Toxic Green

I have been at my current (as of this date) job for five years. I hit my five year mark around October 9th, 2007 or so. I think it's the longest I've ever worked at a place, mostly because I've worked in so many libraries while at school, I've lost count. I think I've only had two "official" jobs after graduate school. UBH (United Behavioral Health), the McDonald's of the Mental Health world, answering phones for a big insurance company, helping customers access their mental health benefits, very corporate environment and Eucalyptus House, my current job. I don't think I've ever been fired. I'm generally a good worker. I might have a few bumps in the road, especially at the beginning (I have, like who doesn't, authority issues) but I always settle down. So after five years, these two new women take over the program, a new Director and Assistant director and woah.

They come into the program and approach us (the counseling team) like they are having to perform a hostile takeover. And I think we were all just blinking, going "What?" because we had just been waiting to get these positions filled and some of us were even looking forwards to them coming on (my husband had worked with one of them at his house and highly recommended her). But suddenly we are dealing with irritable bosses who treat us rudely and like children. And those of us dumb enough, strong enough, to speak up and out find ourselves at the end of the barrel and over a barrel as well. Bastian was smart; he left due to his frustration around the new bosses. And after he left, I was the one left with the "big mouth", speaking up and, in their minds, against the Fluffy Bunny way of life.

Shadow exists, people!! Get used to it!

But alas, no matter that I have seven years of clinical work under my belt, that I'm a professional, that I know what I'm doing in this job and have worked here for five years. Suddenly I have four different issues I've been "written" up for. The last one being the "final warning and your next one is your termination". Considering no one else was being written up for some of the same "things" I was being written up for, I went up to the next boss at that point, to no avail. To my knowledge, no one else has been written up even though others continue to do the same thing that I was accused of doing. So, yeah, I feel singled out.

So as I was driving home from work the other day, fuming a bit about my supervisor's attitude, this song came up on my iPod. It struck me how appropriately this describes my situation and how I understand Toxic Green and Bypassing.

Insanity - Oingo Boingo

I'm so sorry, please forgive me
Who do I pray to to straighten out this problem?
Straighten out this problem, straighten out my mind,
Straighten out this crooked tongue, this crooked tongue, this crooked tongue.
My mind has wandered, from the straight and narrow.
My mind has wandered from the flock you see.
My mind has wandered, the man just said so.
My mind has wandered, I heard it on TV.
And the flock has wandered away from me now.

-chorus-
All around the world now
Like a big bright cherry cloud
Traveling from home to home
TV sets and telephones
Here it comes just like a storm
Bathe in it and be reborn
Time to let the world know
Welcome madness, say hello, say hello, say hello
Like a wave we cannot see
Washing over you and me
Hiding here and hiding there
Madness hiding everywhere
Such a curiosity
Here it comes to set us free
Plenty left for you and me
Say hello insanity

I am the virus, are you the cure?
I am morally, I'm morally impure
I am a disease and I am unclean
I am not part of God's well oiled machine
Christian nation, assimilate me
Take me in your arms and set me free
I am part of a degenerate elite
Dragging our society into the street
Into the abyss and to the sewer don't you see
The man just told me, he told me on TV

Do you think you're better than me
Do you want to kill me or befriend me

The alcoholic bastard waved his finger at me
His voice was filled with evangelical glee
Sipping down his gin and tonics
While preaching about the evils of narcotics
And the evils of sex, and the wages of sin
While he mentally fondles his next of kin
My mind has wandered from the flock you see
And the flock has wandered away from me
And he waved his hypnotizing finger at me

Let's imitate reality
Let's strive for mediocrity
Let's make believe were all the same
Let's sanitize our little brains
I'd love to take you home with me and tuck you into bed
I'd love to see what makes you tick inside your pretty head
I'd love to hear you laugh tonight, I'd love to hear you weep
I'd love to listen to you while you're screaming in your sleep

Christian sons, Christian daughters
Lead me along like a lamb to the slaughter
Purify my brain and hose down my soul
White perfection, perfection is my goal

Do you think you're better than me
Do you want to kill me or befriend me

Christian nation, make us all right
Put us through the filter and make us pure and white
My mind has wandered from the flock you see
And the flock has wandered away from me

Lets talk of family values while we sit and watch the slaughter
Hypothetical abortions on imaginary daughters
The white folks think they're on the top ask any proud white male
A million years of evolution, we get Danny Quayle

(chorus)

I'd love to take you home with me, I'd love to tuck you in
I wish I could protect you from the wages of our sin
I'd love to hear you scream tonight, I'd love to hear you cry
Protect you from the madness that is raining from the sky

(chorus)

I'd love to take you home with me and tuck you into bed
I'd love to see what makes you tick inside your pretty head
I wish that I could keep you in a precious Chinese box
On Sundays I would pray for you so it would never stop
I'd love to hear you laugh tonight, Id love to hear you weep
I'd love to listen to you while you're screaming in your sleep
I'd love to soothe you with my voice and take your hand in mine
I'd love to take you past the stars and out of reach of time
I'd love to see inside your mind, to tear it all apart
To cut you open with a knife and find your sacred heart
I'd love to take your satin dolls and tear them all to shreds
I'd love to mess your pretty hair, I'd love to see you dead.

Prepare for the bizarreness of an Oingo Boingo video and the fantastic creepiness of Danny Elfman. Well, you used to be able to, but again, nixed. Different and really long. (That one nixed, medium length put in. Sigh, I hate when this happens).

I've Got A Good Mind...

Well, the last straw was yet ANOTHER write up at work and finally I took it up to the next level, my bosses boss. As I was driving to the meeting with said person, Rock You Like a Hurricane come up and I was thrilled and inspired and walked into the meeting feeling pretty good. And I did pretty good job, stayed professional, mature. But to no avail, she agreed to just about everything my bosses had said. I'm sort of like "Whatever" at this point. I know I'm a good worker. I know this isn't about me but my Toxic Green bosses and their Fluffy Bunny, bypassing attitudes.

So after I left and was driving (my nice new scooter, well, a few weeks old or so) home, this song came on my iPod and I felt relieved. Maybe it is time to go. Ahh, but so confusing. But in that moment, it felt so right.

As to the lyrics, I couldn't find an official listing and many sites listed different things for "pack it in, jack it in", so I'm just putting the one up that sounds the closest!!

Maddening Shroud - Frou Frou

Sometimes I like to get away from this maddening shroud
Sometimes I'll have you know it's all insane
Maybe it's time for me to pack it in
Maybe it's time for me to jack it in
Maybe it's time for me to halt...

I've got a good mind to throw it all away
Throw it all away
Throw it all away
I've got a good mind to throw it all away
After all, what is it worth

Sometimes I like to get away from this saddening crowd
Sometimes I feel my life is all in vain
Maybe it's time for me to pack it in
Maybe it's time for me to jack it in
Maybe it's time for me to halt...

I've got a good mind to throw it all away
Throw it all away
Throw it all away
I've got a good mind to throw it all away
After all, what is it worth

Some days my strength walks out
Some days I can't go on
It is for real
We can walk about
We can work it over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and...

I've got a good mind to throw it all away
Throw it all away
Throw it all away
I've got a good mind to throw it all away
After all, what is it worth
I've got a good mind to throw it all away
Throw it all away
Throw it all away
I've got a good mind to throw it all away
After all, what is it worth

Some sort of strange anime clip video, not the official artist's music video.

The Mist

FUCK!!!!!!

(*run around, screaming and waving hands*)

I just saw a trailer on TV for the movie The Mist, adapted from a Stephen King novella. You can go here to view it.

I know, y'all are saying "Yeah, yeah, it's Stephen King, paltry horror crap."

Well, let me tell you about The Mist. I happened to be reading it when I was working the tower for Port Control at the island of Diego Garcia when I was in the Navy. A tall tower with glass windows all around so you can see out over the harbor. So what, you say?

Well, Diego Garcia is in the Indian Ocean, about seven degrees south of the Equator, one to two thousand miles in any direction to the nearest land masses (Africa, west; India, north; Australia, east). A tropical island most people would love to vacation on. That sugar white sand, the luscious blue water you can clearly see your feet on the bottom waist deep, temperature not too hot due to the island breezes blowing over the small bit of land. Of course, unless you're in the military, you'll never see it. Sorry. But one thing about this very tropical island is that it had very tropical weather. Which includes a lot of rain. A lot of rain. No, really. A damn lot of rain. It could rain for fifteen minutes, it could rain for two days straight. And because this little island is sea level, large, sloshy pits of water would form up in the road ways (which had dips slightly below sea level), almost deep enough to hit the bottom of the little vans used around the island.

What's a little rain? It was miserable at times, those two day stints but the brief little "squalls" that swept over the island were refreshing.

There and gone. On land, it didn't seem like much, a brief spat of rain and then nothing, a lingering humidity left behind.

But sitting in that port control tower, I could practically see across the entire lagoon, the "bay" of water inside the "footprint" of the actual island land. And I'm merrily reading The Mist on one my duty shifts, I think on one of my first day shifts alone after training. So far, I had only experienced the squalls on land. They were fun, immediate and brief. But here I am reading about a thick, white mist taking over a small town with freaky, killer, trans-dimensional spiders or bugs swarming in it when I look up and see a solid wall of white advancing across the water from the opposite side of the lagoon, headed directly toward my little tower. I think my eyes got about as wide as they have ever gotten. I'm thinking of the people holing themselves up in the grocery market, with all those glass windows, surrounded by an almost opaque, white mist; creepy spider things trying to work their way into the store to sup on the tender flesh inside. I had learned the habit during training of keeping the tower door open since the little "office" could certainly bake with all that sun blaring through all that glass and at that moment, it was wide open.

You can damn well bet that I ran for that door, throwing it shut and locking it, clutching my hand held radio, eyes probably growing ever wider as the white wall bears down on me. You see, the squalls on land are tempered by the palm trees and buildings and, well, the small bit of land mass. But the tower was completely open to the lagoon. So when the squall hit, I have not experienced the like before nor since, except once getting hit by a really massive White Out dust storm at Burning Man. It swept over with an almost strange hissing noise and shook the tower practically to the foundations. It raged about my little enclosure, rattling and almost bowing the glass windows until I thought they would shatter (thus allowing all those nasty trans-dimensional beasties in, besides the concept of being shredded by exploding glass, besides just being fucking scary in the moment). Although come to think of it now, I probably would have been safer with the door open to let the pressure off the glass.

And I couldn't see shit. It was completely white beyond the windows, I couldn't even see the railing of the little catwalk of the tower, not two feet from the windows. I couldn't see anything in any direction and I had a 360 degree view from that tower. I think I just stood there, rather like a rabbit in shock, while the squall raged around me and my little tower. I was stunned by its power, in awe over this wild and almost savage act of nature. And of course, just waiting for those trans-dimensional spiders to break through and eat me. I am not kidding you. This is why I shouldn't have read or watched any sort of horror media at the time, I was a lot more lured into the story and less able to separate "reality/fantasy" boundaries than I am now.

Then the rain started lashing at the windows, blurring and obscuring my vision of that solid white, and suddenly, it was gone. It was so clear afterwards, as though the storm had swept away any particles in the air that might muck up distance viewing.
The sun was merrily shining across the lagoon water, making it light up with that fantastic tropical blue color that I have come to miss. My little tower had held up, the windows were fine. Of course, the tower and windows had been going through this almost daily for years but I didn't take that into account, especially having the fear of the King in me at the time.

After that first squall, I learned to just calmly close the door and would watch with some interest, always with awe, as those walls of white swept towards me, would not quake along with the tower and would almost shrug as it passed on by. But every single time, I was always reminded, even if faintly, of that novella, The Mist.

I don't know if I'll be seeing the movie or not.......

Rock You Like a Hurricane

Well. You know the song. Don't deny it, you know you do and you know you used to sing to it and probably even dance to it, so I don't want eye rolling of any kind unless it's to swing your long ass 80's hair hard in circles.

So you have to wonder what the quality of your life must be like if you wake up with the Scorpions "Rock You Like a Hurricane" stuck in your head. Because that's what happened to me this morning. Got up (at work) and "Here I am!!" comes crashing through my head like the iceberg through the Titanic. Great. "Rock you like a hurricane!!" it exuberantly continued. Oh great, even *I* remember the damn words. But then, the fun doesn't stop there because it sings out happily again... "Here I am! Rock you like a hurricane!", over and over. Like one of those mockingbirds that thinks that outside your very own bedroom window is the best place to go through his entire repertoire of sounds at the top of his lungs at three in the morning. And they have some amazing lung capacity for a little bird. And apparently, I don't know the words after all. Except those.

But I suppose it's appropriate for my life lately. I've been having a hard time at work with my new bosses. Hmmm, do I continue to tear them a new asshole? Really, this is my blog after all, so what. Bah.

So we got a new director and assistant director recently, about three or four months ago, I guess. And wow. Well, just, wow. Marty calls their style of approach "Toxic Green". Green being a level of a type of stage development created/put together by Ken Wilber. A narcissistic, integral philosopher bald fuck that Marty likes a lot. He's okay. I haven't really read enough of him to really know but I sure do hear a lot about him from Marty.

So apparently level Green is when people develop the mindset of equal harmony and destruction of hierarchy. The toxic side of Green would be taking this to a ridiculous level, a shadow level of bypassing bullshit. Where EVERYONE is equal and there is no hierarchy. When of course, there absolutely exists a hierarchical structure. So my bosses are so client-centered they border on insane. And very staff-ignorant. And in work like mine, you have to take care of your staff or guess what, the clients will suffer! Gasp! Wait a minute! By jove, they've got it all wrong!!

I was almost assaulted by a resident the other week. In the setting I work in, transitional housing, not an acute crisis program, violence towards staff is, at least to my understanding in the past five years or so, not tolerated. Period. You make a violent gesture towards staff, you are OUT. Usually next day if not right then (the police take you off and you're 5150'd). But the resident is still here and doesn't even have a three day notice, or a thirty day notice. Granted they didn't want to give him a 30-day notice, have him be more pissed off at me and me still working there. But please. He shouldn't be there anyway. But the police did not take him away when I called them when the incident happened. So after this, my bosses wanted me to sign a "Mutual Respect Agreement", stating that staff and resident will not be violent towards each other. The resident had told my bosses that I was the one to yell at him and raise my hand towards him. I refused to sign it, stating that signing this would play into his delusions that I was the one attacking him, not the other way around. My bosses didn't like this and on and on. Very annoying, very unsafe. I could go on and on but really, I'm so tired of the situation I could just puke. So screw them.

So, in the meantime, I've been waking up with these "Kick Ass" or "inspirational" songs in my head. Probably in a desperate attempt to keep me from saying the above to their faces. In an attempt to keep me from collapsing and quitting. Because I do like the hours and my benefits. So, the songs. Stuck in my head, most mornings.

Rock you like a hurricane, bitches!!

Fortunately, I have been waking up with better inspiring songs "stuck" in my head. Such as this one.

Good Times Around the Bend - String Cheese Incident

Gonna pick myself up off the ground
When that old feeling comes around again
I’ve had enough of feeling down
There’s something I’ve lost that must be found again

chorus:
Sometimes it seems like such a hard life
But there’s good times around the bend
The rollercoaster’s got to roll to the bottom
If you want to climb to the top again

Driving down the highway in the rain
Look out of my window and see that southbound train
It’s headlights still shining in my brain
Stayed right alongside me just to ease my pain
chorus

Well the snow is gone and the springtime’s here
And the rivers song is buzzing in my ears
Sit and watch the treetops sway
Here comes a breeze to blow my cares away
chorus

String Cheese performing live.



So. Way better than the drivel crap that was "Rock You..." (you know you loved it!!).

Rock You Like a Hurricane - Scorpions

It’s early morning
The sun comes out
Last night was shaking
And pretty loud
My cat is purring
And scratches my skin
So what is wrong
With another sin
The bitch is hungry
She needs to tell
So give her inches
And feed her well
More days to come
New places to go
I’ve got to leave
It’s time for a show

Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane

My body is burning
It starts to shout
Desire is coming
It breaks out loud
Lust is in cages
Till storm breaks loose
Just have to make it
With someone I choose
The night is calling
I have to go
The wolf is hungry
He runs the show
He’s licking his lips
He’s ready to win
On the hunt tonight
For love at first sting

Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Rocked you like a hurricane

It’s early morning
The sun comes out
Last night was shaking
And really loud
My cat is purring
It scracthed my skin
So what is wrong
With another sin
The night is calling
I have to go
The wolf is hungry
He runs the show
He’s licking his lips
He’s ready to win
On the hunt tonight
For love at first sting

Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Here I am, rocked you like a hurricane
Here I am

Sorry to have to do this to you, but....