Esoteric Degeneration

"All of us at one time or another had our lives fall apart."-- Dina Strada

And for spastic to argue tenaciously with the pressures of women issues, not all of us spend our lives under institutional regimentation only to realize there is no way out from under its thumb, not even in that blanketing things left unsaid in our untrammeled collegiate system. We all get sick from time to time, and if we don't die from esoteric degeneration (how is this link for indecipherable jargon?) then either our hearts give way to plaque or our organs consume themselves with cancer, but in what sense of the word do our choices represent our freedom?

Let's take the conventional Robert Frost motif on roads not taken: Joanne heeds Professor Jerry and stays home in Ridley Park. Speculation about graduate work aside, she winds up as a part time librarian or special ed instructor, never sets eyes on the former Linda C Richman, notoriously toxic executive, and the grandson of the nearly retarded monosyllabic Mrs Phillips assaults someone else. Okay, my blood brother still wastes away like a blasted ear of corn, my mother still drops dead, perhaps in front of me, my father still loses everything because the IRS sees him through the lens of a mafia version of Enron (yes, another unclear allusion but it involves taxes and I have no fucking idea why federal agents set off on my father like a wolf pack), so he still winds up back in the hood when we were once almost near a Harvard family level of affluence, and maybe I just snuff out like vanilla, forced into Inglis House without having ever been privy to its horrific impact.

I would have never gone screaming in prose to a mutedly gay lawyer about my toxic panic vis a vis Linda's reign at an ineffectual intake center coupled with an abusive attendant care paradigm, and neither he nor any other elected official can do a fucking thing for me while I sit here evaluating how my 53 year old intestines and increasingly pronounced hearing loss and loss of muscle mass will allow me to navigate back into substantial gainful activity. Uh huh.

Brian, the man, is having a town hall meeting tonight, as he's so carefully drummed into me with two emails and a robo call beneath the bubble of punishment I'm taking in this Jazzy Quantum. I don't go then I don't go. The budget allocation under state Republican austerity doesn't affect me directly either way; the Philadelphia public school system is a cesspool regardless of who does what with it, and Harney County's answer to what remains of American individualism reads more like a travesty of Pilgrim's Progress than a spirited hoorah for the independent underdog. If I do go, even though I'm not unionized and PNI will ignore me as readily as any other established outlet, then maybe I get a story, red meat in pansy land, something.

One of the residents of Riverside with terminal cancer, a bigot named Dominic, disparaged me in a brief give and take: "You bring people down." That maybe true, from the viewpoint of an animal caged in captivity, age 5 and onward.

Weekend on the Hill, an address to Fareed Zakaria

Mr. Zakaria, I offer my regrets that your children were harassed over the telephone after your column about self-destructive whites who support Trump was spoofed. Aside from the fact that I've traipsed on the hem of the fourth estate long enough to know that energy flags even with a deadline approaching, and aside from the fact that I've had more articles fall apart than I've had published, you wrote a bad column about a statistical analysis of white suicides for those in my age group, suggesting in your last line that people like me take a reality check, and that "Trump can't fix it, no one can." Exactly what kind of observation is that, even with the acknowledgement that Wapo needs to resolve its revenue generation issues just like the rest of us?

That Donald Trump is where he is at the moment in the run for the White House is a testament to more than a few failures of the previous and current administrations. Afghanistan hasn't been a viable nation state for more than 30 years. Bush and cabal didn't resolve that issue, destroyed Iraq as a buffer zone, and Obama subsequently offers seven years of apologias. Usually, national policy has little effect on my stagnant paralysis as a disabled woman, but the ACA is apparently deciding what kind of healthcare I need for itself without my participation, a cripple who's tragedy amounts to the realization that liberal academics who believed her intelligence would be her economic security were wrong. My career in Philadelphia, brief as it was under vocational interference and afterwards, was basically segregated within the public welfare system. Now it is worse than it was in my twenties, for reasons which have run the gamut through this account purportedly about disability in entertainment, which for the most part it is. The social media mockery to which you were subjected probably has its roots in the fact that your ability to brand your writing is too diaphanous, and yet, like many of your colleagues, you're unionized, salaried, to dish up milkweed as some sort of castigation, then the fact that you were trolled becomes its own establishment media item. That is the nature of the business; readers, however, even if they aren't over-educated with the debt to show for it, know when they're having their chain yanked; if they reacted before thinking it through the behavior was inappropriate, but the sensationalism whose maw you feed rather ineptly at times, puts the blame partly at your door.

I'm going to be blunt: I look like shit, and the last time I had a decent repast twice in the same day is beginning to fade from my memory, and I haven't taken the risk to use my aging bath chair since the building manager telephoned Health and Human Services agents to humiliate me last April, so my personal hygiene is under challenge, and if I am more than likely going to go the same way most section 202 housing residents go I've resolved to take my own life, and I am having a harder time than usual this month. I wanted to, determined to, keep my Amazon Prime membership. Why? Burnished comfort of vanity beyond my means? In a few hours I shall with embarrassment drive to Trader Joe's for a loaf of bread on my laundry money, good as my word when it comes to my visceral hatred of entitlements for what I'm subjecting myself to. I wouldn't have the slightest compunction about becoming a domestic militant, if I could, against housing authorities who've treated me like chunnel since I was a graduate student, and intake systems whose use of assurances rapidly germinate their own criminal liability, but even radical libertarian ranchers occupying federal lands in Oregon relegate morbidly angry quadriplegics to entities like Bellevue, particularly if they're now too old to ride stallions on their own as a good method of leg stretching. Most woman of my age probably swooned over Daniel J. Travanti in his heyday, with his cultured moderated pragmatism. I know I did, fantasized over the man as the perfect televised version of my father whom I'd never marry. Progressive multiculturalism destroyed even the humane standard of decency he represented. If you were as astute an analyst as you should be, allegations of fraudulence wouldn't continue to hound you as they do.

Pizzo

"Intuitive improvisation is the secret to genius"-- Christopher Walken, playfully Zorin

On the other hand, as some of my early viewers may recall, I want to return to Italy to die there, so maybe lack of accessibility wouldn't be such an issue, if all I wish is to close my eyes and press my fatigued lips to the sampietrini, Roman basalt being the basic sequence of my DNA. Going home to be robbed of my dignity by clever ladri may not be the most peaceful way to expire, but transporting the greaseball to Philadelphia hasn't succeeded in erasing the dago from the flesh, and at my age I have to make a choice: throw every impoverished energy I have into setting my sights on Tuscany, or fight the disability center. Perhaps my ambulatory viewers do not quite comprehend the sequential spiral of events, between 1989 and now. I've given bits, and hints, and turned Linda C Dezenski into a byword, only occasionally objective as to the shared blame between the two of us, but the problem of Liberty isn't simply her exorcism, nor my exile. Independent living centers generate their own bigotry, and the only way to put a stop to that is in eliminating them, or at least redistricting them to reduce the constant litigation. Employers get sued, it is a fact of life, and we mitigate that with reality television transforming executives into camera philanthropists to avoid insurrection, at least most of the time. Dushey's humanitarian conscience was a dog and pony show for the camera, not to be believed, ultimately unsustainable. The sole reason spastic paid the plight of Shoppers World any attention was a dearth of material, indifferently checking in with NZT, but intake centers like Liberty are in a class by themselves, and only the disabled who emerge from them truly understand this. Reasonable accommodation means, in CIL culture, that competency is a nice idea, much like Gandhi's barb about western civilization. EEOC lawsuits are the norm here, and this is truly why I prefer reactionary retrenchment to the progressive spectrum. Tom Earle is an attorney of disability law, and yet, utilized his legal blindness as a cover for negligence. To me this is incredible, though passing the buck was a blatant admission of his predecessor, Fern Markowitz. "I am not responsible for her conduct."

Direct quote. Again, this isn't simply about what Liberty did to me. No one accepts responsibility for the abuse and stigma which is a daily occurrence in IL. No liability might be the motto of the entire country, let alone the state, or the city. I'd break the law to get Liberty closed down, and only my exhausted scrambling prevents me from acting, but when I'm ready, I'm going to load my guns and put up a hell of a fight. I want a better future for those after me.

I nearly hurt myself in the winter of 2000; that is how distraught I was, racing around to find a therapeutic lifeline, and I will not permit them to do this to others in perpetuity, the bedridden who are abused. It may not be as rampant as nursing home neglect, but the very activism Liberty trumpets hides its secret holocaust on a small scale. This is not progressive, not for all Krugman's blue blood whinny about socialized medicine, and Shoppers World inadvertently exposed these skeletal fossils, if you listened to the vagaries of the employees problems: nursing homes, pregnancies, dialysis. Executives like Dushey cannot bankrupt themselves due to lack of awareness over shoplifting and the inadequacy of Medicaid. On the positive side, if I do get across the Atlantic, the ladri would discover I'm an excellent enforcer. My first allegiance is always to Rome. Don't forget it.