I’m taking these Chinese herbs to help me sleep but they leave me a tad groggy during the day unless I’m excited. So I’m driving home in a daze last night and I had a sense memory of about a decade in my life working ordinary jobs and that sense of ennui that came with it, just going through the motions of life, and the sharp contrast that was with the decade I had 1997-2007 earning my living from writing and the passion and excitement and self-aggrandizement that flowed from it. When I’m writing all day and people are responding, I’m excited. When I’m typing and filing and answering the phone, I feel barely alive. I wonder if I could get as excited about helping people and living the 12 steps and Orthodox Judaism as I get from writing a widely-read blog and getting all that mirroring. When my life is firing on more cylinders, I’m not as vulnerable to abandonment. When my life isn’t firing, I tend to cling and to seek more from my relationship, put more pressure on it, squeeze the life out of my partner, drain her for mirroring until she sets limits on me, which I don’t take well. Can I get as excited about doing good as I did about writing transgressive material for a huge audience? Can I get more of the cylinders of my life firing by practicing what I wear?
From 1997 to 2007, most of my friends were writers (LA Press Club etc), and then I faced the grim reality I’d need to go in a new direction to earn a living, and I haven’t recaptured that community. Also, Cathy Seipp died in 2007, and I lost a world. She connected me. I was a stray dog she adopted.
