Over Hill, Over Vail

"Gore Creek Drive - Vail, CO" by Nick Csakany.

On the way to Vail, I tried to prep my largely impatient punk-rock boyfriend about the pretentious twitchy qualities that mark my oldest brother and his wife, but...what to say? It was like trying to describe the desolation my father had exiled himself to, deep in the wastelands of western Texas, that he pitched as a false paradise to anyone who listening; it was, by its very nature, a contradiction in terms. Some things (and people) you just have to see for yourself.

Because Kent was a brilliant man, he and I got on really well as friends, and that was the main bond between us, way beyond any temporary romance he and I may have had. We just "got" each other and the worlds we came from, in the present tense. When I told him about Jim's trendy Internet "start-up", the very first question Kent asked me was: "Why are they pissing away all their money on family vacations for the executives and their entire families, on one of the wealthiest resorts in the country?!". Uh....because they're corrupt, dude. I was always embarrassed by the obvious nature behind my brother's greed. It unnerved me, which is what he likes about money: it's power that's fleeting but satisfying, to the right type of mind.

We didn't share his fascination for all things rich, white, and insane but Jim came about honestly, meaning, he picked it up practically from birth. As far back as we knew him, Jim has always been attracted to the wrong types of things. Give him real food, and he wants fake. Take him to a cousin's overly extravagant wedding you know he can't afford, and Jim wants a pass to the country club just so he can grovel to get in, and then pound wanna-be joiners over the head with his success. It sucks, and it doesn't feel like how family should feel, but that's the world he wanted; it's also about as far from the lessons any true Acadian should have learned a long time ago as it could possibly be, but that's how it is.

Corruption isn't for just the insanely rich. It also infects anyone aspiring to it, the way a suicide wreaks havoc on anyone near the crime scene, in a blast zone of evil that tries to eat at the healthy life around it, or so the perpetrator wants you to believe, like the cartoon victim who lies to the very end, denying it every step of the way. But, Jim's taste for ostentation and bragging far surpassed his need for discretion, and that's what I fall back on during his worst times: he'll snap out of his "money haze" to see the truth of how it really is. After all, his kids are dark as fuck! They ain't passing as "Anglo" at family reunions anytime soon, and isn't that why he and his wife avoid them? I know he knows that, deep down inside, where his ancestry tucked away all the good stuff that no raving lunatic can ever snatch away from him, no matter the amount of pretty guises.

Sure enough, as soon as we hit the first steep hill into town, there was Jim's insane "tanorexic" of a wife running uphill in the snow with my nephew in her "runner's" baby carriage that cost a mint, and immediately upon seeing her, we both bust out laughing. That crazy bitch could always be counted on for being just what we know her to be: stupid as fuck, and deeply programmable by any corporation that needs available drones for rent. You see, her womanly "baby fat" struck the wrong chord with the obviously gay and very butch woman she reported to, the one who barked at her whenever she felt like it (day or night, weekday or weekend, during office hours or while on "vacay"), so she could have the pleasure of seeing my brother's wife lick her boot-heels, in one of the gayest female displays I have ever seen in my life, but that bitch is beyond cray-cray. We all know it.

Not one of our friends and family like her, and we have a HUGE family. Not. One. Person. She is one of the rudest, nastiest, viciously aggressive cunts we've ever had the misfortune to meet in my family, and we're New Yorkers. Know what I mean? Like many a company of underlings and "yes-men" I've worked my way through, that's exactly what every total ass-kissing MBA really wants: to trap each other in a cycle of cowardly cringing and then furious lashing out, in one of the sickest examples of "making it" that humans currently have. How is that success? It isn't, but that doesn't stop them from tap-dancing all the way to an early grave with fully loaded pockets.

Sure enough, their trip was by-the-book: a grossly over-priced "villa" that every executive booked his family into, so that was the first thing we heard about, their plush "suites" in a hotel resort. Oh. Kent and I exchanged knowing looks during their delusion opening stump-speech; they do realize we actually live in Colorado full-time, right? Like, their insanely over-decorated tourist trap for dumb out-of-town white folk is our everyday. They must know, right? After all, my brother went to an very impressive and really expensive Ivy League school for his business degree. They must know, no? 

No. That wasn't the facade at all. As soon as we asked them astute questions about re-investing in chancy Internet start-ups, my brother's wife began her real drinking of the day, early as the afternoon was. As we watched her skinny tan arms slinging it back, the jig was already up. Ohh....that's it. It's a bank scam! Huh. Funny, or did my bro not remember that our "Pops" (her annoyingly cutesy name for my father that we all hated for its falsely intimate Southern hokey charm, because he disapproves of her the most, first and foremost) actually spent his time in the banking system as young man working at The Bank of New York, and then as the owner of The First Bank of Lockney, because I sure did! I remember his lessons quite well, because I know how to listen, and that's an essential skill in business.

After that, me and my man tore through it proper. We spent our time as far away from the madness as we could, and as actual Coloradans, it wasn't difficult for us to disappear into the landscape. We booked a snowboard lesson with a pathetic stoner on a wildly dangerous "bunny" slope designed for maximum casualties. Those dumb shits actually put small children on the same hill as a 250lb 6' Scotsman on a seriously sharp blade edge, because if you can maim your customers while draining their wallets, what better way to score huge bar tabs from "weekend warriors" in their designer casts, made by the hotel doc who loves all the "powder" he can get? Heavy on the hints, natch. 

And that's actually what my man on the real did, after I couldn't take the dip-shit surfer lingo from some blond kid who just wanted to get high for free while giving away absolutely nothing in "how-to's" that were cleverly disguised as "snowboarding lessons" for the dumb, rich, and insane, like the generically spoiled Generican she must surely be. Sure enough, I couldn't do it, especially with toddlers on skis whizzing past us, so like any really good mother, I bailed on a set-up made for accidents soon enough. My man didn't, as is his nature, so I got the pleasure of watching my death-metal rock g-d plow into that fucking idiot who was, in order: severely under-weight for a real athlete, too short for her job with full-grown adults, falsely blond, overly tan, and a truly dumb, naive youngster in over her head.

I saw him (safe at my cafe table a good distance away, with my gear already off and soaking in the warm mountain sun) knock her off her feet and straight onto her back at full ramming speed, as she stayed down on the snow holding her arms across her chest for a good long while, with the wind knocked out of her. Ha! My man! That's what a real Scotsman-on-ice does as a "novice", honey! Knocks ya right off yer feet. It was good fun, and she called it quits after that, beat right down to her feet by an actual man with a penis. They were some brilliant moments, though, like meeting my brother in the village at a cool lunch spot, high off really good beer, free as we were from his overbearing hexan-hagen* to order actual good German food that we love, in the perfect setting for it, without his wife's anxious fretting over her non-existent "back fat" that she manufactures on cue to escape notice of her eating disorders (yeah, we know).

Or, seeing the lights of town wink on one-by-one magically, lighting up the quaint village in a town awash with sparkling snow and pretty lights, with cute lil' baby Jimmy and his adorable chubby cheeks red from the cold, as we watched a few ice skaters make their way leisurely across the small rink at sunset, as happy in this world as any other place on G-d's green earth, and isn't that our way? Bring on the snow, then, and a cheerfully roaring fire. I've got the really great stories to tell, over a strong lager in a tall-necked glass. Not her, though. She has this disease that makes her fingertips turn white. 

Best that she go to her fucking "feng shui" designed condo in her native Florida, where she can simply tan and diet in peace, in an "vacay" second home that was bought during my active time in MMA, because it was in foreclosure, thus could be had for a song-and-dance during someone else's most difficult times, financially-speaking, of course. What a coincidence, don't you think? Or is it just more genius marketing "synergy" by one of the former female corporate "greats" of the world"? Hmm. That's for you to decide, my liebchens.

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Biest

Grammar Nazi

The "Judas" Bible in St Mary's Church, Totnes, Devon, UK. This is a copy of the second folio edition of the Authorized Version, printed by Robert Barker, Printer to King James I, in 1613, and given to the church for the use of the Mayor of Totnes. This edition is known as the "Judas" Bible because in Matthew c26 v36 "Judas" appears instead of "Jesus". In this copy the mistake (in red circle) is corrected with a slip of paper pasted over the misprint.[1]"Judas Bible2" by Etan J. Tal - Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

It takes all kinds of people to publish the books that we cherish and pass on to our loved ones, including the good, bad, ugly, and indifferent. I've cataloged all the types I could into my brain as I went about my career, full as it is with the facts needed to produce the most complex yet beautifully simple objects humans make. I was there slugging it out in other people's offices, over other people's problems, because I loved it, which was greeted with the necessary amount of derision intended by someone who just realized that they fucked up by assuming all the real book people of the world were gone. Not so.

In recognition of actual genius, even when it was undetected by the unwashed mousy messes I was often forced to work alongside of (and in the process, often giving them a free education that's priceless just to do my job), I amassed quite an impressive head count. At the end of my tenure working under the guise of various "bosses", and when it became blatantly obvious to an entire industry worldwide that I could outwork even the clever rich white "dons" of Oxford U. in an unbeatable quick time (creating a new record, too: took me only a few scant weeks to supposedly upset the "board" and other "shareholders" who were "in charge of covers", which I found out by sweeping right over the head of their favored pet du jour, a pathetic sell-out of a "Creative Director" who allowed herself to be shipped overseas at their back-and-call whenever they felt like it, by pandering to their lily-white asses through her social media to reflect exactly what they wanted to hear, which isn't exactly like setting the world on fire with originality, but I digress), my fellow co-workers took a devilish glee in recording my "head counts" of those fallen comrades who had unfortunately tried to sell their souls to a bunch of real intellectuals who didn't need them, plush as we were (are) with actual credentials and experience.

Actual know-how is a frightening thing when you have no fucking idea about what you're actually doing, much less caring about it, because as every really dedicated teacher has already found out, it takes a hell of a lot more than a pittance of a salary to become your devoted servant. The gap where your overblown salary sits is filled with our genuine heart, and that's not something you can fake on a mere teacher's salary. Just ask any faithful publishing professional. It's enough to make you blanch white, and what rough sport it is, too.

And so, when I met those adoring fans of mine (sometimes unwashed, because a lack of soap doesn't discriminate between good or bad either) in your office spaces who followed my every move over the company's Ethernet network, or cheered aloud when I pushed through another great cover that was in danger of rejection out of spite, sabotage, or corruption, I felt it, even when I knew my crew of production editors who dared to sail with me on one of my last voyages asea* while awash in ill-gotten money, were doomed to repeat themselves because such is the nature of their gifts: harnessing their fretful compulsiveness in the typo-free artwork you all appreciate.

I couldn't do it, but you sure can. Thanks for that. I realize it takes a lot of nerve to man my chair by forcing turf wars over layouts most people will never see, know about, or give two fucks about how long you sweated over it bro, but you made me look good, even when there was no one around who cared enough to know quality work when they see it. I do. Thanks, D'avi. You're a beautifully crazy kid, man, and I could do with a little less stalking, okay? Now get to work! You have a lot of it to do, you petty-ass motherfucker. Just keep your little turf wars off my fucking margins....ya fuck. I'll see you in "Merry Olde Englande"**. You'll be the so-and-so holding the white gloves.

 

For the production staff at OUP/USA: it was a hell of a ride, wasn't it?

http://global.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195393040/book/preface/ 

* Davey's world:   http://www.word-detective.com/2011/08/asea-at-sea/ 

** White gloves:   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindisfarne_Gospels 

Montezuma's Revenge

Around this time of year, people go "stir crazy" from winter, apparently, because it's so brutal and difficult as an annual event, Northern European white folk just HAVE TO escape all this horrid, bone-chillingly cold weather for an expensive tropical vacation manned cheaply by slaves, er, Mexicans. Mexico is such a bargain! Just yesterday, I saw a young couple on a court t.v. show bitch about having three slaves, er, employees and a wedding planner do everything but grovel at their feet for a mere $500 wedding reception, but you know, Cabo is sooo expensive this time of year. Like, it totally isn't their fault and stuff, right?

Wrong! Judge Judy hung 'em out to dry, like the stupidly spoiled shits they really are, even predicting the end of what will surely be a very brief marriage between what looked like a gay couple acting straight and sublimating their rage onto some older wedding coordinator and her husband (both straight-looking and therefore, hated), because if the worst complaint you have in this world is the cost of cheap labor south of the border, then you have no real problems. It's like fat people ranting about how much cheap food they have to eat that's readily available whenever they want it, because it's just too much! We should outsource it to a third world country, to places where hunger is truly cost effective.

It was in this spirit of discontent that my family had its last vacation together in Cozumel before my parents split, and what better place to separate from women and children than a luxury hotel resort staffed by people so poor, they probably have to steal from the leftover bread in the baskets just to live, which means I hated it on site. It was totally fake, and utterly full of crap. I could feel myself depressing downward on the way there from the airport, trucked around in this garish tourist vehicle from the airport that was overly gay, just so the locals could blatantly see a bunch of rich "white" Americans fly past them, living as they did in hovels. Honestly, I was much more interested in them and their lives than being carted around by a bunch of paid-for patsies, but I had long learned since to hide my quiet observations behind silence, drinking in the real in as much detail as I could before hitting the mise-en-scène.

The resort was exactly what I thought it would be, and as such, was completely unsuitable for children. It was more like a honeymoon / vacation spot for dumb Texans with money to burn. Everything tasted weird, and before we could pour the first glass of something cool to drink in all that oppressive heat, my mom readily unpacked her hysterical fears about the water to great effect. She had the entire floor to herself in their hotel room, while she carefully outlined the plan about water consumption this far south: don't drink from the tap, drink only from the bottled water provided (boohoo), and don't eat the ice cubes that are made from "their" bad tap water, either. Ask for drinks without ice. Oh, and don't eat the fruit in the drinks, either. That has "bad" water in them, too. The umbrellas decorating the drinks were okay, but don't pick your teeth with them. Residual germs.

One day we noticed a filthy stream of raw sewage that was suspiciously yellow-colored, and upon closer inspection by me and my middle bro that's exactly what it was, because the "lily pads" floating on the service of our collective urine from the hotel deliberately funneled directly into that gorgeous turquoise ocean of theirs were all made from plastic (you could see the seams from the molds that made them), bought and installed to simply pass as a healthy stream of water to the drunk turistas in passing, such was their desperate hope that we were all as stupid as we looked, sounded, dressed, and ate, with the exception of one very smart little native New York girl. After we told our parents about it, they tersely told us to "just stick to the pool", because we knew the jig was up.

After that, the cons were on like wildfire. My oldest brother was chasing some southern tail, in the form of an easily-had blond Texan teenager busily experimenting with boys and alcohol. I actually felt kind of sorry for her, because her fat red-faced dad was the very definition of an ugly American tourist (loud drunk twang, garish Hawaiian shirt, and the standard socks-with-sandals that mark the true amateur), so by the time we were halfway through the vacation and having our own adventures, my parents rightly pulled the dramatic focus back onto themselves by openly booking separate hotel rooms, so my mom could dramatically bathe her sunburned legs in white hotel towels, carefully leaning on me for emotional support during what she announced to me as "The Divorce" (with handy printed playbills soon to follow). We all went our separate ways after that, as was also part of the plan, and I was only thirteen years old.

At first, I was drunk from the freedom of being loosened upon a new foreign environment to explore without doing constant chronic care for the always-sick home crowd, which was quickly followed by the recognition that my parents were ceding their joint hands in parenting forever, preferring instead to put us into a feral "sink or swim" mode that signaled their cutting us loose from them, while they dug at each other in little snipes for the rest of the trip, to simulate the stimulating "highs and lows" of their exceedingly dull and highly co-dependent match, punctuated by huge public sighs at dinner, followed by long glances directed at the meaningfully empty chair of the missing parent "in grief", designed to show just how genuine their parting must, in truth, be. It wasn't exactly Shakespeare, is what I'm saying to you.

But, I made do. I looked around the hotel grounds for other signs of bullshit, and when I got bored with that (it was typically faux and overly manicured, ho hum), I stumped for a trip to the local Mayan ruins, so I could at least see something genuine and original in this sea of badly done off-Broadway theater. The drama queens pressed the heat issue and full sun poorly, er, I mean really really well and I totally believed it, while I chalked this trip up to another disaster funded by my parents with poor decision-making abilities, and began waiting for the day when I could actually visit countries on the real. That time is now, amigos. Not so for my brothers. Jim jumped ship with his dumb Texan so he could check out over beers had on the sly and not-so-cleverly hidden teenage sex (which he proclaimed loudly like an obvious douche, because he's no lady-killer), and my other brother simply disappeared.

I figured he wanted time alone to manage his feelings, which I've been told all my life he needs an especially long time to do, because he has "difficulties processing his emotions", which meant people treat him with kid gloves, as much unlike my experience as you could get. But, much like the native Mexicanas working at the resort, I'm sure I wasn't the only teenage single mother in residence, times being what they were back then. I was bored with it all, so I just said I was "going exploring", but just when I felt I couldn't wander around aimlessly anymore, my middle brother swooped in to save the day with a new show now appearing near you, called "Monetzuma's Revenge". 

You see, I "checked out" by hiking and walking and swimming and admiring the truly local flora and fauna I could find on my own, but not my family. No, my brother took our oldest brother's early Spanish-language primer solemnly given to us as young teens to heart, and that was to order beer as minors and put it on our parent's tabs, as the price of their admission to our group show. I hated beer because I had normal teenage taste buds as a young girl, but I found that for the first time in my life, I actually loved the taste of coffee. It was a revelation to me, so delicious was it to drink, that I felt like I was truly tasting coffee for the first time, and in a real sense that was true, because it was one of the few actual locally-grown foods I had while I was there.

Not so for my bros. Bernie got drunk and blamed it all on the water, an excuse that was as handily tied and packaged for him as the colorfully bowed gift baskets in our hotel rooms, as a "thank you" to los gringos for checking into their tourist trap. My mom and dad actually had to parent, by overcoming huge hurdles like speaking Spanish, a language so familiar to New Yorkers that most of our signs are bi-lingual (thank you, Nuyoricans!), and navigating the healthcare system of a country so under-deprived and obviously corrupt, my parents fretted nervously over it for days, retelling the story over and over again, with drinks in hand and jauntily smoked cigarettes, making for a delightfully fretful time towards the end of our trip that gave them the necessary conversation to spill, over actual conversation that neither of my parents can do. They talked about their "mad dash" to that Mexican E.R. for years!

Years later, my brother finally admitted that he made up food poisoning and a case of "Montezuma's Revenge" because he was scared to tell anyone around him in authority the truth, which was often beat out of us for our daring, and that he was simply hungover from ordering all the beer he could drink as an obviously young minor that the locals freely gave to him, citing later on at the hotel that "we all looked alike" with a careless "no habla espanol" shrug, mugging their parts as effectively as the key players around us did, in an almost real attempt at mimicking the human condition. We all bought into his act so much, in part because of all the other distractions happening at the same time, that my brother successfully hid his alcoholism from me for years and years and years on end, cutting me off quickly when I told him the truth about living with his condition.

For almost as long, he had bartered around the charming hangover story at family holiday parties (haha, those crazy kids!), praised for his masterful deception, patted on the shoulder for being a secret drunk, while I was cut off, cast off, cut out, and brutalized again for daring to speak up when it was inconvenient for me to do so, conveniently timed just as my freelance gigs and unemployment benefits that I'd earned since childhood were running dry, because I didn't give my Irish Twin the pity party he felt he was rightfully owned, instead of the stern and sage advice I gave him. Before long, I was homeless and agitated, because this happened just a few short years ago, in some sort of organized manner that doesn't seek justice, but rather revenge. A revenge against reality at all costs, no matter the price I paid for it. Vive México!

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

Ice Age

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prospect_Park_%28Brooklyn%29

We had a snowstorm recently in the tri-state area, which means every kook with an ax to grind about the seasons comes out in full force on our local news broadcasts, either as deniers for global warming brought on by mass consumption and clogging pollution, or some out-of-towner brought to New York City by corporate from another marketplace that's way warmer (and naturally much better, duh), who just fucking hates it here. Both are annoying and often the same person, but much like the turning of the earth on its axis, New Yorkers accept posers for who they really are: thrill seekers looking to make a quick buck in the heart of the empire, hopefully at our expense, because we're that good at weathering storms every year, like in preparation and stuff. 

Of course, it never really works out that way for the bluesy bipolar broad bored with life itself, because this town spits out people like candy. We have every type of season existing in the Northeastern U.S. within perfect balance, divided neatly into three months each with four distinct seasons, which we often like to explain to any type of human from any spot around the globe in excruciatingly long (and highly technical) detail, if need be. Meteorology, ain't it a kick? It's actually fun to mess with 'em sometimes, like the mayor pretending that Saturday's snowfall was "the worst one ever!!", as a direct contradiction to the near-constant snow we had just last year, but such are the devotees of "the idiot box" and its' voodoo priestesses promising heightened hysteria they can all "get high" off of, in some delusional end-of-the-world type of scenario, rampant with overly dramatic words in description of a simple snow, so that they can nod along with some droning talking head. Yeah! So cold, so dreary....gasp! Like death itself!! Go global warming! We love you! Sooo warm.*

Meanwhile, we're having downhill sled races in the park, with cool Park Rangers handing out hot chocolate to the kids for free, happy as ever in a landscape turned magical with sparkling snow, but...uh, yeah...sure, it's the end of the world in a northern climate. Meet you at the rink? No need to rent. I have my own ice skates! Oh, right....booooo, that's bad fun >:( I forgot! In a way, we use our environment to weed out the kind of people who wouldn't make it anywhere let alone here, so much so that we've kind of perfected life in all its aspects, complete with a southern colony for those retired exiles we call "Snow Birds", those charming Grandmas you all see in Florida, dope, with the strong native accents. And that's why it's hard for whiners everywhere; they have a lot of competition, too much for us to even notice them all, thus sucking some of their joy out of killing our fun, which never works. What a pattern! Almost predictable, like the weather itself....right?

But, that's what major shifts are all about. It was the same thing in the workplace, when publishing transitioned from the purely manual to the computer desktop: people who couldn't make the leap in thought necessary to move forward didn't excel, and the rest did. No one specifically asked me about that "sea change" either, but you didn't hear me complaining about it overmuch. I didn't have the time for it, what with teaching myself graphic design for books on the computer at night, running my own household with roommates and boyfriends in tow, and staying alive long enough to do it again the very next day. Boohoo. No one cared because work had to be done, so you just learned what you needed to get through the day, and in the process, I became the greatest apprentice the industry had ever seen.

Our families were like that, too. My grandmother's parents decided at some point that they had enough of working after the ice industry went bust with modern refrigeration, choosing instead to refuse speaking English to their children while forcing my studious grandmother to work on their behalf, thus depriving her of her dream about advanced education, not that it worked. She excelled far past them anyway, because she had to, and because she could, and isn't that what they saw with me, too? I could've done without the abuse, domestic violence, mental illness, and addictions that seemed to spring fully formed all around me, but like my grandparents, I knew I could bridge the gap if I had to. I didn't have the choices that I make easy for the people who depend on me to survive, because this isn't exactly my first "Ice Age" to gap, nor will it be yours. Welcome to the same evolutionary theories as then, newly packaged for you in the Digital Age because we had to, for you to keep up with us, so do. Keep up!

https://www.prospectpark.org/news-events/news/

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

Chameleon

http://wiki.waveborn.com/becoming-so-good-they-can-t-ignore-you

Competitive media companies tend to be bitchy hot-spots for gossip, as employees fight it out among themselves for the most coveted positions within a house according to their appropriate levels, or not, as the case may be. You think some of the books you read are freaky? You should meet some of the people who make them....shudder. Bookish types tend to be somewhat anti-social: think of a mad scientist who just HAS TO clean every beaker in the the lab twice or thrice to guard against invisible alien...er, germs, and you're there.

Many well-read people are simply addicts with a bent for technical and highly repetitive labor clothed in sheep's garb, but take away their main "jones", and they're like any other addict; snarling nasty vicious beasts. I love reading as much as the next professional publisher, but take it away from me and I know I won't freak out, miss it as I may, because I'm in such a phase right now when it's more important for me to produce work through writing than being your passive audience.

It's the same thing for most well-trained artists who go through different phases of productivity based on many factors that include time, money, inclination, location; same as any other field, with the exception that there is no one to pass the buck to, which makes for much more difficult productive periods than the average "joe", but such is life. Because we create content long before the public has access to it, our companies (and lives) are filled with intrigue and possibility which, in the wrong hands, makes for a potent cocktail that people not born to the work can't handle.

I see bound galleys at garage sales all the time, but it's one of the most unethical acts a publishing professional can do, because leaking a book early to the public deprives everyone in the work queue the right to earn off it as a property, the way that buying bootleg DVD's is serious intellectual theft, but catch any drunk at the bar on Friday night, and you've got a thief looking to score, hot to brag about his "already seen it" status to other junkies who use it as leverage, too. Why not just wait? I always liked waiting to see something, like being pleasantly surprised on Christmas morning, not that I need to have the element of mystery to enjoy anything. I'm happy with "spoilers" that deprive media junkies of their high, because I'm a mature adult who understands that there's tons of available content for just about any person out there in the world, and as such, I accept that I probably won't be able to get to all of it, so why try? Just relax, and enjoy it.

But, some people need dirty nasty secrets to hold over one another as bribes, just like assholes in a typical office do. We all know them: they're that shifty-eyed kid who sneaks onto your email behind your back, so he can develop some "strategy" to foil your genius without you knowing it, even though he (and every other person on the payroll) is utterly dependent on you for income, thus breeding the hatred that envy inspires. I dated a typical ad guru who knew all the tricks of the trade: hire brilliant but vulnerable people like, say, a single woman living paycheck-to-paycheck in the city, just one small check away from bankruptcy but famous anyway, even though you should, like, NEVER say it to her face or she'll, like, know it and stuff, and there goes secrecy as a strategy!

So, I know all the big personality types who peddle our wares, grudgingly as "no-talents" tend to be as a group, but also utterly dependent on us, and isn't that why they turn on us? It's a pretty easy formula to suss out, much like the reason the retarded bully in the playground hates everyone: simply because you're there, and because his father's a mean drunk, so they're set up to be that way. Anyway, during our brief time dating (most of which the ad guy spent in competition with the other man I was dating), he asked me a lot of leading questions about the "other man" disguised as "support" from the modern guy looking to "score" with a beautiful woman. After a quick while, it actually became a pseudo-gay relationship between the two of them through me. He also thought it was bitchy fun to "out" a well-known and highly respected actor to me, simply because I knew his work well and the women he's collaborated with creatively, like, say an infamous Broadway actress with very curly hair (thanks for not selling out "soul sister") who can pass for my doppelganger at times.

I was nonplussed because lots of people are gay, to which he became a little twitchy about it, "Oh, oh sorry...did you have  a 'crush' on him?" Uh, no...never really thought about it before. "Because if you did, I'm so sorry!" Yeah, no sweat, dude. Actually, we were in downtown Brooklyn on a warm day, and I was thinking about pizza at a "famous" place that's always crowded with tourists, and as a native New Yorker, I never fucking wait on lines for our food, like some gimmicky tourist trap meant to gouge the unsuspecting. I cook better than most people anyway! He seemed curiously let-down that I couldn't give a fuck about some artist's sex life, and why would I? What does it have to do with me? It's the same thing at work: why would I give a fuck about who sleeps with who, and when? I make the work, they sell it and give me the profits I earn through my own labor. It's a pretty effective formula for craftspeople that's worked since we thought of it many moons ago.

It did give me a lot insight into why people like him sell-out so quickly; it's the fear that the money will dry up, once we figure out who they really are, which isn't true for experts like myself. Like my mentors told me, do your job well and that's your security. You don't need all the bullshit. If you work hard, you'll succeed, and that's always been the case with me, because nothing beats hard work. Anyway, after he and I necessarily drifted apart because he couldn't figure out how to work with an open honest person like myself, I noticed that he drifted out west, after his ex-wife moved there with his one child, the same woman he loved/hated by alternately craving her sex and then cheating on her to get her attention, like a ten year-old in crafts class off of his Ritalin. Really? Skirt-cashing the very woman he despises? Oy....strange are the ways of the disordered classes.

Anyway, I'm counting on him cyber-stalking me today without telling me how much he loves my work (and that happens every day, too), so let me take this time to ease his mind: back in the day, we "the knowing public" also knew that Liberace was gay, as we did about Richard Chamberlain, George Michael, and the fabulously feminine Boy George, and you know what? We love their music and their art anyway, because as Steve Martin once famously said, all you have to do to be a master artist is work harder than anyone you know, and "be so good that they can't ignore you". Ain't that the truth? There...now it's out there. The truth is out there! See you on the flip side of life, kids, and all the other "minors" in my audience. I see you!

http://bit.ly/1SBWvgb

http://bit.ly/1SBWvgb 

Sportsdyke

Infamous 80s hairdo known as "the softball haircut", or more recently dubbed the "Dyke-O'Mullet", as worn by my kind of lesbian, a man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullet_%28haircut%29

Psychological warfare doesn't just take place in offices, behind closed doors. Luckily for me, abuse follows me wherever I go! In fact, some of the weirdest behavior that seems to happen around me all the time was during my time on the mats of some infamous dojos, with or without athletic lesbians included, because (and here's the kicker), I'd be there regardless of the other people who may or may not be seriously dedicated athletes. Me? I just don't give a fuck. It's enormously expensive to train with elite athletes, and as such, I take it seriously enough (kinda like ballet as a kid), but better, because there's lots of dudes around, which brings me to another important point: I've done some of my roughest fighting with my brother Bernie, during that glorious time before he hit puberty, and when I actually had a decent shot at beating him or making him cry, which I hated. He was my best friend as a kid, and a beautifully sensitive boy who was bullied at school (he was called "pretty boy" a lot), which I also hated.

It's part of what makes him so angry, because he's always had great difficulty processing his emotions well, given genetic difficulties that he certainly didn't want or ask for, which gave him way more free passes at home and away than I had, but not by much. He gets crazy/angry quickly, which, as an experienced martial artist in the Super Heavyweight class, means I can't train with him in total effectiveness at the dojo for competitions, which he also reminds me about whenever I want him to spar with me. You know, he could do me a favor, instead of the other way around, but whatevs, Bern. No, I know! You pay a lot of money for "your time", too, and I'm so puny and weak, how could you get a decent workout for your money? Not much has changed between us in that sense over the years, besides his obvious big size over me. You think I'm kidding? He's bred one heck of a big boy who took to MMA naturally (without hard time on the mats) much more than his older, smaller, and way more experienced black belt brother in Taekwondo, and that bears a seriously strong thinking-over, too.

Which brings me to the other point about me and fight training; it's in the blood. I'm not a warrior because I choose it, or because I like some trendy fucking gym scene. It chose me. And my brothers. And my nephews....but I digress. What some crazy dyke thinks is a good rubbing around with her strap-on "bestie" while spending our time on the mat to play stupid fucking games with (BTW: thanks, Anne, for rolling with Peg while "dyke-ing" it up at TSMMA, while I tried to stay alive with you two fucks during grappling, you know, because you had a brown belt and Peggy has a black belt), is my real fucking sport. Wackos waste time, and time is money, so get a grip, moron.

Just do what I do. Wrestle it out like a pro during class (while I look at some of the more handsome gentlemen folk with actual penises who may be training) and then afterwards...well that's up to you and me and you-know-who, because that "Big Injun" I know (who happens to be just around the bend) is the best warrior ever, if you know what I mean. Like, the ultimate. Yeah, that's it! How catchy! Training with professionalism without the weird fucking head games that don't work is like being "The Ultimate Warrior", or something like that. I dunno. Maybe.That's what I heard, at least, from those people commentating live on t.v. during MMA fights. See you on the mats, warriors, and leave your fucking crazy dyke shit you think you're working out at home, okay? I don't give a fuck about it. It's "go" time! Happy hunting.

http://www.mulletjunky.com/

The Man Who Liked Men

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

I've worked with just about every type of human currently on planet Earth (twice, thrice, and more than nice), as part of the exclusive media elite of New York, and I studied alongside them, too, as part of the intellectual elite who attend the world's finest schools, rife with the wealth, power, and privileges the children of the richest families so often have. It's given me a wide range of deviant behaviors to observe (and fight) that even the most hard-bitten city detective would have a tough time beating me on, and that's also part of the point: working through the highly competitive and very selective environments that are so difficult to gain access to, they bring on a severe case of "the crazies" for people who are not mentally equipped to work at that level. It causes "freak outs" in the most showily aggressive and publicly hostile ways, which are necessary for us to take action against.

Underneath the cover of work, there's even wild accusations of corporate espionage among employees, ones that quickly followed on the heels of my official apprenticeship, and that's part of it, too: knock out the really gifted folks who threaten anyone in "the game" who can't perform well without using deceit. When I broached the supposedly large gap that existed between the worlds of manufacturing and art, they called me a "spy" on both sides of the fence for being brilliant enough to work technically as well as artistically, which was in direct conflict with company practices at the time, because I was the first classically trained artist to work in both the production and design departments at St. Martin's Press, and the harassment didn't end.

I "sucked" at design because I didn't know computers like the highly experienced graphic designers who couldn't draw expertly like me and my friends who'd studied many art forms could do. When that didn't work, the lead art director laughingly mocked me for not knowing computers like he did as an expert his 30s (I was in my early 20s at the time), by making all of us take some personality test that was rigged for assigning the name "Marie" as that of some stuffy old secretary, because I came into the department as a manager who could perform many job functions, unlike the diva designers who plead ignorance to anything they didn't want to do.

Like any old scam appearing daily at offices for the disordered worldwide, I actually came out ahead of the game through my proficiency and humility to absorb any type of task that was needed for the job at hand, and that was part of the point about my apprenticeship, too: I can do anything better than you, even when I'm robbed of your clear advantages in some sort of fix or "double-cross". When trifling co-workers couldn't hack at me though the work flow, they re-doubled their efforts to con me into social situations disguised as those mandatory horrors known as "the office party", in desperate efforts to get me drunk and spill the beans, which I always did, because more than one wise person told me repeatedly that if you never lie, you have nothing to hide, and that's the truth.

But, that didn't stop 'em from firing hard at me over the years. One of the best cons was a bitchy Eurasian gay girl in disguise, working her typical "art fag" hairdo and expensive designer clothes for all it was worth by sleeping her way through the office staff, girls and boys alike. Oh, I staved her off at arm's length like I know how to do in my sleep, which took 'em awhile to sort out amongst themselves. The industry types in the know rigged a mandatory job requirement for me, making me work oversees with her as their lead production editor (untrained in German, on foreign-language computers with European power sources), because the openly gay woman from the U.S. design team was openly sick, and she constantly threatened discrimination lawsuits that they told me they were afraid of behind closed doors, even though the company had other "out" gay people working there.

It put me in direct line of this editor's abuses overseas in English, which was a new one for me, working as I did alone in a supposedly German-language-only design studio that's a classic isolationist technique for the chronic abuser seeking to attack. It was desperately done, but I knew the deal ahead of time, because it took me six months to find work, a long time for someone as experienced as me, but that's an economic downturn for you. On my first day of work, I saw the gay designer and her manager savage each other in the hallways by violently cursing at each other, after which I immediately called my father to report obvious workplace abuse. He told me I "had to" work there because there were no other jobs out there, and since it took me "so long" to find a job, I had no choice. He told me to "keep my head down, and my mouth shut", which I dutifully transposed onto a small yellow post-it as the anagram "HDMD" in thick black pen, and taped it to my work monitor so as to remember his sage wisdom, which was noticed by the staff around me, though it oddly went unremarked on by the very same employees who seemed to be verbally abusive about any other thing, wherever I went.

In fact, I'm so good at keeping my cool, I became famous for it. Christina, the arty in-over-her-head provincial with the ready strategy of promiscuous office sex, made me her friend by force, which is a common enough technique when the work thing doesn't quite pan out. Her and her friends from Boston put the heavy hand on for inviting me out, so much so that I knew it was a corporate strategy for getting the personal goods on me, so as to use by attacking my psyche through office attacks that would be hard for me to prove, which it was, and which I won at anyway, but that's a story for another day. She tried to set me up one weekend with her guy friend who had trouble dating, and who was also working the online dating scene hard, just like I so happened to be doing at the same time. Huh...what a coincidence.

We had a day at the beach outside of the office that went bad, because my obvious female sex organs in my sexy, black, halter-top bathing suit freaked out their friend, which Christina explained away as the current "skinny fetish" that was all the rage in ads. He even told her she should work out those thighs of hers to sculpt away ugly body fat (she was a size two), because anything over a size four was "fat" (duh, Marie), as she eyeballed me derisively over crepes in some trendy Village hotspot. Oh. Poor me....I wonder if I can cut weight as an athlete? Huh. I did it to blend into their social structure, strict as their group's rules were about appearances back then. It all came apart at their very next party during a holiday Fourth of July weekend, when I innocently inquired about whether their friend liked me or not. Uh, no. They squirmed around me for awhile, until I overheard their skinny blond (and very tan) friend say that he didn't "like anyone over 'a buck seventeen'", in a thinly veiled reference to their group-sanctioned anorexia that has never been my real scene.

The jig was finally up at work when the gay female designer gossiped with us during one of our production meetings (we were all seeing each other socially outside of work by then: I even went to Diana's lesbian-friendly birthday party at a tech-themed bar!), by huffing over this same editor's revelation that the very same guy she tried to set me up with had met a short-haired blond woman online, and that they were dating. It was going really well! Oh, yeah? "So....she's dating men again?!" Diana seemed a bit taken aback by her reveal about her male friend's new girl. "That's funny", she remarked in an offended way, "because the last time I saw her, she was performing as a man in drag shows on the lesbian circuit." 

You could hear a pin drop as the wanna-be, art-fag-with-no-talent from Virginia froze in our little circle of female-only media employees discussing million dollar licensing for a German publishing company on a low-paying teacher's salary. "Haha!" Christina turned bright red, "Oh, really?"  Within months, she'd be back at work overseas (I broke the scam open on that already, because they couldn't prove it was worth the money for me to go there to work), but as an editorial lead (she'd forced out by then the woman who hired me by using all of us to "gang up" on her, though in truth the poor woman was simply incompetent, plus I already knew the group of girls would turn on me, too), Christina felt she had all the power in the world to abuse me until I left for a book publisher, figuring she had won. Whaddya think, New Yorkers? C'mon. Give it to me straight. I think can handle it.

Traitor

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

Unlike carefully guarded work-flows, my "daily bread" is a kind of open warfare that takes place publicly in the real world, for anyone to see. It's weird, but I've been famous all my life, which sucks. I actually don't seek it out, which is very odd for some people with self-aggrandizing types of mental illnesses to understand, who seem to take the content that they see as some sort of confirmation that we, the makers of such content, have the easiest lives ever, when it is often the exact opposite, but hope (and a raging disassociated disorder greatly aided by booze, drugs, welfare, and daytime television) springs eternal.

In every environment I go to, there's someone who has a problem with my existence, in a daily re-enactment of an age-old bias against me and my people that remains unsolved nor properly addressed until this very day, when we, the people, strike back against it. As it is for every beautiful woman of the world we live in (no matter how modest, hard-working, unassuming, or brilliant she may be), the freaks come out in full force, in a stalking aggressive way that marks the deranged and violently aggressive among us. For me, the first perpetrators of violence in any environment are typically gay women, which is strikingly different from the typical "pro-woman" posture that has incorrectly infected the modern Feminist Movement as some sort a gay girl's club, over an actual bid for civil rights that it is truly intended for, but such is life.

Public spaces are rife with indiscretions and planned attacks, and my life is no different as an openly "out-and-about" woman in society, which makes for enemies I didn't even know I could make, like the deranged lesbian secretly harboring death threats against me alone at her office desk, whispered as insults made out the side of her mouth, as she finally strikes up the nerve to pass by my workstation so as to insult me better. Well done! I guess feminine beauty that is loyal to a man's wedded touch in publicly exchanged sacred vows is a majorly capital offense against gay people everywhere...oh, wait a second...yep, this is 2016 and Federal Law grants the legal right to marry to any mature, healthy, adult American citizen, so fuck you very much!

Leigh was just such a dyke: bullish, mannish, Southern, arrogant, petty, ugly, and crazy. She hated me on-site, when she came over to our book design studio the first week I was working, to "play" with "her girls", who were actually my boss and the other professional book cover designer for a prominent sci-fi division that I knew from my time at St. Martin's Press, and which was an integral work connection that formed a favorable impression verifiable through that network, because the owner of the studio was a well-known hand-letterer for several award-winning science fiction book covers, now working on kid's content with me as her assistant. Oh....kinda different when it's legitimate and respectful, right?

Well, she breezed in with her gunmetal-colored man's do in a button-down long-sleeved shirt and men-styled corduroys to interrupt our problem-solving meeting at the owner's computer station, aping around playfully with my new co-workers as she recounted some weekend dyke tale that involved her fat girlfriend (also with the standard men's hairdo that's not dyed, so deal with that, asshole!), her gay crew, and an Indian restaurant with belly dancers that she mocked in front of us, in case we were in question as to how she felt about us as "straight" women working together without her daily involvement.

Her behavior grew worse with time, as it always does with me, because I am just as open with my life references that she set the tone with, in that very first introduction when she aggressively let me know about her sexual preferences, and which she hated as well, because my fiancee at the time was an actual beautiful man, and not a fake one. I called her out after awhile, and to which my boss told her other designer that she'd never have the guts to do, which I already knew through her well-known "deer-in-the-headlights" stare that was her trademark way of handling stress in conversations that were way over her head.

My boss couldn't protect me as a worker, not that I needed her to, as the better artist, and that was part of the ongoing attacks against me, too. I already knew all about daily hate from my own life and self-defense, but what I did do is give my boss every weapon she needed to discipline and edge out the offensive editor of happily-made children's books on the sly (without acknowledging my prowess as a skillful workplace operator), because I knew Leigh wouldn't be able to stop herself from attacking me, crazy as she is. After her repeatedly weird non-issue complaints that I used "too much tape" to put together my book mechanicals (so not earth-friendly), I knew she was that desperate to "out" herself with a career suicide sponsored by workplace harassment and unemployment benefits, which was exactly what she did.

After my gorgeous live-in boyfriend paid a visit or two to the office when she was visiting from the office across the hallway that we worked with for children's packaging, I knew she would boil over with seething hatred, never taking the time to know me, my life, or him (all far from perfect and marred with abuses), which was just what I wanted to prove publicly. As I went through the engagement and wedding process that my also-married co-workers knew intimately, too, she couldn't stand to hear us talk about it, even as we spoke of our hardships as ethnic women of New York; Carol as an Italian-American designer in the prominent, male-dominated art and design book studios of the 70s, Carrie as a Jewish woman forced to live with her mother again for financial reasons after her divorce, and me, living a far from perfect life.

When I knew she'd keep picking at me, even after censure coolly done by the higher-ups when I wasn't around to take notice of it (or feel a sense of closure and/or validation about), I pushed her over the edge by harmlessly remarking in front of her that "most of my friends were men" while I talked about my wedding plans made with a good friend of mine from school, which made her visibly gnash her teeth in front of the three of us. Oh, goody! It was just what I wanted to see from a hate-filled bitch like her, over-her-head as she was even in the shallow margins of our real book world, working at a small and relatively unknown book packager as a minor piss-ant who sweated over each typo like the insanely power-hungry bitch she really is.

She sputtered for a moment in distress, not instantly glib and nasty as she usually was, with this piece of offensive "hetero" content unfairly introduced into her heavily guarded, she-male world. She turned red, spitting with anger at me, in this minor revelation made over wedding arrangements, "WHAT?!" She struggled to assimilate my love for the men of my life, normal as it is, and real as it is, too. "MOSTLY MALE FRIENDS?!" Uh, yeah, bitch. No one for you to work over on me, in a secretive "lesbian underground" kind of way. No dirt for you! I smiled a little, as always taken aback by my devotion for the men who have loved me in my life. Yeah, I said. I have three brothers and a father! Who do you think I spent most of my time with, growing up? I made it as odd for her to question me, as it was (and is) natural for me to love. 

She couldn't deny that to me as my birthright, so she took one of her last weak shots at me, made right in front of the woman who cut my paychecks every other week (and without paying me for health insurance, full-time onsite freelancer that I was back then, that's now illegal for companies to do in New York City, so "you're welcome" for that, kids). "Oh, yeah?", she snarled at me, "Well, that makes you a traitor to me! YOU'RE A TRAITOR TO YOUR OWN SEX!", this, to a social advocate like me working at a design studio of women, at a time when that just wasn't done. "Yeah, that's what you are! You're a traitor!" And with that, her fate (and her end) in our industry was sealed.

After I left the small company out of boredom and my own prowess, I stayed in touch with the owner of the studio. Sure enough, and true to pattern, the offending editor left for points south after I left the company, never to return to the professional, big city, major league world of book publishing ever again, kids. How's that for a "happy ending"? Nighty nite, and nice knowin' you! But, not really, bitch. Not really.

This one's for you today, Carol and Carrie: real "designing women".