Dune

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

Part of the allure of the west for me was that I had never seen it before. It was true: the very first time I "saw" Colorado was the night we drove up to a hotel in Boulder, and it was the dark of a rather recently settled west, which meant there were almost no lights. I couldn't see a thing. I asked Dave once or twice while we were on the highway if we would be able to see the mountains at all, even in the dark, and he laughed at me, saying that the mountains were facing his direction and not my side of the van. Oh. The next morning gave me no better clues about the landscape, because a blizzard had hit the area overnight, blanketing everything in a deep white snow that sparkled painfully in the bright desert sun. "Welcome to Colorado!" He laughed at me as we dug out the old gray van (a.k.a."The Rat") from the light powdery snow. 

Acute altitude sickness left me light-headed, queasy, and then actively vomiting. He was better with that because it mimicked his hard drinking ways, and he flattered himself into thinking that it gave me a taste of the morning sickness from pregnancy that would surely come to us one day as "marrieds". It allowed him to briefly feel like he had the upper hand over me, because his troubles were far too serious for anyone to handle outside of expert medical care, and they had failed at that, too. I knew that if he was going to stick it through, a big move like this would either shake him loose from me or give him the ballast he needed to endure serious married life with a woman like me. 

It was, in fact, exactly what I told my friends and family back home. Suffice to say, Dave was less ripe for adventure than me. Incurable brain disorders will do that to a person. Still, he was sailing on the illusion of greatness, and this was a performance opportunity for him. "Yeah", he explained to me as we swiped snow from the van, "you'll feel sick for about a day or two, but once you acclimate, it'll go away." Nowadays, I could've looked that up on the Internet in 3.5 seconds, but back then he felt that it gave him the leverage he needed to lead like a man, because he'd visited his older sister on their parents dime when she lived out there on a gated golf course community. Great. Along with the factoid about us being a mile high, thus ended Dave's supreme intellectual reign about all things western. Really, that was it.

After Dave went home, I began dating a man who was much more independent (like me), because he was estranged from his child-abusing parents by necessity. It wasn't great, but at least we could get up-and-go early in the morning, without the 12 p.m. wake-up call and grueling hours of coffee and cigarettes that Dave's manic-depression needed for him to remain sitting upright. I didn't have to sit around waiting and babysitting a man-child who would never really be fully functioning without massive support from his too tight crew of incestuous locals who also never broke away from home to explore the world. Vacation badly at a Floridian tourist trap or consistently hit an "all-you-can-eat" cruise ship buffet, yes. Real travel? No. Can't do it.

But Kent could, so we did. After so many years trapped inside a series of dark smoky rooms at night with a bunch of uneducated drunks, I felt free to roam. He was a burly sort of permanent bachelor used to being on his own, and after the cloying co-dependence of David, I found his carefree attitude refreshing. At least I was on my own again. No more playing nursemaid to a sick man. It seemed like I got away from a really bad situation cleanly, in a powerful "no harm, no foul" play that had set me completely free of a family that had never really warmed up to me. In addition to my mobility, Kent also had a great appetite for food, unlike the pale hard-drinking chain-smoker I'd just left.

We ate our way through Denver with expensive dinner dates that left me two sizes bigger than normal, but given what I'd been through with a depressed angry alcoholic, I figured I could lose the weight later, in exchange for my name and my life back. Hard as it was at the time (Denver was suffering through a skinny tan fad brought on by Californian relocatees in the millions), I knew I could bounce back from it, and slowly I did. I had my own feelings to contend with, and during a visit from my mother, she was surprised at the strength of my returning appetite. I'd spent years eating poorly or not at all with Dave, given his weird schedule of habits, and it had left me wanting. I was shocked and afraid at the ferocity of my returning hunger that seemed to never dull, and the somnolence that constantly weighed down my limbs.

The height of the mountains didn't help, either, so even though Kent and I were free to roam around and travel, I often felt too tired to do so, in sharp contrast to the 10-mile hikes I could walk in the mountains back home, even when I was loaded down with a pack. Being considered "fat" and "tired" was new to me, though my status as an outcast for this divorce was not. There was always something about me that pushed the scared conformists away, saggy as they were with their own fears. But gradually my energy returned, and with it, new life. I began ditching the car so I could walk to work instead, and we had a new dog that needed as much walking as we could stand. We hit the mountains, avoiding the obvious tourist spots for the more down-to-earth open spaces that are free to the public. 

I could feel my blood moving again, and I knew I was on the way to recovering from this most recent ordeal. Still, some trips from that time period bring it all back to me, like the sluggishness that felt like I was wading through thick muddy water during our trip to the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado. As I walked through a desert that looks much smaller than it feels after you're in it, I felt a weight sucking me down, trying to pull me in, chaining me to the sand, forcing me to take slow heavy steps, and it was a good thing, too. The desert opens up like a surreal pop-up book after that first small hill, rapidly expanding into a large full-blown desert, and that's no place for a New York girl like me to break down. I come from the water. I come from a solid place I was destined to return. I wanted to make it back home.

Famine (an Gorta Mór)

The scene at Skibbereen, west Cork, in 1847. 
From a series of illustrations by Cork artist James Mahony (1810-1879), commissioned by Illustrated London News 1847.

After my Scandinavian friend via Labrador from way back when moved out a few years back (though his stuff remained around the property for years afterward, gypsy that he is), Steve was rather quickly replaced by a Haitian-American family as new tenants. The father was gregarious and friendly to me when he felt like it, and the mother to their young son never spoke to me at all, which is rather typical for the seriously sick. The man would appear at odd times of the day and night, and I soon became accustomed to the habits of a household struggling with manic depression made worse by their recent move.

Believe it or not, they fit in with the rest of the household far better than I did at the time, better tuned in as they were to the various traumas at play throughout the big old house and its surrounding property. Like some mysterious theater for the insane, cars and trucks appeared and disappeared, sometimes for sale at the garage next door, to be back in use the very next day. What were their reasons for so many back-and-forth decisions? I never knew, as the resident healthy elder among a group of disordered individuals adrift in their diseases, cut off from forming families like the rest of us do out in the real world.

"Fritz" was charming, talkative (when he did appear), and spotty in all of his endeavors. At times, he would be cheerfully waiting with his adorable little boy outdoors for the short bus that took him to nursery school for half a day, as is fitting for a toddler still growing. Fritz would manage some tasks fast and efficiently, while he struggled to adapt to other basic day-to-day schedules on a regular basis. I say "Fritz" because I have also become used to a dizzying array of names over the years, some real and some ridiculously false, and my man from up north had the former thing going on with him.

First, he gave his son a name so weird and difficult to pronounce that I knew it was some sort of joke only he knew about. OK....whatever. I'd been told that people on the run often assume names to prevent the long arm of the law from reaching them, and after awhile, his new family seemed to fit that bill. The father said he was a Haitian-Canadian-American immigrant, with another family living in Montreal that he never saw, which was made odder because unlike his young wife, he was the one at home with his boy. The mom left early in the morning every day, to be replaced by a series of gradually more inept nannies, culminating in a tall angry woman who became abusive after their boy lingered on the porch to get a closer look at my Halloween pumpkin that lit up at night, made less scary in daylight but still interesting to him, nonetheless.

As I made coffee and got ready for the day, I could see them on the porch from the light of the tall windows; the boy was with a woman unknown to me. We knew he was trying to work out babysitters with his mother's assistance because the landlord told us. I saw the babysitter grab his hand, tugging him towards the front door and chastising him more harshly than he deserved, growing more aggressive with each tug on his little hand. I heard him rebel against it by yelling out loud (as I would have, too, because he wasn't doing anything wrong), so that I instantly stopped in the doorway between the kitchen and the large living room, clearly visible to them both through the big windows facing the porch. After that, the father was in charge of the boy, and he and I struck up an uneven acquaintance based on his daytime errands around the house. He told me that emigrating was easy for someone like him, expressing disdain for anyone who did it poorly.

I told him that were all immigrants here once, and that our histories didn't speak of ease and luxury, but rather of harshness and long voyages. I knew he wasn't interested in me as a person, because he never really asked me any questions about myself, but as one of the few people around the house who dared to openly speak with me outdoors, I was content to listen while observing his brilliant little boy. The boy, like me, was utterly unlike the other shut-ins living in the place. He seemed alive, curious, and energetic, picking up objects for a closer look and naming them aloud, when he did emerge from the house with his father on nicer days: "Car! Truck! Cloud! Sky!" He'd point out all the life moving around him happily to his father, and they seemed like good friends. He clearly cared for his son very much, and that's something I always approve of, under any type of conditions.

Their residency upstairs wasn't an easy one, unlike Fritz's glib pronouncements about relocating as told to me. At first, me and my closest neighbor Mike heard loud banging sounds and a furious back-and-forth pacing upstairs every night that wasn't right, and we knew it. The landlord largely ignored our inquiries, getting involved only when the nighttime banging became so glaringly obvious, that he told them to buy area rugs to muffle the sound, like I've done in the past to assuage the complaints of people living beneath me (per NYS law). Fritz didn't like spending the money to do it. He told me the landlord didn't reimburse him for his own rugs! I added in my conversation with the owner that active toddlers (like large dogs named TeddyBear;) need to be taken outdoors to play because of their natural energy levels, but just like the poor girl living in the attic space with her parents, I never saw the two children in residence playing at the playground right here in town, or at any of the library events for kids, even though I'd left information about our community center for him to use.

After awhile, even the father was forced to admit to me that he was hanging in there, but the going was rough. Uh, yeah! Yes, America is hard. Freedom is hard, and our lives often reflect the battles we have daily to preserve our way of life here. He finally admitted to me that if he had a choice between here or Canada, he'd probably have chosen Canada, because it's so much easier. Of course it is! French Canada is great, as long as you can bear up under a wintertime so severe, you'd be begging for a Haitian beach after it, poor as that nation historically has been. And for a Haitian man like him, I imagine driving a cab is a breeze when the native tongue is French, too, and therein lies the problem with a largely white Quebecois entrenched in their separatist ways: you can drive them around to earn a living for your family, as long as you snap to their ways, like a slavish devotion to a French culture that exists overseas in Europe. Know what I mean?

There's a steep price to pay for socialized healthcare, in a taxed system that presumes everyone on the planet (which is Quebec, where else?) is healthy and unhealthy in the exact same measure, which is about as far from life as you can get. College is free! Isn't that great? Sure! Just ask a hippie guy named Jean-Paul. I met him on a trip to McGill back in my college days. He preferred to matriculate in school after school after school, as a way of ignoring real life. His first degree was in history (like my ex-boyfriend) and then he was going to Nova Scotia for an art degree, as a way of deferring adult decisions like: who am I, and who do I want to be when I grow up? It was absurd.

And their "free" clinics are great, as long as you don't die on their waiting list for that also "free" gall bladder removal subject to approval by a board of people selected to make those decisions without consulting a Doctor of Medicine. That's what you get there. I'm not saying I dislike the province of Quebec, I'm just saying that resistance is futile. Back in the 90s, Montreal still had a large group of people who wanted to break away from the rest of Canada, like the state of Texas or the ancient city-states of Rome, and we all know where confederacies lead: nowhere good for the rest of the emigres.

Like the rest of the household of people who habitually need the healthcare we have to give them, he gradually stopped "bumping" into me outside, finding himself in the rough ride of democracy like every single one of our ancestors have felt keenly. I knew he realized the strength behind our life imperiled here as it sometimes is, and the true grit it takes to make a "go" of it in a free society, which is why people often fall back on the care and decisions of others. As their family fell apart upstairs, I knew instantly knew what was happening to him; he couldn't make it here.

He told me as much on the last Fourth of July, running into me on the porch as he drank next door on the first floor, waiting for me to show up for the fireworks, like we had discussed a week before. He seemed put out that I was just appearing outside at nightfall, as I explained to him that the Mets game was on. I'm from Queens, homeboy? I'm a native, bro! He never really knew my lineage, nor did he ask me, preferring instead to wander down the hill with a beer bottle in his hand, letting his boy run freely down the hill ahead of us. Uh....I was nervous at first, but Eli knew how far to go and when to turn back towards us.

We watched the small town fireworks from the crowded sidewalk, and he seemed overwhelmed at the size of it, like people had just sprung up from the pavement beneath his feet as we walked downhill. He was disoriented by this show of support in such numbers, like it wasn't what he expected, and I could tell as he looked around, that he was trying to form an impression that was not forthcoming. Eli threw grass and pebbles around to attract his father's notice again, which he did. People turned to our little trio to smile, and I could see that he saw a diversity reflected back at him that was new to him. Welcome to "The Land of the Free", homeboy! We made our way back up the steep hill, with his young son walking in front of us.

As we chatted out on the lawn, Eli thought it fun to play with the grass while we spoke, so I joined in the fun, tossing handfuls of the fragrant grass softly into his face to watch him giggle. I laughed, too. It was a happily gentle night for us, and the weather was perfect. We talked about the town below, and the largely Irish-American crowd who lives and thrives there. Rather than piquing his interest in our town, like a real newcomer, he cut me off with a tale told of dumb Africans driven onto ships past by evil slavers sporting mirrors with which to fool those poor unfortunates with. Huh. He's never met my ferocious African-American friends from around the way. They'd know their reflections from bathing and scrubbing their wash in the water, dude, like every other human being on the planet before them.

Sensing a game was afoot, I cut him off in turn, with my own sad tale of woe about our beleaguered Irish past, like the deliberate impoverishment of Ireland by England, for their defiance of empire-building ways. He seemed taken aback by that, and also quieted by it. Oh, he hadn't heard of that....he trailed off like a tragic Shakespearean character, humbly wishing his apologies to me for such a past. He just didn't know...oh! You didn't know that soldiers watched families die by the side of the road from hunger like the Soviets had, or perhaps China during their "people's revolution"? Well, excuse me, monsieur. You're talking to the daughter of wars survived, droughts tolerated, and crops deliberately destroyed. Ain't life grand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29 

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921 

Garbage Picker

I often find handy little critter signs around my environment that tell me you are a loud, abusive, crazy, chain-smoking drunk because I can mysteriously "read into" obvious cues like a stubbed-out cigarette butt (I don't smoke and when I did, it wasn't the "Ghetto Menthol" brand now made with even more harmful fiberglass, yo!) near the container made for plastic recyclables, because your broke ass is looking for bottle deposits to cash in. See, if you were legal, you could get a real job. In this case, I frightened away the crazy Hispanic female flipping the lid right next to my door in broad daylight by simply opening my door to let her know that I keep bottle deposits indoors to return myself because I understand that she's a sick illegal fuck haunting my 'hood. She chose to play the ever-handy "no habla ingles" routine followed by a wavering little smile delivered with the important casual shrug that lets me know she feels superior to me as a welfare queen picking through my fucking garbage. I don't see her around anymore. Huh.

Much like Donald Trumps' wildly trumpeted assertions that capture this country's imaginations daily, New Yorkers learned a lonnng fucking time ago that if we want any of our real cultural interests, influences, and/or lifestyles accurately represented, we need to speak up. LOUDLY. That includes bad minstrel acts with broadly comedic bits included for the crowd living in the provinces: there's no time for subtlety when your cabbie speaks Urdu on his Bluetooth all day long to his family back home, with the backseat t.v. blaring away. "Turn right! NOW!" Yes. You do this now. In addition to a daily influx of every single language currently spoken on planet Earth (plus a few phased out that only our excellent scholars still know), we learned how to communicate with "other" perfectly well, with or without our elegantly beautiful and highly educated Shakespearean flourishes added in expertly spoken "High English"...because you don't understand it.

We even adapt our native language to your foreign-import cab business, is what I'm telling you today, because we understand concepts like "world" and "trade" and "capital" and "empire" like it's written on the backs of our hands, because it is. It's in our very DNA. Suffice to say, grunts newly arrived to our mostly peaceful shores signal our unique status back to us by aggressively shouting thickly-accented words like "money" at us rudely and repeatedly, usually accompanied by a greedy, grasping, grabbing hand gesture of "give now" that are somewhat lost on our more delicate sensibilities, which is also why we deliver curse words in regional accents so very well, like I do. You evil fuck! You can't give everyone you meet a cultural lesson with each and every transaction, though Lord knows we try.  
We really do. 

That's why Chinatown has signs in Mandarin and Cantonese, and Spanish Harlem is bilingual with ESL classes for your Hispanic son ("Spanish" in NYC, get it?), plus restaurant signs in Koreatown are....? Right! Crafted with signs designed by us in both Korean AND English, because we do notice that you are not quite like us, and that's OK. Not in North Korea, of course, where you come from, but here in America, you can be free to be you and me here, and no, this is not some advertisement made just for t.v., like the trashy shows you pretend are representative of us and our genuine, caring communities. It's called the "House of Representatives" in our government. Scary, isn't it?

So, when I tried in English and Espanol to tell the disordered people around me and my environs that recycling is the law, the natural response in "evil" and "crazy" is to openly pick through my trash right in front of me, or pretend not to understand "Ingles" on this particular day, like a bad actress from an overly exaggerated show on an equally lame Spanish soap opera, because that's abnormal to do in any country, using any human language. I know, because I also wrote about other like-minded Hispanics who live right next to their trash and love it (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/08/hecho-en-mexico.html). They love it so much, they make "art" from their garbage for money!

But, we don't do that here, so adapt, you dumb-ass. Pick up your fucking trash, get a real job, or go home. You can do any one of those things here, because freedom really does mean "free", and not some perverted totalitarian version that you and your fucked up family pretend that it means, in your state-mandated history books. I understand that drones, minions, and slaves want someone to whip them in their dysfunction until they cringingly behave, like some horribly abusive slob in a weird S&M "scenario" that's been scripted with gay costumes and cues and special words and...wait, where the fuck are we?!

You're on my land, ass. You're living in New York and the Americas. Get with it, or get the fuck out. Simple, n'est-ce pas? If you like garbage so much that you want to live near a mountain of it, Paraguay has just what you need (http://www.landfillharmonicmovie.com/), and I am most definitely not some rich white businessman writing that to you today. It's all me, babies. This is all me and my values, plus all of yours, too, because in this Warrior of Nations, we fight for what we want, and that includes the right to recycle our own trash without funding your illegal move here and back from wherever the fuck you came from. We are a nation of immigrants. We know the routine. Trust me. We know every move you make. Twice!

As you can see in this case, a hood rat who managed to secure a very important government job picking up recycling (with a finely-paid full benefits package), decided it was okay to illegally hit me up around Christmas with a card meant to shake me down for extra "dinero". I sent him a very sincere holiday card back to him, taped to the inside of the paper receptacle where I found his card (mine has to be taped inside because people steal shit around here) thanking him for his service to the community and I meant it, because I do not hand out my favor lightly. This week, I decided to give him a beautiful travel brochure from a tour service that my family has used with great results, and some beautiful bookmarks from a woman's museum in our nations capital, to see if he was truly interested in "Americano". No, senorita. Huh. My mom loved the pretty bookmarks so much, she put them up on her well as part of a display (they are printed excellently as high-end color reproductions, which is a mark of quality to a refined mind, but I digress), and my father's family has visited many of the tours presented by our friends in Montana who book eco-friendly, one-of-a-kind tours all around the world (including Hispanica and its outlying areas), but they were obviously not good enough for Senor Correando, or "Eduardo the Recycle Guy", as he familiarly addressed himself to me in his Xmas card. I guess our real national treasures like beautiful bear cubs in Yellowstone Park, and our world-famous female artists (myself included) are simply not good enough for this superior recycler. Clearly that must be the case, because he carelessly flipped over the lid I prepared just for him, and left it out in the rain, making it soggy and no longer useful. Here's a handy tip for you: I AM NOT YOUR PERSONAL ATM.

"Buenos dias, Eduardo!"

http://www.dol.gov/general/topic/wages/wagestips