Sufficient Champagne

"The historian is the physician of memory. It is his honor to heal wounds, genuine wounds. As a..."

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 17:50:39 -0500

“The historian is the physician of memory. It is his honor to heal wounds, genuine wounds. As a physician must act, regardless of medical theories, because his patient is ill, so the historian must act under a moral pressure to restore a nation’s memory, or that of mankind.”

- Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Weird.

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:41:01 -0500

Me: Chris Brown just got a fucking Grammy. Jesus.
She: Oh like how people who don't beat women do? That's weird.

We’ll see what the remaining gin has to say, but I’m...

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 20:17:39 -0500

We’ll see what the remaining gin has to say, but I’m pretty sure I peaked early this evening.

What kind of cat is this. It looks like Wilford Brimley. I want...

Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:14:00 -0500

What kind of cat is this.
It looks like Wilford Brimley.
I want it.

"And poor Jesus, bless ‘im, if he was still in the grave he’d be rolling over in it."

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 01:00:19 -0500

“And poor Jesus, bless ‘im, if he was still in the grave he’d be rolling over in it.”

- Kiki DuRane

swamibooba: That sounds like a highly subjective question, but...

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 00:12:00 -0500

swamibooba:

That sounds like a highly subjective question, but I say we do need one another. Being gay is a privelige few get to experience and with it comes common ground that goes beyond mere sex and relationships.

Sure, the gay subculture came into being partly as a survival mechanism against overall cultural oppression. I say partly, because gay culture existed long before the concept of pure homosexuality and heterosexuality was accepted. The queens gathered to bitch and camp and make fun of everyone else long before we were severely oppressed. I’m just gonna say it: we had a subculture partly because we are better than everyone else, apart from that whole business of reproduction.

So my take is at this particular point in history we don’t necessarily need each other as a group, but we will eventually. And anyway, we still find each other for friendship. Take you and I - we may share interests in, say, Judy Garland, Babs and Walter Benjamin - but that we both know what it’s like to be a gay man only enriches our discourse.

I don’t want to live in a world where it’s hard to find friends with informed opinions on gay porn and can make a joke about felching that references Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Ah, yes; and yet, but.

I should say, before I make myself totally insufferable, that I push on this question because it is a serious question, not because I think that you ought to be made to contradict yourself. I me thinks you’re intuitively onto something quite correct. But I did happen to sign me up for a course called “Homosexuality and Psychology” and I me see no reason why I I should be the only one made to suffer for my mine shitty choices, yes? So once more into the—giggles!—breach.

——————————

There are easily eight different ways to come at this.

An identity built on sex is a contradiction in terms, because identity is etymologically about same-being and sex presumes and requires different-being. It actually depends on the monadic subject. So we fuck lonely, needing more the space between one and another than one another ourselves.

Claiming the same-being of any sexual practice is ridiculous; why is my attraction to cocks any more unifying than my attraction to blondes?

Indeed, the relationship between practice and identity

————————————

Gallic shrug, I made myself tired and stopped caring. It’s all very desiccated and somehow misses the point. Maybe that’s the more pertinent question: what is the point? What is at stake in identifying, in talking about reciprocal supra-personal needs?

I think the stakes are written in part in gay blood—in lonely, angry suicides and in self-abnegating practices of unsafe sex and in stunted and frustrated flows of desire.

(This is all very unrefined, but deal.)

But so then if we’re bleeding all over these real and valuable cuts between one thing and another, what about those of us who don’t seem to notice?—we’re thrown back on the stupid gay people. For whom perhaps a better word is “ignorant.” They’ve been granted—they’ve inherited—the freedom to ignore.

Which is a freedom, not a liberation.

But what, still, are they missing—what, still, are the stakes?

So, in "The Education of Henry Adams", do you think the passage about his sister's suicide is pretty much the best depiction of death-by-tetanus EVAR, or do you have a better example? Also, what kind of bourbon are you drinking? I am aware that this technically counts as two questions, so shut it.

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 23:02:00 -0500

As the celebratory post-regatta yacht drifts [I literally unintentionally pulled up my sleeves at this moment as I tried to think of adjectivedverbs but gave up and still settled on] bloated, palely towards a lonely point on the impossible, impassible horizon, a school [or whatever more-than-one-thing thing, you fucker] of beluga sturgeon flits across its bow BEFORE LITERALLY JUST FUCKING EXPLODING IN THE VAGINA. THE FISH-VAGINA. I MEAN IT. BOOM. WHO KNOWS, GLOBAL WARMING OR SOME SHIT, RIGHT. The drifting yacht is showered in the choicest beluga caviar, enough to feed armies, nations of the fattenedthinnenedfattenedthinnenedfattenedagain—if only they could do more than bash their faces against it—if only they could shift their lower upper-New-England jaws to chew.

P.S. Maker’s Mark, the “mark” part marking the place where what I could swallow and what I could afford perfectly intersected.

This is an idiotic post about "process." Do not read this idiotic post about "process."

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 21:07:53 -0500

Thesis §4 begins with 900 of the most solid words I have ever written. I wrote them a year ago. Everything I’ve tried to add to them just mars the loveliness of what’s already there. I have honestly no idea how to get over this self-erected hurdle.

How is the new medication working out? And what's the progress report with writing?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 20:32:00 -0500

Hey, one I can answer soberish! It’s very kind of you to ask, you know.

I’m not quite sure yet how the new meds are working, and I’m trying to be very careful about not talking myself into a narrative about them. My psychopharm and I are titrating up on what’s called Emsam, which is the brand name of a transdermal patch that delivers 6mg, 9mg, or 12mg per 24 hours of the MAOI selegiline. I’m up to 9mg/24hr as of today. MAOIs are of course a venerable and powerful class of antidepressants, normally relegated to near-last-resort status (nowadays, one normally has to fail a few categories of the modern reuptake inhibitors as well as tricyclic antidepressants before a doctor will try an MAOI; I’ve failed various combinations of SSRIs, SNRIs, and Wellbutrin, with and without mood-stabilizer kickers, as well as ECT, but insisted that we skip over tricyclics and straight to the real ball-busting stuff) in part because they normally require severe dietary restrictions. But because Emsam is delivered through the skin directly into the bloodstream, it bypasses the liver and goes straight to the brain on its first pass through your system and can therefore be used on any diet.

At the lowest dose, two weeks in, I’ve had good days and bad days. But I’d say that the absolute lows that I’ve experienced in the past and came close to again during the pre-MAOI med washout aren’t there. I’m tempted to say that I’m responding about as well to a baby dose of Emsam as I did to massive doses of other drugs, which is a positive sign. Really, the fact that I detected any response is a positive sign: in what I’ve read and heard, people either don’t respond at all or it changes their lives. Anecdotally, there doesn’t seem to be a middle ground. Of the ten people my psychopharm has prescribed Emsam to, five turned completely around and five didn’t notice a thing; people on the wild wild web report either complete remission or nothing. I’m cautiously optimistic—MAOIs are particularly effective for treating atypical depression like mine, and they’re seriously fucking potent (I take the fact that eating cheese on most MAOIs can kill you to indicate that clearly they do a lot of something). Meanwhile, I also terminated with my old shrink and I’m making the transition into full-blown classical psychoanalysis, which is something I have far more faith in than the half-measures of relational psychotherapy or the infantilizing nonsense of the *BTs.

The danger, it seems, lies in mistaking optimism for neurochemical balance—that is, in getting so amped about the potential inherent in the change that I pink-cloud myself into believing that the new drug is working when it isn’t. I suspect—I can’t be sure, of course, but I suspect—that I’ve done that to myself before and it’s ended ugly.

As for work, I had a wonderfully productive few weeks in January when my neurochemistry was all fluxed up with the meds draining out but I could still take my Adderall and Dexedrine and if I stopped writing for even a second I completely and totally collapsed, so, hounded by the threat of melancholic dis-integration, the threat of going gooey à la Margaret Hamilton, I worked constantly and wrote forty or so not-bad pages. I have since become more torpid, but I’m trying to booze and amphetamize—both ends of the candle and all that—my way back into productivity tonight and make a dent in the ethnography section.

WHERE do we GOOOOO frooom heeeeeeeeeeere?!

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:40:00 -0500

DEEP IN MY HEART I’M CON CEAL ING
THINGS THAT I’M LONGING TO SAY.
SCARED TO CONFESS WHAT I’M FEE LING
FRIGH TENED YOU’LL SLIP… AWAY.

I would like tonight to be filled with bourbon-and-askbox joy.

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 18:10:26 -0500

I would like tonight to be filled with bourbon-and-askbox joy.

"Remember that the word psychiatry means ‘healing the soul’, not ‘medicating the brain’."

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 01:08:25 -0500

“Remember that the word psychiatry means ‘healing the soul’, not ‘medicating the brain’.”

- Elio Frattaroli (via psychotherapy)

Dear Shut-Ins and Assorted Bachelorfolk:

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:47:38 -0500

The Keurig Elite has a button for a small mug and a button for a large mug. Much as I suspected, the “Large” button dispenses almost exactly enough boiling water for those ramen instant-lunch styrofoam cup dealies.

You’re welcome.

fuckyeaharresteddevelopment: Guide to the Chicken Dance (via...

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 18:25:40 -0500

fuckyeaharresteddevelopment:

Guide to the Chicken Dance

(via Arrested Development — ANIMAL)

"To be a dumb gay person is a luxury that was won for you by gay people who came before when being..."

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 22:35:08 -0500

“To be a dumb gay person is a luxury that was won for you by gay people who came before when being gay was so complicated and so difficult that dumb gay people didn’t last.”

- Dan Savage, from the documentary Making the Boys, about the play/movie The Boys in the Band.

Gay history is so fascinating and so heartbreaking, it’s a shame it isn’t more well known, especially now that there are enough fearless gays and lesbians to tell their stories and the stories of older generations.

(via swamibooba)

Truthful Today

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:25:17 -0500

The queer obsession with trash sometimes seems to me like a celebration of shame.

Wish me luck…

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:16:08 -0500

Wish me luck…

A winner is me.

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 11:31:09 -0500

A winner is me.

When the Adderall wears off and I get depressed again, I start...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 20:49:00 -0500

When the Adderall wears off and I get depressed again, I start to think, “Ugh, posting self-indulgent self-aggrandizing little notes to Tumblr? Might as well be LiveJournaling about how jealous all the boys who won’t date you are going to be when you fill out, dick.” Then Amazon tells me which Kindle books it’s anticipating will be most successful and it’s like, “Okay. No, you can do this.”

shamalam: ilovecharts: razzledazzy: Tumblr this is a...

Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:22:13 -0500

shamalam:

ilovecharts:

razzledazzy:

Tumblr this is a different poll on the same site. Come on guys we can fix this, it’s a disgrace.

Vote here.

Since this screenshot, ~4,000 more for oppose and ~53,000 more for support.

Get cracking, Tumblr.

It makes me tired and sad that I care, but clickety click click.