Better Costner Handles

Shall we return to more comfortable pathologies? Not one of my better posts in yet another season of squandered opportunities, to be sure; perhaps I will delete it, but not this morning. I am due to meet Ed on the tenth floor to discuss my threat of legal action against our landlord, and then I have to go forage for cat food, weekend supplies. I have no idea why I am talking to Ed; he has read some of my reporting, as have some of the other tenants, some of those deceased, and I have made a lasting impression on Mr. B^^^owitz. He has his own chronic conditions, swollen forearms with swollen lymph glands from dialysis, reminiscent of bubonic plague, and I use him as an example of a man who would be an acceptable partner, except that I have little interest in him now. He has a paramour named Suzanne. She is tortured by a severe case of epilepsy, which is why I never pushed befriending the woman, though she approximates the caste from which both my mother and myself never easily subscribed, unlike my mother's sister, and Mary wants me tucked away, safely managed, to die in a nursing home, though she herself would not put it like that to you. Mary would say I am in denial about what is in my best interest, and that is having a black woman bathe me, a catheter out of one end, an ostomy tube out of the other. Ah, the glories of medical model death micro-management. Marie, the other aunt, less educated and more ill, tells me I am worrying about what has not happened yet, but it seems my thirties have led to this, the slow creep of the inevitable, from which my former employer will not have much of a conscience. They never do. Centers, like businesses, like media conglomerates, vomit casualties; independent living centers are simply more glaring examples of what a deplorable model looks like.

Actors should not discuss politics, because they instantly diminish in stature, and I include Clooney, with his white guilt flag waving protests about the Sudan, in this critique, but George knows his limits where Costner does not, and as a consequence, Kevin, veering off the expected A-list track, sounds like a blithering idiot, more folly in the liberating qualities of serial predation. This is the dichotomy of a film like Mr.  Brooks. Implausible with interesting strata, bound together and playing off each other, simultaneously within narrative incredulity. One thing Denby does not dwell on in his considerate interpretation, is that Evans ties together two staples of the American diet, the diabolical mind that is Earl, exposed for our convenience, juxtaposed against the thriller gore of the violent rampage that is the Hangman killer. Both are follies of the imagination, and most survivors of violent crime and institutional torture know it. The human animal is not so far removed from evolutionary excess, and I have serious doubts that we will succeed into a speculative future that purges this reality, even if our species survives resource depletion for a time, a barren world with no predatory rivals. Perhaps I will mourn the last polar bear, the last great white, before my skeleton browns to forensic issue, no more of my emotive discontent to sally.

Viscosity: The Case Against Homosexuality

Part of the reason I do not believe in God, or monotheism as a dialectic concurrent against Eastern pantheism, is that it is conceptually easier, as even theologians have a difficult time ascribing the existence of personhood outside or inside of natural law. Evolution and biology are also contributors, inclusive of natural deformities, like my fucking colon. I should have weighed the evidence of my segregated childhood in Old Forge grade school and given up, never aspired, nor have dared to tie sexual arousal to my history instructors who believed their precocious student was Harvard material, all due to my gastrointestinal tract. No, my darlings, Jerry was not the first, he was simply the penultimate for my asinine and obsessive temperament. The nursing students I lived with looked at me askance then, and in the contemporary era, I twirl negro assessment teams on my pinky, pleading with the ACLU for my liberty, when in point of fact, there is no such thing; in the US, we are the country of the governed, and the broken body gets governed the most. I should just give up, and let the minority paraprofessional return to their earnings off my epidermis, the least educated among them believing I am in the grasp of demonic possession.

I was not always like this. Nope. I fought with my uncle over integration, defied mio padre to try to date a wheelchair basketball player, and came on to the son of a reverend, and unlike my Shakespearean, Michael considered it; had I not lost my cool it no doubt would have been the almighty fuck of my life. I was fascinated by case law surrounding marriage and initially, in the abstract, supported gay marriage. What changed? Jesse Bering and his more notorious colleague, whose only response to me was to send me a skyscraper snapshot from his "outside your window" catalogue, the skyscraper I view every day, struggling to restore my profession from my failed vocation, may or may not know the LBGT culture I have observed, learned, and sometimes trusted, only to get a knife in my back from it, and abused by it at least twice in both my professional and client capacity, but if they do, they never write or speak of it frankly, and I know I am not winning any popularity contests, but the movie faggot who is every girl's best friend, the metrosexual wedding planner with a Vogue bible, is a non-threatening character study to reassure movie goers. The truth is messier, darker than that, and that Zola had to portray Nana's lesbianism as vicious in order to get this sad eponymous novel published is not all that far from the truth. Franzen, knowingly or not, does the same thing with Denise Lambert, who swings like a wrecking ball into her boss'es marriage, turning the wife into a masochistic whiner. Whatever the abuse and duress I've suffered, Franzen's characterization of Denise is a rebuke that illustrates an exhausted sexual liberalism, and even though this exhaustion hurts his novel, his argument is on point. The biology of sodomy and lesbian sex games may be inconsequential, procreation aside. Culturally, sexual orientation is going to send us over a cliff, and the disabled, like myself, will keep getting exploited, and this despite the fact that I have been spared being forced to be a sex toy on the down low. My intelligence and ability to react has protected me, but the developmentally disabled are fruitbowls for the welfare class. Of course, neither you, Andy, or Bering have anything to say about that. You do not even wish to consider the implications.

Statue of Limitations

I am not partial to Jonathan Franzen's work. Is he a talented author? Certainly, but The Corrections lays itself itself out like a schematic for a haunted mill, whatever Franzen's attempted reinvigoration of the Tolstoyan tradition; like his patriarch Alfred, I am the dog who barked too late, without a progressive and sexy ailment which can be diagrammed to the point of excruciation. I have a graduate level accreditation, and a Grecian short order cook refuses to let me pay for her corner shop burger because I cannot enter her establishment. I have no references, have allowed myself to be beaten like a spayed bitch for 12 years, and even on a beautiful summer day in the middle of center city, for all that it mattered, I might have been in the middle of a zombie takeover. I cannot keep utilizing the old skins, and would in fact sooner rip out my entrails bare handed than ever work again for any CIL in the continuous United States, and though sequential clips with New Mobility would in theory show another editor that I can grease the skids, I cannot reasonably approach them for more work and expect to get a green light, not that I am attempting to over emphasize my Blogger posts, but they are cached, and on the record, and I am not keen to highlight technology and equipment I cannot afford, one, and two, I have nothing to offer them at this point that they would be interested in letting me cover, Ms. Byzek aside, and meanwhile...

Biology Fallback

Another item Slate's gay journalists, and William Saletan, enjoy using is the scientific measurement of autoerotic arousal as an indicator of bisexual repression. Here is Bering again:

Research has shown a positive correlation between a man’s loathing of gay men and his own repressed same-sex desires. “Since homosexual behavior violates both their moral code and their sense of identity,” explained the psychologists Donald Mosher and Kevin O’Grady long ago, “homosexual threat is experienced as men become aware at some level of their … arousal to homosexual stimuli. This awareness can be avoided by anger, disgust, and contempt directed against homosexuals, as a means of bolstering hypersexual identity.”

Jesse Bering and the Progressive Left

As a content aggregate, if this is the best way to categorize what Slate Magazine is, an extension of  floundering corporate media enterprise, it likes trends that I do not care for, or, I am not affluent enough to enjoy. Poverty accentuates vulnerability, indeed. Susanna Daniel successfully caught Slate's tempo as a long delayed first time suburban novelist, and I have yet to penetrate the site on the strength of rapidly aging bylines. I do not think its Jewish contributors offer the best philosophical analysis, and their political illuminations are no better, no worse, than David Brooks in his climb through the ranks. Much of its woman's interest coverage is dull, and they virtually ignore the disability activism of which I'm often critical, although their journalists were kind enough to respond when I gave them a capsule of the hostile environment, long in the making, that exists between me and my disability center (the picture of the lovable minority spastic in his chair is so adorable that it only reinforces your perception that my judgment is impaired; am I assessing your sentiment accurately, mmm?) They also enjoy catering to homosexual identity and ceding the field of human pair bonding deconstruction to columnists like Bering.

For anyone who has been following me since I started blogging, whether you've responded or not, whether you are sympathetic or not, I imagine you say to yourself that I cheapen my intellectual capacity through reactionary trash talk. Fair enough, as the charge stands. I could be forgiving of Jimmi Shrode's significant mental, emotional limitations, and for a couple of early years, he was my friend, as was every other named individual I have discussed in my disabled culture past, and, do I actually care about him and Erik as a couple, where Shrode's penis goes? No, but they disgust me. Is that fair? I have written things about myself that might disgust normal comedic and presumably Protestant happy women like Susanna. It may not be fair, but this is what I have to say in response to Bering's censure of homophobia: disgust is not an invalid response to the sheer squalor of the human body, nor is emotional pain in response to sexual exploitation, whether it can be graded as abuse or not. I have been denigrated by whites and blacks alike, hurt in very bad ways by boths straights and gays, and this is why I see progressive sexual equality, and progressive sexual liberalism, as dangerous, at the end of the day, as we keep pushing the boundary. How horrific does the human condition have to become before liberals are willing to recognize that social difference, and sometimes caste, have a legitimate function for cohesion and survival?

Whatsoever we imagine, is Finite. Therefore there is no Idea, or conception of anything we call Infinite. No man can have in his mind an image of infinite magnitude.


Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Rounds

The larger question, beyond those of us who lose, give way to a dissipated waste, some of us not so fortunate to earn a place in the aftermath, is whether we are threatened as a species with systemic collapse, as medical science finds increasing evidence of unintended biological consequences within our domesticated and technological structures. I may be better off in a section 202 unit than the institutional life of my childhood, an unnecessary one, or the phantasmagorical exposure to it later, in my work for Liberty, case managing Inglis House, but my bid for matriculation, in as far as it was possible, failed, and failed brutally, and in this sense, Cassie's tokenism is a hollow victory. I fully understand why William tapped the phrase measure for measure to represent symptomatic disillusion with proscribed formulas.

Pest Control

One day you are twenty-three years old, perhaps tremulous in the environment of the inner city, but young, fickle, still able to squeeze in denim, you strut in in that power chair, no ass, no hips, but men can feel you swivel, that you are willing to sexually take risks, and then in the blink of an eye, you are fifty, and realize you predicated your entire life on a mistake, your best years behind you, beaten by repressed duress, repressed dysfunction, white suffering lodged up against over-weening black matriarchal collective censure, even when orchestrated by white Protestants. Depression is one thing, but I sit here in a moon night shirt with a profound sense of loss, biting my tongue not to spearhead you with a sharp ugliness, what lifelong public housing has done to a woman like me, the sheer poison of it, crying out for god's sake, what have I done?

And you realize that most of this damage has come through the exterminators, the mandatory federal insistence on killing insects, mice, juvenile rats, carriers of plague reverberating in our collective memory. Brandon was able to attack me because the exterminator was due the day I took off from work to prepare my transition to the next employer. That Henry was a pest control technician, a freelancer and a poseur both, has only recently struck me in terms of its grim significance, especially after 27 years of pressure and counter-rebellion between me and Presby after visits from the guy with the chemical hose. That this is a necessary exercise misses the emptiness of my energies it has left behind, periods of plateau and escalation. I threw down the gauntlet with manager Trudy yesterday, and the travesty is that it does not matter. My strength dangles from a paper clip. My father put me away when I was nine, nine. What freedom have I in all actuality had? I never applied for a mortgage, can never lose the rehabilitation hospital leash. What has all this been for? Not one person from Liberty can or will answer that, nor will Linda ever take responsibility for what she did, the disastrous blow it was, the causal link to so many subsequent defeats. My aunt mentioned the Empire shooter this morning. We were trying to figure out where I might go. "What's wrong with this country?"

"That's what happens when you lose your job."

And so many of you think I am unstable for not letting the bad things go.

Last Action Hero

It is a fine line between spoof, fantasy, and authenticity when Bruce Willis dons this particular American archetype. Even in his work for M Night Shyamalan, which was exceptional, seeking out and attempting to pinpoint the Willis cornerstone is not an easy task. His comic ablations have sharp edges, while his dogged trots, swaggering in valor, carry an undercurrent of the topsy turvey, quite different from Bale's globular alienation, which nearly thuds, like the way a thick glass bauble strikes a linoleum floor. Wherever you'd like to trace its roots, (radio?, noir?, the gunfighter?) the action hero illustrates that Protestants are not so far removed from the iconic indoctrination of the Catholic sensibility they rejected in the 15th century. I am not quite definitive on how it injected itself into my bloodstream, projected into my mind, like Mary's grandiose and submissive humility before the divine, it molded into my erotic needs, my emotional attachments, the way I handled intimacy with my female friends, those that mattered, and probably will never share again, certainly not with disabled women. Is this unfortunate? I feel guilty about pushing the younger Louise away, I do, but aside from authorial distance, I feared corrupting her, or hurting her, the pain of Linda's image hovering in the channels of my injured psyche. It is difficult to clear away the scars and look dispassionately at my personal loyalty toward this woman, why it mattered, why at one time I would have sacrificed and subordinated my own ambition for Linda's success. I never saw this as homoerotic; that was her fault, and mine, due to my need to confide, which Anthony LaPaglia dissects so succinctly in Bulletproof Heart, worth viewing for his lead performance alone. I nearly ended up dying over having my belief in her shattered, hurled as violently as Fanny hurls the bowl which haunts the great Jamesian novel. Don't ever believe in a leader like that, ever. What I saw in Linda wasn't exactly inaccurate. Liberty promotes her as an attractive centerpiece, a soothing counterpoint to the brawn and hyperinflation of a Cassie James Holdsworth.

Is it unfair? I suppose, but I hate Cassie and Jimmi, and would hate Erik, but Erik is spent, more dead than alive; much like my aunt's relation to her mother, Jimmi would defy hell itself to see Erik's humanity in Erik's carcass. But hating Linda is another matter. She is a tragedy in some ways; hate is too easy; the moral in payback, that is the treacherous terrain. Much as we see in a public, cosmetic fool like Todd Akins, self-preservation is ferocious. I know Ruth Marcus will not mind the artful stealing. She is the established fourth estate. I hang with very spacious bylines. Welcome to @BKAttorneyNJ. I will take all the lawyers in my contentious universe that I can keep in orbit. Am I fearful? A little too obsessive, perhaps?

Merci, Todd Akins

I'd go further than WaPo's editorial board. Every woman who stretches her thighs wide open to get humped is a victim. Some learn to like it, but I think everyone with a vagina carries the psychic scars of hymen breaking penetration. You know what my first lover told me?

"I'm gay."

And I did not get it; now I do, and yes, the memory hurts, rather badly, despite the passage of time, despite my married gallants. My first time making love, and this is what I get hit with, twenty four years old. If my stepfather had in fact raped me, I doubt things would have turned out much differently. That does not mean the right wing is wrong about psycho-sexual gradations, only that Akins has the mental acuity of a wart hog.

Reminiscing Isaac

Many people consider Isaac Asimov to be a classic science fiction writer, perhaps even a great one. The panegyric may have some rough edges balancing itself on the fence, but yesterday retrieved in my memory the huge impact his Foundation Trilogy and works like "Nightfall" had on my psyche. Isaac's work, in other words, planted the seeds of my pessimism about our species. The classic tale can also serve as an analogy for what Hitchens wrote in one of his last reviews about the 20th century being the age, and tragedy, of the absolute idea. Nightfall is undoubtedly a narrative composed during the second global war, and its tropes, the clash between data and belief, can just as easily be interpolated to reflect the sense of doom brought on with the rise of National Socialism after the collapse of the aristocratic hierarchy.

What blew the plastic fluidity of my pre-collegiate mind, however, now feels like an overwrought ode to quaint beliefs about mass hysteria. Losing the sense of magic and wonder about existence is not always what it seems.

Asimov Forever

I may not be able to litigate my way out of the cost of urban brutality, but this is on my legal adversary wish list, oh yes, and you are going to help spastic get the robot, right peoples? I have been firing six cylinders all day. No drug deals, no stealing, black racism, black lack of sexual control, black exploitation of my vulnerability, no other ethnic group or Caucasian insistence dictating to me how I have to live. My work is cut out for me, but yes, I am owed, after my life of trying to make it just like you, in this lying superpower of prick might known as the United States. Mio padre told me to email him the information; in our dreams.

Same Old

I am already reverting back to my 2002 level of poverty, the stress of such that led Poets & Writers to kick me off Speakeasy. My remaining savings is but the smallest cushion, clock ticking, whether or not I can freelance back in to sustain my online activity, and I doubt it. Liberty rescued me the first time, around the early nineties, when the Internet became a word that has since backdated in currency, but the updraft from the disability center was enfeebled at best, looking back all that way. My work under Linda 1 and Linda 2 was not stressful, and indeed, in context, it was ridiculous, and it was before my assault. It is very difficult for me to convey to my twitter account, even to other Philadelphia accounts, how much urban poverty, urban violence, had damaged me between 1993 and 2009, the latter date a kind of murky cut off for a cap on the African American retreat on what had been a continuing escalation to evict me. To go where, to do what, I cannot tell you, but some months before his birthday, I told mio padre, "You and mommy were right. I should have left Diamond Park and come home." Within days. Google Maps has a picture of these twin units, nothing more than an ugly and urban brutalist architecture, from which I could only go to another building with the pretentious hypocrisy of the same sort, and no, I am not grateful. Do slumdogs, whether Indian or Thai, have it worse? I cannot really rate it, because my youth was a boomerang between hospital and institution and back again. So no wonder then that poor Jerry clunked me over the head when I first set eyes on him. Christ man, we've gotten old, but I see you're still *at it*. I cannot say I'll never do another reading, but poetry under a gas light, what the fuck have we changed, my old mentor?

What have we done? I speak the unspeakable, and you've retreated to New Orleans, still filling the same estuaries that when I was young, hit my cognitive hemispheres like speed. In a very real sense, the artistic outlet has more quietly disillusioned me, as well. The American Constitution allows the outlet, but does nothing to check the power of Jon Corzine, or Hank Paulson or the CEO of JP Morgan to float nonsensical trillions. I live on perhaps .00001% of their 6 billion dollar leak, and the best Homo Tweets can bleet at me is to "get help," in all the glory of his progressive vision of what social equality looks like, that says nothing to what my half-century of damnation has cost. Social work never made me happy, not really. The Matrix Research Institute gave me a small sense of the aphrodisiac of merit, something I paid a high price to experience. It will now take me about two hours to safely simulate a decent shower. Most of you never even have to think about this. I do, my lungs slowly suffocating on pus that feeds oxygen generating commercials, and I am still battling to live an absurdly decent life, stifling a jagged sob.

Lance Armstrong? Possibly

I am fairly cynical about national elections, because all of our presidents have their balls in a vise, and have to be closet centrists. I know journalists and political analysts make a living on the spectrum shifts in American liberalism, conservative sentiments, but to me the two party system is intrinsically broken. If I sat down with David Brooks and Ruth Marcus and asked them what the differences between an Obama Administration and a Romney Administration would be, beyond the biracial/Mormon cosmetic issues, what could they tell me? Pakistan is a bloody nightmare. Ditto Syria, and my affluence died with the Clinton's desire to "rule the world," to paraphrase the Martin Peretz who inspires mockery in as much measure as he doles. Still, I renewed my ID yesterday through PennDot, which was about all I managed, I'm afraid, due to the usual colon impaction. They are sending me a photo ready card, but I still physically have to get to Arch Street. Rolling to urinal for an old woman's piss.

Potty break over, I hit on Lance Armstrong as my write in candidate of choice if I cannot lean either to Harvard's left brain or its right, if indeed I can vote at all on election day. My editor at AccessLife chastised me when I protested that Armstrong's testicle loss had nothing to do with being disabled; the issue spawned a small uproar. I take the idea of writing him in from one of his interviews in retirement. Rose asked the beleaguered cyclist if he had an interest in politics.

The GOP loses me on the issue of voter fraud; it is a non sequitur as far as I'm concerned, but so is litigation over voter ID. We live in the 21st century, and need proof of identity, though authors like Hannu Rajaniemi play on this in interesting ways. I think I like  The Quantum Thief , but unsure of all its suggestive possibilities, it sits in archive, for now.

Edit:
After writing this post I put the text back into its collection, though I am not rereading now. Hannu toys with many satirical conceits I do not usually relish, like the reliance on humanoid as freak show, and satirical grandiosity, but his ambition with QT, as a franchise or otherwise, is self-evident, tying mysticism, physics, and computer science together in a quite heady plot, which he puts together skillfully, but I remain mystified by the narrative.

Window In

I have no idea how accurate Blogger statistics are, nor whether it is serendipitous or not, but most of my.... followers?, readers?, however the holy fuck you account for yourselves, you seem to be European, through what connection, this is of little import, but in the aftermath of the Great Collapse of 08, you seem to be killing yourselves. I cannot welcome you to the land of indignity beneath our Western veneer if you keep this up, so cut it out. My childhood was one of orthopedic butchery, encapsulated by fear of the monkey child, until my emotional pain, and trauma after trauma, betrayal upon betrayal, disappointment upon disappointment, turned me into what I am now, and I may not have an answer for my old age, but the answer I hold to is that I will battle back. This does not mean that women like Debra Horne will not break me in the end. People like Debra succeed because their job is to punish non-compliance, in sometimes justified fashion, sometimes not. It is their livelihood to monitor, as indeed it was mine for five years. Suicide is not going to change the paradigm we've created that destroys the human spirit.

Now, in my case, how I stay out of more institutionalization later, I do not know; the truth is, beneath the deadly contours of my rage, a deadly rage yes, but impotent, an impotent daydream of wild justice, beneath this, I am weary, exhausted beyond my strength, and I may just go poof, and women like Debra will assess this with convictions like "I knew it," and any former surviving bosses, those who deserve punishment, those who do not, but made an effort, will feel sorry. Outside of the legacy of my thus far minor authorship, this is my lot, the pity of people who will look away, but I will go down fighting, and maybe, just maybe, give the next Linda C. Dezenski, the next Debra, or even the next Jimmi, whose behavior undermines the very inclusion he seeks, reason to pause. You have to fight, fight your pain, fight your poverty, and if you will go down, due to Alzheimer's or something else equally progressive, well, make your choices in the early stages. Not resisting the inevitable, however, is not the same thing as self murder. In this universe, there has never been a verified case of resurrection.

Schiavo Divides

Let me take up a leg from Jimmi's column, in relation to the Schiavo fiasco, where he writes "we kill what we don't understand." This is an over-simplification. No one wanted Terri Schiavo's death, not in terms of her own individuation, and this includes the much maligned husband, whose detractors were thrown  the paean I mentioned last month. This stupendous national quarrel was an argument over human dignity, and whether that involved survival at all costs, or a compassionate release. The latter argument won, validated in as far as the forensic evidence indicated this woman's identity had vanished upon her first collapse; even if the activists were not entirely wrong, however, what was the point of all this? My retarded sister was not much higher up on the cognitive functionality chart. She suffered for her twenty-two years. This issue is not going to go away, but for the significantly absent, as writers like Byatt illustrate (re: Little Black Book of Stories) it is more about what those of us still present, self-aware, project. The Christian right does not get a charity luncheon for its conscience. They blind themselves in relation to the quality of life issues here, and death with dignity is a valid argument. Always will be.

Blubber Addendum

This is an addition to Wounded Blubber, which I think would suffer as a post if I lengthened it. I do not want to give my readers the impression that I am not flawed in actual, physical presence, and in the immediate aftermath of the discovery that Linda C Dezenski had made me expendable, I am not sure how I managed to survive, because my reaction to these events was in direct proportion to the realization that the horror my life would, did, become, and I went off on Mr. Shrode over the phone, when I still had access that way, but it was an emotional pain agonized over Linda's betrayal, the horror of what she had exposed me to. Jimmi could not follow this thread, neither then, nor in contemporary terms; he doesn't get it, and if he was to respond to my posts at all, he'd tell you in his own words that I treat him with contempt. This is true, and not only that. I should not have lost control to the extent that I did, not with him. He is a fragile boy, and no matter how badly he ages, like a bowl of gelatin, squashes, easily, in contrast to the strength in my contorted frame.

However, and this is my main point: the fact that I have to aim my speech at him like a fighter in training, that he and I cannot talk it out, and he has to ignore me to cope, belies his activist compassion, which feeds the contempt. I have seen Jimmi engage in verbal tantrums as if it was nothing, forgotten in so many hours, but not with spastic, and spastic wanted hers, to borrow from his published simplicity. Jimmi and Erik will never be my friends again; that goes without saying; but the fact that our former relation as friends cannot so much as be acknowledged in the normal course of social exchange, this is infantile, as far as I am concerned. He believes in the collective rights of the disabled, except for those unduly harmed by the zealousness of that belief; it is this behavior of his, along with other behaviors I have observed on the liberal battlefront, that has made me critical of gay demands, sexual and social equality.

Wounded Blubber, Feline Primacy

Meteorological data indicates it will be a beautiful end of summer day today, but that humidity will return tomorrow. Nice day for an outing, and perhaps I should make the effort, as I need new Velcro-latch sneakers, and a shoe horn. Only then can I go trolling for freelance or consultancy contracts, as I do not know of anything full time I can vie for close to current residence, although, since I started my long and drawn out roar to the politicians, and soon, any potential litigators, this residence may not be where I live all that much longer. My worry is two-fold: that I may wind up in an environment that will be as bad as Diamond Park, which was my first subsidized housing unit, or that I may wind up incarcerated, even inadvertently. Conservatives may kill quadriplegics, but progressives usually make things worse, so unless I get lucky, I am damned either way, and do not have the mettle today to go pretend that I still have any chance to be middle class, buying furniture, cars, durable appliances, children, husbands, power, or Nietzschean pretences. Here is one of Jimmi Shrode's columns that I once hissed at him about. What is wrong with it? It is angry, I'm angry. Jimmi writes of marginalization; I am marginalized, but what Jimmi will never admit to is the following: he and Erik and Cassie and Linda can play their power games and trample anyone they like simply for the sake of hating the oppressors. Jimmi applied for a job and got it and quit it, and that spastic_dowager's livelihood was destroyed in the process wasn't his fault, even though my former colleagues broke the rules to give this unstable homosexual whale employment. Erik, his partner, was Secretary of the Board, and before Erik's mind degraded to where it is today, Jimmi and Erk and Cassie did many extreme and fanatical things that merited investigation by the Justice Department. What did spastic ever do? Her job. That is what spastic did, and it never amounted to a damn hill of beans, either at the disability center itself, or later, at the Matrix Research Institute, and yes, moving on and letting go is the sane, the proper thing, but in the following years, between 2002 and 2009, my life became a nightmare for three reasons:

1. the way the center coordinators treated me, their lack of competence outside of specifically proscribed paradigms.

2. my landlord's repeated violations of my civil liberties.

3. Septa's CCT connect restrictions

Spastic now lives for vengeance, and unless I die tomorrow, I'll fight for it the rest of my life. Erik is not fine, as Jimmi suggests. Erik is a utility for uneducated paraprofessionals to earn a living, after all his years as the extreme and vicious transvestite, Erik's life is a coordinated set of restrictions, and quite honestly, despite my own aging limitations, I would rather be dead than live the way Erik does, and his refusal to quit smoking suggests he has his own destructive desires. Kimmy is sleek and healthy, by contrast, and has won what is left of my own scarred passions left unfulfilled, and it is all I can do not to adopt her. I tell myself to wait a month, unsure how much I will complete today, after litter duties, which I have engaged in increments, over a fresh and strong Italian roast. If you are white, you do not want to live in Diamond Park, unless, like Garrett Reid admitted, the inner city is some kind of thrill. It wasn't for me, I was just a naive and tormented student who thought MLK was noble.

King certainly was black royalty, and his rhetoric is no salve for the trauma Philadelphia has inflicted on me. I will not survive much more of it, if the future has more in store.

The Real Fascist Cripples

Wikipedia contributors certainly know how to masticate films, and there is nothing I can illuminate about Valkyrie factually that this entry does not cover, though Lane's quip about English character acting was perhaps the most amusingly accurate. Viewing this movie gave me a brooding, uneasy feeling, as if it prefigures the collapse of the United States in a way I cannot quite quantify. It strikes me once again, that Cruise and I are months apart. Risky Business made him a super citizen, his credo makes him suspect, and I sit in power chairs, scraping bottom barrels, despite the fact that like my former supervisor, I was groomed by *the state* to be a poster child, which may indicate rancor towards social inequality despite my recoil from the rainbow coalition.

That recoil is genuine, although the full extent of my corrosion remains a toss up, in terms of what or who I hate, and why. I am fully aware of my capacity, and if I wanted to, I could mop up the floor with people like Jimmi Shrode and Debra Horne, and indeed, after my fall from grace, I did attack Jimmi's intellectual arguments, in the elevator, on the sidewalk, and he would recoil like wounded blubber, but whether he, or the coffee colored bitch slapper who considers herself a social services professional and isn't, are worth my hate, that question is more painful, not easy, and revolves around competence, entitlement, value judgments I dare making.

von Stauffenberg's motives do not seem so mysterious to me, whether one believes Cruise penetrates the man or not. The elite in the German military came to realize, late in the day, that fascism was destroying German national identity, not vindicating it. But what Cruise does bring to the role, in the same vein that motivates my obsession with pushing back against disability ideology, is that strident focus on the end goal,which is to eliminate the cancer, stop it from progressing, and the character's injuries exemplify this, how hard one has to be to see it through.

Cruise's command of the camera is a gift that most of us lack, and I am not decrying his success. What makes me uneasy is his superlative stature, which to all appearances has erased the identity that had to underly his acting ability, at some point. Perhaps that is a degree of hyperbole, but I doubt the exaggeration goes too far.

Richard III, in Mammary

My problem is this, and I have posted about it before, from time to time: I do not want to have to publish simply for free anymore through the small presses. Cannot afford it, but I am admittedly off my game, not that one failed article idea means I should stop pitching, or even that the idea itself was wrong, and I may need to utilize travel time to do some ground research, and give the nice editor a reboot at a later date, after I make a medical outline, screaming while I rip out my hair; my confidence has dwindled, entangled in my anger with you know what and who, but this goes deeper than her and their violations. It is panic at what it will take me to get back in the door with old clips, the clock running on my savings, and I cannot simply tie my hopes on contests for my few strong fiction bits, poetry manuscripts, or even restoring my ad banners, which may be a lost cause. I even found an open managing editor position that I am interested in, yet I do not wish to forsake independent presses entirely.

No, will not tell you where, but it has been open for some time, and I may break a sweat over it for nought, but will likely take the five hours necessary to make a cv package; the good news is I finished a memoir, not quite as playful as Death at a Funeral, which makes Peter Dinklage more interesting still, about my mother and her horse; it is going to a paying market, and I do not know if I have enough time to turn it into a story for a contest deadline which is yawning, if I can work that fast, or have a chance to win. The British just have a way with comedy of manners, and the defecation scene in the above mentioned was very true to life about incontinence and impaired mobility. My decision to fight back against the hell Liberty Resources has put me through may have come too late, we'll see, but engaging the battle has liberated my ability to really return to working again. Leaving this landlord for something less regimental will be the positive cure, but I do not know if my window for that has viable currency.

NC Green

I used to watch Charlie Rose regularly, and stopped doing this because I have come to hate his entertainment industry segments. Glad I missed this one except for the last few seconds, and some days feel we need to dispense with shallow accolades, superficial appraisals that surround notorious personalities. Marcus, however, commands my respect. Astonished are you? I do not have the time this morning, and yes, though I have posted about social fear, and being targeted by multi-ethnic abuse, used the n word twice online by my count, and offended maybe 88% of progressive sympathies it might have been wiser for me to cultivate, I hesitate to really roll up my sleeves and apply myself to African American memes, for yes, I am that paranoid, and two, a reactionary is one thing, but a smart one with a multiplicity of scars is another, and when I bite, people do not know what to say.

I will retract calling Chris Rock a punk. Whether his audience simply accepts him, or really feels he deserves his recognition, I'll leave that open, but I find him shrill, mostly annoying, and wonder why you cannot make an effort to be less shallow, in incremental stages. Some of Charlie's segments may shift my rudder in the near future. Speaking of shifts, is this the biography you hope gay marriage will prevent?

Cher Like A Horse

The late 80's film Suspect slipped my mind, quite simply, since few of you, impaired or not, seem willing to offer me suggestions, or are not sure what to serve up. I have never seen Liam Neeson do a bad job in any of his films, including this one, and he brings a big heart to Carl's pain, but the casting director might have had more courage than allowing for Cher's mind meld as a harried public defender up against sinister force, a villain with an equally sinister mind that knows how to use institutional barriers, and the power of the system, to quash the hard luck minions who slip and vanish into the underclass. I have seen the film at least twice, and could extrapolate further, but I am generally dismissive of the story line, even though I forget why the judge crossed the line into the unforgivable, while Cher and Quaid skirt the ethics to unearth the greater truth. A resounding and familiar theme coming from me, I suppose. In the prime of her maturity, Cher cuts a beloved figure, but not as an average jo of a lawyer who suddenly goes into inspired detection mode.

There are times when the rules have to be broken, but, on the other side of the coin, when legislation designs case management systems that crush would be idealists and engage in collusion, if only on the basis of default, then those who know things are broken have to push back, which is not to convey that I will not return to this adjudicating thriller sometime at a later date, if I get what I wish, which is a more tranquil resettlement for my old age, and less untended consequences that lead to untold, unspoken, mostly silent cruelty from forced social equality those on the left demand.

Spastic's Pan Fry Cheese

This is constructed all through Trader Joe's staples, something I shall miss if I ever get the fuck away from PresbyHomes and never hear the name of this corporate menace ever again. Their web site is a total lie, not that any of you care, but you should, and it is my job as a dying writer to make you care, isn't it? But first, my quadruple bypass food. I take two slices of French sour dough, three thick slices of sharp cheddar, split one, take three or four slices of pepper salami and place them on top of two cheddars, add fried or fresh diced onion, ketchup or any dark tomato sauce I have available, chili pepper, put the split cheddar on top, close sandwich, load in pan using a light sunflower oil, if possible, fry until browned and drizzle any of the cheddar melt on top.

I have the information from the ACLU that I need for my second round of my complaint letter to my state representative; I am wise enough as a fool to know I may not live long enough to satisfy my vengeance on Linda's dainty pixie hair styled skull, but I am not done, and my sword shall hang over her sociopathic conscience such as it is until disability centers decide to hold their staff accountable. I told you, I am not perfect and got as soppy as you like in my last bid to save myself twelve years back from bankruptcy and destruction I cannot undo, with a stress shortened life expectancy, but Linda and Liberty have failed me since they hired me, and I mean what I say when I say that Congress needs to revisit the 504 statue that created this federal mandate.

I may not live to see it, but the corruption that enabled Linda to traumatize so many will end. I challenge the worthy students of Temple Law to look at the court records, see how often Liberty Resources has settled in employment discrimination cases. Compare these with other disability center scandals in the rust belt and you will see that something is wrong with this paradigm. I want compensation if I can find a way to that, however unlikely, but there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, and more than money, I want to clean it up, and both progressives and conservatives cannot see the woods through the trees. I am going to dismantle this palace, one way or the other, so help me.

Elizabeth's Assets

"To eat with the devil you need a long spoon." Chaucerian proverb

Melvin Frank uses physical injuries of his characters under his direction to suggest the brittle collision between reality and expectation, especially as we head into maturity, but George Segal and Glenda Jackson don't carry any authentic seasoning to Lost and Found. Wince worthy, especially as Jackson embodies the best a female command presence has with out insinuating lesbianism must necessarily follow.

Neither Segal's loss of spouse nor Jackson's divorce get anything other than cursory summaries via way of explanation. There is a fake suicide staged, which, thanks to a cat, puts Segal in danger. He recovers, has a germane outburst, is about to tell Maureen Stapleton what she can do with her liberal pretensions when the real reason Jackson was cast becomes clear: to stop the unspeakable.

Impairment incorporation, as occurs when Hannibal gives Verger a high C-4, is an improvement.

Deflation Leitmotif

I was researching the veteran scriptwriter Sherry Coben, who unwittingly sucked me into the pleasure of self-identification with her hit show during my collegiate years, which was most likely a hit exactly because of women like my divorced mother and her then closet butch best friend, which yes still pisses me off even though I knew Kmac with a significant amount of childhood to adolescent intimacy. (Would I cut this woman the way I would cut New Mobility's managing editor if I ever saw her again? I cannot say; there are differences, and Kmac was one of the few people at my mother's funeral with whom I could field my grief.)

At the risk of repeating myself, my reactionary hostilities are not simple. Josie Byzek never really cared about being my friend. She met me in the city to make up for burning my date, the end. Never contacted me to see how I was doing afterwards, long before I started blogging and recounting my abandonment by Philadelphia Cripland, and Kmac lost her daughter, who I knew once, but what these two women have in common, along with the majority of lesbians who were out, including the former master and commander of my now hated disability center, Fern Markowitz, is that they were poison to my well being.

Wiki has a citation about the pressure CBS was under to ensure that the characters of Jane Curtin and Susan Saint James were not lesbians, but Coben unwittingly hit the zeitgeist of my formative years. The late seventies saw a skyrocketing dissolution of nuclear family security, and I am not the only boomer who got scarred by that. But Coben also captured the humor of not knowing where the place settings were in the last quarter of the last century. My mother and Kmac were Kate & Allie prototypes, and Coben, from my region, captured the tempo that the country understood and grasped, nostalgia already setting in during the Reagan years. The curse of a disadvantaged freelancer is that every idea has already been done, however, and the angle has to be wedged with ever more finesse.

The Kantian Concerns in Escapism

One thing that the burgeoning novelist Lee Doty shares with more accomplished authors and conceptual artists like JJ Abrams, and the canonical, like Cervantes, or Thomas Mann, is the fantastical troping of escape from reality. Doty just handles this badly, which is what I do not like about his foray into this much abused genre. His main superhero, Dek, is a boy with Downs syndrome who is plucked, ambiguously, out of a car accident, and is made into a replicant by his wizard father. The same happens to Roy, who is speculatively retarded. Doty never spells this out; instead these boys get superpowers and are conveniently killed in the opening narrative. We can also note, in the fabled discussion thread which followed my negative review, Doty ceased any comment directed at me as soon as I admitted to a disability. I did not expect that he would answer my email, as by that point I was thoroughly antagonized, but it is interesting, none the less.

We utilize chronic conditions creatively in a variety of ways, Abrams with somewhat more ingenuity toward a mythology. There was Locke's real world paralysis, or Rose's terminal illness, all suspended on a magical island transposed from Stevenson into a post 9/11 world. Henry James dollops consumption and other mysterious ailments into fairy tales. The young Mann, who I can only tolerate in small doses, and have placed his corroded novellas that signal the death of the Romantic movement into archive, for the time being, does the same thing, turning the very aspects of deterioration into a melodramatic looking glass. I preface my diffidence toward Mann's homo-erotic tortures with the caution that I have not read his more mature Modernist works, but still feel that James' genius is more synchronic toward my distaste for leveling the playing field over the pursuit of sexual pleasure, which can also be blinding, and in some ways, a selfish escape, however liberating the intense orgasm might be. Henry James knew, as I have learned, to my misfortune, that intimacy, even the purely emotional, can have deadly consequences.

Doty leans heavily on Philip K Dick for his cultural references in Out of the Black, but Dick, in his post nuclear android settings, does not let us escape from the challenge of whether we create worlds of our own destruction, or can hold to optimism for the future, which is another way of conveying that you should not dismiss what bitter would be elitists like myself have to say. Does this mean I am hostile to imagination? Not at all. I just want you to think twice, and whatever you shy from in my behavior, what does Doty's shunning of me entail, especially when he is willing to exploit the disadvantaged on the cheap. Food for thought.

Falco Nodule

Despite my ignorance on how the industry works, and the fact that my cable television subscription ended with my career in 1997, and I can only access the good stuff second hand, by word of mouth, I will intuit that Edie Falco is under appreciated, for both obvious and subtle reasons, though her strength as a victims' advocate in Freedomland helped to make this one of my favorite contemporary films about the corrosion of US morality, a film that was not afraid to be honest about black norms, white dysfunction, white mental stability. In the earlier Laws of Gravity, she looks so much like my former best friend, Susie Davison, that I forgot what I was looking at, and wondered if Sue had gone into acting. My heart broke watching Falco's performance, though the film itself seems hindered by its strong verbal dependency. I am going to attempt another viewing in ten minutes or so, but want to warn my readers that at some point I am going to dig deep, and hoist a load on my shoulders, and where we come out on the other end might leave you running for cover. I am sure the homosexuals who checked out my rhetoric assume that I am in denial about the fraying of my orientation, given that my supervisor traumatized me in such a dramatic fashion, leaving me urinating on the scar tissue twelve years later and beyond, but I am too honest, hard hitting for that. Gravity is up, and I want to try to follow it, if only for extrapolation.

Deadlines & Coffee

Perhaps assassinating my article would help, and crying on the shoulders of other freelancers, but when I return, I have a glimmer towards a better integration of the Italian Diaspora, just a glimmer, with the aims of this project, after refreshing myself on Amiel's Queen of Hearts, which does its own precursor to our contemporary use of hyperlinks, tracing through back to Big Night. Indulging web logs are also dubious in terms of brain cell health.

Parasomnia

"His end was not pacific."
                              --Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense

The CI episode Consumed is another impairment hinge exploited for nefarious ends, and Wolf's writers, like the Russians, may be onto something in the suggestion of somnambulance as a kind of mass hysteria of manipulating the dolts, our strings being pulled. When my father placed me in Home of the Merciful Savior, and it was an actual institution in my day, and not the classroom shown here, I was abused by the nigger nannies then (did I shock you, using racial slurs when I know better, tsk, you have a shameless tongue spastic!) just I have been under almost constant harassment by them under my current landlord, and, nearing the end of my life, I am raising my voice for a less regimented existence too late. Lungs going, arteriosclerosis advancing, activists like Cassie James-Holdsworth are making things better for the next generation or not, according to one's point of view, but this offers me little consolation. She will be dead soon, as will Linda, and myself, and we simply cannot get it right. The medically fragile are angels, people like myself are demonized, and to really be matriculated, we have to be super human. If Brian Greene and his theoretic allies are right about the multiverse, granting his analogies give me a fucking headache, then the turmoil of cognitively advanced species essentially replicates forever. It is also a convenient rationale for why so many human civilizations conceive of an afterlife.