Stratus Babylon

"I got sunshine, on a cloudy day."-- The Temptations

I am overtired this evening, but the mere thought of crawling back into that miserable hospital bed, with its brown lamination, turns my stomach filled with his cooking and food preparation, as I wait there every morning vibrating with his sex in my nose, wanting to make love to him in the morning sunlight, like the blind wife of the chief of police in John Gardner’s Sunlight Dialogues, flashing back to the pleasurable intimacy of her worn out marriage. We’re both angry, he and I, and I’m learning a bit too much about what life would be with a black man of his caliber, and as I’ve already intimated, it isn’t a fine caliber, but rather that of a yoked plow horse, blotting out everything else in my enfeebled brain, my poor weary mind once perfectly happy to be a miserable angry spinster flirting with the language of incitement for my audience. I’m pissed enough at the moment to turn us both in, screwing myself at least five ways to Sunday, causing him a job loss he cannot afford, because I can’t take it, but even if I do this, I’m not getting over his explorations of my body anytime soon. I never said no, and he’s having a difficult time with the geyser steaming out of my fault lines, kissing him finally, although why he accepted it if I am getting carried away signals he is also vulnerable, but I did not swoon. Curiosity. “You used me,” he objected, but didn’t he do the same?

If I could kick him out on his fucking ass I’d be fine, but if I continue to repress, and if he continues to stay, I am already half gone, mostly gone, while he reads me through his planet cycles of astrological forces in a language I don’t comprehend. You’re nasty. Who would want that? Ah. This, dear readers, I understand, my nasty selfish temperament, almost echoing that of Trudy Richardson, building manager nemesis to whom he was introduced. What a success of cultural appropriation, as I am drawn in small mincing efforts to compare the vacant departure of my stepmother to Death at a Funeral, which I believe is burrowed in my archives, a comedy actually filling in the lines of life. This was not the case for my father's third wife. All her son did was pop champagne. "She was a nice person," this nasty boy said, only here once to upgrade an old Sony large monitor computer. At the very least, mine and my father's ambivalent antagonism fleshed out another embittered invalid who suffered an excruciating death; in any case, I'm otherwise shut down, wondering how desperate I am to find satiation. Even if he winds up turning another leaf, I am horridly taut, worn out with it. Sad, I suppose, fallen so far down the ladder that a black man without his girl can't finish what he started, sadder still I'm better off but could care fucking less, me and my matches not in heaven.

Stasis

"drizzle the arugula with the oil"

I keep telling myself go to bed, but having ruined my dinner, I'm wrestling the demonic struggle of my next pithy citizen's review in my head, selling out, as always, toward anything triumphantly mine above standard. I always have John's voice in my head, having read his work above and beyond my studies with Jerry, and if John was a liberal, which I suppose he was, his anger is the common thread that sears his work like a phosphorous flesh wound, let alone the scars of Taggert Hodge's repulsive upper quadrant. Gardner and I share a profligate anger such as dims even the impetus of kindness. I introduced Robert to a local Bay area novelist who shall remain unnamed, anonymous because she visited my dowager account rather than my Examiner page and I believe, reading between the lines, my Blogger posts caused her a mild choking sensation, and then she mailed me her book, which I did not want her to do--please stop giving me books, for the love of Christ enough already, really, but I introduced her to Robert, and was not generous in doing so, but a bit terse actually, as if to say, "See, I am an alien even on the gracious tolerance of San Francisco creative writers and their spouses, so allow me to present you to each other in an undercurrent of snide write off." Wondering why I am so unkind to Caucasian affluence to which I once belonged, so briefly as all that, in a dago leather imitation, at any rate.

Gardner died in such a way as to freeze dry his novels beyond their relevance, not entirely sure what I mean, but close to the sense that he is tragically anachronistic, wielding the Vietnam War like a plug to stretch out the anatomical asshole, and as I've already conveyed, I should quietly close the Toshiba, take my half wrecked P-200 off the charger, make my haphazard transfer to my dirty bedspread with my horrid mattress, and try vainly to go back to sleep, allow my body to adjust to the coming fall, take a break from this account, spend the week finding a fucking lawyer and then take another week to convince the fucking lawyer to sue the fucking state of Pennsylvania to which I am domicile, and good luck with that.

Obviously, I will give compliance with mortality a run for its money, along with everything else. I hope my obstinate aunt expires in ICU, if you'd like the truth, which you do not, oh, the things my rage would make you wonder about whether you should fear me, but then again, testing Google, you know, after pouring my blood into this, if not always due diligence. Yes, Gardner's legacy informs my bitterness, perhaps predicts it; if you'd like me to sound almost like a former middle class Catholic under pressure, this latest family deathwatch has realigned my relations with my paternal, married cousins, and this is not necessarily bad. I am not entirely without alliance, of some sort, not that they can mitigate my invidious hatred of section 202 housing.

Whippoorwill Quirts

I would not mind going to Edgewater. Frank and I were still duking out the end game of our relationship as a couple when the building was going up; two minutes down the block from my building, and now you definitely know where I live, by inference if nothing else, it might as well be a world away, and in fact, when they were ready to inhabit, sent me a postcard, and I never bothered. Now cursing that lack of investigation, the man I spoke to did not sound sanguine, or if not that, at least vague enough to confuse me, asserting that "you would not qualify as a section 8 tenant." Why not if one of my former clients lives there under similar circumstances? Is it optimal? No, as I'd still be in the same location, a street over, but anything not Presby does remarkable things, lifts my spirit, restores hope, with the prospect of being able to tell Ms. Horne and her cohorts they can go fuck themselves royally making me chortle with glee, sheer delight to be free of shanty town. You have no idea the full extent of what the residents here have done to me-- it was not simply constant harassment by the managers, not simply my near death in Diamond Park, and the mere prospect of anything else not in a crime plagued environment, for my health, I need the hope of movement, after 27 years of dehumanizing bigotry, my god, no wonder I identify with the extremity of Taggart's pain, though I did not lose children and drive a spouse mad. Hesitantly, I believe last evenings pill did the trick, and I am "clear," to use the standard call of television cops, but we shall see. There have been no flares. Before we return to the long dangling Ricos, I want to expend just a little more energy on Newtown's grief, partly due to my own fantasy valve despair deposits, in which I take no pride, trust me, but after years of the action thriller implosions on screen, are we not saturated with these video special effects as an outlet?

The left is entirely correct on its political sentiments about automatic weapons and the ease of executions. I live in a city of which in circumference is 85 percent a war zone in waiting, after all, though I am not entirely sure that mental health services is any more than a polite euphemism, as I cannot say if I was not a cripple I would not have sustained this much damage. I am a cripple and my life was never anything else. The question is why those in pain resort to violence as opposed to those in pain who do not. What lifts lethargy to go outside of legal mechanisms in place? I do not need David Brooks to know that most mental health clients are bullshit artists, preying on the vulnerability of more stable service providers, and would no more be spree killers than my former writing friends, or current friends, like the novelist Gretchen Laskas (who will never speak to me again), or the poet Robert Thomas (who, all things being equal, probably will).

I think if you take the Virginia Tech shooter, the Aurora shooter, the Giffords attacker, Adam Lanza, that it runs deeper than weapons cancer, because guns have always been part and parcel of what forged American identity. We live in an age of  autonomic desensitized alienation, fed on a diet of Kevin Spacey masterminds, and those who are sick get this same steady diet that hammers away at the fact that the human animal is expendable, and more than that, the poor, or those that climb, and then fall, are the unforgiven, and can thereby be bitch slapped in  a bureaucracy that no one understands, nor is anyone accountable to it. All I want to do is safely relocate out of the city, and receive justice, but that is a virtual nightmare.

I have been to Farmington CT, and fell in love with the Yankee sensibility that made the US the beacon of the world, but that self reliance, hardy and firm, the point of departure for much of the corruption of worldliness in Henry James, has all but been vanquished by guilt and victimization, which I, as an ostracized disabled woman, have been very much a part, as much a part as Jovan Belcher, or Michael Vick. Forced social equality has assisted in lowering moral cohesion, whether or not you want to accuse me of oversimplifying, it is still the truth. Had I not fled my life in Ridley Park, I would not be a broken old woman exposing herself before you, not horrified by how tolerance represses the truth of what we live. Nor am I conveying that we should re segregate ourselves according to ethnic contours. But throwing out the cell phones and the rest of our gadgets, and not creating EEOC crimes in email, taking responsibility when we're wrong, and being honest that we are different, for Christ's sake, well, that is a start.

John Gardner and the Twilight of Suffering

To the detriment of being on my better behavior with young Lance and his charming efforts to get the untutored through Ulysses, I fell asleep Thursday in near winter bright afternoon reading what I actually wanted to read on the Paperwhite, scowling, The Sunlight Dialogues, really into it when Millie faced Taggart without quite realizing who the demonized little brother was, when I fell into a reverie due to the pain in my hip, right hip, still dislocated, and Steel did not butcher. All that physical suffering as a child so that I can entropy into more now. Dr. Chance and Steel controlled the destiny of many, if not Linda herself. The retarded spastics who might have been under my case management eye at one time, now my limited but happy neighbors, gave me the link, and I saw my future, this problem leg in a splint, while I lie in a bed, a discarded bit of meat, hoping my snotgreen cherry monoxide scarred lungs will prevent me from living long enough to get my jaws broken when I bite a future Debra Horne on the pork of her forearm. Gardner, being dead and dead quick, cannot help being an anachronism, whether or not he was taking a cue from Tarkington to deconstruct America through exposing the Hodge family, making Clumly evocative of a sterile old rooster who carried the mark of death through his white hairlessness. Never finished the novel in school, so I am not sure where he is going, dated and outlived by Wallace, who killed himself less quick, less neat, but with a more accurate tempo that Gardner suspected, but did not survive long enough to hate, media hype. Even if I wanted my trigger of pain to be my swan song, and I am not entirely positive about that although punished, yes, Linda too does not know when to quit, when to stop humiliating, and that because I built her up, trying to hang on to one last tie that actually mattered to me, because I was afraid of the collapse I am still living, even if I wanted to go outside of those boundaries to enact that punishment, and made an effort, I would not be able to make it count, to use it to expose the corruption and cruelty and through taking that action, strike at the conscience. I cannot direct a caustic intelligence to mesh with the reality of a broken and declining body to achieve the affect of the lone hero, the one who stands alone. I can no longer afford upgrades, need a new laptop battery, and either have to save this machine or format my newer, smaller, backup. If someone could explain for me, when installing new drivers, does the machine in DOS equate the ENTER key with SET UP? That is what I do not know how to do, hit the right button to get the updated drivers working. I will not bite, I just do not have the mind to handle mainframe and software degrade issues. It is an HP Pav dv6, roughly six years old, if anyone can explain this to me in simple, toddler, terms, you are one of the few who have my gratitude.

Very small meals, I have to stay up and go to Joes. The chair is nearly on full power, that achieved yesterday, barely enough clean clothes, if we look away from agony, ecstasy is no longer possible either, but if I am going down, I am going in flames, that much I know.