Novena in an Advanced Directive

 

                                            image of feral parrots by James Woods

Before waking at five thirty this morning to feed Saint Gregory and his sister Georgina, (never actually calling to Greggie by his papal nomenclature) I had a waking terror, at the break dawn. This is fairly common since I started my grating downward spiral with JEVS Care-at-Home in 2018; nightmares with the sun, in disposable tissue-stitched elastic I had never been previously forced to wear. These terr0rs usually scatter, and I dissipate, returning to my static misery aging, burrowing my umbrage towards Philadelphia’s color-coded majorities, and it isn’t because of recent criminal events like the Ramadan shooting last Thursday. The disruption that incident represented was an integral part of Philadelphia’s minority identity, the undercurrent that the “brotherly love” actually blankets over, beneath that adoption of that now careworn Nation of Islam rhetoric as well. Somehow this city, molded by Quakers who the British couldn’t subdue or export fast enough to suit the tenuous grasp of its Anglican largesse on the east coast, is just a seedy tale of dereliction, and had those symptoms been made more manifest when I was in intellectual foment in Chester, in its then one idyllic campus hotspot, perhaps I would not have engaged such a destructive journey. My engagements at Rusk Institute during adolescence, in Manhattan, over a twenty-four month period, consecutive intervals during which I returned home for Ridley Junior High down by the lake, prefigured later hard choices which would ultimately unravel my life into this despicable travesty, but in 77? I had some mewing hope that another stint in rehab would undo the brutality of Shriner’s Hospital.

Being an in-patient once again would wind up an extraneous exercise, but it did place Greg Hepburn in my path, and to a teenager, he was solidly defined for a spastic gimp, like a compact Arnold Schwarzenegger, not so tall as the former body builder, but well defined for a rough shod recreation therapist, stringy blonde hair which brushed the shoulder of his form-fitting knit shirts, usually sky blue in color; for casual wear his jeans and tee accented what masculine virility he had.

It might have been a virility I could have tested, had I not scuttled the fact that I was a minor and a temporary in-patient who at least made a pretense out of following the rules, and he was an empowerment hire, it didn’t matter. I was slightly too passive to stroll on my wheelchair rims around my spartan, laminated junior high school bragging “I have a long distance boyfriend in Manhattan,” (even as the reflections of an increasingly confined woman wonders if she had worn this medallion man as an active lie, would it have led to a healthier engagement with my milieu?) but he was a figurine, however much flesh and blood, however prickly our city boy to girl discussions, who became an internalized fantasy of a lonely girl burgeoning into womanhood who couldn’t find her way amid conventional teenage norms.

It might be said, if the jolt from the subconscious wasn’t gone in a flicker, that the dream sequence bore a certain similarity to Tony Soprano’s car ride while he was recovering from his demented uncle’s aggression in hospital, but it was too quickly vanished, my nearness to the Gregory Hepburn of yesteryear on the passenger side of a Chevy Impala, his eyes reflecting red rimmed in the rearview mirror, furtive, possibly absconding, like death on the lam.

The Muck & The Cringe

I used to believe that a warm and soft-centered drama like Thirtysmething was emblematic of the oyster on the shell liberalism I was supposed to exude in my post-collegiate life, and suppose I did, but not like these characters, attractive to watch in their Hope has a baby isles, groping along with whatever their zeitgeist amounted to, rooting for their genuflected sensibilities, but by the time This Is Us came along, I couldn't connect to Milo Ventimiglia's tenacity for his transracial family, but the double entendre of his death scene in the ambulance, which was the last episode I caught, just dawned on me as I refreshed the pilot of Heroes and the raw text of Peter Petrelli trying to be Superman while flailing in Dockers and working man's dungarees. Uncertain I want to wade through the conspiracy paranoia, so prevalent in 2011, once again.

"But taken altogether, I think, Sterne's fame increased every year until his death." --The introduction to the uniquely original Tristham Shandy.

Random Genetic Mutation

 "I didn't mean to kill him, Frenchie."-- John Hurt, The Discarded

The day after Christmas, the former Walmart shit-faced imbecile who discards my disposable underwear, (mainly from CVS ) came down with a chill, and the end result of that is, I have been stricken nearly two weeks with possible COVID-19 induced influenza, and all I have to show for it is the Elon Musk nigger modal owl hooting over my embittered carcass: I created an only partially successful GoFundMe campaign which stopped dead at the doorstep of my father's relatives, and that's that, a former writer, of some small reputation, driven to such hate, even as I am almost better, I find relief only in a type of ventilation genocide, because Twitter is nothing but a refuse pile, bot accounts of the poor choking each other to death, and I think of the late Brian Dennehy, charging, taking a stand, getting killed by a polycephaly gimp, because this is what super attenuated pressures achieve, beneath the overlay of Stephan Hawking's voice box, and the best we can do for ourselves is Elon, or his peer, Vivek? Not that the two are comparable, but India already has Narendra Modi. We don't need him in the West Wing.

The Mighty Back Hoe

 "I will catch a cold."-- the doctor in Washington Square

In some sense of the word, but for happenstance, we all end our lives as patients , whether its Antonin Scalia in his upscale lodge, or David Miranda emaciating away due to intestinal inflammation particular to the southern latitudes, as if homosexual indigenous pair bondings with American Caucasians simply cannot be original enough, always involving some fire of the body. Is happenstance any better? A distant cousin I only greeted at family gatherings, named Bryan, died in a manufacturing accident where he worked, one of those disasters of circumstance which catches everyone off guard, vanished. Whether Jake Sully does the same, in Avatar, is what I have been turning over to try to make a blockbuster two decades old relevant from another perspective. Is he a terminal patient who prolapses Pandora into the Walt Disney version of a patrician paradise? In recollecting the controversy surrounding the movie in its original release date, David Brooks analysis was off a notch. Sully wasn’t better at being native than the Na’vi; he was simply more attuned to taking risks, like a young Darth Vader, who, you might remember, was a good Jedi in the skirmish which took his hand in the Star Wars prequel. Although a conscientious viewer cannot help but be transfixed by Cameron’s futurist cowboys and indians battle, Sigourney Weaver’s overacting is a predictable keystroke; for the moment, this leaves me with nothing more to add.

Neuralgia

 "He actually asked me what Chief Davis had on me.  He did."-- Lance Reddick, The Wire

Reddick's  demise on Friday caught me off guard, which can be read as obvious in The Washington Post's rather rushed eulogy to remind us that walking tall with a stiff upper lip can be humorous. I know very little of the appearances Thomas Floyd cites, but I am aware of the ballpark: by the time I had cycled out of Dick Wolf's now somewhat careworn script formulas, I knew to keep my eyes open for the occipital center which allowed Reddick to reign in Titus Welliver and Dominic West prior to the heavy tread of Bosch for seven seasons. Why exactly did we need Bosch? To have Reddick exclaim "Bosch!" in exasperated frustration, or "Bosch." Deadpan, cryptic, knowing; if there is a hint of complaint, why didn't I drop the damn series, dragging my heels with The Wire as is. Same time, same place, we've lost the suave chieftain of the bulbous eyes, who was murdered once in the film Faults, which may not succeed in its turn on the deprogrammer. Perhaps I will return for that which I am attempting to grasp without being hypocritical, because I always respect the humanism of the solid authoritarian, from a distance, even though I've brought liberalism to its knees in distain of my voice. I'm not offering remorse amid the unexpected, only a shared mortality closing in. The man was five months younger than I. He had money, better doctors, and the standard rates still apply for minority health outcomes, sharp stabbing, and stabbing, while I pass massive stools in a commode bucket on the labor of a floor worker's eccentric jolts of poorly formed astrological tropes. James Leo Herlihy , the author of Midnight Cowboy, liked characters on the fringes. I don't, and such differentials in stature matter, however intangible.

Olfactory Frsson

 It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by  another, as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not, -- Daniel Defoe

I did not know much about Mark Ruffalo prior to his whimsical stand-in for Bill Bixby in 2012, much like many viewers. I was able to recognize him as an important foil to DiCaprio in Shutter Island  almost solely, in far too narrow a fashion, because his lead work with an agit prop made film , entitled The Normal Heart , made me furious. As a “made for television” project, it was designed to provoke as a raunchy modern Dionysian outcry for homosexual freedom at the start of the AIDS epidemic in the eighties, letting the good times roll under the  “voo doo economics” (notoriously characterized by George Herbert Walker Bush)  administration of the actor politician who in those very 80’s, was very good at projecting his solidarity with lines in the sand; and just why did Ruffalo and Julia Roberts (perhaps aging out of synchronicity?) and Alfred Molina, not unknown in his younger years for representing gay pathology, lend themselves to this cable documentary drama? Ignorance is not always the requisite criterion for bliss: I might have suspected, but didn’t, that the director, Ryan Murphy was a lapsed Catholic who went ape shit after coming out, with a chunky, heuristic fervor, both his camera and his screen writer insistent upon the fact that histrionic orgies are cause for celebratory affirmation, as opposed to the pall of repulsion, with death from a new epidemic causing such outrage amid the urban left that a viewer might be persuaded a new era of genocide had enveloped the big cities. When Roberts doctor Emma Bookner emphatically tells her patient queue to “stop fucking,”  Ruffalo ardently asserts that you can’t tell gay men this. “Sex is all they have,” be belts out with nasal hypermania. This doesn’t really offer retrospective justice for anyone, and this angry teleplay ignited a backdraft on this besieged spastic writer in the opposite direction Murphy and his cohort celebrities expect. Forget about reactionary incitement with the potential for intimidation:  if a physician suggests abstinence from coitus as a temporary measure to save my life, then logic dictates I follow medical advice,

I was actually present when AIDS broke onto the scene in the United States as a foreign enemy, and took my brother’s life due to drug addiction, so Ruffalo’s doubletake provoked an illegal degree of rage, the type of which not only shackles the marginalized, but also places them on the radar of law and order. The much dissected Anthony Fauci has been fabulously quoted, as Covid waned, saying “we’ve entered the age of the pandemic,” but he began his rise as a public figure trying to break the stranglehold of HIV, and at best managed a ceasefire with a drug regime that is evidently the gay black male’s cocktail, if the Truvada commercials are accepted as an anecdotal representation. Ruffalo may have mollified me since, slightly, with his short serial I Know This Much is True , but HBO, at best, regardless of craft, is a network of domestic terrorism, and needs to be perceived accordingly. Radical Traditionalist Catholics were once the holy warriors who repelled the Saracens from Europe, when our blood was worth its faith.

Malaise Stampede

 Villeneuve screened the film for the families. They approved,-- an app footnote

I was mildly drawn to the sparingly edited, starkly shot Polytechique, about six moths before I subscribed to Topic and its dog-earred cultural appropriation, and I let it get away from me at the time, without realizing that Villeneuve would both abuse and offer Frank Herbert fealty with a vengeance in 2021. Whether or not Herbert would have approved of multi-ethnic Freemen is a matter open for debate, but Vileneuve, as director, takes a liberty when dealing with the 1989 massacre which is suspect. Santo Blais, characterized as Jean Francois in the film, whose hesitancy in confronting Lepine is implied, hung himself due survivor’s guilt, and his parents followed suit. He didn’t gas himself with carbon monoxide in a sealed car.  Had he been mortally wounded attempting to stop Lepine, that is the heroism worthy of artistic license: Yes, Santo displayed bravery, but Canada’s pasteurized equanimity takes it too far afield, at times, especially when rigor in the face of danger is warranted