Garbage Picker

I often find handy little critter signs around my environment that tell me you are a loud, abusive, crazy, chain-smoking drunk because I can mysteriously "read into" obvious cues like a stubbed-out cigarette butt (I don't smoke and when I did, it wasn't the "Ghetto Menthol" brand now made with even more harmful fiberglass, yo!) near the container made for plastic recyclables, because your broke ass is looking for bottle deposits to cash in. See, if you were legal, you could get a real job. In this case, I frightened away the crazy Hispanic female flipping the lid right next to my door in broad daylight by simply opening my door to let her know that I keep bottle deposits indoors to return myself because I understand that she's a sick illegal fuck haunting my 'hood. She chose to play the ever-handy "no habla ingles" routine followed by a wavering little smile delivered with the important casual shrug that lets me know she feels superior to me as a welfare queen picking through my fucking garbage. I don't see her around anymore. Huh.

Much like Donald Trumps' wildly trumpeted assertions that capture this country's imaginations daily, New Yorkers learned a lonnng fucking time ago that if we want any of our real cultural interests, influences, and/or lifestyles accurately represented, we need to speak up. LOUDLY. That includes bad minstrel acts with broadly comedic bits included for the crowd living in the provinces: there's no time for subtlety when your cabbie speaks Urdu on his Bluetooth all day long to his family back home, with the backseat t.v. blaring away. "Turn right! NOW!" Yes. You do this now. In addition to a daily influx of every single language currently spoken on planet Earth (plus a few phased out that only our excellent scholars still know), we learned how to communicate with "other" perfectly well, with or without our elegantly beautiful and highly educated Shakespearean flourishes added in expertly spoken "High English"...because you don't understand it.

We even adapt our native language to your foreign-import cab business, is what I'm telling you today, because we understand concepts like "world" and "trade" and "capital" and "empire" like it's written on the backs of our hands, because it is. It's in our very DNA. Suffice to say, grunts newly arrived to our mostly peaceful shores signal our unique status back to us by aggressively shouting thickly-accented words like "money" at us rudely and repeatedly, usually accompanied by a greedy, grasping, grabbing hand gesture of "give now" that are somewhat lost on our more delicate sensibilities, which is also why we deliver curse words in regional accents so very well, like I do. You evil fuck! You can't give everyone you meet a cultural lesson with each and every transaction, though Lord knows we try.  
We really do. 

That's why Chinatown has signs in Mandarin and Cantonese, and Spanish Harlem is bilingual with ESL classes for your Hispanic son ("Spanish" in NYC, get it?), plus restaurant signs in Koreatown are....? Right! Crafted with signs designed by us in both Korean AND English, because we do notice that you are not quite like us, and that's OK. Not in North Korea, of course, where you come from, but here in America, you can be free to be you and me here, and no, this is not some advertisement made just for t.v., like the trashy shows you pretend are representative of us and our genuine, caring communities. It's called the "House of Representatives" in our government. Scary, isn't it?

So, when I tried in English and Espanol to tell the disordered people around me and my environs that recycling is the law, the natural response in "evil" and "crazy" is to openly pick through my trash right in front of me, or pretend not to understand "Ingles" on this particular day, like a bad actress from an overly exaggerated show on an equally lame Spanish soap opera, because that's abnormal to do in any country, using any human language. I know, because I also wrote about other like-minded Hispanics who live right next to their trash and love it (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/08/hecho-en-mexico.html). They love it so much, they make "art" from their garbage for money!

But, we don't do that here, so adapt, you dumb-ass. Pick up your fucking trash, get a real job, or go home. You can do any one of those things here, because freedom really does mean "free", and not some perverted totalitarian version that you and your fucked up family pretend that it means, in your state-mandated history books. I understand that drones, minions, and slaves want someone to whip them in their dysfunction until they cringingly behave, like some horribly abusive slob in a weird S&M "scenario" that's been scripted with gay costumes and cues and special words and...wait, where the fuck are we?!

You're on my land, ass. You're living in New York and the Americas. Get with it, or get the fuck out. Simple, n'est-ce pas? If you like garbage so much that you want to live near a mountain of it, Paraguay has just what you need (http://www.landfillharmonicmovie.com/), and I am most definitely not some rich white businessman writing that to you today. It's all me, babies. This is all me and my values, plus all of yours, too, because in this Warrior of Nations, we fight for what we want, and that includes the right to recycle our own trash without funding your illegal move here and back from wherever the fuck you came from. We are a nation of immigrants. We know the routine. Trust me. We know every move you make. Twice!

As you can see in this case, a hood rat who managed to secure a very important government job picking up recycling (with a finely-paid full benefits package), decided it was okay to illegally hit me up around Christmas with a card meant to shake me down for extra "dinero". I sent him a very sincere holiday card back to him, taped to the inside of the paper receptacle where I found his card (mine has to be taped inside because people steal shit around here) thanking him for his service to the community and I meant it, because I do not hand out my favor lightly. This week, I decided to give him a beautiful travel brochure from a tour service that my family has used with great results, and some beautiful bookmarks from a woman's museum in our nations capital, to see if he was truly interested in "Americano". No, senorita. Huh. My mom loved the pretty bookmarks so much, she put them up on her well as part of a display (they are printed excellently as high-end color reproductions, which is a mark of quality to a refined mind, but I digress), and my father's family has visited many of the tours presented by our friends in Montana who book eco-friendly, one-of-a-kind tours all around the world (including Hispanica and its outlying areas), but they were obviously not good enough for Senor Correando, or "Eduardo the Recycle Guy", as he familiarly addressed himself to me in his Xmas card. I guess our real national treasures like beautiful bear cubs in Yellowstone Park, and our world-famous female artists (myself included) are simply not good enough for this superior recycler. Clearly that must be the case, because he carelessly flipped over the lid I prepared just for him, and left it out in the rain, making it soggy and no longer useful. Here's a handy tip for you: I AM NOT YOUR PERSONAL ATM.

"Buenos dias, Eduardo!"

http://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/wagestips

Rock you like a hurricane

http://www.himandus.net/hofh/chauvin/richard/richard_00_acadian_history.html

I planned on writing a piece today about minority culture, when a casual conversation with my neighbor directed me towards another key issue affecting impoverished Americans that's a tie-in with today's "Hurricane Joachim" conditions, and that is this: flooding. It's no secret to my Acadian, Cajun, and Creole peoples that oppressed minorities who threaten the status quo were (are) pushed into marshlands and swamps (what up, Zydeco fans?), conveniently "resettled" during occupational wars with not-so-hidden agendas. Richly fertile island nations with beautifully exotic women were suspiciously targeted the most often. 

To this day, "white" Canada disparagingly refers to any native person as an "Aboriginal", in a clear attempt to marginalize their First Nation status by wrongly placing them in the same category as the people of Australia, who are seen as less than attractive by the European Penal Colonists sent there without choice. Obviously, each human tribe on Planet Earth has a range of beauty from the ugly to the more comely, but it is no secret (see me in pics) that the Métis figured something out: French (or Scotch/Irish) guy mates with squaw = an "OMIGOD, how do I get my hands on that?!" level of attractiveness that my sweet Norman Barese grandmother from the Abruzzi region of Italy called "Oo la la!" in a loud voice whenever she thought it was wise to remind her family about me and my key "factor", and she was never wrong about anything. Like, ever.

The Canadian government recently officially recognized that the enforced separation, murder, and ethnic cleansing of Acadian Métis was "unfortunate", which is kind of like saying that the Serbian Croatian War was "bad". Yeah, you think? Ripping families apart based on eye color has become such a taboo subject in my culture, that deeply ingrained prejudices about it remain in place to this day. My Québécois/Irish-American college boyfriend from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn told me a few times that he had qualms about my "marriageability" because I have brown eyes (strikingly coal-black eyes are a trademark Métis feature) and he has blue eyes, and, ahem, you know, well, maybe he wanted blue-eyed children. Me, looking like what you know to be true, and he is no supermodel. It was a petty little head game he played with me to parlay my supposed insecurities about my looks into his hands, which...well, you see where I'm at with him today. Nowheresville.

Race continues to define the descendants of a culture that took American ideals at face value when it came to openly assimilating different cultures. French with Africaine? No problem: you Creole now. European with a Native? Okay, we are Métis. Ditto with your Irish, Scottish, British, and Dutch ancestors with us. Now you tribe, too. Twenty-five percent is all you typically need to get in, barring any serious medical conditions like violently anti-social paranoid schizophrenia (which is kind of a "no-no" in any human community), and we just might let you in for life. All we ask is that you accept my brother and my sister, who may or may not share eye color or the exact same skin tone, but we have a wide range. You follow me here? 

The Acadian Deportation (Le Grand Dérangement) is exactly what got you stranded in an area below sea level, ami. Homeboy, you sinkin' in Red Hook right now ("Hoek" in Dutch, New Amsterdam) because they don't like you and your kind, especially if you get along well with your neighbor, who may or may not be the same color as you. Ya dig? You're the "problem" they want gone. "But, who exactly is 'they'"? "Who", indeed. Now you're asking the right questions. See you on the other side, friends. And take swimmin' lessons in the hood, mes Cajuns et Creoles. Hurricane season is officially here.


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

http://portsidetanker.blogspot.com/2013/02/red-hook-sandy-surge-map.html 

https://umaine.edu/canam/publications/st-croix/acadian-deportation-migration-resettlement/ 

Roman Bath

In the bath (March 2015).

Being multi-ethnic (and -racial as well as -lingual, but those are stories for another day) has its' distinct advantages. When in Rome, I was mistaken for a homegrown paisana taking her new "Americano" boyfriend for a ride in a pricey tourist joint by the Romano waiter, when in actuality I was on vacation with my soon-to-be annulled husband who was really just an old friend of mine from college. More on that some other time, too. True story! See it here! Click on link below! (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/10/boneyard.html)

Roman bath (March, 2015).

 
So when I see myself in pictures, I see different aspects of my ancient histories co-mingling in sometimes the most delightful ways. Angles, lighting, seasons: they all change the way I see myself and it what comes through in the photos.

On one particular morning this week, I caught sight of myself in some large mirrors mounted opposite to me on the bathroom wall while I dried off. I didn't know what I had yet, but afterwards I saw on this day in March that the "Italiana" in me came shining through, perfectly intact throughout the ages, as if I was still cloaked in a toga that was a la moda way back when. 

"Ala Mercadante", still intact (March 2015).

What do you see when you look in the mirror? 
Be honest with yourself, and you may be surprised (like I was) with what you see, particularly about what has come down through the ages intact within your genetic material that's still very much a part of who you are today. I can't think of a more solid case for genetics than the art I see around me that's also a part of who I am, too.

http://www.compassrose.com/static/PompeiiFresco.jpg

Sweet Cherries

My life, in a bag of cherries: 
bilingual, Oneontan, sweet, and always in season.