A Mission Creep Leap of Faith

I made a bet I’d last another year, despite chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, not quite so fast-acting as necrotizing fasciitis, and placed this dour domain on auto-renewal. It is true Sullivan’s closure of The Dish heralded the death of the blogosphere, as I continue to be less receptive to how he brings his experiences to bear on Trump era controversy. More on that later, while I plod along with no revenue because I write illegal threats I cannot carry out on my own, under no illusions: Even if I attract the crackpot elements, controlling them and creating incentives for enforceable codes of silence is another matter. When Pistorius had currency  in 13, I was unhappily conflicted over the events leading up to his disgrace. On the athlete’s side of the argument, even if he wanted to kill Reeva in a heat of the moment quarrel, he could have thought of a better strategy than “it was accidental” and then bawling himself into a pity party, though this last seems to have worked to his favor temporarily. Concessions may be given to the prosecution on the basis of the evidence, but where was this amputee’s incentive to kill the woman? He had everything to lose, unlike partisans, who are forced to utilize violence for autonomy, or to act against tyranny, and did lose it, his disability making him patently more vulnerable than a typical murderer, however that is defined in South Africa. My aunt argued with me about the case, equating Pistorius’ alleged fear of black crime as Americans would fear it in inner city Philadelphia, or the Bronx, or St. Louis, or Compton. The difficulty with this line of reasoning is that Africa is primarily populated by indigenous black natives, with allowances made for various Nubian populations, Africa belongs to black Africans. Europeans could not achieve in Africa what they achieved in the Northern Hemisphere, and into the sewer it goes, yesterday’s news pitted against a rare exceptionalism in a broken body made better than ableism through technical improvements on the bipedal biology. I wish reporters would follow up on these issues more often. If Pistorius is killed in maximum security because of his developmental birth defects, I doubt the Steenkamp family would find closure in a hypocritical justification. I am not excusing the man. He was a rare cross over hero against a majority that is so conflicted about deformities and damage in the first place, on one level just another he man venting misogyny, on the other, just another monkey who couldn’t be trust out of his cage. Flesh eating bacteria makes headlines because it is swift, and echoes pandemics of yore, if it isn't the opening salvo of the next. Complex mammals have few defenses against it; cases seem to be on the rise, and we've earned it, battling too hard against death as a natural process. My return will contain more of my leg crossing unpleasantness, terrain I've waded in before. We'll see whose stomach recoils first.

Kaepernick’s Kneepad Cushions Humility

He felt a sharp stab to make someone pay.-- Henry James

I only rarely pay attention to sports on this account, although gaming offers its own aesthetic criteria. I aggregated an opinion piece on Oscar Pistorius for Examiner before Clarity Media folded its far too obvious tinsel imitation of a Huffington Post style a la carte. AXS Media, into which I was briefly merged, doesn’t seem that much better off, and I am wobbling the seesaw: Is it time? Should I give up? Or simply go find my Mucinex? My lapse of attention to the season had little to do with the art deco of “take a knee,” and much more to do with near total loss of control—perhaps not as graphic as what Pistorius is living (wondering what he’d make of my racism on the fable of apartheid’s coffin). I understand why those who truly love football stand in awe of Belichick and Brady. In my youth, Dallas had a similar dynasty, but I am too careworn for the animus of rivalry other than to say Brady’s precision, relentless as it is, begins to glaze my occasional enthusiasm for a game. I cannot fake joy over the Eagles either, because I’m suffering, that dreaded, dreaded word, despite the concerted activity about my person, and my façade of endearment to the new attendants (I do actually like the weekend girl), my physical pain and lunging mental desperation coincides with dismay. XLVI was suspenseful, historic, but more and more of American football is much like what went down during the NFC Championship. Despite what it took to survive the playoffs, despite 11 – 1 records, one team wilts. Fox could have saved Philadelphia its mini-holiday and aired The Resident at halftime. The contest between my home franchise (is it really locally seeded anymore?) and the Vikings was finished at 14 to 7. The rest was icing for old east coast urbanism. I would like to have killed the architect who created row homes. While my father waltzed off with his dead son to Phoenix, in the classic flight from jurisdiction, I defecated in a bucket commode with his sister, in that modest little house keeping her alive, waiting for that soon to be violent section 811, Diamond Park, to be ready, and now I am 56, my spiral hoovering over the garbage disposal, 15 minutes away from the intersection at Broad Street which would bring me right back to ground zero.

Mary, my mother’s sister, is a PhD. She teaches too, like my former mentors. Career wise I probably wasn’t cut out to be an instructor. I do like certain aspects of journalism and breaking stories, but that was hard enough stable to be competitive. This life long battle with the sheer brutality of medical model rehabilitation, it is like the relentless persistence needed to play Tam O’Shanter, a difficult and simple card solitaire. I beat it once, I believe in Ridley Park. My favorites, which buying Warfield’s Pretty Good Solitaire restored, are some of the hardest.

St. Helena

Streets and Alleys (which sometimes ends faster than the layout takes to deal).

Auld Lang Syne

I found Thomas because I missed going up against terribly long odds, poor spastic and her aspirations. I did not want to live under the Philadelphia Housing Authority all of my life, to essentially be killed by it. I truly thought, like Vassar Miller, a generation before me, that I could do something more. One of my staunchest advocates for holding on is a woman named Nancy Loss, but again, she only sees me as a compliance paradigm. Stay at Riverside, or go to a home, where Mary and her children think I belong. For me, it isn’t either or. I don’t want to live like this. The character Dreyfuss played in a television movie sued for the right to die because quadriplegia was intolerable. He won.

Shameless Hussy Does a White Paper

"If I seem cavalier about it and in fact I am cavalier about it, it is because this is not my life."-- Donna Leon, with allowances for lack of exact transcription.

Meanwhile, back in the land of grandiose effacement over an old woman's grandiose self-importance, every time a journalist like James Foley dies chasing after a scoop in ancient lands with statistically marginal individuals, the media conglomerates, NYT, Wapo, LAT, CNN, ESPN, let out a yelp of pain. The holy sanctum has been violated: gathering information civilized people need to know at their leisure in a coffee cafe.

Let's take a step back. Foley was a photographer, and his images of the Syrian conflict no more or less redundant than a native's use of his or her cell phone, not that I have data on how many Syrians own a Samsung as opposed to a functioning Apple OS. Reports, making allowances for lack of certainty, indicated Foley was tortured in his captivity. Perhaps this caused him to reevaluate the value of foreign correspondence imagery for the sake of a scoop, since it seems being driven for a news story has its own shades of the pathological, or maybe he rethought the Spanish Inquisition, but how much do people outside of the millennial hot zone that is forever the Middle East feel driven to put themselves in danger by bating Semitic beasts?

Do Foley's images have empirical value? No, with the exception of his beheading. Those images, in and of themselves, will remain as a genealogy marker. As hard as we try to divorce ourselves from primate origin, we're still rather large apes who evolved back into nakedness, even without modern barbers. Knowledge generation is a tricky business, but the Fourth Estate holding itself aloft as a modern temple whose abstract conceptualization is inviolate doesn't take into account the fact that revenue needs to be generated. Most of what the public reads has no monetary value that we can use in turn to generate money, including humanitarian crises. ISIS was bought and paid for according to Western free market and entrepreneurial values. Accommodating the beast will invariably create paths for its transformation. Radical egalitarians like Foley need more patience, not the rush of trotting about hot zones. I am not done with my Pistorius sentiments. Dyer triggered an exasperated trial run. Initially, I wasn't going to bother, but not I'm hunting for sources and more retail packaging.

Vicious Irritation

I want to expand a bit on the travesty of vanity. Examiner is useful for a student or casual citizen journalist who follows aggregating methods. Even established media outlets aggregate, blog, dumb it down or up. Clarity Media outsources a tutorial which is standard journo 101 from your eleventh grade high school collegiate track instruction. The reviewers are a grade above the vanity contributors, and basically all they do is approve or reject news content for Google or Bing's RSS feed.

Now, follow along a moment. Examiner's guidelines suggest content between 150 to 400m. My rapid write up on Glass, which is starting to bore me as the ultimate angst device, ran to about 230m, aggregating from three other more content driven pieces. The reviewer rejected it as newsworthy for being too short and gave me new guidelines, which are Google's standard for newsworthy material. 

Fine. You fix it. This is what journos do-- but I only wrote it hurriedly to maintain my eligibility for promotion on Google News, which is under threat because yours truly hasn't written news in 25 days. None of Examiner's trending topics interest me, a major exception being Oscar Pistorius. I see larger issues afoot in the plight of Bladerunner and the damnation of identity. I want to do a real article on this, my own work.

I am having technical problems on my Examiner page, however. So, do I now lose my precious eligibility to have my content promoted? Ha ha ha. I do not know much about Clarity Media. I know they own The Weekly Standard, which I would like to apply for a position with, if they could accommodate me, and have an opening, but this publication has more sobering standards, and I myself am nearly done in, so to speak.

Points to a larger issue of aggregate systems collapse. Examiner itself has a well meaning personality disorder. Saying one thing under management, another at the zombie stooge level, under which I'm running myself haggard, stinky witch with fish oil arm pits and straw dry dull greying hair, trying to maintain some modicum of self-reliance. I have no idea why Frances Glenn Cross believed his anti-antisemitism would be satisfied with the deaths of innocent people in temple. Since he is being tried under hate crime statue, presumably federal attorneys will argue he is rational, and wanted to kill out of hate.

My impulses toward violence are different, and stem from both deplorable inefficiency of state systems, my significant hatred of compliance models which are going to relegate me into infantilism anyway so why am I still fighting? and getting screwed so significantly by the activists themselves. BBC mystery producers know something about this in their Inspector Gently series. The desire to strike back doesn't pop out of a vacuum. I have no idea what you think about my content, contradictory as it is, maybe sometimes loopy also, indicative of skills giving way to belligerence, and maybe my hatred of gay and lesbian psychology has something to do with ugly women relegated to getting off on themselves with dildos, (investigating for a cover story) and my ex-supervisor's imaginary climaxes that she painted for me. Maybe. Reflexive analysis isn't an arm wrestling match with psychiatric manipulations, but it is also something I intuit as more compelling.

I don't know what I'd be willing to do in real world terms, if age, dependence, could be surmounted. It is not the innocent I want, but gnostic self love, regardless of its gender spectrum, is a kind of self-interested tunnel vision. We aren't all special, in the aggregating sense, and you know it.