Bohemian Crip And The Great Disabled Heresy....

Love this song by The Bodeans 

I'm disabled, and I want more.  For myself, right now. I kind of want All The Things, really, in the way a lot of Americans do, but only a few really get to pull off, and the ones that do? Don't look like me.

I know a better politics takes time, but it feels like I've been waiting(and working, in addition to "wishin' and hoping' as the old song says) Even as I write this right now, I feel pressure from within to do the expected good disabled person thing and take a quick note of my blessings: How fortunate I am that aside from the Big Kahuna that gave me the impetus to write a disability-writer blog(glass half-full says "as well as wrenching the time to compose from wage slavery") most of my health situations are *complaints* not agonies and that I have a supportive family that doesn't mind if I give from evenings and weekends to nag strangers. But gratitude is far less spiritual when it feels both compulsory and like I have lived out an exceptionally cloying and non-erotogenic stereotype by living up to it.  Especially when I'm not that good at doing it.

A lot of disabled people don't get to be fifty.  Which is heavy, just on its face, but also puts me in this weird space, where if I wanted to accept it, I could be an Elder Stateswoman and shit...scare the criplings about life before even dial-up--they'll also never know what a revelation it was either, back when a crip on a prom-court ballot was "so mean," and not a "so sweet" viral ticket to talk to Kelly Clarkson or somebody.(Sadly, probably the one thing that doesn't shift that much? Disabled people's chances of...getting anything at the end of that night.) But I don't feel like a wise elder; maybe nobody does.  I interviewed a 94-year-old volunteer for a legislative district newsletter once who wasn't all that into playing oracle for the rest of us.  Though it made her a really tough interview, I could respect that.  And I'm really not ready for the Bernie Sanders "plant trees you'll never sit under" trip right now.  At least not full-time.

A lot of my abled friends are  downsizing and downshifting from stuff right now(Not to make them sound like they live in a Sunday supplement) but I'm not really there, either.  Though I clear out from time to time--kind of a losing battle, since "Add To Cart" is a lot easier than creating a life that feels exciting, and I'm keenly aware that if *my* life, borrowed as it feels, calmed down any more, it wouldn't be simplifying, but more like something in suspended animation.

Mary Chapin Carpenter says it better and shorter

One of The Ones Where God Is A Dick...

 I'd been waiting to read Matthew Perry'shonest memoir, both because paperbacks save space and because, well, that's it, and I wasn't ready for the end yet.

Sometimes I think God, if there is as Supreme a Being as to be accounting for all move humans make, can be a dick.  Not only for the difficult things I’ve been stuck with or the friends I have lost before their times but for sticking people with addictions and not offering full-on cures. As I read Matty Perry’s memoir(could we *be* on a more-first-name basis? I think anyone who has, at bottom, such a low self-opinion as well as an iron-clad conviction that the road not taken is the right one, could well have been one of my favorite friends as well as my favorite Friend) I found myself also thinking of Tommy Raskin, and how his family had everything to throw at his depression, probably in ways most people do not, and they still couldn’t keep Tommy from suicide. Probably everything is more complicated than it looks, but it does seem, in this, as in so many areas, that our culture is out of ideas.  Hospitalization for depression or  in-patient drug rehabilitation  have, respectively, saved a lot of people, but it seems to me that follow-up when people get home? Might not be as strong as it needs to be. People can’t stay shut away forever.(Which insight might put me on a par with abled people who  kind of sag with relief when they hear the ADA was passed, if not that they have to do something to make it happen, quite frankly, but I admit it, and will learn more in the future.) Have to admit that my early fascination with addiction memoirs has always been the combination of stories with more bodily functions than mine—as in other things, Perry here does not disappoint—yikes, in fact--combined with “looking fine.” My teenaged self-needed to know that there were a lot of ways of being broken and a lot of ways out of being broken, too.  I never found my way out either, though. I'm still here, unlike Matty.  Sometimes I really do wonder why, even though I'm not the instrument of my own destruction in quite the same way addicts can be.

What makes God a dick is that, Perry,  seems so close to really understanding things about his life and what matters(as well as what might have gone wrong with “Studio 60”) and he didn’t get much of a chance to put those ideas into practice before his untimely, accidental death. I can almost hear Chandler Bing’s voice in my head as I turn the pages saying “So close!” and it’s both a happy and sad feeling.  Happy for being so familiar, sad because, after this there will be, to my knowledge, at least, no new words coming from it.  I watched most of what he did, even the ones that didn’t last.  Even the movies that he might have been some of the unwitting best parts of—it makes sense that he would be hard on himself about some of that, but I still looked up in surprise sometimes. I have a friend who was also a fan who died at the same time. I hope that Matty would understand why I sometimes imagine them together during that big, over-hyped blackout night enjoying the momentary perfection of an eternal stick of gum.