The Thieves of Lake Cumo

The European woman who I reference here, with my minimal Italian catch phrases, and here, in my otherwise harmless effort at ingratiating camaraderie, blocked me for my attempt at middlebrow kindness, and yes, I have been sling-backing twitter long enough to distance myself from over-heating, but still, I meant no harm and was trying to be a kindred spirit.

@Svetulja15 Ciao! Jozanny <___mio mal

😎

— Joanne M Marinelli (@Jozannyme) February 26, 2018

 My archeological dip shits on this account have nothing to do with her, or forming an attempted rapport with those still residing in my generational homeland, and I wish her well, but we cannot always remain immune from such slams. I am not really into Vincent D’Onofrio’s fireside chats with his followers, to utilize him as an example. He seemed a little too into it somehow, with his tweets, and got burned. As a consequence of being made a fool, he turned his social media account over to a manager, and I rather silently went poof: I can conceivably see a day where I can write an essay about Goren and the law’s relationship to disability and crime, but editors were created to give their writers press passes, if I ever get myself out from under this dip shit, piling as it does. D’Onofrio didn’t seem able to manufacture the requisite coolness, whereas I’m in the middle. I can simply be analytical, but still let my hair down now and then, however the “numbers game” of social media twists our heads. I am not the only writer of such unfortunate circumstances. Alessandro Manzoni wound up suffering from a nervous condition after The Betrothed gave us the modern historical novel. Bulgakov is known for one work, and he burned The Master and Margarita, then rewrote it from memory, (I can do no such thing with my works, which Riverside has repeatedly placed at risk.) We cannot all plot a book a year, as Oates does, though I think she has taken “publish or perish” so literally as to have diluted her power, and I simply hate Stephen King, to let the cripple in me be true to herself. King is not the worst fantasist, by far, but most of his output is dreck, and even at his best, his motifs are infantile. The Stand, for a nearly hysterical work about the collapse of civilization in the US, turns out just to be a retelling of the Resurrection through King’s sympathies for white trash working class. I prefer puking to treating him with respect, as I’ve had my fill of white trash mentality of late. Rather than pivot it in on the screw, giving you a two page post, my broken spirit worms its way to bed. We’ll pick up.

Congenital Kiss and Tell

On January 31^st, Vincent D’Onofrio expressed consternation for the loss of some followers due to voicing his political beliefs, and with a slight hedge, I offered a mitigating consolation without mocking him, but admit I’m a bit taken aback by how soft he seems to be outside of the studio’s insulation, and perhaps I shouldn’t be, since he is a regional performer with crossover national appeal. Woods is a little larger, but one thing the two actors share is a sense of the personable on social media not so readily apparent with others, and since fame interests me as a contextual problem, with questions about whether Twitter collapses recognition, engenders it with sometimes detrimental spontaneity, or not, with Ebert’s dictum that “[Celebrities are] just people,” coming into play, getting used to the pain of this hard vinyl seat, the physical pain and despondency in tandem. Mike the prick wants 400 dollars to convert what I’m sitting on to a base with a cushion, and if I was desperate for a usable chair in the fall, I’m not only now desperate to rid myself of torture, but the spool unwinding in my interior doesn’t know how much longer I can stand it. The man at the helm of Mr. Wheelchair has lied to me fifteen ways to Sunday. He had another chair for me. Now he doesn’t. He was coming in November to rectify the problem, then it was December. Then January. Each time he was a no show. Neither of us trusts each other. A little of that fame utilized to raise conscious awareness might be useful at present, as I’d rather not take the time and energy to consult a lawyer about this, and Medicare is its own sweet draconian process.

Today I lost a truck load of followers becuz of my views on where our nation is at right now. My liberal snowflake views,my bleeding heart views,my freedom2call out false info when I c it&my call4equlity.I have2say though it did put a smile on my face. #NoFearNoGreedNoEnvy

— Vincent D'Onofrio (@vincentdonofrio) January 30, 2018

D’Onofrio’s public worry about his drop illustrates that everyone can be affected by “the numbers game,” of automated models, unless consumed by distress which reduces its concern: Much to my astonishment, Karina refused to break off our relationship founded by Craigslist. She returned to Philadelphia for personal reasons I will not dangle before you with callous indifference, ignored my indignation, and crashed in upon me with her heart of gold hugs, however suspect its reliability, so I relented and we’ve made up, just after Amazon’s own streamlining suggested I might be interested in Breathe, an Indian series with more than one or two parallels between hero cop with his emotional wounds and his antagonist. Madhavan is interesting as Danny, a soccer coach whose son is afflicted with cystic fibrosis, due to more than his unipolar descent into psychopathy. Due to the fact that this is Bollywood rather than its American cousin, the series whets my aesthetic curiosity, but this said, I am not convinced this is how killers are made or pursued in Indian society, but why Danny descends into hell, why he destroys his own social decency, you’re looking at it right here people. I could be wrong, but Breathe seems to have its own melodramatic subversion, damned if I don’t find it funny, even if the logic of his multiple efforts for one fresh donor after the other  is unclear. 

Fiberglass Insulation

By implication, older people who use personal social services have been subjected to bureaucratic procedures and assessments that have increasingly focused on what they cannot do or achieve in order to identify their eligibility for services. These kinds of assessment procedures have contributed to the construction of older people using services in a language of dysfunction and problem states [....] Opportunities for narrative approaches have declined, Baars and co-authors, page 143, Aging, meaning, and social structure

My poor aunt gets combative with me when I verbally point to affinities, aggressive without understanding I am referring to acceptance. I have to find other supports than a cancer stricken 75 year old half out of her mind, and if cousin Richard is occasionally perusing mio postio, my advice to my cousin is to start spending it down. It isn't easy Richie, never is. Stephanie and I have poppa, and I'm 3/4ths in the sewer. Apply pressure before she spirals into hospice. "Yeah, and you?"

The difference between me and tu mere, my cousin, is I haven't been diagnosed with additional disease other than molar cavies, already tied to cerebral palsy as a symptom. I'm pugilist, and show obvious wear and tear no employer would look past to give me a chance-- except as a radical author, but that is still a niche doorway; I'm otherwise stable except for Ken Cantrell's  compassionate malevolence putting an end to a miserably secure environment (sigh). Now I'll face bowel movements and disturbing the peace, and other flags. The police operator who took my call Thursday morning was courteous. The emotional armor of a seasoned practitioner in play in our Orwellian U-verse, she was even, sonorous, like Peter Haber, the Swedish variation on Ian Flemming.

Sjowell, like Dick Wolf's screen writers, gets the conflation right in "Boy in the Glass Bowl", illustrating how crime and abuse ripple in concentric circles around impairment until they fall back inward. An autistic boy who cannot articulate is easy prey for a sodomite who then makes him an orphan. Sjowell emphasizes solving the puzzle is its own reward, and Beck's team can return to the rewards allotted to camaraderie among those close to Arctic climates. Only with Vincent D'onofrio of yore are viewers taxed a bit more. The Terri Schiavo episode was searing, so dark and cruel in conclusion that I winced; the husband's capture was more horrible than the brain death he caused, Goren almost functioning as a yawl, raking rivulets of exposure in a triumph of materialism.  Wait until I confront Trudy's boss. He is the real prick, the tour de force toward whom a tongue lashing would be a pleasurable offense. Trudy is deft, and evasive, but displays her weakness, Louis Armstrong eyes with their genetic inclination to dissemble. I want her supervisor. Ken Cantrell, the thick ape, just vibrating for castration. 30 years ago such hate would have never been a pleasure.

Autonomous Straight

"You're going to have to accept the fact that sometimes we can't save everyone." Shemar Moore, toffee muscle

We never see Bobby Goren romantically involved with a woman, only the implication of prospective involvement. Forget Nicole Wallace (sheesh); forget the occasional utilization of Eames as the faux lover despite its dual implausibility-- dual because they often play act couple for the sake of solving the case, but by the end of season six certain insinuations goad Bobby into aggression-- his dying mother, his brother whom he loses to murder, the denouement with the brass busted shrink (again, sheesh), no, the more subtle interstice is with the blond foil with the attachment disorder, or his flirtation with the brunette who had a summer girl crush on the Russian mob girl killed by the cross dresser who killed his mama out of natal jealousy.

I know exactly zero about D'onofrio's ballet with metal affect, but he did not get Goren's stressor imbalances out of method acting, and the beginning of the end of Vincent's deconstruction of his best known character is quite interesting when juxtaposed against the dying Scheider. Even with a multiple myeloma, Roy is the consummate ladies man pitted up against a suffering buffoon whose analytical abilities aren't enough to keep him together anymore. The deconstruction of the super human predator/prey motif is as superlative as it has always been with the use of psychopathy as entertainment, but this is very much an insider's industry script, a homage to Schneider the super cool against Spielberg's super monster. And should Steven feel guilty for the frightening decline of our monster fish? I think about how much fear orcas and sharks inspire real terror within. There is a bucket to do, eh? Go to Seaworld, drive to the edge of the sea tiger's liquid prison. Voila, spastic is an abstract seal to stun into edible submission.

But the intangible fascination lies in the fact that Schneider has aged, his eyes muddied, his neckline in rivulets, and he is still the Schneider who could sexually satisfy, could be for me the alpha coitus of the century, while D'onofrio has to give mea culpas to tattles that his weight gain in season seven was due to medication. 

Different cultures have different values when it comes to physical vanity-- and I wonder, actually, if this is the real problem with the nature of being human. We conceive perfection, dignity, metaphysical harmony, unable to reconcile this entirely with a strictly biological, material narrative, chemically manipulating pain and suffering, altering and sometimes torturing the female shape. Demi Moore's fortune spent on plastic surgery isn't quite enough to fool the close observer that she is now preserved as opposed to attractive. But Liz Taylor was forever Cleopatra. She just had that goddess aura straight through to cessation. 

I have my own vanity, but it never laid in the attempt to compete with an ambulatory woman's considerable advantages. Perhaps a more ruthless humility would have served my old age.

Wolf's Complex

The impact Dick Wolf had on procedural formulas is moving into pop culture archival analysis, but the attitude of his guild writers toward disability is problematic, not cut and dry in terms of victimology or perpetration: the Criminal Intent episode "Inert Dwarf," where Austin Pendleton reasonably approximates Stephen Hawking as a diabolical genius who uses his disease to kill a graduate assistant who blows a theoretical construct the physicist holds dear to pieces, contextualizes my problem as the angry disabled writer brutalized once too often. Goren supposedly trips up *Dr. Manotti* by exposing Manotti's manipulations of his more able caretakers, and then proving Manotti committed murder through not tripping off a power chair alarm. The writers may have played this twist from the news that abuse allegations involving Hawking were being investigated, only then none of us ever heard anything else about the case, good, bad, or facilitated.

Despite my empathy for D'Onofrio as Bobby Goren, Inert Dwarf stretches credulity and feels false. ALS literally destroys male muscular fibers, no matter how bitter the brain in such a degenerative casement, so it is difficult to see how Manotti pulls off this nearly perfect ruse.

What Wolf gets right, however, is the lack of pandering. Disability often destroys and exposes family pathologies as much as does sex drugs, money, and spousal battery.

Wolf's Subversive Sniffer

Dick Wolf's modality undercuts the no pity exaltation by acknowledgment of cruelty within the matrix of disabity itself, as well as exposing the realism of our vulnerabilty to systems designed to help us. I know of actual cases of Paratransit users raped by minority drivers, and Wolf's SVU writers expose this by flipping the caste, but still exposing the fact that transit authorities hire criminals who hurt us. Saving money is more acceptable than our safety. CI nuances this more finely with both leads, D'Onofrio and Noth, and I give them credit for the honesty about the darkness in the bell jar of chronic conditions. "Conscience" is a great example of this. Heart disease feeds the original motive of the husband, who wants control of a trust fund and cannot, therefore, kill the wife, and, merely as a matter of technicality, puts her in a persistent vegetative state, which then triggers the opening murder of the doctor hoping to relocate the person within the damaged mind, which cannot be done, but fear of viability triggers the husband's admission of guilt that was meant to satisfy those convinced of something more sinister in the motives behind the battle between Schiavo's spouse and family. If Terri's husband had truly wanted her dead, the case would not have dragged on for fifteen years in which the woman's brain did not rewire itself. Josie Byzek sniveled to me over this meal I could not afford that "we [the activists] should have never gotten involved."

I'd like to ask what human being wants to languish like that? With rapid and sustained intervention, some PVS can be reversed, but disability activists need to grow the fuck up. Every dollar wasted on Terri's brain stem after the obvious became apparent could have been spent on helping those of us with living minds, and this is in part why Josie pisses me off, aside from burning me on a potential date. The woman refuses to apply herself beyond issues of empowerment. I am still consciously aware and dare to assert that I deserve better than living like this; if my brain implodes, then yes, let me decease under humane palliative care. I'd rather those dollars go to wheelchair users who might dare to dream of romantic adventures in Paris, Tuscany.

Implausibles

In the 2003 CI episode Suite Sorrow, Hal Linden plays an in the closet socialite who manipulates his daughter into matricide, to then unwittingly trigger his own death in a foiled entrapment that Vincent D'Onofrio's Goren misjudges. I do not know about the sandwiched convolutions from which we have to infer the multiple points in fifty minutes of narrative. This is a continuing problem with the limitations of the format for Dick Wolf's now foundering formula. I believe there may have been a death by injection trial on which it might be based, but I cannot remember enough data for search to lead the way, and I could be wrong anyway because this high powered real life balding husband fell under suspicion when I read Time Magazine regularly, but despite the artifice of the teleplay, inclusive of having Erbe's Detective Eames vindicate what we must feel about such family dysfunction in the last concluding seconds of the episode, such stories reflect back upon the ubiquitous nature of domestic violence in the United States. I happen to be bold enough to feel that this undercuts the progressive argument about homosexuality and marriage. Heterosexual marriages fail often enough as it is, especially when celebrity is involved, or, as in the case of my mother and father, you mix a significant mental illness with an Italian temper. My step-mother, who in no way functions as such, has fared little better. My dad may not have an arrest record to match that of the typical serial wife beater, but he is one none the less, a fact I usually obliterate in my conflicted feelings for him. Progressives are absolutely correct to say that no fault divorce laws weakened the once historic economic power of marriage, but the continuing tent expansion will make it all but meaningless, in the end.

Frank, my ex, made a bad bargain thinking I could have been a good wife for him. He tried to strangle the first. This is Latino trash pillow talk for you, but had I gone through with the wedding, settling for him, as some women interest columnists suggest, I could conceivably have a jacket with an attempted murder charge, and that is both a facetious and accurate statement, one and the same. Having seen the gay lifestyle up close, swimming against the tide as I may be, things are going to get much messier for family law adjudicators, I don't give a flying fuck how pedestrian a media bouncer like Andrew Sullivan with his HIV status and his faith, and his articles that analyze and out the troubled Prince Benedict 16, wants to be. To push identity to these kind of extremes is bad for the human animal. I have been through too much trying to help the disadvantaged, I have seen too much; we're dooming ourselves.