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Oprah famously said on her talk show that she loved giving away stuff because "GIVING FEELS GOOD", in a not-so-veiled reference to the compulsiveness that drives the lives of so many celebrities. Who doesn't like a new car?! Right? It's sort of like a shopping high, except you and your audience participate in the buzz of "new car smell" together, like a bunch of giggly girls at a sleepover sucking on helium balloons and doing bad cartoon voices.
After the hangover from her giveaways, Oprah was stuck with an African lawsuit alleging sexual abuse (herself a victim of molestation as a young girl) at the all-girls boarding school she famously built in Africa to make better female Africans, as weird a gesture for an eccentric rich American to make as ever. Much like Mark Zuckerberg's condescending attitude about giving "free internet" to those poor Africans (what about us here?), it's a do-gooder pose that hides, if not malicious intent, then some seriously disordered intentions.
At the local free library, such cheap easy sentiment runs rampant through their special needs policies (to attract local, state, and federal funding), that includes someone else cleaning up the messes from their ridiculous build-a-bag-from-newspaper workshops for retarded adults. They pander to brain disordered people without actually giving a fuck about the abuses tied to their presence at a place for advanced learning (which a library used to be), including not monitoring heroin users on the nod at their public access computers. That's distasteful and not part of their job!
It's okay to pad their typically empty building with Down Syndrome people, or day residents from the local psych center who need healthcare over stupid craft projects, because that's what makes them FEEL GOOD. The lady with carpel tunnel and OCD can feel proud that she shelves books all day very precisely, over those poor unfortunates struggling to use a mouse without her benevolent help. It keeps their corrupt system of co-dependence in place, so everybody who's sick benefits without actually calling it that.
That would be "labelling" and they don't do that in their "judgment-free zone", except for this: every book and media product in a library is very carefully assigned a Library of Congress category (by people like me) for the purpose of classification, bar-coded (also by people like me) for the ease of finding it by corresponding subject at their very place of employment. The dysfunctional pattern they're trapped in is so bad, that the disabled people working there were separated to me from the handicapped patrons they condescend to only by the distinctive blend of arrogant social "do-gooders" everywhere, saturated as they are by the scent of patchouli, a hippie's classic olfactory weapon of choice. See you in the stacks, kids.
Hippies living in Oneonta were largely comprised of two parts: the arrogantly rich "Trustafarian" from Long Island (kids with trust funds who "slummed it" just for college), and the meeker "peace-punk" of upstate New York. Neither camp liked me very much, as someone who could not be brainwashed by exposure and near-constant repetition of "The Grateful Dead", but I could care less. They liked to have fun more than anything, and in my quest for the perfect good time, they came closest to the concept I had in mind.
Their group centered around a wealthy hippie named "Bobby" from Long Island, whose mom sent him Italian-American food by the frozen trayful every few weeks or so. Because my college boyfriend was housemates with him one year, I was obliged to attend a few of his "Monoke-ass" events: a party game made out of smoking pot, playing the board game Monopoly, and eating his mama's cooking. As much as I loved lasagna, I had an Italian-American mother (and grandmother) of my very own, and she had no big problems with making food, outside of her willingness to do so.
I always felt like an interloper around them, and judging by the nasty looks they threw my way, I could tell they knew I didn't belong to their group, either. Cults are sensitive like that. Even slight deviations from their strict set of "norms" would find you greeted with a chilly reception, standing outside of their group looking at them from a more comfortable distance, which was fine for an Acadian girl like me. They were, uh, much less receptive to the werewolf cold that I withstood wearing my brother's old flannel shirts. I was also wayyyy too beautiful for them to handle gracefully, and I knew that, too.
That's where the more mellow upstaters came into play. They tempered the aggressive ethnicity of the downstate hippies with their more laid-back country vibe, since this was their "neck of the woods". They were more familiar with concepts like "Canada" and "Nova Scotia", making it slightly easier for me to attend their events without the rigorous hazing that went with the Jewish and Italian girls from L.I. looking to play sexy in rich hippie garb. I didn't even know there was a competition going on. Me and Karen just didn't want to die. Like I wrote before, no one gave two fucks about ethnic working-class girls like us. We were on our own, and no group would have us, which suited our independence well. Sink or swim. That was our home shore we always washed up on.
But I understood their need to belong. They wouldn't have made it, otherwise, and perhaps that's why their envy was directed at me whenever I was around. Anyway, I've never been a diva or an "attention whore", so staying in the background was fine by me. I really didn't need another spotlight to perform under. My class crits gave me more than enough time to hone my voice. I certainly didn't need the phony pressures of a pseudo-friendly social scene to boost my ego. I wanted to survive. And so, when the upstate group joined forces with the downstaters, we all benefited from their creative merger, in the form of a groovy rock band that played tunes anyone could enjoy and dance to.
It was the last ingredient we needed for our perfect party cocktail, catapulting our parties to instant fame, like all of our other antics. We now had a really good house band that would play for beer and pot. Done and done. Bobby played the drums, and they found a guy named "Tony" to be their lead singer. He wasn't particularly good-looking or charismatic, but it didn't matter. We always had girls at our party for him to flirt with and/or hookup with. They were kinda skanky to my crowd, what with the herpes that spread through their group like wildfire (in the guise of their "sexual freedom"), so we were fine at not being included in their events as party planners.
We could drink and dance as much as we wanted to, without having to clean up afterward. Me and Karen grew up emptying other people's ashtrays and rinsing out sour-smelling beer cans. Uh, not invited to their "private" practice sessions, too? High five! It ain't easy bein' a single teenage parent, so any night off we had to simply enjoy listening to music was always a good time to us, and with my bouncer boyfriend, no cover charge was even sweeter. Over time, their parties and our groups blended together anyway, as we jokingly changed the band's original "peace dove" hippie-bird name to the more fun and familiar choice of cool New York kids everywhere: Rock "Parmigiana". And we did. We rocked good music and good food like the authentic lifestyle to us that it is. Join us.
My attempts at creating a home out of the remnants of my aunt's apartment in Kensington were often met with sneers from the 30-something crowd who competed with us as teenagers at RISD (taking the one available scholarship for Illustration from us as well!). She dropped snippy remarks about my poverty, like: "Oh, this is such a claaasic 'starter' apartment", the very same privileged bitch who took college money from us by working professionally as a graphic designer for many years, and was taught illustration by her illustrator dad before going to school with us for Illustration (hence "winning" that Hallmark prize money, the one and only prize awarded to students for Illustration), living off the comfort that her IT husband provided for her. She then set at sabotaging our lives and work when she realized NYC was out of her reach (even after she ripped us off), to finally retreat to that northern place where all rich hippies go: Woodstock, NY.*
But enough about her. I was left with whatever my aunt didn't want to pack and move with her, like she was on the run from a serious crime, instead of the easy living my father's sponsored support provided her, present at each and every level of her life, which included (totally free of charge): apartments (in New York City), houses (in West Texas), jobs (in his company), healthcare (from out of his pocket as her employer), furniture, movers, cars, insurance, food...everything was always included. The only way I could do my apprenticeship in the city and stay alive was living in her cast-off apartment that had some furnishings, leaving me to pay off her monthly maintenance fee (it was a co-op), and all of the other bills that came with living in Brooklyn.
Anything else that I needed to survive, I had to either find, make do with, or do without. It was with this barely-able-to-eat budget that a basic answering machine came to mind because I had none, and I needed one for potential employers to contact me while I interviewed for work. I had nothing except my clothes, my artwork, a drafting table, and a few lamps, moving out of my mother's house at 17 for school, and not looking back. I have always been almost completely and totally on my own, for most of my life so far. I told my cousins from Sheepshead Bay (they liked to drink at the old man's bar on the corner, down the block from my aunt's place, because it's a cheap dive with a great jukebox), that I needed an answering machine, and they told me not to shop on Canal Street for home goods, but what could I do? I was flat broke with just my work savings from college jobs and a credit card, before I began living paycheck-to-paycheck.
I'd known about Canal Street since my student days, because there's a really well-known art supply store there, packed with several floors of stuff. It's the one place in the city where you can find everything you need to make art, and that's a rare thing. Back in the frontier days of Brooklyn, I had to do most of my shopping in Manhattan, and lug it home on the train or (if I just got paid) in a taxi, but that was extremely rare. Every penny counts. I screw up my budget, I starve. End of story.
So, I knew when I picked up a shrink-wrapped machine down on Canal Street (which cost me two subway fares to get to, for the ride there and back from way-out Brooklyn, taking me hours to do, with transfers and construction re-routing on the weekend) that I was entering into a shifty no-man's land of goods and services, a shady place to shop where there are no guarantees, but when was my life any different? If I didn't do something (anything) to help myself, nothing happened. Absolutely nothing changed, because no one did anything about it, just like it is today. It looked "hot" and slightly used when I picked it up in front of a street stall, but it was either this or nothing, so I bought it from some chain-smoking Chinese guy for $15.
My dad's cousin laughed drunkenly in my face the next time I saw him, because within a month, the two mechanical arms that sprang up when you needed to change the tape broke off. They completely popped out of their tracks, never to be put back into proper working order again. "I told you so", he slurred at me, and then he bought another round. Thanks. Within a week, I made the painful decision to invest in a $25-35 machine, knowing I'd feel the squeeze at the supermarket that weekend; no after-work drinks or take-out slices for me. When I turned to look around the joint, I simply saw myself reflected in the mirror behind the bar, because there was no one else to turn to. Ain't never been any different for me than that.
* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/trustafarian
