Blue Patches With Rubber Tips, Bearing the Crutch

"It doesn't have to be a death sentence," --Megan Crowley

It is difficult to adjudicate A Patch of Blue against contemporary standards without viewing it as a public service announcement to maintain silence in the face of differences between ethnic groups not altogether superficial. I must have seen the film a half dozen times, find the echo of my own reactionary fear in Shelley Winters and her recriminating castigation, calling Poitier your black buck, play acting the white trash of which I am a little embodied, or Poitier’s containment of the blind girl’s unintentional disruption, when she nearly topples the fruit pyramid in the supermarket, and yet the movie filters through me like a light urine stream right before a major stool struggle, the arc of the narrative dissipates, leaving behind the poignancy of a connection between a disabled woman and a black man essentially teaching her how to adapt, never actualized, because Poitier’s character realizes the girl’s feelings are based in part on a sheltered dependency. In North Philadelphia, there was, in fact, a blind woman beaten daily and traumatically by a black husband. The dowager was the unfortunate observer of her caramelized face browbeat by crisis counselors and patrol officers, and she disappeared before I relocated to Race Street, a most likely death sentence to an inevitable probable cause, lest you continue to marvel about the scars of the lioness breathing more shallowly beneath my ribs, and so we come full circle, back to my initial rebellion, planting myself in the inner city solely on the basis of a lust to live. To my sensibilities of enduring interior conflict, Shane, (ahem) the paraprofessional tending my shriveled wings, is sexually attractive, and makes me realize what happiness I might have had with such strength as his, and it is rather unfair to discover this, tottering on the brink of  a final weakness towards helplessness I cannot defeat, that the right degree of masculinity ignites my passion, the very will to live, after years of absorbing everything of the emotional pain I’ve written about to my audience. Part of me says to hell with the stigma, and wants to win him despite what I am, despite what he sees every day, and consume him. But I am playing tic tac toe with an aging woman’s embers. He is not the true target, simply a man I like using his strong shoulders as a bulwark for a spastic quadriplegic who was never loved as she wished, with her reactionary anarchist already looking down her nose at having fun with such tensions. It would never work between us, and I know it already because it isn’t a last act of love, merely defiance, fooling yourself the hormones still work in secret. We could not succeed as a couple, as equals in the dynamic of society’s fabric, in any sense. I cannot embrace his world, having sustained such damage in it, any more than he could embrace mine—the world from which I fled, deluding myself in relation to liberal sanctity. Yet I do like him, his energetic man child smile, clinging to him more than a little, like Amy Adams defying narrative frameworks with mystical orthography that eddies linear time. Like the actress, I too ply her thematic imperative, of calling out, “Come back to me,” the life I see as so fulfilling, married to a kindred heart. What sort of love letter is this? One that knows Miss Crowley is in need of a market correction.

The Schema: It's not about me.

Mr. Deasy chases after him to deliver a final vulgar sally against the Jews. Ireland has a clean sheet in the matter of persecuting them because, wisely, 'she never let them in.' The New Bloomsday Book, p 10, kindle paperwhite.

The curse of naivete and sensory loss, a jingle of smirks, jibes, I had no idea Leopold was a Europeanized Semitic until Blamires cued me in, and I should have caught this earlier, even if I have difficulty hearing the summaries and questions of young Lance. My neighbor in the 14 above, David, is running his garbage disposal; the odor from his apartment during the renovations that started in 2007 freaked everyone out, everyone. I do not like him, but never complained, because I understood he was trying to do as much as he could for himself, and not attempting to victimize the octogenarian Nego league, but his apartment was so bad that Trudy's pressure may have borne fruit had he not complied, and he is a bad power chair driver, breaking his plumbing line and caving in my ceiling beneath his commode, a product and casualty of the inner city, he begs for change every so often, and this is another aspect of disability culture dirty laundry. In the interplay of progressive dialogue, a historian out of Harvard in the guise of Dr. Gordon-Reed has more to say to me than my neighbor above, solely a product of his environment, and a disruption therein. Do I have a right to judge David against the brutality of my own urban failure? Maybe not, but I should not have to have his lifestyle imposed upon my own standards of conduct.
 
For being drunk this morning, I did pretty well getting in, wailing to the guard I was a monster--"I am on the phone!" I managed, by three in the morning, to feed the children, undress, curse my father's voicemail, post here, rinse out my pants, and then, get into bed even with the shakes, soldier on with Ulysses because I was sick to my stomach, and then finally listened to kimmy's teeth, and got up, living on tea and mint, I may not be dead yet, but I know I am finished, and will never get to live in a spacious art studio, with a patron mindful of my demands and my autonomy both. The living death of Presby will ultimately be victorious, even if I fight like a wildcat, and sue Philadelphia Corporation for the Aging.

Did I really believe I was going to incite rebellion in a bar where I rolled in like the ghost of Bukowski? Still, thanks to Drinker's West. You are an accommodating establishment, and if I was a non competitive incongruity, the able and better made up women were nice, and I was happily multicultural and was cool. Why? Because I was able to make my own choices. Your establishment will be relieved to know I shall not become a regular fly on the tap, cannot afford it, but every now and then, since you have enough space, I'll make an occasional invasion. Rachel, little J-man believer sweetie, sorry if I stuck my foot in it, but I was in serious buzz land by the ball drop. I only saw one older man even remotely sexually exciting, and wonder if this is an evolutionary downgrade strategy, but I had a nice night, thank you.

The historian Annette Gordon Reed , who I mention above in terms of her comparative cast, her appearance on the newshour, is something I'd like to get to when my analytical penetration resumes online functioning. My title is a paraphrase of Gretchen's last rebuff. I was wrong not to accept my slaying by the Speakeasy community, as I have admitted, but by the same token, I cared about my 2002 regulars, and these loss of sustained connections do matter as we age, discarded.

Permeable Gray

"Permeable Gray" was the title of an essay I had started when I was twenty-four, but never completed, during my first year in Diamond Park,  during my first experiences with the assault of the barren, like drywall and plaster, on my aesthetic sense. Every urban skyline in America probably looks like the urban skyline of Philadelphia, unpleasantly garish, thus my title, which more readily found its thematic intent in my dead cat, and so became the essay I wanted under another title.

I believe I tossed the original hard copy, or will, if any pages are left in my folder bin, but today it looks like the callow transitional day I had in mind, a garish permeable gray that deters me from driving outside, and yet is also a signature of my defeat, my failure to succeed against the merciless indictment of American poverty. Like Studs Lonigan, which I indifferently purchased last evening, as if I need to keep replaying An American Tragedy in a thousand variations, I am apparently in need of hardier mettle, though it could be argued that I've read enough of Dreiser and company to not need anymore educating on reality by the American left.. Books have to be everything for me now, absorbing all the passions of failed lovers, absorbing my inability to travel safely as affluence might allow, and return to my origins; this is to what my life has to cling, the damn text, the narrative, the homosexuality and hetero-romance that subverts itself within it, that is repulsive to observe as I have observed it, and contradicted myself within its planks rather than found reconciliation, and I mean this as a progressive matter, not that I am tormented about a personal homoerotic experience that Linda once gave me and made me feel threatened. I can look back on my conversation with her and objectify it: she was being literal, knocking down my longing by giving me a picture of how fantastic it was for her to fuck her then spouse Bruce, but it was still insensitive. She knew nothing about my personal life and made assumptions which were inaccurate.

My desire to get laid just cracked open, out of nowhere, evidently, except for seeing Linus Roache as Merton Densher. And I have no male on me to seize the moment. I may not be the only one in deprivation and sensual starvation, but I do not know how we accommodate it and come out with a happy ending when war wounds come into play.

For those of us who know The Wings of the Dove Densher's name is ironic, a prelude to his retirement from the world, because his guilt is weighed upon the innocence he trampled. Maybe I will finally publish something in The Henry James Review to please the dead ghost of my memory of Michael C. Clark. I scribbled out an idea on the James list, an idea derived from my imperfectly tortured account here, and I have a year to send the editor Susan an acceptable abstract. I have not written a damn abstract in years, but let's engage in hypotheticals:

I put my wounded intellect to the grind, complete my task, and let us stipulate, for the sake of argument, that it passes Susan's peer review, and is published. What happens then, the pearly gates open and I can get the fuck out of Presby?  There is no joy juice that in turn can reconcile how much time and strength I've lost, that can offer me achievement, the foundation of any happiness.