Candied Camera

"My experience as a lawyer and a judge is that you listen to all the testimony and then you try to determine the motivation for the one that is not telling the truth." Senator Heflin via Anita Hill.

Scandal seems to be necessary if only due to the fact that we're half-assed primates who believe we control the universe but conveniently ignore that fact that it remains a challenge for seven billion people to shit on decent toilet bowls, so when I ask myself if I am being disingenuous in following Bobbi Kristina's potential expiration, the answer is yes, but no more so than the reporter who cobbled together the piece: I'm two faced, but I also exist on this earth because my surviving grandmother did not institutionalize the woman who bore me, who hooked up with my father, according to Aunt Mary, to avoid matricide, and the end result was my mother institutionalized two children in her stead. Whitney Houston, husband, daughter, cable reality show, recall the unseemliness of Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, in my misfortune to have watched those hearings. Joseph Biden bellowed like a bull elephant, perhaps unable to convey without destroying his political career, that hearsay is not a disqualification for conservative minorities.

I am not sure how I survived the psychic familial scars. Maybe I did not suicide because I could not; maybe my sexual drives went into latching onto teachers, but as you grow older, do not have a sustaining social structure, it grows harder. Houston and then Bobbi may not have cared to reach out, mentor, the way primates of status usually do, but that was the route I took, burning myself to a crisp. And as I physically weaken, I am not sure how much I can continue to absorb.

I had a history teacher, the one whose name I haven't yet typed, Raymond Bruno. He was suave, 180 degrees a conservative to the latter day Jerry McGuire's liberalism, and I did something bad to Ray, as his student, and threatened something in one of my teeming epistles. I cannot remember what, but remember that he was furious with me, because he cared. My crush on him finally ending when I found the new obsessions, I wanted to marry Ray Bruno too; wish I had. At one point he suggested I had an Electra Complex. An accurate foretaste of my future. Our narcissism of suffering, black or white, needs re-examination.

Wicked Men

Dear Joanne,
Thank you for contacting my office. I appreciate your taking the time to share your thoughts about current issues. Please be assured that constituent correspondence will receive a reply in the near future. Pat Toomey

Thursday evening a crisis ensued with cupboard bare of tins, and when I returned Friday morning at nine lady iguana leapt onto my thigh and stood, in need of reassurance against abandon, and I cursed my heart, one that loves these children too much and yet after a lifetime of dead felines and an inability to save myself perhaps coming down the turn off on Baltimore Pike, underneath all this I am a regular smoe that mourns her few authentic friendships. They are gone, and all I have left is a battle that takes a bull headed obstinacy to wage, an embarrassment at my temper, an exposure to more indignity, like Biden repeating "pubic hair in a coke" in the Anita Hill fiasco. 

I never understood Hill then, but I understand the pain of hostile environments, friends and colleagues belittling, turning on you with snide and disparaging epithets. Castro is our newest pariah, the new "monster." But these residential imprisonments are common among the lowest urban social castes. Sordid, like little Affleck tearing down Morgan Freeman one plank at a time. Oh, even I shut Ariel off, and debate donating to the women in their trauma, but it is exactly through the process of not being willing to open your eyes that notorious horrors like this happen. Castro will be murdered in prison if not in due process of justice, but he is human. The worst kind, sadistic, devoid and beyond redemption.

When I wrote "I wanted Christopher Dorner to win," I understood the 31 page views, the gawk, is she really crippled?  How can she mean that? Like a raw, vibrating lash, and yes, even through he was wrong, and seriously eroded his own case by killing the daughter, I had hoped to see in him a defiant liberator, victorious against a modern malaise represented by filth like Castro. Tamerlan Tsarnaev, by contrast, was a cosmetic zealot in the vein that Biden meant it during his speech for the fallen officer, and crashed American psychoses with bad manners; fine tuning my dark discriminations.