Cave Troll

Because of the genetic nature that typifies neurotic behaviors like hoarding and obsessive-compulsive rituals, I was raised among a group of rather short, fat, twitchy women on my mother's side who sometimes wrongly believe (in their worst disassociate and delusional states) that objects are more important than people, which is about the most abusive thing a mother can be towards the human children she birthed, and whom are now dependent upon her for life and care. Of course, the root of our faith defies the need for talismans and other superstitions as mere witchcraft, but in our family groupings, the pagan is sometimes closer than the monotheist, especially if you can't break through to the people around you using logic and reason.

Most Italian-Americans like to blow their tops to release the pent-up stress that comes along with sitting in a room full of people, eating plateful after paper plateful of someone else's home-cooked meals, while being as unobtrusive as possible as long as their needs are being met. Failing that, it's showtime. Then, it's a horrible gnashing of the teeth, angry spitting, and pulsing veins popping out of their foreheads, in almost direct contrast to their rather pathetic physical state. Uh, excuse me, bitch? You said what to me? It doesn't happen as much now that me and my brothers "rule the roost", but when we were smaller and more vulnerable, our family got away with as much hurt as they could without drawing the attention of social services or law enforcement, because that's actually what crazy bitches off their meds really need, in lieu of decent behavior.

If their violently abusive presence wasn't ugly enough to serve their weird agendas, then an out-pouring of incredibly escalating and extremely juvenile head games ensued, vicious in their focus on bizarre trivial household matters, like the "right" way to put a plastic bag in a garbage pail that sucks design-wise. If you "outed" them on that particular fetish (my mom and her sisters like the sound of plastic rustling, like dogs do), they simply argued until you went away or complied with their insane demands about shit no one really gives a fuck about, because it doesn't really fucking matter. Petty and spiteful is the domain of the common cave troll, not mine. Lines were then drawn in the household, like a sitcom family gone awry, with designated areas strictly off-limits to the non-complying human that could be enforced with a long boring story about their psychotic mindset, which was the point: that was the power they could use against you as their evidence to back their compulsively disordered actions and outbursts.

No, no, no. That's not it! You don't understand me! You're not listening to me! You didn't close the bag "properly"; that's why the chips went stale. You need this special gadget, like the one I have! It's magic. Well, I had to call the plumber because you have all that hair that's clogging up the drain! You knocked the car's transmission out-of-whack and that cost me money. No car for you! Every wacky thing that caused them the slightest pressure would cause them to spew out a bunch of falsehoods and lies, because their abuses supposedly swirled around our "incompetence" without their necessary hyper-vigilant monitoring, but really, what the fuck can a kid do to a nervous mother tearing paper into strips because the relatives are stopping by, er, I mean, it's recycling. Yeah! That's it! This is recycling. You can see the little wheels of their dysfunctional brains whirling now too fast, whereas before it was a depressed stupor. And it certainly wasn't limited to our often violent home lives.

After college graduation, the same trolls inhabited our office spaces, too, with the same bitchily passive-aggressive and lowly mentality as the ones they displayed within our family units behind closed doors, now aired out in public, and always with the same type of pissant jobs like secretaries (now "admins") and junior assistants, rife with ready-made excuses to explain away their phobias and unexplainable oddness around rather average and dull office workers. With me around, it was like they were wind up so tight that their heads might explode in confused hostility.

First, it would be deliberate neglect towards obvious job duties like changing the toner, making coffee, or keeping the fax area clear of excessive paper by tidying up when near it. You know, stuff a two year-old knows how to do. Then, after a period of tight observation (now called "stalking") while I went about my day, they would form the same bullshit plans to subterfuge my day, like noticing I forgot a small amount of food in the fridge, or an unwashed coffee cup in the sink that could be pounced upon with an alarming alacrity that did not mark their usual day-to-day work behavior. Next, the typically nasty "Wash your own dishes! I'm not your Mom!" notes show up next to the company sink, with other stupid notes posted on the fridge or, even better, a group email sent to me and cc'ed to my managerial higher-ups, but not until after catalog season was over, and they'd already used my designs to push their products onto the consumer.

Anything to humiliate, embarrass, or harass me would be an ideal day in their offices of the world. You know, to balance things out because they get "shit on" all day long! Uh...but not by me. "Sorry, you know how I 'get' around conference time". Their abuses were fine and excusable, even noble, given how "hard" they worked at the bottom of the corporate ladder! Except, I'm a working class Acadian; ain't nobody done nuthin' I haven't had to do for the diva's around me at least four or five times. It just didn't work with me around. If the cunt working reception couldn't frighten me away from the reception desk area during my work-related conversations (she's, like, really sensitive about boundaries and stuff because she was raped and she doesn't have a "real" desk like we do!), the next day a big heavy box full of books or paper would magically appear right in front of the area we stood in to talk to her, even though she often complained about her "bad back" when it came to moving boxes or mailing out packages.

Ditto with any apartment dwelling or townhome I resided in. If I recycled, then the bitch on the block would find good reason not to do so, like hiding all those empty vodka bottles in the common trash so the building's owners would get fined with the next garbage collection, by blaming it on "that new girl" who just moved in, which is always me. She must not know the rules! If I happened to use a common staircase, then clutter would appear the next day to block my path (because the bitch of the building tensely hid behind her door, looking at me through the peephole because she heard me laughing with a friend as we walked upstairs, and that's not right!), like their shoes on a too big mat by their door, or (as in the case with the house here in Pearl River), a kitchen chair obviously blocking the top of a small staircase everyone used. But, not me! I can't. There's, like, history! Such as...Oh! She's better looking and I started fights with her. Huh.

After awhile, the psychotic begin a brutal obstacle course of manipulation and deceit. "Well, no one helps me move boxes!" Or: no one looks at me! I have to do something to get attention! See? It's always put back onto you to solve them as the problem, so that their pressure is put back on your shoulders as a weight, even though by now, it's such a false construct to use with me, that's its purpose is easily discernible to any healthy outside observer, which is exactly what I want. I want help for your hoarding mood swings, and violently aggressive, wildly transgressive behavioral problems, because if you're so desperate for interaction (any kind, good or bad) that you put large objects in doorways to express your illness over other humans using it, then you are so fucking nuts, you should be in society-supported housing for the critically mentally ill and infirm.

Objects for the insane take on more meaning than they should because of their inability to communicate properly with the lifeforms around them, which is about as seriously ill in "human" as you can get, given the range of communicative abilities that we possess as a species. If you can't talk, write, read, speak, listen, or even hand signal your intentions clearly to others in a way that's appropriate and easily understood, go seek a doctor's help immediately, because there's something very wrong with you. And no, it isn't me, or anything about me, my life, my appearance, my lifestyle, my education or religion, nor is it my presence, or my great abilities to be heard and understood at an expert level. I'm not your problem. It's you. Got it? Good!

https://www.omh.ny.gov/omhweb/cogdys_manual/CogDysHndbk.htm

Espresso

My friend Elvis had a lot more problems than his over-priced "caffeine delivery system" cleverly marketed to addicts. He hoarded beyond control when circumstances in his life caused him stress, like helping out friends in need, or waking up in the morning without a hangover, or not having a stash of coke hidden somewhere in his rat's nest of a room. So, it wasn't like I took it personally when he "kicked me out" of his place during my bout with homelessness, because I knew it freaked him out that he couldn't abusively control me, like he does with the sicker people in his life around him, so he can feel like he's the "king of the hill".

Quite a tipsy structure to maintain isn't it? His life was never built on totally solid ground, besides his ethnic parents who had emigrated to New York from Puerto Rico. I could tell he missed it there, too, with his morning mango/guava Entenmann's danishes out on the kitchen counter for his work crew of illegal immigrants. You can tell when a person is homesick, you know? He had adored his mother, who was ailing and under his brother's full-time care (he's also disabled) when we first became more acquainted. After we knew each for awhile, he told me that her death had rocked him to his core. She had bed sores his brother had to dress every day, and neither of them were mentally stable enough to handle such a mature scene. 

He told me more than a few times that she had sores on her vagina that caused her pain, which I could have surmised from the medical term "bed sores" (which regularly occur in elderly people who are hospitalized long-term), so I knew he had sexual identity issues to go along with his obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, schizoid-affective, addictive personality disorder. When I was forced to couch surf with him for awhile, after I lost my rent-stabilized apartment in a rigged scheme designed to do so, I knew he would think I was his captive to pore over and possibly romance, though in an interim period of our friendship, I found out that he had repeated his psychotic pattern of severe relationship dysfunction without any help from me at all.

He'd done work in a building for a family made homeless by a strong hurricane we had in the city years ago that had greatly affected the lowest-laying, poorest neighbors of Brooklyn. During that process, he'd made friends with a disturbed young woman who was fragile, vulnerable, and needy. Perfect! He could swoop in as her "rescuer" to give her items that she and her dependent family needed. She had her parents and brother living with her in the cheap basement apartment, too, when it flooded out completely. I met her briefly after I left my apartment, when Elvis gave me a lift to a nearby hotel in Park Slope that was, ironically, housing hurricane victims through a city agency, as the residents there wrestled with complex legal paperwork that was out of their depths, given their socio-economic strata.

She was twitchy and weird, pulling on her hair repeatedly and answering Elvis' questions abruptly, leaning over to play with her smartphone so her hair would cover her face. If she was the "stable" one in her family, it was small wonder that Elvis saw an opportunity he could manipulate to his advantage. While they dated (or whatever the fuck two head-cases like them do), I cleaned up a tenement room on Ninth Street and went back to work. After that situation went bust (or "Cotto Crazy"), he offered to help me out, per his typical pattern. I was originally going to live with his brother temporarily, but that deal went bust because they can't do business properly, so I couch-surfed on a sofa made-up for his brother, while Elvis stashed his slightly sicker brother in the apartment of their chain-smoking Nuyorican friend.

His brother complained incessantly that I had deprived him of his "home" while I slept on a couch, which is a crazy thing to think about some guy's sofa, but that's family for you. While I stayed there, his cardboard boxes remained in the hallway, as if in limbo, and Elvis quickly lost his mind over a woman too beautiful, brilliant, and healthy to be in his company for any real length of time, but that's my life. I don't have any reliable help in my family. I am the help! And so, Elvis started going downhill almost as soon as he realized I wasn't going to be his fellow shut-in/nursemaid, like his cousin living in an illegal apartment in his basement (he'd bought a Park Slope townhome with his parents money), and his nervous brother who stopped working years ago, so he could use their mother and her age as an excuse to live with her for free, as her makeshift caregiver.

They pretended he was starting an "Internet business", which was laughable to me, because they were also embroiled in a crazy lawsuit over the apartment deal that went bust after Elvis did work there, leaving his brother effectively homeless, too. Elvis also told me he had "put his hands" on his last girlfriend (also while homeless), who had moved in with him shortly after he bought her and her family used clothes, so she felt like she owed him, hence the speedy courtship. They "broke up" after he probably tried to choke her to death one drunken evening together, but with me, he played it wayyy cooler. He knew about me and my martial arts background because his brother had a black belt, and he kept a samurai sword (a rather cheap display one, not the real kind) behind the sofa where I slept, which I effectively displayed one night after he tried to get "touchy feely" with me.

He had tried to get me to touch his stomach because he stopped eating while I lived there, hiding it behind some diet-and-training routine along with his snake oil pill cabinet. I freaked, which put him on notice for the remainder of my stay. He grew paranoid, rifling through my stuff while I worked days at an insane office in Manhattan, saying it was the price he charged for my non-payment of rent, even stealing a street sign from me that I had found cleaning up the other place I lived in for a short while. He tried to play it off like I had problems with touching and intimacy, which I blew up like the phony case it was. He grabbed me and forced me to touch his body while he lifted up his shirt, in a move that gave him a taste of my body and muscle that must have stayed with him long after that night, because he almost immediately dropped my hand after grabbing it. I don't feel like his soft crazy women.

And so I came to understand that his make-believe coffee machine was deeply anchored to his delusional fantasy life, and that he desperately wanted me to be in it with him, as a savior to his rotten life. He'd made a fake picture in his head of me in his garden during the summertime as his maid/cook/lover, beautifully dressed and expertly serving him and his friends wonderful iced drinks. Huh. I then told him how many weeks I was out from getting my own place due to my calculations, now that I'd secured a gig as the design lead for a small publishing company headed by some trust-funder looking to go bust in a financial scheme with his publisher dad. I made (and spent) a lot of money working at professional houses around the city, but only enough to support me and my expenses in a place as expensive as New York, where most natives are only one paycheck away from homelessness and bankruptcy.

He immediately grew anxious after I shattered his artificial construct, as so often happens with the very sickest among us. He could earn a living if he was enabled by the sometimes sicker people around him, but on his own? Elvis merely drowned, clutching at people madly to help him out of yet another mess. He also told me he was guilty over a murder he and his friends committed many years ago; he and his friends had killed a bum sleeping in the park, in an end-of-the-world vibe that sat over the entire city during its last down-spiral in the crack-fueled 70s and 80s. My college boyfriend had also tortured a bum sleeping on a park bench with his best friend in a similar scenario as a teenager, too, as the city veered out of control into anarchy.

As soon as he realized I'd be moving on quickly without him, he began planning his attack, packing my stuff into garbage bags while I worked hard, padding himself with his fucked up brother, his dependent cousin, and an old girlfriend of one of them, who gave me a fake look of sympathy (really, it was fear), because those poor muthafuckin' Nuyoricans finally realized that they had actually met one of the kind of people who had originally inhabited a land they can't live on peaceably. 

They had actually done battle with their first real ethnic minority: me. And guess who won? As he and his brother shook my hand (after putting my stuff in the trunk of Elvis' car), I could see that they learned from my lesson well enough. No more. No more abuse. And just like that, I was back on my way to a nice hotel with cable t.v. and a free Continental breakfast, like the rest of my homeless Brooklyn people. Thanks for that.

https://www.mentalhealth.gov/get-help/health-insurance/

Beanie, baby

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

I didn't blame my friends for all of their problems, because life isn't like that. Humans are social animals, and as such, we need a family group to survive those first fragile years, unlike other mammals that need to run within minutes of their birth. Our relative co-dependence compared to other animals is the price we pay for our big brains, which are given biological precedence in early development, hence the international symbol for "cute" as it is decoded within babies: overly large head, wide eyes, pert lil' features, and an adorable clumsiness. We've simply been bred to stick together in need, and it isn't wrong for us to do so.

But, my friend Dave's parents were way beyond anything I'd seen with my hardcore Brooklyn kids from "around the way". The first time me and Karen went to see him off-campus (we had, of course, early run-ins with the T.A.'s living in our respective dorms for freshman and sophomore year as required on-campus living, because we were seen by the state as being too young to maintain a household by law as teenagers, before we could escape to a funky old house off-campus), he offered to throw up a sheet to divide his off-campus room, and charge us rent for sleeping on his floor. Wow...touched by that. Thanks, dude.

To show our gratitude, we dutifully inspected his room for closet space and other living area features, which he was too slow to respond to. O...M...G....this kid has brand-new clothes with the price tags still on them hanging in his friggin' closet for his exclusive use! But...but...what the fuck? We were baffled, because Dave worked suck-ass summer jobs like the rest of us, except his jobs were upstate in Schenectady, where the pay is much lower than the rest of the state. How, muthafucka?! "Oh, that's nothing!" Dave went underneath his bed and pulled out plastic containers full of new underwear (still bright white and sealed in the packages, yo!), different types of socks, anything he could possibly need, like, bought for him ahead of time and everything.

Who has parents who even do that?! We were stunned. He felt kind of bad for his parents shopping habit strewn about his room so obviously, so he offered to give us a few of his shirts. "Go ahead! Take one! I've never worn them before!" Yeah, we could tell, but, like, fuck, dude...don't you get it? Yeah, he did. He knew they liked shopping more than caring for him, and that's why he was fucked. I mean, what kind of monster tricks you out at the mall in the summertime, so you can fail out of school in the fall?! Sick working-class people with GED's do that. Not really disciplined folks looking to get by and get better. You know? As bad as we felt about our write-ups, we were somewhat grateful for our educated parents from the city at that point, because at least they didn't buy backwards into life. This shit was so weird.

Who buys a 21 year-old guy living in a house with his friends "tidy whitey" underwear?! Is he too stupid to do it himself? WTF?! I couldn't remember the last time my mom actually bought me clothing, and I was still only 18 as a sophomore. You had to work at a clothing store to get new clothes with your employee discount that came out of your paycheck, right? Karen agreed with me, because she was also raised by wolves, so we shrugged noncommittally to Dave's half-ass offer of draining a couple of working teenage women whatever money we had left (deducting school supplies and food, naturally) from our summertime paychecks. Uh, thanks for nothing. Asshole.

We joked about that for awhile, and then we moved on. From the strangely arrogant demeanor of Dave and his wanna-be WASP sister, I thought they came from money, but the first time I ever saw Dave's parent's house, I couldn't hide my shock. What the....where's your...? This is it?! You grew up here?! It was baffling; a rather small, nondescript, squat one-level towards the back of a generically suburban block. Ohhh, shit, dude. It was then that I fully realized how "out of it" they were. Dave made it seem like his father spent like a surgeon, when in reality, "The Captain" is a big Polack
with power plant union money married to his high school sweetheart, a former head cheerleader at the local high school. Ahh....now, I understood it.

It was pure bullshit bravado by the undereducated, and it didn't end there. They had packed the basement of their little house with their dead relatives tacky furniture, also stowing a second refrigerator and freezer next to shelves filled with those huge vats of club-bought mayonnaise, like they were expecting the end of the world any day. They thought it was funny for me and Dave to "go shopping" downstairs in their rat-packed basement when we lived in Brooklyn, but I was never really sure why. How the fuck are we gonna carry this around in the city?! Why would anyone need this much stuff?

And that was far from the end of their madness. They took us along on a "shopping trip" to Amish Country, a dead place on the map for tourists where we wandered around some outdoor mall looking at the exact same stores as the ones in upstate New York. Why are we even here? We didn't really need anything, and we were on a serious budget besides. What the fuck is this even for? They paid for our motel room so they could pack it with more of their stuff, filling their big car with so much shit, that they laughed at us as they packed crap under our arms and feet in the backseat. Ginger had also picked up a raging "collecting" hobby on the side that excluded her husband, hoarding these small toy animals that came with fast food purchases.

She forced his dad to stop at every fast food joint we came across on the road, and when we said we weren't hungry, she shrugged it off: "Just throw it out. I don't care about the food." And that's exactly what we did. We made U-turns in the parking lots of these fast food places across America to dump perfectly good food into trashcans designed to curb litter, not feed addictions, but it made Dave's straits a lot easier for me to understand. I didn't exactly come from a totally healthy background, either. How they ever expected "college" from a life like this was yet another symptom in their family's downfall, comprised of one horrible decision after another.

Just when we thought his parents had gorged themselves completely, we were wrong. His mom shouted out "Stop!" from the passenger seat of their comfortable retiree car, so she could pick up a couple of those wooden cut-out reindeer for her front lawn. For Christmas. In the summertime. What a great vacation idea for us! His dad had finally had enough. "Where are we gonna put them? Come on!" She wasn't deterred at all. "We could strap them to the roof, maybe?" Me and Dave laughed, because we'd bought nothing. Not one damn thing, and we came home drained with less than nothing. We felt worse than before the trip by their unchecked excessiveness, plus all of the drinking and eating in bad strip mall restaurants that we were forced to go to with them, on their dime. We had less than zero.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_buying_disorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_therapy

Guinea Foul

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatso_%281980_film%29

Like I've written before, my mom and her siblings like to hide their addictions and use them against one another, like watching mentally-challenged adults freak out over a hand of "Go Fish" played with peanuts that they steal from each other all game long. It hurts their group even more when they use their addictions against each other as a ploy, hence the cover-ups and deceit. They divert their compulsive obsessive addictive disorders into weirder and weirder stuff, in their unending war with each other to secure some coveted higher ground that has all the leverage and power they need to escape healthcare, which is about as opposite to a real family as one can get, and I suppose that's part of the point with being evil in secret, like a woman who prostitutes herself to hide her heroin addiction: it's done for the cheap illicit thrill. 

Having closeted disorders is hard to prove in any court of law (one of my mom's siblings finally managed to pass the bar after several very expensive tries while living at home, totally funded by my grandfather and ConEd), without describing something so bizarre to a sober judge in the bright light of day that it seems like you made it up, which is part of the point, too: throw suspicion onto one other in an insane game of "Round-Robin" until someone gets bored, grows tired, or just leaves. They sit clenched to their kitchen chairs working each over like it's lunchtime in a prison cafeteria, which is alternately scary/dull, and that's another "fun" facet of it, as well. It's another "Contest of the Wills", like schoolchildren holding their breath in a playground competition held during recess, in a bid for dominance that's also my lifelong stress test. Who is the weakest link? Not it!

And so I'm left out of the daily details that haunt the rest of my family, lucid as I am. You don't want witnesses around the scene of a crime, especially tricky law-abiding people like me, which is silly, because I already knew the jig was up many years ago. My mom described her upbringing as "schizophrenic" because her mother was an Italian Norman and her father was a French Swiss/Irish Norman. So... Norman on both sides of a European merchant family who traded widely around Europe? Oh...Sensing a rip in "The Force" that was more like trying to eat one decent meal with my mother without a violently hysterical drama of "high-highs" and "low-lows" accompanied with laughter that dissolved into tears (because I'm not manic depressive, which one can easily prove nowadays with all sorts of handy medical exams), my mom would poke at my questions to her like she was doing laundry for three days straight, in an order that only she can possibly navigate with her extreme brand of hypervigilance. Neat!

She'd go on to describe different cultural rituals to me that she had to toggle between growing up, like funeral services between the two clans. Uh huh. "Very strange to me! The Italians eat and cry, and the Irish drink and laugh!", which is pretty much lifting a scene straight out of Dom DeLuise's movie "Fatso" that her and her sisters approved of as appropriate dinner table conversation, because they found it funny to be portrayed as food addicts in a real movie, while totally missing the point that being sick is not the same as being famous, even for the dubious distinction of eating like there's no tomorrow. They each have variations of the same eating disorder, which they colorize as being "completely different" from one another, when it's obviously the same genetic disease spread around them as immediate siblings.

My mom is a food hoarder like her siblings, but she "controls it" with yet another nifty game of vigilance, through the constant monitoring of exactly how many boxes of crackers and cookies she has, and if you touch one without asking, she MUST replace it in a never-ending cycle that I disembark from as soon as possible because, once again, I do not share their cheerful problems with food. Haha! It's funny, right? Her youngest sister complained about caring for my beautiful grandmother who supported her all of her lazy life, until we all sent her free food that she promptly rejected as "too healthy", which she hid in closets stuffed with clothes and papers. That's one way to create a sick house for the elderly: being sick yourself! Needless, I had a professional healthcare worker tend to my lovely grandmama, who can attest to this day about her beauty and grace that I've told you about already.

My mom's middle sister has the worst food addiction, which she is very proud of, like she won the top blue-ribbon prize at a country fair pie-eating contest. Much like a drunk doesn't really give a shit about what type of beer he/she drinks, my mom's sister "gets off" on making horrible food (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/12/swap.html), so she can monitor you eating it and then ask you a sneaky series of oddly intense questions about it that you have to avoid like a live minefield, or she explodes into a psychotic fit of barely suppressed rage. My grandparents called her "Harpo" after the famous "Marx Brothers" character who can't speak, because she becomes mute with shock around normal people, and she looks like a man. Attractive, right? No! Wrong! That's why she pretends to us that her disgusting bland food is like having sex (to have a good story to tell in group therapy, like auditioning for "Dr. Phil", duh. Lots of competition in New York for top t.v. spots!), except without any pleasure to be had from it whatsoever, unless you are the exact same kind of weird closet case as her, which changes upon exposure of it with a big handy bunch of lies at the ready, like the fork she HAS TO eat with.

The prize pig in the bunch is my mom's youngest sister who (last I heard) wanted to die from the cheap chemical filler Aspartame and its subsequent poisoning (http://aspartame.mercola.com/), because she also has an anxiety disorder that makes her a total chickenshit, which is an ironic Hell I could have never designed for her. She's too scared to commit suicide! Oh, dear. She's addicted to fast food and that's not a new trend, which is unfortunate in her t.v.-addict world that blurs the line with reality, greatly assisted by a bunch of prison/welfare queen lesbians who like to drink, do drugs, fight, and...well, they can't show you the sex, unless you pay extra somewhere else for it, because every stripper/hooker has a cheap porno site on the side to supplement her "baby daddy" child support. Again: duh. You're sooo naive!

She also likes to huff plastic and hoard dollar store crap, which is also not an original thing for Wal-Mart addicts/shoppers who got the jump on their "lifestyle choices" out in the MidWest many many years ago, without benefit of the two hip, smart, native New York parents she had, the very same people who helped raise me. Isn't that ironic? Or don't you think? I call it a "Guinea" foul! What do you call it with your family? Let's discuss it amongst ourselves.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=guinea

Rush

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28biology%29

Close to the city as we were, my family were natural experts in the dramatic arts, seeking out occasions that best displayed those skills to an audience up close and personal. To this day, my mom still stages tense little dramas to give color to her day by using anyone available to her to indulge her weird whims. Lately, she's become a little too glittery and shiny in the eyes over me standing by her kitchen sink, which is one of the great joys of her life. She calls the mundane chore of washing the same pots and pans over and over again as "playing with the dishes", and in order to safeguard her treasure trove of washables for later on when she's alone to savor it gloriously, she monitors me moving around her small apartment-style kitchenette while I do something as banal as making her a cup of tea. Sometimes, she'll complain that I move "too quickly", which is her special top- secret kooky code for "I can't hypervigilantly follow your movements so as to draw freaky vibes from your handling of my precious dishes (she hoards paper in times of stress, too), so I will find some way to demean/abuse/harass you while you are in my area of keen interest."

Oh. So, I'm not your biological girl-child that you pushed out during childbirth, right? And that's actually the reality behind it. In the middle of my mom's worst head-case scenarios, I can be anyone who is blocking her road to success by "incorrectly" moving a pair of "her" glasses out of my way on "her" countertop. If I've learned anything from shows like "Hoarders" and "Taboo: Obejctum Sexuals", it's that people with compulsive obsessive addictive personality identity disorders over-personalize objects to such an extant that they exalt them far above over actual lifeforms as a priority in their lives, which is inherently incorrect in modern Homosapien. It's like this mad, sickening, crazy tilt-a-whirl of a ride that the afflicted can't get disembark from, covert as my mom's expert stylings have become over the years.

Like most seriously sick people, my mom has had to reorient her "fetishes" (her word for it, not mine, because I simply see dishes in a sink, not a soapy fairy tail of fun that's a portal to a mythical magical Neverland) in between the noticing of healthy sharp observers like myself, which is exactly why she abuses me (and anyone else) who encroaches upon "her" territories overmuch, like a rabid weasel protecting its young. She's turned boring household chores into quick conduits for biologically addictive chemical payoffs for her benefit only, like a junkie becomes an adept thief at stealing away in the middle of the night to shoot up in lots of creative ways that you and I would never think about, even during our most feverishly delusional states.

The other night, I saw an episode of "Law and Order: SVU" that totally blew my mind in its' accounts of dementia. While the detectives worked a murder case about a neurotic young woman pressed by her evil boss overmuch (they were "besties" at work!), who turned to the cold comforts of alcohol consumption and promiscuous sex over say, consulting a good doctor and getting a better job (locked as she was in a highly tense and very stressful lesbo push-and-pull with her crazy, short-haired boss over pressing deadlines that are such a rush in the workplace, if only you put off everything until the last minute), the medical examiner told them this handy little bon mot about drunks: that their victim hadn't been sexually abused by a stalking rapist. No, it was much fucking weirder than that. She used a wine bottle to push the booze directly up her butt to absorb its intoxicating elixir, which has the added bonus of keeping one's breath fresh, too. Neat, huh?

The resident M.E. went on to further explain other covert methods of alcohol addiction, like the ever-useful "Vodka Tampon" that some nifty co-eds like to use: simply soak aforementioned tampon in a glass of booze before hitting class, insert it, then go go go! I was like, what the fuck, people?! It's so fucking convoluted and weird, you should know that's why those girls wind up on a slab in their 20s and 30s; not because I forgot the key combination of event sequences for their maximum enjoyment, like the types of sponges I HAVE TO use at my mom's place (one sponge is for the dishes, and the other one is just for the countertops and they MUST BE disinfected in the microwave periodically because germs kill just like in that scifi show about zombies you got me hooked on and now I HAVE TO watch it and buy the books and all the paraphernalia and its all your fault because you're here and why are you here, no wait, it makes sense you HAVE TO let me explain it all to you in overwrought detail!), because I must be the reason that my mom does laundry and "plays" with her sink full of dishes every night until three or four in the morning. She just gets a mysterious jolt of energy at those times before the lethargy sets in every "morning" at noon, when she finally wakes up after 3 or 4 cups of black sugared coffee!

Just like any type of foreign criminal mindset that's completely batshit, it's not so much that my mom has cleverly hid her illnesses from me (hiding in plain sight as they are), it's just that it's so petty and strange to normal people like me that we could care less, and that's the point of it: if you hide your false enjoyment over common activities, you can get high from the tension that exists only in your stupid mind, because the person in "your" area doesn't know that you wiped your finger over your butthole in the bathroom, exited, then wiped your grody pinkie finger over said hated person's objects ("they" shouldn't be there anyway!), so only you know how bad it is when "they" dare to pick up "your" butt pen. It's sort of like being around that crazy bitch from a typical bunny boiler horror movie who sticks a toothbrush up her butt because that prettier roommate just has to go (tusually me in a staged role that only she knows about, teeheehee), especially if she's straight and there are "too many" handsome boys hanging around all the time, because she's just "too pretty, you know?"

Therefore, we must die, or at least get sick from your urine in the company coffeepot, because we also dared to live and breathe and not notice your crazy, or the highs you get from that huge bottle of mouthwash in the company bathroom, you fucked up, overgrown sorority girl, because deep-down you know we just don't fucking care about your weirdo routines, unless you make them an instrument of horror, devastation, and abuse. Then, after you've set the stage with your powerfully totemic "special" objects, you can kill me off or at the very least get my mom to snap out because you moved something around of hers that you know will cause a meltdown, Bernadette, you fucking bitch of a cave troll. No more "high life" from this clan, starting today. Go huff plastic from a bargain store elsewhere, hag. We get it. We know! And we can totally see all those invisible germs crawling over your skin, and the aliens are coming to take you away with those anal probes that they do because....the truth is out there. Love, X.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_%281996_film%29

High Anxiety

Compulsive patterns are hard to break. Just ask my mom. Like many women of her generation (pre-Baby Boomer and post-Gen X), she struggled to assimilate herself into a world not of her choosing. Underneath the burdens of her innate challenges, she tried to figure out who she was, without any of the guidance that we have now, thanks to the narcissistic angst of the modern "Special Needs" parent and their Autistic kids. Like them, questions about gender/identity are particularly difficult.

Imagine worrying over the very existence that you and I take for granted everyday, like: who you are attracted to and what do you do about it? They painstakingly work at the core of who they might be with a therapist over some of our most basic human instincts, like a learning-impaired child with dyslexia trying to assemble the puzzle pieces that words represent. Can you imagine that? 

No wonder the disordered reach out wrongly (now numbered as 5 out of 6 people, or 8 out of 10), seeking shelter from the storms that brew inside their heads. Lashing out feels better than trying to understand their garbled perceptions of human speech, because concepts need to be labored over later, when they feel like they can process our communications better, with the guidance of an expert who's researched brain disorders for many years.

It was in this way that I came to accept my mission of breaking through to my own mother's badly broken brain (and becoming an excellent mother way before my actual biologically appropriate time), stuttered and repetitive as it is. When she "argues" with me (and it really isn't arguing to me, because I'm in control while she is not, and she doesn't like that), it's to release the pent-up stress that is the result of her disorders and illnesses.

Even worse for my mom is the trap her education brings to her incorrect assumptions and improper responses, like: how can she have me as a brilliant daughter, when she's the one who studied science? She doesn't understand that genius is genetic and many-abled, because she feels her arrogance must be vigilantly guarded, lest the knowledge from all of her over-wrought degrees (that all of us supported her in having), evaporate in an instant, like her mental faculties do during her sickest times.

In compensation for her low points, she learned to cover up her chronically anti-social behavior (like many people suffering with serious brain disorders do, to avoid detection as a life strategy), by re-orientating them around more conventionally disorientating events, like flying in an airplane, which is a common enough phobia that passes as a legitimate non-mental illness she can play to the hilt by letting her anxieties out under that appropriate cloud cover. She channels nervousness and anxietty brought on by ordinary events (that would surely reveal the depths of her diseases) into everyday compulsions that appear harmless on the surface, like washing dishes or folding laundry.

The problem with that is that she never learned to express her incorrect trains of thought accurately (which don't hold up under careful scrutiny well), because those conversations would reveal her serious compulsive-obsessivenesss that she inappropriately feels she can manage because she studied botany in school over sixty years ago. It doesn't make any sense, and a closer examination of her reasoning process reveals to a studied scholar (like me) exactly why doing laundry is not the same as genuine grief, which she will do anything to avoid, because emotional pain feels likee the psychic pain that is her life.

In avoidance of feeling feelings that are crucial to our health (like how a good night's sleep eludes her during the manic stress that occurs around heightened emotional times like holiday seasons, some of the worst emotional stress our mentally ill family members have), many people like her hoard and over-attach emotions to objects that have no real significance, then work a complex scheme to cover it up, like causing a hysterical fight over blinds that were raised slightly askew. For example, when my grandmother died, I mourned her thoroughly. I felt sadness, a deep sense of loss, and also a joy at having known her. I would not be me without her. Such was the gift that a life like hers brings, so that a big void is necessarily left in her wake. 

I don't dislike feeling very strong emotions, because I know I can process them correctly over time with an appropriate thought process, but the most disordered among us sometimes can't even get out of bed in the morning (my mom gets that typical manic-depressive "surge" of energy at night, because she also has Circadian Rhythm Disorder, sometimes puttering around until 4:30 a.m.), let alone contemplate concepts like life and death. They break life down into superficial, bite-sized bits that become extremely unproductive over time, especially in isolation, causing the abuse that they feel they need to keep their "creature comforts" in place that are signs of severe emotional distress.

Case in point, my mom has a big healthcare appointment coming up, which is a symptom of her holiday stress. Doctor appointments are often used to block out emotions she can't handle, so she tap-dances around her mental illnesses by using more socially acceptable illnesses as cover-ups. Like a lot of chronically sick people, she is disturbed by old-fashioned ideas about mental institutions that no longer exist, but she doesn't know that. Her brain just tells her to avoid detection at all costs, even if it leads to the death of a loved one, which she will regret later on after her fugue state has passed. My mom has had to retract her false claims of "elder abuse" thrown at me during her life stress (under threat of legal prosecution by family who has also been falsely accused by her), because she couldn't handle my hard move from Brooklyn that was tied to her basement area as my storage unit, and the use of her car for me to painfully move all my stuff by myself over the course of three days.

After I told her on the last day that I was too tired to do the psychotherapy she needed to "see" my stuff in her basement (which would have been too grueling for me to supervise, because her delusions make her MS symptoms worse, and I was already physically exhausted), so I simply told her: "I have nothing left to give", which is her worst nightmare. She called the cops for me not being her nursemaid during my hardest time. That's it. In fact, the policemen who responded to her panicky call have picked her up off the floor before, through her Life Alert system, one that took years for us to enforce properly with her, and then she failed a basic recognition test. "Nope, never seen you before", as he reminded her that he was there for her when she broke her shoulder in seven places, because he picked her up off the floor and called for an ambulance.

He then administered the same test with me, and I responded correctly that he and I had never met before at my mother's house, which was true. It was already over with at that point, even as my mom told him I was "nuts" because she is mad, something authority figures often hear: the classically immature "I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I" speech given in lieu of a more carefully reasoned rationale. The jig was up and he and I knew it, as we exchanged pointed glances she missed during her diva crisis about me not emotionally catering to her during my real life event, which is part of a destructive family pattern firmly in place. He warned her then that she had no legal right to lock me out because I had already established residency, which she promptly forgot as soon as they walked away, by trying to slam the door in my face again.

I then called the two officers now present back to her rapidly closing front door, as they warned her once again (repetition is commonplace for Special Needs people) that she has no legal right to change the locks on me, because delusional paranoid states are some of the most challenging times of communication with the sick who walk, talk, work, and live among us. She might not actually have any memories attached to my stress, because as soon as she is calmed, soothed, and stroked like a puppy, she forgets about other people, even the ones she gave birth to, which she naturally doesn't remember well, because "they" gave her ether during her labors, as she lay unconscious from heavy sedation. "Yeah, one minute I'm in labor, and the next thing I had a baby!", she likes to tell me. And how...exactly? "I don't know! I was 'out' like a light!", which is unlike any birthing experience I've ever seen or heard of.

That's the crux of it in a nutshell: stress and panic reorient her chemically addicted brain to use other people as her drug to get high off of, as serious a sickness as any strung-out heroin junkie. Right now, she's busy nursing the high from her next doctor's appointment, which happens next week, resulting in typical conversations like "I can't think of anything right now! I 'have to' (and it's always HAVE TO) focus on my mouth pain and 'getting through' (like some soldier in combat) my appointment next week. Once that's over, I can 'focus' again"!, which is pure bullshit. She doesn't ever snap to "after" her moments, but the deferred payment program helps her to successfully avoid stressful times, like birthdays and Christmases, especially if she falsely pads her schedule to be artificially busy, as clever a deceit as any con by a really good cat burglar.

She's totally full of shit about being present and available for you somewhere off in the distant future when she feels better (because I fix what's wrong while she's on the nod), and that's just the way addicts like it: they can get high off of you during their blackout times, even when she remembers days, weeks, and months later that she just abused the one woman around her who's healthy enough to keep her alive, and that's me. Then, in the middle of the night when no one's around to see her or help her, she cries herself to sleep, because she remembers that she almost killed me through abuse and neglect. 

And that's the worse part of it all: that a smart woman who can make me a perfect grilled cheese is alone by herself every night, remembering in one big flood of emotions that the genuine love she feels for me was replaced by an extremely violent hate that is psychosis. That's what I cannot abide by any longer, and neither should you. We want more for you. We want you to get better. We. Want. More. I want a real mother. I want the woman who worked at the Botanical Gardens, who taught me all about the native trees, plants, and flowers we love that we can also point out and name together in Latin or French, as well as English. That's who I want back. You can keep the abusive, obsessive-compulsive addict this Christmas.

Freefall

"Tales from the Office Crypt" are always strange. Nothing says horror to me better than a bunch of mindlessly programmed office drones just waiting to die, by miserably hanging on to jobs they hate year after year. Have you ever walked among the living dead? Horrid territory to cross, and we all have the stories to prove it. With that in mind, let's dive right into this cheerful holiday season's major bummer, that of the careerist suicide. They walk among you every single day, whether or not you're aware of them, though by their shuffling ineptitude, the object is more like "passing" for being alive over life itself. It's a cheap con game for suckers.

You've met part of my extensive cast of characters by now, some more memorable than others, with the understanding that boring weirdos probably go out of their way to shock me, because appearing here is about as close to Broadway and the big-time as they'll ever get. "Lisa the Average Designer" was one of those types. She's about as bland as you can get, which is her life strategy for getting by; being as nondescript as possible so as to not arouse, well, anything from anyone. It's the office version of "playing possum", which is actually a really good practice for being dead, and given her dreadful output of work, I'd bet that one really good clear scanning of her brain would show her to be more dead than alive. Hurry! Someone unplug her before she dies on her feet!

One dull day in the generic office that never changed was her annual diving down into the holiday blues, greatly aided and assistance by a near-constant daily dose of Valium that she liked to brag to me about, as if heavy usage of addictive narcotics on the job was as glamorous as a lesbian love affair in prison, which it isn't. She mechanically stumbled around the place like a ghost already dead in the land of the living, moving only to lurch awkwardly between the lunch room for free coffee and then back to her computer, her dead eyes neither noting anyone nor saying anything, which clearly telegraphed the message to her co-workers that she wasn't all there, because she isn't.

It was in this cheerful spirit of giving that Lisa decided to finally cough up a real story about her past abuses on the job, like the annual horrorfest that is the big company Christmas Party, a dreadfully forced gaiety requiring strong drinks, loosened neck ties, and even looser tongues. Her clammed-up tight PTSD from too many burnout years on the same job heightened the bombed-out demeanor she had as a refugee of publishing wars. One infamous company routinely bulk hired (and then bulk fired) every few years as a solid financial strategy that wrecked every life it destroyed, by artificially buoying up hopes that maybe this year would be different, though in reality, they just shuffled employees around the industry based on their bottom lines. Middle-manager? You're in, just don't dare ask for that raise so your kid can go to college.

Like the cafeteria here? Great! Just clam up and take it when that incompetent manager asks you to cover for him once again, because he/she sleeps with half the office, and blackmail ruins lives. Lisa was a typical Baby Boomer lay-off from a company so famously abusive in the industry, that their one-time CEO was well-known for his practice of firing new hires on their first day for stepping into the building's elevator while he was in it (which was part of HR's strategy for quickly dispatching of people who escaped their dysfunctional notice first time around, or who had an "in" to the company that superseded their bullshit "decision-making process" cronyism that didn't match their "corporate culture as a fit") in lieu of actually publishing that as part of his company's policy in their employee handbook for all to see, which could be pursuant as an action made through proper legal channels. 

Fun, right? Wait, there's more to get you "in the mood" for this holiday time of year! Do you like those free flu shots from the company nurse? How about the "free" spinning classes in the corporate gym? So good, right? Right? And yet, despite all of the crap they shoveled down her throat, she still maintained to her last day there (in full earshot of her "new" company because her deaf ass yelled all her answers to me), that she would leave the gig where I worked alongside her like that <snapping fingers>, if they would only just call her back. But, why is that so bad? OK. I'll tell you why.

Because in addition to the mad editor who hoarded so much that he lived (with company permission) in his office, eating off of a hotplate placed near a huge stack of highly flammable papers, you know, since we print books on paper in publishing. Did she ever report him to HR as a fire hazard? Nope. Not once. And that was the bargain she made: ignore the kooks and the crazies, under pain of firing. So, what did you do with the layouts, I asked her? I had to know. "Oh, I just placed them near his hot plate without disturbing anything, or, if he wasn't there, left it on his seat." Yeah! Makes total sense. She was that desperate to belong to a big, name-brand house.

It all culminated in the annual Christmas party, when another editor decided he'd had enough, so he jumped out of the window during canapes and cocktails. Yep, that's what she told me, with absolutely no shame or embarrassment whatsoever. Yeah, she laughed dryly, because she has such a great sense of humor. "We had to go back to our offices because the party was over, and then HR made all of us who were there talk to the company therapist." And...did you? Yeah, she said, but I was fine. She sold her soul a long time ago anyway, but that she didn't speak to me. I already knew she was dead inside.

For all of my brothers and sisters fighting the good fight today and every day, I urge you to seek counsel during stressful holiday seasons when you are particularly prone to depression. I don't want to see you go down like that. Suicide is for punks who can't handle life, and chronic clinical depression combined with alcoholism is no joke. For family and friends of patients in care this year, make sure they double up on "the goods" by taking more meds than usual if necessary to get by, under strict supervision of a doctor. You don't want to walk around with the pain of their murder lying heavily on your heart. Trust me. You don't want that. You can't handle it. G-d bless you this year.

 For you, Jimmy: http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/07/jimmy-od.html