R.I.P. an old friend.

Symptomology? Or over-think?  When one of my oldest friends died a month ago, I guess I was shaken up. I don't show grief very easily, almost not at all, but what I do, what I did when my parents died, twenty and thirty years ago respectively, is I break out in some symptom. I catch a cold. Or my back goes out.

This time I broke out in Atopic Dermatitis; on my forearms. I suppose it's some kind of amalgam of hives, psoriasis and who-knows-what. (Playing doctor isn't one of my kicks.) At the same time, I'm beginning work on a book. I've talked about my other book, in other posts. (So you'll know it's self-published and all that and I don't have to run-on justifying.)     

A life's transition. Very dramatic. Felt like I had to tell somebody. Thank God I could talk to my wife, (common-law, State of Florida), and to my friend's Ex, who came and visited. ...and now it's a month later and I'm still putting some kind of salve on my arms, and having started the new book, I'm noticing a little mental weirdness. When my father died I went through a period of feeling haunted, especially when, a few days after he died, I was doing T.M., which I by then had been doing for six or seven years, and I felt a huge explosion in the room, and the sliding door to the back yard opened up by itself. Crap. Even remembering it sort-of freaks me out. I knew it was the old man. He loved to needle me. A poke here, a tease, there, nothing mean....and then for a couple of weeks, my life seemed sped up. In Manhattan one day while riding a bus I began to feel like I was duck-walking through an old Charlie Chaplin movie.

I'd had a similar experience back in the sixties, while on L.S.D., wandering around in a big meadow trying to be rusticated. I laid down in the grass, and closed my eyes, and saw my surroundings in black and white, and then felt that I was watching a movie reel, and the film reel broke and went, 'thwack-flicker-flicker-twang-snap'; stop. And then a pop like a muffled pistol shot, after which I was immediately down from the acid trip. I went and had a beer.  

But back to the mental block. I have difficulty feeling grief, sadness, that kind of thing. Thirty years ago, a poet named Allen Plantz recommended I read Love Story. Allen wasn't blocked or anything but his wife had died recently, and coincidentally he'd read that book, and he just knew it pulled all the right strings. (Helped him to cry.) I never read the book.  See, I didn't want to feel the feeling. Maybe it, (Fear of crying...) was, is, a phobia.

Meanwhile, back in the present, I'm starting to feel those things...just like a shrink once told me...

"One day you'll be driving along and you'll have to pull over because you'll be bawling your eyes out."  Well, no bawling yet, but I've had these experiences of feeling weepy. A little bit teary.* So there it is, the present state of my mind. Do I think anyone would want to hear about this?  Well, why not. One person somewhere who has had a similar experience with being shut-down.   

*I am aware, as you would expect me to be, that the aging human's lowered libido loosens up the mortar that structures the character armor, turning it into hot buttered grits. 

*Drawing, by me, of my above mentioned friend, Einar Handrup, 1961,  33W.67th, NYC NY.