Banned!

It's probably no secret to you, my steadfast readers, that I face difficulties wherever I go, and that I consider it a frequent and unfortunate part of my life. I was "banned" from the local library recently for my astute and well-targeted observations about their deliberate misuse of the space and intentional misallocations of public funds (as well as our public trust), but more on that later.

Suffice to say, it is a matter requiring deeper investigating, and happily, my network is solid enough to overcome most of the societal obstacles we encounter, either as individuals or together as a group. Since I still consider myself rather new to the "Fame Game", I lacked the publicity-driven foresight to have a photo op with our visiting "men in blue", though I did express to them my relative delight about being in similar circumstances to another famous female New Yorker, albeit without the bleary-eyed mug shots, telltale orange jumpsuit, occasional acting career, and several raging brain disorders openly manifested. Maybe next time.

I have something far greater, so much so that it can be see as either extremely threatening or benevolently fortuitous, and it pays to know the difference betwen the two. I have real power, and I have all of you. That's the strength of my position, because with it, we can move mountains. Within a day, I bought a Wi-Fi enabled tablet with a keyboard for $65 at my grocery store, with my good neighbor's permission to piggyback off his Internet access, so I can now write to you from home. It speaks of my dedication to you, and that the opposition is afraid of us. Good! We can't lose, because....guess what? We've already won.

Free the Internet

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

In typical twist of fate, today is the anniversary of Frederick Douglass' birthday. It made sense to me when I explored the graphic on Google's search engine, because I created the title for today's piece last week, in another bit of fortuitous timing that marks vocational life. It's the type of head-space that has no quirky coincidences for us, only excellence. We live our lives deeply through intelligent design, the harmony that thrums through the universe or, in the words of the now-immortal Carl Sagan, “... the nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.” 

We are all made of the same stuff, so it makes sense to me that we would align ourselves accordingly, in harmony and perfect agreement. Mr. Sagan also noted the necessity of variation among life as essential to our shared successes: “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos 

Did we not at times share living spaces with humans so vastly different in perspective that we fought our most heart-wrenching, bloodiest war over it, so much do we believe that all men are born free as a manifestation of G-d's will that His children live together well? In fact, He tells us that if you do not fight hard enough for the lives of your women and children, then it is also your fate to accept gladly your rightful enslavement at the hands of your victors, because you have not properly defended what is yours by rights, and that is also what I ask of you today: to give more, because it's not enough. 

Yesterday I was talking to my father, a man of another generation who struggles with change before he converts to the newest technology and who was, at the onset of my career, a staunch anti-technologist made more so by his avid desire to preserve what he felt was his precious toehold over me in my work as an apprentice desktop publisher, by refusing to participate in this "New World". I could understand it, even as I worked to make the change from the hand-made to the digital easier for everyone around me, as it was not available to me, because I hadn't initially signed on for computer science, but here we are, and yesterday he (finally!) agreed with me that the Internet is the greatest advance in worldwide communications that we have ever seen, because he finally adopted the very technology I cut my teeth on as a young leader in business. Only after finally giving in to my greater expertise did he see how all the pieces fit. Aren't they beautiful?

What became his avid denial about my greater gifts became his grateful acceptance in old age, which is none too soon. Pride goeth before the fall*, and as someone who was tasked with excelling in business while learning impaired, he often made do with his challenges while he struggled to reconcile himself with the worlds I trafficked in, varied universes unto themselves that he doesn't always understand, but that's my job to bear up under. I want you to join us as an "early adapter" to a movement that's actually quite old, and free the Internet, just like you did with t.v. networks. As the astonishingly high price tag behind our superior technology initially frightened off the non-artistic layperson (as it rightfully should), then so has this initial phase of tool usage passed into worldwide acceptance. 

We will always have cheaper machines to do small tasks for minor chores done by smaller people than you and I (as is appropriate with any truly sophisticated social hierarchy), but for those of you who want to soar with us in the skies, then come along for the ride. Make the Internet free for all people, regardless of price. That's what Frederick Douglass deserves. A place where freedom reigns.

http://everyoneon.org/

“ If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men. ”

* http://biblehub.com/proverbs/16-18.htm

 

Welfare Burger

True punk-rock spirit, as evidenced back in the day. Keep on it, man.

It's hard for our brothers and sisters around the world to tap into our common consciousness, beset as they are in this world by the woes cast upon them through continued war, famine, and injustice. That's why it's so important for us to speak up whenever we encounter wrong, difficult as they may be to do at times, because we often traverse the worst adversities when we are at our loneliest low points in life, but just like that old Christian poem "Footsteps"*, it just seems that way from the outside looking in. It is then when you are carried by The Lord Our G-d, as His Most Faithfully Beleaguered in Faith. As so often happens in my life, outsiders see one reality when in truth, it's the exact opposite of what they presume it to be, and that very deception is what leads them down the wrong path.

I meat a bleary-eyed Ecuadorean the other day on the street while he was waiting for the bus. I'd noticed him from the other side of the street before, because he stared at me like I was levitating across the sidewalk in front of his apartment building, instead of me hatted up and running an errand, sans makeup. In fact, when we crossed paths, I explained to him that I spend zero dollars ($0) on my appearance. But, but...he sputtered, swaying a little on his heels, I'm so pretty! Now that you've gotten to know me better, that sounds funny, right? Like, asking Jesus when he got his last pedicure while he walks around poorly shod in a pair of old worn sandals, but I was charmed by my new friend.

After all, that's what he was raised to believe in. Pretty girl = easy street, just add (+) one man. Done deal! Of course, that's an absurd way to think, because I'm not a prostitute for hire based solely on my looks (not that I mind beauty as a visual artist because it's part of my world) but in many American cultures, beauty is mythologized to such an extent (especially if you're a drunk, divorced, red-eyed Central American grandpa waiting on a cold Northern sidewalk for a public bus that's on slow rollin' country time), that talking to someone like me seems like, how can this be true ?! Oh, it be, brother man. I assure you of that, esse.

You see, when you're out there in the real world, you don't just get a small slice of pie from the same place over and over again (my G-d, the horror of that!), you eat "the whole enchilada" as they say, and that's exactly how me and my crew play this game called life: like it's winning just to be here, because we come across a lot of "walking dead" out there; bombed-out, brain-dead folks just wandering listlessly throughout their days, so unconscious and unplugged from the world as it exists, waiting to die. A nightmare...and so, when we see something we don't like, we say something, because speaking up is an action that leads to other actions, even if at first it's just misguided thoughts (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/06/say-something.html). It's all part of your training.

Most of my peers have already reached the type of early success that puts us in direct proximity to junior staff who need constant mentoring and teaching because we're tradespeople, and giving back to underlings is crafted into our lifestyles. I teach every day that I'm alive, even if it doesn't fit into your misconceptions about relegating learning to some far away classroom staffed by someone else, even though that someone else is probably someone I went to school with, here in New York, and I can also out-teach any day of the week. My creative hierarchies necessitated me into learning many many abilities so well just to stay competitive and on the job, that I can teach you in another language (in your native language, since you can't speak mine), using whatever tools you have handy.

After you do that for many years like we have, you develop a sophisticated routine centered around schooling. And so, when my Coloradan ex-boyfriend decided to take his act on the road by lecturing the Asian liquor store owner down the block from us in our Denver neighborhood, I couldn't have clapped harder for him in appreciation if I tried. It was one of my most favorite characteristics about him: that he used his power and prestige as a high-earning white man in our society to tell people what they avoided hearing through deliberately planned abusive neglect, by feigning continued ignorance about well-known facets of our American lives. On one such afternoon, I guess Kent had enough of the hypocritical bullshit, because he told me that he finally told the Korean owner what was up, and I was enraptured.

Kent liked to buy some booze to put into his little biker backpack that they make just for riders to squeeze liquid into their mouths during a ride (yeah, not the best use of it, but you don't know his full story and it is massively bad), so he could meander around town on the many bike paths that line the area in an inter-connected web that's the envy of older cities, though the common practice of compulsive over-exercise to cover up a serious mental disorder as it is used out west is a whole other article entirely. Suffice to say that he was familiar with the lay of the land, as he'd lived in town for many years, spending his days driving through he streets that he didn't bike, as a Master Electrician with his own junior apprentice to school in the trade.

I guess he figured he'd had enough of the shit show we'd seen play out unfairly in society over the years, because he and I talked about the judicious use of "mixed residential" zoning laws that are the mark of enlightened urban planning in newer cities like Denver, escaping the common traps most older cities succumb to, like the bust-and-boom, up-and-down patterns that characterize the instant ghettos and gentrified private parks with silver key access that define New York City life. We'd seen our native cities go down fast that way, like he had with the council flats in England, and I did with the projects in the city. Urban planning had created instant ghettos that insured encircled and entrapped cycles of poverty that no one could escape from, let alone a terrorized impoverished people who'd descended from the cruel mistreatment of corrupt plantation owners from centuries past.

We had enough, and it was reflected through his band's song titles about injustices that I felt keenly in my life, too. Kent told me back at our place that as he was walking back to the cooler for a cold drink, he couldn't help but razz the wealthy owner into embarrassment. We'd seen him cruise up to his immigrant business in the 'hood with a brand new Benz curbside, strategically placed as it was right across the street from public housing that was clearly demarcated as such with bolted-on plaques across the front row of old brick townhomes, across the street from his ghetto liquor store. Who the fuck did he think he was? What right did he have to come here and pick off the "po' black folk" with instant access to the very poison that killed them and their brains, by walling himself behind a plastic partition like some pussy?

Kent and I had seen him roll up in his fancy car in our urban neighborhood with his clean little prep school boy, all nice and pressed in his fancy private school clothes, but what right did he have to set up shop across the street from the poorest folks in town? Huh? Kent said he just stood there towering over this little guy and his small prep school kid. They played the whole smiling " haha...no speaky engrish" game with him that they'd been taught by the very people they bought the place from, with one very important caveat left unwritten but certainly lived out loud for the whole block to see: American assimilation is possible in one quick generation, you just have to sell out the more beset "minority" beneath you on the totem pole, even though there's no fucking way any Chinese-American can be a fucking minority, when China and the Americas are this fucking big. 

Nice try, though. "Kunta-Kente"**, you're my straight-up superhero, man! Don't ever change, bro, no matter how hard they grind you down. You're beautiful to me, baby. "Papa" this! We did, you know that, right? We really did show that small town what living is all about, be it with this century's immigrants or the very next ones. Still have your passport with your little boy Visa photo? That shit's adorable, kid, even if you did have a rough go of coming and going whilst traveling back and forth from "The Motherland", because someone (ahem, you know who) fluffed your fucking birth date on your kiddie passport, to give you a ride every time you exited and entered the country of your own free will. Who would do that to their kid going into a new country, you know? We do! Don't change a thing, baby. You're perfect just the way G-d made you to be. Amen to you, brother. This one's for you and yours today, baby. We're all red on the inside: http://taylorseafood.co.uk/ and http://www.taylorfoods.co.uk/

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=welfare+burger

* http://www.onlythebible.com/Poems/Footprints-in-the-Sand-Poem.html

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

On the hunt

http://www.venisondonation.org/

If you're a regular reader of mine, you should know by now that hunger is a human problem, and not a food one. Humans have always used resources as leverage against one another in times of war, and what greater weapon of mass destruction is there if not for starvation? 

Many a cynic has gone on t.v. in some corporate-sponsored advertisement to disturb your Saturday ballgame viewing with horrible images of bloat-belly children in Africa, in a crass exploitation of so-called "white guilt" and the collective sense of responsibility we feel as hardworking, wealthy Americans. 

But, as my man Father Raphael (from Nigeria) pointed out to one such carnival barker who used the St. Francis parish to fund-raise, with his disgustingly lurid pictures of poor children: "When hasn't there been starving children in Africa?", which is a delicate, sensitive, and extremely intelligent criticism that opens up further under scrutiny. Aren't there rich people in Africa who care about Africans?! 
What happened to them all? 

As bad as the slave trade has been for many people of American descent, it isn't the full story about our world in crisis. It's sort of like my old housemate from art school, who immediately noticed when I didn't pack-rat my tiny hearing aid batteries for recycling later, because I replaced an old one for a new one while walking and talking with her on the street, and then tossed the tiny battery into a garbage pail. (Sue: they're mercury-free because I asked my audiologist on my next visit to town. Thanks for making me feel paranoid and irresponsible. Sleep easy, gentle hippie). 

Is it really up to me and my every miniscule action to save the world?! How can that be? I understand the Butterfly Effect*, and the implications that a small movement may have many miles away, but like my mom's exhortations about sending my uneaten broccoli to Africa, there's something about useless fretting that obscures much deeper issues.

When I had no money to give, I gave my blood. When I had no food to eat, I sold my belongings. When I had more time to spare, I gave it back to the church as an apprentice Sunday School teacher. 
Which brings me back to the same eternal question of: what can you do? Besides sending badly cooked vegetables overseas. 

This week, I urge you to look beyond the quick, obvious, and easy, as you reach back out into the world to help. What can you do right now, with just what you have on hand? 

Thank you for your patience while we right your wrongs, most directly with new legislation that addresses massive supermarket waste. 
Don't worry: we won't send you deer meat, if venison isn't your thing. 
It isn't mine, either.

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/food_waste_loc/?bkmQyjb&v=61604

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

The Spider's Web

Small town life is different than the city. "Gotham" is all about money and the "go, go, go" energy of our sometimes misspent youth. It's easy to get caught up in the exciting merry-go-round of "new, NOW, Next!", but for every time there's a season and a reason. Circumstances led me back here, and I am not sorry for it. Rockland is easy for me to manage. I know it because I feel it, and the kids I grew up with now run stuff, too. 

We can get anywhere we need to be very quickly, to put out those fires and chase away "the baddies". This area has become the perfect microcosm for us to patrol, manage, problem-solve, and ultimately, rule over. If we do it right here (at this scale and this level), we can expand it into a growing sphere that enfolds the larger world, which is the exact type of change we talked about growing up. It's become an organic thing that ripples out whenever we want it to, because we grew it, nursed it, and brought it back to health. WE ARE ALIVE.

It's also a lot easier to catch flies in a spider's web than it is to fly around the world setting up snares, which is something me and my crew learned early on, in our individual lives that we talked about together, because we'd be bankrupt twenty times over if we followed along with everything that seriously dead-ended any kook coming before us. 

And so this visual metaphor about a team of spiders weaving perfectly overlapping triangles has become the mental landscape me and my friends created, using what we had at hand: a tightly interwoven network that is flexible, tensile, adaptable, extremely strong, and unbreakable. We will move forward, and you're all coming along for the ride. Strap yourself in!

Don't be fooled by an empty-looking country road in a valley that's filled with the swirling mists from one very dangerous river; it ain't what it seems to be. You can trust me on that, because your bank just went out of business forever. Today (and every other day) we take back the land, for it is ours. This is just the beginning. Join us. 

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10206227577064507&set=gm.1685789014982523&type=1&theater

Stop, Anellotech.

http://www.freshair.org/

Today as I sit at the local library on a public-access computer, the front doors are open to catch some of the cool afternoon breezes, to the sounds of schoolchildren having an outdoor playday with teacher-supervised games and sports, right across the street in the town park. 

I want to keep it that way, and I can't do that if we allow a highly-toxic petrochemical refining plant to take up residence on what was formerly Lederle's site, and then Pfizer's, pharmaceutical companies both: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Cyanamid and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfizer. 

They'd been having secret town meetings and court appearances in Rockland. We have a "Master Chemist" and a "Master Litigator" on the case, but I want more. Concerned moms are also appreciated.

I want it gone forever, and so I ask you to willingly join me in this. Afterwards, we can collectively heave a huge sigh of relief, breathing in the fresh clean air for a battle well-fought and hard won that is the refuge for the righteous and the just.

Freedom from corruption...that's what we want. Join us. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1595952577299501/

Update: http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/rockland/orangetown/2016/01/14/anellotech-cancels-controversial-pearl-river-vent-pipe/78787388/

Make Your Voice Heard

Today's "Mission Impossible": get involved. Whew! Wow, so hard...

Hey, friends! Over the next few years, I'm going to talk and write about hearing loss (which is congenital in my family) in a way that's constructive and helpful, because I've found that the current dialogue (when it is present) is wayyy crazy (read: typically human). I tested the waters recently with a group of my senior friends, a really well-educated and hip crowd, and they had stunned, scared looks on their faces. Oh. Not a good sign. It's a contentious topic, mostly because it's been co-opted artificially by health insurance companies that do not work for you. They work for money and profit. I think it's self-explanatory, but you'd be surprised by the level of ignorance people have when they are resistant to adult subject matter, ie: "not fun" stuff, like a Florida vacation. Oy. New Yorkers!

Anywho, let's get on with it. I'll go first: I started losing volume in one ear around age 30-32, a time typical for great bodily change in mature women, and so it was with me, too. My live-in boyfriend noticed it first, and then I noticed it at work. Aha! My dad is deaf, and so was his sister, my late aunt; actually, they're much more impaired than I am, but that's also an outcome of their generation's neglect. Well, I got diagnosed early on (wrongly at first, but that's a story for another day), learned all about it, became an expert so as to self-advocate for me and my health, and now I can share it with you all.

It's kind of a scary process: you get locked into a sound-proof booth, and it feels like you're taking a test that you know you're going to fail. Uh oh. Yeah, I know, but do it anyway. Just like any subject, a big "Fear of the Unknown" factor compounds and effects wrongly our attitudes about health care. I had my teeth cleaned by my dentist yesterday, and there's some pain and discomfort involved. I know that from years of experience, so I practiced deep breathing exercises while watching Will Farrell on t.v. dressed up like a green pilgrim for St. Pat's Day, knowing I was being tended to and cared for by a real Rockland County kid (my new dentist: such a nice boy!), whose parents own the jewelry store across the street. In other words, I'm home!

But first, we need to address the inequity that exists in health care and within their corporate culture. I was told by a rep at a well-known health insurance company back in the day that my hearing loss was "cosmetic" (and that it would "NEVER", an actual direct quote: "Never be covered by health insurance") because I am relatively young and no one can see it on my face, like seeing a squinting blind person with thick glasses. Can you imagine a rep saying that to someone born near-sighted? Insane! So, first, let's get it straight: as complex as hearing is compared to vision (thus making it more expensive, naturally), you must first accept the concept that hearing devices are like glasses for the ears.

That's it, folks. It's simply this: giving assistance where it's needed, and as it's needed. Get involved in the conversation by talking about it with someone today. Start there, and then let's build on top of that. Let's do this thing! Thanks to Tracey in town for supplying me with the handy dandy hand-out you see pictured below. More to follow on this topic in the future. Be sure of that.  Good day to you all!

http://www.hearingaidtaxcredit.org/