Brothers and Sisters

Hanno continuato inventandosi una mia contrapposizione con Beppe Grillo che è inesistente ed è quanto di più lontano dalla verità ci possa essere .-- David Casaleggio

Yes, it would be delightful to get out of my own head once in awhile, take a cessation from electronic gadgets, the grid, satellite signals, shed my contorted muscular skeletal distress for a lithe ability to jog in spandex with a breeze toning down my furious theorizing, driven by my own sense of disembodiment with all I've lost since my great personal rupture -- difficult for me to remember the exact date, but near to Thanksgiving 1999. I cannot really call my actions a legitimate suicide attempt, rolling in to the kitchen, grabbing a flimsy supermart steak knife, breaking down in inane laughter, florid tears. I should have been tougher, thus I tell myself, and I did fight for some semblance of recovery, but as I've detailed many times, so many hands were extended, mostly in impotence, much like Yabberz and Niume, more contemporaneously. AccessLife breaking apart was my most unfortunate circumstance. I liked them, wanted to take Linda's advice, work for them full time, in the burgeoning dynamic of digital birth pangs, and I am trapped in Presby, in addition, the epicenter of so many applied scars. People have suggested I write the fucking novel about life under Presby's management, but I'd doubt it sell. Who'd want to read a life of terror and then the duress of guardian threats always surrounding me because I defy minorities in learned hatred and paranoia? I follow Beppe patiently, in attesa di vedere, but can he govern? The government in Roma can be likened to City Council, or more analogous yet to American public housing "authorities"-- most of you perhaps think I'm lucky to have so many protections against eviction despite an invalid's squalor. "I can smell," Luca Zingaretti rebukes his sidekick, during the Montalbano paint by numbers nod towards the wasted space of spastic servitude of ableism. Our odors create new victims, as Dubus wrote in one of his tactful essays about life in wheelchairs and turbulent colons. I presume, if my life in Philadelphia became a game of The Man in The Iron Mask, with my naivete  coasting me through until I realized the enormity of my lack of expanse, my shackles, that life in Tuscany would have been more banded still, life on a balcony, watching the remnants of the mafia settle their scores. This post was supposed to be a critique of Sanders and his radical left pipe dreams. He is not responsible for Hodgkinson's actions, though I will also assert Trump brazenly opened this door during the general campaign. What if a supporter had put a bead on Hillary? I voted for him anyway, and maybe even because he incited and we winked at it-- but Sanders is responsible for a militant, dangerous conviction. He is not a classical Marxist, but just take a look at Venezuela across the isthmus. Is this the chaos we're bringing to civilized society for the next ten, fifteen years?
Sadly, I am not strong enough: I am never going to quite "get better" from opening up to my former Jewish supervisor Linda, apparently handling her newer frailties with a healthier and still self confident humor. Face to face, what we did to each other in virtual space would never have happened, but I cannot reinvent myself, and getting fucked over by disability activist collusion creates the same impetus for dissidents who used to be heralded in the anti-Soviet era. We've lost so many definitions, but cripple isn't one of them, no matter we we say.

La Cattiva Strada

Somebody moved behind the brown door: first on the left, then on the right; first footsteps, then a muted rumpling of fabric and the clanking of pots; the concierge's grey eyes seemed to penetrate the wood in pursuit of the invisible noise.-- Georges Simenon, The Engagement

It isn't that one doesn't perceive the strategism within the provincial puzzles of Andrea Camilleri; Simenon was one of his influences, and it shows in the flowering absurdity and pathos of his local color. His narratives are as much about the terrible transmutation of the Old World into contemporary materialism, the one vomiting into the other with the repugnance of centuries old collapse, as they are about the fraud and corruption which truly besiege the carabinieri and all of Europe. Less murder, more graft. In the States, regardless of ethnicity, to an extent, most murders are an emotional argument: kill the wife and stage a suicide, get rid of the bitch on my ass, or go serial predator to assuage the corrosion of pathological pain. Americans go postal, enjoy blockbuster slaughter. Europe, excepting the transplantation of the mafisio, whose golden age was killed off by the ruthlessness of the FBI, is a bit different. The players are dirty, do business off the books, and authors obfuscate their real critique by leaving a dead body around; that real critique takes aim at provincialism, dirty money, and the plight of migrants, like Pakistanis who leave the volatility of the Iron Triangle, only to be victimized beneath placid milk white  surfaces. For the more swarthy Sicilians, who aren't as European as the Germans, the stigma may envelop Tunisians, but for Camilleri, it is the same formula as other mystery writers from the Continent, his progressive cues play out a bit differently than they do in American class conflicts. Spastic cripples like Bejou are simply what they are, dirty, unwashed, going off under stress, part of the comic poke of Italian effacement after centuries of diminishing hegemony.

The problem: Luca Zingaretti's screwball antics, especially when played off Peppino Mazzotta, feel forced by Rai television, and the mesh of the horrific lengths to which the criminal will go against the scatological gossip filling in the blanks doesn't quite work, not that Rai does err on the side of grandiosity, but Zingaretti is an insult to true Roman heritage, may he dormire con i pesci, grinding my teeth. You cannot win them all.