Acquired Deficiency

"After it happened people stopped calling me the golden boy." -- Jude Law

The reason this Savage Garden song strikes a visceral chord, becoming such an end of the century hit, is actually due to the diving baritone of the lead vocal into the refrain, and I weep along with it for the passions and anticipations of unity never to be. Law's argument, as a sugared honey on whom women like to dote, is to put yourself out there, as per Jennifer Tilly's Nina, and perhaps I never made enough of an ass of myself, however many online follies abound. I used to ask ambulatory men out point blank in my just off North Philly campus days, and would not dream of it now, with the obvious poverty of my distressed lower jaw.

Jay Rosen's tweet about Andy's closure, however languishing, of his Daily Dish caught me by surprise. I remember my email to Sullivan about David Foster Wallace, and by that time did not expect a response, but my first email to acclimatized Briton was impassioned, and he sent me a screen shot of the Amtrak building I look at every day, drawing me in to his "view from your window" theme. Then I chucked civility to the wind, and it's too late now, as I gaze back over the hills and vales.

What I haven't seen said, which doesn't mean it hasn't been intimated, is Sullivan is battling a life consuming disease, that his blog has bounced from one media outlet to another, that very few pay money for blogs unless the blogs have a unique signature, and even before I washed my hands of homosexual equality, I saw no reason why I should pay to read Andy's analyses, despite the fact that he works harder for access in his posts than I do, and my reasons for this are economics. I'd source DIA if I had subscribers, but lacking those, I save my armor for articles I might sell, on spec or not.

Still, he is established, referenced by other established opinion writers, and if he is on the shoals, my fatigue and dramatic commode evacuations should portend dire warnings, yet I do not give it up, whatever that is, writing less and less offline, not out of blockage as much as stamina, chasing cat vomit and other forms of waste, I begin to fear my silence as much as the poet columnist Laurel Speer, sharing hers with me in raw draft. More than likely, I will not wrest myself out of poverty before my COPD puts me on oxygen, crossing my fingers that I can rely on a somewhat feckless woman like Karina. She is basically a sweet girl, 35 and in an arrested development, while I whittle away on aggression which my talent constrains. I can't really look on her relative youth as a source of hope for a declining dignity.

Part of the offense I cause, which liberals would ridicule if I had any legitimacy, is a personalized animosity toward homosexuals, since the majority I've known have been evasive and duplicitous, and Andy, arguably, has some of this in his interview responses-- yet there was a time, when David Brooks turned me onto this mercurial gay English Catholic, that I respected Andrew Sullivan, saw my viewpoints in tandem, if not my ruptured faith. He has burnt out from a relatively privileged platform. I've burnt out sinking in quicksand, too maniacal for an alternate route toward port.

Tucson Conversations

Great curiosity and a greater memory were necessary, Tertullian, De testimonio animae

The sometimes self published poet Laurel Speer was one of the last independents I had a traditional correspondence with, and it was Laurel's essays to me that Karina, eating her own zeitgeist, tossed in the trash, which ignited my blazing saddles warfare with-- as much as I want to use invective, it is a judgment how often one can rail with "muthafucker niggers" all the time before people stop reading-- but suffice it to say, like one of John Gardner's murdered anarchists, I look at black culture with a jaundiced eye, even with the security guard calling me at 11 during the election returns because a tenant heard a noise-- the disabled with ability to matriculate should stay out of public housing, whatever else-- Laurel's daughter is disabled, so unlike the suburbanites on P&W's site, my emotional pain did not seem to faze her when I copped to it, on our typing paper exchanges. She did not deign to advise me, lecture me about drugs, and I did not offer my opinion about her poetry. She is a better columnist, and if she and I were to have a public debate, which I know she likes to do, she would probably write, is this scurrilous online attitude working for you?

But the larger question is about the limits of tolerance, and what comes after the destruction of civilization if annihilators succeed before we destroy the environments from which we evolved, and we threaten ourselves with silence. Most literary writers seem threatened with it, at some point, as the flesh shrinks, we are not at our most dynamic. I do not want to email Eugene Robinson with pride in informing him of my bigotry-- what I'd like to know is why the American black mindset is so schematic, so fatalistic, so pretentious, and with all that so predatory, willing to make me expendable because I am the weakest link. This is also why I need to find a way out of Riverside. If I had listened to my parents, to Jerry, whose memory I've abused with unfair license, I would still think Martin Luther King had justice on his side. Now I see de facto segregation as the better form of sanity, and in my heart, that homosexuals need an exorcist, which could be the hyperbole of bisexual trauma, but nuance is, shall we say, on going.

I have had kinky fantasies, nothing worth writing about, as I am conservative even  in masturbation, but after what I've been through, imagination and reality often crash with unexpected results. The sloth who hit on me, Eddy, she did not make me realize that lesbian games were for me. Being exploited by inner city trash made me sick, and made me understand my own father's racism when, like any teenager, she wanted to sow her oats. Now I do papa one better.

Having seen a couple of Walking Dead episodes, the series isn't just a blue collar form of empowerment, it is a Southern cautionary tale for urbanites, one that I'm unsympathetic toward, though power chairs would have trouble with homestead terrain.