Critical Second Generation

I sure hope the road don't come to own me.-- Carole King, plaintive

My second generation kindle is showing its naked age at eighteen. The not quite French vanilla top cover is stained, its first hairline crack appearing early. Many years later it took a urine spill from my urinal, and the laminate on the five-way cursor split; it has to be coaxed. The screen is scratched, the battery isn’t taking a charge, the ink beads want to return to Israel for vacation, and yet, somewhat remarkably, I am still able to get it to function.

By necessity, I now depend on the marginally younger Paperwhite, but will miss the device, this particular device, when I can extradite myself to trade it in. I know Amazon has manufactured many kindles, and the $600 I spent for both of mine may seem steep compared to current prices, but I admit to attachment, and treat the outmoded model just as families treat coma patients, loving it more than the newer touch interface versions, since I am, unabashed, a proponent of keyboards. Guilt trails my soul, weeping a dirge at the organ. The Paperwhite has a protective case, O ye miserly dowager, if you are as devout as you claim, the older reader deserved the same consideration. Every actor in the industry has the art of portraying the coma nailed to the wall, in those reconstructed hospital episodes. The knack is in interpretation of the locked in individual. For Benjamin Walker, Teresa Palmer’s down time in The Choice, due to a car accident, represents coming to terms with loss. It permeates the dialogue of the movie skillfully for an otherwise light romance where the canines know everything ahead of their owners. In The Descendants, the comatose wife is a trigger, pain and discovery leading to a lesson in forthrightness. In House, the coma is the butt of a joke, and in the original Coma, the condition was weaponized to reveal medical conspiracy we all fear in physicians, surgeons especially, and in the canceled Hand of God, PJ the whining wimp is Ron Perlman’s moral guilt, divine mystery, or both. Wondering how many takes go into these efforts to illustrate the dilemma of how technology is used to force the living dead on our conscience, early on in this stupid crisis, I nearly choked to death aspirating a steak sandwich, and suppose this terror will be revisited, hardware in its ICU stages.

Vanities

I have not self-published a manuscript to kindle yet. I do not feel quite confident enough to do so, and do not know if I should, nor what I'm even worth, be it as a poet or columnist. I am also not sure how to ask advice of anyone who has self-published through Amazon's distribution model. I've read complaints on the Good Reads site about delayed commissions, but I only ever had a problem with one Amazon seller, long ago, before I understood how the retail giant is an Intranet unto itself, partnering with other businesses. I have always received payments promptly, however.

I have, this after 34 years as creative writer later journalist, one, mind you, one poetry manuscript of strongest work about ready to go, and I will not tell you how much money I've lost on contest fees and contributor copy support, I who cannot afford to enter all that many to begin with, over the years, with this one manuscript always ready to go, but I've now slowly developed a rhythm for electronic submissions, finally found formula, as it were, even if, my sorry slaving for Examiner aside, my most powerful essay on urban poverty I gave away to a woman named Bianca for her Appalachian area journal which I haven't yet added to my CV because yours truly doesn't know what Karina K did with my contributor copy, and I cannot get this Karina K back on the phone, and the one editor who liked my deaf pitch before that, I failed. And this is the stuff who opines for legacy media, with a select hit list for disabled members of the Philadelphia activist community, except for the fact that I've been published in established media, but not lately, since I am Anthony Elonis with a sometimes more insidious, or entertaining menace, not quite so puerile.

No husband to murder, and my scar tissue has throbbed on past my long ago supervisor's departure, c'est pas? I haven't read Elonis's posts. I suppose he reads like ISIS in an inflammatory state, but if he was writing his *puerile* invective against wife in a journal on paper, would we be here? I am as savage as he is on my bad days, teetering precariously toward brutal, and I mean brutal, institutional indigence. Barring a miracle, I know exactly how much control a nursing home will impose on me if I go from section 202 housing into a Medicaid home. I've lived it and earned a living from it. Established journalists even publish about it these days, and we take out the violins. I very seriously do not want my remaining years to linger in such a circumscribed fashion, and I'm back to submitting poems again, after all this time. I am a fool people, to let a resource center which was never very good to begin with, cause me so much damage, not as if the system offers disability entitlement recipients all that many options.

Petite Sentiments

Before I return to my futuristic medical catastrophe of poverty induced stroke, barring poverty induced subcutaneous embolism, a few spare thoughts on the kindle paperwhite, spare, because I wish to cash in with a digital angle, though I never can write as fast as Yoffe, which may be just as well.

I am more comfortable carrying the paperwhite around, as the older kindle keyboard model has taken a beating, though it has stood the test of time, remains functional, and I am not ready to trade it in yet. Still manually easier to subvert the location issue through bookmarks and highlights on the older and technically more spacious device. Touchpad is still frustrating, though divining menu operation did not take me too long. With a little effort, I can read the paperwhite in dim light, and as long as I do not buy a text accidentally, Amazon's special offers, though no friend to the over-educated, do not trouble me, as this giant retail monopoly represents the best and the worst of Friedman's holy grail. Amazon's claims about battery life are so so, but since I am normally near a power outlet, this is not much of an issue. Relaxing into a text itself might be, but this may also be the residual effects of my bloody and asinine bid to becoming a patron of local color, and expending money I shall never recoup, much like the drain from felines dead and alive, and sibling rifts and expenditure, on the conquest, semi-lucid at this point, of Ulysses. (Lance, dear fellow, I take back what I said about "not deciphering," bloody fool spastic is!) Still cannot distinguish the period from the comma, but in terms of modern alienation and agony, figuring out which is which is a minor affair in Sebold's flickering window candle.  Certain classes of least functional cripples may not benefit from all this that is derivative of the cell phone.

One thing I have not done is transfer my periodical content, not yet. Less pressure. I am also entirely ignorant of comparisons to other models, but I am not seduced by the Apple device fetish as the rest of you, so you may deem that mild generational resistance. How much I can still absorb and maintain my dignity? The fact remains, this technology would have made me a better student; for that, a great deal of regret. This may seem like opaque reasoning, but the physical act of researching is a touch harder for wheelchair users, however much larger universities pride themselves on access, library architecture seems welded to the Victorian age, not that this was a conscious issue in youth, but in contemporary terms, it does begin to matter, and academic electronic fair use issues might include disabled access exemptions.

Tech V Earth

"I'm talking about a relationship with a device."
--Cynthia Nixon


If the kindle came equipped with a vibrator and gender identification software I'd marry it; charging it in the face of a hybrid storm is no doubt lame, but this amounts to my preparations for Sandy. Hardest thing is that my plastic nicotine vapor has not arrived and I assume if the winds really hit the postal service will go into cardiac arrest, and this will amount to my most discomforting withdrawal, second hardest will be intermittent power outages, but Philadelphia, asinine backwater that it is, seems to collect sordid child abuse cases and leaves the grand theater of disaster to NYC. Give or take, I can eat until Wednesday; currently mining The Lovely Bones, but I am not sure the story is ripe candidate topically. To cope it uses the magical realism route. An engaging first hour, however, and more than that, to add a quick end note, this adaptation is my idea of a perfect modern drama. Sebold reminds me of Alice Hoffman.

The soft fatalism that resolves this tale may be how Sebold resolved her own trauma. I commend the courage of her survival skills. I know who all my attackers were, and for her never to have received justice, never to have known, illustrates why we cling to fate. It must have taken her quite a leap, but I am not positive that quantum mechanics ensures lex talonis, though on the basis of probability it may allow for it. The film runs again in an hour, and moved me powerfully. My physical stress is taking its toll, and for the next 24 hours, perhaps, I will conserve my strength, and try to talk to my own projects as I talk to you.