Contents Under Pressure

Unlike the addicts and "headcases" lurking around us, me and my working class friends always knew we smoked, drank, and experimented to escape the daily hell(s) we came from. We always knew that if/when we ran things, it would be better, and now it is. But, that didn't help us out much as kids, except in the same dully repetitive way, which was the point behind our terrible homes: we had to do what our insane parents wanted us to, or needed and/or forced us to do, or we'd become homeless children susceptible to crazy-ass hookers and the drugged-out zombies on crack serving them up as their pimps on the then-wild streets of 70s-80s New York City.

We'd see the bombed-out buildings and wandering packs of wild dogs lope through our old neighborhoods like hounds escaped from hell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfen_(film), and wherever we went, there'd be art in our wake to tell our "peeps" about the bad news, too, though in a really fun and entertaining way. That's how you have to do it with the insane, or they could "snap out" on you, in a suddenly violent way. We'd been at the bad end of a father's fist or a mother's belt borrowed from him, and what they couldn't beat out of us, they starved us into doing, by withholding money and time and parenting.

My grandparents were "hip" to the whole scene; they'd also been forced onto our mean city streets before they were ready, by sick households that just gave up, to have family that then joined together to force them out of school (where they belonged) into rotten jobs that were humiliating and demeaning to the brilliant kids with potential that they were, and remained for the rest of their lives. Their mad families made their prowess—in comparison to their ineptitude(s)—their punishment for "out-living" them. I asked them about it, in between abusive bouts in our sick households, as I leaned in over summertime glasses of excellently-made iced tea or fresh lemonade, drinking in their good health like the succulent blend they had made it for; just for me and my ears alone.

My grandmother wanted to be a nurse or a teacher, and so in response to the brutal pushing of her parents, older brothers, and older sisters (who lived in their own fantasy worlds of delusional thinking and absenteeism), our Great Lord gave them, in His Infinite Wisdom, me to teach, and I drank it in like I was ready for it. I needed it, their succoring. Lord knows I was hungry for it, banished and isolated as I was in a home full of untreated sick people that they also knew all too well from their own lives and upbringings. Well, what did you do after your brother pretended he was "trying out" for the Yankees (cough<bullshit>cough), by wasting his time playing stick-ball in the streets? I asked her, and she told me the truth. Oh, she told me, I won the decision-making process in my household, by becoming a factory manager by the time I was 19 or 20-years old. 

Yeah! That cheered me up. And she did. Through her superior ability to earn, she ruled the roost, which pulled her out of an abusive relationship that was to be her arranged marriage with a boy back from "The Old Country" in the Abruzzi region of Bari, most likely a cousin too closely related for a good healthy match anyway. He put his hands on her, and she fought back by standing up to him, which earned her her father's approval and respect. In the meantime, she met and fell in love with my French Swiss/Irish-American grandfather while canoeing, because they both loved the beach and the outdoors. Ha! Of course, you do. Me, too! But, like, why did they do what they did to you?

"Oh, I don't know..." She'd trail off, in recollection. "After refrigeration put him out of the ice business, he just stopped working." Huh? I never heard of such a thing in my extremely strict household, where child labor was considered a natural right by my sick parents, just like theirs. Why? "I don't know!" she responded to me. "I think they were scared and tired of trying to 'make it' in America. They just refused to learn English." Ah...Yeah, I knew that one, too. Just give up and cave into it. "And my brothers were favored for being older by Italians, so they got away with doing nothing all day." Ha! Yeah! Right! I have that, too! She nodded, and then continued talking to me in private, where no one else could hear her but me, and maybe my silent grandfather.

"Yes, but you have to understand something, Marie..." My ears perked up like the puppy I was, in the presence of greatness, because even I knew from my earliest years that my grandmother ran shit like the strong-armed, Bronx-born female she was. "The work that they refused to do made me much stronger than them." Uh huh. Preach it. Better than school on a Sunday. "After I took the economic lead in my household, I had 'the say' then. Not my parents. Sure, my father loved me and stood up to the neighborhood after my fiancee 'put his hands' on me, but I also had to wait almost four years before I could marry your grandfather, because they were prejudiced against Irish people", and here she made the drink symbol with her hand to her mouth, like you're tippin' back all the way in one big swallow from yo' glass.

Yeah, word. I got that. It meant I'd have to wait for what might be a very long time, even after I succeeded from all my hard work, to get what I wanted, maybe much longer than necessary, because it would take that much time for my family to catch up to my reality in any time, either the past, present, and/or future. And after that, we'd pause in our short conversations that were blessedly free from the static of the mentally ill around us—either swirling about in tense motion, or sitting around us in fretful waiting—in these short exchanges that were like breathing in fresh air after working underground all day in the explosive sewers of the city, like my grandfather did for most of his life (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolidated_Edison). 

They'd take a long steadying pull from their cool sodas or glasses of beer, as I followed along with my baby soda or lemonade. It became a ritual that me, my friends, and our classmates would re-enact at about the same time, wherever we were, that'd bring us together in an almost magical synergy we knew it was; a deeply spiritual destiny that we were fated to meet, like the aligning of the planets under a thick blanket of stars in the crisp clear air of upstate New York, protected as we were in our hard-to-reach mountain stronghold of Oneonta, re-creating sacred rituals of renewal and refreshment as young teenage "parents" who'd been made to run things way before our time(s): "It's 'smoke 'em if you got 'em' time!" 

And then we would. We'd pull out cigarettes to take long drags from, in a steadying way that meant the next fight was near, followed by a long drink from an ice-cold beer that'd been cooled from the snow we'd just reach outside our dorm rooms or old houses to grab for our coolers. It wasn't alcoholism, or addiction, or the "touchy-feely" language of some fake pseudo-science made just  for t.v., like the bad pop psychology that's become the business of rehabilitation, rather than the cure. We wanted more for them and for you; now, then, and always. We want(ed) a cure; not for us, but for you. All of you. You get me? Yeah, I bet you do. Now you do. From me, you do.

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

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

Bad Medicine

As you well know by now, many of my very best friends are educators. I loved being around them in college, because we studied everything we could within the time frames we had available. For most of us, it marked the most intellectually free time we had in our young lives thus far, and we luxuriated in the company of other gifted educated people. Higher learning set our minds free, and our passions were something we desperately wanted to share with the world through our excellent communication skills, which brings you here to me today, and us, as a community, now.

That didn't stop us from deeply considering the past because as the saying goes, someone not well-versed in it is doomed to repeat it, and as working class kids, were just as keen at escaping the purgatories of our family homes as our trapped parents were. It just didn't work, for anyone around them. Through our studies, we put together the pieces we needed to change the world, often by looking at ourselves through our shared histories first. My first love and my best friend became history majors; she, as a female educator in a male-dominated field, and my boyfriend as a failed scientist first (he blamed me for that, of course), until he reached his loudly talkative stride as a history major and legal scholar (yeah, you're welcome, bro).

We had many fascinating discussions, as we filled in the gaps left wide open by our ill-prepared families over many beers and a toke or two, though we were all avidly aware that our wildest partying days ended upon graduation, because each and every one of us almost immediately entered the working worlds of commerce and trade, pairing our academia with the real world so as to fill in the gaps present there, too. It was less welcomed than our friendly community of gifted scholars, artists, writers, and athletes, because almost everyone is threatened by a samurai warrior at first, with good reason. You may suck as a human being, and that pisses off native New Yorkers who've been a happily blended people for centuries. You might not fit in with us, and that happens in societies often, especially during our younger years, as we adjusted to the dysfunctional around us, through intellectual problem-solving in various industries.

Because my crowd was heavy on the history, I parted ways with their deeper explorations as I filled out my curriculum, necessary as it was for us to do as individuals, but I kept pace with any content discussed, because I spent my youth reading, which became part of my vocation, too. One of the more interesting second year 200 levels was an oddly named enticement called "EHIS 232 History of European Witchcraft" (http://www.oneonta.edu/undergradcatalog/ehis-232-history-of-european-witchcraft.asp), which I was delighted to find still on the schedule, today. Well-done, snow-bound freaks! Keeping our cultural interests alive across the years has been challenging, too, because disordered populations often seek to banish from the history books their own checkered pasts, as inconvenient truths they no longer wish to confront or solve.

Not so with our crowd. We wanted to keep the flames of our ancestors lit through the invocation of our co-joined spirits through well-told stories, reflected in the enjoyable classes taught by professors equally passionate and adept at bringing the past back to life, in dark classrooms with brightly-lit screens filled with art history, through images of relics that we wanted to unlock and tell everyone about, sharing our common knowledge with as many minds as we could fill, empty as those containers often are among the common and sick looking to turn away from the lights of enlightenment, as antithetical to our group's ethos as it ever was.

One of the key pieces we put back together was the insulting truth behind our obliterated indigenous pasts, found here at this windswept mountain school, kept alive by torch-bearers from the past. We realized that traditional medicines made from local plants had been wiped away by the voracious greed of invading Europeans who sought only to reap the value from our harvests and leave, laying waste in its' wake. It'd begun a long time ago, with the arrival of exiled wackos from their own countries, infecting our countryside with their fevered cults of delusion, evil and dangerous as ever, free to spread like wildfire across the forests and plains of this land named "The Americas" by Italians who didn't bother to ask the dark people who lived there its name, spreading their diseases at the same time they planted their invasive crops laden with foreign-born vermin.

Their spooks and devils were the same as those in their Old World countries, specters hallucinated in deeply thick woods entered fearfully at night with the exact same psychoses that had their cults exiled by regions afraid of their illnesses, the same falsely-made leper colonies as ever, made from old women casts as witches by the rise of male-dominated European medicine, along with their strong inheritance of herbs and crops, now lost to the ages, to be picked up by those children of theirs adrift in a home world full of foreigners, made expensively strange with their imported medicines and crop-killers.

Today we take it back, as we tell each other again the cures we've always known to be true, activating them out of our very DNA, despite the condescending rich white man's sneers over "folk cures" that actually work, as scared and sick as ever with their typical lusts made out of greed and money, borne through our inflamed bodies aching to heal from the kind touch of a loving mother seeking to ease her infant's cries at night, through expensive salves and ointments sold to her by foreign-born, European-trained doctors who care so little for us that they would rather sell us salves made overseas and shipped here at our expense (loyal to another land and blind to our cries for help), choosing their tribes over our native soil, further impoverishing and bankrupting women and children by sickening them deeper still.

After years of expensive doctor visits with a Jewish/European white woman who bankrupted me to make her and her family wealthy instead, laughing at my concerns with her pad of rich snake oils sold through fancy white male sales reps sitting in her over-heated Brooklyn office, backed by years of continued prescription renewals that only temporarily relieved my eczema; nasty ugly rashes that bled and oozed in the pressure-filled public spaces rife with their sick, pressured by their pounding sickness over our cooling seasons here that they cannot tolerate, causing my body to burst into large red angry rashes by their continued European madness, misplaced as it still is by their relocation here from their ousting elsewhere. 

It's time to take a stand against their exile wrongly forced upon us here in the Americas, because not one of them during my many long years of their imposed poverty told me to use oatmeal as a homeopathic cure; not one single corrupt wealthy European-American. Not one link found online through their Internet searches controlled by advertising dollars back by Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, and Big Medicine, searches made at night, using expensive online access that women and children typically cannot well afford, searches made by a million concerned mothers looking to ease their crying babies at night with a simple dollar store cure like an oatmeal bath, with the same kind of poultices applied directly to their delicate skin, ones that cure, cool, and comfort at the same time. Well, you can rest easy. We're home. You can all go home, now. Sooner rather than later.

Cures done at home through common pantry items, by the numbers: http://www.solitaryroad.com/s815.html

Their pricey European/American store-bought versions: http://www.aveeno.com/product/aveeno-+baby+eczema+therapy+soothing+bath+treatment.do

You sick fucks! Baby powder, moms: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/athome/talcum-powder-and-cancer

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

Addendum: I'd like to add that my eczema has become far worse with age, greatly assisted by: global warming (sweat adds salt to the body where it wouldn't normally be, during normal cooling-off seasons), stress greatly exerted upon me that has been confirmed over the years as purposefully done as a means to detract from my beauty through the application of abusive pressure that would (hopefully) cause sickness in me (as part of the continued oppression of my people that I inhabit in a daily role), and that this Jewish-American doctor I sought out (after two other female doctors moved out of the Park Slope section of Brooklyn) took a Hippocratic oath to heal and not hurt that was put into direct conflict by her continued recommendation of an Israeli-made ointment that she said (defensively) she prescribed to me because I was a female athlete, and therefore I needed a synthetic non-steroidal salve, even though I never needed a test as an amateur athlete, nor do low doses of steroidal salves show up in modern testing. 

I should also add that she was extremely hostile and aggressive to me at first, as was her entire office staff (several of whom were fired, like the office women from a previous doctor I saw during my time in Brooklyn), as were the other female practitioners she recommended to me. It should also be noted that the main ingredient listed for this salve is "petrolatum", a petrochemical derivative that's wide usage and distribution is a continued sales boom to fossil fuel manufacturers, and their waste by-products. 

Take from that what you will. M

Acadian heads-up: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/fashion/26skin.html?_r=0 

Colored heads-up: http://www.softeeproducts.com/products/treatments/indian-hemp-hair-and-scalp-treatment/

Homeless for the Holidays

Through no fault of my own, I was homeless a few years ago because my family turned their backs on me for being economically dispensable to the unsavory family business that I had worked hard for, a business that was struggling to stay afloat from all of their excesses and not mine. I developed a publishing program for bargain books sold at B&N stores worldwide that's made me infamous throughout the industry. They wasted tens of thousands every year on decorating expenses, stupid parties, pricey real estate, and fancy white gardeners for their office balcony (that I never really had time to use), before they gave us a real 401K plan that we had to ask repeatedly for. My dad had once asked me to sell books only for a dollar or for free, as some sort of test of my "worth" as a publishing executive, and it was one that I easily accomplished. When the economy tanked yet again, they cut the staff who weren't family (or married to family/friends) and jettisoned the rest of us, which surprised me not at all, because I know how people who are bad at business react to stress: they don't. You do. 

So began yet another typically old family pattern of dysfunction spurred on by the upsets present in my life, which goes something like this: if "Mama Marie" ain't earning, then she ain't eatin', and that was certainly true for me. I almost fainted from hunger on some of the worst days (during which my father had the gall to ask me if I'd ever gone hungry, after I'd exhausted all my funds, credit, and extraneous belongings, like any normal person would do to avoid being a burden to others), in between the outrageous emails I sent to my family that gave them full advance warning (because I can succeed at business without even trying, despite the lack of their expensively bought M.B.A.'s, thus adding more fuel to their envious fire) of my upcoming eviction due to lack of payment (with no legal advice offered from my lawyer uncle or the corporate lawyer my father has on retainer for his needs), even while my father congratulated me publicly for my success at earning a spot at a prestigious writer's colony (because he wanted me to teach him writing so he could pen his memoirs and brag about it), because I worked that hard to be good for them by compensating for their deficits during my homelessness, like any real mother would. 

In return, I got bizarre offers for a limo ride to some mental institution in Westchester for all my troubles, when I really just needed an expense check sent to me, like any other businesswoman in publishing who itemizes correctly and transparently. There's no secrets here, anymore. How else was I thanked? Well, every time they made the wrong decision about me, I told them the truth about their sicknesses, illnesses, deficiencies, disorders, impairments, addictions, and crimes against humanity that they owe me "big-time" for, because the only times I get pulled into badness of any kind is at someone else's say-so, and isn't that way it always is for people of good faith? We are tried and tested to see through all the badness around us by fighting our way through it, alone. It is in this way that you've come to be my adoring audience in the year 2015: because you asked me to undergo rigorous feats of strength that you can't do, like any true hero does, and I survived to tell you the tales about my amazing, death-defying acts of life, like an ever-ongoing Homeric odyssey of epic modern proportions delivered freshly and freely almost every day.

And so it came to pass that I found myself isolated and alone at some hotel room (during our most holiest of seasons) in the Sunset Park* section of Brooklyn, living by my wits and a tenuous room connection to the hotel's WiFi service, booking rooms at B&B's in the area so as to be ready to go to work on Monday morning, because I worked my way through it, just like I always do. Sure, a few days I had a small powder blue bag with me on the elevator in the morning that was remarked upon by one of my design assistants, but that was it. 

The holiday itself found me with absolutely no contact from anyone whatsoever: no good wishes, no phone calls of forced bonhomie. 
There was no gratitude or charity towards me of on any kind, except the G-dly ones I received by my own hand, because I walked several miles to be with my parish family at St. Francis of Xavier in Park Slope (where I was "shadowing" Sunday school teachers guided by Sister Kathleen, the former principal of the elementary school across the street, by following along with her lovingly designed children's curriculum) for church service on Sunday, because I said I would.  
I said I would be there.

http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org

 https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dhs/prevention/homebase.page

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Park,_Brooklyn

Half-Assed: A Homer Simpson Story

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

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

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

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