Archive

11:16 am. New Pixies album. I was so excited to listen to it but it hasn’t grabbed me yet. That said, I rarely love their stuff on a first listen.

4:29 pm. Wasted most of the afternoon dealing with Chase Bank’s astonishingly inept credit card fraud department. Spent the rest of the afternoon dealing with the New School IT Department’s byzantine bureaucracy.

12:46 pm. Spoke with Mandy this morning to try to resolve our differences re The Show. We have two days to resolve them before the Court orders us to do forensics which would ruin us financially. We are running out of time.

5:07 pm. Faculty meeting was insanely boring, as usual. I try to keep my mouth shut because I know that if I were to say what I truly think, I would start to mercilessly criticize everything everyone is doing and saying.

3:17 am. It was Beckett’s birthday today. He was born 14 years ago exactly. I was so happy that day. We almost lost him and we were so scared. Every year I would pray to God to let him live just one more year. After the first several years, I stopped worrying about it as much and hardly ever worry about it anymore. But I’m so so happy that he’s made it to 14. I hope he lives as long as I have.

I wanted to film him for the annual birthday film I’ve been making since he was born. I asked Kathy if she would film Beckett and I together but she said I should ask him if he’s okay with that. He wasn’t. I agreed to just film him alone, even though the footage would be better if someone else were filming, and that seemed to make him happy. Kathy helped me set up the camera and then prepared to leave. She had bought him a present and I told her she should wait till he got here to give it to him but she thought he would prefer for her not to be over when he arrived so she left before he got here.  

11:36 pm. Went with Kathy to Greenwood Cemetery where I tried to teach her how to drive a car. She did great and we had a lot of fun just driving around the cemetery, stopping occasionally to take pictures of angel and headstone statuary. Also showed her the koi pond.

2:47 am. Went to the Ion Pack event at Baby’s All Right tonight. It was incredible to watch every episode of the Show back to back. My mouth was wide open with delight. But Kathy was getting triggered by the Show and was obviously having feelings throughout. She started crying at the part about Mandy’s mother’s suicide. At one point, I asked her what she needed and she said: “I'm having a panic attack and I need alcohol.” I didn’t want to leave and miss any of the show so I asked her: “Why don’t you go get some?” She continued crying and I realized she wanted me to get it for her. I offered to a couple of times but each time she would turn down my offer. She eventually was able to stop crying and got up to get herself a beer.

M. (with whom there had been some intrigue-like Instagram and email correspondence a few months back that I had briefly hid from Kathy), was at the event and introduced herself to me during the intermission. Kathy emerged from the bar area and walked up to M. and said: “You’re M.” M. invited us to a “sound bath” afterwards. I asked her what a sound bath was and she said it involved listening to certain sounds while on ketamine. I didn’t think Kathy would be keen on that but instead of saying “No, thank you,” I asked Kathy what she thought. Kathy said something to the effect of: “We already have all the ketamine we need,” but with the subtext being: “get away from my boyfriend, bitch.”

8:42 am. Scarlett’s forehead seemed hot this morning so I took her temperature and it was 99.2. I texted Mandy to see if she thought I should let Scarlett go to school or not but she didn’t get back to me and Scarlett said she felt fine so I took her to school.

9:57 am. Nice walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge. I like walking. It’s not so far.

9:18 pm. Fun day with the kids. Drove Kathy home (because she wasn't feeling well but also because she likes it when I drive her places) and then proceeded to Chinatown to pick Scarlett up from her friend’s apartment. As we passed Barnes and Noble, Scarlett said: “I like Barnes and Noble. Also, I feel carsick. Can we stop and go to Barnes and Noble?” So I parked the car and we went to Barnes and Noble. She suggested I browse the books downstairs while she browsed the books in the kids’ section upstairs but I don’t like having her out of my sight so I just tagged along with her in the kids’ section the whole time.

Afterwards, we went to Trader Joe’s because Beckett wanted frozen Apple Blossoms and Scarlett wanted chocolate-covered acai berries and I wanted chocolate-covered frozen strawberries. They had none of those things in stock but the information guy there was insanely nice and invited us into the booth so we could see the computer screen that showed when the various shipments would be arriving. The cashier, who was also insanely nice, then offered Scarlett as many flower stickers as she wanted. Scarlett and I both marveled at the kindness of Trader Joe’s employees, which is a far cry from the alienated labor at the neighborhood grocery store we usually shop at.

9:32 am. Kathy woke up a with a bad migraine. Got her some coffee and made her some soup.

10:35 am. Divorce nonsense all morning.

12:07 pm. Went on a walk with Matt Green[1] today. I’d been wanting to meet him since before Covid so it was especially exciting. He was just like he is in the movie[2] - upbeat and easy to talk to. We talked about seeing the beauty in what most people would see as ugliness and I promised to send him the relevant passages from Stevens’s Comedian as the Letter C[3] that changed the way I see the world.

6:42 pm. Kathy nauseous and dizzy for most of the day. She’s worried again about being pregnant.

10:35 am. Finished reading Brecht’s Edward II.

11:42 am. Listened to Brecht on Brecht[1] while jogging. It’s so bad it inspired me to ditch it[2] in favor of a theatrical staging of Brecht’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee instead.

5:07 pm. Scarlett and I played basketball against Beckett. He won, but we gave him a run for his money, which made him happy.

2:25 am. Kathy and I went on a date to see Moonage Daydream. I was excited to see it, but also excited for Kathy to see it. She’s not a big Bowie fan and I was hoping it would get her to appreciate what’s so great about him. She went in with an open mind but hated the film with a passion. She said that the filmmaker made Bowie seem pretentious and dull. I didn’t hate the film as much as she did, but I know what she meant. A lot of the visuals were silly and it was more of an elevated music video than an insightful documentary about Bowie.

1:39 pm. Beckett was hungry this morning and asked what food we had to eat. We didn’t have much. I suggested pancakes and he said okay but then I realized I was out of eggs. So I made him and Scarlett oatmeal instead.

A few hours later, Beckett was hungry again so I offered to go to the store to buy eggs so I could make pancakes. He said okay. Then I asked Scarlett what she wanted to eat and she said the two leftover ribs she had ordered last night. I had forgotten about the ribs and it occurred to me that Beckett might prefer the ribs to pancakes but there were only two which was barely enough for Scarlett, let alone for two people. I wasn’t sure what to do but I thought I should let Beckett know that Scarlett wanted the two ribs and to make sure he was okay with that. But he wasn’t and said he wanted one of the two ribs. I offered to buy more ribs so they would each have enough but both Beckett and Scarlett were, for some reason, strongly opposed to my buying more ribs.

12:32 pm. As everyone with a job knows, the great thing about working is that it doesn’t give you time to think about all the things that would otherwise drive you to immediate despair. It defers despair to later. That’s why I can’t stop working.

Hard day. Kathy was having a hard time and I was torn, once again, between work and love.

“Spring’s bright paradise has come to this

Now the thousand-leaved green falls to the ground.

12:28 pm. Had breakfast with Roger Beebe[1]. Hadn’t seen him in a couple of years and had forgotten how much I enjoyed his mind. It was a pleasure to listen to him string words together.

6:58 am. Met with the new dean. I liked him right away. Easy to talk to. He had dignity and grace.

12:02 pm. Went to the dentist to get my teeth cleaned and was told I needed a full set of x-rays. But the dental assistant couldn’t put the torture apparatus in my mouth without making me gag. I think she was afraid I was going to throw up on her. She kept saying: breathe through your nose. But I couldn’t for some reason.

Then she “cleaned” my teeth. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a more brutal teeth cleaning in my life. I kept thinking: “The Butcher of Carroll Gardens.”

8:12 am. Kind of horribly depressed. Life is feeling lacking. This talk of break up is making me feel empty and hopeless again.

- Help me, Father.

12:27 am. Kathy and I talked about the possibility of breaking up tonight. That was a first. It wasn’t a fight. More like a reckoning with how things have been lately. It was sad but sweet and gentle.

4:05 am. Things with Kathy are back on track. It was so hard to communicate there for a while. She came over after I agreed to be gentler, kinder, and more tender.

Connection is such a tenuous thing. It’s there and then it’s not and sometimes it seems so hard to get it back. It took the entire evening, truth be told, but by the end of it we were feeling close again. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this close to anyone. It’s a whole other level.

4:09 pm. Beckett loves his new school. That makes me so happy.

8:10 pm. Scarlett and I finished watching Farhadi’s A Hero. We both found it devastating. To think that the person who made this masterpiece would be sued by an ex-student for plagiarism, lose in court, and face jail time for making one of the most compassionate and humane films in the history of cinema is mind-boggling. It reminds me of the Mandy situation.

2:41 am. Got a nice email today.

Hi Caveh

7:18 am. Fight with Kathy last night. We went to bed angry. At one point, she put her arm around me to try to make peace. I wasn’t mad enough to turn away but I also wasn’t not mad enough to turn towards her so I just lay there without moving and eventually fell asleep.

8:53 am. Kathy is not pregnant.

11:56 pm. I got several emails from Vimeo today saying they had taken down several episodes of the Show because “We do not permit content that violates a third party's privacy.”  This is a serious escalation on Mandy’s part. Now I have to hire yet another lawyer to fight this latest attempt to censor the Show.

I have to hand it to her though. She's certainly good at what she does.

10:41 pm. Kathy’s worried she’s pregnant. The test she took seemed negative but it wasn't 100% clear.

11:21 pm. Kathy and I finished watching Lars Von Trier’s Manderlay, because I assigned it to my Brechtian Cinema students and needed to re-watch it. The last time I saw it was 15 years ago, when I showed it to my Third Cinema class at San Francisco State University. It was a large class (over 100 students) and the students were stunned by the film, but no one was indignant or offended. Watching it again 15 years later, I was struck by how much more shocking and transgressive it is now than it was then. The cultural climate has changed so much that I’m bracing myself for a lot of angry reactions from the students. I could be wrong, but I think a lot of them are going to be pissed off.

Kathy was disturbed by the sex/rape scene in the film and started crying. We stopped the film so we could process what she was feeling - guilt about similar experiences she's had. I decided to try to describe my interpretation of her psychosexual proclivities which made her feel both understood and, surprisingly, frustrated and wanting to lash out at me. We talked about how feeling understood makes her feel more vulnerable and brings up a fear of abandonment. It was kind of a great talk and it brought us closer.

11:13 pm. Steve Kasher[1], who is in town for an art fair, invited me to join him and the autobiographical female cartoonists he represents for dinner. I told him I had my kids with me so he suggested I bring them along (the kids and I had visited him and his wife in the Hamptons once, so he knew and liked them). Neither of them was keen on going to a dinner party but I was able to arrange a playdate for Scarlett and Beckett agreed to go as long as we drove (he hates the subway). I asked him and Scarlett if it was okay if Kathy came too and they both said okay, as long as we didn’t have to pick her up (Scarlett gets carsick easily).

It was a first for Beckett to agree to having Kathy join us on a family outing so I was thrilled. Kathy came over and we all went on our first trip together. Traffic was bad and I had forgotten to get gas and we were running late so I got a bit stressed out, but it was also a beautiful night and there was something mystical for me about walking through Manhattan with both Kathy and Beckett by my side. It has been so difficult to integrate these two parts of my life and tonight was a huge step in the right direction.

11:36 pm. Kathy was having a hard time today. I said some harsh things the other day and they have been reverberating in her brain ever since.

Scarlett’s lawyer emailed me to ask if he could come over to interview her yet again tomorrow. I’m not allowed to say no and I have to pay him a fortune every time he does this (and he can apparently do this as often as he sees fit). Not sure why he needs to interview her a fifth time and in person after he has already filed his report, but I suspect it has to do with Mandy’s claim in court that my apartment is roach-infested and that the children lack proper clothing.

12:03 am. Spent most of the day in varying degrees of fighting with or being alienated from Kathy. We were so stuck. At one point, I called Peter to get some perspective and he told me Kathy was calling him at that same moment, clearly for the same reason. Later, Kathy told me he agreed with her that my position was insane. We started fighting again and she suggested we call Peter together. He did a fantastic job talking us through our respective positions and gently but firmly encouraging us to rethink our assumptions. He’s so much better than the mediator Mandy and I pay thousands of dollars to. Wishing Mandy would let Peter mediate for us. Not only would he be way more effective, he would also do it for free.

Kathy and I agreed that Peter has a rare gift for this and should pursue it professionally.

2:18 am. Kathy and I started watching Baz Luhrman’s Romeo + Juliet, which I had never seen before and is one of Kathy’s favorite films.[1]

I kept pausing the film to talk about it – mostly about what I liked in the film, but also tangents which the film made me think of – the acting history of Leonardo DiCaprio, Baz Luhrman’s directorial choices, alternate readings of Shakespeare’s intention in the play, incorrect emphases in the enunciation of lines, how I would adapt the play, etc.

3:30 pm. Court wasn’t as awful as I expected it to be. The Judge seemed to grasp the complexity of the first amendment issues in the case and essentially said she would not grant Mandy’s request to prohibit me from talking about the kids in my work and/or using actors to play the kids. She made the point that it is outside her jurisdiction and that comedians do this all the time.

Mandy decided to throw a curve ball at the beginning by having her lawyer say that my apartment has roaches (which is true). What she failed to mention was that Mandy’s apartment also has roaches, although fewer roaches because she lives in a co-op that pays for an exterminator to come regularly. She also failed to mention that because Mandy refuses to sell the apartment we co-own, I can’t afford to live in a roach-free apartment building - one that doesn’t have a crooked landlord who refuses to pay for an exterminator to come regularly. She also failed to mention that my many attempts to pay an exterminator to spray my apartment are useless and doomed because it’s a building-wide problem that can’t be fixed by spraying just one apartment.

12:50 am. Court appearance is tomorrow. Don’t really know what to expect but everyone says it will be awful.

4:00 am. Shot the final Ashley scenes for Season 3 (I think). Stefan was more depressed than I’ve ever seen him (which is saying a lot). He could barely hold up the camera. At a certain point, he just put his head in his hands and laid his head down on the table. Kathy thought we should end the shoot early but I insisted we continue till we were done. Peter picked up the slack and helped with the lights. Kathy helped with the framing and just trying to make sure everything continued to move forward.

Afterwards, Kathy said she was really worried about him. I am too.

3:21 pm. Scarlett came over so we could have lunch. At a certain point, Beckett started putting her down. He does it so often that she has become allergic to it, so she started getting very upset. Instead of dropping it, he continued to escalate the put downs and Scarlett got more and more upset. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I told him to go to his mother’s house and that I would have lunch with Scarlett separately (he had already eaten). He walked away looking hurt. I felt bad and, reconsidering, called out to him. When he turned around, I saw that he had tears in his eyes. “Come with us,” I said. “I don’t want to,” he answered, before turning and walking away.

I felt terrible but I also needed to feed Scarlett so I let it go. Over pizza, Scarlett and I processed what had happened and what to do about it going forward.

11:02 pm. Great day with Beckett. He wanted to go to the Dream Works water park in New Jersey so I cancelled all my appointments and we went there, just the two of us. There was a huge wave pool. I had never been in one and it was insanely fun. Beckett was impressed by my body surfing ability and it was nice to be able to do something that impresses him – it’s rare. But whenever a wave would come, I could ride it much farther across the pool than he could and he couldn’t understand how I was doing it. So I felt proud.

Also, the water slides were unimaginably scary and I think Beckett was impressed that I was relatively unfazed by them. I was as terrified as he was but maybe better at surrendering completely to the experience and trusting that the engineers of these contraptions knew what they were doing.

2:22 am. Eternal TV, the streaming service currently broadcasting the show, received a cease-and-desist letter from yet another lawyer hired by Mandy. How can she afford this? The letter threatened them with legal action if they didn’t take down the new episode.

Spoke with my divorce lawyer, spoke with the mediator, spoke with Eternal TV, and spoke with friends to try to process and respond to Mandy’s latest onslaught.

5:21 pm. Kathy in a bad mood all day. Said she was feeling fat and ugly. I told her it seems she wants to feel that way and asked her why she would want that. She said she didn’t know. I suggested we act out a sexual scenario in which I call her those things. She was ambivalent but I thought it would be healing. It wasn’t. Afterwards, she felt even worse.

9:45 pm. Class was fun tonight. It was nice to try something different. I screened everyone’s audition videos and asked everyone to weigh in on what they liked and didn’t like about everyone else’s auditions. It felt like visiting a new country. 

12:01 pm. Woke up to an email from my publisher saying he had received a letter from a lawyer saying she represents Mandy (how many lawyers does Mandy have and how can she afford to keep doing this?) who is threatening him with a cease and desist order for publishing the book I wrote over a year ago and that I haven’t been able to release because of Mandy’s continuing legal threats. It’s weird to me that someone whose ambition in life was to be a writer has become so pro-censorship.

6:34 pm. Received an even more disturbing letter from the court-appointed lawyer for Scarlett. After charging us $10,000 to “represent” Scarlett and after having three phone conversations with her, he had said that Scarlett said she enjoyed being in the show and wanted to continue to be in it. Then a week ago, several months after having completed his interrogation, he said he wanted to speak to her again. When I asked why, he refused to tell me. I suspected that Mandy had something to do with this and asked her if she knew why he was contacting me. She did her usual sleight-of-hand where she doesn’t say no exactly but makes it seem like she’s saying no. I’ve seen her do this so many times that I should have seen it coming but, as usual, I took her at her word. But everything he said in this letter to the court completely and almost verbatim parroted all of the points she has been making for months.

6:37 pm. I made plans to meet Frances[1] half an hour before class so I could give her a copy of the Brecht on Brecht play we will be performing at the end of the semester so she could scan it before class. But as soon as I arrived, I realized I had left it at home.

10:10 pm. Class tonight was fun. I was dreading it but I enjoyed it. We read some of Marlowe’s Edward II, looked at examples of villanelles, and did a class bonding exercise. I felt like I did a good job. I don’t always feel that way but I felt that way tonight. One student said he felt more energized at the end of class than when he walked in. That was gratifying to hear and made me think that this should be the purpose of education.

I got an email this morning from a total stranger saying that there was going to be a street theater production of Bertolt Brecht’s The Measures Taken only a few blocks from my apartment. I’ve been interested in that particular play because of its centrality to the House Un-American Activities Committee's hearings at which Brecht testified so I asked Kathy if she had any interest in seeing it. She said, “Nope! But if you wanna go, I’ll come!”

It was the usual non-gender-conforming crowd and I thought the production was pretty good. But it became hard to follow because there were these older Chinese men who were talking extremely loudly in Chinese a few feet away from where the performance was taking place. Then a guy with a speaker blasting what Kathy later informed me was Tupac installed himself only a few feet away from where the performance was taking place and proceeded to turn up the volume to an insanely distracting level. I was pretty mad at the guy the whole time but nobody was asking him to turn it down. I was tempted to go talk to him myself but I didn’t want to further interrupt the play.

10:56 pm. Good day. Played basketball with Beckett. I think that made him really happy. He beat me but I gave him a run for his money, which made it extra satisfying for him.

Uploaded the new episode this morning only to discover – because Kathy offered to watch it to make sure there were no issues – that it was riddled with missing sound and dialogue. Apparently, one of the audio tracks had been muted before the last export. The absurd number of technical difficulties I’ve been having makes me wonder if the universe is trying to tell me not to release it, or not to release it yet.

Beckett couldn’t sleep again last night. Scarlett called me into the room in the middle of the night and my going in there woke him up. He said he was up all night after that. This morning, he was in tears again. He was also in a very bad mood for most of the day. He desperately wanted to go to Sky Zone because he thought that if he got a good workout, he would be able to sleep more easily tonight.

11:45 pm. Beckett wanted to go to Sky Zone (in New Jersey) and Kathy wanted me to pick her up from her Ketamine treatment and I wanted to finish checking the sound mix so I could release the new episode but it wasn’t possible to do all three of those things. By the time I realized we would need to leave for Sky Zone to get back in time for me to pick up Kathy, it was basically too late. The traffic had gotten worse and we would only have a little bit of time before I would have to rush back to pick up Kathy.

We were already halfway to Sky Zone when I made a rare executive decision. Usually, I pretty much do whatever the kids want. But I decided to prioritize Kathy’s well-being and announced that we would not be going to Sky Zone today but could do something in Manhattan instead. I suggested ping pong and Beckett agreed on the condition that we have dim sum afterwards. So we played ping pong, had dim sum, and got back home in time for me to pick up Kathy.

11:32 am. Sound mix still not quite right. It’s hard to figure out what happened. Am I being insanely neurotic? Yes. But I’ve always been this way. Every film I’ve ever made has been made this way.

8:58 pm. Beckett really wanted to go rock climbing so I canceled an editing session to take him and Scarlett. Scarlett had never been before and she LOVED it. Beckett was being very sweet to her – encouraging her to go past her comfort zones whereas I was all about encouraging her not to go too far past her comfort zones. They both wanted me to try it as well so I did. It was pretty terrifying stuff.

Kathy spent the whole day with me and the kids. Beckett didn’t comment on her being here in the morning, which surprised me. Instead, we all had breakfast and hung out.

Kathy and I tried to give the mix a final listen before sending it out but there were tons of sound and sync issues. Spent most of the day trying to fix them, but it was hard to do that and also take care of the kids.

Finalized the sound mix (episode supposed to come out tomorrow) at Maxwell’s place.

Kathy had offered to babysit but Beckett said he would watch Scarlett. I was a little worried about how conscientious he would actually be but Scarlett seemed fine with it. During the mix, I got a text message from Beckett that said: “scarlett’s having some anger issues rn.”

11:28 pm. Kathy started writing me a daily journal entry because we’ve been apart (first because she went upstate for her mom’s birthday and then because I have the kids this week). When she sent me her first journal entry, I asked her if I could quote from her journal in this journal and she said she'd rather not. But then tonight, she changed her mind. So I’m just going to quote from her journal entry for today:

August 21, 2022

10:02 pm. Hard day. Fight with Kathy on the phone last night. She’s hurting so she went out and got drunk and was being a bit belligerent on the phone. I got triggered and started to feel hopeless and things escalated quickly. I was angry and started to question our compatibility.

Beckett didn’t sleep well again last night so I went to the hardware store and bought a set of drill bits so I could double the black curtains in the bedroom. The effect was incremental at best and mostly symbolic but I think symbolism is important.

10:38 am. Scarlett and I played basketball against Beckett, two against one. He beat us 7 to 0. He really is very good.

11:15 am. On the way back from Whole Foods, Beckett started criticizing Scarlett for not carrying enough of the groceries, even though she was proactively carrying more groceries than I’ve ever seen her carry, and was also carrying his basketball that he had brought. It seems that no matter what she does, he manages to find fault with it.

10:22 am. Beckett was up most of the night from insomnia. He was so upset that he was crying, hitting the bed, and moaning throughout the night. I’ve never seen him so distraught. He told me he can’t seem to sleep at my place for some reason. When I suggested asking his mother if he could sleep at her place tonight, he said: “No, Dad. It will just start a fight.”

I texted her anyway but she didn’t bother to respond. She did, however, schedule a doctor’s appointment over Zoom. The doctor prescribed Melatonin which made the whole thing seem less scary and overwhelming.

7:12 pm. Mandy situation is getting worse. I’m worried about Beckett’s allergies and him waking up in the middle of the night unable to breathe. Mandy is going out of town with her boyfriend for a week and I asked her if she could make sure Beckett can get into the apartment if there’s an emergency. She did her usual “Call me” and walked away. When I called her, of course she didn’t answer.

Scarlett is here, which is a relief at least. But Mandy’s refusal to be friendly or kind colors everything and adds stress to a situation that doesn’t need to be stressful. When she dropped the dog off (two days earlier than we had discussed) without asking me and I objected, she said “I’m leaving Friday” and walked away, as if that somehow addresses my concern. The kids are caught in the middle and do their best to cope but there’s a toxicity in the air that’s inescapable.