Malls and Mood Rings

Real bone ash is chemically inert and free of organic matters. -- Axner Pottery Supply

Ted Danson never quite made it to the top of the A list, unless Cheers at its peek is equivalent to Clark Gable not giving a damn as Dixie smoldered. Our favorite libertarian bar tender is now just a familiar face who can graft into series as filler. The two greatest romances of my network epoch were Steve Austin and Lindsay uniting the orthopedic ward cheering our first tacky cyborg lovers, though how that would actually work at face value raises interesting issues. Would it have been piston oil coitus?

The other was Ted Danson and Shelley Long. I was as invested in that chemistry as the rest of you, hooting and swooning and wondering if I'd survive or die gladly with that kind of Yankee bronco fuck, but the man could never propel himself aloft toward deification after the series ended, perhaps because his character's feather weight gravity in Cousins couldn't ground the actor into really challenging roles. The Canadian birthday cake pastoral suited the plane on which his ambition hovered, betrayals and regroupings playing themselves out in Vancouver's postcard version of an American metropolis, indulgent, pretty to look at, generating nausea up digestion.

Two interesting moments within the episode arcs: Rossellini with her lip bleeding when the couple consummated their revenge. It was not an authentic sexual expression it itself, but catches something about seven year itches which hits the right note, and made me chuckle at my escapades, and Petersen in the doorway afterward, with his beer. He hits weird notes as an actor in forgettable ensembles, cutting his dialogue in key moments, imprinting memory. Danson transplants him in this remake, only to replace Petersen as CSI's driving force. One with diminished stature the other only gained as the deaf forensics expert.

I pity Gallagher's daughter. Eight years old, and her affluent well educated mother has her diagnosed because her tantrums are *violent rages*.  Do any of us ever stop to wonder whether or not a species should trust its own efficacy to reprogram itself? I had a few bitter altercations with my mother. We served to trigger each other. But my developmental physiology mimics emotional fluxes that in my mother were dangerous, and thus made me overwrought. This poor kid already has life long inadequacy grilled right into her psyche; here's hoping mom gets payback. Parents are well meaning enemies, but often can't envision long term consequences.

No two trajectories of every emotional aberration are the same, and as someone who was branded from the moment I was bundled into an incubator, I do not have to imagine the stigma the Gallagher's institutional paradigm inflicts on their eleven year old girl, their alarm at her volleys. I have not experienced them, but I spent a lifetime coping with them, in autistic deaf dumb and blind children, in my own institutional youth grafting, let alone my dead career. This professor's clutch on the throttle may harm as much as mitigate her child's behavior. My mother's censure and judgment did as much to me, especially when she was under her own psychiatric treatment, waltzed into Shriner's to push my buttons, among other items on the lengthy laundry list we accrue into maturity.