Dear Will Self,
Sometimes I have to resist the impulse to make connections to other writers; it has gotten me into trouble in the past, particularly when I wrote letters, real letters, to ugly male poets, or sick male draft dodgers (American) who hibernated in Montreal until they abandoned their wife and son. I got caught with my proverbial panties around my ankles with that incident. Perhaps it should have taught me a lesson, long before I recognized my former supervisor online, and that she bitch nearly put me in Liam Neeson’s mortuary.
I do not know that I’d consider Dave mentally ill, the draft dodger. The adjective used was the cry of his ex-spouse’s pain when dealing with a seductive manipulator. Her husband out maneuvered me at his own game, which might be just as well. He might have raped me, as I was young and feckle enough for the marriage bed, as many men from my past can attest. I was a heat seeking missile for a five Euro fuck. The abuse had not really erupted full blast into my psyche then. I was young, and sleeping with ambulatory men who had no discernible physical impairment was important to me.
“False Blood” your essay in Granta 117, is typical for the publication, and I cannot really ferret out the keynotes within it that made me want to rush to email to contact you, telling you about my dead addict brother. I resisted. You’re British, married, with children, and actually earn a viable living in our profession. Your blood condition is uncommon and sounds like a typical, if otherwise charming, British eccentricity. Whereas cerebral palsy is run of the mill. Even spastic aggression is run of the mill. I know I am not in motive to seduce you. My libido only rears its head in odd moments, I’m tired of being rejected by men online who won’t be bothered even to meet me to give me a chance, and I remember then what my former lesbian editor did to Cecil, and I wish someone would bust Josie for me, for doing that to my prospects, but it wasn't illegal, and women are known for despoiling out of jealousy.
No, I do not know how to cope with the stress of what the black nursing aides did to me. When added up to what cerebral palsy has cost me in terms of sexual assaults and medical brutality, it might as well be a small miracle that bouts of ideation aren’t worse. I have mentioned the mixed race woman Miss Eddy, who hit on me. She is a sick and ugly person, and told me her father was murdered, which might be her fate if she doesn’t learn how to contain her attacks on the down low. American black vernacular for secret sexual perversions. I do not enjoy wanting horridly ignorant poor people dead, but she may exploit other invalids and since I did not file charges against her I cannot prevent it.
Two others stand out. A voodoo lady from Germantown who Liberty afflicted me with not days into my mother’s death. Straight out of a studio zombie casting, missing teeth and a head turban. She opened my mail illegally, looking for a will, frightening me terribly. In this city you learn, and I could smell it on her, that she would have robbed me at the nearest opportunity of physical incapacitation. I could not even grieve for my mother with this poison hovering over my ass, trying to victimize me. No one helped me; I had to get her out of my studio, keep her out on my own recognizance; in fairness it wasn't in the bankruptcy lawyer’s purview to be of assistance but she is the person to whom my terror was revealed.
The disability center coordinators know full well the type of paraprofessional prototype which lends itself to criminal solicitation, and yet they continue pairing indigent minorities with the most vulnerable among the mobility impaired, essentially creating expendable classes and manufacturing tokenism to call it freedom.
Cassie's elevation creates its own form of tunnel vision which is ultimately a contradiction in terms. Cassie knows it. Josie knows it, and this is why the culture expiated me out. I refuse to accept the paradigm and see it as a low grade genocide metastasized to such a degree on the east coast, west coast, American rust belt, that it is nearly impossible for a body to extricate out of it.
The other was Ingrid Bunton who wore her dead newborn as a decal and slept with one of the security guards who came banging on my door. She impregnated herself on the job and the scandal made me a laughing stock.
I do not have an answer as to why I have singled you out with this type of half way measure, a post on my blog to which you need not reply, but I am reaching out to a stranger who has had his own battles, a stranger who might understand. I intend to put my disability center out of business; their evil has to be reigned in, and no federal mandate is such a vapid excuse for criminal incompetence. It is not within your range to help me, doubtlessly, and you’d probably chastise me for insinuating such an incongruous folly. You have your isles, but your work has struck a chord in me. Sincerely.
Momentary chuckle. Yes, I can answer my own question about why these pond mates are following me. Twitter is primarily a promotional format. I've had little to convey in positive or negative fashion about the European disabled community other than to offer mild praise to the journalist Will Self, who came to my attention through the indomitable Granta Magazine, whose editors are engaged in a conspiracy to turn the clinically depressed into pub sausages, or just horribly slow in updating their next travel issue.
I'd love to write a Granta travel essay. I know the voice right here, underneath the pungent odor of little Vincento's piss. Hard to tell if he has feline dementia as he has always been rebellious with the litter box before I came to bear responsibility for his brother's death, and it is mine, not the veterinarian's. Joey did not like a urinary tract diet and he wore my nerves. I'm guilty. Philadelphia has nullified my spirit, however, so interesting Granta's readers in any rite of passage of mine will take some doing. Warning to @EnhancetheUK: I can be vitriolic, and I have my own little personal black book of assassination targets, if you believe you can tolerate that.
However, I turned on the Toshiba in the opening of a trying week of bloody busy weather, and it cheered me a bit to find you. 8mate is it? Or is that Australian? If I want to convert and vandalize the limousine of Prince Charles and Camilla I'll give you a toot. And oh yes, I intend to get this independent living center dissolved for corruption, hate crimes, and illegal collusion, and I am going to do it, too.
Stay tuned.
"The term deep state originated in Turkey." -- a paraphrase from Sennott's reporting.
Granta Magazine is of singular distinction only due to the fact that I've supported it solely as a subscriber. In the nineties I was intimated by its quality, more like a quarterly collection than a periodical, and the sisters who founded Glimmer Train imitate the Granta brand, but imitate it like a Tiffany lamp knock off. The Glimmer Train sisters have rejected me, though be it rarely, and this is fine. Glimmer Train is not my favorite project. Granta used to be; I am less enamored of its voice, less intimidated, even irked by its contributor narcissism, I've become selective, more easily led to perceive flaws, than I was in the past. I do not kid myself. Certain bylines still matter, and Granta's would, but nothing I have is that piece. I am not going to write about my mother's death in that sonorous Granta fashion. Pushing the envelope in a manuscript about wiping out Philadelphia's disability activists? Maybe, but this is speculative, dependent upon my control, brimming with the ironic undercurrent particular to Granta's voice, and selecting the right word that leads to the singular and pleasing sense of pretense. I cannot lose it to raw aggression, in other words.
Let's indulge in speculation and say I get in by next year. I had to move past the half century mark to realize even a Granta byline changes nil, paid or otherwise, at this point. If I was still in my thirties it might have landed me a position under which I could manage my debt, but not now. The only time this public housing shanty guarantees me relative undisturbed peace to work is between two and six am. The internet is of course somewhat to blame for my fall in productivity, but before I opened a blog account, that drop in productivity is mainly due to nearly continuous conflict with Presby. Sure, it is amusing, but not when you have no other options, and managers, whether white and shrill, or black and liars through their teeth, have the power to limit the circumference of your daily routine to a 24 hour care facility. I can no longer rely on family to take me in. I transferred to Riverside against my will in 1994, and faced continuous harassment by the other tenants until I threatened the current manager, Trudy Richardson, with legal action. It is Trudy, and her "former OVR employee" Debra Horne, who took what traumatized me in the inner city, and made me nearly irreversibly biased against urban African American culture, and I know if I cannot get away from section 202 housing, then I really will sicken, lose to aggression, vitriol mitigated by chemical saturation and its side effects. I can get on another transfer list, sure, back to bad neighborhoods, weakened further still by waiting who knows how many years, and I can't take this anymore, except I have to take it, unless by a miracle I can hire myself away full time and sustain it.
4:30 this morning saw me take two plus hours to make a submission to the same old literary journal circuit, just to keep myself active, and this is a sink back to the excruciating poverty of my twenties. If I sink back into this fox hole, the quick sand of indigence before my social services career, then it is essentially over. It doesn't bear repeating who and what I have to thank for that, but at my age, the emerging exposure contributor's copy catch all might as well be the joke of a real world Truman Show character defeated by post production realism.
