Raging (Against The Machine)

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

The American political system is one of the most complex in the world, because that's exactly the way it was designed to be, to prevent tampering and corruption. Given the heightened emotional climate surrounding our political process, it's no wonder that outside observers around the world feel it is a rigged game, like my Eastern European friends at the local barber shop who emigrated from countries with gross human rights violations and completely fixed elections.

Their former governments have trained them not to have a say in politics, because if they do, riots and bloody wars will break out, bringing years of crippling economic insecurity and societal unrest for what could be many decades. They've been tricked into apathy and indifference by believing that nothing they say or do matters, therefore why should they bother voting or speaking up to make a difference, if it only brings you and your family more pain? It absolves them from feeling responsible or guilty about their government, which is the exact opposite of freedom, like their casually superficial cynicism that goes nowhere and does nothing to solve our human problems.

For example (like I told my Russian-American hairdresser, Katy), most people around the world don't realize that our constitution reads "We, the people..." because there is no "us" or "them" in the United States. We are our system of representation. Over 1.5 million (MILLION) people work in Washington D.C., for all sorts of national departments and federal agencies within our government (not including state and local levels), with key positions avidly sought (and campaigned for) that often begin with the relatively simple process of collecting signatures door-to-door. That's right. You read that correctly.

We teach government from the earliest grades in our educational school systems. Katy and I also discussed that in the barbershop, because she attended design school in Russia and is fluent in English, which makes her atypical from many newly-arrived immigrants, like my great-grandparents from Italy who were poor farmers. She complained about the easy questions on the American citizenship test designed for your tired, hungry, and poor "masses yearning to be free" (as written on the Statue of Liberty) who are learning a new language; not just hip, well-educated designers with an active part in their destinies.

Peaceful, non-violent elections every four years are the foundations of our freedoms. That's shocking, isn't it? No coups, no fratricides, and there's no rioting in the streets. Were it the same for sporting events! Just the sweet hard work that is our freedom. It isn't perfect, problem-free, or dispassionate, but it is exactly what the rest of the struggling world wants. You just have to work at it every day, like we do. Throwing away your vote is one of the biggest symptoms that something is very wrong with you and your life, to care so little about your future and your fate. Or maybe you're just not American enough to participate? THEN, VOTE.

The White Man's Grave

Years ago, I read a fictional novel by Richard Dooling about the hazards that the rich white man faces while trying to impose his cultural constructs upon Africa, resulting in the loss of his soul. When a local cabbie picks up a generic-looking businessman at the airport, the first question the white man asks him is: why is that big old tree in the middle of town hung with so many brightly-colored flags? He'd never seen anything like that before! What did it mean? The cabbie smiled at the sweating, overweight, red-faced white man sitting in his backseat, dressed too formerly for his trip in a "power suit" and corporate-approved necktie. "That's a 'witch' tree." Another warlock is born.

You see, the tree's decorations were caught in the branches by flying witches on their nightly midnight rounds, leaving their tattered garments hanging from the ancient tree that only other witches could see. The white man had come back to his own heart of darkness. He was looking for a relative working overseas that was said to have been lured into the bush by evil spirits, which naturally unleashed his arrogant condescension upon a nation that had him down cold a long time ago. Sure enough, out came his expensive leather briefcase full of American money, to better expedite his superior search with bribes. But, witches don't feed on just that alone. They wanted his soul.

And they got it. He was so poorly prepared for the cultural shift that he lazed in a dopey haze on the plane ride over there, with not one single true fact in his head about countries that were there long before his boardrooms and executive meetings. He'd make appointments with native people that were never kept, bribing warlords and government officials who laughed at his silly currency, until he realizes that those gleaming eyes in the bush are also calling his name. And so to goes his fate, the same as the pushy social do-gooder with a matching sense of overblown entitlement towards the world about needing our "relief", when they wanted our guns instead. That's where most of the money went to, anyway.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15788.White_Man_s_Grave

Bathtub Gin

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

I never had great expectations about Las Vegas. So, when my father invited me and my Coloradan boyfriend to Vegas, Kent explained the trip to me like this: you won't like it because it's tacky and cheesy, but you should see it just once to understand what the hype is about. I loved his Anglo-Saxon bluntness about overblown tourist attractions that so matched my personality. We both hated unruly mobs of "Genericans" spending their money chasing a dream that would always be out of their reach, like his punk band playing at so many dive bars; there's only so many addicts you can put up with, before the bottles and the fists start flying.

The marketing campaign at the time advertised a more "family-friendly" experience, because Midwestern "family values" groups were targeting obvious hot spots like "Sin City", putting a huge dent in the notoriously crooked town that began with mob money way back when. From what we saw with my little brother during the daytime, their advertised clean-up was kind of true. We stayed at a rococo hotel decorated like a gay Roman bathhouse, with the added bonus of a small version of the Guggenheim Museum on the first floor. The exhibit featured American motorcycles, and my big lad couldn't have been happier about it.

We took my little bro to a hotel with an aquarium, and Kent rode the "New York, New York" roller coaster with him a few times, too. We strolled through each attraction in the air-conditioned underground via a series of inter-connected malls that blurred over time, with typical shit for sale. We went during August, the hottest month of the summer, in one of the hottest desert climates we have, thus ensuring the cheapest fares. The hotels had enormous water misters at every outdoor cafe and restaurant to spray the crowd down and keep them shopping; the same fake humidity that Denver used to "green" its lawns and parks artificially.

But at night, the town changed character completely. At one point, there were so many flyers for hookers strewn on the streets that we began shielding my little brother's eyes during every intersection we crossed, revealing the true character of the town that so many Disney-like structures sought to obscure with their phony cartoon cheeriness. It was fake, but so what? We felt worse for the retired seniors who were susceptible to gambling addictions, mindlessly pulling on the arms of so many slot machines that took their life savings. It was really fucking depressing.

After so much time underground, you begin to forget what time it is, whether it's day or night, and the day of the week. My dad won a few hundred bucks at a machine in a mall court, which found me and Kent escorting my brother 100 yards away from him because it's illegal to have children around gambling. We waited in front of some storefront while an employee gave him his winnings. And that was it; our Vegas vacation. Pleasant, but no big deal. When I saw on the news recently that workers were drilling a hole underneath Lake Mead (the only water source for all life in that area) so they could drain it like a bathtub, I knew it had gotten much worse since our visit in the late 90s.

With the sickness in Oklahoma, I'm not sure which crisis is worse. Chemical companies have been pouring waste water underground, destabilizing the entire region. There have been over 900 earthquakes already, and the situation worsens with each passing day. Unfortunately, we've seen what "the white man" can do to our Mother Earth here in the Americas, and it needs to stop. Today. I'm calling on my native people to pray like the faithful people I know you to be, to end this madness forever. You need to take back the land that is rightfully yours. You need to "go native". You need to "see red". 
I know I do.

Banned!

It's probably no secret to you, my steadfast readers, that I face difficulties wherever I go, and that I consider it a frequent and unfortunate part of my life. I was "banned" from the local library recently for my astute and well-targeted observations about their deliberate misuse of the space and intentional misallocations of public funds (as well as our public trust), but more on that later.

Suffice to say, it is a matter requiring deeper investigating, and happily, my network is solid enough to overcome most of the societal obstacles we encounter, either as individuals or together as a group. Since I still consider myself rather new to the "Fame Game", I lacked the publicity-driven foresight to have a photo op with our visiting "men in blue", though I did express to them my relative delight about being in similar circumstances to another famous female New Yorker, albeit without the bleary-eyed mug shots, telltale orange jumpsuit, occasional acting career, and several raging brain disorders openly manifested. Maybe next time.

I have something far greater, so much so that it can be see as either extremely threatening or benevolently fortuitous, and it pays to know the difference betwen the two. I have real power, and I have all of you. That's the strength of my position, because with it, we can move mountains. Within a day, I bought a Wi-Fi enabled tablet with a keyboard for $65 at my grocery store, with my good neighbor's permission to piggyback off his Internet access, so I can now write to you from home. It speaks of my dedication to you, and that the opposition is afraid of us. Good! We can't lose, because....guess what? We've already won.

Psychic Friends Network

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

Certain generations develop a type of "groupthink" that transcends their immediate presence, to become indicative of a much deeper action taking place than that which it would openly appear to be. Because me and my classmates were forced into extraordinarily difficult life situations coupled with extreme stress, we had to communicate without exposing it to the very people supposed to protect us, our parents, who would retaliate any action they could perceive or stump as a threat while in their delusional states. I know it's as intense as it reads.

I have never (NEVER) met a GenX'er who was not physically, emotionally, mentally, and sometimes sexually, abused to the extreme. Under our parents bigger and often stronger hands, we had to make quick life-changing decisions "on the fly", though it is not something we wish to replicate in any other generation. Sanity and hindsight will do that to you. It left us to contemplate just what the fuck went wrong with the sick people around us, when we had the time and space to do so, which, for me and my friends, meant our successful escape to an away college, as a time period of such happiness and fulfillment that it ever marked in severe contrast those later times when we felt just as unfulfilled as we had during our entrapped childhoods.

We had been tasked, as children and teens, to heal every serious adult woe that existed including, but not limited to: alcoholism and addiction, sexual dysfunction, homosexuality, their media-touted "mid-life crisis", adultery, divorce, joblessness and homelessness, extreme over- and under-spending, bad healthcare systems and the medicated side effects of their genetic disorders like madness and dementia combined with schizophrenia and a bevy of scientifically complex mood/identity/personality disorders with a lack of available and appropriate treatments that threatened immediate bankruptcies, foreclosures, and debt, along with not-so-handy alternatives like debtor prisons and/or incarcerations (or foster care) through corruptly inept social services and justice departments. Like, everything that the world has to offer us as severely marginalized individuals.

As a really small generation, we found that our dire circumstances necessitated an unforeseen sophistication to our brief interactions, squeezed as we were by our parent's (and/or grandparents) acute paranoia, which meant that all of our household communiques were strictly monitored for any signs of advanced thought or problem-solving abilities that would conflict with an illness that took on biblical proportions, in direct contrast to our religious ethics. We were "wrong" for simply existing in the covering chaos that evil thrives in, susceptible as our families were to it, in their sicknesses. We became adept at "reading" our emotions well with just a glance or a look, which often only increased the paranoia of the less adept around us.

Survivors of bipolar families like ours often describe in alarming detail (to them, not us) the "rock-and-a-hard-place" space that the severely mentally ill impose on the people around them, as a boxed-in corner where you can either choose death or their abuse. I'm not kidding or using an arty metaphor, either. We had death-defying car rides with stoned drunks as children trapped in their back seats, or rocky water rides down spring-filled rivers that became ego-driven contests with parents hellbent on destruction in the face of our greater gifts that were designed for service but refused through wanton pride.

It's a hard thing to prove as a child, and even harder to describe without the evidence that our families would just as wantonly destroy, in fear of prosecution or exposure. That's how entrenched their untreated sickness became. They'd rather die or kill us, or at the very least hurt us badly, than admit to any wrong-doing or making of mistakes. It was an incredibly selfish and spoiled thing to do, and I remain aghast at my parent's immaturity, as I am in awe of our relative composure in the face of their extreme carelessness. I've been told that I am extremely "lucky" to be alive, but I know it's not luck. It's me, and my extraordinary band of "freaks" that you call "superheroes" or "X-Men", if and when the mood or the money strikes you. Try living it.

Gotta Have Park

When I wrote that I competed with adults at the hardest school in the world—with the lowest admissions rate in the world—I meant it. I was vying for my class spot with people who had already lived a few lives and careers before me, which is about as daunting as it gets, not that anyone came to our defenses. We were their fodder; everyone's: the teachers, the administrations, the other students, and that included any/all adults working around us. People who try to excel by becoming talented fakes with great mimicry skills are very nervous people indeed, because they need much better, smarter people—to feed off of to survive—and that included the teenagers and very young adults we were back then, which was sort of like sending a young Jimi Hendrix into war involuntarily, to die for a country that denied him the right to drink at certain water fountains, let alone buy himself a real stiff drink before being shipped out to active wartime duty at 19-years old.

As much as we tried reconciling their presence at our school, it didn't seem fair to us, and we knew it, because we started making some noise, and then some much louder noise, until the "profs" who thought they could game us by sabotaging our expensive education got a real taste of working class life and the transfer student mindset. It sent them tail-spinning downward while taking potshots at kids like me, working three jobs at once while taking only studio classes, because I had essentially completed an entire Liberal Arts curriculum in just three short years, though that degree was unjustly held from me, too (in lieu of my transfer status), just like I was forced to complete my senior year of high school, even though I had completed the curriculum by junior year with college credits and a Regents diploma, but if the gifted left, who would be there to pay for all of your salaries? Right?

In retaliation for circulating a petition around campus asking for desktop publishing classes to be placed on our curriculum, equipped with the kinds of computers we actually use in the workplace, I was "blacklisted" by the very professors who were there to supposedly educate me. It didn't matter—just like it hadn't mattered in my educational past—because my mentor let me pursue my work in his classes as independent studies, which is, once again, like becoming a grad student as an undergrad, but, again, that doesn't pay for your two apartments in Providence and Brooklyn, does it, "Prof"? No! We did! We paid for that for you, so you could take open potshots at children, basically. It made for some very weird classes indeed. 

Take, for example, Ellie. She decided to play the "ethnic minority" game by wrongly trumpeting her prized European status to an openly disparaged minority like me, which made for the most awkward kiddie-adult conversations you could imagine, as she openly campaigned for me to get kicked out of "her" school that she attended as an undergrad at 34. Huh...that's so...odd. And it was. She would talk about her past as a forest ranger (why didn't she learn to draw while living all alone in a forest for months on end?), as we pondered how the fuck she could go from living on Mount St. Helen during its epic volcanic blast to sitting in on our kiddie crits, because I sure as fuck never had the time to work on a portfolio before attending college, let alone blow off one career for our kiddie art classes, in comparison.

It was highly suspect and dubious in the extreme, but just like every other situation I've faced in my life. I had to make it, like a Marine dropped behind enemy lines with no lines of communication or ammo left, nursing a serious bullet wound or two while evading capture and/or the enemy. If I didn't attain a degree from this school, there was no job waiting for me in the outside world, and I didn't want to die from homelessness or starvation, which is just like today. 

I write to you from a public library that's becoming increasingly hostile to me, because the director here has already called the police on me for standing up to one of their Special Needs crafts "teachers" for harassing me by lurking behind me as I typed, and then aggressively staring at me, mouthing words at me as I typed to you all, which, just like then, resulted in me attaining a police contact on the force by an officer who flat out told me not to even bother to talk to anyone at this location again. "Just call us instead." That's how bad it gets. 

Like every moment that's precious in this life we live, so is our land. We live off the land that grows the food we need to live. No healthy land, no food for the animals to eat, and that includes us. If we do not protect our precious resources—like our land and water—then we do not survive. Sometimes—like my work, education, and life story—it is that simple. It becomes that basic, our survival. No food=no us. No bees=no pollinators. It all comes back to our defense and self-defense skills, and so, even though adults with more money, more experience, and a heck of a lot more time than me still tried to kill me off, here I still am, fighting for my survival while I fight for all of us. 

So, Ellie, even though, in your misguided hatred and aggression of an artistic life that was never yours to live by destiny, I dedicate today's fight to you anyway, for a t-shirt you wore back in the day that read "Gotta Have Park", and even though you wore it to protect your own government job as a forest ranger, I still believe in its message. What cannot die has never really lived, as far as I'm concerned. Live.

http://www.earthshareny.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdevelopment 
http://www.environmentnewyork.org/ 

Murder, Inc.

The business of murder is one of the biggest operations in the entire world, hiding not so discreetly behind the facades of so-called "legitimate"companies. Doubt me? Take a look at some of the rapper Jay-Z's lyrics that infamously brag about funneling his street drug money into, say, white music companies that exist safely overseas in Norway. Recently, a salacious story broke here that the film "Wolf of Wall Street" was actually financed by a criminal's capital (http://www.wsj.com/articles/malaysias-1mdb-the-secret-money-behind-the-wolf-of-wall-street-1459531987), which surprises business-savvy New Yorkers, like, not at all. Where do you think movies get millions of dollars to create big splashy films? The American Red Cross? Uh, hell, no. Not enough of a return on one's investment for curing cancer.

And so, when American actor Sean Penn found himself unwittingly caught in the middle of an international drug bust for the notorious drug cartel leader "El Chapo" (https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/01/13/the-drug-cartel-that-protected-sean-penn-also-terrorizes-mexican-journalists/), we were also rather nonplussed about the connection. I mean, actors are people famous for doing eyelash thickening ads for pharmaceutical companies in between precious t.v. and film gigs, like the movie "Lost in Translation" deftly explores (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Translation_%28film%29). Overseas, we're all just so much American capital to foreign investors, ya dig?

On this Friday, I want us all to think about changing the conversation and the way we think about business forever. My father always used to tell me about "the banality of evil" that was run by so many average white guys in rumpled business suits commuting to-and-from their Midtown offices every single day of the week. We like to pretend that the business behind killing is something glamorous and fun like the movies would have us believe, but when was the last time a murderous criminal fronting the money for such skewed films told you the truth? They may have their conduits to the public's imagination, but so do we. I have all of you.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/feb/18/worlds-top-firms-environmental-damage 

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1662817/infographic-of-the-day-the-worlds-most-environmentally-damaging-industries 

Backbone

Houses have "feels" to them, just like any well-trafficked space for humans that spans many years. One might even say that these living spaces become permeated with the psychic energy from so many people who lived in them over the years, serving as a beacon for those who come after them, whether or not we know the history of these places. Such was the case with me, certainly; I noticed the beautiful Queen Anne here in town every time I walked past it, on the long walk from my mother's apartment to the local library, in country miles and any type of weather, because such is the measure of my devotion to you, my loving audience. It's what I trained for.

But, that didn't make it any easier. If I was sick—like I was my first year back in Rockland, lying on a thin pull-out chair that served as my bed on the cold floor of my mother's spare second room that she denies as such, to obscure the real reason for exclusions, which is her psychotic temperament—I still had only me to pull through anything, any time of year. So, when I found out that a really large studio was "to let" in the old house on the cheap, guided by the forcefully abusive hands of my mother and father who still gang up on people together when it occasionally serves both of their needs, it wasn't a surprise to me that the space called to me with a variety of energies.

A nice boy I grew up with—who cleaned my rugs for me, continuing the trade that his family established up here many years ago, in a reference and number given to me by my mother to better facilitate the quickness of my move—noted the exact same thing: "Hey, my friend used to live here years ago!" No way! It wasn't a surprise to me. Rockland is that small a place to live. Cool! I showed him a few of the key features that dated the place, like the original flue made in the 1800s by an iron worker from the city. The local librarian who's also a history buff told me an account that backed it up roughly to the letter, though I figured Dutch in there as an early ethnicity.

He said that the old house was designed as a showpiece for a German-American fire insurer from the city who hired fancy artisans that he paid to come up by train, to complete the impressive house. And that matched with what I found in the makers mark imprinted within the iron on the flue. Who knew insurance was such a lucrative business? But then, it occurred to me that structures were very prone to fire years ago, being made of wood and all. Another local told me at the library that her husband was descended from an Italian painter called Niccolini, who made a living painting big fires for just such a purpose, on a hill overlooking the burning structures, to record the event with a supposed deft accuracy. Huh.

His son-in-law, a chiropractor, moved into the big house after his daughter married, another dubious trade that has never won legitimacy from the authentic medical establishment that honors their Hippocratic Oaths solemnly made and upheld, like a lawyer pledging the truth with his clients while swearing on a stack of Bibles. While I have loved the house before I moved in, as a passer-by who can appreciate the finer details of historical architectural constructions, like the decorative wooden cut-outs that look like the spines of a backbone from certain angles that buttress the beautiful old house, the apartment around the bend of the big porch attracted something much less savory.

My neighbor told me the police had to batter down the front door during a violent domestic dispute he finally called the police on, and that was before the sick woman who left feet first this past year in a body bag, because after years of public drunkenness and drug use, she finally succeeded in committing the suicide that she'd loudly proclaim to anyone who'd listen. It was quite different from my side of the house, but similar to my neighbor's predicament with the previous couple years prior: we'd both reached out to prevent harm from happening to other people, and we were both still here, like the backbone carved out of wood by an artist far better than the man who hired him to do such crafty work. Such is the power of a much mightier spirit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/nyregion/30bartender.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/nyregion/julian-niccolini-co-owner-of-four-seasons-restaurant-pleads-guilty-to-misdemeanor-assault.html

Thug Life 4E

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Children Ten Commandments

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

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

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

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

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

Assistance

As you may (or may not) already know, I began my official on-the-books working career at 15 years-old, which means I've been paying into our system since, with my taxes that were taken heavily from any meager paycheck I could ever hope to have, just so I could stave off starvation, sickness, and homelessness when times got rough (like the upcoming week), and they were always rough for me and my generation, because we don't use war for blood money. It's kinda unethical, you know? Living in a constant state of stress like the "paycheck-to-paycheck" lifestyle was specifically designed to keep me and my friends stressed out, and, hopefully, too sick to notice egregiously illegal behaviors like stealing and working the system behind our backs, to benefit anyone but the people who truly needed it.

With that in mind, I had very little expectations about any of the "social services" that were supposedly there to help me out whenever I needed it, you know, because I paid the heaviest tax shares in our free society as a hard-working single woman who paid all of her bills and expenses. My dad also liked to bark it out to me in a rough, red-faced laugh, whenever he felt embarrassed about his evasive financial maneuvers that were totally legal, because he had worked with legislators as a cable t.v. business owner to make sure that the laws benefited him and his money best. "Hey! Thanks for the 'bail-out' on my failed crops!", he'd brag aloud as a "gentlemen farmer" who didn't need the money, stretching out his hand in mock fellowship for me to shake, taking another big drink afterwards. You're welcome.

Not that I expected understanding from him, or any other rich white man. If he failed to humiliate me in front of his guests to keep me down, my cousins would gladly chip in. "Yeah...I don't think I could ever take Unemployment", said one fucking dick of a cousin to me over "the holidays". This, from a dip-shit who needed his dead father's money handed to him by his mommy so he could hide out in college for, like, ten years, and then do jack-shit for the rest of his family when they hit hard times. Yeah, go fuck yourself, kid. I changed your fucking diapers when you were a baby, and you've never done a g-ddamn thing for anyone besides yourself in this family. I didn't say it out of deference to my lovely grandmother's home, but I took a deep, steadying breath before I schooled him about how my benefits are my money taken out of each paycheck I'd ever paid into since childhood.

Uh, you didn't work throughout your entire school career that lasted for, like, twenty years or so, right? Oh, if I said that, then I would have been chastised for "ruining Christmas" for everyone, because my cousin had it so hard with his father's early death from alcohol and chain-smoking, that he must be allowed to be a completely selfish prick whenever his spoiled, lily-white ass feels like it, to make up for his present state of unreal being. Same with his uptight, upstate white bitch, because "they're scientists". Yeah, right, I've got one of those, too, ass-hat. Boy, does my mom know how to clean Petri dishes and hyper-vigilantly monitor the dishwasher? Like no other. We got nothing back from all of our finessed payouts from a system designed to bankrupt us the minute were stopped "working" at someone else's company.

And it didn't end with privatized humiliation. If we dared to take back a small share of our tax money like I did, the system would try to force me back into someone's office as quickly as possible. It was like welfare for working class people, except that I carried everyone involved. You know, just like I did at home without the handicapped people noticing small details like me. I wasn't worth the trouble, or so I've heard all of my life. I was "carefully selected" to be in a joke of an "entrepreneurial program" designed to flatter the ego of rich whites encountering their very first crisis in life, and it didn't end there. To continue this system of entitlement, my dad also had to do his part, by once again threatening me over the phone or via email, withholding money or using other serious ramifications like a tour in a loony bin (chauffeur-driven, of course), if I didn't find my own way fast.

Oh, okay...so, just like my everyday life, right? Well, yeah! It's always this aggressive indifference to protect one's own ass. It was so cowardly to me that it took my breath away still, and my dad had benefit of a Navy training with plush G.I. Bill money for his service to our country. Of course, the "seminar" was a complete sham. Both of the "mentors" were paid by the state for their participation in the program as rich white retirees, naturally. Gotta protect that income stream of revenue, know what I'm sayin'? As used as I've become to this obsessive ass-covering that marks the seriously disturbed individual in a high-performing workflow, it's never stopped shocking me. The complete condescension behind it by people with much less ability, that's what's always bothered me. It's so rankly obvious.

So, I sat through it and then had to talk my former "mentor" of a businessman father (not to me, but to those impoverished Mexicans and po' white trash of West Texas, y'all) about how it sucked—without him threatening to hurt me by withholding the paltry scraps he tosses my way like I was one of his cheap throwaway dogs that he likes to hurt or kill whenever people aren't watching—and in his barren empty plains, there's no one there to hear you scream. I reiterated my expertise in securing funds from many a rich white man who deliberately set himself up as a "creative patron", so as to better yank at the chains of oppression that binds talent to money, as a torture device for our simple acts of living, working, and excelling far beyond his expectation and your awareness. I survived, you see. I'm still alive, and that is rather inconvenient, isn't it?

I wouldn't like being reminded about my degradation and subsequent downfall, either. No one has the "Art of Empathy" perfected quite like me and my very small band of loyally caring illuminators, for if we didn't understand you in your human condition better than you, who would bind your egotistical books for you to use as a trophy at family parties, while my work "languishes" behind your falsely turned backs? We support and love you anyway, without your validation or evidence, because if we don't give more than you, then you all go down hard, don't you? No, don't answer me back. Your continued silence is all the proof I ever needed to show intentional negligence and deliberate impoverishment, but, oh, how the times have changed despite your artificial halts to progress? Yes, they have. Finally.

Schedule of Minimum Wage Increases
December 31, 2016
$11.00 per hour
December 31, 2017
$13.00 per hour
December 31, 2018
$15.00 per hour
December 31, 2019
$15.00 per hour

http://www.labor.ny.gov/workerprotection/laborstandards/workprot/minwage.shtm

Tar Beach

Me and my friends instantly hated "Baywatch" the very first time we saw it, even though David Hasselhoff was the "King of Cheese" back in the day for this crazy show about his talking police car (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series), and his status as a "rock star" in Germany (http://chicagolampoon.blogspot.com/2011/10/germanys-perplexing-love-affair-with.html), but it gained cult status in our 80s-era dorm rooms filled with horny teenagers who played drinking games every time there was a run on the beach filmed in slow motion with a girl in a tight red bathing suit. It sucked, but so did most of pop culture. Who fucking cares?

We humped a grind over every summer like any other east coast kid trying to make a buck for school and living expenses, and to get out of our mother's collective hairs. The kids from Long Island did clam-digging over the summers for work, plus surfing, boarding, and skate-boarding that became rollerblading with the next "fitness" craze. My family had long aborted our annual trips to LBI as too expensive, though occasionally a relative might rent a house, but with our clash in cultures, it wasn't worth going to yet another house full of crazy people.

My Brooklyn friends did what any other kid from the 'hood does: they took the train out to the beach. After I graduated, started my career, and transitioned to my own work full-time, I found myself in a similar situation: broke, alone, and wanting to hit the beach. I lived in the fourth floor of a 120 year-old walk-up in the Slope, and after I ordered a boogie-board for cheap online, I hooked up with some of my training partners in BJJ at the Far Rockaways boarder's beach, no swimmers allowed. It was a good fit for us, because we could use our mandatory rash guard shirts that we used for no-gi classes to surf with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_wrestling), which gave us more exercise that was different from our main sport. Well, not mine.

They were blown away by some "white" middle-aged female rolling with the boys as a part of my MMA training, then hitting the beach like a native, and it was easy to see why. The beaches of Brooklyn and Queens had been home to hardcore ghettos for a hundred years, despite the kitschy faded glory of Coney Island that attracted dykes, misfits, and trendy hipsters looking for retro "art fag" design spaces on the cheap, but they learned. White kids from out-of-town always do. After dark, our beaches became some of the worst neighborhoods in all of the five boroughs, definitely not some fake SoCal paradise from t.v., not that I believed any of the hype I saw on t.v. anymore.

You see, in response to a "tidy whitey" Manhattan that catered to rich foreign diplomats and the local ethnic population serving them, we were supposed to retain a foothold in our culture on our teacher/social worker/publishing salaries that mandated we live as far away from our now over-priced native homes as possible. Makes sense, no? No, it didn't. But, rich white men hate looking at "depressing" project people who are passed out on a subway grating. It's, also, like, really hard on your shoes, too! So, the "powers that be" ruined our fair city in a few short years through some of the worst, most corrupt urban-planning to ever happen on planet earth, changing the landscape of our city from a great trading center with gorgeous waterways to a depressing hellhole that you couldn't walk through without an escort.

Coney became infamous for murders under the boardwalk and floating bodies washed up on the beach, as Jersey spiraled down into dysfunction with an annual epidemic of dirty hypodermic needles dumped carelessly into our waters, some of them infected with HIV and AIDS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe_Tide), through the evil immorality of "healthcare" businesses looking to make a quick buck off the backs of a downtrodden and exhausted sick people. It was doubly worse for an elderly population that still remembered with great fondness Steeplechase rides at the beach during sunset, cotton candy with their loved ones, and the novelty of an electric Ferris Wheel that lit up at night to illuminate the sand with its many colors, as fireworks exploded in the background of another day in a public urban paradise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steeplechase_Park).

Sure, it was hard working the daily grind in a city of strangers, but so what? We had everything we needed in a quick bus ride or train stop away, but then it changed drastically. A disenfranchised people who never had any real comfort with swimming in our rougher waters were pushed out to the beaches, as a cruel reminder of a place they knew they didn't belong. My Filipino training partner was horrified by the early murkiness of our summer Atlantic Ocean, because he grew up in the tropics. Uh, this ain't that, homeboy. Ditto for my sparring partner from Korea. Are there animals under the surface? Uh, yeah, girlfriend. She preferred to stay on the beach while I body-surfed the waves like an otter fishing in its home waters, because I am.

Slowly, we came back after many years away, and so did our town. We brought to it all of our experienced know-how about social justice and real public change, just like we said we would to each other all those years ago, as we sat in spare, dirty, broken-down rooms; drunk, high, scared, and often alone. Never again. That's what we thought then, and that's what happened, as I fought my own battles in middle-age through the corrupt court systems of the city and country. 

I see you, muthafuckas. I take pictures, and I document, document, document. You can, too, because it works. That's how we bring back the world, people: one beach at a time, block-by-block—or lot-by-lot, like my good folks of the "Stop Anellotech" movement in Rockland County fighting Big Pharma and Big Corporate Petrochemical—because this city and this land is ours by our collective birth rights, and not yours, so give it back. Now is the time.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tar%20beach

Without Prejudice

Much like a confused America wrongly divided itself into two incorrectly opposed factions of "black" and "white", the saying that mental illness (like cancer) doesn't discriminate is dubious and suspect in the extreme. When I heard the verdict for the O.J. Simpson trial live on t.v along with millions of other people, I knew that the corruption of our court system now extended to wealthy African-Americans, too, and if you think that's "equality" in the eyes of the law, then you need to go back to school immediately. In fact, that's what I said for many years after the court case, whenever I was asked about my impression of it: "Well, African-Americans are now just as corrupt as 'rich white men', because they can buy their way to an innocent verdict like they do."

It's like pretending that you are less complicit in a crime because you just stood there while someone else hacked to death a woman in her kitchen for being brave enough to divorce her abuser/attacker. I mean, it's not like you swung the ax yourself, right? Right?! Wrong! And that's exactly where many murder cases wind up while under examination in a courtroom setting; the bystanders who did not stop the crime, or report it, or try to deter it in any way are in some cases just as culpable as the actual murderer for participation in a crime, especially if the attacker is seriously mentally ill. If you knew better and you did nothing about it (hence the cover-up and subsequent silence, post-crime), then you are charged with criminal acts along with the actual murderer. Get it?

This heady climate of celebrity culture has become just another stage for performing, for the criminally insane acting out who use their crimes to gain access to the public's attention. You are O.J. Simpson, regardless of melanin*. Look, I like black-and-white cookies from the deli just as much as any other hardcore New Yorker, but what happens when you can't break it clean in half anymore, because most Americans today are "colored" and mixed ethnically, too? There is no privilege of bias based on "racism" (and there is just one modern human race living today, as far as I know), or skin tone. 

If you are severely mentally ill with violently psychotic tendencies that have been easily observed and often remarked upon in public spaces (like, say, offices and large football fields), then there really isn't anywhere to hide anymore, nor should you continue to do so. Your healthcare claims will be denied, like a car insurer denies coverage to a serial negligent driver, as with a D.U.I. No compliance with our laws = no insurance coverage. Now, if you want to pretend that you need dental coverage but not medical treatment for your personality disorder, then fine. You can pay for it out-of-pocket the next time you wind up in an E.R. for an accident caused by your mental illness. Welcome to "The New America". It's way better than the last version.


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