Bark at the Moon

Me, Robusto, and "Dangerous" (a.k.a. Mad Dawg Dave), wandering around Cambridge in the early evening, lost and high and young and having fun.

Back in college, I didn't openly speak about being Native American, because it wasn't something I was accustomed to talking about. Like our old Dutch and British Colonial roots, we had assimilated a long time ago, or so we thought. Being Métis often cropped up at the oddest times, and the most inconvenient ones, too, like partying with the boys back in college. New York State has some very large, powerful, and highly public native societies, a lot of which center on being a mad, bloodthirsty Mohegan, which are not my roots. Most Americans get their ideas about "Indians" based on bad Kevin Costner movies about beautiful hippy chicks with feathered white-girl hairdos, who just happen to live like the natives do in their peacefully quaint pot-smoking tents, where free-love and lots of nudity reigns. Nothing could be further than that about the fucking Indians I know. Promiscuous and alcoholic, yes. Nice? No. Not particularly.

It should be noted at this point in the piece that you really have to judge each tribe individually, and every individual separately, which really sucks if you are manic-depressive and learning-impaired, like my retarded friend Dave was, and still is to this day. He was also very drunk and extremely handsome back when I first met him, which didn't help him out at all as a retarded Indian. He's one of them Half-Breeds where the Euro and the Native just don't quite fucking mix right, especially if that Euro part is part Polish. Some days that fucking kid doesn't know whether his jacket is on frontwards or back, or if he's got armholes in them or not. He's that fucked up. It's actually really funny to watch, if you've managed to skip the ten-day drunk he's on.

Oh, he can plateau for years on dry land, but then he crashes and burns for years, too; trapped in a wetland he can't get out of by himself, without someone else to pull him out of the dirty bog waters he happens to be stuck in at the time. You know? He's got a really small territory, one plain boring chunk of suburban upstate New York that he can handle...and that's barely manageable on some moonlit nights as well. It's like he was made badly out of several types of clay with different firing times that just don't meld well together, and on really bad days, he splits apart at the seams. If you've ever met a New World American with mixed parentage who's really fucked up, then that's it, with some extreme Indian shit added for extra fireworks. He's a wild drunk, but he's also funny and charming at times, too. It's changeable, based solely on his unique blend of chemistry, same as his sister.

Some days she's this gorgeous Native American Cindy Crawford who's also a gourmet chef, and then at other times, she's that desperate middle-aged chick trying to act young, making out with a teenage guy in the back of the bar to prove her worth, still. They're heart-breakingly superficial, and it's a truly weird mixture, man. Just when you think they're soulful, they puke on your shoes. Just when they even out their looks, they go meth-addict skinny on you, smoking and drinking and drugging for days and days on end. Something inside of them never gelled right, and too much time with them can drive the wrong "whitey" mad. It didn't work with me, but then my genetics formed a healthy, stable branch of Indo-European the first time out, creating a strong generation of Métis that thrive in both Old and New World soil. 

Genetics are great if you think about it, but if you half-ass it, you get them: my part Mohegan, Cayuga, Irish, Italian, German, Polish friends who never set into a clearly focused picture, just blurry fleeting images of your fun night out, when you may or may not have made out with one of them. I'm proud that I chose a native blend my first time out, but like the new wave term "starter" suggests, I'm glad I half-assed that first fake marriage so that I could get it annulled, because there's no way a boy like my old friend Dave could ever fully bear the weight of Holy Roman Catholic vows, made in a sanctity that will always escape him. He tries, you know? He tries. And that's about it. He's a half-boy, half-man, wild child of the night, as depressively manic as he can be, and he's not the one for me. Hang in there if you're still seeking your moon-mate. He or she is out there. You just have to look harder...

For you, Fiona

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian 

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

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

Bride of Chucky

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

My life changed with the economy, just as it has for millions of Americans and billions of people worldwide. I didn't like it, but I did accept it. Instead of keeping up with someone's rat race, I now run my own, every single day. This is the best job I've never had, precisely because it isn't just some paycheck that some random generic stranger spits out of a payroll system every week, regardless if I am working there or not. Corporations are not people, but you, my audience, most certainly are. Just like there is no course or school curriculum that can create a "Master Illuminator" in this century using the latest (or not) technology, so there is no college class in being me.

Part of that change is accepting what resources you have available to you, rather than expecting some pricey company to buy stuff for you. Luckily, I do not derive my ego off of man-made gadgets (that must be horrible), desperately lining up like a million other compulsive addicts at the "launch" of some new device. That sounds mad, and it certainly looks that way on t.v. I can wean myself off of pop culture anytime I want to. I went for years without a television set, which freaks out almost everyone I meet, except for the most backwoods hippie kid with wacky survivalist parents who are anti-The World. I simply couldn't afford a pricey t.v., nor did I need it, so I went without it.

Ditto with computers, cameras, Internet...etc. If I don't have the money to buy one of them, I find a way to have access to it, which is why I freely publish to you off of the community WiFi: that's "no overhead" for you business douches, and sometimes it means I traverse difficult public environments that I do not control, like the bank of cheap computers that are available at most public libraries. It sucks, but so did most of the junior designers in any given department on any day, at any publishing company across the U.S (or the world). It's not new, it's not great, but I'm here for you, glitches and all, which makes it the most transparently published site in the world. No ads, no agendas. Simple. Just me.

That pisses off a lot of people, a lot of people, especially the wacky conspiracy theorists/indigents who frequent public spaces for warmth, or to nod off their recent heroin high. It's brutal, but it is real. I've seen it. Government employees typically care more about maintaining their steady paycheck than policing the people who visit their library every single day, but such is the mostly selfish nature that typically marks lower minds than mine. I don't publish just to my peers, know what I mean? And so, on any given day, I can be typing to you while listening to music and hugging it out with my special friends from the ARC community (Hi, friends!), or concentrating through your obvious eating disorder and rank bad breath, as your overstuffed hoarder car sits outside, parked askew by the curb. It's not my choice or design, but here I am: your beacon of light in the nighttime of your disorder.

Given how much time I spend out in the world, I'm used to the wider ranges of the human experience at the bipolar extremes of your insanity, with the understanding that my beauty and brilliance draws "wack jobs" like moths to a flame. If they don't "catch" me out in public, they plan for it, like the deranged stalkers they really are. 
It's utterly revealing to me. So, on one fine day, a total nut-job from the local chapter or "Dipshits Anonymous" stopped by to heckle me here, while he sat at a public computer doing absolutely nothing but look at me out of the corner of his eye. I know when people seek to engage me, and if I'm done with my work, I use any extra time I have to lecture to you all, if I can, which is what I did on this particular afternoon.

He was a rather garden-variety wacko: a "Right to Life" idiot who dissembles under any type of intellectual scrutiny. Within minutes of our "talk" (which I'm loathe to use as a term suitable for him), he hated my attention. First, he pointed out that he was the deranged nephew of a famous New York politician to justify his rudeness towards me (arrogance as the first sign of weakness=check), backing up his hippy-style ranting by his woven rainbow bracelet (a symbol of successful pot smokers worldwide), to show me that he doesn't trust "The Man", hence his obvious outsider status within his very successful family, thus making him available for viewing during normal daylight business hours: the black sheep who can't work=got it.

He quickly directed me towards his conspiracy du jour: women and their bodies. He hates them. Oh, okay. Gay AND crazy. Check that one off, too. To show me how much disdain he has for the female body, he let me know that he knew all about biology (but wouldn't tell me where or how, which makes me suspect that he's a high school dropout), but that he rejects it. Oh. Delusional, too! Wow, this is just getting better and better for me. Whenever I calmly answered him with logical, non-ranting types of answers grounded in rigorous scholarship, he seemed like he was about to implode right next to me. 
He ballooned himself up, becoming confused, red-faced, and apoplectic in front of me in under ten minutes, which was a new personal best. I love stripping people of their false delusions.

Since it became obvious rather quickly that he had no firsthand knowledge of anatomy, probably because he can't perform sexually with a partner due to his own rotting brain and complete lapses with any decent healthcare, he backed himself into a corner very quickly. 
I was horrified and embarrassed for him. I hate the feeling that I am causing hurt to someone who's disabled, but he sought me out. 
He talked over me manically, become more panicky by the second. 
He blurted out over and over the same weird lingo that has no basis in reality; the speech of the demented, in a mantra that he seemed to think would soothe his fevered delusions: "Partial birth <pause> partial birth <slight pause, then it sped up to cover over me>partialbirthpartialbirthpartialbirthpartialbirthpartialbirth..." 

When he slowed down enough for me to inquire through his stuttering psychotic episode, I asked him why he thought there existed such a hallucinatory haunted house movie-version of women's healthcare, in an odd scenario I haven't never heard of, nor seen, or read about...ever. Why? He told me it was true. That was it. He had thought it up, and therefore it must be real. He thinks women go to some scary evil doctor to give birth to a baby while the doctor chops it head off slowly. Swear. At that point, I reached into my bag, pulling out a black "Illuminations" collectible sticker that I hand out in public, to give to him as a reminder in the future about how badly he fucked up with me, and then I put headphones back on to signal the end of our brief chat, but not before I slowly pulled out a set of rosary beads that I carried with me, showily draping them over the edge of my bag that sat by the computer station I worked at. End of discussion.

Because, dear readers, what that kook in the wild did not know about me (surprise!) is that my man Father Stephen at my home parish of St. Francis of Assisi in West Nyack had asked me on the phone years ago about whether not it was prudent for us to allow such extremist firebrands into our intellectual community for their weekly meetings, to which I replied "Of course"! Who better than him, someone who has devoted his entire life and vocational service to tending all of you, to chair what amounts to a bloodier version of "Alcoholics Anonymous" on any given day? If not me, try him. I dare you, because he's a master educator, too. Booyah! Oh, no, son...you did not see that one coming at you, did you? No! You didn't! Oh, yes. I did.


For those of you mature enough to look at images that depict what a woman's early miscarriage looks like in "human", please click on the following link: http://s1161.photobucket.com/user/sandraebey/media/019.jpg.html. That...that's it. All of your horribly misguided fears and insane paranoia is centered over some blood and tissue that most women naturally develop (and flush out of their bodies) each and every month. That's it! Thanks to Sandra for the images. You go, girl! Please feel free to explore this scientific topic that's existed for all of of humanity on your own: https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=what+an+early+miscarriage+looks+like.

Don't hate the seed, nor the carrier. It's just nature, yo. Chill! And take a class or two, will ya....geesh: http://www.butterflybirth.com/how-many-eggs-is-a-female-human-born-with/. Ignorance is hell!

Mallhead

The First Church of Toronto: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopping_mall

My mom's youngest sister is addicted to shopping and junk food, just like she's always been. My grandparents took care of her all of their lives until their deaths, but even my grandmother's Norman Italian longevity wasn't good enough for her. If she was having a "bad" day (and they're all pretty fucking bad, by her choice), she'd express her magical desire for my grandmother to live forevuh in her horrible-sounding accent, because apparently her giving life wasn't good enough for her youngest brat. My aunt likes magic instead, a perpetual teenage attitude delivered in the most blatantly obnoxious tone possible, guaranteed to start a fight so she can get high off of the juices that flow from anger; an addict right down to her core.

My grandparents struggled all of their hard-working lives with her terrible presence, alternating between disgust and trying to care for their very sick daughter, between fits of living that they managed to squeeze successfully into the margins of other people's disordered lives. After all, we were experts at it. I was healthy and so were they, and that's about it for our small immediate family circle. Not much material to work with, but we managed it as best as we could, thankfully with our sanity and good health intact, much to the gnashing teeth despair of my mom and her ugly sisters. They removed moles like they tried to shed their awful weight, without ever covering up how horrible they are.

Desperate to escape the confines of their children's miserable homes, me and my cousins sometimes tacked on excursions with our young aunt out of sheer desperation, which my grandparents understood. They can barely drive around, but small distances are fine. If I needed clothes for school, Aunt B. could manage that, with lots of compromises for her girlish brain to accept our passage with her. Given my mom's sugar addiction, I grew up in a house plagued with migraines that only abated until I was well into college and young adulthood. It could have been genetic (I have lots of overweight diabetics on both sides of the fence), but it was certainly never helped by my family. They forgo real food to eat dessert first, which pretty much guarantees I'll get sick if I eat like they do, so I avoid it like the plague. It is the exact opposite of our traditions about breaking bread.

Nonetheless, stuff is stuff, and where better to cadge a ride than from a junkie who goes directly to the source to mainline it? She's never practiced religion, preferring instead to excel in cheap gaudy plastic shit that she can torture us with by using them as "ugly bombs". Her best friend died an untreated hoarder, with my aunt claiming ignorance of it after her death, which fooled none of us. You see, each and every one of the grandchildren in my family have become violently ill on these shopping sojourns with our aunt; every single one of us. At first, my mother and her sisters used cleverly hidden techniques to cover up the fact that they made us sick.

First, it was my supposed "hypoglycemia" that caused me to return home from shopping trips pale and nauseous. Oh, no problem: just feed her food! My mom treated me like I was a pet her sister didn't know how to feed and water. After that, it was on; I had to gulp down these sugar-free foods so she could continue her worship at store windows. "Stuff something down her throat", was an oft-repeated phrase in my mother's house, to keep people from guessing the source of my sickness. Same thing with my other cousins: Bill had a strange gluten intolerance that made him dizzy, Elizabeth ("that poor thing") grew up without a real mutha (not true), therefore she's a sickly orphan...on and on it went for years, until the Nanuet Mall fell into disrepair, in which case, Auntie simply needed a venue change.

Same thing with the "new" mall in West Nyack. We all strangely felt sick just walking through the multi-level building with her, which she quickly devised cover stories for, aided and assisted by our mysterious "symptoms", "Oh, yeah? You don't feel good?", with a quick panicked look to her sidelong glance at us. Uh, no. I feel overly hot and sick to my stomach. Unfortunately for her, I outgrew all of my bad health and habits through hard work. "Weird...I call it 'Mallhead'. Billy gets it, too", and so it went for a few more years, until each one of my cousins confessed to me that every one of them got sick shopping with her, with the exact same set of physical responses.

I let it slide while my grandmother slowly declined in her advanced old age, but not by much; my aunt loved using her as a deferred payment plan to big family discussions that would "out" her true agenda. I let my cousin and his long-time girlfriend buy her a huge flat-screen t.v. one Christmas, with the excuse that my grandmother's cataracts were the reason she needed a new one. They were gone for hours, hours that I comfortably spent in happy companionship with my grandmother and mother. My cousin returned from the excruciating trip red-faced and ashamed: another sucker punch by that crazy incompetent bitch. He was kind enough to install the set for her, just like we all enabled that hateful little dwarf: in honor of our parents' parents, those G-dly people who gave rise to us.

I finally put my foot down during a weekend stay with my mom. I offered to go with my girl cousin (that poor unfortunate "orphan") and my aunt to the mall, but we were barely down the street when something odd happened. Elizabeth suddenly took ill in the car, which forced our aunt to stop at a junk food convenient store chain. She used the same old line about my cousin just being hungry, as she tried to hide her delight at this unexpected pit stop for her preferred type of junk food. For once, she sprang sprightly out of the idling parked car to grab something quick in the store. She was all smiles as she watched my cousin (who was going to nursing school at the time, hence her new-found knowledge about healthy foods and exercise), gulp down rotten food so we could all go shopping for her.

But, for some strange reason, her evil alchemy didn't work this time. Liz didn't feel better as we drove down the same street we were on before the "pit-stop". "I'm not actually hungry", Liz tried to explain to our sick aunt, as she sat in the passenger seat, mulling over a nasty selection of salty junk food over sweets, neither of which is designed to cure anyone on the planet. "I still don't feel good", Liza said weakly, grown pale as I watched her open her jacket for air and crack the window at the same time, the very same actions we all took over those long hard years, as my aunt rehashed her old lines about carsickness and the car's heating system. "I don't think I can go shopping", she muttered, and if there was a heart that was gladder than mine at that moment, you'd have been hard-pressed to find it. I was already in recline just being in the backseat, hearing the same old bullshit in my head about my ill health again and again.

And just like that, we were back at my mother's apartment, with Liz resting on my mom's couch, like I had also done for years and years, recovering from another awful bus trip from the city. It was over....it was finally over. The curse had been lifted! I wished Liz was healthier so I could hug her, but my girl was all grown up, aided and assisted in my mastery of invisible motherhood by no one but myself, just as she had also suffered with her own disordered parents. The curse had been lifted forever. After that, we began to openly speak about "Mallhead" to each other at family gatherings in quiet companionship, whenever that little bitch was out of earshot. Nothing beats an evil witch like the greater good. We had finally won in adulthood. We won.

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

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

Hooters

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

Not all art directors are created equally. I've worked with a lot of disordered people in my time, usually while smoking a cigarette with one of them outside, as they told me their similar tales of woe. But Lisa was different in a few key ways. She fit the template for being slightly arty without being too much so, talented without outshining anyone around her, and noticeable only in her prolonged absences when the work she did piled up. She hid behind conformity, nursing her work along in small, bite-sized chunks, preferring to hide behind typesetting for book interiors than the open warfare that typically marks cover design meetings. She simply didn't have enough personality to set the world on fire, which she knew about in rigorous detail.

One of the stories she liked to tell me over and over again was about her parents first meeting at a mental institution: he was the big orderly intern who helped her mother as a delicate new resident with the harder patients. Like a lot of fucked up rich kids from WASPy families, she took small pleasures in the shock value associated with her long term exposure to the psycho-therapeutic arts. It contrasted highly with my working class roots littered with empty beer bottles and full ashtrays. Didn't smell the same to me at all, nor did my telling it make her more comfortable with me. It's not a soothing space to be in.

She loved to tell me that she never received affection from her coldly intellectual parents, preferring the pleasures of one particular dog breed that she became attached to. It was "kooky" without crossing that sharp line between revealing the depths of her obviously medicated state and her robotic creaky movements around the office. Every interaction within our small studio area was lined with her disorders that she could only hint at in a professional business environment; a well-honed performance designed for her to slowly draw off a steady income from bland corporate environments that tolerated creativity in small bite-sized pieces. That was her real expertise.

One of her weirder stories about her life with mental dysfunction centered around her strange sense of self about having a beautiful daughter, something most mothers typically wish for. She was confused by it (of course), as she still struggled in her 60s to accept something that existed within the world whether she liked it or not. She could be that slow cognitively-speaking, which made her a great fit for the dysfunctional family business she landed at the end of her career. 
I ignored her petty political ploys most of the time because they were that dull to me. She told me every other month or so that she wanted me fired, which never happened on her say-so. It was funny and heartbreaking to watch her slowly drown in her own ego and incompetence, clutching at old political devices for an office climate that no longer existed in modern New York City.

She loved that her blond Shiska-looking daughter (she's 1/2 Jewish and 1/2 WASP: people, do not try this blend at home without extreme caution) got her lots of attention, as much as she hated that it wasn't about her. And so, in retaliation for her own nature, she set up a series of passive-aggresive hurdles for her daughter to struggle with and then overcome at her command; as controlling and manipulative as her outdated office politics. It didn't work at all, but that's what pays the bills for a lot of inept psychotherapists: not solving the problem for their clients, just nursing it along minutely while they purposely sabotage their own healing process. She shot her foot publicly that often.

Her and her "younger" (and also deaf) husband riffled through her daughter's clothes after she moved out west, pillaging an old set of telltale shiny orange "booty shorts" for what she described as their Halloween costume: old "Hooters" workers entangled in a sexual discrimination lawsuit. It was so fucking weird, I had to know why she thought that was a good idea. Did anyone know what her outfit meant? No, she laughed, they thought it was funny that we wore those kind of outfits. Oh. I wondered what her poor daughter thought about their oddly dual-gendered approach to a business that remains heterosexual at its core, but like any of her answers, I didn't have the time or money to coax it out of her like her therapists did. Naturally, I already knew what fueled her envy and self-loathing.

You see, short of walking into the office with a shotgun under each arm, she was that invisible to us. In her desperate attempts to avoid becoming a target again, she managed to make herself completely unnoticeable whatsoever, in a PTSD-like response to the shifting sands of big time New York City publishing. She simply couldn't hack it, not with all the fake fairytales in the world, no matter how often she told them. She was a coward, and that was the real outfit she wore every single day of her life. Like any other really sick person, I wished her no harm, as much as I grieved for the children who were left in her care, no matter how temporary that was, because (and here's how I always "caught" her) she came from a wealthy family that had absolutely no need to push her daughter into a disrespectful job like a waitress job at a wing joint that bordered on being a strip club.

Instead of being shocked at her break from "vanilla" normality, I was merely aghast at her vicious nature. "Was your daughter ever hassled there?", I asked her. Oh, yeah, she said. Her job was right off of Columbus Circle during their big construction phase, and one time she was followed home all the way to Brooklyn on the subway, by one of her regulars from the construction site. I don't think there's enough Valium on her planet that would've covered up my genuinely horrified look. G-d, the horror of her....she continually set up her daughter for serious hurt and permanent damage, with obvious murderous intent. She had the decency to blush at my straightforward questions, while giggling nervously like a little girl. What a nightmare she is, I thought to myself. Thankfully, her daughter made it out of her horrible house alive (with or without the Halloween costume), because I see you, you bitch. I see right fucking through you.

Valley of the Dolls

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

My dad ran off with his secretary, to the surprise of just about no one. My cousin worked at the same upstate cable company as them, and linesmen know all the gossip from the constantly clucking office girls. She was a poor country girl with buckteeth, bad eyesight, and what was used to be called "rotgut" which is today's Celiac's Disease, turning her once embarrassingly-skinny frame into the huge marketing hit now called "Gluten-Free Living", a new diet for hiding eating disorders, much like the low-fat craze of yesteryear and the also retarded "Paleo Diet"; food fads that die fairly quickly on the shelves, but unfortunately for her, she has the real thing. 

She'd been shopping around for a man for quite some time, with poor luck. It was a small rural dating pool that had (by necessity) to include married men as well as single ones, guys who figured out really quickly that she was just some scared kid looking for a steady gig that came with a guaranteed paycheck, with a job no one could fire her from, and given my parent's obvious tensions at the company Christmas parties, my dad was just the meal ticket she needed to get out of town, to fulfill her small town dreams about success. 

We didn't really blame anyone involved. It was obvious to us by now that our parents generation was fatally flawed; some of it was not of their own choosing, like canned foods with extended shelf lives and the spoiled upbringings of "Depression Era" parents looking to give their kids a better time of it. We had no such allusions about life: for me and my brothers, life is no mystical magical fairy tale ride at some overpriced amusement park. We do the real thing. There's nothing else for us in this life besides hard work, which is exactly what we do almost every single day of our lives, stopping only to rest by G-d's command on Sunday, as a necessary respite from the weeks labors. Our rewards are the excellence we achieve through the sweat of our own brows, and that's just the way we like it. 

But for people with severe challenges like the ones faced by their "Silent Generation", sometimes the only recourse they had in life was a kind of needy co-dependence, which is exactly how we continue to see our damaged family members. It's not really a "blame game" as much as it is one long, exhausting, and highly overwrought group therapy session from which there is no escape except bad vacations and more shopping trips. Of course we wanted more. What do you do after you buy everything you ever wanted?! And that's exactly the place where my and my siblings wanted to land; a place exempt from petty competitiveness and dead-end jobs. We came around full circle from the often degrading hatreds that lead a family downhill and spiraling out of control, which is another reason I'm in charge: I'm the best!

So, it's with that overall perspective that we hold our parents mistakes. My stepmother's horribly awkward provincial tastes reflect the insular values of backwoods farm folk: people who greatly fear and also lust for the supposed treasures that our fair Gotham is portrayed as giving away so easily in t.v. shows and movies. They actually believe t.v. shows and movies offer redemption for them, or at least provide another delusional fantasy to prolong their inevitable facing up to reality. When my dad's secretary finally had all the money she ever wanted, she had absolutely no idea what to do with it. She bought the requisite gaudy jewelry and furs that ridiculous "trophy wives" are supposed to have, like the show Dallas taught her how to do, in order to blend in with her new western surroundings. 

It was obviously infuriating, but it wasn't my life to live, and I thanked the heavens every day for it (still do). It was a horrible fate to be stranded in a dusty town in the decline that's so far off the beaten path, they pay people to visit them there. I didn't blame my dad for checking out of reality through John Wayne movies. He's from Bed Stuy neighborhood drunks, and he considers living well his revenge against the ravages of their WWII generation's alcoholism and PTSD. She follows his suit, which was the ideal presented to him as the picture perfect way to ride off into the sunset. It doesn't work, but they still try really hard to give us their best stage smiles. It's heartbreaking, and it's not my world to live in. I wait, patiently observing them from a safe distance, offering them ancient hopes about redemption and family life that is theirs for the taking, if they make it back home in one piece. We'll be here.

And so it was no surprise to us that my dad's wife decorates like a twelve year old girl with too much time on her hands, in that QVC/HSN style known as "Country Quaint". It's so fucking bad that I feel bad for my dad, a guy with a keen eye for good wood furniture and genuine antiques. He tries to steer her in the right way, but given the material he has to work with, he meets with uneven success on any given day. Their weirdly overdone mini palace is like a combination of gaudy floral prints mixed with the throw-up from a hungover cowboy's hat. With that in mind, we learned a long time ago to just let it pass, while they give visitors these weird "tours" of their house decorated in all corners with odd trophy cases, like two lost children taking our hands to seek a validation that we do not have to give to them.

For awhile, when Denise was in full-on housewife mode raising my youngest brother, the shopping was through the roof, as she desperately worked to stave off the soul-crushing bordedom that comes with semi-arid plains living; there's no one around for miles and miles but plain dirt road, which must have been excruciating for a small-town girl with dreams of glittering diamonds, never-ending champagne, and tacky Broadway musicals. Big gay shows don't work in the provinces real well. We tolerated their shopping trips with the same rolled eyes we have about their head-in-the-sand routines so indicative of their "do-nothing" generation; we don't get it.

For a time, I gave my younger brother much-needed doses of reality to temper the credit card fantasies of excess they dreamed of while I lived in Colorado, which was a relatively quick drive away for us used to being apart from nearly a continent's width away. We made fun of them as we drove down to the ranch in one of their old pick-ups, giving him guidance, support, and discipline along the way. He had so freaked out my older brothers during his own Spoiled Brat stage, that they cut him off completely, to stave off any infections that might pass onto their own young children.

Unfortunately for them, genetics doesn't work that way, and as a lifelong educator, I don't believe in writing off children, especially the ones in my immediate family, and so I talked and talked and talked to him, breathing fresh life into their stale routines, by planting the seeds of wisdom that he would need later on when I wasn't around. Just like with my grandparents, I talked to him directly (without any of the deliberately frustrating and weirdly convoluted hints that pass for secret-keeping in seriously disturbed social groups), letting him know that his mom's taste freaked me out, too. Whether it was out of a deliberate perversion about childhood or her own unsatisfied needs about her upbringing, she went through this dreadful faze of using life-size porcelain dolls to decorate with, like creepy stand-ins for the friends and family she didn't have around.

I don't know, man. It was so fucking strange, we laughed cautiously about it, hoping to stave off whatever fucking voodoo is cooked up with those things. Again, I wasn't sure if she was using them as evil guards to stand sentry by the guest room door, but there they were for many years; silent, still, unblinking, and very dead-looking dolls, the stuff of every decent kid's nightmares. Like all their other weird ploys, we couldn't figure out if it was on purpose or from her innate brain-damage, and that was the brilliance behind her ploys: she could actually be that stupid for real. My bro told me she was dumb at six years old. I calmly reassured him that it meant our Doucette DNA had survived their many travels intact, and this was the bane of our advanced consciousness: to suffer fools gladly (at times).

He was her only meal ticket to a greater portion of my dad's will after he died; the only kid she had to bargain with, and in their world, that makes all the difference. It meant they could continue to use money as a form of leverage in our family, using their deaths as the strings to pull along family members they viewed as vulnerable, as it suited their games between each other. It worked as a dysfunction between the two of them, but not with us. We don't need money to get ahead. It left them alone in their barren wasteland while we chomped on the Big Business douchebags of Gotham, a wolves feast of fools if ever there was. Our bloodsport is survival, and it helped my younger stranded bro to know that he was not alone in our clan. We are the wolfpack.

Still, I grew up on the stories of New England Gothic and Stephen King's horrors, classic fables that we all know so well (BIG FANS, Mainer). And so, on one rare morning while our parents slept in or drank coffee elsewhere in their strangely built house of hidden corners, I flat out asked Patrick if those fucking dolls scared them shit out of him, by the laundry room where they stood silent and glassy-eyed. "Yeah...", he shrugged, bolstered in confidence by my visit and the strength my big blond Scottish boyfriend represented to him, as a clannish tattoo-covered rock star with seriously Christian ideas to match his own Methodist upbringing, "...but I got over it a couple of years ago." Oh, good! How did you do that? 

I asked him because I was concerned for him being alone as a young boy, stranded in the middle of nowhere with two adults who may or may not physically abuse him while he quickly outgrew them: "One night I just couldn't take it anymore! I just stood in front of them like this," and he planted himself squarely in front of the tallest girl, "and I said to her: 'OK, evil doll. Do whatever you're gonna do. If you wanna kill me, go ahead. Just do it already!'" He'd been taking self-defense lessons on the suggestion of me and my older brothers, because we knew his bratty ass would get beat up on the very first day of school. He liked to brag about money back then, and how much of it his parents had. Wouldn't go over so well with the Mexican kids of teenage sharecroppers, and unlike them, we didn't want him to actually die, just grow up.

Good answer! Me and my boyfriend smiled at each other. He might just survive childhood alive after all! My dad liked to take people into the desert with horses that may or may not hurt them really bad, like the one that almost took off my sister-in-law's head when it suddenly sprang into a bolt towards the barn. She barely made the duck before the barn roof would have chopped off her head. He also strung us along a line of horses uphill in shifting sand, his wife putting an end to trips in the remote back-country because we told her that Patrick's horse almost tipped over on top of us. She went completely white back at the house, and cautioned my dad against his follies for the rest of our time there, a rare show of moxie for his mostly-chastened secretary.

After a heartbeat or two, Patrick turned towards me proudly, "And that's how I did it!" What happened then? "Absolutely nothing! I realized that those dolls couldn't kill me. They're not evil. They're just a bunch of stupid dolls," and like that, the cloud lifted on his nursed fears about old toys and their supposed powers over him in this life. There ain't nothin' we can't do against a bunch of dumb-looking, silly-ass girly toys that any kid outgrows real fast. They're dull! Well done, kiddo. I'll be seeing you under a full nighttime moon, with stars that still shine brightly in the sky, on a beach with no-name. Come on, boy. You know the spot. It's in your DNA, werewolf.

Candyman

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

My next door neighbors in New City were the remnants of the old Dutch/German farm families of Rockland County, and they were not happy about the changes around them. Family farms were split apart to make room for hastily-constructed tract homes, and the farm families who had long relied on those plots to make a living soon tore apart, too. Country life is significantly different than city life, as immortalized in the cartoons we watched as kids, like Tom the zoo-suited city cat who slickly tries to two-time good ole country mouse Jerry by stealing his girl. They were afraid of us, and deeply suspicious of our motives, as we were with them.

My dad got into property disputes right off the bat, and the folks up from the city were "coloreds"; just on our block alone, we had a Puerto Rican street preacher with a storefront church who never once signaled our existence to us. Not once, in all the years we lived there. The Italians next door were just as weird; Tino was a typical con artist of a jerk who hated everyone except Italians, including the black people he served pizza to in the Bronx, where he kept his store. The Evretts were African-American, and they had the last house built on our quiet country lane. They were extremely reserved as well, which only fueled the fires of our imaginations further. They kept a nanny goat in their backyard, which was so odd for the time, we joked they had "voodoo" rituals at night, hence the need for discretion and their relative distance from the rest of the pack.

There weren't many play options available for hip city kids like us, which led us to make a sometime acquaintance with the farm kids next door, though truthfully, they had a mental retardation that served more often as comic fodder for our bored country brains, rather than forming any real alliance between us. You did what you had to do. The nearest store was a mile walk away (and a hard one at that), to a tiny convenience store...sigh. So, sometimes when the country kids came a-knockin', we let 'em in, but the window was a very short one, since we'd passed them intellectually at birth. Eddie, the youngest, was so markedly effected that he couldn't speak real words, only a homemade kind of patois that his older sisters had to decode for us. "Drin" was his name for Kristine (she was the girl I played with), and "Grog" was his name for his middle sister Margaret.

He got into all sorts of trouble, the kind of trouble that retarded kids got into, like banging his head on the family tractor in their garage, causing a rush to the emergency room that only further hastened his decline of a lifelong condition that never fully cleared up. I re-connected with the sisters using social media to find out he had passed in his 30's, which didn't surprise me at all, though I expressed my condolences for our childhood friend. His nose always ran, and his eyes were either red or watery, giving his wide country face a streaked, mad appearance. They ran around without shoes or parents, which scared us, too. Who are they? Where are they? Their insular culture was only reinforced every time we saw their fat mama on the porch. She hated us on sight, preferring to team up with their uncle next door to strip our plot of its' rich topsoil, in retaliation for the humiliation of having to split up the family farm.

She was a tall, plain, fat woman with short mannish hair, who screamed at her kids to get back into their yard every time she saw them on our yard or playing with us, which freaked us out even more. The only time I heard her speak was when she came out of the old farmhouse to tell her kids that Elvis had died, and that was because my mom was in the yard with us, playing badminton with the family net we set up running parallel to their family plot. It was so odd for her to even speak to us, that I have never forgotten the event to this day. We saw her more infrequently after that, what with school and winters spent indoors. There were whispers going around that she was unhappy, and we kids just figured it was more redneck static about "city slickers" that they were expressing to our parents, because our mom and dad clammed up almost totally when we were at the kitchen table, giving each other silent adult-like looks instead.

The only other time I ever remember seeing her again was the next summer, when my mom told me she was pregnant again. I tried making out the swell of her stomach but honestly, because of her weight, cheap baggy clothes, and ugly demeanor, spying was hard, plus I really didn't care what women did with their husbands when playtime was to be had, however infrequent it was at times. After that, we waited for the baby to be born so we could see the farmer's wife at suppertime, when she opened the kitchen door to shout for her three kids, who may be anywhere in the vicinity, and we were not disappointed. Finally, one evening the screen door banged open loudly to reveal her large frame with a small swaddled bundle in her arms. The kids were in the yard with us again, with our family group playing badminton, and we were rewarded for our patience with a closer look, bolstered by the presence of my mom.

We creeped up to the line of tall bushes they planted to separate us from their view, a harsh property line to obscure the horrors of city-folk in close proximity to their sturdy farmer's stock, or so we thought. Emboldened by my nosey mom, we stood right next to the bush line to get a closer view of the baby in her arms, my mom telling us that she was indoors a lot because newborns needed a lot of attention (to explain her relative absence as a country housewife, which was weird in hindsight), to see tiny arms and feet moving. There's the baby! We've always been a child-loving family, so the sight of a newborn made us really happy, and for once, the farmers wife seemed proud to have our attention. You see, dear readers, as the baby squirmed in his blankie, he pushed down the part that was covering his face, a face that was not "white" in any way, shape, or form.

Our snobbish uptight farmer's wife had just given birth to a beautiful and obviously "black" little boy, and that was the last time we ever saw her again. My mom couldn't wait to run indoors to tell my dad, and neither could we. Gossip this good didn't break 'round there very often, and when it was as juicy as this, no one could refrain from talking about it. After all, the indiscretion was already out, right? She'd cheated on her farmer husband with a black man, and their wasn't enough land in all of New York State to cover up that fact. They moved away after that, the kids with the mom, with the father alone in the house for sometime on his own. I kept in touch with the oldest girl via "Pen Pal" letters for awhile, but given how little we had in common besides proximity, the friendship died out. None of them would attend college or attain the status that was always my destiny to reach, leaving little besides New City goings-on to message each other about, which is exactly what we did during my brief foray into common social media.

As hard as the break-up had been at the time for their family, the girls enjoy (to this day) a happy, healthy relationship with their younger biracial half-brother, choosing to have a loving family instead of perpetuating the typical prejudices of the day, a rare but very beautiful ending to the beginning of this witching hour that is the start of our traditional Samhain season (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain). Get ready for the real bugbears* of this world. It's Halloween.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugbear

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candyman_%28film%29

Throwaway Culture

Many Americans have been trained by advertisers, promoters, and marketers to see their time as so valuable (like the President of these United States) in this busy, busy, busy world, that they need shortcuts to every single chore on the planet. Too tired from working three jobs to wash your face? No problem! We've got you covered. Want to remove dust and harmless fluffies from your hardwood floor? Hey, that's too lowly a chore for someone as "exceptional" as you. Use these throw-out sheets instead. It's fun, and any idiot can do it. 

The only problem with constant convenience-themed living is that you actually need to have something really valuable to replace what you stole from nature. Want to see what your stupid fucking dryer sheets look like in our ecosystem? Here you go, ass-wipe:

http://www.cbs46.com/story/27431955/disposable-wipes-clogging-equipment-increasing-costs-for-customers

That kind of quick, easy fix doesn't seem so appealing anymore, does it? It's really disgusting, and you're not worth it. Believe me. You're not the center of the universe. Hard to fathom, but true. Instead of using paper napkins, I use cloth ones that I wash. Weird, but yes. Instead of wiping floors with throwaway wipes or paper towels, I use my old t-shirts that I dampen with water. Being evil just doesn't seem as fun anymore, right? I know.

Balls Out

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_sage-grouse

Last week I was lucky enough to catch a "Nature" special, and you know how I feel about PBS-type programming: LOVE IT! When you channel-surf using "free t.v." technology like I do (a digital antenna with an adapter made for a flat screen t.v.), you get what you get. Just like those old "rabbit ears" of old, reception becomes a challenge, and just like then, you can tune into different stations by moving the digital antenna around. When I saw the infamous "Nature" graphic come onto the screen, I got excited as I always do, knowing that beautiful photography is their standard, and I wasn't disappointed. Sleepy, yes, but also very interested.

This special focused on the amazing adaptability of the American West, a place often referred to as 'The Great Empty", which the host argued differently. Vast and human-free, but very much alive. These motherfuckin' birds are the jam, so good are the males at mating. 
I know crazy dudes who can't even tie their own shoelaces, let alone approach a decent woman, but that's how it goes for the disordered of our kind. In the wild, there's no such deception: you either got it, or you don't. The male who fights and wins against each and every opponent steppin' up to him gains entry to any female grouse he wants, with the stats to go along with his champion status, too: a record 31 lays was recorded by a group with one male. He managed to mate every 1/2 an hour with a different female grouse. That's impressive!

And not problem-free. A lot of the males are crippled, maimed, or dead at the end of mating season, and that's part of the point, too. The females want the best genes for their offspring, and these are not animals with complex sexual responses like humans. It's something to be fought for, won, and moved on from very quickly, as is suitable to their much shorter life span and lower brain capacity. But, I loved the strutting bravado of their ornate mating rituals and showy displays. 
If you got it, flaunt it! Very simple, isn't it? And so it was: the bird with the best ballsy performance got all the girls. Makes your dating life seem like a breeze in comparison, doesn't it?

At the end of every day, each individual is responsible for mating successfully, to the advantage of their species. If some jerk-off can't figure out how to speak to you properly, what good is he to you, girl? Not much. Even a birdbrain could tell you that, if only it would speak, right? Wrong. What messages are you not getting with his chest all puffed out? That bird's got his balls way out there, man, so why don't you grow a set? Grow up! Life is short, much shorter than you and your rinky dink, so get over it. It ain't all about you, bro. There's plenty of other males out there in the world. Respect your woman like you respect yourself, and you may just get the woman you deserve, instead of the woman you pay for. Mother Nature always wins.
 

For Takoda: I'm always on display, kiddo!

History 3x

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma,_Alabama

History often repeats itself, which is exactly what my father said to me over and over again. He's learning impaired (Dyslexia), so he's always liked plaques, signs, homey knitted samplers with folksy sayings, mugs, t-shirts, bumper stickers...anything that reminds him what life should be like. It's annoying, but I also remember almost everything he told me, because he's repeated it so often, too, which is irksome at times. I prefer free-form originality and evolutionary progression; he likes the solidity of comfort and the sentimentality of old routines. 

We both like productivity and early mornings when no one else is around, which is why the appearance of hipsters here in Rockland County concerns me so much: if shitheads paid by their companies to relocate to trendy neighborhoods can't afford the city anymore, we're all doomed within the tri-state area, and these are not New Yorkers you mix with. They want conformity and trends; not newness and culture. They are not from here.

It was with this sense of repetition that I saw the events in Tennessee unfold on the evening news for awhile, acting like hicks in these isolated pockets always seem to do; seemingly armed with "the truth" and a mostly white local government armed to the teeth to back her outrageous sense of entitlement. In one of the early scenes from "Selma", Oprah Winfrey's character goes to the county courthouse to register as a voter, a fairly new federal right granted to African-American citizens. She's given a verbal test that even a seasoned historian would fail, a test that does nothing to dim her spirit. That's what hard-won rights granted to free people tend to do.

Armed with the truth, she gathers her community to protest in response to this one illegal act that defies logic, only the expression of a deeply ingrained ignorance that typically signifies inbred ignorance so entrenched, it is nothing short of violent, which is also point of the part. How do you break into the minds of a better, stronger people who use the the very effective tool of passive resistance as a societal tool to create change? You use anger and hatred against them, whipping folks up into a massive mob mentality with no reason or boundaries. That's what I saw on national television: some ugly redneck denying people their civil right to marry, and you must know by now how that goes down with me. It doesn't.

I was reminded of another historical event that affected me greatly; the story of New Yorker Solomon Northup's* nasty capture and subsequent sale south of the Mason-Dixon line, because it was once legal there to buy and sell humans like they're animals. And what can you do to property? Anything you g-ddamn want, which is what a bunch of fucked up retards did, to cover up the fact that they couldn't labor under a hot sun (like an African can), or do it efficiently (like poor folk always do), or turn a profit on a land they emigrated to from another land (like every American immigrant before them has had to do). There's no talking to people that insane.

It's not that the people of the north were always so righteous. Solomon took his name from the upstate farmer who set him free. He was also the gentleman who came looking for him when word got back to his hometown and family that he'd been illegally tricked into capture, like any gentleman worth his weight in salt would. After that, it was on. The Northups convinced Solomon to write down his true account the year he returned home, while it was still fresh in his mind, but also as part of his testimony in a legal proceeding that went on for years, transcending state boundaries, because that's the mindset of the truly righteous in this world: we don't ever give up, and we don't ever give in.

We became their willing collaborators, constructing the Underground Railroad** to help families on their road to freedom, and we fought a bloody Civil War on the basis of those freedoms, rights that are the legal right for every free American citizen, which we will do again, so it is in this vein that I will write this one more time to you, Southerner: Don't tread on me. Ever. Bitch.

Your homework, fuck-up:
*    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Northup
**  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Railroad

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

The law, shithead:  

http://cnn.it/1eM7m6g

Dirt Weed

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blunt_%28cannabis_cigar%29

Years ago, after the publishing industry went bust and employers quickly set-up weirdly convoluted political climates to drive out the healthier and more expensive employees by using their cheaper and more deranged ones to do their dirty work (hidden behind a thinly-veiled agenda that was never really very cloudy or unclear, except if you had to prove it in a court of law,) my bubble burst by design, because I beat the "big boys" at their own game. 

Rich white men have always used money and the threat of impoverishment to silence those carefully observant, high-performing employees who are better than their own kids at the family business, knowing that most single women in New York City are one paycheck away from homelessness. It's a total dick way to "win", which is the point of Evil, Inc: a place where we don't do business fairly (the real company motto), but tricky knife-in-the-back games are part of what makes dysfunctional business go. Healthy people tend to share the wealth, as well as the free dispersal of information, which sucks if you can only win by rigging the game to your advantage illegally.

After that, I was on the move from place to place. At first I stayed locally, finding temporary friendship with a troubled man I met at the public library (I could tell he knew who I was behind his badly done "actor-y" facade), but times were desperate, which was the whole point behind that hurt, too. See? "If you would have just played the game, Marie, your entire family wouldn't have turned their backs on you (no one wants to see you anymore without money and help to give out freely), because you talked openly about what you saw at work." Of course, that sick family was my responsibility, too, and if I don't help sick people whenever they want it, there's abuse to be had. I should have learned my lesson years ago. I'd heard the bullshit speech thousands of times before.

Except, really healthy, brilliantly powerful women don't work that way. That's why we run this world you live in. And so, I didn't cave. There's was nothing left for me to give, anyway: no work, clothes, housing, food, rent, healthcare...all of that goes away when you speak up against injustice, whether it's at home or at work, which is exactly why I did it. I couldn't live like that anymore. It was intolerable, the injustices I've seen, like the fact that the entire Housing Court of Brooklyn, New York is currently funded by black women on layaway, hard-working women who don't want their children homeless for Christmas. The U.S. Marshall (a nice white guy from Long Island) explained to me that they are way better now, because they don't toss your stuff on the street like they used to anymore! He looked at me like he wanted consolation then, right when I had none to give.

After getting "thrown out of the inn" during Christmastime (so to speak), I lived by my native New York wits. The very woman who had illegally harassed every worker at the shop I blew the whistle on, the same one who had once bragged to me about her "street smarts" (a total joke when you face living on the streets, which is exactly what I did), while that crazy bitch went on believing that sucking dick would save her life. It didn't (spoiler alert). It did, however, buy her what she thought was enough valuable time to plot my destruction (Girl Power!), and get herself canned, too. After all, I knew it was about money. That's all it ever was, not the fact that I noticed (and documented) each and every illegal occurrence that happened there, which is why I faced off without counsel one of the company's nephews with legal experience, who asked me to hand over my notebooks to him about the situation, which I flatly refused. I still have them, dear readers.

The Neuyorican guy I met from around the way did 'hood business with me: he wanted access to my soon-to-be-gone Park Slope digs so he could use the kitchen because he was working in food service, and I wanted to get into his tenement building from 'round that way, so I could save up some money for another rental apartment. We struck a deal: I would sleep on his floor (which I did), while me and some guy named Jose cleaned the room next to his so I could move in, which is exactly what I did. I worked as a lead cover designer for some broke crooked indie outfit that was yet another spoiled Jewish kid's response to his father's valid foothold in the business, to come home at night to a bipolar guy weaning off his meds through the copious use of weed, giving him a harsh hacking cough that did not abate with time.

He seemed amazed and paralyzed by my Acadian energy. How could I work all day and then work some more at night? Where did it come from? He came from Brownsville*, a place so bad, that the main source of income is living with crazy and Welfare, which is what he did when the kitchen jobs went away. You see, my friend was "too good" to start at the bottom of the kitchen hierarchy by washing dishes. It was so obvious that he didn't want to work, even his teenage dope dealer told him so. Imagine that? Gettin' schooled by some hood rat, but that's how it went down, for real. We went over there on one really cold winter night to meet esse comin' out his mother's nice town-home apartment that's across the street from a public school playground, to meet me and Cotto on the sidewalk. At first, my friend told me to wait on the corner, but as he stood there pacing back and forth, nervously smoking his menthol cigarette, he got bored (he's manic bipolar), so he started talking loudly to me some feet away.

At that point, I was like, why not just walk up to him, when some fly kid with his "phresh" gear came bounding down the staircase to the stoop. He wore a matching bright red hat to go with his ghetto hoodie and red sneaks. Typical. He started laughing when he saw my man there speaking with me, because we looked like a broke-ass version of "Beauty and the Beast", presenting quite the pic on some slow cool weeknight in the 'hood. He made small talk with Cotto during the exchange of a dime bag for money, when my friend let him know that he wasn't happy at his current gig because he was a "real chef" (this, from an ex-con who was forced to choose a cooking program as part of his rehab in the joint), by also explaining that he never really wanted to be a chef (he sucked at it, lighting up a tea towel I gave him one night at the stove during his very brief tenure as a personal chef in my kitchen), and that washing dishes was beneath him.

The kid looked at him laughing, and to me, which I played politically correct by staying silent, to deliver one hell of a line: "Yeah, but you gotta start somewhere, though", a line his own mama must have said to him a million times when he crossed over her doorway down to the streets, buying his flashy gear and bragging about it by sporting it up and down the block, a hastily tossed up sneaker on a phone wire serving as his calling card to area schoolkids. That fuck-up from Brownsville just got schooled by his more successful teenage dope dealer, man! It was unbelievable and also totally Brooklyn, all the way down to this kid's shiny new kicks. Only in New York, you know, bro? Only in New York can a punk kid beat out a grown man without even trying, or leaving his mama's house. That's the warped view of success from around the way, and those are the people I come from. Don't you ever try to can con me again, yo. I know you.


* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville,_Brooklyn

Columbine

Around the world and on my shelf: people in books and photographs.

I lived in Littleton, Colorado during the Columbine Massacres, and even worse than the media orgy that followed, was the timing of my very New York mothers' visit out west. Uh oh... she and I were eating at a local restaurant, when she noticed in horror that she was wearing a dark raincoat eerily similar to the teenage killers "Trenchcoat Mafia" look (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Harris_and_Dylan_Klebold). 

It was an unfortunate synergy to the events of the day, not least of which was the almost ecstatic release of pent-up psychological energy loosened upon the area, a public hysteria that stood out sharply to the mostly sullen reticence of the prairie people I met native to the land, and therein lies the problem: affluent white people are often really fucked up. Rich white kids terrified me in the Ivy Leagues and Ivory Towers of school and work, a feeling that did not abate with exposure to more of them existing in isolated pockets around America. Needless, my mom told me I should leave Colorado and move back home, which she reminded me about almost every time we talked on the phone, and we both agreed: "There's something wrong with the people out there." She was right. We saw it in the people around us.

 In Colorado, there are two types of humans: whites and Mexicans. Some adopted Asian orphans are thrown in for diversity''s sake, but when I lived there, being from New York was considered so exotic, my fellow New Yorkers traded in their actual personas for an easier "Seinfeld" version of themselves to show locals over their truer colors, because native Coloradans just didn't understand them. There wasn't enough inside of them for us talk to, which is horrible if you are indeed the parent of a fucked up white kid. Who talks? Exactly. No one does. 

As the story unfolded, supposed new "details" emerged, none of which were particularly new or interesting to me: the killers had schemed and plotted their violent psychotic episodes right underneath their parent's noses, because the mom and dad were too busy with their petty careers to learn more about them. Teenage years are the prime check-out time for the dysfunctional parents who spawned their little messes, because high school age adolescents need less time and care, which is exactly what they got from their parents: nothing. Sure, both boys had enough money from their parents to stockpile a lot of weapons (same as the fucked up rich kid in Cali, with a plush movie-producing dad to go along with his intimate knowledge of video and youtube), and they lived in houses so big, there were plenty of spots to hide anything they wanted to, which is exactly what they did. Expertly.

Not teach, not learn, not grow, not function, and ultimately, not live. Just die. It was the same "here we go again" feeling I had early this morning on a rare coffee run to the corner because I was out of milk. The t.v. was on in the convenient store, showcasing fat white lady after fat white lady, crying about the cycles of dementia and abuse they remain trapped in (redundant to me already at this age), because their bodies tell me everything I know to be true about them with one quick glance, without me ever having to hear it from someone like them again: they're sick, and so are their kids. Again. 

What's next? First: drop the gun, asshole. Speak up about that sick kid in your class, or at your job, or sitting next to you pretending to work at a public library's computer so he can stalk you while smelling badly, openly and without censure from people who see me daily, in my own community. Tell someone, tell anyone, and keep on telling the truth about that sick motherfucker sitting next to you every single day, until someone around you does something about it. Speak up!

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/10/mass-shootings-increasing-harvard-research

You're almost home, human. Join me: http://bit.ly/1j5tc6Y