Next In Line

Um. Details please.

— Soledad O'Brien (@soledadobrien) June 26, 2019

There is an incurious internecine battle going on this late but cooler Sunday, as if the Me Too movement decibel decided to metamorphize its attention to patriarchal complacency masquerading as competency. Soledad O’Brien and other women in the fourth estate have launched some scathing criticism of Bret Stephens. According to these strident feminine voices, Stephens is the worst columnist printing at the flagship New York Times. All I can do is sit back and wish for a bag of herbal popcorn, as all I can tell you is I know Soledad’s name. She and I had a brief thread about titles which may have puzzled both she and I. Perhaps she wanted to know how I got an opinion piece about Jennifer Wilbanks into the Philadelphia Inquirer and made it my own. It was the convenience of timeliness, something I now lack due to a black woman named Trudy Richardson who has used her power to abuse me so thoroughly that my fantasies of motion involving her homicide where I fracture her skull into a mortal trauma isn’t too well held in check by the fact that it is what she wants so that she can dispose of me. I may hate what my former supervisor Linda did to me to get me to this point, and I hate those who protected her criminal malfeasance, but my life has endured incontrovertible set backs due to two black women in public housing, and it galls me beyond measure that all my academic promise has transmuted. I am a rabid animal who wants to destroy the domestic matron class forcing me to suffer almost beyond my capacity to endure it, and the hen house is now acluck over Stephens and his statistical inaccuracies, his designation of a new class, the Obama-Trump voter. What can I say? I am one of them. Obama and Mitt Romney and Pelosi made my life a living hell with Romney’s healthcare plan for Massachusetts, and Trump running around goring the establishment has only accentuated the city of Philadelphia’s time honored provincialism. I never had an easy time of it with NYT. Shortly before I managed online access, they threatened me with a collection agency over a three dollar deficit. Once online, they suspended my book forum account for momentary frustration with another poster, which was nothing, teeny funnel, but from what I can glean from Google, the media brand that the New York Times is has been challenged of late by other feature writers. I myself don’t believe Douthat and David French are worth what they’re paid: I demand more of Douthat’s mindset, and French is simply a cowering liberal who pities the police when they use deadly force against aggressors like me.

The Mercy of Adam Kokesh

In many countries, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people are persecuted, attacked and killed.-- Fred Hiatt, an admirable opinion writer otherwise.

If I attempted to throw myself on the mercy of the Libertarians, just as with the the leftists, it would be to little avail. Some of you may or may not know I tweeted the indomitable Tony Stiles a direct message asking him if he could help me leave Philly to let me know, and I did not expect his largess to follow through and leap to my rescue in the shadow nation we'll call Nigerland, as I'm not sure I'm ready to risk total banishment in digital space just yet if I allow myself my true nasty colors-- for which Poets & Writers did ban me, but in my four years of running my mouth on Speakeasy, my vitriol had not coalesced into extremism in this unfortunate spastic frame. I list to my right, my right arm flexes in, and I'm peasant trash who really believed she could be a matriculated establishment player, after years of fighting the welfare state, I'm right back where I started leaving a large impersonal city campus without enough money to wash the piss out of my laundry. I became distraught with every resignation from every job I hated, and leaving the Matrix Research Institute was no exception, but the difference then, in 1996, was I knew I was fucking finished. Circumstances merely dragged things out. I started to write for money after dear lesbian bitch dead in my own heart published Leaving The Matrix Institute in a PA council on disability chapbook, and I managed to get lucky, and then surprised when mommy dropped and her insurance carrier left her children money. My younger sister wanted my cut and I said no. She and Ben joked about how long I held onto that nest egg, and now it's over. I'm on the verge of irrational flight out of one of the better 202 housing units in center city, mostly due to shame over my creativity with skid marks, my inability to get along with the wastrels in this community, the wastrels who make up the majority in this country, broken by the Roosevelt's culture of dependency. You want to come clean my apartment as an act of charity before the exterminator shows up tomorrow and my war with Trudy Richardson begins again?

No? I thought not. This fucking Jazzy is hurting me, and all I want is to run, and pray for luck, when I actually logged on to research Medicaid's health care plans. If I could I'd slide into a hole and starve to death while the beat goes on, and as yet, I endure, but probably not much longer. I wonder what Hiatt would have to say about gay activist corruption that had such a disparate impact on my well being. He'd parse it no doubt by differentiating bad acts from equal treatment. And my response?

Fuck that.

Weights And OZY

OZY's ability to utilize twitter's lists is marginally opaque,and this was a legitimate request for guidance on the model, ignored-- and more than anything else, this willingness to ward off-- this account is just an opportunistic reservoir for spammers if I am going down, in any case-- gets to me. I am an OZY 2014 intriguing journalist, but because I went to their website and didn't know what to do, now I'm persona non-grata, because I was frustrated rather than pleasant. I am opaque on Medium's structure too, but Ev never offered me any cosmetic support-- OZY did, and their team refuses now to respond to me.

Did the intern listing me actually read what I was writing? People tried to shut me down for my empathy for the late, ineffectual anarchist Christopher Dorner.  The only change between then, and now, I'm out of money, and a ten year old Quickie which suited me best, is down

The girl across the street, Jodi, lives by nursing home rules for the mentally retarded in a community model setting. Her case manager or welfare claims agent gives her 40 dollars a month as pocket change, and the state manages the rest of her entitlement. My ex, with his posterior multiple strokes mental processing, says "She isn't retarded, trust me." With umbrage indicative of a bad experience that, as his former lover, I am better off not knowing, but I know better than he that she is an MR client. Banned from this building for stealing.

She asked me for toilet paper over the intercom; in her mind, my slightly higher status obligated me to support her. Conservative principles kept me alive with 1963 neo-natal technology, and then tortured me in various institutional settings upon which liberal academia sort of lied to me--granting that I gave up hope in my 30's that a doctorate would necessarily do me any good (it would not now). 

Popular sentiment of working class talk back: the world doesn't owe me anything. And oh yes it damn well does, a lot more than Carlos narrating pasteurized prisoners on horses.

Pepper Spray

I had forgotten about the US House of Representatives on my twitter feed. They are still following me, which, oddly, doesn't trouble me. They legislate federal public housing, and I was a year into section 202 housing travail when I showed up, like a wayward spark, on the Senate Committee for Social Security. At the time I received a few expressions which suggested that I was a fool suffered gladly, primarily from a bald Hawkings-like figure who was a doctor of public policy, diseased power chair user whose only commonality with myself was our medical equipment. I forget what I asserted to earn such implied censure, but I understood him. Matriculated intellect challenged, disrupted, by a petite spastic savant, forgetting why Richard Baron sent me there at all, other than it was part of my job to cajole people like myself away from entitlement dependency. We had two meetings about a bill, the first meeting hastily scheduled because I was already on Amtrak and could not be called back, so I committed the sin of inefficiency under the Clinton's watch too! I should put this back on my resume.

No one in the Executive Branch knew I breathed, and Toomey was still a private citizen then, but I learned that politicians are figureheads, and power is vested in the aides. If we recognized this I think we'd have fewer problems, because politics boils down to appropriations, and appropriations would find it prohibitive to customize architecture and programs toward optimal outcomes.

But I am going to say something: I did not move into a section 811 building like Diamond Park simply due to an English professor whose mouth, like mine, was his weapon. I moved into Diamond Park because my private living arrangements with Marie were horrific, not due to any fault of my aunt. My family never invested in best accessibility practices. I suffered for it, and Diamond Park eased that, absent medical technology, but my bid to live independently was a failure because the violence I was party to was endemic. 

My transfer to Riverside was also a failure, and I consider it inhumane to forcibly lump the disabled and low income seniors together. My first years here were hell, Babette Josephs notwithstanding, I was terrorized by the seniors, literally, then gradually by management, years before Trudy Richardson took over. I've individualized her and Debra Horne, but that too is irrelevant when the landlord's goal is marginalization for the sake of the regime.

One solution is to reconsider segregation: I would have been happier in a smaller community of peers with CP and MS who had the ability to remain autonomous outside of monstrosities like Inglis House, but to mediate such infrastructure issues costs a significant domestic investment. It is all about money, just as Sturgess realizes, to his character's dismay, in 21. For all the government mandates that integrated me, the government still failed, abominably, because it cannot regulate the reality of my vulnerability: I'm expendable. 

Slay your own Jewish princess

"They weren't really your friends," my ex, who wasn't either.

I held my nose, and offered Alyssa a compliment in the comments thread for her column on streaming distributors and damaged old men who assimilated the upheavals of the sixties. Alyssa even looks the self-depreciating brunette I was in high school, if you take away the cerebral palsy. I try not to read her columns that often. Sometimes I missed the point; sometimes I didn't care, but even she realized that progressive furor should not have felled Amy Pascal. The difference, between Ms Rosenberg's soft-pedaling on the reigns, and my objections?

I do not see where Pascal's exchanges with her co-ceo were insensitive. I did not read the original hacked accounts, but on the basis of media comments, don't see the supposed insensitivity. What I read was a powerful corporate female letting off steam, just like the jokes Linda, as a locally powerful executive, used to send me-- about being a psycho killer. I knew they were jokes, I knew she was letting off steam, and that they were her way of being my friend, much like her confidences about why she was throwing me over, and I asked her to stop sending me these transmissions even though they were popular snark into which she submerged for an outlet. I should have ended this communication long before her bemusement at my expense led to the knife in my back.

But Amy Pascal wasn't betraying anyone, and asserted herself to get where she was, and as citizens, we should be ashamed for ending her career on such a note. I could have put some weight on it, rolled up my sleeves and tried to halt the train, defending her before she resigned.

I'm also willing to tell progressives they are insane motherfuckers, and its perfectly understandable that they get murdered in gay panic scenarios-- the unprintable aggressions (I am fully aware that "motherfucker" is still forbidden in mainstream typeset), and it is this which sets me off against ADAPT demonstrators like Jimmi Shrode. I pulled on him, and I pulled on his transsexual partner. Why did I do that? Because I knew if I stayed at Riverside it would cost me terribly, envelop me, take me out of the mainstream, and I've been right about that, even while admitting that I should have held my pain in, upon realizing the full extent of Linda's treachery. I did not, and let both Jimmi and Erik have it. They're corrupt, and that corruption hurts innocent people, and it is this silence of liberal disabled LBGT activists which throws me into a frenzy: Your utter inability to be accountable. Jimmi is still cognizant enough to know that he broke the law to accept that job at the disability center, and refuses to even concede that states have non-profit guidelines for a reason; his activism has no room for my non-compliance; I am cut out, like a cancer, ignored, even to the degree that other wheelchair users talking to me, upon greeting him, get ignored, and this too, is insane, not advocacy.

The good gay doctor of The Constant Gardner may not have deserved to have his balls shoved down his throat with such gruesome revelation, but this is the kind of reactions humans have when compliance models insist that discrimination is meaningless. It is nearly midnight. I am strolling out to the 7-11.

Naivete

Bill Cosby needs to be prosecuted. If progressives believe Darren Wilson evaded a fair verdict, and I don't, whatever the inconsistencies of his grand jury testimony, something needs to be done to alleviate the accusers of the comedian, as well, and this is where I disagree with most of the Post's opinion writers on the matter, statue of limitations be damned. Kathleen, having a deadline to meet, doesn't speculate on whether NBC protected Cosby as a brand name asset, and liability may be easier to sustain against a big network. This should be investigated. I cannot claim shock. Merely minimal awareness, but the details are making me sick, turning my stomach, and this is why we're all guilty, myself included, never paying the old man's innuendo any mind.

But some of his accusers have their own culpability, just as I do. Tarshis is on the record as saying she blamed herself for many years, and this is easy to comprehend. I cannot blame myself for my mother's low life, sometimes dangerous strays, as I had no ability to get away from them, but I blamed myself for trusting my former supervisor Linda C Dezenski, as I admitted to Brian Sims aide, in tears. I *talked* to her, told her things, trusted her, and the humiliation this purchased me was and is too much to bear. Did it end her career at Liberty earlier than she would have liked? Maybe not directly, but nothing I have written about her, our interaction, is hearsay: the email threads, Liberty's assurances to me before doing me incalculable economic harm, can be traced, verified-- but I am culpable, and should have restrained myself. The trauma from that and subsequent instances, like losing unrestricted Paratransit access, the building renovations when I was absent reliable power chairs, the abuse, I am lucky to be alive.

But I'd consider it a significant lack of judgment to go to a bungalow of any sort with a celebrity like Cosby, and drink with him, by myself-- this is not to imply that Joan was looking for sexual trouble due to the fact that she was 19 and star struck, but whether or not it was the last year of the flower power decade, she displayed a critical lapse in judgment, and in Hill's case, this lapse falls on her parents. Hill was a minor, and if her allegations have any merit, she should have had an escort. Their unwillingness, or inability, to file charges within the appropriate time frame is another factor, just as it is in my case.

Statutory limitations should offer at least some latitude for the stability of the victim: I wasn't strong enough to win a settlement from Liberty Resources in the immediate aftermath of their breach, and can understand the power of that stigma. Robinson may be factually correct that serial rape has a time window, but serial revictimization is also a killer of women, crippling and impairing notwithstanding that some victims remain physically intact. 

Autotrophic Folly

"The term deep state originated in Turkey." -- a paraphrase from Sennott's reporting.

Granta Magazine is of singular distinction only due to the fact that I've supported it solely as a subscriber. In the nineties I was intimated by its quality, more like a quarterly collection than a periodical, and the sisters who founded Glimmer Train imitate the Granta brand, but imitate it like a Tiffany lamp knock off. The Glimmer Train sisters have rejected me, though be it rarely, and this is fine. Glimmer Train is not my favorite project. Granta used to be; I am less enamored of its voice, less intimidated, even irked by its contributor narcissism, I've become selective, more easily led to perceive flaws, than I was in the past. I do not kid myself. Certain bylines still matter, and Granta's would, but nothing I have is that piece. I am not going to write about my mother's death in that sonorous Granta fashion. Pushing the envelope in a manuscript about wiping out Philadelphia's disability activists? Maybe, but this is speculative, dependent upon my control, brimming with the ironic undercurrent particular to Granta's voice, and selecting the right word that leads to the singular and pleasing sense of pretense. I cannot lose it to raw aggression, in other words.

Let's indulge in speculation and say I get in by next year. I had to move past the half century mark to realize even a Granta byline changes nil, paid or otherwise, at this point. If I was still in my thirties it might have landed me a position under which I could manage my debt, but not now. The only time this public housing shanty guarantees me relative undisturbed peace to work is between two and six am. The internet is of course somewhat to blame for my fall in productivity, but before I opened a blog account, that drop in productivity is mainly due to nearly continuous conflict with Presby. Sure, it is amusing, but not when you have no other options, and managers, whether white and shrill, or black and liars through their teeth, have the power to limit the circumference of your daily routine to a 24 hour care facility. I can no longer rely on family to take me in. I transferred to Riverside against my will in 1994, and faced continuous harassment by the other tenants until I threatened the current manager, Trudy Richardson, with legal action. It is Trudy, and her "former OVR employee" Debra Horne, who took what traumatized me in the inner city, and made me nearly irreversibly biased against urban African American culture, and I know if I cannot get away from section 202 housing, then I really will sicken, lose to aggression, vitriol mitigated by chemical saturation and its side effects. I can get on another transfer list, sure, back to bad neighborhoods, weakened further still by waiting who knows how many years, and I can't take this anymore, except I have to take it, unless by a miracle I can hire myself away full time and sustain it.

4:30 this morning saw me take two plus hours to make a submission to the same old literary journal circuit, just to keep myself active, and this is a sink back to the excruciating poverty of my twenties. If I sink back into this fox hole, the quick sand of indigence before my social services career, then it is essentially over. It doesn't bear repeating who and what I have to thank for that, but at my age, the emerging exposure contributor's copy catch all might as well be the joke of a real world Truman Show character defeated by post production realism.

Seasons In The Sun

We had joy we had fun-- Terry Jacks

Misconstrued email is the source of so much folly. This is the one thing I have not really examined with you, and it significantly shortened my life span. My neighbor hits a send all button to help a marginalized figure, who has his own footprint. I very briefly skimmed his post about taking himself off Social Security, and while I am no fan of entitlement strangulation, the consequences of indigence in a city like Philly is not the adventure of a graphic novel, but Mr. Tollen is presumably an ambulatory fellow.

I am not mad at Ed. *He just did not pause to think that a disenfranchised wheelchair user and a disenfranchised mental health consumer would not be able to accommodate each other when he (Ed) told me to contact Zach directly. That direct contact disappointed me and made me feel excluded. Zach gives small private talks about Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, important but superseded figures. A small episode come and gone. I dealt with people like Zach every day under my salaried grant project, and Ed may follow my blog and skim my posts; he probably does the same for Zachary Tollen, but this does not mean we're getting through to each other, and I find that discouraging. 

The same confusion created a cyber EEOC case between Linda C Dezenski and myself, and the corrosive poison of my anger resides in the cost. Linda was embarrassed, faced demotion, and I was traumatized to the brink of institutional incarceration, and a crippling guaranteed federal debt which is driving me into myocardial infarction or an early stroke. Even if my political representatives investigate, no one is going to restrict Linda's economic viability for prior bad acts, and that due to tokenism. She is a prescriptive and compliant public figure who humiliated me and countless others, but the people that run this state know a radioactive problem when they see it.

Move on? It would be nice, but my health is failing, and I can't leave a landlord also guilty of recurring criminal negligence. Consider yourself lucky.

*As I indicated yesterday, however, the implication of bringing Zach and myself into each other's sphere of influence is for me only an additional source of shame and annoyance. I am trying to climb back up, not give into Mr. Tollen's functional limitations. A thanks but no thank you situation.

Viatica Franchise

"It won't be Amazon." -- Leon Wieseltier

No, it won't be Amazon, nor will it be Google Books, but like Leon in his past, I am always broke and skirting the edge of destitution, and gave my ambulatory younger sister and brother four thousand dollars while Trudy Richardson was threatening me on the telephone in an imitation Oprah Winfrey voice that "I would not be living at Riverside." Four years later I wrote her a letter and said back "as an African American woman who can live where you choose, either evict me or leave me alone," and like magic the black police state flips a pancake: "oh of course you're normal, you're not doing anything wrong..." Landlords really hate litigation, don't they, in the munificence of forced egalitarianism of the pluralistic American landscape? Is digital monopolization of publishing good for the dialogic of ideas, the very cause of authorship? Sure, I can teach myself how to take my work straight from hard drive to a kindle file, and turn (a) blog account into a spam market for my own vanity, but would it pay? I am not part of the establishment in which Leon and Marty Peretz wag their inner Jewish mother at the Beltway because we have 2000 years of Hebraic law on which to draw, nor could I maintain the visibility pressure through which David Brooks secures his affluence by being the voice of Everyman. I hate David Brooks, because I have intellectual parity with him and live on rats corn seed and he gets money for saying on air what McCain believes: That American prestige necessitates involvement in a sectarian schism American citizens know we need no part of. McCain may deserve his own affluence, but Brooks? Brooks is where he is because Buckley chanced to offer him a job. Marianna Torgovnick examines the merger of Italiano Americana with the conceit of Jewish men making good husbands. Had I walked I might have been a variation of her, the feminine Italian intellect lost in the humanities shuffleboard with that *good husband* who, even with that veneer of feminine taming, betrays me in some manner that is displeasing. Ed Berkowitz did not mean to set me up with fringe nut cases; it happened because he could not think to tell me that Zach Tollen was a mental health consumer. If Ed had been able to offer this sacrosanct assessment I would have avoided interacting with a nut case with a not unusual Jungian fixation that more or less is an indication of limitation. I will get past all this, but it tells me I was wrong to single out Mr. Berkowitz, to attempt to bridge a gap, or even to worry about my loyalties to whom, since Ed's partner has epilepsy. If you see me as just another fringe player out of the world of James Leo Herlihy, then that defeats the purpose.  

And Nothingness

He plies his trade with meticulous care, weighing, measuring, disassembling and tweaking his special gun with artisanal devotion. And the virtues of the film itself are those of craft rather than art. 
-- AO Scott, ever meticulous.

To give you a sense of the span of time, in 1998 I logged onto the Poets & Writers website with the stunned intimidation of an acolyte joining the priesthood. I told myself not to open my mouth, which in more literal terms means lurk, not post. I imagine some of the women of Speakeasy would have appreciated the counter factual of never knowing I existed. Admittedly, I hurt some of these women unfairly, sitting here at Tom Reid's hand painted desk, the eastward wall of my studio bordering the janitor's supply closet. 19 years here at Riverside, relocated assault victim, screaming to leave to anyone who would listen. "It is nice here," people say. 

In terms of the entitlement nation that alarms George Will, this particular public housing building may be nice. Beneath the surface it bears all the hallmarks of a re-education camp.

Poets & Writers kicked me off their site due to my mental anguish in coping with this landlord, constant housekeeping issues. It is mid 2013 now, and I was wrong to believe that submitting my notice to Trudy or her future replacement was the one choice I could still make. Not really, as I cannot pack my belongings and cannot drive voluntarily on battery power much past seventh street. From the first day my father left me here overnight in a heap of furnishings in 1994 (my mother had to rescue me), I hated living here. I have to leave, and that is tantamount to a death sentence, one that Anton Corbijn stalks through tunnels and terraced pathways I necessarily could not navigate. Despair is literally making me ill, as much as George Clooney is a rack of doomed nerves in beautiful Roma, bella Roma.

I'd sell my soul to get off this dead end corner of Race Street, to get away from the autonomic remains of ancient Africans who think in monosyllables, to get away from the skeletal remains of Erik von Schmetterling, and the Gladhandler, equally cadaverous. 

Decadent Valet

That Wells Fargo has fraudulently processed mortgage documents using a process called robo-signing has been evident for nearly two years, since scandal enveloped the mortgage industry in 2010. That it kept doing it even after the scandal broke has been known for months. --Travis Waldron

Simulations

Every company stands behind their products. It is a convenient blanket for the truth of the matter, which is that the electronic lithium battery is unstable. I ripped myself off and ordered two fresh batteries, as I tossed the receipt from Walgreens and forget the date of purchase, though I told you my trip on Locust street was unpleasant without going into detail about inner city minority insolence making it unpleasant. There are variations on every version of my posts of course. Erik was my source for my first paid byline, and both s/he and Linda, ruthless corruptors, would mope, along with another vacant spastic I'll call the Gladhandler, that they wanted to support me, and did, except Linda views giving her confidence as confessing to collusion, breach of ethics, and expects that the good lieutenant, being loyal, to understand, even while the lieutenant's life collapses, but Erik and the Gladhandler and my ex currently lead lives I consider to be nothing more than autonomic living deaths.

I'd be much better off if I could get away from it, and age as I must in a fresh clime without so much dead baggage, water logged albatrosses. I should not have to move heaven and earth to achieve this in my own looming weakness, bowels as recalcitrant in the seasonal humidity as is the norm for my body. I have tried everything short of getting physical to make Erik understand I hate what s/he is and stands for, if this level of dependency has to be so ironclad as to destroy the desire of ambition. I am now truly discomfited through sinus and my colon, and wonder what it is too late for. Happiness and the esteem of my own economic security?

Privacy, in theory

Weary of torturing my posts to aim for the acumen, not pretension, but acumen I want to have, I am researching privacy and the constitution, and a legal scholar reminds me simply that it is about what the government cannot do. This is no longer applicable, because the social services system can do anything it wishes to me due to my technical quadriplegia. I do not want minority aides because many of them have traumatized me; I do not want Presby staff constantly in and out of my unit, so Debra Horne and Trudy Richardson can forcibly remove me any damn time they please for a psychiatric assessment due to my expressed animosity and then come up with competing rationalizations for it. I raise my voice; they do not bother to ask if this due to the fact that my larynx is the only part of my anatomy that works with above average capacity, and that my need to talk may be a functional compensation for a seriously compromised mobility as opposed to a simple bipolar label, among other things, and the Medicare actuary decides which and what medical technology I can and cannot have as a lifelong entitlement beneficiary, and independent living centers will go on deliberately marginalizing until they kill enough people to create a trauma nearly as powerful as Newtown. I will get the change I want, even if it means a major traumatic sacrifice, but never again, ever, can I maintain a positive outlook on the basic sanctity of the human condition, and that is tragic, not just shedding a long nascent infantilism.

Krauthammer Codicil

Everything Dr. Krauthammer contends in public argument is what I have been attempting to convey to my audience on a more personal, and sometimes risky level. After all, discussing the corrosion of internal vengeance power fantasies after digesting lifelong humiliating paradigms is not something that will get me invited to Michelle Obama's Motown galas, but I am going to breakdown Charles' delineations a little further: the welfare state in America manufactures psychosis, if not spree killer psychotics, whatever prevention modalities remain in place. The entitlement system essentially traps vulnerable people, and literally drives them insane if they cannot secure gainful, and I'll add, secure employment.

Charles is entirely correct. My landlord has no legal authority to commit or institutionalize until dementia or aggressive behavior translates into property destruction, criminal behavior, or inability to function, but there is no flexibility in Medicare or state regulatory systems to adapt to individual needs as opposed to forced compliance, and I don't have the money Charles probably does to buy services more tailored for his needs as a paraplegic. There may not be any free lunch, but conservatives like the doctor are tone deaf to the fact that my birth disability nearly precludes my ability to succeed under our titular free market capitalist system. I have to succeed the same way my former counselor Cassie James does, earning her salary on the backs of those with developmental disabilities whose limitations prevent matriculation. This does not explain the Lanza family, but it is part of the larger problem, regulating ourselves to death with compliance, alienating ourselves with devices and the glamor of violence.

Whippoorwill Quirts

I would not mind going to Edgewater. Frank and I were still duking out the end game of our relationship as a couple when the building was going up; two minutes down the block from my building, and now you definitely know where I live, by inference if nothing else, it might as well be a world away, and in fact, when they were ready to inhabit, sent me a postcard, and I never bothered. Now cursing that lack of investigation, the man I spoke to did not sound sanguine, or if not that, at least vague enough to confuse me, asserting that "you would not qualify as a section 8 tenant." Why not if one of my former clients lives there under similar circumstances? Is it optimal? No, as I'd still be in the same location, a street over, but anything not Presby does remarkable things, lifts my spirit, restores hope, with the prospect of being able to tell Ms. Horne and her cohorts they can go fuck themselves royally making me chortle with glee, sheer delight to be free of shanty town. You have no idea the full extent of what the residents here have done to me-- it was not simply constant harassment by the managers, not simply my near death in Diamond Park, and the mere prospect of anything else not in a crime plagued environment, for my health, I need the hope of movement, after 27 years of dehumanizing bigotry, my god, no wonder I identify with the extremity of Taggart's pain, though I did not lose children and drive a spouse mad. Hesitantly, I believe last evenings pill did the trick, and I am "clear," to use the standard call of television cops, but we shall see. There have been no flares. Before we return to the long dangling Ricos, I want to expend just a little more energy on Newtown's grief, partly due to my own fantasy valve despair deposits, in which I take no pride, trust me, but after years of the action thriller implosions on screen, are we not saturated with these video special effects as an outlet?

The left is entirely correct on its political sentiments about automatic weapons and the ease of executions. I live in a city of which in circumference is 85 percent a war zone in waiting, after all, though I am not entirely sure that mental health services is any more than a polite euphemism, as I cannot say if I was not a cripple I would not have sustained this much damage. I am a cripple and my life was never anything else. The question is why those in pain resort to violence as opposed to those in pain who do not. What lifts lethargy to go outside of legal mechanisms in place? I do not need David Brooks to know that most mental health clients are bullshit artists, preying on the vulnerability of more stable service providers, and would no more be spree killers than my former writing friends, or current friends, like the novelist Gretchen Laskas (who will never speak to me again), or the poet Robert Thomas (who, all things being equal, probably will).

I think if you take the Virginia Tech shooter, the Aurora shooter, the Giffords attacker, Adam Lanza, that it runs deeper than weapons cancer, because guns have always been part and parcel of what forged American identity. We live in an age of  autonomic desensitized alienation, fed on a diet of Kevin Spacey masterminds, and those who are sick get this same steady diet that hammers away at the fact that the human animal is expendable, and more than that, the poor, or those that climb, and then fall, are the unforgiven, and can thereby be bitch slapped in  a bureaucracy that no one understands, nor is anyone accountable to it. All I want to do is safely relocate out of the city, and receive justice, but that is a virtual nightmare.

I have been to Farmington CT, and fell in love with the Yankee sensibility that made the US the beacon of the world, but that self reliance, hardy and firm, the point of departure for much of the corruption of worldliness in Henry James, has all but been vanquished by guilt and victimization, which I, as an ostracized disabled woman, have been very much a part, as much a part as Jovan Belcher, or Michael Vick. Forced social equality has assisted in lowering moral cohesion, whether or not you want to accuse me of oversimplifying, it is still the truth. Had I not fled my life in Ridley Park, I would not be a broken old woman exposing herself before you, not horrified by how tolerance represses the truth of what we live. Nor am I conveying that we should re segregate ourselves according to ethnic contours. But throwing out the cell phones and the rest of our gadgets, and not creating EEOC crimes in email, taking responsibility when we're wrong, and being honest that we are different, for Christ's sake, well, that is a start.

And More Porchetta Feuds

Every single day, since I left Matrix, disbanded since Irvin Rutman retired or passed away, I have gotten up from that day bed five yards behind me, trying to convince myself my life was not over. Every damn day, first the unemployment office, sometimes in tears. Then I reunited with this gang of crooks briefly and not easily, before the shit hit the fan with their ensconced princess, and one of their many now deceased employees gave me a stipend for a profile of another dead girl, Karin. Her lack of mobility due to her type of cerebral palsy killed her, killed her young. Her lover had a felony record, and Liberty paid this offside Adonis under the table. This is what they do. Imagine then, how fortunate it would have been for me if Linda had wanted a bisexual fling spastic a la mode, though I puked when I began to fear her motives in our email conversation. If you fuck a Liberty staffer, fringe benefits abound, and Linda accused me of this, in fact, after the pin popped my skull and I turned into an IED. Or a grenade. Whatever you like. Every day. I tried, at first, to return to, social services on the Matrix model, and then got lucky with freelance work, but that was not such that I had to string. At AccessLife I started to believe that maybe I'd get back to near my old salary, but failed to realize how insecure journalism is; I carried on bravely, still intend to, but remained entombed in this building, if only through inertia, meaning that this marvel of competency threatens, rarely litigates, though since I put my defiance in print, my back is up.

And so today, I managed a round with my sister, and her husband may be joining the ranks, if his tumor paralyzes him. His entire family is on disability, either SSA or workman's compensation, and in an odd way, this finishes trying to mend fences with my immediate family. If the physicians cannot treat to maintain the man, I know Stephanie. She'll leave him, the children grown. I am only an aunt to the six of them, counting the little brother ignoring me, after I pissed away 4,000 dollars on the two of them, in name. We really don't need episodes of Revolution, do we, to learn how the human animal turns on a dime?

She suggested that maybe I could visit for Christmas, perhaps not realizing that this involves more labor than can be managed, especially with her spouse impaired. Even if Septa scheduled a ride for me without a crisis negotiator, I am no longer entirely safe in my manual wheelchair. It is fifteen years old beyond any usefulness, and the Catholic heavens forbid she visit me here at Riverside, which is my point, beyond money. My officer cousin can inconvenience himself for my sake, and his mother's, but in my sister's suburban lexicon, this amounts to catastrophe.

I know. Focus on my goals, stay positive, and I'll be in exactly the same place tomorrow, living scar tissue.