Life Imitations Leaves Scar Tissue

"Things are pretty much the same everywhere."-- Timothy Hallinan's Thai cop sidekick

This trial in Thailand seems to echo Western perceptions of vacuous Asian ethics, in a border country seemingly caught in an intersection. I have the actual AP feed bookmarked on my phone, and may refer back to it, but this seems a bit spooky, superimposed from our narrative entertainments in exotic locales. A Nail Through The Heart makes the Scandinavian television series, The Legacy, look like a picnic, and The Beach, as a film, dilutes itself with a poorly referenced plot, but why Thailand? A constitutional monarchy surrounded by a history of leftist extremes, with a big lying socialist bully up north, suffering and pleasuring civilization and savagery collide in an interesting dynamic. Hallinan's novel was so powerful it made me lie for hours in the dark, superimposing many things of my own. Timothy's American optimism perseveres through his travel detective, despite a tidal wave of genocidal deception, and mine cannot, even though he thanked me for my review when I was still with Examiner.

I have been thinking about proportionality for some time, and this case raises it in spades, whether the migrants are guilty or being set up, what possible justice is there for such a brutal attack? The British families will be haunted the rest of their lives, and what motives Zaw and Win may have had seems puzzling, as the evidence indicates there was a degree of rage to these killings. The case also is an exception to sociological studies about class and crime. The indignant do not kill the privileged, except when they do, apparently to sate some driving impulse.

I part company with conservatives like George Will about the death penalty in the US. Will acknowledges the reality of its erosion, and it is a state sanctioned cessation of life in which a percentage of innocent individuals were unjustly electrocuted, hanged, or injected, but I do not think it should be abolished. Some humans are heinous beyond incarceration, but anyway you choose to parse it, justice for these two Britons doesn't seem attainable through standard judicial procedure.

Tsunami Effect

"People who watch it know it isn't boring."-- Robert MacNeil

To stay with IIsoe's adaptation as a lede, for a bit, the Catholic Church is correct with its catechism that some diseases represent evil. We never see Veronika's homosexual husband Carl, but it is his desire to satisfy his need for sodomy which precipitates the latter day crises at Gronnegaard, and the cancer weakened Veronika only has the satisfaction, after lifelong sexual promiscuity, of being caviler with Singe, the youngest daughter who never knew. The elder woman perhaps knew she was dying, and reveals the truth to a clueless florist of 26 that appearances concealed the consequences of so much sexual liberalism. Was Veronika cruel to the girl who only a day earlier she was attempting to ingratiate? Is lack of reticence appalling? As when a mother confesses her former best friend made a pass at her, and then, oh, a year, six months, regrets, through her emotional disorder psychiatry insists on classifying, says "I wish I never told you that."

Veracity alters the landscape. I loved Kathy more than my own mother when I was 12, and wished fervently to trade places with the deceased daughter Colleen. Kathy came out before my mother's anecdote, showing up at my sister's tete a tete gatherings, and I met the partner, a relative of the dead husband. My gaze stayed overhead. No remarks, just two fat women well over 35. I attempted to rekindle former childhood attachment as pretense. Hugged former childhood attachment at funeral for the bipolar matriarch who isn't to be blamed for my 53 year old predicament, and would burn the enemy at the stake along with New Mobility's star lesbian. Do I realize the implications of my rhetoric? Grand standing? Inflammatory? 

The media is just as absorbed in generating Bobbi Kristina into. a saga as it elevated Terri Schiavo into a Shakespearean tour de force. Terri Schiavo, however, was emblematic, to all parties, whether it was the life affirming ecumenical advocates, or the death with dignity advocates who wanted a vegetable with minimal awareness and a shrunken brain to be released. Nothing could be proven against Michael Schiavo prior to 2005. Terri's presumed diet pill usage is not an a priori indicator of abuse. Bobbi Kristina is not emblematic, just the poor little rich girl who brought the hood into Paris, in essence, despite Houston's celebrity and daddy Brown's acumen, whatever that amounts to. The family has the money to emulate Caucasian anal retention standards, but black is black, skidding on its on depreciation and hair relaxers. And Bobbi's attempted suicide or abuse at the hands at adopted brother is fresh enough that if the conspiracy minded Caucasian public could not get Michael, they are damn well going to roast Nick Gordon in a public shaming.

The upstanding Fascist who hates the hood where she is now totally indigent gives him the benefit of the doubt, even if the girls are always the heavy. Public television newscasts are boring, and pink. Why am I picking on Ozy? They were nice to me, and all the sudden I've developed a papier mache indignation. Why? No one reading my content is willing to risk helping me re-engage first, worrying about the rest later. Safety and support outside the box. Work, a fresh change of environment where I can reach for a modicum of tranquility. I'm not ready to die. On the razor's edge, I'm still fighting. Give me a chance. The libertarians accepted me. More than I can say for the hideous cruelty and corruption in the progressive welfare state.

Fighting With Silent Leftists, Whether Die Swiftly or Linger in Traumatic Entrails

Arm chair positivists. What I haven't had for years is someone picking up the phone and hey Joanne, how you doing? Don't get discouraged. Want to come work for us? How can I pick apart what OZY indices on twitter means, why their members are members? Why they put me on an intriguing journalist list-- 2014 was undoubtedly my last active year, despite the tremulous energy I've thrown into my posts. Bobbi Kristina has ceased to be a flap jack. Maybe. Her case differs from Terri Schiavo in our arguments about value, efficacy. Schiavo became an irrational cause celebre with insinuations of spousal indifference. None of us can know the inside of the Schiavo marriage, just as none of us know if Nick Gordon is guilty, but if Schiavo was a cause, Bobbi is an unspoken casualty of racial celebrity unable to adjust to life in the bubble. Real fame is a curse, making black celebrity more of a tightrope, unless you were Diana Ross, but the vegetative body, it troubles everyone, the dead alive. Venezuela might have become a beat if Hugo Chavez, like the fictional Veronika Gronnegaard, lingered in a coma. Veronika doesn't linger long, and essentially dies for a daughter emotionally oblivious to the impact, however debilitating. Frederick, the eldest son, virtually goes into major depression. Gro loses everything. Sunshine/Singe loses her innocence and splits her family.

My mother's death, swift, pulled the lynch pin out of my family, and barring a miracle I die alone in upscale minority projects. I will probably never fully recover my health for a simple reason. I did not leave Riverside in 2006, which is when I should have, and my ability to endure this community is failing. That simple. I am dying because I cannot change my hostile environment, because I'd have to fight the disability center tooth claw and nail for absolutely nothing. I rip $450 out of their petty change budget, let's say. Nothing. The disparate poverty of their current client base is loathsome, and their information and referral staff still type narrative notes, poising the same questions, destroying my self-same determination they claim to uphold. Faust got to see the world for his deal with the devil.

My choice is stay, give in, take incarceration, or go back North, fifteen minutes uptown, so I can fall into spastic bitch trash slot. All because I'm not an anti-anxiety medications trying to control a classroom.

I believed in a dynamic life. This is simply going through the motions of American catacombs. No one wants an uncouth bitter bellicose happy anarchist fantasizing inglorious paybacks, skull fractures on a makeshift alarm clock as a weapon. There I have ideas, those reverberations of unwitting consequences. Even revenge comes cold.

Fumes from the Exhaust

"Those grown old, who have had the youth bled from them by the jagged edged winds of winter, know sorrowfully that Indian summer is a sham to be met with hard-eyed cynicism."-- Grace Metalious, Peyton Place

Even those lacking a certain artworld diction might find the works of Veronika Gronnegaard trivial in an otherwise engaging drama from Maya IIsoe, who, whether she intended it or not,shows the progressive spectrum is exhausted. Veronika did what she wanted sexually, whether or not she could tell that her first husband was a dangerous sexual libertine, and then the spears thrust outward.

Another flag: Frederick's wife sleeps with her brother-in-law. Credible, but even for Scandinavian tendencies to repress, how could anyone's marriage survive such an indiscretion? In the difference between my leonine ideals of a good man, and my ex, the imbecile half-wit Frank, I suspect love is closer to the constant fighting in which Frank and I engage, but if he fucked my sister, I write this dead pan-- the man would be dead, and I mean that. [He is safe, as Stephanie has her own problems.] So, while the exchange between the actors as husband and wife seems consistently Protestant, and buried below the surface, Sliveg's [sic] declaration that what she did was unforgivable usually proceeds a death knell of some sort.

Just a note about my ex: I am not fair to him, and only continue the volley because I have absolutely no support other than a misogynist moron. I am basically dead to the man, yet we still fight like Raymond's parents, on the sitcom, and it does make me laugh, that whatever I dish to the Bronx bastard, he throws it right back. 

I'm a writer.
That's no excuse.

He has no idea.