Galley Tear Sheets

"Marriage does not complete you."-- my former glaucoma blind neighbor

 I had the poor bastard on his knees trying to console my inconsolable stream of tears for a domestic life I’ll never have.  (Though this more nuanced Molina love portrait will remain only a synopsis via second hand.) I did not intend to do that and did not turn and play aggressor in the process of his knee on my behalf, with a shrug, as I by mere happenstance remember this post, without enough context in it to recall the necessity of citing Alberto Moravia. Poor Shawn is out of his depth, and out of curiosity I said he could read my posts. And as you can read, he commented with a vernacular appreciation, and I do not care what he says, Joanne you’re not dead! Nor do I care what the crones of Visiting Nurses say about bringing me back. Frank was a living embodiment of what former neighbor Tom advised me in my mid-twenties. Frank was a lack of completion, more than that, an alienation. Shawn is not a completion either but for reasons unknown to me, our simulated intimacy whispers in my ear: this is what it means to be held, this is comfort in another’s strength, and he has to give me time to have my little whirlwind. I have had larger whirlwinds, even derived satisfaction from utilizing pity to manipulate men of more piercing temperament than he, but now I only feel chagrin at my power to bring a softer Hulk to marriage proposal position within the blink of an eye, a boy man who thinks my acquired culinary tastes are akin to sinking in quicksand, and makes me laugh, exclaiming, “I cannot eat this,” despite the fact that I thought seaweed snacks were a popular vogue. My past and present make rather strange bookends: Brandon was one Negro stereotype out of The Birth of A Nation, the aggressor whose lewd violence threatened white purity, and my life itself, and now I am distressing my caretaker of sweeter cocoa hue because I never made a good marriage. Without actually being able to petulantly stomp my foot and fracture solid concrete, my grief nevertheless stands in as a recipe substitution doing exactly that. Don’t I think other people suffer? Sure I do. Stephen Hawking bore his 24 hour maintenance with gentility, and Megan Crowley deserves President Trump’s attention, though I believe her father’s zealous determination to be misguided, which immediately places our relation to each other, corresponding points of impairments, in opposition with my arguments, but I’ll never have Gretchen’s pleasure, probable joy, in the sanctity of her union with Karl. I never wanted children, but the way Gretchen brings her little girl to life has its charm, and I will enjoy one day meeting her daughter, though my budget is momentarily too strained to return to the Virginias—but my point is, I begin to see why wives of such caliber celebrate family, and fear the lash upon lash which has fed a fury such as mine, defying online rules of engagement. I see what it is. When you lose the ability to utilize your toilet on demand because of a predatory mechanic you desperately begged for help, then get back to me, in my past sterile godsend that was September 2017.

Blue Patches With Rubber Tips, Bearing the Crutch

"It doesn't have to be a death sentence," --Megan Crowley

It is difficult to adjudicate A Patch of Blue against contemporary standards without viewing it as a public service announcement to maintain silence in the face of differences between ethnic groups not altogether superficial. I must have seen the film a half dozen times, find the echo of my own reactionary fear in Shelley Winters and her recriminating castigation, calling Poitier your black buck, play acting the white trash of which I am a little embodied, or Poitier’s containment of the blind girl’s unintentional disruption, when she nearly topples the fruit pyramid in the supermarket, and yet the movie filters through me like a light urine stream right before a major stool struggle, the arc of the narrative dissipates, leaving behind the poignancy of a connection between a disabled woman and a black man essentially teaching her how to adapt, never actualized, because Poitier’s character realizes the girl’s feelings are based in part on a sheltered dependency. In North Philadelphia, there was, in fact, a blind woman beaten daily and traumatically by a black husband. The dowager was the unfortunate observer of her caramelized face browbeat by crisis counselors and patrol officers, and she disappeared before I relocated to Race Street, a most likely death sentence to an inevitable probable cause, lest you continue to marvel about the scars of the lioness breathing more shallowly beneath my ribs, and so we come full circle, back to my initial rebellion, planting myself in the inner city solely on the basis of a lust to live. To my sensibilities of enduring interior conflict, Shane, (ahem) the paraprofessional tending my shriveled wings, is sexually attractive, and makes me realize what happiness I might have had with such strength as his, and it is rather unfair to discover this, tottering on the brink of  a final weakness towards helplessness I cannot defeat, that the right degree of masculinity ignites my passion, the very will to live, after years of absorbing everything of the emotional pain I’ve written about to my audience. Part of me says to hell with the stigma, and wants to win him despite what I am, despite what he sees every day, and consume him. But I am playing tic tac toe with an aging woman’s embers. He is not the true target, simply a man I like using his strong shoulders as a bulwark for a spastic quadriplegic who was never loved as she wished, with her reactionary anarchist already looking down her nose at having fun with such tensions. It would never work between us, and I know it already because it isn’t a last act of love, merely defiance, fooling yourself the hormones still work in secret. We could not succeed as a couple, as equals in the dynamic of society’s fabric, in any sense. I cannot embrace his world, having sustained such damage in it, any more than he could embrace mine—the world from which I fled, deluding myself in relation to liberal sanctity. Yet I do like him, his energetic man child smile, clinging to him more than a little, like Amy Adams defying narrative frameworks with mystical orthography that eddies linear time. Like the actress, I too ply her thematic imperative, of calling out, “Come back to me,” the life I see as so fulfilling, married to a kindred heart. What sort of love letter is this? One that knows Miss Crowley is in need of a market correction.

The Destruction of Pompe, Interdicted Sclerosis

"We thought we could change the world."-- Mario Vargas Llosa, post goat mortem

During the 2016 primary season, I tried to build a case, perhaps somewhat unsuccessfully, that Trump's hostility toward Serge Kovaleski, driven by his media antagonism, if we tally the number of fake news tweets into his presidency, did the collective social conscience a favor. That the president then flipped a coin in his first address to Congress to usher in Megan Crowley as a time honored, privileged, diminutive token doesn't contravene his credibility so much as expose a divided American psyche, and I'd say the ratio is at least 1 in 50 on the conservative side. For every extraordinarily privileged persons like Megan, or fully matriculated individuals like Governor Abbott, there are then ten marginalized wheelchair residents in a public housing facility with zoophytic lives, attributable to how badly Medicaid Waiver systems are administered. Though budget allocation is a factor, the number of dollars spent on regulating the poor to death isn't the only problem. Socialized medicine is a regulatory nightmare that hasn't changed in the 35 years in which I began making my living at it, unless the change is that of even more stricture through centralization, and this represents the failure of inclusion since Helen Keller became the apostle of being in the world despite the severity of her deprivation. My life was in jeopardy from 10/17 through 3/18 only to be placed in jeopardy once back in the system by a provider's attendants being a no show, which goes to the heart of why I took myself off of waiver services in 07. At this level of poverty in the Philadelphia region, the digital economy has a subzero impact. Case managers are like Bill Murray repeating Groundhog's Day with no outlet to wake up, and it represents Erik's failure beyond his current end of life mental decline. He forced this section 202 housing contractor to "renovate" the building, putting every single resident in here through unimaginable hell for well over a year, only to have the city's housing authority strike back by prohibiting disabled tenant access to senior living facilities unless they meet the age requirement, and ADAPT's defiance against medical model authority has also cratered in IL, since they now have nursing coordinators, and if we have a class of 30 autistic students blowing bubbles in a park, this is featured in a local news segment like a Gnostic gospel for savants, taking victories in the acknowledgement of our still precious limitations. If you'd like an example of how my pessimism could be assuaged, the Amazon series Britannia, though it vibes like Masterpiece theatre on steroids, presents its maimed with a live and let live aspect. There are no phalanx of visiting nurses doing absolutely nothing, certainly not with effective treatments, simply adaptation and aid by and whom is at hand. In the life of Emperor Claudius, which coincides briefly with the harsh rabbinical life of Jesus, there were no overzealous fathers who created found wealth for 24 hour nursing care, no persistent vegetative states used for dramatic purposes to portend malignancy. You were butchered, or tortured, wounded, survived or not. This is more beneficial for bipedal primates than blood thinners allowing a 94 year old to catapult into thinking her care givers and relatives are demons boring holes in her skull. If some of you would like me to cease hating the devoid lives of so many invalids I've lived through in this bariatric driven Commonwealth, stop elevating Megan for her stoic coping, and for those of developmental birth who can, let us hope too, like the slim minority of paraplegics and amputees in the mainstream, that we can earn establishment prominence. That's real inclusion, not government contracts with religious organizations and state civil servant intake that can't tall it's asshole from its dung heap.