The Etruscans

My best friends’ father Charles was her first inspiration for studying history, though he'd pursued a psychology degree instead, which got him a stressful social workers’ job in the Bronx during the height of the citys’ struggle with crack cocaine in the 70s and 80s. After his idealistic post-college stint in the Peace Corps, a time of hippie experimentation with native sweat lodges and hallucinogenic trips on peyote buttons in the Mexican desert, he struggled to find meaning and equilibrium among the hard-hit minorities who came to his office for help. 

Instead, he found bitterness and a lack of understanding that ingrained in him a casual prejudice fueled by his own inertia and passionless marriage. It was hard for us to watch her hip, smart, educated parents from the city, the first to attend college in their families, go down so deeply into alcoholism and madness, but like so many of their "silent generation", they refused to admit the seriousness of their illnesses to anyone, so they could condescend to the people stuck in the ghetto, who they wanted to see as having so much less than us.

We'd find him puttering in his garage during summer breaks from school, sweating in the heat and avoiding his wife inside the house. He'd made a little workshop for himself there, so he could paint tiny military figurines in exacting period detail, while he expounded upon his favorite topics like the Etruscans, always delivered in the exact same way: "Girls, have I ever told you about the ancient Etruscans? They were a very advanced civilization that pre-dated the Greco-Roman time period. Most people don't know that." Ah, okay. It was better than the usual power struggles between her parents, with their tense silences and chain-smoking drunks that'd go on for days. We'd go on beer and cigarette runs for them just to get the fuck out of the house.

With a little encouragement, her father would go on to describe Etruscan burial mounds and their sophisticated societal hierarchy that would inform and inspire the later governments of the much more famous Greco-Romans. We found it touching that he clung to Italy's historical underdogs out of some sense of loyalty to them and their almost-forgotten world, like any real historian would. Though her parents never made it out of their personal struggles with addiction and mental illness, I can still see him in my mind's eye working in his garage, at a time when the whole world was opening up to us from between the pages of our college textbooks, in the cold mountains of an upstate New York winter. Ta, Charles. Thanks on that. 

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“3 years, 10 months, and 19 days...” That's what a woman buried on Mount Moor had lovingly carved into the tombstone for her child. "That's a mama who loved her baby", I said to my brother in passing. We read off their names, dates, and military service as we walked around the small grounds, hemmed in on every side by a new mall and its parking lots, in an area of Rockland County that was swampland when we were growing up here. There was actually nothing to see on the road from Nanuet to Nyack, but for this hidden little gem of a cemetery tucked into boggy marshland nobody else wanted, as fitting a historical tribute to segregation for ethnic minorities as ever.

Acadians, Cajuns, and Creoles shared the same fate, too. Bayou water is considered "bad" water, because mosquitoes give sickness to the people forced to live there. What the new laws couldn't wipe off the face of the earth, nature certainly could. It was an economical way to get rid of a despised people (often better than the European colonists around them who couldn't acclimate to this new place, similar as it is in climate to Europe, but that wasn't the real problem) through deliberate marginalization and severe economic poverty, except for one powerfully overlooked fact, and that was this: already-oppressed minorities often bond with similarly afflicted tribes, and so we did.

What was once a power play among the socio-economic elite, based on their weirdly outdated prejudices against "interbreeding", allowed our ancestors the relative freedom of marrying whoever they choose, which often meant mating with the much greater genetic stability present in the indigenous people who walked their way here, carrying their culture and robust good health with them. And so, it backfired against the minority elite horribly, which only angered the white man even more. We saw name after name of a people who lived over 80 years and more, way before modern medicine was available to them.

Unfortunately, their children didn't fare better. We saw a lot of markers and smaller headstones with one date etched simply into the stone, as places to memorialize their still-born babies before a naming ceremony could take place. I'd passed by the small cemetery many times, always rushing to make an errand on someone else's time, but this time, my brother went along with whatever I wanted. I priced out a few items in the bloated mall that are completely overpriced for this land and its economy, and we both left empty-handed, to visit my grandparents at their resting place. It only seemed fitting.

We were baffled by the overly ornate constructions of chain restaurants that we know are no good, wondering aloud how any amount of business could sustain such an obvious waste of space. Most of the square footage was blown on bad plastic decorations serving one purpose: to attract the eye of someone who'd obviously never been to a mall before, which is totally out-of-date for the area. I can't imagine that this "new" mall will up stay for very long, and that's a comfort to me, too. Long after these stores (with their cheap shoddy merchandise) will be plowed underground, our ancestors will still reside in relative peace, nestled in a little hillside that overlooks the real Palisades of Rockland, with their beautifully rocky facades. Happy Earth Day, 2016.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palisades_%28Hudson_River%29

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Moor_African-American_Cemetery

Deadhead

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

During this very important "Year of Mercy" (as ordained by His Holiness in Rome), Our Most Holy Father has actively encouraged us to speak out against a culture of death that seems to grow stronger with each passing year. Back in the 70s and 80s, the biggest hippie band in America was a rock band called "The Grateful Dead", with skull logos emblazoned on as many items as a wealthy "Trustafarian" without a full-time job could comfortably buy, in between supplemental cash sales from the drugs they used in their psychedelic world. If you've ever heard their sets from back in the day, you'd know why you needed a lot of artificial stimulus to listen to it: it's repetitive and redundant in the extreme, always with the exact same sound.

A lot of other rock bands suffer from an uncomfortable distance between studio tracks and performing live because most of their talent is coaxed out by the excellent producers and sound guys who stay up all night hitting lines of coke with the band to get one or two decent riffs, let alone an entire track. It's really hard work making great music. "The Dead" took the opposite tack, by relentlessly sticking to the same type of meandering playing, as soon as they felt sure their audiences' acid trips had kicked in. Oh, good! The kids have finally zoned out. Let's play whatever we want.

Don't get me wrong. I like their music, but the whole scene was like a cult to me, and that totally turned me off. I know tons of great songs and artists from the exact same time period, but listening to their sound wasn't exactly what this band sold. They wanted you to give up your life to follow them on the road, because what better way to make a living then off a generation of kids raised without parents who are vulnerable to strong outside influences? That's what. And that's exactly who my first real "Deadhead" friend Michelle was back then, and still is today, as I found out during our obligatory "let's meet for after-work drinks after reconnecting on Facebook" routine that marks our life in this digital age of social media.

After blowing her gasket as a publicist at someone elses' PR firm for the fashion industry in the city ("I got a freakin' picture in 'Vogue' fer crissakes! I deserve more money than her!!", jerking her finger at the other junior publicist sitting in their bigwig's office, as she told it to me in a regretful tone, after a drink or two), her rich and totally absent daddy sent her a lot of money to start a fancy business in Midtown, with cushy offices to match the pricey real estate with the obligatory trendy loft apartment to launch her successfully into the future. She dated a really well-known chef who was younger and he lovvved cooking for her at her place, but they just broke up. She was then talking to me about freezing her eggs. Oh. That sounds really expensive....still waiting on that check for me, by the way. 

Anyway, it was the exact same deal as when I met her late in our high school careers, alone and scared and almost bullied to death. Some of the "popular girls" started a rumor that she slept with one of their boyfriends, and after that, the cheerleaders turned on her ruthlessly in the open hallways and bathrooms of our huge New York public school. She wasn't safe anywhere and in her desperation, she turned away from the posers to seek out better friends among kids who had real power, like me and my group of diverse, smart kids from tough homes.

I took her into my social life, but my friends instantly hated her. She was (and is) a breezy, well-practiced con artist by necessity of her home environment, not that she took much from me but an ill-given $45 at the Jersey Shore for a bag of mushrooms bought at the WaWa grocery store on LBI, as an act of revenge for cutting her out of our senior trip to the beach. I shudder to think what that group of adult teens running New York homes with jobs, cars, keys, and futures would have done to her, but at the time, she wasn't thinking straight. 

She was almost gang-raped by a sports team from school, for being foolish enough to be lured over to their fake "house party" that quickly became a group of drunk guys looking to take advantage of the girl "everyone" hated, by blaming it on her bad reputation. I didn't feel that way about her at all, and I told her a few years back at our mini reunion. She never stole any of my boyfriends from me, and even if she did mess around with one or two of the boys in our crowd, it was all water way under the bridge. We don't see them socially anymore anyway. No harm, no foul.

But the redhead from high school that she pissed off then was deeply in love with her teenage boyfriend, and she wanted Michelle tortured for the rest of her school career. I took her under my protective wing, like I've done with many a foundling ousted from the comfort of an empty nest that wasn't ever really all there. I don't recall meeting her dad ever, except maybe for a ten-second brush-up that he would have instantly regretted by blowing out the front door of their family home almost immediately. Her mom was a seemingly ditzy housewife who planned and hosted expensive parties for their clients at their large suburban home. She'd airily invite us to eat the catered Jewish food that was leftover in a fridge full of plastic-wrapped trays in a fake sing-song voice, then leave just as quickly, too. To where? We never really knew.

And that's what all of us had back then: a bunch of empty homes without parents. Michelle had all the time, money, clothes, booze, sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll she could fit into her busy schedule, but no real family. She had a car filled with gas and nowhere to go, and no one to see. It was heart-breaking to see the way her parents cruelly cast her off like an unwanted pet. She floundered like any troubled kid her age would, and then one year she discovered "The Grateful Dead", and she was instantly hooked. Hippies are savvier than they look, and staying on the road to see expensive concerts is a hard gig to manage, even for spoiled rich kids from decent families. Who'd pay for their concert tickets when the money ran out? She came back with connections to a new group of kids she met on tour from Hastings-on-the-Hudson, who were just as bored and rich as she was.

She tried to talk me into going on the road with her one summer while we were on break from college, which was met in my mother's kitchen with a loud derisive snort that my middle bro liked so much, he quickly pulled up a stool to watch the early fireworks. This should be good! Michelle's plan was to sell the multi-colored yarn bracelets we'd make. I had one in my pocket to show as a sample. My mom was completely unimpressed. It wasn't a great plan, but I'd seen Michelle pull money from some of the dirtiest, lowest-rent pockets around. She could pull it off. Yeah, but...can you? Good point! My mom reminded me that I earned the money I put in my pocket during semesters, and that was indeed true. "You need a job!", as was always the case for the desperate, disordered, and chronically needy surrounding me. Who else will pay for your expenses at school, if you don't? It was suddenly quiet in our large suburban kitchen that'd been an expensive renovation for my proud parents of years past.

I spent a horribly dull summer working at a "Herman's World of Sporting Goods" store at the old Nanuet Mall, waiting for my friend to come back from tour, and fitting in about as good as a shiny new apple among the depressing brightly-colored golf clothes for the rich white men away on vacations who did fit it into neatly assigned roles. She came back early, running out of gas, with an enthusiasm for the old hippie band that was met with a much cooler reception here with her home crowd of well-versed natives with a taste for genuine Americana, like jazz and blues music. Why go for some derivative version when you can hear the real thing? It was the same thing at college: my boyfriend was housemates with a group of similarly rich Jewish kids from Long Island, who were also very strict in their faith. They hated me, too, because I didn't fit into their clichéd world of a rigidly defined counterculture that they had borrowed from an older generation almost entirely, with the same Patchouli-scented clothes and wild hairstyles.

What was the point of rehashing it, by stealing it from other people? Dying in a civil rights march back then was not fun, and these lazy rich kids knew nothing about that. I finally went to see a show with my college boyfriend in the city over a summer break, and I was just as unimpressed as I was by their rote memorization of playlists at school, from old tapes passed around since the '70s. Ehhh...I shrugged my shoulders as we talked on the busy streets outside of Madison Square Garden. They sounded exactly like every mixed tape I'd been forced to listen to at his college house in Oneonta. No surprises here! He immediately defended this key facet of his religion to me, shaken in his faith as he was with me. We were in the middle of a city thrumming with life all around us. Who had time for those old geezers and their lame rock? It was played out! It all sounded the same.

He stammered, citing such magical experiences as a certain "California Dreaming" type of fantasy he'd heard on many a mixed tape gone by, with mystical shows on sparkling west coast oceans he'd never actually been to, explaining that the guys needed to "vibe off " the venue's locale in the same way their fans needed to be stoned out of their minds to be sold on a cult of almost-dead musicians and their skeleton-branded gear. They must've been "bummed out" by the crowd, man! New York City isn't their scene...blah blah blah blah blah. I didn't get it then, and I don't get popular cults now, except that a bunch of insanely devoted kids spent all their money and time following this band, with nothing of note to show for it except maybe an early death by drug overdose, or dying from heart failure brought on by years of heavy substance abuse, just like the overweight singer from the band they loved now playing in the real land of the dead, with a similar name as some famous ice cream flavor. Forever and ever, indeed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/10/opinion/a-culture-of-death-not-life.html?_r=0

Oregano

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

Kids from Rockland County don't know shit about real drugs growing up, because our hardcore city parents wanted to give us a taste of the "good life" in the country, where the air is cleaner. We live a wholesome lifestyle that's hard for some transplants to adjust to, accustomed as they are to the networks of "Gotham City". It can be harder to survive if you're, say, a hardcore racist redneck "Welfare Queen" (no one cares about your insane ideas about some "confederacy": http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/07/confederacy-of-dunces.html), or a pampered Nuyorican playing the fake minority card you think you have as darker southern European looking to game a bunch of crazy white women from the dykey "Social Do-Gooder" class of condescending pseudo-intellectuals. Uh uh. Not here.

And that was part of the charm for us, too. We were such quick New Yorkers that our one childhood foray into the hinterlands of the Northeast known as "Pennsylvania" (it borders New York State), saw us immediately bumped up a grade or two, just for being able to read things like "maps", which are crucial for a successful urban childhood. The rural teachers in that small mountain town were both charmed and in frightened awe of us, because we could speak as children, too. How....odd. Yes, that's it. That's what our educated genetics were to their brand of "townies": strange! We considered it flattering to be their opposites, because even a toddler knows that the flip side of "bad" is "good", like turning over cards in a playful card-matching game, or sorting shapes and sizes to fit inside a colorful plastic ball, one of my all-time favorite pastimes as a very little girl.

It was a good variation early on in habitation among different types of communities: the big city life, rural mountain towns, and then the rather bucolic country charms of a newly settled Rockland County suburb, still ripe with farmland all around us. We grew strong and outdoorsy and independent, though the farm kids left us bored, and then that congealed into an excruciating pace that felt like an eternity, even with the advanced classes in a very good public school system, with our Regents exams and college credits received before our senior years. Waiting to move on while stuck in someone else's bad head is torture for the gifted class, like putting a "Special Needs" child in a foreign language class, just to watch them surely explode in a frustrated rage. It felt like that for me and my friends.

So, we did what every smart kid does while waiting for older humans to figure it out, get you out, or give you help that never comes until it's too late in its cruelly unnatural suppression. We naturally turned to experimenting with fruity wine coolers (kiddie taste buds=marketing genius!) and cigarettes, in the lull that's intellectually like one long hot summer with the constant drone of cicadas in the background, as a white noise we couldn't tolerate anymore. I took my PSAT's and I think one SAT test at the high school either drunk and/or high, just for the thrill of it. I had a nearly perfect score on the English side of it, without even trying hard or studying beforehand (surprise surprise), and I still didn't need any classes or credits to graduate as a senior. What would you do, if you were me and still a child in someone's disordered household? We all had the same problems.

Because my friends at school were also older by at least a year or two (in deference to my "Irish Twin" brother, because my parents forbade me from moving up another grade as was natural for me to do, so as to not offend him with his Dyslexia, nor compete with my mom's early graduation that she was coached through by her gifted parents, huge artificial advantages for them both), they got into a lot more trouble way ahead of me. They had already dated and lost their virginity, were on birth control and/or having very early-term inductions so as to go through college uninterrupted or, conversely, plotting marriages through intentionally manipulative early pregnancies with a big fat Catholic wedding, in lieu of college. 

They were shipped off to rehab and/or their grandparents' homes, both here and back in the "Old World" (because it moves in both directions in the Colonies: America for the Euros living overseas, and Europe for the Americans established here), or upstate to "juvie" and mental institutions, all before I had my first date, first kiss, and/or first real teenage rebellion experiences. Of course, instead of teaching me anything with their knowledge, they sought to one-up the house genius, but I digress. That was anything I wasn't already used to.

Kids began sorting out addictive preferences according to their genetics. The obviously bad kids hung out at "The Wall", smoking and listening to po' white trash heavy metal. The Irish kids hid their homosexuality from their uptight parents with dubious hetero links to suburban normality. Smart kids hid behind their grades and their ingrained roles as "teacher's pet", loudly bragging about test scores that were largely determined by the test designers' conceits as a scholar (publishing is like that, too). The rich Jewish kids already had Ivy League lawyer/doctor/dentist/chiropractor fathers who "made it". They just had to not screw up badly enough to wind up in jail. And then there was me and my friends, cooler than any one particular strata, and adept enough to straddle as many roles as we had to adapt to, taming stresses long held in our families as best as we could.

We developed habits and coping skills as we needed them, as we watched our parents' lives fell apart. We became parents, mentors, elders, and counselors before our time, inadvertently pole-vaulting ourselves far above the heads of the generation immediately before and after us, the good results of which you are reading about now, as the "X" that marks the spot for you to find treasure, on the road-map we laid as our joint beneficial futures. We became law enforcement, clergy, teachers, social workers, activist, artists, writers, and philanthropists, without the corrupted money inherited from other people's labors, because there was none to be had. We would have donated what we didn't need, anyway.

And so, when me and my friend Molly were bored in homes empty of mothers, we fiddled with grown-up stuff, like any teenager running a household would: we played with the stuff that was around us, and available for us to use. She delved deeper into drugs, alcohol, and sex, to a level that scared me, but I was interested in any experimentation that made time go by faster. We giggled as we recollected the smell of "pot" (marijuana). It kinda smelled like burning oregano! Kids that we were (and already experienced cooks, which girls were expected to know how to do, in our large traditional households), we found the spice on the shelf and dived right in. Here it is!

We had cigarette rolling papers, but no real drugs, because none of us liked the time it took to go into the cities worst neighbors for something as silly as dried-out weeds. Not worth the risk. We didn't have the money or the cars that'd make the drive into town either, scant as our working class resources were (are), because every single one of us had to have after-school job(s). We took our badly-wrapped pseudo "joint" (a rolled marijuana cigarette) into my mom's bathroom, because her small powder-room had a window we could crack open to dispel the strong smell, only to be promptly discovered by my "Irish Twin" brother now home from school, too. He banged on the door to scare us, and we laughed even harder as we tried to put out the burning paper in my mom's tiny bathroom sink. Oh, well!

What did we learn from this banal experiment in recreational party tricks? Well, since we'd already taken lab classes with dissections in junior high school, not much. Unlike other pantry items (<cough> meth monkeys <cough>) that the much harder and more ingrained addicts around us must have known could give you a "buzz", we simply found out what we already knew at the outset of our funny little time-waster: oregano is made for better things, like spicing up a Sunday dinner spaghetti sauce, but I'm sure you kids today are much hipper at this kind of stuff than we were back then, what with the decriminalization of cannabis as your "Medical Marijuana" today, because of its mildly narcotic medicinal effects, and all. GenX did that, too.

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/340818/Better-Off-Dead-Movie-Clip-Nasal-Spray.html

The Lemurs of Madagascar

http://www.patriciawright.org/

Just like the movie, I had to wait an irrational amount of time for something this cool to be freely available on DVD. "Tighty whitey" parents of the 'burbs often cop this arrogant attitude about life, partly to cover their fears about getting discovered as a project person from the Bronx. Of course, the accent (and the raging 'tude) is a dead giveaway to me, but sometimes they pull off the magic trick of affluence with the right amount of condescension to cover up their crippling insecurities; like believing you are all-powerful by keeping a well-known children's movie (that's right: for kids!) for an inordinately long time after checking it out of our lending libraries, totally disproportionate to your actual sphere of influence.

It's weird, but that's the point of view of people schooled to think they can say, do, and act any way they want, because their rich daddy is a lawyer (or chiropractor), so often did me and my friends get threatened by their whiny asses in the open halls of public school. They were in over their heads, and we knew it. Once they grew up somewhat, and figured out that we were more adept at secret beatings than getting nabbed by the POPO, they just shut the fuck up and went away.

Me and my friends here at the Pearl River library had to keep checking my online queue for months, making adjustments around some rich asshole who thinks $400+ change for a missing DVD is justified because their little Maury has "difficulties" at school, or because they are so busy, they just couldn't be bothered to drop one DVD into the mail or a box, just like the President of the U.S! It's such delusional thinking that I've stopped trying to communicate with the insular and insane of Rockland, just like I did with their scaredy cat kids who scream when they are squeezed slightly, and that's exactly why this post isn't kid-friendly either, parents of Hollywood: I want more of this type of movie, and less of you. Much less of you.

Special shout-out today goes to the lady from New York who had the guts and ingenuity to stick to her guns, by following her chosen fields of study to wherever they called her: all the way to the lovely people and beautiful animals of Madagascar. She's from SUNY Stony Brook, yo! Way to represent your peeps! Thanks, Dr. Wright: you do us right here at home. We proud of you, girl! Keep going!!

http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/centre-valbio/people/patwright.html

http://www.patwrightlab.net/

http://www.rhinebeckcsd.org/newsdisplay.php?ID=36

Georgian Court

Welcome to Georgian Court.

Last week, while photographing a enigmatic stone house, I noticed a "For Rent" sign parked on the lawn of a 50s mod building. Stylin'! Prominently displayed on the brick front is a gorgeous, cheerful script of a logo, emblematic of the kind of "can-do" energy that sparked the post-war Baby Boom, fueled by an economy pumped full of spoils and profits from a war won well. 

Seems very quiet and quite safe.

In an effort to regain some of the normality that was lost during war time, conformity was key. A soldier in enemy territory stands out much more by not blending in, and it was a lesson learned well. After looking at the grounds, I walked up the small hill to a surreal picture of similarity: each and every apartment was exactly the same, and I mean, down to the very last detail. 

It's well-manicured. Each bush is the same.

There are no anomalies of any kind in the small, handkerchief-sized lawns; no wild, weird decorations, no decor at all, actually. Everything had a comforting, bland sameness to it, and that's exactly the point: to be the same, to have the same things, to live the same day over and over again, without any traumas, shocks, or surprises, as a relief to a post-traumatic life. In it's own way, it's a lot scarier than the dark, mysterious house next door, for the sheer effort it makes to present a unified front, like a artificially fake neighborhood in Disneyland, unmarked by any sort of identifying characteristics whatsoever. 

I bet nothing ever really changes around here.

There's a desperate quality in maintaining that kind of approach, which stands out in stark contrast to say, an overblown, badly decorated kitschy style. A slight, warm wind swirled through the leaves that day, as I left the apartment grounds exactly the way it has always been, and will always be, for here on out, until it crumbles to the ground. How's that for a good scare?

Creepy. Nothing moves but the leaves. Where the people at?