Pin Cushions, Pitch Black

Natasha Richardson, in my estimation, never really seemed to fit in her films, except for The Handmaid's Tale, and in that laughably histrionic Margaret Atwood vehicle, none of the big names fit, because it was a turbo charged warning which was so grandiose that it metamorphoses its own mockery. Often the industry does this intentionally. Sometimes my own heaviness achieves this by accident. Alpha and Beta is a case in point. I showed it to one of the agency aides, in my nine year revolving door with the system, before I let Mary Johnson have it for her now defunct site, and I expected that Esmin the easy Jamaican soul would have been offended. "You're funny!" she said, laughing, on her scan of the final page. I wasn't trying to be. My world had shattered, and I was desperately trying to glue the egg back together, and in a rather convoluted sense, this entire account is a sort of vomit on my ruptured idealism. I screamed in Linda's voicemail, in my nervous breakdown, during that fresh turn of the century, (think I'm recovered?) "I believed in you!" And that is the truth. I thought she represented a triumph of integration.

Today, I am in fact much closer to Karl Shapiro's defense of the notorious Tropic of Cancer, which I am still reading. Miller is, for me, a stop and start nihilist, and though he is terrific with oral cadence, and a necessary voice, he isn't a great writer, hardly as canonical as his defenders would like. Henry James achieved more with his attenuation in the relic of the Victorian age than any of the leftists who mushroomed in the thirties. Miller is so raw he makes the throbbing radioactive vein in my chest seem cowardly, when I discuss which minority [substitute nigger bitches if you are in the she needs lithium like her mother category] exploited me in what fashion. They were not all uncouth brassy caste stricken Medicaid recipients, but a substantial minority of all those women in my revolving door have taken their toll. With my every transfer a feat of engineering physiological memory, I'm damned unless my remaining intellect can pick up my body after my next mistake, can guilt trip my way out of my corporate landlord before I lose myself, and I am doing that, at only fifty three, numb with apathy and avoidance, resilient only because of a corrosive-- well, I understand, in certain respects, the destructive attractions of the jihadists, though for me decapitation is lame. Everyone can breathe easy there.

So it perplexes me. Natasha Richardson cannot internalize, like Jodie Foster, who was a great actress because she internalized identity conflict. Ms Foster is not Ellen. DeGeneres radiates dyke like a wallowing hippo. Jodie Foster doesn't fit the categorical LBGT mold. Oh, I am not challenging her private intimacy so much as complimenting what will soon be lost, and that is the ambiguity of the outsider. It is what has made the child actor with whom so many of us came of age a powerhouse. Richardson, by contrast, is a two dimensional doll for thirteen year olds, hard to cast in the appropriate venue, but it is her role in Past Midnight which triggered my recent distress, conjoined with Benitiz's outreach. The soldier did not do anything wrong, exactly, and I never understood Hang Outs and now, duh, it is a chat scroll, but I am done whoring myself for nothing and should have ignored him. If I can find a divorcee like Cecil Morales who has the intellectual affinity for which I am starved, which is why I cannot forgive Josie Byzek, then yes, I'll take him, but I do not want anymore PC fantasy, as such. I was never shallow enough.

Natasha often paid a heavy price for similar psychological risks, despite the fact she'll never have a legacy beyond historical relevance, unlike Vanessa.

Pakistan Is A Scorpion

I just had a chat, not so much strange, as disconcerting, with an alleged contractor for the US Marines on Google Plus, and I was polite, but bewildered. I am too soldered up with naive scar tissue to play cyber fantasy games, anymore. I used to, but  got too sucked into it, and cursed myself for logging on to see how Hangout connections worked.

What the fuck am I supposed to say to men younger than I with my drying punta, to take a term from Barry Unsworth, the great mimic? Of whom I was not cognizant of decease, by the way, and thought the novelist still living. 

I miss sex, being a naturalized trollop, I do, but I also know it is too late for me to find liberation with a man, on Viagra or not. My affairs were hurried trysts, without orgasm, frigid woman ripe to get her head twisted by homosexual vultures and straight mentally ill molesters alike. Some of which I've detailed, perhaps not well enough for my viewers to understand the sense of violation these inappropriate behaviors from my clients imposed on me.

He is a Hispanic widower from Ohio on the ground in Syria, and my sympathy, if he wasn't bluffing, walked hand in hand with an interior tantrum: I am fucking bored and don't want to be doing this. Everyone wants a photograph. I directed him to the photo I uploaded on Medium with my Afghan column, an incongruous image placed there because I did not want to run afoul of permissions. 

Since I had lashed out at my former manager the way I did fifteen years ago I assumed it was due to bisexual susceptibility, and challenged myself accordingly, but never went in search of an experiment. The women who actually did hit on me made me feel three things: the mixed race woman who dared to do what she did triggered a need for self-immolation and a homicidal urge to give her a lethal hematoma. This is the reality of state intake systems. Like Cosby's alleged accusers, who couldn't gain traction, I have to live with the knowledge that I could have subjugated myself for the benefit of Miss Eddie's indulgence; she would have died if she had forced her pass much further than she did, and it can always happen again. The only response from the ambulatory world is to go through another 50 minorities with whom I do not wish to engage; we should be able to do better than this, which is why I fight Presby's intimidation tactics so forcefully. Eviction notices are more humane than 22 years of harassing intimidation to pair me with women who exploit me.

The client? Sharon was an amputee. I was tired. It was past ten in the evening. I was at the Darby Project Share in my small manual Quickie in which I wasn't all that maneuverable, supposed to use my skills as an advocate, but people self-involved in mental aberration, I've learned, could care less, and try to take advantage, and that is what Sharon did, whipping out her arm behind my back and running her finger up an erogenous zone. My back flexed involuntarily, but her hit wasn't arousing, and in fact what was being gauged was my susceptibility to collapsing boundaries, much like what Annabella Scoirra faces as the vulnerable therapist against Deborah Unger. Scoirra raises her palm to halt her patient. With Sharon, all I could do was retreat inward because of where I was, and woke with the memory Monday morning, angry. This is what I've been subjected to all my life: finger fucked in the Home of the Merciful Savior, assaulted under my mother's blind shadow. You know the rest, but unlike Chris Cooper, doing the repressed fanatic in American Beauty, chewing cunt isn't on my secret Happy menu. If it was I'd have a few bodies on my belt by now.

Yes, I feel provoked, and shouldn't have responded to the fellow's invitation. My post title comes from Lynn, a reporter I once posted with, echoing what all Americans knew after nine eleven.

White Knight

I've stopped using Linked In, not because I want to cause trouble, not on a career networking site, but because I do not understand its posting policies, and I am, evidently, not the only participant who feels like I'm in the middle of a digital police state: one teacher posts that Catherine, in Wuthering Heights, is *bitch,* and I get flagged for possible lack of relevance. No idea who spearheaded that, but many Linked In users delete, constantly rephrasing. Not exactly sure this is beneficial to our evolutionary social hierarchy. But everything now automated, while the site muzzles with one hand, it woos engagement and paranoia on the other.

Why would a real estate developer from Atlanta look at my profile? Accident? Gentrification? Owns a stake in public housing? I have no idea. If it was up to me I'd detonate this damn building and dance on the rubble, and yet we cannot stop ourselves, can we? ISIS may be an outgrowth of Saudi extremism migrating outward, unique to a deprecated Sunni culture none of understand, but reaction doesn't spring out of a vacuum. We're all overwhelmed, our healthcare systems, the Secret Service-- Wapo's reporting has displeased me, as all human systems are fallible, and no national executive ever entirely immune from risk. Reagan was shot by a man living his own film version of his obsession in his head-- our inability to solve economic stratification.

What did I desire that has been so sorely lacking? Privacy, a place to write and flourish, not stacked like a pancake with a bunch of gibbering idiots and a bitter transvestite doctor living on 1/4 of his fucking brain with a lupus like condition preventing his sex change, an androgyny worse than the disease. Everyone in this building is a living corpse, except for the occasional accident of youthful disruption and sexual irresponsibility. I have no pleasurable sexual memories. My last husband was 1997, and I handled him and the liaison with very little poise. I did not love him but shouldn't have kept sleeping with him, as when he knew he had made me vulnerable, only then I received the time immemorial phrase of my adult life, "I don't feel anything."

Coupe de gras.

Gateway finesse

"There is something wrong with you," -- a Turkish liberator in New Jersey masquerading as a backgammon player during failed phone sex

Not to get too self-referential about this account, (who cares?) but my page view data sometimes amazes me. Why do the former Warsaw Pact Poles read my posts? I've written absolutely nothing about Lech Walesa as a precursor to the fall of Soviet hegemony. Yet my muted appreciation of Orhan Pamuk's ability to dissect the tension between fundamentalism and secularization draws 30 page views from the fine, if beleaguered, citizens of Turkey. I am quite free to break the Turkish law on the books about mocking Turkish citizens if I please, but such a law was evidently written to be mocked for its very existence. It is a silly law, telegraphing to Muslims and Christians alike an inferiority complex.

I am interested, if a Turkish viewer cares to respond, in what has drawn these 30 views? Pamuk is a fine writer; that unfortunate Turkish family with its hand walking children speaks to the global problems of outcasts among outcasts, and Erdogan, whatever his aspirations, and political corruption, will not reconstitute the Ottoman Empire-- but beyond this there are limits to what (Westernized) multi-culturalism can hope to achieve. Turkey is in a highbrow third world status? How does this earn my commiseration when I have been a lifelong American untouchable whose educators led her to believe she could achieve self-sufficiency? Is it the policing of chronic conditions and poverty as a criminal act which interests you? Snow is a rich novel, full of taupe-skinned romanticism, inadequacy, with a poignant dose of irony and Chekhovian tendencies to exaggerate foibles. I will finish it with pleasure, and remain delighted that I was able to actually pay attention to a foreigner on Charlie Rose, but I wouldn't be caught dead in Istanbul. Midnight Express still informs the popular culture about Turkish predilections for rough play. More than one can insinuate gently.

Or maybe its ISIS? Not to worry. Certain levels of militancy are still of American manufacture, super-sized.

Mishi

My silence on my puncture via exotic cultural dynamism is only due to the fact that in those dusk to dawn chats with mystery Eurasian man, the last of my youth and sense of magic went with his rejection of any meeting between us. Not that I didn't keep looking, but whereas the later Argentine Cecil would have been settling on a pompous but intriguing old fool, Mishi, by contrast, took my last hope for real passion with him and his bong inhalation, and I became Petrarch and mailed him an ode five pages in length, pulling it from circulation later. Would you like to read it?

The Last Virtual Seduction
                                         
                                  for AT

And I have come out with bloodied hands again--once more on the
wheel towards the routine and the rack,
fingernails torn from the flesh in a Peter O’Toole scream, his
English witticism to combat the German fascist with the tip of a pen--
lest we forget,
the guilt of our ancestors, between Axis and Reich:
and what bubbled in a lethal caldron of darkness and blood, in the
mixtures of marriage between system and slaughter,
a German soldier found his geisha, a
daughter of that fiery Chrysanthemum Throne to bed her
and wed her. How such a
dynamic and vital an issue would spring from these
sinews of fictions and fervor?  A prince
who would dance amid sunbeams and hook me in the mists of delight, like
a flower whose petals transfix on the sun with no
choice but to follow the orb in its path from dawn until dusk
and through dusk into night to the next dawn again,
I found lightning made strike far too 
early and too fast, a
flint struck its spark to form the
tears of flickered  flame, their
shapes to join and merge to yield the larger fire

the tribe will gather round
and feel the thrill of fear and awe we still feel pulsing the
beat in our blood
when we see the mighty cat stalk the bush
and tell its tale, fear and awe in our gestures and our
speech, rising and falling excitedly, reminiscent of hoots
and calls when we feared to become the prey of the sleek and mighty
feline, pristine in its majesty, enthralled by moon’s
reflection in a glassine and deadly eye which held us to its
gaze, and gave him name, in those early
days, in the time of the nomad & hunter
Kagamishishi the Mirror Lion may have made his
way on a story teller’s tongue, a legend one
day you would take on your own, as on its own it did woo
me, your handle:

a sixteen hour play whose dance transforms the sexes,
a woman wears a puppet on her hand

and through the motion of movement, the 
placement of slipper to floor just so,
and measured at a pace to seem forever passes by in what
she transforms and turns into, as the clock ticks, a
second is like a grain of sand, one
grain removed from a mountain for every million
years, and still hard pressed to catch up, an 
eternity in what the mirror reveals, reflects back behind the 
beauty of a painted face,
the muscle of the feline behind his mane,
and here comes the lion as Kagamishishi leaps forth like
ghosts in the smoke of a Shinto temple,
an echo behind and before us,
flesh bursts alive from a pane of glass, the
birth is the roar of the King of Beasts in possession of his
pride, those final weary
steps upon the stage his alone to make and hold me
fast, the tired and dazzled audience,
an American girl wide with wonder,
the eye enchanted and enlarged, the
pupils held to the computer’s glare like magic in the
dark, like magic and the snort of cocaine, hope’s
blossom gives its violent birth,
all between dimensions of a keyboard and a screen
you watched the heart in shock, 
how it did plummet
and how it did drop, bouncing back in your throat retained:

and love is not possible this way, no— you shake your
head, thrash your hair and stomp, to rebel against the tidal
wave of passion surging to its shore; resisted too the pin
pricks of that hopeless lovely special waltz which found its
circumnavigation in your valves to Mozart’s key, the steps themselves
light as twinkles on the mobile above the newborn in his
crib, for these are the stars that dance their finite skies of joy
as beholders to delight fine as a fistful of talcum 
you throw in the air, to snort and explode up your nose
and blow you away well beyond the Oz-Land Emerald City
Oppenheimer never dreamed in his deadly fusions of atoms,
never dreamed, as you yourself were but the stuff that dreams were made,
when Emperors urged their subjects to wield broomsticks
while his cities bulged to mushroom clouds that blast
and burn away to cinder,

this blazing past of terror to score its mark along my 
breast in the very silence of the things themselves that are always left
unsaid,
the revolving doors of time in an instant removed, to weave back
and go forward again, to denude like
the peel off the flesh of an orange, with the linger of acid in the
sweet of its pulp:

you have to swallow this hard,
down it goes and please digest:

How many programmers with their million bytes of code,
the bewilder of zeros and a wilderness of ones, a
thousand micro-typists to create the words between only two,
the most complex and elemental of your binary
pair,
 a man and a woman, like you and I, we
who might find ourselves in any bar, across any table top
where I might nurse a favored drink, with a
discussion of the classicists whom I might like indeed:

The viola might rise and pluck; the violin might coax and warm
the circulation so inflamed you see its sparkle in a 
soft and limpid look I cannot help but offer--
a spinel falling from its meteor,
a crystal to pierce the muscled heart
and make the flash of light beneath my smile which has its
hints and textures, just a trace of the Old
World left, in the curve and fullness of my
lips when they come into the play, like the
Mediterranean breeze to billow the sails in the Italian strains
still here, in a great-grandfather’s passage 
and travail, a random tap to my shoulder,
this finger of time, to remind me
this is left
what is left for me to meet: a classic case perhaps,
a classic clash of East meets West
never so classically simple, nor so far removed, as an
inner voice of the woman-child might attest:

No dad normally I would not be attracted to Asian 
men but this one is different and only half

Japanese and happens to speak English even better than I
These are the wheels which already turn,
evolve a defense against the ghost of protest not even 
needed to keep a safe divide.  It is only I the
poet who would dare beyond the probable of cause:
Oh where are my emotes?  Those dear commands for which I but slash and think,
my bubbles in the air like champagne, my colons to make my expression 
its pink, and a private message sends a whisper, a confession, 
or a pass--
and here alone in the apartment I can almost believe
I am here in his office and can loosen his tie,
or nudge him in the ribs and listen to his cries in lieu of the
past lives which haunt us all—
This is going to sound really sick but my ex-girlfriend was in to anal
 penetration—

and there is a logic to this, a computation mode,
behind these mists and streaks of passion which only partially conceal,
like a woman in the dark undressed behind a
see through silk, to let her silhouette seduce the final
swollen urge to thrust,
the final union of the good and bad I know, 
whether to stand about face, and halt,
reassess and plan the retreat, or move forward on ahead  
and plow:
I am physically disabled like the clients whom I used to serve

and the past is an echo on this loss of relevance,
the motive to ease the agony which vibrates and strums the soul,
the purchase of this computer to find my way online, 
and for one moment, in a vulnerable space,
a vulnerable time, 
the virtual world became a glittering baroque too
bright, floating and formless,
the real one cast aside,
the one where you left employers by their way
and lost work as a concept though somewhere
still maybe it hides,
a glance in the recycle bin— check your Windows 95—
and you roll from wall to wall, 
fiery as a dragon’s fire when full of rage,
an anger so many knights have tried to slay in the
darkness of my lair, and failed, even death himself,
his sickle but to make a slighting graze

born in the breech three months early,
I would not breathe at first
and would not breathe again so a
wee bit of brain tissue died
and spasticity became a word, a ruler, and a
secret not easily relayed, in how these
muscles tense and spasm of their own accord
and the knees of my leg which do not lock to stand, never to know the
promise of a ballerina leap,
and the balance on her toe with which a
heart might match her splendor, so much the
fairytale in which I sought my way

I cannot handle it you said, in the face of my few
rare victories, so minuscule and small within the squares wherein
any Napoleon might have made his bid:
So what am I here for?

Surely, not for the sake of art?
Or love pure as a diamond which draws a wrist to bleed, the thick blue 
veins of my strong and muscled wrist, a substance harder than iron
and sharper than glass slicing straight through what I felt within my
grasp, a very choke hold on the
vine in its ascent,
and a vision obsessive perhaps,
a vision obsessed,
creator of all my omnipotence

a crucible, in which hope and folly mingle,
more alive than the rushing currents of my river,
far brighter than the rays of light which warm my sun

only in my dreams

someday the lady might kneel before you, below the
mercy of your sharpened sword,
frozen there in stillness until a 
hand reached down, to raise my vision towards the sky,
and I would know then, in a moment called forever, what the 
mirror in your eye reflects, to see the 
song of myself staring back.
.
*************

The last time I was so smitten I would have done anything, or so I believed, to set eyes on him, seducing me only by teaching me about high Japanese classicism. The real me, that being the one who fled her emotional fantasia over much ado about nothing, died here. Not quite ready to allow it back into the field. 

Good Tidings

"An artist is always alone-- if he is an artist.--Henry Miller, in the early and rough edges of The Tropic of Cancer

Alice Sara Ott has a wondrously acculturated life brought about by her discipline as a pianist who handles the levers with her bare feet. The discipline is admirable because no disabled woman with my type of developmental brain injury can achieve it, but in the confusion of her Eurasian identity, the legacy of Germany's link to Japan as an Axis power, is a saga not wholly unfamiliar, even for those outside the glass of her high octane lifestyle, the privilege of her mobility (unless the Russians blow her airliner out of the sky too in Putin's quest for winning the pissing contest in the waning days of this remorseful presidency via Harvard Law). I did not tell you about my superheated crush with my Eurasian when I was 36. Hormones and slavering insanity in the early days of cyber coupling pursuits before it made the satire of Letterman's top ten list, prepared to give my father a legitimate reason to kill me when I begged him for money to fly to Dusseldorf in pursuit of my own high yellow biracial cosmopolitan fellow with his charming Japanese German dick.

"I couldn't handle it," he told me, and freaked out with regret at the thought that he hurt me, not anticipating the lethal humiliation that the former Linda C Richman would have in store for me soon thereafter.

*
My elder cousin asked after me, and I would prefer a friendship with his wife Adele over that of the fractious succor I have with her mother in law, but the simple act of her husband's query gave me a sliver of hope that I can get the fuck out of Riverside before it is too late. (Conversely, the wagons may be circling around my waning strength and emotional terror at the hands of Presby's bitches). Clarity Media for some reason has given me a promotion. Because I growl? The African American inner city stoicism on its broken regressive back, its authoritarian Stalinist mindset, has scarred me irrevocably, and I can't throw a holy high fucking fit at Jerry for doing this because he advised me not to, but what was that really about? I wouldn't have been able to handle coercing his virtue even if I had the capacity to tempt him. Always running, without the finesse appreciation such as this requires.

Quad care

"What barn do you people come out of?" Cecil the caustic Argentine

I had intended to bunker down and stop creating microslices of spastic self pity, but I am sick again and literally thrilled at the prospect of intern or student treating my uretha with their hesitant ignorance and then I have to fork over my money for their tuition; I know menopause is variable and I am not too concerned about what I hope is a late ovulation surge, but this is treatable crap; knowing me it is probably bladder cancer. Can't catch a break. 

Did the bills, cleaned, and need to stop worrying how much affinity I have with Woolf, or my mother; my life was traumatic and difficult and disabled people have hurt me and we are as cruel as others can be.

Tomorrow then.

*

It was tomorrow when I wrote myself a sick day, but now I am really worried it might be influenza, and if I have to go to the ER like this I might as well be one of Scorese's urban disembodied. When I moved into this building I was 34 years old, making over 25,000 dollars a year. Do any of you believe that I can now resume that course?

I can put myself in the head of my former disabled associates and tell you their side of it, and show them compassion; however, I am the one who is alone and broke and scared and knows what games my landlord is willing to play, and some of my attendants, not all, have contributed to my stress induced trauma; my sister and brother are treating me like I am a meth head because I am angry that they need to judge how I live as worse than welfare scum, won't telephone to wish me HNY yet I was a saint when I wrote them checks out of my MMA. This isolation is supposed to keep me positive, well balanced?

I have to return to bed.