Diving Bells

"You aren't welfare trash. You have your writing. You're intelligent." --Frank, whose unspeakable crime was attempting to make spastic_dowager his wife.

I cannot handle it when I visit Frank in his unit. He is not in a nursing home, but he lives within the community in name only. His studio looks like a hospital ward in precisely the relation that my studio looks like a train depot. He lies in a hospital bed surrounded by steel frames, pulleys, life alert buttons, and I did not enjoy anal sex on the end of his fist; he admired the lubricated intensity of my climax, however, and this, our creation of a third gender, one that I destroyed in horror, with the realization that the lead car was about to flatten me, has nothing on the failed queer intimacy between John Marcher and May Bartram. I have interacted with some of these scholars Tate refers to for years, and the best they can do is assert that homoerotic impetus subverts traditional Victorian bonds, and remain fixated there.

I think there is more to it than that, whatever the erosion of lesbianism's epistemological force, as if there is truly an erasure of the value of the breast as a container because same gender attraction to her own vessel was eradicated via the rise of Semitic monotheism. Literary scholars sometimes forget to stop making love and assuaging each other's ego. There is a third way into James that doesn't necessarily involve his orientation, whether he actively ejaculated into it, or not.

Simulation, and I think this is what has keep me fixated to the mastery of James, beyond my dead academic advisor giving me a lifelong quest, or my now very pained sexual security, which must, after all, have some bisexual proclivity, since I kept my distance from Alexandra but was impacted by the knowledge of her absence upon her decease, or my cling to Michael's memory itself. My own little plot for a divorced professor with two children, his younger daughter named for Emily, of course. I was there for his happiness when she was born, but this is simulation, just as Frank and I, had I married him,would have been an imitation of viability as husband and wife, and yet I am not finally surrendering, in the classical right wing trigger dynamic, to confess to self sanctified faggots that I am truly one of you, and that my depressive episode with Linda was a near lethal dose of gay panic and wallowing in maudlin strings, I loved her as an imprint of how I saw myself in her psychopathy, though I believed this for a number of years after our near deadly altercation with each other, my obsessively referenced supervisor. I believed that her conduct must have cracked me because I am a repressed switch hitter, but this is an error, at least in terms of self-realization, though I share many of her attributes: cold, analytical, lacking in empathy unless it is an extraordinary tragedy, like Newtown. She is a praying mantis in physique, which I would have preferred over my florid cellulose, but those are genetics.

Henry James penetrates the horror of simulated intimacy, even while Marcher acknowledges how this diminishes us in its very grasp, makes us perfect asses. I did not work at all Saturday, but I have the data I need to reconstruct my political representative contacts, as I need to get away from the dying doctor transvestite, before my anger at this figure overcomes my developmental condition in a miraculous display of strength; this is why I visited Frank, to spew the poison of Erik von Schmetterling out of my mouth.

Right To Bear

Nothing is as frightening as a disillusioned liberal.
--popular saying



I twirl her reputation like a baton in the hands of a cheerleader who possesses the dexterity to twirl, watching the shiny loose change tumble from her pockets, blood bouncing in her skull, dizzying, post-surgical nausea unpleasantly sloshing in a disturbed stomach, my once and never again editor from Lancaster, taking from me what can never be replaced, will this end of life investment in venom be worth it? My energy is too fagged on this warmer winter morning to refine the incision, lucky for my skimmers, so I speculate, pondering the gun control issue, and the unfortunate rise of the new witch hunt over those with mental defect, diseased brains, or mood disorders aggravated by poverty, and sometimes deliberate blindness of self-interest. Both sides have it wrong, the radical left and the anal retentive NRA.

Against the NRA is the fact that guns are designed to kill very efficiently. The right needs to admit this and stop beating about the bush. Guns are lethal weapons, and even in trained hands, lead to tragic and unintended consequences. They may give us nice fantasies, especially in the hands of a still vibrant, erotic, dangerous Christopher Walken in his early Reaganesque Forsyth vehicle of mercenary cynicism, but they erode moral empathy, and make our inner cities war zones of post traumatic stress inbreeding.

Against the left: Stop splitting hairs and stand for something. The second amendment needs to be revised, and that revised law needs to be ratified the way the founding fathers intended ratification to work, passed by a 2/3 state majority. Easy, no, but progressives damn themselves this way all the time. Sexual equality is cosmetic sissy whining and obscures real concrete and serious issues that ail the failed Enlightenment Ideal that was supposed to be the United States. Stop picking on what is primarily a problem of underclass poverty, mental illness, and start asking some serious questions about weaponry and capitalism, corporate profit. Toying with an article proposal here, the specifics of which shall not be for your consumption.

Privacy, in theory

Weary of torturing my posts to aim for the acumen, not pretension, but acumen I want to have, I am researching privacy and the constitution, and a legal scholar reminds me simply that it is about what the government cannot do. This is no longer applicable, because the social services system can do anything it wishes to me due to my technical quadriplegia. I do not want minority aides because many of them have traumatized me; I do not want Presby staff constantly in and out of my unit, so Debra Horne and Trudy Richardson can forcibly remove me any damn time they please for a psychiatric assessment due to my expressed animosity and then come up with competing rationalizations for it. I raise my voice; they do not bother to ask if this due to the fact that my larynx is the only part of my anatomy that works with above average capacity, and that my need to talk may be a functional compensation for a seriously compromised mobility as opposed to a simple bipolar label, among other things, and the Medicare actuary decides which and what medical technology I can and cannot have as a lifelong entitlement beneficiary, and independent living centers will go on deliberately marginalizing until they kill enough people to create a trauma nearly as powerful as Newtown. I will get the change I want, even if it means a major traumatic sacrifice, but never again, ever, can I maintain a positive outlook on the basic sanctity of the human condition, and that is tragic, not just shedding a long nascent infantilism.

Krauthammer Codicil

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.

Garland's Simile

Part of this is my titanic struggle not to smoke tobacco, and I fear an imminent breakdown of the fact that I have been clean since last March; part of this is my menstrual cycle is an all but sterile issue, and I am still enough in the memory of fertility to mourn my healthy femininity, and the welfare state should not be killing me with compliance. There was a woman here  in Riverside Presbyterian, tall and intimidating, with dry toffee skin, bipolar, how dangerous I know not, who thundered at me, "You don't believe in God?" as if it was an insult. Amy with the face cancer telephoned me, asking me, because of my background in advocacy, to stop Debra from evicting this woman for not taking her medication. For me that was a conflict of interest, and she chased me on the Parkway. I pitied her situation, avoided contact.

Enter Jane with the dog, white, over  the last twenty four months, she threatened me, has harassed countless residents, forced me to change my telephone number, and I asked why Debra Horne is not evicting her?

Anyone have any faith in state vocational civil servants who leave and take  on the Protestant work ethic to keep poverty a healthy and thriving industry of exploitation?

I would do anything to go home, something I no longer have to go to, and caution that access to mental health services is not a panacea for HUD's contractual alliance with religious companies that browbeat the most disadvantaged populations.

More to the point, neither woman is or was helped by Presby, and after 27 years, I, personally, am being destroyed by women who have total access to everything I do, all the money I have; they control every aspect of my life, threaten me at will, and yes, I can give my notice, except for the fact that doing so is tantamount to putting myself physically at risk. I do not know what happened to Amy's friend, and Jane is stigmatized by most of the tenants, at least those that still utilize healthy social networks. I am afraid of her irrational antagonism, and what I was once trained to do would not help. Is it an over-magnified social fear?

I was sitting in lobby, talking. Jane came in with the dog. I told her that I was going to legal aid and asked her if she would like me to mention her concerns, offered her a hairbrush for the mongrel. She said no, caught the elevator. I started to head up, and Jane took the lift back down, followed me on the larger freight elevator, and had a violent altercation with me, in the car, at close range, and then started telephoning me at one, sometimes three, in the morning. The managers suggested I call the police if it continued, and asked me to write it up, and she has since graduated to harassing my former clients. Her triggers are possibly borderline for actual violence, and that she is now preying on people I worked to help troubles me. Neither Trudy nor Debra have any professional training in mental health, disability, or geriatrics, and as such, are not qualified to either integrate or remove the problem populations they are being paid to handle.

But Trudy, the current manager, does chart, if you like, any signs or symptoms that count as aberrations she can use to advocate for institutionalization, has done her best to make me doubt my sanity, and I am grateful to Ed for scorning that tactic, reminding me of my strength, but I've never had a vacation, never able to get away from this, except for funerals, and the independent living coordinator, whoever they are, is roughly equal in parity to the cruelty of Debra's ignorance and lack of qualifications. Jane needs mental health support, and should have been evaluated for that during her residency application, but neither Presby nor centers like these have the money to spend for personnel training. Hence, when they promote black women through the ranks, the supervisory staff is basically no more than a few steps ahead of their low income welfare residents.

 If I cannot leave, safely, I will be broken beyond my ability to recover, perhaps not immediately, but soon.

Whippoorwill Quirts

I would not mind going to Edgewater. Frank and I were still duking out the end game of our relationship as a couple when the building was going up; two minutes down the block from my building, and now you definitely know where I live, by inference if nothing else, it might as well be a world away, and in fact, when they were ready to inhabit, sent me a postcard, and I never bothered. Now cursing that lack of investigation, the man I spoke to did not sound sanguine, or if not that, at least vague enough to confuse me, asserting that "you would not qualify as a section 8 tenant." Why not if one of my former clients lives there under similar circumstances? Is it optimal? No, as I'd still be in the same location, a street over, but anything not Presby does remarkable things, lifts my spirit, restores hope, with the prospect of being able to tell Ms. Horne and her cohorts they can go fuck themselves royally making me chortle with glee, sheer delight to be free of shanty town. You have no idea the full extent of what the residents here have done to me-- it was not simply constant harassment by the managers, not simply my near death in Diamond Park, and the mere prospect of anything else not in a crime plagued environment, for my health, I need the hope of movement, after 27 years of dehumanizing bigotry, my god, no wonder I identify with the extremity of Taggart's pain, though I did not lose children and drive a spouse mad. Hesitantly, I believe last evenings pill did the trick, and I am "clear," to use the standard call of television cops, but we shall see. There have been no flares. Before we return to the long dangling Ricos, I want to expend just a little more energy on Newtown's grief, partly due to my own fantasy valve despair deposits, in which I take no pride, trust me, but after years of the action thriller implosions on screen, are we not saturated with these video special effects as an outlet?

The left is entirely correct on its political sentiments about automatic weapons and the ease of executions. I live in a city of which in circumference is 85 percent a war zone in waiting, after all, though I am not entirely sure that mental health services is any more than a polite euphemism, as I cannot say if I was not a cripple I would not have sustained this much damage. I am a cripple and my life was never anything else. The question is why those in pain resort to violence as opposed to those in pain who do not. What lifts lethargy to go outside of legal mechanisms in place? I do not need David Brooks to know that most mental health clients are bullshit artists, preying on the vulnerability of more stable service providers, and would no more be spree killers than my former writing friends, or current friends, like the novelist Gretchen Laskas (who will never speak to me again), or the poet Robert Thomas (who, all things being equal, probably will).

I think if you take the Virginia Tech shooter, the Aurora shooter, the Giffords attacker, Adam Lanza, that it runs deeper than weapons cancer, because guns have always been part and parcel of what forged American identity. We live in an age of  autonomic desensitized alienation, fed on a diet of Kevin Spacey masterminds, and those who are sick get this same steady diet that hammers away at the fact that the human animal is expendable, and more than that, the poor, or those that climb, and then fall, are the unforgiven, and can thereby be bitch slapped in  a bureaucracy that no one understands, nor is anyone accountable to it. All I want to do is safely relocate out of the city, and receive justice, but that is a virtual nightmare.

I have been to Farmington CT, and fell in love with the Yankee sensibility that made the US the beacon of the world, but that self reliance, hardy and firm, the point of departure for much of the corruption of worldliness in Henry James, has all but been vanquished by guilt and victimization, which I, as an ostracized disabled woman, have been very much a part, as much a part as Jovan Belcher, or Michael Vick. Forced social equality has assisted in lowering moral cohesion, whether or not you want to accuse me of oversimplifying, it is still the truth. Had I not fled my life in Ridley Park, I would not be a broken old woman exposing herself before you, not horrified by how tolerance represses the truth of what we live. Nor am I conveying that we should re segregate ourselves according to ethnic contours. But throwing out the cell phones and the rest of our gadgets, and not creating EEOC crimes in email, taking responsibility when we're wrong, and being honest that we are different, for Christ's sake, well, that is a start.

Conrad's Kurtz

I have watched the PBS Newshour with near very religious fidelity since the start of my social services career, many years before MacNeil retired early, and long before the aging Jin Lehrer, of whom a fonder affection is generated, moved himself behind the scenes, and unlike the young athlete I am only casually espying on television, I cannot go for a contemplative stroll on a path with fall strewn leaves, even if I had one of my chairs fully charged, and today, as the Google homepage and every other digital traditional media outlet reminds us, we could all use contact with our feet and the soil, draining away, losing the self, considering our sins. My television familiars, as I consider the Newshour anchors, broke the Newtown massacre for me. "Not again," seeped through, bitter wormwood, picturing my ferocity earning your shunning opprobrium if I pushed the envelope, but the WaPo headlines overwhelmed me. I break down in tears, and despite myself, if only to indicate how much this has penetrated my psyche, God help us for the weapons technology we have at our disposal. Barring sudden death from lung fluid, I shall return when tears cease to threaten the fetid city air that I breathe.