Mighty Bitch

Moving back to New York was big enough to shake loose my Colorado boyfriend, just like moving out west shook up my New York ex. Me and my dog Ted didn't have easy escapes like my men, so we did what every woman with a family does: we made do. To help Teddy adapt to Brooklyn, I enrolled us into a basic obedience class to make our walks through Prospect Park (and around the neighborhood) safer. He never got used to the big inflatable rat union workers put up in protest on street corners, or the way subway grating vibrates above ground, whenever a train passes by underneath.

My main concern was his safety. After our first lesson, the dog trainer confirmed for me what I already knew. Open runs in Prospect Park are full of the biggest urban danger for every dog walker: bad owners and their pets. I'd seen a guy wrapped in padded clothing teach his German Shepherd to attack him every morning in the park during off-leash hours, which meant we had a serious timeline in place for the most challenging human environment on earth. It was what my new dog-training friend told me, too: if we walked our dogs every morning and evening in the park, it was only a matter of time before our pets would need stitches after an attack.

Fuck that! Ted had survived an e-coli/ebola infection from swimming in a lake in Denver's public park, and that was after he fully recovered from a car accident. It was enough to get me to commit to the classes, even though I was still interviewing in the city for work, rapidly losing weight after my ex left me with the high rent to pay. Mama always comes last. When my friend saw Ted snapping at treats with wolf-like gusto, she was delighted. Oh, so he "responds" to food! That's good! Some animals don't :( Ted was her first Malamute.

We quickly got bored with the easy exercises, which did not go unnoticed in class. The trainer realized Teddy was deciding which orders he would obey, based on his moods and the amount of cooked chicken with brown rice left in my pocket. It totally waylaid her. He was picking and choosing which commands to follow! On purpose!! Right. Welcome to snow dogs. After that, Ted would run through her little obstacle courses, standing by the side of the cones to razz his competition. Every time another dog tried to weave through the cones, he'd smile and "Woo!Woo!" loudly, laughing at them nervously shying away from him. 

She kicked us out of the class for disturbing the other animals, which Ted took as a sign, pulling me towards the cold outside and the school doors. One animal was so badly inbred that the instructor had a special corner of the gym coned off just for the doddering old couple who diapered it and picked it up for staircases, because it didn't "do stairs". She said to me that she told them to put the animal down, but they'd already "bonded" with it. Oy vey...

A rather colorful gay couple had chosen the name "Noodles" for their surrogate child (this was before legalized gay marriage), which made the calling-out exercises a lesson in restraint for the entire class, as the masculine-looking female yelled at the top of her lungs in a sing-song voice (for an unnecessary "park-like" simulation): "NOOOOOODLESSSS! COOOOOME!" The short butch woman proudly recounted her training sessions in the park for us during class because she told us, "we're gonna win first prize!" There're fucking prizes?! After that, her and her long-haired femme made no secret that they saw me and Ted as their top competition in the small class. I was just trying to stay alive through the slow starvation of poverty while blocking Ted from swallowing my arm up to the elbow.

By coincidence, my father and stepmother were visiting during our last class. The teacher played graduation music for our walk down the saftey-cone aisle one more time, as I wisely skipped the cap and gown pictures that would only be Ted fodder turned to diarrhea later on. Because of our, uh, lack of commitment to the process, we got second place without even trying. Honestly, I'd never seen two happier lesbians in all my life, smiling proudly as they took the #1 blue ribbon home. It was for kinda hard for us to be angry at them. After all, the biggest bitch in class won.

One-Two Punch

Before I graduated from the publishing industry to become a totally broke independent, I honed my repartee skills on a viciously left-wing website that was popular with a devoted lesbian crowd while I worked a day job as an Art Director, but first I needed the right avatar for my online persona: a "front" for my actual intellectualism as a genuine media professional working in the big city among so many striving, pseudo-literary poseurs.

I found the perfect image in an actress whose breakthrough part had been playing it straight in a thinly-masked gay role about a female boxer from the 'hood. Because I was training hard in MMA at the time, my sports lingo was freshly dyke-friendly, which dovetailed nicely since the "out" actress had practically crashed her car on the set of a popular t.v. show with her also-drunk girlfriend in the passenger seat. She was dysfunctional enough for me to pass muster with the bullish traffic cops on the site. It got me "in" with their gatekeepers, as I began hunting the board during the annual summer slowdown that's our industry standard. I was so good at it, in fact, that I became a "starred commenter"; meaning, out of all the responses their articles generated, mine would be at the top of the list as a preferential read.

It was incendiary. As I won every conversation, the trolls went wild with bloodsport. The message boards were so hot that the editors, in a fit of diva pique, decided to remove them from the article's features one slow Monday morning, as their entire audience (myself included) wrote them the painful truth: our sparring meant to be a sideline to their "ChickLit" main event was far better than any trite, canned copy a bunch of easily-programmed drones could ever hope to write.

Their collective online works were such robotic, politically-correct pieces of crap, that any ass-kissing, first-year student at a women's college could regurgitate the tepid curriculum of an average "Gender Studies" class on their site. Their supposedly select cadre of special guest writers and accompanying editors didn't have an original point of view in the entire pretentious place, but I did. I was so unnerving to the home team that I earned a "rep" that carried me all the way here, to you: my beloved, faithful audience living in the land of the free and the home of the brave, in an actual writer's paradise that's "The Promised Land". Thanks for sticking with it. <Ding ding!> "HERE. WE. GO!"

Pancake Breakfast

In addition to the pain of being the token "hetero" at any gay girl scout meeting (as well as many design groups in the city, as an adult), I also hated everything they did as an activity, because I had pretty much learned it already on my own, or with my brothers and my dad's boy scout troop, and it was all the cool stuff like making fires, swamping out canoes, basic CPR, hiking, and making fires. Done. Why did I have to do it again with these chicks? They were horrible. My mom was also invited along for girl scouting, and she took the opportunity to join this gay movement with a gusto that frightened me in its bitchiness. As the only straight kid, it meant that almost every conversation excluded me, plus I didn't have the right hair length (too long, curly, and feminine) to make it plausible, even as afterschool banter with these queer kids.

It was excruciating, but because my mom had felt excluded from our boy scouting excursions that we loved as a family, she clung to the all-gay girl group like a pit bull biting down on its prey with its jaws locked. Finally, as a mom, this was her métier: a bunch of short-haired, gender-challenged bitches who worked on becoming better fucking bitches like it was the only badge in the book. It was pure hell for me, and it went on for far too long. Because my mom thrilled with this same-sex "be-in" like we were beret-wearing hipsters listening to jazz music at a smoky club in the Village (except that would have been infinitely better for me as an experience), I was also forced to go to their gay day camp (run by another large butch female), and overnight trips that made me cry bitterly. 

The idea of it was so repulsive to me, because I knew what waited for me there: more hazing and brutal abuse, with the continued betrayal of a mother who liked gay kids way better than her own straight daughter, at times. I went on one camping trip with them, and it was one of the worst experiences of my life, in cruel contrast to the great outdoor experiences I had with my brothers and their friends, led by my dad in our childhood, and then on our own. We had barely made it through the night, when my mom (finally) and I decided it was enough. We conferred via a brief tête-à-tête by the morning campfire, sullenly cooking breakfast with wet wood that blew thick smoke in every direction. "Yeah", my mom finally agreed, "there's something really wrong with Chris (the troop leader). We should quit. Never again." Yes! Finally! Sanity had returned to my usually savvy New Yawk mutha. You're back on the right team!

Because of this joyous news, I moved closer to my mama as we tried to salvage pancakes over a poorly made fire that would flavor anything we made with charred wet wood, not anything like the gourmet "smoking" techniques you see on t.v. cooking shows. "This sucks", my mom declared, and I was overjoyed. Never again. I'd never have to see these fucking cruel bitches again on my free time, outside of the nasty jeering they performed for each other as they passed us by in the hallway. We were finally out of this hellish scene! They were so fucking crazy that everything we did sucked, which only pissed off their butch leader even more, as she saw her troop spinning out of control with lowered attendance for each passing weekly meeting, because of her incompetence.

I leaned against my once-again pretty mama as we whispered back and forth over the campfire. Sensing a disturbance in the wicked dark forces, the angry butch had, just moments before, pulled back a tent flap in anguish, as her little spies reported back to her about my breakfast badge that went up in flames with the poorly made fire and soggy pancakes. Sabotage, like ballet, is a big part of the bitchy gay world, and each passing second confirmed what I had pretty much known since birth: I do not belong here, and in case I ever forgot that fact—with momentary lapse of politeness and genuine conversation that's "normal" for Rockland County—they snapped back at me way harder than was necessary, because that's what being a bipolar gay scout troop is all about, like cheerleading and reality t.v. shows.

"Mom", I said to her quietly, "can you flip these pancakes for me? I have smoke in my eyes," at the exact same time as one big looming butch stood over us aggressively, who had also passed the night poorly, like we all had. And it was true. The smoke stung my eyes so badly that they watered and reddened badly. It really fucking hurt. But, seeing this tender scene between an actual mother and her biological daughter was more than this bitch could take. She snapped out, screaming and yelling at us, with her eyes bulging and her hands balled into fists. "THERE ARE NO 'MOTHERS' IN THE WILDERNESS!!" She jeered down at us hunched over the fire. My mom, not to be bested in "bitch-speak" by anyone (she's from the Bronx, and they made it famous), said back to her, "That's not true, Chris. We saw a mother bear with her cub, like, yesterday, right near this campsite." And that was true, too. 

She hated us even more for having the right facts. "That's not what 'scouting' is all about! You have to 'pretend' she's not your mother to earn this badge!" Yeah, fuck you, lady. I'm, like, ten years old and scared. Anyway, I choose my mom and my family, you fucking freak. And that was it. "I don't care!" Fuck this, bitch. I threw down the spatula, and walked away from the campsite to pack up my gear. Lady— or whatever the fuck you think you are—you can take your fucking gay girl scout troop and shove it, and just like that, I was done. So was my mom. The spell over her was finally broken, and I had my real mom back. That was the best thing out of all of it. I got my family back. Shove that, butch! No badge in the world can cover "loyalty", when it comes to blood bonds. We'll always win.

Scouts Honor

My dad was the Scoutmaster for my bro's Boy Scout troop growing up, and it was awesome. We did really fun things like canoeing, wilderness hiking, and history tours that became treasure hunts to find the most building markers in Philadelphia at nighttime, which kind of felt like that t.v. show "Sleepy Hollow". I learned about camping (always pack extra white socks for makeshift bandages, and triple-wrap matchbooks in foil and plastic for waterproofing), orienteering (moss almost always grows on the north side of a tree, but always carry a working compass anyway), reading trails and the landscape, but I mostly knew that anyway. I was the best scout my dad ever had, until I joined "The Brownies" and then "The Girl Scouts".

Then, the pace slowed to a crawl, and there were no boys around. At all. There were absolutely no menfolk or boys around anymore; just a really "butch" troop leader who'd adopted two kids with "her" "husband", which was jarring to me outside of a girls-only softball practice that I did not attend outside of school hours. Ya dig? Country queers were deeply closeted back in the day, but we knew who was who anyway because we knew "gay", even as very young children. For instance, at Chestnut Grove elementary school in New City, his name was Patrick, and he was (is) a very nice, quiet, devoutly Catholic Irish-American boy with a blue pen type of birthmark. In junior high, his name was "Bryon", and he did funny things like foil bullies from pulling on his pants for wedgies and compose sonnets on the fly while pursuing an acting career in the city that he continued for years.

In high school, "the gay kid" was Pete and he's an awesome painter, albeit with a lifelong appreciation of goth music and/or the lifestyle, but I digress. We're talking about lesbians. In our school, her name was Gina, and she was famously found in bed with her "best friend"—a petite, highly-freckled Irish-American girl one grade behind her—by her mom the summer before we all left for college. Unlike the average suburban "sports dyke" though, Gina was (and is) the real deal: an all-star athlete who attended college on a basketball scholarship, not that it ended there. She played almost every sport that we had a team for, like volleyball, track and field, baseball, swimming, etc. So, we knew "gay" and we knew the real deal, too, not just the awkward "closet case" lurking around doing vaguely "faggy" stuff. We were "out" with each other about who were were, because we were all we had back then as a generation.

Still, the crazy dykes in my troop surpassed even my sophisticated New York understanding of gay culture. They were fucking horrible. They were cliquish to the extreme and insane, and instead of feeling ashamed about it, they reveled in their loud queerness like the assholes they were. My mom loved it. Unlike, say, dancing or art, she could excel in this. My mom remains one of the bitchiest gossips I have ever met in my life, and she's also kind of an "art fag", too. She loved the little cliques she could giggle with like a kid, over weird shit like different colored strings that were made into bad crafts no one really likes. That's a fucking badge for chicks in this troop?! The good sportsmanship of my father and my brothers had wrecked me on this gay girl experience, and nothing less as a scout would do.

I made it through Brownies easily because I really liked the illustrations that came with the handbook for me to read, plus my friends were part of that troop, but once the local "closet case" took over, she upped up the manic energy a few gay cheerleader notches, and I couldn't take it anymore. My mom immediately bonded and then sided with the gay girls and their dykey troop leader with the crew cut, to laugh about me behind my back and make fun of me, which is what she did at home with her sisters anyway, so why did I need to earn a badge in it? I really didn't. Plus, did I mention there were no boys? Like, no men at all, and that's hell for a straight girl, man-ladies. Turns out that hell for a totally heterosexual woman is a bunch of bitchy, bipolar, deeply closeted queers in a homocentric Girl Scout troop in the 'burbs, with no room for escape. Buckle up, boys. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

TMI "Poopypants"

As the bargain program I packaged for the largest U.S. book retailer in the country wound down (after years of brutally hard work and unusually long hours), I finally found myself enjoying some free time during the day, even contemplating trips to the beach over long three-day weekends like any other publishing employee accustomed to summer hours. It became, dare I say it, a  more genteel and congenial place to work, much more like my way of doing business, with organization and efficiency built right into the workflow, which increased the mental static of the severely disordered around me in almost direct proportion as a contrast, because now I had time to explore the neighborhood at lunchtime and walk around the office. Oops.

I began surfing the web for longer and longer intervals, even becoming a "starred" commenter on a trendy media site geared towards the workaday lesbo, which was tremendous fun for me. As the assholes at work became increasingly rabid amid the next economic crash, killing each other off in violent work conflicts that matched their growing unease, I simply put on my headphones and went to work on another site. I'd put up "Illuminations" over one slow summer hour day before the weekend started, as a way to keep a focus on my personal work and achieving my artistic goals. 

At first, I established myself artistically through posting my photographic and design works to advertise my credentials, with a link to my extensive online portfolio to seal the deal as your new publisher, and it worked. In my business, when you don't receive a lot of negative criticism, you know it's time to go ahead at full speed, which I did. But, the rabid "Politically Correct Police" at this newsy dyke site hated me so fucking much, I immediately knew that I had struck online gold. Every single comment I posted, even the most harmlessly obvious observations, were vehemently denied and attacked in a way that meant those boy/girls knew I didn't strap on a fake plastic penis after office hours. No, it was far worse than that. I preferred the real kind, the fleshy one that comes attached to a man. Ew!

They must have sensed a beautiful hetero woman attracted to males in their midst by my writing alone, but because my comments were so good at generating buzz on the site and drawing attention to their shitty pieces (plus, I helpfully followed the site's rules by not answering their hysterics in "Common Cave Troll"), I was allowed this free pass through online lesbianism, with some temporary restrictions applied. They were boring, in their own bitchy out-of-towner type of way. Do you know the country queer moving to the city looking for an exotic good time but hopelessly inept? That! That was the annoyingly whiny tone of every overly emotional crybaby who went "wahwah" about New York City and its inhabitants; how unfair and cruel the city was to them and their "poopypants" interests.

I'm not joking, either. One of their biggest features was written by this bland WASPY bitch from the 'burbs who decided to unleash her inner "alternative" goth lesbian on all of us unsuspecting readers by publishing photos of her dirty vibrator covered in old period blood stains as it compared to her new one of the exact same model. So fucking interesting, troll. Here's my mucus in a tissue! Get a life, bitch. Every weird hick who has ever tortured me on the job came bubbling to the surface through these inane puff pieces designed to attract dykes in such a brutally obvious way, I found my smarter commentary striking lightning quick responses to their fucking bullshit as fast as I could type it, edit it, and post it, and guess who won? 

I did! It spurred me to write a lot more during the day, which was part of the point for me, and in the process, I pulled into the fray the unsuspecting crazy dykes who worked with me (or around me) to stop their work and read my posts. It became such a huge distraction in an office that conspired almost daily against me, that their publisher was forced to ask me to stop writing during the day (over his bullshit editorial staff), which I duly ignored. You can't legally censor creative output at a publishing company. It's that tricky "Freedom of the Press" and/or "Freedom of Speech" thingy we have in the Constitution. Duh. And so I typed on, in response to an injustice present in an unfairly skewed media world that sought to push me out, when they actually lived and breathed on my fucking land, on my fucking turf, earning on my fucking say-so through my design works that actually earned a lot of money for the house. If you don't like it, get the fuck out!

And so, out of those excruciatingly irritating tourist bitches with a zest to treat our fair city like a lesbian cruise ship on their "vacay", arose my desire to write more and more about my interests, which are a lot like yours, right? "Outsider" culture became no longer hip to practice, because how fun is it to read about changing a baby's shitty diapers? You know, the ADHD couple with the already fucked-up kid dancing around your cocktail party bare-ass with a stained diaper in their hands to show off? You crazy fucking bitches were that for me: so egregiously wrong in your hatred for us as a society (and your complete inability to adapt to normal human life) that I found it easy to despise a group of supposedly "marginalized" minority voices who used media to get attention, like any other spoiled football star overdosing on hookers, booze, and blow, except without the talent.

I took away their privileges at hating us for nothing more than simply being here and being healthily normal, but more importantly, for loving our lives and daring to love the city that gave rise to us. I stood fast in front of their searingly misdirected anger at me, and through the power of my words, I channeled them back into their backwater channels where they belong. And do you know why? Because this is my real prime time, bitch. I am your fucking "Major League" woman-in-action, dyke. You just didn't know it, yet. And now you do. You can thank this here mama the next time a woman gets voted into an important office, pigs. I probably voted in their primary election while you were too busy online "roasting" some plebe you wrongly perceived to be more powerless than you, and isn't that like every single prejudiced dyke who secretly hates women that you've ever met? It sure is! Who's the traitor now, bitch? Yeah, that's what I thought. Go fuck yourself. Without airbrushing, losers.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TMI

Zombification

All of my life I've known that there's something wrong with some people, even as a baby. I've seen it in animals, too. My fluffy white dog loved almost everyone, except the crazy dyke who "dated" my mentally ill aunt in secret, much like her silent hoarding habit. Our adorable little princess doggie would immediately bristle, baring her fangs aggressively and raising her hackles in anger, and she was right. That bitch was totally fucking nuts (she died from a deliberately bad surgery done years ago), and psychosis is something most life forms pick up on. I don't want you to think that you need special superpowers to know "crazy" when you see it or feel it, because you don't.

Anomalies in our human world are fairly easy to spot, like the disordered dykes who wander around the local public library thinking they can stalk me on the sly by pretending to have a real interest in our community. By the way, say "hi" to the camera, bitch! We also note license plates to go along with your cars' make and model, because we all know each other here in Rockland County, so thanks for making it easier for us to spot you. Bitch.

Dead people are like that, too. They have a hollow feeling to them that permeates their entire being, often with a seriously bad smell to go along with their mental static (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/10/michelle-hat.html). I don't want you to think that I'm prejudiced against serious illness either, because my mom is the most disabled person I've ever met, and I've tended to her my whole life. It isn't just sickness that needs fixing. It's like there's something rotten deep in their soul.

Psychotics know we sense them as a disturbance in the force (life force, that is), and so they continue this weird gay dance of circling around human life on the periphery, until we notice the quietly lurking nut-job in a corner of a room, punching a black hole into our days and lives. They will cite loneliness as an excuse for sabotaging the peace and quiet of our happy days, but that's a total fucking lie. Psychos hurt people because it takes their minds off the innate badness that's seeped into the core of who they are. It's their essence that offends.

Back in art school, we had a friend who was like that. If you didn't enable her obsessive compulsive addictions, she lashed out at you and then tried to build a consensus around the shaky justifications she needed to cover up her bat-shit routines, like an incessant cleanliness that was (and still is) directly linked to her mental illnesses, and not a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink of a college house. My friend Cheryl, also significantly problematic like a lot of the people I met at school (what else do you call a professional graphic designer in her 30s from a professionally artistic family who decides to compete with a group of working class kids in art school?!), felt it in Lisa, too.

"It's like there's this hole inside of her <she would gesture to her midsection> that she's always looking for you to fill for her", and that was dead-on. She was so needy that it was too extreme to be around her sometimes. If you had a male friend hanging out, that was even worse. She'd try to poach him from you or the group barely after introductions had been made, like we were in a deranged competition that only she knew about, which I guess she figured gave her the "edge" she needed to "win", but at what we were never really sure of. Need I tell you that she is a former cheerleader, bisexual, and manic depressive? No?! Right! Because you already knew that, just like I did, and so did our hip art school friends.

She'd hit on gay men to see if they would "turn" for her (totally delusional), or pretend she wanted to kiss girls at the bar to put on a big gay show, if a lot of people were around and not talking to her; anything for attention. She had the requisite art-fag hairdo (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/09/art-fags.html) to go along with her overly trendy outfits, decorated with stupid hats and pilgrim shoes with too-big buckles, using a garishly bright red lipstick made for you to notice how unusual her lip shape was, cleverly accented with slightly darker lip-liner. She just tried too hard about shit no one gave two fucks about, which drove her to even more abusive behavior.

And it never ended with her. If I introduced her to a single guy, I could count on Lisa to either A) hook up with him or B) try to later on. If the guy was my boyfriend, I could rely on her to make "subtle" overtures to him in front of me that I had to prove in this wild series of ever-escalating head games that were designed for her to decrease her mental static by using me, instead of taking medication and going to therapy. If she was flat-out busted by the entire group for her machinations and schemes, she'd shrug her shoulders of any blame by saying that "if he was really into her, he wouldn't have slept with me! That's her problem", because she had that line at the ready in case she was caught. After awhile, it didn't matter if the life-form was male or female, just easy or drunk enough for her to manipulate.

My oldest brother bought into the Yuppie world hardcore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuppie), which meant that he has trafficked with some of the biggest scumbags on the planet, in the world trading center of downtown New York City. He describes the dead people he's worked with as "sketches"; outlines of people roughly drawn, without any real detail filled in. We were all pretty much saying the same thing after a certain point in our lives, and it was this: dead people were everywhere, and we could prove it. We've seen them and talked to them all of our lives. I can see dead people. So can you! How's that for a rainy day like today? Beware, humans. They're everywhere.

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/closet-psychological-issues-being-and-coming-out

Stigma

Having been the target of significant harassment all of my life, it's no surprise to me when I encounter it out in the larger world. Towards the end of my public service in other people's privately-held companies, I came to expect a certain timeline that I folded into my performance as I went about my day. During my time at one large textbook publisher, the very hallway in front of my office space became known as The Illuminator's Hallway, as employee after employee recognized that the letters "Master Illuminator" might as well be engraved above the doorway leading to it. And, no, " La Lohard" celeb who likes to stalk chicks: that was not a holy fountain to bless yourself with, at the company entrance. Dumb bitch. Nice act, though. You play a drunk wandering into the wrong building while "vaping" really well!

After awhile, it became a rather quiet, and (dare I say it?) quite pleasant place to work towards the end of my tenure there, in sharp contrast to before, like I was being used as a dishwasher for the insane. It forever secured my fame with the native English-speaking crowd, both here and "across the pond", which was part of the point: letting the Brits overseas know that we still have a solidly strong foot in the game. Nothing to front about here. I've also worked in some of the most illegally toxic office environments that a modern city like New York has to offer, without being fully prosecuted right underneath my nose (avoiding my participation in your affairs, eh?), although I expect the dust from those lawsuits to have been settled by now. 

I considered it my patriotic duty to monitor adherence to the law by whistle-blowing in the most intelligent manner that's ever been recorded in those offices, by which I mean this: evil don't win ever against me, ever. I might let a bitch hiss under her breath in my direction—if I'm really busy—but rest assured, retribution will always be mine, as the fate of His Most Righteous in gloriously-done battle. I don't lose fights either unless, of course, you rigged it by cheating (like a punk-ass beyotch), in which case any match you thought you won is null-and-void in my record book and everyone else's. 

I was dropped into disordered, predominantly homosexual offices so I could fight my way through them, which I did, with every single facet of my existence coming under fire. The crazy bitch who lead that charge? Yeah, you should know that Diana cried "Foul!" like a bitch on Day One, after stealing a glance at my very first rough layouts over the company server, and that was some small-time German publisher of common ephemera. Feel me? I hurt her so fucking bad, that she used as excuses: 1) her mental illnesses 2) the fact that her tiny little "bi" bitch (who cheated on her husband with her, while still married) needed the money from her job for law school, so they could strong-arm us into accepting legal deals that do not benefit the majority of our population, 3) that her daddy was an abusive drunk who left her and her mom early on, hence the damage (boohoo: her mom is a Methodist minister somewhere in Dallas), and finally, 4) the "poor dyke" card. 

She threatened lawsuits towards the middle and end of my tenure, too, because she just couldn't hang in there with it, and once again, one very fucked-up small family business that's an exercise in pride and the human ego fired an employee quickly on the heels of my departure, in case I cooked up any winning employment lawsuits that they rightly deserved, and got served with in my absence. I ain't got time for no court, y'all. I got work to do. And so, when I was dropped into another fucked-up small family business (this time, Jews from New York), I expected the teeth and claws of the insane to come out quickly. 

By now, I'd rightly earned a reputation as a woman not to be trifled with, so it was mostly pissant shit I could ignore in the face of my bigger workflow that earns. It took a few years for them to run the clock with me, thinking that they were sucking me dry of my "good" designs that were deliberately rejected by their Observant manager that they placed at B&N to do so, so they could milk my brilliant cover designs in my absence from their company hard drive (Hi, there!). It didn't work, because I was already famous, but it was a nice try. Nice try! 

After that, they let their rabid Israeli bitch of a secretary loose on me (so they thought), and I took her down, too (after also embarrassing her at MMA, because the bitch tapped out on a bland white belt for rank-ass beginners at a bullshit school for office tools), while using her bad shit to fuel the anger that put my work over-the-top, because no one uses me without my approval. Ever. Feeling "randy" now, boys? No?! Huh...silence finally reigns. Again.

So, when I hear bullshit justifications about undoing the "stigma" associated with mental illness, I know that the perpetrator of such a farce is also mentally ill (and afraid of exposure), because healthy people know the real cost of untreated psychosis in this society and worldwide. It doesn't wash with us, anymore, because we know better. But, we will take your Hollywood money and funnel it through special "committees" designed to bilk you out of your ill-gotten gains by using your immorally psychotic power to bankrupt the rest of us.

If you think this mama is dumb enough to accept your sob stories after my history of abuse at the hands of the chronically sick, as wars beaten and won by me (and publicly witnessed), you are worse off than you originally thought. Go back to your doctor, stat! We will protect our land, we will protect our children, and we will protect this land that is built of the "pursuit of happiness"; not your vanity, nor your ego, or your pride, and certainly not your cowardice, or your fears about your diseases. It ends today, because the rights of the healthy take precedence over the rights of the chronically-ill abuser. Together we rise, not fall. Your fears, my dear public, are well-justified. Drunks kill people. Guns kill people. And crazy people kill people. You will solve brain disorders, and you start will start that process today. Go!

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/science-news/2008/mental-disorders-cost-society-billions-in-unearned-income.shtml

Performance

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

When we were students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 90s, we had a few interesting guest speakers and the occasional crazy prostitute who used "shock value" to sell a really horrible performance to a bunch of fucked-up WASPs afraid of everything. It wasn't like I had tons of experience with middle-aged Jewish hookers, it was just that I already knew the deal: that it was a long dull prelude to her inevitable down-spiral into rehab, where she will try to shock the shit out of a bunch of mental patients who desperately need genuine psychiatric care over the hubris of some Jewish lady opening her legs without prompting from anyone, in a lame attempt to top the crying Albino Asian girl rocking back-and-forth in the corner of their white room because she fears being raped by her scary rabbit doll. 

It's just another game of one-upmanship for most native New Yorkers, used to seeing weird shit in the middle of what was once a normal workday, until some crazy guy flashes onlookers crossing a city street wearing nothing under his drab khaki raincoat other than a deranged expression, but that's a story for a rainier day than today. What's next? Toads falling from the fucking sky?! You know what I mean? It's, like, just another fucked-up thing you have to deal with because of other people's problems, when you really want to be at home with your feet up on a cozy ottoman, sipping a nice warm cup of honeyed herbal tea.

And that's exactly what it felt like for me to be in the audience of an Annie Sprinkle "show", and I use quotes as a description because there's no fucking way that what happened up on that stage was "art" for anyone other than my particular brand of fucked-up WASP's who were also my vegetarian housemates back in the day. I saw it as a cry for help that two very suppressed individuals needed, along with meds and sex therapy, the exact same boat as the poor ugly hooker onstage striving to be someone other than a banged-up prostitute looking for a second act. It was sort of like the political game of art school itself, albeit as a nastier version of the real school, where your psychotic prof is searching for shit-on-a-shingle served up to her as "art", as part of her anger issues with her more talented artist daddy....okay, but, fuck! Me and my broke-ass crew are paying for this joint right here!

Why give our hard-earned money to this fuckin' chick?! Why do I have to do art therapy with these fucking headcases?! Shit...I mean, man, I needed solid drawing skills like a daVinci born yesterday, not this shit right here, yo. That's how angry a R.I.S.D. experience gone wrong could be for us, because the meter was running at an exorbitantly high rate that was much higher than the highest priced call-girl in Manhattan, and that chick wasn't all that, bro. I felt that nervous with each passing dollar thrown away on crap, but my richer WASPier friends didn't care. Sue had (has?) a trust fund from her rich Boston lawyer dad (a well-respected tort lawyer she used to work for as a paralegal in between her questioning phases, like punk rocking in San Francisco), and Riddell worked the "perpetual student" angle as a local-yokel from rural Connecticut who got sympathy money from a New England state that still wants to believe they have strong homegrown talent among them. 

So, there I sat as a last-minute tag-along with them in a somewhat full auditorium, in the middle of the day, that was nowhere near as fully attended as the works of other major art stars of the day. We sat in one of the back rows that had a limited view of the stage, which suited me just fine. I had a feeling she'd be even worse up-close than from this relatively comfortable distance. She then asked the audience to line-up in front of the stage for a "viewing", which basically meant that this particular crazy lesbian spread her legs on a table, inserted a speculum, and then said through her mike that we could look at her cervix. WHAT?!!! Why the fuck would anyone want to get near her?! 

I guess that was part of the point, because even with heavy makeup and bleached-out hair, some of the attending lesbians couldn't get past the reality of her pasty flabby skin and banged-up face. I chickened out at first, but Riddell (as the hetero male in our trio), hopped up quickly from his seat, ready to have a look. I stayed in my seat looking at my assignments, but luckily for me, my hippie-mom Sue went to the stage to see firsthand. She came back to me in my seat, and said there wasn't much there. No shit! We went back down to the stage together, to give Riddell moral support for waiting on line on a side staircase leading up to the stage. We milled around the front of the stage, looking for any print materials that would back up her performance or artistic cred but, of course, there was none to be had, because she's a complete fucking hack. There were no drawings, no brochures, no artist statement (other than her onstage ramble of fake "artspeak" followed by a mental prepping to her audience about her nudity and insertion that was supposedly her "piece"), and no actual art at all. 

Oh. It was kind of exactly what we expected, which was nothing. Afterwards, we grilled Riddell about what happened: "Yeah, it was awesome!" He said that he went up there, spoke to her two female "assistants" who may direct your questions to her as she reclined on a surgical table with a gynecological instrument and a microphone, then you peeked between her open legs that were covered by a white sheet like a doctor's exam, and then he saw a cervix as a 30-year-old guy. 

Jaded as we were becoming about our burgeoning learning in the art scene and its lurking pseudo-denizens, it actually bolstered our faith in our sometimes difficult-to-follow classes, because the real thing is never a substitute for pure bullshit. It was actually a great life lesson to learn, delivered to us during a critical time in our studies when we sometimes felt like giving up. After that, I knew without a doubt that I could be beat that crazy fucking bitch in art, design, photography, painting, nudity AND health care (along with everything else) any day of the fucking week, whether awake or asleep. Thanks. I guess....
 

Here's what it really takes for a "free ride" that's for less than half of us: http://www.risd.edu/admissions/student-financial-services/types-of-aid/RISD-financial-aid/