Ironside Enumerations

Again he thought how processional Venice was, -- Barry Unsworth, Stone Virgin, p 50

I cling to Stone Virgin, a Booker Prize text, as if it was on its way to becoming sepulchral, if not scriptural; what Unsworth achieves in his work, something I could never do, no mattter how much I researched, or fight to travel, is to transition the character type of Henry James, into modern fin de siecle figures. He collapses figurines into modernism without resorting  to linguistic tricks. David Mitchell may have made me weep, with the fatal imprint of Cloud Atlas, but Unsworth gave me a religious revival, and may have had an indirect impact on what I was attempting to achieve in Dimmer Beacons, and failed, despite that the essay is in its third printing, and as with every risk of revision, a rewriting of the text for my too slowly compiled non-fiction collection may lead to something lesser, if I really get ugly about Linda, and whatever kudos to the culture of victimhood, Linda was my fault. I talk. I talk to total strangers about the haggard bitch of articles. I call Tony Stiles my little brother to feel better, and I'm killing myself into a principled libertarian death spiral so that nigger nannies can make their car payments, fraying my rage between homicidal transcendence and suicidal anchor stones to keep my corpse floating beneath the riverbed, after a week of extraordinary duress on bouillon cubes and basil, the last of my kind, in actuality. Many writers up through World War 2 went insane, or needed torpor, and died, like James l Herlihy, and I am my old self until I return to Presbyterian Homes, which I am going to leave, despite the week of bouillon cubes. All very well, but I cannot dismantle a sports chair like Bruno Debrandt more successfully rendering a modern, paraplegic cop in the WYBE feed, Cain. Cain succeeds where Underwood failed because it doesn't utilize black guilt. I know Debrandt from more than the convoluted Spiral, a series only viewed sporadically, but cannot place his role which imprinted him, and I was going to inveigh that his functionality was outside of my worldview, but that isn't true. I lived date rapes and fucks and spasmodic heavy petting.

Part of this is panic over my dad. He is old and I want to go to him, to stop being a guilty financial transaction, to forgive him for doing to me then what Trudy Richardson does to me now, and I hate this woman so much it frightens me. I hate Trudy Richardson more than I hate Linda Dezenski, because this is what I wanted from Linda, to spare me the Presbyterian Moby Dick avarice. What the Presbyterian Homes model represents is human dystopia at its worst, and we need to stop it, just as we need to stop our obscenities with exotic game like Harambe. Only we cannot stop what we're doing, can we?

Lesson Plan

"Voglio costruire qualosa."-- Simone Montedoro

Let me link you to my Dimmer Beacons essay imported to Medium from Breath and Shadow, not because I want attention, but because Medium has a better font, and the piece serves as an example of a cop out failure for which Ability Maine gave me a $25 dollar honorarium, Chris Kuell deeming it good enough, which it isn't.

I was trying to say something about failure, both in a micro and macro context, intent on enlarging on a deeper existential threat, and instead, I consciously stalled, perhaps unwilling to address that there was a homoerotic element of danger in both my admiration of my supervisor's ability to wield power as a disabled woman, and her inability to retain any personal loyalty she would project to subordinates prior to turning on them (I am not the only one who is triggered to upset at the mention of her name; like anything, IL has its particular subculture for the initiated.). I was also trying to examine the elusive metric of success, which I failed by virtue of feeling over discipline. The failed scholar in me has regrets, but tenacity in research takes time, and health--or at least enough energy to complete the task. 

Now, it is my work, and I can take certain components and remix them, but I think I was dredging a bit up on what it is to live a life fully instead of vaulting into safety valves, which is a personal flaw, rarely doused with cold water, and those I can count on my fingers: the cruelty of the first time I had sex with Scott, my affairs with married men, perhaps looking for a death via Medea, because when you get caught as the "other woman" the fury that Euripides brings to life doesn't feel quite so legendary in the fog of antiquity, and then life with Frank.

My ambitions, however, were essentially destroyed by a K-12 paradigm because I wearied of graduate studies. My aunt didn't. She has her PhD, negotiating that with being faithful to the Catholic Church-- though I cannot see that she has derived any real economic security as an educational administrator.

And the question remains. I signed into Medium and published myself, but I am not sure what that means. It is a platform, catering heavily to communication and computer tech, and the seismic new world order. I only partially speak that language, especially as the train left the station in my mid-30's, and I didn't bounce back.

And whatever my way forward, I won't bounce back into home ownership, having a car; perhaps not even a passage to Italy, though I still hold out hope to close my aging eyes on Rome. In the meanwhile, former follower Kelly Clark seems to have vanished-- not that I'm troubled. Normally I would not have followed a celebrity blitz feed as was her content, but I indicated my willingness to accommodate cute.

What couldn't she handle? My bad attitude? I'll never know, but I don't think I'll change. My earth was scorched; entropy now cometh... I may tire out, but I suspect happiness is a polite fiction-- not that there aren't genuinely happy folk who don't need Prozac. Or all we all on something? 

* I am past the point of anti-depressant utility; being made to look placid isn't a substitution for an actual repair, and regeneration past the half century mark becomes tricky.