Niles & Daphne

You're not Jewish are you?-- a widow's response to Kelsey Grammer being out of his element at her husband's funeral

I never quite got that joke on Frasier, and I knew I was supposed to, the laugh track creating a brief caesura, even my executive director Richard Baron mentioning it at work the next day, repeating the actresses question with a bemused guffaw the dowager did not have the courage to interrupt for purposes of enlightenment about dropping dead suddenly and the Jewish norms of medical hypochondria being prepared for it, but I did understand the Niles and Daphne exaggerated classism collapse: the psychoanalyst all hot and heavy for a domestic being a better class of warden to Mahoney as the gadfly father slowing down, Leeves interjecting herself at the appropriate moment and then turning back to the sink to finish the dishes, familiarity over. This is representative of the conflict in care-giving, whether or not we humorize it. Some days it is difficult to do that, as when bathroom maintenance fails, or the man cuts at you: little brother's troubled son "not being your business," objecting to your coldness, akin to the way a prospective partner would, but he and I differ on my brother, my public battle with my sister-in-law. I want her to stop behaving like a teenager and rectify my nephew's emotional pain. This is the price of the cannon I loaded at her, and so it shall remain, my regret burrowed in the fact that my sister Stephanie is a good mother, as are other members of my family better parents than what my brother seems capable of. I love Benny, but our relationship, for me, is over. In the 8 months I've been going through this, not one call or text in my direction. Stephanie, my sister, may not set foot in Riverside, but she's been here for me. Truce remains intact. As to the fight with Galahad, I played the bruised lover, emphasis on played. We made up, but my volubility rouses his masculine irritation, irrespective of my coldness. My magic nigger man phase, if the dowager is honest with Joanne, is over, mainly, other than being gratified he'd fuck me, all other things being equal. "Let me fuck you if you want me to stop talking," this I said this morning, a rote effort to return to the moment, for whatever reasons, in my analytical dispensary. He did, after all, remind me of the lover I had hoped I could be for the right man, when it mattered, but I am, as I said, bored, as he vacillates between the caring boy and the man who's frustrated. Live his life or shut the fuck up, in his dedication to this provider and it's scum of the earth criteria, the care workers as equally Medicaid clients. If it wasn't a slow burn killing field without the fanatical star quality of the Khmer Rouge, that would be one thing, but it's killing me, my good news for you, as such, I found my draft of The Driver on my external drive, which doesn't mean I've been almost eliminated. If I had the strength to calibrate my work as I used to, perhaps I'd get past this; not while I'm forced to dump in a disposable out of mutually shared fatigue, exchanging the hug and kiss, his happy ritual. I haven't destroyed his construct, not just yet. It isn't a lie he's pierced my armor, despite that my interior conflicts haven't meshed.

Hassan is Dead

What time was it when I woke Monday? After-noon-ish, focusing my entire energies on one small load of laundry, perfuming my sister's much abused and only worn in the building maternity jumper, made it to the laundry room at 7:30 and had to wait. The elderly black man was using the front load washing machine. Made it back up here by 9:50 to see the movie adaptation of the novel I avoided deliberately when it was the darling impulse purchase of its time. Not all of the movie. Had to piss and was starving, but I got the basic points. Sodomy is the Islamic secret beneath the web of lies we all play, Housseini's tale just another version of The Killing Fields, and my spiritual waste land is as stark as Pol Pot or the Taliban. This is what my autobiographical narrative has done to my soul, and there is no redemption, just an Aaron Eckhart dark comedy without the merit of his bite. A woman with cerebral palsy who let public housing for urban road kill destroy her life.

I never expected to succeed as an author, or a writer, or a poet-- not even when I was Jerry's fuck me adhesive on my grandiose metaphysical quest -- but I expected to succeed, and it never occurred to me to attribute failure to mood disorders. Perhaps it should have occurred to me. Not that I am shocked my stepmother is dying. She has been seriously ill since she and mio padre married. My ambition to be established in a career is slipping through my fingers and I am going to lose my father soon (if Jerry himself is not threatened with the same prospect after our communique in 07) and I can feel my own mortality falling apart, like the corpse of the friend in American Werewolf in London. We all have to die, but I know the mental torture of being bedridden like my fucking moron ex Frank is something I simply cannot endure; my life has been a runaway abject terror of living like that, like this, living like I am, an intelligence buried under squalor contained by nursing aides who are neither medical caretakers nor janitors. Perhaps I cannot rematriculate. Perhaps it is already too late, the pain of genocidal epochs absorbed like a sponge. I've never been happy. Obsessive, yes, desperate, yes, strong, yes. Moments of pleasure, my byline in Philadelphia Inquirer garbled ecstatically to my sister in anti-climatic fashion, whereas Jerry would have understood. It would have called for a drink. None the less, what progressives have done in succeeding to keep me de-institutionalized is more inhumane than my parents abandoning me in Home of the Merciful Savior. I should have died in the knife fight that threatened the occupational therapist who played John Denver records in the playroom, after we were fed dinner. This was also the me decade I knew.