Spotted Fever

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

When I was 18 years old, I almost died from a tick bite. My college boyfriend was visiting Rockland with me, and we were going back to school on a slow difficult bus ride through the mountains of upstate New York, with stomachs full of my mom's spaghetti and meatball dinner. After the second time I threw up, the bus driver began telling students that someone was sick on the bus before they got on, so they could weigh their options on the staircase. Later, my idiot boyfriend would tell me that he finally knew he was "in love" with me when he realized that he was more worried about my health than being embarrassed by the smell of vomit, which didn't dispel any of my notions about his relative immaturity in comparison to mine.

It was so serious that I couldn't make it back up the hill to campus, after the bus dropped us off in Oneonta. We had to crash at his brother's downtown apartment above "The Black Oak Tavern" that he shared with his hipster girlfriend, arranged by my boyfriend on a payphone while I sat on a suitcase waiting for his brother to let us in. Their "crash pad" was exactly what you'd expect from them as a couple: one big exposed brick wall, with arty black-and-white partially nude photographs taken of his girlfriend in very favorable angles hanging on the other walls, and an acoustic guitar resting in its stand in the corner, just in case you missed every other cue that you were around seriously "arty" types. I had to stay there for at least a day or two to regain my strength for the bus ride back up to campus.

Once there, I immediately went back to bed. My best friend and my boyfriend took me to the health center on campus the next day. We were told that I simply had the flu, and if we would have believed them, it would have been of horrible consequence to me for the rest of my life. But (thank goodness for our college arrogance), we didn't listen to some young, rather dumb, and woefully underpaid healthcare aide working in a remote hick town, because I wasn't getting any better, and I couldn't hold down food or water. My roommate called my mom from the dorm's pay phone to keep her abreast of my condition (which was hard for us to do, because we budgeted our precious quarters for laundry use), and she asked her to take my temperature regularly.

She called back with the results, saying it was high, and that she couldn't even stay in her own dorm room because it smelled so bad from vomit. Touching, eh? But, that's exactly the way it was for us back then; too much sympathy directed attention away from you that could make the difference as to whether or not you also went down, and we didn't want that for any one of us. We fought hard to stay alive. After another few days, my mom made the important decision to pick me up from school and take me to see a real doctor, my childhood pediatrician Dr. Dreyer. She still counts it as one of her great acts of mercy towards me, that she interrupted her busy life to care for me this one last time. If she had refused to do so, I'd be dead or seriously impaired right now. So, thanks for not letting me die...I guess.

That must seem cruel to you now, as a younger generation raised to believe that you might hold all of the potential of a magical golden statue, priceless in your own estimation, but that's not how my parents saw it then, or how they see it now. Pragmatism ruled the day for working class religious families, because tragedies happened every day. That's the way it was (is). They had an "heir to spare" (in their own words), because they already had two male sons to carry on the family name and inherit any property or family assets through their future children. I was considered a mistake, because my mom didn't want to get pregnant so soon after my brother was born, and yet here I am writing to you today. It's rather miraculous, when you think about it.

I was so weak that I couldn't walk down the flights of stairs from the dorm's third floor, so my strong young boyfriend wrapped me up in a blanket and carried me downstairs in the harsh cold weather to my mom's car, putting me into the passenger seat. She'd arranged a makeshift garbage bag in the car for me to get sick in, which I did throughout the trip home, even though I had nothing in my stomach. I'd never been so sick in my life. When I got home to my mother's house, I could barley walk the small steps from my childhood room to the bathroom we all shared as kids, and that was barely four steps away.

I felt like I had really bad arthritis, because every joint in my body ached. In between fever dreams, I had to steady myself against the wall with shaky hands just to make it a few steps, and that was becoming harder to do with each day that passed. I felt like I was dying. My mom got me to see my childhood doctor right away, and he diagnosed me with one look, because I had definitive red target rashes covering my arms, like a textbook case of tick bites. He took a blood sample, but prescribed antibiotics for me to start right away, before the test came back, because beating this disease meant that time was of the essence. If the disease settled into my bones, I would have been crippled for life, because it meant we waited too long to start a course of treatment. We later surmised that I'd been exposed to deer ticks walking the wooded path from campus to town, and that the bite site was somewhere on my head, which we never found, because I had a crop of big curly 80s hair to rival Bon Jovi's back then.

Of course, Dr. Dreyer was right, because he's the best doctor I have ever seen in my life. He came from an Observant Orthodox Jewish family, a kind and fiercely intelligent man who often had Hasidic families in his waiting room. They seemed even more scared than we were of being sick, because their exposure to the outside world was so rare. They'd established a successful religious community in Monsey called "New Square", and they were attacked often enough that it didn't help their communication with the outside world. They sat silent and mute, apart from us by worlds and centuries. Still, I admired his commitment to their devoted families, because they were often biased against by seemingly rational doctors who defied their advanced education with superstitious beliefs.

My mom told me he was a great man for tending to them. They were often on welfare and vastly underage, in comparison to our more sophisticated and educated families, which meant that he charged them a sliding fee for their office visits that they desperately needed, because like strict Catholics, their young women didn't use birth control. I always liked that about him, and today I remember him with you during this High Holy week. Thank you, Dr. Dreyer! !חג פסח שמח

http://www.healthgrades.com/physician/dr-ronald-dreyer-39qpx

Beanie, baby

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

I didn't blame my friends for all of their problems, because life isn't like that. Humans are social animals, and as such, we need a family group to survive those first fragile years, unlike other mammals that need to run within minutes of their birth. Our relative co-dependence compared to other animals is the price we pay for our big brains, which are given biological precedence in early development, hence the international symbol for "cute" as it is decoded within babies: overly large head, wide eyes, pert lil' features, and an adorable clumsiness. We've simply been bred to stick together in need, and it isn't wrong for us to do so.

But, my friend Dave's parents were way beyond anything I'd seen with my hardcore Brooklyn kids from "around the way". The first time me and Karen went to see him off-campus (we had, of course, early run-ins with the T.A.'s living in our respective dorms for freshman and sophomore year as required on-campus living, because we were seen by the state as being too young to maintain a household by law as teenagers, before we could escape to a funky old house off-campus), he offered to throw up a sheet to divide his off-campus room, and charge us rent for sleeping on his floor. Wow...touched by that. Thanks, dude.

To show our gratitude, we dutifully inspected his room for closet space and other living area features, which he was too slow to respond to. O...M...G....this kid has brand-new clothes with the price tags still on them hanging in his friggin' closet for his exclusive use! But...but...what the fuck? We were baffled, because Dave worked suck-ass summer jobs like the rest of us, except his jobs were upstate in Schenectady, where the pay is much lower than the rest of the state. How, muthafucka?! "Oh, that's nothing!" Dave went underneath his bed and pulled out plastic containers full of new underwear (still bright white and sealed in the packages, yo!), different types of socks, anything he could possibly need, like, bought for him ahead of time and everything.

Who has parents who even do that?! We were stunned. He felt kind of bad for his parents shopping habit strewn about his room so obviously, so he offered to give us a few of his shirts. "Go ahead! Take one! I've never worn them before!" Yeah, we could tell, but, like, fuck, dude...don't you get it? Yeah, he did. He knew they liked shopping more than caring for him, and that's why he was fucked. I mean, what kind of monster tricks you out at the mall in the summertime, so you can fail out of school in the fall?! Sick working-class people with GED's do that. Not really disciplined folks looking to get by and get better. You know? As bad as we felt about our write-ups, we were somewhat grateful for our educated parents from the city at that point, because at least they didn't buy backwards into life. This shit was so weird.

Who buys a 21 year-old guy living in a house with his friends "tidy whitey" underwear?! Is he too stupid to do it himself? WTF?! I couldn't remember the last time my mom actually bought me clothing, and I was still only 18 as a sophomore. You had to work at a clothing store to get new clothes with your employee discount that came out of your paycheck, right? Karen agreed with me, because she was also raised by wolves, so we shrugged noncommittally to Dave's half-ass offer of draining a couple of working teenage women whatever money we had left (deducting school supplies and food, naturally) from our summertime paychecks. Uh, thanks for nothing. Asshole.

We joked about that for awhile, and then we moved on. From the strangely arrogant demeanor of Dave and his wanna-be WASP sister, I thought they came from money, but the first time I ever saw Dave's parent's house, I couldn't hide my shock. What the....where's your...? This is it?! You grew up here?! It was baffling; a rather small, nondescript, squat one-level towards the back of a generically suburban block. Ohhh, shit, dude. It was then that I fully realized how "out of it" they were. Dave made it seem like his father spent like a surgeon, when in reality, "The Captain" is a big Polack
with power plant union money married to his high school sweetheart, a former head cheerleader at the local high school. Ahh....now, I understood it.

It was pure bullshit bravado by the undereducated, and it didn't end there. They had packed the basement of their little house with their dead relatives tacky furniture, also stowing a second refrigerator and freezer next to shelves filled with those huge vats of club-bought mayonnaise, like they were expecting the end of the world any day. They thought it was funny for me and Dave to "go shopping" downstairs in their rat-packed basement when we lived in Brooklyn, but I was never really sure why. How the fuck are we gonna carry this around in the city?! Why would anyone need this much stuff?

And that was far from the end of their madness. They took us along on a "shopping trip" to Amish Country, a dead place on the map for tourists where we wandered around some outdoor mall looking at the exact same stores as the ones in upstate New York. Why are we even here? We didn't really need anything, and we were on a serious budget besides. What the fuck is this even for? They paid for our motel room so they could pack it with more of their stuff, filling their big car with so much shit, that they laughed at us as they packed crap under our arms and feet in the backseat. Ginger had also picked up a raging "collecting" hobby on the side that excluded her husband, hoarding these small toy animals that came with fast food purchases.

She forced his dad to stop at every fast food joint we came across on the road, and when we said we weren't hungry, she shrugged it off: "Just throw it out. I don't care about the food." And that's exactly what we did. We made U-turns in the parking lots of these fast food places across America to dump perfectly good food into trashcans designed to curb litter, not feed addictions, but it made Dave's straits a lot easier for me to understand. I didn't exactly come from a totally healthy background, either. How they ever expected "college" from a life like this was yet another symptom in their family's downfall, comprised of one horrible decision after another.

Just when we thought his parents had gorged themselves completely, we were wrong. His mom shouted out "Stop!" from the passenger seat of their comfortable retiree car, so she could pick up a couple of those wooden cut-out reindeer for her front lawn. For Christmas. In the summertime. What a great vacation idea for us! His dad had finally had enough. "Where are we gonna put them? Come on!" She wasn't deterred at all. "We could strap them to the roof, maybe?" Me and Dave laughed, because we'd bought nothing. Not one damn thing, and we came home drained with less than nothing. We felt worse than before the trip by their unchecked excessiveness, plus all of the drinking and eating in bad strip mall restaurants that we were forced to go to with them, on their dime. We had less than zero.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_buying_disorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_therapy

Getaway Car

Takashi Hososhima from Tokyo, Japan

My ex Dave was known by a few choice nicknames at Oneonta, notorious as he was for his good-looking "bad boy" ways, at a school famous for being the hardest partying school in the entire S.U.N.Y. school system back then. We called him "Dangerous" (because he was, to himself and others, but more for him than me), and "Mad Dog", because he raged at the machine like he was alien to it, which he was. His parents were high school sweethearts who thought much higher of themselves than two hard-partying, working class kids from upstate New York should have, and that was Dave's biggest problem.

They coddled him for being sick and beautiful, just like they did his older sister. Their kids had certain rock star components that they couldn't back up intellectually, which always left them frustrated, angry, confused, and feeling alone, attacking anyone around them during certain phases of the moon, like the half-deranged mixed Indians they are. It was maddening, because they can plateau for a few good years of productive work before bottoming out during their up-and-down cycles that characterizes the average manic-depressive. I hated it for them, but that was the best I could do without some hardcore medical back-up, which his parents refused to acknowledge, because it meant drying out for all of them (at the same time), as a lifestyle change too significant for arrogant Baby Boomers who refused to grow-up, stuck in their down cycles like the mental children they are.

They can shop and they can consume, and at their heights, they can party with the best of us, but during their dark times, they become rabid beasts unwilling to take a simple anti-depressant pill that's been around for ages, because their character flaws (like their arrogance) won't allow them to admit that they need medical help, minor as the cure sometimes is. It saddened me as I watched them make asses out of themselves in public from the sidelines of their disorders, powerless as you are when they are in the grip of their madness and addictions, knowing that one good doctors' visit is all they really need. Have you ever known someone like that?

I bet you have. Heart-breaking, isn't it? They were gorgeous on the outside only and deeply flawed from within, like a lunatic lion with his lioness, suffering from the same thorn in their paw that you can only pull out for them so many times. Get a grip, man, and get help, will you?! At the end of it (with certain types of Indo-Europeans), that's really the best you can do for them, by backing away to give them the space they need to disappear into the bottom of a bottle, and hope that they can finally learn to see through the haze of booze and their own distorted visions. It's actually born of a cowardice that can seem shockingly needy and co-dependent to healthy people, which is part of why they don't last that long around us.

You can either a) take care of them (for their families), or b) watch them they cling to someone else, like a barnacle stuck on the side of a rapidly wrecking ship that's taking on massive amounts of water. If you aren't a fucked-up "enabler" (and I most definitely not that), there's nothing in it for us to watch someone fall down drunk and then stagger slowly to their feet once again. It's sheer torture to watch sick people do that to themselves without reaching for help that's often inches away. So, I simply didn't do it after awhile, because getting ego-gratification from propping up a sick person is often ten times more sick than being the alcoholic him/herself. Know what I mean? What kind of sick fuck does that weird shit with loved ones, over and over again in a broken-down cycle? Not me!

Still, I loved Dave for loving me for so long behind my back (I admired his loyalty with its requisite hidden agendas attached) and he was incredibly physically beautiful, which warped his poor mind into further social distortion, because he couldn't handle his own looks. Some folks think it's "fun" to be almost inhumanly gorgeous but it's actually really scary, and it never goes away. People act so fucking weird and abusive to you, it's insane, and it's their kind of weirdness, not yours. People have these strange ideas that it's like wearing a pricey fur coat, or buying really expensive shiny jewelery that you can take on-and-off whenever you feel like it, but it sure as fuck isn't that. It's bone deep and it stays with you, despite weight loss (or weight gain), seasons of the year, age, hair color, skin tone, hair, or any other kind of superficial shit that average people get wrong all the time.

They thought (because their parents taught it to them) that they could barter off their beauty like their were prostitutes, which they sometimes verged on becoming, trading off their looks for petty shit like money, jobs, purses, and cars, as objects that are easily given and just as easily taken away. I thought they were dumb college kids saddled with their parents false expectations about creating scholars out of thin air without any effort, which is total bullshit. Ask any teacher. And that was it, too: we knew they were doomed to fail, because it remains the established pattern backing their disorders.

As working class New Yorkers, me and my best friend Karen were way beyond sympathetic to their pain. We lived with it at home with our own families, and because we'd already seen so many people go down as teenagers, you take the chance to help a brother out, man, when you can. You don't easily pass that up. They were more than our friends. They were family, and you don't disrespect soulful people in pain, you know? We were in it together. I didn't want to just help, I wanted to help them heal along with me, as we returned home to our families armed with knowledge and information, as they still struggled in pain. As soon as we learned lessons in college, we almost immediately tried applying it with vigorous strength to the family living in our homes, whether it worked or not, though we desperately hoped it would. What do you think motivates two teenage girls from roughly abusive families, besides minimum wage and part-time work?

We put our very heart and souls into the fight for our lives and the lives of the people around us who were drowning in drugs and alcohol, thanking our lucky stars everyday for the better health we felt so fortunate to have, hard as we worked for it. We knew they weren't made of the same stuff as us, but oh, did we want to help a brother out. It became the stuff our lives were made of, too, our life's mission and raison d'etre for being in it with them, for as long as we could manage it. It meant (and still means) that much to us. And so, when they fell down, we picked them up time after time (actually physically picking them up and supporting their often greater weights, athletes that we all are), and carrying them back home to the safety of our humble houses that we held together with our love, blood, sweat, and tears, but it wasn't something we could do on our salaries for very long, without facing down the fear of bankruptcy, which I finally did.

It went far beyond kicking someone when they were down, because we'd seen it up close for far too long, even though I'd escaped some of the worst facets of addictive disorders from my parents abilities to maintain drug- and alcohol-free existences for periods of time, weird as their disorders expressed themselves in other areas of their lives. Without healing madness at the root of it, it simply went into different odder directions, sublimated into an ever-stranger series of "fetishes" (self-described to me), like obsessive counting games, or folding laundry long into the night. We'd seen it's weirdness up close-and-personal in the people closest to us, as the very people who gave birth to us, and we hated their diseases with a passion that fueled our work at an almost inhuman pace, as we frantically tried to outpace their madness, sometimes falling down hard in the face of it by becoming overwhelmed, awash and swamped by the sheer number of illnesses we had to bear up under and support on a woman's salary.

We carried them as long as we could, and then we had to cut the chord to save ourselves, an enormously humble and selfless act that is not for juniors or beginners. Don't do it like we did, unless you have our gifts and genius, okay? Don't try this at home, folks, and don't "go it" alone. Gird yourself with as many strong healthy warriors as you can, and fire at it with everything you have in your arsenal, because that's exactly what I'm doing with you who are along for the ride today with me, out there in my audience, thinking that you're alone. You are not.

For all of David's supposed bravado in the face of life's challenges (as well as the normal day-to-day stuff he shied away from, too), at home he was just another scared New York kid too afraid to drive a car from my aunts' Brooklyn apartment to our parent's houses upstate. Despite his exaggerated tales of car chases and bank robberies gone wrong, you should know, my dear friends, that it was always just me driving him in-and-out of the city in the early morning light to avoid traffic, tourists, and fast-moving cabs that could cut you off at any moment, because he simply didn't have it in him to navigate an urban jungle as deadly as my native New York City. I did. You should know that.

Goth Kid

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peek-a-Boo_%28song%29

When we were in high school, we knew who the gay kids were, because we'd known most of them all of our young lives thus far. It isn't very difficult to suss out the shy Irish boy who speaks with a light lisp and hangs out with the same group of tight-knit Irish-American boys we took First Communion with at the older, smaller St. Francis of Assisi parish back in the day. Our classmates were simply part of our lives, not some over-dramatic assimilation into another alternate universe. They remain they same down-to-earth New York kids I grew up with.

Their teenage years were a bit rougher, though, as the drama queens dug deeply into Glee Club, A/V classes, and art studios with an intensity that spoke more of a desperate soul seeking kinship or validation during those fragile, ego-forming years than the truer scholarship behind those disciplines. Imagine incorporating an undesired sexuality into your adolescence with a traditional working class background? Yeah..it was like that. We could talk to each other about what was going on in our lives, and that was about it.

That funny kid with a flair for the naughty limericks we passed back-and-forth in religion class at Albertus Magnus after public school became "Brion" in high school, with an ascot and attitude to match it, followed quickly by his acting debut on television with a widely aired commercial for a popular board game that he announced in art class with an alarming frequency. And it didn't stop there.

Pete was unknown to me until junior year, when he became our resident "Goth Kid" in a big way. His rebellion was epic, and totally 80s. He wore heavy black eyeliner (like the singer of his favorite band "Siouxsie and The Banshees"), an Egyptian ankh symbol (like she did), tons of black turtlenecks, Doc Martins, and occasionally a flannel tied around his waist, like any true-to-life Goth* would. It didn't hurt (or help) his look that he was six feet tall, which is a lot of black clothing to wear around so many pastel-colored Yuppies in Izod shirts with the collars popped up in the back, or the bright primary-colored Guidos and the Guidettes who loved them, with their shiny hot rods bought by daddy in the school parking lot, wearing gold crosses on thick chains. It got easier and easier to stand out from the herd.

It was made even weirder by his obvious Nuyorican background, because his full name was Peter Costales, and I write "was" because (like Mikey from the Life cereal commercials), it was rumored that he died from an overdose, though I am happy to say that isn't true. Instead, he became really serious about painting dramatic portraits in oils like Sargent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Singer_Sargent), and that's what I remember most about him, besides his large dark frame stretched out across a studio desk to recover from an experiment with clove cigarettes that went awry, in a furious bout with nausea that took him all class to recover from. His work was beautiful and very sophisticated for a teenager.

Unlike posers, he had the real thing, though in the political game that is high school, he lost a rigged contest for "Best Artist" to the Vice Principal's son Paul Bierker, which turned him off from school for good, as it should be. He was definitely better than him, and so was my boyfriend Raphael, who also painted in oils to great effect. Whereas Ralph dropped out of school to party (and blame it on me), Pete took his act to the S.U.N.Y. school system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_University_of_New_York_at_New_Paltz), like two other friends of mine from that senior year art class. We had no idea how to make a portfolio for submission, because there were no teachers to help us with it, or mentors to teach it, so we applied to a bunch of state schools to see which ones we got into and could afford.

The last time I thought about that group of dedicated artists from high school was when I saw Keith from our senior year art class, as we waited for an Adirondack Trailways bus upstate in the Nanuet strip mall off Rte. 59, where there used to be a Dunkin' Donuts. I asked him about John and Pete, and they didn't see each other as much anymore, what with classes and life taking over. Made sense to me. My best friend and I were destined to part ways as she became a student history teacher, and I went on to earn a B.F.A. from R.I.S.D. after my Liberal Arts classes at S.U.N.Y. Oneonta. They had a much shorter bus ride than I did! It almost made me wish I went there instead, because it was the first stop we made before the long difficult mountain bus ride in snow and ice laying ahead of me, but I knew that.

I was going to take a much harder road than they were, and I knew that meant something to them, too. Pete fucking hated high school for being oppressive and juvenile as much as we did, with an art teacher so burnt out, he announced on the first day of class that he would give an "A" to anyone who showed up for his class, and that was it. There was no talent required, or intellectual thought, or rigorous training involved: just a bunch of brilliant, ethnic, New York kids riding out a senior year we didn't really need, because we all had Regents credits for college already, with one tall, gay, Goth kid wearing pronounced eye makeup included. Thanks for staying strong, Pete. You big weirdo!

Kiss Them for Me

Siouxsie and the Banshees

It glittered and it gleamed
For the arriving beauty queen
A ring and a car
Now you're the prettiest by far

No party she'd not attend
No invitation she wouldn't send
Transfixed by the inner sound
Of your promise to be found, oh

Nothing or no-one will ever
Make me let you down

Kiss them for me, I may be delayed
Kiss them for me, if I am delayed

It's Divoon, oh it's Serene
In the fountains pink champagne
Someone carving their devotion
In the heart shaped pool of fame, oh

Nothing or no-one will ever
Make me let you down

Kiss them for me, I may be delayed
Kiss them for me, I may find myself delayed

On the road to New Orleans
A spray of stars hit the screen
As the 10th impact shimmered
The forbidden candles beamed

Kiss them for me, I may be delayed
Kiss them… Full lyrics on Google Play

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

Wired

Wired Anxiety (Wikimedia Commons)

For years I've trucked through many different kinds of creative crowds, ones that are particularly acute, emotional, and open by nature, as we're taught and so inclined. Through the years, we've openly discussed just about any facet of the human experience fit for talk, and some things not so carefully done. Artists creatively problem-solve in many different types of ways, so obsessive chatter from neurotics tend to grate on our collective nerves after awhile, like watching a dog run around in circles without benefit of a funny video online, and you are that dysfunctional unfunny human to us. Where exactly are is this going? Brainstorming is fun, if it produces something eventually.

Like many artistic people, I've struggled in the past with blowhard college boyfriends who spent a lot of time tanked on talk, high on way more than actual learning. My first real boyfriend was the first person to openly admit to me that he vastly preferred natural biochemistry to artificially-induced ones, expensive as drugs tend to be, because of the vulnerable compulsiveness that actively marks addiction. He seemed to think that higher learning meant you could ramble on about any crazy idea that you had out loud to anyone in the room, rather than internalizing concepts or, even better, writing them down cohesively, but that's why he's an entertainment lawyer who guards artistic paychecks that he's dependent on for a living, and you read me instead of listening to him talk, not that he didn't try every trick in the book to knock me down as many pegs above him as I was.

My father and every one of my brothers hated him for being the all-boys prep-school quarterback he bragged about endlessly, along with his pretensions towards greatness for being a blue-eyed French Canadian/Irish guy living in our world on the east coast. Yeah, dubious at best. It was until years later that I saw him accurately depicted in the awesome comedy "Wedding Crashers" (he finally realized his media dreams of fame!), through Bradley Cooper's dead-on impression of a back-stabbing bitch of a boyfriend with serious homoerotic issues that I realized how many of my friends, family, and acquaintances despised him, which happily brings us together, here on my site today: a place where we can all get along, and group grievances are finally aired out in the open...not that he did any of that.

He plays a lot of "head games" that go nowhere and do nothing, which I often found to be more common among non-creatives, because they have to wait while we make the work the world uses, as a set of people that I sometimes feel sorry for, because they're relegated to the sidelines of life while the big hitters take the risks that earn the big glory. He can't do that because of his disorders (among them addiction, compulsiveness, Lupus, and a big case of "asshole"), but that doesn't stop him from trying hard to impress. I've always hated his egotism based on being a "serious scholar", which often means he spends a lot of time trying to marginalize the star power on center stage ineffectively (ironic as his job must be for him), and that's what I remember most about him now, besides his chemical addictions; an insecurity so violent, he loses way more ground than he gains.

He tried hard to convince me that I was dumb (because I'm an artist, so "genius=stupid", I guess), and often "crazy" over serious family problems that I didn't control as a working class teenage girl, and that my "partying" was motivated from the same interesting, glamorous manic ennui as his that he would only obliquely refer to in "nonversations" that didn't matter, with people too stoned or drunk to care about his points, because directly addressing his issues would make him lose precious leverage in society, even though as a spoiled white boy from a poncy private school, he had all the power then.

It was desperate and striving, character flaws that I finally couldn't forgive or put up with anymore, along with the many unsolicited hours of boredom he would bring to the card table, when all we really wanted to do back then was play drinking games and have fun during our precious off-hours from work, or school, or both. I have never forgotten his immature pillow-talk about his chemical addictions that I thought were just puppy love ravings over my sexual prowess, and the desire for me that he channeled into his "highs" that he could yank me around with, though given the difference in our looks and status, it was highly unlikely to ever pan out. It was okay if he was moodily and maudlin, but if I had an actual serious illness, I was "weak" and I'd never be "virile" like him (see also: "Gaston"), though in reality, he's the one with the in vitro triplets and I'm the one with the long-lived fertility.

If I spent a lazy summer drowsing and dreaming, I was a bad housewife hurting my chances at a favorable marriage with him in the future, because I didn't get twitchy or itchy from seeing dishes in the sink. If I had a hard time managing my very sick and very large extended family as a working young woman in school, it was obviously because I was too stupid to do so; I couldn't read books like he could as a history major (because I'd already spent my youth reading as many books as I could find), and that must be sad. All I could do was get into a school for brilliant Leonardo da Vinci-types :( Poor me!

He'd drone on for hours, interesting only to him and his particular biochemistry, like the badly staged scenes he directed with a drama queen's tenseness, in these diva-like displays that had absolutely no talent behind them at all, and that was the crux of it: he earns off of talent, because he's drawn to us as much as he hates us for it, in a classic up-and-down, love/hate cycle that became the biggest bore I'd ever met. His passions for some brand of iced tea were rave-worthy and "smile-rific" which you HAD TO try or he'd just die, whereas my charcoal drawings were lame for an untrained teenage girl, and "EW!" Nudes! Who would do something like that?!

For the record, Bart, the productive people who run the world do "gay" stuff like that. That's who. By the way, you're welcome for the nice house in Brooklyn, the wife (with those unfortunate brown eyes that you told me hurt my chances for a good match in college...oops!) and 3.5 kids you forced your poor wife to bio-engineer for you with rounds and rounds of expensively-provided fertility treatments (because you're sterile) with long hospital stays that required her total bed rest for months; the same very family you step out on and/or check out from physically and mentally periodically, because your work is so important as a contracts guy for your union that you have to hit the road whenever things get bad, seeking the rush you need from other people's more exciting lives (like the actors who provide for you and your family, you know, "gay") that you watch from the set in the shadows, picky as ever, and fussily looking for problems that will cause a pay-out for violations from your plush union. You can thank this "dumb artist" for your life, whenever you get the chance. Bro.

 

Hey, O-towners! This one's for you today. I felt your pain. Thanks for hanging with me back in the day anyway, arrogantly over-bearing boyfriends notwithstanding. I really needed the support, just like you did. 

Grand

http://www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org/if-you-love-somebody-grandparents-raising-kids/?gclid=CM3xoaOL5skCFc2RHwodBloIYg

Like every family out there in the real world, mine also struggle with mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, learning impairments, developmental disabilities, age, abuse, neglect, and sometimes extreme ethnic prejudices. My father's sister Marilyn was so challenged that she spawned (and then abandoned) two families, back-to-back. First was my cousin Brian, born to an Italian-American man I've never met, and then summarily dropped off at my paternal grandparents' door, without ever getting a "thank you" or one single, decent paycheck to cover his expenses, I'm sure. And why would she have done that, when she was proud to show off her white vinyl Go-Go boots instead of her own son, tucked away as they were under his bed in my grandparent's Queens apartment?

No, she was proud rather of being deemed "good looking" enough back in the day to dance for men for money, thus creating a generation of orphans we've yet to shake in this century. My "Grandpa Fred" made good money from his cab-driving by then (as the proud, hard-working owner of a medallion, an amazingly incredible feat given his poor, immigrant, Depression-Era roots), and so my cousin at least had my grandmother and him, a solid roof over his head, and my grandpa's really good food in his tummy, even though it still wasn't enough to conquer his drug addiction in the future.

I'm just glad that they were able to provide for him for a time, enough to be considered a real family, especially since my step-grandfather and grandmother never had kids of their own. What a blessing in disguise it must have been for them as an older couple! As bad as my father's family is with their notorious "disappearing acts", I'm extraordinarily proud of them and their loving giving to Brian, alone in the world without a father and mother as he was. At least he had them, and at least he has us. That's a lot more than many of our most beleaguered children around the world (and around the way) have.

We need to support our elders and grandparents who decide to adopt their children's children, whether from infirmity or neglect, as a way to stem the bleeding our sacred family's have been suffering under; this weight that we all need to bear as equally as we can. Thank you to my man Ernie Anastos (geez, stay positive, will ya?) and the wonderfully gentle Kathy Gibson for highlighting her parenting support platform for those grandparents who can adopt, so that all of our children may thrive to great success in the future. We need every hand we can take for this battle that we're in. Thank you! This one's for you today, fighting the good fight every single day you get 'em fed, dressed, and out the door to school. You're not alone anymore. We're here.

http://stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/back-to-school-picnic-2014.html

http://www.stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/back-to-school-picnic-2015.html

http://stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/mothers-day-luncheon-2014.html 

For the rest of you, you need to do this NOW. That means tech support for those elders in your community who have school-age children using computers and smartphones and tablets and laptops (standard in most school districts nowadays), free backpacks at the beginning of each and every school year that they have enrolled children, plus free pantries for food and toiletries. Ever look at a Social Security check? Yeah, make that work. Ladies, I know you feel me on this one.