Untenable Mummers' Day

The holiday is the perfect time.--the man in charge

In this chair I cannot go bare buttock as I used to. The vinyl seat is too hard, too small, and the discomfort I undergo has taken away very nearly all my control, including the food preparation I did on my own, let alone dressing and food shopping. Nor have I so much made a dent in assessing what the cleaning service did or did not do with certain personal effects, including my clothes to which I had adapted. When the Caribbean accented paraprofessional sat me up in the winter afternoon, before the bad transfer assist, alarming as that was, my growing weakness might as well have set off a Geiger counter. I got Mike on a word of mouth basis from a former Liberty consumer, and assumed he understood cerebral palsy fittings. I am at fault for taking the chair, assuming I could adapt, but he should have known better also, on the basis of the broken models piled under the daybed beneath the one window I once handled on my own, on top of a week’s worth of unnecessary hospital stays. I don’t have access to my work, cannot restart much of what I was doing, not from scratch, and my aunt thinks I’d thrive in her mother’s home, all because of a combustible grease monkey. A Man Called Ove is the type of literary conceit on which I was weaned. The title character feels life has passed him by. His suicide attempts fail. Poor planning, community interference. The point of the film, probably the book too, is learning he is still valued and can fill in the gaps. I’ve no such luxury, fearful I’ll never get past this. Fighting welfare and Medicare rationing kept me healthy. Seven doctors had nothing to treat me for. Diaper shit and piss, my inability to sustain my nutrition, is making short work of this, and if I did not feel I’m being forced down the drain, it wouldn’t be so hard to swallow. A nursing home isn’t going to let me write and have digital access, despite the occasional Washington Post feature from those with no choice. I left Oz off at season four, after “O’Reilly” kills Nathan’s rapist himself, weary of all this overflow, wondering how much longer I can persevere, but maybe it isn’t simply Philadelphia, it’s self-depreciating half assed efforts, with swatting being the new eel wriggling in the cesspool. Libertarians should have no problem uniting against weaponizing police against innocent civilians. I have my recidivism too, from my childhood under the knife to some damn cubicle, accepting it as the hardship of decline. It isn’t worth it: Let’s see what the new year brings, shall we? I’m off to bed, against better judgment, daring to remove the diaper, staining the underpad so my crotch can get some air.

One That Got Away

The Town That Dreaded Sundown was produced while the Zodiac killings were still under active investigation, approximately 400 miles away. The documentary drama came of age in the decade of my childhood, although I did not know anything of Pierce’s work until very recently, when ThisTV purchased syndication and ran it in their cyclic fashion. While the trombone sequence can be considered signatory for the seventies idea of graphic exploitation, my concern with the film is less critical, and more symmetrical, to allude to Brian Greene’s reminder about the past and present, in physics. The 07 Zodiac has an uncanny familial reflection when compared to Pierce’s more primitive lampoon. Like The Onion Field, Zodiac elevates the focus of the true crime genre, and raises questions about justice and equity. If we wind up haunted by the heinous whom we never apprehend, the penal systems we have for those criminals proven guilty seems to be little more than an existential boomerang. Wambaugh brackets his film between the explosive annihilation of a good man with a strong center juxtaposed against an abscess of judicial process for his impulsive villains, and Fontana and Levinson,  in Oz, bind all together in manipulative culpability, while the EU confinement centers virtually dispense with the concept of punishment. Oz is a good series, but it gets bogged down by too much emphasis on "the rats in the maze," investigations with no repercussions, death sentences with no proportionality. Murderers, however, are the most distinctive of group subsets, marked by an irrevocable violation against the group, to the point that even our more aggressive primates are impacted. Apes may be more in the moment than some, but when they conspire to kill they know they've stressed the bonds that bind the families under the alpha leaders.