Plummet

"I had stopped petitioning the heavens for miracles four days before."-- Sheri Booker

Even in 2009, during my brief electronic correspondence, or conservation, with Daniel Schneider, his offer of a byline in Cosmoetica would have been a downgrade. I had already appeared in nearly a hundred literary journals. Even with my CV, I've lost count of my bylines, for everything, articles, poetry. In this sense, my long nine month stint at Examiner hurt me too. After getting in legacy media, chasing tail aggregating for peanuts kept me fluid, but hurt me professionally. Perhaps constancy reflected a certain uneasiness. Getting buried in endless repetition of stringer scoops is nothing, and it is the same with Dan's writing. Good for a student, but at some point, exposure is meaningless if all we do is skim. Penetrating the value market will not help me much unless I can build something sustainable from any future bylines, and get work I can handle.

The flap over Erdely's lax dependence on her primary source, which seems to involve more than a hint of buyer's remorse (collegiate age girls may want to rethink promiscuity?) and the much more disturbing crisis with Hughes and TNR, suggest that the lightning speed of reactivism is a continuing problem, and that we're fast losing nuances in contemplation, which at the very least, The New Republic offered as a glossy, whether or not you were a supporter. I appreciated the fascinating insights into a composer like Stravinsky even if I never invested in learning classical music, and I suspect the insulation needed for that is difficult to accrue through surfing a synopsis-- it points to my level of indifference over the death of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, which is as cold as you like. Not that cops aren't a favorite target of beat reporters for a reason. Police do criminal things, sometimes rape hoes as well, but protesters develop tunnel vision, and I've turned myself blue in the face attempting to expose what I have acquired, empirically, through so called disability activism. My antagonism toward individuals like Jimmi Shrode and Erik and Josie, and the catastrophic knife in my back from Linda and our disability center, is as much about their hypocrisy as it is the ossified sterility of the paradigm. Jimmi is all about transitioning the helpless, decentralizing them. Accepting my emotional injury because he used his personal relationship with Erik to take advantage in an federalized system which demands impartiality, this he cannot do, and thus I'm persona non grata.

It will happen among these progressives of conscience with their sit ins. Darren Wilson did not set out to murder Brown. He was doing his job on patrol, and the NYPD did not intend to kill Garner in public. They were subduing a man placed under arrest. To use Erik's phrase, "shit happens," like the climate change which we're all on the doomsday machine to repair. We may not be able to repair it, and if we traded off civil liberties for the sake of security after 9/11, what about our food sources in a hundred years if global warming becomes a calamity? Take a step back. We are not all equal in value, and never will be.

Same Old

I am already reverting back to my 2002 level of poverty, the stress of such that led Poets & Writers to kick me off Speakeasy. My remaining savings is but the smallest cushion, clock ticking, whether or not I can freelance back in to sustain my online activity, and I doubt it. Liberty rescued me the first time, around the early nineties, when the Internet became a word that has since backdated in currency, but the updraft from the disability center was enfeebled at best, looking back all that way. My work under Linda 1 and Linda 2 was not stressful, and indeed, in context, it was ridiculous, and it was before my assault. It is very difficult for me to convey to my twitter account, even to other Philadelphia accounts, how much urban poverty, urban violence, had damaged me between 1993 and 2009, the latter date a kind of murky cut off for a cap on the African American retreat on what had been a continuing escalation to evict me. To go where, to do what, I cannot tell you, but some months before his birthday, I told mio padre, "You and mommy were right. I should have left Diamond Park and come home." Within days. Google Maps has a picture of these twin units, nothing more than an ugly and urban brutalist architecture, from which I could only go to another building with the pretentious hypocrisy of the same sort, and no, I am not grateful. Do slumdogs, whether Indian or Thai, have it worse? I cannot really rate it, because my youth was a boomerang between hospital and institution and back again. So no wonder then that poor Jerry clunked me over the head when I first set eyes on him. Christ man, we've gotten old, but I see you're still *at it*. I cannot say I'll never do another reading, but poetry under a gas light, what the fuck have we changed, my old mentor?

What have we done? I speak the unspeakable, and you've retreated to New Orleans, still filling the same estuaries that when I was young, hit my cognitive hemispheres like speed. In a very real sense, the artistic outlet has more quietly disillusioned me, as well. The American Constitution allows the outlet, but does nothing to check the power of Jon Corzine, or Hank Paulson or the CEO of JP Morgan to float nonsensical trillions. I live on perhaps .00001% of their 6 billion dollar leak, and the best Homo Tweets can bleet at me is to "get help," in all the glory of his progressive vision of what social equality looks like, that says nothing to what my half-century of damnation has cost. Social work never made me happy, not really. The Matrix Research Institute gave me a small sense of the aphrodisiac of merit, something I paid a high price to experience. It will now take me about two hours to safely simulate a decent shower. Most of you never even have to think about this. I do, my lungs slowly suffocating on pus that feeds oxygen generating commercials, and I am still battling to live an absurdly decent life, stifling a jagged sob.

The Real Fascist Cripples

Wikipedia contributors certainly know how to masticate films, and there is nothing I can illuminate about Valkyrie factually that this entry does not cover, though Lane's quip about English character acting was perhaps the most amusingly accurate. Viewing this movie gave me a brooding, uneasy feeling, as if it prefigures the collapse of the United States in a way I cannot quite quantify. It strikes me once again, that Cruise and I are months apart. Risky Business made him a super citizen, his credo makes him suspect, and I sit in power chairs, scraping bottom barrels, despite the fact that like my former supervisor, I was groomed by *the state* to be a poster child, which may indicate rancor towards social inequality despite my recoil from the rainbow coalition.

That recoil is genuine, although the full extent of my corrosion remains a toss up, in terms of what or who I hate, and why. I am fully aware of my capacity, and if I wanted to, I could mop up the floor with people like Jimmi Shrode and Debra Horne, and indeed, after my fall from grace, I did attack Jimmi's intellectual arguments, in the elevator, on the sidewalk, and he would recoil like wounded blubber, but whether he, or the coffee colored bitch slapper who considers herself a social services professional and isn't, are worth my hate, that question is more painful, not easy, and revolves around competence, entitlement, value judgments I dare making.

von Stauffenberg's motives do not seem so mysterious to me, whether one believes Cruise penetrates the man or not. The elite in the German military came to realize, late in the day, that fascism was destroying German national identity, not vindicating it. But what Cruise does bring to the role, in the same vein that motivates my obsession with pushing back against disability ideology, is that strident focus on the end goal,which is to eliminate the cancer, stop it from progressing, and the character's injuries exemplify this, how hard one has to be to see it through.

Cruise's command of the camera is a gift that most of us lack, and I am not decrying his success. What makes me uneasy is his superlative stature, which to all appearances has erased the identity that had to underly his acting ability, at some point. Perhaps that is a degree of hyperbole, but I doubt the exaggeration goes too far.