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.