Appalachian American Ennui Conflated with Goya's Black Pictures

February 3, 2025: State of Tennessee v. [Redacted]: There I sat until my Motion for a Mental Evauation could be addressed so that my 70 year old client's emerging dementia could become official; requiring, I pray, for a dismissal with prejudice. The defendanat in state of tennessee v. [redacted] was a giant. As he and his dimunitive counsel took position behind the lecturn, an anomalous thing happened; anomalous, that is, in the Third Judicial District. See, Judge Beckner the Horrible started allowing a stipulation to the prosecution report to substitute for a recital of the underlying case during allocution, thus protecting me from the trauma that would have undboutedly come to roost upon the recitation of particularly horrid events. I'm reminded of Riley Eugene Ellison, whose three year old body died after he was burned alive inside of a clothes dryer in Cocke county and the consequent death stabs inflicted against Riley's torturer with a shapend plastic toothbrush. . . So, there I sat when the pretrial detainee was asked to plead guilty "if he was in fact guilty." He agreed and responded to the satisfaction of the court. But the recitation of facts was what cold cocked me between the hemisphers of my brain. After hearing just enough to nail my attention, I realized that I needed to get the hell away from the prosecutrix, whose performance was pure gravatas. Let's get this out of the way. The audible factual basis for the plea was child rape, called Rape of a Child on the charging instruments. Of his own daughter over a cruelly long duration of months, perhaps years. So I left and went outside. Put it this way, I could no longer hide the welling, so I hid my body from the bench, bar and gallery, opting to shut my eyes and stare at the warm winter sun. I went back and forth through security so I could peek into the silent courtroom in order to assuage my mental health that the nightmare had ended, enabling me to work. Errant, I went back inside in order to advance my motion only to realize that the play was at intermission, and started again with a victim impact statement by the deeply wounded victim, who said this: "I was so excited to spend time with my father after so long." I thought I was going to bleed to death, recalling my own inablity to spend precious time with my own children during one of the dark pictures in the nineties, painted in by yours truly. And he rapes her?! How could this have even happened to the redacted girl. Vaginal rape. Fellatio. Cunnilingus. Everthing but sodomy. I wonder what the everpresent, un-in-ter-vention-ist god thought of the horror story as it played out. Fact: Everpresence is bullshit, folks. But non-interventionousness is not. So when the young, overweight young woman with purple hair furthered the impact her biological father had inflicted, I had to leave the gallery. Again. Goya's black pictures are ubiquitous now that I'm old, and apparently still up for it.