It's Probably Weird....

 that I might not have foundKeith Robinson's comedy if he hadn't had to struggle back from two strokes, the last one more severe and during the peak of the pandemic.   Sometimes it feels like I owe so much entertainment, to say nothing of interpersonal relationships, to the fact that so much that's awful happens to us all.

 "Different Strokes" a good special, and it's good to know that "never missing a beat" is not just something they award us with to leave us out.   For my taste, the best bit was about talking with a stroke at the Popeye's chicken drive-through. Nice to see some rep from a black perspective...we don't see that enough.(Even if that is its own challenge to what passes for disability group unity.  I'm bad at that, anyway, bring it on.

Also..

 A woman with a disability in a biopic or anywhere else who didn't always say Please and Thank you would be vilified forever.

Covering my Beat With "My Left Foot"--

 

“My Left Foot” is, I think, one of a thousand movies I must have gone to with my father during visitation, so we didn’t have to talk about how strange it had become between us.  Although I think movies really are among the rare things we both like. In this case, of course, the thing we didn’t talk about went further back than the thought that they both had started new lives that were different from the one that started my brother and me. Because I have cerebral palsy, too, though not like the one author and artist Christy Brown had.  I don’t see many, okay, maybe any, bodies that match mine…my best guess for why is that,although humans classify things to have them make sense, but that maybe, each muscle’s response to trauma, and the call from the brain that mostly never comes, is highly specific.(Even now, though, since we are writing of my high school years as The Exception, I write this while fighting off the urge to tell my readers how much better off my family and my body were than that. About being top of the middle of my class at least and how much I made the staff of literary magazine laugh. I went to two parties in four years.  It was different, but not mind-blowingly so.)  Disabled people still spend a lot of time on the outside looking in.

Maybe my dad picked this movie to show me how good he thought I had it.  Or maybe it was kind of a boyish wonder at how much  Daniel Day Lewis was able to appear like a disabled person—a talent we’re not supposed to admire anymore on representational and authenticity grounds, but Day Lewis was able to make me think he was one of us, so much so that I felt guilty about my disappointment when he made another movie and it was clear that he was not.(In another, sweeter movie, with us in it, of course, my father picked that movie to send me a message about our past and our future and stuff, but it did not work out as the viewer guides might have predicted.) I searched my memory, but I think that viewing only gave me the dubious “opportunity” to say what people still want me to say: That I’m lucky, and that it’s good for me to find someone “worse off” than I to measure myself against. Although you can’t always tell who is struggling most by looking, actually, I think it’s better not to make extending compassion some kind of misery Olympics.

Now that I’m older and we’re in a caregiving shortage that an informal arrangement is helping us forestall, I am a bit envious of Christy’s crowded house and neighborhood, if not the mess, poverty, and drunk das.  No stranger to having an indomitable mother myself(and maybe the same age as Oscar-winner Brenda Fricker by the end of the movie) I find myself wondering how Bridget Brown kept her spiritual tank filled.  My mother did not get *many* breaks when I was young, but she had some friends to hang with or sometimes a little retail therapy.

Why was Dr. Cole so confused by Christy’s crush? We are built with the same emotional parts other people have, and it looked like she smelled like perfume and quoted poetry to him—it’s like infatuation generation.

Playing with Something...

on Dreamwidth 

(Even though it's not completely my creativity, I thought some of my readers might want to know, particularly since updates have been a bit slow this month.  "In My Life" belongs to Lennon-McCartney, obviously.

Kind of feeling envious...

 of those disabled people who met each other and found their tribe. It has never really been that way for me, even after getting past not wanting to be reminded and such.

(Maybe that's what holds us back.  Some combination of sharing it the most outside the family...mostly, if you're not Deaf, that's how it goes. And reminding us of stuff we'd rather not think about.)

A postscript...

 When I send e-mail, I'm all about the PS.  A lot of times, this is different, because I'm looking for my Op-ed close-up in a way that probably only happens in movies anyway, but I think Ta-Nehisi Coates used  to blog a lot.

I do feel for the kids who missed so much during the heat of the pandemic. I do wish, that when I missed things during my own youth(and I probably had hundreds of thousands of compatriots...if you're reading this, and you think this fits you, the world owes us all a hell of a good time and a moment in the spotlight during which  the phrase "it really makes you think," is never used once.)   that the response could have been more compassionate and less full of thoughts like:

"What did you expect?"

"You have to understand..."

"Be realistic..."

"People get uncomfortable..." or, for a multi-generational occasion "They're from a different era," accompanied by much helpless shrugging.(Maybe we could normalize apologizing when our Forebears should be impolite? Realizing of course that life isn't a Norman Lear show and that the person themselves will not appreciate a confrontation--that man really did skew my expectations, sometimes.  But sometimes "I'm sorry.  I love her and I love you, But sometimes she doesn't get it." might have been good.

Not only did none of this bullshit help when everybody "hung out without me", trying to live it out and extend this harshness-disguised-as-wisdom to other people has made a callus on my soul hurt. It makes it hard to be good to people when realism is the same as eating a shit sandwich.

A Type of Grief...

 

Usually, even when your Bohemian Crip has had a tough week(getting dental work repaired while disabled is hardly listed as a mood elevator, even when you’re trying to do what your mom and Taylor Swift would do and “Shake It Off”) I find myself wishing there was more depth to the pain.  Even though thinking “Dag, this is where I’m like everyone else?!, as well as dealing with your mouth’s sensitivity, in addition to your spirit’s might seem like more than enough, I still wish I were like Greta Thunberg and have a whole ailing planet to ache for—not that I don’t, but I don’t have her focus.

On one hand, I’d love to be able to say that the cries of pain from Gaza hurt my heart so much that that is where the cloud comes from(and they’re  one of the shapes) but, given the level of conflict in the region, would that be signing an agreement to never be happy again?) I usually like to make this journal lighter when I can, both because that’s more fun and because half of America tends to imagine disabled people as either always at the doctor or still left out from sixth grade softball tryouts. It kind of seems like a goal to show that we enjoy things in between limitations,  even when I feel like adding “that one time,” because it’s been a while and I’ve missed out a lot.  I’m not entirely comfortable writing that, because I think we have often taken the concept of pride in our identity the wrong way and given ourselves a new pressure  to stubbornly insist that we wouldn’t change a thing

. I can’t say that, not sure I ever will, but I can only write that from the vantage point of surfing one of a declining number of crimson waves(won’t miss that, exactly, whenever it wraps up, but it has provided clarity for my emotional writing from time to time, as well as a convenient hook for family members to decide I’m making a big deal over nothing, and, at the end of the week, everything will look good again. Maybe some of the Opera will go away, but that’s not the same.) 

Sometimes I wish both things were true, even though I think that person would be kind of a joke in real life.   Sometimes I even wish snap, pop psychology was right and I was maternal enough to get lifted by helping sticky-fingered kids make macaroni necklaces.  But I think it’s another Never that makes me feel bad about menopause.  I have had a lot of never since I was nine and my parents and I had what I now tend to think of as the “forever and ever, amen,” Talk about cerebral palsy.  (It seemed better when I was nine than it does today, and, no we never really had another one.)

It's still hard to mourn a friend who was more passionate about our relationship than I was. Not to say I was unfair about it—it’s just that I’ve most often been on the other end of the divide, and it’s me, for God’s sake. If I was unfair about that, I was mainly questioning her taste, I think.