Assistance

As you may (or may not) already know, I began my official on-the-books working career at 15 years-old, which means I've been paying into our system since, with my taxes that were taken heavily from any meager paycheck I could ever hope to have, just so I could stave off starvation, sickness, and homelessness when times got rough (like the upcoming week), and they were always rough for me and my generation, because we don't use war for blood money. It's kinda unethical, you know? Living in a constant state of stress like the "paycheck-to-paycheck" lifestyle was specifically designed to keep me and my friends stressed out, and, hopefully, too sick to notice egregiously illegal behaviors like stealing and working the system behind our backs, to benefit anyone but the people who truly needed it.

With that in mind, I had very little expectations about any of the "social services" that were supposedly there to help me out whenever I needed it, you know, because I paid the heaviest tax shares in our free society as a hard-working single woman who paid all of her bills and expenses. My dad also liked to bark it out to me in a rough, red-faced laugh, whenever he felt embarrassed about his evasive financial maneuvers that were totally legal, because he had worked with legislators as a cable t.v. business owner to make sure that the laws benefited him and his money best. "Hey! Thanks for the 'bail-out' on my failed crops!", he'd brag aloud as a "gentlemen farmer" who didn't need the money, stretching out his hand in mock fellowship for me to shake, taking another big drink afterwards. You're welcome.

Not that I expected understanding from him, or any other rich white man. If he failed to humiliate me in front of his guests to keep me down, my cousins would gladly chip in. "Yeah...I don't think I could ever take Unemployment", said one fucking dick of a cousin to me over "the holidays". This, from a dip-shit who needed his dead father's money handed to him by his mommy so he could hide out in college for, like, ten years, and then do jack-shit for the rest of his family when they hit hard times. Yeah, go fuck yourself, kid. I changed your fucking diapers when you were a baby, and you've never done a g-ddamn thing for anyone besides yourself in this family. I didn't say it out of deference to my lovely grandmother's home, but I took a deep, steadying breath before I schooled him about how my benefits are my money taken out of each paycheck I'd ever paid into since childhood.

Uh, you didn't work throughout your entire school career that lasted for, like, twenty years or so, right? Oh, if I said that, then I would have been chastised for "ruining Christmas" for everyone, because my cousin had it so hard with his father's early death from alcohol and chain-smoking, that he must be allowed to be a completely selfish prick whenever his spoiled, lily-white ass feels like it, to make up for his present state of unreal being. Same with his uptight, upstate white bitch, because "they're scientists". Yeah, right, I've got one of those, too, ass-hat. Boy, does my mom know how to clean Petri dishes and hyper-vigilantly monitor the dishwasher? Like no other. We got nothing back from all of our finessed payouts from a system designed to bankrupt us the minute were stopped "working" at someone else's company.

And it didn't end with privatized humiliation. If we dared to take back a small share of our tax money like I did, the system would try to force me back into someone's office as quickly as possible. It was like welfare for working class people, except that I carried everyone involved. You know, just like I did at home without the handicapped people noticing small details like me. I wasn't worth the trouble, or so I've heard all of my life. I was "carefully selected" to be in a joke of an "entrepreneurial program" designed to flatter the ego of rich whites encountering their very first crisis in life, and it didn't end there. To continue this system of entitlement, my dad also had to do his part, by once again threatening me over the phone or via email, withholding money or using other serious ramifications like a tour in a loony bin (chauffeur-driven, of course), if I didn't find my own way fast.

Oh, okay...so, just like my everyday life, right? Well, yeah! It's always this aggressive indifference to protect one's own ass. It was so cowardly to me that it took my breath away still, and my dad had benefit of a Navy training with plush G.I. Bill money for his service to our country. Of course, the "seminar" was a complete sham. Both of the "mentors" were paid by the state for their participation in the program as rich white retirees, naturally. Gotta protect that income stream of revenue, know what I'm sayin'? As used as I've become to this obsessive ass-covering that marks the seriously disturbed individual in a high-performing workflow, it's never stopped shocking me. The complete condescension behind it by people with much less ability, that's what's always bothered me. It's so rankly obvious.

So, I sat through it and then had to talk my former "mentor" of a businessman father (not to me, but to those impoverished Mexicans and po' white trash of West Texas, y'all) about how it sucked—without him threatening to hurt me by withholding the paltry scraps he tosses my way like I was one of his cheap throwaway dogs that he likes to hurt or kill whenever people aren't watching—and in his barren empty plains, there's no one there to hear you scream. I reiterated my expertise in securing funds from many a rich white man who deliberately set himself up as a "creative patron", so as to better yank at the chains of oppression that binds talent to money, as a torture device for our simple acts of living, working, and excelling far beyond his expectation and your awareness. I survived, you see. I'm still alive, and that is rather inconvenient, isn't it?

I wouldn't like being reminded about my degradation and subsequent downfall, either. No one has the "Art of Empathy" perfected quite like me and my very small band of loyally caring illuminators, for if we didn't understand you in your human condition better than you, who would bind your egotistical books for you to use as a trophy at family parties, while my work "languishes" behind your falsely turned backs? We support and love you anyway, without your validation or evidence, because if we don't give more than you, then you all go down hard, don't you? No, don't answer me back. Your continued silence is all the proof I ever needed to show intentional negligence and deliberate impoverishment, but, oh, how the times have changed despite your artificial halts to progress? Yes, they have. Finally.

Schedule of Minimum Wage Increases
December 31, 2016
$11.00 per hour
December 31, 2017
$13.00 per hour
December 31, 2018
$15.00 per hour
December 31, 2019
$15.00 per hour

http://www.labor.ny.gov/workerprotection/laborstandards/workprot/minwage.shtm

Ghetto Movie Theater

Back in the day, when America's air often buzzed with a thousand flying bullets in broad daylight—like that was the sane thing to do with twin concepts like "new" and "people"—we had an attitude of social looseness that constantly imposed upon the needs of others with an impunity that was artificially called "freedom", when, really, it was often a smokescreen for insanity committed in public spaces without fear of censure. Take, for instance, the ghetto movie theater (see also, Times Square in the 70s: http://gothamist.com/2013/03/27/photos_of_times_square_in_the_1970s.php#photo-2). 

Kids dared one another to run into a peepshow theater and back as if we were risking our young lives like western gunslingers of yore, and we were. Yeah, we had the buses of the Port Authority to take us back home, but if you missed the last sane commuter bus leaving the station, it was just you and your friends with hours of time in an almost empty bus depot, trapped with bums who got much scarier, louder, and active with each passing sip from their cheap bottle of wine. 

We were terrified of getting caught in the city's rain, because we knew a trickle of water could rouse a bum if it reached him before the rains stopped, like the time me and my boyfriend watched water fall down in torrents, stuck underneath a Central Park overpass. We only had so much time left before the water woke him up, and then it finally did. He was pissed off until he suddenly noticed us, which sent him flying towards us in a greatly renewed psychotic rage.

Which meant that we were constantly searching for safe places and happy diversions to combat the hellish scenes popping off around us. It was, uh, a little stressful, to put it mildly. People chain-smoked and drank like "The Final Days of Judgment" were being visited upon them any second, and if you believed the signs of the ranting religious zealots who frequented the midtown tourist areas, the end was always near. Ditto with the bald white "Hari Krishnas" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Krishna_(mantra), who were usually ex-hippie burn-outs from the 60s looking to wind down (or amp up) from their tense neurosis "the natural way", which meant spinning around like a "Whirling Dervish" for hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mevlevi_Order), banging tambourines and asking for money from onlookers.

There were also door-knocking, tie-wearing, short-haired Jehovah's Witnesses, robotic over-groomed Mormons who looked like extras from a 1950s-era movie, or "Moonies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonie_%28nickname%29) who would turn aggressive on you in a New York minute, which made the average New Yorker play this weird game of pretending not to notice that bleeding guy sitting next to you on the train, because he might stab you if you tried to help him out. Eye contact was also a serious no-no that kept us from helping out one another, because my dad repeated the same line about it over and over again with "no good deed goes unpunished", as an illustration of that very principle we used to live by. 

And so, our public lives were rife with strangely surreal scenes from horror movies or prescient sci-fi movies like "Escape from New York", that warned of The Second Coming as an apocalypse for the damned. Behavior was at an all-time low, and public life reflected the lesser of two evils that presented itself to us at any time. Sure, smoking a big stinky cigar in a movie was rude, oppressive, and unhealthy for everyone around you, but heck, it was better than rape, right? Right?! People sneaked booze and pot into theaters all the time under their jackets, and gay men used the movie's bathrooms as frequent hook-up spots that became so notorious for city people, we avoided public restrooms like The Plague. Anything could happen to you in there.

Like the worst of the human experience that becomes repetitive over time, we got used to extremely fucked-up people. Not comfortable or complacent, but accustomed to seriously violent offenders who'd snap at the slightest excuse to do so. People shouted back at the movie screen, or hissed their questions loudly to each other, in bad stage whispers that were clearly audible to everyone around them. My mom is so bad with watching movies, that I got used to prepping my friends about her odd behavior, because she loses the thread of the narrative quicker than anyone I've ever met. 

At home it was better, because we could stop the movie for food and drinks, or bathroom runs, or funky relatives with serious impairments, which my parents are not nice about. They're New Yorkers from the Bronx and Bed-Stuy, ya feel me? They aren't "nice" about anything, including their own ignorance that they self-defend like embarrassed kids at the rough local playground for tough kids in leather jackets, with switchblades and greased-back hair, smoking unfiltered cigarettes while snapping their chewing gum loudly. In other words, "assholes" presenting themselves in quick visual shorthand. 

"Who is that?!" my mother would yell out loud, and if you ignored her, she'd just abuse you until you had to give her the answer, which she argued about through her constant sense of befuddlement and misunderstanding, especially if she objected to the highbrow intellectualism that surpassed her grasp of the subject matter, like an offended two year-old after their lollipop is ripped out of their hands. It was histrionic bullshit, but look where they came from. Horror shows.

Years later, after we escaped our own individually tragic fates that working class people like us were often fated to, we could sit back and relax over something as simple as watching a t.v. show or a movie without being molested with uncommon violence for our presence or preferences. And, lo and behold, along came a show that addressed our humble city roots with a fun twist: we were safe now, and we also had homemade hand puppets to help spread the fun around to our friends. We'd say to each other in asides: "Yeah, check out that guy's hat and hairdo! Historically accurate, n'est ce-pas?" Or: "Yo, did you see that karate move?", quickly followed by "Hey, I wonder what he'll do next?" "Oh, I don't know! Let's pretend to be surprised by hammy bad acting and a cliched script!" Ahhh! Look out!! He's right behind you! Nooo!!! Don't go into that scary dark basement! 

Thousand Yard Stare

Being the sole sane member of the many social groups I've encountered throughout my life is fraught with difficulties, especially if any one person (or group of people) is used to gaming the system through secrecy, and I, unfortunately, know very quickly about their true state of mind, which is uncomfortable for both of us—as the authority figure assessing it correctly (yet again), and the liar perpetrating the fraud right in my face. Not the the "New Gen" has done much better with it, as an issue. Now, it's considered "hip" to have as many complex issues as possible (great for reality t.v.), especially with the single children of so many modernly unhealthy couples who're used to almost constant enabling, and who also bear the weight of their broken dreams, in addition to carrying around their poor genetics. 

Before we began a voluntary militia, anyone could be drafted into military service and made to fight a brutally violent war, with the size and scope of your collective psychosis allowing for heinous acts of violence—sometimes including child murder—that would almost certainly get you sentenced to death back home. The warrior mindset is traditionally for those who seek out that particular type of service because we know we can come back from it; not unscathed from battle without recovery time built in for healing from our war wounds, but enough to know that we will endure and survive it, because we've already done so through similar life conditions as civilians. Every social group full of mentally ill people is a potential battlefield, and conversation is typically marred by a defensive passive-aggressiveness that makes it really hard work for me.

Suffice to say, those who seek to "escape" the dreaded horrors of medication and healthcare, pretend to shrink from their falsely overblown fears about exposure and revelation like a mythical vampire shirks the light of day. Really? With fucking Oprah being a American gazillionaire?! She's famous for saying lines on television like "My 'va-jay-jay is a-painin'!", so how do you reconcile this sudden coyness with your reality? It's a complete fucking sham, as I am forced to endure yet another game of pretending that I don't know you suffer from insanity, you know, because people like me who work under the conditions I do, on the budget I have, consistently delivering at an extremely high level on almost nothing, cave in the face of your healthcare. Really? You really expect me to believe that?

And it's everywhere I go, every single day; family, friends, co-workers, bosses, acquaintances—no one is immune from living life and the human condition. Of course, we know you're nuts, but that's rude to say over a company dinner that you're paying for, isn't it? But, that doesn't stop 'em from trying it with me anyway, because compulsive addictive disorders kinda come with some obvious behavioral markers that you can't exactly shave off like beard. Nice try, though, really. Yes, we know, and we have tons of tests to prove it anytime we want to, in a variety of ways, but if you're selfishly demanding a class in avoiding detection like you're Meryl Streep at the Oscars, then class is now in session, and here's your first clue: see the picture above. 

For the residents of my town: see that crazy old guy who hoards on his property that's right next to the Methodist church (Amen!) with a misbuttoned shirt on almost everyday, walking around "shell-shocked" like he just survived the bombing at D-Day, but he didn't. He doesn't actually do anything, besides walk around town like a zombie. It also includes: the closeted country lesbo at the local grocery store who licks her lips when she looks at you, just to be a complete fucking bitch to a gorgeous heterosexual woman (you hateful piece of shit), and when that doesn't work, pretends not to see you standing prominently in the middle of the aisle so she can "accidentally" bump into you like the psychotic stalker she really is. Or, the way someone lingers near you at the library, pretending to be absorbed by a book on the shelf for ten minutes like a fucking retard, or a hoarder in a bargain store lingering over plastic junk like she's fondling a ten year-old girl. It's obviously repulsive, and you can't hide it or control it.

And yes, to answer your question again: it is now mandatory to take a healthcare screening —that includes tests for psychological readiness—before leaving the hospital with your newborn, so you don't abuse your baby at home behind closed doors, where you feel safe to do so. Isn't technology great? Oh, that's right. You "hate" that, too. I must have forgot! My memory, you know....it isn't what it used to be. Sigh. Anyway, I don't get the Internet reliably like you do, with 24/7 access to answers at my fingertips whenever I want them, so I also have that excuse in my back pocket, with a dozen others that I've cleverly rehearsed ahead of time just to "stump" you, when, really, it isn't possible to do so, but don't ever say that to me in person or write in down. I might "know" it then, like the aliens can do without your tinfoil hat in hand. Yeah. That sounds good. That makes sense. 

 

http://www.postpartum.net/professionals/legislation/

 

I Write the Book (Everyday)

 

For working class people like myself, our productivity serves as the vocation that directs and guides our lives, because labor is the greatest conduit to self-determination that we have. It was a really hard concept to describe to the average Americans I met earlier in life, like the feeling behind mia famiglia*, a shared closeness that bonds New Yorkers on a deeper level than your average cul-de-sac couple, because if you don't figure out how to live on top of one another in a small tenement flat with a shared bathroom on every other floor, you're fucked for life. You might just kill someone on the next "bad" day!

Much like our advanced solutions for recycling and re-purposing, our island nation began with limited space that demanded excellent and immediate solutions. While other Americans buried their toxic trash in empty fields that they hoped would just disappear like so much dust under a carpet, we were forced to live with our garbage strewn everywhere, as the price we paid for our failure to adapt. There was simply nowhere else to go. Our limited shared spaces created some funny dynamics, like the floating garbage barge denied docking pretty much everywhere (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobro_4000), and the infamous prison barge for our society's over-spill of convicts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_C._Bain_Correctional_Center).

When you can't take the train without a deep feeling of paranoia because the homeless drug addicts outnumber the people of the everyday working world, you've got a big problem, and when you can't walk down the street without the rank smell of a two-week pileup of garbage during the hottest season of the year (ah, August in the city...), you kinda want to solve those problems as quickly as possible. And so, we did. In the process, we became the world leader for innovation, adaptation, flexibility, and real change, because we had to. It's hard, and it's entirely human. But, on any given day, you'd find just as many working class people like me encountering the same situations with solutions already in hand (and cheaper than yours to implement, Baby Boomer) right now.

So, we waited. And waited. And then, we waited some more, for you to catch up to a reality that you check(ed) out of regularly with t.v., booze, pills, shopping, junk food, and whatever else the "idiot box" sells you, because you can't cope with the world you made—and then destroyed. Thanks for that, by the way. I heard one of the designers from the home-based reality show "Queer Eye for the Straight Eye" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queer_Eye) joke that he'd simply become the maid service for a bunch of dysfunctional shut-ins, and it was easy to see why. "You know your apartment needs cleaning when you have air fresheners plugged into every outlet", was the most direct way one of the designers could explain the concept of "clean" to a drooling chronic case of angst.

For me and my hard-working friends, the class system was completely different than the false realities sold to us in college and on the job through popular t.v. shows and movies. There were no more "blue collar" or "white collar" designations anymore. We were left with those who can, and those who can't, with a million problems needing solutions, and all of them were yours, not ours. In order to live, we had to solve your alcoholism and indifference for you, by managing it better than you did, with your greater share of power and money. In short, we became the ruling class from every great time in history, like the samurai warrior class of Japan, or the enslaved architectural scribes of Ancient Egypt. Because we had to. We had to work our way out of it. We simply had to. We have to work. There is no other choice.

Work for me has always held the power of self-determination, as the ability to rise above the shitty overblown titles of the inept office worker, or the ineptitude behind the egotistical fast-food restaurant manager, doomed for a life of gruelingly repetitive banality. Anything but this. That's how we felt about it. Anything must be better than this. And we were right. It was. Our lives were/are so much better than the people in our families that we grew up with back then. I always describe my group ethos as thus, for our motivation: I don't want to die. That was/is our motto. SO inspiring, right! Yeah, sure. It's a great bestseller, if you package it for demented retards. We rose above the labels and strata of the American Dream, because the fantasy was never real for us. We became the work, and in the process, we began to rule the world. Through popular vote, of course. What else is there?

Pope Francis Verified account ‏@Pontifex

People are the primary artisans of their own development, the first in charge!

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4:00 AM - 21 Jun 2016

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* la mia famiglia. my family.  

Tar Beach

Me and my friends instantly hated "Baywatch" the very first time we saw it, even though David Hasselhoff was the "King of Cheese" back in the day for this crazy show about his talking police car (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight_Rider_(1982_TV_series), and his status as a "rock star" in Germany (http://chicagolampoon.blogspot.com/2011/10/germanys-perplexing-love-affair-with.html), but it gained cult status in our 80s-era dorm rooms filled with horny teenagers who played drinking games every time there was a run on the beach filmed in slow motion with a girl in a tight red bathing suit. It sucked, but so did most of pop culture. Who fucking cares?

We humped a grind over every summer like any other east coast kid trying to make a buck for school and living expenses, and to get out of our mother's collective hairs. The kids from Long Island did clam-digging over the summers for work, plus surfing, boarding, and skate-boarding that became rollerblading with the next "fitness" craze. My family had long aborted our annual trips to LBI as too expensive, though occasionally a relative might rent a house, but with our clash in cultures, it wasn't worth going to yet another house full of crazy people.

My Brooklyn friends did what any other kid from the 'hood does: they took the train out to the beach. After I graduated, started my career, and transitioned to my own work full-time, I found myself in a similar situation: broke, alone, and wanting to hit the beach. I lived in the fourth floor of a 120 year-old walk-up in the Slope, and after I ordered a boogie-board for cheap online, I hooked up with some of my training partners in BJJ at the Far Rockaways boarder's beach, no swimmers allowed. It was a good fit for us, because we could use our mandatory rash guard shirts that we used for no-gi classes to surf with (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submission_wrestling), which gave us more exercise that was different from our main sport. Well, not mine.

They were blown away by some "white" middle-aged female rolling with the boys as a part of my MMA training, then hitting the beach like a native, and it was easy to see why. The beaches of Brooklyn and Queens had been home to hardcore ghettos for a hundred years, despite the kitschy faded glory of Coney Island that attracted dykes, misfits, and trendy hipsters looking for retro "art fag" design spaces on the cheap, but they learned. White kids from out-of-town always do. After dark, our beaches became some of the worst neighborhoods in all of the five boroughs, definitely not some fake SoCal paradise from t.v., not that I believed any of the hype I saw on t.v. anymore.

You see, in response to a "tidy whitey" Manhattan that catered to rich foreign diplomats and the local ethnic population serving them, we were supposed to retain a foothold in our culture on our teacher/social worker/publishing salaries that mandated we live as far away from our now over-priced native homes as possible. Makes sense, no? No, it didn't. But, rich white men hate looking at "depressing" project people who are passed out on a subway grating. It's, also, like, really hard on your shoes, too! So, the "powers that be" ruined our fair city in a few short years through some of the worst, most corrupt urban-planning to ever happen on planet earth, changing the landscape of our city from a great trading center with gorgeous waterways to a depressing hellhole that you couldn't walk through without an escort.

Coney became infamous for murders under the boardwalk and floating bodies washed up on the beach, as Jersey spiraled down into dysfunction with an annual epidemic of dirty hypodermic needles dumped carelessly into our waters, some of them infected with HIV and AIDS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syringe_Tide), through the evil immorality of "healthcare" businesses looking to make a quick buck off the backs of a downtrodden and exhausted sick people. It was doubly worse for an elderly population that still remembered with great fondness Steeplechase rides at the beach during sunset, cotton candy with their loved ones, and the novelty of an electric Ferris Wheel that lit up at night to illuminate the sand with its many colors, as fireworks exploded in the background of another day in a public urban paradise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steeplechase_Park).

Sure, it was hard working the daily grind in a city of strangers, but so what? We had everything we needed in a quick bus ride or train stop away, but then it changed drastically. A disenfranchised people who never had any real comfort with swimming in our rougher waters were pushed out to the beaches, as a cruel reminder of a place they knew they didn't belong. My Filipino training partner was horrified by the early murkiness of our summer Atlantic Ocean, because he grew up in the tropics. Uh, this ain't that, homeboy. Ditto for my sparring partner from Korea. Are there animals under the surface? Uh, yeah, girlfriend. She preferred to stay on the beach while I body-surfed the waves like an otter fishing in its home waters, because I am.

Slowly, we came back after many years away, and so did our town. We brought to it all of our experienced know-how about social justice and real public change, just like we said we would to each other all those years ago, as we sat in spare, dirty, broken-down rooms; drunk, high, scared, and often alone. Never again. That's what we thought then, and that's what happened, as I fought my own battles in middle-age through the corrupt court systems of the city and country. 

I see you, muthafuckas. I take pictures, and I document, document, document. You can, too, because it works. That's how we bring back the world, people: one beach at a time, block-by-block—or lot-by-lot, like my good folks of the "Stop Anellotech" movement in Rockland County fighting Big Pharma and Big Corporate Petrochemical—because this city and this land is ours by our collective birth rights, and not yours, so give it back. Now is the time.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tar%20beach

Credit

In addition to his lack of driving skills, Cotto has no idea what money stands for (hint: it's for goods and services).To him, every day is either the best day ever (like a whacked-out teenager at Disneyland), or his imminent death—like a kid eaten by a gator at Disneyland (http://www.cnn.com/2016/06/15/us/alligator-attacks-child-disney-florida/). And that's exactly what his serious mental disorders are about: really really REALLY!!! great things that make you stay up for days and days and you just don't understand and why aren't you more excited, Marie? Sleep?! Food?! WHY???!!! GET PUMPED UP!!! Yeah, kid. Call me when the show is over, or starts, whichever happens last. I'm going to sleep, and I'm eating breakfast. Bitch.

The same is true about his understanding of family. His dad was his drinking buddy/sexual escapades partner (aye yi yi), and his mom's new "old man" looks at him kinda funny, too. He's been staying up late to watch t.v. recently, so he could screw the people living around him from using "his" pull-out sofa as a bed, and when you question that, he blames you for his escalating drunken abuse. It's a landscape without any safe places, which makes jail seem much better in comparison, because at least you get decent food and a bed to sleep in, you know? And maybe skip the nighttime rape scene, for once.

I felt bad for him because he had it that hard coming up in "da game" of life, but he's such a selfish fucking dick, you can't help but wish for him to be as far away from you as possible. Just because someone's really sick doesn't mean they can't also be a completely selfish asshole. I'm sure the staff at his residency center wants him dead or gone on his worst days, particularly the days when he deliberately craps his bed so the big buff orderly in the tight white scrubs can change his diapers for him while he sexually harasses him with molester-type comments. You know? A punch in the face is sometimes much quicker and easier than strapping him down to the bed and cleaning out his mess. Poor fucker. I've been there with head-cases before. Many, many, many times over.

So, when I asked him about his "credit card debt" that he intentionally mischaracterized as a fun "Sex and the City" shopping spree, it was just as depressing as I thought. "Well, Marie...", he began. Oh, OK. I'm the dumb fuck sleeping on your floor in your Army/Navy sleeping bag that you can talk down to. I forgot where I was for a minute! Actually, I didn't. Yeah, Cotto. What happened? I wanted him to just take his sleeping meds and go the fuck to sleep, but he was going off of his prescriptions one-by-one, because he couldn't handle the stress of homelessness, welfare, and his broke-ass two-year school on Staten Island for people without their G.E.D.'s coping with several mental disorders, and I was supposed to pretend that wasn't true with him, so he could psychotically pretend that I was his trapped quarry, when in truth, I could crack open his shin bones to the marrow whenever I wanted. 

Not that I wanted that. He was a dumb bloated mess of a human being, and I questioned that status on most days, too. But, let's hear it. It'll come out anyway, and it's not like I have anything better to do on a Tuesday night, besides getting a good night's sleep on this here dirty tenement floor so I can out-design the crazy "creative director" at work tomorrow, who would short-change me out of a health plan and rip-off all of my cover designs out of professional envy and hateful sabotage. So, yeah. Go ahead. Well, my grandmother died, and she asked me to "look after" her mail while she was in the hospital, so I did. Uh huh. I question every part of that sentence, but yeah. And?

"I took her Sears credit card." For how much, Cotto? And he waffled on that, too. Sigh...every step of the way, eh asshole? "About 3 or 4 grand." It was probably much higher than that, between the $5-$7000 range, because he then told me his "lawyer" advised him to pay it back quickly. Riggght...while you blow off your dish-washing job (not good enough), buy dirt weed instead of meds, and jam in a stressful college-like experience at the same time, so you can justify your subsequent freak-out and imprisonment? I think I know this tune! "It came addressed to her in the mail and I was staying there." So? So what? "I needed money." He clammed up like a hardened convict who's just "lawyered up" because he already knows the drill.

But, like, why? I mean you have two fucking cell phones, an expensive video game console that's also your hard drive, an iPad, a laptop, and ghetto headphones. The whole nine, kid. What the fuck did you spend it on? I never got a real answer that made any sense to me. What the fuck did he buy with it? For those of you reading me outside of the U.S., "Sears, Roebuck and Company" is a really old catalog business that began when the west was still a bison-filled frontier for European sharecroppers in covered wagons hoping to escape/frame "Indians" for all of their horrible massacres, in a lustful quest for blood and oil money that has come to be known as "The Wild West." You've seen the movies, right? Like that. Or, more specifically, like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sears.

I mean, he wasn't exactly home-owner material as a self-entitled welfare queen. People like me work hard. Not him! He's "special". Well, Cotto, sigh...don't make me phrase it like I'm taking away your lollipop, you fucking prick. I'm tired. What did you buy with it? I waited...and then waited some more. And some more. This, from an arrogant dick who liked to pretend he was exceedingly verbal and highly loquacious with his carefully chosen bon mots. Give it up! He looked down, and thought about it, but finally, he was too embarrassed to tell me. I'm sure it wasn't for garden hoes, or trimming shears for his fucking front lawn with carefully groomed hedges. And to this day, I still don't know what he bought with a housewares store credit card used by Americans for generations as their rural general store.

I know what we did. My mom asked me to circle clothes out of a huge Christmas catalog every year for toys and clothes, and if they didn't fit or we didn't like it, we went back to the store in Nanuet (still there) to return it. That's what country folk did back then, while your dad browsed the barbecue grills and dreamed of a motorized lawn mower with a comfy riding seat, like the big Italian douchebag next door to us had, riding around smiling on his ghetto "pizza money" from his 'hood storefront in the Bronx that would become a model for the summertime NYC movie classic "Do the Right Thing" that explored ethnic and racial tensions between the Italian-American immigrants who earned their plush living off the backs of impoverished, trapped African-Americans living in a hot city without air conditioning, just like we did.

We had heavy, awkward window units that sat tipsily in the small window sills of our split-level home, and if we wanted even that cool comfort in our rooms, we had to pull down a ladder in the ceiling to go into the attic, carefully stepping between the beams so we wouldn't fall through the floor, and then pushing the heavy units down the stairs at a steep angle to whoever was at the bottom. We had air conditioning in our small bedrooms only; not in the kitchen, or the living room, or the converted basement downstairs. If it was too hot to stay in our rooms for too long, we went outside, or we walked a mile and a half to the public pool up-and-down the impressive hills of this area, or we ran through a sprinkler on the lawn, spraying each other with a green garden hose. I know that he didn't do any of that, because he said would die in his early 50s, just like his father and his father's father. 

It was sad, but it was real. As he told me his life of woe, I knew his life was designed for him to fail. And so, I listened to his halting confessions that he had to work up the nerve to tell me over shared dirt weed blunts and cheap beer, because it probably included evil staples of the projects like child rape, child abandonment, and/or child endangerment. How did I know? He told me his dad was his first "party" partner. You fill in the blanks. And that's what I did. I "read" him expertly, better than anyone else did, and that's why I got out of the ghetto alive, just like my hardcore New York City family. That, and I kicked out an old abandoned bookcase piece-by-piece after work one night, so I could leave the floor of his dirty room for the room next door with a chain through the opening where the doorknob used to be, in front of him and our neighbor "Rex", his "hood rat" partner-in-crime for those days, even though it was mostly particleboard. Almost.

My mutha's naybahood: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Avenue
My fahthizz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford%E2%80%93Stuyvesant,_Brooklyn
And mine, bitch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodside,_Queens

Winston

By now you should know that compulsively hoarding "cat ladies" and most "volunteer" pet rescue kooks are totally fucking nuts, because they use animals for their own selfish healthcare needs instead of going to see a doctor regularly, and these bitches can definitely afford to see a rich white psychiatrist any day of the week. Ya read me? My own particular obstacle course of "fucked-up white person" dysfunction came in the form of an unstable Jewish/WASP from Connecticut who had insane parents with money to spoil her rotten, just so they could avoid icky things like "parenting" on the daily, which is a big "no-no" in demented, wealthy, corrupt, country circles that worship money and extreme dieting as a panacea to manic-depression and suburban alcoholism, best done indoors and away from legitimate authority figures who don't have help on the payroll as the ticket price to their admission to a better life for their families.

Lisa was a typical selfish bitch working unnecessarily in publishing, is what I'm sayin' to you. Much like our Napoleonic publisher's bitch of a wife, she told me early on that she didn't need to work for money, she just didn't like being bored. Right....same! We had nothing in common and she knew it, so, just to fuck with me as a better-looking genius, she pretended she didn't know I was working in the same room as her, choosing to signify her utter distaste for the genuine working class ethnics of native New York like me by shutting the office lights to the studio room while I still sat in it, because she was threatened by my superior work ethic, too, in addition to my good looks. You know: a total fucking bitch among many.

She was also one of the worst book designers I'd ever met, though as an average white Baby Boomer, that wasn't especially exceptional to me, either. I knew a lot of dumb rich fucks from publishing. When I finally told her that I noticed she was shutting the lights on purpose, she giggled and blushed like a crazy toddler caught stealing cookies from the cupboard before dinnertime, and then she quickly walked away embarrassed, down the short hallway and out the door without saying a word to anyone. Like any other asshole in business, she pretended she couldn't "hear" me, even though she had the money to buy two hearing aids for herself and I didn't, which didn't give her quite the edge she hoped for, because she's also stupid and slow.

In addition to nursing her long list of deliberately untreated disorders and serious health conditions as leverage and the occasional workplace weapon (where it's completely inappropriate to do so because, like, we work with books as objects), she had absolutely no conversation skills whatsoever. So, within record time, I pushed through my obligatory "too low" job title that was used as a justification to underpay me my true worth (as yet another sign of disdain telegraphed to me that was glaringly obvious), to take command of an imprint without a real leader that became a big money-maker for the largest book retailer in the country, because Lisa was too incompetent to lead effectively. Within my first week on the job, every freelance designer, on-the-job contractor, pre-press artist, printer, typesetter, service provider, ex-employee, as well as all of their current employees, told me the exact same thing. 

Oh....great. Plus, Marie, she hid her deafness from us on purpose! That was my first "work lunch" with the young Millennials working there. Their treat. Gee, kids, thanks for cluing me in! They wanted to tell me that they didn't know about it, because they didn't hire her. The publisher did! Okey dokey! Yeah, I got that. Thanks. Every dick move you could think of, they threw at me, which I expertly dodged just as quickly. Lisa continued to avoid me passively-aggressively through a thick haze of Valium and anti-depressants, only moving about the office in a creaky, stiff, robotic way when she needed more coffee from the office kitchen. She ignored everybody like it was part of her job. That was their big "Art Director" on-site, when I got there: a bitch too crazy to speak normally in "human". Some communication expert.

It wasn't exactly a "hostile" takeover on my part, in the wake of her almost complete mental and physical absence within the company, but crazy bitches do what they do anyway, regardless of my active participation or bodily presence. That didn't stop her from trying to hang her hat on my hook as part of her poor work survival skills, and she told me that every few weeks, too. "You know, I'm trying to get you fired", she'd say to me with a half-lidded death-stare frozen onto her angry face. Yeah, bitch? How? You fucking suck. The only time she spoke to me was to try and give me orders, but like I mentioned, I'd already locked myself down tight with the other imprint in the house that she demeaned as, yep, too "lowbrow" for her to work on as a bargain book line. 'Kay, bitch.

The only time she brightened up at work was after I pinned a large colorful photo of my dog Teddy smiling up at me while walking in Prospect Park, with his cutely-colored collar of rainbow smiley faces prominently displayed. Oh! Now, I was a human fit for her to talk to! You have a dog! Uh, yeah. She could care less about me and my dog, but it unfortunately opened up the door to the only subject she actually cared about, her stupid fucking terrier, Winston. He was as average as she was, but it helped me get actual work-related information out of her if I just unlocked her artificially-sealed mouth with some loose doggie talk. What a fucking weirdo! Within weeks, everyone in the office visibly groaned whenever Lisa lisped at me in her overly-loud deaf accent, because it was like a sitcom beer-drinking game: how many times will this daft bitch repeat the same story over and over again? 

Oh, good. Winston, again, She was the dullest person I'd ever met, and her interior book layouts were as boring as she was, which is why we gave her old classics to re-design for the umpteenth time. Hard to screw that up, but she would, periodically, which caused Manufacturing to go ballistic and then ask me to prove her liability. Uh, what the fuck do yo do for me, exactly, besides ride my coat tails for a living? Fuck off! Pin her in a meeting on your own without my ammo, because you humps sure as shit don't give me anything to work with. You want a turn-coat, make your own, and don't you know, readers, without me they couldn't? It was so sad and pathetic, because she cost them so much fucking money with her errors, but the crazy old man still wouldn't fire her. He liked talking to an "older" woman! It was that fucked up, but who cared?

I was face-out on the shelves of every single B&N store in the world and online. I just didn't fucking need them. So, whenever we had to interact about work, I brought up her dip-shit dog, which got her talking to me, and then I waited for her to obsessively repeat the exact same story back to me. When there was an opening conversationally, I took it, as the leading creative adult working in the company. But not before she first told me the exact depths to her depravity, as a way to be colorful with her rather generic roots. First, her parents met in an insane asylum (OOO!) when her dad worked as the orderly helping her resident mom with the bigger mental patients needing subduing. Uh huh...that sounds like a good story...and then it would end.

Ditto with her "dog rescue" work. She knew I got badly hurt in a walking accident with my giant Mal. Did the bitch care? Nope! She reiterated to me that she once again wanted me fired. Anyway, she doesn't work with those kinds of animals. Ew! She was offended by the very suggestion, as well as the poor, ailing, elderly people who tried to give her other types of similar terriers to place in better homes. She didn't give a fuck. Not her job! Anyway, they had legal issues with "pet adoptions". But, that didn't stop her from giving a face-eating dog to a healthy young couple with small children! Did she tell them? "Oh, I don't have to do that. It wasn't his fault he was hungry!" You fucking cunt. Okay, so tell me about your dog. Was he a rescue dog? Oh, yes, and from a nice, rich, white gay couple of affluent men living in a beautiful downtown loft, too, which means he was treated really well. 

Yay! That's some sort of pride in something, I guess. But, did I know that she only did it because she lacked affection as a child? Excuse me? What the fuck did you just say to me? I'd do that to her when I wanted her to speak even louder, so the whole office could hear, thus sharing complicity with her obvious dysfunctions. Yell it, Lisa! And then she would. Out loud, in front of anyone. "My parents didn't touch me as child!" OH! What else? "I use dogs for affection because I lacked intimacy as a child! My parents are cold and emotionally distant." 

And there it was, my fellow excellent humans of Earth: an actual bitch-sized snare that caught me one very large, dumb, clueless kook in the wild office spaces of New York City. That's how you fight back without tricky employment lawsuits and illegal firings, with clearly documented cases of workplace harassment attached for good measure. Rainbow-colored and neatly packaged, too.


Dear crazy "cat ladies" and fellow "dog-whisperers" of the world, please take note: you will be phased out by real warriors in the near future, but we do accept cash, checks, and money orders. Just not you. Your homework for today is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humane_law_enforcement