parting favors for patrick

anderson pink, allston, massachusetts –

would she had told me precisely where to wrap the ring were it to finally come to the final episode —

i have lasted here a bit longer than perhaps i would have liked, my time would have been better spent gazing at myself naked in the mirror for several minutes, then a good 25 push-ups, then a feigned dust-off, swagger and push, and then back to the mirror, an adjustment of the lights, drawing the curtains and parting the sheets, he rises from the backroom, cups and caps, coffee bags and shirt amiss, dusted hair — always genuine —

i made a list of things i would like to do with patrick on our first date:

1. just talk.

i feel so utterly lost, i know that i have lost perspective — which is a noble and happy sign — but i feel like i’m melting into the woodwork. i restarted the wellbutrin after taking a week off, it’s hard not to conclude that it makes things worse when i am already under the comforter without the comfort. it seems completely unable to lift me out of the rainbow void, though perhaps its supposed talent is to keep me from looking down as i sink. i feel so utterly alone — which is false, a fable — but it’s hard not to conclude in such a state that i am isolated. i can barely function like this. i am sure that my mood will perk and please once school starts in a couple of weeks — i am always down in the dumpster when i’m off work — but this seems especially bad. yet, that said, there is the likelihood that this is exactly what i experienced last year at this time, perhaps it is better this time around, i have lost all perspective. i am able to remind myself of the impossible: that this mood will pass, like a train, for the next stop, better — more confident.

what i don’t understand is how i have lost such mojo since 30. i was so utterly popular and happy — zip a dee doh dah plantation — in grad school in my 20s, then when i moved to another undisclosed location and found myself in a fearsome mental hospital for 7 months — it ran me aground, psychologically. the nurses and doctors tortured me — all of them — and i must say that i never really recovered, or have not recovered yet. that hospital did more damage to me than any psychological trauma or misfired neuron or unnecessary medication. there is such a thing as psychiatric abuse, and those who have never experienced it seem to uniformly dismiss it. i think many patients have been abused by psychiatry and simply haven’t noticed; i cannot determine whether this is better or worse, i am tempted to say the latter but on my bad days i acknowledge: the former. i am tethered to psychiatry for the meds — even if my psychiatrist is firmly anti-psychiatry, a relief — but i find it so demoralizing that so many — patients or not — do not recognize psychiatric abuse. psychiatrists are criminals — so many of them — and to listen to patients defend these monsters because they don’t know any better — are uncritical, unthinking — i find so troublesome that it leaves me with the satisfaction that i will never get better. i realize that i am at a down spot now, that i am pitying myself in a way that i can simultaneously see as reprehensible — i will never take responsibility —

i made an updated list of things i would like to do with patrick on our first date:

1. just talk. like we are talking for the very first time.

i was so confident in my 20s. i would like to return to my heights, it will return in the classroom, but i will have to hold until then.

update re patrick: tense, conditional.

update re trevor: hiatus, streaming.

update on dan: companion or alcoholic?

for those who feel it and those who wish it,

for those who dish it and those who listen, comment, and move on with their lives —

andy

you know who really stays in touch well by email?

groupon.