Cave Troll

Because of the genetic nature that typifies neurotic behaviors like hoarding and obsessive-compulsive rituals, I was raised among a group of rather short, fat, twitchy women on my mother's side who sometimes wrongly believe (in their worst disassociate and delusional states) that objects are more important than people, which is about the most abusive thing a mother can be towards the human children she birthed, and whom are now dependent upon her for life and care. Of course, the root of our faith defies the need for talismans and other superstitions as mere witchcraft, but in our family groupings, the pagan is sometimes closer than the monotheist, especially if you can't break through to the people around you using logic and reason.

Most Italian-Americans like to blow their tops to release the pent-up stress that comes along with sitting in a room full of people, eating plateful after paper plateful of someone else's home-cooked meals, while being as unobtrusive as possible as long as their needs are being met. Failing that, it's showtime. Then, it's a horrible gnashing of the teeth, angry spitting, and pulsing veins popping out of their foreheads, in almost direct contrast to their rather pathetic physical state. Uh, excuse me, bitch? You said what to me? It doesn't happen as much now that me and my brothers "rule the roost", but when we were smaller and more vulnerable, our family got away with as much hurt as they could without drawing the attention of social services or law enforcement, because that's actually what crazy bitches off their meds really need, in lieu of decent behavior.

If their violently abusive presence wasn't ugly enough to serve their weird agendas, then an out-pouring of incredibly escalating and extremely juvenile head games ensued, vicious in their focus on bizarre trivial household matters, like the "right" way to put a plastic bag in a garbage pail that sucks design-wise. If you "outed" them on that particular fetish (my mom and her sisters like the sound of plastic rustling, like dogs do), they simply argued until you went away or complied with their insane demands about shit no one really gives a fuck about, because it doesn't really fucking matter. Petty and spiteful is the domain of the common cave troll, not mine. Lines were then drawn in the household, like a sitcom family gone awry, with designated areas strictly off-limits to the non-complying human that could be enforced with a long boring story about their psychotic mindset, which was the point: that was the power they could use against you as their evidence to back their compulsively disordered actions and outbursts.

No, no, no. That's not it! You don't understand me! You're not listening to me! You didn't close the bag "properly"; that's why the chips went stale. You need this special gadget, like the one I have! It's magic. Well, I had to call the plumber because you have all that hair that's clogging up the drain! You knocked the car's transmission out-of-whack and that cost me money. No car for you! Every wacky thing that caused them the slightest pressure would cause them to spew out a bunch of falsehoods and lies, because their abuses supposedly swirled around our "incompetence" without their necessary hyper-vigilant monitoring, but really, what the fuck can a kid do to a nervous mother tearing paper into strips because the relatives are stopping by, er, I mean, it's recycling. Yeah! That's it! This is recycling. You can see the little wheels of their dysfunctional brains whirling now too fast, whereas before it was a depressed stupor. And it certainly wasn't limited to our often violent home lives.

After college graduation, the same trolls inhabited our office spaces, too, with the same bitchily passive-aggressive and lowly mentality as the ones they displayed within our family units behind closed doors, now aired out in public, and always with the same type of pissant jobs like secretaries (now "admins") and junior assistants, rife with ready-made excuses to explain away their phobias and unexplainable oddness around rather average and dull office workers. With me around, it was like they were wind up so tight that their heads might explode in confused hostility.

First, it would be deliberate neglect towards obvious job duties like changing the toner, making coffee, or keeping the fax area clear of excessive paper by tidying up when near it. You know, stuff a two year-old knows how to do. Then, after a period of tight observation (now called "stalking") while I went about my day, they would form the same bullshit plans to subterfuge my day, like noticing I forgot a small amount of food in the fridge, or an unwashed coffee cup in the sink that could be pounced upon with an alarming alacrity that did not mark their usual day-to-day work behavior. Next, the typically nasty "Wash your own dishes! I'm not your Mom!" notes show up next to the company sink, with other stupid notes posted on the fridge or, even better, a group email sent to me and cc'ed to my managerial higher-ups, but not until after catalog season was over, and they'd already used my designs to push their products onto the consumer.

Anything to humiliate, embarrass, or harass me would be an ideal day in their offices of the world. You know, to balance things out because they get "shit on" all day long! Uh...but not by me. "Sorry, you know how I 'get' around conference time". Their abuses were fine and excusable, even noble, given how "hard" they worked at the bottom of the corporate ladder! Except, I'm a working class Acadian; ain't nobody done nuthin' I haven't had to do for the diva's around me at least four or five times. It just didn't work with me around. If the cunt working reception couldn't frighten me away from the reception desk area during my work-related conversations (she's, like, really sensitive about boundaries and stuff because she was raped and she doesn't have a "real" desk like we do!), the next day a big heavy box full of books or paper would magically appear right in front of the area we stood in to talk to her, even though she often complained about her "bad back" when it came to moving boxes or mailing out packages.

Ditto with any apartment dwelling or townhome I resided in. If I recycled, then the bitch on the block would find good reason not to do so, like hiding all those empty vodka bottles in the common trash so the building's owners would get fined with the next garbage collection, by blaming it on "that new girl" who just moved in, which is always me. She must not know the rules! If I happened to use a common staircase, then clutter would appear the next day to block my path (because the bitch of the building tensely hid behind her door, looking at me through the peephole because she heard me laughing with a friend as we walked upstairs, and that's not right!), like their shoes on a too big mat by their door, or (as in the case with the house here in Pearl River), a kitchen chair obviously blocking the top of a small staircase everyone used. But, not me! I can't. There's, like, history! Such as...Oh! She's better looking and I started fights with her. Huh.

After awhile, the psychotic begin a brutal obstacle course of manipulation and deceit. "Well, no one helps me move boxes!" Or: no one looks at me! I have to do something to get attention! See? It's always put back onto you to solve them as the problem, so that their pressure is put back on your shoulders as a weight, even though by now, it's such a false construct to use with me, that's its purpose is easily discernible to any healthy outside observer, which is exactly what I want. I want help for your hoarding mood swings, and violently aggressive, wildly transgressive behavioral problems, because if you're so desperate for interaction (any kind, good or bad) that you put large objects in doorways to express your illness over other humans using it, then you are so fucking nuts, you should be in society-supported housing for the critically mentally ill and infirm.

Objects for the insane take on more meaning than they should because of their inability to communicate properly with the lifeforms around them, which is about as seriously ill in "human" as you can get, given the range of communicative abilities that we possess as a species. If you can't talk, write, read, speak, listen, or even hand signal your intentions clearly to others in a way that's appropriate and easily understood, go seek a doctor's help immediately, because there's something very wrong with you. And no, it isn't me, or anything about me, my life, my appearance, my lifestyle, my education or religion, nor is it my presence, or my great abilities to be heard and understood at an expert level. I'm not your problem. It's you. Got it? Good!

https://www.omh.ny.gov/omhweb/cogdys_manual/CogDysHndbk.htm

Zombification

All of my life I've known that there's something wrong with some people, even as a baby. I've seen it in animals, too. My fluffy white dog loved almost everyone, except the crazy dyke who "dated" my mentally ill aunt in secret, much like her silent hoarding habit. Our adorable little princess doggie would immediately bristle, baring her fangs aggressively and raising her hackles in anger, and she was right. That bitch was totally fucking nuts (she died from a deliberately bad surgery done years ago), and psychosis is something most life forms pick up on. I don't want you to think that you need special superpowers to know "crazy" when you see it or feel it, because you don't.

Anomalies in our human world are fairly easy to spot, like the disordered dykes who wander around the local public library thinking they can stalk me on the sly by pretending to have a real interest in our community. By the way, say "hi" to the camera, bitch! We also note license plates to go along with your cars' make and model, because we all know each other here in Rockland County, so thanks for making it easier for us to spot you. Bitch.

Dead people are like that, too. They have a hollow feeling to them that permeates their entire being, often with a seriously bad smell to go along with their mental static (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/10/michelle-hat.html). I don't want you to think that I'm prejudiced against serious illness either, because my mom is the most disabled person I've ever met, and I've tended to her my whole life. It isn't just sickness that needs fixing. It's like there's something rotten deep in their soul.

Psychotics know we sense them as a disturbance in the force (life force, that is), and so they continue this weird gay dance of circling around human life on the periphery, until we notice the quietly lurking nut-job in a corner of a room, punching a black hole into our days and lives. They will cite loneliness as an excuse for sabotaging the peace and quiet of our happy days, but that's a total fucking lie. Psychos hurt people because it takes their minds off the innate badness that's seeped into the core of who they are. It's their essence that offends.

Back in art school, we had a friend who was like that. If you didn't enable her obsessive compulsive addictions, she lashed out at you and then tried to build a consensus around the shaky justifications she needed to cover up her bat-shit routines, like an incessant cleanliness that was (and still is) directly linked to her mental illnesses, and not a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink of a college house. My friend Cheryl, also significantly problematic like a lot of the people I met at school (what else do you call a professional graphic designer in her 30s from a professionally artistic family who decides to compete with a group of working class kids in art school?!), felt it in Lisa, too.

"It's like there's this hole inside of her <she would gesture to her midsection> that she's always looking for you to fill for her", and that was dead-on. She was so needy that it was too extreme to be around her sometimes. If you had a male friend hanging out, that was even worse. She'd try to poach him from you or the group barely after introductions had been made, like we were in a deranged competition that only she knew about, which I guess she figured gave her the "edge" she needed to "win", but at what we were never really sure of. Need I tell you that she is a former cheerleader, bisexual, and manic depressive? No?! Right! Because you already knew that, just like I did, and so did our hip art school friends.

She'd hit on gay men to see if they would "turn" for her (totally delusional), or pretend she wanted to kiss girls at the bar to put on a big gay show, if a lot of people were around and not talking to her; anything for attention. She had the requisite art-fag hairdo (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/09/art-fags.html) to go along with her overly trendy outfits, decorated with stupid hats and pilgrim shoes with too-big buckles, using a garishly bright red lipstick made for you to notice how unusual her lip shape was, cleverly accented with slightly darker lip-liner. She just tried too hard about shit no one gave two fucks about, which drove her to even more abusive behavior.

And it never ended with her. If I introduced her to a single guy, I could count on Lisa to either A) hook up with him or B) try to later on. If the guy was my boyfriend, I could rely on her to make "subtle" overtures to him in front of me that I had to prove in this wild series of ever-escalating head games that were designed for her to decrease her mental static by using me, instead of taking medication and going to therapy. If she was flat-out busted by the entire group for her machinations and schemes, she'd shrug her shoulders of any blame by saying that "if he was really into her, he wouldn't have slept with me! That's her problem", because she had that line at the ready in case she was caught. After awhile, it didn't matter if the life-form was male or female, just easy or drunk enough for her to manipulate.

My oldest brother bought into the Yuppie world hardcore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuppie), which meant that he has trafficked with some of the biggest scumbags on the planet, in the world trading center of downtown New York City. He describes the dead people he's worked with as "sketches"; outlines of people roughly drawn, without any real detail filled in. We were all pretty much saying the same thing after a certain point in our lives, and it was this: dead people were everywhere, and we could prove it. We've seen them and talked to them all of our lives. I can see dead people. So can you! How's that for a rainy day like today? Beware, humans. They're everywhere.

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/closet-psychological-issues-being-and-coming-out

Palette Knife

 

Judging by the amount of press "celebrities" receive for their illegal exploits, it's no surprise that they've co-opted t.v. for their publicity purposes, by using their prison mugshots as their latest head shot, and their crimes as the press that nabs producers looking for a "hot" star, as long as they can get insurance for a project that'll cover an abusive alcoholic who sometimes sets random fires. (Thanks for that, Bart). What's the point in reigning it in? They get as much attention for their misdeeds as they do for their phony charities, set up as tax shelters to funnel their money into. What does it matter if it's "good" or "bad"? That's entertainment! It's a twisted kind of logic.

And those are just the psychopaths who know how to channel their inner demons into violent emotions onscreen, as if on cue. You don't want to meet Special Ed/Needs without a drama queen attached to it. Much. Less. Fun. My younger cousin with autism (and a few other serious brain disorders) learned early to fake emotions by spewing crocodile tears that seemed to clear up as soon as your head turned away from him. That was even scarier, because his face fell into a dead mask with nothing behind the eyes, the heart of mental illness itself.

Because he hid his mental disorders behind closed doors (and his family refused to talk about his problems), life itself was acting to him. It was all fake, because he lives in a disassociated state of surreal unreality and, kids, if you think that sounds like some sort of fun party trick, let me assure you, it is not a good ride. Schizophrenic sufferers randomly hallucinate screaming, streaking black shadows right in the middle of a typical day, or because they were stressed out when you asked them a direct question made with appropriate eye contact.

He simply didn't know what to feel, or when to feel it, or why it was happening, and what he should do about it. It was either freak-show fireworks or nothing; temper tantrums or dead numbness. With brain disorders, patients don't understand what's happening, let alone how to process the strong feelings that are a normal part of  life. It's the range of experiences that completely throw them into illness. Imagine this: you think about a rather stressful but common event (like paying bills or going to the dentist), and just thinking about it causes you to have excruciating pains throughout your body, starting with your head. Can't imagine it? Neither can I, but that's what a mental illness does. Thinking = pain.

For addictive disorders, it's a deadly combination of personality defects, character flaws, mental instability, physical handicap, learning impairments, and emotional misfiring. I've seen psychosis in people who vacillate between a depressive blankness to a caffeinated, motor-mouthed mania, up close and personal, because we all have. Every single person on this planet knows someone in their family sickened with these illnesses, because we're the healthy ones who take care of them. Or avoid them. Or they avoid us, the next time they "fall off the wagon" (again) because it rained yesterday, and you weren't "nice" to them, or "sensitive" enough to meet their needs that always take precedence over yours, because you're healthy and they're not.

As with the most adept family member, the burden falls onto the healthiest person, who then becomes the crux upon which the balance of the entire family rests, or not, as the case may be, as it is with me. If mama ain't doin' well, ain't nobody doin' well, get it? It's a message that I have to constantly reinforce with my sick family (and there's a lot of them), by reminding them accurately of my timeline and theirs, which seems like a magical parlor trick to the insane, when it's really called "memory", and it's a normal thing to have. On most days, the  emotional range I will get back from my sickest family members will be like a game of "Spin The Wheel in Hell!", because they find mature subject matter <spin the wheel> "bad", or "sad", or is it "mad"?

And that's it. That's sometimes all I will get from the people I raised/grew up with (besides avoidance and communication blackouts), which is my direct cue that they have become sick in my absence again, and then it's time for me to perform Anne Sullivan to their Helen Keller (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sullivan), except instead of an inner super-genius, I have to get them to react to basic skills like caring and sharing, so I don't starve to death. Weird, right? You should try it sober. Like most heads-of-household, it's only by the grace of G-d and my own hard-working excellence that I avoided their diseases and addictions, because it turns out that you can't actually beat the life out of someone who's healthy. I'm living proof of that.

Yesterday, I watched a chilling episode of an old t.v. show called "American Justice" that highlighted a psychotic man who decided the only way out of his "problems" was to kill his entire family. He calmly ate breakfast, shot his wife, dragged her body to their empty ballroom (he felt "pressure" to provide for his family), then talked to his elderly mother who inquired after the noise. That's when he shot her in the head, too, but he had to leave her where she was, because she was too heavy for him to carry, and that stressed him out more. He also shot his children as they arrived home from school one-by-one, though the soccer-playing boy didn't drop right away like the other two, so he HAD TO shoot him ten times instead.

We know all of this detail about his hideous crimes because he sat down after dinner (killing is tiring, but he was feeling relaxed now that his "problems" were gone), and wrote a five page letter to his pastor, full of bullshit, half-truths, lies, excuses, finger-pointing, and blame. He left his dead family on plastic tarps in the ballroom that he felt "pressured" to buy for them, because his mother supposedly nagged him into becoming successful, then he withdrew thousands of dollars from the family's bank account (he said he was bankrupt and that was the last straw, after being fired again for aberrant behavior at work), and then he disappeared for fifteen years. He was finally free!

After his time on the road, he even married again, happily changing his name to avoid capture, working as an accountant (he blamed his OCD personality disorder for the killing spree, after finally being correctly diagnosed by a court-appointed psychiatrist, because in his arrogant delusion he never thought, "Gee, I should go talk to someone like my doctor"), and then appearing on the show to give his point of view. In between monotone recounts of a story he's told a million times (he loved the show "America's Most Wanted" and bragged to his co-workers about it, which led to his capture, like every other common criminal before him), he finally broke out into the gleeful laughter that played around his mouth the entire time he told his side of the story.

You see, he enjoyed it. He loved the fact that he excellently executed his demented plan, so much so, that he was disappointed by the lack of attention. He loved the artist rendition of him as an old man shown on "his" episode of A.M.W.; he couldn't believe how accurate it was. It looked just like him! He didn't know they had aging technology like that, told with a cagey look to his watery eyes. He knew he couldn't cop an insanity plea because of the calmly meticulous planning behind his sick crimes, but he tried it in court anyway. Worth a shot, right? I mean, as long as the cameras were rolling, why not give it a "go"? Maybe someone in "T.V. Land" would feel bad for him. Heck, he might even get married again!  He had the rest of his life to live.

 http://nypost.com/2015/02/08/charles-mansons-fiancee-wanted-to-marry-him-for-his-corpse-source/

 

Cry Wolf

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

During my last full-time gig working for other people's families before my own, I knew in my gut that the term to my lasting apprenticeship was finally waning to its rightful conclusion. I'd made bargain books for the premier English-language retailer of the world resemble its fuller priced editions for richer whiter companies, which was my mission. The best of us then graduate to "Publisher" after many years of service given to others (and their pockets), but it's never an easy graduation.

I'd made the break real during the height of my MMA/BJJ training, and like co-founder Dana White of the UFC, the best fight league in the world , I found myself in the unenviable position of couch-surfing at 40+, which is the true sign that you're actually doing it: you're making the break from the system that held you down to make a run for it, and it is ugly. I couldn't have done it with kids, dogs, and households in tow, dependent on me as they typically are, because temporarily-had crack shacks in the 'hood ain't no child's game. You have to be free, angry, and loose to do it and survive with your sanity intact, which (luckily for me), is not the problem. It's never been the problem.

So, what was? Can't you tell by now? Other people's problems, and working them out for them for free (without getting any accolades for it), just to get my job done for some old rich white dude. Same shit, different day. I knew I'd be sweatin' it hard, and I knew they'd be gunning after me just as hard, because that's the price true talent pays when you fly from the system reliant on people like you, or they all fail. A freakish silence was all the recognition I needed to recognize my power, through that circle of their fears surrounding me. You can do that and not die?! Geez.....it blows them away, know what I'm sayin'?

The small Jewish family business I worked for trained their rabid dog to attack people, and then when she went full-on loco (aided by a cult for wellness operating a seriously illegal pyramid scheme, and a lack of properly administered pharmaceuticals supervised by a serious medical professional), she turned on them, too. I think they mistakenly thought a fucked-up Israeli girl from Long Island wasn't a match for their monied control, but they were wrong. This wasn't some neurotic crisis. She was a full-blown suicidal psychotic, which they had glimpses of through her failed relationships, like the death-threat text made to our cell phones in the middle of a work day by a fired employee (her former "bestie"), and they cut loose people wholly dependent on them.

Not only did Becky threaten suicide after her firing to me, Ayelet, and some other employees, but my friend Jimmy OD'ed after hooking up with them as a freelancer, too. They kept sick people on the payroll only if they sucked their dicks, then cut them off knowing they'd be vulnerable. I blamed them for each former staffer's mental health issues and subsequent deaths just as much as any "feelgood doc" who over-prescribes Oxycontin to create a drug addict for their heroin hook-up later on down the line. I knew my rigorous comebacks from serious bone breaks and DVT on their salary without any support from them knocked them ajar, and that's what I needed to do to take them out of the business for good: prove them wrong on each and every level they'd ever had, as seriously deluded pseudo-intellectuals.

They played G-d with their sick staff in codependent plays for leverage, power, and domination, which means nothing to me. I knew my real howls at the moon beat their "Crazy Jew" schtick any day of the week, and I was right, because here I am on a Monday writing for you instead of working for them, which is proof positive in the game of publishing. One of the last times I had a verbal exchange in "human" with their disordered receptionist, she was talking at me as soon as I walked through the front door, which was odd, because she took pride in ignoring company staff as they came into the office at the beginning of every workday. She thought being a bitch was some sort of superpower, but to this New York girl, she was just another fake blonde out-of-towner drowning in her own incompetence, unfit for the game.

She forced me to take off my headphones to hear her speak to me, without waiting for a proper conversation cues to be established at my convenience, as the first stab in a series of dully petty power plays of controlling manipulations done spitefully, writ upon me first thing in the morning to catch me off guard, except for this: I use music to work with and train by, plus I've Art Directed musicians professionally, so...yeah, no go. I asked her to start over, and she did. Did I know today was the anniversary of her famous Central Park rape? Sigh....here we go. Uh, no. How would I know that? I gave her a tired look to let her know that her simplistic, childish shock tactics failed with me (yet again), because I don't have time for bullshit in my day.

She tried to make a Broadway play out of her madness anyway, by describing her annual ritual call to the detective who supposedly handled her case back in the day. Yeah....what did he say? Let's move this scene along, okay? It was one of her last attempts at yanking my chain before she curdled into a rather typical manic/depressive hatred that she controlled manipulatively, like the fucking psycho she is. At this point in my employment, I knew she screwed half the ugly staff and got "dirt" on the rest, or so she thought. She had nothing on me.

I have no idea to this day if she lied about her Puerto Rican rapist because she seemed to have a "thing" for dark guys, or whoever paid any kind of attention to her, male or female. I noticed she'd vacillate between attractions as personality/identity disordered to center around the stronger core personality of the key people in power, like me. If she sensed I liked a man, so would she, and then she'd start some weirdly secretive contest that only she knew about. But, back to her bitch post at the reception desk. So, what is this really about, Ayelet?

Well, she just happened to have a picture of the suspect who she thought was still at-large, because she just felt it in her gut, drama queens, like a pit in her stomach, you know? Like, right here <press fist to stomach to represent a knot>....NO! Not her anxiety disorder. Not that! Conversation over! Whenever she got hip (and it was hard with someone as dumb and impaired as her) that you knew she was lying to you, she'd turn on you, in the same pattern over and over again. OK, I'll bite. What the fuck....I'm waiting for the office coffee you don't make anyway. What else?

Oh! Her carefully crafted mis-en-scene was back on! We could pretend to role-play with our famous Art Director again! Great! She immediately brightened up, to produce a grainy police sketch of this:

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

That crazy bitch was so far gone, she thought a brilliantly educated Maestro (who reads practically every fucking day of her life) didn't know a picture of the fucking "Unibomber". Their crazy-ass bitch showed me, someone who worked at a newspaper during 9/11 to tell the tale to all of you, a picture that was in every fucking newspaper and media outlet for years, as the centerpiece of her madness gone murderously bad. Just like the brother of such a sick murderer, guess what I did? I turned her ass in to the authorities, friends of Earth. No one (NO ONE) fools this New York mama, fake rape victim or not. Take that to the bank, and show it to them as evidence that I'm solid for it. Ya here me?


Read it and weep. I took this info to staff meetings over their madwoman: https://www.osha.gov/

I also want healthcare for the mentally ill made mandatory for employment and ongoing health benefits through insurance carriers: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/workplace-testing-employer-requirements-29496.html

For the record, I've taken lie detector tests on job sites (as a teen for a mall retailer at an afterschool job, because Donnel used me to try stealing some clothes, and girl, you know you do that), random piss tests, voluntarily submitted blood-work, psych screenings (as written tests and other), along with everything else that goes along with being me. Now you know.


P.S. - That bitch also told me she jogged through the park after midnight alone because, you know, she's manic and stuff, and she HAD TO lose weight. Sound native to you?

High Anxiety

Compulsive patterns are hard to break. Just ask my mom. Like many women of her generation (pre-Baby Boomer and post-Gen X), she struggled to assimilate herself into a world not of her choosing. Underneath the burdens of her innate challenges, she tried to figure out who she was, without any of the guidance that we have now, thanks to the narcissistic angst of the modern "Special Needs" parent and their Autistic kids. Like them, questions about gender/identity are particularly difficult.

Imagine worrying over the very existence that you and I take for granted everyday, like: who you are attracted to and what do you do about it? They painstakingly work at the core of who they might be with a therapist over some of our most basic human instincts, like a learning-impaired child with dyslexia trying to assemble the puzzle pieces that words represent. Can you imagine that? 

No wonder the disordered reach out wrongly (now numbered as 5 out of 6 people, or 8 out of 10), seeking shelter from the storms that brew inside their heads. Lashing out feels better than trying to understand their garbled perceptions of human speech, because concepts need to be labored over later, when they feel like they can process our communications better, with the guidance of an expert who's researched brain disorders for many years.

It was in this way that I came to accept my mission of breaking through to my own mother's badly broken brain (and becoming an excellent mother way before my actual biologically appropriate time), stuttered and repetitive as it is. When she "argues" with me (and it really isn't arguing to me, because I'm in control while she is not, and she doesn't like that), it's to release the pent-up stress that is the result of her disorders and illnesses.

Even worse for my mom is the trap her education brings to her incorrect assumptions and improper responses, like: how can she have me as a brilliant daughter, when she's the one who studied science? She doesn't understand that genius is genetic and many-abled, because she feels her arrogance must be vigilantly guarded, lest the knowledge from all of her over-wrought degrees (that all of us supported her in having), evaporate in an instant, like her mental faculties do during her sickest times.

In compensation for her low points, she learned to cover up her chronically anti-social behavior (like many people suffering with serious brain disorders do, to avoid detection as a life strategy), by re-orientating them around more conventionally disorientating events, like flying in an airplane, which is a common enough phobia that passes as a legitimate non-mental illness she can play to the hilt by letting her anxieties out under that appropriate cloud cover. She channels nervousness and anxietty brought on by ordinary events (that would surely reveal the depths of her diseases) into everyday compulsions that appear harmless on the surface, like washing dishes or folding laundry.

The problem with that is that she never learned to express her incorrect trains of thought accurately (which don't hold up under careful scrutiny well), because those conversations would reveal her serious compulsive-obsessivenesss that she inappropriately feels she can manage because she studied botany in school over sixty years ago. It doesn't make any sense, and a closer examination of her reasoning process reveals to a studied scholar (like me) exactly why doing laundry is not the same as genuine grief, which she will do anything to avoid, because emotional pain feels likee the psychic pain that is her life.

In avoidance of feeling feelings that are crucial to our health (like how a good night's sleep eludes her during the manic stress that occurs around heightened emotional times like holiday seasons, some of the worst emotional stress our mentally ill family members have), many people like her hoard and over-attach emotions to objects that have no real significance, then work a complex scheme to cover it up, like causing a hysterical fight over blinds that were raised slightly askew. For example, when my grandmother died, I mourned her thoroughly. I felt sadness, a deep sense of loss, and also a joy at having known her. I would not be me without her. Such was the gift that a life like hers brings, so that a big void is necessarily left in her wake. 

I don't dislike feeling very strong emotions, because I know I can process them correctly over time with an appropriate thought process, but the most disordered among us sometimes can't even get out of bed in the morning (my mom gets that typical manic-depressive "surge" of energy at night, because she also has Circadian Rhythm Disorder, sometimes puttering around until 4:30 a.m.), let alone contemplate concepts like life and death. They break life down into superficial, bite-sized bits that become extremely unproductive over time, especially in isolation, causing the abuse that they feel they need to keep their "creature comforts" in place that are signs of severe emotional distress.

Case in point, my mom has a big healthcare appointment coming up, which is a symptom of her holiday stress. Doctor appointments are often used to block out emotions she can't handle, so she tap-dances around her mental illnesses by using more socially acceptable illnesses as cover-ups. Like a lot of chronically sick people, she is disturbed by old-fashioned ideas about mental institutions that no longer exist, but she doesn't know that. Her brain just tells her to avoid detection at all costs, even if it leads to the death of a loved one, which she will regret later on after her fugue state has passed. My mom has had to retract her false claims of "elder abuse" thrown at me during her life stress (under threat of legal prosecution by family who has also been falsely accused by her), because she couldn't handle my hard move from Brooklyn that was tied to her basement area as my storage unit, and the use of her car for me to painfully move all my stuff by myself over the course of three days.

After I told her on the last day that I was too tired to do the psychotherapy she needed to "see" my stuff in her basement (which would have been too grueling for me to supervise, because her delusions make her MS symptoms worse, and I was already physically exhausted), so I simply told her: "I have nothing left to give", which is her worst nightmare. She called the cops for me not being her nursemaid during my hardest time. That's it. In fact, the policemen who responded to her panicky call have picked her up off the floor before, through her Life Alert system, one that took years for us to enforce properly with her, and then she failed a basic recognition test. "Nope, never seen you before", as he reminded her that he was there for her when she broke her shoulder in seven places, because he picked her up off the floor and called for an ambulance.

He then administered the same test with me, and I responded correctly that he and I had never met before at my mother's house, which was true. It was already over with at that point, even as my mom told him I was "nuts" because she is mad, something authority figures often hear: the classically immature "I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I" speech given in lieu of a more carefully reasoned rationale. The jig was up and he and I knew it, as we exchanged pointed glances she missed during her diva crisis about me not emotionally catering to her during my real life event, which is part of a destructive family pattern firmly in place. He warned her then that she had no legal right to lock me out because I had already established residency, which she promptly forgot as soon as they walked away, by trying to slam the door in my face again.

I then called the two officers now present back to her rapidly closing front door, as they warned her once again (repetition is commonplace for Special Needs people) that she has no legal right to change the locks on me, because delusional paranoid states are some of the most challenging times of communication with the sick who walk, talk, work, and live among us. She might not actually have any memories attached to my stress, because as soon as she is calmed, soothed, and stroked like a puppy, she forgets about other people, even the ones she gave birth to, which she naturally doesn't remember well, because "they" gave her ether during her labors, as she lay unconscious from heavy sedation. "Yeah, one minute I'm in labor, and the next thing I had a baby!", she likes to tell me. And how...exactly? "I don't know! I was 'out' like a light!", which is unlike any birthing experience I've ever seen or heard of.

That's the crux of it in a nutshell: stress and panic reorient her chemically addicted brain to use other people as her drug to get high off of, as serious a sickness as any strung-out heroin junkie. Right now, she's busy nursing the high from her next doctor's appointment, which happens next week, resulting in typical conversations like "I can't think of anything right now! I 'have to' (and it's always HAVE TO) focus on my mouth pain and 'getting through' (like some soldier in combat) my appointment next week. Once that's over, I can 'focus' again"!, which is pure bullshit. She doesn't ever snap to "after" her moments, but the deferred payment program helps her to successfully avoid stressful times, like birthdays and Christmases, especially if she falsely pads her schedule to be artificially busy, as clever a deceit as any con by a really good cat burglar.

She's totally full of shit about being present and available for you somewhere off in the distant future when she feels better (because I fix what's wrong while she's on the nod), and that's just the way addicts like it: they can get high off of you during their blackout times, even when she remembers days, weeks, and months later that she just abused the one woman around her who's healthy enough to keep her alive, and that's me. Then, in the middle of the night when no one's around to see her or help her, she cries herself to sleep, because she remembers that she almost killed me through abuse and neglect. 

And that's the worse part of it all: that a smart woman who can make me a perfect grilled cheese is alone by herself every night, remembering in one big flood of emotions that the genuine love she feels for me was replaced by an extremely violent hate that is psychosis. That's what I cannot abide by any longer, and neither should you. We want more for you. We want you to get better. We. Want. More. I want a real mother. I want the woman who worked at the Botanical Gardens, who taught me all about the native trees, plants, and flowers we love that we can also point out and name together in Latin or French, as well as English. That's who I want back. You can keep the abusive, obsessive-compulsive addict this Christmas.

Eat "Phresh"

Homemade, yo! This is me and my making, kids. Try it at home.

People from the 'hood are all crazy, which is the point. Hate someone different than you? Disenfranchise them through systemic abuses that are also lawful, and then push them to the margins to suffer sight unseen, where they will languish until the next generation also has hurt encoded within their DNA, like a ticking time bomb. It's certainly one of the motives behind every mass genocide perpetrated throughout human history; to deliver wrongs unto you and your children that they won't recover from, except for one minor detail. We know about it, with the "we" being you and me and anyone else reading this, hip to the game that plays out between good and evil every day, on this chessboard that is life itself.

So, while the t.v. media machine churned out canned surprise, showy tongue-clucking, and a false show of horror at some well-known sandwich shills' public downfall, I chuckled wryly to myself as I watched what passes for news these days, having been down this road before. I had a friend who nervously spit out common sayings as a means of coping with stress, or when she couldn't quite figure out solutions to the problem at hand, and that was this: where there's smoke, there's fire. It's kinda like the "from the frying pan into the fire", which is also the name of a tugboat restaurant called "The Frying Pan" that's parked in New York's Hudson River. That was one of the last times I saw my poorly beleaguered friend.

You see, when I was still a junior designer in New York, I worked with a twitchy Italian-American woman who has a constant expression of wide-eyed tension on her face at all times, accurately reflecting her nervously compulsive state of being. She could do the same task twenty million times, but she was also co-dependent on the people around her to lean on when she gave out (as long as she paid them to be her allies and friends), when they were really supposed to be co-workers and employees. She was hooked on shopping (made worse by her studios' location in a building known for wholesalers who had seasonal sample sales all the time), driving her to create fake acts of kindness ("Let's close the studio and shop!"), when we really were just recycling our pay out of one pocket and into another.

I didn't really mind the break from my labors that were sometimes challenging but often somewhat mindless (I was still paying my dues in the industry) plus I'm no addict, but her longtime assistant fared worse under her strict guidelines, for living off of what she considered "her" dime: Carrie was overweight, divorced, and living with her mother, though when I was there, she was recently spared her free "Pizza Fridays" because our boss was on a new diet, one that depended greatly on buying this company's kind of food. It was baffling, just like her heated and almost daily arguments with her second husband, a stressed-out Italian-American cop who was clearly part of her pattern. She didn't have any children, and by the freaked out way she had about her all the time, I knew better than to ask. She was a woman at that age when being barren can crack a fragile woman hard.

Because of her touchy mannerisms, I made her at first for a pampered, kept woman, but over the course of my freelance employ there (she couldn't afford to pay me health insurance but kept me on as part of her office staff for two years, which is now illegal to do in NYC), I found out that she was just like any other New Yorker struggling with a big dysfunctional family and living in a small cheap apartment in Mount Vernon, like the rest of us. It was weird, but given her odd eccentricities, it made total sense. Her arrogant sense of superiority hid obvious insecurities, with her rather tenuous hold on reality.

After a time, me and the woman who worked for her at her design firm asked her a direct question one afternoon, emboldened with knowing looks we gave each other as we turned our office chairs to her, because our computers faced the walls with our backs to one another, leaving the owner to be the only one who could see all three computers at the same time, and that was this: what exactly do you intend to do when you stop paying some company to feed you? How will you feed yourself? She shrugged it off lightly, playing busy with never-ending deadlines, brushing off our serious question with a pointedly dumb shrug, "I guess I'll just have to keep buying their food," which was our exact point to her: you need to buy their chemically laden food to stay "thin" because you can't do it on your own, despite her status at the time as a publishing expert with access to just about any type of information that existed on the planet. 

Welcome to "AA" in this century, Carol! I'll see you later on, if you've indeed mastered food and nutrition, yet. I know I have. By the way, I know you scoped me out upon my return to New York City from out west, after I visited you openly in your office empty of employees, because your business went downhill when Vince's business dried up, and you were both coasting on back-list content created by a lot of other artists and designers, like me and Carrie. You thought you were spying on me during my visit to St. Patrick's Cathedral to light a candle but, my dear, I both heard and saw you there out of the corner of my eye, mumbling to yourself that I was still "too young" and "too pretty" for you to talk to anymore, because you felt that you didn't have any advantages over me anymore. Clever, girl. You never did. 

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

Cappucino

http://coffee.wikia.com/wiki/Espresso_Machine

Like I wrote in another post, jerk-offs have it really hard in our culture, particularly when they have to hide their fascination with stupid shiny gadgets, and so much so, I have invented a name for them that you may feel free to use with impunity called "Gadgeteers". Similar in douchebag intensity to "Marketeers" who serve to do those annoying sales jobs you don't have time for because you make the stuff they sell, they are equally creepy to be around for any real length of time.

I've crossed paths with many, many different types of douchebags in my lifetime, but for some reason (perhaps an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder with extreme Hobbit Hoarding built right in), people who are dicks about objects seem to strike an extra annoying cord with most logical, sane Homo sapiens (Latin: "wise person"). My friend with a rock n' roll name was just such a character. He's fun to drink with, but you don't want to take him home with you. You know? He has no real fucking clue about life at all, because he's the product of successful immigrant parents who coddled him like the half-retard he really is.

When I was forced out of economic necessity to couch-surf at my friend's pad for awhile, he wasted no time in telegraphing his disdain for my human life by immediately dragging me on an insane and totally unnecessary run to a big bargain center in the 'hood, after he forgot the club card for the store at the cash register loaded with his greedy goods, thus forcing us to double-back and pick it up at his boy's house, because he doesn't actually have a card of his own for real. This particular fucked up shopping trip was actually brought on by his stress/anxiety/excitement of having a woman as beautiful as me living in somewhat close proximity to him. 

After said completely unnecessary and totally fucking weird trip to his magically dull "Land of Programmable Hoarding Zombies" (I left empty-handed because I was shocked by the utterly uselessness that two pounds of fake orange cheese curls in a huge plastic tub actively leaking toxic fumes right underneath your nose represents to a healthy human like me), my friend proceeded to squirrel away his weird collection of towels and washcloths in his room, tucked away safely behind closed doors, a room that he actively keeps under lock and key (paranoid as that is in your own home), with a thick silver chain.

He also assured me with confidence that I no longer needed a doctor or real medicine anymore because he had a fully stocked "Pill Cabinet" stocked with the weirdest snake oil shit I have ever seen in my life, shit that he tried to sell me by describing the powerfully accurate phenomenon behind shark oil droplets, because he has never seen an old shark in his life, ever! He kinda felt bad for me (naive as I am), because my doctor has a thriving active practice with years of schooling and training done in New York's leading scholarly institutions and hospitals, because, like, they don't tell you the truth. Pharmaceutical companies do that! And then he showed the wacky fucking brochure that the crazy lady on the first floor of the apartment building I used to live in (but was forced out of, hence the couch-surfing phase I was forced into), peddles around the place to support her biracial boy who is sometimes in school, and sometimes not.

Oh, and I was also tasked with fixing his incredibly complex and overly expensive robot toy that never made a cup of coffee once, because (since I was staying there "rent-free"), I owed him a lifetime of service and slavery by daring to survive and thrive (I was already back at work) right underneath his nose and, disgustingly enough, in his own house! 
Of course, he rifled through my stuff while I was at work, stealing a cool bus sign that I found in this squalid tenement I'd been cleaning out to live in, as payment for his many "services" rendered to me, in addition to: my gift of many hardcover books to him and his cousin from the company I was working at while I stayed there, plus another rare gift I'd given him a few Christmases back of an original framed vinyl Elvis album that I took right off my own wall, the very same rock god he'd been named after by his sweet Puerto Rican mother.

It was an utter farce. I soon learned what every friend he'd ever had stay there with him knew (and there were tons: his brother surfed the couch before me, there was a recent ex-girlfriend brought down-low by a hurricane so she was ripe for the grabbing, and then there was little ole me...sensing a pattern here?), and that is this: Elvis is totally fucking insane and physically abusive, in between rounds of beers with some fun thrown into the mix by his eccentric personality. I fiddled with his overly complex, crazy piece of crap for awhile with the instruction manual, then I found an actual stove-top coffeemaker in the cabinets that operated solely on gas burner power and someone putting coffee in the top of it to brew, because I had to go to work in the morning.

He was so distraught by the long death of his robot toy, that he tried in vain to pull at least five other people into the situation while I stayed with him. First it was me, then his cousin who lives in an illegal apartment downstairs, then some of his contractor buddies (yeah, more stringent blue collar thought-building and a-happening types..this should totally work) who also grunted in anger at the thing, and then, most weirdly, his coked-up IT friend who took the same amount of time as me (Genius is great!) to finally deliver him the same bad news: this shit is broke, yo. After his shiny robot was finally pronounced dead at the scene forever, he admitted what his crew had known for years; his cheap-ass bought the thing after it had "fallen off the truck", which is a cutesy thug name for a "hot" stolen item, and given the banged-up nature of the box it came in, it had probably never worked, ever.

This, after he tortured everyone around him for years with some stupid fucking machine that had never worked, all because Elvis wanted to fuck around with us as objects for his curiosity in his stupid fucking "Demento World". In his weird world, smart people have to pay a stiff price for out-thinking him by performing magic tricks, like fixing something that never worked, as payback for his broken brain. 
He hadn't liked the hubris behind his coke dealer/IT service guy, so in retaliation for his gifts, Elvis would present his riddle within an enigma to solve, but not before he begged me to stay awake long enough to rake him over the coals intellectually as payment for his services. 
I didn't really have a choice because his guests were meant to torture me into staying awake in the living room where the couch is (and I had work in the morning), while he did cocaine with them all night.

I did stay awake on my own, and then I also found the little bag of coke from his dealer hidden underneath the illegal bootleg DVD's that he also hoards on his coffee table, which gave me all the leverage I needed to stay alive a little while longer under his roof. But don't you fret. It was interesting for me, too, readers! His coke dealer took the machine in payment for the drugs, and from there on out, for the rest of my time staying on his couch, a big empty space stood on his counter-top where that useless hunk of junk had been, and I was "allowed" to make my morning cup of coffee in peace while he hid in his room behind a closed door, under lock and key. 

He also has a security camera above his front door that shows a picture of who's there on his computer screen, an awning with the wrong street address prominently printed on it because he has made lots of enemies in his lifetime, and a conspicuously absent Master Illuminator from his life. That would be me, folks, the most important object that has ever been housed under his roof, except for this very key and quite central fact of life: I ain't no coffeemaker. You out, boy.

http://chn.ge/1RX52GW

 

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

This one's for you today, Ms. Rousey! It ain't no big thang in our world, girl. Shake it off, and get the fuck back out there. We all know you ain't a real Samurai Warrior unless you been tried and tested through failure. That's why we get all the good stuff in this life, yo. We don't take the easy way out ;)

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%BE%8D