Rasp Off the Grass

One fact alone is enough: that over fifty thousand Federal soldiers perished of starvation in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in camps and hospitals had wrecked his health. --Mobi text, Literary Times Supplement, 1915

The inconsistency of ideology. Moderates like David Brooks and the dame of Wapo want to save monogamy by expanding the tent. What does it lead to? Idiotic political articles about the manicures of Cory Booker and masculine identity. On the basis of my experience with urban black culture, African American sexuality is more fluid than what is admitted. This includes the innuendo, allegations, and political demise of Jennifer Carroll, let alone my fount of follies with blacks in attendant care, graphic sordid tales that would make Kathleen's chastisement of Miley seem positively preschool. Ms. Parker now says the pendulum always swings back. This is an over simplification of social retrenchment, because now we have a new closet, one not initiated by Cory, granted, but one that stipulates "since my orientation does not matter there will be neither confirmation nor denial regarding my sexual preferences."

The Roman Empire did not fall due to the sexual bestiality of its ruling elite; it fell due to overt military pressure and over- extension, which does not mean the distraction of bread and circuses doesn't have a pertinent analogy to the sheer scope and breadth of American materialism and callow corruption through video saturation. I am as much at fault as anyone; my online footprint is overpersonalized, graphic with anger, and at least on Blogger nibbling at tinsel town bread crumbs.

My study of a pansy like Walt Whitman was cursory at best, and of the little I know of Leaves of Grass from upper track summaries of the Transcendentals, I never found the verse particularly moving. My Mobi purchase was partially obligatory thereby, trying to cram everything in before my occlusion or stroke hits, which it will, invariably-- but, and this is the caveat, the Transcendental movement had a point. Whitman's fame rests not on his homosexuality, but on his grandiosity and idealism, his hope that the revised editions of his work would halt the nation at the brink, before the shot at Fort Sumter. Gay and lesbian couples in and of themselves aren't going to destroy anything, as they have existed as long as human awareness, but radical egalitarianism is well on its way to turning everything into a triviality. In Whitman's era, the belief in transcendence was possible, despite the horrors of collateral damage we can now only imagine. I never liked MTV.

Houyhnhnms

...there will be found the future warriors of the faith who will march out one day, burning and slaying in Christ's name, against a heathen Europe sunk in corruption, to see at last, amid the smoking ruins of Rome, a black Pope will sit on the throne of Peter.--Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers, p.29

Two pitches in one month, wow, aren't things looking just grand? The failure of my hearing loss article came about because I looked at deafness and chronic conditions as distinct, and then became rapidly confused, and beyond that I am still running a ticker tape, revising the pitch. Tried to behave with the editor as these losses are costly, and I am sulky about that, and have been sulky most of the week as it is the holiday and I'd like to get out and have no plans. Sticky and grumpy and for you, no doubt, your shower is routine. For me it is a damn death dance and I cannot do it today. Dana Byrd wrote me a short personal note on my membership renewal request, thanking me for participating in the Ulysses group last year, as if it was somehow commendable that spastic Italian trolls rubbed shoulders at the intersection of Dublin and Jerusalem. When I last saw her she was impeccable. Member appreciation night. Tight blond bun, blemished slightly by acne, she seemed preoccupied with her own worries, perhaps that her employment wasn't up to scale? Or a lover's rift, and despite the fact that I am on the edge, the brink of true madness, maintaining my membership matters. Next week it shall be renewed, because I believe in the preservation of what we were.

I can barely remember the pleasurable heat of a man's penis inside me. More than likely I will never again have the opportunity for willing and consensual pleasure, and I am angry about that too. But let me qualify: I am mad that Obama essentially changed nothing; I am mad that the tea party essentially changed nothing and in addition, they seem to think behaving like morons is a virtue. I am an American, regardless of my lust for Tuscan soil, but I am tired and have been beaten down by the disabled community in this city, no less, by a landlord that now walks on egg shells with me, by my declining strength, and for the Europeans and others who have viewed my posts, forget the myth of American exceptionalism. It works only for a minority, and of that minority, fewer sustain success through the course of a lifetime. Corporations can be compassionate to loyal cripples, of course, and I blow a kiss to old Ma Bell, but more than likely I will not be blogging after 2014, whether on Google's platform or another. My debt default will hound me to my grave, and no one cares about independent living center collusion, nor what it did to me; this is peanuts in the scales of corruption, and I am sure the feds will get right on it when I get to them; my health and ability will never be the same, however, and in a counter narrative I could just surrender and heed Veronica, find a care facility and then wait in pain because I am still strong willed, not ready to die.

Can't you just live your life? 

The risks involved in taking a leap of faith once again at my age are different than yours, and I'd be alone in taking them. I have very little new manuscripts to submit, and I have to start culling these posts for transformation. I hope that odor is a gasoline discharge wafting in, rather than something in the studio. None of the powers laid a finger on China over Tiananmen but the Alawites need to be scolded into the next century's persecuted minority. I cannot imagine the loyalists around the Assads could not calculate the risks of a mass carnage. I did not know Hafez was guilty of the similar atrocities when I used to read Time's coverage of his rule. I thought in black and white terms. Good guys and bad, but I can envision dying by a police taser, if disease doesn't get me first.

Chapter 17, Four Seasons in Damascus

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier, returning to the range, admire?-- James Joyce, Ulysses, pg 522

Balefully intrigued, I may look at Almost Human beyond the pilot, but it presupposes a successful reintegration of damaged individuals, and this strains credulity, regardless of how futuristic the techniques of law enforcement, and the expenses of production being such that we need preseason press conferences, though perhaps these have always existed since the creation of movie cameras. Despite this blog, and despite the fact that I hope to develop a few articles out of it, and know I am good enough to interview Jodie Foster, I am still studying however, and waiting for a respectful idea to percolate that is different but still publishable, despite all this, I loathe the industry most of the time, despite its significant intersection with literature. If we are not utterly lampooning on the side of Milton Berle and The Three Stooges, or depicting a hackneyed dime novel on the set, these days, we are rigorously imitating the collapse of the United States, and I can see Jay Carney playing himself in a film funded by the MPLA once the dust settles, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia realigns itself with China for regional hegemony.

It is actually about regime change, and I am angry enough to be dangerous. What holds me in check is not physical helplessness, though that is an issue; it is the knowledge that if I wanted to engage in an insurrection I'd lose, and also the understanding that I could not do any better than all the other assholes in politics. If NBC cancels Hannibal I will take to the streets. I understand Syrians are suffering, but the US has been engaged in failed military action in the Islamic world for over a decade. John McCain keeps rationalizing like a caveman hinging on our military superiority. That superiority isn't going to hold or even last very long when the social safety net keeps spitting out shattered lives.

Arianna's Umbrella

The problem of Syria is analogous to the bilateral argument between atheists and theists. If the major powers do nothing, we face the prospect of a regional military conflict that will only grow in size and scope, and might threaten Israel. If the major powers act, or take sides in a proxy conflict, then we may wind up with the same playbook, and break the bank in the process. The use of chemical agents to exterminate life is an engagement of excessive torment on living bodies. Physical torture is one thing, but poisons are another, an overwrought condensed agony living things should not have to experience from human manufacture. Our planet is deadly enough on its own, and more to the point, Assad who trained to be an ophthalmologist, thinks he can get through this by utilizing Mithridatic tactics, and this not against an external enemy. Why does the Middle East remain in the mindset of eighth century jurisprudence?

On that question I submit greetings to Ms. Morin, who replaces Amy, who understandably had enough of my lack of beatitudes. Happiness is difficult to come by given one set of experiences over another, aside from my relief mechanisms in anarchy, but I have my own honor code. What I'd convey to JL Morin on far lighter terms than my above paragraph, is that I would be happy to engage in inglorious grunt work for the Huffington Post, if I understood how an aggregate works, which I only partially grasp. Fact checking is fine, and the like, since it is in the field I wish to remain with my lingering viability. We shall see.

I am risk adverse to this extent: If I snowball myself into full time work in another location and fail due to the fact that I am aging, I cannot just chuck it up to a loss and then scurry back to Philadelphia's public housing system. I have to be sure an employer can truly accommodate my limited functionality. I am still smart, to a varying degree, but need quadriplegic supports better than those received in the past, and negotiating this isn't easy. I have covered breaking news stories, and it is high octane, but obviously, going to Damascus would be absurd. 

Reluctantly, I remain against a surgical intervention. What would it solve?

Canadian Trumpets

It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense. Wittgenstein, Tractatus, kindle location 9-17

Lena Canada's triumphant tale is dated, but nothing has changed in the United States since its conversion. I lasted five minutes with the film, and the once magnetic John Amos filling the time honored role as the minority domestic touched by God to tend the angelic birds with broken wings. Absolutely nothing has changed, but this was my life, and I was that girl and my idol was not Elvis Presley, but my plot points were exactly the same, just as they are for the disabled victims of rape whom are goaded into fighting back by Mariska Hargitay. Abuse victims crawl out of the woodwork to connect with this actress; never mind case management, cannibalizing celebrity empathy is more rewarding, orgasmic and aspirational for both sexes, but Hargitay has made the most of a casting limitation, and she projects living within Olivia Benson, making her fictional part more interesting than she is herself.

If you want a taste of my authentic self (and what is that?), I think both theism and atheism is a waste of time, but consider Kuhn a fortunate metaphysician, since he is in a select and dwindling minority of thinkers who worry about veracity and evidently makes a living doing it. I agree with him on one of his main contentions, which I will frame thus: If religious doctrine makes no sense, neither does the narrative language of theoretical physics. Quantum mechanics may have valid proofs, as does the big bang, and impaction which leads to the birth of new voids, but these are mathematical equations that have no end, and just move on to the next mechanism. Human mind is not capable of processing it.

If I can inhabit the space of logic, what is it then that makes me retract from radical progressive equality? The censorship of experience, primarily. Friendships with homosexuals, the kind of gay people who are only filmed for POV, has not been good for me, filled with dark back stabbings, equal to the macabre histrionics of John Webster. Even when it comes to my late editor Alexandra Grilikhes, and her etiology, the silence of willful blindness was a gulf upon which I could not presume a platonic attachment. The further the tent expands, the more bewildering it shall become. We are the only species with an argument, but a species nevertheless, one that should acknowledge its primate evolutionary triggers more often, even while acknowledging that the revolutionary act in Genesis, that of naming, is essentially what created humanity.

Amazon Queen

Casting James Garner was tacky perhaps, but since everyone loved The Rockford Files that was capital to bank on in the past, and Maureen Stapleton bypasses her near mutilating death experience without a hitch, and if Biehn is an empty cypher, the fault may not lie solely with Bianchi. I caught the similarities and antecedents with All About Eve on my own. Garner is a likable personality, but outside of a stock western cowboy with trigger wounds, the man never inhabits a character. Like Bea Arthur, Garner always plays himself, and by the time this feckled infusion finds its way to Chicago Hope, it becomes stultifying. Yet The Fan is more than a hybrid tongue in cheek slasher film; it is also a bridge between old industry glamour and our modern hyper classification, the end result being it has shaky footing in both worlds. Bacall's fragility is stunning, and even more beautiful in the median between youth and withered old age, such as is apparent in both her role and off screen tiff with Kidman in Birth.

Catherine Zeta Jones and Stephen Fry want to help all Caucasians who go whacked by the age of 45. *Her* trigger was Michael's throat cancer, aren't we so lucky to be educated thus? And Fry perhaps created tri-sexuality, fucking men, women, and the Monty Python legacy altogether, why not end his life if he cannot become god like Charlie Chaplin? I went hunting, and indulged my usage looking for an early bit of Bogart sentimentality I was going to utilize, but I cannot find the film title. Fans would know it; he tumbles to his death after being emoted by the girl with the game leg, before he made the big time, smoking himself to the end just like Christopher Hitchens with his palpable extrusions. I cannot remember why The Rockford Files were enlivening. Perhaps it reassembled the last frontier self-reliance, with James taking his lumps because the noir code says this is what the good guy has to do until he gets old enough to get a Supreme Court series cancellation.

I have little sympathy for Fry. Only his affluence leaves him once removed from the clients I dealt with daily, and suffering is tyrannical, selfish. Those of us with victimization and life long indigence may have commiserate excuses, but not Fry, even if he only remains second tier. It is much the same as a Syrian refugee casting an eye on my lifelong threats of eviction by landlord because of my lack of willingness to passively comply. I can still take a shit, watch a flat screen television, do not live in terror of Islamic schisms, so who am I to live in pain at the bottom of the American barrel? I am old enough to see this sarin usage as a repeat of Saddam Hussein slaughtering his own in the war with Iran.

Destruction!

He was my teen idol! Ahhhhhh

Corman's Austerity Complex

Rebecca is a grim anatomy of wifehood. -- Nina Auerbach

What conceits does Ray Milland bring to bear on patriarchal assurance? An underlying unease, doubt, and a splintering breakage as doom closes in or threatens to overtake him. He sacrifices the blond goddess in much the same way Jon Avnet seems to be having a dialectical argument with himself over the torture and asphyxiation of Asian women. Avnet needs to cease directing films; his repugnance is different in kind from the cult affections we reserve for Roger Corman. Why do we harbor them? Corman knew how to use the anxiety of our mastery, unlike Nita Farahany, who believes we can regulate our genomic modifications to ourselves. Now now. Dr. Farahany holds her own with the boys and their age old junk swagger, knows her science, and can unravel a red herring, or two, but if we accept the science of Carbon 14 dating and other empirical measures of time, life on Earth is roughly a billion years into existence, and may have died and started again under many big bangs and impactions, not to imitate Liu Xing, so it may not be all that precious in evolutionary terms, but any species ought to be cautious over Utopian manipulation.

Corman takes Milland on jump cuts that Jeff Goldblum would not dream of in remakes of old classics, (though women risk it all for the tight wad and the naughty Jewish lad gone astray for nearly the same reason) and I think it would be difficult for any madman to gouge out his own eyes, but X is the cracker jack at the dawn of medical model hygiene as a police state, and anticipates our own dismantling through magnetic resonance imagining, at least through indirection.

The dilemma for radical libertarianism is that as a philosophy it is already and quite fatally doomed. Google may be a quite playful giant, and it has allowed me to skirt the edges of some not so trollish sentiments. Amazon is just a huge retailer that gets its innovations and conveniences down, though how good it is for complex thinkers is an open question. NSA perishes with American power, regardless of what future interest builds on its technical prowess, but Mitchell's world of corporate holocaust down to the last resort is already here, and it will take over, regardless of Snowden, or the fact that Bradley Manning is an enemy of state because he wants a vagina. 

Virgil Swann

"It's simply impossible for us to live with vulgar people. It's a defect, no doubt; it's an immense inconvenience, and in the days we live in it's sadly against one's interest."-- Henry James, The Reverberator

Smallville, recalled due to wanton disregard for sanctity, was too much about being occult eye candy; Welling was a nearly too perfect retrofit to the solid, self-defined, simple back to basics American that Christopher once exemplified and still attempted to exemplify once he became helpless. 

He could no longer exemplify it as a true expression of quadriplegia; his paralysis makes my ability to drag my upper torso across the floor positively invigorating, and I did not get along with him at AccessLife, being my usually contentious self; yet I feel guilty for the deaths of Reeve and his wife. I had nothing to do with either his subcutaneous pressure sore or Dana's lung cancer, and my interaction with the pair was limited, but there is guilt, right here, in this absence, in an empty space that can only be defined as a void.

Superman necessitates the values of the GI Joe American male; no way to get around that without negating what the graphic contours of his abilities represent. In looking back at the series, and adding the conjunction of Leah Remini's troubles, perhaps Scientology had too much influence on the series. It was in spite of myself television. Nothing on, and a utilized package, so Reeve playing off Welling was less effective than it might have been if I had a) understood Swann as the technocratic prophet; cared about L Ron Hubbard's repressed and rigid disciplines (he looks like a man whose lymph nodes overflowed with hedonism), and understood what the guild was doing with superhero encoding. It was bewildering most of the time, involving fantastical degrees of possession, corruption, and Nietzschean will to power.

Not all men, certainly, but most men are failed overgrown children, which is why I am so perplexed about Frank's hurt and don't know what he wants from me. I became intimate with him as a form of proof that I did not want to find a lesbian stick bitch along former supervisor Linda's lines, and also because I was sexually lonely. He was a horrific and revolting mistake, and leads one into certain temptations about the intelligence of the Hispanic male. If he and I had been young, then I could understand, but this was not a pairing out of love. He is a pig with a past of multiple partners and STD risk.

I need new friends; a new fuck buddy might be too much for which to hold out. If Pope Francis is orthodox this is right and a good thing for the Church. It is time. New Crusade. New Zeal. The Inquisition still exists as a matter of scant resource. The office should be reopened, and since I've lived in hell during my half century as a wheelchair user, there is no greater degree of suffering left which I have not previously experienced.

Fervor

"I am only going to say this once; if you do not stop harassing me I am going to contact the police."

As much as I hart poor Joanie across the way, I had to put a stop to the behavior; she was driving her power chair into the vestibule of my building and dialing my intercom, because she needs toilet paper. If I had sales, even if I had only succeeded in completing my hearing loss piece (the editor of which declined my Linked In invite, so there you go; it smarts just a little despite the fact that it was my failure under pressure), I'd give the barnacle tart what she needs, but I myself am in a near constant state of being overwhelmed, and decided it was necessary to shut her down. Do I enjoy behaving toward her as so many have toward me? No. I understand she is lonely. I understand she is looking for support. Frank hates her, and to the degree I hate him as an ex-fiance, I am tickled. But my understanding of Joanie nevertheless necessitates limits on my mercy. I am not getting paid to be the pied piper anymore. Was she harassing me as a matter of criminal liability? Maybe. What differentiates her behavior from my own as it relates to using email to converse, or chasing a personal attendant, or Daniel Schneider ceasing to respond to me once I asked to be removed from his Cosmoetica list, or what differentiates it as a dangerous behavior, is a matter of degree.

Would it alarm Jorge Mario Bergoglio to know that I would kill for Le Santa Sede? Catholic atheists are scary! But it is a basic truth: I would defend the Vatican and the Papacy regardless of the sacrifice; every Pope should be a radical Christian; he is also the last vestige of the Roman Empire, and the college of cardinals would do well to remember that.

I weep for Francis. Sheer zeal.

Forever Young

After the shock of the initial impact, in the ensuing days to follow, an investigative reporter who is not me will add details and revelations that add points to the tragedy of Lee Thompson Young's apparent suicide. Does the recognition stem from The Guardian? Yet another litigation drama that came and went? Smallville?

I look at what I have endured and cannot fathom why a personable young man who managed to work as an actor, in an age increasingly not beholden to the guilt of MLK's polemical identity gamesmanship, would kill himself at his age. Look at what I've risked to tell you, learn to listen. Such inexplicable selfishness helps no one. My condolences to his family.

Cuckoo's Forfeiture

My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and that the most truthful way of regarding illness---and the healthiest way of being ill---is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. -- Susan Sontag

Meryl Streep presents herself as a translucent mirage in Dark Matter (2007), a progressive caught between multicultural faith and the reality of academic politics. Forget extrapolations. Chen’s direction and Shebar’s script are irresponsible in their rendition of events that transformed Gang Lu into a spree killer, with his goal perhaps being the elimination of an entire department. Liu Xing is too sympathetic as an alter, and the triggers that lead him to kill Aidan Quinn’s Reiser foreshadowed on the cheap, with tai ching intersplices dispersed between scenes; its binary closures of the women racing, both the attache and the mother, in a fatuous attempt to contain the damage. The Virginia Tech massacre was a real and traumatic event, one that perhaps forever pierced the notion of intellectual ambition as a form of insulation against the vulgarity of urban violence.

In many respects, I am a radical advocate of free speech, doomed and dwarfed thereby due to the worrisome rise of the digital global conglomerate, and rarely engage in the moral chastisement of cheap theatrical manipulations, but Bridget Fonda’s Single White Female falls into the same category as Chen‘s lame interpolation. The unedited scene of deceptively forced fellatio between Jennifer Jason Leigh and Steven Weber was a masturbation stimulant that I did not need to incorporate in the psyche of my delayed sexual maturity, but the scene made an indelible impact, this out of nothing but a B grade slasher formula dressed up by psychological excuses for purposes of justification, just another patriarchal brick thrown at the shrieking and hysterical female, not a few leagues past the range of veracity.

I’ve needed a bit of rest, trying to finish some much needed chores, remind myself that I actually was a writer before portals and search engines. At my age it's increasingly difficult, and in the rare instance that I view television to escape, I did not need that unexpected tantrum of blood and guts with a shiny Colt revolver and a bling starburst. 

Epicanthic Majority

"I do this because I do not want to be silent anymore." Bia Ling

Some party officials involved in the toppling of Bo Xiliai must have been aware of Jon Avnet's ponderous, top heavy, flat on its face film, Red Corner. Taking in the reversals as mere stand in mechanisms, the playbook of corruption and paralysis is virtually the same in the mediocre legal thriller and in real world events in Chongqing.

Part of Avnet's problem as a director is that he creates an atmosphere of asphyxiation, then traps his actors in it, which neither realism nor dramatic tension can repair, aside from his fixation with the mutilation of the Asian female figure.

As to my irresponsibility with my terms of reference, this is laziness, and on better days my torpedoes will have better aim. One of the first activities I engaged in as a consultant for Liberty, when they were wealthier and rented space on city line, was feed an old woman in a chest brace spaghetti at a hastily organized luncheon which I believe was my responsibility. Whether it points to the utter uselessness of a higher education, I'll let you access for yourself. How it is indicative of human worth?

My vascular system is probably going to wig out in the near future, and I am going to try to get as much online detail up as I can before that, as disability center governance has always been a strategic game of spank the monkey.

It is due to the amazing tenacity of Allison Joseph, a woman who should be nominated as literary resource agent in chief, that one discovers more promising markets like Pentimento. I have not had time to study its content, but it has a better aesthetic focus than Breath & Shadow. I do not know if Chris Kuell is still with Ability Maine (he is), but it stands to reason that a blind editor should feel no shame in requesting sighted assistance for proofreading galleys. Pentimento may signify some incremental progress on the issue of quality standards.  

Period Anime

Whether I should add Joseph Merrick's life story or Finding Nemo to my list is debatable. Animation has its own subculture, and seems divided between Walt Disney's pedophiliac psyche and Japanese penile envy. We recognize in scientific terms that spiny damaged fish get eaten, not accommodated. But as to the flick that cemented Anthony Hopkins as the next Olivier, it is not easy to keep The Elephant Man in its period, not from a revisionist perspective. Animus toward clinical specification is a valid activist point of contention, which is probably why death as escape did not involve protests when it came to the earlier Victorian rendition of empowerment, compared to Clint's masterwork, but each film is about the victory and freedom of dying well. Does it make Merrick's life and exploitation a great movie, excusing artistic license? The narrative is a progressive orgasm, perfectly plotted out so the audience learns about dignity, acceptance, and the medical scientist as Frankenstein is necessary as a villainous redeemer. Ambivalence seems warranted, because we do not see Merrick in the less than gauzy terms of actually living his life as an astute capitalist.

The other film in the same time frame which I could not accurately recall was the Dreyfuss vehicle Whose Life Is It Anyway? An appropriation which leaves me ambivalent because it exploits suffering for profit. If it was Richard Corliss, the esteemed movie critic rightly chastised the casting directors for putting the vivacious Dreyfuss in Harrison's shoes. One wonders what drives extraordinary empaths like Dreyfuss to chemical dependency, and I can imagine the demands of such habitation has something to do with it.

Top Ten

All this phrase making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now.--Virginia Woolf

When I was all too briefly on Daniel's gmail group, I asked his clique what was the best movie on disability. I am not sure I saved their answers; I have my regrets about Schneider, though one look at his page says our personalities are too similar, which does not excuse the fact that I did not have to react, to him, or anyone. I could have just hit delete and hit delete and pulled on him or the clique when I thought it useful. Not sure what his complaint about Google Search means. With my colorful level of denigration I am lucky Blogger doesn't reinvent the wheel and blow me a kiss. I see nothing wrong with gay panic as a self defense, for example, since women have hit on me, four, five times. Aggression is justified when a firm no doesn't halt the behavior, and I am not a still virile Kevin Spacey gently disengaging Chris Cooper in American Beauty. The more I think about the edits made to this film due to screen testing, the less I like it, but American dysfunction and broken bodies are not quite the same.

The disability movement as it is recognized today started with the American Civil War, and in symbolic and actual terms, this fucking country always reenacts the conflict, so of course one of the most radicalized studio dares is the 1946 classic, which ends with its celebrated inclusion due to love. The double amputee lets his little woman on the inside. Aw. Love. One of Josie Byzek's favorite words of emphasis. The activists she profiles agitate against the able bodied world out of love. The thought occurs. If I log onto twitter and have a row with Hillary Clinton's account, then I'd possibly be in real trouble, and laugh silently due to my curious thought processes. An FBI dossier would get the right individuals to pay attention, and I'd launch the wheels of justice. This is probably why the poor utilize violence to resolve disputes.

Next I'd pick A Patch of Blue, so forbidden and sexually charged. It was a great influence on my desire to become (no, won't type it but I do think it) a black man's lover, which almost happened twice. The third time my father threatened my life, but that third time was a deliberate provocation on my part. I yelled at da last week "I am a throw back to Mussolini and now I am worse than you!" I guess I was trying to tell him he should have killed me. The man is now eighty and cares about absolutely nothing. Not me, his grandchildren, nothing. I am not including The Miracle Worker. All of these films carry Scott's "too schematic" charge, but this play turned movie about a favorite patron saint over does it. Beyond this there isn't much which isn't worth forgetting until we reach the present day. For me this starts in the nineties.

Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby makes the list as a backhanded compliment; the film is not about disability, which the rabid protesters either would not, or could not understand, and I defend its message without necessarily defending the actor's politics. The same entrapments closing over Swank's fighter are the ones I want out of as well.

Beyond this there are allegories, other titles, vulnerable wheelchair users, demonic wheelchair users, the *uplifting* biopic empowerment narratives that bore me in the same way a ritualized prey kill becomes a banal inconvenience, but nothing which reaches the magnitude of Orson Welles, and his ground breaking work, with the exception of Diving Bell, which Amazon finally bought for instant video. I may not view it till next month, depends.

Stories like this give me wicked, diabolical ideas, but with my luck I'd kill the worm after a fest of trots.

An Elgar for Hillary

Or a nihilist soothed by taut strings

"You're the one who left me." Frank Versante, my nihilist ex fiance

Who am I to judge how Hillary played the hand her husband dealt her? Just a disenfranchised voter who doesn't have much to be thankful for in terms of political ejaculations. I write many things that breach manners, how homosexual friends and associates and sixty year old transgendered freaks twisted my mind and loyalties and sensibilities and how a supervisor's gloating became ugly and a mass mocking, and all this is what is wrong with me in my broken body according to everyone else. I do not let it go, even though, whether I let it go or not, the fount of ablest hatred is always at hand, similar to Sister Veronica's interrogation.

I understand hate crimes, and while Antisemitism used to perplex me, after what I have been through and whom with, it doesn't anymore. So again, whether Bill and Hillary find each other a necessary liability is something none of us can ascertain against expediency. Huma Abedin may have made the same calculation for a lesser problem, since no one is claiming Anthony Weiner is a serial affair monger. Political analysts discussed this during the opening days of the Bush Administration, that one thing both of our major political brand families have in common is a narcissistic preoccupation  with themselves, and I do not understand why any American wants more of the same when so many of us have been left behind.

I would love to let the trauma Linda Dezenski dumped on my plate and a Jewish lesbian named Fern Markowitz then facilitated before the still functioning transvestite made the old crone eat shit go, but the games we Americans play with our most disadvantaged elements in our social safety net makes us no better then Sisi and the justication he uses to crush Brotherhood sympathizers. I want to go back to work, with a misshapen set of teeth because I cannot afford dental fees, with chronic bowel impactions and lung fluids. I can't drive and can dream on if I think New Mobility would give me more work when I am still angry at their Jesus lesbian for breaking the girl buddy honor code--and as I've told you, they put me on ice before I raised my voice about Josie Byzek and her labial Gnosticism. Jesus loves her, her body crippled by damaged nerve sheaths.

If the Hillary movie is made, surely a vetting intern can find video of the couple patronizing a group of special education angels in wheelchairs.

Hantavirus

For hypothetical PETA Partisans, The Black Marble engages the emotional interest. It takes a conceit I was trained to attend, the destruction of animal human bonding, cf, a more crew cut Martin Sheen killing Foster child star's hamster, Mel Gibson's dog killed by an archer in Road Warrior, the cat mutilation in Never Talk to Strangers, and turns it into the central conflict. Wambaugh had the nerve to focus a real slice of life vice on cruelty to animals, and I had a difficult time not uttering death threats at Harry Dean Stanton in a thirty year old film where James Woods looks fresh out of the performing arts-- but this film represents mature original comedies of which place viewers like myself on starvation diets, because they simply aren't made any more. Independent films, with few exceptions, spin their story arcs under the same burden of fragmented expectation. Harold Becker had the courage to allow his actors to be flawed human beings. Even Stanton's Skinner is traumatized by taking out his hatred on hyper terriers.

Most pet owners don't look too closely at the guilt of having faux children. I do; it is at once the ultimate form of narcissism we hold up for ironic exaggeration, and painfully appreciated at the same time. Eschew human children and become an immersible zealot. Favorite swine, favorite whale (orca is scary!), favorite carnivore.

If we really wanted to do a favor to other species, we'd engage in wiser palliative treatments, breed less, and restore habitat.

I have mentioned my senile uncle repeatedly. In the last two years he has has heart surgeries, hernia corrections, bladder surgery, and this week it is a new adventure under the knife; the sole reason I do not spar with my father's sister over this insane Nascar race she runs with bad health and medical model brutality is because I never had a vested interest in Joe and don't have the right. Try having your entire life circumscribed by orthopedic medicine as a curiosity, and maybe my argument for human dignity might not seem so misanthropic. 

Pubic Lunch

October 6 President Sadat is assassinated by 4 members of Jama'at Al Jihad, a parcel of Muslim Brotherhood history

Rebecca De Mornay displays a curious sexual aggression with Antonio Banderas in Never Talk to Strangers. The paint by numbers schematic of this narrative is a few notches above in sobering responsibility compared to its fraternal twin De Palma slasher, yet DeMornay's performance reaches through the formula, and is worth mentioning in the context of repressed and traumatic memory. She gets the brittle vulnerability pushed to its trigger point right within the reticence of the lead character's control, and had that unifying copulation scene been shot for a mature audience, at least one quadriplegic might not have been able to withstand not acting on the frustration.

It goes to the disabled journalist's point, however: All physical intimacy, however healthy and consensual and beautiful when it is about the conception of children, has triggers. The further from conceiving you go, the more potent the trigger, and, when we move along the spectrum of homosexual eroticism, the closer you get to this with a partner (and I have observed more than you) the more legitimate disgust with the frailty of human flesh one is entitled to feel. Again, much like Orson Scott Card, science fiction novelist turned hot potato, I know progressives are having a field day, and radical equality for evolutionary mechanisms is here to stay, but I believe that as we lose the constraint of definition, we lose a unique sensibility that kept us human in the first place, and if a liberal wants to ask me if my former ally doesn't deserve its happiness on the same terms as my paternal cousins (who I believe have relatively stable marriages), my answer is no. Innuendo has been circumnavigating the web for years that in ratio to Bill's sexual appetites, Hillary had an equal indulgence for *pussy*; I have never seen it substantiated, but I am also not eager for a repeat of our sniggering contempt for America's eminent centrist couple. I liked Bill Clinton. I thought he had potential to be a great president and I'm angry with him for failing, but I remember far too much, and Hillary's ruthlessness with her excuses does not mean she deserves to be the first lady who actually takes charge at the helm. She failed to deliver on health care, gave the GOP enough of an ethical dilemma that they never got over it, didn't do much at State other than to suggest kindness would work better with Assad. I would not be worse off under Hillary than I am today, but if I am still functional, I have my doubts I'd wind up any better.

Monsters We Dance With

"All some animals have ever known is a life of constant abuse."-- Roberta Flack, aging out of transcendent range

Ever reliable Billy Bob. To the extent that dwarfism is representative of industry conventions, Tony Cox adds an additional layer within Bad Santa, particularly juxtaposed against John Ritter's deliberately colorless attitude being caught off guard, made to look bad when he is simply invested in upholding a modicum of decency. (Yours truly used the same phrase "you people," as a deliberately scathing scold with minority building manager, no clueless naivety here to be trampled by a thieving drunk.) The dialogue is slightly too soft as an expose of the underside of American optimism, but Cox uses the jester to conceal a latent ruthlessness which ableism necessarily engenders. Any atmosphere of the macabre is dispensed with, replaced with street wise betrayal which has its own justification, no conscious remorse, in this case foiled by nominative dork to jackass mode, filling the need for a role model wherever it might turn up.

American Paladin, a closer look

"He is a man who cannot be rejected."-- Charlie Rose

Not having a phone is a rather radical act of self-assurance for Dinklage's  Finbar, an ascendant insularity that really isn't punctuated by the insistent overtures of the Cuban food vendor, and it is in this sense that I'd argue that McCarthy reverses the polarity of the pro-forma progressive paradigm of The Station Agent into something more unwittingly tragic, not that McCarthy denies Dinklage a human range. Much like Garcia's deployment of the dwarf actor in Things, both these directors go against the theatrical absurdity of type, and Finbar is a person, whom, according to interpretation, is yanked out of his shell by the disruptions of the fallible beings around him, but what do we know at the end of the day, about the train aficionado, aside from the fixation repressed persons without other outlets develop for objects of technological condensation?

We know he had an implied intimacy with the deceased Henry, through affinity and shared interest. We know he's had sex, this through Joe's inquiry, and McCarthy's adept poke in the eye of tiresome ambulatory curiosity, we see a regressive boyhood within the adult whose interior rage dares a suicide but pulls back. We see him chastened into empathy for Clarkson as the inconsolable mother who uses her grief for the loss of her son to feed off Finbar's stoicism; no needy cripple here, only selfish ambulatory grifters, and though McCarthy happily resolves his film into the usual bromides of acceptance within loss while life still moves forward, even chilling with beers on the porch, that is about it. The jester lets down his shield, not performing on demand for the court, as was superimposed on viewers for most of the 20th century. Dwarfs were macabre signatures, from the wizard of oz through the Michael Dunn of Porter's Ship of Fools. Of course, the dwarf in Porter's character study fills the role of the chorus, and is allowed to be a mature persona too wise in the folly of life, but he is still a device, which is exactly what Dinklage remains in McCarthy's world of what's possible: the form of the shrunken human body is a mask, a mask to disguise, cover hideousness that may hide an ideally brutalized heart, in one of Peter Laurie's less typecast roles, straight through Mickey Rourke picking up the time honored conceit in Johnny Handsome.

Dinklage, much like Garcia's Albert, is actually more relevatory in Death at a Funeral as the hyped up prostitute for the secretly gay family man, conveying more in the stereotypical fetish than he does attempting to fully flesh out McCarthy's libertarian, somewhat self-hating freak.

Shoestring budget or not, Clarkson does a disservice to the taxing culture of mental illness, waltzing down the hospital corridor in scrubs, a my bad smile on her face after being the pill popping drama queen. Attempted suicides rolling back the emotional pain which reverberates on all those around them doesn't lend itself to that level of resolution.

47 Ceilings

"You guys lucked out. I normally hate everything, but like the Rosenbach."

I have to charge for a few hours before I can begin to labor frantically. Tuesday offered a transitional thunderstorm and a power outage disrupted my plans to circumvent, or mitigate, the exterminator’s morning censure. HUD’s mandatory extermination polices have inadvertently (or perhaps by design), been the source of much duress in my lifelong conflict with the public housing methodology of Presby, and I knew uncoupling my work relationship with Tim would lead me down this path, but things have to come to an end, and by degrees, a compliant pack mule grew tired of harnessing a manufactured Jezebel; it lasted seven years. I cannot ride it farther, and only repressed my frustration with his flower child mind for as long as I did because it was worse on the grid, and sometimes he and I managed well enough.

The ability to get along with others has been significantly eroded, but what I confessed to the archive librarian Tuesday morning in the rain was more true than she could probably contextualize in processing my anti-social behavior. Her little preserve of a Jewish bookseller as an historic artifact still holds its charms, whereas what my years under Rick’s well meaning authority revealed to me about human suffering, its clinical, stigmatizing, and so often utterly incompetent aspects, destroyed my aspirations, even my quest for transcendence, when coming to terms with my place in humanity, and humanity’s place for itself.

I do not care to relive my Matrix years all that often. My essay about my time at the Institute took me three years of walking on hot coals, and it wound up in my erstwhile lesbian traitor’s chapbook outlet, my own draft still on my hard drive, but the advocate who interviewed me with Dan decided he wanted to kill himself approximately 48 hours after I was hired in their weird Alden Park offices, and he insisted on resigning, which left me in a situation where I never would have accepted the position. I engaged in subterfuge, begged my former CSPPPD supervisor to take me back. She refused because of Cassie, and in trying to do the right thing, keeping myself employed with them, my own health was subsequently destroyed, upon which Liberty made its own substantial contributions after I forced my resignation.

In the abstract, Rick’s proposal made sense: hire people on the entitlement rolls to counsel other beneficiaries off of those same rolls back toward matriculation, or supported employment. In practice, as Samuelson of Wapo has noted, the disincentives for those with mental illness were too great. Lawyers waged great battles to say that most disenfranchised Americans became disabled, and real cripples like myself end up all the more victimized, because I do not want to ride with the herd, case managed into oblivion, but here we are, with a broken welfare state that cannot, in point of fact, sustain Romney’s 47 percent.

Swords of the convenient

Silas Lapham is a fine type of the successful American. He has a square, bold chin, only partially concealed by the short reddish-grey beard, growing to the edges of his firmly closing lips. His nose is short and straight; his forehead good, but broad rather than high; his eyes blue, and with a light in them that is kindly or sharp according to his mood.-- William Dean Howells

I happen to be facing an extenuating moral crisis brought on by a nun who already has two thirds of my corpse in a coffin. Do I have a social worker? Do I have medical visits? Am I still able to wash? Have I made a list of long term care facilities? It is my extenuating moral crisis, but it points to an unpleasant truth that mainstream media outlets only grapple with as a family quarrel. Americans, and westerners more broadly, are as constricted as the average Chinese or Russian citizen. We just aren't imprisoned for complaining about it. Beneath the surface of our heralded free market, we are as corroded as the Cold War Soviets, just as the Russians and Chinese today are corrupt marketeers beneath their state models.

I cannot sit here and passively give way to end of life micro-management that could last over 20 years; I cannot.

Deforestation

"But that's your job Joanne!"-- Richard C Baron, premiere Jewish boss

As you can see, Rick has not relocated very far from the offices in Germantown which bracketed my very long ascent to a nervous breakdown. He is not a bad executive, when all is said and done, but I diverged then, and still do, from the conceptual models he and Irv Rutman utilized to get the grant funding that gave me my middle class salary for two plus years. As a polite technicality we all agree I lasted with the project three years, and there is no love lost between any of us on lack of efficiency in the supervision of the advocates, one of whom simply wasn't qualified to assist those who wanted to utilize the work incentives. 

Extrapolate my sparring matches with this very small band of liberalism's Stalinist largesse onto the fucking joke Philadelphia harbors as an an excuse for an independent living center, and there you have it. Had I listened to my old professor Jerry, stayed in Delaware County, my mother's death might have precipitated my early return to institutionalization. Instead, black managers for a protestant company violated my civil rights. I ate it for years until I put it on paper that I would file a lawsuit, then all goes silent and they hire a group therapist so that the homosexuals, Koreans, Africans, assorted wheelchair users, make nice-- and they wait, for my body to break, for me to get entangled in red tape, for my family to come together in an unfortunate agreement.

A personality whom I cannot recall, but his film was Running With Scissors and he might have been Brian Cox. I cannot be sure, he did a Cozi talk stoop segment and said there is always another perspective to bring to bear.

Right. What perspective is that? My body took a great deal of punishment for Rick's methodology of inclusion. The center from which he got me only and ever was honest with me once about not hiring me back. Instead of hearing that, I allowed their forked tongue appeasement psychopathy to make me ill with a cynicism and bitterness not so easily reversed as my desire for freedom grows ever more restrictive. I can give Presby my notice. Go to SSA and stop my benefits. All that would do is return me to childhood incarceration. There was an imbroglio years back about Inglis sitting on Liberty's board of directors. How and why it was resolved does not matter, because the system is a revolving door, with its self determination little more than a polite fiction. The civil servants who allocate your tax dollars? They are the ones with actual power. 

The Flying Nun

"My mother took religion much too seriously."-- David Rieff, son of a famous lesbian

Do television producers mock Catholicism to make it palatable to a Protestant audience? If anything, "The Flying Nun," as an idiotic conception of Jewish assimilation within the industry, is a testament to Sally Field's endurance in her evolution from perky white chick to serious actress. Elements of this doofus aspect are still to be found in more contemporary productions. Whoopi Goldberg's "Sister Act," or the BBC with "Call The Midwife" (fuck the British left, hurrah!)

Only kidding. British progressives are insufferable.

I told you I sent a letter to the publisher of the novelist Jayne Anne Phillips. The franchise author Anne Rice was similarly rewarded, but for different reasons. Phillips offered me a vision of vicarious man hunting between two female writers with similar views, but Anne Rice pissed me off, and I remember what her assistant had to peruse, in terms of my content, with more alacrity. I received a bookmark. I tell you this not because it matters. I shall soon be in oblivion, most likely as a dead alive aggressive fury. I bring it up because I am rarely provoked to communicate by letter in the mindset of a fan with cannibalistic adhesion, and yet here are two exceptions. A literary story teller and a vampirist who lost a child to leukemia and is a bit flaky after all that hysteria in print, a hysteria which doesn't translate to film adaptation. My internal barometer may be closer to Rice's than I care to admit, though I have had enough, tapped out on that histrionic voice. Lestat drinking the blood of Christ. Had no idea where she wanted to go with that fantastical exploitation.

It is not the apostasy so much as a sense of cheap antagonism, but my biographical narrative with faith and lack of belief is similar to her own, especially since I am wrestling with a return to my parish, to shield the fury of my intolerance beneath weak American Catholicism. Mmm. The misery of my old age that you see before you actually started with The Matrix Research Institute. That job, as an advocate, sapped the life out of me. I never truly recovered. Resigning from one set of Jewish executives to scurry back to those who launched me in the first place--this is the end result-- occlusion driven fanaticism.

Dangerous Idylls

It symbolizes a crucial lesson about craft: utility is not contingent on perfection of form.--David Sherwin

Anton Corbijn offers an inspired interpretation of landscape and enclosure, from the opening shot of rushes and thicket in a Swedish winter, to his claustrophobic overlay of Italian villages and underground freeway tunnels. AO Scott is right about Corbijn's practiced composition. AO Scott is absolutely correct that it is not enough and there are things not to like about The American, a film I wanted to view again before my rental time clocked out and did not, but the preeminent critic under the employ of the Sulzbergers is also wrong, because there are pleasures, insights gained over time, under the breezes of transfixing arcs. I was never big on George Clooney. Liked him well enough; he and the original ER cast made those early seasons, and there too, he portrayed sexual indolence with a shiek and brassy extra, asking her why they did not marry? It is there in Solaris as well, a fatal envelopment, a man done in by his own pampered intimacy, which points to why he cannot quite be the equal of Cary Grant. 

Grant was an onscreen dandy and womanizer who had the ability to contain himself. Clooney cannot; he dies for the nurturing maternal climax that smothers him. Occasionally he plays off its negation, as in Michael Clayton. I think this is why his sociopath Jack/Edward is nervous, unpleasantly taunt in certain key shots; he is attempting to demythologize the autonomic predator. With a better story line it might have worked.

It took me nearly three hours to make my coffee and omelet Saturday evening, in between copper urinal shots. We die young for fried eggs. One pitch, two submissions, in addition to all this time spent on Blogger where I earn not a fucking cent! Dedication, but I can do no more, and missed the spout because her royal highness now runs the studio. 

We shall save all felines! Had to get the incitement in-- and yes, I know your interest would peek markedly if I got past Clooney's publicist, but pricking the guilt of his privilege over his arrest record for the sake of Sudanese advocacy is a high bar.

Cozy Cocoa

"I did not force your mother to have an abortion because I was trying to be a good Catholic."-- Nicholas Marinelli, the yuletide season following the death of his second wife.

Cooksey and Matheson seem to suggest that the Judeo-Christian conception of Satan has Manichean aspects, particularly in The Cowboy. The original Maya kills herself and the old man replaces her with the blond. I know cast changes have to be handled and television is pissant when it is free, but the notion that the devil may undo cf 2281 is an irresponsible offense to the French Canadians who want autonomy for Quebec.

I had assumed, from carefully bored followings of NBC's Cozi TV, that "The Campaign Manager" was the last, and one of the darkest of Cooksey's offerings, but the episode guide says it is "The Exorcist". I missed the Tattoo Artist. Not a regular viewer of The Supernatural, (the writers do not know what to do with the endless bro-male Caucasian angst), the two shows are nevertheless the same in terms of bromides. The American screen writers dance around personifying God. Their Lucifer was a petulant romantic, now MIA, but God is just hip dude, discussed but unknown even by the now half crazed archangels. Cooksey dispenses with all that, but the underlying cynicism in the dispensation squirms a displeasure. Then again, the series was canceled. The shows that exist emphasize the absence of divine will simply through the sheer dominance of demonic trickery. Does this indicate European maturity about divine manifestation? Over the course of the forty plus episodes in syndication, Cooksey slowly collapses the triumphant metaphors into human monstrosity hard enough for any of us to wrap our minds around, but only up to a point. The show touches domestic abuse lightly.

I may have taken risks battling my demons for all of you to read, but Derek Medina defies the capacity of ignorance. He loves his FB contacts, then murders the reality of his failing marriage. Of course, I do not know who is reading my posts, though I have been told my anger at my landlord has had a ripple effect--but I assume a certain degree of anonymity. Liberty ignores me, for instance, or if not, maybe they remain a little worried about future legal action. So does my family, and if Mary has seen this I have a good idea of what chastisements might be in order, and still take the risk. I understand the temptations that led men like Dorner and Medina to their destruction, and I understand them because I have faced a life of brutality and near violent abuse-- but I do not love you, and in fact do not know if I still care about anyone. Saving felines from poachers still matters, and I get an overwhelming emotional response when hunters and scientists kill my kitties. Other than that? Perhaps an unfortunate testament.

Marinara Sauce

"What if they come after the kid?"--Annabella Sciorra

One gets Abel Ferrara, but the way in which The Funeral spirals outward unnecessarily causes confusion, and if I can sit still for the next viewing I will take a second look. Walken was not entirely convincing as anything but Christopher Walken keeping time with rigid key notes, stuck between Francis Ford Coppola's operatic take on the consolidation of power, and Scorsese's more graphic glamour menace. You don't stand in the dirt arguing with your mark as a salve to the ethics of your marriage and then conclude with the recognition that compassion is not part of the Costra Nostra business model go boom. Ferrara does offer some convincing grimy moments with the Giovanni flashbacks, and this degree of courage might have served him better. A truer examination of how greaseball peasants made American bling culture. The inner city gangsta model is a corroded copy of an already disintegrated model.

Sciorra simply isn't in the film, not quite divested of Criminal Intent barometers of conscience, in the thirties the wife of a syndicate player wouldn't have had that level of pristine television diction, and why Gallo has to redo a tap to Reservoir Dogs is too self serving.

Interior Palsies

"There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. --Virginia Woolf

It is not so much the embarrassment. I have dealt with that, taken myself apart and reassembled the pieces, frightening off midwestern humorists and dozens of other collagen enthusiasts, no. This is not the wedge; loathing is. Disability center dynamics literally make me sick to my stomach. The endless presentations, sex seminars, legal aid professors lecturing about benefits and assuring downtrodden alumni that services offered by law students are limited in scope, without reference to the mystery of how state budgets get codified in Harrisburg, people like Linda constantly neutering the semantics of the English language: "Attendants are not care givers but assistants." That is Linda's voice. "We categorize it as excess revenue." She complained to me when we argued over our computers that no one wanted to see her for herself. I tried to see her, and discovered a raptor beneath a parakeet's warbling delicacy, which means befriending this former boss was a mistake. The trial for a sterile and segregated case management compliance model that made me promise after promise after promise and never followed through, hurt me physically as well as triggering a crisis is slated to rule for the plaintiff, and yet I am a quadriplegic, who though mainly self-sufficient when stable, can nose dive just as quickly. 

A disabled in action member Susan exclaiming "you have balls," this during the rare strategy gatherings I attended. Yes. Balls to defy Erik and shutting the she-man down when he attacked her.
Balls to confront Linda and take them all on and come away from all that significantly beaten.
Balls to make online users leery. Balls to be totally familiar with the interior cripple who will behave like one when it suits, to don that voice, the little girl inside who in all other things being equal wants to stamp her foot and get a new able-bodied warder like Jayne Anne. Ambulatory women protected me from my mother when I was young. Psychologists in repressed marriages made me dinner; physical therapy aides taught me catechism. Camp counselors taught me the intrigue of boys, so why can't I have more successful writer friends? Like Joanie chasing me. Mentally retarded girl practically falling out of her lap to have me ward her.

As I have shown, however, I have as well the ruthless analysis of my own interior calculus, one that knows I have passed the female novelist scene, not quite so rewarded anymore by literary press culture, so perhaps I am play acting, indulging the regression, the assurance of an ambulatory baby sitter. I have taken charge of Joanie in the past. Taken her out. She's harmless, a child who thinks she fazes me with an admission that she dated my fourth cousin. He is also afflicted (that corrupted Old World genetic code), barely walks. I hardly know him. There isn't much more quality of life time for the sacrifices and choices I need to make, and that forms part of my morose shadings which bloggers are not supposed to indulge. I am weakening; in not so many years, I shall soon be mainly bed ridden. Ms. Dezenski will probably retire with accolades, unless I really have the stones. She withstood the Crothers treatment paradigm for seven years, a daughter of presumable Jewish affluence.

Newly Minted

Contemplative. Ritualized execution in the 21st century does not carry the same significance it had under the monarchical symbolism that so concerned Foucault. The death of Nidal Hasan may therefore be pointless as an administered justice; it may in fact offer him a self-conceptualized dignity as a martyr that he does not particularly deserve, living in that broken body, removed now from the empathy of the human socializing dynamic, though how these analytically framed objections to the death penalty apply to treason is in a separate sphere all together. Treason is different than most capital crimes, even spree murders, and Hasan is unquestionably a traitor, one of Clarke's domestic enemies that the military brought on itself through lax standards of accreditation. Ironically, Hasan has reached his nefarious status simply by falling back on eighth century morality codes. Assimilation could not create the comity between identity and western fidelity to standards, to procedure, to multi-cultural influx. Is it too simple to say Hasan's superiors could have prevented the Fort Hood massacre by relieving the man of his duties? Perhaps he would have preferred giving up his citizenship and joining Hamas, that wonderful league of indignation.

Flesh micro-managed, hemmed in by constriction however long it lasts, ostomy bags to discard his excrement, pressure sore maintenance. He has, in a sense, dehumanized himself, and may not survive prolonged incarceration regardless of appellate timelines. What standards are psychiatrists required to adhere to in order to practice psychiatry? Why was such a man drawn to such a field in which his performance was so mediocre? Why didn't the military apparatus raise enough flags about his behavior? Why does society treat me like an Islamist simply because I was born the way he is now immobilized?

Researching a pitch can still amount to procrastination. Worrying my level of diplomacy, but I have to look past ideology and advocacy for the time being. Larger issues at stake.

Auto Struct Alpha

"I wasn't rude enough to let them know what I was thinking."  -- Patrick Stoner, passionate Sherman detractor

Careful attention was paid. How Stewart's voice rose across the table from the intrepid interviewer whose mannerisms and verbal stilettos where formed in the states of American feudalism, but who knew when to hold back with the classically trained presence before him. "Why did he do it?" Patrick's voice rose an octave, not losing control but invested, trying to sort out the enigmatic nature of Shakespeare's darkest protagonist. Macbeth is less John F Kennedy getting his magisterial head blown off like a ripe melon, more Eliot Spitzer using his prosecutorial techniques to rationalize the perfect legitimacy of his needs to exhort power through ejaculation. Any literary mind can relate to Patrick's outcry. Why in the name of god does a good lieutenant destroy the sanctity of his place of honor in the realm and over reach, triggering an apocalyptic bloodbath? Beneath this is the unspoken frustration in the mind of a man who knows no matter how well trained he is, his fame rests on his inexplicable role as a Frenchman with an English accent in a children's science fiction series that turns grown men and women into loons, hence his modulated dialectical mentorship and rivalry with Ian Holm, who can play a synthetic android and escape being fenced in by a figure like Jean Luc Picard.

Stewart owes a great deal to Rick Berman's send up of European finesse, despite the entrapment, but the hints of frustration remain for public distillation. In his minor roles of ruthless villainy, one could envision Stewart actually inhabiting the Union's terrorist general, the one who raped the Shenandoah Valley. William T Sherman's destruction of the South was necessary. His mind was brilliant, critical, calculating, compartmentalizing native tribesmen into nuisance thugs. His brutality paved the way for this modern world where identity is paramount and genocidal in the same breath, and true value is in the efficiency profit margin.

We can't all be matinee icons.

Following Money

"Contact the police ma'am," Tim Keller, coordinating

Watergate was the singular political crisis of my formative years. Despite Woodward and Bernstein, despite the court battle over Nixon's tapes, despite John Dean, despite Liddy, despite the Gerald Ford pardon "for the sake of the country," despite the film, the narrative arc of Nixon's paranoia is not entirely cogent. I lived it, and after the JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations, the notion of a conspiracy nation came of age, despite the fact that McGovern was a political neuter, the dust of history hasn't made my grappling with the high crime of the break in any easier, and corruption has since grown quieter, more systemic.

The more I learn about the staff of politicians, the more I am tempted to go "suck up power in the streets," to channel Patrick Stewart playing Lenin (bad casting choice but who cares, I can imagine a hard driving and virile Stewart to the point that he can slice ham for money at his discretion; I know he has children and is a divorced knight of the Commonwealth and the only way I'd ever set eyes on him is if Yahoo News gave me a terminal disease story and the old man sighed and said "jolly good, I will do the bloody dying cripple bucket list, but I get a Tonight slot for it!")

This is the carcinoma that drives independent living center exploitation of the most vulnerable populations in this country: the corruption of the Medicaid dollar. Policy regulators know it, so does the coordinating staff here. And the police have better things to do than to freeze disability center accounts simply due to the fact that I can get investigators to the cadavers, even if I do not know the exact location of the graves.

I do not want to alienate Sims; he is my state legislator and has a civil rights background, and I have been through some significant, sometimes even heavy duress. Maybe he can assist me in unraveling some of that damage despite the fact that I have chilled my heels on gay equality. Ditto for my other representatives, especially Toomey. If Toomey's aids have checked out my online footprint, they might conclude my liabilities outweigh any asset I may pose to them, but damage due to continuous trauma does not mean that I am wrong: Consumers are made expendable by IL policy and governance all the time, maybe made worse in the rust belt than elsewhere, although CA may be just as bad. I am the real thing, and if I am the real thing, this gives Toomey the cover he needs to roll back on some of the corruption that is to some degree insulated by the threat of litigation due to that favorite GOP buzz saw: the federal mandate.

I cannot say I became loyal to WaPo because of their seminal exposure of a national disgrace, but like Woodward once was before he turned himself into a presidential portraitist, I am hungry. Whatever its problems, and it has them, the Post whets this appetite. Journalists make excellent sociopaths, excusing Kathleen Parker's aptitude for fuzzy wuzzy was a bear. National mainstream media needs that type of voice, one which doesn't command respect. Keeps power players off their guard.

Andre Dubus

The pineal gland was vitally connected with the center of life.  Alexander Blade

Gassy, coffee made, the letter opened, untouched, part multi-tasking, the Josephs aide de camp could not find it when Babette's office was closing, and I wept about the matter to Brian Sims guy when I telephoned their office. "Stupid woman," scolding myself mentally. The Sims guy no doubt believes my judgment is impaired, and to the extent that key personnel have any memory of me aside from the chief operating officer herself, Liberty would tell you an effort was made to make it up the injury. I had no desire to run an art therapy group, however, and parted with Barbara the art therapy performance artist, no slight intended to the Bride. I never really understood the obsession of Scott Norman to get the Bride to give developmental artists a place on stage. Wasn't that big a deal. The Bride is small, stuck in a protean time warp; never saw a performance there which caused any emotional response, unlike The Wilma.

Liberty is only important to the extent that it is not a competently run organization. That incompetence nearly got me killed during my landlord's renovations, and the injury has affixed itself. A mammary tumor? Ligament issue? Arthritis? Occlusion? What is your favorite game of solitaire? Go to the doctor and have the mammogram? Well, if I could find a practice that would respect the fact that I do not have the impetus for aggressive treatment, then perhaps. I do not find the source of precious life all that precious in my case, eroded to the degree that conflict with Presby is the way of life. My career was supposed to define that. Only because I am a wheelchair user poor as grit in your teeth does the need for change become a pathology. Conceding that "sell my soul" was trite, not worth the thirty pieces of the Pharisee. Poverty is abundant with powerlessness.

Beneath all the carnage, I miss her friendship, the COO, truly liked the woman, more than many of those functionally ambulatory, and wasn't prepared for her to catch me off guard with her obliging clitoris. I will try to go to Rome, the Rome of Anton Corbijn, where beautiful women, seemingly by necessity, well endowed, have to be mutilated. An age old issue. I saw things AO Scott and others did not mention in their review of The American. The lack of perfection in Irina Björklund's buttocks in the opening shot within the chateau. Her ass looked like a porcelain bowl.

For all the looks and all the charm, Clooney has the sexual vulnerability of men who are more beautiful than masculine, as if he is lonely even when he has what he wants. I am lonely without any of that whatsoever. I think even Dubus was lonely some of the time; his wife left him after he lost his leg in the car accident, the wife who had to clean the black fecal matter off the furniture of an established inheritor of Hemingway. I will go to Rome, make love to the sampietrini, give myself back to the fictive God I bargained with, adolescent, pleading.