Death Knell

"Your mouth is your weapon," a Jamaican named Esmin, long gone

The progressive left does have its own economic mechanism, one of equally limited resource distribution. It is called the grant proposal; this philanthropy is the driving engine of academic studies, and it is also an important part of why Liberty Resources inducts the disabled, and then gets sued and hated by them, people like me, but to broaden the scope, NCIL, of which Liberty is a member, would not exist without two things: Medicaid Waiver resource allocation, and grants awarded by Foundations, or trusts like Pew, which funded me at Matrix, until I turned off the tap. (Yes, I resigned and caused the disenfranchised to lose their income, talk about tough love.) I have written more than dozens of posts about why NCIL's "centers" are a fucked, static little bubbles, destroying as many disabled lives as they empower, but even outside of community integration models, disabled individuals who are matriculated, because they want to help, make promises on which they cannot deliver. Disability In Arts, which now hangs quietly on Yahoo Groups, a fucking disaster, because the real crips could not understand I was after an aesthetic inquiry, and lezzie bitch did her thing, as I've posted in the past, but look at her flatulent happy face, whereas I hide behind a baby picture, because, offered me additional sorry experiences. Another lesbian, who looked like Meat Loaf, worked at a technical school in Maryland, and offered me a class on this very topic, utilizing pop culture, like Star Trek. then she vanished, after I duly printed the syllabus. After pressing her, I discovered her department did not have the money to bankroll the course. Why did she offer it to me then? I cannot pay my bills with a slap on the back to console my intelligence. I went through a similar experience with a PhD in San Francisco with polio. I was going to edit and mentor challenged journalism students. Her grant fell through, but as she had not blindsided me, I stayed with her voluntarily. I inadvertently became terse-- I do not mean uncouth and belligerent, as I am here, just testy, about something, and she, being a Bay area liberal, cut me loose. That was that. She was just "trying to help," and I knew that. I wasn't trying to break up, but I was indigent then, very badly so. It is a travesty that my mother would have to die with an unexpected insurance payout five years or so later, and I utterly failed to get myself out from under this building-- but I can't dwell on that. It wasn't enough of an asset for a commercial lease. I would think, that even though wheelchair users have the shared experience empathy, we could try a little better to stop setting ourselves up for failures like these. Dale doesn't quite fit into this promises promises, as he and I don't know each other, but it came to the same thing, cross purposes. He IM'd about his grant, I IM'd back I'd be willing to explore a job proposal, and if it walks like a duck, it may actually be arsenic destroying Puget Sound's ecosystem. I need work, not giving him a free plug. It is true I've used Australian sources for my past features blowing up attendant care, but that can only be taken so far. My sense is that the Australian IL net is more pervasive than the stateside system in the US, more laissez faire, as is intimated in Muriel's Wedding, but I have little inclination to relocate to England's penal colony, and have little idea what Dale and his peers are complaining about, in terms of quality controls, as it seems.
In light of this, the Chicago attack, which went viral long before I paused to see the news clip in the traditional way, illustrates that the law is often as cock and bull as these failed empowerment attempts. If it had been me, I would have forced that lovely Windy City crew to mortally injure me. To echo Michelle Cottle, out of the old New Republic, before candy ass Hughes bought it, all hate crime statues do is overburden a judiciary that is already overtaxed with addicts eating their own feces.

Invidious Distinctions

When I write in Quarantine that Russell Crowe is too generic, another way to frame my contention is to bracket it in terms of over-exposure. He gets the organic nature of paranoid schizophrenia right in A Beautiful Mind, in terms of John Nash's transition from promising scholar to a man beset with illness, and it also felt like an Ike and Churchill rendition era film for modern consumption. Beyond this the star underwhelms, and does nothing to reconcile me to Australia. One of Tatyana's characters felt the same way in her early collection of stories, yanking the land mass out of the ocean like a diseased molar. A film like On The Beach exempts itself, simply by virtue of being early nuclear porn, as we call it today. It is not a fair comparison, but we do see a certain difference in handling impairments, however: the Rhonda of Muriel's Wedding adapts to her cursory paralysis, whereas here in the States, Swank's Maggie and her choice causes reactionary protests.

I happen to be on the character's side. Being a writer is an insulating process, by the nature of the beast, but when it has been your life for half a century, and essentially failed you, even if you always know you can never do anything else, sick now, broken, as well as crippled, making a choice to let go does not seem so threatening. The activists I knew, at least those who aren't dead, have nothing to say to me, and won't, obviously, since I haven't been nice, and on angry days, ah, well, some of you have seen the same diabolical villain films as I have, and can use your own imagination about what I do with a slowly dying vengeance, biodegrading; the very awareness of the fact that I am fragile fuels my urgency to get away, the ever omnipresent American impetus. Migrate. East to west, west to east, or be Hemingway in Paris.

I am running out of time. I am probably not going to make it, and neither stoicism nor protest is entirely satisfactory.

Quarantine

Our food will be poison.
                                        the ophthalmologist in Blindness


如果我的偏执狂放大的优良中华人民共和国公民滚动通过我的帖子？

How accurate the calligraphy I have no idea. Simply an attempt to be accommodating, but allow me to be honest with the most powerful hunk of Asia: I fear not you the people, but your mighty nine member Politburo? Yes, most of us lowly, if educated, Americans, fear your Communist Party, its corruption, thuggery, and the beating of heroic self-educated blind lawyers who can still score a victory for small cogs. The people of the United States are not free, but we do a better job of respecting personal dignity than your officials, and you, dear citizens of China, have a terrible petty provincialism. Grow up some day soon. Spastic waves.

When I watch Australian films, I tend to get a bad taste in my mouth, as if degeneration on the basis of criminal caste had some truth, and wonder in the back of my bigoted mind if America got the better part of British blood in the colonial era, or if it's just that Australian dysfunction is an uneasy mirror reflecting back on all of the white working class, the status of a Blanchett or a Russell Crowe aside, and Crowe does not really count; he is too generic and Hollywood plasters his face in every white might blockbuster of which humanity can conceive; given this, I had a difficult time controlling my self pity renewing my acquaintance, after midnight, with Muriel's Wedding. I wept, and the mismatched love making towards the conclusion, after the mother's suicide, was convincing. Most homily women have the untapped depth of Toni Colette's character. From a 2012 perspective, some of the digs in Hogan's script were cheap, and Rhonda is little more than a bitch in stencil, but this film was made for women like me who never wanted to go lesbian, but need the emotional intimacy of a best friend, and can make love to a great looker with the best of them.

Let us drop the facade for a moment. The real Joanne Marinelli never went to her senior prom. Can you even enter into what that must have been like for me as a teen? There was no American Civil Liberties Union, not in 81, blaring trumpets for me because a high school student with cerebral palsy could not so much as get a trophy beau with a corsage to experience such an important rite of passage.