Curio of Wondrous Delights

I'll eventually get round to posting these on tumblr, but the rehab center/nursing home they've temporarily sent me to has terrible internet that will barely load dw, much less tumblr. Or my school website, for that fucking matter; I’ve had to file for incompletes on all my courses, and hope I’m out of here well in advance of getting the work completed because to study in this tv -riddled sensory-overload landscape is impossible.

The details are so pedestrian: the common story for so many disabled folks of one mistaken step that jeopardizes all their hard-won independence. I took a fall doing something that was, retrospectively, rather thick. But I'm proud and stubborn and...and I paid a vastly higher price for being stupid than most people, because of my cerebral palsy.

Spinal fusion surgery is never an "easy" thing to recover from, but it shouldn't send you to a nursing home for a month either. Unfortunately, the way you need to sit up--and walk and do...everything really--is nigh on physically impossible for me. At least, while on spinal precaution, which is the name of the game for the first 4-6 weeks--one week already passed in the hospital, so four-five more of this. For so long, my strong back has compensated for my painfully weak legs.

And when it can't anymore, well...then we're talking about physical assists to go to the bathroom. And stepdad is 71; he has no business doing all that shit (he offered, repeatedly, because he knows what a deeply visceral terror sitting in a place like this is for me, but there are some offers you can't in good conscience take).

This place...it's not one of the worst. The nurses and staff care deeply, though they're painfully overworked. But it's hedged about with regulations. Take, for instance, the bathroom saga. I was evaluated by physical therapy on *Friday*. On *Friday*, they agreed it would be more than good for me to get the physical assists to go to the actual bathroom, with such unmentionables as adult diapers as a precaution if I couldn't make it, considering the added physical stresses. Galling, but fair.

Fast-forward to late Saturday night, warm trails of piss spreading in a lake around me in bed. Because y'know what they didn't do on Friday? Put it in the computer. Which means none of the aids will take me to a physical toilet because physical therapy hasn't verified my fall risk yet.

There are no words for how dehumanizing it is to lie in your own fluids. There will never be words.

Nor are there words for the simultaneous sensory-depravation and overload hellscape. No going outside, except with family, and I, who love this time of year am dying at missing the warm weather and smelling recycled air. So, no new experiences, but oh fuck, so much noise. Tvs constantly on as people try to relieve the unremitting boredom of just...existing here, waiting for various therapy appointments.

Oh, the staff say--and truly mean in many cases, particularly of the elderly patients--that they provide both medical care and a toolkit to avoid future falls. But I have a million hacks to avoid falls; I just also have cerebral palsy on the high end of the "moderate" spectrum, which means sometimes, they don't work.
My one uncomplicated delight is roommate, a wonderfully spit-fiery octogenarian. And her daughter brings waves of brightness into our lives like yesterday's fresh watermelon delivery. I'm overjoyed she's getting sprung on Tuesday.

I know why I'm here, and I'd do it all again to spare stepdad, who was there every second in the hospital and whom I love more fiercely than I thought I would ever love anyone aside from my Mom. I've made abundantly clear to the social workers I'm out of here the minute I'm off spinal precaution, fuck their recommendations. And I'm trying to learn some new therapy tricks. But oh GOD, y'all, oh GOD this place is bleak, and I feel like it's bleached everything from me but the need to survive till the end of four weeks. Fortunately, there are therapy services for the brain...they're not weasels anymore; depression is like swimming through treacle and slowly drowning and hasn't been this bad since I started my lovely brain-chemistry miracle meds.

There are so many memories I want to preserve--of deeply kind nurses and stepdad's forehead kisses and...so many things I'll write about another day. But right now, I just want to hold the brightness of watermelon close and try vainly to go back to sleep. Because of course, internal clock is utterly ruined, and sleep more an exercise in passing off time than anything refreshing. Still, there is watermelon in the world, and ice water in my thermos and I will survive this.

Tomorrow marks the start of the new semester. So tonight, I'm treating myself to the beginning of my shamelessly self-indulgent fannish fifty, first brought to my attention by the incomparable delphi.

I've decided to do fifty recs, with the proviso that if I'm short by a lot in November or so, I'll intersperse professional work I think deals especially adeptly with fannish tropes--Naomi Noviks deconstruction of chosen one narratives etc. I'm beginning the festivities with the piece I most dearly wish I'd written; December will be for friends' works, because I want so many of you whose work is as dear to me for instigating our friendship as its theme and content to have the gift of having your art seen and praised throughout an oft-fraught holiday season.

Title: The Ministry's Man
Author: musamihi
pairings: John Dawlish/Bartemius Crouch Senior (unrequited), John Dawlish/Rufus Scrimgeour
Summary: John Dawlish has spent his career in the shadows of the Ministry's great men. One of the things they have in common is they never stay for long.

Rufus Scrimgeour is the character I will come back to at ninety, rocking on a porch and ruminating about decency warring with pragmatism in a world where the chickens wrought from generation upon generation of prejudice are coming home to roost. He's Churchill--riddled with trauma from the last great war, certain of his moral rectitude, but also bullish to a fault and embodying so many of the prejudices destroying the world around him--and! disabled, which makes the entire character arc a thousand fucking times better.

I'm not ashamed to admit, here in a circle of mostly mutuals, that at the darkest lows of suicidal ideation after Mom's death, I lived to read and write more fic about the flawed wartime Minister and Thorin Oakenshield--also a deeply flawed king trying to reclaim a homeland and let his better angels triumph (I have a type, y'all)

I can't now recall which HP Beholder Ministry's Man sprang from (GOD, I miss that fest and at least half the HP fics to be recced by me come from its brilliance) It feels like one of those pieces that is simultaneously a reflection on and deconstruction of canon so perfectly precise it must've always existed.

Of course, I first read it for the Scrimgeour. His portrayal is a masterclass: proud and prickly but also clever and discerning, ruthlessly exacting while being deeply compelling and empathetic in his desire to keep the state afloat. Ironically, though, it's the fic's use of Dawlish to elucidate moral concerns that leave me in awe and writerly envy.

For John Dawlish is a mirror, bland and blank and utterly loyal to the state, even when the state comes to be embodied by Voldemort. He's almost Harry's exact foil, unthinkingly obedient, merely present to be manipulated as greater forces of personality desire. But like any mirror, he's deeply observant, reflecting the question: how do you proceed in a world fundamentally premised on moral decay and prejudice? When the other side is worse, what means are acceptable? The fic is a philosophical tour de force, with no easy answers, casting as unsparing an eye on Dumbledore's refusal to engage as it does on the excesses of Crouch and Scrimgeour.

Early in the fic, we're treated this haunting dialogue: "It's going to get away from you, Barty," she says, stopping not five paces from me...."Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary measures." Mr. Crouch looks her square in the eye and starts winding a muffler around his neck.

From that moment, the center cannot hold, forcing us to ask what these world-weary characters should have done, or if the outcome was inevitable all along.

And every time, I'm sucked along with the Ministry's man until I'm breathlessly returning to the beginning in the desperate hope this end will somehow be different.

Somewhere in the tumult of summer semester, I discovered the work of the inimitable C. S. E. Coony through her remarkable novel Saint Death's Daughter. The novel itself is a constant unfurling joy for me--it's almost six hundred pages y'all and it has footnotes and the feel of a grand Tolkien epic except it's queer and centers women and poetry and necromancy with consequences and I could wax rhapsodic endlessly and haven't even finished it. But, for the purposes of the post at hand: there's this passage where two friends discuss the fact that one has utterly failed to correspond for eight months. And the failing correspondent looks helplessly at the intended recipient and says: I have fragments of hundreds of letters I began writing you, but there were never-ending distractions. Y'all, I want a shirt or mug or something because best mood encapsulation ever.

Summer semester was a whirlwind: learning the online learning environment, remembering my unpardonably rust MLA. Fall is a delight and challenge, with profs who're pushing me harder than I've ever been pushed. Except. Except for biology, which is eating up time like a ravenous dragon and making it impossible to give my other classes the attention and thoughtfulness they deserve.

The college contracted with McGraw Hill, which is notorious for being vile on the accessibility front. They've claimed to invest significant time in righting past wrongs, and initially I was cautiously optimistic. But the activities that are accessible--and they have modified things in some cool and interesting ways, with good descriptions of graphics--still take two-three hours with a screen reader, compared to the hour they're "supposed" to consume. And sometimes, you run smack dab into something that just...isn't. Like they put in tremendous effort and then got exhausted and went fuck it, we won't implement the proticals we already have here; no one will call us on it. I'm getting by on a mishmash of scribes and complicated written explanations to show that I do understand how the other students are dragging and dropping.

So, for all of you I owe E-mail too, or who I've just dropped out of comment threads with, I'm so damn sorry. Know that I would vastly prefer engaging with fandom right now, but for the moment, hell's circle has a boa-like grip; eventually, perhaps, I will escape.

[apologies for some judge's commentary the actual song ends about the 1:58 mark, but I couldn't find a stripped down version of just the piece for the life of me. MY GOD, his voice is the best thing I've heard in ages.]

I've told the story of my intersection with Allison Moorer elsewhere It may seem odd, and even unproductive, to be as enamored with a memoir about grief as I patently am with Blood; lord knows I've gotten some skeptical side-eye from folks and mutters about poking bruises and making them worse.

But one of the things Blood talks about and grapples with is the idea of healing as accepted functional haunting; how to carry your ghosts without being overpowered; what memories are of value, and to what do you cling out of obligation? Stepdad grieves differently than I do; I think of it as triggered grief, brought about by specific memories etc. etc. But I'm always aware of the "hole in the world" as one of Moorer's chapter titles puts it, and so much of the last year has been the learning of how to contain the abyss while also containing y'know...all the profoundly glorious, joyous shit that makes life worth living.

It feels profoundly validating to see a reasonably functional adult--with many of the markers of career success etc. etc.--stand up and say: yeah, I, too, am deeply fucked up by grief. Even if that grief is a different shape than yours.

The piece is also a meditation on legacy: the way that we, often robbed of the ability to know family with the nuanced eyes of our adulthood, know shadows; how much of our lives is spent attempting to reconcile the pictures we have with those of others; the jagged edges where all the pictures don't fit, and coming to terms with our own lack of clarity. It's also a piece about trauma and alcoholism and other profoundly complicated, raw shit, and there aren't really words to do it justice.

Fortunately, there is the album Blood, ostensibly penned as a memoir companion, but more a contained project in its own right. It feels as experimental and unique as a Mitchell album: a kind of opera done in country, folk, and jazz.

My choice of opera is very deliberate; just as the language barrier often excludes us from the nuances of Italian opera, there is a curtain across Blood. Moorer has pain-stakingly told the story in the memoir. This is all the poetry of the memoir, paired down and sharpened not into stories but word-pictures. Snapshots that take you through an entire journey. From a woman struggling in a relationship to two children clutching hands in the dark as human monstrosity surrounds them. From a woman bitterly exhausted of "pushing this rock up a hill" to the raw admission that all that was ever wanted was someone's love. Capped off by an exquisite ballad in which all the roiled-up feelings are slipped back into the mental box they appeared from to make room for a little piece.

It's an absolute rollercoaster in ten songs--forty minutes, tops. The poetry still has me quoting phrases over and over--to which I won't subject y'all, because they lose their power out of context. And the ambiguity fascinates me. We will never know, and are never meant to, if the woman struggling with the breakup is Allison herself, or Allison's mother, just before her death. We will never know if this story is told chronologically from Mrs. Moorer's leaving to Allison's healing, or in flashback after the breakup brings all the memories roiling forth.

We simply live in ambiguity, as adrift as grief so often makes us, until we're brought to catharsis. I can't rec either the book or the album enough, but especially the album if you need something beautiful that won't entirely gut you.