En Velo

Caroline was a French foreign-exchange student at our high school I met in French class, because when the teacher asked her to read, she read our curriculum the way I read "Moby Dick": flawlessly, like a native. Everyone in class turned around to look at her in astonishment, until the teacher finally admitted she was French-born like herself. Oh.

I immediately asked her afterward why she was taking it, because a lot of the students were worried that she would throw off the curve for the entire class, and we were fourth-year language, Regency-diploma students with advanced college credits (Amy and Michael Wechsler, I'm thinking of you two, specifically). I didn't want to see her attacked by the other students for the rest of the year, and with a last name like "Doucette", the only other French name in our senior class, I felt honor-bound to become her friend. It was the right thing to do.

She was a really nice person to talk to, actually. Besides, she explained to me that she was taking senior-level classes at a high school that was foreign to her, given entirely in English. She had a grade-point average to protect, too. After all, European colleges were a lot more particular about grades than our more well-rounded studies that included athleticism and the arts. They wanted certain numbers as cut-off points for certain levels, and that was that. Taking French would guarantee her an easy "A" she really needed, because she had to take Chemistry as her science requirement in English, and she was completely struggling with it, as you could imagine.

Her fluency as an excellent student at home in the south of France found her using a tutor after school just to get through the lesson plans, which was embarrassing enough for her. There was still the social stigma of her year in New York to be addressed. She lived with her affluent grandparents in an exclusive neighborhood of expensive architect-designed houses, each one a unique statement about the intrinsic wealth of New Yorkers. Her grandfather was a tenured History professor in the city, and her grandmother an eccentric Japanese calligrapher with a private studio equipped with Shoji screens and custom sliding doors, wandering around the house with an affected air of white privilege as she toured the grounds in her cheomsang.

They were, in short, insufferable, and Caroline had been sent abroad because of a sexual scandal in her hometown after she'd fallen in love with an Arab boy. Her parents "je ne sais quoi" about providing her with birth control pills as a 16 year old minor ended when confronted with his gang affiliation and darker skin. She told me he was part of a moped gang that did violent "drive-bys" for their initiation. As his girl, she rode on the back of his bike during their fights with rival gangs. They would hold razor blades between their fingers to swipe at each others faces, making long-lasting scars that they wore with pride.

"Like thees", she showed me as if holding a blade sharp-side down between her index and middle finger, "pht pht!", imitating a slashing sound. They'd go for cuts across the cheeks that would be permanent reminders of their epic Euro battles made from small scooters imported from Italy. After a couple of run-ins with the cops, her parents freaked out and she was shipped here, to New York City and its environs, which I found questionable as a choice. She immediately took up with a few Asian martial arts guys at school, as her latest ethnic fetish. But, it did the trick of unsticking the dangerous Arab boy from her, which was the whole point. By the end of the year, I spoke French like "une naturelle", acing my college-level language classes. Merci, Caroline. Pour toi.

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

Winston

By now you should know that compulsively hoarding "cat ladies" and most "volunteer" pet rescue kooks are totally fucking nuts, because they use animals for their own selfish healthcare needs instead of going to see a doctor regularly, and these bitches can definitely afford to see a rich white psychiatrist any day of the week. Ya read me? My own particular obstacle course of "fucked-up white person" dysfunction came in the form of an unstable Jewish/WASP from Connecticut who had insane parents with money to spoil her rotten, just so they could avoid icky things like "parenting" on the daily, which is a big "no-no" in demented, wealthy, corrupt, country circles that worship money and extreme dieting as a panacea to manic-depression and suburban alcoholism, best done indoors and away from legitimate authority figures who don't have help on the payroll as the ticket price to their admission to a better life for their families.

Lisa was a typical selfish bitch working unnecessarily in publishing, is what I'm sayin' to you. Much like our Napoleonic publisher's bitch of a wife, she told me early on that she didn't need to work for money, she just didn't like being bored. Right....same! We had nothing in common and she knew it, so, just to fuck with me as a better-looking genius, she pretended she didn't know I was working in the same room as her, choosing to signify her utter distaste for the genuine working class ethnics of native New York like me by shutting the office lights to the studio room while I still sat in it, because she was threatened by my superior work ethic, too, in addition to my good looks. You know: a total fucking bitch among many.

She was also one of the worst book designers I'd ever met, though as an average white Baby Boomer, that wasn't especially exceptional to me, either. I knew a lot of dumb rich fucks from publishing. When I finally told her that I noticed she was shutting the lights on purpose, she giggled and blushed like a crazy toddler caught stealing cookies from the cupboard before dinnertime, and then she quickly walked away embarrassed, down the short hallway and out the door without saying a word to anyone. Like any other asshole in business, she pretended she couldn't "hear" me, even though she had the money to buy two hearing aids for herself and I didn't, which didn't give her quite the edge she hoped for, because she's also stupid and slow.

In addition to nursing her long list of deliberately untreated disorders and serious health conditions as leverage and the occasional workplace weapon (where it's completely inappropriate to do so because, like, we work with books as objects), she had absolutely no conversation skills whatsoever. So, within record time, I pushed through my obligatory "too low" job title that was used as a justification to underpay me my true worth (as yet another sign of disdain telegraphed to me that was glaringly obvious), to take command of an imprint without a real leader that became a big money-maker for the largest book retailer in the country, because Lisa was too incompetent to lead effectively. Within my first week on the job, every freelance designer, on-the-job contractor, pre-press artist, printer, typesetter, service provider, ex-employee, as well as all of their current employees, told me the exact same thing. 

Oh....great. Plus, Marie, she hid her deafness from us on purpose! That was my first "work lunch" with the young Millennials working there. Their treat. Gee, kids, thanks for cluing me in! They wanted to tell me that they didn't know about it, because they didn't hire her. The publisher did! Okey dokey! Yeah, I got that. Thanks. Every dick move you could think of, they threw at me, which I expertly dodged just as quickly. Lisa continued to avoid me passively-aggressively through a thick haze of Valium and anti-depressants, only moving about the office in a creaky, stiff, robotic way when she needed more coffee from the office kitchen. She ignored everybody like it was part of her job. That was their big "Art Director" on-site, when I got there: a bitch too crazy to speak normally in "human". Some communication expert.

It wasn't exactly a "hostile" takeover on my part, in the wake of her almost complete mental and physical absence within the company, but crazy bitches do what they do anyway, regardless of my active participation or bodily presence. That didn't stop her from trying to hang her hat on my hook as part of her poor work survival skills, and she told me that every few weeks, too. "You know, I'm trying to get you fired", she'd say to me with a half-lidded death-stare frozen onto her angry face. Yeah, bitch? How? You fucking suck. The only time she spoke to me was to try and give me orders, but like I mentioned, I'd already locked myself down tight with the other imprint in the house that she demeaned as, yep, too "lowbrow" for her to work on as a bargain book line. 'Kay, bitch.

The only time she brightened up at work was after I pinned a large colorful photo of my dog Teddy smiling up at me while walking in Prospect Park, with his cutely-colored collar of rainbow smiley faces prominently displayed. Oh! Now, I was a human fit for her to talk to! You have a dog! Uh, yeah. She could care less about me and my dog, but it unfortunately opened up the door to the only subject she actually cared about, her stupid fucking terrier, Winston. He was as average as she was, but it helped me get actual work-related information out of her if I just unlocked her artificially-sealed mouth with some loose doggie talk. What a fucking weirdo! Within weeks, everyone in the office visibly groaned whenever Lisa lisped at me in her overly-loud deaf accent, because it was like a sitcom beer-drinking game: how many times will this daft bitch repeat the same story over and over again? 

Oh, good. Winston, again, She was the dullest person I'd ever met, and her interior book layouts were as boring as she was, which is why we gave her old classics to re-design for the umpteenth time. Hard to screw that up, but she would, periodically, which caused Manufacturing to go ballistic and then ask me to prove her liability. Uh, what the fuck do yo do for me, exactly, besides ride my coat tails for a living? Fuck off! Pin her in a meeting on your own without my ammo, because you humps sure as shit don't give me anything to work with. You want a turn-coat, make your own, and don't you know, readers, without me they couldn't? It was so sad and pathetic, because she cost them so much fucking money with her errors, but the crazy old man still wouldn't fire her. He liked talking to an "older" woman! It was that fucked up, but who cared?

I was face-out on the shelves of every single B&N store in the world and online. I just didn't fucking need them. So, whenever we had to interact about work, I brought up her dip-shit dog, which got her talking to me, and then I waited for her to obsessively repeat the exact same story back to me. When there was an opening conversationally, I took it, as the leading creative adult working in the company. But not before she first told me the exact depths to her depravity, as a way to be colorful with her rather generic roots. First, her parents met in an insane asylum (OOO!) when her dad worked as the orderly helping her resident mom with the bigger mental patients needing subduing. Uh huh...that sounds like a good story...and then it would end.

Ditto with her "dog rescue" work. She knew I got badly hurt in a walking accident with my giant Mal. Did the bitch care? Nope! She reiterated to me that she once again wanted me fired. Anyway, she doesn't work with those kinds of animals. Ew! She was offended by the very suggestion, as well as the poor, ailing, elderly people who tried to give her other types of similar terriers to place in better homes. She didn't give a fuck. Not her job! Anyway, they had legal issues with "pet adoptions". But, that didn't stop her from giving a face-eating dog to a healthy young couple with small children! Did she tell them? "Oh, I don't have to do that. It wasn't his fault he was hungry!" You fucking cunt. Okay, so tell me about your dog. Was he a rescue dog? Oh, yes, and from a nice, rich, white gay couple of affluent men living in a beautiful downtown loft, too, which means he was treated really well. 

Yay! That's some sort of pride in something, I guess. But, did I know that she only did it because she lacked affection as a child? Excuse me? What the fuck did you just say to me? I'd do that to her when I wanted her to speak even louder, so the whole office could hear, thus sharing complicity with her obvious dysfunctions. Yell it, Lisa! And then she would. Out loud, in front of anyone. "My parents didn't touch me as child!" OH! What else? "I use dogs for affection because I lacked intimacy as a child! My parents are cold and emotionally distant." 

And there it was, my fellow excellent humans of Earth: an actual bitch-sized snare that caught me one very large, dumb, clueless kook in the wild office spaces of New York City. That's how you fight back without tricky employment lawsuits and illegal firings, with clearly documented cases of workplace harassment attached for good measure. Rainbow-colored and neatly packaged, too.


Dear crazy "cat ladies" and fellow "dog-whisperers" of the world, please take note: you will be phased out by real warriors in the near future, but we do accept cash, checks, and money orders. Just not you. Your homework for today is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humane_law_enforcement

Over Hill, Over Vail

"Gore Creek Drive - Vail, CO" by Nick Csakany.

On the way to Vail, I tried to prep my largely impatient punk-rock boyfriend about the pretentious twitchy qualities that mark my oldest brother and his wife, but...what to say? It was like trying to describe the desolation my father had exiled himself to, deep in the wastelands of western Texas, that he pitched as a false paradise to anyone who listening; it was, by its very nature, a contradiction in terms. Some things (and people) you just have to see for yourself.

Because Kent was a brilliant man, he and I got on really well as friends, and that was the main bond between us, way beyond any temporary romance he and I may have had. We just "got" each other and the worlds we came from, in the present tense. When I told him about Jim's trendy Internet "start-up", the very first question Kent asked me was: "Why are they pissing away all their money on family vacations for the executives and their entire families, on one of the wealthiest resorts in the country?!". Uh....because they're corrupt, dude. I was always embarrassed by the obvious nature behind my brother's greed. It unnerved me, which is what he likes about money: it's power that's fleeting but satisfying, to the right type of mind.

We didn't share his fascination for all things rich, white, and insane but Jim came about honestly, meaning, he picked it up practically from birth. As far back as we knew him, Jim has always been attracted to the wrong types of things. Give him real food, and he wants fake. Take him to a cousin's overly extravagant wedding you know he can't afford, and Jim wants a pass to the country club just so he can grovel to get in, and then pound wanna-be joiners over the head with his success. It sucks, and it doesn't feel like how family should feel, but that's the world he wanted; it's also about as far from the lessons any true Acadian should have learned a long time ago as it could possibly be, but that's how it is.

Corruption isn't for just the insanely rich. It also infects anyone aspiring to it, the way a suicide wreaks havoc on anyone near the crime scene, in a blast zone of evil that tries to eat at the healthy life around it, or so the perpetrator wants you to believe, like the cartoon victim who lies to the very end, denying it every step of the way. But, Jim's taste for ostentation and bragging far surpassed his need for discretion, and that's what I fall back on during his worst times: he'll snap out of his "money haze" to see the truth of how it really is. After all, his kids are dark as fuck! They ain't passing as "Anglo" at family reunions anytime soon, and isn't that why he and his wife avoid them? I know he knows that, deep down inside, where his ancestry tucked away all the good stuff that no raving lunatic can ever snatch away from him, no matter the amount of pretty guises.

Sure enough, as soon as we hit the first steep hill into town, there was Jim's insane "tanorexic" of a wife running uphill in the snow with my nephew in her "runner's" baby carriage that cost a mint, and immediately upon seeing her, we both bust out laughing. That crazy bitch could always be counted on for being just what we know her to be: stupid as fuck, and deeply programmable by any corporation that needs available drones for rent. You see, her womanly "baby fat" struck the wrong chord with the obviously gay and very butch woman she reported to, the one who barked at her whenever she felt like it (day or night, weekday or weekend, during office hours or while on "vacay"), so she could have the pleasure of seeing my brother's wife lick her boot-heels, in one of the gayest female displays I have ever seen in my life, but that bitch is beyond cray-cray. We all know it.

Not one of our friends and family like her, and we have a HUGE family. Not. One. Person. She is one of the rudest, nastiest, viciously aggressive cunts we've ever had the misfortune to meet in my family, and we're New Yorkers. Know what I mean? Like many a company of underlings and "yes-men" I've worked my way through, that's exactly what every total ass-kissing MBA really wants: to trap each other in a cycle of cowardly cringing and then furious lashing out, in one of the sickest examples of "making it" that humans currently have. How is that success? It isn't, but that doesn't stop them from tap-dancing all the way to an early grave with fully loaded pockets.

Sure enough, their trip was by-the-book: a grossly over-priced "villa" that every executive booked his family into, so that was the first thing we heard about, their plush "suites" in a hotel resort. Oh. Kent and I exchanged knowing looks during their delusion opening stump-speech; they do realize we actually live in Colorado full-time, right? Like, their insanely over-decorated tourist trap for dumb out-of-town white folk is our everyday. They must know, right? After all, my brother went to an very impressive and really expensive Ivy League school for his business degree. They must know, no? 

No. That wasn't the facade at all. As soon as we asked them astute questions about re-investing in chancy Internet start-ups, my brother's wife began her real drinking of the day, early as the afternoon was. As we watched her skinny tan arms slinging it back, the jig was already up. Ohh....that's it. It's a bank scam! Huh. Funny, or did my bro not remember that our "Pops" (her annoyingly cutesy name for my father that we all hated for its falsely intimate Southern hokey charm, because he disapproves of her the most, first and foremost) actually spent his time in the banking system as young man working at The Bank of New York, and then as the owner of The First Bank of Lockney, because I sure did! I remember his lessons quite well, because I know how to listen, and that's an essential skill in business.

After that, me and my man tore through it proper. We spent our time as far away from the madness as we could, and as actual Coloradans, it wasn't difficult for us to disappear into the landscape. We booked a snowboard lesson with a pathetic stoner on a wildly dangerous "bunny" slope designed for maximum casualties. Those dumb shits actually put small children on the same hill as a 250lb 6' Scotsman on a seriously sharp blade edge, because if you can maim your customers while draining their wallets, what better way to score huge bar tabs from "weekend warriors" in their designer casts, made by the hotel doc who loves all the "powder" he can get? Heavy on the hints, natch. 

And that's actually what my man on the real did, after I couldn't take the dip-shit surfer lingo from some blond kid who just wanted to get high for free while giving away absolutely nothing in "how-to's" that were cleverly disguised as "snowboarding lessons" for the dumb, rich, and insane, like the generically spoiled Generican she must surely be. Sure enough, I couldn't do it, especially with toddlers on skis whizzing past us, so like any really good mother, I bailed on a set-up made for accidents soon enough. My man didn't, as is his nature, so I got the pleasure of watching my death-metal rock g-d plow into that fucking idiot who was, in order: severely under-weight for a real athlete, too short for her job with full-grown adults, falsely blond, overly tan, and a truly dumb, naive youngster in over her head.

I saw him (safe at my cafe table a good distance away, with my gear already off and soaking in the warm mountain sun) knock her off her feet and straight onto her back at full ramming speed, as she stayed down on the snow holding her arms across her chest for a good long while, with the wind knocked out of her. Ha! My man! That's what a real Scotsman-on-ice does as a "novice", honey! Knocks ya right off yer feet. It was good fun, and she called it quits after that, beat right down to her feet by an actual man with a penis. They were some brilliant moments, though, like meeting my brother in the village at a cool lunch spot, high off really good beer, free as we were from his overbearing hexan-hagen* to order actual good German food that we love, in the perfect setting for it, without his wife's anxious fretting over her non-existent "back fat" that she manufactures on cue to escape notice of her eating disorders (yeah, we know).

Or, seeing the lights of town wink on one-by-one magically, lighting up the quaint village in a town awash with sparkling snow and pretty lights, with cute lil' baby Jimmy and his adorable chubby cheeks red from the cold, as we watched a few ice skaters make their way leisurely across the small rink at sunset, as happy in this world as any other place on G-d's green earth, and isn't that our way? Bring on the snow, then, and a cheerfully roaring fire. I've got the really great stories to tell, over a strong lager in a tall-necked glass. Not her, though. She has this disease that makes her fingertips turn white. 

Best that she go to her fucking "feng shui" designed condo in her native Florida, where she can simply tan and diet in peace, in an "vacay" second home that was bought during my active time in MMA, because it was in foreclosure, thus could be had for a song-and-dance during someone else's most difficult times, financially-speaking, of course. What a coincidence, don't you think? Or is it just more genius marketing "synergy" by one of the former female corporate "greats" of the world"? Hmm. That's for you to decide, my liebchens.

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Biest

Sick House

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

As soon as I moved into a cheaper, smaller fourth floor walk-up in the 'hood, I knew it was trouble. Like my mom's typical "old lady" development, I could feel people tensely watching me behind their paranoid peepholes. It was also unnaturally quiet in the middle of the day for a New York townhome with multiple family dwellings, because gentrification has its own set of difficulties for native New Yorkers like me to contend with. Where were the laughing kids playing in the hallways, or the savory smells of homemade food that's always on the stove? Pampered white people bring economic stability with them, but with a serious fee that's often too steep an emotional price for us to pay for them, because they fucking hate actual hardcore urban living.

I can somewhat understand it. After returning home from out west, an old workplace "frenemy" of mine from back in the day took a picture of me with a rare shocked look on my face, as I took in the midtown skyscraper landscape anew with fresh eyes. This ain't like back there. What's even weirder for people like me is that after I get into the groove, I rock this town like I was born to it, which I am. That shocks a lot of people, especially out-of-towners who think they know what city living is all about. No, you don't. Unless you helped build and power this town like me and my crew for several generations, you don't have that kind of claim to this land, and that is actual soil underneath all this new concrete, "homey".

Same thing with rich white folk who've been transplanted here by their corporate firms from afar. I think they think we can't tell how stressed out they really are, because they think it's "uncool" to show the toll that this town takes on everyone, but their bulging wide eyes give it away every time. You feel it right away, too, just like every time I visited my mom's old person's development: I knew every set of retired, bifocal eyes took a look (or two) at me from underneath their old-fashioned lace curtains, as I walked it back and forth from her apartment to the parking lot (waiting to mess with me in that extremely hyper-tense way that older city people have), like the kind of curtains that Irish ladies who take tea at the exact same time every single afternoon (because they HAVE TO conform to some kind of a ritual, wink wink), ones that they put up as soon as possible to maintain that strict sense of privacy they feel entitled to in the plush suburbs.

Not so in the city. We live on top of one another atop some of the most expensive real estate on the planet. To me, it's a mostly happy communal lifestyle, but for those poor unfortunate people from wherever the fuck they come from, it's too much scrutiny for them to take. These are the type of people who lie for a living, and the kind of accountability that comes with close living is something they don't know how to process very well. As much as I will always love "Brownstone Brooklyn" (always, peeps, always), I also hated the tense, jittery prosperity that drives out people like us for cheaper points north periodically, though that's part of our lifestyle, too.

It's like you can feel their nervous juggling acts through the very walls that have absorbed the small vicious fights they try to have quietly so the neighbors can't hear, unlike the raucous drunk Micks who've inhabited these types of low income buildings for years. I don't like either type of dysfunction (the rich kind nor the drunk kind), but at least some drunk fuck is an easy mark for us natives: just add booze, and start the countdown to crazy. Easy to beat. Weirdo neighbors from other countries took to fantasizing about my "downfall" like the easy target of New York wealth and privilege they wanted me to be, or so they mistakenly thought.

The problem was (is), it took (takes) years to "push out" someone like me, because that doesn't actually happen unless I want it to, and they didn't (don't) control it; other savvier, harder, native New Yorkers had (have) to artificially rig it through a crooked homegrown system, and by the time it did (does) happen, my ousting had (has) lost all the luster that they used to spark with, over glasses of cheap white wine and overly shiny eyeballs that I never want to neighbor with. Not once. Because this native girl grew up with tea, tenseness, and mental patient standoffs like it was part of her landscape. "Sick house" or not, in our fair city of Gotham or out in the countryside, it just doesn't matter, Micks. I know it when I feel it. Don't you?

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

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