Congo Square

Me and my boyfriend "Kunte Kente" spent a few of my birthdays in New Orleans, and I could tell by the way I had a feel for the city that I'd been there before, in another lifetime: the food, the music, the way I was greeted at the airport....this Acadian girl was home. Of course, I'm the original northern branch of a family tree that's stretched itself wide across this country we live in, though often not of our own choosing. The harsh heat and humidity endured by the Cajuns and Creoles who had settled in the bayou told me everything I needed to know about our history, because we're made for adversity. 

Still, the American South can be so very different from New York because of its deeply segregated past. When I took a road trip to Graceland in college, I'd never seen black folk order food from a diner just to eat it in a car parked in the parking lot outside of a restaurant. It was scary and strange to me. So, too, did New Orleans have that dividing line back in the late 90s, before the flood. I'd never seen poverty that sharply split between the fat white tourists in town, and the children who performed for them in the streets, with bottle caps on the bottoms of their shoes instead of taps.

Kent warned me that we'd be crossing more divides like the French Quarter's, if we wanted to see some of the prominent tourist attractions of New Orleans, and Congo Square was on our list of "must see" places. He and I met in a recording studio, and Kent worked as a professional musician before we met, sometimes during our relationship, too. I'd also studied the history of jazz and blues in school. Most of my music is heavy on the R&B and hip-hop, as well as the classics. We simply had to go see where it took root and spread out from the epicenter of the square to the rest of the world.

Instead of a dusty dirt square packed with drummers, we found a bunch of tidy bricks neatly arranged in a circle, and we were the only people visiting that day. The weather had turned a little rainy, though nothing frightening to us, so we spent some time walking the circles of stones in the pattern they're laid out in, like the beginning of "The Wiz" musical from Broadway. But, that wasn't the biggest part of our trip over there: it was first stopping at a dive bar to talk with a white-haired hipster about directions before we crossed a serious four-lane highway to the ghetto, before we walked past openly burning garbage cans in broad daylight and burned-out car wrecks abandoned by the side of the road, like New York City during the 70s and 80s. The dividing line between us and our destination was that clear, and that real.

The Mat Room

Fraternities and sororities at Oneonta existed mostly for the hardcore suburban Long Island crowd who went to the same high school together (which seemed like a pointless thing to do in college), or those downlow weirdos too embarrassed to join the unisex organization of social do-gooders with the purple triangle logo on their Greek shirts, ya dig? With the high-priced fees that came with "rushing" during pledge, me and my crew thought it was crazy to pay to have friends when you could just throw a kegger and kids would show up, anyway, once the word got out around campus. We had more trouble containing a good time than publicizing it.

Still, a slow Wednesday night with no Thursday classes could find you extending beyond your typical routine to include off-campus frat parties, especially if one of your boys roomed with one of their "frosh" pledges. It meant we might catch a break with the cover charge. Five bucks blown on skunky stale beer or a drained keg meant you just walked down a mountain in a snowstorm with nothing to show for it besides missing dinner at the cafeteria. Oh, well. You'd have to wait until the morning, if you didn't stash food in your room from lunchtime.

I'd been to few of them without incident, which must have driven the crazies wild, because I found myself alone in their basement kitchen thumbing through an old issue of NatGeo I'd found on the counter (with its distinctive yellow border) while my friends made a run for the keg, when some douche came over to make a rude comment to me about the partially nude African women depicted in the magazine. It was a shocking thing to do at a hip New York school with a lot of urbane city kids, but certain pockets of the state bred bad stuff that we didn't have close at hand growing up, though it was certainly around. 

He was obviously drunk, too, and he had a wild angry look to his bulging glassy eyes that made him doubly dangerous. Psychotic drunks were a serious hazard at any party. Most gatherings I went to were attended with my large boyfriend, but without a big bouncer around, anti-social headcases could take the time to hassle you and feel comfortable doing it with their similarly challenged friends. As soon as he targeted me, he flipped on me, demanding to know who I was and how I got into his party. I was trapped against the kitchen counter, alone in the room with him.

I tried to look past him to catch the eye of someone, anyone, because I couldn't see the heads of my friends over the crowd in the living room. He got in my face, yelling about who the fuck did I think I was to rebuff his advances in his frat house? It was insane, and it got out of control within seconds. Some tall guy finally came over to see what the commotion was about, because the kid wanted me thrown out of the party, which was fine by me. I'd had enough. As bad as it was, that was nothing compared to the stories I'd hear walking home that night.

As we walked around collecting our friends after my "ousting" from their lame party, I caught a glimpse of a dirty room, behind a partially opened door, covered in graffiti with bare mattresses on the floor. During the party, we'd been told that it was a makeshift crash pad for brothers too drunk to stand, but that's not what another girl at the party told us. She whispered to our small group that it was the room they took girls too drunk to resist. It was their rape room. And it was the last frat party I ever went to.

Proud to be a N*gga

My cousin Kenny is proud to be a n*gga, because he's told me that more than once, even singing it to me like this: "...bee-cause I'm proud to be a niggggaaaah!" His cellphone used to have a recording of him singsonging "Kennndaahhhl!" every friggin' time it went to voicemail, which drove my ex-boyfriend crazy, because John would need help at the yard and "Ken Doll" couldn't be bothered; exactly what we'd come to expect from a fat, bald, 6'1, Celtic-Jewish-Indian like him.

He never wanted to fit in with the 9-5 crowd, and for years, he struggled to find work that was inoffensive to his cocktail party persona, before he finally settled on joining a pipe-and-drum band near the beach. He's good at it, too! He and his then-girlfriend (now wife) played together at the biggest parades 'round the way, turning their alcoholism into a somewhat respectable McOpportunity. It wasn't what I'd want for him, but he's made a life from the broken shards of his rough Brooklyn upbringing that's left most of his family dead, and he's not even 50, yet.

I just hope someday he'll realize he doesn't have to jettison parts of his identity that he feels he needs to hide in order to fit in with typical American society, because I personally know of a clan that would dearly love to have a musician with the heart of an Irishman, the beat of an Indian, with the soul of the faithful play at their tartan-clad family gatherings on a certain New Scotland beach. We pay with real money, too. My father always used to tell us as kids that we should be proud of who we are, because it's not like we had a say in the matter, and he's right. We don't. It's already happened.

Remember, my Americans: the freedoms you take for granted have not been equally extended. Some of us can't even walk on ancestral lands and feel proud about it, without someone else looking to take it away to sell it back for a fee. Think about that while you bitch about the line at the polls, or your simple black-and-white racism, or any of the other issues that you think take precedence over basic human rights like dignity and equality. We're not there, yet with this country, but some of us would really like it to be. They're colored, too, just not like you.

The White Man's Grave

Years ago, I read a fictional novel by Richard Dooling about the hazards that the rich white man faces while trying to impose his cultural constructs upon Africa, resulting in the loss of his soul. When a local cabbie picks up a generic-looking businessman at the airport, the first question the white man asks him is: why is that big old tree in the middle of town hung with so many brightly-colored flags? He'd never seen anything like that before! What did it mean? The cabbie smiled at the sweating, overweight, red-faced white man sitting in his backseat, dressed too formerly for his trip in a "power suit" and corporate-approved necktie. "That's a 'witch' tree." Another warlock is born.

You see, the tree's decorations were caught in the branches by flying witches on their nightly midnight rounds, leaving their tattered garments hanging from the ancient tree that only other witches could see. The white man had come back to his own heart of darkness. He was looking for a relative working overseas that was said to have been lured into the bush by evil spirits, which naturally unleashed his arrogant condescension upon a nation that had him down cold a long time ago. Sure enough, out came his expensive leather briefcase full of American money, to better expedite his superior search with bribes. But, witches don't feed on just that alone. They wanted his soul.

And they got it. He was so poorly prepared for the cultural shift that he lazed in a dopey haze on the plane ride over there, with not one single true fact in his head about countries that were there long before his boardrooms and executive meetings. He'd make appointments with native people that were never kept, bribing warlords and government officials who laughed at his silly currency, until he realizes that those gleaming eyes in the bush are also calling his name. And so to goes his fate, the same as the pushy social do-gooder with a matching sense of overblown entitlement towards the world about needing our "relief", when they wanted our guns instead. That's where most of the money went to, anyway.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15788.White_Man_s_Grave

Reefer Madness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_Madness# 

Yesterday afternoon, I watched a popular entertainment program like I usually do, to be somewhat familiar with today's pop stars, because it's hard for a punk rock fan like me to identify with such rabidly followed trends like its the final Wimbledon match or the last game of the World Series. I wasn't exactly a "Tiger Beat" reader* growing up, and I'm pretty sure it would've been banned from the house for being stupid, anyway. My parents can be really egotistical about their educations. Like a lot of bourgeoisie in suburbia, they're still uptight about their relatively recent "escape" from blue collar life in the city; they can be fretfully uptight as a result.

And entertainment news is considered lowbrow t.v. fare, but I am thankful I'm not working their celebrity beats, too. They all look, sound, and act the same to me, anyway. In between the latest "bad boy" arrest was a refreshing live interview with former t.v. host Montel Williams, a proud American military vet and an outspoken advocate for fellow MS sufferers, which speaks to the heart of my family. He spoke about the relevance of medical marijuana to his treatment, and it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it. My mom and I talked about an article I forwarded her about cannabis for her MS, and she didn't reject it as an option outright, which was surprising at first.

When I was growing up, a common attack amongst my mother's family was the demonizing of anything illegal, like smoking pot or underage drinking, that served as an effective cloud cover for their shopping/sugar/pill-popping addictions that had thus far escaped mainstream notice, though times were quickly changing. With the advent of reality t.v. came widely-available media content about mousy fringe types, like the extremely anti-social cat hoarder, or the guy who dresses up in diapers to heal from his abusive childhood. 

Unlike obvious (and legal) social behaviors like smoking and drinking, mental illness became a mainstream topic, thus blowing the lid on their hereto hidden afflictions, especially when my aunt's "dear friend" died from botched surgery as a quick fix to the hoarding habit that placed her in a low-rent apartment around the corner from her late mother's Bronx multi-level townhome that she filled to the roof with junk, floor by floor. Nowhere to run, after that. Still, their semi-public bristling at my lifestyle differences behind their closed doors worked well among their small familial group, where clinically-diagnosed paranoia reigns supreme. Pot smoking became attached to schizophrenia through their compulsive repetition of it, aided and assisted as their pea brains were by so much widely available "newsie" propaganda. 

With the crack craze of the 80s and 90s, lawmakers were desperate to end the murderous rampage from the drug's use that practically bankrupted the city, causing the "white flight" that my mother and her family still rant about, comfortably entrenched as they can be in their casual racism. There were news reports after news reports about "gateway drugs" and "latch-key kids" that my mom and her sisters passive-aggressively sent as news clippings to one another, in a search for the minutely incremental leverage that marks the habitually anti-social. But, they were just following along with the masses.

Of course, me and my friends attending a well-regarded teacher's school in upstate New York knew better about a plant called "MaryJane". Me and my Irish/French-Canadian boyfriend referred to it as "herbe" and "l'herbe" at the same time that classes like "The History of Jazz" and "The History of Rock n' Roll" were filled with students every semester. And therein lie our generational cracking open of the case, forever. I mean, we were taking astrophysics and/or high school SAT's on weed and beer, yo. We already knew what science would eventually catch up to. But one cult movie classic really tied up the loose ends for us, culturally.

Marginalized as African-American people and their works were, no one could deny the artistic relevance of jazz and blues as predominant musical forms that were (and still are) undeniably American. Classes about another American artistic import, the movies, showcased cultural prejudices on a world stage, like the stigma portrayed in the old film "Reefer Madness" turned white audiences against some jazz cat's homegrown stash, versus the huge pharmaceutical megacorporation's factory-manufactured outputs of "Class One Opoids" that are much more addictive, and much more of a gateway to hard street drugs like heroin than some ole weed could ever be. And therein lies the brilliance behind co-opting artistic businesses for mass coercion.

I was impressed by Mr. Williams for being a public proponent for research about alternative delivery methods of medical marijuana that don't open patients up to smoking-related health issues (which my mom and I had already discussed, because she's a pill-popper), as I also noted that he is no longer a daytime t.v. talk show host, either. Still, he represents a celebrity voice in the African-American community that stands by its roots, one rational conversation at a time, now that the real junkies in society are dying off in droves. Finally, GenX gets to share its healing message of peace, love, and understanding through traditional medicine, one patient at a time. "You're welcome" for saving your lives, once again.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Beat

Evil, Inc

We've explored madness as it's currently expressed through certain industries, and the personality types who work at these kinds of enterprises, typically of the manically-addictive bisexual, personality-disordered, and former cheerleader type. She really really likes "positivity" in all things, except when she doesn't, and then she has to diet extremely well to compete with just about anyone in her own crazy pseudo-relationship that has absolutely nothing to do with reality or you, except you're around it while it is in its most freaky feral states of transition. That would be one type of employee. There's also the asshole sales manager who HAS TO be on the move constantly, or he will also short-out to go insane, plus he also really enjoys phony bullshit that he thinks will spring your wallet magically open. It doesn't.

That's why GenX has become one of the most hated and vilified generations of all time, in a process that was carefully cultivated by pretentiously arty sell-outs, like their chosen "alt" (that's "alternative" in quick, cutesy, chic-speak) movie director who smokes pot, has really bad relationships, never leaves his home, and then says we're all as lazy as him, because we're not. He's a fuck-up with really good press, because he's backed by people with money who want to preserve their privileges through a deliberate misportrayal of one of the hardest working generations of all time. It doesn't take as much money as people think to create a war machine that keeps on churning after the death of one of its creators. See also: Michael Jackson.

Millennials aren't immune to assholes, either. Their biggest social media guru is busy buying up huge tracts of beachfront land in Hawaii (http://www.forbes.com/pictures/emeg45mgmd/mark-zuckerberts-kahuaina-plantation/#47e9318526d5), so he can block public access to it with a full-time security staff of buff bodyguards, lots of paranoid outdoor cameras to track you walking anywhere outside of his compound (not of him and his team, because those pictures could leak out!), and a big thick wall to keep you all out. Like any typical asshole, he'll tell you that's he's "preserving the land" but, really, open space is a public park concept that's rather basic for any rich white dude with money to burn and phony charities to back, for flowing money in various directions that are both out of state and/or the country. But, I digress.

Let's get back to building evil war machines. I was particularly insulted by the fake summit a certain PC-building guru held for the richest idiots on the planet, to, like, save the world and stuff. They had a typed-up agenda of items and everything, so you know it's legit! On their list of key humans that will surely save us (not) was the impressive Spanx-wearing billionairess who has upheld the image of faux fitness for many a Hollywood starlet and her beard-wearing beau. I mean, hello? Form-fitting garments made from petroleum products? Duh! That's one impressive bitch! Cameras were not allowed inside what must have been their riveting brain-trust, because we would probably spontaneously combust from all their genius and stuff, but, like...absolutely nothing happened as a result of that meeting. Or it did, but for them and not any of us, where you and I can't see it.

They talk condescendingly about typical bullshit like drugs, crime, and homelessness ("urban" is the word they use for us as a "key demographic" my n*ggas, or, er, "coloreds"), but what I find so very interesting about all of these fake summits is the elephant in the room that not one of these compulsive-obsessive "billionaires" ever utters out loud, where the press can hear it and write it down: that the worst conditions in the world stem from psychosis and madness. Where's the research devoted to that? I'll put it up for you to link to here, but not one of them ever will, because when was the last time you met a really healthy person who pounded energy drinks for days just to code in some dull computer language over and over again, or to swim the exact same lap with the exact same stroke for years and years and years, way after we dropped it as kids? Never, right? Same as me.

https://www.google.com/#q=most+evil+companies

Meet "The Daltons"

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

My ex-boyfriend from college was in way over his head with me and he knew it, because people told him that over and over again. His manic obsessions bounced around in his head, making him sometimes think that people are fucking with him when they aren't, like classically paranoid hippies think about "the government" (as in "We, the People"), and sometimes people really are fucking with him, because he can act like a total fucking dick. He made a series of rude racist comments that he thought he could get away with as a six foot tall ex-quarterback/bouncer, which didn't help out his rep with us at all.

A tall annoying Jewish kid pledging a Long Islander frat lived next door to him freshmen year, and because the kid was a spoiled skateboarder with a rich daddy, Bart decided to mock his prominent nose in front of us one afternoon, when we were just hanging out on their dorm floor. That's how it went down with him: we could be drunk and high and having fun boarding up-and-down the hallway badly giggling about it, then Bart would trip when someone pointed out that he sucked at something like boarding, which he didn't do as a kid in his tidy whitey Bay Ridge neighborhood, because he's a fancy prep school boy.

After that, their "Cold War" began in earnest. For years, Mike Z. told Bart (after he told me he wanted to "see other people" in Montreal, because he didn't want to marry the woman he lost his virginity to) that he swore he saw me walking around Benefit Hill in Providence while I was at R.I.S.D. with a "black" guy (which wasn't true), but Mike had landed a direct hit on his target, square in the chest. I dated a handsome architect/furniture designer in the M.F.A. program from New Jersey who was newly divorced from his bipolar ex-wife, and he was a blond Dutch boy. I went on one date with Beau Bernstein, a good-looking Jewish boy from Manhattan whose famous father produced "The Beatles" first American tour (seriously), and he is definitely not African, not that there's anything wrong with that.

I also dated a messed-up cute sculpture student playing weird games with my Jewish, pot-smoking, and possibly bisexual hippie friend Beth who was "slumming" it in worn clothes that screamed "bohemian" loudly, with requisite woven-knit African tam placed on her long, scraggly, and frequently unwashed dark hair. They were experimenting with naked friendship, when they both lied down on a bed without touching, and then she scribbled manic sayings about worms and penises on cardboard for me to see, which she hurriedly crumbled up when I asked her about it. "Is it an art project?" I don't know. I was just there to help them grow some pot in her attic with his help, funded by their growing trust funds for the raised electrical bill and the equipment ordered from "High Times", like grow lamps with special bulbs. 

I have no fucking idea what was going on between them (still don't), except that maybe identity/personality disorders, trust funds, drugs, and really difficult art and design schools do not mix together well. Oh, and there was also a nice boy I fooled around with during the beginning of art school over a summer session (my Mom really liked him, but I barely remember him), and that was it. Truly. For years, Mike Z. played games with Bart's head in revenge for his racist and anti-Semitic comments, and I can't say I blame him for it. Bart used to grill me about the penis sizes of my exes (not that I had many to compare with, at 17 years old), asking me how much bigger he was.

It was kinda gay, but the kid was a virgin, after all. He was so fucked up about it, that he couldn't perform on the night we designated for the act to take place in my dorm room (Karen went home for the weekend, which was rare for her to do), and of course, we had to talk about it for way longer than was necessary. Go to sleep, I finally told him. We'll have sex in the morning. Really? Really. He was 18, and that's how it was. He believed me after that, pretending I was like a prescient "witch" when really, I was healthier and more mature than him, but he would argue with that, too. He could become arrogant, self-defensive, and boastful in a heartbeat, looking to place blame on the people around him, like blaming me for his failure at science, which blew up his boyhood dreams of tending to hunky football players as a P.T. 

Uh...sorry, bro? He didn't help me with any of my schoolwork or art projects because he couldn't then, and he certainly can't now. It was reactionary in the extreme. "Dutch Boy" called him "Old Man" to his face for being choosy, fussy, or picky about fucking everything, and there was something really weird about his fears that he forced us to talk about at length (as therapy for him), because he never really solved any of his problems. He was abusive towards me, too, saying crazy shit about my mixed heritage that he disparaged as a "Bourbon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Bourbon) Quebecois (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qu%C3%A9b%C3%A9cois_%28word%29), a way of putting himself above me as an Original Métis because he was supposedly "whiter" than me, eerily similar to the color games African-Americans play with each other to disrespect each other as less colored or "too" colored, you feel me?

It was okay when he developed a red tan in the summer because he had eczema on his upper arms (don't we all?!), trotting out exotic stories about a French-Canadian Great Uncle with prominently full lips who could have been part Indian...what did I think? Uh, sure, bro....they didn't exactly keep records about indigenous squaws and their fur trappers back then, you know? Except for my line, they did. In fact, I have a copy of my ancestors' handwritten diary with names and dates. In this century, we even have a genetic database! Hard to fake or beat, but like any desperate "student of history", Bart searched for clues among the stacks to prove that he was better than anyone else, when we were just a bunch of working class New York kids trying to make it, you know? It was oddly striving for someone of his age, but he wouldn't be the first bad scholar who can't compete with the actual chops of an impassioned academic and we were that as a group, overall.

Because of my beauty, brains, drive, and work ethic, his comments never really bothered me as much as his questioning seemed to knock him off-kilter much quicker than anything I ever did to him. I felt bad for him, actually. He could be a sweet boy when he let his guard down. He reminded me of the chesty character "Gaston" from the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast" (http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Gaston); an overblown cartoon character searching for himself by breaking apart other people into shards that he could examine at his leisure, except life didn't move at his pace. It got even weirder after I broke up with him. He dated and married a plain-looking teaching student who liked him from afar during college (typical, typical) with the "horrible" brown eyes that he supposedly was worried about mixing into his precious blood lines through me, because blue eyes are recessive genes to my stronger line, and perhaps domination by childbirth was his real fear with me, because it's true.

After we met up several years ago (he heard I was back in the Slope, and tracked me down via my phone number after a supposed random drive-by when he saw me walking Teddy down the block, because his boss just happened to live in the neighborhood), and he was still in love with me. He told me years ago when I broke up with him that he was upset because I was the best-looking woman he ever dated, which should have been a big clue, no matter how many times he heard it from me and other people. Yeah... major douche chills, right? So what?! He had aged poorly as I had aced aging, as we both predicted in our teens. I've always been younger looking than my actual age.

He didn't stop with the texts and emails, as I knew he wouldn't. When I was in a tough spot after my early morning accident with Teddy, I met up with him after work for a beer so he could carry me upstairs to my apartment on his back while I was still on crutches. He naturally disparaged my rent-stabilized historical apartment for looking "just like "college" because I was a rather recent move-in to the place, similar to my former "frenemy" Cheryl's comments about my aunt's "starter" apartment in Kensington, as cues to me that they were far ahead of me in life. It didn't work, obviously. He's reading me along with her right now, eh? But it did give me cues that I was 100% correct in dropping them from my life, not that I needed much verification. After that, he got weirder with his rapidly responding emails.

He'd told me we could have an affair because he had Lupus from those poor recessive genes of his (we hadn't known that in college), and as a result of his diseases, he was sterile. Ha! He'd boasted so often about his virility and rugged good health that it was the greatest justice I'd ever heard of. Poor kid! What an ass! He'd forced his lower-earning wife to bear triplets in a hospital bed through many in-vitro sessions (poor thing!), which I accurately described to my family and friends as "dodging a bullet", true in every sense. The Loup Garou of our mythical pasts had returned (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loup-garou_%28homonymie%29)! After that, he sent me a series of emails under a series of weirder pseudonyms, as a prelude to an affair that never happened. I married an Indo-Euro, bro! No going back from that.

One of the last email account names he used was so weird, I just had to ask him about it. What the fuck does "Dalton" mean?! One email name was an easier trace to a certain "Star Trek" episode (we'd met in our dorm as he watched Star Trek alone in the common room smoking a cigarette that I bummed from him to make conversation, and our pretext to meeting him as our new college-age drug dealer who lived in the room right beneath us....ha! Nice one, Karen!), but this one was more obscure....WTF? His reply was just as bad as I feared for him. He wrote that he was tired of explaining and spelling out his obviously French-sounding name to the movie people he worked with out west, so he decided to "Anglicize" it for their comfort. WHA???!!!

This was the same kid who'd openly bragged about his roots to all of us in college over and over, about how much of a real "working class" champion he'd be for all those poor union people after graduating, but this? This shit....?! The "sell-out" moniker he'd always feared becoming had landed squarely on his shoulders, and not ours. His brother Quentin's girlfriend Shelley had been a "sell-out" for straightening her curly hair like girls sometimes do (I did it in the 90s, too), but not him! No, becoming an entertainment lawyer who watches show-biz types for contractual violations that he can sue over, well, that's just great. Not a sell-out at all! Except he was, and poorly so. 

I didn't respond to him after that, even after he pretended that we established some sort of yearly check-in pattern as old friends that didn't exist. He goaded me into responding to him by insulting my obviously Acadian last name through his description of a Toronto band with it, a name I am fiercely proud of. It was the first legal stipulation I made in the paperwork I filed at a Colorado courthouse for the no-fault divorce I paid for on my own, after a 1/2 hr. consult with a bitchy female attorney who insulted me for taking up her valuable time, as I scribbled away all the legal advice I could afford for the $75 it hurt to pay, because I felt I'd lost something I would never get back when I gave up my name. I was so relieved to have my last name back that I immediately knew on each and every level that I'd absolutely done the right thing, just as I'd done with every other bad boyfriend I had in the past. I'd kept my name and my identity, even when it wasn't convenient for me to do so, and people, it has never been convenient for me to do so, but I stayed true. I got to keep my soul. Hard to beat that.

Free the Internet

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

In typical twist of fate, today is the anniversary of Frederick Douglass' birthday. It made sense to me when I explored the graphic on Google's search engine, because I created the title for today's piece last week, in another bit of fortuitous timing that marks vocational life. It's the type of head-space that has no quirky coincidences for us, only excellence. We live our lives deeply through intelligent design, the harmony that thrums through the universe or, in the words of the now-immortal Carl Sagan, “... the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” 

We are all made of the same stuff, so it makes sense to me that we would align ourselves accordingly, in harmony and perfect agreement. Mr. Sagan also noted the necessity of variation among life as essential to our shared successes: “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos 

Did we not at times share living spaces with humans so vastly different in perspective that we fought our most heart-wrenching, bloodiest war over it, so much do we believe that all men are born free as a manifestation of G-d's will that His children live together well? In fact, He tells us that if you do not fight hard enough for the lives of your women and children, then it is also your fate to accept gladly your rightful enslavement at the hands of your victors, because you have not properly defended what is yours by rights, and that is also what I ask of you today: to give more, because it's not enough. 

Yesterday I was talking to my father, a man of another generation who struggles with change before he converts to the newest technology and who was, at the onset of my career, a staunch anti-technologist made more so by his avid desire to preserve what he felt was his precious toehold over me in my work as an apprentice desktop publisher, by refusing to participate in this "New World". I could understand it, even as I worked to make the change from the hand-made to the digital easier for everyone around me, as it was not available to me, because I hadn't initially signed on for computer science, but here we are, and yesterday he (finally!) agreed with me that the Internet is the greatest advance in worldwide communications that we have ever seen, because he finally adopted the very technology I cut my teeth on as a young leader in business. Only after finally giving in to my greater expertise did he see how all the pieces fit. Aren't they beautiful?

What became his avid denial about my greater gifts became his grateful acceptance in old age, which is none too soon. Pride goeth before the fall*, and as someone who was tasked with excelling in business while learning impaired, he often made do with his challenges while he struggled to reconcile himself with the worlds I trafficked in, varied universes unto themselves that he doesn't always understand, but that's my job to bear up under. I want you to join us as an "early adapter" to a movement that's actually quite old, and free the Internet, just like you did with t.v. networks. As the astonishingly high price tag behind our superior technology initially frightened off the non-artistic layperson (as it rightfully should), then so has this initial phase of tool usage passed into worldwide acceptance. 

We will always have cheaper machines to do small tasks for minor chores done by smaller people than you and I (as is appropriate with any truly sophisticated social hierarchy), but for those of you who want to soar with us in the skies, then come along for the ride. Make the Internet free for all people, regardless of price. That's what Frederick Douglass deserves. A place where freedom reigns.

http://everyoneon.org/

“ If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. ”

* http://biblehub.com/proverbs/16-18.htm

 

Candyman

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

My next door neighbors in New City were the remnants of the old Dutch/German farm families of Rockland County, and they were not happy about the changes around them. Family farms were split apart to make room for hastily-constructed tract homes, and the farm families who had long relied on those plots to make a living soon tore apart, too. Country life is significantly different than city life, as immortalized in the cartoons we watched as kids, like Tom the zoo-suited city cat who slickly tries to two-time good ole country mouse Jerry by stealing his girl. They were afraid of us, and deeply suspicious of our motives, as we were with them.

My dad got into property disputes right off the bat, and the folks up from the city were "coloreds"; just on our block alone, we had a Puerto Rican street preacher with a storefront church who never once signaled our existence to us. Not once, in all the years we lived there. The Italians next door were just as weird; Tino was a typical con artist of a jerk who hated everyone except Italians, including the black people he served pizza to in the Bronx, where he kept his store. The Evretts were African-American, and they had the last house built on our quiet country lane. They were extremely reserved as well, which only fueled the fires of our imaginations further. They kept a nanny goat in their backyard, which was so odd for the time, we joked they had "voodoo" rituals at night, hence the need for discretion and their relative distance from the rest of the pack.

There weren't many play options available for hip city kids like us, which led us to make a sometime acquaintance with the farm kids next door, though truthfully, they had a mental retardation that served more often as comic fodder for our bored country brains, rather than forming any real alliance between us. You did what you had to do. The nearest store was a mile walk away (and a hard one at that), to a tiny convenience store...sigh. So, sometimes when the country kids came a-knockin', we let 'em in, but the window was a very short one, since we'd passed them intellectually at birth. Eddie, the youngest, was so markedly effected that he couldn't speak real words, only a homemade kind of patois that his older sisters had to decode for us. "Drin" was his name for Kristine (she was the girl I played with), and "Grog" was his name for his middle sister Margaret.

He got into all sorts of trouble, the kind of trouble that retarded kids got into, like banging his head on the family tractor in their garage, causing a rush to the emergency room that only further hastened his decline of a lifelong condition that never fully cleared up. I re-connected with the sisters using social media to find out he had passed in his 30's, which didn't surprise me at all, though I expressed my condolences for our childhood friend. His nose always ran, and his eyes were either red or watery, giving his wide country face a streaked, mad appearance. They ran around without shoes or parents, which scared us, too. Who are they? Where are they? Their insular culture was only reinforced every time we saw their fat mama on the porch. She hated us on sight, preferring to team up with their uncle next door to strip our plot of its' rich topsoil, in retaliation for the humiliation of having to split up the family farm.

She was a tall, plain, fat woman with short mannish hair, who screamed at her kids to get back into their yard every time she saw them on our yard or playing with us, which freaked us out even more. The only time I heard her speak was when she came out of the old farmhouse to tell her kids that Elvis had died, and that was because my mom was in the yard with us, playing badminton with the family net we set up running parallel to their family plot. It was so odd for her to even speak to us, that I have never forgotten the event to this day. We saw her more infrequently after that, what with school and winters spent indoors. There were whispers going around that she was unhappy, and we kids just figured it was more redneck static about "city slickers" that they were expressing to our parents, because our mom and dad clammed up almost totally when we were at the kitchen table, giving each other silent adult-like looks instead.

The only other time I ever remember seeing her again was the next summer, when my mom told me she was pregnant again. I tried making out the swell of her stomach but honestly, because of her weight, cheap baggy clothes, and ugly demeanor, spying was hard, plus I really didn't care what women did with their husbands when playtime was to be had, however infrequent it was at times. After that, we waited for the baby to be born so we could see the farmer's wife at suppertime, when she opened the kitchen door to shout for her three kids, who may be anywhere in the vicinity, and we were not disappointed. Finally, one evening the screen door banged open loudly to reveal her large frame with a small swaddled bundle in her arms. The kids were in the yard with us again, with our family group playing badminton, and we were rewarded for our patience with a closer look, bolstered by the presence of my mom.

We creeped up to the line of tall bushes they planted to separate us from their view, a harsh property line to obscure the horrors of city-folk in close proximity to their sturdy farmer's stock, or so we thought. Emboldened by my nosey mom, we stood right next to the bush line to get a closer view of the baby in her arms, my mom telling us that she was indoors a lot because newborns needed a lot of attention (to explain her relative absence as a country housewife, which was weird in hindsight), to see tiny arms and feet moving. There's the baby! We've always been a child-loving family, so the sight of a newborn made us really happy, and for once, the farmers wife seemed proud to have our attention. You see, dear readers, as the baby squirmed in his blankie, he pushed down the part that was covering his face, a face that was not "white" in any way, shape, or form.

Our snobbish uptight farmer's wife had just given birth to a beautiful and obviously "black" little boy, and that was the last time we ever saw her again. My mom couldn't wait to run indoors to tell my dad, and neither could we. Gossip this good didn't break 'round there very often, and when it was as juicy as this, no one could refrain from talking about it. After all, the indiscretion was already out, right? She'd cheated on her farmer husband with a black man, and their wasn't enough land in all of New York State to cover up that fact. They moved away after that, the kids with the mom, with the father alone in the house for sometime on his own. I kept in touch with the oldest girl via "Pen Pal" letters for awhile, but given how little we had in common besides proximity, the friendship died out. None of them would attend college or attain the status that was always my destiny to reach, leaving little besides New City goings-on to message each other about, which is exactly what we did during my brief foray into common social media.

As hard as the break-up had been at the time for their family, the girls enjoy (to this day) a happy, healthy relationship with their younger biracial half-brother, choosing to have a loving family instead of perpetuating the typical prejudices of the day, a rare but very beautiful ending to the beginning of this witching hour that is the start of our traditional Samhain season (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain). Get ready for the real bugbears* of this world. It's Halloween.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugbear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candyman_%28film%29

History 3x

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma,_Alabama

History often repeats itself, which is exactly what my father said to me over and over again. He's learning impaired (Dyslexia), so he's always liked plaques, signs, homey knitted samplers with folksy sayings, mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers...anything that reminds him what life should be like. It's annoying, but I also remember almost everything he told me, because he's repeated it so often, too, which is irksome at times. I prefer free-form originality and evolutionary progression; he likes the solidity of comfort and the sentimentality of old routines. 

We both like productivity and early mornings when no one else is around, which is why the appearance of hipsters here in Rockland County concerns me so much: if shitheads paid by their companies to relocate to trendy neighborhoods can't afford the city anymore, we're all doomed within the tri-state area, and these are not New Yorkers you mix with. They want conformity and trends; not newness and culture. They are not from here.

It was with this sense of repetition that I saw the events in Tennessee unfold on the evening news for awhile, acting like hicks in these isolated pockets always seem to do; seemingly armed with "the truth" and a mostly white local government armed to the teeth to back her outrageous sense of entitlement. In one of the early scenes from "Selma", Oprah Winfrey's character goes to the county courthouse to register as a voter, a fairly new federal right granted to African-American citizens. She's given a verbal test that even a seasoned historian would fail, a test that does nothing to dim her spirit. That's what hard-won rights granted to free people tend to do.

Armed with the truth, she gathers her community to protest in response to this one illegal act that defies logic, only the expression of a deeply ingrained ignorance that typically signifies inbred ignorance so entrenched, it is nothing short of violent, which is also point of the part. How do you break into the minds of a better, stronger people who use the the very effective tool of passive resistance as a societal tool to create change? You use anger and hatred against them, whipping folks up into a massive mob mentality with no reason or boundaries. That's what I saw on national television: some ugly redneck denying people their civil right to marry, and you must know by now how that goes down with me. It doesn't.

I was reminded of another historical event that affected me greatly; the story of New Yorker Solomon Northup's* nasty capture and subsequent sale south of the Mason-Dixon line, because it was once legal there to buy and sell humans like they're animals. And what can you do to property? Anything you g-ddamn want, which is what a bunch of fucked up retards did, to cover up the fact that they couldn't labor under a hot sun (like an African can), or do it efficiently (like poor folk always do), or turn a profit on a land they emigrated to from another land (like every American immigrant before them has had to do). There's no talking to people that insane.

It's not that the people of the north were always so righteous. Solomon took his name from the upstate farmer who set him free. He was also the gentleman who came looking for him when word got back to his hometown and family that he'd been illegally tricked into capture, like any gentleman worth his weight in salt would. After that, it was on. The Northups convinced Solomon to write down his true account the year he returned home, while it was still fresh in his mind, but also as part of his testimony in a legal proceeding that went on for years, transcending state boundaries, because that's the mindset of the truly righteous in this world: we don't ever give up, and we don't ever give in.

We became their willing collaborators, constructing the Underground Railroad** to help families on their road to freedom, and we fought a bloody Civil War on the basis of those freedoms, rights that are the legal right for every free American citizen, which we will do again, so it is in this vein that I will write this one more time to you, Southerner: Don't tread on me. Ever. Bitch.

Your homework, fuck-up:
*    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Northup
**  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

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

The law, shithead:  

http://cnn.it/1eM7m6g

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/ 

Brown

Every day of my life I'm the target of abuse, because I am not like you. I know! It's weird, right? Weird but true. I'm an actual ethnic minority, which is also really strange, because most welfare offices operate on the flawed premise that people who come from the biggest continent on Planet Earth (also known as "Africa": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora) are rare as human beings, hence the marketing terms "urban demographic" and "minority", which is not actually true in any of the numbers I've ever seen (creative accounting aside), you know, because of the size of it. Nor does your status as a descendant of the formerly vast Spanish Empire entitle you to cash money, gifts, and/or prizes, or anything else that's totally free. Again, see the real numbers here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaniards. You read it right, amigo. That number is 48 MILLION PEOPLE. Stick that on your flag and smoke it!

With that in mind, I use an herbal-based cleansing conditioner that's oddly shelved in the "ethnic" section (read as "black" or "brown"), because apparently the only weirdos with this kind of fucked up hair must be marginalized at each and every opportunity that presents itself to the makers of said products, just in case you somehow wake up one day to realize that you are not alone. In fact, there are BILLIONS of you muthfuckas, a'ight? I know what you're thinking: "Mommy" is trapped in a weirdly fantastical bubble that is suburban America, a place where "white" people think they are normal, and you are the oddball. I know, because every time I go into a commonly overpriced drugstore chain here in New York, some bitch behind the counter pretends not to see me if I may (rarely) need her help because the self-service machine is fucked up, just so she can signal to me anew my lowly position in relation to her, in case I forgot that my status as "Other" did not scrub off my skin during bath time.

It's become such a joke with my peeps around here, that I openly signal my understanding of the situation to any other "minorities" waiting in line who are similarly ignored by retail clerks (read: black folk. Yep, in 21st century New York), by pantomiming a scrubbing motion up and down my arm, mouthing to them: "It didn't wash off me, either!", then pointing to them, "Didn't wash off on you neither? No?", finally throwing up my hands in mock frustration to shrug my shoulders and just walk away. What's a n***a to do, right? The ad copy on a brown-colored bottle of cleanser marketed to "n****s" is so offensive, I had to read it a couple of times just to get it down. I think I counted at least six references to my "unmanageable" "unique" "twisted" "natural" hair, like I am some fucking Aboriginal Pygmy from New Guinea, recently discovered by a jauntily-dressed British explorer on safari.

I am not your particular pygmy dream child to fret over, Weird Marketing Wacko. I am just not entirely "white", like billions of other muthafuckas on the planet. Deal with it, yo. 'Cause we fuckin' do, every damn day. Every day we deal with your inbred isolated pocketed of protected weirdness, ya frightened Hobbit folk. Get wit' it in this century. People MOVE AROUND the globe. Fuck! Alright, now that we got that mess taken care of, let's look to my numbers for the real deal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29. Join me here in my land that is without delusional fantasies. It's fun! Ain't no one throwin' a better party than Acadians. Trust! I am your "One Percent", and I am the home you seek in this time of sickness among the rare who remain healthy. Come back to me in this world. 
We are forever, my love.

"To infinity and beyond!"

"Buttahface"

US Navy American professional iron man athlete Karl Gillingham spots Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class Ardinis Strickland. As an added bonus, try picking out the least attractive white guy in the photo as part of the game. You will win no prize, whatsoever. Nothing at all. Maybe some backlash.

I had kind of a great weekend. The weather was cooler at night, which makes for good sleeping, and boxing was on during daylight savings time, also very good for humans without that pesky circadian rhythm disorder known as "Manic Depression". In other words, this mommy watched boxing for free on a local t.v. station she gets with her digital antenna without using drugs to stay awake. Yay! I know, right? Girls, I know you feel me on this one. What planet do they live on? Baffling...

Anyway, back to the show. The boxing matches were a highly competitive weight class, and the talent was fierce. One handsome young man was sharp right out of the gate. I could tell by the condition he was in that he would win, and win he did, within the first minute of the first round, which is rare for boxing (not so much for MMA, but they are different professional sports). On a side note, they were televised from Foxwoods*, which helps to line the pockets of my Connecticut natives, who definitely owe me a cut of the profits for babysitting one very particular and highly disordered Mohegan/Cayugan/European disaster that my tribe did not create, because white man's "Fire Water" still does him and his kind wrong in this century, and they choose not to adapt or die. But, you know, also for solidarity's sake and stuff.

So, it was with great delight that I watched some experienced talent make their way through the day's fights. Another strong standout young man fighting out of Brooklyn was the favored fighter, for all the right reasons. His technique is excellent. He fought an Australian "Aboriginal"-type youngster of less experience, who had to be carried out of the ring, which sucks for the fighters and fans alike. It's not the kind of outcome anyone wants. But, the fight's doc assured the announcer that he was responsive on the way out, which is a great sign for his recovery. He'll go back to Australia with a much better idea about American sports, which is critical for a 23 year old.

This also handsome Brooklyn fighter had some flair, like you'd expect to tune into as representing freshness from the 'hood. Him and his crew sported wild python-like outfits in various colors (flashy, yo!), and after his show was over, he threw out swag to the audience, which is always the right thing to do in business, kids. Free stuff wins over the crowd every single time, and I LOVED his presence of mind about his chosen profession. But then, something very strange happened. The camera panned to the thin attendance in the seats (daylight hours being horrible to illicit cretins and all), and this really funny-looking Pimp Daddy with a big hat and polyester suit (I shouted out "HuggyBear!" to the t.v. in true ghetto-style...yeah, it was that much fun), with his banged-up looking white bitches....or so I thought.

Turns out, the back-story about this boxing gentleman was about his recent hiatus from the sport (they always spout shit about "cage rust" to fill up the time: it's an urban myth), due to the birth of his child. In most modern circles, this is also known as Maternity Leave. Ah, so what? Papa needs a brand new bag for baby. Good on him for doin' the right thing for his girl. Most guys ain't stand-up about an unplanned pregnancy, IMHO (and a big "Fuck you!" to "Scooter" for tossing me that bullshit acronym in a supposed "business" email. I know you read me, bitch). Life happens. And then, the camera scrolled back to my suited-up ole gansta with what I thought was his crew, but, OMIGOD was I wrong, because underneath this average white girl's pic was her MARRIED NAME to this handsome, successful Africa-American boxer.

Alright, let's work this out together. Yo, part of keeping your team together is letting your homeboy know that banged-up broad is an international flavor that transcends skin tone, and that my man now his HER GENETICS on his baby's face. Part of being a good teammate is keeping the ugly groupies away while your man trains. I mean, WTF Brooklyn? He found that in Brooklyn? You could walk half a block and find ten honeys betta than Miss Coyote Ugly 2015, which leads me to the next fabulous piece of ghetto-truth: beauty only mates with ugly when crazy is involved, and a strong one at that. Doubt me? OK, follow this link to see which famous actress** is married to what the sea done drug up and washed onto the beach from Down Under, because girlfriend needs funding for her vanity projects, hotel rooms, award show gowns, and most importantly, pricey uninsured meds.

Booyah backatcha. Don't mess with mami, boys. I know all them tricks. Y'all been schooled, so don't let yer boy roll with that banged-up bisexual cheerleader just cuz you won the trophy, and homeboy deserves a good time, even if it's with that thing (um, cheerleader) lookin' for a paycheck with the Mrs. Degree she wants to graduate with. Being head quarterback ain't all that. It's hard work carryin' your ass on any given Sunday, so don't get yo' boy drunk and pair him with ugly just as payback for "da game". I am so onto you. You gotta create the total package, coach. That's training for life.

See it here: http://bit.ly/1W5BSIi

For more tips about how to be a good friend, please follow along with these choice, highly-styled lyrics from back in the day:

Take It Off 
De La Soul 

(It's hurting.)
(Smell your breath!)
(You smell like Jabba.)
(Your nose is what's doing it.)
(You're talking into the recording... YO!)
(Okay Lucky, start it off.)

Take take take take take it off...
Take it off, take take take take it off
Take it off, take take take take it off
Take it off, take take take take it off
Take it off
Take it OFF!
(Take that suede front off)
Take it OFF!
(Take those contacts off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that horsemeat off)
Take it OFF!
(Take those shell-toes off)
Take it OFF!
(Take those track fleas off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that doo-rag off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that moth neck off)
Take it OFF!
(Take those fat laces off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that bomber off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that BVD off)
Take it OFF!
(Take those Converse off)
Take it OFF!
(And those Gazelles too)
Take it OFF!
(Take that Kangol off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that Jordache off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that Afro off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that jhericurl off)
Take it OFF!
(Take that Le Tigre off)

Take those acid-washed jeans, bell-bottomed, designed by your mama...Off? Please? Please..

*   http://www.foxwoods.com/aboutus.aspx
** http://likesuccess.com/428884