Use The Knob

"you better mean it"-- Chaz Ebert

On a good day, which is not today, I may throw caution  to the wind in relation to concern about the Jazzy motors and corrosion, and do my old bathing chair transfer, at leas once, given that it is summer, particularly as I may present myself to Toomey's staff and become a nuisance about NCIL abuses, I don't know. I'm tired, expect too much of people and myself, and my only intimate relationship apparently resides in Twitter and libertarian politics, and keeping my chin up despite 202 carpets turned into a muddy gulch in ten years of powerchair tires and cat puke and urine and other choice accidents. In Indecent Proposal, Woody Harrelson mentions an architect named Louis Kahn who died impoverished on a bench but as yet, built a masterpiece, and I shall no longer even have that as compensation. No masterpiece here, having glanced at Linda's insufferably shallow posts. I shouldn't have. After eighteen years, it behooves little to observe her superficial shields have only worn the worse for wear. I don't even have the savvy, for it takes savvy, to die of an opioid induced overdose, not having a doctor at my disposal to coax into a nice bottle of Fentanyl. Even if I did, or had the money for a dealer, I'd probably vomit it up. Unlike Marilyn and Michael and Prince, I don't have the fucking privilege of celebrity pill popping, though the ailing O'Neal with his whiny tenor could provide an availing tutorial along the parallel lines of self-pity; I have that in common with the star of my youth. What I do not have, particularly, is a favorite Marilyn Monroe film. The more I study her, the more I see a calendar girl who was a fish out of water, and she and Arthur Miller were one of the more improbable power couples. What in the holy fuck did they marry each other for? He wound up making her a caricature, and she wound up killing Clark Gable in a pretentious and ugly little film.

I wrote, many hundreds of posts ago, that there was something about New Wave black and white movies which cannot be reproduced. I am not a professional critic, but this holds true for me with films of a certain cast, and Miller badly wants this for The Misfits, but it is an ugly movie, nearly its entire ensemble spaced out with injuries or imminent death, and even Roger Ebert, when he could still speak, kind of trailed off, with Miller's motifs about the necessity of slaughter making little sense even to a fat Chicago newspaper man with his Pulitzer and his chocolate bunny widow. (I have no particular need today to be unkind to Chaz simply due to reactionary intransigence beyond the aforementioned descriptive depreciation.) It isn't Don't Bother to Knock either, though for all intents and purposes, Anne Bancroft's recriminations might as well be interchangeable with what I get from Richardson's managerial duress. I should have telephoned the legal referral I received today, and instead, rowed my oars in typical avoidance due to huge impaction, successfully dispensed. Why am I still writing? Much like the overweening caretaker in The Goddess observes, "it's all I know how to do," and I cannot return to my mother's family either. It is a convenience of self-deception, loving them but no longer of them, I shall disrupt my sordid stability in dramatic fashion shortly, uselessly, perhaps, but the act of defiance is ready to cascade a riot of one.

Watering Hole

"Let me apologize for this barbarian."-- Arthur O'Connell

Pessimism,gushing forth in spades: The only update I had on Michael Washington after he ceased being the manager of Diamond Park, was an obituary notice for the death of his father, Reverend Paul Washington, who gave the commencement speech to my indifferent departure from Temple. I would have slept with his son without question, and was so hot for the man that a woofie in my drink would have only knocked my body temperature back to normal. Would it have been good sex? Would I have gotten pregnant? Converted to black? My narrative of my lava emotes destroying my potential prevented that, and the last time I saw him he was wasted, still the most beautiful black man I ever laid eyes on, but wasted.

Not sleeping with him did not prevent the inner city from scarring me toward my gradual right wing compass correction, but it did stop me from turning ho-- had he been Muslim instead of some obscure Adventist denomination, perhaps I would have successfully drugged my brain lesions and reverted back to a shallow Catholic suburban mode, and all this raw fury would have followed my mother's pattern of breakdowns. Unlike Kayla, I'd never go near a Muslim. Black, white, Arabic, nope. 

I had dinner with one, in a strange experience, an Iranian who invited Tom Reid (I think) after I transferred. Tom stayed with me for awhile, and my mother told me to snatch him while the going was good, but I never really attempted to breach our aesthetic congeniality. Out of all the players in my best university past, I miss Tom the most. Why? He could keep up with me intellectually, and you cannot imagine my loneliness, starvation, for a man with Tom's discernment; it would not hurt to see him again; it might be disorienting, awkward, and we'd be changed, but he was a good fellow, and I'd be delighted to have coffee with him. What the Iranian wanted from him I am not sure; it was the most jittery dinner I ever had with a foreigner. Whether he was a repressed homosexual and wanted me out of the way is moot, but certainly the whole thing was weird.

Kayla apparently wanted to be a chameleon, and it evidently killed her, so her third world adventurism gets no pity from me. Syria may need serious intervention, but Peace Corp progressive mentality is irrational when it comes to the Middle East. That level of altruism may actually hint at mental illness, and if I wanted to know why she is dead, my answer lies in the fact she was trying to hard to erase her national identity. Isis may be what it is, and her attachment to the pasteurized Omar may have been what it was, but she was a fool, more than that

Marilyn Monroe actually looks repulsive in Bus Stop, beneath the surface it is rather cynical about sexual relations in America  Our fifties answer to domestic violence. She really looks like a battered drug addict through most of the film; it has the panoramic sweep common to the color technology of the time, but the textures that come out on screen are simply ghastly. Why was this a popular play? Taming of the shrew for apes? Watered down as it is, the much upgraded Urban Cowboy seems to get some of its cues from the hucksterism of this not to be believed gumball story.