Blood Guilt Gentility

Even now, I can hardly bear to tell the tale. --McMurtry, in every author's heyday

Despite the time and effort I have put into taxing Safari (outdated) and Chrome, my memory of the mid-nineties, when I was immortal, and actually had a white collar career, suggests that Lonesome Dove had a vibrant currency, but it may not have been the series out of Alberta, where Christianne Hirt, as Hannah Call, is too good to be true. Canadians, being the winsome sops that they are, tried to reference this in the climax to Season One, prior to Baristow developing his bitter streak in the "outlaw years". I only caught a glimpse of Robert Ulrich, in the other variation on the now faded Larry McMurtry franchise of poignant Texan tales, when I had not passed the ladder rung of 35. The show never caught on, though it may have simply been a scheduling conflict. I have been studying the drama only this year, along with Comanche Moon, and admit that the Canadian production is of greater depth and quality than Henry Winkler's partnership with Showtime and Dead Man's Gun, but it still has an undercurrent of being somewhat too holistic, perhaps as a paean to the mythos of American innocence. With this complaint duly noted, however, Eric McCormack more than aptly captures my growing sympathy for the Confederate ideal with his depiction of Francis Mosby. To throw in the usual dowager tire iron, I could almost hate the man for then taking on the part of Will, in that superficial, flinty, metrosexual  comedy, evidence it might be conducive for me to time out the virtual world and fight the barren parameters of my real world existence, but I'll editorialize the white out developed for typing paper on this particular caveat.


Granted, this is a studio presentation of pretty people groomed on the set, costumed to Victorian era corsets, but the voices of Grant, Lee, and General Sherman, can be overlaid on the actor's presentation with some degree of admiration. When it is done right, the power of the aristocratic mien we've lost to industrialization, commercialization, liberalism, is something to be regretted, and Mosby has trace elements of something already entombed in the catacombs during the active years in which the frontier was being subsumed into a superpower that would last approximately 57 years. I date the rise of the United States as starting in 1939, and  beginning to crater around the time of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Armchair scholars may take any issue with this as they please, as we can say, as well, that American power was predestined in the wealth of the Gilded Age, but I tend to feel the Second World War cemented certainty out of what was before then a likely possibility. I also don't single out the Lewinsky phenomenon to lay blame with the Clintons. The Reagan era ended abruptly with the ouster of Bush 41. Bill and Hillary were only representative of a liberalism that no longer recognized itself, made a feint, and then blindsided neo-conservativism into a grave mishandling of an ideological disaster. I don't think we'll recover, regardless of whether or not Trump is shown the door. I am not attempting to suggest American decline has a genealogy marker, and I haven't read Dr. Ferguson's rise and decline summation of the American Empire. But the Iraq War as solution to September 11th, 2001, opened up a cascade, like a broken vending machine, and the western hemisphere has a yellow underbelly, and my skepticism about China picking up the slack is unchanged. What exactly did the Middle Kingdom do prior to the 17th century other than coalesce the territorial landmass of Asia we currently recognize? I am not talking about gunpowder, or other appropriated technologies. I am asking what the Emperors and mandarins did before the European tea trade at the point of a bayonet? An insulated history, in which non-Han Chinese were "barbarian," still informs what global Chinese leadership could look like fifty years from now. I am not particularly heartened by the picture: it is China which will not allow the Korean peninsula to unify, grow up, develop better living standards. Hong Kong is a game of cat and mouse. I don't know where else to look for a better outcome than to a more realistic stratification of the past, with recognition of the reality of caste. Mammalian primate hierarchy isn't a polite fiction. It is an ecological reality for complex living organisms, hence the character of Francis Mosby, and nobelesse oblige, the uniting force of that within group dynamics to which we unfortunate, and remarkable finely tuned apes always turn: I've written enough in my embittered online voice for today.

Soon Yi and silent acquiesce

When you started aborting, we were still watering-- Vincent Peloso

I am critical of the nanny state over which Nutter resides and Arenda adjudicates with an overzealous tilt. I have trolled in reactive fashion over my dimly varnished view of African American culture, thus diminish any creditably I might have once wielded with what I perceive to be legitimate criticism. I realize this culture isn't monolithic, and can strive to command respect. Despite the fact that I am uncouth, and more than not dismissed by serious scholars who put in a great deal of leg work, I do respect McWhorter, but his iconoclastic streak sometimes confuses me about his reactive tendencies.

The governance of the city of Philadelphia is rather sterile; this is not solely attributable to Nutter's administration. PA is one of the original 13 states, and Quaker imprinting hasn't always been conducive to the dynamics of entrepreneurial energy. Liberty's static existence is a microscopic representation of Philly's sterility, with little pockets that thrive, like center city finance. Center city urban design; it isn't enough against the stoic fatalism of black residential areas-- or even the Rosenbach's tacit acceptance of neighborhood fruitcakes-- a rare criticism of the the museum's insular yet egalitarian embrace of the residential disparities within its ranks.

I migrated back to Philadelphia shortly after the Move bombing, in my incalculable timing, and I'll say this for Wilson Goode: He started a tradition of ineptitude getting our city serious media coverage. Not that this is a form of urban exceptionalism: NYC is as sordid as Woody Allen's arousal triggers, and the the adopted daughter he grafted from Mia has the poise reminiscent of a  Khmer Rouge survivor-- which takes us into the caverns of Shoah beneath the sting of Woody's satire-- his early work even had a subversive anti-Semitic charge thrown at it, one I am not studied enough to analyse fairly; Detroit is a smaller inner city version of Brotherly Love. Even San Francisco has the Tenderloin-- but what it illustrates is that the left is not free of the socialist tokenism Ralph Ellison so brilliantly crucified now nearly 3 quarters of a century behind in Invisible Man.

The Obama Administration friend zone designation is more of the same. I have to try and go out now in this weather for dry cat food. A stressor to finish me off, perhaps.

Cherry 3000

"Tone it down a little." Jack Neale, a man who wanted native American wish fulfillment.

Miss Jack. He injected humor into my strident injury. Good man, but best left where it was, pressed in a rain slicker on the stow away coat hanger. I do not want a relationship with another wheelchair user, and the odds of finding an ambulatory male who finds my mettle engaging? I met one, in fact, just recently. My libido surged back to life, grateful, but playing the game involves hassle not worth the price of admission whether or not he can sustain an erection. He is potty trained, lively, and not an imbecile. So sorely tempted. Damn it all to hell.

Men. If even half of you took the time to understand assertion and accommodation, and that winning a mind like mine is its own reward. Men.

John Kerry is a life sized prosthetic, and this reflects the nearly intangible difference between China and the United States. The most marginalized American sat a foot away from one of the wealthiest and privileged blue bloods and engaged him in national policy even while in the present tense she is turning insurgent on a service offered on one of our most powerful corporate models.

Kerry probably busts his face playing hockey to frustrate his own sensibility of being mannequin deadwood. He is also one of the last of his species, and his disappearance from the political landscape is cause for concern, equivalent to Trader Joe's being a rare case of a California franchise success. This is not ideology. It is the elder statesman, and pragmatic inclusionary business model always improving on efficiency. The nature of grocery retail is such that Joe's cannot hire wheelchair users at their retail outlets, but they conspired with regional bakeries to create maple walnut blondies.

I will be there to nominate Joe's as an insurgent candidate on the floor of the convention in 2016. Why can't we remember that we know how to get things right, and be sensible? Infrastructure and mobility, aspiration. Important parts of the recipe.

Insolence and Mercy, Calypso

Sean Penn infuriated since childhood. He bristles, but this is Penn, Castro's general on the mainland, carrying public nonchalance in his back pack like the fabled Gibraltar, started his brand in Bad Boys, making an actor's decision not to engage in vengeance, and it may be a false memory that I was on the floor splayed like Kafka's vermin, staring bugged-eyed at young Penn's punk nose and stringy hair, like so many former punks I once knew. John now resembles Patrick Stewart. Takes the cake. When punk academic and I were young, he had a full bodied mane, uncharacteristic for an Italian.

Never got a chance to run my hands through that mane, now a polished pate, but it was my poem I wrote about doing so that set my supervisor off. I mailed it to her to imply she had my confidence, and there we had it, an unrequited longing fractured against her blind husband's industrious performance.

Irony. We've all seen Sarandon work her way into Prejean's progressive tenacity many times. Her mercy nearly destroys her, and perhaps this will be my fate, consumed by a more dominant woman's mangled empathy brutalized into making so many subordinates expendable. Yet the death penalty is a binary American ignition. For or against, we polarize around what remains of ritualized executions, an act which can never undue the horror of aggression just to get off on the rush.

To the extent that the Internet reflects reality, mama told my my temper is frightening. Who wants to deal with a peevish spinster so unforgiving  of pedestrian frailty, bearing the brunt of my censure? Let me place you in my sister's shoes. If her younger daughter experienced life long surgery, institutional constraint, developed the need for a wheelchair, wound up a rape victim despite parental efforts, was inspired by a leader, then denigrated, abandoned to a landlord's threats, would you want it brushed off, swallowed, if you passed away unexpectedly? I cannot move. I am dependent on battery powered technology capable of malfunction. Why is it so strange that this builds into frustration that I do not vent on society, since it is ineffective?

It isn't simply about narcissism. Decentralization is as cruel as a centralized environment, sometimes more inefficient, and just as prone to abuse as that which makes ambulance chasers drool. Lack of accountability means that equal protection doesn't apply. Do you believe in a caste system where individuals like myself should be untouchable? Cassie James is fiery too, like a cyclops. She has been escorted by security agents more than once in her actions against Paratransit. The system beat her by imposing restrictions. Used to be we applied for the service with a physicians signature. Now we have to be evaluated by physical therapists who know nothing about our conditions. I refuse. When you watch Sarandon invest so deeply in a spree killer, you can think of me. Never committed fraud; never cheated HUD out of a dime, broke my damn back as an advocate even for a homeless man whose fungal stench made my BO seem like a welcome scent. I never lied to my caseload, never classified them as a case management issue, nor misinformed them.

I want justice. I intend to have it.

Taps

High features, naturally strong and powerfully expressive, had been burnt almost into Negro blackness by constant exposure to the tropical sun," Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

The more we learn.  It was an accidental circumstance that a Jewish public housing tenant, who is in a comparatively soiled outhouse more lowly than the gorilla below me, reconnected me to mental illness empowerment intake; my anger was triggered because I asked the aforementioned tenant for more information, and should know by now that ethnic Communists undergo lobotomies in terms of gate-keeping skills. My spirit, my very essence, needs a change, and the reason America is in jeremiad is because the social safety net is destroying our ability to take the initiative, and my starvation for fresh space is turning into a pathology, and it need not.

This is not about mood swings. I have client confidentiality I need to maintain-- Christ-- but I knew well enough how pedestrian Edward is-- never again. Never. You may hold me accountable. No more overtures to public housing residents. That the president has lost all credibility with me is not nearly as disconcerting, but represents a national disheartening. I would prefer to leave the country, seriously. I can more readily doom myself under European case management than rot in the city of my birth, watching my digital clocks tick. Given the time I should be resting, but I am trying to contract typhoid like John Malkovich, who also does blindness in his first major supporting role. Actors never get it right, even the top billed like Malkovich whose face is now in protean death mask stage, sightlessness. Not Cameron Diaz in Garcia's vignettes.

Things You Can Tell is very good, merges into itself and its inclusionary frictions, yet I balk at saying it is a great film meshing disability, urban loons drawn familiar, to our recognition. I have dealt with Garcia as auteur before-- but the film doesn't fit on the mantelpiece properly in terms of really challenging viewers. This is how I am dealing with it now. With Garcia, it is about the magical realism of the father. The style is a shield, because we know we're looking for nuances of interpretation. These days we're all magical realists, our wars fought to be cached on YouTube. Living the science fiction we read as affixed adolescents, our government at the bidding of a Charlie Rose scoop. Yet despots fascinate us. Admit it. We create narratives around them, held by megalomania, giddy when it is fractured by hubris. Mussolini hung like a dead and bloated mule carcass. Czar Nicholas out of tune and executed in countless variations of Doctor Zhivago; all of Russian literature is Doctor Zhivago, the American induced mortal illness of Hugo Chavez, or Elizabeth's beheading of Mary Queen of Scotts via Glenda Jackson.

The blind rarely have a fixed eyeball. Their countenance usually has the appearance of a pronounced brow ridge.

Some affection for Isabelle Allende. The aide who received the stories of Eva Luna recognized me this morning. She was a single mother child herself years ago. Blows to the solar plexus aren't helpful. Deep breaths. I thought Edward Berkowitz cared enough about my concerns to be discriminating, and taking a few minutes to categorize the situation behind these private lectures he disseminated with Zen-like laissez-faire would have shielded me from a past with very negative consequences. Perhaps some of you understand how leaving a job is like a divorce. He worries my use of detail compromises online safety, but my emotional vulnerability never crossed his mind; he and I know each other and have the ability to ascertain each other's reality, unlike forum moderators. Existential hopelessness.

Wolf bane Intrigue

Al Qaeda planned attacks years in advance, inserted sleeper cells, did reconnaissance. They took the long view, believing that their struggle would take decades, perhaps generations. -- Richard A Clarke, page 227

I cannot recall all of Clarke's testimony before Congress after 9/11, but I remember his demeanor, how it had a manichean aspect. He was very briefly a real American policy maverick, and his policy wonkish book was the first of its kind for me. I purchased the hardback seeking reassurance after the terrorist attack, and finished Against All Enemies in the hospital before my graft surgery, a period during which I often wept conspicuously, and the ward nurse guilt tripped mio padre and immediate family members into paying me a visit. I wanted to go home, then, as now, I want to go home. Mother's side of the familial would tell you that my longing to restore my sense of place and identity is my fault, and it is; they wanted me to move back in with mother before she dropped dead, so that I could relive all my sexual assaults, and I broke off my wedding engagement just weeks before the non-event, and apparently all I live for now is the fucking blog post, alternately violating my own internal decency and then reigning myself in.

Clarke is a competent assessor, but he wrote nothing I did not already know through my assiduous reading of  the papers, or viewing PBS, reading The Boston Review. Last week I wondered where the title had gotten to, but did not panic over its absence. I may have given it away years ago, perhaps to the little whodonnit bookstore on my Chestnut Street corner. Though faded into the pundit netherworld, Richard Clarke did not have to violate national security to bite back the Bush Administration where it counted and get his point across. Looking at Edward Snowden's actions in this light lends itself to being fearful of young white men's paranoia, despite my own bigoted sizzling, displacement, rage at defeat.

Yet the maw this strange young man opened, if not racist, then at least a wound with a stink about the fact that we have a choc-mix centrist left administration in place, is a complex issue, as well as a perplexing event. Americans have to be be able to trust themselves in order to remain a superpower, and the government has to be hard on such people if it is to be able to function, and yet it bewilders sense, what young men like Bradley Manning (though a rage riddled homosexual) and Snowden have thrown away and forsaken, breaching patriotism in real world terms. Does Edward truly believe he will be able to thrive in Ecuador? 

My alienation from the disability *conspirators* I was once in league with is not so draconian, not quite. I was always a writer first, but the game of spy-craft and the nature of intelligence and national interest is a labyrinth that mirrors psychopathy, the zeal of ideology driven a league too far. Literature and Hollywood have thrived on it since both have been in existence.

In the burrowing for my epigram, however, Clarke's evaluation recalls that I have to be true to my own sense of justice, however beaten I may be, whatever length of time it takes. If I cannot finish my protest missive today, I have to remember that I did get a draft off last year, without realizing that Babette Josephs political career had nearly concluded. Staying abreast of office holders is useful.

Recertifications, half and half cookie

I do not believe in James Purefoy's acting, nor his character, but if Christopher Dorner had taken his pain, calculated better, and had attempted to become a genotype such that the fictional character Joe Carroll of The Following represents, I would have become an accessory after the fact for poor Christopher, and that goes for anyone with real balls enough to know that the American political system does not work, not nationally.

In Sex and the City, fans remember the Blair Underwood arc with Nixon, and how the extra who played one of the condominium owners raised the issue of the sports doctor with financials under pressure, then we swerved to the hot chocolate. Would those financials have continued to be investigated daily if the character had remained a recur?

Every nine months total strangers, adversaries, like Trudy, and Ludie (the infantilism here in black female names)-- I was living here before Ludie was hired, yet I have to give this girl total access to my financial information. I am about to refuse, and that will essentially force everyone's hand, including my own. I was once making close to 26,000 a year. What does Presby save in real dollars due to the fact that, through hands on experience, Ludie knows how to foot?

I do not begrudge Ludie her job, but this company has had its hand in ending my matriculation. I don't want to play this game anymore. This, for my internal sensibility, is the choice I have, the death of a thousand cuts because my credit rating is in the congestive heart failure of a marginal debt, in comparison to this young woman's, versus making myself homeless, an irrational act, because it is a fast rupture against the lethargy of failure.

Harvard has never posted one word, not as chastisement, nor pity, in response to my irritable volubility. Our interaction, as such, is an accommodation. Once in a while I follow her links, encourage her with the passion I once had, and she is too busy to argue with me to sing "here comes the sun," not that I know what she thinks. I can infer, however. The safety net in Texas is, I am assuming, harsher than eastern PA's, and a new location is not a cure for my life, but I need to make one last play toward mobility, and where I land, it will be my last act.

Firebrand Dissidence

"The US is not a third world country!" -- a victim of superstorm Sandy on Staten Island


If I had my health, my former strength, I would be ramming my power chair tires against Chuck Hagel's door to become one of his political operatives, and Senator, I have no qualms about putting my foot to the pedal: I salute you. I salute you for the courage to oppose a war which spelt the beginning of the end of global dominion for the U.S. I salute you for having the courage to oppose homosexual equality, and I understand why you issued an apology to the "aggressively gay" ambassador, but you should not have had to do that to reignite your political career as a possible Principal in Obama's second term, and I am, in fact, going to badger both of my Senators in support of your nomination should it become a reality and you make it out of committee for a full floor vote. I salute you for the courage to see that the state of Israel does not have the sacrosanct right to do whatever it damn well pleases for the sake of its existence, and I can promise you I am going to research your voting record and come up with a more succinct analytical praise than I can do off the top the of my head in this post.

We may be too late to save our republic in accordance with its Enlightenment ideal, but I, who have absolutely no power, am quite willing to raise my doomed voice for those of you who can still grasp it. You were a man of great courage in your active legislative years, and I deeply regret not having paid more attention, written with all the thirst and desire for real leadership I can muster, regretting that I did not go into some kind of political arena so that I could solicit you for for employment. Please hold firm.

John Gardner and the Twilight of Suffering

To the detriment of being on my better behavior with young Lance and his charming efforts to get the untutored through Ulysses, I fell asleep Thursday in near winter bright afternoon reading what I actually wanted to read on the Paperwhite, scowling, The Sunlight Dialogues, really into it when Millie faced Taggart without quite realizing who the demonized little brother was, when I fell into a reverie due to the pain in my hip, right hip, still dislocated, and Steel did not butcher. All that physical suffering as a child so that I can entropy into more now. Dr. Chance and Steel controlled the destiny of many, if not Linda herself. The retarded spastics who might have been under my case management eye at one time, now my limited but happy neighbors, gave me the link, and I saw my future, this problem leg in a splint, while I lie in a bed, a discarded bit of meat, hoping my snotgreen cherry monoxide scarred lungs will prevent me from living long enough to get my jaws broken when I bite a future Debra Horne on the pork of her forearm. Gardner, being dead and dead quick, cannot help being an anachronism, whether or not he was taking a cue from Tarkington to deconstruct America through exposing the Hodge family, making Clumly evocative of a sterile old rooster who carried the mark of death through his white hairlessness. Never finished the novel in school, so I am not sure where he is going, dated and outlived by Wallace, who killed himself less quick, less neat, but with a more accurate tempo that Gardner suspected, but did not survive long enough to hate, media hype. Even if I wanted my trigger of pain to be my swan song, and I am not entirely positive about that although punished, yes, Linda too does not know when to quit, when to stop humiliating, and that because I built her up, trying to hang on to one last tie that actually mattered to me, because I was afraid of the collapse I am still living, even if I wanted to go outside of those boundaries to enact that punishment, and made an effort, I would not be able to make it count, to use it to expose the corruption and cruelty and through taking that action, strike at the conscience. I cannot direct a caustic intelligence to mesh with the reality of a broken and declining body to achieve the affect of the lone hero, the one who stands alone. I can no longer afford upgrades, need a new laptop battery, and either have to save this machine or format my newer, smaller, backup. If someone could explain for me, when installing new drivers, does the machine in DOS equate the ENTER key with SET UP? That is what I do not know how to do, hit the right button to get the updated drivers working. I will not bite, I just do not have the mind to handle mainframe and software degrade issues. It is an HP Pav dv6, roughly six years old, if anyone can explain this to me in simple, toddler, terms, you are one of the few who have my gratitude.

Very small meals, I have to stay up and go to Joes. The chair is nearly on full power, that achieved yesterday, barely enough clean clothes, if we look away from agony, ecstasy is no longer possible either, but if I am going down, I am going in flames, that much I know.

Consternation, Constraint, Abandon

Just managed a cup of tea, and my last piece of fudge, how much longer I can sit up and google attorneys with the appropriate blocks of text for paralegal intake, this is an issue of lung function, physical pain, keeping it and my contempt together under wraps. Worry about location later, just find a damn lawyer, find one, as if my remaining chances in life come down to creative loopholes in statutory regulations.

Liberal Caucasians, confronted with the reality of my contorted frame, react with concern: "You going to be okay?" As if I was the personal responsibility of the Ulysses instructor for contributing to his financial security, with the compassionate staff Shylock (ouch), hovering not five feet behind him to whisk the olive green cripple back on the street-- an unfair, not entirely inaccurate characterization-- so the young painter with the marine buzz cut head could treat me to something hot, the Jamacian orienting me, grounding me back in time, to when I started to transfer to the couch in my university apartment and Jerry leapt, like a leprechaun, grabbing my arm, as if I was going to fall. "You okay?"

They leave it to the Africian Matriarchial Nanny to wield the truncheon, and thunder, "you will live the way we tell you or I'll put you right back in the nursing home. You are not a human being, but a child, and if my minority kindred threaten, harass and sexually abuse you, you are an appalling monster to dare throw that back in my face!"

But unlike Liu, I live in a democratic republic, and my overregulated lack of privacy, lack of choice about where I wish to reside and with whom, oh, its not a progressive failure that has destroyed my health and well being over the course of 26 years. If I want to leave, then there is the shelter for the homeless, whose eyes will light up "a whitey has fallen among us!" while they shiv me, unwittingly curing the pain in my ribcage that has been ongoing since Liberty canceled my services because anger at molestation and humiliation is a threat to freedom, as is accountability. Back to bed, were it a mercy to perish swiftly.

This may be ambitious, at least for the undead, but an expose on Duane Morris would be interesting, following the money, how the firm and PCA keep each other affloat at my expense. It is not easy coming up with the type of attorney who would foot me through Google search. Try again in a few hours, revise my state representative letter template, and unfortunately aim at the ACLU. Fucking Christ.