Assistance

As you may (or may not) already know, I began my official on-the-books working career at 15 years-old, which means I've been paying into our system since, with my taxes that were taken heavily from any meager paycheck I could ever hope to have, just so I could stave off starvation, sickness, and homelessness when times got rough (like the upcoming week), and they were always rough for me and my generation, because we don't use war for blood money. It's kinda unethical, you know? Living in a constant state of stress like the "paycheck-to-paycheck" lifestyle was specifically designed to keep me and my friends stressed out, and, hopefully, too sick to notice egregiously illegal behaviors like stealing and working the system behind our backs, to benefit anyone but the people who truly needed it.

With that in mind, I had very little expectations about any of the "social services" that were supposedly there to help me out whenever I needed it, you know, because I paid the heaviest tax shares in our free society as a hard-working single woman who paid all of her bills and expenses. My dad also liked to bark it out to me in a rough, red-faced laugh, whenever he felt embarrassed about his evasive financial maneuvers that were totally legal, because he had worked with legislators as a cable t.v. business owner to make sure that the laws benefited him and his money best. "Hey! Thanks for the 'bail-out' on my failed crops!", he'd brag aloud as a "gentlemen farmer" who didn't need the money, stretching out his hand in mock fellowship for me to shake, taking another big drink afterwards. You're welcome.

Not that I expected understanding from him, or any other rich white man. If he failed to humiliate me in front of his guests to keep me down, my cousins would gladly chip in. "Yeah...I don't think I could ever take Unemployment", said one fucking dick of a cousin to me over "the holidays". This, from a dip-shit who needed his dead father's money handed to him by his mommy so he could hide out in college for, like, ten years, and then do jack-shit for the rest of his family when they hit hard times. Yeah, go fuck yourself, kid. I changed your fucking diapers when you were a baby, and you've never done a g-ddamn thing for anyone besides yourself in this family. I didn't say it out of deference to my lovely grandmother's home, but I took a deep, steadying breath before I schooled him about how my benefits are my money taken out of each paycheck I'd ever paid into since childhood.

Uh, you didn't work throughout your entire school career that lasted for, like, twenty years or so, right? Oh, if I said that, then I would have been chastised for "ruining Christmas" for everyone, because my cousin had it so hard with his father's early death from alcohol and chain-smoking, that he must be allowed to be a completely selfish prick whenever his spoiled, lily-white ass feels like it, to make up for his present state of unreal being. Same with his uptight, upstate white bitch, because "they're scientists". Yeah, right, I've got one of those, too, ass-hat. Boy, does my mom know how to clean Petri dishes and hyper-vigilantly monitor the dishwasher? Like no other. We got nothing back from all of our finessed payouts from a system designed to bankrupt us the minute were stopped "working" at someone else's company.

And it didn't end with privatized humiliation. If we dared to take back a small share of our tax money like I did, the system would try to force me back into someone's office as quickly as possible. It was like welfare for working class people, except that I carried everyone involved. You know, just like I did at home without the handicapped people noticing small details like me. I wasn't worth the trouble, or so I've heard all of my life. I was "carefully selected" to be in a joke of an "entrepreneurial program" designed to flatter the ego of rich whites encountering their very first crisis in life, and it didn't end there. To continue this system of entitlement, my dad also had to do his part, by once again threatening me over the phone or via email, withholding money or using other serious ramifications like a tour in a loony bin (chauffeur-driven, of course), if I didn't find my own way fast.

Oh, okay...so, just like my everyday life, right? Well, yeah! It's always this aggressive indifference to protect one's own ass. It was so cowardly to me that it took my breath away still, and my dad had benefit of a Navy training with plush G.I. Bill money for his service to our country. Of course, the "seminar" was a complete sham. Both of the "mentors" were paid by the state for their participation in the program as rich white retirees, naturally. Gotta protect that income stream of revenue, know what I'm sayin'? As used as I've become to this obsessive ass-covering that marks the seriously disturbed individual in a high-performing workflow, it's never stopped shocking me. The complete condescension behind it by people with much less ability, that's what's always bothered me. It's so rankly obvious.

So, I sat through it and then had to talk my former "mentor" of a businessman father (not to me, but to those impoverished Mexicans and po' white trash of West Texas, y'all) about how it sucked—without him threatening to hurt me by withholding the paltry scraps he tosses my way like I was one of his cheap throwaway dogs that he likes to hurt or kill whenever people aren't watching—and in his barren empty plains, there's no one there to hear you scream. I reiterated my expertise in securing funds from many a rich white man who deliberately set himself up as a "creative patron", so as to better yank at the chains of oppression that binds talent to money, as a torture device for our simple acts of living, working, and excelling far beyond his expectation and your awareness. I survived, you see. I'm still alive, and that is rather inconvenient, isn't it?

I wouldn't like being reminded about my degradation and subsequent downfall, either. No one has the "Art of Empathy" perfected quite like me and my very small band of loyally caring illuminators, for if we didn't understand you in your human condition better than you, who would bind your egotistical books for you to use as a trophy at family parties, while my work "languishes" behind your falsely turned backs? We support and love you anyway, without your validation or evidence, because if we don't give more than you, then you all go down hard, don't you? No, don't answer me back. Your continued silence is all the proof I ever needed to show intentional negligence and deliberate impoverishment, but, oh, how the times have changed despite your artificial halts to progress? Yes, they have. Finally.

Schedule of Minimum Wage Increases
December 31, 2016
$11.00 per hour
December 31, 2017
$13.00 per hour
December 31, 2018
$15.00 per hour
December 31, 2019
$15.00 per hour

http://www.labor.ny.gov/workerprotection/laborstandards/workprot/minwage.shtm

Famine (an Gorta Mór)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exodus (Movement of the People)

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

Year after year after year, we see the same dysfunctional pattern: corrupt government goes bad in yet another bloody coup, blundering rich white people attached to relief agencies swarm the area to witness first-hand the same type of atrocities (again), equipped with an effete cameraman as their only protection. 

These are desperate people seeking fame, fortune, glory, and the spoils of war (with maybe an award or two for extra boasting power); the area becomes flooded with conflicting tribes, petty warlords, and other opportunists there to catch the gold drippings hanging off of each and every well-meaning (and oh so charitable) drop from the American Red Cross by, that's right, those infidel American pigs!! Praise G-d!

As much as I love the idea of an unchanging homeland that continues on forever and ever, I know that the ground moves beneath our feet, as does the air above our heads, and the water in the oceans we cross. So do we as humans. You are not a plant rooted to only one type soil. You do not need any more oppression from people who do not love you. You can change. You can move. And so you must.*

I'll be here waiting, and I always keep my word to my people. Come here; live freely like we do. Amen to you during these days of upheaval, great stress, and extreme worry. May your journey to other lands see you arrive safely upon those shores, to a peaceful, law-abiding people who wait for you with open arms. Amen to you today, my many faithful who are free.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

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

To my Syrian (and former cab driver) friend from New York, now the proud owner of his own air conditioning business, a big success if ever there was: thanks for helping out a neighbor in need with A/C when yet another corrupt landlord failed to do so, knowing that she is disabled and cannot move about freely. You came to her in her time of need, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your service. Also, your knowledge of Aramaic** is most encouraging to me. 

To my new Syrian-American/Syrian- friends: Mike might not say it to you, but he wanted a big warm hug from Mommy, and he got one with a smile:) This one's for you, homeboy.

*   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Exodus
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aramaic_language

 

Confederacy of Dunces

http://nyti.ms/1skVMyf

You've seen it on all the news programs lately: why all this fuss over some old flag? Because, (and this will be the last time I will address this issue with any amount of serious consideration, because it's that fucking stupid to me), our ancestors fought and died in our nations' bloodiest war: a civil war that divided families and pitted brother against brother, in the name of righteousness. 

Southerners created their own stupid dip-shit flag and useless Monopoly money so they could pretend to live in a delusional fucking world where it's okay to murder, torture, rape, and continually victimize people like they're worse than the cattle most of us eat every day. 

You see, if a cow didn't make the brutal trip across the sea and over a very long distance, like, say, the ones West African people were forced to endure under inhuman conditions, those poor people of the South wouldn't have food, ergo cows are better than people from another country. See? That's logic! No?! Well, my stars. 

http://theurbanchica.com/poetry-and-still-i-rise-by-maya-angelou/

Take down that fucking flag hundreds of years after we won the war, because it is a symbol of your continually deliberate and very calculated system of ignorance, hatred, and oppression, you inbred fuck. I mean it. You lost. There. Get over it. 

You will not "rise" again. There is no "confederacy", and they never will be. We are one united nation, shitheads. Oh, and your boringly repetitive music sucks, too. Ahhh...now, I feel better. Thanks, guys!

Here's your homework, fuck-up:
http://www.ushistory.org/us/27f.asp
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p2956.html 
http://www.history.com/topics/black-history/slavery
http://www.civilwar.org/education/history/civil-war-overview/overview.html 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Civil_War
http://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war

For Kara

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/editions/nchist-colonial/1904

"Smokey"

Years ago I smoked cigarettes, which is hard for many people (including me) to fathom. Why?! Truth be told, I was a horrible smoker, which was why I began in the first place: I'm not a binge drinker like many of the kids I grew up with. "Smokey" was actually another one of the nicknames created by my "bestie", like "Uker". I'd puke if I drank too much, you know, because too much alcohol makes you sick. 

And so I compensated for not having an alcohol addiction by using cigarettes to calm my stomach from an excess of beer drinking, something college kids ruthlessly monitored me over (like my normal sleep patterns and continued persistent refusals to party overmuch), to keep their own massive consumptions obscured. I knew it, just like I knew my Dad smoked, as did a few of my grandparents, in response to life stress and their own addictive patterns. 

Like many Gen X'ers, I found myself wrecked by the consequences of other peoples' blatant disregard for my health, well-being, and safety. After years of being bored and sickened by someone else's stupid habit, I finally broke the cycle of abuse for me by quitting smoking cold turkey, because I had several bouts of DVT, related to knee surgery. 

I knew I was never an addict by the time I tried to use the lowest dose of nicotine patches available, because I had to leave my art director's job mid-day from a sick stomach; the severe nausea healthy people have in response to the harsh chemical cocktail designed to addict that's in cigarettes. For me, the cycle has forever been broken by my iron will, though the mentally ill receptionist at that former job, who compulsively gossiped as a political weapon (which I successfully used against her), merely changed the tone of her attack from noting my smoking habit to any other thing she felt she could get away with. 

Today I ask you to break the bad habits imposed upon you by others (those that were created in response to repeated personal attacks), by getting clean and healthy, like our fabulous health official Dr. Mary Bassett; herself an educated healer and fellow New Yorker, also caught in the twin traps of getting by on nothing, while fighting a corruptly biased system. Today we declare our collective good health, for all the peoples of the world still fighting oppression. I got your back, girl. 

May G-d bless you and keep you safe, 

in these final days of hope and light.

Quitting Smoking:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/about/commish-bio.shtml

https://a816-nycquits.nyc.gov/pages/homepage.aspx

The Tobacco Industry:

http://www.thestreet.com/topic/25884/top-rated-equity-tobacco.html 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/ 

A series of black and white self-portraits I made for (and sent to) my old college boyfriend, who needed support during his time at McGill University while I worked three jobs at RISD, which he blamed me for. He retaliated by transferring out of Oneonta before me during my last semester there, supposedly because I "insisted" on "wasting my time" at art school. Amen to you who are my similarly afflicted.

1-866-NYC-QUITS (1-866-697-8487) 

http://www.nysmokefree.com/ 

Monumental

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

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

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

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

http://www.monumentsmen.com/

Free Tibet!

Yesterday I saw a "Free Tibet!" demonstration in midtown. It was a great reminder for me that many people of the world are still fighting for autonomy and freedom of religion, while we can enjoy these freedoms here in the States, especially during the holiday season. 

I don't often go to the Times Square district (too many tourists), so I found this devotion to faith and homeland a refreshing change from the usual overwhelming commercialism that bombards the senses from every direction.

I was trying to find a street address for my errand, so I crisscrossed the protesters twice. The first time I passed them by, a demonstrator handed me the flyer you see pictured above. It reminded me of the famous album cover for Rage Against the Machine that shows a monk burning himself to death in protest. Such passion and pain!

About a block later, an African-American New Yorker dressed as a security guard looked at me, smiled, and gave me the "Power to the People" fist. I immediately smiled back. Exactly.