Simon Axler

...the sense she had now when Mr. Carmichael shuffled past, just nodding to her question, with a book beneath his arm, in his yellow slippers, that she was suspected; and that all this desire of hers to give, to help, was vanity. -- Virginia Woolf

To ready a sonorous viola that is an omnipresent suture to a heart of festered scabs, the subtext in many of my biographical posts is about lack of belonging: I did not fight to close the deal for a terminal degree, never found my way through the thicket of becoming an independent scholar, my shoddy case management training has turned me into a wistful exterminator, and I failed to establish myself as a journalist; creative writing can go fuck itself. I still practice it, will continue to do so, but most artistic expression, when you take a step back, is an eddy of vomit, canonical or otherwise. Rereading Les Miserables is an insane idea. I do not even know why it occurs to me to return to Victor Hugo, but perhaps reminding myself about the arc of Jean Valjean is relevant to modern alienation. When I was still under Linda's supervision, then I belonged, and that is where my internal bleeding truly resides; not in my career satisfaction, for I can vouchsafe that disability center employment is Orwellian, but I did what I did for as long as I did for her, not for the most discarded and broken bodies on the face of the earth, not for the dozens of mentally ill who challenged my own health not long after, but for a Jewish woman with a milder case of cerebral palsy whom I defended like a pit bull against all her detractors, then enabled her to become a fatal catalyst, making me a bull dyke in all but name, and I lashed out at her as much. Now I'm your bitch, hissing it out of my countenance violet with fury, stupidly emoting, never able to remove myself from this casualty laden environment. Padre's solution, if it isn't a shell game, is for me to move in with his sister and my demented uncle who paws my breasts when he can get away with it, but Joe is in Alzheimer's land, so I chalk up those behaviors there. If I could graft myself to the Rosenbach, it would be a gently vindicated landing, and they are good, despite that my cleaving to wade through Joyce was wobbly--but negotiating that slope is tricky, not being a nuisance, making myself useful. They fascinate me in many ways, these archivists and patrons, and their secular liberalism is good. Linda's is a psychopathy, much like Edward Snowden's transitory impermanence; his narrative goes deeper than his dissidence, deeper than immediate analysis.

The systems we've created have overtaken us.

The genie I cannot put back in the bottle isn't homoerotic desire: after Ms Dezenski bucked about her orgasms, I asked myself if she was flirting with me, and rolled into the bathroom with a COPD temperature and proceeded to puke. No, what I am going to grieve the rest of my life is the affinity of mutual esteem. I doubt I will ever have it again in another woman to admire or respect. There is an old adage that pontificates we really do things for ourselves. Indirectly, my loyalty to what Linda represented was an internal reward based on belief of derived  power through her leadership. Indeed, I held onto my position at Matrix as long as I did because I wanted to be as strong as I thought she was, and that example mattered more to me than sex.

I still live it, to channel Kevin Whately, but I have to pay the price for that in my hope for more equitable futures. If I lose to savagery, and then face elimination through that, then perhaps all I can hope for is to be my own voice of consolation for the suffering that finds its way to me.