Beleaguered Castle Asteroid Shield

The murder of Andrew Petrie, ex-United States senator, changes the lives of his wife, Yvonne, and two brothers, artist Hugh and the mystic Stephen. Here's a brilliant analysis of relationships that miss, of introspection and misunderstanding, and of repercussions.-- a sympathetic reviewer

 It was disconcerting to realize only in mid-sentence that I was disagreeing with Joyce Carol Oates about the alleged non-action of the Parkland security officer when I scrolled search under the literature section. 

I have not researched the facts on the ground, but if he stay out of range, that was wrong.

— Joanne M Marinelli (@Jozannyme) February 24, 2018

The sheer volume of her output is rather daunting, rivaling that of King, even if she is too cerebral and literary to have King’s popular appeal. I know when I’m out-gunned, and wouldn’t have responded to her point at all had I caught myself, but I am not really an aficionado of her novels. A section of The Assassins scored beneath my undergraduate breast. Oates was up there, one of her central characters silenced by a respirator, undermining my expectations, and I am always down here, in the mucus mudpies, getting nigger fucked over every time I try to restore my work and submission routine, waiting on another visitation by a woman who until recently tended my hospice downgrading stepmother. More than Victoria herself, I want to sink to my knees and beg her fiancé, who claims he can convert anything, to restore my files. Even if the alchemy of how we react to the famous is somewhat integral to our own psyches, a star like Woods doesn’t faze me in the digital distance, but Oates does, even if longevity has dimmed her shine. Her celebratory profile of Mike Tyson was too convenient and self-serving, Blonde was a mixed bag, and tapping her for a White Oleander jacket blurb was in questionable taste. First time women novelists coming out of MFA culture have considerable lag time, and nothing White Oleander’s author did felt authentic to me. The main character was like a watered down Lolita with a flat tire. It came, went, movie deal, hackneyed as anything else.

Oates’s impassioned liberalism doesn’t leave much room for air, but I still feel she’s wrong. Cruz was on a rampage and had significant fire power, but security officers are hired to face such risks, and this officer might have done something short of martyrdom to save lives. That is the role for which they get paid. The actual instructors themselves should not have to function as police too. There are enough accreditation hurdles teachers face just to teach; having them armed in class has predictably bad outcomes. It may not be an impending world’s end, but Trumpian brinkmanship has increased my anxiety even as my range eclipses in this unstable meteorological shift of season. I need to stop punishing myself with procrastinating despair and get back to work while I wait to fix and upgrade technology, but I’m near breaking point, not sure how to scale down to adjust. Marie’s family is contemplating an exodus from the city due to taxes. This is radical for this branch of my family. It may be too late for me, the cruelty and paces Presbyterian Homes, constriction and loss of independence, my tonnage caving in my birdlike shoulders, catching up with Oates’s wrinkled visage.

Fidgets

"It's hard to find much of a pulse."-- Drew Taylor

For a high functioning quadriplegic, reliable power chairs are the difference between life and death. Even with two models though, snow storms strain already vulnerable survival skills. Getting to Trader Joe's tomorrow or not with which chair is an issue, and I've been gently starving on tuna and eggs a bit of fish, for over a week. During the blizzard of 96 I cracked a castor on dry ice and went through hell with a black woman who sat at my table and played solitaire and walked me in my manual to my closest Dunkin Donuts franchise so I would stop discussing my failed engagement. I detached myself from any further working relationship with her for no real valid reason, and she moved on to an ancient crone of her own ethnicity. "Do you clean up dog shit?" her soul sister asked her. This was before the renovations, and my studio reeked of fecal tobacco and urine, and in 2014 the pungency may not be the same, but years of Tim the Mule and the failed cleaning service hasn't changed much about lived poverty in a studio with six year old carpet, dander, fur, flaking ceiling, stained drop ceiling over toilet because David, the toffee gang banger casualty, cannot cease and desist from dislodging his toilet from the flush system. Is it this level of powerlessness that breeds spree killers like maggots? We need to stop this, despite Aaron Eckhart's persuasive argument about technologies and trade offs, even if I cannot speak to Taylor's lampooning glee over Mary Shelley's original zombie. Even my rage is now passe, transmuted, it seems, into an argument about modern capitalism and confusion over rights and entitlements.

Guns basically have one design function, and in the best of all possible utopias, the technology which have given us this kill candy isn't going away, but I have to break with conservatives on treating the Second Amendment like any other form of retail. It has to stop, despite the sociological undercurrent of the American reality. Like Islamists, our disenfranchised utilize violence to settle disputes, and even as a form of conversation, a dialogue that uniquely ends in cessation and anti-climatic death tolls. The kill rate isn't really a good evolutionary check on the population, as it is not an efficient predatory cull. Wielding weaponry, through most of human history has been a privilege, not a form of radical equality, one on which the NRA seems to insist.

Anticoagulant

"You can do better sister. I'm married." Richard Conte, giving the Eisenhower era bourgeois a tutorial on the benefits of denial.


When I listen to the American left and its moderate counter voices go at it over a film like Zero Dark Thirty, I throw up my hands, if not in despair, then at least, futility. Kathryn Bigelow glamorizes torture, depicts it as no more than a video game, or she does not. We need new gun control legislation, and while we empower everyone, hey, civil rights is not a suicide pact, and potentially violent people like James Holmes need to be contained, so let's take a page from the affluent psychiatrist paraplegic who eschews his other classification as a wheelchair user and return to the good old days of involuntary commitment, while cynicism is the intellectual reserve of the mediocre, like the spastic_dowager, who has taken many risks to leave her scarred psyche bleeding in her amateur neuro image scan without quite crossing the border toward anarchy, which, even if I did, probably would not be taken seriously, while still cognizant enough to know that eradication has been done many times in the course of civilization outpacing our capacity to cope, and that after we get over this massacre, that genocide, we lose more definition, and so what is the use of being slightly more forgiving of Mussolini for being an inept projection of a virile thug. Isn't she funny, the poor little spaz, getting a little attention from Europe, Asia, in fascination? Mockery? Perhaps as a target of exploitation. You don't even know what horror is you little gnome, so why not be more positive and upbeat while the US is in its superpower status, however much it is diffusing?

We have short memories, whether in geological historical time or merely related to the course of human history, and I do not have to spearhead this, and could be nice, engage in the pleasantry of willful blindness and small kindness, when merited, I just have not dropped those dimes.

I have not seen my sister's eldest girl, Nicole, since the death of her granny. She is in a Catholic college now, and do not know what she makes of my rift with her mother, if anything. Stephanie shields her from me, afraid of what I might say about granny's past, or her own mother and father's, for that matter. The topic of my sister's pregnancy termination is a prime example, one of my searing trump cards; it is not that I want to hurt nieces or nephews, but merely that I must refuse the censorship of manner, politeness, merely due to this notion that kids don't know. Parents kid themselves about what kids do or don't know, and I may be wrong, and Nicole's children will live in a better world of radical equality of the kind that frightened Orwell, Huxley, in their totalitarian era.

If anything survives on this rock after we engineer ourselves into --*, natural evolution might want to give the lucky sentient horseshoe toss to the cuttlefish; yes, I know, that is misanthropic mediocrity crying uncle.

We all have better days.

Hood Intermissions

I suppose this is black urban social norms under the might of the NRA at its finest. One area where liberals still have me is on the interpretation of the Second Amendment, and in point of fact, I do not give a fuck how jurists want to read its bipolar sentence structure. It needs to be rewritten in favor of police and standing armies, notwithstanding the tyranny of executive power, because firepower doesn't resolve that kind of corruption, the hemorrhaging in Syria being a case in point. Philadelphia is no different from Georgia in this instance. African Americans enjoy using cheap violence to resolve disputes. In the disabled community, race is only discussed in terms of analogy, like something from a horse's ass, or the mouth of Cassie James, because the discarded are bound together. Not me. I actually read the black intellectuals that some of the residents I live with do not have the comprehension to interpolate in their daily lives, and I do not buy into the guilt that Al Sharpton has built into his visibility platform, and I can envision the sardonic mindfield a conversation between John McWhorter and myself would yield, not that McWhorter has any reason to acknowledge me, and if I actually wanted him to do so, it would probably be as an outlet for the emotional pain living in a black urban community has caused me. I'd pit my intellect against John's any day, my crippled fists swinging. I have observed, I have seen, and by the blood of Christ I am so disgusted by the way your damn underclass lives that a rewind to the willful blindness that my sister and brother deploy against me would be a blessing, and if you think I am not being fair to the black intelligentsia that makes progressives do cute dog tricks, you are within your justification, but even if I break down to the point that I really do become deranged, I will still suffer at the hands of the institutional caretaker who is on their way to being the same type of brutalist that I am today due to the same exposure and stress. Neither my father's more overt bigotry nor my attitude is responsible for that bleak rust belt society out there, and I do not want to see it anymore. That is why I hate this country. The United States is a lie, and nothing but, a lie of vacant celebrity, a bottleneck elite that strangles all else.