Forge of Valor

As much as I love the convenience of the Amazon business model, this aftershock in light of my negative review of Out of the Black will not die, and I see this in part as not just a contest between two writers who may never break ranks out into successful authorship, but a critique of digital immediacy. Would I have purchased this text had I viewed it on a bookshelf in a book store like Borders? Hard to say. Quentin Tarantino may opine to the ever plodding Charlie Rose that he "likes genre," but I am more diffident than the stylized filmmaker, who needs a transfusion, if the failure of his Jewish revenge fantasy is any indicator. I tend to prefer the next generation when it comes to authors who can challenge the conventions of  genre, and Lee Doty is not such an author, but rather a talented hack who cannot escape comparisons to Rowling and come out worse for wear. In a very real sense I am tired of discussing this, wish Doty well in all his future endeavors, but will not let it go that his novel drops the ball, not once, but four or five times, and screams out for a brave editor who would have helped this fantasy operator clean up his act. I bought the text on the strength of another customer reviewer who asked, "When was the last time a fat nurse was the hero?" A lesson in here for keeping faith with professional critics, as per my training.

As to my Amazon reviews, I do not write them for the sake of the Common Reader, or to move products with the company, per se, but to keep my critical faculties engaged with the intent of a future project for publication. My distaste for Lee Doty's notable and continued cop outs did not receive the full weight of my intellectual censure, but this is precisely because it was not worth my time and effort to point out its defects. My review is a write off, and not a real effort, and no further exertion on my part will be forthcoming. Doty behaves as if I killed his daughter's teddy bear just to be a bully. Due to this I'll never read another work by him knowingly.

Pedestrian Guru, In Sync

Though I can appreciate the technical, time commitment, and editing difficulties that go into a bio-doc such as this, I am afraid My Reincarnation did not impress me in the way its progessive sympathies might have intended. It was young Yeshi's angst in his relation to his father's authority that I found much more interesting, as opposed to what may be seen as a certain fatalism, and inevitable resignation to following in the old man's footsteps, in its conclusion. The more I learn about Buddhism in the contemporary era, the less impressed I become. Of course it stands in stark contrast to Semitic monotheism, and is more about human harmony in a natural environment as opposed to the bedouin saturation in moral guilt, though it did, the film as storyline, make my adolescent association with a Eurasian doctor in NYC less improbable. He claimed to be half-Italian Japanese, which given his last name, he most likely was, and had an interesting dynamic going on between his fiancee and his mistress, driving me down the hallway one evening, hopping and chanting while he raced my Everest manual, "Maritsia is a whore! Maritsia is a whore!" Post graduate cultural tensions just slightly over my head, though I could never get in his pants to make it a threesome. He wrote to me later, as all men who wouldn't sleep with me tended to do, past and future, but did give me a steak dinner on the roof of a skyscraper, back in the days when the Twin Towers were a wonder to marvel. I wonder if my optism died with the magic of such evenings.

Weakest Link

My new foster kitty has taken charge of the situation, wasting little time on Joey's scent, little Vincent's angst, or my diffidence, despite her small size. She seems little more than a kitten herself, and had a stillborn litter veteranian medicine could not save, holds me prisoner by making her favorite spot the power chair. After a week of this I have threatened her with return to City Kitties, and both she and the former little Vincent seem to be getting the message, but I am nearly over the edge, wondering if I should forsake them both at this point. Joey cannot be replaced. I may kill my father's sister if she says another word to me on the matter, which will no doubt win me plaudits with my cousins. But the Friday Lady Rambo came to me (here is her picture, and while under my roof she is Lady Rambo and though sweet, has stressed me out; if you wish to adopt her do not worry about me!) Erik decided to converse with me on the outside vestibule. Callow as many an activist in the past has been to me, I was civil to Riverside Presbyterian's dying Dr. Seuss, who looks like a ghastly cat in the hat. I did not tell transvestite freak to fuck off precisely because his mind is nearly gone, and he was not a direct agent playing along in what Linda Dezenski did to me. I have never fully articulated what happened to me as a political casualty in Philadelphia's cripland, and may never actually be able to spell it out for a public until I find out if redress is utterly hopeless, but Erik and Jimmi's self-interested sense of entitlement, rule breaking, and Justice Department investigations into their activities played their part.

Implausibles

In the 2003 CI episode Suite Sorrow, Hal Linden plays an in the closet socialite who manipulates his daughter into matricide, to then unwittingly trigger his own death in a foiled entrapment that Vincent D'Onofrio's Goren misjudges. I do not know about the sandwiched convolutions from which we have to infer the multiple points in fifty minutes of narrative. This is a continuing problem with the limitations of the format for Dick Wolf's now foundering formula. I believe there may have been a death by injection trial on which it might be based, but I cannot remember enough data for search to lead the way, and I could be wrong anyway because this high powered real life balding husband fell under suspicion when I read Time Magazine regularly, but despite the artifice of the teleplay, inclusive of having Erbe's Detective Eames vindicate what we must feel about such family dysfunction in the last concluding seconds of the episode, such stories reflect back upon the ubiquitous nature of domestic violence in the United States. I happen to be bold enough to feel that this undercuts the progressive argument about homosexuality and marriage. Heterosexual marriages fail often enough as it is, especially when celebrity is involved, or, as in the case of my mother and father, you mix a significant mental illness with an Italian temper. My step-mother, who in no way functions as such, has fared little better. My dad may not have an arrest record to match that of the typical serial wife beater, but he is one none the less, a fact I usually obliterate in my conflicted feelings for him. Progressives are absolutely correct to say that no fault divorce laws weakened the once historic economic power of marriage, but the continuing tent expansion will make it all but meaningless, in the end.

Frank, my ex, made a bad bargain thinking I could have been a good wife for him. He tried to strangle the first. This is Latino trash pillow talk for you, but had I gone through with the wedding, settling for him, as some women interest columnists suggest, I could conceivably have a jacket with an attempted murder charge, and that is both a facetious and accurate statement, one and the same. Having seen the gay lifestyle up close, swimming against the tide as I may be, things are going to get much messier for family law adjudicators, I don't give a flying fuck how pedestrian a media bouncer like Andrew Sullivan with his HIV status and his faith, and his articles that analyze and out the troubled Prince Benedict 16, wants to be. To push identity to these kind of extremes is bad for the human animal. I have been through too much trying to help the disadvantaged, I have seen too much; we're dooming ourselves.

Semi-Lucid

I do not think Erik and I ever had an honest conversation about anything, barring his unfortunate physical anatomy, and Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas in Basic Instinct, and I am beginning to wonder if I was nothing more than a damaged member of the herd to him, which I was. I have never fully recovered from Brandon's assault against me. I thought this stocky and powerful black man was going to kill me when I lived in Diamond Park, and my first deceased child Oliver saved me. I wrote an essay about it which is doing the rounds, but I have a very hard time writing about Brandon looming in on my face, clamping his hand on my mouth hissing shut the fuck up I am not going to hurt you. He was black like an African from the Congo, and I never recovered. He dragged me from the doorway in my power chair to the bedroom, strangling me while I looked for something and anything to use against him. Oliver trotted in, and I found superhunan strength and screamed for a very long time. Then I was robbed by a black attendant, and then molested by another mixed race woman. Would someone from ADAPT like to tell me why I should keep going with this paradigm, in addition to having been abused by my mother's second husband? I have lost count of how many of these boyfriends abused me too, and tried to kill Stephanie on numerous occasions. My subsequent job with my mental health clients did not help, and you want me to go to therapy to "accept that it can always happen again." No doubt it shall, and this is what my relationship with Frank was like, with the severity of his stroke damage. When we kissed, when I allowed him to touch me, he was wrapped up in his own gratification, never with me, unless I shit myself out of stress and drinking too much water. I have a funny story about that and should have never fled his apartment the evening I had bad diarrhea. The aberrations of one public housing tenant affect many. I should have also firmly declined the engagement ring, kicked in that assertiveness training, you know, and all I would have been left with was a loathsome coupling, though I have had better 69 positions, never fantastic, and it is a little late in the day to hope that Viagra would reserve a special for my old age. My whole life has been about trying to create a good life, a rewarding one, not sitting in a studio ducking my head from online communities, and online interactions, except for my family. My mother's sister Mary is not accusing me of being my mother, and it is a relief. We are having an adult discussion, and she wants me to recommit to Catholicism. I truly wish I could. Why does all this matter? I believed in the Philadelphia activists, all of them, even if I disagreed with them, and all of them, including Josie and her Christian faith, truly only care about their own self-interests, over and above correcting their ethical behavior. None of them made up to me for the pain they caused me. Ablests dismiss me, or scold me, or ban me. Spastic would like to belong somewhere, find a place to rest her head.

Parrot's Game

The elder of my patriarchal cousins who was going to take a look at my Ad Sense support dialogue, the one who told me Drexel's computer center was not a viable option this time around for my problems, he fell through a hole in the floor of a friend of his son's at a graduation party, and I am not sure how much I want to pay Geek Squad to advise and or come fix me up. Now that I could use that lavish Black Tie protection, I no longer have it, and I am not all that keen on taking Septa to Best Buy for a nearly four year old HP, or my newer but cheaper Toshiba that I have used but once, and my cousin said what I told you, "Why are you worried about Ad Sense given what you earned back?" But I invested in it as a motivating force. This is trivial given my cousin's accident. In conjunction with my last post, however, I am no longer a huge fan of peer support counseling where the trained peer repeats the concerns of the disabled individual back to them. Erik's mind may now have significantly limited capacity, but he remembers how to do this. "We all have highs and lows," he said, when I was talking to Monica, despite mutual antipathy, about my brother's slam dunk homeopathic diagnosis. I was actually more liberal once, and like the ACLU, dove in to the LGBT acceptance modality as readily as what you see on Breaking Pointe, which, despite art therapy, the disabled cannot enter into, but not anymore. My life has swirled too much around the undercurrents of the human freak show, and if I could get away with open hostility to Riverside's lady male, I would tell him to go scuttle into hospice and save the taxpayers of Pennsylvania some money, and yes, my antagonism toward Erik & partner is potentially crueler than this, but that is due to my utter and absolute disdain for "the Adapt action". If ADAPT demonstrations were wiped out I would applaud, because they are absolutely ineffective and do nothing to solve the problems with the single payer options in national insurance programs like Medicare or VA benefits, regardless of how empowered they make paraplegics and quads feel.

Locked In, the Kantian Concerns

When House was a fresh and unique network morsel, a nurse wrote a column, on Salon, perhaps, that the cast "did everything," and her complaint was accurate but ignores the narrative intent of the show, which was to examine human nature through medical detection as Doyle famously developed it for a reading Victorian audience as it headed into the 20th century, and as I professed on LiveJournal, which I am leaving in an agonized and frustrated fashion, I missed the homage to Holmes initially, a lazy ass who needs Wiki for everything but will not help them with their entries, at least not yet, but that the allusion did not sink in at first is understandable. I have read some Doyle in print, but not a great deal. His detective mostly filtered through my perception due to video, and when I think of Sherlock Holmes, I think of Jeremy Brett, who is my favorite Holmes actor. Canonical but modern. I do not readily take to Doyle's diction, and that remains the case despite free kindle downloads. Shoot me, I'll grin while you pump the bullet into me, and say that House at its best was more than an examination of the price of genius, and episodes like "A Simple Explanation" and the later "Lockdown" illustrate the alienations of our increasingly complex domesticated existence. You have to be a follower of the series to appreciate these micro moments as great dramatic episodes, but Lockdown pulls it off without a hitch, with the banal and the urgent and the tragic interlocked like a small fifty minute work of art. The give and take between Laurie and Strathairn, who is also increasingly one of my favorite character actors, is nothing short of agonizingly, hair rippingly perfect when it comes to the irony of the human condition with life swirling on about the dying and the existential in monotony. It also illustrates why I am a little weary of using shared experiences for affirmation. No, the hundreds of personal narratives that New Mobility publishes are not valueless, but they are bad journalism that distracts from reforms that would help those of us who have been wounded by the ideology that Cassie the fraud and Josie the pedestrian dike with MS tirelessly embrace. Louise wanted to share that she had crushes and dark impulses too, and gee, my experiences are not unique, just as Dr. Nancy Rubel tried to help me see that she was not perfect, and divorced, and had her parents in her head. I may still have her card where she called me a strong woman, and I am, just as she was a savvy therapist. This doesn't change the fact that disability centers, and state vocational offices, have a certain ossified sterility about them, and we need reforms.

Special Olympics Intransigence

In an anecdote for Jon Bateman, who perhaps shares that type of mystifying and implacable Canadian temperament with his countrymen, one that finds my Italian American histrionics to be something of a puzzle, let me say I love hockey, and wheelchair hockey is probably the one para Olympic sport I have an enthusiasm for, since I love brawls on skates. Now the bad news that I will state in readily accessible fashion: I do not want anymore disabled friends, either in virtual or real life. This does not mean you cannot comment on my blog and tell me to go to hell for sabotaging the empowerment tactics you all hold dear, and I am using you in a mass plural, and not singling out Mr. Bateman per se, but I am singling out young women like Louise indirectly, and I will broaden this out slightly to explain that I do not like interacting with fans of my work. You can follow me, praise me, damn me, yell at me like my half-brother Benjamin that I "need something," and I may or may not respond, but no friendships unless I decide otherwise. It simply does not work out for me. I trusted Linda C. Dezenski. I trusted Josie Byzek. I trusted Jimmi Shrode. I trusted Erik von Schmetterling, and while Cassie James did not exactly violate my trust, I believed in her integrity once, and that has sunk with the ship. Trying to stay friends with my semi-imbecile ex did not work, and the mentally retarded who are my high functioning neighbors flee my company like a bat out of hell, the inverse being true, as well, that the friends I attempted attachment to did not want me. Louise sent me a nice email about my work and I put it away. She later resurfaced, and the attempted familiarity was a mistake, and from now on I will keep the walls in place. Writing about the personal is different than interpersonal intimacy. Ask the more affluent British writer Will Self, who I may or may not email, but if I do I will not directly court his intimacy. I am published enough that I resist fan psychology, and even when it comes to Niall Ferguson, despite my mildly subversive tongue in cheek, my mode of operation is looking for new peer support venues. In other words, interact if you like, but seeking a bond with me is off the table. Ablest writers at my level or above, excepting the few I have already linked to and kept, will be taken on a case by case basis.

Key Largo Aside

The thought occurred to me and I thought I'd note it anyway as I am winding down toward my presleep reading, that John Huston is my favorite film director, and that because he is a pessimist, if not downright misanthropic as I am myself. Chinatown is a very dark film not just because the incest leads to inbreeding, but because it signifies a basic truth about those with real power. They win, and this is true whether or not you see a Gandhi or a Cassie James rise to the surface. I know Polanski directed, but Huston had some influence on the price we pay that Polanski exposes, and the film is rare for me in that I like Faye Dunaway and Nicholson both, which is not always the case in other venues, and by the way, for those of you familiar with my anti-CIL stance, I mean what I say about spending the rest of my life to fight to dismantle them, and if necessary, I will use Adapt's tactics, and break the law to get this ball rolling. I am not their only critic, but I am a zealot in my belief that they represent the worst aspects of socialist corruption, and I want this removed as a stain on the American soul. I hope the right will join with me on this.

More Actual Over Symbolism

In the iconic Huston would have been B film that defied expectations, Lionel Barrymore's character, James Temple, embodies all the contradictions of disability that are far older than the somewhat monochromatic identity games that ADAPT and Cassie and the rest of the old guard that I have written about play. This old man, Mr. Temple, as he is addressed by Bogart in close formality, perhaps Bogart's attempt to ward off the threat of caring for him and widowed daughter in law, he is a benevolent tyrant toward the indigenous natives that Huston is clearly exploiting, though in 48 this was no doubt a progressive move, of which Temple's paternalism was meant to be seen as inclusive, but Temple is also just as trapped, between Robinson's hard cruelty and the Bogart/Bacall compassion. The latter may be better than the former, but this is not a social relation between equals, and the same holds true today, despite the partisan, and false reverence for the ADA, as espoused by New Mobility and the rest of IL culture. My feature for them in 2004 was one of the few times they went under the radar, so to speak, to look at a real and troubling issue within the equally monochromatic *attendant care* paradigm, and yes, it saddens me that I sacrifice them as a market I have already penetrated, but Tim Gilmer has ignored me even before I highlighted my antagonism toward Josie, which is real and will not be undone, and though it hurts my career, and I am an aging wheelchair user who very briefly felt part of their family and then wasn't, I sacrifice them for the sake of integrity over a conflated lie. The ADA, independent living is just that, a lie, just as is the elevation of Cassie over the expense of so much suffering. For every Cassie James, for every John Hockenberry, and even Vassar Miller, for whom I have no castigation, only praise, and that is because Vassar is authentic, a real literary artist who transcends, for all those, very few of us have real control, real power to adapt to our limitations and call our own shots. Who actually has this power? The Medicare and insurance actuary, those that control transit authority budgets, and the wonderful asses that run federal and state housing. I will expand in another post after some rest.

Actual & Titular, Juxtaposed

Here is my state representative honoring Cassie during the holiday season, and this was probably before she was dragged out of Governor Corbett's office. In fairness to the insular culture of Liberty Resources, I have no idea what the governor's methodology was in saying no wheelchairs allowed, at the time of the incident, but as the former attorney general seems to be governing my state on the shadow of fraudulent concerns, namely that his disadvantaged constituents want to conspire to commit fraud, and I am just as equally calling this woman what she is, a paper tiger full of her own inconsistencies, both she and Tom can continue their partisan love games while I sit on the sidelines, not because I do not care, but because both of them blow through smoke screens.

On Polemical Nonsense

In my understanding of disability activist history, it is Justin Dart who is the father of the ADA, but in my mining of traditional video programing, part of my bible for this project, whether or not I resolve the ad banners issue, I find that Richard Pimentel is also considered a father of this penultimately useless statue, almost as if history decided to bifurcate superlative necessity by creating the homoerotic power fuck of the twentieth century, though the dichotomy is more likely related to semantic insecurity. This is so prevalent in disability culture that it's sickening, which is why, as I hurtle toward my biological entropy, I am sometimes deliberately uncouth. I can understand the emotionalism surrounding the word nigger, but what I would say to those of African descent is that I also have experienced life long bigotry and prejudice, and though at my half century mark I am almost so bent out of shape that nothing may glue me back together again toward a peaceful release, I look at it this way: Better to call me a cripple rather than police the word while society will continue to strip me of any practical freedom. In contemporary independent living parlance, caretakers are not caretakers, but attendants who *assist,* and the word client carries a horrendous stigma over and above the use of consumer. To me the latter is more offensive, even bovine, to the point that the classification known as "the consumer society," leaves a great deal to be desired. Activists frown, as well, on the recognition of pain and suffering, so as to not invite pity, which, as I have indicated, was an undesired effect of my brief exchange with Niall Ferguson. If it seems that I am hung up on the guy, do not be alarmed that this is to any unreasonable end. His ideas preoccupy me as a rational and optimistic conservatism of which I'd like to see more of, although his sex appeal doesn't hurt. Damning myself, I suppose, since I am pitching his name to try to get more work, and thus should forbid myself from posting in public that he is hot, but my good doctor, you are very hot indeed, and sexual desire has always driven my intellectual drive, a fatal flaw, woe and weal.

Where was I? Yes, dismantling IL ideology instead of wondering how many scholars actually resist these temptations successfully. Is giving in a fall from grace? I mentioned in my blogging past that Jerry was hot to me back in the day, and I am both glad and ambivalent about his angst over this. I stuck one of my notes in his inbox in my exuberant freshman days, and drove back to the elevator cubicle and saw him come out, sigh, rub his forehead, as if to ask himself "why me?" He did not seem conscious of the fact that I was spying on his reaction, and I will probably die with this imprint emblazoned on my scarred brain, the honesty of the ablest society to which I've always wanted to belong, the honesty of its sense of burden about me, the invalid pest with the mouth that doesn't know when to shut up, who wanted to be loved and love with a dithyrambic zeal, and the best I could get was a slobbering spic from the Bronx who had to stick his fucking hand up my ass in a simulated virility that was a death dance of a rebellious decline. My attachment to Joey was healthy by comparison, and my cat, as you know, is dead; then again, great sex is mostly the stuff of fiction. I did know a sister student who had an affair with my philosophy professor, and she was a sweet friend, but my envy at her success versus my failure is positively Shakespearean. To this day it goads me, even though she got hurt, and is partly the reason I do not talk about my philosophy professor, though I guess it could be worse. Cripples in China have to deal with real thugs. In America, you are only killed if you defy the paradigm, if you try to trust lesbians, other spastics, a crazy lady with spina bifida who terrorized black Paratransit drivers with her actions, but these days, wears the Janus face, and says the restrictions on use are justified due to functionality. I hope I never set eyes on Cassie James again. I think I'd enjoy wringing her neck. On a personal level this is unfair. Cassie had nothing to do with the fact that Linda was enjoying her chess match, using me like a pawn in a backfired power play while Cassie was freaking out over her difficult pregnancy on British soil. Cassie directs her anger outward, causing suburbanites to  deploy the self-interest of not seeing, but Cassie does this herself, rationalizing the crimes of her employer, doing nothing to rectify it. She may not have bipolar disorder, but her public profile reeks, a house divided against itself.

Placemarkers For Kevin

I am not quite sure how I digest Kevin Costner as Earl Brooks. His character is as methodical as the world around him is messy, and William Hurt always allows me to see the possibilities of the humanist life I might have had as a second wave beatnik if I had been able to walk and fuck better than I actually can. I am still turning this interesting look at psychopathy around while I am off to bed, full of pain killers, not knowing whether loss has defeated me, finally, or if I will yet scuttle through, like the poet Vassar Miller, my dialectical rival.

Aborted Launch

The rapid convergence of queer theory and disability studies over the past few years has been nothing short of extraordinary. Robert McRuer

My interview with the PhD from the Bay area was humorous to the extent that I had a fecal gas attack and she did not know I left her hanging, drove to toilet, and only then resumed the interview. She had polio, hired me, did not get the grant proposal. I reacted in email, more frustrated than not, and she and I parted company. This came after the actress my former disability center siphoned into a WIMM grant. If I had written anything particularly vicious I would have remembered, and believe her affronted sense was due to the fact "she was trying to help." I cannot remember much else, even if I wanted to remain her protege. In terms of keeping a connection, I blew it. Inadvertently. Perhaps she succeeded in creating the educational paradigm she wished, and her students work for the usual spin doctors. I hope she succeeded, and perhaps found tenure at Berkeley, liberal mastiff.

Now the clincher: In came a lesbian with an MIT affiliation who offered to make me an online instructor for a course I really would have enjoyed doing. Resume sent, syllabus material developed, and while I waited, I might have been in the North Pole discovering fossilized hermaphrodites. I cried out into the darkness and finally, though I needed magic pliers to get it out of the woman, discovered her department never had the money. She "just wanted to help." 

This is not mutual empowerment through shared matriculation, sorry. In my book, pipe dreams are just that, and this forms a part of why I am more angry at the activists themselves than I am with the ambulatory majority.

Level Fields

We live in an era of Milton Friedman revisionists, from the mostly dynamic Niall Ferguson globe trotting around colonial Africa, to Cato Institute free marketers like Johan Norberg and detractors like Naomi Klein, and the majority of ADAPT activists do not have the acumen to follow my line of thought here, or to even understand why it matters. It is not their fault, but the evil lies in disability center enforced egalitarianism, which my regulars know traumatized me very badly, although it was my failure, when emailing Niall, which for me was a tribute, since it takes more than intelligence to rise to prominence in the way he has managed, that he responded he was sorry for my situation. No. I wanted him to apply that Scottish mettle of his to grind independent living ideology into a fine pulp, as I cannot do it myself; these two poles represent my interior suspended animation. I am not able bodied enough for Harvard, and not compliant enough for pukeville Stalinist paradigms like Liberty Resources, and am not a purist, either to free market ideology lifting even the poorest individuals into more equality, or a socialist who wants to rectify the injustice of destructive disparity. Niall might argue he isn't a purist either, but if I substitute Norberg's cell phone in his video for a semi-automatic, I think the gospel of fundamental capitalism exposes its flaws, flaws that keep liberals in business. Treating guns and military hardware as a commodity has destroyed many of those disadvantaged humans, those who Niall might argue ultimately benefited from his killer apps, and I cannot quite balance gun manufacturer profits and urban warfare that spreads from the declining US into its Latin American hemisphere like a cancer. An Adapter might argue that where they elevate Cassie and her polemical nonsense, I weigh her down. That is true. My former supervisor Linda could not be trusted to the extent that I did trust her, or tried to, but neither can Cassie be trusted, and this is not due to the fact that I knew her when, and remain unimpressed, and think that Liberty makes her indispensable at the expense of others more deserving, but aside from that issue, I cannot believe in any activist, no matter how out there, who after thirty years, cannot address the bigotry within independent living centers themselves. Cassie might say she tried to make up for what Linda's humiliating behavior did to me, and this is true. She wanted me  to do a grant proposal, and I could not. Linda C Dezenski is still at helm of whatever range her leash allows, but more than that, disability centers need to be abolished for the very sake of social equality, and I will activate myself to this end until my death, but will add one more thing: Cassie taking me out for pizza when she lived in the same public housing paradigm I cannot escape wasn't the least empowering. Going to see a Chagall exhibit with my friend Tom Reid was. Why? My intelligence was respected in the latter.

Place Marker Laurie

Black Hole was one of the few episodes of House that I missed during its mature decline, and I got home from my run in time to catch it on my local station rerun cycle. Interesting but improbable, and now I have to go to bed, no tweeting, with the suspect for my dizzy spells being my pressure sore that emanates from my left buttock like a single zipper track and this could be dangerous and I'd care if I had my self esteem back, a paying freelance sale, and a good man's ear, and could exit senior housing and get my life back, which is impossible.

Hood Intermissions

I suppose this is black urban social norms under the might of the NRA at its finest. One area where liberals still have me is on the interpretation of the Second Amendment, and in point of fact, I do not give a fuck how jurists want to read its bipolar sentence structure. It needs to be rewritten in favor of police and standing armies, notwithstanding the tyranny of executive power, because firepower doesn't resolve that kind of corruption, the hemorrhaging in Syria being a case in point. Philadelphia is no different from Georgia in this instance. African Americans enjoy using cheap violence to resolve disputes. In the disabled community, race is only discussed in terms of analogy, like something from a horse's ass, or the mouth of Cassie James, because the discarded are bound together. Not me. I actually read the black intellectuals that some of the residents I live with do not have the comprehension to interpolate in their daily lives, and I do not buy into the guilt that Al Sharpton has built into his visibility platform, and I can envision the sardonic mindfield a conversation between John McWhorter and myself would yield, not that McWhorter has any reason to acknowledge me, and if I actually wanted him to do so, it would probably be as an outlet for the emotional pain living in a black urban community has caused me. I'd pit my intellect against John's any day, my crippled fists swinging. I have observed, I have seen, and by the blood of Christ I am so disgusted by the way your damn underclass lives that a rewind to the willful blindness that my sister and brother deploy against me would be a blessing, and if you think I am not being fair to the black intelligentsia that makes progressives do cute dog tricks, you are within your justification, but even if I break down to the point that I really do become deranged, I will still suffer at the hands of the institutional caretaker who is on their way to being the same type of brutalist that I am today due to the same exposure and stress. Neither my father's more overt bigotry nor my attitude is responsible for that bleak rust belt society out there, and I do not want to see it anymore. That is why I hate this country. The United States is a lie, and nothing but, a lie of vacant celebrity, a bottleneck elite that strangles all else.

Culinary Interlude

The pickings on traditional broadcast feed have been slim this week. I was not impressed with the pilot for Saving Hope, and as such, no link. I was also not impressed with the climax of Awake, as I warned most of you that I wouldn't be. As a mid-season replacement, however, the series is worth viewing again as a gaming theory deployment, since we are living in the post-Lost aftermath, and any number of series have come and gone, failed or succeeded, in the wake of JJ Abrams and his dubious reinvention of the wheel, and I say dubious because nothing going on in television today is new, and Cervantes himself could make Abrams look conceptually infantile, and yes, that can be asserted even if I only followed the series for two seasons. Little Vinnie has found a new lease in hunting a fly, but he does not have his brother's furred toes. I do not know whether he is depressed by his brother's absence or not, but he has thrown a few mewing tantrums, and seemed to be crying to me, begging me, in fact, to give him back his brother, and perhaps this fictionalized feline empathy is why I am a failure, or points to it, though Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark liked cats better than children as well. I realize children are necessary, but humanity in and of itself is not, and on that note, I am driving to the convenience store in desperation on a partial charge; I will never be able to restore what Joey's death took from me, and yes, we all lose pets and either replace them or do not, but to quote Anthony Hopkins trying to play a repressed minority trying to pass, Joey was not the first love of my life, and not even the greatest, but he was my last. I will be back in a few hours, give or take.

A Screech and Melancholy Smatter

For those in my audience who remember this ongoing saga from LiveJournal, my fabled transvestite friend, whose metaphysical entrails I have roasted in any number of posts, he *remembers my name is Marinelli*, and so what then, of my descriptive character assassinations that have illuminated my emotional pain, or the combined rhetorical roar of both Erik and Cassie's zeal amounting to a handful of dust? The duplicitious bitch bastard whose ethics unwittingly destroyed my hope of any economic security for my old age is a dying moron who remembers to be nice to me out of pity, while both he and I subsist in a dark fabled version of American Stalinism disguising itself as the willful blindness of propriety. I dashed upstairs yesterday to see if the vendor had any useful produce, and was ready to hang myself over the geriatric horror I've had to live with these last 27 years, and yes, my strength is breaking down and I cannot take it anymore. "Write it then," Monica Carr said, my former fat Catholic ex-attendant who has lupus, as I've told you, and called the police on me 12 years ago because she could not do her time. "You have a wonderful way of expressing yourself." she exclaimed, and I can see a novel about independent living and disability advocacy in the voice of John Irving


But I am not a novelist with that kind of timing, and will probably never finish the novels on my hard drive that I've all but abandoned. To start a third which might leave me with the possibility of getting sued in the creation of a roman a clef, this seems unrealistic. In the right mode, I am a competent journalist, genetically predisposed poet, using the blogger format to my own inappropriate ends, which speaks for itself. I borrowed Merle Miller's resurrected novel from the kindle library. Three chapters in, I am struggling not to abandon yet more repressed homosexual narcissism. So far I find it a mediocre expose of the other side of the Beat era as lost generation. I have missed some films that I wanted to mine for us, but I am not sure I am up for another browbeating of Saving Private Ryan. A few minutes to make up my mind, for a long and grueling exercise about my grandmother's generation, one that knew its duty.

Bill of Margins

We manufacture the affection of domesticated felines and canine companions, to a certain if not perfect extent, gelding them, to use Woolf's charming outlets with gerunds as opposed to participles, off the top of my head I believe I am not in error, though willing to be conditioned a goose of pedagogic density for its distraction; I know arrested development is a major hand in these nurturing attachments. After Joey's first block, I had hoped it was not chronic, and when the pet transporter dropped him off home, when I opened the carrier my pretty love leapt into my lap. "Did you see that Frank?" I asked. Oliver never did anything like that, nor any other cat I assisted to raise; he sat with me for hours, poor Joey, and I coaxed him to try to eat the urinary tract meat, what a mother that, heating it, hiding the medication. Over time I came to believe I had beaten it, believed that the first block was unique to the circumstance of his young adult meddle, because Dr. Andeer yanked my chain a little. "You love this cat," she exclaimed, every time I rushed him in over the least symptom of straining, and no, there was no block, no bladder crystals, just symptoms of spring allergies, but would it have been better to exhaust all my resources now, and when he was eight or nine or ten or twelve, have nothing left to then relieve him? I am watching the Branagh adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing, slow to fulment myself into Shakespeare's vibrant sense with our youthful modern language, what is he assailing in this comedy? That love has no concrete identity? That virtue has no true reflection? I am stirring an ado, but the event of death has come, has passed, and shall it gladden anyone to know I had a civil discourse with my cousin, whose wife Adele I often imagined as a suitable confidante, even if the need for such a figure, or the desire to confide, is the weakness of my character that Anthony LaPaglia coolly dissects to Matt Craven. I am still not sure how I feel about Bulletproof Heart, not sure that Boyle's necessary quibble, a quibble needed to drive the story, hangs like a justified suit. It is without question that I would have thrived to be paid to mourn with ostentation, but whether I break down, hold it in, whether my vertigo is symptomatic of how hard I have swallowed losses, or the evil of institutional bigotry, losing this feline love is not a put on, I loved the animal, riding around with his remains in my canvas like Morrison's Pilate carried her ancestor's bones. I showed the memory print of Joey's paws to the Little One. "Here is your brother," I said, astonished at his caution. He did not swat, but hid under the bed until I shut off my tears, a consequence of such a marginalized frustration, that I do not know.

My baby is home

I want his remains buried with me when the time comes.

Feline Odes For An Urn

Not quite, but I should break now before my broadband goes into its afternoon slow zone, get something else to eat and then finish charging and wash up to take my long power chair stroll to my vet, to get Joey's remains. I am feeling overwhelmed, and do not know if Drexel U would still bend the rules to assist me. My warranty with Best Buy and its Geek Squad Black Tie protection expired, and I have a few other hundred things to do before a stroke or cardiac event disrupts me, yet I am in distress about my monetizing illiteracy, and polishing my archive content, and footnoting that I need to delete my LJ tweet links. Maybe I should risk tracking my married lover down after all these years. I could see Yahoo latching onto that as newsworthy, couldn't you? I do not want to argue with Benjamin anymore right now, and I am not really sure he can negotiate the byzantine layers to Google's support systems. I do not really hate my sister, only the relationship we have with each other. I tell her voice mail I hate her; if I am suing her, I do not yet know. It may raise our mother from the dead,

Peeping Expirations

I regret never having attempted to conquer statistics, or demographics. These probability and percentages and median averages are black holes crushing my intellect in a supernaturated gravitation field, upon which I speculate that the number of westerners intimate with death must run into the thousands, with adjustments for anomalies. I am familiar with the threat of my own mortality, and that even before cigarettes shortened my lifespan. I was not supposed to survive my birth, did, nearly died from pneumonia numerous times before my twelfth birthday, was nearly murdered, tossed on my skull a few times, and that can kill you; it makes me feel like Houdini Cripple, but I have yet to experience someone dying on me (nodding off pause) in terms of going *through* the loss curve common to our agrarian roots. I have seen death lurking in the inner city violence paradigm, watched paramedics work on a public housing tenant like Mr. Morton, collapsed in his doorway, a black male old enough to remember segregation, and too old not to have been scored upon by whatever denigration that amounted to; neither he nor his wife saved themselves, due to the beliefs of an obscure sect that may have been a corruption of Christian Science. I found them to be unpleasant ignorant people, and it was my fault, after all, that I have seen so much of the black community, the gay lifestyle, up close. Had I listened to my parents. Scratch that.

Porridge Stones

My brother Benjamin looks like Will Wheaton, my least favorite ensemble player from Next Generation. I looked at Wheaton's twitter page, twitter profile, and I have absolutely nothing to say about the youngster but I am filling space by saying his performances in recent years have been too self-conscious, and though I considered following him, I need a better reason than the fact that Patrick Stewart melts me and the boy used to be near the Shakespearean trained actor. Patrick Stewart restores in small measure my dwindling lubrication. Benjamin called me back (again) after I had, metaphorically, stomped my foot, but a new chasm has arisen, alas, over my niece and her graduation, and I am not sure my sister and I wouldn't, at some point, resort to a bad cat fight. However, when Will says twitter is fun, I have to ask, why? I no longer have fun, but my enjoyments are archaic. Horseback riding, hockey sticking, baseball, good theater. These things fun. Cyberspace and its gadgets less so. I in fact find the Internet frustrating or a net negative distraction, as much as it is a virtual tool when used properly, and not for procrastination. Certainly texting can convey humor, but as a form of entertainment, it makes me hedge.

Lethal Injection

I wonder if these agrarian Pentecostals realize that the authors of Semitic scripture were prone to rhetorical exaggeration that is common to all polemical writing of persuasion, and that it does not mean that the human body can withstand lethal doses of venom. Lauren Pond's ethical dilemma is both relevant and a pedestrian false dichotomy. You either do your job as a journalist or you interfere; agonizing about her decision in public is not an expiatory exercise. Same analogy with me and my cat. I killed the animal in the long term by indulging him and in the short term by hesitating, and I have to live with this, even if my bond with Joey was unique. Forgiving myself, not forgiving myself, rationalizing my stress and expense over the last six years, none of this will make any difference. This Pastor is dead and was an idiot, which makes me wonder if religious fanaticism is slowly falling victim to evolutionary necessity, being eliminated out of the gene pool.

My aunt may actually be right, and that, due to age, my sinus pressure is causing my vertigo, which has mitigated slightly; fear of locked in syndrome nearly sent me to the emergency room, but I slept off the anxiety. Bulletproof Heart (1995), with Anthony LaPaglia, is an interesting bit of poseur in its own right, whether or not this reviewer is being fair to Mimi Rogers as the traditional noir femme fatale. I cannot make up my mind from one viewing that did not have my undivided attention, writing this, microwaving a single serve pizza, taking care of little Vinne; his brother's ashes are in. I have to pick them up, and missed what the psychiatric fruit gave LaPaglia's character as a diagnosis to explain Fiona's S&M games, but it is some form of catatonia, sporatic and intermittent.

I cannot really say I know Cheryl Strayed, but she and I used to interact in the Poets&Writers Speakeasy, and there she is on Amazon with Oprah, who looks matriarchal and awful in that photo, and I am still here, in exactly the same place. Rocking the boat may not get me out of it either. I wonder if those on twitter who have attacked me would read Cheryl's work and judge us both accordingly. For all the physical and emotional punishment I have absorbed, I never turned to substance abuse, but there we have it, another average American blonde whose internal struggle is good marketing for a black beauty queen's media.