Bad Santa

I've always hated staged photographs with phony backdrops, like the ones most suburbanites take their kids to during Christmastime at the local mall. There's nothing fun about some drunk dressed up as a big scary rabbit who wants you, a small child, to sit on his smelly lap. With my basic instincts intact, I moved into my aunt's old apartment (in the Kensington section of Brooklyn), after college to get work as soon as possible, because I have always been the backup plan in my life. There is no "plan b", which is why we (as a family) invested so much in my education. OK: here's time to think. Now: do. Simple. 

And it was. I got an entry level job right away with lots of prestige, per the pedigree we just paid for at school. That was the deal. We used "white-bread" RISD for a resumé cred that would get me into big city life, I would give back to the world, and here we are. But with each new level I attained came pitfalls and challenges so severe, I always knew I was the best player on my particular family team. How else to win in the forefront of your technology? There was no other spot for me than the one I took up, with the worst and most severe extremes you could imagine, which is why I write my stories down for all of you to talk about, verify, then act on, because it's all true. Every single word of it.

But not everyone lives an honestly open life, because they don't know how to succeed through trying. My aunt was one of those lazy types. She could do stuff, but she wanted to smoke and drink more than she wanted to think. What can you do? There's only so much therapy and rehab you can pay for, before you learn to just give up their ghost, which is what most hardened addicts decide to do, especially the smart-mouth arrogant ones. They feel that the "thumbing the nose at life" routine is cool, so that's what they do: make stupid snarky remarks at the local bar, like some brilliant bar-stool philosopher who deliberately chooses to blow their big time career so they can sit around and regale you with their life stories, except without the big life, or will to live. In the end, it's almost always suicide for them.

You keep waiting for a punchline to the joke, or a moral to the story, only to find at the end of their big "onion-peel" routine that there's absolutely nothing at their core; the ultimate jab at all of humanity, by being an utter waste of time. It's evil, petty, and cruel, but so what? If you want to crumple up your life like it's a wadded-up piece of used toilet paper, I guess you can, but who will be there to witness it? Other drunks who testify about your offenses against G-d? Why would a divine presence that can be anywhere at anytime in any century, doing anything, care about your ineptitude? Should we care at all? Of course, we should, but it is something that I still struggle to define for my brilliant but careless family, which is the core of every human problem. What do you do about lazy fuck ups? How far does it go? 

I don't know if anyone can answer that for anyone else, except I know that I fight evil wherever it rears its' ugly head, and that it's always there somewhere, either in the background, or as that fat loud drunk spitting right in your face. Ultimately, who gives a fuck about some drunk, but you in that one small moment with them? Is that the best you can do? I don't follow along with the bottom-feeder set, even as I tentatively cross through their barren territories, ones that were strip-mined of their usefulness many years ago, probably by some fat, corrupt, white guy not from my line; someone who treats the earth, the land, and the people around them like it's disposable, just like their life.

And so I looked through the flotsam and jetsam of my aunt's life, just like the pieces of history she left behind too soon for us to sort through, like we were guests at her intergalactic junk sale, which was the highest heights she aspired to. Some of it was intentionally scary, like the old photo she had on one wall of her paid-for Brooklyn apartment, with scary eyes that followed you everywhere, for me to take down and give to some art fag in the city who aspired to decorate the sets of other people's movies; a perfect ending to the fake history she attached to the picture when I asked her about it, like he was my real dead uncle, just so she could have a drunken laugh in my face.

It was silly and bitchy and beer-flavored and...so what? But that's what she was like; in between the bad jokes were real histories that she tossed away just as casually, like all of my war hero grandfathers' medals from WWII that I kept for years as the only family conservator who cared about them, now framed in my father's house after I salvaged and packaged them for him, because at the time, he could've cared less. Every time I moved (and I made several big intercontinental moves funded and fueled by my energy and output solely), I lovingly wrapped his trophies to be carried away with me. Finally, years after my father built another weird extension to his desolate McMansion, in a hollowed-out space with an empty trophy case where we should be, he finally asked me for them, so his housewife could have something to decorate with, and then show guests, at their holiday dinners.

But that's how it was. Some of her trash was obviously treasure, like those sepia-colored photos of people who were clearly family, because my father and his sister were easily recognizable to me in them. I asked them questions about who they were, and sometimes they answered (correctly or not, I don't know), and sometimes they didn't. All I know from this vantage point in the autumn of 2015 is that as a very young woman who was used to running other people's households and lives, even as a twenty-something on a borderline poverty paycheck in publishing, I still had the presence of mind to call my aunt from her abandoned apartment one weekend afternoon, on a phone and line I paid for on my own, black pen in hand, to ask her about each and every old photograph I found.

And so, here it is for you to read: family from long ago, carefully reconstructed through the disordered recollections from a bunch of lying, cheating, stealing drunks, a people who were given the keys to a castle that's deeply engraved in their hearts, never to be collected. On the back of one such photo I inscribed (in carefully legible black handwriting) the story of Shirley Doucette, because I had an immediate feeling of dread just looking at her "bad" Santa photo. That's how intuition works; you learn to trust your gut by honoring your immediate reactions to real life situations, without the beery boozy drunk to talk you out of what you know to be true about life and the world around you. And there, in my neat adult handwriting, is her brief but sad life story that may or may not be true: that at the age of 12, some man ripped her off the street while she was walking home from school, kidnapping and raping her repeatedly, before murdering her like she was worth nothing more than a piece of trash.

I have no idea if it is true, but this is what I have, here and now, in this year that is 2015, and that is this: when I took out those old crumbly sepia-toned photos, ones that my aunt had carelessly discarded like my ancestors' body flung out onto the road after someone evil had finished using her, I saw this image after taking a series of pictures of her and the rest of my clan. It looks like the dark blurry outline of a girl about her age, with a low-set, dark blond, curly ponytail, dressed in her century's garb, encircling her young arms in a hauntingly beautiful embrace from behind me, with her arms wrapped around my shoulders, as I stood by the window taking a photo of her old Christmas photo, and this is what I know about it now. I feel nothing but love: a purely simple, honest kind of love, of a kind that endures forever, in every time period for all time, through the ages, in this century and that one, too. This is a forever kind of love.

Hello, Shirley. I love you.

Rescue Me

People involved with animal rescue are a special breed of human, oftentimes not for the better, as I found out during several unique situations in my life. After my werewolf, uh, M'Loot Mal*, pulled me aside for a bagel bite early one morning, I was too fucked up to care for him anymore. I had promised Ted that if couldn't take care of him, I would always provide for him (ALWAYS), and as a woman of my word, I always keep the promises I make. Me and my mom placed him with a loving "empty-nesting" wacko; someone we would never trust in our day-to-day lives, but at that point, it was either some kook in upstate New York who used to kennel Mals, or we sold him on the open market like he was a car from Craigslist. Uh uh. Not happening.

So, one afternoon, a couple of uneducated hicks from rural suburbia picked up my Mal at a boarding kennel in Brooklyn, but before that, they sat at my mom's small kitchen table, giving me the final sales pitch about why they would be good "pet parents", watching me avidly with greedy beady little eyes that tracked my signature across his breeding papers granting them ownership, with my crutches leaning conspicuously against the chair I sat on, but not without first asking me if he really was "free". If you don't know what Snow Dogs represent to me in my culture, try this one on for size: ask a professional working cowboy to part with his favorite work horse, or the barren cat lady next door to give up her little "Snuggly Wuggly" with all the cutesy-poo outfits, too, and you've got it down pat. I spent many hours creating the perfect companion, of a kind that brought my people to this land from very far away. They gave us this life we have, this destiny that we are so blessed to receive daily. It's, like, "way spiritual"**, in Anglo terms.

It hurt, but it would allow me to keep tabs on him through them, and that crazy-ass woman cared for him until the very end, because I saw the pictures she posted on social media (almost in real time), as she sat in the backseat of her car saying "goodbye" to one of the most rockin' spirits this planet has every seen, her eyes red from crying, but he was dying, and that was that. Honestly, I'm glad it was her and not me, though I offered to pick him up for her, or be there to hold her hand. I was sitting in another car when my mom and middle bro had put down my Samoyed many years ago, and it is one of the most excruciating pains I have ever felt in my life, but that's the way real life is. It hurts so good, you know? I wouldn't trade the love of a childhood best friend, so special to my particular ancestry, for all the tea in China. It means everything to me. I owe them my life.

But, that's not how fucked up people treat animals. They don't come from animist cultures that revere them as part of the Holy Spirit powering the entire universe, sacred fellow life forms that are a crucial part of this biosphere we all live in, worthy of our respect, just like we do it. Crazy Euros are no different in this "new" world sometimes than they were back in the old countries that place objects far above people, for no good solid reasons that make any real sense, other than their own rampantly unchecked ill health. I worked with such a violent, foaming-at-the-mouth bitch, who told me she rescued just one type of dog that she liked (letting all the other types of dogs die in "kill shelters" or puppy mills, if they weren't "her" special little breed), because, like I said, she's a real fucking bitch. She wanted me fired for getting injured, not once offering to shelter my type of dog, the very ones that brought Indo-Americans to this world across the Bering Land Mass many moons ago.

No, that fucking cunt wanted me and my dog dead, but she pretended to be a typically "bleeding heart liberal" to get free passes for her psychotic behavior openly manifested between calming doses of Valium at this particular wacky family business. Yeah...like that. Another no-talent dipshit even went so far as to tell her in front of me that she was, like, the best person ever, for using animals like pawns in her fucked up game of "madness played to look like pure chance". She justified her hatred towards her fellow humans by telling me more than once that she liked her terriers way more than me (and her beautiful, orange shorts-wearing daughter), because her parents (who met at the psychiatric institutional facility) "never showed her affection". That's right, this bitch tried to kill me because of her neurotic wealthy parents from Connecticut. Makes sense, no?

No, it doesn't. But that's not all. She went on to tell me (within clear earshot of the entire small company, because she yelled all of her answers by deliberately neglecting her hearing loss), that she adopted a terrier to a family with toddlers after finding out that the dog she "rescued" had eaten the face off of an elderly woman who died in her apartment alone. Wait a minute...what they fuck did you just say to me? I was baffled by her intentional neglect towards people. It was positively shocking. What about the children now left alone with the animal? How long had the dog been alone?! Dogs don't just start chowing down on old dead people unless they're absolutely starving to death. Well, she explained in a condescending tone, she didn't "have to" tell them by law, because dog rescue doesn't work that way. OK, bitch, fine, but don't you think this family has a right to know? Jeezus, you had small kids once, you fucking horror show. What about that?

Even without the cursing in my head (she'd use that as leverage against me, if I dared to use "unprofessional" language in front of her), my intent was perfectly clear. She narrowed her eyes at me in obvious disdain, and typically at this point, she would either A) clam up completely by turning her back on me, so she could play the "deaf card" and/or B) gloss over my point by waiting a beat, to make it seem like I did something wrong, then continuing on after a moment or so: "...anyway...", like I hadn't just made perfect sense, which I did. She closed her eyes halfway to telegraph her dislike for me, then said "Well, the records are sealed", turning her back to me completely, like the conversation was over. Except for this, Lisa. It's not over, bitch. It's over when I say it's over, or until I prosecute you for every legal infraction you've made. This conversation is still on the table, because now I hold all the cards. Is that clear enough for you? I think it is.


*   http://omalmalamutes.com/omal/kotzebuevsmaloot.htm
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animism

'Licious

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

Urban legends play havoc with an American kids' sugar-addled brain, already heightened by the potently charged atmosphere inherent in our wildly free mix of humans. You never know on any given day what you're gonna get, because the New York City area is the capital of our whole Empire, with a new set of immigrants (refugees from your next civil war or natural disaster) streaming daily into our harbor seeking a respite from their woes. What can we do? It's messed up that your parents don't speak English to you, but that's nothing compared to the horrors we scared each other with on the playground, most of which centered around candy, a crucially important part of any kids' school day. Candy gave us something to look forward to, you know?

Myths abounded in our Gothic towns, like the pet alligator some kid flushed down the toilet that grew to epic horror-movie proportion in the city sewers, or the boa constrictor that bit a kid in the ass, because it crawled up through the sewer pipes to bite him while he sat on the toilet. Like, really scary stuff. If that didn't happen to you in the morning, you might get beat up for your lunch money, forget your homework, then get spanked for that, or you could die from a toxic candy combo that we dared each other to do on days when we were feeling a little braver, because nothing really bad had happened to us.

"Life" cereal was a huge brand back in the day, and in a brilliant counter-espionage move, some company wonk circulated this fake rumor that the child actor who played "Mikey" in the commercial had died from a lethal combination of Pop Rocks and soda, which naturally drove us to dare each other to try it for money. No problem! My mom and her scary sistas were bad enough witches with or without the soda they're all addicted to, anyway. Gimme that! And so me, my middle bro, and the Katt sisters stood at the end of our lane daring each other to try it. We each did it after no one died, taking turns feeling that weird popping sensation of mini candies mixed with fizzy soda. It was odd, like spearmint-flavored Lifesavers sparking in the darkness of a closet while you watched your friend eat one (my mom told me about that particularly fun food fact growing up), but that was about it.

Nonetheless, the madmen who created those classic ad campaigns pushed product over what was basically a childhood dare for many years, by firmly implanting it within each and every American kids' memory. It was sheer marketing genius. After that, the rumor mill cranked into overtime, when Madison Avenue spreadsheets reflected the buying power attached to false rumors. Kentucky Fried Chicken had rat meat in it, so that's bad. Don't eat it! 

Spider eggs were found in Bubbalicious gum, probably because some crazy redneck working in a factory hated city kids, like that fat lazy bitch behind the KFC counter who hates us, too, or the weirdo who injected shit into Tylenol bottles, just like that crazy psycho who put razor blades into kids' Halloween apples one year: it was crazy enough to be true, just like the psychotic people we meet everyday who want to kill us for no good reason other than the fact that they're fuckin' nuts and we felt vulnerable as kids, because that's what our neighborhoods feel like on any random day. You just might die, yo.

Crazy Paprika

In light of recent developments like madness and manic depression (which turn out to be not-so-new, after all), I decided years ago to give online dating a try. I found a highly coveted piece of real estate online, from what used to be a hippie-dippie sharing site for creative types on a budget, such as myself. Why not move from buildings to boys? 
It made sense to me after a German business trip that lasted months for no good reason, during those halcyon days of riding out a desk job with people hell-bent on mutual destruction, or at least driving each other into early graves. What was the point? I bowed out of their mutual chemical destruction to seek out what lurked beneath the service, and I had a hell of a ride surfing for companions while holding off a raging office bitch from tearing through my neck completely. It's what passes for "multi-tasking" bloodsport in Manhattan business circles. No? Oh, uh, okay. You may need a few more primer courses before moving on to "Excellence".

Anyway, my day job sucked, but that certainly wasn't anything new. 
All of the good, healthy productivity was diverted overseas by the company owners who had a much bigger stake in their home country than our U.S. game. No problem. Under a looser structure of discipline, I thrive, and if the entire company reads my e-mails through the company network, so much the better. I love publishing to a crowd, no matter how big or small. During my tenure with online denizens, I discovered a recently re-located opera singer at a downtown Brooklyn internet start-up, a celebrity chef, some requisite arty types (like actors, designers, poets, etc.), and a one very problematic Eastern European who was not-so-recently arrived. My new manic depressive acquaintance at the next desk job I scored for free online dubbed him (after just one outing with us for cocktails) "Crazy Paprika". She also said, with a few more drinks in her, that we had "showed her what real love looks like", because he picked me up after work to drive me home. Oh....

It went downhill quickly, because within a month he fell in love with me, wanted my children (I wanted a new puppy), and then pestered me into the rather trite romantic vision of a weekend spent in Vermont, probably because he saw some American movie that told him we do such things many years ago. The truth was, as handsome as my new friend is (and he is that, trust, girls, you know me by now; I don't date "common" or "ordinary"), he and I had absolutely nothing in common besides physical beauty. He had dated and impregnated an ugly older woman to get her to fund his American Dream, but after they broke up, he was stuck cleaning houses in the city and living in a cheap Hasidic neighborhood that never (NEVER) opens up to outsiders, especially obviously good-looking Goyim ones. He just didn't fit, and like his media-derived visions loosely based on me and "Pretty Woman", his actual life resembles Movieland very little, so little that it has made him madder than ever.

Sure, waiting on a line that goes around the block for toilet paper drives a person insane, but what he told me was so bat-shit, it solidified my impression that Eastern Euros are fucking crazy forever, not that I needed much more evidence. He told me tales of abuse so severe, I know that if a post-Cold War regime can slowly starve to death it's own people while watching, you're fucked unless you move, which is exactly what he did. They had to sign up for a waiting list spot for an old car that was ten years long, and that's the nice stuff. Most of it was centered around really old, out-of-date technology "for the people", while the corrupt upper tiers of Communists gorged themselves fat on Western luxuries, much like China still does today. They're corrupt, but, so what? Good and bad people exist everywhere, and if you don't like your government, you have to fight for freedom like we do.

Mad people live a life based on delusions, not reality, so when he fell head over heels in love with me, I wasn't particularly flattered. It was way too quick. Not that I doubted my prowess as a lover, because I am experienced, it was that I knew he didn't really know me at all, just the outside wrapping, which is great, but so what? Where does this go? Well, it goes downhill quick, like every other doomed romance when I'm "The Man" with the cool job, great apartment, hip clothes, and tremendous attitude, but...where does that leave you? Riding on my coattails? How is that masculine or sexy for me?! It isn't, and barring unforeseen fetishes that will most definitely NOT crop up in the future, I don't get off by strapping on a fake penis in my hetero-themed family unit. That's why my man is there, yo. Feel me? I'm the girl, you're the boy; that's how it works in traditional family structures where gender and sexuality are hetero, healthy, and normal. It just works out that way naturally.

So, we burned through it quickly, while he freaked out, panicked that his Golden Goose dreams funded by his richly gorgeous dream girl fantasy went up in smoke, because he's not all that. When he grabbed my arm in his car to prevent me from exiting (after I told him to leave me alone) after work one afternoon, I knew this particular Eastern Euro was gonna be a royal fuck up. He then stalked the crazy blond receptionist from my day job, the one with the obviously cheap clip-on hairpieces from Ricky's (they were the real duo in all this), barreling angrily down the block in her baggy beige knit poncho, as she headed towards the bar and back to Long Island on the LIRR, when she still lived there with her parents. She laughed it off, while being openly jealous that I could inspire such bunny-boiler insanity after a few short months of dating. In BipolarLand, jealously and stalking are highly coveted trophies to be bartered around like cash. Not so much for me, in my genuinely legitimate quest for love and romance.

She told me he followed her down the block right outside of the office building where we worked, laughing and saying how "lucky" I was, because she couldn't get a second date after getting drunk and putting out, so, like "wow"! Uh, okay...I backed slowly away from the reception desk to do the real work that makes a publishing company money. After he figured out that she was just as fucked up as him, because she didn't pull away in horror when he grabbed her by the arm in a clearly desperate stalking move, he moved in closer. He began following me home from work for weeks, forcing me to take different trains home (which I did, I mean, fuck, I 'm a native homeboy), which forced him to recognize that he was outplayed by the subways. He called me all night long (manics tend to stay up all night, not sure if you knew; oh you do? Yeah, me, too) to disturb my sleep, but I was locked up tight on the 4th floor of a building he couldn't get into, because there were four good, strong locks he had to get past.

When that didn't work, he escalated into deeper behaviors, like leaving my old cassette tapes that I had taken on our road trip to Vermont on my stoop with a weird note, months after we broke up. I upped the ante, too, playing the uncle-who-is-an-immigration-lawyer card (that's actually true), and then filling a restraining order with the Park Slope police, but in his illegal status, he was already a law-breaking immigrant, so I guess he figured he could do what he wanted, since no one squeezed him about blowing his Visa years ago. No one banged on his door to drag him away in the middle of the night like Eastern Bloc nations do, so what was the harm in hassling this "stuck-up American bitch"? Well, the problem is, he didn't really know what it took to be a successful transplant from another country who worked their ass off, and I did. That's how, bitch.

Once he figured out that I had a full deck of playing cards with all the leverage, he became extreme, and that's the exact sweet spot you wait for with garden variety fuck-ups, because once you break the law out loud and in front of reliable witnesses, I fucking own you. You're mine, punk! And that's exactly what happened. His last desperate stand was to shine his headlights directly onto the building I lived at, honking his horn, blinking his headlights, and calling me non-stop: this, after the Immigration card threat and the Restraining Order, words he pretended not to understand when his English suddenly got real bad, real quick. I no understand, followed by a sheepish shoulder shrug and big "poor me" eyes. Yeah, buddy. We all come from somewhere, bro. So, how did I do it? What was the final nail in his Transylvanian coffin?

Oh, girls, you know me! Mama scared him like the pretend punk he wanted to be: through the power of sheer illusion, just like his feverish media-inspired dreams. I had a leftover BB gun from my crazy redneck ex-boyfriend from Colorado, the big Scottish lad who liked to shoot squirrels from his apartment for fun and target practice, in between his big Elk hunting expeditions in the backwoods. I took that pretend .45 out from it's hiding spot, and in the shining glare from his amped-up, overly bright headlights, I held it up against the window, the clear shadow of a gun in silhouette showing up enough for even his fake-addled brain. Yeah, bitch, 'cause that's what's up. He didn't know if it was real or not, and in his Western cowboy fantasy world, it just might be. Who was he to know me better? I have the warrior-like attitude to back it up. Don't fuck with me. This is my world you livin' in, boy. Don't front, and don't forget. See you on the firing range.

Miss American Pie

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_%28music%29

Madness wasn't something that occurred just inside the home for me, safely tucked away behind locked, closed doors; it was everywhere I went out in the world, too. In this modern world that marks the abolition of segregation from our free society, I went to public school, like all of my friends and neighbors did, boys and girls happily included (with the occasional "Baby Jazz", too). That harmony and mature acceptance was (and still is) reflected in every environment I went into, like college, or going to the gym, or grown-up office work with my first real suit bought just for interviews as part of that special occasion, but otherwise, me and my generation formed a heterogeneous blend of mixed company wherever we went or now find ourselves in, because in "homosapien", it's a language easily understood, or so I thought. 

Baby geniuses have it rough out in the world; a wild place of limited abilities and other people's impairments, which pretty much guaranteed that sometimes the only other humans in the world who understood me in my smaller social circles of childhood were the very people who were most closely related to me through the "magic power" that is genetics; a fascinating branch of science that tells the truth about who we really are, whether we like it or not. Madness was the same way. Sure, people try to game us into thinking they're healthier than they are, but with time and experience, that window closes to ever-smaller widths all the time. It naturally limits the access people have to me, and for the truly sick, that's a frightening thought. I could be the only muthfucka on "da block" who will really help them out of the mess they're in, be it the inherited kind or not. I am a master problem-solver, but that don't always make the medicine go down smooth, know what I'm sayin'? Drunk fucks are still just that, same as any other century with Problem-People. 

Still, I've always wanted to help, much like my innate joy at all things "baby", animal and human alike. Are we not cute furry mammals? We sure are! But, much like the divorces that broke up bad marriages right around the time kids grew old enough to handle it (like junior high school age), parents began fleeing the scenes of their crimes the way baby birds leave the nest: very quickly while fattened on family funds, a kind of last-ditch-effort flight that belies the desperation felt by the fleeing parent, male or female, though as so often is the case for most native New Yorkers, that flavor is almost always of the male kind. And so we grew up a generation without any real father figures, though that was also like many other generations before us, certainly that of a lot of Acadian Métis; an ethnicity that knows their papas have limited ranges of domesticity built into their crazy boat-trippin' lifestyles, so much so that after the third or fourth month, you want them to leave anyway, so as to make their way at sea, bringing home bags filled with goodies and tales of adventure born on the high seas. 

We didn't exactly want them around full time, anyway. Ain't it time for you to catch some fishing boat off the coast? "Bring back lobster!", we shouted to their navy-clad backs and slammed doors. Whew...glad he's gone. He was becoming one ornery motherfucker! After my dad left, my friends' fathers quickly followed suit, swallowed up by the vastness that is the metropolitan New York City area. They were gone, gone, gone, baby! I adjusted quickly to it, as the lifelong realist I remain, but my friends with troubles didn't. Quick changes are disastrous to kids with mental problems, and my friends quickly broke apart like their parents did. The first one to go was my friend Molly, and it was epic. She left school with a bad case of chickenpox that happened during high school, way after we all had the disease and moved on from it, scars aside. She did not. That time period home, after her father left her mother, must have been the straw that broke the camel's back, because she came back to school pox-ridden and skittishly scared, breaking out in hysteric tears even at my less funny material. I was worried, and so were my friends. 

She began using drugs hard, moving straight from the sneaking-cigarettes-in-the-bathroom phase to sniffing coke and losing her virginity, then onto date rape in the backseat of one of our friend's car while she watched, a friend who'd already been to rehab and back by sixteen. They started getting shipped off to the relatives, those with out-of-state and -country grandparents, or (in the worst cases like Molly's) institutions way upstate, supposedly out of harm's way. I knew it was bad when she threw me under the bus with her mom for the minor infraction of pot smoking, which is about all I had done in comparison to my deflowered addict classmates, except they hid how bad it was for them from me, to use my younger inexperience as much-needed leverage in their savage working class households. Our toeholds on middle-class respectability were very fragile new ones at that. Any one of us could go back down at any time, and my less respectable friends would much rather it was me than them. 

She became one of the first people in my circle to honestly betray me, which she never apologized for, because I never saw her again after her coke addiction and promiscuity came to light. It had absolutely nothing to do with me because I wasn't around her anymore, after she successfully back-stabbed me several times. She went down on her own, like the genuinely addicted and insane typically do. One of the last times I ever saw her socially was during her tentative school attendance after her bouts with divorce and chicken pox, trying to recover her health in the newly shark-infested waters of her parents broken marriage. Like a lot of my classmates, she didn't make it out of their madness, because like most seriously sick people, her first brush with real madness came on the heels of her puberty, and she never fully regained her footing with the healthy life. I went over to her house after school, to see if she would apologize to my face for taking the hits from her mom for my supposed "fast life" of sex and drugs; me at fifteen and never been kissed, watching from the sidelines of their depression. I wanted to see how she was doing, not that she actually cared about me anymore, in the face of her much larger adult woes. 

She sat on the floor of her bedroom in a corner, rocking back and forth, asking me if I liked Doug McClean's* song "American Pie" (I didn't, and much like everything else about most of my hometown classmates, my taste in great music surpassed theirs at a much earlier age than normal, too), as she picked up the needle from her plastic kiddie 45 record player, playing the song over and over again, asking me if I heard the strange messages that she swore she heard, too. I couldn't follow her into madness during my teenage years. 
I certainly can't do it now, but I can tell you all about a young Irish/German girl named MollyAnn Dougherty who left our town seeking a cure and never returned, because that's exactly what I promised my friends I would for them when I got to the top: I would tell everyone about them, about what happened to them in their very abusive homes, so that we could break the cycle forever. This one's for you, kid.

American Pie

Don McLean

A long long time ago
I can still remember how
That music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they'd be happy for a while

But February made me shiver
With every paper I'd deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn't take one more step

I can't remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
Something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
So

Bye, bye Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry
And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye
Singin' this'll be the day that I die
This'll be the day that I die

Did you write the book of love
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
Do you believe in rock and roll?
Can music… Full lyrics on Google Play

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

Toto

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toto_%28Oz%29

I didn't know Charles at Oneonta, but like any lifelong "famous" person, he sure knew me. It's an odd sort of fame, because it means that everyone around me is talking about me behind my back, leaving me out in the cold (socially-speaking), which is a form of abuse in of itself, with or without the backstabbing gossip. It's fucked up, but so are people, and since I live a life in the public eye, I have no choice. I don't like it, and I don't control it. People swirl around me, like I'm the calm cool eye in the center of their tornado-like life, which is absolutely true. I don't participate or enable their dysfunctions, but there they are for me to see right on their surface, in full view. It makes disordered people pull way back from me, which is great for me because it means that I telegraph my intentions clearly. I prefer honesty: it's a deep part of my faith, and like my father, I do not suffer fools easily, just like our Lord and Savior did not during His Time on Earth. It's like being the "King of Lose" that's also the ultimate winning strategy; a baffling combination of human and super to the ill and healthy alike.

Of course, I'm a woman, and just not another Catholic saint (we have more than enough martyrs in the world, real and imagined), although I am those, too. But sometimes, just like any other working class student at a state school, I want to forget the cares of the day and have a good time. Charles knew some of my good friends, but because of my status, a lot of people connected to our various social groups knew me without actually being good friends with me. Charles supposedly had a girlfriend before he left college for good, but I only knew him as an "out" gay man back in the city, and a rather promiscuous one at that. I'm glad that I didn't know him at O-Town, because after a few beers, I would have pulled the poor girl who thought he was just "really nice" aside, to tell her away from the main group at the party that he was obviously gay, because I'm like that. I tell people the truth, unless there's some deep strategy at play that risks life or death, but you don't want to know about that right now.

Suffice to say, after I moved to Brooklyn to work in companies as their apprentice, my friends connected to the city began hanging out together again, as we adjusted to this form of "adult" living. Charles was part of one of my cliques from school, and just like before, I didn't really know him that well. He was just there, drinking and smoking like the rest of us, working low-paying "artsy" jobs while trying to stay afloat, just like we were. He was a gay man raised by a hip single mom from the 'hood who decided she had enough "snap" in her to cut out the deadbeat dad and go it alone. I admired that, as much as I knew all the pratfalls of his life. It ain't easy, yo. We got on fine, until he pulled me in for a closer look. Then it started poppin' off badly.

First, my crazy friend from RISD felt alone in "The Big Apple", so in retaliation for this turn-around she felt happened between Providence and New York, places where she thought she was some hot-shot and I was not, this current series of events was most unwelcome. She set at sabotaging a group of friends by sleeping with one of my college "besties" from state, who I just happened to have set up with another good friend of mine before leaving for art school. After she torpedoed that crew (which was fine with me, because they were quickly figuring out that I wasn't some hard luck case that they pretended I was back then, out of ignorance and spite), she went wacky with Charles, another guy who felt that he was on the fringes of our clique, looking in from the outside. In truth, none of them knew me all that well, they just flattered themselves into thinking so, so as to have access to my crowd of gifted beautiful people they felt were ripe for the picking.

It was fine as long as everyone got along, but in the fierce competition of city life, wanna-be's began dropping like flies around us if I didn't consistently support them in whatever they felt I should, like hooking up indiscriminately with people I cared about, and then whining about how hard life was while ignoring my obvious strengths, in desperate bids to regain some mythical upper hand over me that never really existed, and then resuming their plots against me for their continued exposure to me. Once I pushed Lisa out of the nest, she hooked up with Charles as his "Fag Hag", so she could maintain the illusion of being a real big-time "fashion designer", when in reality, she was struggling to make it like any one of us. The privileges were just gone without her realizing I had removed the braces that held her up. 

She and Charles were disastrous together. After a few months as roommates, vicious baby wars broke out between them, so bad that she wished AIDS on him for having the audacity to attract men she felt she deserved, which is the enemy to every single crazy "art fag" I've ever met. She worked on these boring conversions of adamant gay men like she was some type of goddess, when they really just wanted to party and have fun, occasionally stopping to kiss the girl they danced with at some club or party. It was harmless fun, but she acted like his lovers were some kind of direct attack on her fragile ego, which curdled into a hatred that continues to this day. I was with one of my good friends from school at that point in time, and he and I were trying to make our own way out in the world. We didn't need her around to cause the bitchy conflicts she thrived on, like her needy insecurities that were a bottomless dark pit no one wanted to fall into.

She left for the "Left Coast" because she isn't good enough to make it in New York, and by the time me and my crew finished with her, she knew it. Charles ripped her apart like she was his personal chew toy, which is exactly what she made herself into so she could play the Art Fag game to the hilt. They had used each other for money and convenience, as superficial as any of the many rejected sweater designs at the one and only fashion company she has ever worked at, because she's actually a knitter and a seamstress, and not an actual designer. Needless, we don't stay in touch. Why? She couldn't handle the truth then. I suspect not much has changed in her life since then.

I hooked up with Charles again while I was dating a fellow RISD grad I met at an alumni party. We were in Park Slope, walking around and enjoying the summertime weather, when we happened to pass the bar and restaurant that is right next to Charles' place in the 'hood, with him ensconced at an outdoor picnic table of choice, firmly implanted there as their regular customer. We were excited to see each other, and Charles was already deep in the cups with free-flowing pitchers of Sangria that we began ordering in triple while catching up, enjoying each other's renewed acquaintance. He loved my recent summer fling because he swore he was gay, too, which we laughed about it when my new beau got up to use the restroom. RISD guys can skew as "gay" easily sometimes, especially when a certain someone I was dating then told me that his best friend is bisexual, hence the gayish lisp that often marks the more effeminate type of man.

My guy swore to Charles that he wasn't gay, and we all went back to his apartment next door to the bar to "get high", something me and my RISD friend laughed about, because it was like being in college for us; that's how rare pot smoking had become to us out in the adult world where we thrived and excelled. After my summer romance ended, I didn't see Charles that much anymore, even though he was a block away from my apartment at that time. He was still embroiled in these weird baby wars that he tried to involve me in, with little success. Of course, he had a partner of ten years that he wanted to leave, thinking of using me and my apartment as his launching pad for this supposed upcoming "divorce" in their civil war, but as a woman in my 40s who had beaten most of her demons on her own, I was in no mood to enable a guy who still read comic books high, while occasionally working as a massage therapist out of his apartment, in between trips funded by his rich white boyfriend, and frequent hits off a burning joint.

It was way too "hippie dippie" for me, and I'd never been a hippie, anyway. I was way too working class, but like most kids back then who didn't actually know me, they saw tiny glimpses of me through a smokey haze of their drug use and ineptitude, which typically didn't reach all the way to me personally, so that's how I took it years later, too. One of the last times I saw him was during a rare weekday when I wasn't working at the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, having a "girlfriend's brunch" while sitting outside at a Bar Toto table, enjoying in the warm October weather. At the time, I knew I'd avoid getting pulled into his messy teenage-like affairs, so I simply enjoyed what little time he and I had left during this century's acquaintance with each other; not as real adult support, but a fun diversion nonetheless.

We talked about the upcoming Halloween holiday, which he accused of being racist and not gay enough. There happened to be a gay couple sitting within ear shot at the table next to us who heard our conversation (the service was slow and really bad), so we chatted about his feeling that there are a lack of gay black superheroes for him to dress up as. I quickly lost interest in the game, preferring to whisper back the under-breath responses that the pretty blond guy at the next table came up with, while his partner was using the restroom. I had tapped out from this kind of teenage life many years ago, and after that brunch, we both knew it, instead of just me. He still had a lot of growing up left to do, like becoming financially independent and on his own, with a thriving career that he tended to by himself.

Before we parted ways (for good?), we recited a list of what we thought could be gay superheroes, me playing the role of "Dorothy" to his "Toto" as part of the supporting role he had in my life, before circumstances put me back in the whirlwind of change that he never had the guts for, for many really good and really messed-up reasons that mark the Gen X'ers who raised themselves, for better or worse. We finally settled on an obscure character from M. Night Shyamalan's movie "Unbreakable" played by Samuel L. Jackson; a character who may or may not be "gay", obviously black, and obviously super-heroed, but just not as good as the everyman played by Bruce Willis, as the relatively unknown character "Elijah Price", an obscure reference that suited his geekish boyish bent towards comic book life with storybook endings. I hope it suited you well, Charles, as the temporary "Boy Wonder" to the forces of my life that were too big for him to handle. Fair thee well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unbreakable_%28film%29

Michelle the Hat

Like I mentioned yesterday, I don't have the time or the space to be a voracious book reader these days, though for many time periods in my life, it was my almost my sole domain, so much so, that it formed the basis for my scholarship, vocation, and religious worship. Occasionally I read other people's works, though not so much these days, with a few exceptions like "Twelve Years a Slave" and my long-term appreciation of Stephen King, whether or not I've read his most recent works. It's like being a U2 fan even if you miss the lavish stadium shows, or you hate their latest album because it sucks: you're still a fan, just not of that, or while you're working during your most creatively productive times. I didn't watch t.v. during most of the 90s, when I was in school and working hard. I've had cable t.v. in the past, but not right now. It's like phases of the moon that I pass through, noticed or not.

When King dropped his follow-up to "The Shining" (his period that I read the most, because I was a house-bound kid riding out childhood with one of my favorite Mainers and modern practitioners of New England Gothic), I knew I was going to read it at some point, life and work distractions be damned. It's like candy for me, and the hardcover edition jacket was a fucking bloody mess that immediately caught my eye on the shelf, which makes me love/hate book cover design all over again. I checked it out, and reading it was like trying on an old jacket of mine that'd been hanging in the back of my mother's closet for years that I forgot about, but recently rediscovered on a visit to find that it still fits me like a glove. It went down smooth, like greatly aged Irish whiskey on the rocks, drunk on a chilly autumn night in a certain Celtic-inspired hamlet with lots of misty fog from the river winding through it periodically. I inhaled it like I lived it, which I do.

And so I know really great life analogies when I read them, because I live life like a crazy Yankee who's a lot like the heroes of his horror stories, in my very own version of a funky New England "Halloweentown" that's always atmospheric and a little spooky, like the colorful fall leaves that are falling down around the old gravestones marking our distant and oft-forgotten Dutch, French, Indian ancestors. They're there, whether we recognize it of not. Denizens lurking around the edges of our lives are like that, too, like the wacky patrons who come here to the library because they have nothing else to do and nowhere else to go. They're not like me at all, except for the very vague connection that we may or may not be sitting amongst the stacks at the same time, and that's exactly who "Michelle the Hat" is to me.

She's like a rotten character from some other writer's book life, because she has absolutely nothing to do with me, besides that fact that she and I may (or may not) be in Rockland County and alive at approximately the same time. I knew her as soon as I saw her (and smelled her), just as I knew that she would force a conversation with me, because she's the kind of ugly dyke on welfare who knows me and my work but stubbornly refuses to acknowledge it to my face, because she's a rotten fucking bitch. She purposefully stalks women in town by memorizing their daily schedules, and then acts on that information aggressively, much like the obnoxious odor always around her of rotting teeth and early death. 

She's disgusting to look at and she knows it, that's why she forces herself on us, like that fucked up and rather nondescript co-worker who smells badly on purpose just to ruin your day: she's another petty, vicious, gross-out artist among many, with nothing better to do than be the kind of annoying fucking bitch you want to go away or just die off already, since she's hellbent on doing that for a living, in lieu of an actual job or any real purpose in life. So, when I read about the lead bitch in "Doctor Sleep" who kills off humans by feeding off their souls, like the local toxic welfare cases around town who fucking hate us but lurk around us anyway, I already knew Stephen King's character called "Rose the Hat" (infamous in her ghoulish circle for wearing a man's old top-hat like a circus ringleader, and for sleeping with both men and women indiscriminately, because she'll take whatever life form she can get), because I knew it was the just the right fit for this fucking evil bitch at my local library.

And sure enough, she hits on men, women, and children alike, like the desperate foul-smelling ghoul seeking an early death she really is: not exactly human, but here among us somehow anyway, lingering like the backed-up sewer smell from the last big Nor'easter that ran through town, overfilling the drains and flooding the streets with the half-rotten corpses of every animal that died in the recent flood. On one particular afternoon, she left behind the ugly black Beatles cap that she wears every day to cover up her fat, round, misshapen head, and if I could bottle what "evil" smells like, that would be it. I smelled her hat before I saw it, and it was so aggressively bad, I used a pencil to push it behind a computer sign for patrons a few computers away, after quickly nudging it further and further away from me for a few lines or so before that final push with a big holding breath.

On another day, one of the other homeless disordered women who frequents here (a much nicer person than Michelle, actually), finally turned to her while I was working to tell her that I wasn't the only person offended by her deliberately bad smell; she's also offensive to other humans and lifeforms, too, so whatever performance piece she thought she was doing solely for me was failing badly. The odor that permeates everything around her is like a combination of really bad halitosis (she has rotten teeth that turned brown many years ago), toxic diarrhea from an old unchanged diaper, and the stank from a slowly rotting corpse in the sun, of a human being who ate only the worst junk food before she got cancer and died in her early 30s.

It was so bad that after I got home from the library, I could still smell it on me. I brushed my hair several times to get rid of it, scenting my brush with hairspray first and then a few spritzes of perfume....to no avail. I changed my clothes, put on some more deodorant, sprayed on some more scent, and then brushed my teeth again. Her rotten odor lingered like the bad taste in my mouth, finally forcing me to take a really long bath to wash it out of my hair through several good rinsings in mid-afternoon, a habit I am not accustomed to, because I bathe every morning (barring extreme circumstances or rarely occurring events), and I brush my teeth after every meal. Even when I smoked, all my friends told me that they thought I was a non-smoker (which I genuinely always felt myself to be), because I never had the really foul smell of a typically addicted chain-smoker attached to me, again, because I managed it like I tend to all the other aspects of my life.

I used to wash my hands after smoking outside in fresh air (with no children around to breathe in my second-hand smoke), and I was also a frequent user of breath mints and/or mouthwash to obscure the taste of cigarette smoke some more. I've also always burned either candles and incense, too, as well as performing regular seasonal house cleanings, because I like to have healthy habits even at my lowest points, and so I drew no other conclusion than the obvious one, dear readers: "Michelle the Hat" is pure evil, albeit of the boring foul kind that creeps around the dark corners of your hometown, like a certain infamously terrifying clown from classic horror fan fiction; a thing that hunted children by lurking in the darkness and murk of your town sewers. Beware this Halloween of the monsters you might already know, not the ones you don't. It's evil enough.

The Acne Artist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29

Believe it or not (and since this is me, you should totally believe me, but if not, there's tons of actual documentation to back up my claims), book publishing attracts a lot of groupies. Educated (for the most part), highly technical groupies, but add-ons nonetheless. They're the type of people hooked on reading, which is usually a bad thing for other types of addiction, but in this case it creates someone who is uniquely over-educated and typically smarter than you, the average person. As James Baldwin once famously said, he didn't mind being born poor, black, and gay because he was a very gifted New Yorker who could work the odds against him. He felt blessed, and he felt that if public school neglected him, he would read every book in the local public library, which would make him very well-educated, and he was right: 

“It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”― James Baldwin

 

Readers form a synergy between the living and the past that cannot be broken, a rare type of erudition that eludes other types of education out there in the real world. It's been one of the biggest blessings of my life, but not the most compulsive one, because I'm not a compulsive addict. A friendly clerk here at my local library and I like to chat when I check out DVD's, most oftentimes movies, because I don't have cable t.v., nor do I go to the cinema very much. She sees me here and now, which led her to ask me, one of the most educated and well-read people on the planet, if "I ever read" yesterday (too funny), because she doesn't see me do it right underneath her nose. Obviously, right now I am busy writing to you all, which cuts into my other endeavors.

I went on to explain to her that there are people who only know me as a rock star book cover designer, because that was my trade for years. There are other people who wonder why I don't illustrate, photograph, and/or show my fine art in galleries anymore, because I am obviously busy being a publisher who utlizies all of those skills daily to publish for all of you, but compulsive people with learning disorders don't easily understand that. They simply don't get how I could, say, be at one time in my past, one of the best female Mixed Martial Artists in the world (and the only one in my age group), who gradually stopped training because of injury, a lack of time, and available funds, but that's exactly what happened with me. My parents are still baffled that I wasn't a professional ballerina, because I could have done that for living, too.

No, gifted people suffer from the same life conditions as you do, just with way less time: there's not a lot of it for extremely talented people with genius level IQ's, which means you don't know how many different facets I have, which is also why I don't run out of things to write about, speak to you about, or make art about...ever. There's just a lot more of you than me. I am just one, as you are many. Book publishing is the same as the general public, which was the market I designed for: "Adult Trade" (although I designed for other markets, too), items of general interest for the general public, which means I know just about everything. It's weird, but it's a function of my trade. I've read every type of book there is several times over, as well those in my head that I haven't made, yet, which means you are my forever audience.

We do have specialists within our workflow as a production queue with some very dull technical aspects, so badly repetitive to a mind like mine that I transcend lower level jobs in a year or less, which is also typical for me: to catapult past people who have been laboring for years under just one of two types of conditions in the workplace. It's excruciating for me to be around them as I must be for them, although I cross through their viciously defended territories often enough to make it very uncomfortable for someone who is basically a human typewriter in this modern age. It's not a good fit, but I already knew that, it's just that I don't have the time to school each and every one of you individually, that's what I write it down here: for reference's sake. 

Same thing as my attention-getting design work at some commercial business: I'm there to do that specific trade (which encompasses more skill sets than you'll ever have), but obviously I don't have time to show you all of my G-d-given gifts, which makes me seem almost like divinity to the people who worship at the altar of book-making: I am their "Great One", The Maestro who always gets it right, even if you don't get it at the time. They publish my supposed "rejections" for years afterwards, too, which makes me seem like some magical golden goose who keeps producing even after my physical presence has long gone from their doorways. It's unnerving, and that's my life: to outlast all of you, as a final legacy that's my gift to the world.

It's created some absolutely havoc-wreaking dynamics on what can be a compulsive response to life, if you have disordered people manning the lead positions at the top who hate change like they can't see the germs on their clothes. In the industry, we have staffers who do one small chunk of the book process over and over again, without ever gaining any type of perspective or overview about the entire life-cycle of a book from concept to bound book, which often makes me the only one sitting at your round table meeting who knows what the fuck is going on, above and beyond your wonky V.P. widget of a human being, which is why the best of us "graduate" from a set industry to strike out on our own, which is why you are also now reading me, instead of the other way around. Oh, I've checked out a few books here, but it's really only if you can out-write or out-think me, which is highly improbable.

Occasionally we get "art fags" so disordered that they run screaming from our industry like we just set them on fire, which we have; a horrible state of affairs if your mind is already more jumbled than you can sort out. Making books is somewhat like making a really good movie: there's "money people" who produce, accountants who keep track of the books, managers who tend to the budget, and then there's the content-makers and content-generators at the top of the pyramid that include me, the editor, and our publisher, with or without some rich white "ladies who lunch" on the board joining us in meetings against our will because they're bored, thus forcing their boring presence upon skillful people like us, because we're truly exciting to be around.

We have a whole crew of onlookers we carry financially on the backs of our labors: secretaries, guys working the mail-room, that cool dude from IT...you get my point. They see a tiny portion of our labor, because that's what we have time for. You: fix my computer, NOW. You: how much time do we have in the schedule? None? Ah, that's what I thought, and yeah, no money either. That's how it goes at the top; it just gets harder and harder to perform under ever-changing heights of extremes that you can't handle, which leads to freak-outs that are so weird, I have to tell you about them. We attract kooks like magnets, ones who seek to impress others with their "creative"-ish jobs that drive them horribly mad because they can't do it.

BinBin was one such creature. Because she can't hack a real artistic life, she designs the same thing day after day after day, and when she finally complains about the monotony, someone like me tosses her a cover off the back-list with a tiny print run of no real consequence for her to design, which she fails at abysmally, thus sending her right back to the bottom of the workflow where she belongs. Oh, she hates us as much as she hates herself, and that's the weirdest part: BinBin telegraphed her Chinese hatred of the "White Man's" English language art-form by deliberately rubbing Vaseline all over face every evening before passing out in a drunk stupor, because she used her pus-filled acne to torture us with at face-to-face meetings, in the final irony of it. She isn't a real artist. No, her real artistry is using her body as a performance piece to hurt the people around her, because her father is an alcoholic who's a better artist than her as a professional musician, and she can't fucking handle that.

So, instead of working towards getting better, she decided to freak us all out by grossing us out, and that is her real genre: that of a gross-out artist, like the kid in your class who makes "boogie art" from his picked nose, or graffiti on the desk with his leftover chewing gum. It's offensive, but so what? There was nothing else to her besides the acne that she can or cannot clean up according to her not-so-very-hidden agenda tied to her worsening emotional state from her own incompetence and arrogance. Instead, she chose to spend her days playing weird head games with her hard-working co-workers, people who deeply love the printed word and the romantic poetry of the English language. She thanked us for allowing her to apprentice in our great trade by passing around horrible nude photos of herself through the company's in-house email network (stupid, too, like those ten "certificate" programs she has listed on her resume, with not one real art or design school degree), mugging her gross face at all of our productive meetings as a spite for her lack.

Don't forget history, people. Hitler was a failed artist before he became the anti-Christ, not the other way around. Be warned during this time of transition about the real horrors that exist in the world, while ignoring the fake distractions around you that mean nothing. The next great evil might just be the person sitting next to you who processes the same dull paperwork every day, in this rich character study about the banality of evil that's from me to you during this wicked Halloween season. Beware the techno-geek who seeks to harm you through your screen, because I hear what she has is catching....boo at you!

http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/art.htm

Static

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise_%28video%29

In every human family there are unhealthy people, and then there's me. In contrast to my sick family members, I stand out like there's a permanent spotlight shining down upon my head at all times, which there kind of is. I can't help it. I notice things like people, places, and, well, the things that are around me, which is unnerving to a lot of people with serious mental disorders. After the state psychiatric institutions were deregulated in the late 70s, herds of brain disordered people have littered our neighborhoods like the societal indigents they are, without ever choosing to be that. I feel sympathy for them, but not much, because when I was growing up, me and my friends were terrorized by people too fucking sick to care about us, with absolutely nothing to replace those scary old psychiatric wards of yore, except the anger of an entire generation of children who served as the "X" marking the spot where healthy parents should be. We had none.

And so we began a lifelong crusade of speaking about our lives openly: first to one another, and then to a wider audience in the real world, as wild and different as the frightened and totally unmedicated people we were forced to spend somewhat intimate company with at family gatherings, not that seriously sick people can handle normal human relationships, like, say, that of greeting your cousin in an appropriate manner. Instead of recognition or awareness, we got weird kids who stood facing empty corners, or they sat staring into space for hours while stuffing their faces with food, faces twisted into grotesque expressions that are the opposite of genuine hunger, like Gorgons from ancient mythologies past. Our job was to ignore them as best as we could, while normalizing the oddball behavior of the mentally ill among us, lest they notice our healthily flushed cheeks fresh from outdoor exercise, or our bright eyes that shine from good eating.

It was what we knew how to do: pretend that our cousins were perfectly fine, even when it was obvious that they weren't, but what else could we do? Put them away? My mom and dad were friggin' nuts, but they were also brilliant at times, too. Yeah, my paternal cousin from Brooklyn was a lying thieving drunk, but he's also one of the quickest, sharpest, funniest comedians I've ever met in my life. They were not all bad, certainly not horrible enough to toss into some prison-like hellhole of a Halloween haunted house, like those abandoned buildings that litter this country's poor history with our collective psychological past. Some people have disorders they can manage with professional help on an outpatient basis and some can't, but what we all agreed upon was that prison is no place for people with schizo-affective disorders. They need reliable adult supervision and affordable medicine, but if you've ever tried to reason with a hallucinating schizophrenic on a ten day bender, you know how bad other people's psychoses can be, especially if you aren't the knife-wielding maniac.

So that's what we did; we tried to lives our lives alongside seriously under-treated patients because there was no alternative to the horrors of the penal institutional system, until today. My cousin John A. was so bad, though, that there was no amount of explaining we could do to cover for him. We told friends and distant relatives visiting from out-of-town that he was merely "autistic", when that was clearly not the case, but what else could we do? My uncle barely managed on his own, and his ex-wife is an alcoholic nurse. There wasn't anyone to turn to. My uncle has successfully raised two completely abnormal and utterly dysfunctional adults who cannot pass as normal in society, leaving us with the burden of coping with them as best as we can, while they take and take and take from us without ever giving back, creating a deficit so brutally one-sided, that each and every one of us in my immediate family have borne the brunt of their irresponsibility.

My uncle has a very small business that's staffed with one lifelong employee, a man so sick, he has completely filled up his apartment with stuff like any decent hoarder would, living out of my uncle's office space by taking showers where he can and eating off of a hot plate, and this is what passes for "legal counsel" in my mother's family. This, after he almost bankrupted my grandparents so he could not work any job while attending lengthy law school exams and numerous tries at the Bar Exam, living at home like my mom's youngest sister has all of her life, until both of my grandparents passed. My cousin spent hours at our house in New City flicking light switches on and off, until we worried he would break them. Ditto with the microwave and the doorbells. And just like horror movies of the day, he would stare for hours at the t.v. set in the basement. At what, we had no idea, until one afternoon when we were emboldened by a group of us, we asked him: "Hey! What are you staring at?"

Do you know what he told us? He told us that was listening to the voices coming out of the set that spoke to him in between the static. Fuck...that would be why he had answered "nothing" in a flat monotone to our previous lone inquiries, because he's clever enough to know what not to say to us, as if someone had coached him about "passing" under keen observation. And do you know what he does today, readers? He works for the U.S. Department of Taxation, otherwise known as "The IRS". Yep, he compulsively fills out numeric data day after soul-crushing day, until his supervisors finally gave him another column of numbers to fill in, after slowly transitioning from part time to full time work over the years, with lots of great benefits that we all pay for as U.S. citizens. He does the job that a mindless computer can do better every day of the week, and he does it with your life and taxes on the line . How's that for a case of the Halloween "Heebie Jeebies"?

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heebie-jeebies_%28idiom%29