Before Dishonor

Presumably, ABC hopes to hold its audience for A Million Little Things with a certain degree of incompatibility between Ron Livingston's upbeat attitude juxtaposed against his character Jon's decision to act, and throw himself off a balcony: was it due to realtor graft, his wife's affair? Oh yummy, but let's do the conscientious thing and offer the audience a public service announcement for suicide prevention. I have little objection to Yvonne Villarreal raising the issue of "romanticizing" the character. She is on target, at least from the perspective of the issues surrounding the ensemble and their collective affect. Rescuing Roday from his third rate mediocrity on psych was a mistake, whether or not asininity is an effective mechanism for levity. I simply fail to see how making a purportedly mature drama about the tincture of despair ameliorates what is now a national crisis. There are no captures here of modern medical barbarity like Inglis House, or losing function. NBC's Reverie may not be Black Mirror, but it at least had the courage to touch upon centralization and its cruelty as the very last business model we'll willingly forego as we stampede toward the end of history. 

I am sorry I've been so long away. I shall address it in a bit. Many issues are distressing me, not the least of which is Jack Dorsey's herd mentality, on top of my personal situation and the horrendous need to readjust. I miss James Woods' voice on :TwitterVerse, and that investment is the least of my problems.

Untenable Mummers' Day

The holiday is the perfect time.--the man in charge

In this chair I cannot go bare buttock as I used to. The vinyl seat is too hard, too small, and the discomfort I undergo has taken away very nearly all my control, including the food preparation I did on my own, let alone dressing and food shopping. Nor have I so much made a dent in assessing what the cleaning service did or did not do with certain personal effects, including my clothes to which I had adapted. When the Caribbean accented paraprofessional sat me up in the winter afternoon, before the bad transfer assist, alarming as that was, my growing weakness might as well have set off a Geiger counter. I got Mike on a word of mouth basis from a former Liberty consumer, and assumed he understood cerebral palsy fittings. I am at fault for taking the chair, assuming I could adapt, but he should have known better also, on the basis of the broken models piled under the daybed beneath the one window I once handled on my own, on top of a week’s worth of unnecessary hospital stays. I don’t have access to my work, cannot restart much of what I was doing, not from scratch, and my aunt thinks I’d thrive in her mother’s home, all because of a combustible grease monkey. A Man Called Ove is the type of literary conceit on which I was weaned. The title character feels life has passed him by. His suicide attempts fail. Poor planning, community interference. The point of the film, probably the book too, is learning he is still valued and can fill in the gaps. I’ve no such luxury, fearful I’ll never get past this. Fighting welfare and Medicare rationing kept me healthy. Seven doctors had nothing to treat me for. Diaper shit and piss, my inability to sustain my nutrition, is making short work of this, and if I did not feel I’m being forced down the drain, it wouldn’t be so hard to swallow. A nursing home isn’t going to let me write and have digital access, despite the occasional Washington Post feature from those with no choice. I left Oz off at season four, after “O’Reilly” kills Nathan’s rapist himself, weary of all this overflow, wondering how much longer I can persevere, but maybe it isn’t simply Philadelphia, it’s self-depreciating half assed efforts, with swatting being the new eel wriggling in the cesspool. Libertarians should have no problem uniting against weaponizing police against innocent civilians. I have my recidivism too, from my childhood under the knife to some damn cubicle, accepting it as the hardship of decline. It isn’t worth it: Let’s see what the new year brings, shall we? I’m off to bed, against better judgment, daring to remove the diaper, staining the underpad so my crotch can get some air.

Despair, Numb toppings

My tone has only been moderated of late out of fatigue, but my caustic bite will invariably imperil me in short order. Attendant care coordination used to be part of my job, but whether Medicaid Waiver Services were centralized into Pennsylvania's Independent Living Enrollment under Corbett or Wolf,  Maximus is a centralized Marxist obscenity, and I have absolutely no idea how to survive it. The system is worse than any of the nigger stories I've told you, just the system, which is a hornet's nest of cheap immigrant labor. I hear my followers plummeting even as I write this, knowing we all grow frail and need support, but this intake system is a disaster. The broker I met yesterday said it covers the entire Commonwealth. Hundreds of residents have probably died, or lapsed into a coma, waiting for services to kick in.

I have no more reason to live, not after this round, recuperating and failing at the same time. None, and my body stresses may not leave me much choice, soon, whether I hope to save my published works or not. The grandmothers valiantly attempting to restore me cannot see my rapid before and after prolapse in on myself, so much so the little suicide plan in my head won't work to the extent I've regressed. It isn't that I want to die, I just know depending on blacks is tantamount to a fatality, and whites ain't gonna spare me. I know it already. I cannot be a good ideological libertarian being crushed by entitlements, and if I have more time than I believe, I am campaigning for euthanasia. I part company with all who think this marginalization maintains dignity, and when I do meet the case manager, I am going to end up pissing her, him, off.

Elbow Curvatures, Cast Off

You can also be addicted to hate.-- the manufactured paraplegic of Emerald City

Even though the majority frame it this way, and this includes me, and Blogger, in my antipodean merger of aggression and trolling and gleefully rationalized spree killing, mourning that I shall never have the luxury of splitting Richardson’s skull open before disappearing into the dusk: the nigger with her protruding frog eyes and buck teeth conniving, she has beaten me. She contracted my father and his sister into hiring a cleaning service which wiped out my command of my domain. I did give my notice, but it is extreme duress not to have any control of my own space, and in a power chair in which my strength has been wasted. I cannot use this bucket seat for anything else but driving myself around, with emaciated ligaments screaming at me in pain to quit. I’m crying in small episodes, revealing my darker side to this sumo wrestler Muslim I lose in 13 days. She is a stupid fat bitch, hurting and bruising me up, and this is the dues I’ve paid to the Obama Administration. I cannot be ugly with the stupid fat Muslim without generating more crisis. It’s Barry Levinson, it’s Oz, at a pace more malingering and cruel, only slower. My only crime: getting overwhelmed with poor central planning and bad nutrition, living past 55. I might as well be nigger prag (not that I’ve translated the slang for prison rape) not that anyone is fool enough to engage in domestic insurrection for me. The joke is orthopedic medicine and disability activism hasn’t tortured me enough: the ambulatory majority, applying brute force, telling me to adapt, has decimated my strength, and when you’re bowed down in concentric circles, in such a fashion, the deployment of free speech, advocating for men like Craig Brittain only illustrates the fact that aligning myself to the far right hasn’t deregulated me into a safe haven. I messaged Craig once after Twitter allowed him to return. Could he pick me up at the Texas border? Dead serious, I did not persist, and no libertarian has truly befriended me. Suicide, or regimented agony until I careen into the inevitable death spiral, digital connections have left me on my own. Not that it was my right to impose on Mark, across the pond, or even Craig, but I was looking for an individualist willing to at least partially take on the burden I represented, they themselves not realizing, Craig, particularly, that companies are not beholden to the First Amendment. Jack has the perfect right to give Twitter the personality of a smore, and Google can shut me down for my embrace of violence as part of the simian psyche out of which we evolved, though in my case, it is more for an agenda than indiscriminate mayhem. It is now amusing that I was willing to take a ban for a cautious oddball who dumped my account despite my loyalty. What does it matter now? My anus, urethra, every bit of my biology weakened. Nine weeks, a cacophony of bitches telling me this is how it has to be, unless I have the strength for poison, if I haven’t waited too long.  

Setting Your Watch By The Bowels of Philip Seymour Hoffman

Are you okay?-- the indulgent lack of specificity in modern ecumenicalism

Search prevents the least among us from being the dunce in our virtual public spaces, and as such, after Meloni left SVU, whatever his brash liberalism amounts to in social media, the overly long running spin off seemed to become a hollow allegory of itself. Followed so intermittently, Noah’s appearance was a disconcerting element, even if it was designed to give Mariska Hargitay a counterbalance; it is not that outlandish that a daughter of an alcoholic rape victim adopts the son of a pimp, but the series no longer works. It has a hollow knell to it with so much of its core ensemble now absent from the set, and the writers seem to acknowledge this with the season opener. Olivia Benson is slipping once again, but unless there were hints from last season that the equally over stressed dowager missed, the child abuse allegation is just this short of ludicrous, straining credulity, like Gary Webb's suicide after his CIA story collapsed under scrutiny. She became distracted, the child ran into the street, and the inexorable grind of the state against the individual begins again, as with OJ, or the Angleton murder and gambling scene in Houston’s upper crust.

While under no circumstances is the brutal killing of Mrs. Angleton anything worth condoning, her surviving spouse kept beating the system, and no government allows that, none, whether by purportedly unbiased legal processes or not. We’re all at the mercy of mass tolerance, whether Zuckerberg’s or Jack’s, not that either of these uber liberals are involved in day to day postings. I’m rapidly wearying, even if I understand why my long term writing associates utilize Facebook as they do, just as I keep blogging with dismal skepticism, in varying shade overs to cynicism. I have overkilled with tweets, so I am not one to judge the frequency with which my few Facebook connections describe too much too often, but if Gretchen had posted about her medical travail with fibromyalgia ten years ago, or five, I might have taken heart, and persevered. I replied to her weariness with her pain in more detail than some of her relatives, and my muted positives on her behalf were genuine. She married well, to all appearances has produced happy children with a loving husband, but I am about ready to roll out the door of Riverside Presbyterian, despite the tally of what justice, in its pithy abstraction, owes me, despite the condition of my power chair, despite the chasm that will open before me, I am probably going to run, abandoning very nearly everything, even my contributor copies reorganized in the nexus of Karina’s well meaning disruption to my order. Then I’ll be off the radar, soiling myself in the next county. Presbyterian Homes is doing everything in its power to force my compliance with Philadelphia’s welfare system, or set me up for a forced intake to a wheelchair community like Inglis House, and I am not going to allow it. It is that simple.

Unlike Webb, my professional reputation wasn’t destroyed through the pressure of overreach, just bad luck, and my willingness to be scathing, ruining the rudiments of my small crescent of bylines. I can’t take the bullshit that goes on in public housing anymore, and if I cannot take the ignorant vindictiveness of urban poverty with its relentless cruelty destroying my spirit, how much less the relentless human offal of a home for cripples, merciless, huge, the stench of disease permeating its halls. Regardless of my sympathies for a fiery, hard Roman Catholic faith, there is absolutely no dignity in this existence of such vulnerability, and I’ll need a week or so, but I either leave, or fight my way into a convulsive conflict with African Americans and hypocritical white Protestants whom I literally despise with their horrified proprieties. They are the ones abusing me, constantly breaking me down, and it’s just more of the same. If Olivia Benson was an actuality, there is very little probability that she could have aged so well adjusted into her leadership role. Eighteen years is it? Her life of being assaulted and abducted, while more dramatic than my mostly sordid degradation at the hands of violence, would have never left her so well adjusted to take over from her captain, however well intimated these slight hints are at her newly acquired destructive armor, after a fashion. Yeah, it is serial fiction, akin to a comic book, and audience loyalty needs lines of resilient moral constancy, but if I am to recover anything of the woman I once was, described as full of life, I have got to get the fuck out of here, with virtually nothing, even my published work locked away. Nothing more than the blood curdling my veins says I either leave or die, regardless of how Wolf has an actress so solidly typecast put in her papers.

The Delirium of Italy

"The mind of man had thought of everything, except for that which was beyond its comprehension." The opening narrator.

One wakes with mind on the verge of mental collapse after ingesting oxidant rich salad, now a luxury, and realizes borderline corrosive throbbing is tied to the freight train engines. As far as I'm aware, the constant vibrating, before the age of 50, never added to agitation, but now I understand the residential distress with it. Management suggested the tenant's council contact Jim, but not even WPVI can alter the fact that tracks run behind the buildings of this so called optimal city location. Harryhausen seemed to grasp this urban dissonance in 20 Miles to Earth. The film opens like a third world apocalypse recovery operation, since, after all, if the lord of animation wants to vacation in Rome, the studio can sign on Sicilian fishermen to clamber around Hollywood's quaint variation on man's destruction of its own toys. Then the plot veers into the territory of the great and chilling Andromeda Strain, which is one of the best science fiction films the US ever made about the destructive potential of viruses, and then it slowly turns on exotic life form in a capsule transforming into a mythic Titan. The battle with the elephant still provokes the child's love of pachyderms into a lethal protest: Okay, kill the motherfucker now for mortally wounding an African poacher's main source of sustenance.

Both the script and the direction of 20 Million toy with expectations, one of the few films of its kind to transplant the Godzilla monster into the Old World passing the buck to the American superpower, warning its redeemer of its own potential folly, but it seems to be a film within a film, with Roman provincialism suggesting an alternate route which Juran declined to pursue, all for the sake of the commercial success of bread and circuses.

To the extent that Zakaria is rehashing the statistician generated news item, I want to remind my ambulatory readers of one thing: My academic mentors and family were correct in my university transfer being a costly mistake, but condemning me to 30 years of being stuck in the same place is a punishment far exceeding the impulse. I had the same expectations of economic self-sufficiency as any ambulatory white individual with a college degree, and the welfare system I've utilized to fail in that career is too punitive. I did not ask to survive with cerebral palsy, to be carved up like ham on an orthopedic assembly line only to be brow beaten the rest of my life by case managers and vindictive rental agents, as I fall out of competitive markets to millennials and their digital graphic expertise. May 2016 be the year of the leap I'll survive just a while longer.

Solidarity

"Socially, culturally, morally, America has taken on the aspect of a decadent society and a declining nation."-- Patrick J. Buchanan, preface to Suicide of a Superpower

It is rather disconcerting to respond to a GQ image of the stadium exodus in Paris just prior to heating up your fish and chips and then find yourself quoted live on France 24 three hours later, rushing to telephone the dying aunt now holed up with dying brother and my immediate progenitor, my father, exhausted with tales of his dying wife, as fed to you by a sister you listen to, mouthing support you do not mean. Louise is dying, the fleeting nurse and more evincing invalid with her rheumatoid arthritis. "Her rectum is falling out of her ass," says besieged sister, and this makes you, as a cripple who wants to kill her apartment manager on any given Sunday, feel curiously more lucid than the rest of my clan: I am now evidently in charge, hanging by a thread while being quoted by France 24, watching the civilized world simply descend, trying to curb my hyperbole, but truly believing that Caucasian moral decency is imperiled, aware that this is a draconian throwback even to the 19th century. I could tell you too, how I took on Trudy Richardson and Debra Horne and the new one, Gail Sims, last week, losing my temper, standing up to Debra, calling her incompetent, a lout, realizing my contempt for these mocha women isn't worth my soul.

Louise has Sundowning Syndrome, to hear my sister tell it, while I continue to accrue a better, diminished, picture of Ben Carson, my mild interest in the black boy who did good in Detroit waning. He fooled Nightline, evidently, those many years ago, the carefully groomed and educated minority now revealing levels of bombast which alarm the establishment, reminding yourself you have little idea who the establishment is. But the generalized anxiety among the fractious conservative class seems to convey "What if Trump or Carson gets the nomination, or worse, becomes president if the edifice of ossified Clinton centrism cracks?"

My response to this is cynicism: So what? Neither the smirking monkey with his evangelical definition nor the mogul-shyster would have the actual power to do much damage, not immediately, in this facade of a democratic republic where a wastrel of a reactionary like me gets quoted on live international television looking for social media filler about the latest attack on Europe which has broken many congruent hearts.

If I in turn had the power to generate hawkish policy, I'd say its time for the third world war. Assassinate Assan Rouhani of Iran, dissolve Syria, expose the Russian armed forces for their ineptitude, and so forth, as withering in rhetorical sentiment as papier-mache, while I was quoted on France 24, trivialized spastic on the margins, preferring to die in battle. Ludicrous, my family decimated by chemotherapy, innocent Western blood flowing in the age of a troubled new century molded by the fanaticism of a nefarious Saudi named Osama. The disintegration of Airbus 321 was tactically effective. It caused a united retrenchment. The attack on Paris, in contrast, will backfire, in expected ways and otherwise. All I can do is regret benighted choices, observe the web of familial disease, crack ghoulish jokes. Consider the hospice industry with disgust. People need to know when it is time to make peace with death, and my stepmother, and my father's sister Marie, and her brother, need to stop receiving extraordinary medical intervention. They will not do it of course, but it would free up resources to ease the stringency of the welfare state we all hate. The brutality of a cause, the brutality of centralized institutional paradigms, these are flip sides of the same coin.

Costner's Blessing

"I don't want to get on your bad side!"-- the black adder, now burdened with complications of appeasement

Despite its subject matter, Mr. Brooks is not about the impact of psychological pathology on the American scene, unlike ABC's new Wicked City, which is a bit of a toss up-- and in a brevity of an aside-- this spastic's young adulthood wasn't populated with the discothèque remembrance the show attempts to evoke with nonchalance. Reviewers noted certain things about Brooks: Costner loosens up playing against William Hurt, who in the right context is every woman's prime capture if she has ambition toward a fulfilled life, and the director Evans suggests, subversively, that a successful businessman is analogous to being a serial murderer, but there are vectors in this film which come together like blades in a jigsaw, actually sending up celebrity, notoriety, their hanger's on, and what goes on beneath the surface of successful appearances. Demi Moore says something about her tabloid rep encapsulating her brass balls detective who defeats the spree menace of the Hangman killer and his badass girl, offering viewers, perhaps her fans, a sense of the cutthroat approach necessary to say on top. The fact that her cop, Atwood, is insulated by wealth in an estranged familial environment is also a veiled reference, but to what exactly? Pimping to the market is no guarantee? Photographs of women almost nude in revealing pregnancy no longer generate the chatter they did when Demi was still young, before she spent small fortunes on her plastic surgeries, and what Brooks reads in the aberrant behavior of the daughter is a third person limited narration. As an audience, we aren't offered an alternative viewpoint, loose threads to fall where they may. The police may be smart enough to figure that someone was trying to throw suspicion off the daughter, for instance, or, if she killed her father as an eventuality, how would she have planned to get away with it.

The difficulty with Brooks lies in its substrata toward the ironic, confusing us with the reflections breaking off like shards, despite Costner's diabolical pleasure with himself. Brooks neither quite succeeds as a parable about undercurrents, nor as a truism about the urban underclass, such as we are invited to wince away in Henry, portrait of a serial killer, which itself lost its nerve for the sake of its rating. I have not lost mine, I am simply so beset with inevitable unraveling that my caustic invective threatening Google's pecuniary market interests wouldn't help even if I freaked out other somewhat troubled lone wolves, and no, I do not mean I want to rant death on the heads of my perceived tormentors either. I am a failed writer, but my own acuity denies frothing, if not a hideous temper. Another way to say this is Mr. Brooks examines macro-aggression in a microscopic context, and does so unsure of its balance. To hint, with slight mystery to the nuance, why able-bodied individuals destroy themselves against the biographies of quadriplegics who've been beaten, regardless of precocious sensibilities, is unfathomable. Alcoholics can walk, and yet disease themselves into the dependence of mass material victimhood, as do addicts, and the demographics of Caucasian suicides in my age group. PBS had a seven minute segment on whites my age killing themselves due to disenfranchisement, and nothing is as bad as a cripple who has seen the institutional hell she refuses to return to, without being able to find a pathway to safety. If you can walk and drive a car, count your blessings. I am certainly past the ability of spontaneous pleasure when architecture and poverty defeat it. Then again, maybe I can write some lyrics for Louy Fierce, an intriguing possibility between ableism and reconciliation with ferocity of chronic impairment denial of wholeness.

Why did he decide to follow me? The inner voice need not be sated on that puzzling note.