Sommelier's Emergency

 'Liberation!' Astonishing how criminal instincts do survive in the human species." -- Yevgeny Zamyatin, stewarded by beleaguered American translators.

The old adage about mixing apples and oranges isn’t quite so representative of incongruity. Both apples and oranges are rich, nutrient liquid masses produced for seed germination. Both apples and oranges are tree borne fruits with peelable and edible skins, in some degree, packed with citric acid, with one favored by worms, the other more porous to the naked eye and associated with the benefits of sunshine, currently a rare commodity in this neck of the northeast, where the Delaware River swivels with an inverse question mark at its narrowest before it empties into the Atlantic; yet the semantics of the phrase remain due to correspondence which pleases the symmetry of primate eyes. The idiomatic mixing of horticulture’s most domesticated fruits is indicative of a disruptive pattern, and for those who try to toy with this, like this former palsied poet still out to pasture, sometimes it works, like in my happily recovered “Electromagnetic Custer” piece, which the 1991 graduate team at Oxford Magazine accepted last minute, but when it doesn’t, it can splinter under its own weight. A good example of this is Gareth Tunley’s 2017 indie, “The Ghoul,” which is rather baffling, and splinters off in too many unexplained directions, despite Tunley’s efforts to create an infinity trap for its troubled protagonist. It may be a short feature, but the supporting character Moulson is never adequately connected to the hero’s menacing and wayward turn, and as can be best puzzled out, Christopher’s university couple friends have a parallel to the older therapists who feature prominently in whatever narrative arc there is to grasp. A hellish sensibility cannot serve as the sole sinews for such disjointed lack of a plot. The Prime Original 7500 fares better, but aging battle axes in the fractal of a drain swirl pummel touchpads bit more slowly than of yore, and my ambition to tie this into disillusionment with libertarians of the left? I have a bad habit of losing patience with account holders who irritate me, and I tried really hard with Curt, but his sentiment that “Tubman’s bust (sic) appearing on the twenty dollar bill is really cool,”  broke this imperiled camel’s hump, and I blocked him in a miserable affront to my endorsement of 1^st Amendment principles. Since I am still stupidly paying Alphabet for this domain, I don’t have to post this very minute, but my buttock has been forced into jeopardy. Overheated gauze. The obstinate nigger care simply isn’t enough for the hatred and hastily assembled ignorance which destroys spastics such as I, despite qualifying remarks by any sympathizers.

tutto in famiglia

Shut the hell up you bitch ass nigga. You will continue to run this country further into the ground and risk lives every time you breathe. You’re not the president. Just a dumpster full of hate. FOH. Sick to my stomach that literal shit currently represents America to the world. https://t.co/qoNWllmZIm

— Jussie Smollett (@JussieSmollett) January 12, 2018

I have not had much to post about my mother's sister Mary in her ebullient mark upon her league of students in the face of her deceased sister's emotive turbulence. This is due to fear of consequence. Her husband, also obese to the point that its malevolence on his family is grotesque, is a Methodist prig, and in other circumstances her might have been to PA's Delaware County what Chris Noth's Peter Florrick is to Cook County in Illinois. If he had not married into Mary's Catholic family, he might have been a local big wig, and the paper's treated him him as such when he was "Chief of D's," to use the Dick Wolf colloquium from SVU in an overt strategism to draw the audience in. 

Unlike yours truly, Mary is a true bovine conservative, and when she gets a few simple ideas in her head she masticates them to the finish line, and if niggers like Trudy Richardson have terrorized me for nearly ten years of her managerial authority, than what better advocacy can the Worrilow family offer me but to move into Fair Acres with my grandmother's living cadaver in Lima? I'd be given a room with another patient where I could "come and go". The wonders of the empty hollow that is the Americans with Disabilities Act from a woman twice my size, twice as thick, replacing herself with titanium bones. I have broken with my aunt, permanently, which points to the anathema, the irony, that poets and writers suspended my account from the Speakeasy for detailing the issues of chronic condition which Gretchen posts about daily on Facebook, but I hate the latter, regret the former. Mary nearly died earlier in 2018, due to pulmonary embolism, and yet everyone is slavering to do me more harm. Trudy's been at it longer, and I am determined she'll pay a price for that. Lumping me in with dementia patients prone to violence is not a conducive environment, nor as safe as my sister might otherwise believe. I may not be able to assist true conservatives in excising LLhan Omar as a fatal virus on our body politic, but Presbyterian Homes is going to feel my bite. Corruption before the face of God might as well open the doors to Armageddon.

Residuals

If I did not stop doing this I was going to die.--Cheryl Strayed

On the whole, I was predisposed towards prejudicial distain of Salvation, simply by virtue of dealing with fifty years of the asteroid meme in the industry, and I could have made myself sleep, as CBS re-aired the pilot Friday evening. It had a few libertarian brush strokes, but the fact that Dell flat screen computer monitors and Apple phones have become supporting players in television science fiction doesn't translate well, as far as I am concerned, which is why I might have paid more attention to The Mindy Project; its twitter account followed me a long time ago. I haven't written about it because I am ambivalent about the humor in The Office, but at least these situation comedy offshoots from British models still focus on character. In an alternate world where I had mobility on my feet, as you do, I might have been Mindy as heroine, playfully acerbic as opposed to caustic, in the varying degrees of hostility humans have, mocking their own behavior.

I need to be cautious in reconciling with the maternal voice of my sex. Children need to be reared, but in the developed world, we've lost perspective on the matter. Reconciling with Gretchen, and getting too familiar with Robert's liberalism, reminds me why I've gotten banned from the collective social voice, and I cannot wade back in like a holistic penitent. It isn't that I want to hurt them, or be disparaging. I know Robert hopes I find my way to peace, acceptance, some sort of happy extraction, and Gretchen probably forgave me because she knew she wasn't the target of my antagonism, but sometimes, the second sex, with its pasteurized, urbane husbands, is insufferable, and my Speakeasy past, not wholly absent in social media, recollects my unease with clacking hens. I've kept Cheryl Strayed on twitter, but the memory of her authorial voice about her journey into horse and needle tracks had a vaporous quality to it, a sort of conspiratorial nod that her lack of control with narcotics wasn't serious. I forget why she and I connected nearly twenty years ago, and as I've written before, that she ignored my greeting on twitter doesn't rankle that badly. It might be simply that she doesn't remember we used to post to each other. We would not have become, or remained friends, however. There is another whom I haven't mentioned. Diane Kirsten Martin, Robert's workshop colleague. She and I sparred over my bias toward Africans on Facebook. I did not get banned for being civilly frank, thought I might, frankly didn't care, and we've ignored each other since, but this still reflects the lassitude of Robert's nature. Diane is catty, I'm the brass bitch, and Cheryl, his wife, smiles mischievously. None of this is my world, this San Francisco Episcopalian middle brow curvature, and it never shall be. But if I reject it, then what exactly was I aspiring to, defeated as I am by urban progressive corruption? 

And On the Saga Goes

Editors are a rather lowly masquerade, an ever entertaining game of musical chairs:

To Kevin Larimer,

My name is Joanne Marinelli, an ailing disability journalist from Philadelphia. I was a long time supporter of Poets & Writers from the days when the periodical was called Coda. I discovered the organization from issues of the magazine in my dead academic advisor's office, and thought I believed in what the organization represented until I joined Speakeasy in 97-98. Moderator "Dana" banned me from the boards in 02, because users complained about my injection of quadriplegia and my bad attitude, and within the last two years, one of your interns blocked me from following PW's twitter account because I reacted to a poetry invitation by tweeting the organization discriminates against the disabled, the block being the case in point. Poets & Writers continues to solicit me by regular mail. I want to know why. 

I cannot compel you to answer me, and I confused another gentleman on the phone, relating to this long association, around 9/16 when I managed to get past voicemail recordings: What I do not want in response is "if you do not wish to be solicited we'll remove your address". I am 54 years old, facing a grave crisis which is putting me at risk, and PW ostracizes me online, telling me in 02 that your methodology doesn't serve my needs, but your circulation department solicits me for a subscription in order to serve those needs. I have the latest envelope, with postmark, to prove it came after the twitter block, and I will be filing an ADA complaint with the NY state attorney if PW and I, as a writer with cerebral palsy, cannot reach some kind of accord on the matter.


What do I want from Poets & Writers? A fair arbitration. I no longer have time for Speakeasy, but I supported PW diligently through the turn of the century. Check your records. What do I have to show for it? I am rotting under the same section 202 rental agent I have lived under since 1986. Do the math. Do you think, as an ambulatory male, that this represents an extraordinary length of time for an unhappy wheelchair user with a graduate education, defaulted loans she'll never pay off, her health failing? Len Fulton never treated me this way, and I succeeded creatively under Dustbooks with far greater regularity than I do with your magazine listings; I'd like to write a retrospective tribute to him from that perspective, using his surviving family as sources, at least initially. I attach the column he accepted while SPR was still in print. This email is long enough, but I also seek access to emergency services for writers in peril. Gee, can PW help me there?

Quantum Models in Slovenia

Though I haven't perused any recent issues, Poets & Writers loves contributions about profiles in which the established figures discuss technique; never did a damn thing for me, blindly shelling out my money, for years. The organization is baffled at my ire now that I'm really feeling an economic pinch, but it is the same as other motifs seeping through this account: the price of spastic dowager's loyalty and passive acceptance. My technique to produce creatively never recovered from two things, the first being moving to this wretched studio at Riverside (Karina either trashing or misplacing my scrapbook of articles), and the second adapting to digital, even though it seems counter-intuitive, as I made more money as a journalist online between 99-08 than I ever did riding shotgun with literary journals as the caboose of arts and sciences departments, but while we're at it, let me merge apples and potatoes: I used to consider Kenyon Review to be highbrow, a desirable addition to my CV; that I use the past tense doesn't mean I'm now nonchalant, so much as questioning creativity's didactic ability in the modern era. I sampled KR online when my now distressed second generation kindle was more vogue. Forget dates. It was more than two years ago through, and there was a fictional story of an orphan chimpanzee whose mother was killed by a poacher who sold the baby to a progressive white American woman who had an adopted black daughter. The simian and the human youngster bonded but the chimp grew up, and like Caesar in the reboot, is placed in captivity, a last meeting with human sister ending in distress. The contributor's point was, I believe, to make us question human tendency to compartmentalize. Yet the senseless travesty of Harambe occurred despite the most astute of Kenyon's imperatives. The incurious toddler was actually the expendable mammal if we are going to arguable over the health of bio-diversity. Not that I wouldn't have made an effort to distract the silverback to recover the child, but in no way would I have shot dead an innocent ape denied its freedom so that we could gape at it; speaking of which, this is an upgrade I'll gun for next month. Back to work, back to coffee, and those who care about the election in November, go fuck yourselves. I wash my hands of the whole national scene.

Bearing Witness

The graduate student who had a major crush on Ward liked me for myself; she was kind to me in an authentic way that was better for me then my too tight cleaving to my former best friend, Susan Davison. Susie-- I made Sue, and then her sister, live for me, because I did not really venture forth and take risks. With B---, the graduate, it was of a gentler tenor of mutual appreciation, and I got caught in the middle, between her and my philosophy professor, because she and I bonded, and she got hurt, with Ward and his open marriage rationalizations. I am not saying anything illegal occurred. B--- was of age, but I became the shoulder on whom she wept, and for that, I cannot forgive the not so spectacular instructor at Widener in his sinecured cocoon. Living his theories was a convenience which disregarded young adults like B--- and I were stupid. Though I no longer wear it, I still have the beige windbreaker she gave me before she departed. She had to go back, as she fell in love with Ward. I knew myself better. I was saturated with Jerry, besotted, obsessed in an unhealthy and dangerous manner. He and I are both circling the drain and I'm still writing it, flavors diminished as they may be, but I knew it was closer to intellectual rape as opposed to being Fallen, as B--- had fallen into a desire David was irresponsible to encourage, and I cannot forgive him. In anger, forgetting my rancor toward John for not seeing the woman I wanted to be for him, I told him in anger what Ward had wrought, and Tassoni and I were not so dissimilar in indignation. Tassoni threatened to go to the tenure committee. I attempted to dissuade him as I did not want to be involved and the woman was my friend. What happened after that?

John heads his own department in Ohio. I am a genocide survivor who pisses off Poets & Writers, the philosopher has a goatee, his protege an unfinished rite of passage, three television series rolled into one.

Grieving for Harambe

"I think it's about finding a place to live," Michael C. Clark, my dead academic advisor running a more harried composition course

Beating someone to death is something, an action, in the abstract, of which I believe I'm capable, whether or not I share Depp's cunning at being able to overcome lesser strength and other limitations. I have little to no idea why Depp is on my mind. It is not Secret Window, which I did not like anymore the second time than I did the first. It may be Donnie Brasco, and his latter day Victorian detective in the Hughes brothers From Hell, certainly one of my favorite derivatives. I like things that show me how far I could never go, or believe I could never go, but I never entered into Johnny as a sex idol. For me that was Elton John, the most notorious British fag, and I no longer enter into his piano and Taupin's lyrics with the same sense of masochistic inducement. My grade school teacher Neil Montgomery hooked me onto Elton John, and I queasily regret it, having to peer into revelations not necessarily easy to confront. 21 Jump Street had status, that I know via reputation, but Depp came to me through Tim Burton, as opposed to music, or an aura of a cult icon. Where Ben Landis is on that scale his fans know better than I.

I tweet to Ben and to some degree Nate and Ali like regular people not to show how cool I am, but because how am I supposed to feign being fazed? If I was 15 years younger Nate Maingard might have needed to flee me with an ANC bribe, not to scare the rainbow candy musician, as we know age and youthful beauty rarely collide in triumph, but Landis, to his credit, has me thinking about personalization, in light of his recent queries about abuse. My three recent tweets to Will about Trump and the Russia hack, to my mind, weren't indicative of personal feeling, which cannot be said for Poets & Writers.

I telephoned them, late, after I hesitated to transfer and then beat the anxiety to transfer, and barely heard the editor's name. I left my number with a bit of kimmy's bristling and bushy tail, intending to duke it out. Just as I asked on Gawker, why does this matter? To the extent I have a reputation at all, and I did, it is in spite of PW, not because of them. Yet I supported them for years, and cannot explain to those of you who don't know it what it is like for a majority of people from your own class to turn on you, get you booted, but the circulation department still wants your fucking subscription. What happened to me on Speakeasy is a reflection of what ambulatory society does to quadriplegics and those with Downs, with MR. Poets & Writers was a predominate voice in my life before they were Poets & Writers. Before I collapse in the exhaustion of age, there will be a score to settle.

Moral Dilemmas in Putrefaction

Even as recently as five years ago, when I in fact just started posting, not so inadvertently discovering affinities with spree killers, the thought that Jayne Anne was not my intellectual superior would have been unthinkable, and that, primarily, because this bastard was a personal deity, and while this may be categorically unfair to southern women writers who only mildly differentiate themselves from urban northeasters, Miss Phillips has systematically left me unimpressed, and I've contemplated removing her from my small mounties of rage on twitter, where she has neither responded, nor blocked me, my ambivalence neither here nor there toward our respective twilights,  unlike Poets and Writers, which blocked me for writing stigmatize in capitals after they invited suburban mermaids to chorus with them at a poetry reading. I may have reacted and tweeted inappropriately about how conformist the organization has become since its early days, but they are the ones being intransigent now, not I.

I have not been rude to Miss Phillips, and retain yet a slight trance of deference in my responses to her normative academic liberalism, but what I read in her, even as a disabled woman who personalizes on the basis of an effervescent clinging, is a white Southern woman who's used up, running the standard leftist treadmill we all know. This is a great deal to masticate in what amounts to a simple binary choice in the complexity of computer binary code, or is it something else, like a disabled woman betrayed by cosmetics? 

Sleeping With Nick Denton

"An erection is often an indicator of asphyxiation."-- Chris Meloni, no tattle here on gay marriage.

One learns not to make too much of anything, and of course the poor tattle site has its problems, but all my comments may only be viewed under pending approval while those who need to be Nixonian freely post fuck and bullshit. This a scrabble hardened woman doesn't quite comprehend. I am not a requisite Kantian saboteur just for the purpose of being one, although maybe this ties into Gawker contributors?

The balance, between that of strength and entropy is often astonishing, but I suppose this has much to do with the DNA of Southern European peasants who cannot quite break their station. Slowly, as I creep toward Friday, we may go on a ride about poets, writers, and the excessive power of ostracization. Before this city takes my carcass, I am going to war with graduate writing systems, but the air is seasonal, and I'm in great pain, even holding in the purple in the clench of my jar as father and sister lie about finding me a new "place,"; not sure how I can bring you in on why we hate the ambulatory world.

Nicotine Hytonia

"Do you know what happens to cops who get ten million dollars? They eat their service revolvers."-- a still robust Samuel L. Jackson

I am trying not to panic about the Toshiba. The monitoring system is warning me I need a new battery once again and I simply do not have it. They run about 130 USD not including shipping costs, and that is basically it. I do not eat, and kimmy will be lucky to get fresh litter. I'll have to transfer myself back to my more expensive, older, HP, which will run on the adapter even when the battery fails, but it will still result in an episodic migraine. I almost certainly indicated to my audience, and most definitively indicated to Yabberz before I deactivated myself, blocked Melissa Nguyen Horton from following my feed on twitter, that my poverty is the most effective weapon against  me,  pushing back against her, politely mind you, as she did nothing wrong in the matter of my ambivalent user activity-- I also cannot stand BridgeToursJade, the card player she is elevating this evening to her pundit class (I have been online almost over twenty years and Jade has the dubious distinction of being able to obsessively out-post me into the nether regions of Sheol.)

My regret, if you like, is my exasperation for wasting my time when I already know better; in the context of a libertarian battle cry of "Remember the Alamo!" I also remember earlier virtual investments. and some of you may recall my pained mostly capital response, yesterday:

@poetswritersinc all those years of my tireless support and U STIGMATIZE The Disabled! Hypocrites!

— Joanne M Marinelli (@Jozannyme) June 22, 2016

I do not suppose any of you care to know, outside of my taut, stricken nerves, why I was so impolitic to a probable student intern who is entirely ignorant about how far back I go with this organization, how strong my fealty was to Poets & Writers as a way of life: The climax of Under Suspicion, is, as NYT accurately observes, a clash of dramaturgic titans making an attempt at claustrophobic French imitation. Don't ask if Hackman was attempting homage, but he bravely pushes his dick where even I would fain to stray; it is a conflagration most of us deny in even the process of accepting the utterly plausible flashbacks of craven desire clinging to the lust, sheer lust, for existence.

Does She Understand The Implication of Her Posts?

I only logged on an hour ago to look up the dates on gen x, and I fit either as a young boomer, like my aunt, who is ten years my senior, or a gen elder. It is stupendous to consider that I'm both. When I crossed the 300 follower mark on social media I knew it would drop, given I tread dangerous waters.

I don't care. That is one primary difference between Cheryl and I, the successful memoirist who interacted with me 13 years ago as a P&W subscriber, our only bridge to each other being her heroin needle. She pulled herself back with a mercurial irreverence in her authorial voice which has earned the woman her middle brow redemption, and I am genuinely happy for her recognition, but meant what I tweeted to her about posing for a photograph with Oprah.

Never, never and a day could I ever be so conventional for the sake of sales. My notoriety, if it comes, is up through the dark side. But the true tragedy of this country: Cheryl Strayed can milk recovering addiction. I snort nothing, probably will never recover substantial gainful activity, and my minority building manager humiliates me with impunity, and any whites coming to my defense would face the culturally ingrained African deceit. Trudy Richardson has 50 variations on her rationalization for attacking me. There is no door number three with the real reason: I signed my own death warrant with this rental corporation when I was all of 23. 

I never realized. 

Phosphorus Angel

"They are more afraid of assisted living than they are of dying." A liberal analyst

Liberals always ably diagnose problems of their own making, which invariably leads to retrenchment, the brawn of knocking a defined but slightly less ripped contract killer Jason Statham inhabits as himself. Statham is not a portrait actor. He doesn't inhabit. He performs as an action figure, in most of his films in affiliate circulation, but he seems to have a particular comprehension of his niche that is put together just well enough to be funny. I like Crank, which says something about me. Some of my regular readers know this already. 

Having stipulated viewing pleasure, however, doesn't mean a trained eye doesn't see the narrative as fantastical.  Gangsta may get off on breaking each other down, but surely Chev's employers knew he was dangerous, and if they wanted him to die hard, they would have further disabled him in the opening jump, mind games aside. Neveldine and Taylor make up for their preposterous plot devices, and Statham is in obvious sympathy with the notion that action achieves more than sensitivity training, but even here there is a beneath the surface subtext: Defiance is maintained through perseverance. Loopholes, like keeping yourself on uppers, can pay dividends, and being smart about not over-reaching can pull you out of a tight spot. How real world is Statham's urban jungle for the rest of us? Well, poverty is mostly accrued in increments of petty vandalism. Not that gun ownership isn't ubiquitous in black society, but city violence is by and large, banal, taking a toll on everyone.

My eye was running over my old files, and I still have Dana's email from Poets & Writers Speakeasy, banning me in 02 for personal attacks against other users, as if I was the Tantrum Special Needs student from The Slap, or Modern Parenting. I remember a few flares, and suppose, justifiably, users may have been frightened. Vitriol comes from unreachable pain-- but what I wanted, from P&W, from anyone, was out of the regimented hell of my domestic life. The poet Bob Zordani suggested going back into the MFA system (if you know of him he was pretty cool back in the day) and so forth. I wanted the fucking liberals and more moderate suburbanites to come rescue me, literally, and a part of me still does. We do not, in general, tend to do that for each other, but cripples do, without much hesitation. The new social media, to some extent, reigns me in, and there are only so many ways to reap revenge on a system, and a supervisor, who did their number, then their expulsion; family pushes back, even mio padre, however, on the arc of where I've been, where I'm going, honestly, children do not need to be saved if they cannot make their own decisions. I may start something in the morning, filing a police complaint against Presby. It may not be enough of a something that the officers will arrest me. I don't know, but I'm starting it anyway, hopefully with enough composure intact. I want to be able to vacate Riverside with a modicum of safety.

My instructors meant well, but my wounds go too deeply for ever a full recovery. "Hang on for a little while." Whisper in my ear. May be a bummer busy week.

When is it puree?

"They later reversed the policy." --Judy Woodruff on Facebook and beheading videos

Elonis v US brings together a number of tawdry elements which eventually leads to enlightenment in civil and criminal code, just as the Web is under no obligation to grant the indignation of my extensive disability and my forceful rhetoric tolerance: it is actually a reflection of my reality in the temporal world. I'm needy, and my oral stream is, can be, selfish absorption, but just as this is the case for me, so it is for Anthony Elonis-- but there are differences, and in the Elonis case, the difference is the real toll domestic violence, the possibility of it, inflicts on women, to a near universal degree, sans Janay Rice, versus Elonis need to act out with his impulse control issues (just as some of you may feel I simply derive pleasure from being malicious and have no redeeming value in my content, am far too eclectic, perhaps even nullifying, if you shouldn't be worried about my zealotry with age). Well, my hypothetical detractors have a point. Search is under no obligation to refer my content in the public domain if it is too negative. I can go back to my diary and publish a nihilist rant for kindle which would sell for nothing. Google, Poets & Writers, the literature forum, the NYT online book forum formerly with Mick Sussman which I really enjoyed and forget why I dared the emperor of American liberalism with a dirty ditty, starved as I am for fine discernment, all were within their rights, and Blogger has allowed me to throb, mostly, to its credit, because I've held at least a certain degree of puerile sentiment back, partly fear, partly the knowledge I have more ambition than that, and doing my best not to let my landlord roll me out in a straight jacket-- though it may eventually come to that.

Elonis, however, is simply puerile. But why does he need to do this on Mark Zuckerberg's digital interactive yearbook which has everyone's CV barring mine? He could write a private blog and invite other men to fantasy with semi-automatics. My outrage is due to the knowledge of my legal passivity: I was afraid to fight, one, and that a litigator would not help me, and secondly, I wasn't just screwed, I was royally so and everything in my present environment recollects it: Blogger let me find the courage to have a small effect, but what do we do when people who can take it in to their head to act if they are incited to do so? Mrs. Elonis has the right to her personal security, and bad systems that become intrenched, if targeted by violence, not only escalates tragedy, but escalates the fact that we need to teach each other about over reach. Progressives bear the brunt of my anger. They told me I could succeed and it is through hard won insight discovered that they are lying Stalinists, but the right gets some too. Property ownership is still more important than anything else-- we'll come back to this. People have the right to their rage, and to their intolerances even, and fantasies, but writing as therapy, on the merits, need not have absolute access to all platforms. I'd never write a project like this in an online yearbook-- and you don't have to read my posts when I feel a ventilation, not that I know what your kids think, though I can guess. I couldn't help laughing at Judy's language that evening. ISIS in the modern world is horrific, and ghoulishly macabre. It isn't the kind of diet we really need, however. We have the movies, and the right to bear arms.

Shame, Aggression, False Pretenses

When I first joined Examiner over the winter, their advice to me, however removed in locale and my internal time sensing mechanism, was "not to hide." But any raise in profile carries risks, and I sometimes wonder why Blogger tolerates my sometimes rampaging content, not all of it an act, because posts are regulated for behavior, and not given full free speech latitude, but this points to how social networking stokes paranoia. I am afraid of Linked In's controls, and the hassle of having everything I write in a group like the Professional Women's Network "subject to review". It is a large group, and I don't want to presume too much, but subjecting to review is neither a guarantee of containment, nor definitive indicator of future acts. My grudges have poisoned my emotional well being, certainly, but when I broke my wedding engagement with Frank, my family should have helped me relocate. They did not, and I am stuck in exactly the same place I have been in against my will since 1994. The former supervisor who hurt me has probably paid off her mortgage. My apartment manager Trudy Richardson, who was a cheaper investment for Pennsylvania than I, gets paid to harass me for being non compliant, and Jimmi and Erik, Christ knows what they think they've actually achieved. Disability activism presumes that transitioning from an institutional environment to a housing environment where behavior is proscribed to the 10th power is the definition of success. For me this rings hollow without rewarding matriculation-- and I have been without that since 2005. Being in section 811/202 housing from the beginning of a career that keeps breaking me hasn't been the easiest thing to withstand, but we seem to insist on regulating ourselves down to the bland banality of oatmeal. I wanted a real independence in my life, not 50 memos about inspections and tenant meetings and who gets ostracized for not being a black baptist. I wanted to travel, not demonstrate with other wheelchair users for empowerment. It is a flawed and forced form of inclusion that has its own sterility. I wanted an income for vanity, my own furniture, decent clothes, not struggling with disability payments, alone, with no friends of my own choosing.

I have interacted with a woman named Mary Bryant on the network, and if I am guessing correctly she's a better Catholic than I ever was, even in the fervor of my religious years. I opened up, just enough, to tell her I don't recommend Linked In members read my blog-- if the post goes through-- but if she did she'd probably wonder why I'm not on my dead mother's lithium dosage, getting *help*. It would certainly be a way for the social cruelty I've experienced life long to be buried, in tandem with the fact that I've dished some of that back, particularly on suburban female author hopefuls with caustic ferocity born out of despair. I may have wised up, but social fear is not an unwise prerequisite when utilizing social sites. I've had a horrible life. It pisses me off, and the people who've wronged me got away with it. Every time. 

Periscope Has Gender

I shall not be reviewing Eric Edwards. He contacted me politely in a group mail to Amazon customer reviewers, asserting he was a local celebrity in San Diego. Emails from strangers asserting blessed fortunes tend to elicit hostility, but I strapped on my muzzle, mentioned Examiner, and Eric Edwards sent me a PDF of his masculine point of view, whose acknowledgments offer garlands to the 56 year marriage of his parents. I cannot do it, read this short text and offer a salient synopsis, mainly due to my perception of a certain insularity from the author, though this is what it takes to hone merit, create a pathway toward establishment. And this represents the answer to my unhappiness beneath turgid victimization: I wanted to be Ann Patchett appearing on Charlie Rose. I'm not Patchett, who is what? Bemused? Wry, yes, but wry in an abbreviated manner, with a pleasant projection of self-sufficiency. I envy that. People who stay intact, hold it together. She is right about teaching. It is not the right profession for all of us, and like she did, I turned to writing articles, but turned to it too late with too many events either threatening me physically or destroying an already precarious health.

My father's sister is, sadly, senile, and due to this I will stop posting about her. Overtly, anyway. She has anti-depressants she is not taking. She needs them, because her cognitive abilities are deteriorating. If I try them yet again, it will be a game of guess the right dosage until something goes wrong with the cocktail. Dependence simply creates more problems. I already know this due to tobacco, blu cigs, and aeros, my expenditures on these products. I am not going to discuss the fact that Marie is nuts with either cousin William or Richard. I was, but Marie and Joseph are old and sick. I am worn out with it, much like the latest outcry over Shinseki. 

The VA has treated the rank and file like an expendable class from Hoover's days in office, when he had Eisenhower shoot protesters. I am over 50, and soldiers getting fucked over by the Pentagon is a solo chorus that never stops improvising. This is just one sub-group, veterans, and I am a raving maniac because intake centers eschewed me, case management wasn't exactly my dream niche, and I opened my mouth on a message board @ P&W and all hell broke loose. Sigh. We don't know what we're doing, even those with the expertise to dismiss my reactionary stance. The 100 is just another show easy on its production values, but one day humanity really will face these choices, in a collective necessity over riding self interest.

Hollow Log

Billowing tirade, I splintered on my ex today, unfairly, hissing at the glamorization of Michael Sam's sex life, then roaring I would nuke the entire eastern seaboard if I could, then disconnected the 5c in tears. Nuking the entire eastern seaboard implies that anguish has that degree of magnitude: I cannot break what binds my future asceticism, and my pissant student loan debt which is going to crush me, with or without putting myself back on Medicaid.

If I find Frank and his bulk on his hospital bed and his Hoya lift repugnant, with a running price tag he has cost Pennsylvania well over 100, 000 dollars, I should have the decency to leave him alone, regardless of my nerves. My rage was about the sand pit sucking me under. My landlord repeatedly broke the law, letting seniors harass me freely for years, and yet because I then roar at Trudy, who is just trying to be a good matriarchal black nanny, I have to let all that go. Vulnerable cripple with target right smack on her back. My disability center breaks state and federal law so often that they are a running joke, and I have to let all that go, poets and writers in a unified front regrettably parked my digital ass out the door because I had an insurrectionist rage in relation to all this, and they are about selling craft to refine talent. If I want to be Henry Miller with jugs, then hey. P&W has to vacuum in writing students. Go staple your brain, spastic.

George has MS. He doesn't rave. He writes well crafted short stories with a mildly sinister aspect. I met him and his wife at an Abington bookstore in my little manual chair, bored out of my mind. "I talk just like I post on Speakeasy don't I?"
"Yes," he nodded.

"I think it is enough," this is what he posted on the boards as Dana, the moderator, and Gretchen, the melodramatic southern novelist, closed ranks and banned my account. Whatever the inflammatory nature of my rhetoric, I had residents of Riverside throwing bars of soap at me, while this man, writing with the hope of saving troubled teens, ostracized me after having met me and I purchased First Tiger, his early YA novel. I wonder if my neighbor and follower Ed knows that about my history with this building, that I was physically pelted. Doubtlessly not. He suffers too and doesn't let it throb where dialysis evidently disfigured him. The horror of such group stigmatization doesn't go away with a snap of the fingers.

Weigh this. Weigh this against a history of medical disfigurement, life long sexual victimization, then come back at me with Atwood's salutary apologia for Toni Morrison's embodiment of dignity in endurance. Language signifies the reality of the flesh, but it isn't tangible. There is no reason to run into similar troubles at Linked In. It is simply a career resource site, and I do not have the time, but this is why I fear mass aggregation.

I forgot to add, with economic contests such as this, the voices of the dead recounting Sunset Blvd seems charmed, indeed.

Michael's Prism

"I don't know," Michael C. Clark, always wry, never fearful of bewilderment.

"Speakeasy is not meeting your needs," oh god forbid, not the staff who evaluate MFA curriculums, but their volunteer board moderators.

It is his memory which embodies the emotional investment of my exile from P&W, on a digital scale. Their customer service agents, in the little contact I've had with them since 2002, are perplexed by my personal indignation. Of course they would be, as creative writing is an oversold academic industry which should not be a separate and distinct subset in the study of literature, and yet it is. MFA groups polish technique, leave us with Toni Morrison roasting smores over slavery's aftermath, or Franzen, always living in a block bluster mindset.

As a published writer unable to make the transition to franchise author, I want something else? Yes, to remove the pain of loss from my memory, when Michael wasn't my husband, but was representative of the humanist soul mate I desired, believing in its happiness. I may excoriate Jerry McGuire, but Michael I rarely write about. Embarrassment, guilt for being such an imposition on his personal space. He tolerated it, that imposition, except when he told me about his diagnosis, and I did not know what to do. I ran away, me, when he was always there for me, even with my 28 year old dating troubles with a Jerry look a like who had ferrets.

I listened to Michael's son Andy play the violin, was there when his daughter Emily's birth was announced in the CAS cafeteria, and realized far too late in my life that here was the graduate student hook up I should have played for, and realized it with the anguish distinct to Jamesian novelistic antipodes: Michael was whom I should have married, this Michael divorced, with his wife's motives bewildering to me. Michael Clark was a perfect husband, father and teacher to the extent that fallibility allows--and I am not much for fallibility, my own included, always struggling for a better thesis, the vision that will give me that breakthrough, that victory particular to itself.

I did love Michael C Clark. We were not physically intimate, so the authenticity of feeling may be on the cheap: I did not have to deal with his weight that made his pudginess charming, or evaluate his capacity for sexual blandishments, but I loved him.

I weep, what else is there? He never told me he was designated my academic adviser because he took on that role for Widener's disabled student body, a demurral of recognition in the fact that I always was and will remain, a segregated element. I know what some of you would say about that. My quadriplegia isn't an excuse to hurt others. I've been told this on innumerable occasions, and yes, I have been wrong, sometimes over the top in vitriolic build up, but when the paradigms surrounding me impede equal opportunity as a fact of life, progressives like Jonathan Capehart are waxing in effusive cosmetic jewelry.

The power of those who control the connective software, this has a cumulative affect.  

Fear of Crowds

I joined a literature group on Linked In with over 30k members, and, if I allow myself to get familiar, my posts on Blogger will probably lead to Crucifixion by affluent professionals with children, and I kid with ye not that the anxiety in my chest is palpable. I am the mouth who managed to get banned from Poets & Writers, the New York Times Book forum, that for writing an angry ditty about a crotch on a stick, which was stupid on both ends; the Literature Network decapitated me without so much as a gunshot over the bow; the Jamesians are probably alienated by my impatience with arcane detail (with the exception of their personalities), and I'm moving hell at high tide for a new source list. Twitter shrugs. Twits can tweet fuck if they want to, and no doubt finds the spastic dowager amusing. I don't worry about twitter. Twits pointing guns and threatening airlines are more problematic than my poverty and plight in Philadelphia. Do I stand by my reactionary output? My online travail is a reflection of lifelong victimization, swallowed whole in public welfare America.

Do I cower? Will Blogger close my account before I hit delete if I hit delete? There are more ways to push boundaries than by expressing outrage with expletives worn out from wards of state at the bottom to Under secretaries of state saying "Fuck the EU," on Russian audio capture. 

Phase Four

"That was last year. This year I need to make a living."-- William Holden

I am not good enough with code to copy the photo the Rosenbach sent me of author Wesley Stace. I'd get into trouble trying to use it anyway even if I was good enough to lift it, but he is slouched in a Lazy Boy, eyebrow cocked, frigid expression. I am tired of being the writer who hovers around franchise novelists, in the first place, and secondly, his conscious distribution of airs would collide with my solid, planted, braying bulk. I have no idea who he is, and I am not typing into search for a frame of reference. Not to recognize a writer feels curiously liberating.

I cleaved to the Speakeasy site seventeen years ago, sitting in the same stained shirts, creating a psychiatric ward with my posts, as one homemaker flung the accusation in my direction. I grieved for a very long time about my banishment, and those more sympathetic to me than the pedestrian sentiments which closed ranks against me, consoled me with the suggestion, "We do not have time for the Speakeasy." Meaning keep busy, live your life. Seventeen years, same spot, same place, additional abuse heaped on me like spaghetti sauce, being followed by my jackass Jewish neighbor because HE is now the West Philadelphia mental health advocate. No one in P&W's Spring Street offices realizes the emotional nature of my tie to their brand, nor am I implying they should. My academic adviser is dead, and I'm rotting in an old age facility, more or less, learning to be vile with fluid ease, switching back and forth, derogatory analyst slaving for pennies with Clarity Media's laughable, snarky sibling. Oh yes, they be teaching me. Content, video, aggregating. AP style. Google News algorithms run the fucking universe. Now I am always busy, when I am not fondling my bedsore, skin rotting beneath my fingers. Joey has joined the dead in my nightmares, my poor sweet little boy, resurrected right out of Stephen King's playbook. Examiner is run by real people, but I've never seen such a cock-a-mammy enterprise: "Joanne you're eligible for Google News promotion..." This from a Colin somebody; when I get names I save them, only Google News is now weeding Examiner out of its feeds. Changes in the equation. In my psyche, I said to my dead brother's shadow "Nicky put the knife down, you're not going to kill me." Classic Hitch.

Rattle and Clear

Samantha  was my undergraduate roommate, and as you can see, she not only survived the experience, but reasoned that if she could backgammon with a precocious spastic and a homosexual tag mate, then she could live in LA. I can see mouths agape with wonder here.

Ms. Kline found me online first and wrote hurriedly that "she'd never bother me again," in that arduous sensibility we retain that we're wrong, somehow to reach back to the past. I did not mind that she found me so much as I minded that I shelved her memory away as an inconvenience, though having taken a couple of years, I am a bit softer.

While her journey with the hope that men found her sensual tarried on in the bedroom, I typed in the living room. This is the ongoing formation of my epitaph. Spastic typed. 

Somewhat annoyed with myself for putting Jayne Anne Phillips up here while I am over here (as she and I are only so far apart economically; I have produced, but this is not the same thing as succeeding with the MFA system), I would not submit to a project like IDK, not today. Partly it is about brand. Kenyon still matters, and they almost almost accepted me. I would support them even if I never get the byline; up on my high horse, starving.

Samantha and I share in common that we remain instantly recognizable. Everyone from my high school class says "You're Joanne!" I stare back vacantly. Samantha got placed in a Goya poem.

Nevertheless, I am in a great deal of trouble, of the aging indigence variety.