Shyster of Last Resort, sans Bulgakov

"You read a lot, don't you?"--Tony's disappointed Philadelphia contact

The one character trait that unites Philadelphia's dispersed Italian community is bullshit artistry. My grandfather, his children, my entire tribe, and I have taken my slops, in the agrarian lingo, and splattered the walls. Perhaps I should take a ride into Kensington and see how long it takes to wind up in hospital. I am really giving my notice, and it is not funny, and yet, I'm releasing myself from pretensions I hate, all this over assistance paid by Medicaid. Marie Varenas, who has no online presence whatsoever, except for me and my posts, conveyed, that, as a last resort, EMS could haul me back in to her kitchen, where I waited in my 20ish years on academic probation, because I hated Temple, for Diamond Park to be habitable, nagging Michael Washington, my retched conditions unseen, so long ago, but I really cannot do that again. My uncle who lives there now is functionally senile and circling the drain with his condition, aside from my aunt's.

I have not seen my father's sister since my mother's funeral. She looked like a Spanish version of a generic Joan Rivers on a bad Botox day, and her weight loss after losing her stomach would impact me noticeably, but, if I am able to visit her until I sort this out, she is there. 

Individuals with political positions may feel sorry for my arc, but I could see, in that constituent interchange with Brian and his audience, that politics is primarily a game of appeasement, and I am increasingly treated like a woman who is told to know her place, and behave. I should have sought adjudication when the iron was hot, but I am intransigent, demanding it now, and it will lead to EMS or police carting me off, and after that happens? Yet this conflict is invigorating me. I can see some really hard policy pieces coming out of it, if I can snatch electrical outlets, in some context. I'm pissed, really mentally divorcing myself from Presbyterian Homes, and terrified of shelters, but this isn't simply about compliance. It is about choices. I toured this building with the last Caucasian assistant manager who worked the secondary position, Janice, after I became an Eppi crime victim, and turned her down.

Presby, if it really bases its theology in good works, should have down the right thing and found me another rental agent after my attack. I was working, I had a salary of 23,000 a year, and what eroded my health was my hatred of how this community treated me, a life long hazing and initiation through the facade of social cruelty. Yes, there is no landlord tenant nirvana, but I have been crucified in a community I never selected, nor desired, and my ticket to that drain is on the horizon. I am really breaking some eggs, throwing all my energies into a new plate. It may not be enough.

Fiberglass Insulation

By implication, older people who use personal social services have been subjected to bureaucratic procedures and assessments that have increasingly focused on what they cannot do or achieve in order to identify their eligibility for services. These kinds of assessment procedures have contributed to the construction of older people using services in a language of dysfunction and problem states [....] Opportunities for narrative approaches have declined, Baars and co-authors, page 143, Aging, meaning, and social structure

My poor aunt gets combative with me when I verbally point to affinities, aggressive without understanding I am referring to acceptance. I have to find other supports than a cancer stricken 75 year old half out of her mind, and if cousin Richard is occasionally perusing mio postio, my advice to my cousin is to start spending it down. It isn't easy Richie, never is. Stephanie and I have poppa, and I'm 3/4ths in the sewer. Apply pressure before she spirals into hospice. "Yeah, and you?"

The difference between me and tu mere, my cousin, is I haven't been diagnosed with additional disease other than molar cavies, already tied to cerebral palsy as a symptom. I'm pugilist, and show obvious wear and tear no employer would look past to give me a chance-- except as a radical author, but that is still a niche doorway; I'm otherwise stable except for Ken Cantrell's  compassionate malevolence putting an end to a miserably secure environment (sigh). Now I'll face bowel movements and disturbing the peace, and other flags. The police operator who took my call Thursday morning was courteous. The emotional armor of a seasoned practitioner in play in our Orwellian U-verse, she was even, sonorous, like Peter Haber, the Swedish variation on Ian Flemming.

Sjowell, like Dick Wolf's screen writers, gets the conflation right in "Boy in the Glass Bowl", illustrating how crime and abuse ripple in concentric circles around impairment until they fall back inward. An autistic boy who cannot articulate is easy prey for a sodomite who then makes him an orphan. Sjowell emphasizes solving the puzzle is its own reward, and Beck's team can return to the rewards allotted to camaraderie among those close to Arctic climates. Only with Vincent D'onofrio of yore are viewers taxed a bit more. The Terri Schiavo episode was searing, so dark and cruel in conclusion that I winced; the husband's capture was more horrible than the brain death he caused, Goren almost functioning as a yawl, raking rivulets of exposure in a triumph of materialism.  Wait until I confront Trudy's boss. He is the real prick, the tour de force toward whom a tongue lashing would be a pleasurable offense. Trudy is deft, and evasive, but displays her weakness, Louis Armstrong eyes with their genetic inclination to dissemble. I want her supervisor. Ken Cantrell, the thick ape, just vibrating for castration. 30 years ago such hate would have never been a pleasure.

Simon Axler

...the sense she had now when Mr. Carmichael shuffled past, just nodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slippers, that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. -- Virginia Woolf

To ready a sonorous viola that is an omnipresent suture to a heart of festered scabs, the subtext in many of my biographical posts is about lack of belonging: I did not fight to close the deal for a terminal degree, never found my way through the thicket of becoming an independent scholar, my shoddy case management training has turned me into a wistful exterminator, and I failed to establish myself as a journalist; creative writing can go fuck itself. I still practice it, will continue to do so, but most artistic expression, when you take a step back, is an eddy of vomit, canonical or otherwise. Rereading Les Miserables is an insane idea. I do not even know why it occurs to me to return to Victor Hugo, but perhaps reminding myself about the arc of Jean Valjean is relevant to modern alienation. When I was still under Linda's supervision, then I belonged, and that is where my internal bleeding truly resides; not in my career satisfaction, for I can vouchsafe that disability center employment is Orwellian, but I did what I did for as long as I did for her, not for the most discarded and broken bodies on the face of the earth, not for the dozens of mentally ill who challenged my own health not long after, but for a Jewish woman with a milder case of cerebral palsy whom I defended like a pit bull against all her detractors, then enabled her to become a fatal catalyst, making me a bull dyke in all but name, and I lashed out at her as much. Now I'm your bitch, hissing it out of my countenance violet with fury, stupidly emoting, never able to remove myself from this casualty laden environment. Padre's solution, if it isn't a shell game, is for me to move in with his sister and my demented uncle who paws my breasts when he can get away with it, but Joe is in Alzheimer's land, so I chalk up those behaviors there. If I could graft myself to the Rosenbach, it would be a gently vindicated landing, and they are good, despite that my cleaving to wade through Joyce was wobbly--but negotiating that slope is tricky, not being a nuisance, making myself useful. They fascinate me in many ways, these archivists and patrons, and their secular liberalism is good. Linda's is a psychopathy, much like Edward Snowden's transitory impermanence; his narrative goes deeper than his dissidence, deeper than immediate analysis.

The systems we've created have overtaken us.

The genie I cannot put back in the bottle isn't homoerotic desire: after Ms Dezenski bucked about her orgasms, I asked myself if she was flirting with me, and rolled into the bathroom with a COPD temperature and proceeded to puke. No, what I am going to grieve the rest of my life is the affinity of mutual esteem. I doubt I will ever have it again in another woman to admire or respect. There is an old adage that pontificates we really do things for ourselves. Indirectly, my loyalty to what Linda represented was an internal reward based on belief of derived  power through her leadership. Indeed, I held onto my position at Matrix as long as I did because I wanted to be as strong as I thought she was, and that example mattered more to me than sex.

I still live it, to channel Kevin Whately, but I have to pay the price for that in my hope for more equitable futures. If I lose to savagery, and then face elimination through that, then perhaps all I can hope for is to be my own voice of consolation for the suffering that finds its way to me.