(written vaguely over the course of november)

I went to a bar alone after seeing patients this week, the familiar one near W 4th St. Maybe I’ll eventually go to bars more and more obscure, and become a “character,” but for now I’m here at Shade Bar in my own limited way, and because I didn’t bring a notebook, and I want to work on my case presentation on R, the attractive patient of mine who evinces no anxiety or guilt, I’m writing on a folded piece of printer paper. It feels like a masculine act, to sit at a bar alone and to work something out alone, as if I were doing math on a napkin. An older man, in his mid 40s, ended up talking to me. He was very drunk, and he looked sort of generic and featureless to me, as if the whiteness of his hairs had drained away any marker of individuality. He asked me what I was writing about, so I explained to him that I was a psychoanalyst in training and that I was writing notes on a patient in advance of a presentation I was to give, and that therefore there was a level of confidentiality to what I was writing about, but that he was welcome to read it, since there probably wasn’t any identifying information in what I had written. So he looked at the piece of paper, and kept on telling me it was amazing that I had written that, and I said I didn’t understand why. It felt less flirtatious than “chummy,” the whole interaction. Then I talked to the bartender and listened to him say a few words about a manuscript of a novel he just submitted to an agent. It had something to do with vampires, a vampire realizing that his ancestor wasn’t who he thought he was, and therefore that his vampire status was in question. I thought of Jewishness of course, its determination by matrilineal descent according to halakha. I watched him give a dog treats at the door. I listened to him talk to a young woman about what sort of martini she might like to have, and I insinuated myself as a participant in the conversation by reacting to what she was saying about her elderly neighbor who makes martinis without vermouth. The woman scared me a little—she seemed droll and defended, as if she had dealt with a lot of harrassment or heartbreak. The lacy pattern on her tights reminded me of Shetland knitting and I wanted to comment on this, but I didn’t for some reason. So that was the scene.

Other than that, I’m spending a lot of time alone. I feel ambivalent about dating, though I’ve been on two dates with NJBs from Hinge. On feeld I had somewhat involved conversations with two Buddhist Jews, but didn’t end up meeting either of them. One of them is a bit too old and the other is just visiting for a month. The NJBs from Hinge I met were not attractive to me. I walked all over Greenwood Cemetery with the first, and we talked about classical music and literature. I liked that he seemed kind but I knew I couldn’t do it with him. The second guy was meaner but still sweet and I guess he liked me a lot but I couldn’t do it with him either. It’s kind of nice that after these two dates Jewishness is becoming less of an object-cause-of-desire and more of a background setting. I seem to like this decision of mine. But for now it feels absurd to “play the field” when everyone seems so serious about finding a wife. Neither do I know how to be promiscuous or scientific anymore, as it seems particularly absurd to have casual sex with a marriage-minded NJB from Hinge.

Next I watched Barry Lyndon for R. The film brought out a sadistic pleasure in me which I haven’t experienced in some time. It was so nice to see the soldiers fall on the battlefield. And I found it genuinely erotic to watch the boys get spanked, to look at the ways they sigh and wrinkle and turn red in the face. Look at those welts on the soldier’s back. I used to look at the redness on Jerry’s back and apply an ointment. How nice it would have been if those were scratches or bruises, not acne, and how nice it would have been if I had dared to fuck him or spank his ass hard, I remember belting him lightly the first time we met, but never again I believe, which I now regret.

R’s fatherlessness makes him a particular kind of hero, I might say that anyone without a father is a kind of hero. I think of myself as a kind of fatherless child though my father was objectively in my life far more than was the case for these two patients, or for Jerry. What does it mean to have a father who died in a duel before you were born, only to half-win a duel, and then to half-lose a duel, ending your life as a cripple?

R’s father died when he was 5, of leukemia.

Perhaps one day I’ll read David Copperfield for D, who describes her life as “Dickensian.” D’s father left the home when she was 5 or 6 and she remembers nothing of the time before. He likely sexually abused her, and this was the probable cause for the parents' separation. She saw him around afterwards, always drunk. He died in his 40s from too much drink, and thus pre-deceased his mother, who was the primary loving parental figure in D’s life, though as it later came out, D’s mother’s father was also quite loving. Her good parents were her gramps and granny.

I block my father out of my head because he’s so desirable, I tell Jerry, and Jerry says, you can’t think that, you must be kind to him while he’s alive, he’s your father! That’s a living condition, being one’s father, but I think of it as a dead condition.

A happier moment in my life: I took the F train last week and encountered someone sitting across from me. I was on my way to a date, the second date I’ve been on in the last several weeks. There was a man who kept on looking at me on the subway car, sitting across from me. At some point he turned to the woman next to him and asked her a question about a stuffed charm on her bag. Then he looked at me, for a while, and I smiled, and looked away, and looked back. I couldn’t stop grinning and looking and looking away, the looking away made me blush with shame. Why couldn’t I simply hold his gaze? I didn’t even find him desirable or attractive. He was fat, but I thought to myself several times that if he lost some weight he might be handsome. We got off at the same stop in Park Slope, the one closest to Saint Eves. I grinned and told him that I found him voyeuristic. He denied it. I told him I was voyeuristic, so I appreciated catching a like-minded voyeur on the train. As we walked I told him a little about myself. Is that why you’re talking to me? I don’t know if you’re Jewish, I said, but sure, you look Jewish. He told me not to become Jewish, because Christmas is awesome. Before I had time to respond we were at the block at which I had to turn left, he right, so we parted ways and I walked to Saint Eves smiling a lot, truly happy.

I felt grilled during the date. Grilled with respect to the question of whether I had a fetish for Jewish men, and if so, what that fetish entailed. The guy asked if he could kiss me in the end and I still thought he would reject me. He wanted to see me again. I saw him and then said no more over text. There was no sex, just the kissing, in public, and the intimation that I might be worthwhile, but I didn’t understand it. Dating now is sort of boring, it’s a bit of a stupid act, but the reality is it’s helpful for me to know that there’s a demographic of highly educated liberal Jews who grew up reform and who do want to be or become more religious who are open to and interested in dating an Asian woman who wants to become Jewish. I don’t really like how neatly these pieces fit together for now. I feel like a teenager, rebellious: nothing’s good when it’s given to you so easily. And I don’t understand how these men feel so satisfied in themselves that they’re now ready to reproduce. I don’t want to have sex with them.

The next thing that happened in my life is that I wandered around the Lower East Side and Chinatown after the second date. I came across a family near the edge of it, the man caught my eye as somewhat handsome, wearing an attractive sweater. This was at the triangle between Chatham Square and E Broadway: Kimlau Square is its name. The mom and dad stood behind the little boy and the grandfather; the grandfather bent down and said to the boy in a friendly way: “why are you always trying to trick zaidy?” I’ve never heard zaide, zayde, spoken out loud before. But that’s Adam! Zayde, zeyde, zaidy, zeide. I was flushed with life after that. O Gramps! O Zaidy!

Mom is in Japan, asking me about miffy stuffed animals to purchase. I’ve mentioned the idea of purchasing miffy merch to her because Adam continues to send me pictures of Boris and Miffy each day, from those Twitter accounts that pose Boris and Miffy stuffed animals in different stagings. Sometimes Miffy is wearing a Boris hat or Boris is wearing a Miffy hat. He also sends me photos and videos of “poggies” and “punnies.” He continues to text things like “it haint so.” Part of me derives pleasure from imagining him as a an old man with an extensive collection of kawaii plushies, bears and rabbits. A new idea of yiddishkeit: an extensive desire for cuteness, a real true desire for cuteness that seems to stand in for the lack of the yiddish language. Adam told me once that his grandmother had said that yiddish was “for the streets,” and discouraged her husband from using yiddish in the house, so he learned only a little bit of the language, one of the few words he recalls is that of the adorable punim. Adam deserves a nice birthday present this year even if I have to mail it to him.

Who am I from (unchosen), who are my people (chosen)?

The Chinese like to bicker, they like to fight. Mothers show care for their daughters and sons by criticizing them. The only form of love is practical advice. This is what Jerry loved about the Chinese, I think, that snub-nosed hardboiled attitude towards the world. And the militant fire in it, the directness but also the lack of control, the betting on horse races, the men-asking-you-to-film-them, the judgmental hysteria of the girls.

The Koreans are more religious and a bit more formal. Or at least there’s a strong sense of sin ingrained in the culture. Suffer alone and atone for your sins sort of people. Pray really hard sort of people. I think I can accept this better than the chaos of the Chinese.

The Jews, so caring until it becomes rudeness. A lot of feeling in trying to connect, including over one’s judgments. A desire to joke about things, to debate, to spar kindly. What Adam called “irony” lies in rarely claiming a position with one’s whole heart.

Working class white Americans of some anglo-saxon protestant sort of origin. Beautiful bodies when made to do sports or beautiful minds when made to write. Crushingly violent feelings and thoughts. A violent swerving between rightness and wrongness. A sense of faith in love, a belief in belief. Then everything goes wrong, a vision isn’t shared, then what comes next? Big question mark, big art comes next.

And I am closer to sort of committing to a single existence, to being a serious scholar and serious wanderer who goes to shul alone and really learning to daven. At the same time, I don’t know if I’m depressed, and if all this withdrawal from love will work. I’m coming up with figures to be fascinated by in the mean time: I’ve discovered Nathan Fielder, our LA Kafka. I’ve gone to see Andy Statman at Barbès. R says he feels shame around homogenous Jewish spaces, around the idea of Jewish “endogamy.”

He feels he can only approach Jewishness from the angle of the non-Jew, which I suppose is what Nathan Fielder does with his explorations of intermarriage. For R Jewishness has to be a thing with “thick walls,” it has to be “watertight,” against the attack from without that makes claims about something or other around Jewishness. It has something to do with Zionism for him, the desire to defend Jewishness against Zionism. Perhaps endogamy, and racial ideas of Jewishness, are what lead to Israel.

I got ambushed, I just met a third Jew, he’s like a raccoon. He has such a beautiful face.

I had lost interest in dating I suppose but I met him “for exercise”; it made sense to me to have an excuse to bike to Manhattan that day, and I told myself I would ask him about the time he had spent in Taiwan, and that he was pretty in a few of his pictures, so perhaps I could encounter some kind of pleasure of the flesh even if we weren’t compatible. But mostly I just didn’t think about it and told myself I was “exercising.”

Anyway, his cock is beautiful and he has beautiful eyes, a kind of long shape with a color I’ve never seen before. There’s a halo of gold around the greenish brown of the irises; I know this is called “hazel,” but it’s not something I’ve stared at so directly before and is therefore entirely new to me, like a new word. I like his thick tongue, which reminds me of eating cow tongue, or of handling the meat of a cow’s tongue before slicing it. I felt a cunt-erection just from being kissed, like hot wind was inflating the cunt. Like the strait gait through which the Messiah might enter, per Walter Benjamin. He lives in Manhattan Chinatown; there’s a dead mouse on the wooden stairs, the doors are painted red, the roof overlooks gives a view of some of the main buildings of Tribeca, like the Criminal Court and the Supreme Court. I like passing through the trash courtyard that separates the front and back sides of the building; again a kind of double gate, air shaft, space for sun to pass through. He wore a black sweater with a nice halo, partly made of tanuki fiber. It was crazy to read that fabric tag. I enjoyed sitting with him in Tompkins Square Park as I read it, and that it felt necessary to keep kissing to keep warm, and that arousal itself feels like warmth, and that other people were probably watching and avoiding watching.

He has a lot of friends, and he’s already introduced me to a couple of them. One of them is the founder of Tutu gallery herself. I said I wanted to meet her when he mentioned her name, so he Facetime’d her, and we spoke, the three of us, from our bed to her kitchen. I found her weird and direct in a way I like. I’m going loopy thinking of this small world, or this kind world which actually manages to wrap us all together. Perhaps I will next introduce him to my neighbor, the “handsome neighbor with curly red hair” whom I told Jerry about, and whom I actually managed to bump into twice today; his name is Noah. He has a Scottish last name. The second time we talked he told me about how he wants to join shomrim and he gave me his phone number. He’s an LA Jew with a Jewish mother and an irreligious father. I don’t actually find him that attractive, thankfully, but I’m sure many other people would, and he’s 40.

I like that it might be possible to form a scene. None of my other friends or exes really had friends I could connect with and maybe it can be possible now. I liked his other friend, the artist, who spoke about flirting with her therapist, whom he’s also had a sexual relationship with. I liked his roommate however awkward the relationship might be between them. So I better do something in return and introduce him to a few of the people I know if not all of them, all these psychoanalysis people and these random people like my neighbor and maybe even some of my exes who are now my friends. And it’s exciting to me that Staffsky is a Southern Jew, born in Alabama. I was interested to hear about his domestic travel to his family’s new family, as his parents are divorced and have found new partners. Given my repudiation of travel, it’s striking to meet someone who travels, and to find myself challenged on this front, and to have to face the artificiality of my decisions. We’re all differently diasporic, it’s all coming together, how diasporic we all are, and I like the weird ways in which we’ve found shelter, and created these little scenes or networks amongst ourselves. I like seeing what Jerry’s doing on Substack nowadays however removed I am from it, and even though I’m still always a little freaked out by the idea of him, the idea of him hating me or of him having been seriously hurt by me, this desire to preserve and to respect the people who have entered or passed through my life remains strong.