I interviewed for new roommates today.

I hope they didn't realize I am utterly frightened of living with another person here. It's the perfect place for 1.  But the rent is so high,  I have to have a roommate.

I also texted the dick I am having great sex with (and inevitably wanted to change into date-able) about feeling dismissed by his innocuous enough (but still dismissive because he IS dismissive) texts. He won't call on the phone- like as a policy. (Divorced.)  Come on already.  Oh sex.  Worth it, in spite of, or even for, the tears.
Amy is visiting and I wish she lived here.

One thing

it's safe to say I'll never do is name a child, anyone's child,

1. Brooklyn
2. Bronx
3. Manhattan
4. Queens

Maybe Queens.

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