Patchouli

Oprah famously said on her talk show that she loved giving away stuff because "GIVING FEELS GOOD", in a not-so-veiled reference to the compulsiveness that drives the lives of so many celebrities. Who doesn't like a new car?! Right? It's sort of like a shopping high, except you and your audience participate in the buzz of "new car smell" together, like a bunch of giggly girls at a sleepover sucking on helium balloons and doing bad cartoon voices.

After the hangover from her giveaways, Oprah was stuck with an African lawsuit alleging sexual abuse (herself a victim of molestation as a young girl) at the all-girls boarding school she famously built in Africa to make better female Africans, as weird a gesture for an eccentric rich American to make as ever. Much like Mark Zuckerberg's condescending attitude about giving "free internet" to those poor Africans (what about us here?), it's a do-gooder pose that hides, if not malicious intent, then some seriously disordered intentions.

At the local free library, such cheap easy sentiment runs rampant through their special needs policies (to attract local, state, and federal funding), that includes someone else cleaning up the messes from their ridiculous build-a-bag-from-newspaper workshops for retarded adults. They pander to brain disordered people without actually giving a fuck about the abuses tied to their presence at a place for advanced learning (which a library used to be), including not monitoring heroin users on the nod at their public access computers. That's distasteful and not part of their job!

It's okay to pad their typically empty building with Down Syndrome people, or day residents from the local psych center who need healthcare over stupid craft projects, because that's what makes them FEEL GOOD. The lady with carpel tunnel and OCD can feel proud that she shelves books all day very precisely, over those poor unfortunates struggling to use a mouse without her benevolent help. It keeps their corrupt system of co-dependence in place, so everybody who's sick benefits without actually calling it that.

That would be "labelling" and they don't do that in their "judgment-free zone", except for this: every book and media product in a library is very carefully assigned a Library of Congress category (by people like me) for the purpose of classification, bar-coded (also by people like me) for the ease of finding it by corresponding subject at their very place of employment. The dysfunctional pattern they're trapped in is so bad, that the disabled people working there were separated to me from the handicapped patrons they condescend to only by the distinctive blend of arrogant social "do-gooders" everywhere, saturated as they are by the scent of patchouli, a hippie's classic olfactory weapon of choice. See you in the stacks, kids.

Soul Survivor

As the leading intellectual of a business (whether or not it's openly acknowledged to my face, since it's typically done behind my back as some sort of financial strategy), my first few days, weeks, months, and/or years of any new employment I had were fraught with difficulties, tensions, ego trips, paranoid schemes, covert meetings, and hurriedly hushed exchanges like I was just hired to run the universe instead of design some books. The grueling audition process I went through was supposed to ameliorate qualms and fears that average people have about content generators, but sadly, it did not.

I was subjected to rounds and rounds of emails, resume screenings, online questionnaires, personality profiles, psych screenings, drug tests (for a corrupt newspaper union, haha), with several more rounds of interviews with my portfolio shown to a variety of employees from different departments who would not have access to the highest levels of a house like I did, done to an insane degree. Such is the power to create a company (or destroy it) that we bring to the table as a group.

I'd always hoped that my relative openness, honesty, and transparency (in big business New York) would alleviate the troubled minds of the more pedestrian office worker vis-a-vis their limited perceptions about illuminators but, more often than not, interactions with a real genius doesn't actually make lower-level employees feel better about themselves or their career choices, which is why I often handed out books to inquiring office cows. You know: because that's what we do. Nefarious, I know.

So, it was no surprise to me when the feathers of any new house I joined were ruffled loudly and with much angst, most acutely from the large hen-house, since we're paid less than teachers, which makes modern publishing heavy on the female workforce. Lunches would be set-up and attempted, odd scrutinies would take place in the office kitchenette, bizarrely stilted interactions were forced in the hallways or bathrooms, interruptions about a fake crisis during my crucial deadlines were staged as a sabotage...to no avail. In our world, you either make something or you don't, because the future belongs to those of us wiling to get our hands dirty, and with the amount of work that I do, it isn't a carefully calculated life of leisure devoted to one's over-priced manicure or shiny new gadget. It's more like: "I made this <pat book>. See?" Good! Now I can go back to work.

We'd published books about assholes in business, as me and the other much deafer art director in the office yelled back-and-forth, reading aloud from a book about company stereotypes, like the common "office bike": the desperate blond (always blond!) receptionist who sleeps around because "everyone gets a ride", within clear earshot of the reception area. Still, no avail. They kept on coming. Scooter was one such douchebag whose limited prowess barely masked his deeper ambitions of artistic glory, as just such an example of a tool. No one liked him, but he managed to form icky alliances within the company like we were competing for the last piece of roasted rat on a remote desert island for a sick "reality" game-show about starving people and their madness. What was the point?

He seemed genuinely baffled by my gifts, as much as he hated any kind of reference to them. He'd find some excuse to come back to the design studio, then draw out a weird discussion that could have been more easily done with a ten-second email, to slowly walk back to his cramped overheated office scratching his head about the obvious truths I just told him about the book he showed me, because acquisitions was supposed to be his game. He thought he cleverly hid his lack of a buying streak with our designated wonk at a major book retailer, by pretending to question us about a potential book property up for re-licensing like it was playtime at the zoo, and I just fucking ripped his head off in the lion cage, every single time.

Naturally, like all the other inept "lifers" at that company, he just happened to "fall into" publishing, just like he fell into my den of protective lionesses filled with nursing cubs. Shoo! On an afternoon like any other afternoon, he seemed to finally have an epiphany about who I was, discreet as I managed myself to be amongst those who are not of the calling. As the rays of golden light struck sharp shapes across the back wall of my studio desk, he came back excitedly (for once) to show me a book that just crossed his desk. Did I know it? Nope. Ah...here he hesitated, like a student daring to give an apple to his favorite teacher. Did I know this book was like me? Yes, Scott. I did. Happy All Soul's Day, on this beautiful autumn day in 2016.

Angel Fire

One of the best meals I've ever had in my life wasn't at a fancy "eatery" (please excuse the hipster term) in a trendy New York neighborhood full of outsiders looking to make it big in my hometown. It was at a modest cabin nestled quaintly in the gorgeous Sangre de Cristo valley of New Mexico. I'm not an avid skier, coming from a childhood home of much humbler and inexpensive past times, but during my active teenage years, me and my brothers (with a cousin or boyfriend/girlfriend or two, thrown into the mix) would fly out to spend our college breaks with my father and his wife at a lovely small-town resort they found in New Mexico that's within driving distance of their West Texas home.

Since it wasn't some pricey tourist dive*, our trips meant (as they always did growing up) that we had to socialize with the local provincials, with their very limited experiences that they had no trouble abusing children over, so that we could have maybe a day's worth of fun during our grueling college years to satisfy our parents arrangements. It was also weather and/or our pocketbook(s) permitting, or my father pulled his purse-strings to call the shots that favored him best. We were lucky to have a good time at all, is what I'm saying to you, and as my faithful working class readers, I know you understand the drill.

It's like a Florida vacation washed out by monsoon season with your ADD grand kid who freaks out during horrible airplane turbulence that lasts for hours and you spent $8000 for it (and you couldn't even afford that), which is why credit cards were invented: so you could try and escape the soul-crushing reality of your 9-5 office hell with the promise of a heavenly vacation that was never real like they are on t.v., except now you're in debt, in addition to having a really bad time. Oh, and there's all those work emails in varying tones of recrimination and panic to go through before Monday morning, too. You lucky asshole. Isn't it grand? Our family trips were like also that: a terrible guessing game of who will get drunk and be a complete piece of shit first, because every family vacation is like that. Every. Single. One.

The revelation of an uncomplicated good time at a family restaurant that served us at a long table with mismatched bowls we simply passed around to each other, without worry of this one's Epi-pen peanut-dust allergy or her Celiac Disease that's easily manageable with basic human speech skills that are devoid of the typical (and repetitive!) brain-dysfunctional Off-Broadway show, was utterly miraculous. A husband and wife team cooked the food they served to us in the cabin they lived in, as their only guests in attendance, away from the maddening tourist crowds. They served the best mashed potatoes I've ever had in my life, followed by the best peach cobbler I've ever had for dessert, too.

As we stood on their wood-plank porch watching the Milky Way stars emerge above the rural New Mexican mountains, free of sky-obscuring light pollution, after a spectacular pink and purple sunset we knew was divinely inspired, not even my dad's annoying toothpick habit that included repeatedly sucking his teeth loudly could spoil our mood. For an evening, just one evening, we'd been in heaven, and it was worth the price of the ticket. Believe you me. And you should. Some memories are so good, they withstand the test of time, like a love that's everlasting. Amen to you, on this holy All Saints Day in 2016. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Fire,_New_Mexico

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Fire_Resort

Millionaire

Before Gen X'ers made their "Special Needs" children into hip play-things, serious mental illness was a drawing room subject that could be hinted at politely in mixed company using a bunch of phony-sounding euphemisms, but never to be directly addressed. Once a problem is accurately named (so the thinking goes), superstition held that one had to go about solving the problem, and my parent's "Silent Generation" doesn't do that. We do.

Of course, my family is like any other family; we have some very seriously disturbed people living within it, though how alive they feel is of some debate. In order to quantify as "successful" to a bunch of brain disordered people, my family had to vigorously redefine success as the blind obtainment of objects without purpose. That was it: car, spouse, house, kids. Done. You passed! If it seems too easy, you're right, and just as many of my friends and I escaped the common traps of the falsely upwardly-mobile lifestyle for treasures that can't be bought and sold like so many commodities on the open market. 

We invested in ourselves and our education, like our hard-working grandparents taught us to do, so that when the time came for us to give back, we'd give way more than our fair share, which is the world you're living in right now. But the retarded living "secretly" (not so much) among us had to do so much more than us, just to pass as simple 9-to-5 office drones. They needed long-studied Masters degrees, and every time society shifts technologically, they are right back to feeling lost and afraid again. 

They are the perpetual students who never really learn or master anything, which is why you'll find so many expensive MBA's working at suburban tax preparers after their initial MA and BA degrees, or rote technical jobs in labs that took them almost ten years to attain. When I presented them with my real accomplishments (like scoring an interview at the Annie Lebowitz studio in the 90s on an Illustration degree as my second ever professional interview), it was undermined and shoved mentally in a drawer in the back of their minds, while I suffered through their bad photography with overly expensive cameras and trite tourist shots taken on plush cruises, with tales of photo contests never won spinning through their delusional heads.

And so it was with one of the more anti-social members of my family who preferred light switches and t.v. fuzz to contact with humans, memorizing train schedules over normal conversational greetings besides a light grunting that replaced actual speech. He was lovingly called "Rain Man", like Dustin Hoffman's infamously Autistic character, for his ability to mentally check out using inane facts and trivia. It was always the same. Always the same. When he finally used his abhorrence of all things personal to his sole advantage by appearing on a game show none of us watched (we were all busy with travel, careers, and love lives), me and my brothers didn't even know about it, much less care, to the detriment of the psychotic gathered among us at holidays.

Ahem. Perhaps we hadn't heard? If it was intended as a snide reference to my hearing impairment as a feeble attempt to correct the imbalance of their completely co-dependent ineptitude, consider that a huge failure as well. And so we had to feign an enthusiasm over his one chance at being in a spotlight, using all three callers for the more difficult questions you had to actually know through real study habits, not blind compulsions. Game over. Still, with the help of his family, he won a nice chunk of change for someone with his limitations. Christmas will be good this year! He and his father were notorious cheapskates who would sit around with glazed eyes and blank stares with their arms folded tightly across their chests, while we exchanged humble gifts at my grandparent's apartment.

They just sat on a couch waiting for food to be served, doing and saying nothing to anyone, except for the one year my uncle gave me some free mugs from his Met Opera attendance that were "too girly" for him to use, or some spare calendars he also got for free. Like any real mother, I was touched by these few shows of humanity that had stolen away from the tight grip of his mental illnesses, as remote and alone as I know them to be. The son never improved, because we were never allowed to discuss his diseases with him, which might lead to a cure. Instead, he languished year after year in the same dull IRS government job that went slowly from PT to FT on a special needs work program, slowly draining his show earnings on a bunch of train rides with similarly disordered people. And he never gave us a thing. Not one single present. Not ever. Not once.

"I love lamp!"

Jerk-offs have a hard time in society. They already feel "exposed", and so in the quest for attention and popularity, they created their very own special blend called Objectum Sexuality. Sounds exotic, right? In truth, it's masturbation using objects with human attributes assigned to them, through the power of their own fevered imaginings. Have trouble talking to women without stalking them, or fondling them in public spaces like the fuckin' piece of shit that you are? No problem! Dress up your dildo like a mascot and call it "Harry"! No? Oh! You like "boy" objects and "girl" objects, henceforth I must refer to you as a Pansexual Polyamorous Bisexual Objectum Sexual. Seriously. That is exactly what one woman who is a regular on the media show-pony circuit wants you so desperately to believe about her, because she is the "most specialest" kid on the block, helmet not included for outdoor activities: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=7283494.

She, like "Diaper Baby Boy" and "Obsessed Car Guy", have full-on public displays of anti-social affection with their objects of choice based on their imagined sexual relationships that take place mostly in their heads, because all of them were sexually molested and/or violently assaulted as young children, which they will tell you about in great detail as to the many reasons why they cannot ever love disgustingly fleshy human people. They've had many productive meetings with their therapists that allow them to talk openly about their intimacies! As funny as it is to poke fun as some chick who thinks the Berlin Wall is a "hot celebrity" (thus making a committed monogamous relationship with "him" difficult. I know! Even objects have commitment-based issues), she actually gets the German government to give her the keys to an old turret for their overnight "honeymoon", so that they can intimately "exchange energy" as husband and wife, thus publicly validating her feelings. Their lack of a true homospaien sexuality is rooted is utter and complete dysfunction: http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/man-who-sex-over-700-4435804

I lost it when she showed everyone in T.V. Land her handmade to:scale version of the Berlin Wall (naturally, she's also an "artist"), sitting upright in her bed at night waiting for her to come home, with a robe and ascot tied jauntily around its "neck". Really? People be desperate to get on t.v., yo. For her, it began as a stress response to media attention while she trained for the Olympics as some special white girl Japanese archer, which was not rare enough to get anyone's attention because Japan ended it's national policy of Isolationism many years ago, hence she rubbed herself with it and named it. Voila! Instant spotlight: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erika_Eiffel

It's not that I don't want her or any other person with Special Needs not to have a sexual identity, nor do I question the integrity of a learned psychologist steering away a possibly psychopathic individual towards masturbation with creativity attached to it, I just have to wonder where it ends for them all. Do they ever get better? Just like the movie-version of Lars and his Real Girl sex toy, it saddens me that the thought of touching another living human being fills them with repugnance, instead of generating the biochemistry necessary for our most intimate relationships. I may really like that lamp I bought from some catalog, but will it ever really love me back? Of course not. You know it won't. 

As much as I may like the charm of your over-indulged story about a new coffee-maker, it's not actually a friendly robot who beeps happily in response to you, like a human might. I know, because I am the type of designer and artist who makes objects: tools are made for humans to use, not love sexually. Just like imbuing "Wall-E" the Mars Rover robot with human characteristics will ultimately fail over time, so we are made to belong to one another. That's what we want for you. Trust me, I know. Keep taking those meds, tho'. We want you to be the best you possible. We want you to be a healthily thriving human.

http://www.objectum-sexuality.org/

In an interesting side note, it occurred to me after I wrote this piece that the English language (unlike modern Romance languages) does not place objects in the same category as humans, by wrongly assigning them as masculine or feminine. We have, simply put, "he", "she", or "it". "It" is assigned to inanimate objects that are made from inorganic material (like rocks), and organic matter that has not developed a consciousness, like plants. Certain objects have great ritual significance (like an old oak tree that has survived for many generations), becoming over time mythological symbols of home and lineage, but without a human to assign a gender to it, there is none present. It with this higher awareness about words, and a greater sense about the world, that we recognize and understand that objects do not have a deeper and/or greater significance than people. 

It should also be noted that the English language is derived from Indo-European traditions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language), predating many of the pagan European societies from which Roman Catholicism sprang from, in a brilliant feat of cultural assimilation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_and_Paganism), with some cultures placing a much bigger emphasis on objects as part of their worship. It may be part of the reason why some humans have retained an over-dramatic ability to wrongly place emphasis and affection on objects that they can control, as a response to life stresses (like children do with toys), as a lurking remnant of our primitive responses to an environment not yet understood, like continued fear-based responses to weather conditions on our planet. 

In fields like "Cultural Anthropology", certain remote and isolated cultures (like those on the island of New Guinea), still have native peoples who use ritualized homosexuality during their childhood, with elaborate sexual rituals and older initiates who teach them to worship "male" phallic symbols, like the trees in their forest. It is only until the tree gods are placated in their masculinity do boys become young men who lay with women. From then on out, it is understood by both genders that their world is divided neatly into "his" and "her" objects, a confused but ancient response to nature. Obviously, there are plants and animals that reproduce sexually and asexually (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproduction), but this was something that primitive cultures did not yet understand fully. 

You're welcome, human.