Altered States

It is not that I would not sleep if I tried, more simply, Thursday vanished, and half dressed for the drug store, I stopped, like the song, not undressing, like the singer, but stopped, ate, wondering how long I can stop speaking to my entire family, and find a bus, survive getting off it, and never returning. I use my past, my memory, and will continue to do so, but unlike what happens to lost itinerants in Hollywood, there is nothing for me in that past, its people, even if I use their names. Quadriplegics cannot do Jack Kerouac on the road, especially with old diodes that will not behave, and charge properly. "Whatever it is they did to you," Anne Kline intoned in a low voice, "people here still care about you."

No they don't, but the point is, for all that able bodied individuals are aware, or not, of how these centers function, they do not stop doing harm to a substantial number of people that come in, get indoctrinated, humiliated. The lucky ones, like Chris, sue and settle and then become director of an independent training center that then burns down, and the cycle continues. Sue and settle with the next Linda. The unlucky ones, like Ken, do pot in their nursing home apartment wings, and never mind Cassie's freedom rhetoric, suffer in obscurity, and me? I just took too many blows from too many sources, and what truly angers me, my own case aside, is no one puts a stop to it. Certainly not a lawyer like Thomas Earle, who I used to believe was a decent man, nor Fern Markowitz, the lesbian, whose decency seemed tied to being the bad cop. She was always a ferocious and inexplicable woman to me, who treated me like she needed to use a whip on my haunches. Not the national cil council, not the state regulators, nor the auditors, and employee litigation is just the cow with an udder always full. Corporations, like BP, oh, they pay a price, but no one gives a holy fuck about disability center malfeasance; their scandals get buried, particularly in areas with large disadvantaged populations. The closest the right gets to it is with a home grown idiot like Rick Santorum, and the best the left will do, nationally, is scream they will protect entitlements, when Medicare is a fucking nightmare to begin with, and public housing does not know what constitutional law is, not when government is subsidizing its brick and plaster. The left says this is better than what it was in Roosevelt's day. Not by much, especially not when age makes risk more costly. I cannot reform this by myself, but wince at what it may take to rouse the public. Caretakers killing us doesn't do it, Paratransit drivers raping us gets a script in a Dick Wolf drama, and cil consumers look the other way, until it happens to them, then they sue. No one touches how this system operates, because those like me are supposed to be matriculated, with superhuman effort, minimal resources, and those mostly badly managed. Now I'm going to bed, lucky if I don't drop the Joyce group this weekend at the little museum that tries very hard. Money already pissed.