crazy friend!

andy pink, portland, oregan, maine —

greetings from the underground of portlands:

i have recently discovered that not everyone is aware of their moods. i am always aware of my moods, watching them and gauging them — up, down, higher, lower, frustrated, satisfied, uncomfortable, anxious, torrid, and so on. i am never without the thought of my mood. i remember as a child using this word, “mood.” i must have been taught it as a child, this word, and for some good reason. the word “mood” has always struck me as a kind of mature word, almost poetic, more mature than “feeling” (as a gerund, i dislike this word itself) or even “emotion.” to use the word “mood” as a child is an index that mood is at issue for him. i often obsess about my mood — esp if it is under the weather — and i find that i can get in a bit of a tizzy over the mood itself. it seems to me that worse than the mood is my reaction to the mood. that is why when i am down and out these days i just sit with it, relax with it, do little, stop thinking, and remember that it will pass, like clouds, rain, sun, or downpours. to not think about mood seems like a foreign luxury, but it also strikes me at the same time as a kind of personality defect.

weirdly and unseemly, i answered a “strictly platonic m for m” ad on cl, it was seeking a bipolar friend. i already have 2 crazy friends: one was a folie a deux partner of my first time in a hospital (we were separated), he is now a linguist in europe; the second is a friend from graduate school who is mostly nos but has been hospitalized several times, she teaches in a state other than the state of portland. both are far from here, so it would be nice to have a manic depressive friend in portlandia. i met him yesterday, he was homeless when he first came to portland from not-portland, and he has glazed eyes, like donuts. we shall go to the movies next week. i don’t feel terribly drawn to him at the moment but perhaps that will change. i don’t take to people right away, for the most part, and i think i like the other based mostly on time put in, between the two of us. i am generally lonely. school is my main thing, my job, but it doesn’t take up nearly enough of my time, so i find myself ruminating on my mood, not quite demoralized these days, but out and about.

come to think of it, shame is my main issue.

shame is public, the secret is almost visible, perhaps already is, how would one know, it’s unverifiable, shame is the affective correlate of paranoia, it is to be inadequate to the standards of the other, to be red faced, chagrined, in the eyes of those outside of you, those who matter for no apparent reason other than that they are not you. guilt, very different, is to feel an inadequacy in relationship to ones own standards of behavior and action, it is essentially private, there is no secret, it is all within rather than without. i never feel guilt. i always live up to my standards, i never feel responsible, i feel no inadequacy, and my personal and private standards always achieve equilibrium with my actions, even if such standards must shift, high and low, up and down, moody standards. shame is at the keyhole. i am gazed at from the keyhole, wide.

i love the stranger (he is my favorite man), yet i also feel so vulnerable and ashamed in the face of him. worse than the stranger is the acquaintance. there is nothing quite so awful as the acquaintance. one doesn’t know where one stands vis-a-vis the acquaintance. the question is: how do we transition from stranger to friend without the detour of the acquaintance? this is a deeply practical question.

my new digs are pretty good. i have yet to have the girls over. the new mattress (for one, i tell you) is coming tomorrow morning. comcast is getting their shit together later in the afternoon tomorrow. the syllabi for the monday classes will be taken to the copier downtown (orlando) tomorrow mid-afternoon, then picked up monday morning. i must convert files to pdfs and post them, possibly tomorrow morning. later in the week syllabi, they will be done on monday. must go to school tomorrow.

anna, i know the student who wrote the penis comment on the student evaluations, read closely the comment did not suggest offense at multiple penises (freud discusses such a horror in his essay, “medusa’s head,” worth reading, avail online, quick) — she was simply bored by so many penises. i can see this boredom in the utterance but not in the vision. to see so many penises seems scary, not boring. but so many words, as in my book manuscript, after some time, how many penises per page is necessary, after all?

at the end of the post, i doubt the new bipolar friend will have a future. but at least we will not be acquaintances. unfortunately, we will be strangers no longer. i now see my psychiatrist twice a week, monday and wednesday, i find it helpful to talk — “symbolize,” would be a word here — it binds feelings to words, affects to speech, emotions to abstractions, content to form.

i should like to fly one day, but only if i am the only one in the air.

the delta is nice this time of year, but i miss the corn —

mister pinkster