After Midnight

Despite occasional harsh prejudices to the contrary, I remain an unpopular "day person" awake in the dawn of your socially acceptable manic-depression. In my small town of Pearl River, only two businesses operate 24/7, 365 days/year: the convenient store on the corner doing a brisk business in chemically-laden tobacco, booze, energy drinks, junk food, and lotto tickets, or the chain drugstore right across the street with its handy drive-up window. 

It speaks to our priorities about what we feel is most important to us in our lives, and it's the commercialized convenience of excess, which makes my natural body-clock jarring to the pale shakiness of a typical "night owl". Nor does it stop at a simple day/night dichotomy either, observed through the touchy tenderness about "alternative" circadian rhythms. It was in this vein that I suffered through each and every New Year's Eve with my mom growing up, who gets a "jolt of energy" (her words) between 10-11 p.m., moving around her carefully controlled, highly monitored "home environment" (her words again) to wash dishes and do laundry, then check her emails until 12 p.m.-1:30 a.m., unless of course I want to watch the UFC fights in her apartment airing "late" that end around her usual bedtime of 2:00 a.m. Then, my entire life and schedule is immediately suspect and abused.

It didn't matter how much my mom and her freaky friends or family "made fun" of me for sleeping at night, even if it was New Year's Eve. When you wake up between 6-7 a.m. in the morning, you go to sleep in the evening whether you want to or not, and that's healthy, except if you're paranoid and bipolar. Then, it's the complete opposite. Most of the seriously disordered people I know crave sugar, caffeine, or cocaine to get that rush when the depressive side of their illness kicks in, making them miss active late nights over a feeble, disabling, daytime lethargy. Of course, I can stay up for an event if I plan for it, but if I don't have to, I don't. It's simple: no dinner date or late-nite party to attend, I'm asleep. And I'll probably be working the next day. 

So, to all you lone wolves regularly sleeping with the sun like I do, know that you're not alone in your healthy sleep habits this New Year's Eve. And no, Jane, there's nothing wrong with getting a full 8-9 hours of sleep, despite peer pressure or what you've been told about "peak performance hours" for "maximum productivity". They're marketing buzzwords for anxiety and mania, anyway. Have a good night's sleep, and I'll see you all in 2017, fans of daytime. G-d bless. 

Arena

Warriors have always been regarded by society with fear, awe, and a little trepidation. Would you want to get on the bad side of someone who could kill you ten different ways before your body even hits the ground?! It might make friendships and relationships a little bit trickier, but I like to think that it makes us more honest and respectable towards each other, because we're both combatants. After all, fighting is a legitimate (and fun!) sport of women competing against other women, not men. It isn't a fair fight, anyway. Men have the biological advantage because of their greater height, strength, and muscle mass.

That's not to say that a female black belt can't take out a larger, less well-trained man, because they do so in dojos around the world every day. It's just stating that two athletes of the same skill and experience who are of different sexes are not evenly matched, which is why we do not compete in arenas together....in this century. In the past, prisoners, exiles, and other enemies of the state fought their way to freedom in Ancient Rome's Coliseum.

It is an awesome site to see. It's much bigger than it looks in pictures, which makes its past more frightening when you think about how many people watched other people (and every kind of animal known to mankind) die very violent deaths, for so many years. It was their Metropolitan Opera, major Broadway musical, and giant concert stage, operating around (and between) fights to the death. There were side stages, dropped floors with hidden panels, rising platforms bringing up lion cages to the main stage, chambers for costuming with props, an armory, and a network of highly sophisticated, intricately complex irrigation systems that flooded a stage with water, to re-create epic battles at sea for "The Empire". 

The sheer spectacle and grandeur of it, even all these years later...to say that the Coliseum is impressive is a totally inadequate understatement. It wasn't just the size and scale of their stagings, either. Gladiatore were huge stars. You can still see graffiti in Rome scratched into the ancient walls that publicize and congratulate favorite fighters of the day. Cemeteries have stone tributes to enslaved warriors who won their freedom from the empire through the shedding of blood for sport, which must have sat uneasily on a cornered Christian's shoulders, new as they were back then to the pagan state of Rome. It's a good thing we believe in forgiveness and redemption, mes gendarmes, because death by mass suicide isn't in our credo either. Rest easy, warrior.

The Book of Ende

Becoming a female illuminator in the late 20th to early 21st century has been arduous, odd, and ultimately, my raison d'etre thus far. Unlike, say, Impressionism or the Renaissance period, any examples I found of exceptional illuminating were extremely rare, and a female's excellent works rarer still. But, they were there. Back in my apprenticeship, St. Martin's Press had annual editorial buying trips to England, in a reverse production process that had us recalibrating equipment to accommodate film flats done the exact opposite of our photographic process used for plate-making on American presses, but I digress.

Murder mysteries were (and still are) an export with an easy audience here in the States, as any real publishing professional will tell you. Just look at the numbers for Hercule Poirot, Agatha Christie, and the "Dial __ for Murder" series. My mother is particularly enamored with a British show currently airing on PBS about two older women who plan estate gardens and solve murders, in the exact same format every single week, which is the core demographic for any murder mystery audience.

Edward Gorey famously illustrated an opening spot for the introduction to the PBS "Masterpiece Theater" murder mystery series, in a gothic pen-and-ink style that had the 90s graduating classes of RISD's Illustration department completely under his spell: a cool, hermetic character who left New York City after his own career in publishing for Provincetown, to create work reminiscent of the the 1900-1930s Art Nouveau revival, but I digress again. 

At work, we produced a series of murder mysteries by British authors that I still have on my bookshelves, with one stand-out selection: "The Apothecary Rose". Here, we find a female herbalist working in a medieval abbey garden attached to a cloister, who also solves murders most foul. Back then, the weapon of choice was often poison secreted from the abbey garden or her own apothecary shelves, for death-dealing instead of healing. 

The same fictional construct used in murder mysteries was the actual historical context for female illuminators working in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance: artists who were either raised in the family business of making books attached to a prestigious monastery, or the nuns working in the scriptorium of their own monasteries. It was uncommonly educated and rare for anyone to read, write, and paint with such skill, but for a woman? Well, that's another story entirely. 

Happy Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa, to my illuminated readers of 2016.

The Agony and the Ecstasy

Seeing famous art in person is revelatory for artists and designers. We first learn about art through slides (for older artists), photographed reproductions in textbooks (for most current generations), and now online jpegs (for GenY and Millennials), in images that don't capture the texture of a piece, or its lighting from different angles. There are a lot of details you can miss, like, say, the sexual orientation of the artist, and/or their deeply-ingrained personal preferences.

The "Ecstasy of Saint Theresa" was just such a piece for me, when I saw it on my honeymoon to Italy. It's so obviously NOT exclusively religious in emotional tone, that I was a little shocked no one else in the church noticed it. Bernini must have had one heck of an understanding patron, if you know what I mean. The Middle Ages and Medieval Europe were notoriously prejudicial against homosexuality, unlike the bathhouse days of ancient Rome; an embarrassing reminder of Italian decadence that brought "The Hand of G-d" down upon them through plagues and pestilence. 

The great cathedral-building days of Europe were a time for repentance and the outward shunning of excess, unless you were a gifted artist with a thing for sumptuously expensive fabrics backed by a very appreciative admirer with extremely deep pockets, like my man Bernini so clearly was. The statue, more than anything else, is about his careful study of drapery and, after that, sexual experiences between a saint and an ambiguously-gendered cherub thrusting a "ray of light" through her, as she falls faint at his/her feet.

So.....totally gay. Okay, well, that makes sense. Creative communities are usually very accepting. But, to get it placed as the main altarpiece in the center of a repressive, regressive medieval Catholic church? That takes balls only a real Renaissance master would have. I'm sure the crowd swooned when his statue was finally unveiled with a dramatic curtain pull from the artist himself, from a cord made of the most fabulously braided brocade, with his smiling, exceptionally generous patron standing right next to him, beaming proudly. Remember: it's all in the details, kids.

The Etruscans

My best friends’ father Charles was her first inspiration for studying history, though he'd pursued a psychology degree instead, which got him a stressful social workers’ job in the Bronx during the height of the citys’ struggle with crack cocaine in the 70s and 80s. After his idealistic post-college stint in the Peace Corps, a time of hippie experimentation with native sweat lodges and hallucinogenic trips on peyote buttons in the Mexican desert, he struggled to find meaning and equilibrium among the hard-hit minorities who came to his office for help. 

Instead, he found bitterness and a lack of understanding that ingrained in him a casual prejudice fueled by his own inertia and passionless marriage. It was hard for us to watch her hip, smart, educated parents from the city, the first to attend college in their families, go down so deeply into alcoholism and madness, but like so many of their "silent generation", they refused to admit the seriousness of their illnesses to anyone, so they could condescend to the people stuck in the ghetto, who they wanted to see as having so much less than us.

We'd find him puttering in his garage during summer breaks from school, sweating in the heat and avoiding his wife inside the house. He'd made a little workshop for himself there, so he could paint tiny military figurines in exacting period detail, while he expounded upon his favorite topics like the Etruscans, always delivered in the exact same way: "Girls, have I ever told you about the ancient Etruscans? They were a very advanced civilization that pre-dated the Greco-Roman time period. Most people don't know that." Ah, okay. It was better than the usual power struggles between her parents, with their tense silences and chain-smoking drunks that'd go on for days. We'd go on beer and cigarette runs for them just to get the fuck out of the house.

With a little encouragement, her father would go on to describe Etruscan burial mounds and their sophisticated societal hierarchy that would inform and inspire the later governments of the much more famous Greco-Romans. We found it touching that he clung to Italy's historical underdogs out of some sense of loyalty to them and their almost-forgotten world, like any real historian would. Though her parents never made it out of their personal struggles with addiction and mental illness, I can still see him in my mind's eye working in his garage, at a time when the whole world was opening up to us from between the pages of our college textbooks, in the cold mountains of an upstate New York winter. Ta, Charles. Thanks on that. 

Hieronymus Bosch

My quest to find Illuminators from the past (and present) took me to some interesting places, like "The Dark Ages" of Medieval Europe. At the same time, my best friend and college roommate's classes as a History major crossed over into the Art History and Painting classes I needed for my "two-degrees-in-four-years" program that I was enrolled in at Oneonta State, called the "2-1" (or "Two-To-One").

While I poured over the detailed Celtic knotwork in "The Book of Kells" like it was inscribed upon my heart (and it is, I know that), Karen delved into the socio-economic peculiarities of an uncivilized Europe caught in the massive death-grip of "The Bubonic Plague". Like the Salem witch-hunts of New England, paranoia and fear ruled the landscape, creating myths and superstitions that persist in the more rural parts of Western Europe to this day.

It was gothic and horrific, perfect intellectual fodder for two kids like us who'd already lived through some incredibly dark times, to study in the deep dark cold that settles upon upstate New York in a thick blanketing cloud of snow lasting six months or more, because that's "winter" to us. I could relate to her fascination with the macabre. I was a devout reader in my childhood and early teens of creepy and ghostly tales, like Edgar Allen Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death", considered one of the best pieces of literature ever written about the plague and its impact on medieval society.

One artist in particular grabbed her attention for a few months (or weeks) in an appreciation that has not abated time, for its stunning intricacy and originality: Hieronymus Bosch. Like the illustrations in the first edition of Dante's "Inferno", Bosch was seen as a gruesomely realistic painter who'd channeled Hell itself in his fantastical depictions of the imps, demons, and devils that lurked in the darkest corners of his twisted, surreal landscapes.

The amount of detail...it was captivating in its volume and visual complexity. How many creatures he'd crammed onto his canvases, like a man on fire to reveal the depths humanity had sunk to in its darkest hour; a real-life emotional landscape that captured the psychology of the times and the mindset of medieval man during one of the worst holocausts in human history. It must have felt smiliar to the fictional world of "The Walking Dead"; bodies piled by church graveyards at first, then covered over in carts, to finally be dumped by the side of the road in abandonment, festering and spreading even more disease.

Much as my generation (like many generations) still thinks of its cultural influences as widely known (like our music), I realize in middle-age that if I want to keep our kind of awareness alive, the type that sparked the interest of a few young scholars in late adolescence, then it's going to be me who does it. This is "My Illuminator's Life", in full circle. Enjoy it my little gremlins and goblins, because something wicked this way comes....and it's downright Medieval.

Poor Richard's Almanack

I didn't know anyone like me growing up, except through books and magazines. My older cousin was married to a graphic designer who designed HBO catalogs in the city back in the 80s (like a weekly "T.V. Guide" for cable), and then hand-painted wooden duck decoys at their home as her "creative outlet". Not exactly what I wanted to do as an adult, but then again, I had no idea how to tell people around me who I was and what I'd become: "sort of like Benjamin Franklin", which would've been met at the dinner table with lots of eye-rolling and violent denials. 

Usually, my brothers just called me "gay" or a "retard", so I spent most of my childhood in my bedroom with my best friends who lived in the books they wrote just for me; that's how it felt. It was warm, intimate, and always understood by me, which helped with the adversity in my childhood home that's also the world we live in. It's never easy to innovate, or "to become", or to be that thing people fear the most: powerful, educated, and righteous. It wouldn't have done me any good to talk about something so rare and special that eludes so many people for so long. Why chase after it?

Luckily, my dad loves history, government, politics, the military, and quotes, which gave me the plug-ins I needed to create space for my work to grow; work that was rough and under-funded so it would seem amateurish, though for the ferocity of the concepts underneath. "Concept is key" is one of his favorite sayings, along with this one attributed to Ben Franklin: "Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise." He and I were the only regular nighttime sleepers awake before dawn to the awesome silence of a tense house so often governed by my mother's manic cleaning sprees and dramatic scenes, especially the evening before another stress-filled holiday that felt more like torture than celebration to us.

Then, we would have an excuse to go hiking in the woods before anyone else in the house woke up with their needs that took precedence over two "morning people" openly disparaged in a dreamy, late-night t.v. world that made chronic insomnia seem like this hip, new thing. Where would we have been without history and a few good quotes to back us up? I still go to bed way before it's considered "cool", to take quiet morning photos of empty streets filled with big dark houses under beautiful Hudson Valley sunrises. 

Wish you were here.

Landmine

I recently read online that a well-known American actress has "come out" as a former Scientologist, while promoting her film that accuses the cult of brain-washing and coercion, which definitely fits the profile for cult status. Former members are shunned from the community after they leave, like the practices of the Amish and Hasidim. It's an intensely painful way of assuring "brand loyalty", because once someone questions their commitment to certain doctrines within the religion, their families are immediately pressured by the rest of the group to conform the questioning family member back to their faith under threat of ousting, too, and failing that, they turn their backs on non-conformists for the rest of their lives.

Brutal, isn't it? But, the members of these groups point out that this is the way they maintain their traditions over the centuries (not that Scientology has a long history), and if an individual disagrees so strongly with their beliefs, why stay? They're free to go! The Amish have an adolescent rite of passage called "Rumspringa" that allows for freedom of expression through a temporary relaxation in their strict rules about smoking and drinking and dating, as long as it's done outside of the community's boundaries. Once that time period ends, the teenager has to decide whether they want to return to the community and re-affirm their beliefs, or leave for the world outside. 

It sounds deceptively simple, until you realize that by leaving their homes, they will never see their Amish family again, unless it's a quick "hello" from a car parked in front of the family farm by a lonely son waiting for his brother and sister to return from church in a horse-drawn buggy, because the Amish don't use electricity. Their shunning extends to the entire community, too; their parents will never know their children with the "English" (their word dating back to Colonial times for Americans living outside of Amish country), nor when their beloved grandmother passes away, or how many children their sister has with her husband. 

There are no birthday cards or anniversaries, weddings or funerals. To them, you cease to exist as if you had died, but you haven't. It's the particular pain of a deeply indoctrinated belief system that doesn't allow for sustained inquiries, because under the surface of their strict faith lies the doubt of their members who know they won't hold up for long under the scrutiny that serious challenging brings. That's not to say they aren't religious, moral, or ethical in their beliefs. 

When an emotionally disturbed man walked into an Amish school with a gun (they're pacifists who don't believe in weapons) and murdered their children, they issued one statement to the public about healing, then tore down the schoolhouse and built another one away from the site of the massacre. There were no lawsuits or ongoing prosecutions, no threats to sue or vows of revenge. They acknowledged what happened and moved on from it, in a powerful expression of forgiveness and faith. I think it made a lot of Americans see the other side of their lives, besides the rather tawdry reality shows on t.v. about ex-Amish and their struggles outside of the community.

For the bipolar receptionist at a small family firm I worked for, there were no other sides to her life or her faith. She was prone, vulnerable, and suffering. When her youngest brother pulled her into his quick-moving world of martial arts McDojo's and "Landmark" seminars, she fell hard for both pyramid schemes like a drowning woman clutching at a rope tossed to her in high seas during a really bad storm. In lieu of actually healing from her serious brain disorder(s), she'd been fed a steady pop culture diet of group therapy, rehabs, extremely expensive pharmaceuticals, and, yep, more talk therapy, but no cure. In the wake of healing, the hard-pushed and deceptively marketed products of the world pulled her under, into her next psychotic break from reality, because the pressure of a fully-functioning adult life was too much for her to bear.

When the members of her Landmark group sensed blood in the water after she started attending their "sessions" and "classes", they moved in on her with great force. I'd pulled away from her after her unrequited crush on a 19 year-old at the dojo that quickly became obsessive officially kicked off her down-spiral towards illness again, because I could see she wasn't handling the intensity of fight training well, and given her psychosis, exposing someone as sick as her to violence was like putting a match to gasoline to watch it explode. It seemed cruelly unnecessary. 

Whereas her brother and her new friends from the group benefited from the est-style seminars, she quickly became entangled in their network overmuch, staying on the phone for hours at work with Landmark members who put the "hard sell" on her to find more people so she could afford more classes, in classic pyramid-scheme style. One of the more memorable images from that time period was a story she told me about all-day "lectures" with severely restricted, member-supervised food and bathroom breaks, while they were shouted at from onstage by the senior people in the organization running the show. They decided when a member had enough, or if they needed more pushing. If they found their extremely personal reveals acceptable, they would ring a large bell that everyone in the auditorium could hear, yelling "BREAK THROUGH! BREAK THROUGH!", like the proverbial Pavlov dog salivating at a dinner bell. She never had a chance.

http://m.motherjones.com/media/2009/07/landmark-42-hours-500-65-breakdowns

Ba-Ba-Buoy!

Yesterday, a good friend of mine asked me (again, because he's elderly) about marriage and children, which are admittedly much easier questions for me than you might think, but here it goes, one more time: I was married (in a outdoor ceremony by a female Methodist minister, which makes it "null and void" in our Catholic tradition) to a friend of mine from the SUNY school we attended that he failed out of, and because he's a manic/depressive alcoholic, we didn't have any children. I did "know" he had problems without really knowing it, because I don't share his disorders, but I wanted him to make it as my friend and a fellow native.

I was "down" with him as a squaw, which meant it was more than just between us; we were fighting to survive in this world, and I understood that about our lives. Plus, he was really handsome and a carpenter, which meant that he gave me enough space to create without actually being a gifted artist, and that was serious: he just didn't have the intellect I needed. But, he was a nice boy and he could be very charming, so I helped him with counseling ONCE by holding his hand for the first visit, and then he never really addressed healthcare again. Oh, well. If his family didn't support our vows like they promised at our wedding, then there wasn't a real marriage between us, like my father said to me over the phone. It was time to go. And that was that. He got re-married and divorced again, to come looking for me again, too.

"Well, what about kids?" Oh, uh...what about children? They love me, and I've been taking care of people my whole life, so....you know? It isn't some desperate thing for me to be a caring person. He said he'd noticed me around town with a tall handsome man, and I laughed. Yup! That totally sounds like me. Experience is a hard master to learn from, especially if you don't have that much, which is why I've always enjoyed talking with older people. They really connect with what I'm saying on a deeper level. Besides, I've always been a natural parent, and it's about stuff that matters, too, like this time at the beach with my niece.

Her mom was riding the corporate pony like a seriously programmed drone, which meant me and my brother were free to go to the bay without her tense dramatics and canned marketing copy following us there. Fine by me! Let's go. It was a beautiful summer day, so I took the train (actually, several) from Brooklyn to Grand Central to Connecticut, so we could go swimming in the sound near their hometown. My niece wasn't getting along with her brother, so me and my bro split up: he took the boy, and me and my girl went swimming. The bay is a lot calmer than the roughness of the ocean, so we felt easy in the water. She confided to me that she always wanted to swim out far enough to touch the big red buoy floating in the bay, and she was feeling confident with me by her side, so we decided to do it.

The sun was warm and the water felt great, but like any big swim, halfway through it, you feel the distance spread out before you. It got choppier, too, and I could see the apprehension in her eyes, so I let her know she could put her arms around my neck and I'd swim us back to shore, anytime she wanted to. Nope. She wanted to do it. That's my girl! I talked about other swim strategies to combat swim fatigue, like floating on your back to catch a rest, and we tried it a couple of times together. It was a lot farther out than she thought, but that was the challenge of it for her. I think she was 10, at the time. I asked her how come she hadn't done this swim with her mom, and even though I knew the answer, I wanted her to keep talking to lessen her fears.

She said her mom told her she was "burnt out" from swimming because of her swim team days at school (she's a compulsive runner, too), so now she was just "bored" with it. Oh, how fucked up and selfish, I thought to myself. But, that's who she is, and my brother married her anyway. And that's why, on that day, I easily took on the role of a mother to fill in the gap that her sick mom leaves behind, with the grace of a native New York girl who's been swimming her whole life. I could do it, so I did it; not to take away, but to give.

We finally made it to the buoy, and it was a lot bigger than we expected. She got scared as we clung to it bobbing on the waves, and then she was done with it. "Okay, let's go back. Like, now", and then she started swimming without me. Smart. She was a little breathless, so she wanted to have enough energy for the swim back to shore. I gave her some space to enjoy the experience on her own, following her in the water from a safe distance. We were tired when we made it back to the beach, but we knew we'd just had one of the best days ever, because my little Jane had passed one of her first real tests of bravery. Well done, Métis. See you in the ocean again, soon.

Congo Square

Me and my boyfriend "Kunte Kente" spent a few of my birthdays in New Orleans, and I could tell by the way I had a feel for the city that I'd been there before, in another lifetime: the food, the music, the way I was greeted at the airport....this Acadian girl was home. Of course, I'm the original northern branch of a family tree that's stretched itself wide across this country we live in, though often not of our own choosing. The harsh heat and humidity endured by the Cajuns and Creoles who had settled in the bayou told me everything I needed to know about our history, because we're made for adversity. 

Still, the American South can be so very different from New York because of its deeply segregated past. When I took a road trip to Graceland in college, I'd never seen black folk order food from a diner just to eat it in a car parked in the parking lot outside of a restaurant. It was scary and strange to me. So, too, did New Orleans have that dividing line back in the late 90s, before the flood. I'd never seen poverty that sharply split between the fat white tourists in town, and the children who performed for them in the streets, with bottle caps on the bottoms of their shoes instead of taps.

Kent warned me that we'd be crossing more divides like the French Quarter's, if we wanted to see some of the prominent tourist attractions of New Orleans, and Congo Square was on our list of "must see" places. He and I met in a recording studio, and Kent worked as a professional musician before we met, sometimes during our relationship, too. I'd also studied the history of jazz and blues in school. Most of my music is heavy on the R&B and hip-hop, as well as the classics. We simply had to go see where it took root and spread out from the epicenter of the square to the rest of the world.

Instead of a dusty dirt square packed with drummers, we found a bunch of tidy bricks neatly arranged in a circle, and we were the only people visiting that day. The weather had turned a little rainy, though nothing frightening to us, so we spent some time walking the circles of stones in the pattern they're laid out in, like the beginning of "The Wiz" musical from Broadway. But, that wasn't the biggest part of our trip over there: it was first stopping at a dive bar to talk with a white-haired hipster about directions before we crossed a serious four-lane highway to the ghetto, before we walked past openly burning garbage cans in broad daylight and burned-out car wrecks abandoned by the side of the road, like New York City during the 70s and 80s. The dividing line between us and our destination was that clear, and that real.

Dutch Courage

Perhaps it was the defiance of a newly-made national identity spurning control of an overseas monarchy, but, for whatever reason, the phrase "have a little 'Dutch courage'" remains rooted in the lexicon of America's "New Amsterdam". It's not a nice reference, either, because it implies that you're an utter coward unless you have a strong drink or two before you make any bold moves, which any night on the town would prove correct, rife as bars are with fistfights and amorous advances rejected as easily as one gets drunk.

It's also a clever nod to the infamously "neutral" stance of Switzerland and other Scandinavian countries that backed out of the fight during WWII, to profit instead from the murderous theft of Germany's Third Reich through their banking system, hence the illicit-sounding "Swiss bank account" that recurs in many an old-fashioned spy tale from that era. That's not to say we are immune to the pleasures of tavern life here in New York, or nursing a budding romance over a few cocktails. 

Social lubricants are often the glue that binds young lovers together, or as Jerry Seinfeld said on his sitcom (about drinking), "How do you think ugly people get together?!", as he and his best friend Elaine bemoaned the undateable inhabitants of Manhattan. Certainly, people have been looking for draughts of courage to sustain them in lieu of actual bravery for a long, long time. In fact, Rockland County is home to the oldest tavern in New York, and I like to think that on a full-mooned autumn night, the ardor of a man is bolstered by the potency of a drink well-made and even better served. Have at it, then. 

http://76house.com

Cheetah

Like a lot of people around the world, I grew up with a love and appreciation for animals and nature that I never "outgrew", not that I think it's immature to feel that way in the first place. Naturally, any type of show or book that featured an animal "best friend" was at the top of my list, which also hasn't changed in adulthood. The "Nature" series on PBS recently aired a special about the wild animals of the Congo; specifically, the chimpanzees and gorillas of the jungle as told by their native son, and I urge you to see it (see link below). The landscape is as stunning as the appreciation for its beauty is heartfelt.

Besides the hokey "Mr. Ed" and poor ole Lassie always finding Timmy in a well during the surreal black-and-white 50s era of television, we waited for something to fill in for "talking" Hollywood animals with mouths full of peanut butter, and "Tarzan" was that for us. He was the king of the jungle, and he always had a little monkey best friend. In the animated series from the 70s, he had a monkey that curled his tail around his neck, while other movies showed Cheetah the chimpanzee as his "go-to" animal for news of the jungle.

We loved his battle cry of "ahhh ahhahhhh ahhh!" that signalled to the other animals trouble was afoot in their jungle. Then, he swung through the trees at lightning speed to chase away the bad guys, and they were almost always bunch of pansy-ass white dudes in stupid "explorer" gear looking to exploit the unspoiled wilderness for profit, or their museum collection(s), or their trophy wall(s). Uh uh. Not in our jungle!

It seemed kind of plausible, too. We loved stories about remote Abominable Snowmen living in some far-off frozen land that remained undiscovered, or wild "wolf boys" abandoned by their parents at the edge of a clearing to be raised by a pack of wolves in the forest. It could totally happen! Wolves are really caring, social animals! We talked about it over comic books, sitting at the kitchen table, dreaming of the day when someone would come to save the animals of the forest and their native habitats, including the wild jungles of the world. The good news? I think we're getting very close. 

See you in the woods, children of the wild.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/congo-full-episode/14635/

The Colony

Despite depictions to the contrary, the continents of the Americas were already settled and populated for millennium before the European invasion, though carefully cultivated propaganda often repeated has done its best to suggest otherwise. In fact, while doing a word search for links to this piece, words like "occupation" and "invasion" were nonexistent when grouped with "European" and "America", replaced by the far more benign and majestic-sounding "Age of Exploration" (rather one-sided), or "colonization", implying that plenty of space was "up for grabs" and available without years of murder, torture, and displacement, which is simply not true.

It is a concept that's also reinforced in Euro-centric schools here in the United States, shown to schoolchildren as the Pilgrims and Indians happily sharing a feast together in what colonists called "The New World". Fellowship and friendship among people isn't arguable, though the intentions of a bunch of rabid nut-jobs like the Puritans were definitely suspect, and therein lies the truth: that "colonists" like them were driven from their homelands for religious extremism and other acts of violence against men, much like the establishment of penal colonies in Australia.

Convicts were often given a choice between prison and expulsion, because a long sea voyage that may be your untimely death was preferable to rotting in jail. Given the feudal system of medieval Europe, it's no wonder their "undesirables" chose a boat instead. The lord/serf system of labor and land ownership was a direct precursor to the slave economy of the American South, and just as deranged. In Europe, serfs were considered property just like they were here, in colonies created for economic expansion and world domination.

Not that it stopped there. With the advent of the media age came new conduits for programming and/or re-programming, as the case may be. Movie after movie after movie showed the handsome white man "dressed to kill" in his ten-gallon hat, armed and dangerous to the savagely murderous Indians who pillaged their towns and raped their women, in an almost direct contrast to the actual battles waged on land already occupied by the First Nations. The hero wore white, the bad guy wore black, and the Indians bled red blood. Done! History for the Special Needs set: easily digestible and almost guilt-free.

Except that it wasn't. As indigenous people fought back harder than any "sophisticated" wealthy euro ever had the right to expect, those territories were left to the natives (now as disenfranchised and often poverty-stricken "reservations" free of U.S. interference), as other less contested lands were carved up by the governments of France, England, and Spain, until a new American identity was born to the children of proudly mixed parentage from "both sides of 'the pond'", which is where we stand today: a nation about to be led by yet another rich white man born to four European grandparents (with an Eastern Euro import wife), who won an election in the same "red" states fed by the southern slave economy that drives them back towards the same rich white man they remain indebted to. And you wondered why he isn't taking a salary for his presidency....<shakes head in disbelief>

Jungle Book

Deep in the heart of every human being beats a primordial memory of the jungle everlasting; an ancient link to our tree-living past. Ever since I can remember, I have loved trees: drawing them, painting them, photographing them, even using an image of a tree through four seasons to decorate the top of one of my earliest resumes.

As we descended from our arboreal homes in search of food and water, the distance between the ocean and the trees of the savanna that we called home grew and grew, as did our brains fueled by the richness of the sea and the creatures we eat. We responded to the growing grasslands by stretching our legs to cover the distance, but memories of our forest home continue to pervade our collective human consciousness.

Escapist fantasies about leaving the world behind suddenly become more acute in times of great stress, like during presidential elections with transitional governments, forcing us to confront our need to flee. For me, the forest represents something more than a relaxing place to unwind from busy careers and ringing cell phones. It is the place I feel most at home, and with the beat of the boreal so dear to my heart, it's no wonder that I want to be where the wild things are. You can't chain down what's meant to be free.

It is in this hope that I look forward to a more understanding future that recognizes the human condition as it pre-dates modern borders, with boundaries drawn by outside interests not native to the land we call "home". Let us be who we are. Let's go home. And let us be dual citizens of the world as it is written in so much bureaucratic paperwork, if that's what it takes for us to move about as we're meant to. I promise you I won't be a bother. You won't be able to find me in the forest primeval without a professional guide, anyway.

Telenovela

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

My grandfather practiced his Spanish by watching Univision (our Spanish-language channel here in New York) telenovelas, with his drugstore black-rimmed glasses and a small Spanish-to-English dictionary in hand for quick translations, sitting way too close to the t.v. with the sound blasting. It was great fun for us to see him watching his daily shows, too, because he could be such a tough Mick from the city at times, tempered as it was by his consideration for others and his innate sweetness. He wasn't just learning for the heck of it, either, though with his cool old-time vaudeville impersonations and great accents, his flair for language and communication was proof enough that he'd kissed "The Blarney Stone" probably more than once.

No, he did it because his older brother, my Uncle Jack, married a Colombian woman after his divorce, my Aunt Yolanda; a tall woman with a naturally majestic presence indicative of a native high-born to a good family from the mountains outside of Bogota. And it didn't stop there. My grandparents took a few trips to see them after they relocated to Colombia, once my uncle retired from his successful business that found him financially independent. They had two beautiful little boys I remember holding and changing at our house, as a little girl: Juan y Francis, with their classic mestizo coloring of olive skin, light eyes, and lush brown curls. Irish paired well with Colombian!

It was important to my grandfather that his brother's family feel comfortable in his home, and it was important to me, too. As guests, they could curse telling stories and smoke in my mother's house (my dad had to go outside or in the garage to smoke), while I refilled their glasses and emptied out the big glass ashtray we used for parties and holidays. Francis had fallen asleep, so me and my aunt took him into my parent's bedroom for a nap, using their pillows to make a barrier on either side of him so he wouldn't roll off the bed. I was so nervous about the baby that I kept going in to check on him, with their laughter following me down the hallway. "Is he still there?"

He was, and they were charmed by my youthful inexperience with newborns. "Oh, he'll sleep for hours not moving, Marie. He's fine!" Uh, you don't know that! My own parents weren't exactly careful with kids, and my uncle drank a lot more than I was used to with my more even-keeled grandfather. Still, they were raucous and fun, and we loved having a South American branch to our family tree that we'd describe as one big carnival tent for times when were we feeling less generous. Before they arrived at my parent's house, we went over simple phrases and basic sayings so we could greet them from the top of the stairs as they came through the front door. 

"I want to be able to greet my brother's family properly when I see them", my grandfather nervously explained to me again while we practiced. My grandparents always felt insecure about their lack of a formal education, because they had to leave school to earn money for their families as children. I could relate. I wanted to make a good impression, too, because in our households, family always came first. You did great, grandpa. You really did. It was just perfect.

para mi tía Yolanda

The Mat Room

Fraternities and sororities at Oneonta existed mostly for the hardcore suburban Long Island crowd who went to the same high school together (which seemed like a pointless thing to do in college), or those downlow weirdos too embarrassed to join the unisex organization of social do-gooders with the purple triangle logo on their Greek shirts, ya dig? With the high-priced fees that came with "rushing" during pledge, me and my crew thought it was crazy to pay to have friends when you could just throw a kegger and kids would show up, anyway, once the word got out around campus. We had more trouble containing a good time than publicizing it.

Still, a slow Wednesday night with no Thursday classes could find you extending beyond your typical routine to include off-campus frat parties, especially if one of your boys roomed with one of their "frosh" pledges. It meant we might catch a break with the cover charge. Five bucks blown on skunky stale beer or a drained keg meant you just walked down a mountain in a snowstorm with nothing to show for it besides missing dinner at the cafeteria. Oh, well. You'd have to wait until the morning, if you didn't stash food in your room from lunchtime.

I'd been to few of them without incident, which must have driven the crazies wild, because I found myself alone in their basement kitchen thumbing through an old issue of NatGeo I'd found on the counter (with its distinctive yellow border) while my friends made a run for the keg, when some douche came over to make a rude comment to me about the partially nude African women depicted in the magazine. It was a shocking thing to do at a hip New York school with a lot of urbane city kids, but certain pockets of the state bred bad stuff that we didn't have close at hand growing up, though it was certainly around. 

He was obviously drunk, too, and he had a wild angry look to his bulging glassy eyes that made him doubly dangerous. Psychotic drunks were a serious hazard at any party. Most gatherings I went to were attended with my large boyfriend, but without a big bouncer around, anti-social headcases could take the time to hassle you and feel comfortable doing it with their similarly challenged friends. As soon as he targeted me, he flipped on me, demanding to know who I was and how I got into his party. I was trapped against the kitchen counter, alone in the room with him.

I tried to look past him to catch the eye of someone, anyone, because I couldn't see the heads of my friends over the crowd in the living room. He got in my face, yelling about who the fuck did I think I was to rebuff his advances in his frat house? It was insane, and it got out of control within seconds. Some tall guy finally came over to see what the commotion was about, because the kid wanted me thrown out of the party, which was fine by me. I'd had enough. As bad as it was, that was nothing compared to the stories I'd hear walking home that night.

As we walked around collecting our friends after my "ousting" from their lame party, I caught a glimpse of a dirty room, behind a partially opened door, covered in graffiti with bare mattresses on the floor. During the party, we'd been told that it was a makeshift crash pad for brothers too drunk to stand, but that's not what another girl at the party told us. She whispered to our small group that it was the room they took girls too drunk to resist. It was their rape room. And it was the last frat party I ever went to.

Proud to be a N*gga

My cousin Kenny is proud to be a n*gga, because he's told me that more than once, even singing it to me like this: "...bee-cause I'm proud to be a niggggaaaah!" His cellphone used to have a recording of him singsonging "Kennndaahhhl!" every friggin' time it went to voicemail, which drove my ex-boyfriend crazy, because John would need help at the yard and "Ken Doll" couldn't be bothered; exactly what we'd come to expect from a fat, bald, 6'1, Celtic-Jewish-Indian like him.

He never wanted to fit in with the 9-5 crowd, and for years, he struggled to find work that was inoffensive to his cocktail party persona, before he finally settled on joining a pipe-and-drum band near the beach. He's good at it, too! He and his then-girlfriend (now wife) played together at the biggest parades 'round the way, turning their alcoholism into a somewhat respectable McOpportunity. It wasn't what I'd want for him, but he's made a life from the broken shards of his rough Brooklyn upbringing that's left most of his family dead, and he's not even 50, yet.

I just hope someday he'll realize he doesn't have to jettison parts of his identity that he feels he needs to hide in order to fit in with typical American society, because I personally know of a clan that would dearly love to have a musician with the heart of an Irishman, the beat of an Indian, with the soul of the faithful play at their tartan-clad family gatherings on a certain New Scotland beach. We pay with real money, too. My father always used to tell us as kids that we should be proud of who we are, because it's not like we had a say in the matter, and he's right. We don't. It's already happened.

Remember, my Americans: the freedoms you take for granted have not been equally extended. Some of us can't even walk on ancestral lands and feel proud about it, without someone else looking to take it away to sell it back for a fee. Think about that while you bitch about the line at the polls, or your simple black-and-white racism, or any of the other issues that you think take precedence over basic human rights like dignity and equality. We're not there, yet with this country, but some of us would really like it to be. They're colored, too, just not like you.

Raging (Against The Machine)

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

The American political system is one of the most complex in the world, because that's exactly the way it was designed to be, to prevent tampering and corruption. Given the heightened emotional climate surrounding our political process, it's no wonder that outside observers around the world feel it is a rigged game, like my Eastern European friends at the local barber shop who emigrated from countries with gross human rights violations and completely fixed elections.

Their former governments have trained them not to have a say in politics, because if they do, riots and bloody wars will break out, bringing years of crippling economic insecurity and societal unrest for what could be many decades. They've been tricked into apathy and indifference by believing that nothing they say or do matters, therefore why should they bother voting or speaking up to make a difference, if it only brings you and your family more pain? It absolves them from feeling responsible or guilty about their government, which is the exact opposite of freedom, like their casually superficial cynicism that goes nowhere and does nothing to solve our human problems.

For example (like I told my Russian-American hairdresser, Katy), most people around the world don't realize that our constitution reads "We, the people..." because there is no "us" or "them" in the United States. We are our system of representation. Over 1.5 million (MILLION) people work in Washington D.C., for all sorts of national departments and federal agencies within our government (not including state and local levels), with key positions avidly sought (and campaigned for) that often begin with the relatively simple process of collecting signatures door-to-door. That's right. You read that correctly.

We teach government from the earliest grades in our educational school systems. Katy and I also discussed that in the barbershop, because she attended design school in Russia and is fluent in English, which makes her atypical from many newly-arrived immigrants, like my great-grandparents from Italy who were poor farmers. She complained about the easy questions on the American citizenship test designed for your tired, hungry, and poor "masses yearning to be free" (as written on the Statue of Liberty) who are learning a new language; not just hip, well-educated designers with an active part in their destinies.

Peaceful, non-violent elections every four years are the foundations of our freedoms. That's shocking, isn't it? No coups, no fratricides, and there's no rioting in the streets. Were it the same for sporting events! Just the sweet hard work that is our freedom. It isn't perfect, problem-free, or dispassionate, but it is exactly what the rest of the struggling world wants. You just have to work at it every day, like we do. Throwing away your vote is one of the biggest symptoms that something is very wrong with you and your life, to care so little about your future and your fate. Or maybe you're just not American enough to participate? THEN, VOTE.

Caravan

You'd think I'd have learned my lesson about transporting potentially dangerous goods across country borders and state lines back in my Montreal-bound college days, but I hadn't. It was in this same spirit of adventure that me and my ex from Colorado decided to move back east with an almost fully grown werewolf sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my car, connected to my boyfriend driving alone in his big red truck through walkie-talkie. Uh, yeah.

Ted did not wear a seat-belt, nor conform to quaint human customs like not moving around a speeding car while driving on a busy highway, which included his attempts to get into my lap as I drove us cross-country, because he "werewolf-remembered" sitting that way with me as a puppy while Kent drove us around Denver. Clever. The first two days were fine, with our biggest concern being the motel owner not noticing a rather large wolf-like object accompanying us into our hotel room for the night, though I had tried to prepare for our overnight stops with a list of animal-friendly places along the way printed off the computer, like any other idealistic new mom.

On the third day of our road trip, Ted totally lost his shit. He'd been wonderful until then, but two days of long boring car rides had offended him beyond belief, conditioned as he was to better stimulation from his parents. And it wasn't a light rebellion, either. He fucking blew his stack in the middle of a rainstorm high in the Pennsylvanian mountains while I was passing two large trucks on both sides that completely doused my car in vision-impairing sheets of water while Ted tried to climb into my lap with more force than I'd felt until then, before banging his head against the window and crying at the top of his lungs.

I scrambled shakily for the walkie-talkie with an emergency "Mayday" call to Kent, who was pissed off about stopping while we made good time, but there was nothing else I could do. A Giant M'Loot Malamute with exceptional bloodlines has been bred to know when enough is enough, and we'd both had more than enough. We stopped at a misty field in the mountains, waiting for Ted to regroup while he walked around scenting the air.

He reluctantly got back in the car, but the warning to me was clear: no more, Mom. Any East Coaster knows that every big road trip ends with the massive length of Pennsylvania's mountains of forest to confront for hours and hours of radio silence before finally making it back home, like a lesson in patience and homesickness. Lesson learned. While Kent deconstructed himself to implode within a mere ten days in the city (nice, New York; what is that, a record?), I walked through beautiful Prospect Park with Ted, as I promised myself I would never let anyone get between me and my home again, and I haven't. That's the strength and power of a mother's word.

See you next week.

Slackers

All of my early life, I was told that I was sloppy, lazy, careless, and a pig, without actually being any of those things. The name-calling was used by my parents to hide their real agenda: using children as a workforce to make their lives easier. It was simple to them. Why else were we born? I was talking to my friend Katy today (while getting a haircut from her) about wild American politics, because the Russia she's from is so very different from our world here. But, times do change. We no longer allow children to get work permits from their elementary school principals for a paper route like they did when I was a kid, nor do we ask children to bear adult economic burdens by letting them leave school, like my grandparents had to do during The Great Depression.

But, my parents didn't have that to deal with. My mom had one (ONE!) part-time job during school wrapping Christmas presents at a department store (and that was only seasonal) because she complained bitterly about the homemade food my grandparents served her, so they told her to go out and get a job and go buy her own food. They were great cooks, by the way. My dad always complained about his terrible childhood and crippling poverty...with my nursing assistant grandmother and medallion-owning grandfather with his own taxi. 

It never added up to their self-described portraits of severe deprivation that they continually tried to sell us as a reason for their abuses against us, especially since I grew up with my maternal grandparents a mere 5-minute drive away. Sometimes the truth could be had for a 30 second phone conversation with them, too. Into this toxic cocktail came the Baby Boomer hangover about "free" everything without any work required (just like life!) that lasted for a couple of years in the 60s when they were teenage drop-outs, followed by my parents Silent Generation of rabid consumer fantasies fueled by massive t.v. consumption, where anything can be bought for a price including happiness, again, just like real life!

Any GenX'er wanting to make it had to give lip service to a bunch of half-baked stoner ideas from the late 60s, or subliminally gay "buddy" Western movies from the repressed and deeply closeted 50s, with neither being the culturally correct stance to have. People were totally full of shit all around us, every single day, parroting lines from t.v. commercials for dish soap like a long lost savior had just given them the winning golden ticket to a better life. It was fucking insane. No one told the truth anymore, because you couldn't make money that way.

Just like fashion magazines pushed the same vapid blond as their falsely generic ideal about "American" beauty so, too, did movies "toe the line" creatively by flattering fragile Baby Boomer egos with their hugely overblown senses of self (derived mostly commercially and economically), by rehashing the old media term "slacker" as a deliberate mischaracterization of GenerationX, the same way marijuana was demonized for being dark and mad. It had absolutely no resemblance to the blue collar roots that me and my friends had coming up from the city, with some of us from the projects, while working 3 part-time jobs just to get to school.

Of course, that's the plan behind any kind of serious bullying: make up a falsehood passed off as the truth, spread it around, and then sit back to enjoy the show. While some Ritalin-dosed muthafucka easily got funding and industry backing in the early 90s to make a really bad movie about arty assholes in Austin*, the rest  of us did what every real working artist does: we got a good night's sleep so we could wake up and go to work again, day after day after day. Not the exactly same picture as Hollywood's version, is it? It's not mine, either.


* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slacker_(film)