Human Services Injunction Chambers

"I am not sure what you are referring to. I was attempting to meet with you to go over all your questions," one of them, which would have amounted to a twelfth  interview in a two year time frame.

While I am very good at punishing myself for the obstinate choices of youth, and then inveighing about subsequent injustice at the hands of an urban, impoverished, and dubiously competent minority caste which overpopulate our cities, that same caste which places Kanye in his own inequality bracket (obviously a tolerated bracket), I suffer in obscurity over why I objected to the living complex my then still sanguine parents located for me in Woodlyn. I have no idea if the complex was operated Elwyn Institute, or Delaware County HUD, but it was white, seeded with peers whom I knew. Independent Living Centers weren’t yet quite incorporated in Pennsylvania at the time, which is why activist groups still had the muscle to have tort. Perhaps I would have had a little job in the town library, remained a technical virgin. I really can’t say. The visit was pre-college, meaning that my whirlwind of hormones had not yet made me even more unreasonable with presentation of the men I wouldn’t be able to lasso. I’ve also posted before that I searched for this Woodlyn unit on various housing databases prior to my 2017 crisis in October, to no avail. The only thing I vaguely recall is an unwillingness to be concentrated among other wheelchair users, like pole vaulting into North Philadelphia was going to resolve that issue.

Service coordinators, against whom I invariably rebelled in the early eighties, and whom I invariably terminated in 2007, replacing with continual persecution by the women’s negro league who tried to incarcerate me, and who now frighten me with phrases like “protection from abuse,” do absolutely nothing but make assessments. I was one, and I too, was powerless for clients, so I am uncertain why their salaries are justified. At best, they make suggestions, and are often subtle projections of bias and stigma themselves, shielded and difficult to come up against in fidelity to process.

Epistolary Arts of Fading Elders

"I cried," Atul Gawande, before traveling to the Ganges with dad's ashes

Debra Horne
Riverside Social Worker, nominally
158 N 23rd St, Office
Phila., PA 19103

Debra:

Let's presuppose, for the moment, that I take the pedestrian point of view, and I concede that my outlook is distorted from years of familial dysfunction, medical model institutional abuse, and parental genetics ingrown years before Presby and I engaged in what, unwittingly, has become a lifelong battle of Stratego.

Everyone, except you and the assessment team Trudy deployed in 2007, has understood that I cannot continue to utilize my former disability center. Charles Horton, on the Mayor's Commission, an African American just as you, grasped my problem without even needing to hear my narrative, which I spared him, and asked if I contacted UCPA; Tim Keller, who is Brian Sims communications director, exclaimed "You can't go back there!"

Two men grasped my dilemma, but you? Let's see:

1. Because Trudy "had to do something," when I had my power chair break down which lasted nearly a year, you, a woman with a consumer model compulsion disorder, two of your brothers from god knows where, treat me like an animal, surrounding my doorway after my uncle restored my chair at cost, arguing in public about my mental health because I wept in front of you and other erstwhile Occupational managers in the past, or lost my temper, understandably, having my life so severely disrupted for weeks on end, so many significant portions of my life spent teaching myself complex solitaire games while defecating on portable commodes, and you want what, a rosy and compliant imbecile overjoyed  to have my career imploded by the time I was all of 37, in a senior living facility like this one.

Linda C Dezenski did more than dominate me in graphic terms in an unwise exchange of confidences Debra. She pitted me in a political battle within the center which violated the state's statutory guidelines and its federal mandate, and my pain over this made me "the Other," destroying alliances, the coordinators assigned to me subsequently disparaging of my concerns: I was abused by more than one paraprofessional, Debra, since I became ineligible for Medicaid--at least until I conveniently distributed my assets in supporting Tim Artis's habit-- which doesn't mean he didn't deserve his pay.

2. But the fact that I let Presby off the hook for its liability in my assault in Diamond Park, the social ostracism I have received here at Riverside, the fact that my rematrication, my attempts to reassert myself have been beaten back by your ideas of relegating my humanity, even while you were coaching Lucille Vaugn for her promotion, the destruction, nearly continuous, of my personal property, none of this matters. In your book, I should be grateful for being a life long living wage for unskilled labor.

I'm done, and on the basis of everything I have been through, I am going to the state attorney general, and whatever happens, whether I set myself up for even more abuse in a shelter, or break down in a home, I am never going to forget the cruelty you, your superiors, the other residents, and privileged individuals like Monica Carr, have imposed on me. Never. Hide behind as many meetings with Ken Cantrell as you please.


Joanne M. Marinelli

Overly Involved

I am just an aging disabled woman on her way out, but what I do differently than the angry trolls on New Mobility chat boards, which New Mobility may have ceased to maintain, given Facebook's monopoly, is that I sublimate it into a justified critique of progressive overreach, while the left shifts uncomfortably with the implications, like the cremation of the Russian traitor in the new fast paced Allegiance on CBS. Very few people can handle that degree of ruthlessness. My medical model life has been an incremental equivalency of that ruthlessness, just as the ISIS burning death of a member of the Jordanian air force moves beyond the nature of any argument. The pedestrian nicety holds that Muslims don't kill other Muslims. Zarqawi's legacy closed the door on that polite fiction, but by the same token, graphic excess is not a triumph in fear.

Joshua was initially responsive toward my appreciation of Chaim Potok, and there it ended, and I just blocked a young woman named Natalia Lomala without knowing anything except that she doesn't tweet. Why should I care if my non-compliance is on the verge of more ruthless control? I'm on the verge of being finished, evacuating myself. I'll be placed somewhere, and social media won't do a damn thing for me.

Perhaps it isn't dying, yet. A simple bronchial flare which has subsided, but when did I ever have a moment of fulfillment outside of case management processes? During my inept sexual congress with Scott Bryan, recovering coke addict? My slightly less inept fling with Pat Dillon, the Irish version of my father, over-dramatizing my emotional vulnerability during our break-up? I drove out in a rain storm to a food vendor, crying. My sister screamed at me that he was married, what did I expect? And I forget what Edith, the assistant manager on Presby's typical minority promotional track, did at the time to console me. I was only a resident for three years, and rolled to the office to be consoled, Debra Horne not yet on tap as the bully matron.

"But you're a quadriplegic, what do you want?"

Too poor even for the salve a clean slate might offer, this is all I long for, the last desire, scarcity of resource will dictate how terrible this will be for me.

Information and Referral

Shut the fuck up, I'm not going to hurt you-- lines I have to live with the rest of my life

My sin, such as it is, a skim of the jeremiad written by John Lewis for The Atlantic. With the latest tally in Peshawar being 141 killed by the Taliban, initially supported by ISI, as I need not remind you, African Americans seem to have it pretty good these days, despite their own predation among themselves, and what their social dysfunction has inflicted on me. I have seen what  local police experience daily, indigent minorities engaging in systemic violence among themselves with impunity, in some of the poorest urban environments. Danieal Kelly wasn't killed because my Italian father fled South Philadelphia, or because a cop shot first and assessed later. Despite the fact that this child was case managed by city services, she was an embarrassment to her mother, who ignored her daughter's pleading for water. Lewis might rebut me that police aggression is different in kind from racial shame, and my response?

Oh please. Poverty and wealth are not entirely about the luck of distribution. Inner city entitlement breeds its own myopia, among blacks, among certain classes of disenfranchised homosexuals, among disabled individuals like myself. I am overweight, and it is hard to knock those extra pounds off with one good arm, but I have made an effort, in maturity, giving up ice cream, eating at least two salads a week. I saw a new tenant get on the elevator as I was coming in, and she easily doubled me for obesity, probably due to soda, which I swore off a long time ago. The woman probably doesn't care, given her age-- you have to be 62 to live here--I, and a few other crippled sots, were let in younger because we're exactly that--the tarts-- I just have the misfortune to have a genius IQ battered by my own obstinacy-- and that indifference to her health isn't socio-economic. Poor people are either brutal or fatalistic; if they are white like me with a useless humanist education stuffed into them beaten down by the procedure, then they are angry and pissed off.

Lewis fears for the country. Christ. I don't get stoned, don't drink, don't have a criminal record. and my life is on the margin. Because of predatory lending? Hardly. My mother was a fucking nut case and I couldn't get what I wanted as an undergraduate, trotted off to live life in an urban liberal dictatorship, and got screwed by activist collusion at the end of the day-- with the Matrix Research Institute's Pew grant funding being a noble experiment pitted against an entitlement system designed to ration and penalize incentives. Once an individual gets on disability, getting off is life threatening, barring the relative security of civil service, or tenure, and I am too old to aspire to that now. Ambulatory minorities don't have that excuse; they have chips on their shoulders, or dream of professional sports, but none of us have equal worth, regardless of which nation we inhabit. The Scandinavians, maybe the Japanese, have the closest thing to a classless society, but there is hardly any nirvana in that when these nations depend on China or Russia being placid, or on America power maintaining a certain status quo for Europe and the Pacific.

Progressive idealism is noble? Fine. Move in with me and see what life is like in North Philadelphia or Kensington for two years. I'm done beating my breast over officers who profile on the basis of ethnicity or criminalizing on the basis of a chronic condition. I spent my whole life trying to be decent, as a case manager or otherwise, and certain situations are irredeemable. 

Sedentary Colons

I suppose I am a cold hearted bitch in my own right, looking back on some of my posts, though I've held back here and there, out of respect, not having to violate all confidences offered to me in the past, my life basically destroyed by infantile paradigms, mad at myself for not seeing sooner that Philly's excuse for a disability center was more of the same I've lived through my whole life. I wanted something to do, and a three limb amputee named Laverne, fired later for lying about site visits, trained me as a volunteer. Blinded by enthusiasm, stupid, but Liberty was only nine years old then, wealthier, whiter. Couldn't see it for what it was. Zoo for the monkeys, spurred on by fallen paps with invisible tethers of bias. Intuitively I knew better, chafing at the bit. I let them take so much away from me: Jenelle Dost, Ann Piccinotti, Fern, Jennifer Barnhart, even Staroscik, my other manager, dismissive, going by rote. Debbie Russell's look of guilt in 07, the sting of that was a hostile environment as well, though she had nothing to do with the dilation and curettage game that Linda and I were playing. Another co-worker drawn in.

She taught me how to ride the ADA buses after I struck her by accident driving the elongated halls of the Presidential Suites in the 90's, a commonality in the fact that she also lost a brother to AIDS, in the years when it threatened to become the "impoverished black" disease, though I did not know her well enough to know the brother's underlying contaminant; though never friends, her layoff in 08 was nevertheless unfair, asserting this in honesty. Nearly everyone has departed, while I linger, visions of sugar plums so many nursing home beds with catheter drainage bags, waiting on renal failure, if nothing else.

Decent Breakfast

The plot twists in this Vares episode were as obvious as any equivalent American procedural. It was the actors who were unsettling: the wounded doctor in gauze shaking like a coward while his patient with stymied suicidal impulses kills his wife, and the Finnish Godfather, whatever he should be called. It is perturbing that Eastern Europeans look like a society under post traumatic stress, never mind the narrative. The men look blasted by famine, the women malnourished,, weary and gaunt if attractive, pallid and pasty like stale dumplings if homily and obese. This is Vladimir Putin's claim toward a resurgent Russian dominance?,

This is what the U.S. has to look forward to while progressives keep surging relentlessly? In all this time I've been raising my voice, I've raised it because the system invested in me up to a point after my life long paces in a strenuous institutional model that make Angstrom's reopening of the gulag, this time for corruption rather than dictatorship, seem like a weekend holiday. I do not need to keep revisiting what I've told you about, trying to be a competitive employee in power chairs on buses, Septa's Paratransit curtailment using a bidding contract with this venerable institution to do it. I was a patient at Moss briefly, hoping they could undo some of Shriner's aggressive surgical damage to my feet, but the doctors were concerned about the already significant loss to my educational calendar, so all bets rested on my astute and clever acumen, and we've seen how that has fared in my greater Delaware Valley journey.
.
Such a bleak assessment of the human condition. Finland, of all places. The Swedes? They lie just to cash in on crime drama television, but what Majek dredges up to imitate hard boiled noir feels like an authentic disparity indeed. The loss of all hope crushes the spirit, and I've taken this blow (childhood institutionalization) by blow, (family mental illness and death of siblings) by blow (domestic abuse) by blow (city governance corruption) and my foreign viewers must be amazed that I'm a disabled American who is still vested in the exceptionalism of the United States. Philadelphia has its own subjugation tactics in relation to mental heath and chronic conditions. It is a wonder I just don't fold up the damn tent. I've never had a vacation, not of my own making. Padre took me to the Poconos as a kid and it was a disaster. I had stress incontinence without having the classification for it back then, my sister Stephanie screamed when our father left the room, as she often did back then, my dead brother Nicky stole the waitresses tips, and now I'm telling my HUD contracted landlord with their hypocritical Protestant exploitation ethics that they are going to compensate me for years of duress. How deep does the damn sinkhole go.

Subtext

I might have met Theresa Hunt in passing; I cannot say for sure one way or the other, but as I keep hammering home, case management is not a panacea for competency, and Richard Plotts outburst doesn't surprise me. He had a jacket littered with violence, and I have absolutely no record, but the women who run Presbyterian Homes treat me as if I were a Richard Plotts simply because I have been victimized, or I've fallen-- whereas Plotts himself wasn't secured with appropriate precautions despite his antagonism toward protocol and the people behind the protocol. How he got the weapon will be investigated, but the issue of security at psychiatric facilities is ongoing, because ambulatory felons are less suspect than cripples. Bellevue Hospital had a researcher killed by a violent patient in the 90's, one of the few civilian cases which held me riveted during my last months with Greater Media Cable. The woman's family lost what I felt was a winnable case. If I had actually engaged in self-inflicted violence, or struck out at Presby staff and needed Richard's level of treatment, then I could understand how and why I've been browbeat repeatedly-- but evidently, cerebral palsy in and of itself inspires more fear than a man with Plotts' history.

What Forgiveness Does for Me

Let's see:

Two of my mother's lovers sexually assaulted me. One was Beaky, who decided to rape me after I came home from a party with John. 

Hats off Tassoni. I hand it to you with admirable sarcasm, and some knowledge of your misogyny. You made it. A department head, only a year and a half my senior, needed to reach for a safety valve when I pitched an error by writing to you in 2002, always looking back over my shoulder. Shake me off by finding a classification with which to label me, and  never knowing. I could not tell you. Never did. How could I, when I at least wanted to be your lover. How could I tell you. I did not. Beaky, and then my much more dangerous stepfather.

Linda did not know, and I could not tell you about her either. Somehow there is a disconnect between Chester and Philadelphia, more related to survival perhaps, that education would protect me, desire for you, worship for Jerry. Safe harbor with Michael, while a heroin addict named Stuart tried to torture my family to death. Independent living off side Temple's campus just more of the same molestation I used to receive at home. I want the nigger woman dead more than the addict grandson who assaulted me before her. He was simply going to kill me to get high. Miss Eddie hit on me, and I have to live with this John, that I no longer have compassion enough to see her as anything more than a non-viable deviant with minimal human characteristics; I picture her with a bloodied scalp. I'd enjoy seeing her hurt, and cannot forgive the world John, for creating lesbianistic abusers whom by necessity make me regurgitate, corrosive and monstrous in return. Forgive her for being a pig with the inability to control her lewd touching. Forgive Linda and Josie and Erik and Jimmi and Cassie for a zealotry which cannot acknowledge how many lives it destroys in tandem with a case management system designed to imply I am less human than you.

Forgive you for how you negotiated your interaction with me. Forgive Josie for rupturing a hope, an anticipation of a seasoned romance. Peevish clit sucking Christian published my departure from the fine world of mental health integration. She then let me be on team Mobility for five minutes. A heterosexual flirtation was too much to witness, however.

Never mind. Vituperation has turned me sour, right? I'm appalling, you never felt that way, and I can never hope to feel with another Linda's bravaccio with her divorced, Jewish husband. My neighbors and classmates from Folsom, before you knew me, and from Ridley Park, where yes, you visited, my father none too happy about that, these suburbanites disparaging me, at a disability center where a blind Mexican American cannot cajole state politicians to engage. This is social services intake in the city of brotherly love.

I don't want to die like this Tassoni. I wanted to bear your children, earn some degree of acclaim in my own right, and I cannot even hope to relocate without miraculous intervention. This is what forgiveness does for me.

Bon Morte

I thought John Barth was dead, and that I had simply missed his obituary in passing, but his jabbing narrative voice is exactly the same as when he was still writing about being middle aged and married to his graduate student wife, only he is 85 or so, and empty as a bramble, or so he says. It turns out Mr. Harper died and I did not know. Typical Philadelphia black man, simple as a mousse, limping down Race Street after some scandal with resident council funds. "You have no choice," this is what he told me around 2010 when Brian got his manual wheelchair caught in the tracks outside my window, the engine flattening the poor traumatic brain injury bastard like a scrap of tin, no choice for me not to participate in Presbyterian Homes religious activities. I never do. I find Ann Beattie's anecdotes cruel and doubt her veracity, and yet her essay didn't-- oh how can I convey this, tired and scuzzy?-- her acerbic sensibility about her social set meshed into my rage, life long, about not being in it too with every franchise author of repute. I am still up, brush burning tail bone, contemplating a complicated essay on systems that I probably cannot do without investigating endless regulations and human processes being overwhelmed by them, the latest VA scandal symptomatic of the fact that civilization is invariably going to collapse if we keep this up. I haven't found my voice for it, as I usually do, however. This may take me some time, and yet my productivity is challenged because my enthusiasm ebbs. I get tired of authors, the industry, the pretensions. A young minority felt touched by the dismay in one of my Linked In posts, and he reached out to me. What the hell could I tell him? That my poverty is an acid vat and he was being kind to an angry fascist, coiled in her bitterness and terror of the swallowing to come?

I told him something in the futile poignancy of his desire to be supportive. It was courteous and emblematic enough of doomed circumstance, while Beattie had cutting edge collegiate sex with an instructor I had to relegate to a cocaine addict who cut me by bragging about his black girlfriend. Like Ann, I have the familiarity of a Chinese outlet when I desire the comfort of fried rice. Recognized it in the success of her reputation, my aggrandized failure.

I am not going to beat Pennsylvania's social services paradigm. If veterans are a vast post service entitlement class constantly straining resources, my vitriol, to use the poet Amy Holman's justified scolding of my uncouth temper many years ago, has to be taken in context. Soldiers serve their countries and become expendable unless they stay in the hierarchy. I lost my caste, basically in 97, and then caught a few minor breaks. Not major or even lucky ones: Mother died and left the kids a lump split by a third, and I made about six months of my entitlement benefits on commission, roughly. Since the tap dried and 50 cents per word went poof, I did not rush to the IRS ever popular kiss and tell rubric. I would have had I become established. I didn't. This is a difficult industry in which to achieve that, and I'm not a novelist. Not a competitive scholar-- not that I fear academic journals; I'm simply not superwoman.

Sneezed, needed a napkin. Even to get away, a little while, away from my antagonism toward Jimmi Shrode, his partner. I used to go to Wildwood, but that was long ago and would now be a logistical inconvenience, much like getting along with fans. Sigh.

Human Singularity

Other futurists have long argued that we are heading instead towards a global economic and ecological collapse.-- Eden, Steinhart, Pearce, Moor, Singularity Hypotheses, p2

Bill Bixby was no doubt resented by countless fathers during the run of this quiet and unassuming series. I certainly saw padre in the projection of the actor as the suave cosmopolitan patriarch who had to negotiate the cracked terrain of the me decade. I had no idea he succumbed to prostate cancer after doing the earlier switcheroo version with Ferrigno, and the only clever thing about the 03 Hulk was giving the body builder the cameo in the opening. The film wants to be liked, wants relevance, and in the ghost of Ebert's tumorous glands, bollo uncle Roger focuses on Elliot's graphic performance as a worthy conformity to the genre. Yes. Connelly and Elliot redo Beautiful Mind with more exaggerated gravity, but Hulk is not terribly interesting. Schwarzenegger trying to psyche Ferrigno out in their early competitive days is more so, in terms of the psychology of bullshit and bravado. Should I bother comparing 08 and 12?

Wait for pins to drop? The 12 variation looks more like Lou. To summarize: the 03 version is the weakest of the resurgent Marvel films. Enjoyed less with each viewing. The continuity rolls like a rushed three penny opera, and the best I can say about Nolte is he seems to be channeling Katherine Hepburn; it does not absorb into the character.

I have to stroll out in a bit. The female throws house cat tantrums when her dry food vanishes, so hopefully CVS is open and I will be able to get into my branch. This year I am not looking to gather with exuberant students of my defeated hopes. I can only speculate that some of you aren't that stupid and do not like the implications of my festering temper, but people like Fern Markowitz, within her secular indulgences, and narrow minded bitch slappers like Debra Horne, manufacture the kind of aggression driving against liberal eradication. Debra has threatened me, more than once, and I do not like shallow paint by numbers organizers with that kind of power. 28 years is enough, even if compassionate capitalism might turn out to leave me worse for wear.

What do we do with poignancy for fallen father figure archetypes? 

Castles Don't Write Mysteries

A man with a reflective turn of mind, walking through an exhibition of this sort, will not be oppressed, I take it, by his own or other people's hilarity--Thackeray, location 11

I never really prefaced children, which any regular viewers I have know is both a lie and a truth. Once I wasn't exiting university with a husband of choice, I never prefaced the risks of pregnancy, and aborted the idea of motherhood for a career, and for writing. Little patience with little humans; it is not really a regret, as my maternal drives are more suited to terrorizing poachers and other instances of animal cruelty which is unintentionally caused by hoarders (some of those are female) and aggressive human males. People who butcher silverbacks should be put to death. Fossey's murdered spirit offers zealous support, sotto voce. People who kill kitties, ah; people who kill kitties are zoned off, breed apart, not much of a surprise that my Russian viewers have vanished. 

Mother Russia still believes in empire, in an economy that hunts and gathers, to channel George Will. Did the lengthy pause for coffee prove disruptive to my train of thought? Families aren't a beneficial panacea when other system modalities fail. I do not think even Ed, my lone account follower, realizes that I badgered my mother with wroth tantrums to get me the fuck out of Riverside Presbyterian from my earliest days when the company shuttled me over from the Temple campus environs. Marie attempts to pacify me with the belief that her brother my padre, will provide deliverance. This fable from my earliest days of my father's responsibilities does more detriment to my health than not. My father is nearly 80. Before my mother left him he was almost a millionaire. The IRS decided to destroy him fifteen years ago. Deference only partially weighs in on my speak no evil stance. I do not know what he did or how he did it when it comes to tax code violations.

The state of Pennsylvania considers me a violation simply for being alive at this point. Trudy and I are supposed to discuss my transfer request. I do not want to discuss it. Presby has gnawed on my soul, in conjunction with Septa and my disability center, since I was 23 years old. I do not know where you are in your life, but think about that. A 23 year old university graduate spit out like gristle in a 20 block radius of a city founded by Quakers. Philadelphia might as well be run by Joseph Stalin.

47 Ceilings

"You guys lucked out. I normally hate everything, but like the Rosenbach."

I have to charge for a few hours before I can begin to labor frantically. Tuesday offered a transitional thunderstorm and a power outage disrupted my plans to circumvent, or mitigate, the exterminator’s morning censure. HUD’s mandatory extermination polices have inadvertently (or perhaps by design), been the source of much duress in my lifelong conflict with the public housing methodology of Presby, and I knew uncoupling my work relationship with Tim would lead me down this path, but things have to come to an end, and by degrees, a compliant pack mule grew tired of harnessing a manufactured Jezebel; it lasted seven years. I cannot ride it farther, and only repressed my frustration with his flower child mind for as long as I did because it was worse on the grid, and sometimes he and I managed well enough.

The ability to get along with others has been significantly eroded, but what I confessed to the archive librarian Tuesday morning in the rain was more true than she could probably contextualize in processing my anti-social behavior. Her little preserve of a Jewish bookseller as an historic artifact still holds its charms, whereas what my years under Rick’s well meaning authority revealed to me about human suffering, its clinical, stigmatizing, and so often utterly incompetent aspects, destroyed my aspirations, even my quest for transcendence, when coming to terms with my place in humanity, and humanity’s place for itself.

I do not care to relive my Matrix years all that often. My essay about my time at the Institute took me three years of walking on hot coals, and it wound up in my erstwhile lesbian traitor’s chapbook outlet, my own draft still on my hard drive, but the advocate who interviewed me with Dan decided he wanted to kill himself approximately 48 hours after I was hired in their weird Alden Park offices, and he insisted on resigning, which left me in a situation where I never would have accepted the position. I engaged in subterfuge, begged my former CSPPPD supervisor to take me back. She refused because of Cassie, and in trying to do the right thing, keeping myself employed with them, my own health was subsequently destroyed, upon which Liberty made its own substantial contributions after I forced my resignation.

In the abstract, Rick’s proposal made sense: hire people on the entitlement rolls to counsel other beneficiaries off of those same rolls back toward matriculation, or supported employment. In practice, as Samuelson of Wapo has noted, the disincentives for those with mental illness were too great. Lawyers waged great battles to say that most disenfranchised Americans became disabled, and real cripples like myself end up all the more victimized, because I do not want to ride with the herd, case managed into oblivion, but here we are, with a broken welfare state that cannot, in point of fact, sustain Romney’s 47 percent.

Carcinoma

The phenomenology of moral wrong and evil is vast and complicated. -- Charles Griswold

At the end of La Strada, Anthony Quinn's brutality is pierced through by Masina's absence, perhaps even silence. Are we supposed to forgive Zampano? What does Fellini insinuate about oppressive relationships? If the biracial inner city Miss Eddie had not caught me totally by surprise-- she was preparing to leave, turned around and lunged at me, and her mouth said what lips say when someone hits on you-- if I was not so shocked, I would have lacerated her skull with any blunt object available, within my reach, and I would have felt justified, and might have attempted to break her arm, dislocate her shoulder; if the police had come, I am not sure if I would have been arrested. Officers on the scene are not interested in twenty plus years of traumatic events, The only method I have to circumvent my hatred of her slovenly indulgence is contempt. I know from what she told me that her Caucasian father was murdered (good) and that she "kisses everybody" when I fought with her the next day and suggested she leave. She looked frightened.

When I went to a basketball game with a technician named Rick; it was obvious about thirty seconds in I had made a mistake dumbing down to my sister's idea of white welfare trash. After an excruciating two hours, I almost almost got rid of him, but he coughed in the hallway. Taking pity I offered him tea. He kissed me. Fuck him and get it over with. Things proceeded accordingly until I discovered he lacked protection. He tried a soft force, but had obviously never confronted the resistance of palsied legs; he left, called me two three times after he skedaddled for real. I forgave both him and myself long ago. Date gone bad. If I ever see Eddie again, however, she'd face my triggered anger as a representation of ablest violation that I have experienced over the course of a lifetime.

Jesse Bering might say this is a classic aggressive response to unwanted erotic stimulus, but I'd object that attendant care management doesn't respect me as equal to ambulatory humans, and won't unless I'd rematriculate. I feel justified in defending myself against black females on the down low. 

Simon Axler

...the sense she had now when Mr. Carmichael shuffled past, just nodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slippers, that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. -- Virginia Woolf

To ready a sonorous viola that is an omnipresent suture to a heart of festered scabs, the subtext in many of my biographical posts is about lack of belonging: I did not fight to close the deal for a terminal degree, never found my way through the thicket of becoming an independent scholar, my shoddy case management training has turned me into a wistful exterminator, and I failed to establish myself as a journalist; creative writing can go fuck itself. I still practice it, will continue to do so, but most artistic expression, when you take a step back, is an eddy of vomit, canonical or otherwise. Rereading Les Miserables is an insane idea. I do not even know why it occurs to me to return to Victor Hugo, but perhaps reminding myself about the arc of Jean Valjean is relevant to modern alienation. When I was still under Linda's supervision, then I belonged, and that is where my internal bleeding truly resides; not in my career satisfaction, for I can vouchsafe that disability center employment is Orwellian, but I did what I did for as long as I did for her, not for the most discarded and broken bodies on the face of the earth, not for the dozens of mentally ill who challenged my own health not long after, but for a Jewish woman with a milder case of cerebral palsy whom I defended like a pit bull against all her detractors, then enabled her to become a fatal catalyst, making me a bull dyke in all but name, and I lashed out at her as much. Now I'm your bitch, hissing it out of my countenance violet with fury, stupidly emoting, never able to remove myself from this casualty laden environment. Padre's solution, if it isn't a shell game, is for me to move in with his sister and my demented uncle who paws my breasts when he can get away with it, but Joe is in Alzheimer's land, so I chalk up those behaviors there. If I could graft myself to the Rosenbach, it would be a gently vindicated landing, and they are good, despite that my cleaving to wade through Joyce was wobbly--but negotiating that slope is tricky, not being a nuisance, making myself useful. They fascinate me in many ways, these archivists and patrons, and their secular liberalism is good. Linda's is a psychopathy, much like Edward Snowden's transitory impermanence; his narrative goes deeper than his dissidence, deeper than immediate analysis.

The systems we've created have overtaken us.

The genie I cannot put back in the bottle isn't homoerotic desire: after Ms Dezenski bucked about her orgasms, I asked myself if she was flirting with me, and rolled into the bathroom with a COPD temperature and proceeded to puke. No, what I am going to grieve the rest of my life is the affinity of mutual esteem. I doubt I will ever have it again in another woman to admire or respect. There is an old adage that pontificates we really do things for ourselves. Indirectly, my loyalty to what Linda represented was an internal reward based on belief of derived  power through her leadership. Indeed, I held onto my position at Matrix as long as I did because I wanted to be as strong as I thought she was, and that example mattered more to me than sex.

I still live it, to channel Kevin Whately, but I have to pay the price for that in my hope for more equitable futures. If I lose to savagery, and then face elimination through that, then perhaps all I can hope for is to be my own voice of consolation for the suffering that finds its way to me.

Garland's Simile

Part of this is my titanic struggle not to smoke tobacco, and I fear an imminent breakdown of the fact that I have been clean since last March; part of this is my menstrual cycle is an all but sterile issue, and I am still enough in the memory of fertility to mourn my healthy femininity, and the welfare state should not be killing me with compliance. There was a woman here  in Riverside Presbyterian, tall and intimidating, with dry toffee skin, bipolar, how dangerous I know not, who thundered at me, "You don't believe in God?" as if it was an insult. Amy with the face cancer telephoned me, asking me, because of my background in advocacy, to stop Debra from evicting this woman for not taking her medication. For me that was a conflict of interest, and she chased me on the Parkway. I pitied her situation, avoided contact.

Enter Jane with the dog, white, over  the last twenty four months, she threatened me, has harassed countless residents, forced me to change my telephone number, and I asked why Debra Horne is not evicting her?

Anyone have any faith in state vocational civil servants who leave and take  on the Protestant work ethic to keep poverty a healthy and thriving industry of exploitation?

I would do anything to go home, something I no longer have to go to, and caution that access to mental health services is not a panacea for HUD's contractual alliance with religious companies that browbeat the most disadvantaged populations.

More to the point, neither woman is or was helped by Presby, and after 27 years, I, personally, am being destroyed by women who have total access to everything I do, all the money I have; they control every aspect of my life, threaten me at will, and yes, I can give my notice, except for the fact that doing so is tantamount to putting myself physically at risk. I do not know what happened to Amy's friend, and Jane is stigmatized by most of the tenants, at least those that still utilize healthy social networks. I am afraid of her irrational antagonism, and what I was once trained to do would not help. Is it an over-magnified social fear?

I was sitting in lobby, talking. Jane came in with the dog. I told her that I was going to legal aid and asked her if she would like me to mention her concerns, offered her a hairbrush for the mongrel. She said no, caught the elevator. I started to head up, and Jane took the lift back down, followed me on the larger freight elevator, and had a violent altercation with me, in the car, at close range, and then started telephoning me at one, sometimes three, in the morning. The managers suggested I call the police if it continued, and asked me to write it up, and she has since graduated to harassing my former clients. Her triggers are possibly borderline for actual violence, and that she is now preying on people I worked to help troubles me. Neither Trudy nor Debra have any professional training in mental health, disability, or geriatrics, and as such, are not qualified to either integrate or remove the problem populations they are being paid to handle.

But Trudy, the current manager, does chart, if you like, any signs or symptoms that count as aberrations she can use to advocate for institutionalization, has done her best to make me doubt my sanity, and I am grateful to Ed for scorning that tactic, reminding me of my strength, but I've never had a vacation, never able to get away from this, except for funerals, and the independent living coordinator, whoever they are, is roughly equal in parity to the cruelty of Debra's ignorance and lack of qualifications. Jane needs mental health support, and should have been evaluated for that during her residency application, but neither Presby nor centers like these have the money to spend for personnel training. Hence, when they promote black women through the ranks, the supervisory staff is basically no more than a few steps ahead of their low income welfare residents.

 If I cannot leave, safely, I will be broken beyond my ability to recover, perhaps not immediately, but soon.

Michelle Obama, Contravened?

According to EJ Dionne and Joe Biden, Michelle Obama scored with her personal narrative, and indeed, if you pay any attention to the upscale pundits, the First Ladies should run the damn presidency, and sometimes have. My problem with the Obamas is not their potential, nor the hope they generated in 2008 as a political couple. The issue that sticks in my throat is nothing happened. Where did the change we can believe in go? It vanished into TARP, into Timothy Geithner's stress tests, or into derivatives and credit default swaps, mysterious financial tricks that make me feel my IQ is near parity to the imbeciles among whom I live, and no, I am not being kind, to the same degree that Philadelphia has more than once nearly taken my life, I am entitled to causticity. Today I thought I'd give you another reason for that.

When I first returned to a full urban life, now defeated I suppose, I had a neighbor, Levora, who lived to my right, and the good Sisters, recognizing my intellect, wanted me to mentor the girl, motivate her to finish study for her GED. Problem was, Levora had Huntington's complicated by the fact that Levora was not Olivia Wilde playing a bisexual doctor who did not yet have full blown symptoms. Levora was the real thing. Levora had it early, a gangly athletic girl with google eyes and a large smile who broke down and cried to me, "It's too hard!" Levora and her brother fucked like bunnies, passing on this condition to their children, and I have to live with the memories of the disgusting physical dissipation of this family in the inner city, live with the memory of her dying seven years later at Inglis House, another black woman in scrubs rubbing Levora's reptilian neck with ice chips. Linda, who was then not what she would become, the Linda who isn't so much stronger than I am, only and simply more capable of destruction, said, "Don't feel guilty."

Someone should. Levora is forgotten by all but any survivors, a living shame, a scandal under any model we'd like to use. The ideological left is back to whining about the fact that the disabled want to work. and the ideological left is tone deaf. Abilities need to be recognized as well as limitations, but again, this is another case of liberalism run amok. I think it is a horrible thing to give birth knowing you've passed on a death sentence in so many years; it is also a horrible thing that in trying to imitate those who told me I was normal, that I have been punished repeatedly for aspiring to live a rich aesthetic existence.