Sugar Monkey

I've had a sick mother all my life, but she will deny it almost every time you ask her about it, except on those days when she chooses to be agreeable about it, and that's about the best way to describe it, in a nutshell. When I was little, her back hurt too much to carry me, after years of toting my much bigger and older brothers around, so she told all of us that she had a "bad back" with perhaps an early onset of arthritis. After that, she made a big deal about lying down in total quiet and darkness ("I must lie prone and still for awhile in utter darkness and silence. Thank you...": cue whispered sick voice), and if anything dared disturb her during resting time periods, she became imperious and abusive, like a mythical princess complaining about feeling a pea under several mattresses, which wasn't far off from her off-Broadway version.

She made my dad put a wooden board under their mattress that was already super hard or "orthopedic", because my mom loves to use medical-sounding words to describe her psychic pains. If we dared wake her up in the middle of night with our bad dreams, she sprang up like a vampire roused out of it's coffin before nightfall, gasping for breath and completely cold. She told us we couldn't move the bed at all, because every "jar" we made gave her excruciating pains to her lower back. When she really did break her back by her continued insistence on tennis lessons after her MS diagnosis (my mom has never been an athlete ever, but she'll lie about that most days, too), she told us that she had to lay perfectly still to get a good nights sleep.

And so it went. When my paternal grandmother took ill during a visit to our house, my mom took the opportunity to play out a hysteric scene that included dramatically folding like crumpled paper and dropping to the hospital floor in pain, even though she wasn't the one dying. "That's when my MS 'kicked in'"!" she likes to tell people, blaming my dead grandmother for her still undiagnosed illness. 

After the gift of MS was given to her, anything and everything became an excuse to cover her tracks, ones that often lead her to describe her self-prescribed "issues" with someone else as the source of all of her angst, aches, and pains besides herself. When I got laid off, she used me as the primary target for her "depression", so she could get an anti-depressive prescription from her neurologist in the city.

Because I can accurately construct a real timeline for just about anything, she dumped me from doctor duty because I was hip to her game. Her and her weirdo sisters do crazy shit like take limo rides to see a "specialist" in the city, but they'd ignore you being homeless at their feet, just like her phony church lady sister who uses the church to fill in her dull, lifeless schedule. She'll tell you she's religious, but she's just mouthing the words. My mother is tricky, though, because even if she's "crying wolf", she may actually be hurt, but she wants to parlay it into another type of scenario over healing quickly, because that would rob her of stringing it out into series of soap opera-like vignettes that she can fill in her time with, too. She's told me to my face that she likes to visit "quacks" because she has this delusional idea that she can "Jedi mind-trick" them into giving her any type of pills she wants.

My mom absolutely loves hoarding medicine and papers, too, which makes it visually easy for me to assess exactly where her head is at. Because she has a background as a lab technician, she's savvy enough to work a con game that includes official-sounding language to mask her real symptoms, and she thinks she's really good at it, but not with me. She does genuinely have a lot of disorders, and those I take very seriously. Right now she has really bad mouth pain that she calls "Neuralgia", which may or may not be related to MS nerve damage, but she's had it for years even though she can't quite remember. I took her to a few dentists in exploration of her condition with no solutions, thus giving her a great excuse to go into full-on "Princess mode" by booking a fancy car and whisking away into the city for a glamorous turn with a pricey doctor (hopefully handsome, too, so she can visit him many times over) at a certain university she used to work at many years ago, giving her the proper amount of attention she feels she deserves.

Ditto with her diet. She and her siblings all have eating disorders (which they call "food issues"), like they're at a dainty, white-gloved tea party for debutantes only. It's insane because they all have such a thick lowbrow Bronx accents that people outside of the tri-state area can't understand them when they speak. They're the ultimate provincials with arrogant "bougie" ways, a striking contrast between their continued, ongoing ill health and a certain glowing girl who was made to do chores for them all of her life, because they don't have time with their "busy schedules". It's insanely ridiculous, because they're basically office workers, with the soft stubby bodies to prove it. 
My mom has almost no muscle whatsoever at times, making her extremely prone to back-breaking falls, until we forced her into a regular schedule of PT/OT that she's since become accustomed to, though at first she treated her healthcare professional like a manicurist she could wave away when she didn't feel like it.

Of course, I found an expert therapist who also uses her training in clinical psychology with the elderly to work my mom (she mistakenly dropped the info that I have to remind her about during one particularly grueling circular argument she was desperate to win against me), because my mom likes to threaten to throw people into mental institutions if they don't follow her commands. It's a childish game of "I know you are, but what am I" that continues until her stress has been released through the heightened, angry confrontation (like a toddler does when tired), immediately forgotten after she gets her chemical payoff from her angst, which is followed by an equally nuts game of "I have no idea what you're talking about", milking the doddering senior act for all its worth, because she got caught making threats again.

Then, her head droops onto on her chest, falling asleep while you're speaking to her in mid-sentence, in complete opposition to her awkward hyper-vigilant tenseness a mere minute or so ago. If anyone dares to suggest to her that she should take a nap, or notices how weird it is for her to tune out the way she does in the middle of a conversation, she snaps to her next compulsive routine that centers around tea. You see, my mom has also been a sugar addict all of her life. I'm sure it's fun as heck for her healthcare team to deal with. When I told her this past weekend that she was "my sugar monkey", she laughed delightedly at it, like it was a game of truth-or-dare for her to win, which is so fucking odd, because I've known her all my life. She wakes up to several strong cups of coffee with sugar, and continues her hard usage throughout the day, using our Irish tea tradition to cover up her over-ingestion of cookies, cakes, crackers, and pie.

Anyone who dares to mention her nod-offs to her gets the ole MS-related excuse (which could actually be true, if she's between her doses), or her exhaustion from metal distress (uh uh...we've given my mom a very easy life compared to ours), or it's simply because she's getting older. Some of it may be true, some of it may be her delusional fantasies, or some combination of both. I've never met a better liar than my mom. Even the hardcore drug and alcohol junkies in my family lie weaker than her, so good and practiced she is at it, though with her type of checking out, I'm not sure if she knows. Recent studies have shown what we've always known to be true, that treetop monkeys eat a leaner type of diet that lends them a calmness denied to their bottom-feeding fruit-eating monkeys as the epitome of over-aggression, fighting with their band of monkeys throughout the day. Guess which one you are, mom? Guess which one your special little monkey is? "Oo oo"! 

It's not a problem for me, though. I know her better than anyone, because I've taken care of her the longest. It's okay: I'll grab you the best fruit from the top of the tree, mama. Ain't never gonna let you go down on my watch. Just remember: "fructose is sugar, too", Dr. Diane and have at it, my lil "Sugar Monkey"! Here's that recent data we talked about this past weekend, while you ate pie in the middle of the day that would have given me an instantly vicious headache (http://bit.ly/1SuPkTG). I just talked and watched and waited on her as she ate, salvaging some cheese crackers from her pantry (she keeps anywhere from 6-12 boxes on hand, because "they're all different"). By the way, did you notice you didn't get the healthier turkey leftovers? 

They gave you some of the desserts, and someone was rude enough to cram different pie types of top of each other in an angry rush (like women who diet compulsively do), in a rude gesture that said you aren't even worth the time it takes to separate desserts carefully into sections, just sloppily crammed on top of one another, in shame and haste. I saw that, too. And that cherry had no flavor, the one I picked out of the pie tin to taste while you ate slices of coconut cream pie. 

It was the strangest thing, given how much your family protests to be "foodies", isn't it? That pie had no absolutely no cherry flavor at all....it was just one dull sweet note with no flavor, like the kind of food served in hell, cruelly robbed of any taste as a punishment for someone who suffers from, say, gluttony as a vice. Odd, don't you think? 

http://orthomolecular.org/library/articles/webach.shtml

http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2015/01/07/sugar-health-research

http://abc13.com/health/study-sugar-is-as-addictive-as-cocaine/533979/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235907/

Static

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_%28video%29

In every human family there are unhealthy people, and then there's me. In contrast to my sick family members, I stand out like there's a permanent spotlight shining down upon my head at all times, which there kind of is. I can't help it. I notice things like people, places, and, well, the things that are around me, which is unnerving to a lot of people with serious mental disorders. After the state psychiatric institutions were deregulated in the late 70s, herds of brain disordered people have littered our neighborhoods like the societal indigents they are, without ever choosing to be that. I feel sympathy for them, but not much, because when I was growing up, me and my friends were terrorized by people too fucking sick to care about us, with absolutely nothing to replace those scary old psychiatric wards of yore, except the anger of an entire generation of children who served as the "X" marking the spot where healthy parents should be. We had none.

And so we began a lifelong crusade of speaking about our lives openly: first to one another, and then to a wider audience in the real world, as wild and different as the frightened and totally unmedicated people we were forced to spend somewhat intimate company with at family gatherings, not that seriously sick people can handle normal human relationships, like, say, that of greeting your cousin in an appropriate manner. Instead of recognition or awareness, we got weird kids who stood facing empty corners, or they sat staring into space for hours while stuffing their faces with food, faces twisted into grotesque expressions that are the opposite of genuine hunger, like Gorgons from ancient mythologies past. Our job was to ignore them as best as we could, while normalizing the oddball behavior of the mentally ill among us, lest they notice our healthily flushed cheeks fresh from outdoor exercise, or our bright eyes that shine from good eating.

It was what we knew how to do: pretend that our cousins were perfectly fine, even when it was obvious that they weren't, but what else could we do? Put them away? My mom and dad were friggin' nuts, but they were also brilliant at times, too. Yeah, my paternal cousin from Brooklyn was a lying thieving drunk, but he's also one of the quickest, sharpest, funniest comedians I've ever met in my life. They were not all bad, certainly not horrible enough to toss into some prison-like hellhole of a Halloween haunted house, like those abandoned buildings that litter this country's poor history with our collective psychological past. Some people have disorders they can manage with professional help on an outpatient basis and some can't, but what we all agreed upon was that prison is no place for people with schizo-affective disorders. They need reliable adult supervision and affordable medicine, but if you've ever tried to reason with a hallucinating schizophrenic on a ten day bender, you know how bad other people's psychoses can be, especially if you aren't the knife-wielding maniac.

So that's what we did; we tried to lives our lives alongside seriously under-treated patients because there was no alternative to the horrors of the penal institutional system, until today. My cousin John A. was so bad, though, that there was no amount of explaining we could do to cover for him. We told friends and distant relatives visiting from out-of-town that he was merely "autistic", when that was clearly not the case, but what else could we do? My uncle barely managed on his own, and his ex-wife is an alcoholic nurse. There wasn't anyone to turn to. My uncle has successfully raised two completely abnormal and utterly dysfunctional adults who cannot pass as normal in society, leaving us with the burden of coping with them as best as we can, while they take and take and take from us without ever giving back, creating a deficit so brutally one-sided, that each and every one of us in my immediate family have borne the brunt of their irresponsibility.

My uncle has a very small business that's staffed with one lifelong employee, a man so sick, he has completely filled up his apartment with stuff like any decent hoarder would, living out of my uncle's office space by taking showers where he can and eating off of a hot plate, and this is what passes for "legal counsel" in my mother's family. This, after he almost bankrupted my grandparents so he could not work any job while attending lengthy law school exams and numerous tries at the Bar Exam, living at home like my mom's youngest sister has all of her life, until both of my grandparents passed. My cousin spent hours at our house in New City flicking light switches on and off, until we worried he would break them. Ditto with the microwave and the doorbells. And just like horror movies of the day, he would stare for hours at the t.v. set in the basement. At what, we had no idea, until one afternoon when we were emboldened by a group of us, we asked him: "Hey! What are you staring at?"

Do you know what he told us? He told us that was listening to the voices coming out of the set that spoke to him in between the static. Fuck...that would be why he had answered "nothing" in a flat monotone to our previous lone inquiries, because he's clever enough to know what not to say to us, as if someone had coached him about "passing" under keen observation. And do you know what he does today, readers? He works for the U.S. Department of Taxation, otherwise known as "The IRS". Yep, he compulsively fills out numeric data day after soul-crushing day, until his supervisors finally gave him another column of numbers to fill in, after slowly transitioning from part time to full time work over the years, with lots of great benefits that we all pay for as U.S. citizens. He does the job that a mindless computer can do better every day of the week, and he does it with your life and taxes on the line . How's that for a case of the Halloween "Heebie Jeebies"?

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heebie-jeebies_%28idiom%29

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 

Detox

So-called "celebrities" burn through $30,000 in cash for this, yo.

Just like Californian wildfires and desert droughts, every year summer's are extremely hot across America, and every year New Yorkers short out the power grids by turning on their air conditioners full blast at the very first sense of heat and/or discomfort (http://bit.ly/1D96Ny1). You may not know it, but your ridiculous "lifestyle" makes us easy targets for developing Third World countries around the globe, who mistake our waste for future affluence. 

Trust me, you don't want this. Shiny cars and blonde bimbos with fake tits and spray tans look good for awhile, but just like any high maintenance object, they require an almost constant stream of money to stay that way, and after awhile, "Father Time" gets us all in the end. It's Fool's Gold*; not a genuine gold rush like the Old Hollywood movies and t.v. shows of the past portrayed it. Most of those fantasy movies were made by East Coast Jews and low class Micks who didn't fit into their own pictures "look" anyway. 

No amount of money could erase that fact, written across their faces for the world to see, obscured only by costumes, makeup, and fake "movie magic". It was recently reported that Mariah Carey needs $50,000 an appearance** to maintain the illusion of beauty (which would certainly explain the less attractive Billionaire Euro she's now dating), and you really don't want to know what those Kardashians spend. If I saw that on t.v., and my child was starving to death in my arms in some refugee camp, I'd hate us, too. Bombs away!

This "celeb" is also AFRICAN-AMERICAN! http://bit.ly/1MwnaYH

I can only tell you that me (and many others like me) are not the wasteful ugly Americans you see on t.v., because almost every day for years, I have written about our collective truths and showed you our landscapes here, so you would know that I am not lying to you about how I live, who my people are, and how we got here.

We have to detox from: sugar, processed foods, plastic surgeries, countless harmful cosmetic procedures, alcohol and drug addiction, ignorance about treatments for mental illness and psychosis, wanton consumer consumption, fossil fuels, bullshit vacations to escape hateful (and wasteful) office jobs, over-commuting to stressful city jobs to maintain an illusion of success (when you are, in reality, one paycheck away from losing it all: the houses, the cars, the "family" toxic cruises), the old factory model of business management, the medieval concept of "landlording" and serfdom, and a billion other hateful systems that Old Money Europe set up in America. 

You don't need all that stuff, hoarder, so just let your useless, worthless junk go. We've been bankrupted by rotten debt, from a system I certainly didn't create or support, nor ever willingly participate in. Did you? Then turn down that friggin' A/C*** with your dumb, sweaty ass in that twenty floor office building. Asshat.

*     http://bit.ly/1DMfqcN
**   http://bit.ly/1SL9Oqj
*** http://nbcnews.to/1LfaLX2


Oh, I ain't done, yet, kids. I'm about to ruin your day completely with this joint right here: http://bit.ly/1IGN6QL. Enjoy!