Slopes for the Doctrine of Chances

 What if after all these years you discover that behind your determined, disciplined mind, impervious to discouragement, behind the fortress admired and envied by others, you have a tender, timid, wounded, sentimental heart?  --Mario Vargas Llosa, The Feast of the Goat, p4

Slopes for the Doctrine of Chances

Normally, suspended as I am between the pit and the pendulum, I would not pay attention to flimsy content generation from entertainment media, but the algorithm knows just how often I will yield to clickbait for a Star Trek headline, and on October 14^th, I thought Rick Gonzales’ hastily reassembled deadline profile for giant freaking robot, contending that Lien fell to Garrett Wang over a sex appeal vote, was worth a read. I did not know that some odd fifteen years later, bearing in mind behavioral deterioration doesn’t have neatly bracketed timelines attached, that this ensemble cast member of a “children’s show,” one that would turn Patrick Stewart into an internationally renowned superstar, would fall victim to alcoholism, domestic violence, and indecent exposure. My link here represents CNN’s initial reporting, itself probably compiled from a local Tennessee paper, or a stringer assigned to the township precinct, from which Gonzales aggregated his concluding paragraph, representative of how little automation has done for five & dime outlets. As I have previously indicated on Blogger, I myself went from earning 3k, starting in 99, deflating through 04, to virtual slave labor, two failed aggregate ventures, and then barreling into disaster with generic generation z mindsets in Medium's dubious cacophony of a collective palette. In other words, I understand the architecture of the padding in which Gonzales was engaged. I allowed it to resonate, allowed myself to feel something about Jennifer Ann Lien’s piteous fragility and the way Gonzales framed the arbitrariness of here today, gone tomorrow, because of the way in which producers and casting directors play shuffleboard. I worked in mental health; I am mindful of Foucault’s castigation of its practices, not that Lien’s neighbor wasn’t within her rights to protect her children, but the behavior of this celebrity with her latter day life of incremental shambles wasn’t really the full blown onslaught of mental illness as it is defined in the medical welfare paradigm, like shadows on the wall. She simply engaged in loss of inhibition, perhaps bored, unable to match Gwyneth Paltrow in an anti-gluten campaign, if this was the model she hoped to copy, within an industry afterlife. She made better connections than I did to pursue her telegenic appeal, fell further. All that seems to be left is a canonical asterisk.

Almost Less Than 24 Hours

The last time I sought emergency mental health services was between 1999 and 2000, after Linda was finished playing politics on my economic desperation. I do not bring it up to keep reviewing the respective prisms through which my former supervisor and I saw our interaction. It simply all boils down to the same thing: the image of my brother looking desperate, rabid, while my immediate family commiserated with the juvenile psychiatrist. This crisis wasn't about me, my immobility, but my younger brother's cathartic violence. He died a rapist and a vandal, wasted by AIDS, and I write this for anyone who cares to click the flag to read: I was pissed, majorly, about being pulled from my midterms to talk about Nicholas, and yet I'm pretty much the same, absent the desire to commit sexual violence, as such. My parents were a bad cocktail, a stereotypical Roman male with that singular Italian fury, and a beautiful but suicidal manic who ate her way out of her looks, a couple who manufactured two cripples and a dead sociopath, with my so called normal sister and her fucked up family.

"You need help," my sister's refrain after the CIL got done doing to me what it does to nearly everyone. There are variations: Dr. David Ward trying to get me to accept that I was clinically depressed, before CILS had a legal mandate, or my history instructor before that, trying to intercede in my life so he could sail me off to Harvard. Until I grew up some and got hit with the Tassoni thunderbolt, I wanted to marry Mr. Bruno, smiling at the normal puppy things. 

I should not write this, but despite the fact I am not at the Jayne Anne Phillips level, particularly since I am not a novelist-- and might have a little more change to bring my entitlement up a couple thousand if I was-- be that as it may-- I am fucking tired of the literary submission scene, but I can also never rise to the level of lawyer journalists like Jennifer Rubin, along with the others in her class. My withdrawal is pounding on me, yes, and my lunging hate (my audience should be so glad I am a quadriplegic, as I seem to have inherited Julius Caesar's thirst for war, or I am the -- never mind-- I cannot make my psyche complimentary to spree killers, though I have already) boils like a Georgia peach zombie wresting with the next vulnerable cast member. Even if I give my notice, flee, setting myself up for an unknown sleaze bag house arrest, I've past the point of revitalization, despite the fact that just as Virginia Woolf, we can push an exclamation point on the ecstatic. My fans who used to send me letters said "we'd never try to make a living as a writer," and I certainly never intended to, but re-matriculation? The harder I try, the crueler it becomes. 

Terminus, foie gras

"I saw a bunch of scared actors afraid of losing their jobs."-- John Corbett, who manages to make me curl, pleasantly

It was gratifying to see the late Patty Duke Astin in the instantly forgettable 05 Bigger Than The Sky, its two hour run time consuming my salmon pate preparation, a steady diet of which usually revives my energy, but not today, not even with a thousand milligram caplet swallowed beneath it. The amount of caffeine I have absorbed, the real shift in humidity as the summer season shifts into full gear, this accentuates my plaque build up, my arthritis, and the strange irritation in my rectum which has been and remains not part of my normal biological narrative since I allowed the late Frank access to it. A former aide named Kisha assured me that Frank's enthusiastic anal experimentation would not have done anything harmful to me. She is probably correct, as my intimacy with him ended within the first year and six months of our relationship, and any infection from his hazardous body would have done more to me by now; it is, nonetheless, a basic truism, before 2006 my colon in and of itself wasn't raising the potential of malignancy. The tendency towards polyps runs in the family, as well

In mid 2016, I understand the situational irony of actually being dead alive, almost as well as Duke comprehends, in either her maudlin or satirical modes, her emotional pendulum swings-- my mind and its acuity still relatively intact, but knowing the end is in sight, giving into it despite my libertarian exhilaration. Just getting through the day, making myself a meal, grinding what remains of my occlusion to get through my ligaments, breathing shallow, let alone driving this battered vehicle about my limited range, or throwing a load of colors in the wash, is doing me in, much like the labor of the Comtrex freight, protesting its heavy metal elements on the rails.

I was rather stupid to allow myself to get drawn in to the Yabberz community, and I'm extracting myself from it, reluctantly, true, like a puss-faced toddler. There are some sharp witted users who habituate the virtual dynamic of Golden State liberal hypocrisy, but the best of them visit infrequently; not all of them may have mental health issues, but one of the return users, harleyboy66, is an exact replica of the clientele I used to case manage, possibly dangerous under the right provocation. I can tell because of his lack of coherence. He was the wrong person to be having an online discussion with about quadriplegia and ideation. I am not quite certain what I'm going to *do* with Mike and Melissa's volatile maven. I agree with a Romanian critic that Yabberz has an unpleasant political miasma to it, but on the other hand, as a blogging platform, it does have its uses, and as I'm not under commission, I can still keep my account active enough to experiment with ideas, if I can keep a lid on threatening the faux liberals, as well as the true left, with total annihilation. If anything, Yabberz has contributed to my own polarization, and I am still not particularly fond of peripheral views to which a Cyclops is limited. And since I have forgotten my fatigue, obviously I need to be true to myself, and work, in the time I have, work.

I also want to scream at Tony Stiles to steal a hydraulic van and come rescue me from an African American punk majority, if only as a charitable contribution. Perhaps I should contact the Koch brothers.

Feasibility Study

It has been an excruciating week, and perhaps I've held off flipping totally out with a strength I did not know I had but I cannot do this again, and I've been more facetious than I've intended, diverting my inner maniac who can only hear her bones snapping like the dried out wishbone of a turkey breast. I don't know. I don't want to be done, but by the same token, camping out at Toomey's regional offices on the verge of hysteria achieves what? I'm like a city Feeney against the black power of Seth Williams, at least in terms of human trafficking in the independent living paradigm, and if the Karina I fired remaining in my life is the new force of Christian moderation on the ferocity of a genuflecting destitution, it is too little too late in hackneyed terms: "Would you want to live here?"
"No," she said, grasping what 22 years in this formerly mixed, now mostly nigger shanty, has done to my health. An old nigger down the hall with nothing better to do puts cards under my door on a cyclic basis, quoting Matthew in her nearly illiterate block letter pen print. I'd spit in her face without a second's hesitation if I knew who she was. The 1997 version of the Outer Limits classic is more sophisticated than the black and white original, with its charming use of tin foil. The black and white, however, has the passion of its conviction, especially due to the irrational exuberance of mutually assured destruction in its time. Today Dr. Simon Holm would be arrested for leading Pegida. 

The real me is exactly what the minority staff keeps attacking and threatening: an extremist created through having her welfare destroyed by section 811/202 housing corruption. Oh yes, by next week I'll be snarling less, if I haven't collapsed by then, but my humanity is damned, at least based on the preponderance of evidence.

Corporate Accommodation, Early onset

....There are none so easily carried away as those who are without passion. Turgenev

My chair was taking too long to finish charging yesterday for me to drive to an AT&T outlet for assistance, but as I managed to actually fall asleep last evening, I may make it this afternoon, and if wealthy enough, I'd offer Ma Bell's customer service a buffet. How many spastic trolls are there who get away with venting their criminal imagination using their own victimization? My deeper point about Levora, is that the Catholic nun misread the situation. Why push a dying young woman to get an equivalency diploma without teaching her about responsible behavior? 

Many women do sexually irresponsible things, and I've glided over some of my follies, for which I am now too weary, but one thing drilled into my Fallopian tubes was the command "Do not get pregnant!" And I never did. Cerebral palsy is not even degenerative, and yet my womb was forbidden to nourish a fertile embryo. Carriers, like Levora, who know they're carriers of horrific degenerative diseases should remain sterile. Too much trauma already afflicts us as it is. My anxiety may be a prelude to early senility. Marie [the aunt] reads it in me just as I've read it in her since my mother's passing, and I drink a pot of coffee approximately every twelve hours.

Why not continue to play Russian roulette with psychotropic medications?

Three reasons: I have observed how many mentally ill people nearly die on them, including my mother. A proscribing psychiatrist made her lithium dosage too high, and my mother had to be hospitalized for it a few years before she died. Ditto what I was exposed to at Matrix. Mental and physical illness are not distinct subsets, trust me there, and many seriously delusional patients get that way for physiological reasons, and not simply due to depression or traumatic stress.

Major third reason: Proscribing therapists do not know how to treat those of us with brain lesions. They get it wrong and we overdose into seizures. One of my consumers, Cheryl Ward, had cp about to the degree Linda Dezenski does, but her anxiety was much more pronounced than mine. She died here in the building at the sweet age of 24 because she took the wrong combination of script. In my estimation, non-terminal clinical euthanasia is preferable, even if ideation is occasionally an impetus behind it. Home of the Merciful Savior was bad enough as a childhood experience. Inglis House, however clean its linoleum floors are kept, has the overwhelming stench of human waste concentrated in it, so why do this to ourselves? 

When I selected Rudin in my Turgenev collection, I had no idea it was the author's first novel. My sympathies, being Jamesian, are omnipresent; the titular character is a vain windbag, stuck in time.

I don't have the courage to email Jerry and apologize to him for mangling our three semesters with each other in my posts, nor is it necessary. I sacrificed my chill factor in 2007 to contact him for the sake of his legacy. More than that is treacherous, but in a concession to his intellectual superiority, it wasn't his duty to give me a reality check about life as a quadriplegic, in academia, or out of it, in the intermingling of obsession, and a little hatred in the affection. Chair is done. I'm off, perhaps to ask for a prototype Apple to smash as an outlet, grinning, in resignation.

I know I make things harder than they have to be; I know I'm losing, dwindling away out of time, but it remains equally true I've sat here in the carnage of my career too long, and failed to utilize my savings within the appropriate setting to get away from what the independent living movement did to me; I live with my past dying in front of my eyes, and at times it is unbearable.

Think Positive!

Unlike Charles, or Michael Burry, who is both a writer's non-fiction construct and a real life investor with a medical degree, I failed though lack of application once too often. Case managing at my disability center was a mistake, not simply due to a pathological cat fight between me and a Jewish spastic, but because the human suffering I've seen is tearing me apart as much as the human suffering I've lived, and that includes what I had to absorb under Rick.

I do not blame the man. On the contrary, I remember his teaching lessons as if I was Elijah fed by ravens. I could see both Daniel and Rick clearly, having no desire for them, other than regret for my job. I had to be strong enough to live by institutional parameters, then absorb much worse for the sake of an appalling salary, and now minorities treat me like an imbecile, not deliberately, but because on top of all this fucking shit after being attacked by vicious dogs in their 70's for years, I should stay in this facility because I'm 52.

I'd rather become homeless and die through a seizure delivered by a taser. I'm not trying to nit pick every slight, but we've lost the ability to understand each other. Whether I go down to the telephone store this week or wait, the customer service agent couldn't grasp I log online through a USB broad brand plug in.

I still do not agree with Charles Krauthammer all the time, but I commend him for this series. Here, he tacitly admits what I more brazenly rage over. The health system is insane. I should not have to get a primary physician's script every time I need rehabilitative support, and if nothing else sparks an insurrection, the American health care models will do the trick.

**
I was, once, a powerful poet, whatever I sacrificed in technique, but alas, I didn't go into banking like TS Eliot.

Mimic

Blogger managed to frighten me, and I am still digesting it, as a prelude to the arc of my life ending exactly as it started, bodily functions constrained, wondering why viewers of my posts necessarily need to feel victorious in censoring a voice soon to fade regardless. Humanity knows it is in trouble, and power has shifted away from territorial governance to corporate control on a global scale, just as David Mitchell presaged it in Cloud Atlas, and just as the main catastrophe in the novel indicated, it won't really change that we're doomed to irrational repetition of conflicting interests, whether vengeance is refined through engineering efficiency or relegated to vulgarity, I am not certain I ever had a choice about my destiny, part failed scholar, part failed systems module, part semi-failed writer who cannot grasp everything, computer science being one topic of unfortunate illiteracy. Even if I desired comprehension, I could not grasp the complex aspects of circuitry and code, but understand the power it generates, and it scared me; I'm used to human censure, but not being wiped off search because I cause offense, or am considered irrelevant, or simply a provocateur.

Decorum would insist that I need not lift the curtains I do to prove a point, but I'm suggesting otherwise. We pay a price for sustaining people like me, especially when the judicial process cannot rectify the trauma which has to be necessarily absorbed. I am ignoring the health systems in place for that rather than seeking adequate treatment because mental health is a game of Russian roulette, and pharmaceuticals don't work. I learned this about intake long ago, just like prison, therapy is a cycle of recidivism by degree, and makes treating professionals themselves vulnerable, which liberal journalists ignore when they talk about crisis in services. There is no getting better for approximately a third of trauma clusters, only volume muting, and Google muted my volume, why?

The inferences? What I've insinuated about hate? Perhaps. I do not hate my ex-fiance in the traditional sense of domestic discord. I hate what he is, how the Bronx molded him, and hate how he lives, and how I live too. For my subjective intent, it isn't worth the price, which is why I engaged in an inappropriate social outreach and gave Tony Stiles my telephone number. His local notoriety doesn't mean anything to me personally except that it gives him a capacity I've lost in being vanquished so I took a chance, not really expecting that he'd oblige me with a reciprocal response as a knight in shining armor. I'm looking at a position for a health journalist, and I am not motivated, indecisive as to whether I should force myself to apply anyway. I'd rather become a dictator and overthrow a representative government, a brief and flaring bookend to my tortured legacy.

Scourge

"Old age is sordid."-- Georges Simenon

Leave it to me to hire a hypothetical methamphetamine user in Karina in order to ameliorate my justified social fear of revictimization, only to wind up deep fried in turmoil due to her inexperience. The fun never stops. I nearly went into scorn mode and almost lashed out at her, you stupid bitch.

That might apply to me as well, as I apply it to every person associated with Riverside Presbyterian. I liked Ed Berkowitz once, liked him and Suzanne, pitied her epilepsy and used him, Ed, as an example of an "acceptable man," if one like him was available-- and these niceties of social manner evaporated because he tried to hook me up with a nutcase who gives lectures about disparaged Jungian correspondences, subconscious, and disease, and I became illuminated to the fact that Ed Berkowitz was not a knock off of my Jewish side of the family, only a mental health consumer leading the less functional along, and I am pissed. 

Pissed that I reached out to a tenant who likes what he has in the Presbyterian management; pissed that I saw his mental heath issues in his countenance simply out of an innocent meeting with him on the tenth floor for coffee, pissed that I feel duped into have dislodged Zach Tollen's comfort zone, pissed that Karina pissed me off so much that I am willing to disrupt the status quo, putting blacks in their place by fighting back because now the white girl distressed me as well as the fat and thickened black matriarchs, who would have never done what Karina did anyway because they are black. I am the one who gave Karina the rope. I'm the one who has to get over it, even as I initiated my end game with this company.

I am going to give Nakea Fuller the finger too, PHA's *accessibility coordinator," which in translation means a black woman with a better pay grade than Debra Horne, with comparable competency issues.

I never did win any popularity contests, laughing. I am going to be gone soon, and my masterwork? How Philadelphia engenders bigotry and class conflict, reflecting the meanwhile on Scandinavia, placid and static, the palest Caucasians, sterile, polite, with their idea of dramatic conflict to wear dour pouts, get their socialized medical treatments, return to their service vectors with smiling "jas". They would encircle me as if to protect their clime from a foreign invader, threatening to sour the milkweed.

I applied to be a Beacon Writer, after a stumble and fumble, with my best pet peeve: the crony capitalism of real estate. If my father knew that I've thrown down the gauntlet with Presby he'd kill me if he did not have one foot in the grave, but I have to fight.

Fugue

Perhaps I presume, but we'll presume then. Melinda looks like a gentle soul who perhaps took a knock or two during the recession, and despite the fact that my virtual life hasn't done much for me, or, the little it has done is a little late, her picture with the boy recalled home and some better moments in Ridley Park. It was not all sexual abuse by proxy of my mother's men. She picked them up like stray dogs. Joe the Flop, Walt the Indian, a Jamaican I never met, Don, Beaky. Men drawn to over-sexed fat volatility, even my ailing father on his knees begging her not to divorce him. Mom had a way. I guess men smelled she was a whore, ignored the weight. 

I am so depressed I am like blackberry juice on the fingertips, and want to give my notice, without a damn plan in all the world. I want out, more than anything, I just want out of this building, though it is the same in every public housing building, and all tenants spar with building owners. Karina is causing me grief, and I cannot trust myself during inspections tomorrow not to go at it with the staff and want not to be here but bottle blond has her own problems and I can dismiss her from service twice too and laugh starkly. I might as well be bisexual with the shit I am putting up with for a 35 year old white girl who reminds me of home, home that no longer exists for me.

I am not in the best of shape. My father's sister is dying. Stomach cancer. No surprise, but Marie has been my only support since my mother died, and padre is exhausted trying to keep wicked stepmother Louise alive, and if I follow my heart, and scuttle downtown to the Italian consulate, let's assume I tantrum my crippled poverty across the Atlantic. My regret will consume me five minutes after docking, because the still virile Stanley Tucci was right. Italy has nothing but history, and yet I want to go, and upon getting there, storm into RAI and punch Luigi Perelli to ensure his prostate remembers my fist, the crafty old socialist. He is a liar, and so is The Washington Post.

I would not know what to say to Melinda, at least not in digital idiolect, except to say thank you for a picture of her smiling peace with life. I'll never experience it. Would she like a roommate?

Miscellaneous Protocol

"They do not have to be doing this,"  Cassie James Holdsworth, linear whiner at regulatory restriction

No, I am not feeling particularly better, though I am less phlegmatic in color. Food is an anathema. It would be a pleasure to cease digestion and consider the possible vaginal absorption of Ensure. The Golden Years Rush.

Common Sense LOA edition back on shelf, due to other priorities, but Paine's anti-authoritarian rationale derived from agrarian Semitic polemicists mistrustful of city states would fit right in with the bravado insurgency. Would you enjoy a small token of honesty? Okay. I took a dig at the Miriam Carey event yesterday, a dig on the basis of deconstructing irrational behavior, upending it with the tenet that Obama speaks to everyone on nearly a weekly basis.

But in my annoying interdisciplinary approach, the Carey family has my commiseration. Miriam was sick, much sicker than the system ever attempted to make me accept about myself. I have been in Senate offices in DC, and I do not fuck with the capitol police, and I'd vanish at the approach of the Secret Service, who would kill me because I am mad at the President, which in translation means the trappings of the Oval Office would not subdue the Spastic Tongue Lashing, and then I'd go boom, like Miriam, poor woman. I do not believe she had to die like that, but what to do? I'm not that radical about non-compliance. She did fuck with the capitol police, the secret service, the landscaping contractor.

Nonetheless, the odds of her gaining access to the President were 10 to the sixth power to one, and it is unseemly, playing wild west with a citizen in pain in Washington's metro area with her baby in the vehicle.

On the less slim chance that my energy realigns sufficiently and I can land future assignments that I will complete to an editor's satisfaction, I am in search of a photographer with a decent portfolio who can negotiate their own contracts. I'll reiterate this every so often. I cannot deal with pics, even if Apple had spastic smart phones. I do have a portfolio. It may not be Vanity Fair, but it is sturdy, with one byline to a Pulitzer Prize winner. I am not in the mood for breakfast. Sulky morning, wondering how a dental hygienist could afford an Infiniti in the first place.

We need a moment of conscience.

Charm Fractals

"I tried that,"  Vera Farmiga on a woman's time honored prerogative on experimentation.

Up in the Air (2009) signals a number of conflicted messages I am not prepared to discuss in significant detail; it has to seep in, hopefully faster than my ligament contractions, but it rivals my admiration for Aaron Eckart's scathing bite, and my initial viewing makes me regret lack of effort to see it in its initial release. Definitively of its age, I see things in the comedy which point to why The American, a year later, didn't mesh. Clooney's ruthless charm is too decent for psychopathy in actualization. Depersonalization is one or few degrees removed from an assassin nerved by conscience, very similar to lack of accountability without litigation to force the issue. This Teflon mannequin aspect the actor projects at his best may explain his self-appointed status as Sudanese savior, and also why he and Clooney pere mesh uneasily between news media and entertainment. "Why did Europeans do everything?"

My loutish philosophy professor used to toss this trick question out to his class as a kind of false positive, but let me ask, what has the guilt tied to imperialism actually solved? Aren't some of Clooney's more substantial projects a rather bleak answer in kind? 

My follower shambled in from his daily routine the Tuesday evening I chased the Rosenbach's tail feathers. I was in congress with the developmental idiots, reviving McCarthyism. Ed did not say hello, and I simply observed him walk in, take the elevator, knowing his sanguine temperament did not mean to trick spark my social fear based on Project Share field duress. No regret, no pang of remorse. I had my doubts from the moment I sat with him over coffee on the tenth floor, but I also lost my sense of provocation as well.

There is a lot of bull shit artist in me, but spastic flesh moving past the half century mark is actually coming home to roost, and in the degree to which I am pressed for time, murder conspiracies may not matter, made into a kindle single, or seriously considered. Pointless wild justice on the principle of the thing. Does it come down to the amount of indignity we have to tolerate, the number of casualties needed before real movements mitigate the body politic?

Taps

High features, naturally strong and powerfully expressive, had been burnt almost into Negro blackness by constant exposure to the tropical sun," Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe

The more we learn.  It was an accidental circumstance that a Jewish public housing tenant, who is in a comparatively soiled outhouse more lowly than the gorilla below me, reconnected me to mental illness empowerment intake; my anger was triggered because I asked the aforementioned tenant for more information, and should know by now that ethnic Communists undergo lobotomies in terms of gate-keeping skills. My spirit, my very essence, needs a change, and the reason America is in jeremiad is because the social safety net is destroying our ability to take the initiative, and my starvation for fresh space is turning into a pathology, and it need not.

This is not about mood swings. I have client confidentiality I need to maintain-- Christ-- but I knew well enough how pedestrian Edward is-- never again. Never. You may hold me accountable. No more overtures to public housing residents. That the president has lost all credibility with me is not nearly as disconcerting, but represents a national disheartening. I would prefer to leave the country, seriously. I can more readily doom myself under European case management than rot in the city of my birth, watching my digital clocks tick. Given the time I should be resting, but I am trying to contract typhoid like John Malkovich, who also does blindness in his first major supporting role. Actors never get it right, even the top billed like Malkovich whose face is now in protean death mask stage, sightlessness. Not Cameron Diaz in Garcia's vignettes.

Things You Can Tell is very good, merges into itself and its inclusionary frictions, yet I balk at saying it is a great film meshing disability, urban loons drawn familiar, to our recognition. I have dealt with Garcia as auteur before-- but the film doesn't fit on the mantelpiece properly in terms of really challenging viewers. This is how I am dealing with it now. With Garcia, it is about the magical realism of the father. The style is a shield, because we know we're looking for nuances of interpretation. These days we're all magical realists, our wars fought to be cached on YouTube. Living the science fiction we read as affixed adolescents, our government at the bidding of a Charlie Rose scoop. Yet despots fascinate us. Admit it. We create narratives around them, held by megalomania, giddy when it is fractured by hubris. Mussolini hung like a dead and bloated mule carcass. Czar Nicholas out of tune and executed in countless variations of Doctor Zhivago; all of Russian literature is Doctor Zhivago, the American induced mortal illness of Hugo Chavez, or Elizabeth's beheading of Mary Queen of Scotts via Glenda Jackson.

The blind rarely have a fixed eyeball. Their countenance usually has the appearance of a pronounced brow ridge.

Some affection for Isabelle Allende. The aide who received the stories of Eva Luna recognized me this morning. She was a single mother child herself years ago. Blows to the solar plexus aren't helpful. Deep breaths. I thought Edward Berkowitz cared enough about my concerns to be discriminating, and taking a few minutes to categorize the situation behind these private lectures he disseminated with Zen-like laissez-faire would have shielded me from a past with very negative consequences. Perhaps some of you understand how leaving a job is like a divorce. He worries my use of detail compromises online safety, but my emotional vulnerability never crossed his mind; he and I know each other and have the ability to ascertain each other's reality, unlike forum moderators. Existential hopelessness.

Newly Minted

Contemplative. Ritualized execution in the 21st century does not carry the same significance it had under the monarchical symbolism that so concerned Foucault. The death of Nidal Hasan may therefore be pointless as an administered justice; it may in fact offer him a self-conceptualized dignity as a martyr that he does not particularly deserve, living in that broken body, removed now from the empathy of the human socializing dynamic, though how these analytically framed objections to the death penalty apply to treason is in a separate sphere all together. Treason is different than most capital crimes, even spree murders, and Hasan is unquestionably a traitor, one of Clarke's domestic enemies that the military brought on itself through lax standards of accreditation. Ironically, Hasan has reached his nefarious status simply by falling back on eighth century morality codes. Assimilation could not create the comity between identity and western fidelity to standards, to procedure, to multi-cultural influx. Is it too simple to say Hasan's superiors could have prevented the Fort Hood massacre by relieving the man of his duties? Perhaps he would have preferred giving up his citizenship and joining Hamas, that wonderful league of indignation.

Flesh micro-managed, hemmed in by constriction however long it lasts, ostomy bags to discard his excrement, pressure sore maintenance. He has, in a sense, dehumanized himself, and may not survive prolonged incarceration regardless of appellate timelines. What standards are psychiatrists required to adhere to in order to practice psychiatry? Why was such a man drawn to such a field in which his performance was so mediocre? Why didn't the military apparatus raise enough flags about his behavior? Why does society treat me like an Islamist simply because I was born the way he is now immobilized?

Researching a pitch can still amount to procrastination. Worrying my level of diplomacy, but I have to look past ideology and advocacy for the time being. Larger issues at stake.

Bolingbroke, Deep Purple

"Oh come on Joanne, we all know that spastic contraction increases the intensity of the convulsions, and I know what the power of the truth is!" -- Linda C. Dezenski, at the beginning of the end of everything good I clung to about the American left.


Any individual on the inside of the independent living dynamic would liken the above email exchange to a standard disability sex seminar, nothing graphic, no implicit intent here to humiliate, or even threaten. I had solicited the woman's advice on vaginal dryness, and I am the one who went beserk in the end stage, and only hurt myself more by cascading into a rage and its subsequent emotional fracturing that I never want to experience again, and only by degrees, and an iron will, survived what this above morally corrupt executive is capable of doing to others for the sake of power, really on the interior of Shakespearean examination of what drives the human will to command, govern, ascend, accrue wealth. I understand Dorner, and given the edification of Ellroy's crime noir, I am not quite ready to concede that the Los Angeles police department is preeminently righteous in this matter, even after the death of Rodney King. The tragedy of Christopher Dorner, however, is that it took him four years to embody living death, to decide to strike, knowing that in doing so he has given up on his humanity, falling into the age old fallacy that his skills put him above human empathy. It is up to me, if not as a commissioned journalist (and no, I cannot cover a deadly and fast moving event like this) then as a writer of literary skill, to negotiate men like Christopher.

Linda is not causing me pain now, and most of the staff around her, and my old friends who contributed, are dead, or left the independent living center, but that culture gave me blow after blow after blow for nine years after this eight month cyber exchange led to my rift with her and my subsequent denigration, to which my landlord and economic contraction contributed mightily, and now my life depends on my ability to make money through writing almost by necessity. And the ablest response? Take drugs, get therapy. You need help, tuning us out, not listening, banning us off social networks, (in my case sometimes unfairly, I was myself on TLN but never went on the attack against their considerable moronic personas, the owner simply would not pay me for the one chapter I did, hello life long ban, after four years, I cannot keep going through this, letting my guard down and then getting exiled). This is what progressives inflict upon themselves, even Jesse, ever the oportunist to stay in play. Then the professionals go on the air to discuss the psyche and its aberrations. What has created this new playbook after 9/11? The DC sniper, VTech, Aurora, Newtown, and now the latest alienated paramilitary man. This is not attributable simply to guns as a glittering commodity, dicing mental health diagnoses. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, while I calculate even a mild disruption by Nemo. It will not be pretty, never is in our modern welfare state.

Anticoagulant

"You can do better sister. I'm married." Richard Conte, giving the Eisenhower era bourgeois a tutorial on the benefits of denial.


When I listen to the American left and its moderate counter voices go at it over a film like Zero Dark Thirty, I throw up my hands, if not in despair, then at least, futility. Kathryn Bigelow glamorizes torture, depicts it as no more than a video game, or she does not. We need new gun control legislation, and while we empower everyone, hey, civil rights is not a suicide pact, and potentially violent people like James Holmes need to be contained, so let's take a page from the affluent psychiatrist paraplegic who eschews his other classification as a wheelchair user and return to the good old days of involuntary commitment, while cynicism is the intellectual reserve of the mediocre, like the spastic_dowager, who has taken many risks to leave her scarred psyche bleeding in her amateur neuro image scan without quite crossing the border toward anarchy, which, even if I did, probably would not be taken seriously, while still cognizant enough to know that eradication has been done many times in the course of civilization outpacing our capacity to cope, and that after we get over this massacre, that genocide, we lose more definition, and so what is the use of being slightly more forgiving of Mussolini for being an inept projection of a virile thug. Isn't she funny, the poor little spaz, getting a little attention from Europe, Asia, in fascination? Mockery? Perhaps as a target of exploitation. You don't even know what horror is you little gnome, so why not be more positive and upbeat while the US is in its superpower status, however much it is diffusing?

We have short memories, whether in geological historical time or merely related to the course of human history, and I do not have to spearhead this, and could be nice, engage in the pleasantry of willful blindness and small kindness, when merited, I just have not dropped those dimes.

I have not seen my sister's eldest girl, Nicole, since the death of her granny. She is in a Catholic college now, and do not know what she makes of my rift with her mother, if anything. Stephanie shields her from me, afraid of what I might say about granny's past, or her own mother and father's, for that matter. The topic of my sister's pregnancy termination is a prime example, one of my searing trump cards; it is not that I want to hurt nieces or nephews, but merely that I must refuse the censorship of manner, politeness, merely due to this notion that kids don't know. Parents kid themselves about what kids do or don't know, and I may be wrong, and Nicole's children will live in a better world of radical equality of the kind that frightened Orwell, Huxley, in their totalitarian era.

If anything survives on this rock after we engineer ourselves into --*, natural evolution might want to give the lucky sentient horseshoe toss to the cuttlefish; yes, I know, that is misanthropic mediocrity crying uncle.

We all have better days.