The Occupation of Venezuela

"Guaido has grown so much politically they haven't been able to touch him," the assertions English language media  asserts about stature

Things are moving too slowly for any hope on my part that mobility medicine can mitigate what I have had to endure since September of 17. The direct care worker, whose pseudonym he probably cannot reference as the knight from the Arthurian legends, gave me most of the day off, but for all that, making an effort to cut down on Twitter interaction, discipline is compromised through indigestion due to my bowel and inability to evacuate, as by the time he gets here I am empty and when he’s ready to clock out, it is too late, is only just getting in 3 o’clock Monday, his automotive issues taking a toll on the month. I have not moved the goal post further along toward developing new editorial relationships, though I have started a back burner story about the homosexual drug addict Jevs sent me as a back up when Galahad takes time off. Obamacare, no matter its exchanges and networks, doesn’t change the nature of an hourly wage on Medicaid budgets, and you’ll get drug addicts with criminal records who can get aging tenants evicted for being extreme homosexuals with criminal records. Eviction from a public housing building such as Riverside might leave me overjoyed if it was the result of my own actions, but if it came about as the result of an extreme queer (even Galahad recoils from this man, and Galahad is an inner city minority resident),  this is something else again, and would give me ample cause of action to sue Trudy Richardson, the building manager who no more believes in civil liberties than she would that the legends of St. Nicholas has legs, but be heartened. Apathy has triumphed over my visions of treating Trudy like one of Daryl’s head shots from the Walking Dead, which relates directly to the fact that Galahad resents the fact I’m not grateful for him. Why should I be? He isn’t indispensable, and I cannot push him to help me regain strength. His time off, though earned, is primarily arbitrary. Jevs doesn’t have standards in place to be mindful about giving these individuals required down time such as I’d receive. He is frustrated with this lack of gratitude. These flare ups take their toll, the vituperations in a sphincter which exudes a furnaced laxity so domineering that a younger undergraduate took the Shakespearean’s request to write a poem about her name literately and wrote an anagram about her identity being flushed into the sewage system. “It’s it’s—” stuttered the then voluble Jerry McGuire, with his ham fisted strength yet young, at the time, less good looking, than the now imploded Luke Perry. Magee Rehabilitation, its first keystone inscribed the same year as Jerry’s “it’s it’s,” stumble cadence at a conference table on a Chester campus, is more representative of a healthcare system in crisis as opposed to something worthy of marvel. I’m not post-op; not in recovery. The physical therapists express resistance toward my treatment, the only innovation since my last visit being wall diagrams about surviving a mass shooting, oblong ellipticals in deep red blue color contrasts, with arrows. Perhaps soiled adult briefs would be a distraction in the face of such an event, burrowing the exuberant celebration of youth, a youth which truly believed in victorious conquest. As one of my literate British followers noted, when you have nothing left to lose, you have nothing left to fear.

Robert Guillaume's Fake Prison Milk Eye

Mario Puzo's Hell's Kitchen is less widely  known than The Godfather. It covers the same terrain in slightly weaker form, with its central character getting whacked off in a Jacuzzi, wherein the novelist allows the dying consciousness its self-depreciating voice, the same as any wise guy. You can see within this narrative that Puzo was a man of Eisenhower lesbian erotica. It wasn't an "identity" back then. More like the ultimate patriarchal fantasy: two pussies and a dick in the middle. I suppose its exposition on what Hell's Kitchen then represented is a complimentary bookend to the 1990 State of Grace, one of the few films in which I do not like Ed Harris' role. The slow motion gun battle in the bar is one of the more idiotic in the annuals of modern film, and a waste of Harris' otherwise extraordinary energy, which I sit here considering, impacted to the point of day long discomfort, an overgrown toenail still waiting to be sawed. The first film in which Harris ever made an impression on me, though it might have been another actor look alike, he was mock fucking his wife in a standing position, virtually having a stroke in order to project restrained violence in intercourse. I've never seen anything like it before or since, but I'd certainly be interested in trying it, my shins raised to the collarbone. Less arthritis pain. I never had sex in affection, only illicit excitement. Whether I'm right or wrong about the scene being one of his earlier roles, after A History of Violence Ed just seemed to explode with a string of great performances. This is why I am suffusing my synapses, attempting to contextualize it, my stepmother once again in hospital, my father exhausted, while my head is doing a little pep rally, cheerleading: die you damn bitch.

Niume cratered, as one might suppose, top heavy as it was with mostly insufferable posts. I am getting weary of the necessity of digital improvisation, all the same, but in not so many hours, I'll rear my head to enter the preliminary stages of my piece for the think tank, though the Russia investigation is steam rolling.

Resurrection's Security Detail

"Kate Simon reveals the special charms of the Umbrian hill towns, the enchantments of the Etruscan tomb paintings." Jacket blurb, The Places In Between

The injury which Ken Wahl sustained on the set of Wiseguy during the Tucci Pizzolo segment was mere happenstance, luck of the draw, much as his neck injury was bipedal carelessness, something which fame may aggrandize, and yet, if Umberto Eco wrote a pendulous attack on hermeneutics with his convoluted novel  Foucault's Pendulum (read more than twice), it is not so easy for humans to dismiss pattern recognition. We're configured for it, and the familiar things of more vigorous adulthood are sometimes recognized with shock, recollected schematics much easier to grasp in scope: As an actor, Ken Wahl wore his emotions and his retro-eighties shag doo hairstyle on his sleeve, for me, back then, just more disco culture transplanted onto an organized crime drama which was already part of a bygone era, an era which Mario Puzo captured and magnified for studio players to glorify. Michael Corleone's power, in other words, went the way of the Kennedy brothers as martyrs. We either bury the JFK, RFK assassinations, and move on, knowing the Warren Commission never answered the public unease, or drive ourselves crazy.
Cannell's show was window dressing the moral ambiguities of the 20th century coning to a close, which Kevin Spacey capitalized on to become one of the greatest actors of his time, great acting for which we nearly lack a syntax. Where Wahl is an open book, easily read, even if personally unknown, Spacey is a manipulative master of a humane but ruthless center, even in lesser films, he has the uncanny ability to keep his audience suspended on the wire, until delivery of the dénouement where he triumphs, whether or not Wahl's face was in the mix. Enter contemporary surrealism of 2016, since we're all on twitter with its massive micro data aggregation. I'm there, Wahl's there, and my cancerous aunt, the few thousand like her who find social media alienating aren't, but they, with the dowager and Ken Wahl only two decades behind them, are dying, in their last years, tick tock. A disabled woman makes an attempt to be heartfelt in her usual birdshot method, to a heartthrob of yesteryear who inadvertently took the punishments to his physique that his character sustained for dramatic continuance, followed him and retweeted his adoptive cause and he returned the favor, and to discover that at 2am, just transferring, sent a shot of adrenaline right through her heart, as if she could roll straight back to her hormone raging thirties.
I felt vulnerable, and emailed my sister like a squealing teen, as if tomorrow my knight will finally appear to ride me out of this corrupt African majority city because an actor was conciliatory, if cautiously so, as I also wasn't raunchy in my outreach, also careful, because his past brought me back to a collegiate womanhood before the worst wounds became an inhumane pin cushion, because he made me feel like an Italian American who would have her man, as was once hoped, instead of portents in busted legs getting injured by cameramen, signifying lack of heed for omens, for civilization under strain, the weight of lethargy a valve into which old age invariably gets bottled. I am not conciliatory. I did not vote for Trump because I think conservatives will give me vindication before I buckle under my own weight. I'm not one of the mogul's supporters. I simply understand his insensitivity, and since I wanted to make a choice, afraid of dying, I picked the lack of empathy I myself have learned and roared and got reported for numerous times already, knowing the Clinton mendacity would be worse than a dickhead from New York. As the national voice of Jewish motherhood, Marcus is already in histrionics, but fair is fair.  My notes, too, however, are ossifying on a familiar scale, because all I have are the search for signs, the hope for magical evasions of burgeoning helplessness. You might ask what's wrong that a fleeting connection made me feel flush? Nothing, but it is the vain strength of days bygone, since every defecation, every move I make, is a balance on a tightrope whose safety net is effervescent.

Cringe

Levels of vengeance are coded comparatively. Delight in Ray Liotta's machinations as Wozniak and distaste for Warren Kole's agent Stahl as overly self-righteous still falls within the parameters of a revenge fantasy, even if we weigh how far we're willing to see a world weary lieutenant go. So far Adi is letting Wozniak hold his own, seasoned enough to process rationalizations and methodology, not quite a full sociopath. Invariably, NBC will have an entertaining antagonist fall. Woz will go too far and even wicked delight will turn against him; J-lo will be scathed but left with the possibility of redemption, because this is still television land. Though it is fair to say dirty cops usually get exposed in the real world. This is why beat reporters exist. The Wilkins case, however, is irreparable, and seems to hinge on some bizarre evolutionary throwback. Stealing newborns occurs in the wild, but cases like this, along with aggression in the elderly, and the gruesome microwaved baby case, veer toward unimaginable unease with the inexorable pressures of primate domestication. 

Images of that litigation were never forgotten: the mother testifying on video so as to be shielded from public outrage. Killing a newborn is one thing. Cooking it to death invites bile to rise in the back of our throats. How does an incident like that even happen? Lane's alleged attack is as equally visceral and unfathomable and if found guilty she should be executed, on either a material or metaphysical basis. If we're just a smart bit of meat, the meat doesn't need that mitochondrial DNA perpetuating itself, and if humans indeed have souls, Lane fed hers into a psychosis which is better off dead. Even in the dark side of Mario Puzo's world, the author's intimations about why Vito kills an infant stays within tolerable limits, rather than mere sensational butchery. How poor Michelle Wilkins ever truly recovers from this is beyond anyone's capacity to actualize, even within a world view poisoned by lifelong medical, regulatory regimentation. It would be rather a highbrow solace if NBC allows Wozniak to emerge victorious, the cult hero with blood on his hands, still a Brooklyn capo.

A dowager's bitterness is also in part about her own naivete, so invested in intellectual authority, in literary journal submissions, in independent living paradigms, as a way of life. I was a hot property as a student, and beyond, and now I'm sick of it, an advocate of giving idealists brutishly short lives.

Molten Eggs

"You cannot enforce this deal with him;  he's deranged!"-- Chris Kramer, UFOlogy


The one last observation I have to offer about my curious conflation, for the time being, is that I am more forgiving of Marty's acquired prejudices against Muslims than the scofflaw that surrounded him at Harvard and his resignation from The New Republic over them. I was still very active on the TNR site at the time, and remember much of the salient details of the uproar, but Marty has been formed by his experiences much as I have been formed by mine, and he is as entitled as he is cultured, despite the fact that old age has turned him into a Mario Puzo character (and Michael, you successfully bored me to tears only two paragraphs in, despairing for my non-existent byline, alas!). Bigotry is never the sum total of anyone, even those less erudite and flaming in reaction. My experience with the disabled/LBGT activists has taught me this: betrayal is more important than the principles these activists purportedly stand for, that they have no honor, and that they will subvert anything to their own ends, including the Christian faith, or any doctrine, biological science, for that matter, and their minds are not so stable as the psychiatric shift warrants, and though I can be duped, I shall not reconcile with libertines simply because they wear dress clothes and imitate pedestrian modality. I have been too close, seen too many head games, whether or not they involved me, and hurt too often. Human homosexuality is not moral, nor blessed, nor spiritually sanctioned, virtuous.

It is subversive, psychologically twisted, indulgent, and gratuitous, even if its practitioners are happy, or have an untouchable A list status, or falls into queer genius, but I will deal with cultural and literary contributions at a later date.

Lament as I may that I have no fresh series to attach to, I have found rewards in the dead zone of cancellation, and I am finding The Collector of use, as I have mentioned in previous posts, and I hope someone in the industry one day attempts to reinvigorate it. The UFO episode was a decent bit of gamesmanship, and funny, to boot. I am not quite sure where Cooksey was taking all the threads, all the motifs within the mainframe, but suffice to say, I am mining the episodes that exist, and need to review the pilot once more. Remind me that I cannot wilt with surrender back into the literary journal entirely, but a great deal of that is sheer fatigue. 28 submissions a month on average down to two. Do you see what you are sapping out of me? Stingy lurkers, the lot of you.