I Was Very, Very Sick When I

That's What Tyrants Do, I Guess. They Make You Covet Their Attention; They Make You Confuse Attention For Mercy.

In Contravention Of My Belief That Any Life Ending In Death Is Essentially Pointless, I Needed My Friends To Open Up That Plastic Bag And Take One Last Look At Me. Someone Had To Remember Me, If Only For A Few More Minutes In The Vast Silent Waiting Room Of Time.

One Of The Goals Of Analysis Is You Become Your Own Analyst. You Continue The Process Even If You're Not In Therapy, Whether You Continue The Process By Walking Down The Street Thinking About Things Or Whether You Continue The Process, As I Do, By Writing About Them.

Then I Celebrated My Wall Of Books. I Counted The Volumes On My Twenty-foot-long Modernist Bookshelf To Make Sure None Had Been Misplaced Or Used As Kindling By My Subtenant. “you’re My Sacred Ones,” I Told The Books. “no One But Me Still Cares About You. But I’m Going To Keep You With Me Forever. And One Day I’ll Make You Important Again.” I Thought About That Terrible Calumny Of The New Generation: That Books Smell.

I Write Five, Six Days A Week. The Thing Is Capturing The Voice. I Feel Like I've Been Perfecting One Voice - In Different Iterations, Sure, But The Russian-ness Has Always Been The Undercurrent.