Slouching Towards Gomorrah

Cessation is one of my counter narratives, for those of you clever enough to catch it, my own doubts about zeal, doubts about how much hardship I am willing to inflict on myself for the sake of principle, and what I truly believe about liberty and the reality of my biological entropy. Not acceptance, but cessation, giving up, shutting myself down, falling silent, to avert the price tag of a self-immolating anger. Overwhelming and losing my identity in savagery defeats any purpose in having an agenda in the first place, and a sense that nothing I do, no matter how hoarse I make myself, changes anything, or will, and that the very people I am inviting to see through my perception are those who flee, finding me "frightening," to quote Gary, the Jungian, and very old Speakeasy regular (and remarkably, David Harris is still there, a tug of nostalgia, not knowing if this is a good or bad thing, that the forum has a steady bald Jewish Virgil to guide you through to the Messiah of your choice. Not a bad guy, David; we had some interesting conversations, but if he is a real author worth reading or a pedagogue who thinks my obsessive drama nothing more than pyrotechnics, that we can leave unanswered. Why not try and return? On a simple level, I do not know if the moderator would remove me if I assert my identity as a voice from the past, and on a more complex level, we'd save ourselves from the doom of extinction by methane gas for at least a few centuries if we roasted a significant percentage of MFA students and indulged in limited cannibalism. I may not be where I wish, but P&W has nothing to offer me but more of the same: institutional compliance). I have nothing against getting the MFA, but it would not help me and I cannot afford the debt, so let me dial back and make a correction: the point of impaction in The Brothers Rico begins with Conte in that bright rat pack dress robe on the telephone about harboring the psycho he finds in his office. Let us not gloss over that robe, whether it is satin, nylon, or velvet (any trivia assists here appreciated, wardrobe geeks?) Karlson's dominating shot of it subdues the audience with a grand sense of Eddie's style, not just his material status; marks him as a target, for us, for his antagonists, and in the coda of lead billing, he is the star. Or is he? The coital pleasures with Foster remain an interlude with its own unease, the letter from her sister, as a plot device, contributing.

The meeting with Gino in the car escalates this tension, which leads to an important question: Why doesn't Conte act to save his brother in the immediacy of that moment? Is his delay plausible, attributable to lack of realism?

Pause. Spastic goes like the ghost of Denmark's true king to go whimpering to the evil ACLU, even though I might as well rupture my spleen. If American communists are one of my limited weapons, however, the arsenal of the powerless is what it is, ready to abort what should never have been born.

Timbre

If I am going to sacrifice the thin gruel of my security, it will not be immediate. I have to cushion my flight to allow my scant resources to offer me the slimmest chance possible to avoid de facto state imprisonment. My family cannot or will not assist, and Liberty, we have been there and back again, is a dead tool, and as long as I have any mind left, I have to reject their paradigm. My emotional investment, and my emotional pain, is about the past. Neither of my former supervisors respected me enough to sit down with me and figure out what the CIL could do to still support me, and no, sitting down to work with Gil Ott, who died in the position that I would have wanted, was not the worst thing in the world, nor the attempted partnership with his actress friend, but I am not Joe D, the lobby consumer, and needed to make a living, one, and two, one of my supervisors is guilty of criminal conduct.

David Harris, a Speakeasy writer who long outlived his usefulness on that community, consoled me years ago by saying I thrive on contention. He is right about that, but not about how my Liberty superiors treated me. Disability centers are not Microsoft or Google at each other's throats in a complex digital interdependency that is so big, their future failure will spell significant disaster.

Federal mandates that make Liberty and all its sister state centers a reality, this is American Marxism in action, and it is a sick system. Surgeons keep replacing parts, much as they do in Vice-President Cheney's chest, but the corruption remains, and the very people this paradigm was designed for wind up suffering. Too many, as in this case, I am not an exception to the rule, and the only thing that can fix it is a Congressional review.

I am taking most of the day off. I am going to read, sulk, and eat chips with black bean dip. I will be back tonight, like Henry Fonda, resurrecting John Steinbeck.
At some point, the fact that centers keep making excuses for malfeasance will ultimately make them unsustainable, and it needs to be addressed at the federal level, whether I live to see it or not-- but my additional issue is this. Griping online is one thing, but mailing letters is another, and quadriplegic or not, I have to plan some kind of withdrawal.