Charlie Brown Christmas Tree

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

One of my favorite "poverty stories" from my mom centered around my Norman Irish/French-Swiss (from Alsace-Lorraine) grandfather's Christmas Eve tippling. He "slaved like an African" as he used to say, underneath the ground in New York City's dirtiest environments, just to make sure other families were provided for, even while he worked to make up the difference to his own, as is customary among first generation immigrant families establishing a strong foothold in a new land, which is exactly what my ancestors have always done. I've always taken an enormous amount of pride from my previous generations accomplishments, and this charming lapse in my grandfather's customary tight rein upon his family freed me more than he could guess, though I suspect he knew the outlets that I needed, because he needed them, too. After all, he raised my mother.

You see, parents of seriously disordered family members (and children made parents before their time) need an extraordinary amount of strength to break through the addictions, compulsions, tics, and nervous disorders of the people they care for, in order to provide for them, but that doesn't mean they always appreciate it. My mom regularly panics when she's confronted with the severity of her illnesses, threatening the most serious hurt and abuses she feels she can deliver upon the heads of the very people who care for her the most. Like every high-performing person before me, the stress of caring for the sick and infirm is an extreme life condition to bear up under, one that's greatly relieved at times by the tempered mellowness of a good stiff drink, and an Irish one at that.

My grandfather kept a good bottle of strong Irish whiskey on hand at our house at all times, for those times when he needed relief from the very people who were most dependent upon him at the time of my growing up, which was my youngest aunt and grandmother. I always felt an enormous amount of empathy towards him, as he taught us in our home about the merits of a great crystal glass (also an Irish tradition), and the grace of a "good pour" to deliver the optimal amount of pleasure from a single glass of excellently-brewed malt savored in a hard-won peace, safely apart as we were at those times from the more wild extremes of our extended family. People like us, who are always in charge under penalty of death or serious hurt to a loved one for our slight lapses in their consistent care, learned early on to cherish the finer things in life like those that simple, well-done crafts provide for us.

It was no different for me. When I was forced by economic brutalities visited upon me through a careful network of systems I didn't design (hence the corrupt injustice of it all) to live with my mother for a time, 
I drained every drop of alcohol in her place. Even my mom's Italian relatives who have no real stomach or palate for drink took part in a relieving glass in the evening, needed as it was after a grueling day in the life of Diane. I found a stash of plastic-bottled whiskey my brother hid in the back of her pantry many years ago (and drained it dry with my mom's visiting cousin from Texas who always stays for free on her couch), an old weird bottle of homemade strawberry wine brought over years ago by an equally weird friend of hers (and never touched, because my mom and her siblings trained each other to covertly hide their compulsive addictions behind more superficially acceptable forms of release, like shopping and eating), and any other booze I could find, because life with the seriously sick is one hell of a ride.

So when my mom complained her faint little baby complaints about my grandfather's evening tippling bought with the scant extra he had leftover from a holiday paycheck that was spent all year in the planning of its expense carefully (just like I do, with every penny accounted for correctly in my tight household), doled out as it was among her and her siblings first, because they whined so much about this mythical "deprivation" of theirs that they suffered with, I admired the restraint and the courage that it took to channel all of his energy towards moving this family forward, even if it skipped a generation or two. So what if he got drunk off his holiday pay? What did any of them do around him (except for my loving grandmother) but bitch and moan about their phantom complaints brought on by the delusions of their own fevered minds, distorted as they were about his true priorities that were sound (in me), and have withstood the test of time.

So what if he only had enough leftover to buy the last Christmas tree on the lot, and often a small sparse one at that? When my mom and me and my middle brother recovered enough financially to become a family unit again, one of our first acts as a newly divorced family was to fly as a group to visit my violently out-of-place New York brother adrift in the blandly white Midwest, to celebrate Christmas together again as a family. We giggled as we gathered around his little apartment tree, happily surprised and pleased with ourselves for pulling off the impossible by becoming a family again, against all the odds in every book there is. That's what I think about when I think about my Christmases past: how incredibly lucky and blessed I am to be alive and with you all, in this miraculous century of miracles and light. 
Merry Christmas to you, in 2015. See you soon.

The Santa Con

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

Blackface is weird in every century, because stupid rich white people think they can get away with it. After all, if you're corrupt and you know it, who better to look down upon than a people notoriously kicked around by an entire culture designed to abuse them? We had to fight our nation's bloodiest war just to protect humans from treating other people like cattle, with a lot less respect than that at times. 

Sickness doesn't whack you in the face like a punch delivered expertly in a boxing ring. No, psychoses just creeps up on you, festering in those isolated pockets where such illness traditionally breeds: in the rural back-country, far from the modern civilized world, making it odder still that New Yorkers openly harbor such blatant prejudices against their own neighbors, as they have for generations. 

First, it starts out with that one Jewish kid in school envious about the many Christmas gifts the pretty blond shiska girl gets; you know, the one he fetishes over to the extreme, without ever doing her the human courtesy of greeting her properly, with normal eye contact and a wide open smile that says "hello" to you, before you hear it spoken aloud. Dehumanization is a necessary part of any disenfranchisement program, and the seemingly sophisticated provincial that New York breeds is a particularly dangerous kind at that.

The pseudo-intellectual cosmopolitan knows all about local theater (heavy on the musically-inclined Jewish crowd), or the most recent New Yorker op-ed commentaries (heavy on the Jewish liberal afraid of what lies west of the Hudson River, where those scary burly "bridge-and-tunnel" people live), but you'd be surprised that they're most often more afraid of the savvy native living in their midst, with a much wider and well-balanced view of the world that we live in. And so the ball rolls further downhill, away from what they think is their right as a hometown crowd in our fair city. First, the retail stores closed (no shopping), as do our gentile restaurants (no "Chicken Parmesan" on our holiday), and then before you know it, every store will be closed in honor of the birth of one very special Jewish boy.

Because even as cynical Hollywood cranks out nasty movies (hey there, Canadian "Jew-Fro") based on your Jewish attendance during our holy day, they forget that the sole focus of this day is the birth of a humble Jewish boy born destined to create one of the world's greatest faiths. Isn't it ironic that the sneering drunken holiday some Jewish people have created to blaspheme our holiday is the very same one born of their faith? So, the next time you think it's harmless to dress up like a slut and gorge yourself during our religious holy day (ooo, you're so "naughty"), because you mistakenly thought Christmas is about shopping and some big fat guy in a red suit, let me assure, it is not, and we're watching you very carefully.

For more on the real religious traditions tied to our traditional (and modest) forms of gift-giving, I invite you to explore the actual histories tied to our faith. For instance, did you know that the man known throughout Scandinavia as "Saint Nicholas" (taking his name from an earlier saint*, as is our naming tradition) earned his title by giving dowry gifts of money to the poor girls in town, so as to hasten their marriages**? Because that's the truth. I know! Soooo much better than the dumbly-dressed bar slut. OK, then check this one out. The North Star was said to have served as a guide to "The Three Wise Men"*** (who were kings) by guiding them across the winter sky to converge upon Jesus' birthday place in Bethlehem****, then a Jewish city? No?! They brought gifts of gold (gelt), frankincense, and myrrh, and today we still burn incense in church and at home, during certain rituals.

So come on in! Everyone's invited to celebrate this party. You haven't been left out in the cold, at all. You have the whole world at your feet through His Birthday (of Our Savior), through the gift of faith that is our annual message of peace to you. Now, put down that beer, you stupidly-dressed bar slut. Ain't nobody care about yo' ass, ho.

 

http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/home/ 

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

*         https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Nicholas
**       http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/three-impoverished-maidens/
***     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Magi
****   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bethlehem

Grand

http://www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org/if-you-love-somebody-grandparents-raising-kids/?gclid=CM3xoaOL5skCFc2RHwodBloIYg

Like every family out there in the real world, mine also struggle with mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, learning impairments, developmental disabilities, age, abuse, neglect, and sometimes extreme ethnic prejudices. My father's sister Marilyn was so challenged that she spawned (and then abandoned) two families, back-to-back. First was my cousin Brian, born to an Italian-American man I've never met, and then summarily dropped off at my paternal grandparents' door, without ever getting a "thank you" or one single, decent paycheck to cover his expenses, I'm sure. And why would she have done that, when she was proud to show off her white vinyl Go-Go boots instead of her own son, tucked away as they were under his bed in my grandparent's Queens apartment?

No, she was proud rather of being deemed "good looking" enough back in the day to dance for men for money, thus creating a generation of orphans we've yet to shake in this century. My "Grandpa Fred" made good money from his cab-driving by then (as the proud, hard-working owner of a medallion, an amazingly incredible feat given his poor, immigrant, Depression-Era roots), and so my cousin at least had my grandmother and him, a solid roof over his head, and my grandpa's really good food in his tummy, even though it still wasn't enough to conquer his drug addiction in the future.

I'm just glad that they were able to provide for him for a time, enough to be considered a real family, especially since my step-grandfather and grandmother never had kids of their own. What a blessing in disguise it must have been for them as an older couple! As bad as my father's family is with their notorious "disappearing acts", I'm extraordinarily proud of them and their loving giving to Brian, alone in the world without a father and mother as he was. At least he had them, and at least he has us. That's a lot more than many of our most beleaguered children around the world (and around the way) have.

We need to support our elders and grandparents who decide to adopt their children's children, whether from infirmity or neglect, as a way to stem the bleeding our sacred family's have been suffering under; this weight that we all need to bear as equally as we can. Thank you to my man Ernie Anastos (geez, stay positive, will ya?) and the wonderfully gentle Kathy Gibson for highlighting her parenting support platform for those grandparents who can adopt, so that all of our children may thrive to great success in the future. We need every hand we can take for this battle that we're in. Thank you! This one's for you today, fighting the good fight every single day you get 'em fed, dressed, and out the door to school. You're not alone anymore. We're here.

http://stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/back-to-school-picnic-2014.html

http://www.stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/back-to-school-picnic-2015.html

http://stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/mothers-day-luncheon-2014.html 

For the rest of you, you need to do this NOW. That means tech support for those elders in your community who have school-age children using computers and smartphones and tablets and laptops (standard in most school districts nowadays), free backpacks at the beginning of each and every school year that they have enrolled children, plus free pantries for food and toiletries. Ever look at a Social Security check? Yeah, make that work. Ladies, I know you feel me on this one.

The Doll's Wig

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

One of my parent's favorite party tricks is retelling their supposedly impoverished childhoods that never really bore up to reality, and how could it? All of my grandparent's provided for their children excellently (and their children's children) for well beyond their years, every one of them going on to college, with the exception of my dad's sister Marilyn, who became an unwed mother and proud Go-Go dancer. Not exactly stellar, but what did they expect? American assimilation was rough for our poorly educated great-grandparents who were "fresh off the boat", back in the days when it was a truly rough ride indeed. My grandparents coped with an economic depression so profound it's infamous worldwide, with parents who may or may not choose to work again, because they couldn't read, write, or speak English.

It made the mundane and middle-class financial deprivations of my parents seem ridiculous in comparison to them and us, which they are. My parents came off the big economic boom that war always seems to bring to winning societies, without them ever really confronting hunger, starvation, or death, except when they did stupidly reckless things with their lives, which they sometimes still do. They were (are) like children to us, and that's how I treat(ed) their woes: like the children of privilege that I know them to really be, because without my grandparents and me, they'd be dead, something they can admit to when they are feeling satisfied, generous, and well-fed, which is all the time.

And so it came as no surprise to me and my brothers when my parents always lined their pockets plushly to over-filling first, questing to fill needs that are much more psychologically-based than true-to-life, severe as their disabilities can be at times. They pout, throw tantrums, threaten, intimidate, harass; they do everything short of murder, and on some days, I could see them in both of those roles, too. My dad used to tell me brief stories about his "Greaser" adolescence in Brooklyn that ended when his best friend was electrocuted for murder, forcing my grandmother to ship him off to the Navy, like she'd sent her husband to war many years ago.

Next to my father's unmarried mother "living-in-sin" and a missing alcoholic for a dad, my mom must have felt performance pressure keenly. And so she mined her roots for scenes that she could use during their resource-based arguments, like two children fighting over a bag of candy. The unfortunate effect for us caught in the middle was always the same result, though: there was way less available for us, and that's exactly what happened as a result of my mom's poverty stories. She told us that they were so poor, that one year the only thing she got for Christmas was a doll's wig for her old doll, and that was it. She used it to justify her tight pocket for each and every year that we presented our Christmas wish lists.

Of course, she neglected to tell me that it was probably one of the finest wig's money could buy, from a store that my grandmother must have pinched pennies to please her bourgeois daughter with the unreasonably pretentious airs, but that was the price my grandparents paid for a fancy parochial school education. They figured it was worth the price if even one of their disordered kids could get a job after college, and it panned out, like all of my grandparents really good plans do, and just like mine do. After all, I learned from the best. 
Life for us is a world of plenty.

Bodega

Bill Clinton was considered the first "black" American president because he came from the lowbrow South (earning him the name "Bubba"), with a crazy-ignorant mama and an alcoholic brother who's in-and-out of jail, before, during, and after his Presidency. It was something that people like us from the 'hood could understand, with a huge sigh of relief. It certainly made a lot of sense to me as I entered the Ivy League, because I'd never met that many fucked-up rich white kids in my life. I wasn't "out" as Acadian, because I was close enough to Canada that a New Englander with an axe to grind could destroy me through bias against French-Canadians as the key to my college career ruination, which is exactly why my people were mass murdered centuries prior: for a supposedly shameful act of love between a European man and an Indian squaw with offspring so defying beautiful, that many of us are still hunted in envious sport.

Think I'm exaggerating? The Canadian government has just officially recognized the "ethnic cleansing" of Acadian Métis (or "Aboriginals", as they derisively insist in calling all natives  common to the Americas), let alone admit to the child abduction and rape that was a common practice for wealthy Europeans hoping to wipe out key witnesses to their crimes. It's not unlike the United State's checkered past with it's own native peoples, that a President like Barack Obama has been actively working to address with Sally Jewell, the Secretary for our Department of the Interior, by taking meetings with tribal elders to heal the hurts here, from way back when.

Instead, I stuck to what I thought were the relatively easy immigrant-bias experiences of my maternal Irish and Italian forefathers, but I was wrong on those accounts, too. I was attacked in an advanced photography class for daring to refer to me and my ConEd grandfather as "working class," by a British git who thought he could get away with it, and he was right. The teacher was a grad student I knew, who chose to smooth over my revelations with an "across the pond" type of cultural misappropriation that was grossly ignorant, preferring to refer to their welfare childhoods as much more severe in poverty and bias than anything we could have possibly have endured in New York City, paved with gold as the myths were.

They co-opted my conversation (which would have opened the door to further inquiry with the mostly New England student body present in that class) between the two of them; he as a poor boy from Mississippi with torn jeans he couldn't afford to fix (?), and he with council flats and a company coal-mining dad. Both were older than me, too, and so it was easy for them to swipe my background to the side successfully, as having the most hurts from the working class, and it certainly didn't end there.

In the tony Painting Department (I was in the relatively "working class" major of Illustration so that I could get a job after graduating which I did. I was also the first in my graduating class to obtain a full-time job with "health benefits", too! I also had 3-4 part-time jobs while attending RISD, in stark contrast to the po' white boys who were on scholarship just for singin' their song), and I was openly laughed at by the slightly dykey, arty, rich white lady with the short, mousy-brown haircut and the "John Lennon glasses" for daring to make a painting about my Irish great-grandfather's work on the iron and copper work around New York City. When I asked her why, she just huffed at me, "I don't know 'why'...it's just so...so...so...funny!", because she'd never seen a project like that before.

Me and another kid from New York (a rich Jewish Long Islander in school for film-making, but with a populist bent that was extremely unfavorable at the time) decided to prank her for being a delusional rich asshole with no sense of reality, but that's a story for another day. Suffice to say, my working class housemate Riddell helped me forge the copper frame for the piece, and I used copper wire to sew the denim to the frame as a canvas, direct references to his bridge-building and metal shop-work (he was a master craftsman who made a copper version of "The Last Supper" that still hangs in my mother's place, and which I cleaned myself many times, so as to carefully note the finesse and detail attached to it as being very finely done), as direct references to our "working class" history that couldn't be denied, and that was just the easy Irish stuff from a century ago. I could not have built with my current lexicon the full story of my people, built on the backs of murder, rape, and theft as they are.

I ran up against white bias and European prejudices all the time, in almost every critique I had in studio, or outside-of-class social encounters. Out as an "Indian"? Do you know what they did (do) to us?! It was a family secret that had no time during my tenure there, fraught as it was with all the above reasons I just noted, easily observed as they were by my friends and classmates. I barely made it out of there with my life, as a crime victim of robbery while working a job, and "blacklisted" by rich profs afraid of losing their tenure, as they lost their minds at our expense. You see, "The Ivory Tower" is only good as an edifice if you uphold their traditionally white WASPy values tied to lip-service and exclusion, not by extolling the real, true, expat rebellion with a long-storied past, as actual descendants of the "Daughters (and Sons) of the Revolution" like I am through my paternal grandmother's line (http://www.dar.org/). It was too much for their warped, privileged minds to bear.

It was in this way that I became infamous as the first openly "black" student at R.I.S.D., which I didn't really know at the time, because I always had three or four part-time jobs and a full studio schedule, which is unheard of among the plush upper crust set who struggle to read and write, like the illiterate cast-offs from wealthy families who were in the majority against me and my offensively real New York roots. I could get away with "ethnicity" if I did phony displays of African Dance (like my friend Riddell did), because the museum wanted African artifacts and a faux arty display would play well overseas with fancy donors, not with actually beleaguered native Americans hip to the game. Money came untied with that kind of awareness.

And so I found myself in a car ride with my punk rock housemate Sue and her weird hippie friend Ellie, who I naturally thought was a rich Jewish girl from Michigan, because she had all the superior airs typical of the boho "Trustafarian" set with no real talent, but who liked to spend time in academia as pretentious intellectuals. She never really liked me, open as I was about my ethnic roots (as much as I could get away with, alone and unsupported as I was), and it wasn't until many years later that I figured out the specifics as to why. I knew she hated "pretty girls" (not that I thought of myself, even as people openly gape and stare at me). I thought she was embarrassed because she and I had to take basic drawing class (with my mentor, Lenny Long), because we were really far behind the older and richer matriculated students.

It didn't bother me, especially since Lenny had gotten to me at my core (he's from New York), by giving me an infamous speech about not letting "them:" win by making me quit, and it worked because I got angry enough to channel it into energy I could use, like fighting does for me as a warrior), plus I also knew that I had the deck stacked incorrectly against me, through no fault of my own. So? Do the work, he said to me, and that's what I did. That's what real working class kids from New York do, but Ellie didn't know that. I knew she was a former forest ranger in Oregon during the Mt. Saint Helen explosion, alone like a lot of anti-social hippies are in a fire tower for many months on end. 

She had that typical awkwardness about her, often wearing the usual Birkenstock-with-socks hippie garb that marks the warm weather kind who does not cotton to our climate well, because they "winter" in warmer climes. She also had the type of curl that we call here on the East Coast a "frazzled-haired yenta" and her last name was "Leon", a new Jewish name that easily could've been anglicized years ago for the MidWest, from what might be the original Leonberg(er), like they used to do with newly-arrived immigrants to Ellis Island, which coincidentally was the photo essay my first photography teacher from S.U.N.Y. had been assigned to through a grant from New York State: to document the renovations of Ellis Island in New York. She also told me back then that I could get into R.I.S.D., if she got into Yale as an Italian-American. "You can do anything", she told me. Thank you for that.

We were on a beer outing that went comically awry one afternoon, for reasons that puzzled me for many years. As we drove up to a shady-looking joint, I immediately balked about going inside to get beer for our group. "Uh uh," I said, "I'm not going into one of those places." Ellie turned to me in the backseat, with her childishly barretted hair in plain metal clips, and the de rigeur makeup-less face that are necessary components for the rich hippie crowd, "What do you mean 'that kind of place?'" I knew I said something wrong, but I was only 21 and living outside of New York for the first time, unlike my housemate Sue and her friend Ellie, both women in their 30s on their 2nd, 3rd, and 4th careers and educations. "That's a bodega!", I giggled slightly like she was a dimwit, or she had deliberately set a trap for me, and it was the latter. "Yeah, a bodega.", she huffed impatiently back at me. Uh, okay. Poor thing. "Yeah! That's a Puerto-Rican joint in New York." She turned up her nose at me, turning slightly in direction without looking at me in the backseat of their car, "And what exactly are 'those types' of places?", like a sour-faced teacher calling on the retard kid who never knows the answer.

"You know!", at this point I was the exasperated one. Where's she from, yo? "A Puerto Rican grocery store!" She sat still, so I went on, "See those 'booty' posters in the window", and I pointed to the ass-shot beer posters typical for a Hispanic deli in the 'hood. "They always have those in the window". She huffed again, "They?"...uh, yeah..."THEY always have those?!", she continued, working up steam to make some unknown point, "I'll have you know that I'm a 'Catalan'!!" Me and my friend Sue from Boston waited for her to finish her sentence...yeah...and? So...? "Tsk", she tsked-tsked fussily, still in a huff. "I'll have you know I'm a Catalan Spaniard* from my father's line." Ohhhh! Whew! What a relief. That's it? Yeah, bitch. We know! You're a European white girl, esse. I laughed, took their money, got out the back of their car, and bought us all beer for our party back at the old house on Benefit Street.

Shit, that bitch just wanted us to know that she was better than us. Just another day at R.I.S.D. for me, and then I didn't really think about her unless I made contact with my former housemate, Sue. How come she never reconnected with the rest of our transfer group? And then, a couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Sue that finally cleared it all up for me. She was more than embarrassed by her time at R.I.S.D.; she was mortified. You see, Sue went to see Ellie in Michigan, her home state, and on that trip she finally learned her really shameful secret, the one that she really didn't want us to know about back then (besides some banal European history) and that's this: she's the daughter of a well-known and much more successful illustrator father that she could never compete with or keep up with, and that was why she picked on the one "negro" she felt she could safely get away with picking on: me. And she did get away with it, until today.

This one's for you today, Sue. Long may truth and freedom ring with a loud "Yanqui"** rebel yell! We know who we are, girl, and we are revolutionary. Keep on shining, my true punk-rock friend. We tore it up rough enough to scare 'em, didn't we? Yes, we did.

Kirk Lazarus: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropic_Thunder

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language
 ** https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yanqui

Swap

For years, my mom and her immediate family have been stuck in deeply ingrained patterns of dysfunction that are hard not to notice, though if they are openly observed and remarked upon, they freak out to prevent revelation, which is part of the abusive cycle they remain trapped in. It's heart-breaking to watch sometimes, because like children who want candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I know that their bad choices will only make them sicker through my continued neglect. And just like I know that all those pop-culture movies contributing to deliberately false ideas about real American life that we know aren't true (just like I know that people in India do not break out into Bollywood-type skits every time someone gets engaged, funny as that might in the entertainment world), I know that they argue with me because they fear committal to a state mental institution, like old horror movies filmed in black-and-white.

They don't realize that those abusive types of hospitals are a thing of the past, because they fear healthcare, too, just like my mother's youngest sister hides her irrational phobias over rain and storms, because she knows it's another symptom of her psychoses. It was in this manner that my mother and her family hid the worst of their sicknesses behind socially acceptable hobbies like cleaning and eating and shopping, because they provide easier cover than drinking and smoking, which they mistakenly believe are more open manifestations of mental illness and the stress that produces.

Of course, their weirder addictions simply made our households much more stressful to reveal to anyone outside of our family group (which was part of the point), forcing me and my Gen-X friends into old patterns of drinking and smoking to relieve the inner tension cause by their abusive patterns, which put us right back to where our Depression-Era grandparents lived: at hip, flapper-type bistros full of smoky jazz and fun, which was not at all what my mom and her sisters wanted. They can't smoke, or drink, or have fun easily, because their nervous tensions make them feel nauseous all the time, especially when they don't take their medications. 

My youngest aunt is so "pukesy-poo" (they make up cutesy names to hide the root cause of their anxieties), that as kids, we knew she'd get sick from sitting in a rocking chair that moved slightly (so we'd sneak up behind her to tilt the chair back-and-forth, making her squeal), or from hearing about someone vomiting (so we'd imitate puking sounds with our grandpa), or it might be that she simply she wasn't sipping from a straw the stomach-calming sodas that she's addicted to.

In was in this way that my mom's middle sister became a hardcore food addict, with an addiction so severe that she has to attend weekly group meetings and pay out big bucks to some unhealthy food company that "has to" feed her controlled portion-sizes of chemically-laden food that will surely kill her off someday soon, like my mom's Aspartame-addicted youngest sister. They haven't actually conquered anything in this world. If anything, their silent generation of "Do-Nothings" have created even worse patterns with harder addictions, like hoarding and binge eating, or simulating a "shopper's high" through a covertly athletic "runner's high", making it extremely difficult to diagnose and treat, which is also part of the point.

One year, my infamously large "Moose Dog" accompanied me to my mom's eating-disordered sisters' house in upstate Westchester with me, staying overnight in her basement on Christmas Day Eve, with the understanding that he and I would leave early the next morning for my mom's place in Rockland after staying the night, because I wanted access to her immediate back yard for bathroom runs that are easier when no else is around, like we did whilst in the country. She was fine with that, and so throughout the day, as other family stopped by, I went up-and-down the basement stairs to the rest of the house, periodically checking in on my still-young Malamaute.

At some point during the day, Ted had figured out how to open up sealed plastic containers to gorge himself sight unseen, because on a food run to the garage, my cousin (her son) was looking in the garage and then the basement room for something, while I held Ted's leash and looking on. He stuttered a bit at first while he looked for something his mom had asked for, because where some such holiday food had been stored were the missing Christmas cookies that my aunt and her "fat friends" (the women who join her in her periodic over-eating that's related to their disorders), trade with each other under the cloud cover of a traditional church cookie swap.

You see, Ted masterfully uncapped (without marring them) the tops of each container with Christmas cookies, eating every single one of them, and it was at least three large flat containers that can hold sheet-pan sized cakes. Hilarity ensued, as first my other cousin (her second son), and then my aunt joined us in the mysterious search for her cookie-swap cookies. We all laughed about it, as Ted reposed regally upon on the cool tile floor near the basement door, in a tellingly calm Zen-like fatness, well-satisfied with his holiday endeavors, unruffled as he was because he successfully masterminded this quest for food done on the sly, because winter is coming!! Feed me fat!! FAT!!!

But that's not why my cousins were laughing. They loved Teds' "taking one for the team", because each and every year my cousin's suffer with this gaggle of crazy females and their weird cookie obsession, because even more than that, they bake poorly on purpose to hurt one another with. Addicts don't eat food because it tastes good like we do. No, the point behind their cooking is to make the drug that they need to get high (taste, flavor, and skill aside), and that's exactly why my cousins will always remember one very special dog who ate all the food that sucked, forever putting him in their memory favorably, because your food addiction is no match for my dogs, ladies.  
You're not even as good as one of my animals, woman.

The Nest

Students are human beings, too. When I was in college, I often attended class hungry, or sick, or both, because I have disordered parents who sometimes struggle to understand food, clothing, and shelter as it applies to other people, even the very small ones who would have died if it wasn't for our naturally high abilities for adaptation and survival. I had to tell my father that I needed new shoes as a toddler (before my vocal chords were fully formed) by retrieving an old pair from my room and clapping them in front of his knees as he looked down at my scowling face, because he wanted to mock me for my childish inability to speak that I didn't control. It was that hard to breakthrough to them during their more seriously disordered states.

My dad liked to say that he didn't have real parents or role models, but that isn't true. My grandfather died from cirrhosis, but he was also a war hero. My grandmother lived with my step-grandfather, and before my father was married, he lived with them. In fact, my father has never lived on his own. He went from his mama's house to the Navy to his first marriage, and then right into his second one, though they lived together for years prior to that marriage. And when my single grandma was tight on cash (she worked most of her life as a nurse's aide), my father had his uncle in Brooklyn who gave him work through his successful grocery store, providing healthy fresh food for the entire extended family during their times of need.

After my grandmother met my grandfather (and he was that, because even if he wasn't my biological one, he certainly could have been as an Italian-American man), they lived off his great earnings as a cabbie, and he after he bought his own medallion (meaning everything he earned through his fares, he kept), they never really had to worry about money again. Boohoo, right? Same thing with my mother. My maternal grandparents paid for my mom's fancy, private, all-girls Catholic school AND college AND her wedding AND whatever else a young couple needed to establish themselves in residency, with young children in tow. My mom went from her parent's place to her marriage, and after my father left, me and my brothers took care of her (just like we do now), because my mom has never earned enough to support anyone other than herself, and we chip in with that, too.

In fact, I have never had the full support of my parents, a difference that was often made up by my grandparents and their successes, because my maternal grandparents moved up here to Rockland from the city soon after we did, making sure that those times when my mom forgot to pick me up from school (after waiting for an hour or so), I could call my grandfather to pick me up because he was successfully retired from ConEd, and my grandmother never drove, just like many city women of her time and age. Without that support system, I was told by more than one expert that me and my brothers would be dead, and I know that's true because my brothers had the exact same responses to their severe lapses in maturity and responsibility.

But what could my grandparents really do? They could adopt us, but my sick youngest aunt had to live with them full-time, disabled as she is. And then what? How could we all live off of one pension? Besides, we were brilliant and they knew it, so just like them with their disordered parents during "The Great Depression", we went to work. 
I have never attended school without working a job (or two or three or four), first with my child's worker permit obtained through the principal at Chestnut Grove Elementary (my older bros told me what to do, where to go, and how to get it), so I could earn with my brothers on their paper routes, and then at age 15 I officially went to work through my mother's signed consent at the Nanuet McDonald's. All of my work history is on public record through our national Social Security agency.

And so here we are. Unlike my parents, I earned all my way through, with or without them. At my S.U.N.Y.  school, I worked and took out a parental loan for my mother to make up the difference from the loss of my father's income (I still have the paper work related to that transaction), and I also had T.A.P., a tuition assistance program through the State of New York. While there, I worked as a library aide, and then back here in Rockland at the old Herman's World of Sporting Goods store in the original Nanuet Mall, when I wasn't attending school in Oneonta during the summer like I did one year (so I could transfer to R.I.S.D.), living with my then-boyfriend who took the same required classes. It was the same thing at RISD.

I worked at a pizza parlor, as a darkroom technician, and a teaching assistant in photography. In between those gigs, me and a housemate worked as house painters for faculty who went back to the city, because he and I stayed in Providence to earn extra credits just like I did in New York. In between food from the pizza place, I had to supplement with food from the school's store, which my father and his wife noticed, because they thought books and materials were the same thing as eating food. Same thing with my mom: she didn't know (because she blacks out and has memory-related psychotic episodes) that me and my best friend practically lived off ramen noodles and a hot plate, because we couldn't always afford food from the cafeteria.

It was so bad, some of my friends stole food from the grocery store, and when the worst of us got caught (Dave, you fucking drunk), his parents bailed him out like they always do, because he did it as a lark, while his friend's starved from impoverishment. If Karen and I were short one month, we'd let our friends drink in our dorm room (risking expulsion from campus), so we could return the cans to get food from the one grocery store in town, or, if we were tired and in need of some fun, we'd get pizza and beer from the Black Oak Tavern in town, the same place my boyfriend worked the door when he wasn't working as a doorman in the city over summers, while on break from school.

So, when I saw a school program for a college on Long Island that is a free pantry for students who need to eat and use toiletries (because college students are people, too), it really resonated with me. I have never ever had anyone provide those things for me free of charge.  
Not once. Not ever. G-d bless you!! And kids, you need to replicate this program on every college campus around the world, because hungry kids find it hard to pay attention in class. Trust me, I know that better than anyone. Give. That's the reason for this season, as they say. You need to give to get back in this world. You need to give.

http://nestncc.weebly.com/ 

High Anxiety

Compulsive patterns are hard to break. Just ask my mom. Like many women of her generation (pre-Baby Boomer and post-Gen X), she struggled to assimilate herself into a world not of her choosing. Underneath the burdens of her innate challenges, she tried to figure out who she was, without any of the guidance that we have now, thanks to the narcissistic angst of the modern "Special Needs" parent and their Autistic kids. Like them, questions about gender/identity are particularly difficult.

Imagine worrying over the very existence that you and I take for granted everyday, like: who you are attracted to and what do you do about it? They painstakingly work at the core of who they might be with a therapist over some of our most basic human instincts, like a learning-impaired child with dyslexia trying to assemble the puzzle pieces that words represent. Can you imagine that? 

No wonder the disordered reach out wrongly (now numbered as 5 out of 6 people, or 8 out of 10), seeking shelter from the storms that brew inside their heads. Lashing out feels better than trying to understand their garbled perceptions of human speech, because concepts need to be labored over later, when they feel like they can process our communications better, with the guidance of an expert who's researched brain disorders for many years.

It was in this way that I came to accept my mission of breaking through to my own mother's badly broken brain (and becoming an excellent mother way before my actual biologically appropriate time), stuttered and repetitive as it is. When she "argues" with me (and it really isn't arguing to me, because I'm in control while she is not, and she doesn't like that), it's to release the pent-up stress that is the result of her disorders and illnesses.

Even worse for my mom is the trap her education brings to her incorrect assumptions and improper responses, like: how can she have me as a brilliant daughter, when she's the one who studied science? She doesn't understand that genius is genetic and many-abled, because she feels her arrogance must be vigilantly guarded, lest the knowledge from all of her over-wrought degrees (that all of us supported her in having), evaporate in an instant, like her mental faculties do during her sickest times.

In compensation for her low points, she learned to cover up her chronically anti-social behavior (like many people suffering with serious brain disorders do, to avoid detection as a life strategy), by re-orientating them around more conventionally disorientating events, like flying in an airplane, which is a common enough phobia that passes as a legitimate non-mental illness she can play to the hilt by letting her anxieties out under that appropriate cloud cover. She channels nervousness and anxietty brought on by ordinary events (that would surely reveal the depths of her diseases) into everyday compulsions that appear harmless on the surface, like washing dishes or folding laundry.

The problem with that is that she never learned to express her incorrect trains of thought accurately (which don't hold up under careful scrutiny well), because those conversations would reveal her serious compulsive-obsessivenesss that she inappropriately feels she can manage because she studied botany in school over sixty years ago. It doesn't make any sense, and a closer examination of her reasoning process reveals to a studied scholar (like me) exactly why doing laundry is not the same as genuine grief, which she will do anything to avoid, because emotional pain feels likee the psychic pain that is her life.

In avoidance of feeling feelings that are crucial to our health (like how a good night's sleep eludes her during the manic stress that occurs around heightened emotional times like holiday seasons, some of the worst emotional stress our mentally ill family members have), many people like her hoard and over-attach emotions to objects that have no real significance, then work a complex scheme to cover it up, like causing a hysterical fight over blinds that were raised slightly askew. For example, when my grandmother died, I mourned her thoroughly. I felt sadness, a deep sense of loss, and also a joy at having known her. I would not be me without her. Such was the gift that a life like hers brings, so that a big void is necessarily left in her wake. 

I don't dislike feeling very strong emotions, because I know I can process them correctly over time with an appropriate thought process, but the most disordered among us sometimes can't even get out of bed in the morning (my mom gets that typical manic-depressive "surge" of energy at night, because she also has Circadian Rhythm Disorder, sometimes puttering around until 4:30 a.m.), let alone contemplate concepts like life and death. They break life down into superficial, bite-sized bits that become extremely unproductive over time, especially in isolation, causing the abuse that they feel they need to keep their "creature comforts" in place that are signs of severe emotional distress.

Case in point, my mom has a big healthcare appointment coming up, which is a symptom of her holiday stress. Doctor appointments are often used to block out emotions she can't handle, so she tap-dances around her mental illnesses by using more socially acceptable illnesses as cover-ups. Like a lot of chronically sick people, she is disturbed by old-fashioned ideas about mental institutions that no longer exist, but she doesn't know that. Her brain just tells her to avoid detection at all costs, even if it leads to the death of a loved one, which she will regret later on after her fugue state has passed. My mom has had to retract her false claims of "elder abuse" thrown at me during her life stress (under threat of legal prosecution by family who has also been falsely accused by her), because she couldn't handle my hard move from Brooklyn that was tied to her basement area as my storage unit, and the use of her car for me to painfully move all my stuff by myself over the course of three days.

After I told her on the last day that I was too tired to do the psychotherapy she needed to "see" my stuff in her basement (which would have been too grueling for me to supervise, because her delusions make her MS symptoms worse, and I was already physically exhausted), so I simply told her: "I have nothing left to give", which is her worst nightmare. She called the cops for me not being her nursemaid during my hardest time. That's it. In fact, the policemen who responded to her panicky call have picked her up off the floor before, through her Life Alert system, one that took years for us to enforce properly with her, and then she failed a basic recognition test. "Nope, never seen you before", as he reminded her that he was there for her when she broke her shoulder in seven places, because he picked her up off the floor and called for an ambulance.

He then administered the same test with me, and I responded correctly that he and I had never met before at my mother's house, which was true. It was already over with at that point, even as my mom told him I was "nuts" because she is mad, something authority figures often hear: the classically immature "I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I" speech given in lieu of a more carefully reasoned rationale. The jig was up and he and I knew it, as we exchanged pointed glances she missed during her diva crisis about me not emotionally catering to her during my real life event, which is part of a destructive family pattern firmly in place. He warned her then that she had no legal right to lock me out because I had already established residency, which she promptly forgot as soon as they walked away, by trying to slam the door in my face again.

I then called the two officers now present back to her rapidly closing front door, as they warned her once again (repetition is commonplace for Special Needs people) that she has no legal right to change the locks on me, because delusional paranoid states are some of the most challenging times of communication with the sick who walk, talk, work, and live among us. She might not actually have any memories attached to my stress, because as soon as she is calmed, soothed, and stroked like a puppy, she forgets about other people, even the ones she gave birth to, which she naturally doesn't remember well, because "they" gave her ether during her labors, as she lay unconscious from heavy sedation. "Yeah, one minute I'm in labor, and the next thing I had a baby!", she likes to tell me. And how...exactly? "I don't know! I was 'out' like a light!", which is unlike any birthing experience I've ever seen or heard of.

That's the crux of it in a nutshell: stress and panic reorient her chemically addicted brain to use other people as her drug to get high off of, as serious a sickness as any strung-out heroin junkie. Right now, she's busy nursing the high from her next doctor's appointment, which happens next week, resulting in typical conversations like "I can't think of anything right now! I 'have to' (and it's always HAVE TO) focus on my mouth pain and 'getting through' (like some soldier in combat) my appointment next week. Once that's over, I can 'focus' again"!, which is pure bullshit. She doesn't ever snap to "after" her moments, but the deferred payment program helps her to successfully avoid stressful times, like birthdays and Christmases, especially if she falsely pads her schedule to be artificially busy, as clever a deceit as any con by a really good cat burglar.

She's totally full of shit about being present and available for you somewhere off in the distant future when she feels better (because I fix what's wrong while she's on the nod), and that's just the way addicts like it: they can get high off of you during their blackout times, even when she remembers days, weeks, and months later that she just abused the one woman around her who's healthy enough to keep her alive, and that's me. Then, in the middle of the night when no one's around to see her or help her, she cries herself to sleep, because she remembers that she almost killed me through abuse and neglect. 

And that's the worse part of it all: that a smart woman who can make me a perfect grilled cheese is alone by herself every night, remembering in one big flood of emotions that the genuine love she feels for me was replaced by an extremely violent hate that is psychosis. That's what I cannot abide by any longer, and neither should you. We want more for you. We want you to get better. We. Want. More. I want a real mother. I want the woman who worked at the Botanical Gardens, who taught me all about the native trees, plants, and flowers we love that we can also point out and name together in Latin or French, as well as English. That's who I want back. You can keep the abusive, obsessive-compulsive addict this Christmas.

The Winchester House

The doors to the bathrooms were solid wood; they were replaced with glass so that tourists would not mistake them for functioning bathrooms, which they are not. The only functioning bathroom was outside Sarah Winchester's bedroom, which had a small window for a nurse to check in on her, later in her life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Mystery_House

I loved ghost stories as a kid. Whenever a new catalog from a particular children's book club came around the classroom, I always circled a few key titles for my perusal: ghost stories, vampire tales, paperbacks from the horror genre, and the "Guinness Book of World Records". Anything about the supernatural or fantastical immediately captured my imagination, like faked spirit photographs from the early 19th century, or those infamously blurry and deliberately ambiguous images of the Loch Ness monster. How could anyone prove or disprove such vague claims?

It was in this quest for the truth that my first tentative paranormal investigations began, heightened by my natural curiosity about the big, unanswered questions behind common cultural mysteries. I never really believed in space aliens or crop circles, but I was fascinated by the gullible people who did, usually fringe characters who never really fit into the world, seeking phantom societies they felt more comfortable with. 

Eventually, every huge hoax has been exposed to reveal the more interesting truths behind them, like: why would a group of British artists spend their evenings developing mathematically-accurate concentric circles in flattened fields of wheat? Well, because they're beautiful, and because mass hysteria is a prevalent human phenomenon, so much so, that for many years, major universities in England devoted departmental funds to their art, mislabeled as surreal, nocturnal alien encounters (http://www.circlemakers.org/). The art is actually much better than some invisible ghouls that go "bump" in the night, but the stories and untruths inspired by creative acts are part of the culture that surrounds each myth-making legend attached to them.

I was reminded by such a cultural creation walking uphill from town with one of my friends from the "basic yoga for disabled seniors" class that's held every Monday at our community center. She told me a great story about an older man who owned several trade magazines (they published journals for electricians, boat builders, etc), who disappeared on a yachting trip. She didn't think much of it at the time, because the younger son immediately took up his vacant post to evade lingering questions among the staff and authorities working the case. She attached her memory of the event not to his untimely death, but to the area called "The Bermuda Triangle". She cited all the typically kooky stories we've all read in the same pulp fiction outlets, like those Big Foot photos that never seem to be in clear focus. Isn't that odd?

Much like ruining a younger sibling's belief in the tooth fairy, I felt bad for letting her know that there are no unknown, uncharted giant invisible whirlpools that suck in boats from the ocean, much like there aren't invisible air-shafts over Bermuda that pull down planes into the sea without mechanical or pilot error. Stories like that are great cover-ups for nefarious deeds, though, which is the more likely part of the scenario behind the disappearance of her publisher way back then: that he didn't know how to captain his own ship, thus was lost to the rough currents and sudden squalls that any good sailor knows how to combat effectively (and here in the conversation I cited Robert Redford's movie "All is Lost", as a recent example of one man's battle against the sea), or that he absconded with company funds and staged a fake death so that he could make off with all the money. 

Even worse (and this I didn't share with her because she has a fragile psyche), may be that his own son murdered him so he could take over the family business, which happens a lot more than we think. My friend said she looked up the old company online, and they are no longer in business, which didn't surprise me at all. Well-constructed edifices do not topple easily. The name of the building she worked in has changed, too, but she didn't want to hear the truth. She wanted to believe in comfortable fairy tales that remain mysteries forever, because she disassociates from reality. I asked her a few quick, sharp questions designed to assess her ability to observe her surroundings while in yoga class, and she failed every assessment test I gave her, not that I'm trying to ruin my friend's peace of mind.

Far from it. I want to build her up so that she tells me her really good stories, like the one she mentioned about the mysteriously absent pater familias, because I told her the truth: those are the stories publishers actually want. She walked away from me full of new information that she will almost certainly struggle to assimilate effectively, which is also point of the point. If she can learn to build her stories around real structures that hold, then she won't be tempted to lapse into unproductive patterns of thought that go nowhere, like her mythical Bermuda Triangle, the worst kind of cultural deception there is, because it's not real. In fact, there's nothing magical there at all.

It reminded me of the old story about Sarah Winchester, the wacky eccentric heir to the Winchester family fortune (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Repeating_Arms_Company), who said she built staircases to nowhere to accommodate the dead people murdered by the rifles her family's company made, a story told to me in grainy black-and-white photos from an old paperback I ordered many years ago, through my elementary school's book-buying program. I felt sorry for Sarah, even as I understood the power of her penance. She lived through the profit from a culture of death we are still living in now (http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/money/industries/manufacturing/2010-10-20-remington-700-trigger-cnbc_N.htm), as evil a stain as any human could ever hope to bear, and no wonder she couldn't stand the weight of it.

Would you be able to live in a fancy mansion, knowing that your family murdered millions of average people, just like you? If you can't (and you know you can't), then how can you ask your peers to bear up under the sin of killing that's behind every mass murder? We can't go on like this. Let's tackle gun reform laws revised for mandatory licensing, certification, and permits for legal gun ownership, with psychological background checks cleared before we issue permits to the ill and infirm. It's why you're seeing more frequently open manifestations of extremely violent events. We're shining a light on the darkness that hides within. We're winning.

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

http://www.winchesterguns.com/library/articles/detail.asp?id=746