Go Postal

I spend a lot of time thinking about mailmen. And yesterday evening, as the day’s heat sizzled off every surface, I had the occasion to meet two of them in a moment of repose; they spoke to me like I was family, not a beat skipped in our common purpose to connect at levels so uncommon for strangers these days.

One is a woman. A mail woman. The other is her husband. Suffice it to say they were delivered by the mail to each other, and candid as they are about the challenges of being married, and being mail people, the radiance of their being, together, and separate in their own rights, rushed like 17,000 goldfish swimming straight to my heart, then burst into a lotus flower, with petal after petal unfolding as we spoke.I had so many questions.  “Do you have Benefits?”

“Barely.”

“Workman’s Comp?

“No—it’s complicated. Postal workers don’t work for the government, really.”

“What would make a carrier’s day?”

“A comment. A thank you.”

“No,” I say, “like cash.”

“Well, if you are someone who really works us, and we go above and beyond for you, a $20 at the holidays makes a big difference.”

“How did you get into it?”

“I always wanted to deliver the mail,” the post lady says, pointing to the place in her chest that says the truth before it ever gets to our lips. “I just thought it was a great thing to do. What I never considered, were the extremes.”

Here’s the truth they didn’t have to tell me, but what I need to hear and hear more about—the USPS is a major revenue provider for the US government, securing massive amounts of secured retirement funds for other government employees. They now deliver on Sundays for Amazon. No air-conditioning in those vehicles. Not a lot of heat when it's cold outside. And the USPS doesn’t shred and recycle junk mail. It has been told to me before the USPS works like many high revenue, not for profit monopolies, to fire its employees almost the moment they train them—perhaps explaining why people in so many "not for profit" sectors, “go postal" and decide to take drastic measures against unethical practices no matter the risk of personal reputation or pride.

Be as You Wear, The Good Hood Company, functions primarily to hijack the emotional processes that result in “going postal,” well, because even when a work induced mental meltdown doesn’t result in murder and suicide, it rocks the foundation of a community, and work induced mental meltdowns happen because a person is at war with her psyche, not with the world or with the company. Work induced mental meltdowns are happening all around us, in large and small ways. From the numbers, it looks like buying things we don’t need is one of the great symptoms of disease of overwork and undernourishment, and the postman, cometh. The postal carrier, sees. 

To rely on a service that combines the most toxic elements of bureaucratic and corporate atrocity works hard against the radiant heart which is the signature on every one of our hoods. That the USPS doesn’t recycle—ugh—it tears at me, but the people who carry the hoodies, well they are the ones we are thinking about.

The mail carrier must ignore every injustice. S/he must ignore the weather, ignore the attitudes of ingratitude. Ignore the machine. S/he knows what she does and why. At the same time, as with so many of us who find the joy intrinsic to our work, no one is looking more forward to his chance to retire—the man of the couple tells me, “but in the meantime, we laugh. And have a good life.”

What luck is mine to be a member of this little neighborhood—where I get to meet and be friends with the mail people who are the actual messengers of love and light, and delight—and when they aren’t carrying mail, the woman of the couple carries an infant girl for the days while her mother who desperately needs some roots in order to grow wings, works to make a life in a hood where she is also a transplant. Some people have made it their life "to beach," rather than "to bitch" about all life never gave them, and beach bumming is nowhere in the equation. I came to live for half the year in NC, not to escape the life I had carefully constructed in New England, but parts of it needed to be dismantled, or else. Almost to the day of my own postal size meltdown, I have arrived here, there, everywhere with only one thing in mind—which is how to best carry my good hoodies to every good hood where I become fortunate enough to contribute to its keeping. Every kid has to grow up somewhere, and each of us can influence the environment, regardless of what our "business" is.

If I can survive extreme affluence, extreme poverty and many of the psychological traumas associated with both (which are the same);  if I can go postal over the social injustice and inequity I fought along with other educators and civil servants for 20 years without any actual blood on my hands, and return to tell about a time I remember, not so long in the past or in the future, where each of us knows that if we are alive, we are changing the world—then we can, and we will, build good hoods even in places where very bad things have happened. Our hearts depend on it.

What Will The Children Learn about Independence Day?

Let's get personal, for a minute--after all, it's Independence day--the day of independence from everything that is not you and that is not me. So, let's get personal, and let's get personally, free. 

Drugs aren't personal-- just like death isn't personal. But we are people; life is personal; this is the great thing about being people-persons on a planet-place with its own sun, and moons, and oceans, rivers, lakes, goats, puppies, wolves, lions, kittens, bears, bugs, tigers, giraffes...and enough food for all the people we have on the planet RIGHT NOW, and any others from now on who we choose to have, freely. See, making people is free--but we have made it a business called manufacturing humans. Schools teach children how to earn and spend. Children watch their parents struggle to earn and spend less than they earn. Banks hold all the money and buy things that don't exist in order to manufacture things that humans thing we need because we are free. But when money loses its value, which is has; when the drinking water gets dirty, which it is,  the parents of the children pay more taxes to clean up water that was already clean. Then sickness happens, physical and mental. We are in it--a plague that will only be viewed by history. How did becoming free mean thinking that we need all these medications besides food and water; besides love and sex and music? -Because we are free, but actually, we are slaves to an economy, a system of labor, and liquid capital without collateral for longevity, which leads to "loss" of capital for an economy and to salvage a nation, that said it freed the slaves--

No wonder we are all trying to heal our cosmic pain, which is caused by being slaves to the chemicals our bodies naturally receive and contain--

See, drugs, are for sale,  and they can be sold safely, by anyone we want,--when People, are "free"--when people agree, "we are not for sale."

HOORAy! hAve you ever just wanted to celebrate a day where we are FREE? Really and truly free? Here's my idea--we HAVE SO MUCH FUN BEING PERSONAL PEOPLE TODAY-- Cry, yes--our planet is hot with greed; Resist, yes! Resist! any instinct to do less, when you know you can do--just a little bit more, loving, grieving, winning, losing, giving--but, please, whatever we do today, let's make it very personal to the whole world, this incredible truth of being human--universally, which is this--each of us is fighting a battle our ancestors already won for us, and they lost a lot first--like everything, all their goats, and sheep, their buffalo, their languages, their rivers, their sacred medicines, their jungles, their farms, their lovers, the loves of their lives--for one reason, so that their children (that's USA) would be, and remain a land of the FREE & the BRAVE--open to all and to any person, from any place who agreed on this one thing--that we would allow each other to be free, no matter what God, whose bed--not a matter of life or death--what S/HE said. We agreed to one thing, after all the small-pox and massacre of indigenous people---remember, we agreed, to be, personally, You. And personally, Me. Free from the burden of social inequity. I mean, we have messed it up over the years--but what about now--here's another chance--to be free from dependence on any idea, place, person, or thing. And let's take it personally. It's a personal choice to be free. You don't have to be free like me--be free like you want to be. 

Today, I medicate myself with water and plants and animals raised by farmers I know--today, I am able to drink from a "clean" source, and because I can eat freely of the hot or the dog, the fu or the pha or the tof, my liver can detoxify anything I put into my body--and this is the beauty that makes biology, and not history, not thinking, the source of our freedom. My privileges are many, but most, to offer you a product to wear on your body that, should you choose to use its power, can end the war on terror, from inside, out. Be your own Heroin. And be free. Always & Already.

See, I love a well-fitting pants-suit, but I was born in a birthday suit--barely alive, but breathing and kicking and having won the battle my grandparents had already done--and like most indigenous people--they lost everything (we are all indigenous people, btw)--

Everywhere, there are slaves. In the US, and inside each of us and in all of the people we meet, there lives a slave to some idea we have of who we are, what we should wear, who we belong to, and what we should be. When what we are is in this freedom ring together--once the bell also called consciousness was rung, it couldn't be unrung; our political, religious, economic, ethical freedom is never at stake--and it never actually was, and we can agree that it never will be--and let freedom RING.

What will our children read about us from looking at our tweetstory e-books? 

Will they ask, "What kind of "civilized people" needed a holiday to remind themselves that they were free? And why did they eat so many hot dogs and drink so much beer all day? Eeew. I thought they were, um, like, independent."

Buy a hoodie. Add a heart. Be free, now. Be love, now. Be light, now. It's really just, personal. 

Independent Blunders & Gold Star Wonders

Founding a clothing company for the sole & soul purpose(s) of funding the daily activities of The GoodBrain Project's basic love and service wasn't by design. When funding for NYC Public School renewal dwindled and vanished in the years from 2013-2016, I knew it wasn't personal. One devastating banishment after another by educators from both the private and public, rural and urban sectors, who I thought were my best friends weren't personal--but/and they showed me that the "broken systems" and "charity waters" that affluent people throw parties to protect live in the mind, and remain acceptable as some version of a "free-market" where almost no one I have ever met, is free.

So let's be--personal, and personally, free. 

Drugs aren't personal--just like healthcare failures aren't personal; just like death isn't personal. Not even success is personal-- the better we do in public service, the fewer opportunities there are to serve anywhere where children are being used as fuel for a terrifying future we must, right now, choose to lose as a habit of our own demise. If we continue to depersonalize--the whole world goes blind and deaf and dumb. We are people; this is personal. People are "free"--we are not for sale.

Here's the big deal--see, schools have a hard time being anything other than factories that manufacture goods to be treated by hospitals and prisons--they produce sick people who often break even the most sensible rules. Certain schools gear learning away from disease and incarceration, but the schedules, the rewards and punishments, the common duels between teachers, admin, and students prepare most people for lives of despair rather than sharing tools to repair what is not working. 

Certainly, there are places in both the public and private sector where stakeholders in education communicate and create collaborative and culturally relevant experiences so that children may grow into the fullest expression of themselves...but I'd be able to sell a hoodie for half the money if there were more than a few. Here's the clue--when 59,000 people a year are dying of overdose while almost 1/2 the population is headed for jail, the psych ward, or the system, our schools and our habits of mind and of heart have failed us, failed themselves, failed you.

It's not the system that is to blame. At work in public and independent schools for what will have been 18 years this last June--(that's crazy)--2,227 children's lives have passed through mine in ways that transformed me; 196 teachers have been reviewed, hired, and wired for sound, and 229 men, women, and children have sought my services independently as a means towards growth or inspiration to heal from a world of the completely deranged. And in 18 years, everything really has changed--but this one thing has stayed the same: we treat children as though we don't want them. And the truth is, we don't. Children have become the things we make when we can't make decisions; children have become kids--grazing in fields we don't bother to fertilize with anything but pesticides, grown up with parental gossip and gear-heads heating up the sidelines. Sport used to be for playing--now 27 games a season are for staying out of the house, staying out of trouble--and because of too many injuries on untrained bodies, or too much pressure on winning, sports are for getting into trouble. Steroid use, self-starvation, opioid abuse. An estimated 10,000 kids become addicted to pain killers because of sports injuries they are coached to "play through."

There is no system that can't be broken by basic love and attention--and while I am the least a fan of parent shaming, Be as You Wear strives to quit the habit of blaming everyone else for why our young people are failing in ways that end them rather than contribute to building in them a fitter, faster, wiser, fight. Parents of the world, unite! Children do not learn how to lie and cheat and bully and medicate themselves in school. They learn these habits from watching you. And yours are the mirrors I am looking through every time I meet a person age 12-22 who ruins her/his life with drugs and alcohol--it's not because of school; it because of a system of domestic rules, perhaps unconscious, that have made children cruel and unusually damaged, by everything, including school. And only a fool will dive into a shallow pool after a day of being taught how not to--which explains why children who are taught by adults who do a lot of drugs, learn how to take medicine before they turn year two.

If you are a family who does not medicate yourselves in any way, not with booze, not with drugs, not with tech, not with food, call me for a hoodie, I'll give you a few!

If you are a family that doesn't worry about money, or safety, or being cool, call me, and tell me what in the hell to do with a world in so much denial--we are becoming the tools of a system we aren't changing, but blaming for why we continue to lose.

In the same way we have come to retire our elderly population in the US as non-consumers, and therefore, non-entities, we ignore the needs of our young people who watch everything we do. The only clue they are getting is how to be addicted to deadly and less deadly toxins and thought toxins that make it possible for fewer and fewer moments of connection to cure whatever ailments we actually suffer by numbers and circumstance we can't control. 

We cannot know 99% of what happens inside the mind of another human being, but the 1% we share is the fact that we are made of the exact same stuff--dead stars, water, and so much wind, that without some grounding in our shared skin, we are about to blow ourselves away. This US Independence day marks a chance to become freedom fried once and for all from the things we aren't made of--fear, greed, and false pride. If buying a hoodie won't change your mind about who is to blame for your fate, or who you hate, or if you aren't done denying the truth of what it is you wish to make (music, art, a well loved home, or a healthy relationship where it's safe to mate), it will hold your heart as we try to part with idea that we are anything other than a 1 in 400 million sprint miracle of pure light and skin, and life--any other story of creation is a lie. It's personal. We are people--and it is time to love each other beyond the conditions, or because of them--I don't care why--I care for XY and 23 sets of chromosomes we have to multiply ideologically, if not biologically.

Never let the passion, love, and delight inside us die. 

Buy a hoodie. Add a heart. Know you are loved beyond the measure of what human ideas make, and let's eschew the fear of losing insurance, and rather, take our healing into our own hands, and let the power of our voices shake a few million people out of our slumber-- and right back into wonder. 

Why Farmers don't Grow Pharmacuticals

When Brooklyn, NY was being ravaged by Heroin in the 1970’s and black men were dropping dead at home and in Vietnam, not a lot was said. Then when crack was introduced to the urban streets, the subtle genocide against young black males in the US was raging again—and when all that failed to cut the Nubian root down, well, the antidote to urban renewal became mass incarceration.

It feels like sand stuck in my bathing suit to know that white kids dying of this overdose thing is the thang that is finally asking people to pay attention—that, and the suburban morgues are over-filling, but the truth is that once any deadly or toxic thing scourges a population of people with money to spend on “curing disease,” the issue gains the substantial enough revenue to build prevention, connection, eradication.

Until now, the response of affluent or “educated” families whose children who have become hooked on a drug that will quickly or slowly kill them is something of a paradoxical phenomenon—not one truly significant move has been made to cure the affliction, but hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent to rehabilitate an under-researched condition, based on the conviction that there is no cure for addiction.  Because we have built a school system, a conspicuous consumerism rooted in environmental degradation, and therefore, an economy that profits on the sickness and incarceration of the truly most gifted, we have raised a whole generation of rehabilitated zombies who believe that leaders show up well lit and backed by a green screen.

I never had to touch the heart-stopping killer drugs to nearly die of love for the uncured addict who thinks he is rehabilitated. Twice I did this for romance, and two dozen times for women, otherwise, whose families can't get this one--there is nothing shameful about Heroin, Cocaine, Meth, Ketamine, Benzodiazepine, or Nicotine abuse or addiction. These are big time medicines--and because your children do not know what they are taking, they took a thing that hooked them. If they are alive and clean even one day, your children are miracles. You are miracles for never giving up on them, but the cure is still very far away. And the cure happens again and again every day. It is free; there is no money that can pay for the kind of revision of life that must follow chronic abuse and addiction.

Here’s the truth—there is a cure for everything. But nothing can be saved—not even your own life. The opposite of life is not death, but we won’t live this way forever. The only opponent to LIFE is human thinking—and mostly the thinking that we can “save” anything, each other, ourselves. We must question everything, and in doing this, we connect with everything, and it’s likely that if you find out what happens to your brain and your body after prolonged use of drugs you never really learned about, you probably won’t die of a drug overdose, or anything other than good health. But here’s also the truth, the nasty shit, the drugs, the addictions, the mental afflictions, aren’t coming off the streets; they hang out in your living room, between the sheets. Unconditional love is the only way towards getting clean. The only bad neighborhood we build is in the brain. And escaping that hood is a one day at a time thang--no rehab can take you out, or keep you out, of a place that wants you dead, by charging 28k for a bed and some yoga therapy.  Save your money and measure your own success in taking 12 or 1200 or 12,000 steps towards the cure--but anyone who tells us that we have to pay someone else other than a farmer for our good health?--Well, that's the disease we're all sick with. 

The Wars Fought On Drugs, Jerry Garcia, Kurt Cobain & Purple Rain

Recreational drug use and abuse, as we have known it, has come to a swift end. Not the use, itself, and not the abuse, but the end of an age of ignorance regarding those plant based drugs, which can be used safely for medical and shamanistic treatment of myriad diseases, and those plant-based drugs which cannot be used safely, without the supervision of psycho-pharmacologists and pain management specialists. If the measure of safety is overdose and death rate, then we have a responsibility to get schooled on how the war on drugs has deepened our dependence on the things we do not need. No matter what we have ever thought, regardless of the drug or no drug experience, it is time to stop judging and start just saying “yes” to life.

Something has gotten inside us—an idea that we have something to fear—the war on drugs has always been what it said it was—all wars are fought under the influence of drugs.

Think about it in a small way—what was the last conflict that arose in your own life? What were you fighting about? What substances (even the legal ones!) were involved in the escalation? Were you hungry when you fought?

Every war on drugs is a lost cause. We are united through all our difference by one cause whose "effect" made us. This “cause” is called LIFE. Fill it with your chemical light, and see how free of all kinds of nasty chemicals we can be.

Rejection can protect or deflect. Connection is the cure. Do the right thing—get educated about the classifications, applications, and side-effects of the drugs you or your family members are taking. If you see something, say something. If you have questions for your doctors, ask. If you are worried about your child’s consumption of sugar or media, talk about it—none of us is alone, and the one life we can save, is priceless—it's our own, and every day, is a daily operation to remember what we are really made of...light, sound, and the energetic vibration.

Buy a hoodie. Add a heart. Raise the frequency of your goodbrain waves and make this "one wild and precious" solstice your deep sensation.

Hearts & Lies

Time doesn't heal all wounds--this is one of the lies we tell each other with the purpose of soothing each other in times of great agony, but it's a lie all the same. Until recently, I believed this lie, and many other lies told to me by people who only wanted to soothe me in times of agony. Until recently, I only understood lies as something we shouldn't tell, but the truth is, lies are most of we what we tell each other out the fear that keeps us fearful.

Here's what I mean. Every time I "think" something about what someone else is doing, or why, it's a lie. I have no idea why people do what they do, and neither do you.

Every time l tell myself that I am the way I am, it's another lie. I am nothing but an idea I have of myself and as soon as the idea of myself changes, I am no longer the way I thought I was. I am the way I think I am. The thoughts I choose to believe become the things I am and shall become.

This week marks the first of BAYW's mission to make overt what has been, for too long, a covert operation to end the plague of opiate overdose and death before it became a national emergency.  It seems we waited too long, but it can never be too late, to make straight what is a crooked road towards a nasty fate.

While it remains my intention to protect the identities of the people and professionals who have suffered the grave loss of life and reputation due to the lies proffered by the Drug and Alcohol Rehabilitation Industry about addiction, treatment, and continued recovery from the emotional and physical illnesses that arise from the disease of addiction, even long after cessation, I have also reached a crisis of conscience which calls me to act in defiance of the "acceptable lies" used to soothe the victims of entirely this preventable loss . Many of the lies being unintentionally told are by recovering addicts, in response to not a selfish, but a desperate need for soothing in a time of extreme grief over the rising numbers of drug addicted children and young adults who have been denied the proper resources for prevention in an age of information and information recovery regarding the more and less extreme effects of some drugs over others. 

For every ordinary person who has survived a death defying circumstance, there comes a time when an extraordinary impulse to share the story of survivorship arises--every one has a different story, which is why there is no such thing as "garden variety addict"--people aren't planted, we are cultivated from a whole mix of 23 sets of chromosomes, each. The time has come, to heed the call, so here is mine to you today. Say "Yes" to life, not just "No" to drugs. If you are a parent, remind your child--a yes to life is a no to harmful things. If you are a recovering person, give yourself some credit for stepping overt the lies we tell, to come clean, and by all means, share your truth, and we'll skip the misery. 

Buy a hoodie,  plus REDD certified T-shirt, put a heart on them--and let's build the energetic force of our "one wild and precious life." 

With Heart,

Athena