soulcast redux, and sehnen

August 22, 2011 at 12:29 am (musings, real life)
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sunday 21 august 2011….    turners toils

Well, it’s another strange feeling of traveling back in time. Though this particular bit of time travel doesn’t bring the pleasure that others do. To be journaling on SoulCast again feels weird indeed.

My first online journal ever, in april of 2008, was this one, Sehnen, but it wasn’t here then. I started writing it less than a month after the absolute worst and most damaging events of my life. I was naïvely hoping very hard for several things to result from that first journal, things which never happened. I was unloading every day on public computers, into my journal pages, small pieces of the anger and pain and resentment… small pieces offloaded so that I could just have enough release of steam to carry on with each foreign, ugly, unwanted day.

Then a couple of things happened in january of 2010. One was that SoulCast’s owners had decided they didn’t want the site anymore, and so they didn’t maintain things, and so it developed huge spam problems and huge loading problems, and became a monumental mess. The other was that someone told me they could help me make a website on WordPress, and I wanted a website. I hadn’t originally planned to move the Sehnen blog here, but the SoulCast problems just got worse and worse.

I copied every single one of the many, many posts I’d written there from april 2008 to january 2010. Stored them in a folder, and deleted nearly all of them from SoulCast. These are the posts I label as “copies,” and I’m nowhere near finished getting them all into this WordPress version of Sehnen.

So it was a year and a half ago that I pretty much abandoned SoulCast. I’d stop by once in a while to write something short, see how many bloggers were left, how many new spammers had come, etc. By june of this year, there were almost no bloggers from the old days still hanging around. And the spam was phenomenal. This got me mad. Even though my website is here, and the bulk of my work is here, and my art and photos, I hated the idea of SoulCast being what it was when I went back to check in a few months ago. I decided that I would write there regularly again, no matter how many spam comments I had to delete and how many spam blogs appeared on the homepage. I was fired up to be there again, even if the ship had sunk.

I found out the site was up for auction on Flippa. Those few of us real bloggers who were left waited to see what would happen. One of them even suggested that we bloggers get together and buy the site, but I have no disposable income, so I stayed on the edges of that brief discussion. And then, a week ago, I went to write my usual stuff, and lo and behold, editing had gone berserk, comments too, and techno-glitches were everywhere. But this time the mess had been created by a new owner. This new owner was changing the server, implementing spam blockers, fixing bugs, and so on. The mess was because everything was in transition and there was a new owner who cares about SoulCast being a viable blogging site again.

And so I’m there as a regular again, something I never expected. I thought the days of me writing daily on SoulCast were long gone, and lo, here they are back again. But the original SoulCast Sehnen is here now, or some of it is, and eventually all of it will be here. So the journal on SoulCast that I call Sehnen is both the same one I started out on, and not the same. It’s here where I come to read those posts I originally wrote there. An odd feeling, really odd, to read in either one of my Sehnen blogs.

I want to support the new owner as much as I can, because they really seem to want to make SoulCast a good place. I want to support new bloggers who are slowly showing up (there must be an ad about SoulCast somewhere). And I want not to forget how I felt in those earliest weeks and months after my life was decimated, my animals vanished. I want not to forget the state of psychological shock  I was in. Writing on SoulCast, just being there, takes me back to that time that I don’t want to forget, but it’s eery to go there, to be sure.

Post number one hundred on this WordPress version of Sehnen. And the writing goes on, because the damage goes on.

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read…   Sehnen at www.soulcast.com …    and this Sehnen…

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why did I go

July 5, 2011 at 8:37 pm (federal protection, musings, real life)
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tuesday 5 july 2011…        (new post)

If anyone’s been keeping up with the last seven or so posts, anyone might be wondering why I even kept accepting Matthew’s invitations. All this wrangling, all this refusal to answer my questions, the cloak-and-dagger baloney, the tears and anger, both his and mine. There isn’t one pat answer. Layers of answers, because I’m a multi-layered, deep-feeling and deep-thinking person. Everything in life, absolutely everything, has facets and nuances.

Here are the answers, plural, to the question of why I went:

1. Matthew was the one who’d told me about this ugly, criminal situation in my life. He was the bearer of the bad news. Because he was the one who told me, I wanted to stay in his sphere.

2. I wanted information, and he was the one who had it. If all he would give me were crumbs, then I wanted those crumbs. And I stupidly kept hoping for more than that.

3. I was extremely alone. Animals gone, my way of life torn to shreds, only one friend who lived some distance away and didn’t come to greenfield very often. Matthew was the only company at my disposal. And with him, I didn’t have to keep all of the same secrets I had to keep with other people. With him I could at least talk about the landlady and the mafia chick and the protection. And as weird things happened out on the streets, Matthew was the only person on the planet with whom I could talk about them and not be treated like a nut.

4. I was in love with him, after all. And as totally abnormal and twisted as this relationship and this crime situation were, it was the one and only place in my existence where love made an appearance, however mangled and distorted that appearance might have been.

Not every single moment with Matthew was a moment of tears or anger or refusal to answer questions or cloak-and-dagger tricks. Most of them were, but not all. There were moments of laughter and mutual teasing. And others when we talked about books or music or our pasts. Once I brought bubble-soap and blew bubbles over to his chair for him to catch. He didn’t want to at first. I suppose it struck a macho crime-fighter like him as too childish. But after he’d grudgingly caught a few, he started smiling and getting into it. Then I blew the bubbles over his head so he’d have to reach for them. There were the rare times when we’d talk about the things we would do together after this was over. There was the time he had bought tea for me, and even made it for me, and served it to me in a little white china cup. He had some too, in an identical cup, even though he is a coffee person. It was the one and only time he ever behaved as if I were a special guest. Never happened again, at least not to that degree. Sometimes he would find me on the street sick from the humidity and my attacking immune system. Often at those times he’d take me back to his hovel, turn on the air conditioner, and make us rice for supper. He’d watch me very intently when I was sick. No matter what idiot face or idiot voice he might be using, his eyes were always real, and on many occasions I saw the unmitigated concern there in those large blue eyes that bored into mine. Once I’d fallen out of bed right onto a wooden captain’s chair and had got a huge hematoma on my right leg. When he saw the thing, he lost a great deal of his facade. Worry, worry, that’s all he was. How did you get that? he wanted to know. I told him, and he didn’t believe me, evidenced by the fact that he continued to ask me throughout the afternoon. He asked me if I didn’t think I should have a doctor look at it, and would it go away, and did it hurt. About the fifth time he asked me how I got it, I got exasperated. I told you how I got it, and I told you the truth. You know I’d tell you if anyone hurt me. Then he looked at me with puppy-longing eyes and said: You promise? I promised.

That was some of the good stuff that passed between Matthew and me. There’s more, but I’ve made my point. And though there wasn’t nearly enough of it, and though all the dark stuff outweighed it by far, it was the only good stuff available to me in the world. In every empty, ugly minute of every empty, ugly day, it was the only good stuff I could lay my hands on.

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read…    Poison and snowflake trees…   Mental hell…

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who was that guy

July 5, 2011 at 6:52 pm (federal protection, musings, real life, sanity)
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tuesday 5  july 2011              (new post)

a little preamble…    Just heard a story on the radio, another interview with another soldier in afghanistan. He says he’s not re-upping anymore after this tour. Doesn’t want to “get to the point where I have no respect for humanity anymore.”  And he says he’s close. I understand this man completely, and anyone like him. A soldier has one kind of trauma and emotional strain. I’ve had different kinds, far removed from battle and war. Others I’ve known have had different kinds yet again.  It doesn’t matter what the traumas are, what the overwhelming emotional strains are … there are hundreds of different kinds, I’m sure. What matters is that there are people, and I’m in that group, who break under this weight, and break for good. This soldier is aware that this could happen to him. I’m aware that it has happened to me. No respect for humanity as a species left. Not since 2008. None. And I’m fine with that. I wouldn’t have been fine with it in 2007, to despise the human race to the degree that I do now, but as of 2008, my conscience regarding humans gets shut off whenever I choose to flip the switch. My life brought this about. The ice-cold actions and words of other people brought this about.

This particular guy was my own age, or maybe slightly older, and I’m going to be blunt and say that his face was rather ugly. I didn’t like to look at his face. I never saw this guy until the very end of June in 2008. It’s certainly possible that he was in greenfield before that time, but if he was, he never ended up near enough for me to notice him until that time. I thought he was one of the many older, low-income alcoholics that live in greenfield and turners. His clothes were old and often not very clean, hair always just slightly greasy. At the end of June, he took to sitting on the bench in front of the health of food store and saying hello to me, though he never asked me for any cigarettes or money, as certain others did. By the end of June I was extremely sensitive to faces and bodies on this particular bench, because it’s the place where Matthew and some of his pals so often sat. When a new face appeared there, I noticed. The first day this guy was sitting there and said Hi to me, I noticed everything about him, and that he was new to me.

I didn’t think he had anything to do with my situation. Most people didn’t — it was only certain ones. I thought he was just a drinker who had perhaps lived in greenfield for a long time and only recently taken a liking to that bench. I tried to be pleasant to him, because I felt sad, not about his presumed drinking problem, but about the ugliness of his face. It both repelled and saddened me. A couple of times I sat down beside him if there was room, smoked a cigarette with him, and talked about innocuous things like the weather or the mayor or whatever. He was just this ugly, down-and-out man that I tried to be nice to, though I certainly never sought him out. If he was around, I was nice.

All of that changes on Sunday 13 July. I go to the health food store shortly before ten to wait for them to open so I can have breakfast. This is a routine for me on most Sundays, since the health food store is the only place in the center of greenfield where I can pay for my meals with food stamps. Lots of other low-income people go there for the same reason. Well he’s there too, and another guy, on the bench, waiting for ten o’clock. I begin the usual empty, meaningless social chit-chat. And then he jolts me. I happen to be looking right at his face, sitting right beside him, when he says, in a slightly taunting tone: You have a daughter, don’t you? I’m completely upset by this question, try to hide it, and pretend I didn’t hear. I return to whatever subject it was we were on before he shot that question out of nowhere. But he won’t let me ignore it. He asks the question again, the nastiness in his tone having increased. I’m angry. I say a very terse Ya and look away from him. I’m about to get up off the bench, but he has more to say: Well you can be my mother now. I don’t look at him when he says this, and I do get up. He’s not finished. Did you hear me, he asks, I said you can be my mother now. Whatever, I say to him. Someone unlocks the door of the store and I go in, making sure I don’t go anywhere near this ghoul while I’m in there.

Please bear in mind that at this point in time it’s only been eleven days since Matthew said the kill-word to me. Not enough time for me to process this stuff. It’s only been three days since the white-haired man. And while I’m still trying to process comes this stranger saying these things. He is a stranger. I buy my food with the question repeating in my mind: How does he know I have a daughter? This question is both valid and sane. I’ve only been living in greenfield for four months. Most of the people I’ve met there know almost nothing about my life before the eviction, including that I have a daughter. She lives in another state, we haven’t spoken in two years, and I just don’t tell most people that she even exists. Nor do I tell them much of anything that doesn’t directly bear on the landlady, the eviction, the animals, and the DMH. So how in the hell does he know, and why does he put that emphasis on the word daughter? Why does he say I can be his mother now, again with the emphasis on a certain word?

I ponder this during my breakfast. I ponder some more after I leave and go walking, for the sake of the blood sugar. I can perceive this man’s remarks, in light of what Matthew has told me, in only one way: this is some kind of threat against my daughter. This is my intellectual conclusion, but my psyche certainly doesn’t want to accept it, and so I push it away by thinking about other things. Denial. I cannot always defeat denial.

Later in the day I leave my rented room a second time to get lunch, and Matthew shows up and invites me over. I’m well steeped in my denial now, and have not thought about this stranger and his words for hours. I go to Matthew’s and am there two hours before this man comes to the surface again, and it only happens because Matthew and I have got back onto the subject of people wanting to hurt me. I’m asking him more questions, trying, and not succeeding, to get more information out of him. Then I remember the ugly guy and the things he said. Denial is, for the moment, overcome.

And what about this ugly coot this morning, I ask my Matthew. I’ve only been seeing him for a couple of weeks. What’s he all about? Why did he say those things about my daughter? How does he even know I have one? Then Matthew asks some questions of his own. When did this happen, and where. What does this guy look like, and exactly what did he say. After we go all through it, I take another of my infrequent stands: I want to know if she’s all right, I say. And I know you can find that out for me. Find out. I want to know. As I recall, I didn’t have to do too much demanding before he said Okay. Then he said, let’s go outside. I’m already used to the stupid cloak-and-dagger way Matthew does things. I’ve met the weird radio. Before I stop talking to him later that summer, I will meet the weird VCR, which eventually replaces the radio. I watch the posing in front of the window every bloody time I go there. When he says Let’s go outside, I don’t even bother to ask why.

There’s a square table in the backyard with two chairs. He says we sit there, and so we do. We sit for what seems ages in the heat, and in my restlessness to know about my daughter. At last a young guy comes out of Matthew’s building from the front door, carrying a big circle of garden hose around his shoulder. He watches Matthew as he walks from the front of the house to the back. Matthew makes a hand signal at him, and the guy goes back inside through the back door. I hate this stuff. I say Now that you’ve made your little signal to your little pal, can we go back in to the air conditioning? Not yet. So we sit some more. Finally he says we can go in.

When we get there, I ask him if my daughter’s okay. He says we have to wait a bit. He lies down on the floor and I park on the futon. We talk, and sounds are coming from upstairs. This doesn’t throw me. I’ve heard footsteps in the upstairs of Matthew’s apartment before. This time it’s a squeaking chair. Someone is sitting in it, making little movements that cause the chair to squeak. After about seven noises, Matthew comes out with a question, a disingenuous, phony question: What is that creaking noise? I bite, as always. It’s a butt sitting in a squeaky chair. I better go see who it is, he says. He goes upstairs and stays there a little while, then comes back down with a red face, sniffles, and wet eyes. He dashes right into the bathroom. When he comes out, he says the noise was a door blowing in the breeze. There is no breeze today. And in August, when that room has been emptied and I’m allowed to go into it, I will learn that there is no door. The upstairs of Matthew’s apartment turns out to be an attic that has been loosely made into a couple of rooms. The one above Matthew’s livingroom not only has no doors, it doesn’t even have a frame for one. The second room is further back and has a door. To this day I’m willing to bet my last nickle that whenever I was around, at least, that door was locked.

After the bathroom, he parks himself in his favorite chair and starts talking about something or other. Is my daughter all right, I bark at him. Yeah, she’s okay, he says with impatience. Are you telling me the truth? Yeah, I wouldn’t lie to you about that. But this time I don’t entirely believe him. I didn’t like the way his face was, and the sniffling and wet eyes, when he came down the stairs. I get angry. I take another stand, one he completely ignores. I want you to tell me yourself or send me one of your monkeys every day to let me know she’s all right. I’m speaking very angrily when I say this, and he gets annoyed at my anger. He has absolutely no justifiable reason to resent my anger. He’s the one who told me about this situation in the first place, and he is not stupid, not by a long way. Surely he has no right nor reason to expect me not to get angry at these things. He’s angry that I’m angry, and once again I just want to slap him, and so I leave.

I go to my room and start trying, without success, to reach my daughter. The sheriff’s department in her town goes to the address I give them, but she doesn’t live there anymore. They say that on Monday they’ll call her office and try to reach her there. Monday comes and goes with nothing, and I figure they forgot. But they didn’t. They’d called her and talked to her, and had only forgotten to call me. In any case, I don’t hear from her until Tuesday. All those hours of waiting since the drama at Matthew’s Sunday afternoon. Many things happened in those waiting hours that I’m not going to write about here because I’ve had enough right now of walking down these dark roads. Maybe another time.

That July, by the time I heard from the daughter on the 15th, had already seen Matthew introducing the k-word on the 2nd, the white-haired man on the 9th and 10th, and was about to produce the man in the white bandana on the 18th. It was quite literally one bizarre, hollywood insanity after another that July. There was never time to recoup, time to absorb. It just kept coming.

And from that Sundaythe 13th on, the man with the ugly face is my enemy. I see him in future almost everywhere I go, often sitting down on the sidewalk. He makes occasional nasty remarks to me over the rest of the summer, and then I leave greenfield. When I return to greenfield for a long-term stay in June of 2009 (it’s been nearly a year since I lived there), he pops up all the time again, and makes his periodic nasty remarks. Sometime in late 2009, he disappears. If he’s still in greenfield at that time, I certainly never see him again.

And also from that Sunday on, I refer to Matthew and his pals as monkeys. I do this for over a year. I even buy stuffed monkeys and carry them around with me, another one of my quirky ways of showing them, in public, how much I detest them.

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read…     Mishibone…    Neverending solitaire…

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why are you still alive?

July 1, 2011 at 11:34 am (federal protection, musings, real life)
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friday 1 july 2011….        (new post)

That’s another question that a collection of very lousy therapists, plus a whole gaggle of regular people, have asked me: Why are you still alive? If there are these nasty types who are so bad that you have to have this undercover protection, why haven’t they got you? It seems to me, so many of them have said, that if they wanted you this badly, they’d get you. No protection would stop it.

Most of the people who have put forth this argument have done so in a very superior and arrogant manner, whipping out their trump card and pronouncing judgment on my sanity with gloriously smug, self-satisfied smiles. Slap, slap. That’s what I want to do, but of course I don’t. There are a great many people in this world who need a good slap or two. It is this attitude I despise, this smugness. The unspoken words: The very fact that you’re not dead means you’re nuts. Well, that is indeed one thing that my continued existence could mean. But there’s one more thing it could mean, and it’s a thing no backwater greenfield graduated-at-the-bottom-of-my-class therapist would even allow as possible: I’m still alive because the protection is very efficient. I despise the attitude, but not the question. The question is one of the many that I have myself.

I’ve gone through my blog pages from the very beginning and mostly sanitized the anger I was pouring out in 2008 and 2009. There are equations in people’s heads that have been put there via trickle-down from the psychiatric community over the last twenty-five years: Emotional = nuts. Angry = nuts. Washing your hands too many times = nuts, and so on. I thought that some readers might reconsider the whole sanity issue if I took out my angriest words and sentences, or if I toned them down, and so for the most part I’ve done this. Another word I extracted almost every time I found it was the word kill. I’ve replaced it with harm, hurt, things like that. Saying that someone wants to kill you = nuts.

But that was the word in the room, and if I’m to hold to the truth as I’ve heard and seen it, I have to use that word in this post, because that was the word. On Wednesday 2 July of 2008, that was the word. Matthew and I were in the room, and we were there with the word kill. It wasn’t that people wanted to hurt me or harm or get me. It was the k-word.

Can you imagine what a shock that was to me, can you empathize with that? I’d only known for ten days that I was being protected from criminal stuff. And in those ten days, this is what I had envisioned someone possibly doing to me: a beating; broken teeth; broken bones;a stay in the hospital; maybe even as far as rape, but that was it. The idea that Judith’s pals would actually go all the way to the k-word was so ridiculous to my own mind that it never even entered my head in those ten days. That’s what I was nagging Matthew about on that July second: you’ve got too many people in the library with me all the time. I don’t like it. Nobody’s gonna beat me up in the library, for christ’s sake. And that’s when the k-word entered the room, and that’s when I kept saying You’re kidding, right? I couldn’t take it in. It took me days to take it in.

So why am I still alive? I don’t know. Matthew never told me how the protection works, how many people are involved in it, and why it is that someone doesn’t just shoot me while I’m walking along the street. No answers, no answers. The word kill was the one that Matthew used, and I have a sense that fed types from Burlington, Vermont would only get involved in the first place if it was a potential k-word situation. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t believe such mucky-mucks in the cop world would have protected a nobody like me unless the k-word was in the picture.

Another question never answered? How long is this going to go on? Little crumbs that told me almost nothing were all I got. On 13 July, a very bad day (this day has to be a page of its own), I got a crumb. We were sitting across from each other at a table in his backyard, waiting for his pal to do something I wasn’t supposed to see. We were both grim. I said: This has gone on longer than you people thought it would, hasn’t it? He says Yes in one of his idiot-voices, but there is no idiot in his eyes. His eyes are intelligent and sane and serious, as they always are, and they are full of regret. There is never an alcholic, idiotic loon in his eyes, no matter what ludicrous things he is wearing or saying or doing. Matthew’s eyes are always sane, and always contain the evidence of an extremely keen mind.

Another couple of crumbs: during the first two weeks of August there was all the talk about driver’s licenses and cars and maybe going to a new apartment. Around the twelfth there was a request that I should buy him a present. I argued, but my arguing was mostly just teasing. And he says: After all this, you can’t buy me a present? And I asked if ”all this” was going to be over soon, and he said, of course, Maybe. And then, during the wee hours between August 17th and August 18th, just once: it’s almost over.

I don’t know why I’m still alive. I asked him more than once, no response. How am I still alive, also unanswered. When do they get tired of me and move on to other business? Unanswered. When do you people go on to other business and stop following me around? No answer. The fact that I cannot describe the process that has resulted in me still being alive doesn’t mean I’m nuts. It means I’ve asked for the knowledge, the description of this process that kept me alive, and have been denied this information. The fact that I can’t answer these things doesn’t mean the k-word was not in that room on that day in July of 2008. The fact that these protectors chose to protect me in this hellish undercover manner, never to show me an ID, never to knock on my door and tell truth to me, does not make me nuts. It makes me their property, perhaps. Their bait, perhaps. But it doesn’t make me nuts.

In this very town, turners falls, two people over the years have mentioned the word mafia to me in relation to their own lives. Two women. In 1993, one of these women told me she and her family believed that one of her sisters had been murdered by her mafia boyfriend. In 2009, the other one told me that her former husband had been a mafia man. And my mind, my intelligent, educated mind, did not jump up inside me and say: Nuts! Inside me my mind allowed for both possibilities: the possbility of ordinary people stumbling into mob people, and the possibility that these women were very angry and hurt and wanted to find the cause of their suffering. But never nuts. I’ve thought these two trolls unstable over other things, but not over using the m-word, and not over believing that they or their relatives had unwittingly brought mob people into their lives. Why can’t that same objective, critical thinking be afforded to me.

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read…   Stolen stars…   Mishibone…

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who, why

June 30, 2011 at 1:41 pm (animals, federal protection, homelessness, musings, real life, sanity)
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thursday 30 june 2011              (new post)

I’ve written just in the last several days about the who. The name or names that Matthew would never give, still won’t give me. He told me that people wanted to hurt me, he told me I was being protected and by whom, but he never said any names of any family or families who are the ones from whom I need this so-called protection. This lack of names is a thing that, to my own mind, speaks to my sanity, to the fact that I’m not delusional. I do believe that if I were nutty, I would simply supply the names. I’d take them out of my memory of old news stories, or whatever, but as a delusional, I would have names. It would be the names that would be a salient feature of the delusion as a story, a story that included all the necessary names needed to complete the scenario. I’m sane, and so I have no names, except that one possible Greif. But that one didn’t come from Matthew. If it had, I would be certain of that name. No other name, except my own, oddly enough, has ever come up. The grandfather that Matthew told me was a mob man had the same last name that I do, so there’s that. I would have more details if this were a delusion.

Just as important to me, the purported object of a hunt, as the who, is the why. Why? Many bad therapists and many regular people have asked me this question over the last three years. Some psychiatrists too. Why do they want you? The response I have is flimsy: because I lived in a building with a very insane and substance-addicted woman who loathes me, and she’s connected to these people by marriage, and she asked them to hurt me. My answer doesn’t live up to the drama of the situation — other people’s drama, not mine. I didn’t ask to be told by a man that I was in this kind of trouble and this kind of protection. It happened to me. The drama of crime mobs and protectors and undercover crap belongs to the mobs and to the protectors, not to me. I didn’t dream it up, and I didn’t choose it. But when I talk to others about all of this, all the drama doesn’t, of course, escape them. And rather than allowing for the possibility that this has happened to me, they prefer to stay in their denial and decide that I either invented this drama because I love drama, or I imagined it.

I want the answer that isn’t flimsy, and have always wanted it. I’ve paced around Matthew’s livingroom floor, smoking, stepping around the day’s pile of clothes-code, with tears in my eyes and with my volume escalating: But what do they care about me? I’ve never witnessed any of their big crime-doings, I never stole any of the money or the drugs. I’m nothing to their world. I pause in my pacing and crying and near-yelling to look at him and see if he will speak. Sometimes he does, and spouts some of his idiot-shtik. Nothing real. Other times he just keeps quiet. I go on: So what if their little Judith hates me and asked them to hurt me. So what! Do these gangster types go around bumping off everyone little Judith hates? Do they really spend their time and their resources that way? Don’t they have better things to do, more important things to do? I hurl these questions at Matthew repeatedly over two months, and I never get the answer. On July 26 of 2008, when he tells me about my grandfather, I ask again: So what? Is this because of Judith and my grandfather? So what? Whatever my grandfather did that made them kill him, it was over sixty years ago. If they want to bump off people in my family as some kind of a vendetta, why haven’t they been doing it for the last sixty years? Why now? Why me?

I get no logical response. I get shtik. But while I am railing about sixty years ago and vendetta and all that, I suddenly remember the murder of my cousin, and a whole new area of question and of pain floods through me: my cousin. All those years ago. I’m sitting now. The pacing is fairly rare. I usually plant my butt on the futon and do my railing in minimal comfort. So I start telling Matthew all about cousin Billy, and I can see in his eyes that he already knows, but he chooses not to say so and lets me keep talking. This has happened before when I’ve told him certain things about myself or Judith or the landlady: he already knows. It’s there in his eyes. But he’s not going to admit that to me. So, as always, I pretend I don’t see what’s in his eyes, and I don’t say You already know, and I just keep telling my facts.

When I get only a few sentences into my facts about Billy, Matthew turns his face towards the window and keeps it there. Stares out the window while I talk. Will not look at me, not even once. As I go on, as I start to cry, the side of his face that I can see, the right side, gets red. His right eye gets red. Little slow tears begin falling from his right eye, but he won’t look at me, and he won’t speak. When I finish the facts about Billy, the facts as they were told to my family long ago, I start it up again: Did they kill Billy? Did they? I want to slap his face over and over until he answers me Yes or No, but I don’t. I just get louder, I cry more. I ask the questions again. And then this, not for the first time and not for the last: You’re not gonna tell me. Same old story, you’re not gonna tell me. I have a right to know. I’m the one in this situation and I have a right to know. But who the fuck cares about my rights. Not that psycho-landlady and not the DMH and not you and your people. And then I shut up and start smoking again.

This is yet another fact that I believe speaks to my sanity: If I were delusional or lying, I would have a Why. It would be there as part of the structure of the delusion, or it would be there as a fabrication. I don’t have, and have never had, a Why of substance.

I’ve waited a long time to be able to write the things I’ve been writing for the last week, the things I deliberately left out in 2008. And when I now write them, three years later, I am there in the room again with Matthew. I’m crying and pacing and smoking and questioning. Or planted on the futon, smoking, firing questions at him. I’m there in a room with a man who says that he and others are protecting me from me from some very nasty people. In the room with a protector who says he’s fallen in love with me. I’m there, thrown out into the streets and my animals disappeared, talking to a man who says he’s in love about criminals he says want to hurt me, and every single moment of my hours and days is that much-abused word, surreal. This is not MY life as I knew it for 55 years. These things should not have happened to me. I paid my rent. My eviction was illegal. The DMH was supposed to HELP me. I’m not in a crime mob, and never was. I never did anything to this crime mob. I should not be homeless at this moment. My animals should not be hidden from me, waiting for the lethal injection. I should not be in this room with this agent-type man hearing about these bizarre things, talking about these bizarre things. He shouldn’t be in love with me, nor I with him. We should never have met. None of this is MINE.

In retrospect, I see Matthew as my handler. No, it’s not just in retrospect. I did feel that three years ago, too, but would never allow myself to use that word, even in my thoughts. I have only ever heard of the criminals getting federal handlers, but just as my protection is not the normal kind, my role as target seems to have warranted other exceptions, too. I got a handler for a while. I’ve been hearing a lot about federal handlers lately, in the news stories about Whitey Bulger, and on radio shows that just happen to be interviewing retired agents who were undercover and were, at times, handlers.

Matthew my protector. My handler. My love. My rage and torment. All in the summer of 2008. But when I write it now with no holds barred, I’m there in that room again, wanting to slap him and slap him again, until he tells me what I deserve to know. I’m there in that room crying about one painful element of all that surreality, while layers and layers of other painful elements sit just beneath the surface that I give to Matthew and to the world. I’m trying to hold, always, the tsunami of grief and anger at bay. It escapes in spurts. In my tantrums that I throw on my blogs in 2008. In my occasional outbursts to Matthew. In the tantrums that I throw all alone in my rented bedroom. And in my many bouts of grief-tears for my animals, sometimes being spilled in the libraries unabashedly, while I sit and write about these souls who were the center of my world.

I want the Who. I want the Why of substance. I deserve them. I have paid in pain, and still pay, for the right to this Who and this Why. And I will never, ever get them.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read…  Don’t ask…  Mugsy’s book…

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the man with the white hair

June 26, 2011 at 2:37 pm (federal protection, musings, real life)
Tags: , ,

sunday 26 june 2011…     (new post)

This post is a companion to another one called testosterone town. That one was written in 2008. Today I’m going to say more than I said then.

There were reasons that I thought were good ones for not writing all of it three years ago. The biggest of those reasons was that in July of 2008, I was still very sappy about Matthew and the others said to be protecting me. I didn’t want any of them to be hurt protecting me, and I certainly didn’t want it to be because I gave too many details in my blogs.

I’ve long since lost my sappiness about these people, and the straight, unpretty truth is that I don’t give a flying banana what happens to any of them. So why haven’t I given the details before now. Well, first because it’s hard now to write about these things. In 2008 I had to sit down and vent every day in order to just keep going. But now… now I know that my contempt for Matthew and his colleagues is so huge that nothing will ever vent it; and I will never, unlike the people in the Whitey Bulger case who sued the feds and won, get any justice. Another reason… I’m sick to death of being called delusional. It’s insulting and it isn’t the truth. I’ve known delusional people and I’ve read books about them. They have a certain way of talking and emoting, a certain affect, that I don’t have. And the delusions multiply, in the cases I know about. It may start with a belief that there’s a plot to kill the mayor, and then another plot to kill someone else evolves, and so on. The tree of imagination is always growing new leaves, and sometimes those leaves are very different from one another — whole new stories appear. A few so-called therapists have even said to me that I’m not the way delusionals usually are, but they write delusional on their pieces of paper anyway. What I tell has always been the same at its core. Sometimes new elements have appeared, and that has always been the result of what some other living person said to me, not inventions in my own head. I have always told the truth as far as I know it, and owing to Matthew’s refusal to answer most of my questions, I know very little.

So I know that in writing anything at all about the crime-chick and her connections, Matthew and his colleagues, bizarre things that have gone on around me since 2008, puts me again in the witness box where I will be judged a loon. I am no loon. Whatever other insults people can justifiably throw at me, I am rational and sane and suffer no delusions. On with it, then.

day one

It was a Wednesday, 9 July 2008, hot and humid, early afternoon. I was living in the rented bedroom where I had no kitchen privileges, and so had to get all my meals out somewhere. I didn’t spend too much time in the room, because it hurt too much not to have my animals there all around me. I had only been told seven days before, by Matthew, that people wanted to hurt me. I hadn’t had much time to adjust to this news.

I had taken my lunch, book, notebook and drawing pens to the only picnic table that exists on Bank Row in Greenfield. This was one of my frequent sitting spots. It’s a very small, grassy area with one side edged in trees. I get up from the table to stretch a little and try to relieve the pain in my joints. I have my back to Bank Row and its intersector, Deerfield Street. Because I’m facing the wrong way, I can’t see the man coming at me on the bicycle. I’m lost in my own thoughts and don’t hear him either, not until he’s nearly on top of me.

I turn quickly and there he is, looking as though he’s going to run me down. He squeals on the breaks about three inches in front of me. I have known about certain things for only seven days, and so I memorize him as much as I can for a later grilling of Matthew. His eyes are very blue, like Matthew’s, but not as big. The most identifying feature about him is his absolutely white, shoulder-length hair. He can only be in his early forties, but he’s gone snow-white. When he stops, he says to me that he’s new in town (I already know this — I’m familiar with all of the scruffs in Greenfield by now, and he’s decked out like a scruff), and he wants to know where all the drunks hang out. He’s smiling, but the smile is mean. Despite his every-day words, I can feel the hostility coming from him, can feel that he despises me, even though I don’t know him, even though he’s new in town.

I tell him in a snotty way that I wouldn’t know where they hang out because I’m not a drunk. I tell him to go up to Main Street and ask somebody there. Lots of drunks are on Main Street. He says, still smiling that leering smile, that he can see that I’m in a bad mood so he’ll leave me alone. Thanks for the information.

I go back to the table and start to cry. Not about the man, but about my animals. I sit there crying, smoking, and a car comes down Bank Row and stops straight across from me, right in the middle of the street. For five or so minutes no traffic comes down Bank Row, so the car is able to remain stopped dead in the road. The windows are so darkly tinted on this car that you can’t see the driver, or anyone else who might be in it. It looks like the car has driven itself to the middle of the street. It looks very new, is thickly layered with black paint, and shiny as a mirror. In these ways it’s like the mob cars, but I don’t think it’s one of them. It’s not from Connecticut, for one thing. And for another, it has several thick antennae sticking up from it, which I hadn’t seen on any of the mob cars. I hardly ever see them on any cars. Only when traffic comes down the Row behind it does the car drive off.

I’ve had two very weird occurrences in the space of ten or so minutes, added to those seven days of knowledge given me by Matthew. I’ve done all I can: I’ve memorized the man and his words, and then the car. I’m powerless. I can do nothing to send that man back where he came from, and I can do nothing to find out who was in that car. I continue my thoughts on my animals and my tears a couple minutes more, and then I leave.

I’m thirsty again, so I decide to go to the health food store for something. That is Matthew’s base, that store, and his cousin is one of the big shots who runs it. I’m still crying about my animals, I’m not in the mood for Matthew’s undercover shtik at the moment, so I go down the alley to enter the store from the back. And there he is. Matthew. Coming at me from under the awning over the back door. Using his phony whine-voice and his phony I’m-just-a-nut grin. How are you he says, as usual. I play along. Oh not so good today, Matty, how about you. Are you having a happy day? Somewhat, he says. And then his eyes bore into mine very sanely, very intelligently, full of concern, despite the phony idiot grin on his face. Still cryin’? he asks me. I say yeah. He has his right hand wrapped around a cup of coffee, but he stretches out the middle finger and presses it against my upper arm. Says very quietly, so no one around us will hear, Hang in.

I have questions I can’t ask because we’re in public. I can’t ask: why did you say still crying, as if you knew I’ve been crying for a good while? Were you in that car? Who was in that car? Who was that man with the white hair? What am I supposed to hang in against, and for how long? I wait to see if he’ll invite me to his hovel so I can ask these things, but he doesn’t. I get something to drink and leave.

day two

10 july and a Thursday. Three, four times I see the man with the white hair. Every time he gives that same smile and says Hi there. I don’t answer. Matthew I see not at all, all day long, and that’s very, very strange. I return to my room for the last time that day after I’ve had my supper somewhere.

At 7:30 I go outside to have a cigarette. As soon as I do, a state cop car drives past me down the street. I smoke and go back in. At 8:00 I go out to smoke another. There’s a state cop helicopter flying fairly low over my street, away from town. And here’s the man with the white hair, pedaling furiously in the same direction, chuckling, as if he’s trying to outrun the helicopter. When he gets even with me, he looks over at me with that same grin, but says nothing this time. Up the street they go, helicopter and bicycle.

Now I’m more nervous. This man who clearly has contempt for me has seen where I live. Matthew has asked me to hang in. I don’t like this stuff. It’s hokey and over-dramatic and cloak-and-dagger. It’s Hollywood. And most importantly: it does not belong in my life. I’m not a criminal, and never have been. I don’t have criminals as friends or as family (Matthew hasn’t yet told me about my grandfather). This stupid, sociopathic drama that goes on between mobs and the people who hunt them is NOT MINE. I don’t deserve it, I don’t want it, and I hate it.

I can’t sleep. I just keep listening to the radio and going outside to smoke. At two in the morning, I start hearing sounds outside my windows. It sounds like people punching each other, but there are no voices. First the sounds are at one window on one wall, then they’re at the others on the other wall. I sit on the floor, listening. When it stops, I finally go to bed, but I’m a long time falling asleep.

day three

friday 11 july…  In the morning I look at the bark mulch under my windows. There are large footprints in it. They weren’t there yesterday. I know this because of one of my personal quirks. When someone lays down new mulch, as my landlady had just done, or new sand or new soil, I like to look at it every day while it’s still untouched, before anyone steps in it. I like the unspoiled look of it. So I knew with no doubts or delusions or paranoia that those large footprints were brand new.

I walk all the same streets and go to all the same places that I did yesterday, but there’s no sign of the white-haired man. Early afternoon Matthew comes along and invites me over. I ask some of my questions, but I’m so tired that I forget to ask all of them. And this is what I get:  All you need to know is that he won’t be bothering you anymore. The line I quoted in the other post. He said it with pride, on the edge of arrogance, as if the big strong boys had done their macho thing and they were proud. And I – the little lady, the little victim, the little piece of bait?  –  mustn’t go on asking questions. I did go on asking questions, but he gave me nothing else.

These things really happened. These words were really said. I’ve never seen that white-haired man again, in either Greenfield or Turners. He was in Greenfield for less than three days. Dear Matthew said that he’d never bother me again, and he never has. 

Ten days later, on july 21, a man called Jim said something to someone (in my hearing) that made me wonder if this white-haired man was someone named Greif. Vittorio or Luigi Greif. But that’s only a maybe, only another unanswered question.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read…  Mugsy’s book…   Lucked out…

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why do I live among these trolls?

February 28, 2011 at 12:17 am (animals, real life, turners falls)
Tags: , ,

sunday 27 feb 2011…  tricky turners falls…   (new post)

On my way to this blog just now, I saw a quote by the, apparently, very troubled Charlie Sheen. Here’s said quote:  “My motto now is you either love or hate and you must do so violently.”  I agree with this statement in its basic principle, but not in its every detail (just because Sheen seems to be flipping out at the moment, doesn’t mean that the intelligent man he used to be isn’t in there somewhere).  But I would alter the sentence to read: You love in some places, you hate in others, but you ought to do both with passion. And this belief actually has something to do with what I was planning to write about before I saw Mr. Sheen’s quote. At least tangentially.

Why do I live in this town among these despised trolls?  I’ve been asked this question, in various words, several times over the eleven months I’ve been living back in Turners again. All of the people, but one, who’ve asked it have done so in a snide way, the message being: You hate us so much, get the hell out of here. We hate you too. I have some readers, you see, among the Turners denizens, and they take great umbrage at what I say about them in my writing. My responses? 1.  Deal with it, shmuck. I’m telling real things about the way I’ve been treated by real Turners-ites over 25 real years. You can’t handle having your own disgusting behavior written about on the internet and tossed back into your face, well tough. 2. Show me you’re better than you’ve presented yourselves to me in the past. Apologize, for starters. After you do that, treat me well. What’s that old saw?… when hell freezes over.

The one person who asked me the question without being snide, did so on the library steps back in the summer. He was a man I’d never met before, but he’s lived in this town for decades. He looked at me with intense scrutiny and asked me how I was doing. I told him not very well. He said “This can be a hard town.” I told him that it has been for me. He wanted to know the name of the woman who had evicted me, and I told him. He said he and his wife don’t do any business with her, and I said I was glad of that.  And then he said “So why…” and he hesitated. I finished it for him: So why am I living here again? Yeah, he said. And I told him.

After our conversation he told me to take care. I haven’t seen him since, but I know he’s still around because he’s a long-term townie. He just happens to be one I never met before. And since we’d never met in any formal way, I can only conclude that he must have known things about me from my blogs, or from town gossip about my blogs.

In several posts scattered around my many blogs, I’ve written at least a sentence or two about why I came back to this crucible. Now I seem to have decided that the subject needs a post of its own.

I came back here because it was here that my animals were stolen from me and hidden from me in various other towns, where they were eventually killed. I came back to the scene of the crime, so to speak, to the scene of the worst trauma of my life, because I’m not capable of being anywhere else. I have a good friend out in the county where I spent the first 32 years of my life, and part of me longs to go back there and be near her. That same part of me misses the ocean more than I can say. And theoretically, I could go back. In a couple of months, having served my sentence in the ponystall, I will presumably be given movable rent subsidy that I can use anywhere in the state. I think about going back. I think about it a lot.

Every time I consider it, I know that I can’t, in spite of the very strong internal forces that want to pull me there. I can’t leave the scene of the crime. My heart’s not ready. It may never be ready. And before that crime was committed nearly three years ago, this town was the scene of the years and days and minutes and hours spent with my animals, spent as myself, to the extent that the landlords and fellow tenants of this burg let me be myself.

I need to be able to walk the river or the canal any hour of the day or night… and remember. I need to walk by the buildings that were once our homes any time the yearning comes… to remember. I feel closer to the stolen animals here, and to the person I was and the way of life I had before the crime. I cannot go.

It would be different if I had a car. Then I could live in Deerfield or Greenfield or Leverett, and come here to the places of my memories any hour I needed to. But lacking said car, leaving this town cuts me off from walks at five in the morning, or ten at night, or any other time when the grief is weighing a ton and that longing strikes.

The fact that I despise these trolls passionately is one of the reasons I experience misery here in this armpit. But the fact that I loved and love those animals, and every minute I had with them, with, as the cliché goes, every fiber of my being, is the reason I cannot leave. Love with passion, hate with passion. If someone deserves your contempt, if that’s what they have earned, then they deserve it one hundred percent. If an animal has engendered my love, then they deserve that love one hundred percent. My own belief.

I hope that I’ve cleared up the question for anyone who may have it, as to why I came back here to poison.

 

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dona nobis pacem

February 23, 2010 at 5:15 pm (lousy mental health care, musings, photos, quotes, real life)
Tags: , , ,

Page Twenty-five

sehnen posted on May 08, 2008 | views: 121 | Tags: dona mihi eosx

thursday 8 may 2008   greenfield

Very tired today. Starting to have some trouble sleeping. I can get very tired anyway, even when I sleep. Chronic fatigue syndrome and raging immune system work together to sap energy.

Shirley Temple, may you lose whatever is dearest to you. Ditto for you, Cry Baby. Psycho landlady and psycho tenant? Really I’d prefer that you simply drop dead where you stand. I’m angry in my overwhelming sadness, can you tell?

Dona nobis pacem. I started making signs with those words on them way back in 2000 or 2001. It means “give us peace.” But as we know, my animals and I did not get peace, we got mayhem. And I had a little thing I kept in the kitchen not long before we were destroyed that said adh mor.  “Good luck.”  We didn’t get that either. Foreign languages were always a big part of the life that we shared together, because I’ve studied a bunch of them, and because long ago I used to teach Latin and German to people who mostly didn’t give a rat’s ass about Latin and German. But I studied a lot of languages that I never had to try to shove gently and cheerfully down someone else’s throat, and that was fine.

So we listened to lots of songs in lots of languages, and if I knew the song, I sang. They loved for me to sing to them. If I can remember the lines I want and how to spell them (I’m very rusty in some of this stuff), I want to put them here for my stolen friends. They were written by Edith Piaf long ago; I think they might well be the only lyrics she ever wrote. She wrote them for her husband, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, who had been killed.

                               Si un jour, la vie t’arrache a moi;
                               si tu meures, quand tu sois loin de moi;
                               si tu meures, c’n'est pas de probleme,
                               car moi, je mourrai aussi.

Anyway, for my lost ones. I haven’t seen these words written in many years, so my spelling may be off. And I don’t know how to do accent marks on a computer. What the do you care? You probably don’t read French anyway. See how angry I am.

Update 3 June 2009: I am still a homeless woman, more than a year after writing this post. I now have a rented room, which is civilized, but it is not a home. Home to me, in the physical sense, means at least a bathroom, kitchen, livingroom, and bedroom. And that is what I had for 55 years. I was never restricted to one bedroom of space to move around in, let alone a shelter or a respite or a hospital or a park. I am a loveless person; all the love was taken. And a hopeless person. It’s almost 15 months now that I’m homeless. Whoever it was that failed in their duty to help me find a home — the DMH or matthew’s crowd or both — those people have caused damage; damage in the form of humiliation and degradation and hopelessness. And worst, the loss of all the animals. Dona Nobis Pacem. My innocent, wonderful animals and I did not get peace. They got torn away from me and from each other. Some of them got free of the stress of all that followed by the death of the needle (and I’m not even told precisely how many were killed.), and some of them got adopted, which to me is not nearly the same as staying with your own family, when you are old and have been there all your life, till death.

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(stained glass at www.signals.com)

read…  Braon…  Stolen stars…  Soulcast…

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thoughtlessness

February 23, 2010 at 4:43 pm (photos, poetry, real life)
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Page Twenty                                 (copy)

sehnen posted on May 05, 2008 | views: 141 | Tags: poetryx, do not thinkx

it’s monday, 5 may, 2008    greenfield

 

 

Number 24

 

You took away
the love I gave and got.
You want me living loveless.
Maybe you think
your tablets are just as good.
You took away the love
that was my guide.
You want me living aimless.
Maybe you think
bumhood is all I deserve.
Or maybe you think
that one like me,
one so out of synch with average,
so at variance with
people-bla-bla bullshit,                                                                                                  
shouldn’t be alive at all.

 

I’m alive.
I breathe, my heart bangs.
I am a biology.
But what will you
poke or prod or prick
to see if my soul is living?
What do you think loveless means?
Could be
you don’t think at all.    

here to poetry links

Not much else to say, really. So much was so frozen for weeks. I guess it was a kind of mental shock. Grief, memories came in spurts. But now it’s constant. Now it’s thawed.


Update 29 May 2009: That is the crux of what was done to me: all the love I received in this world was taken from me, and everyone to whom I gave love. I have lived a loveless life for more than 14 months. You really can’t count Matthew’s love for the time that he felt it: it was love of such poor quality. And yet the hope that his love would turn out to be better than it looked was there for a number of months. The hope that there was some love yet to know. But no sale. His love was/is self-involved and uncaring.

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read…   Shadowpoems…   Lucked out…

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thursday 18 february 2010

February 18, 2010 at 6:39 pm (art, disaster, musings, real life)
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Page Ten       (new post)

turners fails

If you’ve read any of the previous posts, you can see that I’m copying the original Sehnen posts from Soulcast into this new Sehnen blog. It’s a time-consuming project, but I can’t deal with the slowness on Soulcast anymore.

It was my first blog, and I’ve probably said that already. I chose the site because the name of it precisley fit what I was going to do: cast my grieving, outraged, frightened soul onto the internet. And I still  like the name Soulcast, but I can’t deal with the site’s problems. And I’m still casting my soul — in sorrow and despair and anger and in truth — onto the internet. My way of life was stolen. Consequently I don’t have a hell of a lot to do besides write.

I’ll say some things here that I didn’t say in 2008, as well as some things that I did say, but not thoroughly. I had waited from March 12th until June 6th of that year for the DMH to come up with an apartment and give me back at least some of my animals. Things that were said to me by my mailman, one of my bank managers, one of my doctors, and an ordinary Turners citizen had led me to believe that everything was going to be okay, that I would get my animals back (those who hadn’t yet been killed). As it turns out, I was absolutely right and not delusional to have believed this, but I had to wait a long time to hear it said. Late in 2009, my then therapist told me he had asked some questions and found out that there had indeed been a plan to get me an apartment and give me back some animals, and that I had been “screwed by the system.” The plan had fallen through. He didn’t say what the plan had been or why it hadn’t happened. I am sick to bloody death of people keeping from me, as if I were not an adult with rights, information about my animals and my life. But it’s still going on, three years later. And wasn’t it nice that a mailman and a doctor and a banker and a citizen got to know there was this plan, but anne nakis didn’t get to know.

So I was waiting. I said in my blogs and to other people that my animals and I were finished, but in my heart I didn’t fully believe it. I believed there was a plan. And I kept that as my secret, in a superstitious belief that if I talked about this plan I believed in, I’d somehow jinx it. Shut up about it and wait was my strategy.

But while I was waiting, there were these folks who were in my face all the time, Matthew among them. They had started doing this on March 13, my first day out on the Greenfield streets, and it continued every single day. As time went on, it became more egregious. Already in April I was complaining to my friend about these people. I had lived in the Greenfield-Turners community for over twenty years, and I’d never had such a thing occur. It exceeded by far the dictates of coincidence. The only explanation I could find for these people swarming around me like flies on poop was a weak one, but it was all I had. Over the months from January to April, I had made many complaints about the lack of service I’d received from the DMH. I complained to the Northampton and Boston DMH offices. I complained more than once to the governor’s satellite office in Springfield. I complained to Health and Human Services. My case manager at DMH made a special point of whining to me how much trouble I’d caused them.

I’d complained so much to people higher up than the Greenfield DMH, and I’d said so often that if I lost the animals, I’d die of grief (and I absolutely believed this. It baffles me as I sit here, on a couple of levels, that I’m still alive), that I began to wonder if these people who were always dogging me were some kind of watch-dogs the DMH had hired to make sure I didn’t commit suicide before they implemented their plan. And I knew it was stupid, this theory, but when my brain is presented with a puzzle, it’s compelled to solve it. If one solution turns out to be incorrect, then brain will start over to find another one, but there must be a solution. My brain can’t exist in a daily state of unsolved puzzle, and neither can my psyche. My solution was stupid because I had never said I would kill myself. I’d said I would die of the grief. It was stupid because these watch-dogs wouldn’t be able to stop me doing suicide, if that’s what I wanted to do. It was stupid because the DMH has many depressed clients, and why would they put watch-dogs on just one? But here was the puzzle of these people literally stalking me, and all the trouble I’d supposedly made for the DMH was the only solution I could, at that time, come up with.

I grew so sick of these people, Matthew and the rest. I tell you it was so bad that many times I would come out of a public restroom to find one of them standing right there, so close that I almost hit them with assorted bathroom doors. And no, they did not want the bathrooms. As soon as I came out, they went away, or they would follow me. I would rage inside that I couldn’t even bloody pee without these people hovering around me. They would sit at tables next to mine and watch me eat. On and on. It was real, it was extremely obvious, and it was extremely upsetting. Around the fifth of June I decided I would no longer be a client of the DMH, and then this would all stop. I wrote them a letter saying I no longer wished to be their client. When you do this, there’s a thirty-day waiting period in which you can change your mind, if you like. This meant that about July 7th, I would be officially quit of the Department of Mental Hell. Yes, I thought about my animals and the plan. I thought my letter of termination would spur my case manager into finally telling me about this plan, so that I would remain a client, get an apartment, and get animals back. But the letter spurred nothing, and over the thirty days of waiting I decided that the plan had already been ditched.

The thirty days would pass. I would no longer be their client. I did yet more waiting. Waiting to watch the stalkers not stalk me anymore. Waiting to see them just go about their own business in the shops and on the streets, like everybody else, and leave me alone. But by mid-June, it hadn’t stopped. It had got worse. So brain-that-hates-puzzles goes back to the drawing board in late June. Solution one was not correct. These colossal pains in my bum have nothing at all to do with the DMH. Now what?

On 23 June, a Monday, I’m walking Main Street between one hanging place and another, and suddenly my crime-chick neighbor comes back to mind. The mob cars that had come to the house to visit her in August and September of 2007 came back to mind. Every single thing she had done to torment me for seventeen months came back to mind. Her dealing drugs in the backyard came back to mind. It was the lightbulb going on in the head; it was the proverbial epiphany: this all has something to do with her. And why didn’t I think of this sooner, because if I had, I wouldn’t have terminated with the DMH just yet.

A day or two later, I found Matthew doing his vigil again beside the health food store. I’ve written this part before, and to me it’s worth writing again. I say to him: You people following me and watching me all the time. You’ve got nothing to do with the DMH, do you? He shakes his head and says in one of his idiot voices: No. Then I say: this is something criminal, isn’t it. And he nods and says in the same voice: Yes. And for the second time since March 12 — only three and half months — the fabric of my days was torn to threads. Still ahead of me on that day: On 2 July, a week away, Matthew Lacoy would pick up those unraveled threads that were my hours and days, and he would cut them up into even more pathetic little pieces with his own special pair of scissors. Those scissors were the one word kill.

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read…    All my stars…   Stolen stars…

~~~~~   website  ~~~~~~  Share    ~~~~~~~

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 all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

 

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