Urinary Tract

After consultation, middle child sister suggested I may have a urinary tract issue instead of hypoglycemia. Possibly, but I am feeling alarmingly unsteady, and wish to apologize for failing. I could just delete the blog and aim for more polish--not that I ever wanted to be a bland pedestrian, but even I did not realize how much, as a survivor, I seethe. And many out there have had it worse with disability and violence; many out there have had a few turns of the screw with activist groups, lawyers and litigators. If my medical catastrophe is coming homeward bound, I suddenly find blanks being loaded into the chamber, my soul trying to gnaw through my stationary despair, a desire for departure without so much as a farthing of hope for renewal, my mind is still fighting, striving for justification without knowing, if tolerance has stepped beyond my boundary, which it has, what in the name of nihilism I hope to achieve. Nothing, perhaps, but yes, I have forgiven the stupid black junkie who tried to subdue me, without being able to forgive inner city black culture: I've observed, seen too much, and don't seem to have a water hole available to come up for air, amid the pocket of urban destitution I've lived, the failed compatibility with my homosexual friends, my dissonance with Jewish lesbian ferocity.

Contextualize it as I might, even running to Italy would leave me at odds with the socialists in my country of ethnic origin; Italy has its own problems with migrants, space, resigned to a collapse from within, even here, I have a certain level of contempt for Palermo, tourist destination as it may be. Sicilians, staggering snort with commedia dell'arte, always dislocated from the true sense of place I've always felt I needed. I never saw the Pope in an overcoat, only to see Francis buttonholed in white in his visit with the Turkish pasha. Disconcerting, his body bundled like an angelic gangster.

I've not yet keeled. Buongiorno, on me.

Blood Children's Insulin

Justice denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.-- John Rawls, 1971

Brandon Phillips served time for his aggravated assault. Two years. Did his time, his grandmother's bones long in the ground, and the damages from the inner city and Diamond  Park, well, fifteen minutes away from a lifetime of inviolate branding, compiled by the incompetence of pluralism and cruelty of the peevish elderly, is merely fifteen minutes away. The beneficiaries in all this? The property owners, who escaped liability because I was passive, and thought the managerial minority staff were looking out for my interests.

The difference between Camille Cosby and Hillary Clinton is a matter of degree. Former Flotus stood by husband because she derived her power from a philandering husband who became the president. The Bill from Arkansas loved women, besides, though things sometimes go awry, his naked penis hanging in front of Jones an embarrassment, but legally not systemic harassment (I have done a lot of research on this). Herein lies the reason I will not vote for Mrs. Clinton. She enabled Bill's behavior in a trade off to climb the political rungs, in contrast to Napolitano, who, beyond the occasional sympathy profile, glitters with no such star dust.

The Bill from Philadelphia apparently doesn't feel our pain, and is allegedly just another black predator. Whatever side of the fence we choose, lives have been forever altered. Darren Wilson killed a future NFL scandal in Michael Brown, flabbier, if larger, than the Brandon who forever altered me. Brandon was wiry, strong, compact. Darker than Brown, and sorry but this is what he looked like, thick lips inflamed like a vagina with herpes, eyes red with hard driving inflammation, I no longer fantasize about blowing his fucking skull off; his attack was impersonal, stupid. Didn't even steal the five dollars from my consultancy fees lying on the table. If Brandon's time served is nothing against my fear of more suffering to come, contemplate what Wilson faces beyond more potential litigation: revenge threats, loss of his career. Cosby's legacy is tarnished, perhaps irretrievable, but he will be dead soon.

It is the reverberations left behind. These will reach up and ensnare the future.

Quentin Radio

"The press will have a field day with this latest escapade."-- in the script

Vengeance, if individuals are serious about enacting it, changes people. Christopher Dorner probably recognized, before the tear gas blaze in the cabin, that he had failed, and that killing his supervisor's daughter wasn't as liberating as he thought it would be, and that he was better off dead in those mountains as opposed to getting the death penalty-- and yet, his impulse to engage in anarchy against our institutional paradigms and their increasing complexity wasn't invalid.

Let me go back to Poets and Writers banning my online account (yes, I'm over it but making another point). Posters were afraid of me because I was raw with pain about what happened to me within the ranks of independent living, but, whatever my rhetoric and its decibel level, it was raw, it was grief, and beneath the surface, even today, I lost something in role models once valued. Linda was the only woman with cerebral palsy who I genuinely liked, even though, to channel Kill Bill, I knew what she was capable of. I just didn't believe she was capable of doing it to me, and in turn, she probably did not calculate that I'd put a dent in her bubble, leading to her early retirement.

That is emotional investment-- but why? Because the role model heroine was all I had, itself a sad commentary on fulfillment. The only job I never struggled with internally was my brief sojourn with AccessLife. A good editor is worth his weight in gold, but it was one position, and even with Christopher Reeve I was perhaps unfairly contentious. I am less raw now of course, but the inexorable grind is closing in on me as I age with this condition, and my line between being a bullshit artist and real malevolence is blurring, hollowly, perhaps, as the transsexual is 2/3's corpse, punishment enough for his ethics, and I was told Cassie James departed the field with an illness as well, but the thought of dying so browbeaten-- whatever the pedestrian counsels about acceptance, my ego cannot swallow it-- but what resolution would serve? It isn't about punitive  damages rolled into an annuity. It is about striking the system, and or really paying a price for which I lack the tenacity.

I have, however, become that cold.

Naivete

Bill Cosby needs to be prosecuted. If progressives believe Darren Wilson evaded a fair verdict, and I don't, whatever the inconsistencies of his grand jury testimony, something needs to be done to alleviate the accusers of the comedian, as well, and this is where I disagree with most of the Post's opinion writers on the matter, statue of limitations be damned. Kathleen, having a deadline to meet, doesn't speculate on whether NBC protected Cosby as a brand name asset, and liability may be easier to sustain against a big network. This should be investigated. I cannot claim shock. Merely minimal awareness, but the details are making me sick, turning my stomach, and this is why we're all guilty, myself included, never paying the old man's innuendo any mind.

But some of his accusers have their own culpability, just as I do. Tarshis is on the record as saying she blamed herself for many years, and this is easy to comprehend. I cannot blame myself for my mother's low life, sometimes dangerous strays, as I had no ability to get away from them, but I blamed myself for trusting my former supervisor Linda C Dezenski, as I admitted to Brian Sims aide, in tears. I *talked* to her, told her things, trusted her, and the humiliation this purchased me was and is too much to bear. Did it end her career at Liberty earlier than she would have liked? Maybe not directly, but nothing I have written about her, our interaction, is hearsay: the email threads, Liberty's assurances to me before doing me incalculable economic harm, can be traced, verified-- but I am culpable, and should have restrained myself. The trauma from that and subsequent instances, like losing unrestricted Paratransit access, the building renovations when I was absent reliable power chairs, the abuse, I am lucky to be alive.

But I'd consider it a significant lack of judgment to go to a bungalow of any sort with a celebrity like Cosby, and drink with him, by myself-- this is not to imply that Joan was looking for sexual trouble due to the fact that she was 19 and star struck, but whether or not it was the last year of the flower power decade, she displayed a critical lapse in judgment, and in Hill's case, this lapse falls on her parents. Hill was a minor, and if her allegations have any merit, she should have had an escort. Their unwillingness, or inability, to file charges within the appropriate time frame is another factor, just as it is in my case.

Statutory limitations should offer at least some latitude for the stability of the victim: I wasn't strong enough to win a settlement from Liberty Resources in the immediate aftermath of their breach, and can understand the power of that stigma. Robinson may be factually correct that serial rape has a time window, but serial revictimization is also a killer of women, crippling and impairing notwithstanding that some victims remain physically intact. 

Velleity, Mio Mal

"The light in Sicily is corpuscular," -- the perceptive cinematographer for RAI's Montalbano.

Luca Zingaretti is actually annoying for a Roman greaseball, however acculturated his Old World inadequacy against the modern age, his clean shaven pate and passive acceptance of the voluptuous female in chase of his ineptitude baffling, unlike  Terence Hill, Luca cannot fit into the spaghetti western codex.

Eastwood makes it easy in Sudden Impact, despite the moral equivocation of some of Sondra Locke's targets. Females, victimized, need to acquire the accouterments of masculine power and strike back. Not that it heals her torn psyche, necessarily. After the cartoonish punks are wiped out, Callahan has to make a judgment call about Jennifer; makes it. Everyone's debt was paid. The cost is what it is, including the price Eastwood himself pays for having created Million Dollar Baby using the same Social Darwinism model dressed up with characters in whom we invest. Eastwood is the only conservative who offers the disabled an answer within his ideology: death with dignity is better than being defeated by an environment with scarcity of resource, though Hilary is, of course, only an actress performing a white trash home girl out of her depth, and as an able-bodied women felled by the realities of the boxing industry, her decision for active euthanasia was easy for audience empathy. Developmental conditions are another matter, and for that we have to dive back in the archive for the orangutan and related mimics to loosening. 

Gang rape is a rare phenomenon, involving the dynamics of group psychology with which Sabrina Erdely should have been armed before she proceeded apace, perhaps inserted in the script to mitigate Locke's vengeance, presupposing we still live in a world where we can resolve injustices perpetrated on our own initiative.

Ulysses may be a very large Joycean experiment, but Virginia Woolf succeeds without resorting to so many belabored correspondences, though we would never allow To The Lighthouse to supersede the former. Both novels hew to their scenic locales. Woolf's alluding subtly is richer than Joyce's, not so prone to cerebral hemorrhaging. Certain Romans aren't keen on the brogue.

A See D See

She's overwrought with vengeance." Peter Rainer

The exertion it takes to masturbate outweighs the reward, but when time is taken to deal with a cunt as uncomfortable now as it was in my folly to ask Linda's advice on the matter, I scroll through a dreary set of scenes. A pallet mattress in a greyish flophouse where I am gang coaxed into masochistic submission, or go through a tie down in some stolen episodes from Japanese porn, with very little cognizance as to why Western men go for Asian women, although I find Indian men arousing and have a rape scene with my former cigarette vendor, infrequently, and exchanged Jim Brown for Bill Cosby in Joan's viral redeye scenario, or would have swapped Cosby for Brown had I remembered Brown was representative of black power in my era. Who, after all, wants to get raped by a thick lip flapper with a floating eye such as Cosby exhibits?

Black abuse of my person is the indelible stain, yet I have not taken my own life, unsure if it is sheer will or simply lethargy, perhaps both, but I will never again allow an African of either gender to lay a hand on me, ever.

Sometimes it's a whirlpool bath, or the married computer consultant's dick. He was kind to me. I called myself his whore, lacerating my soul over meaningless sex with a man whose wife cuckholded him and had a middle aged spastic's insistence. I almost had a fight with my mother's sister and would have had cellphone not served as a check. It isn't her fault she cannot see what institutionalization and her older sister's mental health has done to me. Like my own younger sister, she cannot see it, cannot deal with it, and that is most any audience, almost as indigent now as I was when I ran here because Jerry McGuire was an absence of presence. People attempted to tell me when I was that young that my compulsion to attach to his like was an obstinate distortion, but then again, I have never lived life with a full throttle investment. Not that I feel it any longer, his absence of presence. I've used up that little bit, and to be honest with you, I am irked SUNY contacted me about a no nothing reading I did in Pittsburgh. Not with them. Him. Still playing the teacher with his fucking encouragement. Christ man. I'm a cripple. Neither you, nor Michael, nor David ever talked to me about realistic career options.

You all taught me how to think. Bravo. Didn't stop me from being a vibrating pin cushion for every fucking imaginable threat out there. Even if I agree with blue blood liberals like Dana that McCulloch shielded Darren Wilson, I am glad that he did, which is the inverse of being relieved that Michael Brown is dead, but if you fuck with cops, then you can expect to become dead. I do not fuck with officers, and I can still expect, that one day I may die in their custody. Visions of how that plays out are as varied as the wind. 

Cleaned my coffee pot. Beet salad, lentil soup. If I could lose sixty pounds and get my teeth fixed, a fedora and a zoot suit would suit me just fine, and you can pass the cannoli on that. Plenty of hot coffee too.

Artificial Insemination

the share of folks not in the labor force remains near all-time highs-- my former grant funder

I was partially in error about Clarity Media's automat. Whatever unfathomable, mysterious reason, after offering my former editorial team a foul berating, I'm still receiving mails from AXS, in the calamitous state of affairs with the economics of content. I am sorely beginning to miss three dimensional space; haven't been back to my Examiner page. If it still exists. Worth more than the arthritis of my ligaments have put into it, I believe I'm worth more, I mean, than penny generated content. Maybe Morris believes she is worth more too, and would like to claw out Spielberg's eyes in a Minority Report rendition. It was her best role, getting Tom Cruise out of deep freeze in a good movie with a silly second sight premise. Women like Penelope Cruz seem to exist to get Cruise out of deep freeze.

Motifs associated with Morris to some extent. With objections to Cold Case otherwise noted, what it does differently is pace itself at the slow speed of reminiscence. It's best propaganda tool was its third oldest puzzle, Best Friends, and Tessa Thompson makes the most of her time on camera. The writers were clever, making it a girl crush, perhaps a transplant from the Harlem Renaissance. Could such affairs of the heart have occurred in Philadelphia in 1932? Between a moon faced Rosie and a minority fedora dyke? (I have a fondness for this male fashion statement which must mean I am repressing the liberating aspects of finding good pencil thin clit; get me to a psychoanalyst to embrace my deeply repressed bisexuality! That is what the LBGT activist terrorists would allege.) I doubt it. Caucasian male and a black woman, yes, but in 32 lesbianism did not exist as a recognized classification. Tessa's Billie dies not because of white male intolerance, but because the screen writers guild indulged in a progressive fairy tale. Yes, the jilted male beau gangs up on the pretty "darkie" girl, so the audience is offered a less than 30 second consequence, but it is still a dream sequence.

We'd react differently if this was transposed on Showtime, elongated into a drama series of depression era lesbianism between a maid and a bootlegger's sister. The world is not in fact shaded in back and white overtones with soft or harsh studio lighting. The writers in fact end the episode almost as if Rosie was a Victorian heroine, compensated for repressing her fascination with the attraction to the forbidden by being granted affluence, burying her dalliance within the safety of fantasy. One can see why Morris is cast between the fantastical and the futurist. Her countenance has that zeitgeist of the alien about it, otherworldly, living in her own dreamscape, whether we scrutinize her biography, chasing after what year she left Temple University after the rest of us, or not.

Joan Tarshis

When I hear of horrific things like like Tarshis being sodomized after downing a redeye, I feel compelled to reach out to the victim through shared experience, though I myself was never forcibly sodomized. Stuart Lone, my fabled heroin addicted stepfather, merely groped me, tortured my dead brother in front of my eyes. It was mother's man before him, another stone addict named Beaky, ugly as sin, who tried to rape me, and I let my ex Frank penetrate me anally, perhaps out of self-hatred, and I did not like the pressure on my bowel. Had problems days afterward. Well, I found the old woman, coping with her torment, much as I am letting it all hang out, coping with mine and losing, understanding Robinson's cautious commiseration  and Ta-Nehisi Coates' struggle with his conscience.

As an Italian woman with quadriplegia assaulted by a black relative of a public housing tenant and molested by a biracial inner city woman, I do not really have a say in this internecine argument about black identity spilling over into white cross over acclaim. Cosby did not have the greatest impact on me due to the popularity of Cliff Huxtable, rather, I had to endure countless instructional films of Bill Cosby doing exaggerated versions of Ralph Ellison's lone black man defiantly penetrating through the brick walls of white preconceptions, and it influenced my subconscious about the righteousness of being a straight arrow. Now I have to live with the imagery of his alleged forced penetrations, with these women alone with him like naked sheep, shorn of their woolly coats, in our sexually permissive society.

I tweeted to Joan. You can read it. I cannot enter into how she lives with it, being forcibly fucked by such a talented man who had such an influence on our psyches. It isn't about whether or not we believe her, or want to defend an icon who may have to end his public career on such a note, it is more about what kind of society we want, where trauma is apparently the new normal, and nothing is innocent any longer. Coates' observation that we generate our moral values from people like Cosby may seem a deft perception, but in reality, personality cults cut across human cultures. It isn't simply an American meme. Napoleon is still a herald in France. Margaret Thatcher was part of a Reagan era triad, of some sort, and so on. Nomenclatures evoke their own language, and Ellison would probably be turning in his grave. I was naive enough to tape his picture and obituary on my door in the inner city the year he passed away in 1991, a man whose genius strove more than most to call identity politics the tragedy for which they were. Right now I can't forgive anyone. Black journalists, corporate media, women like me and Joan who eat it and don't fight back until it is far too late, certainly not a comedian who made me believe my moral center was a justified possibility.

Follow the guidelines

I do not enjoy taking myself too far afield with this account--

("oh really, that's news" I hear you people, since we all regress to high school, I hear you) but I'll address twitter directly, though this applies to author viewers who happen upon this account through other means:

After nine months of practice, I have learned I actually don't mind reviewing if I care about something, so I am still willing to review twitter authors. I looked up Publisher's Weekly guidelines, and they need four months advance notice. I know their voice from my third life on Amazon--don't we all-- and they will probably reject any write up I do at first; the tough part is they require a four month advance notice.

If you want to trust me that far, contact me with at least that much time prior to your publication date, though for me, a few weeks extra might be advantageous, and if, or when, I find another outlet similar or akin to Examiner, I will let you know.

One thing that annoys me about myself is why I allow myself to get upset over so little. Examiner was like a middle school refresher, and while I may never be good enough for the bylines I'd kill for (I believe that I am on the basis of past experience) getting back on the horse wasn't valueless. That David Brooks made the leap from The Weekly Standard to NYT informs on the insights gained about the dirt in this business, however, and Clarity Media has questionable ethics because it is a cut rate operation.

Personal Responsibility

A year out of my life, almost, for virtual crap. In late summer I did my own piece on Chanticleer gardens for Examiner's mirror site, AXS, and uploaded it on the wrong site without realizing it, which precipitated Thursday's events.

I wasn't going to quit. I had decided, before I drove down to John's shop for the Toshi, to be polite with the editorial team, submit a ticket, which I did, and tread water until I could find another venue, but I got mad. After nine months, they still can't treat me like a person and offer me personalized responses. No writer can field everything alone, and I've failed, I guess, with content development, at about a 30 to 60 ratio, but they approved my Chanticleer write up, asked for a photo, and when I emailed Nikki Brodt (actually Lloyd, but in this instance, her name is meaningless) on my phone to tell her my pc was down, in not 48 hours they rejected the article.

I stayed polite, asked for guidance, and they send me Google News guidelines, as if unable to think for themselves. Who needs it if it takes me 6 or 7 months to accrue 15 dollars sent to Paypal? Yet I stayed, and I feel deflated for having resigned from slave labor. I don't know what to do anymore, honestly people. Even when I was so angry at Linda that I went berserk, all those years ago, I could not engage in self harm, remembering my mother's suicide attempts. I put myself back together, however slowly, however caviler, disparaging therapists, but I hung on. What do I do now? Even if I could get it, I don't think I'd be happier at Huffington Post, if they operate on the same principal, even if more higher end, than Clarity's Cracker Jack spin offs.

Not that Yahoo has a dossier on my temperamental online history, but they've carried water on some of it, and though their articles have gotten better, they aren't a particularly good media culture for me. Sigh.

Update: I unsubscribed from Examiner's auto barrage of trending topics, but they haven't closed my page, and I am unsure of what to do about that until I update my resume. Not feeling well with this brutal November cold either.

Tin Men

"What if God was one of us?"-- Joan Osborne

My first thought, as the allegations against Cosby gathered steam last month, was: Why did these women never prosecute and file formal charges? My fear, 14 years ago, wasn't about going after my supervisor so much as it was how those on Philadelphia's Human Relations Commission would regard my depressive episode that followed in its wake. Then I think of my stepfather, Stuart, plying me with Jack Daniels. I too never prosecuted my mother's lovers for sexual assault. I too, never contacted the police about Miss Eddie from Unlimited Staffing.

It becomes increasing difficult to bear, with age, and yet no one wins here. People older than I too look on Cosby as a beloved figure. As a child, his projection of authority was a solidifying force, and perhaps date rape is more difficult to prove than a forensic examination of my email thread with Linda C Richman prior to her divorce: If I did go after Eddie legally, also, it is my word against hers, despite the prevalence of nursing aide abuse.

To protest that nothing is sacred doesn't mean I think Cosby's fractured image should be glued back together. It is an outcry, our faith always foundering on the shoals. In Helen Gurley Brown mode, with a middle of the road sentiment about men, their virility, and hands on slap and tickle, I had hoped this was about a grandee engaging in overly forceful groping, but the use of drugs screams out rape crime, loud and clear.

During my unexpected vacation, I had to re assess my physical ability to hold down traditional employment, and the axis is wobbly. As a lead in to what I've been turning round in my mind, Cold Case was never quite my cup of tea as a procedural, neither realistic nor fantastic enough to break its televisionish  stodginess, but it had poignant sound tracks.

Withering Pressure

To Examiner: I was going to try to hang on until I found a new position, but your automated management is contradictory and doesn't foster supportive relationships between disadvantaged contributors and your editorial staff. I am a quadriplegic with spastic cerebral palsy, and I've busted my ass for your aggregating demands for next to nothing. As I see little hope of advancement, fuck you, and fuck your parent company in Denver. This means I quit, affectionately.-- my sentiments exactly


And that is that, except for the fact that Examiner, being a digital tabloid, will probably keep my yahoo address on its rolls for a time: I cannot feel too badly, as receiving 10 dollars for over 12,000 words in 9 months signifies I am almost better off writing for nothing, looking at all the labor I've put into it. (Thus far, I am indeed still logged in to my page, we'll see.)

As happens to most Presbyterian tenants, my family is pressuring me on one hand while Trudy Richardson barks her thus far empty threats on the other, but Marie's sentiments that "I'll wind up on the street" are vacuous, simply by default. The corporate office may move for eviction before I find a lawyer, I can't say one way or the other, but the city would do what the company doesn't have the authority to do: reinstitutionalize me in the event of notice of intent, but I told Marie, as she continues to divest herself of her internal organs, that I can't live with what has been done to me anymore. whether it portends destruction or a new path for my remaining viability. I've learned how to surf, using the 5c, in my floundering absence, and realize how disconnected the devices leave us, despite content convenience. Scrolling my posts on a Mac safari is one thing: Offering me a way out of our merciless safety net is another. I understand. I have to fend for myself. I do regret, a little, losing my reviewer status. Evaluating books isn't that bad a task, but Clarity Media's model is notoriously bad.

Tucson Conversations

Great curiosity and a greater memory were necessary, Tertullian, De testimonio animae

The sometimes self published poet Laurel Speer was one of the last independents I had a traditional correspondence with, and it was Laurel's essays to me that Karina, eating her own zeitgeist, tossed in the trash, which ignited my blazing saddles warfare with-- as much as I want to use invective, it is a judgment how often one can rail with "muthafucker niggers" all the time before people stop reading-- but suffice it to say, like one of John Gardner's murdered anarchists, I look at black culture with a jaundiced eye, even with the security guard calling me at 11 during the election returns because a tenant heard a noise-- the disabled with ability to matriculate should stay out of public housing, whatever else-- Laurel's daughter is disabled, so unlike the suburbanites on P&W's site, my emotional pain did not seem to faze her when I copped to it, on our typing paper exchanges. She did not deign to advise me, lecture me about drugs, and I did not offer my opinion about her poetry. She is a better columnist, and if she and I were to have a public debate, which I know she likes to do, she would probably write, is this scurrilous online attitude working for you?

But the larger question is about the limits of tolerance, and what comes after the destruction of civilization if annihilators succeed before we destroy the environments from which we evolved, and we threaten ourselves with silence. Most literary writers seem threatened with it, at some point, as the flesh shrinks, we are not at our most dynamic. I do not want to email Eugene Robinson with pride in informing him of my bigotry-- what I'd like to know is why the American black mindset is so schematic, so fatalistic, so pretentious, and with all that so predatory, willing to make me expendable because I am the weakest link. This is also why I need to find a way out of Riverside. If I had listened to my parents, to Jerry, whose memory I've abused with unfair license, I would still think Martin Luther King had justice on his side. Now I see de facto segregation as the better form of sanity, and in my heart, that homosexuals need an exorcist, which could be the hyperbole of bisexual trauma, but nuance is, shall we say, on going.

I have had kinky fantasies, nothing worth writing about, as I am conservative even  in masturbation, but after what I've been through, imagination and reality often crash with unexpected results. The sloth who hit on me, Eddy, she did not make me realize that lesbian games were for me. Being exploited by inner city trash made me sick, and made me understand my own father's racism when, like any teenager, she wanted to sow her oats. Now I do papa one better.

Having seen a couple of Walking Dead episodes, the series isn't just a blue collar form of empowerment, it is a Southern cautionary tale for urbanites, one that I'm unsympathetic toward, though power chairs would have trouble with homestead terrain.

Trickle Down

My choices this evening is the cable zombie hit or a comic book movie about a vigilante. I hate zombie films, zombie themes, but realize the popularity of the series was due to the performance of composite Americans under threat from atavistic hordes. I could quell my curiosity, read my rereads and new reads, mull my a la carte labor for Examiner: If I stop writing for them, I lose the discipline it gives me, but staying is equally thankless, given my age and return for my labor, and the fact that I want more cerebral projects.

I really can't take the stress of trying to relocate myself in the face of such odds, and okay, if I have to buckle, then I'll buckle.

The Doctrine of the Faith

Research, seriously trying to restore my veneer of respectability even if it kills me, which it might, but let's start simply and work our way up, or delve into contact tracing:

1. I basically think homosexual norms are evil
 a. Secular liberalism runs a close second

2. I concede 1 is partly based on Semitic doctrine even as monotheism is increasingly under assault, not without reason

3. But the main justification for 1 is personal experience, much of which, but not all, of course, I detailed in earlier posts.

4. I accept that micro-biology is complicated, but I reject it as an excuse for sexual orgies, and the permissiveness of sexual indulgence.

5. This may seem to contradict my near hatred of socialism and the welfare state, but one thing at a time.

As I need some rest, I'll hold it there, but I think it is time for a new authoritarian society to emerge, globally, and I'll refine these points as we go along.

Unsworth out of hiding

Hydrochloric Acid? It is what the Russians used.

Issue: I might not have the manual dexterity not to burn my thigh off, but the good news is this: I hid my Stone Virgin edition so the inadvertent dope fiend would not take it, in the pet supplies yellow coarse weave carry bag, hanging on my useless manual wheelchair. Scorched earth soul appeased. I can delete Karina's number from my Apple, remembering articles read about picture phones in the 70's, but those concepts weren't Skype, nor Steve Jobs and his touch interface fetish. Karina called me back, despite my constant indictment of her behavior. I take no pleasure in the continual accusation, as she was not exploiting me the way the sisters do.

I remember Ebert's 30 second discussion of The Constant Gardner, before silence clutched him. I am fighting the desire to cry over the infamous critic, and that conjures my email to Hitchens. Neither Ebert nor Hitchens ever replied to me, but I fancy inferences, though those could be erroneous, I avoided the film like the plague, knowing the British penchant for moralizing and fastidious faith in red tape, and should have continued to avoid the film, like the plague, and right now, we're not going to discuss it, suffice to say here is a radical idea: Everyone get the fuck out of Africa and let Africans solve their own problems. 

In another life, Ralph Fiiennes is the husband I wanted, however. He would not have failed to protect me, to make me happy, and that sorrow is my beaker's jagged edge. Le Carre is adept at characters, fully fleshed, driving his plots, but at the end of the day, his pessimism is another shovel of dirt in our graveyard, like my internal struggle to stop writing for Examiner. I log on to send them a tag, quit, and then realize it is a crock, and I can slow to an inexorable crawl, in search of another venue. 

Delusions of American Syndicalism

As Morris describes members-only unionism, it is based on voluntary membership, and does not rely on NLRB-recognized exclusive representation (which recognizes exactly one union as the representative of an entire bargaining unit)--Life-Long Wobbly

It has often been noted, that within his directorial framework, Frank Capra was very dark in his journey toward his egalitarian, if heavily Westphalian, utopia, and this is just as true for Lost Horizon as for his more successful films. The point of contention for a skeptical viewer resides as much in Capra's wobbly axis as it does in the metaphor as a struggle for faith. The script falters, unsure of itself and the price of doubt, and fails to acknowledge that even the nirvana of Shangri-La is striated on the belief of ethnographic European superiority.

It also illustrates the danger of allowing adamant visionaries too much power in Hollywood. Capra must have known something about the Wobbly anarchy which in his time was just beginning to fade, not really libertarian, simply a reversal of polarity toward labor rather than managerial processes, which, in the Depression era collectivism of the American village, was dangerous. Dissimilar to any president since, Hoover actually faced the threat of rebellion, and his passing of the reigns to a benevolent blue blood like Franklin was simply the course of genealogy from which the country has never recovered. These days it isn't so simple, of course. We've moved from leftist radical to "the liberal progressive spectrum," to quote Krugman, who looks increasingly frail.

As an historical artifact, Lost Horizon is absolutely worth viewing, and sets a precedent for future surrealist poses, even if they obfuscate their way toward disaster, but critically, the metaphor is rife with contradiction, particularly as it relates to how the original pilot was vanquished. Someone would have heard a struggle, found a body, so the European passengers must have been dead in the first place, with the exception of Conway, whose brother George cannot accept the truth, and thus perishes trying to give his brother back to the world as the absolutely essential Foreign Secretary.

Is Maria's discontent analogous to Lucifer's rebellion? Does Capra feel evil is the reality set against sedate metaphysics? 

The man was a loon, and his amputee lama Perrault just as sinister as Ahab, his legacy problematic, very much alive. The number of human beings who can recall what any existence was like prior to Its A Wonderful Life is dwindling, as it must, but we believe in Stewart's triumph with the bump on his head in our collective noggins, and that, too, is the folly of American sentiment. Bill Gates certainly contributed to what he became, and deserves credit in his current status as the last American tycoon, whether or not his ferocity with his geniuses was trumped up, but circumstances played a part in his fate, like smaller computing units, and he and his wife should be able to see damaged potential and offer it a hand while they're curing malaria for Africans.

There is a mind here.

Urbane Nobelesse

Still, I have to ponder credence and ask how many of you would sacrifice yourselves, pointlessly, for the sake of a real bitch and her memory? Not sure whether to damn le Carre or Fiennes on this. le Carre, much like Michael Lewis, is an expert in his field, always intent on exposing his idols as false deities so that we can do the same. What stops us is self-interest, or being overwhelmed by too many causes, competing and canceling each other out. I sacrificed myself on much less than great sex with a stick in the mud falling for the fire of my conviction, equally pointless.

CripSpeak

This is the way developmental disability works. Without knowing anything else about him, I would email Ken Cruickshank in no more than a blink of an eye, as if he understood all the injustice of my emotional wounds that have carpet bombed Poets & Writers and Yahoo Chat, and type, "I have been told I'd be happier if I lived in Oregon. Could you and your family assist me with relocation?" Without having any regard for the fact I am a total stranger who doesn't have a decent Instagram representation of herself. The same exact mind that can openly excise vile demons with a so what attitude, who in turn knows nothing about him, I'd do it anyway, which is why suburban women of a certain class, like my mother's sister, like the effect of anti-depressants on my reactive capacity. It is one area that unites Aunt Mary with minorities like my apartment manager, the difference being Trudy isn't a relative and offends me by talking slang. Psycho-tropic drugs have risks, and can send someone with my brain lesions into seizures-- this is why I do not take them anymore. When I did, they impeded function, and I have seen anti-anxiety medications kill women like me. A resident here named Cheryl Ward, briefly my client. 24. Whatever they gave her killed her. She overdosed or had an adverse reaction, and used to express her fear of the door rattling. My fear is slightly more attuned. 

Trudy Richardson and Debra Horne are bigoted minorities with too much power over my interior dignity, ergo, bigots with power create reactive bigotry in turn, and homosexual squeaky boys like Brian K. Sims find this radioactive politically, to be sure. Besides, physicians most often don't take in the whole picture, and are less than inclined to admit that distressed patients represent huge earnings. Bowel impaction generates a great deal of my anxiety, and there is no cure for it. Comes with the extent of my condition, and the less calorie intake I have, at my age, the more difficult my bowel movements. It can take two days for me to clear my colon in winter.

Not to say that connections wouldn't be able to find me a less threatening housing environment. Presbyterian Homes is not about respecting rights. It is a business, expending and eliminating vulnerable people, and that, at Philadelphia's cut rate socialism.

Red Light, Somewhat West of Kathmandu

My religion is complicated. Literature is my true religion. After all, I come from a completely non-religious family.-- One of Orhan's many interviews at the intersection of art and agitprop.

Ellen Burstyn was the singular embodiment of first wave feminism in my youth; if Valerie Harper came into the limelight easing tensions about woman's lib and the now funereal ERA, which the Clinton quest for dominion certainly illustrates to be absurdest theater, Burstyn was the studio panacea for the deflated aspirations of Gloria Steinem. Ms Magazine is dead, and the only semantic relevance of girl power is simply to deconstruct the binary nature of gender roles.

Hence, a signature feature like Resurrection has been avoided out of tacky embarrassment, much like the five minutes given to Deepak Chopra's assurances offered to the anxiety of Christian gnosticism, and yet, no one forgets the end of this film, an old woman, coming to terms with self-reliance and the unexplained, passes her curative touch to a sick little boy, and for those who need God to exist outside of natural law, the pesky business of ontology is resolved as a triumph, which lies at the heart of salvation. Tragedy can be sudden and deep, like the accident which cripples the title character Ellen makes her own, but there are the consolations of grace, mysteries beyond biology, but Petrie doesn't quite rest on his laurels, picking sides. He indicts science for subjecting Edna to cruel objectification, and then takes aim at the theists for utilizing this woman as an agenda she certainly never subscribed to, turning her gift into a scourge, something the X-men franchise picks up later in a one dimensional fashion, in this century.

Resurrection makes no bones about the fact that ordinary people are heroic backbones, that common sense encapsulates eccentricity as a carnivalesque experience, if left to itself, and the absolute determination to have all the answers is sometimes more detrimental than acceptance of things beyond comprehension, and leaves the audience wanting to believe in the greater good. 

I was going to convey, with an embarrassment of my own, that I've temporarily fallen in love with the voice, the vision, of Orhan Pamuk, which is inexplicable. Charlie Rose annoys me most of the time, and it may be I absorbed Orhan's responses because he was equally exotic and pasteurized as an Ottoman Imperial elite, but his resonance on me as the invisible graduate has no rational basis, unless it goes back to my story about my phantom sexual liaison with Jerry McGuire as a figment of my imagination.

The intelligentsia, while observant of my potential, often silently eyes me with consternation for my disruptions in the breach, and if I met Pamuk in whatever setting, he would probably recoil, taken aback, and I'd bristle with insolence, but from this distance, a gulf as wide as an aftershock, his stratagems in his story tellings have pierced the bitter vines which have entangled my internal organs, little salve to whatever such reverberations amount. 

Scales to Skin, Anthropogenic?

"I thought you might like to have it back."-- Dustin Hoffman

There are two films in American distribution entitled Heaven. Blanchett's pre-Babel dramatic allegory, and the earlier Scott Reynolds construct, where Martin Donovan is coyly etched with attractive facial lines, and Danny Edwards does a good job at being a Cosmo coca exotic lure. Both films pit metaphysical conceits with no real world veracity against Western materialism-- in the case of Reynolds a gritty and colorful American materialism-- and in each narrative-- materialism loses. In the 98 film, the loss goes to a transgendered minority with second sight, and in the 02 film, corruption and greed fail to swallow the self-righteous, as encapsulated by Blanchett and Ribisi, barely male and female in their sexual division of the name Philip.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, purposely archived in 2013, Ebert is unhappy with Tykwer's denouement for his poignant morality play, but I am less sanguine that the escape via helicopter was meant to be happy. The fugitive couple vanish like pin pricks in a particle wave as if they never existed in the first place.

Hollywood loves tantalizing audiences with the prospect of the sordid glamorized on screen. Black victimization, cross-dressed in the minstrel tradition, that's entertainment! In real life, inner city sexual practices in the closet veer toward the slovenly, slothful repugnance, thirty second news clip, cousin of so and so from the block raping a five year old, or my *agency* attendant throwing herself on top of me. Dirty, in this context, doesn't mean sexually naughty. It means soiled, just as Phillippa's self-made bomb, in a real city environment, has a grotesque sputum streak about it, even if the terrorist cause has legitimate grievance. Sometimes it does.

Gay marriage will not elevate all homosexual activity on an equal playing field with sexual expressions of love between a man and a woman as representative of a celebration of life. This is just progressive wishful thinking, and won't mitigate corruption that Hollywood does correctly associate between queer lifestyles and criminal illegality. I have had too much real world experience . Where activists and people on the fringes congregate, unethical behavior and corruption usually have a thriving nest. Stability comes with a price, and that is affluence, which itself is not self-sustaining for very long periods of time. Even in a film like Tootsie, probably one of the last of its kind, the script had the courage to illustrate that sexual deception can, does, have negative consequences. Durning's character fell for an exaggerated variation of a drag queen, but that character, the butt of audience laughter while the cat was in the bag, wasn't so funny, humiliated, when Hoffman's character gave up the game.