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

Ba-Ba-Buoy!

Yesterday, a good friend of mine asked me (again, because he's elderly) about marriage and children, which are admittedly much easier questions for me than you might think, but here it goes, one more time: I was married (in a outdoor ceremony by a female Methodist minister, which makes it "null and void" in our Catholic tradition) to a friend of mine from the SUNY school we attended that he failed out of, and because he's a manic/depressive alcoholic, we didn't have any children. I did "know" he had problems without really knowing it, because I don't share his disorders, but I wanted him to make it as my friend and a fellow native.

I was "down" with him as a squaw, which meant it was more than just between us; we were fighting to survive in this world, and I understood that about our lives. Plus, he was really handsome and a carpenter, which meant that he gave me enough space to create without actually being a gifted artist, and that was serious: he just didn't have the intellect I needed. But, he was a nice boy and he could be very charming, so I helped him with counseling ONCE by holding his hand for the first visit, and then he never really addressed healthcare again. Oh, well. If his family didn't support our vows like they promised at our wedding, then there wasn't a real marriage between us, like my father said to me over the phone. It was time to go. And that was that. He got re-married and divorced again, to come looking for me again, too.

"Well, what about kids?" Oh, uh...what about children? They love me, and I've been taking care of people my whole life, so....you know? It isn't some desperate thing for me to be a caring person. He said he'd noticed me around town with a tall handsome man, and I laughed. Yup! That totally sounds like me. Experience is a hard master to learn from, especially if you don't have that much, which is why I've always enjoyed talking with older people. They really connect with what I'm saying on a deeper level. Besides, I've always been a natural parent, and it's about stuff that matters, too, like this time at the beach with my niece.

Her mom was riding the corporate pony like a seriously programmed drone, which meant me and my brother were free to go to the bay without her tense dramatics and canned marketing copy following us there. Fine by me! Let's go. It was a beautiful summer day, so I took the train (actually, several) from Brooklyn to Grand Central to Connecticut, so we could go swimming in the sound near their hometown. My niece wasn't getting along with her brother, so me and my bro split up: he took the boy, and me and my girl went swimming. The bay is a lot calmer than the roughness of the ocean, so we felt easy in the water. She confided to me that she always wanted to swim out far enough to touch the big red buoy floating in the bay, and she was feeling confident with me by her side, so we decided to do it.

The sun was warm and the water felt great, but like any big swim, halfway through it, you feel the distance spread out before you. It got choppier, too, and I could see the apprehension in her eyes, so I let her know she could put her arms around my neck and I'd swim us back to shore, anytime she wanted to. Nope. She wanted to do it. That's my girl! I talked about other swim strategies to combat swim fatigue, like floating on your back to catch a rest, and we tried it a couple of times together. It was a lot farther out than she thought, but that was the challenge of it for her. I think she was 10, at the time. I asked her how come she hadn't done this swim with her mom, and even though I knew the answer, I wanted her to keep talking to lessen her fears.

She said her mom told her she was "burnt out" from swimming because of her swim team days at school (she's a compulsive runner, too), so now she was just "bored" with it. Oh, how fucked up and selfish, I thought to myself. But, that's who she is, and my brother married her anyway. And that's why, on that day, I easily took on the role of a mother to fill in the gap that her sick mom leaves behind, with the grace of a native New York girl who's been swimming her whole life. I could do it, so I did it; not to take away, but to give.

We finally made it to the buoy, and it was a lot bigger than we expected. She got scared as we clung to it bobbing on the waves, and then she was done with it. "Okay, let's go back. Like, now", and then she started swimming without me. Smart. She was a little breathless, so she wanted to have enough energy for the swim back to shore. I gave her some space to enjoy the experience on her own, following her in the water from a safe distance. We were tired when we made it back to the beach, but we knew we'd just had one of the best days ever, because my little Jane had passed one of her first real tests of bravery. Well done, Métis. See you in the ocean again, soon.

Millionaire

Before Gen X'ers made their "Special Needs" children into hip play-things, serious mental illness was a drawing room subject that could be hinted at politely in mixed company using a bunch of phony-sounding euphemisms, but never to be directly addressed. Once a problem is accurately named (so the thinking goes), superstition held that one had to go about solving the problem, and my parent's "Silent Generation" doesn't do that. We do.

Of course, my family is like any other family; we have some very seriously disturbed people living within it, though how alive they feel is of some debate. In order to quantify as "successful" to a bunch of brain disordered people, my family had to vigorously redefine success as the blind obtainment of objects without purpose. That was it: car, spouse, house, kids. Done. You passed! If it seems too easy, you're right, and just as many of my friends and I escaped the common traps of the falsely upwardly-mobile lifestyle for treasures that can't be bought and sold like so many commodities on the open market. 

We invested in ourselves and our education, like our hard-working grandparents taught us to do, so that when the time came for us to give back, we'd give way more than our fair share, which is the world you're living in right now. But the retarded living "secretly" (not so much) among us had to do so much more than us, just to pass as simple 9-to-5 office drones. They needed long-studied Masters degrees, and every time society shifts technologically, they are right back to feeling lost and afraid again. 

They are the perpetual students who never really learn or master anything, which is why you'll find so many expensive MBA's working at suburban tax preparers after their initial MA and BA degrees, or rote technical jobs in labs that took them almost ten years to attain. When I presented them with my real accomplishments (like scoring an interview at the Annie Lebowitz studio in the 90s on an Illustration degree as my second ever professional interview), it was undermined and shoved mentally in a drawer in the back of their minds, while I suffered through their bad photography with overly expensive cameras and trite tourist shots taken on plush cruises, with tales of photo contests never won spinning through their delusional heads.

And so it was with one of the more anti-social members of my family who preferred light switches and t.v. fuzz to contact with humans, memorizing train schedules over normal conversational greetings besides a light grunting that replaced actual speech. He was lovingly called "Rain Man", like Dustin Hoffman's infamously Autistic character, for his ability to mentally check out using inane facts and trivia. It was always the same. Always the same. When he finally used his abhorrence of all things personal to his sole advantage by appearing on a game show none of us watched (we were all busy with travel, careers, and love lives), me and my brothers didn't even know about it, much less care, to the detriment of the psychotic gathered among us at holidays.

Ahem. Perhaps we hadn't heard? If it was intended as a snide reference to my hearing impairment as a feeble attempt to correct the imbalance of their completely co-dependent ineptitude, consider that a huge failure as well. And so we had to feign an enthusiasm over his one chance at being in a spotlight, using all three callers for the more difficult questions you had to actually know through real study habits, not blind compulsions. Game over. Still, with the help of his family, he won a nice chunk of change for someone with his limitations. Christmas will be good this year! He and his father were notorious cheapskates who would sit around with glazed eyes and blank stares with their arms folded tightly across their chests, while we exchanged humble gifts at my grandparent's apartment.

They just sat on a couch waiting for food to be served, doing and saying nothing to anyone, except for the one year my uncle gave me some free mugs from his Met Opera attendance that were "too girly" for him to use, or some spare calendars he also got for free. Like any real mother, I was touched by these few shows of humanity that had stolen away from the tight grip of his mental illnesses, as remote and alone as I know them to be. The son never improved, because we were never allowed to discuss his diseases with him, which might lead to a cure. Instead, he languished year after year in the same dull IRS government job that went slowly from PT to FT on a special needs work program, slowly draining his show earnings on a bunch of train rides with similarly disordered people. And he never gave us a thing. Not one single present. Not ever. Not once.

Evil, Inc

We've explored madness as it's currently expressed through certain industries, and the personality types who work at these kinds of enterprises, typically of the manically-addictive bisexual, personality-disordered, and former cheerleader type. She really really likes "positivity" in all things, except when she doesn't, and then she has to diet extremely well to compete with just about anyone in her own crazy pseudo-relationship that has absolutely nothing to do with reality or you, except you're around it while it is in its most freaky feral states of transition. That would be one type of employee. There's also the asshole sales manager who HAS TO be on the move constantly, or he will also short-out to go insane, plus he also really enjoys phony bullshit that he thinks will spring your wallet magically open. It doesn't.

That's why GenX has become one of the most hated and vilified generations of all time, in a process that was carefully cultivated by pretentiously arty sell-outs, like their chosen "alt" (that's "alternative" in quick, cutesy, chic-speak) movie director who smokes pot, has really bad relationships, never leaves his home, and then says we're all as lazy as him, because we're not. He's a fuck-up with really good press, because he's backed by people with money who want to preserve their privileges through a deliberate misportrayal of one of the hardest working generations of all time. It doesn't take as much money as people think to create a war machine that keeps on churning after the death of one of its creators. See also: Michael Jackson.

Millennials aren't immune to assholes, either. Their biggest social media guru is busy buying up huge tracts of beachfront land in Hawaii (http://www.forbes.com/pictures/emeg45mgmd/mark-zuckerberts-kahuaina-plantation/#47e9318526d5), so he can block public access to it with a full-time security staff of buff bodyguards, lots of paranoid outdoor cameras to track you walking anywhere outside of his compound (not of him and his team, because those pictures could leak out!), and a big thick wall to keep you all out. Like any typical asshole, he'll tell you that's he's "preserving the land" but, really, open space is a public park concept that's rather basic for any rich white dude with money to burn and phony charities to back, for flowing money in various directions that are both out of state and/or the country. But, I digress.

Let's get back to building evil war machines. I was particularly insulted by the fake summit a certain PC-building guru held for the richest idiots on the planet, to, like, save the world and stuff. They had a typed-up agenda of items and everything, so you know it's legit! On their list of key humans that will surely save us (not) was the impressive Spanx-wearing billionairess who has upheld the image of faux fitness for many a Hollywood starlet and her beard-wearing beau. I mean, hello? Form-fitting garments made from petroleum products? Duh! That's one impressive bitch! Cameras were not allowed inside what must have been their riveting brain-trust, because we would probably spontaneously combust from all their genius and stuff, but, like...absolutely nothing happened as a result of that meeting. Or it did, but for them and not any of us, where you and I can't see it.

They talk condescendingly about typical bullshit like drugs, crime, and homelessness ("urban" is the word they use for us as a "key demographic" my n*ggas, or, er, "coloreds"), but what I find so very interesting about all of these fake summits is the elephant in the room that not one of these compulsive-obsessive "billionaires" ever utters out loud, where the press can hear it and write it down: that the worst conditions in the world stem from psychosis and madness. Where's the research devoted to that? I'll put it up for you to link to here, but not one of them ever will, because when was the last time you met a really healthy person who pounded energy drinks for days just to code in some dull computer language over and over again, or to swim the exact same lap with the exact same stroke for years and years and years, way after we dropped it as kids? Never, right? Same as me.

https://www.google.com/#q=most+evil+companies

Camp Out

The suggestion of any overnight venture with a bunch of insane (and gay) Girl Scouts was stomach-churning to me in the extreme, but me and my mom had already committed to being there, so we wanted to see it through. I was at the end of my rope with this clique, in the same way I practically decided overnight (to my rather detached and then suddenly overly-aggressive parents) that I would not pursue anorexia nervosa with a bitchy all-girl ballet troupe for a living, like, after the very first lesson, but they needed years to work out their overreaction to kids in tutus, which I understood, to a point. I'm really cute! This felt like that: I knew what was going on, but they needed "time to process it", which was our family's go-to phrase for mental disabilities and serious learning impairments.

Such is the way of life for the healthy children of sick parents, and, besides visits from my grandparents, I didn't know any other types of experiences at home, because all of my classmates and friends growing up had similar stories (or worse) to add as fuel to our group's fire. We hated our home lives, but children can only do so much, not that it stopped our parents from using us however they saw fit, which was poorly and often. My mom's neighbors in her current senior neighborhood are the exact same way: crazy angry city parents suffering from serious disorders who back up one another over, say, the health of any other type of human being on the planet, give or take a few acceptable life forms like their plants, because in "DivaLand", they must always come first, or abuse will surely follow.

"Yeah, Diane!" Ruth calls out to me working for my mother, like I always do. "That's what children are for!" And that's how they see it: they're sick (and now old, too) and we're not, so they will tap us until we crack, if we stick around, in between hours of free labor. Then, you co-dependently cycle through your circle to bleed other people dry, which doesn't work, because they're sick, too. So, it's back to me? NO! I'm so shocked! It's like a really bad play that's repeated over and over again, and any events or activities attached to them as a generation played out more or less the same, which made us tired of parenting them as children, which, as far as I can tell, is unique to Generation X. Nonetheless, they we were: at a horrible overnight with a fucked-up troop of gay Girl Scouts and their crazy butch "leader".

It was to be borne with as little drama as possible, but with manic depression flowing as freely as the soda that sustained these raging bitches, we were kinda doomed from the beginning. Not that I needed anymore confirmation about these types of things. Sigh...parenting is really hard in childhood, you know? I felt like I needed coffee with my mom and the other parents just to get through the night, and I don't need caffeine to remain aware mentally, which means I'm forced to undergo rigorous feats of endurance, yet again, that I did not need to repeat. My ethnic background and my home tribe of Acadian boys had pretty much set me up for country life, anyway. I didn't need these fucking chicks, and they hated that, too. Becoming overly attached is a sign of involvement in the "Mental Patient" world, and we knew how that play ended, too: badly. For you.

With this mindset of gritted teeth backed by true grit, it was simply a situation made to be borne out by me, however it happened, and I just hoped none of the country queers (and their pampered city parents) died or tried to kill each other throughout the madness that would surely ensue, because that's what madness does to people and their children, gay or not. The mothers were set up in a cabin, and my mom had already bitched about that to the Nth degree with her own act that spanned three curtain calls, because before she had MS as a convenient excuse to freak out, she used a hypothetical "bad back" and "pre-arthritic condition" that was possibly osteoarthritis (so interesting!) that she could deliver expertly when it was needed for her comfort, like sleeping on the wood floor of an old tent in a sleeping bag, like I did with the other children in the troop. But, not her. Oh, no.

She explained in great detail how she had several unique conditions that required special treatment, like a pad to sleep on and her own bed, which she got, while I wondered who would try to kill a girl first in the big tent at the camp. It wasn't long before I found out. There was movement along one side of the tent that sent the already-hysterical girls screaming like it was their big scene in a "Jason" movie, except it wasn't. It was probably a snake attracted to the lights they insisted in shining after "lights out", because of their night terrors, also a greatly understood part of the their tribal culture that was easily assimilated by their types of brains. Yes! Had to be it! I sighed, took a look, decided (what I already knew) that they weren't worth talking to, and then went to find my mom at her continued coffee klatch that was "hardship" in Diane-speak.

She decided that it was worth checking out, after she had abandoned me to sleep there on my own with those crazy bitches because the floor was "too hard", even though she had a stiff wood board installed beneath her mattress for firmness at home, with a gay little step-stool on her side of the bed, so she could get into her prized "antique" bed. I knew about it from every angle, because all of my young life I was forced to help her with everything, included flipping her orthopedic mattress, adjusting the wood slats under the bed, changing the sheets (of course), and adjusting the wood board. She had to have light-proof shades, the birds were also too noisy by her window, and she had a bevy of water-bottles, cold compresses, pills, special pillows, and other accoutrements attached to her bed-rest days that included hoarding piles of papers on my father's side of the bed that she would then dump onto the floor at night, until he finally forced her to go through it.

I didn't expect much courage from her, is what I mean to write to y'all. And she didn't disappoint me, as she played the "city mouse" frightened by the woods at night to a hilt. We talked it over as a group (sort of), and after my mom was also similarly reassured that they were bat-shit and overreacting to normal nighttime stimuli (like noises and movement) as a means of entertainment, she left after finally suggesting that maybe the boys from an overnighting Boy Scout troop were pranking them by pulling on the tent flaps, and that was it. Boys?! NOOO!!! "My mother specifically said I was not to interact with boys!" It sent a shiver of terror through the group that was way worse than a snake sighting, but I was psyched. I could use my flashlight to signal for help! Heck, it was better than having to go through the torture of picking an "outhouse buddy" with some chick in a full-on house bathrobe, metal mouth retainer, and bunny slippers. Fuck, man...where's my badge for that? None was forthcoming.

But, I'd made my point with Diane, and the next morning's pancake breakfast cinched the deal for me, forever. We were done, and my mom had a tale of torture and abuse that included severe back pain with lots of <insert her brand of medicine here>, and a total lack of sleep because the mattress was "lumpy". I got closure, and an end to enforced gay girl groups for me, for the rest of my childhood. It was quiet, I cried a lot in my room from the sheer loneliness and isolation of it, but at least I could read, and since that was considered an "educational pursuit" by my upwardly-mobile parents, they couldn't be seen as ripping that away from me, under my grandparents watch. All I had to do now was make it into college. And wait. There was always a lot of that to spare. Just hunker down, and wait it out.

Wall of Confusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shock to the Heart

Back in the day, we used to say lines from the old show "Sanford and Son" to each other that we had memorized by heart (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanford_and_Son), having heard the same lines over and over again, like our parents compulsive "jokes" that were often told in times of stress and/or drunkenness, when they didn't know how to fill in conversational spaces with other humans correctly. 

"Old Man Sanford" would clutch his heart in mock anguish to deliver the well-honed line to his son that he was "on his way home" to see "Ouisie", his wife who'd passed on already, because he was "havin' the big one" that was so often threatened on the show but never actually came about. Oh...so, it's just a lie, then. We kinda felt gypped by the lack of "sudden death" action on t.v., like the nonsense our hysterical parents would blab out loud that was even less funnier than the sitcom stuff repeated for years on t.v. Yeah, sure. I know this line.

It became symptomatic of the psychological distress we'd see in the world that was the response of someone who uses their medical condition(s) as a manipulative tool(s) to get out of work, or human discourse, church on Sunday, or family visits. For a people who felt bereft of power, my parents and their friends employed a handy toolkit for the insane that included veiled threats (and not-so-veiled threats) that they often combine(d) with violent cursing and escalating acts of physical violence, which, rather than convincing us to obey their demands, made us want to stay even further away from their trouble spots. For them, their sickness became weapons for gaining leverage in the home and at work, with varying degrees of effectiveness.

It was silly and wasteful, but so were/are our parents, accustomed as they were to an ever-booming economy fueled through the machines of war. We wanted something better. We wanted something more from them and society, and the world at large. We wanted actual communication over the trite tricks brought on by so much t.v. viewing for the compulsively-addicted brain, followed by periods of paranoid non-engagements that could last just as long as their patterned routines that they inserted in lieu of actual thought. We talked to each other as a social group, and we wanted to see real conversation brought back, egged on as it was by the "shock" tactics of our disc jockeys and talk show hosts. A lot of it was the same old bullshit, but occasionally we broke through the static with our own hard work. See? Repetition does bear results, and I can talk about it at length, too.  
How's that for power tripping?

32 Flavors

As you know from recent headlines (and some not-so-recent), public spaces have become rife "hotspots" for all sorts of crimes, like mass murder, which is also not new to human society. I've always known that people were unsafe. Just ask my family. A more vicious set of scavenging predators you're less likely to meet. We have/had: convicted murderers doing hard time, prostitutes, drug dealers, prostituting drug dealers also doing hard time, mobsters, gangsters, punks, etc. You name it, we've had it, and those were/are just the more openly active criminals from my father's side. The lazy people from my maternal line are much savvier at hiding their crimes, because "guineas" are like that. You know, mafiasos. Not my grandparents, but probably yours, paisans.

It's made my aggressive good health (not that that wasn't attacked constantly and/or mocked, like any other illnesses I might have/had, too, because it was) stand out in sharp relief to any family functions I attend(ed), or if I just wanted to use the upstairs bathroom where it was warmer before getting ready for school as a kid, with my two brothers pushing me around. It didn't matter what I said, did, wore, performed, or, apparently, wrote to millions of reading people. No change. That's sort of an anti-good health policy, isn't it? It certainly is! 

In retaliation to my relative patience and composure, I was attacked for being "boring", or, in the words of one criminal dyke at work in a dull office that could be anywhere, "vanilla", because after the best-looking fighter at our dojo turned her down hard, she pretended he was "too young" for her anyway (like I had already told her) and, besides, he was ugly from "cauliflower ears" (which all fighters have), so if he did prefer me to her (and they all do), it was because we were just a couple of bland nobodies next to her, as one out of http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/commuters-nearly-double-manhattans-daytime-population-census-says/ admins working in the city. 

The strangest part behind the rather unsavory and highly ineffective tactics of using one's mental illnesses and psychiatric disorders to decorate oneself with, like, say, a pretentiously-colored beret to cover up your ineffectiveness as a real working artist by pretending to look like one instead, is that the severely mentally ill and psychotic actually become rote and predictable, the way a "goth kid" telegraphs his belonging to a group of millions by wearing the exact same outfit as a million other goth kids. You know? Black eyeliner, all black clothes, black hair dye, chain wallets from the mall store catering to sulky teens living in the 'burbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Topic): their seemingly "alternative" cultural stance became as standard as their rather boring juvenile behavior.

In the strangest twist of all, in response to the poor secretary who went around a bland midtown office for weeks bragging about liking "hard sex"—because her infamous "Unibomber rape" in Central Park made her feel shame about her body's natural responses to sex, even when it's "unwanted", and that usually slays them in group—we just started making fun of her for pretending that her mental illness was kinky. Yeah, bitch...we know. You like choking people and being choked. In time, I learned about more fucking weirdos at dojos, like the porn fetish that caters to sick fucks who like punching women in the stomach. 

You know, typical weirdo shit on the Internet that you can find in a 5-second search, just like I did, and you know what? Still wasn't weirder than me typing it in during the brave new days of online engagements, because I already done wrote the book about it, bitch. See it right here, haters: http://mariedoucette.blogspot.com/2012/01/hes-very-loving-cat.html. Midget porn: you have to be weirder than that. Because I got 99 problems, but a stupid weird bitch like you ain't one of them. Feel me? Not in the real way, but mentally, like. Yeah, you do. You fucking get it. I can tell. Totally.


"99 Problems"

If you're having girl problems I feel bad for you son
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
[Verse One]
I got the rap patrol on the gat patrol
Foes that wanna make sure my casket's closed
Rap critics that say he's "Money Cash Hoes"
I'm from the hood stupid what type of facts are those
If you grew up with holes in your zapatos
You'd celebrate the minute you was having dough
I'm like fuck critics you can kiss my whole asshole
If you don't like my lyrics you can press fast forward
Got beef with radio if I don't play they show
They don't play my hits well I don't give a shit SO
Rap mags try and use my black ass
So advertisers can give em more cash for ads...fuckers
I don't know what you take me as
or understand the intelligence that Jay-Z has
I'm from rags to riches nigga I ain't dumb
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
Hit me
[Chorus]
99 Problems but a bitch ain't one
If you having girl problems I feel bad for you son
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
Hit me
[Verse Two]
The year is '94 and in my trunk is raw
In my rear view mirror is the mother fucking law
I got two choices yall pull over the car or
bounce on the double put the pedal to the floor
Now I ain't trying to see no highway chase with jake
Plus I got a few dollars I can fight the case
So I...pull over to the side of the road
And I heard "Son do you know why I'm stopping you for?"
Cause I'm young and I'm black and my hat's real low
Do I look like a mind reader sir, I don't know
Am I under arrest or should I guess some mo?
"Well you was doing fifty five in a fifty four"
"License and registration and step out of the car"
"Are you carrying a weapon on you I know a lot of you are"
I ain't stepping out of shit all my papers legit
"Do you mind if I look round the car a little bit?"
Well my glove compartment is locked so is the trunk and the back
And I know my rights so you gon' need a warrant for that
"Aren't you sharp as a tack are some type of lawyer or something?"
"Or somebody important or something?"
Nah I ain't passed the bar but I know a little bit
Enough that you won't illegally search my shit
"Well see how smart you are when the K-9's come"
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one
Hit me
[Chorus X2]
[Verse Three]
Now once upon a time not too long ago
A nigga like myself had to strong arm a hoe
This is not a hoe in the sense of having a pussy
But a pussy having no God Damn sense, try and push me
I tried to ignore him and talk to the Lord
Pray for him, cause some fools just love to perform
You know the type loud as a motor bike
But wouldn't bust a grape in a fruit fight
The only thing that's gonna happen is i'mma get to clapping
He and his boys gon' be yapping to the captain
And there I go trapped in the kit kat again
Back through the system with the riff raff again
Fiends on the floor scratching again
Paparazzi's with they cameras snapping them
D.A. tried to give the nigga the shaft again
Half-a-mil for bail cause I'm African
All because this fool was harrassin' them
Trying to play the boy like hes saccarin
But ain't nothing sweet 'bout how I hold my gun
I got 99 problems but being a bitch ain't one
Hit me
[Chorus X3]
You're crazy for this one Rick
It's your boy

Thousand Yard Stare

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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