The Sagittal Plane

 Vaughan devised the massive rear end collisions of sworn enemies, hate deaths celebrated in the engine fuel. -- Crash, location 160

In recent weeks I have, in desultory fashion, worked a few words a day on a staid assessment of Mitt Romney, staid in comparison to the furor of The Rolling Stone’s assassinations of the former governor as OCD plastic, very nearly anachronistic in terms of its hostility, now that we’re all sober to the fact that hard rock as a form of protest is just another business model; 2012 is a displacement milestone, perhaps an expiation over the fact that this was the last national election cycle in which I did not participate, assisting in neither Obama’s second term mandate nor Romney’s contraction as a national figure. In the passage of time which comprise the dates 1979 to 1986, the phrase “frontrunner for Black Sabbath,” would have been unfamiliar to me. I was cognizant as to what KISS or Ozzy represented; I may have listened to the noise, observed my sister handling a pungent roach with tweezers, but this is as far as it went. I haven’t been able to fend off the ranks of becoming a member of the living dead, poisoned mice in my drop ceiling crackling like a burnt fuse, and so I look at them myself: I have always known them, been proximity to them, and still live with them, and imagine if I really desired to invite a backlash of disciplinary action from the carefully cached online presence of Human Good, then all I have to do is procure illicit camera shots of the American morons epitomized in section 202 housing and provide you with names to the faces, like the bald guy Morton with his Tourette’s syndrome. I almost substituted Tay Sachs disease for the more eccentric neurological disorder, the processes of an overburdened mind whose suffering is almost unfurled beyond any ideological points of reference. What I allude to is this 88 minute special interest documentary on the French solution to criminal insanity, Unit for Difficult Patients. Chantera does a fairly decent job with her grant dollars explaining the UDP as a psychiatric control fortress, sketching out a brief history of the city of Cadilac as a magnet for trauma, and offering these patients what dignity she can in reconstructing their stories. She concentrates on Eric, a bong head who stabbed his sister in the throat, and even in this very circumscribed world, the French tendency toward the disingenuous takes hold, with Eric’s mother relieved that his schizo-affective disorders are so rigidly controlled, while his case manager shrugs with the admission that the UDP wasn’t the place for this man, meaning he should have done his jail time. At the end of his story, he smiles like a whipped dog, the mark of his suffering indelible, and modern liberalism lurches forward. No, I am not going to suggest that the blades of the guillotine offer more precise relief. They do of course, but what I saw, what it always reverts back to, is the seeds of institutional methodology contain the flourishing growth of human damnation. These men, their history of violence, drugged into malleable children who behave for occupational therapy projects.

I had singled out the Osbournes prior to the new lock jaw disease of the current age; I warned this woman didn't know herself very well, didn't I?