The Taste of Ginger in the Encroaching Dark

The largest of the war programs, begun three months after the outbreak of the Civil War, also evolved into an old age program-- Raymond Richards, Closing The Door to Destitution

At the risk of alarming Blogger's gate keepers, I thought I'd be dead when I reached this point in my personal fortunes, and, amazingly, I am not; not yet, but I am driving on a trick wire. One thing goes awry, like my old micro bake oven kicking in, and I've had it. I cannot rely on my relatives supporting me with checks forever. In tandem with this, my freelance pitches have foundered. I am working, but I cannot think of new markets, have trouble comprehending how Burry bet against credit default swaps and made money for his sometimes irascible investors. I even went so far as to trouble Timothy Taylor to explain this in a post, and the plodding economist finally ignored my email, perhaps not knowing how to explain bear markets. Buy low, sell high. My financial acumen goes that far, but I will be damned if I can grasp how failing subprime mortgage loans made a very few very wealthy, nearly killing me without trying-- not that Michael Lewis doesn't have command of his subject in The Big Short. I just do not see how bankruptcy for indigent failures like me drives investment. Independent press authors wrote openly about living off accumulating debt in the Small Press Review when Len Fulton still printed his tabloid monthly. I lived off my Discover Card awhile in 1996, but sank so far under I am afraid of applying for credit again, and certainly can't claim commissions. To boot, I'm out of nicotine, and will have trouble handling the pathological rage seeping into Riverside's infrastructure. Getting past the month of January is going to be a tickle, and not of the salmon pink variety, and yet, despite this, I'm unwilling to implement my suicide. Not just yet. Maybe I hit on something and a merciful editor gives me a small advance toward a kill fee, though it would have to be a fast transfer.

Entertaining the notion of seeping into places has always entranced me, in terms of its literary motifs, which is why a loosely joined interlocking episode film like the 1995 Four Rooms merits the attention of piss water. The film may have been based on Roald Dahl's unsparing success entertaining children darkly, but the dowager saw it as an overlay of suburban spoofs like Bewitched and The Addams family, and those series too, benign as they were, stitched over the questions we asked in our nuclear households, "Is this all?"

Whether one rooted for Elizabeth Montgomery or preferred Lee Remick, the comedy actress did not have Remick's range, which was good enough to support Richard Burton.

In terms of sour mafia films, Johnny Cool inhabits its place with malingering urine odors, yet it is fascinating to watch Silva waltz his little rancid dance. Montgomery comes exceedingly close to doing something interesting at the intersection of good breeding horny for brutality. It is, in fact, one of her best studio roles. She almost saves the film, but not quite. Nomenclature fails us at certain points of comparison, and Tim Roth would go on to better success as the sinister epileptic in The Deceiver two years after Rooms falls flat, and yet cannot quite share the mantle for emulating Brit Pack menace in maturity as does Christopher Walken, who drew Richardson into a web of evil which subsumed her.

I was never in a place where I dreamed of an assassin's infamy, and do not mean to make light of the UK's concern over Colborne, but his arrest is reminiscent of an episode of Mister Ed. A horse is a horse of course, and the thought of taking pot shots at the Prince of Wales, as if succession actually changes things, is ludicrous, and yet, this is the age in which we live, isn't it? Time to check my mailbox, and humiliate myself trying to buy a box of cat food with quarters.

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.

The Mucinex Capsules Slipped My Mind

Yael Grauer is right about one thing: Choices we make intersect with how life experience molds our outlook. Emotional over-investment can impede success, as much as alienation can enhance it, but in reading her post about her depressed friend, the dividing line comes into play: why ambulatory people who have work they care about would commit suicide is beyond me, and her work smacks of an insular narcissism typical of all Americans. Who among us would want to be in Jason Rezaian's predicament, whatever our problems? An Iranian interment might change my mind about bronchodilators, perhaps with lightning speed, although it would be something for the imagination, wouldn't it? Pitting caustic spastic intelligence against the Persian Revolutionary Guard. Acute blunt force trauma, and voila, one bravely deformed skeleton is a minute addition to anthropology. Where was I?

Suicide, or my fascination with Burry's speculative success, his willingness to trust Michael Lewis with such an intimate portrait in The Big Short, which I'm reading on loan. If I tried to invest the little I have left in any sort of speculative fiance I'd run afoul of HUD. Libertarians may hate the Internal Revenue Service, but if they had the clout to dismantle HUD I'd be able to move toward decomposition with some residue of pleasure. Every public housing unit in this country and not a few university apartments, look exactly the same, perhaps built up with Chinese drywall.

Before I graduated to COPD, I had chronic bronchitis, which Rick might remember, and expectorants used to clear me up, with a great deal of fluid, and I've cheated myself this way for many years, like a leper in a Philippine sanatorium, yet another de facto colony of the United States. Why do Asians inhabit these islands? Like many disparate regions in Africa, things haven't changed outside of Manila, beyond Imelda Marcos absences for a lampooning article in Time, and never forgotten from my history lessons was McKinley and his deplorable governance of  the islands at the turn of the century. Of course in 110 it has metamorphosed into progressive determinism, with typhoons and cluster villages ravaged by flooding. 

Forget my conflicts with my building managers, work, take it easy, and bolt, one last time, die hard, die well, write a better post in forty-eight hours. Forgive myself for being an asshole, something I find rather difficult to do.