Of the twenty children Brown fathered, nine died before the age of ten, among them a baby girl accidentally scalded to death by an elder sister.--Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising, loc. 143
How many times have I written here not to telephone dying aunts, particularly when I am under so much strain of my own accord? Waiting on a small line of credit which shouldn't have been approved, even if we all know that game; told myself not to dial her number, but my father doesn't quite fill me in on medical gossip events, so I dialed, and the rate at which she and I disconnect from each other is a form of compensation toward not hurling expletives at each other; things which cannot be unsaid. I "slipped" in relation to my demented uncle's mortality, and that was enough, as it usually is. My knowledge that my cousin's mother is on the fringe, being closed by concentric bands on functionality, isn't the crux of the problem.
I have no social extensions to keep me on the ground, with my yellowed and crooked underbite, my weary and mortally wounded eyes-- even when I am safe on supplies, the damage can be read in my eyes like a marriage between Henry Lee Lucas and the Kama Sutra. I have tried to provide myself outlets. The Rosenbach, as I knew beforehand, wasn't the appropriate venue. Liberty On the Rocks members -- with the exception of Zach Tollen-- he a product of the consumer model, tolerate and feel badly for me to an extent. They see I have an active mind, one invariably dragged by a ball and chain, like my uncle's body, which, like an orca when it expires, is classified as a biological hazard, but I have no intimates, nor intimacy, in my marginalized indigence, thus at my core more caustic than my aunt. My niece's MS is a blow to my sister's self-absorption, and honestly, I don't really care, having lived my own rivers of death, but this is what eighty year olds ahead of me do, even if they are progenitors. They wag like maids.
Though I cannot for the life of me do it tomorrow, showing up at a Toomey campaign hub at the last minute to make scripted calls, this will also leave an indelible imprint of commiseration, unless I take 48 hours to fight with dressing as I used to, before the Quickie shorted out, but even then, desolation radiating off one's flesh like a depth charge blowing the bodies of fish to the surface doesn't exactly forge new paths in the garden. Black Mirror seems to be something of interest which escaped notice, but it will have to wait in an interior queue of a black lung goop, assuming I have an opportunity to get to it, even if it is a primarily ambulatory oxymoron. As a disabled woman in the 21st century, let alone the previous one, I shouldn't be able to comprehend the destitution of John Brown's life.
Will Smith is not an actor in the aesthetic sense when we use the phrase "great performer". He is competent only in following the beat in his scripts, and this he learned through the audience track in Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which in turn made him likable in Men in Black, but when you examine the porous fatalism of Seven Pounds against the image of Liberians left lying in thoroughfares as no more than rabid animals, Gabriele Muccino's proportionality is a very dangerous game we play with ourselves through the filter of the studio system. The lie of balanced scales. The Jennifer Lopez vehicle Angel Eyes does the same thing only slightly less stupidly, not offering up any sacrificial remorse as it leaves its principal characters rough around the edges in the aftermath of a vehicular tragedy, unlike Tim, who for some inexplicable reason literalizes Christian cannibalism as expiation for the gratification of technology.
Propulsion engines simply are what they are, much like the distractions of cell phones, but disease?
Death, purely on the scales of evolutionary dynamism, seems to be necessary, but I have a hard time, just as anyone else, with the excruciating nature of excessive pain bequeathed to complex organisms, whether it is the bludgeoning death of cute mammals like baby seals for absolutely no reason, or an infectious agent like Ebola reminding us all that despite our unparalleled success as a species, we simply cannot act collectively to mitigate destruction without turning ourselves equally into soulless autonomic functionaries slaving away at the behest of an inexplicable agent. CDC authorities assure the developed world, however, that we have no reason to worry. Hogwash. Antibiotics and the concentration of our sick bodies in institutional settings gave rise to super bacteria like MRSA. There is no reason then, that Ebola, like AIDS, could not in turn adjust, and spread from West Africa and hit vulnerable sectors in China, India-- which is not to say the human body would not eventually adapt in turn, but the hubris of our faith in ourselves is nothing short of lunacy.
In the facade of diligence, I long ago took notes on Of Human Bondage in my wheelchair friendlier inner city apartment, always meshing disability studies, and what better way than through the harpsichord of W. Somerset Maugham's sexual indifference to women unless they were dying of syphilis. Faggot doctors, with Hollywood's ingenious tapering of Tyrone Power to serve as the face of the lost generation. In fairness, I have no idea what the struggling matinee pony boy knew of Fitzgerald's jazz age, but he was a young child of America's derelict energies between the great wars. Such a damn stupid film. Fake acting, paint by numbers schematic. Despite myself, I also watched Gillian Anderson inhabit Edith Wharton's Lilly Barth. Been some time since I took my LOA of Wharton out of the bookcase my father gave me, and I do not remember Stolz having such a prominent place in the novel. The television adaption shriveled the antisemitism of Wharton's milieu. No surprise. I can't say if it is better to go quickly and thus be enshrined like Power, victim of daddy genetics, or wilt like a run of the mill has been horse's ass, sans David Brenner.
Obviously, if I am unhappy slaving away for Examiner.com then I should ease up and revest my energy into the hope of better pay for other markets. It annoys me. That I remember Brenner at all and felt caught with my pants down, that his obituary was notable enough for no real reason other then the fact that I watched him and can't place any value on his jokes except for the fact that he was a lanky horse who came out of the same urban environment in which my energies are ebbing with every damn bowel transit.
Not fame I ever wanted. Success. The right man. The right version of esteem and self-sufficiency, all down the drain of fear, my own version of Gillian's cry of uselessness in a character where she exudes pretense and middling craft, and yet her Barth, who doesn't want to pay the price of her vanity in relation to her own self worth as a feminine figure worth having, manages to break through in a facsimile of every woman's insecurity. Had I married Frank, it would have amounted to an unspeakable horror. My job as a writer is to convey it, the obscene pot-marked Hispanic skin, his ocher obesity and gout. The big google diabetic eyes, the constant maintenance of his living carcass, just like my last living uncle with his frigging MRSA and Marie's terror of it. Fucking western physicians, and here I am, still striving. Ah. My poor aunt tells me she is a latent carrier. Our wondrous support systems.
"Stop complaining about your on site visits." The former Linda Richman, failing to consider my future rate of attrition.
Hollywood has so commercialized the process of dying it is easy to forget how radicalized the ritual has become since the human animal invented cultural memories. Death through aging or illness used to be an unfortunate but expected communal reality. The invention of theatrical role playing as a form of didactic social instruction reflects this, (setting aside totem transformations). The tragedy of Hamlet is camped today, but in Renaissance Europe, a dead king convulsed the state. Medicalization robs us of communal sobriety and the sharing of grief. It is palliative care, family grouped around a bed, patient set apart by monitors, intravenous feeds, hospice, morphine, barbiturate saturation. We still have sudden death, the shock, handling a dead pet we could not save, losing a husband at the race track to thrombosis, mechanized destruction of our flesh by machine, these days even more chilling since a joystick can deliver it, but the sanitation of death is reflected back via media norms on an ever shifting landscape. The 21st century insists we process the dying as a psychodrama with its own rules. I have dealt with a few of these films, one that eludes me at the moment but it is either still on my other account or buried in here and will come round again, but more important is the modern death as a jigsaw puzzle is a common directorial scheme, good or bad. Darkness, Jacob's Ladder, the poorly made I Inside, Identity. All of these jump cut, keep us guessing, want the viewer to feed on uncertainty.
Fascinating, therefore, that E. G. Robinson would use it, the dying itself, to force Charlton to live energetically in his lead in Soylent Green. I researched this uncited Wiki passage, and dissatisfied, changed it to what traceable sources assert.
This doesn't mean Robinson, who carried Hollywood through the golden age, did not manipulate Heston, shocking the younger man into a raw integrity within a dystopian landscape, already creeping upon us, despite our billions in number. MRSA now eats people because of western healthcare's brutal success. For those of us not species optimists, that spaceship lottery will no doubt be a dicey proposition.
