Goddamnit but the thing I was saying was just…honest…I said ‘it feels like you’re telling me a parable’ about this guy…then he wanted to argue and deny that there was anything similar about the guy and me. Just seemed fake. I said ‘methinks the lady doth protest too much’ and he said ‘that means you think I’m lying.’ I said ‘I just didn’t expect you to react with this grandiose denial of it.’ after I said the parable thing he like…I don’t know, it felt calculated. He was saying like ‘oh no no. No. Never. I would never ever think you were like Ted, ever, I swear on my mother’s grave [he didn’t like his mother] and the bible and if I could I would slit my wrist right now to show you that in no way, that I’m aware of, do I think those things—or any similarity at all, really, between you two—I see him as this terribly self-centered person who’ll take everyone down with him if he’s going down, not like you at all—not about you at all.’

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just imagining it and he’s telling the truth. Really does not feel like it. I’m not exaggerating what he said, he said the mom’s grave and bible and wrist thing and all the never ever’s with this rehearsed-looking face and sarcastic tone.

1:21am: headache. Shit one more thing: what preceded what I just typed was a long monologue about how Ted had betrayed him and was hopeless and had ‘zero interest in psychotherapy, zero insight, on the surface all the time’ (dad repeated those phrases maybe three times each during monologue, all context points from previous recurring arguments we’ve had re: me not wanting to do therapy and not liking it, after having tried therapy and it not seeming to work). He said Ted was depressed and wouldn’t leave bed for six months and his son who was three or four years old would walk by his room and say ‘mom, is daddy seeping?’ I said ‘Ted sounds sad.’ dad said something about how Ted was depressed but didn’t have feelings. I said ‘it feels bad to feel depressed, to have no feelings, I think depression is a feeling.’ then dad said the ‘zero insight’ things. He and Ted were childhood friends and dad won’t talk to him anymore because Ted got dad and his friends to invest in real estate before shit hit the fan around 2008. Dad thinks Ted is hoarding all their money because he won’t return phone calls. I don’t return phone calls either. That was another thing dad kept repeating, to emphasize Ted’s shittiness: ‘he never returns my calls.’