Let's Talk About Therapy

If the split-screen dialog between Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Annie Hall (1978) seems impeccably timed, of skillful cadence, that is because it was shot in the same take, with the thespians next to each other. They constructed two adjoining therapists’ offices for this scene. Allen, indeed, could have interlaced the separate scenes into one, but the “natural,” however time-wasting, way of doing this sustains the understated result. The male protagonist is seen in a mahogany-lavish office with a Heidegger look-alike — being and time, on the contrary, time being almost up. Psychotherapists are perhaps referred to as “shrinks” in reference to the Freudian super-ego (conscience, the cause of suffering) they professionally try to shrink; or, it was initially a contemptuous expression from tribal “headshrinkers” who dehydrated the decapitated heads of their rivals. A euphemism for therapist is analyst, the Freudian specter of anal securely hidden away in the overall scheme. (Awareness of “the rapist” in therapist is, however, a deeper fault of your own.) Any time I call my mental health clinic to confirm the breadth of my own chemical balance, a receptionist broodingly — though employed to sound sincere, understanding — asks me if I feel like either harming myself or others. A corroborating existential retort would launch this into a three hour monologue, so I just answer No. My therapist is a gay Buddhist convinced that I may be a closet-gay and a clandestine Buddhist as well, in spite of all efforts on my part to indicate otherwise.

We quarrel. He suggests I suck a dude off, I survey his wall of certificates looking for rainbows. I condemn everything bad in my life on my father and he condemns me — or more notably, the “self-fabrication” of me, for which I am to distinguish from a detached extent i.e. “the continuous self” — and I question if this zen shit is even effective. I don’t smoke weed and drink anymore, and therefore incessantly more moody, which is a perilous combination just being two minutes from the nearest corner-shop, where I can get both cheap liquor and some weed for under ten pounds. The point is, he says, allowing yourself to feel – forcing that word into italics with teeth, lips and tongue — the way you do. To leave the past. We drudge through “consciousness” exercises where I am to envision my breathing. I picture my nostrils being fucked by a Borrower-sized man with two dicks. Knew that night where I’d experiment with dwarf porn would come back to haunt me. Fridays come around and colleagues at job number two talk of Happy Hour — whose insinuation that we as the western-world people are otherwise miserable every single hour of every other single day of the week I find somberly poignant — and I timidly disclose that I have therapy. They grow quiet while a mist of embarrassment seeps around us, as if some line had been crossed, as if I should have modestly lied and said I’m going to the barbers or going to get an enema.

The characters of Allen and Keaton in the end break up. We, the viewers, were made to believe they would be the perfect couple i.e. garrulous dialogue and esoteric references, but not in the bedroom, thus in life. The academic tragedy, perhaps pompousness, is that a mouth’s connection to the mind would ever be more meaningful than on a lover’s swollen gland. Both Freud and Heidegger metaphorically dug their own graves and found themselves in a hole, but only the former was clever enough to use lubrication. My homo-monk sits with me for fifty-minutes every Friday, and while I’m appreciative, one side of me kinda desires the opposite of him: a straight (maybe bi-curious) hooker who doesn’t charge me a discounted price as long as I keep taking some pills. I almost arrive early to every seven o’clock session. There’s a bench I sit on outside, and write and read. Girls pass me and I feel shielded by my phone. I gaze into it as if it were significant communication with a forthcoming person, to show these humans that I too was significant. Solitary, if ignored, will become aggressive. Like a ravenous dog. While still waiting, I take pleasure in planning to eat chili-con-carne in my kitchen after reading when I get home. To post a blog on tumblr entitled “i want to die” seems rather american-teen-angsty, so I delete with the backspace key — an effacement I desire continued back to my genetic code — and rise up and buzz my therapist’s door number. A bramble falls, a bird flies. I’m not homosexual. Life feels like an audition for a film. While waiting to be buzzed in every second is painful, and continues on.