Real Time

Whoa.

This is trippy.

As I write these words, it's 6:56am, on Tuesday, May 10th.

This is how I used to roll-- back in the day. I'd wake up at the bum-slit of dawn, walk the dogs, make coffee, and come back up to the office to write, and then I'd post live, somewhere between 7:15 and 7:45 in the morning. The day's post was pretty much always up before eight. Of course, this post won't go live until its scheduled time of 7:18am, EST on May 11th, because I've already got a post pre-loaded for Tuesday.

Because I'm just. that. cray. in the mem. brane.

Writing in the morning again feels weird. Off. Nostalgic. There are birds outside my window making ridiculous noises. They sound even funnier than Asian chicks make when they're getting pounded, and I think we all know how funny that is. Birds are truly idiotic if you watch the right ones and you watch them closely enough. Small birds especially. They all look like they have epilepsy-- not that epilepsy is funny, so please save your righteously indignant emails about that-- but they way they dart around and jerk their heads-- it's like they're break-dancing to strobe lights.

Fucking birds. I hate epilepsy.

Anyway, part of the reason I'm writing in the morning on Tuesday is because it's an assignment from my therapist. It is designed to keep my ass in this chair and not in my car, speeding to my 8:30am appointment with him, which I have every Tuesday morning. The first time I ever saw him, I arrived at 7:47am. That seemed absurd, even to me, but I rationalized those negative thoughts away by saying to myself, "Well, you're a new patient, of course you're going to have paperwork to fill out." And, what do you know, I did have paperwork to fill out. However, I was unable to start said paperwork for twenty minutes, because, when I arrived at 7:47am, the doors to his office were not even unlocked.

I've been trying to force myself to leave the house later each week, so that I arrive at his office at a socially acceptable "early" time. The latest I am allowing myself to leave the house so far is 7:40, which is almost epileptically funny if you consider the time I arrived at his office five weeks ago for our first appointment. According to Google Directions, which is never wrong-- just like Wikipedia-- it takes between 22 and 24 minutes to get to my therapist's office, and the distance is 9.8 miles. Knowing that, any reasonable person who lives in my house would most likely leave that house for an 8:30am therapy appointment at 8:00am.

I'm not sure I can do that. See, it's 7:08am right now and I'm already getting schpilkus.

(Schpilkus, n, Yid: Ants-in-da-pants.)

They say that "the unknown" is the biggest inducer of fear in most people. I don't know who "they" are but they must never be wrong-- like Google Directions and Wikipedia and Dr. Oz-- and, frankly, I'm willing to agree with "them". I fear the unknown probably more than I fear carotid artery disease or an abdominal aortic aneurysm or skeevy people in elevators or someone hitting my car where the gas tank is located. Of course, I fear all of that, too, but the unknown is far more seductive because it comprises any number of awful, terrible things, including CAD and a Triple-A and all that other shit I mentioned, as well as... everything else.

Where I'm going with this is, I'm obsessively early because of that... unknownness. The traffic jam occurring up the way. The car accident. The detour. The bottleneck. The what-ifs. My life is comprised of approximately 753,000 what-ifs, and I have them for every single circumstance or situation in which I engage in daily life. Why do I write my blogs a day or sometimes two or sometimes three in advance? Well, what if the internet connection goes down tomorrow and I'm unable to post.

Well, what the fuck if?

Who gives a shit? Maybe you. Definitely me, that much I think we know for sure. But it's more about the settling of the beast within me that craves consistency and sameness and order and security. Do you know that those words are comforting, even to tap out on the keyboard and see appearing on the screen?

Last week, I was assigned by my therapist (goddamned C.B.T.) to wait just ten more minutes before hopping in the car and sit and force myself to write about what it feels like to write while making myself not leave the house for my appointment.

"See," I said to him in his office last week, after arriving there at 8:06am, which is better, "everything got all fucked up this morning because I had coffee at Starbucks with my father, so I wasn't at home and I wasn't at a computer, and I wasn't going to write on my smartphone."

"Did you consider, after your father left to go to work, just hanging around at Starbucks by yourself for another ten or fifteen minutes?"

I stared at my shoes. I had considered that, but I didn't do it.

"Yeah," I replied, "but we'd been sitting outside and it was kind of chilly and, besides, who the hell wants to sit at Starbucks all alone anyway?"

Hm, I would have said to me, had I been the therapist, only about half the fucking civilized world. But, you're right-- who the hell would want to sit at Starbucks, listen to inoffensive, faux-indie muzzak, enjoying a delectable, warm beverage while looking at hot, mousy-haired medical students studying for their Step II exams on their iMacs?

It's 7:20am, on May 10th. I'm going to schedule this post. Shave. Leave the house. Get a pastry from someplace.

And go.

Where I Left Off

"Well, I'd kind of like to pick up where I left off," I told the therapist on the phone during our initial chat last week.

"Oh, okay," he said, "when were you last in therapy?"

"I stopped going when college ended," I replied, "in 2002."

There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. Well, on both ends of the line, to be accurate. I guess you can't really have silence on only one end of a conversation, can you?

This is the type of horseshit that my new therapist is going to have to contend with every Tuesday morning, at 8:30am. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that I'm more than likely this cat's first Tuesday appointment-- I can't imagine anybody loonier in their tuning to get up for a 7:00, 7:15, or even a 7:30am session of mind-bending bollocks. But me? I'm ready at crow of cock. If this sonofabitch wanted to see me at 6:30, I'd be there, ready to throw up all over him.

Symbolically speaking, of course.

That's really what therapy is, though, in my mind, at least: vomiting. Vomiting out the contents of your mind and, to take the analogy a bit too far, sifting through the viscous detritus to find the choice chunks to... study.

I hope you're not reading this whilst shoveling in your Sugar Smacks. Do they still make those things?

In any event, today is my first day back in therapy in nine years. As I bang out this blog, I would say that I'm somewhere on the spectrum between ambivalence and elevated anxiety. Part of me knows what to expect, part of me has no idea what to expect. Maybe the techniques will be similar and familiar, but the office and the man behind the clipboard will be different.

Oh, and I suppose I'm a little different, too. A little grayer up top, but still just as immature as I was as a college junior, in many ways. The fact that I can boast a marriage, a car, a mortgage, two dogs and a job aren't really relevant. I'm still struggling with how to deal with my family, still racing frenetically from one obligation to another like my ass-crack is on fire, still battling that depression and anxiety. Still resisting medication. Still... dying to talk about myself.

Don't look so surprised, dear.

I wonder, though, in the end, what good it will do. Because we're doing CBT, there will inevitably be homework assignments that I will have to do-- well, not HAVE to, but that will be in my best interests to do. There will be some that must be written, and no doubt there will be some that will have to be... performed, as it were-- interactions between myself and others that will probably make me uncomfortable, irritated, annoyed, and wanting desperately to stick my head into a sandbox, or a bag of sugar, or Megan Fox's nether regions.

I would be lying if I said I was 100% up for the challenge. I'm not 100% up for anything these days. Oh, go ahead-- make a penis joke. If you don't, I will.

I told this individual, (I feel uncomfortable calling him "MY therapist" just yet, seeing as we haven't even shaken hands as of this moment) that I wanted to pick up where I left off, but I know there's really no way to do that-- not when you "left off" with someone else, and not when you did it nine years ago. Truthfully, I don't really know what I want, or how I intend to achieve it. And I know he's going to ask me, and I don't know what I'm going to say.

I suppose most of what I want is to feel better. Isn't that why people go to people called "doctors" in the first place? I'm pretty sure it is. In the plainest language: I don't feel well. Sounds childish, doesn't it? But some of the most childish-sounding things are the truest of all.

My head/belly hurts.

I'm sad.

You hurt me.

I'm sorry.

I love you.

That's not fair.

All as true as true can be. And though it was often my way during therapy in college to talk the psychological talk, to be elevated and insightful and sometimes even a little poetic, perhaps I ought to just stick to those innocent little basics, and maybe I'll feel better a little bit quicker.

I hope it goes well. No doubt I'll have more fun there than at my dentist appointment at 2 today.