Arthur Miller's Larynx

"What are you, my wife?"   -- a harried paraprofessional who was grateful I recalled he forgot to fax his time sheet

When management turns on the radiator, I always tend to destabilize in my intestinal region, though somewhat unbeknownst to me, I was vulking waste into my disposal briefs because of a summer cold, so the situation has somewhat reversed itself, even though my interior air quality is now analogous to a fabled Turkish bath. And we've had so much of this lately. Erdogan's authoritarian hypocrisy, the House of Saud and its Janus face. If I am familiar with Khashoggi's writing I cannot remember it. Of course he did not deserve death in a choke hold with dismemberment, but I am going to assert a truism via which I only diminish my once vaunted desire to return to the ranks wherein those with contracts club each other over the head: Saudi Arabia is an enemy.
It is over now, the cold, but I desperately need to regain some independence. I cannot continue to function like this, with or without this minority and our near affair. I don't want him, and this is a near 180 degree turn, but I can't feel anything for a man who disdains my thirst to return to analysis. Our welfare partnership nearly tore asunder this past Monday. He became furiously angry that the kitchen was in moderate disarray, given my punishing helplessness in this Quantum model. I love my godfather, but the vendor he runs, Mainline Medical, failed me. My suffering is obdurate, and my purported nurse blew a gasket because I did not make the fill-in aide do a better job. He frightened me as if I had actually been weak enough to sleep with him, and it nearly ended that morning between us. It is probably the way it will end, although he grew tender, appreciative, when I simulated "being" his woman, reminding him the time sheet had to be faxed, after we closed the rift which only fuels my confirmation bias. A failed little boy who cries for his mother, this fellow. I'd flick him away like a speck of lint, remembering I too can reject able bodied men. I'd go on, colder, harder, bigoted, but you've had enough implosive virulence from yours truly whose first priority is weaponizing anesthetics against homosexuals, mounting them with pins, despite the papal voice of Francis: Do not condemn them. Indeed, I admire the illumination of Foucault despite his resistance to thesis, on body mechanization. AIDS was in its infancy as a known pathogen in 1987, so I cannot, much like Erdogan, go "too" far, but I respect Foucault's use of a structuralist approach to make us see the insidious nature of control on our physiology, invidious , ever encroaching. Perhaps, the more rigorous the work product, the more sexual risks Michel Foucault needed to take. Well, he was French.
Into this, the Facebook engaged in a mass purge last week, and Breitbart, nonetheless, stirred me into empathetic anger for Brian Kolfrage. I am following him on Facebook, not yet on Twitter. Here is the article informing many of us about why we lost PM Beers. Here is the press release. It may read like a conscientious consumer protection plan, yet I never trusted social media from day one, and have some degree of difficulty placing a three limb amputee with a family to support on par with Rasputin. I will have a more focused post on the conflicts herein, perhaps on LinkedIn, which censored me briefly from participating in groups due to "lack of relevance." Now I simply do not engage. Before my older more functional Quantum failed, I made a tremulous job search on LinkedIn, and nothing ever panned. I received letters of interest from unfunded grants, like Plato's cave wall. I have to broaden my efforts. However weakened, the dragon wakens once more. Help me.

Hyper- vigilance with Lobster Bisque

"She went after everybody," my dead ex-fiance on why Trudy Richardson's predecessor, Brenda Williams, was terminated.

Once a nervous breakdown occurs, however mild it might have been in comparison to that of maternal progenitors, the threat of an escalating relapse is always present, the anxieties of post traumatic stresses more prevalent, the war between pragmaticism and the platform for your byline a harder struggle, as I tossed my Lessig rebuttal, as a speculative all nighter, to Brian Doherty of Reason when I actually had another pitch for him, and the dead bloodhound olfactory nerve linked to my ego is saying leave him alone. At least for a few months. On the other hand-- there is always the other hand, even if one wants a libertarian flag to flutter over virtual skeletal fracture, my bones snapping in creative destruction, my younger sister yelling at me when I said civilly that I know she'd put me away, time permitting, when the time comes; but we did not fight. I simply told her my writing ability was losing to anxiety, and if I was ever to in fact go senile she needed to tell me.
"Get out more."
With what? The LOTR meet up tolerates me, but none of its members reach out, and while the peripatetic Karina does reach out (maybe she needs an elder female figure too spastic, ever think of that?), the failed private care giver and the troll are on different tranches.  Karina isn't a peer, and I really have nothing to talk with her about.  Extremes of destitution take their toll on the calcium of bone which has passed the half century mark. The disabled community which follows me online cannot really help me, even if I embraced them more readily, which I do not. Where I am not cruel outright, I am either otherwise cold, or cool, although this particular slice of my audience can take pleasure in the fact that I've taken 20 lashes from think tanks I believe I have a divine right to penetrate. Snorts at self. Get up, keep fighting. I had an argument in my head about why I abandoned My Disability Matters. He and I messaged each other about prospective job proposals, and as usual, the end result was a significantly lower level of expectation. "The site is up, maybe you can write about it." Thanks Dale I know you're blind and have a much more positive attitude, but no thanks. It is analogous to fake news and false hopes.

In relation to the left's latch onto the newest evil, that of digital propaganda, Foucault has a point when he raises his voice about genealogy records being a more trustworthy metric over narratives. Take Gwen Ifill's death. PBS inflated Ifill's video eulogy out of proportion; the Newshour, one of the first pre-cable news shows to air the Watergate hearings, spent an entire week giving Gwen a memorial. It may not have been a concoction, like the pizzeria, secret den of iniquity, but it was a lot of inflated padding, less so in print. Her obituary wasn't truly news, not under the rubric of the right to know. It was an accolade, meaning, in essence, that much media filler is a take, a perspective, basically unnecessary, diluted already by television technology; now it collapses under automation. I'm still enough of a journalist to know how to check my facts, how to investigate and confirm. A public which cannot do the same cannot simply paint Russian hackers as the new red devil. 

Closer Look at the Fault Lines

In this great tradition of the eminence of detail, all the minutiae of Christian education, of scholastic or military pedagogy, all forms of  'training' found their place easily enough.-- Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, p 140

It is difficult to remember how frightened we all were in the year after 9/11, and most analysts believed, at least before the timeline became cogent, that Muhammad and his protege signaled the dawn of a new era. As far as mass murders go, Muhammad was atypical, not an impulse spree killer like the Aura shooter. The discipline he displayed was true anarchy against the state, at least initially, and biography is a bit disingenuous with its quick facts. Muhammad was a solder first and foremost, and then a domestic terrorist in the last months of his life, and probably has more affinity with Lee Harvey Oswald than we would care to credit. Both men were molded for the sake of the national defense, and both the assassin and the serial sniper had a degree of temerity rare when it comes to treasonous behavior, if one accepts that Oswald was a lone actor.

This is the price we pay for being the sole animal able to manipulate biology and body to the aerodynamic extent that we do, as Foucault's analysis explores, a homosexual so fascinated with control and assembly, ironically to pay an exorbitant price, perhaps unwittingly, for his own sexual desire.

The digital age has made us aware, conversely, of how rapidly we're superseding our own bipedal engineering, toppled in hubris by complex financial instruments and proxy conflicts which could trigger global aggression of some sort, especially as Turkish destabilization is not a headache NATO needs on its plate. Not that anyone cares what an impoverished spastic thinks, but it might be time for NATO to close ranks against Putin's recidivist incursions. Russia is hardly in a position to re-establish its Soviet empire, and could be stopped with a firm display of unity and muscle. Let Isis have what it wants. The US made Iraq ungovernable in an ideological argument with extremism that it failed to win, hence, let the new Islamists create their modern caliphate. They'll evolve. Everything does.

From The Mouth of Ashley Judd's Assassin

"You think I pushed Cheryl too hard?", Stephanie March, SVU incarnation

Hilary Swank and Jennifer Garner have the nearly exact corresponding genotype in the eye of a casting director. They are both reasonably attractive tom boy brunettes with well defined cheekbones, with complexions comparable to a glass of milk; not great beauties, but wholesome American girls with thick African defined lips in a darker contrast to their Caucasian skin tone, at least with lavender colored lipstick, with equally equivalent range and talent, the only real difference between the two of them is Swank attained elevation against Eastwood and then went poof, both women having trouble maintaining their first billing leads on screen, with Garner more tangible to television. Wait another ten years lady. At 44 you think your body will hold the assembly line, mature but sturdy. By 55 those martial arts moves you've perfected as Supergirl in a technocratic age will require performance enhancing drugs.

It is easy to believe as brunettes, we are all Hilary and Jennifer, this is why the studio selects them. Girls just like us who marry the reasonably hip boy next store Affleck, but none of are truly like this, on closer examination, the athletic naivety which muddles its way through rural trash family exploitation and betrayals of trust, landing on our feet with a chance at second love, or the true father figure riding to the rescue on a mercy mission which concedes that our determination and strength as overwhelmed, shielded, as always, by the Hollywood marriage, an inexplicable anachronism in the modern age, much like Foucault's fascination with the royal body of the sovereign as a living embodiment of the body politic. Michel's queer intellectual rigor wasn't in error, as the still relatively undefined AIDS virus destroyed his body due to his inability to stave off unsafe anal penetration and direct his energies elsewhere, (though in fairness, in 84 ,  Fauci's carefully proscribed phrases about "unsafe sexual practices" weren't current in liberal lexicography). The health of the sovereign does reflect the health of a national power. The real problem, as we hurl four years ahead, where the dowager logged on to research temporary political jobs, isn't the pneumonia, but the clots, the concussions, bad temperaments tailgating fading relevance, on both ends of the political spectrum. More on this in more demanding thought processes later; this post was borne out of an annoyance, desiring some quiet evening reading. The dowager failed, volume and video the only things to penetrate a sterile evening, loneliness, fear, sore epidermis, stressed digestion.

Epistolary Art

"Actually, McCain wasn't that much of a maverick." -- Kathleen Parker

AO Scott represents the worst aspects of east coast liberalism; had he been presented to me as an ambulatory husband I would have been allowed to choose, I might have taken a second look at the pair bonding dynamic between Josie Byzek and her partner Virginia (not really, but in terms of trigger happy hyperbole what is a broken down and angry writer to utilize?) Assuredly, he is an excellent critic, but the difference between the shield of his snobbery and the pretensions of my failed intellectual ambitions are leagues deep and miles wide. I would have been perfectly happy being Patrick Stewart's fuck bunny on an Enterprise mock up instead, and this has much to do with why I breached the paywall of The Washington Post, only to discover I now belong to the harem of Jeff Bezos.

What is an old woman to do?

My letter to my former state representative Babette Josephs is important and I am struggling to get it *right,* in template form because it will probably serve for the most part as my first chapter for a non-fiction book proposal on why independent living centers do not work. I fully understand that I am not the only American traumatized by bad executive acts and you are sick of me mentioning Linda's name and hey spastic, look what it is doing to you?

But what the paradigm did to me reflects the hell, literally, it inflicts on others who cannot in fact raise their voices. Can I actually get Linda fired? I really don't know, but in real world terms, if I had taken action then instead of fearing that the EEOC would have turned its wrath on me, she would not have remained as second in command. What the center's community services staff did later in terms of their lack of competency are additional jewels in the crown, and what triggers these oppressive engagements is what Foucault examined with the design, conception of the panopticon. I have to walk this line, move, rescue my literary legacy all at the same time. If all else fails, I could mew to the Sicilians.

Mechanical Stigmata

There is a passage, page 20 in the American print edition, where Broch's ruminations on the military uniform reasonably anticipate Foucault's pertinent observations about imposed controls on the body, toward a greater efficiency, in Discipline and Punish. Sheridan's translation is accessible, but understanding Foucault is a difficult task, though for me a necessary one, if my only weapon against state control is my intellect, or what remains of it. I am studied enough, however, to see in Michel a near brilliant thinker, who, like Nietzsche, succumbed to sexual death, presumably through sodomy, which, if you were Foucault, was the way to stick it to the bourgeois: be one of the first AIDS cases on French soil. Angry faggots not only make good fascists. They excel at the deconstruction of authoritarian regimes, implemented by state imposition or social pressure. I put the treatise aside for the time being, hoping The Foucault Reader would pave my way into a more accessible grasp of the man and the methodology, as if I could then take it and shove it up Debra Horne's ass. (She would be duly noting my belligerence here, but she cannot see herself that what she gets paid to do is assault  human dignity. I am not the only one with undercurrents.)

My considerable antagonism toward this woman is not personal in the sense that her humanity means anything to me, one way or another. She is a homily black woman with just enough pique about containment to infuriate. Since we have been adversaries, Debra, my wheels have been turning too lady.

I've heard, on the vine, that she once volunteered for Liberty. Fitting, given how much she has harassed me at Riverside, and harassed, and harassed, an archetype more or less, of the compliant patrician who sees that the mortuary receives its toe tagged corpse. Eventually we all give way before it. This inextricable combat going on twenty eight years of my life, the dog shit glistened in the early dark of my late food shopping dash yesterday, and I thought of how inspirational it was of my repugnance, how much I view her as a lard of screeching diarrhea. If I had the power to do so I would destroy Presby. Make no mistake relating to the depth, breadth, of my hatred for what in the Presbyterian sensibility constitutes good works. My country deserves to be hated for its contractual forms of repression. No longer do we fill out applications for Paratransit. A rehabilitation hospital bids on a contract to evaluate impaired or disabled public transit riders, and the ACLU and the sanctimonious progressives are worried about the sacred state of clit lickers and the rights of all of us to sicken and infect from the STD of our choice. More than anything else, the pretense of homosexual virtue makes me livid, because it is really a false issue, and not progress. Only a distraction, while we topple under the weight of our social structures, the complexity of our systems beginning to overwhelm, not simply indolent and linear minorities like Debra, but everyone, even the professional class, of which John, whom I am pondering now only as a wasted excess of dubious merit, is a rather dry example. He and I both came from working class families with some generational emigration, though I know very little of his actual history, I am assuming it is similar to the near lightning transformation between my Roman grandmother and myself. Meritocracy, presumably, has rewarded him, his partner and his support structures presumably better than mine. I was more of a victim of the life he led as a young man than a participant in it, and his dialogue is about nuances of teaching without being a dictator, and this is mine, getting banned from online communities, my crimes sometimes unknown, quite honestly. I do not know if Dana still moderates the Speakeasy, but she once told me my posts were powerful, and I understood what she meant, on one level; if they were that powerful, however, I would have had more control over my own autonomy. I have not made it to the DMV yet, and it will more than likely not be today, but after I get that finished I will start eating rust to hunt out the best contacts I have for that position that ignited that small spark toward remaining a human animal. It will not include this fading deity.

What drives my internal fury is what drives the continued currency of the legendary Dantes. I have seen, but not quite processed, Patricia Arquette in Stigmata. What we seem to demand of female actors when we contest them against the supernatural is interesting. What Polanski wanted of Farrow was to be out of her depth? Arquette is the troubled face of the rational believer, suffering in the pathway of tensile forces.

Age of Reason

I have been slow to enter into my LOA edition of the collected works of  Thomas Paine. My edition was still relatively fresh, with spanking hardcover newness, in the stone age of 1997 when I was still healthy enough to interview at organizations like New Orleans, which did for mental retardation and developmental drooling what The Matrix Research Institute did for psychiatric illness, but at approximately a paragraph to a page a week, Common Sense is still a refreshing read, and illustrates Paul Rabinow's point about our intellectual interdependence on the Enlightenment Era.  In contemporary time, I reflect on Paine's complaint about monarchical authority, but surely the colonial polemicist knew some executive force had to be in charge. 

It is not much of a stretch to sense that Paine would have been appalled at the state of the divided government in the US today; his passion against Britain's increasingly decorative monarchy, to use Niall Ferguson's phrase, can be extrapolated, and Paine would have lashed out at executive branch authority with the same zeal, even while he died a pauper in the country that took on England's mantle.

Telling.