I recently had the pleasure of attending Stephen van Dyck's thesis reading.

"A book-length conceptual writing project called "People I Met from the Internet," a detraumatizing, horizontalizing, decriticalizing of memories, spaces and otherness to sameness/"homoness."

In anecdotal footnotes, Stephen presented a coming out story similar to Joe Brainard's I Remember. The emergent list format, as popularized by the 25 Things, is a style whose parallel structures grants a certain equality to each phrase. The teen tryst in a New Mexico cave is aligned with each encounter thereafter, each with a story, each with the same detached yet ironic delivery.

I was intrigued by the way the text bloomed when read aloud. Having encountered the text in a previous draft, the horizontal legal paper and tiny font was a bit daunting. However, when read selections, the room exploded.

The introduction was by Matias Viegener, recently featured in Vice for Fallen Fruit.

There is this strange thing. This Ativan thing. Ativan and Lorazepam are the same thing, the latter is the generic name for it. Last summer's text, Lorazepam and the Valley of Skin, was dedicated I suppose to dating whores and benzodiazepines.

It will be a year now that I have been on and off this one. Prescribed to me, yes, by a psychiatrist who seems not to realize that the withdrawals can be fatal. Every month I have withdrawals, every month I go back on again.

But on a more cheerful note, I recently found out that Britney Spears is on Ativan. D-listed had this to say about her conservator double-dosing her to keep her sedated.

Somehow this is funny to me.

Into some blank time.
I want to remember the day.

The fan whirs, the ac flutters.
My nails grow long and sharp.

I'm up early revising a poem. problem at hand: translation. Does what seemed clever in Spanish and French work in plain bold English. Then to Swedish.

Cold water: the dark of morning

Two websites that have caught my eye recently are shrink rap and crazy meds. Both deal with the wide fun world of psychiatry: the former from the perspective of the professional, the latter from the consumer. Shrink rap has at times made me so angry I almost had a seizure at the computer. "How dare they! So this is what that bastard thinks when he ignores me and throws prescriptions." Crazy meds, while a bit web-design challenged (let he who is without sin, yes, true) has been quite helpful.