Novena in an Advanced Directive

 

                                            image of feral parrots by James Woods

Before waking at five thirty this morning to feed Saint Gregory and his sister Georgina, (never actually calling to Greggie by his papal nomenclature) I had a waking terror, at the break dawn. This is fairly common since I started my grating downward spiral with JEVS Care-at-Home in 2018; nightmares with the sun, in disposable tissue-stitched elastic I had never been previously forced to wear. These terr0rs usually scatter, and I dissipate, returning to my static misery aging, burrowing my umbrage towards Philadelphia’s color-coded majorities, and it isn’t because of recent criminal events like the Ramadan shooting last Thursday. The disruption that incident represented was an integral part of Philadelphia’s minority identity, the undercurrent that the “brotherly love” actually blankets over, beneath that adoption of that now careworn Nation of Islam rhetoric as well. Somehow this city, molded by Quakers who the British couldn’t subdue or export fast enough to suit the tenuous grasp of its Anglican largesse on the east coast, is just a seedy tale of dereliction, and had those symptoms been made more manifest when I was in intellectual foment in Chester, in its then one idyllic campus hotspot, perhaps I would not have engaged such a destructive journey. My engagements at Rusk Institute during adolescence, in Manhattan, over a twenty-four month period, consecutive intervals during which I returned home for Ridley Junior High down by the lake, prefigured later hard choices which would ultimately unravel my life into this despicable travesty, but in 77? I had some mewing hope that another stint in rehab would undo the brutality of Shriner’s Hospital.

Being an in-patient once again would wind up an extraneous exercise, but it did place Greg Hepburn in my path, and to a teenager, he was solidly defined for a spastic gimp, like a compact Arnold Schwarzenegger, not so tall as the former body builder, but well defined for a rough shod recreation therapist, stringy blonde hair which brushed the shoulder of his form-fitting knit shirts, usually sky blue in color; for casual wear his jeans and tee accented what masculine virility he had.

It might have been a virility I could have tested, had I not scuttled the fact that I was a minor and a temporary in-patient who at least made a pretense out of following the rules, and he was an empowerment hire, it didn’t matter. I was slightly too passive to stroll on my wheelchair rims around my spartan, laminated junior high school bragging “I have a long distance boyfriend in Manhattan,” (even as the reflections of an increasingly confined woman wonders if she had worn this medallion man as an active lie, would it have led to a healthier engagement with my milieu?) but he was a figurine, however much flesh and blood, however prickly our city boy to girl discussions, who became an internalized fantasy of a lonely girl burgeoning into womanhood who couldn’t find her way amid conventional teenage norms.

It might be said, if the jolt from the subconscious wasn’t gone in a flicker, that the dream sequence bore a certain similarity to Tony Soprano’s car ride while he was recovering from his demented uncle’s aggression in hospital, but it was too quickly vanished, my nearness to the Gregory Hepburn of yesteryear on the passenger side of a Chevy Impala, his eyes reflecting red rimmed in the rearview mirror, furtive, possibly absconding, like death on the lam.

Mise en Scene Buona Serata

 

Observing James Gandolfini bring Tony Soprano to life is analogous to becoming the prophet Jeremiah, sacrificing the droll life of whatever a Bedouin does, say, shaving his pubic hair with carving knife, in order to chastise Israel into whatever the rewards an aesthete lifestyle was supposed to bring to the first nation to recognize the divine as other dimensional and without limit. My Roman blood sang the song of going home, the very DNA I fled for Nigger City USA, an impulse of heart for which I’ve never forgiven myself: David Chase kept me sane just a little while longer, while perhaps some of you can imagine how much I regret not being able to stay concurrent with it due to an antiseptic barrenness of my own. That Jimmy faded to black in Italy in parallel circumstances to his title character creates the same dissonance in me that Eugene Robinson felt about Cosby. Can I offer perspectives about the series which established critics cannot? Perhaps in micro fragments, but not this evening, bone weary as granite, as cool and unforgiving as marble to our rubbery fingertips, but I do have to write about it, rerun it for the rest of the miserable ferocity of my life.

Disgraced Under the Torch

"I believe in genocide," Robert Downey Jr, not emulating Michael Gambon

James Gandolfini begins to be noticed in his supporting roles, in one of those mysterious processes of the sudden obituary for a performer one never knew, like the old friend in your back pocket; his support was small but pivotal in She's So Lovely.

How much the man is to be blamed for the muddle of The Last Castle is open to debate, but he hit the requisite notes as the resentful subordinate. In Fallen, (98), he is supposed to be the false feint to Denzel's righteous Hobbes, but Sigel's cinematography makes everyone look diabetic, and one wants to rush to give Goodman insulin rather than fear his conversion. If Hoblit is connotative about race, it is not implicit, and his unwitting template for the now tiresome bro series, The Supernatural, is not to the director's lasting credit.

The film strives for nuance, however, in a more ambitious fashion than the show. Azazel is a stand in for our inhumanity to ourselves. No obstinacy can eliminate it, just as strength of will cannot eliminate vulnerabilities that thick set matrons, their brains made of alligator stool blockage, will prey upon.

My manual wheelchair flip in 2007 was humiliating enough, lying for three, four hours latched onto a belt buckle which threatened my organs. How many days pass, Trudy, a well trained Oprah gibbon, launches her assessment team upon me, always on a day I have something to resolve, shamble-ass Debra Horne bellowing in the hallway "Do you want to hurt yourself?"

A former vocational counselor from Mississippi's civil service, and then they call out the big guns in April of this year, Department of Health and Human Service assessors. Do they inspect the work the rental agent hasn't done? No. Do they care how many of these aides violated my personal dignity? No, they use their ability to walk to intimidate me, rushing my bedside, before I held their utter impotency at bay on second visit at my door. I've had enough. I am not going to forget, and I'll break the law, if necessary, to punish this cruelty. This is your energy for the vengeance fueling hell. I forced my disability center to file a grieve with DHS, nothing happened, but this same department jumps through hoops for minorities scoping my back as a target, making themselves fools in the process. The state may not fall anytime soon, but bureaucratic procedures at this pro forma level are a travesty. I am prosecuted for my debt on one end and my disability on the other. Why not simply restore me to employment and relocate me? No, my failure means my body will be used now in PA for slave labor. 

Brubaker's Valkerie

"My colleagues have a lasting vocation, that is to say, they see in the ecclesiastical calling a long continuance of dining well and having a warm suit." Stendal, p144

I stopped to watch The Last Castle this afternoon, as opposed to remaining steadfast to Georges Simenon recycles. I was never particularly huge over Redford, but he too is an ailing link to my vanishing boomer lexicon, a language where one of the last real boomer superstars knows what its like not to have Paul Newman, and so I made a reluctant choice, not sorry to see the late Gandolfini in action up against the straight arrow icon. 

The story wants to be a real world metaphor, like the late 80's Big Night, Tucci's critically acclaimed love child, but seemingly doesn't make a great deal of sense. I certainly couldn't figure it out as anything more than a pissing contest where your crime doesn't define you until it does? Irwin's piece de resistance appeals to me, of course, and like the damaged Aquilar, Redford as Irwin sacrifices his superlative status as the last American superstar, for an idea about fundamental fairness, or something, I am not entirely sure, the point taken that Colonel Winter, like Aquilar, loses self control in just that moment it takes to violate military code, to prevent Irwin's last act of defiance.

I've been thinking about my personal course of action, as forcing police officers to arrest me, the stress of that would finish me, even if the last thing a cop cares about is making an angry quadriplegic angrier still, and why can't she accept that she needs an attendant? Housekeeping help? I never did not accept it; that isn't the point. I have taken a series of blows from which recovery has been difficult, and this Christian landlord of mine, whatever my slavering hatred, has liabilities, aside from Ms. Richardson's ability to terrorize me, and I'm too angry to stand down, stopping just on the verge of letting her goad me into insulting her last fall. I cannot keep standing down on these matters, and if I have to earn myself a jacket, then the state has another notch in its belt.

Monica Carr was one of my first so called aides, during an early episode without a power chair. Welfare assigned her to me for 12 hours a week. I actually needed the help, and she could not do it, reported me to her police district for harassment. There was no Trudy google-girl then, and Debra Horne was conspicuously absent when another woman named Star, from Homemaker Services, tried to steal my commission as a contract journalist for HTP. Can I trust discussing this with O'Brien? I'll try; then I'm calling the cops, filling a complaint, and appealing to AG Harris, who is supposed to be aggressive.

Italian Anglais

"Will you be civil!" --Nicholas Marinelli, Sr.

Fathers and daughters invariably disappoint each other. As an undergraduate, I had to do some forging on ahead with vocational services when padre could no longer afford the tuition. I doubt yanking vocational services along as I did in the mid-eighties would be possible today as it was then. My education was expensive, as my old age will be even more so. I told myself not to get my hopes up when I heard "looking for a new place," before my aging parent's cell phone went dead, but leaden despondency vanished.

My father hates me. You may say I exaggerate, but he attempted abandonment of all his children, even his dead son, when my mother divorced him; he hates the fact that I am a cripple, hates the fact that I am slovenly via biological inclination; I hate my father, but always loved his elegance, sense of style, his drive for material acumen.

I have been trying to make him proud of me for 50 years, and my grief for my sociopathic ghost of a brother is mainly through his eyes. He loved little Nicky, loved Italy. Gandolfini's sudden death was a story in my head I am writing in irony before it became an obituary, much like Pacino's ...And Justice For All was an episodic soap opera in the foment of his Godfather arc. The former film is not a Francis Ford Coppola masterpiece, but getting past the fact that Justice is a situational argument about jurisprudence, it is actually a very dark rendition about the dirt that goes on in the criminal courts, and how the law grinds people with a civic sense of decency into a pulp, and favors sadists, which John Forsythe's one dimensional demeanor adapts to conveniently, in this instance.

It was some years ago now. Padre may have been 69 or 71, still handsome. I was lowered on the hydraulic Paratransit lift, growling about the driver's incompetence, before my sister and I ruptured into civil war, appearing for my usual compulsory holiday visit, and I was admonished. All whites are racists, but they hide it behind whatever vinaigrette you'd like me to list: veneer, condescension, affluence, ripping off (immersion in) black culture, belief that Barack Obama is a demi-god, or one of my favorites, paternalism toward the Sudanese in relation to the eradication of the guinea worm.