Soul Survivor

As the leading intellectual of a business (whether or not it's openly acknowledged to my face, since it's typically done behind my back as some sort of financial strategy), my first few days, weeks, months, and/or years of any new employment I had were fraught with difficulties, tensions, ego trips, paranoid schemes, covert meetings, and hurriedly hushed exchanges like I was just hired to run the universe instead of design some books. The grueling audition process I went through was supposed to ameliorate qualms and fears that average people have about content generators, but sadly, it did not.

I was subjected to rounds and rounds of emails, resume screenings, online questionnaires, personality profiles, psych screenings, drug tests (for a corrupt newspaper union, haha), with several more rounds of interviews with my portfolio shown to a variety of employees from different departments who would not have access to the highest levels of a house like I did, done to an insane degree. Such is the power to create a company (or destroy it) that we bring to the table as a group.

I'd always hoped that my relative openness, honesty, and transparency (in big business New York) would alleviate the troubled minds of the more pedestrian office worker vis-a-vis their limited perceptions about illuminators but, more often than not, interactions with a real genius doesn't actually make lower-level employees feel better about themselves or their career choices, which is why I often handed out books to inquiring office cows. You know: because that's what we do. Nefarious, I know.

So, it was no surprise to me when the feathers of any new house I joined were ruffled loudly and with much angst, most acutely from the large hen-house, since we're paid less than teachers, which makes modern publishing heavy on the female workforce. Lunches would be set-up and attempted, odd scrutinies would take place in the office kitchenette, bizarrely stilted interactions were forced in the hallways or bathrooms, interruptions about a fake crisis during my crucial deadlines were staged as a sabotage...to no avail. In our world, you either make something or you don't, because the future belongs to those of us wiling to get our hands dirty, and with the amount of work that I do, it isn't a carefully calculated life of leisure devoted to one's over-priced manicure or shiny new gadget. It's more like: "I made this <pat book>. See?" Good! Now I can go back to work.

We'd published books about assholes in business, as me and the other much deafer art director in the office yelled back-and-forth, reading aloud from a book about company stereotypes, like the common "office bike": the desperate blond (always blond!) receptionist who sleeps around because "everyone gets a ride", within clear earshot of the reception area. Still, no avail. They kept on coming. Scooter was one such douchebag whose limited prowess barely masked his deeper ambitions of artistic glory, as just such an example of a tool. No one liked him, but he managed to form icky alliances within the company like we were competing for the last piece of roasted rat on a remote desert island for a sick "reality" game-show about starving people and their madness. What was the point?

He seemed genuinely baffled by my gifts, as much as he hated any kind of reference to them. He'd find some excuse to come back to the design studio, then draw out a weird discussion that could have been more easily done with a ten-second email, to slowly walk back to his cramped overheated office scratching his head about the obvious truths I just told him about the book he showed me, because acquisitions was supposed to be his game. He thought he cleverly hid his lack of a buying streak with our designated wonk at a major book retailer, by pretending to question us about a potential book property up for re-licensing like it was playtime at the zoo, and I just fucking ripped his head off in the lion cage, every single time.

Naturally, like all the other inept "lifers" at that company, he just happened to "fall into" publishing, just like he fell into my den of protective lionesses filled with nursing cubs. Shoo! On an afternoon like any other afternoon, he seemed to finally have an epiphany about who I was, discreet as I managed myself to be amongst those who are not of the calling. As the rays of golden light struck sharp shapes across the back wall of my studio desk, he came back excitedly (for once) to show me a book that just crossed his desk. Did I know it? Nope. Ah...here he hesitated, like a student daring to give an apple to his favorite teacher. Did I know this book was like me? Yes, Scott. I did. Happy All Soul's Day, on this beautiful autumn day in 2016.

Pretty Boy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Smear

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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/

Thousand Yard Stare

Being the sole sane member of the many social groups I've encountered throughout my life is fraught with difficulties, especially if any one person (or group of people) is used to gaming the system through secrecy, and I, unfortunately, know very quickly about their true state of mind, which is uncomfortable for both of us—as the authority figure assessing it correctly (yet again), and the liar perpetrating the fraud right in my face. Not the the "New Gen" has done much better with it, as an issue. Now, it's considered "hip" to have as many complex issues as possible (great for reality t.v.), especially with the single children of so many modernly unhealthy couples who're used to almost constant enabling, and who also bear the weight of their broken dreams, in addition to carrying around their poor genetics. 

Before we began a voluntary militia, anyone could be drafted into military service and made to fight a brutally violent war, with the size and scope of your collective psychosis allowing for heinous acts of violence—sometimes including child murder—that would almost certainly get you sentenced to death back home. The warrior mindset is traditionally for those who seek out that particular type of service because we know we can come back from it; not unscathed from battle without recovery time built in for healing from our war wounds, but enough to know that we will endure and survive it, because we've already done so through similar life conditions as civilians. Every social group full of mentally ill people is a potential battlefield, and conversation is typically marred by a defensive passive-aggressiveness that makes it really hard work for me.

Suffice to say, those who seek to "escape" the dreaded horrors of medication and healthcare, pretend to shrink from their falsely overblown fears about exposure and revelation like a mythical vampire shirks the light of day. Really? With fucking Oprah being a American gazillionaire?! She's famous for saying lines on television like "My 'va-jay-jay is a-painin'!", so how do you reconcile this sudden coyness with your reality? It's a complete fucking sham, as I am forced to endure yet another game of pretending that I don't know you suffer from insanity, you know, because people like me who work under the conditions I do, on the budget I have, consistently delivering at an extremely high level on almost nothing, cave in the face of your healthcare. Really? You really expect me to believe that?

And it's everywhere I go, every single day; family, friends, co-workers, bosses, acquaintances—no one is immune from living life and the human condition. Of course, we know you're nuts, but that's rude to say over a company dinner that you're paying for, isn't it? But, that doesn't stop 'em from trying it with me anyway, because compulsive addictive disorders kinda come with some obvious behavioral markers that you can't exactly shave off like beard. Nice try, though, really. Yes, we know, and we have tons of tests to prove it anytime we want to, in a variety of ways, but if you're selfishly demanding a class in avoiding detection like you're Meryl Streep at the Oscars, then class is now in session, and here's your first clue: see the picture above. 

For the residents of my town: see that crazy old guy who hoards on his property that's right next to the Methodist church (Amen!) with a misbuttoned shirt on almost everyday, walking around "shell-shocked" like he just survived the bombing at D-Day, but he didn't. He doesn't actually do anything, besides walk around town like a zombie. It also includes: the closeted country lesbo at the local grocery store who licks her lips when she looks at you, just to be a complete fucking bitch to a gorgeous heterosexual woman (you hateful piece of shit), and when that doesn't work, pretends not to see you standing prominently in the middle of the aisle so she can "accidentally" bump into you like the psychotic stalker she really is. Or, the way someone lingers near you at the library, pretending to be absorbed by a book on the shelf for ten minutes like a fucking retard, or a hoarder in a bargain store lingering over plastic junk like she's fondling a ten year-old girl. It's obviously repulsive, and you can't hide it or control it.

And yes, to answer your question again: it is now mandatory to take a healthcare screening —that includes tests for psychological readiness—before leaving the hospital with your newborn, so you don't abuse your baby at home behind closed doors, where you feel safe to do so. Isn't technology great? Oh, that's right. You "hate" that, too. I must have forgot! My memory, you know....it isn't what it used to be. Sigh. Anyway, I don't get the Internet reliably like you do, with 24/7 access to answers at my fingertips whenever I want them, so I also have that excuse in my back pocket, with a dozen others that I've cleverly rehearsed ahead of time just to "stump" you, when, really, it isn't possible to do so, but don't ever say that to me in person or write in down. I might "know" it then, like the aliens can do without your tinfoil hat in hand. Yeah. That sounds good. That makes sense. 

 

http://www.postpartum.net/professionals/legislation/

 

Wall Me In

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

Like the businesses I "manned" for other people who were often too incompetent to do so themselves, I'd just as often run into the walls of their ineptitude as quickly. Can't speak up? Force your underpaid minion to attend (that'd be me running your meeting better than you), for half the price. Having trouble with new ideas, concepts, technologies, and their executions? That's OK! Pretend superiority over your resident genius (I knew that, BTW) by airily flaunting your laziness with over-dramatic sighs that express your disturbed "businessman of importance" state of mind, someone with the weight of the world pressing down on his shoulders (like, paperwork related to book manufacturing), while passing off the real work that you are "too busy" to do onto the people in your workflow who are actually qualified in the industry, you ignorant hack, and when we do excel, feign indifference and ignorance while you check my email every 10 minutes because the office handbook said you could do so. Hi, there!

And so, when the last business I worked at full-time imploded on itself, after I fixed it on their deliberately abusive shoestring budget (which was my job to do), I simply sat back and watched the kooks kill each other off, in the calm wake that follows on the footsteps of my excellent leadership. I grew accustomed to a quick headcount of firings that I'd metaphorically mount in my office at the beginning of every new venture, one that naturally expanded outward to include environments I visited for my hobbies, too. Magnetic personalities draw out the crazies who need a strong identity to stalk around in an openly mad way, or else they are rootless, restless, and increasingly psychotic.

Of course, that means I have to support the weight of a thousand poisoned darts aimed at me at all times, and if I don't properly manage your psychotic house rat, she'll go batshit and tear into your throat, and since you're a coward, well....that just won't do, will it? Word quickly spread throughout my industry of choice (and now, to the wider world) that if a manager didn't fend off their own troubled employees, I fought back like a normal, healthy, high-performing muthfucka, which means you get canned wayyyy before I do, and with your prescription healthcare plan (that I pay for) you need a steady supply of pills for your cocktail of meds, or it will bring on serious withdrawal like the fucking junkie you really are, so I set my internal clock and wait.

Within weeks, the worst headcases "flip" on one another, like addicts trying to cop a plea for a better deal with the D.A. for a reduced prison sentence. It's become routine. At first, I was shocked when the last crazy little Jewish man I worked for (with the serious Napolean complex) decided to try and frame his rabid bitch of a secretary's schizo-bipolar behavior as some sort of "catfight" happening between us, I knew he was "in" on the office scams with her. Ah. Probably his mistress or a relative...or both, because they're so fucking weird. So what? Whatever crazy shit he and his freaks did behind closed doors meant nothing to me professionally. He smirked his phony bullshit suggestions at me, like putting up a bead curtain to give me some "privacy" when I told him she would attack in a continually more aggressive and openly aberrant way because she stopped taking her pills, on suggestion of a cult she attended called "Landmark", one that she actively recruited for within the office during daytime business hours and in between the calls they placed to her all day every day for recruitment purposes on the company's dime and office phone lines.

It broke at least seven workplace laws that I knew of as a layperson just after my first few seconds of thought, and that was without any outside legal counsel. After that, things went downhill fast. He thought he was going to see a "hot" girl-fight in action between me ("the hotness") and his weak, limp cunt of a receptionist. Not happening. I simply brushed up on modern OSHA standards about legal office behavior, after his legal publishing experienced nephew ganged up on me with their insanely gay production guy. I beat them with a few slips of paper I printed out minutes before our "meeting", and that was with them monitoring my every move over the company's computer network wired by the publishers' own son. Oh. Yeah, it's like that.

He grew fretfully desperate, because his fake yellow-haired bitch hatched a new evil ploy for stalking me in his office for every counter-move I made; that's how powerless he was with a typical office slut who traded on blow jobs over any real talent or work ethic. I knew I had everything I needed when they actually built a little fucking wall to obscure me from her increasingly paranoid stomping up-and-down the company hallways, just to get a glimpse of me during her ferociously psychotic break from reality. His simpering cripple of a crazy wife came back to see me in my newly-altered studio space (which she rarely did, so she could telegraph her obvious rich housewife disdain for "laborers" like me at every opportunity she had), with a strategy delivered in a fake, loud, stage voice (you know, because of my "hearing" problems): did I feel "better" with the wall in place?

Her typical condescension at having to even interact with a beautiful human like me made my flesh crawl, but since this was her big gay Broadway moment, I didn't want to let her down. Oh, yes! I smiled with my best phony bitch impression. It's soooo much better back here now. Her face caved in, and then she recovered quickly, pasting on another sickly smile. Oh, good! Psychologically, I bet this really helps you out. Yes, crazy bitch with the lying cheating family living in a nest of vipers. Your crazy lesbian mistress/sex worker/receptionist with the obvious mood swings is why you built a wall to block me from her crazy eyes, so I definitely think about $60 worth of particle board and spackle (that I actually helped the contractor put up, which was greeted with more derision by his nephew with the phrase "boy, you sure do seem to know your materials" line along with the information that he has a "gay best friend" he told me about on his very first day of his employment in a phony gushy TMI-kind of way) will cure her of paranoid schizophrenic bipolar obsessive compulsive personality identity disorder. Any day now. Should happen...right about....now....no...it never happened. Still no cure for you.

A recent ex-neighbor of mine who's also clearly troubled but can occasionally speak "human" back to me on his "good" days, laughed with me one warm spring afternoon last year, when he let me know that our resident fake blonde psycho-bitch wanted to draw an imaginary white line down the middle of a house that she merely rents space in, because every cave troll has to have its toll paid, and since I don't do that (because I'm not mentally ill to a room-bound recluse off her meds), I no longer have access to "her" side staircase to the back of the residence that the rest of the household can use, because she imagined a fake history between use. And don't you know, mes amis, I could practically see her erecting a crazy brick wall (made with the landlord's bricks and carried out on his property) behind my back? <sigh> Here we go again. I wonder who will win, don't you? No? Huh. Neither do I.

Fight back, friends. Our collective knowledge is power: https://www.osha.gov/

"No one should have to sacrifice their life for their livelihood, because a nation built on the dignity of work must provide safe working conditions for its people."- Secretary of Labor Thomas E. Perez

Wired

Wired Anxiety (Wikimedia Commons)

For years I've trucked through many different kinds of creative crowds, ones that are particularly acute, emotional, and open by nature, as we're taught and so inclined. Through the years, we've openly discussed just about any facet of the human experience fit for talk, and some things not so carefully done. Artists creatively problem-solve in many different types of ways, so obsessive chatter from neurotics tend to grate on our collective nerves after awhile, like watching a dog run around in circles without benefit of a funny video online, and you are that dysfunctional unfunny human to us. Where exactly are is this going? Brainstorming is fun, if it produces something eventually.

Like many artistic people, I've struggled in the past with blowhard college boyfriends who spent a lot of time tanked on talk, high on way more than actual learning. My first real boyfriend was the first person to openly admit to me that he vastly preferred natural biochemistry to artificially-induced ones, expensive as drugs tend to be, because of the vulnerable compulsiveness that actively marks addiction. He seemed to think that higher learning meant you could ramble on about any crazy idea that you had out loud to anyone in the room, rather than internalizing concepts or, even better, writing them down cohesively, but that's why he's an entertainment lawyer who guards artistic paychecks that he's dependent on for a living, and you read me instead of listening to him talk, not that he didn't try every trick in the book to knock me down as many pegs above him as I was.

My father and every one of my brothers hated him for being the all-boys prep-school quarterback he bragged about endlessly, along with his pretensions towards greatness for being a blue-eyed French Canadian/Irish guy living in our world on the east coast. Yeah, dubious at best. It was until years later that I saw him accurately depicted in the awesome comedy "Wedding Crashers" (he finally realized his media dreams of fame!), through Bradley Cooper's dead-on impression of a back-stabbing bitch of a boyfriend with serious homoerotic issues that I realized how many of my friends, family, and acquaintances despised him, which happily brings us together, here on my site today: a place where we can all get along, and group grievances are finally aired out in the open...not that he did any of that.

He plays a lot of "head games" that go nowhere and do nothing, which I often found to be more common among non-creatives, because they have to wait while we make the work the world uses, as a set of people that I sometimes feel sorry for, because they're relegated to the sidelines of life while the big hitters take the risks that earn the big glory. He can't do that because of his disorders (among them addiction, compulsiveness, Lupus, and a big case of "asshole"), but that doesn't stop him from trying hard to impress. I've always hated his egotism based on being a "serious scholar", which often means he spends a lot of time trying to marginalize the star power on center stage ineffectively (ironic as his job must be for him), and that's what I remember most about him now, besides his chemical addictions; an insecurity so violent, he loses way more ground than he gains.

He tried hard to convince me that I was dumb (because I'm an artist, so "genius=stupid", I guess), and often "crazy" over serious family problems that I didn't control as a working class teenage girl, and that my "partying" was motivated from the same interesting, glamorous manic ennui as his that he would only obliquely refer to in "nonversations" that didn't matter, with people too stoned or drunk to care about his points, because directly addressing his issues would make him lose precious leverage in society, even though as a spoiled white boy from a poncy private school, he had all the power then.

It was desperate and striving, character flaws that I finally couldn't forgive or put up with anymore, along with the many unsolicited hours of boredom he would bring to the card table, when all we really wanted to do back then was play drinking games and have fun during our precious off-hours from work, or school, or both. I have never forgotten his immature pillow-talk about his chemical addictions that I thought were just puppy love ravings over my sexual prowess, and the desire for me that he channeled into his "highs" that he could yank me around with, though given the difference in our looks and status, it was highly unlikely to ever pan out. It was okay if he was moodily and maudlin, but if I had an actual serious illness, I was "weak" and I'd never be "virile" like him (see also: "Gaston"), though in reality, he's the one with the in vitro triplets and I'm the one with the long-lived fertility.

If I spent a lazy summer drowsing and dreaming, I was a bad housewife hurting my chances at a favorable marriage with him in the future, because I didn't get twitchy or itchy from seeing dishes in the sink. If I had a hard time managing my very sick and very large extended family as a working young woman in school, it was obviously because I was too stupid to do so; I couldn't read books like he could as a history major (because I'd already spent my youth reading as many books as I could find), and that must be sad. All I could do was get into a school for brilliant Leonardo da Vinci-types :( Poor me!

He'd drone on for hours, interesting only to him and his particular biochemistry, like the badly staged scenes he directed with a drama queen's tenseness, in these diva-like displays that had absolutely no talent behind them at all, and that was the crux of it: he earns off of talent, because he's drawn to us as much as he hates us for it, in a classic up-and-down, love/hate cycle that became the biggest bore I'd ever met. His passions for some brand of iced tea were rave-worthy and "smile-rific" which you HAD TO try or he'd just die, whereas my charcoal drawings were lame for an untrained teenage girl, and "EW!" Nudes! Who would do something like that?!

For the record, Bart, the productive people who run the world do "gay" stuff like that. That's who. By the way, you're welcome for the nice house in Brooklyn, the wife (with those unfortunate brown eyes that you told me hurt my chances for a good match in college...oops!) and 3.5 kids you forced your poor wife to bio-engineer for you with rounds and rounds of expensively-provided fertility treatments (because you're sterile) with long hospital stays that required her total bed rest for months; the same very family you step out on and/or check out from physically and mentally periodically, because your work is so important as a contracts guy for your union that you have to hit the road whenever things get bad, seeking the rush you need from other people's more exciting lives (like the actors who provide for you and your family, you know, "gay") that you watch from the set in the shadows, picky as ever, and fussily looking for problems that will cause a pay-out for violations from your plush union. You can thank this "dumb artist" for your life, whenever you get the chance. Bro.

 

Hey, O-towners! This one's for you today. I felt your pain. Thanks for hanging with me back in the day anyway, arrogantly over-bearing boyfriends notwithstanding. I really needed the support, just like you did.