Slopes for the Doctrine of Chances

 What if after all these years you discover that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid, wounded, sentimental heart?  --Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat, p4

Slopes for the Doctrine of Chances

Normally, suspended as I am between the pit and the pendulum, I would not pay attention to flimsy content generation from entertainment media, but the algorithm knows just how often I will yield to clickbait for a Star Trek headline, and on October 14^th, I thought Rick Gonzales’ hastily reassembled deadline profile for giant freaking robot, contending that Lien fell to Garrett Wang over a sex appeal vote, was worth a read. I did not know that some odd fifteen years later, bearing in mind behavioral deterioration doesn’t have neatly bracketed timelines attached, that this ensemble cast member of a “children’s show,” one that would turn Patrick Stewart into an internationally renowned superstar, would fall victim to alcoholism, domestic violence, and indecent exposure. My link here represents CNN’s initial reporting, itself probably compiled from a local Tennessee paper, or a stringer assigned to the township precinct, from which Gonzales aggregated his concluding paragraph, representative of how little automation has done for five & dime outlets. As I have previously indicated on Blogger, I myself went from earning 3k, starting in 99, deflating through 04, to virtual slave labor, two failed aggregate ventures, and then barreling into disaster with generic generation z mindsets in Medium's dubious cacophony of a collective palette. In other words, I understand the architecture of the padding in which Gonzales was engaged. I allowed it to resonate, allowed myself to feel something about Jennifer Ann Lien’s piteous fragility and the way Gonzales framed the arbitrariness of here today, gone tomorrow, because of the way in which producers and casting directors play shuffleboard. I worked in mental health; I am mindful of Foucault’s castigation of its practices, not that Lien’s neighbor wasn’t within her rights to protect her children, but the behavior of this celebrity with her latter day life of incremental shambles wasn’t really the full blown onslaught of mental illness as it is defined in the medical welfare paradigm, like shadows on the wall. She simply engaged in loss of inhibition, perhaps bored, unable to match Gwyneth Paltrow in an anti-gluten campaign, if this was the model she hoped to copy, within an industry afterlife. She made better connections than I did to pursue her telegenic appeal, fell further. All that seems to be left is a canonical asterisk.