I Got the Will (Drive Myself Sleepless)

Most common "gym rats" are notorious addicts looking to divert their angst-driven energies into something else besides cocaine and alcohol, and the endless sleepless nights that accompany serious bouts with manic depression. When I trained in martial arts, the sales pitches mirrored the mentality of their community comprised mainly of high school drop-outs, with the occasional two-year college program for a sports-related major thrown in for a better salary, which meant that they tried to sell me on their type of packaging. I didn't "train" to lose weight from the holidays or from over-eating, I wasn't there to get ready to go to the beach for the summer (I'm a native, yo! My routine is: wake up, brush teeth and hair, put on a suit with a cover-up, grab a towel, and LET'S FUCKING GO!!), or counteract my hypertension and/or hyperactive disorders. I was actually much weirder for them.

I was there because I'm a fighter, and I fight everyday to make the world a better place through my works. I know! It was like I was so fucking alien and strange to them, that the sports kids working the joint finally gave up talking to me (a great sign that they finally "got it" about me), or trying to use some tired sales pitch to "get me" to buy more classes. I either have the time, money, and inclination, or I don't. There simply isn't anything some junior can do or say to me that will "get me" to do anything, which makes Gen X the most hated marketing demographic the modern world has ever seen, giving me and my friends a great deal to be proud of, as it reflects our angry young punk view of the world. "Fuck you! Feed someone!" <middle finger> You know? Just get real with it, already. I don't need your tired ass tryin' to pick my pocket, muthafucka. I already ride the subway every day.

That's how I felt about it back then. If you're not adding value to my life, you're gone from it. I didn't have anything leftover to give. I was already making beautiful books for the public as fast as I could, at a cut rate price point that was way below market-value, giving the rest away to rent, food, medicine, clothing, and some fucking gym(s). They weren't putting money in my pocket, you know? It was all one way with them, so no need to be so fucking coy about it. Anyway, it was a "no harm, no foul" kind of situation for me. You don't go out of your way to mess with me, then I will show up, take your class(es), train, and then leave.  That's what I give: a perfect, static-free ride that puts money in your pocket with my attendance. What more do you need?

But, that's not what an addicts sells. They always want more. Way more. When I "leveled up" to my brother's harder martial arts school for the seriously wealthy wanna-be and those athletes who are supported by their deep-pocketed fandom, I knew it was risky just being there. My brother routinely lies about how much experience he has as a martial artist with a lot of disposable income, and artificially lowers his belt rankings whenever he feels like, so he can appear more like a beginner, and win against more gifted fighters with less experience in class and in competition. He's also a lot bigger than most dudes, which makes him less injury-prone in BJJ, and he likes to hurt people. Badly. He's a dude with some serious issues.

And so, his "pro" school reflected this warped world at an insanely jacked-up rate, with a lot more intensity than the average McDojo at your local strip mall. Know what I'm sayin'? Our gi's were embroidered with the word "competition" emblazoned on them already, regardless of a student's level or skill, just to let newcomers know that they're all seen as "fresh meat". And the kooks were quick to come-out. My flushing mechanisms were well-honed by then, so I knew crazy bitches would try to hurt me. What can I say? I was already injured. I popped my own meniscus (already damaged) and my partial ACL tear to a full one at my own discretion, doing a class drill common for BJJ but killer on your knees. Most addicts immediately get surgery (and more than just one or two knee surgeries, these are hard-bitten junkies, after all), but I didn't have the time or money to do so.

Besides, ACL replacement surgery is this harmful roll of the dice where you can either 1) receive a cadaver graft (!!!) from a recently expired person, and hope it takes to your body post-surgery without rejection or 2) get a graft made from a ligament lifted from another part of your body, and then keep your leg almost completely immobile for an entire year, and that's before the grueling PT part of your rehabilitative process even begins. Oh, and then you re-tear and re-injure your knee soon after resuming MMA/BJJ training, anyway. It just buys you another year or two in the game.

Huh? Say wha', muthfucka? I ain't in this business gettin' rich! There was absolutely no reason for me to undergo some serious life-threatening procedure so some out-of-town muthafucka can nurse his growing bank account (including his posh pad in Rio), just so I can pretend to be some bad-ass bitch. I rehabbed my knee injury at the YMCA in Brooklyn, because I had to do a similar thing after my first knee surgery from my dog walking accident with Ted. And then, like my doctor said, I just changed sports. It was hard to do, but I did it. I did Tai Chi, an aerobic kickboxing class (for amateurs), swimming, weight lifting, yoga, Pilates, bag training, and running on the elliptical. Problem-solved.

I still have some knee instability, but I have a professional knee brace for more intensive sports (like, say, downhill skiing that I don't do), and a series of other types of commercially-made knee wraps to compensate for rough times, like spring, when the weather turns really wet and humid. Always bothers my knee. C'est la vie. Here I am still writing to you, and that's what really counts in my world. My life story is what I trained to be a sensei* in, not your broke-ass view of the world, rife with crime and drugs. Feel me? I'm not a gym toy or a work-out machine for a bunch of screw ups to use at their discretion, pro career or not. Seek yo' gym fodder elsewhere.

After my real agenda became known, the intensity of the "hard sell" upon the other gym clients became more intense. If they slept a decent 8-9 hours worth of sleep a night, then they were characterized as "shiftless and lazy" in some classes because (in the words of one famous athlete) "your competition is training while you sleep!" Uh, excuse me? That muthafucka in the UFC was out bangin' last night at some club with a bunch of ugly-ass hookers, and I know that because I saw the footage live on entertainment t.v., whacked out on coke and his own self-created case of OCD. Get the fuck out! 

But, the more susceptible people around me took such wildly-made and totally irresponsible claims to heart. For them, their newly adopted sport held the zeal of a recent religious convert, pouring their emotions about their lives into something that could be as banal as sweating it out on some funky blue mats on a Monday evening with an out-of-shape fat dude in a bright headband sporting a really bad attitude because he isn't a real athlete, or fighter, or warrior. The reality behind any kind of training is the regularity and repetition of it, though with the more advanced classes and sparring sessions of MMA, that boredom is alleviated by the harder challenges each fighter faces, whether they be emotional, financial, mental, psychological, or physical. 

At the end of my stints training in other people's places, I came out with the exact same sense of self that I had before (and after) my MMA training: if I work hard enough, I can do anything. Of course, age and injury visits us all at some point in life, but the awe the other martial arts students in class had for me—and my relative maturity, in comparison to theirs—in those highly stressful fight sessions (regardless of age), pointed out anew to me what every art and design studio I'd ever worked for already knew about me: that I was already a "black belt" in life, and that I'd been one for a very long time. It wasn't something you could buy, or earn at some gym. And dip-shit, get a good night's sleep. That's mandatory. See you out there!

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

for Cassius

Sleepless by Soul Coughing

I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless

So much time is cashed
So much smoke is wasted
Sudden disappearance
And the air is thick and cool

And I can't approach myself
Skidding over this perdition
And now I'm out on the veranda
When I should have gone to school

I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless

Well I call for sleep
But sleep it won't come to me
Shuffling in the hallway
I can hear him on the stairs

And I hear his lighter flicking
I hear the soft sigh of his inhale
And the whole width of my intentions
He exhales into the air, yea

I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless

I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless

I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless

Skeedunt, stunt the runt
Smoking Buddha blunt
Skeedunt, stunt the runt
Skeedunt, stunt the runt
Smoking Buddha blunt
Skeedunt, stunt the runt

I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless, sleepless, sleepless

I got the will to drive myself sleepless
I got the will to drive myself sleepless
Sleep, sleep, sleep
Sleep, sleep, sleep
Sleep, sleep, sleepless

The Teflon Septum

Charles liked to brag to us, in between his flagrant bouts of work avoidance, that he was a complete burnout because of the 70s and the disco scene in New York City back then. Of course, it didn't hurt his existential angst that he was also a complete asshole to the entire company, but that didn't seem to deflate his overwrought sense of self at all. I'd never met someone so arrogant with so little skill before, because I never saw him actually design anything. Nothing. Not one book cover. It was fascinating to me. Not that it stopped him from taking credit for other people's designs made under his "direction", which was such a fucking joke compared to our grueling schedules and after-hours work that we began a more honest and realistic process of each designer claiming credit for his or her own work. 

He never talked to me about books, computers, design, technology, or publishing, except if it was to order me to help him through another horrible crise, in staged scenes with tons of sighing and nasty looks made from his inert position behind his desk. Oh, and he liked my handsome new boyfriend Dave, so he thought up a way to take pictures of him by using a potential book cover design about Jewish people with us as the romantic couple in some test shots, but after just one cursory glance, the design was immediately killed because Dave and I are so obviously goyim, even in profile, just like his dip-shit test Polaroid of us taken in the office one afternoon. Before his budget was completely cut-off, though, he made me take the train to some far-out Brooklyn photographer's fancy brick studio in the middle of a work day for yet another test shoot. I was just happy to get the fuck out of the office for a little while.

He was also one of the most grossly incompetent people in power I'd ever worked with, which naturally led us to question his position of authority at the company. How? How the fuck had this even happened? The "higher-ups" at the house gave us a string of excuses, like he had a lot of work experience, and that he'd been bounced from every single work department we have in publishing, which didn't make us feel any better about him, especially because we were all working class kids busting ass in a too-expensive city not designed for us. It was like the city had become a gay stage set for rich white out-of-towners, which we clung to as more favorable than the nightmarish 70s and crack-fueled 80s. Of course, Charles had loved that time period the best!

He'd sweep through the office with his air of superiority, stopping by our desks only to share more of his greatness with us, like his rank of Buddhist priest (get the fuck out!), or his splitting headache that required pills from the nurse's office, or his clogged sinuses that were the result of poor drainage because of his, ahem, compromised nasal passages. Okay...whatever. It didn't take with me as even a casual recreational drug reference, because during my supposedly "hippie" days at O-Town that were greatly exaggerated by my much more productively "high" group of friends (I worked too much, went to classes, and got tired in the evenings or nursed bad hangovers from too much drink in secret), I actually got a real education.

So, Charles, had to gear up for another wittily dropped bon mot that seemed cool and casual, le tres chic. The next time he had a diva fit of "the vapors" in the office during actual work hours, waving around a gauzy, thin, brightly-colored hankie while dancing around to George Michael (hint, HINT), he dramatically paused by my studio desk to declare the same poor nasal passages with the clear sign of a finger held against the side of his nose. OH! You were..in the mob? That's what it used to mean here in the city. Tsk! Nooo, Marie. Sigh...I was so dreadfully dull and uncool to talk to. "I have a 'Teflon' septum!" Okay, wait a minute, are you telling me that you have an artificial bridge in your nose? The conversation only became more baffling to me with his continued explanations that he thought were so subtle.

Finally, he gave it up to me in a normal voice that was his alone, and not the affected soprano he usually trilled around us airily. "No! I had a deviated septum that I 'burned through' completely that had to be replaced." Jesus! I didn't realize allergies could be that bad! That actually happens...huh. No! Marie! His shoulder sagged as the hot pompous air deflated right the fuck out of him, only to be squared again while he quipped at me that "children" today were soooo ignorant. "I did a lot of 'coke" during the seventies!" Oh! Aha! I had inadvertently caused one of the biggest douchebags ever to work in publishing to declare loudly, out in the open, that he was a washed-up addict, right in front of a bunch of rabid designers who hated him with the passion of a thousand burning suns. My day was finally done.

Of course, the bitch that replaced him was even more insufferable, but at least we had our jobs and cover designs back. And one less "former" manager of "The Village People", but only during their really early days on the club scene, like wayyyy before their peak Studio 54 days, so if you look him up, you won't find him in the liner notes credited as their manager because he worked for free back then, just for the love of music. Sigh...he was so naive back then. Uh huh, of course not. Why would there be an actual documented work history for him to have that we could verify and see? We had all the ammo against him that we needed for his ousting, and that was before the hot pants-wearing gay boy messenger service became a regular thing for him. Thanks, Charles! You finally did me a real "solid". 

for Orlando, Florida - June 2016

Hooked on Feelings

For people with severe mental illnesses, emotions are a place fraught with a thousand little tensions that don't add up to a whole picture, especially for the seriously bipolar. I watched a receptionist talk (more like interrupt and over-talk) with various employees in a corporate setting for years, and she'd steal facets that she liked from different people by littering her "nonversations" with their borrowed expressions. It was the only memory recall she had; these shards of other people's personas that never added up to a real person for her. 

It was doubly odd because she came from a really strong cultural presence in New York, as an Israeli immigrant living in a strongly Jewish part of "Lawnguyland". It wasn't like she was an ethnic minority living on her own. Her parents sent her to a private schul during her formative years, but after puberty, she became sicker and sicker. There was something broken within her that never really worked right, and it was grueling to be around. She'd call herself a "painter", exhibit some drawing skills as an illustrator, then go completely downhill after that first good picture, like all the other areas of her life.

She was also extremely vulnerable to the outside world. I could tell her parents were exhausted by her ongoing illnesses, as the only explanation that made any sense after years of observation. She was too sick to live with, and she had weird tense stand-offs with her roommates at the city apartment she found while commuting from her parent's place on the island. She told me she'd been raped, mugged, drugged, knock-down dragged-out drunk, and that was just during my small time window with her. G-d knows how many horrors awaited for me in her life. I simply didn't want to know them anymore, because like any challenged child, she never got over any of it. Her alleged teenage rape was just as fresh as if it happened to her yesterday. 

When I first met her, and she blabbed that she was raped to us at a bar during after-work cocktails—as a bizarre justification for not working at a more "artistic" job—I thought it had happened to her, like, a year ago, and that's why she still lived with her folks. It was like that for every single experience she could dramatize, like gossip or dirt on her fellow co-workers, but never anything deep, real, or significant. She was the most trivially superficial thing I'd ever met, and so repulsive to me intellectually, that I found I couldn't stand her presence sober, like that one crazy bitch at a frat party you only see when you're forced back to the keg line. Ugh...you again, bitch? Sigh...fine, I'll make small talk with you to get a beer.

That's what she was to us—that crazy bitch at the reception desk who would physically block you so she could pelt you with her trash talk. It was fine every once in awhile, but full-on crazy all the time pulls at you real quick, know that I mean? She was a work obstacle we had to constantly get around, like an ill-placed traffic cone in the middle of a narrow city street, clad in a warning color like "safety-cone orange". 

She was also very susceptible to the slightest marketing pitch, because she had no genuine sense of self. It was nerve-wracking and jarring to my wholesomeness as a cohesively packaged unit that was beautifully-made through my own hard work, like the books I made for our company. Tight, yo! She'd complain to us that she had no money, then she blow hundreds of dollars every week on these grotesque white-blond dye jobs at a salon, with a full pedicure and manicure and maybe a facial (if she had time), in addition to her oft-repeated tanning salon sessions, supposedly because she suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder as a Jew.

In fact, her short list, just as I can remember from that time, was this: PTSD (from the infamous "Unibomber/Central Park rapist"), recovered molestation memories from childhood (sent to me at work in an email in the middle of the day through the company server), manic-depression, bipolar personality identity disorder, ADHD/Adult ADD, dyslexia and other learning impairments like illiteracy, a low IQ, alcoholism, drug addiction (to cocaine and pain pills), bloating and serious water retention (hence the aggressive over-sharing about bodily functions), marked obsessive compulsive addictive hoarding tendencies with significantly ritualistic behaviors, personal boundary issues, a low self-esteem, a hyperactive sex drive that led to a series of increasingly risky behaviors like jogging through the park at 1 a.m. to shed those awful pounds, yo-yo dieting, poor self-image (hence the narcissistic grooming habits), a love/hate food addiction combined with bulimia mixed with occasional sprees of anorexia nervosa, over-spending (she said had to live with her parents because of shopping-related debt, which gave a cool "Sex and the City" vibe to her manic sprees), fixations with people that became stalking and cyberstalking, ambiguous sexual/gender orientation with slight schizoid affective characteristics interspersed with unsuccessful online dating that rarely went beyond the first date (she actually showed me the "you are crazy" text to go along with it), chronic depression with suicidal tendencies, as well as other violently criminal tendencies to go along with her markedly psychotic features.

She was also the most delusional consumer I have ever met. If there was a woman's magazine lying around the reception area for our guests to peruse, she'd blame the images for "forcing her" to buy more shit she didn't need. Huh. Uh, how exactly does that fucking work? If a new tech gadget came out, she HAD TO have it, even though she was almost completely ignorant about computers and technology. Oh, well! 

If the bland Midwestern girl made homemade brownies and dared to bring them to the office without first screening it with her manipulatively controlling codependency, we could all look forward to a work day filled with her odd sneaky runs to the kitchen to cut the already-small brownies into these tiny little pieces that she'd furtively jam into her mouth too quickly, licking her fingers and mouth nastily, saying "Mm. Bitch. Mm. Bitch..." over and over again, smacking her lips in a grossly piggish way. Same thing with the office jar of candy. 

It had to be placed behind a piece of paper and away from her desk— which was our company's reception desk—because she couldn't handle seeing it, and that was after someone busted her for starving all day long without a proper lunch break (she'd blame the publisher for that), which forced her to cram salad into her mouth at her desk, pouting and giving us evil glares the entire afternoon for being a human who eats. Even though she spent more on herself than anything or anyone else around her, it still hadn't worked. She remained consistently greasy-haired with a dirty cap jammed down onto her matted head (she didn't like her forehead wrinkles), wearing the same torn stained jeans, baggy sweater, and unfashionably clunky shoes. 

She remained disgusting, even with her expensive outsourcing of every facet of her life to other people. Her Jewish dentist cousin would give her free teeth-bleaching that she bragged about to an office of better-looking "Ivy Leaguers" who most often just stared at her in disbelief. What to say? She was so fucking crazy that there was no coming back from brain damage that bad, and we knew it. And that was before she went off her psychotropic cocktail of meds, joined a cult, and then recruited for them openly during company hours. In short, Ayelet Rand was the most disturbed person I had ever met in my life. Her sole focus in her life was her, and her confused "feelings" about life that we were forced to help her sort through during our difficult day jobs, because the crazy old Jews who owned the company found her neurosis "charming". How's that for a lawsuit? Hey, it's really not that big of a  problem, though. There's a big sample sale going on right down the block! Yeah, right. Bitch. Meet you there later. Much later.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/t-magazine/human-emotion-the-one-thing-the-internet-cant-buy.html?_r=0

TMI "Poopypants"

As the bargain program I packaged for the largest U.S. book retailer in the country wound down (after years of brutally hard work and unusually long hours), I finally found myself enjoying some free time during the day, even contemplating trips to the beach over long three-day weekends like any other publishing employee accustomed to summer hours. It became, dare I say it, a  more genteel and congenial place to work, much more like my way of doing business, with organization and efficiency built right into the workflow, which increased the mental static of the severely disordered around me in almost direct proportion as a contrast, because now I had time to explore the neighborhood at lunchtime and walk around the office. Oops.

I began surfing the web for longer and longer intervals, even becoming a "starred" commenter on a trendy media site geared towards the workaday lesbo, which was tremendous fun for me. As the assholes at work became increasingly rabid amid the next economic crash, killing each other off in violent work conflicts that matched their growing unease, I simply put on my headphones and went to work on another site. I'd put up "Illuminations" over one slow summer hour day before the weekend started, as a way to keep a focus on my personal work and achieving my artistic goals. 

At first, I established myself artistically through posting my photographic and design works to advertise my credentials, with a link to my extensive online portfolio to seal the deal as your new publisher, and it worked. In my business, when you don't receive a lot of negative criticism, you know it's time to go ahead at full speed, which I did. But, the rabid "Politically Correct Police" at this newsy dyke site hated me so fucking much, I immediately knew that I had struck online gold. Every single comment I posted, even the most harmlessly obvious observations, were vehemently denied and attacked in a way that meant those boy/girls knew I didn't strap on a fake plastic penis after office hours. No, it was far worse than that. I preferred the real kind, the fleshy one that comes attached to a man. Ew!

They must have sensed a beautiful hetero woman attracted to males in their midst by my writing alone, but because my comments were so good at generating buzz on the site and drawing attention to their shitty pieces (plus, I helpfully followed the site's rules by not answering their hysterics in "Common Cave Troll"), I was allowed this free pass through online lesbianism, with some temporary restrictions applied. They were boring, in their own bitchy out-of-towner type of way. Do you know the country queer moving to the city looking for an exotic good time but hopelessly inept? That! That was the annoyingly whiny tone of every overly emotional crybaby who went "wahwah" about New York City and its inhabitants; how unfair and cruel the city was to them and their "poopypants" interests.

I'm not joking, either. One of their biggest features was written by this bland WASPY bitch from the 'burbs who decided to unleash her inner "alternative" goth lesbian on all of us unsuspecting readers by publishing photos of her dirty vibrator covered in old period blood stains as it compared to her new one of the exact same model. So fucking interesting, troll. Here's my mucus in a tissue! Get a life, bitch. Every weird hick who has ever tortured me on the job came bubbling to the surface through these inane puff pieces designed to attract dykes in such a brutally obvious way, I found my smarter commentary striking lightning quick responses to their fucking bullshit as fast as I could type it, edit it, and post it, and guess who won? 

I did! It spurred me to write a lot more during the day, which was part of the point for me, and in the process, I pulled into the fray the unsuspecting crazy dykes who worked with me (or around me) to stop their work and read my posts. It became such a huge distraction in an office that conspired almost daily against me, that their publisher was forced to ask me to stop writing during the day (over his bullshit editorial staff), which I duly ignored. You can't legally censor creative output at a publishing company. It's that tricky "Freedom of the Press" and/or "Freedom of Speech" thingy we have in the Constitution. Duh. And so I typed on, in response to an injustice present in an unfairly skewed media world that sought to push me out, when they actually lived and breathed on my fucking land, on my fucking turf, earning on my fucking say-so through my design works that actually earned a lot of money for the house. If you don't like it, get the fuck out!

And so, out of those excruciatingly irritating tourist bitches with a zest to treat our fair city like a lesbian cruise ship on their "vacay", arose my desire to write more and more about my interests, which are a lot like yours, right? "Outsider" culture became no longer hip to practice, because how fun is it to read about changing a baby's shitty diapers? You know, the ADHD couple with the already fucked-up kid dancing around your cocktail party bare-ass with a stained diaper in their hands to show off? You crazy fucking bitches were that for me: so egregiously wrong in your hatred for us as a society (and your complete inability to adapt to normal human life) that I found it easy to despise a group of supposedly "marginalized" minority voices who used media to get attention, like any other spoiled football star overdosing on hookers, booze, and blow, except without the talent.

I took away their privileges at hating us for nothing more than simply being here and being healthily normal, but more importantly, for loving our lives and daring to love the city that gave rise to us. I stood fast in front of their searingly misdirected anger at me, and through the power of my words, I channeled them back into their backwater channels where they belong. And do you know why? Because this is my real prime time, bitch. I am your fucking "Major League" woman-in-action, dyke. You just didn't know it, yet. And now you do. You can thank this here mama the next time a woman gets voted into an important office, pigs. I probably voted in their primary election while you were too busy online "roasting" some plebe you wrongly perceived to be more powerless than you, and isn't that like every single prejudiced dyke who secretly hates women that you've ever met? It sure is! Who's the traitor now, bitch? Yeah, that's what I thought. Go fuck yourself. Without airbrushing, losers.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/TMI

The Dead Can Speak

For most European Americans, the idea that the dead can speak from beyond their actual time on Earth—in other time-frames than our own—is a story told to them solely though pop culture, in cheesy Hollywood movies about evil Ouija boards or haunted houses rife with demonic possession. But, if you delve just a little deeper into better content than the kind offered on generic prime-time t.v., you'll find a lot more varied factual accounts of our relationships with our ancestors, as told in our very blood and bones.

Forensic science, in the duel branches of forensic pathology and forensic archaeology, can uncover the brutally violent truths behind the deaths and oppression writ upon our ancestors bodies (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/), ones that that were denied life in the history books and textbooks of our mutual pasts, as white America sought to exploit their often weaker economic poverty through a cultural dominance that's extremely one-sided, because cultural assimilation often goes hand-in-hand with bloody wars for land and other precious resources, which means your kind of reminiscently Asiatic eyes are a most inconvenient feature to be dealt with evenhandedly. You are that which they wanted to destroy.

And so, with the now-modern inconvenience of genetic testing and cultural databases, it doesn't really matter what an opportunistic liar or an immoral cheat says or does, because the truth will come out in your blood work, whether you like it or not (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3122205/White-NAACP-leader-pretended-black-pictured-time-scandal-broke-responds-atatcks-saying-don-t-two-sh-ts-gusy-think.html). There's no hairstyle or skin tone that a wack-job looking to exploit white America's guilt about race can play, because science has made gaming the system obsolete. If you are just 25% Native American, you can get money from the state for college, just like a person of partial African-American descent can score pricey contacts and seed money for businesses from the NAACP, making your genuine ethnicity a very lucrative thing of the past. 

With your latest genetic test in hand, your reality changes, or, as the case with me, it becomes the history of your name (as my name) as it is written on the features of most modern Americans, now as your factually-verified claim laid to rest. It simply is so. But, it's way more than ancestral land rights or fishing claims, important as those are to indigenous people. Enter into the scene every carnival barker of yore who proclaimed their psychic ability to contact the dead, looking to take advantage of that ever-grieving parent who lost a teenager too early to a drunk driver, or a car accident of any type, or perhaps a grisly murder/suicide. So many questions to ask them...are they happy? What actually happened?

Then, the mystical arts of speaking to the dead become the fodder of anyone with an open question or hard emotional case that needs solving, especially if it involves child rape and/or murder, in our bids to relieve the extreme pain of a parent lost to grief. It's hard not to imagine what avenues we would not explore for them as a culture, in an attempt to alleviate such anguish. So what if she's a crazy housewife from "Lawguyland" (that's "Long Island" for the uninitiated) with a harsh accent and a phonily exaggerated appearance who "reads" people in an audience really well through their "tells"? We want to believe. I was no stranger to the allures of a good ghost story as a kid, buying book after book about poltergeists, only to be disappointed by a complete lack of supernaturally spooky life experiences. So, where the heck are they anyway?

And then the people I loved the most in this world died, my beloved grandparents, and with them, my tether to their pasts, as our ethnic stories and personalities that we had so lovingly clung to in each other, now together again in this new land of hope, faith, and promise. I started visiting my grandfather's grave alone, just to see what I would feel. At first, it was small but beautiful experiences, like a young stag grazing alone in the cemetery's grass with new moss on his antlers, looking up at me at the exact same time I reached my grandfather's grave stone, or hearing his distinctive old New York voice so clearly that I knew I had connected with him in my mind's eye with a searingly accurate recollection.

After that, it was game on. It was no longer a process driven internally by me and my strong memories, however great they were at alleviating my profound sense of loss. No, I could hear my grandmother laughingly explain to my maiden aunt living with her that now I was splashing around like a little girl in my bathtub, and then she would say the date and time in a future that held a middle-aged me alone in an old Hudson Valley home without her actual physical presence. It was so cheerfully normal, that I knew our sound waves were actually reaching each other in a way other people could hear, too, which is a discovery that's not without a rather extensive scientific past. 

Lots of audiophiles have sworn that they connected with their loved ones through a radio tuned to a particular frequency, like a son hearing his father (now deceased) talking to his grown son in the future using the same old device, ham radio aficionados both. Lucille Ball famously told the story of her dental work transmitting radio broadcasts through her mouth on live television back in the day (http://altereddimensions.net/2014/lucille-ball-picks-up-morse-code-radio-through-dental-work-fillings)! Hollywood made a sensationalist version of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_%28film%29) by skirting around the real physics behind radio frequencies and audio signals that bounce around the earth's atmosphere, coming back around again and again after the earth's rotation is complete. 

What was once wacky science fiction becomes our reality with time, backed by real hard science (http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/k-4/features/F_Hearing_Voices_From_Space.html). Your grandparents and mine would no more have believed that you could hear voices from space anymore than my grandmother thought she would live to see the day we bought water from plastic bottles, free as it was for her in the city, the source of some of the best water on earth. It would have been unthinkable that such a vast resource as readily available clean water would be sold back to us through superficial hacks like "beverage companies", but such is the case as it is now. Why would anyone drink from harmful plastic bottles when the minerals of city water have amazing health benefits that come straight outta the tap? And my grandparents were right.

The same goes with our digital imaging advances and microscopic investigations. What was completely unbelievable a few short years ago is now our day-to-day reality. Computers and the Internet? When was the last time you went a full day without your smartphone or tablet? When was the last time you didn't have Internet access? Contemplate that, and you're already more than halfway there. The far-out astrophysicist who launched the best photographic lens we developed at the time weren't just looking for space dust out there. They were looking for the Eye of G-d and His Creation of the Universe we live in, beyond time and space, in this here-and-now for all times, because our real natural phenomenons come from the source of all life itself. Welcome to the space age, kids. It's a groovy place where we're one, even you there, that curmudgeonly old guy afraid of average machines like the common PC. This galloping mechanized horse engine now as wings to fly. See you out there! Now I can hear it.

http://hubblesite.org/the_telescope/hubble_essentials/

Singing in the Key of Ella

"Annndddd....I only have eyes...I only have eyes...yes, I only have eyes...forrrororrr youuuuuu....." I've always loved jazz and the blues, and luckily my beatnik city parents did, too. In addition to rock n' roll and my dad's occasional country album, they had tons of vinyl from the greats, like Dizzy Gillespie and John Coltrane. They met at a dance club, and they often visited jazz clubs in "The Village" when they first dated, seeing legendary artists like Bob Dylan when he was just another broke Jewish kid tryin' to make it in "The Big Apple". It was something they could understand, being second-generation immigrant kids themselves. Everyone's ethnic in the 'hood, knowwhatimean?

I took to the big rock acts of the 60s, 70s, and 80s first, but after that pop cultural introduction, I found myself hungry to know more about the American roots of our music, as yet another example of a cultural heritage that'd been co-opted from us (without paying fees for creative copying, and without permission) by white Europeans, no offense. Thanks for all the money! In a big classroom in upstate New York, I took a class so fucking hard that I still have anxiety dreams about it (http://www.oneonta.edu/academics/music/biographies.asp#).

They had this blind cat in class who was an idiot savant with tunes, even DJ'ing overnight at our infamous college radio station (held in very high acclaim), to come into class with an escort on one arm, like any true rock star would, sitting in the front row, or, even better, he pulled a chair right before the instructor's podium on the auditorium floor. And he was vicious. If the prof pulled just the horn section from a track, his hand always shot up first. Man! How does he know it from just a small two-second sample? It did nothing to dispel our notions about handicapped people and their "Spidey" senses that went tingling in the absence of sight (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Spidey-sense).

After that, I always worked in design studios that had music playing (or Howard Stern, haha, Carol!) in the background while we worked (or much louder after hours, when the 9-5 staff ran out the door ahead of us, always ahead of us and the end of our real work), to the amazement of the office cows wandering through our studio spaces, aghast at this break from a typically uptight protocol that they mistook for a laxity in our disciplines, but such was not the case. Almost all of my art degreed friends are also professional or semi-professional working musicians, given credence to our supposition that the arts blend together in both the practicing and well-practiced artist alike.

And so it went. I allowed the people in my life to think that they had a big "one-up" on me when they strummed their guitars slightly, or tapped a silly tambourine for attention like a trained seal at the circus, while I declined to explore yet another avenue for my already prolific output that often scared the amateurs around me. Then I scored a recording studio gig. Of course, I didn't have the time to devote to audio sessions, though my man Randy pulled me into the studio for a few vocals on commercials and promo pieces for our business clients who needed a smooth, silky, pleasantly female voice.

But, it hadn't started there. When I worked at a pizza joint in Providence, Rhode Island, my friend Greg used to encourage me to call the guys working at the liquor store down the hill for a trade. "Do the voice!", he'd say to me. "You know, that sexy one you use when you talk on the phone." So I would, and, lo and behold, with a little bit of giggling, we'd happily traded a pie with the works for a six-pack of beer, to make both of our work gigs go a little easier. That's how it went for me. My physical presence coupled with my artistic and intellectual prowess was already way more than the average Joe or Jane. I'm half-harassed to death as it is!

It wasn't until I was laid off from my last long-term office gig that I finally let the tiger out of its cage. They had requisite "art fag" kids who wrote shitty plays and bland music that I stayed very fucking far from. Pretentiousness freaks me out, besides, if this mama don't earn, ain't none of you playin' jack shit, right? So, I did the trade I was apprenticed to, and I did it famously well. End scene. Or so I thought. After I began working from home in earnest, transitioning to being a publisher with my own voice, I realized I didn't have to hide anymore.

This stupid white dude living beneath me in Park Slope felt "bad" enough for me (yeah, right) to let me piggyback off his WiFi for awhile—until he blew that up, like a typically arrogant WASPy douche with an overblown ego and sense of entitlement to go along with his easy life and generically "exotic" Asian girlfriend built like a prepubescent girl. He told me he was a "Sound Designer" like he was proud of it, which means he holds the fuzzy boom mic on set, and then goes home to fiddle around with his ProTools all night long like a raging manic-depressive, on a pricey computer that you and I can't afford without going into debt. I know: its a "dick" title to go with his bad attitude. He hated me, but he also wanted me, too, and ain't that like every otha boy on tha block? So, I let my music play loud enough to be heard (rare as that was back then) because he earned his money from sound, so what could a bitch like him really do about it? 

To go with his flabby life, I dubbed him "BitchTits" behind his tall, pompous back. He also drove a suburban SUV in fucking Brooklyn, and then complained like a whiny out-of-towner about a lack of parking on some of the most difficult streets to do so in the city. No shit, white boy! But, in the heat of my anger simmered another tiger in the tank. I finally let myself sing, after never really trying to do so in front of average folks, and it worked. I let myself find the right pitch and tone for my classic mezzo soprano (http://www.harmonyangels.com/Verse-Voice.html), a key I had avoided like the colored plague it was marked for my life, and do you know what I found out? I fucking sang in the key of Ella fucking Fitzgerald. 

That was it. That was all it ever was. I just needed to find the right notes to go with my voice, much like my beautiful grandmother's pitch, who was so modest about the strength of all of her gifts from G-d that shone like a brightly-filled chalice of light, that she only allowed herself free reign to pour it out while she was in church, where it was safe from the kind of scrutiny that sought to rip away gifts as freely as they'd been given to us. We knew that the disordered and dysfunctional swirling around our smaller healthier group circled us like hyenas, eager for the leftovers of our greater gifts that dropped from us like leftover crumbs, smacking and licking their lips in hideous gluttony.

And just like that, the evil spell surrounding and suppressing me was finally broken. The hangers-on and wanna-be's dropped away as I fell down hard financially because I had nothing left to give, in a shedding process that marks the life of any real acolyte who seeks to walk with G-d and be in the presence of His Almighty Grace. I was finally free, free to be me, free to be you and me. Ain't life grand?

Nurse Ratchet

Because of my grandparents working class values and abiding faith in G-d, they tried to instill a sense of productivity and societal participation into their children with very limited success, given the innate seriousness of their disorders. And because my grandparents were forced to leave school during "The Great Depression" to support their dependent families, they saw education as a ticket to a better life, even if it meant that their children failed abysmally. They paid for fancy parochial schools and degrees that were way beyond their children's intellectual capacities, just so they could be financially solvent enough to move out and be on their own.

It wasn't easy. On my mother's best days, she can talk to me about science, but barely, especially if she's sick. She becomes argumentative about something she feels she's an "expert" in, even though the highest work level my mom ever achieved in science was a a lab manager who ordered supplies for the rest of the staff. I should know. She spent my youth calling me on her lunch breaks to chew food loudly into my ear and gossip rudely, because she was bored.

Her compulsive habits were so bad that my brothers couldn't give her their work numbers anymore. She'd deliberately goad me into anger over my work phone, just to have the satisfaction of knowing that my reaction to her might shock my cubicle neighbors, because she did the same thing with the other weird lab rats she worked with. She complained so much about us that her co-workers were nasty to us if we happened to be at home, which is what she wanted as a revenge for being a somewhat working mother part-time.

I felt terrible for my grandparents. They'd paid for her posh undergraduate degrees after she had been on academic probation while living at home, which is so easy compared to the lives me and my brothers have that I know they did it because she's handicapped like the rest of her siblings. Ditto for my father; my mom bitched and moaned so much about being "forced" out of work to become a mother that my father paid for her to go back to graduate school, then had to sit down with her at our kitchen table to help her through her coursework after working 16-hour days at his own job, just so my delusional arrogant mother could get a job as a bottom-level lab technician who cleaned glassware all day long, in between her lengthy phone calls from work on the company's dime. Some deal, right?

A pattern formed within my mother's family that her siblings and their children replicated with the same codependent degrees of success. I thought one of my cousins was, like, an astrophysicist with a Ph.D, when really, he was just a horrible student stymied by his thesis adviser (always an excuse for their incompetence), and that's why it took him and his then-girlfriend 7-9 years to earn a Masters degree from a college I got into directly out of high school, and that included blowing off my senior year of studies. Didn't need them anymore. And so it continued...this aching annoying bravado coupled with a deep insecurity that completed the next generation of pencil-pushing nobodies with over-blown ego's, condescending conversations, and terrible attitudes. They totally fucking suck.

They don't actually do anything really worthwhile. It's all a cover-up for their mental illnesses. I worked with tons of pseudo-intellectuals in publishing. They had to have advanced degrees to be able to compete with average people in the workplace. But, perhaps the most egregious over-educating of a sick person has to be with my one female cousin on my maternal side. After graduating with some generic Bachelors degree from a local no-name school, she worked poorly at a series of doctors/dentists office in Riverside, because after living with her father who paid all of her expenses, she then moved into the exact same building as her alcoholic mother who's a nurse. Yay!

She simply switched her needy codependency to her mother instead of her father. At work, she was told numerous times that she was extremely anti-social to the patients, so, guess what my aunt and uncle decided to do? Pay for her to go to nursing school! Of course! That's what you do with incompetent mental patients. Put 'em in a position to abuse with impunity! It was one of the worst decisions I'd seen yet from my mom and her siblings, but with my elderly grandmother ailing, her family went right down with her, without her constant advice and care. I'd seen it up close, too, what the doctors and healthcare aides complained about firsthand, because I observed my cousin at Nyack Hospital when my grandmother was there.

I could read the drug name and dosage from my seat at the foot of her bed (it was clearly marked as a saline solution in her IV drip), but my cousin made a big dumb show out of trying to read it (she failed), then requisitioning my dumber aunt to go get a real nurse so she could quiz her about an obvious thing like that, but only after I supplied her with pen and paper, because she had none. We had enabled her from the beginning of the visit to the end, and she was supposed to be the one in nursing school. It was an abomination and a tragedy, but I knew my uncle was desperate for her to be economically independent enough so she couldn't be a burden on him any longer, and that I understood.

My mom is also a huge burden, even though she lies about it, and at every level: economically, financially, psychologically, socially, physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, both domestic and abroad. You should try taking a mentally ill woman with Multiple Sclerosis on the road sometimes, without consulting an expert like me, and good luck with that. My life is like planning a series of small military operations, because if me and my brothers forget just one small piece of the puzzle that my mom and her family surely neglect, then our lives are ruined before theirs. They make sure that they always come first. Try it with a group of the disordered, and you can start to feel a sense of what our family "vacations" are like: brutal hard work, in addition to all the work that piles up on our office desks in our absences, because we run businesses for other people, too.

There is absolutely no way this woman from my family should be working with sick people. She cannot take care of herself. Her parents made sure of that. My uncle and his daughter are negligent of other people's needs in the extreme. She barely sent me a few sporadic, tepid, generic, cheap Christmas cards, let alone show genuine emotion for me and my family. From him? Nothing. Not one thing ever. She has also never sent me a card, or a gift, or an email, or even talked to me openly at family gatherings unless she had to. This is the woman they let graduate from nursing school?! And do you know what she told me in my grandmother's hospital room, after I noticed her lack of clear observation? "I'm not going to be, like, a real nurse. I can do the paperwork the other nurse's don't have time to do."

Two college degrees costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for my uncle to shell out—and by extension, all of us—for a mentally ill healthcare aide who wants to sit in a chair and file papers all day. That's what you get for your time, effort, and money. Does that seem worth it to you? It's like my friend Cotto; we spent, as a society, millions of dollars in free programs pretending that a man who should be institutionalized just needed a condescending "helping hand" from the taxpayers, because he's seventh generation Hispanic. It's unreal! But, that's exactly where we wound up with him and so many other sick people of the world.

It's time we stop pretending that these poor slobs need jobs. They need a home, medicine, and healthcare. But vocational training in the healing arts? You've got to be kidding me. She can't tie her own shoelaces without help. Can you imagine your grandma needing her help with an IV drip? That crazy kid can't even look at blood! And yet, some city school in "tha 'hood" desperate for cash did that very thing. They took my uncle's money in exchange for his waste of a daughter earning a diploma from yet another city school that we all paid for with our taxes. And guess what her graduation photo looked like? One short, fat, ugly, and unpleasant-looking white girl posing with a bunch of proud-ass black women from around the way, and ain't that always the way, though? Enough. It's enough. I've had enough of it.

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

Without Prejudice

Much like a confused America wrongly divided itself into two incorrectly opposed factions of "black" and "white", the saying that mental illness (like cancer) doesn't discriminate is dubious and suspect in the extreme. When I heard the verdict for the O.J. Simpson trial live on t.v along with millions of other people, I knew that the corruption of our court system now extended to wealthy African-Americans, too, and if you think that's "equality" in the eyes of the law, then you need to go back to school immediately. In fact, that's what I said for many years after the court case, whenever I was asked about my impression of it: "Well, African-Americans are now just as corrupt as 'rich white men', because they can buy their way to an innocent verdict like they do."

It's like pretending that you are less complicit in a crime because you just stood there while someone else hacked to death a woman in her kitchen for being brave enough to divorce her abuser/attacker. I mean, it's not like you swung the ax yourself, right? Right?! Wrong! And that's exactly where many murder cases wind up while under examination in a courtroom setting; the bystanders who did not stop the crime, or report it, or try to deter it in any way are in some cases just as culpable as the actual murderer for participation in a crime, especially if the attacker is seriously mentally ill. If you knew better and you did nothing about it (hence the cover-up and subsequent silence, post-crime), then you are charged with criminal acts along with the actual murderer. Get it?

This heady climate of celebrity culture has become just another stage for performing, for the criminally insane acting out who use their crimes to gain access to the public's attention. You are O.J. Simpson, regardless of melanin*. Look, I like black-and-white cookies from the deli just as much as any other hardcore New Yorker, but what happens when you can't break it clean in half anymore, because most Americans today are "colored" and mixed ethnically, too? There is no privilege of bias based on "racism" (and there is just one modern human race living today, as far as I know), or skin tone. 

If you are severely mentally ill with violently psychotic tendencies that have been easily observed and often remarked upon in public spaces (like, say, offices and large football fields), then there really isn't anywhere to hide anymore, nor should you continue to do so. Your healthcare claims will be denied, like a car insurer denies coverage to a serial negligent driver, as with a D.U.I. No compliance with our laws = no insurance coverage. Now, if you want to pretend that you need dental coverage but not medical treatment for your personality disorder, then fine. You can pay for it out-of-pocket the next time you wind up in an E.R. for an accident caused by your mental illness. Welcome to "The New America". It's way better than the last version.


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