"That's Kim Kardashian's husband! He was in prison and had a problem with drugs. He was on a program."-- my mentally retarded and enthusiastic client Joseph, with his complimentary data banks
Having finally streamed the first episode of High Castle, my main dismay had nothing to do with its quality as an Amazon original, and its exposition was finely tuned for a war era drama; it is merely terrain in which I've been to before, alternate timelines already adapted for the small screen. I will meander into the intrigues of the series slowly, you'll have to be patient as I fail to resolve or succeed at some level with my long overdue transition, though I made poor Joseph happy, the high function mental retardation client, the sole constant in my brief rise and more torturous descent, as far back as 1991, perhaps even earlier I may have shared space with him. He recognized Cameron Hilson's picture on my phone and grew excited, and told me your story, Cameron. This, the simplicity of a senior aged child is one of the sole reasons I followed you back, a retarded man adding to celebrity literacy. All it means, at best, is a sardonic bemusement, which does not have to be virulent for its own sake. You were a baller. I, who can barely conceptualize balance on my feet, can barely fathom the exhilaration of sprinting like a gazelle on the field. You have a drug problem, did some short time? My little brother died a drug problem, and North Philadelphia, in my lifelong game of hopscotch, can be liked to hard time in the obstinacy of my insistence in making my own way. I have mentioned Lydia Nayo before, the lawyer who blew Philadelphia for San Francisco, feeling the need to confide in me, unbidden, that she, having been raped by a white man, had the ability to compartmentalize bad actors apart from white privilege and ethnicity. Good for Lydia. I applaud, and invited her to lunch when her mother died and she had to return east.
Surprised? It never materialized, which is just as well, with my dismal view of African American norms, it's brass insolence, even insistence that I give it recognition, as it pertains to this public housing environment. As unpleasant as it is to stipulate, blacks can be just as cruel, and stigmatizing, as an Asian who perceives Europeans as barbarians, though this is a neoclassical conceit long since superseded, layered and obfuscated, as everything is in the digital era.
I caught fire on George Will's "Dangerous Disability" column, and as the crusty and challenging libertarian trespassed my provenance, I had my chamber loaded, and lost my thread, and now I'm surly, our governance via New York City's jackass not rectifying matters. I've naught returned to my other assignment, but I've been a bit overly phlegmatic mid-May, and have much up in the air. Given that it will rain through mid week, I'll counsel my own re-entry, seeping my way back, not giving anyone room to comfort me in a hospice bed, when it comes to that.
Medium keeps its contributors informed about page views, and I suppose, because I was posting off the cuff, my comment on the Ask Ethan post about black hole theory correction picked up over a hundred views. I took some physics at Temple University and nearly flunked out, but this doesn't mean I despise the study of space. Most of it is counter intuitive even for the mathematical minds which grasp it, but what I meant, without entirely understanding extraordinary mass condensation, is: If we presuppose universes repeat themselves due to impaction, consciousness doesn't seem to repeat with it. I do not feel loss of identity when my cellular waste builds in my colon and discharges. We do not remember the squeal of pigs being electrocuted for their succulent flesh once we ingest pork, so information is in fact lost on a biological level. Information is lost on a cultural level as well, and we'll never learn as much as we need to to defeat destructive capacities of entropy. We're apes. Smart apes, the most dangerous species yet encountered, but apes, slightly better engineered, and while the equations may have been proven through induction, language itself imposes its own limitations.
Whatever the viability of theories on black holes and strings, motion and matter does not think about itself in those terms. Holes, strings. Simple implements of mammal amusements. Are physicists going to argue that energy is a living element? Stars are a chemical process, partial oxidation, partial hydrogen bomb. They aren't conscious, they aren't minds with directional intent. We'll never comprehend why particles and waves exist, why they create chemicals, nor why chemicals under the right conditions ingest themselves and reproduce, nor even define thinking. Thoughts have no mass. They evolved with the basic plankton brain, but do not exist. The only evidence we have for thought are the images of brain activity, but brain activity is not itself evidence of directional imperative. For that we have DVD teleplays.
Beneath opens with an interesting premise, seems to have a touch of after.life to it, which I admire intellectually, and then decelerates into a creature elimination film whose denouement shrivels on the vine. What is mildly intriguing about the script is survival guilt conjoined to the moral lesson of medical model brutality, not something burn victims with chronic irritation need to view when they feel their life slipping away, toying with the fact that familial bonds are the best humans can do, but with denial being necessary. Beneath the surface, sisters hate each other, whatever tender moments between them. My sister and I have a multitude of stakes within our defense mechanisms: shared abuse, a sister who should never have lived.
The disabled community makes excuses for those with minimal awareness, but I am going to be cruel. People like my sister Michelle should be put down. She lived 22 years in hell, even if she did not know it. Toward the end she struggled with constant lung fluid, and my parents did the right thing, but were wrong to let her live at all, and I'm making this assertion with my mother's sister free to read my link. I love my aunt, mind, but Disability In Arts is in part a last will and testament by a woman in a precarious position who allowed her life to be destroyed by intensely disappointed emotional investments in people and indoctrinations, a woman more than likely to be defeated by the metastasis of dubious African American competency, which has infested Western standards beyond repair, although it is true the citizens of Rome waited Hannibal out, and whatever the tactics of the general on his elephant, went on to rule the world. The European Union should fly the Syrian refugees to Russia.
If Putin is supporting Alawite ruthlessness with material, then let the leader of the Russian Federation handle the consequences.
OZY's ability to utilize twitter's lists is marginally opaque,and this was a legitimate request for guidance on the model, ignored-- and more than anything else, this willingness to ward off-- this account is just an opportunistic reservoir for spammers if I am going down, in any case-- gets to me. I am an OZY 2014 intriguing journalist, but because I went to their website and didn't know what to do, now I'm persona non-grata, because I was frustrated rather than pleasant. I am opaque on Medium's structure too, but Ev never offered me any cosmetic support-- OZY did, and their team refuses now to respond to me.
Did the intern listing me actually read what I was writing? People tried to shut me down for my empathy for the late, ineffectual anarchist Christopher Dorner. The only change between then, and now, I'm out of money, and a ten year old Quickie which suited me best, is down
The girl across the street, Jodi, lives by nursing home rules for the mentally retarded in a community model setting. Her case manager or welfare claims agent gives her 40 dollars a month as pocket change, and the state manages the rest of her entitlement. My ex, with his posterior multiple strokes mental processing, says "She isn't retarded, trust me." With umbrage indicative of a bad experience that, as his former lover, I am better off not knowing, but I know better than he that she is an MR client. Banned from this building for stealing.
She asked me for toilet paper over the intercom; in her mind, my slightly higher status obligated me to support her. Conservative principles kept me alive with 1963 neo-natal technology, and then tortured me in various institutional settings upon which liberal academia sort of lied to me--granting that I gave up hope in my 30's that a doctorate would necessarily do me any good (it would not now).
Popular sentiment of working class talk back: the world doesn't owe me anything. And oh yes it damn well does, a lot more than Carlos narrating pasteurized prisoners on horses.
"It's not a PC thing."-- Amy Harmon
Ms. Harmon's facial expression lends itself to superciliousness, and this is what centered my focus on her appearance at the end of a brief documentary about Rosie Glynn, her widowed mother, who teaches writing in the Pittsburgh area, and the younger Glynn sister, who is normal. Rosie is mentally retarded, and is herded like a livestock animal in a curtailed supported employment program, a very regulated form of slavery for aggressive imbeciles who are aggressive because they know their minds are a garbled bouillabaisse.
Amy, mind, has made her specialty out of the developmentally disabled autism spectrum. Case manager once removed, which is why her disingenuous expression is so easily read in her evasions, telegraphing itself loud and clear. The progressive expansion of radical equality isn't going to stop until our desiccated bones merge in ecological empathy for a blade of grass. Not that I don't understand.
On the contrary, I weep for Rosie, pity her mother, and realize the younger sister will deploy the psychiatric profession at some point in her maturity in order to handle the emotional guilt. I comprehend why Rosie Glynn removes oxygen from the dining room, creating a vacuum which crushes the soul 20,000 leagues beneath the sea.
Five years ago I wrote that I wasn't going to deal with agenda films like this often, but now and again they have to be included, because Amy Harmon struggles with the brutality of forthrightness to the degree that she herself is more the monstrosity than an adolescent screaming at her mentally ill mother to have an abortion, getting whipped across the face for it, and with a bloodied eye, almost going into foster care. This is the vitriol for which the fortunate, if droll, poet, Amy Holman, rebuked me, a vitriol that would have turned my half brother into a fetal carcass, as so many women do with their pregnancies. It is all about the demeanor, how we get censored, how we conjoin Asian women with their abortion rate. Bill Kurtis is offering an expose. I use his story with an undercurrent of divisiveness that incites Indian women with indignation. What's my point?
*
All I wanted to do is go out to dinner, enjoy the man's company, and fuck him, if applicable. I was healthy enough at the time to still engage in a romper room frolic, whether he needed Viagra or did not, and I still feel it. No matter how much I might humiliate my former editor, nothing will return the moment to me, the heightened magic of anticipation, that she destroyed lashing out at him over her keyboard, right in front of my eyes. Please. Don't tell me to buck up and keep trying. I lunged at nearly every possible opportunity I could since I was 36.
What man wants me at 52, with only the virtue of thinning pubic hair? I know women do this to each other, but what I did in my past life to wind up drawn and quartered by the ultimate third world den mother with multiple sclerosis must have been unimaginable. If I ever see her again, for all my physical vulnerability, she'll feel my scorn, the all consuming bitterness, like a phoenix reborn out of bone ash. I have to keep revising, keep pushing, now the blog, now the article, my only polish a glittering ferocity.
I was surprised when Monica queried me voluntarily about Frank, during Brenda's international incident two weeks ago, surprised that she chose to speak to me on her own, at all, though I'd have to look up the date. If I do not write it down, either online, hard drive, or hard copy, I cannot remember the time frames about these things. I still dislike Monica, in the sense that white attendant reactionism to me, or paternalism, as with the-Susan-who-treats-Sherry-like-a-large-toddler, and that wasn't going to work with me, is about equal to the African dysfunctionalism in this system that has so scarred my psyche. If any of you read a future byline which indicates that I have been killed by one of these sterling paraprofessionals, don't be surprised; it happens, and all of Josie Byzek's efforts at chronicle collection, all of New Mobility's educational awareness pieces, do not change the fact that beneath the surface, attendant care can be as abusive as nursing home neglect.
I am not trying to rap Ebert for attempting to bridge the gap with his fans; if he gets a few to turn their civic conscience on, this is not a bad thing, but Roger got old and got sick, and I have been swimming in this cess pool since my sister Michelle's childhood. I remember her institutional environment, remember mine, and by default, my local disability center destroyed my life. I may salvage something, but it is too late for me to go back, absorb Hathaway's stress as Andrea, and climb back up, and even if, when I mail my missive, someone gets me a lawyer, and this lawyer comes up with a tactical approach that works, and Linda is politely retired, and Tom either institutes reforms or moves on, my compensation wouldn't amount to chicken feed, and that is the enormity of injustice.
It took me a superhuman effort not to hurt myself back in 2000. I could not stand up for myself with EEOC intake personnel while I was decelerating and fighting it at the same time, even with a therapist, and this is the issue about time limits and the law. There is no other support system out there for me. Liberty is it, and they make me sick. My sister doesn't care. To her I am like Sherry, and to be treated like Sherry, and so I shield myself with contempt. My brother cares just enough not to be as callous as Stephanie, but when it comes to educating himself, and being aware, like the advocating author Rachel Simon, he chooses, like my sister, to stay blind, because they have children, and I am a terrifying burden.
Some people reading this may be moved, disabled or not, but do not know what to say or how to help, and I have already had my fill of Josie's compassionate pretensions that possibly cost me a happy memory of fun out on a date, with the anticipation of romance. I would wipe out the ideology behind the simplicity of independent living as a phrase with my bare hands, if I could, and it would not change a thing.
