Something I was never able to convince the therapist of was my fear of being exposed for something I never knew was wrong with me. I fear there is another version of me out there, a living instance of me that knows nothing of me and resembles me in behaviors not in the slightest. I might be singing and dancing on a river boat. I might be masturbating to religious statues in public spaces. I might have no face or I might have 11 hands. I imagine that just the right type of exposure will put me in front of people who take one look at me and conclude “Yup, he’s a ___.” I harbor the irrational fear that I will be called out as something horrible, or something I never knew I was.

It might be a reflection of how I don’t know what I am, or who I am.

I never got through to the therapist on all this, who heard my words and assumed I was living in fear of being outed for some horrible things I did long ago. I don’t have anything too dreadful in my past. What I fear most is that that doesn’t matter. I fear I am being indexed. The air I breath is being collated and logged, submitted for statistical analysis and predictive monetization.

…

At a mostly empty beer hall. I thought earlier that today would be a good day to start stopping. Drinking, that is. But I changed my mind after writing the previous entry, which seems to have had a calming effect on me. Writing can do that, and I am working the writing muscles of my brain with all this .MOBI of late. It makes me dizzy at times. I think I’ve slept such epic long hours this week on account of the exertion of my brain in all this writing.

I liked thinking about how far I could go with the shovel motif. How would I have shoveled snow, growing up in Florida and living in rental apartment buildings all these years? But that memory of being handed a shovel at Don G.’s funeral back in 2001, just before 9/11, and pitching some dirt on his coffin… that memory is golden. Hah. I wonder if I could have refused to do that on account of what I thought was its ghoulishness. I could plead ignorance later, or anxiety.

The reception for that funeral occurred at a place I would revisit many years later. I can’t think of the name of the place now but it is an Italian restaurant on Queens Boulevard around 70-something street. I was invited to attend a meeting there of the IPANY, the Independent Payphone Association of New York. It was one of the oddest encounters of my life, one which in retrospect probably never should have happened.

But I’ve written about that incident ad nauseam. For all that I am not sure I ever made the connection between that place and my previous visit there for the funeral reception for a friend.

I need to go home and do things.  Unlike last night it is actually too dark in here to think.