Fidgets

"It's hard to find much of a pulse."-- Drew Taylor

For a high functioning quadriplegic, reliable power chairs are the difference between life and death. Even with two models though, snow storms strain already vulnerable survival skills. Getting to Trader Joe's tomorrow or not with which chair is an issue, and I've been gently starving on tuna and eggs a bit of fish, for over a week. During the blizzard of 96 I cracked a castor on dry ice and went through hell with a black woman who sat at my table and played solitaire and walked me in my manual to my closest Dunkin Donuts franchise so I would stop discussing my failed engagement. I detached myself from any further working relationship with her for no real valid reason, and she moved on to an ancient crone of her own ethnicity. "Do you clean up dog shit?" her soul sister asked her. This was before the renovations, and my studio reeked of fecal tobacco and urine, and in 2014 the pungency may not be the same, but years of Tim the Mule and the failed cleaning service hasn't changed much about lived poverty in a studio with six year old carpet, dander, fur, flaking ceiling, stained drop ceiling over toilet because David, the toffee gang banger casualty, cannot cease and desist from dislodging his toilet from the flush system. Is it this level of powerlessness that breeds spree killers like maggots? We need to stop this, despite Aaron Eckhart's persuasive argument about technologies and trade offs, even if I cannot speak to Taylor's lampooning glee over Mary Shelley's original zombie. Even my rage is now passe, transmuted, it seems, into an argument about modern capitalism and confusion over rights and entitlements.

Guns basically have one design function, and in the best of all possible utopias, the technology which have given us this kill candy isn't going away, but I have to break with conservatives on treating the Second Amendment like any other form of retail. It has to stop, despite the sociological undercurrent of the American reality. Like Islamists, our disenfranchised utilize violence to settle disputes, and even as a form of conversation, a dialogue that uniquely ends in cessation and anti-climatic death tolls. The kill rate isn't really a good evolutionary check on the population, as it is not an efficient predatory cull. Wielding weaponry, through most of human history has been a privilege, not a form of radical equality, one on which the NRA seems to insist.