John Schnatter, chairman and CEO of Papa John's, posted his own apology on Facebook Monday. He revealed the two employees involved in the "reprehensible" message were immediately fired, as they "defy both my personal and the company's values."-- Cavan Sieczkowski
Given what I learned later on, I suppose it was an honor that Lydia, from my Speakeasy days, emailed me. She was a black attorney from San Francisco who had roots in Philadelphia, and the admirable ability to change her environment. She was raped by a white man but had the ability to differentiate that experience from such suppositions as "all white men like it rough with jig poon" and there I am ripping off Ellroy and his more extensive slang vocabulary. Lydia was trying to help me understand that not all blacks will necessarily victimize me, and I do understand that, but many African Americans have victimized me, and in the one case violently at nearly the cost of my life. I can juxtapose that with the young upwardly mobile kid who hugged me on New Years at Drinkers West, or Claudie and my conversation with him about cats, dead cats, the ashes of dead cats, Haiti. I have Graham Greene's fascination with this impoverished colony of the United States, and told Claudie about my work in that direction.
It is not enough. I am traumatized, even by Tim's inability to manage his time without nearly always giving me short shrift. I needed a new broom and dust pan; he indicated to me he would price it and pick it up, and this is the systems failure that attendant care represents. I am out forty five dollars for a vacuumed carpet and basically a three week argument with a fucking simpleton who considers my intelligence and acuity to be an insult to his entitled minority identity. Caucasian women are little better, but there the stigma is different. Monica Carr did not want to do the time and called the police to intimidate me. Susan McNally insisted that I comply with her terms, and I wouldn't. It is never going to end, and I am going to die in misery and frustration, if not physical anguish.
Sure, I have a side that once believed that civic decency was noble, and a passion for interpretation that still draws me to Jerry's output. I'd enjoy analyzing his work for you, how at his strongest Jerry can defy expectations, but his work that is online is not the work he shared in workshop, and taking all that out of the closet and going through that to apply my best sympathies to make you love me takes time, a luxury I no longer have, and will not have the more I have to depend on paraprofessionals, and if the indignities of infirmity get much worse, my options seem fairly stark. My meal today was a hot half and half powdered cappuccino and a carrot. This morning I had a pork roll and do not really feel like preparing a meal. I invited Lydia to lunch when her mother passed away. Perhaps out of duty. She declined. Then again, how can a hard black lawyer and a precocious spastic with their denigrating war wounds actually see past the labels each other carries. Thanks to the Jamesians I am now on Linked In. I avoided it because of my supervisor. All I wanted was a contact number for Senator Toomey. His staff telephoned. Uh huh. And I have to handle any expectation behind that euphemism.
What Toomey's staff learns contextually is different in framework than my mere EEOC grievance: I mean what I say about changing systems management around disability and sustaining matriculation.
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