After Midnight

Despite occasional harsh prejudices to the contrary, I remain an unpopular "day person" awake in the dawn of your socially acceptable manic-depression. In my small town of Pearl River, only two businesses operate 24/7, 365 days/year: the convenient store on the corner doing a brisk business in chemically-laden tobacco, booze, energy drinks, junk food, and lotto tickets, or the chain drugstore right across the street with its handy drive-up window. 

It speaks to our priorities about what we feel is most important to us in our lives, and it's the commercialized convenience of excess, which makes my natural body-clock jarring to the pale shakiness of a typical "night owl". Nor does it stop at a simple day/night dichotomy either, observed through the touchy tenderness about "alternative" circadian rhythms. It was in this vein that I suffered through each and every New Year's Eve with my mom growing up, who gets a "jolt of energy" (her words) between 10-11 p.m., moving around her carefully controlled, highly monitored "home environment" (her words again) to wash dishes and do laundry, then check her emails until 12 p.m.-1:30 a.m., unless of course I want to watch the UFC fights in her apartment airing "late" that end around her usual bedtime of 2:00 a.m. Then, my entire life and schedule is immediately suspect and abused.

It didn't matter how much my mom and her freaky friends or family "made fun" of me for sleeping at night, even if it was New Year's Eve. When you wake up between 6-7 a.m. in the morning, you go to sleep in the evening whether you want to or not, and that's healthy, except if you're paranoid and bipolar. Then, it's the complete opposite. Most of the seriously disordered people I know crave sugar, caffeine, or cocaine to get that rush when the depressive side of their illness kicks in, making them miss active late nights over a feeble, disabling, daytime lethargy. Of course, I can stay up for an event if I plan for it, but if I don't have to, I don't. It's simple: no dinner date or late-nite party to attend, I'm asleep. And I'll probably be working the next day. 

So, to all you lone wolves regularly sleeping with the sun like I do, know that you're not alone in your healthy sleep habits this New Year's Eve. And no, Jane, there's nothing wrong with getting a full 8-9 hours of sleep, despite peer pressure or what you've been told about "peak performance hours" for "maximum productivity". They're marketing buzzwords for anxiety and mania, anyway. Have a good night's sleep, and I'll see you all in 2017, fans of daytime. G-d bless. 

Beanie, baby

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

I didn't blame my friends for all of their problems, because life isn't like that. Humans are social animals, and as such, we need a family group to survive those first fragile years, unlike other mammals that need to run within minutes of their birth. Our relative co-dependence compared to other animals is the price we pay for our big brains, which are given biological precedence in early development, hence the international symbol for "cute" as it is decoded within babies: overly large head, wide eyes, pert lil' features, and an adorable clumsiness. We've simply been bred to stick together in need, and it isn't wrong for us to do so.

But, my friend Dave's parents were way beyond anything I'd seen with my hardcore Brooklyn kids from "around the way". The first time me and Karen went to see him off-campus (we had, of course, early run-ins with the T.A.'s living in our respective dorms for freshman and sophomore year as required on-campus living, because we were seen by the state as being too young to maintain a household by law as teenagers, before we could escape to a funky old house off-campus), he offered to throw up a sheet to divide his off-campus room, and charge us rent for sleeping on his floor. Wow...touched by that. Thanks, dude.

To show our gratitude, we dutifully inspected his room for closet space and other living area features, which he was too slow to respond to. O...M...G....this kid has brand-new clothes with the price tags still on them hanging in his friggin' closet for his exclusive use! But...but...what the fuck? We were baffled, because Dave worked suck-ass summer jobs like the rest of us, except his jobs were upstate in Schenectady, where the pay is much lower than the rest of the state. How, muthafucka?! "Oh, that's nothing!" Dave went underneath his bed and pulled out plastic containers full of new underwear (still bright white and sealed in the packages, yo!), different types of socks, anything he could possibly need, like, bought for him ahead of time and everything.

Who has parents who even do that?! We were stunned. He felt kind of bad for his parents shopping habit strewn about his room so obviously, so he offered to give us a few of his shirts. "Go ahead! Take one! I've never worn them before!" Yeah, we could tell, but, like, fuck, dude...don't you get it? Yeah, he did. He knew they liked shopping more than caring for him, and that's why he was fucked. I mean, what kind of monster tricks you out at the mall in the summertime, so you can fail out of school in the fall?! Sick working-class people with GED's do that. Not really disciplined folks looking to get by and get better. You know? As bad as we felt about our write-ups, we were somewhat grateful for our educated parents from the city at that point, because at least they didn't buy backwards into life. This shit was so weird.

Who buys a 21 year-old guy living in a house with his friends "tidy whitey" underwear?! Is he too stupid to do it himself? WTF?! I couldn't remember the last time my mom actually bought me clothing, and I was still only 18 as a sophomore. You had to work at a clothing store to get new clothes with your employee discount that came out of your paycheck, right? Karen agreed with me, because she was also raised by wolves, so we shrugged noncommittally to Dave's half-ass offer of draining a couple of working teenage women whatever money we had left (deducting school supplies and food, naturally) from our summertime paychecks. Uh, thanks for nothing. Asshole.

We joked about that for awhile, and then we moved on. From the strangely arrogant demeanor of Dave and his wanna-be WASP sister, I thought they came from money, but the first time I ever saw Dave's parent's house, I couldn't hide my shock. What the....where's your...? This is it?! You grew up here?! It was baffling; a rather small, nondescript, squat one-level towards the back of a generically suburban block. Ohhh, shit, dude. It was then that I fully realized how "out of it" they were. Dave made it seem like his father spent like a surgeon, when in reality, "The Captain" is a big Polack
with power plant union money married to his high school sweetheart, a former head cheerleader at the local high school. Ahh....now, I understood it.

It was pure bullshit bravado by the undereducated, and it didn't end there. They had packed the basement of their little house with their dead relatives tacky furniture, also stowing a second refrigerator and freezer next to shelves filled with those huge vats of club-bought mayonnaise, like they were expecting the end of the world any day. They thought it was funny for me and Dave to "go shopping" downstairs in their rat-packed basement when we lived in Brooklyn, but I was never really sure why. How the fuck are we gonna carry this around in the city?! Why would anyone need this much stuff?

And that was far from the end of their madness. They took us along on a "shopping trip" to Amish Country, a dead place on the map for tourists where we wandered around some outdoor mall looking at the exact same stores as the ones in upstate New York. Why are we even here? We didn't really need anything, and we were on a serious budget besides. What the fuck is this even for? They paid for our motel room so they could pack it with more of their stuff, filling their big car with so much shit, that they laughed at us as they packed crap under our arms and feet in the backseat. Ginger had also picked up a raging "collecting" hobby on the side that excluded her husband, hoarding these small toy animals that came with fast food purchases.

She forced his dad to stop at every fast food joint we came across on the road, and when we said we weren't hungry, she shrugged it off: "Just throw it out. I don't care about the food." And that's exactly what we did. We made U-turns in the parking lots of these fast food places across America to dump perfectly good food into trashcans designed to curb litter, not feed addictions, but it made Dave's straits a lot easier for me to understand. I didn't exactly come from a totally healthy background, either. How they ever expected "college" from a life like this was yet another symptom in their family's downfall, comprised of one horrible decision after another.

Just when we thought his parents had gorged themselves completely, we were wrong. His mom shouted out "Stop!" from the passenger seat of their comfortable retiree car, so she could pick up a couple of those wooden cut-out reindeer for her front lawn. For Christmas. In the summertime. What a great vacation idea for us! His dad had finally had enough. "Where are we gonna put them? Come on!" She wasn't deterred at all. "We could strap them to the roof, maybe?" Me and Dave laughed, because we'd bought nothing. Not one damn thing, and we came home drained with less than nothing. We felt worse than before the trip by their unchecked excessiveness, plus all of the drinking and eating in bad strip mall restaurants that we were forced to go to with them, on their dime. We had less than zero.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_buying_disorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_therapy

Getaway Car

Takashi Hososhima from Tokyo, Japan

My ex Dave was known by a few choice nicknames at Oneonta, notorious as he was for his good-looking "bad boy" ways, at a school famous for being the hardest partying school in the entire S.U.N.Y. school system back then. We called him "Dangerous" (because he was, to himself and others, but more for him than me), and "Mad Dog", because he raged at the machine like he was alien to it, which he was. His parents were high school sweethearts who thought much higher of themselves than two hard-partying, working class kids from upstate New York should have, and that was Dave's biggest problem.

They coddled him for being sick and beautiful, just like they did his older sister. Their kids had certain rock star components that they couldn't back up intellectually, which always left them frustrated, angry, confused, and feeling alone, attacking anyone around them during certain phases of the moon, like the half-deranged mixed Indians they are. It was maddening, because they can plateau for a few good years of productive work before bottoming out during their up-and-down cycles that characterizes the average manic-depressive. I hated it for them, but that was the best I could do without some hardcore medical back-up, which his parents refused to acknowledge, because it meant drying out for all of them (at the same time), as a lifestyle change too significant for arrogant Baby Boomers who refused to grow-up, stuck in their down cycles like the mental children they are.

They can shop and they can consume, and at their heights, they can party with the best of us, but during their dark times, they become rabid beasts unwilling to take a simple anti-depressant pill that's been around for ages, because their character flaws (like their arrogance) won't allow them to admit that they need medical help, minor as the cure sometimes is. It saddened me as I watched them make asses out of themselves in public from the sidelines of their disorders, powerless as you are when they are in the grip of their madness and addictions, knowing that one good doctors' visit is all they really need. Have you ever known someone like that?

I bet you have. Heart-breaking, isn't it? They were gorgeous on the outside only and deeply flawed from within, like a lunatic lion with his lioness, suffering from the same thorn in their paw that you can only pull out for them so many times. Get a grip, man, and get help, will you?! At the end of it (with certain types of Indo-Europeans), that's really the best you can do for them, by backing away to give them the space they need to disappear into the bottom of a bottle, and hope that they can finally learn to see through the haze of booze and their own distorted visions. It's actually born of a cowardice that can seem shockingly needy and co-dependent to healthy people, which is part of why they don't last that long around us.

You can either a) take care of them (for their families), or b) watch them they cling to someone else, like a barnacle stuck on the side of a rapidly wrecking ship that's taking on massive amounts of water. If you aren't a fucked-up "enabler" (and I most definitely not that), there's nothing in it for us to watch someone fall down drunk and then stagger slowly to their feet once again. It's sheer torture to watch sick people do that to themselves without reaching for help that's often inches away. So, I simply didn't do it after awhile, because getting ego-gratification from propping up a sick person is often ten times more sick than being the alcoholic him/herself. Know what I mean? What kind of sick fuck does that weird shit with loved ones, over and over again in a broken-down cycle? Not me!

Still, I loved Dave for loving me for so long behind my back (I admired his loyalty with its requisite hidden agendas attached) and he was incredibly physically beautiful, which warped his poor mind into further social distortion, because he couldn't handle his own looks. Some folks think it's "fun" to be almost inhumanly gorgeous but it's actually really scary, and it never goes away. People act so fucking weird and abusive to you, it's insane, and it's their kind of weirdness, not yours. People have these strange ideas that it's like wearing a pricey fur coat, or buying really expensive shiny jewelery that you can take on-and-off whenever you feel like it, but it sure as fuck isn't that. It's bone deep and it stays with you, despite weight loss (or weight gain), seasons of the year, age, hair color, skin tone, hair, or any other kind of superficial shit that average people get wrong all the time.

They thought (because their parents taught it to them) that they could barter off their beauty like their were prostitutes, which they sometimes verged on becoming, trading off their looks for petty shit like money, jobs, purses, and cars, as objects that are easily given and just as easily taken away. I thought they were dumb college kids saddled with their parents false expectations about creating scholars out of thin air without any effort, which is total bullshit. Ask any teacher. And that was it, too: we knew they were doomed to fail, because it remains the established pattern backing their disorders.

As working class New Yorkers, me and my best friend Karen were way beyond sympathetic to their pain. We lived with it at home with our own families, and because we'd already seen so many people go down as teenagers, you take the chance to help a brother out, man, when you can. You don't easily pass that up. They were more than our friends. They were family, and you don't disrespect soulful people in pain, you know? We were in it together. I didn't want to just help, I wanted to help them heal along with me, as we returned home to our families armed with knowledge and information, as they still struggled in pain. As soon as we learned lessons in college, we almost immediately tried applying it with vigorous strength to the family living in our homes, whether it worked or not, though we desperately hoped it would. What do you think motivates two teenage girls from roughly abusive families, besides minimum wage and part-time work?

We put our very heart and souls into the fight for our lives and the lives of the people around us who were drowning in drugs and alcohol, thanking our lucky stars everyday for the better health we felt so fortunate to have, hard as we worked for it. We knew they weren't made of the same stuff as us, but oh, did we want to help a brother out. It became the stuff our lives were made of, too, our life's mission and raison d'etre for being in it with them, for as long as we could manage it. It meant (and still means) that much to us. And so, when they fell down, we picked them up time after time (actually physically picking them up and supporting their often greater weights, athletes that we all are), and carrying them back home to the safety of our humble houses that we held together with our love, blood, sweat, and tears, but it wasn't something we could do on our salaries for very long, without facing down the fear of bankruptcy, which I finally did.

It went far beyond kicking someone when they were down, because we'd seen it up close for far too long, even though I'd escaped some of the worst facets of addictive disorders from my parents abilities to maintain drug- and alcohol-free existences for periods of time, weird as their disorders expressed themselves in other areas of their lives. Without healing madness at the root of it, it simply went into different odder directions, sublimated into an ever-stranger series of "fetishes" (self-described to me), like obsessive counting games, or folding laundry long into the night. We'd seen it's weirdness up close-and-personal in the people closest to us, as the very people who gave birth to us, and we hated their diseases with a passion that fueled our work at an almost inhuman pace, as we frantically tried to outpace their madness, sometimes falling down hard in the face of it by becoming overwhelmed, awash and swamped by the sheer number of illnesses we had to bear up under and support on a woman's salary.

We carried them as long as we could, and then we had to cut the chord to save ourselves, an enormously humble and selfless act that is not for juniors or beginners. Don't do it like we did, unless you have our gifts and genius, okay? Don't try this at home, folks, and don't "go it" alone. Gird yourself with as many strong healthy warriors as you can, and fire at it with everything you have in your arsenal, because that's exactly what I'm doing with you who are along for the ride today with me, out there in my audience, thinking that you're alone. You are not.

For all of David's supposed bravado in the face of life's challenges (as well as the normal day-to-day stuff he shied away from, too), at home he was just another scared New York kid too afraid to drive a car from my aunts' Brooklyn apartment to our parent's houses upstate. Despite his exaggerated tales of car chases and bank robberies gone wrong, you should know, my dear friends, that it was always just me driving him in-and-out of the city in the early morning light to avoid traffic, tourists, and fast-moving cabs that could cut you off at any moment, because he simply didn't have it in him to navigate an urban jungle as deadly as my native New York City. I did. You should know that.

Guinea Foul

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatso_%281980_film%29

Like I've written before, my mom and her siblings like to hide their addictions and use them against one another, like watching mentally-challenged adults freak out over a hand of "Go Fish" played with peanuts that they steal from each other all game long. It hurts their group even more when they use their addictions against each other as a ploy, hence the cover-ups and deceit. They divert their compulsive obsessive addictive disorders into weirder and weirder stuff, in their unending war with each other to secure some coveted higher ground that has all the leverage and power they need to escape healthcare, which is about as opposite to a real family as one can get, and I suppose that's part of the point with being evil in secret, like a woman who prostitutes herself to hide her heroin addiction: it's done for the cheap illicit thrill. 

Having closeted disorders is hard to prove in any court of law (one of my mom's siblings finally managed to pass the bar after several very expensive tries while living at home, totally funded by my grandfather and ConEd), without describing something so bizarre to a sober judge in the bright light of day that it seems like you made it up, which is part of the point, too: throw suspicion onto one other in an insane game of "Round-Robin" until someone gets bored, grows tired, or just leaves. They sit clenched to their kitchen chairs working each over like it's lunchtime in a prison cafeteria, which is alternately scary/dull, and that's another "fun" facet of it, as well. It's another "Contest of the Wills", like schoolchildren holding their breath in a playground competition held during recess, in a bid for dominance that's also my lifelong stress test. Who is the weakest link? Not it!

And so I'm left out of the daily details that haunt the rest of my family, lucid as I am. You don't want witnesses around the scene of a crime, especially tricky law-abiding people like me, which is silly, because I already knew the jig was up many years ago. My mom described her upbringing as "schizophrenic" because her mother was an Italian Norman and her father was a French Swiss/Irish Norman. So... Norman on both sides of a European merchant family who traded widely around Europe? Oh...Sensing a rip in "The Force" that was more like trying to eat one decent meal with my mother without a violently hysterical drama of "high-highs" and "low-lows" accompanied with laughter that dissolved into tears (because I'm not manic depressive, which one can easily prove nowadays with all sorts of handy medical exams), my mom would poke at my questions to her like she was doing laundry for three days straight, in an order that only she can possibly navigate with her extreme brand of hypervigilance. Neat!

She'd go on to describe different cultural rituals to me that she had to toggle between growing up, like funeral services between the two clans. Uh huh. "Very strange to me! The Italians eat and cry, and the Irish drink and laugh!", which is pretty much lifting a scene straight out of Dom DeLuise's movie "Fatso" that her and her sisters approved of as appropriate dinner table conversation, because they found it funny to be portrayed as food addicts in a real movie, while totally missing the point that being sick is not the same as being famous, even for the dubious distinction of eating like there's no tomorrow. They each have variations of the same eating disorder, which they colorize as being "completely different" from one another, when it's obviously the same genetic disease spread around them as immediate siblings.

My mom is a food hoarder like her siblings, but she "controls it" with yet another nifty game of vigilance, through the constant monitoring of exactly how many boxes of crackers and cookies she has, and if you touch one without asking, she MUST replace it in a never-ending cycle that I disembark from as soon as possible because, once again, I do not share their cheerful problems with food. Haha! It's funny, right? Her youngest sister complained about caring for my beautiful grandmother who supported her all of her lazy life, until we all sent her free food that she promptly rejected as "too healthy", which she hid in closets stuffed with clothes and papers. That's one way to create a sick house for the elderly: being sick yourself! Needless, I had a professional healthcare worker tend to my lovely grandmama, who can attest to this day about her beauty and grace that I've told you about already.

My mom's middle sister has the worst food addiction, which she is very proud of, like she won the top blue-ribbon prize at a country fair pie-eating contest. Much like a drunk doesn't really give a shit about what type of beer he/she drinks, my mom's sister "gets off" on making horrible food (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/12/swap.html), so she can monitor you eating it and then ask you a sneaky series of oddly intense questions about it that you have to avoid like a live minefield, or she explodes into a psychotic fit of barely suppressed rage. My grandparents called her "Harpo" after the famous "Marx Brothers" character who can't speak, because she becomes mute with shock around normal people, and she looks like a man. Attractive, right? No! Wrong! That's why she pretends to us that her disgusting bland food is like having sex (to have a good story to tell in group therapy, like auditioning for "Dr. Phil", duh. Lots of competition in New York for top t.v. spots!), except without any pleasure to be had from it whatsoever, unless you are the exact same kind of weird closet case as her, which changes upon exposure of it with a big handy bunch of lies at the ready, like the fork she HAS TO eat with.

The prize pig in the bunch is my mom's youngest sister who (last I heard) wanted to die from the cheap chemical filler Aspartame and its subsequent poisoning (http://aspartame.mercola.com/), because she also has an anxiety disorder that makes her a total chickenshit, which is an ironic Hell I could have never designed for her. She's too scared to commit suicide! Oh, dear. She's addicted to fast food and that's not a new trend, which is unfortunate in her t.v.-addict world that blurs the line with reality, greatly assisted by a bunch of prison/welfare queen lesbians who like to drink, do drugs, fight, and...well, they can't show you the sex, unless you pay extra somewhere else for it, because every stripper/hooker has a cheap porno site on the side to supplement her "baby daddy" child support. Again: duh. You're sooo naive!

She also likes to huff plastic and hoard dollar store crap, which is also not an original thing for Wal-Mart addicts/shoppers who got the jump on their "lifestyle choices" out in the MidWest many many years ago, without benefit of the two hip, smart, native New York parents she had, the very same people who helped raise me. Isn't that ironic? Or don't you think? I call it a "Guinea" foul! What do you call it with your family? Let's discuss it amongst ourselves.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=guinea

Rush

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28biology%29

Close to the city as we were, my family were natural experts in the dramatic arts, seeking out occasions that best displayed those skills to an audience up close and personal. To this day, my mom still stages tense little dramas to give color to her day by using anyone available to her to indulge her weird whims. Lately, she's become a little too glittery and shiny in the eyes over me standing by her kitchen sink, which is one of the great joys of her life. She calls the mundane chore of washing the same pots and pans over and over again as "playing with the dishes", and in order to safeguard her treasure trove of washables for later on when she's alone to savor it gloriously, she monitors me moving around her small apartment-style kitchenette while I do something as banal as making her a cup of tea. Sometimes, she'll complain that I move "too quickly", which is her special top- secret kooky code for "I can't hypervigilantly follow your movements so as to draw freaky vibes from your handling of my precious dishes (she hoards paper in times of stress, too), so I will find some way to demean/abuse/harass you while you are in my area of keen interest."

Oh. So, I'm not your biological girl-child that you pushed out during childbirth, right? And that's actually the reality behind it. In the middle of my mom's worst head-case scenarios, I can be anyone who is blocking her road to success by "incorrectly" moving a pair of "her" glasses out of my way on "her" countertop. If I've learned anything from shows like "Hoarders" and "Taboo: Obejctum Sexuals", it's that people with compulsive obsessive addictive personality identity disorders over-personalize objects to such an extant that they exalt them far above over actual lifeforms as a priority in their lives, which is inherently incorrect in modern Homosapien. It's like this mad, sickening, crazy tilt-a-whirl of a ride that the afflicted can't get disembark from, covert as my mom's expert stylings have become over the years.

Like most seriously sick people, my mom has had to reorient her "fetishes" (her word for it, not mine, because I simply see dishes in a sink, not a soapy fairy tail of fun that's a portal to a mythical magical Neverland) in between the noticing of healthy sharp observers like myself, which is exactly why she abuses me (and anyone else) who encroaches upon "her" territories overmuch, like a rabid weasel protecting its young. She's turned boring household chores into quick conduits for biologically addictive chemical payoffs for her benefit only, like a junkie becomes an adept thief at stealing away in the middle of the night to shoot up in lots of creative ways that you and I would never think about, even during our most feverishly delusional states.

The other night, I saw an episode of "Law and Order: SVU" that totally blew my mind in its' accounts of dementia. While the detectives worked a murder case about a neurotic young woman pressed by her evil boss overmuch (they were "besties" at work!), who turned to the cold comforts of alcohol consumption and promiscuous sex over say, consulting a good doctor and getting a better job (locked as she was in a highly tense and very stressful lesbo push-and-pull with her crazy, short-haired boss over pressing deadlines that are such a rush in the workplace, if only you put off everything until the last minute), the medical examiner told them this handy little bon mot about drunks: that their victim hadn't been sexually abused by a stalking rapist. No, it was much fucking weirder than that. She used a wine bottle to push the booze directly up her butt to absorb its intoxicating elixir, which has the added bonus of keeping one's breath fresh, too. Neat, huh?

The resident M.E. went on to further explain other covert methods of alcohol addiction, like the ever-useful "Vodka Tampon" that some nifty co-eds like to use: simply soak aforementioned tampon in a glass of booze before hitting class, insert it, then go go go! I was like, what the fuck, people?! It's so fucking convoluted and weird, you should know that's why those girls wind up on a slab in their 20s and 30s; not because I forgot the key combination of event sequences for their maximum enjoyment, like the types of sponges I HAVE TO use at my mom's place (one sponge is for the dishes, and the other one is just for the countertops and they MUST BE disinfected in the microwave periodically because germs kill just like in that scifi show about zombies you got me hooked on and now I HAVE TO watch it and buy the books and all the paraphernalia and its all your fault because you're here and why are you here, no wait, it makes sense you HAVE TO let me explain it all to you in overwrought detail!), because I must be the reason that my mom does laundry and "plays" with her sink full of dishes every night until three or four in the morning. She just gets a mysterious jolt of energy at those times before the lethargy sets in every "morning" at noon, when she finally wakes up after 3 or 4 cups of black sugared coffee!

Just like any type of foreign criminal mindset that's completely batshit, it's not so much that my mom has cleverly hid her illnesses from me (hiding in plain sight as they are), it's just that it's so petty and strange to normal people like me that we could care less, and that's the point of it: if you hide your false enjoyment over common activities, you can get high from the tension that exists only in your stupid mind, because the person in "your" area doesn't know that you wiped your finger over your butthole in the bathroom, exited, then wiped your grody pinkie finger over said hated person's objects ("they" shouldn't be there anyway!), so only you know how bad it is when "they" dare to pick up "your" butt pen. It's sort of like being around that crazy bitch from a typical bunny boiler horror movie who sticks a toothbrush up her butt because that prettier roommate just has to go (tusually me in a staged role that only she knows about, teeheehee), especially if she's straight and there are "too many" handsome boys hanging around all the time, because she's just "too pretty, you know?"

Therefore, we must die, or at least get sick from your urine in the company coffeepot, because we also dared to live and breathe and not notice your crazy, or the highs you get from that huge bottle of mouthwash in the company bathroom, you fucked up, overgrown sorority girl, because deep-down you know we just don't fucking care about your weirdo routines, unless you make them an instrument of horror, devastation, and abuse. Then, after you've set the stage with your powerfully totemic "special" objects, you can kill me off or at the very least get my mom to snap out because you moved something around of hers that you know will cause a meltdown, Bernadette, you fucking bitch of a cave troll. No more "high life" from this clan, starting today. Go huff plastic from a bargain store elsewhere, hag. We get it. We know! And we can totally see all those invisible germs crawling over your skin, and the aliens are coming to take you away with those anal probes that they do because....the truth is out there. Love, X.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_%281996_film%29

Waste Not, Want Not

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

My grandfather told me everything I needed to know to live well: how to do what needed to be done, when to do it, for how long or by how much, and why for. Between he and my grandmother, there wasn't anything that they couldn't cover with their accumulated knowledge base over the years. It's also how I know when their remaining family are totally full of shit: because they told it to me first. It's freaky how often their skills come up in my life, like besting a cashier at the grocery store in, what is to me, a simple game of sorting shapes and sizes that allows me to expertly pack bags that they can't. See? Like that. You do your job like that.

It's not really a contest between us, is what I'm saying to you. Together, we packed up cars to go to the Jersey Shore with the diva belongings of every over-packed (and over-shopped) drama queen's stuff nestled perfectly in the back (just in case one of them, you know, actually got off his/her fat ass to interact with a living breathing human who did not give birth to them and/or nurse them daily), because if we didn't manage their belongings expertly, we'd have to sit on the hump in the middle sandwiched between their ill-bought fantasies. We've all been there with family like that, haven't we? Healthy people in sick families have their brilliantly exciting lives pushed aside by the sick, when they are the ones in the margins of life, looking at us from the sidelines while we excel behind their deliberately turned backs. Convenient timing, isn't it?

But like my fathers sayings, my grandparents never really died in me, and they're here with me now. I don't mean allegorically, like some overblown Off-Broadway "dramedy" with sighing ghost-rattled chains and showily exaggerated moans of disbelief, but actually embodied in my living faith that's theirs as well. What began (and ended) with your brief encounter at thrifty living during seventh grade  "Home Ec" class became the ethos we need(ed) to survive your major economic downturns, the very same that fill the sanitariums and rehabs with the many afflicted among us who cannot cope with change. FYI, I bought rice and beans during the last "economic downturn". When we need(ed) to save on your utility bills, we turn(ed) off the lights and looked for apartments on the cheap with large, tall windows that bring in the natural light of day, hated as that may be for cretinous behavior.

We're saying that we know your waste is manufactured to foul the earth deliberately and that it stops today, because we made laws (furtively and secretively behind your back....kidding! It's on the books because we made them, and like, wrote them out and stuff). Besides, your total dipshit ways aren't working anymore, or ever. From now on, restaurants and other food distributors will be penalized ($$$) every time they're caught throwing out food that can be used legally, without excessive spoilage, for human consumption. Ditto for all restaurants, food trucks, sidewalk carts, and other fine purveyors of foods. 

My grandfather often quoted a Barese saying at the beginning of each meal as "mangia tutta casa", which in direct translation means to "eat the house" but in actuality meant "take all you want, eat all you take" as in "don't eat us out of house and home" with your rampantly unchecked and aggressively compulsive eating addiction, yo. Because my grandparents raised themselves, their sick families, and their children's children in times of great depressions, they knew (like me) exactly what family members with severe addictive disorders do, in addition to what all those other highly toxic and deeply anti-social behaviors do to the rest of the members of a family: they unfairly tax those who of us who can control their consumption unchecked unlike say, a watcher of weight addicted to junk food. In the excellent words of my grandfather if you "waste not, (you) want not" and that's how we feel about life, because that's how we live it: without waste. Nothing goes to waste in our happy homes. Welcome to the New World Order. You're welcome, by the way!

http://www.usda.gov/oce/foodwaste/resources/donations.htm

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

Wired

Wired Anxiety (Wikimedia Commons)

For years I've trucked through many different kinds of creative crowds, ones that are particularly acute, emotional, and open by nature, as we're taught and so inclined. Through the years, we've openly discussed just about any facet of the human experience fit for talk, and some things not so carefully done. Artists creatively problem-solve in many different types of ways, so obsessive chatter from neurotics tend to grate on our collective nerves after awhile, like watching a dog run around in circles without benefit of a funny video online, and you are that dysfunctional unfunny human to us. Where exactly are is this going? Brainstorming is fun, if it produces something eventually.

Like many artistic people, I've struggled in the past with blowhard college boyfriends who spent a lot of time tanked on talk, high on way more than actual learning. My first real boyfriend was the first person to openly admit to me that he vastly preferred natural biochemistry to artificially-induced ones, expensive as drugs tend to be, because of the vulnerable compulsiveness that actively marks addiction. He seemed to think that higher learning meant you could ramble on about any crazy idea that you had out loud to anyone in the room, rather than internalizing concepts or, even better, writing them down cohesively, but that's why he's an entertainment lawyer who guards artistic paychecks that he's dependent on for a living, and you read me instead of listening to him talk, not that he didn't try every trick in the book to knock me down as many pegs above him as I was.

My father and every one of my brothers hated him for being the all-boys prep-school quarterback he bragged about endlessly, along with his pretensions towards greatness for being a blue-eyed French Canadian/Irish guy living in our world on the east coast. Yeah, dubious at best. It was until years later that I saw him accurately depicted in the awesome comedy "Wedding Crashers" (he finally realized his media dreams of fame!), through Bradley Cooper's dead-on impression of a back-stabbing bitch of a boyfriend with serious homoerotic issues that I realized how many of my friends, family, and acquaintances despised him, which happily brings us together, here on my site today: a place where we can all get along, and group grievances are finally aired out in the open...not that he did any of that.

He plays a lot of "head games" that go nowhere and do nothing, which I often found to be more common among non-creatives, because they have to wait while we make the work the world uses, as a set of people that I sometimes feel sorry for, because they're relegated to the sidelines of life while the big hitters take the risks that earn the big glory. He can't do that because of his disorders (among them addiction, compulsiveness, Lupus, and a big case of "asshole"), but that doesn't stop him from trying hard to impress. I've always hated his egotism based on being a "serious scholar", which often means he spends a lot of time trying to marginalize the star power on center stage ineffectively (ironic as his job must be for him), and that's what I remember most about him now, besides his chemical addictions; an insecurity so violent, he loses way more ground than he gains.

He tried hard to convince me that I was dumb (because I'm an artist, so "genius=stupid", I guess), and often "crazy" over serious family problems that I didn't control as a working class teenage girl, and that my "partying" was motivated from the same interesting, glamorous manic ennui as his that he would only obliquely refer to in "nonversations" that didn't matter, with people too stoned or drunk to care about his points, because directly addressing his issues would make him lose precious leverage in society, even though as a spoiled white boy from a poncy private school, he had all the power then.

It was desperate and striving, character flaws that I finally couldn't forgive or put up with anymore, along with the many unsolicited hours of boredom he would bring to the card table, when all we really wanted to do back then was play drinking games and have fun during our precious off-hours from work, or school, or both. I have never forgotten his immature pillow-talk about his chemical addictions that I thought were just puppy love ravings over my sexual prowess, and the desire for me that he channeled into his "highs" that he could yank me around with, though given the difference in our looks and status, it was highly unlikely to ever pan out. It was okay if he was moodily and maudlin, but if I had an actual serious illness, I was "weak" and I'd never be "virile" like him (see also: "Gaston"), though in reality, he's the one with the in vitro triplets and I'm the one with the long-lived fertility.

If I spent a lazy summer drowsing and dreaming, I was a bad housewife hurting my chances at a favorable marriage with him in the future, because I didn't get twitchy or itchy from seeing dishes in the sink. If I had a hard time managing my very sick and very large extended family as a working young woman in school, it was obviously because I was too stupid to do so; I couldn't read books like he could as a history major (because I'd already spent my youth reading as many books as I could find), and that must be sad. All I could do was get into a school for brilliant Leonardo da Vinci-types :( Poor me!

He'd drone on for hours, interesting only to him and his particular biochemistry, like the badly staged scenes he directed with a drama queen's tenseness, in these diva-like displays that had absolutely no talent behind them at all, and that was the crux of it: he earns off of talent, because he's drawn to us as much as he hates us for it, in a classic up-and-down, love/hate cycle that became the biggest bore I'd ever met. His passions for some brand of iced tea were rave-worthy and "smile-rific" which you HAD TO try or he'd just die, whereas my charcoal drawings were lame for an untrained teenage girl, and "EW!" Nudes! Who would do something like that?!

For the record, Bart, the productive people who run the world do "gay" stuff like that. That's who. By the way, you're welcome for the nice house in Brooklyn, the wife (with those unfortunate brown eyes that you told me hurt my chances for a good match in college...oops!) and 3.5 kids you forced your poor wife to bio-engineer for you with rounds and rounds of expensively-provided fertility treatments (because you're sterile) with long hospital stays that required her total bed rest for months; the same very family you step out on and/or check out from physically and mentally periodically, because your work is so important as a contracts guy for your union that you have to hit the road whenever things get bad, seeking the rush you need from other people's more exciting lives (like the actors who provide for you and your family, you know, "gay") that you watch from the set in the shadows, picky as ever, and fussily looking for problems that will cause a pay-out for violations from your plush union. You can thank this "dumb artist" for your life, whenever you get the chance. Bro.

 

Hey, O-towners! This one's for you today. I felt your pain. Thanks for hanging with me back in the day anyway, arrogantly over-bearing boyfriends notwithstanding. I really needed the support, just like you did. 

Sugar Monkey

I've had a sick mother all my life, but she will deny it almost every time you ask her about it, except on those days when she chooses to be agreeable about it, and that's about the best way to describe it, in a nutshell. When I was little, her back hurt too much to carry me, after years of toting my much bigger and older brothers around, so she told all of us that she had a "bad back" with perhaps an early onset of arthritis. After that, she made a big deal about lying down in total quiet and darkness ("I must lie prone and still for awhile in utter darkness and silence. Thank you...": cue whispered sick voice), and if anything dared disturb her during resting time periods, she became imperious and abusive, like a mythical princess complaining about feeling a pea under several mattresses, which wasn't far off from her off-Broadway version.

She made my dad put a wooden board under their mattress that was already super hard or "orthopedic", because my mom loves to use medical-sounding words to describe her psychic pains. If we dared wake her up in the middle of night with our bad dreams, she sprang up like a vampire roused out of it's coffin before nightfall, gasping for breath and completely cold. She told us we couldn't move the bed at all, because every "jar" we made gave her excruciating pains to her lower back. When she really did break her back by her continued insistence on tennis lessons after her MS diagnosis (my mom has never been an athlete ever, but she'll lie about that most days, too), she told us that she had to lay perfectly still to get a good nights sleep.

And so it went. When my paternal grandmother took ill during a visit to our house, my mom took the opportunity to play out a hysteric scene that included dramatically folding like crumpled paper and dropping to the hospital floor in pain, even though she wasn't the one dying. "That's when my MS 'kicked in'"!" she likes to tell people, blaming my dead grandmother for her still undiagnosed illness. 

After the gift of MS was given to her, anything and everything became an excuse to cover her tracks, ones that often lead her to describe her self-prescribed "issues" with someone else as the source of all of her angst, aches, and pains besides herself. When I got laid off, she used me as the primary target for her "depression", so she could get an anti-depressive prescription from her neurologist in the city.

Because I can accurately construct a real timeline for just about anything, she dumped me from doctor duty because I was hip to her game. Her and her weirdo sisters do crazy shit like take limo rides to see a "specialist" in the city, but they'd ignore you being homeless at their feet, just like her phony church lady sister who uses the church to fill in her dull, lifeless schedule. She'll tell you she's religious, but she's just mouthing the words. My mother is tricky, though, because even if she's "crying wolf", she may actually be hurt, but she wants to parlay it into another type of scenario over healing quickly, because that would rob her of stringing it out into series of soap opera-like vignettes that she can fill in her time with, too. She's told me to my face that she likes to visit "quacks" because she has this delusional idea that she can "Jedi mind-trick" them into giving her any type of pills she wants.

My mom absolutely loves hoarding medicine and papers, too, which makes it visually easy for me to assess exactly where her head is at. Because she has a background as a lab technician, she's savvy enough to work a con game that includes official-sounding language to mask her real symptoms, and she thinks she's really good at it, but not with me. She does genuinely have a lot of disorders, and those I take very seriously. Right now she has really bad mouth pain that she calls "Neuralgia", which may or may not be related to MS nerve damage, but she's had it for years even though she can't quite remember. I took her to a few dentists in exploration of her condition with no solutions, thus giving her a great excuse to go into full-on "Princess mode" by booking a fancy car and whisking away into the city for a glamorous turn with a pricey doctor (hopefully handsome, too, so she can visit him many times over) at a certain university she used to work at many years ago, giving her the proper amount of attention she feels she deserves.

Ditto with her diet. She and her siblings all have eating disorders (which they call "food issues"), like they're at a dainty, white-gloved tea party for debutantes only. It's insane because they all have such a thick lowbrow Bronx accents that people outside of the tri-state area can't understand them when they speak. They're the ultimate provincials with arrogant "bougie" ways, a striking contrast between their continued, ongoing ill health and a certain glowing girl who was made to do chores for them all of her life, because they don't have time with their "busy schedules". It's insanely ridiculous, because they're basically office workers, with the soft stubby bodies to prove it. 
My mom has almost no muscle whatsoever at times, making her extremely prone to back-breaking falls, until we forced her into a regular schedule of PT/OT that she's since become accustomed to, though at first she treated her healthcare professional like a manicurist she could wave away when she didn't feel like it.

Of course, I found an expert therapist who also uses her training in clinical psychology with the elderly to work my mom (she mistakenly dropped the info that I have to remind her about during one particularly grueling circular argument she was desperate to win against me), because my mom likes to threaten to throw people into mental institutions if they don't follow her commands. It's a childish game of "I know you are, but what am I" that continues until her stress has been released through the heightened, angry confrontation (like a toddler does when tired), immediately forgotten after she gets her chemical payoff from her angst, which is followed by an equally nuts game of "I have no idea what you're talking about", milking the doddering senior act for all its worth, because she got caught making threats again.

Then, her head droops onto on her chest, falling asleep while you're speaking to her in mid-sentence, in complete opposition to her awkward hyper-vigilant tenseness a mere minute or so ago. If anyone dares to suggest to her that she should take a nap, or notices how weird it is for her to tune out the way she does in the middle of a conversation, she snaps to her next compulsive routine that centers around tea. You see, my mom has also been a sugar addict all of her life. I'm sure it's fun as heck for her healthcare team to deal with. When I told her this past weekend that she was "my sugar monkey", she laughed delightedly at it, like it was a game of truth-or-dare for her to win, which is so fucking odd, because I've known her all my life. She wakes up to several strong cups of coffee with sugar, and continues her hard usage throughout the day, using our Irish tea tradition to cover up her over-ingestion of cookies, cakes, crackers, and pie.

Anyone who dares to mention her nod-offs to her gets the ole MS-related excuse (which could actually be true, if she's between her doses), or her exhaustion from metal distress (uh uh...we've given my mom a very easy life compared to ours), or it's simply because she's getting older. Some of it may be true, some of it may be her delusional fantasies, or some combination of both. I've never met a better liar than my mom. Even the hardcore drug and alcohol junkies in my family lie weaker than her, so good and practiced she is at it, though with her type of checking out, I'm not sure if she knows. Recent studies have shown what we've always known to be true, that treetop monkeys eat a leaner type of diet that lends them a calmness denied to their bottom-feeding fruit-eating monkeys as the epitome of over-aggression, fighting with their band of monkeys throughout the day. Guess which one you are, mom? Guess which one your special little monkey is? "Oo oo"! 

It's not a problem for me, though. I know her better than anyone, because I've taken care of her the longest. It's okay: I'll grab you the best fruit from the top of the tree, mama. Ain't never gonna let you go down on my watch. Just remember: "fructose is sugar, too", Dr. Diane and have at it, my lil "Sugar Monkey"! Here's that recent data we talked about this past weekend, while you ate pie in the middle of the day that would have given me an instantly vicious headache (http://bit.ly/1SuPkTG). I just talked and watched and waited on her as she ate, salvaging some cheese crackers from her pantry (she keeps anywhere from 6-12 boxes on hand, because "they're all different"). By the way, did you notice you didn't get the healthier turkey leftovers? 

They gave you some of the desserts, and someone was rude enough to cram different pie types of top of each other in an angry rush (like women who diet compulsively do), in a rude gesture that said you aren't even worth the time it takes to separate desserts carefully into sections, just sloppily crammed on top of one another, in shame and haste. I saw that, too. And that cherry had no flavor, the one I picked out of the pie tin to taste while you ate slices of coconut cream pie. 

It was the strangest thing, given how much your family protests to be "foodies", isn't it? That pie had no absolutely no cherry flavor at all....it was just one dull sweet note with no flavor, like the kind of food served in hell, cruelly robbed of any taste as a punishment for someone who suffers from, say, gluttony as a vice. Odd, don't you think? 

http://orthomolecular.org/library/articles/webach.shtml

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/01/07/sugar-health-research

http://abc13.com/health/study-sugar-is-as-addictive-as-cocaine/533979/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/