This Came Up In Memories...

 If you want to see me and hear my voice, you can watch me read one of my "Collegiate" type stories, it's here.The Happiest Place On Earth

"Crip...er, Fish Out Of Water"....

 

For an episode of television that is a.  animated, and b. Not designed in any way to showcase the disability experience(as indeed, very few episodes of television are, which is why I’m always looking for it in places where I probably shouldn’t find it.) “Bojack Horseman” seemed to highlight certain frustrations we all share, but that might hit harder for my disabled self.

The usually-selfish and coasting former sitcom star BoJack Horseman is riding high after the sports bio-pic “Secretariat” gets nominated in a film-festival in a sort of undersea Scandinavia. He struggles because of the equipment that allows a horse to breathe underwater—more on that at the end—and  can’t sleep because of the time change.

Which makes him late for his event, fall asleep on a bus, and end up helping a male seahorse have babies(They get separated and one of the babies gets attached to BoJack, who is surprised, but for once, doesn’t attempt to leave the little beast with someone else…maybe the affection it gives him means more when he’s so vulnerable?   It’s hard to tell with heightened emotions and minimal dialogue—as well as the, like, frustration muscle memory from trying to take a bus to college in a wheelchair for two years—sidenote, glad that paid off—literally making me sweat and fear for this cartoon horse the whole time.

Things should get more comfortable at the festival lovefest, right, but, as Paul Buchman would say, not so much.   BoJack spots a director that he had a role in getting fired, but he thinks he can’t talk to her with his scuba equipment on. He pours his heart out in a note, only to find, after several drafts, that his musings are smeared and illegible.  Adding insult to injury, the last  day’s revelation that the scuba suits have a button at the neck so people can speak.

Saying Good Stuff About My Friend's Book..

 

The book is called Suffer For This” and, as a long-time online friend,  albeit one where we’ve never even broken bread because of the country in between us and because your Bohemian Crip can’t globe-hop like she might want, I had to check this out. The first thing I’d say is that, especially given that the title is “Suffer For This”, I’m glad I didn’t have to. At times, it can be hard to know what to say about a friend’s work, especially when he has edited you before.(I do feel like I know Victor on a more intimate level now, since it was our hobbies that brought us together initially, and at a point when you might be past the whole collegiate What Does It All Mean?  bull-session thing. )

We never really got to love and marriage, much less the “things that you do in the dark that make the daytime seem all right” or whatever the Tennessee Williams quote really is—I’m close, all right? The fact that might be good enough for me probably says something about my declining standards, but there was a point where I’d never make this post because my “Life is my Adena Watson case,” energy would mean hours of tracking down the quote and forgetting about what I wanted it for.  Given that, I think a certain amount of imprecision counts as a personal best. Which means, I think you can tell that I liked reading about some of the encounters that made it somewhere between prose, poetry, and memoir in this book without relating very much at all. “Purely physical” is more about eating when I’m not hungry, if you’re me. Not anything that makes you sweat.  I think, if I had to describe my own love life and couldn’t use phrases like “that one time,” or even more sadly, “in my in-box”, I might have to go back to a poster that hung in the independent-living center when  I was at my crip-power fiercest—hey, it was the 1990s-we thought we still had hope—Anyway, there was a poster of a deaf woman ordering a pizza on a TTY, and the caption read “It took an act of Congress to order this pizza,” and that’s what my history is like. At least,it could make a sentence now; at times, I’ve had my doubts.  But, yeah, not a lot of room for falling into things, so I might  have read something like this and judged it a lot instead of appreciating it—the one thing disabled people always get to be is Too Good For This World—the “so, could you leave?” is often implied.  So, maybe it’s good I didn’t know that stuff before. I’d have read it wrong, anyway.

Even though, as you might have guessed, I’m sort of behind for my age, so I might always be down to yak about  What It All Means in person, if somewhat short of things to contribute.) I really liked this book. I found it tough, tender, and revealing.

Stop Playing, Superstore!

 

Superstore is still a cool show, which I like a lot and love to finish the night by watching—Amy still overcompensated trying to get her brother and Mateo together, but she does that sometimes.Like many of us, she is often slow to move once she has an idea in her head.Also, it might mean that the title of this episode might work on multiple levels, hee, hee.(Although neither kind of "pickup" is especially effective, it should be noted.)

 However, in the latest episode that I finished,"Curbside Pickup"  a lot of the comedy was unintentional, as Garrett was depicted as being able to bop right into his coworker Jerry’s apartment with zero prep or extra exertion.  I like Garrett; I don’t want him held back—more than I want *me* held back, obvs- but that doesn’t happen, ever, especially if I’ve not visited your house before. 

 I imagine that it would happen even less in a place like the show’s setting, St. Louis, where snow,and slush are real possibilities, leading to stairs and high thresholds on doorways. St. Louis also doesn’t have an official law calling  for a visitability standard in private-home construction.(Don’t really think Arizona has one, either.  I think I wish we did.) In case you don’t click—but you love my links, right?—visitability means what it sounds like it means—that somebody with a mobility aid could come to your home and have a full-ish experience there.  Maybe even have fruit punch at the baby shower and have a place to pee. Mostly, this doesn’t happen, which is why I meet everyone like they are my promising Match date, whether they are or not.  It’s just simpler.  Note, also, that I didn’t say “simple”

It makes me feel like either a nag who is obscenely grounded in the tiny, frustrating details of life to point this stuff out…almost an admission that I don’t reach for the stars or something Or that I think every comedy is a .brightly-lit documentary—I don’t.

 But I think it’s a problem to have widespread depictions without access barriers in a world with massive access barriers. Because I’m tired of meeting new people and having them look at me blankly.  You know?

 But that’s part of the reason the #Representation and #OwnVoices conversations are so passionate and so intensely misunderstood…including disabled people in society doesn’t often mean we do the same things the same way, just sitting down, in the case of wheelchair users.

 The older I get, the less true I think that is, but I can see why people got so attached to it in the wake of the even-more misguided and dehumanizing take of us as, you know, special little people who live on love and fairy dust and who might actually get offended if someone paid us for our time.  

 I get that, and I even wish I could thank people for writing about it that way(We’re not *completely* different, after all) but just dropping in a wheelchair without thinking the story might change…kind of does us a disservice.  Abled people, too.  They should get to meet the real us, for once.  Also, if people don't take in lack of access as a problem, it won't ever get really fixed.