The Underground

 
When the northern states abolished slavery forever, they became revolutionary for a second time since the original thirteen colonies war for independence with Britain, except this was much more personal. It split a new nation in half along the Mason-Dixon line, between a falsely sharp black-and-white divide, punctuated by the shocking bloodshed of The Civil War.

Of course, the reality of American life is that European colonization and its economy based on imported African slave labor created a corrupt dynamic on top of a native culture that had already bartered, traded, and mated with newly-arrived locals, to create the first mixed ethnicity outside of plantation boundaries. In opposition to the insanely cruel inhumanity that drove the southern slave trade, an underground railroad was designed to free people from their captivity through a secret network of waterways, safe houses, and territories, up to the free states of the north.

New York was essential to the resettlement of freed slaves via its connected waterways of rivers, streams, and brooks. Not far from where I am now is a historic town on the Hudson River called "Nyack", that has a few old underground stops made for a people who yearned to be free. From here, they could escape to the colder north of our upstate wilderness, impenetrable in the wintertime to a slaving people used to the much warmer weather of the American south. Even further north are the prominent river and bay area conduits to Canada, to the always-free provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

We still have rebellious warrior genes in our blood, represented in the eye-patch logo for the Pearl River Pirates high school football team, or the horned helmet for the team from my high school alma mater, the Clarkstown South Vikings of West Nyack. Here, there is same blended ethnicity as Solomon Northup, the famously kidnapped and freed New Yorker from "12 Years A Slave": Indian, African, European, even Asian blood running hotly through our veins. If you ever need to escape tyranny, I knew a few buccaneers who'll help. Welcome to the underground, my friends. You've reached terminus, the end. 
Finally, free at last.

Raging (Against The Machine)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting#

The American political system is one of the most complex in the world, because that's exactly the way it was designed to be, to prevent tampering and corruption. Given the heightened emotional climate surrounding our political process, it's no wonder that outside observers around the world feel it is a rigged game, like my Eastern European friends at the local barber shop who emigrated from countries with gross human rights violations and completely fixed elections.

Their former governments have trained them not to have a say in politics, because if they do, riots and bloody wars will break out, bringing years of crippling economic insecurity and societal unrest for what could be many decades. They've been tricked into apathy and indifference by believing that nothing they say or do matters, therefore why should they bother voting or speaking up to make a difference, if it only brings you and your family more pain? It absolves them from feeling responsible or guilty about their government, which is the exact opposite of freedom, like their casually superficial cynicism that goes nowhere and does nothing to solve our human problems.

For example (like I told my Russian-American hairdresser, Katy), most people around the world don't realize that our constitution reads "We, the people..." because there is no "us" or "them" in the United States. We are our system of representation. Over 1.5 million (MILLION) people work in Washington D.C., for all sorts of national departments and federal agencies within our government (not including state and local levels), with key positions avidly sought (and campaigned for) that often begin with the relatively simple process of collecting signatures door-to-door. That's right. You read that correctly.

We teach government from the earliest grades in our educational school systems. Katy and I also discussed that in the barbershop, because she attended design school in Russia and is fluent in English, which makes her atypical from many newly-arrived immigrants, like my great-grandparents from Italy who were poor farmers. She complained about the easy questions on the American citizenship test designed for your tired, hungry, and poor "masses yearning to be free" (as written on the Statue of Liberty) who are learning a new language; not just hip, well-educated designers with an active part in their destinies.

Peaceful, non-violent elections every four years are the foundations of our freedoms. That's shocking, isn't it? No coups, no fratricides, and there's no rioting in the streets. Were it the same for sporting events! Just the sweet hard work that is our freedom. It isn't perfect, problem-free, or dispassionate, but it is exactly what the rest of the struggling world wants. You just have to work at it every day, like we do. Throwing away your vote is one of the biggest symptoms that something is very wrong with you and your life, to care so little about your future and your fate. Or maybe you're just not American enough to participate? THEN, VOTE.

Around the World

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Around_the_World_in_Eighty_Days 

Parties at Oneonta became our go-to creative outlet for lifting our spirits and casting off the sometimes extreme pressures we were under, as working class kids from New York. When I mentioned to my father recently that I can write "lowbrow" at times in a colloquial dialect that is unique to this area, and to also mean that I can be at every level of work, he reddened and barked a sudden harsh laugh at me, baring his top row of dentures. "Hah! Yeah, you're 'lowbrow'!", as if I had suddenly forgotten who I am and where I was, which I hadn't. I have plenty of reminders. 

I don't have the luxury of checking out from my life, no matter how bad it can sometimes be, because such is the nature of living. Suffice to say, unlike the hangers-on to our hip scene, I really wanted to learn, and anything that jeopardized that went out the window. I couldn't afford to not be present during my own education, happily deferring it to the hands of others, like so many other spoiled suburban kids. I was born in the projects of Queens to an Acadian Metis and an Italian-Irish American, some of the lowliest ethnicities on the planet for this country. Of course, in your country of origin, it could be the complete opposite, because such is the perversity behind prejudices and hate: to blind you to your true worth for the false ones of a commercial world.

We had discussions about our parties, too, appropriate to each setting. For freshman year, kids often joined together to have a party on the entire floor, or sometimes the whole dorm threw one large shindig. The most popular kind was the "'Round the world" party, with every dorm room offering a different type of booze. Those were completely fucking dangerous. Kids did crazy shit like soak a whole watermelon in grain alcohol, in a garbage can or a bathtub that they were proud to show off during the week. "One bite of this should do the trick!", as we took turns slapping the melon. We wanted a quicker entertainment we could afford, because every penny counted in our fractured homes, where scarcity was often used as a weapon.

A girl from "Lawnguyland" had a set of test tubes in a wooden carrier filled with a noxious-looking neon-green substance, while another carried around a tray of red jello shots (made with vodka) that had been neatly set in those small paper condiment containers from the cafeteria. It was like "Martha Stewart: Unplugged", which is an MTV reference, kids. Look it up! I left after a few dorm rooms, because our run-ins with campus security and two-day hangovers had learned me to steer clear of liquids that were uncertain-looking. I wanted to have fun, not throw up in the bathroom down the hall for hours and hours.

As sophomores, we expanded our view of partying to include multi-levels, in mixed gender dorms that reflected our more mature mentalities. Random wild hookups were a thing of the past, with most of us either in relationships or busy with school and jobs. There was always work. Boys and girls now lived in suites right next to each other, without incident. Anyway, the Long Island boys next door to us were a tight "Jew Crew" of frat brothers and a couple of very white upstaters. No problems, there. Still, with Halloween right around the corner, epicness awaited us in the form of grander and more complex parties.

On our list was the oft-touted "Heaven and Hell" party. It was a fantasy scene suited to three levels: the top level was Heaven (of course), the middle layer was Purgatory, and then there would be a "Dante's Inferno": a hell of our own creation. We decorated each floor in our minds with smoke machines and cotton ball clouds, or flickering fiery flames like those lamps from "Spencer's Gifts" (another 80s reference*) with plastic strips powered by a mini-fan to simulate fire. We'd use tinfoil-coated walls to bounce light around the rooms, or paint one room a heavenly light-blue color at the beginning of the semester, decorated with sparkly stars and even more mood lighting. 

Mood lamps....eh. What can I say? It was a thing**. Anyway, every year around this time, I still think about cool crisp autumns, fall decorations, the fun of Halloween, my outfits and costumes, and how much I still want to spread that great feeling around. The joy we felt at just being free enough to talk out loud about whatever we wanted to, whenever we could, without being abused or pushed aside, felt like "manna from the skies" to us; a gift so valuable, we knew we couldn't live without it. That's what freedom and a good time can do. It can set your soul free. Soar!

*    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spencer_Gifts
**  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lava_lamp

Dune

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Sand_Dunes_National_Park_and_Preserve 

Part of the allure of the west for me was that I had never seen it before. It was true: the very first time I "saw" Colorado was the night we drove up to a hotel in Boulder, and it was the dark of a rather recently settled west, which meant there were almost no lights. I couldn't see a thing. I asked Dave once or twice while we were on the highway if we would be able to see the mountains at all, even in the dark, and he laughed at me, saying that the mountains were facing his direction and not my side of the van. Oh. The next morning gave me no better clues about the landscape, because a blizzard had hit the area overnight, blanketing everything in a deep white snow that sparkled painfully in the bright desert sun. "Welcome to Colorado!" He laughed at me as we dug out the old gray van (a.k.a."The Rat") from the light powdery snow. 

Acute altitude sickness left me light-headed, queasy, and then actively vomiting. He was better with that because it mimicked his hard drinking ways, and he flattered himself into thinking that it gave me a taste of the morning sickness from pregnancy that would surely come to us one day as "marrieds". It allowed him to briefly feel like he had the upper hand over me, because his troubles were far too serious for anyone to handle outside of expert medical care, and they had failed at that, too. I knew that if he was going to stick it through, a big move like this would either shake him loose from me or give him the ballast he needed to endure serious married life with a woman like me. 

It was, in fact, exactly what I told my friends and family back home. Suffice to say, Dave was less ripe for adventure than me. Incurable brain disorders will do that to a person. Still, he was sailing on the illusion of greatness, and this was a performance opportunity for him. "Yeah", he explained to me as we swiped snow from the van, "you'll feel sick for about a day or two, but once you acclimate, it'll go away." Nowadays, I could've looked that up on the Internet in 3.5 seconds, but back then he felt that it gave him the leverage he needed to lead like a man, because he'd visited his older sister on their parents dime when she lived out there on a gated golf course community. Great. Along with the factoid about us being a mile high, thus ended Dave's supreme intellectual reign about all things western. Really, that was it.

After Dave went home, I began dating a man who was much more independent (like me), because he was estranged from his child-abusing parents by necessity. It wasn't great, but at least we could get up-and-go early in the morning, without the 12 p.m. wake-up call and grueling hours of coffee and cigarettes that Dave's manic-depression needed for him to remain sitting upright. I didn't have to sit around waiting and babysitting a man-child who would never really be fully functioning without massive support from his too tight crew of incestuous locals who also never broke away from home to explore the world. Vacation badly at a Floridian tourist trap or consistently hit an "all-you-can-eat" cruise ship buffet, yes. Real travel? No. Can't do it.

But Kent could, so we did. After so many years trapped inside a series of dark smoky rooms at night with a bunch of uneducated drunks, I felt free to roam. He was a burly sort of permanent bachelor used to being on his own, and after the cloying co-dependence of David, I found his carefree attitude refreshing. At least I was on my own again. No more playing nursemaid to a sick man. It seemed like I got away from a really bad situation cleanly, in a powerful "no harm, no foul" play that had set me completely free of a family that had never really warmed up to me. In addition to my mobility, Kent also had a great appetite for food, unlike the pale hard-drinking chain-smoker I'd just left.

We ate our way through Denver with expensive dinner dates that left me two sizes bigger than normal, but given what I'd been through with a depressed angry alcoholic, I figured I could lose the weight later, in exchange for my name and my life back. Hard as it was at the time (Denver was suffering through a skinny tan fad brought on by Californian relocatees in the millions), I knew I could bounce back from it, and slowly I did. I had my own feelings to contend with, and during a visit from my mother, she was surprised at the strength of my returning appetite. I'd spent years eating poorly or not at all with Dave, given his weird schedule of habits, and it had left me wanting. I was shocked and afraid at the ferocity of my returning hunger that seemed to never dull, and the somnolence that constantly weighed down my limbs.

The height of the mountains didn't help, either, so even though Kent and I were free to roam around and travel, I often felt too tired to do so, in sharp contrast to the 10-mile hikes I could walk in the mountains back home, even when I was loaded down with a pack. Being considered "fat" and "tired" was new to me, though my status as an outcast for this divorce was not. There was always something about me that pushed the scared conformists away, saggy as they were with their own fears. But gradually my energy returned, and with it, new life. I began ditching the car so I could walk to work instead, and we had a new dog that needed as much walking as we could stand. We hit the mountains, avoiding the obvious tourist spots for the more down-to-earth open spaces that are free to the public. 

I could feel my blood moving again, and I knew I was on the way to recovering from this most recent ordeal. Still, some trips from that time period bring it all back to me, like the sluggishness that felt like I was wading through thick muddy water during our trip to the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado. As I walked through a desert that looks much smaller than it feels after you're in it, I felt a weight sucking me down, trying to pull me in, chaining me to the sand, forcing me to take slow heavy steps, and it was a good thing, too. The desert opens up like a surreal pop-up book after that first small hill, rapidly expanding into a large full-blown desert, and that's no place for a New York girl like me to break down. I come from the water. I come from a solid place I was destined to return. I wanted to make it back home.

Smear

 

Women's healthcare (and women's bodies) have long been demonized by an extremist sector of our society who continually struggle with their sexual identity, gender, and maturity level, which means that the rest of us have to be subjected to their continued insanity as it relates to those topics, and I want that very much to stop. Like, today. It came to a sharp point for me through the pet adoption process I did with a couple of high school drop-outs not of my social set; like, not even related to someone on the bottom rung of my family, ya dig? 

As such, they were so far off from reality and where they should be as human beings, that I found basic communication with them difficult, which means they're psychotic, especially when it's when combined with all the scientific evidence someone like me can drum up with a team of ethical experts like myself. What I'm saying to you in plain English is this: me and my mom always knew Angel and Dom were fucking nuts, but they were crazy enough to take care of a beloved family pet, and that's what we needed then. Anything else, like their false sense of friendship towards a woman like me, was entertained with my promise to Teddy in mind, like any real mother would do.

It's not that I particularly disliked them as people, it's just that they're the kind of people working behind the PetCo counter at the local strip mall who handed me my change, or the woman handing dental instruments to my dentist while I got a routine exam. Angel never attended college, nor did her ex-husband (although several prior ex-husbands could have been college educated...who knows?), and neither did any of their children, or children's children, because they way they kept their freaky "lifestyle" intact was brainwashing their young with their half-ass theories of life that cannot be supported in higher learning institutions (from the sheer volume of its madness), nor out in the world at large, or even in the wider social circles among their rather unhealthy inbred set of mountain folk, a place where child birth by uneducated teenage girls is considered an acceptable practice, which is about as far from me and my family as you can get.

It made for some strange bedfellows, like Angel's vehement support of gay lifestyles and gay marriage (really, anything "gay" at all), that she combined with her rather pedestrian view of women's healthcare that her wacko father taught her, that meant killing babies in secret satanic rituals the rest of us call "clinics" or "hospitals" or "the ob/gyn" or "doctor's offices", because her fucked-up dad told her that the tissue we generate—that may or may not grow to full-term in a woman's uterus—was, in actuality, fully gestated already at the beginning of the fertilization process, which means that women everywhere transport a tiny-size human shrunk down to impossible proportions that's pushed through her egg sack into the Fallopian tube, to attach to the uterus like an astronaut with an air-line floating in outer space looking to attach to the hull of a speeding spaceship. And I'm a sci-fi fan!

She used her rudimentary skills as a barely-educated dental admin (six-month certificate, tops) combined with her rigorous pet store training to tell me that they had "pictures" to support her point of view, which means they go to some quack who bought an old camera from a defunct doctor's office on Craigslist to sell made-up pictures to other crazy pregnant women who want a photo to put on their fridge of their "baby" to brag about to other nut-jobs, and they're also highly Photoshopped recreations that are not based on any particular scientific reality, other than keeping the insane somewhat gainfully employed. Out of this weird cocktail of half-baked ideas and rigorously-guarded ignorance came about Angel's special blend of the next generation of fucked-up bipolar bisexuals, like her porno-appearing daughter whom she touted to me and my mom (on the one visit we had with Ted at one of her exes houses) as a real beauty, and that was also not true, in addition to all of her bad medicine.

What it did produce was this: Angel's gay daughter—who self-describes her education on Facebook as "the school of hard knocks"—attached herself to a strip mall BJJ dojo because I'm a fighter, to rub up against other weirdos who have mental patient fetishes, then turn that legitimate martial arts scene into bad, amateur online porn by frequenting underground sex clubs with rubber mats and no lighting but lots of body oil, to get knocked up out-of-wedlock twice by a gay Brazilian instructor at her dojo who needed to establish residency here in the U.S. (and a kid would do that for him), in between her day job as, yep, another dental "assistant" from some certificate program for high school dropouts. 

But, "abortion" was "murder", and over that, her and her fucked-up daughter were vehement, vicious, and very vocal about, which must be a great hit at every Pride Day parade, you know, as a place where people are dependent on "straights" like me and my men to provide eggs and semen for them as couples, then carry their kids for them (for the guys), or adopt our kids when something goes awry in a pregnant teenager's life, and it will. That was wrong, but everything else they did was OK. How's that for a smear campaign? It's one heck of a crazy cocktail. People, you have to vote to be heard in this country. That's it. So, do that. Vote for for sanity. Vote for reason. Vote for education. Vote for healthcare, for all of our citizens, because you're worth it to me. That's what civil rights is all about, kids, even you assholes in the back of the room who will fail out at 14 or 15. Imagine how the president feels? That strongly. And that well-educated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_induction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_abortion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misoprostol
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cervical_dilation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Childbirth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrics_and_gynaecology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gynaecology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrics_%26_Gynecology_(journal)

http://similac.com/pregnancy/3-weeks-pregnant

 

Miscarriage of Justice

Like the history of modern medicine and its marginalization of traditional home-based herbal remedies that used to be the expertise of women (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2016/02/bad-medicine.html), women's healthcare has been similarly co-opted by disordered interests, rife with harmful hidden agendas. When was the last time a prominent urologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urology) was murdered for performing a vasectomy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasectomy) on a man, or his patient publicly vilified for receiving such a procedure? No? There you go! That's all the answer you ever needed.

When I was in school, we studied the intricacies of debate and logic to dismantle false constructs as quickly as possible, given the normal mental capabilities of the particular human we would be in conversation with, or maybe not. Even at my teacher's college in upstate New York, "Special Needs" and "Special Education" were separate coursework from the regular curriculum, designed for average Liberal Arts students, that formed the basis of our freshman and sophomore years, before the student chose a Major (and/or Minor) to specialize in.

In short, we're taught to tell a normal person about the flaws in their perceptions as grounds for their re-education, even in extreme cases of the most cult-like indoctrination present in the minds of the people who've been brain-washed (perhaps in social isolation), manipulated for someone else's benefit besides their own. That's unfortunately where healthcare for women has ended in America: stuck in the worst minds we have as human beings, creating bizarre social distortions that feed public fears about the human body from a steady diet of ignorance and hype that's typical of mentally ill households. Who holds sway there? The biggest strongest douchebag, that's who.

Even worse for most average American families were the men who loved their women enough to take care of them, or speak up for their human rights. Every single intellectual argument I've ever had about women's healthcare that's still seen as "controversial" I have won (and I mean, EVERY SINGLE ONE), so this is not an open invitation to you, as my reading public, to become a right rotten cunt to me about something that I solved using ancient Aristotelian logic at S.U.N.Y. Oneonta, at 19-years old (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Term_logic). 

It was such a huge victory for me that the entire class came up to me to talk about it, because my boyfriend and I had planned to argue "pro" and "con" sides of any argument we had within class beforehand. Like I'd written before, we were so good at masking our romantic relationship that the entire class was fooled, though one cool homeboy from 'round the way in Brooklyn told my boy to tap my ass, " 'Cause she's feelin' you, man! You got her all worked up tho', bro!" After which time, at the end of our very last class for the summer, we told him the truth: that we were boyfriend-and-girlfriend all along. He. Freaked. Out. "I knew it! I knew it!", he shouted out to the rest of the class.

To reiterate old scholarship from my teenage years, let's go over some key points ONE MORE TIME (for yo' dumb ass, and not mine): Roe vs. Wade* will not be overturned by The Supreme Court, no matter how many partisan games are played. Okay? Time to grow up about "icky" female bodies, because they exist whether you like it or not. Women are not sexual slaves for public consumption, and I expect you to understand that as clearly as I have explained it here, again. If you do not, and you respond to reason with artificially-heightened rhetoric at any point in the future, I will immediately understand that you have mental problems, just like you've read in my prior works on this site. 

Sexuality is not a crime in these modern times, and as such, it is not actionable as a just cause on its own. You still have to prove malicious intent, which you will not, because women are not always aware of their inner workings (like a man isn't), because we do not come with specialized, high-end, digital-imaging equipment, nor do we have an instruction manual attached to our bodies (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstetrics_and_gynaecology). We do, however, come to the table educated nowadays, because health and hygiene classes begin in grade school. If you have a fifth-graders knowledge twisted, once again, I will know (as will many others) that you are sick-minded.

Here are some simple numbers that even a high-school drop-out like you should be able to process: "Unlike men, who produce new sperm daily throughout most of their lifetime, women are born with all their eggs in one — okay, two baskets (ovaries). To be more precise, a woman is born with about one to two million immature eggs, or follicles, in her ovaries. - Jun 12, 2015" (Columbia University)

If you continue prejudices against nature, you must then also include (in this era of civil rights) legal actions against men who choose not to reproduce: "...the average male will produce roughly 525 billion sperm cells over a lifetime and shed at least one billion of them per month. A healthy adult male can release between 40 million and 1.2 billion sperm cells in a single ejaculation.- Jan 24, 2013"

That means, every time a man knowingly prevents a pregnancy, he must be held accountable in the same way a woman is, because even though our biologies are different, our human rights are not. It's worth nothing that men have not been legally accused of murder for birth control in this country, ever. Given your (new) understanding of the numbers involved in our human reproductive systems, it then stands to reason that women are not "murdering" fertilized eggs during its earliest reproductive process, just like "Plan B" and other types of early-induced miscarriages are designed to be: not harmful to a later-stage fetus or the woman, but to accurately simulate the earliest stages of human gestation, a time when most women naturally miscarry anyway (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miscarriage). 

Truthfully, any woman will tell you that she's had as many miscarriages as she's carried full-term successfully, if you bothered to ask to her. It's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of! In fact, there are typically no real bodily signs for most women who miscarry, whether intentionally performed by their doctor, or without us even knowing it, because material rejected or expelled by women is usually incorporated into our next menstrual period. In which case, we didn't even know it happened, which is what we still insist on calling all "abortions" today, like the mischaracterized horrors certain sick minds want it to be, when it is so clearly not that (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/10/bride-of-chucky.html). We know you know that, by the way.

So, what will happen? Well, "welfare queens" will be rightly prosecuted for using their natural child-rearing capabilities as an excuse to make money from their children, just like selling a man's sperm without his consent would be actionable in a court of law. Then, the healthy women living happily among you, who voluntarily had minor medical procedures designed to keep their lives intact (and who care so much for all life on this earth that they willingly chose to become excellent women first before becoming mothers), will be given the credit they both deserve and earned for being socially responsible citizens. 

It also means your that bloodily-staged shows of the past will become the trite comic fodder it's always been for enlightened minds like mine. G-d wants us to be happy, healthy, productive, and (most importantly) part of His Loving Family. Planning parenthood wisely is about the most beautifully humane gift any woman can give her future family. You were wrong. You are wrong now. Adjust accordingly. That is all.

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

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roe_v._Wade

À Votre Service

Vocational service is odd to outsiders, until you try it. My mother and her family are sometimes so disabled, that to them (mostly on the surface, when being a true "drama queen" really counts), the idea that I have a business where I can publish to you daily from a public library cannot penetrate the denseness of their disordered consciousness. "But...someone else gives you a job...and you don't have a 'job'!" 

None of them have business degrees, or MBA's, or business degrees from famous Ivy League schools with MBA's attached to it, like my brothers do, nor the entrepreneurial experience all of us as a family have, because as proud members of the merchant class, we believe that honest trade is a good measure in any kind of society. Fair trade is defined to us as a "win/win" situation, which is the only type of business I transact. You read me, and we all benefit from it. You see?

I do not have commercial advertisers because I am a not-for-profit, and I come from religious family. Who better to fund me than my own kind, the same people who first showed me the beautiful traditions of our faith? They drove me to all those extra "Religion" classes after our regular public school curriculum days ended—our parents, grandparents, and anyone else who was trustworthy and going to Confession on a Saturday afternoon before a big holiday. They drove us to classes, church services, and all those devotional duties (besides religion class) that are required by canonical law for us to accept the rites conferred upon us through our ancient rituals, beginning at birth through to today. It's an important part of my service.

Yeah. It's a lot of school, study, and thought. Why do all that?! Lazy people have a hard time with honest labor that they can't easily game for a quick buck, and I have family who are much less ethical than me. My mom had the audacity to tell me the other day that I "just go to the library", after I showed her the Claddagh pin that the Director of the Library gave me as I sat here typing to you on St. Patrick's Day, because I'm here Monday through Friday, every single week (barring emergencies and holidays), banging it out on some old PC keyboard, off the top of my head, sitting next to your New York "public", and if you think that isn't hard, try it on your own with my minuscule budget, without any staff to assist you. 

Then, I presented my mother with the works of two master children's book illustrators, old books that I found here and bought at a bargain rate (to assess her ongoing decline, and any lessening in her acuity), a soil conservation program shadily sponsored by a pharmaceutical company through a Midwest university that I thought she might be interested in (as a former botanist who had a blessedly quick brush-up with breast cancer), and a coupon from our local carpet guy that we always use, with deep roots in the community. She heard...uh....some of it. Attention spans were never their strong suits, but that's a long list of medical diagnostics for another day other than today.

Suffice to say, I have family so disordered at times that they don't understand (and this is a very short list of their ongoing ignorance): devotional service (unless you're part of a clergy they can pay/control), vocational service (like doing social work, volunteer charity work, and/or teaching with skills that you can't buy at some broke-ass dollar store), and my continually ongoing artistic devotion with hardcore spiritual high notes, as endeavors so outside of their norms that they can't figure out how to infiltrate a presence like mine on the Internet, because computers are to be demonized and feared, lest someone "beats" you in that, too. It's arrogance and insecurity at its worst, and quite of few of them go down hard because of it. False pride is the worst kind of sin to carry. I strongly urge you to free yourself from it, through the Rites of Confession before this Easter Sunday.

Since they can't marginalize my website by attacking its quality, they say it isn't a "real job", like every threatened amateur afraid of artistry before them, and that truly is scary, because those inherited genetics are built from their fears. Because I don't work through a corporate entity someone can attack (like a public holding), then I must not be "in business", and since I can't be railroaded into accepting a high interest bank loan, then my father must not be my venture capitalist, since there are no shareholders to manipulate. There's just me and the obvious strength of my gifts. Ahhh....I see a dawn of recognition in your eyes. Good! You have to be as good as we are in this game called "Life" to know when someone is helping you build an edifice that can't be disseminated in thousands of little ways that gangsters, er, business lawyers can gain off your labor without you even knowing it. 

Needless to say, my few brush-ups with court systems, judges, and lawyers (none of my doing, actually, and through no fault of my own) taught me all I needed to know about how those venues are gamed by the players operating them economically, and that is not my joint. This is. What about me? As someone who's been in this little game called "media" since, well, almost all my life, I know that this freedom I have with you, my audience, is a much harder currency to earn than any money you can deposit in someone else's bank for their financial gain, and this New York girl ain't havin' none of that. You've already had more than your fair share, my dear family. Pour la Belgique.

 

Famine (an Gorta Mór)

The scene at Skibbereen, west Cork, in 1847. 
From a series of illustrations by Cork artist James Mahony (1810-1879), commissioned by Illustrated London News 1847.

After my Scandinavian friend via Labrador from way back when moved out a few years back (though his stuff remained around the property for years afterward, gypsy that he is), Steve was rather quickly replaced by a Haitian-American family as new tenants. The father was gregarious and friendly to me when he felt like it, and the mother to their young son never spoke to me at all, which is rather typical for the seriously sick. The man would appear at odd times of the day and night, and I soon became accustomed to the habits of a household struggling with manic depression made worse by their recent move.

Believe it or not, they fit in with the rest of the household far better than I did at the time, better tuned in as they were to the various traumas at play throughout the big old house and its surrounding property. Like some mysterious theater for the insane, cars and trucks appeared and disappeared, sometimes for sale at the garage next door, to be back in use the very next day. What were their reasons for so many back-and-forth decisions? I never knew, as the resident healthy elder among a group of disordered individuals adrift in their diseases, cut off from forming families like the rest of us do out in the real world.

"Fritz" was charming, talkative (when he did appear), and spotty in all of his endeavors. At times, he would be cheerfully waiting with his adorable little boy outdoors for the short bus that took him to nursery school for half a day, as is fitting for a toddler still growing. Fritz would manage some tasks fast and efficiently, while he struggled to adapt to other basic day-to-day schedules on a regular basis. I say "Fritz" because I have also become used to a dizzying array of names over the years, some real and some ridiculously false, and my man from up north had the former thing going on with him.

First, he gave his son a name so weird and difficult to pronounce that I knew it was some sort of joke only he knew about. OK....whatever. I'd been told that people on the run often assume names to prevent the long arm of the law from reaching them, and after awhile, his new family seemed to fit that bill. The father said he was a Haitian-Canadian-American immigrant, with another family living in Montreal that he never saw, which was made odder because unlike his young wife, he was the one at home with his boy. The mom left early in the morning every day, to be replaced by a series of gradually more inept nannies, culminating in a tall angry woman who became abusive after their boy lingered on the porch to get a closer look at my Halloween pumpkin that lit up at night, made less scary in daylight but still interesting to him, nonetheless.

As I made coffee and got ready for the day, I could see them on the porch from the light of the tall windows; the boy was with a woman unknown to me. We knew he was trying to work out babysitters with his mother's assistance because the landlord told us. I saw the babysitter grab his hand, tugging him towards the front door and chastising him more harshly than he deserved, growing more aggressive with each tug on his little hand. I heard him rebel against it by yelling out loud (as I would have, too, because he wasn't doing anything wrong), so that I instantly stopped in the doorway between the kitchen and the large living room, clearly visible to them both through the big windows facing the porch. After that, the father was in charge of the boy, and he and I struck up an uneven acquaintance based on his daytime errands around the house. He told me that emigrating was easy for someone like him, expressing disdain for anyone who did it poorly.

I told him that were all immigrants here once, and that our histories didn't speak of ease and luxury, but rather of harshness and long voyages. I knew he wasn't interested in me as a person, because he never really asked me any questions about myself, but as one of the few people around the house who dared to openly speak with me outdoors, I was content to listen while observing his brilliant little boy. The boy, like me, was utterly unlike the other shut-ins living in the place. He seemed alive, curious, and energetic, picking up objects for a closer look and naming them aloud, when he did emerge from the house with his father on nicer days: "Car! Truck! Cloud! Sky!" He'd point out all the life moving around him happily to his father, and they seemed like good friends. He clearly cared for his son very much, and that's something I always approve of, under any type of conditions.

Their residency upstairs wasn't an easy one, unlike Fritz's glib pronouncements about relocating as told to me. At first, me and my closest neighbor Mike heard loud banging sounds and a furious back-and-forth pacing upstairs every night that wasn't right, and we knew it. The landlord largely ignored our inquiries, getting involved only when the nighttime banging became so glaringly obvious, that he told them to buy area rugs to muffle the sound, like I've done in the past to assuage the complaints of people living beneath me (per NYS law). Fritz didn't like spending the money to do it. He told me the landlord didn't reimburse him for his own rugs! I added in my conversation with the owner that active toddlers (like large dogs named TeddyBear;) need to be taken outdoors to play because of their natural energy levels, but just like the poor girl living in the attic space with her parents, I never saw the two children in residence playing at the playground right here in town, or at any of the library events for kids, even though I'd left information about our community center for him to use.

After awhile, even the father was forced to admit to me that he was hanging in there, but the going was rough. Uh, yeah! Yes, America is hard. Freedom is hard, and our lives often reflect the battles we have daily to preserve our way of life here. He finally admitted to me that if he had a choice between here or Canada, he'd probably have chosen Canada, because it's so much easier. Of course it is! French Canada is great, as long as you can bear up under a wintertime so severe, you'd be begging for a Haitian beach after it, poor as that nation historically has been. And for a Haitian man like him, I imagine driving a cab is a breeze when the native tongue is French, too, and therein lies the problem with a largely white Quebecois entrenched in their separatist ways: you can drive them around to earn a living for your family, as long as you snap to their ways, like a slavish devotion to a French culture that exists overseas in Europe. Know what I mean?

There's a steep price to pay for socialized healthcare, in a taxed system that presumes everyone on the planet (which is Quebec, where else?) is healthy and unhealthy in the exact same measure, which is about as far from life as you can get. College is free! Isn't that great? Sure! Just ask a hippie guy named Jean-Paul. I met him on a trip to McGill back in my college days. He preferred to matriculate in school after school after school, as a way of ignoring real life. His first degree was in history (like my ex-boyfriend) and then he was going to Nova Scotia for an art degree, as a way of deferring adult decisions like: who am I, and who do I want to be when I grow up? It was absurd.

And their "free" clinics are great, as long as you don't die on their waiting list for that also "free" gall bladder removal subject to approval by a board of people selected to make those decisions without consulting a Doctor of Medicine. That's what you get there. I'm not saying I dislike the province of Quebec, I'm just saying that resistance is futile. Back in the 90s, Montreal still had a large group of people who wanted to break away from the rest of Canada, like the state of Texas or the ancient city-states of Rome, and we all know where confederacies lead: nowhere good for the rest of the emigres.

Like the rest of the household of people who habitually need the healthcare we have to give them, he gradually stopped "bumping" into me outside, finding himself in the rough ride of democracy like every single one of our ancestors have felt keenly. I knew he realized the strength behind our life imperiled here as it sometimes is, and the true grit it takes to make a "go" of it in a free society, which is why people often fall back on the care and decisions of others. As their family fell apart upstairs, I knew instantly knew what was happening to him; he couldn't make it here.

He told me as much on the last Fourth of July, running into me on the porch as he drank next door on the first floor, waiting for me to show up for the fireworks, like we had discussed a week before. He seemed put out that I was just appearing outside at nightfall, as I explained to him that the Mets game was on. I'm from Queens, homeboy? I'm a native, bro! He never really knew my lineage, nor did he ask me, preferring instead to wander down the hill with a beer bottle in his hand, letting his boy run freely down the hill ahead of us. Uh....I was nervous at first, but Eli knew how far to go and when to turn back towards us.

We watched the small town fireworks from the crowded sidewalk, and he seemed overwhelmed at the size of it, like people had just sprung up from the pavement beneath his feet as we walked downhill. He was disoriented by this show of support in such numbers, like it wasn't what he expected, and I could tell as he looked around, that he was trying to form an impression that was not forthcoming. Eli threw grass and pebbles around to attract his father's notice again, which he did. People turned to our little trio to smile, and I could see that he saw a diversity reflected back at him that was new to him. Welcome to "The Land of the Free", homeboy! We made our way back up the steep hill, with his young son walking in front of us.

As we chatted out on the lawn, Eli thought it fun to play with the grass while we spoke, so I joined in the fun, tossing handfuls of the fragrant grass softly into his face to watch him giggle. I laughed, too. It was a happily gentle night for us, and the weather was perfect. We talked about the town below, and the largely Irish-American crowd who lives and thrives there. Rather than piquing his interest in our town, like a real newcomer, he cut me off with a tale told of dumb Africans driven onto ships past by evil slavers sporting mirrors with which to fool those poor unfortunates with. Huh. He's never met my ferocious African-American friends from around the way. They'd know their reflections from bathing and scrubbing their wash in the water, dude, like every other human being on the planet before them.

Sensing a game was afoot, I cut him off in turn, with my own sad tale of woe about our beleaguered Irish past, like the deliberate impoverishment of Ireland by England, for their defiance of empire-building ways. He seemed taken aback by that, and also quieted by it. Oh, he hadn't heard of that....he trailed off like a tragic Shakespearean character, humbly wishing his apologies to me for such a past. He just didn't know...oh! You didn't know that soldiers watched families die by the side of the road from hunger like the Soviets had, or perhaps China during their "people's revolution"? Well, excuse me, monsieur. You're talking to the daughter of wars survived, droughts tolerated, and crops deliberately destroyed. Ain't life grand?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29 

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_famine_of_1921 

Lord of the Flies

All across the nation, American voters cast their ballots in hopes of voting into effect those necessary changes that will help us reach what we define as our "Manifest Destiny*": hopes that each and every one of us have about the future world we want to live in, by passing those values onto the next generation through our right to vote, even if we don't live to see those helpful changes put into place. We see this vast land that we live in as part of G-d's sacred covenant with man, an unbroken promise about delivering us into "The Promised Land", so that it's more to us than some petty pissing contest or ego trip. 

We are actually crafting the very world we live in. It's a very active culture to participate in, one that has defined us as being the world leader for freedom in action, by granting every citizen the exact same vote of "one". Today, all across America, you are an "Army of One", as holy and united as any other land that has come before you, or that will exist into the future. With that in mind, I expect you to rise above the phony posturing that has defined media culture in modern times. You are not voting for "pretty", although you should look to pleasing human symmetry as a sign of good health. You should not vote for "rich"; you should vote for someone who is willing to reach deep into their own pockets to do what they say they will, just like I do.

It goes without saying that your votes should count towards our shared visions of good health and happiness for those who come after us, and if you know of people on the ballot who do not openly share those hopes about a shared good future, don't vote for them. If you have only one option to vote for, then ask yourself why more people haven't come forward to put themselves in the spotlight with the money required to become a candidate: how bad is the corruption around you? Are you passive? Do you do nothing in the face of corruption? Then, you are the very problem we seek to address through these public acts of voting and legislation. If you are too incompetent to vote, then you have to ask yourself why you are even an American citizen, so lazy and complacent as you are in the face of citizenship.

Many people have lived and died on much less than the principles that you are putting into action today. We have been instructed by His Holiness in Rome to vote into office those officials who actively support our unified goals about the preservation of our Earth, as our birthright from The Creator. You do not have the right to destroy this planet, or any of the lifeforms on this Earth. Witness this: I have an infestation of fruit flies in my current apartment, in part due to the noncompliance of the law by those people in my direct environs, in part due to the natural biochemical process by which organic matter breaks down, because that's exactly what happens when you recycle all the plastic and metal that you use. You only have food garbage leftover as trash.

So, answer me this: why am I the only person who cares enough to follow the law in this household that is not exactly of my choosing? How can a supposed "wealthy" man be foolishly considered a prominent business owner, respectable enough to own property, lording this power over his tenants by using them as puppets in his mental games that openly flaunt the laws we live by? How can he be considered "rich" in our society?! He stands for everything we despise: he's arrogant but illiterate (I had to talk him through his own business contract, which he then breaks), he's delusional and cowardly, he hides behind the people he depends on for money, like mocking the openly drunk mentally ill women who pay him Section 8 money from the state every month: how can he be better than them? He can't be.

And so, just like the representative from the sanitation department at Pearl River Day who stonewalled me by not giving me any straight answers about composting** in New York State, this one lowly man is deceived into thinking that he can openly disparage my efforts at recycling by myself without censure, when he and every other tenant does not recycle according to our very own laws, every single week, right underneath your noses. If you do not enforce your own laws, you are part of this corrupt system that we will replace. And make no mistake about it: you will be voted out, because today, on this day in November 2015, we (the truly elect of this world you live in) have drawn a dividing line between the rotten and the righteous that cannot be undone. Take comfort. You are not alone.

http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/8799.html

*    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
**  http://www.dec.ny.gov/chemical/294.html