morning has broken

L sees a beautiful path  i wish i did jasmine is hell. abandon all  modesty and freedom. abandon hope. use up your love, your friends. distance from your sweetheart, from your baby dog. lose food  and drink. oh to drink again. draughts and draughts of water. oh i so miss that.

so last post. i thought i  had something to say. but really, i don’t. just the same  things. bad worlds. goodbye cruel worlds cliches. love to all. i miss everything. and all of it. and all  of you.

end of days

i can’t fathom the trump inaugural. but there is also too much of a fixation on him when the problem is so much deeper and extends to the entire corrupt republican establishment  .

and yet i have to ask myself how much is left of  me to care about this. feeling so much worse. but on and on it goes.

no more energy for things. goodbyes. good wishes. none left in me.

Re Nancy Fraser’s article about the death of progressive neoliberalism

re nancy eraser’s article: > https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/progressive-neoliberalism-reactionary-populism-nancy-fraser

Some good points I think. But, also wrong in parts. For example, she doesn’t acknowledge that Clinton did win the vote, or that clintons platformwas 75% sanders, which means it was in itself a significant break with BILL clintonism, Hilary also addressed the rust belt and jobs. But the media and republican elites and FBI and putin were allied profoundly against her per se as they always have been. Hilary is not bill. There is no ‘clintonism’. And Fraser over emphasised a rational self interest motive fortrump supporters, which is not persuasive to me. That has much more to do with projective standing in for entitlement. Trump got votes because he is an entitled privileged bully who has reinstated the speakability of white entitlement. And is part of the mediatised reality culture which is phantasmatically more real than what is real.
My opinion anyway.
Xxxd

[from note to B who sent me the link]

to this i’d add that the rust belt is not the only casualty of progressive neoliberalism – there is also, among many other casualties, the wanton destruction of education from state schools to universities in general (marketisation, demonisation of teachers, adjunctisation), to facts and logic and evidence; to democratic structures `(gerrymandering, destruction of citizenship, privatised prisons and corrupt, racist policing), demonisation and destruction of social/health safety nets, re-rise of authoritarianism. none of these issues is intrinsically trump territory. many casualties of progressive neoliberalism support/ardently desire an alternative progressivism.

goodbye

goodbye

I think of you

I remember love

It burned inside my heart

And rushed along my skin

I held it there

the dream

of you

 

it was

oh love was fire

I was alive

2008

---

goodbye (Variation)

when I /

spoke

 

finally /

                    my voice stunned

before the end of this day

 

grey /

winds

 

struck ice /

                    we shivered

this estrangement

 

how /

could you

 

shrunken /

                 bone cold

know yourself

 

or my /

fury

 

for what I called it /

                 love

what we called it

 

when /

we spoke

 

intimately /

                 my jaw shook

with the effort

 

stone /

barriers

 

caught my throat /

                 we had

no language for that

 

how /

could it

 

happen /

                 that terror

 

could/

            rock our flesh

 

like this

 

crawling /

                 stunned goodbye

from our lips?

 1991

______________________

neither of these poems were about me . until now. when they are. unimaginable twist of fate. and what is lost is me. have to relearn to type again. hands not working now. stylus hard on a laptop. haven’t figured it out.

trapped in the new year

anticipating calamities. israel/palestine, brexit, trump, syria, refugees everywhere crashing into intolerance and cruelty. the world k and her peers will have to confront, left to them to make better. a sorry world. and here i still am, trapped in a chair, barely moving hands inexorably contorting to their own calamity. nothing i can do now.

all the things i wanted to be throughout my life were active. poet, scholar, activist, actor, director, editor, artist, designer. maker of things. now ending like this. except its not ending. why not? it needs to end. i need to end.

biopolitics. irony of its totalising reality. not capillary power. it coalesces instead. a central proscription. you will not be enabled to a final fear free, pain free end. this is what they see as ‘reasonable limits’. i hope everyone who takes that position suffers as i do. i feel vindictive about this. let them suffer what they impose, thinking this is moral, they are elevated. entitled. be grateful. doled out in antagonised defences ‘but i am here to help’. yes, help yourself. protect your comfort. as you do what most any person takes for granted, standing up, leaving the room, picking something up. drinking their drink. you have no idea. and you are hateful and selfish. i say so.

does this apply to the world? yes. that too.

blow you off

can’t leave fast enough. close down. get away. this is a trap and free people need to be free.   even if plan fell through. that door is escape. dash. get away.

meanwhile is hidden for now. can pretend it away. resentments don’t matter from a distance. can face away. not looking.

lola is asleep with smile. not like yesterday when she was slumped morose in her bed all day. now just me who is morose. difficult. hateful. get away from her. get away.

postscript

i thought i might be done with this. left hand folded over and crushed. no longer working. now right hand going. need to go to  bed every hour. what more to say. am sick to my stomach all the time and sitting up is an ordeal. but then o is lying down. does anyone really need to hear this chronicle. do i really need to write it. letters from friends. hard to write back now. what to say. no stamina for it. alienated from lola. nothing left for her and she has migrated to g. i am jealous. but how not.

watching big bang theory season 10. easy watching. interruptible without losing the plot. guess my mind is going from feeling so fatigued.

seasons

watching youtube videos. things i want still to do. i still want things. i still miss things. everything is much harder. need oxygen so my heart doesn’t have to work so hard. watch people with wild animals. always wanted to do that. watching comedy. kate mackinnon. watching peoples hands. when i dream, mine are still like that.

dreams about food. sometimes bad, others just strange. today wanted to eat.crushed ice to drink better than popsicles.

i miss fashion  think about clothes i won’t get to wear. and things i won’t get to build. and home in los angeles. i didn’t guess that i would be lost in england. always thought it would be the other way around. recurring nightmare i had for years. lost in familiar places. like pico boulevard. but everything i built gone and i forgot where i was supposed to go. or the beach. where no one was there and i couldn’t tell if i was north or south.

it is christmas time. i always liked christmas. lights and decorating the tree. presents. nice food.

if i was well i would bake a cheesecake. and cookies for the neighbours. and i’d figure out something for a nice dinner. and i would be able to eat it all. and when i’d go to bed it would be soft and my muscles would relax, instead of stiffening up and hurting. i’d find something nice to wear and g and i could have a party. we could drive to costco and get a cake that i like. we could put out starters and i could make lasagna or chicken skewers and rice. we could invite our neighbours and friends.

then i could fly home. and feel the sun.

addendum 2

from an article in the guardian today 

I now recognise that the whole project of sharing our Christmas was flawed, and it taught me a salutary lesson. It taught me something about what could be termed benefaction. Caring can lead us to expect the objects of our care to be gracious in their receipt of our largesse, to accept unreservedly our support; essentially, to know their place.

And when they don’t, when the victim refuses to submit to their victimhood, when they insist instead on retaining ownership, they challenge our charity and we take offence. What I learned, that shameful Christmas, is that charity, care, whatever you call it, is essentially a two-way process, in which the recipients may be victims to us, but they are desperately seeking to restore the selfhood that the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune have eroded.

That is their right and, while we are distributing the Ferrero Rocher, it behoves us to pay attention. There’s a lesson for the 1% in there somewhere.”

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/24/lonely-old-lady-christmas-lesson-charity

my comments

AND A LESSON FOR THE HOSPICE CHARITY MOVEMENT TOO. ITS WHY K FINDS ME SO OBJECTIONABLE AND BULLDOZES THROUGH MY EXPRESSED INTENT TO KEEP OWNERSHIP OF MY LIFE AS AGAINST HER COMFORT ZONE. THEY GET OFFENDED AT MY INTERROGATION OF THEIR ILLOGICS. AND ARE FRUSTRATED BY MY FIGHTING TO KEEP MYSELF IN MY OWN TERMS INSTEAD OF GRATEFULLY SUBMITTING AS A COMPLIANT PATIENT. THEY WANT TO FEEL GOOD ABOUT WHAT THEY ARE DOING. AND I MAKE THAT DIFFICULT.

addendum

d thought my last post was harsh. yes. she is right. i was harsh. palliative care is doing their best within constraints they are bound by. maybe believe in too. they can’t stop me being a hostage. if i want to move, i have to ask and then wait each time. not anyones fault. just how it is. they say we can give you drugs within reasonable limits. i ask, what defines reasonable? it upsets them. C was equivocal. maybe how she feels. maybe constraints of her position. i got angry. festering with it. but not necessarily at anyone. just angry. So am sorry to have been harsh.

the problem is i don’t want to die. but am anyway. i want to stop it. I’m fighting unconsciousness. i wont have peace or acceptance. there are bad ways to die. this is one of them. i resent dying. i resent having my day to day everything in other peoples hands. people like me make demands. we don’t want to wait because waiting is itself a galling loss of selfhood. you fucking wait i want to say. but know that this is unfair and ugly. but also the truth. who wants to loose all the minutia that add up to autonomy. self respect. self definition.

so in a way I’m not sorry. and am sorry about that.