Wall of Confusion

With the decline of mental healthcare that marks this century and the last, we've all been forced to become doctors of the human condition, with or without the surgeon's paycheck. I've become accustomed to the twitches of other people that mark their significant discomfort out in the world (not that I like it at all), while also being robbed of the proper mechanisms in place that prevent real healing from occurring. It's like I wrote about certain therapy/rehabilitative business models: they succeed by deliberately not solving the problem for you, which is a rather big way to lie to sick people who are already vulnerable in the extreme. Comedian/actor Andy Dick was recently on t.v. to talk about his battle with addiction and his addictive disorder that's put him back in rehab FOR THE 20TH TIME. Is that real healing for anyone?!  

Corruption does that to people, even those working in the healthcare industry, by slowly seeping into your soul bit-by-bit without you knowing it, because evil hides behind easy comforts when you're prone. In the vacuum that came with the American de-institutionalization of psychosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation), people were left to fend for themselves, which is about as far from our ideals about happiness and the pursuit of it as you can get. Doctors were left to treat violently sick people with prescriptions sold to them at a huge mark-up—through the creation of huge pharmaceutical giants—instead of receiving real care, because true healing takes a lot longer than many employers, shareholders, and investors like for their returns, aided and assisted in their delusional jobs by the sense that time is much quicker than it is, like the time montages they see on t.v. Why can't we all be quicker? Drink more coffee! Stay up longer with this pill! There's always a product that's a quick fix over the slower tending that really solves a problem.

My physician in Brooklyn told me that she didn't over-prescribe antibiotics because they lose their effectiveness with time, making us much more vulnerable to greater illnesses, but people with mental problems who already struggle with less than accurate timelines want it now now now! They don't know how to incorporate a longer wait, suffering as they already are. Add more time, and they worry about keeping the health plan they get through their routine office job, because their boss is kind of a fucked-up asshole already, and any absences encourage managers to fire people too quickly, in behavioral patterns that were developed during "The Industrial Age" that treated people like they were the machinery they worked on, even though the exact opposite is true of our daily lives and strongest skill sets as human beings. We are far from being disposable as unique individuals. With my doctor's guidance, I weaned myself from the over-the-counter cold and flu products that caused my heart to race like I just pounded coke in the bathroom stall of a Wall Street trading firm.

It was always the same "Get back to work!" message that was shouted at me, so that someone else could get rich from my work, while I struggled to stay awake. I began waiting out seasonal colds, and then instructing the people around me about my process, which involves a longer timeline. My doctor told me (and it's true) that any suppressing drug will only leave you open to repeated bouts of illness, if only we could simply wait for our body's natural self-defenses to fight the illness during that first cold of the year. Instead of hopping around in a couple of days (work work work! busy busy busy!), I began to wait for 10 days or more, which immediately freaked my mom out when I lived with her, even though I repeated my good science to a supposed scientist like her over and over again, which she promptly forgot during my prolonged colds, growing more and more agitated by the day, until she exploded in a violent psychosis that she blamed on my repose.

The sickest among us continue to struggle, trying in vain to adopt to a work world that already passed them by many years ago, leaving them bereft of healthcare and support. My mom is one of those people who always feels she needs "more support" or more education, when in truth, her brain is incapable of working in our world. As a result, she learned to cover up her diseases expertly, letting them show only around other diseased peer groups—like her laboratory co-workers—at work in a place where she could use her "friend's" illnesses against them for leverage to keep herself employed, in the event that they sabotaged her efforts at work as a handicapped single mother.

She has a distinct pattern that she refuses to acknowledge to me, because I am not a part of her sick world, and as a social group rife with varying degrees of markedly anti-social tics and paranoid responses to ordinary stimuli, they break down quickly in the face of good health that surpasses them, so they seek to tear down the one person in their sick group who can lead them out of it, trapped in a co-dependent pattern that never brings them the healing they so desperately need. Like the character "Sheldon" from the popular sitcom "Big Bang Theory", she found a group of over-educated people who told each other as a tribe that they were smarter than other people around them because they were in science as technicians, rather than the grant-wining superstar researchers who truly excelled at work.

Most of them went on to work other compulsively repetitive jobs, like her friend who went from cleaning Petri dishes every day to a tax accountant, where she could basically do the same job every day, with some variations. They weren't all that smart under careful scrutiny, which is exactly what they seek to avoid the most, like the medicine that will ease the obvious symptoms of their public manifestations of anxiety, like Sheldon Cooper's abstract physicist character—and they are certainly not him, fictional as he is—though they certainly pretend to be. In retaliation for their inequities and insecurities, we have an enormously anti-social peer group in our world with deeply ingrained traits that were never socially acceptable, and it's time that changed.

Instead of nursing along people who pretend ignorance to compensate for their brain disorders, why not try telling them upfront that you know they have a disease? After all, I can't "cover up" my deafness in certain kinds of settings, so I began educating the people around me, to prevent a lot of weird gaming from going on. It's not our job to make sick people feel better about their annoying tics that were developed in lieu of appropriate healthcare. We are not the problem in this world. You are. So, change. Change it. It's time to stop using your psychosis as a weapon. We're not fooled by it. It's not a real weapon for you, anyway. It never really was. It's over. Really and truly.

http://csgv.org/issues/guns-and-mental-health/

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/obama-gun-control-rule-mental-illness-217340

http://www.ibtimes.com/guns-mental-illness-white-house-releases-new-reporting-guidelines-background-check-2248724

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/24/opinion/robbins-mental-health/

Shock to the Heart

Back in the day, we used to say lines from the old show "Sanford and Son" to each other that we had memorized by heart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_and_Son), having heard the same lines over and over again, like our parents compulsive "jokes" that were often told in times of stress and/or drunkenness, when they didn't know how to fill in conversational spaces with other humans correctly. 

"Old Man Sanford" would clutch his heart in mock anguish to deliver the well-honed line to his son that he was "on his way home" to see "Ouisie", his wife who'd passed on already, because he was "havin' the big one" that was so often threatened on the show but never actually came about. Oh...so, it's just a lie, then. We kinda felt gypped by the lack of "sudden death" action on t.v., like the nonsense our hysterical parents would blab out loud that was even less funnier than the sitcom stuff repeated for years on t.v. Yeah, sure. I know this line.

It became symptomatic of the psychological distress we'd see in the world that was the response of someone who uses their medical condition(s) as a manipulative tool(s) to get out of work, or human discourse, church on Sunday, or family visits. For a people who felt bereft of power, my parents and their friends employed a handy toolkit for the insane that included veiled threats (and not-so-veiled threats) that they often combine(d) with violent cursing and escalating acts of physical violence, which, rather than convincing us to obey their demands, made us want to stay even further away from their trouble spots. For them, their sickness became weapons for gaining leverage in the home and at work, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

It was silly and wasteful, but so were/are our parents, accustomed as they were to an ever-booming economy fueled through the machines of war. We wanted something better. We wanted something more from them and society, and the world at large. We wanted actual communication over the trite tricks brought on by so much t.v. viewing for the compulsively-addicted brain, followed by periods of paranoid non-engagements that could last just as long as their patterned routines that they inserted in lieu of actual thought. We talked to each other as a social group, and we wanted to see real conversation brought back, egged on as it was by the "shock" tactics of our disc jockeys and talk show hosts. A lot of it was the same old bullshit, but occasionally we broke through the static with our own hard work. See? Repetition does bear results, and I can talk about it at length, too.  
How's that for power tripping?

Ghetto Movie Theater

Back in the day, when America's air often buzzed with a thousand flying bullets in broad daylight—like that was the sane thing to do with twin concepts like "new" and "people"—we had an attitude of social looseness that constantly imposed upon the needs of others with an impunity that was artificially called "freedom", when, really, it was often a smokescreen for insanity committed in public spaces without fear of censure. Take, for instance, the ghetto movie theater (see also, Times Square in the 70s: http://gothamist.com/2013/03/27/photos_of_times_square_in_the_1970s.php#photo-2). 

Kids dared one another to run into a peepshow theater and back as if we were risking our young lives like western gunslingers of yore, and we were. Yeah, we had the buses of the Port Authority to take us back home, but if you missed the last sane commuter bus leaving the station, it was just you and your friends with hours of time in an almost empty bus depot, trapped with bums who got much scarier, louder, and active with each passing sip from their cheap bottle of wine. 

We were terrified of getting caught in the city's rain, because we knew a trickle of water could rouse a bum if it reached him before the rains stopped, like the time me and my boyfriend watched water fall down in torrents, stuck underneath a Central Park overpass. We only had so much time left before the water woke him up, and then it finally did. He was pissed off until he suddenly noticed us, which sent him flying towards us in a greatly renewed psychotic rage.

Which meant that we were constantly searching for safe places and happy diversions to combat the hellish scenes popping off around us. It was, uh, a little stressful, to put it mildly. People chain-smoked and drank like "The Final Days of Judgment" were being visited upon them any second, and if you believed the signs of the ranting religious zealots who frequented the midtown tourist areas, the end was always near. Ditto with the bald white "Hari Krishnas" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Krishna_(mantra), who were usually ex-hippie burn-outs from the 60s looking to wind down (or amp up) from their tense neurosis "the natural way", which meant spinning around like a "Whirling Dervish" for hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mevlevi_Order), banging tambourines and asking for money from onlookers.

There were also door-knocking, tie-wearing, short-haired Jehovah's Witnesses, robotic over-groomed Mormons who looked like extras from a 1950s-era movie, or "Moonies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonie_%28nickname%29) who would turn aggressive on you in a New York minute, which made the average New Yorker play this weird game of pretending not to notice that bleeding guy sitting next to you on the train, because he might stab you if you tried to help him out. Eye contact was also a serious no-no that kept us from helping out one another, because my dad repeated the same line about it over and over again with "no good deed goes unpunished", as an illustration of that very principle we used to live by. 

And so, our public lives were rife with strangely surreal scenes from horror movies or prescient sci-fi movies like "Escape from New York", that warned of The Second Coming as an apocalypse for the damned. Behavior was at an all-time low, and public life reflected the lesser of two evils that presented itself to us at any time. Sure, smoking a big stinky cigar in a movie was rude, oppressive, and unhealthy for everyone around you, but heck, it was better than rape, right? Right?! People sneaked booze and pot into theaters all the time under their jackets, and gay men used the movie's bathrooms as frequent hook-up spots that became so notorious for city people, we avoided public restrooms like The Plague. Anything could happen to you in there.

Like the worst of the human experience that becomes repetitive over time, we got used to extremely fucked-up people. Not comfortable or complacent, but accustomed to seriously violent offenders who'd snap at the slightest excuse to do so. People shouted back at the movie screen, or hissed their questions loudly to each other, in bad stage whispers that were clearly audible to everyone around them. My mom is so bad with watching movies, that I got used to prepping my friends about her odd behavior, because she loses the thread of the narrative quicker than anyone I've ever met. 

At home it was better, because we could stop the movie for food and drinks, or bathroom runs, or funky relatives with serious impairments, which my parents are not nice about. They're New Yorkers from the Bronx and Bed-Stuy, ya feel me? They aren't "nice" about anything, including their own ignorance that they self-defend like embarrassed kids at the rough local playground for tough kids in leather jackets, with switchblades and greased-back hair, smoking unfiltered cigarettes while snapping their chewing gum loudly. In other words, "assholes" presenting themselves in quick visual shorthand. 

"Who is that?!" my mother would yell out loud, and if you ignored her, she'd just abuse you until you had to give her the answer, which she argued about through her constant sense of befuddlement and misunderstanding, especially if she objected to the highbrow intellectualism that surpassed her grasp of the subject matter, like an offended two year-old after their lollipop is ripped out of their hands. It was histrionic bullshit, but look where they came from. Horror shows.

Years later, after we escaped our own individually tragic fates that working class people like us were often fated to, we could sit back and relax over something as simple as watching a t.v. show or a movie without being molested with uncommon violence for our presence or preferences. And, lo and behold, along came a show that addressed our humble city roots with a fun twist: we were safe now, and we also had homemade hand puppets to help spread the fun around to our friends. We'd say to each other in asides: "Yeah, check out that guy's hat and hairdo! Historically accurate, n'est ce-pas?" Or: "Yo, did you see that karate move?", quickly followed by "Hey, I wonder what he'll do next?" "Oh, I don't know! Let's pretend to be surprised by hammy bad acting and a cliched script!" Ahhh! Look out!! He's right behind you! Nooo!!! Don't go into that scary dark basement! 

Nurse Ratchet

Because of my grandparents working class values and abiding faith in G-d, they tried to instill a sense of productivity and societal participation into their children with very limited success, given the innate seriousness of their disorders. And because my grandparents were forced to leave school during "The Great Depression" to support their dependent families, they saw education as a ticket to a better life, even if it meant that their children failed abysmally. They paid for fancy parochial schools and degrees that were way beyond their children's intellectual capacities, just so they could be financially solvent enough to move out and be on their own.

It wasn't easy. On my mother's best days, she can talk to me about science, but barely, especially if she's sick. She becomes argumentative about something she feels she's an "expert" in, even though the highest work level my mom ever achieved in science was a a lab manager who ordered supplies for the rest of the staff. I should know. She spent my youth calling me on her lunch breaks to chew food loudly into my ear and gossip rudely, because she was bored.

Her compulsive habits were so bad that my brothers couldn't give her their work numbers anymore. She'd deliberately goad me into anger over my work phone, just to have the satisfaction of knowing that my reaction to her might shock my cubicle neighbors, because she did the same thing with the other weird lab rats she worked with. She complained so much about us that her co-workers were nasty to us if we happened to be at home, which is what she wanted as a revenge for being a somewhat working mother part-time.

I felt terrible for my grandparents. They'd paid for her posh undergraduate degrees after she had been on academic probation while living at home, which is so easy compared to the lives me and my brothers have that I know they did it because she's handicapped like the rest of her siblings. Ditto for my father; my mom bitched and moaned so much about being "forced" out of work to become a mother that my father paid for her to go back to graduate school, then had to sit down with her at our kitchen table to help her through her coursework after working 16-hour days at his own job, just so my delusional arrogant mother could get a job as a bottom-level lab technician who cleaned glassware all day long, in between her lengthy phone calls from work on the company's dime. Some deal, right?

A pattern formed within my mother's family that her siblings and their children replicated with the same codependent degrees of success. I thought one of my cousins was, like, an astrophysicist with a Ph.D, when really, he was just a horrible student stymied by his thesis adviser (always an excuse for their incompetence), and that's why it took him and his then-girlfriend 7-9 years to earn a Masters degree from a college I got into directly out of high school, and that included blowing off my senior year of studies. Didn't need them anymore. And so it continued...this aching annoying bravado coupled with a deep insecurity that completed the next generation of pencil-pushing nobodies with over-blown ego's, condescending conversations, and terrible attitudes. They totally fucking suck.

They don't actually do anything really worthwhile. It's all a cover-up for their mental illnesses. I worked with tons of pseudo-intellectuals in publishing. They had to have advanced degrees to be able to compete with average people in the workplace. But, perhaps the most egregious over-educating of a sick person has to be with my one female cousin on my maternal side. After graduating with some generic Bachelors degree from a local no-name school, she worked poorly at a series of doctors/dentists office in Riverside, because after living with her father who paid all of her expenses, she then moved into the exact same building as her alcoholic mother who's a nurse. Yay!

She simply switched her needy codependency to her mother instead of her father. At work, she was told numerous times that she was extremely anti-social to the patients, so, guess what my aunt and uncle decided to do? Pay for her to go to nursing school! Of course! That's what you do with incompetent mental patients. Put 'em in a position to abuse with impunity! It was one of the worst decisions I'd seen yet from my mom and her siblings, but with my elderly grandmother ailing, her family went right down with her, without her constant advice and care. I'd seen it up close, too, what the doctors and healthcare aides complained about firsthand, because I observed my cousin at Nyack Hospital when my grandmother was there.

I could read the drug name and dosage from my seat at the foot of her bed (it was clearly marked as a saline solution in her IV drip), but my cousin made a big dumb show out of trying to read it (she failed), then requisitioning my dumber aunt to go get a real nurse so she could quiz her about an obvious thing like that, but only after I supplied her with pen and paper, because she had none. We had enabled her from the beginning of the visit to the end, and she was supposed to be the one in nursing school. It was an abomination and a tragedy, but I knew my uncle was desperate for her to be economically independent enough so she couldn't be a burden on him any longer, and that I understood.

My mom is also a huge burden, even though she lies about it, and at every level: economically, financially, psychologically, socially, physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, both domestic and abroad. You should try taking a mentally ill woman with Multiple Sclerosis on the road sometimes, without consulting an expert like me, and good luck with that. My life is like planning a series of small military operations, because if me and my brothers forget just one small piece of the puzzle that my mom and her family surely neglect, then our lives are ruined before theirs. They make sure that they always come first. Try it with a group of the disordered, and you can start to feel a sense of what our family "vacations" are like: brutal hard work, in addition to all the work that piles up on our office desks in our absences, because we run businesses for other people, too.

There is absolutely no way this woman from my family should be working with sick people. She cannot take care of herself. Her parents made sure of that. My uncle and his daughter are negligent of other people's needs in the extreme. She barely sent me a few sporadic, tepid, generic, cheap Christmas cards, let alone show genuine emotion for me and my family. From him? Nothing. Not one thing ever. She has also never sent me a card, or a gift, or an email, or even talked to me openly at family gatherings unless she had to. This is the woman they let graduate from nursing school?! And do you know what she told me in my grandmother's hospital room, after I noticed her lack of clear observation? "I'm not going to be, like, a real nurse. I can do the paperwork the other nurse's don't have time to do."

Two college degrees costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for my uncle to shell out—and by extension, all of us—for a mentally ill healthcare aide who wants to sit in a chair and file papers all day. That's what you get for your time, effort, and money. Does that seem worth it to you? It's like my friend Cotto; we spent, as a society, millions of dollars in free programs pretending that a man who should be institutionalized just needed a condescending "helping hand" from the taxpayers, because he's seventh generation Hispanic. It's unreal! But, that's exactly where we wound up with him and so many other sick people of the world.

It's time we stop pretending that these poor slobs need jobs. They need a home, medicine, and healthcare. But vocational training in the healing arts? You've got to be kidding me. She can't tie her own shoelaces without help. Can you imagine your grandma needing her help with an IV drip? That crazy kid can't even look at blood! And yet, some city school in "tha 'hood" desperate for cash did that very thing. They took my uncle's money in exchange for his waste of a daughter earning a diploma from yet another city school that we all paid for with our taxes. And guess what her graduation photo looked like? One short, fat, ugly, and unpleasant-looking white girl posing with a bunch of proud-ass black women from around the way, and ain't that always the way, though? Enough. It's enough. I've had enough of it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability

Ill Communication

Do you remember when you and your brother were kids, and the two of you decided to flush one or two of your smaller toys down the toilet just to see what would happen, only to watch the water slowly rise to the top of a clogged toilet bowl in a growing panic, wondering what to do next, turning around to see your Mom standing in the bathroom doorway with a thin smile on her lips? Communication is like that; effectively done and it's almost like E.S.P. Well, how did you know what we were doin'? And then she'd say, "Because I have eyes in the back of my head", or even creepier, "Well, it was too quiet, so I knew you two were up to 'no good' because you're always so noisy!"

That's how my Bronx-born mama rolled: with eagle-eyed precision and harsh corrections. My parents weren't training us to be alright in your particular corner of the globe. They wanted us to be able to survive in the city and beyond, which means that you have to not die to win and that's not always easy, especially when the people around you are workin' all sorts of cons and scams: in degrees, mind you, but they get there step-by-step just like you do, through deliberate obfuscation, vagueness, and outright lies.

Like my mom, I know when the people in my family are sick, because they stop talking to me completely, as well as everyone else around them. I mean, we get nothing from them, and I can't tell you how disturbing that is, except if you know what I mean because you've lived through it, too. I've have sisters-in-law who have never sent me a card, or a letter, or an email, or an invite, or returned a phone call, and these are supposedly affluent white women who went to the best schools their families could afford. Nothing. You get nothing from them but their neurosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurosis), and maybe some insults, if the wine is freely flowing.

Imagine if I spent all this time writing to you, telling you all about my life through a "ghost writer" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwriter) or an outside editor, because despite my years of education and experience, I still can't communicate what I want to say. That would be such an utter failure to me, I'm not sure I could stand it. I simply don't understand that level of selfishness, or the depth to that inability. How can someone earn a lot of money for houses and cars in multiple, but can't talk to someone as open as me? How can that be successful? 

And before we go on to that, I'm tellin' you that these women have had the same Catholic upbringing that I did, except with way more expensive bells-and-whistles built into their experiences, like fancy parochial school educations from birth. Do you know how much of a selfish, sick, unfeeling, hard person you have to be to watch someone like me and not care enough to help out? Think about it. 

Think about the inaction, ineptitude, incompetence, insensitivity, and utter lack of generosity you have as a physical therapist on the clock only (like my brother's wife), but never when your sick mother-in-law with Multiple Sclerosis needs it, especially between those Medicare "donut holes" in her coverage that occur each and every year? Besides sickness and badness, is there any other explanation for withholding all that your family gave to you for free? Because I've heard every excuse there is too many times to count.

We've been dug into this deep hole as a society, that we find harder and harder to climb out of, because of the gross inequality that comes from the over-acquisition of material goods over the better skill sets that should be part of the healing arts, including excellent communication. If you can't talk about what's wrong, you are it. There isn't any other place to go, or hide. It's you. You are the problem. The problem in your life and in this world is you, so you better start talking. I'd start today, if I were you. Cough it up! Get it out! That's the only way to get rid of it. If you can talk your way into money, you can talk to people about your sickness. Cut the fucking bullshit. It's time.


Your homework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communication

The Pretend Boyfriend

http://goosebumps.wikia.com/wiki/Bride_of_the_Living_Dummy

When I was growing up, there were certain questions we weren't allowed to ask, like why our cousin John didn't get help for his obvious medical conditions that included a series of tics and hand-wringing rituals he HAD TO perform within certain time windows, or why our aunt was single for so long and lived with our grandparents. Of course, the only job she ever had was being an entry-level admin a mere block away from their condo development (which she drove to, because walking is for healthy people, suckers), and she slept on their pull-out couch in the living room. We knew they were sick people, but no one was allowed to talk about it openly or freely, because solving problems is also "taboo", especially if you're kind of an asshole, and they are.

Their fetishes and multiple life-long problems are always yours to solve for them, always, and any deviation from that established pattern of co-dependence unleashes their "inner bitch" like a heroin addict weaning off methadone. It wasn't worth the few visits we had to suffer through to even pretend to care about them anymore, when they so obviously didn't care about us or their own health. What was the point? Lapses in our natural childhood senses of curiosity created time frames they built into thick walls during our absences over the years to tend to our own lives, creating defense mechanisms made worse with time and deliberate neglect.

Even if we wanted to have normal conversations with my cousin, he's such a fucking dick, no one wants to. He's never done anything for anyone, ever. Not one card, or holiday gift, nor any kind of praise or acknowledgement from him (kudos can only go to him), unless he's forced to give us an awkward peck on the cheek (if the gathering is so small that he flares violently enough to attract attention, then my uncle goes over to him and whispers in his ear to make sure he resembles human customs), in case we didn't get the first thousand messages he telegraphed to us openly and without censure that he doesn't really give a shit if we live or die, just that he gets a pile of leftovers from us for free, because he has no friends, life, or cooking skills.

In fact, outside of his annoying trivia habit or compulsive train rides, there's absolutely nothing there for anyone. There is simply nothing beneath the surface. Once you get past the severity of his issues, you uncover a total selfish prick. Same thing with my aunt. After disarming her "raging bitch on steroids" act, you're left with a whiny little puke of a person, so it's not like we're peeling back layers of untruth to uncover the golden goddess within, or anything. She hoards cheap plastic crap from dollar stores, vomits from basic things like chairs that move slightly, getting "high" from junk food, soda, and hoarding, She's an evil little troll, which she knows, so that's why they came up with this whole diversion and ignoring routine; they don't want you to know how much they "soul-suck" from humans like you. But, we do know.

For years, my aunt pretended that her one boyfriend from college and the neighborhood (some kid we barely remembered from the 70s), "broke" her heart forever, because she deliberately ditched him night after night, leaving the plans that they'd all made together in the lurch on purpose, just to be a bitch to him and her supposed "best friend" (an average-looking blond girl, also local). They did the inevitable hook-up one night that was rigged by my aunt so she could milk it forever, because teenagers get together with enough time, booze, pot, and planning, if you leave them alone together often enough. Of course, she couldn't partake in any normal teenage partying, because she'll have psycho "bitch fits" in public, and that was the real secret: she didn't want to reveal the depths to her madness, even if that meant forcing her "bestie" and her boyfriend into a relationship that everyone knew she couldn't sustain anyway, due to illness and infirmity.

She's so inept at being "human", her old friends from back then left her company to get married in her marked absence, not reconnecting until they finally divorced many years (and kids) later. The old boyfriend probably thought he could finally collect on all that hot teenage sex they missed out on years ago (you know, because my grandparents were strict Catholics who kept an eye on her all the time, in between their fun senior cruises), and all those push-offs onto her friend, but no such luck. My aunt played it off like he just wanted "sloppy seconds". She just knew that their marriage couldn't last compared to their "true love", but it was pure bullshit. All of that manipulation and maneuvering around was simply to divert everyone from figuring out that she's secretly gay, but too fucked up to do anything about it, hence her unhappy reorienting of addictive energy into hoarding and mall trips for the insane, in lieu of genuine healthcare and real relationships.

All of those years of lies, spitting out curses, staged bitchy scenes with deliberately-done cold wars, tricks, and head games...just because some bitch no one likes is gay, and can't talk to the women she really likes. That's what all of their sickness that we were forced to absorb was about: their fucked-up gay shit, make-believe boyfriends and fake boyfriends be damned. I can't wait to find out what's hiding in the closet of the autistic kid. Shit, by now? Must be legions of skeletons in there, yo! Happy hunting today, freak-finders. Don't forget to vote. You know those freaks ain't registered for shit, let alone some primary. Too much work. Someone else can do it for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_apathy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue

Care Bear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Care_Bears

My Irish twin married his high school sweetheart, years after they met working at DiNoto's deli in New City, down the big hill from our home off Germonds Road, and across the street from her private Catholic school "Albertus Magnus", also in New City. She worked as a pretty counter-girl selling cookies and pastries up front, while my brother and his friend Mike Ryan washed bakery trays in the back. Unfortunately for my shy brother, his friend said he liked her first, which I suspect was a secret way of motivating him into finally asking her out, and it worked. My brother told everyone that as soon as he met her he knew she was "the one" for him, even after college and his jobs in the city.

They were the first couple in my family of siblings to marry and have children, squeezed as they were into a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side that I only visited a couple of times (once for the birth of my first nephew), because Dave and I lived in Colorado. They soon moved to Hoboken after my second nephew was born, and that's where Annie lived when the Towers fell, because I finally got through to her from my office phone at The Denver Post, as she described to me (as best as she could) a scene from a horrific, real-life nightmare that unfolded right outside of her living room window with my baby nephew crying in her arms, cut off from my brother in the city, who once worked for an Internet start-up in one of the towers.

She has never been verbal or communicative (just like my brother), so I didn't expect to have a relationship with her, as the quintessentially shy and aloof Irish-Catholic girl. She could be chilly, distant, and arrogant, like the most difficultly clannish Irish can be, and those were the traits I distanced myself from the most, because that's the intended effect: keep away! And so, as I write to you today, she has never once called me on the telephone, nor written me a letter, or sent me a card, nor has she ever answered any of my correspondence through email, laughingly telling my brother once as I visited their home that he was "horrible" to me for not staying in touch, which is about as far from family as you can get. What's the point of marrying? To become more isolated and alone?

It didn't make any sense to me, and it still doesn't, but like I wrote, I didn't really have any high expectations for her, given my brother's ongoing difficulties, and her own family. Her mother chain-smoked into a thin reedy shape (like a twitchy, over-caffeinated, tea-drinking Mick, you know the type), while her father always hung back behind his strong silent cop facade. When I asked her parents what they planned to do now that they were retired, they gave me a long blank stare, broken finally by his wife "....nothing....", followed by a nervous quick shrug. Okay....so....no traveling? "No. We're just gonna stay home." Huh. Nice talking to you, I guess. Of course, it wasn't.

Her older sister and brother-in-law provided even less conversation, drinking beers morosely at my brother's family holidays, supplying very little effort. Her sister was a bit "butch", but that could be a persona crafted from years of elbowing her way through ER's as a nurse. Her husband seemed to have a slight lisp, deferring to her like she was the boss who ran the show, and their one kid said absolutely nothing the entire time they were at my brother's house in New Jersey. There wasn't much to do in their quiet suburban neighborhood but sit in their kitchen eating and drinking, which I grew up doing. It was intolerable.

My brother likes nature, hiking, sports, music, food, concerts, museums, and photography, but Annie often seemed like she was just there for the ride as his addition, and nothing more. I often thought that, excellent student though she purported herself to be, she went into Occupational Therapy because it seemed like a steady job to have, like her sister's nursing career, because I have honestly never received any sort of care or healing vibe from her. Ever. Not once. Not once has she helped with my mother's extensive therapies that she needs for her M.S., nor has she ever helped my brother with his sports injuries related to his martial arts training, and that's her own immediate family! She does absolutely nothing for anyone else, except perhaps herself and hopefully my nephews, some of the time.

It's a surprisingly selfish way to be, for someone who spent all that time and money (and her parents) to become a part-time housewife realtor (and she did the one task I gave her related to that poorly last year), and an occasional therapist. What the...? Why do all that work to stay at home? I didn't get it, except perhaps she's embarrassed to tell us that she feels the most fulfilled as a wife and mother, which is fine by me, but why not just say that? What's with all the creepy silence?! It's frighteningly dysfunctional, which makes me glad that she didn't take to the O.T. life after my nephews were in high school, and she became certified to practice it in New Jersey. I wouldn't hire her!

She didn't speak up when my grandmother needed transferring to a hospital for an infection from the rehab facility she was in for the elderly, preferring instead to ignore the old women in wheelchairs turned to facing the wall by some minimum wage orderly who took their sweet time changing the sheets in their expensive rooms. It was one of the most shockingly abusive things I have ever seen in the healthcare industry. I was the one who went up to the desk (after visiting with my grandmother), to inquire about my grandmother's transfer status to Nyack Hospital, to be told by the office staff that they had called the ambulance service for her transfer, and we were all waiting on that. Huh...I turned around for support to see my brother, his wife, and their two sons standing mutely behind me, powerless and motionless, like they were avoiding capture and eye contact upon penalty of death.

The last time she seemed to have any impact upon healthcare was her first job after graduation from the pricey Boston school her working class parents paid for, after she bragged to us about having a total academic scholarship, when we were all broke and in college, which turned off us S.U.N.Y. kids about as much as possible, even when she told it to us over a few beers as part of her point of continued disdain towards us. She worked in Westchester for a depressing hospice run for children with terminal cancer, living for free on their campus in a small apartment that my brother stayed in, under the false pretext of living with my mom during their engagement period, like the rigidly Catholic stance her family portrays to outsiders.

I visited them there, to gently inquire why children would need occupational therapy. What did she do, exactly? Again, even over several bottles of beer, it was excruciating to get any information or the barest of answers out of her. She hemmed and hewed, finally saying that she rotated their limbs to prevent them from getting bed sores. Oh....that must be hard for you, since none of your patients ever recover. Yeah, with a shrug and a downward look. We were there for a graduation party to start that she was giving for one of her fellow classmates, which included a girl from my school (hi, Shiela!) who has since helped my mom with PT, when she did that type of work.

They even had a theme for the party, giving each other cutesy cards and little stuffed animals that they giggled over like schoolgirls, because they had dubbed themselves "Care Bears" while in school together, after a dopey cartoon made for kids and the greeting card industry. I was surprised my brother didn't say anything, because we typically outed obviously gay stuff in cartoons, like the infamously purple-triangle "Tinky Winky" from the twee children's show "Teletubbies"*. My classmate Sheila was a total hippie burn-out in high school, smoking cigarettes and pot at "The Wall" with the other low-class metal-head kids, even dropping out of Honors English class (which I stayed in), as well as Honors French. I talked to her about dropping after the few first classes, because I was scared as the youngest kid in every single class I attended at school, and she said the same thing back to me, then actually did it.

I was shocked to find out that she earned an O.T. degree for something as "square" as being a healthcare aide, because she had never once mentioned having an interest in science, let alone attending advanced science classes in high school, in any of the sciences! Her friends in high school attended B.O.C.E.S. in the afternoon for grease monkeys who wouldn't attend college (in lieu of matriculated classes at Clarkstown South), and carried cosmetician cases with their dummies to experiment hair dyeing on. I actually thought she dropped out of school senior year, because she was really into doing LSD, like the harder core Rockland rednecks who came from seriously addicted farm families. "Why excel?", they said in response to us. They were going to die anyway! That was her crowd, back in the day. So, it was a bit of a shock to see her there at my future sister-in-laws party, especially since I now worked in publishing, just like my advanced English Literature skills in school directed me to.

Sheila avoided talking to me at all, or making eye contact, or making the obligatory awkward small talk, preferring instead to adopt the gay "Care Bear" identity that this strange group of girls had. I suppose it was in deference to their training, like brothers-in-arms have after serving in wartime together, but as I watched them pass these little kid items between one another, I thought it was one of the gayest things I'd ever seen in my life, and I suspect that my brother's wife knows the powers of observation I have by now. Perhaps that's the real reason behind all this "radio silence" her and my brother use as a weapon against anyone and everyone. I called out my parents recently for his latest communication blackout, which was met with the same patterned resistance that reeks of enabling, but that ends today, my dear readers, because now you know that I know. I know.

Murphy's Law – Care Bear Lyrics

I just broke a bottle
I just broke some glass
I don't know much more to
And I'm kicking your ass

So what if I broke a bottle
So what if I kicked his ass
Quit counting on me
You're a pain in my ass

I don't need no doctor I can't pay the fee
Don't need no social workers counting on me
I'm not sick there's nothing wrong with my head
Better leave me alone you're gonna end up dead

Care bear
Caring on me

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletubbies