Ironside Enumerations

Again he thought how processional Venice was, -- Barry Unsworth, Stone Virgin, p 50

I cling to Stone Virgin, a Booker Prize text, as if it was on its way to becoming sepulchral, if not scriptural; what Unsworth achieves in his work, something I could never do, no mattter how much I researched, or fight to travel, is to transition the character type of Henry James, into modern fin de siecle figures. He collapses figurines into modernism without resorting  to linguistic tricks. David Mitchell may have made me weep, with the fatal imprint of Cloud Atlas, but Unsworth gave me a religious revival, and may have had an indirect impact on what I was attempting to achieve in Dimmer Beacons, and failed, despite that the essay is in its third printing, and as with every risk of revision, a rewriting of the text for my too slowly compiled non-fiction collection may lead to something lesser, if I really get ugly about Linda, and whatever kudos to the culture of victimhood, Linda was my fault. I talk. I talk to total strangers about the haggard bitch of articles. I call Tony Stiles my little brother to feel better, and I'm killing myself into a principled libertarian death spiral so that nigger nannies can make their car payments, fraying my rage between homicidal transcendence and suicidal anchor stones to keep my corpse floating beneath the riverbed, after a week of extraordinary duress on bouillon cubes and basil, the last of my kind, in actuality. Many writers up through World War 2 went insane, or needed torpor, and died, like James l Herlihy, and I am my old self until I return to Presbyterian Homes, which I am going to leave, despite the week of bouillon cubes. All very well, but I cannot dismantle a sports chair like Bruno Debrandt more successfully rendering a modern, paraplegic cop in the WYBE feed, Cain. Cain succeeds where Underwood failed because it doesn't utilize black guilt. I know Debrandt from more than the convoluted Spiral, a series only viewed sporadically, but cannot place his role which imprinted him, and I was going to inveigh that his functionality was outside of my worldview, but that isn't true. I lived date rapes and fucks and spasmodic heavy petting.

Part of this is panic over my dad. He is old and I want to go to him, to stop being a guilty financial transaction, to forgive him for doing to me then what Trudy Richardson does to me now, and I hate this woman so much it frightens me. I hate Trudy Richardson more than I hate Linda Dezenski, because this is what I wanted from Linda, to spare me the Presbyterian Moby Dick avarice. What the Presbyterian Homes model represents is human dystopia at its worst, and we need to stop it, just as we need to stop our obscenities with exotic game like Harambe. Only we cannot stop what we're doing, can we?

Pakistan Is A Scorpion

I just had a chat, not so much strange, as disconcerting, with an alleged contractor for the US Marines on Google Plus, and I was polite, but bewildered. I am too soldered up with naive scar tissue to play cyber fantasy games, anymore. I used to, but  got too sucked into it, and cursed myself for logging on to see how Hangout connections worked.

What the fuck am I supposed to say to men younger than I with my drying punta, to take a term from Barry Unsworth, the great mimic? Of whom I was not cognizant of decease, by the way, and thought the novelist still living. 

I miss sex, being a naturalized trollop, I do, but I also know it is too late for me to find liberation with a man, on Viagra or not. My affairs were hurried trysts, without orgasm, frigid woman ripe to get her head twisted by homosexual vultures and straight mentally ill molesters alike. Some of which I've detailed, perhaps not well enough for my viewers to understand the sense of violation these inappropriate behaviors from my clients imposed on me.

He is a Hispanic widower from Ohio on the ground in Syria, and my sympathy, if he wasn't bluffing, walked hand in hand with an interior tantrum: I am fucking bored and don't want to be doing this. Everyone wants a photograph. I directed him to the photo I uploaded on Medium with my Afghan column, an incongruous image placed there because I did not want to run afoul of permissions. 

Since I had lashed out at my former manager the way I did fifteen years ago I assumed it was due to bisexual susceptibility, and challenged myself accordingly, but never went in search of an experiment. The women who actually did hit on me made me feel three things: the mixed race woman who dared to do what she did triggered a need for self-immolation and a homicidal urge to give her a lethal hematoma. This is the reality of state intake systems. Like Cosby's alleged accusers, who couldn't gain traction, I have to live with the knowledge that I could have subjugated myself for the benefit of Miss Eddie's indulgence; she would have died if she had forced her pass much further than she did, and it can always happen again. The only response from the ambulatory world is to go through another 50 minorities with whom I do not wish to engage; we should be able to do better than this, which is why I fight Presby's intimidation tactics so forcefully. Eviction notices are more humane than 22 years of harassing intimidation to pair me with women who exploit me.

The client? Sharon was an amputee. I was tired. It was past ten in the evening. I was at the Darby Project Share in my small manual Quickie in which I wasn't all that maneuverable, supposed to use my skills as an advocate, but people self-involved in mental aberration, I've learned, could care less, and try to take advantage, and that is what Sharon did, whipping out her arm behind my back and running her finger up an erogenous zone. My back flexed involuntarily, but her hit wasn't arousing, and in fact what was being gauged was my susceptibility to collapsing boundaries, much like what Annabella Scoirra faces as the vulnerable therapist against Deborah Unger. Scoirra raises her palm to halt her patient. With Sharon, all I could do was retreat inward because of where I was, and woke with the memory Monday morning, angry. This is what I've been subjected to all my life: finger fucked in the Home of the Merciful Savior, assaulted under my mother's blind shadow. You know the rest, but unlike Chris Cooper, doing the repressed fanatic in American Beauty, chewing cunt isn't on my secret Happy menu. If it was I'd have a few bodies on my belt by now.

Yes, I feel provoked, and shouldn't have responded to the fellow's invitation. My post title comes from Lynn, a reporter I once posted with, echoing what all Americans knew after nine eleven.

Unsworth out of hiding

Hydrochloric Acid? It is what the Russians used.

Issue: I might not have the manual dexterity not to burn my thigh off, but the good news is this: I hid my Stone Virgin edition so the inadvertent dope fiend would not take it, in the pet supplies yellow coarse weave carry bag, hanging on my useless manual wheelchair. Scorched earth soul appeased. I can delete Karina's number from my Apple, remembering articles read about picture phones in the 70's, but those concepts weren't Skype, nor Steve Jobs and his touch interface fetish. Karina called me back, despite my constant indictment of her behavior. I take no pleasure in the continual accusation, as she was not exploiting me the way the sisters do.

I remember Ebert's 30 second discussion of The Constant Gardner, before silence clutched him. I am fighting the desire to cry over the infamous critic, and that conjures my email to Hitchens. Neither Ebert nor Hitchens ever replied to me, but I fancy inferences, though those could be erroneous, I avoided the film like the plague, knowing the British penchant for moralizing and fastidious faith in red tape, and should have continued to avoid the film, like the plague, and right now, we're not going to discuss it, suffice to say here is a radical idea: Everyone get the fuck out of Africa and let Africans solve their own problems. 

In another life, Ralph Fiiennes is the husband I wanted, however. He would not have failed to protect me, to make me happy, and that sorrow is my beaker's jagged edge. Le Carre is adept at characters, fully fleshed, driving his plots, but at the end of the day, his pessimism is another shovel of dirt in our graveyard, like my internal struggle to stop writing for Examiner. I log on to send them a tag, quit, and then realize it is a crock, and I can slow to an inexorable crawl, in search of another venue. 

Goldie Hawn's Train

"Our first instincts aren't always great."--Amy Poehler

It struck me in my linoleum furred kitchenette that I lost track of my Barry Unsworth Stone Virgin edition as allowed to preview on Google Books. I was rereading it for my own pleasure when I hired Karina K last spring, and now it has vanished, like so many of my possessions vanished when this damn corrupt company hired Trudy Richardson to traumatize the residents during the 2007 renovations. Not that she took it, my edition, but Karina fondled it like she wanted it, and now it is gone. Not in the closet, as far as I can tell. I looked everywhere. It angers me that, regardless of my experiments, I get trampled on, even with the best of intentions, and I telephoned the girl the night after this post and laid into her in much the same way I am defying the African Americans with their Presby salaries. When I told Trudy's voicemail "I had enough!" I meant it, even if this means, as a weakening woman, my security is in jeopardy

I had a submission process that served me very well once, with markers, typing paper, stamps, notebooks, clipped articles. My pitches were fewer, but I produced and published, and I have yet to recover that equilibrium, especially since 2007, and if I am going to be moving again, the weight on my chest against my desire to work feels like 20,000 tons of cubic pressure. We laugh at Goldie Hawn, the woman who carried blond cluelessness from the new age to the Clinton era, and I have grown fonder of Death Becomes Her as an idiotic farce over time-- Trudy is a toffee version of Hawn-- incredulous bulbous eyes with what she has to put up with in my unsanitary unit, but my hit list is, shall we say, tremulous with the anticipation of growth.

Unsworth's inspired period tale is one of my favorite modern Booker nominees. Reading it comforts me. and he gets his Italian mindset right. How I don't know, and I am not sure I could ever authenticate an authorial voice the way he does between past and present and a stone madonna that is something touched by history, but I loved this book.

Grinding my teeth. Buy it again. Never hire a Caucasian woman twenty years my junior because she reminded me of Maureen, my neighbor, or because she reminded me of happier university times, but these disruptions to my need for stability, to hold to my routine, to be able to create, might land me in prison if I cannot find a landlord who will leave me in peace. Beat the system and hire a damned assassin. During trial argue lack of discrimination as a point in my favor. But where I go from here, I have no idea. Medicaid Waiver services are no surety, even if Craigslist might kill you.