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

Thug Life 4E

Trifling 'hood rats ain't nuthin' new to me. Like I've explained to y'all  before, the first real criminals I met who tried to scam me were my very own family."Home" and "house" and "safe" were never really words that signified good places for me to live in, as my sickest family members told me every time they thought I "stepped out" of line of their controlling manipulations. Continually consistent and strongly applied coercion is the very first sign to working class kids that our parents or older siblings are gearing up for their next big push at us, in a series of highly coordinated acts that spoke of their persistent ability to attack me behind my back as a child, which solidified my "head of household" status to me over and over again, at a very young age, when I was just some po' girl chile with no one to help me out, and nowhere to go.

Except that I did. I always had my excellently faithful grandparents to back me up with their good health and superior strength, as a direct contradiction to the fearful paranoia that so deeply marks the sickest people around us. They illegally violated our privacy and sense of security every time they were caught abusing us, and that could happen at any time, with their violently frenzied periods of deep paranoia that define the day-to-day reality that is mental illness and psychoses. It became so bad, me and my brothers began threatening exposure to our school teachers and social services, with the achievement of a new family policy clearly stipulating that there would be no hits to the head, so as to prevent telling marks from clearly showing where anyone of authority could see them, not that we thought foster care was any better than what we had. We knew.

It didn't stop my mom from beating up my oldest brother into a broken arm that he covered up for her expertly at Nyack Hospital's ER back in the day, with the conveniently well-practiced excuse of "falling down the stairs" at the ready by both parties that they carefully rehearsed during the car ride over. It was easy for him to do, too, because my brother had prior sports injuries that my mom could frame into a clear sense of his proven carelessness as a wild boy child. 

Our "savage" genetics were also an easy target for her to blame us for any of her abuse that she aimed at us. We were raked over the coals by the mad people around us, to the point of our collective perfection in comparison to their obviously bad behavior, which was then thrown into our faces, too. "What are you, like, 'perfect' or something?" We learned to avoid crazy people the way a cat burglar breaks into a city apartment during the summertime, through an open window by a conveniently placed fire escape.

My self-defense makes attempts at scamming me into this absurdly surreal game of "cat-and-mouse" that I can best with both hands, arms, and legs bound tightly, with a blindfold on. And it continued throughout my life at every public venue I ever "dared" to appear at, including the very public abuse that I suffer(ed) at this public library, because it doesn't matter where I go or what I do, who I am with, and what I look like. It doesn't actually have anything to do with me at all, because I don't do anything wrong, which is a huge problem for a violently acting-out criminal sitting next to me at a public computer, or on the bus to the city, or on the subway, or at work in some office.

It became a pattern that, no matter how cleverly and craftily done, I managed to fight back against —on little food, sleep, money, clothing, medicine, support, and/or shelter—sussed out in record time, to the horrified amazement of yet another delusional individual who felt protected enough to attack me in full clear view of several authority figures in charge who had every opportunity to clear up the situation with one word in my favor. But, that's part of the job, right?

Over time, I even developed a handy "cheat sheet" formula for businesses and other public venues that preferred to witness ongoing abuse that goes unchecked without protecting me, because, you know, I'm obviously society's number one scumbag. One: hire a bitchy thick blond to "man" your reception area with an even bigger desk to match her overblown ego. Two: allow her to gossip loudly and spread rumors within clear earshot of large groups of people who will then feign a planned indifference that you will pretend to control with Three: a series of intentionally inept "scolds" done purely for publicity's sake, before telling your mistress(es) behind closed doors to keep on doing exactly what she's been doing, because, again, I'm the beautiful, high-performing single woman on an extremely tight budget that you like to squeeze as part of some con game.

She, in turn, will blow on her troll dolls in an unchecked madness that you will laugh about in an obviously evil way, because you like seeing your lead bitch with fangs rave at a woman out of your league. So, on this very special Friday, let's go over your "Special Needs" list of rules that even a kindergartner understands, just in case you plead ignorance or impairment. Ready? Okay, here we go!

Children Ten Commandments

1. Have no other gods.
2. Have no idols.
3. Honor God's name.
4. Honor the Sabbath day.
5. Honor your parents.
6. Do not murder.
7. Do not commit adultery.
8. Do not steal.
9. Do not perjure yourself.
10. Do not covet.

Got it? Good! Now, let's go over every flaw you have, in clear language that even you can understand, with your list of serious impairment(s):

Vice		Virtues
Lust	Luxuria	Chastity	Castitas
Gluttony	Gula	Temperance	Temperantia
Greed	Avaritia	Charity (or, sometimes, Generosity)†	Caritas (Liberalitas)
Sloth	Tristitia/Acedia	Diligence	Industria
Wrath	Ira	Patience	Patientia
Envy	Invidia	Kindness	Humanitas
Pride	Superbia	Humility	Humilitas

^†This virtue is generally considered to be the greatest and the most important of all. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_deadly_sins

Don't play this here New York mama for a "sucka", kids. That is all. See you next week. Be ready. It's "go" time!

Ghetto Movie Theater

Back in the day, when America's air often buzzed with a thousand flying bullets in broad daylight—like that was the sane thing to do with twin concepts like "new" and "people"—we had an attitude of social looseness that constantly imposed upon the needs of others with an impunity that was artificially called "freedom", when, really, it was often a smokescreen for insanity committed in public spaces without fear of censure. Take, for instance, the ghetto movie theater (see also, Times Square in the 70s: http://gothamist.com/2013/03/27/photos_of_times_square_in_the_1970s.php#photo-2). 

Kids dared one another to run into a peepshow theater and back as if we were risking our young lives like western gunslingers of yore, and we were. Yeah, we had the buses of the Port Authority to take us back home, but if you missed the last sane commuter bus leaving the station, it was just you and your friends with hours of time in an almost empty bus depot, trapped with bums who got much scarier, louder, and active with each passing sip from their cheap bottle of wine. 

We were terrified of getting caught in the city's rain, because we knew a trickle of water could rouse a bum if it reached him before the rains stopped, like the time me and my boyfriend watched water fall down in torrents, stuck underneath a Central Park overpass. We only had so much time left before the water woke him up, and then it finally did. He was pissed off until he suddenly noticed us, which sent him flying towards us in a greatly renewed psychotic rage.

Which meant that we were constantly searching for safe places and happy diversions to combat the hellish scenes popping off around us. It was, uh, a little stressful, to put it mildly. People chain-smoked and drank like "The Final Days of Judgment" were being visited upon them any second, and if you believed the signs of the ranting religious zealots who frequented the midtown tourist areas, the end was always near. Ditto with the bald white "Hari Krishnas" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hare_Krishna_(mantra), who were usually ex-hippie burn-outs from the 60s looking to wind down (or amp up) from their tense neurosis "the natural way", which meant spinning around like a "Whirling Dervish" for hours (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mevlevi_Order), banging tambourines and asking for money from onlookers.

There were also door-knocking, tie-wearing, short-haired Jehovah's Witnesses, robotic over-groomed Mormons who looked like extras from a 1950s-era movie, or "Moonies" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonie_%28nickname%29) who would turn aggressive on you in a New York minute, which made the average New Yorker play this weird game of pretending not to notice that bleeding guy sitting next to you on the train, because he might stab you if you tried to help him out. Eye contact was also a serious no-no that kept us from helping out one another, because my dad repeated the same line about it over and over again with "no good deed goes unpunished", as an illustration of that very principle we used to live by. 

And so, our public lives were rife with strangely surreal scenes from horror movies or prescient sci-fi movies like "Escape from New York", that warned of The Second Coming as an apocalypse for the damned. Behavior was at an all-time low, and public life reflected the lesser of two evils that presented itself to us at any time. Sure, smoking a big stinky cigar in a movie was rude, oppressive, and unhealthy for everyone around you, but heck, it was better than rape, right? Right?! People sneaked booze and pot into theaters all the time under their jackets, and gay men used the movie's bathrooms as frequent hook-up spots that became so notorious for city people, we avoided public restrooms like The Plague. Anything could happen to you in there.

Like the worst of the human experience that becomes repetitive over time, we got used to extremely fucked-up people. Not comfortable or complacent, but accustomed to seriously violent offenders who'd snap at the slightest excuse to do so. People shouted back at the movie screen, or hissed their questions loudly to each other, in bad stage whispers that were clearly audible to everyone around them. My mom is so bad with watching movies, that I got used to prepping my friends about her odd behavior, because she loses the thread of the narrative quicker than anyone I've ever met. 

At home it was better, because we could stop the movie for food and drinks, or bathroom runs, or funky relatives with serious impairments, which my parents are not nice about. They're New Yorkers from the Bronx and Bed-Stuy, ya feel me? They aren't "nice" about anything, including their own ignorance that they self-defend like embarrassed kids at the rough local playground for tough kids in leather jackets, with switchblades and greased-back hair, smoking unfiltered cigarettes while snapping their chewing gum loudly. In other words, "assholes" presenting themselves in quick visual shorthand. 

"Who is that?!" my mother would yell out loud, and if you ignored her, she'd just abuse you until you had to give her the answer, which she argued about through her constant sense of befuddlement and misunderstanding, especially if she objected to the highbrow intellectualism that surpassed her grasp of the subject matter, like an offended two year-old after their lollipop is ripped out of their hands. It was histrionic bullshit, but look where they came from. Horror shows.

Years later, after we escaped our own individually tragic fates that working class people like us were often fated to, we could sit back and relax over something as simple as watching a t.v. show or a movie without being molested with uncommon violence for our presence or preferences. And, lo and behold, along came a show that addressed our humble city roots with a fun twist: we were safe now, and we also had homemade hand puppets to help spread the fun around to our friends. We'd say to each other in asides: "Yeah, check out that guy's hat and hairdo! Historically accurate, n'est ce-pas?" Or: "Yo, did you see that karate move?", quickly followed by "Hey, I wonder what he'll do next?" "Oh, I don't know! Let's pretend to be surprised by hammy bad acting and a cliched script!" Ahhh! Look out!! He's right behind you! Nooo!!! Don't go into that scary dark basement! 

Zombification

All of my life I've known that there's something wrong with some people, even as a baby. I've seen it in animals, too. My fluffy white dog loved almost everyone, except the crazy dyke who "dated" my mentally ill aunt in secret, much like her silent hoarding habit. Our adorable little princess doggie would immediately bristle, baring her fangs aggressively and raising her hackles in anger, and she was right. That bitch was totally fucking nuts (she died from a deliberately bad surgery done years ago), and psychosis is something most life forms pick up on. I don't want you to think that you need special superpowers to know "crazy" when you see it or feel it, because you don't.

Anomalies in our human world are fairly easy to spot, like the disordered dykes who wander around the local public library thinking they can stalk me on the sly by pretending to have a real interest in our community. By the way, say "hi" to the camera, bitch! We also note license plates to go along with your cars' make and model, because we all know each other here in Rockland County, so thanks for making it easier for us to spot you. Bitch.

Dead people are like that, too. They have a hollow feeling to them that permeates their entire being, often with a seriously bad smell to go along with their mental static (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/10/michelle-hat.html). I don't want you to think that I'm prejudiced against serious illness either, because my mom is the most disabled person I've ever met, and I've tended to her my whole life. It isn't just sickness that needs fixing. It's like there's something rotten deep in their soul.

Psychotics know we sense them as a disturbance in the force (life force, that is), and so they continue this weird gay dance of circling around human life on the periphery, until we notice the quietly lurking nut-job in a corner of a room, punching a black hole into our days and lives. They will cite loneliness as an excuse for sabotaging the peace and quiet of our happy days, but that's a total fucking lie. Psychos hurt people because it takes their minds off the innate badness that's seeped into the core of who they are. It's their essence that offends.

Back in art school, we had a friend who was like that. If you didn't enable her obsessive compulsive addictions, she lashed out at you and then tried to build a consensus around the shaky justifications she needed to cover up her bat-shit routines, like an incessant cleanliness that was (and still is) directly linked to her mental illnesses, and not a bunch of dirty dishes in the sink of a college house. My friend Cheryl, also significantly problematic like a lot of the people I met at school (what else do you call a professional graphic designer in her 30s from a professionally artistic family who decides to compete with a group of working class kids in art school?!), felt it in Lisa, too.

"It's like there's this hole inside of her <she would gesture to her midsection> that she's always looking for you to fill for her", and that was dead-on. She was so needy that it was too extreme to be around her sometimes. If you had a male friend hanging out, that was even worse. She'd try to poach him from you or the group barely after introductions had been made, like we were in a deranged competition that only she knew about, which I guess she figured gave her the "edge" she needed to "win", but at what we were never really sure of. Need I tell you that she is a former cheerleader, bisexual, and manic depressive? No?! Right! Because you already knew that, just like I did, and so did our hip art school friends.

She'd hit on gay men to see if they would "turn" for her (totally delusional), or pretend she wanted to kiss girls at the bar to put on a big gay show, if a lot of people were around and not talking to her; anything for attention. She had the requisite art-fag hairdo (http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2015/09/art-fags.html) to go along with her overly trendy outfits, decorated with stupid hats and pilgrim shoes with too-big buckles, using a garishly bright red lipstick made for you to notice how unusual her lip shape was, cleverly accented with slightly darker lip-liner. She just tried too hard about shit no one gave two fucks about, which drove her to even more abusive behavior.

And it never ended with her. If I introduced her to a single guy, I could count on Lisa to either A) hook up with him or B) try to later on. If the guy was my boyfriend, I could rely on her to make "subtle" overtures to him in front of me that I had to prove in this wild series of ever-escalating head games that were designed for her to decrease her mental static by using me, instead of taking medication and going to therapy. If she was flat-out busted by the entire group for her machinations and schemes, she'd shrug her shoulders of any blame by saying that "if he was really into her, he wouldn't have slept with me! That's her problem", because she had that line at the ready in case she was caught. After awhile, it didn't matter if the life-form was male or female, just easy or drunk enough for her to manipulate.

My oldest brother bought into the Yuppie world hardcore (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuppie), which meant that he has trafficked with some of the biggest scumbags on the planet, in the world trading center of downtown New York City. He describes the dead people he's worked with as "sketches"; outlines of people roughly drawn, without any real detail filled in. We were all pretty much saying the same thing after a certain point in our lives, and it was this: dead people were everywhere, and we could prove it. We've seen them and talked to them all of our lives. I can see dead people. So can you! How's that for a rainy day like today? Beware, humans. They're everywhere.

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/articles/closet-psychological-issues-being-and-coming-out

Rush

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_%28biology%29

Close to the city as we were, my family were natural experts in the dramatic arts, seeking out occasions that best displayed those skills to an audience up close and personal. To this day, my mom still stages tense little dramas to give color to her day by using anyone available to her to indulge her weird whims. Lately, she's become a little too glittery and shiny in the eyes over me standing by her kitchen sink, which is one of the great joys of her life. She calls the mundane chore of washing the same pots and pans over and over again as "playing with the dishes", and in order to safeguard her treasure trove of washables for later on when she's alone to savor it gloriously, she monitors me moving around her small apartment-style kitchenette while I do something as banal as making her a cup of tea. Sometimes, she'll complain that I move "too quickly", which is her special top- secret kooky code for "I can't hypervigilantly follow your movements so as to draw freaky vibes from your handling of my precious dishes (she hoards paper in times of stress, too), so I will find some way to demean/abuse/harass you while you are in my area of keen interest."

Oh. So, I'm not your biological girl-child that you pushed out during childbirth, right? And that's actually the reality behind it. In the middle of my mom's worst head-case scenarios, I can be anyone who is blocking her road to success by "incorrectly" moving a pair of "her" glasses out of my way on "her" countertop. If I've learned anything from shows like "Hoarders" and "Taboo: Obejctum Sexuals", it's that people with compulsive obsessive addictive personality identity disorders over-personalize objects to such an extant that they exalt them far above over actual lifeforms as a priority in their lives, which is inherently incorrect in modern Homosapien. It's like this mad, sickening, crazy tilt-a-whirl of a ride that the afflicted can't get disembark from, covert as my mom's expert stylings have become over the years.

Like most seriously sick people, my mom has had to reorient her "fetishes" (her word for it, not mine, because I simply see dishes in a sink, not a soapy fairy tail of fun that's a portal to a mythical magical Neverland) in between the noticing of healthy sharp observers like myself, which is exactly why she abuses me (and anyone else) who encroaches upon "her" territories overmuch, like a rabid weasel protecting its young. She's turned boring household chores into quick conduits for biologically addictive chemical payoffs for her benefit only, like a junkie becomes an adept thief at stealing away in the middle of the night to shoot up in lots of creative ways that you and I would never think about, even during our most feverishly delusional states.

The other night, I saw an episode of "Law and Order: SVU" that totally blew my mind in its' accounts of dementia. While the detectives worked a murder case about a neurotic young woman pressed by her evil boss overmuch (they were "besties" at work!), who turned to the cold comforts of alcohol consumption and promiscuous sex over say, consulting a good doctor and getting a better job (locked as she was in a highly tense and very stressful lesbo push-and-pull with her crazy, short-haired boss over pressing deadlines that are such a rush in the workplace, if only you put off everything until the last minute), the medical examiner told them this handy little bon mot about drunks: that their victim hadn't been sexually abused by a stalking rapist. No, it was much fucking weirder than that. She used a wine bottle to push the booze directly up her butt to absorb its intoxicating elixir, which has the added bonus of keeping one's breath fresh, too. Neat, huh?

The resident M.E. went on to further explain other covert methods of alcohol addiction, like the ever-useful "Vodka Tampon" that some nifty co-eds like to use: simply soak aforementioned tampon in a glass of booze before hitting class, insert it, then go go go! I was like, what the fuck, people?! It's so fucking convoluted and weird, you should know that's why those girls wind up on a slab in their 20s and 30s; not because I forgot the key combination of event sequences for their maximum enjoyment, like the types of sponges I HAVE TO use at my mom's place (one sponge is for the dishes, and the other one is just for the countertops and they MUST BE disinfected in the microwave periodically because germs kill just like in that scifi show about zombies you got me hooked on and now I HAVE TO watch it and buy the books and all the paraphernalia and its all your fault because you're here and why are you here, no wait, it makes sense you HAVE TO let me explain it all to you in overwrought detail!), because I must be the reason that my mom does laundry and "plays" with her sink full of dishes every night until three or four in the morning. She just gets a mysterious jolt of energy at those times before the lethargy sets in every "morning" at noon, when she finally wakes up after 3 or 4 cups of black sugared coffee!

Just like any type of foreign criminal mindset that's completely batshit, it's not so much that my mom has cleverly hid her illnesses from me (hiding in plain sight as they are), it's just that it's so petty and strange to normal people like me that we could care less, and that's the point of it: if you hide your false enjoyment over common activities, you can get high from the tension that exists only in your stupid mind, because the person in "your" area doesn't know that you wiped your finger over your butthole in the bathroom, exited, then wiped your grody pinkie finger over said hated person's objects ("they" shouldn't be there anyway!), so only you know how bad it is when "they" dare to pick up "your" butt pen. It's sort of like being around that crazy bitch from a typical bunny boiler horror movie who sticks a toothbrush up her butt because that prettier roommate just has to go (tusually me in a staged role that only she knows about, teeheehee), especially if she's straight and there are "too many" handsome boys hanging around all the time, because she's just "too pretty, you know?"

Therefore, we must die, or at least get sick from your urine in the company coffeepot, because we also dared to live and breathe and not notice your crazy, or the highs you get from that huge bottle of mouthwash in the company bathroom, you fucked up, overgrown sorority girl, because deep-down you know we just don't fucking care about your weirdo routines, unless you make them an instrument of horror, devastation, and abuse. Then, after you've set the stage with your powerfully totemic "special" objects, you can kill me off or at the very least get my mom to snap out because you moved something around of hers that you know will cause a meltdown, Bernadette, you fucking bitch of a cave troll. No more "high life" from this clan, starting today. Go huff plastic from a bargain store elsewhere, hag. We get it. We know! And we can totally see all those invisible germs crawling over your skin, and the aliens are coming to take you away with those anal probes that they do because....the truth is out there. Love, X.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crash_%281996_film%29

Speed Freaks

3.) Over-stimulate yourself. Caffeine, tobacco, loud noise, driving fast, working without breaks, skipping meals - there are so many ways to keep the body and brain on overdrive and keep the anxiety levels high. 

My mom and her sisters were adept at abusing each other into what they believed were less overt addictions that they thought cleverly hid their compulsions and addictions (strange as they are) like shopping, hoarding, and staging fake scenes to create anxiety they huff like a can of paint. It became a psychotic form of artistry over the more rigorous disciplines behind thinking, doing, and making, which is for suckers like me, who pay their benefits through our day jobs because if we don't, they'll make our lives a living hell that's hard to prove in a court of law without devoting mountains of time and evidence to it, therefore I must have "too much free time" and that means I need to work more (hence their shaky lazy superiority over "working stiffs" like me and the million other people who take care of them), because if you can't abuse people behind closed doors with secret horror shows, who will pay the taxes needed for their disabilities?

Instead of managing children, life, and stress, my mom would pull to a short-stop in the middle of a highway, threatening to crash her car and kill us all if we didn't behave, creating over-dramatic heart palpitations that released the addictive body chemistry she needs to cope, over more obvious (and honest) relaxants like drinking and smoking, which could be pointed out to anyone and are therefore actionable by their feared perpetrators, like, say, someone very bright who caught onto their mental illnesses. Oh, they'll say they're afraid of being dragged away by scary large men wearing white coats, carrying butterfly nets and tranquilizer guns, and then cast without consent into some haunted house horror show, but those stories are now relics from our distant medical past.

Without having any real excuses to hide behind anymore, it's become harder and harder for actual head-cases to strike out against load-bearing "normals" like me, as if chronic abuse and violent derangement are key facets of our human culture that they must protect in order to thrive as a species, when oftentimes it's simply me and my brothers trying to get my mom to stick to her weekly therapy and take her medicine for the billionth time, which she alternately hides and/or lies about to blame on..who else? Me! Children and other family members are amazingly adept excuse-generators for a bevy of life's woes, like hiding sickness and delusional behavior. 

She's always been a very bad driver who uses a host of convenient replies like: 1) she didn't need to drive when she lived in the city so that's why she's "bad" at it, and that was only admitted after she drove into a brick wall with a realtor sitting right next to her while she shopped for her fantasy senior apartment complex with handy car-ports for auto aficionados like herself (preferring instead to joy-ride with my grandfather's car back in the Bronx, without a driver's license), or 2) she didn't learn to drive until her 30s, and that was only because of her friendship with a woman at the local DMV during the brief year we lived in rural Pennsylvania, where she had major diseases like "walking pneumonia" with the spot on her lung even, so she got off easy on her driving test (that's her friend's fault, get it?) which leads to 3) her driving so fucking poorly, she gets into tons of accidents that she covers up whenever she can, because for many years she also drove with two feet, one on the gas and the brake (sometimes at the same time) plus 4) she cares more about her car than her own life and the lives of others at times, which she hides behind cutesy stories about being Mario Andretti the race car driver, or being "like a cabbie, fast but good" which she could never actually do for a living because "she's a woman" (sexism, you see), which is also an excuse for her not performing well and besides that, she was a commuter. "Everyone drives fast during 'rush hour'. That's why it's called that." Oh.

And finally, she liked speeding in cars as an older woman with a more advanced case of MS because it "gave me my life back" with the gift of mobility that's robbed her the use of her dead limbs over using an actual motorized wheelchair, preferring instead to torture us with her snail's pace that's necessary to "retain her ambulatory status" (pronounced "stay-tuss, which is different!"). It's like she's talking to her group at the local church, or the high school, or in attendance at the public library, because she's gone to a bunch of those. First it was for the Divorced Catholics group, then it was the Divorced Catholics group for singles, and then the MS support group (too handicapped for her tastes), but she was finally outmatched in these modern times by all the pros on the high-profile talk show / court t.v / reality programming circuit, with years of solid professional acting chops under their respective belts, so she had to give it up.

Instead of coping, she harassed me one Christmas with a death-defying trip in a really bad blizzard across the Tappan Zee bridge and back from Connecticut. She insisted that she HAD TO see family because "it won't be Christmas if we don't go", forcing me to pack up all of our stuff, packed into "her" car with my Mal in the back. He was forced to sleep in the garage because of all the allergies they supposedly have, even though my brother and his wife now have a dog  that's "allergen free", so I could spend my time being demeaned through their bitchy comments about my humble well-thought gifts, my mom's huffing abuse (because my brother's wife ignores her completely), and checking on my dog throughout the trip because his kids opened the garage door whenever they wanted to, forgetting that my dog was inside, so I could do all this while sleep-deprived, too. Best. Holiday. Ever.

If I dared to mention the conditions she abused us into, she'd bring up her sisters affectations about weather phobias and car driving panic attacks. At least she was better than them, right? Right? No, that's sharing the same genetic disorder in different ways, like the breast cancer bouts you all had. Oh...She might then lapse poetic about flights of fancy over magical lanes of sparkling snow, like she was riding on Santa's sleigh and I should just get over it because it's fun and besides, it's Christmas. There's always a reason behind a reason behind an excuse until finally, in this century, there isn't anymore, because there isn't. It's called real medicine.

http://www1.nyc.gov/nyc-resources/thrivenyc.page

Gawker-Stalker

For many years I've been subject to almost daily stalking and harassment, both covertly and overtly done. Some of it's harmless, like the kids who come to see me at the library, but most of it's malicious: popular actors driving around town (or who happen to be conveniently filming nearby) seeking me out so as to copy my mannerisms for the purposes of selling copycat versions of me to the media (not gonna happen, so drop it), or those seeking to gain an insight into the mindset and habits of what they desperately want to be their personal Shakespeare that they can kiss up to, or once again, to rip me off (also not gonna happen), or disordered lesbians"on the nod" publicly and desperate for any kind of attention, or just your average everyday psycho with nothing better to do than harass beautiful women.

Envy has dogged me with its vicious shadow all of my life, which made me the warrior I am today, while happily causing extreme frustration among the local psychos seeking to hurt, with the unfortunate progression (for them) of making me into a human weapon who can crack open their weak jaws any time I want (thanks!), which would then unfortunately open up my family to lawsuits over medical bills perpetrated by your addicted watcher of drunk housewives off their meds (with all the hype over their misplaced sexual aggressions), combined with the rise of court t.v. shows and a proliferation of law firms that cater to the seeker of remuneration by any means possible. 

Our neighborhood nut-case has taken to using a cane whenever it's convenient for her to do so (like visits to Public Assistance, or pissing off a samurai), as a means of fobbing off the retaliation brought about by the physical attacks she instigates because, like any real nut-job, she's a total coward when it comes to facing the consequences of her abuse, which fits neatly into her well-observed psychological patterns.

I'm also watched secretively whenever I work off an Internet network anywhere in the world (which is just about all the time, because I work transparently), which was (as was intended) highly disturbing to me as a young single woman living and working alone, though after consulting a very savvy publishing player I'd known for years, I realized that I could take his advice and use abusive workplace peeping as my main media outlet for their aggressions, because according to him, that's part of what we do. Of course, as a relatively unstable head-case himself, his advice was always delivered in these pseudo-mentoring tones of condescension over my continued surprise about commonly occurring workplace abuses that he relishes as a bizarre part of "playing the game", over say, being masterful as an artist instead, but whatever.

I used their peeping to establish a strong underground media presence online, with loyal haters and well-meaning followers, in between my now-infamous cover designs submitted and taken on the sly over the same network violations (designs slyly rejected, too, as part of a group peeping protected in an employee manual for "managers" to do whenever they wanted to see our work on "their" equipment), through commenting on several well-known "gawking" media websites under an appropriate fighting pseudonym, so as to deliver blows during the day that I could audibly hear resonate throughout the small office space I masterfully directed. Whenever I made a comment online about bizarrely bitchy behavior openly displayed with overt symptoms of mental illness at work, with clever oblique references that my abusive co-workers couldn't sue me over but knew the references, nonetheless (haha, I can write better than the "pro's, too!), I could hear sharp intakes of breath (that was questioned, too, because I milked my "deafness" for strategy like the other art director did), followed by many pleasurable hours of manic ranting that had to be done sneakily under-breath, so as not to invoke the same obsessive managerial attention.

My old contact was right! Publishing is fun!! I should enjoy, it. His point was that I should feel "flattered" that people cared enough to harass me, but given his hatreds and pettiness as a rather generically unattractive designer, his point of view only went so far with me, which was part of the intent, too, because he flat out told me as an apprentice that he would cut off helping me at work and then hunt me openly in the industry, because he's threatened by talent. Oh. He also told me over a few cocktails we had next to my dojo that was getting media attention for launching the careers of several fighters into the then-exploding UFC (and what handy timing my training there was, too), that the teachers there looked "gay" (and I agreed that they kinda did, becauset homo-eroticism is built into the sport as a sales tool), in a classically offensive posture that I already knew.

He then told me a tale about one of his former design assistants, now the founder of Twitter (wow!) many years before he started the company and how rich he is, after selling out (which turned out to be a total lie), but not after he grilled me about my thoughts first. I told him the app seemed immature, stalker-ish, and for young people with ADD plus a severely limited word count, and that I hadn't yet figured out what to do with it as a new media, but that I had bookmarked an account with my name on it for future use. He laughed, and said that it sounded a lot his former assistant. It jarred a memory I had of him from years ago, after I contacted him during my re-entry into the world of New York City media. He's always an insanely trendy adapter of any new technology and indiscriminately so, so he can brag about waiting on line for hours to buy the latest gadget with a million other people who think, act, and buy just like he does. I'd find out during our last evening meal together at an outdoor restaurant popular at the time that he'd finally begun therapy in earnest and that he'd been officially diagnosed with adult ADHD, after years of office abuse and the obvious symptoms of a ten-minute attention span, with loyalties as fickle as a toddler at a playground, now on a Ritalin.

He'd told me about social media years before, though, fresh from out west as we walked around after work on a warm spring evening looking for a place to drink and eat that called out to us (we're both great city walkers), saying what fun it was and that I should hop on the bandwagon with them, because a guy in his design studio just "tweeted" (with handy new marketing lingo for teens and the "Peter Pans" who love them - yay!) that the blond guy from "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" was having dinner at a cafe nearby. Uh, okay. So what? Millions of people were eating dinner in the city at the time, and then we passed by him as we walked by the outdoor cafe, which he then had to point out to me, too, because I don't notice "stars" unless they make a big show of harassing me, bringing me full circle to being right back here at a Rockland County library, where I work their sometimes silly media outlets; more gawking, and ever more stalking. Don't let that be you. Don't turn into some media tool made for marketing lies selling fake shit. You're better than that, and so am I.

High Anxiety

Compulsive patterns are hard to break. Just ask my mom. Like many women of her generation (pre-Baby Boomer and post-Gen X), she struggled to assimilate herself into a world not of her choosing. Underneath the burdens of her innate challenges, she tried to figure out who she was, without any of the guidance that we have now, thanks to the narcissistic angst of the modern "Special Needs" parent and their Autistic kids. Like them, questions about gender/identity are particularly difficult.

Imagine worrying over the very existence that you and I take for granted everyday, like: who you are attracted to and what do you do about it? They painstakingly work at the core of who they might be with a therapist over some of our most basic human instincts, like a learning-impaired child with dyslexia trying to assemble the puzzle pieces that words represent. Can you imagine that? 

No wonder the disordered reach out wrongly (now numbered as 5 out of 6 people, or 8 out of 10), seeking shelter from the storms that brew inside their heads. Lashing out feels better than trying to understand their garbled perceptions of human speech, because concepts need to be labored over later, when they feel like they can process our communications better, with the guidance of an expert who's researched brain disorders for many years.

It was in this way that I came to accept my mission of breaking through to my own mother's badly broken brain (and becoming an excellent mother way before my actual biologically appropriate time), stuttered and repetitive as it is. When she "argues" with me (and it really isn't arguing to me, because I'm in control while she is not, and she doesn't like that), it's to release the pent-up stress that is the result of her disorders and illnesses.

Even worse for my mom is the trap her education brings to her incorrect assumptions and improper responses, like: how can she have me as a brilliant daughter, when she's the one who studied science? She doesn't understand that genius is genetic and many-abled, because she feels her arrogance must be vigilantly guarded, lest the knowledge from all of her over-wrought degrees (that all of us supported her in having), evaporate in an instant, like her mental faculties do during her sickest times.

In compensation for her low points, she learned to cover up her chronically anti-social behavior (like many people suffering with serious brain disorders do, to avoid detection as a life strategy), by re-orientating them around more conventionally disorientating events, like flying in an airplane, which is a common enough phobia that passes as a legitimate non-mental illness she can play to the hilt by letting her anxieties out under that appropriate cloud cover. She channels nervousness and anxietty brought on by ordinary events (that would surely reveal the depths of her diseases) into everyday compulsions that appear harmless on the surface, like washing dishes or folding laundry.

The problem with that is that she never learned to express her incorrect trains of thought accurately (which don't hold up under careful scrutiny well), because those conversations would reveal her serious compulsive-obsessivenesss that she inappropriately feels she can manage because she studied botany in school over sixty years ago. It doesn't make any sense, and a closer examination of her reasoning process reveals to a studied scholar (like me) exactly why doing laundry is not the same as genuine grief, which she will do anything to avoid, because emotional pain feels likee the psychic pain that is her life.

In avoidance of feeling feelings that are crucial to our health (like how a good night's sleep eludes her during the manic stress that occurs around heightened emotional times like holiday seasons, some of the worst emotional stress our mentally ill family members have), many people like her hoard and over-attach emotions to objects that have no real significance, then work a complex scheme to cover it up, like causing a hysterical fight over blinds that were raised slightly askew. For example, when my grandmother died, I mourned her thoroughly. I felt sadness, a deep sense of loss, and also a joy at having known her. I would not be me without her. Such was the gift that a life like hers brings, so that a big void is necessarily left in her wake. 

I don't dislike feeling very strong emotions, because I know I can process them correctly over time with an appropriate thought process, but the most disordered among us sometimes can't even get out of bed in the morning (my mom gets that typical manic-depressive "surge" of energy at night, because she also has Circadian Rhythm Disorder, sometimes puttering around until 4:30 a.m.), let alone contemplate concepts like life and death. They break life down into superficial, bite-sized bits that become extremely unproductive over time, especially in isolation, causing the abuse that they feel they need to keep their "creature comforts" in place that are signs of severe emotional distress.

Case in point, my mom has a big healthcare appointment coming up, which is a symptom of her holiday stress. Doctor appointments are often used to block out emotions she can't handle, so she tap-dances around her mental illnesses by using more socially acceptable illnesses as cover-ups. Like a lot of chronically sick people, she is disturbed by old-fashioned ideas about mental institutions that no longer exist, but she doesn't know that. Her brain just tells her to avoid detection at all costs, even if it leads to the death of a loved one, which she will regret later on after her fugue state has passed. My mom has had to retract her false claims of "elder abuse" thrown at me during her life stress (under threat of legal prosecution by family who has also been falsely accused by her), because she couldn't handle my hard move from Brooklyn that was tied to her basement area as my storage unit, and the use of her car for me to painfully move all my stuff by myself over the course of three days.

After I told her on the last day that I was too tired to do the psychotherapy she needed to "see" my stuff in her basement (which would have been too grueling for me to supervise, because her delusions make her MS symptoms worse, and I was already physically exhausted), so I simply told her: "I have nothing left to give", which is her worst nightmare. She called the cops for me not being her nursemaid during my hardest time. That's it. In fact, the policemen who responded to her panicky call have picked her up off the floor before, through her Life Alert system, one that took years for us to enforce properly with her, and then she failed a basic recognition test. "Nope, never seen you before", as he reminded her that he was there for her when she broke her shoulder in seven places, because he picked her up off the floor and called for an ambulance.

He then administered the same test with me, and I responded correctly that he and I had never met before at my mother's house, which was true. It was already over with at that point, even as my mom told him I was "nuts" because she is mad, something authority figures often hear: the classically immature "I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I" speech given in lieu of a more carefully reasoned rationale. The jig was up and he and I knew it, as we exchanged pointed glances she missed during her diva crisis about me not emotionally catering to her during my real life event, which is part of a destructive family pattern firmly in place. He warned her then that she had no legal right to lock me out because I had already established residency, which she promptly forgot as soon as they walked away, by trying to slam the door in my face again.

I then called the two officers now present back to her rapidly closing front door, as they warned her once again (repetition is commonplace for Special Needs people) that she has no legal right to change the locks on me, because delusional paranoid states are some of the most challenging times of communication with the sick who walk, talk, work, and live among us. She might not actually have any memories attached to my stress, because as soon as she is calmed, soothed, and stroked like a puppy, she forgets about other people, even the ones she gave birth to, which she naturally doesn't remember well, because "they" gave her ether during her labors, as she lay unconscious from heavy sedation. "Yeah, one minute I'm in labor, and the next thing I had a baby!", she likes to tell me. And how...exactly? "I don't know! I was 'out' like a light!", which is unlike any birthing experience I've ever seen or heard of.

That's the crux of it in a nutshell: stress and panic reorient her chemically addicted brain to use other people as her drug to get high off of, as serious a sickness as any strung-out heroin junkie. Right now, she's busy nursing the high from her next doctor's appointment, which happens next week, resulting in typical conversations like "I can't think of anything right now! I 'have to' (and it's always HAVE TO) focus on my mouth pain and 'getting through' (like some soldier in combat) my appointment next week. Once that's over, I can 'focus' again"!, which is pure bullshit. She doesn't ever snap to "after" her moments, but the deferred payment program helps her to successfully avoid stressful times, like birthdays and Christmases, especially if she falsely pads her schedule to be artificially busy, as clever a deceit as any con by a really good cat burglar.

She's totally full of shit about being present and available for you somewhere off in the distant future when she feels better (because I fix what's wrong while she's on the nod), and that's just the way addicts like it: they can get high off of you during their blackout times, even when she remembers days, weeks, and months later that she just abused the one woman around her who's healthy enough to keep her alive, and that's me. Then, in the middle of the night when no one's around to see her or help her, she cries herself to sleep, because she remembers that she almost killed me through abuse and neglect. 

And that's the worse part of it all: that a smart woman who can make me a perfect grilled cheese is alone by herself every night, remembering in one big flood of emotions that the genuine love she feels for me was replaced by an extremely violent hate that is psychosis. That's what I cannot abide by any longer, and neither should you. We want more for you. We want you to get better. We. Want. More. I want a real mother. I want the woman who worked at the Botanical Gardens, who taught me all about the native trees, plants, and flowers we love that we can also point out and name together in Latin or French, as well as English. That's who I want back. You can keep the abusive, obsessive-compulsive addict this Christmas.