Exiled on Main Street

Being an exile in your own land is a strange experience. People descended from more recent émigrés to our beautiful land here don't know (or understand) my last name. I've already had to spell it out twice today while explaining its long heritage, in this small hamlet that is rather fluent in "immigrant" (as is most of the New York area), so you can imagine what the rest of the country (and by extension, the world) is like for us. We need better publicity!

The land of "Acadia" pre-dates the creation of the current borders that divide the United States and Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acadia), much like my sophisticated Norman ancestors (pre-dated by my ancient Greco/Roman/Mesopotamian ones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_world) dominated Europe through trade and their cultured abilities to connect with the local people around them, wherever there may be around the globe, much like I do today. That does not mean that I have that state of awareness reflected back to me often, resulting in my infamously patient temperament I learned to develop, lovingly guided by my grandparents.

"You're gonna learn all about patience now!", was something my grandmother told me more than once, in recognition of those greater gifts that need much more extensive (and slower) explanation to the crowd gathered around me. Leadership is not easy, and like any great educator, repetition is a big part of our toolkit. Publishing is rife with trends in the human experience that need more than one or two nuanced marketing niches to accurately describe content to an interested audience, and that could be just a single genre.

We like to research by looking at a subject from all angles, then pick the entry point we think you can plug into the easiest, so as to enhance your comprehension as you move forward, with or without us. But, how do you do that with a people who were cast out, dispersed, and strewn around so as to prevent a congregation of support from building a case for us that we were supposed to make for you? You're reading it now, and how many years has it been? It seems backwards, doesn't it? That's how long it's taken for me to unfold our red carpet ride through history for you, with its complexities and various moving parts.

Today I am grateful to have this public forum that reintroduces you back to us as a concept in these modern times as your loving ancestors; marginalized, impoverished, and beset as we have been. Rest assured, my dear majority, we have always been here for you. Sometimes a minority group is small for its precious rarity, not for its insular exclusion, and so I ask you to rethink your rigidly guarded boundaries done quickly and incorrectly, to be carefully redrawn by the people who came here to lead the way back home, not block the passage of others seeking to enter. Are you worthy of us? Are you worthy of Acadia? I hope so, because we're here to stay. That's our “forever” promise to you, as our beloved descendants.

∞

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_%28utopia%29 

∞

Vanilla

The rather typical Jewish family I worked for years ago liked to embellish themselves with decorations, to make up for their obvious embodiment of average New York stereotypes: they were short, annoying, bland, and "artsy", without having any real drive or talent. They wanted to appear "interesting", except they weren't, at least not for the commonly-held ideas they sold around town to a gang comprised mostly of outsiders. I liked their native roots the best; he, as an athletic man who studied ballet with some of the greats back in the day, and she, as a Brooklynite growing up in a strong Eastern European neighborhood by the beach that remains so to this day.

They met in college. She was already a risqué "gay divorcee" who had to be talked into marriage by him, a pathologically shy orphan raised by his grandparents who learned to approach strangers by sitting on park benches to force interactions with pretty girls. They were odd eccentrics with typically neurotic mental problems, and that was more engaging to me than their "New Yorker" brand of popular intellectualism, sans the real intellect needed to sustain new ideas, or even slightly visionary ones sometimes. But, they were pretentious about literature and they had lots of money, which are both my bags.

Like many people who aspire to creativity, they decorated their office with kitschy types, the same way they hired an expensive gardener to create a balcony none of us regularly used, because it was in direct sunlight at lunchtime and done almost completely for show. You couldn't sit out there at comfortably in the bright noonday sun that high off the ground, and I was often way too busy to do so, working at my desk while eating lunch. If I did venture outside of my studio space during the workday, it caused a stir that rippled throughout the office for the rest of the day, so dull were they in comparison to me. It was a reflection of their poor character, made by flashing money around where it wasn't needed (like your average bourgeoisie), preferring to spend thousands of dollars on their bullshit "outdoor garden", in lieu of creating an investment plan for their employees to retire on. They were almost completely full of shit.

Same thing with their kids. They had a grand piano lugged up to the publishing offices, hiring another expensive gadget-maker to tune the thing every week, even though none of us had the time or inclination to play, because we aren't musicians-for-hire. Both of them bragged about drawing income from the company without really giving a full effort into making the company profitable. The son liked to say he was a musician (as a hobbyist not earning from his music), hiring a company to make CD's he could pass around the office, without being good enough to ever earn a recording contract with a major music company.

The daughter was even worse. The son could do some IT/computer work they needed as a smaller cheaper company (being dumped when we leveled-up to the majors), but the daughter was a total disaster. She wasted millions of dollars, freely spending Euros overseas in London, so she could pretend to be a "playwright" over there because she wasn't good enough to breakthrough into our native Broadway theater scene. She even bragged to me about it one time, while trying to force me to make color copies about some article done over her expensively decorated flat there, while we still didn't have a decent 401K plan.

In short, they were total cunts best ignored by the entire staff, which we flagrantly did, often with wild abandon, so arrogant and condescending were they to us, as the actual hard-working talent that the back of their family business stood on. They were desperately striving and achingly insecure, which was great fun to watch, because they had to continually escalate their "quirky factor" almost in direct proportion to our greater gifts earned through hard work. I designed the cover for a hot new best-seller? Okay...let's force our bad housewife photographer friend on her as a test, so she has to look at her book without insulting her (or us by extension), as the company benefactors. Done!

I learned a long time ago about lifting money out of the wallet of a rich buffoon without actually stealing from him, making our trade the most honest kind of business they'd ever done. They were actually paying me market value for my talent, a rarity then as it still is now. Did the other Art Director receive some sort of kudos publicly in a meeting, as the lesser of two designers working in-house? Hmm...let's call in that total bitch of a rich housewife we know (the one who did weird shit to the walls in her husband's spare time and called it "interior design") and make the real designers talk to her....and so it went. They'd hire one of their rich cronies' bored housewives to be a company admin, or put one of their nephews on the payroll to gossip, spy on us, and do boring database shit we didn't have time for.

Almost every week, they played a "one-upmanship" game only they knew about, so busy were we with the real business that made money, next to their arty side ventures that went nowhere and did nothing, like the old man's wife and her bad poetry. It only won obscure awards no one heard of because she had the time, money, and manpower to use the office and its staff to submit work for her, done in the 60s when she was at home with her kids. That must have been fun. I could practically see the old man pulling out his hair at the office, back when he worked for S&S, eager to push a distraction on her that fed her voracious ego. They were monstrous to behold during their worst fits, almost pure evil down to their rotten cores, such was the level of their incomprehensive unawareness and sheer ignorant naivety.

Most of their staff reflected their poor decisions, rampant egomania, and various mental illnesses, in one way or another, except for moi. I expected to be revealed soon, as is my level of exposure in society, and so I was prepared for it. They sicced sick person after deranged weirdo after secretive lesbian after me, and none of them penetrated me in the slightest degree, because I fed them whatever I wanted them to know, so I could set events into motion, like "The Maestro" I am famous for. After a certain point in one's career, playing office games with mental patients becomes a bloodsport. Sometimes I felt bad for them (okay, every single day), and I'd tell them the unvarnished truth about themselves and their respective conditions, which they pretended to be offended by, as I passed by their desks on my way back to the studio that made the books we sold for a healthy profit. 

I did it because it was my job, not because I wanted to shock the plain-looking Jewish girl from Long Island sitting at the front desk, with her "scandals" about sex she didn't understand or know how to have properly, within clear earshot of respectable business-types with keener minds than she'd ever met before. The slutty office girl sleeps around? Huh...well, I'll be a "monkey's uncle"! And then the joke wouldn't be understood, as I stood there with a copy of a book about evolutionary theory in my right hand, held up jauntily for anyone to see. Nice book, right? Am I right?! Nothing but the sound of crickets. 

She almost broke her back trying to shock me and the other older designer working in the studio who'd been cast off by the majors for a lack of ability, plus her plush expense account (typical middle management shite), by inventing one stupid story after another, like the married Nuyorican kid she commuted with on the L.I.R.R. Oh, what should I do? We'd sit there in our swiveled desk chairs, breathing at her in false sympathy, nary a spoken word shared between the two of us, because about her a soon as she left our work area, we turned right back to our work. Uh, who the fuck is she compared to the astronomy in our books, yo? Muthafuckin' nothin', y'all.

And on and on it went, one dull fetish after another. Oh, she liked being choked, because we took martial arts classes and she thought she could fold that in somehow. Uh huh, neat, sister. Get the fuck away from me. Usually it was sex-centered, like a teenager with ADHD going through puberty while on (or off) their Ritalin, except that one of us was likely to be designing chapter heads or openers for Lady Chatterley's Lover*, with a nude women on the cover proposed as the design that set our company (and the retailer), and, by extension, the entire industry, on fire with the real scandal of an exposed woman gracing the cover of every hardcover classics version we printed for their stores, to be distributed throughout the country and then the entire world. Kinda hard to beat, eh?

And that was finally the problem with them, and all of their dull characters: no matter how hard they tried to "top" someone at a typical Manhattan office engaged in making books, nothing could compare to the writers' lives and loves that we had our noses deeply buried in. Nothing. It made them finally realize, at the end (I think or, at least, I hope) how much it takes to become famous worldwide. You can't buy it, or strap it on, or paste it onto yourself for some necessary color; you have to be actually be it, that thing that makes you print-worthy all around the world. And here we are today, my dear readers. Better than some plain ole vanilla** flavor of ice cream, isn't it? I got all the flava I ever needed, and you ain't gone none, “hon”.


*    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley%27s_Lover
**  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conventional_sex

Minority Report

"Minorities" tend to change with the times, depending on who you ask, and the amount of money involved. Sometimes it's also dependent on the size of your notoriously murderous, squaw-stealing tribe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mohegan_people), so you can cash in on the white man's excesses involving his drinking and gambling by manipulating those weaknesses (just like they did to you, right?), using the prized tribal lands that your ancestors fought for, to feed your own greed. Its sort of like a dog biting its own tail, don't you think? Neither party goes very far in sickly co-dependence, preferring to stay trapped in their own pattern rather than risking a cure to good health.

It's insanely cowardly, but that's how human nature can be sometimes. It's up to us, as "publicans" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publican), to keep the records regarding our histories straight, for the sake of our children's children.  So, today, it is with great pleasure (and perhaps a touch of sadness for your lately-ruptured innocence) that I present you with this true life story about murder by numbers. If I were you, I'd think carefully before your next racist diatribe, friend. You're probably on the majority list, along with the other so-called European elite. All I ask is that you let your computer do the math for you, by adding them up. Everything else has already been done.

Read 'em and weep, and then, I want you to disband your favorite federal "colored folks" organization, made for getting money through some trumped up case of "white guilt" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_guilt). Every type of human on this planet has suffered through some kind of holocaust or massacre involving direct family. It's over.

Africans around the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_diaspora
Hispanics, and other Latins: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_and_Latino_Americans
Holocaust victims, in total: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust 
Armenian Genocide: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armenian_Genocide 
Russian deaths during Stain's rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin 
Chinese starvation and state-sanctioned murder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution 
Communism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_Communist_regimes
Great Potato Famine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29
And, finally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll 

Now, here are my relevant numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29. I expect no further questions need to be asked regarding repatriation, resettlement, and reclamation, on behalf of my people? Yes...?! Good! I hear nothing but crickets! I like that sound. Reminds me of the country.

More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotted Fever

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Footprints

It's no secret among creative communities that envy is the biggest obstacle in any of our workflows; in other words, our toughest problems are human. I can design anything I want to, for any type of budget, using any kind of tool, in any language you want, but how does that help you if you're uneducated, illiterate, learning-impaired, or brain disordered? It doesn't, does it? 

Hence, the literary world has almost always been comprised of top-tier intellectuals, because it isn't fun (or fair) to make us describe the same text, layout, or picture to you again, when our job is to make art that soars above the heads of those who come after us, sometimes by a millennium or two. We address special needs in the books designed for the people who tend to them, but books for the blind is a rare genre, indeed. When was the last time you met a Braille-reading typesetter? 

Audio books fare far better with the vision-impaired market anyway, because who has time to learn Braille, especially if you began life sighted? You see images in your head, and that's what creative content is really about: your imagination. No one else can do that for you. You have to supply that. I suppose that's why artists and designers are treated with such extreme prejudice and suspicion in any type of company: it must be threatening to talk with someone who knows (comparatively) all the answers, but that's the point. Our higher education is your knowledge base to tap into. Being angry at superior intelligence defeats the whole point behind hiring creative genius.

And so, it was no surprise to me that I worked with a quiet old Jewish man at the end of his career who still carried a huge chip on his shoulder from that big promotion he was denied many years ago by the major leagues. Why? He told us many times (when he wanted to scare or intimidate us into silence) that he didn't need anymore money. Okay....but we do. How does your point of view on the subject matter? It was totally irrelevant. Either keep the company going or don't. His employees would simply go to work elsewhere. It was a baffling bad strategy that highlighted his lack of abilities the big companies must have noted as quickly as I did the first harrowing week in his employ.

Of course, the old man's very first employees were rejects who never really worked for the big league companies, as a skeleton crew comprised of typical industry cast-offs, and a bigger bunch of pompously pretentious art fag "wanna-be's" I've never met. One of his "lifers" (Hi, "Scooter"!) was a glorified salesman/paralegal who worked boring contracts for us, and the other some lazy idiot fired almost immediately by a bigger brand-name publisher, not that I thought higher of larger publishing companies, anyway. I was better than the nut-cases working for abusive bosses who practically tossed people out the window by ignoring their pathologies for mere profit, because compulsive crazies do the grunt labor better left to machines than humans with fully-functioning brains.

His oldest "hires" were those two nut cases strange enough to work out of his home with him, as his nut-job family wandered in-and-out all day long. What kind of legitimate person does that? No one with a reputation to protect or their good name, like, say, me. By the time I came on-board his company, he realized that he needed real talent to work with B&N; not the crazy hangers-on from his daughter's bullshit screenwriting class for tacky no-talents at the local "Learning Annex" location. The two biggest douchebags who gave me the most condescending attitude right away were the exact same two dicks who were so desperate for validation, that they worked for almost no salary in some crazy old Jewish guy's apartment.

I'm not talking about building computers in your parents garage, or publishing original works through the public library's Internet access, either. Those two douches couldn't pen a novel if their lives depended on it, but they could be immoral enough to profit from the works of others. It made them constantly irate, especially when heavy-hitters like me and my production manager created a profit-producing workflow without their input. Ever hear the sound of teeth grinding? That's it. They did the mental version of gnashing teeth every single day. 

Most of the staff avoided them. They were windbags who preferred sucking each other off, in meetings rife with odd head-games over the making of any real art, which suited us just fine. They were nobodies, and they acted like they knew that already. They were "easy come, easy go". And they did: first, one was fired for physically assaulting the old man in a meeting, then the next for a lack of available funds, because they siphoned cash to various family members before their "seniority" that was bragged about. Without constantly sucking the talent from their betters, they became snarling vicious losers in our absence, bringing the company down brick-by-brick from the crazy old man's final incompetence, and that was this: his inability to see through his overly emotion connections to the friends and family who were the sickness that tore his businesses apart.

The very first month that I did a favor for their production manger of a dead classics series (feeding off the souls of writers they would never be) told me everything about them that I needed to know, besides their widely telegraphed disdain that existed around every office corner I turned. That big douchebag for their classics series threw down an easy layout his incompetent designer couldn't do on the ground of his office floor, to walk over it on the way back to his desk, thus leaving a big dirty footprint on the piece of paper that I would easily see, because he thought it would get to me somehow, except for this very prurient fact that the demented always seem to miss: that old layout can turn to dust, because the books I made are still for sale throughout the country, not to mention on the shelves of the book-buying American public printed with my name on them, and not his.

How's that for a "make it pretty" housewife decorator of a designer, Mark? Those were his actual words to me, as an already-famous art director and book designer that they didn't know because of their industry irrelevance, after flipping some minor layout from his dead imprint disdainfully across my desk for me to correct, because his designer was too stupid to keep up with a single female rock star like me. Besides, right after they "hit it" big with their classics series, B&N simply pillaged their idea in-house, creating an award-winning Classics series of their very own, thus cutting out the middle men forever. Thanks, Jo. Nice one!

One night I dreamed I was walking

Along the beach with the Lord

Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand

Sometimes there were two sets of footprints

Other times there was one set of footprints

This bothered me because I noticed that

During the low periods of my life when I was

Suffering from anguish, sorrow , or defeat

I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord. "You promised me

Lord, that if I followed You,

You would walk with me always.

But I noticed that during the most trying periods

of my life there have only been

One set of prints in the sand.

"Why, when I have needed You most,

You have not been there for me?"

The Lord replied.

"The times when you have seen only one set of footprints

Is when I carried you."

http://h2ofootprints.wikia.com/wiki/Footprints_%28Poem%29 

The Pretend Boyfriend

http://goosebumps.wikia.com/wiki/Bride_of_the_Living_Dummy

When I was growing up, there were certain questions we weren't allowed to ask, like why our cousin John didn't get help for his obvious medical conditions that included a series of tics and hand-wringing rituals he HAD TO perform within certain time windows, or why our aunt was single for so long and lived with our grandparents. Of course, the only job she ever had was being an entry-level admin a mere block away from their condo development (which she drove to, because walking is for healthy people, suckers), and she slept on their pull-out couch in the living room. We knew they were sick people, but no one was allowed to talk about it openly or freely, because solving problems is also "taboo", especially if you're kind of an asshole, and they are.

Their fetishes and multiple life-long problems are always yours to solve for them, always, and any deviation from that established pattern of co-dependence unleashes their "inner bitch" like a heroin addict weaning off methadone. It wasn't worth the few visits we had to suffer through to even pretend to care about them anymore, when they so obviously didn't care about us or their own health. What was the point? Lapses in our natural childhood senses of curiosity created time frames they built into thick walls during our absences over the years to tend to our own lives, creating defense mechanisms made worse with time and deliberate neglect.

Even if we wanted to have normal conversations with my cousin, he's such a fucking dick, no one wants to. He's never done anything for anyone, ever. Not one card, or holiday gift, nor any kind of praise or acknowledgement from him (kudos can only go to him), unless he's forced to give us an awkward peck on the cheek (if the gathering is so small that he flares violently enough to attract attention, then my uncle goes over to him and whispers in his ear to make sure he resembles human customs), in case we didn't get the first thousand messages he telegraphed to us openly and without censure that he doesn't really give a shit if we live or die, just that he gets a pile of leftovers from us for free, because he has no friends, life, or cooking skills.

In fact, outside of his annoying trivia habit or compulsive train rides, there's absolutely nothing there for anyone. There is simply nothing beneath the surface. Once you get past the severity of his issues, you uncover a total selfish prick. Same thing with my aunt. After disarming her "raging bitch on steroids" act, you're left with a whiny little puke of a person, so it's not like we're peeling back layers of untruth to uncover the golden goddess within, or anything. She hoards cheap plastic crap from dollar stores, vomits from basic things like chairs that move slightly, getting "high" from junk food, soda, and hoarding, She's an evil little troll, which she knows, so that's why they came up with this whole diversion and ignoring routine; they don't want you to know how much they "soul-suck" from humans like you. But, we do know.

For years, my aunt pretended that her one boyfriend from college and the neighborhood (some kid we barely remembered from the 70s), "broke" her heart forever, because she deliberately ditched him night after night, leaving the plans that they'd all made together in the lurch on purpose, just to be a bitch to him and her supposed "best friend" (an average-looking blond girl, also local). They did the inevitable hook-up one night that was rigged by my aunt so she could milk it forever, because teenagers get together with enough time, booze, pot, and planning, if you leave them alone together often enough. Of course, she couldn't partake in any normal teenage partying, because she'll have psycho "bitch fits" in public, and that was the real secret: she didn't want to reveal the depths to her madness, even if that meant forcing her "bestie" and her boyfriend into a relationship that everyone knew she couldn't sustain anyway, due to illness and infirmity.

She's so inept at being "human", her old friends from back then left her company to get married in her marked absence, not reconnecting until they finally divorced many years (and kids) later. The old boyfriend probably thought he could finally collect on all that hot teenage sex they missed out on years ago (you know, because my grandparents were strict Catholics who kept an eye on her all the time, in between their fun senior cruises), and all those push-offs onto her friend, but no such luck. My aunt played it off like he just wanted "sloppy seconds". She just knew that their marriage couldn't last compared to their "true love", but it was pure bullshit. All of that manipulation and maneuvering around was simply to divert everyone from figuring out that she's secretly gay, but too fucked up to do anything about it, hence her unhappy reorienting of addictive energy into hoarding and mall trips for the insane, in lieu of genuine healthcare and real relationships.

All of those years of lies, spitting out curses, staged bitchy scenes with deliberately-done cold wars, tricks, and head games...just because some bitch no one likes is gay, and can't talk to the women she really likes. That's what all of their sickness that we were forced to absorb was about: their fucked-up gay shit, make-believe boyfriends and fake boyfriends be damned. I can't wait to find out what's hiding in the closet of the autistic kid. Shit, by now? Must be legions of skeletons in there, yo! Happy hunting today, freak-finders. Don't forget to vote. You know those freaks ain't registered for shit, let alone some primary. Too much work. Someone else can do it for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_apathy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_fatigue

Beanie, baby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Heist

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

My ex-friend Dave (and a big "Fuck you!" to you today!) robbed the ATM of the bank he worked near his hometown in his own fucking car, under the camera he knew was installed, because his mom got him the job, and she also worked there as a manager. It was something so fucking stupid, I just had to laugh when he told me what he did, because it's such a Polish-Indian thing to do. Not familiar with that particular brand of local flavor? Okay, check this out: his parents took him to Polkas (http://www.huntermtn.com/summer/festivals/) and Powwows (http://www.crazycrow.com/New-York-Powwow.php) at Hunter Mountain. Uh, yeah....it could be that far apart in realities at times, which is fine if you're cool, open, smart, or even somewhat marginally curious intellectually-speaking, and Dave is none of those.

He's fun, and he used to be incredibly handsome, but on his worst days, he becomes a drunker, angrier version of Seinfeld's "Putty" character, only without the acting chops, strength, height, or athleticism. In other words, making fun of him only went so far at blocking out his insane static so we could all have a good time. It took an entire tribe of our homegrown Oneontans to make Dave feel whole, and in their absence, a vacuum formed inside of him that was almost bottomless in need. He was a dangerous mad dog off his meds, and he refused to go to a doctor to simply start the first step of admitting that he needed the white man's medicine, even after several convictions, but I already knew that.

What I didn't know how to do was cure my strange Indo-European friend because, back then, I didn't have the science at my elbow to give him that adequately explained the lack of a digestible enzyme for alcohol present in most Native Americans, not that he would have understood it anyway, because he's also seriously learning-impaired. When we lived together in Brooklyn, I had to hold his hand to go see a regular ole psycho-analyst, which is the neurotic New Yorker's version of taking a few baby aspirin, given the intensity of our lifestyles here. Lesser people go under very quickly.

But, when he plateaued health-wise, he could remain stable for a few years, and I knew that, too. Given the hysteria surrounding our parents' generation of mentally abusive marriages, the fact that I was actually marrying a good friend of mine from college (albeit a party friend, and not an actual classroom-attending one) gave me better odds of "making it" in a relationship than their disastrously disassociated version of reality. Doubt me? Watch any episode of "Mad Men", and you're right there in it with them. I felt a pit in my stomach after each show, which was confirmed by my mother as being authentic in tone and emotionalism for the time period of the series.

And so, as Dave spiraled downward in my native city, (he was so stressed out, he developed a painful rash of Shingles around his mid-section, a disease only older people typically get), that I knew I had to relocate him. His sister Shelley had enjoyed Colorado, and I loved New Mexico when my family and I went skiing in Angel Fire, so we zeroed in on that area of the country as ripe for the next construction boom he could immediately profit from, and it panned out exactly the way we planned it. He got a job right away as a construction grunt learning his chops in the business, while I answered ads placed for creatives. His people (and some of mine) hated my fallow time period of looking for full-time work (which is insanely hard to do), because back then, six months was considered a "long time" to be out of work, charming as that seems now to us as Americans.

They tried to pressure me into becoming a waitress like their drop-out kids (haha!), which was laughable, but I could take their peer pressure standing on my head. Next came their increasing insistence that I have a baby for them because his sister never wanted to have kids, also a joke to a fertile woman like me still in her 20s. Uh, why?! I can work for 20 more years, which is exactly what I did. When I finally got a "rock star" job as a freelance designer for The Denver Art Museum, with my illustrations lining the entrance of Denver's International Airport and hanging from the building's very facade, they backed right the fuck off. Average people are blown away or stunned by any kind of real success or celebrity, especially if there's an article in print, so it bought me the time I needed to establish myself in a totally new market, which also worked exactly as I planned it to be.

I knew book design work was scarce out west, even though I agreed to our adventure on the strength of securing an interview ahead of time in Boulder. I went there (after a brief bout of altitude sickness), but was extremely disheartened by what I saw. The job was a couple of hippie chicks printing some mags and the occasional book on brewing beer in your bathtub. Oh....uh, no. Hell, no. We also found the real estate market destroyed by the wealthy college students who artificially jacked-up the prices in the housing market for even a dilapidated shack, so we left Boulder for the more-inclusive town of Denver, and we were right to do so. It was a much better fit for us, as urbanites and New Yorkers, even mimicking the historical charm of Park Slope in some parts, with big historic Victorian homes with lots of personality.

We set up household to begin our lives there, but not before I made Dave tell everyone around us the entire truth. For real, though. I had most definitely not forced Dave to rob his mother's bank for me, for something as average as a spontaneous road trip to my college town in Rhode Island, because as a RISD-oid working three part-time jobs with a full studio schedule of classes to fill (I'd completed my Liberal Arts studies at Oneonta, and my dad was riding my hump about money like he always does), I barely had time to maintain my hard-fought for equilibrium as it was, let alone randomly urge "Mad Dog" Dave to use his own car to take out money from the ATM of his mom's bank. Know that I'm sayin'? Look at me and my work. 'Nuff said. I was kind of busy back then.

He used me as an excuse because he knew he fucked up so bad that it outed him as a retard with our old crew, so he thought he could put the rap on me partially (thanks for that, BTW) for a little while after he left town in a panic. In truth, Dave missed the college lifestyle and his group of friends, which I totally understood. Even my supposed "friends" at RISD wanted to knife me in the back to eat me whole while roasting me over an open fire on some days, and these were supposedly gentle-hippie vegetarians. This was before the word "vegan" was invented, but douche-y for me, not before "lacto-ovum" and "macrobiotic", which are anorexics masking their eating disorders behind feel-good "save the whales" movements = total shite.

But whatever. At least with Dave, we could go to Club Babyhead (http://www.setlist.fm/setlist/deftones/1996/club-babyhead-providence-ri-73d866f5.html) and freak out to some ska or punk music. He was always down for that. We had a great time platonically, because I'd stopped dating by the time of his visit, even with Bart's insane "open door" policy of rotating characters. It was too much work, and those fucked-up rich white kids are sick weirdos, man. Dave was at least an Indo-European Catholic schoolboy from upstate New York, and that was a fuck lot more in common than anyone around me for many many miles, know what I mean? It's sort of like making it out of the 'hood as "baller" only to find weirder, more insane strippers at the top than those kinda nice kids from yo block who danced at the local club. Feel me?

Dave was like that for me. He understood some of the real shit I could never explain to an "Ivy Leaguer" on any given day, and at that point in my career, that's exactly what I needed: not his illnesses, or his disorders, nor his utter lack of a decent education that wasn't from a lack of trying. I just needed a real, down-home, New York boy without all the fuckin' crazy bullshit, 'cause I can bring the heat and flash on my own, just like I always been doin'. I needed someone who was "down" in our sense of the word, white man. Not yours. Never yours. Thanks, Indian! You're one crazy n*##a (especially on a full moon;) and I liked that about you, bro. You just ain't my husband tho', but we'll always be "tribe". It's time to bury the hatchet. Stay wild, man!


Click on the link, print out the info on the site, and take it to your doctor, Red:
 http://anthro.palomar.edu/adapt/adapt_5.htm