Games that Suck(ed)

Mission impossible, now ready for your 7 year old hands.

Board games of the past were usually about freaking you out, by proving to you (once again) that being a kid means you have no control over life (just like the game called "Life" that goes on forever), and that your tiny hands can actually do jack-shit because you do not have superior motor control, yet (like your dad who loves to beat kids at their own games). Topping the list for us was "Operation", which has all of the hallmarks of a bullshit game designed by adults who actually hate you at your level.

It had small pieces that went missing the same Christmas morning you excitedly opened it on (probably swallowed by the dog, which means you have to "pooper scoop" for days in the yard to look for it, then wash off the dog crap after you do find it and pick it out of said crap wearing rubber gloves), then when you do have all parts required AND assembled (with your dad who hates holiday mornings with hammers and screws, because he basically escaped from the 'hood by following motor skills to the Navy, which he also hated, and then into white collar work, so this brings back all those bad mornings with his alcoholic parents who drank their pay away and bought no gifts, while you wait for him to angrily burn off his Christmas energy and make your game), a friggin' pair of adult-sized tweezers so other kids can watch your hand shake all over the place with tension and nerves over some stupid game that (to them) has the very fate of the world at stake, with this scary loud alarm that instantly sets your heart racing uncontrollably with a flashing red light that goes off, to let everyone near you know that, yeah, you suck at this game, too. 

So basically, like a really bad, totally dysfunctional, and typically broke-ass working class New York Christmas morning (with or without the hangover,) which me and my bro re-enacted for ourselves and the next generation by working through it one morning at Grandma's place, building an extremely complicated Transformer-like obstacle course with over 100 separate pieces for his totally freaked-out oldest son who doesn't like anything not to work ever, so he stood by us tensely monitoring our progress, alternating crying and occasionally nail-biting within plain sight because my werewolf Malamute unknowingly swept his very large tail all over our work up to that point, thus creating yet another starting point for us to panic over anew.

Up there with the rest of this water torture entered arcade games, designed to rip you off in under 15 seconds flat. Scammers, man. Also, here's a strong "Fuck you! " to the creators of Pacman, Ms. Pacman, and dumb-ass Donkey Kong. Take that! I hated you all >:o( Super Mario Brothers, Intellivision's Pitfall, Tetris, and Wolfenstein may stay with the new computer, but you must go. Go now!

 

Black Eyeliner

"I HATE pichas! I look so weirdly dwarfish and outta praportion  in them! Ugh, she could wayeh a papeh bayag and still look good. I know! I KNOW! I hate huh, too! Don't stand next to huh in pichas!"

By now you know that I grew up in the 80s, right after Punk Rock and New Wave hit it big, and that my family life is less than stellar; the music has changed, but not my peeps. At least, not much. When I was small, we thought my mom's minuscule youngest sister was a kid, because mentally she is. She was 16 when I was born and because she's handicapped, we treated her like a favored pet, because if we didn't, she might come at you with a really sharp knife from the kitchen drawer that she snatched with rare Hobbit-like quickness in under 40 seconds, made odder still by the fact that she is chronically lazy and almost completely physically inept....except in highly important cases of mania, like someone noticing she is very small and unpleasant.

It had some funny moments (like only people who grew up around serious disorders can have), which was driven home for me last week through the animated show "Bob's Burgers", about an eccentric family with a wacky "New Yawk mutha" who has a (surprise, surprise), paranoid tinfoil hat-wearing younger sister who has to hide underneath a tent to go to sleep at night. In her ample spare time, she also creates weird games called "Gail Force Winds" with rules that she can change at anytime, like blowing your game pieces off the board because you're 9 and you don't yet realize that she is clinically schizoid because she acts like a kid you go to school with, and that's why she slept on your grandparent's couch for most of her adult life, with the exception of that time when she had a series of creepy basement apartments, first in my Mom's house (where she was thrown out for competing with my mom's compulsive rules about germs and cleanliness), and some other house in New City...with weird games that had fluctuating rules according to her mental state.

I was fine for awhile growing up, hiding out among a gaggle of grand-kids who are much much stranger than me (some have obvious Autism), but once I hit puberty and started to outgrow her, she went nuts, which was bad enough, because I was the teenager coping with all these changes, like my dad running away with his barely legal secretary, and me losing my childhood forever...but I digress. I began showing markedly different traits than my mom and her short, fat sisters. Like some nightmare fable, they grew wider and uglier from their abusive lifestyles, while I sprung up and grew leaner, with a beautifully perfect oval porcelain face to match, which they noticed sarcastically every time there were two of them in a room against me. Unfortunately for me, I had the body to match, too: perfectly long legs that went on for days to match the rest of my athletic frame, with perfectly proportioned hands and feet to match, beautifully sized and featured extremely well.

After the awkwardness imposed upon me by my mom's poor taste in hair and clothes, my coming out phase was disastrous for me. I grew up to be a supermodel at a normal height, so there would be no giraffe jokes that I could hide behind. I was....well, perfect-looking, and I grew more so with each passing day. I learned how to style my hair really, really well, found a great hairdresser on my own, earned my own money and bought my own clothes, then experimented with makeup that wasn't my mom's cast-off Mary Kay cosmetics, made for someone twice my age. I wasn't wildly punk or new age, but that didn't matter. I was gorgeous and normal, in fact, brilliant at school with lots of friends, hobbies, and interests, which I began not hiding as I blossomed verbally, too.

My handicapped maternal aunt with my paternal grandmother. They knew.

It was under this cloudy sky that I stupidly accepted one of my aunt's summer invites to go to her rented beach house with the younger sister, without my mom or any of my brothers. My mom was cautious about it, and so was I: they are really incompetent. But, we figured, my mom wanted some space and I loved the beach. Who cares, right? They have a house at LBI and I love to swim, which they can't do well. I'd maybe make a few new friends and be at the beach most of the time. It was a complete disaster. The first day out, I was walking with my youngest aunt to the beach when something happened; we passed by a house with two teenage boys about my age playing a board game outside, on the second floor deck of the house their family rented. "Hi!", one of them waved to me from the balcony, "Hey, how are you? What's your name? Do you want to come up and play a game with us?" Maybe! I was thirteen and I really liked boys, but, no, thanks guys, I'm going to the beach with my aunt. Maybe later?

And that was it. She went completely bat-shit insane. She gnashed her teeth in that crazy way she does, baring her large teeth in her huge head that sits on a short squat body, pulling her lips back in a snarl that bares her gums, hissing at me, spitting curses, calling me a slut with black eyeliner and that's why those boys wanted to talk with me, yeah (building up steam), because I look like a WHORE!! in that makeup and that's why I attract attention I shouldn't have and it was all my fault and I look like a slut. She spit out words like daggers, so insultingly out of place to what happened on a mild Jersey Shore beach day that I knew immediately what was happening: she was going to try and destroy me over my beauty, and if she caught me alone, she'd do something really bad to me.

It was such a bad betrayal by a woman who had pledged in front of G-d and family to protect me (she was supposed to be my "godmother"), that I didn't know what to do. My beach day was ruined, which was part of the point, and I was in tears; hysterical, scared, shocked, scalding child's tears, with no responsible adults around: not my mom, or my dad, or my grandparents. No one was there who would help me. I made a scene back at the house anyway, to drive the point home in front of my mom's sisters and my younger cousins, so that they would know it was real, though I knew they'd probably cover their asses and lie about the situation later on. I was bereft. I have never felt so lonely and isolated in all of my life, save for one or two times after that. I was trapped, because I couldn't drive away. There were no phones, so I had to walk by myself to a payphone to call my mom in tears.

She felt terrible, and she knew I was telling the truth. She knows her sisters. We talked about her driving down to pick me up, but I wanted to stick it out. Rockland County is many hours away, and as single mom, her life was hard enough. I calmed down a little bit, wandered around the ice cream hut until sunset, then slowly went back to the house. My cousin talked to me a bit, which helped. He lived with his mom's madness every day, too, and his father had died recently from cancers caused by smoking and alcoholism. He understood, which helped me calm down enough to stick it out for the rest of the vacation, because I had a witness who could testify later, on my behalf.

I didn't talk much for the rest of the summer, and from then on out, I knew my aunt was so sick, that she could kill me in the wrong mood, or if I was alone with her for too long. I turned inward against myself, and after the insults that stung successfully manifested itself directly in my markedly changed behavior, the sisters snapped at fake "slut" slurs as the ammo of choice. I would go on afterwards to have sporadic periods of sex, drugs, and rock n' roll brought on by family madness, fueled by the fact that I might as well try and act like a slut, since I looked like one anyway. I was doomed no matter what I did, which opened the door wide to a series of adult male predators. And to think that I once thought, as a young kid, that I looked like an 80s rock star.

A year later: me and my bro at the beach (I was 15) with a friend and my mom, wearing my "slutty" 80s eyeliner. We did it, man. We won, because we survived. BTW - "quel tan" in this photo, bro! Rock on!

To all my peeps: I told you I wouldn't drop this, because Rockland kids shouldn't punk-out on one another, ever. Here you go, man, for that next time your moms gets drunk and mad at you for breathing at her the "wrong" way, or your dad gets slap happy with his stupid asshole drunk friends when the family BBQ turns bad after nightfall...without the horribly nigthmarish "Annie" foster care bullshit to hurt you even worse. 

I kept my word, didn't I? Yes, I did. Because I want you to make it, guy. I don't want to be the only one at the top anymore, you know? And call the cops in town. They're my friends as grown-ups. You can trust them to help. We went to school together. They know me. Also, in this century, we leave a paper-trail that's mile wide and a mile long until we get the help we need for one another. Do it. This Mommy doesn't lie to cover her ass. (I might to help you, though. Acting chops also help me to not get knifed in a drunken bar fight gone bad, ya dig ;) We have to stick together in this world to make it.

http://www.informationrockland.com/Search.aspx
http://bit.ly/1C2Rrnf 

The Real Girl

Lately we've seen a lot of anti-social behavior publicized in the news, problems so ridiculously obvious that the people in HR once again failed to properly address employees behaving in highly atypical and aberrant ways, in full view of people with cameras and many other trusted employees. Not that I've ever trusted or relied on some HR wonk to screen anyone for me, let alone choose which pencil I might use at my desk. First, they make jack shit as pay (because it's essentially a useless job), and second, they typically favor the mentally ill employee in any given situation, because (and here's the fun part), a lot of Human Resource workers have generic "Psych" degrees from nameless schools, places where they yearned to understand their own broken brain, and now yours on the job. They can't get a job with their degree upon graduation, and now neither can you, in petty retaliation for their many problems.

It was so bad at the end of my corporate career, that I pre-screened every possible job lead I had by asking a series of industry-related questions over the phone first, before I wasted my time commuting to some wacky interview at my own expense. If I got weirdly paranoid stonewalling from a 20-nothing kook who is power-tripping over my possible career future on the other end of the line, (because as a female business leader, I can't have that in the workflow) I simply didn't waste my time pursuing it further. Why would I? 

I don't need anyone to ask me questions. I ask them, and then I teach YOU what to do about it the next time it happens. That's why my salary is much higher than yours, and you hate that, too. Plus, I have this rock star portfolio of infamous and well-known book cover designs that you need an Ivy degree and tons of real world experience to interpret correctly. Why would I waste my time with someone who has absolutely no experience in publishing? It would be like my mom (back in the day) submitting to some lame (and very easy for her) Pipette exam timed by a pencil-neck geek with a bad attitude who failed out of some joke two-year community college. 

What's the point? Would you try to teach a donkey rocket science? Well, would you? I'm waiting for your answer to my bullshit clipboard series of odd questions that I hide from you (like a very fucked up and purely verbal Rorschach test), while impatiently tapping my fingers on a table to give you the uncomfortable feeling that is ME, the know-nothing HR girl, who is the big-time designer and not you. Huh. That's odd. Isn't it?

After I get through them as the main obstacle to me potentially doing business with a company in the future, it's the key people I see every day. I never use an HR wonk, or hire talent through them, or use them to screen freelancer portfolios, or type email's to one of them, or talk to an HR employee on the phone, or even speak with one of them at the company Christmas party, because they are nothing to us. I make books. You don't. Therefore, you are not actually part of my real world work. You are a business expense that we (as a company) do not need, because you are useless. That's why you give "Creatives" so much attitude: the clock is ticking on your boring office job, which is funded by this girl right here. That's right: you are being phased out of this business, and not me. End of discussion.

It's sort of the office equivalent of me pretending that you sitting there next to a blow-up sex doll during lunchtime in the company's cafeteria is the same thing as my hot relationship with this gorgeous, interesting, and very educated man in the real world: you see us in the hallway or elevator, stare at us like we're sideshow freaks, then spend your time sitting in your office on the company's IM network, gossiping about how cool/smart/fun/pretty we are, but right after you ignore that 10th email I sent you sitting in your Inbox, the same one that your supervisor, the department head, and the VP of Design/Production received from me about that guy from Production Editorial who twitches in his cubicle all day long (on a good day) violently cursing to himself, or the editor who openly lives out of his office space and eats off of a hot plate that sits right next to a pile of papers (which the sick Art Director ignores, because she's on Valium for her clinical depression) because he hoards so badly, he can no longer live in his apartment.

Yeah. It's kinda like that. It's kind of like me noting that you are a violently anti-social, highly medicated, viciously paranoid psychopath (in full view of a bunch of low-paid, drugged out zombies who are used to doing excruciatingly dull, compulsively repetitive tasks like robot drones by the company higher ups, the Board of Director, and the ever-important shareholders), every single day of my life, telling anyone who will listen in a thousand different ways, and who do nothing at all about it but ignore it, hoping the problem goes away. You did nothing. You did absolutely nothing about it.

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/08/26/active-shooter-reportedly-attacks-tv-crew-in-virginia/

20 Years After Man

http://on.mash.to/1roxBi5

By now you know all about the angry zeitgeist behind GenX methodology, because we want to blow the whistle on how we see the world, which takes us to some very strange places indeed, first and foremost is the human condition as it exists out in the world, because we sometimes stand up openly and in violent contrast to pop culture and its' requisite artifacts around us. It's hard: you're the problem and we clearly know that, but how to change you, a broken human? Answer: through intelligent design, and very often mindless repetition, resulting in positive growth. 

It's excruciating slow in genius-time, which means me and my peer group often outsource intellectual capital (in the form of expert consultation) to do the more dreaded monotonous and daily grinding of your ax. We feel anger at you, but since you're the patient, we can't in all good ethics hurt you, so we seek to heal you. But, where does the energy go? Oftentimes, we channel it into our art, music, dance, clothes, speech, etc. You get the point: Mommy is mad, but it's against the law for me to slap the shit out of you at this point in time because I'm a registered human weapon, so I won't. Feel me?

With that in mind, take most local and evening news programs: it's made mostly for people who need the repeating of spoken words for their ADD/Dyslexia/BDP (like a lot of the anchors themselves), therefore it is the exact opposite of informative for someone like me. If I'm a regular viewer of television content, I often have to watch an alcoholic with shiny red-rimmed eyes sign his lack of comprehension live and on-air, in the form of the same question over and over again. Yes, it IS very painful. Thank you for not answering, and/or caring about me as a person, because your sickness takes precedence over me and my feelings each and every day.

So, I watch most stuff with a grain of salt. Oh, I know the anchors who are good at what they do, and the ones who are glorified actress/model/wannabes in tight dresses, but when I see and/or hear Ernie Anastos, that means "GREEK" to me in New Yorkese. He's been an anchor here for so long, that like The Mets or The Yankees, we would struggle with change; the real kind, not your temper tantrum over no chocolate ice cream left in the freezer.

It was with great trepidation and some degree of shock/awe/horror that I had to watch my man from New York sign weirdly easy questions at some New Age pale skinny gay gothic hipster in all black and some eyeliner from Ohio. Sorry, Middle American peeps, for your loss (sarcasm). The intellectual premise was thus: what to do when robots take over? I'm sorry....what the fuck did you just say? Did that fucking hipster just say "robots" in all seriousness to Ernie freakin' Anastos?! Dazed, I waited a bit, thinking this mess would right itself, but no; some 20-nothing "producer" even had the graphics guy throw up a cheesy (and quickly made) type graphic for this very serious and timely pertinent Robot Takeover story. Is it ethical to, like, be nice to them and stuff? Holy shit, yo. Excuse the fuck out of me? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY?

By now, I'm very used to media dip-shits, because publishing isn't exactly filled with just Harvard, Yale, and RISD, so I know I can expect a complete fucking idiot at any time in life, but sometimes the very fact that some ass thinks that we would want to watch his gay friend mouth their shared mental disorder makes me, well...mental. And then I went off, shouting at the t.v. like any Mad Dog-drinking Times Square bum pissing his pants in broad daylight. That's how fucked up you and your choices are to me sometimes. I re-grouped, shouted many choice and very appropriate curse words at my t.v set, and then I did what I do best: I "depantsed" intellectually some kid who has the nerve to invade my space, just because I want free t.v. and not some rip-off cable channel that makes YOU richer, and not me.

So, here it goes: we humans make robots, we humans then service the robots, and (THIS IS FUCKING KEY) because machines break down all the time with or without humans, our metallic equipment doesn't last long. When I did have some satellite channels in Brooklyn, and heavily rocked the NatGeo channel (among a few other choice channels), I actually discovered things; you know, like you do with educational programming. Disclaimer: you should know upfront that I an a huger fan of free PBS channels, mostly for the nature specials, but some other stuff, too.

And so I realize that I had the privilege to watch informing and entertaining specials about what happens to our stuff 20 years after <insert latest type of Apocalypse here>, which formed this brilliant deduction: shit breaks down when we aren't there to take care of it. Your house falls apart, weeds sprout up everywhere, and wild animals nest in your old bedroom. Chernobyl is a radioactive human nightmare BUT wolf cubs are born there, irradiated. So it's like that, asshole.

The Mars Rover spent half the Martian year docked on the side of a small hill, parked there by code sent to it through NASA engineers, so that it's solar cells and other mechanical works won't get gummed up when they try to power it back up after the annual sand storm season, with, yes, yet more slow code sent to it via space. Except for that one time, when the images that came back to the control center didn't accurately predict the small depression in the sand, so the guys had to send it messages in painfully long Computerese to move it very slowly back and forth (like parallel parking in the city with an angry mad trucker cursing at you for blocking traffic), because if it breaks down, there goes $40 billion U.S.D. of our taxpaying money, and if the robot is done, it's fate is to be forever covered in sand.

Ditto with episodes of "Taboo" that highlight fringe carnival freaks as entertainment. Yeah, I know that guy jerks off in his car and pretends it's his girlfriend, but do you want him dating your daughter? Same thing with Diaper Boy; he can't talk to you, A PERSON, because some crazy human beat him every day of his childhood so, lo and behold, he wants to be held like a small child instead of loving you. It happens, it's disturbing, but at the end of the day, your stupid fucking robot toy that kicks a soccer ball to the President (you know, the man we freely elected to kick a ball AND save the free world on a shoestring. Yeah, that guy.) is just that: a very fancy and nicely designed piece of equipment that breaks down. And it doesn't get to save the world. No. It gets that crazy IT guy who costs $XXX/hour to fix it, because your dumb fucking machine costs us $XX billion dollars to make, no Presidential addresses included. How's that for a price tag? No?! 

Yeah, that's what I fucking thought. I have to monitor your usage of what becomes (conceptually to me) that fancy fucking color copier with it's own hard drive, and then fix it for you when you become weird about using it, because you are too cheap to outsource it to some wonk who specializes in gadget repair. Oh, then please douchebag me around in a phony budget meeting because you ONLY UNDERSTAND spreadsheet numbers from your learning disordered brain, (that's why you work in the text-based industry of literature) plus I'm way better looking than you, and you really hate that. I PASS. YOU FAILED.

Just learn some real shit by clicking through the links below, yo, and more importantly: LEAVE ME ALONE.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_After_People
• http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2014/10/nuclear-tourism/johnson-text
• http://www.space.com/11773-nasa-mars-rover-spirit-mission-ends.html 


“I’ll be in the paper, the news with Ernie Anastos
They’ll even print my recipe for pasta with pesto”
—“Finger Lickin’ Good” by The Beastie Boys.

Spoils of War

http://voc.tv/1jOnjUT

I watch and read a lot of content that isn't specifically designed for me, nor catered to my particular demographic, because it's part of my job to stay au courant of pop culture trends. Like my former job description as an Art Director in Adult Trade book cover design ("You can't judge a book by its' cover" for the umpteenth time. Haha...yes, you can, and you certainly should. That's why we invest so much into it upfront as our most important marketing material: to create enough visual interest on a bookshelf for you to pick it up and want to explore further, because we actually really fucking care about the books we make. But I digress, shit-heel...), people think my job is one thing over the actual reality of it: to be an expert who accurately judges and assesses any type of creative content, in whatever form it takes, in any language or country, on any device, for any audience. 

It's actually a lot harder than it sounds or looks, because you're big hit bestseller may, in reality, be a totally trite and highly repetitive piece of derivative shit for me; one that's almost exclusively driven by slavishly current marketing trends, which is a really bad sign in creative businesses, because if you can't come up with original ideas consistently, you're done. It means some asshole middle manager who is a big nobody has sapped your talent and then gets the pathetic joy of discarding you like you're a used car battery, which is the worst thing that can happen to any artist. You are no longer relevant culturally because you've lost your platform.

With that in mind, I always try to let my friends at the library know what I'm checking out as part of my job, and what I really like, because part of their job as librarians (who are some of the most important people in our audience to market to) is knowing my preferences and suggesting materials to me as recommendations, then talk to me intelligently about it (but really, you, not me, because I already know). We publish almost exclusively to libraries at times, in special Library Editions; maybe large print books for the blind or vision-impaired, or perhaps books designed to handle the rougher climate of a public library's bookshelf by using tougher binding materials manufactured just for them. They know me and my audience here, because I've published books just for them at certain times, or oversaw it as a supervisor at some point in time in my long career.

That's why I read the "Twihard" series to my great displeasure: because my weirdo aunt who is emotionally stuck at 14, due to the severity of her mental disabilities and impairments, desperately wants me to believe that I am just like her, through this obviously fake Christmas "gift" (because hoarders use objects to express their feelings for people....ugh): I'm permanently stuck on stupid with some "hot" vamps involved, just like her. Uh, great. It's a series, right? And so I read the entire series as part of my professional follow-though routine, and because it also became a wildly popular movie series of some of the worst tripe I've even seen marketed to teens, which really pisses me off. And the books really suck, too. Bad writing.

So, when I check out some white men war movies, it's always attached with the caveat that this content may or may not be marketed for me, which is fine, because I'm a grown up, and we might also have the added bonus of making fun of some really bad art at the check-out counter, because librarians are people, too! I digest way too much content that is throwaway junk, but that's no different than any other day for me: it's for you, kid, and not for me. Mommy has very few needs. And so it happened that I saw a string of war movies recently, representing different types of people (loosely drawn from the facts), in the form of wacky expensive movie fiction, which is problematic for a realist like me. If it's tied to actual human beings who exist(ed), then great; my job just got easier by cutting out the rich white man to go directly to the source. Moms also don't need puppet shows that are stand-ins for real people, kids!

"Unbroken" was about some small town guinea who was picked on for being Italian (yeah, me, too), which got him angry enough for his brother to use as an energy in the white man Olympics, in front of Nazi's who yearned to be the purest whitest people ever....uh oh, Dago Boy is in real trouble. And then he is: all of his fancy Olympian skills become fodder for some mentally ill jerk-off who wants to channel his homoerotic energy into breaking an American Olympian cleaning up shit in a Japanese prison camp. Tough guinea wins (we usually do), but he never gets the apology he wants by the mad rich Jap who heads for the hills in embarrassment after the war. Boohoo, bro. No guts, no glory. We women know boys find war games really fucking fun. Would you want to grind sawdust into the scant remains of the flour that you have on ration, while your children starve slowly in front of you? No?! And that was one of the easier WWII scenarios women had, back in the day. You don't want to know about the rest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbroken_%28film%29.

"Lone Survivor" is better: this tough muthafuckin' white boy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Luttrell) pulls through champion-style, too, but with a broken back and a new foreign friend. I like that he manages to rise above the spoils of a typical war by bonding with the villagers who hid him from the enemy, because they realize that the nasty war tribes around them are totally fucking nuts, regardless of nationality, and they would just as easily kill them as that broke-back white boy, because they're right. People are driven mad by war, because video games with real targets (like pregnant women and their nursing children) are really fucking hard to kill, even if you know that they are human smart bombs sent to rip you to shreds. Do you want want to be the person flicking the switch to that electric chair, you monster? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster%27s_Ball)

I know I'm a great warrior who would totally fucking kill you in a knock-down, drag-out battle to the death for survival, but it's a rare thing to have a fair fight, when the righteous wins over evil. What do you do when the sands shift under your feet? Or, how can I be a good guy when I just blew the head off of a defenseless woman? That's the kind of thing that stays with you, man, and sometimes it kills you back at home, where another type of war rages: the one that plays inside your shell-shocked and highly concussed skull, which is what this white boy played in this fucking war movie about how war may turn even your new war friend into a foe, in a heartbeat: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Sniper.

Not so glamorous anymore, is it? These actors don't go home to nurse you through the after-effects of your war-induced illness, bro. I do that for you, people in social services do that for you, but this fucking celebrity gets to breeze through a photo op at the local VA, drop a check, and he is gone, gone, gone, girl. Then, the really bad movie starts to play in your head, once again...where will Hollywood be? Nowhere in sight. That's the true spoils of any given war; money you don't get and will never see, while you heart-breakingly watch (by yourself) your son or daughter struggle through yet another series of tremors that the Veteran's supposed benefits package just ran out on, and G-d forbid that they get their hands on that kitchen knife before you do. Who will be there in that room with you? 

Here's a wild guess: it won't be a Bradley Cooper type of actor. The man who helps you pick up the pieces later on will be your real friends, family, neighbors, and community activists. That's who you owe, and that's who I work for everyday, because that's who I am: your friendly fucking neighborhood war hero. But, like, so not with the actual PTSD that's so dramatic on camera, dude. That's, like, totally not cool, you know? Pay me, yo! I'll throw you a real party, man, with no weird gold statues that don't mean jack-shit, either. I promise ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Iraq_War_films

Fudgie the Whale

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carvel_%28restaurant%29

New York kids grew up with Carvel ice cream cakes. It's what we wanted for every birthday, and so did our friends, because our parents would never buy that for just any old day. They were specially ordered through a storefront here in New City, and they were customized, but only so much. You could choose the ice cream flavors, that toothpaste shit passing for icing, and some of the colors, but that was about it, because (and here's the funny part), Carvel was so 'round-the-way "flavid", that they were broke-ass like only a really successful tri-state chain would be: one mold, five different kinds of cakes.

And that was the really fun part: guessing the mold's origin in the latest homemade commercial, because "Fudgie the Whale" was also "Cookie Puss" (a weird alien-like creature with a bizarre helium voice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooky_Puss), or (given the holiday), that banged up-looking cornucopia NOW ON SALE FOR THANKSGIVING!!! It was designed to hide the mold pan's original intent: capture the imagination of every area kid on the block by turning that one mold a bunch of different ways, aided and assisted by the creative use of icing.

They were sometimes rough looking and dumb. but I defy you to find brown cookie crunch crumble shit that's bettah. You won't homeboy. It's that good. "Yeah, gimme some more with that toothpaste crap. Hit me with it, bro!" It won't last forevah: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cookie_Puss.

"Hi! I'm 'Cookie Puss!', and I'm out of this world!'" Wha the...?

Enjoy the summer, friends.

 
Special shout-out to Howard Stern and the rest of crew for representing our interests and the insanely wacky New Yawk lifestyle, because it ain't funny if it ain't done in "that accent"*. You know the one! Enjoy The Hamptons, yo. "After 40 years of hard work you're a real success!" (Thanks, Cashflow.)

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

Hecho en Mexico

Ever since the beginning of Donald Trump's campaign, the media has made much out of his Mexican immigration comments, like he exposed his genitals on live t.v., or something horrible like that. You may not like that he's blowing the lid off of your illegal $9/hour worker scam (because your basic business model sucks), but you have to see it from a native New Yorker's point of view. The nanny who raises your kid for you, so you can commute to some dull generic job, has no real stake in your child's future, because you can't even feel enough compassion to pay her health benefits, while she stuffs money in her bra on the sly to send to her poor extended family back home.

We have a wonderful recycling program in the city and state of New York, one that has created a false Banana Republic economy out of picking through our trash. The afflicted and addicted on my block are so bad about lifting bottle and can deposits from the county's recycling containers, that I have to use a separate indoor garbage can for just those types of returns, because I don't want some violent fucking drunk using the money from my garbage as an excuse to continue drinking. That's not what reusing our natural resources is about. 

Ditto with that tiny little lady pushing a shopping cart, stringing five kids along with her. Sure, she looks small and vulnerable, and you feel sorry for her, but do you really think "The American Dream" for her and her family should be taking our trash as a full-time job? Her children will never see us as equals, or treat us like friends, family, and neighbors. They see "white people" as money, which is laughable, since I see her as a desperate single mother of EUROPEAN descent that's Spanish-flavored, which definitely does not make her a minority. The numbers don't add up to her sense of self about stealing from our garbage.

The media is just as bad at holding up this phony sense of self, to make money off of us, because it's blatantly untrue that Hispanic Americans are some small poor underclass. One t.v channel did this whole piece on some music teacher in Paraguay who uses garbage to fashion instruments for his students because THE PEOPLE OF PARAGUAY decided that it's appropriate for their own people to live in filth. Did we do that to them?! And you know what they want, more than anything in this world? To leave their country ASAP for America. That's right, they want to come here instead of cleaning up the trash in their own community, because apparently they're too good to do what you and I do on any given day. So, I guess it's OK to come here illegally and riffle through our trash than pick up your own garbage? Does that make any sense to you?

The people in these shadowy underground networks adopt the same arrogant attitude as some stateside Chinese: they disdain learning English to favor their own language (something my grandparents didn't have the luxury to do, because they had to work in the city as minors to feed their families during The Great Depression), nor do they pay taxes, or take their children to our schools, just so they can feed off of our cast-off bits and pieces, without ever giving back to the very system that gives them life. They do not fund our hospitals, or vote in our elections, or work in our businesses, all because you want a cheeseburger for $5, a five dollars that will never be adjusted to current inflation rates, because you can't deal without your creature comforts.

Since I've been back in Rockland County and openly encamped in town, not once has that cute little Hispanic lady with five kids—the one who canvasses the block every week during recycling day with her shopping cart piled far above the rim with can returns—ever waved at me, or said "hello" to me, or acknowledged my existence in any way, shape, or form, because to her, I am nothing but a dollar sign. I am not human to her and her family. I am nothing but money to her.

The Mexican Wedding Dress: my mom bought it on a family trip to Cozumel many years ago and never wore it once, so she gave it to me. I love it!

Focus

Doubly exposed, with a tensely unhappy look.

All my life, my mother has taken really bad photos. It's always been weird to me, because before I was born and for some short time afterwards, my mom loved painting. I still have the precious little watercolor that she made me for my baby room, of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet floating on a watery green background that was supposed to reference grass, but I don't mind the abstraction. My first oil paint kit was my mom's old discarded one that I pulled out of the back of a basement closet. I was reminded every time I opened it, with it's old brushes, linseed oil, and postcards that she used for reference. She wasn't very good, but she also didn't stick with it. There's one painting I found (now hanging above her bed at my putting) that she did of a landscape from a photo. It has some brilliant elements, but just like me with a fondness for science, her vocations led her elsewhere.

Which made her utter lack of ability with cameras even more troubling. Why? She hated posing for pictures, gladly showing me her sulky pouting baby pictures in black and white that my grandparents made her pose for. She cited all sorts of excuses: she hated getting her hair set with curls, she didn't feel like posing, or she was "too busy" to take a good shot. Baffling answers all, but they didn't tell me the real story, because unlike my mother, I could read pictures like they were books. Her photos were all over the place; bad angles, blurry shots, jarringly off composition, always out of focus, or she had a really tight, forced expression of her face when she did pose.

Cutting me out of the picture, and getting away with it.

I didn't really make the connection until many years later, years after I expertly learned the businesses of visual communication, and the various methods of those mediums, because it's that complex. My mom hates posing for photos because she looks crazy in them, and she knows it. It gelled for me with my oldest brother and his wife: with all their compulsive traveling, not one single travel shot produced by them (they also shun the creativity of most social media). Not one. Oh, years of oddly posed Christmas cards of them that they framed for us as "gifts", my savvy marketing family even hiring a professional photographer for their staged Greenwich, CT shoots, but not once did they pick up a camera. They'd admire it in others, market themselves through the medium and put it on their walls, but not once have I ever seen one of them take an actual photograph. They say they don't need them or like them either, which is doubly weird, because they work out to maintain their images all the time. But, I suppose if I had a suicide mom and kids on serious psychiatric medication (like my brother and his wife), I'd hate reminders, too.

Ditto with pictures of me. Not one of me on any of their walls. My mom has these strange plastic-wrapped bundles of pictures, sometimes correctly labeled for the individual in the photo, and sometimes not. They come to me as she finds them stored throughout her household, or when her cleaning lady moves old furniture around. Her handwriting on them ranges from the perfect schoolgirl of her youth to the much more recent scrawl of her senior years. I have no idea why she randomly selected some pictures to be packed away in baggies and some not, except for the obvious proof that these photos show me, like time capsules of her madness: because she still struggles to make sense of the world around her, and who the people are in the photos.

Posing behind me, like I'm a trophy fish on the wall or a decorative lamp.

 
Nowadays, I use them as a form of art therapy for her, just like her onsite caregiver Lynette does in much more vivid detail with her, one image at a time: who are these people? What do they mean to you? Do you remember taking them, or how you felt at the time? More and more, I feel like all of my very learned expertise comes down to the feeling Anne Sullivan must have had breaking through Helen Keller's massively intricate self-defense system: I have done all this for her, to break through the walls of her mind that are like prisons for the many facets of her fractured self. I use my art to break through, very often to her, violently and aggressively, as you can plainly see why here. 

Some days, I simply sign the same messages of hope and loss, love and anger, here on this site and through other media outlets, over and over again until you get it. And sometimes, like this perfectly framed summertime photo obviously taken by grandfather for its' astonishingly stand-out clarity, I get help exactly when I need it, through a man who openly supported my art and personality without prejudice at great contrast to our unhealthy and immediate family. I can feel the power of His Eternal Undying Love, spoken loud and clear across the ages, through one simple, humble, and very beautiful photograph of a little girl trapped and angered by the madness of others, because that's exactly what my healthier grandparents lived through with their children and grandchildren, too.

It was the summer of '75 for me and my awesome Grandpa.

For the Many Faithful of the World: today I give thanks for the loving, beautiful, and gifted grandparents who were essential to my good health growing up. I would not have survived this life without them. Their patient care was often just a phone call and five minute drive away. I also give thanks for all of you who have survived the cruelty of other people's madness to achieve great personal success, by breaking through the many walls around you to greatness. Long may you reign in peace with us. Amen to you.

 (for Bernard and Ann, two of His Most Faithfully Devoted Servants)

Here's a hint: I'm the one in the middle.

The Lemurs of Madagascar

http://www.patriciawright.org/

Just like the movie, I had to wait an irrational amount of time for something this cool to be freely available on DVD. "Tighty whitey" parents of the 'burbs often cop this arrogant attitude about life, partly to cover their fears about getting discovered as a project person from the Bronx. Of course, the accent (and the raging 'tude) is a dead giveaway to me, but sometimes they pull off the magic trick of affluence with the right amount of condescension to cover up their crippling insecurities; like believing you are all-powerful by keeping a well-known children's movie (that's right: for kids!) for an inordinately long time after checking it out of our lending libraries, totally disproportionate to your actual sphere of influence.

It's weird, but that's the point of view of people schooled to think they can say, do, and act any way they want, because their rich daddy is a lawyer (or chiropractor), so often did me and my friends get threatened by their whiny asses in the open halls of public school. They were in over their heads, and we knew it. Once they grew up somewhat, and figured out that we were more adept at secret beatings than getting nabbed by the POPO, they just shut the fuck up and went away.

Me and my friends here at the Pearl River library had to keep checking my online queue for months, making adjustments around some rich asshole who thinks $400+ change for a missing DVD is justified because their little Maury has "difficulties" at school, or because they are so busy, they just couldn't be bothered to drop one DVD into the mail or a box, just like the President of the U.S! It's such delusional thinking that I've stopped trying to communicate with the insular and insane of Rockland, just like I did with their scaredy cat kids who scream when they are squeezed slightly, and that's exactly why this post isn't kid-friendly either, parents of Hollywood: I want more of this type of movie, and less of you. Much less of you.

Special shout-out today goes to the lady from New York who had the guts and ingenuity to stick to her guns, by following her chosen fields of study to wherever they called her: all the way to the lovely people and beautiful animals of Madagascar. She's from SUNY Stony Brook, yo! Way to represent your peeps! Thanks, Dr. Wright: you do us right here at home. We proud of you, girl! Keep going!!

http://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/centre-valbio/people/patwright.html

http://www.patwrightlab.net/

http://www.rhinebeckcsd.org/newsdisplay.php?ID=36

Kalifornia

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

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

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

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

Play, boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Hendricks

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(For Jim)