Yesterday’s therapy was ever more intellectually intense and mentally evacuatory than any one yet. It was off to a weird start. She came prepared with a printout of my first NYTimes writeup, from 1998 (I think). It was in the now-defunct “Circuits” section. She could not find the front page story on the NYT.com web site, as I warned her might be the case. For some reason the story is not findable using the NYT.coms earch engine. I think I can tell why. It’s because they rebuilt older pages to be SEO-optimized, which ironically has caused them to disappear from both internal NYT.com and public commercial searchies.

But whatever. The session wandered off into the wilderness of shit I haven’t talked about since I can’t remember when. Psycholinguistics, Lacan, kinesthetics, quantum physics, and my belief that the present is available to the future behind a paper-thin veil of metaphysical parchment yet to be discovered by science. As always I found myself getting vein-bulgingly worked up over things I forgot I cared about. I had her believing my bullshit while simultaneously feeling myself walking the plank into the ocean of shit that owns our world.

I left the office feeling like I could see hundreds of miles into the future. She is from Memphis. Dad was from Kingsport. I recounted a bad memory of my first therapist, who made some well-intentioned but seriously unkind comments about my mother, saying she (my mother) was a horrible parent. I called that therapist a cunt. Today’s therpist wrote that down, then added that if she ever said anything like that then to let her know. There’s a strange dynamnic in which I feel vulnerable enough that I might need this woman going forward, but she is showing her real self to me, too.

I made a potentially important contact last night. A payphone connection. Sara used to write about payphones for a trade journal in the 1980s and 1990s. Now she does not but she is in contact with the publisher of that trade journal, which ceased publication long ago. That publisher went on to become one of those Internet dudes who made millions doing as little as possible. I wrote to him some months ago but never heard back. Sara has a direct line to him, or so it seems. All I am looking for is print or digital copies of that trade journal. I have been requesting copies from offsite storage at the NYPL and reading them in Room 217 of the Schwarzman branch, taking photos of the pages which contain interesting content and procuring a handheld scanner to get high-res images of advertisements and illustrations. But having ready access to this stuff on my own terms would make things a lot easier.

The outline is flexibly complete. About 8000 words. This book writes itself, except for the historical slings and arrows, which I find are not as straightforward as the primary sources would have me think.

Typing through a sore head and my first beer in 8 or 9 days. Sobriety is what it is (David), I shall revisit, but I am not averse to enjoying life. I am actually testing myself but in ways too melismatic to explain in two or three words when I would need 40 or 50. Goal here is booze tonight and tomorrow, then back to the desert. I think I did good work in redistributing the money I would have spent on booze last week. I put $100 toward a one-year subscription to the expanded newspapers.com, which now includes relatively current publications. Until now only a few papers from the 1990s and 2000s were there. Now a bunch of papers are current as of last month, but it costs $100/year to get to them. It will be useful for the payphone history thing but also for finding me. There are a number of relatively minor mentions of me out there that I didn’t know about until now. I remember when Ian and his editors were vetting me for the second Times story and they found some crazy story from a Bermuda newspaper about what a scandal my payphone web site represented. The NYT was impressed. I did not care. I have not thought so much about those Times stories since a long time ago. What the hell, who am I trying to impress with this stuff?

…

I think there needs to be a new term for “straight”. Gay vs. Straight. Not that it’s a competition, but isn’t it dismissive to ascribe homosexuality with terms making it sound like something exciting and new while heterosexuality is just blah: STRAIGHT. Who wants to be that?

…

Alan and I made it out to Woodlawn Cemetery on Monday. First time there for both of us. There are famous people there but I was not impressed by that, nor did I think much of the landscaping or general place. There were brightly colored azaleas (I think) but for the most part the grounds were kind of scrubby to me. The most impressive thing was the Lotus Mausoleum, which looked like a freakin’ luxury hotel.

Alan is the first friend I made in New York. He is ~5 years older than I thought. We were running through the Grand Central subway station en route to the Times Square Shuttle and I could not help but think “I am running so that I can keep up with a 67 year old man.” I am 48. It was a good thing to think, not a mortality gasp type of thing. Alan will almost certainly survive me. His mother almost cracked 100. Mine did not. Alan has 30 years left. I don’t think I do.