The Dining Room Table

When I could still enjoy solitaire as a form of recreation rather than psychological duress, some of my favorites were the two deck game, St. Helena, and the small table game, Four Seasons. I made Four Seasons harder than it is on Warfield’s software, allowing only one move on the tableau per pile. I won rarely. Another was Hit or Miss (or Roll Call), a simple count and discard game, Accordion, and oddly enough, Perpetual Motion, which is a simple pattern game which can last a long time. I would not recommend playing it on the device, in my teenage mind which had no idea I’d plummet back into this distraction at this age, not helping myself. I have to wean myself away from all this awhile, upset that I allowed Karina to prey upon my sympathies, giving her money to wash my hair. Instead of being conscientious about the matter and giving me advance notice that her mother would be entering hospice, she took my money without finishing what she started, flimsy woman. I read this a long time ago in her and knew better and the Muslim, who is up in arms that I’m ditching TLC even though I’ve told her this for weeks, won’t do it, and my father’s ex attendant, whom I said I was going to hire on my dime, won’t shut the fuck up, so much so I’m having second thoughts about honoring my verbal assurances to her. She lost her mother too. “When Momo calls what you going to say?”

This is Saran, the big African child who cleans my stool five days a week. What does she think I’m going to say? I am a racist Momo and I’m sick of your accents and skin color, sick of not being able to have any time to myself, at all. I may not be dying, but my strength is gone, and all I have is my mental capacity struggling against my mechanics, not even positive I can trust my uncle’s company to restore my independence just a little. Mike altered what he sold me, but I shall never be fully functional in this machine, and it may be too late; fine, but I am losing my ability to cope. In Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams, this peels off under your thumbnail like mica, a sad series, aptly casting Terrence Howard and his moral rectitude, carrying the burden of incendiary individuals like myself on his back. For me, this is going to bed early. I will make edits tomorrow after the Jewish nurse dashes off. She has achieved nothing in terms of making things better. I am under no illusions about moving on, what I’ll continue to face.

General's Patience

"I like girls too."-- Elton John with Kiki Dee appeasing heterosexual conventions when he was a seventies concern

I was once a fanatic for the work of Elton John, and yet, for all that, could never get close, five minutes away from speaking to Taupin on live radio, the producer had a leg crossing discomfort with my question, would not let me through, and then I heard it reiterated in the disc jockey's interview. Fans let things like that go. I've come to regret it, the fanaticism, touched on it previously, and could not follow the seasoned artist's twitter account. The scathing subversive underbite of Elton at his best warped the way I looked at the world, and I had an infantile dismay with his sexuality. Exactly why mystifies me, amid his dichromatic flamboyance, more fascination with it than attraction to it, his weakness was maudlin pathos.

Billy Senese cannot be accused of maudlin pathos. Closer To God alludes and alludes, and yet it is a very crisp film, and rather realistic, however unfortunate this is for the genome project. The tracks of a shrieking baby stay with you. The true climax of the film pierced, and it pierced despite the fact that it was gaming the viewer with Larry Cohen's monster baby. Right before the close of the story, Victor's original child, not meant to survive, goes on a rampage. Jeremy Childs croons to it, Baby Ethan, to lure it in out of necessity, and then Ethan runs to the doctor. flinging his arms around the waist of creator father. The shrieking stops, consolation mitigates its suffering, momentarily, only to be betrayed by a lethal injection, the shrieking starts again, desperate with pain, crescendos into a collapse, overpowered by the chemical overdose. Remove the camp, as Senese does, and discover that a horrified sensibility doesn't know quite which way to turn. The script is not perfectly derivative, but Senese has courage in his daring use of pressure points. I don't envision the science of cloning as a midnight scenario, messy and clinical in parts, as alarming as some transhuman issues. The minute Dolly became cost effective, the fate of manipulating our own bodies was sealed. The only reason a human clone hasn't been done, or revealed, is because geneticists aren't keen on being assassinated, but it is also biologically regressive, like homosexuality itself. Cloning is an inefficient and less viable method of replication. Sexual reproduction was the advance, enabling evolution in its diversity and success: leave it to apes to get excited about stimulating an ovum into carbon copies.

Despite the camp, and its lack of a surgical impricator, the trailer for It's Alive frightened me. I've never been able to shake it off, like one of Warfield's impossible layouts. Patience is not an easy solitaire, but General's Patience is a brain atrocity, a pattern so rigid it's nearly impossible to break. I'd suggest, if you enjoy computer cards, hacking your download to cheat it. You'll live longer.

Kaepernick’s Kneepad Cushions Humility

He felt a sharp stab to make someone pay.-- Henry James

I only rarely pay attention to sports on this account, although gaming offers its own aesthetic criteria. I aggregated an opinion piece on Oscar Pistorius for Examiner before Clarity Media folded its far too obvious tinsel imitation of a Huffington Post style a la carte. AXS Media, into which I was briefly merged, doesn’t seem that much better off, and I am wobbling the seesaw: Is it time? Should I give up? Or simply go find my Mucinex? My lapse of attention to the season had little to do with the art deco of “take a knee,” and much more to do with near total loss of control—perhaps not as graphic as what Pistorius is living (wondering what he’d make of my racism on the fable of apartheid’s coffin). I understand why those who truly love football stand in awe of Belichick and Brady. In my youth, Dallas had a similar dynasty, but I am too careworn for the animus of rivalry other than to say Brady’s precision, relentless as it is, begins to glaze my occasional enthusiasm for a game. I cannot fake joy over the Eagles either, because I’m suffering, that dreaded, dreaded word, despite the concerted activity about my person, and my façade of endearment to the new attendants (I do actually like the weekend girl), my physical pain and lunging mental desperation coincides with dismay. XLVI was suspenseful, historic, but more and more of American football is much like what went down during the NFC Championship. Despite what it took to survive the playoffs, despite 11 – 1 records, one team wilts. Fox could have saved Philadelphia its mini-holiday and aired The Resident at halftime. The contest between my home franchise (is it really locally seeded anymore?) and the Vikings was finished at 14 to 7. The rest was icing for old east coast urbanism. I would like to have killed the architect who created row homes. While my father waltzed off with his dead son to Phoenix, in the classic flight from jurisdiction, I defecated in a bucket commode with his sister, in that modest little house keeping her alive, waiting for that soon to be violent section 811, Diamond Park, to be ready, and now I am 56, my spiral hoovering over the garbage disposal, 15 minutes away from the intersection at Broad Street which would bring me right back to ground zero.

Mary, my mother’s sister, is a PhD. She teaches too, like my former mentors. Career wise I probably wasn’t cut out to be an instructor. I do like certain aspects of journalism and breaking stories, but that was hard enough stable to be competitive. This life long battle with the sheer brutality of medical model rehabilitation, it is like the relentless persistence needed to play Tam O’Shanter, a difficult and simple card solitaire. I beat it once, I believe in Ridley Park. My favorites, which buying Warfield’s Pretty Good Solitaire restored, are some of the hardest.

St. Helena

Streets and Alleys (which sometimes ends faster than the layout takes to deal).

Auld Lang Syne

I found Thomas because I missed going up against terribly long odds, poor spastic and her aspirations. I did not want to live under the Philadelphia Housing Authority all of my life, to essentially be killed by it. I truly thought, like Vassar Miller, a generation before me, that I could do something more. One of my staunchest advocates for holding on is a woman named Nancy Loss, but again, she only sees me as a compliance paradigm. Stay at Riverside, or go to a home, where Mary and her children think I belong. For me, it isn’t either or. I don’t want to live like this. The character Dreyfuss played in a television movie sued for the right to die because quadriplegia was intolerable. He won.