"That was an act of mercy."-- Megan Ketch
The generation gap is pronounced enough, in the dowager's circumstance, to illuminate the archaeological aspects of comfort in following a program schedule, but ever since Hugh Laurie wrapped up House, yours truly has a deficit reduction. If she wants a cable show like Six Feet Under, it needs to be purchased and streamed, or scavenged on You Tube, not that binge watching is necessarily conducive to mitigating tinnitus and the agitation of stress piss. As weary as video is, the will to discipline crumples, easier to eat and view, as room for eating and reading is crimped. In that vein, American Gothic has the expected level of eccentric exaggeration enlarging upon complicity, in a tinsel level homage to the actual Hawthorne, who resonates yet with great power-- not that the dowager has been faithful to the series. The back story of Garrett's log cabin years sang to my soul up until the suffocation, even though I endorse euthanasia in my radicalized fashion. In trying to ease the strains of mio poppa, I suggested home hospice care for the pathological stepmother. The only reason I can place before me as to why my father is killing himself over this vile snake (mutual antipathy toward Louise unites the sister and I yet) is that he doesn't want to be alone. I made the mistake of informing the cancerous aunt, and enter in the pyrotechnics. How would I like it if someone put me in hospice? I started to argue that Presby has been trying to make me the state's problem for years, as Marie herself so recently threatened through Trudy Richardson's instigation, but she did not want to be reminded of our familial sparring match, indicating I could do with other alliances.
I love Marie, but she needs to prepare to die, as does Louise, my remaining paternal uncle, my father, as do I, for that matter, just not at Inglis House, hence stark options, as the storm dampens the end of summer, leaving me not too disheartened about skipping festivities, as the Rosenbach, so many years ago, was my last grasp toward revitalization. No regrets, but there is no longer much interest, even if I had the money. Hearing loss strains the populist lectures, and the quasi-academic atmosphere doesn't offer enough to meet my intellectual demands before my synapses fail, as they will if I can't get the fuck out from under this landlord, carping away.
I may vaguely recall the docu-drama on which Code Black is based, but the show is little more than a tapered version of ER, harsher, slightly messier in some respects, but still television, soft pedaling the truth about modern medicine, offering resolution, didactic salves, because people want gauze on reality, and my reality is my cynicism. I'd toss the Western medical paradigm straight down into our depleting fossil fuel reserves. Saying I don't believe in it is too simple. It is more about quality of care and difficulty of access simply to get the technology for non-terminal prognosis. Stable quadriplegics such as I should not have to jump through hoops to upgrade. Even for an individual with my acumen, at my poverty level the red tape is too much, and with me, even when I have a treatable instance, physicians cut corners, precisely because I'm a cripple. Why mince words? Next to Saving Hope, Code Black is a comparative Hamlet, as network discovered, since the former is now an ION retread in my area. The series tries to circumvent the generic pretty people syndrome by acknowledging a metaphysical realm of mystery in the movement toward entropy, with all our angst and hang ups, but even in reruns, there is no compelling reason to sacrifice my dwindling time constraints, though I'm watching it this evening, since the storm stonewalling its way up the coast applies itself to my bio-genic rhythms, managing my stool earlier, not that such fortunes will last. Another urinal stint, then bread and butter. Joyce Carol Oates, the fierce novelist whom I no longer read, imposed unremitting violence on her characters, in an exposition still posited in a civilization not threatened with imminent collapse, while the visual apocalypse has run its course, starting with Lost, culminating in The Walking Dead relocating to AMC. More than likely, civilization will blip a little here, a little there: like Philippine death squads, the continued erosion of superpower status across the board, the death clinics from Soylent Green come to life, this even though we ignore the inconvenient fact that they thrive at a lively pace, not quite on the free market terms that gave Milton Friedman a hard on.
Everything Dr. Krauthammer contends in public argument is what I have been attempting to convey to my audience on a more personal, and sometimes risky level. After all, discussing the corrosion of internal vengeance power fantasies after digesting lifelong humiliating paradigms is not something that will get me invited to Michelle Obama's Motown galas, but I am going to breakdown Charles' delineations a little further: the welfare state in America manufactures psychosis, if not spree killer psychotics, whatever prevention modalities remain in place. The entitlement system essentially traps vulnerable people, and literally drives them insane if they cannot secure gainful, and I'll add, secure employment.
Charles is entirely correct. My landlord has no legal authority to commit or institutionalize until dementia or aggressive behavior translates into property destruction, criminal behavior, or inability to function, but there is no flexibility in Medicare or state regulatory systems to adapt to individual needs as opposed to forced compliance, and I don't have the money Charles probably does to buy services more tailored for his needs as a paraplegic. There may not be any free lunch, but conservatives like the doctor are tone deaf to the fact that my birth disability nearly precludes my ability to succeed under our titular free market capitalist system. I have to succeed the same way my former counselor Cassie James does, earning her salary on the backs of those with developmental disabilities whose limitations prevent matriculation. This does not explain the Lanza family, but it is part of the larger problem, regulating ourselves to death with compliance, alienating ourselves with devices and the glamor of violence.
Before I return to my futuristic medical catastrophe of poverty induced stroke, barring poverty induced subcutaneous embolism, a few spare thoughts on the kindle paperwhite, spare, because I wish to cash in with a digital angle, though I never can write as fast as Yoffe, which may be just as well.
I am more comfortable carrying the paperwhite around, as the older kindle keyboard model has taken a beating, though it has stood the test of time, remains functional, and I am not ready to trade it in yet. Still manually easier to subvert the location issue through bookmarks and highlights on the older and technically more spacious device. Touchpad is still frustrating, though divining menu operation did not take me too long. With a little effort, I can read the paperwhite in dim light, and as long as I do not buy a text accidentally, Amazon's special offers, though no friend to the over-educated, do not trouble me, as this giant retail monopoly represents the best and the worst of Friedman's holy grail. Amazon's claims about battery life are so so, but since I am normally near a power outlet, this is not much of an issue. Relaxing into a text itself might be, but this may also be the residual effects of my bloody and asinine bid to becoming a patron of local color, and expending money I shall never recoup, much like the drain from felines dead and alive, and sibling rifts and expenditure, on the conquest, semi-lucid at this point, of Ulysses. (Lance, dear fellow, I take back what I said about "not deciphering," bloody fool spastic is!) Still cannot distinguish the period from the comma, but in terms of modern alienation and agony, figuring out which is which is a minor affair in Sebold's flickering window candle. Certain classes of least functional cripples may not benefit from all this that is derivative of the cell phone.
One thing I have not done is transfer my periodical content, not yet. Less pressure. I am also entirely ignorant of comparisons to other models, but I am not seduced by the Apple device fetish as the rest of you, so you may deem that mild generational resistance. How much I can still absorb and maintain my dignity? The fact remains, this technology would have made me a better student; for that, a great deal of regret. This may seem like opaque reasoning, but the physical act of researching is a touch harder for wheelchair users, however much larger universities pride themselves on access, library architecture seems welded to the Victorian age, not that this was a conscious issue in youth, but in contemporary terms, it does begin to matter, and academic electronic fair use issues might include disabled access exemptions.
We live in an era of Milton Friedman revisionists, from the mostly dynamic Niall Ferguson globe trotting around colonial Africa, to Cato Institute free marketers like Johan Norberg and detractors like Naomi Klein, and the majority of ADAPT activists do not have the acumen to follow my line of thought here, or to even understand why it matters. It is not their fault, but the evil lies in disability center enforced egalitarianism, which my regulars know traumatized me very badly, although it was my failure, when emailing Niall, which for me was a tribute, since it takes more than intelligence to rise to prominence in the way he has managed, that he responded he was sorry for my situation. No. I wanted him to apply that Scottish mettle of his to grind independent living ideology into a fine pulp, as I cannot do it myself; these two poles represent my interior suspended animation. I am not able bodied enough for Harvard, and not compliant enough for pukeville Stalinist paradigms like Liberty Resources, and am not a purist, either to free market ideology lifting even the poorest individuals into more equality, or a socialist who wants to rectify the injustice of destructive disparity. Niall might argue he isn't a purist either, but if I substitute Norberg's cell phone in his video for a semi-automatic, I think the gospel of fundamental capitalism exposes its flaws, flaws that keep liberals in business. Treating guns and military hardware as a commodity has destroyed many of those disadvantaged humans, those who Niall might argue ultimately benefited from his killer apps, and I cannot quite balance gun manufacturer profits and urban warfare that spreads from the declining US into its Latin American hemisphere like a cancer. An Adapter might argue that where they elevate Cassie and her polemical nonsense, I weigh her down. That is true. My former supervisor Linda could not be trusted to the extent that I did trust her, or tried to, but neither can Cassie be trusted, and this is not due to the fact that I knew her when, and remain unimpressed, and think that Liberty makes her indispensable at the expense of others more deserving, but aside from that issue, I cannot believe in any activist, no matter how out there, who after thirty years, cannot address the bigotry within independent living centers themselves. Cassie might say she tried to make up for what Linda's humiliating behavior did to me, and this is true. She wanted me to do a grant proposal, and I could not. Linda C Dezenski is still at helm of whatever range her leash allows, but more than that, disability centers need to be abolished for the very sake of social equality, and I will activate myself to this end until my death, but will add one more thing: Cassie taking me out for pizza when she lived in the same public housing paradigm I cannot escape wasn't the least empowering. Going to see a Chagall exhibit with my friend Tom Reid was. Why? My intelligence was respected in the latter.
