� Ted Casablanca, reporting in "The Awful Truth" (January 23, 2003 edition)

It occurred to me after I�d posted it that "whiteness" wasn�t really what I was going for with the title of the last entry. I wanted something more along the lines of "opaqueness." But even though "opaqueness" is correct, I learned "opacity" first and that is the word that feels right to me, and then with "opacity" my literary reference would have been, well, opaque. Then again, I had thought I�d get around to doing more on the theme of Dickness � ahem! � than in fact I did.

OK, excuse me in advance if I go slightly opaque myself for a little while here. I want to sharpen, if only for the record, the focus of some of what I wrote about last weekend, and I want to do this after having spoken with Number Two last night and incidentally getting some solid evidence that she didn�t read the backgrounder I filled out for her when she and I first got together. Oh well. The fact is, on the one hand thinking about things and on the other saying them, feeling your lips move and hearing the words come out in your voice with your inflections, are qualitatively different experiences. In a very basic way, speaking aloud gives ideas meaning in additional registers. One register amounts to a kind of taking public responsibility for the thought or opinion � even if you don�t think it anymore, you did, and you are going on record as having done so: you will accept the fallout wherever it falls on the spectrum of reaction all the way from what, disdain?, to � again you see what I�m getting at � vulnerability. Another register is also fallout-related but has more to do with other people�s *immediate* reactions to the things you say and how, perceiving them, they reflect back onto the thing you have described and make you see it in new light. It is not hermetically protected anymore, you are not protecting it. (So maybe part of you knew it had to be protected.) I mean: last weekend, I described some past events in a factual way, merely reporting the facts as I had experienced them. To me, in my head because I had never really talked about them, they did not seem so horrible. Or maybe my orientation was to the larger situation rather than individual people�s roles in it, forest not trees-like? Or maybe it was a bad sad mess I hadn�t wanted to think about, much less talk about, at all. Whatever. The fact is that now I think I am growing an anger in me that I hadn�t had before. I was treated with abominable indecency � with Dickness � by someone whom I am reluctant to tag as an all-out abomination but, this is not up for debate, sure as hell knew what would have constituted decency. Wrongs were done, and I feel this now in a much more visceral way than the Minister of Information part of me had allowed. I am so desperate sometimes to be seen as fair that in toeing the line it�s my own feet I step all over; it�s as if my giving of the benefit of the doubt is some kind of emotional photo op, like I�m afraid other people are not going to believe it unless there�s that kind of evidence. Or, to use Vanessa�s term, I eat a lot of shit.

This is what therapists are for, I suppose. Last night Number Two and I talked about this opacity I�m talking around, and if there�s one thing that�s reassured me about the headshrinking process, it�s the way so many strands of what looked to be a snarl of random neuroses can all be worked back to the same few places. We don�t need to get into the specifics here. Fear of abandonment, love and affection through performance, equation of self with Calculator Brain, blah blah blah. Having learned, as a kid, to have such a funhouse of low expectations of others that now my sensors are warped and I either can�t tell when I�m being dumped on or can�t see how matters should be otherwise; having grown so accustomed to shit in my mouth that I have a hard time tasting it anymore. Shutting up and taking it way more than I should. Yesterday afternoon I had been feeling really content, coherent and integrated. It is good that I am capable of feeling like this, but after last night I must concede that there are still a lot of knots to work out.

Doctors in general are irritating me today. The think just because they�ve been to that much school and make that much money they can get away with things, such as when they drop the ball on something, shunting responsibility over to someone who has been to not much school and makes not much money. Me, for example. But I always save the e-mail I send and maintain a CMA file for faxes and correspondence, so don�t even try telling me, for example, that I rescheduled the meeting from two to three. Why would I do that? Please.

I�m feeling gloomy and weepy lately about diplomacy and politics, where the fuck this country is going and who all it is going to leave behind. I am feeling better and better about my decision to take this job � we are still presuming that it will be offered; people are very nice and keep calling me up and asking me about this, in eager voices that suggest that they want me to be in the club � because from what I can tell the market�s getting worse and benefits in general are withering. Layoffs are still happening. Everyone I know is holding white-knuckled to whatever they have, and who knows, maybe in a few years my having signed on at low pay to a secure monkey job will only prove to have been ahead of the trend. Let�s face it, death and sickness are among the few remaining growth industries. And at a more personal level, watching what Bush is doing to the Constitution and to representative democracy makes me alternately sick and sad and terrified. Just today there was the news that one of his appointments to the Presidential Advisory Commission on AIDS had called the disease the "gay plague" (that this nominee withdrew from consideration is immaterial) and that he was authorizing the use of federal funds for the construction of churches. American education esp. in math and science increasingly becoming a joke, tax breaks for Humvees, what�s going on in North Korea, Bush playing Reagan playing John Wayne in agitating for a war with Iraq, Rumsfeld insulting France and Germany for being backwards � it gives my whole body a migraine and a pack of nervous tics so that I�m both catatonic and manic, and I feel like my skin is raw. Paul Krugman is right about everything. I keep thinking of the setting of the Lorrie Moore story "Like Life" � we�re getting there, you know, we are almost there now. And don�t even get me started � please, please don�t get me started � on Roe v. Wade. (But read this. Why indeed.) I think eventually I might try to end up living in another country. I don�t think this is a good one anymore.

Free At Last: I called and had cable nuked. RDG told me about her cable package, eleven bucks a month for channels 3 through 13, and I would have been all over that for the Discovery Channel and PBS, but Millennium Cable sucks and doesn�t offer such an option. The operator offered me 50% off basic cable for six months, which would have been $20 plus tax for about 40 channels, and you�d think I would have taken it, right? I had a flash of righteousness, though, about the subsidization factor that still would have been in play, and I told her no thanks. It�s rabbit ears and DVDs for me from now on. And one less nasty mouthful to swallow.

(Mrs. R., I will be in a better mood by tonight.)