Graeme Daniels Psychewriter

Hey, I’m Ray, bustin’ in here with my say. About dating. I don’t know. What’s the deal with hiking? Why do so many profiles say, “I’m into hiking”, with people offering that as, like, a first date? I don’t think anyone’s really thought this through.

See, it’s not that I’m lazy or that I don’t like nature, or just hanging out while walking. My shrink says that the thing about hiking is similar to being in a car. You don’t look at each other. Then he goes on about non-verbal communication, how that’s more stressful. That’s true, actually, though I find talking trouble enough. It’s like a first session, I told him: if he’s not on his game he won’t ask the right questions, show enough interest, or worse, he’ll ask a question that shows he wasn’t listening, like the time I asked this guy how his wife was doing after he’d previously told me she died. Doh! Yeah, good thing the onus was upon my shrink to talk right the first time we met. Me, I just had to show up and be myself. I never thought I had to impress him.

But I digress, got off the path of what I was saying, which is what can happen when you’re on a hike, which is why I’ve got a problem with this whole hiking trend. So, it’s safer, says the shrink. As in a car, you’re flanking each other, or you’re walking in a line, one behind the other. Don’t have to look at each other, see anxiety in the other’s eye. I get it. But it’s a commitment. Seriously, a hike—on average, what people call a “hike”—is not just a ten-minute jaunt around the neighborhood. It’s an hour, or two, in a park, on an open field, or a plain, in the woods, or some shit like that. Safer? Yeah, not if you’re with some creep intent on stabbing you out of sight or earshot. How about that kind of safety, especially for women? Anyway, even if it’s not dangerous in that way, it’s still a problem of commitment.

Take me. See, as you might guess, I’m apt to say the wrong thing from time to time, offend people. And that’s easier to do than ever these days. So what if you’re on a hike, in the middle of a field or somewhere, and not at the beginning or end of the hike but right smack in the middle, and you say something that the other person thinks is shitty like…oh, I don’t know…I can’t remember all the wrong things I’ve said. I can’t keep track. I say ‘em everyday. On a “hike” you’re stuck. You’re in the middle of nowhere, still in earshot with no buffers as you turn tail and walk away. That wouldn’t be me, of course. I’d be the one standing in the field, holding out my hands maybe, calling out, saying “what’s the problem?”

See, a coffee date is easier, has more exit routes, more buffers. By that, I mean you got the gentle buzz of the shop, or just that fact that there’s people around so you’re less likely to call out or hear some smack being called out to you. Or, if you wanna get out without a fight, you can just quietly edge away, make an excuse, say you gotta be somewhere. Coffee? That could be any amount of time: fifteen minutes? A half hour? Three, if you’re hitting it off. Me? I had one date that lasted five minutes, though not because she left. On that one I bailed, pretended I needed a bathroom, then I slipped out. I’m not proud of it. That was shitty, I guess.

But that touches on another thing: catfishing. You know what catfishing is? Everyone does. My shrink didn’t, which was a change—me schooling him, I mean. He knows everything. He knows about gaslighting, which is a term my ex used to use, saying something about what I did to her. I didn’t get what she was saying. She didn’t talk properly. Or I didn’t listen. Who knows? My shrink says the latter is probably true, as he thinks I don’t listen; I don’t “take in” as he puts it. Well, I took that in, I suppose. Still, I told him about catfishing, the problem of people—mostly women, from my point of view—not being who they say they are, or more specifically, not looking like they looked in their profile pictures. Take this woman I went on a date with, and not a coffee date or a “hike”, but a proper date—like a dinner date.

I selected this place that wouldn’t have been a problem had she looked like her goddamned picture. It was called—get this—“Fat Lady”, or it had those words in its name. You’d think the managers would’ve thought through that one, but no matter. It’s a good place. Good food. Anyway, on this date, our first date, I get there first and I’m waiting in the front area, looking out for her. When she walks in she gives me a big smile, walks up and gives me a hug. It took me a moment to react because at first I didn’t recognize her. I mean, there had to be at least a twenty pound difference—maybe thirty—between image and reality. But we sit down, have a meal and talk, and in the dimmer light of the restaurant I’m thinking that she looks kinda cute, and the conversation isn’t bad. She’s asking more of the questions, which is good. Towards the end, she’s asking if I wanna hit a bar afterwards. I gotta admit, she was doing more of the groundwork, and I was feeling alright. I’m not sure what was going on with me exactly, but then she did this thing, said something that threw me off my game.

My game. My shrink and I talk about that concept too. My game, his game; everyone’s game. Well, I fumbled, made a mistake. No such thing, he says. Words are actions too. They reveal the unconscious, and also what is conscious. Was I conscious? I don’t know. She remarked on the restaurant name, said it was weird. I think she was relaxed by that point, didn’t know what she was saying. I know I didn’t, so I said something wrong. I smirked, I guess, and said “seems about right to me”. She set her drink down, her smiled at once ghosted. She reached for her bag, signaling her departure, though she didn’t leave at that moment. She just got quieter. The room quieted just a tad also, as if everyone in the room had heard me. By the front entry there was a logo, a cartoon image of a fat waitress holding a plate. Even she seemed like she was shaking her head, giving me disapproval.

I should’ve gone on a hike.

Where did you go? I can see where you were at one point, laid out upon a desk, preening yet submissive and above all, patient. Then you were truly mine, stuffed into the leather pouch, wedged alongside the runts, the frowning Andrew Jacksons and those pawnish George Washingtons. Seconds later, I was up and away, moving in swift turns, sliding my limbs into a jacket and stepping out in one fluid motion. I said I’d be back to my one and only witness, my retiring wife, couched in mid-evening settlement, absorbed in TV. With the extra bill, plus a few others, there were fleeting thoughts of opportunity for a gratuitous expense, but no time, and not enough imagination to explore desire. Perhaps I’d fill up the tank on the way back, I thought prosaically, thinking of the next day. Saturday beckoned with the freedom of an empty schedule and a dearth of expectation. It would be like days gone when I was a carefree bachelor, living alone and without attachment or obligation. Days off were a chance to disappear: just get in a car and go, wondering how long I could go for without being missed. An early lesson in displacement, such flights remind me now of an Amis witticism. In “Let me count the times”, a compulsive masturbator loses track of his habit, and amid his auto-destructive reverie, he borrows expressions from less shameful vices: “I’m tempted to run away with myself”.

             I’d go away with myself, but only for an hour or two. That’s how long it would take to feel lonely and bored; that the idea of dropping out was not as good as it would seem from within the traps of everyday life. Nowadays, there’s less of those feelings, what with everything in my life packed in, sardine-like, wearying me like an anesthetic. But when the week’s finish line approaches, I indulge the old thoughts, think of an open road and a stretch of travel time wherein the sun is out, casting a spring-like glow upon a light journey. There is little fatigue in this vision—rather, I conjure a breezy sigh and a relaxed glance at landscapes that pull me into their rainbow promises. That 50 dollar bill would have paid for that, I later thought as I fumbled through the lesser bills, searching for the missing note. Disconcerted, I paid for a half-tank with the remaining funds, thinking the prima donna of the pack would turn up later. Recalcitrant, it would be hiding on that desk at home, still preening and thinking itself important. Or, with troublesome mischief, it may be ensconced in one of my file boxes below my desk, having dropped down from the back of the desk’s wooden cliff.

             But I distinctly remembered placing it in my wallet! Oh well, I thought, driving back after that last appointment, at first relatively unperturbed, just glad to be done with that last hour of a fourth ten-hour day in a row. When home, I’d have a quick look through clothes and the piles around my desk area—one or two sets of papers, plus the pockets of my jeans, and the jacket that I’d deftly slid into an hour or so earlier. I’d already given these places a cursory look, but had found nothing. No problem. The bill was simply being difficult. So, it would call for a bit more effort, would it? It would thumb its nose at me, still thinking itself all that, I guess. When I returned I stepped into my home office, thinking this would take but a minute. The last messy piece of unresolved business from a long day would be tidied up and I would then be free to release; as quickly as I’d moved earlier, I’d find the bill, chide it for hiding from me and giving me a hard time. Then I’d slide out of my evening wear and find a nook in a couch in which to recline and then surrender myself to the weekend.

             Still no bill. By this time I was starting to escalate my pace, letting my blood pressure rise, becoming more hasty in my search methods. After about ten minutes I’d looked through that wallet about a half a dozen times. Having done so, I was intimately familiar with the odd tears in its linings, suggesting a replacement would be due when all this is over. But I can’t buy things like that if I lose things like 50 dollar bills, I heard myself thinking. That’s the neurotic in me: it thinks that happenings like this are the thin end of the wedge; or, that oversights, mistakes like this are just too cruel, too unjust and brutal to bear, somehow. Fifty dollars! That can buy, like, a lot of…I don’t know, this is just not acceptable, regardless. And yes, I was thinking something like this as I kept looking at that wallet, inspecting its slithered openings, thinking that a crisp note could insinuate its way inside one of the holes and disappear, teaching me a lesson about carelessness. Meanwhile, I was on first name terms with a piece of lint that I kept molesting within the right pocket of my jeans. The coarse cotton lining contrasted with the smooth, impeccable surfaces of my work jacket, whose unsullied silk seemed to call out with a mocking rebuke: “don’t blame me, there’s nothing to see here”.

The day would end with no result, portending a sleepless night, a dreamless rest. It wasn’t that I needed that lost bill. As I calmly inventoried material reality, I reminded myself that I was okay—that my wife and I were financially settled; that it had been a good year, despite the torrid changes brought on by Covid; that loss and misplacement were an aberration; that on the whole, I was on top of things. But I don’t like mysteries, especially those of the mundane kind, with little but a trite warning behind them—the start of something big. The questions nagged: how could it have slipped out from the leather pouch and not taken others with it? Might I have set it down somewhere and forgotten the action? Had there been more time than I realized between actions, and had I in fact taken it out, spent it on something illicit that I have done well to repress. No, I don’t think so, actually. I know what my thoughts were and where they went. I just don’t know what happened to the thing-in-itself that displaces them.

Was it a gopher snake or a rattler? The man didn’t know, and initially, his question was delayed, subordinated to a frightful reaction. The man’s utterance was ambiguous. A half-bray, choked by inhibition, was matched by his physical response, a brusque step backwards. I didn’t see any of this. Listening, imagining the scene and its meaning, I waited, my patience countered by an ever-muted eagerness. “Are you okay?” I asked, half-thinking the problem was simply a matter of the line. The phone was always cutting out during sessions, and during those with patients who amid Covid prefer their sessions while walking amid nature, the competition from distracting sounds, the elements of nature like the enveloping sound of wind, or the glitchy, tenuous, un-natural features of cell phone technology, are often letting us down.

             “Is that a gopher snake?” The man’s rhetorical question, arriving within seconds of his first comment—a protracted version of something like “whoa”—was for his own edification. The fascination suggested a modicum of knowledge, for he was already determining the absence of danger. The fairly large reptile, situated amongst some dry brush across a trail carved over time by feet rather than machines, was not making the signature sounds of a dangerous predator. It had moved but hadn’t otherwise been aggressive. Its sideways darting action, according to the man, had been enough to deter approach. Learning. The man emitted a nervous laugh as he stepped away, soon to resume the process that is ever more uncertain, his analysis. Breathless, walking faster, he marked time by wondering aloud about my experiences of snakes. Not much, I was inclined to say. I’d barely heard of anything called a gopher snake, for example. Otherwise, I brought to mind mythological associations, plus discussions at an analytic society that lamented the stereotyped image of serpents in general; the disregard of their expansive, cross-cultural meanings. In mine, snakes have meant temptation, seduction, and in this scene that association, or something close to it, was prevailing for me.

             Distraction. The prior subject had been distraction, plus—allusively—the man’s tentative commitment to analysis. We’d talked about the couch before, long before Covid hit, when sessions at my office had been the norm, not sessions by phone in the background of naturalistic settings. During this fraught period, I’d stayed at my office, sat in the same chair, albeit with less disciplined stillness, gazing at the same office walls and unchanging art, feeling alone and vaguely envious. My patients, like this one, were not just obeying “lockdown orders” or later recommendations by the CDC, or even my cooperation with those same authorities. They were making choices of where to be when speaking their minds, and simultaneously deciding upon variations of repression: how to take one’s mind off things. The couch. “The couch”, I reminded, after the man recovered his breath and asked after the prior subject of discussion. With little or no sense of irony—not yet, anyway—he stuttered back to the topic, asking me to take the lead, remind him of his former thoughts also; to guide him. 

“Get back on track?” I said drolly, which cued a laughing recognition. Where is he? He understood.

             The man remembered the walls of my office, the blank white space interrupted by unchanging artwork. He admitted that nature offered more variety to his roving eye, his stimulation-seeking mind. He soon associated to the reasons for his treatment: that other reason that his eyes wander, seeking distraction. It had been this tendency that got him in trouble, brought him to my lesser stimulating lair. A typical night: he and his spouse would be at a restaurant, dining and having a pleasant experience, conversing easily, enjoying a good meal. At some point, a woman would emerge from an adjacent space, perhaps entering the dining area from a restroom or from a waiting area. The man would glance in her direction and—inwardly at least—utter “whoa”, thinking the woman was his type. His fantasy. Within an instant of that thought he’d be machinating, managing the unspoken, half-digested dilemma: how to steal another look while concealing the act from his wife. He MUST look again, he thought half-consciously. Consciously, before his wife, and for the most part with me also, he MUST NOT look again. Defensively, in sessions, he’d often turn to a point of debate. His wife, unlike myself or his 12-step sponsors, had been and was still the more likely witness to his wayward masculine gaze, but as a long-suffering eyewitness to such incidents, was she the most “objective” observer of his habits?

             On the couch he might contemplate this scene, these events that actually happened on several occasions, though now the memories recede into the background, dismissed by latter day wishes. He’d prefer to not think about such painful memories. Better to move on, hit the trail, so to speak. The couch is still. It forces subjects to lie down, even, portending sleep and the arrival of dreams, or their retrieval. The subject, as in the patient, is drawn inward by this device, this hoary tradition of psychoanalysis. The answers: they are inside, not in the environment, we think. Who is we? “We” is…doesn’t matter. I agree. That’s what matters. I’m trying to get patients to agree also, and they do for the most part, in theory anyway. “It’s true,” says the man in a cheerful voice, evincing an agreeable air. He is quieted now, his startled encounter with the wild over. His well-defended, good-humored, studied urbanity is back, ready to think with me, be reminded of his purpose. He recalls points made some time ago, before the material reality of the last year compelled a change in our process. “There are indeed less distractions in your office, on your couch. To see the mountain outside your window I’d have to twist my neck, strain to see it”.

             “Are you that desperate to look outside?”

             He laughed again. “No”, he eventually said, perhaps unsure. What did he want to say? What is he supposed to say? A dilemma. He affected neutrality, the cover of matter-of-fact observation. “Just not much to see in your office, that’s all.”

             “No snakes?”

I’ve been wandering lately, in my dreams, into busy landscapes, discontinuous scenes, performing stream-of-unconscious travel. A recent excursion was atop a high-rise in an urban setting, amidst a modest gathering of partygoers. The setting might have been futurist, post-Covid, around about dusk beneath a mauve sky with a tawny glow upon a horizon. A crowd of about fifty people are tentatively assembled on this rooftop garden and plaza, milling about rows of empty seats, holding tall glasses of wine or champagne and waiting for either a performance or a presentation—no difference, I suppose. As I stride in, feeling like an interloper, I guess that the first description is more accurate. There are clues to an impending musical entertainment: an electronic drum set, absent a drummer, plus several microphones set up some feet apart as if prepared for a group; a couple of technicians on their knees, scrutinizing equipment or rolling up troublesome cables. Behind an electric piano or synthesizer, a lone figure is tinkling upon keys, rapt in concentration. He or she—the figure is androgynous—is familiar to me but altered, though despite the physical differences, the demeanor is unmistakable: beyond introverted, hunched and prickly like a vole, the figure plays their instrument as if no one is there.

There are plenty there, all dressed in black—sexy, sophisticated, death-like evening wear black. Even the technicians are dressed in black, which in itself doesn’t seem unusual. In fact, the ephemera matches my associations of concert-going experiences half-forgotten, only the atmosphere betrays an unsaid influence. In my dreamy thought I am surprised, still thinking that gatherings like this are forbidden, which might explain the air of reticence and sepulchral gloom. Just feet away from the piano-playing figure, a pair of onlookers consult with each other, appearing officious, responsible, and smooth. They are managers, perhaps, or hosts of the event that seems about to begin. Regardless, the performer, still alone on stage despite evidence that others will join (her?), persists in self-absorption, and as I move towards this figure I invisibly helicopter, fascinated and envious. Why envious? I am now gazing at the person, at last deciding it is the she I thought it was, and wanting to intrude, and query. How do you do it? I want to ask. How did you do it? How did you manage to stay this silent, this removed, this seemingly disdainful of the pack, the norm, the orthodoxy, the everything-that-is-normal, and yet curry this seeming interest?

Is it just your talent that got you into this trendy post-modernist milieu? You’ve made some effort to fit in, having dressed alike, almost. Although, I think that is silver glittering trim upon your performance costume, which sets you apart, if only just. Also, there is a hint of stylizing gel in your spiked hair, which is fashionably disheveled yet revealing of effort—at least a modicum of worry before a bathroom mirror, I think. This surprises me. Maybe it disappoints, for I have projected onto you nothing less than separatist cool and lack of pretension. Perhaps it’s merely a glimpse into your effortless knowing, this well-dressed gesture; this ambient presence of yours. I am asking you questions now, only you’re not answering. I know. You do not owe me anything, including explanations or help, but I am curious, and I am hoping that is enough to pry your mind open so you can tell me your deal, and then help me with my desire.

See, I’m not sure but I think you might be in danger. I think this because I am in danger, and I further think that the you in this scene is really me, preparing to go public with something that I have kept to myself for some time and now it is getting its opening night. I wish I could be as poised, as confident and self-contained as you seem. Wait…what happened? You seemed to start something, say something, and then share a thought, not music, with the crowd. There was a misunderstanding, it seemed, about music and words. A different expectation. The gathering of the ordinarily cool and winning: they misunderstood, thinking you plainly earnest when—I know—what you were going for was ironic detachment which would then be mirrored, in further irony, by a resonant intelligence. This was supposed to be a club, a secret society introducing a novel medium. Now you’ve walked away with a frown on your face, a tiny streak of sweat streaming away from a gelled curl of hair, because some idea you had has let you down. And you looked at me, I think—just a fleeting glimpse, perhaps thinking I was someone who might help you get away, escape with me, for this is now our shared, infuriating problem.