Hepatic Cirrhosis

"There is this sense of urgency."-- Charlie Rose

It is not enough for me that Sally Mann is the cipher and the filter for her stricken husband, Larry. It may be enough for him. It may be enough for Sally, who, obviously, is insecure with the recognition her photography provoked, and needs discretion as a shield despite the impact of her aesthetic revelations, and it may be enough for an intrepid interviewer like Rose, but a much more difficult video for Charlie's audience to digest would have been to interview Larry Mann about what it is like dying from muscular dystrophy after giving his life for his wife's pursuit of interpreting the world through a camera lens. That's tougher than for what mercy allows, and it would have created controversy for a tired old man whose heart did not kill him, and made Sally herself more of a lightning rod.

In fact, I am going to throw down the gauntlet: Before Charlie retires, I am challenging him to interview nobody. I'd like to see what he would do with an individual with a developmental disability who strove and failed. I want him to cut across the insularity of success and sit at that table with a cripple scorched by poverty, a squandered genius, and see what happens, because I've grown cynical about aesthetic bubbles, and the priesthood surrounding altered perspectives. It isn't that images cannot change the world, merely that we're all inundated to their previous power to move us. In the world of color rods in the cone of the iris, Sally's dead greyhound with it's head lolling on a fence, elongated body like the slash of an angel, is a dead dog. If it had been a crushed insect, we would have had a different reaction.

I'm dying. Before you tell me to go to the doctor, I've been to one, another young Asian resident who knows absolutely nothing except the pathology of various rote causations. My identity is beginning to submerge into my autonomous bodily functions. In part you can thank these motherfuckers with their subtle avarice, death panel profiteering at my expense; in part it is my social fear, but if I'm broken, I haven't been broken the way Trudy Richardson may believe: I did the recertification to stay on in 202 housing at the last possible second, but am ready to give my notice, abandon everything but my computer briefcase, shed my library, and roll, with nothing but a farthing, with the realization that with every sleep, I drift off into the end result, into an occlusion of my cardiovascular system, shrinking away. I've burrowed down very far, so far away there is no room for the recrimination of human social structures falling apart at the seams. I cannot sustain encroaching uselessness, and that is breaking me of its own accord.