Moondance

I knew that my relationship with a certain young Mr. Mulvihill wouldn't last for very long because he was too proud of being inbred and ignorant as fuck, in addition to his poor diet, lack of appropriate sleep habits, and near-daily drinking habit to the point of intoxication, not to mention his utter lack of a well-rounded education. Irish-American boys had become my comfort food, best dated between long-term romances like, say, during a summertime spent mostly at the beach, to be dropped once the party turned violent, and in their battered homes, it always did. Someone else always started swinging first.

But, for a time, it was easy enough for me to see someone who lived a half an hour's drive away from me (with no traffic), so I could pursue my work life in the city. He didn't like the patterns of our weekend romance, but I honestly didn't have much more to offer someone who, while financially successful, remained a high school dropout. He was lost without his "homies", even as he hated being stuck in a co-dependent drunkfest with the old gang at Gerritsen Beach. He was a mechanically-inclined millionaire with a depressingly unfinished house in an insular pocket of Brooklyn, with horrible social skills and a peculiarly small worldview.

There wasn't anything I could do for him unless he did it himself, and with the fistfuls of cash he always had on hand, he seemed to think that he called all the shots with me, a world-class art director. It was delusional and arrogant, but money will do that to ya. He could run his yard and his demented crew, and that was about it. I'd never had a life that small, and the tension of our ill-fitted pairing showed early and quick. I broke up with him often, and the stress of being stalked and pursued yet again in my late 30s, after all my life experiences, made me angrier than ever.

I didn't want the whole juvenile "push-and-pull" dating thing; I never had. I wanted a hot love affair that lasts forever. I was the "queen of clean breaks" who bore her former suitors no ill will, but John had inroads with my family that made me worth pursuing in his mind, which also made me incredibly dangerous to someone as small-time as him. I could wreck him and his family forever with a call to the cops because of his past, and he knew it. Ultimately, after one night's big showdown, that was it. He knew better than to push his way into my life and my home, because he begged me afterward not to press charges.

His "ex" wife (not officially divorced though legally separated, as I later found out that he lied to me) had pursued domestic violence charges with a vengeance designed to chain him even tighter to her, and I was more than fine with that. I didn't need their brutal mind games in my life. Besides, the whole weird love triangle between him, his best friend, and his best friend's wife totally freaked me out, as did the strange semi-incestuous attachment his half-sister had to him. It was creepy and weird, and it felt like I was living someone else's life besides mine. I wanted out, and I got it by fighting for it.

That isn't to say we didn't ever get long. Obviously, a handsome Mick with a good job rolls off me the way water does a duck's back. It wasn't exactly unflattering, and cute New York boys have tons of confidence and charm, especially on a Friday night with their pockets full of pay for boozy food-and-drink extravagances. But, I was no ingenue. More than one girl has sat back and watched a parade of savvy boys try to play me like a fiddle. It takes a lot of finesse. Suffice to say, we had enough cultural commonalities that being with him could be as fun as getting drunk at a football game with a tailgate party full of cheeseburgers. You don't do it often, but once in awhile is fine, you know? I just didn't need season tickets to the show.

One of our last dates was one of our best, though with his crew's challenged perceptions about time, it went on for far too long. They tried to squeeze a good time out of me the way show-biz parents overbearingly set up their kids for child molestation: maybe they didn't mean to hurt me at first, but after their tenth beer or ninth hour, I could feel the suppressed rage of their intolerance towards me chafe like an ugly wool sweater that itched a red rash all over you. It was oppressive. The concert we went to see at Jones Beach* was like that.

They were a little too happy about seeing a show by a notoriously temperamental artist who'd walk off the stage in a huff if he felt the "vibe" from the audience wasn't right. I had that to look forward to, as well as the long car ride (with his sister and best friends, again) who still thought drinking and driving was fun, like being trapped in a time machine from the 70s or 80s. It was a bad feeling, especially with their young girl in the car, too. We got there way too early, which meant more boring hours in a parking lot trying to drink and have fun with people who don't know how to talk.

Finally, it was time to see the show. John was huffy with me in the seats because he hated one of my more mild college stories that I told to pass the time. His best friend defended me by saying that John had an experience like that, too, and he was more subdued after being caught in another lie. And then, just like that, the magic happened. Van Morrison sang one of his most famous songs about the moon in October skies just as a pair of swans entwined neck-in-neck swam by the stage in the surrounding Long Island Sound, sparkling moonlight and twinkling pianos and all. I wished that could have been our good summertime ending, but it was not. Still, I have one more memory to go along with one heck of a talented Irishman, diva or no. It was much appreciated, lad. Ta!




* http://www.dec.ny.gov/outdoor/66660.html

Pretty Boy

Out of all of the kids in our family, my middle brother Bernie perhaps suffered the most from bullying because of his sensitivity, his misunderstandings, and his innate emotional difficulties that he's struggled with since birth. We were always marked as "different" from our unique status as genuine ethnic minorities, whether or not we dressed the part, like some insane white lady from the Midwest looking to indulge her bipolar bisexual jungle fever by "passing" (lying) as another ethnic group, or an obvious jungle tribal reference overdone with faux primitive costumes and lots of weirdo makeup from some overly expensive gay Broadway musical. Reality is a much better, subtler artist than that.

We didn't fit in all the usual ways, and it wasn't something that the other children around us or their parents (or even our teachers), would be able to discern readily, because like the Dodo bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodo), we are a very small tribe. We just didn't expect to meet anyone like us, ever, so it didn't really seem like that big a deal to us when we didn't meet them out in the world. So. <shrug> It was just like at home, with my mom's loud Italian/Irish family who'd dominate any gathering anyway with their hysterical shrieks, unless one of our native werewolves got drunk and smashed his car while re-parking it in our very own driveway, which naturally would take center stage as the primary household drama of the day.

But, for Bernard, it was different. He responded with an intensity that frightened us, like his nighttime roaming that'd find him downstairs rummaging through the closet in the spare bedroom, or opening the door to the garage, or, even weirder, just standing in a corner facing the wall, like some horror movie vision with ghosts and ghouls. His anger was scary-bad, and we had no idea where it came from, other than he was born to it, and that's just the way it was. My oldest brother played the all-knowing diplomat who'd work a room like a seasoned politician using his special blend of phony charm, my youngest brother played the spoiled brat for all it was worth, I simply stood up and fought back, while Bernie continued to struggle with a response to it, like the schoolwork that so often evaded him.

We'd have impromptu boxing sessions in the backyard, so we'd develop the confidence to fight back if we were attacked, but given our father's background, his sparring sessions were dubious at best. He told us he "studied" at the famous Gleason's Gym in Brooklyn, a well-known boxing studio in the city (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleason%27s_Gym), but just like our most troubled brother, he could turn on you, too, by taking pleasure in besting us as children, that he defended while laughing. "Well, I might not be able to 'beat' you for much longer", which is an odd thing to say to a young girl and her smaller brothers, when he was fully grown at 6 ft. He liked to lord it over us by looming angrily above our heads and breathing heavily like a bull ready to charge. It was that bizarre.

If we dared to ask them how they problem-solved bad situations as children, they would give us showbiz answers like "Oh, I was so funny I just joked my way out of it", which, if you've ever met my mother, you'd immediately know is total bullshit. It was the same with my dad. He'd lie just like my mom: because it was raining, or sunny, or the sun came up. No good reason for it. Ever. And so, just like every other facet of our lives, we had to think our own way out of it, because if we had the audacity to speak up, we'd be punished for it by my dad, who made a scene at school with a teacher who was much smaller than him, with violent curses and threats. After he pulled that trick at elementary school with Bernard's teacher (who just happened to have a French-Canadian last name, and be several feet shorter), parents were forbidden from our lives, which is what they wanted anyway.

We were just as stressed out at school as my middle brother, but because my father favored him above us —he wanted to flatter himself into feeling like they were the same type of person, which my brother chafed at all the time, because he knows my dad, and any comparisons are not favorable to him—we were left to figure it out on our own successfully, which we did, with some of us better at it than others (ahem, that's me). Whereas their name-calling became our playground opportunity to throw a few good curse words around, Bernie would crumble under it. "Pretty boy! Pretty boy!" He was taunted by the less attractive boys for his blue eyes, long eyelashes, golden brown curls, and olive skin that tanned with just a hint of sun, making him a stand-out target for the uglier kids in his classes. 

I was a "nerd" who couldn't compete with the pampered Jewish girls and their expensive Gloria Vanderbilt jeans in the coveted dark wash that meant they were brand new from the mall and unworn by any other siblings in the house, while my mom might put out my brothers old Toughskin jeans from Sears and then shrug it off. "What?" She'd act offended. "You're 'lucky' to have any clothes at all! Jeans are jeans!" This, from a woman whose favorite color in the 70s was a "shit brown" made into long polyester skirts worn with clunky orthopedic shoes that made her resemble a nun, or a lesbian, or a lesbian nun. Take your pick. She'd blow it off as part of her "genius cred" that went with science, which meant she could be completely stupid about anything that wasn't under a microscope or in a Petri* dish.

Bernie, in comparison to us, always felt insecure. I could read, spell, write, speak, and draw brilliantly, while my oldest brother aced his grades and played sports. But Bernie just didn't fit into any niches at all. He had learning disabilities that made school torture for him, and the rather generic team sports at our American schools were lame. He'd try them and then abandon them all, like he was trying on clothes. After my father left home, we'd talk about applying to the colleges he was deathly afraid of, because he couldn't take the tests.  We talked about the Army, but during the height of Reagan's "Cold War" years, we were afraid he'd be drafted into some bullshit war with the Soviet Union, when, in truth, they starved behind their walls and killed each other off way quicker than we ever could, but that information came to us only after the Berlin Wall fell.

After a year in the freezing north of New York that can shake loose the heartiest of souls, he came home for good, to live at home with my mother while attending school, and that was the trick of it for him. He gave up on the skills he couldn't master to focus on the numbers that spoke to him in the only language he really understands, which allowed him to attend my father's Alma mater. Because of my father's identity/personality disorders, he's hell when you cross-over into whatever he feels is his area(s) of "expertise", though like any other life situation in our lives, I'm happy to report that my brother aced him with his experience, not that my father didn't try and best him by ruining it in comparison to his life experiences, which is always made to seem much harder than anyone around him, as part of the con job.

Not only did my brother graduate with a Bachelor's degree in Accounting, he received an MBA in the same four years, something my father couldn't top as an accomplishment. And just like so much in our lives, the style of fighting we felt in our blood as children became the sport that you watch today in the UFC. How's that for winning? He's the most belted martial artist in our family, the strongest male sibling, and he can also count like a muthafucka. The universe cares about us, man. Really. Like, way more than our biological parents, yo! But not more than this here Acadian Métis mama. No. Not more than me. I love you more. I love you more than all of them.

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

Thug Life 4E

Trifling 'hood rats ain't nuthin' new to me. Like I've explained to y'all  before, the first real criminals I met who tried to scam me were my very own family."Home" and "house" and "safe" were never really words that signified good places for me to live in, as my sickest family members told me every time they thought I "stepped out" of line of their controlling manipulations. Continually consistent and strongly applied coercion is the very first sign to working class kids that our parents or older siblings are gearing up for their next big push at us, in a series of highly coordinated acts that spoke of their persistent ability to attack me behind my back as a child, which solidified my "head of household" status to me over and over again, at a very young age, when I was just some po' girl chile with no one to help me out, and nowhere to go.

Except that I did. I always had my excellently faithful grandparents to back me up with their good health and superior strength, as a direct contradiction to the fearful paranoia that so deeply marks the sickest people around us. They illegally violated our privacy and sense of security every time they were caught abusing us, and that could happen at any time, with their violently frenzied periods of deep paranoia that define the day-to-day reality that is mental illness and psychoses. It became so bad, me and my brothers began threatening exposure to our school teachers and social services, with the achievement of a new family policy clearly stipulating that there would be no hits to the head, so as to prevent telling marks from clearly showing where anyone of authority could see them, not that we thought foster care was any better than what we had. We knew.

It didn't stop my mom from beating up my oldest brother into a broken arm that he covered up for her expertly at Nyack Hospital's ER back in the day, with the conveniently well-practiced excuse of "falling down the stairs" at the ready by both parties that they carefully rehearsed during the car ride over. It was easy for him to do, too, because my brother had prior sports injuries that my mom could frame into a clear sense of his proven carelessness as a wild boy child. 

Our "savage" genetics were also an easy target for her to blame us for any of her abuse that she aimed at us. We were raked over the coals by the mad people around us, to the point of our collective perfection in comparison to their obviously bad behavior, which was then thrown into our faces, too. "What are you, like, 'perfect' or something?" We learned to avoid crazy people the way a cat burglar breaks into a city apartment during the summertime, through an open window by a conveniently placed fire escape.

My self-defense makes attempts at scamming me into this absurdly surreal game of "cat-and-mouse" that I can best with both hands, arms, and legs bound tightly, with a blindfold on. And it continued throughout my life at every public venue I ever "dared" to appear at, including the very public abuse that I suffer(ed) at this public library, because it doesn't matter where I go or what I do, who I am with, and what I look like. It doesn't actually have anything to do with me at all, because I don't do anything wrong, which is a huge problem for a violently acting-out criminal sitting next to me at a public computer, or on the bus to the city, or on the subway, or at work in some office.

It became a pattern that, no matter how cleverly and craftily done, I managed to fight back against —on little food, sleep, money, clothing, medicine, support, and/or shelter—sussed out in record time, to the horrified amazement of yet another delusional individual who felt protected enough to attack me in full clear view of several authority figures in charge who had every opportunity to clear up the situation with one word in my favor. But, that's part of the job, right?

Over time, I even developed a handy "cheat sheet" formula for businesses and other public venues that preferred to witness ongoing abuse that goes unchecked without protecting me, because, you know, I'm obviously society's number one scumbag. One: hire a bitchy thick blond to "man" your reception area with an even bigger desk to match her overblown ego. Two: allow her to gossip loudly and spread rumors within clear earshot of large groups of people who will then feign a planned indifference that you will pretend to control with Three: a series of intentionally inept "scolds" done purely for publicity's sake, before telling your mistress(es) behind closed doors to keep on doing exactly what she's been doing, because, again, I'm the beautiful, high-performing single woman on an extremely tight budget that you like to squeeze as part of some con game.

She, in turn, will blow on her troll dolls in an unchecked madness that you will laugh about in an obviously evil way, because you like seeing your lead bitch with fangs rave at a woman out of your league. So, on this very special Friday, let's go over your "Special Needs" list of rules that even a kindergartner understands, just in case you plead ignorance or impairment. Ready? Okay, here we go!

Children Ten Commandments

1. Have no other gods.
2. Have no idols.
3. Honor God's name.
4. Honor the Sabbath day.
5. Honor your parents.
6. Do not murder.
7. Do not commit adultery.
8. Do not steal.
9. Do not perjure yourself.
10. Do not covet.

Got it? Good! Now, let's go over every flaw you have, in clear language that even you can understand, with your list of serious impairment(s):

Vice		Virtues
Lust	Luxuria	Chastity	Castitas
Gluttony	Gula	Temperance	Temperantia
Greed	Avaritia	Charity (or, sometimes, Generosity)†	Caritas (Liberalitas)
Sloth	Tristitia/Acedia	Diligence	Industria
Wrath	Ira	Patience	Patientia
Envy	Invidia	Kindness	Humanitas
Pride	Superbia	Humility	Humilitas

^†This virtue is generally considered to be the greatest and the most important of all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins

Don't play this here New York mama for a "sucka", kids. That is all. See you next week. Be ready. It's "go" time!

Espresso

My friend Elvis had a lot more problems than his over-priced "caffeine delivery system" cleverly marketed to addicts. He hoarded beyond control when circumstances in his life caused him stress, like helping out friends in need, or waking up in the morning without a hangover, or not having a stash of coke hidden somewhere in his rat's nest of a room. So, it wasn't like I took it personally when he "kicked me out" of his place during my bout with homelessness, because I knew it freaked him out that he couldn't abusively control me, like he does with the sicker people in his life around him, so he can feel like he's the "king of the hill".

Quite a tipsy structure to maintain isn't it? His life was never built on totally solid ground, besides his ethnic parents who had emigrated to New York from Puerto Rico. I could tell he missed it there, too, with his morning mango/guava Entenmann's danishes out on the kitchen counter for his work crew of illegal immigrants. You can tell when a person is homesick, you know? He had adored his mother, who was ailing and under his brother's full-time care (he's also disabled) when we first became more acquainted. After we knew each for awhile, he told me that her death had rocked him to his core. She had bed sores his brother had to dress every day, and neither of them were mentally stable enough to handle such a mature scene. 

He told me more than a few times that she had sores on her vagina that caused her pain, which I could have surmised from the medical term "bed sores" (which regularly occur in elderly people who are hospitalized long-term), so I knew he had sexual identity issues to go along with his obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, schizoid-affective, addictive personality disorder. When I was forced to couch surf with him for awhile, after I lost my rent-stabilized apartment in a rigged scheme designed to do so, I knew he would think I was his captive to pore over and possibly romance, though in an interim period of our friendship, I found out that he had repeated his psychotic pattern of severe relationship dysfunction without any help from me at all.

He'd done work in a building for a family made homeless by a strong hurricane we had in the city years ago that had greatly affected the lowest-laying, poorest neighbors of Brooklyn. During that process, he'd made friends with a disturbed young woman who was fragile, vulnerable, and needy. Perfect! He could swoop in as her "rescuer" to give her items that she and her dependent family needed. She had her parents and brother living with her in the cheap basement apartment, too, when it flooded out completely. I met her briefly after I left my apartment, when Elvis gave me a lift to a nearby hotel in Park Slope that was, ironically, housing hurricane victims through a city agency, as the residents there wrestled with complex legal paperwork that was out of their depths, given their socio-economic strata.

She was twitchy and weird, pulling on her hair repeatedly and answering Elvis' questions abruptly, leaning over to play with her smartphone so her hair would cover her face. If she was the "stable" one in her family, it was small wonder that Elvis saw an opportunity he could manipulate to his advantage. While they dated (or whatever the fuck two head-cases like them do), I cleaned up a tenement room on Ninth Street and went back to work. After that situation went bust (or "Cotto Crazy"), he offered to help me out, per his typical pattern. I was originally going to live with his brother temporarily, but that deal went bust because they can't do business properly, so I couch-surfed on a sofa made-up for his brother, while Elvis stashed his slightly sicker brother in the apartment of their chain-smoking Nuyorican friend.

His brother complained incessantly that I had deprived him of his "home" while I slept on a couch, which is a crazy thing to think about some guy's sofa, but that's family for you. While I stayed there, his cardboard boxes remained in the hallway, as if in limbo, and Elvis quickly lost his mind over a woman too beautiful, brilliant, and healthy to be in his company for any real length of time, but that's my life. I don't have any reliable help in my family. I am the help! And so, Elvis started going downhill almost as soon as he realized I wasn't going to be his fellow shut-in/nursemaid, like his cousin living in an illegal apartment in his basement (he'd bought a Park Slope townhome with his parents money), and his nervous brother who stopped working years ago, so he could use their mother and her age as an excuse to live with her for free, as her makeshift caregiver.

They pretended he was starting an "Internet business", which was laughable to me, because they were also embroiled in a crazy lawsuit over the apartment deal that went bust after Elvis did work there, leaving his brother effectively homeless, too. Elvis also told me he had "put his hands" on his last girlfriend (also while homeless), who had moved in with him shortly after he bought her and her family used clothes, so she felt like she owed him, hence the speedy courtship. They "broke up" after he probably tried to choke her to death one drunken evening together, but with me, he played it wayyy cooler. He knew about me and my martial arts background because his brother had a black belt, and he kept a samurai sword (a rather cheap display one, not the real kind) behind the sofa where I slept, which I effectively displayed one night after he tried to get "touchy feely" with me.

He had tried to get me to touch his stomach because he stopped eating while I lived there, hiding it behind some diet-and-training routine along with his snake oil pill cabinet. I freaked, which put him on notice for the remainder of my stay. He grew paranoid, rifling through my stuff while I worked days at an insane office in Manhattan, saying it was the price he charged for my non-payment of rent, even stealing a street sign from me that I had found cleaning up the other place I lived in for a short while. He tried to play it off like I had problems with touching and intimacy, which I blew up like the phony case it was. He grabbed me and forced me to touch his body while he lifted up his shirt, in a move that gave him a taste of my body and muscle that must have stayed with him long after that night, because he almost immediately dropped my hand after grabbing it. I don't feel like his soft crazy women.

And so I came to understand that his make-believe coffee machine was deeply anchored to his delusional fantasy life, and that he desperately wanted me to be in it with him, as a savior to his rotten life. He'd made a fake picture in his head of me in his garden during the summertime as his maid/cook/lover, beautifully dressed and expertly serving him and his friends wonderful iced drinks. Huh. I then told him how many weeks I was out from getting my own place due to my calculations, now that I'd secured a gig as the design lead for a small publishing company headed by some trust-funder looking to go bust in a financial scheme with his publisher dad. I made (and spent) a lot of money working at professional houses around the city, but only enough to support me and my expenses in a place as expensive as New York, where most natives are only one paycheck away from homelessness and bankruptcy.

He immediately grew anxious after I shattered his artificial construct, as so often happens with the very sickest among us. He could earn a living if he was enabled by the sometimes sicker people around him, but on his own? Elvis merely drowned, clutching at people madly to help him out of yet another mess. He also told me he was guilty over a murder he and his friends committed many years ago; he and his friends had killed a bum sleeping in the park, in an end-of-the-world vibe that sat over the entire city during its last down-spiral in the crack-fueled 70s and 80s. My college boyfriend had also tortured a bum sleeping on a park bench with his best friend in a similar scenario as a teenager, too, as the city veered out of control into anarchy.

As soon as he realized I'd be moving on quickly without him, he began planning his attack, packing my stuff into garbage bags while I worked hard, padding himself with his fucked up brother, his dependent cousin, and an old girlfriend of one of them, who gave me a fake look of sympathy (really, it was fear), because those poor muthafuckin' Nuyoricans finally realized that they had actually met one of the kind of people who had originally inhabited a land they can't live on peaceably. 

They had actually done battle with their first real ethnic minority: me. And guess who won? As he and his brother shook my hand (after putting my stuff in the trunk of Elvis' car), I could see that they learned from my lesson well enough. No more. No more abuse. And just like that, I was back on my way to a nice hotel with cable t.v. and a free Continental breakfast, like the rest of my homeless Brooklyn people. Thanks for that.

https://www.mentalhealth.gov/get-help/health-insurance/

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

Grand

http://www.equalvoiceforfamilies.org/if-you-love-somebody-grandparents-raising-kids/?gclid=CM3xoaOL5skCFc2RHwodBloIYg

Like every family out there in the real world, mine also struggle with mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, learning impairments, developmental disabilities, age, abuse, neglect, and sometimes extreme ethnic prejudices. My father's sister Marilyn was so challenged that she spawned (and then abandoned) two families, back-to-back. First was my cousin Brian, born to an Italian-American man I've never met, and then summarily dropped off at my paternal grandparents' door, without ever getting a "thank you" or one single, decent paycheck to cover his expenses, I'm sure. And why would she have done that, when she was proud to show off her white vinyl Go-Go boots instead of her own son, tucked away as they were under his bed in my grandparent's Queens apartment?

No, she was proud rather of being deemed "good looking" enough back in the day to dance for men for money, thus creating a generation of orphans we've yet to shake in this century. My "Grandpa Fred" made good money from his cab-driving by then (as the proud, hard-working owner of a medallion, an amazingly incredible feat given his poor, immigrant, Depression-Era roots), and so my cousin at least had my grandmother and him, a solid roof over his head, and my grandpa's really good food in his tummy, even though it still wasn't enough to conquer his drug addiction in the future.

I'm just glad that they were able to provide for him for a time, enough to be considered a real family, especially since my step-grandfather and grandmother never had kids of their own. What a blessing in disguise it must have been for them as an older couple! As bad as my father's family is with their notorious "disappearing acts", I'm extraordinarily proud of them and their loving giving to Brian, alone in the world without a father and mother as he was. At least he had them, and at least he has us. That's a lot more than many of our most beleaguered children around the world (and around the way) have.

We need to support our elders and grandparents who decide to adopt their children's children, whether from infirmity or neglect, as a way to stem the bleeding our sacred family's have been suffering under; this weight that we all need to bear as equally as we can. Thank you to my man Ernie Anastos (geez, stay positive, will ya?) and the wonderfully gentle Kathy Gibson for highlighting her parenting support platform for those grandparents who can adopt, so that all of our children may thrive to great success in the future. We need every hand we can take for this battle that we're in. Thank you! This one's for you today, fighting the good fight every single day you get 'em fed, dressed, and out the door to school. You're not alone anymore. We're here.

http://stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/back-to-school-picnic-2014.html

http://www.stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/back-to-school-picnic-2015.html

http://stfrancispantries.org/community-programs/mothers-day-luncheon-2014.html 

For the rest of you, you need to do this NOW. That means tech support for those elders in your community who have school-age children using computers and smartphones and tablets and laptops (standard in most school districts nowadays), free backpacks at the beginning of each and every school year that they have enrolled children, plus free pantries for food and toiletries. Ever look at a Social Security check? Yeah, make that work. Ladies, I know you feel me on this one.

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

Crazy Paprika

In light of recent developments like madness and manic depression (which turn out to be not-so-new, after all), I decided years ago to give online dating a try. I found a highly coveted piece of real estate online, from what used to be a hippie-dippie sharing site for creative types on a budget, such as myself. Why not move from buildings to boys? 
It made sense to me after a German business trip that lasted months for no good reason, during those halcyon days of riding out a desk job with people hell-bent on mutual destruction, or at least driving each other into early graves. What was the point? I bowed out of their mutual chemical destruction to seek out what lurked beneath the service, and I had a hell of a ride surfing for companions while holding off a raging office bitch from tearing through my neck completely. It's what passes for "multi-tasking" bloodsport in Manhattan business circles. No? Oh, uh, okay. You may need a few more primer courses before moving on to "Excellence".

Anyway, my day job sucked, but that certainly wasn't anything new. 
All of the good, healthy productivity was diverted overseas by the company owners who had a much bigger stake in their home country than our U.S. game. No problem. Under a looser structure of discipline, I thrive, and if the entire company reads my e-mails through the company network, so much the better. I love publishing to a crowd, no matter how big or small. During my tenure with online denizens, I discovered a recently re-located opera singer at a downtown Brooklyn internet start-up, a celebrity chef, some requisite arty types (like actors, designers, poets, etc.), and a one very problematic Eastern European who was not-so-recently arrived. My new manic depressive acquaintance at the next desk job I scored for free online dubbed him (after just one outing with us for cocktails) "Crazy Paprika". She also said, with a few more drinks in her, that we had "showed her what real love looks like", because he picked me up after work to drive me home. Oh....

It went downhill quickly, because within a month he fell in love with me, wanted my children (I wanted a new puppy), and then pestered me into the rather trite romantic vision of a weekend spent in Vermont, probably because he saw some American movie that told him we do such things many years ago. The truth was, as handsome as my new friend is (and he is that, trust, girls, you know me by now; I don't date "common" or "ordinary"), he and I had absolutely nothing in common besides physical beauty. He had dated and impregnated an ugly older woman to get her to fund his American Dream, but after they broke up, he was stuck cleaning houses in the city and living in a cheap Hasidic neighborhood that never (NEVER) opens up to outsiders, especially obviously good-looking Goyim ones. He just didn't fit, and like his media-derived visions loosely based on me and "Pretty Woman", his actual life resembles Movieland very little, so little that it has made him madder than ever.

Sure, waiting on a line that goes around the block for toilet paper drives a person insane, but what he told me was so bat-shit, it solidified my impression that Eastern Euros are fucking crazy forever, not that I needed much more evidence. He told me tales of abuse so severe, I know that if a post-Cold War regime can slowly starve to death it's own people while watching, you're fucked unless you move, which is exactly what he did. They had to sign up for a waiting list spot for an old car that was ten years long, and that's the nice stuff. Most of it was centered around really old, out-of-date technology "for the people", while the corrupt upper tiers of Communists gorged themselves fat on Western luxuries, much like China still does today. They're corrupt, but, so what? Good and bad people exist everywhere, and if you don't like your government, you have to fight for freedom like we do.

Mad people live a life based on delusions, not reality, so when he fell head over heels in love with me, I wasn't particularly flattered. It was way too quick. Not that I doubted my prowess as a lover, because I am experienced, it was that I knew he didn't really know me at all, just the outside wrapping, which is great, but so what? Where does this go? Well, it goes downhill quick, like every other doomed romance when I'm "The Man" with the cool job, great apartment, hip clothes, and tremendous attitude, but...where does that leave you? Riding on my coattails? How is that masculine or sexy for me?! It isn't, and barring unforeseen fetishes that will most definitely NOT crop up in the future, I don't get off by strapping on a fake penis in my hetero-themed family unit. That's why my man is there, yo. Feel me? I'm the girl, you're the boy; that's how it works in traditional family structures where gender and sexuality are hetero, healthy, and normal. It just works out that way naturally.

So, we burned through it quickly, while he freaked out, panicked that his Golden Goose dreams funded by his richly gorgeous dream girl fantasy went up in smoke, because he's not all that. When he grabbed my arm in his car to prevent me from exiting (after I told him to leave me alone) after work one afternoon, I knew this particular Eastern Euro was gonna be a royal fuck up. He then stalked the crazy blond receptionist from my day job, the one with the obviously cheap clip-on hairpieces from Ricky's (they were the real duo in all this), barreling angrily down the block in her baggy beige knit poncho, as she headed towards the bar and back to Long Island on the LIRR, when she still lived there with her parents. She laughed it off, while being openly jealous that I could inspire such bunny-boiler insanity after a few short months of dating. In BipolarLand, jealously and stalking are highly coveted trophies to be bartered around like cash. Not so much for me, in my genuinely legitimate quest for love and romance.

She told me he followed her down the block right outside of the office building where we worked, laughing and saying how "lucky" I was, because she couldn't get a second date after getting drunk and putting out, so, like "wow"! Uh, okay...I backed slowly away from the reception desk to do the real work that makes a publishing company money. After he figured out that she was just as fucked up as him, because she didn't pull away in horror when he grabbed her by the arm in a clearly desperate stalking move, he moved in closer. He began following me home from work for weeks, forcing me to take different trains home (which I did, I mean, fuck, I 'm a native homeboy), which forced him to recognize that he was outplayed by the subways. He called me all night long (manics tend to stay up all night, not sure if you knew; oh you do? Yeah, me, too) to disturb my sleep, but I was locked up tight on the 4th floor of a building he couldn't get into, because there were four good, strong locks he had to get past.

When that didn't work, he escalated into deeper behaviors, like leaving my old cassette tapes that I had taken on our road trip to Vermont on my stoop with a weird note, months after we broke up. I upped the ante, too, playing the uncle-who-is-an-immigration-lawyer card (that's actually true), and then filling a restraining order with the Park Slope police, but in his illegal status, he was already a law-breaking immigrant, so I guess he figured he could do what he wanted, since no one squeezed him about blowing his Visa years ago. No one banged on his door to drag him away in the middle of the night like Eastern Bloc nations do, so what was the harm in hassling this "stuck-up American bitch"? Well, the problem is, he didn't really know what it took to be a successful transplant from another country who worked their ass off, and I did. That's how, bitch.

Once he figured out that I had a full deck of playing cards with all the leverage, he became extreme, and that's the exact sweet spot you wait for with garden variety fuck-ups, because once you break the law out loud and in front of reliable witnesses, I fucking own you. You're mine, punk! And that's exactly what happened. His last desperate stand was to shine his headlights directly onto the building I lived at, honking his horn, blinking his headlights, and calling me non-stop: this, after the Immigration card threat and the Restraining Order, words he pretended not to understand when his English suddenly got real bad, real quick. I no understand, followed by a sheepish shoulder shrug and big "poor me" eyes. Yeah, buddy. We all come from somewhere, bro. So, how did I do it? What was the final nail in his Transylvanian coffin?

Oh, girls, you know me! Mama scared him like the pretend punk he wanted to be: through the power of sheer illusion, just like his feverish media-inspired dreams. I had a leftover BB gun from my crazy redneck ex-boyfriend from Colorado, the big Scottish lad who liked to shoot squirrels from his apartment for fun and target practice, in between his big Elk hunting expeditions in the backwoods. I took that pretend .45 out from it's hiding spot, and in the shining glare from his amped-up, overly bright headlights, I held it up against the window, the clear shadow of a gun in silhouette showing up enough for even his fake-addled brain. Yeah, bitch, 'cause that's what's up. He didn't know if it was real or not, and in his Western cowboy fantasy world, it just might be. Who was he to know me better? I have the warrior-like attitude to back it up. Don't fuck with me. This is my world you livin' in, boy. Don't front, and don't forget. See you on the firing range.