Esoteric Degeneration

"All of us at one time or another had our lives fall apart."-- Dina Strada

And for spastic to argue tenaciously with the pressures of women issues, not all of us spend our lives under institutional regimentation only to realize there is no way out from under its thumb, not even in that blanketing things left unsaid in our untrammeled collegiate system. We all get sick from time to time, and if we don't die from esoteric degeneration (how is this link for indecipherable jargon?) then either our hearts give way to plaque or our organs consume themselves with cancer, but in what sense of the word do our choices represent our freedom?

Let's take the conventional Robert Frost motif on roads not taken: Joanne heeds Professor Jerry and stays home in Ridley Park. Speculation about graduate work aside, she winds up as a part time librarian or special ed instructor, never sets eyes on the former Linda C Richman, notoriously toxic executive, and the grandson of the nearly retarded monosyllabic Mrs Phillips assaults someone else. Okay, my blood brother still wastes away like a blasted ear of corn, my mother still drops dead, perhaps in front of me, my father still loses everything because the IRS sees him through the lens of a mafia version of Enron (yes, another unclear allusion but it involves taxes and I have no fucking idea why federal agents set off on my father like a wolf pack), so he still winds up back in the hood when we were once almost near a Harvard family level of affluence, and maybe I just snuff out like vanilla, forced into Inglis House without having ever been privy to its horrific impact.

I would have never gone screaming in prose to a mutedly gay lawyer about my toxic panic vis a vis Linda's reign at an ineffectual intake center coupled with an abusive attendant care paradigm, and neither he nor any other elected official can do a fucking thing for me while I sit here evaluating how my 53 year old intestines and increasingly pronounced hearing loss and loss of muscle mass will allow me to navigate back into substantial gainful activity. Uh huh.

Brian, the man, is having a town hall meeting tonight, as he's so carefully drummed into me with two emails and a robo call beneath the bubble of punishment I'm taking in this Jazzy Quantum. I don't go then I don't go. The budget allocation under state Republican austerity doesn't affect me directly either way; the Philadelphia public school system is a cesspool regardless of who does what with it, and Harney County's answer to what remains of American individualism reads more like a travesty of Pilgrim's Progress than a spirited hoorah for the independent underdog. If I do go, even though I'm not unionized and PNI will ignore me as readily as any other established outlet, then maybe I get a story, red meat in pansy land, something.

One of the residents of Riverside with terminal cancer, a bigot named Dominic, disparaged me in a brief give and take: "You bring people down." That maybe true, from the viewpoint of an animal caged in captivity, age 5 and onward.