grindr fails and other unrecyclables

andy pink, chicago ill —

for daisy with pinks, too lazy for kinks —

andy here, first off, the update on the health situation: things have been unbearably bum smooth for the last abouts month, it may be due to the undulating quietude of the scornful illness — per my white psychiatrist's perspective, no doubt — though i am want to say that it is the added necromantic abilify, courtesy of a farm lab in north korea unto a capitalist factory farm in japan, which has always been a good drug for me, back to my rochester days on the diss, which has done the trick, and at 15mg, which i may arbitrarily boost to 20mg, on my own, i think i am well on my way to stability for the rest of 16, and possibly beyond, into my 40s, post december, i also think it is possible that the topomax, which i think is widely considered a weak and mixed drug — and is used for all ilks of maladies from obesity to seizures — the topomax may be drawing closed circles of inner peace around the small nipples of my bosom — i should post pics of my pecs on this site, coming soon, if spoiler alert: they are tiny, these pink nips — and i may ask to increase the tompomax dose, which is at a mid range of 50 bid, to 75 bid when i see the doc team on thursday, in the place of a reading of the lithium blood serum level, which will be deferred until friday; in any case, mostly smooth moves, though i did manage to take a perhaps unnecessary 2mg dose of haldol yesterday, which was successful, as i was in a bit of red bout with purple paranoia which was not an orange emergency situation but was uncomfortable and tight, which it often is, and i found myself wanting to quell this stiff discomfort, i have come to realize that a pop of 2mg rather than the usual 1mg is a better elixir for the inner tension of paranoia — the catastrophe has not happened yet, contra heidegger — when it rears its monstrous and diversionary cerebral cortex.

i am now semi certain that trevor will not die of cancer : ) but i am also semi convinced that he will always be a bit sickly, or sallow, from his liver disfigurement : ( but this is fine by me, he will always be able to playfully banter on the telephone, in his easygoing way, with an autistically tinged ring of needed affirmation from his ginger'd exboyfriend from afar; and i will alway be there for him, exboyfriend, as i am, and we will always be together, in our way; i have decided that i should like to write a book with him, together, i think this would be a splendid project; but it would have to wait until after his diss, and perhaps after he publishes the diss as a book with routledge. up next for me, is the marxism book project, which i have a bit on with althusser and ranciere, and even a bit of marx written up too, and also finishing (which needs work) 'a pervert's manifesto' — with michael williams, mostly mike's work, to be published on this site, for mike's book — but also, most intriguingly — for me, the in-progress work, 'the zyprexa files,' a fictionalized memoir about madness, sex, death, violence, and family, which will include snippets from my medical records inpatient at various mental hospitals in the northeast; this will be wonderful, a fictionalized nonfictional memoir account of my life, and i hope to work on bits of it in the class i'm taking at emerson college this semester starting, soon — tomorrow — in a class of likely 18 years olds with me, the most handsome, smartest, funniest, most charming, likely best writer, but to a degree — even as best dressed — a good deal older, and perhaps most vintage, in the entire room of souls in this college classroom. i will take occasional notes, of the notes to the files, and write up the notes as an entry in tomorrow's edition to the fact sheet.

on grindr last night, a beauty hit my up ("hmu"; babies today) and we chatted briefly, with his impromptu several "hahaha" and "idk" (babies today) and then it became evident that he was simply toying with me (there must be a babies today acronym for this ploy, though i do not know it); and, so, i left him, who lived in "baker" — ? babies humor — rather hurt, really, for no good reason, and i guess, i can see, in a way, how such shenanigans are fun, for someone, a baby, i suppose, though probably not all that good looking, i'm sure the pic was a fake, probably a fattie, of some sort, no doubt truly 18 though, but it still hurt, not least because my pic for some reason was the object of a reasonable ruse, i was, qua pic, a likely target for this type of game ("hmu" or its equivalent in baby speech). in any case, there was no action last night, or even real banter, which is all i'm really looking for, other than friendship with young gay guys, too, so i called it a night, took my 4 pills of doxylamine (what the babies call "unisom") and my 4 dephnilyphine (what the babies call "benadryl") and hit the ball sack; i did manage to jerk off twice yesterday — mike said he jerked off four times yesterday, and i believe him — i've moved toward jock porn this past week and mike's on a roll with bel ami twinky euro porn; to each his own, in lonely desperation. (how mike can jerk off to euro porn and still despise the — and my own — uncut dick is beyond ratiocination.) the book edits are coming along well; i should receive the rest of the corrections from the printers today or tomorrow and finish this epic round of proofreading by friday, wait a week, get them back, do the final round of proofreading, wait a week, check the corrections of the corrections, and then authorize for publication; it may very well be published on the birthday of mike's father, october 3, which would be stunning, and yet another reason to believe in, as mike puts it in the book, the spirit of the system —

re dave's illustrations for the book; with so much discussion of the penis in the book — and also of the clitoris — it is surprising that there is no iconic (rather than simply symbolic) figuration of the penis in the book — iconographically, the penis is nowhere to appear in the book, there is virtually no phallic imagery in the book, none, and perhaps that was dave's intention, i never did ask him, i do like it this way, i think the proper motivation of the pervert, at his best, is to entirely do away with the penis; i can say, and i know mike certainly agrees, as did the guy i went on a date with a month ago, whom i explicitly asked — men are simply sexier in clothes than without them; the cloth, the fabric, the design, the outfit — cotton, leather, canvas, silk, velvet, and so on in form; but more so in function — the veil, obfuscation, obstacle; these are the desirable antiobjects of the pervert's pleasure; desire qua obstacle is the pervert's pleasure, and clothing is this functional obstacle to the penis qua object. it is an excruciating yearn for the penis, it is presence, as visible, as available, in its immediate visibility, a presence that is quiet, and still, unmoving, without twitch or touch, still and quiet, unmoved, this is the penis that is obscured by the jockstrap and the cup, by the boxer and the brief, by the jeans and the cords, this object is suspended and in abeyance, and the unavailability of this object — which must be kept secret at all costs because it is precisely not the object of desire even it if pretends to be — simulates itself as — this object of desire; for the pervert — for mike and andy, for you and for the people who are the same as you — there is no proper object of desire; the subject is entirety full, and the self-affection of masturbatory gestalt plenitude, the nothing is missing complementarity queerness to a lackluster dissatisfied, violent and depressive, heterosexuality, this subject of the queer, the pervert, needs no object; everything veils everything and, for this reason, the all is revealed, at once, in plain sight.

i'm here at hoodlo cafe in charlestown, where i frequently come to haunt mike, as mike haunts me, and i've deferred writing about him in this entry to the fact sheet, not sure why, it is very pleasurable to write him, write about him, symbolize his body, especially his movements, and our distant alienated relationship, but our bond is so desperately visual and physical — but without touch — that it is an effort of suspension and imagination — of the real into the ideal — to put him and us into words for the reader. i thought the other day whether the penis can be appreciated apart from the personality — which i suppose is obviously true, as is the case in any dirty audible porno flick, or any wet still porno photo, or any one night stand or any quickie tryst — but does the personality of the man enhance appreciation of the aesthetic of its owner? were mike's penis to be objectively — from a subjective perspective, such as my own — not the prettiest and the fairest in my kingdom, would i appreciate it all the more because he is charming and humble and funny and smart and hardworking? these are my criteria, self wise of the other:

1. charming (which is a complex set of criteria, and interact with the body in a peculiar, and in some ways unexpected and unpredictable, set of ways, contingent on such dimensions as height, for instance);

2. funny (extremely important; and also helpful if sense of humor is variable; dry is really quite lovely, and sometimes difficult to meet at, because it is so subtle, it is difficult sometimes to cultivate a dry rapport, between two, but it is certainly worth putting in the time, to develop the bond, because there is nothing quite as sacrosanct and sexy as dry material between two in love; witty is great but i can get jealous of another's prowess in wit if it exceeds my own talents; deadpan (close to dryness) is good; and i love absurdist, if i have the energy);

3. kindess (at the right time, to the right degree; without moralism);

4. humility (not overdone, but combined with a variant of shyness or awe with the world and its grandeur/monstrosity);

5. smart (this naturally follows from funny and charming, i suppose, but it also intersects with politics, not necessarily of primary interest, to the man under scrutiny and potential appreciation, mike i'm thinking of here, but a tendency toward radical politics, bikes over autos, is a necessity, or an intuition about politics is crucial, a general proper sensibility about the proper order of the world, is necessary here);

6. handsome (and i do believe looks grow over time, with me, it need not be love at first sight, and when it is, it tends to be overwhelming, as it was with patrick, and it can't possibly end well, as it probably won't with mike; better for it to grow, organically, for there to be some initial, 'he's cute,' without an overpowering sense of urgency to be deferred).

i realized the magic of mike's glasses: they are coke bottle; they are thick; i think, quite genuinely, he has a thick prescription; it is nice to fantasize that the prescription is due to overreading, an obsession with books, with letters and texts, but it is probably due to some congenital failure, i can imagine a boy with glasses, little glasses and a thick strap around his pudgy neck, made fun of by the boys, faux flirted with by the girls, short and pudgy, with glasses, this is my mike, and i feel very strongly that i love him and perhaps that i always loved him. i wonder whether i would fall this way — like i did for p*trick — if i weren't manic depressive; i usually think of my psychical tick as an inadequation between affect and reality — that my feelings do not properly correspond with the world, that my emotions do not properly fit with the situation — and perhaps this is the case with andy and mike at hoodlo cafe in charlestown, right at this moment at 9:18AM on september 6 16, the day of the return to school, late in this evening, in south boston. but i still believe, at least since patrick, in love at first sight, and i think i felt this way about mike — who is otherwise, at least according to kate, and perhaps by any objective (or subjectivized objective) standard, simply ordinary, a regular handsome guy, perfectly a guy, not spectacular, but in the way i see him: broadway showstopper with punk aesthetic. i may have missed the secret kernel that i ultimately found in him the first couple of times that i witnessed him, i cannot recall for certain, but i am almost positive that quite quickly — and perhaps in an instant — i recovered from my indifference and noted the extraordinary beauty of this ordinary boy. i am bound to never tell this boy how i feel, this boy is destined to never read the fact sheet, and our affair will remain the fodder for public consumption only. one day we will meet, and i will ask him, 'i know, it's like' —

jheri curls for mary girls,

andy pinkster

word on mental illness: given that western medicine is the paradigm which dominates the treatment and definition of madness in our time, mental shenanigans are understood primarily — in principle — through the prism of the healthy/unhealthy binary opposition; certain behaviors (modes of thinking, styles of acting, ways of feeling, and so on) are deemed "healthy" and those which deviate from these "healthy" modalities are defined as "unhealthy." but it is crucial to realize that the healthy/unhealthy opposition is also mapped onto other binaries in the culture, primarily good/bad, right/wrong, and appropriate/inappropriate. no matter western medicine's — and the dsm's — will to situate mental illness within the opposition of healthy/unhealthy, the issues of goodness, rightness, and appropriateness invariably seep into the evaluations and judgements of mad members of the community. qua unhealthy, we are deemed bad, wrong, and inappropriate — our thoughts, our behaviors, and our feelings; this is inevitable if mental illness is considered an "illness" through the prism of the healthy/unhealthy binary opposition, and it is invariable if the etiology of mental illness is considered a "broken brain," whether in the metaphor of "genes," "biochemical imbalance," or other somatic explanation. but how are crazy people to live in the world, and live with themselves, happily and proudly, if they are to accept, and not be accepted as, bad, wrong, and inappropriate?

there really is no good answer to this question. for this reason, it makes sense to quietly but fiercely reject the broken brain theory of mental illness and even to contest the idea that mental illness is an illness altogether, along with it that mental illness is a deficit in need of rehabilitation or management or cure, whether from a counselor, a psychologist, a social worker, a psychiatrist, or a pill. but even then, in such an impossibility, against the psychiatric pharmaceutical industrial complex, it is hard to imagine that homo sapiens, in their everyday stupid cruelties, will not, as they have learned from western medicine, still not judge crazy people as, if not unhealthy, then at least bad, wrong, and inappropriate. it would be best, in the best of all possible panglossian worlds, to enjoy madness and its wild and wooly manifestations — to celebrate the irrational and the unreasonable — but white and plain humans who are bored on trains and cowardly in cars are unlikely to meet the energy of the crazy that they encounter on the streets and in the stores. but, that admitted, there must be a space carved out in the culture for the expression of madness — in all of its seething hot glory — in its unhealthy (or not) good, wrong, and inappropriate electricity. that space is art. the text is the space of the irrational and the unreasonable, and it is the time and place for the symbolization of all that is deemed deviation from the good, the right, and the appropriate. the mad are not inherently or essentially creative for any reason other than that their modalities of behavior, styles of thinking, and modes of feeling must be relegated to the margins of the text in the spaces of aesthetics. art is the space of madness, the time and place for the bad, the wrong, and the appropriate — qua health. this is so for sheer reasons of practicality and logistics — it is a place to appreciate the unappreciable.

the possibility of this release of madness to the margins of the society in the space of art has been opened by the postmodern baudrillardian 'hyperreal' or simulation of a 'map without a territory' — the idea being that the sign is split from reference, that the imaginary is split from the real, that language is split from the world. but unfortunately, the hyperreal has been inverted in late postmodern culture under identity politics and multiculturalism — the ideological supplement of late capitalism — and instead of the triumph of the sign over the referent, and the imaginary over the real, and language over the world, the exact reversal of this hyperreal move has transpired. instead, the imaginary has taken on the value of the real, the sign has become truthful, and language has become equivalent to world; now, the imaginary is real, the sign is true, and language is the world. now, rather than the sign divorced from the referent, the sign is the referent. all of language has become a metalanguage; all of language has become a philosophy — precisely the reverse of the autodeconstruction of philosophy that postmodernists promised with the severance of language from reality. in the dissolution of the sign, the imaginary, and language into the incinerator of the referent, the real, and the world, the space of art — simply: artifice — has been erased and, in the process, madness and its free expression of the bad, the wrong, and the inappropriate in the outside of the world has been lost. there is now no place for madness — bad, wrong, and inappropriate — apart from the world of the referent of the healthy, the good, the right, and the appropriate. the art of madness has been violently swallowed — in the form of a pill via pc politics — by the real of world. rather than hyperreality, as baudrillard predicted of postmodernism, we have hyporreality, as i call it, which is the return of the referent to the sign, the real to the imaginary, and the world to language. there is no space to hide from the dimension of healthy/unhealthy — and good/bad, right/wrong, and appropriate/inappropriate. the mentally ill are locked in the dimension in which their modalities of feeling, styles of behavior, and forms of thinking can only be expressed in the society of normativity: healthy, good, right, appropriate — the real, the referent, the world — such that the subjectivity of those who are a bit off, a little weird, kind of eccentric, not quite right, a tad beyond the pale, and sort of off base — we, we mentally ill, we can only be consigned to bad behavior, wrong thinking, inappropriate feelings, and unhealthy lives. given this, how are we possibly to feel good about ourselves? given this, how are others to feel good about us?

the problem with this excursus is not the analysis but the logistics; madness is not an aesthetic affair but an everyday happenstance; it is on the street, in the bedroom, on the subway, in the classroom, at the coffeeshop, at work, in the restaurant, and so on; it cannot be confined to the page, the canvas, the book, the play, the theatre, or the poem; rather, it erupts, anywhere, unpredictably, and quickly, apart from a chosen audience, or spectator, even apart from an actor or a performer; it is an everyday accident, and it is part of our daily lives, either as the sick and demented or the normal and annoyed; it can be categorized as the bad, wrong, and inappropriate of the aesthetic — unhealthy art, or an art of the negative — but it is also situated in the everyday and so it is the appearance and manifestation of the bad, the wrong, the inappropriate, and the unhealthy — the abnormal, even if it is a regular happenstance — in everyday life, in the world of the referent, the real, and reality, not of the hyperreal, but precisely of the anchor and the foundation of the artifice of art. at best, then, madness must be conceived as a performance art of everyday life — theatrics of the negative — an aesthetic of existence, an art and care of the self which cultivates — by accident, perhaps unintentionally, without reason or logic, without choice or decision — which manifests the irrational and the unreasonable in the bad, the wrong, and the unhealthy — the strictly abnormal — in everyday life, an artistic performance of the abnormal that can be appreciated as a work of art in its everyday monstrosity and spectacle. this is ultimately the modality of spectatorship — in shocked horror and befuddled awe — that the madman should be witnessed as, a crazed performance of the abnormal, the deviation of reason, the divergence of the rational, the showcase of the bad, the spotlight of the wrong, and the performance of the unhealthy in the pure showmanship of the abnormal in its bright positivity in contrast to the gray dreariness of the otherwise everyday good, right, healthy, and normal of the prosaic busyness of the world that we know and loathe, ready to expire from in a gesture toward an other that is yet to come, whether the other world or the other revolution. you should be lucky to witness this show — spotlight on madness — and to dismiss it as a "broken brain," splattered on the stone and cement of the public sphere is to dismiss the precious value of the free ticket to the performance you respect: the bad, the wrong, the unhealthy, and the abnormal. you respect: the irrational and the unreasonable. you respect: the deviation and the divergence. you respect: what cuts, what trips, what bites, what fucks with your codes and conventions, your behaviors and your niceties. you respect: and you take it. and then you applaud, and then you go home, and then you respect yourself, and then yet you wish: would i one day be bad, wrong, unhealthy, and abnormal, too. would be the pill for it!

if you see mike, tell him i say, "i know, it's like" —

andy pink on the ice rink

this afternoon:

vagina poetry

walk

nap

shower

this evening:

teach

jerk off

write, i will write mike a letter tomorrow, and i will tell him everything