The Dining Room Table

When I could still enjoy solitaire as a form of recreation rather than psychological duress, some of my favorites were the two deck game, St. Helena, and the small table game, Four Seasons. I made Four Seasons harder than it is on Warfield’s software, allowing only one move on the tableau per pile. I won rarely. Another was Hit or Miss (or Roll Call), a simple count and discard game, Accordion, and oddly enough, Perpetual Motion, which is a simple pattern game which can last a long time. I would not recommend playing it on the device, in my teenage mind which had no idea I’d plummet back into this distraction at this age, not helping myself. I have to wean myself away from all this awhile, upset that I allowed Karina to prey upon my sympathies, giving her money to wash my hair. Instead of being conscientious about the matter and giving me advance notice that her mother would be entering hospice, she took my money without finishing what she started, flimsy woman. I read this a long time ago in her and knew better and the Muslim, who is up in arms that I’m ditching TLC even though I’ve told her this for weeks, won’t do it, and my father’s ex attendant, whom I said I was going to hire on my dime, won’t shut the fuck up, so much so I’m having second thoughts about honoring my verbal assurances to her. She lost her mother too. “When Momo calls what you going to say?”

This is Saran, the big African child who cleans my stool five days a week. What does she think I’m going to say? I am a racist Momo and I’m sick of your accents and skin color, sick of not being able to have any time to myself, at all. I may not be dying, but my strength is gone, and all I have is my mental capacity struggling against my mechanics, not even positive I can trust my uncle’s company to restore my independence just a little. Mike altered what he sold me, but I shall never be fully functional in this machine, and it may be too late; fine, but I am losing my ability to cope. In Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams, this peels off under your thumbnail like mica, a sad series, aptly casting Terrence Howard and his moral rectitude, carrying the burden of incendiary individuals like myself on his back. For me, this is going to bed early. I will make edits tomorrow after the Jewish nurse dashes off. She has achieved nothing in terms of making things better. I am under no illusions about moving on, what I’ll continue to face.

Chiaroscuro, della Scalizo

Of the twenty children Brown fathered, nine died before the age of ten, among them a baby girl accidentally scalded to death by an elder sister.--Tony Horwitz, Midnight Rising, loc. 143

How many times have I written here not to telephone dying aunts, particularly when I am under so much strain of my own accord? Waiting on a small line of credit which shouldn't have been approved, even if we all know that game; told myself not to dial her number, but my father doesn't quite fill me in on medical gossip events, so I dialed, and the rate at which she and I disconnect from each other is a form of compensation toward not hurling expletives at each other; things which cannot be unsaid. I "slipped" in relation to my demented uncle's mortality, and that was enough, as it usually is. My knowledge that my cousin's mother is on the fringe, being closed by concentric bands on functionality, isn't the crux of the problem.

I have no social extensions to keep me on the ground, with my yellowed and crooked underbite, my weary and mortally wounded eyes-- even when I am safe on supplies, the damage can be read in my eyes like a marriage between Henry Lee Lucas and the Kama Sutra. I have tried to provide myself outlets. The Rosenbach, as I knew beforehand, wasn't the appropriate venue. Liberty On the Rocks members -- with the exception of Zach Tollen-- he a product of the consumer model, tolerate and feel badly for me to an extent. They see I have an active mind, one invariably dragged by a ball and chain, like my uncle's body, which, like an orca when it expires, is classified as a biological hazard, but I have no intimates, nor intimacy, in my marginalized indigence, thus at my core more caustic than my aunt. My niece's MS is a blow to my sister's self-absorption, and honestly, I don't really care, having lived my own rivers of death, but this is what eighty year olds ahead of me do, even if they are progenitors. They wag like maids.

Though I cannot for the life of me do it tomorrow, showing up at a Toomey campaign hub at the last minute to make scripted calls, this will also leave an indelible imprint of commiseration, unless I take 48 hours to fight with dressing as I used to, before the Quickie shorted out, but even then, desolation radiating off one's flesh like a depth charge blowing the bodies of fish to the surface doesn't exactly forge new paths in the garden. Black Mirror seems to be something of interest which escaped notice, but it will have to wait in an interior queue of a black lung goop, assuming I have an opportunity to get to it, even if it is a primarily ambulatory oxymoron.  As a disabled woman in the 21st century, let alone the previous one, I shouldn't be able to comprehend the destitution of John Brown's life.

Pity the Trump

The time is all we've lost/ I'll try it! Jonathan Edwards

I cannot say what the other drifters in Philadelphia's LOTR think of me, with the possible exception of Black Adder, a young man who doesn't suit as a primary target, but I no longer have a healthy social intelligence, let alone social extensions I value, and value me in return. I had a flicker of interest in the Asian computer geek, but haven't batted an eyelash, nor intend too, as I know nothing, inclusive of his age, sexual orientation; he is kind, however, and comprehends my fervor when I see him. I have a relationship to kimmy, at least in mourning for Vinnie, a relationship to broadcast schedules, to Trader Joe's as a brand, to the self-absorption of the seventies, singing Jonathan's post Woodstock angry ballad as loudly as I could in my alienated urban world of happy blacks and more diffident Pakistani's.

All I have left is memories of fraudulent emotional investment, and on bad days, the cut of my former manager's voice in my head, with her come off it attitude because a poem of longing for a man I never caught had a double entendre on the word "come," which suited her convenience to go off on me. "Hands With Cerebral Palsy" was never a literal experience between Tassoni and I, never an assertion of a caress to his face, only the stanzas of a broken heart. In this context, I've assiduously avoided too much dissection of the flaming Trump phenomena; never liked him, saw him as carnivalesque, his rise indicative indeed of the warnings prophesied in Network and Max Headroom, but the establishment has so gone off its rocker I'm leaning toward not giving my vote to Harambe, the saintly victim of human primacy. "Sunshine" was a pop fizz out of the turbulent 60's, but despite the resonance of the chords Edwards strikes, it cops a plea, and in that vein fails its liberal zeal.

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.

Pretentious Liberal Motherfuckers

"You sure?"-- Lawrence Gilliard, coming back from the dead to cross us over

The Hortons did not do anything overtly illegal in their solicitation. This was not a case of the state police tracking my brother down like an animal, a script straight of a seventies exploitation film, which is what my indelible memory of his face in that detention facility compares it to, an episode of The Fugitive. All the Hortons did was find my twitter account;  perhaps in the belief that a raging bull with tits would help their traffic ratio; I said to myself what the fuck is this?  And made successive errors in judgment,  for which I am now shamelessly trolling the couple and their community regulars.

Just like Mark Johnson, I can strike below the belt, and I was going to tell Karen Lee Bartlett her husband was an annoying voluble ass, just to be cruel. She was probably checking me out, because her motor moving epileptic spouse gave me what I thought I needed: chatter. If she was worried, she needn't have been. I would have abused BridgeToursJade with far more ease than try to steal him. The level of damage we can cope with in our partners is in the eye of the beholder-- but this is why I knew I had to get the fuck out of there and erase myself, because I was going to hurt an innocent party, due to the fact that other site users hurt, or were provoking me beyond what I can stand these days.


Yet my loneliness is still overweening. An online "regular" is better than the sheen of oils on my brother's psychotic adolescent bewilderment, cutting him off from normal human discourse forever. It would never be the same after that.  He was a hardcore drug user. If this is what my attitude is like starving for nicotine, then my brother off PCP should have been shot dead, then and there, as a fugitive on the run, spaced out, in the shame he brought to our family name, his face riddled with tweaker acne. He did not simply rape an anonymous party, but one of my father's tenants: If I rebelled against doing penny articles for Clarity Media, I was not going to give them to the nanny state mentality of Mike and Melissa for nothing, and was cruelly harsh with her, telling her Mike was a bozo fuck. That's mean, but I shall never, ever make the Yabberz News mistake again.

Eating my usage like no tomorrow

"I hoped the day would be a lot of highway," my favorite British sentimentalist

My occasional seizures of loneliness belie my underlying scorn. Monica Carr senses it, which is why she is afraid of me, and telephoned her police station as a justification for the fact that Medicaid set me up with its pathetic system, and while I was waiting through my power chair repairs, all but helpless in an 800 dollar twenty year old manual, she abandoned me in a commission of fraud against the state. I hate this woman more than anyone I know, and would take a great degree of pleasure in excoriating her toxic and morbidly obese flesh, but since I have ameliorated the worst of my caustic lashes, I'll see if I can snap her picture-- useful for a lawyer in an accumulated onslaught of what Riverside's outstanding social mores have paced me through. I was told, though I cannot confirm her version, that she institutionalized Nelson-- her Puerto Rican amputee, in his passive infantilism, for not taking his medication, and a resident named Candy, a woman who had the admirable moxie to high tail it out of here and go back South, had to get him out. Doesn't quite add up, but this is who she sleeps with, Nelson, and that is what she did to him. You figure it out.

I have a small list of people I'd like for friends, including the project director of the Rosenbach, but can't force these things.

Who am I to have such an exclusion zone?

I had every Elton John album, and never forgave my father for stripping me of my collection when he dumped me here--another reason why Karina drove me to a head. Trudy and her supervisors haven't locked horns with me just yet, but it is coming, and part of me has ceased to care, even if I have to go to court. Accessing attorneys is not an easy feat, is it? I need one who is not burnt out so much that they won't heed the cumulative effect of Presby's long term civil violations.

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.

Anti-Trust Harpsicord

"I've been missing in action for over a month."-- David Carradine, swinging funerealist

Solutions are always trickier, and always imperfect, but one I can suggest off the bat is to bifurcate advocacy from case management systems. The disability center services recipient controls absolutely nothing. They are merely led to believe otherwise. The ones with the control are the fund allocators for Medicaid waiver services, and, as I've previously indicated, I have some research to do.

As Cassie used to empower her troops by commandeering Septa vehicles, she was also perpetrating the continuation of class conflict (cf Blue Collar) through the intimidation of non-unionized primarily minority CCT drivers, CCT drivers who also victimize and infrequently kill their clients due to poor training, criminal jackets. And Ms. James knows this is a valid charge on her doorstep, has been investigated by the DOJ, and in contemporary terms she mews softly, defanged and spayed.

I've always believed in more constructive engagement, even in terms of old American cities with impossible transport authorities.

For those of you who've suggested work at home on per hour basis solutions, I am not excluding the option, merely hampered by phlegm derived inflammation welling up through my Eustachian tube, building up the ear wax. Writing is and must by necessity be an insulating process, but I need constructive social engagement, not from Presby, and certainly not from 714 Market Street. Linda Dezenski may stay healthy when she is through eating her own by fidelity to the process, but I cannot be in that environment, even after I force her resignation. 

Gangsta Grades

Everyone knows that Rome was all bread and circuses.
                                                             --Oswyn Murray



On my way home from the Joyce group Saturday, I paused at the commerce building cubicle to eat my turkey and drink my caffeine like a speed freak, and two of the women in the group, with whom I might have clicked, given they were not grandmothers, or old Irish cops, passed and cut me, quite rapidly, not even bothering to say hello, and as they left my line of vision, a disturbed African American stopped, tried to engage me, screaming at the top of his lungs, "I love you!" "Go away or I'll call the cops." Okay, he said.

Merely an episode, perhaps prescient, given where the local disability activists have left me. Online interaction does not work; patronage has not succeeded, and I cannot imagine what subset of the publishing industry would want to accommodate me on a part time basis, in terms of steady pay, not simply commissioned sales-- and yet we laud violins for poor Swartz, another hounded victim, though his actual crime in terms of digital copyrights seems, at least for Eric Holder's tenure at Justice, mushy.

Public housing has already killed me, and you, Liberty, one day you will immolate yourselves, not by me, because my will is sapped, but you will cause this city such a scandal one day that its administration will be forced to put you into receivership, because this is Philadelphia, the metropolis that invented the ever diminishing returns on self depreciating incompetence, passed between Italian corruption Jewish liberal lesbianism and black and white Protestant denominations of least qualification like a platinum coin worth a billion dollars for the supremacy of the jackass model. No, I am not going away, but even if a lawyer will sue for me, I am already lost, sitting in the kitchen, drained of any desire to believe that I am still a real human being, still capable of thriving, and then a squabble of the usual sort among the Jamesians revived me temporarily, led me to a brief surge, and I send them all hugs and kisses, even Greg Zacharias, who, like my brother, thinks I need SSRIs in an appropriate dosage to modify my view about the conspiracy against me.

From my earliest posts on Arlington Road, I have been in an in depth argument with Greg, actually, and also my family, to show that yes, non compliance creates the trauma that makes the system act to operate against our universal desire for autonomy. Ah, the cripple and her scholar tweaking! Such small joys, let's finish up with The Brothers Rico, though the film may linger on for some time.

Privacy, in theory

Weary of torturing my posts to aim for the acumen, not pretension, but acumen I want to have, I am researching privacy and the constitution, and a legal scholar reminds me simply that it is about what the government cannot do. This is no longer applicable, because the social services system can do anything it wishes to me due to my technical quadriplegia. I do not want minority aides because many of them have traumatized me; I do not want Presby staff constantly in and out of my unit, so Debra Horne and Trudy Richardson can forcibly remove me any damn time they please for a psychiatric assessment due to my expressed animosity and then come up with competing rationalizations for it. I raise my voice; they do not bother to ask if this due to the fact that my larynx is the only part of my anatomy that works with above average capacity, and that my need to talk may be a functional compensation for a seriously compromised mobility as opposed to a simple bipolar label, among other things, and the Medicare actuary decides which and what medical technology I can and cannot have as a lifelong entitlement beneficiary, and independent living centers will go on deliberately marginalizing until they kill enough people to create a trauma nearly as powerful as Newtown. I will get the change I want, even if it means a major traumatic sacrifice, but never again, ever, can I maintain a positive outlook on the basic sanctity of the human condition, and that is tragic, not just shedding a long nascent infantilism.