Oden's Hammer, with admissible discrepancies

Part of what I am attempting to do on Disability In Entertainment Arts is utilize my brain damage to my advantage, which is why I convolute so many things together. It doesn't always work, and my short lived protégé Louise Norlie indicated I might be less confusing, and less rushed, but some of my triggers are indicative of trauma no iconic personage can cure, like guilt over my online usage. I need to at the very least, mitigate this. My provider isn't an authoritarian dragoon. I may have had a little trouble mailing my bill in during the era of dial up , for which even I can scarf as a primitive folly, despite not being fully wireless- but I waited a little too patiently for ATT to convert to online billing, and I followed suit. I have been responsible, did everything they every asked of me, including the dreaded credit deposit. (Years ago, and yes, they returned it, but I am lucky I had over 30,000 dollars at my disposal to play these games.) Quelch. Now she is discussing long lost freedom of her personal finances. No one does that, nor do I, up to a point, but I am only attempting to illustrate how far my life imploded thanks to the false assurances of the disability intake model: When I was 23, still a rather fresh inner city body, I was in danger of starving to death, because the SSA field offices, overwhelmed, did not keep tabs on what their verifiable cripple was doing, and arbitrarily suspended my SSI. It points to why, unlike my dying father's sister, I am very very reluctant to depend on state welfare. I got through it then, but being very nearly in the same place, 32 years later, is obscene. I'm fully cognizant that I am less elastic, and yes, part of this falls on my shoulders: I resigned from The Matrix Research Institute like a water logged koosh ball, frightened of my clients, overwhelmed at losing my brother-- hence, "bumping into" my former manager from the center from which Matrix plucked me, this wasn't my best option, confiding in her through posts. My wounds over that permeate this entire account, revealing to me an implosive level of destruction which could, hypothetically, write itself out as a NSA political thriller spiraling into Armageddon.

Ten years ago, getting away from Presby terian Homes, this would have mitigated such terrible scars. [Riverside is the beige white tower if you want to rescue and thereby own my loyalty for life.] Now? I may have a case to sue the corporate office in Spring Mills from here to the center of the earth, but if I perceive an occasional overage as a crime against humanity. I am not really long on holding onto my sanity. My shins are going, but this doesn't mean a paraprofessional represents an optimal solution, you can trust me. I see too many abuses, even under Trudy's duress, using every weapon she can, striking out at me without realization of the consequences, because she is a moron, because Presbyterians hire minorities barely a step ahead of their brutal underclass on which they earn their salary, and there are far too many people like this, as opposed to those of keen acuity damaged by relentless cruelty. I have research to do, and may slow with Blogger for a time. I don't know if the company will allow me to code ads back in. They do not have to. I may, just barely, hold my inner savage in check, but I shall never be entirely free of the belief that people driven to violence have had too much amplified whippings. 

As for Louise, I don't know how she is faring under the Trump Administration. She was a nice girl. Our contact had too much subterfuge.

Fuminori Nakamura and the vigor of Asian noir

"I tried to remember when I first realized that I was virtually ambidextrous," -- The Thief

When Ali Spagnola started to follow my twitter account, I embedded a certain degree of astonishment in Guardian. Before that, I telephoned the cancerous Italian aunt, and said "Marie, I have a huge pop star following me on twitter and she doesn't need me in the slightest." I also cannot explain twitter to cancerous aunt, but then I said "Oh, wait!" and figured out a little puzzle. A woman known to Ali wrote a post of the sort many suburbanites relate to, and I made a comment to the effect that disabled individuals still, by and large, view this world through glass houses, mildly petulant. Is it a contradictory following?

Ali has that heart-shaped svelte energy. My body, no matter what I do, even starving on pride, is indolent. I am small enough in stature to weigh her size, at 5 ft 2 in, but obesity trends in my family, and I'm probably 240, or hovering there, as I've not been eating much. I'm also 20+ her senior. But, I used to drink, wanted to fuck every beatnik of a certain type in sight, and had I not ended up so victimized? The possibilities of ambidextrous exuberance were there. 

In all honesty, I haven't had the time to know what Ali's musical recognition offers me. I know what my rewards are from a few, select followers, but I am the old lady defeated by a majority nigger city (and yes, this morning I've posted it) and I'm dog paddling, my breathing tube breaking the surface, sinking back, and inexplicably emerging once more. Amazed, wondering where this strength, even with the dry skin, post-menopausal vagina. I am Nakamura's addict pickpocket lover held in abeyance only because I'm designated as a special class, with dubious federal protections, but let me make a comparison.

Patrick Stewart wouldn't respond to me as a person for whatever tea is left in Tianjin, because I flout decency and good manners, but, if he did, I'd have a reaction; perhaps log off, cry for a week, delete this account for shame, for failure, but not with Ali Spagnola. Her outreach took me back, yes, and the feisty artist she undoubtedly is has earned my gratitude, but she might as well be a stepdaughter I'm mentoring, and this is basically ditto for most of my verified users. You're blank slates, with the exception of those who I came to first.

Ignorance precludes intimidation. As for endorsements, Fuminori Nakamura is the greatest Asian noir author to walk on Japanese soil. A developmentally damaged mind would need to live very long to equal a novel of the underside with such skill as he exhibits. He got me through an extremely difficult week.  

Feet On The Ground

Since he has a verified account symbol, Nate must have name recognition. Perhaps I've done the beatnik circuit with his relatives. A look at his capsule biography puts that to rest. At the same time, my mind flips through my involvement with Athol Fugard's work at the Wilma, remembering I used to orbit the anti-apartheid clique with perfectly self-righteous conviction, and now, in my old age, not so sure. I am thinking about tolerance, in conjunction with the way I've delineated Trudy Richardson, Debra Horne, and most of North Philadelphia in public, and candidate Oliver, to his credit, reached across the aisle. Maybe he senses that my real issue is the sense I am being shilled by these women unfairly, given my history with the killing fields of Protestant do-goodism.

I do not have contemplation in hand to get into it this morning. I'm just letting my guard down: I'm scared.

Presby has no legal ability to shuttle me to Inglis, but they are doing to me, at a much younger age, what they've done to many others in my 21 years of observation, and I cannot stay much longer, whether I push back hard or meander and duck. I'm angry enough to get arrested at eight thirty, if necessary, but that only hastens Pennsylvania's crushing brutality against me, unforgiving of failure, and I have to find a space to camp. Then perhaps another.

But if Nate threw his hat in my ring, then I can whisper "Hang on..." and hold tight. Thank you Nate.

Votive Voces for the Dead

I paid Google twelve dollars, almost everything I earned aggregating (huzzah, to echo a Harvard instructor), for a domain to protect all my writhing processes, and now I want to hit delete. Poof. Boom. Exhausted tinder, wipe it out and start over, rescind my swearing on a certain Shakespearean head, slay my malevolence and aim for love me I'm an invalid endearments, but it would not work. I'd find my way back to the wrong side of the culture wars, and even my relatives in Rome, of whom I have only faint hints, would be tempted to gag me and rummage for a hair shirt and a switch. We rarely see in film that the dying too can be tyrannical, the longer they linger, and Marie the Italian aunt is furious with me, over trifles, but she wins, I scurry, whose lungs the worse for wear? (Mine)

She needs hospice, while I, more ruthless, prepare my funeral train. I may have read former follower Clark wrong; twitter disconcerts us all, and the inferences I sewed together may be off base. It is difficult to engage each other through devices with so many loopholes and IP addresses, but after I wished her farewell, I began my rather fated outreach, and Marie's farewell to me, in so many words, is an old, precious photograph of Lillian walking me, in little white braces, with my cousin Thomas, who, much like my father's son, overdosed himself to death. I never knew what Lillian suffered through all this: diseased husband, divorced sons with menacing tempers, half bred daughters in law, one of them a loon. My mother.

What the fuck am I? The scathing, if manufactured, sociopath? I was a horrible child, my other aunt's assurances aside. Mother hate, and rebellion against the matriarchs, and yet Lillian, who ruled like the queen mother in her family, is the voice of my dead, the voice of a small Mediterranean country that created the world as we know it, and collapsed into a tourist location for mystery writers. My grandmother is here, with her taciturn disapproval reigning me in, with her stern peasant strength and pride that made her beautiful.  Voglio vedere la sua Roma, mentre lei lo sapeva, ed esprimere un desiderio. I'll check it against my dictionary later, in my bad habit of having nothing to say. But I'm a writer. I boil the water, out comes the angel hair, al dente, or softer still. I am not sore at Marie. She's dying, and scared, not that my mortality isn't looming with terror, but I may have slightly more time, whether Jerry forgives me or not. He was the most extraordinary instructor I ever knew, bar none, and coming from a teething bitch, fighting to the last breath, that is the best gift I can ever return, even if he was Irish. Italians look down their noses, you know.

Extinction to the 10

"I turned to the person next to me and said if this was risk analysis, I would rather drill my eye out with a hand augur." Thomas Peltier

Cindy Boren, despite brand headline dramatization, may be right about the demise of the NFL, and if she is right, I may just save the Blogger technocrats some stress, archive my account, and have myself arrested for intent to commit a hate crime. The prison system could not afford the expenditure, but it amounts to the same thing.

Domestication, coupled with luck of evolutionary design, allowed homo sapiens to succeed to the point of exterminating our own sub species, despite the fact that species alternates make life more interesting, but the death of American football, like the death of Roman Catholicism, like the replacement of a sovereign head of state with an autonomic statutory procedure, spells the beginning of the end-- this is why I am against giving homosexuality equal treatment (I've lost this battle, concede the fact, but plow on, unable to feat a transplant to Uganda.) 

Our own pacification means we lose our adaptive advantage, and don't tell me athletes don't know that performance doesn't take a toll. Everyone knew, even without giving the term "punch drunk" a medical tag replacement like CTE. Love of the game, like anything, is about doing, creating something greater than ourselves, but no, mothers (if she was a mother) like Kelly Clark want to transform humanity into mole rat colonies.

I am going to take a risk, as a socially inappropriate minority, and make a discomfiting assertion. Those of us with developmental issues over-personalize: I still live with my umbilical cord psychic attachment to Jerry McGuire, best damn Shakespearean on the East Coast; I'll never get over the fact that Gail was a better match for the John P. Tassoni who broke my heart, and I will never be able to trust disability activism in the same way because of what Linda Dezenski and Josie Byzek did to me. I'd let it go if either had the courage to publicly address the fact that they crossed the line, but they won't, but there you have it. I speak the language of personal absence, and did not know Kelly Clark was trying to get DIA out of the public domain, at least on the basis of my twitter feed. That said, I was trying to be nice, to take a cue, or two, from her tweets, and expand on them, and yes, feel a trifle, just a trifle, hurt that she either blocked me or closed her account. I was attempting to engage with her, not adopt her; if she was a kid, well, I am not writing to a target YA audience..

This is how we think, people with brain damage. Dispassionate processes are not how we make our approach, and with that said, I wish Kelly the best. If she was a dyke I had no way of knowing, and she did not have to read my links if they violated her sense of propriety. 

Overly Involved

I am just an aging disabled woman on her way out, but what I do differently than the angry trolls on New Mobility chat boards, which New Mobility may have ceased to maintain, given Facebook's monopoly, is that I sublimate it into a justified critique of progressive overreach, while the left shifts uncomfortably with the implications, like the cremation of the Russian traitor in the new fast paced Allegiance on CBS. Very few people can handle that degree of ruthlessness. My medical model life has been an incremental equivalency of that ruthlessness, just as the ISIS burning death of a member of the Jordanian air force moves beyond the nature of any argument. The pedestrian nicety holds that Muslims don't kill other Muslims. Zarqawi's legacy closed the door on that polite fiction, but by the same token, graphic excess is not a triumph in fear.

Joshua was initially responsive toward my appreciation of Chaim Potok, and there it ended, and I just blocked a young woman named Natalia Lomala without knowing anything except that she doesn't tweet. Why should I care if my non-compliance is on the verge of more ruthless control? I'm on the verge of being finished, evacuating myself. I'll be placed somewhere, and social media won't do a damn thing for me.

Perhaps it isn't dying, yet. A simple bronchial flare which has subsided, but when did I ever have a moment of fulfillment outside of case management processes? During my inept sexual congress with Scott Bryan, recovering coke addict? My slightly less inept fling with Pat Dillon, the Irish version of my father, over-dramatizing my emotional vulnerability during our break-up? I drove out in a rain storm to a food vendor, crying. My sister screamed at me that he was married, what did I expect? And I forget what Edith, the assistant manager on Presby's typical minority promotional track, did at the time to console me. I was only a resident for three years, and rolled to the office to be consoled, Debra Horne not yet on tap as the bully matron.

"But you're a quadriplegic, what do you want?"

Too poor even for the salve a clean slate might offer, this is all I long for, the last desire, scarcity of resource will dictate how terrible this will be for me.

CripSpeak

This is the way developmental disability works. Without knowing anything else about him, I would email Ken Cruickshank in no more than a blink of an eye, as if he understood all the injustice of my emotional wounds that have carpet bombed Poets & Writers and Yahoo Chat, and type, "I have been told I'd be happier if I lived in Oregon. Could you and your family assist me with relocation?" Without having any regard for the fact I am a total stranger who doesn't have a decent Instagram representation of herself. The same exact mind that can openly excise vile demons with a so what attitude, who in turn knows nothing about him, I'd do it anyway, which is why suburban women of a certain class, like my mother's sister, like the effect of anti-depressants on my reactive capacity. It is one area that unites Aunt Mary with minorities like my apartment manager, the difference being Trudy isn't a relative and offends me by talking slang. Psycho-tropic drugs have risks, and can send someone with my brain lesions into seizures-- this is why I do not take them anymore. When I did, they impeded function, and I have seen anti-anxiety medications kill women like me. A resident here named Cheryl Ward, briefly my client. 24. Whatever they gave her killed her. She overdosed or had an adverse reaction, and used to express her fear of the door rattling. My fear is slightly more attuned. 

Trudy Richardson and Debra Horne are bigoted minorities with too much power over my interior dignity, ergo, bigots with power create reactive bigotry in turn, and homosexual squeaky boys like Brian K. Sims find this radioactive politically, to be sure. Besides, physicians most often don't take in the whole picture, and are less than inclined to admit that distressed patients represent huge earnings. Bowel impaction generates a great deal of my anxiety, and there is no cure for it. Comes with the extent of my condition, and the less calorie intake I have, at my age, the more difficult my bowel movements. It can take two days for me to clear my colon in winter.

Not to say that connections wouldn't be able to find me a less threatening housing environment. Presbyterian Homes is not about respecting rights. It is a business, expending and eliminating vulnerable people, and that, at Philadelphia's cut rate socialism.

Darren Wilson. Am I?

Hand a baby a grenade and sit riveted by Hollywood's version of Western liberalism meets the Khmer Rouge in the guise of Jolie's sculpted cheek bones in her mission statement with Clive Owen in Beyond Borders, in his giddy up version of egalitarian rage. A saga juxtaposed over the truth doesn't get us any closer to the facts about cellular organisms, because humans exposed to continuous devaluation of our lives grow hard. Even on small scale variations, numbness sets in. Not so much that we disbelieve the NIH, but anyone with a decent education can research viruses, feel uneasy about how closely they mirror independent and autonomous cell structures: Philadelphia has a significant West African contingent. Children with asthma are being stricken by a new endo virus more deadly than a cold. This may not be proverbial writing on the wall, but it might be a gross glob of snot such that inspired Balzac to write his Faustian tale about a man granted all his wishes by an ancient cloth, which, as it shrinks, damns his soul with it, and from there we start writing,  perhaps not on a wall, perhaps on our myriad pixels and code, reconsidering the solicitude we place in technology and lab cultures. Closing off the West African border may not be a very good idea. Ebola doesn't need a border.

A non academic member of the James list was confused about my private reasons for my departure from my longest, if sometimes, fractious e-list association. What did my virtual abandon of a younger woman with osteogenesis imperfecta have to do with the Jamesians? Valid question, one which I did not answer succinctly. Louise lurked on the list. I coaxed her out of her shell and then bucked, as I've written in other posts. I did not buck hard, did not engage in a tirade, but none the less, I bucked and it was a selfish act, aside from the fact, as I iterated a day or so ago, that the community is, by and large, no longer serving my hope of independent scholarship while I am busy digging my grave in the best of the projects. Certain things stay with you though. Baby pulling the pin of a grenade. The Borg are humane by virtue of comparison. Perhaps I am over-dramatizing. The managers of Riverside, the managers of Diamond Park, have been threatening me with dire consequences for 28 years. The difference, within the past year, is that I've threatened them, in writing, the baby with the grenade, liquefying my own internal organs. They call this the white butterfly in triage.

Senseless Prattle

I'd like to offer brief praise to Mike Levy, and Writersblock here sponsored by Beacon. Sometimes, not being able to run my mouth has fringe benefits, as I am literally torturing myself about keeping or removing my account with the Henry James list serv. This is all very nonsensical, I know, letting myself get familiar with a munchkin and divorcing myself from that, while carrying the mark of Cain on my forehead for my deplorable lack of tact, but it is slightly more than that. I once found the Jamesian community valuable, feel like I've contributed to a devaluation among its teaching colleagues who know each other, some of whom would find meeting me awkward and burdensome, so what use does the group still have for me?

If I want to write about James I can do it, suffer peer review, without the posting nonsense going on today. They used to actually talk about things that made me think-- but Mike have provided me with a useful tool, and I owe him the gratitude of never being unkind! He is a decent fellow! 

Scourge

"Old age is sordid."-- Georges Simenon

Leave it to me to hire a hypothetical methamphetamine user in Karina in order to ameliorate my justified social fear of revictimization, only to wind up deep fried in turmoil due to her inexperience. The fun never stops. I nearly went into scorn mode and almost lashed out at her, you stupid bitch.

That might apply to me as well, as I apply it to every person associated with Riverside Presbyterian. I liked Ed Berkowitz once, liked him and Suzanne, pitied her epilepsy and used him, Ed, as an example of an "acceptable man," if one like him was available-- and these niceties of social manner evaporated because he tried to hook me up with a nutcase who gives lectures about disparaged Jungian correspondences, subconscious, and disease, and I became illuminated to the fact that Ed Berkowitz was not a knock off of my Jewish side of the family, only a mental health consumer leading the less functional along, and I am pissed. 

Pissed that I reached out to a tenant who likes what he has in the Presbyterian management; pissed that I saw his mental heath issues in his countenance simply out of an innocent meeting with him on the tenth floor for coffee, pissed that I feel duped into have dislodged Zach Tollen's comfort zone, pissed that Karina pissed me off so much that I am willing to disrupt the status quo, putting blacks in their place by fighting back because now the white girl distressed me as well as the fat and thickened black matriarchs, who would have never done what Karina did anyway because they are black. I am the one who gave Karina the rope. I'm the one who has to get over it, even as I initiated my end game with this company.

I am going to give Nakea Fuller the finger too, PHA's *accessibility coordinator," which in translation means a black woman with a better pay grade than Debra Horne, with comparable competency issues.

I never did win any popularity contests, laughing. I am going to be gone soon, and my masterwork? How Philadelphia engenders bigotry and class conflict, reflecting the meanwhile on Scandinavia, placid and static, the palest Caucasians, sterile, polite, with their idea of dramatic conflict to wear dour pouts, get their socialized medical treatments, return to their service vectors with smiling "jas". They would encircle me as if to protect their clime from a foreign invader, threatening to sour the milkweed.

I applied to be a Beacon Writer, after a stumble and fumble, with my best pet peeve: the crony capitalism of real estate. If my father knew that I've thrown down the gauntlet with Presby he'd kill me if he did not have one foot in the grave, but I have to fight.

Zelda?

I do not really pay much attention to twitter as a general rule. I did at first, to a degree of detriment, but I haven't yet read tweets on my cell, and I am cautious about targeting (as opposed to mentioning) followers. Basically I write and tweet, and do my best to stay out of arguments, though I did tell the singer who wrote incendiary remarks about Obama that he was a fool. Early on, when I was new to the site, followers coming or going piqued me, and I did post about three. Homo Tweets seemingly disappeared, and good for him. Being gay and a New York liberal deigning to lecture me about getting therapy was a trifle much, but I had a level of ignorance about how the system worked, and when I was with LiveJournal, I reacted in error. 

Even chatter junkies can be driven ill by continuous feed; hence I keep my distance, and don't really give a fuck about micro blogging in the aggregate, even though we're all people on it. Given this, the attacks on Zelda are baffling. Robin was a privileged man. He had to work hard, grant that, and probably needed cocaine to drive himself, as I do not see how else the relentless improvisation propelled him into becoming a Hollywood convention. But the majority of us aren't so lucky, hence the anger some of us feel about his suicide. Limelight fades; this is an inevitable truth, and the medical model bullshit correspondents dutifully milk to highlight mental health are all well and good, but Williams was hideously selfish, and should have made contingencies aging stars usually make to age with dignity. He did not and set a bad example, but this isn't Zelda Williams fault. She lost her father, and why she was taunted so viciously is inexcusable. She'll be grieving a long time.

Why I was so nettled by the event may be my own fear about stark choices ahead I may have to face that a celebrity like Williams wouldn't have had to contend with in the same way, whatever the state of his fiances, and one would think, after inhabiting a neurologist like Sacks, the comedian would know better; I'll get over my umbrage. I have to, but attacking his child is below all common decency.

Health Care Crisis

Perhaps Google earns money off my raw content, and since I am not earning money off my raw content, then why am I investing so much of my time, breaking so many eggs, shredding my wounds? A Blogger account is not much, in terms of a legacy, if it can even be counted as one. Let me return to the poor vaunted Louise Norlie, secretly telephoning me from her backyard in New Jersey. "Most people go with their aide," she said, with an implied perplexity at my lack of having one. But in the ten years plus of having one, then using my own money to borrow Tim, I was abused, for the most part, by the African Americans taking the job. Not all of them, but a significant percentage. Every "aide" I had except for the new one, whom I have only used once, has discomfited me, if not abused me with micro-behaviors, and this is all I have to look forward to. Dealing with low income stressed strangers who have their own triggers. I did not go through six fucking years of university to make getting a diaper change my life time award, but my age is pushing the turning point where I'll have no choice but to depend on ignorant women with bad teeth for my care.

My last advice to Louise, by the way, is to assert herself for herself. Stop looking for apron strings, or for someone like me to draw you out on a specialized list serv, or for someone like me to engage with you because we both have other aesthetic needs beyond medical model maintenance. Go out, take a risk, meet a boy. Have sex. Do something rather than sneak telephone calls to wounded warriors.

Marie and I haven't spoken in over a week. A record for me, but father's sister and I have worn each other out. She doesn't want the same services offered by PCA that I also refuse at my peril, but it was her choice not to have hospice care for Lillian, my favorite grandmother, or my uncle, her husband, who died of lung cancer while she still smokes three packs a day. Nor is my father getting care for my stepmother Louise, with her RA. Did he marry her to punish himself for me, his dead son? I don't know, but he is eighty and cannot give his wife nursing care.

Louise hates us, my sister says. I don't doubt it. Maybe that is guilt over my mother, or that my physical vulnerability reminds her of her own, but let's extrapolate, even though I am not Timothy Taylor: You probably have an uncle Joseph with cognitive limitations signifying mild dementia, or an aunt with a broken wrist who can no longer climb stairs, with MRSA exposure and infection. If a mostly stable quadriplegic like me can fall out of production due to transit restrictions and major fallout with compliance, with the parental generation of her family now falling into "nursing home eligibility" (I welcomed padre into the club not many weeks back when Marie and I discussed the Louise crisis). My stepmother always is a crisis-- how are we going to afford the direction in which we're heading? You may think my euthanasia advocacy cruel, but demographics estimate global population will reach 11 billion by 2100. We're crushing ourselves.

Hollow Log

Billowing tirade, I splintered on my ex today, unfairly, hissing at the glamorization of Michael Sam's sex life, then roaring I would nuke the entire eastern seaboard if I could, then disconnected the 5c in tears. Nuking the entire eastern seaboard implies that anguish has that degree of magnitude: I cannot break what binds my future asceticism, and my pissant student loan debt which is going to crush me, with or without putting myself back on Medicaid.

If I find Frank and his bulk on his hospital bed and his Hoya lift repugnant, with a running price tag he has cost Pennsylvania well over 100, 000 dollars, I should have the decency to leave him alone, regardless of my nerves. My rage was about the sand pit sucking me under. My landlord repeatedly broke the law, letting seniors harass me freely for years, and yet because I then roar at Trudy, who is just trying to be a good matriarchal black nanny, I have to let all that go. Vulnerable cripple with target right smack on her back. My disability center breaks state and federal law so often that they are a running joke, and I have to let all that go, poets and writers in a unified front regrettably parked my digital ass out the door because I had an insurrectionist rage in relation to all this, and they are about selling craft to refine talent. If I want to be Henry Miller with jugs, then hey. P&W has to vacuum in writing students. Go staple your brain, spastic.

George has MS. He doesn't rave. He writes well crafted short stories with a mildly sinister aspect. I met him and his wife at an Abington bookstore in my little manual chair, bored out of my mind. "I talk just like I post on Speakeasy don't I?"
"Yes," he nodded.

"I think it is enough," this is what he posted on the boards as Dana, the moderator, and Gretchen, the melodramatic southern novelist, closed ranks and banned my account. Whatever the inflammatory nature of my rhetoric, I had residents of Riverside throwing bars of soap at me, while this man, writing with the hope of saving troubled teens, ostracized me after having met me and I purchased First Tiger, his early YA novel. I wonder if my neighbor and follower Ed knows that about my history with this building, that I was physically pelted. Doubtlessly not. He suffers too and doesn't let it throb where dialysis evidently disfigured him. The horror of such group stigmatization doesn't go away with a snap of the fingers.

Weigh this. Weigh this against a history of medical disfigurement, life long sexual victimization, then come back at me with Atwood's salutary apologia for Toni Morrison's embodiment of dignity in endurance. Language signifies the reality of the flesh, but it isn't tangible. There is no reason to run into similar troubles at Linked In. It is simply a career resource site, and I do not have the time, but this is why I fear mass aggregation.

I forgot to add, with economic contests such as this, the voices of the dead recounting Sunset Blvd seems charmed, indeed.

Inciting Accreditation

"I could have just bought another pair."-- Robert Duvall, attempting to echo what mortality causes us to lose.

It is not Alzheimer's, yet. It is mainly that I rush, and as I asked Robert to remind me, I should have edited my email to Marcia-- and this reflects the net negative of digital lives, trying to beat deadlines, trending topics, not giving ourselves gestation time. 

My own sense of alienation enables me to understand it in freaks, or those like Louise, with their particular deformities, and the girl wanted to talk books and aesthetic tastes, so it should not have been that difficult to humor her without my wounds vibrating to a banshee tempo-- but I did not desire this association for myself, on my own terms, and, even if she meant no harm, which she didn't, she disrupted my comfort zone with the other members on the list, and now I feel like nothing more than a disparaging element.

Losing competency when never having had a chance to actualize it in the first place due to physical obstacles and psychic pain, this is a terrifying prospect-- but competency related to what? I meant what I posted about respecting Marcia's analytic ability, but psychoanalytic theory hovers in the realm of discredited mythology, one that preoccupies itself with androgyny in an abstract sense. The actual reality of dealing with a clinically ill transvestite like Erik von Schmetterling imposes a real threat to a psyche, triggers revulsion one can taste, and that I had to struggle with even when I imposed myself on him and Jimmi in their unit, three floors up, or engaging with them in public.

How does theorizing, outside of tangible data related to physics or biology, enable progression? Increasingly attracted to gaunt definitions in masculine figures, I am not trying to parachute in on terminal degree scholars without having earned it. All I wish is to utilize their expertise to accomplish good work before it is too late, because working hard is all I have left.

In their eyes, I am a disruption, annoying, even threatening. But a caged animal is threatening when so many elements go against its ability to thrive, when human sexuality epitomizes itself in liberal doxology as salutary for its own transient virtue, leaving us all rutting like happy pigs. My body never lent itself to those discoveries of paramount pleasures and stimulations. Even those of you who may want to commiserate and suggest gels or orifice beads and other toys of the trade, I would object and indicate there are more important things, a restraint towards a wiser conservation, like the cruel, but necessary culling that took place on the new CW series, the 100. We've lost the virtue of self-sacrifice, yet another reason I disdain homosexual lifestyles.

Phillips Head, Stripped

"You have to touch me. On the inside part. And you have to call me my name." -- Beloved, p. 137

It was a surprisingly cool day. Normally, I do not get much fresh air on this back end of the building which faces the Schuykill, and it is pleasant, the need not to scurry after my life long concomitant triggers with animal waste and feline maintenance. Cats. Spend how many ten spots on trinkets for them and they prefer to practice their hunting skills with our Homindaen accouterments: the ear plugs for the Apple, a device whose touchpad interface still has not merited the need to fetishize its convenience, or my endless supply of plastic cigarettes.

This is scant consolation for my frayed relations with the Jamesians, and I bitterly rue my gushing ease of familiarity with Louise. I almost hate her for my flawed ease of intimacy with crippled strangers. I had a major disruption on the list years ago, before Louise lurked on it, (or so I assume, as she would have been very young and perhaps still an undergraduate) when Carrol Cox wrote a controversial article for HJR about the list serv itself. Marcia was still easily conversant with me back then, and explained to me that Carrol Cox flustered a number of her colleagues, not just me. I thought Dr. Cox made a stab in my direction, however. Feeling slighted, I unsubscribed in a huff. Returned later, tail quietly between my legs.

I cannot unsubscribe and re-subscribe as the whim seizes me, but I no longer feel welcomed, encouraged, supported, and this friction began when Louise approached me, unwittingly creating the cripple to cripple affinity, and now I’m pissed off. I liked being the underdog with these scholars, liked the hope that I could one day submit an article, and join their conversation, only to be called upon to be a mentor and good lieutenant for a girl of nascent naiveté who was impacted by the force of my writing. I cannot remember what led to my opening up with her.

Initially, I thanked her for her praise and left it at that. Much like more successful authors, I have enough experience to be wary of admirers (my obsessive clinging to the memory of Jerry McGuire being a case in point). If I thought anything else about it, I speculated incorrectly that Louise was a graduate student who knew nothing about the furious chip on my shoulder. I forgot about it. She approached me again, followed me to LiveJournal, where I have yet to wrap up my account. I made a fatal mistake at that point in the extent of my interaction, allowed her to telephone, posted something facile to the list serv which upset Greg who in turn upset me, post openly about all this, and cannot glue that fellowship over a singular and esoteric appreciation back together.

As a virtual community, small straw that it is to cling to, the list was my haven away from disability and civic strife, and I am pissed. Really, but being pissed doesn’t grant absolution, nor make Greg and I easy again. I had the right to decouple myself from the girl. I have been in a precarious state of living for a long time. More than likely my emotional state will continue to rock under duress. Louise has a federal job, and whatever security goes with that. I have the nightmare of recycled indigence, and whatever her fragility, she has not sustained my abuse. I no longer have the strength or psychic space to carry other disabled people due to my ability to survive hell, and in the same vein, Dr. Ian has the right to cut me loose, for whatever perceived breach. It was a small thing that mattered to me though, belonging and contributing to those appreciative of Jamesian mastery. I’m left at a loss, growling of little consolation.

I will bookmark the idea to one day expand on my displeasure with Toni Morrison's masterpiece. It is still important to be responsible towards the aesthetic dissonances we harbor.

Ambrosia Stings

"Everyone has choices!"-- Gordon Alexander

A psychoanalytic theorist named Marcia Ian just gave me the cold shoulder, and I can feel the singe from her offices on campus to the swollen crest of the Schuykill flooding, one which had the Fire Department lock down my building last week. So I can only surmise I confuse most of you most of the time and that is why I never receive suggestions? hmm. This is what I wrote her, admittedly hurried, asking her to be an article source:

" Hello Marcia,

It has been a long time since I dumped my scars on Jamesian scholars like yourself, but I have come to admire your mettle even within my defeat. I am writing, however, to request a source quote from you on a Simpson's puff piece, if you are willing.

I aggregate for Examiner

http://www.examiner.com/books-in-philadelphia/joanne-marinelli

for an appalling commission, but I have trapped myself in a damned if I do or don't mode. An original source would get me promoted on Google News for a few more pennies, and if I am a good girl perhaps Clarity Media will help me out one day. (I highly doubt it.)

I'll write it up and then think of something along the lines of satire, animation, a better world. The editorial team posits a 48 hour deadline, but a credentialed assignment gets more latitude. Perhaps I will purchase one of your studies."

My opening sentence obfuscates, granted, as I did not want to rehash my laments of 14 years ago on which she deigned to advise me-- and I have no reason to feed you that either, as I still like how she thinks-- but she verbally slammed the door in my face as smartly as a nun with a ruler.

I am not sure what to make of it, and replied to her rebuff, regardless of the danger of being junked in her trash folder, but let that be a lesson on the justification of paranoia.

Louise Norlie attached herself to me via the James list subscribers, and perhaps Louise was a student of one of the subscribers. I tried to accommodate Louise at first. Some of you may remember me writing about this in earlier seasons, and I then told Louise I needed to stop interacting with her, which was the truth. I was afraid of hurting the girl down the road, and really did not want to be her buddy.

I can also understand that many terminal degree scholars do not like my manner, and I simpered about Greg Zacharias for a bit after he scolded me; I do not hold onto every grudge, however. I'll get past it, but I once believed Marcia a sympathetic mind set, and she is a decent instructor, capable of challenging perspective. Licking my wounds is obviously much more interesting than serving up Simon Baker like a suckling roast, which was my initial intent. I'll weigh just diving right back into it.

Meryl Streep's character in The Devil wears Prada has real world equivalents. I surpass that a bit being a reactionary troll bitch whom Google probably can't wait to see institutionalized so they can bury her nasty and bitter-- but we'll venture back over that unholy ground later.  

Danny DeVito, Birdseye

Not only do people point to very different features when they describe aesthetic experience or justify aesthetic judgments, but the language of aesthetic discourse also varies tremendously from one place and time to another.--Marcia Eaton

10 Rillington Place encapsulates a verity that transcends its age as a film. I remember viewing parts of it at a young age, but believe the lugubrious waif this spastic moll once was took it as a thriller; the revisitation and nostalgia of it is more chilling, and sexually arousing. Being drugged into passivity pussy access is a stimulus. Asphyxiation after the fact is not. Necrophilia is putrid. No one looks at a man like Christie and wants to suspect that he can strangle an innocent child, achieve erection with cadavers, and yet the lexicon has overtaken us, giving Hannibal in his incarnations another kind of veracity, a language of irony with pop culture and the liberation of murder, a liberation that takes on its own linguistic structure, embedded in Saussure's classification of human vocalization. The parent empire has staid formulations, even the same frictions with the African diaspora. Bryan Fuller mitigates it by being hip. Americans like a classy subversion.

I mull Devito's arc. Drowning Mona has yet another kind of truism, marred or not by familiar casting. Mothers have to live with the psychological score cards imprinted, and as a consequence, we laugh at the adult maiming and emasculation, wincing. Marcus projects a good old schlub in the end while we whack each other with all our emotional baggage, naked vulnerability.  Jamie Lee Curtis hits one out of the park. She made me laugh in a 25 year old satirical drama that ran fresh for me, cuing recognitions in its exaggeration. But our real vulnerabilities inflict real trauma.

"I've always recognized the personal bond between us."

Linda Dezenski wrote that to me fourteen years ago and what the fuck is she doing? is what I asked myself. She never telephoned Matrix to see how I was. Never extended her friendship after I had resigned from her department. I felt gratified, however, and thought her authority would remain a safe harbor for me. Infantile? Perhaps. In 01, in a tactical mistake, I met with her between mutual human shields. You stay away from me. An indictment uttered I've been putting on trial ever since. I liked her before I made the attempt to trust her. It is difficult, not having healthy and happy social bindings, and that was one thing I wanted, friendships. The esteem of work, my own self reliance, all up in smoke. Let's see.

Louise tried. Daniel Schneider tried, but these are online contacts. Schneider was a misconstrued apprehension. Louise was too close to home and too young. Ed tried, and miscued and I bristled, again, on trust, I engaged his associate. Zach and I bumped like fools, but it was not Zach. My history with Project Share is best left as ancient history. Everything instant digital access is necessarily beneficial?

Aphelion

The SHARE website doesn't convey the sensibility of rolling into a psychiatric facility that polices itself rather poorly. I was sexually harassed in a Darby Share, threatened with assault in a Northeast location, propositioned in a partial hospital, and have seen eruptions of the sort that make the mentally ill easy targets for Kathleen Parker and David Brooks. What goes on in a Share is innocuous until an incident, valid or obscure, disturbs the peace. People masturbate, fondle each other, stare at television listlessly once their entitlement for the month is spent. Sordid and boring, how much of the negative behavior is attributable to reluctance to comply with chemical saturation, finding the dosage combination and the therapeutic treatment that works, I am not the blogger to turn to for that data. Charles Krauthammer is the practitioner turned conservative paraplegic follow the schematic this is the concomitant series of conditions psychiatrist. Does he still treat patients? Unknown. What would he point out to me? That I use quadriplegia affected damage from cerebral palsy not to work at attitude readjustment? That anti-depressants work? That my perspective is impaired from post-traumatic stress?

Was I bipolar when I was an undergraduate? The answer to that question has to be tempered by the fact that my life was regulated from birth until seventeen years of age by institutionalization, and when I met Jerry I was nascent, naive, repressive about my mother, her significantly more severe suffering, her sometimes abusive lovers, and I regret the extent of my emotional investment in his intellectual ability, know it was not his fault, and perhaps not entirely mine either, and as he counseled me on several occasions, pedagogy is not entirely unaware of this aspect in the instructor student dynamic. All this as a given, I have never seen myself as sick, ever, until I had to fend off Debra Horne threatening me when my life imploded in the recession, and this contributes to the sense of stigma that Ed inadvertently linked me to when he connected me to Zach Tollen. The burden is almost one too many to carry, especially when the weight of matriculation is a much different bar for me than it is for a licensed driver who owns a car, or has use of one. 

Can I let an accident of incomplete information go? Yes, but my attempt at selecting a neighbor as an outlet essentially ended, either as a failure of my ability as a writer or a mutually skewered comprehension. The reason it is so much more difficult to shrug off disability center negligence is due to the fact that this negligence never corrects itself, never reforms, and my former supervisor got away with the commission of a serious crime. The impact of this on my life was proportionately detrimental, and I remain cemented in place. How would you maintain a healthy outlook in such circumstances?

I avoided the mention of the naval facility shooting, more or less out of saturation, but I do not see it as either a treatment or gun regulation failure. Navy reservists need to have access to weapons, but soldiers and police are as fallible as anyone. They snap. We cannot control every contingency.

Charm Fractals

"I tried that,"  Vera Farmiga on a woman's time honored prerogative on experimentation.

Up in the Air (2009) signals a number of conflicted messages I am not prepared to discuss in significant detail; it has to seep in, hopefully faster than my ligament contractions, but it rivals my admiration for Aaron Eckart's scathing bite, and my initial viewing makes me regret lack of effort to see it in its initial release. Definitively of its age, I see things in the comedy which point to why The American, a year later, didn't mesh. Clooney's ruthless charm is too decent for psychopathy in actualization. Depersonalization is one or few degrees removed from an assassin nerved by conscience, very similar to lack of accountability without litigation to force the issue. This Teflon mannequin aspect the actor projects at his best may explain his self-appointed status as Sudanese savior, and also why he and Clooney pere mesh uneasily between news media and entertainment. "Why did Europeans do everything?"

My loutish philosophy professor used to toss this trick question out to his class as a kind of false positive, but let me ask, what has the guilt tied to imperialism actually solved? Aren't some of Clooney's more substantial projects a rather bleak answer in kind? 

My follower shambled in from his daily routine the Tuesday evening I chased the Rosenbach's tail feathers. I was in congress with the developmental idiots, reviving McCarthyism. Ed did not say hello, and I simply observed him walk in, take the elevator, knowing his sanguine temperament did not mean to trick spark my social fear based on Project Share field duress. No regret, no pang of remorse. I had my doubts from the moment I sat with him over coffee on the tenth floor, but I also lost my sense of provocation as well.

There is a lot of bull shit artist in me, but spastic flesh moving past the half century mark is actually coming home to roost, and in the degree to which I am pressed for time, murder conspiracies may not matter, made into a kindle single, or seriously considered. Pointless wild justice on the principle of the thing. Does it come down to the amount of indignity we have to tolerate, the number of casualties needed before real movements mitigate the body politic?

Striated Wrists

Depending on which executive branch of government is the prosecuting and pursuant body, I am both not disabled and nursing home eligible. To the DOE my cerebral palsy is essentially meaningless, because I went to university, then maintained gainful employment with my condition, and the department, along with Treasury, has the power to garnish and freeze my bank accounts. One day soon I will reach that particular part of Siberia despite my already stringent poverty level. To the state of Pennsylvania, however, in order to receive services, I have to be classified as a nursing home candidate not cogent enough for self determination, and my Jewish bankruptcy lawyer, who left my bankruptcy status only partially complete, given that I would have been better off now had she negotiated with my DOE creditors, explained that as a matter of adjudication, both claims are valid. I am an institutional candidate who needs primary care and functionally able at the same time, unless I legally change my status. Ed Berkowitz parsed this another way, through sucking me back into the world of mental health services and mental illness self-determination, and this is my reward for opening up to my neighbor. I telephoned him about two hours ago. Mr. Berkowitz and myself are friends no more, though he is free to continue reading if he wishes.

Liberalism. I am 51 years old and only as functional as my power chair and grab bars, a bare minimum of medical technology available, while SEPTA does everything it can to reduce my accessible transport options. The Soloist only glances off this red tape, as it is about the tragedy of potential genius broken, but the Project Share model is even worse than the congregation of follies at disability centers.

Advocate for myself? Oh certainly. Challenge my own competency and surrender so the minorities can earn twelve dollars an hour giving me sponge baths. Perhaps you ought to reread some of my more virulent reactions in this context. Ed, I know you were not thinking about anything in particular in promoting Zach Tollen's *tributes,* but I feel hurt, emotionally wounded without cause, and I may have case managed this man. Lose my email Edward, lose it. We are back to hello and goodbye. The next time Suzanne is flat on her back with a seizure I am not driving to get security's assistance.