The Fullness of Life

"It will never work."-- Marie Varenas

One thing that stands out in the Talhotblond docudrama is everyone's thick setness, even Jessi Shieler. Certainly attractive, but no anorexia waif. Her mother is portly, her father looks built, and even Brian Barrett looks like a sausage beer belly in the making. Only Tom Montgomery wasted himself away to a gauntness commensurate with the travesty of his actions. I was going to be my usual incendiary self, and inveigh that I wish I had a character like marinesniper in my back pocket to manipulate, but honestly, I feel badly for the fellow. He is still human, and Schroedor illustrates this in a compelling fashion. A disabled woman, never loved, can read the hell in this man's eyes, red hot pokers that have creased mine with an opaque lack of clarity.

Was he insane in the commission of the crime? On the basis of the fact that this was an online chat relationship, I would imagine so, but who is rational in the belief that a device like a computer can transform our droll lives inundated with saturated fat? Next to Mary Shieler's pathological transference onto her daughter, I am not only sane, but too intelligent for my own good, but there is nothing here in this story to respect. Mary Shieler wanted to be her daughter, got off on jerking men around, and Tom Montgomery had unreachable pain, pain which should bar him from any release back into society.

I started out my online life on Yahoo chat, and had enough cyber sex to warrant vaginal replacement, not a few questionable phone contacts, took it all too seriously, made myself stop, and my societal status is such I would not be caught dead on Match.com. I am what I am, an unremarkable homily cripple who lets herself get fucked over and sometimes can't help but face the oncoming train, and lo and behold, thousands are like me, at least in certain respects. What is it about the technology that does this to so many people? In part, devices are shields; in part, role playing is a vicarious coping mechanism, but there is more to it, a break down in semantic relevance. One thing I share with the poor, despite my overly long academic history, is a belief that killing has a place in our conversion, as Cormac McCarthy argues in his fiction. I believe it because every opportunity I had to litigate against what happened to me in the city of my birth, I never took, and like Joan Tarshis, one of Cosby's alleged early victims, I have to live with it, and keep eating it, or devolve in my rhetoric, which I have, oh yes, verily, but there is no justified linguistic texture for Tom or Mary here. I cannot even get angry, as I normally would.

I can say Americans are incredibly stupid, but my vulnerability, this morning, cannot slither back into contempt, sitting on its laurels. That poor young woman Jessi has to live with her mother's bizarre, almost homicidal envy. The Barrett's lost their kid because of middle age regressions chasing after the fountain of youth, and I am a desperately failed writer clinging by my fingernails while the merciless clinical jaws of poverty close in on me. My aunt annoys me because she shoots down these present bids I make for senior year adaptation, but I do not see the harm in a bid for relocation with a live in companion. I know my own narrative.