Plummet

"I had stopped petitioning the heavens for miracles four days before."-- Sheri Booker

Even in 2009, during my brief electronic correspondence, or conservation, with Daniel Schneider, his offer of a byline in Cosmoetica would have been a downgrade. I had already appeared in nearly a hundred literary journals. Even with my CV, I've lost count of my bylines, for everything, articles, poetry. In this sense, my long nine month stint at Examiner hurt me too. After getting in legacy media, chasing tail aggregating for peanuts kept me fluid, but hurt me professionally. Perhaps constancy reflected a certain uneasiness. Getting buried in endless repetition of stringer scoops is nothing, and it is the same with Dan's writing. Good for a student, but at some point, exposure is meaningless if all we do is skim. Penetrating the value market will not help me much unless I can build something sustainable from any future bylines, and get work I can handle.

The flap over Erdely's lax dependence on her primary source, which seems to involve more than a hint of buyer's remorse (collegiate age girls may want to rethink promiscuity?) and the much more disturbing crisis with Hughes and TNR, suggest that the lightning speed of reactivism is a continuing problem, and that we're fast losing nuances in contemplation, which at the very least, The New Republic offered as a glossy, whether or not you were a supporter. I appreciated the fascinating insights into a composer like Stravinsky even if I never invested in learning classical music, and I suspect the insulation needed for that is difficult to accrue through surfing a synopsis-- it points to my level of indifference over the death of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, which is as cold as you like. Not that cops aren't a favorite target of beat reporters for a reason. Police do criminal things, sometimes rape hoes as well, but protesters develop tunnel vision, and I've turned myself blue in the face attempting to expose what I have acquired, empirically, through so called disability activism. My antagonism toward individuals like Jimmi Shrode and Erik and Josie, and the catastrophic knife in my back from Linda and our disability center, is as much about their hypocrisy as it is the ossified sterility of the paradigm. Jimmi is all about transitioning the helpless, decentralizing them. Accepting my emotional injury because he used his personal relationship with Erik to take advantage in an federalized system which demands impartiality, this he cannot do, and thus I'm persona non grata.

It will happen among these progressives of conscience with their sit ins. Darren Wilson did not set out to murder Brown. He was doing his job on patrol, and the NYPD did not intend to kill Garner in public. They were subduing a man placed under arrest. To use Erik's phrase, "shit happens," like the climate change which we're all on the doomsday machine to repair. We may not be able to repair it, and if we traded off civil liberties for the sake of security after 9/11, what about our food sources in a hundred years if global warming becomes a calamity? Take a step back. We are not all equal in value, and never will be.