Providence

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Providence,_Rhode_Island

The city of Providence was in pretty bad shape during my time attending the Rhode Island School of Design. Downtown was a workplace for the suburban 9-to-5-Monday-through-Friday set, abandoned to junkies and the homeless people on the weekends, like a ghost town. There were no stores open or attractions to see, other than a small mall built inside of a beautiful old building with an ornate glass ceiling. Surrounding the town was a large concrete sewer that reduced the river to a dirty little stream filled with garbage.

College Hill was a bastion of old houses and historic cobblestone streets by comparison, so the lack of any type of inviting nightlife (save for the one music venue we all frequented for discount tickets to traveling punk acts on their way from New York to Boston) actually spared us from a lot of the violent random crimes that plagued less savvy college kids. Occasionally we went to the Italian section on the other hill facing downtown for big spaghetti dinners, to be greeted by an archway hung with a copper pineapple for its guests, a sure sign of a paisan good time.

The misty narrow streets once haunted by the likes of Edgar Allen Poe were still as captivating to young artistic imaginations as ever, easy as the old scenes were at blurring the lines between then and now, in the dense fogs that would descend upon the town, blown inland from the sea. The air would become thick with moisture, salty and briny as the ocean, as every Northeastern city does. Anyway, the hill held enough for us to explore. The main drag at the top of the hill in our college district had cheap eats, like the vegan-approved falafel joint I went to with my hippie housemates that inspired me and my friend Dave to coin the phrase "The Falafel Mafia!" yelled out loud in an Arabic-sounding voice. 

We wanted to make t-shirts for our next punk band that would have one really bad performance before folding forever. Screeching is tough on the vocal chords! It wasn't until years later in Denver that I met a Portuguese/Italian guy from Massachusetts also living out west, who told me about the wackier side of town. He asked me if I knew a big decorative element downtown, and then I remembered. Oh, yeah! There was a building like New York's Flatiron skyscraper: narrow to a point, to fill out two bigger corners in a triangle-shape. "Right," my friend Chris said to me while we worked at The Denver Post. "It's evil." Uh...okay. Why? This should be good.

Chris had some traumas growing up that he felt pushed him into evangelical Christianity, trading his sex addiction for the headier blend of this weird-ass new age cult that flourished in the midwest during the 80s and 90s. It was the time of the "SuperChurch" with its strange crystal palaces and homosexual pastors who always seemed to be caught with illegal drugs and a hooker. My work friend was now a passionately ignorant "Born-Again", which was made doubly weird by his self-professed Catholic upbringing. The arid plains out west can do strange things to some people. 

Still, it was far better than dying from an overdose, so I tolerated his blowhard lecturing about my own faith as good-naturedly as I could, without letting him cross the line into offensiveness. I already knew who I was. Did he? I wasn't so sure. People with mental problems get confused easily. Chris had lived in Arizona with his divorced mom after they left the Northeast years ago, and even though Denver throws down some serious snow, homeboy continued to wear linen pants and a thin golf jacket like he was driving a golf cart around his retirement community. His brain wasn't catching up to the change in locale. 

Like office people everywhere, Chris preferred fanatsies about tropical beaches, grumbling about the weather while planning his next bad tourist vacation that would put him right back on the work-wheel he loathed so much. But, back to the story. So, what's wrong with that building's sculpture? It was a stone carving of a guy in a turban that faced people who came into town down a certain block. Oh, the genie is an evil symbol designed to be a focal point that draws in bad magic. Sigh...really? I don't think the oldest Ivy League schools in American give two fucks, other than its aesthetic appeal. Didn't stop us from doin' a damn thing.

He gave me that special kind of smiley condescension that marks the kook who's just been exposed. Turns out, Chris recruited another wack-job from his mega church to go on "hunting trips" that would neutralize evil hotspots. Ah, what the fuck...I'll bite. It was an office job, after all. What else was I gonna do at a plush union gig besides crossword puzzles and free music downloads? Well, first he lightly chastized me for my naivety about the creepy-crawly things I didn't know. Right. Yeah. So, the genie? Right! Well, you're supposed to counter its dark forces by staking out the four corners of a cemetery resting on a hill before town with a magical string that keeps the evil graveyard spirits from entering. 

That's what he and his brain-dead friend were doing with Denver (and it had to be done at midnight, too), and that's what I should have done for Providence. Uh huh. Besides the three jobs and all that art? Yes! Okay, neat. Thanks for that. In any event, I'm happy to report that my lapse in good judgment about crazy rituals did not hurt it one bit. In fact, after I left the city, great changes were already taking place. They removed the concrete blocks that held back the river, building a beautiful outdoor riverwalk that ended in an amphitheater for concerts and plays. A gondola boat gave tourists rides up-and-down the canal like Venice, with charming lights illuminating the scene at sunset. 
Not a bad ending after all, is it? 

Backbone

Houses have "feels" to them, just like any well-trafficked space for humans that spans many years. One might even say that these living spaces become permeated with the psychic energy from so many people who lived in them over the years, serving as a beacon for those who come after them, whether or not we know the history of these places. Such was the case with me, certainly; I noticed the beautiful Queen Anne here in town every time I walked past it, on the long walk from my mother's apartment to the local library, in country miles and any type of weather, because such is the measure of my devotion to you, my loving audience. It's what I trained for.

But, that didn't make it any easier. If I was sick—like I was my first year back in Rockland, lying on a thin pull-out chair that served as my bed on the cold floor of my mother's spare second room that she denies as such, to obscure the real reason for exclusions, which is her psychotic temperament—I still had only me to pull through anything, any time of year. So, when I found out that a really large studio was "to let" in the old house on the cheap, guided by the forcefully abusive hands of my mother and father who still gang up on people together when it occasionally serves both of their needs, it wasn't a surprise to me that the space called to me with a variety of energies.

A nice boy I grew up with—who cleaned my rugs for me, continuing the trade that his family established up here many years ago, in a reference and number given to me by my mother to better facilitate the quickness of my move—noted the exact same thing: "Hey, my friend used to live here years ago!" No way! It wasn't a surprise to me. Rockland is that small a place to live. Cool! I showed him a few of the key features that dated the place, like the original flue made in the 1800s by an iron worker from the city. The local librarian who's also a history buff told me an account that backed it up roughly to the letter, though I figured Dutch in there as an early ethnicity.

He said that the old house was designed as a showpiece for a German-American fire insurer from the city who hired fancy artisans that he paid to come up by train, to complete the impressive house. And that matched with what I found in the makers mark imprinted within the iron on the flue. Who knew insurance was such a lucrative business? But then, it occurred to me that structures were very prone to fire years ago, being made of wood and all. Another local told me at the library that her husband was descended from an Italian painter called Niccolini, who made a living painting big fires for just such a purpose, on a hill overlooking the burning structures, to record the event with a supposed deft accuracy. Huh.

His son-in-law, a chiropractor, moved into the big house after his daughter married, another dubious trade that has never won legitimacy from the authentic medical establishment that honors their Hippocratic Oaths solemnly made and upheld, like a lawyer pledging the truth with his clients while swearing on a stack of Bibles. While I have loved the house before I moved in, as a passer-by who can appreciate the finer details of historical architectural constructions, like the decorative wooden cut-outs that look like the spines of a backbone from certain angles that buttress the beautiful old house, the apartment around the bend of the big porch attracted something much less savory.

My neighbor told me the police had to batter down the front door during a violent domestic dispute he finally called the police on, and that was before the sick woman who left feet first this past year in a body bag, because after years of public drunkenness and drug use, she finally succeeded in committing the suicide that she'd loudly proclaim to anyone who'd listen. It was quite different from my side of the house, but similar to my neighbor's predicament with the previous couple years prior: we'd both reached out to prevent harm from happening to other people, and we were both still here, like the backbone carved out of wood by an artist far better than the man who hired him to do such crafty work. Such is the power of a much mightier spirit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/nyregion/30bartender.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/nyregion/julian-niccolini-co-owner-of-four-seasons-restaurant-pleads-guilty-to-misdemeanor-assault.html

Demon Hunter

One of the more salacious facets of our Holy Roman Catholic faith is exorcism, so much so that Hollywood has grown fat and rich with its telling and re-telling over the years, almost in direct contrast with the intensely taut state that is demonic possession. It's not something I talked about during my office career, as sanitized places where the gossip can be about sex or drugs, but never about the evil that lurks around a generic-looking water cooler, but that's exactly what it was.

After reenacting countless work scenarios where every single card in the crazy deck was played for a host of sick people at work, it was the only explanation left to explain the suicides, mental illnesses, and violent psychosis I observed firsthand, as well as heard in the first person from other employees. You could feel it swirling around you, the way you can feel a house's soul as either empty and fraught, or lively and well (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2016/01/sick-house.html). It's the same thing with some office spaces and commercial buildings: if you immediately get a bad feeling (or very soon after), trust it.

In criminology, sometimes a gut instinct is the only thing a really good detective has, besides knowing the killer is guilty as fuck, because evidence is notoriously tricky to find, and that's what evil relies on. It was the only explanation that made sense to me after my years toiling for insane family businesses; that they thought they had "the drop" on better workers because they cheated. It was something my dad and I used to talk about openly with one another. He worked for a sick family in Pennsylvania (the one year we had lived, as a family, outside of the New York area) who had a solid business that didn't need tricks, but they skimmed off the top anyway, and for peanuts, too. If they made a million-dollar deal, then a thousand or a few hundred dollars would go missing. It was always petty cash.

And it was baffling to my father, because they were already rich and successful. I asked my dad why he didn't call the cops after figuring out their scheme, and he just muttered that "all good things come in time". He got a big payout as his severance for knowing about them, in a dramatic stand-off scene that enabled us to move into a house in suburban New York with our family dog. He just wanted out. I knew it was finally over when the head of the family (one son flipped on the brother and father to cop a plea) appeared on the cover of a famous American magazine, and it still sickens me to think about it to this day (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rigas). 

Given his rough Brooklyn upbringing, my father already knew that the line between businessman and gangster could be a thin one. I think he was afraid they'd kill us, if he talked about it to anyone in the cable business. Besides the company, there were absolutely no signs as to how tight a grip the corruption of this wealthy family had over the other rich white men in town. We lived in a beautiful Victorian house we were very happy with, and the countryside was beautiful. I had my own room! Plus, we got the cutest little Samoyed puppy I'd ever seen in my life. Life was good. But, still, there was something. My mom asked one of the women in town to do a "house reading" for us, which, to the uninitiated, is gauging a living space for "good" or "bad" spirits. 

We were told that our house was "clear", meaning that if anyone had died there (and with a house that old, before funeral parlors and that sort of thing, dying at home came with the territory), they'd been happy, peaceful people who'd moved on easily. Oh good...we breathed a sigh of relief. That's good. And it was. We had a clay patch in the backyard, beneath a little ridge that led to a set of old train tracks we loved to explore together. As kids, we were instantly bumped up a grade for our innate New York street smarts and natural acuity (in rather stark comparison to the small-town folk), and we jumped into huge piles of autumn leaves in the fall that smelled of the richness of the earth. It taught me that good and evil can live right next door to each other, sometimes in very close proximity.

Let's leave it at that for now, as a sort of a beginner's primer to the (super)natural forces that exist around us, every single day. I couldn't wear a cross to work back in the day without getting hassled about it, (in yet another tale of workplace harassment that's actionable by law), and my life in the secular world has always danced around the natural one that I know to be true, but try telling that to deeply ignorant people who are afraid. Fear is a crippling emotion that feeds off bad juju (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juju), keeping its oppressors stuck in deeply ingrained patterns that can last for many years, often until death. And afterward.

Some say that "if it doesn't kill you, it makes you stronger", but that's not what happens with evil. No, sometimes it soul-sucks at you real slowly, until you grow weaker and weaker, almost dead with its sickness. Doubt me? Well, I've survived brush-ups with a few witches (recently, too, with a deranged Hexe: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Hexe), and as your favorite modern Fili (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fili), let me assure you: witchcraft isn't something that you just hand out once a year with Halloween candy. No, children, there are dark things to be afraid of that go bump in the night, and I'm here to tell it to you straight. Class is now in session.

http://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2015/04/16/vatican-exorcism-course-draws-170-students-to-study-demonic-activity/

Huggy Bear!

Yo honky, this here is Huggy Bear. You know, from "Starsky and Hutch"?

Me and my bros hero-worshipped few people growing up, because real-life heroes are hard to find (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2011/12/ackerman-update.html). Our short list back then (and now) was: Mel Blanc, Forrest J Ackerman, and Lou Ferrigno....in no particular order....or is there? We loved the adults who made stuff just for kids, because that's a form of love every child innately understands, like the punchline to a great cartoon voiced well and excellently drawn. How could we resist? We didn't!

We loved monster movies and the heroes who fought back against the bad guys for all of humanity, as well as any kind of action feature that had the good guys winning, kind of like how we do it now;) To us, they represented the best of what we wanted to be when we grew up: actual human beings that our kids (and their kids, and so on...) could look up to and feel proud of. It wasn't always easy for us to see the kinds of people we knew and loved reflected back at us in mainstream media, marginalized as we are as minorities fighting back against oppression (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/06/curly-girl.html), but like any other "good guy" out there, we persevered, living to fight another day.

The supposedly background character "Huggy Bear" from the 1970s t.v. show "Starsky and Hutch" (like the family from "The Jeffersons" and The Walkers from "Good Times") felt a lot like the people and neighborhoods we came from, trying to make their way against insurmountable odds in a cruel world, just like Fat Albert and his ragtag crew of kids from the block resembled the mixed bag of kids from around the way, in a combination of our 'hoods from the city and the country. Huggy Bear seemed to always be there went it all went down, not as the well-paid white actors in the lead, but still essential to the plot somehow by circumstances beyond his control.

But, that's how it went down in the day. Our guys weren't always played by the white actor in the lead, nor were they the sheriff in the big white hat playing up to the movie's full-face, up-close screen time; they were just there, hovering in the background, waiting to step in just when we needed it. In the meantime, we did what every single one of us in my crew did naturally, because we talked about it at length growing up: we worked hard (harder than most), went to school, entered the workforce, and kept our heads barely above water, at times subsumed by the forces of the tides as they turned, to dominate each and every corner of human life, because that's exactly what G-d promises us. Not easy or cushy, not money or houses or cars, nor anything shiny that can be bought and put up for sale, but who we are brought back to ourselves as the reality of who we really are hits us, and how strong we've become through our jointly-applied labors.

For all the underpaid, unsung glories of the world out there (and you know who you are), this one's for you today. Keep on rockin' and doin' your thing, knowing that the right person is watching you, even when it seems like we're not, because we are. We're right there with it.

(For Mo)

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.

Dark and Light

 

You might not know it, but advertisers fucking hate you. So do their useless product generators, and their insane marketing people. They hate you, too. I mean, really hate you. Your hair is bad, your skin is bad, your weight is bad....everything about you is bad, Bad, BAD!, in ever increasingly hysteric tones. I am (of course) the greatest evil in their Bizarro* world, because I am immune to programming, which sucks for them (or you, if you read this and recognize yourself in it).

Gen X'ers, like hep cats, jazz aficionados, flappers, and every other original generation before them, are particularly offensive to the "sell-at-all" costs crowd, because we are not a marketing trend. How do you reach a demo with no pigeon-holed stereotype? You can't, thus the hatred hardily mixed with fear and loathing (thanks, Hunter S. Thompson). No one can get inside your head if you know who you are, the essence that is YOU, because you can't be commoditized.

The chains that bind us to oppression are often of our own choosing. My father used to tell me that the greatest prisons are the ones people create in their own minds, and that is true. How can you be a wage slave unless you sign on the dotted line to the contract that binds you to someone else, most likely a stranger without your best interest at heart? When you do react against it, there's a steady stream of vindictive slurs tailor-made just for you, like "Darkie" or "Pasty".

Don't believe me? OK, check this piece of weirdness out. "Your skin is too dark! Buy this": (insert brand name here). "Oh, yeah? Well, I think your skin is too light. Buy this": (insert competing brand from same company here). Freaked out, yet? Welcome to my world. 

You can have all the lotions you want, if you'd only buy into it.

http://bit.ly/1jgA2FF

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

Take it to the bank

Traditional banking is going away for good, and I mean that sincerely. Why put your money in a safe house that's compromised? You don't. Banks were supposed to be the place where your paycheck was protected from the bad guys, but a fortress is only as good as its' security. As recent as two years ago, anyone could deposit money into any type of account, under any name, with no I.D. check. Yeah, that means what you're thinking. Your nice grandma with the fly car also has a grandson who deals drugs, and every week he'd put stinking cash reeking of pot smoke into her account, without anyone doing anything about it.

But that's why criminals worked as "inside men" at banks nationwide: that's where the money is, and that's what robbers steal. The banking industry has become such a magnet for illicit use (Off-shore banking, anyone? Sweden?), that the notoriously criminal firm of Goldman Sachs* recently announced their entrance into the banking game, for rich people only, of course: http://www.businessinsider.com/goldman-chair-writes-anticorruption-letter-2015-2.

I had my own run-in with the old crime syndicate a few years back, one that has its' hooks into every con in town, real estate and the city court systems included. The system temporarily bankrupted me, but not before I made each one of their key players do every financial tap dance there is, because no one messes with me and gets away with it. I am always a native New Yorker, no matter where I go.  

As the world's capital, we've always been a very wealthy area. Commerce was my dinner table conversation growing up, hence the lack of a business school on my curriculum vitae, but you didn't know that about me, did you? No, you didn't. That's because my dad was a greaser who played suckers for pool, one of my granddads' was a bookie during the Depression (in between pony rides), and they both taught me how to shuffle a deck of cards, just in case that junkie in Times Square wanted to shake me down playing "Three Card Monty" back in the day. So, we're back to the beginning, right? Not exactly.

After a corrupt system robbed me of all my pocket change, I was forced to do what I do best: improvise under the gun in the tightest of squeezes, which is exactly what I did. It's called "High Performing" in the circles where strong games are played. I ditched all my accounts, ran on cash, lived off my tax refund with a debit card from a chain tax service, then ditched that debit card the next year for a hard check. 

Of course, the well-known tax service couldn't cash it for me, because they aren't a bank. I knew that already, because I know businesses from the inside-out, and that's exactly what was told back to me: my own answer coming out of some admin's mouth (sorry, I meant "Office Manager"), which is certainly not my first ride around the block.

So, if you think financial calisthenics is the type of bloodsport you can handle, have at it. I know I can do any kind of weird gymnastics the system wants to throw my way. Sick and tired of being played? I got your back.  Read, learn, then do.

http://comptroller.nyc.gov/takeittothebank/

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

   http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/cake/shortskirtlongjacket.html

Killer

Fake food makers and sellers are the new pharmaceutical companies, and "Big Pharma" was the beast that replaced the tobacco industry. It's disconcerting for lobbyists and other middle men, because if they can't skim off the top, who will feed them?! 

And that's the problem with stealing the flame from your neighbor's hearth: it robs everyone else in the tribe of life-giving warmth and protective light, forcing us back into the cold dark befitting scavengers who prey off the good that a torch-bearer brings, which means this in"Newspeak"*: evil does not change garb often, because it can't. 

http://www.medicaldaily.com/pulse/soft-drink-dangers-8-ways-soda-negatively-affects-your-health-319054#

Bad people are not as good as us because they never have been, and they never will be. Oh sure, one can conjure up a false sympathy for the devil and his agents, but at the end of every day's light lurks a demon of the night seeking to benefit from creeping around the edges of a real society's earnest efforts. 

Let's not allow them to win in this century, eh? Time for the Dawn of a New Age. Let's begin this age of enlightenment today and every day afterward, until we get what we need.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/living/cdp_pan_pop.shtml 

http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/living/sugarydrink-media.shtml 

http://www.medicaldaily.com/bye-bye-sugary-drinks-what-happens-your-body-when-you-stop-drinking-soda-326034

 

*Newspeak is the fictional language in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, written by George Orwell. It is a controlled language created by the totalitarian state Oceania as a tool to limit freedom of thought, and concepts that pose a threat to the regime such as freedom, self-expression, individuality, and peace.

Monumental

Saving history from destruction, one piece of work at a time.

I decided to continue building on yesterday's themes about service and stewardship by writing to you today about a real-life situation from the past, and it is this: saving our greatest artworks from oppression and evil. Hitler and his regime didn't have one sole purpose in war, that of killing an entire religious ethnicity to create some wacky "master race". No, they wanted to wipe out any traces of our cultural past by stealing and secretly destroying the best of art, design, and statuary. 

It's a powerful story that's been largely untold until now. A handful of priests, nuns, clergy, and other lay people united with a small group of self-appointed warriors (who were also artists, writers, scholars, professors, and curators), and the few military men they could requisition, to rescue some of the greatest works of art that we have as a species; works that were to be burned forever (as so many were, or gifted to the German elite who stole them), so as to wipe out our past as a people, on NO BUDGET, with almost no support, and no additional resources granted to them of any kind from any ruling government, relying instead on their own ingenuity, bravery, and heroics, on the worst killing fields of Europe during the close of WWII.

Chew on that the next time you feel like you can't do something in life. I often live with less to get through tough economic times, so I know firsthand that you can do it, too. What are you waiting for? Permission? OK. Permission granted! Do it now!  I think she was worth it. What do you think?

http://www.monumentsmen.com/

For JonBenét

I was walking to church service a few weeks back, enjoying the sunshine and looking at shop windows in town, when this particular brand of insanity popped out at me, like a punch to the face:

WTF?! I'm no prude. I grew up dancing around in formfitting leotards as a kid, but never in some weirdo outfit like this, because (and this is key) MY PARENTS WOULD HAVE NEVER ALLOWED IT. Why, you ask? Listen to me, you g-ddamn fuck up, you know perverts who hurt children look for little girls to be dressed up like a woman because they are fuck ups. They know parents who outfit their kids like this are totally vulnerable to their brand of manipulation.

Just like we know "reality" t.v. stars pimp out their kids, pumping them full of sugar and drugs so they can "perform" onstage for these weirdos who use these events as a pretext to fetishize their children, the people who pay money for the privilege to attend, brandishing phony trophies and other "prizes", as they also lurk anonymously in the darkened audience, gazing at the objects of their desire onstage, primped out for all the world to see. In other words, this ain't no Sugar Plum Fairy dancing in a classical ballet at Lincoln Center, and we are onto you. Do you hear me, loud and clear?

We are onto you.

G-d bless you today, my parents, neighbors, friends, and dear families in Christ. Today (and for every day after, as these atrocities continue to occur), we go to battle against all the things that dare to go bump in the night, in direct defiance of Our Lord's True Nature, thinking that their sick gazes go unmolested by our unseeing eyes; that it does not pierce straight into G-d's heart, He Who Sees and Knows All. We see you. Know that, and sleep well, my children, tonight and every night.

And you, you who have so deserted the keeping and company of men of good faith, look what you have chosen to make famous with your attentions and focus. How do you sleep at night? This, this woman below, this is who you gave a major t.v. contract to. This is who you put on a major t.v. network. This is who you made famous. Does she look like she cares about you, or us, or herself, or anyone? No more.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/19/living/parents-ban-child-beauty-pageants/

http://www.tlc.com/tv-shows/toddlers-tiaras

Loosey Goosey

When the bottom fell out of my life financially and economically through spiteful intent and malicious design, after my supposed friends and family abandoned me, I found that abandonment embodied in a ramshackle tenement, in what was also supposed to be one of the "best" neighborhoods in New York City: Park Slope, Brooklyn. By no coincidence, it is comprised mostly of white out-of-towners who ask to be resettled there through their also-wealthy realtors and big money companies, so that they can feel some sense of security living in a town with a really bad reputation, much hyped as it is on t.v. and in movies. It is not my native New York.

It should then also come as no surprise to us, as New Yorkers, that we awoke Sunday morning to a loudly trumpeted double murder and suicide luridly served up and gleefully splashed across every local "news" program, a horror that was supposedly committed in response to "racism" (a divisive concept I do not believe in, because it is a human construct that does not actually exist in our blood that flows freely), but which is actually madness in the guise of evil. I was not fooled by the gunman's racist exhortations online, a mockery to all of us during this season of glad tidings and one very special birthday, but isn't that the point, the very hell that we women relive each and every day? We give birth, only to watch men and boys kill each other (our children) in each others' name. One life is given, and two are taken away, or two are taken and one is murdered, but the result for a woman is always the same: grief, pain, and mourning, as we watch our children taken away from us, after laboring so hard to keep them alive and safe under our charge, brief a time as it is.

And so it was with me, when I was forced into poverty and homelessness by the very people who pledged to give me life and succor it gladly in G-d's name, in His House, and standing on His alter; a move I made done in quick fear to a rotten, filthy hole of a building with horrors inside that also existed in full view of one of the wealthiest neighborhood's in the world, like a sacrilege to any who dared enter it, in the form of a roach-filled, rat-infested tenement that was the only thing I could afford to pay at the time before another corporate job started (at half the salary and below my level, you know, to fully take advantage of my vulnerable status). My labor only encouraged the tenants who lived there, beneath me in every regard, to feed off my body and blood as I worked unholy hours every day and night for them. I gave them everything: first as my money earned through my labor which is made from my honest and good hard work, my few scant hours of free time filled up with their petty tricks lies, deceits, and nonsense, all my best advice and attentions, my good wishes, all my richest and most worthy gifts freely given to them, and still it did no good. They still choose each day to waste G-d's precious riches.

The man who introduced me into his world and environment was recommended this dirty place through the local bodega, the very same place that sold him "loose" cigarettes, an unknown element to me before I came first to sleep on his floor in his sleeping bag and then, after I paid he and the super to help me empty out another filthy room adjacent to his little cell, was the same place I made clean so I that could sleep in that chamber of horrors that was padlocked with a chain instead of a doorknob before I went to work in the city, earning more for them to take from me cruelly, as they devised. 

This focal point of crime disguised as just another local bodega served as the community hot spot for criminal endeavors, because I asked my fallen friend to tell me about it. The same bodega owner who sold him cigarettes one by one in a small paper bag also took advantage of his derangement and continued poverty by directing him to an illegal tenement where he squatted, until the rich old white lady owner from Long Island found out that super was also in on the take, and kicked us out through some rich white lawyers working the city housing court system, because we hadn't given her enough to stay in her illegal building. After all my battles there were won, I actually paid what is considered "fair market value" for the privilege of staying in her squalor.

They told my mentally ill friend at the bodega (because he was new to this place that he always aspired to be, susceptible as he was: a broken ghetto kid from Brownsville) where to buy pot, and they advertised in their store window how they could illegal hack into your iPhone for a $50 fee (which was locked because you couldn't pay your phone bill) through something also unknown to me at the time that's called a "jailbreak". My friend and a neighbor had to teach me how to do it, where to go, and which man to ask for at the bodega for these services. They were that unknown to me at the time; these strange, foreign, shadowy, secretive underworld concepts that baffled me and still do, like the criminal who spends ten years plotting a crime that's over in ten minutes, never recouping his actual loss spent planning such hopeless endeavors. That's how wasteful and stupid it was to me, emotions not dulled or diminished today through the time and distance that has passed.

So the next time some carnival barker (with his obvious freckles and slick pompadour) appears on t.v., the same one who refuses to pay taxes in our home state and city where he also resides, tries to convince you that we exist in a society that's as flat and dull as any generic black and white cookie bought in a corner bodega that can easily be broken in half, remember my words here as you read my true life tale, before you rush to judgement about who is the criminal and who is the thief. Chances are that when you look in the mirror, it's you, and that this current tired rerun being played out on t.v. for sport and amusement is a phoney crusade made from fool's gold.

http://www.withsprinklesontop.net

Merry Christmas to you during His Holy Days
of Peace, Prosperity, and Love.

Insane Cat Posse

Uh oh. I feel eyes on me, like I'm being watched....

Rockland County rednecks like lots of things: Hooters, hot wings, beer (all in one great location), huntin', big trucks with flashing lights and awesome monster tires with stripper silhouettes on them mudflaps, and dollar stores. The dollar store in my town is no different than, say, a Wal-Mart is out west. There are pairs of scratchy polyester pants, cheap plastic shoes; in fact, a bevy of plastic goods that "off-gas" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outgassing) at such an alarming rate, you get a headache if you're in there long enough. It's an unhealthy but sometimes necessary place to shop, for financial reasons.

Ah!! Scared the bejeesus outta me!

And just like my truckin' neighbors, the t-shirt rack rarely disappoints. It's a wealthy mix of loud cheesy prints, sayings, and slogans, most of it overly jingoistic (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jingoism) nonsense about flags with colors that don't run, big deer heads, guns, and camouflage prints that relay strong fears about "foreigners", and that's just the male shirts.The women tend to like chocolate and cats; lots and lots of cats. This one design is so particularly egregious, such a high temple to offensively bad taste, I had to snap a few pics. These cats' eyes follow you, and they are angry; oh so angry. Beware. Halloween is a'comin'.

My Mega Foes

The Evil Borg Kitty "Mecha-Anchovy", my first real foe.

Enemies are hardly new to humankind. It pretty much happens whenever there are more than three people in a room, and because of a basic principle called "factioning", the producers of the day stage morality plays in the guise of "reality" t.v. shows, catering to the interests of the drunk and/or mentally ill among us. Me, I prefer the classics in those old school renditions by Shakespeare, but as a publisher, I respect all revisions, updates, and new editions of this ever appealing and exciting classic tale of Good vs. Evil. Who will win?!

Harbinger of Gloom, the evil "Doom Shroom"!

It's all so falsely cliffhanging that students since time immemorial have created drinking games about spot societal clichés to pass the time; time that would be excruciating without a serious crutch to numb and dull the senses, which puts us on pretty much the same level as the morality tales' participants. And just like my college days, I still prefer cartoon enemies over the real, dull, and repetitive kind. After all, new foes are so fun to create, aren't they? Witness my ascent on the game Bejeweled Blitz, as I climb the ladder up, up, and away! The evil Tiki Gods get angrier and more powerful as I rise, and also, strangely, boringly, achingly repetitive. Thanks for watching with me.

I had a post-Apocalytpic dream about an Alien Yeti invasion=I won!

As We Know It

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2626412/NASA-spots-worrisome-Antarctic-ice-sheet-melt.html

The day that has long been foretold is now upon us; the harmful change to our natural world, as it has existed for millennium, has begun, and will move swiftly towards us all. We have artificially warmed our world to such a degree that we have destroyed one of the last great wild spaces on our planet; one of our polar ice caps.

It is with a heavy heart that I also write to inform you that our race has sealed the death warrant for millions of species and fellow inhabitants on this planet. No longer can the powers that be, (who reaped the earth for gain and profit, with the intention of passing on their sins to someone else to figure it out and clean it up), hide behind their profits, lawyers, paid government officials, and corporate-sponsored specious reasoning. 

As dire as this expected news is for us, I also found a bright spot amid all my depressed thoughts, while fretting about the impending changes that have been irreversibly set in motion. Those who counted on thriving under the cover of dark will now be exposed to the light. No longer can someone "accuse" someone of "making up" Global Warming under the guise of some weirdly vague hippy, meddler, do-gooder type of argument, nor can the evil forces of the world point the finger at a scientist for falsely "twisting" the facts (and why someone would do that is still open to debate, because it was never a real question to begin with), because that part of our world is gone now too; the wrong with the right.

It is not whether have you enough information to move forward, because many, many others before me have told you the story of our planet's sickness long before it flashed onto your screen in a brief one minute spot during the evening news, but this: what will you do today, and from now on, to make the changes needed to save our planet and the species that still have a chance of making it out alive from this worldly mess? 

If your spot on the globe is coming under water (and for sea-level dwellers and coastal inhabitants, it most certainly will be, with the expected 4-12 feet of melt water that's expected to hit the planet soon), it should not be about me, (and people like me), who know the problems and have the answers, but rather this: how will you and your children and grandchildren and elderly, along with the sick and the vulnerable in our population, survive under the new climate? Because it isn't me, or people like me, you have to fear. 

It is yourselves. 

Good luck out there,
Your Sister in Christ

http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/antarctica-ice-sheet-disintegrating-n103731