Weights and Measures

Ian Hacking has brilliantly shown how the diagnosis of fugue as a medical entity was linked in France to social concern over vagrancy.'--Pathologies of Travel, page 266

Intimations of homelessness, rolling into a crowd of young minority adolescents asking if they had seen a manila envelope I dropped to my avowed homosexual state legislator Brian K Sims and his team, after my conversation with his communications coordinator Tim, some seasons ago, who suggested that I call the police. I stopped following Sims on twitter, rarely voting on state political matters. Next my state senator, and so on. Even if I manage to leave Riverside Presbyterian intact, the way Philadelphia and its services network function, the fine and out standing professionalism of Trudy Richardson, Debra Horne, Liberty Resources, Septa, these have reduced me to pulp at the bottom of a Nutribullet, and as I have already been to CPS off Broad and Chestnut, I have little faith in their intake. I'm beaten, slaving away at some two bit tabloid website, a pallet bed in a West Philadelphia shelter doesn't seem all that bad at the moment, though the system, as it is, would sue each other about me, and I'll wind up in a place like Inglis, if not Inglis itself, the web now a huge spam cart, and beneath this beaten disabled woman is a streak of fantastic brutality so vile Blogger would shut down my account if I engaged in specificity. I know I actually of some of this cruelty in me. Not uncommon with brain damage, nor aging. I told a black woman who manages subsidized housing that I hated her, to her face, and came exceedingly close to excoriating her for her race, not caring if I did, but she played her race card on me too, trust as you may, despite the feminine pain I carry, and in this light I can tell you I am both envious and disturbed by Jean-Pierre Alaux Blood of the vine series. Like Nicolas le Floch, the adaptations of the books is well done, and we get a view of the insular world of enology, which has intrigued me for years. The French have both a bizarre and realistic take on justice and moral culpability. Much more intriguing than British didactic teachings to its wounded superpower child, yet Alaux is illustrating through his procedural what I am illustrating when I use revelation in the way I do: Sin manufactures monsters out of the innocent. An old European Jew figures out that collaborators of the Petain regime slaughtered his family during the war, and so he executes them, one by one, until a French police squad guns the fellow down, but only after Arditi, himself an odds and ends misfit who isn't quite the straight arrow, solves the puzzle, with its disturbing implications.

Europe, and undoubtedly the United States is falling down this slope as well, will never revert to colonial outgrowth. And, despite Putin, despite a surging China too, though Jinping is as much a ripe for mockery jackass as is our American Harvard Law professor (I think it is time to diminish the influence of Harvard University on national policy, seriously) the age of imperialism is over, the end of nationhood itself is, all things being relative, upon us, not in my lifetime, and maybe not quite in the lifetime of my eldest niece, but it is here, nevertheless-- yet we lose something if the post-Google global conglomerate doesn't pay attention to history, especially Old World history. Savant neighbor Robert, the spastic tart who lives in Riverside with me, told me today to believe in myself, tried and true axiom, and yet, believing in myself, the principles of personal liberty which I cherish, means I am placing my personal security in peril. I nearly took Debra Horne's head off when I talked to her yesterday, literally telling her I was tired of taking it, and meaning it. Yes, Debra is, in progressive terms, a disadvantaged minority from the South, but her matriarchal ignorance doesn't make her any less bigoted because her job is to enforce compliance. Riverside's owner, whoever this person is, isn't a slumlord, but he, she, or they, are still extortionists-- which again doesn't mean I am against property owners, just their lack of accountability, and the brutal double standards foisted on me all my life.