Imminent Belgium

"Would you mind shining your light on someone else today?" Mark Johnson, a liberal writer I managed to infuriate with no one else's help

I went to bed early this morning and couldn't sleep for the agony in my jaw, not so simple now to find a dental hospital that could treat me; it is not simply a question of draining Pennsylvania's Medicaid allocation. I know what it is like sitting in that dental chair for hours on end being tortured with root canal. I now have gum disease, and I'm suffering from indoor allergens and other small secrets relative to quadriplegia, and believe I'm functionally dying, like my Aunt Marie, dragging herself along with less adaptive ability, as time goes by. 

Morally, I don't know what to do. Kill myself now, wait for the bloody stroke, or tell the nigger bitches in the office that they've won, and consign my fate to Inglis House after a life with so little joy to it. Sex was never much, not like it was for Linda and her telescopic exuberance. And I did not want to fuck her, despite my stupidly unwise outburst from which it took me so long to recover. What made me angry was my dialectical rivalry with the spastic bitch. She could have great sex between her two husbands, while my clitoris hangs out like stewing meat for an Italian casserole, with absolutely no memories of that good fuck, except for anal games with my discarded and no less turbulently deceased spic ex of a pig. I do not enjoy anal penetration, don't want to suck tit, and there it lies. My only memories are rift with friction of never fitting with the right man, a good man, or lesbians in a variety pack coming at me not because I was signaling them, but because they thought my emotional vulnerability made me a good butch. And they were lucky that I was too impaired to kill them. That is what would have happened had it gone beyond hitting on me in the wrong situation, or in environments out of my element, and now it's too late. Stresses beyond my control are killing me, enfeebling me beyond being a good advocate for righteousness, or to climb onboard Toomey's train, or even writing one decent scholarly work. Where am I going to get the energy?

I'm barely eating two meals a day, struggling not to be haunted by Frank's infantile gluttony. I don't want to be haunted by it, my remorse, contempt, and the fact I hated him but took pleasure in being a couple, but what else is there, except the olive tinge to his face? I knew my mother was dying, and so did my sister, but I suspect neither of us ever resolved losing our mother. It has been 11 years, and we can mark the same parallel with Frank. I knew he didn't have long, and wonder if he died to spite me. I can't know, especially as I interjected to stay in his life, as opposed to reconciling anything

When the time came, I thought, in the throes of death, I'd scream for Jerry, somewhat parenthetically, or go back further, to Raymond, whose emotional armor I was able to pierce, sibilant, manipulative teenager that I was, but no. There is a place where Joanne and all her longing is simply unraveling, coming apart, without bonds to hold her to the ground, constant tension from my jaw, my temple, strange declensions in my left shin, sturdy enough to linger on in torpor, to lose my time and place. Then I get mad, but it may not be enough, and my Roman father who despised my survival in the world, he may outlive me. The one twist in the endless stream of police procedurals from the European left: in "A Death in Flanders" the actor playing the retired inspector keels over dead on the train, staring at the woman passenger across from him as intently as the French predator he collared, an effective send up. But we're not all that lucky, with our broken, battered hearts. Those of us without looks, figures, or enough shallow ruthlessness.

Josie Byzek, LBGT, Disability Activism

Progressives need to realize they are front and center in this kind of backlash. I have been turning over my hostility to gay lifestyles for many years now, since I have stated that, in the past, I was intellectually with the left. What changed is that I've had far too much exposure to lesbian duplicity on the one hand, both of the secular Jewish and Gnostic Christian genotypes, represented by woman like Fern Markowitz, and Josie Byzek, and my personal sense that homosexual males are more unstable, and I take this view despite the removal of homosexuality from the DSM as a disorder. Am I indicating that same sex orientation cannot be as pedestrian as an HIV positive Briton like Andrew Sullivan, with his gnostic Catholic my sodomy is blessed sentiments would like it to be? No, but Andy himself is a contradiction in terms.

That charge might as equally by aimed at me, an atheist who thinks that American Christianity is about as equi-distant from its Bedouin roots as pagan river deities are to the Hoover Dam. It is complicated, and I cannot disentangle it all in one post, but I am convinced things will get uglier before we develop a new social paradigm my dried bleach bones would not recognize. Ironically, however, it was my nearly lethal email exchanges with Linda that destroyed my tolerance, because I let her twist me inside out to such a degree that imagining I could ever be anyone like Fern virtually annihilated any self-esteem I had left, in the time frame that these events occurred.

I am not quite stupid enough to let myself off easily with moral prognostications of the sort that Yahoo details, but I also will not condemn revulsion. It is a legitimate response, and I will build up my argument over time.

Josie did not, and does not now, occupy the same space in terms of what was once my regard and respect, admiration, for a woman like my former supervisor. The wounds that each inflicted on me carry nearly the same weight. I cannot write about my relation to Linda, not yet, because it triggers me like Amy Irving in De Palma's early and interesting, if overwrought, supernatural thriller, but as of the winter 2013, I can put my money where my mouth is in terms of Ms. Byzek. She is a managing editor and I am a freelancer who needs a contract, if not the (relative?) security her publication offers, but I am a powerful writer, and just how powerful, she is one day going to find out, with my metaphorical fist aimed right between the eyes. It will not undo what she did, but people like me know how to put full force and credit into the desire for retribution.