A Conflagration of Enemies, Fallen

 Her absence is like the day, spread over everything.-- CS Lewis

It is very difficult not to write about the end of my life, circling it as I have been since September 2017, fleeing this building in a battered power chair on its last legs, when Donald Trump simply completed his own remarkable subversion of conservation to become the nominee under the party of Abraham Lincoln, then winning, now embattled for reelection, that day I stalled dead in the PECO parking lot, an officer strolling his patrol car next to me as I limped the Magee ordered Jazzy back to Riverside. I have almost willed myself to die since, giving into what the minority administrative class of Presbyterian Homes wants, to move portfolio dividends from nursing home investments into capital gains on the basis of biological entropy. Is this a healthy form of capitalism? I couldn’t say. I still have a self-styled hillbilly, circa 2020, prattling her plague induced anxiety in my head, having committed the cardinal sin against followers, departing from her feed with public distain, reminding myself that using irritants as a trigger to work is an invidious spark, at best.  I am folding laundry and looking at Twitter. This is my life now. These are the type of tweets she posts daily, fifteen or twenty a day, certainly prone to identification. I used to do my own laundry on Riverside’s first floor above the ground floor vestibule, not my favorite activity. It is now left to the bandy ass caregiver who reminds me I have nothing good to say about anybody, nothing good to say about people anymore, unless I choose to elevate a certain trait. There is another woman, similar to Wilder, who is also a follower, to whom I am benevolent. Her observations are more grounded, less addled. So why did I chastise the 35 year old chasing in vitro fertilization with her husband, as opposed to maintaining the implied contract with the other? Because I think Wilder Larkin needs to find some other outlet for mental health, so I hurt her feelings, and god as my witness, I never want to hear from her again. Certainly other people never want to hear from me, like Virus Empathy out there in Denmark. She was Mike’s friend. Who’s Mike? A credo libertarian who led me by the nose, local to me. I don’t know if his name is really Mike, and I wondered if he and I might become real life friends. The answer to that is no, but I wasn’t looking primarily for a lover in him, my physiology being too exhausted for sexual intimacy, my rectum like sandpaper. Mike is a broken litmus test, a lumbering puppy who spends too much time in the operating theater. He still sounds lonely, and we live close enough together in this city that an accidental meeting is entirely possible, if I do not join the cluster. This includes Monica Carr, who joined the ranks of SARS casualties in Pennsylvania by virtue of her underlying obesity, lupus, a prior cardiac arrest which cost her a front tooth—Covid 19 was merely icing the pastry chef laboriously applied to her broken leg. She and her two aunts died nearly simultaneously, then came Erik von Schmetterling. This post was supposed to be about Erik, about the invidious influence of this rabid woman’s presence on my career, my life, but the sultry advance of the tropical storm air is too much for me. I wanted this transsexual dead, and the failed torrential physician who only completed an internship obliged, ten years my senior, with only marginal help from my voice applied lash, slightly larger than the Higgs boson. She died some time in the last days of Wolf’s lockdown, so I owe the governor something despite my hatred of the Keystone State’s political osmosis, although what helped Erik along was a smoking addiction impossible to shake. I hated Monica in a superficial barred fangs posture. I do not know about death. Abusive attendants come a dime a dozen. She traumatized many of our lives, however, was a key figure in the dissolution of Homemaker Services, which is nothing. Waiver services consort and dissolve like baby black holes outside of our galactic spiral. These are the reverberations of an antagonistic space, one that no longer endears me to the collective Twitter cacophony. 

Radiator Vapor

Every year, Michael Pera, Riverside's custodial henchman horse's ass (and this isn't an exaggeration, he is a rube typical of the type Presbyterian Homes hires to save money) makes me sick when he turns on the heat. This year was worse than usual, and though I made an effort, I had to sleep, and missed my third attempt, partly resistance to clinical examination, to be evaluated for an alternative model chair.

Not sure what I'm going to do now, as I can not expect a walk in on a stronger day would lead to an accommodation from rehabilitation specialists who do not see themselves as sycophants. I make things very hard, and if I'm still on the verge of giving notice, so as to release my threatening, mostly impotent virulence on the heads of this rental corporation, I not only threaten my survival for the sake of political protest. The homeless would make short work of me if I joined them in this generic contraption designed to save money. I've already transformed into a mostly feral defiance that women like Debra Horne and Trudy Richardson and the morbidly obese Monica Carr created, as a matter of intimation.

If I give up on myself, there's no further point.

Heat Advisory

Even in the worst of circumstances, writers write in their minds, only to draw blanks on all the vivacious verbiage in their heads once in front of the damn keyboard, and the only thing roaring at me now is "I can't go through this again," except I have to go through it again. I can't thrive in this world of applications and computer science. I can't surrender without that surrender translating into a certified nursing assistant's paycheck, or some other facsimile of an aide. The welfare state and its fucking solutions. Aides. Aides like Monica Carr. I've posted about her, her lupus, her morbid obesity worse than my mother's.

She's on the third floor in her client's studio because she can't breathe, and I am like one of the furies waiting to tap dance while she enters Hades. 

A post is not a community, and Blogger will be relieved, no doubt, if I go, kicking and screaming, as the reality of my age forces me back into either a centralized facility, or I stay here in the forced diversity under contract with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. If the oligarchs in Putin's vast tundra want a bone, HUD is the most corrupt federal department in the United States, and that seems contingent regardless of ideology. Real estate equals corruption leading to bribery.

Yes, I have fonts of material yet, yes, I need to be realistic about the fact that I'm 53 and psychotherapy would saturate my fucking bloodstream with an anti-anxiety agent, and thereby I go from battered wife syndrome to a drone on a gurney while my mood is regulated while the aide changes my diaper, but I'm worn out. No, Philly isn't all that bad away from minority residential areas, and yes, I have a lousy attitude. I hate the vernacular "have a blessed day," and I'd be over joyed if I never hear it uttered out of another African American mouth, and even if I could relocate, I'm too old to ever be safe.

I was going to assert that I quit, but I cannot say I will not return tomorrow after a bowl of plain angel hair-- but this is the beginning of my goodbye. I can't be too unforgiving toward my best instructors. Maybe I was bipolar then and simply wasn't diagnosed. I bothered my academic advisor as often as I was pining about God-Shakespearean (wry self-pity), but in any event, I've had enough, and now, having sat in this god awful power chair far too long, I am afraid to leave the Toshiba on. It is now making strange sounds, like a smoke detector, and my Hewlett Packard, though pricier, is older still. Sniff.  

Brubaker's Valkerie

"My colleagues have a lasting vocation, that is to say, they see in the ecclesiastical calling a long continuance of dining well and having a warm suit." Stendal, p144

I stopped to watch The Last Castle this afternoon, as opposed to remaining steadfast to Georges Simenon recycles. I was never particularly huge over Redford, but he too is an ailing link to my vanishing boomer lexicon, a language where one of the last real boomer superstars knows what its like not to have Paul Newman, and so I made a reluctant choice, not sorry to see the late Gandolfini in action up against the straight arrow icon. 

The story wants to be a real world metaphor, like the late 80's Big Night, Tucci's critically acclaimed love child, but seemingly doesn't make a great deal of sense. I certainly couldn't figure it out as anything more than a pissing contest where your crime doesn't define you until it does? Irwin's piece de resistance appeals to me, of course, and like the damaged Aquilar, Redford as Irwin sacrifices his superlative status as the last American superstar, for an idea about fundamental fairness, or something, I am not entirely sure, the point taken that Colonel Winter, like Aquilar, loses self control in just that moment it takes to violate military code, to prevent Irwin's last act of defiance.

I've been thinking about my personal course of action, as forcing police officers to arrest me, the stress of that would finish me, even if the last thing a cop cares about is making an angry quadriplegic angrier still, and why can't she accept that she needs an attendant? Housekeeping help? I never did not accept it; that isn't the point. I have taken a series of blows from which recovery has been difficult, and this Christian landlord of mine, whatever my slavering hatred, has liabilities, aside from Ms. Richardson's ability to terrorize me, and I'm too angry to stand down, stopping just on the verge of letting her goad me into insulting her last fall. I cannot keep standing down on these matters, and if I have to earn myself a jacket, then the state has another notch in its belt.

Monica Carr was one of my first so called aides, during an early episode without a power chair. Welfare assigned her to me for 12 hours a week. I actually needed the help, and she could not do it, reported me to her police district for harassment. There was no Trudy google-girl then, and Debra Horne was conspicuously absent when another woman named Star, from Homemaker Services, tried to steal my commission as a contract journalist for HTP. Can I trust discussing this with O'Brien? I'll try; then I'm calling the cops, filling a complaint, and appealing to AG Harris, who is supposed to be aggressive.

Eating my usage like no tomorrow

"I hoped the day would be a lot of highway," my favorite British sentimentalist

My occasional seizures of loneliness belie my underlying scorn. Monica Carr senses it, which is why she is afraid of me, and telephoned her police station as a justification for the fact that Medicaid set me up with its pathetic system, and while I was waiting through my power chair repairs, all but helpless in an 800 dollar twenty year old manual, she abandoned me in a commission of fraud against the state. I hate this woman more than anyone I know, and would take a great degree of pleasure in excoriating her toxic and morbidly obese flesh, but since I have ameliorated the worst of my caustic lashes, I'll see if I can snap her picture-- useful for a lawyer in an accumulated onslaught of what Riverside's outstanding social mores have paced me through. I was told, though I cannot confirm her version, that she institutionalized Nelson-- her Puerto Rican amputee, in his passive infantilism, for not taking his medication, and a resident named Candy, a woman who had the admirable moxie to high tail it out of here and go back South, had to get him out. Doesn't quite add up, but this is who she sleeps with, Nelson, and that is what she did to him. You figure it out.

I have a small list of people I'd like for friends, including the project director of the Rosenbach, but can't force these things.

Who am I to have such an exclusion zone?

I had every Elton John album, and never forgave my father for stripping me of my collection when he dumped me here--another reason why Karina drove me to a head. Trudy and her supervisors haven't locked horns with me just yet, but it is coming, and part of me has ceased to care, even if I have to go to court. Accessing attorneys is not an easy feat, is it? I need one who is not burnt out so much that they won't heed the cumulative effect of Presby's long term civil violations.

Inimitable Autonomies Within a Myeloma

Brown initially shared Garrison's pacificism. As a boy, he'd been so disgusted by what he saw of soldiers during the War of 1812 that he later refused to drill with local militias and paid fines to avoid military service. -- Midnight Rising, kindle edition loc 375

In relation to the ACA, I take a different view. Health care will never be radically equalized; it is impossible to achieve this on a global scale. Access to humane treatment is not entirely beyond scope, but this has regional variability.

I have written that I believe in self worth, and do, but cannot delude myself, on macro scales, that my individual life is valuable. My birth was dangerous and difficult and the fetus was supposed to die, didn't, and when that is the summation of an existence, it alters the viewpoint. Someone like Monica Carr, herself a warped challenge for you not to judge her disapprovingly, as she is not simply heavy, but repulsive, like the teletubbies, of which I've been suspicious since I first laid eyes on them, used to tell me that my reactions were irrational. Mmm. For a happy god-fearing suburbanite who successfully raises her progeny and keeps her partner's testicles in a vise, a desire for a short lifespan might be irrational.

Not for me. Existence, to be precious, needs contingency, and it's okay to be single, if you have sustaining relationships and function around that; during youth, dreams of ambition kept me afloat, but I should have realized as an undergraduate that I was doomed, simply as a matter of policy containment and failed domestication. I am sloppy, cluttered, have Italian sinuses, and when I have not been caged, or made into a Frankenstein facsimile, pedestrian sensibility wants it done as a matter of course, hence the dimmer on empathy for aggressive treatments of complex cancers, or even Dick Cheney's heart disease. Continuous fighting in this sense is the irrationality on a evolutionary scale. We're a complex primate, but possibly not unique, and sustaining each 7.1 billion self interested persons may be beneficial to selfish desire to stick around as long as possible, but not in the best interest of the large egg on which we live. If you are over fifty with a multiple myeloma, all that chemo, all those drugs, may buy you time at the expense of other long term viabilities.

I never believed in my own invincibility, and that is one value the long term disabled community can offer. That I'd rather have euthanasia available as an option is not an easy thing to write, but I write it in terms of my expenditures. I have not raised children. Career has been a lifelong unhappy battle, and because people need to make a living themselves, they get the right to manage how I live, and from here, within how many months, I will be forced, once again, to depend on quasi-asinine nursing care, primarily bed ridden because lifting me off a mattress invites liability. I'd rather go to sleep than spend an excruciating period of time under that duress. Now I have to go work on my 400 word piece of snark. Harrumph.

Bilateral Relations; Monica Carr

"I don't know how I cut my toenails."-- Kevin Costner

In deference to Masterson, what she chooses for closure, for the knowledge her characters have in intimate terms that viewers are cut off from seeing in The Cake Eaters, these live inside the absences created in the film. Examples are in the opening arc, with Melissa Leo engaging young boys in 16 millimeter home movie style, framing itself on the inside of modern post production technology, evoking, much as the classics do, a wistful longing for less complicated and more magical moments, the memory of being so excited when a father went up on the rooftop to mimic reindeer, and his eldest child lie on her pillow, so excited that Santa was coming! Wakes in the morning and finds a doll figurine in a plastic flower bulb right where she slept, in awe that St. Nicholas could do such things. This is the omniscient Leo's secret smile for the unknown holder of the video camera, the outcry of pierced innocence as Aaron Stanford and Elizabeth Ashley drag Kristen to the flea market outhouse. What is Masterson suggesting about endurance? The toll of the things our internal censors screen us from sharing fall into so many variations. The plea of a spaz in a twenty inch nylon seat, bolted as these thing are to a titanium frame she bought at a cut rate deal from a long dissolved vendor, glued to telephone receiver, chasing a morbidly obese and disgustingly repulsive nominally Catholic woman over many blocks of voice mails, a so called attendant who had at least a half dozen clients, committing fraud against the state of Pennsylvania. She never did her hours, whatever Homemaker Services was paying her at the time, 8, 9 an hour. The quad in the Quickie was likely to see this vicious viper for an hour a week, assigned 12 by Medicaid waiver regulators, and the quad was, of course, down a power chair, waiting and waiting on our single option medically rationed traumatic nightmare we call Medicaid and Medicare eligibility. This blew up into a *serious allegations* incident with Homemaker Services, who have since created a clock in system. You don't see the punishing hostile environment Monica creates for her spastic enemy, spearing each other with venom, my retraction from how her erotic needs promulgate themselves on the Puerto Rican amputee that reads almost to the letter like the regressive episode with the paralytic husband and his caretaker in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but Google images are kind. Monica Carr is 300 lbs of toxic lard, and Nelson the double amputee is that 300 lb toxic lard in a state of decomposition. His incontinence is daily. She calls him "my baby." You want a visual of that physical intimacy in the way we are to imagine Beagle catching his father humping?

Before you make assumptions about my 19 years under Riverside's tactical assault, remember the interstices none of us can ever fully engage with each other. There are gradations to duress, and Monica made her contribution which is common in this paradigm. Never showing up and criminalizing my helplessness. I cannot create I dream of Jeanie through telecommunications, and her cowardice, moral shrink wrap, would be amusing if her body did not inspire very much in the idea of revulsion. When I see a roast pig on a spit, I like a crispy skin, not too willing to contemplate sentience. 

The question remains if Masterson's attempt to be honest with the drollery of defeat overtakes her. Lacks just slightly too little of that movie magic.

Lactose Cappuccino Shin Splints

John Schnatter, chairman and CEO of Papa John's, posted his own apology on Facebook Monday. He revealed the two employees involved in the "reprehensible" message were immediately fired, as they "defy both my personal and the company's values."-- Cavan Sieczkowski

Given what I learned later on, I suppose it was an honor that Lydia, from my Speakeasy days, emailed me. She was a black attorney from San Francisco who had roots in Philadelphia, and the admirable ability to change her environment. She was raped by a white man but had the ability to differentiate that experience from such suppositions as "all white men like it rough with jig poon" and there I am ripping off Ellroy and his more extensive slang vocabulary. Lydia was trying to help me understand that not all blacks will necessarily victimize me, and I do understand that, but many African Americans have victimized me, and in the one case violently at nearly the cost of my life. I can juxtapose that with the young upwardly mobile kid who hugged me on New Years at Drinkers West, or Claudie and my conversation with him about cats, dead cats, the ashes of dead cats, Haiti. I have Graham Greene's fascination with this impoverished colony of the United States, and told Claudie about my work in that direction.

It is not enough. I am traumatized, even by Tim's inability to manage his time without nearly always giving me short shrift. I needed a new broom and dust pan; he indicated to me he would price it and pick it up, and this is the systems failure that attendant care represents. I am out forty five dollars for a vacuumed carpet and basically a three week argument with a fucking simpleton who considers my intelligence and acuity to be an insult to his entitled minority identity. Caucasian women are little better, but there the stigma is different. Monica Carr did not want to do the time and called the police to intimidate me. Susan McNally insisted that I comply with her terms, and I wouldn't. It is never going to end, and I am going to die in misery and frustration, if not physical anguish.

Sure, I have a side that once believed that civic decency was noble, and a passion for interpretation that still draws me to Jerry's output. I'd enjoy analyzing his work for you, how at his strongest Jerry can defy expectations, but his work that is online is not the work he shared in workshop, and taking all that out of the closet and going through that to apply my best sympathies to make you love me takes time, a luxury I no longer have, and will not have the more I have to depend on paraprofessionals, and if the indignities of infirmity get much worse, my options seem fairly stark. My meal today was a hot half and half powdered cappuccino and a carrot. This morning I had a pork roll and do not really feel like preparing a meal. I invited Lydia to lunch when her mother passed away. Perhaps out of duty. She declined. Then again, how can a hard black lawyer and a precocious spastic with their denigrating war wounds actually see past the labels each other carries. Thanks to the Jamesians I am now on Linked In. I avoided it because of my supervisor. All I wanted was a contact number for Senator Toomey. His staff telephoned. Uh huh. And I have to handle any expectation behind that euphemism.

What Toomey's staff learns contextually is different in framework than my mere EEOC grievance: I mean what I say about changing systems management around disability and sustaining matriculation.

A Screech and Melancholy Smatter

For those in my audience who remember this ongoing saga from LiveJournal, my fabled transvestite friend, whose metaphysical entrails I have roasted in any number of posts, he *remembers my name is Marinelli*, and so what then, of my descriptive character assassinations that have illuminated my emotional pain, or the combined rhetorical roar of both Erik and Cassie's zeal amounting to a handful of dust? The duplicitious bitch bastard whose ethics unwittingly destroyed my hope of any economic security for my old age is a dying moron who remembers to be nice to me out of pity, while both he and I subsist in a dark fabled version of American Stalinism disguising itself as the willful blindness of propriety. I dashed upstairs yesterday to see if the vendor had any useful produce, and was ready to hang myself over the geriatric horror I've had to live with these last 27 years, and yes, my strength is breaking down and I cannot take it anymore. "Write it then," Monica Carr said, my former fat Catholic ex-attendant who has lupus, as I've told you, and called the police on me 12 years ago because she could not do her time. "You have a wonderful way of expressing yourself." she exclaimed, and I can see a novel about independent living and disability advocacy in the voice of John Irving


But I am not a novelist with that kind of timing, and will probably never finish the novels on my hard drive that I've all but abandoned. To start a third which might leave me with the possibility of getting sued in the creation of a roman a clef, this seems unrealistic. In the right mode, I am a competent journalist, genetically predisposed poet, using the blogger format to my own inappropriate ends, which speaks for itself. I borrowed Merle Miller's resurrected novel from the kindle library. Three chapters in, I am struggling not to abandon yet more repressed homosexual narcissism. So far I find it a mediocre expose of the other side of the Beat era as lost generation. I have missed some films that I wanted to mine for us, but I am not sure I am up for another browbeating of Saving Private Ryan. A few minutes to make up my mind, for a long and grueling exercise about my grandmother's generation, one that knew its duty.

Crash Dump Curdle

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.