Hassan is Dead

What time was it when I woke Monday? After-noon-ish, focusing my entire energies on one small load of laundry, perfuming my sister's much abused and only worn in the building maternity jumper, made it to the laundry room at 7:30 and had to wait. The elderly black man was using the front load washing machine. Made it back up here by 9:50 to see the movie adaptation of the novel I avoided deliberately when it was the darling impulse purchase of its time. Not all of the movie. Had to piss and was starving, but I got the basic points. Sodomy is the Islamic secret beneath the web of lies we all play, Housseini's tale just another version of The Killing Fields, and my spiritual waste land is as stark as Pol Pot or the Taliban. This is what my autobiographical narrative has done to my soul, and there is no redemption, just an Aaron Eckhart dark comedy without the merit of his bite. A woman with cerebral palsy who let public housing for urban road kill destroy her life.

I never expected to succeed as an author, or a writer, or a poet-- not even when I was Jerry's fuck me adhesive on my grandiose metaphysical quest -- but I expected to succeed, and it never occurred to me to attribute failure to mood disorders. Perhaps it should have occurred to me. Not that I am shocked my stepmother is dying. She has been seriously ill since she and mio padre married. My ambition to be established in a career is slipping through my fingers and I am going to lose my father soon (if Jerry himself is not threatened with the same prospect after our communique in 07) and I can feel my own mortality falling apart, like the corpse of the friend in American Werewolf in London. We all have to die, but I know the mental torture of being bedridden like my fucking moron ex Frank is something I simply cannot endure; my life has been a runaway abject terror of living like that, like this, living like I am, an intelligence buried under squalor contained by nursing aides who are neither medical caretakers nor janitors. Perhaps I cannot rematriculate. Perhaps it is already too late, the pain of genocidal epochs absorbed like a sponge. I've never been happy. Obsessive, yes, desperate, yes, strong, yes. Moments of pleasure, my byline in Philadelphia Inquirer garbled ecstatically to my sister in anti-climatic fashion, whereas Jerry would have understood. It would have called for a drink. None the less, what progressives have done in succeeding to keep me de-institutionalized is more inhumane than my parents abandoning me in Home of the Merciful Savior. I should have died in the knife fight that threatened the occupational therapist who played John Denver records in the playroom, after we were fed dinner. This was also the me decade I knew.