A Mission Creep Leap of Faith

I made a bet I’d last another year, despite chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, not quite so fast-acting as necrotizing fasciitis, and placed this dour domain on auto-renewal. It is true Sullivan’s closure of The Dish heralded the death of the blogosphere, as I continue to be less receptive to how he brings his experiences to bear on Trump era controversy. More on that later, while I plod along with no revenue because I write illegal threats I cannot carry out on my own, under no illusions: Even if I attract the crackpot elements, controlling them and creating incentives for enforceable codes of silence is another matter. When Pistorius had currency  in 13, I was unhappily conflicted over the events leading up to his disgrace. On the athlete’s side of the argument, even if he wanted to kill Reeva in a heat of the moment quarrel, he could have thought of a better strategy than “it was accidental” and then bawling himself into a pity party, though this last seems to have worked to his favor temporarily. Concessions may be given to the prosecution on the basis of the evidence, but where was this amputee’s incentive to kill the woman? He had everything to lose, unlike partisans, who are forced to utilize violence for autonomy, or to act against tyranny, and did lose it, his disability making him patently more vulnerable than a typical murderer, however that is defined in South Africa. My aunt argued with me about the case, equating Pistorius’ alleged fear of black crime as Americans would fear it in inner city Philadelphia, or the Bronx, or St. Louis, or Compton. The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that Africa is primarily populated by indigenous black natives, with allowances made for various Nubian populations, Africa belongs to black Africans. Europeans could not achieve in Africa what they achieved in the Northern Hemisphere, and into the sewer it goes, yesterday’s news pitted against a rare exceptionalism in a broken body made better than ableism through technical improvements on the bipedal biology. I wish reporters would follow up on these issues more often. If Pistorius is killed in maximum security because of his developmental birth defects, I doubt the Steenkamp family would find closure in a hypocritical justification. I am not excusing the man. He was a rare cross over hero against a majority that is so conflicted about deformities and damage in the first place, on one level just another he man venting misogyny, on the other, just another monkey who couldn’t be trust out of his cage. Flesh eating bacteria makes headlines because it is swift, and echoes pandemics of yore, if it isn't the opening salvo of the next. Complex mammals have few defenses against it; cases seem to be on the rise, and we've earned it, battling too hard against death as a natural process. My return will contain more of my leg crossing unpleasantness, terrain I've waded in before. We'll see whose stomach recoils first.

Kaepernick’s Kneepad Cushions Humility

He felt a sharp stab to make someone pay.-- Henry James

I only rarely pay attention to sports on this account, although gaming offers its own aesthetic criteria. I aggregated an opinion piece on Oscar Pistorius for Examiner before Clarity Media folded its far too obvious tinsel imitation of a Huffington Post style a la carte. AXS Media, into which I was briefly merged, doesn’t seem that much better off, and I am wobbling the seesaw: Is it time? Should I give up? Or simply go find my Mucinex? My lapse of attention to the season had little to do with the art deco of “take a knee,” and much more to do with near total loss of control—perhaps not as graphic as what Pistorius is living (wondering what he’d make of my racism on the fable of apartheid’s coffin). I understand why those who truly love football stand in awe of Belichick and Brady. In my youth, Dallas had a similar dynasty, but I am too careworn for the animus of rivalry other than to say Brady’s precision, relentless as it is, begins to glaze my occasional enthusiasm for a game. I cannot fake joy over the Eagles either, because I’m suffering, that dreaded, dreaded word, despite the concerted activity about my person, and my façade of endearment to the new attendants (I do actually like the weekend girl), my physical pain and lunging mental desperation coincides with dismay. XLVI was suspenseful, historic, but more and more of American football is much like what went down during the NFC Championship. Despite what it took to survive the playoffs, despite 11 – 1 records, one team wilts. Fox could have saved Philadelphia its mini-holiday and aired The Resident at halftime. The contest between my home franchise (is it really locally seeded anymore?) and the Vikings was finished at 14 to 7. The rest was icing for old east coast urbanism. I would like to have killed the architect who created row homes. While my father waltzed off with his dead son to Phoenix, in the classic flight from jurisdiction, I defecated in a bucket commode with his sister, in that modest little house keeping her alive, waiting for that soon to be violent section 811, Diamond Park, to be ready, and now I am 56, my spiral hoovering over the garbage disposal, 15 minutes away from the intersection at Broad Street which would bring me right back to ground zero.

Mary, my mother’s sister, is a PhD. She teaches too, like my former mentors. Career wise I probably wasn’t cut out to be an instructor. I do like certain aspects of journalism and breaking stories, but that was hard enough stable to be competitive. This life long battle with the sheer brutality of medical model rehabilitation, it is like the relentless persistence needed to play Tam O’Shanter, a difficult and simple card solitaire. I beat it once, I believe in Ridley Park. My favorites, which buying Warfield’s Pretty Good Solitaire restored, are some of the hardest.

St. Helena

Streets and Alleys (which sometimes ends faster than the layout takes to deal).

Auld Lang Syne

I found Thomas because I missed going up against terribly long odds, poor spastic and her aspirations. I did not want to live under the Philadelphia Housing Authority all of my life, to essentially be killed by it. I truly thought, like Vassar Miller, a generation before me, that I could do something more. One of my staunchest advocates for holding on is a woman named Nancy Loss, but again, she only sees me as a compliance paradigm. Stay at Riverside, or go to a home, where Mary and her children think I belong. For me, it isn’t either or. I don’t want to live like this. The character Dreyfuss played in a television movie sued for the right to die because quadriplegia was intolerable. He won.

Janis Joplin Tours Khmer Rouge

freedom's just another word--

As I have predicted, ceding near total control to state welfare has ended whatever eclipsing independence I’ve clung to, and this power chair has given me a bedsore; it isn’t serious, not just yet, but if I’ve written it once I have written it a thousand times, saying no to attendant care kept me healthy, and had the Jazzy not failed I could have held on a while longer. Despite my tremors, arthritis, me being me, if I can extract or bully a better chair out of the Commonwealth, I may yet tell the visiting nurses and case managers to fuck off, then file a criminal complaint against Presby, and drive off into the sunset. I think some consumers misunderstand me: I do not believe in independent living centers, and even when I thought I did, in the back of my mind, I had more than a few red herrings. My personal loyalty to Linda Dezenski held me in check. She ascertained that herself.

I have stopped living the pain she caused me, even though I’m rehashing it here again, perhaps as a footnote. It was all mostly stress. My blow out was contingent on many factors, but those weren’t sexual. And my burdens have overtaken my stamina to really care about shoving a pogo stick up her ass. It wouldn’t change the “great blow” she landed. All things being equal, I’ll be back later this evening.

Robert Byrd’s White Nigger Echo Chamber

"I have to go to Norristown--" The Mechanic

I am literally teasing matted locks of my greying and now wiry hair out of my scalp, ever slowly, and to my mortification, it looks like Gilda Radner's worst day of chemotherapy, the original anti-prime timer, and yet persisting, slowly, tackling the worst before I let a cosmologist do what they can with it, but as it is now, it perfectly symbolizes what 14 weeks of being at the mercy of Medicare has done to me, and this is what Paul Krugman champions, how long and punishing this has been, trying so hard to fend off the iron jaws of “means testing,” my case is now under review at County Assistance. No idea why, as my savings were depleted by 2014. I held off reapplying for Medicaid as long as I could, but knew I would need it (late in the day) for another power chair, but all of a sudden, I am “under review,” in order that the Commonwealth can ensure it protects itself. No one is willing to ensure I am protected from it. The dynamic nigger duo, Trudy and Debra, contracted with Liberty Health to at first pressure me to comply, and then Tom of Liberty Health did his damnest to talk me into signing myself away, but didn’t know his job, that Hahnemann University Hospital couldn’t put me away. I had no condition they could treat me for, but Hahnemann and the Visiting Nurses association, and Mike's bucket seat ingenuity, have virtually incapacitated me. Libertarian political philosophy, perhaps traditional conservatives, as well, may not have an answer for disability, dependence, and rationed care, but the system has some serious dystopian fissures. Maybe it will right itself after boomers have their mass die off, but I am not so sanguine about Western medicine’s  market correction. My father cannot afford to let his wife die in the most compassionate manner, my body has taken fourteen weeks of a prolapse break down, to the point even my arms are now affected by tremors, and these are my options:

a)      Hang on until I can manage a better power chair fitting and ditch hospital bed and hope for partial recovery

b)      Attempt suicide and hope I don’t fail

c)       Give up and allow Inglis House or equivalent facility to torture me into hospice

The Medicare medical equipment model failed me from 14 forward. The Trump Administration had nothing to do with it. I did not have a primary care doctor or practice that met my needs, and still don’t. The VNA is an outsource model staffed by nurses and other therapists near retirement. Mike and I are in agreement here. They know jack shit, this VNA, but private contraction failed too. Hiring Karina from Craigslist was a mistake, and utilizing Mr. Wheelchair broke my strength, my resilience, and the fucking liberal majority insisting I need an attendant has taken 98 days to put my Medicaid eligibility under review. I’m sure Krugman would blame austerity, but that would be too linear. I was in the beginning of needing to curtail and be cautious, in September 2017, but I wasn’t failing; Pennsylvania seems determined to rectify that. I should go lie down, as the grease monkey is coming early evening. Should you pray all goes well for the dowager’s scathing mouth? All I ever wanted was a career, to make something of myself, to have some freedom to achieve certain things, maybe have a good man, but no, 32 years ago, I moved into an accessible 811, and that anguish and rage permeates this one wee blogging platform. 

Critical Second Generation

I sure hope the road don't come to own me.-- Carole King, plaintive

My second generation kindle is showing its naked age at eighteen. The not quite French vanilla top cover is stained, its first hairline crack appearing early. Many years later it took a urine spill from my urinal, and the laminate on the five-way cursor split; it has to be coaxed. The screen is scratched, the battery isn’t taking a charge, the ink beads want to return to Israel for vacation, and yet, somewhat remarkably, I am still able to get it to function.

By necessity, I now depend on the marginally younger Paperwhite, but will miss the device, this particular device, when I can extradite myself to trade it in. I know Amazon has manufactured many kindles, and the $600 I spent for both of mine may seem steep compared to current prices, but I admit to attachment, and treat the outmoded model just as families treat coma patients, loving it more than the newer touch interface versions, since I am, unabashed, a proponent of keyboards. Guilt trails my soul, weeping a dirge at the organ. The Paperwhite has a protective case, O ye miserly dowager, if you are as devout as you claim, the older reader deserved the same consideration. Every actor in the industry has the art of portraying the coma nailed to the wall, in those reconstructed hospital episodes. The knack is in interpretation of the locked in individual. For Benjamin Walker, Teresa Palmer’s down time in The Choice, due to a car accident, represents coming to terms with loss. It permeates the dialogue of the movie skillfully for an otherwise light romance where the canines know everything ahead of their owners. In The Descendants, the comatose wife is a trigger, pain and discovery leading to a lesson in forthrightness. In House, the coma is the butt of a joke, and in the original Coma, the condition was weaponized to reveal medical conspiracy we all fear in physicians, surgeons especially, and in the canceled Hand of God, PJ the whining wimp is Ron Perlman’s moral guilt, divine mystery, or both. Wondering how many takes go into these efforts to illustrate the dilemma of how technology is used to force the living dead on our conscience, early on in this stupid crisis, I nearly choked to death aspirating a steak sandwich, and suppose this terror will be revisited, hardware in its ICU stages.

Lazarus’ Preclampsia Gorilla Channel Mitigation

His hands, palms upward at his sides, were covered in blood.-- JG Ballard, Crash, p3

I have to walk myself back, and admit to a correction: There are whites, at least those who work for Liberty Health, who are as moronic as Presbyterian Homes minority managerial staff like Debra Horne and Trudy Richardson, even if it befuddles me why the coffee light guard downstairs is fixated on my father’s rushed appearance during this too lengthy interregnum which will result in my spirit being crushed. I do not know what Liberty Health is, but their employees harassed me just as I was harassed in 14 by an earlier pair. The 2017 round was an older man named Tom, and one younger patronizing punk. I asked the younger if he knew any famous people with cerebral palsy. “No,” was my answer, and I should have kicked his ass, even from my filthy mattress. I did frighten them both, in October, as only women can, and they both jumped to help me eat when I hissed with scorn at “fucking regulations!” The kid was a kid, but this Tom is as much an ignorant racist as I admit to being, the forthright savant. I gave Tom more punishment over telephone, as the idiot’s contractual obligations are to shovel us like shit into nursing homes, but, the key is not my inconsolable misery, and the punishment my body is taking and will not recover from. It is what I asked the punk bastard kid, and how he responded. This signifies the failure of sixty years worth of activism and disability law, and that attitudes do not change. I never expected to literally adopt the mantle of Vassar Miller. Those odds are long, but there are not enough of us who can cross over into the mainstream. I once believed Linda Dezenski could do it, but I suppose I took care of that, not quite able to let it flow, like Dana Delaney and her cannabis dealer in “Hand of God.” The dealer is a lesbian nigger, and tells Diva Harris (Delaney) a back story that concluded, “That was the first time I made out with a woman and had an orgasm.” No big deal. Women smirk about sex just as men do, but the way my former supervisor did what she did triggered my emotional scars, and I did not think such a genteel poem as I sent her would have resulted in such a graphic suggestion. I needed to leave this building then, as I always have, my one constant, willing to be homeless outcry, and the counternarrative, looming so large, is to move in with my 94 year old grandmother.

Am I engaging in liberal outrage? Perhaps James Dorwart thinks so, assuming he has time to scan my occasionally esoteric posts—but what some of you may not understand is I am using big tent egalitarianism to illustrate that big tent egalitarianism is a crock of shit. Other wheelchair users understand better than my ambulatory followers, and I am sure James does too—maybe I’ll throw him a bone about art therapy empowerment, as I am alienated out of the shared experience of identity, ever mindful that he stayed in the ivory tower. I deflated out of it, as opposed to pole vaulted. No one’s fault that case management destroyed me in certain ways; teaching might have done so too, but I think it raises serious moral questions, that I have to be destroyed because I’ve been non-compliant—in that sort of quasi-ecumenical vein, where “Hand of God,” works as an implied Pentecostal parable, Blessid is an implied Catholic cheat sheet, and left me displeased, and even the reviewer undercuts his own enthusiasm for what Heske and Fitz do without any valid clues as to who, or what, Jedediah (Montgomery) is supposed to be. The hostile obsessed ex-lover, Ethan, attempts to murder the supernatural neighbor, and I gathered this alluded to the Crucifixion, but beyond that, the only clue offered was Edward’s mention of the neighbor’s black teeth, and that his knowledge of horticulture had something to do with his lengthy lifespan. Instead of actually redeeming “Sarah,” the story ends with the message that the Resurrection makes life precious, too awkward even for apocrypha. I pleaded for help on this account two months ago, inappropriately, and expected exactly what I received, smirking, but if I am forced beyond any choice—I suspect Sarah had other alternatives—toward involuntary medical commitment, I’d be far less anguished if I had a voluntary executor to safeguard my work, published and all. Please think about it. Despite my obstinacy, and the nuclear fallout of my idealism, I deserve better than senseless maintenance in an institution, and even deserve better than immigrant African care. I may not prevail all that much longer, unless Melania invites me over to watch the president’s wildlife footage.

Resisting Conceits of Revolving Turnstiles

Is this what you're afraid of? -- Jeremy Childs

James Hamblin makes the usual devastating and classically liberal argument for which The Atlantic is known, in his dissection of Trump's linguistic foibles. It is the type of feature which readers of the old media periodical appreciate. And I am, admittedly, a dilatory supporter of the publication. Early on in my starving vocation, I sent them poems, fiction, like thousands of aspirants, then stopped, and now only pitch to them when I am in a caffeine overdose of brilliant topic effort. Twenty years ago, I would have trusted Hamblin's byline and expertise, but do not take this to mean I can refute or undermine him with the same detail he utilizes to undermine the president. I used some of his same examples to push back against George Will's "Dangerous Disability" column, which trended on social media late last spring, in a more rapid, cursory fashion, and couldn't give it away. This has made me terse and caustic, because I still know how to do what journalists do, but I always have it harder, with a not quite figurative hand tied behind my back. I thought I could break the glass ceiling. I thought I could have a normal self-sufficient life, but no, the assholes in my state look at my age, my chronic condition, and say I have to categorize myself as "nursing home eligible" in order to maintain independence. I am not being off topic. Hamblin undermines himself without realizing it. Septuagenarians represent an expendable class, not that this is shocking. It is biologically easier to have a medical crisis at 70, or 69, than it is at 36, but he is, essentially, making a meritorious relegation of the aged. Pope Francis would certainly cry foul to that. In my piece, I cited evidence that Roosevelt would die in office, and did not have the time to burrow through microfilm in my battered chair to use the examples Hamblin does to buttress what we already know: FDR was a great Liberal, and but for the grace of god, if the public knew how sick he was as a paraplegic, closing out the ambitions of the Axis powers would have been much more complicated.

As a side note, if you believe my militancy is an aberration, who interred the Japanese? None other than the most powerful, and one of the wealthiest, cripples in the world. I cited more examples than Hamblin does, but my point was that whether or not FDR would drop dead, or JFK was spaced out on narcotics for degeneration, etc, we got through it without the merry Congressional nightmare of applying Amendment 25, and we've survived perfectly fine without Julian Assange revealing Angela Merkel's secret plan to conspire with Elizabeth Warren to remake the west in Castro's image, our birdseed perfectly apportioned.

I do not like Donald Trump, and would have preferred Governor Bush or Rand Paul, but the very charges the left deploys against him exposes why liberalism is ultimately untenable: disability is suddenly the hot button, but no one breathes a word about disability law and what reasonable accommodation means, with appropriate support. I may also agree with Hamblin about Reagan. I knew the old stage hand had dementia during his Iran Contra testimony, but both the country and President Reagan still functioned. Alzheimer's isn't a fucking movie. My grandfather lived with it for years before he effectively lost his mind. In essence, James Woods is accurate. Scratch a liberal and beneath their epidermis, ultimately you'll find a Nazi staring back. Cillizza wins this round, chicken noodle soup notwithstanding.

Untenable Mummers' Day

The holiday is the perfect time.--the man in charge

In this chair I cannot go bare buttock as I used to. The vinyl seat is too hard, too small, and the discomfort I undergo has taken away very nearly all my control, including the food preparation I did on my own, let alone dressing and food shopping. Nor have I so much made a dent in assessing what the cleaning service did or did not do with certain personal effects, including my clothes to which I had adapted. When the Caribbean accented paraprofessional sat me up in the winter afternoon, before the bad transfer assist, alarming as that was, my growing weakness might as well have set off a Geiger counter. I got Mike on a word of mouth basis from a former Liberty consumer, and assumed he understood cerebral palsy fittings. I am at fault for taking the chair, assuming I could adapt, but he should have known better also, on the basis of the broken models piled under the daybed beneath the one window I once handled on my own, on top of a week’s worth of unnecessary hospital stays. I don’t have access to my work, cannot restart much of what I was doing, not from scratch, and my aunt thinks I’d thrive in her mother’s home, all because of a combustible grease monkey. A Man Called Ove is the type of literary conceit on which I was weaned. The title character feels life has passed him by. His suicide attempts fail. Poor planning, community interference. The point of the film, probably the book too, is learning he is still valued and can fill in the gaps. I’ve no such luxury, fearful I’ll never get past this. Fighting welfare and Medicare rationing kept me healthy. Seven doctors had nothing to treat me for. Diaper shit and piss, my inability to sustain my nutrition, is making short work of this, and if I did not feel I’m being forced down the drain, it wouldn’t be so hard to swallow. A nursing home isn’t going to let me write and have digital access, despite the occasional Washington Post feature from those with no choice. I left Oz off at season four, after “O’Reilly” kills Nathan’s rapist himself, weary of all this overflow, wondering how much longer I can persevere, but maybe it isn’t simply Philadelphia, it’s self-depreciating half assed efforts, with swatting being the new eel wriggling in the cesspool. Libertarians should have no problem uniting against weaponizing police against innocent civilians. I have my recidivism too, from my childhood under the knife to some damn cubicle, accepting it as the hardship of decline. It isn’t worth it: Let’s see what the new year brings, shall we? I’m off to bed, against better judgment, daring to remove the diaper, staining the underpad so my crotch can get some air.