Leni

Leni Riefenstahl was a major force at St. Martin's Press, the small house that was quickly becoming a midsized one during my apprenticeship. She'd become our shot at entering the grown-up world of bestsellers about infamous personalities from history that give a house prestige and win awards. The attention over a hardcover edition drives sales, and a major hit is something a house can make a profit from for years, which meant everyone who could get involved did so most vocally. 

I was first introduced to her in the art department. One of my friends was jealous that another art director he considered less talented was designing the cover, and in our back-stabbing world of "celebrity" designers, you're only as good as your last cover design. It wasn't lost on me at the time that we mirrored her world of uneasy alliances made in service to art and design, because she'd worked as a filmmaker during Hitler's regime. 

After the hardcover edition went to paperback, my friend finally got to revise the design to meet his standards, and that's when we talked about Nazi Germany; at his computer, while he colorized her cover photo. He told me he could relate to her conversion to fascism (!!) through the carefully fabricated military outfits. "How seductive it must have been to a poor farm kid back then", he said to me as the son of Chinese immigrants who owned a laundry business. The leather boots, those sharp shoulders on the jacket that fit just so...

Huh. That's....eerie, dude. The first "Leni" art director would come out of the closet years later, after dumping his very masculine wife and their adopted Asian baby, before my friend finally came out as ADHD and OCD. On the heels of those twin disclosures, I could finally see what kind of monst...er, person, would be attracted to stage sets full of blond boys in matching military dress, and just like then, I still don't like what I heard as an excuse for genocide through collusion. What horror!

It brought me back to the importance of authenticity, and how very important it is that we tell the truth about our histories, hard as that may be. For my family, we finally got the happy ending we were seeking, not that we had sat around waiting for validation from anyone. My father's family had told us the truth about our Acadian Metis origins as the first generation of Europeans to intermarry with the Micmac people of Nova Scotia, because that's exactly what my dad's East Asian/Native American DNA reflects: the time period of first contact in Canada between 1780-1600s. BTW, my little native percentage showed up as a Yakutian from East Siberia before our ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge many moons ago.

And so it was no surprise to me that I remembered hearing the art directors talk about Leni Riefenstahl's fake autobiography, because it was said she had her birth certificate forged so she could profit from Hitler and the Nazi Regime as an artist. So, that isn't actually in the book? I had to know our culpability. The art director told me the editor wanted it in the epilogue, but he'd been shot down. Well...what is it? "She lied about not being Jewish, and he's Jewish, too." Oh. That's kind of big deal. 

As I wrote this piece to you, I thought about my part in the process when I relieved myself of debt from a honest lifetime spent on basic food, clothing, and shelter, bought at the time with my bargain salary of $19,500/year. I know I've paid it back in full, and then some. 
The real question is: have you? 

The White Man's Grave

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

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

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

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

Evil, Inc

We've explored madness as it's currently expressed through certain industries, and the personality types who work at these kinds of enterprises, typically of the manically-addictive bisexual, personality-disordered, and former cheerleader type. She really really likes "positivity" in all things, except when she doesn't, and then she has to diet extremely well to compete with just about anyone in her own crazy pseudo-relationship that has absolutely nothing to do with reality or you, except you're around it while it is in its most freaky feral states of transition. That would be one type of employee. There's also the asshole sales manager who HAS TO be on the move constantly, or he will also short-out to go insane, plus he also really enjoys phony bullshit that he thinks will spring your wallet magically open. It doesn't.

That's why GenX has become one of the most hated and vilified generations of all time, in a process that was carefully cultivated by pretentiously arty sell-outs, like their chosen "alt" (that's "alternative" in quick, cutesy, chic-speak) movie director who smokes pot, has really bad relationships, never leaves his home, and then says we're all as lazy as him, because we're not. He's a fuck-up with really good press, because he's backed by people with money who want to preserve their privileges through a deliberate misportrayal of one of the hardest working generations of all time. It doesn't take as much money as people think to create a war machine that keeps on churning after the death of one of its creators. See also: Michael Jackson.

Millennials aren't immune to assholes, either. Their biggest social media guru is busy buying up huge tracts of beachfront land in Hawaii (http://www.forbes.com/pictures/emeg45mgmd/mark-zuckerberts-kahuaina-plantation/#47e9318526d5), so he can block public access to it with a full-time security staff of buff bodyguards, lots of paranoid outdoor cameras to track you walking anywhere outside of his compound (not of him and his team, because those pictures could leak out!), and a big thick wall to keep you all out. Like any typical asshole, he'll tell you that's he's "preserving the land" but, really, open space is a public park concept that's rather basic for any rich white dude with money to burn and phony charities to back, for flowing money in various directions that are both out of state and/or the country. But, I digress.

Let's get back to building evil war machines. I was particularly insulted by the fake summit a certain PC-building guru held for the richest idiots on the planet, to, like, save the world and stuff. They had a typed-up agenda of items and everything, so you know it's legit! On their list of key humans that will surely save us (not) was the impressive Spanx-wearing billionairess who has upheld the image of faux fitness for many a Hollywood starlet and her beard-wearing beau. I mean, hello? Form-fitting garments made from petroleum products? Duh! That's one impressive bitch! Cameras were not allowed inside what must have been their riveting brain-trust, because we would probably spontaneously combust from all their genius and stuff, but, like...absolutely nothing happened as a result of that meeting. Or it did, but for them and not any of us, where you and I can't see it.

They talk condescendingly about typical bullshit like drugs, crime, and homelessness ("urban" is the word they use for us as a "key demographic" my n*ggas, or, er, "coloreds"), but what I find so very interesting about all of these fake summits is the elephant in the room that not one of these compulsive-obsessive "billionaires" ever utters out loud, where the press can hear it and write it down: that the worst conditions in the world stem from psychosis and madness. Where's the research devoted to that? I'll put it up for you to link to here, but not one of them ever will, because when was the last time you met a really healthy person who pounded energy drinks for days just to code in some dull computer language over and over again, or to swim the exact same lap with the exact same stroke for years and years and years, way after we dropped it as kids? Never, right? Same as me.

https://www.google.com/#q=most+evil+companies

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

Palette Knife

 

Judging by the amount of press "celebrities" receive for their illegal exploits, it's no surprise that they've co-opted t.v. for their publicity purposes, by using their prison mugshots as their latest head shot, and their crimes as the press that nabs producers looking for a "hot" star, as long as they can get insurance for a project that'll cover an abusive alcoholic who sometimes sets random fires. (Thanks for that, Bart). What's the point in reigning it in? They get as much attention for their misdeeds as they do for their phony charities, set up as tax shelters to funnel their money into. What does it matter if it's "good" or "bad"? That's entertainment! It's a twisted kind of logic.

And those are just the psychopaths who know how to channel their inner demons into violent emotions onscreen, as if on cue. You don't want to meet Special Ed/Needs without a drama queen attached to it. Much. Less. Fun. My younger cousin with autism (and a few other serious brain disorders) learned early to fake emotions by spewing crocodile tears that seemed to clear up as soon as your head turned away from him. That was even scarier, because his face fell into a dead mask with nothing behind the eyes, the heart of mental illness itself.

Because he hid his mental disorders behind closed doors (and his family refused to talk about his problems), life itself was acting to him. It was all fake, because he lives in a disassociated state of surreal unreality and, kids, if you think that sounds like some sort of fun party trick, let me assure you, it is not a good ride. Schizophrenic sufferers randomly hallucinate screaming, streaking black shadows right in the middle of a typical day, or because they were stressed out when you asked them a direct question made with appropriate eye contact.

He simply didn't know what to feel, or when to feel it, or why it was happening, and what he should do about it. It was either freak-show fireworks or nothing; temper tantrums or dead numbness. With brain disorders, patients don't understand what's happening, let alone how to process the strong feelings that are a normal part of  life. It's the range of experiences that completely throw them into illness. Imagine this: you think about a rather stressful but common event (like paying bills or going to the dentist), and just thinking about it causes you to have excruciating pains throughout your body, starting with your head. Can't imagine it? Neither can I, but that's what a mental illness does. Thinking = pain.

For addictive disorders, it's a deadly combination of personality defects, character flaws, mental instability, physical handicap, learning impairments, and emotional misfiring. I've seen psychosis in people who vacillate between a depressive blankness to a caffeinated, motor-mouthed mania, up close and personal, because we all have. Every single person on this planet knows someone in their family sickened with these illnesses, because we're the healthy ones who take care of them. Or avoid them. Or they avoid us, the next time they "fall off the wagon" (again) because it rained yesterday, and you weren't "nice" to them, or "sensitive" enough to meet their needs that always take precedence over yours, because you're healthy and they're not.

As with the most adept family member, the burden falls onto the healthiest person, who then becomes the crux upon which the balance of the entire family rests, or not, as the case may be, as it is with me. If mama ain't doin' well, ain't nobody doin' well, get it? It's a message that I have to constantly reinforce with my sick family (and there's a lot of them), by reminding them accurately of my timeline and theirs, which seems like a magical parlor trick to the insane, when it's really called "memory", and it's a normal thing to have. On most days, the  emotional range I will get back from my sickest family members will be like a game of "Spin The Wheel in Hell!", because they find mature subject matter <spin the wheel> "bad", or "sad", or is it "mad"?

And that's it. That's sometimes all I will get from the people I raised/grew up with (besides avoidance and communication blackouts), which is my direct cue that they have become sick in my absence again, and then it's time for me to perform Anne Sullivan to their Helen Keller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sullivan), except instead of an inner super-genius, I have to get them to react to basic skills like caring and sharing, so I don't starve to death. Weird, right? You should try it sober. Like most heads-of-household, it's only by the grace of G-d and my own hard-working excellence that I avoided their diseases and addictions, because it turns out that you can't actually beat the life out of someone who's healthy. I'm living proof of that.

Yesterday, I watched a chilling episode of an old t.v. show called "American Justice" that highlighted a psychotic man who decided the only way out of his "problems" was to kill his entire family. He calmly ate breakfast, shot his wife, dragged her body to their empty ballroom (he felt "pressure" to provide for his family), then talked to his elderly mother who inquired after the noise. That's when he shot her in the head, too, but he had to leave her where she was, because she was too heavy for him to carry, and that stressed him out more. He also shot his children as they arrived home from school one-by-one, though the soccer-playing boy didn't drop right away like the other two, so he HAD TO shoot him ten times instead.

We know all of this detail about his hideous crimes because he sat down after dinner (killing is tiring, but he was feeling relaxed now that his "problems" were gone), and wrote a five page letter to his pastor, full of bullshit, half-truths, lies, excuses, finger-pointing, and blame. He left his dead family on plastic tarps in the ballroom that he felt "pressured" to buy for them, because his mother supposedly nagged him into becoming successful, then he withdrew thousands of dollars from the family's bank account (he said he was bankrupt and that was the last straw, after being fired again for aberrant behavior at work), and then he disappeared for fifteen years. He was finally free!

After his time on the road, he even married again, happily changing his name to avoid capture, working as an accountant (he blamed his OCD personality disorder for the killing spree, after finally being correctly diagnosed by a court-appointed psychiatrist, because in his arrogant delusion he never thought, "Gee, I should go talk to someone like my doctor"), and then appearing on the show to give his point of view. In between monotone recounts of a story he's told a million times (he loved the show "America's Most Wanted" and bragged to his co-workers about it, which led to his capture, like every other common criminal before him), he finally broke out into the gleeful laughter that played around his mouth the entire time he told his side of the story.

You see, he enjoyed it. He loved the fact that he excellently executed his demented plan, so much so, that he was disappointed by the lack of attention. He loved the artist rendition of him as an old man shown on "his" episode of A.M.W.; he couldn't believe how accurate it was. It looked just like him! He didn't know they had aging technology like that, told with a cagey look to his watery eyes. He knew he couldn't cop an insanity plea because of the calmly meticulous planning behind his sick crimes, but he tried it in court anyway. Worth a shot, right? I mean, as long as the cameras were rolling, why not give it a "go"? Maybe someone in "T.V. Land" would feel bad for him. Heck, he might even get married again!  He had the rest of his life to live.

 http://nypost.com/2015/02/08/charles-mansons-fiancee-wanted-to-marry-him-for-his-corpse-source/

 

The Winchester House

The doors to the bathrooms were solid wood; they were replaced with glass so that tourists would not mistake them for functioning bathrooms, which they are not. The only functioning bathroom was outside Sarah Winchester's bedroom, which had a small window for a nurse to check in on her, later in her life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House

I loved ghost stories as a kid. Whenever a new catalog from a particular children's book club came around the classroom, I always circled a few key titles for my perusal: ghost stories, vampire tales, paperbacks from the horror genre, and the "Guinness Book of World Records". Anything about the supernatural or fantastical immediately captured my imagination, like faked spirit photographs from the early 19th century, or those infamously blurry and deliberately ambiguous images of the Loch Ness monster. How could anyone prove or disprove such vague claims?

It was in this quest for the truth that my first tentative paranormal investigations began, heightened by my natural curiosity about the big, unanswered questions behind common cultural mysteries. I never really believed in space aliens or crop circles, but I was fascinated by the gullible people who did, usually fringe characters who never really fit into the world, seeking phantom societies they felt more comfortable with. 

Eventually, every huge hoax has been exposed to reveal the more interesting truths behind them, like: why would a group of British artists spend their evenings developing mathematically-accurate concentric circles in flattened fields of wheat? Well, because they're beautiful, and because mass hysteria is a prevalent human phenomenon, so much so, that for many years, major universities in England devoted departmental funds to their art, mislabeled as surreal, nocturnal alien encounters (http://www.circlemakers.org/). The art is actually much better than some invisible ghouls that go "bump" in the night, but the stories and untruths inspired by creative acts are part of the culture that surrounds each myth-making legend attached to them.

I was reminded by such a cultural creation walking uphill from town with one of my friends from the "basic yoga for disabled seniors" class that's held every Monday at our community center. She told me a great story about an older man who owned several trade magazines (they published journals for electricians, boat builders, etc), who disappeared on a yachting trip. She didn't think much of it at the time, because the younger son immediately took up his vacant post to evade lingering questions among the staff and authorities working the case. She attached her memory of the event not to his untimely death, but to the area called "The Bermuda Triangle". She cited all the typically kooky stories we've all read in the same pulp fiction outlets, like those Big Foot photos that never seem to be in clear focus. Isn't that odd?

Much like ruining a younger sibling's belief in the tooth fairy, I felt bad for letting her know that there are no unknown, uncharted giant invisible whirlpools that suck in boats from the ocean, much like there aren't invisible air-shafts over Bermuda that pull down planes into the sea without mechanical or pilot error. Stories like that are great cover-ups for nefarious deeds, though, which is the more likely part of the scenario behind the disappearance of her publisher way back then: that he didn't know how to captain his own ship, thus was lost to the rough currents and sudden squalls that any good sailor knows how to combat effectively (and here in the conversation I cited Robert Redford's movie "All is Lost", as a recent example of one man's battle against the sea), or that he absconded with company funds and staged a fake death so that he could make off with all the money. 

Even worse (and this I didn't share with her because she has a fragile psyche), may be that his own son murdered him so he could take over the family business, which happens a lot more than we think. My friend said she looked up the old company online, and they are no longer in business, which didn't surprise me at all. Well-constructed edifices do not topple easily. The name of the building she worked in has changed, too, but she didn't want to hear the truth. She wanted to believe in comfortable fairy tales that remain mysteries forever, because she disassociates from reality. I asked her a few quick, sharp questions designed to assess her ability to observe her surroundings while in yoga class, and she failed every assessment test I gave her, not that I'm trying to ruin my friend's peace of mind.

Far from it. I want to build her up so that she tells me her really good stories, like the one she mentioned about the mysteriously absent pater familias, because I told her the truth: those are the stories publishers actually want. She walked away from me full of new information that she will almost certainly struggle to assimilate effectively, which is also point of the point. If she can learn to build her stories around real structures that hold, then she won't be tempted to lapse into unproductive patterns of thought that go nowhere, like her mythical Bermuda Triangle, the worst kind of cultural deception there is, because it's not real. In fact, there's nothing magical there at all.

It reminded me of the old story about Sarah Winchester, the wacky eccentric heir to the Winchester family fortune (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Repeating_Arms_Company), who said she built staircases to nowhere to accommodate the dead people murdered by the rifles her family's company made, a story told to me in grainy black-and-white photos from an old paperback I ordered many years ago, through my elementary school's book-buying program. I felt sorry for Sarah, even as I understood the power of her penance. She lived through the profit from a culture of death we are still living in now (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2010-10-20-remington-700-trigger-cnbc_N.htm), as evil a stain as any human could ever hope to bear, and no wonder she couldn't stand the weight of it.

Would you be able to live in a fancy mansion, knowing that your family murdered millions of average people, just like you? If you can't (and you know you can't), then how can you ask your peers to bear up under the sin of killing that's behind every mass murder? We can't go on like this. Let's tackle gun reform laws revised for mandatory licensing, certification, and permits for legal gun ownership, with psychological background checks cleared before we issue permits to the ill and infirm. It's why you're seeing more frequently open manifestations of extremely violent events. We're shining a light on the darkness that hides within. We're winning.

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

http://www.winchesterguns.com/library/articles/detail.asp?id=746

Bad Santa

I've always hated staged photographs with phony backdrops, like the ones most suburbanites take their kids to during Christmastime at the local mall. There's nothing fun about some drunk dressed up as a big scary rabbit who wants you, a small child, to sit on his smelly lap. With my basic instincts intact, I moved into my aunt's old apartment (in the Kensington section of Brooklyn), after college to get work as soon as possible, because I have always been the backup plan in my life. There is no "plan b", which is why we (as a family) invested so much in my education. OK: here's time to think. Now: do. Simple. 

And it was. I got an entry level job right away with lots of prestige, per the pedigree we just paid for at school. That was the deal. We used "white-bread" RISD for a resumé cred that would get me into big city life, I would give back to the world, and here we are. But with each new level I attained came pitfalls and challenges so severe, I always knew I was the best player on my particular family team. How else to win in the forefront of your technology? There was no other spot for me than the one I took up, with the worst and most severe extremes you could imagine, which is why I write my stories down for all of you to talk about, verify, then act on, because it's all true. Every single word of it.

But not everyone lives an honestly open life, because they don't know how to succeed through trying. My aunt was one of those lazy types. She could do stuff, but she wanted to smoke and drink more than she wanted to think. What can you do? There's only so much therapy and rehab you can pay for, before you learn to just give up their ghost, which is what most hardened addicts decide to do, especially the smart-mouth arrogant ones. They feel that the "thumbing the nose at life" routine is cool, so that's what they do: make stupid snarky remarks at the local bar, like some brilliant bar-stool philosopher who deliberately chooses to blow their big time career so they can sit around and regale you with their life stories, except without the big life, or will to live. In the end, it's almost always suicide for them.

You keep waiting for a punchline to the joke, or a moral to the story, only to find at the end of their big "onion-peel" routine that there's absolutely nothing at their core; the ultimate jab at all of humanity, by being an utter waste of time. It's evil, petty, and cruel, but so what? If you want to crumple up your life like it's a wadded-up piece of used toilet paper, I guess you can, but who will be there to witness it? Other drunks who testify about your offenses against G-d? Why would a divine presence that can be anywhere at anytime in any century, doing anything, care about your ineptitude? Should we care at all? Of course, we should, but it is something that I still struggle to define for my brilliant but careless family, which is the core of every human problem. What do you do about lazy fuck ups? How far does it go? 

I don't know if anyone can answer that for anyone else, except I know that I fight evil wherever it rears its' ugly head, and that it's always there somewhere, either in the background, or as that fat loud drunk spitting right in your face. Ultimately, who gives a fuck about some drunk, but you in that one small moment with them? Is that the best you can do? I don't follow along with the bottom-feeder set, even as I tentatively cross through their barren territories, ones that were strip-mined of their usefulness many years ago, probably by some fat, corrupt, white guy not from my line; someone who treats the earth, the land, and the people around them like it's disposable, just like their life.

And so I looked through the flotsam and jetsam of my aunt's life, just like the pieces of history she left behind too soon for us to sort through, like we were guests at her intergalactic junk sale, which was the highest heights she aspired to. Some of it was intentionally scary, like the old photo she had on one wall of her paid-for Brooklyn apartment, with scary eyes that followed you everywhere, for me to take down and give to some art fag in the city who aspired to decorate the sets of other people's movies; a perfect ending to the fake history she attached to the picture when I asked her about it, like he was my real dead uncle, just so she could have a drunken laugh in my face.

It was silly and bitchy and beer-flavored and...so what? But that's what she was like; in between the bad jokes were real histories that she tossed away just as casually, like all of my war hero grandfathers' medals from WWII that I kept for years as the only family conservator who cared about them, now framed in my father's house after I salvaged and packaged them for him, because at the time, he could've cared less. Every time I moved (and I made several big intercontinental moves funded and fueled by my energy and output solely), I lovingly wrapped his trophies to be carried away with me. Finally, years after my father built another weird extension to his desolate McMansion, in a hollowed-out space with an empty trophy case where we should be, he finally asked me for them, so his housewife could have something to decorate with, and then show guests, at their holiday dinners.

But that's how it was. Some of her trash was obviously treasure, like those sepia-colored photos of people who were clearly family, because my father and his sister were easily recognizable to me in them. I asked them questions about who they were, and sometimes they answered (correctly or not, I don't know), and sometimes they didn't. All I know from this vantage point in the autumn of 2015 is that as a very young woman who was used to running other people's households and lives, even as a twenty-something on a borderline poverty paycheck in publishing, I still had the presence of mind to call my aunt from her abandoned apartment one weekend afternoon, on a phone and line I paid for on my own, black pen in hand, to ask her about each and every old photograph I found.

And so, here it is for you to read: family from long ago, carefully reconstructed through the disordered recollections from a bunch of lying, cheating, stealing drunks, a people who were given the keys to a castle that's deeply engraved in their hearts, never to be collected. On the back of one such photo I inscribed (in carefully legible black handwriting) the story of Shirley Doucette, because I had an immediate feeling of dread just looking at her "bad" Santa photo. That's how intuition works; you learn to trust your gut by honoring your immediate reactions to real life situations, without the beery boozy drunk to talk you out of what you know to be true about life and the world around you. And there, in my neat adult handwriting, is her brief but sad life story that may or may not be true: that at the age of 12, some man ripped her off the street while she was walking home from school, kidnapping and raping her repeatedly, before murdering her like she was worth nothing more than a piece of trash.

I have no idea if it is true, but this is what I have, here and now, in this year that is 2015, and that is this: when I took out those old crumbly sepia-toned photos, ones that my aunt had carelessly discarded like my ancestors' body flung out onto the road after someone evil had finished using her, I saw this image after taking a series of pictures of her and the rest of my clan. It looks like the dark blurry outline of a girl about her age, with a low-set, dark blond, curly ponytail, dressed in her century's garb, encircling her young arms in a hauntingly beautiful embrace from behind me, with her arms wrapped around my shoulders, as I stood by the window taking a photo of her old Christmas photo, and this is what I know about it now. I feel nothing but love: a purely simple, honest kind of love, of a kind that endures forever, in every time period for all time, through the ages, in this century and that one, too. This is a forever kind of love.

Hello, Shirley. I love you.

Mallhead

The First Church of Toronto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_mall

My mom's youngest sister is addicted to shopping and junk food, just like she's always been. My grandparents took care of her all of their lives until their deaths, but even my grandmother's Norman Italian longevity wasn't good enough for her. If she was having a "bad" day (and they're all pretty fucking bad, by her choice), she'd express her magical desire for my grandmother to live forevuh in her horrible-sounding accent, because apparently her giving life wasn't good enough for her youngest brat. My aunt likes magic instead, a perpetual teenage attitude delivered in the most blatantly obnoxious tone possible, guaranteed to start a fight so she can get high off of the juices that flow from anger; an addict right down to her core.

My grandparents struggled all of their hard-working lives with her terrible presence, alternating between disgust and trying to care for their very sick daughter, between fits of living that they managed to squeeze successfully into the margins of other people's disordered lives. After all, we were experts at it. I was healthy and so were they, and that's about it for our small immediate family circle. Not much material to work with, but we managed it as best as we could, thankfully with our sanity and good health intact, much to the gnashing teeth despair of my mom and her ugly sisters. They removed moles like they tried to shed their awful weight, without ever covering up how horrible they are.

Desperate to escape the confines of their children's miserable homes, me and my cousins sometimes tacked on excursions with our young aunt out of sheer desperation, which my grandparents understood. They can barely drive around, but small distances are fine. If I needed clothes for school, Aunt B. could manage that, with lots of compromises for her girlish brain to accept our passage with her. Given my mom's sugar addiction, I grew up in a house plagued with migraines that only abated until I was well into college and young adulthood. It could have been genetic (I have lots of overweight diabetics on both sides of the fence), but it was certainly never helped by my family. They forgo real food to eat dessert first, which pretty much guarantees I'll get sick if I eat like they do, so I avoid it like the plague. It is the exact opposite of our traditions about breaking bread.

Nonetheless, stuff is stuff, and where better to cadge a ride than from a junkie who goes directly to the source to mainline it? She's never practiced religion, preferring instead to excel in cheap gaudy plastic shit that she can torture us with by using them as "ugly bombs". Her best friend died an untreated hoarder, with my aunt claiming ignorance of it after her death, which fooled none of us. You see, each and every one of the grandchildren in my family have become violently ill on these shopping sojourns with our aunt; every single one of us. At first, my mother and her sisters used cleverly hidden techniques to cover up the fact that they made us sick.

First, it was my supposed "hypoglycemia" that caused me to return home from shopping trips pale and nauseous. Oh, no problem: just feed her food! My mom treated me like I was a pet her sister didn't know how to feed and water. After that, it was on; I had to gulp down these sugar-free foods so she could continue her worship at store windows. "Stuff something down her throat", was an oft-repeated phrase in my mother's house, to keep people from guessing the source of my sickness. Same thing with my other cousins: Bill had a strange gluten intolerance that made him dizzy, Elizabeth ("that poor thing") grew up without a real mutha (not true), therefore she's a sickly orphan...on and on it went for years, until the Nanuet Mall fell into disrepair, in which case, Auntie simply needed a venue change.

Same thing with the "new" mall in West Nyack. We all strangely felt sick just walking through the multi-level building with her, which she quickly devised cover stories for, aided and assisted by our mysterious "symptoms", "Oh, yeah? You don't feel good?", with a quick panicked look to her sidelong glance at us. Uh, no. I feel overly hot and sick to my stomach. Unfortunately for her, I outgrew all of my bad health and habits through hard work. "Weird...I call it 'Mallhead'. Billy gets it, too", and so it went for a few more years, until each one of my cousins confessed to me that every one of them got sick shopping with her, with the exact same set of physical responses.

I let it slide while my grandmother slowly declined in her advanced old age, but not by much; my aunt loved using her as a deferred payment plan to big family discussions that would "out" her true agenda. I let my cousin and his long-time girlfriend buy her a huge flat-screen t.v. one Christmas, with the excuse that my grandmother's cataracts were the reason she needed a new one. They were gone for hours, hours that I comfortably spent in happy companionship with my grandmother and mother. My cousin returned from the excruciating trip red-faced and ashamed: another sucker punch by that crazy incompetent bitch. He was kind enough to install the set for her, just like we all enabled that hateful little dwarf: in honor of our parents' parents, those G-dly people who gave rise to us.

I finally put my foot down during a weekend stay with my mom. I offered to go with my girl cousin (that poor unfortunate "orphan") and my aunt to the mall, but we were barely down the street when something odd happened. Elizabeth suddenly took ill in the car, which forced our aunt to stop at a junk food convenient store chain. She used the same old line about my cousin just being hungry, as she tried to hide her delight at this unexpected pit stop for her preferred type of junk food. For once, she sprang sprightly out of the idling parked car to grab something quick in the store. She was all smiles as she watched my cousin (who was going to nursing school at the time, hence her new-found knowledge about healthy foods and exercise), gulp down rotten food so we could all go shopping for her.

But, for some strange reason, her evil alchemy didn't work this time. Liz didn't feel better as we drove down the same street we were on before the "pit-stop". "I'm not actually hungry", Liz tried to explain to our sick aunt, as she sat in the passenger seat, mulling over a nasty selection of salty junk food over sweets, neither of which is designed to cure anyone on the planet. "I still don't feel good", Liza said weakly, grown pale as I watched her open her jacket for air and crack the window at the same time, the very same actions we all took over those long hard years, as my aunt rehashed her old lines about carsickness and the car's heating system. "I don't think I can go shopping", she muttered, and if there was a heart that was gladder than mine at that moment, you'd have been hard-pressed to find it. I was already in recline just being in the backseat, hearing the same old bullshit in my head about my ill health again and again.

And just like that, we were back at my mother's apartment, with Liz resting on my mom's couch, like I had also done for years and years, recovering from another awful bus trip from the city. It was over....it was finally over. The curse had been lifted! I wished Liz was healthier so I could hug her, but my girl was all grown up, aided and assisted in my mastery of invisible motherhood by no one but myself, just as she had also suffered with her own disordered parents. The curse had been lifted forever. After that, we began to openly speak about "Mallhead" to each other at family gatherings in quiet companionship, whenever that little bitch was out of earshot. Nothing beats an evil witch like the greater good. We had finally won in adulthood. We won.

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

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strega