The Hurstwood Epidemic

...he listened to it with that air sulky discontent and apathy which the subtle inhabitants of these mountains know so well how to assume. Slaves as they have been since the time of the Spanish Conquest, they still preserve this feature which is also found in the character of the Egyptian fellah.  --Stendhal, The Red and The Black, p.16


The thing that saddens me the most is the interior awareness of irrevocable damage. Until the betrayal of 1999-2000, I honestly never believed anything I felt was a disorder, so much as an affect of alienation due to how brain damage impaired certain fine motor skills, physical mobility; and even after the cane crutch daggers worked their magic, I believed I would recover, because I was a just woman, and evil would not ultimately prevail. I was strong enough to bounce back, despite having been pierced, to borrow from Mark Shields' observation about the first Romney Obama debate, to which I attached little importance at the time, but being right did not get me hired. Only castigating Sullivan as a drama queen had merit, peer cannibalism generating controversy.

Had I left Philadelphia after my mother passed away, I might have been scarred, but reemerged unbowed. Not now. If I do not disengage from this landlord, I am finished, even if I bite my tongue off struggling not to give my notice before I find a rational point of departure. My credit rating will never be rehabilitated. My entitlement, unless I find part time work, will soon be garnished by the Treasury Department, and everyone knows SSA is not a livable stipend, but I am on the lower end of that scale, and the difference between a garnished benefit, when it happens, and no benefit, is the difference between Terri Schiavo with the feeding tube, and Terri without. I am either too raw as a blogger or not cleverly raw enough to unite a following from both sides of the spectrum, from the disabled community that is capable of aspiring to more than obedience to a pied piper, and from an able population who finds me useful enough to pay for. Yes, I know this burden is on me, and if I cannot meet it, then perhaps I should cease concentrating my efforts. Not yet.

You could ask why I left Delaware County, since that seems to be the unwitting focal point from which a woman of fifty is now drowning in her own back bite. Jerry did advise me against this, attempted to wean my vagina monologues off of his intellectual erection in my sex blotted mind, but in being honest with you, I fled my suburban life because I really wasn't present in it. I could not get laid, and everyone else around me had sex: my sister, my best friend, my neighbor girls. I felt like a non-entity, a tumult of all these needs, passions, took to a city campus and got screwed by a coke head. Perhaps I should have realized that the inner city would be no less damaging than the addicts who ejaculated into my mother, beat her son, and attempted, sometimes succeeded, in assaulting her daughters.

OVR set me up in dead letter jobs. I wept, and left, and unfortunately found religion in Linda Richman. I was never clinically depressed working under Linda, because in my bull headed and obstinate purity, she was the key to making the world a better place, and in the sense that Joan d'Arc in France and Joseph Smith in the not fully closed US were the last visionaries to have any real traditional religious impact, that is what she was for me, a cult following. Chris warned me not to idolize her then, and my subconcious warned me later that I was letting my guard down at my peril. This degree of personal loyalty would ultimately not be beneficial to my health. This is where my impulses, the blindness of desire, laid the groundwork for the zealotry of disability activism, and the inherent cruelty and yes, exploitation of case management compliance, only made my ouster, and betrayal from within, a festering wound.

I am almost recovered enough to return to the movies, not that I expect a standing ovation, but I have to divert recovery to my legal issues and other jobbers, so I will be slowing down, but also wish to delineate that from which rancor stems with more clarity. I can spell some of it out in a better sequence.