Fearless Moral Inventory

Fortunately I can't top the revelation in the last post: I never did anything that horrible again, but I certainly learned what I was capable of, and I certainly lost my ability to feel total moral superiority to anybody, concentration camp guards included.

But as I plunge onward in my Al-Anon 4th Step--my fearless moral inventory--that is far from the end of the story.

Let's just deal with one thing tonight: snobbery.

I may very well be the worst snob you have ever met. This is simply true and I am not looking for anybody to say no, no, not true. I realize that by sharing this sin I am also practicing it. So don't say you haven't been warned.

My snobbery of course is born of an all-encompassing and often crippling envy but we'll get to envy next because envy really is the big one. I'm starting with the effect and then getting to the cause.

If you have met me more than twice I will without fail have found a way to work the conversation around to my world-class education. There's no question that you've heard of the place I went to college and grad school. And I'll make sure you know that I went there. And know it. And know it. See? I just did.

And my travels? Oh you'll hear about it. Can't get to the third time meeting me without intimate remembrances of at least three European and/or Asian capitals entering the conversation. I make myself puke with this stuff. But I can't stop myself either. It "just happens."

Then there's the reverse snobbery--worst of all. I live on the East side of Los Angeles--theoretically hipper, more bohemian, more of a melting pot than the all-white West. Oh listen to Mr. Boho's contempt for those whitebread soulless Westsiders! Listen to him brag how much more a Man of the People he is, because he has Armenian neighbors and shops at a Thai grocery! And oh, those soulless Westsiders, when they travel, they stay in cookie-cutter luxury hotels while our Working Class Hero stays at rustic eco-lodges that can only be reached by boats piloted by picturesque natives with whom he is soon conversing on a first-name basis! Watch Tom reach out to the noble savage! Watch Tom eat their humble native foods!

Let's not even get started on the famous and semi-famous friends thing. Let's, just, not.

And the way I conspire to make sure people see the car I pull up in? Sometimes I think that's worse than torturing rats.

On the plus side, I will say that the awareness that is leading me to share all this is a healing thing, and on a good day I may not be as bad as I once was. But can I accept a challenge to simply leave the fact of where I went to college out of my conversation entirely for a six month period? And park my car around the corner where nobody will see it for the same length of time? And make not one mention of any trip I have ever taken? And express not one word of contempt for my wealthy neighbors to the west who know not the joys of the get-down Guatemalan joint on the corner? Maybe I should try it, as a kind of moral sobriety pledge.

I'm not going to stop there tonight. I'm going to share one really really bad thing I did in regard to all this.

When my daughter was applying to college I put on a whole Eastsider act of hey, it doesn't matter where you go, as long as you're happy. Yeah, so why did I take her on a little trip to visit my college, and lead her through the august Gothic halls in which I had passed my own, if truth be told, miserable undergraduate years, and take her to afternoon tea at my, you know, club, and get all teary-eyed at the grand tradition of it all, and end with her feeling that she had to get into this school or else? This was all particularly cruel on my part because while she was a good student she really didn't have the grades or scores for it: it was a stretch. So she applied. And got waiting listed--I think as a courtesy to a legacy, not with any intention that they would accept her. That was rejection number one. Then she didn't, of course, get in off the waiting list, which was rejection number two. She did get into a good school only slightly outside the top-ten glow, but one which afforded me scant-to-zero bragging rights. Then she took a year off (just because she wanted to), and, at my passive-aggressive urging, reapplied to my alma mater, this time for early decision, with new essays and another A or two and some more data on the resume. On this round she got "deferred" and put back into the big applicant pool for spring decision. That was rejection number three. Then I "encouraged" her to get teachers to write additional letters of recommendation etc., which she wanted to do like she wanted to drill a hole in her own skull (one teacher emailed back and said "what do you want to go to that overrated place for?"), and in the end she got the skinny envelope in the spring. So, in essence, I made sure that she got rejected not once but four times from the school I went to.

When I get to making my amends--the 9th Step--the first call is to my daughter. Because that was baaaaad.

Unspeakable

There was an interesting cross-blog discussion recently about the issue of self-censorship in blogland. One cool blog friend went so far as to take down her blog because she felt she wasn't being totally honest in it, so why bother? I miss her blog, but I admire and even envy the integrity of the move. When I started blogging I thought: wow, I can say anything, because nobody knows who I am anyway! But then you make cyberfriends. Cyberfriends you really like. And you want them to like you. So you start to issue press releases instead of genuine messages from the heart.

Tonight I make a move toward real honesty. I tell something really horrible about myself. In sophomore year of college I had two roommates. One was as lost and sad as I was, but with even bigger shames and secrets. One was a player, outrageously good looking and at ease, with more girlfriends than he could handle. Note that during this year I didn't just have acne, I had cystic acne, which means big red weeping golfballs under the skin, always where it counted most: nose, jaws, between the eyes. The good looking confident roommate (for whom I ghost-wrote a paper once in exchange for a few hits of windowpane acid) had two gerbils and a white rat named Henrietta. He'd go to classes with Henrietta on his shoulder. They were very close, my roommate and that rat. I tortured the rat and the gerbils. It was my revenge on my roommate for being good looking and getting laid all the time. I would poke the gerbils with sharpened pencils and once, or maybe more than once, I swung Henrietta around my head by the tail. The other roommate did these things too, but I wasn't a follower in this. I would get sexually turned on by torturing the animals. I'm sitting here thirty three years later trying to remember if one of the pets died from this. I think maybe yes, but that may just be guilt talking. I was never found out, though the other sad roommate and I used to talk freely about the fact that we were doing it. My only defense here is that it happened over three decades ago and I haven't done anything remotely like it since, or wanted to. But that doesn't change the fact that I did it. The good looking roommate is now a big deal real estate guy in Manhattan. We had lunch a few years ago and he seemed happy. He does, however, carry a certain amount of anger at me---because I talked him out of being pre-med. (I did this because he was miserable and hated and couldn't pass organic chemistry and didn't want to do it anymore. He didn't take much convincing.) He thinks he would have made a good doctor. The other sad roommate was a gifted pianist with hopes of a solo career but he would get extremely nervous playing for people, his hands would go all to spaghetti, and I may be the only person who knows that he really had a measure of genius. Now he teaches piano at a girl's school in Canada. He says that in twenty five years of teaching he has never had a talented pupil. And many years ago, while Richard Nixon was president, he and I tortured our roommate's pets.

Now: will I have the nerve to press "publish post"?

Go Figure

So there I was last week in the middle of the blackest broken glass depression I have ever known. Like, lying in bed in the middle of the night howling at the blackness of it all, but silently, so I wouldn't wake up my wife. My inner monologue basically one unbroken litany of you're no good as a writer, you're no good as a husband, you're no good as a man. With extra focus on the tangled mess of my marriage. The tiny voice trying to say that at least some of that wasn't completely true went unheard in the howling hurricane of BLECCHHH.

Then came Sunday morning. My wife said she wanted to go to India Town to replace her wedding ring which she had lost some weeks ago and did I want to come? She has always loved India Town, which is a huge, very active commercial district of Indian restaurants, clothing stores, jewelry stores, grocery stores, etc., about ten miles from us, and she has been trying to get me to go there for years. Bleak as I felt, it didn't seem right to let my wife go off and buy a replacement wedding ring on her own, so I said I'd go, in the afternoon, after I got some work done. (Read: after I stared pointlessly at the screen for a few hours.) When she came home she was getting ready to go into the shower and I was sitting at my desk and I reached up and put my hand on her breast. Now you may know that depression is very hard on the libido and sexual desire was, I thought, the last thing I was feeling, or ever would feel, but for some reason the feeling of her still-clothed breast under my hand sent a hundred octane shot of desire through me that was all the more intense for being completely unexpected. Then she got into the shower and some force--well we know what that force is--picked me up from my chair, took off my clothes and put me in the shower with her and--well--I'll draw the curtain there and leave the rest up to your wildly overactive imaginations. That was good enough. But something else happened. As we emerged from the shower all dripping wet and moony-eyed I realized that the entire cloud of shadow that had been hanging over me and getting darker and darker for weeks had lifted away and vanished like smoke.

And that was only the beginning. We drove out to Artesia, where India Town is, and got off the freeway early so we could drive through neighborhoods we had never seen, and commented and exclaimed at everything, and then got to India Town and went to ten jewelry stores looking for just the perfect ring, and stopped for various amazing Indian snacks every ten feet, and finally found such a beautiful (and cheap!) ring in that super-yellow-glowing Indian gold that I decided to get one to match, and we were hugging and holding hands the whole time and being just ridiculously lovey-dovey. Because we were married on 9/27/81 -- that is, three squared, three cubed, three to the fourth -- our wedding rings were inscribed 3² 3³ 3⁴. On the new rings we had the same inscribed and added + 5², because this year we will have been married for 25 years. Then we went to this great cheap all-you-can-eat Indian buffet place and got big plates of chickpeas and cauliflower and best of all goat stew and sat there over the paper plates and plastic forks and did a little improvised ring-exchanging ceremony, complete with vows. In the picture, the new ring is the one on the bottom.

That was Sunday, and now it's almost Thursday, and the depression has not shown its face since.

Is this just a manifestation of the fact that my self esteem is overly tied up in sex and sexual performance, meaning the high will last only until that shot of confidence has eroded? Is it the start of a new manic phase, as predicted by the Depakote-prescribing shrink I saw last week, that will lead to another crash? Is it the new meds already working? Is it the healing power of sex? Is it love?

Does it matter?

Garden Variety

My whole life I've thought of myself as a garden variety neurotic guy. You know, high functioning but with a lot of crazy noise in my head (and the occasional leap into OCD lunacy) that I could handle by staying busy, or venting in therapy, or, for the last twelve years, those twenty magic milligrams of Prozac. Last summer I decided there was a level of anxiety and self doubt the Prozac wasn't getting at and went off it to see what would happen. What happened is a head full of broken glass and a sense that nothing in my life is any fucking good at all and, worst of all, never will be. There is always the possibility that that is simply an accurate perception and not depression talking. I don't really know right now. Look at it all one way and the guy has a great career, great wife, great kids, house full of books and music and friends and pets. Look at it the other way and the guy has a list of TV credits he's more inclined to apologize for than brag about, a wife whose interest in sex has long been on the wane, a house full of clutter, friends he would be fine never seeing again and pets that only pretend to like him so he'll feed them and take them on walks. (The kids, thank God, look the same through both lenses.)

Is my despair causing my dissatisfaction or is my dissatisfaction causing my despair?

And then there are the all too brief vacations in the land of elation. I'll have a wonderful night of lovemaking with the wife, or a script will get picked up, and for a few days the world shines like the first day of creation--and then they turn the lights down again. So last week I thought "enough of this shit" and went to see somebody about getting back on the meds. With typical OUTRAGEOUS snobbery I went down the list of doctors on my health plan and chose the one who did MIT undergrad and Harvard med school. And got pretty much what I should have expected: somebody reasonably smart and unreasonably stuck-up--rather like myself. Anyway, Dr. Harvard listened very closely and asked many questions and then said the last word in the world I wanted to hear.

He said bipolar.

I said great, when do I get the manic phase?

Ah, he said, Bipolar II. Smaller manic component. And all that elation you feel after sex, the elation that crashes after a few days? There's your manic phase. No, I'm thinking, that's afterglow. But then I thought: he's absolutely right. I use sex as an antidepressant. In fact I was going to do a post on my blog about that! How did he know!

Then he said another word I truly didn't want to hear. I wanted to hear Zoloft, Wellbutrin, Lexapro. But he didn't say those words.

He said Depakote.

I took the second 250 mg dose tonight. Possible side effects include weight gain and hair loss. If you see the fat balding guy in the robe that ties in the back shuffling down the corridor in his slippers, that's me.

The operative wisdom of the moment is: can't hurt to give it a shot.

But does the hair grow back?

Holy Moly

Here we have two relatively obscure passages from the Bible:

Leviticus 11:7-- And the swine, because he parteth the hoof, and is cloven-footed, but cheweth not the cud, he is unclean to you.

Leviticus 11:12-- And all that have not fins and scales in the seas...ye shall not eat of their flesh.

Because of those passages, for reasons that involve a moment in my life at which I prayed fervently for something, and was granted it, and felt that I had to do something for God in return, I haven't eaten pork or shellfish for almost eight years.

And then we have:

Exodus 20:13--Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Number seven in the Ten Commanments! You can't get any less obscure than that!

So why is it that I wouldn't for any reason eat bacon or scallops but tonight, just now, I met a woman I met on line, who does not happen to be my wife, for drinks, in the sexiest bar that I could think of?

Part of the answer is here, under Resentment the Fourth.

Beyond that--?

A year ago a married cousin I'm close to told me he had met a woman on an adulterer's website and was having a wild affair with her. I was at that point in a particularly something's-gotta-change-here mode with my wife so I posted a profile on that website, which is exclusively for married people looking for married people to have adventures with. I got some responses (if I had lied about my age I would have gotten more), there were a few flirtatious emails back and forth, and then I decided I wanted to make it work at home and stopped checking the secret email account linked to that website. Last week I thought, hm, wonder about that email account. And what should I find but a handful of messages in the inbox, one of them posted, strangely, the day before I checked, from a smart and interesting woman who lives very nearby. So--a few more emails back and forth, and last week we agreed to meet for drinks.

Needless to say, during the week I formed a very clear picture of her in my head, and of what would happen on our date, and would slip into a pleasant erotic haze over it whenever I let myself.

When she walked into the bar my eyes went straight to her lips and I thought: when I look at my wife's lips I HAVE to kiss them. It just sweeps over me. And her lips? Kinda thin, to tell you the truth. Didn't bode well. We talked, we had drinks, we did so-why-are-you-here, we ended up kissing and it was--I don't know--it didn't go through me. Thirty three years I've been with my wife--from when I was a sophomore in college--and whatever the problems are in our bedroom--whatever I feel I'm not getting--when I kiss her it goes all through me like electricity. Not metaphorically: actually. And as we sat there after the kiss drinking our drinks I thought: Holy Moly, I'm in love with my wife. It's not just a word or a concept, it actually IS, and it goes way beyond the resentment I feel when we're kissing and I'm aching to touch her breasts and she pushes me away yet again, or the ridiculous fights over money, or any of the little day to day annoyances of life. It's bigger than all of that.

On the drive back from the sexy bar I kept thinking, with typical nattering self doubt, did I blow it? Should I have gone for more? Who cares about the thinness or thickness of lips? And then I got home and in the kitchen were five bags of dried Thai jackfruit from the Thai desserts place around the corner, our favorite crunchy snack food, and my wife asleep in the bed with the dog and the cats piled all over her feet, and I thought: what am I doing? Do I really want to have an affair or do I just think a man who isn't getting what I think I'm not getting at home should have an affair?

Am I being guided by love here, or by fear? How can I tell the difference?

Maybe the answer to that is what I'm looking for.

Though as a very smart therapist/philosopher I've been reading says:

There are no answers, only choices.

Meme Response

The deal here is you answer a question posed by the person who tagged you and then tag somebody else to answer a different question. The question from Bigg was : if your adolescent child came to you at some point in the indefinite future and told you he/she was gay, what would your reaction be?

I hope my reaction would be: Cool. What would you like for dinner? But who really knows how I'd actually react? A friend of mine from grad school, in this position, gave his son a big hug, told him he was proud of him, they cried together a little, and that was that.

The question, which I pose to anybody who feels they have any kind of answer to share, is:

Is this all there is?

This Isn't Working

I took my last hit of Prozac at the end of September, after twelve years of pretty steady on-and-off mainlining of the stuff, and the last molecule of it drained out of my brain around the middle of December. I stopped because Prozac wasn't working: I didn't exactly feel depressed, but the constant low-grade buzz of dissatisfaction with my work and my marriage wasn't going away so I thought I'd try something else, and in order to assess whether that something else was working or not I had to strip all the paint and wallpaper down to the bare sheetrock. So now I'm trying cognitive therapy, and homeopathic treatments with a reportedly gifted (we'll see) doctor, and prayer, and working my al-anon steps, and writing my blog.

But none of it's working.

I wake up every day scared of the work ahead of me, certain that I'm not going to pull off either of my scripts, guilty about my treatment of my wife and irritated at her for her treatment of me and right back to guilt again for being irritated. My brain is such a swirl that I don't even know what's true on the simplest factual level. Do my wife and I get along wonderfully or are we miles apart? Is our sex life going through a relative downswing in the big picture of things and actually way better than my depressed thinking will allow, or is it doomed? Am I a successful writer tackling a couple of challenging scripts or am I a hack once again trapped in projects I have no idea how to carry off?

There's more evidence in support of the good than the bad on all the above counts, but one of the insidious aspects of OCD is that in the shadowy, Kafka-esque courtroom of the brain the evidence for the prosecution is always admissable while the evidence for the defense is invariably struck down. (Yes: you DID kill an Italian climber, and the fact that the entire fantasy is preposterous is BESIDE THE POINT!) The worst part is that when I look back in my journal, which I've been keeping for 6 years now, almost daily, I invariably see that I was writing about the same grinding conundrums in 2000 that I'm writing about now. And when I see that, you know what I feel?

Panic.

Right now I feel lousy in a way that I can't see any way out of.

Except, check this out: I wanted to close this with an old entry from my journal to prove that I've been in this same intractable state forever and that all is bleak in all directions, but in fact on this date five years ago, 3/7/01, I just found this entry:

Wonderful wonderful lovemaking this morning. Flowing from the idea of making (wife's name here) feel good in ways that she likes, not ways that I want her to like.

I'll enter that in evidence and see if the judge will cut me a break this time. Because right there is illumination in an area where I could definitely use some illumination right about now.

Yet More of the Other Side of the Story: MONEY

Before I move forward I have to finish up the Al-Anon 4th step--sorting out my side of the resentments I am carrying against my wife. This has been helpful so far but not helpful enough. Like we say in the program: progress not perfection. A terrific motto for all--but sometimes an invitation to laziness.

This one has to do with finances. I'm always giving her grief over expenditures. The thousand dollars she spent buying two straw hats that I covered in the linked-to earlier post is an unusually large example. Usually it's smaller things. Just this morning she said that IKEA has new slipcovers for the sofa in her office in a terrific sea-green color and I HAD to open my mouth and say "Not right now, okay?" which led to a fairly big blow up and the ultimate secret weapon being slung at me: HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU SPEND ON YOUR THERAPIST EVERY WEEK!? Low, low, low. Plus--as I made sure she knew--insurance covers a chunk of that.

Well, a small chunk.

Now to my side of this long-running story, which quite frankly began thirty years ago when she was my college girlfriend and we were living in our first apartment and each making about three dollars an hour on our summer jobs, and even then I was giving her grief about eating lunch out when there was food in the refrigerator. And it continues now when I am a working writer/director and she makes good money at her own job.

I don't have to dig far to find my side of this one. I'm a weird combination of wildly extravagant spender and cheap bastard. She buys a couple of crazy straw hats because it will make her happy to see her two guys--me and my son--wearing them. She buys extra slip covers. And flowers for friends who I think don't deserve them. And takes broke friends out to dinner, frequently. INCREDIBLY SMALL POTATOES next to what I've spent on my addiction to exotic travel in the last two years. Leaving specific numbers out of it, how would you weigh my Greece with daughter + Costa Rica with whole family + Chile and Easter Island with brother and mother + Biking in France with friends from grad school + three trips to New York--all in the last two years-- against her couple of hats, generally loose attitude toward cash and a few bouquets of maybe not indispensable fresh flowers?

I am awash in shame. As I should be.

What's happening here is a combination of monumental selfishness and self-indulgence on my part plus the OCD of hearing every report of a penny she spends as a sure sign that we will die poor and hungry and living on the street. All while I'm staring glassy-eyed at travel websites choosing which rainforest eco-resort we're visiting next like some gambling psycho in front of a slot machine in Vegas. The traveling thing is beyond our means, and I feel that I've finally been able to put the brakes to acting out that particular addiction. But I'm really bad with how I treat my wife in this regard. Why couldn't I keep my FUCKING MOUTH SHUT about the IKEA slip covers this morning? WHY!!!????