what i didn't need to hear

Scott was still doing lists, moving toward late May now, making lists of things that needed doing, doing the things, going along project by project, room by room. Of course the lists of things were also things. An item on a list might generate a whole new list. He knew if he wasn't careful he'd get mired in a theory of lists and lose sight of the things that needed doing. There was pleasure in lists, taut and clean. Making the list, crossing off the items as you complete the tasks. It was a small whole contentment, a way of working toward a new reality....

The point of these lists and tasks seemed to be that when you performed each task and crossed off the corresponding item on the list and when you crumpled and discarded all the lists and stood finally and self-reliantly in a list-free environment, sealed from wordly contact, you were proving to yourself that you could go on alone....

Bill was not a list-making novelist. He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn't seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in penetrating the relatedness of things or words, those breathy sentences that beat with new exuberance....

She was all drift and spin. Scott missed her in more ways than he could name. He was left with the memorized body, the ageless shape and cadence and the way she arched and twisted, dull-eyed in the near terror of this approaching thing, then all the noise descending on their last held stroke. It was broken down to matchlight in his brain. He half hated her and badly wanted her back. She was the one love, the routine astonishment, someone you could dream of as your sister and then wake to find next to you in bed, without shame or contradiction.

Don DeLillo, Mao II

But then as I came through the front door, the song on the radio (left on for Blake) was "Solsbury Hill." So things are looking up.

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I told Shrink a while ago that I will write an incident in my journal but not my feelings about it. She suggested that this is another way I deny my emotions. I thought of that after copying this bit out. I'm listening to Mao II, which is why the title is "what I didn't need to hear" rather than "what I didn't need to read."

I've been considering her suggestion and I think she's wrong (but of course, I'm not sure! because I'm me). Writing for myself, describing an incident, I don't need to say what I felt about it because I will know. I don't keep a journal to remember how I felt but to remember what happened. This might be denial-ish but it's more that I am unlikely to forget how happy I was the morning after TJZD's wedding to lie in the windowseat with DEDBG and watch the sun come up and play with her hair, but I am likely to forget about the lying and the watching and the playing, and therefore the pleasure, if I didn't record them. If I just wrote, "had great weekend with the heavies" I would probably not remember the specific incidents and therefore not be able to recall the emotions. It is also unlikely I will forget how mortified or distressed I was by the Who Died? or Pot Roast incident even if I don't write them down.

The Pot Roast Incident no longer distresses me but it's the first one that I will admit to that occurred to me. The admission bit is important. I know why these passages matter to me, but I don't need publicly to admit the reasons. What's important is that I record the passages. If, years from now, rereading this, I cannot recall those reasons, that will mean the journal has served its purpose.