I’ve been indisposed. When I don’t blog I’m not a happy man. This is my therapy, and when I don’t get my therapy I get anxiety in one form or another.

I went to an actual shrink for about four months once. It was many, many years ago and my stress level was through the roof and all I really wanted was a prescription to take the edge off on especially bad days. The price to pay was I had to sit there and go through the process of being analyzed.

If I knew then what I know now, that basically, any time you walk in to see your family practitioner for anything from carpal tunnel to bleeding ears the first thing they say is that it’s probably stress related and hand you a script.

Anyway, for a few months I went the Tony Soprano route with a real live shrink. It was awkward. I’m not the greatest communicator when it comes to meaningful discourse. I kept asking if I could mail it in, but she was having none of that. So I sat there and endured for a while, acting pretty much like Tony Soprano does with Dr. Melfi, minus the mob shit and the insults.

I always felt like she was trying very hard to outwit me. A lot of leading the witness type stuff. And all I really wanted was my script. It’s not like I was an addict; at the time I had a very stressful job and once or perhaps twice a week I needed a respite. A respite that didn’t come with a hangover.

So like an asshole I sat across from this woman, who was particularly unattractive, and tried not to do wacky shit, like keep cracking my knuckles or jiggling my leg constantly. On one level I was terrified of this woman. She sat there writing her notes, writing her notes, writing her notes. And I half expected her to suggest shock treatments or tell me I had some kind of fucked up personality disorder. I was always just a little bit afraid that maybe I was nuts. I was always expecting to hear, “I think you’ll be better off living in this facility out in Burbank.”

And let me tell you, struggling for forty-five minutes in front of shrink, desperately trying not to be yourself is more fucking stressful than any job.

“Tell me, what do you think is the basis of your anxiety?”

I suppose I could have just said that I was responsible for a lot of people and a lot of money and that my boss was insane, but it just seemed too mundane. I always went with the drama.

“Life is stressful. Buying a loaf of bread is stressful. Getting a haircut is stressful. Finding a parking spot in your fucking parking lot is stressful.”

“So, you feel that finding a parking spot can be stressful? Or buying a loaf of bread?”

“Fuckin’ A.”

“But there must be an underlying cause. Don’t you suspect there’s an underlying cause to your anxiety?”

And as this went on I kept thinking to myself, Don’t crack your knuckles! Don’t jiggle your leg! Don’t act crazy and you’ll be out of here soon!

I would always begin a reply with, “Logic dictates…”

It would drive her nuts. She would repeatedly try to drill into my thick skull that logic had no place in any of this. That phobias were exempt from logic. “Totally exempt!” she would cry. She was right about that of course, even a dullard like myself could get past the obvious.

In the end it was a pointless exercise. It was much more stressful dealing with this horrible woman than it was to just care less about upward mobility. I’ll never forget that woman’s haircut and her frump-wear. And waiting in the outer office, pretending to look at old magazines while I was really sizing up the real crazies, trying to catch a good look without getting caught.

One day I just never went back. There was no further correspondence, so I suppose I was never “turned in to the authorities” as some kind of nut. In fact, I suspect she was rather glad to be rid of me.