Role-Play

Humans are visual by nature. As predators, hunters, gatherers, and agriculturists, our eyes take predominance over any other sense we have, by careful evolutionary design. We wouldn't be as successfully “human” without our forward-facing eyes. It's made more than one artist become uptight with me, because as a visual communicator, I understand that how we see is of critical importance. It's like a child's game we played as kids: would you rather be blind or deaf? Neither!

And yet, after very little thought, I always gave deaf as my answer, because as a prolific reader, writer, and artist, I wouldn't be half as good as I am with less vision. Like the saying goes, I guess my “prayers” were answered (and no, I never really prayed for that), because I have inherited my father's poor hearing and my mother's once-excellent vision that she needed to see as a young microbiologist. She often bragged that she had better than perfect vision, which is 20/20, topping out in the eagle-eyed range of 10/15.

Unlike her inflated IQ scores, I never doubted the sharpness of her acute "mom" eyes. She was so rigid about her housekeeping that she could tell who had been in the room and what we had moved at a quick glance. It was unnerving, but having "eyes in the back of your head" becomes the super sense that older humans develop after their other senses wane with age. You just know it, right? You can feel when something not right, not that you have your glasses on, granny.

But, that's how every masterful mother has ruled her roost in her small absences, and so it was of great interest to me when I discovered the world of pop psychology, rife with its labored over-acting and defined roles. It was, like, if you didn't perform rote actions lifted from a script, some of the more disordered humans around you just can't figure out what to do. It was unnerving to me. Can you imagine not knowing how to translate what your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth take in, before you knew just what they did? I couldn't, and so began my somewhat uncomfortable fascination with the learning impaired among us, or the seriously mentally ill, as subsets of the typical human experience.

Still, that type of focus has not been without some serious drawbacks, which we found out together as a t.v.-viewing society. With attention came a freak-show madness, wrongly telegraphing to the worst brains watching out there in "T.V. Land" that we care(d) more about their bad brains than their humanity, which is very far from the truth. I wanted results! I want healing for you, not a spot on a popular program. Doubt me? Witness the amount of famous entertainers who've recently passed away from alcohol and drug addictions, usually in combination with very serious medical conditions like manic-depression. 

Do you really think that's a coincidence? We recently lost a pioneering female wrestler who just nabbed a coveted spot on the show "Intervention" that came too late for her, because she died of an overdose before she could make her "debut" on a series that makes money from sicknesses like hers. What, she couldn't go to rehab without some photogenic doc from the boob tube to hold her hand while the cameras rolled? The show producers will simply pick up the next fragile "star", like, the day she died, people.

I know. I've worked with "media types" my entire career. You know what they care about? Your next bestselling book, emphasis on sales. The numbers, bro. They care about the amount of product you push on the buying public (addicts included) more than you, and that's the problem. Entertainment is fun, but what do you do when the music stops and the curtains close? Who are you then? And, who's fighting that fight with you after your last curtain call, when the backroom counts out ticket sales that you get a small cut of, which you don't really care about, because you're whacked out on pills. Besides, it is absolutely abnormal to want that kind of attention day after day. 

"What are you, drunk or something, or high on drugs?" That's what my parents joked about when we ran wild around the house making noise, and it was not a flattering assessment of our characters. If you can't sit down to "mellow out" on your own, what happened to you? You can't always be "on"! Performing is great and all, but a lot savvier producers than you can whip talent into a tizzy just to film it, because (let's be honest) there are actually millions of skinny, bobble-headed, big-teethed, fake blondes spray-painted orange in the world. 

If you burn out, "The Machine" can easily discard you to buy another one (production queues are based on a factory-model, even for you sensitive "creative types" out there), especially a phony personality, because you are totally, completely, and utterly replaceable. Bland "genericans" don't have an actual place in the history books, yo. If you have a soul, you can't actually be bought, so the next time your therapist in group asks you to "act out" a scene with them while the cameras are rolling, you need to immediately get real with it, by finding a new doctor quickly. You need to talk about the real, and you need to talk it out, and you need to get real. Get real with it. Really.

Deadhead

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

During this very important "Year of Mercy" (as ordained by His Holiness in Rome), Our Most Holy Father has actively encouraged us to speak out against a culture of death that seems to grow stronger with each passing year. Back in the 70s and 80s, the biggest hippie band in America was a rock band called "The Grateful Dead", with skull logos emblazoned on as many items as a wealthy "Trustafarian" without a full-time job could comfortably buy, in between supplemental cash sales from the drugs they used in their psychedelic world. If you've ever heard their sets from back in the day, you'd know why you needed a lot of artificial stimulus to listen to it: it's repetitive and redundant in the extreme, always with the exact same sound.

A lot of other rock bands suffer from an uncomfortable distance between studio tracks and performing live because most of their talent is coaxed out by the excellent producers and sound guys who stay up all night hitting lines of coke with the band to get one or two decent riffs, let alone an entire track. It's really hard work making great music. "The Dead" took the opposite tack, by relentlessly sticking to the same type of meandering playing, as soon as they felt sure their audiences' acid trips had kicked in. Oh, good! The kids have finally zoned out. Let's play whatever we want.

Don't get me wrong. I like their music, but the whole scene was like a cult to me, and that totally turned me off. I know tons of great songs and artists from the exact same time period, but listening to their sound wasn't exactly what this band sold. They wanted you to give up your life to follow them on the road, because what better way to make a living then off a generation of kids raised without parents who are vulnerable to strong outside influences? That's what. And that's exactly who my first real "Deadhead" friend Michelle was back then, and still is today, as I found out during our obligatory "let's meet for after-work drinks after reconnecting on Facebook" routine that marks our life in this digital age of social media.

After blowing her gasket as a publicist at someone elses' PR firm for the fashion industry in the city ("I got a freakin' picture in 'Vogue' fer crissakes! I deserve more money than her!!", jerking her finger at the other junior publicist sitting in their bigwig's office, as she told it to me in a regretful tone, after a drink or two), her rich and totally absent daddy sent her a lot of money to start a fancy business in Midtown, with cushy offices to match the pricey real estate with the obligatory trendy loft apartment to launch her successfully into the future. She dated a really well-known chef who was younger and he lovvved cooking for her at her place, but they just broke up. She was then talking to me about freezing her eggs. Oh. That sounds really expensive....still waiting on that check for me, by the way. 

Anyway, it was the exact same deal as when I met her late in our high school careers, alone and scared and almost bullied to death. Some of the "popular girls" started a rumor that she slept with one of their boyfriends, and after that, the cheerleaders turned on her ruthlessly in the open hallways and bathrooms of our huge New York public school. She wasn't safe anywhere and in her desperation, she turned away from the posers to seek out better friends among kids who had real power, like me and my group of diverse, smart kids from tough homes.

I took her into my social life, but my friends instantly hated her. She was (and is) a breezy, well-practiced con artist by necessity of her home environment, not that she took much from me but an ill-given $45 at the Jersey Shore for a bag of mushrooms bought at the WaWa grocery store on LBI, as an act of revenge for cutting her out of our senior trip to the beach. I shudder to think what that group of adult teens running New York homes with jobs, cars, keys, and futures would have done to her, but at the time, she wasn't thinking straight. 

She was almost gang-raped by a sports team from school, for being foolish enough to be lured over to their fake "house party" that quickly became a group of drunk guys looking to take advantage of the girl "everyone" hated, by blaming it on her bad reputation. I didn't feel that way about her at all, and I told her a few years back at our mini reunion. She never stole any of my boyfriends from me, and even if she did mess around with one or two of the boys in our crowd, it was all water way under the bridge. We don't see them socially anymore anyway. No harm, no foul.

But the redhead from high school that she pissed off then was deeply in love with her teenage boyfriend, and she wanted Michelle tortured for the rest of her school career. I took her under my protective wing, like I've done with many a foundling ousted from the comfort of an empty nest that wasn't ever really all there. I don't recall meeting her dad ever, except maybe for a ten-second brush-up that he would have instantly regretted by blowing out the front door of their family home almost immediately. Her mom was a seemingly ditzy housewife who planned and hosted expensive parties for their clients at their large suburban home. She'd airily invite us to eat the catered Jewish food that was leftover in a fridge full of plastic-wrapped trays in a fake sing-song voice, then leave just as quickly, too. To where? We never really knew.

And that's what all of us had back then: a bunch of empty homes without parents. Michelle had all the time, money, clothes, booze, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll she could fit into her busy schedule, but no real family. She had a car filled with gas and nowhere to go, and no one to see. It was heart-breaking to see the way her parents cruelly cast her off like an unwanted pet. She floundered like any troubled kid her age would, and then one year she discovered "The Grateful Dead", and she was instantly hooked. Hippies are savvier than they look, and staying on the road to see expensive concerts is a hard gig to manage, even for spoiled rich kids from decent families. Who'd pay for their concert tickets when the money ran out? She came back with connections to a new group of kids she met on tour from Hastings-on-the-Hudson, who were just as bored and rich as she was.

She tried to talk me into going on the road with her one summer while we were on break from college, which was met in my mother's kitchen with a loud derisive snort that my middle bro liked so much, he quickly pulled up a stool to watch the early fireworks. This should be good! Michelle's plan was to sell the multi-colored yarn bracelets we'd make. I had one in my pocket to show as a sample. My mom was completely unimpressed. It wasn't a great plan, but I'd seen Michelle pull money from some of the dirtiest, lowest-rent pockets around. She could pull it off. Yeah, but...can you? Good point! My mom reminded me that I earned the money I put in my pocket during semesters, and that was indeed true. "You need a job!", as was always the case for the desperate, disordered, and chronically needy surrounding me. Who else will pay for your expenses at school, if you don't? It was suddenly quiet in our large suburban kitchen that'd been an expensive renovation for my proud parents of years past.

I spent a horribly dull summer working at a "Herman's World of Sporting Goods" store at the old Nanuet Mall, waiting for my friend to come back from tour, and fitting in about as good as a shiny new apple among the depressing brightly-colored golf clothes for the rich white men away on vacations who did fit it into neatly assigned roles. She came back early, running out of gas, with an enthusiasm for the old hippie band that was met with a much cooler reception here with her home crowd of well-versed natives with a taste for genuine Americana, like jazz and blues music. Why go for some derivative version when you can hear the real thing? It was the same thing at college: my boyfriend was housemates with a group of similarly rich Jewish kids from Long Island, who were also very strict in their faith. They hated me, too, because I didn't fit into their clichéd world of a rigidly defined counterculture that they had borrowed from an older generation almost entirely, with the same Patchouli-scented clothes and wild hairstyles.

What was the point of rehashing it, by stealing it from other people? Dying in a civil rights march back then was not fun, and these lazy rich kids knew nothing about that. I finally went to see a show with my college boyfriend in the city over a summer break, and I was just as unimpressed as I was by their rote memorization of playlists at school, from old tapes passed around since the '70s. Ehhh...I shrugged my shoulders as we talked on the busy streets outside of Madison Square Garden. They sounded exactly like every mixed tape I'd been forced to listen to at his college house in Oneonta. No surprises here! He immediately defended this key facet of his religion to me, shaken in his faith as he was with me. We were in the middle of a city thrumming with life all around us. Who had time for those old geezers and their lame rock? It was played out! It all sounded the same.

He stammered, citing such magical experiences as a certain "California Dreaming" type of fantasy he'd heard on many a mixed tape gone by, with mystical shows on sparkling west coast oceans he'd never actually been to, explaining that the guys needed to "vibe off " the venue's locale in the same way their fans needed to be stoned out of their minds to be sold on a cult of almost-dead musicians and their skeleton-branded gear. They must've been "bummed out" by the crowd, man! New York City isn't their scene...blah blah blah blah blah. I didn't get it then, and I don't get popular cults now, except that a bunch of insanely devoted kids spent all their money and time following this band, with nothing of note to show for it except maybe an early death by drug overdose, or dying from heart failure brought on by years of heavy substance abuse, just like the overweight singer from the band they loved now playing in the real land of the dead, with a similar name as some famous ice cream flavor. Forever and ever, indeed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/opinion/a-culture-of-death-not-life.html?_r=0

Y

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

Lately I've been seeing stories about the "homeless problem in New York City" which (once again) suggests we are immoral, unfeeling, uncaring moneygrubbers with no thoughts or empathy for the chronically ill of our society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Unlike the "lily-white" self-entitlement of sequestered elite populations around the globe that are part of any sharply divided society, we live a rather open communal life that is jarringly American in its familiarity and democracy. 

Whereas well-monied royalty overseas can traverse their entire lives without ever touching any really gritty urban pavement, softly moving from their cushy chauffeured-driven limos to their thickly carpeted pied-à-terre, New Yorkers have no real understanding about this type of divide that separates people, because each and every native New Yorker (no matter how rich or how poor) uses mass transit almost every single day of some kind, so much so, that its heavy usage is problematic for many daily commuters. It's that well-integrated and designed for our type of mobile lifestyles. In fact, I can't imagine never having the kind of upclose-and-personal experience that typifies that rather humorous mash-ups that define the New York City commute. 

It's both funny and painful at the same time. Ever had a newly-arrived Eastern European emigre with brightly dyed white/yellow hair, thick dark black brows and unshaven armpits put it right there in your dainty face unwashed in the middle of the hottest summer ever, as she reaches up for an arm-grab to the bar above the seats that steadies us during our bucking ride home? No?! Oh, I have. Ever seen a 6'3 drag queen in full-length evening dress covered in bright green spangles and sporting a large red wig with 6" inch red pumps transfer drunkenly between subway stops after midnight? No? I have! Hands up if you've ever had that kind of thing happen to you at least once, New Yorkers...wait for it...there it is: every single hand shot up. 

We don't have these artificial divides that block normal day-to-day interactions between societal strata like other countries do, not that I really wanted to see some esse take a leak into a garbage pail at 8:00 a.m. as I humped it to the Brooklyn courthouse a couple of years back. I think he was wearing an MTA safety vest, too, hence the sense of entitlement about taking a piss in one of his co-workers cans to clean that morning. Fuck. That's rough to see. It's the same thing with our chronic homeless, people. We know they're mentally ill and addicted, yo. That's why they get kicked out of places. Come on, you honestly think we don't know? What kind of dude doesn't wash for weeks on end, preferring to wear a plastic bag as underpants over his winter wear while sleeping outside on a warm subway grate? Do you have any idea what kind of stench that is when he manages to shake it off and walk it downstairs onto a train? 

You know what I mean, New Yorkers. Yeah, baby: it's a trick subway car that seems magically empty during the height of rush hour, because we've all done it. You step onto the car and then it hits you: the lovely smell of throw-up, piss, shit, puke and rotten b.o. that's been heated up in the car and simmered to a nauseous, vomit-inducing perfection. I don't ever want you to think that we don't know about our homegrown problems here, because here's the thing, peeps: any one of those "bums" you see on our streets could be that crazy drunk uncle from your family, or that drug-addicted prostitute of a niece who seems to disappear every few years for another few years, and that's how you know she's back to using, because she's "mysteriously" absent from jolly family gatherings around the holiday Christmas tree. 

You feel me? Of course we know! The Mayor of New York himself has a daughter who suffers from a chronic mental illness and an openly justice-minded wife (http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/24/politics/de-blasio-daughter-depression/). Who better than they to advocate on their own behalf?! These are our families. Why the fuck do you think that each and every single member who joins their local branch of the YMCA pays part of their dues towards housing for the sick and homeless? Because we know, a'ight? We fucking know. Now, pony up for the common cash-kitty. We need lock-downs and mandatory check-ins supervised by the expert people we pay to monitor our sick populace and their coming-and-goings with an access key-card because winter is out there, and we know it. That's why. So fuck you! Whachoo think? We don't take care of our own? Nuh uh, brother. Not on my watch. Now, get to steppin'. I have real work to do.

http://www.newarkymca.org/main/supportive-housing/

https://thrivenyc.cityofnewyork.us/do-you-need-help/ 

Cappucino

http://coffee.wikia.com/wiki/Espresso_Machine

Like I wrote in another post, jerk-offs have it really hard in our culture, particularly when they have to hide their fascination with stupid shiny gadgets, and so much so, I have invented a name for them that you may feel free to use with impunity called "Gadgeteers". Similar in douchebag intensity to "Marketeers" who serve to do those annoying sales jobs you don't have time for because you make the stuff they sell, they are equally creepy to be around for any real length of time.

I've crossed paths with many, many different types of douchebags in my lifetime, but for some reason (perhaps an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with extreme Hobbit Hoarding built right in), people who are dicks about objects seem to strike an extra annoying cord with most logical, sane Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise person"). My friend with a rock n' roll name was just such a character. He's fun to drink with, but you don't want to take him home with you. You know? He has no real fucking clue about life at all, because he's the product of successful immigrant parents who coddled him like the half-retard he really is.

When I was forced out of economic necessity to couch-surf at my friend's pad for awhile, he wasted no time in telegraphing his disdain for my human life by immediately dragging me on an insane and totally unnecessary run to a big bargain center in the 'hood, after he forgot the club card for the store at the cash register loaded with his greedy goods, thus forcing us to double-back and pick it up at his boy's house, because he doesn't actually have a card of his own for real. This particular fucked up shopping trip was actually brought on by his stress/anxiety/excitement of having a woman as beautiful as me living in somewhat close proximity to him. 

After said completely unnecessary and totally fucking weird trip to his magically dull "Land of Programmable Hoarding Zombies" (I left empty-handed because I was shocked by the utterly uselessness that two pounds of fake orange cheese curls in a huge plastic tub actively leaking toxic fumes right underneath your nose represents to a healthy human like me), my friend proceeded to squirrel away his weird collection of towels and washcloths in his room, tucked away safely behind closed doors, a room that he actively keeps under lock and key (paranoid as that is in your own home), with a thick silver chain.

He also assured me with confidence that I no longer needed a doctor or real medicine anymore because he had a fully stocked "Pill Cabinet" stocked with the weirdest snake oil shit I have ever seen in my life, shit that he tried to sell me by describing the powerfully accurate phenomenon behind shark oil droplets, because he has never seen an old shark in his life, ever! He kinda felt bad for me (naive as I am), because my doctor has a thriving active practice with years of schooling and training done in New York's leading scholarly institutions and hospitals, because, like, they don't tell you the truth. Pharmaceutical companies do that! And then he showed the wacky fucking brochure that the crazy lady on the first floor of the apartment building I used to live in (but was forced out of, hence the couch-surfing phase I was forced into), peddles around the place to support her biracial boy who is sometimes in school, and sometimes not.

Oh, and I was also tasked with fixing his incredibly complex and overly expensive robot toy that never made a cup of coffee once, because (since I was staying there "rent-free"), I owed him a lifetime of service and slavery by daring to survive and thrive (I was already back at work) right underneath his nose and, disgustingly enough, in his own house! 
Of course, he rifled through my stuff while I was at work, stealing a cool bus sign that I found in this squalid tenement I'd been cleaning out to live in, as payment for his many "services" rendered to me, in addition to: my gift of many hardcover books to him and his cousin from the company I was working at while I stayed there, plus another rare gift I'd given him a few Christmases back of an original framed vinyl Elvis album that I took right off my own wall, the very same rock god he'd been named after by his sweet Puerto Rican mother.

It was an utter farce. I soon learned what every friend he'd ever had stay there with him knew (and there were tons: his brother surfed the couch before me, there was a recent ex-girlfriend brought down-low by a hurricane so she was ripe for the grabbing, and then there was little ole me...sensing a pattern here?), and that is this: Elvis is totally fucking insane and physically abusive, in between rounds of beers with some fun thrown into the mix by his eccentric personality. I fiddled with his overly complex, crazy piece of crap for awhile with the instruction manual, then I found an actual stove-top coffeemaker in the cabinets that operated solely on gas burner power and someone putting coffee in the top of it to brew, because I had to go to work in the morning.

He was so distraught by the long death of his robot toy, that he tried in vain to pull at least five other people into the situation while I stayed with him. First it was me, then his cousin who lives in an illegal apartment downstairs, then some of his contractor buddies (yeah, more stringent blue collar thought-building and a-happening types..this should totally work) who also grunted in anger at the thing, and then, most weirdly, his coked-up IT friend who took the same amount of time as me (Genius is great!) to finally deliver him the same bad news: this shit is broke, yo. After his shiny robot was finally pronounced dead at the scene forever, he admitted what his crew had known for years; his cheap-ass bought the thing after it had "fallen off the truck", which is a cutesy thug name for a "hot" stolen item, and given the banged-up nature of the box it came in, it had probably never worked, ever.

This, after he tortured everyone around him for years with some stupid fucking machine that had never worked, all because Elvis wanted to fuck around with us as objects for his curiosity in his stupid fucking "Demento World". In his weird world, smart people have to pay a stiff price for out-thinking him by performing magic tricks, like fixing something that never worked, as payback for his broken brain. 
He hadn't liked the hubris behind his coke dealer/IT service guy, so in retaliation for his gifts, Elvis would present his riddle within an enigma to solve, but not before he begged me to stay awake long enough to rake him over the coals intellectually as payment for his services. 
I didn't really have a choice because his guests were meant to torture me into staying awake in the living room where the couch is (and I had work in the morning), while he did cocaine with them all night.

I did stay awake on my own, and then I also found the little bag of coke from his dealer hidden underneath the illegal bootleg DVD's that he also hoards on his coffee table, which gave me all the leverage I needed to stay alive a little while longer under his roof. But don't you fret. It was interesting for me, too, readers! His coke dealer took the machine in payment for the drugs, and from there on out, for the rest of my time staying on his couch, a big empty space stood on his counter-top where that useless hunk of junk had been, and I was "allowed" to make my morning cup of coffee in peace while he hid in his room behind a closed door, under lock and key. 

He also has a security camera above his front door that shows a picture of who's there on his computer screen, an awning with the wrong street address prominently printed on it because he has made lots of enemies in his lifetime, and a conspicuously absent Master Illuminator from his life. That would be me, folks, the most important object that has ever been housed under his roof, except for this very key and quite central fact of life: I ain't no coffeemaker. You out, boy.

http://chn.ge/1RX52GW

 

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

This one's for you today, Ms. Rousey! It ain't no big thang in our world, girl. Shake it off, and get the fuck back out there. We all know you ain't a real Samurai Warrior unless you been tried and tested through failure. That's why we get all the good stuff in this life, yo. We don't take the easy way out ;)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BE%8D

Happy, happy, happy

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

Happiness is weird if you have a paranoid-schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, bipolar-personality identity disorder (with marked petulant/suicidal/narcissistic/psychotic features), like the company receptionist at the small Jewish family business I worked at for awhile, with her typical "Office Cow" dreams of fine art glory and Rockefeller-like wealth; her make-believe, handsome, and very supportive shiska husband standing by her side, just like her first generation Israeli parents who worked blue collar jobs on Long Island prepped her for. Right? No?! Oh, well, then let me try that again. 

Ahem...she was delusional, but people who do bottom-feeder, highly repetitive service jobs are usually like that: arrogant, petty, snippy....you know the attitude. She was bored, and also a totally ignorant loud-mouth, with a completely over-inflated sense of self about her life and her skills, only tempered by her "down" cycles filled with dramatically petulant sighs that widely signaled her "Woe is Me!" boredom, interspersed with frequent hits off the big blue bottle of Listerine in the ladies room, because it has some alcohol in it.

She avoided me for many months, because I was extremely busy and she was busy getting her "best friend" from high school fired from her high-paying executive administrator job, because that's what you do to former Architecture majors who come from the same small Long Island town as you, former shul classmates who are also bipolar and very brittle: you stab them in the back whenever it's necessary. Right? Oh....okay, let me try that one again, too: our former "Office Manager" was one of the biggest fucking bitches any one of us had ever met in the sometimes semi-professional world of big city book publishing, and this was a somewhat gay-friendly media business in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, which is like saying that West Hollywood is "kind of gay". Yeah, like that.

She was an obvious bitch from a company that broke its back hiring other Jews and relatives, so much so that it was sometimes good clean fun to watch the crazy old people who hired these disastrous amateurs justify their secretary's insane bullshit, which got wackier and wackier as time went on. The wife of the owner talked through her anxiety over scary machines by talking back to the copier machine whenever it did any kind of banal action whatsoever; they told me she used to be an elementary school teacher. Huh...wonder what happened with that. Yeah, I knew. Like so many other business, the phony lines that employees used on each other could possibly pass muster under less legitimate circumstances than the real professionalism I brought to the table, which is kind of a bummer if you're an incompetent drug addict. I worked with plenty of those, too, educated or not.

Like any other uptight, self-righteous, hippie dippy, Jewish art fag, she scrutinized me through narrowed eyes every single time I walked passed the reception desk (in case I ever bothered to wonder how she felt about me), and if I was working for "too long" on my own, in her bizarre estimation, she would find an excuse to violate my workspace with her rancid beer breath, usually with a question so fucking stupid, I wondered how she breathed air at all. Sometimes I gave her the answer (the same dull ones, over and over and over again), and sometimes not. I am the Master in any studio, and so whatever I feel like teaching my staff is up to me, at any time I want to, and if anyone disturbs me, they're gone. It's simple: no me, no money.

And so I didn't worry about her neurotic bullshit too much, so successful was I at putting distance between us, while she nursed the same pit in her stomach everyday that she would choose to blame on other people, places, and things, weather permitting or not, like the special UV light bulb she needed because she also has S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder), in addition to the many other serious brain disorders we were forced to ignore under threat of firing, which grew into a more serious threat with each passing fire. As the company grew smaller, she stood out more and more, and not in any good ways. One afternoon, she stopped me walking past her with her disordered teenage bullshit to ask me a vaguely stupid "self help" type of question, because, like, why do other people feel things that are, like, different than her? You know? Like, why?

I had time to kill that day because I just made my deadline way under budget for the umpteenth day in a row, and by that time in my employ, I had the whole company in my pocket. They stopped working to listen to me speak, as they passed around my emails and cover designs like I was Mick Jagger at a mall signing autographs (because they couldn't stop themselves from gossiping about me within earshot), and they followed me wherever I went online using the company's network. In short, I owned them. If I used a famous media site as a starred commenter to slice-and-dice some would-be intellectual, they knew about it. If (and when) I hit it "out of the ballpark" again with my designs, it became company news within seconds. I had their complete and utter attention, short as those spans could be at times. Why their stupid ugly bitch thought to fuck with me on that particular afternoon, after all the schooling I'd already given her, is still beyond me to this day, besides good old fashioned mental defect.

She hated any outward signs of happiness we showed as we went productively about our days, as baffling to her bad brain as if I was the resurrected Pharaoh Queen Nefertiti herself walking around in full Royal Egyptian dress. It was envy mixed with hero-worship, mixed with misplaced desire, and what serious scholar would want that tossed their way? I sure as fuck didn't. You hired her, you deal with it. End of story. By the end of my time there, they tried to railroad me into taking their special bitch "into therapy", that brilliantly inept Jewish band-aid on a disease so bad, people die from it every single day all around the world, by deliberately setting me up as their "fall guy" for their bad hire. Nope. Nice try though! I deflected every single scheme they threw my way, monied up and lawyered-up as they were over me as their paltry advantages, but in the end, all they were left with was this: I'm better than you. That's it, and no banal amount of talking would cure it.

So, to finally answer fully your question, Ye Ole Stupid Bitch of Work Days Past, ("Why are you always happy, happy, happy all the time?"), I'm "happy" because I'm everything that you are not, and will never be. How's that for the truth? Oh, and failing that, click on the fucking link under the pretty picture above, you ignorant piece of shit. Yeah, that big yellow one with the smiley face. I won.

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

Miss American Pie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_%28music%29

Madness wasn't something that occurred just inside the home for me, safely tucked away behind locked, closed doors; it was everywhere I went out in the world, too. In this modern world that marks the abolition of segregation from our free society, I went to public school, like all of my friends and neighbors did, boys and girls happily included (with the occasional "Baby Jazz", too). That harmony and mature acceptance was (and still is) reflected in every environment I went into, like college, or going to the gym, or grown-up office work with my first real suit bought just for interviews as part of that special occasion, but otherwise, me and my generation formed a heterogeneous blend of mixed company wherever we went or now find ourselves in, because in "homosapien", it's a language easily understood, or so I thought. 

Baby geniuses have it rough out in the world; a wild place of limited abilities and other people's impairments, which pretty much guaranteed that sometimes the only other humans in the world who understood me in my smaller social circles of childhood were the very people who were most closely related to me through the "magic power" that is genetics; a fascinating branch of science that tells the truth about who we really are, whether we like it or not. Madness was the same way. Sure, people try to game us into thinking they're healthier than they are, but with time and experience, that window closes to ever-smaller widths all the time. It naturally limits the access people have to me, and for the truly sick, that's a frightening thought. I could be the only muthfucka on "da block" who will really help them out of the mess they're in, be it the inherited kind or not. I am a master problem-solver, but that don't always make the medicine go down smooth, know what I'm sayin'? Drunk fucks are still just that, same as any other century with Problem-People. 

Still, I've always wanted to help, much like my innate joy at all things "baby", animal and human alike. Are we not cute furry mammals? We sure are! But, much like the divorces that broke up bad marriages right around the time kids grew old enough to handle it (like junior high school age), parents began fleeing the scenes of their crimes the way baby birds leave the nest: very quickly while fattened on family funds, a kind of last-ditch-effort flight that belies the desperation felt by the fleeing parent, male or female, though as so often is the case for most native New Yorkers, that flavor is almost always of the male kind. And so we grew up a generation without any real father figures, though that was also like many other generations before us, certainly that of a lot of Acadian Métis; an ethnicity that knows their papas have limited ranges of domesticity built into their crazy boat-trippin' lifestyles, so much so that after the third or fourth month, you want them to leave anyway, so as to make their way at sea, bringing home bags filled with goodies and tales of adventure born on the high seas. 

We didn't exactly want them around full time, anyway. Ain't it time for you to catch some fishing boat off the coast? "Bring back lobster!", we shouted to their navy-clad backs and slammed doors. Whew...glad he's gone. He was becoming one ornery motherfucker! After my dad left, my friends' fathers quickly followed suit, swallowed up by the vastness that is the metropolitan New York City area. They were gone, gone, gone, baby! I adjusted quickly to it, as the lifelong realist I remain, but my friends with troubles didn't. Quick changes are disastrous to kids with mental problems, and my friends quickly broke apart like their parents did. The first one to go was my friend Molly, and it was epic. She left school with a bad case of chickenpox that happened during high school, way after we all had the disease and moved on from it, scars aside. She did not. That time period home, after her father left her mother, must have been the straw that broke the camel's back, because she came back to school pox-ridden and skittishly scared, breaking out in hysteric tears even at my less funny material. I was worried, and so were my friends. 

She began using drugs hard, moving straight from the sneaking-cigarettes-in-the-bathroom phase to sniffing coke and losing her virginity, then onto date rape in the backseat of one of our friend's car while she watched, a friend who'd already been to rehab and back by sixteen. They started getting shipped off to the relatives, those with out-of-state and -country grandparents, or (in the worst cases like Molly's) institutions way upstate, supposedly out of harm's way. I knew it was bad when she threw me under the bus with her mom for the minor infraction of pot smoking, which is about all I had done in comparison to my deflowered addict classmates, except they hid how bad it was for them from me, to use my younger inexperience as much-needed leverage in their savage working class households. Our toeholds on middle-class respectability were very fragile new ones at that. Any one of us could go back down at any time, and my less respectable friends would much rather it was me than them. 

She became one of the first people in my circle to honestly betray me, which she never apologized for, because I never saw her again after her coke addiction and promiscuity came to light. It had absolutely nothing to do with me because I wasn't around her anymore, after she successfully back-stabbed me several times. She went down on her own, like the genuinely addicted and insane typically do. One of the last times I ever saw her socially was during her tentative school attendance after her bouts with divorce and chicken pox, trying to recover her health in the newly shark-infested waters of her parents broken marriage. Like a lot of my classmates, she didn't make it out of their madness, because like most seriously sick people, her first brush with real madness came on the heels of her puberty, and she never fully regained her footing with the healthy life. I went over to her house after school, to see if she would apologize to my face for taking the hits from her mom for my supposed "fast life" of sex and drugs; me at fifteen and never been kissed, watching from the sidelines of their depression. I wanted to see how she was doing, not that she actually cared about me anymore, in the face of her much larger adult woes. 

She sat on the floor of her bedroom in a corner, rocking back and forth, asking me if I liked Doug McClean's* song "American Pie" (I didn't, and much like everything else about most of my hometown classmates, my taste in great music surpassed theirs at a much earlier age than normal, too), as she picked up the needle from her plastic kiddie 45 record player, playing the song over and over again, asking me if I heard the strange messages that she swore she heard, too. I couldn't follow her into madness during my teenage years. 
I certainly can't do it now, but I can tell you all about a young Irish/German girl named MollyAnn Dougherty who left our town seeking a cure and never returned, because that's exactly what I promised my friends I would for them when I got to the top: I would tell everyone about them, about what happened to them in their very abusive homes, so that we could break the cycle forever. This one's for you, kid.

American Pie

Don McLean

A long long time ago
I can still remember how
That music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while

But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
So

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die

Did you write the book of love
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock and roll?
Can music… Full lyrics on Google Play

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