Wall of Confusion

With the decline of mental healthcare that marks this century and the last, we've all been forced to become doctors of the human condition, with or without the surgeon's paycheck. I've become accustomed to the twitches of other people that mark their significant discomfort out in the world (not that I like it at all), while also being robbed of the proper mechanisms in place that prevent real healing from occurring. It's like I wrote about certain therapy/rehabilitative business models: they succeed by deliberately not solving the problem for you, which is a rather big way to lie to sick people who are already vulnerable in the extreme. Comedian/actor Andy Dick was recently on t.v. to talk about his battle with addiction and his addictive disorder that's put him back in rehab FOR THE 20TH TIME. Is that real healing for anyone?!  

Corruption does that to people, even those working in the healthcare industry, by slowly seeping into your soul bit-by-bit without you knowing it, because evil hides behind easy comforts when you're prone. In the vacuum that came with the American de-institutionalization of psychosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation), people were left to fend for themselves, which is about as far from our ideals about happiness and the pursuit of it as you can get. Doctors were left to treat violently sick people with prescriptions sold to them at a huge mark-up—through the creation of huge pharmaceutical giants—instead of receiving real care, because true healing takes a lot longer than many employers, shareholders, and investors like for their returns, aided and assisted in their delusional jobs by the sense that time is much quicker than it is, like the time montages they see on t.v. Why can't we all be quicker? Drink more coffee! Stay up longer with this pill! There's always a product that's a quick fix over the slower tending that really solves a problem.

My physician in Brooklyn told me that she didn't over-prescribe antibiotics because they lose their effectiveness with time, making us much more vulnerable to greater illnesses, but people with mental problems who already struggle with less than accurate timelines want it now now now! They don't know how to incorporate a longer wait, suffering as they already are. Add more time, and they worry about keeping the health plan they get through their routine office job, because their boss is kind of a fucked-up asshole already, and any absences encourage managers to fire people too quickly, in behavioral patterns that were developed during "The Industrial Age" that treated people like they were the machinery they worked on, even though the exact opposite is true of our daily lives and strongest skill sets as human beings. We are far from being disposable as unique individuals. With my doctor's guidance, I weaned myself from the over-the-counter cold and flu products that caused my heart to race like I just pounded coke in the bathroom stall of a Wall Street trading firm.

It was always the same "Get back to work!" message that was shouted at me, so that someone else could get rich from my work, while I struggled to stay awake. I began waiting out seasonal colds, and then instructing the people around me about my process, which involves a longer timeline. My doctor told me (and it's true) that any suppressing drug will only leave you open to repeated bouts of illness, if only we could simply wait for our body's natural self-defenses to fight the illness during that first cold of the year. Instead of hopping around in a couple of days (work work work! busy busy busy!), I began to wait for 10 days or more, which immediately freaked my mom out when I lived with her, even though I repeated my good science to a supposed scientist like her over and over again, which she promptly forgot during my prolonged colds, growing more and more agitated by the day, until she exploded in a violent psychosis that she blamed on my repose.

The sickest among us continue to struggle, trying in vain to adopt to a work world that already passed them by many years ago, leaving them bereft of healthcare and support. My mom is one of those people who always feels she needs "more support" or more education, when in truth, her brain is incapable of working in our world. As a result, she learned to cover up her diseases expertly, letting them show only around other diseased peer groups—like her laboratory co-workers—at work in a place where she could use her "friend's" illnesses against them for leverage to keep herself employed, in the event that they sabotaged her efforts at work as a handicapped single mother.

She has a distinct pattern that she refuses to acknowledge to me, because I am not a part of her sick world, and as a social group rife with varying degrees of markedly anti-social tics and paranoid responses to ordinary stimuli, they break down quickly in the face of good health that surpasses them, so they seek to tear down the one person in their sick group who can lead them out of it, trapped in a co-dependent pattern that never brings them the healing they so desperately need. Like the character "Sheldon" from the popular sitcom "Big Bang Theory", she found a group of over-educated people who told each other as a tribe that they were smarter than other people around them because they were in science as technicians, rather than the grant-wining superstar researchers who truly excelled at work.

Most of them went on to work other compulsively repetitive jobs, like her friend who went from cleaning Petri dishes every day to a tax accountant, where she could basically do the same job every day, with some variations. They weren't all that smart under careful scrutiny, which is exactly what they seek to avoid the most, like the medicine that will ease the obvious symptoms of their public manifestations of anxiety, like Sheldon Cooper's abstract physicist character—and they are certainly not him, fictional as he is—though they certainly pretend to be. In retaliation for their inequities and insecurities, we have an enormously anti-social peer group in our world with deeply ingrained traits that were never socially acceptable, and it's time that changed.

Instead of nursing along people who pretend ignorance to compensate for their brain disorders, why not try telling them upfront that you know they have a disease? After all, I can't "cover up" my deafness in certain kinds of settings, so I began educating the people around me, to prevent a lot of weird gaming from going on. It's not our job to make sick people feel better about their annoying tics that were developed in lieu of appropriate healthcare. We are not the problem in this world. You are. So, change. Change it. It's time to stop using your psychosis as a weapon. We're not fooled by it. It's not a real weapon for you, anyway. It never really was. It's over. Really and truly.

http://csgv.org/issues/guns-and-mental-health/

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/obama-gun-control-rule-mental-illness-217340

http://www.ibtimes.com/guns-mental-illness-white-house-releases-new-reporting-guidelines-background-check-2248724

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/24/opinion/robbins-mental-health/

Shock to the Heart

Back in the day, we used to say lines from the old show "Sanford and Son" to each other that we had memorized by heart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_and_Son), having heard the same lines over and over again, like our parents compulsive "jokes" that were often told in times of stress and/or drunkenness, when they didn't know how to fill in conversational spaces with other humans correctly. 

"Old Man Sanford" would clutch his heart in mock anguish to deliver the well-honed line to his son that he was "on his way home" to see "Ouisie", his wife who'd passed on already, because he was "havin' the big one" that was so often threatened on the show but never actually came about. Oh...so, it's just a lie, then. We kinda felt gypped by the lack of "sudden death" action on t.v., like the nonsense our hysterical parents would blab out loud that was even less funnier than the sitcom stuff repeated for years on t.v. Yeah, sure. I know this line.

It became symptomatic of the psychological distress we'd see in the world that was the response of someone who uses their medical condition(s) as a manipulative tool(s) to get out of work, or human discourse, church on Sunday, or family visits. For a people who felt bereft of power, my parents and their friends employed a handy toolkit for the insane that included veiled threats (and not-so-veiled threats) that they often combine(d) with violent cursing and escalating acts of physical violence, which, rather than convincing us to obey their demands, made us want to stay even further away from their trouble spots. For them, their sickness became weapons for gaining leverage in the home and at work, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

It was silly and wasteful, but so were/are our parents, accustomed as they were to an ever-booming economy fueled through the machines of war. We wanted something better. We wanted something more from them and society, and the world at large. We wanted actual communication over the trite tricks brought on by so much t.v. viewing for the compulsively-addicted brain, followed by periods of paranoid non-engagements that could last just as long as their patterned routines that they inserted in lieu of actual thought. We talked to each other as a social group, and we wanted to see real conversation brought back, egged on as it was by the "shock" tactics of our disc jockeys and talk show hosts. A lot of it was the same old bullshit, but occasionally we broke through the static with our own hard work. See? Repetition does bear results, and I can talk about it at length, too.  
How's that for power tripping?

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

The Pretend Boyfriend

http://goosebumps.wikia.com/wiki/Bride_of_the_Living_Dummy

When I was growing up, there were certain questions we weren't allowed to ask, like why our cousin John didn't get help for his obvious medical conditions that included a series of tics and hand-wringing rituals he HAD TO perform within certain time windows, or why our aunt was single for so long and lived with our grandparents. Of course, the only job she ever had was being an entry-level admin a mere block away from their condo development (which she drove to, because walking is for healthy people, suckers), and she slept on their pull-out couch in the living room. We knew they were sick people, but no one was allowed to talk about it openly or freely, because solving problems is also "taboo", especially if you're kind of an asshole, and they are.

Their fetishes and multiple life-long problems are always yours to solve for them, always, and any deviation from that established pattern of co-dependence unleashes their "inner bitch" like a heroin addict weaning off methadone. It wasn't worth the few visits we had to suffer through to even pretend to care about them anymore, when they so obviously didn't care about us or their own health. What was the point? Lapses in our natural childhood senses of curiosity created time frames they built into thick walls during our absences over the years to tend to our own lives, creating defense mechanisms made worse with time and deliberate neglect.

Even if we wanted to have normal conversations with my cousin, he's such a fucking dick, no one wants to. He's never done anything for anyone, ever. Not one card, or holiday gift, nor any kind of praise or acknowledgement from him (kudos can only go to him), unless he's forced to give us an awkward peck on the cheek (if the gathering is so small that he flares violently enough to attract attention, then my uncle goes over to him and whispers in his ear to make sure he resembles human customs), in case we didn't get the first thousand messages he telegraphed to us openly and without censure that he doesn't really give a shit if we live or die, just that he gets a pile of leftovers from us for free, because he has no friends, life, or cooking skills.

In fact, outside of his annoying trivia habit or compulsive train rides, there's absolutely nothing there for anyone. There is simply nothing beneath the surface. Once you get past the severity of his issues, you uncover a total selfish prick. Same thing with my aunt. After disarming her "raging bitch on steroids" act, you're left with a whiny little puke of a person, so it's not like we're peeling back layers of untruth to uncover the golden goddess within, or anything. She hoards cheap plastic crap from dollar stores, vomits from basic things like chairs that move slightly, getting "high" from junk food, soda, and hoarding, She's an evil little troll, which she knows, so that's why they came up with this whole diversion and ignoring routine; they don't want you to know how much they "soul-suck" from humans like you. But, we do know.

For years, my aunt pretended that her one boyfriend from college and the neighborhood (some kid we barely remembered from the 70s), "broke" her heart forever, because she deliberately ditched him night after night, leaving the plans that they'd all made together in the lurch on purpose, just to be a bitch to him and her supposed "best friend" (an average-looking blond girl, also local). They did the inevitable hook-up one night that was rigged by my aunt so she could milk it forever, because teenagers get together with enough time, booze, pot, and planning, if you leave them alone together often enough. Of course, she couldn't partake in any normal teenage partying, because she'll have psycho "bitch fits" in public, and that was the real secret: she didn't want to reveal the depths to her madness, even if that meant forcing her "bestie" and her boyfriend into a relationship that everyone knew she couldn't sustain anyway, due to illness and infirmity.

She's so inept at being "human", her old friends from back then left her company to get married in her marked absence, not reconnecting until they finally divorced many years (and kids) later. The old boyfriend probably thought he could finally collect on all that hot teenage sex they missed out on years ago (you know, because my grandparents were strict Catholics who kept an eye on her all the time, in between their fun senior cruises), and all those push-offs onto her friend, but no such luck. My aunt played it off like he just wanted "sloppy seconds". She just knew that their marriage couldn't last compared to their "true love", but it was pure bullshit. All of that manipulation and maneuvering around was simply to divert everyone from figuring out that she's secretly gay, but too fucked up to do anything about it, hence her unhappy reorienting of addictive energy into hoarding and mall trips for the insane, in lieu of genuine healthcare and real relationships.

All of those years of lies, spitting out curses, staged bitchy scenes with deliberately-done cold wars, tricks, and head games...just because some bitch no one likes is gay, and can't talk to the women she really likes. That's what all of their sickness that we were forced to absorb was about: their fucked-up gay shit, make-believe boyfriends and fake boyfriends be damned. I can't wait to find out what's hiding in the closet of the autistic kid. Shit, by now? Must be legions of skeletons in there, yo! Happy hunting today, freak-finders. Don't forget to vote. You know those freaks ain't registered for shit, let alone some primary. Too much work. Someone else can do it for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_apathy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue

Dress Rehearsal

Cover for the single "Pass the Mic" by Beastie Boys

New York kids have it rough. Every day is a big fucking drama (without the show business money and audience applause), that your overly histrionic parents stage for disordered friends and family in a rigidly codependent cycle with a distinct pattern, and all you want is some fucking milky tea with cookies after a cold rainy day at school and your after-school job. You know? Everything's a big fucking show, like an act that has three distinctly separate parts with different hair and makeup, sparkly outfit changes, and obligatory curtain calls made mandatory just for them. It's a horrible place where you have to figure out for them (as a three year old) why they don't just get up and "go", because none of it has anything to do with you in the least, and you're a genius toddler who just wants some fucking hot chocolate with whipped cream on top when it's cold outside.

It's excruciating solving other people's problems all day long just to have the simplest, most basic human needs neglected right in your cute lil' kiddie face (and you did nothing wrong, again), whether it's done intentionally or during their self-proclaimed "mental health day", and you know how that goes down: the shades HAVE TO be pulled down so no light can penetrate the tomb-like darkness of their inner sanctum (like a parents' bedroom), you wet a washcloth for said drama queen's head (ahem, hi Diane), and absolutely no noises can be made by anyone or anything, because it's three in the afternoon and you just want a fucking snack like any other young human in your tribe does. 

Children of New York, and other peoples of the world: today I officially declare that the hyped-up bullshit act ends. Tell someone (anyone!) that you have a rabid drama-queen for a parent, and teachers: get involved. It's us or them, and we fight for human rights violations as social justice providers on the daily that our societies so desperately need. We can either take care of each other, let them burn us out completely, or we can take back the day by not letting their madness win. I know what I decided a very long time ago. Don't let it happen to you and your life, or you might go down with them. It's time to drop the act. Stop acting like life is a big commercial, and get real with it. Who's with me?!

https://www.nami.org/Find-Support/Family-Members-and-Caregivers 

For my Rockland peeps: http://namirockland.org/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite_%28magazine%29

Pass the Mic

Beastie Boys

If you can feel what I'm feeling then it's a musical masterpiece
Hear what I'm dealing with then that's cool at least
What's running through my mind comes through in my walk
True feelings are shown from the way that I talk and this is me, y'all
An M.C., y'all my name is M.C.A. and I still do what I please
And now I'd like to introduce (what's up?)
I'll pass the mic to D for a fistful of truth

The name is D, y'all, and I don't play
And I can rock a block party 'till your hair turns grey
(So, what you sayin'?) I explode on site
I'm like Jimmy Walker, I'm (dy-no-mite!)
And now I'd like to pass the mic
To Adrock, c'mon and do anything you like

I'm the A-D-R-O-C-K, in the place with the bass, I'm going all the way
I can't stop y'all, tock-tick, y'all
And if… Full lyrics on Google Play

Care Bear

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

My Irish twin married his high school sweetheart, years after they met working at DiNoto's deli in New City, down the big hill from our home off Germonds Road, and across the street from her private Catholic school "Albertus Magnus", also in New City. She worked as a pretty counter-girl selling cookies and pastries up front, while my brother and his friend Mike Ryan washed bakery trays in the back. Unfortunately for my shy brother, his friend said he liked her first, which I suspect was a secret way of motivating him into finally asking her out, and it worked. My brother told everyone that as soon as he met her he knew she was "the one" for him, even after college and his jobs in the city.

They were the first couple in my family of siblings to marry and have children, squeezed as they were into a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side that I only visited a couple of times (once for the birth of my first nephew), because Dave and I lived in Colorado. They soon moved to Hoboken after my second nephew was born, and that's where Annie lived when the Towers fell, because I finally got through to her from my office phone at The Denver Post, as she described to me (as best as she could) a scene from a horrific, real-life nightmare that unfolded right outside of her living room window with my baby nephew crying in her arms, cut off from my brother in the city, who once worked for an Internet start-up in one of the towers.

She has never been verbal or communicative (just like my brother), so I didn't expect to have a relationship with her, as the quintessentially shy and aloof Irish-Catholic girl. She could be chilly, distant, and arrogant, like the most difficultly clannish Irish can be, and those were the traits I distanced myself from the most, because that's the intended effect: keep away! And so, as I write to you today, she has never once called me on the telephone, nor written me a letter, or sent me a card, nor has she ever answered any of my correspondence through email, laughingly telling my brother once as I visited their home that he was "horrible" to me for not staying in touch, which is about as far from family as you can get. What's the point of marrying? To become more isolated and alone?

It didn't make any sense to me, and it still doesn't, but like I wrote, I didn't really have any high expectations for her, given my brother's ongoing difficulties, and her own family. Her mother chain-smoked into a thin reedy shape (like a twitchy, over-caffeinated, tea-drinking Mick, you know the type), while her father always hung back behind his strong silent cop facade. When I asked her parents what they planned to do now that they were retired, they gave me a long blank stare, broken finally by his wife "....nothing....", followed by a nervous quick shrug. Okay....so....no traveling? "No. We're just gonna stay home." Huh. Nice talking to you, I guess. Of course, it wasn't.

Her older sister and brother-in-law provided even less conversation, drinking beers morosely at my brother's family holidays, supplying very little effort. Her sister was a bit "butch", but that could be a persona crafted from years of elbowing her way through ER's as a nurse. Her husband seemed to have a slight lisp, deferring to her like she was the boss who ran the show, and their one kid said absolutely nothing the entire time they were at my brother's house in New Jersey. There wasn't much to do in their quiet suburban neighborhood but sit in their kitchen eating and drinking, which I grew up doing. It was intolerable.

My brother likes nature, hiking, sports, music, food, concerts, museums, and photography, but Annie often seemed like she was just there for the ride as his addition, and nothing more. I often thought that, excellent student though she purported herself to be, she went into Occupational Therapy because it seemed like a steady job to have, like her sister's nursing career, because I have honestly never received any sort of care or healing vibe from her. Ever. Not once. Not once has she helped with my mother's extensive therapies that she needs for her M.S., nor has she ever helped my brother with his sports injuries related to his martial arts training, and that's her own immediate family! She does absolutely nothing for anyone else, except perhaps herself and hopefully my nephews, some of the time.

It's a surprisingly selfish way to be, for someone who spent all that time and money (and her parents) to become a part-time housewife realtor (and she did the one task I gave her related to that poorly last year), and an occasional therapist. What the...? Why do all that work to stay at home? I didn't get it, except perhaps she's embarrassed to tell us that she feels the most fulfilled as a wife and mother, which is fine by me, but why not just say that? What's with all the creepy silence?! It's frighteningly dysfunctional, which makes me glad that she didn't take to the O.T. life after my nephews were in high school, and she became certified to practice it in New Jersey. I wouldn't hire her!

She didn't speak up when my grandmother needed transferring to a hospital for an infection from the rehab facility she was in for the elderly, preferring instead to ignore the old women in wheelchairs turned to facing the wall by some minimum wage orderly who took their sweet time changing the sheets in their expensive rooms. It was one of the most shockingly abusive things I have ever seen in the healthcare industry. I was the one who went up to the desk (after visiting with my grandmother), to inquire about my grandmother's transfer status to Nyack Hospital, to be told by the office staff that they had called the ambulance service for her transfer, and we were all waiting on that. Huh...I turned around for support to see my brother, his wife, and their two sons standing mutely behind me, powerless and motionless, like they were avoiding capture and eye contact upon penalty of death.

The last time she seemed to have any impact upon healthcare was her first job after graduation from the pricey Boston school her working class parents paid for, after she bragged to us about having a total academic scholarship, when we were all broke and in college, which turned off us S.U.N.Y. kids about as much as possible, even when she told it to us over a few beers as part of her point of continued disdain towards us. She worked in Westchester for a depressing hospice run for children with terminal cancer, living for free on their campus in a small apartment that my brother stayed in, under the false pretext of living with my mom during their engagement period, like the rigidly Catholic stance her family portrays to outsiders.

I visited them there, to gently inquire why children would need occupational therapy. What did she do, exactly? Again, even over several bottles of beer, it was excruciating to get any information or the barest of answers out of her. She hemmed and hewed, finally saying that she rotated their limbs to prevent them from getting bed sores. Oh....that must be hard for you, since none of your patients ever recover. Yeah, with a shrug and a downward look. We were there for a graduation party to start that she was giving for one of her fellow classmates, which included a girl from my school (hi, Shiela!) who has since helped my mom with PT, when she did that type of work.

They even had a theme for the party, giving each other cutesy cards and little stuffed animals that they giggled over like schoolgirls, because they had dubbed themselves "Care Bears" while in school together, after a dopey cartoon made for kids and the greeting card industry. I was surprised my brother didn't say anything, because we typically outed obviously gay stuff in cartoons, like the infamously purple-triangle "Tinky Winky" from the twee children's show "Teletubbies"*. My classmate Sheila was a total hippie burn-out in high school, smoking cigarettes and pot at "The Wall" with the other low-class metal-head kids, even dropping out of Honors English class (which I stayed in), as well as Honors French. I talked to her about dropping after the few first classes, because I was scared as the youngest kid in every single class I attended at school, and she said the same thing back to me, then actually did it.

I was shocked to find out that she earned an O.T. degree for something as "square" as being a healthcare aide, because she had never once mentioned having an interest in science, let alone attending advanced science classes in high school, in any of the sciences! Her friends in high school attended B.O.C.E.S. in the afternoon for grease monkeys who wouldn't attend college (in lieu of matriculated classes at Clarkstown South), and carried cosmetician cases with their dummies to experiment hair dyeing on. I actually thought she dropped out of school senior year, because she was really into doing LSD, like the harder core Rockland rednecks who came from seriously addicted farm families. "Why excel?", they said in response to us. They were going to die anyway! That was her crowd, back in the day. So, it was a bit of a shock to see her there at my future sister-in-laws party, especially since I now worked in publishing, just like my advanced English Literature skills in school directed me to.

Sheila avoided talking to me at all, or making eye contact, or making the obligatory awkward small talk, preferring instead to adopt the gay "Care Bear" identity that this strange group of girls had. I suppose it was in deference to their training, like brothers-in-arms have after serving in wartime together, but as I watched them pass these little kid items between one another, I thought it was one of the gayest things I'd ever seen in my life, and I suspect that my brother's wife knows the powers of observation I have by now. Perhaps that's the real reason behind all this "radio silence" her and my brother use as a weapon against anyone and everyone. I called out my parents recently for his latest communication blackout, which was met with the same patterned resistance that reeks of enabling, but that ends today, my dear readers, because now you know that I know. I know.

Murphy's Law – Care Bear Lyrics

I just broke a bottle
I just broke some glass
I don't know much more to
And I'm kicking your ass

So what if I broke a bottle
So what if I kicked his ass
Quit counting on me
You're a pain in my ass

I don't need no doctor I can't pay the fee
Don't need no social workers counting on me
I'm not sick there's nothing wrong with my head
Better leave me alone you're gonna end up dead

Care bear
Caring on me

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

Reach Out, Touch Faith

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

Because I write so often about faith, to the point of its inclusion in this sites' subtitle, I've attracted a dedicated group of disordered onlookers who like to pretend (as an aggressive strategy) that "holy" means "magic healing pod", even though I've written that this clearly is not the case: http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/09/cocoon.html. It doesn't stop certain types of addicts from pursuing a malignant agenda with me anyway, because like cancer, addictive disorders afflict the good, the bad, the ugly, and the indifferent. If you're an asshole as a drunk, you're still a dick, just someone with a really great excuse.

We even had a host of handy little equations for easy discernment at our parties, broken down as such: Instant Asshole = Just Add Alcohol. Simple, right? You'd be amazed by the amount of jerks we outed through basic human responses like "looking", coupled with an amazing deductive process called "observation". My best friend and I went to school readily equipped with a pocketful of quickly digestible phrases that we'd distribute around our gatherings to the benefit of our friends in attendance, a set of hard-working New York natives we wanted to protect, so we could all have a relaxing night of fun, with great tunes, great food, and great drinks to ease our stress.

Of course, our good times became a target, too, as we learned that evil people with learning impairments need a constant stream of cute "tips" and repetitive tidbits for understanding the human condition, seeing as psychotics are dependent on healthy people to provide guidance and balance for them, though often without the acknowledgment of such, because that would be open and transparent, and if you're a parent who huffs children like they're your personal medicine cabinet, then you already get my drift, without the overly subtle cues (wink, wink). Our happiness and peace of mind were things some of our families went to great lengths to sabotage, especially if your children work all those difficult and demanding jobs that pay for your medical benefits. Get it?

In the interest of their self-interest, the sickest people in our codependent families became awkwardly weird spies, using a bevy of strangely paranoid behaviors and robotic movements to "glean" what they could have learned much easier for the asking, but that would signal their dependence upon us, and if you're a self-described asshole, then that just won't do. We became adept at feeling out other people's agendas in record speeds, so we could move on to the real jobs we had that are indeed challenging, let alone become primary to someone with several serious brain disorders.

It didn't stop suckers from trying to leech off of us anyway, but it did make it a much more difficult gauntlet to run, like playing a game they could never win, hence the justification for all that supposed frustration leading up to our abuse, in an insanely childish cycle of petulance and lashing out that marks the continually untreated psychotic. It gave our parents the ammo they needed to build up secret grudges that only they knew about, with oddly described rituals about our weather here that "they" always get "wrong", in these obliquely vague references to weather and meteorology that did not mark an understanding of their advanced degrees in science, dearly paid for by our working class grandparents and the city of New York. For what, actually? This same ritualistic back-and-forth?

Compulsions became hunting forays we'd lay traps for, often without even realizing it, adept as we were at self-defense. Most of my friends and all of my siblings (and their kids) have belt ranking in martial arts, as a necessary reflection of the daily trappings we could undo, if we felt like exposing someone again....and then again, and....OK! Once more loudly!! It became this retarded card trick of pissing us off so we'd leave them alone in their nervous fretting, so they could turn to comfortingly repetitive behaviors that soothe aggravated souls. It wasn't our problem, and yet somehow it still was (especially in our absences, when we were at our most productive = stage a scene to get attention, and/or conduct a total communication block-out including any and all modern devices), and we knew it was wrong.

Here at this public library (and laundromat, or the local grocery store, in particular drug stores dispensing legal addictions in handy pill form), I reenact these old classmate routines with a mature ennui that signifies my acceptance of your disorder...again. Much like immediate family, they learn to either get with the program or leave, and so I type to you blessedly free of a twitchy emaciated addict with bad breath sitting next to me, behaving as if I'm their fix du jour, because I'm not. They always snap to, because you really have to, one way or another. Sometimes it's either "do or die", as it's purposefully set up by a drama queen with nothing to lose but their unhealthy mindset (real medicine...oh, the horror!), given the moral problems most stubborn psychos pretend to have with "authority", which really means obeying normal laws, like any other citizen complies with, like I do.

Currently, the local crazies like to get as close to me as possible without touching me, like when I'm sitting in a chair at a public computer with Internet access (because that would be overtly actionable by law, in front of lots of cameras in place), so they take turns grazing the back of my neck with their falsely hurried, brushed-by breezes (because, you know, at a small town library, that's the right pace for a part-time government job...uh, no), or they leave notes for each other in garbage pails placed strategically around the room, or they lurk near me pretending to browse (that's an easy trick to pull off, though), or there's just that one out of place mouse pad that needs straightening up right next to my workstation, so they can get an up-close look at my progress onscreen. Like my other vanquished library foe "Michelle the Hat" (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/10/michelle-hat.html), I always seem to win these ho-hum "reindeer games" that some of my public insists on projecting through me, as a magnet for their madness.

You should put on your thinking caps, though, because time is running out! "Michelle the Hat" got so far as barely fingering the intentionally fringed sleeve edge to one of my summertime tops a few years ago (and she had to read my work closely to do that little, by muttering my phrase back to me as a justification, in a hastily delivered mutter "perfect in its imperfection" which I previously published as a line, so I knew she was reading me every day...AHA!), and that had to be done in haste before anyone else caught on to it, like the subversively secretive, evil, ugly, little dyke that she really is, because this here mama knows all the ploys you play daily. Unless you're my man, I ain't gonna let you touch me (and no, I don't have "issues" with normal human touch. Nice try, though, Elvis!), so if you aren't truly ailing, you most definitely won't be healed with some casual proximity to me, because I'm not your personal Jesus statue to play with. Bitch.

Depeche Mode – Personal Jesus Lyrics

Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who's there

Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer

Take second best
Put me to the test
Things on your chest
You need to confess
I will deliver
You know i'm a forgiver

Reach out and touch faith
Reach out and touch faith

Your own personal Jesus...
Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer

I will deliver
You know I'm a forgiver

Reach out and touch faith
Your own personal Jesus
Reach out and touch faith

Songwriters: GORE, MARTIN LEE

Personal Jesus lyrics © EMI Music Publishing

Speed Freaks

3.) Over-stimulate yourself. Caffeine, tobacco, loud noise, driving fast, working without breaks, skipping meals - there are so many ways to keep the body and brain on overdrive and keep the anxiety levels high. 

My mom and her sisters were adept at abusing each other into what they believed were less overt addictions that they thought cleverly hid their compulsions and addictions (strange as they are) like shopping, hoarding, and staging fake scenes to create anxiety they huff like a can of paint. It became a psychotic form of artistry over the more rigorous disciplines behind thinking, doing, and making, which is for suckers like me, who pay their benefits through our day jobs because if we don't, they'll make our lives a living hell that's hard to prove in a court of law without devoting mountains of time and evidence to it, therefore I must have "too much free time" and that means I need to work more (hence their shaky lazy superiority over "working stiffs" like me and the million other people who take care of them), because if you can't abuse people behind closed doors with secret horror shows, who will pay the taxes needed for their disabilities?

Instead of managing children, life, and stress, my mom would pull to a short-stop in the middle of a highway, threatening to crash her car and kill us all if we didn't behave, creating over-dramatic heart palpitations that released the addictive body chemistry she needs to cope, over more obvious (and honest) relaxants like drinking and smoking, which could be pointed out to anyone and are therefore actionable by their feared perpetrators, like, say, someone very bright who caught onto their mental illnesses. Oh, they'll say they're afraid of being dragged away by scary large men wearing white coats, carrying butterfly nets and tranquilizer guns, and then cast without consent into some haunted house horror show, but those stories are now relics from our distant medical past.

Without having any real excuses to hide behind anymore, it's become harder and harder for actual head-cases to strike out against load-bearing "normals" like me, as if chronic abuse and violent derangement are key facets of our human culture that they must protect in order to thrive as a species, when oftentimes it's simply me and my brothers trying to get my mom to stick to her weekly therapy and take her medicine for the billionth time, which she alternately hides and/or lies about to blame on..who else? Me! Children and other family members are amazingly adept excuse-generators for a bevy of life's woes, like hiding sickness and delusional behavior. 

She's always been a very bad driver who uses a host of convenient replies like: 1) she didn't need to drive when she lived in the city so that's why she's "bad" at it, and that was only admitted after she drove into a brick wall with a realtor sitting right next to her while she shopped for her fantasy senior apartment complex with handy car-ports for auto aficionados like herself (preferring instead to joy-ride with my grandfather's car back in the Bronx, without a driver's license), or 2) she didn't learn to drive until her 30s, and that was only because of her friendship with a woman at the local DMV during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania, where she had major diseases like "walking pneumonia" with the spot on her lung even, so she got off easy on her driving test (that's her friend's fault, get it?) which leads to 3) her driving so fucking poorly, she gets into tons of accidents that she covers up whenever she can, because for many years she also drove with two feet, one on the gas and the brake (sometimes at the same time) plus 4) she cares more about her car than her own life and the lives of others at times, which she hides behind cutesy stories about being Mario Andretti the race car driver, or being "like a cabbie, fast but good" which she could never actually do for a living because "she's a woman" (sexism, you see), which is also an excuse for her not performing well and besides that, she was a commuter. "Everyone drives fast during 'rush hour'. That's why it's called that." Oh.

And finally, she liked speeding in cars as an older woman with a more advanced case of MS because it "gave me my life back" with the gift of mobility that's robbed her the use of her dead limbs over using an actual motorized wheelchair, preferring instead to torture us with her snail's pace that's necessary to "retain her ambulatory status" (pronounced "stay-tuss, which is different!"). It's like she's talking to her group at the local church, or the high school, or in attendance at the public library, because she's gone to a bunch of those. First it was for the Divorced Catholics group, then it was the Divorced Catholics group for singles, and then the MS support group (too handicapped for her tastes), but she was finally outmatched in these modern times by all the pros on the high-profile talk show / court t.v / reality programming circuit, with years of solid professional acting chops under their respective belts, so she had to give it up.

Instead of coping, she harassed me one Christmas with a death-defying trip in a really bad blizzard across the Tappan Zee bridge and back from Connecticut. She insisted that she HAD TO see family because "it won't be Christmas if we don't go", forcing me to pack up all of our stuff, packed into "her" car with my Mal in the back. He was forced to sleep in the garage because of all the allergies they supposedly have, even though my brother and his wife now have a dog  that's "allergen free", so I could spend my time being demeaned through their bitchy comments about my humble well-thought gifts, my mom's huffing abuse (because my brother's wife ignores her completely), and checking on my dog throughout the trip because his kids opened the garage door whenever they wanted to, forgetting that my dog was inside, so I could do all this while sleep-deprived, too. Best. Holiday. Ever.

If I dared to mention the conditions she abused us into, she'd bring up her sisters affectations about weather phobias and car driving panic attacks. At least she was better than them, right? Right? No, that's sharing the same genetic disorder in different ways, like the breast cancer bouts you all had. Oh...She might then lapse poetic about flights of fancy over magical lanes of sparkling snow, like she was riding on Santa's sleigh and I should just get over it because it's fun and besides, it's Christmas. There's always a reason behind a reason behind an excuse until finally, in this century, there isn't anymore, because there isn't. It's called real medicine.

http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/thrivenyc.page