Credulity and Suspension

Allow me to express a momentary displeasure with serials, despite the fact that they've driven the market for narratives since the discovery of the stylus and the evolution of play acting: If you have a mature British woman engaged in bigamous relationships because the bigamy is conveniently transcontinental, why would the British authorities treat the British but illegal husband as legitimate, allowing him to arrive in Hong Kong before informing him he had been duped? I was unconvinced of Anthony Wong's repressed pain as the real Asian husband of the deceased Meg Harris in White Dragon, and can see already the "good" Britons  trying valiantly to get the enigmatic Mandarins to behave themselves without the benefit of Charles George Gordon willingness and ability to apply his better disciplined troops to the matter. Wouldn't I be better off applying myself to the implied reconciliation of  The Upside?

Prison Planet traumatized me Wednesday evening when I was looking to weasel my way into whatever support we can gauge through a thread exchange. Strangely, this always intersects, despondency pierced by triggers through which I am better off not becoming open to the ferocity of fighting back, tearing through me like a lash. There is absolutely no respect for the dignity of life in what this man did, and in the era of a just monarchy he would be put to death for offending the divine. Now try putting the agony this lion experiences in a power chair through which life has been circumscribed from birth. This is why I obscure the obvious, or seem to be posting merely what it pleases me to examine, most of the time. I've nothing left to live for, that full metal jacket burning my lung, rousing my bile and a metallic taste at the back of my throat, artery under my armpit throbbing.

And this? A metropolis with aggressive neon spectrums just a little freer than the homogeneous, and frightening temerity of Beijing.

Sleeping With Nick Denton

"An erection is often an indicator of asphyxiation."-- Chris Meloni, no tattle here on gay marriage.

One learns not to make too much of anything, and of course the poor tattle site has its problems, but all my comments may only be viewed under pending approval while those who need to be Nixonian freely post fuck and bullshit. This a scrabble hardened woman doesn't quite comprehend. I am not a requisite Kantian saboteur just for the purpose of being one, although maybe this ties into Gawker contributors?

The balance, between that of strength and entropy is often astonishing, but I suppose this has much to do with the DNA of Southern European peasants who cannot quite break their station. Slowly, as I creep toward Friday, we may go on a ride about poets, writers, and the excessive power of ostracization. Before this city takes my carcass, I am going to war with graduate writing systems, but the air is seasonal, and I'm in great pain, even holding in the purple in the clench of my jar as father and sister lie about finding me a new "place,"; not sure how I can bring you in on why we hate the ambulatory world.

Brokered Conversions

Michelle Cottle's passive aggressive sniping in her articles, whether for The Atlantic or The New Republic, in old media periodical cross breeding, isn't as evident in her online demeanor when subbing for the old PBS battle axe Mark Shields; spastic was more interested in putting her face to the work, merging body to voice, than the analysis predicating the rise and fall of national political ambitions as our two party system continually fragments in the gilded age of Silicon Valley. I admonished Michelle years ago for a blog post she wrote in incredulous censure of a woman in full dementia she overheard in a supermarket. It was a duplicitous method all writers use, capitalizing on ailments to churn content, but it wasn't the woman's fault if she was disoriented, and Michelle's snippy intonation culminated in assigning blame, and yet, if Ms. Cottle represents one end of the ambulatory spectrum, and spastic the other, just short of a contorted "demon" in the black underclass vernacular, then my own quest for fusion has failed. If I won't play by the rules, as reasonable suburbanites like my mother's sister might ask, then what do I expect? I expect the so called progressives to be honest: the media has a caste system too, and Gwen Ifill, Judy Woodruff, would be incapable of offering me social equality.

WPVI could film me in 1992 using the automatic doors of the Presidential Suites office complex, but it is a form of tokenism, much as my unintended comical interludes on Senator Rickles SSA committee, or some such fellow from Michigan, was tolerated with chagrin a few years later, in Washington DC. It was all I could do not to fuck the black congressional aide under the table, but I had wet dreams of my own about Clinton. The district just does something to the sex drive, regardless of ideology, or fringe element.

Perhaps I will never be a fully engaged journalist again. The field has its own bubble, constantly eschewing itself, constantly exploiting, inundating, telling it slant to engage. I understood its mechanisms from the days when my Ridley High article quoting the superintendent about driving school generated controversy in the senior class. There I was invisible, doing my job, fully matriculated, and I daresay happy, but it's a ruthless way to make a living, and has its elements of sociopathy, as the writers for Hannibal intimated in their first season's work. I signed up to do a meet up with writers in center city tonight, but again, I'm too tired, not there so much for group think. All I do is write. I thought the networking would smooth out my vulgar plumage. Maybe next time, again.

In applying my sentiments to the plight of flagship brands, I'd watch for Chris Hughes to hand off TNR to another legacy holder, even a possible merger with the former satellite voice of Boston. We'll see.

Adversary Across The Table

With a supreme act of will springing from the essence of his being, he turned away from his life and the long train of disastrous consequences that had flowed from it." --Richard Wright, Native Son, page 255, 1957 edition

I have held certain cards close to my chest about offering a responsible discussion on race, and after branching out into as many estuaries as there are going back into our seas, I've given up. Fewer black friends than gay ones, yes, but they existed, a blind couple. The wife who thought I was going to suicide over my breakdown at the capable mind games in the hands of my former spastic supervisor, her husband, my neighbor Roger Moore from long ago, sexually attractive paraplegic baller, not many more, leading into the question of why Dr. Ben Carson gained notoriety: because Americans who pay attention to network newscasts which assume a mature audience needn't be coddled like cutting edge medicine, because conjoined twins are still enough of an anomaly to hold our attention, because John Hopkins denotes prestige and Ted Koppel's God complex, and Carson was a minority neurosurgeon in this stratosphere, and yet something cut across the com links and the studio lighting in his emotive force about the Bjani sisters, a viewer could not forget the stress and anguish of "bathroom by committee," and it is that intense emotional investment by which one understands how Carson evolved into the dark horse surprise as 1 in 15.

Do I believe he will succeed Obama? No. Am I aware of the contradiction of respecting his forthrightness juxtaposed against my intolerance? Yes, and I do not intend to resolve it here; in much the same vein that liberal critics plaster Losing Isiah for tasting like tree bark, any critical observations genuinely threaten to veer off the asphalt. People like me give offense, and receive tin ears. We don't even know what having a frank discussion means anymore, except what we internalize when we're in it. Memory seeps like putty after a time, and I seem to recall Richard Corliss making grist about Jessica Lange twenty years ago, but that could not have been possible. The film still was the sociological fodder in its moment, and is, on a certain level, ludicrous. Halle might have been prepping for Cat Woman, and white adoption of black children often leads to depression and mental health disorders.

The film made an imprint, not over its quality, but over its construct and what it straddled, and then gets crucified by superior progressives like Kurchak and lambasted by those like spastic on a rightward drift, who has seen black parents engaged in aggravated assault against their children-- not to excuse my dead mother and her men, but there is still a difference.

Let me switch gears momentarily: I had a traumatic experience in email borne out of desperation and fear and told a former supervisor I thought I had fallen in love with her. On her end she was, or so I speculate, trying to save her marriage by sportscasting to me a little too much. Fifteen years later, I am debating letting a possible occlusion kill me and she wrote herself a demotional grant of some sort and still has a salary. I've put myself on trial, picked pieces apart, and I'll never be entirely repaired, even though I was in a bad space and can't put the onus entirely on her behavior-- but what it did was absolutely shut down LBGT tolerance. I will never knowingly associate with homosexuals again, not after what I put myself through. 

I could, however, sit down with Dr. Carson. The gulf would be there, but both he and I know institutional paradigms to the bean, and I would not assign blame at his door for what happened to me within the community of his ethnicity. This does not mean I'd apologize for the very dark nature of my posts; it does mean I could engage, unless I err that he'd utilize the normal mechanism of recrimination.

Elmer's Glue

"Tollefson has lunch with President Liacouras every week!"-- a liberal literature instructor empathizing with student body sense of collusion.

One cannot be too harsh with the image of perfection that television projects. It is human vanity in play, but it is due to this, and moral clause contracts, that media personalities seem invulnerable. When they topple, it can be gut wrenching or gratifying, and in Tollefson's case, I fall into the former category. On video, after the guilty verdict, the man looked ghastly. It comes as a bit of a shock, and yet, for those of us who has never cheated, merely buffeted by corruption, events such as these only stoke reactionary anger. I made an unexpected windfall from group insurance, little more than two years of my former salary, last 8 years, despite spend down and medical model brutality, so I am at a bit of a loss in comprehending how Tollefson landed himself in this predicament with what seems like a generous pension, and I can hear Jim Gardner's condolences without searching his tweets, with the usual sentiments of high social standing.

The Great Recession is still reverberating, except for special cases in their own bubble of indigence. Everyone wants to be Bernie Madoff, floating on flimsy straws of derivative opulence, except for schmucks and half-crazed peasants, like oxen, tilling hard under the yoke, not succeeding on the basis of virtue, examining true crimes to look for loop holes, discovering that most murders involve petty vendettas and salacious neighbors who want to get their tattles in to modern muckrakers with microphones, lovers killing each other, husbands dis-articulating wives, vamps using sex to kill deluded paramours, everyone trying to look their best: the right sports bra, the best hair extension, the most efficient face lift, the least lethal erection enhancer.

I remember many of the most personable WPVI anchors: this deceased and colorful Texan, Larry King, Dave Roberts, father of the third rate actor David Boreanaz, Lisa Thomas-Laury, whose illness apparently got an astonishing level of accommodation from the ABC affiliate. One assumes this is not due to threat of a wrongful termination lawsuit, since Poems Syndrome seems rather singular and distinct, and Rob Jennings. WPVi's sense of continuity worked in terms of brand loyalty, but that too has pitfalls within our unfortunate mortal coils, even arrogance.

Waltz in the Right Wing

Ah, disaffection! Back in the day when Warren Commission "single bullet theory" Arlen was alive, missing his memory, this guy was American brand right wing. Toomey doesn't know the spastic dowager blog, of course not. Too busy with his stature, but I make Toomey look like Eisenhower. Stark and bitter laugh Jim Brady would not find *classy,* to channel Judy Woodruff. I pasted everything Toomey's staff considers sniveling grievance in his content window to save time, knowing as a federal legislator there isn't much, as a former businessman, Toomey can do for my urban spiritual malaise, but change of habitat urgency breeds strange bedfellows, even if a fascist takeover of the US government has been done. It is already here.

I fantasize about becoming a political operative for our seductive libertarians like Rand Paul. The Fourth Estate is hotter and heavier in its fascination with libertarian streaks than the average citizen,  (only the faintest familiarity with Burke's political philosophy) I suspect. Political journalists hold their breath, waiting for an ideological schism within the nominating ranks every election cycle, and every election cycle to my less than engaged political conscience, libertarians fold. No drama, no surge of excitement about hard liners who will make the trains run on time. It gives me a nearly youthful nearly orgasmic rush, despotism! Women never admit this is our true path to power, through the penises to which they lay claim.

Last time, I was flattered, astonished, tickled, when a Toomey staffer telephoned me. It led to Tim's departure, the nearly 70 year old dope fiend who initiated all of this stress and more games with homosexual psychosis, reigniting my death to blondes sentiments. This time I'll probably receive a form letter telling me to comply with HUD regulations.

Robert Wagner, in Escro

"The life in me abolished the death of things."-- The Ring and The Book

Yes, I sometimes forget just to whom I am posting, certainly not to Oliveira. People follows a time honored tradition older than journalism itself: The need to be amazed by a freak show conjoined to the distortions of glamour, but in the case of Natalie Wood, her theatrical depth always on the verge of overwhelming pathos, her performances remain a specter for which I have no cognizant explanation, except for the fact that her death was a senior year headline. What Redford's character does to her emotionally in Tennessee's carefully contrived melodrama opens some raw wounds, Sundance liberal be damned. She was drinking and fell off a boat. She was on a boat, drinking, she and Robert had a fight, and merry widow tossed her overboard, not that there is any evidence to hover over Wagner's old age. Her character Alva was pressured into sex trafficking and is destroyed by her own desperation for magical innocence, in the covert hovering of homosexual penetrations into familial viciousness, and died in such a fashion it reverberates. We believe things have changed since those times, that fresh meat is not a commodity, but have they? What Rampell delineates at the bottom of the economic workforce barely scratches the surface, but we're demonizing what we enjoy about the convenience of processed food. I patronize McDonald's once in a blue moon-- but escape this juggernaut no less than anyone else who frequent short order establisshments. Golden Lake, Dunkin Donuts, something more upscale when I head to Delancy Plaza, even grocery chains have converted to prepackaged meals.

What I am suggesting is we do not often enough step back to see what polarizes us into idiotic points of advocacy. Restaurant franchises operate on the caveat of instant gratification, not decent hands on customer service. What isn't microwaved is short grilled, in the past, crewed by adolescents never intending such labor becoming a living wage, not in the developed world. Those who remain on the front lines, the farmers who harvest crops, manage livestock, can only push manufacturing technologies so far; the rest of us are basically obsolete, even the CEO five times up the food chain. Alva is a passive anachronism, but in another sense she returns to the future, the last exploitable resource, our terminal diseases.

Shameless Hussy Does a White Paper

"If I seem cavalier about it and in fact I am cavalier about it, it is because this is not my life."-- Donna Leon, with allowances for lack of exact transcription.

Meanwhile, back in the land of grandiose effacement over an old woman's grandiose self-importance, every time a journalist like James Foley dies chasing after a scoop in ancient lands with statistically marginal individuals, the media conglomerates, NYT, Wapo, LAT, CNN, ESPN, let out a yelp of pain. The holy sanctum has been violated: gathering information civilized people need to know at their leisure in a coffee cafe.

Let's take a step back. Foley was a photographer, and his images of the Syrian conflict no more or less redundant than a native's use of his or her cell phone, not that I have data on how many Syrians own a Samsung as opposed to a functioning Apple OS. Reports, making allowances for lack of certainty, indicated Foley was tortured in his captivity. Perhaps this caused him to reevaluate the value of foreign correspondence imagery for the sake of a scoop, since it seems being driven for a news story has its own shades of the pathological, or maybe he rethought the Spanish Inquisition, but how much do people outside of the millennial hot zone that is forever the Middle East feel driven to put themselves in danger by bating Semitic beasts?

Do Foley's images have empirical value? No, with the exception of his beheading. Those images, in and of themselves, will remain as a genealogy marker. As hard as we try to divorce ourselves from primate origin, we're still rather large apes who evolved back into nakedness, even without modern barbers. Knowledge generation is a tricky business, but the Fourth Estate holding itself aloft as a modern temple whose abstract conceptualization is inviolate doesn't take into account the fact that revenue needs to be generated. Most of what the public reads has no monetary value that we can use in turn to generate money, including humanitarian crises. ISIS was bought and paid for according to Western free market and entrepreneurial values. Accommodating the beast will invariably create paths for its transformation. Radical egalitarians like Foley need more patience, not the rush of trotting about hot zones. I am not done with my Pistorius sentiments. Dyer triggered an exasperated trial run. Initially, I wasn't going to bother, but not I'm hunting for sources and more retail packaging.

Predatory Yellow

"It had all the facts wrong."-- Stephanie Verderame, on the IRS agents seizure of future estate assets.

I have never ever fabricated a source in my commissioned articles. Ever, but I am wizened with cynicism in the ever ongoing professional mourners waltzed in by The Fourth Estate over Glass, Blair, and some other justifying frauds of note. We all lie; everyone in the business knows it. We lie by omission, by lack of nuance, so on. Sometimes we organize the facts into a transfixing narrative that feels like veracity, (cf Ana Montes), but every hungry journalist has a prism. To what degree the audience dances depends on trust. Violating it is heinous! But there is a darker truth behind the excoriation of Glass, the massive manhunt that led to the incineration of Dorner. Insurrection. Threatening the underpinnings of the establishment. Now, Dorner played his menace wrong. When I vented that I wanted him to win and received gawker views, it was not a joke. Some of us are that angry-- but he executed his agenda so poorly one has to shrug in a disappointed "WTF?" The minute he put a bullet through that girl's brain, he committed suicide as opposed to launching a crusade. Glass sort of does the same thing. Confirming media bias by getting caught in a fabrication erodes a willingness to believe in our system and the consensus built around it.

Writing such sentiments in rheumy-eyed exhaust is a challenge to delineation, and illustrates the habituation of distracting tendencies, but people who can be fooled usually are, because they bring a set of preconceived notions before the table, but whether or not the Great Recession posited the seeds of a great unraveling remains to be seen. My local media company subversively headlined mass murder as the new national pastime. The sentiment accurately captures the tempo.

Rasp Off the Grass

One fact alone is enough: that over fifty thousand Federal soldiers perished of starvation in Southern prisons. Malarial fever contracted in camps and hospitals had wrecked his health. --Mobi text, Literary Times Supplement, 1915

The inconsistency of ideology. Moderates like David Brooks and the dame of Wapo want to save monogamy by expanding the tent. What does it lead to? Idiotic political articles about the manicures of Cory Booker and masculine identity. On the basis of my experience with urban black culture, African American sexuality is more fluid than what is admitted. This includes the innuendo, allegations, and political demise of Jennifer Carroll, let alone my fount of follies with blacks in attendant care, graphic sordid tales that would make Kathleen's chastisement of Miley seem positively preschool. Ms. Parker now says the pendulum always swings back. This is an over simplification of social retrenchment, because now we have a new closet, one not initiated by Cory, granted, but one that stipulates "since my orientation does not matter there will be neither confirmation nor denial regarding my sexual preferences."

The Roman Empire did not fall due to the sexual bestiality of its ruling elite; it fell due to overt military pressure and over- extension, which does not mean the distraction of bread and circuses doesn't have a pertinent analogy to the sheer scope and breadth of American materialism and callow corruption through video saturation. I am as much at fault as anyone; my online footprint is overpersonalized, graphic with anger, and at least on Blogger nibbling at tinsel town bread crumbs.

My study of a pansy like Walt Whitman was cursory at best, and of the little I know of Leaves of Grass from upper track summaries of the Transcendentals, I never found the verse particularly moving. My Mobi purchase was partially obligatory thereby, trying to cram everything in before my occlusion or stroke hits, which it will, invariably-- but, and this is the caveat, the Transcendental movement had a point. Whitman's fame rests not on his homosexuality, but on his grandiosity and idealism, his hope that the revised editions of his work would halt the nation at the brink, before the shot at Fort Sumter. Gay and lesbian couples in and of themselves aren't going to destroy anything, as they have existed as long as human awareness, but radical egalitarianism is well on its way to turning everything into a triviality. In Whitman's era, the belief in transcendence was possible, despite the horrors of collateral damage we can now only imagine. I never liked MTV.

Arianna's Umbrella

The problem of Syria is analogous to the bilateral argument between atheists and theists. If the major powers do nothing, we face the prospect of a regional military conflict that will only grow in size and scope, and might threaten Israel. If the major powers act, or take sides in a proxy conflict, then we may wind up with the same playbook, and break the bank in the process. The use of chemical agents to exterminate life is an engagement of excessive torment on living bodies. Physical torture is one thing, but poisons are another, an overwrought condensed agony living things should not have to experience from human manufacture. Our planet is deadly enough on its own, and more to the point, Assad who trained to be an ophthalmologist, thinks he can get through this by utilizing Mithridatic tactics, and this not against an external enemy. Why does the Middle East remain in the mindset of eighth century jurisprudence?

On that question I submit greetings to Ms. Morin, who replaces Amy, who understandably had enough of my lack of beatitudes. Happiness is difficult to come by given one set of experiences over another, aside from my relief mechanisms in anarchy, but I have my own honor code. What I'd convey to JL Morin on far lighter terms than my above paragraph, is that I would be happy to engage in inglorious grunt work for the Huffington Post, if I understood how an aggregate works, which I only partially grasp. Fact checking is fine, and the like, since it is in the field I wish to remain with my lingering viability. We shall see.

I am risk adverse to this extent: If I snowball myself into full time work in another location and fail due to the fact that I am aging, I cannot just chuck it up to a loss and then scurry back to Philadelphia's public housing system. I have to be sure an employer can truly accommodate my limited functionality. I am still smart, to a varying degree, but need quadriplegic supports better than those received in the past, and negotiating this isn't easy. I have covered breaking news stories, and it is high octane, but obviously, going to Damascus would be absurd. 

Reluctantly, I remain against a surgical intervention. What would it solve?

Conrad's Kurtz

I have watched the PBS Newshour with near very religious fidelity since the start of my social services career, many years before MacNeil retired early, and long before the aging Jin Lehrer, of whom a fonder affection is generated, moved himself behind the scenes, and unlike the young athlete I am only casually espying on television, I cannot go for a contemplative stroll on a path with fall strewn leaves, even if I had one of my chairs fully charged, and today, as the Google homepage and every other digital traditional media outlet reminds us, we could all use contact with our feet and the soil, draining away, losing the self, considering our sins. My television familiars, as I consider the Newshour anchors, broke the Newtown massacre for me. "Not again," seeped through, bitter wormwood, picturing my ferocity earning your shunning opprobrium if I pushed the envelope, but the WaPo headlines overwhelmed me. I break down in tears, and despite myself, if only to indicate how much this has penetrated my psyche, God help us for the weapons technology we have at our disposal. Barring sudden death from lung fluid, I shall return when tears cease to threaten the fetid city air that I breathe.