Wall Me In

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

Like the businesses I "manned" for other people who were often too incompetent to do so themselves, I'd just as often run into the walls of their ineptitude as quickly. Can't speak up? Force your underpaid minion to attend (that'd be me running your meeting better than you), for half the price. Having trouble with new ideas, concepts, technologies, and their executions? That's OK! Pretend superiority over your resident genius (I knew that, BTW) by airily flaunting your laziness with over-dramatic sighs that express your disturbed "businessman of importance" state of mind, someone with the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders (like, paperwork related to book manufacturing), while passing off the real work that you are "too busy" to do onto the people in your workflow who are actually qualified in the industry, you ignorant hack, and when we do excel, feign indifference and ignorance while you check my email every 10 minutes because the office handbook said you could do so. Hi, there!

And so, when the last business I worked at full-time imploded on itself, after I fixed it on their deliberately abusive shoestring budget (which was my job to do), I simply sat back and watched the kooks kill each other off, in the calm wake that follows on the footsteps of my excellent leadership. I grew accustomed to a quick headcount of firings that I'd metaphorically mount in my office at the beginning of every new venture, one that naturally expanded outward to include environments I visited for my hobbies, too. Magnetic personalities draw out the crazies who need a strong identity to stalk around in an openly mad way, or else they are rootless, restless, and increasingly psychotic.

Of course, that means I have to support the weight of a thousand poisoned darts aimed at me at all times, and if I don't properly manage your psychotic house rat, she'll go batshit and tear into your throat, and since you're a coward, well....that just won't do, will it? Word quickly spread throughout my industry of choice (and now, to the wider world) that if a manager didn't fend off their own troubled employees, I fought back like a normal, healthy, high-performing muthfucka, which means you get canned wayyyy before I do, and with your prescription healthcare plan (that I pay for) you need a steady supply of pills for your cocktail of meds, or it will bring on serious withdrawal like the fucking junkie you really are, so I set my internal clock and wait.

Within weeks, the worst headcases "flip" on one another, like addicts trying to cop a plea for a better deal with the D.A. for a reduced prison sentence. It's become routine. At first, I was shocked when the last crazy little Jewish man I worked for (with the serious Napolean complex) decided to try and frame his rabid bitch of a secretary's schizo-bipolar behavior as some sort of "catfight" happening between us, I knew he was "in" on the office scams with her. Ah. Probably his mistress or a relative...or both, because they're so fucking weird. So what? Whatever crazy shit he and his freaks did behind closed doors meant nothing to me professionally. He smirked his phony bullshit suggestions at me, like putting up a bead curtain to give me some "privacy" when I told him she would attack in a continually more aggressive and openly aberrant way because she stopped taking her pills, on suggestion of a cult she attended called "Landmark", one that she actively recruited for within the office during daytime business hours and in between the calls they placed to her all day every day for recruitment purposes on the company's dime and office phone lines.

It broke at least seven workplace laws that I knew of as a layperson just after my first few seconds of thought, and that was without any outside legal counsel. After that, things went downhill fast. He thought he was going to see a "hot" girl-fight in action between me ("the hotness") and his weak, limp cunt of a receptionist. Not happening. I simply brushed up on modern OSHA standards about legal office behavior, after his legal publishing experienced nephew ganged up on me with their insanely gay production guy. I beat them with a few slips of paper I printed out minutes before our "meeting", and that was with them monitoring my every move over the company's computer network wired by the publishers' own son. Oh. Yeah, it's like that.

He grew fretfully desperate, because his fake yellow-haired bitch hatched a new evil ploy for stalking me in his office for every counter-move I made; that's how powerless he was with a typical office slut who traded on blow jobs over any real talent or work ethic. I knew I had everything I needed when they actually built a little fucking wall to obscure me from her increasingly paranoid stomping up-and-down the company hallways, just to get a glimpse of me during her ferociously psychotic break from reality. His simpering cripple of a crazy wife came back to see me in my newly-altered studio space (which she rarely did, so she could telegraph her obvious rich housewife disdain for "laborers" like me at every opportunity she had), with a strategy delivered in a fake, loud, stage voice (you know, because of my "hearing" problems): did I feel "better" with the wall in place?

Her typical condescension at having to even interact with a beautiful human like me made my flesh crawl, but since this was her big gay Broadway moment, I didn't want to let her down. Oh, yes! I smiled with my best phony bitch impression. It's soooo much better back here now. Her face caved in, and then she recovered quickly, pasting on another sickly smile. Oh, good! Psychologically, I bet this really helps you out. Yes, crazy bitch with the lying cheating family living in a nest of vipers. Your crazy lesbian mistress/sex worker/receptionist with the obvious mood swings is why you built a wall to block me from her crazy eyes, so I definitely think about $60 worth of particle board and spackle (that I actually helped the contractor put up, which was greeted with more derision by his nephew with the phrase "boy, you sure do seem to know your materials" line along with the information that he has a "gay best friend" he told me about on his very first day of his employment in a phony gushy TMI-kind of way) will cure her of paranoid schizophrenic bipolar obsessive compulsive personality identity disorder. Any day now. Should happen...right about....now....no...it never happened. Still no cure for you.

A recent ex-neighbor of mine who's also clearly troubled but can occasionally speak "human" back to me on his "good" days, laughed with me one warm spring afternoon last year, when he let me know that our resident fake blonde psycho-bitch wanted to draw an imaginary white line down the middle of a house that she merely rents space in, because every cave troll has to have its toll paid, and since I don't do that (because I'm not mentally ill to a room-bound recluse off her meds), I no longer have access to "her" side staircase to the back of the residence that the rest of the household can use, because she imagined a fake history between use. And don't you know, mes amis, I could practically see her erecting a crazy brick wall (made with the landlord's bricks and carried out on his property) behind my back? <sigh> Here we go again. I wonder who will win, don't you? No? Huh. Neither do I.

Fight back, friends. Our collective knowledge is power: https://www.osha.gov/

"No one should have to sacrifice their life for their livelihood, because a nation built on the dignity of work must provide safe working conditions for its people."- Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez

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.

STARING IS RUDE

http://www.myvoicetshirts.com/

Children are really weird. They need to be taught how to live well or they won't, because people have some of the largest brains within the animal community. For that level of complexity, learning is the key to our understanding, and knowledge solves almost every problem we have as human beings. It is with this in mind that I've observed that the subject of appropriate eye contact needs to be addressed once again, because humans have forgotten what it means as a form of communication for our species.

Think I'm exaggerating for effect? Just ask my older brother about his kids and their fancy rich white kid school in poncy Connecticut: the problem with greeting adults correctly became so bad, that his kid's school had to put it back on the curriculum, just like in the days of old, when your kid came home from school with a note pinned to his shirt about his behavioral abnormalities. Could be worse; we were told horror tales about physical abuse and public shaming, like raps on the knuckles with a ruler, or sitting in a corner on a stool while wearing a big ole dunce cap. Want us to bring that back? No? Okay, great.

Then let's go over it again. When, say, a new human moves into your neighborhood, it is customary to signal that you understand an event has occurred by looking at said human straight in their eyes, smiling, and introducing oneself, handshake or no. Same thing with students at school: when your child enters a classroom, it is customary for them to show respect to their teacher (who is a very powerful and well-educated authority figure in our communities) by smiling and saying "Hello, Ms.______." Oh, and that underline I typed in the previous sentence means that you fill in the blank with the name of your kid's teacher, dumb-ass.

Yeah, that's what my brother told me: the dysfunctional rich kids in his kid's school were so unaccustomed to greeting humans through eye contact and name recognition (because nannies change often, and their parents care more about their stupid fucking corporate jobs than noticing their kids, because they have that all-important flight to catch for yet another dull business trip), they stopped knowing how to enter a room with people in it. That's right, fellow Americans: our children have forgotten how to greet, speak, talk, and make eye contact with other humans. Where do you think they'll go from there? Nowhere.

Same thing with me walking down a street I've walked for years, in a county I went to school in, also for many years: people seem to not understand that gawking at beauty makes them look like the dumbest, craziest piece of shit I will never ever want to meet. You fucked up by gawking at me, ass-hats, like I'm a fucking piece of furniture, or a brightly-colored painting that's your special shiny object to peruse. 

Today, for instance, the fucking douche-bag guys of Rockland County who like to stalk decided that they would only drive by me in cars and SUV's with tinted windows, because their fucking retarded behavior is so bad, I make fun of them obviously rubbernecking at me when they drive past, by imitating their slack-jawed yokel faces. You fucking dick! So original..stalk the beautiful girl. It's like getting a date by harassing women walking by a construction site, which I like to turn around by catcalling beer-bellied, hard-hatted losers in response. It's awesome! They're so scared of me.

So, to re-cap, let's go over the list once again, for the Special Needs and Special Ed sections, who may or may not need a helmet to participate in daily life. You failed: eye contact, greeting other humans properly, introductions as a customary way of greeting other people, smiling and/or nodding to indicate that you are aware of other life forms in your immediate environs, as well as many other basic forms of human communication. Your child has no shot at life because of your obvious failures at becoming a decent human being. Oh, and by the way: staring is still considered rude in this century, fuck ups. Learn something today, you dumb fuck! I friggin' hate rude people.

 https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=staring+is+rude

The Real Girl

Lately we've seen a lot of anti-social behavior publicized in the news, problems so ridiculously obvious that the people in HR once again failed to properly address employees behaving in highly atypical and aberrant ways, in full view of people with cameras and many other trusted employees. Not that I've ever trusted or relied on some HR wonk to screen anyone for me, let alone choose which pencil I might use at my desk. First, they make jack shit as pay (because it's essentially a useless job), and second, they typically favor the mentally ill employee in any given situation, because (and here's the fun part), a lot of Human Resource workers have generic "Psych" degrees from nameless schools, places where they yearned to understand their own broken brain, and now yours on the job. They can't get a job with their degree upon graduation, and now neither can you, in petty retaliation for their many problems.

It was so bad at the end of my corporate career, that I pre-screened every possible job lead I had by asking a series of industry-related questions over the phone first, before I wasted my time commuting to some wacky interview at my own expense. If I got weirdly paranoid stonewalling from a 20-nothing kook who is power-tripping over my possible career future on the other end of the line, (because as a female business leader, I can't have that in the workflow) I simply didn't waste my time pursuing it further. Why would I? 

I don't need anyone to ask me questions. I ask them, and then I teach YOU what to do about it the next time it happens. That's why my salary is much higher than yours, and you hate that, too. Plus, I have this rock star portfolio of infamous and well-known book cover designs that you need an Ivy degree and tons of real world experience to interpret correctly. Why would I waste my time with someone who has absolutely no experience in publishing? It would be like my mom (back in the day) submitting to some lame (and very easy for her) Pipette exam timed by a pencil-neck geek with a bad attitude who failed out of some joke two-year community college. 

What's the point? Would you try to teach a donkey rocket science? Well, would you? I'm waiting for your answer to my bullshit clipboard series of odd questions that I hide from you (like a very fucked up and purely verbal Rorschach test), while impatiently tapping my fingers on a table to give you the uncomfortable feeling that is ME, the know-nothing HR girl, who is the big-time designer and not you. Huh. That's odd. Isn't it?

After I get through them as the main obstacle to me potentially doing business with a company in the future, it's the key people I see every day. I never use an HR wonk, or hire talent through them, or use them to screen freelancer portfolios, or type email's to one of them, or talk to an HR employee on the phone, or even speak with one of them at the company Christmas party, because they are nothing to us. I make books. You don't. Therefore, you are not actually part of my real world work. You are a business expense that we (as a company) do not need, because you are useless. That's why you give "Creatives" so much attitude: the clock is ticking on your boring office job, which is funded by this girl right here. That's right: you are being phased out of this business, and not me. End of discussion.

It's sort of the office equivalent of me pretending that you sitting there next to a blow-up sex doll during lunchtime in the company's cafeteria is the same thing as my hot relationship with this gorgeous, interesting, and very educated man in the real world: you see us in the hallway or elevator, stare at us like we're sideshow freaks, then spend your time sitting in your office on the company's IM network, gossiping about how cool/smart/fun/pretty we are, but right after you ignore that 10th email I sent you sitting in your Inbox, the same one that your supervisor, the department head, and the VP of Design/Production received from me about that guy from Production Editorial who twitches in his cubicle all day long (on a good day) violently cursing to himself, or the editor who openly lives out of his office space and eats off of a hot plate that sits right next to a pile of papers (which the sick Art Director ignores, because she's on Valium for her clinical depression) because he hoards so badly, he can no longer live in his apartment.

Yeah. It's kinda like that. It's kind of like me noting that you are a violently anti-social, highly medicated, viciously paranoid psychopath (in full view of a bunch of low-paid, drugged out zombies who are used to doing excruciatingly dull, compulsively repetitive tasks like robot drones by the company higher ups, the Board of Director, and the ever-important shareholders), every single day of my life, telling anyone who will listen in a thousand different ways, and who do nothing at all about it but ignore it, hoping the problem goes away. You did nothing. You did absolutely nothing about it.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/26/active-shooter-reportedly-attacks-tv-crew-in-virginia/

Genetics

Pamphlets and prayer, time and money, love and loss, pain and hope.

For years I've thought about oft-touted "stigmatized" diseases, (like alcoholism and drug addiction), as genetic conditions like mental illness, often incurring in the patient at the same time they struggle with substance abuse. It's a phenomenon I've seen up close and personal for most of my life. Mental illness, like cancer, does not discriminate, and so it goes with addictive disorders, which lead me to ask myself, this: if these various conditions and afflictions are so common among humanity, why haven't we properly addressed them?

I know all the usual arguments: "Oh, you don't know how bad it is when I reveal my illness to someone, the prejudice and the bias, blah, blah, blah", words typically spoken by a generic human to me, someone of the most rarest ethnic minority on the planet! I know true marginalization, and watching some random headcase get drunk is certainly not a new or atypical experience for me. Does it sound something like that? Yeah, well folks look at me like I have three heads most days of the week. I'm not exactly "run-of-the-mill" in human.

Most reluctance regarding addictions are due to the person alone, something so well known, it forms the basis of every type of self-help plan, and there are so many of them: AA for alcohol, NA for drugs, sex addiction counseling, Weight Watchers for food junkies, Gamblers Anonymous, it goes on and on and on. Whatever weird "jones" you got, someone else has it, and that's part of it, too. I interacted with some guy online who swore to me that he has a real fetish for frumpy down coats, when he saw a picture of me wearing one in a head-to-toe winter outfit that's common around here, which I then linked back to mental illness and the penchant the disturbed have for unique weirdness, often adopting S&M practices for their shock value. Shockingly, he did not reply and has (surprise, surprise) since stopped following me online.

On any given day. The Dr.Phil show is filled with kooks of varying degrees who have honed their lurid recovery tales over the years, auditioning for a spot on t.v., and finally landing that big audition by appearing on the show with their beleaguered, exhausted families, broke and in tears, in serious need of a vacation and expensive healthcare. Two of the more serious bipolar cases I have met in recent years admitted to their love of hammy bad acting, using their disorders for entertainment value by carefully honing their lies in front of a live (and trapped) studio audience that is the group therapy session.

Instead of feeling the "shame" they so often speak of publicly, it is, in fact, often the exact opposite dynamic in effect: they desperately want our attention, and the more beautiful the human, the more lengths said kook goes to invent a tale of disease and horror. Trust me, I know, though in truth, they never really succeed with me, versed as I am since childhood in the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Stephen King. Yeah, nice try, kid. Maybe next time!

In fact, since I've returned home, me and my friends and neighbors openly discuss our habits, tightly linked as a community as we are, because we share a lot of connectors in our shared genetic history. An upstairs neighbor and I talked one warm summer night when I was on the porch trying to catch a breeze about his many years sober, as I revealed my family's struggle with the disease, no tension or static between us; only understanding and empathy. Heck, I knew kids in Rockland County who bottomed out, left home, went abroad for awhile, and then came back from rehab to graduate, all before our junior year in high school.

Same with my mailman, in a chance meeting one morning at my front door: his many years sober, the hearing disability I inherited from my father, and the link between genetics and populations with food allergies, like Asians may have with dairy products and/or flush from alcohol, Native Americans and their inherent toxicity from alcohol due to a lack of the proper enzyme for breaking down our country's mostly European types of fermented drinks, and my stepmothers' serious case of Celiac's disease, born of her upstate Dutch/German family's rural farm diet of meat and potatoes for many, many years, in relative isolation from the rest of the world, including "The City" and it's highly varied cuisine. Uh, yeah you can't break down wheat gluten! That tends to happen over long periods of time and a lack of proper exposure to different types of food groups.

After me and my mailman conquered that huge intellectual hurdle of inherited human diseases in under five minutes flat, (it was a chill, brisk day and he had a full route to attend to), we moved on easily to other topics like his wife's training diet and athleticism, because I also follow a strict diet when I train in MMA. We pondered why such a thing as genetic disorders are still so taboo, leaving off the conversation for some other time. Perhaps today is a good day to end it.

And so it went that a week or two later, I spotted two lost souls "pamphleteering" outside our grocery store. One man had the wide, red-eye stare of a crazy ex-con, and upon closer examination of the brochure, I was right yet again! Turns out his father started the program in desperation of his son's constant incarcerations from drug and alcohol offenses, as is so often the case. Addicts do not belong in jail. It's like sending someone who hoards to a garage sale with $100 burning a hole in her pocket. Bad news will come from it! Same with the rather stern-looking and stiff young man standing next to him, who briefly chatted with me while not moving, breathing, or blinking his eyes once, because he was heavily medicated: their addictions are one just part of a much larger equation, one that includes mental illness and secret family dysfunctions, and that is the real reason why people don't talk openly about their problems: they know we know.

My ex-husband (soon to be annulled in connection to me, because of his inability to have an adult, mature marriage with his amount of disabilities): it isn't just the alcohol or drugs, or his Native American heritage, or his supposed "stupidity" that comes out whenever it is convenient for him to get out of trouble. It's his mental illness that he refuses to treat, because his psychotic behavior is the lone "power" he feels he can wield against healthy people the most, that he is so prejudiced against, much like his refusal to disclose. He feels that this is his one big "win" against me, by refusing to speak the words any person who cares about their health and those of their loved ones would say out loud or in written form: "Hi. My name is David, and I'm an alcoholic." ("Hi, David" , from the group in response. He goes on to speak some more.). "I'm also a drug addict and mentally ill. I suffer from manic depression that I refuse to treat, because I can use it to hurt my friends and family."

That's what all his time-wasting bullshit of a life comes down to, really; that one small disclosure above in bold, as I typed it out above. Those are the words he chooses to keep deep down inside, get sick from, and eventually die from. It's how he wastes his entire life. Instead of withholding these "magic" words from me, words that were supposed to make me afflicted, he stuffs them back down, choking on their toxic power, making himself ever sicker by it. But, not me. Not ever me. Never me. He has been in and out of rehab and jail many times over.

And so, on this day in Januray: Amen to you who are afflicted and seek solace in The Lord. May you find the peace and help that you need as we humans do, who all have afflictions to tend to in this life that is imperfect while on this planet. May you find solace and soothing in the arms of Our Blessed Lord. Amen to you who have the courage to live. Break the cycle of abuse, my friends. Rise above it! I want you to win and be strong, to become like I have, through the constant care, tending, work, and patience that has made me who I am. I await you on the other side with open arms, too.

Weird Trash

One of my neighbors went through his stuff, to sort it out before moving across the country, which is always a great idea. It's a great idea anytime, actually. You never know what you'll find (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-vintage-tee.html), 
and clutter is a real productivity killer, so, barring any deeply psychological hoarder-type issues that require strong, daily doses of anti-psychotics and almost constant, round-the-clock therapy, take a deep breath, open up a box, and just start. Call it "Feng Shui" if you want to make it sound extra exotic, like some Ancient Chinese secret.

"Hello, invisible ghost dog!"

Anyway, my neighbor was busily sorting through his stuff one day when I was throwing out my regular, dull, every day garbage, and we had a good, brief exchange about his brother's taxidermy gift, and his older model (but still bitchin') Harley bike. The next day, I found the remnants of his cleaning in the garbage pails, which I photographed. 

This is a "negative", or "film strip".

Don't wait for death or jail time: do it now. What have you got to lose, other than junk? Trust me, your tasteless knickknacks are worth jack shit, man, even on eBay, if you can figure out how to do that. Lose the baggage, and join us free people in society. What are you waiting for? A long holiday weekend?! JUST DO IT. DO IT NOW. Thank you.