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

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.

Yeah, Morbz, how's it going?

I have my final radiation treatment tomorrow! Surgery later this summer.

I'm on a new regimen post-radiation, too new to evaluate yet. I feel OK except I'm still way damn tired. So my primary concern is my finances.

<3 Morbs

(ie I need a staff job, not a gig, that'll pay for more of this)

I may hook up with a guy who wrote, "I love kissing in tents."

that sounds kind of hot

Florida in June? Yes.

lol

I should've known my date with a hot Montrealian would go awry when, after texting for a few minutes last night, this world traveler according to OkCupid and high school English teacher wondered if we couldn't eat at PF Chang's because he'd read they serve "good Asian cuisine."

At 6 p.m. tonight he tells me that he doesn't drive. The P.F. Chang's is 30 miles northeast of me.

oof. yeah, missed a bullet there. a hot bullet, sure, but a bullet none the less.

job interview on Monday that might rescue me from ruin

no pressure, though

good luck, morbz!

same!

Get the job Morbs rooting for you

yes

thanks all

gl morbs