Credit

In addition to his lack of driving skills, Cotto has no idea what money stands for (hint: it's for goods and services).To him, every day is either the best day ever (like a whacked-out teenager at Disneyland), or his imminent death—like a kid eaten by a gator at Disneyland (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/15/us/alligator-attacks-child-disney-florida/). And that's exactly what his serious mental disorders are about: really really REALLY!!! great things that make you stay up for days and days and you just don't understand and why aren't you more excited, Marie? Sleep?! Food?! WHY???!!! GET PUMPED UP!!! Yeah, kid. Call me when the show is over, or starts, whichever happens last. I'm going to sleep, and I'm eating breakfast. Bitch.

The same is true about his understanding of family. His dad was his drinking buddy/sexual escapades partner (aye yi yi), and his mom's new "old man" looks at him kinda funny, too. He's been staying up late to watch t.v. recently, so he could screw the people living around him from using "his" pull-out sofa as a bed, and when you question that, he blames you for his escalating drunken abuse. It's a landscape without any safe places, which makes jail seem much better in comparison, because at least you get decent food and a bed to sleep in, you know? And maybe skip the nighttime rape scene, for once.

I felt bad for him because he had it that hard coming up in "da game" of life, but he's such a selfish fucking dick, you can't help but wish for him to be as far away from you as possible. Just because someone's really sick doesn't mean they can't also be a completely selfish asshole. I'm sure the staff at his residency center wants him dead or gone on his worst days, particularly the days when he deliberately craps his bed so the big buff orderly in the tight white scrubs can change his diapers for him while he sexually harasses him with molester-type comments. You know? A punch in the face is sometimes much quicker and easier than strapping him down to the bed and cleaning out his mess. Poor fucker. I've been there with head-cases before. Many, many, many times over.

So, when I asked him about his "credit card debt" that he intentionally mischaracterized as a fun "Sex and the City" shopping spree, it was just as depressing as I thought. "Well, Marie...", he began. Oh, OK. I'm the dumb fuck sleeping on your floor in your Army/Navy sleeping bag that you can talk down to. I forgot where I was for a minute! Actually, I didn't. Yeah, Cotto. What happened? I wanted him to just take his sleeping meds and go the fuck to sleep, but he was going off of his prescriptions one-by-one, because he couldn't handle the stress of homelessness, welfare, and his broke-ass two-year school on Staten Island for people without their G.E.D.'s coping with several mental disorders, and I was supposed to pretend that wasn't true with him, so he could psychotically pretend that I was his trapped quarry, when in truth, I could crack open his shin bones to the marrow whenever I wanted. 

Not that I wanted that. He was a dumb bloated mess of a human being, and I questioned that status on most days, too. But, let's hear it. It'll come out anyway, and it's not like I have anything better to do on a Tuesday night, besides getting a good night's sleep on this here dirty tenement floor so I can out-design the crazy "creative director" at work tomorrow, who would short-change me out of a health plan and rip-off all of my cover designs out of professional envy and hateful sabotage. So, yeah. Go ahead. Well, my grandmother died, and she asked me to "look after" her mail while she was in the hospital, so I did. Uh huh. I question every part of that sentence, but yeah. And?

"I took her Sears credit card." For how much, Cotto? And he waffled on that, too. Sigh...every step of the way, eh asshole? "About 3 or 4 grand." It was probably much higher than that, between the $5-$7000 range, because he then told me his "lawyer" advised him to pay it back quickly. Riggght...while you blow off your dish-washing job (not good enough), buy dirt weed instead of meds, and jam in a stressful college-like experience at the same time, so you can justify your subsequent freak-out and imprisonment? I think I know this tune! "It came addressed to her in the mail and I was staying there." So? So what? "I needed money." He clammed up like a hardened convict who's just "lawyered up" because he already knows the drill.

But, like, why? I mean you have two fucking cell phones, an expensive video game console that's also your hard drive, an iPad, a laptop, and ghetto headphones. The whole nine, kid. What the fuck did you spend it on? I never got a real answer that made any sense to me. What the fuck did he buy with it? For those of you reading me outside of the U.S., "Sears, Roebuck and Company" is a really old catalog business that began when the west was still a bison-filled frontier for European sharecroppers in covered wagons hoping to escape/frame "Indians" for all of their horrible massacres, in a lustful quest for blood and oil money that has come to be known as "The Wild West." You've seen the movies, right? Like that. Or, more specifically, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears.

I mean, he wasn't exactly home-owner material as a self-entitled welfare queen. People like me work hard. Not him! He's "special". Well, Cotto, sigh...don't make me phrase it like I'm taking away your lollipop, you fucking prick. I'm tired. What did you buy with it? I waited...and then waited some more. And some more. This, from an arrogant dick who liked to pretend he was exceedingly verbal and highly loquacious with his carefully chosen bon mots. Give it up! He looked down, and thought about it, but finally, he was too embarrassed to tell me. I'm sure it wasn't for garden hoes, or trimming shears for his fucking front lawn with carefully groomed hedges. And to this day, I still don't know what he bought with a housewares store credit card used by Americans for generations as their rural general store.

I know what we did. My mom asked me to circle clothes out of a huge Christmas catalog every year for toys and clothes, and if they didn't fit or we didn't like it, we went back to the store in Nanuet (still there) to return it. That's what country folk did back then, while your dad browsed the barbecue grills and dreamed of a motorized lawn mower with a comfy riding seat, like the big Italian douchebag next door to us had, riding around smiling on his ghetto "pizza money" from his 'hood storefront in the Bronx that would become a model for the summertime NYC movie classic "Do the Right Thing" that explored ethnic and racial tensions between the Italian-American immigrants who earned their plush living off the backs of impoverished, trapped African-Americans living in a hot city without air conditioning, just like we did.

We had heavy, awkward window units that sat tipsily in the small window sills of our split-level home, and if we wanted even that cool comfort in our rooms, we had to pull down a ladder in the ceiling to go into the attic, carefully stepping between the beams so we wouldn't fall through the floor, and then pushing the heavy units down the stairs at a steep angle to whoever was at the bottom. We had air conditioning in our small bedrooms only; not in the kitchen, or the living room, or the converted basement downstairs. If it was too hot to stay in our rooms for too long, we went outside, or we walked a mile and a half to the public pool up-and-down the impressive hills of this area, or we ran through a sprinkler on the lawn, spraying each other with a green garden hose. I know that he didn't do any of that, because he said would die in his early 50s, just like his father and his father's father. 

It was sad, but it was real. As he told me his life of woe, I knew his life was designed for him to fail. And so, I listened to his halting confessions that he had to work up the nerve to tell me over shared dirt weed blunts and cheap beer, because it probably included evil staples of the projects like child rape, child abandonment, and/or child endangerment. How did I know? He told me his dad was his first "party" partner. You fill in the blanks. And that's what I did. I "read" him expertly, better than anyone else did, and that's why I got out of the ghetto alive, just like my hardcore New York City family. That, and I kicked out an old abandoned bookcase piece-by-piece after work one night, so I could leave the floor of his dirty room for the room next door with a chain through the opening where the doorknob used to be, in front of him and our neighbor "Rex", his "hood rat" partner-in-crime for those days, even though it was mostly particleboard. Almost.

My mutha's naybahood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Avenue
My fahthizz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford%E2%80%93Stuyvesant,_Brooklyn
And mine, bitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodside,_Queens

Right Stuff

This one's for you, boys.

https://www.wwiimemorial.com/Registry/plaque.aspx?honoreeID=333036

Take back the world

As we speak, we the faithful are working towards the most peaceful and effective way to ease the world of this madness that has affected our brothers and sisters for centuries: the wars, the famines, the hunger, the starvation, all the death and violence, the mutilations and torture, the withholding of resources...all of it.

Because all of it comes from the same dark, hateful, insidious place: the heart of darkness at our very centers, the beast that beats within all of our breasts, a beast we must willingly confront (and best), if we are to win this last final battle of good over evil, here on earth.

Think I'm exaggerating? I'm willing to bet by now, my many followers, that you don't. I call them just as I see them, and as it happens out in the world. Hang on, and pray for the light that heals you. You are not alone. You were never alone.

Today, I commit myself to taking back the world from madness. Today, we begin anew the fight against the evil that lurks within ourselves, and then.....we turn it outward in a warm embrace. 

Read what we are doing here in my small town, and take it. This is the way out, for us all. This is the way back. This is the way home. And it is just how I designed it to be. Amen to you.

 See you on the U.S.S. Enterprise, my friends.

http://bit.ly/1C2Rrnf

Say Something

9/11 brought many changes to the New York lifestyle, chief among them being an awareness about security and our vulnerabilities. 
It seems laughable now that we had such open systems, but in the quest for freedom, we sometimes skew towards the lax instead of what is actually reasonable. The first popularization of what has become the country's motto began in the subways of our fair Gotham, with one very powerful slogan that deeply reflects our inherent honesty as a culture, with this sentiment: If you see something, say something. (https://www.dhs.gov/see-something-say-something)

I tried it out for myself one Sunday afternoon, traveling by train from Rockland County through Secaucus Junction in New Jersey, on my way back to Park Slope in Brooklyn, after visiting my mom over the weekend. An average, middle-aged white woman left behind a medium-sized bag on the rack above the seats; something that's typically expected from a city tourist, but not the commuting locals. 

I immediately noticed it, and said something to the very next ticket agent I saw coming down the aisle. The woman in question happened to be an off-the-clock transit worker who left her belongings behind, but that didn't deter me at all from doing the right thing. You shouldn't be swayed by some slight (and temporary) discomfort, either: http://web.mta.info/mta/security/.

We built this society as free people, and it is up to us to maintain it properly. I submit to you as an example that of my upstate people, who relish this current opportunity to partner up with law enforcement, so that we may catch our criminals who escaped (with inside help, of course) from our state prison, as they head(ed) north to another country. It is not our way to leave problem-solving to our neighbors, because we patrol what we love. 

One more to go! Keep up the great work. Be safe, follow the law, respect our officers in times of crisis, and always defer to the trained authorities who work extremely hard to track our society's convicted murderers: http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/26/us/new-york-prison-break/. You're doing a phenomenal job.

 

1-888-NYC-SAFE

Homelessness

 


Homelessness is not real. It is an artificial human construct that does not in actuality exist as a problem for us. We do not have a shortage of cheap, available housing in this country. We have a shortage of heart and soul. Witness this, mes amis: I pulled these figures off the web in a second (from 2013), and the number of vacant homes in America is 14.2 MILLION. Yes, you read that right: millions of empty homes that need humans to inhabit them: http://www.realtytrac.com/content/news-and-opinion/americas-142-million-vacant-homes-a-national-crisis-7723.

After all, if we don't care for objects, they break down, fall apart, and drop away. It is our tending to a house that makes it into a home. What is the point of chronic abandonment? More losses? It doesn't make any sense, any way you look at it: from an economic standpoint, a moral point of view, or as an ethical debate. We need people to feel at home, because people deeply rooted in the idea of community do not commit offenses against their neighbors who love them, because they would be the very same who gave them shelter. Would you? And if you do have diseased neighbors so sick that they bite the hand that feeds them, we have options for those sick members of our society, too. We can take care of our own and move forward, my friends in Christ. Don't believe otherwise, because that is a lie.

To pretend otherwise is a conceit that you (and you know who you are) can't afford to ignore anymore, because we're onto you. Move forward with us, human, in love and in faith. That is all for today. You have your orders. Go for it. This is "Love Thy Neighbor", folks. You want to get in on this message for real; like, yesterday, in fact.


610,042 people were homeless in the United States. 

Nearly two-thirds of people experiencing homelessness 
(65 percent or 394,698) were living in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs. 

Click here:  https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=how+many+homeless+in+america

The Tyvek House

Years ago I dated a man who was friendly with a third cousin of mine, 
a cousin who felt closer to me because he and my brother were the same age. They had a tight bond as kids and teens. We parted ways necessarily: my brothers and I had destinies that included education and great successes, while he struggled with older family issues like two alcoholic parents who died early on, car theft, and false claims through labor unions for workers compensation, the petty cons he learned early on from the masters themselves.

After I came back from my travels out west, I naturally sought him out, because both before and after Denver, Colorado, I lived in Brooklyn, and he is from Sheepshead Bay. I am the sole remaining family member of my father's line to retain any footing in the city at all, such is the length we have moved outward from it, but such is the place of big media houses and art, so that's where I returned.

And just like my romantic life, I felt I had left behind the traps of working class culture for good, like binge drinking partners, tangles with the law, and domestic violence, but such would not be the case. Like many women of my age, I had a brief marriage to a totally inept partner, only to immediately take up with a man who was slightly better in comparison, then he too fell apart when we left his comfort zone for my urban habitat. I was single, and 37. My cousin's then-girlfriend (now, wife), had just the same experience. Sure, my cousin was a violent, chronic drunk who was always unemployed, but have you been out there lately? Dating is hell! She felt it especially as a large woman, enough to frighten her back into my cousin's arms, even after he disappeared to Ireland with a girl he knocked up when she broke up with him, then returning to Brooklyn, begging her to reunite with him. 
I had reconnected with my cousin at a family reunion, listening to his tale over many drinks that day, while pictures of a boy that may or may not be his circulated around a large picnic table.

I had also tried the usual dating outlets available to modern women, like online dating (a cruel joke for brilliant women, if ever there was), and then a prolonged relief from such abuse through intentional, deliberate abstinence. My cousin, knowing this, reintroduced himself into my scene, with (what else?) bait to hook me back into the lifestyle. It was sophisticated baiting, too: his friend was, on the surface, a great catch: Irish American (as I am in part), a business entrepreneur, and a brilliant mechanic. It seemed logical: two advanced tradespeople uniting for mutual benefit. But just like life, he was far from ideal.

He carried around baggage from a prolonged, bitter divorce, his parent's broken family with kids from different fathers and mothers, a raging drinking and cocaine habit (that he had pitched to me as moderate during the courtship stage), and the insular, inbred ignorance of the uneducated, vicious closed-mindedness that marks the isolated clans of Gerritsen Beach. Enter me onto this stage, and you can already imagine the conflict. I kinda stood out. Noooo?! Me?

But, I had been celibate awhile and I was vulnerable to suggestion, so we began a dysfunctional dance that revolved around his baffled incompetence with relationships, coupled with my continued breaks up with him via text messages, like a nightmare version of me as a teenager dating in the Computer Age. It was nonsense, but it was the kind of bullshit I was raised in, so I knew it well.

Just like his typical working class woes, so the block in his neighborhood followed suit. People, okay let's just say it, a string of fucked up drunks, rung his doorbell at all hours of the day and night, and they felt completely justified in doing so. They all knew each other and had intermarried with one another, so it was kind of like the repulsive, convoluted dating done in front of a reality television audience, but with much less monetary compensation. He knew his environment was problematic; he is very intelligent. We bonded early on at a stupid St. Patrick's Day party we were invited to in the Rockaways about the idiotic drunks around us that slobbered and pawed each other while wearing daddy's cop hat as a costume, enacting terrible, deeply ingrained patterns that always got them nowhere but drunk and out of money.

The events of 9/11 were no different for the people there. It was rife with severe, long term mismanagement. Across the street from his house, which was in a permanent state of construction that went on for years, (my then-boyfriend also lived in a state of flux. He had a staircase in his house without a banister, the components of which remained packed away in a long cardboard box on his living room floor, because there was "never enough time" to complete projects), stood a house permanently clothed in Tyvek covering, the stuff that goes on before the actual house siding goes up. We used to muse aloud about when it would be done, but there were never any signs of progress.

He told me that the man of the house had received a huge settlement from the city after 9/11, supposedly for a fireman's service, but John thought he was merely "retired" on disability after winning money from some lawsuit. His drunken lurching about the block in the middle of the day would obviously suggest such a thing happened, such were our awesome powers of observation. And just like any Shanty Irish Mick with a serious addiction, his requisite blond "trophy" wife (no big prize, but she had all the stereotypical attributes like hair dye, nail polish, and leisure suits) had a bright, new, red sports car in the driveway. Such were their priorities in the wake of great trauma: permanently applied workout clothes, shiny sports cars, and a house renovation that went nowhere, a visual reminder of their perpetually stuck state.

I've since moved on successfully, finally closing that chapter in my family's history forever by physically fighting my way out of his reach, which effectively broke many years of culturally supported abuse. When I think back about the events surrounding 9/11, New York, and New Yorkers, I know that I am just one of the millions who made it out of a continual, self-sustaining abusive cycle alive, and for that, I will always be grateful. I fought back and I won, even when no one was in my corner, because I broke his arm when he put his hands on me, even before I learned (and earned belts in) mixed martial arts. I know now that whenever he feels uncertain about his story with me, he will remember me each and every time a rainy day causes his healed fracture to ache, while he tries to repair the trucks in his fleet.

Take care of yourself today, New York.

My Week in Gaming: Fighting Since Day One

I feel so alone!

Yes! Teeny Phoenix helps me smite my Mega Foes.

Bart Discovers MMA

Forgotten at school, again.

"Where's your brother?"

Uh oh. Police Mom Marge is here.

Bart's caught fighting in the playground...

...with Homer's support. Ooops.

So Marge takes on the head of a fight league in order to protest violence, and its effect on kids...

...and kicks his ass. Margie likey!

But, what effect does it have on little Lisa and her brother Bart?

A new generation of fighters! Tune in to the very end to see who wins.

Dedicated to me and my bro Bernie, fighting since we were babies in the late 60s, now celebrating a great sport that finally matches the dreams (and scuffles) of our youth. Special "shout out" to all you "crazy" kids and silly, little dreamers. Here. We. Go.

The Yoga Mat

The yoga mat.

Every Monday, me and a group of retirees (I'm the youngest attendee so far, surprisingly) do an entire hour of basic yoga FOR FREE. That's right, free, at our local library. I'm pleasantly surprised by the exercise, but also grateful. As a middle-aged athlete who is also currently un-insured, I have to be very careful. At the height of my brief dojo career at two big name gyms in the city, I often rolled BJJ and sparred MMA with 20-somethings who practiced various forms of these extreme full contact supports without any health insurance whatsoever. When I asked them what they did when they got injured, they often shrugged their shoulders, and said "Just wait, I guess. And heal."

And so it happened to me, except I was still covered under the policy I was paying for. I found out that, in addition to the two pins put in place years ago after a knee surgery that was the result of an injury I got when walking my dog, I tore my ACL and also had a medial meniscus tear, along with bone, ligament, and tendon bruising. Well, at least I didn't fracture anything this time, I guess.

The yoga mat and me.

I decided not to have expensive (and somewhat risky) ACL surgery, because I did not have the ability to undergo a lengthy PT process while I struggled to keep my head above water in these uncertain times (and because no one can do the work I do with my own hands), so since then, I've had the dubious challenge of staying physically fit while enduring fits of employment coupled with lingering fears about homelessness and starvation. Quite the potent cocktail.

Last year I found a cut rate Tai Chi class that met outdoors, and then went up gradually in price as the teacher felt she could get away with. Understandable, but also, not my thing. I get bored with Tai Chi quickly, and I still have a lot of energy. So, it's now yoga, the tai chi form I learned last year, with a lot of walking thrown in for good measure, and right now, it's exactly what I need. Many of the stretches we do in class are the same ones we do in martial arts during the warm up and cool down phases, anyway.

Plus, I've met a great group of people who I share a lot in common with, something that's always occurred between me and the generation above Baby Boomers; blessings all to me. Stay fit, America. We need our strength, now more than ever. Have a great week.

Osu!

Over the years, I've trained in martial arts, and because of that, I've collected a nice set of belts in different forms. Years ago I started it off proper with Taoist Tai Chi, but I didn't receive any belt rankings.

Fast forward years later, and I began a fitness course towards kickboxing and then grappling that became MMA, which got me into Jiu Jitsu. It was fun, but the injuries suck when you aren't getting paid to be hurt and the bills keep coming in, so I took time off.

Recently I've gotten back into Tai Chi, in a shorter form that incorporates animal styles, Wushu, and Qi Gong. It's a blast, and its actually hard for me, because it's the exact opposite of MMA. Whereas one style needs twitchy muscles and quick explosive action, the other strives for precise, carefully considered hand-and-foot placement, slowed down to an almost inhumanly graceful art form. It's the "Yang" to the "Yin"—the total opposite—and I'm finding muscle control and limb placement as challenging as the very first time I threw a punching combo. 

But none of these forms would amount to any kind of sense for me if I hadn't undergone some serious ballet training as a girl. I liked it, but I didn't love it as passionately as an artist has to, in order to make a living from it. I left it behind, not looking back, to continue wrestling and fighting with my bro. We loved martial arts, but none of the strip mall places around our town appealed to us at the time, in the more common dojo forms of Judo and Tae Kwon Do. My middle bro would go on to belt in TKD, BJJ (twice), and even Krav Maga, but it wasn't until we put everything together in an MMA class that it finally made sense to us as a fight form.

I hope I go back to it at some point, but for now, I'm belting in Tai Chi Ch'uan, and staying in the moment, enjoying an art form that I didn't know had masters who gave out belt rankings in service to it. Here's my tally so far:

Taoist Tai Chi: 1 year, no belts
Tiger Schulmann's: 2 years, 6 belts
BJJ: 10 mos, 1 belt
Tai Chi Ch'uan: a month's reintroduction, 1 belt. I have 2 belts.
UPDATE: got a 2nd belt in tai chi ch'uan at the end of the summer
-----------------
Total: 8 belts   Make that 9. Nope! Make that 10!

And I want more.