Jimmy Bramlett
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Lexapro

Blog 1 comment lexapro, sex

It’s Been Nice Lexapro

jimmy

August 27, 2023

I’ve been taking Lexapro for about three years, since the aftermath of the LAPD’s fascistic response to the Black Lives Matter protests in late May 2020. I was stuck in a horrible spiral of bad thoughts where I was paralyzed with the conviction that our vote later that year was useless and that the Tangerine Nightmare would invoke martial law and lead a coup. Although I turned out to be a little correct (I didn’t count on His Combover’s complete incompetence and fucking stupidity), I needed something to help me get past those thoughts and live my quarantine life. I found that showering once a week and just staying in bed was probably not the healthiest way of dealing with shit.

After the initial tweakiness as my brainmeats adjusted to the new chemicals, things were fine. I started working at my desk everyday rather than just staying in bed all day. I hosed myself off on a regular basis again. And then once lockdown rules eased up in 2021, I did have a little ho-ish period to make up for lost time. Things were okay. I figured I was lucky that the decreased sex drive from Lexapro didn’t hit me.

But in 2022, I lost my sex drive. At first I thought because I was getting older and my body was producing less testosterone, shit happens. I would get people texting me to hook up, but I just couldn’t be bothered. Then I got to the point where I couldn’t even count the days/weeks/months since the last time I masturbated. Hm. That’s a little alarming.

Fortunately I wasn’t on a high dosage of the pro, so I decided to stop taking it last weekend. I figured if shit gets bad again, I’ll start using it again. But I found it interesting how my sex drive is back and with a fucking vengeance. I texted R last weekend and met with him a couple of days later where he flogged me for a little over an hour. I had a smile on my face the whole time and was completely aroused. (There was no penetration involved since my last sexual contact was in 2021 and I need to open myself up and R is hung like a motherfucking horse.) You don’t know how fucking wonderful it is to feel sexual again. Even though it didn’t affect me one way or another when I was on the pro, having a libido again in a liberation. I should probably write a novel and have Oprah produce the film adaption of it entitled How Jimmy Got His Groove Back. (Rated NC-17 because, duh.)

Now, I am experiencing the tweakiness again, but I figure that’s my brainmeats readjusting to the new chemical composition or lack thereof or whatever. I’m also emotional as hell. The other night I watched Bros and Shortbus, and tell me why the fuck was I teary-eyed during both movies? Although I do get emotional when I watch movies, that reaction was a little extreme. It’s one thing to be happy about a woman finding her orgasm, but it’s another thing to be shedding tears over it.

That’s it.

Gravity's Rainbow

Blog 0 comments books, fiction, gravity's rainbow, thomas pynchon

What the Fuck Have I Gotten Into?

jimmy

August 26, 2023

Around eight years ago I finished David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, so I thought it was about time to get to Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I’m getting towards the end of the first part of the book, at around page 150, and all I can think about is, “What the fuck have I gotten myself into?”

GR is a fucking slog of a tome. My Penguin paperback edition is 776 pages, and unlike IJ there are not over 100 pages of endnotes. Also I started reading this on July 31, so I’m not getting through this easily.

The problem: I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON. It was a very bad sign at the very beginning of the novel after it’s famous opening lines, “A screaming comes across the sky,” we are presented with a mass evacuation of civilians in what I eventually surmised to be London at the end of WWII. The folks are taken to a old hotel outside of the city when all of the sudden we are introduced to Pirate Prentice and his… um… I don’t know who they are to be honest. His flatmates? His coworkers? His army squad? Come to find out that the evacuation scene was a dream, but I went back and tried to see where that was implied. I don’t know. I guess I see it after looking at it a million times, but fuck man. This is just the first three pages.

But no. I’m determined to finish this because we’ve been told that this is the best postwar novel, period. It won the 1973 National Book Award and is allegedly should have been a unanimous Pulitzer Prize winner but was rejected because it was deemed to be obscene among other things. Now THAT is reason enough to get me to finish this motherfucker. But as I went on, with characters coming in and out like a revue, stories jumping around that I didn’t notice had jumped around until I was already knee-deep and completely lost, it’s tough. Like I said, I have no idea what is going on.

Not to say that the writing is bad. It’s really funny and mischievous that you have no idea if the facts Pynchon presents are true or Trumpian. I mean, there is a character who is running around the bombed-out London wasteland with a toilet stuck on his foot. And, from what I’ve read, one of the characters who is meant to be central to the narrative, Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop can predict where a V-2 rocket strikes based on where he fucks bringing up quite a discussion on whether his hardons are a reverse-Pavlovian response.

This isn’t my first rodeo with Pynchon. I’ve read V, Inherent Vice and Bleeding Edge, so I’m well aware of his style and humor. But this one is going to take a few readings to even begin to understand which brings up this question: Is it my fault it’s difficult or is it the author’s fault? Also, if I don’t see the genius in this, does this mean I’m stupid? Well I know other things I do and are ignorant about make me stupid, but is this another reason to add to the list?

I guess I’ll just continue to slog on.

Someone actually made Pirate Prentice’s banana breakfast. via Tom Pynchon’s Liquor Cabinet
Donald Trump Mugshot

Blog 0 comments donald trump, mafia, rico, rudy giuliani

The End of the Mob, Fun and Humanity

jimmy

August 24, 2023

When I was last in Vegas in January, a cabbie and I were bemoaning how expensive things have gotten in Vegas. Gone are the days of the $5 prime rib dinner, cheap show tickets. Now the buffets are over $70 per person excluding drinks. Table minimums are ridiculous. Even “penny” slots make you play $5 a spin if you want any chance of winning something worthwhile.

Just spitting out my normal word diarrhea, I told him that the biggest problem with Vegas was getting rid of the mafia. Sure the mafia were violent, had very subjective takes on morality, but they knew how to take care of customers to ensure they kept coming back. Sometimes you had to forego some short-term profits in order to ensure the long-term profits and sustainability.

With the corporate vultures that swooped in to fill the void that the mafia left and “maximize profits to appease the shareholders,” the humanity of it all left town. (And yes, there is humanity in murder — without the humans, there wouldn’t be the murder, right? Fuck, I think that’s a Slayer lyric.) But these corporations really are about extracting every penny by any means necessary short of murder.

The 1986 explosion of Frank Lawrence “Lefty” Rosenthal’s car. Rosenthal was a professional sports bettor, casino executive and organized crime associate whose career was the basis of Martin Scorsese’s film “Casino”. (Las Vegas Review-Journal)

I started thinking about this because of the Fulton County RICO indictment of Trump and Co. Giuliani prides himself in going after the mob in New York via the very RICO prosecution that he finds himself under and then “cleaning up” the city. Like Vegas, the mob gave way to this very hypercapitalist nightmare where everything is sanitized and safe. Whatever soul that was there was now replaced with luxury resorts, Michelin-starred restaurants, expensive unattainable luxury shops and day club pool parties.

I just find it ironic that Giuliani’s credibility and career is being ended thanks to the same tool that he used to end the mafia. I guess I should probably complete this thought and think about the ramification of having our former president be indicted and perhaps be reelected and become the first president to serve his term from prison and what all of this means about what Americans want. But that is far too deep and scary, and I just went off of my antidepressants because I lost my sex drive and hadn’t had sex in over a year and go months without masturbating.

That is to say, you know, sometimes the mafia just did it better.

You Are Going To Be Fine

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Solstice!

jimmy

June 21, 2023

On this, the longest day of the year, I’m feeling a little hopeful. I’ve spent the last few months trying to reprogram myself taking little minute baby steps to trying to feel something close to a human. I’m hoping for more changes to come, and I’m excited to see what happens. Ok, not “excited” excited per se. I’m not jumping around in anticipation or anything. Excited in my normal heroin-tinged jaded blasé way. (Say that five times fast.)

Maybe the elevation in mood could be we had two consecutive sunny days for the first time in seemingly forever (it has to be at least a month.) It’s amazing what a little cancerous ultraviolet rays laced with Vitamin D can do to ones neurochemistry.

The Passenger

Blog 0 comments books, cormac mccarthy, the passenger

I Am the Passenger

jimmy

June 17, 2023

It’s funny because I’m not usually as angry as my last few posts have hinted at. I do have angry thoughts, but no one in my real life ever provokes them out of me. It isn’t until I read something that pisses me off enough that I have no other option but to write about it to allow it to pass. Eh, whatever.

But that’s not what this is about. I just wanted to talk about Cormac McCarthy a little since he died this week. I hadn’t read anything by him until I picked up The Passenger, which with along with Stella Maris were his last novels published last year, back in April. I knew about his acclaim, with “Better Than Food” YouTuber Clifford Sargent declaring he’s the best (at-the-time) living American writer we have. While I am skeptical of the hyperbole, I have no doubt that McCarthy was one of the best.

Well, I finished The Passenger last night, and… I don’t know. I can’t say I understood what was going on the whole time. I understood the main character Robert Western, a salvage diver and physics guru, was running away from his past, from something that even he didn’t know. Or he didn’t really seem to care. He just wanted to run towards the end, but he didn’t have the suicidal tendencies of his sister (and surprise surprise) the unconsummated love of his life who was also a math genius. While mostly set in New Orleans, he eventually winds up in Ibiza and… I don’t know? The novel ends.

I had a hard time getting through the book initially. I think because I saw the hype and was expecting it to hook me right away, I couldn’t be bothered with it until it did finally hook be about halfway through. Or maybe it was my own stupid malaise or whatever-it-is-that-has-been-going-on-with-me-for-the-past-several-years. But there were great captivating parts of it. One part that especially grabbed me was in one of Alicia’s delirium scenes (written in italics),

What you write down becomes fixed. It takes on the constraints of any tangible entity. It collapses into a reality estranged from the realm of its creation. It’s a marker. A road ign. You have stopped to get your bearings, but at a price. You’ll never know where i might have gone if you’d left it alone to go there.

p. 297

That hit me like a bullet. I realized that is part of why I don’t write in a journal/diary despite knowing I probably should.

I don’t know if I can say I liked this book or not. Perhaps I need to reread it. Perhaps I need to reassess it after reading Stella Maris. But not quite yet. I need something easier, so I’m going with The Meaning of Mariah Carey (which I hear is pretty damn good.)

Blog 0 comments dodgers, pride, protests, sisters of perpetual indulgence

Breeders, Fuck You

jimmy

June 16, 2023

I find it odd that a bunch of catholics would come and protest this and not the fact that their cult is known for adult men fondling and fucking boys. Not just a few boys, mind you. Not just a few incidents. But a lot. So much so that a fucking movie about exposing these crimes won the Oscar for Best Picture. That’s fucking rich. And they’re upset the Dodgers are honoring a group of catholics who actually helped the gay community especially during the height of the AIDS crisis? When no one would touch us and the fucking president just thought it best to let us fucking die?

Fuck you.

Let me be perfectly clear with you heteros. Pride is not about us queers subjugating ourselves for your acceptance. It is about us making ourselves seen and heard and demanding that we are seen as fellow humans just as we are, not whatever versions make heteros feel comfortable. We’re not all your gay best friend, the little accessory you take shopping with you, that will plan your parties, weddings, what not.

Yes, you might be uncomfortable with some of us. And you know what? Tough titty. For once you have to navigate our world that we had to create because of your ostracization, and you want us to feel bad? Get fucked.

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Why Do I Withhold Pleasure?

jimmy

June 13, 2023

Lately I’ve been hankering comfort foods that I had growing up, namely Korean soups that the Grandmother would make when I was growing up. I finally relented and made kimchi stew. Despite knowing how relatively easy it is to make, I had never made it before. After sautéing the pork belly and wilted sour kimchi, adding the water and green onions with the final voila of the tofu, I sat down to taste it. Armed with a bowl of rice, seaweed paper, seasoned bean sprouts, seasoned perilla leaves, I took that first sip. The spicy sourness mixed with the richness of the pork fat and the warmth of the stew just combined to knock all thoughts out of me. I was in heaven.

The memories came pouring back in of sitting at the table with the Grandmother as she brought out the kimchi stew and I was warmed up by it and it was the most nourishing thing ever I could eat it forever. And that happened again right there. Each sip, each bite just brought so much happiness. It certainly wasn’t the sensuality of Proust’s madeleines, but nonetheless it just made me so…

I also decided to make radish soup with beef, a light soup that has a slight sweetness to it that also reminds me of the Grandmother. After seeing how easy it was to make these, I wondered what took me so fucking long to make them.

I remember folding out the table for dinner, the Grandmother heating up the soup and bringing out the rice and side dishes, sitting down at the table and eating away. If my cousins were over, they would also be sitting and eating along with us. There wasn’t anything really profound said, but there is comfort in there.

But here I am some 25 years after the fact having pure joy ooze through me sip after sip of the soups.

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The Dodgers Are Still Pussies – An Update

jimmy

May 23, 2023

Oh look who met with the Sisters and have now publicly apologized and reinvited them back to Pride Night! Aren’t they so goddamn heroic? Sure, I’ll give them credit for coming to their senses and acknowledging that they made a mistake. I honestly didn’t think that would happen.

But let’s not forget what I said in the original post. Corporations’ morality is guided by capitalism, not altruism. Hardly courageous.

Sisters

Blog 0 comments dodgers, homophobia, sisters of perpetual indulgence

The Dodgers Are Pussies

jimmy

May 20, 2023

Maybe no one told the Dodgers that the pull-out method doesn’t always work. If you’re going to fuck someone with no protection, then you gotta accept the consequences. For their Pride Night, the Dodgers were going to honor the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, but a bunch of Catholics and right-wing Nazis wrote a bunch of letters and the Dodgers got scared. The Dodgers have decided to uninvite the Sisters. Of all the fucking people to listen to. Yeah, we’ll take our moral cues from a bunch of pedophiles and white folks who live in a delusional racist utopian fantasy. These are the same people who think black pepper is too much spice.

Fucking pussies. I guess that’s what happens when a fucking capitalist investment what-the-fuck-ever soulless vampire owns the team.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, after all these Pride celebrations have just turned into corporate grab-bags for our queer dollars. Bud Light and Bank of America sure as hell didn’t want anything to do with us in the 80s when we were being killed off by AIDS. Now that Nazis and spineless soulless vampire politicians are attacking us queers, these corporations are showing just how tenuous their connection to us actually is, just how easy they are willing to toss us aside to ensure their bottom lines are as fat and juicy as possible (the only thing black they like, by the way.)

I also shouldn’t be surprised that the Dodgers would do this in light that they waited until that fat fuck Tommy Lasorda finally died before honoring Glenn Burke last year, arguably the creator of the high five and the first openly gay MLB player in the late 70s. His Dodger teammates didn’t care that he was gay and Burke was considered the heart of those 1976 and 1977 World Series teams. Burke refused the Dodgers offer of a honeymoon if he married a woman and was traded to the A’s in 1978. He was out of baseball by 1979 and died of AIDS in 1995. But the Dodgers couldn’t honor Burke until the guy who refused to acknowledge that his own kid died of AIDS and was gay kicked the bucket.

This is just a reminder that corporations and sporting teams don’t care about anything except your money. Capitalism is their moral guide, and they will always do what will make them the most money. I guess what makes it infuriating is you hope that life isn’t this cynical, and once you are proved wrong it just fucks you up.

Dead Souls

Blog 0 comments books, dead souls, gogol

Why Am I Obsessed with Russians?

jimmy

April 10, 2023

Since the first time I read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment in high school, I was obsessed with the Russian language. I thought the book was so genius that I figured if I read it in its original Russian I would unlock even more of its genius. I guess it shows how I’ve always been wary of translators.

I’ve been slowly reading Nicolai Gogol’s Dead Souls, and it really has me questioning why I’ve been obsessed with the Russian language. He doesn’t really paint a pretty picture of the Russians here, and do I really want to invest my time with learning the language of these really unsavory folks?

I first heard of Dead Souls around that same time in high school but after I heard the song “Dead Souls” by Joy Division by way of Nine Inch Nails (it was the mid-90s after all.) How fucking hardcore is it, a novel with the title of Dead Souls unapologetically teasing the puritanical public? With the chorus of “They keep calling me,” playing in my head, I was expecting something haunting and filled with torment, like the best of Poe, Shelley and Dostoevsky. I most definitely did not expect an incomplete satire of still-feudal Russia around the mid-19th century with no haunting over-, under-, anytones at all. That did not interest my 18-year old gothy self, so I put the book down.

After several more aborted reads through the years, I finally hunkered down to finish it this time. Well, as much as one can finish a novel whose manuscript the author burned parts of right before his death. Hell, even that piqued my teenage interest knowing it back then, something that was so evil that the author had to expel it from this world, like a tortured Lovecraftian soul. But no monsters or anything like that here, just the evils that seem to be burdening the Russian soul during the turbulent period. And really, the characters that Gogol come up with are about as lovable as canker sores.

Let’s start off with our hero Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov. A disgraced customs officer, he now goes around trying to buy “dead souls” from landowners along the Russian countryside in a get-rich-quick scheme thanks to a loophole in the Russian bureaucracy. While Gogol bemoans the influence of western Europe into Russian culture, I guess the German bureaucracy wasn’t one of them. Chichikov does everything to get these people to sell him their dead serfs and to keep the scheme under wraps: charming Manilov; screaming and bullying the elderly widow Nastasya Korobochka; appeals to the greed of Sobakevich. The only person he fails to appeal to is Nozdryov, the town liar, cheat and drunkard. I guess like attracts like, right? Finally rumors start building up against Chichikov, the town turns against him and he is forced to flee, and at the end of the first book Gogol gives us a flashback to Chichikov’s rise and fall as a clerk and eventual customs officer.

In the second book, Chichikov is older and in a different part of Russia and still going around with the same scheme, starting over from scratch. Eventually he weasels a loan from a Kostanzoglo, a very respected and hardworking landowner, to buy a depressed property. Chichikov’s greed eventually gets him in trouble, he is jailed and released thanks to the help of his shrewd friend Murazov and again is forced to flee. The novel ends midsentence as the prince who jailed Chichikov was giving a speech speaking out against corruption.

Everyone is quite awful. The miserly Plyushkin when he realized Chichikov was going to give him money for his dead serfs, “And suddenly across that wooden face glided a warm ray.” (Part I, Chapter 6, 140.) And at a party that he is invited to in the first town, Chichikov noted that of millionaires “many people know full well that they will get nothing out of him and that they have no right to get anything, but they will invariably run ahead to meet him along the way, for instance, or laugh at his jokes, for instance, or doff their hats, for instance, or strive mightily to wangle an invitation to a dinner to which they’ve learned the millionaire has been invited.” (Part I, Chapter 8, 179.)

Gogol also notes the social hypocrisies in Russia. Chichikov, upon seeing that the serfs on Petukh’s property are well off, “But as soon as they start enlightening themselves there, in restaurants and theatres, everything will go to the Devil.” (Part II, Chapter 3, 336.) But for himself, after his lowest of lows in jail once he is able to access some of his possessions and the outlook of his release looks good “He felt a surge of hope, and once more he began dreaming of certain enticements: an evening at the theatre, a dancer whom he was running after. The country and its peaceful ways began to look paler, the town with its hum and bustle again brighter and clearer. Ah life!” (Part II, Concluding Chapter, 413) Mmmhmm.

By the end of Part I, one thing that I understood more was the amount of ambivalence in Russia on where they stood in the world. In the descriptions of the parties and people throughout the book, there is a palpable tension between Russians who want to be seen as more “cultured” and take on the airs of French and Prussian cultures and those that see Russia as a separate entity that should be able to carve their own sphere of influence. The last paragraph of Part I, “Art not thou too, O Rus, rushing onwards like a spirited troika that none can overtake?” Gogol conjures this image of Russia as a runaway carriage speeding away and finally asks, “Rus, whither art thou racing? Give an answer. She gives no answer… [A]ll that exists on earth flies by, and , looking askance, other peoples and nations step aside and make way for her.” (Part I, Chapter 11, 282-283.)

It makes me understand a little more of the psyche of the country here at the end of their feudal period, the end of their empire, the beginning of the USSR, the growing pains of their early capitalism and to now with Poo-tin conjuring a mythical Rus which I guess is like that spirited troika rushing onwards seemingly without any purpose. I guess the question is should be step aside and make way for her?

It should be noted that Gogol was born in the Ukraine, and in Part I Chichikov was telling people that he would be taking all the serfs he acquired back to the Kherson region along the Black Sea.

These are just some thoughts I noted while reading Dead Souls. There’s just too much to go over here. I’m not even talking about how it’s subtitled “A Poem,” and how Gogol had at some point wanted to structure it a bit like Dante’s Inferno (although scholars debate this, I can sorta see it.) It’s a strange book that I liked very much despite it not being a gothic horror. It was humorous, ridiculous at times, and it really left me wondering what a completed version of this book would be.

To get back to my initial question. Sure Gogol poked a lot of fun at Russians and really highlighted a lot of ambivalence that still exists now amongst the people. I mean I’m not sure as to how I feel about Russian culture. But I still do want to learn the language. Who wouldn’t want to read Мёртвые Души untranslated?

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