so after the last posting here i did a little more looking around. what an insane and crazy set of connections. now it is virtually certain the my therapist knew my ex, and she may even have been her closest friend in the world of dance. J. did not have a lot of friends but i remember her talking a certain woman who was bit older than her, and who (like J.) was one of the only white dancers in the company, which was known for its african-american roots. it should have tipped me off earlier that the therapist had the exact same PhD as J… although now that i think of it i didn’t catch if it was from the same university. the idea that the insuror could have directed me to my ex as a therapist is straight from a Wooy Allen film, as is this whole scenario, but i guess that would not have happened since J. seems to work solely wth autistic kids. i posted a summary of this discovery to FB last night. it’s the first thing of any substance i’ve posted there in about a year. it got way more reactions than i expected. i would have thought everybody forgot about me and that my idleness would have told the algorithm not to make me very visible. i mentioned that i lost my virginity in 1991. a woman with whom i had a one-night thing way back in the early Sunswick days commented that in 1991 she was 10 years old. why would anyone say that? i mean, i did not respond with a rude comment asking if she lost her virginity in 1991 but it was tempting.

as sure as i am about these connections the only way i can be bulletproof certain of them is to ask the therapist, or even contact J. again. But I have no desire or intention of doing that. for all its craziness i honestly do not care, and i do not think it makes any difference to the work we did these past 6 months. it does make me feel even more vulnerable than ever, and bringing it out into the open would only make that worse. i do not think she knows. i mean, i am sure of it. she is too strict about things to have nursed this knowledge all these months… though i wonder if her comments about remembering me from Tower Records have sparked any further associations. J. and I, of course, worked at Tower Records during those days, so since they knew each other the therapist had reason to visit beyond just shopping for CDs. it’s really not that crazy a coincidence, though. if anything i should have considered the possible connection a long time ago, when she let on that she had formerly been a dancer. if she had said she was a pianist i would have definitely asked if she knew certain people. i should have considered that her past as a dancer would have put her in contact with J. i mean, the world of people who were active in ballet and modern dance in New York during the 1980s and 1990s does not comprise a vast population. people from that scene knew each other, as would people in any specific arts discipline. but if they were as friendly as i seem to foggily remember then i do not want her repeating one particular comment i made about J.: that she was the worst dancer i had ever seen. the therapist does not seem like she would break her promise that anything said in that room did not leave. but there is no sense creating any further needless provocation. i remember her looking at me with a certain deer-in-the-headlights expression when i made that “worst dancer ever” comment. i did not yet know that she had been a dancer, though her birdcage physique should have been a clue. weeks later she revealed that she had been a dancer, but she added that she was afraid to tell me because of my comment about J.

the therapist must have done all right in her career. she owns an upper east side co-op. I think J. rents a room in a pretty dingy part of Queens. and for what it’s worth i found a fairly recent video of her on YouTube and she looked a lot better then she did the one time is aw her dance 2 decades ago. whatever… it’s all good enough reason to cease the therapy sessions. I’m going to call and leave a message, cancelling our meeting for 2 weeks from now. i hope there is no paperwork or anything.

…

They are tearing up the grass at Calvary Cemetery. I wonder what’s going on. I don’t think they are creating new grave sites. It doesn’t look deep enough for that. Maybe putting in more flowers or something. I tried to send pictures but I just noticed they did not make it to .MOBI because the email was too big. That’s stupid. Today was a 3-bus transfer spectacular. i always forget the B24 bus stops right at the front gate of Calvary. i could save a lot of walking time getting there and back by planning around that. but i do like the walking most times. i just wasn’t in a mood for it today. So it was B24 to Q39 to Q66. A/C on buses is just ace. I intended to visit the chapel at Calvary today but the front door was utterly barricaded by geese. There was goose shit everywhere, which reminded me of my favorite Calvary story. One winter storm lasted 24 hours, a full day of continuous snow. The next day I went to Calvary to see how it weathered the weather. It looked great. All the roads were cleared, with a few paths leading into the burial sites partly plowed. I climbed a staircase to the highest part of the yard, near the CivilWar Veterans Memorial. I looked down and realized I was walking on a blanket of shit, like a magic carpet of fecal matter. Nothing but feces as far as I could see. I imagined it was a fertilizer application, but that made no sense. The turds were not enormous but they were plump.

I restrained my slight horror at the situation and got out of there, but not before ruining an expensive pair of MBT shoes with unremovable shit stains. After thinking about it I realized the turds looked like the goose turds commonly seen around Calvary. During the 24-hour storm all the geese must have huddled together on that strip of land to stay warm, all of them pooping constantly.

Geese are scary. I stay away from them. They kept me from entering the chapel today. It would have been interesting if the chapel itself was filled with geese just standing there, like in the last moments of “The Birds.”