Forever In Bluejeans

"Where do I find the cones?"


This was Frank, telephoning me Christmas day, since it is the time of year that he makes his Spanish coffee. You will consider it an improvement that I have stopped peppering his hideously deformed epidermis with invective, and that because I no longer care, whether you consider this a good, or bad thing. I wanted to love a variation of my father, burnished by a humanist polish, and wound up living my grandmother Pauline's life with Big Lou, the more favorable comparison going to the fruit picker and WW2 laundry driver, my grandfather, and so what, so say, I may be an alpha next to you spastic, but I have inane conversations with my husband, lover, or dildo. Every compensation we make is a mechanism for coping with the truth.

I dance on the grave of my failed marriage to this man, laugh starkly that even here I invested so much in trying to ignore the fact that our sexual intimacy was an exchange: his obedience for using my vagina breasts and anus for his gratification, which ties in to the distortion of aesthetics in the human body throughout the known history of our civilizations, their history of using form for the mythos of their own manifest destiny; my link is not the series I am recalling, however. [I remembered the series after log off and will pick up on it later.]

My agitation increases significantly with bowel impaction, and it would bode well for me to remember it the next time my monologues threaten to rival Jamie Foxx performing race related schizophrenia, except that I do not delude, only feel like a rat in a cage waiting for Debra Horne's checklist to finish me off, more Sancho than Beowulf to my draconian cleverness. Why don't I just put this woman out of my mind? Why does it frighten me so much that an idiot makes me feel less than human? I have dealt with her type all of my life, and I would like to stop matching wits with them. This wish shall never be granted to me-- unless.

That I am damned runs at this point, mmm, 93 percent to 7 for unless? As far as I can ascertain, I am not failing, but do exhibit some death stage symptoms, interestingly enough, and to take a clunker trope from The Collector, where the photographer connected to the journalist who has the autistic son who can discern the intent of the devil, how is hope still possible for someone like myself? My relations with my brother and sister are damaged, forever. Easy enough for them to exploit my sense of obligation as a barren elder, but quite another matter to offer me social equality, visit me despite where I live, I am facing the total abandonment prevalent among both the elderly and disabled populations. Must I forever be a victim to some mechanism of injustice?

Time to feed the pet children. Partially ready for Drinker's West, not going to Arch street in this deserted city morning, my dark blue slacks deodorized in the bathroom, a notation that I will be mocked for my sneakers and my cap, if I wear either. I like my cap, makes me look like a golfing troll. Wink. My father's brother is dying, by the way, and I feel guilty for my not so subtle realization that my senile uncle has been useless for a long time. Marie would kill me, literally, if she knew what I tell you. And just in case I do not have the time tomorrow, happy new year, a phrase so innocuous I should not write it. Medicare has spent thousands and thousands on my uncle's poor quality of life, and inversely destroyed my own by making it impossible to get technology I need to be healthy, happy, which equally suggests I may not be manic, only being driven to it.

Penndot sez

I am determined to survive long enough for the gift of a NYE party, Drinker's West never fear, but I know if I set my alarm Sunday and drive to Arch Street early and then drive home and rest until sevenish, that the website is fooling me and the branch will be locked, despite Photo Center claim; no biggy, can't drink like I used to and maybe the bar will accept my explanation, but spastic want a one night of fun before she resumes her internal John Grisham movie against the entire city, if necessary.

Why must I be Don Quixote in tits? Just get exploited long enough, and cross your fingers that I can finally do this update, and if not, that my Medicare card will work. Barring a traffic accident, blizzard, or sudden death, I'll be there.

Kubik's Chameleon

The sheriff's Goddamn was a murmured curse
        Not for the dead but for the blinding dust
                                                           -- Allen Tate, The Swimmers


I sigh in disappointment, but no studied individual in filmography is assisting me, whether or not they care that Schneider and I sparred each other's bones, and I doubt they do, even in the likeness between Mr. ChickenFried and myself as ugly brunettes and the related caste resentment. Shame at the provocative trigger, and the feeling that I have an occlusion the size of a walnut thrombing in my armpit, waiting for the exact implosive stressor. A little worm made my mind flag slippery in my observation of Larry Gates as Sid Kubik. I should have placed him against Poitier as Endicott, or in the classic anti-communist polemic. Long term memory subtly alerting me, but not effectively until I linked him in this mild winter storm that technically prevented me from driving to the DVM. In actuality, a packed defecation made me fear a Presley simulation. Mildly faint, from leg to left temple, I am the daughter of my grandfather's terminal coronary, "Poppa Lilly," I called him, so you know my Roman grandmother ruled us with an iron fist. Her husband was soft as marshmallow, handing the eight year old in the armchair a copper penny, shiny with the magic of his broad smile, "What 'tis?" He bent over me like a jowl wagging hound, but it is Lillian whose absence pulls; she lived very long, but I miss her the most of all my family. She kept me fluent, beautiful woman, every inch the grand belle, silent strength, auburn hair coiffed perfectly, my body tells me I will be back in her warmth and homemade escarole soon. Mi dispiace nonna Lilly, ti prego perdonami.

Bow our heads. Whatever his ethnicity, for the purposes of the studio system, Gates was a blank check, and did not have any point of origin; he wasn't supposed to have those traits, unlike Ernest Borgnine. This does not mean he could not have been a mafia Don. Northern Italy has its Sweden spillover, fair skin, the type who could have kept a Rico like Eddie rolled in pork grease. Karlson condenses this with theatric artifice, as I mention. Real life does not suck you in to a methodical quarry hunt not minutes after you put a punk in the dungeon, warding off the potential fury of your wife  who will probably rip out your eyes if she doesn't get that baby, properly adorable, and a necessary retrograde: Dianne's Alice will not be deprived of the blessings of new life, a happiness given to a man as uncomplicated as a truck driver employed by her husband. Conte flies to New York, in an affluent cosmopolitan mobility, that might have been a stage set for a cabinet meeting with Ike. There is no question, that to all intents and purposes, Sid Kubik is the assimilated appearance of senior management at the country club, and Conte can be many things in the example of Sinatra, the rat pack play boy, the swarthy breeder whose seed is desirable, but make no mistake. Only Gates can aspire to WASP pretensions, whether or not he is merely a brilliant imitation.

They parry, the nervous avoidance of eye contact by Conte effective; he may not know that Gino has been caught, marked for death not ten feet away, but are we supposed to believe that Eddie buys Kubik's fancy footwork. Is pretty boy really that gullible?

Privacy, in theory

Weary of torturing my posts to aim for the acumen, not pretension, but acumen I want to have, I am researching privacy and the constitution, and a legal scholar reminds me simply that it is about what the government cannot do. This is no longer applicable, because the social services system can do anything it wishes to me due to my technical quadriplegia. I do not want minority aides because many of them have traumatized me; I do not want Presby staff constantly in and out of my unit, so Debra Horne and Trudy Richardson can forcibly remove me any damn time they please for a psychiatric assessment due to my expressed animosity and then come up with competing rationalizations for it. I raise my voice; they do not bother to ask if this due to the fact that my larynx is the only part of my anatomy that works with above average capacity, and that my need to talk may be a functional compensation for a seriously compromised mobility as opposed to a simple bipolar label, among other things, and the Medicare actuary decides which and what medical technology I can and cannot have as a lifelong entitlement beneficiary, and independent living centers will go on deliberately marginalizing until they kill enough people to create a trauma nearly as powerful as Newtown. I will get the change I want, even if it means a major traumatic sacrifice, but never again, ever, can I maintain a positive outlook on the basic sanctity of the human condition, and that is tragic, not just shedding a long nascent infantilism.

Cathedral of Evolutionary Dynamic

"We have gone from a legal system denominated by common law, divined by courts, to one in which statues, enacted by legislatures, have become the primary source of law."-- Guido Calabresi

It takes hubris to play the dunce, as Ron Perlman does in Quest for Fire, a movie not necessarily conducive for outcasts in our primate social hierarchy. Its carefully staged savagery stunned, as opposed to overawed, in the early Reagan era. Watching on contemporary flat screen technology, a mature savant perceives its carefully circumscribed progressive dictum: tolerance leads to better quality of life outcomes. And this is bullshit, in a naturalistic Darwinian allegory which could not possibly have occurred in Paleolithic Europe. Certainly migrations occurred, and different humanoids may have co-existed with different levels of technical knowledge, but no band of early human hunters survived territorial ambush, attacks by sabers, mastodons, grizzlies, and sexual cross breeding with Nubians, a fight with their own kind, and lived to tell the tale, in the creation of the modern homo sapiens. McGill's Naoh may have been the heir apparent, brave but not stupid, with just the right amount of masculine empathy, but it is Perlman's buffoon Amoukar who has the wisdom to know who belongs where, in the sinews for the right sense of place.

My early progressive educators were wrong; they led me to believe that my status as a token cripple who could mediate between worlds was an economic surety, and this is what angers me. Everyone saw my astute intellectual promise. The suave history teacher who had style, the angry hippie, the loutish philosopher whom ISIS might have decapitated as a subversive, perhaps rightly so. I would have never made tenure, even if I had applied myself to some minute thesis. Then we have the activists who are not activists as I define activism. Whatever their rhetoric, they fail and eject too many of the most challenged invalids they supposedly offer self-determination, and couch progress as decentralized case management. They are no better than Putin, in his attempt to resuscitate an outdated authoritarian model.

In 2009, a twitter user, purported homosexual who thought I might have posed a problem to a woman who stopped following me, urged me to "get help". Cures for battle stress due to a life of attempted annihilation don't exist. Neurological science in the seventies was not as advanced as our current genomic sequencing era, but still, Dr. George Crothers espoused beating brain damage out of those handicapped by cerebral palsy. No one stood up and made any conscientious objection. The parents acquiesced. It took how many years for the state of Pennsylvania to investigate and shut him down? Did my mother have a crisis of conscience because her seven year old came home screaming?   

Canadian Bacon, Danish Pancakes

"I had already killed one of your officers, in the corner of the blind alley that leads to the tannery, in order to take his automatic, because I wanted one. I did things that were much more shameful. I committed the worst crime in the world, but that has nothing to do with you. I am not a fanatic, an agitator, or a patriot. I am a piece of shit." -- Frank Friedmaier, the spree murderer anti-hero, Dirty Snow


If you are an American, or a western European, you would process a BBC report like this differently than you would a profile on James Holmes and his psychiatric treatment, correct? The latter is the price we pay for the taming of the western frontier, the mythology and fact surrounding that domestication, the conflict between the indigenous warrior cultures and a mechanized European military that bequeathed to us the post modern fragmentation and erosion of moral cohesion. Pedophiles need compassionate case management too, remember. Whereas the tea workers, they merely rose up against authority, possibly horrific, but in terms of survival, and resources, understandable. I do not think the tea workers would have any problem understanding my anger against disability activists and leaders who turned on me, betrayed me, abandoned me, and here I sit, and sitting mainly due to inertia. However, I feel empathy for the manager. A mass acted in concert and burned him to death, and this as an escalation is worse than the glamorization of Pesci's temper, in which part of my impulses believe acting on would provide catharsis. I cry for dead cats, but relish the thought of eliminating hypocritical liars, not sure where the truth lies between those two propositions, as I'd also cut off my hand before touching a firearm, but would like nothing better than deploying my fists against the prevarication, ignorance, and cruelty I've had to carry, obviously not unique in this sentiment, as Simenon understood it as well, to create an interested audience, but also to suggest that aggression has a possibly complicated ambiguity, one that should serve as a warning to materialists who want to reprogram our primate origins through neuroscience. I prefer the post-war Frenchman to Cormac McCarthy, because Cormac leans to the superlative. Simenon carefully punctures it.

In some ways we are all Eddie Rico, the man in the middle with his own secrets. Guy Savage created a good synopsis of the film as a hatchet job as opposed to the novel, which I'd like to read someday, but I am not necessarily hamstrung, at this moment, by lack of access to the text. Karlson's adaptation carries the unease of its own certainty, and that includes the rapid fire pace at which Conte has to negotiate between his own culpability and Kubik's desire to eliminate loose ends, eroding loyalty. Is criminality, at the height of its organized power, any different than case management burrowing in its paradigms to obfuscate wrongdoing and enforcing stigma we can find in any baboon troupe? Not a bad question to ask in the ration of bacon, which presumably does not slow the industrial slaughter of the livestock which gives us such an interesting meat, to quote a culinary chef.

Then There Were Two, Ctd

Nerves need a brief nap, probably post menopausal;  I need to believe in myself, that I can get out before Presby euthanizes me for biting, in essence. When I was a student, my original location was my mistake, but academic activity and the formation of career was a shield, sort of. As I wrote in my earlier posts, however, this was a transfer under duress, and I am getting out one way or another. I am done; they get out of litigation in which I had cause; my attacker in 93 was a relative of a tenant, I could not determine that he was not the exterminator, who showed up less than 10 minutes after the young man was doing his best to strangle me, and then after Ellen Hovey retires, the company leaves me for dead in another round because of inter-floor transfers? No, this slumdog has barked, and as an American, one way or another I am having their federal contract investigated. I am not staying another year, that is final, and I have been traumatized one too many. I shall not fear; I shall not, and Trudy can shove it where the sun doesn't shine. Be back in a few hours.

My neighbor Ed might say I am exaggerating the threat, since under the last two managers they accelerated the pressure to a crescendo and I am still here, but I am a woman who has lived under the gun most of her life, and if I allow myself to become complacent, this company will dehumanize me, and would, in theory, have a ready, complicit ally in my sister should my father, or Marie, pass away. Affluent property owners would not have me in the first place, unless by some superhuman act of will, I turn my economic fortunes around, but there has to be some median by which I can loosen this invariable hangman's knot.

Family Annihilator. The Second Call

Just having a friend changes his brain chemistry.-- Robert Downey Jr, endearing drug addict, The Soloist denouement


Late Christmas afternoon I took a lengthy shower that went absolutely perfect in terms of lateral transfer, no bad launches back onto the Quickie sling, and then yesterday, I had a Herculean struggle not to just write my notice and be free of this company, as if my remaining 4k and my ability to flee in the middle of a Nor'easter was an absolute necessity. Nicotine depletion and lack of salmon oil cannot be blamed, and the minute I was able to slide my usual supply of Aeros out of my mail cubicle, I went to sleep feeling absolutely powerless. Strange sort of deterioration and dependency loop, I suppose, lay expert that I am, as the first hit of tobacco worked, and then did not. I wonder what it is I think shall change. Much like the late Steve Jobs, my personal hygiene is a game of touch and go compensation. Always has been, and I am genetically prone to clutter, adverse to consistent tidiness, which earns me the appelation of *dirty cripple* from Geri, the building custodian, a very dark skinned stereotype of the minority domestic caste, which has been slowly being eliminated in the age of Obama. The fact that I stink and in her experience, most of the wheelchairs users here have to fake real grooming, enforces her perception that we're monkeys who need constant henpecking for our good, which in turn reinforces my social fear of censure from black women who will more readily exploit me as an invalid with a target painted on my back. And I believe, at fifty years old, that I can break these chains with analytical journal articles, self-manufactured issues, and one last hoorah out of my once promising, tortured intelligence, illuminating this and that aspect?

Who am I fooling? Myself, like Richard Conte's Eddie? The elderly Baptist ladies have not slid one card under my door, and in 18 years, I always received three on average, so my tantrum over the radiator did, then, have an impact, though yesterday I did not cry out, just set off possible danger from hypertension. Aunt Mary wants me to move in with her after she relocates to Aston to be with her grandchildren, but since Pauline, my ailing and fiercely faithful grandmother, is not quite failing, this is not very possible. I love my mother's sister, really, and she is the last relative on whom I have not ventilated my gills, if you will, unless I bring up the fact that Trudy Richardson's nascent innocence, hired shortly before the building renovations, nearly killed me, in conjunction with my treasure trove of broken promises and liabilities from this closed and segregated subset. If I knew then what I know now. Living with Mary still is not optimal; she and her husband did enough saving us from my father's desire to abandon us during one of my mother's suicidal lapses, and Mary and Methodist husband, with whom there has been repressed friction since the early days of babysitting and first base, deserve their peace. Charitable tyranny is possible you see. I'd settle for a clean garage and a sofa bed, like a bevy of online strangers would enfold me with such compassion. Worth an inane giggle; let's return to the film, shall we?

Hey Rosella. Your tagline won my concession, but I eliminated a grapes of wrath migration long ago.  Waves.

Party Time

If any of you doing the local rounds would like to meet me before I go into cardiac arrest, I am in the process of targeting Drinker's West for NYE, and if you would give me a hand, should I get in to the bar, and send your cell phone pictures of me in my old age contortions to my email so I can upload a profile, hey.

I give YOU a free pass to humiliate me. You're young people, a virtual sub species.

That was easy enough. Wish I could have done this last year.

Orderly Mayhem

Using a small number of myths taken from native communities which will serve as a laboratory, I intend to carry out an experiment which, should it prove successful, will be of universal significance [sic], since I expect it to prove that there is a kind of logic in tangible qualities, and to demonstrate the operation of that logic and reveal its laws.-- Levi-Strauss, the raw and the cooked


I was in my small cramped and exasperating kitchenette getting coffee when Paul Picerni, the doomed Gino, gesculates to Conte from behind the steering wheel, not that I wanted to miss the scene. Miscalculated the minutes in the commercial break, but since my hearing loss mitigates in certain circumstances, I heard the dialogue, and Conte's equivocation is a contingent issue in terms of willful blindness. Did Eddie know, as Lamotta, (Bellaver) asserts, "what was going on?" and know it the whole time, subconsciously wanting the whole problem to go away so he could erase history and become the all American consumer, his blood ties conveniently eliminated? This exposes a kernel into the heart of darkness this nation sublimates through constant bombardment of advertising, and it took off, ushered in the modern era, after the war. I have mined my Austrian-Polish grandmother repeatedly, and it is from her that I was integrated into the lie of iconic fanaticism, neither entirely vanquished, nor repelled, in continual battle in my psyche, and the thing that killed my mother, at the end of the day. My mother and maternal grandmother, setting each other off, were far more scary than my scarred neural network. Elements of this are in Rico, in a condensed artifice, and in the context of Simenon's sparse, perhaps even elegant, civil brutality, fenced in, certainly, by structuralism.

I am going to start an uproar among the feminine players, and suggest, as Conrad does in Heart of Darkness, that Eddie Rico blinds himself to the truth because he is afraid of losing his wife. Dianne Forster and Kathryn Crosby may not have much to do in this film, but they hold the reigns, and they hold them with a force that was all but eroded and dead not 20 years later.

No, I am not eschewing sexual equality, merely asking you to see that defined gender roles, however constricted in traditional terms, provided payoffs that have long since vanished, but also orchestrated the horror, as our great writer alluded to it, in the price our species has paid for the prevalent domestication of both, natural ecosystems, and primate aggression. The feminine principle is inexorable, and, in the events of this decade, being challenged, pushed back against with indeterminate regression.

Krauthammer Codicil

Everything Dr. Krauthammer contends in public argument is what I have been attempting to convey to my audience on a more personal, and sometimes risky level. After all, discussing the corrosion of internal vengeance power fantasies after digesting lifelong humiliating paradigms is not something that will get me invited to Michelle Obama's Motown galas, but I am going to breakdown Charles' delineations a little further: the welfare state in America manufactures psychosis, if not spree killer psychotics, whatever prevention modalities remain in place. The entitlement system essentially traps vulnerable people, and literally drives them insane if they cannot secure gainful, and I'll add, secure employment.

Charles is entirely correct. My landlord has no legal authority to commit or institutionalize until dementia or aggressive behavior translates into property destruction, criminal behavior, or inability to function, but there is no flexibility in Medicare or state regulatory systems to adapt to individual needs as opposed to forced compliance, and I don't have the money Charles probably does to buy services more tailored for his needs as a paraplegic. There may not be any free lunch, but conservatives like the doctor are tone deaf to the fact that my birth disability nearly precludes my ability to succeed under our titular free market capitalist system. I have to succeed the same way my former counselor Cassie James does, earning her salary on the backs of those with developmental disabilities whose limitations prevent matriculation. This does not explain the Lanza family, but it is part of the larger problem, regulating ourselves to death with compliance, alienating ourselves with devices and the glamor of violence.

Garland's Simile

Part of this is my titanic struggle not to smoke tobacco, and I fear an imminent breakdown of the fact that I have been clean since last March; part of this is my menstrual cycle is an all but sterile issue, and I am still enough in the memory of fertility to mourn my healthy femininity, and the welfare state should not be killing me with compliance. There was a woman here  in Riverside Presbyterian, tall and intimidating, with dry toffee skin, bipolar, how dangerous I know not, who thundered at me, "You don't believe in God?" as if it was an insult. Amy with the face cancer telephoned me, asking me, because of my background in advocacy, to stop Debra from evicting this woman for not taking her medication. For me that was a conflict of interest, and she chased me on the Parkway. I pitied her situation, avoided contact.

Enter Jane with the dog, white, over  the last twenty four months, she threatened me, has harassed countless residents, forced me to change my telephone number, and I asked why Debra Horne is not evicting her?

Anyone have any faith in state vocational civil servants who leave and take  on the Protestant work ethic to keep poverty a healthy and thriving industry of exploitation?

I would do anything to go home, something I no longer have to go to, and caution that access to mental health services is not a panacea for HUD's contractual alliance with religious companies that browbeat the most disadvantaged populations.

More to the point, neither woman is or was helped by Presby, and after 27 years, I, personally, am being destroyed by women who have total access to everything I do, all the money I have; they control every aspect of my life, threaten me at will, and yes, I can give my notice, except for the fact that doing so is tantamount to putting myself physically at risk. I do not know what happened to Amy's friend, and Jane is stigmatized by most of the tenants, at least those that still utilize healthy social networks. I am afraid of her irrational antagonism, and what I was once trained to do would not help. Is it an over-magnified social fear?

I was sitting in lobby, talking. Jane came in with the dog. I told her that I was going to legal aid and asked her if she would like me to mention her concerns, offered her a hairbrush for the mongrel. She said no, caught the elevator. I started to head up, and Jane took the lift back down, followed me on the larger freight elevator, and had a violent altercation with me, in the car, at close range, and then started telephoning me at one, sometimes three, in the morning. The managers suggested I call the police if it continued, and asked me to write it up, and she has since graduated to harassing my former clients. Her triggers are possibly borderline for actual violence, and that she is now preying on people I worked to help troubles me. Neither Trudy nor Debra have any professional training in mental health, disability, or geriatrics, and as such, are not qualified to either integrate or remove the problem populations they are being paid to handle.

But Trudy, the current manager, does chart, if you like, any signs or symptoms that count as aberrations she can use to advocate for institutionalization, has done her best to make me doubt my sanity, and I am grateful to Ed for scorning that tactic, reminding me of my strength, but I've never had a vacation, never able to get away from this, except for funerals, and the independent living coordinator, whoever they are, is roughly equal in parity to the cruelty of Debra's ignorance and lack of qualifications. Jane needs mental health support, and should have been evaluated for that during her residency application, but neither Presby nor centers like these have the money to spend for personnel training. Hence, when they promote black women through the ranks, the supervisory staff is basically no more than a few steps ahead of their low income welfare residents.

 If I cannot leave, safely, I will be broken beyond my ability to recover, perhaps not immediately, but soon.

Slouching Towards Gomorrah

Cessation is one of my counter narratives, for those of you clever enough to catch it, my own doubts about zeal, doubts about how much hardship I am willing to inflict on myself for the sake of principle, and what I truly believe about liberty and the reality of my biological entropy. Not acceptance, but cessation, giving up, shutting myself down, falling silent, to avert the price tag of a self-immolating anger. Overwhelming and losing my identity in savagery defeats any purpose in having an agenda in the first place, and a sense that nothing I do, no matter how hoarse I make myself, changes anything, or will, and that the very people I am inviting to see through my perception are those who flee, finding me "frightening," to quote Gary, the Jungian, and very old Speakeasy regular (and remarkably, David Harris is still there, a tug of nostalgia, not knowing if this is a good or bad thing, that the forum has a steady bald Jewish Virgil to guide you through to the Messiah of your choice. Not a bad guy, David; we had some interesting conversations, but if he is a real author worth reading or a pedagogue who thinks my obsessive drama nothing more than pyrotechnics, that we can leave unanswered. Why not try and return? On a simple level, I do not know if the moderator would remove me if I assert my identity as a voice from the past, and on a more complex level, we'd save ourselves from the doom of extinction by methane gas for at least a few centuries if we roasted a significant percentage of MFA students and indulged in limited cannibalism. I may not be where I wish, but P&W has nothing to offer me but more of the same: institutional compliance). I have nothing against getting the MFA, but it would not help me and I cannot afford the debt, so let me dial back and make a correction: the point of impaction in The Brothers Rico begins with Conte in that bright rat pack dress robe on the telephone about harboring the psycho he finds in his office. Let us not gloss over that robe, whether it is satin, nylon, or velvet (any trivia assists here appreciated, wardrobe geeks?) Karlson's dominating shot of it subdues the audience with a grand sense of Eddie's style, not just his material status; marks him as a target, for us, for his antagonists, and in the coda of lead billing, he is the star. Or is he? The coital pleasures with Foster remain an interlude with its own unease, the letter from her sister, as a plot device, contributing.

The meeting with Gino in the car escalates this tension, which leads to an important question: Why doesn't Conte act to save his brother in the immediacy of that moment? Is his delay plausible, attributable to lack of realism?

Pause. Spastic goes like the ghost of Denmark's true king to go whimpering to the evil ACLU, even though I might as well rupture my spleen. If American communists are one of my limited weapons, however, the arsenal of the powerless is what it is, ready to abort what should never have been born.

Whippoorwill Quirts

I would not mind going to Edgewater. Frank and I were still duking out the end game of our relationship as a couple when the building was going up; two minutes down the block from my building, and now you definitely know where I live, by inference if nothing else, it might as well be a world away, and in fact, when they were ready to inhabit, sent me a postcard, and I never bothered. Now cursing that lack of investigation, the man I spoke to did not sound sanguine, or if not that, at least vague enough to confuse me, asserting that "you would not qualify as a section 8 tenant." Why not if one of my former clients lives there under similar circumstances? Is it optimal? No, as I'd still be in the same location, a street over, but anything not Presby does remarkable things, lifts my spirit, restores hope, with the prospect of being able to tell Ms. Horne and her cohorts they can go fuck themselves royally making me chortle with glee, sheer delight to be free of shanty town. You have no idea the full extent of what the residents here have done to me-- it was not simply constant harassment by the managers, not simply my near death in Diamond Park, and the mere prospect of anything else not in a crime plagued environment, for my health, I need the hope of movement, after 27 years of dehumanizing bigotry, my god, no wonder I identify with the extremity of Taggart's pain, though I did not lose children and drive a spouse mad. Hesitantly, I believe last evenings pill did the trick, and I am "clear," to use the standard call of television cops, but we shall see. There have been no flares. Before we return to the long dangling Ricos, I want to expend just a little more energy on Newtown's grief, partly due to my own fantasy valve despair deposits, in which I take no pride, trust me, but after years of the action thriller implosions on screen, are we not saturated with these video special effects as an outlet?

The left is entirely correct on its political sentiments about automatic weapons and the ease of executions. I live in a city of which in circumference is 85 percent a war zone in waiting, after all, though I am not entirely sure that mental health services is any more than a polite euphemism, as I cannot say if I was not a cripple I would not have sustained this much damage. I am a cripple and my life was never anything else. The question is why those in pain resort to violence as opposed to those in pain who do not. What lifts lethargy to go outside of legal mechanisms in place? I do not need David Brooks to know that most mental health clients are bullshit artists, preying on the vulnerability of more stable service providers, and would no more be spree killers than my former writing friends, or current friends, like the novelist Gretchen Laskas (who will never speak to me again), or the poet Robert Thomas (who, all things being equal, probably will).

I think if you take the Virginia Tech shooter, the Aurora shooter, the Giffords attacker, Adam Lanza, that it runs deeper than weapons cancer, because guns have always been part and parcel of what forged American identity. We live in an age of  autonomic desensitized alienation, fed on a diet of Kevin Spacey masterminds, and those who are sick get this same steady diet that hammers away at the fact that the human animal is expendable, and more than that, the poor, or those that climb, and then fall, are the unforgiven, and can thereby be bitch slapped in  a bureaucracy that no one understands, nor is anyone accountable to it. All I want to do is safely relocate out of the city, and receive justice, but that is a virtual nightmare.

I have been to Farmington CT, and fell in love with the Yankee sensibility that made the US the beacon of the world, but that self reliance, hardy and firm, the point of departure for much of the corruption of worldliness in Henry James, has all but been vanquished by guilt and victimization, which I, as an ostracized disabled woman, have been very much a part, as much a part as Jovan Belcher, or Michael Vick. Forced social equality has assisted in lowering moral cohesion, whether or not you want to accuse me of oversimplifying, it is still the truth. Had I not fled my life in Ridley Park, I would not be a broken old woman exposing herself before you, not horrified by how tolerance represses the truth of what we live. Nor am I conveying that we should re segregate ourselves according to ethnic contours. But throwing out the cell phones and the rest of our gadgets, and not creating EEOC crimes in email, taking responsibility when we're wrong, and being honest that we are different, for Christ's sake, well, that is a start.

Gravel

Perhaps I am actually in the early stages of dying, and the Asian student who suggested emphysema missed the mark, and I am more correctly caving in to COPD, but so what. I aspired, failed, lived a life of denigration, and you will say the expense of inhalers and steroids and hearing aids I cannot afford even with Medicare and Medicaid is a good thing, and no, I am on the verge of giving up, despite mio padre's guilt. "Don't go in a home," he says.

What the fuck is the bloody difference if I have to be maintained by minorities who feel my hostility even if it is unspoken? I am not afraid of my bath chair today, but that out of basic indifference. I have been breathing like a pneumatic drill since I caught what I hope was a cold, in early December, and the last time I saw a student, or an intern, they gave me Zyrtec. I doubt an antihistamine will do the trick.

If I once believed I was a good person, this is no longer the case, whether or not my triggers are not capable of worse. My Mucinex tablets are not fresh, but I have taken now what I believe to be my fourth. They too once cleared fairly severe bronchial inflammation, and so I wait, going to feed the children tuna, lying back down to read, having contacted the UK author who solicited me.

Conrad's Kurtz

I have watched the PBS Newshour with near very religious fidelity since the start of my social services career, many years before MacNeil retired early, and long before the aging Jin Lehrer, of whom a fonder affection is generated, moved himself behind the scenes, and unlike the young athlete I am only casually espying on television, I cannot go for a contemplative stroll on a path with fall strewn leaves, even if I had one of my chairs fully charged, and today, as the Google homepage and every other digital traditional media outlet reminds us, we could all use contact with our feet and the soil, draining away, losing the self, considering our sins. My television familiars, as I consider the Newshour anchors, broke the Newtown massacre for me. "Not again," seeped through, bitter wormwood, picturing my ferocity earning your shunning opprobrium if I pushed the envelope, but the WaPo headlines overwhelmed me. I break down in tears, and despite myself, if only to indicate how much this has penetrated my psyche, God help us for the weapons technology we have at our disposal. Barring sudden death from lung fluid, I shall return when tears cease to threaten the fetid city air that I breathe.

John Gardner and the Twilight of Suffering

To the detriment of being on my better behavior with young Lance and his charming efforts to get the untutored through Ulysses, I fell asleep Thursday in near winter bright afternoon reading what I actually wanted to read on the Paperwhite, scowling, The Sunlight Dialogues, really into it when Millie faced Taggart without quite realizing who the demonized little brother was, when I fell into a reverie due to the pain in my hip, right hip, still dislocated, and Steel did not butcher. All that physical suffering as a child so that I can entropy into more now. Dr. Chance and Steel controlled the destiny of many, if not Linda herself. The retarded spastics who might have been under my case management eye at one time, now my limited but happy neighbors, gave me the link, and I saw my future, this problem leg in a splint, while I lie in a bed, a discarded bit of meat, hoping my snotgreen cherry monoxide scarred lungs will prevent me from living long enough to get my jaws broken when I bite a future Debra Horne on the pork of her forearm. Gardner, being dead and dead quick, cannot help being an anachronism, whether or not he was taking a cue from Tarkington to deconstruct America through exposing the Hodge family, making Clumly evocative of a sterile old rooster who carried the mark of death through his white hairlessness. Never finished the novel in school, so I am not sure where he is going, dated and outlived by Wallace, who killed himself less quick, less neat, but with a more accurate tempo that Gardner suspected, but did not survive long enough to hate, media hype. Even if I wanted my trigger of pain to be my swan song, and I am not entirely positive about that although punished, yes, Linda too does not know when to quit, when to stop humiliating, and that because I built her up, trying to hang on to one last tie that actually mattered to me, because I was afraid of the collapse I am still living, even if I wanted to go outside of those boundaries to enact that punishment, and made an effort, I would not be able to make it count, to use it to expose the corruption and cruelty and through taking that action, strike at the conscience. I cannot direct a caustic intelligence to mesh with the reality of a broken and declining body to achieve the affect of the lone hero, the one who stands alone. I can no longer afford upgrades, need a new laptop battery, and either have to save this machine or format my newer, smaller, backup. If someone could explain for me, when installing new drivers, does the machine in DOS equate the ENTER key with SET UP? That is what I do not know how to do, hit the right button to get the updated drivers working. I will not bite, I just do not have the mind to handle mainframe and software degrade issues. It is an HP Pav dv6, roughly six years old, if anyone can explain this to me in simple, toddler, terms, you are one of the few who have my gratitude.

Very small meals, I have to stay up and go to Joes. The chair is nearly on full power, that achieved yesterday, barely enough clean clothes, if we look away from agony, ecstasy is no longer possible either, but if I am going down, I am going in flames, that much I know.

Drum Roll Ready Exasperation

Now I am being asked to review certain genres for kindle, that is when I am not being excoriated by the likes of Lee Doty and then abandoned by the likes of Susanna Daniel for their fear that my perception of their work as being relatively shallow is accurate. Although we might add to this by saying Susanna ceased any response to me because I do not medicate my emotional response, and that violates her suburban Christian fastidiousness, and is not true to the revolutionary intent of Christianity in its early formation; it still hurt my feelings, because I had no original intent, not on twitter, of being unfriendly. As to reviews, I turned one fantasy writer who praised me for knowing my stuff down, but this time I do not know. There is as much collusion in publishing as anything else. I wish Susanna well, and of course, she has the perfect right not to see me as one among equals, but all I wanted was a normal interaction with a female novelist who had what I did not, a happy life. I can never have whatever that is, but not being able to build bridges defeats my goal.

Toying with the idea of constructing a mass email to Amazon writers: "You want a review, I want my blog downloaded for kindle." Then WaPo will unearth a price gouging scandal, and I'll be investigated by the FBI.

The power of monopoly.

*
Not that I wish to make overt assumptions, but the aspiring(?) science fiction novelist from the UK has, at least since my Monday transmissions, remained mute. People, look: writing, to me, is not a parlor game, nor is it an Amazon sales ranking. If you are going to approach me hoping for my interest, then don't inconvenience me by vanishing because you suddenly feel intimidated. I have published over 300 poems, I became a semi-established journalist been 99 and 04, and have a small press issue of the now defunct Crawlspace 17 devoted to my work. Small presses are a marginalized joke whether they are training grounds for MFA students or the winsome nostalgia of the radical left for men like Steinbeck and Dreiser. If I had understood this when Jerry and Michael tried to talk me down when I was your age, I would have listened to my father and gone into accounting. I will write until I am dead, but being a publishing whore, that is another issue. Public arguments between established pundits, or even the head bashing between Lee Doty and myself, or Poets & Writers and myself, or my umbrage at Daniel Schneider for making me feel like a fucking asshole, is not what it is cracked up to be. My body is a half century old and might as well be three times that. I have nothing except a small library and an indulgence for cats. If you write shit I'll crucify you, and if you sweat blood and tears and do something from the heart, then I'll recognize that, but if you are going to solicit Joanne because her insights into what she likes or doesn't impresses you, more to the benefit of Bezos bottom line than ours, then Joanne needs help too. Those in the top echelons who get paid for critical review analysis are far and few between, and as a professional, cosmopolitan breed, a dying class. Grow up.

In the spirit of Billy Burke, Let's Trade

He paid little attention to what he said, and blamed Glaucus for his stupidity in taking in and feeding maimed and enfeebled persons. --Alexander Pope on the entirely unnecessary apocrypha on the life of Homer.


JJ Abrams has a subtext in Revolution: We are all capable of being hideous, of betraying those we love the most, and yet still remain as human, or not, as we choose. The show illustrates this to varying degrees, in the relationship between Burke and Lyons, however much their acting is studio stock and trade, and is of particular interest when looking at Esposito, most likely the best actor in the series, or the most interesting, given his resume as a supporting actor. It is interesting to look at the evolution of these portrayals against Simenon's complex noir tensions, which come through in The Brothers Rico, despite its genetic 1950's composition. I hope to be able to say something penetrating about those tensions at the end of the day, for those of you who will bear with me.

I left this last at the scene between Conte and the laundry driver (no hint there of corruption or pressure by the Teamsters, but I thought of it anyway, because this was the era of such corruption at its height), and then an impaction occurs, a condensation that is artificial due to editing constraints: not moments after the psycho gangster exits Eddie's office, the call comes in from Kubik for his facade of a detente, and then the game begins.

I will pick it up from this point after a nap, which I hope is due to a hibernation reflex, and not the closer of congestive heart failure and an oxygen generator. I have much to do so this will, hopefully, be a real nap, and I'll be back after the news. My hair is dry now, having washed it after breakfast (in real time 12/19, whoops).

Barter Economy

My favorite foreign release is Tampopo, and if I torture myself into buying the DVD and then selling it back, or Amazon gets the instant viewing rights, or in longer odds, it plays on my broadcast channels, it is ripe for dissection, however much I might wish for a photogenic memory, this is not one of my gifts. Culling the vignettes I can recall is not entirely satisfactory, though it might startle some of you that a film like this gives me a rare light-hearted delight, a sense of resolution that allows me to hold out, surviving gravel lungs and all, inclusive of supporting the Japanese if they harbor any future hope of continuing to humiliate China. If the boys of WW2 had played their cards with more acumen, Mao might not have ever had the opportunity to lay the mainland to waste.

Let me roll back a prior hostility slightly: Douglas's A Solitary Man turned out to be a wicked enjoyment, a rare moment when I could set aside my antagonism toward the actor and relish his deconstructions. This film is a subtle amalgam: a more incisive war of the Roses absent the poignant finality, an inside commentary on long winding A list twilight, and a softer, if still edgy, Falling Down, which I've mentioned is Michael as the anti-hero that I liked; but Falling Down slams the brakes and winds itself up in law and order moiety. A Solitary Man refuses this safety catch, and is stronger for it, such that may lend itself to future use.

I should not be posting, but my lungs have nearly reset, and depending on how much I catch up, we'll return to The Brothers Rico shortly. Off to bed.

Noodle Drop

The enthralling sensibility of Hero (2002) is valid as an experience, but even with research filling me in on the abstract preferences in Asian art forms, Yimou's loving warrior tribute is a veiled propaganda lie even by classical Asian standards of sublimating autonomy for the greater utilitarian good. Not necessarily because it leans toward authoritarian ambition.

I wonder, however, if I should go back and try to save my novel. I have maps of the seven kingdoms going back to 1989, long before Abrams took over television drama, and this 21st century uptick in Asia's cultural cues goes back further for me. In conjunction, I knew of The Soloist prior to its television distribution, just as Philly knew Steve Lopez. I just saw the film, and Christ knows how many like it since my failure in the world. We'll tuck it away.

Keystone Crab

As to representative metastasis, WaPo's Anne Hull profiles a case in point. Whatever else it gets wrong in terms of political spin, this paper knows how to investigate the American sclerosis. This girl is young, able, and I don't doubt the reality of her plight for a second. I'm starting to feel astronomical.

The Hurstwood Epidemic

...he listened to it with that air sulky discontent and apathy which the subtle inhabitants of these mountains know so well how to assume. Slaves as they have been since the time of the Spanish Conquest, they still preserve this feature which is also found in the character of the Egyptian fellah.  --Stendhal, The Red and The Black, p.16


The thing that saddens me the most is the interior awareness of irrevocable damage. Until the betrayal of 1999-2000, I honestly never believed anything I felt was a disorder, so much as an affect of alienation due to how brain damage impaired certain fine motor skills, physical mobility; and even after the cane crutch daggers worked their magic, I believed I would recover, because I was a just woman, and evil would not ultimately prevail. I was strong enough to bounce back, despite having been pierced, to borrow from Mark Shields' observation about the first Romney Obama debate, to which I attached little importance at the time, but being right did not get me hired. Only castigating Sullivan as a drama queen had merit, peer cannibalism generating controversy.

Had I left Philadelphia after my mother passed away, I might have been scarred, but reemerged unbowed. Not now. If I do not disengage from this landlord, I am finished, even if I bite my tongue off struggling not to give my notice before I find a rational point of departure. My credit rating will never be rehabilitated. My entitlement, unless I find part time work, will soon be garnished by the Treasury Department, and everyone knows SSA is not a livable stipend, but I am on the lower end of that scale, and the difference between a garnished benefit, when it happens, and no benefit, is the difference between Terri Schiavo with the feeding tube, and Terri without. I am either too raw as a blogger or not cleverly raw enough to unite a following from both sides of the spectrum, from the disabled community that is capable of aspiring to more than obedience to a pied piper, and from an able population who finds me useful enough to pay for. Yes, I know this burden is on me, and if I cannot meet it, then perhaps I should cease concentrating my efforts. Not yet.

You could ask why I left Delaware County, since that seems to be the unwitting focal point from which a woman of fifty is now drowning in her own back bite. Jerry did advise me against this, attempted to wean my vagina monologues off of his intellectual erection in my sex blotted mind, but in being honest with you, I fled my suburban life because I really wasn't present in it. I could not get laid, and everyone else around me had sex: my sister, my best friend, my neighbor girls. I felt like a non-entity, a tumult of all these needs, passions, took to a city campus and got screwed by a coke head. Perhaps I should have realized that the inner city would be no less damaging than the addicts who ejaculated into my mother, beat her son, and attempted, sometimes succeeded, in assaulting her daughters.

OVR set me up in dead letter jobs. I wept, and left, and unfortunately found religion in Linda Richman. I was never clinically depressed working under Linda, because in my bull headed and obstinate purity, she was the key to making the world a better place, and in the sense that Joan d'Arc in France and Joseph Smith in the not fully closed US were the last visionaries to have any real traditional religious impact, that is what she was for me, a cult following. Chris warned me not to idolize her then, and my subconcious warned me later that I was letting my guard down at my peril. This degree of personal loyalty would ultimately not be beneficial to my health. This is where my impulses, the blindness of desire, laid the groundwork for the zealotry of disability activism, and the inherent cruelty and yes, exploitation of case management compliance, only made my ouster, and betrayal from within, a festering wound.

I am almost recovered enough to return to the movies, not that I expect a standing ovation, but I have to divert recovery to my legal issues and other jobbers, so I will be slowing down, but also wish to delineate that from which rancor stems with more clarity. I can spell some of it out in a better sequence.

Consternation, Constraint, Abandon

Just managed a cup of tea, and my last piece of fudge, how much longer I can sit up and google attorneys with the appropriate blocks of text for paralegal intake, this is an issue of lung function, physical pain, keeping it and my contempt together under wraps. Worry about location later, just find a damn lawyer, find one, as if my remaining chances in life come down to creative loopholes in statutory regulations.

Liberal Caucasians, confronted with the reality of my contorted frame, react with concern: "You going to be okay?" As if I was the personal responsibility of the Ulysses instructor for contributing to his financial security, with the compassionate staff Shylock (ouch), hovering not five feet behind him to whisk the olive green cripple back on the street-- an unfair, not entirely inaccurate characterization-- so the young painter with the marine buzz cut head could treat me to something hot, the Jamacian orienting me, grounding me back in time, to when I started to transfer to the couch in my university apartment and Jerry leapt, like a leprechaun, grabbing my arm, as if I was going to fall. "You okay?"

They leave it to the Africian Matriarchial Nanny to wield the truncheon, and thunder, "you will live the way we tell you or I'll put you right back in the nursing home. You are not a human being, but a child, and if my minority kindred threaten, harass and sexually abuse you, you are an appalling monster to dare throw that back in my face!"

But unlike Liu, I live in a democratic republic, and my overregulated lack of privacy, lack of choice about where I wish to reside and with whom, oh, its not a progressive failure that has destroyed my health and well being over the course of 26 years. If I want to leave, then there is the shelter for the homeless, whose eyes will light up "a whitey has fallen among us!" while they shiv me, unwittingly curing the pain in my ribcage that has been ongoing since Liberty canceled my services because anger at molestation and humiliation is a threat to freedom, as is accountability. Back to bed, were it a mercy to perish swiftly.

This may be ambitious, at least for the undead, but an expose on Duane Morris would be interesting, following the money, how the firm and PCA keep each other affloat at my expense. It is not easy coming up with the type of attorney who would foot me through Google search. Try again in a few hours, revise my state representative letter template, and unfortunately aim at the ACLU. Fucking Christ.

Merchant of Venice

This bronchial inflammation is the worst to strike in years, and I went off this morning, and at the pervasive incompetence of this company. I have told them, time and again, that their control of the radiator heat makes me ill, and one day they are going to kill me; my tears, my pleading for relocation got ugly, and I wept all the more for how the city of Philadelphia has taught me to hate; indeed, the keystone state itself is a representative metastasis. I should have found legal representation a long time ago, and I'll be working on that most of next week. I allowed Terri Way, the young manager at Diamond Park, to dissuade me from filing a lawsuit then, after the assault, and I followed her here. Both decisions were a mistake. An attorney may not be able to get me a statue of limitations exemption, but they can get me out of the building, and away from Presby's power to turn individuals like myself into a secure portfolio dividend. I'd start searching for public housing attorneys this evening but I am still too somnambulated, and it took a great deal out of me to make up most of that session. The Wednesday group is more affluent, status conscious, and I felt ashamed of myself, my clothes, poverty glinting like a neon sign, and oddly fell in to a conversation about Pynchon's allusions to Ulysses with a very sheik and groomed fellow named Shaun, and put my foot in my mouth offering him my copy of Vineland, Why do I deliberately don social inadequacy? There was no need, the fellow was just following my lead, like all the boyfriends I never had, the inept partners who couldn't.

And yes, I did stop in DD, only because I was going to perish. The young man who let me in must have seen this, and Claudie, behind the counter, had to zap me into the realization that the young man was treating me. Joy to the world. The kids know I am sick, and kimmy bushes out her tail, prancing my shoulders, "Mommy, I am here and I will make you better!"

Cleaned one litter, but had to stop there.

Fangs In The Profiteroles

Set in my styles with a beady eye,
I got connections with the underground.-- Bernie Taupin, Caribou


Eddie and Alice Rico are a fortunate couple in their connubial bliss, but the underlying tensions fray their marital complicity almost immediately into the opening of the film. There is anxiety about the adoption (acquisition) of a child to flesh out their near wealthy status as a 50's family was then defined. There is the argument, not successfully suppressed, about the telephone call Eddie receives about harboring your traditional Americana thug, and the untimely meeting with Gino, the revelations of which you would tend to think would make a pack rat imitator wary. Perhaps it does, but if so, Karlson takes the time to show us how Conte keeps it under wraps with one of his truckers who recently had a child himself (no aura of victimization here, not overtly) until he then gets the call from Kubik.

IMBd, user generated, lists the film as shot on location in Miami, seemingly accurate, given the atmosphere of seediness, something that plagues the eastern corridor of the US well into the 20th century, Philadelphia, DC, and the entire state of Florida in particular. This is the state where Sherman (I wrote Grant in error when first published) tracked down indigenous Seminoles for being threats to civil order some years prior to the fictitious panorama of our civil war, but our plastique Disneyland peninsula, not quite the paradise it is cracked up to be, forms an interesting vector between our agrarian and cosmopolitan norms, as well as the subculture of the American mafia, which has yet to be truly demythologized, and will not be by me to any great extent. I cannot speak for Sicily, as my family, on both sides of its peasant roots, is Tuscan, though we interbred with Austrian officiers and thus have a strain of finer bloodlines, not an uncommon thing in the modern struggle for Italian unification.

I am now as sick as the proverbial dog, and suppose this can serve as your intermission and a place to pause in my labyrinth. I missed the Joyce group Saturday without meaning to despite my poorly stated petulance, shaking a defiant fist. I thought tossing my money at patronage would be a good thing for me, without meaning, inadvertently, to recreate a tepid link back to Temple University, and the young instructor is, as I have written, affable, but I am not forming any real sense of acquaintance with the men and women who also pitched their Joyce pennies, and though I am the dumbest shit in the world for sinking myself in quicksand in my various rationales for thinking I'd succeed in an urban environment, I could have plotted my own study of Ulysses had I wished, without spending 500 dollars for a future essay on which I am likely to earn only a forth of that back. I am not claiming that I have Lance's resources or skills, but as a metafiction, the text is not all that intimidating, and like any other classicist, I would have found my way. To paraphrase Charlotte Stant, making myself stupid, in this instance, would have been a virtue. I have to rest and decide if I am well enough for the 6 PM session.

Convalescent postscript: I have yet to read Grant's memoirs, and I meant General Sherman from the start, but I was multi-tasking, getting a huge attack of bronchitis, thinking about Joyce. This is why I substituted the future victorious drunkard scandal riven Ulysses for his more ruthless and efficient understudy.

Per Vias Rectas

Note to George Will :That battle ended a long time ago. The minute centers like these borrowed the rhetoric of our Enlightened Founding Fathers, the experiment that was the United States came to an end. It is now in a persistent vegetative state, and my ability to discuss it with you across the aisle, one starving freelancer who will odds on die in permanent orbit, hanging at the mercy of the welfare state, to an economically secure libertarian, is guided not by the First Amendment, but by terms of service standards of civility. Manners may help us co-exist as ineffectual primates, but it is used to police both oral and written speech since Cervantes created the novel, at least. Best of luck old man.

I once believed in America, the America in which my father secured for his family the most beautiful rancher one could lay eyes on, and now I am nearly as much a product of urban ghettoization as the sanitation workers for whom King agitated just prior to his assassination. We may not yet be a fully socialist state, but independence no longer exists.

Altered States

It is not that I would not sleep if I tried, more simply, Thursday vanished, and half dressed for the drug store, I stopped, like the song, not undressing, like the singer, but stopped, ate, wondering how long I can stop speaking to my entire family, and find a bus, survive getting off it, and never returning. I use my past, my memory, and will continue to do so, but unlike what happens to lost itinerants in Hollywood, there is nothing for me in that past, its people, even if I use their names. Quadriplegics cannot do Jack Kerouac on the road, especially with old diodes that will not behave, and charge properly. "Whatever it is they did to you," Anne Kline intoned in a low voice, "people here still care about you."

No they don't, but the point is, for all that able bodied individuals are aware, or not, of how these centers function, they do not stop doing harm to a substantial number of people that come in, get indoctrinated, humiliated. The lucky ones, like Chris, sue and settle and then become director of an independent training center that then burns down, and the cycle continues. Sue and settle with the next Linda. The unlucky ones, like Ken, do pot in their nursing home apartment wings, and never mind Cassie's freedom rhetoric, suffer in obscurity, and me? I just took too many blows from too many sources, and what truly angers me, my own case aside, is no one puts a stop to it. Certainly not a lawyer like Thomas Earle, who I used to believe was a decent man, nor Fern Markowitz, the lesbian, whose decency seemed tied to being the bad cop. She was always a ferocious and inexplicable woman to me, who treated me like she needed to use a whip on my haunches. Not the national cil council, not the state regulators, nor the auditors, and employee litigation is just the cow with an udder always full. Corporations, like BP, oh, they pay a price, but no one gives a holy fuck about disability center malfeasance; their scandals get buried, particularly in areas with large disadvantaged populations. The closest the right gets to it is with a home grown idiot like Rick Santorum, and the best the left will do, nationally, is scream they will protect entitlements, when Medicare is a fucking nightmare to begin with, and public housing does not know what constitutional law is, not when government is subsidizing its brick and plaster. The left says this is better than what it was in Roosevelt's day. Not by much, especially not when age makes risk more costly. I cannot reform this by myself, but wince at what it may take to rouse the public. Caretakers killing us doesn't do it, Paratransit drivers raping us gets a script in a Dick Wolf drama, and cil consumers look the other way, until it happens to them, then they sue. No one touches how this system operates, because those like me are supposed to be matriculated, with superhuman effort, minimal resources, and those mostly badly managed. Now I'm going to bed, lucky if I don't drop the Joyce group this weekend at the little museum that tries very hard. Money already pissed.

Active Theatre Rations

Meeks died--thinking the El Serrano Motel looked just like the Alamo. James Ellroy, LA Confidential, pg 6



To augment my brazen temerity, and to object to a simplistic tirade by Jonathan Rauch in the August 2012 kindle edition of The Atlantic Monthly, where Rauch claims that conservative libertarians are not being honest, and that the Tea Party wants to deny health care to the poor, and suggests the right wing wants to repeal this 1986 Act, I am suggesting no such thing, whether due to the cognitive limitations of my uncle's dementia, or certain classes of those sustained with little quality of life in nursing homes.

I have seen horrors in the field, in institutional environments, and in active surgical wards that maybe you have or haven't, and dare to suggest that we begin to make value judgments over who gets more aggressive treatment and who doesn't. The average cost of heart bypass surgery is 60K. My father had many viable and productive years left when he had his procedure. His little brother, with his behavioral disorders, does not, and my aunt's aggressive do everything approach is a misguided drain of resources as opposed to utilizing compassionate palliative efforts. And if that sixty thousand dollars had been invested in giving me the technology I needed in my 30's to give me the most proactive independent environment possible, I would be paying my taxes and have remained a viable and more affluent citizen who could pay her debts. NYT's favorite flatfoot is absolutely correct that the US has practiced socialized medicine for years, but the end result is a horrific nightmare of fraud and sometimes questionable treatment, and what Keystone 65 plus did do me over procuring a power chair from a non-certified rehabilitation facility nearly cost me my life, not that the coordinating jackasses from my favorite center could do more than say "oh, you have to impoverish yourself through spend down!"

It may not be all about me, but what I went through up to 2008 caused me sustained trauma and nearly killed me, and a woman of my intelligence deserved better.

Pinata Reel Change

I am really not much better for my herring and succotash, hands shaking, hypertension swirling in circulation, feeling it behind my eyes. First she is in physical agony from her hip, father's sister, and when I ask what I can do, not meaning a damn word, she wants to hire Tim. Marie seems far more sold on Tim's insolence than I, and his rebuff, when I telephone him to query, "You know I'm here eleven to seven," indignant that I pitch extracurricular activity between the two of them, Italian crone and African road runner, and then "Call me back, it is urgent." She wants to be my long long long long sick uncle's attendant now, and there is one for independent living, Uncle Joseph, the Marinelli spit ball from my days as a child, my father's favorite pinata joke that my Roman Grandmother kept Quiet. I and my fourth cousin were the family spaz'es, and my youngest uncle was the off turd. Sometimes I wonder what Lillian the belle brought over from the old country. The fault more accurately resides with the patriarchal sperm of brow beaten grandfathers who died young. At least I tried to live a life, struggled to have victories and pride, vanquished now. Joe never did. Sat in his chair, sullen, anti-social. This distant fourth cousin, Richard, is a faithful ADAPT activist, marching to the orders of Cassie James Holdsworth and I, well, you hear the scathing acid of my disillusion, the hard erosion into the pathology of a broken imagination, hollowed demonic interior seething poison, or maybe you don't. I would like to email my first cousin, also Richard, a contractual release on his mother, then fly to Roma so riot policia can pock mark my ass with bird pellets, but of course I will instruct the old woman on what she needs to do, involuntary tremors jerking my shoulder blades. Call it a night.

And Coital Absence

"You put writing first, and I put teaching first."-- John Tassoni trying to put a positive spin on one of my disappointments as our real time relationship was drawing to a close.


We've seen where those respective value judgments have left me, though you cannot see it in John himself, his evolution as I have plotted its points. He was not necessarily drawn to violence as my brother was. Two years older than I, since I was a late comer to the collegiate scene because of the surgeries and rehabilitations subject to that, I know only the sketchiest details about John's life in the smaller, if not less dangerous badlands of Chester. My brother did not have to go far to find trouble in the suburbs, to cope with a mild personality disorder that bordered psychosis once he was dying from AIDS. Both he and John used drugs to cope with emotional pain. John's vanity, masking an intrinsically warm and basically kind man, is what enabled him to use meritocracy for his present day satisfactions. How much more I am going to drop about his past, I leave unresolved, not particularly desirous of confrontation even in writing to preserve what escaped me, narrowed my own scope because it eluded me, what I thought desire held to be authentic. There would be absolutely nothing to resolve between us. Had we dated it would not have worked, however genuine I believed my feelings to be; not simply because of my broken and florid homily peasant Italian body that rated his same ethnicity as quality grade stock "I'd never get," to quote my sister. I believed, initially, that he was attracted to me, but feared the burden of fucking a naive cripple twit, and that I then dimmed his interest through my lack of reticence. He would deny this, maybe accurately, maybe not, but spent a good deal of time catering to my want of his attention until the woman who commanded his balls hit the scene, and, if I wanted to be even crueler to my deluded youth, he strung our interaction along because I was a special education dilemma; that degree of veracity hurts even more, but this frank assessment doesn't contradict the initial poignancy of having been utterly smitten. Without a shadow of a doubt, I know that sleeping with him when I was nineteen or twenty would have been transformative, would have healed my sense of inadequacy. Desire can be counter intuitive, but not in this case; it would have been a culminating union, not born of lust.

However his urban environment scathed him, John remained human. My brother did not. He was Tessio and what frightens the able bodied world about me is exactly the fact that my father gave me Tessio's temperament and satisfaction in being an assassin, a temperament that may one day take over what is left of my empathy. I have been struggling for thirteen years with the fact that my supervisor should pay for her assault on my dignity, and my nature, being what it is, will never lose sight of this injustice, and the deployment of a medieval code of lex talionis against it. I murder Linda daily when my scars open at their most vulnerable points, and what is actually going on in my creative execution of her charming sociopathic sensibility is the restoration of my power that she psychologically raped, and a fantasy of choreographed physical control that bests her own. This is impossible. I am merely contorted, florid cellulose, and she is the prevaricating stick bitch who mews like a kitten and gets a slap on the wrist every time she unsheathes her claws to leave some subordinate's gut dripping stool blood; that her career is protected by the very disability lawyers I am supposed to be able to turn to, by Liberty's board of directors, by my former gay activist associates with their own ethical sleaze, activists who despise her, novas the sun in front of my eyes, and I either achieve justice in some way, or I break the law trying. Feed that into the breach of manner calculator while I change to drive to the same old CVS, with its carnival of souls. It is time to hit the dead zone, except for the fact that I have been malingering, unmoving, perhaps wishing my strength would collapse. Eventually it shall.

After I eat, a convenient delay tactic into the urban poverty I cannot handle again with the fortitude of youth, this supposition of an overlay will return to what it superimposes, and that is, John's assimilated manner is as much an affect as Conte's acting in Italian dramas..

The editorship I did want to make an effort to aspire toward is not part of this, but in the time I had remaining, my aunt knocking me off my game, and now my infection, escalated finally into a cold, was a factor. I have to go through mounds of documents that the move displaced, and when I had the strength, my aunt would not listen, and I have an unsightly, useless piece of foam blocking my back wall until I find a booster or throw it out, so I have to bide my time, and if something else turns up, try again. Even if I do find my AccessLife editor, his stewardship was brief, and taking myself seriously in strange lands in North Carolina requires a will, an assertion, that my aunt wore out of me, because she is sick herself, and in pain, and my father is hitting his eighties. If I had a choice, this evening, I'd simply resign.

Yet I cannot bring myself to put an end to this conclusively. Give my damn notice if I need movement more than anything else, and that would put me into an eclipse, anchor me compact to a speck of dust under the constraint of a police baton; hunger must be sated. When I hit auto destruct, it will reverberate, rippling like a pebble, or thrashing, an inept swimmer soon to sink

Coital Glamor

"The novel ended with Flaubert and with James." -- Ulysses, Order, and Myth, page 177


Eliot is on point. We are evolving our way out of the primacy of aesthetic choice, killing language, killing writing as a profession except as it remains necessary for engineering, mathematics, physics, computer science, medical data, until such a time as our extinction. I had a geology instructor back in the day when I suspect pedagogy was not quite the science my former flame elocutes like worsted cotton out of his ear drums, who intoned to the class, "MAN can adapt to any conditions." And of course, this is what you tell adolescents to damper the suicide rate among them as a class, but that kind of optimism is illusory. Beneath all these things that add up to the human half, there is the animal, beneath the love of form, beneath the fact that cultural impermanence triumphs over memory, beneath the quest for intricacy, beneath the story, beneath the failure and the persistence of metaphysics, the Alawites and the Syrian Free Army engage in bloodshed, the Israelis invade Gaza, the Israelis occupy Lebanon, the Israelis have been engaged in constant warfare since Yahweh became a conceptual advance over pagan deification, and this spearhead isn't so much about the cost of the Semitic legacy to our species, so much as the Semitic legacy represents the fact that a chimpanzee is pretty much a chimpanzee, and like other species, primates are dangerous, brutal. Everything else, including the fact that we seem to think we now control the genome, is nothing more than distractions for the bipedal brain. That is why tensions remain dynamic in complicit intimacy between husband and wife in the representational fiction, and perfectionist niceties behind the camera, in The Brothers Rico. I'd argue, however, that some of these highly stylized films from between 1948 to 1968 offer us more insights into the cracks that have since been consumed into the post modern maw, than does the glaze over your eyes waiting for post modernism to transmute and close its bracket. The sex between Alice and Eddie Rico was great, but then there is this pesky business of your past as a bookie, dear Eddie, for the syndicate, with no allusion to what struggles Dianne Foster's character incurred in marrying such a man. Was the material status enough, never mind that from which her eye had to turn away? Or was Alice such a feminine catch that Eddie believed his moral compass was clean, for all intents and purposes? Was his history, their history, a case of willful blindness, all for the sake of style, a certain propriety that everyone achieved after the war in an implied contract? Alice does manage to worry about the implications of the communique over that telephone line, and Eddie equivocates those implications, which sums up the conflict of his character through the entire unfolding of the narrative.

Urethra Knives

The Brothers Rico opens with Richard Conte in a glinty house robe receiving a telephone call, and then in a scene I found fascinating for its time and place, he and Dianne Foster have a fairly frank episode of sexual intimacy while Eddie undresses and gets in the shower. I know some of the pre-33 era black and whites were more risqué, but if you really look at this film, it sells star powered sex as hard as New Wave in the next decade. Eddie is obviously virile in his every gesture at the sink, of which we are offered a nice shot of bare chested beef. Alice is obviously happy with her tiger, and the shoulder bite is permissively promiscuous. The suggestion of infertility in this atmosphere of laden sexual satisfaction is left open for speculation, and this is very Eisenhower era, but it is also very much a part of Simenon's methodology, to leave the issue of a barren, and otherwise happy couple, simply hanging in the air. I have another theory. Italians will never be Wasps, no matter how perfect the imitation. Whether or not this was lifted from Henry James, (cf Daisy Miller ) as much as it might be a standard plot device might be debatable, and you can even tell me I am full of shit, but I have two points in my favor:

1. Daisy Miller positively resonated with the American public; it was a huge hit for James, put the fellow on the map like nothing else.

2. Simenon is European, and 2a. The Saxons, Franks, Austrians and Prussians thought it was acceptable to cast Italians as greaseballs. James does it all the time. Even Prince Amerigo is a somewhat sordid character, royal though he may be, and Wilkie Collins cashes in those chips without hesitation in his major virginal hit.

This still had a hold on the generational Protestants of Eisenhower's day, so, voila, Eddie is cursed because of his provincial roots, no matter how assimilated he is into American material power and status. Italian Catholics, like the Jews, like the Irish, can approximate, but it would take the civil rights era, and perceived  color threat, to implode intramural Caucasian prejudices which flag a film such as this.

Time for a pause, but this analysis will carry me through a number of posts, hampered by my imperfect memory of Brazil's timeline, despite the fact I have seen the film three times. Bridge to cross.

I have taken ill, and because of this, have to resign myself to not reentering a late life academic competition, and in fact, should my posts become inactive, depending how long accessing treatment takes me, you may assume that the interns, or medical students who usually evaluate me, fucked up. This is a health issue I cannot allow to linger, however, unless, unbeknownst to me, I get to decompose in much the same manner as mio bambino, a consoling irony?