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I feel it percolating but it has not found its egress as yet. The unconscious presses upon me much in the way you feel the need to urinate, that bodily pressure. So hello, unconscious. Ah, it sees an opening. I just sent off my copy of Bambi versus Godzilla, a recent book (2007) by David Mamet, writer, actor and playwright. He did the screen plays for “Hoffa” and “The Untouchables.”  At times he slows to sludge but then like a phoenix he soars. His takes on actors, screenwriting and movies are terrifically acute, given his background as writer and director. Of course, he draws upon his ethnicity and laces his prose with yiddishisms which are always apt. Some smart wit said that Yiddish is Jewish rap, in that it is for a special group while keeping outsiders out. So true. However, as I stray in this paragraph, Yiddish words have become part of the American lexicon. “Putz,” “schmendrik,” and the glorious “schmuck” are commonplace, so commonplace a whole new generation doesn’t know their derviation. By the by, the above three words are Yiddish for penis; however, the smallest dick is a schmendrik — go away, don’t bother me; the second, if I have this right, in size is the schmuck. The putz is enormous and god bless you all and a merry Christmas at that. An anecdote of some note, and only from New York City: there was a law case brought from one councilman against another in the city council because one was referred to as a putz. Now these are fighting words. Imagine in court how that had to be defined, explained and adjudicated.

Back to Mamet. (That unconscious has opened up completely now, so hold on.) He takes after Olivier, finding him starch; he lauds Tony Curtis in “The Boston Strangler” and “Some LIke It Hot.” He likes Endfield’s “Zulu,” which is very intense and exciting. He cites “Gun Crazy” as a top-notch film noir. Jordan, my son, is several things as an artist and one is that he does screenplays; I forwarded the book to him knowing full well that when we read that which we like — or don’t like – it falls like talcum powder upon the unconscious mind. As Freud said brilliantly, nothing is  ever forgotten (give that some measured thought).  It may be suppressed (conscious effort) or repressed (unconscious effort), but it is there. Remember that when working with children and your spouse. — and your self.

Today I am lying fallow, as most of the week is spent in retirement twaddle. I read blogrolls for potential reviewers; I read emails to see if I can market the book into other areas; I think; I write books that go nowhere, but I am used to that, having written short stories over a period of three decades with little encouragement except my own inner grit. I fight off despair or whiffs of sticky depression, as I was reared in that tar and have spent not an inconsiderable part of my life pulling away and out of that. A very wise therapist once wrote that one of the major characteristics of an able therapist is that he should have had a depressive for a mother. I did. And what did the therapist wisely say, that the capacity to “hold” within you the torture tinctures of mother’s depression, not to be eroded by that, but to contain it, serves very well when clients come to you as a therapst. A client’s pain and anguish as well as rage and fury can wear upon the therapist, unless he can hold a great deal of shit in his pot without being destroyed. My pot is as large as the crater in Arizona. Who knew that mom was rearing me to be a shrink?

Are you wagging your head about the twists and turns Freese’s unconscious is taking him today? C’mon, let us see what other mental lint is in the stream of consciousness. It is a beautiful Arizona morning as I look out the bay window which is behind my desk. The sun and blue skies, the sun and blue skies, always the sky and the sun, that fireball in the sky. I was thinking last night how I would like to be in New York when the first half inch of snow dusts the streets, covers railings and sills and I crunch along the pavement reveling in the sheer wintry beauty of it. I miss the seasons, I miss the clothing for each season, I am sullied by the same weather every day here in Arizona. Perfection sucks. I am a seasonal person and I have wishes to return to my enclave: imagine this, dear reader — the snow is fresh, falling lightly, the streets are getting a coating and I am in a good diner or bistro-bakery having a cup of joe with a butter-slathered bialy. You know, if I had my family around me, close and dear ones, it wouldn’t be a bad time to kick off — almost as gravitationally holding as “Rosebud.”

Adieu.

I have to turn to something else. Writing my new “book” is fatiguing me and the subject is intense so that I have transferred  to the blog to calm down. I’ve noticed that over the past week or so that I write fewer blogs; the unconscious needs time to fill up before it decants itself. I have been writing about “emptiness” versus “awareness” and I have chosen in my parody to take the side of emptiness. And as I sink into my empty self I am struggling to define what it is to be fully empty, that is an oxymoron in a way. The annoying thing is that often i start something and all along the process I feel it will not work and I am feeling this is so in my new effort. Call it the old depressive in me.

I persevere. I slog through my own verbal shit, now and then coming upon some worthy phrase or insight, perhaps outsight; after all, I am writing about emptiness and I am beginnging to feel there is merit in that stance. What i want to do is go after all the Dyers, Dr. Phils and Chopras who hawk awareness as a commodity. I find all three galling, experts supposedly on their own internal states and then like Joseph Smith selling the snake oil to others, so vastly American. Like religion, these awareness peddlers are the “dragon at the gate.” Perversely, I make a case for emptiness as I throw the gauntlet down. To make it “fun” or digestible, I use humor, ha ha, quizzes, anecdotes, all the paraphernalia of the self-help book. And quite frankly I go after the holies of our culture –Mother Teresa, religion (easy target), hard work, et al. It is quite enervating but I like to snarl at what I feel are the apparitions of bullshit in this culture.

What I intend to do with this short pamphlet or slim book is to self-publish it and give it away as a throwaway. My business card, if you will. I have no doubt that this book has percolated away from consciousness for many years, for its sourness and misanthropy have long been with me. One of the great moments of literature is when at the the end of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver is on a raft, isolated, desolate. When by chance he is discovered by a boat, at first he refuses to come aboard. It is a great moment, for he has seen enough of human nature that the thought to be with others of his kind nauseates him. Bravo!

On this blog I feel free to blather and blather I do. When I began in September 2007 I introduced myself and my intent for this blog. I hold true to it. it is a Thoreauvian puddle, of a kind. I find it useful to write to myself each day as a way of emptying ballast. Very few people respond to bloggers, I have noticed, I have read. I find it interesting that on some sites thousands have visited and maybe 30 to 40 comments are left. Do you have a thought about that? I do. Whatever! I go on quite oblivious to you as you are to me. And so it is in this culture. I believe that a sincere and good writer, leave great writers to history, are writers — this is only a self-centered belief on my part — who are discontented. I know where my discontent lies. And that is for me to work out and work it out I do every time I sit down to express myself. As I said to someone who tried to pin me down like a Nabokovian butterfly with a pin through its thorax, that I am happily discontented – lovvve that oxymoron. Like Indian madras, she had trouble handling the running colors.

I tire and end on this note.

I had a lovely essay completed and somehow it was lost. I used to get bent out of shape about that but I know that an asteroid is hurtling through space at our planet and with that as comfort I will redo the essay. I have a potpourri of things to say, associations and mental quiltwork to express. What has gotten my writing interest of late is The Optimist’s Rag, a parody of a self-help book that I am personally having fun with. I want it to be so dry and savage that one might mistakenly take it for the real thing, whatever that is. I leaven it with puns and dry humor and wild ideation interspersed among the serious and savage things I have to relate. If you will see the Ten Canons and the talk I gave to the Stony Brook Psychology society in 1990 under Pages you will see a very serious effort at getting at self-awareness. Well, I take after myself. I comment on each of the essential parts and parody it. That was interesting to do. The essential theme of the book is that emptiness, empty people and acutely empty people are the happiest people around. I savage self-awareness as unnecessary angst. You get the idea. Often Iget confused and I come out on the side of emptiness which just delights me. Now I will press “save” and see if wordpress does that. I love Bill Gates who breast-fed on a lactating intel chip.

So what does the title allude to. It is how I write. I excavate interiorly, I dig, I scratch and I spade. I crack open geodes and break down shale to get at some “truth” of the matter. Oh, I know when I am there; it is this writer’s “G” spot. (Isn’t writing when it’s going well orgasmic?)  Of late I cannot seem to open that door as I struggle with myself to write about emptiness in as much a serious vein as I write about awareness.  The writing comes and goes fitfully. I am with it. I have that boa’s fucking head in my grasp and I will not let go of the beast until its caged. As you may well know, reader, writer, interested party, we are only sacks of shit and skin ruled by eruptive and often volcanic emotional sources. I realize that well and I count on that seething cauldron to produce the best writing I can do. I am only a utensil to modulate and moderate its strength. I am the spigot. I just associated to Star Trek. I found it enjoyable when I realized that Kirk was the ego, Doc the id, and Spock the superego. Once you have that in mind watch Shatner work the other two, using reason always to get out of predicaments, much as our own ego does for us. Remember, though, the action comes from the id.

I am about 50 pages into the pamphlet or book, some 13,000 words and I have still not nailed the head of the boa to the plank with a tenpenny nail (that’s three inches).  However, I am patient and now and then the unconscious oozes out a few paragraphs. At my age I can only think of the corollary with regard to my own sexuality. Moving on, hmmm!, I started off with a kind of writer’s despair that the work had no merit. It does. I sent a PDF file to my son (Big shot, he thinks he’s a hacker) and he told me to continue. I found that encouraging. If we heard that as a child, continue, go on, reach for platinum, not gold, the world is not the Olympics, your inner self is the medal to obtain, what larks, Pip what larks!

As a tangential note so that you can understand my son’s wild yet dry sense of humor. He works as a high end technician at Morningstar in Chicago. He is an artist and that is how he eats, but it is not his metier. Anyhow he relates how a woman from another department came to him with a problem. Her mouse was not working. Jordan tells me she was a nice person and she did not ask him to come down several floors to handle the situation. What she did to prove the mouse was dead was to shake it vigorously in front of my son as a display of how dead it was and queried him as how he would help her. His response was along these lines, “You only shake people like that.” I now call him the levity that came from my loins.

So the son saves the father, this is not Christianity folks, not from me.

i know no fear as I end this blog. It will be saved or it will not be saved, all this religious terminology. Jews are not into being saved. We tire of that. We tired of that centuries ago. Now we are more into saving one another.  I bid you adieu, having run out of steam and feeling a need to get back to The Optimist’s Rag.

You may have noticed some gibberish when you came on site. All I know is that it is WordPress database error or that is what it says,. My son is on it. I haven’t the slightest clue as to what that means. When I go into the greasy compacted mossy mass of information provided by Wordpress I am inundated with geekspeak. Clearly the digital age destroys by nature, apparently, the well-turned sentence. Clarity disappears altogether and what is “clear” only a geek can grasp. Wouldn’t it be loverly if instructions as to how to repair the above were as basic as the instructions on the back of a shampoo bottle.

So bear with it as my son gives it a mechanistic prostate exam, truly digital.

 Charlene Martel at http://theliteraryword.blogspot.com has corresponded with me over these past few days and I have forwarded copies of my short story collection and copies of the tetralogy for her to review and to put on bookcrossing. Char, as she likes to be called, has been supportive of my writings and what I appreciate is the sense of her excitement expressed through email. To be alive nowadays, or any days, is a rare treat for me to experience, given that a large portion of my life in a secular way was to revivify the dead into living lives while in therapy. Unlike Dr. Frankenstein, clients only needed a charge, a boost, a human being to help them start up. I was no reanimator. Without grandiosity, I was alive so that I worked on making them alive. In this culture, in any culture, forces put us to asleep while we are “awake.” To wit, the thing I loathe the most about Cheney, Bush and Rove are their malignant efforts to put us to sleep. I just associated to a line from Shakespeare or Ray Bradbury, “Something wicked comes this way.” I look at the aforementioned three as a writer, man and therapist and I know in my gut, in the fabric of my self, how morally and ethically deformed they are. Cheney’s mother must have lactated battery acid. Rove is fearful of loving sex, he might turn into shattered ice, and Bush has the recovered addict’s false bonhomie.

Now that I have cleared my mind, I go to the Optimist’s Rag, which is a booklet, perhaps a book, I am writing which is going nowhere and may very well be deadly dull; however, I am writing and that keeps me at it, practicing. My intent is to publish it cheaply as an extended pamphlet to give away to friends as an encore piece to my other scribblings. The intent is simple. It is a grotesque self-help book, a savage parody I hope, in which I try to help the reader acquire a sense of emptiness, and if he or she wishes to go beyond that, to acquire what I term “acute emptiness.” I try to put in all the tricks of the self-help book: bulleted lists; short tasks; fill-ins; parables; Oprahesque “wisdoms,” literary “sound bites,” whatever. I despair at moments of it taking on any real meaning but I do know that editing, pruning, severe pruning, might rescue this book. I am on a lark and I just keep babbling, for it really is an expression of my self at this late stage in my life. I am having fun ripping off some of the articles on this site and twisting and disfiguring them so that awareness becomes despicable and emptiness esteemed. I argue that the truly empty person is the happy person and that the self-aware person suffers from self-imposed agony and anxiety. You choose. Sometimes I creep in between the crevices that connect awareness and emptiness so that I can comment on both.

To wit, Nietzsche’s quotation — one of my favorites — is “knowledge is death.” The empty person realizes that this smacks of awareness, causes unnecessary grief whereas denial of death is a really promising element of the acutely empty person and like all defenses, it should be admired, one to be grateful about. And so I work with this, sometimes seriously, sometimes humorously, always deadpan and dry. Sometimes I get so confused that I end up “empty.”

For you movie lovers as I move sideways here, I have a sleeper for you — see The Red House with Edward G. Robinson, directed by Delmer Daves; masterful Freudian flic with a beautiful score. No more than a few dollars. I am about to order my copy. The last scene shows how brilliant Robinson was. Did you know he spoke 8 languages?

Live!

I gave a reading at Randy Ford’s cultural center in downtown Tucson. Sam Henrie, CEO of Wheatmark, a POD publishing house, attended to hear me read. If you want some feedback about Wheatmark comment at the end of this blog. Wheatmark has published both my books and I am exceedingly pleased with the quality of the paper, the cover stock and the font as well as the editing. My son did both covers and if you are interested in what he can do, write him at jdfreese@hotmail.com. Also in attendance was Malcolm Alexander, one other Poet, Curt (I didn’t get his last name), Randy himself. The attendance was small because the center had moved and a new season was just beginning.  Go to Randy’s website, http://www.elojitosprings.com to see scheduled events and readings.

Jordan is a graphic artist who has won some major prizes. In a few weeks freezelab.com will be up and running as he is revamping his entire site. He is also a fine photographer, cinemaphile, works on animation and recently leaped from a plane at 14,000 feet as a personal deed he had to do for himself. He is 31; and the best part, he is a man.  So saith his Jewish father.

I am scheduled for a major reading of the tetralogy in September. I am seriously contemplating buying horns for the reading. Jews at one time, perhaps today, were associated with having horns and secondly, my book is “devilish” so I will complete the canvas. And since I am Jewish, former teacher and therapist, I feel compelled to teach or share this bit of arcane material with you.

This falls under the category of: Did you know?  Accordingly, when Michelangelo prepared for his sculpting of the statue of Moses he read the Bible in the vernacular. Having been translated from Aramaic to Greek to Latin and then to Italian, in the description of Moses descending from Sinai with the two tablets in his hands, he is described as beeing illumined or having a halo about his head. When halo was translated several times from one language to another and finally into Italian, halo became horn. And so Michelangelo carved two nice horns into Moses’ head. And so began mischief of a very unwholesome kind. Ergo, Jews had horns. I know a woman who traveled across the west to see her husband during the years of W.W.II. In those days it was not uncommon for women to wear hats with a veil. I am so aged that as a child I had seen that. On the seat next to her was another woman and they began to converse to ease the hardship of such a tedious train ride. Soon it was revealed that my woman friend was Jewish. At the end of the ride the other woman felt compelled to ask her if she would be so kind as to lift her veil as she had never seen horns before. No comment. And thank you western civilization.

As a member of a remarkable minority and someone who is presently hated by a fair share of “humanity,” I revel in my Judaism, secular that it is. Why? you might proffer. The answer is mysterious. You figure it out: Because it has made me free!

And away we go. Returning now to the reading, I read “Juan Peron’s Hands” which you can read on this blog under Pages. It is an experimental story that rides on two tracks. See for yourself. The poets read in their two disparate styles and Randy read of an adventure he had with his wife, Peg, back in 1972 when they both traveled in Sumatra on bikes (why?) and that narrative can be read at his site: http://www.thebrainpan.wordpress.com. For some reason the computer created this space avoiding all attempts to correct it. And so it goes.

While this is going on in my life I have been working on a tentative piece called The Optimist’s Rag which is a feeble attempt on my part to write a self-help manual for the chronically empty with a feverish secondary effort to also reach the acutely empty. The premise is simple: I am sending up everything I know about our mercantile culture, from Cheney to plasticine Laura Bush, from the automaton Karl Rove who could not hold my mitt when I played softball as a kid, for he is an evil nerd, the mechanistic feces of a Darth Vader.

Several times I wanted to delete this entire screed but I am having fun just writing and writing about emptiness and how to attain it in this culture. The entire argument is to help the empty reader to attain a degree of emptiness while avoidng awareness of any kind. I have used quotations, mini-essays, short observations, lists and all the paraphernalia of a self-help book with the intent to publish a small pamphlet as a giveaway to friends and others. It is not satire. It is dry savagery. It is fully constructed bile, and it may be deadly to read, but again, writer, reader, whose life is it? If you go to Pages again and look up Ten Canons which is an attempt to help one see or become aware, I take that very piece and attack it, deconstruct it as folly. I then went on to write a new Ten Canons for the empty person. Does it all work? Who knows? I do now that like a freshly roasted piece of meat it needs to “rest,” thank you Top Chef. When and if I will bore you by putting up a few pages.

I will close with an interior observation. Like me, have you ever had the feeling that you are not riding the crest of a wave which is very powerful in turns of sensibility? Rather, I feel, using the sea analogy, as if I am spume and I have not the slightest idea as to where or when I will moisten a rock or a rotten piece of pier lattice. I am spume this past week.

Adieu.