Next In Line

Um. Details please.

— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) June 26, 2019

There is an incurious internecine battle going on this late but cooler Sunday, as if the Me Too movement decibel decided to metamorphize its attention to patriarchal complacency masquerading as competency. Soledad O’Brien and other women in the fourth estate have launched some scathing criticism of Bret Stephens. According to these strident feminine voices, Stephens is the worst columnist printing at the flagship New York Times. All I can do is sit back and wish for a bag of herbal popcorn, as all I can tell you is I know Soledad’s name. She and I had a brief thread about titles which may have puzzled both she and I. Perhaps she wanted to know how I got an opinion piece about Jennifer Wilbanks into the Philadelphia Inquirer and made it my own. It was the convenience of timeliness, something I now lack due to a black woman named Trudy Richardson who has used her power to abuse me so thoroughly that my fantasies of motion involving her homicide where I fracture her skull into a mortal trauma isn’t too well held in check by the fact that it is what she wants so that she can dispose of me. I may hate what my former supervisor Linda did to me to get me to this point, and I hate those who protected her criminal malfeasance, but my life has endured incontrovertible set backs due to two black women in public housing, and it galls me beyond measure that all my academic promise has transmuted. I am a rabid animal who wants to destroy the domestic matron class forcing me to suffer almost beyond my capacity to endure it, and the hen house is now acluck over Stephens and his statistical inaccuracies, his designation of a new class, the Obama-Trump voter. What can I say? I am one of them. Obama and Mitt Romney and Pelosi made my life a living hell with Romney’s healthcare plan for Massachusetts, and Trump running around goring the establishment has only accentuated the city of Philadelphia’s time honored provincialism. I never had an easy time of it with NYT. Shortly before I managed online access, they threatened me with a collection agency over a three dollar deficit. Once online, they suspended my book forum account for momentary frustration with another poster, which was nothing, teeny funnel, but from what I can glean from Google, the media brand that the New York Times is has been challenged of late by other feature writers. I myself don’t believe Douthat and David French are worth what they’re paid: I demand more of Douthat’s mindset, and French is simply a cowering liberal who pities the police when they use deadly force against aggressors like me.

As goes Stephen King

"Some creatures are able to inhabit a space you never knew needed to be filled." -- Patrick Stewart, when still able to deliver a sexually enthralling line

Celebrity accounts on Twitter can be problematic, not just for the celebrity, but for those less successful with recognition: In a mere moment of vulnerability, Ken Wahl could make my heart flutter, despite the fact that binge watching Wiseguy wasn't about aesthetic pleasure so much as laughing at the hairstyle shags everyone wore in the eighties, with a sentimental teardrop, and James Woods, (sorely missed) might have floored my miserable self with any direct validation. Whereas Stephen King incurs my wrath, and when he liked my tweet, a caustic pin in his beatitudes toward being spared, it was all I could do not to rhetorically kick his hoary ass from here to Topeka. He isn't the worst suspense writer in the world, and Carrie tapped into the hysteria of puberty with a relevant timeliness. Some might argue that Shawshank and The Green Mile were structural masterpieces on the big screen that encapsulated American innocence as a main redemptive quality. The dowager begs to differ, and lumps all this in with a dismissive hand wave, Scott Bakula falling into the same category of mawkish obsolescence, Quantum Leap here today, gone tomorrow, but enough of a rolling credit to cast him as Captain Archer. Enterprise is one leg of the Trek expansion franchise with which I'm unfamiliar, and while the premise is sound, with a protean NASA patriotic pride from which Megan Rapinoe could learn to chalk a cue stick, Bakula simply can't carry Archer with any sense of majesty. Cogenitor might have been an episode about the history of the Prime Directive, and it might have attempted to be a delicate cur-in about queer repression, but the writers fall short both on Trip's heavy handed egalitarianism and Archer's conflicted regret, and even I, watching "Regeneration" last night, noted no one ever grappled with the fact there's no hint of the Borg in the original, and no tie in with the heady conflicts in the spin offs. I was certainly into it when Next Generation was the currency of its time. I also thought of sending Shatner a nostalgic love letter thread over the classic "Incident" with Joanne Linville but then thought the better of it. William Shatner the actor in the right context can struggle with demons, but his paucity for pity is self-evident in a constant projection of joviality as a florid old man who's lost his looks, the last of the first.

Not huge on NCIS as a square peg, either

Police identified the two women killed as Elizabeth Conway Nass and Rose Louese Mayr, both 2010 graduates of Mount Hebron High School from Ellicott City.-- an social media event

Once we dispense with the problem of Scott Bakula’s woodenness, we can examine Enterprise for its positive attributes, and these attributes reside in a neo realism that was rough around the edges, better synchronized than the original Star Trek, except for Roddenberry’s pilot, which was darker than Shatner’s hippocampus, and thus, the opening artic sequence of “Regeneration” harbored an insidious malevolence attached to it because it was conceivable that such an event could occur, even if it’s highly unlikely that the Borg exist in deep space. They will exist, one day, because our technological prowess on the verge of the future seems to insist that this collective bipedal beehive will occur, because we've transgressed from murdering black abolitionists like David Ruggles, or attempting to murder them, to arguing about the lack of American principles LLhan exudes and whether she's objectionable enough to have her citizenship reexamined, but what do they stand for? Not Marxism, but Google’s efficacy modules? Possibly, and this 21^st century starship team couldn’t, didn’t grasp the odds they were facing. They simply took action, and boom, a great villainy returns to its proper spin off, threatening the dignity of an actor with the best training the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Company had to offer. His moment of masterful dialogue in the holodeck, with an Arabian steed, was actually closer to: Some creatures have the capacity to occupy a space you never realized existed and needed to be filled.

This art of excellence, alliterated by a Briton who himself was diluted by popular projection of a commercial formula, is the light of humanity we're losing. Once it's gone, then it's gone.

The Overactive Nerve

"I doggedly out myself at London dinner parties as a Leave supporter-- though I might skate safely on the chummy assumption that as a halfway sane person, I backed Remain. -- Lionel Shriver, Harpers April 19 issue

Anorexia Nervosa is a shock and awe driven disorder with a symbiotic relationship to the slasher films of Wes Craven which insist on a near fantastical resilience in the face of modern predation. In contrast to the hypervigilance of feminine mystique under threat, anorexia is a grotesque distortion of the hourglass figure torching itself to emaciation, a form of hysteria on overdrive, with hysteria being the speculative conceit that kills Milly Theale. Whatever else The Wings of the Dove imparts to admiring readers, it imparts a certain vacancy in the mist of ostentation and material need, and this is wherein its modernism resides, despite the fact that James is still the eminent Victorian of repressed portents, even at the turn of a fresh new century, in whose second decade, on his deathbed, James has a stream of consciousness moment with Napoleonic emblems. Feminine histrionics aren't that expansive, and conditions like anorexia, or fibromyalgia, which now possibly afflicts a sister middle child as well as the brow beaten novelist Gretchen Laskas, who probably will never engage your dowager on Twitter, are actually conditions of shrinkage, with force enough to liken it to the tornado's funnel. Noa Pothoven wanted to vanish. Both the state and her family allowed her to do so. As a sexual assault victim many times over, I feel more than Douthat's scolding sensibility of concern he expresses in "Dystopia," and in fact, when this piece resonated with me on the phone, I did not know this column was his, but he is right that this is Europe transmitting the wrong moral equivalence on an international scale. Our species is ill equipped to accept human suffering and it's outcry, and so increasingly dispenses with it.

It is entirely possible that continued force feeding and psychotherapy wouldn't have improved Noa's quality of life. Maybe she wouldn't have learned to cease living with her rapists, but Belgian clinical expertise seemed to have folded rather quickly on this point. Anorexia and post-traumatic stress are treatable. She might have flourished as a writer, or something else, just like the Parkland shooting survivor suicides, or the Sandy Hook parent who took his own life. These deaths are microcosms, as opposed to lemmings stampeding an escarpment, but human life was once much harsher, even in the Jamesian era. In Wings, James never spells out what reporting drives Merton Densher's passion, but Linus Roache has a telling little monologue in the opening of the movie about young adolescents driven into prostitution and then having their venereal diseases hidden by cruel cosmetic deceit. Henry James arguably leaves it open ended for Merton to attack his audience in such a fashion. Was he too principled to realize what he might have done with Milly's fortune to end the practice?

Drought in Cape Town

"Accidents happen quickly. Investigations take a great deal of time."--Jim Southworth, besieged custodian of our national triage crew.

That I feel put upon in my now estranged interaction with fantasy novelist Shayna Grissom is on my plate: she requested a critical volunteer on Twitter, and as a long time follower, I offered, despite my physiological stresses. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the effort involved a shot toward tolerance across the bow, going beyond my own Copernican heliocentrism into normalized primate social interaction, and it backfired. Shayna isn't thinking of my disability, doesn't realize this senior living apartment which I've hated for 25 years is tantamount to a county jail cell because I have no control of my own environment due to blithe fat and jolly nigger cleaning crews and a pair of white trash drug addicts who tended to my dying stepmother, that my cervical and anal regions are depleted of estrogen, are otherwise burning and sore because my godfather's staff fitted me badly to modern power chair technology under the curious vendor brand name of Quantum, and that I've never been to a writer's conference in the Pacific Northwest because I don't drive a Buick with her downturned pursed lips and limp blond hair, she simply wanted that reassurance writers need so I offered, and even though I offered, her urgency was an infringement on a critical care invalid. "I need this done now, immediately. It's been a tough week."
So I did it now immediately after an arm wrestling match with the President of City Council Darrell L Clarke, a man taken aback by an angry Italian spastic who cared absolutely nothing for the fact that the Councilman was the biggest dick at the microphone. It takes a great deal of braggadocio to be a reactionary when African adhesion to urban liberalism is a roiling tsunami drowning you in its cubic undertow, and yes, let it roll off and down your back (meaning mine), casually as Dennis Hopper's gunshot death sprawling his body on our wondrous ribbons of asphalt that forged a nation. Only, I did not believe at the time that Shayna was lesbianistic. Thought she had given a shout out to a husband right before her conference sojourn, but yes, I will concede the now nicely bracketed block of activists (wtf does non-binary mean?) would find it difficult to accept my quadriplegic stark unhappiness near the end of its life as it is. I have, after all, lent silent and tacit support to Andy Ngo later this month. No nuanced quibble here. Antifa is a terrorist organization. It is just a sense of dismay that online contact rarely takes root and offers supportive friendships, especially in generational distances.

When They See Me

Why do I suddenly want nothing to do with you? Because you declare yourself openly anti-gay. -- Shayna Grissom

The difference between first time fantasy novelist Shayna Grissom and left wing journalist PM Beers is generational. Shayna will block my account on Twitter. Beers and I will argue with each other, then play according to the binary choices offered by the tools and unfollow each other. I owe my readers an apology for PM Beers, although she too, like Jason Dorwart, had been linked to my account long term. I knew Beers was the California version of the hard left, but I stayed with her, including through her Twitter suspension, because I believed her able to call the left on bad behavior. Last evening, she posted a link celebrating the aghast recoil viewers are supposed to feel over When They See Us, the Netflix series about the false accusations leveled at the Central Park Five (yes, I remember, the police and the DA were desperate to diffuse hysteria and things went awry, as they usually do over race and sexual crimes). I raised my voice, deliberately, on this woman's thread, because I can't even remove myself from a rental agent guilty of serious criminal negligence, when I am a woman actually and repeatedly victimized by black aggression and criminal behavior, as if the police state in this country isn't firmly entrenched.

Noa Pothoven's saga makes all arm chair theorists like myself uncomfortable, because when I advocate for euthanasia as the better part of valor, her circumstances in no way reflected what I saw as an equitable solution, and if the Belgian state medical apparatus was involved in her death, it is an involvement that goes one step too far. She was raped by two men as a child and developed anorexia, but she was only 17. My sexual abuse began institutionally at the age of nine in a Catholic home for children where black ignorance simply didn't know any better. The age of 57 sees me back in exactly the same place, in which black prejudices reflect the best I can navigate in my life. Black people are not saints. They prey upon each other with ignoble exploitation, just as whites do, especially when entitlement is involved. I do not regret PM Beers. She is an entitled gadfly I tolerated until yesterday and decided not to anymore. Unlike Austin Petersen, I do not call her "friend," which in Petersen's case, a reasonably known libertarian personality, is mainly an honorific. 
With Shayna Grissom, I was simply trying to be supportive of a first time novelist. But here's the thing about Shayna and I, our interaction for a year: she never read my work, nor my blog, and slammed me only because I lent support to The Federalist, on the issue of homosexuality, in public. After she blocked me on Twitter, she had no affliction of conscience following my account on Goodreads. As I told her in message, I was a professional reviewer. Books sales evidently trump whatever offense I impinged upon.

Draco's Fire Lunge

'passed on from hand to hand"-- Elton John, negating projectile weapons

In the differential between being helpless and being rendered helpless, it is interesting to note that the keystone for Magee Rehabilitation Hospital was laid in 1982, while I was zipping around the borough of Ridley Park and the city of Chester, oblivious, on that mainly picturesque campus, of the sterile fate which lie ahead as part of the Jefferson Health network. Magee’s masonry is still relatively young, just shy of forty years, the front line, in Philadelphia, for spinal injuries, I only ever penetrated here to be fitted, as my closed circuit institutionalization began in 1972, not that this insolent and glowering little vixen could know this, with her spitfire blond strands, uneven stare. She could not hope to travel through my varied gateway of sexual molestation at the hands of African minorities, vaginally penetrated, as if I were nothing more than a terrorized marsupial dispensed for use on the forearm of privileged schoolboys. She deserves to be slapped across the face, this single syllable expression of umbrage and bloodthirsty xxxxx’es, and perhaps she realizes, the little cunt, that a spastic such as I calls out the cannon, already in prison, with nothing to lose in the deploy of the big guns.

She isn’t much of an adversary in her bristle.

Ellen De Generes, conversely, probably would comprehend these rivulets of scar tissue in the guise of my violent stepfather, abusing one and all in my whore of a mother’s household. I suppose I fled, like a boomerang, while Ellen dispenses with femininity altogether. This cross dressing transvestite enthusiasm actually has a long undercurrent in vaudeville going back to the Victorian era. The disability law firm from Maryland, following me in a brief subterranean exchange, may be hungry enough to take legal action against the vendor Mainline Medical, presided over by my uncle, Louis Cristinziani, but what good is that in a burning vertigo on the verge of collapse?