I’ve never written about this before, but I count a lot. I count steps, bites of food, my dogs licking me, I count measures in music, and everything in-between. I hope that’s enough preamble.
Before my session I remembered two different things: 1) my grandmother’s bathroom where there was a very loud clock that would echo off the all tile floors, walls, etc., and 2) a story my parents would tell about my birth. When I was born, my grandmother (the same one with the bathroom) held me and apparently told my parents I had sang to her, and that I would be a musical baby. Obviously I don’t remember the event itself, but my parents would tell that story almost every time we were around my grandmother (my parents are quick to make jokes like that).
So I told Tom about both of these things. What he was most interested in was the bathroom. “What were you counting when you were in there?” When I first started listening to the clock I wasn’t a counter like I am now, so I would just listen intently to the sound of the clock. As I got older and started band classes I would count the second hand of the clock. “And what were you doing in there?” All I did in there at first was the regular bathroom stuff. “So there was this demand that you go in there to do all of the typical bathroom stuff, and while you were in there you would count.”
That’s the gist of it, but from there I remembered something else about my grandmother’s house: it was always full of stuff. She was what you could call a hoarder. Food, kitchen equipment, random odds and ends, all of this and more could be found all over the house. After my grandfather died it only got worse.
“She would hold onto a lot of stuff. Kind of like me but a bit different.”
“Different how?”
“What she held onto was random material possessions, whereas what I hold onto is my speech, the thoughts in my head, stuff like that.”
From there I drew a comparison to the car (I’ve written about that elsewhere). The bathroom was, and still is, a place where I go to “get away” from other people. I would go hang out for two minutes, just stand there not doing anything, or reading shampoo bottles, whatever, and when I got older I would check my phone and things like that. Basically it’s the same thing the car does for me now, they’re very similar. In my car I eat, I drink (not alcohol, just random garbage drinks), I smoke, all of this stuff. Tom pointed out that the car took over for the bathroom, not the other way around. The bathroom was a place to escape the gaze of the Other, and as I got older, the car became that as well, it took over.
I remembered one other thing about the bathroom. When I was younger, my parents would tell me to wash my hands before dinner, as a lot of parents probably do. But I wouldn’t wash my hands. I didn’t have any particular reason for not doing it; I think mostly I just didn’t want to comply. I was otherwise a very dutiful child. What I would do instead was stand in the bathroom, run the water for a while, turn it off, “dry” my hands, and then leave. This whole rigamarole is something I still do today (I know it’s disgusting — I apologize for that, but at least you’re just reading about it!).
“It’s a way of escaping your responsibilities.”
“You think so? …how did you get there?”
“You weren’t saying ‘thanks but no thanks,’ you were pretending to comply instead of owning your refusal to do so.”
“I couldn’t refuse to do it when I was a kid, but at this point…”
Tom interjected: “At this point you’re still a child.”
“Children don’t have many responsibilities, do they?”
We ended.