to off Broadway on such a cold night but she?

There will be a bloody mary I suspect.

I have a lot of ideas and someone should pay me. :-)  XX xxxx

Writing...

Anyone do it in little fits of structure and structure and properly filling the space in tiny blocks and, again, little fits of, inspiration.  And think about the deadlines most when you're a depression case and hating yourself for being behind them and having an ulcer? "Process".  Call it that!

Today I am going to work on STARAMA - a revision is happening and it's really demanding and it has to be done, with discipline.

But it's snowing, and I was smoking a cigarette, and thinking.  So I'm blogging until I can get myself out the door to the cafe because that's where I decided I'll do revision work.  Oh man.

But just now out back I was thinking about my mother.  The link is coffee.

Now I'm really back, I am not going to the cafe.  It really snowed!  I thought it was a lot of hype but no.  So I have been drinking coffee and smoking and listening to Aretha.  I ate some raisin toast and drank two pots of coffee, and moved a houseplant inside to save its life.  It's dripping melted snow in the kitchen now. Facebook.

I went home for a night a few months ago for dinner at my mom's house with all of us and my mom's baby sister and her husband and two of their four daughters and my grandmother.  Grammy was about to leave for Florida, now to be her permanent residence, having been helped by my aunt with a General's precision to empty her house in Philadelphia. Grammy had been staying at my mom's for some matter of weeks and the story goes (per Ben) - three nights before leaving, she freaked out at my mother, upset these two sisters didn't even want to see eachother - around the corner from each other all summer.  It is confusing to me too.  It's troubling that Grammy doesn't seem to know what it is either.  Families can be mad it appears.  Anyway, my aunt is hyper intelligent and psychosexually a little - ha! funny.  One wonders what runs in one's family when it seems like a mystery to the matriarch too. I know Grammy acts grand and that's just how she describes Nanny as acting too.  We've got that quality running through us- we teach it down to the first daughter.  Around the women of the family, I think I probably get a bit hyper-analytical - frightened of the family thing... but also thrilled!  Who else can you actually tell family stories with where you, ha, tell the truth, drink a glass of wine, cry laughing that you people were allowed out in public - That is what it was like, fairly often, growing up with my mom and her, my, family.  I know there are other loud insane families out there but mine was really quite show stealing there for a while. In Boston Markets in Pennsylvania, in Malls in New Jersey, at Earnest Hemingway's historic home in Key West, in a town called Odell... Indiana?   Ridiculous scenes.

My favorite story is remembered by Amy and is called "WHERES MY COIN?!"  That's the Boston Market one. Ridiculous. 

My point is I have a great time as long as there's wine.  I do it for the kids I tell you... and myself.  If you're going to have an absurdly dysfunctional family that can't even reasonably leave the house much less go on vacation from when you're nine to seventeen, the reward is wine when you're older and your grandmother freaking out and insisting on seeing her progeny.  With all the bedbugs this summer, Grammy and I didn't even have martinis and steak, our big plan.  I'll do that for Christmas though.

So the point of this is not actually WHERES MY COIN... I told WHERES MY COIN when Ben was outside and I kept it down. I'm not a bitch.   My point was going to be something about else... I have been writing this with the loose idea of telling how when I was real little  my mother told me drinking coffee like I always wanted to do - would only drink milk with coffee in it- would stunt my growth. And took the opportunity walking in the city past a little person to tell me that's what she meant - if I kept drinking coffee, I'd would be a little person.  I told everyone that memory and my aunt, who I haven't seen in six years, since my Grandfather's funeral, turned to her daughters and said "Don't turn against me like that girls."  I just laughed.  I think that's a funny story about my mom!  

I took another break, you missed it. I'm waiting for Indian food.  The point was my mother being a weirdo and how when I tell nice stories about her, they're still weird. :-)

I watched Into the Woods last night on Netflix and that is he most psychodynamic musical ever made.  The Witch.  When she self immolates. You're all liars and thieves like his father like his son will be too oh why bother you'll just do what you do.  And the chords are ascending in some diminished seventh or do I know?  That is probably the best part of the best show.  

Oh sigh.  I have not revised my script, still today. I am listening to Into the Woods. I am considering buying a ticket to California for next weekend.  Just a hotel in Santa Barbera maybe. It's January weather in October.  Can you imagine? Stephen Sondheim. Stephen Sondheim.

So long story short, Friday, my roommate believes the small and apparently painful bites she has found on herself are bed bug bites… again.  This was the hardship of the summer and this time around, we simply have to address by removing books, and fabric to a reasonable degree, to plastic bags, and calling for a treatment – we can’t do what we did this summer again, either of us. She calls the landlord who hates us, he says we can break our lease, so tired is he of bedbug news, and I overhear her making her case that this isn’t anybody’s fault.   He, it seems, is saying the same thing he always says: “We’ve had that place for twenty-five years and we’ve never…” I yell out, “It has nothing to do with the last twenty five years!” He calls me later in the day (I am the “good cop”.  Honestly I am very kind and measured with every horrible fool I must deal with after my six years in Astoria.  It’s the easiest tactic for me.  I think I get screwed over sometimes for being “too nice” but I’d get fucked over as much trying to be “harder” and in a way I’d be fucked twice because I’d be trying to be something I’m not. I stand my ground- I don't back away from obvious sense, and reiterating it as many times as I must, but I don’t throw out the baby that I’m small and pretty and these landlords for the most part are old-country enough they can’t show me their dirty core motivations, or backtrack as soon as they do if I just make the right face. I know. I’m no fool. But I appreciate if we all stay on the social niceties page.  Without this face, I’d be a whole other person… something of a frightening idea. ) and an imbecile exterminator comes to really and truly drench our house and all our things in chemicals - “once and for all” as it were. My roomie gets the hell out to meet her guy, a new guy since the last time we went through this, but, ah not so unfamiliar. I am not fucking anyone right now so when we do these insanely toxic treatments, there’s no go-to place for me.  It’s not her responsibility.  I feel for her that she is the one experiencing these bites. But at any rate I find myself stranded in Astoria.  When I brave return to my house six hours after the treatment I find the air indoors wholly un-breathe-able, drink a bottle of wine outside and call D-------, to tell him I "actually have a big favor to ask": would he pick me up? Can I sleep at his house?  First my stepmom tells me to get a hotel room.  I appreciate the advice, but no.  “One of those websites for hostels or deals” – I mean, there must be a better way. (you know I love hotels, but to find a deal I'd have to internet search in the toxified house, take a train into manhattan- it was already 8:00pm. A hotel?)

Status updates you can’t post to facebook:  A diminished sex drive compared to say, my twenties, is a blessing and a joy.  Late in the summer I went on a “The last straw. That’s it.” okcupid date.  A lunatic whose clothes smelled musty, who I met late at night downtown, he was working the soundboard at “Under St Marks”. A group of Canadians, singers, comedians, had the place for the night. As I shimmied into the backmost aisle seat in the underground pit, I palmed my cell phone, and held it low under my chair.  He texted “Hi.”  I listened to the curly haired stand up comic on “stage” implying incest, screwing up his joke, riffing on his name, his uncle, incest again and texted my “date”, “have you seen ‘Fame?’”  He texted back, “No. Why?” I texted nothing.  He texted to come over to the booth which I did between acts. I whispered “Which dial is his monitor? I’m obsessed with monitors” He said “You just want to show off your knowledge.” I smiled.  Not the wittiest retort although true. When the show was done, I smoked out back with the Canadians. Ky, my date, commenced giving me massages (which could not relax me since I didn’t know yet if I wanted him touching me).  I spent the next few hours trying to relax, tensing to his advances, trying to relax enough to enjoy the adventures he sought for us, explaining that we wouldn’t be sleeping together over 2:00am coffee, then pressed against onlookers at a Doug E Fresh show(!) and then fleeing as Ky frowned.  The cab departs.  I realize I am not dating any more.

The realization I am not dating has yet to give me anything but pleasure in thinking it. 

Early in the summer, before I wasn’t dating, D------- took me to the beach in a rented car.  The trip was a great success, and at the time, I’d laid myself a gauntlet that a male person would bring me somewhere in a car with-God-as-my-witness-I’ll-never-go-hungry-again style.  After the beach, it was back to D-------’s house. (We dated a couple years ago but it ended when he yelled at me about his workday on the phone. There’s an old blog post about it!)  I had my period which, though bloody and messy, meant I was at least feeling like sex.  I blew his enormous penis.

Break.  That was a funny break-point. I’m in my made bed now, in my aired out bedroom, wanting to get to my point. 

That would be: that day, the idea of his huge cock and blowing it turned me on.  I know I blow his mind when I’m into it. How wouldn’t I?  As far as intercourse, well that’s oookay.  I come too fast and then have to sort of put up with the huge thing.  Sad to say, these are the facts. It’s a relief when the whole affair becomes too bloody. I’ve come and we can clean up and relax now.

So we try this again.  What a perfect thing right? He doesn’t drink, he has wheels, he loves to read, he isn’t asking for a girlfriend, he has an enormous appendage, he’s nice to women.  I travel out to his place in summer heat – an hour or more on the subway, what he calls “Prospect Heights” I insist is “Crown Heights”.  I’m hungry and upon arrival realize I don’t know what I’m doing there.  I don’t want to have sex.  Now I’m just at his house. We eat a little, he goes and buys me a bottle of wine and opens it with a drill, we eat, go to bed, and I tense to his touch, toss and turn with horrible dreams all night.  He is angry at me in my dreams for not having sex.  We have long conversations about what a confusing and unfair person I am.  When I wake up and push him away, then touch him lightly, feeling sorry for these pushes, I try to explain and he lets me dig a nonsense grave.  “It doesn’t feel natural.  It feels to me… today. It feels to me…. Now…. That I don’t know, it just isn’t right… just to be so reasonable about it – like I can’t do this. I can’t just kind of say ‘You’re here. You’re fine.  Lets have sex so we both get some’  Are you angry? Does that make sense to you?”

I think he was kind of angry or at least rejected-feeling.  I don’t know.  After I pushed him off again and explained how I was feeling, and I think told him that I wanted a boyfriend to be with, not a buddy, that I needed to feel… something, he had a Eureka moment “So none of that is my fault!” Me: That’s right. Yes.  It isn’t you at all.  We went for brunch and I played some jewel game on his iphone and it felt like being in a sexless relationship.  The kind I’ve nearly never had, always too busy having sexual connections that arrive at me feeling agonizingly in need or want, or fucked up relationships, always sexually strong, and then everything else smacks us, knocks two crazies out cold.  But I feel like an asshole who won’t touch his penis, no matter what I’ve said. And eventhough he seems totally fine having realized it’s not his fault.

Anyway, maybe you think this is a lot of writing all just to say “there’s no chemistry” or “you’re just not that into him”.  I feel like there’s an interesting thing to articulate though.

I called D------- last night and he was there for me.  He took me to a diner, he stopped at a bodega so I could get some Claritin. When we got to his house he vacuumed up all the cat hair and downloaded Real Time so we could watch it.  As we laid in bed after the show was finished, he touched my breast and I didn’t like it.  He went out to read on his couch so I could sleep and came back in around 5am and we only lightly cuddled, mostly just slept next to one another.  I was relieved. I didn’t want to have sex.  If I did, I would have felt like I was for all those reasons listed above.

I love my diminished sex drive of the past few months.  It’s serving me enormously well.  When’s the last time this blog went months without me really liking someone a.k.a, often a.k.a, having had a lot of sexual chemistry with him, and then feeling disappointed when he was pleased with that great sex time and that alone, or some other angst like that.  That last straw date and really feeling like it was the last straw was amazing.  I like how I feel.  It seems to me, yet, a shame, that if I ever was – and I think I once was, evidence suggests… - I now am not able to get myself going for someone just because, hey, that’s hot.  I especially feel a little sorry if he went out of his way to be so nice and is asking nothing of me.  Just wishes I wanted it.  Just feels me right there.  I can't fault him.  I'm the one who wants to just sleep in our separate spaces. I'm the one who feels that way.

In this long ass, poorly articulated attempt to articulate, I am saying:  oh me oh my- once I’d have sex with someone because they were nice to me.  It was not always a disaster wherein thereafter I was in love- it was sometimes but not always. But now that’s all done. 

When I have to explain how it’s all done, all my enthusiasm for your cock, I feel so defensive- as I attempt to explain I think it is as if I’m saying “Oh I have issues.   Yes I’m frigid- it’s my issues” and that is really not it at all. I just don’t want a nice man with an erection who went out of his way for me to feel rejected so it ends up couched that way.

I am so grateful that it hasn't turned out like so many told me it would (not so far) – that my thirties would be a time of aching sex drive.  That I’d just need dick DICK where ever it may be found!  Maybe it won’t last, but deprioritizing sex and particularly deprioritizing dating feels so right.  I don’t even know if I wish I’d found a great relationship instead, I am liking it so much.  All I can possibly do right now is think about myself, freak out about myself, worry about myself all the time.  I am open to love- which would be someone actually seeing and getting these machinations of my mind, and loving them.  But right now, unlike so many other times I’ve chronicled, I’m not even longing for it.  You see, I’ve given up my friends.  I’ve given up and it feels very good.

I couldn’t be a hooker for a place to sleep and I do sort of feel sad not to have given that fun and acceptance to the nice, good, kindly person who gave me that place to sleep.  But I cringe to the penis! And that feels good.  What a crazy blogpost.

I love you all so much my friends, you may not even know.  I love you more more more more more.

-Alexis

I didn't want to work on my shit

So I ordered a sushi feast.

Going to straight to hell.

Love,
Alexis

All day, all week

Please read my friend Kelly's blog post about when we went to Zucotti Park last week to see some Occupy Wall Street. Kelly, the straight bomb.

Having been last week, my contribution since has largely been talking to disapprovers while out and about, correcting their perception, media-backed, that the kids, (and Kelly, I too cannot help calling them kids.  It's something about idealism. Well I'm probably about to say it...) smell and are dirty and spoiled.  I try to appeal to the fact that I and whomever I'm speaking to live in New York so we know from horrible smells, and my olfactory was not in the least offended down there - they should really go see and smell for themselves.  I also tend to mention how much I feel for the "kids".  As with every generation, the media has consistently indulged a reduction of theirs to "they're apathetic, brainwashed by their computers, and now, if they're doing this spoiled".  But kids are supposed to be idealistic! I want to thank them. That's how I feel.  Do we want a whole country of people who, what? buckle down, buckle-down-and-you-should-too.  How ridiculous.  By how ridiculous I mean how unrealistic about humanity.

Today I have my third consultation for psychoanalysis - I guess we'll decide the schedule (at least four times a week!) and payment today.  I feel like I've had one realization already.

Let me tell you why I love New York this year, today.   NYU's free Health Clinic.  Many thoughts, share them in a sec.

Some details on my conversation with that guy Kelly talked about in her post.  He is what really worries me.  The movement itself should encounter division and problems myriad any minute now as movements must.  Their "consensus" thing is bound to, must, mutate, frighten, be frightening, etc.  But that is fine - that is natural - that is the discussion- that is the experiment.  But the gunman, the Charles Manson, the psycho who ruins everything and discredits by ruining. That's a thing.  This guy's delicate psyche gave me a real fright.

Kelly kicked off how he approached - wanting me to agree that the people near us playing some kind of game were "ridiculous".  Let me see if I can properly write our dialogue - which I'm usually so good at, but think I'll have difficulty with here because my heart was racing while I spoke to him.  It's funny because I'd been emailing with my brother and sister about OWS and Revolution before Kelly and I went down there and I had left off with them that I wanted to write them about the personal and the political. How a "movement" suddenly throws into view for you how much they do meet.  Like psychoanalysis, how it may bring a question of "who am I? How did I become me? Why do I have this ideal and not another? What do I want?"  I didn't write that email I had percolating.  But this conversation brought that thought "The political is personal. The personal is political" banging into my head- like "not only personal, the political can be psychological".  It was something about this man's psychology that made me feel in danger.

It's also hard to remember the conversation because the mode was one of cutting me off and then smugness.  It wasn't terribly sensible and I was in a decidedly defensive position - so it's hard to remember as a whole.

I suppose he was asking me why it was happening.  I think that's it.  And that was a hard one to answer cold off the top.  As he told me I couldn't answer him I managed to answer something about "the social contract."  Honestly, I was not beautifully articulate.  I think I said "That's a thing right.  There's a social contract."

"Well what's that?"

Me: Okay, let's see, well quite a few things.  Let me try an example.  Take social security.  It comes out of your paycheck your whole life.  That's a contract - that you're paying in so when you're older it'll be paid into for you.  If I live to be 65, it's worrying to think it won't be there for me.

An older woman, pretty older lady with painted nails and a warm sweater and lots of piled red hair, overheard and politely jumped in.  Apparently Social Security was exactly one of the issues that had her there.  She explained that she was older- she began to try to explain whatever her situation was with Social Security. But the man just interrupted her over and over to say "Are you finished yet?  Are you finished talking?  I'm not listening anymore- are you going to answer my question?"  This guy was so alarming I tell you. We asked him again to clarify his question. She began speaking again. He started in with "not answering my question" again.  She saw someone she knew who she had to talk to for some reason.  She seemed to be an occupier and when you see what's going on there, it is pretty obvious that one would actually need to talk to one's friends pretty often to find out - particularly this day - if you might need to move your stuff,  what the next step was to continue peaceful occupation etc.  It's a hive, you know.  So she, all politeness, excused herself to talk to her friend she had seen.  I mean, I saw her see this person and realize she needed to talk to her/him.  The man said, "She couldn't answer me. That's why she left."  And I said "No- I think she saw her friend.  Although the way you talk doesn't make people want to stay for more conversation."

This is what I'm talking about regarding psychological problems though.  What frightens me about this  person is the inability to see motivations other than that people are stupid and have no point, "can't answer my question".  I guess all I'm saying is that Kelly and I talked to a real sociopath.

The conversation we continued to have following this was wholly ridiculous so my enthusiasm to transcribe it is fading, was never very strong.  I don't have much joy in telling you how dumb this guy's questions which I kept on "not answering" were.  He made me agree that 20% of 1,000,000 is 200,000. (vis a vis the social contract.)  So, he questioned, if a person is making a million dollars and taxed at 20% and is putting in therefore 200 grand, should someone making 50,000 put in less?

I mean, no one who reads this blog is so stupid they don't know how stupid a question this is.  Me: "Well yeah, I'm fine with that.  I mean let's talk about 50,000.  Can they pay 18%?  I mean what's left over afterwards?  Capitalism isn't just taxes right?  Like, people have to be able to buy stuff?  If you tax 18% of 50,000 and leave the rest for the person to live on, can they still buy stuff after paying for wherever they live and eating regular meals, maybe going to the doctor?  You definitely want them to be able to buy some stuff."

Oh on and on we went, and on and on he scared me.  We talked about how a bad diagnosis could bankrupt you forever if you don't have insurance. Him: That's YOUR problem.  Me: Yes, yes it would be. (pause) Oh and yours.  It's actually also yours...

Obviously trying to talk about socialism was not productive. ;)

And it was when I said that what was happening seemed revolutionary to me that he was most scoffing and angry.  I asked if I could explain what I meant by that.  I tried to say something about how what it seemed people were asking was an actual re-examination of global capitalism as a system.  He said "You're delusional".  I said the conversation had to stop then.  Told him that's very disrespectful to me.  He agreed and apologized (my heart raced - frightening.)  I tried to remind him we had agreed on one thing.  He believed the banks should have been allowed to fail.  He believes recessions are a natural part of capitalism and capitalism should have been allowed to work to let the banks rebuild.

Anyay, this man is useless as a tool to understand anything about what is happening with Occupy Wall Street and what the most interesting parts of conversation are there.  I do keep thinking of him in relation to my revelation that the psyche, my own psyche, is interesting - incorporates trauma, incorporates other psyches battling I can't say what...

He's more to me an exemplar of how we live in ourselves with a past and with problems and with defenses and with reactions and with old wounds and with old joys and we can bury them or we can use them or we can do battle with them or or or.

More on the free clinic soon and how I am working unemployment my friends, working it. And how without me saying something, a person in his second month of medical school might have would up seeing my vagina, and my cervix. HILARIOUS.  My whole day at the clinic was a joy and worth telling you about, but my favorite part was telling the third year med student who was about to get her big chance to "swab 360" in my "OS",  "Thank you so much.  Cool.  But Sean can't be in here for that."

XOXO love
A