"You will also die lonely and alone instead of being surrounded by children and grandchildren who love you."-- Marc Thiessen, worthy of emulation more frequently than not.
Discombobulated.
It isn’t one of those words to be touted in relation to pride over one’s range
of vocabulary, but it’s syllable bumbling is sometimes best suited in
description when you give up on those technological extensions that raise human
to cyborg debates on popular science venues. I traded in my old Kindle
Paperwhite some scant days before my 57th birthday, and thought
Amazon, in consideration of the hundreds of dollars I spent on my original
models, would simply ship out the upgrade. Why do we have to keep paying, again
and again, particularly if we’re part of the entitlement class, which in the
States, is bundled into the capital acquisitions pyramid? After sorting out
that I had to indeed buy my new model, the tracking software places it as on its
way from a major sorting center in Newark. Meanwhile my left hemisphere might be
under vivisection. Kindles are vital tools when mobility is compromised,
transforms into a research extension for those of us who wanted career to surmount
family, to transform career into family, and then wind up with poverty’s sterility
on display. The smoothness we see in The Good
Wife is still fictive in this regard, the mere cookie cutter adaptations of
Michael J. Fox in his cashmere long coat as an emblem of his popularity, likability, yes, these things are important, even if the hygiene self-pity
issues are left to his memoir writing upon receipt of his diagnosis. You put it
out there in brazen fashion, but not too brazen, the tremors, the noveau riche
sensibility not so far removed from how success in Hollywood translates the
power of recognition. Writers take a somewhat different track, but we are all
gunning for the same thing, break ranks, then get subsumed by process law, process crimes. This is the complaint
these days, that the process is more important than the individual. Marie Callender is only a simulation of evocative conceits we harbor about the culinary comforts of southern hospitality.
Their branded pot pies are tolerable, nothing to wax ecstatic over in the convenient eclipse of their mass manufacture. My oeuvre, creatively, or journalistic, may not be important in comparison to those who've accelerated into the classics, but it is important to me, the preservation, even if the aging Beats assembled in Pittsburgh were anti-climatic, mostly rude, drunk, later memorialized by my most obsessed over professor, as he felt bad, it was actually the journey itself which is surprisingly a highlight of my burgeoned adulthood subconsciously more and more in alignment with Alex Keating's valiant attempt to put the bit on then the over reach of 40 something boomers. Five hours on Amtrak over verdant hillsides, Hershey, Jonestown, meeting Louis McKee. As both of us were Philly poets, he and I talked about mundane things working class born and bred discuss, bills, grants, the living dead of loneliness in my head, my cousin has a penchant for these playful images designed to milk out the last drop of a smile.
"Does the country kid still have his soul?"-- Bernie Taupin, conversion man
Being an atheist Catholic is in part a contradiction in terms, just as going from a bleeding heart progressive because I was woefully besotted with an air force pilot turned post-modern Shakespearean to the angry anarchist speaks volumes, but one of my first cases which started to cauterize my empathy was that of my long ago neighbor, Levora. A Catholic nun who was socially active in visiting Diamond Park pressured me to pressure the girl to get her GED, and I understood the sister's argument; I befriended my neighbor (and hear my 3 or 4 or 5 minority followers say "Aw," or smile). However, the problem with the Sister's argument, who might have been a case manager, no habit, was Levora had Huntington's Disease, and I watched this young woman waste away before my eyes. Linda Dezenski, when I still worked for her, told me not to feel guilty as I watched Levora dying in my fabled nightmare, and we see how well I obey the dictums of spastic Jewish sociopaths. Before I met her entire afflicted family, Levora start crying during our tutoring sessions. "It's too hard," and with that, I left her alone, and watched her get pregnant and met her brother and her nieces and nephews, all carrying the gene, and while I was not cognitively in the space I am now as I enter the waning years of my independence, Levora's situation allowed me to realize why the far right and genocide exists. The hell of her physical existence and destitution has haunted me all these years, the brutality of evolution a visceral agony staring me in the face, a fortunate cripple some of you might pity in turn, and religious charity has no solution, no absolution to offer the demonizing pain the inner city scarred on me, and never shall.
She and her brother should have been prevented from procreating for the sake of public health, however this may go against a liberal society that doesn't police consensual sexual activity. That is what the Catholic nun should have worked on, sexual restraint in inner city economics.
As for Levora, she always had a smile, grateful for an ice chip, but watching her die made my case for voluntary euthanasia, the dignity of controlling the end of life over the brutal indignity of biology. The Catholic Church is wrong about the level of humility those in constant Third World conditions can absorb. Not that materialism shouldn't be critiqued, but striving for ambition, ownership, the dignity of work, these provide self-esteem. If the Curia wants my favoritism, it might support specially designated cities for the LBGT community, since we separate along those lines on a defacto basis.
Wouldn't it be fun with me in charge? Ha.
"The life in me abolished the death of things."-- The Ring and The Book
Yes, I sometimes forget just to whom I am posting, certainly not to Oliveira. People follows a time honored tradition older than journalism itself: The need to be amazed by a freak show conjoined to the distortions of glamour, but in the case of Natalie Wood, her theatrical depth always on the verge of overwhelming pathos, her performances remain a specter for which I have no cognizant explanation, except for the fact that her death was a senior year headline. What Redford's character does to her emotionally in Tennessee's carefully contrived melodrama opens some raw wounds, Sundance liberal be damned. She was drinking and fell off a boat. She was on a boat, drinking, she and Robert had a fight, and merry widow tossed her overboard, not that there is any evidence to hover over Wagner's old age. Her character Alva was pressured into sex trafficking and is destroyed by her own desperation for magical innocence, in the covert hovering of homosexual penetrations into familial viciousness, and died in such a fashion it reverberates. We believe things have changed since those times, that fresh meat is not a commodity, but have they? What Rampell delineates at the bottom of the economic workforce barely scratches the surface, but we're demonizing what we enjoy about the convenience of processed food. I patronize McDonald's once in a blue moon-- but escape this juggernaut no less than anyone else who frequent short order establisshments. Golden Lake, Dunkin Donuts, something more upscale when I head to Delancy Plaza, even grocery chains have converted to prepackaged meals.
What I am suggesting is we do not often enough step back to see what polarizes us into idiotic points of advocacy. Restaurant franchises operate on the caveat of instant gratification, not decent hands on customer service. What isn't microwaved is short grilled, in the past, crewed by adolescents never intending such labor becoming a living wage, not in the developed world. Those who remain on the front lines, the farmers who harvest crops, manage livestock, can only push manufacturing technologies so far; the rest of us are basically obsolete, even the CEO five times up the food chain. Alva is a passive anachronism, but in another sense she returns to the future, the last exploitable resource, our terminal diseases.
"If I seem cavalier about it and in fact I am cavalier about it, it is because this is not my life."-- Donna Leon, with allowances for lack of exact transcription.
Meanwhile, back in the land of grandiose effacement over an old woman's grandiose self-importance, every time a journalist like James Foley dies chasing after a scoop in ancient lands with statistically marginal individuals, the media conglomerates, NYT, Wapo, LAT, CNN, ESPN, let out a yelp of pain. The holy sanctum has been violated: gathering information civilized people need to know at their leisure in a coffee cafe.
Let's take a step back. Foley was a photographer, and his images of the Syrian conflict no more or less redundant than a native's use of his or her cell phone, not that I have data on how many Syrians own a Samsung as opposed to a functioning Apple OS. Reports, making allowances for lack of certainty, indicated Foley was tortured in his captivity. Perhaps this caused him to reevaluate the value of foreign correspondence imagery for the sake of a scoop, since it seems being driven for a news story has its own shades of the pathological, or maybe he rethought the Spanish Inquisition, but how much do people outside of the millennial hot zone that is forever the Middle East feel driven to put themselves in danger by bating Semitic beasts?
Do Foley's images have empirical value? No, with the exception of his beheading. Those images, in and of themselves, will remain as a genealogy marker. As hard as we try to divorce ourselves from primate origin, we're still rather large apes who evolved back into nakedness, even without modern barbers. Knowledge generation is a tricky business, but the Fourth Estate holding itself aloft as a modern temple whose abstract conceptualization is inviolate doesn't take into account the fact that revenue needs to be generated. Most of what the public reads has no monetary value that we can use in turn to generate money, including humanitarian crises. ISIS was bought and paid for according to Western free market and entrepreneurial values. Accommodating the beast will invariably create paths for its transformation. Radical egalitarians like Foley need more patience, not the rush of trotting about hot zones. I am not done with my Pistorius sentiments. Dyer triggered an exasperated trial run. Initially, I wasn't going to bother, but not I'm hunting for sources and more retail packaging.
I try avoid chasing every issue in a blog post, and I know who Keynes is without being fluent on his conservative theories, but the fact that the new equality of homosexuality has to send a man like Ferguson into a tailspin points to why I have paid my price to be offensive. Skidelsky veers off into futurist theory of the kind the raises its time honored head every time the free market goes bust, and this is not a concern to dismiss, but my concern is what this species is doing to itself every time science offers it a biological rationale to say barriers need erosion.
Opprobrium does not change what impressions offer up to our private judgments: Niall Ferguson is more important (or more accurately, more prominent) than I am, and no doubt many thousands of others, because he succeeds in an equally important institutional environment that processes data in such a way as to engage our perspectives on social function, degrees of affluence, the lack of it, and in the doctor's case in particular, how past discoveries inform our present.
Perhaps Keynes cynicism on economic models in a downturn had nothing to do with orientation, but group think castigation against an off color, possibly lazy segue, is a load of bull dung in a sinkhole. World population pressures, and innovations surrounding that, are beginning to outpace vast sectors of human labor that used to be important, and if the shit isn't hitting the fan now, it well might into the next millennium. People like me are a case in point, state invested, educated, and useless, and this is in the developed world, where we are forbidden to discuss uselessness and the human animal because no one wants to be charged with a hate crime.
I am already reverting back to my 2002 level of poverty, the stress of such that led Poets & Writers to kick me off Speakeasy. My remaining savings is but the smallest cushion, clock ticking, whether or not I can freelance back in to sustain my online activity, and I doubt it. Liberty rescued me the first time, around the early nineties, when the Internet became a word that has since backdated in currency, but the updraft from the disability center was enfeebled at best, looking back all that way. My work under Linda 1 and Linda 2 was not stressful, and indeed, in context, it was ridiculous, and it was before my assault. It is very difficult for me to convey to my twitter account, even to other Philadelphia accounts, how much urban poverty, urban violence, had damaged me between 1993 and 2009, the latter date a kind of murky cut off for a cap on the African American retreat on what had been a continuing escalation to evict me. To go where, to do what, I cannot tell you, but some months before his birthday, I told mio padre, "You and mommy were right. I should have left Diamond Park and come home." Within days. Google Maps has a picture of these twin units, nothing more than an ugly and urban brutalist architecture, from which I could only go to another building with the pretentious hypocrisy of the same sort, and no, I am not grateful. Do slumdogs, whether Indian or Thai, have it worse? I cannot really rate it, because my youth was a boomerang between hospital and institution and back again. So no wonder then that poor Jerry clunked me over the head when I first set eyes on him. Christ man, we've gotten old, but I see you're still *at it*. I cannot say I'll never do another reading, but poetry under a gas light, what the fuck have we changed, my old mentor?
What have we done? I speak the unspeakable, and you've retreated to New Orleans, still filling the same estuaries that when I was young, hit my cognitive hemispheres like speed. In a very real sense, the artistic outlet has more quietly disillusioned me, as well. The American Constitution allows the outlet, but does nothing to check the power of Jon Corzine, or Hank Paulson or the CEO of JP Morgan to float nonsensical trillions. I live on perhaps .00001% of their 6 billion dollar leak, and the best Homo Tweets can bleet at me is to "get help," in all the glory of his progressive vision of what social equality looks like, that says nothing to what my half-century of damnation has cost. Social work never made me happy, not really. The Matrix Research Institute gave me a small sense of the aphrodisiac of merit, something I paid a high price to experience. It will now take me about two hours to safely simulate a decent shower. Most of you never even have to think about this. I do, my lungs slowly suffocating on pus that feeds oxygen generating commercials, and I am still battling to live an absurdly decent life, stifling a jagged sob.
