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| Homemade, yo! This is me and my making, kids. Try it at home. |
People from the 'hood are all crazy, which is the point. Hate someone different than you? Disenfranchise them through systemic abuses that are also lawful, and then push them to the margins to suffer sight unseen, where they will languish until the next generation also has hurt encoded within their DNA, like a ticking time bomb. It's certainly one of the motives behind every mass genocide perpetrated throughout human history; to deliver wrongs unto you and your children that they won't recover from, except for one minor detail. We know about it, with the "we" being you and me and anyone else reading this, hip to the game that plays out between good and evil every day, on this chessboard that is life itself.
So, while the t.v. media machine churned out canned surprise, showy tongue-clucking, and a false show of horror at some well-known sandwich shills' public downfall, I chuckled wryly to myself as I watched what passes for news these days, having been down this road before. I had a friend who nervously spit out common sayings as a means of coping with stress, or when she couldn't quite figure out solutions to the problem at hand, and that was this: where there's smoke, there's fire. It's kinda like the "from the frying pan into the fire", which is also the name of a tugboat restaurant called "The Frying Pan" that's parked in New York's Hudson River. That was one of the last times I saw my poorly beleaguered friend.
You see, when I was still a junior designer in New York, I worked with a twitchy Italian-American woman who has a constant expression of wide-eyed tension on her face at all times, accurately reflecting her nervously compulsive state of being. She could do the same task twenty million times, but she was also co-dependent on the people around her to lean on when she gave out (as long as she paid them to be her allies and friends), when they were really supposed to be co-workers and employees. She was hooked on shopping (made worse by her studios' location in a building known for wholesalers who had seasonal sample sales all the time), driving her to create fake acts of kindness ("Let's close the studio and shop!"), when we really were just recycling our pay out of one pocket and into another.
I didn't really mind the break from my labors that were sometimes challenging but often somewhat mindless (I was still paying my dues in the industry) plus I'm no addict, but her longtime assistant fared worse under her strict guidelines, for living off of what she considered "her" dime: Carrie was overweight, divorced, and living with her mother, though when I was there, she was recently spared her free "Pizza Fridays" because our boss was on a new diet, one that depended greatly on buying this company's kind of food. It was baffling, just like her heated and almost daily arguments with her second husband, a stressed-out Italian-American cop who was clearly part of her pattern. She didn't have any children, and by the freaked out way she had about her all the time, I knew better than to ask. She was a woman at that age when being barren can crack a fragile woman hard.
Because of her touchy mannerisms, I made her at first for a pampered, kept woman, but over the course of my freelance employ there (she couldn't afford to pay me health insurance but kept me on as part of her office staff for two years, which is now illegal to do in NYC), I found out that she was just like any other New Yorker struggling with a big dysfunctional family and living in a small cheap apartment in Mount Vernon, like the rest of us. It was weird, but given her odd eccentricities, it made total sense. Her arrogant sense of superiority hid obvious insecurities, with her rather tenuous hold on reality.
After a time, me and the woman who worked for her at her design firm asked her a direct question one afternoon, emboldened with knowing looks we gave each other as we turned our office chairs to her, because our computers faced the walls with our backs to one another, leaving the owner to be the only one who could see all three computers at the same time, and that was this: what exactly do you intend to do when you stop paying some company to feed you? How will you feed yourself? She shrugged it off lightly, playing busy with never-ending deadlines, brushing off our serious question with a pointedly dumb shrug, "I guess I'll just have to keep buying their food," which was our exact point to her: you need to buy their chemically laden food to stay "thin" because you can't do it on your own, despite her status at the time as a publishing expert with access to just about any type of information that existed on the planet.
Welcome to "AA" in this century, Carol! I'll see you later on, if you've indeed mastered food and nutrition, yet. I know I have. By the way, I know you scoped me out upon my return to New York City from out west, after I visited you openly in your office empty of employees, because your business went downhill when Vince's business dried up, and you were both coasting on back-list content created by a lot of other artists and designers, like me and Carrie. You thought you were spying on me during my visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral to light a candle but, my dear, I both heard and saw you there out of the corner of my eye, mumbling to yourself that I was still "too young" and "too pretty" for you to talk to anymore, because you felt that you didn't have any advantages over me anymore. Clever, girl. You never did.
