Ongka's Big Moka

The gods must have been crazy to show a bunch of hard-partying, state school kids a movie about a tribe in Papua, New Guinea that selects a new "head honcho" to enrich so that everyone can have a chance to participate in the fun, but that's exactly what happened when a class in Cultural Anthropology tore its way through my crowd. After that, the stoners went wild with late night discussions about society's failings. Why couldn't Americans be, like, more hip? Yeah, right. Why? 

Most of the time, our talks took place in the off-campus living rooms of rich suburban hippies whose parents bought them cars and homes to go back to after school. We'd be eating their mama's carefully shipped food like starving charity cases, when I'd been cooking all my life. Pot makes the crazy kids even nuttier, so I sat on my growing unease with my hands tucked between my knees most of the time, in the freezing old houses we rented for cheap. It never seemed warm enough, no matter how many layers we put on.

But, the idea was interesting. If a group of people agreed to it, could you actually give away all of your stuff to someone else without being a total asshole about it? It seemed doubtful, the way hippie kids tried to outdo each other over things like mixed tapes of live Dead shows, while they argued about who had the best collection. The hippies at school were some of the worst kinds of kids, too: petty, deceitful, spiteful, arrogant, defensive, condescending, overly competitive, and cheap. They wouldn't give anyone a loose joint for free, let alone the whole dime bag. These kids were gonna grow up to save the world? It's 2017, and guess what? I'm still waiting on that.

Werewolves of London

Me and my best friend from school were genuine in our desire to get a good education at a great price, but it was most definitely not reflected back at us. The spoiled upstate kids of our generation saw it as practically a free ride that was easily dismissed, so good were the deals of the SUNY school system back then. The application was a simple two-sided form you could write in your sleep to apply to ten schools at once, which made college acceptances rather anti-climatic. I think I applied to five schools at once, as a fail-safe.

Just like my passion for narrative was derided by supposed industry professionals in publishing who just happened to "land" a job in the field, my friend Karen was looked at as an oddity for knowing she wanted to be a teacher and then going to a teacher's college in New York for her NYS certification. I know; too straight a line between points, right? One of our favorite sayings is the basic "clarity is key" phrase, often seen as a threatening balm to the rather scattered psychoses we would encounter throughout our lives, starting in our fucked-up family homes.

We became adept at explaining concepts to disordered minds over and over again, wearing down even the most brutal game of repetition to brass tacks, as a necessary part of any real educator's toolkit. Before our generation would take to "Special Needs" and "Special Education" like the obscuring terms for mental illness and retardation that they are, we had levels at school: Above Average (that's me), Average (occasionally me, especially if I didn't care for the material), and Below Average, or those BOCES kids who will fix your car for an exorbitant price after graduation from high school as a petty revenge for your hard work and natural aptitudes.

At Oneonta, we had a lot of financially successful "white-bread" kids from upstate New York riding the first wave of affluence from their orthodontist/lawyer dads, like the rich Jewish kids of New City. Irish, Italians, and Hispanics were still coming up through unions and the police force when we were kids, commuting to a loud ethnic city with stronger ties to the motherlands "across the pond". For upstaters, America was a generic Rachel Ray type of "EEVEEOHOH!" accent, spoken in an annoying "doncha-know" MidWestern twang. If they were Micks or guineas, they sure as fuck didn't show it as much, up there in north country.

Fiona was like that for us. She'd been born in Ireland, but with her softball mullet that somewhat expressed "butch lite" and her yuppie turtlenecks with the alligator icon on them, we had no idea she even was a Mick 'til we invited her over for a pre-party beer on St. Pat's Day. She's "Dark Irish", like Colin Farell: someone with dark eyes and hair that's linked to the Roman occupation of Ireland, leaving behind their genetics with their legal system and paved roads. That's a harder thing for a lot of Americans to understand with their weaker grasp of world history, but with a History Major roommate/best friend and boyfriend, I didn't have much of a case for pleading ignorance.

Just like Latin folk are pegged as Italian-looking for merely having dark eyes, dark hair, and olive-toned skin (see the show "Jersey Shore"), so did many Irish in America "pass" for other ethnicities, simply by not being the fair-skinned, freckle-faced "ginger" stereotypes portrayed on t.v. True to form, Fiona came from a hard-drinking family rife with tensions, which made her the right fit for our crowd and most of our occasions, but she just as often blew a good party by taking risks that were connected to her deeper ties to addiction than the ones I manifested in school. At first, we thought it was a lark: a Catholic schoolgirl away from home "stretching her wings" sort of thing.

But then she took a bunch of serious nose-dives that me and Karen stayed far away from, like taking full hits of blotter acid with her on-again-off-again boyfriend from high school that she cheated with while he dated another girl, introducing this blond girl from back home as his "girlfriend" at our parties, when he'd been talking our friend Fiona "down from the ledge" just the night before in our suite. We'd find her next door in the boy's suite, sitting with him in a corner on a beanbag while he petted her hair and read her a children's book in a creepy dad voice. What the...?

Back at our homes, we were the adults who handled stress well, not the other way around. This...this crazy shit that they did? It was everything we were afraid of becoming: a bunch of brain-dead drones with loose morals cuddling each other in the light of dawn, rocking back-and-forth like retards. We wanted to experiment and have a good time, within reason. Who attends a teacher's school just to soothe their fucked-up dark-haired mistress? Not us, man. We'd just as soon cut stuff into halves, think about it, and then divide it again into quarters. We wanted to run things, not sit it on the sidelines of life like the deranged people around us.

My final break with Fiona happened gently junior year, while I was the sole inhabitant of the ground floor (barring any party crashers on the two couches) of the big old house we shared off-campus, while she and the two Karens were on the second floor. I had volunteered to take the one bedroom on the first floor because of my big boyfriend who frequently stayed over (or vice versa), since it was a bit of a hazard not to have the front door locked 24/7. Nothing bad actually happened, besides some of our wilder parties that were starting to get a little bit out of hand and scary, as the addicts busily sorted themselves from recreational party-goers like myself.

Fun became besides the point, with so much freely-floating booze and drugs around. Despite Fiona's brush with a nervous breakdown sophomore year, she decided to trip out at one of our parties again, probably in retaliation for a visit by Steve's girlfriend, or something like that. That's the "alchie" way of problem-solving: become an even bigger problem, forcing someone else to sort it all out. By the time the band was unpacking their gear and setting up amps in the huge basement of the house, Fiona was already getting into vicious fights with my punk rock crew who wanted better music than the same old hippie song for trick-or-treating kids on Halloween being played over and over again, to calm her down while the first rush of blotter acid kicked in.

Once again, there was a square-looking Steve by her side, who studied meteorology so he could do the t.v. news of upstate New York in a strait-laced suit and tie, talking his mistress out of stabbing someone with a kitchen knife in his weird "dad" voice of calm authority that was as fake as Fiona's whole "white girl" routine. I may have partied like a rock star with other rock stars in my day, but this down-home girl knows that when the lights come on, everyone goes home. Now. Party's over. I gotta go to work tomorrow, ya dig? This shit, though? Some things were way too kinky to handle well, even for a hardcore city kid like me. This was one of those things. "Aah-ooo!"


I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fooks
For to get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

You hear him howling around your kitchen door
You better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo, huh

He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
You better stay away from him
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw Lon Chaney Junior walking with the Queen, uh!
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw a werewolf drinkin' a piña colada at Trader Vic's
And his hair was perfect, na!

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London
Heh, draw blood
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London

I saw a werewolf with a Chinese menu in his hand
Walking through the streets of SoHo in the rain
He was looking for the place called Lee Ho Fooks
For to get a big dish of beef chow mein

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

You hear him howling around your kitchen door
You better not let him in
Little old lady got mutilated late last night
Werewolves of London again

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo, huh

He's the hairy-handed gent who ran amok in Kent
Lately he's been overheard in Mayfair
You better stay away from him
He'll rip your lungs out, Jim
Huh, I'd like to meet his tailor

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London, ah-hooo

Well, I saw Lon Chaney walking with the Queen
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw Lon Chaney Junior walking with the Queen, uh!
Doin' the werewolves of London
I saw a werewolf drinkin' a piña colada at Trader Vic's
And his hair was perfect, na!

Ah-hooo, werewolves of London
Heh, draw blood
Ah-hooo, werewolves of London

Deadhead

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Career Suicide

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

Believe or not, hatred disguised as competition runs rampantly through artistic communities, so if you are one (you art fag!), you already know all about it. Oh, on the surface they're touchy-feely and accepting about shit no one really cares about, like your gay nude crafts project (yawn, who cares?), but underneath, every single one of them is one bad painting away from a total diva meltdown. It's fun, once you get the hang of it. Slaying people who aren't cut out for the real game of it should be pressing on anyway. Think of it as a personal service.

I've taken out quite a few haters back in the day, because I've always been the target of bias and abuse, so bitchy psychological warfare is nothing new to me. Of course, I preferred the kind of weirdo hatred one finds among stacks of books, rather than the overtly bitchiness of a dance troupe, which is gayer than even I can stand, and I love me some drag modeling on the runways, trannies.

During college, they came out in droves, and not just the fun queers in assless chaps at artist balls. They were out before anyone else, working through their "issues" about looking at their naked boyfriends by drawing them for each and every figurative class. At one particularly small family publishing company, one junior staffer was so freed by the "gay card" at work that he openly mocked everyone walking by who might be on his "shit list" for the day, trapped as employers felt before we had federal protections in place for all types. He giggled viciously while he openly bragged at farting out loud every time a woman who worked in the office behind him dared to pass by his desk on the way to hers, something which she had no control over whatsoever.

He didn't speak to me unless he was practically on top of me, in case I had any illusions about how he felt towards "breeders" like me in the workplace, especially stinky female art directors who could get someone fired, if only she noticed your abuse, which I didn't. He was a pissant, what can I say? He did so little work, and had such a small impact upon our days as publishers, that he attracted very little of the attention he must have thought was his due in Chelsea in this century, which is a few centuries too late for the rest of the gays, I'm afraid.

In his desperation to get a rise out of me during yet another fake "war" over nothing that the crazies heated up whenever they felt "bored" (which was pretty much every single day of their miserable little lives), he called me over specifically to show me a close-up photo of a man's naked ass, with his hands spreading his cheeks apart to reveal a butt-hole, ostensibly to bitch to me about how lonely gay online dating was in the city. It didn't really phase me at the time (see the above: countless of hours of nude drawing classes from every angle) because he's so fucked up, that was considered a "good" day by our substantially lowered standards for the severely disordered, but it was the card I needed to get him fired in a sexual harassment suit that stretched back for years (you're welcome, Susan Norton).

But, he had no idea how far back really deranged scare tactics went with me. I went to the hardest school in the world, which meant that women in their thirties and forties thought it was acceptable to oust us by any means necessary, like those working class kids in their teens and early twenties without scholarships (hi, Cheryl!) from their highly coveted spots in the class. They took the only financial aid available to illustration students through phony trumped up "minority" scholarships (hi, Ellie!) and leads within the largest greeting card publisher (hi again, Cheryl!), supported as they both were by successful fathers who were professional illustrators, and that still wasn't enough to compete. Ohhh....hurts so bad, doesn't it?

The last card that was played out by one of the typical disgruntled 40-somethings living in my town was laid out for me before I left for my adventures out west, in what she perceived to be an unconscionable action of boldness for me to take after securing illustrator Cheryl (before she went back to school with us, she was professional graphic designer Cheryl supported by her computer programmer hubby Alan) her very first professional book illustration jobs while I worked at St. Martin's Press. Hey, you are most certainly welcome for that, too! Oh, wait. I didn't get that either. Huh. I think this might be some sort of pattern...anywho, I digress.

Cheryl had one last coffee with me in the Flatiron District (how chic, I know) during her not-so tearful goodbye to me. She was aghast that I would be leaving her for Colorado, as we walked back to the F train together. But, how could I be leaving? Didn't I know how hard she worked just to be here in New York?! Uh, right. In that cushy Central Park apartment you cadged off an old female friend with my work in your book as professional credits in the industry. Yeah, times are sure tough! I reminded her once again that she was in my home, and as such, I felt free to leave and return whenever I wanted to.

That incensed her even more. I could practically hear her teeth gnashing together in envy, the kind that destroys good careers, like the ones we created for her at school and in town. She seethed standing in her winter jacket, cold as the cross breeze is between avenues at that subway stop. She had to take her last shot at me quickly, because she was freezing in the strong wind, as she hopped around in her understated coat that was fit for her strict vegan religion. I could see her wheels grinding. Sure enough, inspirations struck this 40-something woman. Fear not, dear readers! She delivered her last real bit of conversation to me hurriedly, and then it struck me how much I had won.

"B-b-but, you're committing 'CAREER SUICIDE' if you move out west!" Awww. It was such a nice try that I had to laugh slightly. She was trying really hard. Yeah, I managed a shaky laugh. I'm worried about that, too! I honestly wasn't all that upset, because I knew I would be back someday. I said my goodbyes to New York over the next few days, taking in those tourist sites I normally avoided to light a candle at St. Patrick's and do a quick breeze-through Tiffany's, because in my heart I knew I'd be back. That's what being a New Yorker is all about. Just like my Catholic faith, you can always come home.

So, what happened to yet another bland but somewhat talented housewife artist? Well, her toddler cried until she packed up her drawing board for good (her pictures weren't worth the money she spent in daycare: nice work, Lachlan!), before leaving the city not long after I did for that place in space were all bad hippies go: a cool farmhouse just outside of rich Woodstock, a place where she can be free to espouse her harsh religion of no makeup ever, no meat ever for any type of reason, plus a rigidly enforced homeschooling process that would fully indoctrinate her one child into their fucked up faith of succeeding at all costs, friendships be damned. None of our classmates kept up with her but me, sadly, because I don't do gay "frenemy" shit.

No, this here Acadian mama takes care of her own, even Midwestern foundlings estranged from their own families through alcoholism and a solid case of the crazies that's taken serious hold. I always had the upper hand, dear, and this New Yorker is sorry about that for you, because no drawing can change the hate that goes on in your head, girl. I am sorry for you, truly. I hope it gets better for you soon. I'm still here working for you for free, ain't I? We're working as fast as we can, just like always. No hard feelings. We just don't have the time for it. Sorry.

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

Philosophy 101

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

Much like those oft-repeated stories about typical human corruption and still-horrible wastefulness, hurricane season comes every single year, though if you rely on most t.v. networks for schooling, you'd think that they just dropped out of the sky for the very first time. It's baffling to me as to why some people think that their audience is the same drug-addicted moron with ADHD (off their Ritalin), wide awake at four in the morning, and yet, the scam continues. Until network executives understand that we're not all dumb, rich, and white like they are, we will continue to suffer under the same delusional fantasies that persist with the mentally ill and their limited perceptions about, say, storm clouds, with this confusingly modern science called "Meteorology", something so insanely difficult that apparently only magical people with special superpowers can decipher its secret coding.

Until that one day when recognition finally dawns over the features of the disordered, we must suffer through their hypnotic cloud of confusion. With my friend Lisa, there aren't even the basics of "A,B,C" and "1,2,3", because German-American farm daughters from rural/suburban Minnesota apparently skate by on their finely honed bisexual cheerleading skills from high school, chased with copious amounts of alcohol. I didn't mind it, as much as I totally don't get it as a lifelong cultural reference, because drinking coupled with her perpetually confused pansexual identity questioning just ain't my bag, baby, in any century. She was (like most RISD-oids from that time) functionally illiterate, with a much lower IQ than the average college student, which made me continually question the high price tag attached to my supposed Ivy League education, but it's been cleared up in this century, thanks to pioneers in education like me. 

RISD students can now study Liberal Arts concurrently at an accredited Ivy school like Brown University, along with their art and design studies (I made my own program between my SUNY school of choice and RISD back in the day, because there were no programs for people like me), making for that essentially well-rounded student who needs to be multi-faceted to be a genius in this world. My former classmates don't have those star qualities, but they did(do) have inflated senses of self that blew up like the strong winds buffeting us as we walked around College Hill in the fall-time. 

Lisa is one of those farm girls who tries her hardest to appear sophisticated (she naturally adopted the typical "Art Fag" look that's necessary for Midwestern bumpkins who are in way over their heads), by pretending that she wasn't actually a country bumpkin from the Midwest, which only works if you're around other lying, cheating art school students who are Idiot/Savants* like you. I have no such luxuries in this life. Self-deluded behavior does absolutely nothing to further my cause. Needless, Lisa boasted about her scholarship in Fashion Design, because it's one of the least popular majors at RISD (why go there, when you can attend F.I.T. or Parsons for fashion), but it gave her an ego both crippling insecure and wildly arrogant at the same time; a manic/depressive rollercoaster ride that seemed to be up-and-down like the weather outside, except that the weather always wins, if you are ever dumb enough to challenge Mother Nature to a contest, which she is.

Me and my Armenian friend from Massachusetts wanted to go outside in the electrically-charged air for a thrill-ride, which Lisa tacked onto, like she did with all of my friends. She's that awkward third-wheel kind of kid who's too retarded to understand that you want to be alone for awhile, or "vibing" with your East Coast friend, or on a solo date with your boyfriend. She was exactly like that as an older, near-30 undergrad we took care of. And so, with eyes rolled, we let Lisa tag along with us. Like any kid, she was happy and a little freaked out at the same time. She enjoyed the really strong winds that blew the leaves and water directly into our faces, laughing at the static charge that put our little hairs on end. She found an old pair of jeans blown up against a wrought iron fence that drove her delirious with happiness for awhile, so we were glad. While she was occupied with her new object, we could talk and enjoy the spectacle in our more experienced fashion.

We took a turn through Providence's infamous Roger Williams Park, with me contemplating a lift over the tall fence that girded the park so I could stand on the edge of the statue, underneath his big outstretched hand for an unusual, impromptu, hurricane-season-only photo op (we decided against it after one or two tries, because it was way too tall for our short trio), so we turned around to leave the park. In a rather unfortunate (and also highly fortunate) coincidence, one of the biggest oldest trees in the entire park slammed down loudly to the ground, right in the spot where we had been standing just a few moments earlier. Uh oh...me and Ed were delighted with this rare sighting, with me present-minded enough to crack a joke about some broke-ass Philosophy 101 class at my SUNY school, when I took on the idiot Professor during his lame "tree in the forest" exercise, because it means nothing to an actual thinker like me: "There you go! Proof positive that trees actually do make a sound when they fall down, even if no one is around", or something like that. 

I love the wildness of our forests and raging Nor'Easter storms** like they are the salt in the blood that runs through my veins, but Lisa took a turn for the worst. No more giggling over an old pair of discarded jeans, no more joking about the current you could feel in the air...
no, she was like my young niece during a family ferry ride to the 
Aran Islands: at first all happy bouncy giggles, until that first brutal seasickness sets in. She grew pale and shaky, like the cushioned Midwest girl she really is: "Guys, I don't like hurricanes anymore. 
I want to go inside", less than a block from the big old house we were renting. OK, sure, no problem. Ed and I burst through the door to tell our stories to my housemates, excited as energetic young people always are, but Lisa was rocked to the core. 

She shut up quickly, nursing her de facto cup of organic hippie tea that's essential for nursing a person with such a delicate sensitive nature like hers through nervy encounters with big storms, in this brush-up with reality that her types do everything to avoid, like moving to the West Coast to assume a totally new identity, but that's a story for another day. Today belongs to the wet wilderness of this gloriously tempestuous, wildly beautiful East Coast Autumn that holds an eternal truth for me, and I wouldn't change a thing about it. Not one single thing. Enjoy the Fall weather this weekend, my dear friends, come rain or shine.



* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savant_syndrome
 ** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nor%27easter

Toto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toto_%28Oz%29

I didn't know Charles at Oneonta, but like any lifelong "famous" person, he sure knew me. It's an odd sort of fame, because it means that everyone around me is talking about me behind my back, leaving me out in the cold (socially-speaking), which is a form of abuse in of itself, with or without the backstabbing gossip. It's fucked up, but so are people, and since I live a life in the public eye, I have no choice. I don't like it, and I don't control it. People swirl around me, like I'm the calm cool eye in the center of their tornado-like life, which is absolutely true. I don't participate or enable their dysfunctions, but there they are for me to see right on their surface, in full view. It makes disordered people pull way back from me, which is great for me because it means that I telegraph my intentions clearly. I prefer honesty: it's a deep part of my faith, and like my father, I do not suffer fools easily, just like our Lord and Savior did not during His Time on Earth. It's like being the "King of Lose" that's also the ultimate winning strategy; a baffling combination of human and super to the ill and healthy alike.

Of course, I'm a woman, and just not another Catholic saint (we have more than enough martyrs in the world, real and imagined), although I am those, too. But sometimes, just like any other working class student at a state school, I want to forget the cares of the day and have a good time. Charles knew some of my good friends, but because of my status, a lot of people connected to our various social groups knew me without actually being good friends with me. Charles supposedly had a girlfriend before he left college for good, but I only knew him as an "out" gay man back in the city, and a rather promiscuous one at that. I'm glad that I didn't know him at O-Town, because after a few beers, I would have pulled the poor girl who thought he was just "really nice" aside, to tell her away from the main group at the party that he was obviously gay, because I'm like that. I tell people the truth, unless there's some deep strategy at play that risks life or death, but you don't want to know about that right now.

Suffice to say, after I moved to Brooklyn to work in companies as their apprentice, my friends connected to the city began hanging out together again, as we adjusted to this form of "adult" living. Charles was part of one of my cliques from school, and just like before, I didn't really know him that well. He was just there, drinking and smoking like the rest of us, working low-paying "artsy" jobs while trying to stay afloat, just like we were. He was a gay man raised by a hip single mom from the 'hood who decided she had enough "snap" in her to cut out the deadbeat dad and go it alone. I admired that, as much as I knew all the pratfalls of his life. It ain't easy, yo. We got on fine, until he pulled me in for a closer look. Then it started poppin' off badly.

First, my crazy friend from RISD felt alone in "The Big Apple", so in retaliation for this turn-around she felt happened between Providence and New York, places where she thought she was some hot-shot and I was not, this current series of events was most unwelcome. She set at sabotaging a group of friends by sleeping with one of my college "besties" from state, who I just happened to have set up with another good friend of mine before leaving for art school. After she torpedoed that crew (which was fine with me, because they were quickly figuring out that I wasn't some hard luck case that they pretended I was back then, out of ignorance and spite), she went wacky with Charles, another guy who felt that he was on the fringes of our clique, looking in from the outside. In truth, none of them knew me all that well, they just flattered themselves into thinking so, so as to have access to my crowd of gifted beautiful people they felt were ripe for the picking.

It was fine as long as everyone got along, but in the fierce competition of city life, wanna-be's began dropping like flies around us if I didn't consistently support them in whatever they felt I should, like hooking up indiscriminately with people I cared about, and then whining about how hard life was while ignoring my obvious strengths, in desperate bids to regain some mythical upper hand over me that never really existed, and then resuming their plots against me for their continued exposure to me. Once I pushed Lisa out of the nest, she hooked up with Charles as his "Fag Hag", so she could maintain the illusion of being a real big-time "fashion designer", when in reality, she was struggling to make it like any one of us. The privileges were just gone without her realizing I had removed the braces that held her up. 

She and Charles were disastrous together. After a few months as roommates, vicious baby wars broke out between them, so bad that she wished AIDS on him for having the audacity to attract men she felt she deserved, which is the enemy to every single crazy "art fag" I've ever met. She worked on these boring conversions of adamant gay men like she was some type of goddess, when they really just wanted to party and have fun, occasionally stopping to kiss the girl they danced with at some club or party. It was harmless fun, but she acted like his lovers were some kind of direct attack on her fragile ego, which curdled into a hatred that continues to this day. I was with one of my good friends from school at that point in time, and he and I were trying to make our own way out in the world. We didn't need her around to cause the bitchy conflicts she thrived on, like her needy insecurities that were a bottomless dark pit no one wanted to fall into.

She left for the "Left Coast" because she isn't good enough to make it in New York, and by the time me and my crew finished with her, she knew it. Charles ripped her apart like she was his personal chew toy, which is exactly what she made herself into so she could play the Art Fag game to the hilt. They had used each other for money and convenience, as superficial as any of the many rejected sweater designs at the one and only fashion company she has ever worked at, because she's actually a knitter and a seamstress, and not an actual designer. Needless, we don't stay in touch. Why? She couldn't handle the truth then. I suspect not much has changed in her life since then.

I hooked up with Charles again while I was dating a fellow RISD grad I met at an alumni party. We were in Park Slope, walking around and enjoying the summertime weather, when we happened to pass the bar and restaurant that is right next to Charles' place in the 'hood, with him ensconced at an outdoor picnic table of choice, firmly implanted there as their regular customer. We were excited to see each other, and Charles was already deep in the cups with free-flowing pitchers of Sangria that we began ordering in triple while catching up, enjoying each other's renewed acquaintance. He loved my recent summer fling because he swore he was gay, too, which we laughed about it when my new beau got up to use the restroom. RISD guys can skew as "gay" easily sometimes, especially when a certain someone I was dating then told me that his best friend is bisexual, hence the gayish lisp that often marks the more effeminate type of man.

My guy swore to Charles that he wasn't gay, and we all went back to his apartment next door to the bar to "get high", something me and my RISD friend laughed about, because it was like being in college for us; that's how rare pot smoking had become to us out in the adult world where we thrived and excelled. After my summer romance ended, I didn't see Charles that much anymore, even though he was a block away from my apartment at that time. He was still embroiled in these weird baby wars that he tried to involve me in, with little success. Of course, he had a partner of ten years that he wanted to leave, thinking of using me and my apartment as his launching pad for this supposed upcoming "divorce" in their civil war, but as a woman in my 40s who had beaten most of her demons on her own, I was in no mood to enable a guy who still read comic books high, while occasionally working as a massage therapist out of his apartment, in between trips funded by his rich white boyfriend, and frequent hits off a burning joint.

It was way too "hippie dippie" for me, and I'd never been a hippie, anyway. I was way too working class, but like most kids back then who didn't actually know me, they saw tiny glimpses of me through a smokey haze of their drug use and ineptitude, which typically didn't reach all the way to me personally, so that's how I took it years later, too. One of the last times I saw him was during a rare weekday when I wasn't working at the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, having a "girlfriend's brunch" while sitting outside at a Bar Toto table, enjoying in the warm October weather. At the time, I knew I'd avoid getting pulled into his messy teenage-like affairs, so I simply enjoyed what little time he and I had left during this century's acquaintance with each other; not as real adult support, but a fun diversion nonetheless.

We talked about the upcoming Halloween holiday, which he accused of being racist and not gay enough. There happened to be a gay couple sitting within ear shot at the table next to us who heard our conversation (the service was slow and really bad), so we chatted about his feeling that there are a lack of gay black superheroes for him to dress up as. I quickly lost interest in the game, preferring to whisper back the under-breath responses that the pretty blond guy at the next table came up with, while his partner was using the restroom. I had tapped out from this kind of teenage life many years ago, and after that brunch, we both knew it, instead of just me. He still had a lot of growing up left to do, like becoming financially independent and on his own, with a thriving career that he tended to by himself.

Before we parted ways (for good?), we recited a list of what we thought could be gay superheroes, me playing the role of "Dorothy" to his "Toto" as part of the supporting role he had in my life, before circumstances put me back in the whirlwind of change that he never had the guts for, for many really good and really messed-up reasons that mark the Gen X'ers who raised themselves, for better or worse. We finally settled on an obscure character from M. Night Shyamalan's movie "Unbreakable" played by Samuel L. Jackson; a character who may or may not be "gay", obviously black, and obviously super-heroed, but just not as good as the everyman played by Bruce Willis, as the relatively unknown character "Elijah Price", an obscure reference that suited his geekish boyish bent towards comic book life with storybook endings. I hope it suited you well, Charles, as the temporary "Boy Wonder" to the forces of my life that were too big for him to handle. Fair thee well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_%28film%29

The Praying Mantis

Shit, dude! I open the door to an extremely large Praying Mantis that scuttles towards me and a yellow grocery bag very quickly.

Years ago after college, I set up camp at an aunt's old apartment way out in Kensington, a still unfashionable Brooklyn neighborhood that remains resistant to gentrification and most types of hipsters, barring the toughie who likes to visit authentically scary, rundown Irish bars with actual Cirrhosis-nose victims. You know, those telltale purple and red broken blood vessels of the nose that come to all who spend the bulk of their days sodden and drunk on a bar stool. To give myself a break from the grind, I'd hooked up with a state school friend and her Roosevelt Island crew; a wealthy set of upper middle class kids who still smoked pot and drank mostly unmolested, because their hippie parents smoked with them, either in their upper west side apartments, or in their posh "rustic" cabins in upstate New York. 

That thing is, like, horror-movie huge.

Naturally, they were clustered around "tighty whitey" affluent Woodstock, and I felt uncomfortable in both locales, because unlike these boarding school kids, I was (and am) a product of actual working class roots, which is not so cool when you want to light up with your parents in their impeccably decorated country homes with an Acadian who doesn't play around with that mess. It was horribly awkward and the whole situation eventually blew up like I knew it would, with broken loyalties and intermittent friendships that lasted between high school and college, over divided lovers and who slept with who and when and such, the usual typically boring hippie shit, but in the meantime, summer was warm and fine in these rich kids parents' apartments around the city. 

Damn, dude. What crevice did you crawl out of?!

On one day, me and a bunch of these kids lit up on the terrace during an absolutely gorgeous summer NYC afternoon, enjoying the cool high floor breezes over glasses from a fully flowing batch of Margaritas that stood on the outdoor cafe table in a beautiful glass pitcher. The parents were gone, and harmony ruled the day. Surprisingly for such a high apartment, this kids' parents also had a stunning garden of plants and flowers, which we enjoyed greatly, watching the lazy, fat bees circle above them, surprised that they could make the journey to the 80th floor, or however fucking high we were. It was awesome! 

Great. Now it's scaling the front of the house, to attack from above.

And then, just like that, the vibe changed, when this ginormous fucking preying mantis landed on the edge of a planter, grabbed a bee as quick as a gunshot, ripped its' fucking head off, and then sucked the goo out of its' neck, like we sucked drinks from a straw. What was even weirder, is in that exact space of 60 seconds, each and every one of our group all saw it at the exact same time, as we screamed our heads off, like we just watched a 60s horror flick for the first time, high and drunk and getting more so by the minute. It was glorious, it was summer, we were 20-somethings in the city, and life was good. That was what I thought about later, after the initial shock of seeing a huge preying mantis scuttle at me on the old porch of a big farmhouse in the Hudson Valley on a warm day wore off. It was that good.

For scale: note size of house number in relation to "It".

Health News: Under Your Arm

I've known for years about the link between breast cancer and commerical anti-perspirants/deodorants, my introduction to it via the then-fringe "granola"  world, coming at me during art school, when I willingly elected to live in a house with some touchy-feely vegetarian types, who remain my friends to this day. Back then there were no harder core levels like the vegan, the gluten-free allergist, or the macrobiotic, because just being a vegetarian was weird enough, though my housemates did introduce me to levels like the "lacto ovo" vegetarians and "pescatarian"; those who eat dairy items, like eggs and cheese, and those who also integrate some fish into their diets. I grew accustomed to eating a lot of pasta with vegetable tomato sauce, brightened with hot sauce and Muenster cheese, to make up for the lack of animal protein in my diet. It didn't work for me, because I'm genetically an omnivore, but I learned some very useful items during my time with the Peta-supporting vegetarian crowd, namely that most of our cosmetics and toiletries are made with really unhealthy shit. I had no idea that toothpaste had sugar in it, until my friend told me companies added it so kids would get hooked on the taste to use more product, which is the exact opposite of a dentist's advice about avoiding sugary foods that promote tooth decay. Oh, the irony. My sensitive friend also left out the latest Peta pamphlet she picked up from the local hippie food store with a dramatic picture of the poor rabbit who developed pink eye while forced to submit to eye makeup testing; the only granola grocery store in Providence, RI at the time, with sparsely stocked shelves holding expensively priced items aimed at that "Trustarfarian" near you (a rich kid who wears really expensive hemp clothes, like the shit Gwenyth Paltrow posts on her Goop blog). Yeah, that type of rich kid: really annoying, but kinda right. Anywho, their focus also extended to cosmetic items. 
 

Irritated...by baking soda!

There was Dr. Bonner's soap in the bathroom, printed with his folksy End of the World scenarios about our collective scary future, which was used for hair, skin, and tub cleaning, along with the Moosewood cookbook in our vegetarian kitchen, all rigorously correct items for any self-respecting do-gooder going to a college so expensive, that the few middle-class kids I knew in my classes had parents who took out a second mortgage to gamble on their RISD kids future successes. Yeah, like that kind of pressure. So I went with it, and folded it into my current lexicon. Years later, at a recording studio in Denver, I worked with a guy who lost his Mom suddenly, with no real answers about her death at the time our employment histories overlapped, except for one finding from the doctor who performed the autopsy: an overdose to her system from Mercury poisoning. I never forgot his story, nor the fact that he completely refrained from any kind of under the arm treatment, except for the occasional use of those salt crystals you find in the hardest core hippy store. I can't go with that crystal thing, (it's just so friggin' hippy crazy), but I do supplement my health care routine with under arm baking soda, so effective at controlling bacteria, that there is no under arm funk AT ALL, but the stringent salt does cause a red, itchy reaction with me. So, it's back to expensive organic lavender roll-on, which I can't really afford, but I try to look at it this way: how can I afford not to? It'll last a lot longer than the cheap $.99 stuff now marked down for quick sale (thanks to those pesky ingredient baddies we know about), but you take a gamble on your future health and the risks involved by ignoring your doctor's sage advice. Huh...death, or food stamps? For now, I know what my choice is, but I really hate being in this position. Take it on as an issue, folks, before you really have no choice. à bientôt!

http://www.mamavation.com/2014/06/armpit-cleanse-reduce-breast-cancer-risk.html

Nature: Summer Solstice

Lazing in the grass.

Sometimes these events just creep up on us. A friend of mine in Nova Scotia didn't realize summer started when he absentmindedly watched an early morning sunrise last week.

Watching the clouds go by.

I was fortunately aware of the days' significance, and it inspired a few quiet, classically summer photos to mark the occasion.

“Hippies” like me enjoy nature!

That's what photography does for us: it permanently captures moments forever, those times that are unique to us, never to happen again. 

How do you mark the passage of time?