Slackers

All of my early life, I was told that I was sloppy, lazy, careless, and a pig, without actually being any of those things. The name-calling was used by my parents to hide their real agenda: using children as a workforce to make their lives easier. It was simple to them. Why else were we born? I was talking to my friend Katy today (while getting a haircut from her) about wild American politics, because the Russia she's from is so very different from our world here. But, times do change. We no longer allow children to get work permits from their elementary school principals for a paper route like they did when I was a kid, nor do we ask children to bear adult economic burdens by letting them leave school, like my grandparents had to do during The Great Depression.

But, my parents didn't have that to deal with. My mom had one (ONE!) part-time job during school wrapping Christmas presents at a department store (and that was only seasonal) because she complained bitterly about the homemade food my grandparents served her, so they told her to go out and get a job and go buy her own food. They were great cooks, by the way. My dad always complained about his terrible childhood and crippling poverty...with my nursing assistant grandmother and medallion-owning grandfather with his own taxi. 

It never added up to their self-described portraits of severe deprivation that they continually tried to sell us as a reason for their abuses against us, especially since I grew up with my maternal grandparents a mere 5-minute drive away. Sometimes the truth could be had for a 30 second phone conversation with them, too. Into this toxic cocktail came the Baby Boomer hangover about "free" everything without any work required (just like life!) that lasted for a couple of years in the 60s when they were teenage drop-outs, followed by my parents Silent Generation of rabid consumer fantasies fueled by massive t.v. consumption, where anything can be bought for a price including happiness, again, just like real life!

Any GenX'er wanting to make it had to give lip service to a bunch of half-baked stoner ideas from the late 60s, or subliminally gay "buddy" Western movies from the repressed and deeply closeted 50s, with neither being the culturally correct stance to have. People were totally full of shit all around us, every single day, parroting lines from t.v. commercials for dish soap like a long lost savior had just given them the winning golden ticket to a better life. It was fucking insane. No one told the truth anymore, because you couldn't make money that way.

Just like fashion magazines pushed the same vapid blond as their falsely generic ideal about "American" beauty so, too, did movies "toe the line" creatively by flattering fragile Baby Boomer egos with their hugely overblown senses of self (derived mostly commercially and economically), by rehashing the old media term "slacker" as a deliberate mischaracterization of GenerationX, the same way marijuana was demonized for being dark and mad. It had absolutely no resemblance to the blue collar roots that me and my friends had coming up from the city, with some of us from the projects, while working 3 part-time jobs just to get to school.

Of course, that's the plan behind any kind of serious bullying: make up a falsehood passed off as the truth, spread it around, and then sit back to enjoy the show. While some Ritalin-dosed muthafucka easily got funding and industry backing in the early 90s to make a really bad movie about arty assholes in Austin*, the rest  of us did what every real working artist does: we got a good night's sleep so we could wake up and go to work again, day after day after day. Not the exactly same picture as Hollywood's version, is it? It's not mine, either.


* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_(film)

Thug Life 4E

Trifling 'hood rats ain't nuthin' new to me. Like I've explained to y'all  before, the first real criminals I met who tried to scam me were my very own family."Home" and "house" and "safe" were never really words that signified good places for me to live in, as my sickest family members told me every time they thought I "stepped out" of line of their controlling manipulations. Continually consistent and strongly applied coercion is the very first sign to working class kids that our parents or older siblings are gearing up for their next big push at us, in a series of highly coordinated acts that spoke of their persistent ability to attack me behind my back as a child, which solidified my "head of household" status to me over and over again, at a very young age, when I was just some po' girl chile with no one to help me out, and nowhere to go.

Except that I did. I always had my excellently faithful grandparents to back me up with their good health and superior strength, as a direct contradiction to the fearful paranoia that so deeply marks the sickest people around us. They illegally violated our privacy and sense of security every time they were caught abusing us, and that could happen at any time, with their violently frenzied periods of deep paranoia that define the day-to-day reality that is mental illness and psychoses. It became so bad, me and my brothers began threatening exposure to our school teachers and social services, with the achievement of a new family policy clearly stipulating that there would be no hits to the head, so as to prevent telling marks from clearly showing where anyone of authority could see them, not that we thought foster care was any better than what we had. We knew.

It didn't stop my mom from beating up my oldest brother into a broken arm that he covered up for her expertly at Nyack Hospital's ER back in the day, with the conveniently well-practiced excuse of "falling down the stairs" at the ready by both parties that they carefully rehearsed during the car ride over. It was easy for him to do, too, because my brother had prior sports injuries that my mom could frame into a clear sense of his proven carelessness as a wild boy child. 

Our "savage" genetics were also an easy target for her to blame us for any of her abuse that she aimed at us. We were raked over the coals by the mad people around us, to the point of our collective perfection in comparison to their obviously bad behavior, which was then thrown into our faces, too. "What are you, like, 'perfect' or something?" We learned to avoid crazy people the way a cat burglar breaks into a city apartment during the summertime, through an open window by a conveniently placed fire escape.

My self-defense makes attempts at scamming me into this absurdly surreal game of "cat-and-mouse" that I can best with both hands, arms, and legs bound tightly, with a blindfold on. And it continued throughout my life at every public venue I ever "dared" to appear at, including the very public abuse that I suffer(ed) at this public library, because it doesn't matter where I go or what I do, who I am with, and what I look like. It doesn't actually have anything to do with me at all, because I don't do anything wrong, which is a huge problem for a violently acting-out criminal sitting next to me at a public computer, or on the bus to the city, or on the subway, or at work in some office.

It became a pattern that, no matter how cleverly and craftily done, I managed to fight back against —on little food, sleep, money, clothing, medicine, support, and/or shelter—sussed out in record time, to the horrified amazement of yet another delusional individual who felt protected enough to attack me in full clear view of several authority figures in charge who had every opportunity to clear up the situation with one word in my favor. But, that's part of the job, right?

Over time, I even developed a handy "cheat sheet" formula for businesses and other public venues that preferred to witness ongoing abuse that goes unchecked without protecting me, because, you know, I'm obviously society's number one scumbag. One: hire a bitchy thick blond to "man" your reception area with an even bigger desk to match her overblown ego. Two: allow her to gossip loudly and spread rumors within clear earshot of large groups of people who will then feign a planned indifference that you will pretend to control with Three: a series of intentionally inept "scolds" done purely for publicity's sake, before telling your mistress(es) behind closed doors to keep on doing exactly what she's been doing, because, again, I'm the beautiful, high-performing single woman on an extremely tight budget that you like to squeeze as part of some con game.

She, in turn, will blow on her troll dolls in an unchecked madness that you will laugh about in an obviously evil way, because you like seeing your lead bitch with fangs rave at a woman out of your league. So, on this very special Friday, let's go over your "Special Needs" list of rules that even a kindergartner understands, just in case you plead ignorance or impairment. Ready? Okay, here we go!

Children Ten Commandments

1. Have no other gods.
2. Have no idols.
3. Honor God's name.
4. Honor the Sabbath day.
5. Honor your parents.
6. Do not murder.
7. Do not commit adultery.
8. Do not steal.
9. Do not perjure yourself.
10. Do not covet.

Got it? Good! Now, let's go over every flaw you have, in clear language that even you can understand, with your list of serious impairment(s):

Vice		Virtues
Lust	Luxuria	Chastity	Castitas
Gluttony	Gula	Temperance	Temperantia
Greed	Avaritia	Charity (or, sometimes, Generosity)†	Caritas (Liberalitas)
Sloth	Tristitia/Acedia	Diligence	Industria
Wrath	Ira	Patience	Patientia
Envy	Invidia	Kindness	Humanitas
Pride	Superbia	Humility	Humilitas

^†This virtue is generally considered to be the greatest and the most important of all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins

Don't play this here New York mama for a "sucka", kids. That is all. See you next week. Be ready. It's "go" time!

Speed Freaks

3.) Over-stimulate yourself. Caffeine, tobacco, loud noise, driving fast, working without breaks, skipping meals - there are so many ways to keep the body and brain on overdrive and keep the anxiety levels high. 

My mom and her sisters were adept at abusing each other into what they believed were less overt addictions that they thought cleverly hid their compulsions and addictions (strange as they are) like shopping, hoarding, and staging fake scenes to create anxiety they huff like a can of paint. It became a psychotic form of artistry over the more rigorous disciplines behind thinking, doing, and making, which is for suckers like me, who pay their benefits through our day jobs because if we don't, they'll make our lives a living hell that's hard to prove in a court of law without devoting mountains of time and evidence to it, therefore I must have "too much free time" and that means I need to work more (hence their shaky lazy superiority over "working stiffs" like me and the million other people who take care of them), because if you can't abuse people behind closed doors with secret horror shows, who will pay the taxes needed for their disabilities?

Instead of managing children, life, and stress, my mom would pull to a short-stop in the middle of a highway, threatening to crash her car and kill us all if we didn't behave, creating over-dramatic heart palpitations that released the addictive body chemistry she needs to cope, over more obvious (and honest) relaxants like drinking and smoking, which could be pointed out to anyone and are therefore actionable by their feared perpetrators, like, say, someone very bright who caught onto their mental illnesses. Oh, they'll say they're afraid of being dragged away by scary large men wearing white coats, carrying butterfly nets and tranquilizer guns, and then cast without consent into some haunted house horror show, but those stories are now relics from our distant medical past.

Without having any real excuses to hide behind anymore, it's become harder and harder for actual head-cases to strike out against load-bearing "normals" like me, as if chronic abuse and violent derangement are key facets of our human culture that they must protect in order to thrive as a species, when oftentimes it's simply me and my brothers trying to get my mom to stick to her weekly therapy and take her medicine for the billionth time, which she alternately hides and/or lies about to blame on..who else? Me! Children and other family members are amazingly adept excuse-generators for a bevy of life's woes, like hiding sickness and delusional behavior. 

She's always been a very bad driver who uses a host of convenient replies like: 1) she didn't need to drive when she lived in the city so that's why she's "bad" at it, and that was only admitted after she drove into a brick wall with a realtor sitting right next to her while she shopped for her fantasy senior apartment complex with handy car-ports for auto aficionados like herself (preferring instead to joy-ride with my grandfather's car back in the Bronx, without a driver's license), or 2) she didn't learn to drive until her 30s, and that was only because of her friendship with a woman at the local DMV during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania, where she had major diseases like "walking pneumonia" with the spot on her lung even, so she got off easy on her driving test (that's her friend's fault, get it?) which leads to 3) her driving so fucking poorly, she gets into tons of accidents that she covers up whenever she can, because for many years she also drove with two feet, one on the gas and the brake (sometimes at the same time) plus 4) she cares more about her car than her own life and the lives of others at times, which she hides behind cutesy stories about being Mario Andretti the race car driver, or being "like a cabbie, fast but good" which she could never actually do for a living because "she's a woman" (sexism, you see), which is also an excuse for her not performing well and besides that, she was a commuter. "Everyone drives fast during 'rush hour'. That's why it's called that." Oh.

And finally, she liked speeding in cars as an older woman with a more advanced case of MS because it "gave me my life back" with the gift of mobility that's robbed her the use of her dead limbs over using an actual motorized wheelchair, preferring instead to torture us with her snail's pace that's necessary to "retain her ambulatory status" (pronounced "stay-tuss, which is different!"). It's like she's talking to her group at the local church, or the high school, or in attendance at the public library, because she's gone to a bunch of those. First it was for the Divorced Catholics group, then it was the Divorced Catholics group for singles, and then the MS support group (too handicapped for her tastes), but she was finally outmatched in these modern times by all the pros on the high-profile talk show / court t.v / reality programming circuit, with years of solid professional acting chops under their respective belts, so she had to give it up.

Instead of coping, she harassed me one Christmas with a death-defying trip in a really bad blizzard across the Tappan Zee bridge and back from Connecticut. She insisted that she HAD TO see family because "it won't be Christmas if we don't go", forcing me to pack up all of our stuff, packed into "her" car with my Mal in the back. He was forced to sleep in the garage because of all the allergies they supposedly have, even though my brother and his wife now have a dog  that's "allergen free", so I could spend my time being demeaned through their bitchy comments about my humble well-thought gifts, my mom's huffing abuse (because my brother's wife ignores her completely), and checking on my dog throughout the trip because his kids opened the garage door whenever they wanted to, forgetting that my dog was inside, so I could do all this while sleep-deprived, too. Best. Holiday. Ever.

If I dared to mention the conditions she abused us into, she'd bring up her sisters affectations about weather phobias and car driving panic attacks. At least she was better than them, right? Right? No, that's sharing the same genetic disorder in different ways, like the breast cancer bouts you all had. Oh...She might then lapse poetic about flights of fancy over magical lanes of sparkling snow, like she was riding on Santa's sleigh and I should just get over it because it's fun and besides, it's Christmas. There's always a reason behind a reason behind an excuse until finally, in this century, there isn't anymore, because there isn't. It's called real medicine.

http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/thrivenyc.page

Grand

http://www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org/if-you-love-somebody-grandparents-raising-kids/?gclid=CM3xoaOL5skCFc2RHwodBloIYg

Like every family out there in the real world, mine also struggle with mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, learning impairments, developmental disabilities, age, abuse, neglect, and sometimes extreme ethnic prejudices. My father's sister Marilyn was so challenged that she spawned (and then abandoned) two families, back-to-back. First was my cousin Brian, born to an Italian-American man I've never met, and then summarily dropped off at my paternal grandparents' door, without ever getting a "thank you" or one single, decent paycheck to cover his expenses, I'm sure. And why would she have done that, when she was proud to show off her white vinyl Go-Go boots instead of her own son, tucked away as they were under his bed in my grandparent's Queens apartment?

No, she was proud rather of being deemed "good looking" enough back in the day to dance for men for money, thus creating a generation of orphans we've yet to shake in this century. My "Grandpa Fred" made good money from his cab-driving by then (as the proud, hard-working owner of a medallion, an amazingly incredible feat given his poor, immigrant, Depression-Era roots), and so my cousin at least had my grandmother and him, a solid roof over his head, and my grandpa's really good food in his tummy, even though it still wasn't enough to conquer his drug addiction in the future.

I'm just glad that they were able to provide for him for a time, enough to be considered a real family, especially since my step-grandfather and grandmother never had kids of their own. What a blessing in disguise it must have been for them as an older couple! As bad as my father's family is with their notorious "disappearing acts", I'm extraordinarily proud of them and their loving giving to Brian, alone in the world without a father and mother as he was. At least he had them, and at least he has us. That's a lot more than many of our most beleaguered children around the world (and around the way) have.

We need to support our elders and grandparents who decide to adopt their children's children, whether from infirmity or neglect, as a way to stem the bleeding our sacred family's have been suffering under; this weight that we all need to bear as equally as we can. Thank you to my man Ernie Anastos (geez, stay positive, will ya?) and the wonderfully gentle Kathy Gibson for highlighting her parenting support platform for those grandparents who can adopt, so that all of our children may thrive to great success in the future. We need every hand we can take for this battle that we're in. Thank you! This one's for you today, fighting the good fight every single day you get 'em fed, dressed, and out the door to school. You're not alone anymore. We're here.

http://stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/back-to-school-picnic-2014.html

http://www.stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/back-to-school-picnic-2015.html

http://stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/mothers-day-luncheon-2014.html 

For the rest of you, you need to do this NOW. That means tech support for those elders in your community who have school-age children using computers and smartphones and tablets and laptops (standard in most school districts nowadays), free backpacks at the beginning of each and every school year that they have enrolled children, plus free pantries for food and toiletries. Ever look at a Social Security check? Yeah, make that work. Ladies, I know you feel me on this one.

Hooters

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

Not all art directors are created equally. I've worked with a lot of disordered people in my time, usually while smoking a cigarette with one of them outside, as they told me their similar tales of woe. But Lisa was different in a few key ways. She fit the template for being slightly arty without being too much so, talented without outshining anyone around her, and noticeable only in her prolonged absences when the work she did piled up. She hid behind conformity, nursing her work along in small, bite-sized chunks, preferring to hide behind typesetting for book interiors than the open warfare that typically marks cover design meetings. She simply didn't have enough personality to set the world on fire, which she knew about in rigorous detail.

One of the stories she liked to tell me over and over again was about her parents first meeting at a mental institution: he was the big orderly intern who helped her mother as a delicate new resident with the harder patients. Like a lot of fucked up rich kids from WASPy families, she took small pleasures in the shock value associated with her long term exposure to the psycho-therapeutic arts. It contrasted highly with my working class roots littered with empty beer bottles and full ashtrays. Didn't smell the same to me at all, nor did my telling it make her more comfortable with me. It's not a soothing space to be in.

She loved to tell me that she never received affection from her coldly intellectual parents, preferring the pleasures of one particular dog breed that she became attached to. It was "kooky" without crossing that sharp line between revealing the depths of her obviously medicated state and her robotic creaky movements around the office. Every interaction within our small studio area was lined with her disorders that she could only hint at in a professional business environment; a well-honed performance designed for her to slowly draw off a steady income from bland corporate environments that tolerated creativity in small bite-sized pieces. That was her real expertise.

One of her weirder stories about her life with mental dysfunction centered around her strange sense of self about having a beautiful daughter, something most mothers typically wish for. She was confused by it (of course), as she still struggled in her 60s to accept something that existed within the world whether she liked it or not. She could be that slow cognitively-speaking, which made her a great fit for the dysfunctional family business she landed at the end of her career. 
I ignored her petty political ploys most of the time because they were that dull to me. She told me every other month or so that she wanted me fired, which never happened on her say-so. It was funny and heartbreaking to watch her slowly drown in her own ego and incompetence, clutching at old political devices for an office climate that no longer existed in modern New York City.

She loved that her blond Shiska-looking daughter (she's 1/2 Jewish and 1/2 WASP: people, do not try this blend at home without extreme caution) got her lots of attention, as much as she hated that it wasn't about her. And so, in retaliation for her own nature, she set up a series of passive-aggresive hurdles for her daughter to struggle with and then overcome at her command; as controlling and manipulative as her outdated office politics. It didn't work at all, but that's what pays the bills for a lot of inept psychotherapists: not solving the problem for their clients, just nursing it along minutely while they purposely sabotage their own healing process. She shot her foot publicly that often.

Her and her "younger" (and also deaf) husband riffled through her daughter's clothes after she moved out west, pillaging an old set of telltale shiny orange "booty shorts" for what she described as their Halloween costume: old "Hooters" workers entangled in a sexual discrimination lawsuit. It was so fucking weird, I had to know why she thought that was a good idea. Did anyone know what her outfit meant? No, she laughed, they thought it was funny that we wore those kind of outfits. Oh. I wondered what her poor daughter thought about their oddly dual-gendered approach to a business that remains heterosexual at its core, but like any of her answers, I didn't have the time or money to coax it out of her like her therapists did. Naturally, I already knew what fueled her envy and self-loathing.

You see, short of walking into the office with a shotgun under each arm, she was that invisible to us. In her desperate attempts to avoid becoming a target again, she managed to make herself completely unnoticeable whatsoever, in a PTSD-like response to the shifting sands of big time New York City publishing. She simply couldn't hack it, not with all the fake fairytales in the world, no matter how often she told them. She was a coward, and that was the real outfit she wore every single day of her life. Like any other really sick person, I wished her no harm, as much as I grieved for the children who were left in her care, no matter how temporary that was, because (and here's how I always "caught" her) she came from a wealthy family that had absolutely no need to push her daughter into a disrespectful job like a waitress job at a wing joint that bordered on being a strip club.

Instead of being shocked at her break from "vanilla" normality, I was merely aghast at her vicious nature. "Was your daughter ever hassled there?", I asked her. Oh, yeah, she said. Her job was right off of Columbus Circle during their big construction phase, and one time she was followed home all the way to Brooklyn on the subway, by one of her regulars from the construction site. I don't think there's enough Valium on her planet that would've covered up my genuinely horrified look. G-d, the horror of her....she continually set up her daughter for serious hurt and permanent damage, with obvious murderous intent. She had the decency to blush at my straightforward questions, while giggling nervously like a little girl. What a nightmare she is, I thought to myself. Thankfully, her daughter made it out of her horrible house alive (with or without the Halloween costume), because I see you, you bitch. I see right fucking through you.

Garanimals

In case you haven't figured it out, yet (because I publish to whoever happens to be reading, or not, as the case may be), my mom has a lot of really serious issues with her brain. Some are silly, but many are not. She did not adjust well to young motherhood, but given her brain, there would be no reason to expect otherwise, so it wasn't. It was pretty much exactly how I describe it, which is hard for her, because she suffers from severe limitations in her brain's ability to remember stuff, sometimes really easy basic stuff, too, which is very embarrassing for her as a self-described "feminist" with "advanced degrees in science". She simply doesn't understand how she went to school with a brain disorder and yet, people do it all the time.

Enter onto this groovy 70s scene a woman who was never very feminine, even on a good day, coupled with the unnerving task of dressing children appropriately for school and life. It's excruciating to watch now, but as a child, it was horribly abusive. She missed certain key dates and appointments, and she was excessively tardy, which she covered under a nasty princess-like attitude that allowed her to sweep into a room like she was going to some swinging cocktail party, except it was my ballet class, and she left me sitting on the curb for almost 2 hours when she was a five minute drive away, because she babbles compulsively on the phone with her similarly disordered sisters for stress relief, none of them actually healthy enough to retain the repetitive inane gossip they share.

I was privy to such revealing truths overheard by one of them as thus: "So. How ya doin'. Oh, yeah? How was _______ (insert name of local suburban chain store here). Oh, yeah? How much? Blah blah blah blah blah..." Then, at some point, someone would get up to use the bathroom, or simply run out of tiring gossip, and at that point it was understood in their OCD world that this brief pause or interruption ("NO! Go ahead! You talk now!"), was a signal among them that they could emit throat sounds and other vocalizations amounting to nothing. 
For some reason, my mom and her delusional sisters thought this placed them far above our safety and security as kids, because such is the power of untreated patterns coupled with crippling delusions. And so it went, still, to this day, as I sit here writing to you.

Fortunately for us, most of our dads worked the city as "Mad Men", which gave them the ability to sell to their desperately bored and firmly ensconced housewives. There was a bevy of products available in the 70s and 80s for every type of disorder three times over, in brightly covered and very hoard-able plastic, which gave them the same type of shopping high as if they fondled them directly in stores for hours, so as to check out from reality. "Stuff" became this way out of your domestic iron chains, when in actuality, it was another outward manifestation of a common compulsive/addictive disorder that needs firm addressing in these modern times, lest we generate more "reality" t.v. contestants and their weirdo objects, an ironic term if ever there was.

Because my mom was so challenged in such an obviously similar way to other dysfunctional females, she used t.v. to create an artificial world that she could drone out to and disappear within, and that was exactly the point advertisers wanted to make. Unhappy? Here: buy this! It was instant and immediate relief, but not the kind that ever solved their problem. Do you have to feed kids? How awful! Throw this on the table, girls. Then you can have FUN FUN FUN again! Do your growing children need clothes for school....again?! Omigosh I can't believe children grow so fast. They're like weeds! All of Madison Avenue in the city catered to their flawed senses of self (mostly lacking), and their immaturity about caring for others, by solidifying their points of view through commercials, which gave them the wrong idea that they were getting it right.

Ever year my mom used a thick Sears catalog to handle the enormity of clothing for small people by asking us to go through it, flag what we wanted, and then she would order it over the phone and pick it up in Nanuet, a task you can still perform in Rockland County today, though most "bubbies" have migrated to the internet to hide their gnawing addictions. My mom floundered even under that simple system, and like-minded disabled salespeople responded in kind, by designing a foolproof way to clothe children with as little thought as possible, you know, because the fate of the world is in your hands, SuperWoman!

It was nuts, but so were our parents. Even more pathetic than hating a rather banal and easy task was the fact that my mom mismatched the turtle icon with the giraffe pants. It may have been cruelly on purpose, so that we would be mocked in school, in retaliation for not liking her horrible dashed-together food, or simply because "Dr. Diane" didn't want to be bothered attending to the needs of others, which is the same type of patterned self-centered selfishness that each and every kid I grew up with had to contend with: the mindset of a bully, whether small or large. It didn't matter if it was clothed in a child's sized shirt, or a grown-ups tailored suit jacket back then, and it still doesn't. Gen X'ers see past advertising gimmicks easily today because we had to back then, just to get through any school day. YAY! Fashion!*

So bring it on, world. We're more than ready for any type of insanity you got. I got ten kinds of crazy flavors in my peeps, some of which you ain't never heard of before kid, ya feel me? Yeah, you do. That's 'cause it's a round-the-way type of life from NYC, babay. Everybody crazy in the hood. It's our way here, yo. Project people be snappin' out all day every day, just 'cause you there, right? Word. Your crazy-ass Brooklyn grandma is now my mom's next door neighbor, and my mom's from the Bronx, okay? Let's work through this together, people. We ain't got nobody else to solve problems for us.


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

Black Eyeliner

"I HATE pichas! I look so weirdly dwarfish and outta praportion  in them! Ugh, she could wayeh a papeh bayag and still look good. I know! I KNOW! I hate huh, too! Don't stand next to huh in pichas!"

By now you know that I grew up in the 80s, right after Punk Rock and New Wave hit it big, and that my family life is less than stellar; the music has changed, but not my peeps. At least, not much. When I was small, we thought my mom's minuscule youngest sister was a kid, because mentally she is. She was 16 when I was born and because she's handicapped, we treated her like a favored pet, because if we didn't, she might come at you with a really sharp knife from the kitchen drawer that she snatched with rare Hobbit-like quickness in under 40 seconds, made odder still by the fact that she is chronically lazy and almost completely physically inept....except in highly important cases of mania, like someone noticing she is very small and unpleasant.

It had some funny moments (like only people who grew up around serious disorders can have), which was driven home for me last week through the animated show "Bob's Burgers", about an eccentric family with a wacky "New Yawk mutha" who has a (surprise, surprise), paranoid tinfoil hat-wearing younger sister who has to hide underneath a tent to go to sleep at night. In her ample spare time, she also creates weird games called "Gail Force Winds" with rules that she can change at anytime, like blowing your game pieces off the board because you're 9 and you don't yet realize that she is clinically schizoid because she acts like a kid you go to school with, and that's why she slept on your grandparent's couch for most of her adult life, with the exception of that time when she had a series of creepy basement apartments, first in my Mom's house (where she was thrown out for competing with my mom's compulsive rules about germs and cleanliness), and some other house in New City...with weird games that had fluctuating rules according to her mental state.

I was fine for awhile growing up, hiding out among a gaggle of grand-kids who are much much stranger than me (some have obvious Autism), but once I hit puberty and started to outgrow her, she went nuts, which was bad enough, because I was the teenager coping with all these changes, like my dad running away with his barely legal secretary, and me losing my childhood forever...but I digress. I began showing markedly different traits than my mom and her short, fat sisters. Like some nightmare fable, they grew wider and uglier from their abusive lifestyles, while I sprung up and grew leaner, with a beautifully perfect oval porcelain face to match, which they noticed sarcastically every time there were two of them in a room against me. Unfortunately for me, I had the body to match, too: perfectly long legs that went on for days to match the rest of my athletic frame, with perfectly proportioned hands and feet to match, beautifully sized and featured extremely well.

After the awkwardness imposed upon me by my mom's poor taste in hair and clothes, my coming out phase was disastrous for me. I grew up to be a supermodel at a normal height, so there would be no giraffe jokes that I could hide behind. I was....well, perfect-looking, and I grew more so with each passing day. I learned how to style my hair really, really well, found a great hairdresser on my own, earned my own money and bought my own clothes, then experimented with makeup that wasn't my mom's cast-off Mary Kay cosmetics, made for someone twice my age. I wasn't wildly punk or new age, but that didn't matter. I was gorgeous and normal, in fact, brilliant at school with lots of friends, hobbies, and interests, which I began not hiding as I blossomed verbally, too.

My handicapped maternal aunt with my paternal grandmother. They knew.

It was under this cloudy sky that I stupidly accepted one of my aunt's summer invites to go to her rented beach house with the younger sister, without my mom or any of my brothers. My mom was cautious about it, and so was I: they are really incompetent. But, we figured, my mom wanted some space and I loved the beach. Who cares, right? They have a house at LBI and I love to swim, which they can't do well. I'd maybe make a few new friends and be at the beach most of the time. It was a complete disaster. The first day out, I was walking with my youngest aunt to the beach when something happened; we passed by a house with two teenage boys about my age playing a board game outside, on the second floor deck of the house their family rented. "Hi!", one of them waved to me from the balcony, "Hey, how are you? What's your name? Do you want to come up and play a game with us?" Maybe! I was thirteen and I really liked boys, but, no, thanks guys, I'm going to the beach with my aunt. Maybe later?

And that was it. She went completely bat-shit insane. She gnashed her teeth in that crazy way she does, baring her large teeth in her huge head that sits on a short squat body, pulling her lips back in a snarl that bares her gums, hissing at me, spitting curses, calling me a slut with black eyeliner and that's why those boys wanted to talk with me, yeah (building up steam), because I look like a WHORE!! in that makeup and that's why I attract attention I shouldn't have and it was all my fault and I look like a slut. She spit out words like daggers, so insultingly out of place to what happened on a mild Jersey Shore beach day that I knew immediately what was happening: she was going to try and destroy me over my beauty, and if she caught me alone, she'd do something really bad to me.

It was such a bad betrayal by a woman who had pledged in front of G-d and family to protect me (she was supposed to be my "godmother"), that I didn't know what to do. My beach day was ruined, which was part of the point, and I was in tears; hysterical, scared, shocked, scalding child's tears, with no responsible adults around: not my mom, or my dad, or my grandparents. No one was there who would help me. I made a scene back at the house anyway, to drive the point home in front of my mom's sisters and my younger cousins, so that they would know it was real, though I knew they'd probably cover their asses and lie about the situation later on. I was bereft. I have never felt so lonely and isolated in all of my life, save for one or two times after that. I was trapped, because I couldn't drive away. There were no phones, so I had to walk by myself to a payphone to call my mom in tears.

She felt terrible, and she knew I was telling the truth. She knows her sisters. We talked about her driving down to pick me up, but I wanted to stick it out. Rockland County is many hours away, and as single mom, her life was hard enough. I calmed down a little bit, wandered around the ice cream hut until sunset, then slowly went back to the house. My cousin talked to me a bit, which helped. He lived with his mom's madness every day, too, and his father had died recently from cancers caused by smoking and alcoholism. He understood, which helped me calm down enough to stick it out for the rest of the vacation, because I had a witness who could testify later, on my behalf.

I didn't talk much for the rest of the summer, and from then on out, I knew my aunt was so sick, that she could kill me in the wrong mood, or if I was alone with her for too long. I turned inward against myself, and after the insults that stung successfully manifested itself directly in my markedly changed behavior, the sisters snapped at fake "slut" slurs as the ammo of choice. I would go on afterwards to have sporadic periods of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll brought on by family madness, fueled by the fact that I might as well try and act like a slut, since I looked like one anyway. I was doomed no matter what I did, which opened the door wide to a series of adult male predators. And to think that I once thought, as a young kid, that I looked like an 80s rock star.

A year later: me and my bro at the beach (I was 15) with a friend and my mom, wearing my "slutty" 80s eyeliner. We did it, man. We won, because we survived. BTW - "quel tan" in this photo, bro! Rock on!

To all my peeps: I told you I wouldn't drop this, because Rockland kids shouldn't punk-out on one another, ever. Here you go, man, for that next time your moms gets drunk and mad at you for breathing at her the "wrong" way, or your dad gets slap happy with his stupid asshole drunk friends when the family BBQ turns bad after nightfall...without the horribly nigthmarish "Annie" foster care bullshit to hurt you even worse. 

I kept my word, didn't I? Yes, I did. Because I want you to make it, guy. I don't want to be the only one at the top anymore, you know? And call the cops in town. They're my friends as grown-ups. You can trust them to help. We went to school together. They know me. Also, in this century, we leave a paper-trail that's mile wide and a mile long until we get the help we need for one another. Do it. This Mommy doesn't lie to cover her ass. (I might to help you, though. Acting chops also help me to not get knifed in a drunken bar fight gone bad, ya dig ;) We have to stick together in this world to make it.

http://www.informationrockland.com/Search.aspx
http://bit.ly/1C2Rrnf 

Focus

Doubly exposed, with a tensely unhappy look.

All my life, my mother has taken really bad photos. It's always been weird to me, because before I was born and for some short time afterwards, my mom loved painting. I still have the precious little watercolor that she made me for my baby room, of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet floating on a watery green background that was supposed to reference grass, but I don't mind the abstraction. My first oil paint kit was my mom's old discarded one that I pulled out of the back of a basement closet. I was reminded every time I opened it, with it's old brushes, linseed oil, and postcards that she used for reference. She wasn't very good, but she also didn't stick with it. There's one painting I found (now hanging above her bed at my putting) that she did of a landscape from a photo. It has some brilliant elements, but just like me with a fondness for science, her vocations led her elsewhere.

Which made her utter lack of ability with cameras even more troubling. Why? She hated posing for pictures, gladly showing me her sulky pouting baby pictures in black and white that my grandparents made her pose for. She cited all sorts of excuses: she hated getting her hair set with curls, she didn't feel like posing, or she was "too busy" to take a good shot. Baffling answers all, but they didn't tell me the real story, because unlike my mother, I could read pictures like they were books. Her photos were all over the place; bad angles, blurry shots, jarringly off composition, always out of focus, or she had a really tight, forced expression of her face when she did pose.

Cutting me out of the picture, and getting away with it.

I didn't really make the connection until many years later, years after I expertly learned the businesses of visual communication, and the various methods of those mediums, because it's that complex. My mom hates posing for photos because she looks crazy in them, and she knows it. It gelled for me with my oldest brother and his wife: with all their compulsive traveling, not one single travel shot produced by them (they also shun the creativity of most social media). Not one. Oh, years of oddly posed Christmas cards of them that they framed for us as "gifts", my savvy marketing family even hiring a professional photographer for their staged Greenwich, CT shoots, but not once did they pick up a camera. They'd admire it in others, market themselves through the medium and put it on their walls, but not once have I ever seen one of them take an actual photograph. They say they don't need them or like them either, which is doubly weird, because they work out to maintain their images all the time. But, I suppose if I had a suicide mom and kids on serious psychiatric medication (like my brother and his wife), I'd hate reminders, too.

Ditto with pictures of me. Not one of me on any of their walls. My mom has these strange plastic-wrapped bundles of pictures, sometimes correctly labeled for the individual in the photo, and sometimes not. They come to me as she finds them stored throughout her household, or when her cleaning lady moves old furniture around. Her handwriting on them ranges from the perfect schoolgirl of her youth to the much more recent scrawl of her senior years. I have no idea why she randomly selected some pictures to be packed away in baggies and some not, except for the obvious proof that these photos show me, like time capsules of her madness: because she still struggles to make sense of the world around her, and who the people are in the photos.

Posing behind me, like I'm a trophy fish on the wall or a decorative lamp.

 
Nowadays, I use them as a form of art therapy for her, just like her onsite caregiver Lynette does in much more vivid detail with her, one image at a time: who are these people? What do they mean to you? Do you remember taking them, or how you felt at the time? More and more, I feel like all of my very learned expertise comes down to the feeling Anne Sullivan must have had breaking through Helen Keller's massively intricate self-defense system: I have done all this for her, to break through the walls of her mind that are like prisons for the many facets of her fractured self. I use my art to break through, very often to her, violently and aggressively, as you can plainly see why here. 

Some days, I simply sign the same messages of hope and loss, love and anger, here on this site and through other media outlets, over and over again until you get it. And sometimes, like this perfectly framed summertime photo obviously taken by grandfather for its' astonishingly stand-out clarity, I get help exactly when I need it, through a man who openly supported my art and personality without prejudice at great contrast to our unhealthy and immediate family. I can feel the power of His Eternal Undying Love, spoken loud and clear across the ages, through one simple, humble, and very beautiful photograph of a little girl trapped and angered by the madness of others, because that's exactly what my healthier grandparents lived through with their children and grandchildren, too.

It was the summer of '75 for me and my awesome Grandpa.

For the Many Faithful of the World: today I give thanks for the loving, beautiful, and gifted grandparents who were essential to my good health growing up. I would not have survived this life without them. Their patient care was often just a phone call and five minute drive away. I also give thanks for all of you who have survived the cruelty of other people's madness to achieve great personal success, by breaking through the many walls around you to greatness. Long may you reign in peace with us. Amen to you.

 (for Bernard and Ann, two of His Most Faithfully Devoted Servants)

Here's a hint: I'm the one in the middle.

The Third Eye (Blind)

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

Ever since my childhood bout with chickenpox (one that I don't remember), I've had a fairly visible scar on my forehead. My mom was worried about that, because I'm the only girl in my family, and she didn't want any physical evidence of sickness conflicting with my looks, which is the first real currency women are given in society. 

My market value as a marriageable mate is still very important (to her and to me), so she did what she could to keep a little toddler from scratching, including putting on those little mitts sometimes worn by newborns who scratch at night. Despite her vigilance, a few areas escaped her notice with my unconscious scratching: an area on my thigh, a little spot on the side of my face, and a big one almost dead center. Woe is me!

With time and the thickening of my skin, it's become almost invisible in most lights, excepting those occasions when it isn't. In my quest to normalize a semi-arid city out west, my then-boyfriend and I drove to a suburb of Denver that housed the one Asian section of that sprawling, modern (and almost characterless) city. He was still nursing serious internal hurts borne by an abusive mother and violent stepdad; abuses that included sexual molestation, as well as the usual beat-downs from a stressed-out, working class Brit trying to manage his émigré status, a new marriage with kids, and another country.

I was still licking my wounds from an aborted marriage, illegal as it was, due to my college friend's legal Unfit for Marriage status, so both of us were hurting from complaints not of our doing, but deeply effected by other people's collective traumas nonetheless. Because my ex didn't eat during his manic binge phases, I had greatly changed my lifestyle to accommodate his diseases, which left me in a serious deficit all around. I went a little wild with food on my own, eating and eating and never really feeling full. It was out of control, very uncommon for me, and really scary. I could see myself ballooning up daily.

I remember my mom visiting me in Littleton (right after the high school massacres that happened there), as I sat down to eat a 2nd heaping plate full of pancakes and sausage at the cheap kitchen table my dad and his wife bought quickly for the apartment I had to relocate to. My mom asked me what was going on, with the understanding that she already knew, because she did. I have always been a size 6 as an adult "Miss", but under the stress of earning a living and righting societal wrongs, I gave in to my new boyfriend's huge Scottish appetite. We ate at any restaurant we wanted to, revelling in our escapes from the incompetent horrors of other people's homes.

With this in mind, we sought out Colorado's version of "Chinatown" to look at exotic eastern goods and, of course, eat. He went into one shop to look around, while I stood on the pavilion sidewalk outside, smoking a cigarette, another teenage escape valve I still had in place. As I strolled around the storefronts, a gentleman dressed in the tourist garb of a "guru" stopped his robotic pamphlet distribution for "Ancient Eastern Readings" to open his mouth at me. I wasn't used to agape stares at the time, because weight gain and untanned skin is considered "ugly" out west, but this was more. He looked...scared.

After a quick recovery (like most immigrants learn), he began speaking to me in a language I didn't know, pointing at the middle of his forehead over and over again. My boyfriend was out of the shop he was in, and I was walking quickly away. "What did he want?", he asked me smiling, in the non-threatened, jocular way men who are 6' and 250lbs have with shorter, smaller, and darker men. "Oh," I laughed. I was constantly tired and hungry all the time, clear depressed signs both, and I knew it. Smoking had become a dull chore that made me feel sick, too. I hated my life; a life in a foreign land that felt stiff, colorless, dull, and flat, like an out-of-body experience, and I was acting out a role in someone else's boring movie.

"It's my chickenpox scar." Where? He didn't notice things like that about me, busy as he was staying alive and staying afloat, despite the dragging down qualities of his life, too. "See? It's right here. In the middle of my forehead." And just like that, he promptly forgot about it, because that's how little spiritual significance I had to a big blond, tan, western guy with a very large and showily dramatic depiction of "The Rapture" tattooed prominently on his forearm for all the world to see, because that's exactly how limiting the scope of America can feel to someone who is perpetually outside of the cultural norms.

He lasted ten days in the cushy second story of an extremely wealthy and well-appointed Park Slope townhouse that I secured for us, upon my return home. Ten days, before he bugged out to drive back home, to a dull place where generic red trucks for good ole boys are respected as having more value than the people who sleep next to you for years. Ten days. That's all I got to right his world for him, as my world turned upside down, once again. Ten friggin' days.