The Bullshit Artist

"What's your point?"-- Joan Tarshis

It may not be wise to post when I'm overtired, pausing in contemporary projects to pull up "Jawbone," my nineties story with its loose Biblical overtones of Samson, everyone's favorite Nazarene and Jewish bully. I drove around, unwisely plowing through my folders, looking for the hard copy, and should probably reconstruct it from memory. Pelecanos modern black face, with the gimmick of its masquerade, to which the man is entitled, made me dwell on it a bit. My narrator is a mafia accountant, probably in late eighties Philadelphia, even though I don't specify a date, and it concludes with a brutal pistol whipping death, in the hood. Seven pages of it on my drive. The original runs past twenty, and it's here, in the desk, or the bin, swallowed by my own disgust in my barren life. I'm able to type, numbingly, but the search for my drafts will have to wait. I wanted to reread any ostensible copy I had, tighten the convolutions. Unable to remember if I started it before or after Brandon Phillips hurt me, but I lived through sustained abuse before that. In Diamond Park, I had room. It was a series of joined cubes, built for wheelchairs, and that I miss, if not the cavalcade of the hustle on the pavement outside my window, black men with toddlers in diapers, begging me for bread at similar hours prior to sunrise. What is not to hate from one end of Philadelphia to this one? The black simpletons I live with here at Riverside, my neighbors, while I roll around, crotch on stained pillowcases over simple piece of foam cushion, rolling old socks over my flaky feet, difficult to wear a decent pair of shoes with this god awful chair. I lack the language of aerodynamics to explain, and the slippers I got from Amazon were a failure. I can wear them but they'd never stay on out in the open. Am I close to Henry Miller's nihilistic courage with the grotesque? It was nearly the same with my mother in Ridley Park. She had very little for vanity of appearance and I've less, with the greater impoverishment. Toward the end of her life, eleven years ago yesterday, I realized my mother was insane. I'm progressing along the same route, though I shun the MH consumer model with the same intransigence I display toward the welfare state.

Until she reached her early sixties, I was never sure about my mother, but now I am, and Pauline should have had her first born committed. Then I would not exist, under Google's wary admonishment and social media's accordion  Barring a miracle, I'll be forced into Inglis House, unless I pick an end date, and end my life. Public housing, more than anything else, even my hatred of Liberty Resources, destroyed it, this life where I fought so hard and built a career on the federal welfare system, entered the middle class, and wasn't strong enough. I destroyed The Matrix Research Institute, in part, and should have realized, behind the scenes, that the people who ran Liberty at the top knew Rick, and I shouldn't have trusted them in the first place, my supervisor's antics aside. Now a good day is where I keep control.


Mother did eventually redeem herself, settled down, alone, dying suddenly, though I've never forgiven her, nor Marie, my father's sister, probably bipolar herself, unable to see it in the woman who could not carry me safely to term. I booted my aunt off my contacts, as bad as all that, and explained it hastily to my arson investigator cousin. In my family, the elder Italians set you up to take a fall, and I'm tired, and intend to never speak to Marie Varenas again. Spastic is done, not that she hasn't pulled, and intimated things no one should intimate to old women with too many face lifts. I saw, in one of Tony Stiles tweets, a critique of a Muslim registry. He is right. It would be abused, and can be defeated. Perhaps there is a lesson to be drawn from Samson in that, whoever created his legend. He appropriated the enemy to destroy it.