I told the shrink that our meetings have became very important. I did not add, but I thought: maybe too important. What prompted me to say this was her comment that she thinks it’s a very good thing that I am coming in twice a week. I did not disagree, but added the above comment. It is bringing my life into some kind of balance, and guiding me toward a bare and beautiful assessment of the avalanche of shit on which my life is riding.
She does not understand a lot of what I am talking about. The specifics of web site development, which I delved into a little bit today, are lost on her. That is fine, I can’t expect any random person to understand things as relatively arcane as SSL vs unencrypted web traffic or why i find it amusing that “streaming media” has become such a mainstream term when I doubt that 1% of Internauts could tell you what it means. “Streaming” distinguishes the difference between the stateless HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the serving of content which maintains a state of connection to the server, a connection which lasts until the connection is terminated by the end user or until the content being served reaches its end. When you view a web page your browser initiates a series of connections to each element. The HTML page itself, the billions of CSS and JS files, the quadrillion JPG and PNG files. Once all these elements are downloaded your connection to the server is effectively terminated. That’s how it used to be, at least. Streaming content was different in that it kept an open connection between you and the web server. This terminology was originally applied to the RealAudio protocols, and I actually don’t know if it is even relevant to modern techniques for buffering and transferring high bandwidth content. Streaming media was considered by some to be a joke when it was introduced, but then so was CNN.
blahblah
Today’s session ended with me feeling something in me had been electrocuted, or treated with some kind of shock therapy. The 40 minutes blow by like 40 seconds. I suggeted I might be unable to make next Tuesday’s session. She seemed to think it was twee that I cared enough to say something over a week in advance.
Therapy has me feeling more and more vulnerable. The Italian Woman said I am a vulnerable soul. She also said I am a “perfect” soul. She has a way of funneling perfect words through her perfectly imperfect English, but I consider myself the farthest thing from perfect.
Perfect.
I spent a couple of hours at the library today, getting scans of some funny payphone ads from an old payphone trade journal. I cannot find words which express my bitterness over the fact that the fucking library has a right to inspect the contents of my bag. Today I was forced, twice, to produce for closer inspection my copy of Basho haiku, to prove to them that it was my book and not something I was stealing from the library.
Those Basho haiku stick with you, by the way. It’s a different level of whoosh after yesterday’s Emily Tozer fiesta. Tozer’s poems wash by like elegently turgid waters. Basho does not wash by, but he washes.
The plural of haiku is haiku. Remember it.
I am at the same millienial bar as last night. The women to whom I was attracted last night looked like they were half my age. I am just enough of an old man that I can say that without sounding too, too creepy.
Speaking of old men, I recounted to the shrink today (I will come up with a better term for her, since she really matters to me) a conversation I had on Saturday with someone who turned out for the payphone guided tour. He introduced the subject matter — just making that clear. He was saying that suicide is the #10 cause of death in the US, according to a recently released statistic from who-remembers-who. I heard about it on the radio, which said that middle aged white men account for the majority of that 10% of suicides in America.
To me the #10 cause of death stat is in need of retroactive correction. It is not so much that the stigma of suicide has been fully lifted, but thanks to Kervorkian and others I think that a huge number of 20th century suicides could now be classified as such. Especially among the elderly. On my father’s side there were 7 or 8 deaths of “questionable circumstances” that would probably be considered suicides after today’s forensic analysis analyzed them. But in the past there was The Stigma, and The Myth. The Myth was that your life insurance policy would be voided if you offed yourself, and the immediate beneficiaries of your death would get nothing. That was virtually never true but the myth persisted into the bedrooms and back yards of the infirm who did not want to live like vegetables. So they adapted means that would not be interpreted as suicide. Just a trace amount of too much of some prescription narcotic that could be deemed an accidental overdose. It was like a sorority/fraternity of death. Just keep it subtle so your family name is not tarnished. There is a culture of suicide, I think. I mean, I know there is a culture of suicide.
Hot damn, hot legs straight ahead, captain, hot legs at 1:00.
