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.
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