I think I did find a way to be okay about Will; I’m really trying to let go of anger.  It’s something of a plague.

I saw the GYN this week, for the first time in something like ten years.  I was a GYN avoider.  I lucked into a good one this time; she was very kind and it was all very easy and comfortable.  And I asked her a gazillion questions.  One thing that I told her was that my nipples were sore a lot lately, and she said, “That’s common in menopause.”  I had told her that I hadn’t had a period in over a year, and I knew that this basically meant I was in menopause, but hearing her say the word really made me realize that it was true.  I really have to read up and pay attention and ask the GYN some more questions, but I bet there’s a lot going on with me, especially some of the moods, that may be attributable to that.  But why the hell haven’t any of my other doctors brought it up?  why didn’t my psychiatrist ask me about it when my mood problems got worse?  I’m thinking seriously about a new psychiatrist, because I’ve never adored the old one 100%, but he always gave me the meds I seemed to need. 

But I want more from my doctors these days.  Even though I adored my cool Deadhead podiatrist Doctor Debbie, I’ve switched to a new guy who’s giving me better care.  He was at the office health fair and I showed him the foot fungus that Doctor Debbie had been treating for three or four months, and he said, “I hate to see something like that,” and seemed genuinely distressed.  So I went to see him.  I’ve been with him almost a month now and the fungus is about 70% gone.  Plus he’s taking care of some foot pain I have, and is getting me orthotics.  Much more thorough.

The GYN wrote me a prescription for Valtrex, something I’ve wanted for a long time (suppressant therapy for genital herpes).  But I truly hope that when I learn TM and start meditating regularly, I can get off some of the other meds:  the ones for blood pressure, for instance.  The clonopin for anxiety. 

TM brings us back to the topic of Lynch, who leaves New York tomorrow morning after two days here.  He’s absolutely fascinating.  It was really lovely to get right back into that exact same friendly, fun space with him and Bobby, just picked up where we left off.  Bobby and I talk and e-mail a lot, but it’s not the same.  Thursday night, there was a small prospective-donor event in the city (small meaning about 40 total guests), and Bobby said to me at one point, “It is so great to be back here with you.  We missed you so much in Washington!  It really wasn’t the same without you!”  We just all three fell back into that nice cozy space.  And yet it’s a totally unreal relationship; easily 75% of it has taken place in a car service car, and it’s highly affectionate without necessarily being romantic.  My old boss Ben used to say, “Never talk to authors about yourself.  No one wants to know anything about the publicist.”  I’m not sure if that’s really a good rule; working with my new boss, Tina, has me seeing Ben as less than perfect in some ways.  Plus Ben’s bad at the social thing anyway.  Whether it’s a good rule or not, I could never bring myself to pass up the chance to be friendly with someone like David.  And maybe the fact that I’m casual — as well, I must say, as funny — is why I have such a nice relationship with those guys. 

Today I went with him to tape a syndicated NBC TV show called Your Total Health, and NBC is a class outfit; the producer who was my contact there was young but very professional, friendly but with a slightly slick veneer.  I could never do that little artificial bit; my undeniable old-hippieness wouldn’t ever let me. 

I don’t know how I ever got the nerve to treat David like a regular guy and pretty much be myself around him.  Maybe Bobby sort of eased the way for me before I met David, always telling me how great and sweet and wonderful David is.  So I certainly let David know that I was a fan and an admirer, but then I moved on.  I guess I sort of acted like I do with Will; not too different.  Maybe what I learned from Will, over these many years (this month is 30 years since I first met Will!), is that a marvelous, charming, brilliant, talented person is also a human being.  Being famous is the least interesting thing about David. 

Anyway, yeah, I’m still pretty hyper from these couple of days.  It started at the reception last night; someone was interviewing him when I got there (Tina was with me, and her boyfriend met us there; Tina is a TMer from a TM family that lives in Fairfield, Iowa: TM Central).  But when he was done with the interview and came over to us, the first thing he did was kiss me on the lips.  I don’t know how it sat with Tina (I think OK), but it sure did please me.  And from that moment on, I was right back in Lynchworld.

Again I feel that, beyond the book, I may well stay connected to him in some way.  Is he going to call me for lunch every time he’s in town?  Nuh-uh.  But if his art show comes to New York, will I get invited to the opening?  Possible.  Will I end up finding some way to give back to the Foundation after they cover my TM training?  Yep.  Will I ever take him to see the Japanese garden at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden?  I doubt it, but you never know.  When I very gently reminded him about it this visit, he liked it and brought it up again later.  He does kind of light up sometimes.  It happened after the reception last night, after the talk, and all of the people who wanted to talk to him, and get something signed, fifteen minutes, half an hour, he’s trying to edge toward the stairs from the second floor to the first, trailing people who wanted to talk some more, and I leaned over and whispered to him, “You must be dying for a butt!”  That lit him right up; he looked at me and smiled and I saw him remembering that I was funny and that I “got” him.  He had to remember who I was a little bit, I think, and why not?  he meets and talks to an awful lot of people all over the world (he just came back from a month in Europe:  art opening in Paris, something in Denmark that included a reading and signing, back to Paris to shoot a TV commercial — European TV commercials is where he earns his real bread — and I’m not sure what-all else).  But our little New York triumvirate clicked right back in.  Bobby sits back a bit when it’s the three of us, just as I sit back in a larger group to let others have their time with him.  Bobby’s something of a facilitator; also at times a filter and moderator.  Good audience, too. 

Anyway, anyway.  The episode will be shown in May, mostly likely; David is off tomorrow for a day in Dallas (film) and then back home to LA.  He’s back to Europe in May, for another commercial, Cannes, and then some big arts event.  Oh — and I did finally have a photo taken of David and me (Bobby refused to be in it), which is digital and should be in my work computer Monday.  It’s on Tina’s camera.  If you’re really nice to me, I’ll post it here.

Tina, by the way, has turned out to be all right, I think.  More than all right; a couple of her suggestions have really taken my work to a whole other level.  I needed a push to be a little more proactive with the media, and the results, with two books I didn’t have a lot of faith in, have been awfully good.  I really kind of stopped the learning process when Ben left and maybe I forgot that I wasn’t done learning, but Tina has certainly restarted it — and there’s a lot I can learn from her.  I usually don’t make such sweeping statements, but some of my absolute best and absolute worst bosses were women, and I’m always apprehensive about them, because the bad ones were SOOO bad.  Maybe the first few bad ones shocked me so badly because it was so unexpected, and I had different expectations of male bosses.  I was rarely shocked when they turned out to be assholes.  Anyway, I think I was braced so tightly against Tina being awful that I anxietied myself into a state.  Tina’s not micro-managing — she’s looking over my work to learn what I do and don’t know, and stepping in where I need correction.  That’s her job.  She may be 20 years younger than me (I think I’ve figured out it’s about 18), but she has some solid publicity experience and even teaches classes.  She’s actually very nice.  She took each of us out to lunch separately (on the department).

Now I’m really quite tired.  Hell of a week or two.  There’s probably more — nice talk with my brother tonight — but I think I’m out of brain for now.

I’ve thought some about finding a way to be okay instead of pissed about what Will asked me to do.  I have a tendency to get angry, almost as if I am eager to be wronged, and I’m wondering how I can do things differently.  I’ve been pretty tolerant about Will of late, that and a little bored, and why, really, should it piss me off that he booked a date with an Asian call girl, or that he hadn’t told me about it?  It could actually be seen as kind of a bonding thing, because I am actually the only person he could have called who would and could take care of such a chore; it does say something about trust and intimacy.

That’s one thing.  Another is that I haven’t heard any more about/from him yet.  I had asked him to call me when he could after the surgery (which I understood was to happen some time on Friday), but when I’d heard nothing by 3:30 this afternoon, I called and left a message for Sherry at home.  I should have tried a little harder not to have an attitude about not having heard anything, but may have had a bit of an edge…anyway, I never did hear from her and it’s past midnight.  That’s a drag.  Anything with hospitals and surgery, I want to know things are going all right. I am certainly prepared to visit tomorrow if possible and appropriate.

Even if I feel that Will and I have been distant and somewhat grown-apart over the past year or so, we’ve had so many years of closeness, and there were so many more when he was part of my consciousness.  There were the four years before I met him that I was a crushed-out fan.  The nearly ten years when we hardly ever saw each other, but a month never went by when I didn’t think about him and I always remembered him as someone very special, above and beyond all others.  It took me a lot of years to drink my fill of him and a few to knock him off the pedestal I’d had him on all these years, but there’s an intimacy remaining, and a very permanent love, whatever our connection is from hereon in.

I had some incidents at work last week that also brought out that angry/hurt reaction in me, and I know that I often overreact and I usually chalk it up to the portion of my mood disorder that is not under control.  The blood test my psychiatrist took that turned up the extremely high blood sugar in October was supposed to be checking my liver function to see if I could handle lithium for the mild bipolar I was sure I had, and the doctor was willing to treat.  What he did end up doing was prescribing me some clonazepam because I admitted that I sometimes used Leo’s when I caught those bad crying jags (with Leo’s knowledge). 

But I’m also seeing that in some ways I choose these situations to be bigger bumps than they have to be; I may finally be starting to understand what it’s meant all these years that people have told me, “you take things too personally.”  I never felt I had a choice about how to “take” those things, but I’m really starting to think that I do, and that I’d be a lot happier if I chose some other way to understand them and react to them.  I know that part of this is about creating drama and being able to play a victim, which seems to come out of plain old insecurity and fear of failure.  I’m also determined to get to the bottom of my procrastination, and I’m actually publicizing a book right now that might just do it.  I’ll report in detail if it seems to work.

I also really do hope that the TM thing comes through.  I think Bobby still adores me but I also think Bobby is something of a smoothie, a high-level publicist *and* a guy who drank the koolaid…I like him anyway but I know he has his priorities.  But I think meditation might help me with my moods and with my stress.

Which reminds me…we went to the company’s annual results meeting yesterday, me and Lee and the new boss (I’m thinking she’s okay so far), and the only Tarcher book mentioned, amid the sea of lavish attention to all of the company’s many many award-winning books and many many many bestselling books and many many many many New York Times bestsellers…yeah, you got it, the Lynch book. 

I may not have anything as huge Lynch or Pinchbeck through the end of ’07, though I’ll be doing a big paperback launch for Pinchbeck (very unusual for us, anything beyond a mailing for a paperback), and decent-sized launches in paper for Black Like You and The Power of Kindness. 

The new boss took the Judy Collins book.   Yay! 

I’m tired now.  Should write more often.  And about a lot more than Will.

I had a dream last night that Will and I were somewhere with a group of people, somehow stranded overnight, and a bunch of us had all crashed to sleep together in our clothes, all kind of in a heap.  Next to Will was a nice young woman to whom he was clearly attracted, and in fact he stayed up all night talking to her, which did not permit me to sleep and made me upset.  At one point, I embraced him, and he threw me off.  The next morning, we were about to leave, and he followed this woman into a bathroom where she was showering, and came out naked and with a hard-on.  I left without him.

This morning, Will called me from St. Vincent’s Hospital.  The street elevator to his basement storage space at home had given way with him on it, and he broke his thigh.  But the real reason he was calling was that he wanted me to go into his office, find a copy of Screw under his desk, and call a hooker to cancel his appointment on Monday.  I did it, but, you know, that’s it for me. 

I guess this means no convention, but even if somehow we can go, it’s over with him and me.  That’s all.

Though I should add that hearing him sounding so weak and hurt, I did automatically say “Love you” at the end of the call (which I had sworn never to tell him again), and he replied, “Me, too,” which was a new one on me.  Apparently it’s something he just plain doesn’t say.

And I don’t know if it’s really all over, but I’m not happy about being asked to call his ho to cancel an appointment, especially since he told me recently that he wasn’t using pros.