by j-a [main menu] [thoughthistory menu] Jun, 2002

6-3-02 Preliminaries to the Main Event1 Defending yourself against verbal attack, "friendly" comments, and innuendo. (The fact that you feel you must defend yourself says something about you right from the start.) or How I set myself up to experience the things I do. Recognize the "attack." Some are well-disguised. Create a list of scripts gleaned from previous experiences that you would have liked to have handled differently that inform you how to behave the way you would like to in the future. When an "attack" occurs, the best defense is a thorough knowledge of what's going on. Often, this is all that's necessary. Maybe you can head the whole thing off before it starts by understanding the real motive involved and the mechanism it uses. Understanding the psychology or pathology that compels the undesired behavior toward you is often enough to settle your mind against it and stay any counterattack. After all, counterattacking a person who doesn't know he's attacking will more than likely result in his enmity--unless, of course, you are highly skilled and can get away with it in a genteel and backhanded way. But there is always a residue of unconscious backlash, even if the put-down is hardly consciously noticed. Write into each script the antidote for it. If it is not satisfying enough that you remain at step 2 above, if you feel that a response is needed, or demanded, if the person persists in his attack despite your passive resistance (again, understand that feeling a necessity to respond could indicate a problem of perception on your part, like maybe being too sensitive to slights and too quick to apply defensive measures, and could mean that the real problem is yours), then begin to apply the antidote, which should always be written as a graduated response, the first step of which is a slow sizing-up of the offending party. For example, if the criticism is of your weight or appearance, look the person over slowly from head to toe without comment, dwelling briefly on areas where the offending criticism may be most visible. (Criticism is always, ultimately, denial and projection.) After doing this for slightly too long a time, nod so very slightly, as if to yourself, and stop looking, as if you have been satisfied by what you saw. Change the subject, maybe, or at least look away. [This visual appraisal may or may not have anything to do with the verbal argument. It should, however, focus on the general area in question (unless overall appearance can be made the issue). But you make a stronger non-verbal statement if it does apply directly. Yet, if it doesn't, it is still effective in that it puts the attacker into a defensive posture and attempts to turn the focus of attention onto the attacker.] This visual "analysis" should be enough of a statement for most people, who will become uncomfortable under such scrutiny and will get the message or, if not, at least retreat. But there are those hard core cases who will take your appraisal as a challenge, or even a counterattack (which it is). Remember, the whole point is not to back down. When you retreat, you "lose." (This is why it is best to stay at step 1 where it is easiest to remain without retreating. But if the person persists and you feel you must continue the "defense," then proceed to step 4. Execute the prepared verbal script. If it works, fine. You've achieved your desired result. If it doesn't work, retreat gracefully and accept the loss while making mental notes that you will use to update your script so that the next time a similar incident occurs, you will have a more adequate response. But, whatever you do, do not stand there and engage in a verbal argument that you can't win, unless you are such a quick-witted person that you can succeed in these kinds of battles, which, if you are, you probably do not need this kind of a procedure in the first place and are possibly more like the offending party than the offended. Example of a script: Long Hair on a Man "I see you wear your hair long, like a woman." [Or any such comment that impugns your masculinity because you have long hair.] 1. The script. Being threatened by long hair on a man--or short hair on a woman--so that one must make a negative comment about it indicates that the person is threatened by his or her own opposite gender side. If a man criticizes long hair on another man, he is threatened by his own feminine nature. If a woman criticizes short hair on a woman, she feels threatened by her own masculine nature. If a woman criticizes the long hair of a man, it means that she doubts her own femininity and feels threatened that even a man can look (and act?) more feminine that she. If a man criticizes the short hair of a woman, he doubts his masculinity, and feels threatened in the same way. I wear long hair to aggravate people who are intolerant of the style. People who are intolerant of the style are people who have a problem accepting others' decisions about the way they are going to live their lives. There is really no need to point this out to them because they very adequately demonstrate it for themselves. In fact, hanging around with these people without correcting them can make you look good by comparison, if you can withstand the "bad company" effect (i.e., how can you remain in the presence of a bigot and not comment on the bigotry. Aren't you, then, being complicit?) More generally, people who are non-accepting of others lifestyles and behavioral choices are intolerant assholes. They classify and stereotype people into the group "not like me" and they dump all of their denied self-criticism onto this general group, each specific point directed at the (in)appropriate target. Most generally, people who cannot accept the way a person looks and behaves are fearful that they are that same way inside. (And they're right. They are.) 2. Non-verbal response. Look at the criticizer's hair. Pay particular attention to where it is shortest and longest. If he is a man, note where he is clean-shaven and where he allows facial hair to grow (sideburns, etc.) Examine the neck area thoroughly, especially at the throat. People feel very vulnerable when you look closely at the front of their throat around the esophagus. After slightly too long a time, nod so very slightly, as if to yourself, and stop looking. Smile ever so slightly, as if you're trying not to. 3. Initial denial to participate further. "What are you looking at?" "Nothing." Give the criticizer every opportunity to change the subject. Or even better, change it yourself. Remember. You don't have to go any further. You already know the truth and he or she probably won't accept it anyway, which can only increase your doubt, but can never decrease it. "Yes, you are. Tell me." "No. It's nothing." 4. Verbal response. If the criticizer persists, and you must go on or back down: "Well, I just happen to know something about people who criticize guys with long hair." Say no more. "What?" "No. That's okay. I probably shouldn't say it. I don't want to offend anyone." "No. Go ahead. It's all right. You won't offend me." (This could be more denial, and if it is, it's a sure sign that you will offend.) "No. Telling people things about themselves that they probably don't know is not so smart a thing to do. It's better left unsaid." Either the critizer will back down or persist. If he or she backs down and changes the subject or leaves, you win. You've successfully deflected the criticism away from yourself and onto the criticizer (where it belongs; it's his or her denial and projection). But if not: 5. The coup de grace. Make it as short, succinct, and pithy as possible. Very few people will put up with a long-winded explanation of anything, let alone criticism that is burrowing into their psyches. Long-windedness is a sure way to provoke further criticism. This is where the well-practiced punch line comes into play. "Making comments on the length of a man's hair is a sure indication that you feel a threat to your masculinity and a fear of your feminine nature." [Or vice versa.] If this doesn't completely knock the wind out of his or her sails, at least momentarily so that you can escape without it being seen as a retreat, then you may be headed for trouble. However, some few people, generally those more genuine and intelligent people who are only acting offensively out of ignorance, superstition, or conditioning, will ask you to elucidate further, having been somewhat enlightened by your insight. In these cases, if you refuse to further elucidate, or if you drop the ball while trying to explain, you lose. Intelligent people will always at least pretend to be open-minded toward you about your analysis of their personality or character. Any verbal failure on your part at this point validates their original premise. Be prepared to deliver your entire argument, not all at once, but piece by piece, statement by statement, until they relent or you reach the logical conclusion, in this case, that they are the people who are woman-like (or not, in the case of a woman), not you. 6. The ultimate conclusion. If it escalates this far, you're on your own. Remember, I warned you. If you've made your point and it's accepted, you win. If the criticizer gets pissed off at you, you win--at least temporarily, until he or she meets you again with a better argument or a more powerful criticism. But if it's a guy and he tries to punch you in the face for insulting him--well, you'd better be well trained in physical as well as verbal self-defense.

6-4-02 My brother called this afternoon and asked if I was looking to make any investments. My immediate answer to that question, no matter who asks it, is always an emphatic no, because it sounds like something some shady broker/pusher selling stocks over the phone would ask. So I told him no, which he accepted, and then he told me about a house he saw for sale that was selling for way under the appraised value. So I told him I was interested, because I am, and he knew it, because we'd talked about it before. It was just his way of asking that threw me off. He said he'd pick me up tomorrow at nine to go and look at it. Now, a few hours later, I'm beginning to wonder, as I examine the economics of such an enterprise, if I really want to get involved. At first, it sounds good, but when you factor in all the hidden expenses, such as insurance and expenses related to fixing it up, like travel time, gas, wear and tear on the car, etc., lost interest income, etc., the profits may not be so big. I'm going to have to sit down and work out a financial fact sheet before I get involved--and that itself is more work than I want to do. Let's face it. If it involves anything other than writing, surfing the net, or watching movies, I'm not much interested any more. Still, I'd like to be back in business again. Some of my most rewarding times have been out working with my brother. But do I really want to go back to work? I guess I will though, if the profit margin is high enough and the risk factor low. 6-5-02 Jim called this morning and cancelled the house visit. He said he had to go out on a job. I wonder how serious he is about this. I know he wants to do it, but I wonder if he's afraid to commit himself to a long-term investment. I know I have my doubts. We'll see. Maybe he picked up on my doubt yesterday after we got off the phone. Sometimes I think that he and I--and my sister too--tune in to each other's psyches at a distance. (We don't seem to be able to do it so well up close. Maybe our personalities get in the way.) 6-6-02 If I would have ever entertained the idea of making myself look younger to disguise the dissatisfaction I have with growing old (not that I ever would have anyway, but...), I am permanently dissuaded from it after reading Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," where a fifty year old writer takes a vacation to Venice, falls in love with a kid, and allows himself to be cosmetically transformed into a joke of a old man trying to look younger. Age has its benefits too, even if our society doesn't want to think so. This culture disregards wisdom gained through experience--even politically. I mean, who listens to Henry Kissinger, for example, any more? Or rather, who takes him seriously. (Almost everyone pretends to listen to him, as if they think that he is wise and that wisdom in general is a good thing.) For that matter, who ever did take him seriously, besides Richard Nixon? And you see where he wound up. But that's not fair. He wound up there despite Kissinger. It's Henry's kind of politics and diplomacy that's needed in this world today. But instead, we have Rumsfeld and Ashcroft. Not that Rumsfelt is all that bad, but he favors confrontation over diplomacy, which is exactly my point. Diplomat Colin Powell is all but disregarded as Bush rattles his sword at Iraq, Iran, North Korea, et al., thinking he can intimidate them into compliance with his vision of a newer world order, which is provoking, instead, more chaos. Where is wisdom's role in all of this? Nowhere. It's an action-movie world, and I don't want to look like all the aging action heroes pretending to be young. Sean Connery, Harrison Ford, et al., even Ahnold, are great entertainers, but they are not who they pretend to be. I want to look like who I am. The problem is, who am I? Am I who I look like? If so, then that's okay. I wonder.

6-7-02 Joyce called this afternoon and left a message (I was in bed) saying that Jimmie (it was probably really her) wanted to know if I wanted to attend his graduation this evening. I'm not going to call her back. She's infamous for these last minute notifications. I can't be ready in time. Actually, I could, if I hustled, took a shower, geared up, and adjusted my mind to it. But that's the problem. I don't want to adjust my mind. I had my mind just about adjusted to attend the graduation party tomorrow. Today, I was looking forward to sitting out back and reading the afternoon away in the sun and then working at the computer all evening. I don't want to have to change my laid-back mind. I end up going to the graduation anyway. Social conscious, or guilt, or whatever, provokes me after I awaken sufficiently and find a little bit more energy. I arrive at their house at six. Everyone is upstairs getting ready. Joyce comes down first and asks me about the clothes she's wearing, because Jim apparently has said to her, "Are you going to wear that?" Actually, I think she told me this. Yes. She did. But before she tells me, I tell her she looks fine, intuiting the upstairs criticism before she relates it. I suspend all judgment2 on her choice of wardrobe, a nondescript jersey top and denim skirt, because I don't want to validate my brother's opinion, even though it might be correct in this case, because I already know, without having heard what he'd said, that he was being unnecessarily cruel. There's a proper way of telling your wife that she has not chosen well, with a little bit of tact and a lot of kindness and understanding, and he didn't use that method, I can tell, by the way Joyce acted as she entered the dining room. Jim comes down a few minutes later. I'm standing waiting patiently for them to get the show on the road. (I remember my mother always saying that, and I realize how much this evening seems like those old days.) I look at Jim, too long without saying anything, because I don't have anything to say, and I want to continue to look at him the way I used to when he was a little kid, but I can't because I don't think he understands any more. I look away, but when I look back at him, he's still looking at me, and whereas before I thought he felt awkward, now I do. Probably just to say something, and maybe as revenge for me having sided with Joyce (which he probably couldn't have overheard, but maybe he felt it, although it isn't at all true, my siding with her, I actually did remain perfectly neutral, although he could interpret the opinion I gave her as a vote in her favor), he says "When are you going to cut your hair," and he gives a slightly effeminate motion (which he doesn't really intend, but it comes off that way) with his hand over his shoulder, indicating my hair falling across my shoulder instead of hanging down my back. "What's this, your new girly-man look?" I smile. I actually want to laugh, because he is being funny, but not intentionally and I don't want to encourage him in that direction, so I say "I wear my hair this way to purposely aggravate people." I mean to indicate that I am intentionally trying to aggravate him (which I'm really not. If anything, I'd avoid aggravating him), but he doesn't take it that way. [This is an impromptu attempt to activate the script I wrote several days ago.] Danny, standing nearby, says, "You should cut it all off." I say, "I thought of doing that, getting a buzz cut." "You should," Dan says. Jim says, "Yeah, That'd really aggravate people." I understand what he's trying to do, and I wonder if he knows how obvious he's being. He wants me to think that I can aggravate more people by getting a buzz cut. He wants to provoke me into doing it. [I was thinking about cutting my hair a little bit shorter, but I can't now, because he said something about it. But I like my hair. I like the way I look. I like what I represent, a kind of defiance of the norm, of taste, of sense of style, and especially, of authority. I look the way I want to look, and the only reason I might want to cut it is because it's a pain take care of. If I ever got a job where I had to shower quickly every morning, I'd have to cut it, just for convenience sake. But I'd really have to be desperate to cut my hair in order to get a job. I reason that I wouldn't want to work for a company who wouldn't hire me because of the length of my hair.] Jim is being particularly ornery, especially toward Joyce. Several times on the way to the high school, he states that he doesn't want to go. He's having back pain. I knew this as soon as I saw him, but I didn't attend to it until Joyce, in the van, states it in a way that makes me think that it's said for my benefit, as a kind of apology for the way he's acting. But, I think, I'm having back pain too, and I'm not acting that way. Back pain is just an excuse to act badly. Pain can cause you can to act with indifference as a result of distraction, or it can cause you to completely withdraw. But there is no reason to lash out at people. That activity can be prevented. I know. I've learned how to do it. It's an easy thing to do, once you realize the cause, and my brother, apparently, is well aware of the cause, since he uses it as an excuse. [In my own defense, I never used it as an excuse. I never realized that it was my back pain that caused me to act that way. As soon as I did realize it, I immediately stopped the behavior.] At the graduation ceremonies, I see three guys with long hair, none of them as long as mine. Two are "artists" (one is a photographer, one a cameraman) and one is a groundskeeper, an older man and probably an artist too in his own way. I identify with them, and against everybody else. The rest of the evening is totally boring. Not like the more rewarding Carlow College graduation. I experience none of the insight I had there, maybe because it's the evening instead of the afternoon, my blood sugar is low, the sun overly heats the left side of my face, my back hurts, and we're in the first row of the bleachers in a stadium with loudspeakers just across the track that are too loud and pound in my head and leave in it a numb and ringing feeling. And since we're in the first row, I can't watch the crowd, and the graduates are too far away to see well, so there's nothing to do but engage in mental gymnastica to try to tune-out the speakers giving their cliche-riddled speeches. Jim leaves near to the end of the ceremonies and goes up to wait in the van, and the rest of us walk onto the field to greet the graduates. Except for this final phase, where we can walk around among the people instead of being confined to the bleachers, it's a rather unpleasant experience, and I am glad to get out of there.

6-8-02

We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl year after year, Running over the same old ground. How we found the same old fear.   Pink Floyd, "Wish You Were Here" Flatter only with the truth. proverb

Feeling a bit scattered. Lots of things I need to do, but it's noon already and the party's at two and I told Joyce I'd come over early and help out a bit. I leave here at one, with the most crucial things I wanted to get done, done, so that kind of catches me up and balances the books, but only for today. When I get back home, even though I'm going to be too tired to work, I'm going to feel behind again. [But little do I realize how much. Little do I know what's in store for me this afternoon and evening.]

One of the things I want to do that I didn't get around to was to write out a long list of ideas and additions to scripts that I'd thought of yesterday at the graduation ceremonies and tried to keep in mind via an elaborate list of mnemonics that I'd committed to memory, which occupied my "tune-out" time until I got into my car on the way home and voiced them onto my recorder: among a number of other things, "I aggravate the people with the problems." I add this to the "long hair script."

Another large group of ideas dealt with intolerance, especially as the meta-trait applies to my brother. Over the years, he's turned into a bitter and intolerable (in both directions) person, and every year he gets a little worse. When he stopped drinking, I thought the trend would reverse, but it hasn't. It's a shame that people have to get this way. I'm sure that people could make similar arguments about me, not re intolerance, but perhaps re other areas, e.g., social isolation--although they'd be wrong. I've always been the way I am now, but too afraid when I was younger not to be sociable. In other words, I complied then, whereas now I just don't give a shit. I do want I want to do. I act in the way that pleases me.

But my brother was not always the way he is now. It's not a matter of him having loosened his internal restrictions, but a matter of having tightened them. He used to be a carefree and lovable human being. (I'm thinking way back here now.) But he closed off most of his natural joie de vivre so that it shows only in the rarest moments of playfulness. He used to make me laugh by making surreptitious fun of people, especially authority figures, behind their backs, but these incidents, any more, are very few and far between. As I have opened up (even as I appear to close myself off, which is an illusion), so he has closed himself off, even as he appears to have opened up, which is also an illusion. As I am (possibly) more sociable than I have ever been (because I fear contact less and less as I develop), he is less sociable now than he has ever been (because he fears it more, as demonstrated by his increasing intolerance).

I'm sure he feels that I'm an embarrassment to him and the family (ala my long hair), but he's the embarrassment, not to the family, or at least not to me, because I accept him as he is (or try to, although it's gets increasingly harder), with all his flaws; he's an embarrassment to himself. He stereotypes people and is highly prejudiced to the point of bigotry--against blacks, women, and, generally, anyone who is different from him. And, ultimately, everyone is different from him, because everyone is different.

I take my usual stonewall stance at the picnic/party, observing, not wanting to commit myself to an agenda that might make me look foolish--which nearly everyone will do, because everyone has an agenda that they reveal in their behavior, and at some point not too far beneath the surface, everyone is less than the ideal social being, when each person will act in a way that reveals a flaw, foible, need, or weakness. My own chosen behavior of stonewalling people reveals my internal flaws, but only to the most perceptive observers. Most people see me as simply a non-communicative hard case whom they can't get close enough to talk to because, they think, I won't let them, but, in fact, it's because they won't let themselves, because they don't know how to break through the outer shell. It will take a while today, but this tactic will be breached.

An early hint of this breach occurs when Joyce, as she makes some final food preparations, announces, directing the comment to me, that she is going to get her Masters degree.

This is one of the few moments when I participate in a conversation, because comments were directed at me. Mostly, I stand or sit around feeling left out and a bit awkward, but resigned to the fact that I must feel this way. I'd turned my back on this crowd (they are, in several cases, the same people, or they are so similar in make-up and intent as to be essential duplicates; firemen and their family and friends, typical well-integrated, social people) when I moved just out of the area because a certain few of them had been super-critical of my attitude and lifestyle and I'd gotten to a point in my life--a point I often arrive at, I now see--where I was fed up with the whole surreptitiously critical situation and needed a change, not unlike Cher in Mermaids. This was/is my strategy, mostly unconscious: the past is past, where it should be left, after you've resolved the issues related to it (which can take a lifetime anyway). And so, I remain aloof and taciturn.

But then, Rick O'Connor arrives. He pulls up in his late model car and, as he parks, he waves at me as I sit alone in the pavilion next to the parking lot. But I don't acknowledge him, because I don't recognize him and think he must be waving at someone else. I think, "Who is that old man?" But he catches Joyce's eye and waves at her, and she waves back, and I think that he was trying to wave at her all along. I don't realize who he is until he gets out of the car and walks toward the picnic area.

Rick is one of the few people I will approach, occasionally, when I haven't seen him in a while, and especially now, since I failed to recognize him and must now go over to make an apology. I walk across the area to the food tables where he has headed. When he sees me coming, he says hello, and he imitates me looking at him, puzzled, when he was in the car, and he says something about me not recognizing him. I say, "Yeah. I was sitting there thinking, 'Who's that old man?' " I don't know if he gets the joke or not. I think he might take it as a criticism and not as the self-criticism I now mean it to be, because he's a year younger than I am. [Later, he will use this same technique on someone else, so maybe he did understand.]

After a bit more stonewalling on my part, I'm entreated by my youngest nephew to play badminton, because he's been trying since we got here to entice anyone and everyone to play, and no one will take him up on it. I beat him in two games and find I am just slightly too tired to continue. I don't want to wear myself out and end up feeling lousy. I go over to the picnic tables where Rick, my brother, and a few men I don't know are talking, and I sit quietly a few feet away and listen. More observation. Rick has a pint bottle of Jack Daniels in a small brown paper bag and occasionally as they talk he refills his glass and mixes it with Pepsi. At one point, he offers me some, but I decline. I tell him I don't drink any more, and that is the extent of my contribution to the conversation.

But Rick skillfully, a lot more skillfully than I will realize for a few hours, pulls me into the group. He and my brother talk about our pasts as former firemen, back during a time when the organization, and society in general, was a bit freer and less socially conscious, more given to debauchery and vice. I come to the realization that these other men are the next generation of firefighters as Rick relates stories about our old exploits. He engages my brother to amplify the stories, referencing me occasionally in a flattering light. Without this reference, I understand that these men (most of them) would have no idea who I am. We become subtextually characterized in the stories as old-time firemen, and I'm not entirely happy to be now one of those old timers. I feel like I should be one of the young kids. I feel more akin to my oldest nephew (whose high school graduation party this is) and his friends, all of whom are junior firemen, than I do to these older men. But I am made to look good to these guys as Rick and Jim outline our past. I appreciate the attention, but, of course, I do not obviously bask in the glow. I maintain my usual low profile, even more practiced years later than when I was at the height of my social career as a fireman. Then, the group breaks apart, people leave, different sets of people arrive, and I forget about the session.

Later, in the food pavilion, Rick and some of the women are talking about Consuela, Paul's wife, who looks like his first wife, Peachie, who died of cancer. I'm not really paying attention to their conversation, having only just walked up to get a soda.

"Yeah. When I first saw her, I said that exact same thing to Joyce, and she insisted that she didn't."

"But don't you think she does?" Rick asks again.

"Yeah."

But she's not at tough as Peachie was, I want to say, but I let the topic drop. She looks as tough, I think, but it's only just today (I talked with her for a little bit, and listened to her talk to Joyce) that I realize that her toughness is superficial. She's a beautiful woman, not in any consensual way, she has a hard, tough face, but in my way, by my standards. She has long black hair that is very full without being at all frizzy. I guess women have a way of making their hair look like that if they want to (although frizzy is okay with me too). But underneath her tough-looking exterior, she seems pretty normal. Her looks belie her words and attitude, which is soft and caring and ordinarily social. Peach, although completely gregarious, was abrupt and confrontational.

I remember the first day I met Peach. I was in high school and Paul was dating this girl who lived in Verona who was older that he was (I think--or maybe that was just my impression). I walked into her house and, although they had a house full of people, mostly kids around my age, she made me feel that I was the most important guest they'd ever had. That made a big impression on me, and I was intimidated, although I'd never have shown it then--or since, as a matter of a fact. Ever since that day, I'd always had a respect for Peachie that I never had occasion to reveal, nor would I have, even if the occasion had arisen.

Hours later, Rick has been talking for a while with the younger guys out on the parking lot. As dusk approaches, Rick and Josh, an older fireman's near-adult son, walk back toward the picnic area. As they come within earshot, I hear Rick asking the kid if he knows this guy (me) standing over there. The kid tells him he does. Rick tells the guy that he should pay attention to me, that I'm a very good friend of his and one of the most intelligent guys he knows. They are just far enough away that Rick can pretend that I can't hear him. Then he comes over to me and starts talking to me, seriously, about my brother, whom he says needs my advice and counsel. He says that I should have a serious talk with him, and he heads off into his Vietnam-veteran-try-to-get-over-it-by-talking-about-it-to-people, people who can understand therapeutic routine, which I'd heard him very briefly in passing talking to my brother about earlier in the day.

Over the next hour, as it gets dark, Rick and I stand in or near the food pavilion, adjusting our positions so that our obviously intimate conversation cannot be overheard, and Rick explains his motive for violence that he could at any time give expression to, "without feeling any remorse." Oh yeah, he says, he'd be remorseful later, but in the moment, he wouldn't think a thing about it. He talks about the guilt he feels about what he did in Vietnam, and he talks about his wife, Janie, who is now dead, how much he loved her, how he depended on her, how she was able to calm him when he would start to get too manic and unable to settle down, how she would settle him down just by saying, "Now, Rick, that's enough. Settle down now," how she was his control, and now she's gone, and he doesn't have that control any more.

He moves between these and other subjects, back and forth, obviously fairly drunk, but actually, very much in control, not so drunk as people might think. I listen carefully, trying to understand what he's really trying to say, what he is really up to. He talks about our past, how, when he first met Janie and was over at my place, "in that trailer you used to live in..." ("I still live there," I say.) "...you and I had a talk, and you really helped me out a lot." He wants me to remember, but I can't. I say, "That must have been the day you guys helped me move in," because I know that was the only time he'd even been to my place. I remember he and Mac drinking a pint of pure grain that I had been planning to use for a different purpose. They had gotten quickly quite drunk.

Rick emphasizes how much I helped him on that day. I wonder what it was I said to him, and I feel apologetic that I can't remember it. I tell him that people tell me that a lot, that I helped them out. But I never see it. I'm afraid that I focus too much on the moment, and when the moment's gone, I relegate it to the past. I tell him all of this. I never tell anyone these kinds of things.

Rick continues on, repeating his themes, alternating between them, his present feelings of violence, his war past, his dead wife. And I continue to try to understand. He is completely open toward me, and he has managed to break through my hard shell, my stone wall, and although I'm aware that he has done this, and although I feel the psychic contact full force, as profound as in any therapy session, I don't know exactly how he has managed to achieve it, and I don't have time to analyze it either, because it's all I can do to keep up with him, to stay one step ahead of him, to ascertain that his threats of violence are not so real as I seem to want to feel they are, to remain well aware so that I see immediately any actualization of the violence he only now talks about so that I may head it off or, at least, get out of the way. I suspect, that is, I get inklings, that it is all bluster, or else a game he plays to aggrandize his ego and bring himself up to what he thinks is my more superior level. (If only he really knew.)

Then, all of a sudden, as the transference becomes fully complete, a thought pops into my head and I immediately blurt it out. "You know," I interrupt, "You say you don't have control any more. But it's obvious that you do." He had just been talking again about how Janie kept him in line, and just before that, he had been talking about how much it feels like she's still with him, that she has never gone away. He makes the connection. He knows what I'm going to say, and he says it for me. He doesn't say it in a complete sentence, but only in a few fragments, words. "Janie. Control. Here." And he uses his hands to indicate that he she is here right now controlling him, because, he says, "She's still inside me." He is completely grateful for this revelation that he thinks I provided, and he shakes my hand in that old way we used to do, that I haven't done for years, first a normal handshake, then a upward one, then bumping our fists together. And it doesn't feel like it would have if I'd have done it with someone else, how it used to feel to me even way back when we'd done it, that is, foolish. It feels perfectly natural and genuine. No bravado, no juvenile antics. It feels real. Then he hugs me. And I hug him back. This is not something I do. I don't even hug women that I like a lot. Early in the day, when Karen first arrived, she said "Give me a hug." I was standing sideways to her, and I put my arm around her shoulder as she wrapped her arms around my waist. Then, dissatisfied with the partial hug, she said, "Now give me a real hug. Don't stonewall me," and so I turned to face her and gave her a real hug, realizing for the first time that others, or at least she, understood the stone wall stance.

Rick and I went on to to talk about things other than his pathology (if that's what it is; I still haven't quite decided). He gets back to my brother's problem. Without actually saying it, he wants me to deal with Jim in the same way I dealt with him, just now and years ago at my place. I try to tell him why I can't, but he isn't hearing it. He's lost the transference. Or, it was never working both ways in the first place, but only from him to me. He tries to explain my brother's problems to me, attributing them to Vietnam. I tell him he doesn't see the whole picture, that it starts much earlier than that. But this only confirms his view that I am the one to talk to him to try to help him. I try unsuccessfully several times to get across to him that I am not the one to do this. I am mostly unsuccessful because I must choose my words too carefully, so that I don't reveal to Rick that some of the things I believe to be true about my brother may also apply to Rick himself.

I see at least two reasons why I cannot "help" my brother, the first being the fact that we are brothers, with similar backgrounds and psychologies that would interfere with any conscious transferences we might manage--not that we'd ever manage any, for reasons on both our parts; the second being my brother's own agenda. Rick interprets Jim's unwillingness to talk with him about his experiences in Vietnam as his inability to face up to what he went through. I see it differently. He may only reveal hints of "deeper content" because he doesn't want to give away his agenda of how he uses his status as Vietnam veteran to aggrandize his ego and improve his social status. How true are his war stories? Are they exaggerations? I've talked to a number of guys about their adaptations to their Vietnam experience, both to guys returning from in-country while I was stationed at StratComPac in Hawaii (when they were not yet so post-traumatized, but more still "war-shocked,") and later, throughout the years, both in attempts to help vets specifically and more generally in more casual situations, where they tended to be less traumatized than attention-seeking. The point I want to make, without minimizing the genuine and often severe disability that some of these guys suffered, is that some of what Vietnam vets report is not so much trauma as exaggeration, at the least, or worse, but still far short of disability or trauma, a residue of earlier experiences, mostly repressed childhood trauma, accentuated or "brought-out" by their "war" experiences, many of which might have been third person accounts that they themselves empathized with during their less than eventful stays in-country.

I tried to express this complexity to Rick, but only in the most superficial way, because we were not exactly in a therapeutic situation, we were only at the beginning of what would have needed to have been a longer and involved process, and, in any case, I doubt that I would ever try to begin such a process separate from a formal organization which provided me some kind of personal protection, because, although I doubted that most of Rick's threats re his potential for violence were anything more than mere posturing, some small bit of it was real, provoked and accentuated probably by his experiences (direct and/or otherwise) in Vietnam, but initiated in childhood. This was the point I wanted to get across to him, that war, in and of itself, seldom creates these kinds of long-term violent and/or quilt-ridden tendencies without having a childhood component to latch to and hang on to. Most soldiers quickly put behind them even the most severe of war experiences once they return home to their peacetime environment if they do not have pre-existing pathologies.

But I expressed these ideas in the most superficial way, being too careful. And yet, I think he did get an inkling of what I was saying. One thing I did manage to get across quite clearly, though, was the fact (and I am assuming here that his experiences were as completely true as he was making them out to be and not at all exaggerated) that soldiers who have been in battle and have killed return home with a lowered inhibition to act out their early traumas in a way in which more inhibited non-war-veterans would never think of doing, due to the fact that they have already taken a step over a line. As we spoke about these things, I kept trying to remember a quote that seemed, in the back of my mind, to be appropriate, but I couldn't call it up. As it turns out, it would not have been so directly appropriate and would have been way too light for the subject matter: "It's only kinky the first time you do it." It applies in sense, but not in mood.

I know my brother better than I know Rick, and so I have a better feel for his ability and tendency to exaggerate his experiences to better enable his earlier pathology, which I understand because it is one that I also have had to deal with. And I easily understand in Rick's reports of my brother's talk with him earlier this day that my brother bolsters his ego by pretending (and maybe even to convince himself, I'm not too sure) that he may have killed people, blindly, and possibly even friendlies, by misdirecting fire missions. He's told me this himself in the past, but without the kind of conviction and affect that I experienced from other vets, so that I intuited little truth in his stories and attributed them to ego-aggrandizement. But when Rick reports them to me, he projects his more sincere pathology (at this moment an impossible to extricate mix of war and childhood affect) onto my brother's confidences, so that Rick feels he must request that I speak to my brother about what he's experiencing. But I know better (and not only for the reason I manage with a little bit of difficulty to get across to Rick, that being a family member and sharing a pathological background, I am not the one to undertake this case--because you don't seek this kind of help from close relatives; you go to disinterested strangers) than to try to help my brother with his problems. What I do not tell Rick is that any attempt on my part to question my brother's fragile integrity would only result in an explosion, severe denial and projection, and accusations of persecution based upon feelings of inferiority he still experiences relative to me, his older sibling. I don't know if he feels these feelings consciously (at times, he may), but he often very effectively displaces them into his behavior. (It's for this reason that I don't feel so much of a threat at his explosions as I might with another person--Rick, for example, who uses a tension I feel to pull himself up to a place where he can feel what he perceives to be a more equal status with me, because he sees me as an older (I don't think he realizes he is only a year younger than me), more educated, more intelligent person.

Rick seems to be a genuine person, and he is. He's direct and feeling, and he expresses what he thinks and feels with little reservation, at least when he's been drinking. But even when he has not, as I remember back, he is very gregarious and readily talks to anyone and everyone. Sitting in the pavilion nearby, I overheard him earlier talking to a guest, one of the younger firemen. He asked him what he did, and the guy told him he was a car salesman, and immediately Rick began telling him that car sales is a terrible profession. It sounded way too familiar a way to be talking to someone you had just met, but Rick persisted as the guy began to defend his profession. And the more defensive the guy got, the more insistent Rick became about what a rotten way to make a living selling cars is. I began to think that he'd finally had too much to drink and wasn't picking up on the clues the guy was increasingly giving off, that he was disconcerted that someone he just met would attack what he did for a living. But as it turned out, Rick knew exactly what he was doing and he executed his agenda as skillfully as the best of his profession, which turned out to be...have you guessed it yet? Yep. He's been working as a car salesman for the last seven years. And when he reveals this single bit of information, everything derogatory that he's said about car salesmen is turned around and all listening, if they are at all perceptive, have to recognize his genius at the technique he's been using to lead one of his own around by the nose.

Later, he uses this same genius on me, and it takes me a while to catch on, because I'm not a car salesman. But I am a psychologist, and I should know better, especially given this earlier insight. Yet, if I don't make a conscious effort to do otherwise, I tend to take people at face value when I'm relating to them, and only later, when I'm alone, do I engage in critical thinking about their unconscious motivations. And a part of Rick's genius is that he is genuine. He knows how to insist his way into your psyche, appealing to you on a feeling level, introducing himself to you slowly if he thinks he feels a difficult approach, softening you up, which is what he'd been doing to me all day, and I only very late in the evening began to realize it.

Several times throughout our talks Rick interjects comments, more like warnings, with a serious feel to them, about me not "jerking him around," or "psyching him out." I assure him I am not, even as I think that I might be playing some of my unconscious games that he is picking up on. At one point, in the context of the conversation, I try to exemplify a point I am making with the quote "You're unique, just like everyone else." I try to make him understand the implicit koan, but all he can see is the joke and the semantic deception (which is actually a pretty sophisticated level of perception, but not the ultimate one that I am shooting for). He thinks I'm playing a game with him, using a vagary of words to fog the issue and confuse or derail him. It's only later that I see he was projecting his own manipulating behavior onto me. I also see how wary of me he had been, how hesitant he was to approach me, why it took him so long. He remembers our past far better than I do. He knows how capable I am of disarming and disregarding someone who is not completely honest with me. His genuine approach is probably the only means whereby he is able to penetrate my defenses.

We talk some more about his guilt. I try to use his Catholic faith to assure him that whatever he had done, in Vietnam or elsewhere, he is forgiven for it. I use the example of conscientious objectors in WWII. His God could never condemn naive men, boys really, for what they did or did not do during the war because they had no idea what they were getting into or what the consequences would be. Since Rick is worried about whether what he had done was wrong and that he will be condemned eternally for it (and never get to meet his wife again, which seems to be his real concern), I tell him that his God would neither condemn the conscientious objector for refusing to support his country and fight, but go to jail instead, nor would He condemn the naive farm boy who went blindly into war not knowing what he was doing. But he would condemn the conscientious objector who knew better not to kill, but allowed himself instead to be drafted and ended up killing people--because he knew better. I ask him if he knew what he was doing when he entered the army, and he assures me he did not. [As I think back on it, this may not have been such a smart thing to ask him. What if he had said he knew? I should have gotten that information first, before I presented the argument.]

But all of Rick's inner turmoil, maybe, has nothing to do with his experiences in Vietnam, or not nearly so much as he makes out and maybe even thinks himself. These past sins seem to be relevant to him only in that they might affect his chances of meeting his wife again in heaven. While trying to understand how he feels about Janie's death, I talk to him about grief. I mention that the last time I saw him was at my mother's funeral, and I am about to tell him how readily open he had been with me then, when he interrupts me by telling me that all he had wanted to do then was to pay his respects and get out, because he felt so bad, because he had liked my parents so much. I feel that there is a little bit of posturing here on his part, so I tell him about my own reaction to my parents' death. I tell him that maybe I'm not the person for him to be talking with this about because I never felt any grief for my parents. (The fact that Rick could even get me to talk to him in this way makes him an exceptional person. I still didn't feel that I needed to talk about it. I doubt that I will ever feel that way, but his skill at provoking me to open up amazes me.) He assures me that I am wrong and before he can even go on, I admit that, sure, I am repressing it. But, as I will later conclude, he may have lost the contact for a moment, and when he did, he confused me. He was projecting his own far more "heartfelt" (his word) affect onto me, in place of intuition and empathy, in order to perceive what I should have felt. And I fell down on the play. I wanted him to think that I was a better person than I am, maybe, or a different one, or a less advanced one. Later, I will ask myself this same implicit question again: are those feelings for my parents still in there, repressed, or have I really transcended them, little by little, over the long length of time that my parents were ill, while I grieved in miniscule spurts so that I wouldn't have to let it out all at once and be later so obviously affected. In fact, haven't I almost always reacted in this way to tragedy? Isn't this the way I've always protected myself, growing very slowly over long periods of adjustment, mostly beforehand as I intuited and predicted the course of events, rather than after the fact, as a result? Don't I believe that this is the proper way to develop, outwardly unaffected, inwardly in control? Don't I permanently relegate my hurt feelings to the past in exactly this way, slowly over time? Haven't I transcended all of my hurt in this way? Don't I really believe (I hope I do) that closure is a false concept, at least for people who protect themselves so well, that to live in an eternal present is to deal with pain and sorrow in the moment of occurrence, if not earlier via fantasy and imagination, and to move immediately on? This is why I don't so well remember incidents in my past, not because I can't remember, but because I put them behind me and moved on. If I am prompted to remember, I can, eventually, recall the incidents. (Or is this creative imagination?)

Now that I think back, I think that Rick may have lost the contact in a lot of moments as we progressed, that the initial contact was in fact the result of a prolonged technique, but to a more noble end, to share the affect and the psyche, and once there, he lost his way a lot and had to try to reestablish it, with a lot less technique since we were in the middle of it in an ongoing process. He's a good psychotherapist, but he's not that good. He loses his way and stumbles around a lot. (But, come to think of it, so do the professionals.)

Rick uses his complimentary and flattering behavior to attract attention and get empathy and a feeling of contact in a way that he might never otherwise get it. And he uses his pain, both at the loss of Janie and at his war experiences and their consequences, for the same reason. And a lot of this was genuine and not technique driven. He may use his technique to contact you affectively and to get into your psyche, but once there, at least with me in these limited cases, he was genuinely appreciative of what he got from me, both the insights I had for him, slow in coming at first until I got deep enough into him to see what he was about (I'm not anywhere near the whole truth yet, I know), but easily expressed (because he allowed it, in a way that my brother, and most others, never could) once the method began to flow. He gives complements and attention in order to get them given back. He craves companionship, and he experiences the loss of it in the absence of Janie.

Looking back, I see how Rick's behavior reveals an unconscious inferiority and feelings of powerlessness and ineffectuality. He uses his potential for committing a violent act as a threat to assert himself and raise himself up toward what he assumes to be others' superior positions. If only he knew, how less superior we are, and how much farther advanced he is, because he is capable of drilling right through people's outer shells into the cores of their psyches. He may be consciously aware that he does this, but he is not aware, I suspect, that it makes him a more advanced person. And so he asserts his authority by establishing an implicit threat: he is not only capable, by means of his training and experience, of doing violence (at one point he mentioned, in passing, that he was a black belt in Karate, a claim that I know to have some truth because I remember him and Mac practicing in my mother's kitchen and her telling them to stop it, because they were getting too violent. But I understand his motivation for telling me this. I can make the same claim, and I think to counter his remark by telling him that I too, since I knew him then, learned Karate. But I rule this out. I think, as he tells me this, that I know full well that I would never be capable of defending myself now, and thus I unwittingly allow his intimidation, which I should not do, except that I am aware that, although the conditioned reactions are still there in me, I am very much aware that the necessary musculature development and flexible physique is long since gone--not to mention how my back pain interferes with both my physical and attitudinal response), but he is willing, in moments of abandon, to use violence. In other words, his message is: he is powerful and even dangerous, and thus of an equal if not a superior status, because he is capable of and willing to commit violence. He doesn't see that he doesn't need this ego defense, that he is already superior to most of us, via his ability to affect the people he intentionally encounters.

But how much of this approach is practiced technique? He is not at all your typical slick salesman type, which works in his favor, because you don't perceive this agenda in him. He is completely disarming by being a consummate image of a working-class slob. You don't suspect any practiced technique at all, so that if any of it is practiced, and it must be if he's been selling cars for a while and still has a job, then you don't see it, which is exactly the best way to be when you're a salesman. When he calls you intelligent, you better see that he's projecting his own image onto you, otherwise you will miss the point entirely. It's flattery in its finest form, because it is at least in part, genuine.

But how much is genuine? And how much is passive-aggressive? (And when he talks about the violence he feels, how much is not so passive?) It's an interesting and complex mix. It may be that he is not aware of the mix at all, that he acts on instinct, so to speak. But there were indications that came up during our long conversation that he may have had a thorough understanding of exactly what he was doing. He reveals on several occasions that he understands the complexity of what we are talking about both from his own point of view as well as from mine when it differs from his, and from other perspectives as well. So, if he has never thought in conscious detail about how he applies and intertwines his sales technique with his genuine contact of and feeling for people, I would be very surprised.

In the parking lot as we are leaving, he again tries to convince me to go with him to the Oldies dance that he had earlier suggested that we go to. He tries to play on my sense of pity.

I must exert a caution. I must reestablish my stone wall here. I almost want to go with him. I feel, as I am driving away, that I would like to have gone with him, but I don't yet know his real agenda, and in any case, I would never go with him when he's drinking, and if he wasn't, he probably never would have asked, nor perhaps even wanted to--nor even, maybe, have approached me in the first place, or maybe even have come to the picnic.

My ability to listen to people and to empathize and to tentatively (re my own beliefs, i.e., to suspend my own belief system so that I may agree with and confirm beliefs and opinions others already have but are insecure in until they gain a mutual consensus), my ability to convince people that I understand them, even when I initially do not, thus enabling empathy via expectation, is a trait inherited from my mother. She did the same thing, and everybody loved her for it. But it gets me into psychic trouble, when I will not be able later to turn off the empathy, when transferences are completed and I am stuck in a foreign psychic landscape until I am able to purge it, which is what I'm doing now, big time, in the same way that I do it in a very small way on a daily basis, a mental process not unlike the physical one that Ellen Burstyn demonstrated in Resurrection.

If I had allowed it, Rick would have absorbed my life, commanded my attention full time. As it is, I've been struggling for days (a lot of the content of this long journal entry is material added in rewrite) to assimilate into my art the knowledge and experience Rick has manage to pass onto me, and thus to purge it from my system and return myself to my previous state of relative lack of dissonance, albeit all the wiser for having been engaged by him. I talked to Rick directly and intimately for less than an hour and look at how much time I've devoted to the transference material. Days. What if I had gone to the Oldies dance with him? How much more information would I now be dealing with?

Several times during the course of his conversation with Jeff (one of the newer firemen) early in the day, Rick told him to give him a call, and he emphasized it too much and was too eager, thus revealing, I think, a deficit of attention and companionship. We are very much the opposite in this respect. And yet, I wouldn't mind Rick's companionship, if could keep it under control, if he wouldn't overwhelm me with his obvious enormous need. I can only take so much of any person, especially someone as intense as he is, at one time, and then I must be left alone for awhile to assimilate.

notes for more assimilation needed
Insert earlier:

He accuses me of playing with his head, and I don't know if this is a further form of flattery or if it's pure projection--because that's what he's trying to do to me. If it's an attempt at flattery, it doesn't work so well, because I feel threatened by it. I may be playing with his head in these few instances when he points it out, but it's entirely unconscious if I am. And my intent is to try to make him see something I feel he's not seeing. So it may be that he feels threatened by an indirect agenda he perceives, and I am responding transferentially to his threat perception. Or it may be that he's trying to flatter me by indicating that I have the ability to twist him around. Probably both.

Insert earlier:

How I used to be so "sociable." Lots of people used to know (of) me, as I find out, via Russ (another of the newer firemen), when after we are introduced, he tells me he knows who I am, I'm the guy who used to ride the orange Honda motorcycle. But I tend to forget that social phase of my life, like I tend to forget the past as I move on. Rick reminds me of it as he points out to me, piecemeal throughout the day in joint conversations with others and all at once in the one marathon session towards evening after he has had a sufficient quantity of Jack Black, how much I have influenced people who have known me, and even who have only known of me. I've come to this awareness many times throughout my life. [I've written of it before somewhere. I have to search for it and link to it from here.]

Develop:

• Pre-dreams and premonitions of shootings and violence
• Alan B. dream: going to a dinner/dance). Is this a prescient dream of Rick? Also another dream. (I had that van at the time).
• Some people are so interesting or so compelling or so prone to imposing their psyches onto others that when they do it to me, I have no choice but to relate to them transferentially and treat them as a gold mine of artistic information when they inject themselves into my psyche and force it to act upon the information they impart.
• Rick's not going to be able to give up his problems (the loss of Janie, a penchant for violence, etc.), that is, he's not really going to want to submit to a solution, because that's the way he gets his attention and affective interpersonal contact. If he gives up his problems, whatever they might be, he no longer has the hurt that motivates him to contact people. It's his adaptation to life, which probably goes back a lot farther than Vietnam.
• I don't go out so often any more because I absorb these transferences from people and I have to retreat and figure them out (interpret them). If I don't do this, they begin to build up and crowd out my "real self", that is, they take over my psyche and I become them, instead of me (whatever that is). They work on my belief and self structure. By interpreting them, I attribute them to those unconscious areas of myself and others and I understand how much of them are my own self, repressed, and how much I have unwittingly absorbed, attributable instead to others. In this way, I resolve a lot of internal conflict. In order to live in this relatively conscious way, I have to take others' transferences in little by little. If I am out every day, they accumulate, and I become "not myself," overloaded with a lot of confusing fragments of personality and pathology. Therefore, a procedure:
1. Go out.
2. Take on the transference via empathy.
3. Return home.
4. Interpret the transference.
5. Make a judgment on the balance of unconscious v. conscious intent
6. Attribute each aspect of the interpretation to self and other.
7. All the while, writing about it. (This is my method.)
8. Repeat the process.
9. [This is what is otherwise called life.]
• I wait, for people to approach me, and if they do, I listen, and if they have something to say, if they interest me and don't just pass the time with cliches and bullshit, after I figure out what their agenda is and how I might properly respond to it without getting myself caught up in their games, then I may begin to contribute to the conversation.
• Jim said, when Milfeit asked me about how I was able to retire, that I stay at home a lot and so don't spend money:
• "I buy what I want. The trick is in not wanting."
• Rick is a psychologist himself, using a practiced skill to "contact" people's psyches. People think he may be a person to avoid for this reason, because in his drive to find answers to his problems, he imposes himself on people in a way that they may not so much appreciate, especially when he is drinking (which may be the only way that he can do it). [Maybe me seeing Rick as a psychologist is a projection.]
• Rick's drug use (Oxycontin?), combined with alcohol. [He's proud of it, like we were in our past. He boasts of it to the newer firemen and even offers them some of his pills, which they do not accept. I feel (and even agree with) their more modern agenda--a culture clash.] Rick is not supposed to be drinking at all, on the advice of his doctor. He had a heart attack, or was that just another posture? When I questioned him about it in the parking lot as we were leaving, he seemed a bit hesitant to talk about it and I got that same feeling that I get with Jim and others when they are exaggerating material and don't want to reveal too much for fear that their deceptions will be uncovered.
• Rick has a death wish? He wants to join Janie. In the parrking lot, in a final discussion about life after death, I say "Maybe you go where you expect to go." And he tells me that he feels Janie's presence and knows he will be with her someday. I tell him that just before my mother died, she reported that she saw my father standing in her bedroom waiting for her. This comforts him. It's our last exchange before I leave.

[more analysis of this subject]

6-9-02 My mind's racing at a hundred miles a minute. I get two or three hours of sleep and I'm wide awake again and ready to go. I feel physically exhausted, but mentally I'm super-alert. I feel like I used to feel on speed. Is this the manic phase of a bi-polar disorder? (It doesn't feel like disorder at all, but super-order.) Who needs sleep anyway? There's plenty of time for it during the winter. Maybe this is residue material from Rick's psyche. He seems a bit bipolar, now that I think about it. 6-13-02 Steve comes home from work (landscaping) in the late afternoon. Terry is driving the van. Terry never drives. Marcia (as is usual, if she is home) comes to the door when they arrive. The guys don't get out of the van, so Marcia walks out to it. Obviously, they've been drinking and Steve is drunk. They get into the house with little incident, although I can feel and see the tension. Marcia is playing her Poor Steve/Poor Me game. Over the next hour they are out on the porch occasionally. Steve talks to Terry in that "intimate" way he has, especially when he is drinking, of leaning in too close toward his face, the same behavior that Rick exhibited toward people last Saturday at the picnic. I tire of watching them. I'm very tired. I go and take a nap after setting up the recorder to tape Ozzy reruns. Hours later, I awaken out of a dream. I get out of bed and go out into the front of the house to work at the computer. Steve and Terry are still at it across the street. Steve still talks to Terry in that same "intimidating" way. They're still drinking. Steve is up and walking around, as if he is unable to settle down and sit still, despite the fact that it's eleven-thirty at night. (I've been asleep for four hours.) Steve gets like this in the summer, from the heat, and from the excess sunlight. So do I, but I display it differently. I work longer hours, sleep less, think more. My mind runs on in a way that I wish it would run in the winter, when sometimes it seems it will not run at all. A happy medium might be better, but maybe not. Maybe then I'd be more like other people, more ordinary, less capable of (what I think are) more profound insights. In other words, more "normal." 6-14-02 Cut four inches off my hair this morning. Got fed up with it feeling hot on my neck. Immediately, I regretted it, but after a few minutes, I accepted the inevitable. Eventually, always, I'm going to have to cut it. I can't imagine growing it long like my ex-wife's used to be. It really doesn't bother me that Jim criticizes my long hair. I've long since adapted to my hair length transition and accept myself for the way I now look. I did have a problem for a few months re-adapting to it. (It was long when I was young.) Now, I like the image, even more so than when I had long hair in my youth. My self-image has adjusted and is now very positive (in this respect). But it does bother me that Jim feels that it's okay to criticize me, that I am a subject of his intolerance, whereas before I kind of felt exempted from it. I used to feel that we had a bond where we could be critical of the world together. But we've kind of lost that as his intolerance progresses and generalizes to a wider and wider field. And now I am becoming included in the field of his intolerance. Now that I think of it, maybe I've always been included, behind my back. But I never felt it before; that is, it's never been conscious. I felt he deigned to exempt me. But probably not. Probably, this was all just wishful thinking on my part. Maybe this is just me becoming even more conscious of what's going on around me. I watched my father go through this same thing Jim is going through now, developing intolerance as the world, in the guise of his increasingly decrepit physiology, beat him down, and I hope it isn't happening/going to happen to me. I consciously work at it to assure myself that it is not. I can see how my isolated lifestyle could be interpreted as a retreat from the world. Really, it is not. I've never felt more in touch, due to the fact that I am not so stressed as to need to close out consciousness of it as I did when I was immersed in it up to my eyeballs. But I can see how people might think that I am closing myself off. And I can see how my back problem works to cut me off, when I will feel pain that dominates my attention to the exclusion of everything else. But the pain is so much less now that I no longer have to push myself beyond my limits every day. I relax when I need to, and the pain goes away. It no longer debilitates me. I am free of its limitations, because I've chosen a lifestyle that circumvents them. It could be argued that I impose limits in order to prevent them, that I limit myself to a narrower world. But I am free within that world, whereas I am severely restricted in the larger one to a narrower point that I am in my narrower world. In any case, I keep a close eye on my physical and mental condition, comparing it to that of my father, who ended up for the last ten years of his life (self-)restricted, first to a wheelchair, and then to a bed, with an intolerant attitude that started long before the physical one did and probably brought the physical one on or at least worsened it severely. I feel incredibly freed by the fact that I don't have to guard myself so much any more and worry about what I will say when I encounter people (ala the method learned from Rick's example). I can admit mistakes I have made, admit what a jerk I've been. If Nixon could say that he "messed up" (I just saw that on tv), then I can too. If people don't like it (me), too bad. But this is the summer. I wonder how I'll feel about this same subject in the depths of winter?

6-15-02 I have achieved a state of existence that I never really planned on. I have become the reclusive artist who eschews all else for the sake of his art, thinking the rest of the world of lesser importance--the writer in his garret, the painter locked up in his studio night and day, feverishly producing work after work, ignoring his health and even forgetting to eat. Of course, I haven't gone this far. I guard my health religiously--pretty much the extent of my religion. And I never forget to eat, although I may, at times, intentionally work rather than eat, when my weight threatens to creep up and I see an advantage to not eating. However, unlike most of my states of being (there are many), although I've long held this state to be a high ideal, I never actually planned to exist this way. It just happened, which verifies the strength of role models. Usually, I find my (more complicated, difficult) goals, ambitions, and expectations come to fruition in three to five years, after I have formally established them, on paper (or in pixels). For even more complicated and difficult aspirations, the length of time is more like five to ten years. But for unplanned models, how long does it take? Much longer, I suspect. I haven't thought about this ideal in many years. But here I am. 6-21-02 Joyce goes to Florida on vacation, and she still bugs me. This afternoon, she calls me and asks me to try to call Jay and Jimmie (who did not go to Florida, but stayed home under their own recognizance) because she couldn't get a hold of them. I call the house and get Jay on the first try. Later, I go over there to test a CD in my never-ending quest to develop a foolproof back-up system. Jay is there playing games on the Internet. Jimmie is out. Everything is normal.

6-23-02 I finally got the rest of the grass cut today. It was over a foot high with patches already going to seed and starting to look like a hay field. I got the rest of it cut over the last week or so, the area out front and the parts that people can see from the street. Only my next door neighbor could see the side behind the hedges that was out of control, and her lawn is almost as bad as mine was, so I didn't feel guilty about not having cut mine. Now I got to get out there tomorrow and rake it all up before the sun bakes the cut grass dry and kills the growing grass beneath it. Hot days and nights. I love it, the sense of abandon. Fell asleep at six pm and awoke years later at eleven in one of those chronological disconnects. This happens mostly in the summer. It's the heat. Dreamed I am down on Rt. 22 preparing to go down lower Rodi Road, which turns out to be some kind of mystery area where uninitiated people are not supposed to go. But I go anyway, looking for something. The area is several different places at the same time: the long narrow winding hollow that it really is, a wide nondescript honeycomb of caves, a middle class residential housing plan with brick box houses all in a row along wide treeless streets, and a huge outdoor room sunken down into the valley. I search the area for someone/something, peering cautiously around rocks and corners so as not to be seen, and at the same time, in the same way, some unknown entity or thing is searching for me. I don't find anyone/anything, but neither am I found. [The "chronological" disconnect is a real-time experience of a disconnect between psychic functions?] Cut to Third Street. db is delivering newspapers and I am waiting for her to be finished and preoccupying myself with some secret activity, doing it while she is away and stopping while she returns to where I am to get more papers. I admire her determined attitude as she works hard to get her job done. That's the way she was, always working and dedicated to whatever she was doing. When it gets hot and steamy, psychic "coincidence" seems to become more profound. When I get out of bed and sit down at the computer to continue logging old journals where I left off years ago this afternoon, the first entry I log is about Third Street. It's a piece about a dream with a setting and mood very similar to the dream I just had. Life connects up for me in this way sometimes, and I like it when it does. I wish my life could be this way always, without interruption by those long periods of time when I will see no connection at all.

6-25-02 I got an e-mail this morning from a woman who praised me for (one of) my website(s) [a doorway, actually. What she saw initially and assumed was my site on Geocities was a doorway to my Tripod site, which she didn't recognize as such because the link to it doesn't allow the visitor to leave the Geocities frameset. I've got to fix that]. She says in her e-mail: I visited your website "Postperformance Metaphor" at geocities. Enjoyed browsing through the site. The title of the site gives an insight into the contents of the site. The links provided to various pages are very innovative, and will definitely capture the attention of the readers. I especially liked the link to your page. The poems and proses [sic] speak well of your profession as a psychologist. I also liked the professional presentation of the site. Needless to say, by the time I finished reading this first paragraph, I was feeling pretty pleased with myself, and very grateful for her appreciation, despite her obvious lack of a sophisticated aesthetic of wordcraft. But then, the next paragraph let all of the wind out of my sails. I work in the marketing department of ADDR.com (ADDR.com is a professional web hosting and web design provider currently servicing over 60,000 customers) and we are currently running a special offer. I wanted to offer you 3 months of web hosting absolutely free of charge to give you a chance to try out our services. It's a sales pitch for a website hosting service. Man, was I disappointed. All of her praise turned immediately into hype, whether it was sincere or not. What a bust.

Click on the footnote number to return to the corresponding point in the text. 1. I struggle with myself not to extract this whole thread out of the journal and into a separate pastiche or project. This would make a good story, I think. And maybe one day I'll do this. But for now, there are just too many notes (afterthoughts) to be incorporated into a more formal work, which, if I leave this stuff as journal entries, I can simply include at the end of the piece in a notes setion. In other words, I'm just too lazy. That's what postmodernism does to me, I'm afraid. 2. Judgment should be spelled 'judgement,' like occurrence should be spelled 'occurance.' I should start spelling words the way I think they should be spelled instead of the way convention dictates. But for now, I'll go along. It's just too much trouble at this point to buck the system that far.