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.

Pattern Recognition

Though the novel itself cannot be vouchsafed, the 2011 film on which it is adapted, The Descendents, might have been a godsend for this blog's topicality, if it wasn't otherwise just another remix for Clooney, variations on the same motifs as Up In The Air and Michael Clayton. George, the ultra-guilty blue blood, is in subtext, saying goodbye to his A-list zenith. (No one cares about Sudanese centuries old failure at statehood, kick it back to Egypt.) It is wrapped up, this life as methodical compartmentalization. This sentiment is not to detract from Payne's efforts. Like the sixty plus years older Niagara, heavily dependent on location, Hawaii becomes a foil within Clooney's narrative framework that brackets the dramatic tension of the story. Enforcing disability law statues, in our free societies, may simply come down to how closely you wish to be aligned with federal oversight, but humans with minimal awareness of their environment pose the most disruptive challenge to our norms, whether it is in the Iranian desert, or Ben Carson moving his barometer from a minority medical elite who loses Persian conjoined twins in an operatic theater, to a quixotic political aberration (who's side am I on again?), or a stainless steel stark episode of Criminal Intent, or this movie, persistent vegetative states always say more about the affect of those trying to cope than it does about the absence of presence, except that here, Patricia Hastle's Elizabeth, while not having much to do except to keep her training focused on not having any pretend awareness of what's going on, as her biological breakdown defeats mechanics-- not easy, presumably, her dead alive memory has a stranglehold on the Kings, and a rippling impact of disclosure and discovery on her community. Perhaps the author might scoff, and you too, if I also see this story as a complex allegory for the disappointed expectations of the Obama era. Yes, I'm extrapolating from the fact that Obama was born in Hawaii, and even if the birthers one day uncover irrefutable evidence that Barack was a Manchurian conspiracy of some sort-- what isn't, anymore, with our empire crumbling and the world not exactly serene about giving China a snow job because they are multitude and India, it's closest dialectal rival in that regard, doesn't offer liberty all that much assurance--Obama's legitimacy as a citizen was never really an issue. The issue was his mother, a radical leftist who was too young, perhaps, to be caught in the red panic under Eisenhower, and whether or not she and her children contravened core American beliefs. Given the current 2017 state of affairs in the Beltway, the dowager supposes this must be answered in the affirmative: We see multiculturalism as double-edged, and backlashed, and Payne has very carefully perforated this in his gemstone of directorial care. It's written into the tensions with the natives, in Scottie's acting out, in the back story of the King family. Even mixed race arranged marriages, and progressive largesse, and Clooney's fame, insofar as that goes, cannot overcome indigenous oppression versus the privilege of conquest. I hate being a quadriplegic, even though it is miraculous I have survived this long, traveled on my own, flamed out a career; I hate it, and there is nothing any ideology can do about it. The only thing really driving me now is I want to hurt the left as much as possible, and if I could dismantle the city of Philadelphia as a sovereign municipality, I would. Tall order. It would take an insurrection against our republican system to do it, but I would. I'm never going to have the economic freedom of white privilege, and ?I believed, into my early forties, it was something I could do, that by now, I'd have husband, friends. I am just a stag. The disabled activists I knew are dead, rejected, impotent, or turned on me, and those who aren't I can't really relate to, and they don't like me, in turn, however much ?I cross paths with cripland online. I lack familiarity of friendships I once had, all because of stupid choices, domestic violence, urban crime. I don't really have people I like who like me. Successful writers don't present that as a public face.
 Thus, I am debating myself whether I should flip it, and load my strongest poetry manuscript as a vanity, and market my non-fiction conventionally. The poetry collection is relatively intact, and has been what it is for a long time, and the genre is so insulated, what's the difference if a midlist press sells me for 5 dollars and change or I put my published work up myself for 2.75?