I was back to myself, back on schedule. how do you do it? In fact I was facing a conundrum. I don’t think I could af-ford to do two paintings a day, and, today, I did. That was because the first painting looked complete already without much time having passed. I wasn’t going to ruin a good painting by overworking it, but I wanted to paint for a longer amount of time than I had, so i did another one, and I thought: “how am i going to afford this, and where am I go-ing to put them all? I needed a dealer that could sell my work—and yet, as we all know, it’s not incredibly likely that my paintings are going to sell any time soon, if ever. But I had to push on, didn’t I? I had to go above and beyond the call of duty, didn’t I? I couldn’t just say, “I’m only going to paint for an hour, and that’s it!” No, I had to consider: “I have to paint for two hours at least, don’t I?”

Things had cooled off a little—I’d finally had a bowel movement that accounted for the fact that I hadn’t had a proper bowel movement in a shameful amount of time; I had to dig it out of the toilet, of course, and dump it in the back yard—which is why, upon further study, I was switch-ing from psyllium husk to a stool softener; clearly, the psyl-lium husk wasn’t doing what I’d hoped—moving the stool along so it wouldn’t sit around for so long. Now I was thinking: great, now that I’m not adding mass to my stool, I should have a bowel movement every three or four days as opposed to five or seven—and who knows, the stool sof-tener might cut that in half, so that, well, I’d be going as of-ten as I used to go in high-school—about every other day. That, at least, was the endgame, and, along with my sexual dysfunction, the reason for getting off risperidone, even though, as far as my thinking disorder goes, it worked as well as any reasonable person might’ve hoped.

Well, here we were, in some deeper realm of analytic thought, concerning ourself with mathematical stimulus, trying to prove the existence of heaven. That’s what everybody would like to do, I think, but most people can’t understand anything but love for one another; if told them that math is love they’d say it’s over their heads—as if they didn’t want to think about going to heaven, even if it meant, in thinking about it, you increased your chances of getting there. I’ll be a doctor one day, but this came from someone else, someone I knew only a little, from the church, and, once or twice, his appearance, along with two missionaries, at our dinner table. The root of that—the person I thought of after I overheard that, was Ursula—I wondered, even, if she said it. What was she doing? “Did you say that?”

Here I was, talking to Ursula, having defined myself—through a respectable test, the Storms Sexuality Axis test, to be seventy percent heterosexual and thirty percent ho-mosexual. So all the second guessing myself and overthink-ing of whether or not I’m homosexual had to stop—it had been going on for too long. this pleased Ursula, since, ac-cording to her, I was too straight to be gay, which is exactly what the test said. So good—I was straight enough to deny being gay—only i didn’t want to deny being gay, which is why I call myself queer and say that I don’t fit any catego-ry—I do it for strategic reasons, to silence all the people that, out of hate, would argue that I’m gay, (because of my now prior confusion and my sexual dysfunction). Now that my confidence was growing—I’d gone on misleading both myself and others enough, yes; but also, yes, I was thirty percent gay, and that was important to me—enough to cel-ebrate in my writing since, after all, being thirty percent gay is really quite beautiful, if you’re not a jerk.

You’re young, you have your life ahead of you; and that’s true, I did—not to mention the life to come, in which, well, my life would somehow be both ahead of me and perfectly in step with every decision I make. You’re great to think that – so what was she saying? Was she affirming my be-lief in the life to come—or, perhaps, to keep her happy, I should say a life to come? That way she might not feel like I’m saying she must necessarily also have a life to come—i don’t know why she would want that, but, if that was all she could believe in, then, i guess she didn’t have a choice. I think that’s the main point that some of us want to make—that we’re not free agents, that we don’t have a choice, and the life, this life, is nothing more than a dream that doesn’t involve the consciousness of the person that’s asleep.

Who’s door is that? Yes, truly, one door opens, but can’t I stay here, or go back in time? What if I don’t like it on the other side of that door—and who am I to think that they will open it? Ursula is asking me who’s door this is; but it’s my door, so I must be overhearing something, unless she’s trying to tell me that this is her door, and I should pursue our affair. But to think something like that might be over-doing it, given that, a long time ago, people would tell me that I think too much—and, as I understand, that may have been true, but, if it was, I had a good reason: I never should have been playing baseball in the first place, for example. I should have been drawing and painting, as I soon found out—or, when it comes to women, well, I shouldn’t have been with them at all.