Neurologist's Spike Protein

 

Do you have a cigarette?

This intrepid, if also embittered, disability journalist confesses she used to be a regular viewer of LA Law, as lightweight, cornball, old fashioned serial television. Although it slipped my mind until I searched the recall, it was here on this series that Jimmy Smits entered into his fleeting generational reign as the American Adonis, and here too that Corbin Bernsen and Blair Underwood made their initial impressions; my nostalgia, however, is particularly kind to Alan Rachins as Douglas Brackman, who formed part of the comic relief contingent. Towards the end of the series run, it was also Rachins, digesting the wrongful termination of a transgendered woman, through the show runners, who made an ingenious argument about women and body enhancement, one that seemingly collapsed gender reassignment as little more than enhanced cosmetic surgery. It is a difficult argument to refute weighed against the generational juxtaposition Brackman’s character represents, in the era just before Suits and The Good Wife.

But what recalled Noah’s Bark to me was the synchronized nature of the fictional client’s Tourette’s Syndrome as almost necessarily lending itself before the audience to the correction of social justice Brackman attempts, and then fails to wage. Concealing a condition like Tourette’s is difficult, and Brackman is called on it. The client reveals the truth, Brackman is threatened with discipline, and Steven Bochco’s conscience can sleep well at night for matriculated classes. The disabled of Riverside Senior apartments aren’t the matriculated class, and Morton’s Tourette’s is more the threatening disruption of the automaton, like the liminal figure of Jerry in Master’s of Science Fiction. This Saturday I had the distinct privilege of seeing Morton, his bouncing gait like that of a bumblebee, pacing the sidewalk adjacent to the building, with excrement on his naked toes. It was a rare moment of intervention for me, noting in bitterness that Trudy Richardson, she herself the equally afflicted lupus administrator, tortured me, with Caucasian acquiescence, for significantly less, in terms of infractions.  In letterhead after letterhead, Riverside trumpets how concerned Trudy is for the Negro Urban League women who masquerade their propriety as virtue. Nothing could be further from the truth when public health experts do not have even basic solutions for forcibly herding people with chronic conditions together in to evolving super toxins in our vapor heated indoor air.

I follow a former Planned Parenthood director named Abby Johnson on social media. She and I perhaps share a similar process of having turned rightward after having engaged our careers in the progressive limelight of Steven Bochco’s desire for universal alleviation, but she is as wrong about the fringe and its feral aspects as Bochco is in his: Morton is an aggressive imbecile, no more, no less, incapable of survival through utility. Difficult as it might be to envision how he would have fared in a pre-industrial era, the 21^st century can no longer afford his inability to intersect, just as it can’t afford the sum total of my horrific failure in abridgement with the ambulatory world.

Travanti Hemlock at the root

"It is therefore no surprise to find that anti-homosexual repression is itself an indirect manifestation--" Homosexual Desire, page 55

I probably take the national prize for online inappropriate behavior, and one year went *off* in email with a sort of loose jointed Briton about trauma conversion. Total stranger, and I'm emailing him about a rather intimate issue of masochism, probably fresh in the aftermath in my tug of war with my former supervisor-mentor, but some years before the half-breed from the inner city violated my personal sanctity, upon which I discovered I couldn't be masochist enough, and fought, but to be entirely honest, there is a part of my psyche, after years of learned devaluation, that could have let this absolutely repugnant female have her way, and destroyed myself in the process, but in coming to terms with it, I'm now beginning to put it away, to stop twisting my head, and the next African American who tries a "Miss Eddy* maneuver isn't going to enjoy the consequences.

Leaving Travanti frozen in the eighties of his prime to be able to watch a relatively contemporary work like C.O.G. bite on the ass from a distance takes courage, in more ways than one: Bochco fed us Frank Furillo as a nearly messianic figure, and this is a grave sin, a set of expectations offered by a fictional character against which we judge the men we think we want, the ones who reject us next to the gluttons we reject. Travanti and Bosson really were sanitized versions of my mother and father. It hurts, surprisingly, and leaves us with residues of what we have to offer, which we do, in reserves, until dementia or what will kill us takes over.

Be prepared for post-menopausal pain. It is something a woman over 50 needs to discuss with potential new boyfriends. I was just getting the hang of sex after my fling with Pat, my ludicrous fling which still has an undercurrent of dread, in my thirties, and then the ball stopped, and if I get into Frank (the ex) and sex I may end up asking a hunter to go retrieve that rifle with scope, but it can never now be the same, an expression of a bond of appreciation, had it been if I had been more resourceful in resilient middle years.

Why did I bother to chastise CrimeMonitor? Because I am a victim, two, three, four times over, and when the account holder actually bothered to pay attention, his subsequent click of "unfollow" was the behavior of a mongrel, another arm chair cosmetic. I at least make an effort to think about what accounts have to offer. He, or she, has earned my contempt.