Beanie, baby

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

I didn't blame my friends for all of their problems, because life isn't like that. Humans are social animals, and as such, we need a family group to survive those first fragile years, unlike other mammals that need to run within minutes of their birth. Our relative co-dependence compared to other animals is the price we pay for our big brains, which are given biological precedence in early development, hence the international symbol for "cute" as it is decoded within babies: overly large head, wide eyes, pert lil' features, and an adorable clumsiness. We've simply been bred to stick together in need, and it isn't wrong for us to do so.

But, my friend Dave's parents were way beyond anything I'd seen with my hardcore Brooklyn kids from "around the way". The first time me and Karen went to see him off-campus (we had, of course, early run-ins with the T.A.'s living in our respective dorms for freshman and sophomore year as required on-campus living, because we were seen by the state as being too young to maintain a household by law as teenagers, before we could escape to a funky old house off-campus), he offered to throw up a sheet to divide his off-campus room, and charge us rent for sleeping on his floor. Wow...touched by that. Thanks, dude.

To show our gratitude, we dutifully inspected his room for closet space and other living area features, which he was too slow to respond to. O...M...G....this kid has brand-new clothes with the price tags still on them hanging in his friggin' closet for his exclusive use! But...but...what the fuck? We were baffled, because Dave worked suck-ass summer jobs like the rest of us, except his jobs were upstate in Schenectady, where the pay is much lower than the rest of the state. How, muthafucka?! "Oh, that's nothing!" Dave went underneath his bed and pulled out plastic containers full of new underwear (still bright white and sealed in the packages, yo!), different types of socks, anything he could possibly need, like, bought for him ahead of time and everything.

Who has parents who even do that?! We were stunned. He felt kind of bad for his parents shopping habit strewn about his room so obviously, so he offered to give us a few of his shirts. "Go ahead! Take one! I've never worn them before!" Yeah, we could tell, but, like, fuck, dude...don't you get it? Yeah, he did. He knew they liked shopping more than caring for him, and that's why he was fucked. I mean, what kind of monster tricks you out at the mall in the summertime, so you can fail out of school in the fall?! Sick working-class people with GED's do that. Not really disciplined folks looking to get by and get better. You know? As bad as we felt about our write-ups, we were somewhat grateful for our educated parents from the city at that point, because at least they didn't buy backwards into life. This shit was so weird.

Who buys a 21 year-old guy living in a house with his friends "tidy whitey" underwear?! Is he too stupid to do it himself? WTF?! I couldn't remember the last time my mom actually bought me clothing, and I was still only 18 as a sophomore. You had to work at a clothing store to get new clothes with your employee discount that came out of your paycheck, right? Karen agreed with me, because she was also raised by wolves, so we shrugged noncommittally to Dave's half-ass offer of draining a couple of working teenage women whatever money we had left (deducting school supplies and food, naturally) from our summertime paychecks. Uh, thanks for nothing. Asshole.

We joked about that for awhile, and then we moved on. From the strangely arrogant demeanor of Dave and his wanna-be WASP sister, I thought they came from money, but the first time I ever saw Dave's parent's house, I couldn't hide my shock. What the....where's your...? This is it?! You grew up here?! It was baffling; a rather small, nondescript, squat one-level towards the back of a generically suburban block. Ohhh, shit, dude. It was then that I fully realized how "out of it" they were. Dave made it seem like his father spent like a surgeon, when in reality, "The Captain" is a big Polack
with power plant union money married to his high school sweetheart, a former head cheerleader at the local high school. Ahh....now, I understood it.

It was pure bullshit bravado by the undereducated, and it didn't end there. They had packed the basement of their little house with their dead relatives tacky furniture, also stowing a second refrigerator and freezer next to shelves filled with those huge vats of club-bought mayonnaise, like they were expecting the end of the world any day. They thought it was funny for me and Dave to "go shopping" downstairs in their rat-packed basement when we lived in Brooklyn, but I was never really sure why. How the fuck are we gonna carry this around in the city?! Why would anyone need this much stuff?

And that was far from the end of their madness. They took us along on a "shopping trip" to Amish Country, a dead place on the map for tourists where we wandered around some outdoor mall looking at the exact same stores as the ones in upstate New York. Why are we even here? We didn't really need anything, and we were on a serious budget besides. What the fuck is this even for? They paid for our motel room so they could pack it with more of their stuff, filling their big car with so much shit, that they laughed at us as they packed crap under our arms and feet in the backseat. Ginger had also picked up a raging "collecting" hobby on the side that excluded her husband, hoarding these small toy animals that came with fast food purchases.

She forced his dad to stop at every fast food joint we came across on the road, and when we said we weren't hungry, she shrugged it off: "Just throw it out. I don't care about the food." And that's exactly what we did. We made U-turns in the parking lots of these fast food places across America to dump perfectly good food into trashcans designed to curb litter, not feed addictions, but it made Dave's straits a lot easier for me to understand. I didn't exactly come from a totally healthy background, either. How they ever expected "college" from a life like this was yet another symptom in their family's downfall, comprised of one horrible decision after another.

Just when we thought his parents had gorged themselves completely, we were wrong. His mom shouted out "Stop!" from the passenger seat of their comfortable retiree car, so she could pick up a couple of those wooden cut-out reindeer for her front lawn. For Christmas. In the summertime. What a great vacation idea for us! His dad had finally had enough. "Where are we gonna put them? Come on!" She wasn't deterred at all. "We could strap them to the roof, maybe?" Me and Dave laughed, because we'd bought nothing. Not one damn thing, and we came home drained with less than nothing. We felt worse than before the trip by their unchecked excessiveness, plus all of the drinking and eating in bad strip mall restaurants that we were forced to go to with them, on their dime. We had less than zero.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsive_buying_disorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retail_therapy

Reach Out, Touch Faith

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

Because I write so often about faith, to the point of its inclusion in this sites' subtitle, I've attracted a dedicated group of disordered onlookers who like to pretend (as an aggressive strategy) that "holy" means "magic healing pod", even though I've written that this clearly is not the case: http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/09/cocoon.html. It doesn't stop certain types of addicts from pursuing a malignant agenda with me anyway, because like cancer, addictive disorders afflict the good, the bad, the ugly, and the indifferent. If you're an asshole as a drunk, you're still a dick, just someone with a really great excuse.

We even had a host of handy little equations for easy discernment at our parties, broken down as such: Instant Asshole = Just Add Alcohol. Simple, right? You'd be amazed by the amount of jerks we outed through basic human responses like "looking", coupled with an amazing deductive process called "observation". My best friend and I went to school readily equipped with a pocketful of quickly digestible phrases that we'd distribute around our gatherings to the benefit of our friends in attendance, a set of hard-working New York natives we wanted to protect, so we could all have a relaxing night of fun, with great tunes, great food, and great drinks to ease our stress.

Of course, our good times became a target, too, as we learned that evil people with learning impairments need a constant stream of cute "tips" and repetitive tidbits for understanding the human condition, seeing as psychotics are dependent on healthy people to provide guidance and balance for them, though often without the acknowledgment of such, because that would be open and transparent, and if you're a parent who huffs children like they're your personal medicine cabinet, then you already get my drift, without the overly subtle cues (wink, wink). Our happiness and peace of mind were things some of our families went to great lengths to sabotage, especially if your children work all those difficult and demanding jobs that pay for your medical benefits. Get it?

In the interest of their self-interest, the sickest people in our codependent families became awkwardly weird spies, using a bevy of strangely paranoid behaviors and robotic movements to "glean" what they could have learned much easier for the asking, but that would signal their dependence upon us, and if you're a self-described asshole, then that just won't do. We became adept at feeling out other people's agendas in record speeds, so we could move on to the real jobs we had that are indeed challenging, let alone become primary to someone with several serious brain disorders.

It didn't stop suckers from trying to leech off of us anyway, but it did make it a much more difficult gauntlet to run, like playing a game they could never win, hence the justification for all that supposed frustration leading up to our abuse, in an insanely childish cycle of petulance and lashing out that marks the continually untreated psychotic. It gave our parents the ammo they needed to build up secret grudges that only they knew about, with oddly described rituals about our weather here that "they" always get "wrong", in these obliquely vague references to weather and meteorology that did not mark an understanding of their advanced degrees in science, dearly paid for by our working class grandparents and the city of New York. For what, actually? This same ritualistic back-and-forth?

Compulsions became hunting forays we'd lay traps for, often without even realizing it, adept as we were at self-defense. Most of my friends and all of my siblings (and their kids) have belt ranking in martial arts, as a necessary reflection of the daily trappings we could undo, if we felt like exposing someone again....and then again, and....OK! Once more loudly!! It became this retarded card trick of pissing us off so we'd leave them alone in their nervous fretting, so they could turn to comfortingly repetitive behaviors that soothe aggravated souls. It wasn't our problem, and yet somehow it still was (especially in our absences, when we were at our most productive = stage a scene to get attention, and/or conduct a total communication block-out including any and all modern devices), and we knew it was wrong.

Here at this public library (and laundromat, or the local grocery store, in particular drug stores dispensing legal addictions in handy pill form), I reenact these old classmate routines with a mature ennui that signifies my acceptance of your disorder...again. Much like immediate family, they learn to either get with the program or leave, and so I type to you blessedly free of a twitchy emaciated addict with bad breath sitting next to me, behaving as if I'm their fix du jour, because I'm not. They always snap to, because you really have to, one way or another. Sometimes it's either "do or die", as it's purposefully set up by a drama queen with nothing to lose but their unhealthy mindset (real medicine...oh, the horror!), given the moral problems most stubborn psychos pretend to have with "authority", which really means obeying normal laws, like any other citizen complies with, like I do.

Currently, the local crazies like to get as close to me as possible without touching me, like when I'm sitting in a chair at a public computer with Internet access (because that would be overtly actionable by law, in front of lots of cameras in place), so they take turns grazing the back of my neck with their falsely hurried, brushed-by breezes (because, you know, at a small town library, that's the right pace for a part-time government job...uh, no), or they leave notes for each other in garbage pails placed strategically around the room, or they lurk near me pretending to browse (that's an easy trick to pull off, though), or there's just that one out of place mouse pad that needs straightening up right next to my workstation, so they can get an up-close look at my progress onscreen. Like my other vanquished library foe "Michelle the Hat" (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/10/michelle-hat.html), I always seem to win these ho-hum "reindeer games" that some of my public insists on projecting through me, as a magnet for their madness.

You should put on your thinking caps, though, because time is running out! "Michelle the Hat" got so far as barely fingering the intentionally fringed sleeve edge to one of my summertime tops a few years ago (and she had to read my work closely to do that little, by muttering my phrase back to me as a justification, in a hastily delivered mutter "perfect in its imperfection" which I previously published as a line, so I knew she was reading me every day...AHA!), and that had to be done in haste before anyone else caught on to it, like the subversively secretive, evil, ugly, little dyke that she really is, because this here mama knows all the ploys you play daily. Unless you're my man, I ain't gonna let you touch me (and no, I don't have "issues" with normal human touch. Nice try, though, Elvis!), so if you aren't truly ailing, you most definitely won't be healed with some casual proximity to me, because I'm not your personal Jesus statue to play with. Bitch.

Depeche Mode – Personal Jesus Lyrics

Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who's there

Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer

Take second best
Put me to the test
Things on your chest
You need to confess
I will deliver
You know i'm a forgiver

Reach out and touch faith
Reach out and touch faith

Your own personal Jesus...
Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer

I will deliver
You know I'm a forgiver

Reach out and touch faith
Your own personal Jesus
Reach out and touch faith

Songwriters: GORE, MARTIN LEE

Personal Jesus lyrics © EMI Music Publishing