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

Palette Knife

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Cry Wolf

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

During my last full-time gig working for other people's families before my own, I knew in my gut that the term to my lasting apprenticeship was finally waning to its rightful conclusion. I'd made bargain books for the premier English-language retailer of the world resemble its fuller priced editions for richer whiter companies, which was my mission. The best of us then graduate to "Publisher" after many years of service given to others (and their pockets), but it's never an easy graduation.

I'd made the break real during the height of my MMA/BJJ training, and like co-founder Dana White of the UFC, the best fight league in the world , I found myself in the unenviable position of couch-surfing at 40+, which is the true sign that you're actually doing it: you're making the break from the system that held you down to make a run for it, and it is ugly. I couldn't have done it with kids, dogs, and households in tow, dependent on me as they typically are, because temporarily-had crack shacks in the 'hood ain't no child's game. You have to be free, angry, and loose to do it and survive with your sanity intact, which (luckily for me), is not the problem. It's never been the problem.

So, what was? Can't you tell by now? Other people's problems, and working them out for them for free (without getting any accolades for it), just to get my job done for some old rich white dude. Same shit, different day. I knew I'd be sweatin' it hard, and I knew they'd be gunning after me just as hard, because that's the price true talent pays when you fly from the system reliant on people like you, or they all fail. A freakish silence was all the recognition I needed to recognize my power, through that circle of their fears surrounding me. You can do that and not die?! Geez.....it blows them away, know what I'm sayin'?

The small Jewish family business I worked for trained their rabid dog to attack people, and then when she went full-on loco (aided by a cult for wellness operating a seriously illegal pyramid scheme, and a lack of properly administered pharmaceuticals supervised by a serious medical professional), she turned on them, too. I think they mistakenly thought a fucked-up Israeli girl from Long Island wasn't a match for their monied control, but they were wrong. This wasn't some neurotic crisis. She was a full-blown suicidal psychotic, which they had glimpses of through her failed relationships, like the death-threat text made to our cell phones in the middle of a work day by a fired employee (her former "bestie"), and they cut loose people wholly dependent on them.

Not only did Becky threaten suicide after her firing to me, Ayelet, and some other employees, but my friend Jimmy OD'ed after hooking up with them as a freelancer, too. They kept sick people on the payroll only if they sucked their dicks, then cut them off knowing they'd be vulnerable. I blamed them for each former staffer's mental health issues and subsequent deaths just as much as any "feelgood doc" who over-prescribes Oxycontin to create a drug addict for their heroin hook-up later on down the line. I knew my rigorous comebacks from serious bone breaks and DVT on their salary without any support from them knocked them ajar, and that's what I needed to do to take them out of the business for good: prove them wrong on each and every level they'd ever had, as seriously deluded pseudo-intellectuals.

They played G-d with their sick staff in codependent plays for leverage, power, and domination, which means nothing to me. I knew my real howls at the moon beat their "Crazy Jew" schtick any day of the week, and I was right, because here I am on a Monday writing for you instead of working for them, which is proof positive in the game of publishing. One of the last times I had a verbal exchange in "human" with their disordered receptionist, she was talking at me as soon as I walked through the front door, which was odd, because she took pride in ignoring company staff as they came into the office at the beginning of every workday. She thought being a bitch was some sort of superpower, but to this New York girl, she was just another fake blonde out-of-towner drowning in her own incompetence, unfit for the game.

She forced me to take off my headphones to hear her speak to me, without waiting for a proper conversation cues to be established at my convenience, as the first stab in a series of dully petty power plays of controlling manipulations done spitefully, writ upon me first thing in the morning to catch me off guard, except for this: I use music to work with and train by, plus I've Art Directed musicians professionally, so...yeah, no go. I asked her to start over, and she did. Did I know today was the anniversary of her famous Central Park rape? Sigh....here we go. Uh, no. How would I know that? I gave her a tired look to let her know that her simplistic, childish shock tactics failed with me (yet again), because I don't have time for bullshit in my day.

She tried to make a Broadway play out of her madness anyway, by describing her annual ritual call to the detective who supposedly handled her case back in the day. Yeah....what did he say? Let's move this scene along, okay? It was one of her last attempts at yanking my chain before she curdled into a rather typical manic/depressive hatred that she controlled manipulatively, like the fucking psycho she is. At this point in my employment, I knew she screwed half the ugly staff and got "dirt" on the rest, or so she thought. She had nothing on me.

I have no idea to this day if she lied about her Puerto Rican rapist because she seemed to have a "thing" for dark guys, or whoever paid any kind of attention to her, male or female. I noticed she'd vacillate between attractions as personality/identity disordered to center around the stronger core personality of the key people in power, like me. If she sensed I liked a man, so would she, and then she'd start some weirdly secretive contest that only she knew about. But, back to her bitch post at the reception desk. So, what is this really about, Ayelet?

Well, she just happened to have a picture of the suspect who she thought was still at-large, because she just felt it in her gut, drama queens, like a pit in her stomach, you know? Like, right here <press fist to stomach to represent a knot>....NO! Not her anxiety disorder. Not that! Conversation over! Whenever she got hip (and it was hard with someone as dumb and impaired as her) that you knew she was lying to you, she'd turn on you, in the same pattern over and over again. OK, I'll bite. What the fuck....I'm waiting for the office coffee you don't make anyway. What else?

Oh! Her carefully crafted mis-en-scene was back on! We could pretend to role-play with our famous Art Director again! Great! She immediately brightened up, to produce a grainy police sketch of this:

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

That crazy bitch was so far gone, she thought a brilliantly educated Maestro (who reads practically every fucking day of her life) didn't know a picture of the fucking "Unibomber". Their crazy-ass bitch showed me, someone who worked at a newspaper during 9/11 to tell the tale to all of you, a picture that was in every fucking newspaper and media outlet for years, as the centerpiece of her madness gone murderously bad. Just like the brother of such a sick murderer, guess what I did? I turned her ass in to the authorities, friends of Earth. No one (NO ONE) fools this New York mama, fake rape victim or not. Take that to the bank, and show it to them as evidence that I'm solid for it. Ya here me?


Read it and weep. I took this info to staff meetings over their madwoman: https://www.osha.gov/

I also want healthcare for the mentally ill made mandatory for employment and ongoing health benefits through insurance carriers: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/workplace-testing-employer-requirements-29496.html

For the record, I've taken lie detector tests on job sites (as a teen for a mall retailer at an afterschool job, because Donnel used me to try stealing some clothes, and girl, you know you do that), random piss tests, voluntarily submitted blood-work, psych screenings (as written tests and other), along with everything else that goes along with being me. Now you know.


P.S. - That bitch also told me she jogged through the park after midnight alone because, you know, she's manic and stuff, and she HAD TO lose weight. Sound native to you?