A Purveyor of Necessities

The Roman, like the Englishman who follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his foot (on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. --James Joyce, Ulysses, location 2112


How comprehensive one can be following a 4:40 am dash on the most frigid day of the new year is a good question, but let me dial myself back slightly, for your understanding: When Greg Zacharias admonished me about conspiracies, he meant my James list posts were not being bounced on purpose, not realizing I was attempting to make a sardonic joke. When my half brother admonished me, he meant my family was not engaged in collusion to put me back in a nursing home, but fuck that. My baby bro and my full blooded sister are selfish whining materialistic parents who let me down and feel guilty about it and are headed for a legal negotiation, while my family elders wish I'd shut the fuck up, and mother's sister has reverted to loving inclusionary noises, all well and good, but la damage has been done, though I grant you, in stealing my mentor's title from an old workshop piece de resistance, that I am the primary purveyor of my bubonic plague. If Rico was a Simenon morality play that the studio turned into an uneasy hatchet job that has a great deal to say about Caucasian caste, then Arlington Road is positively operatic red meat, and on my last viewing I paid very careful attention, and there is enough ambiguity about Hope Davis as Brooke, and the blond operative in the ponytail who closes the film, to leave hanging some interesting questions, and a film like Brazil, satire it may be, ties this up nicely, but I am still thinking, and am thinking now of sleep, and my wry smile when Catherine, the blue-eyed bright progressive, chatted with me and the North Philadelphia minorities, about hostility to the LBGT community. Little did she know I was bitter, disillusioned, and how victimized. She would not, none of them knew, and no, they will not, this ACLU offshoot, be able to accommodate me to do their canvassing. It will be too difficult, though the young woman involved in the Cairo uprising interested me, and though you know not to what I allude, she talked back, and the half century old cripple stood firm, unmoving, a virtual edifice of granite, watching humanity knowing not what it reaps.