I tell the creative writing kids, “consider your audience” as if there’s things I can tell kids that they need to know, as if I know anything about what I’m supposedly teaching.

And I guess it’s good “advice” to the extent any advice can be good, which it can’t, but it’s not some dire thing, like, ERMAGERRRD your AUDIENCE is JUDGING you — it’s more like just one of the rules of the game (at least for the current hand) — merely a parameter — part of your GIVEN CIRCUMSTANCES! It doesn’t really matter if the person or people in your head is 100% real or is really gonna read your shit or if they care or if you care if they care — well, it kind of matters a little bit. In every game rule must reside a little bit of life, which is to say of death, which means if you truly don’t care AT ALL it probably isn’t going to work. But if you care because someone owns your time, it doesn’t work either, but it can look like it does which is usually good enough. We put the magic in the real tchotchkes, the ones we make to sell we just don’t put it in.

I’m allergic to words tonight, so this is gonna suck.

pigeon

when my therapist said “You’re very attractive.”

This was back when I needed it — help, that is. I said to myself one night, finally, the night you eventually get to when there’s no other option, “I need some help” and so I called around and got some. The first time I went in, I almost instantly burst into tears, said “sorry,” and my (new) therapist was like, given what you just told me, I would think it would be perfectly fine if you just sat here and cried the whole time.

We went on to other things, as you do.

Nobody can cry forever, unless that’s your thing, which it may be for some people, which just makes me think about how impossible it is to imagine being, truly I mean, someone else, and how tragic it is that we’re these fucking weird gross floppy stinky monkeys in the first place, imprisoned by being alive. But I guess I’m lucky, because I can cry sometimes but then stop and start talking and there’s usually been someone within a day’s travel who for whatever reason was able to give enough of a shit to listen.

If I was still drinking I’d be drinking right now.

My therapist was not the therapist of my charming fictional fantasies. She was not the sexual redemptive transgressive non-real NPC invented by a solipsistic playboy. She was a real, regular, mortal, imprisoned-like-the-rest-of-us human being. I guess everybody is and that’s the seeds of the end of any relationship, you can feel it right there at the beginning if you care to.

Also she was a former Catholic but not really former enough, so she kept steering me towards talking about sexual undercurrents, like surely that was going to be important to my analysis and recovery, but then she wasn’t really capable of hearing about that stuff, when we did actually go there.

This one time I was lamenting feeling like such a glob of worthless shit, you know the drill: I’d “get back out there” except I’m old! I’m fat! I don’t feel attractive enough anymore to — and she interrupted me to contradict: “No, you’re very attractive!”

She said it JUST A TINY HAIR too brightly, just an INFINITESIMAL bit too much like she meant it, and I went back a few more? several more? a lot more? times after that, but really, that was the seed of the end of it.

I miss her. I hope she’s doing OK. I wish we didn’t have to have stupid jobs where someone else owns our minds and bodies because they need to pretend to own their own. I wish what therapists do and what teachers do could just be what we did for each other. I wish I knew what the fuck I was talking about. Sorry. I don’t.

I need help again. I don’t want another therapist. I want my cat to become a person, and then I want the person that my cat becomes to like me and want to hang out with me. I guess it’s a blessing that we never know who’s been reincarnated into what. If I could somehow find out for real whether or not my cat is who I think he is — I’m not sure I’d even want to know.

If I get another therapist I’m gonna have to do the work of becoming human, because the new therapist is gonna have the same fatal flaw as the previous one, and that’s that they’ll be a human too, not a cipher or an ideal, a dumb old real intelligence not a too-smart artificial one, and that means I’ll have to be real too to meet their eyes, to talk, to cry, I’ll have to listen, I’ll have to allow for limitations, and if I have to do that for them, I might as well do it for myself, and then what am I supposed to do? Be a human? Ugh. Humans are made of more bacteria by weight than actual, I don’t know, the-stuff-that-people-are-made-of cells, did you know that? It may be bullshit but I read it somewhere. I don’t remember the correct details of the actual fact, but whatever it actually was, it was fucking gross, I remember that much.

It’s like the only person I was OK to hear “You’re very attractive” from was someone whom I was perfectly safe from because of the role they were playing — the rules of the game. It couldn’t mean the same kind of incinerating threat it would mean coming from someone just out there in the wild, a free agent, a free radical, a fellow nothing, a fellow member of the audience.

I also tell the creative writing kids, anything is better than nothing! You can’t fail this class unless you just don’t do it at all. I’m sorry kids. I’m sorry I lied.