Some new art

 

I turned my maternal grandma into a country music singer. Turns out all my mother's side of the family hated my crazy ass bitch aunt who used me and my siblings as props so the small town she dragged us to would think what a great Christian she was. 

Spring mask. Spring in the mountains of east TN is a mixed bag of crazy ass weather, Hence the crazy colorful plants waiting to poke through the ground.

A shocking crime

 On October 14th I was attacked and assaulted by a cardiologist named Jeff Schoondyke at Karing Hearts Cardiology. I have the police report to prove it and I have filed a complaint about this incident to the TN medical board. This man attacked me while I was having an anxiety attack and my neuropathy was flaring up. He is a menace, a bully, and a person who thinks he is a god. 

If he loses his license to practice medicine in TN, I won't hold my breath, then he deserves it. 

I fear for my life as long as he is allowed to practice medicine and lives in Johnson City, TN.

National Bird Night 1974

 

I grew up watching Alfred Hitchcock films, in 1974, it seemed like I was trapped in one.

Still reeling from the deaths of my sister and mother and getting no help for that because my bipolar aunt and her adulterous husband thought that seeking mental health help for kids was a waste of their time, I was expected to suck it up and be a man. And suffering from culture shock from moving from the KKK capital of Michigan to an even smaller town in SW VA where if you were the slightest bit different you were bullied and looked upon as weirdo, I had to make do as best as I could. My aunt bullied me and her children followed her example, with her illiterate son Matthew at one point trying to murder me by shooting at me with a rifle. When the bullet hit the trailer near where I was standing, my uncle flew into a rage, not because I could have been killed, but because his property was being was in danger of being damaged. The look of disgust on his face when I told him that his son had tried to shoot me showed me he could not care less about my life and that his trailer was more important then my life. And with the bullying I had to endure for being an outsider in a small town made me feel like a target constantly.

On a national level we were finding out Nixon was a crook who put targets on anyone who disagreed with him and that the FBI was spying on anyone considered a threat, like leftists, black activists, gay folks, anyone Hoover didn't like. 

This work represents all that. And the sad thing is, not much of it has changed.

National Bird Night 1973

                  National Bird Night 1973. (Acrylic, ink, markers, and paper on 24x30" canvas)

1973 was one of the worst years ever for me. In late winter/early spring in Detroit an incompetent doctor killed my mother on an operating table. I was not ten years old yet and I had watched my big sister Linda get hit and killed by a car and then a little over two years later I lost the most important person in my life, my mom. We, my remaining siblings and I were forced to go live in a farm, in what turned out to be the Klu Klux Klan HQ of Michigan, with my dad's half sister, her adulterous husband who was obsessed with proving at all times that he was the Alpha male, and their bullying children. It was made clear from day one that they came first and we were second class citizens in a place I did not want to be. I was bullied by my aunt and uncle, whipped with belts, slapped, kicked, and under constant threat of violence. Many foster kids had it worse but any abuse of children, especially ones suffering the trauma I was suffering, was wrong. And to this day my bullying cousins refuse to admit they bullied me. Too bad their parents are dead because I wanted them to admit how badly they treated me and my siblings and to spit on them to show my contempt.  Still though, dancing on their graves is pretty satisfying. 

This work represents on one level my mom leaving my physical life and on another it represents the gains made by women in the fight for equality. I added bits of color to the female figures to give a nod to all the courageous women of color who had it worse than white women. And the crow/raven has long been associated with death in western art.
 

Imagine

Imagine being such a shitty thin skinned asshole that in order to cover up your shitty bullying past that you scrolled through the posts on this blog and emailed commenters to tell them what I wrote about my shitty cousin John and his shitty family was a pack of lies. A long time loyal friend of this blog and Facebook friend from Mexico admitted that my cousin sent her emails telling her that I was a liar and his family never bullied me. But then again John punched me repeatedly in the nose to make me sneeze uncontrollably because he found it funny the first time he did it. 

I look forward to shitting on his grave one day.

Why do you still believe that Trump won the election?

My name is John Iwaniszak and I believe it because I'm a fan of Tucker Carlson. He has a tiny pee pee like me.

Gerrie Steele here, Trump was sent by God and I love to pretend I'm Christian.

Bess Greene is my name and being a media dupe is my game.

My name is John Collier and I want to go to Brokeback Mountain with my illiterate  BFF Matt. 

I'm gifted. Just like Trump's kids. That's what my parents say. But I'm not allowed to talk to strangers who believe in evolution, like Susan Adams.

I'm John Iwaniszak senior and I live to prove that I am the alpha male, just like Trump is.

 

This sportin' life

 Jon Gruden may be gone but there are hundreds more racist, misogynistic, homophobes like him still in all levels of sport.

And speaking of sports, when I was young I was baseball crazy and I loved football too. But after my mom was killed on an operating table and I was forced to go live with my crazy ass bi polar aunt, her husband who lived to humiliate any male he saw as a threat to his dominance, and their bullying children, I found out they all hated sports, especially my cousin John. 

He despised football and would loudly proclaim it every chance he got. He belittled me for liking it and still in to adulthood he hated it and bizarrely, he held me personally responsible for every bad thing associated with it, as if I had some kind of power over others and since I was a fan I MUST think and act like all other football fans everywhere. If I was watching a game in our adolescence and he wanted to watch something else, or merely wanted me to stop enjoying something I liked, he'd tell his crazy ass mother and she would threaten to hit me with a belt or some other weapon to get me to stop watching. He chose to make my life more miserable time after time growing up. And she backed him up. Every time.

Of course he will deny all this and try to spin it as if his bullying was my fault, but that's what gas lighters do. I'll bet he indulged his own kid's interest in sports and never gave a second thought on how he purposely made my life harder when I was already having a hard time with all the bullying I had to endure.

Now I'm a grown man with no contact with him and a home of my own and I have Hulu with live TV expressly so I can watch sports. Sparky isn't a fan of football but she leaves me be while I watch and enjoy because watching sports was a bonding thing between me and her late dad. 

And I know he reads my blog so John, go fuck yourself you bullying piece of shit.

I lost count of all the times my shitty dead aunt and her awful kids said this shit to me

The last email I got from my my horrible cousin John included some of these phrases. He can not understand why I want nothing to do with him or his siblings. They think the bullying their parents did to me and my siblings was normal behavior. 
 

There's no there there

I took Sparky's parents for a ride over to where I spent my adolescence, Lee County VA.  I don't know what was more depressing about that area, the memories of being bullied by my cousins and their mentally ill mother while I lived there or the fact that Lee County hasn't moved an inch forward since I moved out in 1980.

No, not the best

Two things about this Adrian Peterson situation continue to piss me off.

The first thing is, the people who are still defending him by saying that they got hit by their parents and they turned out just fine.  These people are defending a super strong grown man who took a small tree limb off a tree, took the leaves off it, stuffed them in his four year old son's mouth, and then whipped the boy until he raised bloody welts on the little boy's body.  Really?  People are going to defend that shit?  THERE IS NO WAY THAT SHIT IS NOT ABUSE.  And you defend him by saying that you got hit?  So the fuck what?  The fact that you got hit and turned out all right doesn't make what Peterson did right or excuse his brutality in any way.  It, in fact, proves that you were raised by abusive psychotic parents who had no business hitting children and it proves that you did not turn out fine because you still condone violence towards children.

I was hit as a child.  My mother used a belt to spank us with and it was wrong.  My aunt and uncle., John and Gerrie Iwaniszek, who I was sent to live with after my mother was killed on the operating table in 1972, hit me and my siblings.  They used belts, switches, their fists, they threw pots and pans at us, they hurled insults at us.  Most every Sunday my aunt would make pot roast with potatoes and carrots for Sunday lunch.  Even though the taste and texture of cooked carrots made me gag and vomit, she tried to force me to eat them in order to prove that she was in charge.  She'd threaten me with physical violence and she enlisted her children in her sick and twisted crusade to make me eat what made me sick.  They were encouraged to tell her if they saw me not eating carrots and boy, did they ever love to tell on me.  So for years I hated to see Sunday lunch come around knowing that I was going to have to endure all that anxiety and possible violence.  I fucking hated it.  And in their minds, even now after all those years later, they all still think they nothing wrong.  It was one big joke to them.  One of the last things my horrible aunt said to me before she died was she wanted me to come visit her and she said, "I promise, I won't make any carrot jokes."  Her supper table abuse never was a joke to me.  Having to endure violence, the threat of violence, and the anxiety that surrounded Sunday lunch was never a laughing matter to me, I literally feared for my safety.  And why did I have to go through that shit?  Because some twisted old bitch wanted to prove she was in charge of me and because she thought it was fine to hit, slap, and make me suffer through psychological abuse because she was in charge and she got hit when she was a kid and she 'turned out fine.'

Her husband and children were just as bad as she was.  Uncle John tried to punch me for smarting off to him and he nearly wrecked the car he was driving on the interstate in the late 1970's on a trip to Michigan because he wanted to beat my sister Sandy.  He had a hair trigger temper that he didn't have a problem turning on me and my siblings because we weren't really his kids and because he got hit by his parents and he 'turned out fine.'   When my cousin John Jr. found out I would sneeze uncontrollably after getting hit in the nose, he would knock me to the ground and punch my nose to make me sneeze and he'd laugh like crazy, sometimes, he'd just reach over when I least suspected it and punch me in my face to make me sneeze.  And if I dared complain to his parents, they'd tell me to stop being a tattle tale.  His brother Matthew was even worse.  He went around telling anyone who would listen that I was gay, in his mind I had to be gay because I liked to read, wore glasses, was shy around girls, and I didn't like to shoot or trap animals.  He'd hit and beat on me at school and he encouraged his friends to do the same.  He even shot at me once, he fired a .22 rifle at my head but thankfully it missed me and hit the trailer were living in at the time, and his father didn't yell at him for shooting at me, he yelled at him for shooting at the trailer.

That's the kind of shit I had to put up with from people who's parents hit them and who thought they turned out 'just fine.'  Fuck that shit.  No one turns out just fine after being on the receiving end of physical and mental abuse. And no, I'm not ever forgiving any of them for what they did to me and my late siblings, they can all rot in hell for all I care.

The other thing I hate about this Adrian Peterson situation is, the amount of people who say that their parents did the best they could even though they hit their kids.  No.  If your parents or guardians hit you, then they didn't do they best they could when raising you.  They betrayed you by hitting you.  They stole your innocence and forced violence on you.  They didn't do their best, they did a shitty job of raising you and they owe you an apology.

Nearly true conversations: Israel and Palestine edition

Here's how most conversations go when one speaks up for the human rights of the oppressed Palestinians in Gaza:

Human rights defender: It's horrible how Israel is bombing the shit out of Gaza, it's almost as if they're purposely bombing the people of Gaza into the stone age so they can keep them under their thumb.

Israel defender: So you think all Jews every where should die.  How nice.

HR defender: No, I do not think that.  But I do think Israel is bombing and killing Gazans simply because they can.

Israel defender: Oh, I see, according to you Israel has no right to exist and you support all terrorists groups and people who want to wipe Israel off the face of the earth.

HR defender: No.  I do not support any such thing.  Israel exists, that's a fact and nothing is going to change that.  I simply want to see Israel stop killing innocent civilians, to stop bombing the infrastructure of Gaza, and to make peace with the Palestinian people.

Israel defender: The Holocaust wasn't enough for you Mr. Hitler?  Not enough Jews died in that to suit you and your Nazi buddies?

HR defender: Wow.  Now you're just spouting crazy shit.  I did not support the Holocaust, I wasn't alive back then.  I'm just saying that Israel, backed by the USA and most all other western powers, looks and acts like a bully when it comes to Gaza.  They've blockaded it with an eye to choke off any businesses that operate there, they bomb it on the slightest pretext, they've built a wall to keep people from escaping, and they won't let the Palestinians move freely inside their own territory.  And the Israelis keep building settlements on Palestinian land in order to annex that land to Israel.  It's a horrible situation and we need to put a stop to it.

Israel defender: How do you live with yourself you shitbag anti Semite?  I'll pray that you see the light and start supporting the brave Israelis in their struggle to stay free and hold that land until Jesus comes back to earth and gives it to us good Christians.   Now, aren't you late for a KKK rally you Nazi Commie?

Bullies

The film Bully opens today in some movie theaters across the country. I probably won't see it because it will bring to mind all the bullying I endured growing up. And the sad thing about most all the bullying I had to put up with is that it was done in the place that was supposed to have been a safe haven for me, my home.

When my mom died my two brothers, sister, and I got packed off to live with my Aunt Gerrie. Gerrie loved having a bunch of kids around, not because she loved kids necessarily, in fact I'm pretty sure she didn't like kids at all, what she liked was controlling and ordering people, especially those she thought who were weaker than her, kids and in her later life, elderly people, around. I saw immediately that me and my siblings were second class citizens in our new home. Gerrie, who I am convinced now was bi polar, treated us as if we were servants to her and her kids. Together with her husband John, she not only bullied me and my siblings, she taught her kids to do it as well.

She didn't always use physical violence against us, although she did use it at times, I remember being slapped, hit with belts, having pots and pans thrown at me and I saw her do it to my brothers and sister as well. She also bullied us with her words and actions. If one of us got praise for being smart, she's loudly proclaim that her kids had more common sense, which was far more important than the book learning me and my siblings might have. When my sister was voted homecoming queen, Gerrie would tell everyone that her daughter was prettier and more out going than my sister. In other words, nothing we could or would do was ever going to be better than what one of her kids did, and if we reminded her of that fact, then she find some excuse to either hit us or bully us into shutting our mouths.

Her husband John picked up on her ways very quickly and he chimed in with his own brand of bullying. He always made sure he was the alpha male in his house and his sons deferred to him in all things. However, for some reason he thought my eldest brother Charlie was a threat to his status so he took every chance he could to belittle and bully my brother. Charlie put up with his bullshit because he knew that once he graduated high school he'd leave and never go back, and that's pretty much what he did. First he went to college, then the navy, and then he settled in Oakland, CA so that he wouldn't have to be around my aunt and her nutty family.

My brother Karl escaped years of bullying when he ran away the night before we were all to move south to Jonesville, VA. He stayed at times with various members of my mother's family in and around the Detroit area, sometimes I think he was the smartest one of all of us kids because he decided that he'd had enough of the shit my aunt put the rest of us through. Karl never had a problem with telling others the kinds of stuff we had to put up with, the second class treatment, the violence, the insults, and my aunt never forgave him for it. She carried a grudge against him for the rest of her life. He ruined the image she tried so hard to project.

Gerrie bullied my sister Sandy because she looked at Sandy as a threat to her and to her daughter. Sandy, before schizophrenia and depression robbed of her who she really was, was a beautiful girl who was popular and well liked. People flocked to her and she was the toast of Jonesville for a time, which isn't saying much because that town is so little, but when your home life stinks, it's something to hold onto during the rough times. My uncle John also saw Sandy as a threat to his daughter, so between him and his wife they belittled, mocked, insulted, and tried to make Sandy less popular but they simply couldn't do it. However when her mental illness took over her life, Sandy fell back into letting them, especially Gerrie bully and control her once again.

Since the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, Gerrie's kids, as I said before, took to bullying us too. Her eldest son felt free to insult and demean anything we ever did. His brother Matthew took a different tack in his bullying, he thought me weak, so he loved to use physical violence against me, to cast aspersions on my sexuality, and since I wasn't a macho asshole who loved hunting and date raping, then in his mind I was a queer who needed to not only be beat up and abused by him, but by all his buddies too, which is why he encouraged others to treat me the same way he did. He loved to tell girls in our small high school that he'd seen my dick and it was tiny, although when you think about it, how sick is it that he'd go around telling women that he was actively looking at my dick. His sister wasn't much better. She had a huge sense of entitlement over us and me in particular. One day during a church youth meeting they asked all to make a new year's resolution, mine was to try not to break my glasses in that upcoming year. When Bess heard me say that, she cackled and said, "He's so clumsy. He breaks his glasses all the time and then mom and dad have to waste money buying him new ones." She got part of that right, I was clumsy but the rest of her comment was bullshit.

The one thing they all loved to do, and they'd encourage my siblings to join in with them, was to make me eat food that made me vomit. The texture and taste of cooked carrots makes me sick. It makes me gag and puke, which of course my aunt took as an affront to her cooking so she'd try and force me to eat those vile things most every Sunday growing up. She'd encourage her kids to make sure they kept an eye on my and that they rat me out if I didn't do as she demanded and eat the carrots that made me sick. They all took delight in watching me squirm and suffer at her hands. They'd cackle and whoop it up with unbridled glee if and when it came down to crazy Gerrie getting out the belt and giving me a whipping if I didn't eat those fucking carrots. Eventually she stopped trying to make me eat them by force but then the so called carrot 'jokes' started. These jokes were not jokes at all, they were just more bullying by my aunt and her kids, their idea of a carrot 'joke' was to remind me of times when I got whipped for not eating carrots. Constantly bringing up times when I got traumatized for not letting that bitch control me or force me to eat something that made me ill was not my idea of a joke. The sad thing is, none of those bullies learned that, some of the last things they ever said to me after my heart attack was did my cardiologist recommend I eat more carrots.

The last time I saw my cousins Bess and Matt they did mumble some half assed apologies for treating me so lousy during our teenage years but my crazy aunt went to her death under the impression that she treated us all equally. Her oldest son John also holds that view, which of course they would because rarely do bullies ever acknowledge their bullying or apologize for it. When my cardiologist told me after my heart attack and subsequent bypass surgery that I needed to cut as much stress out of my life as I could, I decided to cut my aunt her her children out of my life. Only my idiot cousin John tries to contact me from time to time, even after I told him to leave me alone. He's tried to comment here on my blog and he's called my home, even after I told him that the only way he was to ever contact me was through email so I could have a written record of what he had to say. But his sense of entitlement runs too deep and too strong to do what I ask, or perhaps he thinks he can still bully me, either way, I won't have anything to do with him or his siblings. His mother died, so she won't be able to bully anyone ever again, and I don't know if his father is still alive or not and I really don't care.

If there is any lesson to be learned from what I had to deal with it's this: sometimes bullies are where we least suspect they'd be but they don't have control over us forever. It's best to put them out of your life as soon as possible but if you can't, sometimes time has a way of removing them for you. If you're being bullied by anyone, especially if it's a family member, then I feel sorry for you and I wish I could do more than just tell you that it will get better. And I do know it will get better for you, it did for me.

Thanks

Many thanks to those who contributed to my fundraiser. I appreciate each and every one of you. Your generosity has touched me deeply.

And to my cousin who is fighting to get his donation back from me, you're scum. If the cost of the certified letter I sent your conceptual art cards to you is the price I have to pay to keep you out of my life forever then it was a great investment. I realize that you were raised with an incredibly huge sense of entitlement when it comes to me and my family, but seriously asshole, you need to get help so you can figure out why you have this deep sick need to be liked by those you used to bully. Consider yourself lucky you got the art cards I sent you. And you be sure to let the concept I wrote on them sink in that thick drug addled skull of yours, I know all those years of smoking pot have made you stupid, but damn, it's not that hard to figure out. I don't like you, I don't want to be around you, I don't want you to be around me, and none of that will ever change.

Tiny little bullies

I hate bullies. I hate it that some of these bullies push kids like this to suicide.

Growing up I wore black horn rimmed glasses, wasn't 'tough,' and was smarter than average. All this made me a target for bullies. Yes, I encountered bullies in school, but what's worse was when I went home, the house I lived in was full of bullies.

When my mother got killed on the operating table in 1973 in a Detroit hospital my two brothers, my sister, and I got packed off to live with my crazy aunt and her family. It became pretty clear pretty quickly what the deal was in her house. The deal was she treated us like crap, like we existed to serve her and her kids. She bullied us and treated us like second class citizens, and as a high school friend who I recently reconnected with on Facebook said, "...much like indentured servants; offering you one act of humanity, by allowing you guys to sleep inside the house." If we crossed one of the many boundaries my crazy aunt laid down, she'd think nothing of hitting us with belts, her fists, switches, and once, when I was 12, she threw a stainless steel sauce pan at me. On the day I got out of the hospital after my emergency appendectomy in the mid '70's, I got home and was laying on the couch reading the latest issue of National Geographic that I had gotten out of her purse, it had been sticking up out of her pocket book so it wasn't like I had to dig around in there to find it. She saw me reading it, snatched it out of my hands, and screamed at me for 'stealing it.' She shouted that if I hadn't just gotten out of the hospital she'd have whipped me for stealing her magazine.

And of course all this bad behavior by her towards us didn't go unnoticed by her children. They quickly learned to treat us like we were second class citizens who were there to be bullied. If we had some possession, be it a book, a piece of candy, a record, whatever, and they wanted it, all they had to do was to tell their mother we wouldn't share it with them and she'd force it from us and give it to them. They also copied her violence and psychological abuse towards us. My eldest cousin found out one day that when hit in the nose I would sneeze uncontrollably, so of course for the next few weeks he would chase me down, punch me in the nose to get me to sneeze, and he encouraged others to do the same. His brother not only used physical violence to bully me with, he loved to spread the rumor that I was, as he used to put it, 'a queer.' Both of them encouraged others to treat me and my siblings as badly as they treated me.

I made the decision after my heart attack to cut my crazy aunt and her bullying pack of jackal children out of my life. Being around them, hearing them, hearing from them, all brought my stress levels to rise. So I cut them out of my life. It took awhile for my crazy aunt to get the hint that I didn't want to talk to her when she called me. She finally quit calling and not too soon after that she died. Most of her children got the hint that I didn't want to talk to or hear from them and they quit bugging me.

But one of them has recently tried to establish contact with me through this blog. And because he was raised with such a high sense of entitlement towards me and my family, he can't imagine why I don't like him, won't let him comment on this blog, and don't want him in my life. And like all bullies, he's oblivious to all the bullying he used to inflict on me. When I remind him of some of the shit he and his dead mother used to do to me and my siblings, his only response is to tell me I need 'help.' Actually, I needed help back when I was living in that house with him and his crazy mother. I told him in an email recently to fuck off and I hope it sinks into his drug addled brain. Having a person who used to bully you try to be friends with you is like your rapist wanting to hang out with you right after he finishes raping you.

If you're being bullied, tell someone. And if they don't do anything to help you, keep telling people until someone does help. I couldn't tell anyone for years because the person who was supposed to be looking after me was the ringleader of the people who bullied me the most. And in a strange way, I'm glad others from that era saw what was going on because it shows that I wasn't making shit up and that outsiders could see through the mist of lies and smokescreen of respectability that my crazy aunt tried to project.

Standing up to a bully

I've had a troll problem over on Monkey Scan and I finally figured out who was leaving me asinine and snotty comments, it's a seriously deranged woman from Canada that has been trying to make life hard for my blog friend Wandering Coyote. This creature's name is Grace.

I first encountered her when she started plaguing WC's blog with hurtful comments. WC has been courageously sharing about her mental illness on her blogs and this Grace person saw fit to make fun not only of WC's mental state but also her appearance. WC took the high road and deleted her childish and hurtful comments and took to comment moderation on her blog. So this small woman Grace decides that she doesn't like WC not leaving her comments up so she starts a her own blog, which she has since deleted. On her fleeting blog she took more digs at WC and all those of us who defended her and who call her friend. Well, it turned out that having her own soapbox to carp about WC and all the other people she felt like were drains on Canada's health care system was not enough so she began emailing WC hateful missives.

But soon enough Grace from Canada decided that she wanted to expand her little world of hatefulness and she began leaving comments on Monkey Scan. She slipped one in anonymously before I changed it to where no anonymous people can leave comments anymore and then she left one under own name on my post where I put up the scanned pictures of the Beauty Queens of ETSU from 1956. Her comment, which I deleted, read something like this: "Oh Dr. Monkey you must be a faggoty gay boy since you like to put up pictures of girls in pretty dresses. Do you wear them too?"

Wow, stunning huh. She e stalks a woman having mental problems and then she leaves comments on my blog accusing me of being gay. Oh she knows how to hurt all right. I'll cry myself to sleep over this one for sure. Boo hoo, the mean sad lonely bully lady called me gay. Boo hoo.

I sent her an email telling her that I was proud to have been called gay. After all, look at what all gay people have done for our culture and our society in general. What I should have told her was that I wasn't gay but my boyfriend was. There was a time when someone calling me gay would have hurt me but those days have long passed and unlike her I've grown up, evolved, and I not only know who I am, I am comfortable with myself.

Since my heart attack a few years back I don't suffer fools or assholes gladly anymore so listen up Canada Grace, you're nothing but a low life lonely sad little bully. And your behavior leads me to believe you're not a Canadian at all, you're probably some maladjusted Washingtonian or South Dakotan. You need to grow up and learn to play nice with other people or stay the fuck away from them.

And now let's end this post with the great Tom Robinson Band doing their hit from the late '70's Glad to be Gay. This one's for you Grace: