I was thinking I’d tell the therapist that I don’t need extra sessions, and that I’d be OK with going back to once a week. But I don’t think I will. Not yet. I’ll either wait for her to suggest it or just a while longer. The truth is simple: I need someone to talk to. I guess I was thinking I’d go back to once a week (hah, we never even did once a week) after last session, which was me droning about stuff that doesn’t really matter. I said I was going to call my sister and ask her about something, but I have not done that. I wanted to know if she remembers or still possesses the letters my mother and father wrote to each other before they were married. I’ve been losing my faith in existence over the idea that they never really loved each other, with further disillusionment over the further idea that they barely even knew each other. I wonder what is in those letters, if they still exist.
I’m reminded of a New Yorker cartoon. Two of them, actually. One of them shows an 80-something year old man addressing his son saying “Son, now that you’re 60 there are a few things about the family you ought to know.” Hah. The other cartoon shows an elderly married couple sitting on the porch. One of them asks “WERE WE GAY?” I could imagine my parents, had they managed to cohabitate to the bitter end, asking such a question, but not with any overtone of humor. I have no way of knowing how she would have handled knowing dad was gay. As I’ve said before, I don’t think it would have been a big deal for her. He might have been greatly relieved if she, as I suspet, was gay. But it’s not her or him that I would worry about, even in retrospect. It’s me thinking that in another generation I would never have been born. All things being equal in the space-time-continuum I can’t help thinking I never should have been.
Maybe this too-conveniently feeds my theory of non-existence, and my questioning the validity of consciousness. The brain’s two hemispheres, it has been proven, will function as separate entities when they are separated from each other at the corpus callosum. While held together a unique consciousness is formed, comprising the two separate hemispheres. But the corpus callosum itself has not been proven to do anything except bind the two sides of the brain. There is no synaptic magic going on in that strip of matter. It holds the hemispheres (hah, almost typed “hempispheres”) together but otherwise it does nothing. So where is consciousness? Where is there even one unique single atom that we can point to and say “That is consciousness!” It is not there. No one has proven its existence, so how can we say we even exist? So we resort to the theories of consciousness agents, which I’m not fully ready to talk about. In place of consciousness agents I prefer “God”. This is actually making my head hurt. No, it’s making my consciousness hurt.
My attraction to the theory of nonexistence is, perhaps, a little self-serving. Or maybe it would be more charitable to call it tempting. Underlined by the existential reality that I should never have been born I guess I find these theories to be seductive. Wouldn’t it be handy if none of this ever happened?
Think I’m going to read me some Sartre and then Lacan. Those would be blunt antidotes to the graphic novels I’ve been gorging on lately. The Cerebus series drew me in more quickly (almost said “quicklier”) than I expected. The aardvark was kind of like the alien in E.T., which looked ludicrous at first but quickly became adorable. The aardvark in Cerebus is far from adorable. I’ve also been breezing through some Charlie Brown books I never knew existed. Schulz did not actually draw them, and it shows. He supervised some copycat artists. As Schulz imitations they might be passable to the non-connoisseur but not to one such as myself. The stories are not bad. They are of a different format than his usual 4-frame daily strips — which graduated to 3-frames in the 1990s, if not earlier. The books, published mostly in the 1960s by Dell, contain stories of unequal length, and that contributes to some of the fun in reading them: You just don’t know when it will end, and the extended visitations with this familiar cast of characters is just fun.
I’ve also been revisiting Mad Magazine, which I don’t think I have looked at since college. Some of that shit is really prescient. I think it was a late 1950s issue that had a fake advertisement for a Pine Lawn Cemetery. The ad stated something like “What are you waiting for? Want to get here faster? Buy our product!” It was an ad for cigarettes. I didn’t think awareness of smoking’s evils were especially well known in the 1950s….
I am at the ghetto coffee shop. No one to talk to here. Can’t stay too long because the freezer is defrosting. No flooding, please.
