I often have to pause my life for a minute — whether that’s driving down the sidewalk, using my laptop, or eating a meal--my alma mater. Whenever a writer prefers to sit around and pontificate, instead of working, it signifies sirens of calamity in the background, which actually aren't that dire: I wrote a response to George Will's rather ingenious attack on Trump's willful ignorance, forced myself to find a conclusion, hit the ground with six hundred words, and no one is happy. I have to retool it for other markets I've looked at, fairly certain of ones that would spit in my face, aware of the timelessness issue, and would like to turn the crusty baseball enthusiast upside his head and shake his premium express credit cards out of his pockets, also aware, that if I take these insider dirty laundry issues too far, I possibly wind up black balled. To a certain extent, I am already there, of course. Josie Byzek may not have closed her twitter account because of how often she is cited in Disability in Entertainment Arts, but it is safe to say, I'll never go home again. All I want to know is why I was frozen out of New Mobility. My feature, with intimations of Damore's fate, was controversial, but Tim Gilmer still included me on his contributors. The fat lady hadn't sung, as yet. By the same token, the periodical is very limited, insular in scope, and of little help to me. The only thing I can force upon the United Spinal Association is trouble, but I have larger behemoths in the scope, hence, I have to live with the rancor, or push a point with no real justifiable outcome, but what I want Josie to see is her rationalizations about ambulatory male ignorance in no way protected me, despite regulatory schematics, from paraprofessional abuse, from section 202's regimented discrimination. Does she like it, being a lesbian, that in the dark net of attendant care, so many helpless to defend themselves become enslaved to predatory control? I cannot shield myself from its likely recurrence forever. This, supposedly, was the point of Precious's author, this nothing we can do attitude, despite all our industrious legal generation. Bambauer cleared up a contextual issue for me, in part, and this is how it works, but not really. Google Blogger should suspend me. Twitter too, and authority should force me into compliance, and I suffer say another eight years, until terminal issue discloses itself, or I can take up my little plan and try beating the odds, or go on, wrangle the system for the joy juice that will not force a lethal reaction. Difficult to do with cerebral palsy.
Drexel University is not that well known to me, but well known enough to be intuited that it's little league academics, a bit spartan, perhaps afflicted with uncertainty, and in the larger societal context, George may have survived employee termination, where Lisa did not, because he was white, angry leftist. In contrast, viewers saw Tucker at war with a paranoid minority in Durden, and echoes of the Black Panthers may have resonated. In real time, these issues are about group dynamics, and less about theory, like claims liberty. This is a contextual issue, our faith in an institutional judiciary. It punished Brandon Phillips, my assaulter, but this did nothing for me. It also pushed back against an unscrupulous landlord, one which thrives on a socialist subsidized federalism, dear libertarian friends, but I live in terror, nonetheless, after years of conflict. Yes, I have a choice: go homeless, bully the same old intake system into emergency relocation, but a real genuine legal fight is probably going to take 24 months. For what? Do I presume more affluence? Support him or not, (I am in the middle, hoping he will hurt progressives who failed me), Trump is a symptom; he is not a proximate cause. Some of my longest online associates have made me diffident because of well worn beatnik cosmetic protests that really cannot unravel poverty entrapment.
We know it hurts.-- Subprimal's editors No, rejections from non-paying markets doesn't hurt. What hurts is my loss of ability to make money because I no longer seek succor at the rancid nursery of Josie Byzek's regressive breast. I have been wasting some usage arguing on New Mobility's contact submittal form about the past, and while my observation to Josie that I don't know her well enough to hate her may be accurate, it is not quite true. I would love to go to Lancaster County and whip her across her ugly shrugging self-effacing face, all over an Argentine who cut me off, a Catholic abandoned by his wife, pompous, kindly, hefty fellow with a high voice. I threw out his telephone number. No one can undo Josie's lack of impulse control, anymore than I can undo mine, so what do I want? She has her own self esteem issues, and hides under her tortoise shell. I may conveniently overlook that she published an essay in my collection about "leaving Matrix," and that led me to my pithy 3000 USD, but any number of outlets might have published it, and I had other pieces. No, Tim left me on the shoals in 2005. Journalists know how dirty our business is, the price of gaining access; but what I am talking about is how activists belie their own rhetoric about inclusion. In the span of 24 hours, after I did my personal relationships feature, I was on Tim's list of writers, then not. I took this personally. It hurt my feelings, and it is safe to say no one else ever treated me this way. No editor, no publisher. Even Jeffrey's "I'll pass," on my Brexit efforts didn't sting that much. The failure only motivated me. The problem with me and the Freeman, however, is I like a fight, a brawl, naming names. Jeffrey prefers generalities, and so I am biding my time. We'll see. He may have been confused when I sent him my niume link to District 9, but this film is a splendid three course meal for the politicization of entertainment. Before anything else, I am a ferocious reactionary. Not this ferocious, but Doris Lessing predicted our regressive tendencies in her Memoirs. Did we pay attention? And is this relevant to the virtues of automation? If minorities can do this to each other, doesn't this give you a better sense of why I so urgently and incessantly want to get the holy fuck out from under Trudy Richardson's power to threaten, humiliate me? She's black, superficially authoritarian, but she is stupid, and a nigger nanny. The species still exists. However much you disapprove of my diction. My family cannot handle it, neither can you, what it takes for the majority of functionally dependent wheelchair users to survive, and while I was going to go with the reasonable equanimity of NPR to discuss the explosive, and corrosive growth, of entitlements, worldwide, Breitbart's bristling is not entirely a fabrication. Dependency, simply in and of itself, corrupts the human spirit. The piece answered my question about corrective surgery, though that also has risks.
Treatment of a body of work as complex and open to multiple interpretations as is Freud's risks inappropriate emphasis. Judith Van Herik Journalism, as any established journalist will tell you on any given day, is a cutthroat industry, its players necessarily competitive, but paradoxically, they provide each other with a peer support system: so when a divorced mother like Dorthea Stillman, who had her brand break in Newsweek, could inform me at the turn of the century in rather circumspect fashion that most editors don't respond to freelance queries, it wasn't something of which I was necessarily unaware. It merely made any kind of response or inclusion seem privileged. When I put my feature up on New Mobility, with Tim Gilmer's cooperation, he never gave me any indication that there was something wrong. Indeed, the fact that he included me on the periodical's 2004 contributor's list indicated good work. I got paid, they honored that much, and I would not start blogging until five years later, but I feel I deserve an explanation for why he treated me like a light switch: on his list, then off it. Whatever my problems, these online internecine cordons are a reflection of how quadriplegics with cerebral palsy are treated in three dimensional space. I had not raised my voice about the methodology of Josie Byzek, or anything of the sort. The actions I took, thirteen years ago, included reporting a belligerent wheelchair couple for engaging in rhetorical violence. I was still hurting about the Poets & Writers board at the time. PW had banned my account for "atypical trolling," and at New Mobility, I got you damn bitch I am going to rape and slit your throat. Something of which I've never been guilty, even on Blogger. What I am trying to say is Tim ostracized me, with no explanation: was it my visit and conflict on the board? If so, why not tell me? Josie was a regular contributor on my Yahoo group until she forced me to take away the users freedom to post, but again, in terms of a sequential timeline, Tim dropped me first; the old man, who puts such a premium on his emotional stability, simply cut me off, five years after I had to go through my title IX violation at the disability center. These were my secondary families, my support systems. I certainly cannot blank slate it now, and pitch the old grizzly with my ideas, bypassing my contempt for the spinal cod association's tortoise lesbian, but how would you have felt, within your group identity, being so exiled, under a hostile, criminal, landlord, with that entity's constant, incessant badgering and duress? It is this which draws us into the dynamic representation of a comic actor's embodiment of Satan, the corrosion over time. It can buckle any will. Mr. Frost does an excellent job of illustrating how. Mr. Frost is not a perfect film, by far. It anticipates graphic documentary captures which would come after it, like Schindler's List, plays with some of the same which came before, and mixes this up with turmeric biting melodrama and a dose of camp which borders perilously close to farce, threatening to unravel its moments of stark gravity, but for what Goldblum has to do, within the trappings of Jewish demonology, it is a decent effort, aiming for the implausibly naturalistic. The opening isolation surrounding the character, nearly idyllic, using the pupils as a mirror to reflect white crosses, nice touch, and the devil as an amateur chef speaks volumes, with Goldblum's horror, at the height of his currency, essentially mocking Gentile suppositions of apocalyptic judgment, whether in his finer rendition of The Fly, or in this curious British effort which insists, that like matter itself, evil is an energy which cannot be destroyed. My father, my parents, institutionalizing me for seven years, this was not my doing, but as a nine year old child, I was vaginally penetrated by minority orderlies who denigrated me: she's just like Iris. And I might offer Josie's limitations more leniency if she had the courage to go on the record. She and Tim both. about these cyclic abuses at the hands of those of African descent. Getting past each incident, this is one thing, but when it keeps flinging, like oatmeal, what am I supposed to do? The conduct of the paraprofessional from Unlimited Staffing, her voracious appetite written into her face, like an Okie in the swamp, reignited a revolt against HUD's procedural cruelty which is going to cost me further still. It doesn't amount to selling your soul, or giving a fallen angel the opening it needs to possess, to expulse torture and brutality in radiating waves, but it comes down to an equivalency, whether we believe soul has tangible energy or not.
This is what I'm trying to protect myself from, and couldn't, despite mt IQ, my investigative work for New Mobility, Josie the pissing milch cow's bread and butter, or any lies and subterfuge I engaged in to stave off worse than a sexual pass from the most gluttonous mulatto I ever laid eyes on. It happens more frequently to the disabled than any outside of disability centers know, hence my support for morally cool unpleasantness like eugenics, euthanasia. In 1991-93 I had a true quadriplegic client named Don; his aide put him on the commode and cleaned out his apartment. Not sure how he managed his rescue. Could you forgive or get over that? This is why state Medicaid Waiver systems need to be stopped, and it has nothing to do with conservative astringent. If you read the fine print of these federally "mandated" centers, and you comply with the paradigm, they have a "no liabilities" clause for pairing clients with fly by night providers like Unlimited Staffing, an agency against whom I had had the most cause to seek redress. That "no liability" clause is written into contracts because disability centers couldn't function otherwise, and still, like medical supply vendors, they unravel like a ball of yarn. Homemaker Services broke up its incorporation a number of years back. I first signed onto the waiver as a "federal employee" in 97, then the state treasury said I owed them taxes, because I was assigned a deaf case manager who was accused by the next one of bad faith procedure. Centralized institutional care is hell, cushioned by money or not, but decentralization doesn't work, I am sorry. Very few people like me, without some kind of professional earnings valve, are freer within being constrained by services. Wapo's reporting illustrates this fact. All the state statues amount to nothing because of substantive victimization between client and paraprofessional, left to their own devices. Get rid of it. In the interim, I found an old housing list, by virtue of dumping and cat knocking and then straightening up; dated, but it is what I need, a list, and maybe I can kick box a summer transition.
"I stayed with a murderer, so what friends can I have?" -- a cast member of Leo Gaut, part of the Johan Falk series I was going to tell you, earlier Saturday evening, as a matter of technicality, that I never dated, but an electronic technician named Rick, who got my number because he was white in the deep chocolate off campus ghetto sea, walked me to a McGonigle Hall game, and had one thing on his mind. Paced like something rabid with the one thing on his mind, what year? 89 maybe, and I rejected him because all he wanted was the one thing. Cripples fuck like bunnies, but his roving and unpleasant pale blue eyes, orbs just as easily my mothers, never even looked at me, to the game, from it, I talked him out the door as ably as Liza Minnelli. Two thirds closed he coughed piteously. You want a cup of tea? I relented in fine sleep with him and get it over with sentiments-- fuck him so he leaves, but the stern veered to starboard because I had no rubbers. He had no rubbers and it was my third sexual assault with reluctantly coerced consent, and I won against an unremarkable penis, small from steroids, drugs. He left. So much for dating. I wept like a splinter, punished for staying Caucasian. More remarkable still, he chased after me on the telephone. I flared like a wolverine, and that was the end of Rick, if not public housing men altogether. I should learn from the finesse of European women, their beauty more deeply ingrained than their American counterparts. Sophia Loren cheapened this when she transitioned to Hollywood: I cannot imagine that New Mobility Magazine staffers earn much of a salary. They paid me 400 for my feature, and before that I earned 50 cents a word, while Clarity Media has seemingly become, with stark laughter, my supported employment, my no fault slavery I can opt out of anytime I please. Pro or con. If I fall into indigence of absolute zero come winter 2015, I shall not stand it, not 30 plus anymore, my nerve for field travel vanquished by the long defunct Institute with whom I came to grief. What can you say? Nothing, but the resilience of old bones loses its spring-- this is the consequence of belief and investment in intake centers-- the damage of their indoctrination and subsequent expulsion, regardless of how diminished they've become. Fifteen years of looking for a life raft and new definition, splinters like fangs beneath my fingernails throbbing, urgent.
Aggregation involves the formation of assemblies of particles brought together by collisions, held in contact by surface forces. From a mechanistic point of view, deposition onto a macroscopic surface can be considered to be a limiting case of particle-particle aggregation in which one of the particles has an infinite dimension. Elimelech and co-authors
To state it another way, Jim Gardner was once quoted in Time Magazine asserting "We're not phonies," maybe not, but there is a huge difference between anchoring a broadcast and covering a story, or even pitching an idea. Media oriented journalists like Erik Wemple leave me discomfited at times, despite the fact that I have used my support of old grand Wapo to dissect its crop of contributors, but with the Brian Williams story, I concede Erik has cleared up my contextual bafflement. Perhaps there is a sense here that broadcasters want to be more than show horses, and Williams convinced himself that he was in the thick of it, just as Hillary did years ago. One might call it mannequin legitimacy, in much the same way that the welfare caste loses visibility and credibility, its poverty criminalized. Three times, once in responding to a support ticket in a foul manner of emotional disappointment, I told Examiner.com I quit and decoupled myself from its Pinterest spam market, ashamed that I aggregated so much content for nine months. Yet this is not relevant. It's sister site, AXS, still regularly appears in my inbox, asking me for work, and I don't get it, replying as nicely as I did to Nikki Lloyd last evening, that I was no longer writing for Examiner, having closed my accounts in November 2014. I am no longer sure I can be a practicing journalist. Not due to mistakes. I've made them in good conscience, rushing paragraphs. This is what copy editing is for. Not due to failure either. Sometimes ideas jell and an article emerges, sometimes not, and I have never lied about sources, but I am simply not sure how to stay in the saddle. I do not wish to work for New Mobility anymore, although I am going to write them an editorial about ADAPT Josie Byzek LBGT backlash, dare them to publish it, which they won't, and aggregating past content for different levels of emphasis can trip up the most conscientious, however driven we are toward veracity. My sense is we're all becoming overwhelmed with information, forgetting how to think it through, and this may not behoove us well at the end of the day. History informs us that Woodward, Bernstein, numerous others, did not know what they had with the Watergate break in, and I still don't know what they had. Illegal activity and covert movement against the left in the aftershock of the Cold War, but Nixon's motives? Those seem impervious, however more attuned I was to Gerald Ford's pardon. I remember that vividly.
Since I am discontent with the limitations of Tim Gilmer's self interest, and generally believe that community integration regulatory compliance needs to be reformed, and significantly reduced, I am turning over in my mind the attempt to create a policy think tank that is not going to limit itself with personal experience stories-- but examines the problems of single payer options (Medicare/Medicaid) and the lack of efficacy in their administration and costs, and examines hard things like cognizance capacity toward viable matriculation. Tim was a fairly decent editor; he let me take a risk, but as a manager Josie Byzek was not, and I will deal with that later, because I am working on a column about that. The magazine they run is Helen Gurley Brown's model for Cosmopolitan. I'd like to move toward a Foreign Affairs model. I need a web designer and qualified people. Twitter please pass this along. I want departmental academics like Laura Overstreet. I know it will take time.
In the life of a freelancer, egos get bruised; even those with name recognition receive rejections, and as it stands today, New Mobility would be within its rights to freeze me out, since I am iterating a private betrayal between myself and a bona fide lesbian who would give my bylines exposure up to a point but no further, since she and her partner think like case managers, and neither of them share my brain damage, so they know what is best for me. When my interaction with Josie was active, I was expected to be obedient to her conventional wisdom, and in my present maliciousness, I pay a price. However, let's back it up a step: Post 2004, I was not blogging, and my Josie antipathy was the kind of repressed undercurrent we bury to get along in life; due to my cover feature Tim Gilmer included me on his contributors mailing list, and I needed it, the camaraderie. I was not after Josie's job, nor that of any other regular, and Tim dropped me. This is the nature of the publishing business, but it belies everything disability advocates say they stand for, and this is what goads me about such a narrow minded sterile culture. Tim is a paraplegic himself, and he could have had one of those electronic conversations with me about why I was cut loose in the time frame to which I refer; it is a disgraceful behavior from a man in Oregon who writes so openly about his own emotional health, after I had worked so hard on what was a difficult cover feature, and it points to why the empowerment rhetoric of the independent living movement is so destabilizing to American autonomy. Perhaps not today, but I am going to confront the publisher on it. Will it do me any good? Perhaps not, but I intend to push the point.
Tiffiny, your post about Dr. Tepper and his instructional video points to why I have stopped supporting New Mobility, aside from my rift with your managing editor Josie, whose lesbianism is so sacrosanct that it is holier than my prospective dinner date with an Argentine journalist, but of course, she has rank on you so what can I expect you to say? What I can tell you is that advocacy involves risk, and you do not really examine the first amendment issues you raise in relation to consumer needs for tactical advice, corporate censorship, and public access to digital environments. I do not have a vertebrae fracture. My spinal cord is intact, and I am able to feel sensation in my vagina; I am also fifty one years old, and the issue of constant sexual assertion becomes strident after half a century of listening to it. Sexual liberalism has binary positives and negatives. It leads to a certain degree of narcissistic selfishness, and indeed, led you to drop the ball on the larger issue of public access, prurient interests versus access to expert advice to relieve frustration or overcome obstacles. Lionel Trilling, a literary critic of stature, one whom I'd wager would draw a blank in your academic experience, raises his voice to say Henry James doesn't presume the poor to be stupid. New Mobility presumes that all wheelchair users care about is sex, medical equipment, the rhetorical conveyance of legal equality without being honest about the reality many of us face, and inclusion over viable and workable matriculation policies. Tim Gilmer's long winded personal article about his journey to emotional stability doesn't interest me, not in a glossy that purports to be of use. This does not mean cerebral palsy isn't a reality in my life, and that I do not have flaws, one being honest about my hatreds. I shall never forgive Josie, and consider her nothing more than a pedestrian hypocrite who needs a new experience, like turning her crucifix into a vibrator. She took the pleasure of a personal intrigue away from me. This shall not be forgiven. The reality of my quadriplegia, however, does offer perspectives that lead to befuddlement. Why is is such a precious thing to conquer certain geological formations in dangerous isothermic patterns that could have been avoided? True, I could drop dead from not easing up on the buttock with the pressure sore, but this is the difference between unfortunate circumstance and manufactured tragedy. Elucidate your issues with more focus. That is what I strove for in my 2004 feature that Tim published before he dropped me without explanation. Linda Dezenski, my criminally liable former supervisor, emailed her group that we were "like a second family." That analogy is all but equivalent to a stake in my heart, with how many betrayals I have had to absorb.
It is too humid. I am feeling it, and haven't eaten much, but let me reference Tiffiny Carlson's Spin 2.0 column about SCI sexual issues, and my latter day emails to Linda. Frankness is part of the territory, in the educational sense, and when Linda and I had a healthy camaraderie, we had a good laugh about a soft smoker I saw during my teens with Sue. I described it. "I think I saw that!" was the exclamation, and on the basis of the unexpected recognition, this represented a healthy bit of fun, but there is a difference between that and crossing personal boundaries, then making me eat shit about my discomfort, and setting me up to fall on my sword over a job I could not do that then illegally went to Erik's lover, and subsequent to that nearly killing me over the next seven years. Independent living centers are corrupt simply by the segregated nature of the paradigm. New Mobility knows this, but they thrive on puff pieces mainly useful for wrapping fish bones. Ragged Edge, now defunct, was actually closer Washington Monthly in terms of its investigative caliber. Some of Mary's contributor's had good policy critiques. As to Tiffiny's indignation about the You Tube cull-- that I can't speak to, whether or not your children need that exposure. Now I need to lie down; haven't even made my coffee.
"You are asking people to admit to illegal activity." a New Mobility regular named Barry, I think.
And that is what a good investigative journalist does, educate. There is an undercurrent in American culture, a belief that in the popular lexicon, we suffer from arrested development, emotionally anchored in high school, even as we perform the most complex surgeries, litigate the most arcane points of law. It is what keeps a network like ABC afloat, and in a simple sense, made Six Feet Under worthy of macabre acclaim. Do we have to mature, sober up, in the face of mortal demise? Accept the paternalism of genetically wiser tribal elders?
Disability culture is not quite as static as Goodall's discovery of chimp tool use, but it comes pretty close. Consumer model attendant care is a highly inefficient system that leads to regressive and sometimes abusive role reversal, and all the activists can do, for more than over 50 years of my lifespan, is say community integration is better, even while matriculation erosion basically amounts to institutional parity. I am suffering just as much with Presby as my landlord as I did as an abandoned child in Home of the Merciful Savior. Charles never addresses this, I suppose due to his disavowal of identity issues. John weighs back in now and again, but he is one of the very few disabled public figures who is as successfully matriculated as a media professional with paralysis can be without overstating the obvious. But it is when individuals like my former supervisor, who causes so much unnecessary psychic and economic harm when she has the cognitive ability not to engage in such behavior, and individuals like me, who most often get left out.
Hockenberry, like thousands of disabled veterans, was once able-bodied. Those of us born with chronic impairments are the most expendable untouchables.
One reason I do not support New Mobility through subscription is their lack of innovation, lack of willingness to push, write better articles, get scoops that matter. In this sense, disability and LBGT activism, the radical equality thereof, is monochromatic, and it becomes routine. Now I can hear detractors point out to me that I am well aware that homosexuals make extraordinary contributions to arts and sciences. I grew up on Elton and Taupin, and they pushed pop rock in interesting ways. I love Proust, cannot live without my loving frustration of Henry James and his radical ambiguity, and I embrace this difficulty, not shy from it, but still hold that radical equality is destroying our ability to discriminate, to create fences, allowing the auburn women in the Joyce group to make me feel unwelcome by expressive censure, even if I am hurt by it, and even if I wrote an unkind about the woman from Camden and described to you my brief stroll and rejection of her as suitable-- there is no real reason for this. I connect better to the young professor but feel the need to leave him in peace. My pain and failure to have been as he, this is not his problem; progressives are still wrong, and wiping out the cruelty of the human ape makes things worse, in the long run. I stayed away today because of my fading strength, however, not that the auburns may or may not be dismayed with me. My concerns differ from theirs, and charming Lance wants to teach the book, get us through, and on my deathbed, I will tell him thumbs up, and wink.
Shakespeare's authorship is a non sequitur in terms of relevant academic contention, by the way, and I think Jacobi is merely being a coy devil, his camp of the Claudian line a riot, and relevant to our concerns. The idea of authorship was obviously fluid from the time of Homer to William's era, and it was only in the 19th century that content started to evolve into our modern concept of commodity, intellectual property, and the like. Who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays doesn't matter, just as the authorship of the Greek plays doesn't matter, and the same indifference applies to Homer, his actuality and his legend. I cannot compete with Shakespeareans, but with this qualification, I tend to believe he was the master of his domain.
But as to disabled identity, I am a writer and failed scholar first, and that the activists cannot answer for what their politics have done to me, ultimately, their rhetoric, juxtaposed against the reality of my lifelong alienation, struggle against victimization, is doomed to failure. The New Mobility community, at the micro level, cut me loose, rather than offer me continued support, even if I lost my cool in their online zoological excuse for an interactive community. I have listened to sexuality on our sleeves, we need empowerment, for thirty years. It is as exciting as hospice gruel.
"What about the coldness of the narrator?"-- one of my astute online critical evaluators.
I could envision that my voice raises concerns for the young cyber turks who manage to keep twitter running smoothly. "We try not to interfere," does not mean they are not skittish about anything that may hint at incitement, and I have done more than hint-- but tweets are the brick wall of my digital age adaptation. I do not like cell phone micro-blogs, and it slipped my mind that adolescents who may have gone from my tweets to my posts here may have shit a few bricks-- in essence I hit the tweet button without contemplating twitter culture, how it flares and ends careers that fast, but my career, as such, ended with this merry enclave in 2004, unfortunately. I do not particularly disdain New Mobility for being what it is, a hybrid of Cosmo, my relation to Josie aside. I am mildly piqued at Tim Gilmer for dropping me off his team of contributors after I did my feature, and I have toyed with confronting him about it, but he probably wouldn't offer me an explanation. I visited their online board and shouldn't have (it is not important to detail, but if Poets & Writers banned me for public arguments, on NM's board a quad in Florida posted that I needed to be raped and have my throat cut, and I pasted it in, and reported). That was the only time I played cop, but then got the cold shoulder on any further access as a contributor.
Add two and two together with Josie's need to control her own territory.
However, New Mobility has one or two key notes and repeats these scales, emulating most periodical impulse content, and twitter is not viable for giving me social anchorage. I understand it but intellectually look on it as a virus, and the viral snub by Susanna Daniel effectively eliminated twitter as an interactive community for me. Like Strether, and yes, I may edit that stub, it is clumsy, I feel snubs like spears. I am still conflicted about the magazine, as a second clip would not hurt, but that would take moxie at this point.
Josie and Tim do not read my blog, I am sure. They do what they need to to keep the publication which employs them alive, but this doesn't discount the ripple effect. I could also turn this on its head, submit a piece about being an alienated one time contributor, and why. It would take guts, me to submit it, NM to dare publish it, and Josie to stomach it-- which is not the same thing as becoming her public adversary.
Until his PBS run this evening, I never considered Derek Jacobi sexually attractive. Odd times, but his apostasy, like that of most deniers who relish the implausible, does not make much sense. The Earl was an aristocrat, and just as easily as Essex might have been hanged or beheaded for anarchy, or subverting the security of the state. Not sure I am going to group today. Time to rest, however.
In the iconic Huston would have been B film that defied expectations, Lionel Barrymore's character, James Temple, embodies all the contradictions of disability that are far older than the somewhat monochromatic identity games that ADAPT and Cassie and the rest of the old guard that I have written about play. This old man, Mr. Temple, as he is addressed by Bogart in close formality, perhaps Bogart's attempt to ward off the threat of caring for him and widowed daughter in law, he is a benevolent tyrant toward the indigenous natives that Huston is clearly exploiting, though in 48 this was no doubt a progressive move, of which Temple's paternalism was meant to be seen as inclusive, but Temple is also just as trapped, between Robinson's hard cruelty and the Bogart/Bacall compassion. The latter may be better than the former, but this is not a social relation between equals, and the same holds true today, despite the partisan, and false reverence for the ADA, as espoused by New Mobility and the rest of IL culture. My feature for them in 2004 was one of the few times they went under the radar, so to speak, to look at a real and troubling issue within the equally monochromatic *attendant care* paradigm, and yes, it saddens me that I sacrifice them as a market I have already penetrated, but Tim Gilmer has ignored me even before I highlighted my antagonism toward Josie, which is real and will not be undone, and though it hurts my career, and I am an aging wheelchair user who very briefly felt part of their family and then wasn't, I sacrifice them for the sake of integrity over a conflated lie. The ADA, independent living is just that, a lie, just as is the elevation of Cassie over the expense of so much suffering. For every Cassie James, for every John Hockenberry, and even Vassar Miller, for whom I have no castigation, only praise, and that is because Vassar is authentic, a real literary artist who transcends, for all those, very few of us have real control, real power to adapt to our limitations and call our own shots. Who actually has this power? The Medicare and insurance actuary, those that control transit authority budgets, and the wonderful asses that run federal and state housing. I will expand in another post after some rest.
The rapid convergence of queer theory and disability studies over the past few years has been nothing short of extraordinary. Robert McRuer My interview with the PhD from the Bay area was humorous to the extent that I had a fecal gas attack and she did not know I left her hanging, drove to toilet, and only then resumed the interview. She had polio, hired me, did not get the grant proposal. I reacted in email, more frustrated than not, and she and I parted company. This came after the actress my former disability center siphoned into a WIMM grant. If I had written anything particularly vicious I would have remembered, and believe her affronted sense was due to the fact "she was trying to help." I cannot remember much else, even if I wanted to remain her protege. In terms of keeping a connection, I blew it. Inadvertently. Perhaps she succeeded in creating the educational paradigm she wished, and her students work for the usual spin doctors. I hope she succeeded, and perhaps found tenure at Berkeley, liberal mastiff. Now the clincher: In came a lesbian with an MIT affiliation who offered to make me an online instructor for a course I really would have enjoyed doing. Resume sent, syllabus material developed, and while I waited, I might have been in the North Pole discovering fossilized hermaphrodites. I cried out into the darkness and finally, though I needed magic pliers to get it out of the woman, discovered her department never had the money. She "just wanted to help." This is not mutual empowerment through shared matriculation, sorry. In my book, pipe dreams are just that, and this forms a part of why I am more angry at the activists themselves than I am with the ambulatory majority.
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.
