in other news

andy pink, los angeles, cali —

greetings from compton!

in other news: the lithium level turned in at .6 — this is quite low for me, i’m usually at .8 or .9 but we had gone down from 900 to 750 (and then me to 675) in the hopes of spawning some motivation and commitment. the plan has been executed properly and productively, i think, but i don’t want to ascend. i carry the haldol prn with me everywhere i go, so i will take as needed.

as i’ve stopped smoking (newports) this past month i have been without an invaluable prop. a cigarette really is a prop in a show, a costume or a shoe, a smoker feels naked and vulnerable without it. a cigarette is like a flaming phallus of death — i can’t see how anyone could deny its sexiness, sex and death, pretty much sums it up. it’s a bit like the genet book i’m reading, “funeral rites,” sex and death, sex with hitler, brother crabs, and the like. when my father died, at the funeral parlor, my mother found a way to actually get inside the casket to rest with my father, for a few moments. the only witness was my uncle, his brother. my mother told me this story much later, and she was horrified that she told me, thinking it would be upsetting to me. i had the opposite reaction: i felt such pride and comfort that she had loved him so much as to cuddle with him in his casket in 1984. and he loved her so much that he made room for her, for a couple of moments. my mother later told me that she read a similar anecdote in a simone de beauvoir book some 10 years after she had pulled off the trick herself. but to her, it was original at the time.

i have decided that reading a book in public will be my new prop. instead of cigarette, a metaphor, a book will be in its place. one could wonder what the substitute for the book (as substitute) could be, but such a line of thinking will send us down a bit of a recursive trail which in freud’s view of fetishism can only return to the penis. in genet’s book, being a gay author, there is quite a bit about the penis, there is a discussion of its “translucence” (color, in a way), a discussion that i had never thought about. i did sleep with a guy once who thought that “color” was at issue, the desirable aspect of the penis, and i tend to agree, though this then complicates “color” on the basis of race and ethnicity, differences in the color of the penis. given that slavery and the civil war are the domestic trauma of american history it would only make sense that race relations would be written over the sex organs of the american body. i do wonder whether “translucence” would apply to the penises of other racial and ethnic minorities. is there a black penis translucence? — a latino penis translucence? i tend to think not, which would put in sharp relief that racism insinuates itself in the bedroom, too.

i think that they (we) will eventually cure death, but i think it will require a kind of “paradigm shift,” as they say, a way of curing death that has not been imagined by western medicine. soon, something will emerge about death — information, experience — that will open up the possibility of bypassing it altogether. there may be some way to access the afterlife (which i believe in) without passing through death, may be so in the future, i think.

if anyone cares to comment, i would like to know: which is better, a good laugh or a good orgasm? i would say laugh, but i think in the end i don’t much care for sex, or at least anymore. i still like looking and peeping, but it all seems so exhausting now. i must be depressed.

i have returned to the book manuscript. i am currently working on paring down the sentences, many of which are much too long, making the book easier for the reader. it is quite possibly the most tedious work imaginable on a book, and i’ve got hundreds of pages to tinker with. each fuckin sentence, every one. the book, my friend donnie insists, must be divided into three sections (or volumes) and only the first will be pitched to the academic publisher. the rest will be later. i am working with an illustrator for the book, some conceptual drawings to illuminate ideas in the text, it is coming along well. i will have to tediously edit, then rearrange, then somehow make each volume a whole, consistent and total, even as it gestures toward its cousins. speaking of: my parents were first cousins, married, though i tend to think that such an odd arrangement had nothing to do with my father’s suicide. the problem there i think was that he had an asshole for a father. i did not. i think i am allergic to my new moisturizer.

one of the comments in my anonymous student evaluations from the summer, for my gender and sexuality class, was: “the professor said the word “penis” 40 times in a 2 minute span, i counted.” i’m really quite proud of that.

from a frosty pittsburgh, andy