Hollow Point

"Although we may be frail and helpless,"-- Stephen Hawking

The Churchmen has a deliberate subtext. We're frail and vain and cruel creatures formed of the dust, and thus to dust we shall return, even if hit men acting to avenge a Russian criminal fail to give the actor Samuel Jouy a kill shot for the sake of series continuity. I'm much like his Jose, with a fervor worthy of destruction, a poor atheist and lousy Catholic both, I'm of course overjoyed the European studio system made him a paraplegic who is allowed to return to being a seminarian, and the Modern Catholic might be equally gratified by the admission, that, if I open my heart, I'm right back in Sunday school with the choir and a few hosanna's of my own, except it would be of little use. If I returned and did penance, I'd soon defy Francis and face excommunication. I don't like this Pope, and it's wrong to feel this way about a third world bishop playing the Vicar victims advocate on one lung. My decency is too tarnished for anything useful, still, Hawking set me thinking about why there necessarily need be particle motion and forces  in  the vastness of space. I can't think of any plausible reason why a void simply cannot remain a void, why gases have to react, why elements have distinct features. We can explain it, make analogies, but nothing about matter or our language for its laws is necessarily rational without God than with one, insofar as I can see. Our relatively stable star will one day nova, perhaps after humans go extinct, and what then? Awareness is almost unnecessary, and our minds will never fully understand physics, but take the observer out of the picture, and neither material processes nor supernatural ones have much validity. Neil De Grasse's question about what the purpose of a divine being would be may be valid, but so is the question of why electrons orbit a nucleus, why energy even exists, why I don't go to bed, with my swollen feet. 

Heather Donahue Does an Isothermal

Jean-Luc Bideau dissuades me from enjoying The Churchmen too much. I am sure there are priests like Fromenger, but this particular actor leaves me unconvinced, among other issues, but this admission in no way detracts from the fact that the series has more to it than Samuel Jouy's intensive, persuasive, sexually attractive fervor so ironically crippled in the second season. The series, taking into account the actual production, is not quite ten years old, and one might suppose it alludes to The Blair Witch Project to maintain a complimentary parallel to the metric system.

Along with the Matthew Broderick Godzilla, AI, The Sixth Sense, Blair Witch was one of the last films I saw at the shuttered Chestnut Street Cinema, and it flew over my head as the beginning of the generation gap between myself and those who came of age at the close of the Clinton era. I do not mean this in an aesthetic sense, though I believe the film fails, and Donahue's hyper holding it together and peeling apart like fried string cheese wasn't enough to carry a movie that was deliberately an imitation of rough captured home video. I recall the rapid monologue in dappled sunlight, the weirding out in the closed in motel, and a climax which might have been a bad case of menstrual cramps, and it made such slight impression because there was little that I could grasp in terms of cultural cues. 

Doing films on Chestnut was one of the few things I could do alone without a tortured sense of alienation, and I miss it for this reason. Unlike Liberty On The Rocks, which rankles me as much as I care about it as a sort of wry conceit on political bullshit, in the movie theater I could bond with others, and threw a distraught scene on the sidewalk too, despair surging forth in the stark realization of my doom, interior knowledge attuned to the fact that Cinderella will not be rescued by the perfectly abandoned slipper, much like the sage patrician sensibility of The Modern Catholic isn't quite what I envisioned when contemplating a contribution, and shall have to adjust my parameters if I make an effort. Catechism is long buried in spot memories of Mary Anne; I think she was Mary Anne, who got involved as a stabilizing force in my prepubescent years. She walked me on crutches with the classic cripple's leather helmet, locked me in standing tables, prepared me for communion, let me sleep over. She might have taken me from my mother, and I contemplate in amazement the absence of scars in the care of a decent physical therapy aide. My viewers inadvertently remind me some of my rage-trigger posts about independent living need a polish. Time constraints merit patience.

French Cuisine

"I read your blog,"--Riverside's pork style fairy

I did not goad Jimmi when he actually spoke to me a few days prior. I made an observation to an ever case managed former consumer about my enemy status with the developmental faggot and dying husband, and since I made the observation, I let the potential fight slide. Jimmi is weak, goading him can be amusing, and my balls are going to get me killed, but if he chooses to wade into the disjunctive link between his beliefs, his corruption, and my hatred of ADAPT, he isn't any worse for wear. Insurrectionists haven't yet found the appeal within my interior Joan d'Arc. More to the point, Mr. Shrode refuses to understand that state and federal employment guidelines exist for a reason, and the disability team of my era broke those rules with impunity, destroying my career, and I have to see him and Erik daily. How would you live with something like that? I doubt many of you would find it tolerable.

There is an antipathy to Jean Luc-Bideau with his grandfatherly bulbous nose, and there is also animosity toward Baiot-- the black French actor who in The Churchmen of course has to be a gay seminarian. Bideau has too much of Flaubert's Tostes ruralism about him with that turkey gobble neck of his, and Baiot I've seen around and never liked, too much simper, but other than the jump cut erotic scene between Baiot and the other working class family boy coping with his spiritual calling, I've reluctantly allowed myself to be entangled with WYBE's run of the series, mindful that this is France2's spin on the Vatican, their Pope a bit clueless and modeled on whom, precisely? 


It is a better series about Catholicism than anything produced in the States, as is typically the case, and if I was a God fearing Catholic atheist I'd laugh at the irony. I'm reluctant to go forward with Six Feet Under because of its simulated sexual intimacy between Michael C Hall and a gay black partner, and here comes charging out of Paris, with its aggravating double standards, a second decade series about faith and coitus in the real world, and a gay French African, with impulse control issues, climbing the stairway to heaven The French have had an occasional battle with Italy over the Papacy, so its voice is not to be engaged with too much skepticism in its muted but still relevant battle with Protestant Germany, but this is France, and my patience with sniping remonstrance begins to take its toll. Flaubert, Proust, Dumas, no wonder they hated Dumas, even Stendhal. Simenon too, the rich and heavy cream, over-indulged steady diet, wreaks havoc with the blood sugar.

My Aunt Cecily was more chill about homosexuals in the priesthood, my grandmother's half sister. She enjoyed the impersonal circumspect tone, trying to be the grand lady in the know, except during an episode where my mother had a short-lived relationship with a Jamaican. It was repugnant, simply too much for the old woman. Yours truly was mercifully absent.

If I wind up giving my landlord notice in a fit of hysteria, I cannot rescind it and change my mind out of fear. I can't survive on the street and yet the torsion on my leash is at a breaking point. My stepmother is in a home, and after she married my father she wanted me put away, which ignited the war of the Cinderella's in the family until my sister changed her mind about her loyalties. 

I need to get the fuck out of this building so badly I'm likely to wind up in prison, while my father the bullshit artist will assure me on a monitored line that he'll bail me out in the next couple of weeks.  

Faith is as fragile as our loss of muscle tone.

I am on down time out of weariness more than overages. Next week, with provider forbearance.