The Song of Bernadette

"I had to forget, otherwise life would have been impossible."--Jose Semprin via The Paris Review

My mother took me off the bus in my smaller leg braces that only went up my shin, after school. "Your father has something to tell you." I pranced, excited in my early attachment to suburban animal husbandry. "Where's Squeally?" I queried, he was a big brown bastard about the size of a large Indian rat, similar to this, and kept the house up all night shrieking for a neighbor's female, white as a rat; whose idea this was, to let Squeally meet and scent the female, seemed to be a majority and vastly unwise consensus, because Squeally lived up to his fucking name. He shrieked after the neighbor took the female away and he wouldn't shut up. I loved Squeally. "Your father has something to tell you." And my father held a large brown paper bag, and there was Squeally in the bag with his wood chips, and beloved poppa held a funeral for Squeally for his Nanna, his poor Nanna for whom he hated his wife. It was an illegal and amusing Catholic service for our less intimidating rodent species, in our beautiful rancher with its half acre which is why I love my father, hate my mother, and would put progressives into labor camps. My only cherished moment in a bad marriage between a woman with Sophia Loren's beauty and a sick overwrought mind, shrewish tongue, and her Roman husband. My only good memory. Then I was abandoned, in a room with a bed. By the time I was released from this merciless regiment, purportedly for my own good, my mother was a divorced, hypersexualized slut who nearly killed and permanently damaged her children. She did kill my little brother, because he could not take the pain. Many American stories may be like this, but for me it never ceased, and this is why I cannot forget. Ray Bruno inserted himself in the middle of this. I don't know why, nor what he saw. My intellectual promise was enough? Not anymore, and it's why I hate the activists I came up with, why the cleanliness of dispensing with sick human bodies, those with no further redeeming value, is attractive, even pristine, as it relates to the shells of sapien humanity, like Erik von Schmetterling, the female who is more a Shakespearean horror figure than not, inexplicably linked to the sexual ambiguity of Macbeth's witches. 

HUD believes in culling also. This is what the social safety net of liberal governance is about. Progressives want scarcity of resource to be concealed, and this is why I take the risks that I do. My tough little body may have another fifteen years, give or take; my independence does not. Shut me down if you wish. I intend to keep pushing. Nothing is perfect, but maybe as an end result we can start being more honest. The more complex administration of distribution becomes, the more flawed the regulatory enforcement is, and what I'm asking of my viewers is why I had to keep the medical model in business for all but perhaps a decade of my life if it is going to end the same way, in a room, with a bed, and a ventilator, maybe a catheter for end stage renal disease. We push empathy beyond the limits of where it should be, despite Hawking in his curious role of international shaman. I want real freedom in the little time I can still hold on my own, and to do that I need an Uber model, one willing to barter with poverty.