Abject Failure

The last time my computer battery went south, the Toshiba stopped running, despite the external charger. PhillyTechGuy said it shouldn't do that, but that is in fact what it did, and I am broke, and dirty, with renegade pests run amok, the power chair falling apart, lacking the funds to throw my laundry in the wash, even if I fold, and telephone welfare, the attendant I'd land would be someone as desperate as I am; it would not hold. SSI would give me about forty dollars, and it is stringent. Sell an article and I'm in overpayment territory, and when this becomes your entire life because your brain damage was just bad enough, what is the point? Where am I to find the resilience? Maintain my sanity? I am this close to cancelling my Medicare premium, rolling myself out the door, attempting to manufacture a fatal collision with a truck, which I do not deserve. My father's bypass surgery has put him on notice that it too is ready to fly south, and I am having headaches and seeing spots in front of my eyes; his sister, like my sister, is nearly out of her mind, and she thinks I have solutions to spend down. Throwing in the towel merely trebles anguish, and pathos is out of fashion these days. I would not wake to discover that Inglis House would gratify me. Regardless of what the state spent to refurbish the "wheelchair community," it was built not to be seen. It is a castle where human detritus is hidden away, drugged, mumbling incoherently on gurneys-- how am I to live like that, as opposed to an alternative marginally more palatable? Here lies spastic dowager, done in by bad intestines and deplorable domestic conditions, saying livid vicious things to bingo eyes and buck teeth in the sultry air of an unpleasant autumn. If this Jazzy in which I sit kicks, it becomes relatively moot, believing I can climb the fuck back out. I'd have to go away. I cannot fight medical rationing in an unsafe manual wheelchair for another 9 to 12 months because I cannot get past primary care physicians to get at the damn technology upgrades I need. Terms of service policies frown on "glorifying" negative behaviors invariably grinding down to the inevitable conclusion, but I do not see the dignity of enduring lifelong institutional nightmares, drugged into oblivion for the sake of unskilled labor. They left my right hip dislocated, the fucking crippled children surgeons, after destroying what control I had, cutting hamstrings, fusing feet bones, only to hit middle age arthritis just as ambulatory individuals do; barring a miracle, I can't hold the line that much longer, and I'd rather go down much as General Gordon did in his beloved Sudan, doomed in my own Alamo, because I fled to this city, obstinate ass wipe, cratered by her own expectations. The roulette wheel of our elected officials changes nothing of the obscenity of the welfare state, breaking me, breaking your back as well. Parents never see these consequences. 

Hava Niagila

there is always an exception to the rule

To reiterate, I wrote in one of my proceeding years that my focus on the community integration empowerment module which uses creativity as a therapeutic tool would be limited, thematically, though my many segues into my own disillusionment always touched base with the doctrine. Artistically, however, I have all but ignored the triumphant bugles written by authors like Joni. I read her autobiography in the hospital during my own manufactured butchery years and all I remember is her picture, intimations about her teeth. I can imagine her accusative: you can still move, yet you carry on as if becoming a member of the Gestapo would heal your damage.

I never intended to exclude ADAPT culture entirely. It simply displeases my aesthetic sensibility. Brain damage reverts humanity back to primal absurdity, even in the case of Barbara McWilliams, who wasn't born with a developmental condition. Liberal journalists paint her death in the face of disaster as a paradigm failure, but if the associated press feed covering the California crisis is accurate, then McWilliams ability to assess the situation played a part in her death, and I doubt her attendant should fault state services, already in crisis. Social Darwinism is a convenient lint for nose pickers, but biological frailty overwhelms human capacity. I too might have died over the weekend if I had not relaxed my bad arm enough to push up, as I had been trained, but if surgeons at Shriner's had not put me on an assembly line treatment I DID NOT NEED as a child, I could probably still get on the floor and get back up. I had the ability to do this, and later, if I had a firm chair with desk arms, I could get on my knees and transfer up. I no longer have the right furniture, and my pulmonary function is a factor, but doctors weakened me, and in that sense, don't amount to much, the wise treat them with contempt. Better that we glorify the Tango, a charming meta-dramaturgic effort by Carlos Saura, whetting our fascination with the violent eroticism which is a signature in Argentine politics, a dynamic fusion of rigorous passion and oppression, perhaps a possible influence on Duvall. 

Tango is more sex than the actual act of intercourse itself, as Sola is well aware as the crippled choreographer, an irony too overstated to miss in his role as the seducer. Whatever is left of classical appreciation, tango, as a national obsession, is invigorating, an evolution, one day to supersede its antecedents. 

I was born in the wrong fucking country. 

Ostler Lone

The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind. Thomas Paine

Methinks I am as comfortable as I am going to get this afternoon, with this body always in pain and nearly always rank; had something of a near miss with my feminine urinal so you can add caffeine laden piss to that, my continual coffee intake either masking or preventing diabetes. I don't suppose German netizens wish to inform me why they are my most numerous viewers after those in the US? Any recommendations? I am an extraction of Mengele manufacture without benefit of concentration camp assembly. His eugenics legacy lives on, in much the same way that Gene Hackman is always Gene Hackman and yet inhabits his characters, with the possible exception of his supporting role in Lilith, but even there, he was an adept shrub. And it is quite a distinct idiolect, one that not every actor can inhabit, being Buzz Lloyd and yet distinctively Hackman, in simultaneous fashion. Marooned is ruthless in its imprint of the American global ascent, and I'd in fact argue it is almost as post modern as this guy's work. It is a film without pretense despite a multi-layered contrivance, powerful for those of us who actually lived through the aspirations of the   Apollo missions, as I did. Gregory Peck insinuating suicide to Richard Crenna and getting away with it for the utilitarian good of NASA? This is the decade that was covert about my mother's suicide attempts, a woman who should have been institutionalized, and wasn't. Before she died she told me that, my mother: Had Pauline and Louis her father committed her she would have gotten worse. Not for me to speculate, but her children would not have suffered Stuart Lone, who remains on my hit list (and that my former supervisor ranks nearly in parity to this stepfather, in this exclusive club, tells you how seriously I take her criminality), finger fuck step father who attempted to rape a nine year old girl and made me sick on Jack Daniels so he could violate me. Let Blogger ban me for being desirous of his murder. Monster. Filth. I shall not forgive. I cannot, not for the suffering he inflicted on me, on my sister, now estranged.

This is the reason this series is making me uneasy. Not that I don't *get it,* of course I do. Malevolence can be as methodical as police investigations for the greater good. Prior bad acts can lead us one way or another, but it is still a difficult show, symptomatic of our national ailment, and it doesn't have to be that graphic not to make me want to vomit at its implications.

There is a brief description toward the end of Cormac's nuke porn where diarrhea is dribbling down the father's pant leg, a mortality signature signifying the price this man paid to keep his boy alive. This was my mother's second husband, jigging around on a heroin crash with shit spilling out of his crack, seeping into his denim. The Presbyterians browbeat me for 28 years after on the sentiment that cleanliness, divinely guided, is curative towards the scars of such trauma. Personally, seeing the backend of my domestic malfeasance in blackface only accentuates my despair of humanity. You no doubt see this as narcissistic, but this is how I'm feeling today, arthritis easing momentarily.

Twilight Swans, Mountain's Midnight Slope

"Do you know what they do to people who can't walk?"
                                                   --Dustin Hoffman
While I still have the ability to tell you about absence, one arm naturalized into a broken wing position, held in against the chest, spine tilting my larger breast to the right when I do not consciously fight my posture, my pelvic ligaments sliced by this American Baghdad butcher, who did for invasive orthopedic surgery what Henry Ford did for automobile assembly, so that my legs which I once long ago could command to motion, control through my own methods, on my knees, grabbing arms, standing, then pivoting carefully, hoisting myself, now dangle in useless, delicate constrictions of pain, echoes of foot fusions I should have fought, made my father annihilate me, as he no doubt wished, as sinister in the height of his strength as Kevin Spacey, when Kevin still had the intangible qualities of a box office draw, a zenith created by what? Talent? A slow dance with Helen Hunt, perhaps, in the usual mawkish morality tale?

In American Beauty, Spacey might have been an impersonation of my father, a slightly better constructed version, and thus worthy of my arms around his neck, inside the bubble of our own slow dance, lost into the unity and vulnerability of the other, the silent dialogic I wanted with this man, circumstances not sparing me from the observation of the fact that he had it with Gail, and you did too, as well, at your senior prom? Or at a wedding buffet? His arms encircled around your waist, in rhythmic accord. When I tried to believe, I bargained with your despicable icon to allow me to know this fullness of womanhood, as is proper, and if he does exist, I'd kill him, for he denied me this, but once, when John snuck up behind me in his winter jacket so I could feel how cold his hands were, but all I knew was the blood pounding in my temples, the knowledge in my soul that such a love with his arms around me, his children in utero, was the fulfillment, completion, and the loss that now defines the end of my life, tears still welling in my eyes, never to be held by the right one, the man who could see and read me, wrap his arms around me, insist we have a proper lunch as husband, as wife, dancing to the marvelous climax of the falsetto in the transition of Taupin's expression of passion from "we all fall in love, sometimes" to the somber melancholy of Curtains, I cannot even construct a false memory, never knowing your binary freedom, the right lover's hand cupping my face. There is no pill for this empty space, never shall be.

Scorch

I am not on, not at the moment, not with the precision and focus I want to maintain for this project. Perhaps I will never grasp my thesis, though I know it is here, both in the raw and the cooked, to pull from the culinary arts, which, just as anything else, is coping with life through the palate, a subtle theme in the film adaptation of Cunningham's The Hours. I saw this author on Rose, doing the usual whoring you want to be moved and bowled over and fucked by my vision, do you not? And the film, much like Babel, traumatized me, though it did so using the key Caucasian narcissistic keynotes of Western pretension. Iñárritu is much more complex, and his work is something I have not fully dealt with, and in the stupid way the human mind works, I cannot do my laundry this evening because of Nicole Kidman's ability to emasculate, because Cunningham took one of my few very favorite female writers, Virginia Woolf, and yes, I am hard on on female writers, but that is because most of us, myself included, refuse to suffer for the sake of genius, and this is another reason I literally despise Josie Byzek-- not because she is stupid, but because she lives in pragmatic denial, like my sister, despite the differences between my sibling and former editor, both now antagonists, he took Virginia's anguish and transcended it, and he did this all without directly invoking faith, and I do not know that I will ever read his novel, would love very much right now to scream at him and dig my fingers into his chest and no, of course I shall not, and dare I find an email address and write to him, if I get any response from him at all, it would be a standardized publicist response, but I haven't read the book, so he is safe from the failure of spastic's... what?

Never mind. I spotted this morning, nearly a year to the day that I thought I stopped menstruating. Leave it to me to defy the medical model. I forget which physician it was, of course, but there was an article published about my extraordinary verbal skills in JAMA, or some buried and yellowed medical text. I am not supposed to have them, these skills, the acuity, even the ability to speak as well as I do. I will do laundry later, hopefully tomorrow, and even though one is not supposed to use rhetoric in this fashion, orthopedic surgeons, eliminated, would make the world more bearable. I could write it in more inflammatory fashion, but I hate doctors; they have not made my life or body better, and I'd sue Shriners Hospital for being worse than butchers. They were no more than torturers back in the late 60's, and yet, mio padre is my last parent. How can I hate the man who never allowed me the honor of being his first born daughter, who only wanted to be her father's princess?