Erik's first real imprint on me was at a Disabled In Action meet at the Library for the Blind, on Walnut Street. Cassie was there, planning strategy, later, but in the hallway, Erik was mocking me, smiling facetiously because he was smoking hooked up to an oxygen tank, and I was reacting to the possible danger; one wrong move with his Zippo and no doubt I would have never wound up being his neighbor three floors below-- and this is evidence, for all his zeal, that he contradicts his beliefs with actions of self-hatred; indeed, evidence I should not have latched on to him and Jimmi with my naive faith in their just cause which isn't so just, with their personal corruption. He has declined very badly since those years, and I am weary of observing it, though you think me heartless, to pummel a transvestite in his slowly revolving death.To my mind, the life he leads now, with nearly 24 hour care and his loss of control, isn't much different than a life he'd have in a home, and this is what awaits me in five? ten years? Virtual helplessness, contained by paraprofessionals shoving bowel suppositories up my rectum, like Tim does for Jay, and then tells me feces stories, which inspire me in the tradition of Pynchon and Wallace.Wallace was a competitive tennis player, and I can never experience the joy of that, power serves on a manufactured flat surface. Conceptualize it, maybe, but the joy of balancing on the balls of my feet, that I cannot imagine, and the man took his own life, despite all of his over-educated skill, and I, by turns, can do nothing with the umbrage that rises in me over it, except express it.Why does Erik cause me pain then, if I disavow him and all the rest? Because I was once invested in these activists, and once I cared, and still care enough to roll myself out like a door mat for the sake of mutual support, unless you need a sex change operation, never completed due to your lupus-like disease, your multi-strokes and cardiac events.
To show you how little versed I am in local issues, I was unaware that Santorum's younger daughter Bella was born with Trisomy 18. To read D'Arcy's post is clearly to side with the indignation against medical rationing of quality of life issues, but does Janice herself see the larger picture involved? I will presume, for the sake of argument, that Amelia's mental retardation is significantly less severe than my deceased sister's. If you give her the kidney, what will her quality of life be when she is in her forties, and her parents are dead or in their own decline? If the state of Pennsylvania needs to so severely restrict Paratransit services that I cannot competively hold a job and get myself off the draconian social security death trap, and be repeatedly screwed by federally mandated disability service centers, what is the outpouring of protest for these children achieving? Society has to be willing to pay out to achieve the blind equality that the west sees as a birthright, and it doesn't do that, even as we squabble over Mitt Romney's rewards for his venture capital risks.As for Bella, if she makes it to adolescence, will her parents deem her suffering justified according to their faith? If I'm still here they will receive no commiseration from me.
The 1955 Tarantula deals with malformation, and transformation, in the senses I mean, through Leo G. Carroll's rather curious struggle with acromegaly as a symbolic stand in for irresponsible use of nuclear technology. I will do some digging into Clive Barker's string of American films to see what I can distill about deforming processes that unnerve sensibility.
