Darren Wilson. Am I?

Hand a baby a grenade and sit riveted by Hollywood's version of Western liberalism meets the Khmer Rouge in the guise of Jolie's sculpted cheek bones in her mission statement with Clive Owen in Beyond Borders, in his giddy up version of egalitarian rage. A saga juxtaposed over the truth doesn't get us any closer to the facts about cellular organisms, because humans exposed to continuous devaluation of our lives grow hard. Even on small scale variations, numbness sets in. Not so much that we disbelieve the NIH, but anyone with a decent education can research viruses, feel uneasy about how closely they mirror independent and autonomous cell structures: Philadelphia has a significant West African contingent. Children with asthma are being stricken by a new endo virus more deadly than a cold. This may not be proverbial writing on the wall, but it might be a gross glob of snot such that inspired Balzac to write his Faustian tale about a man granted all his wishes by an ancient cloth, which, as it shrinks, damns his soul with it, and from there we start writing,  perhaps not on a wall, perhaps on our myriad pixels and code, reconsidering the solicitude we place in technology and lab cultures. Closing off the West African border may not be a very good idea. Ebola doesn't need a border.

A non academic member of the James list was confused about my private reasons for my departure from my longest, if sometimes, fractious e-list association. What did my virtual abandon of a younger woman with osteogenesis imperfecta have to do with the Jamesians? Valid question, one which I did not answer succinctly. Louise lurked on the list. I coaxed her out of her shell and then bucked, as I've written in other posts. I did not buck hard, did not engage in a tirade, but none the less, I bucked and it was a selfish act, aside from the fact, as I iterated a day or so ago, that the community is, by and large, no longer serving my hope of independent scholarship while I am busy digging my grave in the best of the projects. Certain things stay with you though. Baby pulling the pin of a grenade. The Borg are humane by virtue of comparison. Perhaps I am over-dramatizing. The managers of Riverside, the managers of Diamond Park, have been threatening me with dire consequences for 28 years. The difference, within the past year, is that I've threatened them, in writing, the baby with the grenade, liquefying my own internal organs. They call this the white butterfly in triage.