Speed Freaks

3.) Over-stimulate yourself. Caffeine, tobacco, loud noise, driving fast, working without breaks, skipping meals - there are so many ways to keep the body and brain on overdrive and keep the anxiety levels high. 

My mom and her sisters were adept at abusing each other into what they believed were less overt addictions that they thought cleverly hid their compulsions and addictions (strange as they are) like shopping, hoarding, and staging fake scenes to create anxiety they huff like a can of paint. It became a psychotic form of artistry over the more rigorous disciplines behind thinking, doing, and making, which is for suckers like me, who pay their benefits through our day jobs because if we don't, they'll make our lives a living hell that's hard to prove in a court of law without devoting mountains of time and evidence to it, therefore I must have "too much free time" and that means I need to work more (hence their shaky lazy superiority over "working stiffs" like me and the million other people who take care of them), because if you can't abuse people behind closed doors with secret horror shows, who will pay the taxes needed for their disabilities?

Instead of managing children, life, and stress, my mom would pull to a short-stop in the middle of a highway, threatening to crash her car and kill us all if we didn't behave, creating over-dramatic heart palpitations that released the addictive body chemistry she needs to cope, over more obvious (and honest) relaxants like drinking and smoking, which could be pointed out to anyone and are therefore actionable by their feared perpetrators, like, say, someone very bright who caught onto their mental illnesses. Oh, they'll say they're afraid of being dragged away by scary large men wearing white coats, carrying butterfly nets and tranquilizer guns, and then cast without consent into some haunted house horror show, but those stories are now relics from our distant medical past.

Without having any real excuses to hide behind anymore, it's become harder and harder for actual head-cases to strike out against load-bearing "normals" like me, as if chronic abuse and violent derangement are key facets of our human culture that they must protect in order to thrive as a species, when oftentimes it's simply me and my brothers trying to get my mom to stick to her weekly therapy and take her medicine for the billionth time, which she alternately hides and/or lies about to blame on..who else? Me! Children and other family members are amazingly adept excuse-generators for a bevy of life's woes, like hiding sickness and delusional behavior. 

She's always been a very bad driver who uses a host of convenient replies like: 1) she didn't need to drive when she lived in the city so that's why she's "bad" at it, and that was only admitted after she drove into a brick wall with a realtor sitting right next to her while she shopped for her fantasy senior apartment complex with handy car-ports for auto aficionados like herself (preferring instead to joy-ride with my grandfather's car back in the Bronx, without a driver's license), or 2) she didn't learn to drive until her 30s, and that was only because of her friendship with a woman at the local DMV during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania, where she had major diseases like "walking pneumonia" with the spot on her lung even, so she got off easy on her driving test (that's her friend's fault, get it?) which leads to 3) her driving so fucking poorly, she gets into tons of accidents that she covers up whenever she can, because for many years she also drove with two feet, one on the gas and the brake (sometimes at the same time) plus 4) she cares more about her car than her own life and the lives of others at times, which she hides behind cutesy stories about being Mario Andretti the race car driver, or being "like a cabbie, fast but good" which she could never actually do for a living because "she's a woman" (sexism, you see), which is also an excuse for her not performing well and besides that, she was a commuter. "Everyone drives fast during 'rush hour'. That's why it's called that." Oh.

And finally, she liked speeding in cars as an older woman with a more advanced case of MS because it "gave me my life back" with the gift of mobility that's robbed her the use of her dead limbs over using an actual motorized wheelchair, preferring instead to torture us with her snail's pace that's necessary to "retain her ambulatory status" (pronounced "stay-tuss, which is different!"). It's like she's talking to her group at the local church, or the high school, or in attendance at the public library, because she's gone to a bunch of those. First it was for the Divorced Catholics group, then it was the Divorced Catholics group for singles, and then the MS support group (too handicapped for her tastes), but she was finally outmatched in these modern times by all the pros on the high-profile talk show / court t.v / reality programming circuit, with years of solid professional acting chops under their respective belts, so she had to give it up.

Instead of coping, she harassed me one Christmas with a death-defying trip in a really bad blizzard across the Tappan Zee bridge and back from Connecticut. She insisted that she HAD TO see family because "it won't be Christmas if we don't go", forcing me to pack up all of our stuff, packed into "her" car with my Mal in the back. He was forced to sleep in the garage because of all the allergies they supposedly have, even though my brother and his wife now have a dog  that's "allergen free", so I could spend my time being demeaned through their bitchy comments about my humble well-thought gifts, my mom's huffing abuse (because my brother's wife ignores her completely), and checking on my dog throughout the trip because his kids opened the garage door whenever they wanted to, forgetting that my dog was inside, so I could do all this while sleep-deprived, too. Best. Holiday. Ever.

If I dared to mention the conditions she abused us into, she'd bring up her sisters affectations about weather phobias and car driving panic attacks. At least she was better than them, right? Right? No, that's sharing the same genetic disorder in different ways, like the breast cancer bouts you all had. Oh...She might then lapse poetic about flights of fancy over magical lanes of sparkling snow, like she was riding on Santa's sleigh and I should just get over it because it's fun and besides, it's Christmas. There's always a reason behind a reason behind an excuse until finally, in this century, there isn't anymore, because there isn't. It's called real medicine.

http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/thrivenyc.page

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. 

Gawker-Stalker

For many years I've been subject to almost daily stalking and harassment, both covertly and overtly done. Some of it's harmless, like the kids who come to see me at the library, but most of it's malicious: popular actors driving around town (or who happen to be conveniently filming nearby) seeking me out so as to copy my mannerisms for the purposes of selling copycat versions of me to the media (not gonna happen, so drop it), or those seeking to gain an insight into the mindset and habits of what they desperately want to be their personal Shakespeare that they can kiss up to, or once again, to rip me off (also not gonna happen), or disordered lesbians"on the nod" publicly and desperate for any kind of attention, or just your average everyday psycho with nothing better to do than harass beautiful women.

Envy has dogged me with its vicious shadow all of my life, which made me the warrior I am today, while happily causing extreme frustration among the local psychos seeking to hurt, with the unfortunate progression (for them) of making me into a human weapon who can crack open their weak jaws any time I want (thanks!), which would then unfortunately open up my family to lawsuits over medical bills perpetrated by your addicted watcher of drunk housewives off their meds (with all the hype over their misplaced sexual aggressions), combined with the rise of court t.v. shows and a proliferation of law firms that cater to the seeker of remuneration by any means possible. 

Our neighborhood nut-case has taken to using a cane whenever it's convenient for her to do so (like visits to Public Assistance, or pissing off a samurai), as a means of fobbing off the retaliation brought about by the physical attacks she instigates because, like any real nut-job, she's a total coward when it comes to facing the consequences of her abuse, which fits neatly into her well-observed psychological patterns.

I'm also watched secretively whenever I work off an Internet network anywhere in the world (which is just about all the time, because I work transparently), which was (as was intended) highly disturbing to me as a young single woman living and working alone, though after consulting a very savvy publishing player I'd known for years, I realized that I could take his advice and use abusive workplace peeping as my main media outlet for their aggressions, because according to him, that's part of what we do. Of course, as a relatively unstable head-case himself, his advice was always delivered in these pseudo-mentoring tones of condescension over my continued surprise about commonly occurring workplace abuses that he relishes as a bizarre part of "playing the game", over say, being masterful as an artist instead, but whatever.

I used their peeping to establish a strong underground media presence online, with loyal haters and well-meaning followers, in between my now-infamous cover designs submitted and taken on the sly over the same network violations (designs slyly rejected, too, as part of a group peeping protected in an employee manual for "managers" to do whenever they wanted to see our work on "their" equipment), through commenting on several well-known "gawking" media websites under an appropriate fighting pseudonym, so as to deliver blows during the day that I could audibly hear resonate throughout the small office space I masterfully directed. Whenever I made a comment online about bizarrely bitchy behavior openly displayed with overt symptoms of mental illness at work, with clever oblique references that my abusive co-workers couldn't sue me over but knew the references, nonetheless (haha, I can write better than the "pro's, too!), I could hear sharp intakes of breath (that was questioned, too, because I milked my "deafness" for strategy like the other art director did), followed by many pleasurable hours of manic ranting that had to be done sneakily under-breath, so as not to invoke the same obsessive managerial attention.

My old contact was right! Publishing is fun!! I should enjoy, it. His point was that I should feel "flattered" that people cared enough to harass me, but given his hatreds and pettiness as a rather generically unattractive designer, his point of view only went so far with me, which was part of the intent, too, because he flat out told me as an apprentice that he would cut off helping me at work and then hunt me openly in the industry, because he's threatened by talent. Oh. He also told me over a few cocktails we had next to my dojo that was getting media attention for launching the careers of several fighters into the then-exploding UFC (and what handy timing my training there was, too), that the teachers there looked "gay" (and I agreed that they kinda did, becauset homo-eroticism is built into the sport as a sales tool), in a classically offensive posture that I already knew.

He then told me a tale about one of his former design assistants, now the founder of Twitter (wow!) many years before he started the company and how rich he is, after selling out (which turned out to be a total lie), but not after he grilled me about my thoughts first. I told him the app seemed immature, stalker-ish, and for young people with ADD plus a severely limited word count, and that I hadn't yet figured out what to do with it as a new media, but that I had bookmarked an account with my name on it for future use. He laughed, and said that it sounded a lot his former assistant. It jarred a memory I had of him from years ago, after I contacted him during my re-entry into the world of New York City media. He's always an insanely trendy adapter of any new technology and indiscriminately so, so he can brag about waiting on line for hours to buy the latest gadget with a million other people who think, act, and buy just like he does. I'd find out during our last evening meal together at an outdoor restaurant popular at the time that he'd finally begun therapy in earnest and that he'd been officially diagnosed with adult ADHD, after years of office abuse and the obvious symptoms of a ten-minute attention span, with loyalties as fickle as a toddler at a playground, now on a Ritalin.

He'd told me about social media years before, though, fresh from out west as we walked around after work on a warm spring evening looking for a place to drink and eat that called out to us (we're both great city walkers), saying what fun it was and that I should hop on the bandwagon with them, because a guy in his design studio just "tweeted" (with handy new marketing lingo for teens and the "Peter Pans" who love them - yay!) that the blond guy from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" was having dinner at a cafe nearby. Uh, okay. So what? Millions of people were eating dinner in the city at the time, and then we passed by him as we walked by the outdoor cafe, which he then had to point out to me, too, because I don't notice "stars" unless they make a big show of harassing me, bringing me full circle to being right back here at a Rockland County library, where I work their sometimes silly media outlets; more gawking, and ever more stalking. Don't let that be you. Don't turn into some media tool made for marketing lies selling fake shit. You're better than that, and so am I.

Bad Medicine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take from that what you will. M

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

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

A "How-to" Guide for New York

I've joked about creating a pamphlet for new New Yorkers for years, witness as I've been over the years to a certain amount of crimes that are wholly unnecessary, but I've been told by more than one person that "common sense isn't so common" and I've certainly found that to be true. You'd be amazed how many horribly performing people there truly are in the world, major businesses included. Once I quickly got my bearings in business (because I had to), I spent a lot of time observing the human condition as I went about my day.

You see, unlike the "diva" designer who is only qualified to set type in a layout, I was trained to do just about anything, which naturally opened me up to ridicule among less talented workers, after I graduated to begin my apprenticeship. I was prepped for it at art boot camp, where the first salvo of the day was often delivered by that famous author you read at the library, in front of some extremely wealthy diplomat's kid, so shame and embarrassment over something like hard work became impossible for me to feel in any workflow.

Unlike putting on typical "airs" about being a native New Yorker (another way of "separating the wheat from the chaff" among so many avidly striving out-of-towners seeking fame and fortune in our fair city), I just did the work, like my forefathers who built this city. I didn't talk endlessly about it, because I worked with people who wouldn't have been able to understand or tolerate any of our real history (in lieu of so much posing and phony posturing), so most of the time I listened and spoke only when necessary, which is a great survival strategy for anyone working in a town full of strangers that you already own, they just didn't know it....yet. Today you do!

After so much time spent listening to other people's fantasies about who they want you to think they are, I would slowly drink my pint (that was put to scrutiny too, for not "being fast enough" around certain desperate yenta's from Long Island who needed that second round badly to try and keep pace, or conversely for being "too fast" to a certain type of reticent, slow-witted people out west) and take it in, as part of my ongoing studies about the human condition. I became a sort of covert cultural anthropologist without really knowing it, and in your repetition I became a master of the human arts.

And so, without much further ado, I present to you my fairly glib but actually totally valid list about rules to New York City living, for the slow and the stupid, as well as the rich and insane. You thirsty natives already know what to do, so do it.

#1 - Do not spit on the subway tracks. Chinatown, this means you. We will fine and ticket you for it, plus it's totally disgusting, which is part of the point, I'm sure. Next time we're on Mainland China, I'll be sure to spray Lysol around while ripping off your dumb face masks. Getting a fucking grip! If you don't like us "Gweilo", then go home. Good luck not starving to death in a labor camp. NO SPITTING.

#2 - Do not ride the subway after midnight, especially if you are a woman. If you can't afford the cab fare home, don't go out with your co-workers who may want you drunk and vulnerable on a train ride by yourself. Pickpockets like drunks asleep on the subway, too. 

#3 - Look both ways before crossing our city streets. This is mandatory. You can be run over by a passing car, cab, truck, or biker in a second, and not even know what hit you. Dumb-ass. Stay home!

#4 - Stand against a pile-on while waiting for a train to come into the station to avoid the crazies, like rouge slashers (yes, I follow the local news) and phantom pushers of people onto train tracks. Plus, you'll line up with the car doors, because conductors use them to align the trains. You're welcome. Assholes.

#5 - Yes, there are maps and schedules for subways, but things happen quickly to underground trains that are hundreds and hundreds of years old immediately after leaving Brooklyn Yard. Adjust for it, muthfucka, or just fucking leave. People get sick, trains derail, rains flood low-lying areas (duh, you dick) and shit just simply breaks from all the use. Get a fucking grip, and always leave ahead of time to reach your destination. Dick!

#6 - Expect serious delays and re-routing on the weekends, because that's when we service those trains you take for granted, shit-head. Expect to tack on additional travel time, because you will have to run an obstacle course so severe, people get panic attacks over it. Really. We can't do a lot of rail work during commuting hours, because millions of jobs and lives depend on our labors, so again, just fucking deal. Ass. Stay home!

#7 - Watch your bag and wallet AT ALL TIMES, no matter where you are in the city. Urban areas are rife with crime, just like Rome, London, or Tokyo, you ignorant fucking hick. Keep an eye on your purse!

#8 - This goes without saying, but there is NO SLEEPING ON MASS TRANSIT. Shit pops off quickly in the fastest town on the planet, and I know your khaki-wearing, office-working ass cannot handle it. Just stay out of the way while warriors do their jobs.

#9 - Last, and not least, summertime in the city smells bad. Really fucking bad. Get out of there. We're like Europeans: the city shuts down most operations during the summer, so get out of town and enjoy it. Take a bus or train to the beach or the mountains, but just go. What do you think that bum who reeks of piss and crap smells like, simmering to a near-boil in the heat of summer? Yep, that's what it is like underground. Best to avoid it, if you can.

There you go. Now, get out there and succeed! Just think about my rules as you're crossing over the GWB, looking at the massive skyline, and remember this: we conquered all that first. We built this city.



***UPDATE*** In lieu of this morning's snow (combined with your general lack of ability to STAY HOME and have a nice three-day weekend), I'd like to add to my list of rules regarding weather and other typically human conditions:

1A - If you are not an emergency worker or crisis manager for the City of New York, nor part of our government, or the crux upon which an entire business stands, stay the fuck home. I thought that would be obvious with a Friday morning snowfall, but New Jersey, I saw you dumb fucks clogging the tolls to get onto the GWB this morning and by the looks of your vehicles, you are definitely NOT in the leading minority that runs shit, you broke-ass mutha-sumptins. Next time, stay home or the Governor will seal-off town again. Do you really want that?! No?! THEN STAY HOME. Enjoy a freakin' snow day for once...jeez...

2A - ALWAYS PUT TRASH INTO THE PROPER RECEPTACLES. Believe it or not, New Yorkers are not dirty animals who love your filth, you tourist fuck. I know you think this town is here for you to piss away your money on dumb sidewalk crap, but unlike Las Vegas, we do not like seeing topless hookers in Times Square on a weekday afternoon with children rolled around in their prams by their well-meaning parents. That is not our culture. Keep your coked-up hooker shit in Nevada where it belongs! It's legal to die there from an overdose of cocaine and several highly toxic human diseases. Here, we take the time to throw away our garbage into the many, many obvious trash cans that are all around town, along with those pretty flowerpots you see in Spring that are maintained by city workers. We care about our home. We care a lot.

3A - RECYCLE. RECYCLE. RECYCLE. It's the law, and it is mandatory. It's the way to keep our towns relatively vermin-free and our immediate environment clean, with long-term health benefits to every single living thing on this planet. You do not have a choice because (and this is key), recycling is mandatory in New York. Violate our "green-clean" ethos and we will fine the fuck out of you, chasing you all the way back to your much cheaper po-dunk town, because here we don't have time to work through your mental static when a good hard hit to the wallet is much more effective. Get it? Good!

Rarebit

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

My accent, like my looks, speaks strongly to my unique ethnic references, marginalized and ignored as they are, or (just as often) mocked behind my back. It's not exactly straight-up New York like an ignorant uneducated "guido", nor falsely pompous like a pseudo-Brit, or posh like a wanna-be WASP. It's Acadian, and it's Métis, and it's the Northeastern United States and the Maritime Provinces of Canada all wrapped up into one. It pre-dates other localized accents, like the land of Acadia did before the divides that bind us, as they currently exist.

Weirder still, it may be your exact kind of "suthin'" accent, Cajun, and that freaks out the down-home black folks even more: yo speakin' my accent, boy, and I mean that in the nicest way possible, because you are my heritage and ancestry, you just didn't know it, yet. Well, today you do. You mine, kid. In fact, all you Joneses and McNulty's are kin, too, whateva flava or color, because this mama don't care 'bout none of that, ya hear? You're alive to me. That's it. That's what counts.

But it's confusing, because it can't be easily mocked on a .t.v show by some bitch of an actress who "steals" from authentic people artistically, and that's a nice way to put it. It can't be deconstructed obsessively to pour into some flat-rate Hollywood starlet, either. They just ain't old enough as a culture to have it down right. You gots to be me! It changes on you, just when you think you have it down pat, because if you ain't me and my peeps, then you definitely don't have it. Sometimes it's New Brit, or Balmoral, or Brooklyn, or deep in da bayou...because that's all the flavor put in there just so.

It didn't really click together for me as a solid linguistic history told in words, stories, music, and cadence until I put my Scottish-British boyfriend back together with his native born folk and then BAM! His "mam" spoke of "movin' the cahr", just like they do is Bah-stin (that's Boston, in local-speak). Oh! Right! I'm from a place called "New Scotland". I would find that pleasant. My folk were easier to place, because my Brooklyn-born grandfather spoke like a character right out of "The Bowery Boys"*, an old entertainment bit done first on Vaudeville, and then in "the talkies". It fit. My mutha and her sistas speak with a dreadfully sharp and very unpleasant Bronx accent that's about as sexy as listening to a power drill whine loudly. Ugh.

The last piece of the puzzle came sharply into focus for me when I finally heard Welsh actor Christian Bale speak in his normal accent on a press junket for his fight movie, which must have knocked it right outta him. Aha! It was tough, street, and kinda foreign at the same time. Yeah! Like that! That's what we got: hard, rough, real lives told in an accent that puts us in the same company that can keep up. 

Out west, folks didn't quite know what to make of me, just like my voice. I was well-educated, but not forced about it. I was hip, but not some ghetto-ass "wigga". I was strong, but not full of arrogant bravado. I was lyrical, without being a pretend la-la land Disney character. I was deep, without being one drama class or Shakespeare reading away from a total drama queen doing Off-Broadway poorly. I was like Christian Bale in this here New World: an ethnic minority that spawned generations over time, space, and vast distances. Yeah, that's it. I'm real. Like a punch to the face. Deal with it. I know do.



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

The Buddy System

Soldiers Holding Hands: It is not unusual in many societies throughout east Africa for men to display their friendship for one another by holding hands in public. Two soldiers on patrol in the streets of Bujumbura, Burundi nonchalantly express their affection for one another. Geordie Mott from Halifax, NS, Canada

My best friend from high school and I formed a friendship pact the summer after our graduation, drunk and high as we were on the beaches of New Jersey, because were were going to be roommates as freshmen, and we were looking forward to freedom, school, boys....or maybe that was just me. I tried back then to be as discreet as possible about my liaisons, taught as I'd been by many years of envious abuse that my looks (never to be openly discussed) were in the same category as my rampant heterosexuality; something to be hinted at, glossed over quickly (for your comfort), and then summarily dismissed, lest it cause anyone else in the room with me embarrassment over something I couldn't control then or now.

It was oddly secretive, which aren't my personality traits, but I considered good social manners and politeness towards my friends to be very important, because we all came from disastrously broken homes that were rife with crazily violent outbursts, followed by those mellow periods that marked our parents shameful lives. It also followed cleanly along with those typically deeply-ingrained patterns of manic depression that we "wrote the book(s) on" as children, because we studied it up-close and personal, and not by choice.

We continued our comic routines about our fucked-up parents well into adulthood, and some of us even have their native New Yawk accents down pat (uh, yeah, me). Our brilliant timing and high sense of comedy made for strong bonds between us; everyone in our crowd loves a good time. Having fun with my friends was something that got me through the rough spots even when we were badly banged up by other people's problems. It was in this common spirit of preserving a well-maintained equilibrium among the mental anguish around us that made the difference between our success and failure, alone as we were.

So, me and my best friend devised a few necessary ground rules to cover us through those first few rough patches we would inevitably have during our first year in college. We were accepted into our schools of choice, proving to nasty detractors (and family alike) that our intelligence wasn't just some crazy person's bullshit hype, something our hapless parents have denied to our faces all of our lives (they have to be smarter), despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. Karen's parents took their pride all the way home to an early grave, which was a type of winning in their twin books of life's massive stand-offs and epic show-downs. They'd rather die from cancer and addiction than admit we were winning, which we are, and we knew it because we had to always justify our existence to the madness of their minds, despite our freedom from their decision to meet, mate, and marry.

We were independent way too soon, and we knew that, too. There would be no rescue for any of us from any of our failures (as individuals, or within a group), because our parent's were the first people we knew who hurt us badly. In response to their insanities, we became perfected, which they hated, too. It was the perfect love/hate dynamic for a disordered generation with no real ups-or-downs. It was "Easy Street" all the way for our softer parents, which is exactly why we went to school with a lot more focus than most 17- and 18-year old's matriculating within an excellent working-class school in upstate New York. We had jobs, some money, and a strong sense of self... and that was about it, besides all of the ideals we knew we had to enforce to create the change we needed to exist out there in the world.

The first challenge for us to address was our rather infamous party skills, ones openly displayed that were duly noted by friend and foe alike, and isn't that life itself? Know thyself first, then know thy enemy second, and we did. Karen was hurt early on during our last summer home by a group of friends who turned on her while they "played house" and we drank on the beach around boys with bonfires, and then I got hurt later on in the season by a man in his 30s looking to "score with a hottie", which meant someone else existed in his head besides me, probably someone made-up and far from reality.

We hammered out the details, though, behind the backs of people we were meant to cut off from, because they couldn't keep up. In between peals of giddy laughter at our new-found freedoms, we planned for the inevitable backlash that always followed on the heels of our frivolities, like partying on a beach in summertime and then being dropped into the coldness of a Canada-like deep freeze for college, in a simulacrum of opposites that we could do nothing about but accept, because we grew up swinging between other people's polar extremes. We knew what to expect, hurt as it was inevitably designed to do anyway.

But, we didn't die at school, and believe it or not, that can happen at any time, which we accepted as gracefully as any teenage woman could. I contracted a serious illness from a tick bite during a walk through the woods my second month at school, after first tangling swords with the "Duke of Puke" and then meeting my first real boyfriend, though today's concept for kids is to stay safe, like we tried to do. One of our few precious rules was to "never party alone" which we intoned to any kid reasonable enough and sober enough to listen (or care about). We didn't save everyone, but we fought hard for our generation, the very one you as Millennials (or more charmingly known as "Gen Y" by their inept parents, as in "Why did I have kids?" Indeed! Why did you?) hold us to the highest human standards one can have for their elders, which is the right thing to do.

Always have a drinking buddy, never go to a party alone, don't party by yourself (in case something should happen to you that requires immediate medical assistance), and never walk home at night in the dark. Stay safe, loved ones. The woods are full of wolves...and Generation X. Welcome to the "New World Order"! It's time to survive, and it's time for survival skills, because "survival skills are paramount to success" (yes, another saying just like my...NOOO!!! My Dad says that!) So. Survive. I want you to survive. Then, we can thrive. And that's another one of our motto's, too. Survive, then thrive.

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/

https://www.nspcc.org.uk/preventing-abuse/keeping-children-safe/staying-safe-away-from-home/. Every childhood is worth fighting for.

Free the Internet

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

In typical twist of fate, today is the anniversary of Frederick Douglass' birthday. It made sense to me when I explored the graphic on Google's search engine, because I created the title for today's piece last week, in another bit of fortuitous timing that marks vocational life. It's the type of head-space that has no quirky coincidences for us, only excellence. We live our lives deeply through intelligent design, the harmony that thrums through the universe or, in the words of the now-immortal Carl Sagan, “... the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” 

We are all made of the same stuff, so it makes sense to me that we would align ourselves accordingly, in harmony and perfect agreement. Mr. Sagan also noted the necessity of variation among life as essential to our shared successes: “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos 

Did we not at times share living spaces with humans so vastly different in perspective that we fought our most heart-wrenching, bloodiest war over it, so much do we believe that all men are born free as a manifestation of G-d's will that His children live together well? In fact, He tells us that if you do not fight hard enough for the lives of your women and children, then it is also your fate to accept gladly your rightful enslavement at the hands of your victors, because you have not properly defended what is yours by rights, and that is also what I ask of you today: to give more, because it's not enough. 

Yesterday I was talking to my father, a man of another generation who struggles with change before he converts to the newest technology and who was, at the onset of my career, a staunch anti-technologist made more so by his avid desire to preserve what he felt was his precious toehold over me in my work as an apprentice desktop publisher, by refusing to participate in this "New World". I could understand it, even as I worked to make the change from the hand-made to the digital easier for everyone around me, as it was not available to me, because I hadn't initially signed on for computer science, but here we are, and yesterday he (finally!) agreed with me that the Internet is the greatest advance in worldwide communications that we have ever seen, because he finally adopted the very technology I cut my teeth on as a young leader in business. Only after finally giving in to my greater expertise did he see how all the pieces fit. Aren't they beautiful?

What became his avid denial about my greater gifts became his grateful acceptance in old age, which is none too soon. Pride goeth before the fall*, and as someone who was tasked with excelling in business while learning impaired, he often made do with his challenges while he struggled to reconcile himself with the worlds I trafficked in, varied universes unto themselves that he doesn't always understand, but that's my job to bear up under. I want you to join us as an "early adapter" to a movement that's actually quite old, and free the Internet, just like you did with t.v. networks. As the astonishingly high price tag behind our superior technology initially frightened off the non-artistic layperson (as it rightfully should), then so has this initial phase of tool usage passed into worldwide acceptance. 

We will always have cheaper machines to do small tasks for minor chores done by smaller people than you and I (as is appropriate with any truly sophisticated social hierarchy), but for those of you who want to soar with us in the skies, then come along for the ride. Make the Internet free for all people, regardless of price. That's what Frederick Douglass deserves. A place where freedom reigns.

http://everyoneon.org/

“ If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. ”

* http://biblehub.com/proverbs/16-18.htm