Patchouli

Oprah famously said on her talk show that she loved giving away stuff because "GIVING FEELS GOOD", in a not-so-veiled reference to the compulsiveness that drives the lives of so many celebrities. Who doesn't like a new car?! Right? It's sort of like a shopping high, except you and your audience participate in the buzz of "new car smell" together, like a bunch of giggly girls at a sleepover sucking on helium balloons and doing bad cartoon voices.

After the hangover from her giveaways, Oprah was stuck with an African lawsuit alleging sexual abuse (herself a victim of molestation as a young girl) at the all-girls boarding school she famously built in Africa to make better female Africans, as weird a gesture for an eccentric rich American to make as ever. Much like Mark Zuckerberg's condescending attitude about giving "free internet" to those poor Africans (what about us here?), it's a do-gooder pose that hides, if not malicious intent, then some seriously disordered intentions.

At the local free library, such cheap easy sentiment runs rampant through their special needs policies (to attract local, state, and federal funding), that includes someone else cleaning up the messes from their ridiculous build-a-bag-from-newspaper workshops for retarded adults. They pander to brain disordered people without actually giving a fuck about the abuses tied to their presence at a place for advanced learning (which a library used to be), including not monitoring heroin users on the nod at their public access computers. That's distasteful and not part of their job!

It's okay to pad their typically empty building with Down Syndrome people, or day residents from the local psych center who need healthcare over stupid craft projects, because that's what makes them FEEL GOOD. The lady with carpel tunnel and OCD can feel proud that she shelves books all day very precisely, over those poor unfortunates struggling to use a mouse without her benevolent help. It keeps their corrupt system of co-dependence in place, so everybody who's sick benefits without actually calling it that.

That would be "labelling" and they don't do that in their "judgment-free zone", except for this: every book and media product in a library is very carefully assigned a Library of Congress category (by people like me) for the purpose of classification, bar-coded (also by people like me) for the ease of finding it by corresponding subject at their very place of employment. The dysfunctional pattern they're trapped in is so bad, that the disabled people working there were separated to me from the handicapped patrons they condescend to only by the distinctive blend of arrogant social "do-gooders" everywhere, saturated as they are by the scent of patchouli, a hippie's classic olfactory weapon of choice. See you in the stacks, kids.

Landmine

I recently read online that a well-known American actress has "come out" as a former Scientologist, while promoting her film that accuses the cult of brain-washing and coercion, which definitely fits the profile for cult status. Former members are shunned from the community after they leave, like the practices of the Amish and Hasidim. It's an intensely painful way of assuring "brand loyalty", because once someone questions their commitment to certain doctrines within the religion, their families are immediately pressured by the rest of the group to conform the questioning family member back to their faith under threat of ousting, too, and failing that, they turn their backs on non-conformists for the rest of their lives.

Brutal, isn't it? But, the members of these groups point out that this is the way they maintain their traditions over the centuries (not that Scientology has a long history), and if an individual disagrees so strongly with their beliefs, why stay? They're free to go! The Amish have an adolescent rite of passage called "Rumspringa" that allows for freedom of expression through a temporary relaxation in their strict rules about smoking and drinking and dating, as long as it's done outside of the community's boundaries. Once that time period ends, the teenager has to decide whether they want to return to the community and re-affirm their beliefs, or leave for the world outside. 

It sounds deceptively simple, until you realize that by leaving their homes, they will never see their Amish family again, unless it's a quick "hello" from a car parked in front of the family farm by a lonely son waiting for his brother and sister to return from church in a horse-drawn buggy, because the Amish don't use electricity. Their shunning extends to the entire community, too; their parents will never know their children with the "English" (their word dating back to Colonial times for Americans living outside of Amish country), nor when their beloved grandmother passes away, or how many children their sister has with her husband. 

There are no birthday cards or anniversaries, weddings or funerals. To them, you cease to exist as if you had died, but you haven't. It's the particular pain of a deeply indoctrinated belief system that doesn't allow for sustained inquiries, because under the surface of their strict faith lies the doubt of their members who know they won't hold up for long under the scrutiny that serious challenging brings. That's not to say they aren't religious, moral, or ethical in their beliefs. 

When an emotionally disturbed man walked into an Amish school with a gun (they're pacifists who don't believe in weapons) and murdered their children, they issued one statement to the public about healing, then tore down the schoolhouse and built another one away from the site of the massacre. There were no lawsuits or ongoing prosecutions, no threats to sue or vows of revenge. They acknowledged what happened and moved on from it, in a powerful expression of forgiveness and faith. I think it made a lot of Americans see the other side of their lives, besides the rather tawdry reality shows on t.v. about ex-Amish and their struggles outside of the community.

For the bipolar receptionist at a small family firm I worked for, there were no other sides to her life or her faith. She was prone, vulnerable, and suffering. When her youngest brother pulled her into his quick-moving world of martial arts McDojo's and "Landmark" seminars, she fell hard for both pyramid schemes like a drowning woman clutching at a rope tossed to her in high seas during a really bad storm. In lieu of actually healing from her serious brain disorder(s), she'd been fed a steady pop culture diet of group therapy, rehabs, extremely expensive pharmaceuticals, and, yep, more talk therapy, but no cure. In the wake of healing, the hard-pushed and deceptively marketed products of the world pulled her under, into her next psychotic break from reality, because the pressure of a fully-functioning adult life was too much for her to bear.

When the members of her Landmark group sensed blood in the water after she started attending their "sessions" and "classes", they moved in on her with great force. I'd pulled away from her after her unrequited crush on a 19 year-old at the dojo that quickly became obsessive officially kicked off her down-spiral towards illness again, because I could see she wasn't handling the intensity of fight training well, and given her psychosis, exposing someone as sick as her to violence was like putting a match to gasoline to watch it explode. It seemed cruelly unnecessary. 

Whereas her brother and her new friends from the group benefited from the est-style seminars, she quickly became entangled in their network overmuch, staying on the phone for hours at work with Landmark members who put the "hard sell" on her to find more people so she could afford more classes, in classic pyramid-scheme style. One of the more memorable images from that time period was a story she told me about all-day "lectures" with severely restricted, member-supervised food and bathroom breaks, while they were shouted at from onstage by the senior people in the organization running the show. They decided when a member had enough, or if they needed more pushing. If they found their extremely personal reveals acceptable, they would ring a large bell that everyone in the auditorium could hear, yelling "BREAK THROUGH! BREAK THROUGH!", like the proverbial Pavlov dog salivating at a dinner bell. She never had a chance.

http://m.motherjones.com/media/2009/07/landmark-42-hours-500-65-breakdowns

Soul Survivor

As the leading intellectual of a business (whether or not it's openly acknowledged to my face, since it's typically done behind my back as some sort of financial strategy), my first few days, weeks, months, and/or years of any new employment I had were fraught with difficulties, tensions, ego trips, paranoid schemes, covert meetings, and hurriedly hushed exchanges like I was just hired to run the universe instead of design some books. The grueling audition process I went through was supposed to ameliorate qualms and fears that average people have about content generators, but sadly, it did not.

I was subjected to rounds and rounds of emails, resume screenings, online questionnaires, personality profiles, psych screenings, drug tests (for a corrupt newspaper union, haha), with several more rounds of interviews with my portfolio shown to a variety of employees from different departments who would not have access to the highest levels of a house like I did, done to an insane degree. Such is the power to create a company (or destroy it) that we bring to the table as a group.

I'd always hoped that my relative openness, honesty, and transparency (in big business New York) would alleviate the troubled minds of the more pedestrian office worker vis-a-vis their limited perceptions about illuminators but, more often than not, interactions with a real genius doesn't actually make lower-level employees feel better about themselves or their career choices, which is why I often handed out books to inquiring office cows. You know: because that's what we do. Nefarious, I know.

So, it was no surprise to me when the feathers of any new house I joined were ruffled loudly and with much angst, most acutely from the large hen-house, since we're paid less than teachers, which makes modern publishing heavy on the female workforce. Lunches would be set-up and attempted, odd scrutinies would take place in the office kitchenette, bizarrely stilted interactions were forced in the hallways or bathrooms, interruptions about a fake crisis during my crucial deadlines were staged as a sabotage...to no avail. In our world, you either make something or you don't, because the future belongs to those of us wiling to get our hands dirty, and with the amount of work that I do, it isn't a carefully calculated life of leisure devoted to one's over-priced manicure or shiny new gadget. It's more like: "I made this <pat book>. See?" Good! Now I can go back to work.

We'd published books about assholes in business, as me and the other much deafer art director in the office yelled back-and-forth, reading aloud from a book about company stereotypes, like the common "office bike": the desperate blond (always blond!) receptionist who sleeps around because "everyone gets a ride", within clear earshot of the reception area. Still, no avail. They kept on coming. Scooter was one such douchebag whose limited prowess barely masked his deeper ambitions of artistic glory, as just such an example of a tool. No one liked him, but he managed to form icky alliances within the company like we were competing for the last piece of roasted rat on a remote desert island for a sick "reality" game-show about starving people and their madness. What was the point?

He seemed genuinely baffled by my gifts, as much as he hated any kind of reference to them. He'd find some excuse to come back to the design studio, then draw out a weird discussion that could have been more easily done with a ten-second email, to slowly walk back to his cramped overheated office scratching his head about the obvious truths I just told him about the book he showed me, because acquisitions was supposed to be his game. He thought he cleverly hid his lack of a buying streak with our designated wonk at a major book retailer, by pretending to question us about a potential book property up for re-licensing like it was playtime at the zoo, and I just fucking ripped his head off in the lion cage, every single time.

Naturally, like all the other inept "lifers" at that company, he just happened to "fall into" publishing, just like he fell into my den of protective lionesses filled with nursing cubs. Shoo! On an afternoon like any other afternoon, he seemed to finally have an epiphany about who I was, discreet as I managed myself to be amongst those who are not of the calling. As the rays of golden light struck sharp shapes across the back wall of my studio desk, he came back excitedly (for once) to show me a book that just crossed his desk. Did I know it? Nope. Ah...here he hesitated, like a student daring to give an apple to his favorite teacher. Did I know this book was like me? Yes, Scott. I did. Happy All Soul's Day, on this beautiful autumn day in 2016.

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.

Hooked on Feelings

For people with severe mental illnesses, emotions are a place fraught with a thousand little tensions that don't add up to a whole picture, especially for the seriously bipolar. I watched a receptionist talk (more like interrupt and over-talk) with various employees in a corporate setting for years, and she'd steal facets that she liked from different people by littering her "nonversations" with their borrowed expressions. It was the only memory recall she had; these shards of other people's personas that never added up to a real person for her. 

It was doubly odd because she came from a really strong cultural presence in New York, as an Israeli immigrant living in a strongly Jewish part of "Lawnguyland". It wasn't like she was an ethnic minority living on her own. Her parents sent her to a private schul during her formative years, but after puberty, she became sicker and sicker. There was something broken within her that never really worked right, and it was grueling to be around. She'd call herself a "painter", exhibit some drawing skills as an illustrator, then go completely downhill after that first good picture, like all the other areas of her life.

She was also extremely vulnerable to the outside world. I could tell her parents were exhausted by her ongoing illnesses, as the only explanation that made any sense after years of observation. She was too sick to live with, and she had weird tense stand-offs with her roommates at the city apartment she found while commuting from her parent's place on the island. She told me she'd been raped, mugged, drugged, knock-down dragged-out drunk, and that was just during my small time window with her. G-d knows how many horrors awaited for me in her life. I simply didn't want to know them anymore, because like any challenged child, she never got over any of it. Her alleged teenage rape was just as fresh as if it happened to her yesterday. 

When I first met her, and she blabbed that she was raped to us at a bar during after-work cocktails—as a bizarre justification for not working at a more "artistic" job—I thought it had happened to her, like, a year ago, and that's why she still lived with her folks. It was like that for every single experience she could dramatize, like gossip or dirt on her fellow co-workers, but never anything deep, real, or significant. She was the most trivially superficial thing I'd ever met, and so repulsive to me intellectually, that I found I couldn't stand her presence sober, like that one crazy bitch at a frat party you only see when you're forced back to the keg line. Ugh...you again, bitch? Sigh...fine, I'll make small talk with you to get a beer.

That's what she was to us—that crazy bitch at the reception desk who would physically block you so she could pelt you with her trash talk. It was fine every once in awhile, but full-on crazy all the time pulls at you real quick, know that I mean? She was a work obstacle we had to constantly get around, like an ill-placed traffic cone in the middle of a narrow city street, clad in a warning color like "safety-cone orange". 

She was also very susceptible to the slightest marketing pitch, because she had no genuine sense of self. It was nerve-wracking and jarring to my wholesomeness as a cohesively packaged unit that was beautifully-made through my own hard work, like the books I made for our company. Tight, yo! She'd complain to us that she had no money, then she blow hundreds of dollars every week on these grotesque white-blond dye jobs at a salon, with a full pedicure and manicure and maybe a facial (if she had time), in addition to her oft-repeated tanning salon sessions, supposedly because she suffered from Seasonal Affective Disorder as a Jew.

In fact, her short list, just as I can remember from that time, was this: PTSD (from the infamous "Unibomber/Central Park rapist"), recovered molestation memories from childhood (sent to me at work in an email in the middle of the day through the company server), manic-depression, bipolar personality identity disorder, ADHD/Adult ADD, dyslexia and other learning impairments like illiteracy, a low IQ, alcoholism, drug addiction (to cocaine and pain pills), bloating and serious water retention (hence the aggressive over-sharing about bodily functions), marked obsessive compulsive addictive hoarding tendencies with significantly ritualistic behaviors, personal boundary issues, a low self-esteem, a hyperactive sex drive that led to a series of increasingly risky behaviors like jogging through the park at 1 a.m. to shed those awful pounds, yo-yo dieting, poor self-image (hence the narcissistic grooming habits), a love/hate food addiction combined with bulimia mixed with occasional sprees of anorexia nervosa, over-spending (she said had to live with her parents because of shopping-related debt, which gave a cool "Sex and the City" vibe to her manic sprees), fixations with people that became stalking and cyberstalking, ambiguous sexual/gender orientation with slight schizoid affective characteristics interspersed with unsuccessful online dating that rarely went beyond the first date (she actually showed me the "you are crazy" text to go along with it), chronic depression with suicidal tendencies, as well as other violently criminal tendencies to go along with her markedly psychotic features.

She was also the most delusional consumer I have ever met. If there was a woman's magazine lying around the reception area for our guests to peruse, she'd blame the images for "forcing her" to buy more shit she didn't need. Huh. Uh, how exactly does that fucking work? If a new tech gadget came out, she HAD TO have it, even though she was almost completely ignorant about computers and technology. Oh, well! 

If the bland Midwestern girl made homemade brownies and dared to bring them to the office without first screening it with her manipulatively controlling codependency, we could all look forward to a work day filled with her odd sneaky runs to the kitchen to cut the already-small brownies into these tiny little pieces that she'd furtively jam into her mouth too quickly, licking her fingers and mouth nastily, saying "Mm. Bitch. Mm. Bitch..." over and over again, smacking her lips in a grossly piggish way. Same thing with the office jar of candy. 

It had to be placed behind a piece of paper and away from her desk— which was our company's reception desk—because she couldn't handle seeing it, and that was after someone busted her for starving all day long without a proper lunch break (she'd blame the publisher for that), which forced her to cram salad into her mouth at her desk, pouting and giving us evil glares the entire afternoon for being a human who eats. Even though she spent more on herself than anything or anyone else around her, it still hadn't worked. She remained consistently greasy-haired with a dirty cap jammed down onto her matted head (she didn't like her forehead wrinkles), wearing the same torn stained jeans, baggy sweater, and unfashionably clunky shoes. 

She remained disgusting, even with her expensive outsourcing of every facet of her life to other people. Her Jewish dentist cousin would give her free teeth-bleaching that she bragged about to an office of better-looking "Ivy Leaguers" who most often just stared at her in disbelief. What to say? She was so fucking crazy that there was no coming back from brain damage that bad, and we knew it. And that was before she went off her psychotropic cocktail of meds, joined a cult, and then recruited for them openly during company hours. In short, Ayelet Rand was the most disturbed person I had ever met in my life. Her sole focus in her life was her, and her confused "feelings" about life that we were forced to help her sort through during our difficult day jobs, because the crazy old Jews who owned the company found her neurosis "charming". How's that for a lawsuit? Hey, it's really not that big of a  problem, though. There's a big sample sale going on right down the block! Yeah, right. Bitch. Meet you there later. Much later.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/t-magazine/human-emotion-the-one-thing-the-internet-cant-buy.html?_r=0

Shock to the System

Lately I've been seeing a building rhetoric grow in popular media outlets that suggest electroshock therapy as a cruel and inhumane practice, even though it isn't designed to be so. If you ever met a violently-shaking schizophrenic or a severely distressed bipolar individual who's completely disassociated from reality (and has been so for days, manically cycling through a series of brain traumas that cannot correct themselves on their own), it's easy to point fingers around the medical community that treats the sickest kinds of people living among us.

It's illogical to assume that currents targeted to specific areas of the brain (that are already shutting down) would be overly harmful, since a severely dysfunctional brain is significantly handicapped to begin with. We run on electricity! All lifeforms on earth are held sway under the same natural principles of Applied physics, and our bodies (with brains) are no different. Would you ask a heart patient to remove his or her life-saving pacemaker just to suit your irrational fears about electrical currents and the mechanical devices made to heal them?

It seems cruel when I phrase it that way, right? And it is. We should be open to any healing practice that has years of solid science backing it. I know mental illness is scary. We've all been victimized by chronic abuse, most often at the hands of the seriously disordered, and isn't that reason enough to keep these kinds of helpful methods around? Any empirical scientist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence) would read the same data that I did, to come back to the same place. If it works, it works. Who are we to question someone else's healing? Let. It. Be.

Forget what you've seen in those old movies (based on better books) about cuckoo birds, insane nurses, and wrongfully-imprisoned Indians who seem harmless until they're violently tripped off. When was the last time you stepped over a homeless individual on the streets, yo? Like, yesterday, New Yorker?! We're confronted with illness every day. It ain't just hype when you confront damage like that, is it? It's real. People need understanding; not fear and ignorance. You need to heal. It's time.

Know the facts, first: 
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroconvulsive_therapy
- http://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/electroconvulsive-therapy/basics/definition/prc-20014161
- http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/electroconvulsive-therapy
- http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/ect
- https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Treatment/ECT,-TMS-and-Other-Brain-Stimulation-Therapies

Role-Play

Humans are visual by nature. As predators, hunters, gatherers, and agriculturists, our eyes take predominance over any other sense we have, by careful evolutionary design. We wouldn't be as successfully “human” without our forward-facing eyes. It's made more than one artist become uptight with me, because as a visual communicator, I understand that how we see is of critical importance. It's like a child's game we played as kids: would you rather be blind or deaf? Neither!

And yet, after very little thought, I always gave deaf as my answer, because as a prolific reader, writer, and artist, I wouldn't be half as good as I am with less vision. Like the saying goes, I guess my “prayers” were answered (and no, I never really prayed for that), because I have inherited my father's poor hearing and my mother's once-excellent vision that she needed to see as a young microbiologist. She often bragged that she had better than perfect vision, which is 20/20, topping out in the eagle-eyed range of 10/15.

Unlike her inflated IQ scores, I never doubted the sharpness of her acute "mom" eyes. She was so rigid about her housekeeping that she could tell who had been in the room and what we had moved at a quick glance. It was unnerving, but having "eyes in the back of your head" becomes the super sense that older humans develop after their other senses wane with age. You just know it, right? You can feel when something not right, not that you have your glasses on, granny.

But, that's how every masterful mother has ruled her roost in her small absences, and so it was of great interest to me when I discovered the world of pop psychology, rife with its labored over-acting and defined roles. It was, like, if you didn't perform rote actions lifted from a script, some of the more disordered humans around you just can't figure out what to do. It was unnerving to me. Can you imagine not knowing how to translate what your eyes, ears, nose, and mouth take in, before you knew just what they did? I couldn't, and so began my somewhat uncomfortable fascination with the learning impaired among us, or the seriously mentally ill, as subsets of the typical human experience.

Still, that type of focus has not been without some serious drawbacks, which we found out together as a t.v.-viewing society. With attention came a freak-show madness, wrongly telegraphing to the worst brains watching out there in "T.V. Land" that we care(d) more about their bad brains than their humanity, which is very far from the truth. I wanted results! I want healing for you, not a spot on a popular program. Doubt me? Witness the amount of famous entertainers who've recently passed away from alcohol and drug addictions, usually in combination with very serious medical conditions like manic-depression. 

Do you really think that's a coincidence? We recently lost a pioneering female wrestler who just nabbed a coveted spot on the show "Intervention" that came too late for her, because she died of an overdose before she could make her "debut" on a series that makes money from sicknesses like hers. What, she couldn't go to rehab without some photogenic doc from the boob tube to hold her hand while the cameras rolled? The show producers will simply pick up the next fragile "star", like, the day she died, people.

I know. I've worked with "media types" my entire career. You know what they care about? Your next bestselling book, emphasis on sales. The numbers, bro. They care about the amount of product you push on the buying public (addicts included) more than you, and that's the problem. Entertainment is fun, but what do you do when the music stops and the curtains close? Who are you then? And, who's fighting that fight with you after your last curtain call, when the backroom counts out ticket sales that you get a small cut of, which you don't really care about, because you're whacked out on pills. Besides, it is absolutely abnormal to want that kind of attention day after day. 

"What are you, drunk or something, or high on drugs?" That's what my parents joked about when we ran wild around the house making noise, and it was not a flattering assessment of our characters. If you can't sit down to "mellow out" on your own, what happened to you? You can't always be "on"! Performing is great and all, but a lot savvier producers than you can whip talent into a tizzy just to film it, because (let's be honest) there are actually millions of skinny, bobble-headed, big-teethed, fake blondes spray-painted orange in the world. 

If you burn out, "The Machine" can easily discard you to buy another one (production queues are based on a factory-model, even for you sensitive "creative types" out there), especially a phony personality, because you are totally, completely, and utterly replaceable. Bland "genericans" don't have an actual place in the history books, yo. If you have a soul, you can't actually be bought, so the next time your therapist in group asks you to "act out" a scene with them while the cameras are rolling, you need to immediately get real with it, by finding a new doctor quickly. You need to talk about the real, and you need to talk it out, and you need to get real. Get real with it. Really.

Cagenado!

Nick Cage as "Everyone"!! 

There was a crisis on my block that resulted in the predicted suicide of a deeply troubled neighbor this past weekend, which points to the burdens our brothers and sisters around the world bear as they fight alcoholism, drug addiction, and serious brain disorders, often alone and without support. I know I did everything I could to help a neighbor in crisis, because I contacted the appropriate community programs and social services, and there'll definitely be more on that. 

Some people raise their eyebrows about the kinds of media content I see, without realizing that it's my job to take on (and process) real-world narratives and situations that are portrayed by the actors playing these roles about some of the worst horrors of the world, like Nick Cage's portrayal of a suicidal drunk in "Leaving Las Vegas". It's become so well-known in our society that we actually refer to planned drinking deaths as "pulling a "Leaving Las Vegas'". When tragedies happen like they did this weekend, it makes me appreciate the people in our society who take on horror everyday, like the officer on scene who told me the bad news, working in service to a community that can sometimes barely watch a fictional movie or book without struggling over the events represented in its content. 

As it happens with people who can't handle difficult events, a lot of people've been trained to "check out" mentally, aided and assisted in their delusional, consumer-driven fantasies by pop culture entertainment that churns out generically escapist fantasies, because some executives have studied people's vulnerable psychologies to sell you product through various media outlets, and you, my fragile-minded friend, are part of their target demo for disassociating from reality on the habitual.

Like any bad habit, compulsive addictive disorders are genetic. You have to have those genes to have a predisposition to addiction, and yet many people are afraid to confront the "negative" aspects of their lives, because they aren't sure they'll make it through to the other side of an issue correctly. "'Tuning out' while 'tuning in'" to difficulty is counterproductive in the minds of the most afflicted. Those of us who confront society's demons do not prefer "dark material". Nothing could be further from the truth for me. I actually like children's movies the best, but you wouldn't know that from my library list or web-surfing history, or that my favorite social media follows are cute doggies. It's ridiculously cheerful, but I've always cherished nature, animals, and children's literature. 

You wouldn't know that from a scan of my library card or my Internet browser. Part of what makes me a publisher is my hard-working ability to rebound from stress that the layperson cannot, and in that way, I feel very close to the clergy, educators, social workers, and police officers who daily see atrocities that are screened from the general public. It's our duty and honor to serve you, though it is most certainly not an equivalent experience for most of you in my audience, and that can be a lonely burden to bear for people in vocational service, cut off from empathy and support as we often are, crisis after crisis. The Lord G-d has given us the gift of forbearance on this daily path we walk alone, unaided by those crutches made for you, the people we care for.

Like my other gifts, I accepted my almost freakish resilience many years ago, as the people around me can testify, almost aghast at my ability to persevere with an uncanny strength that I've only found among His Most Faithful, and probably genetic to me. Where would we be without our ability to move on, mes amis? And so, when my friends and acquaintances blush over me withstanding their petty abuses, sometimes I just laugh. Oh, girl, you have no idea what I been through. Women are asked to bear all of human life, as a life that can also be easily snuffed out just as quickly, and that ain't for everyone in this world, is it?

That's why, when the bitchy clerk at the checkout counter decides today is the day she's gonna give me the ole "stink eye", I'm almost glad she can fob off her psychological stress on a mother figure like me. I understand why people flock to movies to escape from their lives for a little while. I'm grateful for distractions, too. Perhaps that's why (even as we rant against it), we give so many awards and so much money to the people who tell the tough stories you can't find your way out of, like we do with gifted movie actors.

Sure, there are tons of bad actors in a world full of opportunists, cheats, and disastrous hangers-on, but on the days I write to you from an old public library computer on a time limit surrounded by His Most Afflicted, like the ripe homeless woman sitting next to me "on the nod" from heroin who's consistently ignored by staff that blithely passes her by, I found this site about acting great Nick Cage so funny that I laughed until I cried. I laughed so much that a nasty circulation clerk came over to censure me for laughing out loud like one of their Down Syndrome patrons (though no one actually complained), because she'd been waiting to do that to me ever since I showed up at "her library". My presence is a reminder to her of everything that's bad about her. Thy name is "Irony", pissed-off clerk and part-time government employee. I hope it was worth it. Cagenado Lives On!!!

http://uproxx.com/tag/matheus-candido/

for Sue

Wall Me In

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

Like the businesses I "manned" for other people who were often too incompetent to do so themselves, I'd just as often run into the walls of their ineptitude as quickly. Can't speak up? Force your underpaid minion to attend (that'd be me running your meeting better than you), for half the price. Having trouble with new ideas, concepts, technologies, and their executions? That's OK! Pretend superiority over your resident genius (I knew that, BTW) by airily flaunting your laziness with over-dramatic sighs that express your disturbed "businessman of importance" state of mind, someone with the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders (like, paperwork related to book manufacturing), while passing off the real work that you are "too busy" to do onto the people in your workflow who are actually qualified in the industry, you ignorant hack, and when we do excel, feign indifference and ignorance while you check my email every 10 minutes because the office handbook said you could do so. Hi, there!

And so, when the last business I worked at full-time imploded on itself, after I fixed it on their deliberately abusive shoestring budget (which was my job to do), I simply sat back and watched the kooks kill each other off, in the calm wake that follows on the footsteps of my excellent leadership. I grew accustomed to a quick headcount of firings that I'd metaphorically mount in my office at the beginning of every new venture, one that naturally expanded outward to include environments I visited for my hobbies, too. Magnetic personalities draw out the crazies who need a strong identity to stalk around in an openly mad way, or else they are rootless, restless, and increasingly psychotic.

Of course, that means I have to support the weight of a thousand poisoned darts aimed at me at all times, and if I don't properly manage your psychotic house rat, she'll go batshit and tear into your throat, and since you're a coward, well....that just won't do, will it? Word quickly spread throughout my industry of choice (and now, to the wider world) that if a manager didn't fend off their own troubled employees, I fought back like a normal, healthy, high-performing muthfucka, which means you get canned wayyyy before I do, and with your prescription healthcare plan (that I pay for) you need a steady supply of pills for your cocktail of meds, or it will bring on serious withdrawal like the fucking junkie you really are, so I set my internal clock and wait.

Within weeks, the worst headcases "flip" on one another, like addicts trying to cop a plea for a better deal with the D.A. for a reduced prison sentence. It's become routine. At first, I was shocked when the last crazy little Jewish man I worked for (with the serious Napolean complex) decided to try and frame his rabid bitch of a secretary's schizo-bipolar behavior as some sort of "catfight" happening between us, I knew he was "in" on the office scams with her. Ah. Probably his mistress or a relative...or both, because they're so fucking weird. So what? Whatever crazy shit he and his freaks did behind closed doors meant nothing to me professionally. He smirked his phony bullshit suggestions at me, like putting up a bead curtain to give me some "privacy" when I told him she would attack in a continually more aggressive and openly aberrant way because she stopped taking her pills, on suggestion of a cult she attended called "Landmark", one that she actively recruited for within the office during daytime business hours and in between the calls they placed to her all day every day for recruitment purposes on the company's dime and office phone lines.

It broke at least seven workplace laws that I knew of as a layperson just after my first few seconds of thought, and that was without any outside legal counsel. After that, things went downhill fast. He thought he was going to see a "hot" girl-fight in action between me ("the hotness") and his weak, limp cunt of a receptionist. Not happening. I simply brushed up on modern OSHA standards about legal office behavior, after his legal publishing experienced nephew ganged up on me with their insanely gay production guy. I beat them with a few slips of paper I printed out minutes before our "meeting", and that was with them monitoring my every move over the company's computer network wired by the publishers' own son. Oh. Yeah, it's like that.

He grew fretfully desperate, because his fake yellow-haired bitch hatched a new evil ploy for stalking me in his office for every counter-move I made; that's how powerless he was with a typical office slut who traded on blow jobs over any real talent or work ethic. I knew I had everything I needed when they actually built a little fucking wall to obscure me from her increasingly paranoid stomping up-and-down the company hallways, just to get a glimpse of me during her ferociously psychotic break from reality. His simpering cripple of a crazy wife came back to see me in my newly-altered studio space (which she rarely did, so she could telegraph her obvious rich housewife disdain for "laborers" like me at every opportunity she had), with a strategy delivered in a fake, loud, stage voice (you know, because of my "hearing" problems): did I feel "better" with the wall in place?

Her typical condescension at having to even interact with a beautiful human like me made my flesh crawl, but since this was her big gay Broadway moment, I didn't want to let her down. Oh, yes! I smiled with my best phony bitch impression. It's soooo much better back here now. Her face caved in, and then she recovered quickly, pasting on another sickly smile. Oh, good! Psychologically, I bet this really helps you out. Yes, crazy bitch with the lying cheating family living in a nest of vipers. Your crazy lesbian mistress/sex worker/receptionist with the obvious mood swings is why you built a wall to block me from her crazy eyes, so I definitely think about $60 worth of particle board and spackle (that I actually helped the contractor put up, which was greeted with more derision by his nephew with the phrase "boy, you sure do seem to know your materials" line along with the information that he has a "gay best friend" he told me about on his very first day of his employment in a phony gushy TMI-kind of way) will cure her of paranoid schizophrenic bipolar obsessive compulsive personality identity disorder. Any day now. Should happen...right about....now....no...it never happened. Still no cure for you.

A recent ex-neighbor of mine who's also clearly troubled but can occasionally speak "human" back to me on his "good" days, laughed with me one warm spring afternoon last year, when he let me know that our resident fake blonde psycho-bitch wanted to draw an imaginary white line down the middle of a house that she merely rents space in, because every cave troll has to have its toll paid, and since I don't do that (because I'm not mentally ill to a room-bound recluse off her meds), I no longer have access to "her" side staircase to the back of the residence that the rest of the household can use, because she imagined a fake history between use. And don't you know, mes amis, I could practically see her erecting a crazy brick wall (made with the landlord's bricks and carried out on his property) behind my back? <sigh> Here we go again. I wonder who will win, don't you? No? Huh. Neither do I.

Fight back, friends. Our collective knowledge is power: https://www.osha.gov/

"No one should have to sacrifice their life for their livelihood, because a nation built on the dignity of work must provide safe working conditions for its people."- Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez

Speed Freaks

3.) Over-stimulate yourself. Caffeine, tobacco, loud noise, driving fast, working without breaks, skipping meals - there are so many ways to keep the body and brain on overdrive and keep the anxiety levels high. 

My mom and her sisters were adept at abusing each other into what they believed were less overt addictions that they thought cleverly hid their compulsions and addictions (strange as they are) like shopping, hoarding, and staging fake scenes to create anxiety they huff like a can of paint. It became a psychotic form of artistry over the more rigorous disciplines behind thinking, doing, and making, which is for suckers like me, who pay their benefits through our day jobs because if we don't, they'll make our lives a living hell that's hard to prove in a court of law without devoting mountains of time and evidence to it, therefore I must have "too much free time" and that means I need to work more (hence their shaky lazy superiority over "working stiffs" like me and the million other people who take care of them), because if you can't abuse people behind closed doors with secret horror shows, who will pay the taxes needed for their disabilities?

Instead of managing children, life, and stress, my mom would pull to a short-stop in the middle of a highway, threatening to crash her car and kill us all if we didn't behave, creating over-dramatic heart palpitations that released the addictive body chemistry she needs to cope, over more obvious (and honest) relaxants like drinking and smoking, which could be pointed out to anyone and are therefore actionable by their feared perpetrators, like, say, someone very bright who caught onto their mental illnesses. Oh, they'll say they're afraid of being dragged away by scary large men wearing white coats, carrying butterfly nets and tranquilizer guns, and then cast without consent into some haunted house horror show, but those stories are now relics from our distant medical past.

Without having any real excuses to hide behind anymore, it's become harder and harder for actual head-cases to strike out against load-bearing "normals" like me, as if chronic abuse and violent derangement are key facets of our human culture that they must protect in order to thrive as a species, when oftentimes it's simply me and my brothers trying to get my mom to stick to her weekly therapy and take her medicine for the billionth time, which she alternately hides and/or lies about to blame on..who else? Me! Children and other family members are amazingly adept excuse-generators for a bevy of life's woes, like hiding sickness and delusional behavior. 

She's always been a very bad driver who uses a host of convenient replies like: 1) she didn't need to drive when she lived in the city so that's why she's "bad" at it, and that was only admitted after she drove into a brick wall with a realtor sitting right next to her while she shopped for her fantasy senior apartment complex with handy car-ports for auto aficionados like herself (preferring instead to joy-ride with my grandfather's car back in the Bronx, without a driver's license), or 2) she didn't learn to drive until her 30s, and that was only because of her friendship with a woman at the local DMV during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania, where she had major diseases like "walking pneumonia" with the spot on her lung even, so she got off easy on her driving test (that's her friend's fault, get it?) which leads to 3) her driving so fucking poorly, she gets into tons of accidents that she covers up whenever she can, because for many years she also drove with two feet, one on the gas and the brake (sometimes at the same time) plus 4) she cares more about her car than her own life and the lives of others at times, which she hides behind cutesy stories about being Mario Andretti the race car driver, or being "like a cabbie, fast but good" which she could never actually do for a living because "she's a woman" (sexism, you see), which is also an excuse for her not performing well and besides that, she was a commuter. "Everyone drives fast during 'rush hour'. That's why it's called that." Oh.

And finally, she liked speeding in cars as an older woman with a more advanced case of MS because it "gave me my life back" with the gift of mobility that's robbed her the use of her dead limbs over using an actual motorized wheelchair, preferring instead to torture us with her snail's pace that's necessary to "retain her ambulatory status" (pronounced "stay-tuss, which is different!"). It's like she's talking to her group at the local church, or the high school, or in attendance at the public library, because she's gone to a bunch of those. First it was for the Divorced Catholics group, then it was the Divorced Catholics group for singles, and then the MS support group (too handicapped for her tastes), but she was finally outmatched in these modern times by all the pros on the high-profile talk show / court t.v / reality programming circuit, with years of solid professional acting chops under their respective belts, so she had to give it up.

Instead of coping, she harassed me one Christmas with a death-defying trip in a really bad blizzard across the Tappan Zee bridge and back from Connecticut. She insisted that she HAD TO see family because "it won't be Christmas if we don't go", forcing me to pack up all of our stuff, packed into "her" car with my Mal in the back. He was forced to sleep in the garage because of all the allergies they supposedly have, even though my brother and his wife now have a dog  that's "allergen free", so I could spend my time being demeaned through their bitchy comments about my humble well-thought gifts, my mom's huffing abuse (because my brother's wife ignores her completely), and checking on my dog throughout the trip because his kids opened the garage door whenever they wanted to, forgetting that my dog was inside, so I could do all this while sleep-deprived, too. Best. Holiday. Ever.

If I dared to mention the conditions she abused us into, she'd bring up her sisters affectations about weather phobias and car driving panic attacks. At least she was better than them, right? Right? No, that's sharing the same genetic disorder in different ways, like the breast cancer bouts you all had. Oh...She might then lapse poetic about flights of fancy over magical lanes of sparkling snow, like she was riding on Santa's sleigh and I should just get over it because it's fun and besides, it's Christmas. There's always a reason behind a reason behind an excuse until finally, in this century, there isn't anymore, because there isn't. It's called real medicine.

http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/thrivenyc.page

Homeless for the Holidays

Through no fault of my own, I was homeless a few years ago because my family turned their backs on me for being economically dispensable to the unsavory family business that I had worked hard for, a business that was struggling to stay afloat from all of their excesses and not mine. I developed a publishing program for bargain books sold at B&N stores worldwide that's made me infamous throughout the industry. They wasted tens of thousands every year on decorating expenses, stupid parties, pricey real estate, and fancy white gardeners for their office balcony (that I never really had time to use), before they gave us a real 401K plan that we had to ask repeatedly for. My dad had once asked me to sell books only for a dollar or for free, as some sort of test of my "worth" as a publishing executive, and it was one that I easily accomplished. When the economy tanked yet again, they cut the staff who weren't family (or married to family/friends) and jettisoned the rest of us, which surprised me not at all, because I know how people who are bad at business react to stress: they don't. You do. 

So began yet another typically old family pattern of dysfunction spurred on by the upsets present in my life, which goes something like this: if "Mama Marie" ain't earning, then she ain't eatin', and that was certainly true for me. I almost fainted from hunger on some of the worst days (during which my father had the gall to ask me if I'd ever gone hungry, after I'd exhausted all my funds, credit, and extraneous belongings, like any normal person would do to avoid being a burden to others), in between the outrageous emails I sent to my family that gave them full advance warning (because I can succeed at business without even trying, despite the lack of their expensively bought M.B.A.'s, thus adding more fuel to their envious fire) of my upcoming eviction due to lack of payment (with no legal advice offered from my lawyer uncle or the corporate lawyer my father has on retainer for his needs), even while my father congratulated me publicly for my success at earning a spot at a prestigious writer's colony (because he wanted me to teach him writing so he could pen his memoirs and brag about it), because I worked that hard to be good for them by compensating for their deficits during my homelessness, like any real mother would. 

In return, I got bizarre offers for a limo ride to some mental institution in Westchester for all my troubles, when I really just needed an expense check sent to me, like any other businesswoman in publishing who itemizes correctly and transparently. There's no secrets here, anymore. How else was I thanked? Well, every time they made the wrong decision about me, I told them the truth about their sicknesses, illnesses, deficiencies, disorders, impairments, addictions, and crimes against humanity that they owe me "big-time" for, because the only times I get pulled into badness of any kind is at someone else's say-so, and isn't that way it always is for people of good faith? We are tried and tested to see through all the badness around us by fighting our way through it, alone. It is in this way that you've come to be my adoring audience in the year 2015: because you asked me to undergo rigorous feats of strength that you can't do, like any true hero does, and I survived to tell you the tales about my amazing, death-defying acts of life, like an ever-ongoing Homeric odyssey of epic modern proportions delivered freshly and freely almost every day.

And so it came to pass that I found myself isolated and alone at some hotel room (during our most holiest of seasons) in the Sunset Park* section of Brooklyn, living by my wits and a tenuous room connection to the hotel's WiFi service, booking rooms at B&B's in the area so as to be ready to go to work on Monday morning, because I worked my way through it, just like I always do. Sure, a few days I had a small powder blue bag with me on the elevator in the morning that was remarked upon by one of my design assistants, but that was it. 

The holiday itself found me with absolutely no contact from anyone whatsoever: no good wishes, no phone calls of forced bonhomie. 
There was no gratitude or charity towards me of on any kind, except the G-dly ones I received by my own hand, because I walked several miles to be with my parish family at St. Francis of Xavier in Park Slope (where I was "shadowing" Sunday school teachers guided by Sister Kathleen, the former principal of the elementary school across the street, by following along with her lovingly designed children's curriculum) for church service on Sunday, because I said I would.  
I said I would be there.

http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org

 https://www.bowery.org/homelessness/

http://www1.nyc.gov/site/dhs/prevention/homebase.page

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunset_Park,_Brooklyn