Landmine

I recently read online that a well-known American actress has "come out" as a former Scientologist, while promoting her film that accuses the cult of brain-washing and coercion, which definitely fits the profile for cult status. Former members are shunned from the community after they leave, like the practices of the Amish and Hasidim. It's an intensely painful way of assuring "brand loyalty", because once someone questions their commitment to certain doctrines within the religion, their families are immediately pressured by the rest of the group to conform the questioning family member back to their faith under threat of ousting, too, and failing that, they turn their backs on non-conformists for the rest of their lives.

Brutal, isn't it? But, the members of these groups point out that this is the way they maintain their traditions over the centuries (not that Scientology has a long history), and if an individual disagrees so strongly with their beliefs, why stay? They're free to go! The Amish have an adolescent rite of passage called "Rumspringa" that allows for freedom of expression through a temporary relaxation in their strict rules about smoking and drinking and dating, as long as it's done outside of the community's boundaries. Once that time period ends, the teenager has to decide whether they want to return to the community and re-affirm their beliefs, or leave for the world outside. 

It sounds deceptively simple, until you realize that by leaving their homes, they will never see their Amish family again, unless it's a quick "hello" from a car parked in front of the family farm by a lonely son waiting for his brother and sister to return from church in a horse-drawn buggy, because the Amish don't use electricity. Their shunning extends to the entire community, too; their parents will never know their children with the "English" (their word dating back to Colonial times for Americans living outside of Amish country), nor when their beloved grandmother passes away, or how many children their sister has with her husband. 

There are no birthday cards or anniversaries, weddings or funerals. To them, you cease to exist as if you had died, but you haven't. It's the particular pain of a deeply indoctrinated belief system that doesn't allow for sustained inquiries, because under the surface of their strict faith lies the doubt of their members who know they won't hold up for long under the scrutiny that serious challenging brings. That's not to say they aren't religious, moral, or ethical in their beliefs. 

When an emotionally disturbed man walked into an Amish school with a gun (they're pacifists who don't believe in weapons) and murdered their children, they issued one statement to the public about healing, then tore down the schoolhouse and built another one away from the site of the massacre. There were no lawsuits or ongoing prosecutions, no threats to sue or vows of revenge. They acknowledged what happened and moved on from it, in a powerful expression of forgiveness and faith. I think it made a lot of Americans see the other side of their lives, besides the rather tawdry reality shows on t.v. about ex-Amish and their struggles outside of the community.

For the bipolar receptionist at a small family firm I worked for, there were no other sides to her life or her faith. She was prone, vulnerable, and suffering. When her youngest brother pulled her into his quick-moving world of martial arts McDojo's and "Landmark" seminars, she fell hard for both pyramid schemes like a drowning woman clutching at a rope tossed to her in high seas during a really bad storm. In lieu of actually healing from her serious brain disorder(s), she'd been fed a steady pop culture diet of group therapy, rehabs, extremely expensive pharmaceuticals, and, yep, more talk therapy, but no cure. In the wake of healing, the hard-pushed and deceptively marketed products of the world pulled her under, into her next psychotic break from reality, because the pressure of a fully-functioning adult life was too much for her to bear.

When the members of her Landmark group sensed blood in the water after she started attending their "sessions" and "classes", they moved in on her with great force. I'd pulled away from her after her unrequited crush on a 19 year-old at the dojo that quickly became obsessive officially kicked off her down-spiral towards illness again, because I could see she wasn't handling the intensity of fight training well, and given her psychosis, exposing someone as sick as her to violence was like putting a match to gasoline to watch it explode. It seemed cruelly unnecessary. 

Whereas her brother and her new friends from the group benefited from the est-style seminars, she quickly became entangled in their network overmuch, staying on the phone for hours at work with Landmark members who put the "hard sell" on her to find more people so she could afford more classes, in classic pyramid-scheme style. One of the more memorable images from that time period was a story she told me about all-day "lectures" with severely restricted, member-supervised food and bathroom breaks, while they were shouted at from onstage by the senior people in the organization running the show. They decided when a member had enough, or if they needed more pushing. If they found their extremely personal reveals acceptable, they would ring a large bell that everyone in the auditorium could hear, yelling "BREAK THROUGH! BREAK THROUGH!", like the proverbial Pavlov dog salivating at a dinner bell. She never had a chance.

http://m.motherjones.com/media/2009/07/landmark-42-hours-500-65-breakdowns

Reefer Madness

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

Yesterday afternoon, I watched a popular entertainment program like I usually do, to be somewhat familiar with today's pop stars, because it's hard for a punk rock fan like me to identify with such rabidly followed trends like its the final Wimbledon match or the last game of the World Series. I wasn't exactly a "Tiger Beat" reader* growing up, and I'm pretty sure it would've been banned from the house for being stupid, anyway. My parents can be really egotistical about their educations. Like a lot of bourgeoisie in suburbia, they're still uptight about their relatively recent "escape" from blue collar life in the city; they can be fretfully uptight as a result.

And entertainment news is considered lowbrow t.v. fare, but I am thankful I'm not working their celebrity beats, too. They all look, sound, and act the same to me, anyway. In between the latest "bad boy" arrest was a refreshing live interview with former t.v. host Montel Williams, a proud American military vet and an outspoken advocate for fellow MS sufferers, which speaks to the heart of my family. He spoke about the relevance of medical marijuana to his treatment, and it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it. My mom and I talked about an article I forwarded her about cannabis for her MS, and she didn't reject it as an option outright, which was surprising at first.

When I was growing up, a common attack amongst my mother's family was the demonizing of anything illegal, like smoking pot or underage drinking, that served as an effective cloud cover for their shopping/sugar/pill-popping addictions that had thus far escaped mainstream notice, though times were quickly changing. With the advent of reality t.v. came widely-available media content about mousy fringe types, like the extremely anti-social cat hoarder, or the guy who dresses up in diapers to heal from his abusive childhood. 

Unlike obvious (and legal) social behaviors like smoking and drinking, mental illness became a mainstream topic, thus blowing the lid on their hereto hidden afflictions, especially when my aunt's "dear friend" died from botched surgery as a quick fix to the hoarding habit that placed her in a low-rent apartment around the corner from her late mother's Bronx multi-level townhome that she filled to the roof with junk, floor by floor. Nowhere to run, after that. Still, their semi-public bristling at my lifestyle differences behind their closed doors worked well among their small familial group, where clinically-diagnosed paranoia reigns supreme. Pot smoking became attached to schizophrenia through their compulsive repetition of it, aided and assisted as their pea brains were by so much widely available "newsie" propaganda. 

With the crack craze of the 80s and 90s, lawmakers were desperate to end the murderous rampage from the drug's use that practically bankrupted the city, causing the "white flight" that my mother and her family still rant about, comfortably entrenched as they can be in their casual racism. There were news reports after news reports about "gateway drugs" and "latch-key kids" that my mom and her sisters passive-aggressively sent as news clippings to one another, in a search for the minutely incremental leverage that marks the habitually anti-social. But, they were just following along with the masses.

Of course, me and my friends attending a well-regarded teacher's school in upstate New York knew better about a plant called "MaryJane". Me and my Irish/French-Canadian boyfriend referred to it as "herbe" and "l'herbe" at the same time that classes like "The History of Jazz" and "The History of Rock n' Roll" were filled with students every semester. And therein lie our generational cracking open of the case, forever. I mean, we were taking astrophysics and/or high school SAT's on weed and beer, yo. We already knew what science would eventually catch up to. But one cult movie classic really tied up the loose ends for us, culturally.

Marginalized as African-American people and their works were, no one could deny the artistic relevance of jazz and blues as predominant musical forms that were (and still are) undeniably American. Classes about another American artistic import, the movies, showcased cultural prejudices on a world stage, like the stigma portrayed in the old film "Reefer Madness" turned white audiences against some jazz cat's homegrown stash, versus the huge pharmaceutical megacorporation's factory-manufactured outputs of "Class One Opoids" that are much more addictive, and much more of a gateway to hard street drugs like heroin than some ole weed could ever be. And therein lies the brilliance behind co-opting artistic businesses for mass coercion.

I was impressed by Mr. Williams for being a public proponent for research about alternative delivery methods of medical marijuana that don't open patients up to smoking-related health issues (which my mom and I had already discussed, because she's a pill-popper), as I also noted that he is no longer a daytime t.v. talk show host, either. Still, he represents a celebrity voice in the African-American community that stands by its roots, one rational conversation at a time, now that the real junkies in society are dying off in droves. Finally, GenX gets to share its healing message of peace, love, and understanding through traditional medicine, one patient at a time. "You're welcome" for saving your lives, once again.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Beat

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.

Gotta Have Park

When I wrote that I competed with adults at the hardest school in the world—with the lowest admissions rate in the world—I meant it. I was vying for my class spot with people who had already lived a few lives and careers before me, which is about as daunting as it gets, not that anyone came to our defenses. We were their fodder; everyone's: the teachers, the administrations, the other students, and that included any/all adults working around us. People who try to excel by becoming talented fakes with great mimicry skills are very nervous people indeed, because they need much better, smarter people—to feed off of to survive—and that included the teenagers and very young adults we were back then, which was sort of like sending a young Jimi Hendrix into war involuntarily, to die for a country that denied him the right to drink at certain water fountains, let alone buy himself a real stiff drink before being shipped out to active wartime duty at 19-years old.

As much as we tried reconciling their presence at our school, it didn't seem fair to us, and we knew it, because we started making some noise, and then some much louder noise, until the "profs" who thought they could game us by sabotaging our expensive education got a real taste of working class life and the transfer student mindset. It sent them tail-spinning downward while taking potshots at kids like me, working three jobs at once while taking only studio classes, because I had essentially completed an entire Liberal Arts curriculum in just three short years, though that degree was unjustly held from me, too (in lieu of my transfer status), just like I was forced to complete my senior year of high school, even though I had completed the curriculum by junior year with college credits and a Regents diploma, but if the gifted left, who would be there to pay for all of your salaries? Right?

In retaliation for circulating a petition around campus asking for desktop publishing classes to be placed on our curriculum, equipped with the kinds of computers we actually use in the workplace, I was "blacklisted" by the very professors who were there to supposedly educate me. It didn't matter—just like it hadn't mattered in my educational past—because my mentor let me pursue my work in his classes as independent studies, which is, once again, like becoming a grad student as an undergrad, but, again, that doesn't pay for your two apartments in Providence and Brooklyn, does it, "Prof"? No! We did! We paid for that for you, so you could take open potshots at children, basically. It made for some very weird classes indeed. 

Take, for example, Ellie. She decided to play the "ethnic minority" game by wrongly trumpeting her prized European status to an openly disparaged minority like me, which made for the most awkward kiddie-adult conversations you could imagine, as she openly campaigned for me to get kicked out of "her" school that she attended as an undergrad at 34. Huh...that's so...odd. And it was. She would talk about her past as a forest ranger (why didn't she learn to draw while living all alone in a forest for months on end?), as we pondered how the fuck she could go from living on Mount St. Helen during its epic volcanic blast to sitting in on our kiddie crits, because I sure as fuck never had the time to work on a portfolio before attending college, let alone blow off one career for our kiddie art classes, in comparison.

It was highly suspect and dubious in the extreme, but just like every other situation I've faced in my life. I had to make it, like a Marine dropped behind enemy lines with no lines of communication or ammo left, nursing a serious bullet wound or two while evading capture and/or the enemy. If I didn't attain a degree from this school, there was no job waiting for me in the outside world, and I didn't want to die from homelessness or starvation, which is just like today. 

I write to you from a public library that's becoming increasingly hostile to me, because the director here has already called the police on me for standing up to one of their Special Needs crafts "teachers" for harassing me by lurking behind me as I typed, and then aggressively staring at me, mouthing words at me as I typed to you all, which, just like then, resulted in me attaining a police contact on the force by an officer who flat out told me not to even bother to talk to anyone at this location again. "Just call us instead." That's how bad it gets. 

Like every moment that's precious in this life we live, so is our land. We live off the land that grows the food we need to live. No healthy land, no food for the animals to eat, and that includes us. If we do not protect our precious resources—like our land and water—then we do not survive. Sometimes—like my work, education, and life story—it is that simple. It becomes that basic, our survival. No food=no us. No bees=no pollinators. It all comes back to our defense and self-defense skills, and so, even though adults with more money, more experience, and a heck of a lot more time than me still tried to kill me off, here I still am, fighting for my survival while I fight for all of us. 

So, Ellie, even though, in your misguided hatred and aggression of an artistic life that was never yours to live by destiny, I dedicate today's fight to you anyway, for a t-shirt you wore back in the day that read "Gotta Have Park", and even though you wore it to protect your own government job as a forest ranger, I still believe in its message. What cannot die has never really lived, as far as I'm concerned. Live.

http://www.earthshareny.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdevelopment 
http://www.environmentnewyork.org/ 

Wall of Confusion

With the decline of mental healthcare that marks this century and the last, we've all been forced to become doctors of the human condition, with or without the surgeon's paycheck. I've become accustomed to the twitches of other people that mark their significant discomfort out in the world (not that I like it at all), while also being robbed of the proper mechanisms in place that prevent real healing from occurring. It's like I wrote about certain therapy/rehabilitative business models: they succeed by deliberately not solving the problem for you, which is a rather big way to lie to sick people who are already vulnerable in the extreme. Comedian/actor Andy Dick was recently on t.v. to talk about his battle with addiction and his addictive disorder that's put him back in rehab FOR THE 20TH TIME. Is that real healing for anyone?!  

Corruption does that to people, even those working in the healthcare industry, by slowly seeping into your soul bit-by-bit without you knowing it, because evil hides behind easy comforts when you're prone. In the vacuum that came with the American de-institutionalization of psychosis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation), people were left to fend for themselves, which is about as far from our ideals about happiness and the pursuit of it as you can get. Doctors were left to treat violently sick people with prescriptions sold to them at a huge mark-up—through the creation of huge pharmaceutical giants—instead of receiving real care, because true healing takes a lot longer than many employers, shareholders, and investors like for their returns, aided and assisted in their delusional jobs by the sense that time is much quicker than it is, like the time montages they see on t.v. Why can't we all be quicker? Drink more coffee! Stay up longer with this pill! There's always a product that's a quick fix over the slower tending that really solves a problem.

My physician in Brooklyn told me that she didn't over-prescribe antibiotics because they lose their effectiveness with time, making us much more vulnerable to greater illnesses, but people with mental problems who already struggle with less than accurate timelines want it now now now! They don't know how to incorporate a longer wait, suffering as they already are. Add more time, and they worry about keeping the health plan they get through their routine office job, because their boss is kind of a fucked-up asshole already, and any absences encourage managers to fire people too quickly, in behavioral patterns that were developed during "The Industrial Age" that treated people like they were the machinery they worked on, even though the exact opposite is true of our daily lives and strongest skill sets as human beings. We are far from being disposable as unique individuals. With my doctor's guidance, I weaned myself from the over-the-counter cold and flu products that caused my heart to race like I just pounded coke in the bathroom stall of a Wall Street trading firm.

It was always the same "Get back to work!" message that was shouted at me, so that someone else could get rich from my work, while I struggled to stay awake. I began waiting out seasonal colds, and then instructing the people around me about my process, which involves a longer timeline. My doctor told me (and it's true) that any suppressing drug will only leave you open to repeated bouts of illness, if only we could simply wait for our body's natural self-defenses to fight the illness during that first cold of the year. Instead of hopping around in a couple of days (work work work! busy busy busy!), I began to wait for 10 days or more, which immediately freaked my mom out when I lived with her, even though I repeated my good science to a supposed scientist like her over and over again, which she promptly forgot during my prolonged colds, growing more and more agitated by the day, until she exploded in a violent psychosis that she blamed on my repose.

The sickest among us continue to struggle, trying in vain to adopt to a work world that already passed them by many years ago, leaving them bereft of healthcare and support. My mom is one of those people who always feels she needs "more support" or more education, when in truth, her brain is incapable of working in our world. As a result, she learned to cover up her diseases expertly, letting them show only around other diseased peer groups—like her laboratory co-workers—at work in a place where she could use her "friend's" illnesses against them for leverage to keep herself employed, in the event that they sabotaged her efforts at work as a handicapped single mother.

She has a distinct pattern that she refuses to acknowledge to me, because I am not a part of her sick world, and as a social group rife with varying degrees of markedly anti-social tics and paranoid responses to ordinary stimuli, they break down quickly in the face of good health that surpasses them, so they seek to tear down the one person in their sick group who can lead them out of it, trapped in a co-dependent pattern that never brings them the healing they so desperately need. Like the character "Sheldon" from the popular sitcom "Big Bang Theory", she found a group of over-educated people who told each other as a tribe that they were smarter than other people around them because they were in science as technicians, rather than the grant-wining superstar researchers who truly excelled at work.

Most of them went on to work other compulsively repetitive jobs, like her friend who went from cleaning Petri dishes every day to a tax accountant, where she could basically do the same job every day, with some variations. They weren't all that smart under careful scrutiny, which is exactly what they seek to avoid the most, like the medicine that will ease the obvious symptoms of their public manifestations of anxiety, like Sheldon Cooper's abstract physicist character—and they are certainly not him, fictional as he is—though they certainly pretend to be. In retaliation for their inequities and insecurities, we have an enormously anti-social peer group in our world with deeply ingrained traits that were never socially acceptable, and it's time that changed.

Instead of nursing along people who pretend ignorance to compensate for their brain disorders, why not try telling them upfront that you know they have a disease? After all, I can't "cover up" my deafness in certain kinds of settings, so I began educating the people around me, to prevent a lot of weird gaming from going on. It's not our job to make sick people feel better about their annoying tics that were developed in lieu of appropriate healthcare. We are not the problem in this world. You are. So, change. Change it. It's time to stop using your psychosis as a weapon. We're not fooled by it. It's not a real weapon for you, anyway. It never really was. It's over. Really and truly.

http://csgv.org/issues/guns-and-mental-health/

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/01/obama-gun-control-rule-mental-illness-217340

http://www.ibtimes.com/guns-mental-illness-white-house-releases-new-reporting-guidelines-background-check-2248724

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/24/opinion/robbins-mental-health/

Drive

In addition to cooking poorly, thinking poorly, acting badly, and behaving terribly, Cotto was a horrible traveler and automobile driver, which was no surprise to anyone but him, and that was a total lie on his part. His dumb ass gets caught all the time, like the time he overdosed on cocaine and "working out" in Florida as a mechanism for coping with his manic bipolar identity/personality disorder with active schizo-affective features. It was based on his flawed perception that life was totally different in another state, which is only partly true, Yeah, sure, dude: the scenery, climate, culture, foods, and people could be different or dissimilar to you, but you're still on Planet Earth, motherfucker. You're still a fucking human being, you dumb dick.

And that was the other excruciating thing you have to do with severe mental patients who avoid long-term healthcare so they can use it as an abusive weapon against their fellow human beings: he made you repeat shit all the time just to "fuck with" you, except he just came off as a stupid dumb-fuck, which isn't exactly criminal genius, is it? Of course, I know mental patents with Ph.D's who can hardly figure out how to get dressed in the morning without taking lots and lots of drugs, so we went over (again) my part of the lesson plan that includes mental illness and I.Q., and how they are not always related, except when you forget to take your anti-psychotics, dick. Off his meds, he has the fucking mentality of a retarded ten year-old sans Ritalin.

So, when he told me that he pounded lines in Florida and "worked as a personal trainer", the cocaine part of his sentence made sense to me right away, with perhaps some manic-compulsive dieting and exercise thrown into the mix, because addicts with serious mental disorders totally do that. He was a part of "Narcotics Anonymous" (that's N.A. for you "squares" like me), weirdo street-front Evangelical churches catering to madness for the zealot-minded who seek immediate relief with loud shouting and lots of absurd arm-waving, and crazy life goals that include personality changes with any switch in one's geographic locale. Uh, homeboy...how exactly does that work?

Oh, it didn't, he assured me. Thanks, Cotto. I think I figured it out. He always tried to impress me with his intelligence, but coupled with delusional paranoia and his criminal record, I wasn't buying it. When he told me he was arrested down south for driving under the influence, that I immediately believed. Of course, his story came readily-equipped with a "white power" angle concocted in his over-heated tropical Nuyorican brain about "racial profiling" and "The Man", even though he was drunk and high and swerving all over the road when he was arrested. Without a license. I know! Not exactly "12 Years A Slave" material, you know?

But, that's the thing with chronically sick fuck-ups: he actually likes being sick better than he likes healing, so he creates a ton of lies to cover over his inability to adapt to human society, because he can be an evil fuck, and he likes that. After our acquaintance continued in his prison-like quarters of our temporary Park Slope tenement housing, he also let it drop that he stole his dead grandmother's "Sears" credit card from her mail (for what, we can only fucking imagine), and that "his lawyer" advised him to pay the $3000 he put down on the card back.

His theft shocked me less than the fact that he had a lawyer to advise him on complex legal matters, like his subsequent incarceration and rehabilitation program in Florida (that included job training, psychiatric treatment, and free anti-psychotic drugs), that was a mandatory part of his release as a drunk, high, thieving, mental patient on welfare. You get representation for free, too?! I was stunned that he got expert legal advice as a convict. Ain't we supposed to be "gaming" him for the facts, yo? How did it get to be the other way around? The criminal gets legal counsel, but the sweet old "mam" I met on the "Legal Aid" line in Brooklyn has to do chemotherapy for her cancer along with solving her wrongful eviction case. How the fuck did we get here?

At the end of our quick friendship that was always destined to be short-lived—just like his too fast life—I thought he was one of the sickest, most vulnerable people I'd ever met, who been further brutalized by his codependent, drug- and alcohol-addicted Nuyorican parents (and grandparents), and every so-called social system we'd devised for practically untreatable people like him, because we'd rather sell people on this fantasy that with enough money and condescending "programs", he'll be just fine. He just needs to work in the back of dirty kitchen washing dishes, you know? He's just "underprivilieged" as a European-American into several consecutive generations.

It was some of the worst healing and care-taking I'd ever heard of (or seen) first-hand in my life, wasteful and ignorant in the extreme. Most of the welfare workers I met were just as sick and poor as Cotto, with a lot less intelligence than him. He wants to be lazy and unproductive because, and here's the kicker "America", he's really fucking sick. Do you know what he needs? He needs a fucking institutional facility of supported apartments with full-time healthcare workers to take care of him during the rough spots in his life, not your fucking sadistic bullshit about "job training" that you can use, to pose with some retard in a fucking photo for your next political campaign fundraiser. Cut the fucking bullshit with me and Your Holy Father. It's time. Really.

Your homework, plebes:  
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2006/11/welfare_spendin.html

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2013/01/24/1489091/americans-just-cant-afford-mental-health-treatment/ 

Curfew

During the heyday of social media, I grudgingly opened a series of accounts online to reserve spots with my name on them, for sometime in the future when I had more time to devote to it, at the urging of a young acquisitions editor at the small Jewish publishing firm I worked for back then. Why not? It was summer hours, and I was already exploring commenting on websites and posting photography through this site you are now reading. I didn't know what to do with "social" media, but like any other social endeavor, most of it involves family grudges, drunk bitches posting crazy shit online with their ounce of "Dutch courage", some cyber-stalking, and good old-fashioned dating.

Like I've written before, it's a lot like "life" itself, because I've often said that social engagements online are like those first few introductions you make at a cocktail party: you want to be polite, make socially acceptable small talk, and avoid taboo topics like sex, religion, and politics. Of course, after several drinks in, the gloves come off conversationally-speaking (whether in person or online), as those partners somewhat engaged with you on social media conveniently forget that media is my world, and every time you hit the "post" button or "publish" tab, you are in my world, and this is where I rule.

But, that doesn't stop people from trying to pretend that they are on the cusp of a brave new world with no rules, like our initial explorations with the Internet as highly savvy media designers working in the famous Flatiron building of Manhattan on a DOS screen. Wow...sexy. Before more intuitive interfaces were built for the layperson, we used technology like that as a lark to our main business of making books, the benefits of which you reap today by reading my content for free. 

Back then, we were just tossing digital bottles into a large, dark, empty ocean that was devoid of the normal human warmth you might find meeting people in the flesh, like whether that dick hanging around the studio with his designer girlfriend really did meet some "hot chick" online, or it was just some balding older dude fucking with him, because it looked like this:

As I explored my online options with this new world of "online media" that now included nice things that are easy to understand, like pictures and photos with captions, I found the usual human suspects, including: that guy from high school who always wanted to date you but was too scared to ask you out, and his friend-of-a-friend who wants to meet you because you look "hot" in your profile pic, and your drunk redneck bitch of a cousin who not-so-secretly hates you for being prettier and more talented than her and her arty husband (whatever that means). Shit like that. Really common, easy stuff. And it did work. I briefly dated a guy I knew since junior high school days, a guy who knew an old co-worker of mine from my first job at SMP, and a former boss of mine from Denver, now back east again and dating as a rather new divorcee. Same type of stuff.

On the more professionally-geared social site, I met up with a few alumni looking to network and expand their projects through a less dating-themed kind of way that was too casual for their business worlds, which is also an obvious part of my life, too. And so, after a few casual emails traded on this corporate social site, I met up with an older alum who had his own small architecture firm on Long Island. We met at a casual burger-and-beer joint downtown when he told me upfront that he was married. Ah...good! He was balding and pleasant, but definitely not the type of guy I date. No pressure, then. We can just hang out and talk.

We got along well, as two RISD alumni working in the city as professionals, and he assured me that his wife would have no problem with our new acquaintance, because he often mentored younger alumni and attended alumni-based functions in the city socially on his own. Wonderful! I love clarity like that in conversations, especially with our very small pool of incredibly gifted working artists. Save us a lot of time to have that kind of speed, intellectually-speaking. Easy to understand, and easy to follow. Let's drink! You know? You don't want weird shit hanging over your head when you just want to relax and enjoy after-work drinks with a colleague.

After that first meeting, he invited me to an art book signing in "The Village" at an arty retail bookstore that catered to more rarefied artist books and large coffee-table editions with expensive photographic reproductions. In short, I knew I was walking into "Art Fag Central" upfront, but to what exact extent, I did not know, and that was part of the fun for my new alumni friend. He laughingly told me as we walked over there that we were going to meet a couple of mental patients he knew, through a young woman he met at another type of signing that was geared towards sexual content and explicit nudity. Okay...this, on the walk over there. 

Oh, and also, you should know, that at this book-signing will be the "artist" herself, promoting her new book of stupid photos about her dumb adventures as an S&M-themed cougar with severe emotional problems. Ah...so, fucking with me on a RISD-sized scale. Kudos! It wasn't exactly a heart-pounding request to build a DaVinci flying machine during studio class with only paper clips and rubber bands and a 1/2 hour time limit, but it was solid enough as an outing with rather extreme social tensions built directly into it. At first we did normal things, like tour the two-level store looking at weirdo books made about weirdo things, with overly-wrought covers that had weirdo thingamabobs stuck onto them, like a bad crafts project that retails for $400. So, basically, crazy rich white man shit. Got it.

We went back upstairs for the obligatory white wine and cheese course of the evening, served by suitably arty-looking waiters and waitresses, with the requisite "hipster" retail sales staff on-hand, in case you suddenly got the urge to buy an ugly book about an ugly woman who wants to have sex practically in your face for money. Like, a hooker. You know, just your average Wednesday night after-work kind of thing. And to make it even more awkward, she stood in front of the long table set up with a display of her horrible book dressed in a hooker outfit, with a really bad feather boa around her shoulders. Her hungry eyes that searched the room desperately for a social connection freaked me right the fuck out, but after a few drinks, "Fee" finally worked up the nerve to buy her book, ask her to sign it, and then engage her in conversation dressed like your grandmother in a Halloween outfit for a crazy "Times Square" hooker from the 70s that I could barely look at. Ugh...

So, I actually turned back to the two outpatients my friend had introduced me to when they first arrived at the book-signing, and that's social life in the city on any given night, folks: the "artist" at the opening was wayyy weirder than the two mental patients on curfew I was talking to. You see, dear readers, in addition to their mandatory check-in at their housing facility for the insane, they also had (of course) a keen, shiny-eyed interest in weirdo sex that more often included beatings over any actual human contact. The small Asian girl thought she could talk me into it, and at the point, I was like, what the fuck? I'm already here. Sure, weirdo! I gave her my cellphone number so she could send me outrageous text messages that I could show people, because at that point, I was already close to changing numbers from the harassing texts that every ex-boyfriend or male mate I'd ever been with had already sent me.

And that's it. That's our grand future that involves you, your mental disorder, and society. We will provide you with supported housing that has mandatory check-in times with the on-site staff that includes social workers and professional healthcare aides, medical charts with your medication times (because you totally forget that, girl), and key-card access while you recover and rehabilitate from your serious illness(es). With or without the feather boa(s). That's optional, folks. And what a beautiful world it will be. Healthcare and healing, guided by the same two people you love you the best: me, and Your Loving Holy Father. Amen to you, on this perfect late Spring day, New Yorkers. We've earned it. Really.

https://www.omh.ny.gov/omhweb/facilities/rppc/

Nurse Ratchet

Because of my grandparents working class values and abiding faith in G-d, they tried to instill a sense of productivity and societal participation into their children with very limited success, given the innate seriousness of their disorders. And because my grandparents were forced to leave school during "The Great Depression" to support their dependent families, they saw education as a ticket to a better life, even if it meant that their children failed abysmally. They paid for fancy parochial schools and degrees that were way beyond their children's intellectual capacities, just so they could be financially solvent enough to move out and be on their own.

It wasn't easy. On my mother's best days, she can talk to me about science, but barely, especially if she's sick. She becomes argumentative about something she feels she's an "expert" in, even though the highest work level my mom ever achieved in science was a a lab manager who ordered supplies for the rest of the staff. I should know. She spent my youth calling me on her lunch breaks to chew food loudly into my ear and gossip rudely, because she was bored.

Her compulsive habits were so bad that my brothers couldn't give her their work numbers anymore. She'd deliberately goad me into anger over my work phone, just to have the satisfaction of knowing that my reaction to her might shock my cubicle neighbors, because she did the same thing with the other weird lab rats she worked with. She complained so much about us that her co-workers were nasty to us if we happened to be at home, which is what she wanted as a revenge for being a somewhat working mother part-time.

I felt terrible for my grandparents. They'd paid for her posh undergraduate degrees after she had been on academic probation while living at home, which is so easy compared to the lives me and my brothers have that I know they did it because she's handicapped like the rest of her siblings. Ditto for my father; my mom bitched and moaned so much about being "forced" out of work to become a mother that my father paid for her to go back to graduate school, then had to sit down with her at our kitchen table to help her through her coursework after working 16-hour days at his own job, just so my delusional arrogant mother could get a job as a bottom-level lab technician who cleaned glassware all day long, in between her lengthy phone calls from work on the company's dime. Some deal, right?

A pattern formed within my mother's family that her siblings and their children replicated with the same codependent degrees of success. I thought one of my cousins was, like, an astrophysicist with a Ph.D, when really, he was just a horrible student stymied by his thesis adviser (always an excuse for their incompetence), and that's why it took him and his then-girlfriend 7-9 years to earn a Masters degree from a college I got into directly out of high school, and that included blowing off my senior year of studies. Didn't need them anymore. And so it continued...this aching annoying bravado coupled with a deep insecurity that completed the next generation of pencil-pushing nobodies with over-blown ego's, condescending conversations, and terrible attitudes. They totally fucking suck.

They don't actually do anything really worthwhile. It's all a cover-up for their mental illnesses. I worked with tons of pseudo-intellectuals in publishing. They had to have advanced degrees to be able to compete with average people in the workplace. But, perhaps the most egregious over-educating of a sick person has to be with my one female cousin on my maternal side. After graduating with some generic Bachelors degree from a local no-name school, she worked poorly at a series of doctors/dentists office in Riverside, because after living with her father who paid all of her expenses, she then moved into the exact same building as her alcoholic mother who's a nurse. Yay!

She simply switched her needy codependency to her mother instead of her father. At work, she was told numerous times that she was extremely anti-social to the patients, so, guess what my aunt and uncle decided to do? Pay for her to go to nursing school! Of course! That's what you do with incompetent mental patients. Put 'em in a position to abuse with impunity! It was one of the worst decisions I'd seen yet from my mom and her siblings, but with my elderly grandmother ailing, her family went right down with her, without her constant advice and care. I'd seen it up close, too, what the doctors and healthcare aides complained about firsthand, because I observed my cousin at Nyack Hospital when my grandmother was there.

I could read the drug name and dosage from my seat at the foot of her bed (it was clearly marked as a saline solution in her IV drip), but my cousin made a big dumb show out of trying to read it (she failed), then requisitioning my dumber aunt to go get a real nurse so she could quiz her about an obvious thing like that, but only after I supplied her with pen and paper, because she had none. We had enabled her from the beginning of the visit to the end, and she was supposed to be the one in nursing school. It was an abomination and a tragedy, but I knew my uncle was desperate for her to be economically independent enough so she couldn't be a burden on him any longer, and that I understood.

My mom is also a huge burden, even though she lies about it, and at every level: economically, financially, psychologically, socially, physically, emotionally, mentally, intellectually, both domestic and abroad. You should try taking a mentally ill woman with Multiple Sclerosis on the road sometimes, without consulting an expert like me, and good luck with that. My life is like planning a series of small military operations, because if me and my brothers forget just one small piece of the puzzle that my mom and her family surely neglect, then our lives are ruined before theirs. They make sure that they always come first. Try it with a group of the disordered, and you can start to feel a sense of what our family "vacations" are like: brutal hard work, in addition to all the work that piles up on our office desks in our absences, because we run businesses for other people, too.

There is absolutely no way this woman from my family should be working with sick people. She cannot take care of herself. Her parents made sure of that. My uncle and his daughter are negligent of other people's needs in the extreme. She barely sent me a few sporadic, tepid, generic, cheap Christmas cards, let alone show genuine emotion for me and my family. From him? Nothing. Not one thing ever. She has also never sent me a card, or a gift, or an email, or even talked to me openly at family gatherings unless she had to. This is the woman they let graduate from nursing school?! And do you know what she told me in my grandmother's hospital room, after I noticed her lack of clear observation? "I'm not going to be, like, a real nurse. I can do the paperwork the other nurse's don't have time to do."

Two college degrees costing hundreds of thousands of dollars for my uncle to shell out—and by extension, all of us—for a mentally ill healthcare aide who wants to sit in a chair and file papers all day. That's what you get for your time, effort, and money. Does that seem worth it to you? It's like my friend Cotto; we spent, as a society, millions of dollars in free programs pretending that a man who should be institutionalized just needed a condescending "helping hand" from the taxpayers, because he's seventh generation Hispanic. It's unreal! But, that's exactly where we wound up with him and so many other sick people of the world.

It's time we stop pretending that these poor slobs need jobs. They need a home, medicine, and healthcare. But vocational training in the healing arts? You've got to be kidding me. She can't tie her own shoelaces without help. Can you imagine your grandma needing her help with an IV drip? That crazy kid can't even look at blood! And yet, some city school in "tha 'hood" desperate for cash did that very thing. They took my uncle's money in exchange for his waste of a daughter earning a diploma from yet another city school that we all paid for with our taxes. And guess what her graduation photo looked like? One short, fat, ugly, and unpleasant-looking white girl posing with a bunch of proud-ass black women from around the way, and ain't that always the way, though? Enough. It's enough. I've had enough of it.

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