The Geographic Cure

The "Four Corners" of the American West exemplifies the idea that we are tied to our native lands by much more than a superficial connection, because any tourist who's been there can tell you that the biggest distinguishing feature to the monument is the same dusty red dirt on all four sides. Where does one state begin and the other end? Without a marker, you might not ever know.

That's not to say that it doesn't mean something to the people who live there. I hiked Harriman Park one summer several times with my dad, and for me, it became a lesson in identifying the landscape: first were the sticker bushes at the beginning of the trail, a small hillside with a dead deer slowly decaying, then a stand of pines above a waterfall, next to a rock quarry. By memorizing it, I was able to find my way in and out of the mountain, day or night. Those woods became home to me.

Most borderlines are like that, too: clearly defined by mountain chains, big lakes, or an entire ocean, just as I know that my eczema is worse in the warmer weather of New York because I'm missing the cold water seafood of Nova Scotia. And no, I can't pop a couple of pills or pile on expensive (and probably toxic) prescription-only lotions, gels, and salves. My body IS the land that I come from, so closely is our health reliant on this connection.

Armed with knowledge and experience, I avoided most of the pitfalls that accompany people who move around frequently. I didn't (and don't) pretend that a different view or country will cure or improve the human condition, as much as I can accurately recognize what a real home is, what "home" means to me, and when it isn't that, unlike many of my friends and peers who feel that changing locales is like going to a fun, new, costume party every single night of the week.

At its worst? An old college classmate of mine who was a typical Middle American cheerleader from Minnesota, then a fashion designer all about clothes and arty trends, and then a burnt-out Californian in her 30s and 40s just looking to "mellow out and chase waves", when she'd once been afraid of swimming alone in the Atlantic Ocean without her native Northeastern friends by her side in the water. Of course, besides the outfit changes lies her serious case of manic-depression that's incurable, which is the real "final frontier" for us, as human beings: the inner-space of our minds, filled as they may be with the broken dreams of what might've been. It's time to come home.

After Midnight

Despite occasional harsh prejudices to the contrary, I remain an unpopular "day person" awake in the dawn of your socially acceptable manic-depression. In my small town of Pearl River, only two businesses operate 24/7, 365 days/year: the convenient store on the corner doing a brisk business in chemically-laden tobacco, booze, energy drinks, junk food, and lotto tickets, or the chain drugstore right across the street with its handy drive-up window. 

It speaks to our priorities about what we feel is most important to us in our lives, and it's the commercialized convenience of excess, which makes my natural body-clock jarring to the pale shakiness of a typical "night owl". Nor does it stop at a simple day/night dichotomy either, observed through the touchy tenderness about "alternative" circadian rhythms. It was in this vein that I suffered through each and every New Year's Eve with my mom growing up, who gets a "jolt of energy" (her words) between 10-11 p.m., moving around her carefully controlled, highly monitored "home environment" (her words again) to wash dishes and do laundry, then check her emails until 12 p.m.-1:30 a.m., unless of course I want to watch the UFC fights in her apartment airing "late" that end around her usual bedtime of 2:00 a.m. Then, my entire life and schedule is immediately suspect and abused.

It didn't matter how much my mom and her freaky friends or family "made fun" of me for sleeping at night, even if it was New Year's Eve. When you wake up between 6-7 a.m. in the morning, you go to sleep in the evening whether you want to or not, and that's healthy, except if you're paranoid and bipolar. Then, it's the complete opposite. Most of the seriously disordered people I know crave sugar, caffeine, or cocaine to get that rush when the depressive side of their illness kicks in, making them miss active late nights over a feeble, disabling, daytime lethargy. Of course, I can stay up for an event if I plan for it, but if I don't have to, I don't. It's simple: no dinner date or late-nite party to attend, I'm asleep. And I'll probably be working the next day. 

So, to all you lone wolves regularly sleeping with the sun like I do, know that you're not alone in your healthy sleep habits this New Year's Eve. And no, Jane, there's nothing wrong with getting a full 8-9 hours of sleep, despite peer pressure or what you've been told about "peak performance hours" for "maximum productivity". They're marketing buzzwords for anxiety and mania, anyway. Have a good night's sleep, and I'll see you all in 2017, fans of daytime. G-d bless. 

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/

Shock to the System

Lately I've been seeing a building rhetoric grow in popular media outlets that suggest electroshock therapy as a cruel and inhumane practice, even though it isn't designed to be so. If you ever met a violently-shaking schizophrenic or a severely distressed bipolar individual who's completely disassociated from reality (and has been so for days, manically cycling through a series of brain traumas that cannot correct themselves on their own), it's easy to point fingers around the medical community that treats the sickest kinds of people living among us.

It's illogical to assume that currents targeted to specific areas of the brain (that are already shutting down) would be overly harmful, since a severely dysfunctional brain is significantly handicapped to begin with. We run on electricity! All lifeforms on earth are held sway under the same natural principles of Applied physics, and our bodies (with brains) are no different. Would you ask a heart patient to remove his or her life-saving pacemaker just to suit your irrational fears about electrical currents and the mechanical devices made to heal them?

It seems cruel when I phrase it that way, right? And it is. We should be open to any healing practice that has years of solid science backing it. I know mental illness is scary. We've all been victimized by chronic abuse, most often at the hands of the seriously disordered, and isn't that reason enough to keep these kinds of helpful methods around? Any empirical scientist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence) would read the same data that I did, to come back to the same place. If it works, it works. Who are we to question someone else's healing? Let. It. Be.

Forget what you've seen in those old movies (based on better books) about cuckoo birds, insane nurses, and wrongfully-imprisoned Indians who seem harmless until they're violently tripped off. When was the last time you stepped over a homeless individual on the streets, yo? Like, yesterday, New Yorker?! We're confronted with illness every day. It ain't just hype when you confront damage like that, is it? It's real. People need understanding; not fear and ignorance. You need to heal. It's time.

Know the facts, first: 
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
- http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/electroconvulsive-therapy/basics/definition/prc-20014161
- http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/electroconvulsive-therapy
- http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/ect
- https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Treatment/ECT,-TMS-and-Other-Brain-Stimulation-Therapies

Getaway Car

Takashi Hososhima from Tokyo, Japan

My ex Dave was known by a few choice nicknames at Oneonta, notorious as he was for his good-looking "bad boy" ways, at a school famous for being the hardest partying school in the entire S.U.N.Y. school system back then. We called him "Dangerous" (because he was, to himself and others, but more for him than me), and "Mad Dog", because he raged at the machine like he was alien to it, which he was. His parents were high school sweethearts who thought much higher of themselves than two hard-partying, working class kids from upstate New York should have, and that was Dave's biggest problem.

They coddled him for being sick and beautiful, just like they did his older sister. Their kids had certain rock star components that they couldn't back up intellectually, which always left them frustrated, angry, confused, and feeling alone, attacking anyone around them during certain phases of the moon, like the half-deranged mixed Indians they are. It was maddening, because they can plateau for a few good years of productive work before bottoming out during their up-and-down cycles that characterizes the average manic-depressive. I hated it for them, but that was the best I could do without some hardcore medical back-up, which his parents refused to acknowledge, because it meant drying out for all of them (at the same time), as a lifestyle change too significant for arrogant Baby Boomers who refused to grow-up, stuck in their down cycles like the mental children they are.

They can shop and they can consume, and at their heights, they can party with the best of us, but during their dark times, they become rabid beasts unwilling to take a simple anti-depressant pill that's been around for ages, because their character flaws (like their arrogance) won't allow them to admit that they need medical help, minor as the cure sometimes is. It saddened me as I watched them make asses out of themselves in public from the sidelines of their disorders, powerless as you are when they are in the grip of their madness and addictions, knowing that one good doctors' visit is all they really need. Have you ever known someone like that?

I bet you have. Heart-breaking, isn't it? They were gorgeous on the outside only and deeply flawed from within, like a lunatic lion with his lioness, suffering from the same thorn in their paw that you can only pull out for them so many times. Get a grip, man, and get help, will you?! At the end of it (with certain types of Indo-Europeans), that's really the best you can do for them, by backing away to give them the space they need to disappear into the bottom of a bottle, and hope that they can finally learn to see through the haze of booze and their own distorted visions. It's actually born of a cowardice that can seem shockingly needy and co-dependent to healthy people, which is part of why they don't last that long around us.

You can either a) take care of them (for their families), or b) watch them they cling to someone else, like a barnacle stuck on the side of a rapidly wrecking ship that's taking on massive amounts of water. If you aren't a fucked-up "enabler" (and I most definitely not that), there's nothing in it for us to watch someone fall down drunk and then stagger slowly to their feet once again. It's sheer torture to watch sick people do that to themselves without reaching for help that's often inches away. So, I simply didn't do it after awhile, because getting ego-gratification from propping up a sick person is often ten times more sick than being the alcoholic him/herself. Know what I mean? What kind of sick fuck does that weird shit with loved ones, over and over again in a broken-down cycle? Not me!

Still, I loved Dave for loving me for so long behind my back (I admired his loyalty with its requisite hidden agendas attached) and he was incredibly physically beautiful, which warped his poor mind into further social distortion, because he couldn't handle his own looks. Some folks think it's "fun" to be almost inhumanly gorgeous but it's actually really scary, and it never goes away. People act so fucking weird and abusive to you, it's insane, and it's their kind of weirdness, not yours. People have these strange ideas that it's like wearing a pricey fur coat, or buying really expensive shiny jewelery that you can take on-and-off whenever you feel like it, but it sure as fuck isn't that. It's bone deep and it stays with you, despite weight loss (or weight gain), seasons of the year, age, hair color, skin tone, hair, or any other kind of superficial shit that average people get wrong all the time.

They thought (because their parents taught it to them) that they could barter off their beauty like their were prostitutes, which they sometimes verged on becoming, trading off their looks for petty shit like money, jobs, purses, and cars, as objects that are easily given and just as easily taken away. I thought they were dumb college kids saddled with their parents false expectations about creating scholars out of thin air without any effort, which is total bullshit. Ask any teacher. And that was it, too: we knew they were doomed to fail, because it remains the established pattern backing their disorders.

As working class New Yorkers, me and my best friend Karen were way beyond sympathetic to their pain. We lived with it at home with our own families, and because we'd already seen so many people go down as teenagers, you take the chance to help a brother out, man, when you can. You don't easily pass that up. They were more than our friends. They were family, and you don't disrespect soulful people in pain, you know? We were in it together. I didn't want to just help, I wanted to help them heal along with me, as we returned home to our families armed with knowledge and information, as they still struggled in pain. As soon as we learned lessons in college, we almost immediately tried applying it with vigorous strength to the family living in our homes, whether it worked or not, though we desperately hoped it would. What do you think motivates two teenage girls from roughly abusive families, besides minimum wage and part-time work?

We put our very heart and souls into the fight for our lives and the lives of the people around us who were drowning in drugs and alcohol, thanking our lucky stars everyday for the better health we felt so fortunate to have, hard as we worked for it. We knew they weren't made of the same stuff as us, but oh, did we want to help a brother out. It became the stuff our lives were made of, too, our life's mission and raison d'etre for being in it with them, for as long as we could manage it. It meant (and still means) that much to us. And so, when they fell down, we picked them up time after time (actually physically picking them up and supporting their often greater weights, athletes that we all are), and carrying them back home to the safety of our humble houses that we held together with our love, blood, sweat, and tears, but it wasn't something we could do on our salaries for very long, without facing down the fear of bankruptcy, which I finally did.

It went far beyond kicking someone when they were down, because we'd seen it up close for far too long, even though I'd escaped some of the worst facets of addictive disorders from my parents abilities to maintain drug- and alcohol-free existences for periods of time, weird as their disorders expressed themselves in other areas of their lives. Without healing madness at the root of it, it simply went into different odder directions, sublimated into an ever-stranger series of "fetishes" (self-described to me), like obsessive counting games, or folding laundry long into the night. We'd seen it's weirdness up close-and-personal in the people closest to us, as the very people who gave birth to us, and we hated their diseases with a passion that fueled our work at an almost inhuman pace, as we frantically tried to outpace their madness, sometimes falling down hard in the face of it by becoming overwhelmed, awash and swamped by the sheer number of illnesses we had to bear up under and support on a woman's salary.

We carried them as long as we could, and then we had to cut the chord to save ourselves, an enormously humble and selfless act that is not for juniors or beginners. Don't do it like we did, unless you have our gifts and genius, okay? Don't try this at home, folks, and don't "go it" alone. Gird yourself with as many strong healthy warriors as you can, and fire at it with everything you have in your arsenal, because that's exactly what I'm doing with you who are along for the ride today with me, out there in my audience, thinking that you're alone. You are not.

For all of David's supposed bravado in the face of life's challenges (as well as the normal day-to-day stuff he shied away from, too), at home he was just another scared New York kid too afraid to drive a car from my aunts' Brooklyn apartment to our parent's houses upstate. Despite his exaggerated tales of car chases and bank robberies gone wrong, you should know, my dear friends, that it was always just me driving him in-and-out of the city in the early morning light to avoid traffic, tourists, and fast-moving cabs that could cut you off at any moment, because he simply didn't have it in him to navigate an urban jungle as deadly as my native New York City. I did. You should know that.

Wired

Wired Anxiety (Wikimedia Commons)

For years I've trucked through many different kinds of creative crowds, ones that are particularly acute, emotional, and open by nature, as we're taught and so inclined. Through the years, we've openly discussed just about any facet of the human experience fit for talk, and some things not so carefully done. Artists creatively problem-solve in many different types of ways, so obsessive chatter from neurotics tend to grate on our collective nerves after awhile, like watching a dog run around in circles without benefit of a funny video online, and you are that dysfunctional unfunny human to us. Where exactly are is this going? Brainstorming is fun, if it produces something eventually.

Like many artistic people, I've struggled in the past with blowhard college boyfriends who spent a lot of time tanked on talk, high on way more than actual learning. My first real boyfriend was the first person to openly admit to me that he vastly preferred natural biochemistry to artificially-induced ones, expensive as drugs tend to be, because of the vulnerable compulsiveness that actively marks addiction. He seemed to think that higher learning meant you could ramble on about any crazy idea that you had out loud to anyone in the room, rather than internalizing concepts or, even better, writing them down cohesively, but that's why he's an entertainment lawyer who guards artistic paychecks that he's dependent on for a living, and you read me instead of listening to him talk, not that he didn't try every trick in the book to knock me down as many pegs above him as I was.

My father and every one of my brothers hated him for being the all-boys prep-school quarterback he bragged about endlessly, along with his pretensions towards greatness for being a blue-eyed French Canadian/Irish guy living in our world on the east coast. Yeah, dubious at best. It was until years later that I saw him accurately depicted in the awesome comedy "Wedding Crashers" (he finally realized his media dreams of fame!), through Bradley Cooper's dead-on impression of a back-stabbing bitch of a boyfriend with serious homoerotic issues that I realized how many of my friends, family, and acquaintances despised him, which happily brings us together, here on my site today: a place where we can all get along, and group grievances are finally aired out in the open...not that he did any of that.

He plays a lot of "head games" that go nowhere and do nothing, which I often found to be more common among non-creatives, because they have to wait while we make the work the world uses, as a set of people that I sometimes feel sorry for, because they're relegated to the sidelines of life while the big hitters take the risks that earn the big glory. He can't do that because of his disorders (among them addiction, compulsiveness, Lupus, and a big case of "asshole"), but that doesn't stop him from trying hard to impress. I've always hated his egotism based on being a "serious scholar", which often means he spends a lot of time trying to marginalize the star power on center stage ineffectively (ironic as his job must be for him), and that's what I remember most about him now, besides his chemical addictions; an insecurity so violent, he loses way more ground than he gains.

He tried hard to convince me that I was dumb (because I'm an artist, so "genius=stupid", I guess), and often "crazy" over serious family problems that I didn't control as a working class teenage girl, and that my "partying" was motivated from the same interesting, glamorous manic ennui as his that he would only obliquely refer to in "nonversations" that didn't matter, with people too stoned or drunk to care about his points, because directly addressing his issues would make him lose precious leverage in society, even though as a spoiled white boy from a poncy private school, he had all the power then.

It was desperate and striving, character flaws that I finally couldn't forgive or put up with anymore, along with the many unsolicited hours of boredom he would bring to the card table, when all we really wanted to do back then was play drinking games and have fun during our precious off-hours from work, or school, or both. I have never forgotten his immature pillow-talk about his chemical addictions that I thought were just puppy love ravings over my sexual prowess, and the desire for me that he channeled into his "highs" that he could yank me around with, though given the difference in our looks and status, it was highly unlikely to ever pan out. It was okay if he was moodily and maudlin, but if I had an actual serious illness, I was "weak" and I'd never be "virile" like him (see also: "Gaston"), though in reality, he's the one with the in vitro triplets and I'm the one with the long-lived fertility.

If I spent a lazy summer drowsing and dreaming, I was a bad housewife hurting my chances at a favorable marriage with him in the future, because I didn't get twitchy or itchy from seeing dishes in the sink. If I had a hard time managing my very sick and very large extended family as a working young woman in school, it was obviously because I was too stupid to do so; I couldn't read books like he could as a history major (because I'd already spent my youth reading as many books as I could find), and that must be sad. All I could do was get into a school for brilliant Leonardo da Vinci-types :( Poor me!

He'd drone on for hours, interesting only to him and his particular biochemistry, like the badly staged scenes he directed with a drama queen's tenseness, in these diva-like displays that had absolutely no talent behind them at all, and that was the crux of it: he earns off of talent, because he's drawn to us as much as he hates us for it, in a classic up-and-down, love/hate cycle that became the biggest bore I'd ever met. His passions for some brand of iced tea were rave-worthy and "smile-rific" which you HAD TO try or he'd just die, whereas my charcoal drawings were lame for an untrained teenage girl, and "EW!" Nudes! Who would do something like that?!

For the record, Bart, the productive people who run the world do "gay" stuff like that. That's who. By the way, you're welcome for the nice house in Brooklyn, the wife (with those unfortunate brown eyes that you told me hurt my chances for a good match in college...oops!) and 3.5 kids you forced your poor wife to bio-engineer for you with rounds and rounds of expensively-provided fertility treatments (because you're sterile) with long hospital stays that required her total bed rest for months; the same very family you step out on and/or check out from physically and mentally periodically, because your work is so important as a contracts guy for your union that you have to hit the road whenever things get bad, seeking the rush you need from other people's more exciting lives (like the actors who provide for you and your family, you know, "gay") that you watch from the set in the shadows, picky as ever, and fussily looking for problems that will cause a pay-out for violations from your plush union. You can thank this "dumb artist" for your life, whenever you get the chance. Bro.

 

Hey, O-towners! This one's for you today. I felt your pain. Thanks for hanging with me back in the day anyway, arrogantly over-bearing boyfriends notwithstanding. I really needed the support, just like you did. 

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.

Sugar Monkey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bark at the Moon

Me, Robusto, and "Dangerous" (a.k.a. Mad Dawg Dave), wandering around Cambridge in the early evening, lost and high and young and having fun.

Back in college, I didn't openly speak about being Native American, because it wasn't something I was accustomed to talking about. Like our old Dutch and British Colonial roots, we had assimilated a long time ago, or so we thought. Being Métis often cropped up at the oddest times, and the most inconvenient ones, too, like partying with the boys back in college. New York State has some very large, powerful, and highly public native societies, a lot of which center on being a mad, bloodthirsty Mohegan, which are not my roots. Most Americans get their ideas about "Indians" based on bad Kevin Costner movies about beautiful hippy chicks with feathered white-girl hairdos, who just happen to live like the natives do in their peacefully quaint pot-smoking tents, where free-love and lots of nudity reigns. Nothing could be further than that about the fucking Indians I know. Promiscuous and alcoholic, yes. Nice? No. Not particularly.

It should be noted at this point in the piece that you really have to judge each tribe individually, and every individual separately, which really sucks if you are manic-depressive and learning-impaired, like my retarded friend Dave was, and still is to this day. He was also very drunk and extremely handsome back when I first met him, which didn't help him out at all as a retarded Indian. He's one of them Half-Breeds where the Euro and the Native just don't quite fucking mix right, especially if that Euro part is part Polish. Some days that fucking kid doesn't know whether his jacket is on frontwards or back, or if he's got armholes in them or not. He's that fucked up. It's actually really funny to watch, if you've managed to skip the ten-day drunk he's on.

Oh, he can plateau for years on dry land, but then he crashes and burns for years, too; trapped in a wetland he can't get out of by himself, without someone else to pull him out of the dirty bog waters he happens to be stuck in at the time. You know? He's got a really small territory, one plain boring chunk of suburban upstate New York that he can handle...and that's barely manageable on some moonlit nights as well. It's like he was made badly out of several types of clay with different firing times that just don't meld well together, and on really bad days, he splits apart at the seams. If you've ever met a New World American with mixed parentage who's really fucked up, then that's it, with some extreme Indian shit added for extra fireworks. He's a wild drunk, but he's also funny and charming at times, too. It's changeable, based solely on his unique blend of chemistry, same as his sister.

Some days she's this gorgeous Native American Cindy Crawford who's also a gourmet chef, and then at other times, she's that desperate middle-aged chick trying to act young, making out with a teenage guy in the back of the bar to prove her worth, still. They're heart-breakingly superficial, and it's a truly weird mixture, man. Just when you think they're soulful, they puke on your shoes. Just when they even out their looks, they go meth-addict skinny on you, smoking and drinking and drugging for days and days on end. Something inside of them never gelled right, and too much time with them can drive the wrong "whitey" mad. It didn't work with me, but then my genetics formed a healthy, stable branch of Indo-European the first time out, creating a strong generation of Métis that thrive in both Old and New World soil. 

Genetics are great if you think about it, but if you half-ass it, you get them: my part Mohegan, Cayuga, Irish, Italian, German, Polish friends who never set into a clearly focused picture, just blurry fleeting images of your fun night out, when you may or may not have made out with one of them. I'm proud that I chose a native blend my first time out, but like the new wave term "starter" suggests, I'm glad I half-assed that first fake marriage so that I could get it annulled, because there's no way a boy like my old friend Dave could ever fully bear the weight of Holy Roman Catholic vows, made in a sanctity that will always escape him. He tries, you know? He tries. And that's about it. He's a half-boy, half-man, wild child of the night, as depressively manic as he can be, and he's not the one for me. Hang in there if you're still seeking your moon-mate. He or she is out there. You just have to look harder...

For you, Fiona

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian 

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

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