Fugue

Perhaps I presume, but we'll presume then. Melinda looks like a gentle soul who perhaps took a knock or two during the recession, and despite the fact that my virtual life hasn't done much for me, or, the little it has done is a little late, her picture with the boy recalled home and some better moments in Ridley Park. It was not all sexual abuse by proxy of my mother's men. She picked them up like stray dogs. Joe the Flop, Walt the Indian, a Jamaican I never met, Don, Beaky. Men drawn to over-sexed fat volatility, even my ailing father on his knees begging her not to divorce him. Mom had a way. I guess men smelled she was a whore, ignored the weight. 

I am so depressed I am like blackberry juice on the fingertips, and want to give my notice, without a damn plan in all the world. I want out, more than anything, I just want out of this building, though it is the same in every public housing building, and all tenants spar with building owners. Karina is causing me grief, and I cannot trust myself during inspections tomorrow not to go at it with the staff and want not to be here but bottle blond has her own problems and I can dismiss her from service twice too and laugh starkly. I might as well be bisexual with the shit I am putting up with for a 35 year old white girl who reminds me of home, home that no longer exists for me.

I am not in the best of shape. My father's sister is dying. Stomach cancer. No surprise, but Marie has been my only support since my mother died, and padre is exhausted trying to keep wicked stepmother Louise alive, and if I follow my heart, and scuttle downtown to the Italian consulate, let's assume I tantrum my crippled poverty across the Atlantic. My regret will consume me five minutes after docking, because the still virile Stanley Tucci was right. Italy has nothing but history, and yet I want to go, and upon getting there, storm into RAI and punch Luigi Perelli to ensure his prostate remembers my fist, the crafty old socialist. He is a liar, and so is The Washington Post.

I would not know what to say to Melinda, at least not in digital idiolect, except to say thank you for a picture of her smiling peace with life. I'll never experience it. Would she like a roommate?

Minorities do not enjoy pity tantrums of white privilege

Round one goes to me. If we're keeping tabs, it is four black women against one Italian temper and her guilt trip on a bottle blond who no doubt now regrets our introduction. I have a throbbing tension headache, Nakea, which might have been Rita, at least through ear wax crust, Trudy, Debra, Gerry, have their Mississippi wise ass fiddle on a broken ferry steamer. You know why they all jump when I throw a fit? Care to guess?

Multi-lateral victimization has a dearth of riches, and we all know the system is corrupt as a Sin City graphic. We'll return to that issue. Meanwhile, Edward, this long and trivial parting in our shared residency has begun, dumbass. How unkind. I blame myself for inadvertently grafting onto more and entirely inadequate Jewish sympathy. 

Let me tell you what liberals like my former instructor "won't touch": the mind numbing cruelty of black beliefs. Three out of four paraprofessionals think cerebral palsy is equivalent to *demonic possession,* and I thrust my entire youth and health into this nearly unimaginable horror unless you've seen it-- to do good. If I couldn't have the radical hippie, I'd roll in on the barge we call noblesse oblige. Never have I gone off on Jerry, never, even seven years ago in the sturdiness of my mid forties, his authority held its sway over me-- not now. I'd kill him because I was the obstinate one.

au revoir

The failed little boys in old men don't like to be blamed, but if I had the nerve, Jerry, I'd curse you with a ferocity to bleach your bones in the grain of your coffin. "I'm the humanist atheist your parents told you to stay away from."

Manic motherfucker. My whole life, a fantasy burning in a methane mass extinction, because I could not handle the impact you had on my damaged neural net; I'm dying on my own shit and the censure of black bull dykes under any other name, never pausing to question whether I was healthy enough for the investment of a terminal degree, thinking liberal ablest punks out of my league was worth the indulgence of lifelong self-pity. If I had the nerve, you thinking that SUNY sending me an audio contract would be some kind of salve for nearly life long urban destitution. Illness manages to trivialize even the best memories, never enjoying either the consent or the force of your sexual substitutes. I begged in exhortation "don't die before me," fortunate that I don't have the courage to vomit the bile of impetuous contempt, my right armpit sweating glucose (who knows?).

Foul Mood

For the record, I did not want to see the Foley beheading video Gillmor references in our flagship periodical. I have seen enough since the Iranian revolution in 79 that nothing the Arabs or their related sects do to us, or each other, shocks me. The only difference between then and now is the superficial glitterati factor, as true for ISIS as it is for Ferguson, but I also did not need Gillmor to articulate what I've long worried about, where the line is-- not solely due to the fact that my conscience vies with the temptation toward criminality due to desperation out of a lifelong oppression under the heel of every ethic identity, my own, others, and the disabled themselves-- we're cruel as well, as the diction in some of my posts evinces. If I thought I had the savvy to handle it, I'd use ISIS for my own objectives, much as Marthe Keller uses Bruce Dern's mortally scarred veteran, and this is a fairly chilling admission from a fifty two year old naive twit getting squeezed out on both ends, from the system and the people not quite subject to it in the same way (yet), my cries for latitude, for room to breathe, increasingly limited, other than to give my notice and try to make a run for it on some fairly long odds. What do I want?

I want the company Presbyterian Homes out of my fucking life, that is what I want, and for equally myopic black women to stop using my back as a career opportunity while I'm killing myself on my graduate education writing penny articles. Charles Horton, the vice chair on the mayor's commission on disability, was little more than useless, giving me the number for Rita Foley, a black accessibility coordinator for this collusionary enterprise. Her pay grade is so dear she doesn't return telephone calls, and assumes we all embrace liberation theology, since her voice mail, for a city agency, ends on "have a blessed day." Now we know: Philadelphia isn't the American city of independence, merely the functional arm of minority Adventists.

I'm truly not a liberal anymore. I'll grant progressives this: Darren Wilson used excessive force to subdue Michael Brown, but after the life I've led under Eastern Pennsylvania's modus operandi, I'll donate to Wilson's defense fund. Tolerance never meant we had the right to eat each other alive because we cannot learn to divine and respect difference, and difference sometimes means apart from.

Shameless Hussy Does a White Paper

"If I seem cavalier about it and in fact I am cavalier about it, it is because this is not my life."-- Donna Leon, with allowances for lack of exact transcription.

Meanwhile, back in the land of grandiose effacement over an old woman's grandiose self-importance, every time a journalist like James Foley dies chasing after a scoop in ancient lands with statistically marginal individuals, the media conglomerates, NYT, Wapo, LAT, CNN, ESPN, let out a yelp of pain. The holy sanctum has been violated: gathering information civilized people need to know at their leisure in a coffee cafe.

Let's take a step back. Foley was a photographer, and his images of the Syrian conflict no more or less redundant than a native's use of his or her cell phone, not that I have data on how many Syrians own a Samsung as opposed to a functioning Apple OS. Reports, making allowances for lack of certainty, indicated Foley was tortured in his captivity. Perhaps this caused him to reevaluate the value of foreign correspondence imagery for the sake of a scoop, since it seems being driven for a news story has its own shades of the pathological, or maybe he rethought the Spanish Inquisition, but how much do people outside of the millennial hot zone that is forever the Middle East feel driven to put themselves in danger by bating Semitic beasts?

Do Foley's images have empirical value? No, with the exception of his beheading. Those images, in and of themselves, will remain as a genealogy marker. As hard as we try to divorce ourselves from primate origin, we're still rather large apes who evolved back into nakedness, even without modern barbers. Knowledge generation is a tricky business, but the Fourth Estate holding itself aloft as a modern temple whose abstract conceptualization is inviolate doesn't take into account the fact that revenue needs to be generated. Most of what the public reads has no monetary value that we can use in turn to generate money, including humanitarian crises. ISIS was bought and paid for according to Western free market and entrepreneurial values. Accommodating the beast will invariably create paths for its transformation. Radical egalitarians like Foley need more patience, not the rush of trotting about hot zones. I am not done with my Pistorius sentiments. Dyer triggered an exasperated trial run. Initially, I wasn't going to bother, but not I'm hunting for sources and more retail packaging.

Barack Requiem

no faith teaches people to massacre innocents"-- our 44th commander rhetorician

Mr. President: When I was growing up, I was a fervent and occasionally rude Roman Catholic, and though Protestant and church fathers differ on textual interpretation, and it is also well known through the midrash  that Hebraic scribes engaged in hyperbole with a fluidity equal to that of their Hellenistic competitors, monotheism nonetheless does indeed justify the slaughter of innocents, particularly when Joshua invaded Canaan to create the state of Israel. Pagans were put to the sword. Does this mean that the twelve tribes engaged in genocide? Probably not on the scale we see today, but griot  is never entirely inaccurate, transcribed even from the distance of the judges to the courts of the corrupt rulers who led Israel into the Diaspora.

In the Gospel, as well, a pair of hypocritical converts drops dead at the feet of either Christ or Peter, or Paul, for that matter, the zealous torturer who conquered Rome. I did not realize James Foley was Catholic. This pierced my eroding conscience briefly, light as a fallen feather of a falcon. There was a tenure, perhaps as briefly past as Clinton's administration, when the barbarism of ISIS would have been equivalent to the showers at Auschwitz, but what has blurred the niceties of this distinction is the inhumanity of the paradigm, couched in fealty to the procedure. A significant percentage of persons gets weighed down by this, and rather than absorbing this unspecified guilty charge like a rat on a ninja course, they become hardened, join ISIS, a militia. 

Unless an extraordinary 2016 candidate emerges, you will be the last President I voted for. Reagan was a liar, and by the time of the Iran Contra testimony, obviously in the early stages of dementia, but he was the last leader in whom decency of conviction made me happy to be an American; now I'm a fascist promising immolation to myself for a hard life in the land of Negrodelphia. I despise Eric Holder, and you, poor fellow, should have been dean of Trinity College. You disappointed everyone, acolytes and adversaries. George Will has pondered whether or not your second term approaches *Carter territory,* but I see your lame duck standing as closer to Woodrow Wilson working himself into that ineffectual stroke.

Ghost Crabs

"Nausee became a sort of modern classic-- without thereby losing-- in the minds of its enormous readership-- its virulence," Richard Howard, sympathizing foreworded.

Wealth and affluence do not, simply as a condition of social status, abscond with unhappiness, or transmutes avarice into altruism. Europe is no more Utopian than America is the Great Satan, guns blazing at the ready, but with this concession readily available to the realist, Scandinavian crime drama is just a shade gray shy of being a misnomer, and I declare it null and void. A miniseries can be as onerous as researching every exhortation Sartre penned in his master treatise. The Danes and the Swedes and the Norwegians enjoy being affable, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, but its penal system makes my sojourn with inner city poverty analogous to Melville bracing himself for exotic grub in Tahiti. Oh, the feed given to WYBE is not an exact replica of Dick Wolf or Criminal Mind formula, and cold climes seem to breed repression into the authentic Caucasian genome, but let me clarify something for Miss Desmond-Harris: Italians and Greeks never saw themselves as white in the first place. We're a Mediterranean people, swarthy and olive until you get close to the Swiss border.

I was weak enough, however, to see Dirty Money, White Lies through to its conclusion, and Seim got better at inhabiting Sverre when he seemed resigned, as opposed to his feigned resistance to losing his boy scout status in the narrative opening, and marginally amusing impotence, during the first thirty percent of the saga. I could not really see what the differential was between the actresses who played Ravi and Trude. And what Scandinavians take as internecine domestic conflict is no more than puny whining to an American mindset, let alone the Roman.

Yes, there is a permissive drug culture in Holland. This is why the big countries are merciless thugs while the Swiss are like high end escorts repairing their hymen for the Chinese Central Bankers on this end of APEC. while assuring Jacob Lew that American dollars are an absolute prerequisite. The only modern dramatist who was ever honest was Georges Simenon. Otherwise, the EU is lying through its teeth about its subterranean social mores, and its socialist studio system is cognizant of this fact. 

The Queen no longer bleeds!

I was nearly ecstatic to have WYBE Mind television back on air, studying and absorbing European locales like a sponge. All their stations are down, and WHYY has also gone wobbly (and as of 8/19 has also gone offline, in a reminder of technical fallibility... sigh). Governor Corbett is not out to shorten my lifespan, miserable enough as it's been for me. Don't mistake the incivility of which I'm capable just because I've muted the foul and polluting level of my character assassinations.

European procedurals have their own lockdown catering to progressive mandates, but at least my poor mind had something interesting to study. Please come back WYBE. I'll donate, or whatever, just get your transponder back online!

Winded Aura

This theme of personal emancipation accounts for the audacious liberties Miller takes with Tropic of Cancer's style, a pastiche of poetic exultation, bland pornography, and the banalities of a personal diary.

Authors more rarely become celebrities, though at the moment I'd be less fazed than rabid if any of my more fortunate colleagues-- technically, I am an author of minute Chicago Slam acclaim-- but that is a matter of linguistic tongue in cheek-- deigned to get within ten feet of me, except David Mitchell, whom I shouldn't have read; if I ever got within range of his personal space it would not be to gasp and sputter with reverence, so much as to now become a borderline threat, the type Orhan's poet Ka feels when confronted by Hande at a family gathering; his skill diminishes most of us, Mitchell's, in the way that work horses never truly compete with innate genius, however refined. Henry Miller's work, in contrast, is a nihilist rant, when all is said and done, but what saves his travelogue fictions is the dynamic energy of them. 

Miller died while I was a high school student, and in the suburban milieu of Ridley Township, he would have never been taught. Yet in a vague diaphanous echo I remember his books in the school library, and I may have been familiarized with Cancer much earlier in my life, only it did not imprint on my synaptic memory.

It is in this vein that, though I can have no quarrel with the rare ethnic Christian sect in Irbil that Isis members want to slaughter, I still root for the militant proto-state to acquire real power, thrive. However cleansing Arabic fanaticism may be, it is different enough from Catholic authoritarian bluntness that I could never become a convert, almost a dirty word, an escape valve for treason, but sufficiently related in stricture that those who would kill me to save my soul have my admiration. All this impetus toward martyrdom because American section 202 housing conjoined to a deplorable welfare state destroyed my rightful economic station in life? You bet. Watch David Brooks make his aerial arm chops against the barbarism which has the Obama administration muting in fine liberal form, then think about your own lines in the sand.

I was all but forced to move into this building I wanted to vacate 30 seconds later after my padre dumped me in it with the accumulation of my poetic acetic life, forced when I had an income which should have allowed me other mobile options, even back then. Today I have no idea how, or if, I'll ever get back into the middle class, even if I spew our equal protection clause right into a stroke.

Toned Exuberance

Since Ferguson is descending into chaos (as is usual when black America gets upset), I will leave the situation alone--except to add that regardless of whether or not Brown was executed, and I do not think this was the case, regardless of whether or not he had shoplifted, or had an altercation in the prowl car with the officer prior to it, all the protesters are doing now confirms biases long in the making. Destroying the St. Louis community solves absolutely nothing, and yet here we are, with thousands of dollars in losses in an already stressed neighborhood.

Police officers are human. They get killed by perpetrators who steal their weapons, and these stresses are mitigating factors. We have a mixed race president, a black attorney general who still reverberates to the rhetoric of "I have a dream," and the entitlement is apparently sanction to go and destroy. If I engaged with that behavior against my landlord, or the city, where do you'd think I'd be?

Shear Glee

Yes, I know I'm taking a cheap shot with a chortle, but I don't have the gigabytes for a long online post. This has been my world since I was nine years old. Welcome to it, rainbow coalition naive idealists. Hopefully I'll be dead before the American collapse begins in earnest. I wonder how the minority population of Ferguson would relish a migratory journey back to South Sudan, but I could hear a pin drop on that score.

Already one step ahead

I already thought about what Michael's reaction might be to Susan Schneider's announcement about Williams being in the early stages of Parkinson's, and I pissed and moaned over the sink, not that I have any brief over Fox, he is likable enough and unlike the wizened Hank Stuever-- how in the name of Christ do professional critics like him earn a living?-- the humor in Michael's canceled show spoke to me; it may have been too deadpan for Michael's viewing spectrum, but it was funny, subversively so-- and Yahoo probably had this fucking piece in process while I drolly sighed over France 2 Frank Riva.

I have no desire to talk to Fox, nor identify with him, but I can imagine that Michael had wished upon Schneider slightly more tact before her damage control efforts. 

Robin is dead. Michael went into a self-pitying alcoholic binge and then became a point man for motor degenerative studies, and I remind myself on a daily basis that killing my former supervisor in no way buries the scars she permanently inflicted on me, and there are not enough hours in the day to plow through Philadelphia's social paralysis toward justice. I am reconsidering that move to Texas while I consider talking to you about the subterranean obsession of every living writer: getting into The Atlantic Monthly. The one really envious divide between Robert Thomas and myself despite our rarefied civil poetic rivalry: he has had poetry accepted by The Atlantic, which, unknown to him, is a mortal wound to my ego. I think Thursday's rejection of my query on an article counts as my second personal response in twenty years. If I have to buy James Bennet a power chair that climbs its own steps, before I am dead-- writers do actually generate articles for other outlets about the impregnable defenses of this periodical toward any strategism known to man, or even Stephen Glass, for that matter. 

I never obsessed over Williams in his life. Liked the work more than not, but this is not one of my pretensions. His suicide hurts. It does, and I tell myself I'm allowed to be mad. 

How to handle a riot

Everyone is covering Ferguson, even the beautiful state that is really Canadian territory, and I too actually want a piece of this story, as the journalist poet clogged with too many ideas, but my courage will be tested if I plow ahead. I have my own idea and want my own source, though of course most of my content will be based on attribution, attribution to whom I do not yet know, but Reuters is in the running-- and perhaps once in awhile I need to forget about trending topics.

It might be a test of courage, however. I regret that the young man may have died as the result of an alleged bad shooting. I have no reason not to feel regret, but looting and the destruction of retail businesses is not a lesson on civics and policing, and the minorities in St. Louis diminish sympathy by engaging in such regressive antics. I never did any of this as part of the activist community in Philadelphia. Years ago I blew up at a Paratransit driver, but fighting CCT Connect brandishes the soul with Josef K's default condemnation.

Zelda?

I do not really pay much attention to twitter as a general rule. I did at first, to a degree of detriment, but I haven't yet read tweets on my cell, and I am cautious about targeting (as opposed to mentioning) followers. Basically I write and tweet, and do my best to stay out of arguments, though I did tell the singer who wrote incendiary remarks about Obama that he was a fool. Early on, when I was new to the site, followers coming or going piqued me, and I did post about three. Homo Tweets seemingly disappeared, and good for him. Being gay and a New York liberal deigning to lecture me about getting therapy was a trifle much, but I had a level of ignorance about how the system worked, and when I was with LiveJournal, I reacted in error. 

Even chatter junkies can be driven ill by continuous feed; hence I keep my distance, and don't really give a fuck about micro blogging in the aggregate, even though we're all people on it. Given this, the attacks on Zelda are baffling. Robin was a privileged man. He had to work hard, grant that, and probably needed cocaine to drive himself, as I do not see how else the relentless improvisation propelled him into becoming a Hollywood convention. But the majority of us aren't so lucky, hence the anger some of us feel about his suicide. Limelight fades; this is an inevitable truth, and the medical model bullshit correspondents dutifully milk to highlight mental health are all well and good, but Williams was hideously selfish, and should have made contingencies aging stars usually make to age with dignity. He did not and set a bad example, but this isn't Zelda Williams fault. She lost her father, and why she was taunted so viciously is inexcusable. She'll be grieving a long time.

Why I was so nettled by the event may be my own fear about stark choices ahead I may have to face that a celebrity like Williams wouldn't have had to contend with in the same way, whatever the state of his fiances, and one would think, after inhabiting a neurologist like Sacks, the comedian would know better; I'll get over my umbrage. I have to, but attacking his child is below all common decency.

Caricature's Lonely Soul with Subtlety

"The material creation is thus an act of necessity, a means for the light-substance to recover what it has lost of itself."--Manichaeism and Its Legacy, Introduction

Celebrity is not a perfect insulator, now that time has softened the blow of Williams' demise. We cannot know if he thought of the very public struggle of Michael J Fox before he hung himself, perhaps not wanting to become another spokesman for Parkinson's as his improvisational genius lost its vigor if not its acuity. Still, Robin Williams wasn't poor, certainly not spiraling into public welfare territory, whatever his problems. In most of his over 40 film work, his nascent childlike innocence wears a bit thin, but had he lived, the embittered widow he plays in Authority is intriguing, a sinister in between figure, with Dick Wolf offering a tacit homage to Terry Gilliam's Orwellian parodies, and Robin reenacting his Manichean figure from One Hour Photo, which amounts to the best acting from a comedian I've ever seen. There are elements of Jackie Gleason's Lonely Soul in these performances, not that dowager knows what was studied.

Being a bird on a wire caught in a dualistic war between opposing forces is not necessarily a way past binary choices, but Robin Williams had that rare ability to express differance in the same way Derrida went in search of it through pushing the boundary of linguistic decorum. Common sense ruralists dismiss Derrida as "word games," and his reputation now suffers in some quarters, or treated as comic relief by archaeologists in inner-disciplinary conferences, and yet he has his defenders, precisely because his textual appropriations offer a tertiary struggle.  In Authority, particularly, Williams moves Meloni's acting up a few notches from sheer A list intimidation, much like my Roman temper despising African obfuscation causes it to tremble autocratic methodology [in translation, white apartment managers would not have attacked me as relentlessly as drafty and vacant niggers like Trudy  and Debra. End clarification, though I am mindful that I want the 2016 Trenton lawyer's assistance, if the firm can take aim at the right cow] , and the conclusion of the 2008 episode of SVU does indeed evade the pat conceits of detective stories. Williams isn't simply entertaining in these examples. He is disturbing, and I wish he had held on, for a little while, but such mania as made his talent has implosive elements.

Shock, but not awe

This was not a headline I expected to see, and there is no way in hell I'm covering it, not even as an aggregate piece, but I knew when Williams played Mork that his hypermania would crash. I am sad, but just as with David Foster Wallace, pissed off. Ambulatory people are so fucking selfish it is incredible, but wheelchair users have to be heroic. Damn it all to fucking hell. I followed his career since I was a kid.

2:36 AM: I am still upset, too little sleep to work due to pet children and the riot act. I had a certain affection for Robin's persona, and despite the fact that this was an expected trajectory, I am agitated none the less, and this is the drawback of failed intimacy: I don't have a man to comfort me while I thresh out my grief.

I believe in the right to die, but Williams still could have put his stature to good use; more later when I'm less raw.

Personal Loyalties

He handed us fiction after fiction and we printed them all as fact. Just because... we found him "entertaining." --Peter Sarsgaard as Charles Lane

A television commercial when a freshly resigned case manager still had access to cable through a defunct company. One question Americans might ask is how we enforce anti-trust laws when Comcast is the sole provider of pay for view, despite diverse distributors like Netflix and Amazon and Verizon. Verizon is a now redundant spin off of AT&T, but it is a communications utility. Netflix I never fully comprehended but suppose it started as a rental agent. Amazon is a retailer, and now all these corporate models have there own cable box.

In 1997 I was still in job divorce mode which seemed, as a rupture, to take forever to heal, and there was the commercial for The New Republic. I called, subscribed to the print edition, knowing nothing, certainly not that Marty Peretz was insane. I discovered that later on my own in my dialogues with TNR, particularly with Michelle Cottle, but in 97 I read a contributor's article about lice and typhus and old world Jewish quarrels, and fell in love with the writing. I wanted to write like that, doubted I ever could, and understand why David Plotz and Lane want to kill Stephen Glass. I'm a million miles removed from Airforce One's onflight magazine and part of me wants to kill Stephen Glass. TNR has been much changed and diminished in these 17 years. One of their interns was nice to me when I pitched, and I've recounted this, and still get horny over the fact that The New Republic was nice to me and I did nothing with that capital out of fear and intimidation. I emailed them shit on spec later but I myself knew it was shit on spec; that door had closed because I feared to assert myself to get at the former corrupt bastard who ran this city, John Street. I met Street without wearing a brassiere without ever intending to do that. There was a gathering in the parking lot and I had a sudden craving for a burger and threw on shit clothes and rolled down and there was Black Mafia himself and I died. Being ever the politician, he grasped my shoulder and asked how I was doing. No idea I hated him and his excuse for a brother.

Shattered Glass doesn't work as a film because it is too close to reality of events which have damaged us all, and yet, Stephen's breach of ethics, his fabrications, his plagiarism, and the exposure of other notorious cookers of truth who followed, point to a distinctly modern problem as old as the hills. We don't like being drawn in for fools by more temperate psychopaths, remain fascinated by such villains, and don't look too closely at demarcations, such as the fact that bias builds its own slant. I have read John B Judis in TNR's pages, and can't say I always get his policy critiques, but I do not consider him to be virulently anti-Zionist. Jewish liberalism is not always sacrosanct, and has its own unpleasant equivocations which cause undo harm. Philip Roth exposes it however diffident or enthusiastic one might be about the author. I've certainly experienced it, and wrestled hard with my conscience afterwards, despite the roots of poison which have led me to eschew certain other vectors of radical equality.

Yet Billy Ray deserves credit for nibbling around the edges of the edifice we call the fourth estate, and Sarsgaard reached in deep to pull out an inspirational scene on the nature of integrity, despite the fact we have to find ways to entertain the audience, and do it daily. Everyone is in the brand game.

Mishi

My silence on my puncture via exotic cultural dynamism is only due to the fact that in those dusk to dawn chats with mystery Eurasian man, the last of my youth and sense of magic went with his rejection of any meeting between us. Not that I didn't keep looking, but whereas the later Argentine Cecil would have been settling on a pompous but intriguing old fool, Mishi, by contrast, took my last hope for real passion with him and his bong inhalation, and I became Petrarch and mailed him an ode five pages in length, pulling it from circulation later. Would you like to read it?

The Last Virtual Seduction
                                         
                                  for AT

And I have come out with bloodied hands again--once more on the
wheel towards the routine and the rack,
fingernails torn from the flesh in a Peter O’Toole scream, his
English witticism to combat the German fascist with the tip of a pen--
lest we forget,
the guilt of our ancestors, between Axis and Reich:
and what bubbled in a lethal caldron of darkness and blood, in the
mixtures of marriage between system and slaughter,
a German soldier found his geisha, a
daughter of that fiery Chrysanthemum Throne to bed her
and wed her. How such a
dynamic and vital an issue would spring from these
sinews of fictions and fervor?  A prince
who would dance amid sunbeams and hook me in the mists of delight, like
a flower whose petals transfix on the sun with no
choice but to follow the orb in its path from dawn until dusk
and through dusk into night to the next dawn again,
I found lightning made strike far too 
early and too fast, a
flint struck its spark to form the
tears of flickered  flame, their
shapes to join and merge to yield the larger fire

the tribe will gather round
and feel the thrill of fear and awe we still feel pulsing the
beat in our blood
when we see the mighty cat stalk the bush
and tell its tale, fear and awe in our gestures and our
speech, rising and falling excitedly, reminiscent of hoots
and calls when we feared to become the prey of the sleek and mighty
feline, pristine in its majesty, enthralled by moon’s
reflection in a glassine and deadly eye which held us to its
gaze, and gave him name, in those early
days, in the time of the nomad & hunter
Kagamishishi the Mirror Lion may have made his
way on a story teller’s tongue, a legend one
day you would take on your own, as on its own it did woo
me, your handle:

a sixteen hour play whose dance transforms the sexes,
a woman wears a puppet on her hand

and through the motion of movement, the 
placement of slipper to floor just so,
and measured at a pace to seem forever passes by in what
she transforms and turns into, as the clock ticks, a
second is like a grain of sand, one
grain removed from a mountain for every million
years, and still hard pressed to catch up, an 
eternity in what the mirror reveals, reflects back behind the 
beauty of a painted face,
the muscle of the feline behind his mane,
and here comes the lion as Kagamishishi leaps forth like
ghosts in the smoke of a Shinto temple,
an echo behind and before us,
flesh bursts alive from a pane of glass, the
birth is the roar of the King of Beasts in possession of his
pride, those final weary
steps upon the stage his alone to make and hold me
fast, the tired and dazzled audience,
an American girl wide with wonder,
the eye enchanted and enlarged, the
pupils held to the computer’s glare like magic in the
dark, like magic and the snort of cocaine, hope’s
blossom gives its violent birth,
all between dimensions of a keyboard and a screen
you watched the heart in shock, 
how it did plummet
and how it did drop, bouncing back in your throat retained:

and love is not possible this way, no— you shake your
head, thrash your hair and stomp, to rebel against the tidal
wave of passion surging to its shore; resisted too the pin
pricks of that hopeless lovely special waltz which found its
circumnavigation in your valves to Mozart’s key, the steps themselves
light as twinkles on the mobile above the newborn in his
crib, for these are the stars that dance their finite skies of joy
as beholders to delight fine as a fistful of talcum 
you throw in the air, to snort and explode up your nose
and blow you away well beyond the Oz-Land Emerald City
Oppenheimer never dreamed in his deadly fusions of atoms,
never dreamed, as you yourself were but the stuff that dreams were made,
when Emperors urged their subjects to wield broomsticks
while his cities bulged to mushroom clouds that blast
and burn away to cinder,

this blazing past of terror to score its mark along my 
breast in the very silence of the things themselves that are always left
unsaid,
the revolving doors of time in an instant removed, to weave back
and go forward again, to denude like
the peel off the flesh of an orange, with the linger of acid in the
sweet of its pulp:

you have to swallow this hard,
down it goes and please digest:

How many programmers with their million bytes of code,
the bewilder of zeros and a wilderness of ones, a
thousand micro-typists to create the words between only two,
the most complex and elemental of your binary
pair,
 a man and a woman, like you and I, we
who might find ourselves in any bar, across any table top
where I might nurse a favored drink, with a
discussion of the classicists whom I might like indeed:

The viola might rise and pluck; the violin might coax and warm
the circulation so inflamed you see its sparkle in a 
soft and limpid look I cannot help but offer--
a spinel falling from its meteor,
a crystal to pierce the muscled heart
and make the flash of light beneath my smile which has its
hints and textures, just a trace of the Old
World left, in the curve and fullness of my
lips when they come into the play, like the
Mediterranean breeze to billow the sails in the Italian strains
still here, in a great-grandfather’s passage 
and travail, a random tap to my shoulder,
this finger of time, to remind me
this is left
what is left for me to meet: a classic case perhaps,
a classic clash of East meets West
never so classically simple, nor so far removed, as an
inner voice of the woman-child might attest:

No dad normally I would not be attracted to Asian 
men but this one is different and only half

Japanese and happens to speak English even better than I
These are the wheels which already turn,
evolve a defense against the ghost of protest not even 
needed to keep a safe divide.  It is only I the
poet who would dare beyond the probable of cause:
Oh where are my emotes?  Those dear commands for which I but slash and think,
my bubbles in the air like champagne, my colons to make my expression 
its pink, and a private message sends a whisper, a confession, 
or a pass--
and here alone in the apartment I can almost believe
I am here in his office and can loosen his tie,
or nudge him in the ribs and listen to his cries in lieu of the
past lives which haunt us all—
This is going to sound really sick but my ex-girlfriend was in to anal
 penetration—

and there is a logic to this, a computation mode,
behind these mists and streaks of passion which only partially conceal,
like a woman in the dark undressed behind a
see through silk, to let her silhouette seduce the final
swollen urge to thrust,
the final union of the good and bad I know, 
whether to stand about face, and halt,
reassess and plan the retreat, or move forward on ahead  
and plow:
I am physically disabled like the clients whom I used to serve

and the past is an echo on this loss of relevance,
the motive to ease the agony which vibrates and strums the soul,
the purchase of this computer to find my way online, 
and for one moment, in a vulnerable space,
a vulnerable time, 
the virtual world became a glittering baroque too
bright, floating and formless,
the real one cast aside,
the one where you left employers by their way
and lost work as a concept though somewhere
still maybe it hides,
a glance in the recycle bin— check your Windows 95—
and you roll from wall to wall, 
fiery as a dragon’s fire when full of rage,
an anger so many knights have tried to slay in the
darkness of my lair, and failed, even death himself,
his sickle but to make a slighting graze

born in the breech three months early,
I would not breathe at first
and would not breathe again so a
wee bit of brain tissue died
and spasticity became a word, a ruler, and a
secret not easily relayed, in how these
muscles tense and spasm of their own accord
and the knees of my leg which do not lock to stand, never to know the
promise of a ballerina leap,
and the balance on her toe with which a
heart might match her splendor, so much the
fairytale in which I sought my way

I cannot handle it you said, in the face of my few
rare victories, so minuscule and small within the squares wherein
any Napoleon might have made his bid:
So what am I here for?

Surely, not for the sake of art?
Or love pure as a diamond which draws a wrist to bleed, the thick blue 
veins of my strong and muscled wrist, a substance harder than iron
and sharper than glass slicing straight through what I felt within my
grasp, a very choke hold on the
vine in its ascent,
and a vision obsessive perhaps,
a vision obsessed,
creator of all my omnipotence

a crucible, in which hope and folly mingle,
more alive than the rushing currents of my river,
far brighter than the rays of light which warm my sun

only in my dreams

someday the lady might kneel before you, below the
mercy of your sharpened sword,
frozen there in stillness until a 
hand reached down, to raise my vision towards the sky,
and I would know then, in a moment called forever, what the 
mirror in your eye reflects, to see the 
song of myself staring back.
.
*************

The last time I was so smitten I would have done anything, or so I believed, to set eyes on him, seducing me only by teaching me about high Japanese classicism. The real me, that being the one who fled her emotional fantasia over much ado about nothing, died here. Not quite ready to allow it back into the field. 

Good Tidings

"An artist is always alone-- if he is an artist.--Henry Miller, in the early and rough edges of The Tropic of Cancer

Alice Sara Ott has a wondrously acculturated life brought about by her discipline as a pianist who handles the levers with her bare feet. The discipline is admirable because no disabled woman with my type of developmental brain injury can achieve it, but in the confusion of her Eurasian identity, the legacy of Germany's link to Japan as an Axis power, is a saga not wholly unfamiliar, even for those outside the glass of her high octane lifestyle, the privilege of her mobility (unless the Russians blow her airliner out of the sky too in Putin's quest for winning the pissing contest in the waning days of this remorseful presidency via Harvard Law). I did not tell you about my superheated crush with my Eurasian when I was 36. Hormones and slavering insanity in the early days of cyber coupling pursuits before it made the satire of Letterman's top ten list, prepared to give my father a legitimate reason to kill me when I begged him for money to fly to Dusseldorf in pursuit of my own high yellow biracial cosmopolitan fellow with his charming Japanese German dick.

"I couldn't handle it," he told me, and freaked out with regret at the thought that he hurt me, not anticipating the lethal humiliation that the former Linda C Richman would have in store for me soon thereafter.

*
My elder cousin asked after me, and I would prefer a friendship with his wife Adele over that of the fractious succor I have with her mother in law, but the simple act of her husband's query gave me a sliver of hope that I can get the fuck out of Riverside before it is too late. (Conversely, the wagons may be circling around my waning strength and emotional terror at the hands of Presby's bitches). Clarity Media for some reason has given me a promotion. Because I growl? The African American inner city stoicism on its broken regressive back, its authoritarian Stalinist mindset, has scarred me irrevocably, and I can't throw a holy high fucking fit at Jerry for doing this because he advised me not to, but what was that really about? I wouldn't have been able to handle coercing his virtue even if I had the capacity to tempt him. Always running, without the finesse appreciation such as this requires.

Lincoln's legacy

Will Smith is not an actor in the aesthetic sense when we use the phrase "great performer". He is competent only in following the beat in his scripts, and this he learned through the audience track in Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which in turn made him likable in Men in Black, but when you examine the porous fatalism of Seven Pounds against the image of Liberians left lying in thoroughfares as no more than rabid animals, Gabriele Muccino's proportionality is a very dangerous game we play with ourselves through the filter of the studio system. The lie of balanced scales. The Jennifer Lopez vehicle Angel Eyes does the same thing only slightly less stupidly, not offering up any sacrificial remorse as it leaves its principal characters rough around the edges in the aftermath of a vehicular tragedy, unlike Tim, who for some inexplicable reason literalizes Christian cannibalism as expiation for the gratification of technology.

Propulsion engines simply are what they are, much like the distractions of cell phones, but disease? 

Death, purely on the scales of evolutionary dynamism, seems to be necessary, but I have a hard time, just as anyone else, with the excruciating nature of excessive pain bequeathed to complex organisms, whether it is the bludgeoning death of cute mammals like baby seals for absolutely no reason, or an infectious agent like Ebola reminding us all that despite our unparalleled success as a species, we simply cannot act collectively to mitigate destruction without turning ourselves equally into soulless autonomic functionaries slaving away at the behest of an inexplicable agent. CDC authorities assure the developed world, however, that we have no reason to worry. Hogwash. Antibiotics and the concentration of our sick bodies in institutional settings gave rise to super bacteria like MRSA. There is no reason then, that Ebola, like AIDS, could not in turn adjust, and spread from West Africa and hit vulnerable sectors in China, India-- which is not to say the human body would not eventually adapt in turn, but the hubris of our faith in ourselves is nothing short of lunacy.

The Vertigo of Popeye Doyle

This Prince, in the year 1744, while hastening from one end of his kingdom to the other, and suspending his conquests in Flanders that he might fly to the assistance of Alsace, was arrested at Metz by a malady which threatened to cut short his days. At the news of this, Paris, all in terror, seemed a city taken by storm.-- Thomas Carlyle, The Death of Louis XV

Alain Delon's stagger in his take on the procedural, Frank Riva, is meant to echo the chic swagger of youthful virility. His sang froid serving to explain why every woman in six hours worth of video forgives his abandonment of them is the tired apologia of European cinema. His nemesis, Jacques Perrin, has an interesting ambidextrous hovering over the playing field for 90 minutes,  only then to devolve Xavier into a monotone of unipolar spite which is too strident to hold any further viewing interest, but the series plays Gene Hackman on his deathbed, still playing the French Connection on an intravenous line. People who should be dead relics are only playing possum, and everyone is compromised in some way, caught in the scars which last lifetimes, well into a fourth generation. Maxime Loggia takes quite a beating, and then, in an anachronistic absurdity, gets thrown out of his ruthless uncle's jet. 

But why do French dramatists feel beholden to a film, nearly a half century old, where American cowboys made a dent but never got their man? Is this something European weariness is projecting? It's own antiquity? In Nicolas Le Floch it is a dynamic antiquity, a little too smooth, but not incorrect in the assertion that this is where the modern world begins, in the compassionate savagery of the Enlightenment, just as Rai gets the pathos in De Luca just right: This is my Italy, the post Mussolini world that created my twilight, my tenement demise in a provincial backwater created and landscaped by Quakers, their utopia little more than nigger bling. It is not a block, as per twitter's sugared enthusiasm, only a cripple's death, buffeted by one form of brutality after another. 

Appeal to Celine Sallette

Please send me a poster of your ever so talented partner, the more the buff the better. Perhaps the speculative institutional environment which will tragically swallow me alive after such a life will allow me to keep it, which may mean I need to demur on full frontal nudity. All an old woman has in the end is her bittersweet disappointment of never actualized desire, non?

lacrime per Argentina

I'm well over 20k in debt, thanks to the fact that this woman needed to draw me a picture about her orgasms,  before killing me with one of Tarantino's magic swords, a woman who is exactly the same, though she and I haven't exchanged 20 words with each other in 14 years. Pongo bitch delineating a tweak in the process, and voila, supported employment will give high function mentally retarded consumers more simulated affluence. I don't know what fucking planet she lives on anymore, essentially conceding segregation with equal treatment, remember that? Brown versus Board of Education was it? And with the default monkey on my back, I'd give a few of the most radical leftists a run for their money, bad hygiene, a threadbare 6 year old section 202 housing carpet, and I am giving a penny ante digital tabloid a hard time, sulking about them, and sore about my generosity with Karina, and it amounts to the same thing, in the charming phrase of Jerome Robart, it is about tariffs we place on good pussy, or in my case, good blow jobs. Despite the enviable image Ms. Dezenski has imprinted on me, clitoris as an actual allure doesn't work for me, and that was true even during my melt down right before Thanksgiving that November when I blew back on her and then became suicidal. I'll never forget that evening, alive and blogging to you now only because my mother had to die unexpectedly in 2005 and gave her children an insurance  payout. It vanished for my sister and half brother within the year.

I am right back where I started in 2006 after Miss Eddie from Unlimited Staffing molested me, with one exception. I haven't reapplied for Medicaid and SSI. I really don't want them, as regardless of the state in which you live, welfare of this sort is exceedingly restrictive, but I'm at a loss as to what to do next. 

If any of you would want the cash payment I gave Karina, which you wouldn't, it is ten dollars an hour basically to mop vacuum, laundry, at my discretion, except I can barely afford it anymore. I am on my last legs in a inner city Stalinist model that has caused me so much trauma. Linda is still a parrot, and I?

Let me tell you something. I cannot remember why I purchased David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. The blame may lie with the New York Times reviewer, who was provoked to the height of sublime misery by Mitchell's work. I was so impressed by the fact that a writer made a blue blood unhappy that I had to have the book. When I finished it I then faced the most serious existential threat I had since I watched my stepfather torture little Nicky, my brother, before AIDS infected him. Mitchell made me cry. He caused me pain, because he made me realize I'll never have his talent. I staked my whole life on writing, on succeeding with it, on living up to the expectations of my most sympathetic teachers. I'm nothing more than a shit harpy whose former supervisor fucked up to the point of stoking hatred which thrives through centuries. 

Let me make one more point about Ray Rice and Janay: Now that I understand the extent of the player's violence toward his wife, we expect the NFL to arbitrate the behavior of its players. I'd tell Janay to get off her fucking ass, get a lawyer, and get a move on-- the league isn't going to succeed any better than the courts in protecting battered women. Those who know Janay need to make her realize she has to make her own meal ticket. A baller's wife may be a better surety than my talent with literature, but if Rice is injured or winds up killing her, then her security seems less certain.

Julien's Father

Which one is worse, do you think, binary homosexual viciousness or a failed writer baring her fangs at vanity editors? Should we start a pool? Or ask why it is that I'm a failure and Jim Lehrer has affable Texas laurels on which his pending obituary will ride? It is a rhetorical question, attitudinal perhaps, but let me throw out a challenge flag: If progressive's are hell bent on riding to the rescue of Janay Palmer, why did she marry Rice after he dragged her unconscious body out of the elevator? She certainly wears the weariness of a defeated captive in Howard's photo. I never took my abusers back, even if bad judgment lead me to them initially. 

One understands the impetus of Jim's self-depreciation, and the JFK assassination affected him deeply, and led to political novels which I've yet to read. He survived a heart attack, and has exchanged final wishes with MacNeil, and in its over 40 year old history, what has PBS changed? It is as undeniably partisan as Fox, though with a more loquacious undertone.

I reek of perspiration. Marie does not want to rent her row home to blacks despite the fact that her grandson by marriage vandalized the property like one, and yet she wants me to rehire Timothy Artis, because I am a crippled white. I am supposed to be the bloody sainted progressive, blinded by the virtues of equality. Yes, prejudices have generational stratification, and the white Karina really didn't treat me any better than the black women before her, or the homosexual Jesse Staub evasively lying to me to get out from under the evidence of poverty on my life, but if it was my house, would I categorically red line it? Despite the caustic saline oozing out of my chest, I'd like to think I'm still not capable of that type of blanket condemnation. I am not hiring Tim back. He is a boozing addict with a record for possession who is nearly 70 and an infantile communist; dialing his number in the event of an emergency is no guarantee of anything either-- though by a miracle he saved Joey when I was evacuating the second floor to come back to the fifth, where I've been harassed into terror by my minority captors for 28 years now. Fucking charmed life.