Reefer Madness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reefer_Madness# 

Yesterday afternoon, I watched a popular entertainment program like I usually do, to be somewhat familiar with today's pop stars, because it's hard for a punk rock fan like me to identify with such rabidly followed trends like its the final Wimbledon match or the last game of the World Series. I wasn't exactly a "Tiger Beat" reader* growing up, and I'm pretty sure it would've been banned from the house for being stupid, anyway. My parents can be really egotistical about their educations. Like a lot of bourgeoisie in suburbia, they're still uptight about their relatively recent "escape" from blue collar life in the city; they can be fretfully uptight as a result.

And entertainment news is considered lowbrow t.v. fare, but I am thankful I'm not working their celebrity beats, too. They all look, sound, and act the same to me, anyway. In between the latest "bad boy" arrest was a refreshing live interview with former t.v. host Montel Williams, a proud American military vet and an outspoken advocate for fellow MS sufferers, which speaks to the heart of my family. He spoke about the relevance of medical marijuana to his treatment, and it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it. My mom and I talked about an article I forwarded her about cannabis for her MS, and she didn't reject it as an option outright, which was surprising at first.

When I was growing up, a common attack amongst my mother's family was the demonizing of anything illegal, like smoking pot or underage drinking, that served as an effective cloud cover for their shopping/sugar/pill-popping addictions that had thus far escaped mainstream notice, though times were quickly changing. With the advent of reality t.v. came widely-available media content about mousy fringe types, like the extremely anti-social cat hoarder, or the guy who dresses up in diapers to heal from his abusive childhood. 

Unlike obvious (and legal) social behaviors like smoking and drinking, mental illness became a mainstream topic, thus blowing the lid on their hereto hidden afflictions, especially when my aunt's "dear friend" died from botched surgery as a quick fix to the hoarding habit that placed her in a low-rent apartment around the corner from her late mother's Bronx multi-level townhome that she filled to the roof with junk, floor by floor. Nowhere to run, after that. Still, their semi-public bristling at my lifestyle differences behind their closed doors worked well among their small familial group, where clinically-diagnosed paranoia reigns supreme. Pot smoking became attached to schizophrenia through their compulsive repetition of it, aided and assisted as their pea brains were by so much widely available "newsie" propaganda. 

With the crack craze of the 80s and 90s, lawmakers were desperate to end the murderous rampage from the drug's use that practically bankrupted the city, causing the "white flight" that my mother and her family still rant about, comfortably entrenched as they can be in their casual racism. There were news reports after news reports about "gateway drugs" and "latch-key kids" that my mom and her sisters passive-aggressively sent as news clippings to one another, in a search for the minutely incremental leverage that marks the habitually anti-social. But, they were just following along with the masses.

Of course, me and my friends attending a well-regarded teacher's school in upstate New York knew better about a plant called "MaryJane". Me and my Irish/French-Canadian boyfriend referred to it as "herbe" and "l'herbe" at the same time that classes like "The History of Jazz" and "The History of Rock n' Roll" were filled with students every semester. And therein lie our generational cracking open of the case, forever. I mean, we were taking astrophysics and/or high school SAT's on weed and beer, yo. We already knew what science would eventually catch up to. But one cult movie classic really tied up the loose ends for us, culturally.

Marginalized as African-American people and their works were, no one could deny the artistic relevance of jazz and blues as predominant musical forms that were (and still are) undeniably American. Classes about another American artistic import, the movies, showcased cultural prejudices on a world stage, like the stigma portrayed in the old film "Reefer Madness" turned white audiences against some jazz cat's homegrown stash, versus the huge pharmaceutical megacorporation's factory-manufactured outputs of "Class One Opoids" that are much more addictive, and much more of a gateway to hard street drugs like heroin than some ole weed could ever be. And therein lies the brilliance behind co-opting artistic businesses for mass coercion.

I was impressed by Mr. Williams for being a public proponent for research about alternative delivery methods of medical marijuana that don't open patients up to smoking-related health issues (which my mom and I had already discussed, because she's a pill-popper), as I also noted that he is no longer a daytime t.v. talk show host, either. Still, he represents a celebrity voice in the African-American community that stands by its roots, one rational conversation at a time, now that the real junkies in society are dying off in droves. Finally, GenX gets to share its healing message of peace, love, and understanding through traditional medicine, one patient at a time. "You're welcome" for saving your lives, once again.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Beat

Esprit de Corps

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tirant_lo_Blanch#

The literal translation for "esprit de corps"* is the spirit as it is expressed through the body, though its older usage described morale in the military. In truth, it was the best description I had for a Pinterest board I made about movement that covered art, dance, athleticism, martial arts, motion, movement, and the joy of being alive as it relates to the use of our bodies. Certainly, anyone who's ever been in mortal danger has their muscle memories to thank for the continued use of their body as it relates to other activities in a more peaceful future.

Sometimes, when I talk to my mom about my dreams or her MS, she tells me she has recurring dreams about running through a field of grass when, in truth, she was never athletic or even inclined to be active, preferring instead to sit and talk on the phone for hours, or dunk cookies in her tea (annoyingly, when also on the phone), or watch t.v. as she flips through magazines. She'll say it's because of her illness or her allergies (that she also sometimes forgets she has) but, really, it's because her personality prefers sedentary creature comforts. How odd, then, that her brain conjures up vigorous movement to express freedom and joy; feelings she was much more apt to attribute to cars rather than herself when she was younger and slightly more mobile, as part of her innate preferences for machines and artificial experiences over the real and the human.

When I studied ballet, I loved flying through the air the same way I liked swinging through the trees in our backyard, or spinning in a tire swing. Children excel at movement, in part because of their lower centers of gravity, something my less physically gifted parents would often quote at us, as further excuses for their inertia, cleverly designed to hide their laziness through pseudo-scientific phrasing. In contrast, we were made to work all the time, and when we did feel sick or take breaks, our parents hated that, too. "Get up! Do something!" It felt like they used us as charms to stave off their diseases, when they actually nursed our afflictions to budding stages.

There was a ferocity to our play-fighting as kids that transcended the typical city dwellers experience. My mom described us as "savages" or "wild monkeys hopped up on sugar" to her friends and family who are also round and cynical about it.  What were we?! She described the differences between us "soooo strange", like we were bound to be discovered as an ancient pygmy tribe from the bush any day. Me and my brother could fight for hours, scaling the narrow walls of our house's hallway like contestants on the game show "American Ninja Warrior", and it totally freaked her out. She'd never seen stuff like that before, especially among her squat hobbit clan.

I saw a native boy compete on the show last season, without any targeted training or benefit of a special obstacle course built just for appearing on the show, because he rightly assumed that his competitive sport of mountain climbing would do the trick for him, and it did. He grabbed a rope, released it in midair while spinning around to backwards-grab a moving obstacle that he then leapt from, landing perfectly on a mat with both feet. "Whoa! WHAT WAS THAT?!!", one of the announcers yelled out to the roaring crowd. That was an Indian, bro. His bright black eyes flashed with the same gleeful intensity as his big beautiful smile, pressing the red button that signalled his succesful finish. Welcome to the fight. We've missed you.


* https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/esprit%20de%20corps

Joie de Vivre

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joie_de_Vivre 

Like Wadsworth's "Evangeline" and her happy Acadian family with the beautiful black eyes living in a fertile river valley, my joy at being alive is something I can't always hide, even when it is more convenient to the people around me (or more appropriate to their customs) for me to do so. In Asian cultures, a big toothy smile is often seen as the prelude to a false act, like an overly solicitous shopkeeper trying to sell you damaged goods, or the villain dressed in black from a martial arts movie with one hand behind his back, waiting to press the button down on a bomb detonator. "Oh! Haha! You die! You die, now! Hahaha!"

Let me assure you, laughter and smiling in my culture is a sign of happiness, not deeply repressed anger or hostility. If being psycho makes you happy, you need to see a reputable doctor. Like, now. At the office it was even weirder, attracting notice wherever I went, with whomever the audience, as thinly-veiled digs that were supposed to function like so many pins popping so many balloons of mine, like the child I haven't been for quite some time. I guess when you grow up without a wailing wall at your disposable, problems are much less interesting as a showpiece for attention.

We grew up with sayings like "misery loves company" and "keep a stiff upper lip", followed by my dad's favorite "the sun comes up tomorrow" as a rip-off from the popular Broadway play "Annie". It is culturally entrenched among my people to handle problems by solving them through hard work, not worrying over them like a hangnail by "pouring salt on an open wound". There is a time to grieve, and there is a time to live, and we get to savor the richness of life through our emotions and feelings. No one is excluded from it.

Most evenings, I enjoy watching the updated version of the popular game show "Family Feud", most particularly for its inclusive representation of American families, encouraged and culled as they are by the staff of the show and their host, actor/comedian Steve Harvey. It's a lot more real than so-much genteel hand-kissing and flirting, much as I loved Rich Dawson's campy turns about the stage in the 70s and 80s. For the family that makes it to the speed round at the end of the show comes a quick sucession of answers to really hard questions, like last night's repeat episode.

The question was: on a scale of one-to-ten, how happy are you at being alive? The attractive African-American woman answered "TEN!" right away, at the same time as me. After her turn, another nicely-dressed family member came out to answer the same questions, with the extra burden of answering again if she repeated the first contestant's answers. It's a telling way to hear how families have the same mindset through their similiar answers made under the gun. Same question: how happy? And again, same lightning quick response: "TEN!"

Uh uh. Try again. "NINE!" Next best thing, right? And like that <snap!>, I felt less alone in the world, as a part of an "oppressed" people supposedly so drug down through the mud that we can't get clean. Right? Wrong! Wrong answer. I felt like we was all in the same room togetha, and we could be! That's the magic of inclusiveness, and faith, and family. You can't burn your way through it. Suddenly, I knew there were other people in the world like me, and do you know how I felt? Yup. Happy. That's the "joie de vivre" that marks our particular flavor, and you're welcome to it. That's being Acadian, y'all.

In Vitro

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_vitro_fertilisation# 

Native New Yorkers can be wildly out-of-touch with typical American norms, as evidenced by our sophisticated tastes that fit "hand-in-glove" with our thriving street culture. It's both baffling worldly and crazily down-to-earth, as a mixture that both stumps and stupefies the provincials who reach our shores. What to do? Where to go? "Melting pots" stumble those who are new to its exciting mix that we thrive on daily. There's tons of flashing lights, and lots of colors, and movement, and sounds, like a toddler-packed "Cats" matinee musical for savvy adults not on Ritalin. That, unfortunately, was me. Sigh...what I won't do for family.

As it turns out, the same sentiment was shared by my co-workers at my very first publishing job in the historic Flatiron building, located in Manhattan. Your tourist photo op was my first office space, as it still is for the people working the house. While many of you struggled to adapt socially to a rather feminine young man, I was having interesting hallway chats with a very nice production editor proudly sporting a prominent "pink triangle" button to work, as he talked to me about being a Harvard grad and a gay grandfather who came out after marriage and kids. With a woman.

My first meetings in a professional setting were the production meetings we have in publishing. They are weekly check-ins with every branch of the house that works directly with the manufacture of books. There was so much for me to learn as an apprentice that I often didn't know what to ask, so I just listened and wrote stuff down, or scribbled doodles on my big lined notepad. Yay! Office supplies! I was really young. And the managing editor who ran (runs) those meetings was (is) an openly gay women who staged a sit-in at the administration offices while attending Oneonta, which meant we shared the same counter-cultural vibe. She's also from Rockland, and I think Metis.

Needless, I hit it off with that first group of people really well, which made the technical complexity of the work the bulk of my day, over in-house squabbles and political double-timing. I didn't have the power to do anything about it, anyway. But, my higher-ups were tackling the deepest societal issues you can imagine, and they did it while "on the clock" in a fast-moving office that keeps and prints every mistake we make as the core model of our business. 

The managing editor running our weekly meetings had a second-in-command who's also an "out" gay woman, along with my bisexual friend MaryLouise the production editor (her former assistant), plus the gay granddad who also worked in production editorial, and the girl who publicly hooked up with the butch design director at a company Christmas party one year, in what was once known as "the toy building". She was teased for years for sitting on her lap and making out in front of her co-workers. Yeah...that's how we rolled.

I noticed a pregnant woman at one of my first production meetings, and my boss (the senior production manager) chose it as a "teaching moment" that outed her in the process, too. You see, the pre-meeting discussion at the table (before the meeting minutes officially began) centered around Lisa's pregnancy and how her maternity leave would effect the titles in the schedule she was working on. A big part of production is re-assigning work depending on situations just like this one, because life happens all the time. 

She told me a bit about the company's policy on maternity leave, as well as some of the costs related to it that our health insurance covered, which left Lisa the production editor to fight some serious battles with her supervisor's help. And help she got. Not only is Lisa gay like her two direct bosses and other production editorial co-workers, but she was the first woman I ever knew who had an openly in-vitro fertilization process with her also-out female partner through a sperm donor. And that was called "Tuesday morning" at our house, in the autumn of 1993. What does your house talk about?

Mrs. Michael

Being American is a funky experience, because we have more inter-cultural diversity than any other nation, which makes for some interesting combinations. For some of my Berkowitz family members, it's led to new waters where the Celt, Jew, and Native American combine, which means my oldest cousin Kenny "passes" for white, while his younger siblings did not. I use "pass" with quotation marks because like other mixed communities, parentage cannot often be assumed by appearance alone, which is probably the reason my cousin acts out so much. 

If he'd been dark like the rest of his family, it'd be more readily understood that his references extend beyond European ancestry to include the genetically dominant coloring of indigenous peoples. Like being "yella" among African-Americans signals bi-racial, a specific type of red/tan skin-tone marks Metis as "different" right away, especially in combination with black eyes and high cheekbones. It immediately sends a message to people, who pick it up as visual shorthand for "ethnic". 

But, just as skin color alone doesn't define the black experience, so non-indigenous parenting does not exclude or presume a cultural mismatch between, say, a squaw and her French, fur-trapping husband. Some cultures, even geographically dissimilar ones, get it, like my African-American friend and her Irish-American ex. Their daughter is easily discernible as someone of color because African features are genetically dominant over the weaker recessive genetics Northern people have from less exposure to direct sunlight, like blue eyes that often suffer from vision impairments because of less melanin.

That doesn't mean they didn't get along. They obviously did, and in no small part because Irish people have long been considered the lowest ranking ethnicity on the European scale of correctness, so much so that redheads (or "gingers" as they are disparagingly called) have entered our lexicon through sayings that underlie deeply held prejudices against Celts, like "the ugly, red-headed stepchild" as a way of saying someone is unwanted and unloved. A bigger put-down is rarely heard among us. It's a prejudice based on appearances that anyone who's ever been biased against in our society would empathize with right away, and it goes beyond looks.

Celts have long been oppressed for their devoutly Catholic beliefs that are tied to their prolific child-producing ways, which typically marks the lowest class in any society. Large broods make for less resources at home, and as traditionally disenfranchised people, blacks in America would understand Irish tales of woe quite well, especially over a few drinks, which brings us to their next bias as heavy drinkers. Pub society is very important to Irish culture, and so is a fondness for native-brewed drink, which I have a strong taste for as well. It does not include alcoholism and addiction because neither is a good time, beating in the heart of every pub as a cultural barometer to the overall health of the surrounding community.

It also means a lot of my friends and family meet their "soul mates" in bars (or at least they pretend to), because the difference between, say, pint-hoisting cheer and a violent disease can become blurry, especially around closing time. Kenny's parents met in a bar, like that classic joke about a rabbi, a priest, and an Indian chief meeting for the first time at the local watering hole. Quite the set-up. And it was. His Sephardi-looking father, while shorter than his mom, definitely had the same black hair, prominent nose, and reddened skin of his native mother. Unfortunately for my cousin, recessive European genes kicked in for their oldest child with a vengeance, making him tower over them at 6 foot tall with light brown hair, blue eyes, and fairer skin. What was commonly called "attractive" by a European society in the city made him stand out like an awkward white dude anytime he went anywhere with his parents and siblings.

And dark they were. You can see my family reunion photo on this site to pick out the Indians in a snap, where you'd be much harder pressed to single out Kenny. Like my light-eyed middle brother, it made him susceptible to nasty jokes about amorous mailmen delivering to yo' mama when yo' daddy ain't home during the day, which made my brother and Kenny best friends as kids. It made him choose to favor his Irish side for visual (and beer drinking) similarity. But just like being red or partially Christian doesn't necessarily make you a Jew, so did he struggle to define himself by other people's stereotypes.

It's led to some really weird match-ups, like his younger brother Michael's marriage to a much older and less attractive divorced single mother, someone he also met in a bar, as did his sister (my late cousin) with her last two relationships before her passing. Whereas my cousin Kenny can pass for white, Michael and Ruthie had no such luck. Like the Native American actor who portrays a detective on a popular American "cops and robbers" show, Ruthie and Michael were always assumed to be Hispanic, as Nuyoricans became the dominant Latin/Mediterranean-derived "dark" cultures that dominated NYC in the 70s and 80s. Well, that, or Mexican.

In the quest to be suitably paired combined with low tribal numbers (Kenny's mom told us her tribe had only 67 people in it), it's made finding a mate hell on earth. Who gets it?! Michael went with an older Jewish/Italian-looking suburbanite from New Jersey, but I can't see how that can last. Homeboy may be "off the rez", but that don't make Euros easy pickings for the fight. She can't cut it. It means mixed kids are a genetic "grab-bag" that doesn't suit who you are, what you want, or what your expectations about being colored might be.

As a tribe, it means we know she'll try to "rule the roost" like the pushy older woman from her ethnic background(s) she is, and as an Metis male, that ain't gonna fly for too long with any of my cousins, no matter how drunk as fuck your parents were, or how pale the winter turned you. Red sees red. As soon as we met her at a family reunion in Maine, with her outdated 80s hairdo, clothes, and wrinkly tan skin, we knew she didn't belong. Not only looks-wise, but also her attitude and mentality. Plus, she has her own kids from some other guy. She's got another man, bro. Somewhere. Don't make you "daddy" to her, or him, or them kids! Which meant for the rest of the weekend, we addressed him as "Mrs. Michael": a youngblood with a banged-up, older-looking, Euro-broad. Yeah....good luck with that one, son. 
You'll need all the Irish you can get.

Made in China

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_industry_of_China#

The post-Cold War era has given rise to some "new" (old) demons that feed from our collective fears and paranoia about walls we can't see past, and the loss of the self through mass conformity that's reflected in our consumer tastes. Buying, at least to many Ameri-Europeans, has long been touted by advertisers and companies as a way to freely express our individuality, with the unfortunate consequence of the exact opposite, as it so often works in generational trends. Some of it is justified: without world standards for consumer goods firmly in place, every import becomes a case of "buyer beware", with sometimes strange and/or humorous results.

East Asian people of Queens have a fun and actively-thriving "New Delhi" culture we enjoy greatly, with the unforeseen consequence of serious eye infections and other health issues, as the direct result of unchecked charcoal eyemakeup imported from India freely applied as a cosmetic, without the obligatory warning label. And it isn't just overseas goods. American cosmetics have more lead and mercury in them than any of their European counterparts, even "all-natural" products that are supposedly wholesomely made from at-risk bees with their ill-made wax. It's all inter-connected.

As businesses strive to supply already-strapped families affordable toys at Christmastime, so too do they open the door to Chinese plastic goods (or kitchenware with traces of lead) that do not require mandatory testing for stocking (and re-stocking) on our discount "Big Mart" shelves, leaving the average American to presume a level of scrutiny that bests or matches the mind of an actively researching scientist, leaving the hardest hit strata of our society even more vulnerable than ever, in their quest to find better deals priced cheaply.

And some of it isn't unintentionally dangerous either. You'd have to be extremely naive or delusional not to think twice about the pairing of poorly-made Japanese air bags stuffed into German cars sent to an American marketplace with murderous results that doesn't reek of vengeance for our role in WWII. Look what we did to them for their evil actions: we writ (some would suggest) an even bigger horror upon them with an atomic bomb and severe economic sanctions that lead to more hurt, rather than the healing of so many openly infected wounds. Certainly, Oppenheimer deeply regretted the militaristic use of his atomic discoveries all of his life.

It's saturated our consciousness at a deep level, too. Director/actor/writer/producer Robert Redford did a fascinating movie about one man's struggle against the elements while at sea, comically (at first) put into mortal danger by the floating of so many shipping containers from their loosening off a massive cargo ship, now left adrift and filled with those precious Chinese imports of common American brands. And it isn't as remote or exotic as that, either. 

As a production manager and art director, part of every job I worked in publishing is the factoring of their timetables into our U.S.-based manufacturing process, as we calculated the time and cost that it takes for shipments coming off "the slow boat to China" into warehousing and delivery, in order to save our beleaguered American houses precious U.S. dollars. It wasn't always worth it. 

When time was "of the essence", we went with the more direct and timely service that American and Canadian printers can provide. As our industry factored in overseas trade on the daily, we discovered that Asian printers produced low-cost 4-color work, but not the regular typesetting of black type on paper, which ideally marks the best thinking of our American intellects conducting trade, and I like to very much think that our Ivy League at work in media do that better than anybody. Actually, I know we do.

Because our labors are transacted on moral, ethical, and aesthetic levels, in addition to solely economic ones (because we make art and design), it lead to some very interesting discussions. In my early thirties, I violated my "don't date at work" rule with a handsome printing sales rep because he was a sub-contractor to my house, and as such, not technically an in-house employee or my direct report, though one could argue that increased "bonhomie" as the result of our brief coupling would put him in an advantage over me as a managing woman with everything to lose, and it did. Briefly. Fortunately, I'm surrounded by a lot of fuck-ups, and he went on to date his Asian counterpart at his job and our young part-time receptionist, which meant I had way more "dirt" on him and his at-work dating indiscretions than he had over me.

But I learned some really interesting facts about the huge Chinese printing conglomerate he represented stateside, because our original outside-of-work meetings were just that: questions-and-answer sessions between a buying manager and her main supplier, albeit in a hip "fusion" restaurant with moody dim lighting that used the blending of Brazilian food and Japan sushi to market themselves to craze-craving New Yorkers (usually from out-of-town) hungry for the latest exotica, and this Midwestern tool definitely fit the bill. 

Turn out, his company's highly competitive pricing was the direct result of China's mass-production mindset, which utilized an offshore island as their main base of operations for international buyers of their worldwide printing concern, which further meant (and always means) that they are violating human rights somewhere in their production queue at sometime, as they always do when they use their "extreme conformity at any price" mentality that the Chinese try to market as a social system of governmental reforms meant to combat oppression and corruption. Uh, no. 

He informed me that the Chinese people at the factory worked in 24/7 shifts, and that they could implement such an extreme rotation of their staff by supplying us with a total inconsistency in their staff  (because they always change hands), combined with a brutal enforcement of mandatory shifts that are "4-months on/4-months off" work schedules, in which employees are allowed back home to the mainland to recuperate and visit with their families. Wow...that sounds intense. "I know!" he told me enthusiastically. This was the kind of stuff tourists thrived on in our town, pre-recession. "It's nuts! Sometimes monsoon season cuts them off from the mainland for awhile, which means they lose the window of opportunity to go home and see their families for holidays!" Yeah, that would be communism for you.

It kinda dulled any zest I had for producing potential card packages from our lesbian designer, who wanted to push them through our gay sales rep, that resembled so many vagina shapes in cheesy flower photographs like the rip-off Georgia O'Keefe it was. The world could definitely do without these. No need for some horrow-show factory system. He told me that they slept on cots in constant day/night shifts that left them confused, sleep deprived, careless, and almost impossible to communicate with. Every layout went through several translations from English-to-German-to-Mandarin and back, because I saw the markups from our returned card and calendar layouts. What the fuck...

After awhile, I began to openly despise their stupid-looking calendars that we made for their similar conformity-minded and mass-produced wackos, at a price they could easily afford. So much pain and heartache for nothing that becomes so much toxic landfill after it's done. When every crazy employee at that small house turned on me, in an effort to push me out the door, I was horrified to discover that I might have to punch my way out of the job by besmirching my fellow employees, which they'd already done to themselves. I don't want to do that. I don't want to be like them. "Yeah, but you may have to," said our gay sales rep to me, in our last closed-door meeting before my supposed "ousting". Fine, if that's your twisted priorities over dignity and respect. You can have all that pain and hurt. I have this.

Banned!

It's probably no secret to you, my steadfast readers, that I face difficulties wherever I go, and that I consider it a frequent and unfortunate part of my life. I was "banned" from the local library recently for my astute and well-targeted observations about their deliberate misuse of the space and intentional misallocations of public funds (as well as our public trust), but more on that later.

Suffice to say, it is a matter requiring deeper investigating, and happily, my network is solid enough to overcome most of the societal obstacles we encounter, either as individuals or together as a group. Since I still consider myself rather new to the "Fame Game", I lacked the publicity-driven foresight to have a photo op with our visiting "men in blue", though I did express to them my relative delight about being in similar circumstances to another famous female New Yorker, albeit without the bleary-eyed mug shots, telltale orange jumpsuit, occasional acting career, and several raging brain disorders openly manifested. Maybe next time.

I have something far greater, so much so that it can be see as either extremely threatening or benevolently fortuitous, and it pays to know the difference betwen the two. I have real power, and I have all of you. That's the strength of my position, because with it, we can move mountains. Within a day, I bought a Wi-Fi enabled tablet with a keyboard for $65 at my grocery store, with my good neighbor's permission to piggyback off his Internet access, so I can now write to you from home. It speaks of my dedication to you, and that the opposition is afraid of us. Good! We can't lose, because....guess what? We've already won.

SETI

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence#

Just like my physics professor predicted, a lot of students quit his class after a brief introduction to the upcoming semester's coursework, an experience that was duplicated for me at RISD, too, without the intentional bait-and-switch routine necessary for a savvier New York student body that uses English as a first language. I had signed up for a class I thought was "Science Fiction Illustration" that was a catalog misprint of the actual class called "Scientific Illustration". A bunch of us (mostly guys) groaned, got up from the studio tables, and immediately asked for a signature to drop the class. 

The teacher was not pleased; profs lived and died at schools based on class attendance and their lectures, and as much as I liked botanical art, I really didn't need a class in it. I had a mom for a botanist. I grew up drawing plants, trees, and flowers in vast pictorial landscapes. This was no place for me to draw the big beautiful trees of my native Hudson River valley. I could do that at home, on my own. She gave me a nasty look as I opted out of her class, a feeling I felt she might have carried over into the next class of hers that I took, which is every high-achieving student's greatest fear: retaliation and blacklisting based on their agenda as a working artist and not mine as a paid-in-full student.

Both of those fears came to fruition, and by the time I had sussed out the art school game, neither retaliatory actions counted against my post-graduation successes. In fact, that particular prof asked for one of my pieces I had made based on organic forms for the RISD Museum's permanent student collection, which bolstered me enough to tolerate her scathing criticisms of any work of mine that she found derivative, which was accurate for me. I can achieve stunning originality, but with an entire course load devoted solely to labor-intensive studio-work, occasionally I had to phone in a piece between my three part-time jobs.

Our physics professor knew better flagging spirits and intellectual tiredness. He looked haunted by his experience and subsequent failures at the famed S.E.T.I. project that proposed highly intelligent beings would respond to something as trite as a radio signal blasted into space. So what? I'm not channeling anything or anyone alien to earth right now as I sit writing to this to you while listening to my playlist (Dizzy Gillespie's live version of "Swing Low" set in Paris). It was kind of a dubious quest to begin with, and I think that's what did it in for him: the absence of faith in his original artificial construct. 

But, he should have quickly recovered. After all, that's what science and experimentation is about: a series of failures that eliminate choices through an inquiry process, leading you to the correct solution that will hold up under scrutiny for its tried-and-true testing. After a class that found me and my boys sitting closer to him in the classroom, we decided to pull back to the higher seats in the lecture hall. Something about his haggard expression and deep-set undereye bags disturbed us up close, like it was unnatural. You have to be pretty bad off to screw up star-filled nights shining brightly in the crisp, clear, cold mountain air we lived in, as a place very close to nature.

He seemed to be pleading at us, as students sitting in the second row of the classroom, with his foot propped up on a pull-down seat's armrest, looking down at us like we didn't know what was up. "I mean, there's nothing out there!" He said to us, in exasperation. "NOTHING!" He acted blown away by it, like a space alien or lifeform that can traverse time and space through wormholes would give a fuck about his petty ego problems, which is what my man DutchBoy basically said to him. "Yeah, but didn't you know that when you set up the experiment? That it could fail? I mean, science isn't about foregone conclusions." Right! Like, adapt and problem-solve, dude. Let's build a spaceship instead! It should've closed down one avenue for him to explore another, but he was stuck on it as a theory, which is a bad place for any scientist (or student) to be. Time to move on, bro. 

It revealed to me just how limiting my education could be at Oneonta, which helped motivate me to undergo one of the hardest experiences of my life that is the Rhode Island School of Design's admittance process. If I remained on "Easy Street", I risked limiting myself to the intellectual capabilities of someone who mistakenly thought that the key to enlightenment with an eternal deity was to simply blast his BabyBoomer songs into the galaxy like some kind of intergalactic space jam. Someone tapped the "red hair bud" going around campus too hard this winter, bro. Word. And like that, I was ready to tackle the bigger questions of the universe, like: how do I get my snow dog with lots of fur into a spacesuit and decompression stasis chamber? Still need help on that one, NASA. Any day now, right?

Psychic Friends Network

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychic# 

Certain generations develop a type of "groupthink" that transcends their immediate presence, to become indicative of a much deeper action taking place than that which it would openly appear to be. Because me and my classmates were forced into extraordinarily difficult life situations coupled with extreme stress, we had to communicate without exposing it to the very people supposed to protect us, our parents, who would retaliate any action they could perceive or stump as a threat while in their delusional states. I know it's as intense as it reads.

I have never (NEVER) met a GenX'er who was not physically, emotionally, mentally, and sometimes sexually, abused to the extreme. Under our parents bigger and often stronger hands, we had to make quick life-changing decisions "on the fly", though it is not something we wish to replicate in any other generation. Sanity and hindsight will do that to you. It left us to contemplate just what the fuck went wrong with the sick people around us, when we had the time and space to do so, which, for me and my friends, meant our successful escape to an away college, as a time period of such happiness and fulfillment that it ever marked in severe contrast those later times when we felt just as unfulfilled as we had during our entrapped childhoods.

We had been tasked, as children and teens, to heal every serious adult woe that existed including, but not limited to: alcoholism and addiction, sexual dysfunction, homosexuality, their media-touted "mid-life crisis", adultery, divorce, joblessness and homelessness, extreme over- and under-spending, bad healthcare systems and the medicated side effects of their genetic disorders like madness and dementia combined with schizophrenia and a bevy of scientifically complex mood/identity/personality disorders with a lack of available and appropriate treatments that threatened immediate bankruptcies, foreclosures, and debt, along with not-so-handy alternatives like debtor prisons and/or incarcerations (or foster care) through corruptly inept social services and justice departments. Like, everything that the world has to offer us as severely marginalized individuals.

As a really small generation, we found that our dire circumstances necessitated an unforeseen sophistication to our brief interactions, squeezed as we were by our parent's (and/or grandparents) acute paranoia, which meant that all of our household communiques were strictly monitored for any signs of advanced thought or problem-solving abilities that would conflict with an illness that took on biblical proportions, in direct contrast to our religious ethics. We were "wrong" for simply existing in the covering chaos that evil thrives in, susceptible as our families were to it, in their sicknesses. We became adept at "reading" our emotions well with just a glance or a look, which often only increased the paranoia of the less adept around us.

Survivors of bipolar families like ours often describe in alarming detail (to them, not us) the "rock-and-a-hard-place" space that the severely mentally ill impose on the people around them, as a boxed-in corner where you can either choose death or their abuse. I'm not kidding or using an arty metaphor, either. We had death-defying car rides with stoned drunks as children trapped in their back seats, or rocky water rides down spring-filled rivers that became ego-driven contests with parents hellbent on destruction in the face of our greater gifts that were designed for service but refused through wanton pride.

It's a hard thing to prove as a child, and even harder to describe without the evidence that our families would just as wantonly destroy, in fear of prosecution or exposure. That's how entrenched their untreated sickness became. They'd rather die or kill us, or at the very least hurt us badly, than admit to any wrong-doing or making of mistakes. It was an incredibly selfish and spoiled thing to do, and I remain aghast at my parent's immaturity, as I am in awe of our relative composure in the face of their extreme carelessness. I've been told that I am extremely "lucky" to be alive, but I know it's not luck. It's me, and my extraordinary band of "freaks" that you call "superheroes" or "X-Men", if and when the mood or the money strikes you. Try living it.

Colored

The conversation about race and ethnicity can be a troubling game to the people who confuse it, because they lack proper cultural definitions within an appropriate context. I found myself in such a desert last week, watching a popular news entertainment show that highlights the most offensively outspoken headlines of the day. A prominent white news anchor used the word "colored" in her story about African-American issues and, like the jocks working the radio program that airs on t.v., I immediately took umbrage at her usage of it, too. What the...? Who the fuck is she? She don't know.

And then I remembered similarly odd conversations in my own past, where words can tumble out of control given the wrong situation, at any moment. Take, for instance, my meeting with a professor of English Literature during my time at Oneonta. He'd made some political references to his mostly "Anglo" class (or so he thought) of college students, about his supposed activism in South Africa with famous anti-apartheid movements that led him to flee the country to teach in our small po'dunk mountain town. Huh...really? He was handsome, so I dismissed him at the time for playing the adventurous romantic lead seeking to bed willing co-eds looking for a taste of the East, via one fucked-up African country and this state school educator.

He had a posh British accent that bespoke of his family's rather wealthy position in society through his obvious attendance at expensive private schools, and he had an irritating habit of wearing dopey silk ascots to go along with his condescension towards all things American that extended to decidedly less wealthy New York students, like me. I didn't think that much about him until a visit with my friend Donnel shook it up for me. We were still baffled by the death of her father while he was overseas in Ghana, and the subsequent disappearance of his body kept his whole family on edge, including me. According to their tribal customs, her mother needed to be in attendance to perform ablutions related his burial ritual, and they couldn't get any answers from the government or the state department about the events leading up to his death, leaving us in a paranoid "X-File" state.

There was talk of her father's assassination at the hands of some rival gangs with competing economic interests in their home village area which, given the general instability of many African nations, made more sense to us than we cared to admit. After he died, their financial circumstances drastically changed, revealing how deeply in debt their hereto presumed successful international businessman father was. During their foreclosure, our friend drove us past their house after school, to find deputies putting all of their furniture out on the front lawn, in full view of the entire neighborhood. "Just keep driving." Donnel said to us, crouched down in the back seat of the car. It was really disturbing. They moved to a smaller town home, and her mother began working as a low-end healthcare aide in a nearby nursing home to make ends meet, while we pursued various theories and connections to Ghana and Africa, no matter how bare or small.

During her visit to my college, I told Donnel about my English Lit professor with the supposed activist connections. Perhaps he could introduce us to a few of his contacts? We were desperate for any leads, and truth be told, I wanted to get a better look at him in private, to better feel out his intentions towards our student body. And so, one day after class, I made an appointment to see him in his office, a normal practice for any student seeking help, but totally rare for me. I'd never been to a professor's office before, and it was nerve-wracking to me, especially given the content of my errand. After I sat down in our semi-closed door meeting, I simply told him the truth. My friend's father had died mysteriously while in Ghana, and no one would talk to them about it. What to do?

He gave me a nasty look, then pointed to a map of Africa on his wall. You see, South Africa is there, and Ghana is here. See how faraway they are? Yeah, thanks. Asshat. But, you spoke in class about African geo-politics. Do you have any advice for my friend and her family about an agency that they can contact for guidance and support? He launched into another hipster diatribe about Apartheid and his status as a "Colored" man, because Indians (from India) were grouped in with "the blacks", and here he made a disgusted face like he smelled doggie doo-doo, which signaled to me that he was more upset about his classification as a minority in a faraway land than helping out poor black folks and their friends.

It was an astonishingly douchebag thing for him to admit to a student, especially since India has an extremely poor history of human rights, given the rigidity of their caste system of "Untouchables", but I was too stunned by his attitude to respond. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there, disturbed by the look of his purple tongue moving weirdly around his mouth while I had briefly talked. Back at my dorm room, I went over the exchange with my best friend from high school and college roommate, Karen, who was also navigating the rocky shoals of predominantly male academia as a history major; classes that often found her as the only female student in attendance. Here again, my heterosexuality counted heavily against me, as I described the shock of seeing a Chow Chow-colored tongue for the first time.

"You only went to see him because he's good-looking!" Well, yeah, but, no. I honestly wanted to help Donnel and her family, mired as they were in dire straits that I knew from my own mother's single parenting experience, a.k.a "My Mom Fell Apart Again": now performing a disastrous series of nervous breakdowns that we, as children and teens, were supposed to bear up under the weight of, and I wasn't sure how much more this family could take. She understood. Karen's parents (both dead for years now) were locked in horribly passive-aggressive co-dependence that saw her and her older brother begging them to divorce each other in lieu of an early grave, but you can read exactly where that got them. Nowhere. The stakes were so high for all of us to make it out of the messes they made for us, as a generation. They really needed my help.

After that, we took to calling him "Mr. South Africa" for his prettily-waved hair that was highlighted with a gay purple rinse, flatteringly cut just above his shoulders for that nouveau-hippie look, with his bevy of stylishly expensive ethnic-print clothing that fluttered around him like his many-layered Euro scarves, as the Indian answer to our naive prayers, while every AmerIndian on campus was probably just as interested in girls and hooking up as he was, because I howled at the midnight moon with them as a young pack member. It brought me back to talks around our kitchen table with my father growing up, as he explained to us that we're considered coloreds by society for first being Acadian, already a small ethnic minority, and secondly for our familial associations as Métis people.

I called my grieving friend from a pay phone on campus to tell her the bad news that I didn't get any information from the professor we could use (other than people around the world still hated us, which certainly wasn't new to us), and I never felt as frustrated and helpless as I did then, hanging up after a very brief conversation with my normally loquacious friend. I felt like I had totally failed her, in the face of some guy's arrogant assumptions about our society, but I was only 17 and a freshman. Now, I'm an expert in the media's weird and wild "Minority Reports", so old and out-of-date that they still think we're a bunch of simple black-and-white cookies they can split evenly in half, without the juicy red filling that beats at the heart of every American experience. It's time for a palette change.

Ms. Haiti

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauty_pageant# 

Magdala was nerve-wracking for me to be around, a feeling that was soon shared by the entire small family business that hired her. She's tall, smart, pretty, and cultured; in short, she is exactly like every other gainfully-employed woman working in Manhattan and its environs, which caused her an enormous amount of distress. In Queens, she was just another Haitian-American, but something happened to her during her long subway commute into the city. She began to have dreams and visions of her self that she could market and sell to us as her co-workers, which was the exact job description she had, as so many of the marketing/acquisitions/sales staff who function as our support personnel and in-house cheerleaders. She is, to be succinct, a fan of mine, without being a friend or even particularly friendly.

At the time of her hire, she was "engaged" (or "enfianced" in Magdala's irritating patois that was designed to be "exotic") to a short, bland, and rather unattractive French man who's also a single father, which was absurd. She was better-looking than him, and as pretentious as she could be, that tall black girl ain't never gonna be no damn Parisian white girl, knowwhatimsayin'? Too many big white teeth in that large head of hers. She's "bougie" as fuck, fellas, but to so many Euros who drank the waters deeply from our American import t.v. show that now reads like a prolonged tampon commercial about boring yentas living (and sexing) in the city, she was just the ticket he needed to take to New York and our lifestyle here, like a pretty tour guide on his payroll.

His daughter was disastrous for her, too. She was blond, petite, and Euro-pretty, which means she missed her French "maman" the way I miss really good baguettes and appropriately-named croissants livin' in the 'burbs. Oh, well. Ain't nuthin' but a thang, right? Whereas the little Chinese girl of our house bookkeeper spoke broken baby "Engwish" to me and wiggled onto my lap in a record-breaking couple of seconds the first time she ever met me, this carefully-dressed girl of eight or nine spoke haltingly and bristly to a very nervous, buck-toothed, skinny older girl of about 28-34, also over-dressed for her role as part of our sales staff.

She was obsessed with her looks, too, making sure she rushed into my office to tell me "the good news" about her lunchtime experience with a former model's outdoor staff working the line around the block for her t.v. talk show in the nearby studio, asking her to stand in line for hours to try-out for the star's main show about amateur "would-be" models. Again, I was nonplussed as a native New York girl. Well, yeah, sure. You're tall and skinny enough. I mean, that's where it starts nowadays, before attractiveness and beauty. Fit the tiny clothes, first. Them little rich kids in Hollywood diet all the time. Also, how good do you look in pictures? She went into a fretful paranoia right after her initial bout of giddiness, which is not a good sign for any industry, particularly the extra competitive ones. My queries to her were brief and direct, because any really good art director knows I just don't have time for it while I'm on the clock.

She was less sure about her photogenic qualities ("Well, take some pictures. You have a camera, right?"), and her "prominent mole" (honestly, I hadn't noticed) that she felt sure would make her fodder for the people on the show. Well, that and her age. "Oh, they'd just choose me to 'make fun' of me." Yeah, well, if that's your attitude, then modeling isn't for you, because if this little brush-up freaks you out (where it's all about how you look and what doesn't look right), then the actual business of modeling is out because of your sensitivity to perceived criticisms, so I guess publishing was a better choice for you. End of story. I mean, really, where could you go with it? Rehabs are filled with insecure girls waiting for their next big break. Be a scholar!

But, of course, she was massively problematic in our equally competitive book program, questioning her every decision with an infamous defensiveness that was even more offensive when spoken in her hackneyed "Franche" accent that she put on for show. She was a generic drama queen, which is the absolute kiss of death in a town filled with the real deals "trodding the boards" never-so-lightly each and every night. An egotistical diva who doesn't make art...what the fcuk is that? I had no idea what to do with her in our company, and soon my co-workers filed complaint after complaint about her attitude, too. She was snippy and disrespectful, even "on paper" in our in-house emails, and keeping track of the written word is what we do best. Poor thing. She was on a short clock with us.

Within fairly quick succession, she broke up with her "Fiancee" (we weren't impressed enough by her overt "bling", I guess), had a bad affair with an actual good-looking Frenchman with his own media company who soon got his other French (and white) girlfriend pregnant right before Magdala quit our outfit to go work for him in Paris, but she didn't care. She was going to be "a star", baby! With his over-priced "Breakfast at Tiffany" books that were Euro-friendly and arty enough for his snobby coffee-table audience? Yeah, right. 

But, things had been going downhill for awhile. She began showing symptoms of our temperamental publisher's typical firing arc: too many sick days taken without advance notice, eating quickly through his 50/50 health insurance for her bad teeth and multiple gum surgeries brought on by anorexia and bulimia (that raises some red flags, even in New York, as a notorious food town), and then her too-gossipy friendship with our ferociously evil Jewish secretary sealed her fate at the business, forever, all of which I had warned her about during her first few months of employment.

At a company and a town as fucked up as Manhattan, not even a wanna-be media type like the kind who hides months without lunches, punctuated by the occasional fast food binge that's stuffed hurriedly into her mouth for publicity's sake in the company's kitchen (on recommend as a political tactic by the daft-idiot white-blond yenta aggressively manning the front desk) can sneak past us. Yeah, bitch. We know. It didn't work out the way you thought it would. Fantasies can be like that, though: brutal and cruel and quick, kind of the way I imagine most beauty pageants and their contestants are. In real life, I mean. Not theirs. Ours. The real thing. Living a real life is the only true thing we have on this earth, girl. Get some before it's gone.


For Mr. and Mrs. Jay, of "ANTM" fame: yeah, girl,  I saw you scoping me on the down-low while you was underground during my daily subway commute, wit ya reared-back head and "dah-yummmm, 'cuse me!" look on yo' face and your seven foot frame dressed in all black pretending to clutch at invisible pearls. I do know I look that good. And Mr. Jay, ain't nobody incognito at 6'5 with silver-blond hair gelled into spikes walking around Chelsea. That was an "off" day for me visually, BTW. I was on break from the office getting a lunchtime walk after too many years eating at my desk. Feel me? Yeah, you do. I know fellas too scared to approach a lady, even plush "shorties" like me :) Bahaha! Booyah!

The African Queen

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghana 

Donnel has always been different. From the beginning of our acquaintance in junior high school, she stood out as a girl who'd suddenly break into shrieking barks of laughter at any moment, making the whole auditorium turn around to look at her, which is the very first time I noticed her. She was sitting in the back row of stadium seating for our 7th grade science class, the first lecture hall I'd ever been in. Felix V. Festa Junior High School is a lot bigger than my elementary school. In fact, our junior high is so big that it's sub-divided into wings comprised of the different elementary schools in the Clarkstown school district: A, C, and D wing, which quickly split into serious factions.

"D Wing" had a bad rep of smoking, spitting, cursing, fighting blue-collar kids who were rowdy in the hallways we'd briefly pass them in, while going to the main auditorium for the first day speech, at the ripe ages of 13 and 14. "C Wing" had wealthy Jewish kids from northern New City with rich doctor/lawyer parents who'd spring for limo rides to school on their birthdays, or to pick up their date for the 8th Grade Dance. Neither resonated with us.

"A Wing" had kids like us from the more rural parts of New City, or the town kids clustered around North Main Street. We only went there for two years before attending high school, as a way of prepping for the very different type of experiences we'd be having. Grade school here is K-6 (Elementary), 7th-8th grade (Junior High), and then high school, which is 9-12. And different it was. I had a cubbyhole with my name on it at Chestnut Grove Elementary, and I hung my coat from a row of hooks on the wall. I'd never seen a locker before, and I met my best friend Gina on the very first day of junior high (our last name initials being "D" and "E"), because she took pity on me for being unable to open the lock. After she showed me, I could manage it on my own, but I still have nightmares about forgetting my locker combination, or where exactly it is in that huge school during those first few disorienting days.

After that initial loud bellow of belly laughter from Donnel in a packed lecture hall, I could always spot her in class wearing a cute little top bun of hair, with slits for laughing eyes, seated next to her equally striking best friend, Laila. They were as different as night and day. Donnel emigrated here from Ghana with her family at 8 years old, while Laila is a classic Viking-like blond from Norway. Donnel can appear as dark as a winter night with no stars, while Laila's long, flowing, white-blond hair fanned out behind her like the rays of the sun. It was astonishing to me, because l'd never seen people like them before.

There was a lot to adjust to, at my new school. I'd form friendships of my own during those two years, drop others, and as always, walk two miles to school every day, up-and-down the big hill on Germonds Road. For us, that was the real main event, because a kid's candy store was on our way (remember Jill's, next to DiNoto's?). Occasionally, I'd walk a few streets over to wait for a morning bus that stopped on a nearby block with school bus service (home to the large Boos fraternal twin sisters recently arrived from Brooklyn of blond, blue-eyed, German-Italian stock), but most of the time, we just walked.

I wouldn't become friends with Donnel until high school, and it was extremely contentious at the time. Not with me, but with her best friend Laila, who was so jealous of our friendship that she refused to befriend me or even speak to me, which baffled me to no end. She never really liked me, and to this day, I have no idea why, other than my friendship to Donnel. I also dated her younger brother my senior year, ahem, but I digress. Back to Donnel. She had two younger siblings a year behind her in school, Dawn and Donald, but it was her mother who fascinated us. She kept two big pots on her stove at all times: one topped with perfect white rice, and the other filled with the most delicious stews I have ever had in my life. It was the perfect drunk-and-stoned food for us, as teenagers.

Always, the pots were filled with popping hot, saucy, spicy stews, made with big chunks of beef, simmered and softened to perfection. It was my first real introduction to African food, and unlike the bad starvation jokes about Ethiopia or sodden broccoli sent to poor kids with "bloat belly" in Africa, I had no idea their food was so good. It was exactly what you wanted after school on a cold wintry New York afternoon. At her mother's house in New City, two large pots were always on the stove's back burners. I don't remember a single time without them being there. During the summertime, we swam in their backyard pool, which was another luxury to me, coming from a strict Acadian household with rules about no extras allowed (ever) for children.

"Oh, these pots always have food in them," she explained to me during a quick house tour, excited as we were to get into the pool. "See?" She opened one of them with a ladle, to show me the steaming stew inside, pouring it back into the pot. "You don't even have to ask! Just take some. Here's where the bowls are." And with that, she opened up the nearest cabinet, as her smaller siblings raced by us onto the sunny deck waiting outside. It was stunningly luxurious to me, the exact effect they desired towards their upward mobility. Not ask for food?! I'd never heard of such a thing before, and during our time spent at her house, I'd never take something without asking first. It was one of the many cultural differences we'd come across as friends during our time together, but we took it in stride. After all, that's nobility for you.

Donel - One of the numerous Angelic guards of the South Wind.