Ongka's Big Moka

The gods must have been crazy to show a bunch of hard-partying, state school kids a movie about a tribe in Papua, New Guinea that selects a new "head honcho" to enrich so that everyone can have a chance to participate in the fun, but that's exactly what happened when a class in Cultural Anthropology tore its way through my crowd. After that, the stoners went wild with late night discussions about society's failings. Why couldn't Americans be, like, more hip? Yeah, right. Why? 

Most of the time, our talks took place in the off-campus living rooms of rich suburban hippies whose parents bought them cars and homes to go back to after school. We'd be eating their mama's carefully shipped food like starving charity cases, when I'd been cooking all my life. Pot makes the crazy kids even nuttier, so I sat on my growing unease with my hands tucked between my knees most of the time, in the freezing old houses we rented for cheap. It never seemed warm enough, no matter how many layers we put on.

But, the idea was interesting. If a group of people agreed to it, could you actually give away all of your stuff to someone else without being a total asshole about it? It seemed doubtful, the way hippie kids tried to outdo each other over things like mixed tapes of live Dead shows, while they argued about who had the best collection. The hippies at school were some of the worst kinds of kids, too: petty, deceitful, spiteful, arrogant, defensive, condescending, overly competitive, and cheap. They wouldn't give anyone a loose joint for free, let alone the whole dime bag. These kids were gonna grow up to save the world? It's 2017, and guess what? I'm still waiting on that.

Red Light

At the same time I was feeling out my identity as a young illuminator (that came to a head over a collection of excellently preserved Gutenberg Bibles at the Trinity Library in Dublin), my college boyfriend decided it would be exotic for us to smoke pot in Amsterdam, rather than our less glamorous state-school dorm rooms. I didn't really think of it as "fun", so much as a really far away place to travel to, so we could smoke some hash that we'd get cheaper back in New York, but like his newly found discovery of sex (I was his first), he seemed to think that the world would totally change if he was high in another part of it, which it does not.

It's like getting drunk in a bunch of different bars; you just get drunk in different rooms. Accents and a hip European locale, was (and is) travelling to a lot of young tourists: places to get drunk and high for more money. It was stupid, wasteful, and stressful for me to be stoned in another language with an American passport back in the late 80s as a teenager, because you don't need to get a hangnail over and over again to know they hurt badly.

But, of course, who I was and what I wanted was much less relevant to him, since he was paying for the trip. So, before I could miss seeing "The Book of Kells" opened to a text-only folio because the library is closed on Mondays (and I had to fight to stay an extra day to see even that), I found myself sitting in a small commuter prop plane made for European businessmen after a long intercontinental flight from the U.S., exhausted and scared beyond belief at the jostling in a tiny plane, so my boyfriend could smoke pot in a bar.

We nervously went into a hash cafe and ordered pot off a menu from a bored hippie behind a plexi-glass window, to take a seat at a cafe table rolling smokes and drinking beer. Because smoking cigarettes in a bar was still legal back then, it felt exactly like sitting in a bar smoking and drinking, except pot was included with the beer and cigarettes. Just like Ireland is much more to me than a quaint pub to drink in, Amsterdam was punctuated by incredible artistic experiences for me as a college student, like seeing a Rembrandt for the first time, or Vermeer's painting of a milkmaid pouring from a jug by an open window.

There isn't any kind of smoke or lager to compete with that, and my non-artistic boyfriend knew it, hence his sniping sabotages and subterfuges that I'd outgrow right after college. It was the same with the much-hyped "Red Light District" of Amsterdam, walking its cobblestone streets at night alongside the winding, misty canals: if Bart hadn't stopped me at the end of a block to inquire, I'd never had known we just walked down a street with legal prostitution.

New York City hookers were loud, cat-calling addicts running wild through the streets, ready to jack the car of any trick who tried to run them over, not these genteel plate-glass storefronts with a chair in the middle of a window. He made me walk back down the block again, stoned and high as a kite, so I could take it all in, this time aware of what I was looking for. Well...what did I think? Of a beefy, middle-aged, frazzled-haired blond woman sitting alone in a window on a plain wood chair wearing ugly lingerie? Like it was quiet desperation mixed with incredible loneliness and a deeply penetrating sadness. Almost immediately, I missed the bright lights and big things of Times Square; of home.

The Etruscans

My best friends’ father Charles was her first inspiration for studying history, though he'd pursued a psychology degree instead, which got him a stressful social workers’ job in the Bronx during the height of the citys’ struggle with crack cocaine in the 70s and 80s. After his idealistic post-college stint in the Peace Corps, a time of hippie experimentation with native sweat lodges and hallucinogenic trips on peyote buttons in the Mexican desert, he struggled to find meaning and equilibrium among the hard-hit minorities who came to his office for help. 

Instead, he found bitterness and a lack of understanding that ingrained in him a casual prejudice fueled by his own inertia and passionless marriage. It was hard for us to watch her hip, smart, educated parents from the city, the first to attend college in their families, go down so deeply into alcoholism and madness, but like so many of their "silent generation", they refused to admit the seriousness of their illnesses to anyone, so they could condescend to the people stuck in the ghetto, who they wanted to see as having so much less than us.

We'd find him puttering in his garage during summer breaks from school, sweating in the heat and avoiding his wife inside the house. He'd made a little workshop for himself there, so he could paint tiny military figurines in exacting period detail, while he expounded upon his favorite topics like the Etruscans, always delivered in the exact same way: "Girls, have I ever told you about the ancient Etruscans? They were a very advanced civilization that pre-dated the Greco-Roman time period. Most people don't know that." Ah, okay. It was better than the usual power struggles between her parents, with their tense silences and chain-smoking drunks that'd go on for days. We'd go on beer and cigarette runs for them just to get the fuck out of the house.

With a little encouragement, her father would go on to describe Etruscan burial mounds and their sophisticated societal hierarchy that would inform and inspire the later governments of the much more famous Greco-Romans. We found it touching that he clung to Italy's historical underdogs out of some sense of loyalty to them and their almost-forgotten world, like any real historian would. Though her parents never made it out of their personal struggles with addiction and mental illness, I can still see him in my mind's eye working in his garage, at a time when the whole world was opening up to us from between the pages of our college textbooks, in the cold mountains of an upstate New York winter. Ta, Charles. Thanks on that. 

Hieronymus Bosch

My quest to find Illuminators from the past (and present) took me to some interesting places, like "The Dark Ages" of Medieval Europe. At the same time, my best friend and college roommate's classes as a History major crossed over into the Art History and Painting classes I needed for my "two-degrees-in-four-years" program that I was enrolled in at Oneonta State, called the "2-1" (or "Two-To-One").

While I poured over the detailed Celtic knotwork in "The Book of Kells" like it was inscribed upon my heart (and it is, I know that), Karen delved into the socio-economic peculiarities of an uncivilized Europe caught in the massive death-grip of "The Bubonic Plague". Like the Salem witch-hunts of New England, paranoia and fear ruled the landscape, creating myths and superstitions that persist in the more rural parts of Western Europe to this day.

It was gothic and horrific, perfect intellectual fodder for two kids like us who'd already lived through some incredibly dark times, to study in the deep dark cold that settles upon upstate New York in a thick blanketing cloud of snow lasting six months or more, because that's "winter" to us. I could relate to her fascination with the macabre. I was a devout reader in my childhood and early teens of creepy and ghostly tales, like Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", considered one of the best pieces of literature ever written about the plague and its impact on medieval society.

One artist in particular grabbed her attention for a few months (or weeks) in an appreciation that has not abated time, for its stunning intricacy and originality: Hieronymus Bosch. Like the illustrations in the first edition of Dante's "Inferno", Bosch was seen as a gruesomely realistic painter who'd channeled Hell itself in his fantastical depictions of the imps, demons, and devils that lurked in the darkest corners of his twisted, surreal landscapes.

The amount of detail...it was captivating in its volume and visual complexity. How many creatures he'd crammed onto his canvases, like a man on fire to reveal the depths humanity had sunk to in its darkest hour; a real-life emotional landscape that captured the psychology of the times and the mindset of medieval man during one of the worst holocausts in human history. It must have felt smiliar to the fictional world of "The Walking Dead"; bodies piled by church graveyards at first, then covered over in carts, to finally be dumped by the side of the road in abandonment, festering and spreading even more disease.

Much as my generation (like many generations) still thinks of its cultural influences as widely known (like our music), I realize in middle-age that if I want to keep our kind of awareness alive, the type that sparked the interest of a few young scholars in late adolescence, then it's going to be me who does it. This is "My Illuminator's Life", in full circle. Enjoy it my little gremlins and goblins, because something wicked this way comes....and it's downright Medieval.

The Mat Room

Fraternities and sororities at Oneonta existed mostly for the hardcore suburban Long Island crowd who went to the same high school together (which seemed like a pointless thing to do in college), or those downlow weirdos too embarrassed to join the unisex organization of social do-gooders with the purple triangle logo on their Greek shirts, ya dig? With the high-priced fees that came with "rushing" during pledge, me and my crew thought it was crazy to pay to have friends when you could just throw a kegger and kids would show up, anyway, once the word got out around campus. We had more trouble containing a good time than publicizing it.

Still, a slow Wednesday night with no Thursday classes could find you extending beyond your typical routine to include off-campus frat parties, especially if one of your boys roomed with one of their "frosh" pledges. It meant we might catch a break with the cover charge. Five bucks blown on skunky stale beer or a drained keg meant you just walked down a mountain in a snowstorm with nothing to show for it besides missing dinner at the cafeteria. Oh, well. You'd have to wait until the morning, if you didn't stash food in your room from lunchtime.

I'd been to few of them without incident, which must have driven the crazies wild, because I found myself alone in their basement kitchen thumbing through an old issue of NatGeo I'd found on the counter (with its distinctive yellow border) while my friends made a run for the keg, when some douche came over to make a rude comment to me about the partially nude African women depicted in the magazine. It was a shocking thing to do at a hip New York school with a lot of urbane city kids, but certain pockets of the state bred bad stuff that we didn't have close at hand growing up, though it was certainly around. 

He was obviously drunk, too, and he had a wild angry look to his bulging glassy eyes that made him doubly dangerous. Psychotic drunks were a serious hazard at any party. Most gatherings I went to were attended with my large boyfriend, but without a big bouncer around, anti-social headcases could take the time to hassle you and feel comfortable doing it with their similarly challenged friends. As soon as he targeted me, he flipped on me, demanding to know who I was and how I got into his party. I was trapped against the kitchen counter, alone in the room with him.

I tried to look past him to catch the eye of someone, anyone, because I couldn't see the heads of my friends over the crowd in the living room. He got in my face, yelling about who the fuck did I think I was to rebuff his advances in his frat house? It was insane, and it got out of control within seconds. Some tall guy finally came over to see what the commotion was about, because the kid wanted me thrown out of the party, which was fine by me. I'd had enough. As bad as it was, that was nothing compared to the stories I'd hear walking home that night.

As we walked around collecting our friends after my "ousting" from their lame party, I caught a glimpse of a dirty room, behind a partially opened door, covered in graffiti with bare mattresses on the floor. During the party, we'd been told that it was a makeshift crash pad for brothers too drunk to stand, but that's not what another girl at the party told us. She whispered to our small group that it was the room they took girls too drunk to resist. It was their rape room. And it was the last frat party I ever went to.

Providence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence,_Rhode_Island

The city of Providence was in pretty bad shape during my time attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Downtown was a workplace for the suburban 9-to-5-Monday-through-Friday set, abandoned to junkies and the homeless people on the weekends, like a ghost town. There were no stores open or attractions to see, other than a small mall built inside of a beautiful old building with an ornate glass ceiling. Surrounding the town was a large concrete sewer that reduced the river to a dirty little stream filled with garbage.

College Hill was a bastion of old houses and historic cobblestone streets by comparison, so the lack of any type of inviting nightlife (save for the one music venue we all frequented for discount tickets to traveling punk acts on their way from New York to Boston) actually spared us from a lot of the violent random crimes that plagued less savvy college kids. Occasionally we went to the Italian section on the other hill facing downtown for big spaghetti dinners, to be greeted by an archway hung with a copper pineapple for its guests, a sure sign of a paisan good time.

The misty narrow streets once haunted by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe were still as captivating to young artistic imaginations as ever, easy as the old scenes were at blurring the lines between then and now, in the dense fogs that would descend upon the town, blown inland from the sea. The air would become thick with moisture, salty and briny as the ocean, as every Northeastern city does. Anyway, the hill held enough for us to explore. The main drag at the top of the hill in our college district had cheap eats, like the vegan-approved falafel joint I went to with my hippie housemates that inspired me and my friend Dave to coin the phrase "The Falafel Mafia!" yelled out loud in an Arabic-sounding voice. 

We wanted to make t-shirts for our next punk band that would have one really bad performance before folding forever. Screeching is tough on the vocal chords! It wasn't until years later in Denver that I met a Portuguese/Italian guy from Massachusetts also living out west, who told me about the wackier side of town. He asked me if I knew a big decorative element downtown, and then I remembered. Oh, yeah! There was a building like New York's Flatiron skyscraper: narrow to a point, to fill out two bigger corners in a triangle-shape. "Right," my friend Chris said to me while we worked at The Denver Post. "It's evil." Uh...okay. Why? This should be good.

Chris had some traumas growing up that he felt pushed him into evangelical Christianity, trading his sex addiction for the headier blend of this weird-ass new age cult that flourished in the midwest during the 80s and 90s. It was the time of the "SuperChurch" with its strange crystal palaces and homosexual pastors who always seemed to be caught with illegal drugs and a hooker. My work friend was now a passionately ignorant "Born-Again", which was made doubly weird by his self-professed Catholic upbringing. The arid plains out west can do strange things to some people. 

Still, it was far better than dying from an overdose, so I tolerated his blowhard lecturing about my own faith as good-naturedly as I could, without letting him cross the line into offensiveness. I already knew who I was. Did he? I wasn't so sure. People with mental problems get confused easily. Chris had lived in Arizona with his divorced mom after they left the Northeast years ago, and even though Denver throws down some serious snow, homeboy continued to wear linen pants and a thin golf jacket like he was driving a golf cart around his retirement community. His brain wasn't catching up to the change in locale. 

Like office people everywhere, Chris preferred fanatsies about tropical beaches, grumbling about the weather while planning his next bad tourist vacation that would put him right back on the work-wheel he loathed so much. But, back to the story. So, what's wrong with that building's sculpture? It was a stone carving of a guy in a turban that faced people who came into town down a certain block. Oh, the genie is an evil symbol designed to be a focal point that draws in bad magic. Sigh...really? I don't think the oldest Ivy League schools in American give two fucks, other than its aesthetic appeal. Didn't stop us from doin' a damn thing.

He gave me that special kind of smiley condescension that marks the kook who's just been exposed. Turns out, Chris recruited another wack-job from his mega church to go on "hunting trips" that would neutralize evil hotspots. Ah, what the fuck...I'll bite. It was an office job, after all. What else was I gonna do at a plush union gig besides crossword puzzles and free music downloads? Well, first he lightly chastized me for my naivety about the creepy-crawly things I didn't know. Right. Yeah. So, the genie? Right! Well, you're supposed to counter its dark forces by staking out the four corners of a cemetery resting on a hill before town with a magical string that keeps the evil graveyard spirits from entering. 

That's what he and his brain-dead friend were doing with Denver (and it had to be done at midnight, too), and that's what I should have done for Providence. Uh huh. Besides the three jobs and all that art? Yes! Okay, neat. Thanks for that. In any event, I'm happy to report that my lapse in good judgment about crazy rituals did not hurt it one bit. In fact, after I left the city, great changes were already taking place. They removed the concrete blocks that held back the river, building a beautiful outdoor riverwalk that ended in an amphitheater for concerts and plays. A gondola boat gave tourists rides up-and-down the canal like Venice, with charming lights illuminating the scene at sunset. 
Not a bad ending after all, is it? 

Hurricane!

Just like the same news hype that returns every year, so, too, does the change of seasons pose serious intellectual problems for psychologically-impaired people. Every year, my mom and her wacky sisters get vicarious thrills from the earth's rotation around the sun that causes dry conditions out west and big rainstorms in the east, in the exact same way that a UFO fan gets off on strange ideas about alien abductions and well-wished-for anal probes. <Gasp!> Did you see the news today?!

First, it was really hot outside (TOO WARM!) and now it's freezing cold (TOO COLD!), because the "in-between" seasons like spring and fall often have weather patterns like that, which isn't fun unless you pretend you're watching a really scary movie with them, and they don't like horror movies. Uh, okay...sure. Let's go with that. Or, alternately, you could just look out the window, or feel the windowpane to gauge the temperature, or (and this is even weirder) you could actually go outside. Tons of options here.

WHAT?!! GO OUTSIDE?!! "What are you, nuts? I have severe hay-fever allergies! Do you want me to die?!" Or, they never had allergies to begin with and you're a bad person for making that up. Besides, why would you remember something so odd like that anyway? "So strange to me..." Unlike, say, paranoid schizophrenia, I actually enjoy each season for what it offers us. It's necessary to all life on this planet, and it's also a welcome change. Humans like adaptation and growth. "BOO!" Hobbits don't. So, like most of my life, my immediate family briefly passes by me while I live the best life ever, pretending that my challenges are the same "up-and-downs" as their manic-depression. It isn't, but they don't have anything else to compare it to, do they?

Just like their "parties" are some of the most dreadful affairs on G-d's green earth, so, too, did they easily confuse anti-social lurking in corners at large family reunions with "fun", the way alcoholism is nothing like having a great time at a kick-ass party. Drinking = instant asshole. Right? Of course, they know better, but my family likes to pretend that it doesn't hurt as much if they keep a vigilant boot on the heel of my good time. It's a lie, but they've already downgraded their sins against me to a cutesy widdle "white lie" (like the kind that naughty children do), while I sin real bad!

It was the same deliberate untruths they told each other about my body, my sexuality, my fertility, my health, my looks, my partying; anything that could be put down in the "Clan of the Cave Troll" to control the reversal of their intentionally misspoken words that would delay the inevitable good fortune that is my destiny. "Get your shots in while you can", my dad used to say, "because you won't be able to beat her forever." It was as tacit a reason to abuse me as they abused everyone and everything around them in their delusional sickness. How to hurt and get my help at the same time?

Like a crook who wastes $2,000 worth of time planning a $23 rip-off from a $43 bar tab, the pettiness of it was astounding in its depths, like the hapless Moriarty plays to a Sherlock Holmes, without the homosexuality and opium addiction. I don't have those facets. But, you do. I get it. And so, much like anything else that was epic in my life, my family couldn't participate. They could watch from a dark corner of the room, but they couldn't "boogie down" like me and my crew. I told them about our 70s parties with as much detail as they would let me, but when they finally opened the door to one of Bobby's rockin' shindigs, it was "Animal House: The Real" for a group of people who needed a much safer distance from the action.

They looked so uncomfortable. Bobby was swinging in a big Afro wig from a light fixture that gave way inch-by-inch as it was slowly pulled from the ceiling in a dramatic CRASH! to the floor. Just like the movies! Everyone was dancing in 70s-era costumes to "Play That Funky Music", and from the dropped jaws of my brother, his girlfriend (now wife), and his best friend, I could tell they were in shock that such things actually existed out in the world. They stood frozen in the foyer before the huge living room to the big old house we all rent(ed), with intact period details at a fraction of their costs, making the best party they ever attended into a spectator sport. I felt bad for them as I took their coats and got them beers. It'll be okay! I laughed to help them relax a little bit more.

Just like the weather that so frightened them into complacency, I also took my ability to have a good time in stride, too. I knew I was having the best time ever and so did my friends, but to actually see the astonishment on their faces brought it back home for me. Oh. You don't do that. I do. Like every good parent, I wanted them to join in the fun, even if it was just a little while before their drinking habits became alcoholism, and their study sessions with Vivarin became serious prescription pill-popping addictions. My life pulled me away from them, and I could see it on their faces that they knew it, too. We might never meet at this point again.

Eventually, my family stopped asking me if they could come by, by inviting themselves into my life to see if it was real. It was, and it still is. No tricks up my sleeves. Therefore, it seemed fitting to me that one of the last Oneonta parties I went to was held in the great outdoors, in the autumn season of September, still warm in the day and freezing at night, in classic upstate New York style. We raised our now-iconic plastic red cups to a seasonal storm named after a woman by male newscasters, in a cruel joke about our supposed tempermental moods brought on by our hormone-ravaged bodies. We toasted every fierce gust of wind that shook treetops so large, we made them more famous by putting them up in New York City as our Christmas trees.

Big fat raindrops started to fall on us at the same time the wooden makeshift stage Rock Ptarmigan played on started giving way, as all of their friends danced and sang with them onstage. Tony laughed as it tilted first towards the left where they gathered around the empty mic, then slowly gave way as he lightly hopped off the stage before the final lurch that saw it fall completely to the ground. We laughed, too. Show's over! We gave one last cheer to the heavens before the skies opened up, to pour down the rain that we knew would come but cheered for anyway, safely nestled as we were in our loving little city of the hills. It was the best party, yet. Wish you were there.

Around the World

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days 

Parties at Oneonta became our go-to creative outlet for lifting our spirits and casting off the sometimes extreme pressures we were under, as working class kids from New York. When I mentioned to my father recently that I can write "lowbrow" at times in a colloquial dialect that is unique to this area, and to also mean that I can be at every level of work, he reddened and barked a sudden harsh laugh at me, baring his top row of dentures. "Hah! Yeah, you're 'lowbrow'!", as if I had suddenly forgotten who I am and where I was, which I hadn't. I have plenty of reminders. 

I don't have the luxury of checking out from my life, no matter how bad it can sometimes be, because such is the nature of living. Suffice to say, unlike the hangers-on to our hip scene, I really wanted to learn, and anything that jeopardized that went out the window. I couldn't afford to not be present during my own education, happily deferring it to the hands of others, like so many other spoiled suburban kids. I was born in the projects of Queens to an Acadian Metis and an Italian-Irish American, some of the lowliest ethnicities on the planet for this country. Of course, in your country of origin, it could be the complete opposite, because such is the perversity behind prejudices and hate: to blind you to your true worth for the false ones of a commercial world.

We had discussions about our parties, too, appropriate to each setting. For freshman year, kids often joined together to have a party on the entire floor, or sometimes the whole dorm threw one large shindig. The most popular kind was the "'Round the world" party, with every dorm room offering a different type of booze. Those were completely fucking dangerous. Kids did crazy shit like soak a whole watermelon in grain alcohol, in a garbage can or a bathtub that they were proud to show off during the week. "One bite of this should do the trick!", as we took turns slapping the melon. We wanted a quicker entertainment we could afford, because every penny counted in our fractured homes, where scarcity was often used as a weapon.

A girl from "Lawnguyland" had a set of test tubes in a wooden carrier filled with a noxious-looking neon-green substance, while another carried around a tray of red jello shots (made with vodka) that had been neatly set in those small paper condiment containers from the cafeteria. It was like "Martha Stewart: Unplugged", which is an MTV reference, kids. Look it up! I left after a few dorm rooms, because our run-ins with campus security and two-day hangovers had learned me to steer clear of liquids that were uncertain-looking. I wanted to have fun, not throw up in the bathroom down the hall for hours and hours.

As sophomores, we expanded our view of partying to include multi-levels, in mixed gender dorms that reflected our more mature mentalities. Random wild hookups were a thing of the past, with most of us either in relationships or busy with school and jobs. There was always work. Boys and girls now lived in suites right next to each other, without incident. Anyway, the Long Island boys next door to us were a tight "Jew Crew" of frat brothers and a couple of very white upstaters. No problems, there. Still, with Halloween right around the corner, epicness awaited us in the form of grander and more complex parties.

On our list was the oft-touted "Heaven and Hell" party. It was a fantasy scene suited to three levels: the top level was Heaven (of course), the middle layer was Purgatory, and then there would be a "Dante's Inferno": a hell of our own creation. We decorated each floor in our minds with smoke machines and cotton ball clouds, or flickering fiery flames like those lamps from "Spencer's Gifts" (another 80s reference*) with plastic strips powered by a mini-fan to simulate fire. We'd use tinfoil-coated walls to bounce light around the rooms, or paint one room a heavenly light-blue color at the beginning of the semester, decorated with sparkly stars and even more mood lighting. 

Mood lamps....eh. What can I say? It was a thing**. Anyway, every year around this time, I still think about cool crisp autumns, fall decorations, the fun of Halloween, my outfits and costumes, and how much I still want to spread that great feeling around. The joy we felt at just being free enough to talk out loud about whatever we wanted to, whenever we could, without being abused or pushed aside, felt like "manna from the skies" to us; a gift so valuable, we knew we couldn't live without it. That's what freedom and a good time can do. It can set your soul free. Soar!

*    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Gifts
**  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_lamp

Idol Worship

The differences between kids from upstate versus the ones from downstate can be pronounced, as we were to find out during college. Much like the rest of the country takes the social distortions of Hollywood to be synonomous with being Californian so, too, do upstaters sometimes feel mischaracterized by ethnic stereotypes from the tri-state area. Whereas southern New York is almost tropically warm during the spring, summer, and fall (made more acute with global warming), winter for many New Yorkers is the same as Canada: long, brutal, and cold.

In Oneonta, we had a saying: the sun set in September and came back in June, giving us nine full months of cloudcast winter. You had to bring the jolly with you, is what I mean, rather than being overly dependent on nature's cues about weather and personality. Suffice to say, me and my friends were more accustomed to a colder climate than the city kids warmed by so much heat-retained pavement, and the Gulf Stream that blows through coastal New York. Rockland County is at least 5 degrees cooler than the coastline, sometimes as much as 10-20 degrees, especially at night. It fools you into thinking that those city miles to the country are no big deal, but the Hudson River's massive size takes umbrage at that bold claim.

Suffice to say, it shows up in our varied taste, styles, and cultures, often worse for the wear. Like rednecks everywhere, hard-to-reach mountain terrain can breed some strange bedfellows, like those of our dorm-mate Tracey from Buffalo, and our "crazy Injun" friend Dave from Schnectady. We met Tracey from down the hall through her roommate on the soccer team, Lisa, who rocked a softball mini-mullet like the 80s would never die. Their uncanny retro qualities, channeled while living in the present, signalled to us of their rural clans proud identity as stallers of change and slowness to adapt. A lot of folks "head to the hills" seeking escape from the pressures of conforming to everyday societal norms, and they're proud of it.

Into this reactionary niche fit punk rock star turned pop culture MTV videomaker, Billy Idol. He'd gained fame as a young musician for the band "Generation X", to churn out hit after hit and video after video in the 80s. It was catchy at first, but then, almost instantly, his overplayed songs became dated, just like our upstate friend's 10-12 year lag behind our more sophisticated urban values.  Songs like "Rebel Yell" reflected their stubborn insistence at pushing away trends and new things the way vampires hate the sign of the cross. It spoke to their view that the rest of the world sucked, in rejection of their almost non-status as upstaters who felt shunted by the downward cast of Albany to the more populated areas we came from.

The first time me and Karen knocked on Tracey's door, we were greeted with her credo drawn onto the dorm door's message board that read "Idol Worship Lives!" in the logo type of his album covers. Oh...okay. They chafed similarly at my cool drawing posted on our door, done in a surreal "Alice in Wonderland" illustration style that was later ripped off, but not before the Lawnguyland girls wrote on it to let us know they disapproved of us as so-called "hippies", what with Karen's turtlenecks worn under her sports sweatshirts and big silver cross, paired with my cooler rocker-chic flair. Those girls smoke pot and attract boys=bad. We'd made our mark on them that quickly.

But, worshipping a dyed-blond skinny dude in leather pants? Uh, not exactly our style. He was too cheesy for us, and he always looked like he was on heroin, with his dark undereye circles. What was there to love? His videos were even worse; tacky over-produced "art tableaus" for people with poor taste, rife with pseudo-religious imagery he'd ripped off from Catholicism to seem commerically counter-culture. Wanker. British pop stars were "a dime a dozen" for us back then. We didn't need them to become cults of personality for us.

Sure enough, "Pretty Boy" Dave and Tracey from down the hall hooked up early on during the first semester, because he was drunk and she was smitten with his looks. It was great fun for us, because we got to hear in detail how Dave was too drunk to "do the deed", passed out on her twin-sized dorm room bed. She was cool about it, too, laughing it off the next time we were all together, because homeboy hadn't remembered their encounter, like whether or not he had sex. He didn't. It became our party circuit's favorite target for awhile, expressed through the punk rock song "Too Drunk To Fuck"* as Dave's theme.

Tracey "heehawed" at his attention-getting antics right along with us, brushing off Dave's puppy lust like the solid blond girl she was. No big deal. "That kid's got a lot to learn, and not by me. He's so cute, though!" Yeah, we all liked Dave. Then, she went back to smoking her cigarette, drinking her coffee, and putting on her makeup on a face that was underneath some of the hardest sprayed hair on the whole campus, and that was hard to beat. She just rolled with it, like the fun country girl she is. You, rocker. Rock on! Those were the days of our early lives, and nothing could beat it. Seriously. She was 23 and had already been to a community college. We were just geting started.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Drunk_to_Fuck

The U-Haul Mauler

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Haul 

Going back to school for Oneonta students felt like a Christmas Eve party on the same day as your birthday, and you just got a puppy that looks like Snoopy from your parents before you and your crew hit the town. It was that great. Of course, by junior year, we were all feeling the numbness that comes with so many good times, which meant we were growing up. But, we still wanted to summon up that fresh feeling before every semester, and junior year was no different.

Imagine a place where all your best friends hung out and came back to every year, knowing they'd show up ready for a good time. We hit the ground running, docked for the summer at our stupid low-paying jobs, in places that seemed like they were stuck in the mud, time-wise. You know that excruciating summer blues when its all heat and and dust and nothing's moving, especially the air? That's what we came from; stranded from the only people we'd found so far who got us on a few levels, even if some of the crucial parts were still missing. It wasn't nostalgia, either. It's a really beautiful town in upstate New York with a really good state school, framed by a perfect small-town Main Street filled with pubs. Done.

After two years on campus, we were finally allowed to live off-campus, and for my crowd, that was a good thing, too. We'd come close to getting kicked out of our dorms for having louder better times than other people, and the strain of that for two years running started to show. Now, we had house parties to look forward to. Because we were active kids (we didn't call ourselves "athletes" back then unless we attended school on a sports scholarship), we rented a house for $200 a semester split four ways at the bottom of a hill that lead directly to campus, if you could climb a steep mountain hill covered in ice and snow in tan construction books (the only kind that works), all weather permitting. We could be exceptionally healthy like that.

My best friend was JV and Varsity volleyball in high school as the team captain, breaking every finger on both hands, sometimes more than once. Her good friend at Oneonta was on a soccer scholarship, and one of our housemates ate tofu and taught aerobics classes for Continuing Ed. at the school, and at suburban joints over the summer as the prototypical "hot blond" cheerleader type, but with soul. We took all that to mean we should play hackey-sack wasted whenever the sun was out. Ah, youth. Our friend Meg was a real former cheerleader and so was her bestie from home, "Crackhead Jen".

Before my boyfriend switched majors, he wanted to be a sports therapist, being the former high school quarterback he was at the posh Jesuit school Xavier's, while he worked double-time as a bouncer during semesters and a doorman on the West Side during summers throughout our college career. He and I also opted for the actual physical labors of a "Body Conditioning" class (still have the textbook with fun 80s photos on my shelf), while our friends either bowled (and smoked pot) or took camping class...and smoked pot. With beers, too, of course. Not one of us hadn't been camping or to a bowling alley before. My friend Dave (who I would later marry) was also the star quarterback at his high school, and his crew was deep into skateboarding, biking, hiking, surfing, swimming and boating, depending on locale and budget.

So, that's what we showed up with: a bundle of fun under the clear night sky. I drove up to school with a crew of my own, navigating town and driving by our friends houses to see if they were up, yet. Low and behold, there was my man "A-Roll" in his biker wraparound shades driving some busted rental van from the 'hood with graffiti all over it. Ah, Brooklyn boys. I shouted "Hey!" out the window as we passed, just as he turned his head to look but not before we saw him rear-end a car parallel-parked on the street. Haha! What a dick. Keep driving!

We had arrived. For the entire first half of the year, Ariel tried to shake me down for cash as a participant in his smash-up with a townie's car (because I called out his name and waved to him from a passing car), and they hated ethnic city kids with a passion, especially his dark gothic hipster ass in all-black with a slicked-back ponytail. Every time we were at a party, he said I should give him some money for my part in his accident, because he was being sued by the townie with the dent in his car, after he abandoned the moving van on the street. Yeah, right. He sulked for months about losing his deposit on the vehicle. 

He might have just wanted beer and pot money. You never knew with a hungry thirsty Dominican street kid like him. What we did do is almost instantly craft a new nickname for him that we greeted him with every time he showed up for a party. "The U-Haul Mauler" was a smash hit, and we went on to design a punk rock album cover art in his name. We dominated town and campus gossip our first day back in town (like usual), and the semester had just begun. Anything could happen in a magical mountain town nestled in the hills of beautiful upstate New York. Anything. Anything was possible. See you there, kids.

Arael - variation of Uriel; prince over the people.

SETI

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence#

Just like my physics professor predicted, a lot of students quit his class after a brief introduction to the upcoming semester's coursework, an experience that was duplicated for me at RISD, too, without the intentional bait-and-switch routine necessary for a savvier New York student body that uses English as a first language. I had signed up for a class I thought was "Science Fiction Illustration" that was a catalog misprint of the actual class called "Scientific Illustration". A bunch of us (mostly guys) groaned, got up from the studio tables, and immediately asked for a signature to drop the class. 

The teacher was not pleased; profs lived and died at schools based on class attendance and their lectures, and as much as I liked botanical art, I really didn't need a class in it. I had a mom for a botanist. I grew up drawing plants, trees, and flowers in vast pictorial landscapes. This was no place for me to draw the big beautiful trees of my native Hudson River valley. I could do that at home, on my own. She gave me a nasty look as I opted out of her class, a feeling I felt she might have carried over into the next class of hers that I took, which is every high-achieving student's greatest fear: retaliation and blacklisting based on their agenda as a working artist and not mine as a paid-in-full student.

Both of those fears came to fruition, and by the time I had sussed out the art school game, neither retaliatory actions counted against my post-graduation successes. In fact, that particular prof asked for one of my pieces I had made based on organic forms for the RISD Museum's permanent student collection, which bolstered me enough to tolerate her scathing criticisms of any work of mine that she found derivative, which was accurate for me. I can achieve stunning originality, but with an entire course load devoted solely to labor-intensive studio-work, occasionally I had to phone in a piece between my three part-time jobs.

Our physics professor knew better flagging spirits and intellectual tiredness. He looked haunted by his experience and subsequent failures at the famed S.E.T.I. project that proposed highly intelligent beings would respond to something as trite as a radio signal blasted into space. So what? I'm not channeling anything or anyone alien to earth right now as I sit writing to this to you while listening to my playlist (Dizzy Gillespie's live version of "Swing Low" set in Paris). It was kind of a dubious quest to begin with, and I think that's what did it in for him: the absence of faith in his original artificial construct. 

But, he should have quickly recovered. After all, that's what science and experimentation is about: a series of failures that eliminate choices through an inquiry process, leading you to the correct solution that will hold up under scrutiny for its tried-and-true testing. After a class that found me and my boys sitting closer to him in the classroom, we decided to pull back to the higher seats in the lecture hall. Something about his haggard expression and deep-set undereye bags disturbed us up close, like it was unnatural. You have to be pretty bad off to screw up star-filled nights shining brightly in the crisp, clear, cold mountain air we lived in, as a place very close to nature.

He seemed to be pleading at us, as students sitting in the second row of the classroom, with his foot propped up on a pull-down seat's armrest, looking down at us like we didn't know what was up. "I mean, there's nothing out there!" He said to us, in exasperation. "NOTHING!" He acted blown away by it, like a space alien or lifeform that can traverse time and space through wormholes would give a fuck about his petty ego problems, which is what my man DutchBoy basically said to him. "Yeah, but didn't you know that when you set up the experiment? That it could fail? I mean, science isn't about foregone conclusions." Right! Like, adapt and problem-solve, dude. Let's build a spaceship instead! It should've closed down one avenue for him to explore another, but he was stuck on it as a theory, which is a bad place for any scientist (or student) to be. Time to move on, bro. 

It revealed to me just how limiting my education could be at Oneonta, which helped motivate me to undergo one of the hardest experiences of my life that is the Rhode Island School of Design's admittance process. If I remained on "Easy Street", I risked limiting myself to the intellectual capabilities of someone who mistakenly thought that the key to enlightenment with an eternal deity was to simply blast his BabyBoomer songs into the galaxy like some kind of intergalactic space jam. Someone tapped the "red hair bud" going around campus too hard this winter, bro. Word. And like that, I was ready to tackle the bigger questions of the universe, like: how do I get my snow dog with lots of fur into a spacesuit and decompression stasis chamber? Still need help on that one, NASA. Any day now, right?

Colored

The conversation about race and ethnicity can be a troubling game to the people who confuse it, because they lack proper cultural definitions within an appropriate context. I found myself in such a desert last week, watching a popular news entertainment show that highlights the most offensively outspoken headlines of the day. A prominent white news anchor used the word "colored" in her story about African-American issues and, like the jocks working the radio program that airs on t.v., I immediately took umbrage at her usage of it, too. What the...? Who the fuck is she? She don't know.

And then I remembered similarly odd conversations in my own past, where words can tumble out of control given the wrong situation, at any moment. Take, for instance, my meeting with a professor of English Literature during my time at Oneonta. He'd made some political references to his mostly "Anglo" class (or so he thought) of college students, about his supposed activism in South Africa with famous anti-apartheid movements that led him to flee the country to teach in our small po'dunk mountain town. Huh...really? He was handsome, so I dismissed him at the time for playing the adventurous romantic lead seeking to bed willing co-eds looking for a taste of the East, via one fucked-up African country and this state school educator.

He had a posh British accent that bespoke of his family's rather wealthy position in society through his obvious attendance at expensive private schools, and he had an irritating habit of wearing dopey silk ascots to go along with his condescension towards all things American that extended to decidedly less wealthy New York students, like me. I didn't think that much about him until a visit with my friend Donnel shook it up for me. We were still baffled by the death of her father while he was overseas in Ghana, and the subsequent disappearance of his body kept his whole family on edge, including me. According to their tribal customs, her mother needed to be in attendance to perform ablutions related his burial ritual, and they couldn't get any answers from the government or the state department about the events leading up to his death, leaving us in a paranoid "X-File" state.

There was talk of her father's assassination at the hands of some rival gangs with competing economic interests in their home village area which, given the general instability of many African nations, made more sense to us than we cared to admit. After he died, their financial circumstances drastically changed, revealing how deeply in debt their hereto presumed successful international businessman father was. During their foreclosure, our friend drove us past their house after school, to find deputies putting all of their furniture out on the front lawn, in full view of the entire neighborhood. "Just keep driving." Donnel said to us, crouched down in the back seat of the car. It was really disturbing. They moved to a smaller town home, and her mother began working as a low-end healthcare aide in a nearby nursing home to make ends meet, while we pursued various theories and connections to Ghana and Africa, no matter how bare or small.

During her visit to my college, I told Donnel about my English Lit professor with the supposed activist connections. Perhaps he could introduce us to a few of his contacts? We were desperate for any leads, and truth be told, I wanted to get a better look at him in private, to better feel out his intentions towards our student body. And so, one day after class, I made an appointment to see him in his office, a normal practice for any student seeking help, but totally rare for me. I'd never been to a professor's office before, and it was nerve-wracking to me, especially given the content of my errand. After I sat down in our semi-closed door meeting, I simply told him the truth. My friend's father had died mysteriously while in Ghana, and no one would talk to them about it. What to do?

He gave me a nasty look, then pointed to a map of Africa on his wall. You see, South Africa is there, and Ghana is here. See how faraway they are? Yeah, thanks. Asshat. But, you spoke in class about African geo-politics. Do you have any advice for my friend and her family about an agency that they can contact for guidance and support? He launched into another hipster diatribe about Apartheid and his status as a "Colored" man, because Indians (from India) were grouped in with "the blacks", and here he made a disgusted face like he smelled doggie doo-doo, which signaled to me that he was more upset about his classification as a minority in a faraway land than helping out poor black folks and their friends.

It was an astonishingly douchebag thing for him to admit to a student, especially since India has an extremely poor history of human rights, given the rigidity of their caste system of "Untouchables", but I was too stunned by his attitude to respond. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there, disturbed by the look of his purple tongue moving weirdly around his mouth while I had briefly talked. Back at my dorm room, I went over the exchange with my best friend from high school and college roommate, Karen, who was also navigating the rocky shoals of predominantly male academia as a history major; classes that often found her as the only female student in attendance. Here again, my heterosexuality counted heavily against me, as I described the shock of seeing a Chow Chow-colored tongue for the first time.

"You only went to see him because he's good-looking!" Well, yeah, but, no. I honestly wanted to help Donnel and her family, mired as they were in dire straits that I knew from my own mother's single parenting experience, a.k.a "My Mom Fell Apart Again": now performing a disastrous series of nervous breakdowns that we, as children and teens, were supposed to bear up under the weight of, and I wasn't sure how much more this family could take. She understood. Karen's parents (both dead for years now) were locked in horribly passive-aggressive co-dependence that saw her and her older brother begging them to divorce each other in lieu of an early grave, but you can read exactly where that got them. Nowhere. The stakes were so high for all of us to make it out of the messes they made for us, as a generation. They really needed my help.

After that, we took to calling him "Mr. South Africa" for his prettily-waved hair that was highlighted with a gay purple rinse, flatteringly cut just above his shoulders for that nouveau-hippie look, with his bevy of stylishly expensive ethnic-print clothing that fluttered around him like his many-layered Euro scarves, as the Indian answer to our naive prayers, while every AmerIndian on campus was probably just as interested in girls and hooking up as he was, because I howled at the midnight moon with them as a young pack member. It brought me back to talks around our kitchen table with my father growing up, as he explained to us that we're considered coloreds by society for first being Acadian, already a small ethnic minority, and secondly for our familial associations as Métis people.

I called my grieving friend from a pay phone on campus to tell her the bad news that I didn't get any information from the professor we could use (other than people around the world still hated us, which certainly wasn't new to us), and I never felt as frustrated and helpless as I did then, hanging up after a very brief conversation with my normally loquacious friend. I felt like I had totally failed her, in the face of some guy's arrogant assumptions about our society, but I was only 17 and a freshman. Now, I'm an expert in the media's weird and wild "Minority Reports", so old and out-of-date that they still think we're a bunch of simple black-and-white cookies they can split evenly in half, without the juicy red filling that beats at the heart of every American experience. It's time for a palette change.

Eat The Worm

Despite our crowd's consistent demonstrations of hearty appetites backed by impressive quaffing, we were not immune to bad party fouls, like any other high-aiming social group. We were the kind of kids who'd try and make the worst combinations of lunchroom leftovers we could think of, daring kids to eat it for, like, a quarter or fifty cents, which immediately knocked out the rich Jewish kids with orthopedist/dentist dads. They didn't need the change as badly as we did. White milk in a carton was $.15, and my mom didn't give anyone anything extra. Ever. If we wanted some chips to go with our bologna sandwiches or maybe a carton of chocolate milk for $.30/.35 (both junk food items in my household), we had to earn it, which we did by creating insane concoctions we giggled profusely over.

Drinks were fodder, too, because you could make gross-out combos in the obligatory thermos that came with every lunchbox back then. Do people even use those anymore? I'm not sure, but like our clothes and sneakers, a new lunchbox that wasn't a knock-off or a hand-me-down from your less-than-cool older sibling was fresh gear to sport around, and that meant something to us. Like a weird Midwestern religious cult that forbids gifts, presents, and celebrations like the booze that will surely cause them to snap out and kill someone, we were strictly limited in our options, which forced us to get creative, so we did.

Peas mixed with mashed potatoes and something sweet was a solid combo, but over the years, as our stomachs grew stronger, so did the thrills and angst accompanying cafeteria dares. After awhile, like, say, in junior high school, we had jobs for fast food and extra things like a novelty eraser that had meant so much to us in grade school. So, too, did our appetites grow in high school and college. "Mixology" was considered an unspoken minor alongside rolling joints and tobacco in rolling papers, which is kind of like baking with really thin puff pastry in cooking school for the first time: one tear and you're out of the game, unless you become adept at fixing the hole that could render a joint unsmokeable—or a pastry edible—making you the target of jeers for the rest of what could be a very long night.

Certain drink categories quickly became defined to us as a group as utterly non-potable and undesirable for long-term partying, meaning the wrong combo could take you out of the scene and into the bathroom for the entire night, missing out on the kind of crucial action that always takes place at a great party with slammin' music and beautiful people. It hurt, you know? As working class kids, we didn't have a lot of time for recreation, and for us to blow a rare opportunity for fun to remain behind closed doors while recovering from one of the worst hangovers of your life meant you fucked up somewhere, so you'd better fix it for the next time. We had the added bonus of hearing all of our friends make fun of us in the very next room, or prank us hard while we were down for the count, and these were kids from rough homes: they could turn vicious and mean with too much booze and pot. 

You didn't want to be "down for the count", like a prizefighter in the last round of a title fight who needs just a few precious seconds to make it to the end of a fight, in order to earn out from the bout, for all that hard work and dedication. It meant that much to us at school, and we really couldn't afford to blow it. There were no magical "Plan B" pills for us to take, back then. Every fuck-up we made could hurt us badly and take us "out of the running" for life, forever, like "Crackhead Jen" who got busted by "Pubic Safety" (public safety): a ragtag bunch of fat locals who hated us/needed us for a living. She got caught by them for over-drinking between dorms, and then was sent back to Ireland by her parents for awhile, to cool her heels. I finally got Karen back to our room, after they'd been pounding cheap fruit punch powder mix with grain alcohol that our friends bought for us in Pennsylvania.

As part of the prized "heavyweight" class of drinker from solid German/Irish/Italian working class New York roots, Karen could pull it in for adults and parents like I could, but Meg and her roommate Jen were from the quieter town of Mamaroneck in Westchester that left them lacking in their party-training, though Meg proved heartier than little Jen, who'd completely lose her shit after a few drinks. It was weird, because they're both solid Micks, but, with her cheerleader crew, Meg had sampled the darker world of blotter acid trips gone bad in the 'burbs, which actually left her primed and ready for a serious party experience like O-town. This shit wan't no joke to play with, yo. Kids snapped out and went down all the time around us, sometimes waiting it out at a local community college while living back at home with their parents for what could be a few crucial years in our development. We didn't have time for interruptions like that, esses. 

And so, like grain alcohol with powdered fruit drink mix, Tequilla (or "Ta-Kill-Ya", as we renamed it back then) was "loco" to us, man, as were the rest of the mescal group of drinks from south of the border. We'd drank the bottles to the bottom to eat the worm in front of each other, and that's exactly where it went all wrong for us: at the bottom of a bottle of seriously strong booze. We became the kind of crowd who could smoke and drink all night to exhaustion, braced for the deathly-cold walk home by a strict one-shot rule of whiskey at the end of the night, pounded to the same "Smiths" song that signaled it was closing time at the bar to us, cranked to an ear-splitting level. It was time to go home, and no matter how hard the booze hit you in the warmth of a cozy pub, the freezing bitch-slap of our mountain air always (ALWAYS) sobered us up enough to make it home problem-free. It pays to know just who the fuck you are at the end of a night out, especially around a bunch of roughneck New York kids. Take care with it.

 
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everclear_(alcohol)