Mother’s Day in the Empire State

Chapter 1

Introductions, Comments, Suggestions

This Deposition is from May 9th, 2021, and it is being prepared in response to Complaint # 21–4532 and Complaint # 21–6154. Both child abuse complaints come from the Town of Allegheny, New York. They are anonymous complaints about two (2) mothers abusing their children. My name is Officer Constantia “Connie” Munda, and my badge number is number is three, one, four (#314). I’ve been a Child Protection Specialist (CPS) for twelve (12) years in the New York Empire State. 

DEPOSITION TRANSCRIPT BEGINS:
5–9–21, 12:09 am

Dear Honorable Family Court and Good Reader: I’m driving way too fast and it’s a little after midnight, the beginning of Mother’s Day in the New York Empire State. The moon on my western horizon plays games with me and the silvery clouds that are moving in my same westerly direction. “Going West” here in northern Appalachia is the prevailing wind both physically and metaphysically. The American pilgrim traffic has been so thick here for the spiritual and financially desperate and their families for the last two hundred and thirty–four (234) years that this land is called the “Scorched earth.” 

I’m in an unmarked retired State Trooper car and I’m recording my Family Court Deposition on my ear hook with microphone. I will attach this Deposition transcript and approximately fifteen (15) People’s Exhibits for the Family Court and Good Reader. I’m leaving the Albany Capitol region and heading west as many pilgrims have in the past – towards the infamous Seneca Indian Great Hill and its Western Door to America. 

My target Town of Allegheny sits on the threshold of this doorway. My Empire State car, number two, zero, four (#204), a Trooper car converted to a Child Protection Services (CPS) undercover car, is a Ford(F) Interceptor. Low and heavy with excellent engineering this Mad Max car easily slices through the rolling hills of the Susquehanna River valleys. River roads shaded in a purple black, bruised and sleepy from a long winter roll away, winding along with the Chemung River. These Appalachian hills form a hallway valley to my moonlit Western Door for scorched–earth America and all its Great Awakenings. 

This path was not just blazed, but the earth was scorched by the American patriot’s Sullivan Expedition in 1779. Might was proven right to the six (6) Iroquois Indian Nation Tribes who mistakenly sided with the British Empire, both in the American Revolution in 1776 and The War of 1812. Then in 1830 the Western Door became a spiritual pilgrim holy land and path to spiritual experiments championing utopias, Christianity, slave’s rights, and women’s rights. There were the Shakers, the Quakers, the Latter–Day Saints (LDS – the Mormons), the Adventists, the Chautauquans, and even the Jehovah’s Witnesses. This antebellum Appalachia is a burned–over wormhole now, spirituality and culturally it’s an “Up–State” void, a blackhole, and/or, “Nothing.” 

I crack my car window to get some fresh air and stay alert. The Appalachian air is filled with emerald, green pine swamps, bloody dead possums, and skunks in heat. The night air is deeply haunted at this time of night, but I want to start my CPS surveillance and investigations around three–thirty ante meridiem (3:30 am) in the morning. It’s peaceful here in the nighttime with these enchanted little mountains rolling behind… if you’re okay with ghosts, anything is possible here. 

Traveling west into northern Appalachia is similar to going off the grid or slipping around in the night of a third–world country with the American military. Black operations function out of black operations that function out of black operations, which only destroys “Us” and strengthens “Them”. It’s black and fast here in northern Appalachia as I float back into our primordial cave and our lives become timeless and entangled. 

I try to get in the spirit of Appalachia and put my worn–out compact disc (CD) of Faith Hill and Tim McGraw singing nostalgically about beers in the fridge, muddy boots, and desperate house–for–sale signs going up back home in Appalachia. I think the song is called “Back at Momma’s.” 

The spring has not yet come to the Southern Tier. The frigid Canadian air with “Lake Effect” freezes my nostrils and washed hair. I roll up my car window and turn the heat up to eighty-eight (88) degrees. My exterior thermometer reads twenty–eight (28) degrees as I smell my hair / my favorite henna conditioner. The smell reminds me, I need to order more as I’ve already watered it down. The weather here on Mother’s Day in May in the North Country is still like late March for the rest of America (Lows: twenty–five (25) degrees, and Highs: forty–eight (48) degrees). It’s cold and spooky here… especially with the supernatural Ides of March lingering perpetually here in shadows of north Appalachia. Here on May 10th, 2021, only a few spring flowers – mostly daffodils, have pushed through for Mother’s Day 2021, but there is plenty of mud pushing up our frost heaves. 

I come from West Virginia, so I’m not used to these low temperatures in May. Let me tell you Family Court and all you non–Yankee readers out there with thin blood like mine: There is something even more horrible than blizzards and the cold winter season that the sadomasochist Yankees seem to enjoy. 

In New England and “Up–State” New York there is something to live for after being incarcerated for five (5) months (mid-November to mid-April). Imprisoned by four (4) feet of snow, and not confined in your bright, airy large home, but in your ten by ten (10x 10) bedroom. There one sits in a windowless black igloo that resembles a homeless cardboard camp under a bridge, or a lame Burning–Man (BM) camp. Here in this cold discontent, one has to look forward to a “Mud Season.” There one sits shivering even in April and May when your ten-by-ten (10 x 10) bedroom with a space heater between your legs is still your only home. 

Your home used to be your well–lit spacious two thousand (2,000) square foot home, but no northern Yankee can or will afford to heat their whole house. If you thought wet snow was hard to shovel just wait until you have to dig out your car from soft wet mud up to its axles.

The grey sun doesn’t win in Up–State America; even now in May the air smells like wet earth and decomposing leaves. The overall landscape color is that of old, bad, red meat or dried blood. It’s raw, wet, and chilling to the bone here in northern Appalachia, even in the shadows of hot and muggy August. 

I forgot how talky (annoying?) Tim McGraw is in the beginning of this big Mama song, but when Faith Hill comes in and harmonizes, she changes the song from a whiny redneck leaning on the back of his pick-up to a beautiful ballad. Unfortunately, Faith Hill is only whispering in this song, but the slide guitar keeps you tuned in. And then the ooo- ooo- ooohs hit… I’m in the middle of the ooohs right now – this is a musical denouement if I’ve ever heard one. I slide my car window down going seventy-six miles per hour (76 mph) and yell to the possums, coons, and Appalachian blackness,” Hey soundman, turn up the Faith! 

Because everyone needs Faith in Appalachia!”

There is left over brown snow here in the shadows from the mid–April Nor’easter blizzard from a few weeks back that dumped three (3) feet of wet snow on Us.  Along the roadside yellow daffodils are being dusted with snow that looks like confectioner’s sugar on golden caramel candies. Regardless, I can smell the red and brown leaves dying / composting, and an Appalachian summer coming. But spring in Appalachia… a cloudy leftover embarrassment from a St. Patrick’s Day party lingers till summertime with bloody knives still being twisted and muddy tires still spinning. Here in the Southern Tier the winter is never really gone — it lives in the earth and the icy rocks like an evil tradition transposed into a new holiday. 

So, thank the Lord for my warm Ford Interceptor. Aagghh, the luxury of going seventy–six (76) miles per hour (mph) and feeling like I’m at home in my bathtub with a glass of Chianti. A wet, Finger Lake chill runs up my lady–like pant leg and I curse myself for not wearing heavier leggings. I turn up the heat in the car. Peering out into the darkness: the millions of stars are burning bright tonight as I drive west into a land darker than any night sky in New England or the northeast. The white glow of my dashboard instrument lighting is calm and discreet. 

My car smells and tastes like a brand–new car even though this New York State Trooper car was decommissioned seven (7) years ago. A cold Canadian wind blows snow flurries across my windshield as the Empire Troopers (every five (5) exits) clock me doing seventy–three (73) miles per hour (mph) in a fifty–five (55) mph zone. The Troopers have automobile license plate readers, and they instantaneously know I am the Empire Law – I am one of Them. 

There’s a seventy five percent (75%) chance of two (2) to three (3) inches of snow by dawn. This was my spring radar for Mother’s Day 2021 in Appalachia. Not just physical and emotional traps, but speed–traps and honey–traps around every hidden corner, and on every exit.

Honorable Family Court, and Dear Reader, I cannot submit this “Mother’s Day Madness” deposition without telling you my own motherly stories. 

My grandmother was Anna Jarvis from West Virginia, and she started the Mother’s Day Holiday in America in 1908 as an anti–war Holiday for women and mothers.

Thirty–five (35) years later, she was forcefully institutionalized because the floral industry, chocolate industry, and war industry didn’t think her Mother’s Day anti–war Holiday was profitable – or “American.” 

My grandmother told me these industries smeared, litigated, and grinded Grandma Jarvis into the grave. Hallmark cards, the Florist’s Transworld Delivery (FTD) company, Hershey (HSY), and the war industry publicly ridiculed her a “Crazy woman.” They assassinated her great character and branded her NOT a “Good mother.” But please mark my words Family Court and Good Reader: before she was incarcerated, Anna Jarvis vibrated and burned brighter than any other human I’ve ever met. 

Anna Jarvis is in fact the person who named me Constantia Munda, or Connie. She said in Latin it meant “Constant Perseverance.” My Grandma, or Mom, as I call her sometimes – because my real Mom was never really around – was a nurse in West Virginia during the American Civil War. Grandma Jarvis was a doctor’s amputee assistant. Granny used to say in her lovely southern Appalachian drawl, “I sawed off more young men’s limbs with my hack saw than a Kentucky chicken farmer.” 

This was Grandma Jarvis’s daytime / teatime / bourbon–time folly, but I was awoken many nights as a child by Grandma Jarvis screaming on the floor in some type of trance. I’d run to her elegant bedroom, and she would be sleep–walking or more like sleep–sawing. Grandma in the pitch–black darkness would be kneeling on the floor, or leaning over a table, wrestling with something. Grandma Jarvis would be talking / yelling in some guttural alien language that sounded like she was speaking backwards, but somehow, I telepathically understood her. Grandma Anna would yell at me, as she physically fought the wounded soldier. I was trying to hold down the wriggling young man as my grandma sawed his shredded and disfigured legs off. She would be yelling at me to get on me knees next to her, which I did, as she was undulating with the writhing man who would walk no more. I would play along and hold my man’s leg as my mother’s hack–saw teeth picked, nicked, and sawed a God–made invention off a beautiful man. All for a man–made war.

After years of playing along with Grandma Anna and her nightmares I noticed a glow or aberration of the ghostly Union soldier’s spirit as we had him pinned down on the make–shift operating table. And then after my grandma cut one leg off – I heard a sickening thud as it hit the hollow wooden floor in the old grand house. 

Grandma and I went to work on the other leg. I was looking at her trying to control the man and then slowly I started to feel the man’s leg in my hands. I recoiled in horror; the ghostly insanity of war was in me. My grandma yelled at me again, “Stop being a prude and hold this soldier down!” I grabbed hold of the leg and could feel my mother’s saw ripping flesh and muscle away from the bone like a dull wooden saw cutting through brown lettuce and lard. The soldier screamed in terror! And then Grandma Jarvis’s saw quickly hit the bone, and the soldier fought for his life, but his past life was a lost cause. 

I remember holding thick wood; two by fours (2 x 4s) for my carpenter father when he would cut Them, and a human leg is no different than a two by four (2 x 4). The block of wood or the stump of leg makes the same noise when it hits the floor. The bad–end / the dumb–end noise says, “I’m dead now and best thrown in the fire.”

The leg lay on my mother’s bedroom floor like a struggling fish wriggling on a floating dock. I tried to grab the leg, but it wiggled out of my hands like a fish gasping for air / for life. My grandmother continued to hold and ride the young man’s shoulders – she wrestled the stumped soldier to the wooden floor. I finally grabbed the leg, but I was frozen and paralyzed as my dead–fish limb slowly died in my hands. I could feel its heartbeat fade: thump–thump, thump–thump, thum–thum, thum– …. Thum – …. Thum – …. Thu – …. Th – …. It was unbearable and unspeakable. 

My grandma yelled in that strange guttural alien language again. My Granny cried to the man and cradled him as he fell to the floor and curled into a fetal position. Mom sung in lullaby tones in that disturbing language to the soldier who would stroll no more. My hands felt wet – drenched in blood. I put my bloody hand on my mom’s shoulder to wake her. I shook her and there was nothing there in the dark bedroom except my grandmother and a Yankee paraplegic groaning in pain – asking God to kill him. 

“God almighty, I’m sorry… God almighty please don’t let we walk the earth a war–cripple! Please kill me!!!” There was silence, but I swear to my Maker, I swear to this Family Court, and I swear to you Dear Reader – I heard another man laughing. Laughing quietly who said, “I told you so hero–boy, but you didn’t listen… enjoy your wheelchair.” 

God was laughing at Us… covered in blood living in misery. I died a little bit right then and there, because I suddenly realized God our Creator was uncaring, malicious, and vindictive. I shook my grandma more violently and all I could hear was lullabies, groaning, and laughing. I ran out of her bedroom that night unable to wake her. I never went back into my grandmother’s bedroom, and as for her nightmares, I allowed her to wrestle those demons alone. I’m an eternal and infinite coward for that. I’m a bad granddaughter, and a bad nurse, and let’s get this out of the way – I’m a bad mother.

And all bad parents can take my litmus test to see if they have failed at raising their young: Think back to when you graduated high school or college and think about the opportunities you had at your doorstep. Now on the other hand let’s look at the opportunities your children have at the same stage of their lives. If your children have fewer opportunities for food, clothing, and shelter, than you did, then you’re a parental failure. You’re a mommy-mooch and a deadbeat dad, because you’ve either devolved, or you let society devolve.

And bad mothers usually aim to be a great lady like my Granny Anna Jarvis, and while she wasn’t necessarily a good mother,  she was a great lady. Unfortunately, the flower, chocolate, greeting card, and military capitalists put her in the sanitarium because her idea of parenting was different than Americans’ idea of “Motherhood.” Those “Judeo–Christian pirates” (my grandma’s language – not mine) couldn’t pigeonhole my grandmother into an “Eve” or a “Mary.” 

Motherhood for war is where my mother died. On the other side of the scale: mother without war is a special place, a safe place, a friendly place. But sorry to say, my mother died in solitary confinement with few friends or associates in a dirty padded room, in a Philadelphia nuthouse. Regardless, I still have her letters which I carry with me in my old Air Force satchel. 

Was my mother crazy? Was my mother abusive? Am I abusive? Am I crazy? Well, what mother is not crazy and abusive who lives within an Empire. Our “Red–Queen” capitalism and Mother’s Day Madness is just part of the patriarchal game. 

Is this a woman question – a querelle des femmes? The failure of the female mind / the creative soul, the white yin, is in question. Is there a cognitive bias? Are our processing strategies being arraigned under laws not seen to Us? And our enemy – the misogynist Them, is it all men or do women also relish their own subjugation? Has our room, lock, and allowance for freedom been revoked? Has femininity been evicted to the basement, to the toolshed, or are we living under the highway in the homeless camp? 

Has the hardy male cockroach – decapitated but still alive with festering sexism that hides in our society – been reincarnated after we killed it? I stepped on it and felt its ribcage being crushed under the ball of my foot. My foot’s nerve endings felt the cockroach die and the frequency was quantized terror. The cockroach oozed white goo from its crushed body, and I licked at it. The kill sent electricity up through my chakras, slowly… one by one, eventually reaching my third–eye soul. At that moment it felt like someone, or something, had just flipped a switch and turned me off. My once bright constitution and soul was moldy and sleazy now, yet I can still see and feel the fat roach’s antennae moving slowly, I can still hear and feel his heartbeat, I still feel his masculine eyes: dead and reptilian – gazing at me… Judging me… Objectifying me… Waiting in the shadows.

The vividness of value depends on our motherly “Intelligence” or Intel gathered. Besides an absence of evidence and the cumulative effect of probabilities, humanity / civilization, and mothers in particular have a preference for killing their children. Perhaps this is not a women question? But it is definitely a Red–Queen question, a selfish–gene question. A cockroach question… and not a woman question. What is the difference? My human Intelligence (HUMINT) is the most defensible Intel, yet within Intelligence there is no motherly Intelligence. 

My evolutionary future is controlled by my past and I look at the past through my grandmother’s letters. The first letter I hold dear is filed chronologically as one of the oldest – from 1892 – and it is from my grandmother, Anna Jarvis to me, Connie Munda. As I said, she was a nurse during the Civil War, but stitched up both Confederate and Union soldiers back in West Virginia because the State was divided on slavery. 

Anna, my grandmother, started the “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” in 1908 declaring, “Mother’s Day is a day outside the house for mothers so they can unite as a political force against raising sons and daughters for war.” 

My grandmother was a potent and progressive woman, but my grandmother was swimming against the times.

I have this letter tucked in my old military satchel from Air Force bootcamp. Yes, I’m a military woman, which is an oxymoron I suppose — a creator within the business of killing. M–8888 is written in permanent marker – notating the first letter of my last name and the last four of my social security number – on the outside of this satchel. I like M–8888 graphically and metaphysically. It makes me realize my starting point alphabetically and numerically in America – my foundation in America: M–8888. Before the military I was low class dust in America, but now I was a player on the matrix / on the graph. I was a coordinate on the war axis – M–8888, and I was on an Air Force flight to the wild blue yonder.

M–8888 was an easy and memorable number for my airman and airwoman in the Air Force to remember. “Munda–8888” was the easy mail–call and easy lost laundry–call with a lost panty thrown in my face that had my “M–8888” scrawled on it in black on the waistband. You see, all military personnel have to put their coordinates on all their property including my all–cotton panties. Everyone knew me and I knew everybody. Not because I was a red state Mary or a blue–state Eve, but because I was from rural America and the Air Force was a happy step up for me socially and most importantly – financially.

But for those girls coming from the blue–state coasts – being in the military was a step down. For some reason those blue–state babes in the military didn’t have wealthy connections to businesses or opportunities back home. So, these blue–state sweat–hog women from inner cities and lez–be–frenz women from suburbia had to join the military. The majority of which is from southern red–state Appalachia. All of Us red- and blue–state suckers are unlucky souls… we Americans (with our country two hundred and thirty-four (234) years old) still have to maybe die and kill for our food, clothing, and shelter. We have to kill in order to have a chance at getting out of poverty. We have to kill in order to live… and this makes me sad. Then it makes me very angry. 

Didn’t Quincy Adams say, “I am a warrior, so my son will be a merchant, so that that his son may be a poet”? 

Three generations into America in the mid–19th century we did have America’s best minds flower upon the world. Emerson, Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and Wharton were the American Renaissance – the fruit of our American Revolution. The American Civil War happened on the heels of this New England Transcendentalism, but America has never regained that artistic drive ever again. And because in America, if you’re not driving – you’re dying, America rapidly devolved: artistically, literally, physically, and therefore of course, metaphysically, and spirituality.

And I am certainly no poet. I’m a rent–a–cop for Family Court, arresting polluted and perverted parents who abuse their children. And in a greater common sense or commonwealth sense, or humanity sense – these pervs abuse OUR children. The New York Empire feudal system is thriving – because the Empire hates its children. I know this because my son and daughter are not educated to be poets. The Empire’s educational system makes my children scared, jealous, and deranged. I didn’t know this coming from West Virginia (WV) Appalachia. That’s because in those smokey hills of America whether for a woman or a man there: the multiple–choice life question on where you want to spend your life in Appalachia was not multiple-choice. 

Appalachia is a duopoly from the start — am I going to jail today or am I not going to jail today. It is a prisoner’s dilemma question couched unsuspiciously and unthreateningly as a harmless “Do you drive a Chevy or a Ford” question. Similar to the political, “Are you a Democratic or Republican?” question. All these life choice questions are sold to Us a as multiple–choice question by Them.

But these multiple–choice questions are really duopoly questions in a two–party life, in our third–world West Virginia. Appalachian economics are a little Cournot, a little Bertrand, and together, a “Nash–Smash Equilibrium.” In Appalachia, the cold duopoly is the coal mine or the military recruitment office in–between the online college and a sleazy pizza parlor. The Nash–Smash Equilibrium choice, the equilibrium of a country two hundred and thirty–four (234) years old for its children is: A: a life in a hole, or B: a life killing it. Life in America is sold as a zero–sum game, but it is really a non–zero–sum game — it is a minimax theorem. Life in America is a prisoner’s question, not a women’s question. American mothers and her children live within a prisoner’s dilemma.

I chose to kill it, but will never think of myself as a killer, a New Yorker, an empress, or part of the Empire. A bad marriage to a dead–beat Yankee, and then a divorce: me keeping the two children… stranded me here in New York State. I also realized the horrible education system in the rest of America and thought, “Why would I move from the Empire State? I need to persevere… My children, a ten (10) year–old boy emperor in training, and a twelve (12) year-old empress in training would take a serious educational, and more importantly, a social step down if we left the Empire. Sadly, I continued to meditate to myself… if you cannot beat the Empire — join Them! Morally, metaphysically and on the right–side of my brain I admit sadly to myself… Constant Perseverance.”