TRANSCRIPT OF AUDIO FILE:

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT:

THERAPIST: It looks like going forward, starting next Friday, so starting next week, I could do Friday, 2:35. Could you do that?

CLIENT: Yeah.

THERAPIST: All right, cool.

CLIENT: Great.

THERAPIST: All right. The only catch is I've got to stop right at 3:25 those days, so it will be 50 minutes.

CLIENT: Okay.

THERAPIST: Yeah. I've got somewhere I've got to be right at 3:30. Okay, so we'll start that next week.

CLIENT: Next Friday. [0:01:00.4]

THERAPIST: Next Friday, yeah.

CLIENT: Okay. Thank you.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: I'm going to get paid soon, so I can settle up with you. I'll just write the time down. So, Friday, 2:35 to -

THERAPIST: Three twenty-five.

CLIENT: So, I don't think I often come in talking about physiological things, but the past few days, I've just been so incredibly tired.

THERAPIST: Huh. [0:02:00.4]

CLIENT: And like today, like still tired, even though I've gotten plenty of sleep. I was sick to my stomach and then like my pulse is just like brrrrrrr. I'm thinking okay, I had tea, as normal, I had coffee, usually, so it's like my caffeine level is not different. I just feel anxious. I haven't done writing in three days, like I can't sit down and do it. So, I don't know, like I'm going to have to go, I packed up a lot of my books and put them in the entryway. I was very pleased to do that, because you go through and still, there's, you know, a couple of shelves left of books, but I got rid of a lot. You know those W.B. Mason paper boxes? I filled up nine of those boxes with books, so I was able to clear off, I don't know, 75 percent of my books, that are currently you know, as opposed to the 80 downstairs, right, which are going to be that's just basement to basement, less exciting. And I've not seen those books in ages, and those books are like those books, which I haven't looked at, you know, writing and science and statistics, which makes me boring even saying it. [0:03:53.1]

And then yesterday, I don't know, no celebration of Easter, not that I had planned anything but, you know, sort of as a highlight. If you have kids, you do Easter, because of course you do Easter. Last Easter, some family members were out from England, so it's a big deal right? So we had an Easter egg hunt and we drew all kinds of pictures and we had fun, we went to the park, and it's like it's Easter, because it was the kids. So what we did we do yesterday? You know, we got up, we had two laps around the pond, because the gym was closed. Came back and again, sort of feeling tired and whatever. So, went down in the basement and there's a big box, the one I put the curtains in, so Veronica cleaned that and bleached it and sterilized it essentially. And then I got two trashcans and a recycling bin, you know, the big, blue recycling bins. There's three of them; one that we use and then two in the basement, underneath the porch. They're just dirty, dirty, dirty. So, I hose them all down and wash them down and rinse them out, so on Easter I'm thinking, new beginning, Easter! Ooh, you clean your trashcans, fresh start. I was thinking, entirely ironically at the time, because I was pleased doing it, but I was very aware of the fact like neighbors were celebrating Easter and I'm washing the big, blue recycling bin.

THERAPIST: Huh. [0:05:51.0]

CLIENT: And green trash cans. So, I did that and then came in, and then I had gone to the liquor store previously, gotten a bunch of wine, any of the boxes, you get at the liquor store, which is always a bit weird.

THERAPIST: The empty boxes from the liquor store.

CLIENT: The empty boxes to the liquor store. Anyway, so, you know, which were great boxes obviously, but anyway, not being a drinker, so it's strange to be putting boxes of vodka, you know? So, there's a big bookcase in the dining room, mostly Veronica's stuff, some of my stuff, so that was five boxes of books. And then we have, in the living room, underneath the TV, this long, what do we call it? It's this nice piece of furniture but it's deep and it holds a lot of stuff; games and books, National Geographics and stuff you can look at. [0:07:01.7]

THERAPIST: Do you have like a move-in date?

CLIENT: Likely, April 26th.

THERAPIST: Oh, okay.

CLIENT: Yeah. So the mortgage inspection happened on Saturday and I guess they won't tell you if it's bad news.

THERAPIST: The inspection on your place?

CLIENT: Yeah, so the mortgage inspection for the buyer. His mortgage people looked at our place, to make sure it actually was as valuable as he's paying.

THERAPIST: Okay, yeah.

CLIENT: So, you know, it's just like and there's something... I feel like at some level, I'm not I don't feel like I'm having to think too hard about this. I don't feel like I'm it's not like I was It's not like you're packing up to move across country. It's not like you're cleaning house and getting rid of stuff. I mean, it really was just taking books and putting them in boxes. It wasn't necessarily needing to sort through them, but nevertheless, you look and you see things and you put them in some pattern of sorts, and you think of it as these types of books and those types of books. You're evaluating life at a different level because you're packing up, and so you're looking at things differently, not just the surface, you're actually looking carefully. [0:08:29.1]

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: At every book. If it's my book, it has a memory attached to it. If it's her book, it's sort of thinking, oh, did she write that. Or I'll think oh, maybe I'll read that but now not, because I have writing to do. And then also thinking, there's my books in that bookcase, but thinking I want to kind of keep my stuff together and even though that bookcase is going to be put back together, there are some books that I pulled out, to put on my bookshelf in my room, so they'll be packed up with my books. David Foster Wallace's Consider the Lobster and The Handmaid's Tale. So, I took those and put them with my books. [0:09:31.3]

THERAPIST: Those were yours, right?

CLIENT: They are mine.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: But I didn't want them mixed in with other stuff that was mine, because somehow those mean something to me. I sort of thought they shouldn't be in with these books.

THERAPIST: I think you gave both of those to me at one point.

CLIENT: Hmm.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: And then [Poor Land?].

THERAPIST: Poor Land, I've still got that. That's interesting reading actually. All three good books.

CLIENT: So, you know, so then and also it's like, in terms of I don't know, in this I mean, you'll understand this, but it's like I'm not into college basketball and sometimes I can get into it. Sometimes I can get into it, in the sort of fake sense, of sort of let myself get excited when truly, I don't care about college basketball and I generally don't care about college sports. You know, like last year, when the finalists play, it's like okay, it's a big deal, it's on Monday night or whatever, whatever, Tuesday night, Wednesday, whatever it is, Sunday night, Thursday night, or whatever night it is, you know, you watch it. But generally speaking, I don't care about college sports. So, baseball, don't care. The Mets are winning right now, by the way. [0:11:22.2]

THERAPIST: Oh, they're playing the Orioles, is that right?

CLIENT: Yeah, they do.

THERAPIST: Where, here?

CLIENT: So it's Colon versus Santana.

THERAPIST: Oh, is that right?

CLIENT: There's something about opening day I guess, but again, the Mets are not they're going to have to prove themselves to me. Anyway, baseball is intrinsically, it's just, it's so slow. I feel like I'm wondering how long they're actually going to last. Anyway, so this weekend, there's the lead-up to baseball, which I just don't care about, there's no football, the hockey teams are not doing well, and then there's March Madness and I'm not feeling mad about it. Sunday afternoon, I guess, so yesterday, it's Easter, and Easter and Thanksgiving right, are two great NFL games. So, Easter, my Sunday, no celebration, I'm packing up books that I could really care less about, and while I'm doing this, because I'm sitting right in front of the TV, because the books are underneath the television, the night before I had recorded Trading Places, which I don't hold up as a great movie at all, but somehow it captured my imagination the night before, the first like 15 minutes. So then, while packing the books, I'm watching this, Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. I'm a bit amused but also just feeling tired, packing books, and then I have all these open boxes, I need to tape them shut, I need to write labels of what's inside, but I don't, because I'm tired, so I just sit there on the couch. All the books are packed but I haven't shut the boxes, I haven't labeled them, and I'm watching Trading Places, and Veronica comes in and she's sort of irritated that I've stopped. I just said, I'm taking a mental break. She's not happy that I'm tired, been tired. [0:13:51.3]

Anyway, so then I was like all right, fine. So I stop, I go in, tape everything up, label everything, schlep all the boxes out to the entryway, stack, stack, stack, stack, stack. I'm irritated. Anyway, so why am I tired? Am I stressed? I have zero energy to write because writing, you'd better be totally wide awake or you don't even have a chance of doing it, right? So, if you're tired, I mean you don't even attempt to do it, because you're just going to start thinking incorrectly and get depressed and start hating it.

So... Anyway, and then Veronica, today, woke up, sometimes she does. Sometimes she just wakes up and she's mad. And so, we go to the gym. I'm on the treadmill running, she gets on the treadmill next to me, she starts running, we're running side-by-side, and that's fine, because at that point, sometimes she gets too mad at me. She was just like business. Then we get in the car, go to the food store, go to the post office, it feels tense. [0:15:23.9]

THERAPIST: Yeah, huh.

CLIENT: We go by the liquor store, buy you know, get 13 boxes. We could have gotten 16, but 13 fit rather well in the car.

THERAPIST: What about the tension between you two?

CLIENT: Yeah, well, I don't know it's weird. It's like, I don't know, she's mad that I'm tired. I can't explain why I'm tired. I don't know why I'm tired, I just feel tired.

THERAPIST: Why is she mad about it?

CLIENT: It's not like I'm not doing things. I mean, I packed, I'm offering to take down the curtain rods and patch them up and paint them and so forth. It's like little things, like she goes well... I said, well we need to get the right paint. She goes, "Well, let's just buy paint." I was like thank you, thank you, exactly. I said, "Veronica, you know how many different types of white there are? And then, you have to decide whether it's gloss or semi-gloss or flat." It's not flat, but it's hard to tell whether it's gloss or semi-gloss. [0:16:42.4]

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: (laughs) She goes, "It's white," and it's like Veronica, I have done so much painting in this house, you have done zero, I clearly know about paint. If I tell you that it's a problem, and we've got to go and actually try and match it. She goes, "I don't know why you're thinking about stuff like that." So I'm like well, if we're going to take down the curtains, there's going to be holes in the wood, we've got to get the wood putty and I've got to sand it and make it invisible. It's not going to be visible if I get a white that has sort of a reddish cast when in fact it should be slightly yellowish. Not all whites are the same. She goes what's that? I said, that's ceiling white, that's flat. (laughs) Anyway, so I was just like, I was just really aggravated by the idea that that... And she goes, well why did you she ended the fight. She goes, why are you telling me this? Why are you telling me that I didn't do much painting, you've told me this ten times. And I said, because I feel like you're not really getting it. Like this went on over the course of an hour. I said, because I feel like you're not really actually getting what I'm saying, so I keep having to repeat it. You keep saying that all I have to do is buy white paint and I keep saying that there are many whites, and until you acknowledge the fact that I have to go to Lowe's and actually do some color matching, I will keep saying that it's an issue. [0:18:11.1]

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: So she's not getting it. Anyway, so I guess the bigger issue is just the idea of sort of disassembling. I'm happy going to the new place, you know, that's fine, but it's the disassembling of our current life.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Meanwhile, it's different things, right? It's the packing up, doo-doo-doo-doo. Meanwhile, the energy I need to have is very sort of additive. I need to be in sort of accumulation mode and processing mode, to be writing and they are completely opposite energies.

THERAPIST: That's funny, that's right, you were saying that you didn't want to do this at the same time. You did not want to have it be at the end of the semester, because you thought it would just be opposing kind of forces or something like that. I was thinking a couple things. One is that the movie has led you to be really kind of reflective and, you know, you're kind of reflecting on thinking about disassembling things. There's this kind of like you're kind of taking apart what were you guys in this place, and looking at it, and then you'll be putting it back together, yeah, but you're kind of like deconstructing your life there in some way, looking at it. I was thinking that's that you do that with some, I don't know, that it tends to make you feel sober or like it's a sobering process or something like that to you. It has some effect on you doing that, and I think it always has. The move leaves you to really kind of reflect and think. What has this time meant and all that. [0:20:34.6]

Whereas, yeah, if you're thinking about writing, and we've talked about it here, how they're like almost two different kind of ways of thinking, really separate ways of thinking. Almost being in the world in a really different way.

[PAUSE: 0:21:02.3 to 0:21:35.2]

CLIENT: Yeah. I was talking to Elizabeth about this and she goes, when you're tired, she goes you are depleted, and so all of the things that are your normal worries, that you can defend against or don't feel so, so pointedly, come to the fore and are exaggerated, because you just are so tired, you can't fight them off. And it's like yeah, that's exactly right. I don't know.

THERAPIST: What are the anxieties that have come up?

CLIENT: It's the usual, work and money and future and you know, parents getting older and parents being far away and me being far away. What's the... What are the things that sort of make me happy, aren't only distractions or anything. You know, when you don't have them, you know, so no sports this weekend. Racing has the week off, because there's practice, so there's qualifying, and there's the race itself, that's a good you can always just kick back at night, after Veronica's coming in, and just watch qualifying, watch the race. It's very exciting. You know, it's symbolic, in all the ways we've talked about what race car driving is about. [0:23:53.8]

THERAPIST: Hmm.

CLIENT: So, I need to compartmentalize, right? But right now I feel like I can't, and I'm hopeful that I will be able to. Right now, I'm just sort of feeling what next is going to be packed up, and there's a limit to how much you can do, because you have to actually live your life for the next four weeks. It's not like you can take down all the curtains, because then anybody can look in the house with no curtains. So, I'm anticipating, like all right, well, knickknacks, not that there's any knickknacks, but vases and so forth, that are on the floor here and there, just sort of those decorations and pictures on the wall, those can be put away in boxes, and that's fine, it doesn't bother me. But, there's no point where all of a sudden it was like all the curtains have to come down, and that's going to mean, you know, standing on chairs with a screw gun and then all of a sudden, take them all down and she's packing them up and the rods have to go somewhere and everything is expensive, and so everything has to be protected, restoration on hardware, you know? God help us if we scratch this. So it's like and having to put those things in boxes, and how do you put a pole that's five feet long in a box? You can't, so what do you do? It's minor stuff but all of a sudden it's like I need to be doing differential equations at that point, that's what that week is, differential equations. [0:26:11.5]

THERAPIST: Hmm.

CLIENT: So that's the big dig. And yet it's putting pressure, soaking everything down and patching everything up and then painting everything. It feels like well, there's a day shot right there. Taking the mirror out of the mirror, taking the shaving gear out of the bathroom, replacing it with other mirror. So I feel like there's all of these little things and it's like I can't get into a rhythm of like just sort of doing what I have to do, so I feel like, I might as well just drop this course. I like the material, I get it, it's hard, this is a hard course. [0:27:22.8]

THERAPIST: Yeah, but all of kinds of the anxiety of these things, things you've got to get done, but also I guess the feelings are kind of about "life" or real life or something like that, are kind of intruding in that space. Does it feel like that, like you can't have that kind of you can't compartmentalize that enough to kind of focus on the specific you stuff.

CLIENT: The thing is, this is the thing that's a total hassle with this. You know, it's not like and I don't know a situation in which it would be the case. I guess it always has to be this compressed situation, but it would be so nice to be able to say all right, well, I studied for a few hours and I get it and I feel okay about it, and I sort of need a mental break, so I'll take a couple hours and I'll take some stuff over to the house, right? Over the course of the month, I'll just move some boxes, that's good, maybe I'll do that, go to the gym, come back, and there you go. No, you can't, because until you actually have the place. So it all has to take place in 24 hours, everything, everything. [0:28:55.3]

THERAPIST: Oh, yeah, yeah.

CLIENT: It's like, it's an empty house, it's just an empty house and it's right there, and yet, everything has to go in one day. So there's all this sort of lead up to it, as opposed to being able to incrementally do stuff, to sort of ease into it. Stuff has to be taken apart. We had to take apart the bed, got to take apart the cable, got to take apart the futon in the bedroom, got to take apart the drawers. Furniture is a hassle. Take the legs off the couch.

THERAPIST: But that's the kind of stuff you'll do day of, is that what you're...?

CLIENT: Yeah, the day of, in addition to a gazillion boxes.

THERAPIST: Yeah, right.

CLIENT: And all of a sudden you're just are, blink, in a new place. So it's like all right, and then, you know, a week after the phone is in. [0:30:03.6]

THERAPIST: Do you get movers or do you guys do it yourself?

CLIENT: Well, we'll have movers but still, I mean...

THERAPIST: I know it's a huge day. You're not doing it yourself though, the whole thing.

CLIENT: It would make it cheaper if I hired someone, and I borrowed a friend's truck and we took the basement stuff over, because those are just boxes. The problem is, when do you do it? We could just do it right now, right? The basement has been packed, it's been packed for eight years, you know just sitting there. Well, not exactly years, but you know, whenever it's been, where I left my former place. And that's another thing, it's like a museum of sorts. Not that you could see it, like all these boxes of stuff that I just don't even have a sense of what's in it, you know, I haven't seen it, I haven't literally looked at it in a long time. [0:31:12.5]

THERAPIST: Ah-huh.

CLIENT: So that's just going to be moved over from the basement. You know, and then there's this thing too, which is just this minor thing I suppose, but it's like oh, fuck. So, we had the inspection done and the house, beautiful, great, no complaints, no nothing except for a large tree that you know, he was trying to find negatives. Then we had the radon test done, 4.2. The threshold is four. If it's four or greater, you've got to deal with it. I'm like what the hell is radon, start researching radon. I'm like fuck, so then that has to be dealt with. It's not a legal thing, I don't have to deal with it, but it's like who the hell wants to be down the basement breathing radon? Then I read about radon and I'm like Jesus Christ, if we don't deal with the radon in the basement, I might as well take up smoking, it's the same thing. Might as well smoke a pack a day, it's the same thing. [0:32:14.7]

THERAPIST: Is that right?

CLIENT: It's just bad stuff, it's just bad crap. So then I'm thinking, but the house has been sealed up for a long time, it's been sealed up since November and it's wintertime. It seems like the radon was going to be at its peak. So anyway, it's like to solve the problem, you've got to put in some, some something or other that's in the ground and it's like this thing, it has a fan and a tube that goes outside, it goes all the way to the roof. Meanwhile, I have this idea of having all of my stuff down there, because it's a good basement, and setting up, you know, what I started to refer to as like a little Honduran living room, right? I'll do a little rug and a milk crate, and have a TV, and just have like a little thing. Right? But it's like, but I'm might be sitting there breathing radon, so it's like oh, the basement. I had a sort of fantasy of like wow, I've got a big old bunch of space that I could just sort of be in, and I'm like fuck. I mean, now I can't be down there unless we have this stuff solved. Even if you get the vent and even if you do all this stuff, there's no guarantee that it's going to be like a place you actually want to hang out for a couple hours.

THERAPIST: Is the radon from the paint, the old oil based paints or something? [0:33:46.5]

CLIENT: It's ground stuff.

THERAPIST: It's ground stuff.

CLIENT: It comes from the rock in the ground and it can come from the stone itself, what basements are made of. And yet it's entirely dependent on the groundwater, so it tends to peak when the ground is really saturated, because then it's more actively evolving. So, I'm looking at it, the radon test was 4.2, four is the threshold, and I'm thinking what does this mean exactly? I'm like where is it bad? First of all, radon was not even known until 1983, because they had they went and tested background radiation near nuclear plants, and so then going around to various houses, and they all have some background radiation, and they're doing their like test in neighborhoods. Like what the hell is this stuff, and they figured out oh, it's radon, they're like oh, it's naturally occurring, it just exists in people's basements. So anyway, four is this cutoff level, it's four becquerels, and then there's, so what's that relative to. So, 27,000 becquerels would be the amount of radon in an unventilated uranium mine, so that's pretty much the max. (laughs) That's when you go from zero to 27,000. [0:35:19.3]

In the 1920s they had these... You know, back when they did all kinds of crazy things to help people. They would put people in rooms with radon, for its medicinal effects and (inaudible) revivals. (laughs) So, all of a sudden like Jesus Christ, all my boxes that are like now in a non-radon basement, they're going to go into a radon basement. Anyway, so there goes my plans of like painting the basement like really bright white and having like a little twelve-by-ten rug and a milk crate. I'm sort of thinking this is a real, like little den, right? [0:36:24.3]

THERAPIST: Oh, yeah.

CLIENT: I could still do it, but I'm also going to be thinking okay, I'm increasing my chances of lung cancer if I want to get away from Veronica.

THERAPIST: There's a price to be paid.

CLIENT: Anyway, I don't like calling it a man cave, I think that's really whatever, but I guess in my mind, I thought that was...

THERAPIST: Yeah, some space for yourself.

CLIENT: Some space for myself, right.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: But yeah, so now it's a radon cave.

THERAPIST: It's a radon cave, yeah.

CLIENT: And then it's like this stuff too, like stuff there's stuff that like, what exactly belongs to us and what's the part of the condominium trust? There's all this stuff in the basement. Well, it's like we've got 11 snow shovels, right? So I feel like well, I want to take two of them, it's less than a third, still plenty of snow shovels, but if we don't, it's like you've got to buy snow shovels. So then I'm thinking, is that right, to do that? Is it right to take so many shovels? There's three recycling bins and we only use one. Should I take the recycling bin? That's seems weird. So there's all these little weird little micro ethical issues, and not even that's it's ethical, it's just sort of a matter of, like we'll leave and then I'm thinking these jack asses, they book the snow shovels and they took the recycling bin, even though they were never used. [0:38:13.3]

THERAPIST: Mm-hmm.

CLIENT: So then it's like when you move out, do you completely start over? Not a big deal, buying snow shovels or buying, I don't know, just sort of like well... In our area of the basement, there's this craftsman, big like red tool cabinet, which has no tools in it, because my tools are elsewhere, and on it is a piece of wood and you can clearly see that it's been used by somebody previously, and a big red vice that's molted to it. I'm thinking well, it's ours, really, it's in our part of the basement, right? So I'm thinking, well, now you've got a garage, so I'm thinking well, the movers, they can just figure out how to move this giant thing and get it out of the basement. Then I'm thinking, is it really ours? It happens to be in our third of the basement, no one else is using it. It's clearly not Kyle's, it's not Brad's. And there's a desk down there, this big ass desk that we just set stuff on. I was looking at it and I'm like that's a big ass, nice desk, right? And I'm thinking well, I could put that in the basement. But now, it's like, let's go to the radon basement, so what's the point? It's not like actually, you know, it's too big. It's not nice enough to be like actually in the study, if it's designated as the study, it's going to take up too much space. [0:40:00.1]

And then growing up, you know growing up, I had a big bedroom and in my bedroom was this full size executive desk, and so growing up, that's where I always did my homework, at this big ass desk. Anyway, so I miss that and so I thought well...

THERAPIST: You'd like to have that.

CLIENT: I want a proper desk.

THERAPIST: You would have had that in the basement?

CLIENT: Yeah. I'm thinking at least well, they don't make desks like that. I mean, I guess they do but of course they do, but you know, I kind of like this one in the basement. I don't know how you can get it out, it weighs like one and a half tons. It's so big, I'm not sure how it gets out of our little neck of the woods. Anyway, so clearly I'm thinking about all this crap and yet, I need to be thinking about parallelepipeds and the properties of determinants this week, so next week we can do eigenvectors. You can't learn that in an hour. But now I'm thinking about all this other stuff.

THERAPIST: I see, yeah. [0:41:23.0]

CLIENT: Basements and boxes. You know, and then the whole... another little stupid thing. You go from having Internet and cable, to going to a new place. But of course there's going to be some fuck up, of course there's going to be something screwed up, where Comcast drops the ball and you have to like wait around. I'm sure there's going to be a situation where you go three days and you're just like, nothing, you're like waiting for them to show up. I'm sure that's going to be the case, so I'm anticipating that at a crucial time, being able to get online and find answers, not having it, instead having to rely on AT&T, on a little tiny, miniature screen, on and iPhone.

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah. [0:42:30.9]

CLIENT: And then the wardrobe, which is a built-in. It's not a built-in, it's Ikea, but it's so large that it's part of the deal, right? We take all the curtains, we take everything, but the wardrobe stays. Well, I really like my wardrobe and a key part of the wardrobe is two big drawers and then it's taller than this and deeper than that. It's two big drawers and then above that you have pull out drawers for socks and underwear and all the drawers pull out, and so you've got, you know, where my workout gear is and my pajamas and my sweatshirts, and then behind that I've got paperwork, where it's deep. Well that's staying.

THERAPIST: It's staying in the -

CLIENT: It's staying because you can't move the thing. I mean you could, you could take it apart. It's from Ikea but it's so massive that it looks it's essentially built-in. It's not technically built-in, but it's so massive. It was part of the sale. [0:43:24.8]

THERAPIST: Okay, gotcha.

CLIENT: Which at the time made sense, because like Jesus Christ, I don't want to move that thing. But now I'm looking at it and I'm thinking, I can live with that, the wardrobe part, for hanging clothes, just put stuff in closets, because I have more closets, okay, fine. But the drawers, it's like so now, I'm thinking, like I have my routine, I know where everything is. Now all of a sudden it's like where are my socks going to go?

THERAPIST: Ah-huh.

CLIENT: I have the two drawers underneath, and it's like I have paperwork and it's all organized, and computer stuff, so I've got my hard drives and it has a place to be. I'm thinking well, okay, now all of that stuff is just completely displaced and has no place to be. And again, there's something just reflexive, right, it's just you don't have to think about it. You know where things are, you know how far to pull out the drawer to get the black socks. Pull it out a little further, you get the workout socks, you know things are. You know where the sweatshirts are, you know where the workout shorts are, and now I don't know where they're going to be. [0:44:45.1]

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: It sounds minor but it's bugging me.

THERAPIST: Yes, yeah. I mean in a general way, I'm getting the sense that you're really, you know, as you're taking all this stuff, a part of your place, it seems to me like one thing you're doing is really projecting yourself into the new place more and really trying to figure out how it's going to feel over there. I guess what seems to one kind of feeling in the air is one of feeling kind of displaced and not really feeling quite at home there. I was wondering if it had anything to do with well, not if it had anything to do with, but if it goes along with some kind of quality you've seen in Veronica this week, around kind of being more exasperated with you, or something like that, being more irked by you, waking up. I guess that was just today that had happened. Here's what I was thinking, when I said that comment, I was thinking how last week, when we talked about the house actually, and how she was adding you to the will and everything, and that it gave you some sort of sense of feeling like you were welcome, it was like your place together in some way. That's probably too much of a stretch but I don't know. I will say this though, I think one thing that is on your mind is how are you and Veronica going to how are you guys going to live together in this new place, you know? Because in the condo, there's a kind of quality of you feeling, as I said last week, this feeling of like, you know, it's her place, and what's it going to be like at the new place?

[PAUSE: 0:47:15.3 to 0:47:59.0]

CLIENT: Yeah, it feels like it's sort of lost its charm.

THERAPIST: Does it, yeah?

CLIENT: Yes. I can't put my finger on it but I feel like it's really counting on that basement. (laughs)

THERAPIST: Yeah. Well I'm just struck by that it felt like it was going to be your space. It's going to be a space where you would feel kind of at home there, where you could think, kind of do your own thing in a way, in a way that I think this reminds me of like at the place now, you find your pockets or corners or something like that.

CLIENT: That's it. And so now, I'm going to have an entire room, bigger than the one I have now, to study, in another place, that it can be essentially a study. There's more places that I could have this right? But somehow symbolically, it's like literally being in a basement. I felt like I could somehow process and be with my sort of deeper, somehow, dirtier self. [0:49:17.6]

THERAPIST: Interesting.

CLIENT: And have it be nice and so forth, upstairs, but down there, fundamentally it's a basement, so there's a limit to how nice it can be, or even how nice I want it to be.

THERAPIST: Okay.

CLIENT: You know?

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: So it's just, it's just simple. But now, I feel like... Now there's this whole rational aspect, that's the thing. Like the basement seemed like sort of like this sort of irrational pit you can sort of be in, right, sort of like little ant space. But now it's like now there's sort of like this rational aspect to it. The rational aspect is yeah, you can be down there, but you're going to die young of lung cancer. [0:50:19.0]

THERAPIST: It's going to be toxic, yeah.

CLIENT: Yeah. It's like well, now, so I use the basement and you quickly do the washing and the drying and so forth, you've got to spend a lot of time down there, because even if the vent works and the radon level goes to one, it's still one. So it's a matter of doing that little calculus and thinking okay, all right, well, do you spend time in the basement and breathe radon, or not? Do you let yourself eat fried chicken and increase your cholesterol load or not? Do you have dessert or do you not have dessert? Do you put butter on your toast or do you not put butter on your toast?

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: All these little things that are going to affect the heart, affect the lungs, affect quality of life, how long you'll live. I don't want to be thinking about that, I just want to be in the basement and be with my stuff and be able to go through a box at a time and look at books and think oh, that's interesting, maybe I'll go upstairs and I'll take these books and put them on the bookshelf. It's like a place of... I don't know, reorganization or something, or a retreat, or all positive in my mind. [0:51:47.0]

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: In a place that wouldn't require any sort of remodeling, in the sense of like well, this was what that room is and this is what this room is, and this is what this room is, and that's how the living room is going to be, and this is how the dining room is going to be, this is the curtains here. No, the basement, paint it whatever the hell color I want and, you know, stare and look at the black, enamel painted pipes and think wow, we're down here in the guts of this place, great. But now I think, I'll be in the guts of the place breathing radon.

THERAPIST: Okay, yeah. [0:52:47.4]

CLIENT: I didn't start, when was it, Thursday night, from midnight to 2:00 in the morning, then I got up at 5:00 in the morning, so it became sort of being awake for 24 hours. And then after class, there was a guy, whose name is Richard, he's funny, we're the same age, and he reminded me a lot of Charles, he just sort of is just deeply funny. He was talking about it's late at night, right? We're sitting there from 2:00 to 3:00 in the morning, we just talk, and he said, I'm taking this medicine, and he goes, "The world's a lot better now. I had OCD, so I'm taking medicine and everyone notices a difference." So we're talking about this and I said, I don't know whether you love Adrian Monk, and he goes, "Yeah, that's my nickname, Adrian." He said now I feel better. So he's telling me these great stories, we're sitting in this room, it's 2:30 in the morning, in the bowels of N-Star, there's this flickering fluorescent light. He's looking up and he goes, oh, he goes, "This fucking light," and I said, "Yeah, it's ironic, N-Star, and they've got a flickering light." He goes, "Yeah, you want to hear irony?" He goes, "For the blizzard, Nemo, 150 N-Star guys go down, stay in a motel at the Cape, to get ready to deal with Nemo, the power goes out." Two days we're in the dark, at the motel, so the first thing we do is (inaudible) here, and we sort of walk around like normal people, and the hotel staff, they're like, "Why can't N-Star fix this thing?" I don't know. Just completely disavowing the fact that we were from N-Star, walking around the golf pits. (laughs) It's like what a classic video, no, we don't know. They're like God damned N-Star, can't wait until they get here, and they go, doo-doo-doo. (laughs)

[PAUSE: 0:55:23.9 to 0:55:38.4]

CLIENT: So just thinking, it's one of those rare things. In college, you do that a lot, I suppose, I remember doing it, but it's been a long time. Actually, you know, staying up until 3:00 in the morning, just like, just talking.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: Well, just, you know, like talking about the stuff that you would normally talk about, in terms of getting older.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: And like just getting older, and him being annoyed with his girlfriend because she doesn't put the plates in the strainer correctly, and I'm thinking, he's telling me about all these OCD issues and I'm thinking, I've got a little bit of that going on. I remember freaking out because Cindy was cutting a tomato the wrong way, thinking that's it, I can't stand this, she can't cut a tomato correctly. [0:56:44.1]

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, I kept thinking about maybe this is a stretch and everything, but I was thinking about how kind of symbolically, if you want to put it that way, the idea that this it space would be one that would also is potentially poisonous and toxic, you know? Talk about not having things straight and organized or anything, but you're describing a place that feels like kind of free or disorganized and potential and everything, that has its kind of dangers.

CLIENT: And it shouldn't. [0:57:46.2]

THERAPIST: And it shouldn't.

CLIENT: It shouldn't. I mean, quite the opposite. It should be completely (inaudible), like you should go down there and instead of you know, you should go down there and feel like enriched, like there's extra oxygen and vitamin E in the air, and you go down there, you feel better for having been down there. Instead, you go, you know, I don't know, you go down there and you invisibly get attacked by alpha particles and decay, what it is.

THERAPIST: You know, which was the idea of a place that would be enriching.

CLIENT: Yeah, absolutely, yeah, the sense of like really, like being down there is like being with myself and just being able to look at my stuff and my processing, what the hell has been going on, and like being satisfied thinking, there's upstairs and upstairs and upstairs, and now there's this and I can sort stuff out and some stuff can stay and some stuff can move up and then I can just take a break and I can have, I don't know, a table with my stuff that never really gets messed up, instead of being on the dining room table, where I have to clear off periodically. I can just have stuff there. I can have little projects, you know, there's still the garage, which I can walk to the garage. [0:59:21.6]

THERAPIST: Ah-huh, yeah, it's different.

CLIENT: This is the basement, you walk down the steps. It has its own little entrance, you can come in from the outside. I like the fact there's no windows. You can just sort of... I don't know. I was five years old, my parents had a bread rack, so from a bakery, this wrought iron thing like the bakery, you put bread on to sort of cool down. So, I had a master bedroom, there was two master bedrooms and I had a master bedroom in the house. And in my walk-in closet was this bread rack. So I had all my toys and stuff but one rack, I had put down blankets and pillows, and I was five at the time, so I was short, and I would just climb up and I would curl up and I would just go to sleep and I'd just be in the closet. So here, I'm lying on the third shelf of the bread rack, in the closet.

THERAPIST: Is that right? [1:00:35.0]

CLIENT: In the closet, very happy. And of course, I mean so nobody can see, right? Kids will have their little spaces they like going to.

THERAPIST: It was big enough though, to hold you on that.

CLIENT: Big enough to hold me and I had all my stuff and it was nice. I had a massive room, but I liked being in the closet, up on the third shelf, you know?

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: I would just take a little snooze, just take a break from playing with Tonka trucks. You know how cats will be, you know, it's like nice, just get away.

THERAPIST: And your own space. We've got to stop, but what about the space?

CLIENT: It's nice, you know, I feel like there's something important about just being completely isolated, like in a closet, as opposed to one of the designated studies in the new house.

THERAPIST: Yeah. [1:01:49.1]

CLIENT: Where it has seven windows. It's like oh, there's the outside world, nice and bright, sunshine, sunshine, just, you know, that sort of adds to the place, that's good. And, you know, the other sort of study area, it feels a little grim to me, there's only two windows. It doesn't really feel that open to me. I don't know, I don't like it.

THERAPIST: Something about not having the windows, being down in the guts of the place.

CLIENT: I like it.

THERAPIST: Yeah, yeah.

CLIENT: Because then you can just sort of jerry-rig things and it doesn't have to be perfect.

THERAPIST: Okay, yeah, a basement is a better space for that kind of thing. It's like kind of an anything goes space. [1:02:51.2]

CLIENT: And, it's nice too, because I don't feel like I don't think Veronica wants to be spending any time in the basement. She never likes going into the basement.

THERAPIST: Okay, yeah.

CLIENT: Right? I mean, like first and second floor, I feel like even now, it's like even though I have my study, there's a limit to how messed up it could get.

THERAPIST: Yeah.

CLIENT: I don't like it being messed up, but I like knowing that it can get really messed up, and then I put it to order. Right?

THERAPIST: Yes. Without anybody watching it or something.

CLIENT: That's right. In the basement, it's so large that, I mean how messed up can it get?

THERAPIST: Would it be like a point of your domain, yeah. Even if she was to walk down there to do the laundry or something, it still is yours. [1:03:52.7]

CLIENT: There's a finished when we move to this house, the same neighborhood, and the basement was finished. There was all this paneling, which you know, it was nice, it was good, it was really finished, it was like a little living room down there, and the flat screen TV and it was all carpeted and they had chairs and stuff. But then in the kitchen, they had a toilet, and it wasn't actually like sectioned off, with like a little door or anything. It was just there and it's almost like they sort of, they stopped, they just it will be a good idea to have a toilet down here, but they just sort of stopped. The thing is sort of lined up pretty well with the TV. So you've got a kitchen, you've got a little mini fridge, you've got a toilet, you've got TV. You can actually sit on the toilet and watch the game. Veronica was appalled by this. She thought the house was nice, but she was appalled. Like the idea that it was offensive to her that owners could do that to a house, and somehow, the whole house was offensive to her, because it was looked at through the lens of a toilet. There was actually this thing in the kitchen, looking across from the TV. I had the exact opposite feeling, thinking this is perfect. (laughs) It's like these people are brilliant. [1:05:09.7]

THERAPIST: Finally.

CLIENT: (laughs) Ah, all right.

THERAPIST: All right. Okay. It will be a big move.

CLIENT: (laughs) I wonder if that basement had radon issues, I don't know. Yeah, she the level of disgust.

THERAPIST: It was toxic to her.

CLIENT: It was very clean, it was beautiful. A toilet in the kitchen. They just hadn't finished walling it in.

THERAPIST: How about that? [1:06:10.8]

CLIENT: Have a good one.

THERAPIST: Yeah, you too.

END TRANSCRIPT