{"id":2905,"date":"2008-05-20T12:15:24","date_gmt":"2008-05-20T12:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/cognitive-behavioral-therapy-redux\/"},"modified":"2008-05-20T18:40:13","modified_gmt":"2008-05-20T18:40:13","slug":"cognitive-behavioral-therapy-redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/cognitive-behavioral-therapy-redux\/","title":{"rendered":"cognitive-behavioral therapy [redux]"},"content":{"rendered":"
cbtcover.jpg<\/div>\n

Day Two of 3:AM<\/i>‘s Tao Lin Week<\/b>, and we are pleased to offer you six unpublished pages<\/b> from Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy<\/i><\/a>, published by Melville House<\/a>.<\/p>\n

an interesting group of small children
\nbecame exponentially less interesting
\nuntil finally they approached to solicit my poetry
\nin manhattan a brief description of homeless people
\nincludes the rhetorical question \u2018can we stop at jamba juice?’
\nenthusiasm over \u2018the perfect therapy’ increases in february
\ni was very emotional that day and even fell off my bike
\nthen i crossed a distance neither temporal nor physical
\nimmediately i began to cry
\ni first noticed this behind my forehead
\nwritten on a billboard above east houston street
\nlook! a perfect diagram of my contorted face!<\/p>\n

a massive amount of confusion arrived in my brain
\nlike an obese man exiting taco bell with a twinkle of ingenuity
\nin both his eyes at the same time
\nso maybe i am the problem and you are OK
\ni first noticed this phenomenon on the discovery channel
\nthen i turned off the light and made a high-pitched noise
\nthat was the day i created an enormous distance between us
\nin the area behind my forehead
\nwhich i immediately began to cross<\/p>\n

a homeless man lays frozen in his giant coat and no one cries for him
\nso at midnight he rises to solicit my poetry
\nan enormous animal floats ass-first through the universe
\nthen it notices taco bell in both its eyes at the same time
\ni’ve constructed this massive thing that probably doesn’t make sense
\nbut appeals overwhelmingly to our melodramatic sensibilities
\nconcerning \u2018how to live’; like the interesting woman who kneels nightly
\nto touch the frozen, contorted face of \u2018the perfect obese man’
\ni sometimes have an overwhelming urge to confide in you
\nthat i fear i have been exhibiting psychopathic behavior <\/p>\n

that is possibly ruining both our lives\u2014
\nan accomplishment that puts a twinkle in my eye
\nusing expensive gold-inlaid tweezers
\nif desire is a form of possession
\nand possession isn’t good, then
\nwhat? i believe in the healing power
\nof focusing on other people when sad
\ni’ve distilled my novel, short-story, or poem
\ninto its embarrassing, aromatic essence
\nbut i’ve also diagrammed my thought patterns
\nand discovered a structural correlation with the lord of the rings trilogy
\ni observe myself from a distance neither temporal nor physical
\nto cross it would be potentially best-selling<\/p>\n

it can take months of concerted effort to replace an irrational thought process
\nthe exciting thing about cognition-based therapy is that it actually works
\nat taco bell your mother is OK, i’ll cry tears of joy
\nif you cry tears of joy, and there is no such thing as insane destruction
\nall instances of sad crying are actually carefully rendered exhibitions
\nof \u2018sad crying’; my face is actually a highly instructional message
\nin the form of \u2018terrible contortions’
\nto observe this is briefly satisfying
\nthen i realize i’m probably experiencing some kind of anger or discomfort
\ni once asked a professor of particle physics to diagram my massive confusion
\nhe showed me his literary magazine
\nbut did not solicit my poetry<\/p>\n

a loose rendering of my thought patterns into easily communicable ideas
\nalmost always includes the sentiment \u2018i am writing some of the best poetry of my life’
\nearly in the morning the sun’s light reveals
\nthat a homeless man has murdered an obese man
\nin the distance my doppelganger emerges with both eyes frozen
\nhis approach exhibits that he has just watched five hours of the discovery channel
\ni think he is coming to solicit my poetry
\nthen i emailed the file to myself
\nand walked to the bus stop
\ni watched you briefly from a distance
\nbefore approaching to hold your hand<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Day Two of 3:AM‘s Tao Lin Week, and we are pleased to offer you six unpublished pages from Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, published by Melville House. an interesting group of small children became exponentially less interesting until finally they approached to solicit my poetry in manhattan a brief description of homeless people includes the rhetorical question \u2018can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":119,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-buzzwords"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/119"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2905"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2905\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3ammagazine.com\/3am\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}