The Wasp Woman

"I had to do that."-- Susan Cabot in her final film

While I was pondering the lesson of Alison, realizing I never had that I never had the will such as that, the will to optimize for positive outcomes even without the benefit of being stabbed 37 times and left for dead in a gaming reserve, I chanced upon NBC's Reverie by accident. As of this writing, ZapIt no longer provides me with a local programming guide, and in my spastic inefficient manner, I now bounce from network to network when my nose isn't buried in Prime, wondering when, if ever, I will simply sit and read again quietly. Was it by sheer coincidence I caught episode 6, "Pas de Deux", with a paraplegic dancer in a rather disembodied atmosphere? I decided then and there to ditch the marginally better medical drama Code Black for Shahi's winsome, wounded, Marla, downloaded the NBC app, and with the pilot under my belt, have three of ten episodes viewed, as uncertain as published critics how unwitting persons of interest can be tricked into entering Reverie with interrogators without the command prompt, mindful that Hollywood's depictions of virtual reality are nothing new, just more prevalent, closer to the cutting edge, unlike Tron, which was a video game inside. Part of my frustration with the standard medical serial is audiences are cued to marvel at doctors as superheroes, when we all know this is mainly the furthermost thing from the truth. Care is a variance, and Reverie is more accurate than most about institutional processes destroying the individual character. Pilar's life as a cancer patient is ruthless and barren, and Marla's rescue of her in the turbulent Chile of 1973 is more pyrrhic than cathartic, just as doctors cannot do anything for my primary condition, or its secondary symptoms, until my immune system gives way to my now severely limited control. So my energies to restore my published history move at a monolithic pace, only in part due to the paraprofessional and his wretched daytime television. The discomfort I experience in this new model Quantum is more systemic than the old models which have preceded it, and I have taken inordinate droughts behaving like Tim Mccarthy's bludgeoned character in Remainder, a novel Amazon reminds me I purchased in 2010 of all my approximate 630 electronic titles, this personal narrator marginalized into apathetic numbness seems to be overtaking me with the prevalence of Marla's new hallucinatory uncertainty.
The paragraphs I lost on the day of Frank Versante's death are few. I pitched them to Quartz perhaps a year and a half back, looking for clues as to my original coffee piece path. Did I make sense to the editors? I don't know. They were polite, as always, but this reconstruction is catastrophic, unseen by anyone, even Galahad, whom I've ceased to reference. I have to breathe, despite the breadth of my digital losses, including my penny articles. I already know Blogger will not protect this account should I not memorialize it. Perhaps I should have anticipated this now violently sterile way of life, but I never saw it coming, that my entire legacy could nearly be wiped out due to poverty and lack of precaution. Whatever the rage of my betrayal by the wasted space insolence of homosexuals like Jimmi Shrode, this I do not deserve, not the loss of my every accomplishment, everything I aspired to. Real killers are actually memorialized. Journalists tell their stories. A week after the date of this post, I moved, made a pitch. It's something.

Dead to The World

but boys aren't into spina bifida -- a truism from a child recur to a pretty boy ensemble

It is a rare event I wake with him standing over me at the foot of the bed, but I was that oblivious Friday morning, neither hearing the phone nor his entry as he moved to my left, tapping me tentatively, warning me about the necessity of tactile contact, something he believes in rather too literally. While speaking with the case manager about supplies, he forgot himself and caressed my stomach, bare of my aunt’s 1960’s rayon blue evening blouse, in an erotic and rather intimate gesture which leaves little to the imagination, and caught himself while looking at the victorious smile on my face. I won. This is our most vulnerable congruence with each other, that phrase about fucking me to death not beyond the realm of possibility. Any other woman would have seized this opportunity, particularly in light of the battle we waged with each other toward the beginning of May about the physical boundaries already transgressed, but the work week had been wearying, holding well over a cup of urine in my bladder which would have gushed in a not easily removed transference, so I kept the irony to myself, merely chortling you are going to meet mio padre sooner than anticipated. And a part of inner conscious cynicism  says okay so what? You’ve proven black men do have different standards, according to the norms of social intelligence on such issues, your cousin was right. He cares about you. Possibly you don’t care any more after ten weeks of ying yang.But I do care, to the extent humanly possible beyond my scar tissue, and in such moments as these, his masculinity is desirable, the major stumbling block being that we’re caught in a Christian allegory of unintended lust restrained by the virtue of economics. He may be mine, as long as the welfare noose remains inviolate. Is there anything beneath the surface of this state funded contract, should it be removed? Does everything have to be recast as a rhetorical construct? (Yes)

There is, as well, the simple aspect of a woman’s wistfulness to have to learn what its like to be desirable as a woman first to an ambulatory male, her last cognitive worthwhile years on the wane. My marital affairs don’t count here, as these were simply the dowager’s circumventing life-long rejections, the same rejections the daughter of the black alpha surgeon in Code Black understands, playing a character afflicted with spina bifida. I never had these peer experiences on serial television when I was coming of age. Ironside, just as my martial affairs, doesn’t count. Burr deployed a gimmick to extend his viability as Perry Mason.

Winter Moonlight's Vapor Shroud

The Code Black episode which ran last evening seemed to intentionally reference the Spanish Catholic motif that the unpleasantness of life is a dream from which we invariably wake, with varying degrees of courage or fortitude to follow suit, whether it's Dona Luz coping with a deceitful lover and becoming content to be a virtuous single mother thereafter, or the futuristic sensibility of Vanilla Sky rather unevenly adapted for Americana. It was an irritating cheap trick, whether or not there is a certain degree of commiseration for William Young as the compassionate patriarch who knows when to give in to the disruptions of the urban disenfranchised. Spastic has no particular affinity for current medical serials, however more sophisticated scripts, but Raza was at least a curiosity, whereas Rob Lowe is the manufactured, if seasoned veteran, who delivers line readings with new found square jawed machismo. To go from that to the silicon metrosexual tweaks of Pure Genius is insufferable. The public airways may be frambrosia next to what retarded and fed baby boomer narcissism, but it makes taking a backward glance at Cary Grant beat one's chest for glamour, and bourgeoisie style held in place by gleaming hair gel and aerosol. 
Grant was already a mausoleum plague in the Columbo era, but what appealed to our mothers, that vaudeville charm, holds the same magnetism now as then, whether tightly wound in Hitchcock, or more subversively timed in his comedies, which can be decoded along the same lines as Rock Hudson, if with more heartbreaking effect. To scroll a tawdry digital gallery and read that Grant was gay simply because he lived with another male friend was indeed shocking. We may not be able to read orientation on a whim, but Grant? It drew tears, when a more cautious intellect might have challenged the veracity of such claims. As a journalist, rebelling in despair at an encroaching twilight, blows having already broken her back, delving into this particular undercurrent would be akin to chasing Loch Ness: His grandchildren would disavow it, and there is no proof which can be confirmed. The reasons these rumors dog the star stem from the very things that made him one of the greatest celebrities. He toys with sexual secrets to keep his female admirers on the bait, even if we don't give much of a thought to poor Ingrid Bergman, the *gay bachelor's* patsy, as she was against Anthony Perkins in :Goodbye Again (though I would have fucked Perkins in that movie, and again in On The Beach). Bergman is not particularly sexual. She is a gracious elegance of poised need. And the idiot who cast her against Matheau in later years should have lost his job. It did not work. If you see her as the wife of Sartre, sacrificing all for such a great ego, that works. That is how women of her era derived standing, but there is culpability in that social form that shields the deviations of dandies which Proust exposes like a montage in the tide. Spastic cannot read it in Grant, however, the inclination toward sodomy. He might have been an empty vessel mimicking the upper echelon whose ranks he joined by virtue of his talent, but risking that for more roughshod homoerotic experimentation seems beyond where his attention to personal detail would take him. 

Hermine Mnemonic

"That was an act of mercy."-- Megan Ketch

The generation gap is pronounced enough, in the dowager's circumstance, to illuminate the archaeological aspects of comfort in following a program schedule, but ever since Hugh Laurie wrapped up House, yours truly has a deficit reduction. If she wants a cable show like Six Feet Under, it needs to be purchased and streamed, or scavenged on You Tube, not that binge watching is necessarily conducive to mitigating tinnitus and the agitation of stress piss. As weary as video is, the will to discipline crumples, easier to eat and view, as room for eating and reading is crimped. In that vein, American Gothic has the expected level of eccentric exaggeration enlarging upon complicity, in a tinsel level homage to the actual Hawthorne, who resonates yet with great power-- not that the dowager has been faithful to the series. The back story of Garrett's log cabin years sang to my soul up until the suffocation, even though I endorse euthanasia in my radicalized fashion. In trying to ease the strains of mio poppa, I suggested home hospice care for the pathological stepmother. The only reason I can place before me as to why my father is killing himself over this vile snake (mutual antipathy toward Louise unites the sister and I yet) is that he doesn't want to be alone. I made the mistake of informing the cancerous aunt, and enter in the pyrotechnics. How would I like it if someone put me in hospice? I started to argue that Presby has been trying to make me the state's problem for years, as Marie herself so recently threatened through Trudy Richardson's instigation, but she did not want to be reminded of our familial sparring match, indicating I could do with other alliances.

I love Marie, but she needs to prepare to die, as does Louise, my remaining paternal uncle, my father, as do I, for that matter, just not at Inglis House, hence stark options, as the storm dampens the end of summer, leaving me not too disheartened about skipping festivities, as the Rosenbach, so many years ago, was my last grasp toward revitalization. No regrets, but there is no longer much interest, even if I had the money. Hearing loss strains the populist lectures, and the quasi-academic atmosphere doesn't offer enough to meet my intellectual demands before my synapses fail, as they will if I can't get the fuck out from under this landlord, carping away.

I may vaguely recall the docu-drama on which Code Black is based, but the show is little more than a tapered version of ER, harsher, slightly messier in some respects, but still television, soft pedaling the truth about modern medicine, offering resolution, didactic salves, because people want gauze on reality, and my reality is my cynicism. I'd toss the Western medical paradigm straight down into our depleting fossil fuel reserves. Saying I don't believe in it is too simple. It is more about quality of care and difficulty of access simply to get the technology for non-terminal prognosis. Stable quadriplegics such as I should not have to jump through hoops to upgrade. Even for an individual with my acumen, at my poverty level the red tape is too much, and with me, even when I have a treatable instance, physicians cut corners, precisely because I'm a cripple. Why mince words? Next to Saving Hope, Code Black is a comparative Hamlet, as network discovered, since the former is now an ION retread in my area. The series tries to circumvent the generic pretty people syndrome by acknowledging a metaphysical realm of mystery in the movement toward entropy, with all our angst and hang ups, but even in reruns, there is no compelling reason to sacrifice my dwindling time constraints, though I'm watching it this evening, since the storm stonewalling its way up the coast applies itself to my bio-genic rhythms, managing my stool earlier, not that such fortunes will last. Another urinal stint, then bread and butter. Joyce Carol Oates, the fierce novelist whom I no longer read, imposed unremitting violence on her characters, in an exposition still posited in a civilization not threatened with imminent collapse, while the visual apocalypse has run its course, starting with Lost, culminating in The Walking Dead relocating to AMC. More than likely, civilization will blip a little here, a little there: like Philippine death squads, the continued erosion of superpower status across the board, the death clinics from Soylent Green come to life, this even though we ignore the inconvenient fact that they thrive at a lively pace, not quite on the free market terms that gave Milton Friedman a hard on.