I'm Also in the Library and It's Raining: WINTER 2018/2019 GAY THREAD

what kind A? i'm getting a thinkpad!!!!!!!!!!!!

a Dell laptop

do i need to b worried about viruses?

Almost two years and none to speak of besides the mild flu I got in 2018

:) awesome

iMac, about 10 years old.

oo i like those, i wish i had a desktop

MacBook pro, five years old, new harddrive at beginning of 2017 (got in right before Applecare expired). had slight dent on screen from when a drunk lesbian decided to show off her nunchuck skills in the house.

lord, have i told y'all how many places i've lived since i was last active on here? i don't even live in California any longer lol.

nooooo, give us a rundown? it's good to see you here.

All right, surm asked for it.

So, Theo and I are still together. After being homeless for a month in early 2012, I went hopping freight trains with him and our best friend Amanda. Came back to Oakland and ended up sharing a room in a fucked up house with some queer methed out witches. we were there for about 8 months.

The meth took over and they kicked us out because we asked them to not smoke so much meth, so we bought a used 14-foot UHaul box truck in hopes of outfitting it into an RV. while doing modifications and repairs, we lived with Amanda in her room in a fucked up drunk-punk/crust punk squat filled with heroin and lots of bad, mean dogs. we lived there for about four months, then moved into the truck permanently and parked next to our friend's warehouse, where we stayed for the next nine months. it was a nice period, to be honest, because the neighborhood was friendly and filled with other weirdos living out of their trucks and vans, so there was some community solidarity.

then we decided to rent a room in a house a few blocks away to use as an office/studio. we lived there for about a year and a half, sleeping in the truck while doing the rest of our daily activities in the house. rent was cheap, we lived with good friends, it was a nice time.

eventually, because we'd been spending a lot of time there, we took a chance on moving to a hobo/railroad museum in far northern California for the winter. we were caretakers there, and while it was fine but a little hard at first, our lives were eventually threatened by this crazy methed out dude named Croatian Mike, and we started keeping a gun next to the bed in our cabin. we got him kicked off the property, but it was a scary time. eventually, we left the land (despite being told we could stay) because of conflicts with some of the racism and bullshit of other people living there (long story short— one of the other residents was constantly talking shit about us, but it turned out he was a junkie who eventually got kicked off the property).

for four months we lived in the truck on our friend's off-the-grid property at 4500 feet above sea level on the eastern flank of Mt. Shasta, about 10 miles and a fifteen minute drive to the town of McCloud, CA (pop 1500). we had an outdoor kitchen, an outhouse, and built some fences and other infrastructure out while we were there.

eventually, tired of the lack of opportunity in the area, we moved to a queer sustainable farming project in Los Molinos, CA, a small farm town near Redding and Chico. that worked out for a while, we both had jobs and the farm was beautiful, but then some interpersonal drama with other residents caused us to leave in a rush. so, after 6 months, we moved to Chico proper.

there, we lived in a small studio on the property of this very weird faerie dude (lived at Short Mountain and Wolf Creek at various points) for six months...though after two months, we decided to move to Philadelphia, as my parents were having medical issues and we were tired of trying and trying and sort of just scraping by in California.

that was 2017. we up and moved across the US, got a crummy slum apartment, lived in it for 9 months, then bought a cheap house in the same general neighborhood, and have been here for about a year.

so, between 2012 and 2019, i lived in nine places, ten if you include the weed farms we occasionally worked on for more than a month at a time.

oh wait, eleven places if you include the philly spots. lol.

so, maybe that explains my absence here for the past however many years.

damn dude. that's a mighty hard tale and i think it's amazing that you made it through all of that, and with some lols to spare. what a crazy thing that we've all made it back here to witness the journey of the past seven years. life is some crazy shit. i hope you love your house and that you are happy with Theo <3 keep survivin'

Oh wow, I missed that post over the weekend. That's going to make a hell of a road movie someday.

a queer sustainable farming project

Show me how to grow queers!

Send self-loathing, closeted ex-congressmen to Coachella.

lol. xpost, it was actually a really great project, but living with two very sensitive folks who are more "primitivist" than "reasonable" was... difficult to say the least. like, they'd buy irrigation tubing without holes in it because it cost a few cents less than the tubing with holes in it per yard, but then would spend days making holes in the regular tubing. just really pathological cheapskate shit disguised as being "environmentally concerned," tbh.

i'm also glad to be back! hi again, y'all <3

<3

It's June, so here's my (by no means complete, occasionally updated) Pride playlist:

https://open.spotify.com/user/cryptosicko/playlist/4RnlBWPlB2tuxnxvLXZFDV?si=ZSSPXIq4Qzm4ToV1mNEi5g

John Ashbery - self portrait in a convex mirror

oops wrong thread.. the reading and gay threads have similar names rn

well, Ashbery was queer (and I love that poem).

:-) i just ate a whole box of unicorn fudge stripes

I last ate those when Reagan dozed in the Oval Office!

never heard of em

Honestly, a straight pride parade is probably the best possible PR for gays.

xp I bought the "Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror" book of John Ashbery poems many years ago and have never let it go, it is really great

as always I want to revive some Gay Shame events

Well, reread "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" then

:)

I have, many times!

All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.

it's amazing how each time you read a poem like that you come away with something different

that's an interesting read there

I'm in the library and the sun's out!

do we need a spring/summer thread?

Do you need spring/summer head?

my favorite Rosanne Cash couplet.

i just got some but i need more
i've been on a bit of a STREAK

Ashbery was really important to me as a young queer poet, but I haven't read him in years because at a certain point, he started kind of doing the same thing over and over and over and over again.

Not trying to shit on him— his first books and the somewhat later "Flow Chart" really shaped me. (To drive this point home, I've read "Flow Chart" three times, and wrote approximately 35+ pages on Ashbery as an undergrad and grad student lol).

"at a certain point" = 1976, essentially

(i'd put it a little later, but yes)

Sooooo something super weird happened to me this weekend. I had a zoloft induced dissociative fugue. It was so weird I called my friend screaming I have no idea who I am. Scary!!!!!

I hate all of the SSRIs I've tried. some of the weird side effects occurred almost immediately upon starting (tight jaw, grinding teeth, strange dream architecture) and some took weeks to appear (most disturbingly a complete sexual numbing), and I never felt any therapeutic effect.

Was crazy scary but in other ways I do feel it is helping
Medicines are weird man

i went off Lexapro many years ago after a careful titration down. best decision i ever made, but that was for me.

until this whole cancer bullshit i'm dealing with now, i hadn't taken any pharmaceuticals regularly in more than nine years (!!!). to say i have a wicked distrust of the medical industrial complex would be an understatement.

I never felt any therapeutic effect.

my experience too. i'm also wary of pharma -- i'm putting off starting an antibiotic i was recently prescribed at my first doctor's visit in about two years.

i guess i'm going to be a resident of salt lake city for a while.

i'm going broke from i.v. drug use for my cancer, thx Obamacare

How's it all going Morbs, health-wise? What's the prognosis, if it's not too difficult or upsetting to talk about.