the unlikely

andy pink, found in georgia —

"order big kids, it’s on me,” said the black death —

i have been up to 700 on the lithium for a few days now (up from a self-imposed 675 from 900). i am now much less irritable but i still feel like straw, i would prefer to go up in flames, i could if the conditions were right, but at the moment i’m just causing myself hay fever and uncomfortable pokes and prods from various sides of the stack. ultimately, as my psychiatrist will endlessly reiterate, the meds can only do so much — we are at a primitive stage of medicine and its various clumsy interventions, yet. it is difficult to hope for much from a paradigm that cures cancer by setting off a nuclear bomb in your pancreas. that said, i generally enjoy the hospital dramas on television (“er” was a weird exception).

what i want to commit to is: i will stick it out with the lithium at 700, stick with lamictal at 400 which i am now convinced does almost nothing whatsoever, i will stay far from the cold space in the back room where the abilify is hid, i will resist klonipin, and i will attend nightly meetings of “match game pm” reruns in my bedroom. for this — wellness, for sure!

my new crazy person friend (who originates from us territory) i saw last week, downtown, by the factories. we jaunted over to a fairly new restaurant (a year, now two locations, one near my mother in a wealthy suburban village of this metropolis which, this village, is simultaneously situated in three separate locales, itself) — what is important is: jorge and i went to a salad restaurant, all different local (?) greens, kale, various other leafy greens, as they sometimes say at whole foods, and then with various healthy (but not as a way of life, so i could surmise) with many good additionals and sides; i ordered the “september salad” which featured various nuts and twigs whose names i am unable to remember because i did not know them — a fancy type of nut comes to mind, name is still blank on — they poured the beans and beets and breads in a tin bowl — but was it the dreaded aluminum!? — in a bowl, mixed vigorously (must be the most enjoyable job on the line, i assumed) — and then, in a way so intuitive to the palates of even the most sophisticated of eaters — she simply asked: “would you like your dressing light, medium, or heavy?” isn’t that quite lovely? — it would be so easy for such a bourgeois place to enforce a light sprinkle of dressing — light and you will like! goes the imperative — but no no — to each his own load.

jorge got something with chicken. i was even more turned off. we are both marxists — he considers himself a “socialist,” which i would not identify as, as such. in my worldview socialism is a mere bureaucratic form of capitalism. i lived in montreal for a time (also the people’s republic of paris) and i didn’t like the various tawdry forms of help, assistance, and protection, all the while as mounds of credits and debts, +’s and -‘s, added and subtracted their way toward the distribution of bills and coins. what is quite fanciful if unimaginable about a marxist communism (about which marx himself wrote very little) is that it happily does away with such equivalence, the dollar and the coin, the currency, and so no counting is required. i must say, at my moments, afar from my various rulers and protractors and casio calculators, i do wonder: was mathematics an epic historical mistake?

in any case, hopefully jorge and i will dinner yet again — perhaps this monday — and i will finally have a properly crazy friend here in the village of saphris. to live in the village of saphris is to understand that in the lands of the american way, that hard work, personal enterprise, a patriot’s freedom, a victor’s liberty, and the occasional sexual indiscretion — the american way — to live in the village of saphris is to understand that in the red and the blue (and the territory of puerto rico) that it is possible for anyone to achieve the dreams of their therapeutic outcome — whether they were born on the wrong side of the tracks in zyprexaland with a genetic case of hypoglycemia, or were born in the public housing units of the risperidone projects with a bacterial infection of dopamine inconsistency, or were born in the housing shelters of geodon court with a viral case of the unfortunates, or were born in the local jails and state pens of the ghettos of abilify with a constitutional form of a treatment-resistent case of the sluts — all of us, from projects to courts to lands to cells — all of us can one day make it to the village of saphris, despite creed or color or genetic mutation. for me, as an austrian jew, like freud, living with various dsm diagnoses in the middle of the united states — dylan, the orthodox jew, dylan is happy to say:

the unlikely occurred yesterday:

i finished up classes at the college that i teach at (amherst) and i was on my way home on the trolley. on my mind, various mistakes in the gay class, i showed kenneth anger’s 1965 “kustom kar kommandos” which is a 3 min short film about a tight-jeaned young buck buffing his hot rod while the song, “dreamlovers,” plays to our hears and our boners. it is an example of what used to be called “camp,” in gay culture, though i suppose no young buck twink worthy of his eating disorder would utter the word “gay camp” let alone know to what such an aesthetic, sensibility, and attitude might refer. kenneth anger’s 3 min film is gay camp, period. there were a few mistakes along the way, to do a name game (30 of us, i have short term memory loss because i used to live in zyprexaland, so i have a hard time with textual trust falls and the like) — we did the name game with: name, where you grew up, and either favorite animal or celebrity crush. i thought for the gay class this might give the kids who are gay (which seem like only a tossed salad of a three course meal) the opportunity to scrawl their sexuality on the stall door. oddly, many of the kids went with favorite animal (lots of “big cats,”as they say) rather than celebrity crush. the crushes that were owned were of course ones (at 37 to 19) i had never heard of — some of the kids modified “crush” to “would want to spend time with” — at the end, i inherited all of this shock and awe and admitted:

my celebrity crush is: giovanni ribisi. my celebrity who i would want to spend time with is: martha plimpton. (it is unlikely i would ever get access to george — why would i? what have i done to deserve? — but, in any case, none of the kids likely recognized martha plimpton.) if i had gone with dianne wiest — perhaps some of us would be playing on the same side of the field during the occasional softball teen tournament, proceeds to the big brothers and big sisters clubs of detroit, michigan.

you do realize, crazy people: there is no way in god’s green goddess salad dressing that detroit can be “bankrupt” with so many able-body, value-producing flesh-and-blood souls lining the streets in search of cigarettes and solace. why must people read the new york times and listen to economists rather than read my book and occasionally comment on my blog? i would blame the jews, but such: i would myself be implicated.

it is unlikely that i will be able to finally turn to the unlikely, as i am not unexhausted by my various interventions in this text, but the unlikely, simply for us, i wanted to share, for those who read earlier:

i saw rouge-boy on the subway yesterday! it was the same line — but it was crowded, i noticed him late, though i have no idea what stop his body pressed against, foot to sole to sneaker to gravel to floor — to what toes and arch and knob — what trolley stop must have been his? his hair was dyed punk purple — and, strangely, i have no idea what color his hair had been on our virginal voyage together. i think it must have been an ordinary brown, elfin, some unexpected silver spikes of stiletto piercings at the top of his enflamed year — he was at the center of the the trolley, standing, myself a bit back, i hesitated but then did it — i managed to get feet closer to his breath. he was with woman, an older woman, possibly in her 50s, white, like his pale face, against the rouge, this woman — who could she possibly be? i figured mother, yet he was so comfortable with her, chatting, not exactly smiling — i have yet to ever properly see his teeth, let alone climb into his mouth, by myself — this woman suddenly didn’t matter, i moved closer in, i wore my startling purple shades, i could have been 32, he looked me in the eye twice. only until i meet rouge-boy again, under the lamps of the dark, at a club i shall wander to tonight, in the fields of the skyscrapers of the midwest — it will only be much later, then that i will have a chance to ask the question i should have asked before, can i ask it now, my rouge:

“do you remember me?”

although i consider him a young boy, and i consider him homosexual, he wore a dress of sorts, it was striped white and black but in no way could it be described in the style of a zebra. even more concerning, for my own purposes, was that he may have tucked the necessary equipment to his chest, taped or stapled or glued or licked — he had small breasts, no cleavage, assumed to be pale like his hairless jaw and cheek, his mother, her transgender man, my love, his angel, puckered i would say of the tips of his ears, with studs — who was this woman? he left with her at my stop, i trespassed the same door, feet in front of them — somehow! — i had been the caboose in the behind — and he was following me, with her, i couldn’t look back, for his glare, but for a moment he must have wondered: who is the strange boy with the hunched shoulders and the surprisingly cool apple green jansport backpack? to fall in love without the violence of words, the confusions of text, the mislays of communication, the subterfuge of letters, the misdeeds of vocabulary — to fall in love in the unsymbolizable ether is to be both schizophrenic and god. and for her to wear an apple green jansport backpack — how could he ever forget to remember me?

i shall show him — nay, read to him — my posts over our first dinner. i hope his name is ryan. if he goes by a female name i’m afraid destiny will fall from her tracks.

in solidarity in our fight for decent service at cvs,

andy