Ironside Enumerations

Again he thought how processional Venice was, -- Barry Unsworth, Stone Virgin, p 50

I cling to Stone Virgin, a Booker Prize text, as if it was on its way to becoming sepulchral, if not scriptural; what Unsworth achieves in his work, something I could never do, no mattter how much I researched, or fight to travel, is to transition the character type of Henry James, into modern fin de siecle figures. He collapses figurines into modernism without resorting  to linguistic tricks. David Mitchell may have made me weep, with the fatal imprint of Cloud Atlas, but Unsworth gave me a religious revival, and may have had an indirect impact on what I was attempting to achieve in Dimmer Beacons, and failed, despite that the essay is in its third printing, and as with every risk of revision, a rewriting of the text for my too slowly compiled non-fiction collection may lead to something lesser, if I really get ugly about Linda, and whatever kudos to the culture of victimhood, Linda was my fault. I talk. I talk to total strangers about the haggard bitch of articles. I call Tony Stiles my little brother to feel better, and I'm killing myself into a principled libertarian death spiral so that nigger nannies can make their car payments, fraying my rage between homicidal transcendence and suicidal anchor stones to keep my corpse floating beneath the riverbed, after a week of extraordinary duress on bouillon cubes and basil, the last of my kind, in actuality. Many writers up through World War 2 went insane, or needed torpor, and died, like James l Herlihy, and I am my old self until I return to Presbyterian Homes, which I am going to leave, despite the week of bouillon cubes. All very well, but I cannot dismantle a sports chair like Bruno Debrandt more successfully rendering a modern, paraplegic cop in the WYBE feed, Cain. Cain succeeds where Underwood failed because it doesn't utilize black guilt. I know Debrandt from more than the convoluted Spiral, a series only viewed sporadically, but cannot place his role which imprinted him, and I was going to inveigh that his functionality was outside of my worldview, but that isn't true. I lived date rapes and fucks and spasmodic heavy petting.

Part of this is panic over my dad. He is old and I want to go to him, to stop being a guilty financial transaction, to forgive him for doing to me then what Trudy Richardson does to me now, and I hate this woman so much it frightens me. I hate Trudy Richardson more than I hate Linda Dezenski, because this is what I wanted from Linda, to spare me the Presbyterian Moby Dick avarice. What the Presbyterian Homes model represents is human dystopia at its worst, and we need to stop it, just as we need to stop our obscenities with exotic game like Harambe. Only we cannot stop what we're doing, can we?

Key West, in Penury

"I'm not touching it." Jerry McGuire's motto against my varied efforts to penetrate and burrow.


Wherever this post is going, I am writing it 2/3's brain dead, but for the pedestrian in you, I enjoyed myself in group last evening, and if I was 28 years younger, would have lept off my chair, kissed Lance, kissed the archive librarian who I troubled with my arcane preoccupations, and the old man from from the Saturday half who said hello to me kindly, and the Camden group mate, though I would have left out the blonde. Call it the bitch radar. And there! This is what you say, was that so hard? Grasp these small pleasures. What is vengeance and a Valentine's Day massacre in comparison? It is vile, poor spastic, what you force yourself to carry, and your curiosity about Herlihy's demise is a case in point.

Allow me to qualify that all I am after is facts in evidence. In 93 I was in fact thirty and had no idea who Herlihy was, barely knew that Midnight Cowboy was Voight's signature vehicle, and I am cognizant that no one truly understands what motivates life taking, whether they involve Capone's pecuniary interests, or an aging homosexual who could not recapture the vitality of the Keys, and that even under the guise of Wallace's selfishness, and my anger over it, cognizant that his suffering was a piss in the wind, and he had everything I feel that I secretly deserved (and what is that adverb dear, secretly, when you bray loud and clear?), that these things are mysterious, and the intrepid academic has been there and back, enough already, all you have is indignation. True, but I am stubborn, and plow on with my own dialogical efforts. In David's case, the pedestrian can only point to the medical model, and that his clinical depression went off the rails, and yours has not, stronger in failure. In Herlihy's case I think there is more damning evidence, and that is what I seek.

Regardless of my militant stance, I pity the BSA, and while not sure I have fully digested Lillian's analysis, she is right that dodging is not a solution. Democracy may not be easy, to quote Obama, but when faced with the possibility that now something as pedestrian as your local scout troop will be hit with a gay rage scandal, this basically leaves innocence with no safe havens. Intolerable to idealism and honor that goes with it.

Midnight Cowboy

"Our neighbor's head landed in our house." --a young Syrian refugee


If there is the slimmest possibility that I can manage the relocation necessary for any author who truly takes risks, that I can stave off degeneration long enough to accomplish something and redeem my self-respect, I'd like to end this last score of my life as an investigative journalist. I like asking hard questions, and making everyone uncomfortable, not that this would be easy for a spastic quad on her last legs, but I know my own self-worth. I am smarter and sharper than Josie Byzek, the Jesus dyke who knows whats best except for when it comes to violating my trust, and I am a better writer than Daniel. In truth, I feel some pity for Schneider's wasted potential, and I hit on it yesterday. He does not apply himself to focusing on what he knows how to do in his on voice, and devolves in semi-automatic recriminations that interest no one. My persona and his are not so dissimilar, but I have an agenda. Does he, other than culling stray pups to be his online personal groupie base? If you are one of his sympathizers and think you have some insight, I will approve your comment and let it stand, and I don't bruise easily. If you want to let me have it, you may.

Michael Snyder is more informative on Herlihy than either Dan or I are on any topic, but does not answer the central question. If James and Tennessee were so complete in themselves, why did Herlihy kill himself in 1993? He was aging, certainly, but was he sick, tired of being a one note wonder compared to Steinbeck? Lee's stills are priceless and come as a bit of a shock, as both the playwright and novelist look like wax contortions in pain, not only from a different era, but otherworldly, except that their lifestyle, their coded literary subversions, are as familiar to me as the piss in Erika's urine bag. I am interested in an answer, because I am working, torturing, if you like, an essay on writers suicides, and need more facts on the more notorious, and Herlihy made my list.

I empathize with Voight's Joe in the film, and if I can manage, intend to watch it early Friday morning, again. When I will start the digital etext, only Josie's *baby boy* in the manger may know, but I do agree with other viewer comments that the jump cuts in the film suggesting that Buck was gang raped take the edginess out of Herlihy's seminal accomplishment, because it obscures the narrative arc. If Joe and Ratso trend gay, Schlesinger seems comfortable leaving new wave homoeroticism swinging on its own rope, murky in terms of Buck's future maturity and wisdom.

I want progressives, or left center moderates, to understand something: I treated the Philadelphia community I knew with all the tolerance I had, that started to come to an end in 2006, after Miss Eddy, the mixed race inner city woman, threw all her sexual needs into hitting on me, when she was my agency aide. My anger does not stem from an auto-erotic response. I am physically impaired, and I am tired of being used for target practice by men, women, lesbians, and other sociopathic reflectors, whatever the ethnicity, and I did a disservice to my own esteem in breaking bread with Josie and Ginny, even if that social setting was their gesture of remorse. An atypical opponent, I am not quite an over-simplified redneck. The gay scene is not healthy for heterosexual confidence, not in terms of emotional intimacy, confiding friendships. I am going to dismantle your comfort zone, gay equality be damned.