Cheap therapy.

I used to have a therapist, who I liked a lot, and who I visited, on and off, for many years. I cried, I argued, I bargained, I blah blah blah. It was therapy. I learned a lot and I have more tools now than before I went to therapy. Now that I've said that, I don't plan to say another word--if that!--about therapy.

Except that occasionally I buy a copy of O, the Oprah magazine. Don't bother to tell me what's wrong with that. I already know. But sometimes it just kind of cheers me up, gives me a lift, and let me tell you, at this point, I much prefer it to going week after week to an excellent, compassionate, insightful, and skillful professional. For one thing, it only costs me about $4.

Now, as for what I have gleaned in terms of life-improving, soul-healing material with this month's issue: Sarah Vowell's Bookshelf (the "Bookshelf," for those of you whose intake of periodicals includes only The Believer and professional journals, and who would not stoop to mass-market uplift, is a regular feature in O, in which a famous person talks about five or so books that have been important to him or her).

I love Sarah Vowell and her weird little voice. I love her occasional columns in the New York Times. I love running into her on This American Life and wherever else I might run into her. I might, sometime, read Assassination Vacation. Or not. In O this month, she names five books that made a difference to her: Great Lodges of the National Parks, by Christine Barnes; Lincoln at Gettysburg, by Garry Wills; Great Plains, by Ian Frazier; Chronicles, Volume One, by Bob Dylan; and Out of Sheer Rage, by Geoff Dyer. Of this last, she says:

This is a book about not being able to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. Dyer is frustrated and therefore hilarious. He procrastinates. He can't concentrate. He's indecisive about everything from where to live to what to pack. And he lays bare the embarrassing secret of authors. Namely, the amount of stupidity and paralysis and adolescent putting things off that goes into writing about even the most high-minded subjects. As a person who gets paid to pontificate about my nation's history and ideals (but only after walking back and forth to the crackers in my pajamas and/or watching reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on cable), I find this book terribly funny and painfully true.

Yeah. I get that. I will read this book, absolutely, and after I have contemplated my own weird little dances of avoidance for the writing I am supposed to do, and I want to do, then I will calculate my unanticipated, ancillary sabbatical expenses, such as the overages for crackers and other salty snacks. Oh my Lord.

Writing writing writing writing writing: a report.

Here are a bunch of things I would rather do than write, if I am to judge by my performance today:

1.  read the rest of an Irish detective novel that I started last night.

2.  find the book I'm supposed to be reading for my reading group.

3.  take a tiny nap.

4.  check my e-mail and all the blogs and aggregators a truly shocking number of times.

5.  check when The Closer and Trust Me are going to be on tonight.

6.  Twitter.

However:  I did finally bring myself to do it.  I circled around it first by making a revision agenda: what poems in the manuscript are pretty close to finished, what ones are in need of a stiff revision, what ones still need to be fleshed out quite a bit.  Then, I started in on one of them, making notes and looking at the feedback my group gave me, etc. etc.  Also some notes for a new poem or so.  Even the detective novel ended up feeling like not a waste of my time--something about the writing in it, and the way sex and death and curiosity and persistence intertwined in its plot, kept me going while I wrote and wrote and wrote.