Dress Rehearsal

Cover for the single "Pass the Mic" by Beastie Boys

New York kids have it rough. Every day is a big fucking drama (without the show business money and audience applause), that your overly histrionic parents stage for disordered friends and family in a rigidly codependent cycle with a distinct pattern, and all you want is some fucking milky tea with cookies after a cold rainy day at school and your after-school job. You know? Everything's a big fucking show, like an act that has three distinctly separate parts with different hair and makeup, sparkly outfit changes, and obligatory curtain calls made mandatory just for them. It's a horrible place where you have to figure out for them (as a three year old) why they don't just get up and "go", because none of it has anything to do with you in the least, and you're a genius toddler who just wants some fucking hot chocolate with whipped cream on top when it's cold outside.

It's excruciating solving other people's problems all day long just to have the simplest, most basic human needs neglected right in your cute lil' kiddie face (and you did nothing wrong, again), whether it's done intentionally or during their self-proclaimed "mental health day", and you know how that goes down: the shades HAVE TO be pulled down so no light can penetrate the tomb-like darkness of their inner sanctum (like a parents' bedroom), you wet a washcloth for said drama queen's head (ahem, hi Diane), and absolutely no noises can be made by anyone or anything, because it's three in the afternoon and you just want a fucking snack like any other young human in your tribe does. 

Children of New York, and other peoples of the world: today I officially declare that the hyped-up bullshit act ends. Tell someone (anyone!) that you have a rabid drama-queen for a parent, and teachers: get involved. It's us or them, and we fight for human rights violations as social justice providers on the daily that our societies so desperately need. We can either take care of each other, let them burn us out completely, or we can take back the day by not letting their madness win. I know what I decided a very long time ago. Don't let it happen to you and your life, or you might go down with them. It's time to drop the act. Stop acting like life is a big commercial, and get real with it. Who's with me?!

https://www.nami.org/Find-Support/Family-Members-and-Caregivers 

For my Rockland peeps: http://namirockland.org/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamite_%28magazine%29

Pass the Mic

Beastie Boys

If you can feel what I'm feeling then it's a musical masterpiece
Hear what I'm dealing with then that's cool at least
What's running through my mind comes through in my walk
True feelings are shown from the way that I talk and this is me, y'all
An M.C., y'all my name is M.C.A. and I still do what I please
And now I'd like to introduce (what's up?)
I'll pass the mic to D for a fistful of truth

The name is D, y'all, and I don't play
And I can rock a block party 'till your hair turns grey
(So, what you sayin'?) I explode on site
I'm like Jimmy Walker, I'm (dy-no-mite!)
And now I'd like to pass the mic
To Adrock, c'mon and do anything you like

I'm the A-D-R-O-C-K, in the place with the bass, I'm going all the way
I can't stop y'all, tock-tick, y'all
And if… Full lyrics on Google Play

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

Swap

For years, my mom and her immediate family have been stuck in deeply ingrained patterns of dysfunction that are hard not to notice, though if they are openly observed and remarked upon, they freak out to prevent revelation, which is part of the abusive cycle they remain trapped in. It's heart-breaking to watch sometimes, because like children who want candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I know that their bad choices will only make them sicker through my continued neglect. And just like I know that all those pop-culture movies contributing to deliberately false ideas about real American life that we know aren't true (just like I know that people in India do not break out into Bollywood-type skits every time someone gets engaged, funny as that might in the entertainment world), I know that they argue with me because they fear committal to a state mental institution, like old horror movies filmed in black-and-white.

They don't realize that those abusive types of hospitals are a thing of the past, because they fear healthcare, too, just like my mother's youngest sister hides her irrational phobias over rain and storms, because she knows it's another symptom of her psychoses. It was in this manner that my mother and her family hid the worst of their sicknesses behind socially acceptable hobbies like cleaning and eating and shopping, because they provide easier cover than drinking and smoking, which they mistakenly believe are more open manifestations of mental illness and the stress that produces.

Of course, their weirder addictions simply made our households much more stressful to reveal to anyone outside of our family group (which was part of the point), forcing me and my Gen-X friends into old patterns of drinking and smoking to relieve the inner tension cause by their abusive patterns, which put us right back to where our Depression-Era grandparents lived: at hip, flapper-type bistros full of smoky jazz and fun, which was not at all what my mom and her sisters wanted. They can't smoke, or drink, or have fun easily, because their nervous tensions make them feel nauseous all the time, especially when they don't take their medications. 

My youngest aunt is so "pukesy-poo" (they make up cutesy names to hide the root cause of their anxieties), that as kids, we knew she'd get sick from sitting in a rocking chair that moved slightly (so we'd sneak up behind her to tilt the chair back-and-forth, making her squeal), or from hearing about someone vomiting (so we'd imitate puking sounds with our grandpa), or it might be that she simply she wasn't sipping from a straw the stomach-calming sodas that she's addicted to.

In was in this way that my mom's middle sister became a hardcore food addict, with an addiction so severe that she has to attend weekly group meetings and pay out big bucks to some unhealthy food company that "has to" feed her controlled portion-sizes of chemically-laden food that will surely kill her off someday soon, like my mom's Aspartame-addicted youngest sister. They haven't actually conquered anything in this world. If anything, their silent generation of "Do-Nothings" have created even worse patterns with harder addictions, like hoarding and binge eating, or simulating a "shopper's high" through a covertly athletic "runner's high", making it extremely difficult to diagnose and treat, which is also part of the point.

One year, my infamously large "Moose Dog" accompanied me to my mom's eating-disordered sisters' house in upstate Westchester with me, staying overnight in her basement on Christmas Day Eve, with the understanding that he and I would leave early the next morning for my mom's place in Rockland after staying the night, because I wanted access to her immediate back yard for bathroom runs that are easier when no else is around, like we did whilst in the country. She was fine with that, and so throughout the day, as other family stopped by, I went up-and-down the basement stairs to the rest of the house, periodically checking in on my still-young Malamaute.

At some point during the day, Ted had figured out how to open up sealed plastic containers to gorge himself sight unseen, because on a food run to the garage, my cousin (her son) was looking in the garage and then the basement room for something, while I held Ted's leash and looking on. He stuttered a bit at first while he looked for something his mom had asked for, because where some such holiday food had been stored were the missing Christmas cookies that my aunt and her "fat friends" (the women who join her in her periodic over-eating that's related to their disorders), trade with each other under the cloud cover of a traditional church cookie swap.

You see, Ted masterfully uncapped (without marring them) the tops of each container with Christmas cookies, eating every single one of them, and it was at least three large flat containers that can hold sheet-pan sized cakes. Hilarity ensued, as first my other cousin (her second son), and then my aunt joined us in the mysterious search for her cookie-swap cookies. We all laughed about it, as Ted reposed regally upon on the cool tile floor near the basement door, in a tellingly calm Zen-like fatness, well-satisfied with his holiday endeavors, unruffled as he was because he successfully masterminded this quest for food done on the sly, because winter is coming!! Feed me fat!! FAT!!!

But that's not why my cousins were laughing. They loved Teds' "taking one for the team", because each and every year my cousin's suffer with this gaggle of crazy females and their weird cookie obsession, because even more than that, they bake poorly on purpose to hurt one another with. Addicts don't eat food because it tastes good like we do. No, the point behind their cooking is to make the drug that they need to get high (taste, flavor, and skill aside), and that's exactly why my cousins will always remember one very special dog who ate all the food that sucked, forever putting him in their memory favorably, because your food addiction is no match for my dogs, ladies.  
You're not even as good as one of my animals, woman.