The Flying Nun

"My mother took religion much too seriously."-- David Rieff, son of a famous lesbian

Do television producers mock Catholicism to make it palatable to a Protestant audience? If anything, "The Flying Nun," as an idiotic conception of Jewish assimilation within the industry, is a testament to Sally Field's endurance in her evolution from perky white chick to serious actress. Elements of this doofus aspect are still to be found in more contemporary productions. Whoopi Goldberg's "Sister Act," or the BBC with "Call The Midwife" (fuck the British left, hurrah!)

Only kidding. British progressives are insufferable.

I told you I sent a letter to the publisher of the novelist Jayne Anne Phillips. The franchise author Anne Rice was similarly rewarded, but for different reasons. Phillips offered me a vision of vicarious man hunting between two female writers with similar views, but Anne Rice pissed me off, and I remember what her assistant had to peruse, in terms of my content, with more alacrity. I received a bookmark. I tell you this not because it matters. I shall soon be in oblivion, most likely as a dead alive aggressive fury. I bring it up because I am rarely provoked to communicate by letter in the mindset of a fan with cannibalistic adhesion, and yet here are two exceptions. A literary story teller and a vampirist who lost a child to leukemia and is a bit flaky after all that hysteria in print, a hysteria which doesn't translate to film adaptation. My internal barometer may be closer to Rice's than I care to admit, though I have had enough, tapped out on that histrionic voice. Lestat drinking the blood of Christ. Had no idea where she wanted to go with that fantastical exploitation.

It is not the apostasy so much as a sense of cheap antagonism, but my biographical narrative with faith and lack of belief is similar to her own, especially since I am wrestling with a return to my parish, to shield the fury of my intolerance beneath weak American Catholicism. Mmm. The misery of my old age that you see before you actually started with The Matrix Research Institute. That job, as an advocate, sapped the life out of me. I never truly recovered. Resigning from one set of Jewish executives to scurry back to those who launched me in the first place--this is the end result-- occlusion driven fanaticism.

Jim Croce, Canonized

I work so hard on some of these posts, and then I scroll the account every so often and wonder if I should not simply delete, accept that some form of anxiety and early dementia is taking over. Alzheimer's is not yet an affliction, but short term memory blocks started to plague me when Frank and I were current. Growing in concern. Louise is the only online contact who gave me any worthwhile feedback, and Steve Tara interacted and helped me along when I was active on LiveJournal. Why Daniel Schneider invited me to his community is lost on me, and my Russian viewers are a criminal cyber nuisance merely looking for an opportunity to antagonize me with more of the same.

Once I found out Louise was disabled, her backhanded compliment of my published essay diminished, but Steve Tara's interaction was pleasurable, the difference between being being a good lieutenant under an obligation, and a chance meeting of the minds.

I'd enjoy having fun in digs somewhere in Sydney with Steve, but I never wanted to engage Louise once I knew what she had, and understood her lack of sustaining socialization, because the work I did for the supervisor who traumatized me was mentoring. I have had enough of not being able to make my own choices on who I choose to empower. Louise said that if she friended me "you will not talk about me," essentially asking me to honor accepted social manner; what she confided to me is not interesting, but I am willing to violate her trust, or, in a more conscientious fashion, know my own capacity for it. In the usual manner of binary oppositions, I appreciate her outreach, her attempted assistance on a source, and offer her this advice if she is "out there" lurking: Do not invest in safety valves like I did. Find a partner, be wise about your finances, learn how to assert yourself, and stay away from damaged women like me. I am bad news Louise, for a sheltered younger lady like yourself, and do not want people like you looking up to me, and I'll never mention it again unless for reasons unknown it comes up.

This is why I made the interaction cease: the potential to cause her pain, passing it down the food chain. The disabled community itself taught me how to be that vicious, let alone the fabulous homosexuals who familiarized my past, and if I queried those who view this account if you are getting any sense of my strategy, what I am trying to do, or even where I am too obtuse, if you haven't commented in 300 posts to brave the demonic extremism of a damned mind, you aren't about to start now.

Designed by Giambattista Valli

"I don't want my former students dancing over my corpse."  --Michael C. Clark, stoic lifelong forebearer

How much things have changed, even in the incipient nuances. ABC keeps up on those educating captions that it used in Lost. Madeleine Stowe and Henry Czerny are atavistic blood sucking comforts, meant to be. Vampires without the fanfare, either Gothic or overwrought in the histrionic sensibility of  Anne Rice. If you had to choose between mothers who outlive their children and the pulse of that living scar which diminishes them, and a rabid elitist such as I, would you find the decision agonizing? Sontag also died of leukemia, like Anne's daughter, and I can enter into the impact this had on her son, how it magnified for him, felt it in his words, how he kept repeating "she wasn't the same person," over and over to the interviewer, relating her medical battle with the blood cancer.

Michael, in contrast, is my beast in the jungle, a manufactured construct of the sort whom I should have married. This is what my philosophy instructor wanted me to see, but it actualized too late for my realization. What it points to, however, is why I am so invested in the James list and the scholars in it, whether they are gracious or catty. I just want to publish a few good articles to honor the memory of my stalwart academic advisor. He never abandoned me, whatever imposition I became so many years after the fact, and I simply haven't found my angle, cat fights with Greg Zacharias over my lack of regimentation notwithstanding.

The Aeneid

I have refrained from discussing my banishment from The Literature Network with the same impetus that I have discussed my banishment from the P$W Speakeasy, partly due to the fact that my sins in the former community were negligible in comparison to the latter, and the site owner remains, still, an infantile jackass, but losing the connection of virtual familiarity still bites. I have little desire to return to the latter site, and this took me ten years of grinding away at a guilt I allowed to balloon, seeing myself in a fearful and degenerative aspect, which more or less is concomitant on mental illness as a matter of degree, to parse more finely, a mood disorder. To tirelessly reiterate the point, however, what I wanted from the MFA guild was a path to freedom that did not involve teaching, and it is now in twilight. As to the former forum, so called, it bores the shit out of me, minus the handful of useful contacts; those contacts, however, are apparently not my friends, since none of them use my comment section, and they know spastic is also the avatar Jozanny, hence my cynicism about connection and alienation through device, despite the fact that the stability of my lung function is coming to an end. I have probably purchased my last supply of Aeros, and may need more aggressive breathing therapy very soon, and even though I may not have fully connected the dots to any satisfaction of the online legal community, my former supervisor, her employer, and my landlord, have, through their negligence, destroyed my health. Had Liberty kept its promises, I would not today be so weakened, and sick, and levels of loss have their priorities.

However, I reconnected with Virgil (Manny) by the virtue of a spammer who had gotten hold of his yahoo address, and will confess that I have relented in relation to our former friction, which can be blamed on Italian provincial rivalry between NYC and Philly neighborhoods, she smiles while dying. If you hurry and look at the site, you'll notice Orphan Pip is still an active regular, and thus will be footnoted. The moderator Scheherazade, intones, "We take bans very seriously, and will not talk about them."

This, as well, is an utter form of hypocrisy. I committed no crime; my lungs were in bad shape and the site owner kicked me off because I attempted to discuss the chapter summary payment for what I had completed. Our capacity for pretension knows no end, and is in fact, limitless, and no one there cares about compassion for a homebound invalid.

As Manny is of my blood, I forgive his citations of the godspel of John to comfort me, and bear him the affection of our fellowship, remain pleased that he came to meet me and that we exchanged gifts and kisses, and that he and his wife are happy with their young son, and that I can bless their fortunes from afar, and the personal convictions he and I share are no longer so different, though Manny has been a good Catholic, and spastic has not, and can never recommit to the faith, as such, because I cannot vacillate, like Anne Rice, between extremes. I may have mentioned I sent her POB a letter once. Pointless exercise.