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

Kalifornia

Back in the late 70s, my dad took us to California with him on a typical cable t.v. business trip, probably so he could go to a convention or something dull like that. We stayed at a large, bland hotel in L.A., with absolutely nothing original or interesting about it at all, then to the San Diego Zoo (like any other white tourist), a stop at the Chinese Theater to see the handprints of dead "stars" from their era we didn't know (I got a green plastic Buddha bank there, because it was either that as a souvenir or the squashed penny thing) and then my dad wanted to see some western-flavored crap, like the stuffed Triggers he liked as a kid, because he always wanted to be a cowboy. 

We got free t-shirts (mine reads "mighty Mouse" in this photo) and might have had an achingly generic time, if we hadn't insisted on tacking on a visit to one very special editor of cool magazines for kids (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2011/10/monsters-inc.html), because we wrote ahead of time and had our parents arrange it for us. We were down like that: you gotta be savvy New York kids to have a good time, you know? And we were hungry, thirsty lil' devils at that. You can see I'm wearing my brother's hand-me-down jeans (I did not grow up with money) with a hastily-bought and standout gay-colored visor, because I couldn't fucking stand the unrelenting sun out there. I also made my mom buy me some crappy (and also very gay) kiddie shades at the zoo, because I was absolutely miserable: it was hot, crowded, boring, and always fucking sunny. Every day was exactly like the day before it: dry as a bone and dusty. We hated Southern California with a passion that has not dulled with time or age.

Which brings me back to the gripping cranky tone of this piece, because every fucking year we have to see on t.v. how your summer is "THE HOTTEST EVER!", with records temps (!!!), and raging wildfires!! But, guess what asshole? We fucking know you have fires every year because (and this is key) WE KNOW THAT YOU CHOOSE TO LIVE IN A DESERT. That's right, some asshole New Yorker has finally told you the truth, because it's been your truth since well, the last Ice Age: you live in a fucking desert. I promise not to remind you that water is wet, and that it snows here in wintertime, if you decide to finally shut the fuck up about your idiotic choices, and move the fuck on from the glaringly obvious fact that you have stupidly chosen to NOT live near freshwater that's easily replenishable, and/or build your stupid fucking McMansion on stilts smartly built on a precarious cliff-side that either burns in the summer or floods in the spring....each and every fucking year.

So, that would be a resounding "NO!" to the age-old question of "Do we feel bad?" as Northerners forced to watch dry grass burn on some fucking semi-arid hillside every year, at the exact same time. You have the option to move, like any sane human does, by following available and easily sustainable water sources, like humanity has done for millennia. We also don't feel bad that corrupt assholes with a douchey Euro sense of self-entitlement want to drain Lake Mead like it's their g-ddamn bathtub, because dicks like you in Vegas want hookers, blow, and air conditioning on near-constant demand in a nonstop underground twilight that's your fucking compulsive gambling dysfunction du jour. Get with the program, and fuck you. 

Play, boy

Me and my brothers really didn't have much ideas about sex, growing up in our strict Catholic household during the 70s. We certainly had no clue how we were made, nor did my parents ever enlighten us about it, with the exception of one strange hallway conversation between me and my mom in my teens and long after Health Ed classes had already clued me in, along with my own experiences. She asked me if I had any clinical questions, because she likes to pretend that she's a doctor, which is strange enough to deter any child from inquiring.

Children were also seen as a nuisance. Over and over, the adults around us quoted the same trite sayings, like "Children should SEEN, and not heard", and if we counteracted with superior logic, they ganged up on us, sometimes physically. They often kicked us out of the house, whether we liked it or not, and locked us out of the house for hours. I suppose it was to "build character", or they needed a vacation from child rearing, because most of our parents shrugged their shoulders and said "It was the thing to do" noncommittally, when we asked them why they got married and had kids. Oh. Great answer.

They were horrible to us and often really bad company, so after awhile, we learned to stealthily avoid them whenever we could, mostly to avoid their choking cigarette smoke and nasty drunk behavior. Fine! We don't wanna be around you anyhow! And we really didn't. We could disappear for hours, without any adult interferences at all. It was freeing and also wildly dangerous, given the amount of horrors out there in the world, but I guess they figured that the country gentrification of Rockland and our close proximity to the family farm on the two surrounding lots would be enough to quell most dangers, and they were right. Heck, our street wasn't paved by the county for snow, and we had a joint mailbox at the head of the lane for the houses. We were effectively off the radar. We could walk for miles and still be nowhere.

But, there were still plenty of ways for kids to get in trouble, because we tried most of them. We tiptoed around this one rundown cottage on the block that we called "The Shack", a place perpetually darkened by the shade of some towering pine trees, and haunted by a murder of crows. We rarely saw the people who lived there, nor did we want to. Our parents told us in hushed tones that they were this thing called "renters", because they were po' white trash who moved around all the time."That's why you see their kids outside all the time, running around with bare dirty feet and their faces streaked with mud," my mom said to us in a regional accent so profoundly colloquial, people outside of her small environ in the Bronx have trouble with it.

"See?" she pointed at them one time, as we drove past slowly to the end of the land to dump some leaves, or turn around. "They're no good. That's why their mutha feeds them McDonald's all the time." The kids did indeed look down and out, morosely unwrapping their cheeseburgers on the front steps of the small house. This, from a woman who would conscript me into the workforce by signing me away to the same corporation when I was 15. But, our parents did that all the time: blatantly judgmental hypocrisy that was extremely obvious. Still, they weren't totally off base. 

We never knew who they were in school (did they even go to school?), and they never played with us, which was a really bad sign. Even the inbred farm kid who couldn't speak well from retardation rang our doorbell to play outside. They were weird. They were two dirty blond hair kids, with an unfortunate hair color that matched soiled dishwater, a boy and girl of about the same age. The girl looked glumly at us in our car, with one white skinny shoulder exposed from the slipping of her worn baggy shirt. I never even knew their names.

Which is, of course, why we found torn pages from an old Playboy magazine around their house. My grandmother was over, visiting with my mom in the kitchen, and in a rare sign of adult solidarity (she actually liked kids), she pushed us to play outside so they could talk alone. It was intriguing to us for its' rarity, which kept us in close orbit. We did a cursory circuit of the woods at the end of the lane, and snuck around the gravel driveway of "The Shack", which was devoid of rundown redneck cars during the day, for once. And there it was: water-damaged from the rain and torn into pieces, but we immediately knew what it was. It was part of a "Playboy"! No way! My dad sometimes had a magazine or two rolled up and stuffed into an old paint can in the garage, but as we got older, he got savvier and changed his hiding spots.

Anyway, we had no idea what it was, but "nudies" were coveted kid-material. We got stupid over the giddiness of violating the shanty borderlines, and did a blatantly un-kidlike thing to do with our haul: we sat out the front steps of our house, trying in vain to piece together the grainy flesh-colored pieces. It was like a bad jigsaw puzzle. What the heck is this piece? Wait! No, that goes there. What is that? I think it's a ladie's private parts, I don't know. In the midst of our find, we had let our discretion go out the window, right under the noses of two very clever and highly experienced New York City women. We were doomed. After a few minutes of shrieks, muffled giggles, and stage whispers, the totally unexpected event that made complete sense happened: my grandmother had crept down the creaky, carpeted wood stairs to surprise us with the whoosh of a front door opening. AGGGGH....

We were stone-cold busted, and we knew it, but this was grandma; the lady with the incredible meatballs and warm talcum powder hugs. We had to try, so we did. We pleaded with her not to tell mom. We gave her sad, puppy eyes, and we begged for mercy...to no avail. Each and every one of us had to stand in front of my mutha in the kitchen, while she called our friend's parents to deliver the bad news: we were caught with a porno mag, and we all got punished. Uh oh. This was bad: no allowance, no dessert after dinner, no t.v., and we're were all grounded. Fuck.

But, it wasn't all bad. To this day, I relish the touch of a human man over some photo, any day of the week. Pictures are great and all, but they ain't nuthin' like the real thing. A photo don't talk back to you when you need it, or hold you close on a cold winter's night. Only yo man does that for you, girl. Get me on this one? You can have your Photoshopped mistresses, boys. This girl's aiming for the real thing: an actual man who loves her back. Happy hunting. It's a jungle out there. Rowwwrrr!

James Hendricks

It was the thing to do back in the day: hop on a bus to the city, or catch a ride with a friend, and grab a fake ID from one of the shady vendors that lined Times Square. In terms of illegality, it was on a scale on par with buying beer while underage, hence the phony driver's license. Hand skills were also highly in demand. If you were good enough as a forger (and I was), you could erase the info on someone's license and type over the last number that placed you as a minor. If you still had a ways to go, and you needed two numbers changed on your birth date, it was a harder sell.

Bouncers were pretty savvy, especially when the drinking age in New York was 18, and that was the glorious age my oldest brother fell under: a time when you could be a teen and drink in a grownup bar. It seemed less a crime to fudge one number when you didn't have that much time left to go, anyway. For me and my middle bro, it was way more difficult to get away with, because they raised the legal age to 21, and there was absolutely no way I could pass for someone older. I barely passed for a teenager as a kid, let alone someone who could amble up to a bar and order a real cocktail. Besides that, I didn't really like the taste of alcohol.

My brothers passed their fake ID between the two of them, because in the dark of night, photos were less important than the age. Woe to you if you got a smart guy at the door, like someone who knew how to shine a flashlight underneath the unlaminated paper license to read the real numbers under your typewriter job. Then, you could be really fucked; like, hauled down to the station fucked. And any parent from this area who gets a call like that at night does major damage to your psyche for an indiscretion like that. You don't wanna know what strong-ass parents from the Bronx and BedStuy do for discipline, although by now, I'm sure you have good guesses, most of which is now considered illegal to do to a child under current laws. You could get punched right across the face, like my bros did for really serious infractions, for lying about a sleepover to go see a Stones show in Philly. It was really bad and very scary, and that was the whole point. 

http://gothamist.com/2013/11/22/1970s_photos_show_a_dirty_old_city.php#photo-1

We lived in very dangerous waters, and my parents figured it was better to be scared of them than us taking crack addicts on the subway lightly, and in many ways, I didn't disagree. It's hard to come down on the strictness of parents terrified of being knifed on a train during daylight commuting times, or the hellish cast a flaming garbage can had at night on the West Side Highway, intimating the fiery pits of hell, which is exactly where you'd be if you broke down on the wrong side of town, late in the middle of the night, where no one (not even the cops) dared to go. We faced big-time foes, not some tweaked-out little "wigger" with hipster neck tats, a sideways ball cap, and a copped bad attitude, like a suburban kid from Mount Vernon who took the Metro North into "the city".

In comparison to that, who wouldn't need a drink? We reasoned to ourselves as a group that it was insane to be involuntarily pressed into military service without being able to take a stiff drink beforehand. We could die for our country as bullet fodder, but we sure as fuck couldn't dull the pain from it. War before alcohol: an American example of our tendencies towards violence over drink, if ever there was. Doubt me? I've seen movies in the past few weeks (new releases, too), that toss real children around like they're nothing but rag dolls, or they used sled dogs like they are trash to be jerked around on a leash for some stupid fucking movie, with one star punching and pushing away an obviously real animal. Disgusting stuff, and not exactly the red wine with cheese my parents liked to have sometimes.

Compared to a climate like that, an older brother with a penchant for really good music could only mean one thing to me: the mischievous spirit of the 60s lived on and still rebelled, every time some dumb dick bouncer with a high school dropout education and a guido fucking attitude didn't discern what any of our crowd knew at a glance: we were (and always will be) Jimi Hendrix fans. R.I.P., my native brother. And fuck y'all with your weird priorities. Rock lives on forever! We will never really die, because the truly gifted never really do.

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

(For Jim)

The Third Eye (Blind)

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

Ever since my childhood bout with chickenpox (one that I don't remember), I've had a fairly visible scar on my forehead. My mom was worried about that, because I'm the only girl in my family, and she didn't want any physical evidence of sickness conflicting with my looks, which is the first real currency women are given in society. 

My market value as a marriageable mate is still very important (to her and to me), so she did what she could to keep a little toddler from scratching, including putting on those little mitts sometimes worn by newborns who scratch at night. Despite her vigilance, a few areas escaped her notice with my unconscious scratching: an area on my thigh, a little spot on the side of my face, and a big one almost dead center. Woe is me!

With time and the thickening of my skin, it's become almost invisible in most lights, excepting those occasions when it isn't. In my quest to normalize a semi-arid city out west, my then-boyfriend and I drove to a suburb of Denver that housed the one Asian section of that sprawling, modern (and almost characterless) city. He was still nursing serious internal hurts borne by an abusive mother and violent stepdad; abuses that included sexual molestation, as well as the usual beat-downs from a stressed-out, working class Brit trying to manage his émigré status, a new marriage with kids, and another country.

I was still licking my wounds from an aborted marriage, illegal as it was, due to my college friend's legal Unfit for Marriage status, so both of us were hurting from complaints not of our doing, but deeply effected by other people's collective traumas nonetheless. Because my ex didn't eat during his manic binge phases, I had greatly changed my lifestyle to accommodate his diseases, which left me in a serious deficit all around. I went a little wild with food on my own, eating and eating and never really feeling full. It was out of control, very uncommon for me, and really scary. I could see myself ballooning up daily.

I remember my mom visiting me in Littleton (right after the high school massacres that happened there), as I sat down to eat a 2nd heaping plate full of pancakes and sausage at the cheap kitchen table my dad and his wife bought quickly for the apartment I had to relocate to. My mom asked me what was going on, with the understanding that she already knew, because she did. I have always been a size 6 as an adult "Miss", but under the stress of earning a living and righting societal wrongs, I gave in to my new boyfriend's huge Scottish appetite. We ate at any restaurant we wanted to, revelling in our escapes from the incompetent horrors of other people's homes.

With this in mind, we sought out Colorado's version of "Chinatown" to look at exotic eastern goods and, of course, eat. He went into one shop to look around, while I stood on the pavilion sidewalk outside, smoking a cigarette, another teenage escape valve I still had in place. As I strolled around the storefronts, a gentleman dressed in the tourist garb of a "guru" stopped his robotic pamphlet distribution for "Ancient Eastern Readings" to open his mouth at me. I wasn't used to agape stares at the time, because weight gain and untanned skin is considered "ugly" out west, but this was more. He looked...scared.

After a quick recovery (like most immigrants learn), he began speaking to me in a language I didn't know, pointing at the middle of his forehead over and over again. My boyfriend was out of the shop he was in, and I was walking quickly away. "What did he want?", he asked me smiling, in the non-threatened, jocular way men who are 6' and 250lbs have with shorter, smaller, and darker men. "Oh," I laughed. I was constantly tired and hungry all the time, clear depressed signs both, and I knew it. Smoking had become a dull chore that made me feel sick, too. I hated my life; a life in a foreign land that felt stiff, colorless, dull, and flat, like an out-of-body experience, and I was acting out a role in someone else's boring movie.

"It's my chickenpox scar." Where? He didn't notice things like that about me, busy as he was staying alive and staying afloat, despite the dragging down qualities of his life, too. "See? It's right here. In the middle of my forehead." And just like that, he promptly forgot about it, because that's how little spiritual significance I had to a big blond, tan, western guy with a very large and showily dramatic depiction of "The Rapture" tattooed prominently on his forearm for all the world to see, because that's exactly how limiting the scope of America can feel to someone who is perpetually outside of the cultural norms.

He lasted ten days in the cushy second story of an extremely wealthy and well-appointed Park Slope townhouse that I secured for us, upon my return home. Ten days, before he bugged out to drive back home, to a dull place where generic red trucks for good ole boys are respected as having more value than the people who sleep next to you for years. Ten days. That's all I got to right his world for him, as my world turned upside down, once again. Ten friggin' days.

Nightswimming

In art school, real fun was hard to come by. Chills were plentiful, along with fear, hope, and crippling doubt. Combined with your average rich kids' inability to sleep at night without a safety net of cushy money and psychiatrist-prescribed pharmaceuticals, it led to some insane freak-outs, as we dared each other to the dizzying heights that are brought on by frustration and rabid competition. They'd show up to classes exhausted, with shaved heads, and really dark, unhealthy circles under their eyes, with the requisite heavy-lidded baggage. I've never met a more dangerously fucked up group of people in my life. 

When Littleton, Colorado erupted into murder and suicide from the particular kind of violence that is a rich kids' ennui, I wasn't all that surprised. I'd be openly talking about the toxic combo of money and madness for years, to anyone who cared enough to listen. That my theories about white men with money congealed in reality, into my very worst fears about life, actually scared me to death.

It was into this mix that someone in our group mentioned an empty rock quarry as a potential swimming hole. I was desperate for cool water, as an East Coaster. Summertime just ain't right without the beach and swimming to me. I jumped at the chance. We snuck onto the grounds underneath a chain link fence, and past the "No Swimming!" signs, giving it the right amount of transgression for rebellious youth. Of course, my crazy Yankee housemate, with his backwoods working-class attitude and lust for rampantly unchecked athleticism, spurred us on to higher and higher jumps. It was thrilling and really fucking scary (Kudos, Riddell). I mastered cliffhanging from across the quarry, my toes gripping onto a narrow rocky ledge, but the other side of the pond was even worse because it was much, much higher than it seemed.

If you've never free-falled into 30-40 feet of cold murky water that hides its' depth, I can't really explain to you. I asked my friend questions about it while in the water, trying to steel my nerves for the jump. We listened to him talk about the sharp edges of rusty metal that lay on the bottom of the small lake, since it'd been a teenage fad to dump your car there and claim it as a total loss from theft on your insurance, back in rural 1970s Rhode Island. Yeah, okay. That's it, huh?

I climbed up the rocky ridge to the other side, and stood there for a little while, my crazy friend yelling at me encouragingly from the other side of the pond, taking his umpteenth leap into the depths below, from even smaller and more dangerous footholds. Shit. I have to do it. I'm no chickenshit, dude. I did it, and instantly regretted it. I saw sharp rocks quickly rising up to greet me, and thought (really thought) I'd just made the worst mistake of my life. I could hear Riddell yelling that I didn't jump far out enough to totally escape danger ("Oh, no! She didn't jump far enough out!!"), and then I gasped, hitting the water at an odd angle that smacked me in the ribs hard. I could tell he was as scared as I was, and for the first time in my life, I thought I might drown. The fall took all the wind out of my lungs. I screamed underwater, water rushing into my mouth that I had no choice but to gulp down.

I did drown a little bit, but years of swimming lessons really paid off. I bobbed up to the surface, letting out the remaining air in my lungs by yelling out from the pain of my fall. There was silence when I broke through the water. My friends had been bracing for a possible rescue dive. My housemate laughed right after I surfaced. I quickly explained to my friends in the water that I hurt myself by slamming down hard, and that's why I surfaced screaming. "Oh, shit....", as the ones with less experience drifted away from me in the water. I treaded water lightly by myself for awhile, watching other kids take jumps. I was fucking done for the day, man. It was one of those rare brush ups with mortality that I've had over the years that never really leave you.

But back up on the safety of the warm rocks, laying out and drying in the sun, we were happier than we'd been in awhile. So much so, we convinced each other to ride out there on a stifling warm summer night, a night so muggy, it begged for relief. I was a lot safer than my previous trip out there, because sharp rocks don't exactly look nicer under scant parking lot spotlights, but we were buoyed up by our nighttime adventure. Some of us descended into madness and never came back from its' gripping depths, like Greg and his sometime-love Crystal, with the long dark hair. He hugged her briefly on the rocks, in a rare warm embrace of the true boyfriend/girlfriend type, before she wriggled out of his grasp to escape to safer waters like the rippling blackness below.

He was routinely having nightmares, which he tried to capture on film in grainy black and white (and he did get it, as one student duly noted during a crit), the hauntings of madness combined with searing brilliance, hard work, and born-to-it-ness. He looked at me after she left his arms, trying to regroup from the sting of her leaving by shaking out his tight curls, opening his eyes really wide and saying to me shakily, "I've never felt this clean, you know. This water...." he trailed off, shivering in the night, ...."it just makes me feel so clean, you know? I've never felt this clean in my life!" I didn't understand, because quarries aren't exactly filled with pristine spring water, especially those right outside of a major urban area, so I quizzed him further, but to no avail. He repeated it, and I was baffled by it again.

On the ride home, we fell silent as a group, in our caravan of cheap, college-kid cars, watching the moon through open windows, a stark difference to the chatty excitement of our semi-drunk and raucous ride out there, because there ain't nothing' like the feeling of somnolence that comes over your limbs after a long day (or night) of swimming, like those times when your parents drove you back from a beach vacation during summer's off. I remember Greg mentioned the magical way that the moonlight had shimmered on our wet skin like diamonds, and the feeling that anything could happen (which it did, because we summoned it up out of the water for our creation), and that this was the one final, brief respite of summer session before we bore the full, crushing weight of the highest Ivy heights during a real semester, ill-prepared as we were with our small, hard, working class lives.

It was a lot to consider, you know? Take the time out this summer during your vacation to charge your batteries. You don't want the burn-out of an empty and used old battery that's about to be discarded by your respective industries, because when you let someone (or something ) use you like that, you don't ever get it back. And they just throw you away to get another one to feed off of creatively. You are their business; the beating, breathing heart of it. Remember that, through all the games and petty roles being played out in front of you daily, in some generic overly air conditioned office environment. Be unique. Be you. And persevere.

Hieroglyphics

"Gifting", with strings attached.

For years, I've doodled little shapes and swirly glyphs until they covered a page. It was something I typically did during a boring class, or in attendance at yet another dopey meeting for people at much slower speeds, so there was no point in me paying attention with the full force of my consciousness. Of course, I'd learn later on that's exactly what you're supposed to do with massive amounts of mostly useless data: use other parts of your brain to take in information, which has the unfortunate effect of giving my a memory recall so profound, it's like a party trick for me now: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/12/doodling-benefits_n_7572182.html.

But they sometimes took on a deeper meaning to the people around me. One year, my former RISD classmate turned housemate used them to make fun Christmas cards."They're like wrapping paper", she said dismissively to me, and then took them to her day job to work on and show her co-workers, which was weird, since she was so paranoid about people ripping her off without getting paid. I didn't care, because she photocopied them onto colored paper and colored in the Christmas tree, so I used them for cards that year, too.

The pens bled through, creating a constellation of dots on the other side.

Sometimes people noticed me drawing in meetings, like they had in school, but given my chosen profession(s), it hardly seemed worth mentioning to an artist/designer like me, so no one did. Until the year I began working for a small Jewish family that had great book packaging deals with the retail conglomerate Barnes & Noble. It put a whole new focus on me, as their star designer for a major American retailer. People jumped out of their skin around me, with their claws fully out, just like in art school.

They had a dysfunctional receptionist ("No, I'm an 'Office Manager'", and then she'd tell everyone around her that she didn't do office work), who clung to me voraciously, with the desperation of the drowning. She left me alone for awhile, until she got her "best friend" from high school fired, and then she turned her obsessive focus elsewhere, which naturally fell on me, the shiniest object in the room. I knew she was mentally ill because of her twitchy mannerisms and oddly disjointed way of speaking, plus she interrupted my work in the middle of a major deadline, which is the largest taboo we have in my industry. 

Magical dancing snowflakes, forever etched into my mind.

My look registered such shock at her brute assertion into my face for attention (over a banal relationship thing or another email about her poor socialization skills), that she immediately blurted "Oh, I'm bipolar" because it was that out of place for someone to do that to me at that point in my career. She promptly tried to retract it later on, when she turned on me (which I knew she would), after embodying every single facet of her original medical diagnosis many times over, for 10+ years on the job. After many a run-in with the psycho co-worker, I laid some serious ground rules with her in that first intimate conversation about personal matters, which she promised to abide by, but of course, couldn't fulfill.

Anyway, the owner was pushing me hard to befriend her, with a twinkle in his eye, because he used her gossip like a seeing eye dog would, which was fine by me. I got coveted face-out shelf space to promote my imprint (which is actually part of the job), and he could pick her straw head about whatever weirdo thing he wanted to. I knew the game of "Telephone" like a pro. And so we hung out a few times after work, but she couldn't get the necessary dirt she wanted to have as leverage over me with my genuine after-hours bonhomie.

Windmill toys, like the ones we played with as children.

Besides that, she had briefly attended F.I.T. for painting, and it's also part of my job to mentor junior design staff. She could never be a designer because of her learning impairments, but she could do basic illustration work, and so I allowed her to grow closer to me, while I was the one with the authority to careful demarcate appropriate adult boundaries. I still needed good press at the time, and her dull PR about me would help me buoy up a imprint that had lay fallow, so I could have time to turn it into a major moneymaker for the company.

It worked like a charm. She sung like a canary to anyone who would listen to her, and I got to pull a very lucrative project out of the fire, to infamous success. And, I did really like any person with creative aspirations (as I've been taught to do) who want to learn and do better, which she did seem to have, in spurts that came and went with the ups-and-downs of her serious brain disorder. It was really therapy for her, but that was fine, too: RISD masters in degree programs like Art Therapy and Art Education. The better I could break through to the rough spots on her mind, the better I got at my job.

You're a major star, baby!

I used her as a training tool, to better my conversations with a staff that was sub par for big city publishing in the tri-state area, and that was also part of my job, because the owner of the company told me that on my very first review. And so I signed concepts like "books" and "design" and "art" over and over into their hands, realizing that his employees dysfunctions mirrored those of his family, and not me or mine, because I met a lot of his family during my employ.

Their admin used me to gain artistic insight into creative genius, and I used her as a mouthpiece to telegraph whatever aspect of me that I felt the rest of the staff needed to know. She gained inspiration from me and my labors, which is also very typical for someone like me, too. I didn't mind. As I lectured to her at the reception desk, I could feel the entire company leaning in to listen to me, which was the gold in the bank that helped me to gain confidence and break through. I had an entire audience in the palm of my hand, every single day of my life, which has naturally led me here to you all.

A screw loose or two, or is it three, or...how many more?!

She was genuine in her admiration of me, as I was skillful in schooling her with the rest of the Special Needs adults who worked in the fringes of media. The first year of our acquaintance, she gave me a notebook, with the requisite hidden agenda attached: why don't you draw something we can sell to make money off of? I did no such fucking thing, because I was already making major bank that they could coattail off of, but I always enjoyed doodling. She once asked me what my scribblings meant, and I hesitated....who cares? But, as she eagerly awaited my answer, I gave her the most honest reply I could think of at the time: "I don't know....it doesn't really matter to me what they are. I call them 'hieroglyphics'".

A Keith Haring-inspired paramecium dancing in primordial fluid.

And now here we are years later, on a spiritual journey that has brought me back to very essence of my family's historical and cultural roots, buried deep in my DNA, but still very, very real: that time from our most sacred human area in a fertile river valley, tied forever to the lands of Ancient Mesopotamia, then Egypt, then the Greco-Roman era, onto modern Normans (be they Italian, Irish, or French-Swiss), and then my tribe that turned right and went east to India, walking (or sledding) over the Bering Land Bridge with our ancient dogs, to finally meet a boat of French men from Western Europe on the Americas most eastern shores, men who married the M'ikMak squaws from Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, people who drew the cuneiform shapes that resembled the ancient language for those of us who have always loyally worshipped The Great Spirit. 

A "commercial artist", indeed.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Mikmaq_sample_%28ave_Maria%29.jpg

 

RISD’s Ongoing Mission

The mission of Rhode Island School of Design, through its college and museum, is to educate its students and the public in the creation and appreciation of works of art and design, to discover and transmit knowledge and to make lasting contributions to a global society through critical thinking, scholarship and innovation.

Original Mission Statement
On March 22, 1877, the Rhode Island General Assembly ratified “An Act to Incorporate the Rhode Island School of Design.” The corporation, comprised of a forward-thinking group of men and women, artists and business leaders, educators and politicians, was formed “for the purpose of aiding in the cultivation of the arts of design.” The original bylaws set forth the following key objectives for RISD:

First. The instruction of artisans in drawing, painting, modeling, and designing, that they may successfully apply the principles of Art to the requirements of trade and manufacture.

Second. The systematic training of students in the practice of Art, in order that they may understand its principles, give instruction to others, or become artists.

Third. The general advancement of public Art Education, by the exhibition of works of Art and of Art school studies, and by lectures on Art.

http://www.risd.edu/About/History_Mission_Governance/Mission/

Turning Japanese

http://godzilla.wikia.com/wiki/Shobijin

I met Atusko as a transfer student to RISD, over the foundation summer session that's required for each and every student. No one gets a waiver, not even Picasso himself (and he probably would've been kicked out for being a total fucking dick who couldn't paint, anyway), because they do not accept studio credits from any school on Planet Earth (or famous artist, living or dead). She immediately didn't like me, but given her rather traditionally affluent Japanese upbringing, she chose to hide it in plain sight, which is really odd when you are exposing yourself in intimate studio classes everyday.

But, like any other generic wanna-be "art fag", she chose to do bitchy battle with me (mostly one-sided, because, honestly, I had no fucking clue what she was thinking most of the time, nor did I really care) by sublimating her lesbian energy towards me in strange and unusual ways. I didn't know she was bisexual until later on in the summer, when my gay fashion design friends finally told me, as we sat gossiping about her and all the other students. 

She was a total snob in crits, and overly sensitive. She cried a lot, which gave her very red eyes all summer long, and led to a series of drippy red paintings that were either about human blood or being gay and rolling around in period blood with her ex-girlfriend. We didn't really know, and besides that, it was total schlock shock value and really gross. I should be perfectly honest with you at this point: I have never had a lesbian friend. Ever. I've never met a gay woman who actually liked me enough to be a real friend to me.

Anyway, into this heady cocktail of insane competition and mind-blowing academics, she chose to betray another female student by being one of the weirdest assholes I've met to date, and that is hard to beat for a New Yorker, so it actually helped me to remember her over the years, when I would have forgotten her as just another rich Japanese girl with a typically short haircut that they liked in the 90s. Through her friendship with my friend from Minnesota (who would become a housemate and roommate with me for much longer than I ever wanted, but that's another great story or two), I could at least be around her without being a primary target, because my fag hag fashion friend diffused some of her gay anger at me, and life itself.

And so, unbeknown to her, I actually learned a lot about her by being part of a group, and listening to my new arty, wealthy friends speak. They thought they were extremely sophisticated, which was funny for me as a New Yorker. We'd trade stories about where we were from, and we were from all over the globe, in several different languages. I knew she loved her brother, and that she did the same weirdly passive-aggressive and oddly sexually hostile thing with him over his girlfriend, because in "Depressionville", it's okay to sabotage other people's relationships if you can justify it by claiming "jealously" (even if it's incestuous, which is very cool, hip, and strange). With her, it came about at a red-faced and drunk "goodbye" family dinner at a sushi joint, with lots of free-flowing sake. She showed me the pictures from their last visit, as we sat talking and smoking.

By the end of the summer, she tried to convince me that her zitty, greasy-haired, and dyed blonde roomie was as beautiful as a Supermodel, and that Pam's sister was just as gorgeous, too! "Look, MAAHHRIE!" She showed me some glossy mag of a skincare ad with two blue-eyed models: one blonde and one brunette, like the American sisters she was now lucky enough to know firsthand. "Here's PAHHM, and her seester!". Uh, okay. I didn't have the heart to unload my brief experiences with New York, photography, and modeling, which would have driven her madder anyway, so I just said "Yeah", briefly and noncommittally, and let it drop.

She must have sensed that I had some edge I wasn't divulging to her right away, because she nervously fretted around my summertime dorm room in an old house owned by the school, finally landing on my old cassette types, to scrutinize them and judge my musical tastes. Uh oh. This was also really bad dyke territory for me. Chicks could always tell I really knew music by my collection. And there it was: her dip-shit, passive-aggressive opening: "Ohhhh, MAAHHHrie..." she tsk-tsked over my tapes, "you must not like women!" She pulled out one cassette, "See? You have no music by women!!" It was a frightening thing for her to say aloud, because we were in a room full of just female artists, and every single one of them wanted to sabotage me without getting caught.

It was a great move, but unfortunately for her, I actually did have some female recording artists hidden into the mix, with serious tastes in punk rock, New Wave, Ska, R&B, Jazz, and the blues: genres classically difficult for American women to succeed in. I hit her with Exene Cervanka from the L.A. band "X" and Chrissie Hyde from "The Pretenders", but she clammed up coldly, narrowing her eyes at me viciously. Okay, fine. I also have ONLY BOYS in my family, Atsuko. Oh, right! She brightened up at the suggestion that led to her ripping apart her brother's girlfriend, hence the photos she busted out and passed around.

But it led us to better places conversationally, and the room once again opened up to other people wandering around the dorm, looking for something to do after summer studios quit for the day. A nice gay Mexican kid wandered in with his new redhead "bestie" from Long Island (they LOVED dishing over gossip mags and worshipped Linda Evangelista like she was a plastic mannequin), which spread the weirdo tension around the room more equitably. We got higher and drunker, which led me back to happier memories, too. She dropped an A-Bomb then that I never forgot, and it was the most charming thing I knew about her during our brief and tense acquaintance. 

I must have been talking about watching monster movies with my bros, when she cut in excitedly, to top me in the conversation: "Yes! I know what you mean, MAAHRIE. When I was leetle girl in Tokyo, I cried when I saw Godzilla on t.v. I ran to keetchen to mom, and ask her if Tokyo was burning and people die. 'No, Atsuko!', my mommy said. 'Look! Only on t.v. Eats not real!' And she pull back curtain in keetchain to show me city. Not burned! Tokyo okay!"

Hahaha! Awesome!! I didn't care that she hated me in what passed for "subtle" in Japan, or that each and every student in the room wanted to kill me and eat me (or sleep with me) to get ahead. I only knew that one other kid there that summer thought monster movies were great, and I could finally have a decent, well-informed conversation with another girl about my love for all things Mothra and Ghidorah. Finally! 

It was a first for me outside of my immediate family circle. So, for that brief respite, during that overwhelmingly hot and unairconditioned summer, I thank you, Atsuko, for finally being real with me, for a moment anyway, in a faraway land that must have been very scary for you, despite all of your family's money, connections, and prestige. "Look out, Atsuko! IT'S GODZILLA!!"

Targhetto

He was just casually shopping at Target without any pants on, like any teen!

Every summer the city pops off into violent squalls, punctuated by house-party gangland murders. It's so regular to us town-and-country New Yorkers, we plan for it and even text about it to each other, like how we know that the drunks living next door to us will creep out of their rank dank holes once the sun comes out in May, to get violently drunk and cause problems now that winter's over, causing them to carve out their boringly repetitive and totally dysfunctional turf wars on property that isn't theirs, just like the descriptive term "porch monkey" was actually meant for: nonexclusive of skin tone, and they are indeed a stereotypically lazy lot at that (and also white).

Clichés are very good and especially functional for all societies, while also ripe for game-playing idiots. In  Brooklyn, it means you can flip a perp into a martyr by trotting out some cleaned up high school grad photos over yo kid's most recent mug shot when the shit hits the fan and he's screwed up with the law, yet again: neck tats not included, which is exactly what happened in Flatbush last week.

For years I've known about the teen phenomenon called "wilding", which is cutesy slang for this century's "jumping in": a vicious, seemingly random beat-down that's very much planned. When I lived in the Slope, I'd walk down 5th Avenue to Atlantic Avenue because it has an awesome Target store, and I could flip through the designer racks without fear of molested goods, like the pawed over markdowns in the Spring Valley shops here, that are picked over a billion times by Hasidim women with a lot of children, covered in makeup, sweat marks, deodorant stains, and other stuff you don't want to know about.

And so, I shopped in relative comfort for the "phresh" duds I needed to play my "Slick, Big City, Cover Designer" role to perfection by looking the part. It was (and still is) part of my overall presentation, and in any really good business, presentation counts. After one such journey through the clothing stacks, I was back on the floor putting back some duds that didn't work for me. It's a habit I picked up during my tenure as a teenie retailer in the old Nanuet Mall, an 80s heaven of a shopping mall when doing such a thing counted as a recreational sport.

I saw the fitting room racks clogged with clothes left by lazier shoppers than I, so I figured I give the floor ladies a break and do my own put backs onto the racks. Within a minute of leaving the changing rooms for the floor, loosening up the rack, and talking to a floor clerk who asked if I needed help, a...something broke out. I write that because it happened so fast, I was totally scared and unprepared for it, which turns out to be the point: pure shock value.

"What was that?! What happened?" I quickly turned to the store clerk. She sighed and said to me: "Yeah, this happens every afternoon around this time. Every day, and it's always between 3 and 3:30 in the afternoon, when the high school gets out. They're called 'wildings'. The kids text each other at school all day long, so they can arrange to meet here and have fights with each other."

Jesus! That's so scary!! I said to her, while my heart still raced. It was so fucking violent, and I'm a fighter. I thought someone had been stabbed. She told me that was the point, and that as far as "wildings" go, the one we just witnessed was pretty mild, in terms of violence, because no one had been stabbed. "So they do that, too?!", I asked. It was surprising to me, because the Slope and the surrounding neighborhoods are really good, well-established, old neighborhoods, independent of racial background. I mean, the hoods have been the hoods for a really long time, and not within the past 100 years. Where exactly do they come from? Prospect Heights? Fort Greene? Boohoo!

Many an African-American kid from around the way has a dentist for a dad, and a mom who volunteer teaches modern dance in the afternoons at the local BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music). The real "Fight da powa!" had passed for them a long time ago. But, I guess like a Bay Ridge kid's right of passage climbing the Verrazano on a dare, they needed to simulate danger and feats of strength as trials to their fragile identities, so they could brag to each about it later.

"Yeah", she sighed again, as she slowly reached for her walkie-talkie, when I asked if security knew. "Oh, yeah. They know," she clicked the call button, "so does the local precinct, because we call them almost every afternoon." She would know, because as I hurriedly shelved my rejected clothes and walked towards the elevators, she looked like she could be one of their own grandmothers: a decent, hard-working lady starting the second shift of her second day job.

Don't believe the hype, man. It ain't what it seems "in da 'hood" these days. Flatbush kids, I mean you, too. You can't get away with murder for kicks by blaming "the white man" anymore. We all have cameras in our cell phones, regardless of it's price point, and this savvy-with-retail working class mom knows the how much gear (yo shit) costs, or at least a roundabout guesstimate, anyway. Get real wit it, kid.

http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20150727/flatbush/video-police-punch-suspect-during-arrest-brooklyn-target

http://abc7ny.com/news/teen-arrested-in-mcdonalds-brawl-indicted-wednesday/554045/

Look at this purely ghetto-ass shit: the "moms" (or "grandmoms", who was probably made that at 40 fuckin' years old, or some twisted shit like that) jumps into the action with her nasty-ass attitude, while the baggy pants "security guard" loping around in the foreground (in reality, working his minimum wage after-school job while dreaming of his "big time" music career in the city as a "hiphop artist", most likely), looks on ineffectively, just like his punk ass has been doin' all along, totally hip to "da game". Tell me they don't fuckin' know about the trend that I've known about for at least 12+ years! That's some fake ass shit, right there. Home girl had the audacity to play victim with her boy's clean-cut yearbook pic on the evening news programs, which was a heck of a lot nicer than his fucked up (and much more recent) neck tattoo mug shots. But that's life in "da hood": a place where every day is some kind of bullshit con job. We on to you, hardcore, girl. Get it right! Jeeesus...what in the bitch is that....???! <shakes head in disbelief> "Oh, you triflin', petty-ass fool. Always lookin' for handouts. Fuck y'all man!" (That's what I said to the t.v. when I saw it play out on the local programs here in New York) "That's it! I've had it! Fuck y'all! I'm writing 'Targhetto' next week , bitches!!" <scowls mostly to self).

Going to Graceland

We were much more Beatles fans than Elvis fans growing up in my household, a distinction in tastes sharply noted in "Pulp Fiction", in an infamous scene between John Travolta and Uma Thurman. My college boyfriend was an Elvis fan from Brooklyn, which is sort of like being an urban cowboy. It didn't fit, but he liked to cop tastes contrary to the norm to appear different, like sporting a beret or wearing an ascot.

And so I found myself going to Graceland one summer, on an epic road trip that spanned the South to my Dad's place in West Texas. I love road trips, finding them much more preferable to horribly bumpy and terribly turbulent flights that go against the Gulf Stream, a fact that was confirmed for me when my Colorado boyfriend began private pilot lessons. It's gotten worse, too, from compulsive over-travelling brought on by a runner's type of fast pace neurosis that's as addictive as their high sugar and highly caffeinated lifestyles. Chemtrails are the sign that you've polluted the sky, you ugly American.

My exes would fight me on my American preference for the open road, but given my quickness of mind, I usually won out, as I did in this case, because my Brooklyn boyfriend didn't have a driver's license or a car. He was captive to me and my advanced skill sets, a state of affairs that never abated during our acquaintance, much to his chagrin. I made the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia my first day driving, to a smog-filled summer's day that took the wind out of my sails for the rest of the trip. Going to some tourist trap to see the housed remnants of a overdosed singer I never really liked? Great. What a way to spend my summer.

Two days later, I brought us to the state of Tennessee, for a tour of Elvis Presley's house. My very stoned boyfriend was so out of it from getting high in the parking lot, he blurted out that he wanted to see "EVERYTHING!", when the ticket agent asked him which tour he wanted. We'd been flagged by the golf cart security duo as outsiders, for walking towards the house from the graffitied walls outside the grounds, when you were supposed to know to go across the street to buy a ticket, even though no signs were posted with instructions to do so. When he found out that it would cost us over $150 (in 1988, on a working class college kid's budget), he blanched white, and in an embarrassed whispered aside, I told him to just do the house tour.

It was horrible. Priscella still lived in the top floors when she was in town, so we went past his recording studio and racketball court to an impromptu grave site in their backyard, which gave me a blessed moment of silence among the weird hick crowd, who worshipped him like he was some sort of demigod. They also toured his tour buses, his car collection, his costumes, his airplane collection (one of which was named the "Lisa Marie"), and a movie theater that showed his films exclusively. I half-heartedly bought a couple of tepid souvenirs in the gift shop, and then we got back on the road.

My naive New York City boyfriend didn't know how much trouble I steered him out of, until we stopped at a gas station in Mississippi, with a visibly pregnant (and cigarette smoking) woman talking with the clerk behind the counter. They both narrowed their eyes at us when we walked in, eyeballing his dopey "CULTURE" t-shirt, with the word emblazoned over a picture of 70s rhinestone jumpsuit Elvis visiting the White House, posing with Nixon in the Oval Office and shaking hands. He wanted to make an ironic hipster statement that was cutesy "tongue in cheek", and definitely not appreciated by them, which was backed up by our brief exchange with the rural couple at the counter.

The large beer-bellied clerk said to him: "What does that t-shirt mean, boy?" My young boyfriend nervously deferred to him with two palms up, in a conciliatory gesture: "Oh, we've just been to Graceland. It was awesome!." I paid for the gas and asked for smokes, while the two hicks pondered his statement. After a very long pause with continued staring, the large man finally said to us: "Well, we worship him around these here parts." And with that, we were back on the road, albeit with a much more sober and quiet white kid from the city sitting next to me.

Happy trails to you America, on all of your summer road trips. For most of the masses, this is prime vacation season. Just be sure to steer clear of rural areas that worship dead, drug-addicted rock stars. See you 'round the way, mes amis.

CULTURE

A Bug's Life

Getting "buggy" in the country.

Living in the country is different from the city for many reasons, but the biggest change for me are all the animals. Groundhogs, feral cats, and bugs...oh, my! I've had fun with a few Brooklyn boys over their squeamish ways when it comes to bugs. My big, loudmouth cousin from Sheepshead Bay had to call me to remove a silverfish before his shower, for instance. Or, my boyfriend from college who couldn't sleep to the sound of cicadas chirping at night in the basement bedroom of my mothers' New City house, preferring instead the buzz and hum of cars whizzing by on his native Bay Ridge streets to sleep to.

There's more: my Bronx-born mother chafing against the pretty little birds that woke her up on summer mornings, for singing from their nested perch on "her" window air conditioning unit. A well-to-do Park Slope couple from outside the country (of the United States) never really adjusted to communal apartment living, even after I sprung for a few area rugs and a sound machine to cover up the horror of my early morning dog runs. He was a big oaf of a man who loomed behind his tiny and plainly bug-eyed wife, a duo of dysfunctional who belong in some suburban Aussie condo, but not in the city that never sleeps.

Ditto with the wacky lady next door, who was so unnerved by my bedroom air conditioner unit's sporadic summer use (usually at nighttime and after work, too) in my 4th floor walk-up, she banged on it for weeks until she finally left me a weirdly fretful note of frustration. Instead of listening to my reasoning from across the narrow alleyway through our window exchange, she condescendingly offered to buy me some freestanding floor model that's all the rage from wherever the fuck she's from, because I detected an accent not of New York. 

She'd rather "die from the heat" than live with the banal white noise of my bedroom AC, even though the top floor apartment reached in excess of 100°F, and I had to buy it for my snow dog (who would have actually died from the daytime heat), instead of accommodating a rather inane background noise; such was the insane wisdom of the deranged, frazzled-haired Euro lady next door. It was clearly my fault, all of it, everything in the universe, because I'm too poor for her tastes and she's mentally ill.

My mom has gone so far as to request a mausoleum, so that her neurotic remains will never come in contact with bugs. Same turn of the mind as my former building maintenance guy, who freaked out over oven mitts that had fallen between the cracks of his poorly fitted kitchen cabinetry, blaming me instead for these microbiotic horrors left in the wake of my economic eviction from the building; a prolonged process that was supposedly devoted to my non-payment, but was, in reality, yet another city scam about inherited rent stabilization and legally binding leases that are immoral as well as nonsensical, none of which benefited me at any of the times I write about.

And so I've developed to full effect my natural savoir faire about life, inherited through my maternal Norman Abruzzi lines; a shrug of the shoulders delivered much like my grandmother's laidback saying of "Que sera, sera." Whatever will be, will be. Just like this summer's bug migration that I accept as part of my good life here in the valley: first came the big black ants that I tried to deposit on scraps of paper outdoors, one by one, in Buddhist solidarity about the sanctity of all life, and then gave up on from the sheer volume of it. 

Next came the spider who hunted them by setting up residence under the sink in a corner of the kitchen cabinet by the floor and near the old radiator that let them in, then the fruit flies, followed by very small (and tenacious) red ants clustered in the butter drawer of the fridge, feeding on the sweet remnants of fresh salted cream butter that remains there today (before I eat it with a sandwich for my lunch today). I accept it all, as part of this beautiful life. See you soon.

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