Altered States

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

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

Active Theatre Rations

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



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

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

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

Pinata Reel Change

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

And Coital Absence

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


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

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

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

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

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

Coital Glamor

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


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

Urethra Knives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond Pierre Gringiore

"There is no going back to this other person, this other place. This thing, this stranger, she is what you are now."-- Jodie Foster, The Brave One

French society has a way of sublimating disingenuity which is particular to itself, and cuts across its authorial class, reaching back before Victor Hugo, but certainly linking him in a flowering genus: Balzac, Flaubert, Maupassant, the genius of Stendhal, the superb Stendhal, Moliere, Proust. Yet it is linked, too, to Spanish sleepiness, the lassitude of the Spaniard's daydream themes, coupled with fervor, and the crafty shrewd Italian. Even Simenon's sparse discipline is not unaffected by it, and somehow, Bruno Cremer makes Maigret greater than the sum of gossip, realism, sliding the calculus in a great hunter's mind. No one is ever discomfited by the deception of gas, slowly bursting as a stool moves in transit. Bloating is just bloating, until it becomes the biological eruption of death, the thing which kills. Bowl blockage, cervical cancer.

For Simenon, this substitute for wasted, withered flesh is the morphine needle, and in Maigret On Trial, Maigret's Patience, the 20th century is perfected to tradition. The stories tell the battle of Maigret and Manuel Palmeri, who may be Italian, what the fuck do I know about borders being porous, and Manuel's mistress, Aline, and the novels hearken straight back to Hugo's genius in Gringiore's adventures with the Circus of Miracles. Dangerous people fake blindness and amputation to steal, to beg, and Simenon's brilliance is entirely aware of this conceit, while the Belgian production and Cremer's near perfect realization, for a bit actor, makes the novels themselves nearly unnecessary to read. Criminality and the law both exploit disability, create it, and ruthless avarice destroys and eliminates it. I am finally penetrating the coda, finally. I can begin to see, despite the alarming length of fecal discharge, my anger with overages I should be perfectly capable of avoiding. 

Violence as an argument, this will always be with us, and I'm a rare woman, like Jennifer Lopez donning Harlee like an overcoat, entranced by her own abuse, who believes in its cathartic consequences, and that's all I've ever really feared, justifiable homicide, even with its anti-climatic dissonance, and so what. Murder, the stuff of the kitchen table, humanity reverting with age to simple, reptilian responses: fight, flight, bite, tear, before the snake asphyxiates your ability to breathe.

Subjunctive Sinews

Writing is not a profession but a vocation of unhappiness. I don’t think an artist can ever be happy. Georges Simenon

I am not an expert in the revival of American minimalism, but Georges Simenon is much more interesting precursor than a man like Cormac McCarthy. Cormac is exceedingly aware of his craft, but that craft, much like Lionel Shriver's, has flaws that illuminate flags for me, flags that do not allow my applause without reservation. Simenon pares it down to the bone, but his stature has been on the rise in recent years, perhaps because his sparse diction leaves room for intrigue and ambiguity.

I examined, as opposed to truly studied, Dirty Snow with Jay Gertzman (second reviewer) and it was worth the entire participation in the live book club, and aside from Maigret, I hope to pursue more of Simenon's oeuvre. It is his contribution to The Brothers Rico that makes this more than just your sanitized Hollywood mafia staple, and also why it is an interesting adjunct to later films like Brazil and Arlington Road. My wheels have been spinning on this through the last week and a half, through my last three posts of equally minimal political sentiments, through the fact that I still mourn mio bambino and apparently cannot be kind to my internal loss and allow things to take their course. Like most pet owners who disagree with science, I am convinced that Vinne misses his brother still, and that dear kimmy does her best to take charge of both of us (which reminds me I need to get on and use my wonderfully sardonic verbal skills to help my shelter friends, about whom I have never uttered so much as a barb, and why is that? Because I snivel in torrents for my Joey? mio bambino, mio bambino, weeps the soul I no longer have; had I only died with my boy, this throbbing wound for a feline, six months going, is this why?) The little girl sticks her ass in my face, as if to say I am here now, get over it. And oh, grief shall fade, but I'll never have another bond such as that.

Let us examine Rico a bit, and although I rarely put the plot under a microscope, what analytical skills that remain tell me this is the best way to continue my pursuit of this thesis.

Révolte

I lay the mind's contents 
Bare, as upon a table,
And ask, in a time of war,
Whether there is still
To a mind frivolously dull
Anything worth living for
                        --Allen Tate

Stendhal lived during a time of uneasy transition between the Enlightenment, which, in a rare moment of personal exasperation, a fifty year old McGuire exclaimed, "I refuse to teach it!", but in all fairness, Pope has that effect on me as well, with his trilling mock heroic verse, and the burgeoning dawn of global superpower which the Victorian age would bequeath to the 20th century. The world that Stendhal presents to readers is delightfully manicured, much more so than in the Balzac who purportedly supersedes him (and for those of you not familiar with how the dowager handles majority consensus by now, she exclaims "fuck that," and would be stranded on a desert island with Stendhal over  Balzac any day) but it is still a pre-industrial world with a vain and petty aristocracy, wallowing in Napoleon's tragic grandeur, a world where men controlled women, selecting and discarding them like a deck of cards, as long as the female in question was desirable, regretting not studying this nearly unparalleled author with my French professor.

Though I am not sure how France 2 works, in comparison to RAI in Italy, I am now writing in rare protest. to my cultured aesthetes across the pond: Some classical authors cannot be faithfully adapted on screen. Stendhal is one such author, even if curiosity overcame me to see what was done with The Charterhouse of Parma, to realize it is a more superficial variation of Julien's story in Le Rouge et Le Noir. Certainly, Stendhal's world of backstabbing principalities can influence screenplays, but some canonical material should remain just that, canonical, not bootstrapped by the props department to offer sensibilities of the baroque slowly crumbling to egalitarian lies. Not that I do not appreciate the derivative, and in the case of pop culture like Star Trek, even prefer it, but more often than not, adaptations detract from the engagement with literary imagination, with the exception  of Dickens and his Christmas Carol, which is probably known by heart even by Boko Haram. While we may meet our doom enhancing our bodies out of species sustainability,  enhancing our cultural historical memory through the ascendancy of video as the supreme medium can have its drawbacks. As opposed to being enacted, great narratives need to be read. And if some of you are going to object with a question like "What about Victor Hugo?" Hugo's flaws are tightened when they become musicals, movies.

Walks Like A Duck

Before the sea and lands began to be,
before the sky had mantled every thing,
then all of nature's face was featureless--
what men call chaos: undigested mass.

Ovid's prologue, The Metamorphoses


A day of florid insouciance, nasal drip with the cloying and likely unhealthy radiator heat that is so beneficial to the discarded of public housing, Tammy Duckworth's election to the House might have been interesting if she was not a minority potted plant, but if I had once a seat at the table with President Clinton's Social Security advisory committee, there is no reason why I cannot do it again to dismantle independent living centers. If I could just interest a few investigative journalists with experience in tracking bureaucratic waste, the thousands of state dollars that go into CILs and go out into the pockets of litigators and former IL staff who file with the EEOC, even Nicholas Kristof might concede my myopia for revenge is not without foundation, but my day was long, cooking in between feline what is in my food bowl investigation committee, Vinnie throwing precisely two tantrums, I have to quit and come back again. When I really want to make dinner and it takes three hours of urinal dashing and arguments with proto-linguistic mews, of which the surviving brother does not have dead Joey's talent--Joey talked, evidence indicating my ex was right, and my deceased child thought he was human, like the way he propped his back against the table support, his fore paw leaning on the foot, as if to imitate me and Frank in our chairs-- I tire, especially in this heat, too cold out for fresh air via open window, I opened what virtual windows I needed at least for preliminary penetration, but find the flesh bowled and discomfited, beyond toleration.

(I did not tweet this yet and already have one view count, mmm. The anti-defamation league? Google monitoring? No David versus Goliath here, trust me, she says, smirking, as if one bitterly angry quadriplegic is really worth that much cause for concern; I haven't quite tested that with the fury bottled in Ellison's paint factory now, have I?) Not that I care about what those in charge of running Blogger think, or even what you do, the trail of abandon in my digital life reflecting my lack of affirmative structure in real work terms, but getting flagged after putting my heart into this, well, that is the paranoia of my online experience. Everytime I let me be me I get burned. I am, however, in the process of writing, and will slowly critique with more detail, my opening chapters of my book calling for the elimination of the IL federal mandate. This is currently a tap dance.

Before my id took over from the temperamental digestive system, diverting me, my sensibility was aiming at Tammy's profile being a good thing, depending on how she manages to deploy. Not everyone can come back from having 1/3 of their flesh transformed into beef stew, to then turn around and become a federal legislator, giving Petraeus even more reason to blush for shame. He led these troops for which Ms. Duckworth paid with her extensive amputations, and his lamented downfall gobbles the coverage much more so than the major's sacrifice. The EPVA achieved some stunning victories against the federal government, when you look at DC's accessible subway system. One reason I wanted to move to the capital when I had the more stable strength of my thirties.

Still, let me make one distinction for the ablest majority: the Jon Voight, representative of disabled veteran culture in Coming Home, is a distinct subset within the disabled community, from those birthed into chronic conditions. The groups intersect, but by and large, the wounded soldier has far more support toward successful matriculation than does someone like me, who has to be labeled *nursing home eligible,* to tap into even a modicum of the safety net that disabled veterans have, and hell will freeze over before the mainstream press even looks at this as an intramural competition, a pecking order that has valid reasons, but none the less creates a glass ceiling: I cannot supersede veterans preference in the byzantine labyrinth of the civil service aspirant, and it is growing long in the tooth to keep playing that wager.

Petite Sentiments

Before I return to my futuristic medical catastrophe of poverty induced stroke, barring poverty induced subcutaneous embolism, a few spare thoughts on the kindle paperwhite, spare, because I wish to cash in with a digital angle, though I never can write as fast as Yoffe, which may be just as well.

I am more comfortable carrying the paperwhite around, as the older kindle keyboard model has taken a beating, though it has stood the test of time, remains functional, and I am not ready to trade it in yet. Still manually easier to subvert the location issue through bookmarks and highlights on the older and technically more spacious device. Touchpad is still frustrating, though divining menu operation did not take me too long. With a little effort, I can read the paperwhite in dim light, and as long as I do not buy a text accidentally, Amazon's special offers, though no friend to the over-educated, do not trouble me, as this giant retail monopoly represents the best and the worst of Friedman's holy grail. Amazon's claims about battery life are so so, but since I am normally near a power outlet, this is not much of an issue. Relaxing into a text itself might be, but this may also be the residual effects of my bloody and asinine bid to becoming a patron of local color, and expending money I shall never recoup, much like the drain from felines dead and alive, and sibling rifts and expenditure, on the conquest, semi-lucid at this point, of Ulysses. (Lance, dear fellow, I take back what I said about "not deciphering," bloody fool spastic is!) Still cannot distinguish the period from the comma, but in terms of modern alienation and agony, figuring out which is which is a minor affair in Sebold's flickering window candle.  Certain classes of least functional cripples may not benefit from all this that is derivative of the cell phone.

One thing I have not done is transfer my periodical content, not yet. Less pressure. I am also entirely ignorant of comparisons to other models, but I am not seduced by the Apple device fetish as the rest of you, so you may deem that mild generational resistance. How much I can still absorb and maintain my dignity? The fact remains, this technology would have made me a better student; for that, a great deal of regret. This may seem like opaque reasoning, but the physical act of researching is a touch harder for wheelchair users, however much larger universities pride themselves on access, library architecture seems welded to the Victorian age, not that this was a conscious issue in youth, but in contemporary terms, it does begin to matter, and academic electronic fair use issues might include disabled access exemptions.

Bauble Feet

Martian colonists become preoccupied with Perky Pat Layouts, small sets representing penthouse apartments inhabited by a Barbie-Doll like figure and her Ken-like mate. --Behrens and Ruch analyzing Palmer Eldritch


Senator Kerry approximates a human being remarkably well. Surely he is flesh, blood, cartilage and orifice like the rest of us. This was my impression of the man during my obligatory 30 seconds of interaction with him after his 2004 consolation tour, and yes, it says something about this country that a failed piece of tripe like myself could discuss the wrong Treasury Secretary with a New England blue blood, but the yawning gulf between this failed presidential nominee and the urban herd who purchased his global warming book (I am selling my copy back, eventually, and I'm sure you'll snap it up like ginger grahams), says something else about American caste. The wall between the Senator and myself was more impenetrable than any bulletproof vest. Susan Rice  is closer to the ground, a slightly better maintained version of Debra Horne, local dementia calculator, and in that vein of competence, the ambassador has done little to impress me. Unlike Lindsey, I do not consider her intelligence feed on Benghazi fatal. Kerry is simply a more recognized national figure, and has earned the soon to be open Principal slot at State.

If I had the ability to take McCain and the Congressional Black Caucus by the scruff and bust their heads for them, the pharmaceutical industry would begin to worry about its Prozac profit margins. Can I discern the policy differences between Madeline Albright and Condoleezza Rice, or the departing Hillary? Only in the most cursory fashion, but neither Ambassador Rice's ethnicity nor her intelligence is at issue; the question is one of her temperament. The three women who were Secretary had it, but I have my doubts about Rice. That Kerry is rich white and old school does not discount the fact that he has earned this post. He served his country, (this is me not examining the Swift Boat tactic very closely) and he has been loyal to his party, and to Obama. Be glad I do not have real power, because we'd revert to the original thirteen states within no more than a bling. 

Question for the Harvard elite: If I do not have the right to tape Ms.Horne's mouth shut and cut off her thumb that hits the intercom switch to announce coffee hour or the budget grocer, or bible study, simply because I do not have your economic resources to keep my living space private, why in the world would I worry about Facebook or Google? Seems to me, cerebral palsy precludes the implied rights under western constitutional norms that you feel sacred as an ambulatory individual.

Emily Yoffe: White House Procopius

Now David Plotz will never accept a future piece from me, though this does not deter my brain from its Slate bracket file (and much as anything, my Slate byline aspirations need fieldwork), but I shall raise my voice, gently, on the moderate left rollback of the Petraeus imbroglio: If the neo-Eisenhower moderates, a species with no political home to call their own, exhibit character flaws, journalists like Yoffe roll out the tape measure and say let's be adults. Eh. Not so simple. People get hurt, and even if sex that violates commitments to monogamy is no longer criminalized, the state still has an interest in containing adultery. My fling was inconsequential. All of them were, but that does not mean I could not have gotten killed, and I did immerse myself in a pathological marriage between a draft dodger and his wife, unwittingly. Young and stupid, I wanted the thrill of romance, and married men, I discovered, were not afraid of me, and if I was not florid, cranky, and breast fallen, I'd do it all again, but more coolly, smarter. There is a huge difference between the thrill of forbidden pleasure, however, and illicit affairs that damage employment and productivity. And my former supervisor traumatized me, even if she did not mean to do so, by throwing me off my guard, in an email, about her orgasm intensity, and this in spite of the fact that I sought her confidence. I concede that. I enjoyed her company and was lonely and needed work again, but putting all that together became combustible. I did ask her things I feared asking my mother, and that was my mistake, because Linda is an alpha, and like any alpha, her dominance took over, and I became anxious, and the rest is history. That damage will never go away, and I doubt it will for Holly Petraeus either, and her grief is more salient than mine.

Men with power seem to need that urgency inherent in the impetus to spread their seed. We get that, but Petraeus and Broadwell were military officers. The Bush Administration did a great deal of damage creating Homeland Security, adding additional layers to a security apparatus that may not have made us any safer. Obama will not roll it back, but he is more visionary, and as president he should care that intelligence vital to the nation is well managed; it damages his legacy otherwise, carrying over bad ideas from a corrupt and inefficient administration, like Holder being out to lunch with Fast and Furious. Petraeus and Broadwell are human, and Paula was not nuts. She was enamored, and intense, but neither she nor the general are children, and Emily, perhaps Milbank as well, in a more nuanced fashion, treat them as if they were. We joke about the CIA, but we sober up real fast if, say, China takes North Korea off the leash and Seoul finds itself hit with a warhead, si? To serve within the top echelons of power is a privilege, and that should come with certain restrictions on indulgence. Unlike my former boss, Petraeus did take responsibility for his behavior, and then hired a lawyer, which is seemingly at odds with the idea that there are no extraneous legality issues remaining.

Rehabilitating his reputation is one thing, but whisking him back into executive authority is foolhardy, especially if he could not see the implications of having something necessary to conceal before he and Broadwell became lovers.

We tend to believe our republic does a bit more than mirror that Politburo in the east, but what Petraeus and Broadwell did is equivalent to the Communist Party corruption that makes the west feel so superior.

Petraeus Notary

Dana Milbank's back pedaling on the Petraeus affair implies that Director Clapper was too harsh in urging the general's resignation, and while I get the point of his column, and was headed in the same direction, in the vein of a disadvantaged freelancer without the same resources as an old media conglomerate, granted, one that may have saved the country (though I am unclear why Nixon was "this close to being a dictator," to quote a long ago would be paramour of my own), I have to agree with scholars who take the long view, and feel that the Petraeus resignation was necessary. To cue in on what keeps James Fallows awake at night, if the cyber warriors in China had breached the Petraeus-Broadwell electronic trail, then this sexual dalliance would have rapidly spiraled into a potential national security breach; this possibility is what's feeding the hysteria of the Congressional lap dogs. True, it may be a stretch to say that the general's distractions affected Afghanistan, at least in terms of operations theatre, or that it had anything to do with Benghazi, but this is what happens in a society where the narcissism of need, the selfish pursuit of that fulfillment, stains true personal liberty as something soiled, shallow. I may not have elevated Petraeus to heroic status, but viewed from a distance, I thought he was an honorable military leader.

Briefly, as my time is importunate, though open for later expansion, I have been shunned by married women online, particularly aspiring suburban novelists and poets, for my frankness, sometimes graphic honesty about sexual subversion. A little comeuppance seems in order.

Kevin McHale, Mime Karaoke

During a nascent episode of glee, Kevin McHale's Artie is swept up by Dianna Agron's cheerleader (most likely) in an aggressive seduction scene in which the nerdy pretend paraplegic is bewildered, entirely ignorant of the convoluted cross ethnic love plot suggestive of a sizzlingly kitsch hip bisexuality that regresses rednecks to awed pornography Neanderthals. Hot girls and hard nipples, that is an art in progress, as opposed to your grandmother's estrogen loss and the suggestive comfort crones can take in fallen paps, with the fearful androgyny of the Furies ever evocative of our founding myths, and our instinctual unease with gender definition and its tensions in relation to origin.

Artie's bewildered naivete is something of a truism in the wheelchair user innocence lexicon, but only in terms of Caucasian parents sheltering their invalids from any sexual identity: If you are paralyzed and need injections to get a hard on, what's the use? His silence in the scene is meant to have a comic, nerdy impact, but what it also illuminates, inadvertently, and I hear fans of the show's early incisive biting wit on Americana dysfunction crying out, "unfair, you are deploying a cheap stratagem!" is the wall of silence that surrounds the sexual abuse and exploitation of those with chronic conditions, a wall that is even thicker in the inner cities, where black women with MCTD are forcibly raped and assaulted into providing oral sex. No SVU doggedly pursued this girl's rapist and abuser when I knew her, too inexperienced as a journalist in those days to get her a cover story and some exposure to alleviate the duress she lived under, though the violence of her partner affected us all. He vandalized the mailbox unit and killed her cat. This is the systemic stress I was exposed to by Presby in the inner city, to then be nearly ceaselessly harassed here in this unit, let alone what this poor woman had to be subjected to in order to survive (and I do not know that she did).

It also adds layers to our current preoccupation with complicity, to pun on my own correspondence (work at it, you'll get it). That Artie is clueless does not spare him, any more than more worldly experience, and mine was above average for disability norms, spares us from future injury, which time and again, cordons off the unfortuate low status primate. glee is not my thing, particularly, musical theater that unites, mocks, and at the same time articulates the conflict of difference, synthesizing everything into our knowledge of Kantian universals, but I have seen enough of it not to spare you from exercising your mind a little away from the willful necessity of self-interest.

Feeling a little overwhelmed, I was nonetheless pleased to figure out what I had been doing wrong with the kindle paperwhite, the curse of vapid technical literacy.

Complicity Bounding

"I meant it in the sense that we were conspirators."-- Linda C Dezenski, defending her descriptions of her climaxes with her husband. quizzically riding on the heels of their divorce.

For all the efforts taken to circumvent Netflix, and the inconvenience of a DVD collection, sometimes streaming video denies us instant gratification. It was on the ABC affliate, the aforementioned chronicle, but weak signal and laborous transfer provided only glimpses of a vehicle that is possibly intriguing. Just blanked out in blinding white panic on telephone number; synapses assured by last summer's paper bill. If Alzheimer's is in my future more than likely I will be beaten to death by a caretaker, in the sense that verbal ferocity invites provocation. You've glimpsed my Iago already, the interior provocateur of a facile sophist. With that being the opening lead of a future preponderance, the kindle paperwhite yet another catalyst in knock offs to a weakened, weakening stride, let's return to the avenues opened by Paula Broadwell and Arlington Road, though I cannot pull a rabbit out of the hat into the immediacy of revelation, there is something larger here, an overarching issue worthy of grasping, like the proverbial tiger who will maul out my innards unless I unravel the maze. It is a difficult one, but the real life event, the sexual license which seems to go hand in hand with state secrets, keeping and uncovering them, ties into what the studio reflects back. Pellington's fin de siecle is dangerous because it suggests what cannot be said in the mainstream, that everything we think we know is a front for facts not in evidence, that McVeigh may not have been an implicitly independent actor, that federal agents misdirect themselves and miss real threats that might have been caught otherwise. Clinton's sexual misbehavior, for instance, may have exhausted our energy, not leaving us alert to pay attention to Osama, though the right bears blame here too, given that Kenneth Starr suddenly elected himself the American prelate (much as I am doing by airing out the dirty laundry within the homosexual community, by the way-- I have not dug into this, yet, but can assure Blogger that spastic's probing may hit a nerve, and won't we have fun! Do we ban this disabled woman, or what, damn it, we're about efficiency, not defamatory speech! Why us?) -- and while Wiki does a good job describing Kruger's taunt script,  Pellington's texture complicates things, like his jump cut to a Hope Davis replica after her supposed elimination by Robbins' charmingly superlative, and thereby incredulous, glee club, suggesting that Bridges' Faraday was so out of his depth that the only way he could have won was to join the conspiracy, vanish into it. This is partly where Gilliam leads his protagonist in Brazil, who is doomed simply because he tries to be decent, and longs for a kind of purity, that, due to its impossibility, leads to expiration. As phantasmagoric as Brazil is, it leaves Gilliam's fans uneasy, and exhausted Terry's output. 12 Monkeys and The Fisher King, though competent, lack the same force. The third film that binds all this together, surprisingly, is, The Brothers Rico, and this is not simply due to economic pressure. Then again, fans of Simenon understand that we are all complicit in the damage of corrupting and collusionary impetus. I'll take a break, pick it up next post.

And More Porchetta Feuds

Every single day, since I left Matrix, disbanded since Irvin Rutman retired or passed away, I have gotten up from that day bed five yards behind me, trying to convince myself my life was not over. Every damn day, first the unemployment office, sometimes in tears. Then I reunited with this gang of crooks briefly and not easily, before the shit hit the fan with their ensconced princess, and one of their many now deceased employees gave me a stipend for a profile of another dead girl, Karin. Her lack of mobility due to her type of cerebral palsy killed her, killed her young. Her lover had a felony record, and Liberty paid this offside Adonis under the table. This is what they do. Imagine then, how fortunate it would have been for me if Linda had wanted a bisexual fling spastic a la mode, though I puked when I began to fear her motives in our email conversation. If you fuck a Liberty staffer, fringe benefits abound, and Linda accused me of this, in fact, after the pin popped my skull and I turned into an IED. Or a grenade. Whatever you like. Every day. I tried, at first, to return to, social services on the Matrix model, and then got lucky with freelance work, but that was not such that I had to string. At AccessLife I started to believe that maybe I'd get back to near my old salary, but failed to realize how insecure journalism is; I carried on bravely, still intend to, but remained entombed in this building, if only through inertia, meaning that this marvel of competency threatens, rarely litigates, though since I put my defiance in print, my back is up.

And so today, I managed a round with my sister, and her husband may be joining the ranks, if his tumor paralyzes him. His entire family is on disability, either SSA or workman's compensation, and in an odd way, this finishes trying to mend fences with my immediate family. If the physicians cannot treat to maintain the man, I know Stephanie. She'll leave him, the children grown. I am only an aunt to the six of them, counting the little brother ignoring me, after I pissed away 4,000 dollars on the two of them, in name. We really don't need episodes of Revolution, do we, to learn how the human animal turns on a dime?

She suggested that maybe I could visit for Christmas, perhaps not realizing that this involves more labor than can be managed, especially with her spouse impaired. Even if Septa scheduled a ride for me without a crisis negotiator, I am no longer entirely safe in my manual wheelchair. It is fifteen years old beyond any usefulness, and the Catholic heavens forbid she visit me here at Riverside, which is my point, beyond money. My officer cousin can inconvenience himself for my sake, and his mother's, but in my sister's suburban lexicon, this amounts to catastrophe.

I know. Focus on my goals, stay positive, and I'll be in exactly the same place tomorrow, living scar tissue.

Porchetta Links

Things were going fairly well in the waning afternoon sunlight of mid-November's autumn, nature having reminded the latest east coast starling who is actually in charge, things settled down, and although spastic has no hope of earning a fucking cent on her poetry, playing the guilt game with the even more ephemeral literary journal was an active back step, a deceleration (do not kid yourself about my rage-- I may be leery of pushing the envelope with Google, but if I believed that I had the physical ability to carry out a tactical assault for justice, barring that I still have layers of politicians and the civil service to engage, and pity wooing, after this is exhausted, my temperament is such I'd choose this over post modern polemics, if my intelligence could counterbalance my physical helplessness, though the compassionate house nigger lifting me off the foam mattress which was just a little too low for me to do my lateral transfer suggests otherwise). I would spare Tim, in the age old tradition of objective indifference. The man may hold me back, now and again, because of his limitations, none the less, my target is the power that denies the regulatory system nearly any degree of flexibility. Rising up from the black lagoon into this tranquil interlude comes Aunt's obsession with niece and a new mattress for her daybed. My ex found the daybed and I owe him there because its sturdy wooden frame works, gives me hand grips.

For those remaining fans of Terry Gilliam's cult status, this is my aunt with the mattress obsession. Yes, the old woman with her frightening face lift, her ostomy issues, is on my side, and I know that. I lived with her before imprisoning myself in public housing. I know she wants to help, and that she sees how my sister's exploitation has hurt me, on top of my trauma (for newbies not following, I gave my sister a substantial loan during the Great Recession, wanted her to help me during the building renovations, and sister, who won't lift a finger for anyone else, wants to put me in a nursing home. She has husband, education, four children, a house worth 500k, and needs everyone else to support her; you figure it out).

Niece tries to tell aunt that niece needs to track down editor boss for cv for the editorial position, and that the optimal time was then, while I had the space, landlord leaving me the fuck alone, I have to plow through my documents, but no. Aunt and niece shatter each other's nerves, despite me telling her to throw mattress out, nope. Favorite cousin hauls ass with senile uncle. Good to see cousin, teach him kindle, tell him blog is up on Azmo for download. Coz is going to help me advertise... I really want to try for this job, one last great push, and I am screwed now, because the foam needs an inch, or an inch and a half base, and while I have to sort that out and reroute my newfound lack of room, because Tim just leaves things, I am running out of time to put a competitive submission in place. He was a terrific authority figure, my AC editor, and taught me how to be a better journalist. On deadline, I was in Paula's heat for the fellow,  and I have no idea what he looks like. The odds of me finding him before this Thursday? The issue of the economically disadvantaged at a standstill in time management is not new. If I do not apply, if I miss taking a last heroic leap, I might as well be Tuttle vanishing in a layer of ordinance.

Stress Fracture

Women talk about sex all the time.-- Stephanie Verderame's summary of my employment trauma.

Why my body has not exploded from hypertension is not something an investigating physician would concern himself with, because I am trying to do what I once thought miss pixie on her canes capable of doing, fusing a viable link between worlds, though arguably, I am using my literary and corresponding interpretive skills to indict the rhetoric behind the case for community integration, something that Louise my would be acolyte caught, but found  confusing, and as I once wrote, that is fair enough.

I weigh how far I want to wade in the purple, since I am trying to make an effort to be marketable, but, if Linda was the catalyst for my break with the Philadelphia center, my hatred, on the conceptual level, stems from the knowledge that disability centers are no more than decentralized institutional enforcement zones: Instead of putting the broken in one place, which, though sanitary, is cursed with the overpowering odor of ammonia, we get state categorized, and in overwhelming majorities, bitch slapped in the projects; nothing this woman does changes that, either for me, (driving me over to her public housing pizza parlor a long long time ago), or for her followers. If her counter thrust to me after she crashed and burned in England under her own weight was that Liberty wanted me to succeed, I'll believe that when she and other staffers stop breaking the law to further their own agenda, and to practice accountability. If I had had the courage to file with the Philadelphia Human Resources Commission where Thomas Earle now sits, Liberty might be better monitored, and Linda Dezenski, the missionary sociopath, would not be the COO (if I had married and moved to England, maybe that action is a Liberty magic potion: "We hire Cassie back no matter how many times she quits, but we traumatize Joanne with sexual gloating, humiliation, inner city aides who molest, abuse and aggravate her stress because she needs to understand compliance with this way of life is freedom!" Moving into a senior citizens home in the apogee of her adulthood is better than what she did for us running excursions into Inglis House!)

I call it Stalinist. And Old Joe executed many Russians at his convenience. I could not save myself though literary skills and ambition. I could not save myself by modeling Jerry or Michael, oh but what I can do is fight back against this in the last remaining years of my life, and start a movement for Congress to overturn the mandate protection. That direct enough for you, how corrupt and sordid our values are in the early 21st century?

There might be virtue in the argument that I should stop caring. I did not listen to myself when my own instincts told me to back away and pack up shop, and cease trusting this woman. Did I over react to her dominance and rank? Undoubtedly, but the scales were unbalanced in the first place. Linda has the esteem, and mental health benefit, of living in her own home; for nearly 28 years now, I have been chattel in section 811 and section 202 housing, which makes me a second class citizen. We tend to respect those with ownership of private property, and all I wanted from my former family was for them to honor their pledges; instead, Linda's public humiliation of me led to an equally public denigration, and I had served this movement faithfully.  It nearly killed me, and I am certain that others even more powerless have been case managed to death by CIL culture, with the best of intentions. It needs to be stopped, and I will most likely not live long enough to dismantle it, but I must expose it, and at least begin the process of conscientious reform

Like Elizabeth in the heyday of her court, hamstrung by her own insecurities, my inability to assert myself over the system because of a nervous breakdown is saltpeter on my tail feathers. I was told my state representative was leaving office, but saw nothing on her web site to that effect at the time I mailed my template grievance; technically, *all of this,* minus my evidence, is now on public record. Her regional office closes this month. One of her temps suggested city council, a body to which I intend to proceed-- but I do not berate myself internally. My conviction may have cemented late, but it cemented, and I am determined to see movement. Many wheelchair users are helpless, and that is simply a fact, like my grandfather's deterioration from dementia turning into a danger, and I get that, but attendant care only generated more trauma for me, as opposed to what it was supposed to relieve, and the only way to repair that is go after the waiver and its regulations. I will have more to say on this as a policy issue.

Other Women Entry

Distracted this morning, I have to drive to the pharmacy in an hour and half or so, not sure if I should brew a partial carafe, no carafe, heat up a mug of instant coffee which I'd rather save for emergencies, snow storms, busy on my own manufacture, I wonder what you discern in my writing, and none of you respond, not knowing what to say. If you are familiar with independent living/community integration models, you think I am unreasonable, obstinate, that I hurt myself more by not letting institutional ruthlessness go, and that I should listen to the near dead now partially spastic and mostly demented transvestite and return to counseling psychology, but will not comment to that effect because you risk intransigence in my response. I have been in clinical therapy environments from the age of fourteen through... how old was I in 2000? Mmm. A simple subtraction blank, is not early dementia just precious? Absolutely darling, the loss of identity. I may not know all the medical terminology of the clinician, as I was a tangential addition to the narcissism of the mental health field, but I know all the tricks, and I know, in the most reasonable terms, that the cure is work, change in habitat, and why Erik cannot get his stroke scarred mind around that is beyond me. I never wanted to live here, ever, and the toll has been costly. Purely by accident, I discovered a desirable relocation option, and must investigate, at once, and cross my fingers; you can hope for me as well. Perhaps the force of mass consciousness will wax good vibes. Kate's Place is another somewhat less desirable option, but I have to get myself up to 15k sustainable, not easy, and credulously, Kate's appears less accessible than Presby. But whether you are healthy and ambulatory, wheelchair user, cancer *survivor,* rehab patient, 80 year old scholar with cataracts whose gentle optimism parries against me, or Paula Broadwell, the new age Monica Lewinsky, so intriguing!, disability centers generate moral erosion, and they have to go. Big task, little woman, but someone has to stand up.

Married women flock to Holly. Married men--Barack, the silent Clinton, the rumored McCain, wince as if they singed their balls on the stove. My commiseration is for the outlier, the Other. Broadwill can get through this. Right now she is paranoid, with justification, and Paula, honey, emails can be broadcast to anyone? I am speaking as the woman embarrassed more than once, and not just with this pixie on canes. You lost your head, and I do not know what your darling deity is going to do, but you will crash, and you will crash hard, whether or not you write a tattle at the end of the president's term. I got caught once, and this was a Canadian beatnik scandal of minor proportions, but Mrs. Beatnik tracked me down. She cried bitterly about her son, and would you like to know what that felt like, her pain glancing off my chest while I sat on the edge of the ghetto burning Everything He Gave Me? A crucifixion, that was the sensation. The centurion nailed those spikes into my wrists, latching my ligaments to the cross. I had three more affairs after that, but you, lady, are a blithering idiot, hopefully not a double agent, and you shit on your kitchen table by confusing amorous pleasure with your career, his, and altered his marriage beyond repair, even if they stay together, the general and his pedestrian wife. Eventually you'll flee the notoriety, but it will cling to and sicken you and will be obligatory in your obituary announcement. However, I understand the conflict involved in iconic conflagration and sexual desire, how it later became subversive even if it can be fun, and fulfilling, but it is not a reward unless your feminine needs can evolve and come to realize worship of the male principle as a safe haven is a backfiring mechanism. I am old, and bitter, and don't think Americans should revel in the efficiency of Petraeus as a catch valve, but I will extend an offer for luncheon on me. Maybe a sympathetic agent can pull some strings and get me out of this city so I can then be assaulted and beaten to death on K street, or Utah, for that matter. My email is easy to find. I have to roll soon, however.

Arlington's Dialectic

I do not know if Mark Pellington earned his directorial skills on Oliver Stone's knee, but his transitional Arlington Road is a dangerous film in ways that have nothing to do with the orchestrated plausibility of collusion. It opens with a riveting bracket of Mason Gamble as a child, hobbling along the road, minimally lucid, with voice overs by the scout troop Robbins and Cusack use for indoctrination that seem to suggest the Fenimore's were going to sacrifice the boy as collateral damage, or that the boy got caught in the explosion of a terrorist act. Pellington may have wanted to depict Brady as an evocative Holocaust victim, or he may have wanted to reclaim traumatic war images, for those of us with long memories. The burn injury to the arm suggests as much. When it comes to Ruby Ridge, my memory is as obligatory as the next, and whitewashed the tragic turn of events, though the congressional inquisition that litigated the event was as much strum and drag as any other congressional inquisition before or since: the impeachment over an ejaculation stain, the sexual harassment allegations of Anita Hill, the deposing of Oliver North, and now, the latest boffing of David Petraeus may have led to compromised intelligence. Well, hello Dolly. I do remember Oklahoma City and Timothy McVeigh vividly, and Bridges' character is damaged by the consequences of federal overreach, then destabilized by conspirators more proficient than the federal agents trained to police such reactionaries, and then he was sacrificed to the truth, and both Pellington and Phoebe Hoban, writing about Mia and Woody, intimate this truth can elude the most rigorous public exposure. Do I believe in the Tim Robbins character? Not for a second; if he was that good, why not just run for office and put tea party conservatives in charge, but I do believe in Pellington's contention that human ineptitude leads to institutional burrowing. I do not believe in Petraeus. He salvaged, rather than saved, a war in Iraq that should never have been fought, and despite the fact that he is probably a competent manager modeled on Eisenhower, we all know Afghanistan will wind up as a travesty of blood and treasure. In hyperbolic mode in the first year on my other account, I suggested this sorry excuse of a country be nuked, but in more brutalist fashion, if you really want to pacify a territory, then you not only occupy it, but divide and govern it, much like fascist Germany became East and West until the collapse of Stalinism. W43, the cowboy cheese puff, wasn't going to waltz that bride to the altar, and Obama underestimates the tenacity of zealots. Extremists put Afghan girls in my high school class in the latter days of the Carter Administration in 79. By 2020 my sister's younger children will be spoon fed the same refugee dosage, because we have lost the stomach for ruthlessness. Paula Broadwell seemingly put all her passion into a belief, and much as I did thirteen years ago, lost her composure when that idealist bubble seemed about to be pierced. I am sitting here laughing because not 72 hours after Messiah Obama seals his legacy, his new term is rocked by a cat fight over who possesses the rights to sexually feast the American Achilles.

Earlier in the summer, I reacted to Greg Zacharias admonishing me on the James list when I was trying to be witty about spam. He wrote, in context, that the spam filter was not a conspiracy against me, most likely because I used the phrase "collusion of peers" in factual innocence, but the subtext in the public transmission between us was this: I was riffing the man, playfully, subversively perhaps, to suggest, "well, I am a Jamesian and belong in this club". And the subtext of his retort, that what I wrote was silly, was, "no you don't; you forget your place." My brother used the same rebuff, that the family was in a conspiracy against me, because I saw a united front, uncle aunt, sister and grandmother, telling me I belong in a home, as something from which I needed legal protection, and much like the stalwart Bridges in the film, I am damaged, but I am not wrong. If I stop fighting, if I lay down my head and do not force Liberty to accept responsibility for bad acts, and some denial, as well, I'll be as burned as this besotted woman, who is evidently about to be torched, but I also want centers like Liberty eliminated. They waste your time and your money. You don't have to trust me on that, simply look at the evidence. Romney may have been a poor candidate, a shoddy conservative, but liberalism is just as eroded. How inflammatory do I have to be for the FBI to give me a file? Thrilling notion, isn't it?

Reversi, Elemental

                      Set you down this;
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him thus. 
Othello 5.2.407-412
Poor Aleppo. You are not fooled by this malevolent primate, are you? At the very least, we are in love with our own theories about the bottleneck distribution of our origins, except when there is no origin, no first cause. I cannot resist telling you that there is the most fleeting glimpse of Kris Kristofferson's ass in the post post Vietnam film Welcome Home, just barely, a shot of his crack, the tush of post public hair in the buttock cleft. A stock movie with more than a hint of nutmeg on Robinson Crusoe. The Vietnamese remain perplexed by our fascination and defeat in their country. No one ever discusses their subsequent border skirmish with China, no, cripples like me will carry the survival guilt of her teachers and blood uncle who served, even her doomed ladle-girthed slobbering ex, plugging my cleft with his fingers, he hated serving in the infantry, leaving me unsure about damage to my rectum, the girls say no, but still, my suspicions remain. Did he damage me? Rectal penetration with this bobble head felt like an enhanced interrogation technique. I carry their guilt. The silence of mother's brother, the anger of Jerry, whose name I have posted with such frequency that maybe ludes are a good idea at this point, since this is kind of all that I have, my legal stalking of the unfortunate Shakespearean for three semesters, thereof. As if to keep writing him assists me through the act of trivializing him, and maybe it is that, the narcissism of pain, a trivial mockery that I am fucking stuck in one place because I had to run from my family, and now I am stuck in the matrix of black protestants who do not like the new generation of low income Koreans who wave at me with freeze dried grins. Do I have any allies left?

No, and twitter undulations do not really count, even if one of you would, on a dare, help me, or give me space to relocate, the accommodations needed for my broken skeleton are daunting, level shower floor plans, firmly bolted grab bars, toilet at the correct power chair height. I need to cease engaging the transvestite with the catheter on his clitoris. We have been having the same conversation for twenty years; he is old and sick and I don't like him and he treats me still in his scarred and stroke damaged brain like a patient chart, and I am none better for heeding his advice, worse for trusting him and his fucking demonstrations; he depresses me and I am just short of losing my compassion for the Yoda death freak; yet he is my history, and we're still boxing. It is my fault. An enemy that is my only social link, he is either too damaged to actualize my animosity, or perhaps genuinely trying to give me a life line; it's pointless, either way.

I am going to go lie down, but to give you a clue, I will be tying this back in to the last movie, Bright Angel. "O kay," you shrug. I always thought I could win, would win, and had a happy writer's life. My margin of error derailed not a few transit systems.

Little Shrill in the Land of Giants

I am hereby determined to marry an Amazon employee at senior management level; if Obama nationalized the company Hugo Chavez would ejaculate oil into the ozone, sucking up great volumes of CO2 emissions.

Did I just condense Utopia into one sentence?

Mannequin

My pressure sore is likely to now become one of my recurring motifs, as it has been bothering me, fully cognizant of the fact that it can take me as suddenly as it took Christopher Reeve, the engaging and affable ham who used his paralysis for all the tokenism it was worth. I worked with his wife Dana more directly than I did he, her death from lung cancer mysterious, and still a startling surprise. I was somewhat strident in my contention with the actor, as you might expect, and then his buttock pressure went poof! Not a bad way to go, but no, I am not that much of a masochist, and have seen what really lethal pressure sores can do. I have to stop minding Tim and his under class peevish tongue and remember that if I need more down time, then I have to take it. My partnership with this 60 year old buzzard is fraying, and finding new help, with everything else on my plate, leaves me amazed my skin viscosity has left me in peace as long as it has. I intend to discuss Tim somewhat further into my archive mesh, but we'll pan back to the left, and toast some starched white bread in the search for nuance. Whatever the talents of Dermot Mulroney, they are not able to overcome his plastique qualities; it is this that damages Bright Angel with a weight of forced consciousness that none of the players quite control, but the film suggests something about the dark side of manifest destiny, that aggression, being on the edge, is a necessary price, costly, and evasive around domesticating forces, be that feminine pair bonding, or the law. The opening cues you in on that, with Sam Shepard, the belabored father, poaching mallards. Bratt's hostility speaks for itself, but Lindo's role, as the paralyzed veteran Harley, touches on the truth of the darkness of crippled tyranny, even as it enforces misapplied prejudices against angry quadriplegics like myself. The depth of our anger is difficult to take, and around a damaged soldier, wariness might be warranted. Lindo pushes with the same theatricality as the rest of the cast, but his character is the plague that undermines the noblesse oblige that pervades liberal sentiments toward the cracker jack bullshit falling out of the mouths of disability lawyers like Thomas Earle, listed sixth from the top. I do not know him as well as my former friends, but if he stands for what he says he does, he did not care about warding me off, about being a fair arbiter, nor that his staff after 01 had a hand in nearly killing me because that staff did not have the requisite training, nor resources, to guard against what happened to me. Notice how well connected he is, what I am up against in balancing the scales of justice. Philadelphia is a liberal city, remember.

His titles, connections, are why I believe in the conspiracy of unintended consequences. Even if I get an audience with the regulators who control Tom's administration, making them listen to me will be a nearly insurmountable task. Tom is legally blind, but he can pass as one of you, an Obama boy. When people look at me, conversely, they do not see me. They see my power chair, and assume I am a retarded invalid, but by everything I hold sacred, I am not letting the cruelty and injustice that is a daily fact of life at these disability centers go unmolested.

@Ann Tran, if you are not a whale, perhaps you are a mini porpoise. I can bow, figuratively. "Namaste." Now that wasn't so bad, was it? Wink.

Insidious Possession

Satan's three faces are a grotesque counterversion of the three Persons of the Trinity.
--Allen Mandelbaum, note to Canto 34, Inferno


All western countries make bad television series better than the America that gave the world the technology for television, gave the world the technology that makes some of us diffident about the digital age, in fact, not that this is not good. I labored and starved and threw my impassioned energies into the small presses for years, which, just outside of the relative security of small presses in academia, was a small club of loons, alcoholics, mental cases, and hippies reading out of notebooks. By the eighties, nearto the death of Bukowski, a man with whom I have published, and disdain, beatniks were already an anachronism, much like my mentor's late life poetry readings. Listening to his aging YouTube voice, I allowed Jerry too huge an imprint on my life, but am yet able to step out of the narrative, and observe that his pathway ossified, even as mine has stalled, and dwindling into sterility. Where his ambition has settled disappoints me, and my own, we have been over that, my weakened frame hanging in the balance. How we allegorize evil in contemporary tropes has been much more dynamic. My accidental viewing of the Roboticist episode of The Collector reinforces this sensibility. Here Lucifer seems to be an ironic moral arbiter. In a show like Supernatural, he is an angry existentialist. What did he represent to Polanski in Rosemary's Baby? Polanski's genius takes us closer to the truth about the banality of moral corrosion, and most other commercial films do a terribly bad job of actualizing horror to make us take a step back and take measure of the autonomic amoralism we're hurling ourselves through. If I am an atheist, I am one who carries a huge Roman, Catholic chip, at least when I am not looking at the murdered mice of my pets.

I was going to deconstruct the episode in this post, before I spent three hours uploading this blog for Amazon kindle, but let me also step back, since this insipid Canadian production triggered the links between evil and acquisition, a steady diet in which Henry James luxuriated and Fowles updated. The Fowles novel is on my wish list, but I am cool to it at present, over taxed, to the point that I foreshadow what we know now about Obama's mandate. He did not need me. I was busy leaking urine on my poor ancient history hard copy reference guide, stressed, apoplectic that I still do not know how to find the print screen key to take screen shots when I need them. How long have I been online now? Would you like to guess?

A Note to Twitter

I discovered this morning that Amazon has a kindle blog publishing app, and this may temporarily circumvent my problems with my failed AdSense investment. I am not going to hyperlink to AdSense because Google directs me to my account. Ignorance is also disabling, as I do not know if Google Blogger cares about my reactionary disobedience, meaning I do not know if I am still an approved client, if Google's break with my first provider had anything to do with the content of those using LiveJournal who were in pain, or if I cannot restore my banners simply because I do not know how to reintegrate my AdSense account with my Google accounts. People would have legitimate reason to see Blogger close me down: I name names, and in today's world, that behavior is not considered free speech, though I am not the first writer who does it, (Joyce, Roth) and I will not be the last, and I have more to come! (Oh no, Harvard and the legal community brace themselves, egads!)

Tackling and restoring my ads is a longer term issue, but tonight I am going to enter the Dark Side of KDP, and we'll see if I come out on the other end, intact. I am open to suggestions as to how much you are willing to pay for me. Kevin Drum is more valuable than I because he can handle economic data. At best, I have only made preliminary incursions, in two years, in that direction, but I will get better at this as long as I remain stable. Am I worth more than a penny?

Chime in if you like, seriously, whether you are disabled or an ambulatory follower. I am as much concerned that I will undersell myself as I am that I over rate the usefulness of my efforts.