When the dowager was parked at her Widener University desk, much as she is now, in a more dilapidated fashion, still sitting at Tom Reid's fob off hand painted excuse of a desk which should have been traded in long ago, she pounded out an angry story about a home invasion with a female victim who turned the tables on her attacker. The exact date of the story's creation is beyond memory, though it must have been in my later semesters, around 1985. It is a revenge fantasy, far more violent than the home invasion I defeated-- and that defeat really hinged on Brandon's conscience. It is difficult for me to type his name, but as I have always been a deft reader of character, he was as much afraid of what he was doing as I was in fear of my life, and this, really, aside from not being desperate enough to use an old Everest & Jennings power chair, motor pulley threaded to the back wheel with a rubber trim. I do not have the exact term for it, but it was designed much like a bicycle chain links the pedal rotary to the back tire. I was afraid, if I had tried to hurt him, that he'd topple me over or worse. Once he dragged me to my bedroom, Oliver following, that was a trigger. I fought, screamed, won, and in fact, I was screaming with such ferocity I did not realize I was the victor. My rapid, brutal little piece was never meant to anticipate my rather languorous spiral of a brutal womanhood.
During the blizzard of 1996, my landline phone rang in the dead of winter with a female editor asking if the piece was still available. 11 years, and I get a call in a blizzard, with no food in the kitchenette, to be queried by an editor of Blood & Flesh. She liked how I depicted violence against women, and then, in one of those quirks of literary endeavor, this same female editor postcarded that the team had decided to print its last issue and changed her mind, which has seemingly cursed this piece for life. I cannot get rid of it, and if I revise it to any substantial degree, then it becomes an old woman's makeover, as opposed to a university student's subconscious realization that she was a lifelong target of misogynist hatred. Writing it, strange as this may sound, was an interior mechanism to sublimate my undercurrent of hate for Jerry. I know this isn't fair, and the man saw something in me he encouraged to succeed, but my aggrandizement of his intellectual mania had a latent hostility attached to it, assigning blame to the blameless. It wasn't this unfortunate instructor's job to protect me from my mother's abuses--kill her lovers or my stepfather, just as my father, too, never stepped in to eliminate the heinous savagery embedded in my family history:
Opinion | Something is seriously off about this president https://t.co/iyFk6DEfta— Jennifer Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) September 4, 2017
And if this is, psychologically, what I am searching for in Trump's belligerence, I suppose I am bound to be disappointed: I do agree with his critics that he has a propensity to diminish his supporters, like Priebus, and I have no idea why Sessions became a target of the mogul's ire. I do not track Sessions with the same avidity I have paid to other attorney generals, and cannot offer anything about his apparent retrenchment of Order, with capital O, but he had a reason to recuse himself from Probe Russia, which, at the end of the day, will be more or less reveal itself as dirty money, and big deal. I have been a good girl most of my life, but a Mexican lawyer and my building manager want my head on a platter because I am weary of institutional corruption corroding my soul with ferrous iron, but I really do not read some of El Presidente's twitter rhetoric the way Rubin or his other prominent detractors do, particularly when it comes to North Korea. The world cannot be held hostage by Kim Jong Un's diseased xenophobic maneuvers forever, even if war in the South Pacific will invariably be a game changer. We wouldn't be able to compartmentalize it as easily as Afghanistan, and depending on how it happens, if it happens, the health of many a body politic is at risk, while I calculate how to give notice as a form of sanity, teaching minorities a lesson about illegal collusion, at my expense.
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