WAAAAAH!

There are benefits to being neurotic. For instance, I get to swing pendulous between extremes, moods turn on a dime, loving and hating at the same time makes for an interesting day. My neurotic side gets edgy at the prospect of a new therapist and shoots down potentials for having a lazy eye or a turkey neck. They're all crazy as Christians, he'll lament. I choose a woman so he'll compare her to Mom, orchestrator of this mess I call a psyche. She'll examine. But I'll shut her down at the door. Sorry, Bryan's unavailable at the moment, but if you'd like to leave a message....

I tried a male whose timidity fell somewhere between kitten caught in a thunder storm, and turtle surrounded by bored teens. I swear he salivated at my list of symptoms and their catalyst. I wrote him off, delighted that I present such a challenge.

I see her Monday. A smell something like potpourri or sleepytime tea will permeate the air. I'll decline all beverages. She'll interpret my choice of chairs. Hers will be cordoned off with everyday trinkets, glasses maybe, a cell turned off. Books will line the shelves, the titles will spill forth like bullet items on a resume. She read Jung and Erickson but finds Freud too...too...whatever. He snorted cocaine to quell a crippling fear of social occasions. Ditto. Call him what you like, the man had impecable taste in narcotics.

I'll need her to challenge me if this is going to work. She'll have to fight because I protect it. Cup it in clenched hands crowbars can't pry. Over time, she'll push me to release it, but how can I release the very thing that defines me?

My essence.

My pain...

Hindsight

Flashback to 05/02/1987. Like any other 17 year old, my friends were my world, impressing them, my priority. Twenty two years later, Blaine sets up dinner on a night that we're all free. Ritchie and Tommy blow it off. Pete's detained by work. Blaine, Chris, Duane, Rachel, and I sit down to dinner. Olivia, our waitress, is wonderful, engaging, attentive. Alcohol flows, tongues loosen. The skeletal remains of past insecurities wash up on waves of nostalgia. But I am inherently different now...or so I thought.

I wear my past like a red badge of courage, proof that the depths of depravity are inhabitable. I flaunt it, deliver it on the butt of jokes about amorous cellmates and rusty shanks. Dad's ring tone is Darth Vader's labored breathing. Part of it is a giant fuck you to the other survivors who hide it like a hairy mole. Grandma behests, Don't tell a soul, lie if they ask...except when she marched me to the Social Security Office in Lynn. She told them I paced the floor non-stop in an effort to squeeze an over juiced system for disability. And why shouldn't you? The Spanish and the Blacks all do it all the time.

And so I sit through dinner. Split a burger with Rachel, my arm around her, caressing. We check out her ass when she goes to the bathroom, their praise validates my petty existence.

At her expense.

There was a time that I was quite astute at keeping my neurotic side from grabbing the wheel and driving us into a ravine. I think it's time to go back to therapy...