Gotta Have Park

When I wrote that I competed with adults at the hardest school in the world—with the lowest admissions rate in the world—I meant it. I was vying for my class spot with people who had already lived a few lives and careers before me, which is about as daunting as it gets, not that anyone came to our defenses. We were their fodder; everyone's: the teachers, the administrations, the other students, and that included any/all adults working around us. People who try to excel by becoming talented fakes with great mimicry skills are very nervous people indeed, because they need much better, smarter people—to feed off of to survive—and that included the teenagers and very young adults we were back then, which was sort of like sending a young Jimi Hendrix into war involuntarily, to die for a country that denied him the right to drink at certain water fountains, let alone buy himself a real stiff drink before being shipped out to active wartime duty at 19-years old.

As much as we tried reconciling their presence at our school, it didn't seem fair to us, and we knew it, because we started making some noise, and then some much louder noise, until the "profs" who thought they could game us by sabotaging our expensive education got a real taste of working class life and the transfer student mindset. It sent them tail-spinning downward while taking potshots at kids like me, working three jobs at once while taking only studio classes, because I had essentially completed an entire Liberal Arts curriculum in just three short years, though that degree was unjustly held from me, too (in lieu of my transfer status), just like I was forced to complete my senior year of high school, even though I had completed the curriculum by junior year with college credits and a Regents diploma, but if the gifted left, who would be there to pay for all of your salaries? Right?

In retaliation for circulating a petition around campus asking for desktop publishing classes to be placed on our curriculum, equipped with the kinds of computers we actually use in the workplace, I was "blacklisted" by the very professors who were there to supposedly educate me. It didn't matter—just like it hadn't mattered in my educational past—because my mentor let me pursue my work in his classes as independent studies, which is, once again, like becoming a grad student as an undergrad, but, again, that doesn't pay for your two apartments in Providence and Brooklyn, does it, "Prof"? No! We did! We paid for that for you, so you could take open potshots at children, basically. It made for some very weird classes indeed. 

Take, for example, Ellie. She decided to play the "ethnic minority" game by wrongly trumpeting her prized European status to an openly disparaged minority like me, which made for the most awkward kiddie-adult conversations you could imagine, as she openly campaigned for me to get kicked out of "her" school that she attended as an undergrad at 34. Huh...that's so...odd. And it was. She would talk about her past as a forest ranger (why didn't she learn to draw while living all alone in a forest for months on end?), as we pondered how the fuck she could go from living on Mount St. Helen during its epic volcanic blast to sitting in on our kiddie crits, because I sure as fuck never had the time to work on a portfolio before attending college, let alone blow off one career for our kiddie art classes, in comparison.

It was highly suspect and dubious in the extreme, but just like every other situation I've faced in my life. I had to make it, like a Marine dropped behind enemy lines with no lines of communication or ammo left, nursing a serious bullet wound or two while evading capture and/or the enemy. If I didn't attain a degree from this school, there was no job waiting for me in the outside world, and I didn't want to die from homelessness or starvation, which is just like today. 

I write to you from a public library that's becoming increasingly hostile to me, because the director here has already called the police on me for standing up to one of their Special Needs crafts "teachers" for harassing me by lurking behind me as I typed, and then aggressively staring at me, mouthing words at me as I typed to you all, which, just like then, resulted in me attaining a police contact on the force by an officer who flat out told me not to even bother to talk to anyone at this location again. "Just call us instead." That's how bad it gets. 

Like every moment that's precious in this life we live, so is our land. We live off the land that grows the food we need to live. No healthy land, no food for the animals to eat, and that includes us. If we do not protect our precious resources—like our land and water—then we do not survive. Sometimes—like my work, education, and life story—it is that simple. It becomes that basic, our survival. No food=no us. No bees=no pollinators. It all comes back to our defense and self-defense skills, and so, even though adults with more money, more experience, and a heck of a lot more time than me still tried to kill me off, here I still am, fighting for my survival while I fight for all of us. 

So, Ellie, even though, in your misguided hatred and aggression of an artistic life that was never yours to live by destiny, I dedicate today's fight to you anyway, for a t-shirt you wore back in the day that read "Gotta Have Park", and even though you wore it to protect your own government job as a forest ranger, I still believe in its message. What cannot die has never really lived, as far as I'm concerned. Live.

http://www.earthshareny.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdevelopment 
http://www.environmentnewyork.org/ 

Happy, happy, happy

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

Happiness is weird if you have a paranoid-schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, manic-depressive, bipolar-personality identity disorder (with marked petulant/suicidal/narcissistic/psychotic features), like the company receptionist at the small Jewish family business I worked at for awhile, with her typical "Office Cow" dreams of fine art glory and Rockefeller-like wealth; her make-believe, handsome, and very supportive shiska husband standing by her side, just like her first generation Israeli parents who worked blue collar jobs on Long Island prepped her for. Right? No?! Oh, well, then let me try that again. 

Ahem...she was delusional, but people who do bottom-feeder, highly repetitive service jobs are usually like that: arrogant, petty, snippy....you know the attitude. She was bored, and also a totally ignorant loud-mouth, with a completely over-inflated sense of self about her life and her skills, only tempered by her "down" cycles filled with dramatically petulant sighs that widely signaled her "Woe is Me!" boredom, interspersed with frequent hits off the big blue bottle of Listerine in the ladies room, because it has some alcohol in it.

She avoided me for many months, because I was extremely busy and she was busy getting her "best friend" from high school fired from her high-paying executive administrator job, because that's what you do to former Architecture majors who come from the same small Long Island town as you, former shul classmates who are also bipolar and very brittle: you stab them in the back whenever it's necessary. Right? Oh....okay, let me try that one again, too: our former "Office Manager" was one of the biggest fucking bitches any one of us had ever met in the sometimes semi-professional world of big city book publishing, and this was a somewhat gay-friendly media business in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, which is like saying that West Hollywood is "kind of gay". Yeah, like that.

She was an obvious bitch from a company that broke its back hiring other Jews and relatives, so much so that it was sometimes good clean fun to watch the crazy old people who hired these disastrous amateurs justify their secretary's insane bullshit, which got wackier and wackier as time went on. The wife of the owner talked through her anxiety over scary machines by talking back to the copier machine whenever it did any kind of banal action whatsoever; they told me she used to be an elementary school teacher. Huh...wonder what happened with that. Yeah, I knew. Like so many other business, the phony lines that employees used on each other could possibly pass muster under less legitimate circumstances than the real professionalism I brought to the table, which is kind of a bummer if you're an incompetent drug addict. I worked with plenty of those, too, educated or not.

Like any other uptight, self-righteous, hippie dippy, Jewish art fag, she scrutinized me through narrowed eyes every single time I walked passed the reception desk (in case I ever bothered to wonder how she felt about me), and if I was working for "too long" on my own, in her bizarre estimation, she would find an excuse to violate my workspace with her rancid beer breath, usually with a question so fucking stupid, I wondered how she breathed air at all. Sometimes I gave her the answer (the same dull ones, over and over and over again), and sometimes not. I am the Master in any studio, and so whatever I feel like teaching my staff is up to me, at any time I want to, and if anyone disturbs me, they're gone. It's simple: no me, no money.

And so I didn't worry about her neurotic bullshit too much, so successful was I at putting distance between us, while she nursed the same pit in her stomach everyday that she would choose to blame on other people, places, and things, weather permitting or not, like the special UV light bulb she needed because she also has S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder), in addition to the many other serious brain disorders we were forced to ignore under threat of firing, which grew into a more serious threat with each passing fire. As the company grew smaller, she stood out more and more, and not in any good ways. One afternoon, she stopped me walking past her with her disordered teenage bullshit to ask me a vaguely stupid "self help" type of question, because, like, why do other people feel things that are, like, different than her? You know? Like, why?

I had time to kill that day because I just made my deadline way under budget for the umpteenth day in a row, and by that time in my employ, I had the whole company in my pocket. They stopped working to listen to me speak, as they passed around my emails and cover designs like I was Mick Jagger at a mall signing autographs (because they couldn't stop themselves from gossiping about me within earshot), and they followed me wherever I went online using the company's network. In short, I owned them. If I used a famous media site as a starred commenter to slice-and-dice some would-be intellectual, they knew about it. If (and when) I hit it "out of the ballpark" again with my designs, it became company news within seconds. I had their complete and utter attention, short as those spans could be at times. Why their stupid ugly bitch thought to fuck with me on that particular afternoon, after all the schooling I'd already given her, is still beyond me to this day, besides good old fashioned mental defect.

She hated any outward signs of happiness we showed as we went productively about our days, as baffling to her bad brain as if I was the resurrected Pharaoh Queen Nefertiti herself walking around in full Royal Egyptian dress. It was envy mixed with hero-worship, mixed with misplaced desire, and what serious scholar would want that tossed their way? I sure as fuck didn't. You hired her, you deal with it. End of story. By the end of my time there, they tried to railroad me into taking their special bitch "into therapy", that brilliantly inept Jewish band-aid on a disease so bad, people die from it every single day all around the world, by deliberately setting me up as their "fall guy" for their bad hire. Nope. Nice try though! I deflected every single scheme they threw my way, monied up and lawyered-up as they were over me as their paltry advantages, but in the end, all they were left with was this: I'm better than you. That's it, and no banal amount of talking would cure it.

So, to finally answer fully your question, Ye Ole Stupid Bitch of Work Days Past, ("Why are you always happy, happy, happy all the time?"), I'm "happy" because I'm everything that you are not, and will never be. How's that for the truth? Oh, and failing that, click on the fucking link under the pretty picture above, you ignorant piece of shit. Yeah, that big yellow one with the smiley face. I won.

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