Gary Freedman's Blog – July 2009 Archive (37)

I swim in a sea of reality, but that makes me no more a fish than Moby Dick was. Mine is an unreal universe in which the exceptional is commonplace, in which the transient states of frustration or depression or meaninglessness are the norm. I am not a character whose life conforms more or less to the life of the ordinary man. I am an anticharacter in my experiences and in my sense of the world of reality. I require the fabulous and the bizarre. That is my metier. My purpose and philosophy of… Continue

Back in the late 1980s I worked with a fine young man named Jesse Raben at a local law firm. This is his story:



Twenty years later, I still remember one incident vividly. I was in 8th grade at Aycock Junior High School. A boy named Darryl Massey had been bothering me everyday in class, calling me names, sometimes making reference to the fact that I was Jewish. I asked him to stop, but he continued.



I didn’t know what to do about it. I brought the issue up around the dinner… Continue

Today I visited my psychiatrist, Didi Bailey, MD. She practices at the McClendon Center in DC. She prescribes my medications. I see another psychiatrist, Abbas Jama, MD, who does psychotherapy. Two psychiatrists and I'm still looney!

I see a psychotherapist once a week. I've been thinking about cutting down the sessions to once every two weeks, or even once a month. There is no magic in our sessions. I attach no feeling of specialness to our interaction. Psychotherapy should be magical, it should be special. Special in the sense that one feels sensations that are not experienced in the mundane world. One should feel some connection to one's inner self, a connection to one's past and one's future possibilities. One should… Continue

THE FIRST HOUR:



A troublesome -- aren't they all? -- new patient, thirty-seven years old, raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father had a typical petty bourgeois Jewish Orthodox background. The patient's mother was a Polish-Catholic. He is highly intelligent, a compulsive talker, extremely narcissistic and exhibitionistic. He hides his intellectual arrogance behind ironic self-deprecation. He cannot stop his diarrhea of talk, because it is his way of denying his essential… Continue

Yesterday, I was walking down the hall on my floor of my apartment building. I happened to notice a mouse scampering ahead of me. It would stop for a moment, I would catch up with it, it would scamper some more, I would catch up, then, scamper once again. I wonder if the mouse was a tenant in the building? How do mice reach the doorknobs to their apartments, I wonder? Is a lease signed by a mouse legally enforceable? And how do you evict a mouse for nonpayment of rent? They're damn hard to… Continue

I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

Thirty-nine years ago today, June 13, 1970, I started my first summer job, at the Franklin Institute Research Laboratories in Philadelphia. I was 16 years old at the time.

And look at where I am today!

The Holocaust is a grim and sacred event in history. It is not the subject of humor. But I once heard a story tangentially related to the Holocaust that I found amusing.



A few years ago, the Metropolitan Opera in New York presented the modern opera "Moses and Aron," by Arnold Schoenberg, the great and innovative composer of the twentieth century. The music is atonal and its lack of traditional melody and harmony taxes a listener's patience.



During the performance, an old… Continue

I sometimes wonder: Whatever happened to David Freund? David Freund attended my junior high school, Wagner Junior High School in Philadelphia. We were in the same classes in the seventh grade (homeroom teacher, Miss Lillian Camaioni) and the eighth grade (Mrs. MacKay). He later attended Central High School, but transferred after the tenth grade. We were in the same homeroom classes in ninth and tenth grades; the homeroom teachers were Mrs. Barbara Sandler, a French teacher and Mr. Santo Diano,… Continue

There's this old guy who lives in my apartment building. He's lived in the building for about 35 years. He's in his late seventies.



This is what gets me about the guy. He works out every day in the building's fitness center. In his street clothes. He uses the reclining stationary bicycle. I know this isn't the Christian thing to say, but neither I nor Stanley Schmulewitz is Christian. The guy is a total pain in the ass. He listens to the radio while he works out. He laughs, talks to… Continue

After all the dislocation of my life, and the uncertainties of my existence, it is paradise to be in this quiet apartment in Washington. Some people say that my neighborhood is the dreariest part of northwest Washington. I am a stranger here, but I feel at home: it is life, and I am content--yes, miserable, but content with my misery.



I spend the day doing small things, drinking my morning cup of coffee, going to the library, then coming home and listening to music; afterwards going… Continue

So, I'm sitting at the computer at the public library. I'm seated next to Arthur368, a regular at the library. Brian, the head librarian, is here today. He's wearing a very interesting necktie. It features a map of the District of Columbia. You have to get close to the tie to discern what it is.



It's now official. I will be spending two weeks in Atlantic City in early August. I leave on the morning of Monday August 3rd and will return on Friday August 14th. My sister has a condo at… Continue

I am an impostor with many selves. My life narrative is a place where imaginative revisions seem (at least to me) necessary. I understand that we must all construct a story of our lives: the quiet tale we repeat in our heads, after dark, while falling asleep. Without compunction, I change my story at will, inventing details, shaping and reshaping my persona to suit myself and the needs of my avocation as writer and my personal life. But I don't like it when others dwell on the details of my… Continue

I was in a Lisztian mood last night. I watched a DVD of Franz Liszt's "A Faust Symphony," performed by the Boston Symphony, conducted by Leonard Bernstein. The performance was recorded in about 1977. Some consider this symphony to be Liszt's masterpiece. It surely contains one of the most colorful families of leitmotifs in the orchestral repertoire. In fact, each character in Goethe's play is so vividly depicted that you might not be remiss in calling it an opera without words Leonard Bernstein… Continue

OK, so I have an appointment with my new psychiatrist this afternoon. He's from Somalia. I hope he's not a pirate. I've been seeing psychiatrists since 1977--can you believe that? Readers of my posts may wonder what I gain by seeing a psychiatrist. I'm on the fringe, mentally speaking.



Last night at about 3:00 a.m. my neighbors in 135--speaking euphemistically--got frisky. Very frisky. They live across the hall. But I could still hear their antics through their door, across the hall,… Continue

In a book "The Moral Society: A Rational Alternative to Death," John David Garcia presents a revolutionary ethical theory much in the spirit of Spinoza. The author shows that through the ethical development of art, science and technology man can achieve far more than the advocates of supernatural Utopias ever imagined.



What is the "Game of Life?" According to the author it is a game in which we are the pieces as well as the players. It is a game in which the stakes are… Continue