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.
No comments:
Post a Comment