40 words a second, 40 seconds minute, for 40 minutes an hour, 40 hours a day, 40 days amonth. That’s how it feels after therapy these days, just want to keep gushing effluvial backwash from my shit-filled esophagus, my garbage-stuffed distortions.
Sitting at the Business Library on Madison Avenue and 34th Street. Expensive Aeron chairs, per any self-respecting business student or wannabe. I had one of these at corporate and never got what the big deal about these chairs was. Best thing I cansay for them is that when they broke — as they quite often did — a repair person would show up on site within an hour to fix it. That must have been a damn busy job.
Therapist asked last time if I’d bring in an actual copy of the New York Times story that was o n page 1. I wonder if she simply did not believe that it happened, that I was exaggerating, or if some other measure of protocol is at work. As if she can’t look up my real world stuff outside of the therapist’s office unless I show her that it is even real to begin with. I don’t know. But she was genuinely impressed by the Times story. Like, way over the top impressed. This only came up in coversation because I mentioned last time that one of the people I did the guided tour with last week was subsequently featured in the Times, but hey so was I… and in print! hah. She was actually most impressed by that, that it was in print and not just on the WWW.
Otherwise a lot of rangy back and forth about happiness, and how being on the front page of the Times accounted for one very long, extended episode of complete contentment and happiness. not just because it happened but because the story Ian wrote is bulletproof. You just can’t find anything wrong about it, unless you are among those in my life who roll their eyes any time the word “payphone” comes out of my face, and who thus assume that nothing good can come of this childhood fixation.
I like being in a spotlight. it makes me comfortable. I think I read this somewhere (I might also have made it up) that a Broadway actor/actress once said tha they felt safest on stage, because everyone could seem them and know that they were OK. I am kind of that way, so long as I am in control of the situation. I have nightmares about being publicly shamed for something I never did or something I never said. It can happen to anybody. I dreamed a few nights ago about my name blasting off into places it had no business being, my name and the substance of my spirituality and my consciousness diluted into waste matter after being injected into that avalanche of shit on which the world is sailing. I was remembering Pontious Pilate and how it has been said that it is unfair for his name to be evoked in every recitation of the Apostles Creed. imagine knowing you would spend the rest of human eternity blamed for the death of one Jesus Christ. Maybe it’s not as simple as I remember it but if I read the Bible again any time soon I’ll look for signs which are interpreted to mean that maybe Pilate doesn’t deserve all the blame. Damn, I think I just let a line from “Jesus Christ, Superstar” leak into my thinking.
We also talked about Jayson Blaire, the NY Times reporter who was disgraced after it was revealed that he made up most of his sources. He wrote dozens of stories in which he quoted countless individuals, some of them real some of them not real. To make up for the embarrassment the Times sent editors out to re-interview everyone who Blaire actually talked and who he actually misquoted or misrepresented. These were largely just ordinary people who, it should be mentioned, had some reason to be associated with the Washington DC area sniper shootings that occured during the early 2000s. Either they knew someone who was shot or Jayson Blaire said they knew someone who was shot, or else they may have witnessed something or other involving a shooting. These folks who were wildly misquoted as saying magically prescient and at times racially inflammatory things seemed to have no problem with it. When asked by the Times editors why they did not seek to correct these obvious misrepresentations they just laughed and thought it was hilarious, being in the New York Times.
I remember reading that and thinking that my instincts were right all along: journalism, history, recorded acounts of things are largely full of shit, even on the most mundane levels. I think there is an unspoken code among journalists and editors where the story line is allowed to lurch just so far into fanciful suggestion, leaving implications unconfirmed and hanging like slabs of meat in the minds of the readers.
I got pretty worked up about this topic, though I might not have realized it if the therapist hadn’t said so. I get worked up about certain things. more things, I am coming to discover, than I even realized.
This Business Library reminds me of the CNN newsroom. Dozens of pods, nowhere for anyone to hide. Only thing missing is the television at every desk, permanently playing nothing but CNN or CNN/SI. Yo, that’s a very vivid flashback… I might message my only friend from those days. he was in the news yesterday.