my delusion is soaking through/makes my whole world wet with the idea of you
One day O ghosted me and I was thrown back on my origins. It’s possible, like she once confessed, that she suffered from borderline personality disorder, but I was also incapable of drawing borders around myself, my fantasy (and in her “library,” which in reality was her little room in a queer West Oakland household soaked with her art and her dog’s piss, were books, almost exclusively written by women, that included a number of volumes about various DSM disorders). I have a boundless capacity for self-invention, and simultaneously no capacity. I always circle back to her, to O: ghosting, origins, orgasms, oakland, alone, the ohlone way, etc: other words for insomnia. In the prone position of proleptic self-pity, propulsive mourning. She ghosted me like La Maga in Rayuela–but without the metaphysico-erotic clues and withoud a dead baby in her wake, or with only the proleptic ghost of a dead baby (despite hours of circumlocution about it, I never came inside her). Or maybe she went back to her boyfriend: was I the demonic counter-prophylactic agent of a baby, a kind of cuckolding foreplay? It was lucky I was reading Donna Haraway on the Chthulucene at the moment I lost the most pessimistic, multiple, and kind of strange-smelling girl I’d ever loved: I think she believed in the full restitution, not only of the land, but of the senses, of everything that’d been lost. At the very least she taught me to smell and love the freakish part of myself, which really has nothing to do with me. I’m a bad Marxist because I like to play games at the end of time (at the very least I don’t indulge in the fantasy that the bourgeoisie is the only true historical class: in fact, it’s quite the opposite). I’m literally a communist (in a British BBC accent). How did I cope? I got turned on by the pain. I fucked a girl in a far more dire “economic situation” in a warehouse even farther into West Oakland, she probably drugged me or I drugged myself, I remember she bled afterwards and thanked me profusely and stumbling out through the labyrinth I remembered reading an academic paper about the Ghost Ship Fire, about false or falsely periodized or teleological or respectable narratives of Oakland gentrification. She was from Portland, or actually she was from rural Oregon via Portland. I fucked a gorgeous bartender from Virginia Beach, who knew a bit of me just as I knew a bit of her, because of our origins (though she was Black and I was a Jewish kid from the DMV, but still). I saw a domme who very tenderly tied up my balls and teased them with a hitachi wand while fucking me in the ass with a strap-on as we talked about gender and geography, our childhoods. The domme was from Victoria, British Columbia. I let a guy who had just gotten off work from McDonalds in downtown Oakland jerk me off. He was from Neza, which is both a part of Mexico City and a civilization apart. He was one of the ugliest men I’d ever seen and also one of the sweetest, with the most pure longing. I ignored all his texts afterwards (actually I never gave him my number, but I think he would stalk me on Grindr, driving around in his car after work trying to find my new apartment: eventually he gave up). Kaiser and the fascist mayor of Oakland raided the homeless encampment in Mosswood Park a half block away while I finally got some drug-induced sleep. I can see the Kaiser building from my new place, which is otherwise the nicest place I’ve ever lived, at least in Oakland. But it’s important to keep that trauma, that scotoma, in sight. Before O left she called me one morning saying she desperately had to piss. She was in Mosswood Park with her “clients.” She worked with young people with disabilities, mostly just taking them around, sometimes trying to get them “occupational” training, except that after a certain point, their free labor started to be resented by whatever philanthropical small-business fraud had exploited them. They’re weird and they disturb the rest of us. We could probably do without them. She came over and pissed and then we went to Mosswood and I talked to a few of the kids for awhile. They seemed like kids to me but technically they were “legal adults.” They were some of the kindest people I’d ever met: we talked about video games I’d never played, not just a few games but an endless litany of them. I remember Isaac who was very deliberate, whose gaze was very serious, almost tearful in his desire to be heard, understood, and who constantly asserted his self and his multifaceted sense of the world, and then Joe who talked in a manic and beautiful growl, Joe who for some reason commuted all the way from deep E ast Oakland to Berkeley every day, maybe to be with his girlfriend, who was also there. Anyway we were all swinging on the swingsets, or most of us, swinging above discarded syringes and condoms. The way O acted around them really made me fall in love with her all over again. She rolled her eyes sometimes, she recognized her own exhaustion, her own boundaries. There was nothing of that unattractive (to me) extroverted masochism in her personality. But at the same time she recognized that the world was dominated by fascists and neurotics and self-seekers, and that the kids she was working with were different. Maya used to live by Mosswood, too, back before the city of Oakland had encircled it. She’d lied to me about her drug addiction, but I eventually figured it out when she kept getting mugged by the lumpen fascists who stalk the park. They fucked with me a couple times too. Ishamel Reed wasn’t completely wrong, even if he’s been uncharitable sometimes, about Oakland, or this part of Oakland. Maya used to live with a crazy autistic Mormon or Mennonite woman with the worst case of OCD I’d ever seen, she showered constantly and constantly stomped around her room, and at the same time was tortured, naturally, by the loud and abusive sex Maya used to have, tortured but also turned on, she would start to stomp and shower even more. But Maya couldn’t stop inviting men over to her place, she couldn’t be alone for too long, or in company for too long, either. One time we went to one of the motels along MacArthur Boulevard, right near her place, where they promised and for the most part failed to relocate the people in Mosswood. We fucked there in the most mutually abusive way, in a way we never could have fucked even at her place. We woke up with delirium tremens, realizing we had been on a week-long bender and that the place was trashed: we didn’t recognize each other, or ourselves in the cracked mirror.
Possessed of a deep longing, dominated by nostalgia, intimately forlorn and sometimes visibly liquid-eyed and languorous, they are usually pessimistic, often bitter and sometimes cynical. Associated traits are lamenting, complaining, despondent and self-pitying. Of particular prominence in the painful landscape of the ennea-type IV psychology is what has to do with the feeling of loss, usually the echo of real experiences of loss and deprivation, sometimes present as a fear of future loss and particularly manifest as a proneness to suffering intensely from the separations and frustrations of life. Particularly striking is the propensity of ennea-type IV to the mourning response, not only in relation to persons but also pets