Dung, Bitches, Nouveau Princesses

"this far, and no farther,"--Peter Falk

No one of us, whatever the nexus of our identity we shed to be American, is a monolithic block, and in my eruptions on this account about so called activists, that can be seen in the lack of unity between us. I cannot tell you exactly what the rift between Erik & Jimmi and Josie Byzek was, but it was a rift over how "extreme" Pennsylvania ADAPT should or shouldn't be, and Erik, when the hermaphroditic freak was more lucid, removed Fern Markowitz as Liberty's executive director. Josie and Erik and Jimmi and Fern are all part of the LBGTQ block. There is no love lost between them, and Fern Markowitz, in addition, is a Jewish lesbian, just as Linda Dezenski is a Jewish princess, on the lower end of the scale. Where I entered into it, regardless of my fatal attempt to be close to my overly esteemed peer, is Linda used me in a power struggle to get Fern to violate Pennsylvania state hiring guidelines to hire Jimmi for a job Linda offered me which, after my logistics combat at Matrix, would have been next to impossible for me to do. Linda won the battle but lost the war. Jimmi quit, Erik had who knows how many strokes and cardiovascular issues, and I grew too angry to care, and this is the end product of all that, but I was incredibly naive, to lick my wounds by then grafting onto a Christian lesbian who'd humiliate me in public, bouncing online from one failed disability project after another.
It is of only mild curiosity that Josie's twitter account under her own identity seems null and void. I hesitate to attribute it to my rancor. I haven't harassed her on social media, as, whatever my challenge to her role as caretaker extraordinaire, New Mobility is an undeniably progressive platform whose contributors say the same thing over and over with iterative nausea. Perhaps it has something to do with her run for the school board, but you'll notice, whatever her prominence as a champion for the marginalized, neither she nor partner Virginia foster disabled children. If I were Singh Lion, which I'm certainly not, I'd wonder about this curious trifecta of two women with a significant background in case management rearing Asian children of third world ethnicity, particularly when Josie is so impaired by MS. For the being of the welfare class, Josie is fairly solicitous of those in her care. I will not go so far as to impugn her nurturing impulses. My quarrel with her is commiseration doesn't resolve resource distribution, but she never applies herself to that, like the cost of battling over PVS cases, like Schiavo and Bobby Brown, and how this ties in with my ambivalence toward Roth's barrier breaking exposes is somewhat complex. FYI, I've read a number of Jewish novelists, like Chaim Potok, some Saul Bellow, and I've dipped into a little of everything (so how could I have drifted so rightward?) But however cemented his legacy may be, and I do recognize it, Philip Roth is an egotistical prick. I know the movies better than the novels, and concessions to some of his starkest feints have to be granted, but Goodbye Columbus succeeded in making me antagonistic to all of its character types, Ali MacGraw in particular, portrays her coming of age as an expression of masochistic coitus. I am a great deal like Richard Benjamin on screen. This is why he stays with me despite the blithe inattentiveness to his interpretations of Roth in my past, but even as a pursuer progressive of almost 50 years ago, Neil Klugman is a contraction in terms, as are Roth's vigorous sexual expositions. It never occurs to Roth not to allow his men to be vulnerable to sexual entrapment, not to be afraid of knocking up daddy's little girl by not chasing her in daddy's house, like a hound dog. He is vacuous himself, but wants a monogamous commitment, to which Brenda, the perpetual, debutante, seems incapable. The film had its moments, and our urban life used to feel relatively secure where a boy could look up a girl and then show up, talk her home, but there is nothing here to celebrate in Roth's own hypocrisy, a surreptitious man cave, with its lack of respect, leaving me without even the proverbial suitcase to lug back to the depot in the era without stroll carts. 

Continuing Education

Ophelia snaps—just like a lot of people who spend their lives obeying other people without any sense of personal agency.

The smallest moment of what a real couple might have been, this when I was typing out Scott's term paper and he purchased breakfast egg rolls. Cleaned while I typed, this young man whose act of making love to a twenty-four year old woman was an act of self hatred because I had a Penmate clamped between my teeth, fearing the pain; I must have looked like a literal developmental troll, however, rubbery mouth and flushed face-- but in that instantaneous domestic idyll, it was a nice warm sunny moment when I could almost forget my exile to nigger land.

Still alive, towering inferno of spent embers, it just dawned on me that poor Mr. Bryan telephoned to taunt me a year after he broke with me because I taunted John with TMI while the involvement with Scott was ongoing, and payback is a bitch, or an episode of Grey's Anatomy.

I have been awake since two pm yesterday, and urge myself at the very least not to tweet these maudlin tendencies. Every woman has some hymen folly, perhaps not as grotesque as a felt marker bit, but I concede that Google's algorithm is more powerful than my discretion. I did not want him to leave me, this terse and anemic cocaine user. Odd isn't it? At forty two I wanted to kill Frank the minute I let him touch me, the intimacy with his decomposing fat and folds of skin was the ultimate act of self flagellation. Philip Roth's chunky cheap shot hit an on switch, and I have been blooming for business since I finished my notes on the last page. Scott had a firm ass in tight nylon underwear. The havoc of hiring a hustler, which I have never done, almost feels like a lethal dare, and if I tried to track my last affair, wouldn't the wife try to kill me? Did I forget how long ago this was? I need to leave Presby, seriously.

Anglo Habitation: Black Judaism

"Who cares what model the weapon is?" -- Leon Wieselter

I did not mind Roth's specificity over Simon Axler's shotgun in The Humbling. This is not to dispute Leon's churning efforts at literary distillation. I am a failed woman with birth brain damage we classify as cerebral palsy, but do the same thing Leon does, think in the hues of comparative terms, and I do not understand the American Jewish Left's argument with itself. Not for lack of trying, or not so much trying as exposure--perhaps too much of it-- inclusive of the particularly Jewish obsession with Henry James-- where the fuck does that come from? I often ask. How did Jewish academic culture appropriate a fairly affluent but rather fucked up and somewhat not well educated Anglo-Irish snobbish old fart who could never make up his mind and had a great deal of enmity toward American Jewry, as he saw it, in the late Victorian era? My belonging or enmity or both belonging and enmity with the academics surrounding those of us obsessed with the Master is trumped up. I know it. I am neither friend nor foe to Greg Zacharias, and my speculation about his use of anti-depressants exposes me for what I am: a silly cripple who isn't trying hard enough. I wrote to a more accommodating member of this sometimes queer community that I was writing an essay on Lampedusa "for myself," implying that if I ripped my fucking soul apart over James that it was out of obligation to the dead who aren't even necessarily my dead.

I liked Roth's faulty little book, more than Wieselter's nearly overweening deconstruction of it. The Humbling is a satirical take on the pernicious influence of Jewish culture in the arts and the American entertainment industry, and reiterates what Roth achieves with The Human Stain. Hopkins was miscast to play a high yellow masquerading as a Jew who is murdered by Richard Harris in Anti-Semitic mode. This whets my curiosity over the genius of Philip Roth. I also did not read hostility to homosexuality in Pegeen's boomerang relationships. I read a send up of Jewish mothers, of infantile narcissism, an encapsulation of the customer review I may write for Amazon in a concomitant act of phlegm melt and decomposition. Green dildo in a harness?

I think not, but if you like Roth, his send up of the psychiatric modality, one I lived with my mother's continuous hospitalizations, points to my lack of belief in counseling therapy. Not that ableism can't kill me at any time.

Simon Axler

...the sense she had now when Mr. Carmichael shuffled past, just nodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slippers, that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. -- Virginia Woolf

To ready a sonorous viola that is an omnipresent suture to a heart of festered scabs, the subtext in many of my biographical posts is about lack of belonging: I did not fight to close the deal for a terminal degree, never found my way through the thicket of becoming an independent scholar, my shoddy case management training has turned me into a wistful exterminator, and I failed to establish myself as a journalist; creative writing can go fuck itself. I still practice it, will continue to do so, but most artistic expression, when you take a step back, is an eddy of vomit, canonical or otherwise. Rereading Les Miserables is an insane idea. I do not even know why it occurs to me to return to Victor Hugo, but perhaps reminding myself about the arc of Jean Valjean is relevant to modern alienation. When I was still under Linda's supervision, then I belonged, and that is where my internal bleeding truly resides; not in my career satisfaction, for I can vouchsafe that disability center employment is Orwellian, but I did what I did for as long as I did for her, not for the most discarded and broken bodies on the face of the earth, not for the dozens of mentally ill who challenged my own health not long after, but for a Jewish woman with a milder case of cerebral palsy whom I defended like a pit bull against all her detractors, then enabled her to become a fatal catalyst, making me a bull dyke in all but name, and I lashed out at her as much. Now I'm your bitch, hissing it out of my countenance violet with fury, stupidly emoting, never able to remove myself from this casualty laden environment. Padre's solution, if it isn't a shell game, is for me to move in with his sister and my demented uncle who paws my breasts when he can get away with it, but Joe is in Alzheimer's land, so I chalk up those behaviors there. If I could graft myself to the Rosenbach, it would be a gently vindicated landing, and they are good, despite that my cleaving to wade through Joyce was wobbly--but negotiating that slope is tricky, not being a nuisance, making myself useful. They fascinate me in many ways, these archivists and patrons, and their secular liberalism is good. Linda's is a psychopathy, much like Edward Snowden's transitory impermanence; his narrative goes deeper than his dissidence, deeper than immediate analysis.

The systems we've created have overtaken us.

The genie I cannot put back in the bottle isn't homoerotic desire: after Ms Dezenski bucked about her orgasms, I asked myself if she was flirting with me, and rolled into the bathroom with a COPD temperature and proceeded to puke. No, what I am going to grieve the rest of my life is the affinity of mutual esteem. I doubt I will ever have it again in another woman to admire or respect. There is an old adage that pontificates we really do things for ourselves. Indirectly, my loyalty to what Linda represented was an internal reward based on belief of derived  power through her leadership. Indeed, I held onto my position at Matrix as long as I did because I wanted to be as strong as I thought she was, and that example mattered more to me than sex.

I still live it, to channel Kevin Whately, but I have to pay the price for that in my hope for more equitable futures. If I lose to savagery, and then face elimination through that, then perhaps all I can hope for is to be my own voice of consolation for the suffering that finds its way to me.