Almost Less Than 24 Hours

The last time I sought emergency mental health services was between 1999 and 2000, after Linda was finished playing politics on my economic desperation. I do not bring it up to keep reviewing the respective prisms through which my former supervisor and I saw our interaction. It simply all boils down to the same thing: the image of my brother looking desperate, rabid, while my immediate family commiserated with the juvenile psychiatrist. This crisis wasn't about me, my immobility, but my younger brother's cathartic violence. He died a rapist and a vandal, wasted by AIDS, and I write this for anyone who cares to click the flag to read: I was pissed, majorly, about being pulled from my midterms to talk about Nicholas, and yet I'm pretty much the same, absent the desire to commit sexual violence, as such. My parents were a bad cocktail, a stereotypical Roman male with that singular Italian fury, and a beautiful but suicidal manic who ate her way out of her looks, a couple who manufactured two cripples and a dead sociopath, with my so called normal sister and her fucked up family.

"You need help," my sister's refrain after the CIL got done doing to me what it does to nearly everyone. There are variations: Dr. David Ward trying to get me to accept that I was clinically depressed, before CILS had a legal mandate, or my history instructor before that, trying to intercede in my life so he could sail me off to Harvard. Until I grew up some and got hit with the Tassoni thunderbolt, I wanted to marry Mr. Bruno, smiling at the normal puppy things. 

I should not write this, but despite the fact I am not at the Jayne Anne Phillips level, particularly since I am not a novelist-- and might have a little more change to bring my entitlement up a couple thousand if I was-- be that as it may-- I am fucking tired of the literary submission scene, but I can also never rise to the level of lawyer journalists like Jennifer Rubin, along with the others in her class. My withdrawal is pounding on me, yes, and my lunging hate (my audience should be so glad I am a quadriplegic, as I seem to have inherited Julius Caesar's thirst for war, or I am the -- never mind-- I cannot make my psyche complimentary to spree killers, though I have already) boils like a Georgia peach zombie wresting with the next vulnerable cast member. Even if I give my notice, flee, setting myself up for an unknown sleaze bag house arrest, I've past the point of revitalization, despite the fact that just as Virginia Woolf, we can push an exclamation point on the ecstatic. My fans who used to send me letters said "we'd never try to make a living as a writer," and I certainly never intended to, but re-matriculation? The harder I try, the crueler it becomes.