Feeble Evocations

"The best advice I can give you is to stay out of hospitals Lieutenant." -- Leonard Nimoy

For the few of you who may have noticed, I emoted to Secretary Kerry's account that "we had to help France!" But I am in tandem with the analysts who say we cannot prepare for that level of contingency which led to the massacre at Nice. The images did indeed feel just like a joint Francais American thriller, or even the one novel by Harris not about Hannibal, inundation and emotion struggling hand in hand with each other. I want to help, really. I want to drop everything, apply for an impoverished Visa and meaninglessly shed my blood for the neo imperial nation which did so much to launch the United States, but I'd only be a hindrance, despite the dark irony of my intuitive understanding how public housing enabled this man to lose his conscience. This has been a sometimes blaring subtext of my Blogger account for exactly this reason. This so called social safety net should never be a lifetime injunction. I don't even have a criminal record, but can understand if it was despair which drove this Tunisian, how that despair flowered, because his age is precisely how long I've lived under this regime, nearly my entire life, and my family would say I don't want to accept reality-- but Reeve was injured far worse than I, and Dana never abandoned or dumped him, not in the way so many of us are left to hang, and yet, at the same time, this senseless idiot has merely paved the way for more bloodshed which is coming, because he had absolutely no objective other than to sow destruction which will ultimately unite NATO, even if the alliance ends up targeting certain geographical areas of the Arab spring with limited warhead strikes. This degree of carnage simply cannot continue, and we all know it. To fall back on the post modern conceit of one person's terror  is another's freedom, that holds true if the objective can be traced to an oppression which has lifelong consequences, as in the case of the Holocaust era Zionist, or a Chinese Maoist radicalizing against destitute starvation, or a disability activist imposing a tyrannical strike on ambulatory norms, but the Nice attack was an exercise in futile carelessness. It would not have been draconian on the part of Nice traffic authorities to check the damn vehicle, from the back stories I hear coming in. Everything is a weapon now. Digital technologies, 20th century industrial technologies, and the worst things I could never imagine are no longer left to the imagination. God help us all.

The Death of Merle

"All fault tolerance techniques must be built upon a failure hypothesis."-- Concurrency in Ada, p366

The actual online disabled community must feel cheated by me, as they probably should, with the exception being my embrace of emergent aggression in my pre-sixty years, though I can confirm I already know the literature on aging and violence, I do my own thing, and some actual wheelchair users who surf in may scratch a dandruff flake wondering what Romanek's troubled Reagan era parable, such that Static is, has to do with the terrible toll of human helplessness, and the risks I take, eschewing attendant care in a battered, now protesting Jazzy, without a vendor to service it no less, though Moss at 2400 gave me a vendor to try in an emergency, I am, essentially, at the mercy of chance, my jugular exposed. I can make a correlation, of course, between Keith Gordon's fatal aspirations as Eric, and the disabled community's fatal Orwellian prognostications, but why should normal Americans be forced to think; it runs counter to the American way. More importantly, the Farrelly brothers fail. Shallow Hal comes thumb and forefinger close to fusing deformity and Hollywood into a true aesthetic viewing experience but they cannot pull it off. The jump shots to the guy with his obvious brace diaper padded spina bifida, and the woman with the skeletal arms-- my neighbor down the hall has the same condition-- jar the comedy, taking the viewer out of context on discordant notes, despite the beat written into the script. Even as a high farce, letting birth deformity be what it is mars any genre back to earth, which is why I doubt disability will ever truly make great art, cupping my ear to the carpet for the roar of thunder to follow. True, Christopher Reeve, whom I chastised while he was still among the living, was given a cameo on Smallville, and it worked, but Reeve was a trained actor, and ran his larynx tortured invalid cyborg skit before yielding to a lowly pressure sore, something to which I too am at risk, dying in mid-sentence. The Walking Dead now appeals to me, not that it fools me. The intense declarative sentences lend themselves to some nihilistic bemusement, yet its stark survivalism has caught up with those of us always a tripwire away from the worst at the bottom of the barrel. I feel like waving at the production crew and blowing a kiss, even if I'm necessarily a few seasons behind and don't know how close to season 8 WPHL can bring those without a cable subscription. The gay couple bringing Grimes and the troupe to Alexandria make me sick; that goes without saying, but we understand the South conceded feudalism on the ruthless calculus of General William T Sherman, whose memoirs I've scantily penetrated in the 20 (?) years I've owned my LOA edition, starting them again, and Georgia minds its p's and q's with only the softest hint of subterfuge. I knew Rooker was Merle without acknowledging that this is where the serial killer inside went, into a mean mother of a bastard the Governor's system had to destroy. As naturally born anarchists with claws cannot be trusted, they are exterminated by liberalism and tyranny alike.
What's she getting at? 

Ishiguro's Metabolic Fusion

"People let me tell you about my best friend."-- Harry Nilsson

Clifton Collins is a one armed man in the 09 Sunshine Cleaning because he is supposed to stand out as an expert in the peculiar waste management niche Amy Adams' character Rose finds herself, a kind of modern Virgil and ambiguous scarecrow rolled into one, the Winston of empathy and expertise whose knowledge isn't enough to blunt the folly of American dysfunctional narcissism, as it is embodied in Emily Blunt's Norah. As divergent as they are in their respective use of formats, however, scriptwriter and brilliant novelist, Megan Holley and Kazuo Ishiguro are both saying something about the demands of expertise, efficiency, and the negotiation of personal interaction. The 93 adaptation of The Remains of the Day has a komikaze subtextual ruthlessness, absorbed at a cost difficult to take, that the Anthony Hopkins we see twenty years before in Stevens is shallow, somewhat vapid, salvaged by the colonial mercy of gilded age power embodied by Christopher Reeve.

"And I slammed him, this most famous American in his reverberating helplessness."

We all tend to have innocuous thoughts like these running in our minds, even while reflecting on the aesthetic importance of casting. This supporting role as Congressman Lewis was the best acting Reeve ever did, even if Christine Jeffs as a director leads us to fend for ourselves over why the modern moneyed class would preserve an anachronism like a first rate butler.

My body is not as immobile as Reeve's became, and of course I cannot know how he coped internally with the fact that his body was lifeless. All he had left was the salvage of his mind, for a time. He did not have the luxury of my anonymity to be livid, and used the hope of scientific advance as an escape valve. Ambulation was a loss. Other minds simply cannot conceive bipedal locomotion, and those are the cautionary tales.

Virgil Swann

"It's simply impossible for us to live with vulgar people. It's a defect, no doubt; it's an immense inconvenience, and in the days we live in it's sadly against one's interest."-- Henry James, The Reverberator

Smallville, recalled due to wanton disregard for sanctity, was too much about being occult eye candy; Welling was a nearly too perfect retrofit to the solid, self-defined, simple back to basics American that Christopher once exemplified and still attempted to exemplify once he became helpless. 

He could no longer exemplify it as a true expression of quadriplegia; his paralysis makes my ability to drag my upper torso across the floor positively invigorating, and I did not get along with him at AccessLife, being my usually contentious self; yet I feel guilty for the deaths of Reeve and his wife. I had nothing to do with either his subcutaneous pressure sore or Dana's lung cancer, and my interaction with the pair was limited, but there is guilt, right here, in this absence, in an empty space that can only be defined as a void.

Superman necessitates the values of the GI Joe American male; no way to get around that without negating what the graphic contours of his abilities represent. In looking back at the series, and adding the conjunction of Leah Remini's troubles, perhaps Scientology had too much influence on the series. It was in spite of myself television. Nothing on, and a utilized package, so Reeve playing off Welling was less effective than it might have been if I had a) understood Swann as the technocratic prophet; cared about L Ron Hubbard's repressed and rigid disciplines (he looks like a man whose lymph nodes overflowed with hedonism), and understood what the guild was doing with superhero encoding. It was bewildering most of the time, involving fantastical degrees of possession, corruption, and Nietzschean will to power.

Not all men, certainly, but most men are failed overgrown children, which is why I am so perplexed about Frank's hurt and don't know what he wants from me. I became intimate with him as a form of proof that I did not want to find a lesbian stick bitch along former supervisor Linda's lines, and also because I was sexually lonely. He was a horrific and revolting mistake, and leads one into certain temptations about the intelligence of the Hispanic male. If he and I had been young, then I could understand, but this was not a pairing out of love. He is a pig with a past of multiple partners and STD risk.

I need new friends; a new fuck buddy might be too much for which to hold out. If Pope Francis is orthodox this is right and a good thing for the Church. It is time. New Crusade. New Zeal. The Inquisition still exists as a matter of scant resource. The office should be reopened, and since I've lived in hell during my half century as a wheelchair user, there is no greater degree of suffering left which I have not previously experienced.

Mannequin

My pressure sore is likely to now become one of my recurring motifs, as it has been bothering me, fully cognizant of the fact that it can take me as suddenly as it took Christopher Reeve, the engaging and affable ham who used his paralysis for all the tokenism it was worth. I worked with his wife Dana more directly than I did he, her death from lung cancer mysterious, and still a startling surprise. I was somewhat strident in my contention with the actor, as you might expect, and then his buttock pressure went poof! Not a bad way to go, but no, I am not that much of a masochist, and have seen what really lethal pressure sores can do. I have to stop minding Tim and his under class peevish tongue and remember that if I need more down time, then I have to take it. My partnership with this 60 year old buzzard is fraying, and finding new help, with everything else on my plate, leaves me amazed my skin viscosity has left me in peace as long as it has. I intend to discuss Tim somewhat further into my archive mesh, but we'll pan back to the left, and toast some starched white bread in the search for nuance. Whatever the talents of Dermot Mulroney, they are not able to overcome his plastique qualities; it is this that damages Bright Angel with a weight of forced consciousness that none of the players quite control, but the film suggests something about the dark side of manifest destiny, that aggression, being on the edge, is a necessary price, costly, and evasive around domesticating forces, be that feminine pair bonding, or the law. The opening cues you in on that, with Sam Shepard, the belabored father, poaching mallards. Bratt's hostility speaks for itself, but Lindo's role, as the paralyzed veteran Harley, touches on the truth of the darkness of crippled tyranny, even as it enforces misapplied prejudices against angry quadriplegics like myself. The depth of our anger is difficult to take, and around a damaged soldier, wariness might be warranted. Lindo pushes with the same theatricality as the rest of the cast, but his character is the plague that undermines the noblesse oblige that pervades liberal sentiments toward the cracker jack bullshit falling out of the mouths of disability lawyers like Thomas Earle, listed sixth from the top. I do not know him as well as my former friends, but if he stands for what he says he does, he did not care about warding me off, about being a fair arbiter, nor that his staff after 01 had a hand in nearly killing me because that staff did not have the requisite training, nor resources, to guard against what happened to me. Notice how well connected he is, what I am up against in balancing the scales of justice. Philadelphia is a liberal city, remember.

His titles, connections, are why I believe in the conspiracy of unintended consequences. Even if I get an audience with the regulators who control Tom's administration, making them listen to me will be a nearly insurmountable task. Tom is legally blind, but he can pass as one of you, an Obama boy. When people look at me, conversely, they do not see me. They see my power chair, and assume I am a retarded invalid, but by everything I hold sacred, I am not letting the cruelty and injustice that is a daily fact of life at these disability centers go unmolested.

@Ann Tran, if you are not a whale, perhaps you are a mini porpoise. I can bow, figuratively. "Namaste." Now that wasn't so bad, was it? Wink.