Won't get therapy. Will talk to computer.

My family is like a song that’s never done singing. That’s what is written on the pad next to my bed right now. I think we’ve had bed bugs for a month here in Queens. I have a problem with my eye twitching if I think a stressful thought, and next up on the menu, in this feast of life, is go talk to the landlord about how it’s letting us out of the lease or legal action. Est-ce que tu have envy? A jalouse?

I’m back from running away to New Jersey after feeling my brain break in half, each hemisphere falling to one side, clunk. I’m sitting out back at 30th Drive now, which looks overgrown and abandoned. (“It looks like a junkyard.” Twitch twitch. That’s not true – it just looks abandoned.) The living room’s full of garbage bags I’ve started spraying quantities of Lysol into. I’ve put two coats of shitty paint on the wood that six weeks ago I hired someone off craiglist to encase my bedroom air conditioner in so that it juts into the bedroom. If I can break the lease, I still won’t be leaving til October 1st, so I might as well make the crooked pine wood sightly.

I asked if you envied me sarcastically, but man were my parents, my Dad and Carol, good to me when I needed them. They were instantly understanding, dispatching me to their home as soon as I cried uncle, and listening as I tried to reason my way back to sanity. My Dad made a London Broil before initiating the how-quickly-can-you-get-work conversation. I’ve said it before, and, let’s say, now, am really going to implement: I should write about my family!

To begin, (you can being anywhere in a song that doesn’t stop, you can begin with a verse from the side of the family that is so functional) I am like my Dad. I went out there on Saturday, after something bad happened. They were in Maine. They have everything, my parents, my Dad and Carol. They have this beautiful home and garden and pool, they have the three of us children and we all love eachother, and Carol’s huge fun famiily comes to visit often and she maintains her house as her very occupation and one of her great pleasures. My Dad works and likes it. He reads things, edits, makes decisions – he was the Chief Medical Officer of a big pharmeceutical company that got bought out and now he travels all over consulting. He understands shit really well but he’s a man so once he thinks he’s understood as much as he wants to, he may ask you a question and then ask you why you’re still talking about something you’ve already told him. When he was done driving back from Maine, getting his stuff out of the car, organizing his mail, and doing a little work, and came to talk to me, it was about 12:30 on Tuesday night. Him “Why are you telling me about this part again? You’ve told me this.” Me: “Well, because of what you asked… wait a sec, you asked… are you annoyed?” beat. “No.”

None of that is exactly how I’m like my Dad although in some ways maybe a little, but I mean, I’m not a Doctor, not a man, not an executive, don’t like some work I do, using my brain, and have my own family I provide a good safe happy life for.

But I do narrate everything I do in the task department and I realized Tuesday so does he. As he was trying to be ready to sit down to talk with me about how to get out of this existence I’m in, of endless compulsion and untenable maintenance, he narrated everything he was doing. At the supermarket the next day, we searched for corn that met three conditions, white, straight columns of kernals, and no dapples on the kernals. Everything is out loud. “Maybe if I can find a baby eggplant, then an eggplant. What else do we need? Eggs. They’re over here…” When we got back and I mentioned to them that I’d just discovered that my Dad and I both do this, Carol said she’d never notice my father do it, only me. But I know it is both of us – at least to each other. It was sort of amazing, us walking around the house, “I’m starving// Cottage Cheese// yes” Him “Oh but you’ve got to eat becaue we still have to go shopping, it’ll be two hours… and I have to// you like cottage cheese// good go get that and eat that.” Is this all obvious information to you, reader? I suppose I mean that it is something I am thankful for, to see that my Dad and I in a room together is two people riding some kind of very close frequency of thought. It isn’t genetic, but it is because he is my father. I’m grateful.

Are you gathering that from my father I perceive high expectations but reallly they come from me, really from a fairly natural comparison I’m doing. And how yet, how could I have become like my father in more ways than the way we think, sense of humour, and how we operate a little minutely with the intelligence sometimes and are compatible, given that I didn’t grow up in his house as much as my mother’s?

I mean there’s not a duck I have in a row right now. I have been trying to avoid my mother, her calls. I’m going to backtrack now.

(One day, I’ll try to go back to a long ago changing movement of this song, which would be my birth. What I’ve larned about my family before then is an earlier movement. Some nights I smoke pot and like to think so far back it’s the birth of the universe. Astronomers today think they know how to build a telescope that could let you watch that. So they say.)

Let’s say a year ago, though it may be more, My mother and I took a train together from her house into the city. Taking a train together has always been a very bad thing. Be prepared: I’m the same classic idiot in all conversation with my mother. Soprano Alto idiot – I sing idiot.

My mom: Well I think I am going to sell the house and get a one bedroom in Brooklyn.

Me: I thought you were looking in Philadelphia.

My mom: Oh well we thought or a place maybe in Philadelphia – I’ve just been getting a lot of acting work there. But now I am really thinking of like a one bedroom in Brooklyn.

Me: (laughs a little) Alright. So you sell the house in Pennington. Somehow. Sell all the stuff. (My mom and step-dad, whom I always call “Dad” when speaking to my mom, [but always call Carol, Carol] are what you might call light hoarders. Their pantry has food, but really a more apt word is “matter” in cardboard boxes from, literally, ten and twelve years ago, ordered from telemercials as part of a “diet”.) What happens to Dad? Where’s he gonna go?

My mom: He’s there.

Me: (this is not a very happy laugh I have) Don’t you think you’ve, don’t you think he’s kind of used to living in a house now. Don’t you think you’ll miss the space?

My mom: We’re moving. We don’t need that house anymore, and it isn’t going to get a lot of money. It won’t go that far in Brooklyn.

Me: (God’s own tragic idiot) I mean I get it, my Dad is moving to New York again…

My mom: Where?

Me: The Upper West Side. I haven’t seen it; I’m sure it’s nice. I mean… well, you know, you have to work within what you have and yeah, I bet you’re right, you’d have to sell the house to…

My mom: Your father has that kind of money? Is he selling his house?

Me: I mean that’s why I understand what you’re talking about… I mean that’s what they’re trying to balance. That house in
W--------- is beautiful. You know that. It would be nice if they didn’t have to right away sell it. (If I could program myself like a cyborg, I would weld my mouth shut when I’m with my mother and I’d need a complicated key to release and unseal.)

My mom: Well we don’t have that kind of money at all.

Me: Sorry to hear that. Let’s forget about my Dad. All I’m saying is I know that apartments in New York aren’t cheap. I spend my whole salary and more living here.

My mom: I’m just feeling so sorry for you.//

Me: Don’t be sorry for me// there’s no reason to be s…

My mom: So at Tishman Speyer you’re like, a secretary? Is that right?

Me: Yup that’s right. I mean I try to do applications to writing programs, and to write period. So then I can kind of feel it’s a means to an end.

My mom: You know I have to tell you, we can’t pay for you to go to a writing program.

Me: Well that’s a disappointment since, you know, I’ve heard you say that Grampy left money for his grandchildren’s education. I’d sort of hoped that I could be helped to pay for a graduate program. But if that’s true, then I guess I’ll do what everyone else does, you know, if I even get in.

My mom: If your father has so much money he’s moving to Manhattan… and you say it’s a nice place? A nice place on the Upper West Side? You know. We come from different values. Grampy paid for my graduate education.

Me: Well but , well Grampy was your step-father…

My mom: Alexis! Pop Pop didn’t have money like your father has. (I’m just loving what the people behind us on New Jersey transit get to be entertained with here)

Me: I’m just saying. Forget it, I mean I need to tell you//

My mom: I’m feeling so sad for you. What about his other children? He’s paying for….

Me: Stop feeling sorry for me. I need to tell you my Dad and I really get along and he’s always told me I should never feel like I can’t do something I’m sure I want to and should do, not to say need. I’ll never have to really worry. Most people don’t have that. And. the economy just crashed.

My mom: I know. We’ve lost everything. But now… Andrew?

Me: Mom. Mom – you’re really (sigh) Listen to me. You, uh, ought to know I’m the eldest, so it’s unclear what the younger children are doing, what graduate programs if graduate programs, but Andrew works. He lives in DC, he thinks about his future, and he works and he’s doing great. They paid for college and he paid a quarter of Rochester’s tuition for me, just like you did…

My Mom: I just know how much money he has and when I think of it I think….

Me – blah blah people my age, the economic times we’re in, this is how it’s done, you get loans, go into debt, I’ll probably rethink things a bit now that I know graduate school isn’t a paid for thing. Her – moving herself to tears over my neglect. Me, getting off the train reiterating that I’m not neglected. Her- not listening trying to figure out what train to take to her audition and I tell her. The next morning I write her an email saying she has to know I really love and appreciate my dad. Her reply email: “Good because I was really starting to feel sorry I chose him to be your father.” Me in reply to that “That’s my existence I think you’re talking about. Please relax.”

So, now, are you ready for more? I come to find out that aforementioned Pop Pop, who dies during a time period in which my mother tells me I was dead to her (per my understanding, now, today, there is a new girl in my body) while I was in college, left lots of money to my other three siblings on my mothers side. When Pop Pop died, my mother didn’t tell me. A neighbor called me and told me the news and that I should call my mother. My mother started going to psychics and mediums at this point to try to get messages from Pop Pop. At one point my grandmother, her mother, got her a session with Sylvia Brown as a gift to help with her grieving. I graduated and moved to LA and received some weird litigation about his money advising I waive any right to anything. I did so gladly. For what it’s worth, when I caled her at the neighbors intruction to tell her I’d heard about Pop Pop and was sorry, she told me that Pop Pop really thought I was spoiled, unfortunately. (Obviously these things my mother says to me are similar to things she said to me when I was little thing. If you know, reader, how cute I am, this should break your heart. [Oh how possibly pointless this telling is!])

SO – on a trail in Virginia, taking a hike before a five star meal at The Inn at Little Washington, to celebrate my brothers 25th birthday with my Dad’s family, my step mother asks how my relationship is with my mother and so I tell her this. She is horrified. Oh goodness – here, information: if you didn’t know, all my brothers and sisters are half brothers and sisters on one side or the other. I’m the only child my parents had before divorcing and remarrying.

The problem with this writing is here we come to kind of a point and songs with points… welll… so sue me. Ha ha.

So I tell my step mother on the trail about all this. That I am trying to break away from my mother as much as I can, that I can’t believe after thirty years, our relationship is still defined by how I’m not really her daughter unless we both regret my father.

While we are sitting on course three at a round table with our third or fourth wine pairing that night, Carol beside me to my right, my father to her’s, then Adrienne, Andrew, and Rebecca, his girlfriend, on my left…. we are talking about how when we were little kids we played a game with Dad called Roughhouse. Roughhouse began with roughhousing on the master bed. On this you jump continuously, and get roughhoused a bit, picked up and made dizzy and tossed back on sometimes. Once Andrew was big enough and I was about ten, and eleven, Roughhouse came to have objective and strategy. Continuous jumping on the bed stayed “home.” But the objective was to get out the door. All the being tossed around came with being prevented from the door. But also my father took the knob off the door one day. Also his old socks in the laundry might get shoved up your nose, also, you might be put into the dumped out hamper and dangled over the railing. Carol, of course, fled the scene when rough house began and of course said someone was going to get hurt. And then a rule was proposed that roughhousing wasn’t actually done UNTIL someone was hurt. At some point I know I told Andrew that how this all worked was that my father was “The Volcano” and that we were “warriors”.

As we recalled all this, Carol leaned in to me and said, “I’m so upset about what you told me earlier. When your mother talks about your father, I want you to remember this.” I said “Don’t you think I do?” I mean, I was remembering it all out loud right then.

When Carol was finished with a morning of housework and came to sit with me in the living room of the house in W------ this past Wednesday, she said “Are you talking to your mother? Why don’t you ask her to help you?”

And I had to tell her that as a matter of fact, as much as I’ve been trying not to, she had called the day before, when I was in W------- alone, waiting for them to return from Maine.

And now I’m at the top of page 6 single spaced, just got an email that STARAMA is a finalist for a play devlopment program, and must take the journey for wine.

Once I’m finished this song that never stops singing, I assure you, more than anything I want to tell you how keenly I’ve been thinking of the late nineties and being in high school in a time that is past.