A box of raspberry sugar, blood thinning

The only time viewers see pitless indigence on PBS is in still photographs of how poverty and public health used to intersect, at least in the west. In every documentary on death and dying, however, and my earliest was the Bill Moyers video narrative I honestly should have skipped, because I never forgot the sheer anguish of the veterinarian with ALS, his raw suffering, telling his physician he was going to inject himself with horse tranquilizer, sitting in a power chair seemingly equipped to tackle any civil war the Russian army might see fit to foster, very close to the end, begging his wife not to revive him again. She had him dressed in a polo shirt, rubbing his chest, regressively. I've seen countless of people dying, live and once removed by the camera holder who must record it all, and the midwestern animal doctor, expiring finally as Moyers went into post-production, penetrated, stayed, but there are limits. Nursing home residents get 30 second feeds. Anything else, whether the early Moyers, the various battles with cancer ending in defeat or remission, the muscular dsytrophy deterioration, which seems to be a favorite in the annals of clinical travail, have devoted loved ones tending to the demise of the stricken. This holds true for Atul's upgrade on Being Mortal. We don't get the demented dying alone in a ward, not unless it is a bad melodrama on the Spanish Civil War with Gregory Peck. I'm not faulting Atul on this. To coax viewers along directors need to soften our dissolution with thick sweet loving empathy, and there is real anguish within middle class affluence.

But barring extraordinary luck, most disabled people die in a war zone, not in hospital rooms with palliative care physicians. Literary eras seem to exhaust themselves in the same way, Henry James not immune to this flaw: "The Lessons of the Master," whatever its aim at Victorian marriage, is an over-sweetened pastry, certainly not a masterpiece, sans Portrait with the immortally vibrant Isabel.

With the death of James and Flaubert, as Eliot later stipulated, the novel of manners entered a curious phase of life support, slowly gasping to death, holding onto Victorian conceits in a more droll one-dimensional fashion, at a loss, ripe for the ravishes of Modernism to come: The Good Solder epitomizes this exhaustion with form. Ford creates types, not least among them the English Catholic, so important to Evelyn Waugh in his heyday and then to Jeremy Irons doing a magnificent rendition of Brideshead. In James, a gentleman of leisure is circumspect, engages in mysterious financial speculation. Ford, while still keeping the conventions of the caste, savages it. John Dowell is almost fatally bored with the recriminations of his class, and yet the two dimensional aspects of Ford's voice couched in his fortunately affluent American is what lends this narrative its humor: Florence the weak heart invalid duping her utterly dense husband. It is free public domain reading, Edwardian enriched sarcasm light enough for defeated savants, only able to struggle with Joaathan Weiner's difficult narrative shape for a few pages at a time.

Reviewers did not like Long For This World-- but as I search for interesting imperfections, I'm sympathetic, if overwhelmed at times, by Weiner's bizarre futuristic stretch. I look at Gawnde, the bubbly Asian Indian who wants to ease the writhing of our departure, while I have Weiner's complex and faulty narrative in my head. Do these agendas ever meet and coalesce in some fathomable dialogue?

Though I am not in immediate end stage, I'm dying, frightened, pissed off,  Medical students have no idea how to optimize my outcomes. I stopped seeing them in 2007. I don't want to get locked in syndrome, lingering like a fucking android, barking like a rabid dog at minstrel niceties of urban ineptitude. This was my plan for joining our newly vaunted shared economy, my guerrilla warfare despite the successful prosecution of the group in Georgia for not doing a double take with a real nut case. Can I persuade them to come get me? If you watch Gawande's docu-drama, observe his neuro-oncologist colleague closely and you can see why doctors themselves snap out, not to be trusted. Someone has to do the brain cancer, but the women's face earned my pity. 

I Propose to John Dunn That We Stage a Coup

I argue with my aunt Marie, cruelly, brutally, or with the compassionate realism you may like, to get a grip and prepare for her palliative care. She too is dying, like my stepmother, Louise, but Marie and I are much alike, obstinate Roman American temperaments. Neither Marie nor I want the home health care aides, but the difference is Marie has had cancer surgery twice. I only struggle with moderate obesity and the agitation of not enough nicotine, and I have been abused by and within the welfare system. Marie Varenas is dying, and even if this post earns the ire of her sons, my cousins, they have to get on the ball, knowing full well that Uncle Joe is one large plaque blockage.

I managed my shower chair, grateful, but I am telling you now, I would rather put myself to sleep than move here. I will not do it, and though I cannot assign blame to my infamous supervisor for the real horrific hauntings of warehousing our chronic conditions in homes, I wish I had been a wiser 28 year old than I was, wowed by Linda in her jeans and cuff crutches. Even my work for the disability center left the indelible stain of hell imprinted on me.

Hence the issue with algorithms: Eschewing the power of case management doesn't mean we should forget we cannot do human relations by binary code. Twitter suggests I follow Ms. Byzek without being able to denote my hostility toward her for her violation of my trust, and I have used some venomous terms in relation to her sexual orientation. What a solidified block we are, eh? Josie and Erik have their own enmity toward each other, and I hate all five of them, though I do not know Linda's status in ADAPT or Disabled In Action.

I emailed Josie within the last 24 months, chancing my pain to be graphic, because her email account was still on my group. I took her off, with an acerbic bristle, writing "I'll never be civil to you," and never shall.

The way that gays and lesbians informed my past is, if not dying out, ameliorating, and Josie, like many of you, would say her violation of my trust occurred years ago, she lashed out at Cecil to protect me, and tried to make it up, when she and her partner visited the city. The voice of reason in her Christian loving temperament. Cecil may have hurt me of his own accord, true, but that was my business, and even if I beat a conversation to death with an opening, I did not deserve what she did, and she knows it, given what happened to me at the CIL.

I need to read more staff and scrip, and assure John that if my circumstances change, I shall support his output. Let's usurp the UN!

Poop deck doxing

"There is nothing so dangerous as a woman with nothing left to lose."-- voice over narrator.

I recognize Caitlin's description of the problem of digital mob rule; its potential impact lurked in the background long before Spike Lee fell into an "I'm gonna get that sucka," mindset and posted the wrong address for his followers, with the resulting fallout. I am guilty of it myself, to the extent that even if my former disability center is lying about my former supervisor's departure, the sheer force of my emotional pain has had a significant dampening impact. Fortunately for you, I do not opine on Leelah/Joshua Alcorn's orientation. Not due to lack of courage, simply that it is news to me and I can't waddle out buffalo chips chasing every prairie fire, except to reiterate what I've conveyed before. Suicide is selfish. A select number of individuals may have no choice at the end of the day, but I have trouble believing that a 14 year old's suffering was so extreme that he/she had to punish his family with a irreversible solution. Look at the tenacity of Cosby's accusers, or genocide survivors. A didactic scold like Martin Amis isn't wrong about the strength of survivors, using his novel art to excavate fascism. (More on that another day, I have to tackle the pragmatics of post-European imperialism)

China's news agency put out the usual statistical factoid that 35 people died in riots on the mainland. I'm willing to bet John Lewis, as an Atlantic contributor, isn't in temple lighting incense for these 35-- my point being that today's activists should be as honest with their blinders as my generation is not.. My scapegoating exorcism occurred 15 years ago, and nothing has changed about the language as a whine of dependency. I do not wish to return to it, at least not as a protester. The world of IL is a subset, just as this Texas Monthly on Michelle Lyons is a subset, an oracle tableau of stark banality which is not really about the death penalty, because sometimes, there are no answers, and the European line in the sand over life imprisonment glosses over their parallel ethical morass in the worst cases. What Pamela is exploring is a subculture with its own price tag, creating its own expatriates.

It was posted to Writersblock by Venkat, and is the best long form article of 2014, receiving a staggering 8 votes. It may be read as a progressive victory in the wings, but there is always an undertow, a warning in those wings. Surviving is never quite the same when what has to be survived is overwhelming. How we vanish, it always has a ripple effect.

Two Jakes

I went to Beirut in June of 2010 because my father was dying.-- Claire Messud

There is a scene toward the climax in Chinatown, brilliantly staged by Polanski. Mrs. Mulwray drives Jake to the sanitarium which Noah Cross utilizes for his cover up, and in the foreground we see a resident of the sanitarium sexually harass a nurse who looks like a horse's scrotum, and the nurse, care worn and world weary, bids the octogenarian to have a seat and finish his meal. It is nearly a Shakespearean moment. The Nicholson Dunaway Huston trifecta bisected by the lewd romper room antics, antics which offer cues about Roman fucking nubile adolescents in puberty, and yet, Polanski's entitlement with his alleged victim is a footnote, an inconvenience, even as he might have been my psychotic stepfather, in my poem "Broken China" I am crying out daddy daddy help me, wishing my father had killed my mother's second husband, fearful of the reverse but unsure. Stuart was brutal, but my father had a more calculated Roman menace. Should this woman be a footnote due to Polanski's genius? That woman in India, I have to close my mind to her trauma. Many of us would; many of us do. What that must have felt like, gang raped and then internal hemorrhaging, an iron rod to violate her. Violate is too nuanced for her agony. Her uterus was likely perforated. A footnote.

My father will never know how much hatred I feel that I failed him, that the IRS my mother and his son destroyed the life he deserved. He never talks to me but now that his third wife is dying, now he speaks. He made me almost wealthy in an invalid's barren and bleak institutional environment and this is my evil, created my evil, that human life is so expendable. The veterinarian whom Moyers filmed openly discussed euthanizing  himself with horse tranquilizer during the brief time he could operate a power chair. In the last segment, he pleaded with his wife to let him go, recumbent, shrunken, clothed in a polo shirt. We do not realize the profound impact of the photographic medium, the saturation of prognosis, treatment, the mechanized technology with which we contain disease. The majority of my life was spent in a hospital, and then I force myself to watch it in a teleplay funded by Congress to educate the American public on the brutality of modern medicine.

Fruitful Multiplication

"Do you understand, or is it too tough for you?" -- Faye Dunaway

A veterinarian with Parkinson's disease tracked from diagnosis to demise in a Bill Moyers documentary on degenerative illness was the first video of its kind, a viewing that would lead to almost incidental accretion, dozens of cancer treatments won and lost. Physicians who never talk about dying for the cause and effect of their insurance premiums, say instead "We could talk about hospice." A painter tracked through the unraveling of his sinews due to muscular dystrophy, a pathos Good Housekeeping domestication enforcers sop up with bistro dinner rolls, activists rebel against and the telethon moderates itself attempting to placate empowerment inside of wretched pity. Maupassant can be faulted for this overweening saturation in his later stories as his own disease blew the sprockets in his neural net, but American public television producers never say die when it comes to exposing the free market exploitation of death. Suicide tourists and militants, what we have lost isn't just acceptance, but willingness to see death as routine. The right to control dying, the right of self determination within physical vulnerability are not incompatible. Both are about control, but there is only so much control any one of us can exert without some form of scaffolding. Was Noah Cross as sinister and dangerous as Polanski makes him out to be? We'd have to enlarge the question to examine the American mogul.

I am a right to die advocate, slightly complicated by my belief  that death should be used as a form of political protest, but it is a form of extremism, like the practice of Sati under the Indian caste system. Chinatown is a kind of extremism that makes it one of the greatest movies ever made, and Polanski managed to make it without the hatchet jobs which Orson Welles swallowed into morbid obesity. Some films as pandering trash should have never been made. Orca is what? The burgeoning birth of Eco feminism reviving Melville? There are times when death by stoning for Richard Harris is too kind to ham as an interesting meat.

Peeping Expirations

I regret never having attempted to conquer statistics, or demographics. These probability and percentages and median averages are black holes crushing my intellect in a supernaturated gravitation field, upon which I speculate that the number of westerners intimate with death must run into the thousands, with adjustments for anomalies. I am familiar with the threat of my own mortality, and that even before cigarettes shortened my lifespan. I was not supposed to survive my birth, did, nearly died from pneumonia numerous times before my twelfth birthday, was nearly murdered, tossed on my skull a few times, and that can kill you; it makes me feel like Houdini Cripple, but I have yet to experience someone dying on me (nodding off pause) in terms of going *through* the loss curve common to our agrarian roots. I have seen death lurking in the inner city violence paradigm, watched paramedics work on a public housing tenant like Mr. Morton, collapsed in his doorway, a black male old enough to remember segregation, and too old not to have been scored upon by whatever denigration that amounted to; neither he nor his wife saved themselves, due to the beliefs of an obscure sect that may have been a corruption of Christian Science. I found them to be unpleasant ignorant people, and it was my fault, after all, that I have seen so much of the black community, the gay lifestyle, up close. Had I listened to my parents. Scratch that.