Hexan Biest Die(t)

I've been a fan of horror stories and the supernatural since I was a kid, avidly ordering ghost stories and "The Guinness Book of World Records" whenever the classroom's book club catalog came around. It shouldn't be a surprise to you, then, that I follow a similar theme on t.v. My favorite shows to watch, in 2016, are: Grimm, The Walking Dead, Sleepy Hollow, and Once Upon A Time. I also love science fiction, like Stephen King's "Under the Dome" (also a longtime reader) and "Extant"; both aliens-from-outer-space dramas.

But, the fables and fairy tales are my "hands-down" childhood favorites. "Grimm" even has a handsome Indian boy from the reservation doing a cameo as a wendigo*: the forest-haunting alter-ego of our evil and inhuman selves. Characters on the show change under stress into their animal spirits, like the rabbity office worker and the terrified mole-rat who prefers sneaking around underground to any type of contact, be it animal or human. People feel free (or not so free) to reveal their inner demons, like the weaselly back-stabber just waiting for an opportunity to get you alone in the company conference room, so he can turn his twitchy neurosis into a feeding frenzy to your deadly detriment.

Even the generic bitchy blond gets a turn at being a collosal bad-ass, by becoming the hideous decrepit witch she'd really be without all that makeup and surgery. In truth, she has rotting flesh and decaying teeth from typical show-business starvation. Half her hair is gone, too, lost to the stress and competition that goes with maintaining the dramatic lead, covered over by wigs and sew-on human hair that cost her thousands of dollars and years off her life sitting in salons. When we finally see her true soul-sucking form, it actually makes sense; now, there's a look that matches her behavior!

True to my form, I also like cooking shows, and for awhile I was a regular watcher of a timed contest utilizing funky basket ingredients that change with every episode. Sure enough, a "star" allowed the contestants from one episode to make her and her hippie friends a bratty Hollywood luncheon, with a few caveats. Ready? Okay, here it goes: the menu had to be carbohydrate free, fat free, organic, vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, macrobiotic, and acceptable to the lactose-intolerant. She called it "compassionate eating",  a phrase designed by her much-beleagured publicist, no doubt. Oh, and no alcohol (too many calories). One of the competing chefs practically drained an entire bottle of booze in the pantry, wondering what the fuck this crazy bitch with her amount "food allergies" <cough anorexic> actually eats? Here's a hint, maestro: she doesn't. That's the challenge.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendigo

Millionaire

Before Gen X'ers made their "Special Needs" children into hip play-things, serious mental illness was a drawing room subject that could be hinted at politely in mixed company using a bunch of phony-sounding euphemisms, but never to be directly addressed. Once a problem is accurately named (so the thinking goes), superstition held that one had to go about solving the problem, and my parent's "Silent Generation" doesn't do that. We do.

Of course, my family is like any other family; we have some very seriously disturbed people living within it, though how alive they feel is of some debate. In order to quantify as "successful" to a bunch of brain disordered people, my family had to vigorously redefine success as the blind obtainment of objects without purpose. That was it: car, spouse, house, kids. Done. You passed! If it seems too easy, you're right, and just as many of my friends and I escaped the common traps of the falsely upwardly-mobile lifestyle for treasures that can't be bought and sold like so many commodities on the open market. 

We invested in ourselves and our education, like our hard-working grandparents taught us to do, so that when the time came for us to give back, we'd give way more than our fair share, which is the world you're living in right now. But the retarded living "secretly" (not so much) among us had to do so much more than us, just to pass as simple 9-to-5 office drones. They needed long-studied Masters degrees, and every time society shifts technologically, they are right back to feeling lost and afraid again. 

They are the perpetual students who never really learn or master anything, which is why you'll find so many expensive MBA's working at suburban tax preparers after their initial MA and BA degrees, or rote technical jobs in labs that took them almost ten years to attain. When I presented them with my real accomplishments (like scoring an interview at the Annie Lebowitz studio in the 90s on an Illustration degree as my second ever professional interview), it was undermined and shoved mentally in a drawer in the back of their minds, while I suffered through their bad photography with overly expensive cameras and trite tourist shots taken on plush cruises, with tales of photo contests never won spinning through their delusional heads.

And so it was with one of the more anti-social members of my family who preferred light switches and t.v. fuzz to contact with humans, memorizing train schedules over normal conversational greetings besides a light grunting that replaced actual speech. He was lovingly called "Rain Man", like Dustin Hoffman's infamously Autistic character, for his ability to mentally check out using inane facts and trivia. It was always the same. Always the same. When he finally used his abhorrence of all things personal to his sole advantage by appearing on a game show none of us watched (we were all busy with travel, careers, and love lives), me and my brothers didn't even know about it, much less care, to the detriment of the psychotic gathered among us at holidays.

Ahem. Perhaps we hadn't heard? If it was intended as a snide reference to my hearing impairment as a feeble attempt to correct the imbalance of their completely co-dependent ineptitude, consider that a huge failure as well. And so we had to feign an enthusiasm over his one chance at being in a spotlight, using all three callers for the more difficult questions you had to actually know through real study habits, not blind compulsions. Game over. Still, with the help of his family, he won a nice chunk of change for someone with his limitations. Christmas will be good this year! He and his father were notorious cheapskates who would sit around with glazed eyes and blank stares with their arms folded tightly across their chests, while we exchanged humble gifts at my grandparent's apartment.

They just sat on a couch waiting for food to be served, doing and saying nothing to anyone, except for the one year my uncle gave me some free mugs from his Met Opera attendance that were "too girly" for him to use, or some spare calendars he also got for free. Like any real mother, I was touched by these few shows of humanity that had stolen away from the tight grip of his mental illnesses, as remote and alone as I know them to be. The son never improved, because we were never allowed to discuss his diseases with him, which might lead to a cure. Instead, he languished year after year in the same dull IRS government job that went slowly from PT to FT on a special needs work program, slowly draining his show earnings on a bunch of train rides with similarly disordered people. And he never gave us a thing. Not one single present. Not ever. Not once.

Allie

Being a natural mother can be odd. I'm often asked about my life, and how I spend my time. Do I ever get lonely? Sure, but not nearly enough to go to a bar in town by myself, to rub elbows with the angry drunk locals who never made it to the city for a career. That was high school for me. Townies are really sensitive about their lack of experience; a trait that is not well-heightened by excessive amounts of alcohol.

They prefer to remain singularly clannish and inbred by pretending an exclusivity that has successively bred the fatal Tay-Sachs disease into their children, offering roadblocks to their status by remaining exactly where their parents and grandparents dropped them, stubbornly adhering to the idea that someone who has only gone to school in one small town somehow has a leg-up on the rest of us Rocklanders. Good luck with that. I found out through their local genetic study that I wasn't "Irish" enough to be considered for their Tay-Sachs research, and my Norman ancestors would be very glad to hear that. Job well done, for a sophisticated merchant family with ancient roots.

Provincial pockets of lonely cousins are still rather common in this area, as a place built before the relative ease of commercial travel, bane as that is to the environment and our collective health. I found another pocket of genetic oddity in Brooklyn, introduced to me through my rabidly social cousin, who drinks like a good time is at the bottom of each and every glass. When I dated a friend of his, the car service driver from Park Slope was astonished at the change in scenery on the way to his house. This is Brooklyn?! He was from the Middle East, and he'd never seen a seaport town with no lawns like the Jersey Shore in a city borough, but that's exactly what it is.

The houses are built right up to the curb, often with no grass; just crushed shells or stones. Everyone was related to one another, and that was the way they preferred it, trips to the green motherland of Eire or not. Most homes had an old-fashioned nautical theme, with anchors or ropes and buoys prominently displayed. My boyfriend John had kept a boat that he didn't use often enough to justify the fees attached to mooring it all year long, and many of his friends had boats, too. The one bar in town had a pier to the jetty; we often went for boat trips to restaurants and bars that were only open in the summertime to boaters who pulled up to the dock.

His family and friends were immediately suspicious of me, because they couldn't tell just by looking at me who I was related to, in their town. Uh, probably the lot of you, though we've had a good deal mixing of the air since then, I'd suppose. Their Irish decor was also everywhere, and I remained (besides my cousin who introduced us) the only person in his crowd who'd actually been to Ireland. Twice. But, that's clannishness for you. I didn't expect a bunch of high school drop-outs who'd married their cousins and/or half-siblings to take a shine to me, and John and I were frequently on the outs from his drinking habit.

He was the only really successful man in his area, which made him both big-headed and a huge target in equally large measures. He made a lot of money with his trucking business, much more than he knew how to spend well or efficiently. I immediately suggested he begin trust funds for his nieces for their college education, to which he cynically huffed, "They ain't goin' ta college. They ain't goin' nowhere." Ah. Keen to help, are ya? And that was that. He was similarly spooked by the subway ride to my office in Manhattan, and the one work-related event where art directors are treated like rock stars, with free food and drink. He could distance himself from my life while at home with me in Park Slope, but not in the bigger world, and that's the place I lived in.

His best friend was an affable short Mick with a round, cheerfully red face who married the prettiest girl at school, and we all wondered about that. She and John seemed awfully chummy, too, which was confirmed for me by my ever-drunk cousin who manages to stay sharp as a whip, G-d bless 'em. He finally admitted that they'd dated for a brief second in junior high, and that was that. With the size of their neighborhood, there weren't a lot of options around. Suffice to say, they were cordial to me and also deeply unnerved by my presence as resident townies, which I respected by staying politely in the background so as not to offend, as I was taught. But their daughter Allie knew of no such barriers that existed between us.

His best friend's daughter loved me from the moment she met me, with her perfect spiral curls and big round eyes. She loved going to the beach with me because unlike her towel-bound parents, I actually love swimming in the ocean. They seemed to be of the belief that the beach was just one big outdoor bar, without need of a cooler, what with all that sand for beer bottles to go into. Allie seemed nonplussed by her parents bad alcoholism, preferring instead to sit next to me whenever she could, at their family get-togethers. My cousin made a lame attempt at making fun of me for playing with her Christmas toys on the floor with her on Christmas Day, but like my stale beer, it fell totally flat among so much dead-eyed, robotic arm-lifting. Ranking on the only adult present enough to enjoy the company of a child wasn't funny in his 40s.

It was like the joy had gone out of all of their lives, in service to a disease that so plagues Celtic people in this century, still. In between our horrible make-ups and breakups fueled by his illnesses, John would relay her messages to me that she missed me, and that it was the first thing she said whenever she came over to his house with her parents. "Where's Marie? Is Marie coming over?" She wouldn't be the first child to miss a mother she never really had. It's not my place to rear the children born to so many sick parents, but it is my fate to do it better than they ever could. I'm right here, Allie. I'll be right here, where you can always find me. Always.

Vive Le Hate

 
While some women had terrifying brush-ups with serial date rapists and other ghouls that haunted the free site Craigslist during its heyday, I famously dated an international explorer and one very lonely celebrity chef. Neither was a good match for me, but I got pretty close to some decent relationships. Francois was an insecure Parisian businessman who convinced himself that I only wanted to date him because he was rich. Au contraire! The sex was as good as his West Village apartment, paid for every month by his firm.

Our first date was on a snowy evening to see "Le Jazz Hot" that I thought boded well for us both. But, soon he was doubting our age difference and language skills (neither true obstacles), and the discrepancy he saw in our looks. He called me a "Petite Modelle" (mannequin) during our first few beers together, astonished that a woman as beautiful as me was single, and therein lies the rub. He was a bit too thin perhaps, with a receding hairline and stained teeth of a European kind, but it was workable enough for me, though his insecurities were not.

At first, he insisted on seeing me more often, which meant I had to hurry home from work to walk my dog and then trek back to Manhattan for our dates. It was a good thing I was in my 30s and more motivated. Then, when that accommodation became intolerable, he said he would pay for my car service rides to-and-from his place, even though technically he had no money. Oh, mon dieu...then, he made a big deal out of taking the subway to see me in "le suburb de Brooklyn". I began questioning his judgment even more. He chipped away at our relationship like a gay man caught kissing a drunk girl for kicks at a soiree. What gives?

He mined the false construct of the Brooklyn 'burbs all the way to calling me "une salope" for my last name (so suburban), then ridiculing his limited palette sexually ("go find a lesbian to do the 'lick lick'. I am macho"!), to finally excluding me from a dinner party for his middle-aged friends because they would only speak French. That was after he accused me of pretending not to be fluent "en francais", so I could get out of reading his bad murder mystery he supposedly wrote on an intercontinental flight while sitting next to a showgirl from "Le Moulin Rouge" who obsessively counted each bite of food she ate because she was paranoid about getting fat. 

"So cute!" he said to me, as he pulled a bowl of chips away from me sitting on his piano, while rebuffing my amorous advances, citing that we should have dinner instead. He unraveled the strands of our relationship one-by-one to avoid an entanglement, because he told me the only successful long-term "affaire de coeur" he ever had was with a married woman whose husband didn't care if she slept around. Oh, how droll. I think I was supposed to be impressed by his utter lack of ability in handling a woman full-time, but, sadly, I was not. As I sussed out his neuroses one at a time, he just threw more obstacles in the way, culminating in a date "with a friend" that he suspiciously gave me the street address to after a series of texts, so I could find him with a pretty older woman with dark hair and eyes who was obviously interested in him, then fly into a jealous lover's rage.

We had our final mis-en-scene in the posh MeatPacking district of Manhattan. I dressed him down for encouraging these behaviors deliberately to get my attention, while his co-worker awkwardly waited down the block to see what would happen between us, finally coming up to us as we were walking away to say her "au revoir". Out of all these negatives, came the results of one inconvenient test that was absolutely positive. He told me Frenchmen were deliberately seeking to replenish their dwindling bloodlines outside of the country, then moving back home to retain custody that would actively cut the foreign-born mother out of the picture, and that was the last straw for me. It was preposterously abusive. You can only jerk around a smart New York woman so much before the "wild child" in her comes out, and that really threw him for a loop. When my patient French Catholicism was finally exhausted by all his trying immature antics, this mama did what any sane woman would do: I ended his line of succession forever. 
Tell me, where's the sin in that?

http://m.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/kelly-rutherford-loses-custody-children-ex-husband-article-1.2466812

Space Mountain

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Mountain  

Amusement park rides always bothered me with a bad case of "mal de mer", and so for many years I avoided them unless I took the over-the-counter meclizine pills that are sold here in the States for motion sickness. I often thought the dizziness was related to my hearing loss, and that the damage to my middle ear bones heightened the vertigo I felt during fast-spinning rides, but my father is more imapired than I am and he has great "sea legs". Oh, well. After experimenting with rides both on-and-off the pill, I knew it was best to take it an hour before any rollerocaster rides, which was about the length of the wait on the line in the summertime.

But, Disney was different. The whole place is one big tourist attraction, which meant double-dosage every morning, in anticipation of the day's events. I also had to take it while flying, which meant I arrived in a sleepy haze and stayed that way for the whole trip, before the manufacturer suddenly discovered that excessively doped-up sleepiness was a bit too much for anyone to handle well, let alone traveling children. Years later, the non-drowsy version offered me much better results. It wasn't like I had a choice about it, either. I went wherever my family decided to go, whether I wanted to or not, and they don't have the best tastes in travel, preferring easy Americanized experiences over authenticity.

With the park in Florida, everyone around me was way more excited than I was. Once I hit the water slides at our hotel, I had no idea why anyone in their right mind would choose to wait for several hours on a line in the brutally hot Floridian sun. We had all the fun we needed at the hotel pool. Why not just stay there? It was designed to funnel tourists through a series of highly choreographed "events" that eliminated pesky things like choices, because the tram to the park was right outside of our hotel. Wasn't that neat? Uh, sure. Like the subway is above ground, but with too much sun and heat. It seemed pointless.

At the time of our big family vacation that cost too much money (hence the drive towards the park everyday, with a reminder about how lucky we were to see other pale flabby tourists from New York wilt sickly in the heat), the biggest sensation was a ride called "Space Mountain"; so secretive in its marketed allure that no one at the park would disclose what the ride actually was. *SPOILER ALERT* It's an indoor rollercoaster, btw. Just like horror movie hits like "The Exorcist", we were given a build-up worthy of hell itself with caution signs like "Don't ride this if you have a heart condition", and warnings to pregnant women about the stress.

It started to freak my mom out, and then me, too. I didn't want to die. I just wanted to go on a friggin' vacation I could have fun with. I was a kid! But, once we'd passed the point of no return, and we needed to pick buddies for the ride, everyone but my dad bailed on sitting with me, in case I threw up during the ride. They debated backsplash, too. My dad just laughed at me the entire time, hitting my arm around the turns, and taking both of his arms out from behind the bar to make it extra scary, in defiance of the signs that cautioned us not to do so repeatedly. The photos of us taken during the ride were disastrous, too. My dad had on an angry red-faced smile while I looked like I was crying, as did my brothers and my mom. I was just glad it was over.

Afterwards, we talked about how the ride was just an indoor rollercoaster in the dark with some flashing lights. The hype had made it seem much scarier than it was, and I felt like I just passed a bravery test. My dad and my brothers were eager to try other scary rides, but me and my mom had enough boyish thrills for the day. We went on a pleasant little choo-choo train that offered a nice slow ride around the park, giving us a chance to see how pretty it was, without whizzing by at a blurry hundred miles an hour. The boys laughed at our "gay kiddie ride", boisterous to go around the mountain again. They'd later complain about the lines they abandoned in their search for more scares, while me and my mom went for ice cream, iced tea, and souvenir shopping. It was the best ride, yet.

Providence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence,_Rhode_Island

The city of Providence was in pretty bad shape during my time attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Downtown was a workplace for the suburban 9-to-5-Monday-through-Friday set, abandoned to junkies and the homeless people on the weekends, like a ghost town. There were no stores open or attractions to see, other than a small mall built inside of a beautiful old building with an ornate glass ceiling. Surrounding the town was a large concrete sewer that reduced the river to a dirty little stream filled with garbage.

College Hill was a bastion of old houses and historic cobblestone streets by comparison, so the lack of any type of inviting nightlife (save for the one music venue we all frequented for discount tickets to traveling punk acts on their way from New York to Boston) actually spared us from a lot of the violent random crimes that plagued less savvy college kids. Occasionally we went to the Italian section on the other hill facing downtown for big spaghetti dinners, to be greeted by an archway hung with a copper pineapple for its guests, a sure sign of a paisan good time.

The misty narrow streets once haunted by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe were still as captivating to young artistic imaginations as ever, easy as the old scenes were at blurring the lines between then and now, in the dense fogs that would descend upon the town, blown inland from the sea. The air would become thick with moisture, salty and briny as the ocean, as every Northeastern city does. Anyway, the hill held enough for us to explore. The main drag at the top of the hill in our college district had cheap eats, like the vegan-approved falafel joint I went to with my hippie housemates that inspired me and my friend Dave to coin the phrase "The Falafel Mafia!" yelled out loud in an Arabic-sounding voice. 

We wanted to make t-shirts for our next punk band that would have one really bad performance before folding forever. Screeching is tough on the vocal chords! It wasn't until years later in Denver that I met a Portuguese/Italian guy from Massachusetts also living out west, who told me about the wackier side of town. He asked me if I knew a big decorative element downtown, and then I remembered. Oh, yeah! There was a building like New York's Flatiron skyscraper: narrow to a point, to fill out two bigger corners in a triangle-shape. "Right," my friend Chris said to me while we worked at The Denver Post. "It's evil." Uh...okay. Why? This should be good.

Chris had some traumas growing up that he felt pushed him into evangelical Christianity, trading his sex addiction for the headier blend of this weird-ass new age cult that flourished in the midwest during the 80s and 90s. It was the time of the "SuperChurch" with its strange crystal palaces and homosexual pastors who always seemed to be caught with illegal drugs and a hooker. My work friend was now a passionately ignorant "Born-Again", which was made doubly weird by his self-professed Catholic upbringing. The arid plains out west can do strange things to some people. 

Still, it was far better than dying from an overdose, so I tolerated his blowhard lecturing about my own faith as good-naturedly as I could, without letting him cross the line into offensiveness. I already knew who I was. Did he? I wasn't so sure. People with mental problems get confused easily. Chris had lived in Arizona with his divorced mom after they left the Northeast years ago, and even though Denver throws down some serious snow, homeboy continued to wear linen pants and a thin golf jacket like he was driving a golf cart around his retirement community. His brain wasn't catching up to the change in locale. 

Like office people everywhere, Chris preferred fanatsies about tropical beaches, grumbling about the weather while planning his next bad tourist vacation that would put him right back on the work-wheel he loathed so much. But, back to the story. So, what's wrong with that building's sculpture? It was a stone carving of a guy in a turban that faced people who came into town down a certain block. Oh, the genie is an evil symbol designed to be a focal point that draws in bad magic. Sigh...really? I don't think the oldest Ivy League schools in American give two fucks, other than its aesthetic appeal. Didn't stop us from doin' a damn thing.

He gave me that special kind of smiley condescension that marks the kook who's just been exposed. Turns out, Chris recruited another wack-job from his mega church to go on "hunting trips" that would neutralize evil hotspots. Ah, what the fuck...I'll bite. It was an office job, after all. What else was I gonna do at a plush union gig besides crossword puzzles and free music downloads? Well, first he lightly chastized me for my naivety about the creepy-crawly things I didn't know. Right. Yeah. So, the genie? Right! Well, you're supposed to counter its dark forces by staking out the four corners of a cemetery resting on a hill before town with a magical string that keeps the evil graveyard spirits from entering. 

That's what he and his brain-dead friend were doing with Denver (and it had to be done at midnight, too), and that's what I should have done for Providence. Uh huh. Besides the three jobs and all that art? Yes! Okay, neat. Thanks for that. In any event, I'm happy to report that my lapse in good judgment about crazy rituals did not hurt it one bit. In fact, after I left the city, great changes were already taking place. They removed the concrete blocks that held back the river, building a beautiful outdoor riverwalk that ended in an amphitheater for concerts and plays. A gondola boat gave tourists rides up-and-down the canal like Venice, with charming lights illuminating the scene at sunset. 
Not a bad ending after all, is it? 

Hurricane!

Just like the same news hype that returns every year, so, too, does the change of seasons pose serious intellectual problems for psychologically-impaired people. Every year, my mom and her wacky sisters get vicarious thrills from the earth's rotation around the sun that causes dry conditions out west and big rainstorms in the east, in the exact same way that a UFO fan gets off on strange ideas about alien abductions and well-wished-for anal probes. <Gasp!> Did you see the news today?!

First, it was really hot outside (TOO WARM!) and now it's freezing cold (TOO COLD!), because the "in-between" seasons like spring and fall often have weather patterns like that, which isn't fun unless you pretend you're watching a really scary movie with them, and they don't like horror movies. Uh, okay...sure. Let's go with that. Or, alternately, you could just look out the window, or feel the windowpane to gauge the temperature, or (and this is even weirder) you could actually go outside. Tons of options here.

WHAT?!! GO OUTSIDE?!! "What are you, nuts? I have severe hay-fever allergies! Do you want me to die?!" Or, they never had allergies to begin with and you're a bad person for making that up. Besides, why would you remember something so odd like that anyway? "So strange to me..." Unlike, say, paranoid schizophrenia, I actually enjoy each season for what it offers us. It's necessary to all life on this planet, and it's also a welcome change. Humans like adaptation and growth. "BOO!" Hobbits don't. So, like most of my life, my immediate family briefly passes by me while I live the best life ever, pretending that my challenges are the same "up-and-downs" as their manic-depression. It isn't, but they don't have anything else to compare it to, do they?

Just like their "parties" are some of the most dreadful affairs on G-d's green earth, so, too, did they easily confuse anti-social lurking in corners at large family reunions with "fun", the way alcoholism is nothing like having a great time at a kick-ass party. Drinking = instant asshole. Right? Of course, they know better, but my family likes to pretend that it doesn't hurt as much if they keep a vigilant boot on the heel of my good time. It's a lie, but they've already downgraded their sins against me to a cutesy widdle "white lie" (like the kind that naughty children do), while I sin real bad!

It was the same deliberate untruths they told each other about my body, my sexuality, my fertility, my health, my looks, my partying; anything that could be put down in the "Clan of the Cave Troll" to control the reversal of their intentionally misspoken words that would delay the inevitable good fortune that is my destiny. "Get your shots in while you can", my dad used to say, "because you won't be able to beat her forever." It was as tacit a reason to abuse me as they abused everyone and everything around them in their delusional sickness. How to hurt and get my help at the same time?

Like a crook who wastes $2,000 worth of time planning a $23 rip-off from a $43 bar tab, the pettiness of it was astounding in its depths, like the hapless Moriarty plays to a Sherlock Holmes, without the homosexuality and opium addiction. I don't have those facets. But, you do. I get it. And so, much like anything else that was epic in my life, my family couldn't participate. They could watch from a dark corner of the room, but they couldn't "boogie down" like me and my crew. I told them about our 70s parties with as much detail as they would let me, but when they finally opened the door to one of Bobby's rockin' shindigs, it was "Animal House: The Real" for a group of people who needed a much safer distance from the action.

They looked so uncomfortable. Bobby was swinging in a big Afro wig from a light fixture that gave way inch-by-inch as it was slowly pulled from the ceiling in a dramatic CRASH! to the floor. Just like the movies! Everyone was dancing in 70s-era costumes to "Play That Funky Music", and from the dropped jaws of my brother, his girlfriend (now wife), and his best friend, I could tell they were in shock that such things actually existed out in the world. They stood frozen in the foyer before the huge living room to the big old house we all rent(ed), with intact period details at a fraction of their costs, making the best party they ever attended into a spectator sport. I felt bad for them as I took their coats and got them beers. It'll be okay! I laughed to help them relax a little bit more.

Just like the weather that so frightened them into complacency, I also took my ability to have a good time in stride, too. I knew I was having the best time ever and so did my friends, but to actually see the astonishment on their faces brought it back home for me. Oh. You don't do that. I do. Like every good parent, I wanted them to join in the fun, even if it was just a little while before their drinking habits became alcoholism, and their study sessions with Vivarin became serious prescription pill-popping addictions. My life pulled me away from them, and I could see it on their faces that they knew it, too. We might never meet at this point again.

Eventually, my family stopped asking me if they could come by, by inviting themselves into my life to see if it was real. It was, and it still is. No tricks up my sleeves. Therefore, it seemed fitting to me that one of the last Oneonta parties I went to was held in the great outdoors, in the autumn season of September, still warm in the day and freezing at night, in classic upstate New York style. We raised our now-iconic plastic red cups to a seasonal storm named after a woman by male newscasters, in a cruel joke about our supposed tempermental moods brought on by our hormone-ravaged bodies. We toasted every fierce gust of wind that shook treetops so large, we made them more famous by putting them up in New York City as our Christmas trees.

Big fat raindrops started to fall on us at the same time the wooden makeshift stage Rock Ptarmigan played on started giving way, as all of their friends danced and sang with them onstage. Tony laughed as it tilted first towards the left where they gathered around the empty mic, then slowly gave way as he lightly hopped off the stage before the final lurch that saw it fall completely to the ground. We laughed, too. Show's over! We gave one last cheer to the heavens before the skies opened up, to pour down the rain that we knew would come but cheered for anyway, safely nestled as we were in our loving little city of the hills. It was the best party, yet. Wish you were there.

Rock Ptarmigan

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_ptarmigan 

Hippies living in Oneonta were largely comprised of two parts: the arrogantly rich "Trustafarian" from Long Island (kids with trust funds who "slummed it" just for college), and the meeker "peace-punk" of upstate New York. Neither camp liked me very much, as someone who could not be brainwashed by exposure and near-constant repetition of "The Grateful Dead", but I could care less. They liked to have fun more than anything, and in my quest for the perfect good time, they came closest to the concept I had in mind.

Their group centered around a wealthy hippie named "Bobby" from Long Island, whose mom sent him Italian-American food by the frozen trayful every few weeks or so. Because my college boyfriend was housemates with him one year, I was obliged to attend a few of his "Monoke-ass" events: a party game made out of smoking pot, playing the board game Monopoly, and eating his mama's cooking. As much as I loved lasagna, I had an Italian-American mother (and grandmother) of my very own, and she had no big problems with making food, outside of her willingness to do so.

I always felt like an interloper around them, and judging by the nasty looks they threw my way, I could tell they knew I didn't belong to their group, either. Cults are sensitive like that. Even slight deviations from their strict set of "norms" would find you greeted with a chilly reception, standing outside of their group looking at them from a more comfortable distance, which was fine for an Acadian girl like me. They were, uh, much less receptive to the werewolf cold that I withstood wearing my brother's old flannel shirts. I was also wayyyy too beautiful for them to handle gracefully, and I knew that, too.

That's where the more mellow upstaters came into play. They tempered the aggressive ethnicity of the downstate hippies with their more laid-back country vibe, since this was their "neck of the woods". They were more familiar with concepts like "Canada" and "Nova Scotia", making it slightly easier for me to attend their events without the rigorous hazing that went with the Jewish and Italian girls from L.I. looking to play sexy in rich hippie garb. I didn't even know there was a competition going on. Me and Karen just didn't want to die. Like I wrote before, no one gave two fucks about ethnic working-class girls like us. We were on our own, and no group would have us, which suited our independence well. Sink or swim. That was our home shore we always washed up on.

But I understood their need to belong. They wouldn't have made it, otherwise, and perhaps that's why their envy was directed at me whenever I was around. Anyway, I've never been a diva or an "attention whore", so staying in the background was fine by me. I really didn't need another spotlight to perform under. My class crits gave me more than enough time to hone my voice. I certainly didn't need the phony pressures of a pseudo-friendly social scene to boost my ego. I wanted to survive. And so, when the upstate group joined forces with the downstaters, we all benefited from their creative merger, in the form of a groovy rock band that played tunes anyone could enjoy and dance to.

It was the last ingredient we needed for our perfect party cocktail, catapulting our parties to instant fame, like all of our other antics. We now had a really good house band that would play for beer and pot. Done and done. Bobby played the drums, and they found a guy named "Tony" to be their lead singer. He wasn't particularly good-looking or charismatic, but it didn't matter. We always had girls at our party for him to flirt with and/or hookup with. They were kinda skanky to my crowd, what with the herpes that spread through their group like wildfire (in the guise of their "sexual freedom"), so we were fine at not being included in their events as party planners.

We could drink and dance as much as we wanted to, without having to clean up afterward. Me and Karen grew up emptying other people's ashtrays and rinsing out sour-smelling beer cans. Uh, not invited to their "private" practice sessions, too? High five! It ain't easy bein' a single teenage parent, so any night off we had to simply enjoy listening to music was always a good time to us, and with my bouncer boyfriend, no cover charge was even sweeter. Over time, their parties and our groups blended together anyway, as we jokingly changed the band's original "peace dove" hippie-bird name to the more fun and familiar choice of cool New York kids everywhere: Rock "Parmigiana". And we did. We rocked good music and good food like the authentic lifestyle to us that it is. Join us.

Bathtub Gin

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Las_Vegas  

I never had great expectations about Las Vegas. So, when my father invited me and my Coloradan boyfriend to Vegas, Kent explained the trip to me like this: you won't like it because it's tacky and cheesy, but you should see it just once to understand what the hype is about. I loved his Anglo-Saxon bluntness about overblown tourist attractions that so matched my personality. We both hated unruly mobs of "Genericans" spending their money chasing a dream that would always be out of their reach, like his punk band playing at so many dive bars; there's only so many addicts you can put up with, before the bottles and the fists start flying.

The marketing campaign at the time advertised a more "family-friendly" experience, because Midwestern "family values" groups were targeting obvious hot spots like "Sin City", putting a huge dent in the notoriously crooked town that began with mob money way back when. From what we saw with my little brother during the daytime, their advertised clean-up was kind of true. We stayed at a rococo hotel decorated like a gay Roman bathhouse, with the added bonus of a small version of the Guggenheim Museum on the first floor. The exhibit featured American motorcycles, and my big lad couldn't have been happier about it.

We took my little bro to a hotel with an aquarium, and Kent rode the "New York, New York" roller coaster with him a few times, too. We strolled through each attraction in the air-conditioned underground via a series of inter-connected malls that blurred over time, with typical shit for sale. We went during August, the hottest month of the summer, in one of the hottest desert climates we have, thus ensuring the cheapest fares. The hotels had enormous water misters at every outdoor cafe and restaurant to spray the crowd down and keep them shopping; the same fake humidity that Denver used to "green" its lawns and parks artificially.

But at night, the town changed character completely. At one point, there were so many flyers for hookers strewn on the streets that we began shielding my little brother's eyes during every intersection we crossed, revealing the true character of the town that so many Disney-like structures sought to obscure with their phony cartoon cheeriness. It was fake, but so what? We felt worse for the retired seniors who were susceptible to gambling addictions, mindlessly pulling on the arms of so many slot machines that took their life savings. It was really fucking depressing.

After so much time underground, you begin to forget what time it is, whether it's day or night, and the day of the week. My dad won a few hundred bucks at a machine in a mall court, which found me and Kent escorting my brother 100 yards away from him because it's illegal to have children around gambling. We waited in front of some storefront while an employee gave him his winnings. And that was it; our Vegas vacation. Pleasant, but no big deal. When I saw on the news recently that workers were drilling a hole underneath Lake Mead (the only water source for all life in that area) so they could drain it like a bathtub, I knew it had gotten much worse since our visit in the late 90s.

With the sickness in Oklahoma, I'm not sure which crisis is worse. Chemical companies have been pouring waste water underground, destabilizing the entire region. There have been over 900 earthquakes already, and the situation worsens with each passing day. Unfortunately, we've seen what "the white man" can do to our Mother Earth here in the Americas, and it needs to stop. Today. I'm calling on my native people to pray like the faithful people I know you to be, to end this madness forever. You need to take back the land that is rightfully yours. You need to "go native". You need to "see red". 
I know I do.

Around the World

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days 

Parties at Oneonta became our go-to creative outlet for lifting our spirits and casting off the sometimes extreme pressures we were under, as working class kids from New York. When I mentioned to my father recently that I can write "lowbrow" at times in a colloquial dialect that is unique to this area, and to also mean that I can be at every level of work, he reddened and barked a sudden harsh laugh at me, baring his top row of dentures. "Hah! Yeah, you're 'lowbrow'!", as if I had suddenly forgotten who I am and where I was, which I hadn't. I have plenty of reminders. 

I don't have the luxury of checking out from my life, no matter how bad it can sometimes be, because such is the nature of living. Suffice to say, unlike the hangers-on to our hip scene, I really wanted to learn, and anything that jeopardized that went out the window. I couldn't afford to not be present during my own education, happily deferring it to the hands of others, like so many other spoiled suburban kids. I was born in the projects of Queens to an Acadian Metis and an Italian-Irish American, some of the lowliest ethnicities on the planet for this country. Of course, in your country of origin, it could be the complete opposite, because such is the perversity behind prejudices and hate: to blind you to your true worth for the false ones of a commercial world.

We had discussions about our parties, too, appropriate to each setting. For freshman year, kids often joined together to have a party on the entire floor, or sometimes the whole dorm threw one large shindig. The most popular kind was the "'Round the world" party, with every dorm room offering a different type of booze. Those were completely fucking dangerous. Kids did crazy shit like soak a whole watermelon in grain alcohol, in a garbage can or a bathtub that they were proud to show off during the week. "One bite of this should do the trick!", as we took turns slapping the melon. We wanted a quicker entertainment we could afford, because every penny counted in our fractured homes, where scarcity was often used as a weapon.

A girl from "Lawnguyland" had a set of test tubes in a wooden carrier filled with a noxious-looking neon-green substance, while another carried around a tray of red jello shots (made with vodka) that had been neatly set in those small paper condiment containers from the cafeteria. It was like "Martha Stewart: Unplugged", which is an MTV reference, kids. Look it up! I left after a few dorm rooms, because our run-ins with campus security and two-day hangovers had learned me to steer clear of liquids that were uncertain-looking. I wanted to have fun, not throw up in the bathroom down the hall for hours and hours.

As sophomores, we expanded our view of partying to include multi-levels, in mixed gender dorms that reflected our more mature mentalities. Random wild hookups were a thing of the past, with most of us either in relationships or busy with school and jobs. There was always work. Boys and girls now lived in suites right next to each other, without incident. Anyway, the Long Island boys next door to us were a tight "Jew Crew" of frat brothers and a couple of very white upstaters. No problems, there. Still, with Halloween right around the corner, epicness awaited us in the form of grander and more complex parties.

On our list was the oft-touted "Heaven and Hell" party. It was a fantasy scene suited to three levels: the top level was Heaven (of course), the middle layer was Purgatory, and then there would be a "Dante's Inferno": a hell of our own creation. We decorated each floor in our minds with smoke machines and cotton ball clouds, or flickering fiery flames like those lamps from "Spencer's Gifts" (another 80s reference*) with plastic strips powered by a mini-fan to simulate fire. We'd use tinfoil-coated walls to bounce light around the rooms, or paint one room a heavenly light-blue color at the beginning of the semester, decorated with sparkly stars and even more mood lighting. 

Mood lamps....eh. What can I say? It was a thing**. Anyway, every year around this time, I still think about cool crisp autumns, fall decorations, the fun of Halloween, my outfits and costumes, and how much I still want to spread that great feeling around. The joy we felt at just being free enough to talk out loud about whatever we wanted to, whenever we could, without being abused or pushed aside, felt like "manna from the skies" to us; a gift so valuable, we knew we couldn't live without it. That's what freedom and a good time can do. It can set your soul free. Soar!

*    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Gifts
**  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_lamp

Kegger

The road to Oneonta is long, winding, and dangerous in the snowy seasons, but held such fascinations for us as young adults (and a few teenagers, ahem) that we were always psyched to make that last turn around that last bend before town. Because it was so grueling to get to, we had check points at every spot along the way, especially if you had to take the bus because you couldn't afford a car...ahem, that was also me. The Phoeniciaville stop had a redneck bar with a huge wooden eagle above it that matched the tourist bear statues for sale in the gravel parking lot that was their bus stop, for wealthy "urbanites" to buy for their country home's porch. You know the one: roughly made with a chain saw? That's it!

One of the hill-folk closer to town made a fun artpiece on the side of an old barn made from the hubcaps that came off around that last hairpin curve before town, and as soon as we saw it, we knew we were close enough to catch the radio signal from our college radio station. It always seemed to be manned by the voice of Jenny-O, the first real "celeb" most of us ever knew, because everybody we knew knew her, too. As soon as we heard her voice, we knew we were home for the semester, listening to the New Wave sounds of the 80s, where freshness lived.

We were used to pockets of cool civilizations nestled in the rural hills and mountains of our beloved upstate New York, but even for us, New Delhi was whack. It was a wide spot on the road, a small two-year school carved out of the hillside. My friend Meg from Mamaroneck knew a kid going to school there, so she asked me to go with her one weekend. "If you think we party hard, you should see how they drink!" Uh, oh. We were ferocious. "There's nothing to do and nowhere to go. There's not even a town near there! They get drunk in their dorms built around a square, and the only space on campus is that!" Holy fuck...I loved party challenges, but even this one had me apprehensive. I wasn't looking to die or lose my mind. I just wanted a good time.

They did all the party tricks we did at O-town, like keg stands and beer funnels, but there seemed to be a lack of joy to their partying, like we were just going through the motions. There's only so drunk you can get, until there's sickness and hangovers. Who needs that? As soon as those kids got really fuckin' drunk, shit got weird. It was nighttime in the quad, and they lost it. Garbage cans were lit on fire in the square, while students lurched across it, going from room to room. Their dorm rooms sucked, too. No flair at all, compared to ours. Just beat up and covered with marks on walls that hadn't been painted in years. And then some idiot took out fireworks, and started shooting them off the balcony at people in the quad below, while other kids simply looked on nonchalantly, smoking indifferently.

Hey, man. Count me out. I wanted out of that hellhole, like yesterday. We talked about Meg being too drunk to drive, and then getting a cab back to town. We were supposed to sleep over on some kid's dirty floor, but I'd had enough. There's partying, and then there's just plain batshit crazy. This was nuts. No one was having fun. You could see it in their blank eyes, not that kids at an easy two-year school had a lot of brains to begin with. They seemed completely gone, lost in the smoke that wreathed through the square, waiting for the police to arrive. The campus seemed abandoned to them.

"Yeah, they kind of just leave 'em alone to do their thing," Meg said to me, when I noticed the difference between their lackluster mayhem, and the quick censures on our campus. It was striking. "I think they're afraid of them here, because they're mostly from the city." No shit. Me, too. It was a good lesson in the differences between mountain towns and SUNY schools, which can be markedly so. I wanted out. We left that campus for good, and the next day I felt more fondness for our mountain home. That place was not our town. Oneonta was.
The city of the hills.

Idol Worship

The differences between kids from upstate versus the ones from downstate can be pronounced, as we were to find out during college. Much like the rest of the country takes the social distortions of Hollywood to be synonomous with being Californian so, too, do upstaters sometimes feel mischaracterized by ethnic stereotypes from the tri-state area. Whereas southern New York is almost tropically warm during the spring, summer, and fall (made more acute with global warming), winter for many New Yorkers is the same as Canada: long, brutal, and cold.

In Oneonta, we had a saying: the sun set in September and came back in June, giving us nine full months of cloudcast winter. You had to bring the jolly with you, is what I mean, rather than being overly dependent on nature's cues about weather and personality. Suffice to say, me and my friends were more accustomed to a colder climate than the city kids warmed by so much heat-retained pavement, and the Gulf Stream that blows through coastal New York. Rockland County is at least 5 degrees cooler than the coastline, sometimes as much as 10-20 degrees, especially at night. It fools you into thinking that those city miles to the country are no big deal, but the Hudson River's massive size takes umbrage at that bold claim.

Suffice to say, it shows up in our varied taste, styles, and cultures, often worse for the wear. Like rednecks everywhere, hard-to-reach mountain terrain can breed some strange bedfellows, like those of our dorm-mate Tracey from Buffalo, and our "crazy Injun" friend Dave from Schnectady. We met Tracey from down the hall through her roommate on the soccer team, Lisa, who rocked a softball mini-mullet like the 80s would never die. Their uncanny retro qualities, channeled while living in the present, signalled to us of their rural clans proud identity as stallers of change and slowness to adapt. A lot of folks "head to the hills" seeking escape from the pressures of conforming to everyday societal norms, and they're proud of it.

Into this reactionary niche fit punk rock star turned pop culture MTV videomaker, Billy Idol. He'd gained fame as a young musician for the band "Generation X", to churn out hit after hit and video after video in the 80s. It was catchy at first, but then, almost instantly, his overplayed songs became dated, just like our upstate friend's 10-12 year lag behind our more sophisticated urban values.  Songs like "Rebel Yell" reflected their stubborn insistence at pushing away trends and new things the way vampires hate the sign of the cross. It spoke to their view that the rest of the world sucked, in rejection of their almost non-status as upstaters who felt shunted by the downward cast of Albany to the more populated areas we came from.

The first time me and Karen knocked on Tracey's door, we were greeted with her credo drawn onto the dorm door's message board that read "Idol Worship Lives!" in the logo type of his album covers. Oh...okay. They chafed similarly at my cool drawing posted on our door, done in a surreal "Alice in Wonderland" illustration style that was later ripped off, but not before the Lawnguyland girls wrote on it to let us know they disapproved of us as so-called "hippies", what with Karen's turtlenecks worn under her sports sweatshirts and big silver cross, paired with my cooler rocker-chic flair. Those girls smoke pot and attract boys=bad. We'd made our mark on them that quickly.

But, worshipping a dyed-blond skinny dude in leather pants? Uh, not exactly our style. He was too cheesy for us, and he always looked like he was on heroin, with his dark undereye circles. What was there to love? His videos were even worse; tacky over-produced "art tableaus" for people with poor taste, rife with pseudo-religious imagery he'd ripped off from Catholicism to seem commerically counter-culture. Wanker. British pop stars were "a dime a dozen" for us back then. We didn't need them to become cults of personality for us.

Sure enough, "Pretty Boy" Dave and Tracey from down the hall hooked up early on during the first semester, because he was drunk and she was smitten with his looks. It was great fun for us, because we got to hear in detail how Dave was too drunk to "do the deed", passed out on her twin-sized dorm room bed. She was cool about it, too, laughing it off the next time we were all together, because homeboy hadn't remembered their encounter, like whether or not he had sex. He didn't. It became our party circuit's favorite target for awhile, expressed through the punk rock song "Too Drunk To Fuck"* as Dave's theme.

Tracey "heehawed" at his attention-getting antics right along with us, brushing off Dave's puppy lust like the solid blond girl she was. No big deal. "That kid's got a lot to learn, and not by me. He's so cute, though!" Yeah, we all liked Dave. Then, she went back to smoking her cigarette, drinking her coffee, and putting on her makeup on a face that was underneath some of the hardest sprayed hair on the whole campus, and that was hard to beat. She just rolled with it, like the fun country girl she is. You, rocker. Rock on! Those were the days of our early lives, and nothing could beat it. Seriously. She was 23 and had already been to a community college. We were just geting started.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Drunk_to_Fuck

The U-Haul Mauler

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U-Haul 

Going back to school for Oneonta students felt like a Christmas Eve party on the same day as your birthday, and you just got a puppy that looks like Snoopy from your parents before you and your crew hit the town. It was that great. Of course, by junior year, we were all feeling the numbness that comes with so many good times, which meant we were growing up. But, we still wanted to summon up that fresh feeling before every semester, and junior year was no different.

Imagine a place where all your best friends hung out and came back to every year, knowing they'd show up ready for a good time. We hit the ground running, docked for the summer at our stupid low-paying jobs, in places that seemed like they were stuck in the mud, time-wise. You know that excruciating summer blues when its all heat and and dust and nothing's moving, especially the air? That's what we came from; stranded from the only people we'd found so far who got us on a few levels, even if some of the crucial parts were still missing. It wasn't nostalgia, either. It's a really beautiful town in upstate New York with a really good state school, framed by a perfect small-town Main Street filled with pubs. Done.

After two years on campus, we were finally allowed to live off-campus, and for my crowd, that was a good thing, too. We'd come close to getting kicked out of our dorms for having louder better times than other people, and the strain of that for two years running started to show. Now, we had house parties to look forward to. Because we were active kids (we didn't call ourselves "athletes" back then unless we attended school on a sports scholarship), we rented a house for $200 a semester split four ways at the bottom of a hill that lead directly to campus, if you could climb a steep mountain hill covered in ice and snow in tan construction books (the only kind that works), all weather permitting. We could be exceptionally healthy like that.

My best friend was JV and Varsity volleyball in high school as the team captain, breaking every finger on both hands, sometimes more than once. Her good friend at Oneonta was on a soccer scholarship, and one of our housemates ate tofu and taught aerobics classes for Continuing Ed. at the school, and at suburban joints over the summer as the prototypical "hot blond" cheerleader type, but with soul. We took all that to mean we should play hackey-sack wasted whenever the sun was out. Ah, youth. Our friend Meg was a real former cheerleader and so was her bestie from home, "Crackhead Jen".

Before my boyfriend switched majors, he wanted to be a sports therapist, being the former high school quarterback he was at the posh Jesuit school Xavier's, while he worked double-time as a bouncer during semesters and a doorman on the West Side during summers throughout our college career. He and I also opted for the actual physical labors of a "Body Conditioning" class (still have the textbook with fun 80s photos on my shelf), while our friends either bowled (and smoked pot) or took camping class...and smoked pot. With beers, too, of course. Not one of us hadn't been camping or to a bowling alley before. My friend Dave (who I would later marry) was also the star quarterback at his high school, and his crew was deep into skateboarding, biking, hiking, surfing, swimming and boating, depending on locale and budget.

So, that's what we showed up with: a bundle of fun under the clear night sky. I drove up to school with a crew of my own, navigating town and driving by our friends houses to see if they were up, yet. Low and behold, there was my man "A-Roll" in his biker wraparound shades driving some busted rental van from the 'hood with graffiti all over it. Ah, Brooklyn boys. I shouted "Hey!" out the window as we passed, just as he turned his head to look but not before we saw him rear-end a car parallel-parked on the street. Haha! What a dick. Keep driving!

We had arrived. For the entire first half of the year, Ariel tried to shake me down for cash as a participant in his smash-up with a townie's car (because I called out his name and waved to him from a passing car), and they hated ethnic city kids with a passion, especially his dark gothic hipster ass in all-black with a slicked-back ponytail. Every time we were at a party, he said I should give him some money for my part in his accident, because he was being sued by the townie with the dent in his car, after he abandoned the moving van on the street. Yeah, right. He sulked for months about losing his deposit on the vehicle. 

He might have just wanted beer and pot money. You never knew with a hungry thirsty Dominican street kid like him. What we did do is almost instantly craft a new nickname for him that we greeted him with every time he showed up for a party. "The U-Haul Mauler" was a smash hit, and we went on to design a punk rock album cover art in his name. We dominated town and campus gossip our first day back in town (like usual), and the semester had just begun. Anything could happen in a magical mountain town nestled in the hills of beautiful upstate New York. Anything. Anything was possible. See you there, kids.

Arael - variation of Uriel; prince over the people.