Express Yourself

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edward_Hopper_Summer_Interior.jpg

Given the surplus of most advertising budgets in this country (which speaks highly about Capitalism's importance within this society, and what our true priorities really are), it's no surprise that the average American thinks "shopping" equals "fun holiday vacation". It is, in fact, what my disordered aunt tried to sell to me as damaged goods for my entire young life, in her constant bid to have a co-dependent partner with her during her disillusioned mall-based fantasies; a meeting of a certain key demographic with one's core audience, if ever there was. 

Her late best friend filled up her mother's Bronx town-home with her hoarding disorder to live in a tiny rental, choosing instead to die from a bad surgery done cheaply, and one we all warned her about, so much so, that it was actually a form of assisted suicide. All she had to do was go through the contents of her own home to find the money for the top cancer hospital in the country, which is in New York and a subway ride away. Their hobby that began as a conduit to creative expression over any real discernible talents hardened with time, effort, and near-constant practice into a brain disorder so bad, it has become synonymous with heroin usage and alcoholism, with one of the lowest cure rates in all of psychotherapy.

Shopping has become so prevalent within our society that even our supposed higher institutions of learning devote entire curricula to it. You can degree in "Shopping 101", which is thinly disguised behind marketing and sales, but not by much. Asian/Asian-American preferences for goods and shiny objects are so well-known, that Manhattan's F.I.T. actively recruits makers of widgets and experts in object lure, touted as "Toy Design", a weird variant of Industrial Design marketing solely for children, and "Merchandising", which is typically a female who seeks to buy for stores. Oh, you can dress it up in holiday wrapping, but that's essentially the gig: score with a major supplier like Macy's, and that's the ticket into your shopper's paradise. In reality, it is a hellhole of a Christmas experience, like sweating with thousands of fat middle Americans who seek the ubiquitous brown paper bag, rubbing elbows with Mid-westerners who are too lazy to go uptown for Tiffany's better blue one.

And those are the high achievers in this particular sport: majoring in the big city retailers, minoring in the outer circles while awaiting your call-up to New York City, as a symbol of your advanced pocketbook pride. How glamorous! Shopping in "The City"! It's a rather sad and provincial characteristic naive out-of-towners have, wide-eyed with their recent fix, but "Shopaholics" (cutesy marketing term, don't you think?) are not new to me, as evidenced by my own family and their crippling dysfunctional patterns. Feel sad? Buy food! Instant fix. Feeling bored? Graze at the mall, until your identity reaches out to you in the form of some useless tchotchke with no real value, except the one the purchaser breathes into it, instead of loving the human they're with. "What's love got to do with it?" Exactly.

I worked with a typical Eurasian model at the city outpost for a rich German family, and within a week, she let me know we all had big targets on our backs (because she "made it" by working here at some company I'd never heard of before, until I interviewed for the job), and that she was "too cool for school"; meaning she was so inept, she actually failed out of a SUNY school known for "Fashionistas" who loooove to spend their rich Japanese daddy's money. Très chic, n'est-ce pas? It touts "worldly" in a bottle, like the trendy Eau de Parfum du jour, but unlike their skinny frames hidden underneath overly (but artfully) designed clothing, carefully nipped and ticked to disguise their boyish frames, talent wasn't something my viciously bitchy co-worker knew how to shop for. Not well, at least.

Oh, she positioned herself as the "Queen of Greeting Cards", based on her brief tenure at Boston's art museum gift shop, and it was enough to get her the cheap gig in the city, which (on the surface, if you squinted hard enough) passed for a somewhat respectable firm, if you overlooked it's inception as the NYC outpost designed to amuse the short handsome rich German playboy who is the second son to a family that crowned the older brother as the sober C.E.O., because they like the nobility that money can by. That, and the strength of the German Mark before Europe's unification process. Unfortunately for her and the rather pedestrian German-American guy (Hi, Harald) who managed the U.S. product line, I knew all about Deutsch Bank's tactics from my ferociously financial brother, who did his apprenticeship on their sweatshop trading floors, no veal pen divisions included. I know, because I visited my brother at the company when he worked there, to see it for myself. A little short on trust with American financiers and infamous Wall Street trade, I suppose.

Ditto with their group manager as it was with his head shopper. He shorted out when I presented him with numbers on purchasing a reconditioned color printer (why not squeeze the locals when you're an overseas firm, right?), asking me to flow the numbers into columns based on his type of accounting software, because he lacked the ability to comprehend numbers if they were presented outside of the casing he was used to. That's a serious kind of dyslexia, so I asked him again via em-mail. He responded dreadfully. Yes, please. For me? Oh. I guess when you have all the German money in the world backing you, you don't need to master reading and writing early on like I did (for publishing in New York, in English). When I told my brother about his peculiar behavior at a family holiday, he huffed derisively and said, "Yeah. That's classic for a typical 'Deutsch Bank' accountant". Indeed it was, because that's exactly where this manager began his career.

I guess that's why I sit here typing to you on a public library's company for pennies a week (for your great success), and why my brother lives in a very large (and rather well-appointed, or so I'm told) home in one of the rich, hilly, horse country towns of New Jersey; because me and my brother do a heck of a lot more in business than shopping and bean-counting (Hello again, Harald. Still living in New Jersey? How's work?) Everything I needed to know in business, I already knew, and do you know what, my dear followers? Because I wasn't a programmed, brain-washed tool like they were (and still are), in the exact same illiterate ways, they never saw me coming. Herr, Fuhrer! 

That, and the fact that the Edward Hopper Foundation (a famous Hudson River Valley painter with his home museum right here in Rockland County, within the town of Nyack's borders), does not sell the licensing rights to most of his work, as was mandated by his will. We are (and will remain) staunchly: by the people, and for the people. Always. Because there's nothing to buy-and-sell here, ami.  Snap! I'll bet you didn't see that one coming at you, did you?

 http://www.edwardhopperhouse.org/

 

A Bug's Life

Getting "buggy" in the country.

Living in the country is different from the city for many reasons, but the biggest change for me are all the animals. Groundhogs, feral cats, and bugs...oh, my! I've had fun with a few Brooklyn boys over their squeamish ways when it comes to bugs. My big, loudmouth cousin from Sheepshead Bay had to call me to remove a silverfish before his shower, for instance. Or, my boyfriend from college who couldn't sleep to the sound of cicadas chirping at night in the basement bedroom of my mothers' New City house, preferring instead the buzz and hum of cars whizzing by on his native Bay Ridge streets to sleep to.

There's more: my Bronx-born mother chafing against the pretty little birds that woke her up on summer mornings, for singing from their nested perch on "her" window air conditioning unit. A well-to-do Park Slope couple from outside the country (of the United States) never really adjusted to communal apartment living, even after I sprung for a few area rugs and a sound machine to cover up the horror of my early morning dog runs. He was a big oaf of a man who loomed behind his tiny and plainly bug-eyed wife, a duo of dysfunctional who belong in some suburban Aussie condo, but not in the city that never sleeps.

Ditto with the wacky lady next door, who was so unnerved by my bedroom air conditioner unit's sporadic summer use (usually at nighttime and after work, too) in my 4th floor walk-up, she banged on it for weeks until she finally left me a weirdly fretful note of frustration. Instead of listening to my reasoning from across the narrow alleyway through our window exchange, she condescendingly offered to buy me some freestanding floor model that's all the rage from wherever the fuck she's from, because I detected an accent not of New York. 

She'd rather "die from the heat" than live with the banal white noise of my bedroom AC, even though the top floor apartment reached in excess of 100°F, and I had to buy it for my snow dog (who would have actually died from the daytime heat), instead of accommodating a rather inane background noise; such was the insane wisdom of the deranged, frazzled-haired Euro lady next door. It was clearly my fault, all of it, everything in the universe, because I'm too poor for her tastes and she's mentally ill.

My mom has gone so far as to request a mausoleum, so that her neurotic remains will never come in contact with bugs. Same turn of the mind as my former building maintenance guy, who freaked out over oven mitts that had fallen between the cracks of his poorly fitted kitchen cabinetry, blaming me instead for these microbiotic horrors left in the wake of my economic eviction from the building; a prolonged process that was supposedly devoted to my non-payment, but was, in reality, yet another city scam about inherited rent stabilization and legally binding leases that are immoral as well as nonsensical, none of which benefited me at any of the times I write about.

And so I've developed to full effect my natural savoir faire about life, inherited through my maternal Norman Abruzzi lines; a shrug of the shoulders delivered much like my grandmother's laidback saying of "Que sera, sera." Whatever will be, will be. Just like this summer's bug migration that I accept as part of my good life here in the valley: first came the big black ants that I tried to deposit on scraps of paper outdoors, one by one, in Buddhist solidarity about the sanctity of all life, and then gave up on from the sheer volume of it. 

Next came the spider who hunted them by setting up residence under the sink in a corner of the kitchen cabinet by the floor and near the old radiator that let them in, then the fruit flies, followed by very small (and tenacious) red ants clustered in the butter drawer of the fridge, feeding on the sweet remnants of fresh salted cream butter that remains there today (before I eat it with a sandwich for my lunch today). I accept it all, as part of this beautiful life. See you soon.

Cloud Factory

 Welcome to the dog days of summer*, without air conditioning.

(Pearl River, New York - July 2015)

 

 

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

 

 

Mushroom Season

Nature takes care, with the help of the mighty ant (and many other things).

Once the humidity reaches a dew point above 75%, mushrooms pop up all around town, which is magical, beautiful, and very natural. 
A beautiful orange and white cap turned brown in a day, then became a feast for an opportunistic colony of ants. An enterprising army of them made a hanging home from a sturdy leaf of grass for their harvest, creating a short commute to their job site, similar to my life here in the Hudson Valley. 

A sticky colony of ants, in a few blades of grass.

I don't particularly like dampness (if I did, I'd live in a rainforest), but the fecundity of this area is necessary to maintain its' astonishing biodiversity. I'll get by, and so will you, with or without air conditioning. Me? I've already weaned myself off of it, so that we can move forward together, by breaking our twin addictions to fossil fuels and petrochecmicals*, a chemical dependency fueled by the corruption of those who are similarly addicted at Big American Companies. 

A second orange and white cap grows by the stone wall on my commute.

White Mushroom Cap in Grass (Pearl River, July 2015).

Amen to you, during the hazy, hot, and humid weather this week. Better days are always ahead for you, my faithful. Our Father wants what's best for you, especially during this exciting Encyclical season: http://www.papalencyclicals.net/.

Flat caps and clover, perfect for bees and clover honey. What a commute!

 

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

 

Hanging by a Thread

"Magic" (a dogwood petal hangs by a thin strand).

Movement in Blue (and White)

This was the morning sky after a day of tornadoes that swept across Dutchess County into Connecticut. You can see the two systems blowing across each other, the one sweeping out the swirling clouds systems that had the potential to funnel, and dispersing it into vapor. Awesome. Pearl River, NY (June 2015)

Little Cemetary

Meet "The Blauvelts"!

We live among the walking and the dead here in the Hudson Valley region, because the first Dutch settlers who bought the island of Manhattan for some wampum many moons ago to create the city of "New Amsterdam", also took the first opportunity they had to buy vast tracts of land upstate. In fact, Native Americans used the wetlands here on Pearl River's hilltop for a well, not just farming. Why would anyone want land that swamps out every year? Because it was easier to irrigate their European crops through flooding, that's why.

And that's exactly what many European settlers did: replicate their vast landowning system overseas to control property through agriculture and land resources. It's what's passed for Rockland County nobility over the years: that same sense of ownership and entitlement from controlling the land that marked the oppressive regimes of the corrupt European monarchies many of our ancestors rebelled against. How revolutionary of them to do so! Sigh....that's the rich white man.

And John P. Post! The British have not yet arrived.

And so it was that on one Monday morning in yoga, a nice German grandma had to let me know in conversation that one of her children is married to one of "The Blauvelt's", because as a first generation American, she's on much less solid ground than I am as a native, and she wanted me to know about her very important family connections. 

I name-dropped some rich German publishing credentials and European towns from my working past that she hadn't known first-hand as a German native, because she followed her sister over here as a teen to our now re-named "New of York", in honor of our country's next wave of wealthy landowners: the Brits.

Here lies a Mary Van W...something Dutch, and a Perry: Dutch and British!

Except for one very big and powerful distinction: I'm the publisher she follows, and I'm in yoga class with her instead of humping the grind that is the tri-state commute, a trial deemed by weaker souls than me to be so bad-ass, many outsiders write t.v. shows and movies about it. 

Enjoy your time here on our land of freedom; a land we fought for dearly and created, as it ever evolves and changes with the times, because that's what I call "The Royal Treatment".

Aha! A "Bogert" name-changer: much easier to trade with the Brits.

Here it sits on the sub-divivded remnants of their large land parcels.

Time, erosion, and neglect have removed many of their names anyway.

Goodbye, Ye Olde Blauvelts! Maybe someday one of their own will take care of this burial site, but not today. I'm sure they're hard at work at one of their very important desk jobs in the city.

Badass Dragonfly

Me and a young dragonfly, on a beautiful Spring day.

Last week I walked out of the library on a beautifully sunny, warmly seasonal day to spot one very active dragonfly flitting about the entrance. I could tell right away that it wasn't a full grown insect by the size of it, but this little guy already had moxie. I watched it fly around it for awhile before I took out my smartphone to snap a few pics, fretting that the automatic door to the library would draw it in and seal its' young fate forever, before life really began. 

Within minutes I had a lot more to worry about, because I inevitably began attracting attention, which happens every single day of my life. Often I can channel those attentions and energies into more constructive actions, but not always. 

First, some older guy passing by wanted to pick it up and move it after I pointed it out. He worried in imitation of me, upping the conversational ante a notch by saying that the youngster would immediately get crushed by a passerby. He then went one "douchebag" move further, placing his socked Birkenstock foot right next to the bug to make it fly away, supposedly making his point about its' safety by its' immobility. It hadn't moved at all in response to him, unlike the fluttery open-wing display the young bug had flashed at me when I got closer to it earlier.

But that's not all, folks. Two pale hipster chicks with matching skinny jeans, face piercings, and large tats wanted to "help" out, too! I warned one of them away by pointing out her big dog jerking about on a small leash, with the well-known fact that dogs like to chase and eat bugs. Amateurs. One of them decided to get a piece of paper from within the building for emergency bug transport, thus opening and closing the very door I was trying to keep shut once again, which I kept repeating futilely to the small crowd. 

I think she thought she was an expert on all things related to bugs by stint of the rather odd and prominently displayed tattoo on her forearm of a lady's head inside a set of spider legs. It resembled her and her friend, who looked almost the same to me, but apparently I was way wrong about that, too! Oh...that's not what I meant by "Animal Behaviorist", out-of-touch hipster. They always kinda suck.

Finally, one of my older retiree friends from yoga saved me from the gathering crowd by simply passing by. It had gotten way out of hand over this one bug, so I just walked away from the situation. 

We chatted as we walked uphill about tai chi, yoga, seasonal storms and flooding, how water always flows downhill, and realtors that take advantage of your relative ignorance by selling you a place on the cheap that floods with each passing storm because you didn't research water tables before buying the house you now own (which is really about the inanity inherent in the human condition), and then finally, I looked at her tote bag printed with Northwestern Native motifs from her cruise to Alaska, because I know about that stuff, too. She looked a bit pale and exhausted as we parted ways at the corner.

And that's called "Mid-afternoon" to me, kids. I have a feeling me and the juvenile dragonfly I left by the library are going to be just fine without a group of well-intentioned helpers. Let's just call it "instinct" for today's lesson about appropriateness.  Enjoy the weather today. It's perfection.

Trinity

An old tree stump is rife with mushroom life,

as a forsythia bush mixes with the trees, roofs and sky,

and "The Great Tree*" opens up to the world with many arms.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C3%A9tis_people_%28Canada%29

( Welcome home, "Mes Gens" )

Early Spring (April 2015)

Wow! It's actually warm this early in the day. Nice.

We've had some significant temperature drops this week: one day it's sunny and warm, the next day it's a frigid return to winter. It can be hard to retain your faith about better days ahead (not that I view weather or seasons as inherently "bad", but it is a useful metaphor for feelings), but on one gloriously early morning last week, I felt more alive than I had in awhile.  

While I walked to the corner store for a cup of coffee, the sun rose to full effect, coloring the trees and buildings a golden shade of pink, as a chorus of lively birds flew around quickly, like a safari scene staged just for me. It felt great! I breathed it all in, that sweetness and magic, as I hope now that my pictures here give you a bit of the feeling that I have. It's my natural joie de vive and it endures, just like my faith. Have fun today!

Here comes the sun.

Absolutely gorgeous light today.

Look at all these crisscross lines in the sky!

A gentle subtle pink turns to light blue and then some.

What a sky today! Glad I ran out of coffee so I can see this.

A dividing line in the sky.

The dictionary definition of "chiaroscuro" on a humble electrical pole.

A riot of colors shot through the sky.

Trees lining up to spectacular effect.

A big old yellow house on the hill meets the morning sky.

Do you see what I see?

A stand of trees against the sky.

Silhouette of trees against morning light.

Three crows perched on a tree.

Two clouds side by side, gliding through the sky.