Remonstrate on, Alex Keating

"You will also die lonely and alone instead of being surrounded by children and grandchildren who love you."-- Marc Thiessen, worthy of emulation more frequently than not.

Discombobulated. It isn’t one of those words to be touted in relation to pride over one’s range of vocabulary, but it’s syllable bumbling is sometimes best suited in description when you give up on those technological extensions that raise human to cyborg debates on popular science venues. I traded in my old Kindle Paperwhite some scant days before my 57^th birthday, and thought Amazon, in consideration of the hundreds of dollars I spent on my original models, would simply ship out the upgrade. Why do we have to keep paying, again and again, particularly if we’re part of the entitlement class, which in the States, is bundled into the capital acquisitions pyramid? After sorting out that I had to indeed buy my new model, the tracking software places it as on its way from a major sorting center in Newark. Meanwhile my left hemisphere might be under vivisection. Kindles are vital tools when mobility is compromised, transforms into a research extension for those of us who wanted career to surmount family, to transform career into family, and then wind up with poverty’s sterility on display. The smoothness we see in The Good Wife is still fictive in this regard, the mere cookie cutter adaptations of Michael J. Fox in his cashmere long coat as an emblem of his popularity, likability, yes, these things are important, even if the hygiene self-pity issues are left to his memoir writing upon receipt of his diagnosis. You put it out there in brazen fashion, but not too brazen, the tremors, the noveau riche sensibility not so far removed from how success in Hollywood translates the power of recognition. Writers take a somewhat different track, but we are all gunning for the same thing, break ranks, then get subsumed by process law, process crimes. This is the complaint these days, that the process is more important than the individual. Marie Callender is only a simulation of evocative conceits we harbor about the culinary comforts of southern hospitality.

Their branded pot pies are tolerable, nothing to wax ecstatic over in the convenient eclipse of their mass manufacture. My oeuvre, creatively, or journalistic, may not be important in comparison to those who've accelerated into the classics, but it is important to me, the preservation, even if the aging Beats assembled in Pittsburgh were anti-climatic, mostly rude, drunk, later memorialized by my most obsessed over professor, as he felt bad, it was actually the journey itself which is surprisingly a highlight of my burgeoned adulthood subconsciously more and more in alignment with Alex Keating's valiant attempt to put the bit on then the over reach of 40 something boomers. Five hours on Amtrak over verdant hillsides, Hershey, Jonestown, meeting Louis McKee. As both of us were Philly poets, he and I talked about mundane things working class born and bred discuss, bills, grants, the living dead of loneliness in my head, my cousin has a penchant for these playful images designed to milk out the last drop of a smile.

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.

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.

Kevin McHale, Mime Karaoke

During a nascent episode of glee, Kevin McHale's Artie is swept up by Dianna Agron's cheerleader (most likely) in an aggressive seduction scene in which the nerdy pretend paraplegic is bewildered, entirely ignorant of the convoluted cross ethnic love plot suggestive of a sizzlingly kitsch hip bisexuality that regresses rednecks to awed pornography Neanderthals. Hot girls and hard nipples, that is an art in progress, as opposed to your grandmother's estrogen loss and the suggestive comfort crones can take in fallen paps, with the fearful androgyny of the Furies ever evocative of our founding myths, and our instinctual unease with gender definition and its tensions in relation to origin.

Artie's bewildered naivete is something of a truism in the wheelchair user innocence lexicon, but only in terms of Caucasian parents sheltering their invalids from any sexual identity: If you are paralyzed and need injections to get a hard on, what's the use? His silence in the scene is meant to have a comic, nerdy impact, but what it also illuminates, inadvertently, and I hear fans of the show's early incisive biting wit on Americana dysfunction crying out, "unfair, you are deploying a cheap stratagem!" is the wall of silence that surrounds the sexual abuse and exploitation of those with chronic conditions, a wall that is even thicker in the inner cities, where black women with MCTD are forcibly raped and assaulted into providing oral sex. No SVU doggedly pursued this girl's rapist and abuser when I knew her, too inexperienced as a journalist in those days to get her a cover story and some exposure to alleviate the duress she lived under, though the violence of her partner affected us all. He vandalized the mailbox unit and killed her cat. This is the systemic stress I was exposed to by Presby in the inner city, to then be nearly ceaselessly harassed here in this unit, let alone what this poor woman had to be subjected to in order to survive (and I do not know that she did).

It also adds layers to our current preoccupation with complicity, to pun on my own correspondence (work at it, you'll get it). That Artie is clueless does not spare him, any more than more worldly experience, and mine was above average for disability norms, spares us from future injury, which time and again, cordons off the unfortuate low status primate. glee is not my thing, particularly, musical theater that unites, mocks, and at the same time articulates the conflict of difference, synthesizing everything into our knowledge of Kantian universals, but I have seen enough of it not to spare you from exercising your mind a little away from the willful necessity of self-interest.

Feeling a little overwhelmed, I was nonetheless pleased to figure out what I had been doing wrong with the kindle paperwhite, the curse of vapid technical literacy.