I was surprised when Monica queried me voluntarily about Frank, during Brenda's international incident two weeks ago, surprised that she chose to speak to me on her own, at all, though I'd have to look up the date. If I do not write it down, either online, hard drive, or hard copy, I cannot remember the time frames about these things. I still dislike Monica, in the sense that white attendant reactionism to me, or paternalism, as with the-Susan-who-treats-Sherry-like-a-large-toddler, and that wasn't going to work with me, is about equal to the African dysfunctionalism in this system that has so scarred my psyche. If any of you read a future byline which indicates that I have been killed by one of these sterling paraprofessionals, don't be surprised; it happens, and all of Josie Byzek's efforts at chronicle collection, all of New Mobility's educational awareness pieces, do not change the fact that beneath the surface, attendant care can be as abusive as nursing home neglect.
I am not trying to rap Ebert for attempting to bridge the gap with his fans; if he gets a few to turn their civic conscience on, this is not a bad thing, but Roger got old and got sick, and I have been swimming in this cess pool since my sister Michelle's childhood. I remember her institutional environment, remember mine, and by default, my local disability center destroyed my life. I may salvage something, but it is too late for me to go back, absorb Hathaway's stress as Andrea, and climb back up, and even if, when I mail my missive, someone gets me a lawyer, and this lawyer comes up with a tactical approach that works, and Linda is politely retired, and Tom either institutes reforms or moves on, my compensation wouldn't amount to chicken feed, and that is the enormity of injustice.
It took me a superhuman effort not to hurt myself back in 2000. I could not stand up for myself with EEOC intake personnel while I was decelerating and fighting it at the same time, even with a therapist, and this is the issue about time limits and the law. There is no other support system out there for me. Liberty is it, and they make me sick. My sister doesn't care. To her I am like Sherry, and to be treated like Sherry, and so I shield myself with contempt. My brother cares just enough not to be as callous as Stephanie, but when it comes to educating himself, and being aware, like the advocating author Rachel Simon, he chooses, like my sister, to stay blind, because they have children, and I am a terrifying burden.
Some people reading this may be moved, disabled or not, but do not know what to say or how to help, and I have already had my fill of Josie's compassionate pretensions that possibly cost me a happy memory of fun out on a date, with the anticipation of romance. I would wipe out the ideology behind the simplicity of independent living as a phrase with my bare hands, if I could, and it would not change a thing.
Rufus Gifford, writing the latest Obama For America email, had me fooled for a moment with his subject line, writing to ask my opinion about why I wouldn't want to have dinner with the president (paranoia about the Secret Service blowing my head off as a spastic enemy of the state in well meaning accident, perhaps?), and why I haven't donated, and the answer to that has been here in my journal account all along, although why I continue to receive party line apparatchik missives is another interesting question, when I am wearied of American politics all together, but it helps to keep my eye on the progressives despite the fact that the right offers me no solutions. Some of you probably think I sound like a mild cripple fascist, and maybe I am to some degree, at this point in my life, the poison of an urban backwater in my veins, but for me, it is not, and never was, about ideological purity.
Through my eyes, the political system under which this country operates is broken, whether it is exemplified by the Bush Administration's aggressive tactics against my vulnerability, or Obama's end term easing of that pressure without removing it, or helping me to find a way out of it. Liberty Resources, and my dated inside knowledge of centers, their unnecessary redundancy, my near total lack of family support on top of this, and public housing, is just a microcosm of the destruction of American mobility, if it indeed ever really existed without the engines of our major wars and unspoken racial/caste systems, an apt two paragraph prelude to say I may never quite understand Mikhail Bulgakov's intentions in The Master and Margarita, at least, not beyond its obvious anti-totalitarian aspects, because I do not believe that lack of faith necessarily implies state model sympathy. Indeed, Rushdie uses schizophrenia to attack Islamic fundamentalism in The Satanic Verses the way Bulgakov uses it in inverse fashion to ridicule Stalinism, and I'm on Rushdie's side, against Mohammed.
Bulgakov is dynamic, and his work has a superb comic timing, but I am still in the first third of the book, perplexed, and may need several readings over time, even to understand and accept in his work what I am inclined to reject about Christian superlative hopes in the Blood of the Lamb. I worried a few more pages over my cappellini and fish, still mentally throwing up my hands at the fucking Russian literary greats . With the possible exception of my limited exposure to Tatyana Tolstaya's soft magical realism, the grand-niece of the other great wingnut Tolstoy, they all drive me crazy.
I may have found something to stream later this weekend in Sam Fuller's 1964 The Naked Kiss. I saw it once before, and though I cannot spin a precise critique off the top of my head, this is an edgy piece of work, that looks at sexual exploitation from a different angle, and when Constance Towers, the lead, talks about a perv kiss, in her trouble with a suspect fiance, I know exactly what she means.The attendant who molested me did not hurt me, and in that I was fortunate, but women like her are lucky not to get themselves killed. The way Miss Eddie touched me wasn't friendly, or fond, or neutral; it was sick, and had an immediate aftermath, and Jennifer Barnhart, Liberty's director of these services in that time frame, compounded the level of cruelty by terminating my services; it would be difficult to restore them even if I wanted to try again, or will eventually be forced to, but it points to how utterly toothless the ADA is as an enforcement tool, as John Hockenberry pointed out in one of his Cando columns.Centers allow consumers to vent when they are victimized, but have no prosecutable authority; it remains a huge problem within attendant care services, but also points to the extreme difficulty of holding people accountable: Linda has fifty different excuses for what she did to me, as does Barnhart, punishing me further for what I've suffered, as does my building manager, Trudy. They may think their doing they're jobs, but they make a Russian author like Zamyatin look entirely accurate about how we're dooming our species.
I am particularly soured on web writing this morning, having wasted so much time on the issue of enabling code when I do not know how, and disgruntled at the prospect of wiping everything out and starting over. It isn't so much the forty dollars, or hammering out a niche, and failing not to devolve into my own ego, which I did not wish to do, or do but sparingly. It is about restoring a sense of respect and esteem to my life so that as I near the end I can say it was worth it.
As it stands now, it wasn't. I derived very little joy out of my equally sparing intimate episodes with men, and I doubt trying a lesbian experience would have improved on this, as I am hostile to the eroticism of my own gender, especially when directed at me deliberately. My main source of satisfaction was my work ethic, learned from my father, but only rarely enjoyed, and of that, being a journalist was my most vibrant investment, taking me outside of an ontology.
Short lived as it was, AccessLife made me happy, and I haven't been able to duplicate that experience very often. Ebert is not necessarily being a pansy ass when he tweets New Mobility columns, but New Mobility is trapped in an IL ideology from which it will not readily deviate. Josie Byzek, just like Jimmi Shrode, and Erik von Schmetterling, and Cassie James, and Linda C Dezenski, are all woven into this paradigm. None of them like me anymore, if they ever did, but none of them necessarily like each other. This movement is not entirely what it seems, to outside eyes, and what it expects to achieve in the long run is a mystery to me.
As I have written, I wanted an able life, and know I have the intelligence for the success I have envisioned but that otherwise eluded me; if Erik cannot work, I am not sure what emptying his catheter cached urine on Governor Rendell's leg achieves, as has been alleged. Erik has a studio, an entitlement, and his lover; his rage in this context seems counterproductive, and I think it has more to do with his failed body identification, and his inability to practice as a physician, since he became too disabled to be a doctor.
I share the anger at the society that they do, but both have failed me, the IL paradigm and what the able society is willing to invest toward equal opportunity, which, in the US, if your mobility options and adaptations are limited, means you're screwed, unless you live in DC and can access the federal district subway system. The EPVA had the muscle to create it, but as a country, our transport authorities are patchwork nightmares.
loki_onyx admonished me, before unfriending me, about attacking those who'd been kind to me: I needed to take a good look in the mirror. I wonder if loki isn't more protected in his Australian welfare state than I am in mine. After Suzanne Bacal'a funeral, Linda wrote me, "I wish I had been kinder to you," and "I've always recognized the bond between us." Confusing me, even before we came to blows.
Any CIL regular might suspect what she was up to. Peer support, feeding my concerns back to me. I actually thought she meant what she was telling me, and took it to heart.
But how was she kinder to me? I did not ask to be placed like a hapless pawn in the middle of a power struggle between her, Jimmi, Erik, and the indomitable Jewish lesbian, Fern Markowitz, who was toppled while I was gaily being crucified.
Maybe I cannot be *good enough,* any more, but a scholar willing to give me a chance on putting a thesis about Lampedusa's modernism together, or an editor giving me a chance to do a hard policy paper on redundancy, this means more to me than acts of charity.
James Bennet, the methodical editor of the venerable Atlantic Monthly, invoked a historical conversation between Dick Morris and Bill Clinton on the issue of Presidential ratings to illuminate the preoccupation of the March edition, which is namely, are we watching Obama fail, and I have already answered that in the affirmative. It does not boil down to mere policy issues, like whether TARP was large enough, or his health care reform which did nothing to help me during my extenuating circumstances in his months as the President Elect, now being dismantled by the judiciary, or his I had a monster daddy book, or his audacity of hope. He was a great candidate, and then he vanished, by varying degrees, into the methodology of the executive process, and TNR asked the question early on if that was enough to govern the country.
Not from where I sit.
And this is liberalism which has lost its way. Unlike the top tier executives at Liberty, I will not have a pension, not only due to the fact that I was pilloried by them, but by the time I had stabilized myself, about a year and a half later, I lost my special transportation services, was driven to hell and back by my landlord for the sake of renovations, and my medical equipment safety net went snap crackle and pop, and I'll never recover from this, in any financial sense of the word. My heart isn't in the best shape, aside from other issues, and if my senator will not help me, then I'll break the law if necessary to hold Liberty's COO accountable; I'll suffer if I get arrested, maybe sicker, but I cannot bounce in fresh hoops to reach new heights.
This isn't just about the fact that I allowed Linda to twist my stressed psyche 180 degrees. I admit to a vulnerable culpability, and it is ironic that I am willing to use ADAPT's tactics against their members embedded within CILS when I am highly critical of their value; it is about the methodology, which has a very high failure rate, unless you are so disabled, so poor, that a coordinator marking compliancy checkmarks is an upgrade from institutional restraints.
Those who really know me know how much of a quadriplegic I am. Must the system fail me so horribly because I want the same professional and social equality as Jerry had, or John Tassoni obtained? Unlike Erik, or even Jimmi, I want to work and earn a living.
The Matrix Research Institute was my failure, but Liberty promised me support which never materialized, and I have been dealing with this CIL's crippling institutional pathology for over twenty years. It has to change.
Whatever comedy writers borrow from Shakespeare in terms of partner switching, what is funny in translation from the Elizabethan age becomes circumscribed in American films. The Family Stone (2005) suffers from as much, with shades of the white neo-beatniks, the good guys in this case, and shades of the white power professional, encapsulated by a Sarah Jessica Parker fresh off her Sex and the City run, pretty, affluent, misguided about materialism and soul, and to really strain the issue of social propriety, the gay son is deaf and in a cross race attachment. Pow, and oh no here she goes, but no, I am not going, except to point out that if the black actor had attitude like James Brown, and if the cute white son looked more like my old friend Jimmi with his gluttonous pallor and Goth nail polish, the film would have flopped, but Tyrone and Brian are just cute and cuddly, with the bare minimum of eroticism needed so as not to create any threatening aspect. On a superficial level, Stone may seem vastly different than The Brady Bunch, but it runs virtually the same playbook, with the English romantic miscues thrown in. You might ask me what risks I wanted it to take, and it is simple, real life doesn't erupt with lightning rod realizations; no matter what the studio system does, it virtually always distorts representations.
I can be guilty of pretension, but I am not guilty of it when it comes to the realization that LiveJournal has outlived its usefulness, but I overshot my mark and will be stuck with it as a utility for a little while yet. Google may solve my problems rather quickly once I wind my way through their support system. I will post this: Few of you, outside of certain communities, have held my interest. You do not write well, and from the end of one computer, it becomes tedious. The difference between an author and a writer is something the Jamesians will be taking up in conference, but it is a matter of degree. Susanna Daniel may succeed along that trajectory, and become a typical funny bones midwesterner who would bore the living shit out of me, I do not know, but she is not quite an author yet. She is a novelist perhaps just reaching for stature, and scored a byline with Slate, something I have not yet managed. I am still a writer, in this sense, and not an author, but from what I see on LJ, Microsoft is not particularly concerned with the erudition of its client base.You need to remember that even electric posts need to cater to an interest, and those will be my parting words to the English fluent; the Slavic behavior there is a good indicator of why your Soviet empire collapsed. Perhaps Slavic cultural norms have lost fluidity, and would be dying out but for modern technology, swallowed into Asian memes.But writers also internally censor what they have not processed. I create the balance beam between Jerry and myself as something that would make able readers feel sorry that I was caught up in this dynamic, where you might exclaim, "how lonely she was!"Not always. He and I had our tensions between us, and here is a summation for you on the irony of my adult life. The last time I actually spoke to the man was in 92 in my office, fishing for grad school recommendations. I had him on one end of the line reluctantly rebuffing me due to the length of time involved, and then saying we could meet in conference, while Linda was sitting to my right, waiting for me to get off the phone. I think she sat in the W or Indian style that I used to deploy before my surgery. I was swearing off one icon, a little pissed at him, muttering that he was conceited, while the spastic woman I had raised onto a dais was patiently waiting to discuss my goal planner.Therein lies the shattered tragedy of a life that otherwise might have given back so much. Assigning blame to anyone wouldn't change the facts.
The external plot of Brother John is simple. A relatively middle aged black woman is in the doctor's office, and he, though ailing himself, still knows how to utilize bedside manner, lies, puts her in hospital. She dies from the tumor he had already diagnosed as fatal. Poitier's character appears, as he does during each family related death. I believe Beverly Todd is the romantic foil for Poitier's enigmatic angel. I believe Louisa is the love interest rather than the dead relative, but it is not really sweat and blood if I am off with the cast roles. This is the post-antebellum South where the American apartheid of Jim Crow is still within living memory, freshly cracked by Johnson's voting rights act, and the setting is an allegory for man's damnation, which, when Poitier's character vanishes, is suggestive as imminent in a purposely low key manner, but if you want to look for what I call transformative, study Will Geer and the girl as contrastive perceptors of Poitier's character. Thomas is kindly, but weary, losing his ability to drive, and under his empathetic manner is a cynical man whose suffering in itself is possibly the corrosive trigger of the end of the world that is about to start. Maybe 
louise_norlie would read Geer differently and see him as the Jamesian sponge who soaks up an improbable and fantastic conclusion, and that would not be wrong either, but his deterioration, simply a biological fact, becomes transformative evil because the suffering has no outlet, and thus by extension is born by what otherwise an objective process, in this case physical aging.
I sometimes enjoy hanging out in the bathroom in the dark, or semi light from the main length of the studio, my flaccid buttocks sucked into the ceramic, always hating not having apple cheeks that draw a man's eyes, but I don't, although I got a few able-bodied lovers anyway because men are pigs, and my vagina is roomy. I never had an orgasm during sexual intercourse, though I came close with one of my husbands, and I see the more adept of you connecting the dots, and saying "oh," and beginning to understand why my former iconic sociopathic superior unnerved me so profoundly by going off on my relatively mild poem for Tassoni, all of 12 years ago now. Still laboring on my senator draft, I am beginning to feel like Sir Philip Sidney laboring over his Apologia, adamant that poetic lies involve deeper metaphorical truths, although my argument is demanding that institutional patronizing be eliminated. Of course I studied Sidney with my Irish demi-god, and I remember distinctly what Jerry said in his deconstruction of the word "admire," although Jerry would not; he had a bad time at our university, with a crippled devotee dogging his one heel, and his conflict with the deans on the other. I know little about that but can surmise a great deal, knowing the character of the school, knowing Jerry as he was then, a little over my age now.The best, briefest years of my life, but I was miserable then as well, and never listened to anybody, not the nursing students, not David Ward, about what they thought about my (clinical) depression. Dr. Ward was off a degree or two anyway, according to Dr. Rubel, who I counseled with shortly after the exchange of campuses, but with age, fault lines erode deeper grooves. Jerry, being a brilliant Shakespearean, kept his brilliant mouth shut, and when all was said, and all was done, he was the better man for having the discipline not to either lecture me or give in to my need for sexual worship. Today it would not matter. My body is old, my breasts are fallen and uneven, sore on the side, my hips in pain, my sex drive in half baked embers. but I mean this not mattering in a more complex sense than lack of physical consummation Even if he had wanted to, Jerry could not have given me what I wanted in a partnership with him. I was too young then, and far too bitter now. I have rather lived the last stanza of my poem for him, and think about him every day, as an abstraction, narcissistically, after my fashion, the way you think about ice cream, but this is an easy escape hatch. How would things have fared with changing diapers, monitoring pace makers? Loving a memory is another way of admitting defeat in the world. A pair bonding to be lived with was deprived me, except in a very brief mismatch with a man like my grandfather, and it is too late nowI never told anyone anyone I loved them without feeling another consequence, another set of sentiments entirely. My father rejected my desire for his love. Dad I love you. Why? he asked, angry at my mother, angry at my brain damage, my father never struck me, but punished me, just the same. I am 50 and he is nearly 80, and that dynamic is still between us. I pay a price to love mio padre.
I never said it to Tassoni either. Oh, I stuck my foot in it-- wore my dazzled please fuck me heart on my sleeve, but I lounged on one side of my dorm, he the other. Tassoni, I like you. I like you too Joanne, he said, both of us meaning two different things, both in denial. he that he would have to reject the naive little cripple, me, that I could win an Italian boy like him! My father hated Tassoni, which always surprised me, and I never really emailed it to Linda either, though I was screaming, and on the verge of a psychotic break, one which I basically swam back from on my own, I still had the presence of mind to be conditional, lashing at her, but lashing with "I thought I had--" and that isn't exactly a declaration meaning that I did, and it absolutely never came out of my mouth with Frank, couldn't. The man was blind to the fact that I really did not want him, sexually, or otherwise.I am not sure if I loved Pat; my mother said I did not, but my mother had her affairs, and I mine, and I am not entirely sure. I made him leave me and then lost my dignity. Mmm, but I did get over it, and resist what I want to say about who or what I only ever loved, because I know it is a fiction, my own personal mythology, and a falsehood, but I also know I do not have long before something bad happens again, and my will cannot fend off more and more constraint on my independence, and my need to make some last declaration is hard on my heels, because I am a damn jackass who has always been the student of perpetual motion.I may be hard on you, but I am as equally cruel to myself, rest assured. Shakespeare does not write a pro forma romance with Romeo & Juliet; he is ambivalent about the good of passion.
Nicole Kidman's travail after her break up with Cruise only entered my conscious minutely, as both she and he are manufactured Caucasian royalty, whatever nostalgia one wants to evoke over the demise of the studio mongul, Hollywood has not changed the ends, simply the means by which stars become different and untouchable. I can be critical of white cultural norms as well, and arguably, figures like Tom Cruise and Governor Romney represent the worst aspects of vestigal European privilege. I know these are real people, as Ebert said on the radio, but I disagree with him to this extent: They are real people trapped within the facade of what projects them, and can no more do the normal things like take a dump in my sterile public housing toilet than I can work myself to death to give myself even a simulated version of Nicole's body. Kidman and Cruise, and to an extent, our favorite vacuous Mormon, are the super whites, the top of the top, and I resent this almost, a sliver not as much, as I have come to resent urban black culture and homosexual lifestyles; but Alejandro Amenábar deploys this aspect of Nicole's celebrity to great effect in The Others (2001), and I am kicking myself for two things, not seeing the great Jamesian influence on this film, which after doing a search, is quite obvious, and not seeing the film sooner, when Kidman did such interesting promotional articles for it, and I find it, as a cinematic ghost story, to be superb. The cinematography is excellent and achieves what Amenabar wishes to do in haunting us; that shot of the husband's profile on the pillow turning corpse-like next to Kidman's lilly pallor made me shiver with revulsion, and our macabre fascination with infanticide is handled with just the right touch. I evidently missed my calling by not finding my way into marriage with directors like Amenabar or Inarritu. They understand the power of what film can do organically, and how it is different, on a collective level, from narrative text. The Others is worth spending my money to view again, and Kidman managed to reach me more than unnerve me with her hyper vigilant iciness. To imagine what her life was like with Cruise literally makes me think of felines freaking out on a hot tin roof. She possibly deserves better.
At the start of Superbowl 42, I hated the mechanized perfection of the Patriots, and was glad the Giants ended what might have been extraordinary in football history. For 46 I care less, if I have my numbers right, but I would trade all the hype, hoopla, the overblown marriage between the NFL and Hollywood, the celebration of our crass warrior materialism, for a good and even brutal game, regardless of football dementia. I say we should return to the aggressive punishment the sport used to have. Give me blood. Beat the living shit out of Brady and retire him (oooooo).
Twice I have attempted to settle down at this old wooden desk of Tom Reid's, the one piece of worthless furniture I have that has long exceeded its mileage, and twice during these attempted settlings I got the gut burn. First the burn pee, successfully contained, and then a second night dump, flaming out of me, with my maternal grandfather's plumbing; he lived to a badly reached 88, my big child loud grandfather Louis. I inherited his bellicose agitation, his terrible digestive tract, and possibly his Alzheimer's, but that is thus far speculative. I forget where my keys are, or why I rolled to the kitchenette, but not yet lost my spatial sense of location, like why I head to a particular franchise. I may like Dunkin Donuts but my intestines make a different argument, and it was a struggle to visit Dunkin today, and that not for the pleasure of the thing itself, but because I had not eaten. The head crew Asian cut me a break on seven cents out of his tip cup, not because of my poverty, but because of making change, and I guess this means he and I share a mutual respect, given my customer frequency.Asian cultural norms, minus the cult of the Emperor, re North Korea, Mao, I find admirable, and hope they resist the worst aspects of Western identity politics. Yes, I am a bitch with a heart of gold, and if you want to pick a fight, then bring it on, because liberalism creates as many problems as it solves. I have a mind in here, to echo Clinton over Coretta King's coffin, and I should not have had to spend most of my life suffering because I was born with brain damage the size and width of a quarter, and I never, never deserved to be played like a patsy by other disabled people I trusted. Fighting the system is hard enough. I should not have had to spend my best years living in senior housing, and I will die fighting this, spending my last breath in anger, even due to the fact that HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan looks like a venture capitalist. Obama is probably aware of this, and now that I have your name Shaun, you will be hearing from me, though your look of efficiency belies that you head an ineffectual American gulag. Ah, the Principal spin doctors, and their bleeding humane compassion! Clintonian white bread, a good boy trying to aim for the progressive good.
Erik used to meet with HUD Secretaries. I only got as far as the civil servants under them, and that, when I had my little scrap of power at the Matrix Research Institute, but this is the choice I have in this great Republic, to reinstall Harvard left centrists, or a squeaky brand rich Mormon who was molded by Mattel manufacturing.Technically, I am already broke, living on borrowed time. Forty nine is not young anymore, and now my little brother and I had a real quarrel in email; there goes the refurbished basement in South Carolina people. Poof, with a flaming colon up for sale.
