Drought in Cape Town

"Accidents happen quickly. Investigations take a great deal of time."--Jim Southworth, besieged custodian of our national triage crew.

That I feel put upon in my now estranged interaction with fantasy novelist Shayna Grissom is on my plate: she requested a critical volunteer on Twitter, and as a long time follower, I offered, despite my physiological stresses. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the effort involved a shot toward tolerance across the bow, going beyond my own Copernican heliocentrism into normalized primate social interaction, and it backfired. Shayna isn't thinking of my disability, doesn't realize this senior living apartment which I've hated for 25 years is tantamount to a county jail cell because I have no control of my own environment due to blithe fat and jolly nigger cleaning crews and a pair of white trash drug addicts who tended to my dying stepmother, that my cervical and anal regions are depleted of estrogen, are otherwise burning and sore because my godfather's staff fitted me badly to modern power chair technology under the curious vendor brand name of Quantum, and that I've never been to a writer's conference in the Pacific Northwest because I don't drive a Buick with her downturned pursed lips and limp blond hair, she simply wanted that reassurance writers need so I offered, and even though I offered, her urgency was an infringement on a critical care invalid. "I need this done now, immediately. It's been a tough week."
So I did it now immediately after an arm wrestling match with the President of City Council Darrell L Clarke, a man taken aback by an angry Italian spastic who cared absolutely nothing for the fact that the Councilman was the biggest dick at the microphone. It takes a great deal of braggadocio to be a reactionary when African adhesion to urban liberalism is a roiling tsunami drowning you in its cubic undertow, and yes, let it roll off and down your back (meaning mine), casually as Dennis Hopper's gunshot death sprawling his body on our wondrous ribbons of asphalt that forged a nation. Only, I did not believe at the time that Shayna was lesbianistic. Thought she had given a shout out to a husband right before her conference sojourn, but yes, I will concede the now nicely bracketed block of activists (wtf does non-binary mean?) would find it difficult to accept my quadriplegic stark unhappiness near the end of its life as it is. I have, after all, lent silent and tacit support to Andy Ngo later this month. No nuanced quibble here. Antifa is a terrorist organization. It is just a sense of dismay that online contact rarely takes root and offers supportive friendships, especially in generational distances.

When They See Me

Why do I suddenly want nothing to do with you? Because you declare yourself openly anti-gay. -- Shayna Grissom

The difference between first time fantasy novelist Shayna Grissom and left wing journalist PM Beers is generational. Shayna will block my account on Twitter. Beers and I will argue with each other, then play according to the binary choices offered by the tools and unfollow each other. I owe my readers an apology for PM Beers, although she too, like Jason Dorwart, had been linked to my account long term. I knew Beers was the California version of the hard left, but I stayed with her, including through her Twitter suspension, because I believed her able to call the left on bad behavior. Last evening, she posted a link celebrating the aghast recoil viewers are supposed to feel over When They See Us, the Netflix series about the false accusations leveled at the Central Park Five (yes, I remember, the police and the DA were desperate to diffuse hysteria and things went awry, as they usually do over race and sexual crimes). I raised my voice, deliberately, on this woman's thread, because I can't even remove myself from a rental agent guilty of serious criminal negligence, when I am a woman actually and repeatedly victimized by black aggression and criminal behavior, as if the police state in this country isn't firmly entrenched.

Noa Pothoven's saga makes all arm chair theorists like myself uncomfortable, because when I advocate for euthanasia as the better part of valor, her circumstances in no way reflected what I saw as an equitable solution, and if the Belgian state medical apparatus was involved in her death, it is an involvement that goes one step too far. She was raped by two men as a child and developed anorexia, but she was only 17. My sexual abuse began institutionally at the age of nine in a Catholic home for children where black ignorance simply didn't know any better. The age of 57 sees me back in exactly the same place, in which black prejudices reflect the best I can navigate in my life. Black people are not saints. They prey upon each other with ignoble exploitation, just as whites do, especially when entitlement is involved. I do not regret PM Beers. She is an entitled gadfly I tolerated until yesterday and decided not to anymore. Unlike Austin Petersen, I do not call her "friend," which in Petersen's case, a reasonably known libertarian personality, is mainly an honorific. 
With Shayna Grissom, I was simply trying to be supportive of a first time novelist. But here's the thing about Shayna and I, our interaction for a year: she never read my work, nor my blog, and slammed me only because I lent support to The Federalist, on the issue of homosexuality, in public. After she blocked me on Twitter, she had no affliction of conscience following my account on Goodreads. As I told her in message, I was a professional reviewer. Books sales evidently trump whatever offense I impinged upon.

The Day Would Be A Lot of Highway

The feud kicked off after Carrey posted an original that he made, depicting the execution of Mussolini alongside his mistress, Clara Petacci.

Caption rightfully goes to Northam's repository of equally stark satirical interludes.

Before I go on with more integral matters, let me buttress a wound licking moment and yowl that I lost a potential novelist online friend, Shayna Grissom, because I engaged in my usual delight of contention braggadocio in the discovery that Alessandra Mussolini was a living facet of history, and I almost couldn’t not defend her against a farcical jackass like Jim Carrey. To me this is fascinating, that while I’m here on Blogger pondering the many roots and branches of Italy’s indispensable cultural legacies, Mussolini’s granddaughter is actually live on social media! I very nearly groveled and decided this would amount to little more than an irritant, and so went after Carrey, whom none of us like, for his hard joke about Benito’s death. It was lacking in tact, his cartoon, contributing nothing to anti-statist tensions. I only really use Facebook as an outlet, or for a question, but Shayna cut me off, and yes, I felt it, one again reaching for tentative rapport. She did a shout out for a volunteer to review her agent letters, I offered to help, was happy for her novel, and here we are, after following each other perhaps less than a year. Fragile suburban housewives, I am on my last legs, and get shafted by her neediness and insecurity, and none of this had anything to do with her, her husband, or the death of her sister-in-law. That tweet, if hers, may have been when I first paid her individuality any notice. I’d really like not to be dying by myself and get a hug by someone other than a jamboree jigger getting paid to serenade me into the Twilight Zone. I invested in Shayna’s validation, and now, I’ve paid, but if Alessandra allows me to stay on her feed, maybe I can get a nice essay out of it; I am not sure how much I can assume about my strength, taxed as it is. There is no giving up, mind you. A home for cripples would simply torture me. I either can take it on my own, figure out a foolproof exit valve, or take an institutional technician’s abuse. Those, as it stands, are my options, as my bridge to via support caved in a while back. The current caregiver, ever helpful, suggested I ask Shayna for a token fee, the same Shayna who raised her voice against censoring YA novelists. Uh huh. Any reason why I should try to keep placating this tyranny of female centric herd dynamic?