Voyage of the Damned

"I'm going to kill that bitch!"-- Joanne Woodward, conventionalized fury

My efforts to work offline are thwarted, not because of turning in to a social media junkie, but because Karina so innocently obliterated my hard copy existence as a writer because I did not rush out of the bathroom naked to throttle the disconcerted dumbass, compounded by the fact that Presby has compounded my social fears to the ninth power, my revision files of all my mania driven poetry are basically gone, and many drafts were worth saving.

I'm starving, sick, back in indigence, and my life has been eradicated. I wanted to rewrite a complicated suburban piece, a poem about my mother's dyke friend, would be lover, and once, my second mom. I was attached to Kathy. I call her Kmac in here as much to shield my psyche from the depth of my intimacy with homosexuals, both unrealized and known alike (I knew Erik was gay when I hung out with him and Jimmi, but his vagina was news to me and when s/him told me, it was a rare instance when I nearly threw up in his face). As ridiculous as it is, I feel betrayed by Kathy Mac, feel that my childhood sanctity was destroyed by her sexual deceptions, and the few times my sister had her over after my mother's death, I made nice about bridging the gap, but knew the gap would remain, a permanent geological chasm. I cannot prove, but believe she had covert terminations, and most of my data has vanished, because I am browbeat by thick set domestics and snake-tongued prevaricating bulls with tits, my favorite fecal pair, Trudy and Debra. 

I am not the only writer and minimal author (barely one, I guess) to lose so much, but I'm not 35 anymore, and my sense of being threatened and continually overwhelmed is a non-stop conveyor belt. I used to love doing what I do, and Presbyterian Homes has been successful at one thing: leaving me in continual fear of my life. I had to leave Diamond Park, but Riverside had made me pay a high price for its eroding stability-- more inner city residents live here now than 20 years ago-- and another move is on we go, round and round.

Melodious Timbre

And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.--Robert Frost, in his well taught "Mending Wall"


Part of the reason I have not risked Google's ire just yet is that I do not have enough time to truly test American corporate intolerance for free speech, conjoined to the fact that I do care about what I am attempting, and why this web log project matters to me as a legacy. Now, of course, there are limits, and that I am furiously angry at the juxtaposition between independent living ideology and its institutional cruelty, this does not give me the right to behave like Al Capone with sagging breasts, and I am educated enough to know better. Inheriting my father's temper is one thing, and deploying my intelligence to circumvent my loss of strength, and to strike back, that is another, but there is more to it than that.  The larger question is, if I piss everyone off, have I achieved anything? It is an important question, because when I start digging, I am really going to burrow, and I have to weigh those risks; at my best, and perhaps worst, I spare nothing, and that is inclusive of Jimmy Carter's scarred bid for political sainthood. He and Woodward mellowed to maturity in that Georgia climate, and both the peanut farmer and the sympathetic Hollywood widow make me wonder why Lincoln did not allow Sherman to really punish the South, literally bury it beneath the furrows of its plantation caste hierarchy. That damn agrarian pathology, dragging on and on so that we can be sure the death of America's psychic historical scar tissue will outlast the viability of our nation state. The melodrama of her drawling and slightly phlegmatic voice is a superfluous excess, but in Summer Wishes, it fits the feminine state of menopause and regret.

The homosexuality of the son is nothing more than a plot device to ensure the psychological duress of Rita and Harry, but the film is so effective because of the honesty of the characters beneath the stylized mechanisms of its location scenery. What we have here is a husband and wife struggling to come to terms with abandonment (spastic is not alone) and the fact that their progeny have evolved into their own people, with the gay son Bobby exiling himself from pedestrian repression for the sake of his own survival and sanity, and that character, Bobby, transposed from 73 to  contemporary barriers being forcibly smashed, might think Andrew Sullivan is destroying the freedom of alternative choices. He is more sketched into the film to provide Woodward with her conflict, so it is difficult to know for sure, but the dialogue between Woodward and Balsam, for its era, is deft, honest, and lacking in pretension, a generation that still had fascism on its back, and wasn't sure of the right answer, but knew that affluence wasn't the sum totality of its need.

Woodward, Widowhood

"I believe I had an accident; I think I wet myself a little. Isn't that awful?"-- Joanne Woodward to Martin Balsam, 1973


After supreme efforts like this, efforts that knock the wind out of me because I assumed facts not in evidence-- that this campaign could accommodate me by making the work part time, for instance, but opps, no, sorry, fidelity to Barack Obama as an occult demigod is not to be impinged upon by the punishing reality of lifelong abuse, a huge dose of bigotry swallowed daily in my own right, and a degrading lifelong struggle against poverty, yes, I grow angrier still, and wish I had the time and the ability to take young women like the zealous Catherine and her equally zealous Cairo counterpart and give them a reality check, not that I'll be granted the opportunity, but, whoever it is that needs to know, and whatever game theory I am deploying, know this: my opposition to equality on the basis of homosexual orientation is genuine, and if liberals need to think I am asserting this because of the abuse I received at the hands of the disabled community in PA, and that I am in denial of my own homoerotic sadomasochistic impulses, if that suits your fancy, and places me in a comfortable categorization for dismissal, nothing I post will change your mind in that regard, and I am, in the rhetorical sense, being drowned in our cultural *sea change,* in attitude, not so lacking in observation as you might suppose, but I will not, and indeed cannot, allow conservative Britons like Andrew to don themselves in pedestrian gnostic normalcy without putting up a fight, and Andy is not so pedestrian that he did not test HIV positive in 93, before my scar tissue had formed, before I knew what he was, and that is yet another dose of pretension on the American landscape. I am ailing, and no doubt soon to be dead, and Google will have to make its own decisions about my voice, as it wishes, but you have been warned. I am a clever woman, not typical in how I handle my honesty or exposures about bias, and I am declaring civil war without the benefit of biblical injunction.

Which makes Woodward's late century sociological pastiche a suitable and dated point of entry, Newman's less celebrated second half. I am straining to remember what Paul said about the differences between him and Joanne when they became their parts, on his big appearance on the actors studio series, and I cannot quite recall. He worked from inward to out, whereas she had an outward starting point. It does not make me respect her talent any more or less, and in the work of her prime years, she annoys me most of the time, not always, though I believe I see, a little, what made them more the sum of their parts for each other. Last I saw of her was those public service spots for recycling, before Paul died, and yet despite the contemporary mockery that Summer Wishes is prone to illicit, I like her in the role of Rita, and the struggle she and Balsam engage to negotiate their relationship in its seasoned reality. I am, however, understandably, battle fatigued, and fighting the fear of real, and actual, total failure, and can no more turn to the disabled community on the basis of my abused trust, than I can hope for progressive willingness to open your eyes, or that a rational conservative can see me, rescue me from the injustice of this paradigm, and allow me to breathe-- when my strength rebuilds, therefore.