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

Happy, happy, happy

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

Happiness is weird if you have a paranoid-schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, bipolar-personality identity disorder (with marked petulant/suicidal/narcissistic/psychotic features), like the company receptionist at the small Jewish family business I worked at for awhile, with her typical "Office Cow" dreams of fine art glory and Rockefeller-like wealth; her make-believe, handsome, and very supportive shiska husband standing by her side, just like her first generation Israeli parents who worked blue collar jobs on Long Island prepped her for. Right? No?! Oh, well, then let me try that again. 

Ahem...she was delusional, but people who do bottom-feeder, highly repetitive service jobs are usually like that: arrogant, petty, snippy....you know the attitude. She was bored, and also a totally ignorant loud-mouth, with a completely over-inflated sense of self about her life and her skills, only tempered by her "down" cycles filled with dramatically petulant sighs that widely signaled her "Woe is Me!" boredom, interspersed with frequent hits off the big blue bottle of Listerine in the ladies room, because it has some alcohol in it.

She avoided me for many months, because I was extremely busy and she was busy getting her "best friend" from high school fired from her high-paying executive administrator job, because that's what you do to former Architecture majors who come from the same small Long Island town as you, former shul classmates who are also bipolar and very brittle: you stab them in the back whenever it's necessary. Right? Oh....okay, let me try that one again, too: our former "Office Manager" was one of the biggest fucking bitches any one of us had ever met in the sometimes semi-professional world of big city book publishing, and this was a somewhat gay-friendly media business in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, which is like saying that West Hollywood is "kind of gay". Yeah, like that.

She was an obvious bitch from a company that broke its back hiring other Jews and relatives, so much so that it was sometimes good clean fun to watch the crazy old people who hired these disastrous amateurs justify their secretary's insane bullshit, which got wackier and wackier as time went on. The wife of the owner talked through her anxiety over scary machines by talking back to the copier machine whenever it did any kind of banal action whatsoever; they told me she used to be an elementary school teacher. Huh...wonder what happened with that. Yeah, I knew. Like so many other business, the phony lines that employees used on each other could possibly pass muster under less legitimate circumstances than the real professionalism I brought to the table, which is kind of a bummer if you're an incompetent drug addict. I worked with plenty of those, too, educated or not.

Like any other uptight, self-righteous, hippie dippy, Jewish art fag, she scrutinized me through narrowed eyes every single time I walked passed the reception desk (in case I ever bothered to wonder how she felt about me), and if I was working for "too long" on my own, in her bizarre estimation, she would find an excuse to violate my workspace with her rancid beer breath, usually with a question so fucking stupid, I wondered how she breathed air at all. Sometimes I gave her the answer (the same dull ones, over and over and over again), and sometimes not. I am the Master in any studio, and so whatever I feel like teaching my staff is up to me, at any time I want to, and if anyone disturbs me, they're gone. It's simple: no me, no money.

And so I didn't worry about her neurotic bullshit too much, so successful was I at putting distance between us, while she nursed the same pit in her stomach everyday that she would choose to blame on other people, places, and things, weather permitting or not, like the special UV light bulb she needed because she also has S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder), in addition to the many other serious brain disorders we were forced to ignore under threat of firing, which grew into a more serious threat with each passing fire. As the company grew smaller, she stood out more and more, and not in any good ways. One afternoon, she stopped me walking past her with her disordered teenage bullshit to ask me a vaguely stupid "self help" type of question, because, like, why do other people feel things that are, like, different than her? You know? Like, why?

I had time to kill that day because I just made my deadline way under budget for the umpteenth day in a row, and by that time in my employ, I had the whole company in my pocket. They stopped working to listen to me speak, as they passed around my emails and cover designs like I was Mick Jagger at a mall signing autographs (because they couldn't stop themselves from gossiping about me within earshot), and they followed me wherever I went online using the company's network. In short, I owned them. If I used a famous media site as a starred commenter to slice-and-dice some would-be intellectual, they knew about it. If (and when) I hit it "out of the ballpark" again with my designs, it became company news within seconds. I had their complete and utter attention, short as those spans could be at times. Why their stupid ugly bitch thought to fuck with me on that particular afternoon, after all the schooling I'd already given her, is still beyond me to this day, besides good old fashioned mental defect.

She hated any outward signs of happiness we showed as we went productively about our days, as baffling to her bad brain as if I was the resurrected Pharaoh Queen Nefertiti herself walking around in full Royal Egyptian dress. It was envy mixed with hero-worship, mixed with misplaced desire, and what serious scholar would want that tossed their way? I sure as fuck didn't. You hired her, you deal with it. End of story. By the end of my time there, they tried to railroad me into taking their special bitch "into therapy", that brilliantly inept Jewish band-aid on a disease so bad, people die from it every single day all around the world, by deliberately setting me up as their "fall guy" for their bad hire. Nope. Nice try though! I deflected every single scheme they threw my way, monied up and lawyered-up as they were over me as their paltry advantages, but in the end, all they were left with was this: I'm better than you. That's it, and no banal amount of talking would cure it.

So, to finally answer fully your question, Ye Ole Stupid Bitch of Work Days Past, ("Why are you always happy, happy, happy all the time?"), I'm "happy" because I'm everything that you are not, and will never be. How's that for the truth? Oh, and failing that, click on the fucking link under the pretty picture above, you ignorant piece of shit. Yeah, that big yellow one with the smiley face. I won.

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

The Acne Artist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29

Believe it or not (and since this is me, you should totally believe me, but if not, there's tons of actual documentation to back up my claims), book publishing attracts a lot of groupies. Educated (for the most part), highly technical groupies, but add-ons nonetheless. They're the type of people hooked on reading, which is usually a bad thing for other types of addiction, but in this case it creates someone who is uniquely over-educated and typically smarter than you, the average person. As James Baldwin once famously said, he didn't mind being born poor, black, and gay because he was a very gifted New Yorker who could work the odds against him. He felt blessed, and he felt that if public school neglected him, he would read every book in the local public library, which would make him very well-educated, and he was right: 

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”― James Baldwin

 

Readers form a synergy between the living and the past that cannot be broken, a rare type of erudition that eludes other types of education out there in the real world. It's been one of the biggest blessings of my life, but not the most compulsive one, because I'm not a compulsive addict. A friendly clerk here at my local library and I like to chat when I check out DVD's, most oftentimes movies, because I don't have cable t.v., nor do I go to the cinema very much. She sees me here and now, which led her to ask me, one of the most educated and well-read people on the planet, if "I ever read" yesterday (too funny), because she doesn't see me do it right underneath her nose. Obviously, right now I am busy writing to you all, which cuts into my other endeavors.

I went on to explain to her that there are people who only know me as a rock star book cover designer, because that was my trade for years. There are other people who wonder why I don't illustrate, photograph, and/or show my fine art in galleries anymore, because I am obviously busy being a publisher who utlizies all of those skills daily to publish for all of you, but compulsive people with learning disorders don't easily understand that. They simply don't get how I could, say, be at one time in my past, one of the best female Mixed Martial Artists in the world (and the only one in my age group), who gradually stopped training because of injury, a lack of time, and available funds, but that's exactly what happened with me. My parents are still baffled that I wasn't a professional ballerina, because I could have done that for living, too.

No, gifted people suffer from the same life conditions as you do, just with way less time: there's not a lot of it for extremely talented people with genius level IQ's, which means you don't know how many different facets I have, which is also why I don't run out of things to write about, speak to you about, or make art about...ever. There's just a lot more of you than me. I am just one, as you are many. Book publishing is the same as the general public, which was the market I designed for: "Adult Trade" (although I designed for other markets, too), items of general interest for the general public, which means I know just about everything. It's weird, but it's a function of my trade. I've read every type of book there is several times over, as well those in my head that I haven't made, yet, which means you are my forever audience.

We do have specialists within our workflow as a production queue with some very dull technical aspects, so badly repetitive to a mind like mine that I transcend lower level jobs in a year or less, which is also typical for me: to catapult past people who have been laboring for years under just one of two types of conditions in the workplace. It's excruciating for me to be around them as I must be for them, although I cross through their viciously defended territories often enough to make it very uncomfortable for someone who is basically a human typewriter in this modern age. It's not a good fit, but I already knew that, it's just that I don't have the time to school each and every one of you individually, that's what I write it down here: for reference's sake. 

Same thing as my attention-getting design work at some commercial business: I'm there to do that specific trade (which encompasses more skill sets than you'll ever have), but obviously I don't have time to show you all of my G-d-given gifts, which makes me seem almost like divinity to the people who worship at the altar of book-making: I am their "Great One", The Maestro who always gets it right, even if you don't get it at the time. They publish my supposed "rejections" for years afterwards, too, which makes me seem like some magical golden goose who keeps producing even after my physical presence has long gone from their doorways. It's unnerving, and that's my life: to outlast all of you, as a final legacy that's my gift to the world.

It's created some absolutely havoc-wreaking dynamics on what can be a compulsive response to life, if you have disordered people manning the lead positions at the top who hate change like they can't see the germs on their clothes. In the industry, we have staffers who do one small chunk of the book process over and over again, without ever gaining any type of perspective or overview about the entire life-cycle of a book from concept to bound book, which often makes me the only one sitting at your round table meeting who knows what the fuck is going on, above and beyond your wonky V.P. widget of a human being, which is why the best of us "graduate" from a set industry to strike out on our own, which is why you are also now reading me, instead of the other way around. Oh, I've checked out a few books here, but it's really only if you can out-write or out-think me, which is highly improbable.

Occasionally we get "art fags" so disordered that they run screaming from our industry like we just set them on fire, which we have; a horrible state of affairs if your mind is already more jumbled than you can sort out. Making books is somewhat like making a really good movie: there's "money people" who produce, accountants who keep track of the books, managers who tend to the budget, and then there's the content-makers and content-generators at the top of the pyramid that include me, the editor, and our publisher, with or without some rich white "ladies who lunch" on the board joining us in meetings against our will because they're bored, thus forcing their boring presence upon skillful people like us, because we're truly exciting to be around.

We have a whole crew of onlookers we carry financially on the backs of our labors: secretaries, guys working the mail-room, that cool dude from IT...you get my point. They see a tiny portion of our labor, because that's what we have time for. You: fix my computer, NOW. You: how much time do we have in the schedule? None? Ah, that's what I thought, and yeah, no money either. That's how it goes at the top; it just gets harder and harder to perform under ever-changing heights of extremes that you can't handle, which leads to freak-outs that are so weird, I have to tell you about them. We attract kooks like magnets, ones who seek to impress others with their "creative"-ish jobs that drive them horribly mad because they can't do it.

BinBin was one such creature. Because she can't hack a real artistic life, she designs the same thing day after day after day, and when she finally complains about the monotony, someone like me tosses her a cover off the back-list with a tiny print run of no real consequence for her to design, which she fails at abysmally, thus sending her right back to the bottom of the workflow where she belongs. Oh, she hates us as much as she hates herself, and that's the weirdest part: BinBin telegraphed her Chinese hatred of the "White Man's" English language art-form by deliberately rubbing Vaseline all over face every evening before passing out in a drunk stupor, because she used her pus-filled acne to torture us with at face-to-face meetings, in the final irony of it. She isn't a real artist. No, her real artistry is using her body as a performance piece to hurt the people around her, because her father is an alcoholic who's a better artist than her as a professional musician, and she can't fucking handle that.

So, instead of working towards getting better, she decided to freak us all out by grossing us out, and that is her real genre: that of a gross-out artist, like the kid in your class who makes "boogie art" from his picked nose, or graffiti on the desk with his leftover chewing gum. It's offensive, but so what? There was nothing else to her besides the acne that she can or cannot clean up according to her not-so-very-hidden agenda tied to her worsening emotional state from her own incompetence and arrogance. Instead, she chose to spend her days playing weird head games with her hard-working co-workers, people who deeply love the printed word and the romantic poetry of the English language. She thanked us for allowing her to apprentice in our great trade by passing around horrible nude photos of herself through the company's in-house email network (stupid, too, like those ten "certificate" programs she has listed on her resume, with not one real art or design school degree), mugging her gross face at all of our productive meetings as a spite for her lack.

Don't forget history, people. Hitler was a failed artist before he became the anti-Christ, not the other way around. Be warned during this time of transition about the real horrors that exist in the world, while ignoring the fake distractions around you that mean nothing. The next great evil might just be the person sitting next to you who processes the same dull paperwork every day, in this rich character study about the banality of evil that's from me to you during this wicked Halloween season. Beware the techno-geek who seeks to harm you through your screen, because I hear what she has is catching....boo at you!

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/art.htm

Static

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hooters

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

Not all art directors are created equally. I've worked with a lot of disordered people in my time, usually while smoking a cigarette with one of them outside, as they told me their similar tales of woe. But Lisa was different in a few key ways. She fit the template for being slightly arty without being too much so, talented without outshining anyone around her, and noticeable only in her prolonged absences when the work she did piled up. She hid behind conformity, nursing her work along in small, bite-sized chunks, preferring to hide behind typesetting for book interiors than the open warfare that typically marks cover design meetings. She simply didn't have enough personality to set the world on fire, which she knew about in rigorous detail.

One of the stories she liked to tell me over and over again was about her parents first meeting at a mental institution: he was the big orderly intern who helped her mother as a delicate new resident with the harder patients. Like a lot of fucked up rich kids from WASPy families, she took small pleasures in the shock value associated with her long term exposure to the psycho-therapeutic arts. It contrasted highly with my working class roots littered with empty beer bottles and full ashtrays. Didn't smell the same to me at all, nor did my telling it make her more comfortable with me. It's not a soothing space to be in.

She loved to tell me that she never received affection from her coldly intellectual parents, preferring the pleasures of one particular dog breed that she became attached to. It was "kooky" without crossing that sharp line between revealing the depths of her obviously medicated state and her robotic creaky movements around the office. Every interaction within our small studio area was lined with her disorders that she could only hint at in a professional business environment; a well-honed performance designed for her to slowly draw off a steady income from bland corporate environments that tolerated creativity in small bite-sized pieces. That was her real expertise.

One of her weirder stories about her life with mental dysfunction centered around her strange sense of self about having a beautiful daughter, something most mothers typically wish for. She was confused by it (of course), as she still struggled in her 60s to accept something that existed within the world whether she liked it or not. She could be that slow cognitively-speaking, which made her a great fit for the dysfunctional family business she landed at the end of her career. 
I ignored her petty political ploys most of the time because they were that dull to me. She told me every other month or so that she wanted me fired, which never happened on her say-so. It was funny and heartbreaking to watch her slowly drown in her own ego and incompetence, clutching at old political devices for an office climate that no longer existed in modern New York City.

She loved that her blond Shiska-looking daughter (she's 1/2 Jewish and 1/2 WASP: people, do not try this blend at home without extreme caution) got her lots of attention, as much as she hated that it wasn't about her. And so, in retaliation for her own nature, she set up a series of passive-aggresive hurdles for her daughter to struggle with and then overcome at her command; as controlling and manipulative as her outdated office politics. It didn't work at all, but that's what pays the bills for a lot of inept psychotherapists: not solving the problem for their clients, just nursing it along minutely while they purposely sabotage their own healing process. She shot her foot publicly that often.

Her and her "younger" (and also deaf) husband riffled through her daughter's clothes after she moved out west, pillaging an old set of telltale shiny orange "booty shorts" for what she described as their Halloween costume: old "Hooters" workers entangled in a sexual discrimination lawsuit. It was so fucking weird, I had to know why she thought that was a good idea. Did anyone know what her outfit meant? No, she laughed, they thought it was funny that we wore those kind of outfits. Oh. I wondered what her poor daughter thought about their oddly dual-gendered approach to a business that remains heterosexual at its core, but like any of her answers, I didn't have the time or money to coax it out of her like her therapists did. Naturally, I already knew what fueled her envy and self-loathing.

You see, short of walking into the office with a shotgun under each arm, she was that invisible to us. In her desperate attempts to avoid becoming a target again, she managed to make herself completely unnoticeable whatsoever, in a PTSD-like response to the shifting sands of big time New York City publishing. She simply couldn't hack it, not with all the fake fairytales in the world, no matter how often she told them. She was a coward, and that was the real outfit she wore every single day of her life. Like any other really sick person, I wished her no harm, as much as I grieved for the children who were left in her care, no matter how temporary that was, because (and here's how I always "caught" her) she came from a wealthy family that had absolutely no need to push her daughter into a disrespectful job like a waitress job at a wing joint that bordered on being a strip club.

Instead of being shocked at her break from "vanilla" normality, I was merely aghast at her vicious nature. "Was your daughter ever hassled there?", I asked her. Oh, yeah, she said. Her job was right off of Columbus Circle during their big construction phase, and one time she was followed home all the way to Brooklyn on the subway, by one of her regulars from the construction site. I don't think there's enough Valium on her planet that would've covered up my genuinely horrified look. G-d, the horror of her....she continually set up her daughter for serious hurt and permanent damage, with obvious murderous intent. She had the decency to blush at my straightforward questions, while giggling nervously like a little girl. What a nightmare she is, I thought to myself. Thankfully, her daughter made it out of her horrible house alive (with or without the Halloween costume), because I see you, you bitch. I see right fucking through you.

Paragraph President

A deleatur symbol, from Martin Vogel's freeware TrueType font, MarVoSym.ttf, available at http://www.marvosym.com

People have strange ideas about the arts, sometimes based solely on the flawed premise that Hollywood cares about getting it "right" over making movie sales. Witness on any given day the striking differences between the book version and the movie, or the actual way historical people look like over, say, the "sexy" movie-version of Stephen Hawking. Yeah, that vast. The same goes for me in my artistic life with art, design, publishing, and just about anything else, which are dependent on one solitary truth: I work at it until I get it right. The idea of hard work is something that's usually glossed over in a movies' musical montage, spanning over the soul-crushing hours of repetitive monotonous labor, but the truth is, once I learn the basics, I move through the rather pedestrian qualities behind my work onto the more difficult and infinitely harder intellectual questions that are at the center of each business, person, place, or thing that I meet with.

Take, for instance, my graduation from the world's best art school into the "real world" of work: I expected it to be a bumpy ride between student life and my apprenticeship, and so it was. I'd never used a fax machine with any sort of regularity before, or worked in an office environment, nor measured out a mechanical for its' adherence to printer's specs (which changes with country of origin and measurement systems), nor did I have any idea about how to price out a book for manufacturing purposes (with equations for paper weight, spine width, trim sizes, and their individual bulk), but soon I did know all that and more. I moved quickly through production to the art department, because as a RISD grad, I could breach the gap that existed between different departments with relative ease, unlike the rather rote qualities that mark the average "designer": typically a skilled craftsman who is highly dependent on the work of others, along with a strict sense of hierarchy that is guided by the Maestro sitting at the top of the pile, someone who supposedly also worked their way up the same corporate ladder very slowly.

But, I was different than the other people around me....very different. 
If designers couldn't guess the font used in a previous edition (which was supposed to be their "expertise"), they came to see me in the production department working as an assistant, so that I could give them my best guess, and I have never taken a type class in my life. One "designer" told me she went through art school and couldn't draw. Yep. She went to (and was accepted, and then, this is even weirder, graduated from) a noted New York art school knowing that she would never draw a single decent picture on any day of her professional life to come. Can you imagine that? I couldn't then, and I still can't now.

I did, however, quickly pick and choose which work qualities I liked, and what tasks I would farm out to that rather scary dull Asian girl from design, the one who always seems chronically tired and depressed. These were necessary assessments that I began right away in my career, so as to avoid boring tasks that were better suited to lower minds, like taking wild guesses with fonts. Gifted people suffer from other people's boredom rather quickly, and the effects can be markedly excruciatingly for us. I could never be a book designer in the last century. They ruled up boards, made sheets of black type on white photo paper, and then pasted them into lines, day after day after day after day. Always the same thing, over and over and over again.

If we didn't have desktop publishing now, I wouldn't be a book designer at all. I'd have been a children's book artist, or a greeting card painter, or a nature photographer. But I soon learned the key components of graphic design, text, and books during my apprenticeship by combining them into the rather unknown and new art-form that has become the rock star genre it is today, and the leading creative intellectual at any house: that of Lead Book Cover Designer. It was precisely because I could draw, and photograph, and then set the type, while mastering manufacturing materials, with an understanding of computer programming (for your innately disordered brain), that allowed me to rise above it so easily, carefully avoiding those currents that trap minor artists and craftsman into eddies they can't get out of, without spending a lot of money on other people for help.

I'm glad I don't have a compulsive disorder, or a lack of will, or any other sense of entitlement about myself, because if I did, do you know what I'd be today? I'd be the "President of a Paragraph", like the bitchy admin who uses the stockroom supplies to yank yer chain on any given Monday: a rather small unpleasant little pissant who hates their life, but does absolutely nothing to get out of it. That's why I made coffee before anyone else was in the office because I got there first, then I changed the water tank on the cooler by myself, put new toner in the color copier and ordered more cartridges, opened up the design department by turning on all the equipment, put on some tunes, and began working the keyboard through your lunch break and after you left at 5 p.m., to sit here today at a public library to absolutely no applause whatsoever, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Like any high-minded human, I wanted more from life. I still do. Don't you?

Half-Assed: A Homer Simpson Story

At my first "real" job after college (working for a publishing company), me and my art department friends quite quickly and easily noted a disturbing trend among office staff, a term forever "re-branded" for me by an ex-boyfriend as those low-paid women who are our "Office Cows": mostly useless ladies who wander around grazing on break room tidbits so they can gripe about their weight to anyone who will listen, gossip, backbite, email petty plots and schemes around using the company IM (not the smartest crowd, as me and my IT friends noted), talk on the phone, surf for shoes on the web, hate their friends on Facebook, and make bitchy comments under their breath each and every time you walk past them to use the bathroom, in case you ever forgot that you got your job through grueling years of hard work and a three-tier interview process that's harder than most exams the President takes on any given day, you know, because design is up there with a nuclear attack on the scale of importance for humanity. 

Oh, it isn't? Huh...well, that certainly isn't what that fat bitch behind the desk is projecting at me. She's telling me with her "death stare" that I rule the world, and so I must. I mean, it happens to me everywhere I go, so it has to be true. Kidding aside (I really do use my intelligent design to help save the world, as is the gist behind my intellectual and academic movement), gifted people are used to being the center of attention wherever we go, dull offices included. You saw "Whiplash", right? It's kinda like that, except instead of an overpaid actor starring in a hammy ripoff of every artist's actual life, it's the real thing that you cannot buy. We go into rigorous rounds of critiques with the biggest power brokers in business, while they sit there gleefully taking potshots at us, under cover of a "meeting". We're ready for it. We've been trained to do this exactly. But...you haven't had you? I imagine that must be really hard for you to withstand psychologically.

So, you do catch my drift, then? OK. That's what I thought. We can resume our regularly scheduled programming (one that doesn't include you) to return to the task at hand: the hard job done under an impossibly tight deadline (rigged for failure on purpose), with as many human douche-bag obstacles as middle management thinks they can safely get away with, to deliver you the best information available on Planet Earth, in each and every century, regardless of country or language. I'm sorry. I don't understand "Office Cow" when your mouth is full of donuts from the break room. "Gosh, she looks sooooo fat in those jeans!" (Whisper it loudly in a blatant showy stage-whisper for the best effect). Heh heh. Maybe you should go on a diet? Or, you could passively-aggressively suck at each and every task that we ask you to do for us, because you're a complete bitch who thinks we don't see your blind hate and envy coming right at us. Because we do.

You see, that's the "Homer Simpson Way": do each and every job task really half-assed, until someone better than you notices that you suck, and then re-does your shitty work on the company's dime with absolutely no support whatsoever. Yeah, just like that! Do everything really half-assed. That's why they pay me the big bucks. And hey, you're welcome for saving the company again, on an underpaid teacher's salary. Ah yes...there's the almost silent "fuck you" mouthed behind my back that I was waiting for. Thanks! It was the opening I needed to get you fired. Buh bye!