Things That Have Actually Happened

Ed part 9

2012-01-28T07:20:00.004-06:00

I think I'm approaching Land Before Time-esque numbers of installments -- but last one, I swear. Unless he does something else, which is TOTES POSSIBLE, but this will be the last one for toni-- this morning.

Just some bits and bobs to wrap up.

Scary bits and bobs.

First, an innocuous message a year later:

Good luck, wherever you go

Jul 6, 2010 at 10:50 PM

From him, to me.

I noticed your face on the graduation wall. Nice to know you are still going strong in this world. Again, I'll be surprised if you read this far.

The title pretty much says it all. Good luck, Jo.

Now as I said he gave up trying to talk directly to me in person. He settled for creepy muttering or talking to people sitting right next to me instead because, you know, that makes it better (it doesn't). Or he'd just wave, every time he saw me, and say hello, long after I'd begun actively ignoring and avoiding him.

So, one day he managed to find me alone in the cafeteria. I had my laptop set up as I waited for my ride. It was night. I was alone. This was why he spoke to me: no one else was there.

HE WAITED UNTIL I WAS ALONE TO APPROACH ME. IMPORTANT. FACT.

He came up to me and asked me why I broke things off and what my problem was. I just looked him straight in the eye and said, "You're an asshole. Fuck off."

He started going on about how I wasn't so nice myself, blah blah blah, I just closed my laptop and started to leave, he said okay and left first, I remained seated.

Good. Good. I like that result. He leaves of his own volition.

I wasn't about to pretend I owned the cafeteria suddenly. We went to the same school and there are like, five tables there. He just can't sit at mine, and he can't talk to me, okay? I can remain civil -- I just ignore him. I go out of my way not to deal with him, not to START a deal with him. He does the opposite at every turn, constantly pestering me whenever he sees me (or if he can't get away with it, just... muttering... I mean damn that is just so weird and creepy).

He also hangs out at the local game store, The Game Keep. Again, I'unn care. I was there with my D&D group, he was there with his, or whatever they were doing, we didn't bother each other, it was nice. As many times as he repeated the phrase "vindictive bitch" to me in person and over AIM/emails, I would not attempt to purge him from every place I might see him. I am not so immature as to believe his mere presence ruins my ability to enjoy myself. I can be an adult and just not let it be a Big Deal, okay? I just want to play my games. I just don't want to talk to him. I'm tired of him.

So yesterday, January 27, 2012, one of my D&D friends told me that Ed told him to ask me to meet him somewhere.

He told my friend to say this in private. He didn't want anyone to know. He wanted me to send word back with a chosen location.

Uuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Now you see my sudden need to post this.

He wanted to meet me, in private. He didn't want anyone to know that we might meet in person.

He also told this friend that he reads my blog. Whatevs. My internet stuff's all public, I'm not about to get mad about somebody I don't like reading what I post because otherwise I would've made it private, duh. But...

He already knows where I live. He knows where I go to school, where I go to game, who all of my friends are and all of our contact information and what all of us looks like. He has consistently failed not only that I want nothing to do with him, but why, because he lacks the ability to understand or know people, or at least me, despite his constant arguments to the contrary.

He wants to meet me, alone, in secret. HE WANTS. TO MEET ME. ALONE. IN SECRET.

Holy hell. And I was afraid to walk outside by myself before!

I haven't gone to the police because I didn't want to ruin his life that way he wanted to ruin mine. He wanted to destroy my social life, he hung my financial situation and medical crisis over my head like bait to draw me back, he wants to force me to crawl back to him for forgiveness from HIM. But I have never hated him enough to take this to the authorities, to get him kicked out of school or work or the game keep or wherever he may go. I just quietly wished he'd graduate quicker so I could at least have the campus to myself.

And what has he DONE, really? Nothing... concrete. His most threatening, terrifying statements were all done in person, non-quotable as they are not in print or on record. He hasn't actually harmed me. But I fear.

He's wished harm on others.

The military didn't want him because of how mentally unstable he was. Has he done harm to others, too? I don't know. Not for certain.

Reasons I needed to record all of this. Reasons to post all of this, to finally dredge up these bad memories and go over all these ugly conversations again. Because for five years, he's never stopped stalking me.

The reasons all pile up.

They make me feel afraid.

Ed part 8

2012-01-28T06:57:00.006-06:00

This now has more installments than the Harry Potter series. (Books. Not movies.)

You now see why it was important to point out his nigh-blackmail talk of how not wanting to date him ruined his plans for paying my medical bills, and how threatening his general behavior came across: so that what she says here makes more sense.

Subject: Ed

Jun 15, 2009 at 1:29 PM

From Heather, to me.

So since you're not online, I figured I'd send this to you so you're aware of it. If I don't do it now, I'll forget and close the IM.

AIM IM with castlecrash.

2:21 PM

castlecrash: I'm aware I normally don't IM you, so I'll make this quick: have you heard from Jo, and if so, is she doing well?

Heather: This is Ed, right?

castlecrash: Yes.

Heather: Seriously dude, she told you to leave her alone. I'm not telling you shit about her because she told you to leave her alone. You have no right to be asking other people about her well being, you need to leave her the fuck alone.

castlecrash: I intend to honor that. I'm asking if she's doing well in Florida. Unless, of course, you consider it an act of malice to ask if someone is, you know, alive and well as opposed to the opposite.

2:25 PM

Heather: I'm not telling you a goddamn thing about her. Leave her the fuck alone and get on with your life. You have no goddamn business asking after her.

castlecrash: Out of curiosity, exactly what did she tell you about me?

Heather: I've heard a fair few things. Nice job with the threats and the needling to show her what a great man you are, by the way. Real men are really awesome at the passive aggressive BS you tried to pass off. If only all men had your obviously manly qualities.

castlecrash: Threats? WTF?

Heather: Seriously, fuck off. This is bordering on harassment.

castlecrash: Fine. Believe whatever you wish.

castlecrash has gone offline

I know I should have been better at holding my tongue, but all the BS he put you through then he tries to drag me into it... didn't exactly sit well with me, as you can imagine. And see. From the conversation. But I figured you'd want this for the file since it's getting really out of hand what he's doing.

xoxo

-Heather

Subject: Re: Ed

From me, to her.

Argh, I'm sorry he dragged you into this. I hope he's not bothering anyone else I know. I don't know why he thinks I moved, I was in school JUST the other day and I was in the cafeteria with his roommate!

Thanks for sticking up for me and giving him a piece of your mind. *heart*

Subject: Re: Re: Ed

From her, to me.

Not your fault sweetie, don't worry about it. Neither of us could have predicted that he would have done this. I mentioned it to Curt too, so that if Ed tried it again with him he;d be aware. No one else was online that I could talk to at the time.

I figure this is a decent record of how it's going down if it keeps happening to other people.

It did.

He told his roommates to talk to me, for one. I also believe whatever I said to them passed back to him, at which point I had to tell his friends not to talk about me to him because I just didn't want him knowing anything about me. I was content to let him believe I was in Florida but of course the illusion was dashed once we actually shared classes together.

The little weirdo would try to sit as close as possible to me in class or the library, would try to insert himself into conversations I had with other classmates (y'know, ones I LIKED), and mutter angrily to himself all the time while near me.

I'm not kidding. He was always... muttering... grumbling, under his breath, around me. Or talking towards me, but not at me. Or to people next to me, or people talking to me.

He also kept emailing me. Over and over again. For years.

The first one I must have deleted the original of, because I forwarded it to myself and some people I knew, so the title is different. The timestamp should at worst be a day or two off and no more. Actually it appears to have been sent shortly after Heather sent me her correspondence log.

Subject: Ed's FOR SERIOUS REALS "last"-last letter

Jun 15, 2009 at 8:13 PM

From him, to me.

To hell with a senseless promise. What is sooner spoken then broken will be ignored for this letter.

I somehow doubt you will read this, but in the unlikely event you do, best of luck in Florida. Hope you have a roof over your head and food in your belly. And, if nothing else, I hope Florida treats you better than Tennessee did. Those landlords did genuinely ream your family.

Oh, and for the road. :P You did attempt to genuinely injure me, but I saw and stopped most of that in advance, and therefore am not upset. Take care, and leave Tennessee with the knowledge that you have one friend, whether you have the sense to appreciate it or not.

Subject: Just saying hello

Oct 22, 2009 at 7:32 AM

From him, to me.

Likely this won't even be read, and you won't appreciate a hello from me, but, hello. Naturally you will draw your own reason for this communication. Here is the primary cause: for your last birthday, I made what might have been an incredibly stupid oath to remain your friend. I state it like that because I remain genre savvy about the one-sided nature of this friendship of mine. This is rather awkward to me because if you spoke to me, you could trust me. If I spoke to you, not a chance in hell; you are required to re-earn my trust.

By the way, recently read your page. Hope life is dealing you good cards. Oh, and I will be attending game night. I don't expect to see you there, but I figured you might want the heads up. You have been going somewhat out of your way to avoid a social situation with me, and the information might be useful to you.

On an aside, why did you terminate our friendship? It isn't because you hate me, that has been painfully clear to me. That hatred was an act, to a point. So it raises the issue of why our friendship terminated. I believe I have discovered why our relationship ended, and even why you refused to be upfront about it. (If my hypothesis is correct, it is actually quite understandable.) But the friendship termination continues to elude me. I've reviewed our transcripts, and I cannot read between the lines. That is all I know, is that there is something there I am not seeing, and that it should be painfully obvious.

No matter, in the end.

So where am I going with this? All I'm doing is reminding you that you continue to have a friend, and in this state, always will have one. Unquestionably if you did read this, you will also see some kind of mind game in it. Quite frankly, I'm also surprised you read this far. I presumed you would simply delete first and ask questions later.

Simply put, any time you wish to reopen communications, I will attempt to oblige. But in the unlikely event you actually care, you have some damage control to initiate. Either way, best of luck with life, as always.

(Can't read between the lines huh? I guess calling you vain, presumptUous, arrogant, smug, annoying, rude, immature, a bad date, a bad kisser, a bad friend, a bad person, a child, an asshole, and a dweeb didn't do it for you?

Seriously. My bar is just too high. Clearly, no mortal can reach it. My expectations pierce the atmosphere and even Buzz Aldrin would be hard-pressed to follow at this rate.

lolol I have to re-earn his trust and do damage control

yep great way to make me want to talk you again dude

freakin' asshat)

Ed part 7

2012-01-28T06:47:00.002-06:00

I really hope Blogger doesn't have some daily word limit or something or I am hooosed.

I felt so good writing this next thing. I feel even better reading it again. Ooh my vitriol just gives me shivers! I never get to let loose like that.

Because no one else deserves it.

Just him.

Subject: Re: Reply to reply

From me, to him.

I broke up with you BECAUSE I AM NOT IN FUCKING LOVE WITH YOU AND I NEVER WILL BE. If that isn't a concrete reason, then I have no idea what is.

You are in love with me. I was hoping you'd grow out of it when I made it clear over and over again that there was absolutely no chance ever of us being together. Instead, you chose to continuously rehash the topic by telling me I didn't really have a reason to break up with you, that I'd just learn to love you, like some kind of exotic delicacy that just takes getting used to. That is some major sort of arrogancy right there, and that's exactly one of the major reasons I would never want to spend my life with you (aside from a startling lack of compassion in the name of abiding to a greater law than God's -- Man's Law; no sense of public decorum or social etiquette (like the scene where you quoted the 'rape as comedy' article in front of me and my mom, what the fuck were you thinking? YOU WEREN'T.); and the subtle lingering taint of sexism and classism ingrained deeply within you due to your life growing up in this state).

Don't even pretend for one second you can know a person in fifteen minutes. And if you want to break out the, "I can totally control one's feelings after fifteen minutes of knowing them", give it your best shot, boy. I don't really see how you can think you have an ability to bolster or break my spirit when you can't even make me feel affectionate towards you.

Am I getting it right yet? Am I killing your crush, will the puppy stop nipping at my heels now? That's what I'm aiming for -- I'm tired of trying to maintain friendships with people who don't want to be just friends with me, and then having to let it drift into dusty sad death. So instead of just waiting for you to get exhausted and wander away when you realize I won't put out (and by that, I mean emotionally -- you'd be grateful for just that, you wouldn't dare ask for physical putting out anyway), I'm just going to slaughter this ultimately doomed friendship first.

Also, we weren't really a couple anyway. I went to a movie with you. And we didn't even pay since I get in for free. I don't even refer to you as an "ex" anything -- you weren't anything in the first place to "ex" out of. When people ask me when my last relationship was, I tell them it was a long time ago.

If you think calling me a bitch over and over again somehow has the power to hurt my feelings -- it doesn't. It just reaffirms my statement that you are a silly little boy who doesn't know how to speak, for good or ill, without cursing. What unoriginality.

The thing is, you couldn't break me if you tried, because I never let you in. You don't really know what I fear, and I dare you to try to guess. You couldn't bolster me, either -- you failed spectacularly to do so during our dating stint, and only ever succeeded in annoying me. You never learned enough about me to do any harm. No one has. No one will. Except the people I really love...they already know everything. They could kill my spirit entirely if they wished, but they actually have some fucking heart, so they wouldn't, because they aren't vindictive bastards. Because they love me in the way God tells us to love -- to be willing to die for each other. To not turn on each other and go for the jugular when someone doesn't get exactly what they want out of a relationship.

I don't pretend I can break you either. But I sure as hell hope I make you get over all of this. I tire of you and your messages. Just leave me be.

(I find "Re: Reply to reply" so hilarious in its ridiculousness. Ah, the little things on reflections! There was some joy to be found here after all.)

Subject: Terms acceptable

Apr 26, 2009 at 9:42 AM

From him, to me.

No duh. That's quite my point as of the last letter, and why I must respectfully disagree with you when you state that I am in love with you, in spite of me plainly telling you I'm not. But hey, there is a zero percent chance that in the six months since you broke up with me that I've actually gotten over you. After all, you know me well.

Interesting to note that someone who accuses me of vulgarity as a negative trait instantly chooses to dive headfirst into that road. Return evil unto evil?

And going back to that philosophical discussion briefly, I believe the following applies: God asks we put up with the laws of humanity for His sake. The end. I don't see what is debatable about this. Read it yourself in the New Testament if you don't believe me.

Clearly I can drive you into a foaming blood frenzy just by disagreeing with you. Does that suffice for emotional control? And as far as bolstering a person goes, nobody can help a person who neither seeks help nor is interested, something I've never quite entirely understood the why of. It seems far easier to break down reasoning then to build it.

I've actually become quite convinced you both rely on and resent the sympathy of others, and are likely being torn apart by the unresolved conflict. But what do I know? I hardly know you enough for you to clearly fear the idea of "giving me ammunition," despite that alone being more than enough if I felt inclined to act on it in such a manner.

Let me guess: our friendship is doomed much like the prior relationship was? Okay, let's cover this one last time before I kill this topic. The prior died because you wanted it to, and no other reason. You said you weren't in love. Well, no duh. I was actually attempting to avert that and hold it off, because if it had gotten to that point it would have forced my hand well before I was ready to play it. Failure on multiple fronts.

So, you are going to kill off our friendship. Fine. Go ahead and do it, but at least have the gall to admit you are actively taking a hand in its destruction rather than falling back on this fatalistic fate nonsense. You don't know the future anymore than I do, but for a person who claims to have faith in a presence that cannot be preceived with the five senses you have an awfully low amount of faith in...anything, actually.

You don't refer to me as your "ex" anything. Well, not now. That's what makes deletion of data so much fun. You can pretend to yourself and others that you never considered me anything close to you. And you wonder where I get off on my stance of accusing you of self-delusion. If I had to guess, you consistantly rewrite your own histories so as to pretend to yourself your life is something other than what it is.

I've walked your present road before, and I see your path's end.

I didn't call you a bitch in the last letter. I asked if you were believed you were one. Read it again, if you don't believe me.

So, you want me to address November directly? That's reasonable, if late in the request. I decided in that month to do two things: one, give my fury at what I saw as your irrational actions a vent, and two, with this in mind, to see just how you would react to a systemic attack on your ego, something I could not in any decency do while we were going out. I stopped when I realized you seemed to confuse your weaknesses for a shield, and that if I continued you'd end up, well, rather like you are today.

Hardly my best moment overall, as it reflects a slip, a giving in to my darker urges. But again, I don't pretend the past never happened. I did say those things, and at the time I meant them too. Just as you mean what you say to me today.

If it's easier for you to believe I am not your friend, do what you must. Most people don't believe the truth anyhow, and you are no exception to this.

To be honest, I don't feel the need to break you. Besides, from here it doesn't look like you need my help in that field. You are clearly quite capable of doing that on your own. I don't know what's really going on in your world, but I'll honor your request for solitude. Simply decline to respond to this, and that will be answer enough for me.

I hope your future is better than your past, but that's in your hands. Seriously, Jo, take care of yourself.

(If he isn't in love with me has no freakin' reason to never leave me alone.

By the way, asking someone that an insult is only offensive if it's true is pedantic bullshit. If I go up to an African-American right now and call them a nigger, they have every right to get mad about it! I cannot make the sting of the insult go away by saying, "Well, do you FEEL like you're really a nigger? By admitting to feeling hurt, you're just admitting that I'm right! A ha ha ha!"

NO, THAT IS STUPID, THIS IS NOT HOW CONVERSATIONAL LOGISTICS WORK.

By the way I don't think I've ever typed the N-word before either and no I've never said it anyone either! If I ever typed it before I was probably just discussing racism with a friend. Or maybe quoting Blazing Saddles.)

Subject: Re: Terms acceptable

I was holding back. I chose to yell at you. You didn't manage to make me do anything. And I don't speak like this to people whose feelings I care to be tender with; not to people with whom I care to further associate. To prove that, no, you don't really have the ability to affect my emotions, I'll speak calmly now, as I could have done before but decided not to because I was trying to drive you away for good. I was honestly hoping you'd say, "Goodness, what a hypocritical she-dog, I'll not speak to this one again, she's off her rocker!" But psychotic, rabid frothing at the mouth didn't seem to dampen your persistence in leaving fiery bags of feces in my e-mail inbox, so perhaps blunt insults will do the trick.

You mentioned I used to think you were a good man. But then I realized I kept coming away from every conversation with you thinking what a gaseous, puttering, squeaking little sphincter you are. I obviously had made the mistake of confusing "battered" with "nice". So perhaps the stereotypes are true about red-headed stepchildren.

You think I assumed you wanted to "boink and call it a day", but you are wrong. As usual. If only that's what you had been after. Men who think entirely with their genitals at least have the common sense, most of the time, to wander off and bother somebody else when their current target rejects them. Boys with crushes and dreams of the family life, however, have no such sense and fall asleep telling themselves, "Someday, someday, someday..."

I can't stand to talk to people who feel more for me than I for them, and become bitter and jealous and put their fingers in their ears and say, "La, la, la," when I mention that I feel less for them than they for I. Which is why I can never stand to talk to you again. It isn't fate -- it's human nature. I've done this routine so many times, gentle rejection followed by an offer of continued friendship, displaying cordial politeness and trying to still hang out...But it never works out. There's no friendship after a date if someone misinterpreted a clunky, clumsy time and unenjoyable kiss for anything like a "spark". It peters out, it dies quietly.

And of course I'm taking credit for killing it now. Isn't that what I already said?

In case I wasn't clear enough:

Communication henceforth terminated. Your further input is no longer required nor desired. There will be no more responses to reward the self-aggrandized babble that spills from your piehole.

Dweeb.

(You think it's over now, don't you? Hahaha. My poor readers, if they exist.

It's only begun.)

Ed part 6

2012-01-28T06:36:00.003-06:00

Subject: Re: The AIM discussion

From me, to him.

You're being awfully smug about how much you 'know'' about my thoughts and actions for someone who, let's be honest, barely knows me at all. So we shared a few long conversations, but that was all. It takes a lot more than a few sessions of mutually contemplating our navels and an irascible sense of self-assurance to actually know someone.

Yes, I was offended at your words, no duh? You think calling someone a bitch isn't going to be offensive? Again, it just speaks of how little you know me, or how to speak to people in general: you don't throw out obscenities, let alone ones with an overall sexist tone, unless you can be absolute certain it's not going to tread on anyone's toes. Clearly it did. The fact that you tried to defend it by saying it was a joke (so many times I said 'I was only KIDDING!' when I said inappropriate things as a child...I've used and abused that excuse, I'm not about to take it), and then you tried to tell me that one specific group of people is more 'okay' to insult than another (namely, it's more okay to insult women than blacks; not that I'm saying blacks should be insulted, I'm saying you shouldn't use offensive profanities towards ANYone)...

You don't regard me as a friend. Stop trying to kid yourself. I don't know what you regard me as exactly, but your thoughts are certainly more than platonic, yet less than well-meaning.

I know you said you wanted to buy a house and have us all live there. I'm pretty sure what you meant is that you wanted to buy a house and have ME live there, and my parents are just baggage that can't be disattached. I can't believe you thought that making that offer was even in the least bit appropriate.

Also, I didn't tell you what was bothering me: again, don't kid yourself about what you think you know or what you're assuming I actually revealed to you, because 90% of the time I'm not revealing jack shit to you. And when I do mention anything personal to you nowadays, chances are it's not private anyway and I've probably told everyone else. But I don't open up to people who are using my words to load up on ammunition, who are waiting for an excuse to bring up the fact I had the gall not to fall in love with them into a conversation and then pretend to have business in the library and whisk off after that whole goddamn smug-ass, "Oh, you never know, you might end up feeling things you didn't feel befoblahblahblah I totally know you better than you know yourself even though you've known yourself for all of nineteen years and I've barely entered your life like a leaf enters a swimming pool".

I believed you sympathized with Ian because you said, "I feel sorry for him". Duh? How is taking a person's words at face-value considered a "delusion"? I don't think your "accidental" deadpan delivery is so accidental, either. I think half of it is you don't have a strong enough filter between brain and tongue, and the other half is that you're just waiting for a chance to tell someone they were misguided to think you were being anything other than sarcastic. It's so fun to correct people and tell them they're wrong, isn't it? Then to place their deluded misconceptions under Freudian slips and pretend to psychoanalyze them about it. You'll make a terrific lawyer; I can see you humiliating people on the witness stand with a calm, smug smile already.

Make whatever "rational conculsion"s you want to make. Fine, I'm selecting to be ignorant, about...something or other. I'm desiring a parti-- oh cut the jargon, you're telling me that I'm pretending to be stupid so I can make you act angry? Right, it's all part of my master plan. I'm conspiring just to you piss you off. That's my entire purpose in life -- I just sign onto AIM and think to myself, "How can I be a douchebag to Ed? I desire contrition from him!" and then I spend hours setting the chess pieces into place...

You are so vain.

I get angry with you because you're arrogant, presumptuous, and more vulgar than a barely-pubescent boy trying to impress the teenagers. I don't respond to you sometimes because I honestly have no input on a subject, or because I, SURPRISE SURPRISE, have a life and conversations outside of a conversation held with you, because my thoughts don't focus or revolve around you and responding to you as soon as I possibly can.

There's nothing wrong with being ashamed of one's flaws. You just don't believe you have any.

And trust me, I'm completely aware of why I speak harshly to you. You are not. ...or maybe you're just selecting to be ignorant. Har har har.

I'm still not your business. I blocked you on AIM for a reason. It's the same reason I've become increasingly hostile and vulgar towards you. If you can't figure it out, you're a dunderhead. If you think we should still keep open communications, you need to get the stars out of your eyes and stop daydreaming that I'll be your little wifey someday, and stop pretending that our arguments are anything but a slinging of mean words.

Subject: Reply to reply

Apr 25, 2009 at 6:26 PM

From him, to me.

Let's go with your misguided presumption that I don't know you. There is a simple solution to that: inform me when I make a statement that misrepresents you. Then I know you. Problem solved. And, yes, I do know you. Within fifteen minutes of conversation I know how to break someone or bolster their strengths. Anyone can do this, but the difference is that I'm aware of the process.

You still haven't mentioned what exactly offended you. Did that idea of looking for the spirit in words go over your head? Are you literally so consumed with resentment for Ian that you honestly cannot recognize your friends?

But let's ignore that question for now. Let's go to a better one: Are you a vindictive bitch, yes or no? This one is not asked in jest, and is a serious question. Vindictive, used to mean a person who desires an unjust vengeance, and bitch, noun female dog, slang referrence weakness and unpleasantness of personality. And consider how you see yourself, before you answer. If you see yourself as such, I fail to see the problem in addressing you as such. If not, and I hope this is the answer, why would you take me seriously? Either way, this fails to make sense.

"More than platonic, less than well-meaning?" Personal translation: I just want to boink you and call it a day....wow. Just...wow. This is supposed to be...what? I'm sorry, but it's as funny two hours later as it was when I first read it. You cannot possibly be serious, and if you are, then even trying to talk to you is a utter waste of time, as you have already decided you know me (interesting how you claim to know me, while denying the reverse could possibly be true) and that I have no honor.

This seems to be your claimed stance, yet this clashes with your prior stance that I am a good man.

As far as the offer of the house, I asked your parents, not you. And if you ask them again, I was offering a place until they and by extension, you, (and I will say this slow): Moved. To. Florida. Just so we are clear on that. Unless you control where the family moves, I saw no reason to ask you. If I was mistaken, inform me. This offer was quite sincere, however, it's rather a moot point, considering how the deal fell through before it even began. Perhaps for the best, perhaps not. Time will tell.

No, you didn't. You just gave me one of many thoughts bothering you. That doesn't surprise me. But you did give me information you had not given before, and that suffices for me. And that doesn't bother or surprise me. But I have a question: if you told me nothing private, why did you tell me not to reveal some information? That doesn't strike me as public information, unless you believed I had an untrustworthy nature, and you wanted to see how vindictive I was. This does not equate. At some point, you are lying.

The point of communication is to tell the truth. Try again, or at least lie more effectively.

And I don't exactly relish those discussions, but as long as you're bringing it up, 1)I will not pretend the past never happened, and 2)you still have not given a concrete reason for the breakup. Thankfully, I've formed a rational conclusion for this, and since your answer is consistant but lacks true insight, I honestly no longer feel I need your input on the subject, and therefore feel no reason to raise the topic.

So, that little drop in the library bothered you that much, huh? Well, tell you what: if I honestly believed you were interested in rekindling that relationship, I would ask you what you expected to gain from it. Flat out. I'm no longer of the mentality of simply accepting a person at face value. Thanks in large part to you, I will not form a new relationship unless they know what they are looking for. And if it clashes with my ideals, relationship does not happen.

By the way, I actually am grateful to you for this. At the time of the breakup I wasn't, but times change. Not quite the ending I had in mind, but it will do, and I'll survive.

As far as Ian is concerned in my book, let me make this clear: I only have your side of the story, and the victor's write the histories. So I honestly don't know if you were justified or not in doing what you knew was a damned inconvience to him. That's why you did it, duh. Now for the interesting part: up until you started including me in your verbal attack catagory, I decided you were telling the truth, and at best, he struck me as a short-sighted fool. At worst he was an adulterer.

Of course, since I've already caught you in at least one inconsistancy, I have to question every damn thing you ever told me. That's life, though.

Allow me to translate "deliberate stupidity" for you: use of feigned ignorance to lure someone to a position where they will be more suseptable to attack, be it physical, mental, or social. For example: You don't regard me as a friend. Stop trying to kid yourself. I don't know what you regard me as exactly, but your thoughts are certainly more than platonic, yet less than well-meaning.

That is deliberate stupidity (DS) at it's finest. Hence my prior comtemptious reaction to it. The only possible point of this is an attempt to drown me in false points so as to focus me in one direction while you try and sneak in the real point. Who knows? You might have succeeded. I don't assume I'm the only one who can verbally fight someone.

Vain, arrogant, presumptious, vulgar, immature...

Thanks for the clear up. You hit them all spot on, although I think you missed beautiful, awesome, correct, unashamed, and youthful. But, I hold to my stance, and I fail to see where you are going with this. It strikes me much as the aforemention DS in it's probable objective, except unlike that, this actually has roots in reality. But if you actually believe that I don't see my own faults, and were honestly counting on that, *ahem* WRONG!! Sorry, had to give a Superman shout-out. Best line in the movie.

Anyhow, I presumed you didn't respond to me for the same reason most don't: sometimes I just come so far from left-field no one knows how to respond to me. See the above for a prime example. But if you're involved in other conversations on AIM, that's fine. In case you haven't noticed, I'm usually doing something while talking to you as well. I expect a life beyond, and I would be surprised if you had none.

Actually, there isn't. Shame can be a powerful moral compass. However, it does become a problem when it allows the malicious to exploit you.

To be honest, I was unaware you had blocked me on AIM. But then again, I don't know how to look for those things, and it didn't show up on my end. And I haven't noticed any elevation in hostility until say, a few days ago. It takes a lot to register, but thanks to hindsight, yes, I can trace this too.

Anyhow, I'm glad you finally started unleashing on me. I've known about this for some time, but not the specifics behind it. I wish you had done this back in November, but I suppose better late then never.

To be honest, I have a hunch that even communication with you is a waste of time, but I am nevertheless gripped by a compulsion to address this and try to resolve the situation. If you are attempting to return my own tactics (as the emotion behind your words is certainly identical to my November communications), make sure you at least know primary objectives as well as secondary objectives. Understand yourself before you march off to verbal war.

Note to all men: you will fail at wooing, friendship, or anything not resembling a verbal onslaught if you attempt to make up for calling a woman "vain, arrogant presumptious[sic], vulgar, immature" with a bunch of compliments right after.

Like, dohoho you are such a gigantic shitsponge you lovable lady!

Oh, off my feet I have been surely SWEPT!

Wait no, then I just started cussing at him.

Man, who would have THOUGHT?! By the way, he's the only person I've ever actually said "fuck" to in a way that wasn't quoting someone else. I don't even say it out loud in a quoting context. I just don't feel comfortable cursing, generally. I said it out loud to him, once.

THAT IS AN IMPORTANT FACT.

See how many exceptions most human beings ever get from me which he does not? See how many second chances, benefits of the doubt and basic extents of sympathetic speech I stopped offering him?

IMPORTANT.

FACTS.

Ed part 5

2012-01-28T06:23:00.003-06:00

I am so, so sorry for all these damn emails. Their recording, as ever, is necessary!

One may wonder what made him so terrible -- well, that's the thing, he wasn't COMPLETELY IRRECONCILABLE at first, which is why I was willing to remain friends at all. But the once ignorable differences in philosophy merely compounded with the fact that he was a huge asshole after I stopped dating him, which turned like into apathy into dislike into hate.

Just as I -- GASP -- warned him would happen. Because, shockingly, I know myself better than he ever did!

Anyway, enjoy.

Subject: I think you will like this

Nov 23, 2008 at 12:50 AM

From him, to me.

I've been doing some thinking. I've plotted all variables ahead, and a foreign conculsion occured to me: let things advance at there own course. Stop fighting.

Now, bear something in mind. It is not in my nature at all to halt anything if I believe that I succeed. Make no error, I have a clear understanding of my objectives with you, and a plan as to accomplish it. However, it has occured to me that even if I succeed at this, I will still fail. Why? Because my life seems governed by the Diabolus es Machina at times, and I believe this is one of those times.

Call it 36+ hours without sleep, but I think this idea might be worth attempting. I can see the darkness in my future. I can see the most negative possiblities that could possibly arise from my own actions. What's messing with me, is that I cannot, and never have been able to precieve the best possible outcome.

This only bothered me tonight, like something I've always known but never really stopped to consider. Why is that?

Simple: God doesn't want me to see it, because He wants me to trust His path for me.

So I'll go with it, and do something I normally would not consider: halting. It's an especially aggrevating idea when I had literally spent days preparing what I was going to say and do, and how I was going to say it, and all responses you could have, and so on, and so on. I now have to chuck that out the window.

I'll explain the nature of what precisely I'm talking about in person if I ever get a chance. I refuse to print it, because it's dangerous for me. Literally. As in, my life could literally be f**king ruined as a result of it getting out.

Anyhow, I'm running on too little sleep, and I need to call it a night. Oh, I'll be out of town, and thus offline for Monday and Tuesday.

Take care of yourself, and don't let the hits of life knock you down for long.

Your friend,
Ed

Subject: Re: I think you will like this

From me, to him.

I'm going to point out two things: First, I didn't read my email until just half an hour ago (4 am). As in the last time I looked at the internet was...Wednesday or Thursday. So all of a sudden I look at my email and see two things. So I looked at and responded to the first, and you MAY have detected that I was a good bit...ruffled, to say the least, but your comments, especially since you sent them just before my party. Seriously, what? Who says those kinds of things to someone on their birthday? Those weren't discussions, they were just jabs.

Anyway, the second of the two things, since that was all the first thing right there, is that I looked at this email after I responded to the other one, which was sent a day ago anyway.

Anyway I seriously have no idea what you're talking about. Making your politician's instinct for sesquipedalian loquaciousness has flown it over my head or something, or maybe...I don't know. Just, "Huh?"

I'm really not sure if you're threatening me, or telling me you never want to talk to me, or telling me you did a horrible crime and the internet isn't secure because The Man will put you away, or what, but what is the point of sending an e-mail to say "I have nothing to say right now"? That's what this boiled down to! "Hey, I just wanted to let you know, that I am not going to let you know what I was thinking abut just now. Just thought you should be aware that I was at least thinking of saying something but I'm not really up to actually saying it. Toodles." ... Really.

So uh. My e-mail boils down to, "What are you even saying right now (if anything)?"

-Jo

(My confusion in that email was and remains sincere. He has the politician's knack for hollow filibuster at least. Har har har!

He never directly replied. The next email is timestamped for April, instead. I believe I had broken off contact after November, potentially. If I did not then, I did in following emails in NO uncertain terms.

The only reason I didn't block him on Gmail as I did over Deviantart, Facebook, AIM, and everywhere else is because, well. Better the enemy you know than the enemy you don't. I'd rather take his stupid little leavings in my inbox and just never look at them again than not know what he was trying to spew at me at all, in case any of it was ever threatening.

I sound strange to talk of how threatened I felt, but when you've been stalked for five years, a certain level of precautionary paranoia seems healthy, even demanded.

Also the whole, he wished harm on every woman that ever rejected him before, thing. *Shudder.*)

The AIM discussion

Apr 23, 2009 at 2:17 AM

From him, to me.

I actually asked CJ is my deadpan while telling a joke is too good. He informed me that yes, I'm always half-serious even when telling a joke. Those were his words.

This isn't the first time I've run into a problem with this, so I'll ask this: are you offended at my words, or the spirit behind them? If the former, then you've made your lack of agreement with my sense of humor clear, and it won't be a problem again. If the latter, what is the spirit you are seeing? Please think before you answer this.

It's interesting to note that right after you informed me how I'm not your problem, you informed me about what was bothering you, thus proving to me once again one of the theories I've had that never fails to annoy me when proven right: most people are at their most direct and honest whenever something or someone angers or annoys them.

You honestly believe I sympathize with Ian? This delusion would actually amuse me, if I didn't regard you as a friend. You are intelligent and perceptive. I know this for a fact. Knave and yes, arrogant, but nevertheless the above qualities apply.

Therefore, the most rational conculsion is that you are selecting to be ignorant, or pretending to be. The question: why? Answer: you desire a particular course of action from me. So, what course are you seeking from me? Clearly contrition, but for what exactly? As I hopefully made clear in the first paragraph, I'm not entirely sure what you are angry at me for. If I knew, I might be less inclined to be a complete jerk about it, but since it's for nothing as far as I can see, this e-mail is as close to an indicator as you will get that I just might be taking a friend's concern seriously.

It has also occured to me that perhaps you desire a target to vent your hate and fury on. I have no problem with this, but if this is going to be the case, at least make it clear why I'm a valid target. If you are going to dislike me because I'm good at deadpanning sarcasm, fine, but be aware that's why you dislike me, and don't pretend or tell me it's something else. Same applies if you dislike me because I am unashamed of my own flaws and the flaws of others.

In short, know the source of your anger, understand it well, and be justified in your rage. That's part of being honest and true to yourself. Most people have no clue what the source of their emotions are, yet they enslave themselves to first impression rather than looking deeper within, out of fear of what they will see.

And mostly, if you wish to see adversary in this rather than a frank discussion from a friend, that is a price I have paid before. I hope the spirit of this letter gets through to you, but if it does not, then at least it will not be through my inaction, or because I chose the safety of silence over the risk of communication.

Ed part 4

2012-01-28T05:30:00.003-06:00

The saga continues. It saddens me to have such bilgewater weight down my blog like excrement pulling down a dirty diaper, but such are the circumstances that I feel it imperative to put these on public record.

You'll know why, after the recounting. These conversations took place within a few days, or maybe just over one day. However, he continued to contact me for years onward.

Funny, how much two months can mean to a person... and nothing to another.

Subject: Re: Re: Re: I just reviewed the conversation

From him, to me.

Eh, what the hell. As long as the conversation is taking an increasingly hostile tone, I might as well roll with it. Besides, I have no fear of the future. Nothing will happen that was not intended.

(My way of admitting a leap of faith here...)

Of course I was willing to destroy your social life. Note the addendum, which you convienently returned to me: "...knowing exactly why I was doing it." This is right up there with me casually admitting that, yes, I could in fact kill someone in proximity to me if I felt I had cause. It has about the same threat value too. Did you give me cause? No? Okay then, this problem is solved. I make no error in admitting what I am and am not willing to do under extreme conditions. Especially since by the time I told you I would, there was no element of surprise lost, as I had already dismissed it as an acceptable measure. If I were to engage in such an act, I would not have warned you until the last possible minute so as to maximise the emotional damage.

So, yes, I'm willing. And yes, I can be downright ruthless and sadistic when I actually do take the gloves off and set myself to the destruction of another's will. So can you, and if you pretend otherwise, well, let's just say I know better. Intuition.

Well, I thought about outright asking, but I figured that if you didn't tell me the moment of the breakup, that, if it was in fact the case, I'd have to ask in a roundabout fashion. It worked.

My defination of infidelity is a little different than yours. Infidelity to me means...well, I was using adultery as my standard at that particular instance. Hence why I didn't ask. Besides, if you were being unfaithful, this would imply a dishonest nature to begin with, and no, you would not have told me outright if this were in fact the case. The roundabout questioning was partly because I couldn't see your face, and had to guage your words solely by the text you were using and simple intuition.

And as for my suspicions, well, two defenses. One, you did rather spring this one on me. When surprised, I tend to presume the worst. Distrust would be justified on any side of the fence, and if the situation had been reversed, I would have expected it, and wondered what was going on if you continued to trust me absolutely. Two, you are free to view me with suspicion as well if my own bothers you that much. I'm confident I'll pass your standards, just as you have passed mine. So relax.

I obey the laws of man, again, because my covenent with God literally requires me to. And as far as life being a consumable good to be paid for, well, I presume you are referring specifically to the medical field. If not, you'll let me know, or you won't. But I'll go with this presumption for now.

The present system, yes, it is. I have some experiences of my own with this view, and they are just as unpleasant as your own. I don't talk about my sister, because most of the time, it's not relevant. Her constant surgical requirements all but financially destroyed us. So, yeah, I've been there. I don't know how to phrase this, so I'll just say it. Ahem.

I. Am. Not. Judging. You.

At least, not in regards to matters of life or death. As far as I'm concerned, all that you did was necessary, or at least your family believed it was, which is reason enough. If you are seeking condemnation from me, you would have to do something far more serious than that.

Ah, the monetary issue. It's not just that I am getting paid. It's that I am taking the money. The difference? I accept that in exchange for a requested service I will do a particular task in a particular way. If I am not satifisfied with this arrangement, or if I am, in fact, asked to do something that I find morally reprehensible, I have the option of leaving at any time, two weeks notice be damned.

I am aware that my own morality will have to be comprimised if I am to lead. My own morality was comprimised when I chose to serve God. (He has some laws I disagree with.) That's a price. "He who leads shall be the servant of all." And everything that comes with that statement. I won't get to always choose my own morality, unless, of course, my morality happens to conspire to keep me out of office. I would actually consider that an acceptable conclusion to my experiment.

Oh, you misunderstand. I don't care how I'm preceived in the general views. Being viewed as a Templar type is actually quite advantageous. I encourage that. To you, to family, not the case. And you are correct, leaders are not comrades. Machivelli himself wrote as much and the bastard is actually correct. His theory checks out. A leader cannot be preceived as having a favorite. So, yes, it is not a path that others can climb. America is probably the closest I've ever seen to such a power structure and even then it has it's choke points where only X number may pass.

I have thought about these risks and yes, they do worry me. I ask God for the strength to do this. He might reply by shooting down my ambitions. It's happened before.

As I stated earlier, my own brother has called me on that presumptious nature of mine. It works.

You know, I've noticed a trend. You seem bent on pointing out the flaws in the capitalistic mentality i.e. everything has a price. I don't complain about it because their is nothing I can do about it (yet, if anything can be done at all), and I defend it for the same reason I defend anything else: I don't have anything better to replace it should it be lost. I'm all ears if you have a better idea. If not, yes, I understand that it does make life extrordinarily hard. I view it as a faith forger.

Oh, I know you would have challanged me. That doesn't bother me at all. If anything does trouble me, it is that it took you this long. As far as I am concerned, argument, challange, debate, fight, whatever the heck you call it, I consider it healthy, but only if it is resolved. Sometimes, this takes a few times. Sometimes not. Either way, it doesn't bother me, simply because I don't fear confrontation when it does finally come.

Anyhow, look forward to the next letter, despite the expected tone :P

Take care, Jo.

Subject: A few observations

Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 2:44 PM [note, this is just hours before my birthday party that day.]

I've noticed your lack of response over the past several days. I've attibuted several possible reasons to this, but I'm going to presume the most likely reason: you dislike hostile discussion, or being preceived as promoting it. It doesn't bother me at all, but I'm presuming it does bother you.

Another thing that strikes me as funny is our stark contast between our e-mails and our daily interactions. Seriously, you'd think we had a simmering dislike of one another, but what's the conversation? "Yeah, I'll have your birthday present ready. Look forward to showing up."

Anyhow, the point. I've noticed your reasoning for our breakup seems entirely based on the possiblity of future events occurring based on presumed tolerance levels for one another. Yes, I know. I just pointed out that you dislike these discussions. Forgive me for my refusal to simply give up. :/

The hypothesis that you are concealing something remains valid, but with an addendum: I'm curious, is it possible you are hiding information from yourself? This actually seems to happen rather frequently. The only question is, what information could you possibly be hiding?

The first time a possible solution occurred to me, there was an internal debate over whether or not I should just tell you, or use conversation to force you to come to that conculsion yourself, forcing the idea home that you knew it the whole time. The reason for the second, more roundabout technique was simple: in the event that it proved to be not the case at all, at least you would not have that ammo to fire at me, and in fact would have discounted it.

And then it occurred to me that if I am in the right at all, this point won't carry any power at all, and therefore I shouldn't fear it. The future does not frighten me, and nor do points of contention.

Simply put, I think you are afraid of choosing between your family and myself. I couldn't help but notice a little timing quirk, perhaps coincidence, perhaps not. Shortly before your decision, your mom asked me if I was willing to go with you when you left the state. I didn't answer, and I presume this was interpreted as no.

To your credit, at least you haven't used the arguement "we" would destroy each other, because there is no "we" to that at all. I have, however, made another observation. For all the pointing out you've done of how I'm a stone, inflexible in my views, note this: I have no problem with your point of views. You are the one opposed to views that clash with your own. In fact, I'm actually going to go as far as to say you seem to think your standard of morality is at its peak, and that no one holds a higher standard than you.

Bear in mind, from me at least, there is no condemnation in that last, merely a theory. Pride is a permittable flaw, as long as it is recognized.

Anyhow, take care of yourself, Joelle.

Ed

(This next email is another reason I've had reluctance to post, but... I said I will not even edit myself. I hate to post this one in particular, out of all of these, because of my excruciatingly raw vulnerability and admittance to self-loathing I do not like to show. But perhaps by baring such painful thoughts -- which by the way, were far stronger in the midst of a post-homelessness, post-near-death-medical-emergency depression -- will help me move on from them, as I cannot bury and ignore them any longer. I can at least look at them and feel comforted to know I am not as angry at myself.)

Subject: Re: A few observations

From me, to him.

I didn't respond because believe it or not I just didn't have anything to add. I sent the first e-mail because I realized some things I still felt I hadn't really responded to enough. Then your replied, and I had some more things to say. That's really it.

And I don't dislike you. I get pretty hostile pretty quickly to people who I feel have wronged me, and I would've told you not to come to my party if I thought there were going to be any issues.

And my "reasoning" for breaking up with you is that I don't love you. I notice you keep trying to find more than that even after you said you wouldn't. But really, that's all. As I said, I'm not going to stay in a relationship that my heart isn't in. I would never have loved you. If I had tried to lead you on by staying in such a deceitful relationship, I would've just ended up hating you instead because of the situation. I realized that I wasn't going to fall in love with you a few weeks before I actually broke up with you, but I was trying to think of a non-bitchy way to break up with you that wasn't in public (which is hard, because we're around other people almost all the time). So you can keep searching for other reasons, things that don't say, "She just wasn't into me that way," but you won't find anything but frustration down those paths of thought. Creating rationalizations for conclusions you want to be true doesn't make them true. It just makes it more painful.

It's just that I noticed post-dumping that there were additional reasons why it couldn't work anyway. Perhaps if I held that kind of affection for you, they'd all be overlookable, since as they say you can stand to be with someone you love no matter how they are. But when you only like someone as a friend, trying to force anything more than friendship out of that turns into a guilty twinge, and then a tedium, and then resentment towards oneself and the other person and then other couples (just because), and then you end up with one of those couples that does nothing but insult each other all the time because there was never anything in the hollow romance in the first place. Dramatic foretelling, yes, but I know myself well enough to know this. I can feel when I get irritated at someone else out of guilt and annoyance for my own situation (which was a false one, and few things can churn my insides quicker than carrying out a deception).

Anyway, I felt I could go ahead and stuff a lot of words into not many paragraphs, since you took about three paragraphs of "blah!" to actually say something yourself. :p

"I think you are afraid of choosing between your family and myself."

Ahahaha. No. If I loved someone, I'd want to integrate them into my family. The kind of person I think to myself, "I hope my parents think they'd make a good in-law" about.

"I couldn't help but notice a little timing quirk, perhaps coincidence, perhaps not. Shortly before your decision, your mom asked me if I was willing to go with you when you left the state."

Like I said, I think about my actions for a long time before I commit myself to them. I was already thinking of how to phrase the break-up at least weeks before it happened. Although by the time I had committed myself to really doing it, I hadn't heard about that conversation yet anyway. She told me after I had decided.

"You are the one opposed to views that clash with your own."

Often. But also, I really don't get this nitpicky with most people (seriously, theater mandates? Who ruffles their feathers over that?) But I was still suffering post-relationship irritation when I made those e-mails and full of hot air I had been wanting to release, full of argument and Devil's Advocacy. In other words I was just being highly disagreeable. With you. I don't actually think that you're immoral, any more than anyone else who I find alright to socialize with.

"I'm actually going to go as far as to say you seem to think your standard of morality is at its peak, and that no one holds a higher standard than you."

That is seriously one of the most hurtful things you've said to me, or HAVE had said to me. And I know you know this. I'd like to be a snob and say, "I won't even respond to that," but I won't because I have some pretty choice words to respond to that with.

I actually have a huge distaste for and disgust with myself most of the time. Every day I say to myself, "Holy fucking shit, what have I done wrong this time?" because for some reason I'm just convinced that there's no way I can't go through a day without completely screwing up and making someone unhappy or, worse, actively harming them. For so many months and years I play over in my head every time I have made an insulting faux pas, or just an outright insult with harmful intent, or been judgmental or cruel, or selfish, or outright violent, and I think of how contemptable I am and I say, "I need penance, I need a sign I can understand to tell me I'm doing the right thing for once, I am so afraid," and I think of how much I hate myself. Most of the time I'm only...holding of a mild antipathy or vague content-ish-ment towards myself, mostly of shallow concerns, but when I enter a depression I fill up with nothing but self-loathing. Do you know why I study not only the Bible but other religious texts as well, and read books of Maxims and etiquette and things written by old archaic dead people? Well, actually, you didn't know that, because we've only known each other for a few months and we don't actually KNOW each other. We can draw a lot of presumptions but really it's just throwing darts in the dark. But why I do that? Why do I cautiously ask people what they mean, why do I try to be polite and not pick fights and avoid confrontation if it's unnecessary, why do I review my days to see what I could have done wrong? Because I know I'm exactly as evil as everyone else, and I just want to...try to get closer towards some kind of selflessness that might perchance be inspiring to at least one person. I don't want to be that kind of person that a stranger I wronged in passing looks back on and says, "God, what an asshole, I can't believe people these days." I'd hate to be that person. I'd want to be the person that they say, "Huh, that was nice." Or something along those lines. Or even nothing at all. I just don't want to be an asshole. I already feel like one a lot of the time.

If I didn't think anyone was better than me, I wouldn't look up to them and envy their character traits so much, now would I? But you wouldn't know that. You just like to make statements about how people feel because "No harm done, if I'm wrong I'm just corrected", right? Well guess what, making hasty statements can be pretty detrimental sometimes.

And anyway, no flaw is permittable. God says every sin is equally condemning. If you have to tell yourself something you know is unkind is acceptable just because you admit to it, then that's just another rationalization of something you don't want to change thinking about.

Don't you remember how I told you that the way Jula hurt me, as hard as she could, was by telling me I was a snob? How that particular insult has haunted me all the way from my childhood? How I've tried to escape by putting up a non-confrontational front of humility and honesty? Yes, I'm full of pride, and I HATE myself and what I've done because of it.

I've let good people get hurt, emotionally and physically. It will never, ever leave me.

So like I said, there's a difference between stating what you think is true and just saying shit you hope makes the other person feel bad about themselves. You know what you said.

(Looking back on this now I almost laugh at how many times I said he was a good person. THAT was my true delusion.

Recall that in the first conversation, I said I would only evict someone entirely from my life and friendship if I find them vile, debase, immoral or otherwise completely unpleasant.

I have done just that to him. This I never do lightly. THAT IS AN IMPORTANT FACT.)

Ed part 3

2012-01-28T05:18:00.006-06:00

Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 8:41 AM is the date of this next email sent. Wait. That's the date of when I emailed myself the log! Alright, so instead of simply ruminating over it, I must have typed this email within those four hours. I'm solving temporal mysteries, here. Anyway, enjoy.

Some of the formatting screws up on Blogger. I'm not going to try to fix it. I'unn care.

Subject: I just reviewed the conversation

From me, to him.

And

castlecrash: Because I was literally ready to strip you of your visitation rights here if I believed what I was ready to believe.

has been bothering me greatly.

Do you recall how I told you that outside of you (and your friends at your house by proxy), I have no social life?

Do you believe anything has changed since then?

If you would have indeed followed through on that decision to condemn me on a hypothetical prospect of my falling for someone else, then I would have had the exact same birthday
that I've had for many years.
The one where no one is there

and instead of having a celebration I have an empty November day that reminds me of my marching steadily onward towards the grave without people to mourn over it. My yawning voids of birthday 'parties' have been grim reminders of my perpetual loneliness. I almost paused in my decision for the very fear that you would in fact decide to cut me out of my sole social circle.

So I suppose we are both glad I haven't fallen in love for seven years or this would have been another terrible 21st of November. Well. for me.

---

MochaKimono: Approve enough to have done the same?

castlecrash: And no, I would not have done the same.

Then you didn't approve enough at all. Why do the theater's rules matter to you? Why would not that girl matter as much?

castlecrash: Theft, which is what that is tantamount too, while illegal, is acceptable in the defense of your own life.

Why do the laws matter then either? Why do we actually have to PAY to LIVE? Is it only considered illegal because it is considered a PRODUCT to even be able to sustain yourself, because someone somewhere realized that self-preservation was a terrific kind of consumption and decided to market it like anything else. People die for the fault of pennilessness. People are hounded by the law because they decided they still wanted to be alive.

Yet the law still matters to you that much. You actually consider it theft that someone saved my mother's life and mine.

---

castlecrash: No, the horror of this hasn't sunk in to you.
castlecrash: Vigilantism? You mean revenge mentality.
castlecrash: Besides, you have no idea what kind of effort typing this has taken from me.
castlecrash: Err...not sure how either relate to you, the first I will tell you is patently false
castlecrash: Zoe was akin to a sibling for you.
castlecrash: Relax. You told me about fear. Now pay attention:
castlecrash: Then let go of the hate.

I told you. You are a hard-edged stone. You make statements you consider fact. You make presumptions about my feelings or the meanings of my words and state them as facts. You respond to opinions not aligned with your own as if they are complete fallacy. You were demanding of my feelings and reactions. It gets to be grating.

---

So as I said, no, it would never have worked in the long run. Far too many differences. Subtle but sharp-bladed ones.

You still grip to the laws HUMANKIND made and erect them highly. (Like I said. A politician is a man who clings to rules he has forgotten the points of. There are more things than greed to be wary of in your 'experiment'.)

You would not have let a potentially homeless girl sleep for a while. (Yet you said you understood and approved. It would be delightfully ironic to say "I call you out on that" right now. As I said, you can't hate someone if you understand them. To understand them is to love them. I did something loving for her. You would have acted as the Suits' credos demanded, so blindly and blithely; practically an act of hate, and thus not one of understanding.)

And you never did respond to the fact that while you long for power while admitting it is a path of hubris, you stridently refused to even wish for my promotion, which I wanted not for power but only for survival, and still do. You called my wish for gain and the betterment of my life "the devil's jurisdiction".

You called us thieves for having appendectomies.

That last one is the one that hurts the most.

---

That's all. I read the conversation again. And I realized there were things I still had to say.

So yes, I might act a little weird.

Subject: Re: I just reviewed the conversation

From him, to me.

Well, regarding the fact that I am your connection to your social life occurred to me as well. That's one reason I balked at such a measure. I'm not vengeful by nature. And the idea of destroying your birthday was a possibility that crossed my mind. No, I was not willing to knowingly destroy your social life without knowing exactly why I was doing it.

Besides, if I was enough of an asshole to do that, and said friends actually went along with it, you would lose nothing.

In regard to the theater's rules, one, I am being paid to obey the rules for one, and two, when you raised that issue to me, it was without complete information. Your guest rule means I could just say she was here at my behest. That would not be a violation of any rules, and it would not take long to make it so if I were challanged on the issue. As I stated, dignity matters to me, and besides, I am certainly willing to bend a rule or two should the reason be right.

It is theft on the simple grounds that the medical staff needs to pay the bills, and so do the people who loan money. Life in the modern days, and even in older times, is simply about an exchange of services. I neither sought to condemn nor endorse. I called it as I saw it, and under similar circumstances, I would have done the same.

"I told you. You are a hard-edged stone. You make statements you consider fact. You make presumptions about my feelings or the meanings of my words and state them as facts. You respond to opinions not aligned with your own as if they are complete fallacy. You were demanding of my feelings and reactions. It gets to be grating."

Okay, you got me on this one. My brother has pointed this one out to me in the past. And it wasn't so much that were unaligned with my own. Some of those remarks I was asking for clarification on. It's simply an observation of mine that whenever I make a presumption, right or wrong, it generally doesn't matter. Right, and it saves time. Wrong, and I am corrected and learn.

Of course there are differences in our views. If I were looking for a carbon clone of myself, I would never leave a mirror.

I don't consider the laws of God a manmade law. And as I stated, I obey a law out of respect, and mostly because my covenent with God requires me to respect the laws made by man, as well as God. It is a difficult road, but one I must follow.

I have prayed not for your promotion, but that God would watch over you and guide your path. Perhaps your decision is just another manifestation of my prayers. Perhaps not. Regardless, I have prayed that you have the strength to endure misery of this world, to do what God intends of you, and to have the strength to endure the burdens you set upon yourself. A promotion and money are false security. You've admitted as much.

In any case, I've answered each one in turn, as best as I can.

Besides, I'm enjoying this immensely. You would never have challenged me like this if you hadn't broken up with me, so perhaps this is for the best.

Take care, Jo. Until we meet again. :)

(Just looking at all this makes me angry again. My goodness, his little, smug, stupid, smug, smiley faces at the end, raaaAAARRRRGH

moving on.)

Subject: Re: Re: I just reviewed the conversation

From me, to him.

"No, I was not willing to knowingly destroy your social life without knowing exactly why I was doing it."

You were still willing to do it. You erred to admit it. It has destroyed a great deal of trust. I'm also fairly offended that you did not just honestly and openly ASK me if I was indeed interested in someone else. Instead you covertly himhawed and pussyfooted around the issue until I managed to wrest it out of you just before you were about to leave. I think I've already told you that any question posed of me is one I am willing to answer with full honesty.

And I also asked you if you suspected me of infidelity. I consider wayward thoughts and notions and, yes, the act of breaking up with someone to leave them for someone else, as bad as outright cheating. So yes. There was the suspicion in you. It insults me to be considered a person potential of such debaseness. Especially after I already told you exactly and completely why I broke up with you, and you still held on to your suspicions.

---

I was talking about manmade laws. Not God's laws. You admitted you obey men. You don't seem to find anything wrong (at least you haven't indicated that you do) with the fact that life is a consumable good to be paid for and that a continued existence is "tantamount to theft". It's not as if I would want to deprive the doctors of their money, because I'm grateful for their service, and as I said I never want to take from anyone what they deserve to have. But I am poor, and so I am a criminal by circumstance. I am tired of the condemnation, for I receive it often.

You admit you are willing to obey rules that deprive someone of comfort just for the sake of money. I steadfastedly refuse to compromise my morals for any amount of money. My own dignity can go by the wayside for others' sake, but never more than that.

The thing is, you WILL have to compromise your morals moreso if you ever truly want to raise in ranks and lead anyone. People don't take hippie rule-breakers like me as their leaders.

And they don't take leaders as comrades. Remember once you go up, you can't come back down by choice; you can't descend that staircase but only fall from harshly down it. And once you begin to climb, there is always someone to look down on who will never again be able to look at you at eye-level. If equality is an acceptable loss, than alright. But if you don't want people to think of you as a Templar, then your paths are going to conflict with that.

If you walk into the system, it will consume you whole.

"It's simply an observation of mine that whenever I make a presumption, right or wrong, it generally doesn't matter. Right, and it saves time. Wrong, and I am corrected and learn."

It does matter because it's rude and annoying. If you want clarification, don't simply state, "This is what you meant when you said that." People generally hate it when words are put into their mouths (or meanings into their minds). There is a polite way to figure out the meaning of a sentence: to ask.

---

And I would have challenged you. I probably always would have challenged you and potentially come to resent you. It would have come to something irreconcilable. I knew already how it would be and how it would never work, because of that.

Ed part 2

2012-01-28T04:57:00.004-06:00

I don't know when PRECISELY this conversation happened, only that I had immediately emailed it to myself on "Mon, Nov 17, 2008 at 8:42 AM" so... I guess... a little bit before exactly that.

castlecrash: Yo.

castlecrash: Are you occupied?

castlecrash: If you are AFK, let me know when you get back online. I'll be waiting.

MochaKimono: Hi

MochaKimono: I'm just reading webcomics

castlecrash: Oh. Okay.

castlecrash: I've been thinking a bit. I was going to save this for a face to face, but I figured, what the hell.

castlecrash: Refresh my memory: why do you want to break up with me again?

castlecrash: (Btw, just finished Last Days of Foxhound.)

MochaKimono: okay...

castlecrash: You connection or mine may be a little laggy. That, or you are choosing your words carefully. Either one is understandable.

castlecrash: That would be YOUR, not you.

castlecrash: dammit

MochaKimono: Well, when we first started going out, I did feel very positively emotional about it...But sometimes with me, I feel more strongly about something (or someone) than is...uh...I guess I mean, sometimes my enthusiasm is more severe than sincere at first. Which is why I usually dwell on my thoughts for months, so that I can let my strong initial emotions subside before I take action on them, in case I was mistaken (usually when I'm angry, so I just wait until I'm less so, before I speak about it, if at all. Same for any other feeling.)

MochaKimono: But I was too hasty in deciding to date you, because I decided to ignore the possibility that I wasn't going to feel as strongly after some time had passed.

castlecrash: That's normal. Believe it or not.

MochaKimono: And as it turns out, it did ebb away.

MochaKimono: ah

MochaKimono: Well. Normally my decisions about anything take months or years...

castlecrash: I'm not sure what you saw in me initially, but the fact of the matter is you have obviously gotten used to it.

MochaKimono: Really what it boils down to is that...I just don't love you, and I know it's not an emotion I'll just grow into or 'make happen'. Any affection I have for you will always be strictly platonic.

MochaKimono: So once I realized that, I knew it would just be deceptive to stay in a romantic relationship, when I don't really feel romantically.

castlecrash: So, let me see if I'm following this:

castlecrash: We start out friends.

castlecrash: I'm content with said arrangement, simply because my ego has been crushed by years of rejection, and I presume that you will deliver another one.

castlecrash: Then you inform me you would be interested in a romantic relationship.

castlecrash: I actually gave thanks to God at that moment.

castlecrash: A month or two passes.

castlecrash: "Let's just be friends."

castlecrash: Heartbreak ensues.

castlecrash: ...That cover it?

MochaKimono: I'm not going to be comfortable in this conversation if you're going to TRY to make me feel bad about not falling in love with you.

castlecrash: I'm not trying to make you uncomfortable. I'm telling you the truth. Nothing more.

castlecrash: I'm only talking to you, because I'm wondering if there is something I'm not seeing that I should be.

MochaKimono: Alright. I understand how much it hurts to be broken up with by someone one cares for very deeply, but I can't be objective about it when I'm the one that did the breaking up. :/ You should know that I'm probably the last person in the world right now that you can spill out your feelings about this.

castlecrash: So, I should talk about this to, whom? Someone this has absolutely no bearing on/

MochaKimono: There's a difference between talking, and telling me that heartbreak ensued.

castlecrash: Well, what should I tell you? It's all happy fun time?

MochaKimono: I don't want to have it turn into an argument, or anything that'd be a detriment to the friendship we already had.

MochaKimono: You know I have a policy against dishonesty, so no.

castlecrash: An arguement would actually have been constructive, believe it or not. That, too, is normal.

MochaKimono: But you also know that for me to be someone's girlfriend without loving them is dishonest and the longer such a lopsided relationship is carried on, the more painful it is in the end, because such things inevitably break apart. And more time only means a worse breaking.

castlecrash: Uh, that's the question. What did you see in me in the first place?

MochaKimono: Someone who's moral.

castlecrash: And I ceased being that?

MochaKimono: no

MochaKimono: I used present-tense

MochaKimono: But just because someone is a good person, doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to develop more than a very basic affection for them. :/

MochaKimono: We can't control these things. Who we love or who we don't.

castlecrash: I certainly can these days.

MochaKimono: Really, it just couldn't have been carried on. I wasn't going to grow a feeling that wasn't really there. I thought it was at first, at least enough to be something I could foster into a bigger feeling, but...

MochaKimono: Anyway, if I didn't think you were moral, I wouldn't want to be your friend either. I don't even associate with people I consider too debase. But being associable and someone I really like as a person and as a friend doesn't necessarily add up to more than that.

castlecrash: So, I'm expected to be cool if you decide to, say, date someone else.

castlecrash: As rude as that sounds, it is a possiblity that should be considered.

MochaKimono: I'm not interested in anybody else right now.

MochaKimono: And if I was, it wouldn't be your place to veto it anyway, if that's what you're getting at.

castlecrash: I know that.

MochaKimono: If I even WAS interested in someone right now, I'd ignore the notion for fear of it just being a rebound, anyway.

castlecrash: The second part, at least.

castlecrash: And you've eliminated one possibility of my side of board. So, this talk hasn't been a total waste of time.

MochaKimono: And I don't expect you to be happy if I did date someone else, because, well, it wouldn't be something that'd make you happy, I guess. I really have no idea why you mentioned that, to be honest. If it happens, it happens, and it'd hurt.

MochaKimono: Did you think I was practicing infidelity?

castlecrash: Infidelity? Please. I know you better than that.

MochaKimono: okay, just making sure...

castlecrash: But my experience taught me that "Let's just be friends" is a way of saying "Go away, loser."

MochaKimono: no

MochaKimono: Like I said, I prefer honesty

MochaKimono: If I didn't want to be friends with you, I wouldn't say I wanted to be friends with you

castlecrash: The only question on my mind has naturally been, why would this be the case? So, in a messed up way, this is a rather relieving conversation. Even though I can't gauge your face, I believe you.

castlecrash: That's enough for me on that level.

MochaKimono: Really, I just liked it better when we were still friends, before it turned into anything else. I just don't like that added dynamic in general, I suppose. I'm content with just hanging out with people and being close to them without being romantic with them...

MochaKimono: I don't understand your question o.o why would what be what case?

castlecrash: I'm just trying to figure out what to do next. I can convert love to hate. That's easy for me.

MochaKimono: I still have no idea what you asked me

castlecrash: Oh, I was referring to why you would what me to get out of your life. That presumption has been eliminated.

MochaKimono: and if you decided to hate me, I'd be...extremely sad

castlecrash: Want me to get...etc.

castlecrash: I'm aware of that.

MochaKimono: oh...no...I really only reserve "wanting to get people out of my life" if they've actively done something WRONG, like, really really immoral, or if they just have a vile attitude in general

castlecrash: Here's the thing. I'm trying to recalculate several plans, because more than a few of them have been disrupted.

MochaKimono: Normally I try to be pretty forgiving about that anyway, but there have been a few people in my life that are just horrible...But you're not a bad person at all, so that was never a thought to me, of avoidance

castlecrash: I don't want to hate you, but beyond that, you earlier statement regarding who we love remains true. Hell, maybe for me it always has, and I've just insisted on denial...

castlecrash: So, I can't convert my love for you into hatred. Which is an intensely frustrating situation for me right now.

castlecrash: I'm not used to this being a problem.

MochaKimono: I...well, can't objectively reply to that, I guess

MochaKimono: also, brb, I really really have to use the bathroom

castlecrash: Take your time.

Auto Response from MochaKimono: I am away from my computer right now.

castlecrash went idle at 1:47:51 AM.

MochaKimono: back

MochaKimono: I also had two quotes occur to me, relating to what you just said

castlecrash returned at 1:52:49 AM.

castlecrash: Listening.

MochaKimono: One of them I forget who said it, I think it was John Steinbeck, who said, "You cannot truly hate a man if you can truly understand him." and the other is from Ender's Game, which is actually about war, but a character in it says, "In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

castlecrash: Err...not sure how either relate to you, the first I will tell you is patently false, and the second was a state of mind Ender was in just before he did, in fact, wipe his foe out.

MochaKimono: Why is the first false?

MochaKimono: The fact is that humans can't ever truly understand each other, anyway. So it's not really false. It's just not relevant to our capacities.

castlecrash: Because I can truly understand someone, know exactly why they are what they are, why they are doing what they are doing, and still kill them. Have I actually done it? To date, no.

castlecrash: Not the point.

MochaKimono: You can't. It takes God to truly understand someone. That's how he knows the future; he knows ephemeral humans as well as he knows the scientific Laws he made himself. Unless a human can successfully predict every action of another, then no, they don't TRULY understand them.

castlecrash: But I can be pretty harsh sometimes.

MochaKimono: Anyway, what I meant was, that's why you can't just convert love into hate, at least not about me, if you were sincere. It's not like emotion is a glass of water that you can change into gas or solid whenever you have the time.

MochaKimono: It's something that happens inside your mind, and whether you believe it's nothing but chemicals reacting in the brain, or some divine nature of the soul, it's still not something we can ever truly control.

castlecrash: I believe the core of my problem is simple: I'm afraid of returning to a lurker state. The guy always looking in, wondering if he should hold out in the event that she changes her mind.

MochaKimono: We are just playthings of what happens to us and how people interact with us. That's all.

MochaKimono: I'm not going to change my mind.

castlecrash: I know that. Dammit, I know that.

MochaKimono: okay, just making sure

MochaKimono: No need to curse at me about it.

castlecrash: Sorry.

castlecrash: Just a fear of mine.

MochaKimono: s'okay, I just don't want things to start escalating with profanities, it never goes anywhere good

MochaKimono: The thing is, even if we can't control how we feel, we can still control how we act

MochaKimono: I mean, have you heard of Stockholm Syndrome? It's where people in hostage situations get defensive of their kidnappers. But it really only happens to people not aware that it can happen. If you are aware of a syndrome, you can actively avoid it, even if your emotions don't want to.

castlecrash: I hardly classify you as a kidnapper.

MochaKimono: So if you're afraid of going into any state of being, that means you can just step away from it when you feel it coming on. Like the difference between closing your eyes in a fight and actually jumping away from a blow about to land.

castlecrash: But continue...

MochaKimono: I was not making an allegory in the slightest.

MochaKimono: I was referring to a syndrome having to do with emotions that people only ACT on if they're not aware it might happen to them. A condition prevented just by forethought.

castlecrash: So, I should have been more detached?

MochaKimono: What I am presently talking about is that if you're worried about falling into "lurker state", that means you have less cause TO worry, because it's something you can already recognize and avoid.

MochaKimono: We rarely go through the same phase twice, unless we have a weak will, or feel we have anything to gain from a bad phase.

castlecrash: That second is the problem. Hope is ever a powerful force with me. My greatest strength is one of my weaknesses as well.

MochaKimono: Hope's never a weakness when aimed correctly.

castlecrash: I suppose not. I suppose we can remain friends. So, what changes?

MochaKimono: Good hope is just the acknowledgement that your life can improve, or that it's good enough not to need to. It's why people continue to live at all, really.

MochaKimono: Bad hope is holding out for an impossibility or something that will hurt you. That's when it becomes a weakness: when it's no longer knowledge, but just fantasy.

MochaKimono: What changes is that we don't kiss and you don't spend the night.

MochaKimono: Normally I do let friends spend the night, but normally I've never dated any of my friends.

MochaKimono: So I'm afraid at least for now you can't sleep over anymore.

castlecrash: I'll miss both, but I can accept that.

MochaKimono: Okay.

castlecrash: There is still going to be a cooldown period for me. So yes, I might act a little weird.

MochaKimono: Yeah, it happens.

castlecrash: Besides, you have no idea what kind of effort typing this has taken from me.

MochaKimono: Just keep in mind something that helps me keep my temper: "Is what I'm about to say constructive to our friendship, or is it designed to hurt their feelings?"

MochaKimono: There are a lot of times with a lot of people I've had to ask myself that to keep from saying some really dreadful things.

castlecrash: In my case, thus far, neither. I've simply been gathering information, even if it is extrordinarily sensitive to all parties.

MochaKimono: Of course sometimes constructive things are still painful things. In which case, it can't be helped...But I just mean, MEAN things that exist just to evoke a negative emotion. Those are ones to watch out for.

castlecrash: I haven't fired one of those off thus far, have I?

MochaKimono: And you probably do have many of those mean things that show up in your thoughts when you're alone and not busy, thinking about conversations you've had and snark you could have used but didn't out of honor; everyone's got those words in their head, but it's when they come off the tongue when it matters.

castlecrash: In dealings with others, true.

MochaKimono: Well, the "I gave thanks to God"/"and heartbreak ensues" speech sounded less like an event summary and more like you wanted me to feel guilty, to be frank.

castlecrash: Again. Truth. That's how I honestly see it.

MochaKimono: Things that are true =/= Things you should actually say :p

MochaKimono: There's a difference between kind honesty and honesty designed to scour an ear canal...

castlecrash: I just didn't feel inclined to sugarcoat it like I normally would. So I'm willing to concede you have a point.

MochaKimono: Because I do feel bad that I've had to do something that causes pain, but I don't feel guilty that the relationship didn't work.

castlecrash: That was expected.

MochaKimono: I think also in the long run our philosophical differences would have destroyed us if we drew too close

castlecrash: How so?

castlecrash: In reference to philosophical differences.

MochaKimono: Your opinions are like a sharp-edged stone that has already been carved. It may weather and see the sun rise and set in periods, but the things on it don't change, and don't expect goodness to exist in dissimilar edicts. "This thing IS and that IS truth, what is not quite, is on the opposite side of truth entirely."

MochaKimono: It's why you have that urge to constantly "call bullshit" on my opinions :p Because they aren't necessarily true for your circumstances

castlecrash: I apply my circumstances to others as well, but continue.

castlecrash: And take their's into account.

castlecrash: (theirs)

MochaKimono: But for me, I see logic and emotions as indefinably intertwined; scientific and religious thought as merely synonymous co-dependent means of understanding life; love and subservience as the most important qualities and goals to ever have, but also not ever entirely attainable by anyone but God. I think any law that stands in the way of human wellbeing should immediately be bypassed, otherwise it is worthless and ungodly.

(Snipped: a long-ass discussion about government, politics, boring stuff like that. I know I said I'd keep this all preserved as much as possible but there are LIMITS and nobody wants to read this! If you really really need to then uh... mail me... and I'll send you missed? Basically Ed and I disagreed for hours about several key philosophical points I'll not bother to cover in detail as they are basically irrelevant.)

MochaKimono: All you can do is act well enough that your examples influence others.

MochaKimono: And if you can influence anyone to be better, it's a success.

castlecrash: I've wondered about the echoes I send out. Will someone use those as a justification to oppress, or will they get the point of my philosophy? A lot of people have a habit of hearing what they want, and nothing else.

castlecrash: Hence why I'm glad we had this discussion.

MochaKimono: why?

castlecrash: Because I was literally ready to strip you of your visitation rights here if I believed what I was ready to believe.

castlecrash: I'd rather not do things that sweeping and rash.

castlecrash: Only my need to get to the heart of the matter stopped me.

castlecrash: Which, btw, I still have not reached, but I've gotten within eyesight of it. It will do for now.

MochaKimono: What heart of the matter do you mean? -_- I told you everything.

castlecrash: I know that. That's why I won't go any farther. Because it won't do me any good.

MochaKimono: I don't stay in relationships where my heart isn't in them. That's...all of it. There's really nothing more about it. You can reach and dig and try for some vaster deeper meaning, but...there's just nothing else to find.

castlecrash: I'm not searching for deeper meaning, and I never was.

MochaKimono: okay

MochaKimono: I am curious about "what you were ready to believe" was

castlecrash: Oh, I was simply going to presume a worst case scenerio: you simply having found someone else you were interested in, and having decided I didn't cut it compared to them. In short, your decision would have been interpreted as calculated.

castlecrash: In short, eliminate the hypotenuse.

castlecrash: Only without someone dying.

MochaKimono: I have no idea what your last two sentences are even referring to.

castlecrash: TVtrope. Murder the hypotenuse.

castlecrash: Shorthand: out with the old, in with the new.

castlecrash: You asked what I was ready to believe. There you go.

castlecrash: Anyhow. I'm going to get some sleep. I've got a bit to think about.

MochaKimono: okay

castlecrash: Good night, Jo.

MochaKimono: night

castlecrash signed off at 4:10:42 AM.

Ohh, there's a timestamp! Okay, so I guess I stayed online for a few hours longer that ni-- morning, and then emailed myself the log before signing off. See why I record this stuff? To make sure the subtle details don't elude me.

Important details. Things I hope my parents never needed to show to the FBI because I went missing one day.

More to come, in easier to read email format, because I blocked him on AIM at some point. I think we had more conversations first maybe, because I don't think I was that angry in this conversation? More gaps in my memory, filled in only by what logs I've collected.

I'll also point out this all happened around my birthday, which was on the 21st.

Ed part 1

2012-01-28T04:15:00.006-06:00

From my previous theatrical (yet not untrue) post, one might assume this was a torrid love affair of the ages, the likes of which not seen since some action movie where a couple of superspies shoot at each other and then they have sex in a helicopter.

If only I had such exciting enemies. I do not call him much a "nemesis" for he presents no challenge to best, nor "ex" because our stint of dating was briefer than my long-distance high-school romance. I call him my Stalker, a title many disaffected colleginas refer to any male who comments on their bikini-clad Facebook photos, dubious and dishonest a title in such cases, but earned tooth and claw through his valiant efforts to not leave me alone for half a decade. According to rumors, others know him as "Stinky".

He told me many times I had been deluding myself and erasing history. I realized, with a twinge, he was right.

Because I only started dating him on a rebound.

Not a rebound from a relationship, no, but from control over my life. From monetary stability. In previous posts, I detailed how my father lost his job (due to company bankruptcy) and we summarily lost our home. We lived briefly in a tent. This is when I had just began college at ITT. Around this time, two other important things happened, which led to two related, simultaneous decisions I will forever regret:

One, my good old chap Chip (the host of my website Death by Coffee, if you'll notice the domain name) from my first college had vaulted into employ with VMware putting more zeros at the ends of his pay than I thought humanly possible (note: I've always been poor. I'm easy to impress. But he met dudes from Google! I think he met an astronaut once too, like, at a cocktail party. I mean damn!).

Two, I met this guy with a shaggy red beard, "birth control glasses" (those big black square things apparently issued by the military and which he never wanted to replace? Birth control glasses was HIS term, not mine), and the pottiest potty-mouth this side of the campus cafeteria. But he was talking about D&D and I was an embittered loner with no friends and I thought, hey, I can geek out at this guy's table with him and his chums.

I also learned shortly after meeting this guy, who is Ed, that he too had known severe poverty! He had even known domestic violence! WHAT KINSHIP!

I felt, in complete error, the need to hide all of my hardships from the friend who had been there for me since I was 14, and instead throw my trust and time into a douchebag that my parents had rightfully disliked from the start, because I thought that just because someone had fallen on hard times, they would be nice or capable of human sympathy or basic etiquette or hygiene practices (man, I ask for a LOT in a person, don't I?), and that someone who had fallen on good fortune would instantly become some sort of stone-hearted Scrooge unable to relate to my plight.

I was so wrong, on all counts. For the record I have since opened up to Chip again (what kind of a butthead stops talking to the dude nice enough to host her website, huh?), something I am proud to mention, because I am proud and happy for the friendships worth fostering which I have.

Not too long after I met Ed that I thought I might like-like him, so I asked him out. I worked at a theatre then, so I got us in to see a movie for free. We couldn't afford any snacks though, sadly. (I mention these things because at least some people do hold traditions of "payment" constituting a date. Do I? No, I admit, seeing a movie was a date, as agreed upon by both parties beforehand, which is the sticking point of what makes a date or not. But I do feel perhaps its "dateness" could be weakened by the fact it was free and foodless. In any case, no more dates followed, in my adamacy so eventually escape. I had begun planning the end to our date-itude (not "boyfriend/girlfriend" status, words which imply AFFECTION and not to be bandied about in haste) very shortly after the date-itude began.)

It was either that night or maybe some other day that I decided to kiss him. It was an unpleasant experience I shall not dwell on longer. I'll just put it this way: I tried very hard to never kiss him again. I mostly managed; he got a few more out of me, and I made them quick and shallow as possible. If I could, I negotiated for a hug instead. The only reason I dreaded "goodbye" was the goodbye kiss.

Anyway, I only even had contact with him for a couple months at most, including pre-date, so this should have really meant nothing. Met a dude at school, saw a movie, wasn't feelin' it, called it off. Right?

Whoa. Whoa! Hold my horses there. I "mean more to [him] than [I] should", he told my friend Heather. He also asked my parents about him buying a house and having us all move in with him. He also said he had "plans" mostly concerning paying off my appendectomy bill. Just mine, not my mom's. Who gives a crap about my mother anyway? He made it pretty clear that our breakup meant his plans were ruined, as we all know a man becomes utterly incapable of charity toward a platonic D&D player if she is not in a romantic relationship with him. I mean, duh. I never feel compelled to help people if they don't love me! Wait, yes I do, because I'm capable of some measure of unselfish compulsion. Whodathunk I'd expect a selfless quality in a potential partner as well? Like I said, setting my bar WAY too high.

No, I don't begrudge him for not paying for anything, because I knew he wasn't any more financially secure than we were and it's not like he wrote up a contract. Also, as I said: horribly embittered. I expect nothing from anyone. This leaves me pleasantly surprised when someone actually nice does something for me. But I don't care anymore if they don't. It would be completely silly of me to think a man should pay off a huge medical bill for someone he met two months ago -- and it was silly of him to consider it for the reasons he did.

He did not do this out of sympathy. His "friends" lived in the same situation he did, friends he'd known for years. Surely they deserved a penny? No, he fell prey to my womanly wiles and wanted to save me from my situation out of no consideration having to do with my status as a fellow human being, but my status as his romantic attachment.

He continued to mention how I ruined his charitable heart long after, a subtle form of blackmail it felt, as if trying to coerce me back into dating him, with the promise of freedom from collection agencies. This point in particular I MUST mention, for the way he carried himself in this way, it seemed almost like a bribe -- or a reverse threat, if you will, for what else is a bribe? The threat of withholding what's needed unless what's wanted is given.

These were admittedly small points at the time. I did not loathe him so much, for I was not so bitter enough to doubt that a smidgen of goodness lingered in his soul, and I could remain friends with him. To everyone, everywhere: this is a mistake. YOU CANNOT REMAIN FRIENDS.

Don't even bother messaging me with your stories of how wrong I am because it worked for YOU, because your particular individual examples are a few grains in the massive silo of people failing to remain friends after dating. Let alone after a serious, long-term relationship! DON'T TRY. IT WILL HURT. IT WILL MAKE YOU ANGRY. JUST STOP. SAY GOODBYE. GO YOUR SEPARATE WAYS. You don't want to battle uphill against the statistics.

Alright, so I promised some good hard-core solid evidence of his doucheyness, and I intend to uphold my promise! I just thought you all deserved some back story, as I provided for all... three? four? Of the guys I dated or came close to maybe dating me.

I will say this, though, for it makes me so very happy, and I feel... brave enough to admit it now. This is one thing I have kept hidden from my blog or, really, the world and public at large. Why the public at large would give two twigs about this, I don't know? It's something I squirreled away regardless.

At one of the anime conventions following my dissolution of dating Ed, on the very last day, in the last hour, as I waited for my ride, I chatted in the lobby with some people. As I did, suddenly, the woman I spoke to put her hand over my eyes, and leaned forward and kissed me quickly. She stepped back and looked afraid, and asked if she had freaked me out. I was mostly too stunned to respond, but I was really thinking at the time, "What's your number?" but I wasn't sure if asking would make the others in the conversation feel too awkward or excluded so I never asked.

That was the last kiss I had. I'm so glad I had something to replace the memory of... of... his mouth.

Her lips were just so soft. She had a pleasant voice, and no unpleasant odors. It made me sort of warm and fuzzy all over.

Oh, by the way, I'm bi. Actually, no, screw the label! Bisexual implies sexual, which I am not! I prefer to say that I am capable of physical and/or emotional attraction to members of either/any sex/gender, but that's a ridiculous mouthful and it makes me sound kind of uppity and silly, so sure, I'm "bi".

That really has nothing to do with Ed, I just wanted to get that out there. What a stupid post to make a coming-out in, though. But everybody important already knows anyway so whatevs.

What's important is that someone else's profoundly sweet kiss has taken the place of Ed's profoundly unfortunate one in my more recent memory, for which I am intensely grateful. So thank you, random MTAC woman!

(Note to others: This is not permission for anyone else to try to do that. Do not attempt to embrace or kiss me without implicit permission. In fact, that doesn't just cover me, that extends to all women, and heck, all people. Everyone. Just don't do it. This ONE TIME where it was a good thing means nothing for your circumstances because you probably have no grasp of proper context! DON'T DO IT!)

More soon. Logs soon. Sit tight.

Awww sheeit

2012-01-28T03:47:00.006-06:00

I had REALLY been putting this off. Really, really, really.

No, it's not about being beaten -- I already covered that ground, it's no secret from anyone.

It's not about Zoe's death -- I typed with tear-wet hands and shook and sobbed with memory, but finally put it past me.

It's not about a lot of things, because I already wrote them. I've released so much anger and pain through this blog in ways I didn't think possible, never thinking anyone else would bother to read them.

But I know you are. Good. Mother. Fucking. Bloody. Hell. Shit. Piss. Hell again. Mother. Bloody. Crap-on-a-stick you cannot stop stalking me!

I've saved typed exchanges for a while now in case I ever needed evidence to present in case this person whom I call my Stalker ever actually acted against me, but I feel nearly positive this will actually appear as some "evidence" of holding on to the past. I try not to touch those logs. I just stuff them in a folder labeled "Conversations" without a name and ignore them and hope I never, ever need them.

Looks like I need them now -- no, my other tiny handful of reader(s) (? does anyone else even read this? I'm so boring I don't even read most of these myself!), I am not, I believe, in physical danger, or any other potential legal danger -- but I do need to get them the hell out there. I NEED YOU TO GET THE HELL OFF MY BACK, MAN. OFF. MY. BACK.

Anyway, I also saved them for posterity because when someone has an argument and presents their case many years later, how unaltered are their memories really? How colored would those words be by bias? I saved these conversations in their concreteness and I will submit them unaltered. Anyone can choose not to believe me, but I will dutifully preserve even the nastiest of the nasty mud I slung, for I have no desire to erase my own negativity here. Anyone who has read my blog in its fullest knows I'm fairly unabashed.

But I feel no bashfulness, no shame or guilt, for this entire exchange. Not even for the meanness. I relished the meanness, really, for so rarely does an entity so bilious worm its way into my life that I can justify acid of this strength.

Perhaps I am a vindictive bitch after all.

Just in case there are any misconceptions -- namely, the same misconception that seems to have happened repeatedly in the past several years -- this is not an invitation to reopen communications. I will simply be taking several posts to copy and paste a few exchanges of the past for all to see.

Maybe in some world this could be considered wrong. A breach of privacy.

No. I would expect no less an act towards me, if ever I acted so indecently.

A motto I have is that if one does not want their shit on record, they should not have said that shit in the first place. Let alone in print.

Will anyone else read the future posts? Will anyone CARE?

I pretty much have as much stake in their opinions about this as I have about anything else here.

But I've been putting this off for another reason -- I feared retribution.

This is a man who has continued to needle me through whatever avenues of communication allowed, for years after I told him to leave me alone, and then, to needle my friends instead. This is a man who was dishonorably discharged from the military for mental instability. This is a man who told me that every female who has ever rejected him, he has wished harm upon.

This is Edward Carroll.

I sure know how to pick 'em, eh?

Guitar

2012-01-12T12:34:00.002-06:00

We got my dad a guitar for his birthday.

I feel better now.

When I suddenly realize it still makes me angry

2012-01-05T10:56:00.001-06:00

When I was 12 and my dad wanted to buy a bass guitar, I was hesitant to agree with his decision. For one, I had never played an instrument myself yet, and so I couldn't comprehend the immense joy one gets from doing so. I only thought of the money -- was it worth the cost? I didn't think he would ever go professional. For two, I also didn't realize he was already an amazing bassist and guitarist because he'd been playing from nearly my age. I thought it was only a random whim.

I don't think he ever intended to go professional with it either, though he did join a variety of bands over the years and sometimes did play for money, but he never quit his day job over it.

But I don't think I've ever seen him so happy and spirited and full of joie de vivre as when he played, even when he was at home just practicing along with pre-recorded music. He never played his CDs and albums so loud as when he was playing along, whether it was in our little apartment in Tigard, Oregon or our own home in Yuba City, California.

He ended up also buying a full set of sound equipment (an amplifier and speakers), and not casually, the sort of professional-grade items he would drag along for gigs on stage.

He also bought a kit to assemble his own bass from parts. He spent at least weeks very carefully applying coat after coat of polish and varnish to the wood after sanding it. He didn't paint it, unlike most electric basses, leaving it with a natural wooden look like an acoustic guitar.

I didn't find out until last year that when the Lees evicted us, he was forced to sell it all.

I had already found some peace after my anger towards them. Now it returns, bitter and sorrowful.

They had already robbed us of our home, our comfort and safety, our dignity as human beings who wanted to work hard to earn a living and care for ourselves, as we were forced to beg our friends and church for aide, to receive charity from strangers which we could not in good conscience refuse because to turn down any amount of help would be to endanger ourselves, each other and our pet.

They already made my dad question his worth as a man because of his fear that he had failed us (even though it was actually brought about by his company going bankrupt and letting everyone go). They had already taken so much, so swiftly and suddenly. They made us feel helpless and afraid. They made me turn my back on my friends because I was so used to the entire world's scorn at that point I couldn't bring myself to trust anyone not to do the same to me.

I have not really seen him happy since. He has nothing to occupy himself. He has no method of expression, no freedom from monotony. They took his right to the pursuit of happiness. They took his hand-wrought creations -- not just the guitar, but also all the historical models he painted himself, his other favored form of art -- and one of our means of gaining money in a struggling economy, on top of that. They took the happiness and spirit I miss seeing him have.

My parents bought me an acoustic guitar for Christmas.

It doesn't feel right. It doesn't belong with me.

I tried playing it today. I put it away after a few minutes and have been weeping for at least half an hour now, knowing I can never gain as much from it as he ever could, wishing he had bought one for himself and not for me, and feeling terrible for not being as grateful as I should.

But it isn't right. I should not have three instruments while he has none -- while he has nothing.

I can't say any of this to them.

Ocera: Now for Sale on Kindle

2011-12-05T03:18:00.001-06:00

Buy the ebook now!

A young girl caught in the wake of a demonic entity's terror upon her town finds herself taken from humanity, pulled into the dark nether world of Ocera, where monstrous creatures make up the dominant life form and humans among them exist merely as prey and playthings.

But in this world of flame, she forges her spirit into steel, and bears their brutality with adamantine determination. Abandoning hope for rescue, she turns her focus onto raising her son... her demonic offspring.

But a culture lies buried in the past of these demons, and more beings take watch over this planet than any of them know.

"Ocera" is a grim and unflinching look into a world of nightmares and monsters, where magic is not a blessing and children's adventures do not lead to wishes come true.

Appendicitis, part 1

2011-11-25T07:13:00.001-06:00

Less than ten minutes from a stoic groan to crawling on my knees to bang on their door and try to yell for help, but it hurts all through me that the flex of my larynx to squeeze out their names (Mommy and Daddy) would be too much.

I smack my hand against the door and crumple there like a bad prank on the floor. She opens the door, looks over and past my head in confusion and then she spots me there and knows immediately that something is Very Wrong with a capital VERY.

The pain has already coalesced in my right side but I didn't need to wait for that to know exactly the organ at fault. I knew it all along, knew for years that it would come. I think I knew it when she had appendicitis, thirteen years earlier. I knew it, with every strange, dully rolling ache in my side that didn't come from my stomach or uterus -- I knew it was coming, prowling up on me, gently clawing at me to say, "Hey, remember me? Remember that big ugly scar on your mom's belly? I'm coming for you, too. It's hereditary, baby. Here come the same bills she couldn't pay either. Ready to rob some doctors?"

I'm not ready to be a thief, but I'm less ready to die.

I pay them no attention to my parents as they dress and prepare. I attempt to migrate to the living room, but I make it only a few feet up the hall when I sprawl face-down on the floor, pinching small tears from my eyes, and yell. Wordless, rising, roaring of my voice box, I can't cry and I can't quite scream so I YELL.

The worst pain in the world. An extraneous, miscellaneous oops at the end of my intestine and all I can think is, "This is just like that nature show where the lions ate their prey alive. I feel like I'm being eaten alive."

In-between flashbacks of zombie films, I speak my other running thought, a profound, "AAAHHHHH!!!"

The hospital's close, so we skip the ambulance call, but either way I have to go down two flights of stairs when every motion feels like my ribs are going to split themselves open and violently eject their contents through my naval. My parents ask me if I need to be carried. And somehow-- I don't know how, but I think I managed to hit Super Saiyan and dig inside my soul and turn myself into steel for all of the five minutes I need to get to the van. Two flights of stairs and my brain is cursing and crying. Somehow I've gotten shoes on my feet and I know my parents didn't do that for me. I'm somewhere between too much pain to move and not enough pain to stop moving. But I don't need to be carried; I walk on my own.

The walk to the van was bad, but the ride in the van is worse. I feel the shape of the road too acutely, the texture rattling my swollen abdomen, potholes like a buckshot blast to the gut. I set my forehead against the back of my mom's seat and whimper my way there.

Ocera Q&A part 5

2011-11-10T06:25:00.001-06:00

Q: Why the weird chronological format of Sunshield?
A: I tried to start at the beginning, I really did. I still have the first failed attempt saved, which started off with a curt history of Felton's founding and moved on to talking all about the Steads and... it was just really boring, and it wasn't working. I didn't want to give such a concise viewport onto those events. I thought for a while on where I would start the story, and realized that instead of giving long, drawling, cruelly detailed depictions of events out in Ocera (like with the samename story) I wanted to make it a drama about Timber adjusting to 'human' life again. And I also wanted it to start off not from his PoV, hence Akizu.

Ocera got us first-person narratives between the three victims of the worst of Harzi's abuse and really harsh introspectives on the interior workings of their minds, depictions of events as they unfolded, and the immediate reactions to those events. It was always about people finding different ways to deal with their traumas whilst in the thick of the hostile environment. It was basically a drama about an abusive family. Going forward in order was necessary. Things happened when they happened. It's a pretty vicious and sometimes painful read. You see three young innocents break and go dark, doing more and more awful things over time.

I'd like to think that all along, even a reader of How They Met and the Karen stories would have hopes for Dech turning out alright and repenting, maybe even after his first "snap" and raping his little sister. How does one possibly write a character doing that and not have the audience throw the book down in disgust at the alleged "protagonist"? I don't know but hopefully he hated himself for it enough to make the readers hate him a little less. And then he slaughters just about everyone in the palace at the end anyway and refuses to rescue his mother out of shame. If I started off in media res and went back to fill in past events with flashbacks, they would lose their impact. Watching that evil grow in him I feel was important. His darkness means nothing if we don't see him born first, and his innocence is cheapened if it's introduced retroactively.

But with Tim, all his shit happened already, really. I did NOT want to write a tale about his misadventures in the wilderness. I think we're all numbed to those atrocities by now anyway. And his tale was not about a slide into darkness, but merely turning away from the light. He didn't go mean, but he went weak. He became ashamed and afraid. His story is, basically, about an aging veteran having a crisis of faith. It isn't about women and children stuck in a violent family. It's about a man who's failed his family in the act of trying to save them.

Writing about a sufferer of severe PTSD was going to be tricky, so Akizu filled the role of the outsider looking in, trying to decode Tim's actions and understand him as the audience tries to do the same. After reading Ocera it isn't difficult to fill in the blanks. Creating that dark setting with Ocera made it possible to skip all that detail in Sunshield.

But I couldn't leave it out entirely. It helped to break up the scenes and fill in time-skips to have "blips" of flashbacks and nightmares. A dialogue lacking description, a bunch of paragraphs made up of fragment sentences skipping through stages of his life in quick jumps, like photographs in a scrapbook, nightmares with vague, dark imagery.

We heard Elesonya's name dropped first, and nothing else. Then later we finally saw screenshots of their relationship in fast motion, and the first mention of sex in the whole work. Setting up Tim as, in fact, a once-sexual person was necessary for the next scene with Nilah trying to seduce him. Maybe the readers are wondering why a widower's decided to stick himself in a dry spell when free tail is ready and willing. He's just completely shut down on a physical level that Nilah's advances only anger him.

Then suddenly, 'Kavishirsi'. I don't say anything concretely there. I never do anywhere in the story. But if the reader didn't piece it together by then they certainly did after.

Then the first "repeat/mirror" scene: Harziyax's death, this time from Ig's PoV. In my other stories I use arc words and repeated phrases as call-backs a lot, but this is the first entire scene shown start-to-finish again. It sets up a precedent of such things.

Akizu dies and takes with him my author-voice. He was the reader's eyes. He was a nice person trying to figure Tim out to try to help him, but never lived long enough to learn enough. But suddenly Igneous is in charge, Tim barely gets any closure over Aki's death, and Ig is already being an overbearing ass for no reason. Akizu took the brightness out of the book. That little wedge of friendship on the plate got thrown away and the narration was left all alone with Tim's troubled thoughts, like we were locked into his sadness too. I intended a sense of growing claustrophobia from that point on. All of a sudden the palace is small and prison-like, or is supposed to be anyway.

We get a rather extended few chapters taking place over two days, involving Tim and the Seer, Tim and Nilah, Tim and the Theksarsi and then Tim and Igneous. He starts off acting fairly rationally. Spooked in the night, but calmer afterward. He's doing okay and is about to settle his fear by look at the Thek directly. Facing his fears and seeing them in chains.

But it all goes to hell and I get to cut loose with my first strong bout of "psycho grammar" as Tim's brain goes off the deep end and his PTSD shines through. Then Igneous brain-rapes him. By the end of the chapter Tim's torn up, covered in blood, tired, humiliated and knocked unconscious. It's the halfway point, where things suddenly get worse and Igneous' really evil side shows through. The reader is supposed to feel sort of dirty and frightened, too.

The best place to go from there is an extended flashback. You can imagine maybe that while Tim was KO'd, he dreamed about his past (he didn't then, but the feeling is supposed to be the same). I get to look at Felton's culture in more detail, how harsh it was, what their religion and holidays were like, how they all came to be there and what sort of people they produce. I got to look at a younger Tim before he was broken, and show how he and Ellie first started to really draw close, and why he became such the quiet, driven, militant person he was when Grace was taken.

The Cleric's speech was crucial, too.

After that ended, I yanked us back to the less forgiving current events. Or rather, future events. Like I said, flashbacks fill timeskips. We get a "mirror" of "Weak to Water" from Ocera, Dech's interrogation chapter. We get more dreams and nightmares, and I show us Roger's ghost. All along, the grammar is breaking down tremendously. I admit that I get nervous that I'll look too maudlin or overdo it or make it just too difficult to read. But why write if I'm going to hold myself back? The protagonist was cracking under the stress of his poor environment and Igneous' verbal, mental and social abuse. So the grammar cracked too. Periods started falling out, words started to stutter and repeat themselves, capitals dropped and exploded alternatingly.

Repetition is a strong theme moreso here. Tim repeats words when distressed and emotional, out loud and in his thoughts. The poem I wrote for him, "Nothing, Nothing Ever Happened There" shows some of that. The flashbacks are a type of repetition. The mirror chapters, too. It's like a record being scratched, over and over again in his head, more frantically as he breaks down more. By the penultimate chapter, nearly every single phrase is copied from earlier in the story or one of the other stories, used in new contexts.

I'm mildly disappointed with the fight scene really. But maybe it was always meant to be like that. From Dech's PoV in Ocera, his attacker was this random person who seemed like a "final boss" and was just some strange, angry old man who seemed to know his mother. He seemed really driven, full of conviction. But then from Tim's PoV it's just an inevitability and it all means nothing to him anymore.

His "death thoughts" crumble up the grammar even moreso until finally his afterlife, a chapter I've been wanting to write since the halfway point. I didn't touch on everything I wanted to here. It was a way to wrap up loose ends and give Tim a "happy" ending.

And that's that. I've been wanting to write this long explanation for a while, too.

Ocera Q&A part 4

2011-11-10T06:24:00.000-06:00

Q: How much are events in the stories based on your own life, or aspects of characters based on yourself?
A: My real-life inspirations are many, sometimes quite large, sometimes quite small. Let's start at the beginning.

Ruth is based on my own mom. Like I said earlier, her dad is based on Andy Griffith in the Andy Griffith show. He's also based on my mom, oddly. Ruth's own mom is... ALSO partly based on my own mom, but I see her physically resembling Mrs. Weasley from Harry Potter. Felton is based on places in Washington, Idaho, and Tennesee where I've lived, sights, smells, weather and all. The weirdness with the animals at the beginning is inspired by various events at the WA and ID farms I lived on: in Washington, animals got sick and died constantly and rather mysteriously, of ALL species (livestock, and cats and such too). I actually reference my horror story based on that place, "Ferndale", in "Sunshield". The incident with the chickens is partially inspired by my duties as the chicken-keeper in Idaho, and when I discovered my cousin's chicken dead one morning. It was more sad than actually creepy, but discovering dead animals is unpleasant in any circumstances.

Some descriptions of Ocera's caverns are based on my trips into caves (guided tours; I'm not a spelunker). My physical descriptions of Theksarsi are all based on what experiences I've had with animals, either personally, at zoos or just on nature documentaries: the hissing, splayed-clawed posture of alligators and lizards, the quick pulse and rapid eye movements of birds, the body language (folding of the front paws, flicking of the tail) of cats, the way you pet a horse on the muzzle, and the weird warmth of another living being. Touching an animal, especially an unfamiliar one, is very weird and alien, the heat and texture of their skin and the strength and speed of their pulse beneath it. You are very distinctly aware of how different and yet how alike they are to you then.

Ruth isn't just my mom though. She's got parts of me and my friends, too. But mostly she's a mother figure. She's the strong, primal force that is motherly love, how fiercely it holds on to the little things it must protect -- be that their child or their sibling.

Her dad is also based a bit on my own dad. Actually, my dad is present in a lot of characters in a lot of subtle ways. Specifically, the line about her Pa having not cried since Roger's birth is based on the fact that the last time my dad openly cried was at my birth. So I have never, ever seen him cry.

Dech is obviously a lot of me, a lot of the old me, the much angrier me more prone to misaimed violence and tempers from nowhere. He's also got the part of me prone to deep, self-loathing introspection, constant angsting about past mistakes, and waxing in lengthy soliloquy *gestures to this entire document*. He's also people I know. And like all of my characters, lots of him is made up. He is made up of his past. He's an exaggerated poster child of both abuse victim and perpetrator -- a dual role many people fill. He is both my attempt to reconcile with the horrors inflicted on innocents, and my attempt to gain an understanding of the very people that cause such harm.

Teliah is also all of that, on the opposite side of things. She and Dech's relationship is inspired by a quote from Ender's Game that went something like, "His anger was hot and it controlled him; my anger was cold and I controlled it." Both she and Dech are actually control freaks of a different sort. Their childhood arguments are based on a lot of arguments me and my friends have been a part of. A Hedgehog's Dilemma exists among abuse victims, and it gets worse if you're family and not strangers. Attempts to make peace can cause even more anger and hurt feelings. Both parties lash out and are incapable of healing themselves or helping each other, and end up blaming each other's methods of coping as the reason for their own suffering. Sometimes the urge is strong to oust and emotionally wound a fellow victim because their way of dealing with the pain is different than your own, because you want to validate the way you've been living your life the whole time. If they're unhappy, it means they're wrong and you're right. If they're happy, you have to admit you might not be dealing with things correctly. It's a complicated issue I wish I had the ability to explore better in their shared story.

Very specifically, these quotes are taken from real conversations, almost or exactly verbatim:
"He had gone to her, hoping to form some kind of friendship exactly because they'd gone through the same thing, and here she was telling him his pain wasn't valid because he didn't have it happen enough!"
"Used to it?! You never, EVER get used to --"
"I could tell right then that Dech must have loved his father, but still hated him. Only a child could feel two ways about their parent like that."
"You cannot escape. As far as you go, the cage will always be there."
"They'll see my memories, all over my sleeves."
"He didn't want to hear about the Church."

Harziyax is based on the DSM-IV definition of Antisocial Personality Disorder. He would be voiced by Rampage from Transformers: Beast Wars. Go ahead, look up some clips, I'll wait. You'll see...

Nilah is based on the sexy Drow role-plays a friend and I have. We're sort of obsessed with pretending Drow culture is all about lots of sexy revelry, and Nilah is a representative of that. Of course, she also represents a real kind of person, who really does simply find sensuality the best or only way to establish relationships, even, paradoxically, platonic ones.

Timber... is based on a lot of things. His stories are drawn from too many of my own. The theme of leaving your home behind forever, chasing unreachable dreams, trying to do the right thing for your family and end up doing worse in the process, are themes that have followed my lineage for a long time. Sometimes I think of him as my most flawed character. He never does anything outright bad (except when Ig made him kill the Thek kit), but failure to do the right thing can be just as bad.

If Ruth is Tenacity, Dech is Wrath, Teliah is Pride, Harziyax is Gluttony, and Nilah is Lust, then Timber is Sloth, from the most traditional point of view: the apathy, sluggishness, and aknowledged failure to do one's duties, especially spiritual ones. His dreams of the Sun turning away from him are based on nightmares I've had of God turning away from me, and psalms about lying in a grave with God looking away. His entrapment in a double-layered Hell, one layer of human schemes and one of raw bestial violence, is a theme drawn from my most deeply disturbing dreams, struggling to reconcile fear of physical pain and fear of spiritual corruption.

He is a tragic Christian tale, almost a Job's tale: in a way, he does attempt to adhere to his dogma, and in the act of stepping up courageously, earns himself the worst fate imaginable, and his reward of a happy afterlife may be seen as a copout to some. Is he supposed to represent the best kind of religious man, who stands stoic in the face of tragedy while doing what his god and heart tell him, because in the end, it's worth it? Or is he the worst example of what religion can be, a faceless, demanding deity guiding you only distantly and cryptically, leading you on like a horse with a carrot through torment after torment?

He is also of course drawn from my studies of PTSD and war veterans, and a lot of his behavior is drawn on my fears for my friends and family in the military. I fear that this next deployment will not leave them as intact as they left. I fear for all their sanities. His story is my greatest fear. I don't know if I could deal with a family member coming home as thoroughly messed up as Tim. There are traces of one of my own uncles in him, too. An uncle that used to be a really swell guy until he went to prison and came back a very vicious, mean man. A man's pride will prevent his healing, especially in a small, rural community where everybody would find out...

A person usually knows on some level the right thing to do, and the best way to help themselves. But they are often too weak to do it, especially if lacking a proper support system.

Igneous' abuse of him is pretty much a case of abuse and harrassment in management, simple as that. Whether you see their arrangement as an office job or a military structure, or take the subject to appear purely mean or outright sexual (the mindrape was FULL of that subtext, and no Ig never actually did anything to Tim, but as for doing it to people like Kerrigan and Nilah...) it is up to you to decide how much to read into it.

Akizu's death scene was based on my grandfather Alan. I held his hand and read stories to him. When he died, I went and held his cold limp hand again. I described exactly how it felt both ways. In the scenes of Tim's parents' deaths there are traces of my various cats' deaths, the kind of feral horror the sight and feel of a dead body invokes.

Tim going limp and having his brain immediately jump into overdrive and fry out as the demon grabbed his wrists and dragged him across the floor is very much like a scene involving my abusive grandmother when I was a child. Tim's scene ended highly violently. I was fortunately saved before anything happened to me. There's supposed to be a trace of irony in the later statement about how his years of training wouldn't suddenly disappear, because they literally just did. When all of a sudden the person that's hurt you is holding you and pulling you away to do it again, common sense falls with your heart into your feet and it's all you can do to keep standing sometimes -- if that.

Ocera Q&A part 3

2011-11-10T06:23:00.000-06:00

GENERAL

Q: How do you pronounce all the names?
A: Ocera: oh-sair-uh (Like O'Sara)
Saruth: sa-rooth
Dechaerrim: dek-kay-reem
Teliah: teh-lye-uh
Harziyax: har-zee-yaks
Shicerbix: shee-sair-beeksh
Yaliretor: ya-leer-ey-tor
Igneous: ig-nee-us riss-ee-ose
Kerrigan: kair-reh-gun tra-vee
Dellos: del-lohs seh-nit-tee
Akizu: a-kee-zoo na-sock-oh
Elesonya: el-le-sone-yuh
Adeena: a-dee-na
Avanie: a-vawn-yay
Weis: "Vice"
Lauder: "Louder"
Boucher: boo-share/boo-sheah
Rahim: ra-heem

Q: Is Oceran a 'dark' language, like Mordor?
A: No, it's not magical at all. It acts like a bad memory trigger for Tim though. Others simply associate it with demonic, barbarian natives.

Q: Why are they 'demons'? Are they evil by default?
A: (Originally yes.) I hate the concept of any race being default anything. I can only accept animals being neutral by default since they don't possess the reasoning ability to make moral decisions and are incapable of genuine malice. Any thinking species, however, should run the full gamut of alignments. The slice of Theksarsi culture we've seen is a window of time at its absolute worst. They were once a more populous race, never hunting even for sport, revering their gods and nature, cultivating happiness because of their empathic powers.

Then their gods went dormant and seemed to abandon them, and over time they slowly lost interest and forgot about them. Then Harziyax happened. He utterly destroyed their civilization, their sense of community, their ability to trust each other. No one remembered what things used to be like, only his reign of terror. It's like he turned their whole world into little more than a prison facility without the guards.

Originally yeah they were just some generic hell-demons, in another story I wrote and never finished.

As to why they're unholy NOW: think of it as just another kind of elemental energy. They are attuned to fire and electricity and weak to ice. They're also attuned to unholy energy and weak to holy. I used to say that long ago one of their gods cursed the entire planet in a fit of spite, to make them weak to the very aura of their own deities, and maybe this is true but I haven't decided yet.

Q: What do all the names MEAN?
A: Dechaerrim: demon-offspring-half
Teliah: human-hand
Harziyax: scale-chin
Saruth: monarch-mercy (same meaning in Hebrew and Oceran)
Shicerbix: mother-death
Yaliretor: was supposed to be not-seen but... I messed up... it's not-seed
Rahim: (actually a real name, but this is the Oceran meaning) dog-half
Monica: advisor, truth (I picked it because of the 'mon'. Like de-mon.)
Igneous: a type of volcanic rock
Stead: home, place
Timber: strength of a tree
Audrey: noble strength
Elesonya: have mercy, and wisdom (Latin Eleison, taken from lyrics to "Lilium": "kyrie, ignis divine, eleison"/"O Lord, fire divine, have mercy"; and Greek Sonya)
Grace: grace... duh
Roger: spear
Kerrigan: apparently, 'black-haired'. Named because I needed a name, I looked at a chocolate milk bottle, carrageenan was an ingredient.
Travi: Travis without the S. Apparently, 'from the crossing or tollgate'.
Nilah: misery (Drow)
T'Puli: silver, white (Drow)
Richard: noble king, but named literally just to be Dick because it sounds like Dech
Lauder: gift-giver, but named after Harold Lauder from Stephen King's "The Stand"
Kenneth: handsome (lol)
Walters: army ruler
Any other names I don't feel like looking up or just don't have meanings anyway. (Akizu Nasako and Dellos Cenitti have no meanings. Dellos was named after the Dell computer because I was using one at the time.)

Q: What does all the Oceran MEAN?
A: Here is all the Oceran in its most literal translation.
Harzih! Bazi aerras ta-harzih? : "Scale! What kind of child possesses scales?!"
Harzih... eyax... Thaas bixibas... Harziyax... : "Scale... chin... My termination... Harziyax..."
Sisolyet! Yod, yod, yod tapir! : "Be silent! Tens of tens of tens of voices!" ("a thousand voices")
Yushaiyet! Batir thaas alirtiya zi bixibasyen? : "Stop! Why my sibling you have killed?"
Abap, thaas aerr. Hashadyet... apirsi. : "I am sorry, my child. [You] must go... far away."
Tatupi-bipel! : Coward-beetles!
Zi... : "You..."
Sisolyet! : "Silence!"
Zinutsi zixi bixibasi! Kavishirsi! Adashyet il apavyet! Kavishirsi! : "Little metallic deadly [one]! Slow! Come here and suffer! Slowly!"
Zi... : "You..."
Sisolyet! : "Silence!"
Rirran, aippha. : "Goodness, companion." ("good day, my friend")
Thaas tuvahas madim ziya, zeril thaas olra piripmiyet... : "My territory you are in, should my language learn..."
Abap. : "Sorry."
Yushaiyet! Tha -- : "Stop! I --"
Yu-- : "St--"
Abap. : "Sorry."
Tatupi-bipel! Thaya zi bix! : Beetle-cowards! I kill you!
Ocera: parent/planet (like Gaia/Mother Earth to us).
Theksarsi: demonic-monarch, demonym. "Thek" shares roots with "dech".
Dizastrusi: Oceran animal life.
Zitansi: Oceran plant life. Shares roots with "zi" ("you") and "zinut" ("little").

An interesting thing I noticed after writing it: when Dech kills his sibling and yells, "SHUT UP!", since that's in Oceran, he's screaming, "SISOLYET!" just like his father did on two occasions. Serendipity!

Q: What do all the other foreign language bits MEAN?
A: Okay, this is not proper French, but Babelfish French, so bear with my inetivable errors, illuminated Francophones. I THINK the German translated better, because the snippets were small and simple.
Gutentag. : "Hello."/"Good day."
Mon petit : "My little"
Wie gehts es? : "'How are you?"
Triste à Nourrir : "Sad enough to eat", a pun stolen from Camille's "Le Festin", originally "Triste à Mourir" meaning "sad enough to die".
Dieu malveillant, pourquoi avez-vous pris de moi? : "Malevolent god, why have you stolen from me?"
Au contraire! : "On the contrary!"
Mon beau : "My beautiful"
A-arrêter! : "S-stop!"
Mon femme rousse : "My redheaded wife/woman"
Au revoir. : "Goodbye."
Mon roux : "My red"
La Manche : "The Channel", French name for the English Channel

Q: So if they have namesense, what happens if two Theksarsi have the same name?
A: They don't, ever, in all of history. No two Theksarsi ever share names. It's part of their soul and the source of their empathic and telepathic powers. For this reason, Theksarsi are basically incapable of time travel even if they discovered the magic or tech to do it. They could never coexist with their past or future selves. They'd have to travel outside the scope of their lifetime. Otherwise, they blink out of existence in the attempt, or a god steps in to erase one of the duplicate names. (Yes, the gods can revoke names.)

Q: Do Theksarsi have an afterlife?
A: They have THREE afterlives, an evil, a good, and a neutral one, each dominioned over by a separate deity. The good and evil deities rotate every few millenia or so. The third, neutral one decides when to demote or promote the other two and is the god-spirit of the entire planet. It's basically their Mother Nature. The neutral afterlife is also where Dizastrusi souls go. The specifics of what the afterlives are like vary between which gods are in charge.

Q: Do all the Theksarsi live underground?
A: Mostly yes. They're uniquely adapted to subterranian life: red skin for camouflage, thick hides and magical immunity to damage so they can crawl around on the rocks, fire immunity so they can live way down close to the magma, toxin immunity so the sulphur gases and such don't kill them, x-ray vision and darkvision so they can see through rock and don't need light, and no need for food so they don't have to worry about hunting.

Q: What's Ocera's surface like?
A: Massive archipelagos of mostly tropical jungle, with lots of deserts and sandy beaches as well. Three moons, so really wacky tides. Lots of warm rainfall. Lots of intense seismic activity with a prominent mountain chain that's huge, red, sharp and jagged running over the caves where most of the story takes place. The trees are all freakin' huge. There is NO civilization except some semi-sapient Dizastrusi. The flowers are also huge. The plants tend to come in a lot of colors other than green because the sun takes a weird path and they get more light reflected off of the moons than the sun, in that particular region.

Q: Three moons?
A: Theksar, a big red one, Dizastr, a medium blue one, and Zitan, a small white one. Nights of Ocera are rarely without moonlight.

Ocera Q&A part 2

2011-11-10T06:22:00.000-06:00

LONDON

Q: What languages does Dech know?
A: By now he knows English, Oceran, Drow, Abyssal, Infernal, and bits of French and Elven.

Q: What accents does everyone have?
A: Ruth and her family have rural Americanish accents. Felton is based on places I've lived in Idaho and Tennessee. Ruth's dad is played by a young Andy Griffith in my head. Tim is played by an old Clint Eastwood. His own accent mellowed out to something nondescript after living off-world for so long.

Dech's accent at first was like his mom's, then it became more Theksarsi, then more Dark Elven, then more British (London/RP). He switches fairly easily between any and all of them depending on who he's talking to but it's a melting pot of all of those by now.

Ruth's accent is almost entirely Theksarsi by now.

Richard's is a mix of RP/southern French. Everyone else in the London setting speaks appropriately for their class, time and place. I'm American so I'm not very educated on all the regional accents.

Q: Why doesn't X have more kids for all the sex X has in that time period?
A: X can be anyone because this is true of... most everyone.

Everyone in Felton should've had bucketloads of babies with all those happily-married, sexually active couples. Maybe they had invented some contraceptives, who knows. We know that their tech level included firearms because Ruth's PoV mentions gunshots, so hey, maybe rubber isn't implausible...

The Theksarsi have a low conception rate. Very, very, very low. They can live for up to a thousand years and grow to be as big as a whale. It was a crucial part of their evolution to not overpopulate.

The people of the palace have access to modern contraceptives and magical ones. They have access to more modern tech than you'd think because of some of the planets they've been to.

Elizabeth was sterile. This caused her bad attitude, and that combined with her refusal to have sex with Richard anymore drove him to cheat.

Individuals like Ruth and Teliah simply had a lot of abortions.

Q: Have the wizards of the palace been to Earth?
A: They were considering it on their list. They've scouted it out before, and the coordinates existed in their portal-door, which is how one of the wizards managed to shunt a bunch of books to Earth when Dech started to take over. They do a lot of pre-visit study and scouting of a planet before making the commitment to set up a facility.

Q: Would you pick out any theme songs for the characters?
A: Other than the poems and music I made for them myself, yes.
Felton: The Gravel Road, from The Village
Ruth and Roger: There Is a Time, traditional
Timber: If We Could Remember, Yolanda Adams
A Hero Comes Home, Idina Menzel
Timber and Elesonya: Lilium, from Elfen Lied
Karen and Richard: Leave Me Here, HEM
Criminal, Fiona Apple
Richard: Que reste-t-il de nos amours?, Charles Trenet
Le Festin, Camille
Teliah: Gotta Knock a Little Harder, Yoko Kanno
Harziyax: Madness, Joe Hisaishi

Q: What about the ones you made yourself?
A: Here:
Ruth: A Distant, Pretty Little Memory
But That's Okay (by herself)
Dech: The Sun Wouldn't Notice (by himself)
Karen: The Ghost (by Richard)
Timber: Nothing, Nothing Ever Happened There (by himself)
Church of the Sun
Lullaby of the Sun
The Winter Solstice

Q: Does Monica have a surname?
A: Nope. I mean, yes, but I don't know what it is.

Q: What was Monica's family like?
A: She was from an upper-middle class London family with two little sisters. Other than that... I don't know.

Q: What is Richard's family like?
A: I hope to cover this in a story someday but I'll put it here for now:
His father is an Englishman, Liam Lauder. His mother is a Frenchwoman, Celine Boucher. They met, and married, with Liam moving to France to live with her. They had three kids -- Richard, Odette, and Alexander, in order, all raised to be bilingual, on a little farm/orchard in Bergerac, Dordogne. Rich and Alex got sent to a British boarding school.

Celine also has a huge extended family: I've drafted up the entire thing just in case it ever became relevant. Richard has a lot of aunts, uncles, great-aunts, great-uncles, cousins and second cousins.

His parents set him up with Elizabeth, an upper-class Englishwoman, whose parents were pretty ecstatic to marry their daughter up to a wealthy restuaranteur.

Alex joined the French Army, and later on Odette joined The Resistance during the Great War (or at least, lent them aide). Alex was killed in action.

Q: What happens to Kenneth in the main timeline?
A: Ken loses contact with Dech suddenly in the Great War (Dech promptly left the planet after Germany attacked Great Britain, specifically after the zeppelin raids on London). However, by then, Ken had been set up with other contacts, as Dech is something of a great networker. Ken eventually branches out his networks to many supernatural beings, some Earthborne, some extraplanar. He makes a lot of shady deals and gets a lot of pretty awesome rewards in return, eventually becoming effectively immortal and capable of shapechanging. At some point he gets himself a nice home base in a private demi-plane all his own, fashioned into a gigantic Romanesque palace.

Hooray for him.

Ocera Q&A part 1

2011-11-10T06:09:00.002-06:00

This is a document I've had lying around for a while... it's a Q&A I drafted up, with some real questions and I lot I made for myself, concerning my "Ocera suite" as I like to call, it a twinned set of novels, a bunch of a short stories, and a handful of poems and musical compositions revolving mostly around the inhabitants of the fictional planet Ocera and the people they interact with.

Some of you might care about this. Most of you won't. I don't care, I just don't like it collecting dust in my archives, eternally unread anymore.

OCERA

Q: What planet is Ruth from?
A: Some generic fantasy planet.

Q: When was Ruth born?
A: 1718 AD, some time in September. All characters have birth years but she's the only one who I've narrowed it down to the month for.

Q: What was wrong with Harz?
A: He was insane, plain and simple. Specifically, I used sociopathy (antisocial personality disorder) as a springboard. I'd say he's more of a straight-up psychopath however, as sociopaths have an easier time leading normal lives, which isn't something I see him capable of.

Q: What about the voices?
A: Oh, those? Those were outside the scope of his mundane psychosis. He didn't suffer delusions or hallucinations of any sort from his condition. They were both internal and external, and decidedly unnatural, and deliberately invoked by an outside force. HMM.

Q: How does everyone know English if they're not on Earth?
A: BEATS ME. Aka: convenience. Note that it is never referred to as 'English' outside of Earth, however. They call it something else.

Q: What happens after the end of Ocera and before the beginning of How They Met?
A: Dech stays secure in the room for a while to heal once he has control. Then he goes out and kills everyone else who doesn't surrender. He offers them all the chance to stay there under his command, or be killed. Nilah surrenders -- she teaches him the ways of being a biped (including magic, language and sex). Teliah surrenders but Dech decides to be an asshole and test the portal mechanism in the control room by incapacitating her and throwing her through the activated portal without designating an end location. She's trapped in a void/pocket dimension for hundreds of years and eventually breaks free and exacts violent but non-lethal revenge.

Q: What's the purpose of the portal-door?
A: Transporting people and resources from directly inside the building.

Q: Why was it in the same room as the Control Core?
A: Bad writing. Lawl.

Q: Why didn't it have doors?
A: Security. Safety. An airlock. Etc.

Q: Are Dech's actions supposed to be justified with Freudian excuses?
A: Dech did really reprehensible things and was a really evil person for a really long time. He CHOSE not to repent because he didn't want to admit to wrongdoing and humble himself before anyone, not even himself. However, his actions didn't just spring from nowhere. A person IS their past. Without memories, we mean nearly nothing, for there's very little of ourselves without our past to make up a personality or an alignment. Obviously there's more to us than that, if amnesiacs and Alzheimer's patients are an indication; we're not a blank slate, but our selves are not 100% randomly or genetically determined. Our personalities, in a way, are just an on-going reaction we're having to our memories at all times.

Dech would have turned out differently if not for his experiences. All of them would have. But Ruth went through what he did and for a lot longer and never turned evil. There's a strength in her to hold onto her innate "goodness" that Dech lacks. He could not do it. He could not stay strong.

On the opposite spectrum we have Harziyax who had a loving father and never had anything bad happen to him but he was insane and went totally evil anyway. So there's nothing here that dictates who's going to be bad or good in my stories.

SUNSHIELD

Q: Why did Tim go?
A: Because no one else would.

Q: Why didn't he go back?
A: Because he was ashamed and by the time he believed he'd never find Ruth, everyone else he knew was dead anyway.

Q: Why didn't Tim revive Roger?
A: You mean dig up the corpse of his nephew to MAYBE be able to revive him after his sister and parents had already been kidnapped or left town? Both failure and success would be a bad scenario there. He didn't know he could rez anyone at the time anyway. And maybe he couldn't. He got stronger with practice.

Q: What would have happened if he had found her?
A: Then Dech would've been raised in Felton, Tim would've gone to get Ruth's parents, and then stayed home to raise his daughter, and it would've been one nice, big happy family. Oh, and Teliah would've been tortured alone by Igneous for as long as either of them were both alive or until he got bored and killed her, and Richard and Monica may have been killed in the Blitz because they would've still been in London during the wars. And a lot of different people would have been born or not born, killed or not killed. Like all the people Tim revived. They didn't have another holy healer for a long time until Acire was brought in.

Q: Why wasn't Roger in the afterlife?
A: His spirit was haunting his house. Tim met his ghost in that dream, before his usual nightmare took over instead.

Q: What was up with Roger's bedroom? How much of that was Roger's memory, and how much was Tim's?
A: Funny how easily they overlap. Roger's coma was not a dreamless sleep. Harziyax was tormenting the entire town for a month by invading their dreams and injuring them in their sleep.

Q: How is Tim's granddaughter still alive?
A: His daughter Adeena married an elf, Hathel, so their daughter Avanie lives much longer than a human.

Q: Did Tim have PTSD?
A: So very, very much so, yes.

Q: What really happened to him?
A: The 'kavishirsi' individual raped him. Other Theksarsi he ran into tended to just be violent in general. Not ALL of them, but it only takes one to make you racist and paranoid. (It wasn't Harz; he never met Harz.)

Even if none of that happened, he lived in a huge, lightless cave system for 65 years with no human contact whatsoever. That will screw with your head regardless. He's lucky he still remembered how to talk after all that time.

Q: Does Tim know Oceran?
A: Yes. He picked up bits of it while living in the caves and then studied it in secret at the palace, kind of obsessively, because he hated not knowing what the things they said meant. He wouldn't admit he knows it though.

Q: What's up with Igneous?
A: Let's lay out what we know of him: he came to the palace when he was 12, as a student, and never once since has gone back home, had contact with the outside, or even mentioned his life from before. He's a great artist and wizard. He's also a control freak and very sadistic. He's attractive. He sleeps with Kerrigan and Nilah and probably others, and it's usually kinky sub-dom stuff. He mind-raped Tim and constantly threatened and demeaned him, to isolate him. He did this to anyone he didn't like, really. Tim's accusations were basically me speaking through Tim to say those things.

Q: What was Ig doing in the cafeteria that day?
A: I typed that question just so I could point out that Akizu's PoV chapter mentions that not even the Grand Master has the privilege of having food delivered to his bedroom. As soon as Igneous takes over, he goes to the kitchen to order them to deliver his meals to his room. That's why in the Ocera story, his chapter starts off by mentioning he's having breakfast alone. Also no one is allowed to stay in his room overnight even if they had sex. He kicks them out once he's done with them.

Q: Why does Kerrigan sleep with him?
A: She's old, short, kinda overweight, and half her face is covered in horrible scars and she's blind in one eye. She has TERRIBLE self-esteem. It doesn't hurt that Igneous is good-looking and the dude in charge.

Q: Why are all your evil people dark-skinned?
A: Erm, oops. That was unintentional. Okay: Dech I made pale gray at first because it's a creepy, deathly color. His sister I made snow-white because... I dunno. (Note: She's also evil.) I made Harz red because... again I dunno. I didn't know anything about Theksarsi at the time. Finally I decided they're normally red, and Dech and Tel were just anomalies. Nilah is actually not Evil, she looks out for herself. She'll side with whomever's winning at the time, to save her own butt, but she'd rather not get into confrontations with anyone ever. And Igneous is actually based on a Sims 2 character I made in my family, the Stones. Igneous, Pearl, Ruby, Diamond, Emerald, etc. Each one with skin, hair and clothes to match their name. So Ig was black with black clothes. (I also made a Tree family once, and a lot of other silly theme-named families).

Q: Who ruled Felton?
A: They had some kind of democracy and maybe a council of elected officials.

Q: What's up with Pine Basin?
A: Felton was originally not near any other towns. In a RP I'm in, there was a nameless town by a lake that got destroyed, rebuilt and renamed Lakeside. I gave it the pre-destruction name of Pine Basin and decided to retcon it in as being the nearest settlement to Felton. It's where Ruth's parents moved to.

Q: Did they have any more kids?
A: Never.

Q: Did Elesonya ever remarry?
A: She was never in a relationship with anyone but Timber in her entire life. "They were each other's first and only."

Q: So what is the 'Sun'? God?
A: The sun is a giant ball of burning gases. The Sun is a deity which isn't actually the celestial object itself but is fine with the identification as such. The Moon and Stars are lesser deities of a similar nature. Their worship was brought with the Feltonites from their original kingdom. They latched onto the religion more firmly with their rural settlement.

Q: Were there any non-humans in Ruth's time in Felton?
A: Yes, elves mostly, also from their original kingdom. Gnomes, dwarves, centaurs and other things trickled in from elsewhere over the years. It remains primarily human.

Q: Why couldn't Tim summon his sword and armor?
A: The palace had a potent anti-teleport barrier on the entire building, including in-building teleportation, which included summoning and such. The only exception was the portal-door which was 'programmed' into the Control Core as such an exception.

Q: Why didn't we get any Feltonite names until Timber's story?
A: They didn't have names yet. Timber himself didn't exist until the last chapter of Ocera, and only then as Sunshield. It was fitting to leave Ruth's human part of her unnamed and undescribed. Notice she's only described after she's on Ocera, and only Harziyax is described in the Felton chapters. The whole story is kicked off because of the secrecy of names.

Q: Why all the inconsistency in who has the surname Stead or not?
A: Stead is Audrey and Timber's original surname. Audrey's husband forsook whatever his name was to take hers, just like Elesonya took Tim's. Tim was pretty much forced to adopt Sunshield as part of his deal to become a Celestial. It wasn't something he could just be in secret, he had to be branded with it in his very identity. Ellie never used Sunshield because she was just a human and had no divine powers. Adeena used Stead and her husband took on her name as well because his surname was Pickles, so Avanie is also a Stead. Ruth stopped identifying with Stead or Grace once renamed because it was also branded onto her as part of her new species.

Theksarsi have no concept of surnames, tribe names, or anything of the sort. Their gods name them through the mouths of their parents. An extra random name tacked on at the end would seem silly and sacrilegious.

Q: Why did the Sun tell Tim to go fight Dech?
A: It didn't. It was telling him to go to the Control Core since Akizu's death. It wanted Timber to take over the palace. He would've been able, too, if he had the courage to even try. All along, the Sun was merely asking him to show the courage to do the right thing, not back out at the last minute. The Sun has little patience for those too dumb to save themselves. It gives hints and nudges when it feels it's necessary, and when someone steps up to take initiative, it will reward them with power. The Sun, btw, is NOT a strictly LG entity. As an immortal in charge of a realm of death, it has an alien morality compared to our own. Our deaths really mean nothing in the long run, as long as the proper cycle of life and death take place. It's part of why it's favored by farmers and such.

Q: Are Tim and Ruth's transformations supposed to mirror each other?
A: Yes. Both are selected by a powerful being -- one holy, one unholy -- and very painfully transformed into a micro-representation of the "essence" of that being, gaining new powers and/or immunities in the process, a new name, and a very long life.

Random thoughts

2011-11-07T02:01:00.004-06:00

Every time I see someone speaking mostly perfect English with the occasional slip-up that lets you know English is their second language (as opposed to the screw ups native speakers make), I don't ever think, "Wow, they need to brush up on their English," I think, "Wow, I need to brush up on my ANY LANGUAGE EVER".

----

I know I'd get a lot more art clients if I drew attention to myself with fanart of a popular canon, especially shipping art, but I'm just not stupendously INTO any fandom enough to do that. Also... most fandoms out there already have a slew of very talented fans putting out more art than I could ever dream of; I don't feel like I'd be adding anything new or unique enough by contributing my own art. I like to do art for comics with small fandoms, or ones drawn by less-skilled artists, because then I feel as if I'm actually contributing something NEW. But mostly, I just prefer to draw my own characters, or animals.

----

I completely support my nation's freedom of speech and press. Knowing that you can go out there and talk shit about ANYONE and face no legal repercussions is amazing and a privilege I know not every country has. But I do draw a line between voicing our opinions in a public place, and using hate speech against groups that your friends belong to, then telling them that instead of refraining your language around them, they just need to learn how to not feel offended. I don't support an oppressive censorship regime in telling you not to slur the people you hang out with, and you are being a sillyface for acting like I am.

(Some of you may think this applies to you. It probably doesn't. The person it applies to probably doesn't read this, which is precisely why I'm airing it out here, to one-up him in our passive-aggressive back-and-forth. Oh yes, what a zinger he'll never see!

To the rest of you: I know the difference between playfully insulting your friends when we all know you don't mean it, and just saying culturally insulting words willy-nilly AFTER people told you they don't like your language.)

I wish I liked food

2011-05-11T04:16:00.004-05:00

It's not even the taste, it's the texture.

Food smells so wonderful. It usually doesn't look bad. I can see people enjoying it, and I know it must be good. I want to enjoy it. I do.

But I take a bite, and it's all shit.

The texture of most foods is utterly revolting and unpalatable to me. Although in some cases, the taste disgusts me (beans, green beans, cherries, bananas). But usually, it's just the texture. I love the taste of strawberries but I cannot stand to eat them because of all the little seeds. Even apples, which I do eat, are a bother, for they sting the lips and cut the gums and go down hard as if I can never chew them enough, no matter what.

Baklava tastes wonderful, and the mixture of so many textures makes it nearly impossible for me to consume.

The smell of sweet sausage on the skillet makes my mouth water, but I know I'll barely stand to eat it because of the texture. Same with potatoes. Sometimes I do it but it always takes a while. Jerky must be absolutely perfect. Deli meat is acceptable in small quantities. Even pancakes, the hard crusty edges like a ring, I always want to tear it off and sometimes I have to. Chicken, there's always that one... the one, long, string of slimy gristle up the center of a chicken wing...

Oatmeal can't be runny whatsoever. I must stir in the water very slowly in small amounts at a time to get it thick and smooth like cookie dough, lacking hard-edged textures or fluidity.

Grapes and other fruits I enjoy the taste of but they're either cold, or too full of fluid, or the skin is hard to chew, or there are seeds, or it has a strange slimy texture... I love their taste... but I can't stand to eat them...

I can't stand pizza or most pastas because I hate the feel of the sauce amongst the solid bread and cheese aspects.

I wish I liked food. The smell and taste are in most cases perfectly acceptable. But my mouth rejects all but a few narrowly-defined acceptable textures, simple and reduced to basic components. Anyone who does not have such a disorder of the diet will not understand how absolutely yet bafflingly repulsive the things that lie outside these definitions can be, nor the great embarrassment and avoidance of rendezvouses that involve eating. No restaurants, no meals at anyone's homes, no dinners, lunches or brunches, I'd rather eat before I leave and not inflict upon a guest or host the sight of my shameful reluctance to dine. And so I ask in advance for forgiveness of anyone I force to deal with this, and request retroactively and for the future not to act as if you understand the mindset that you do not, and will not ever, possess, and realize that this is just as uncomfortable for me as it is for you, if not moreso, and do not make hasty and insulting presumptions that I can force it away by willpower, or even more insultingly, insinuate or outright state that any of this is intentional or desired on my part.

Because damnit I wish I liked food.

let's see how long this one lasts

2011-05-11T04:06:00.004-05:00

It takes so long to get the nerve to write posts here

and then I immediately and forevermore feel compelled to delete every last one of them.

I've done it before.

One dubious comment. One disparaging remark. One doubtful glance. Or sometimes nothing, nothing except my own mind, consistently hating everything I've ever said.

I typed twice as many words here than you see, and deleted half of them before I posted this.

I don't even keep a diary to myself. I don't keep a journal.

I had a dream journal on LJ. I stopped posting. Sometimes I want to delete those too. Sometimes I feel ashamed of my own dreams.

Writing about my own real feelings and experiences

is excruciating sometimes.

There used to be more. I deleted it all.

I don't actually read my own blog. Doing so only makes me want to delete it even more.

She likes to watch

2011-02-07T07:14:00.004-06:00

My cat MoonUnit seems to enjoy watching the sun rise. Every morning as dawn starts to break, she jumps onto the window sill and bats frantically at the blinds until they've been opened for her to see through. Then she calms down and settles in for a contented sunrise-watching. I'd say it had to do with birds, but we hardly get any birds outside our window; plus they're more active in the afternoon here.

This story is no more or less pointless than any of my other stories. I wanted to point out something I found uniquely poignant about my cat, and I like to imagine she truly finds aesthetic value in the sunrise.

Actually...

2011-02-02T04:12:00.003-06:00

In regards to my post two posts ago, there is another, far more shameful reason I don't like people walking behind me. It has to do with something my parents did long ago -- firmly ingrained into my memory -- one I don't generally admit to anyone. Ye of weak stomach, turn ye back!

Whenever walking past me, as I faced away, my dad would reach over and pat me on the head like a dog. Not a soft tap but a rapid kind of thumping, the kind a dog would really get excited about, but makes a kid's head sore. He stopped doing it when I started reacting predictably Pavlovian and flinching and turning to watch him whenever he came in the room, or covering my head when he went by.

As for my mom, she had two habits, loathed as equally as the former and each other. For one, she'd often reach out to tickle my neck. Sometimes sort of grab it 'round for a tickle. I hate my neck being touched. I seem to vaguely recall her sneaking this maneuver in while hugging too somehow, or maybe that's my imagination. Either way, hugs offered or allowed decreased dramatically and all contact with my neck is to this day promptly fended off from all reachers.

For two, she'd give me "love pats" which can only be described as giving me a sudden light spank or grope, particularly if I ever made the mistake of bending over to retrieve something. I hate my backside being touched.

I stopped bending over to get anything. Ever. Even now, when I MUST stoop to get something off the ground, I all but completely sit down in a crouch that keeps my head up, butt down and eyes on everyone in the room.

Of course Kathy only exacerbated my problems, and perhaps my habits also have reasons as-of-yet unfathomable, founded in things I've forgotten or chemicals in my brain. Who knows? All I know is right now I am a squirrely sort of person that never touches anyone and tends to react poorly when suddenly touched.

Casually dropping this mnemonic over here

2011-02-02T04:01:00.004-06:00

I've never been able to remember Domain, Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species, nor any of the mnemonics to help me remember it. It's a fairly long bunch of words to remember any way you put it.

But for those of you who play MMOs, or at least have an acquaintance with the video of a guild master screaming at his raid for failing to kill Onyxia, here is one I've just thought up.

Dragon Kill Points Can Often Force Guild Screams. (Or, DKP Can Often Force Guilds to Scream, or F GuildSup, or whatever.)

You're welcome.

(I suppose I should put the video in reference here. Warning: carpet F-bombing; some NSFW imagery. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtvIYRrgZ04 )

I don't know

2011-01-19T05:08:00.003-06:00

In a crowded room, a man stands and walks across the room, passing close to me, and whatever it was that I was doing, I look up from it and watch him the whole way. He notices, and wiggles his keyring that had been jangling, thinking the noise was why I looked up, but I did because I can't not watch people cross a room I'm in, and he said, "I started wearing this keyring when I worked in a burn victims ward so that the PTSD victims wouldn't be startled when I walked up to them."

Saying, "I had to look at you because I can't not watch people if they go near me," wouldn't have made it sound any better, I think I nodded and agreed that his keys were quite jangly and felt weird and open and didn't like it, didn't like what it looked like but there it was.

On three separate occasions now in my new social circle someone has accidentally snuck up on me -- either made a sudden noise or suddenly touched me -- and I jumped and cringed. People touch me and I cringe.

I make a joke that ribs on a friend and as they laugh he yells and hits me with a rolled up paper and it's not very hard but I only curl over and cover my head, I don't even say no, or stop, or anything, I think my brain froze when he raised his hand and moved towards me in a way I didn't really expect, I was just thinking, "Please don't hurt me, please don't hit me hard," and try not to be afraid of my own friend and I don't succeed very well but I can never tell him because I don't want his pity and I don't want to have to explain.

But it makes me angry because when he makes jokes that make people mad and they hit him a lot harder even when he says no and asks them to stop and asks them why they're mad because he doesn't even mean it when he makes those jokes, when it happened in my house at my party, I told them no, and sometimes I defend him when he makes his jokes, sometimes they're just silly puns and not remotely offensive, just silly, but I told them not to hit him, they asked me why, and I just said, "I don't like it when people hit other people, and I don't want you to do it in my house." But I made a joke and he hit me. But it wasn't hard. I don't want to make him apologize.

Holly comes to visit and it's only on the second day that it occurs to me that I should hug her because we've known her since I was twelve. She says it was about time, and says, "I didn't go in for a hug when I got here because I didn't know if you were a huggy person. You weren't a huggy kid before." As they walk out I hear my mom tell her that I'm the kind of person who never tries to touch anyone and doesn't like it when they try to touch me, and it's not a mystified or dour way she even says it anymore, just a resignation to the fact. But she doesn't touch anyone either -- and she's far jumpier than I am.

When I was five and she didn't know yet she asked me, "What happened to my little girl? What happened to that happy child? Why are you like this? You're paralyzed in fear at the sight of your shadow and you cry in school every day now."

It was a stupid question to ask because I can never remember who the hell that other child is she's referring to. I can't remember what it was like to be her. I don't remember what it was like not to jump and cringe and have to watch people move and not let them touch me by surprise and heaven forbid grab my arm or wrist. I can't remember what being that kind of kid feels like anymore and it makes me sad and angry sometimes, but also stupid because it's stupid that I should have been changed at all, Kathy only beat me once and tried to do it a second time.

I've never talked about the second time because it's stupid too because she didn't succeed, but it happened years later and is more fresh -- I was eight, then, when suddenly she grabbed my wrists and told me I was going to be punished, and started to pull me away and I didn't say no or yell for help or make a sound at all, I just went pale and went limp and was dragged, just thinking, over and over again, "it's going to happen again" in my head.

It shouldn't have done anything to me but it did and it's stupid and I hate it.

I don't like me and my own head sometimes. I get moods and I hate the way I feel about everything, including that.

People have it worse than me, I should get over it, I'm obsessive. I've told myself that. I've been told that by other people. Which is why I tell myself that.

I don't have the right to speak out against corporeal punishment because my bias is skewed. No, that is bullshit. I have more of a right to know what the hell I'm talking about than any pansy who's never even slapped across the face does. You get to know pain and then you can talk to me about pain.

And I'm a hypocrite for that too.

I write my novels to understand pain. I write stories that explore horrible, nightmarish, unrealistic levels of violence beyond what I've ever heard anyone experiencing, and I write about people who deal with that after the fact. It's not some kind of grisly game of titillation. I'm just trying to understand. I'm trying to figure things out, and figure out people too. I say, "Why would someone act this way?" and I write a history building up to that part of their character. And I write stories that start with the cruel events and work forwards from there. "What kind of person are they going to be now?"

We all have a right to complain.

Don't tell me I don't. Don't ever diminish my opinion because of my experience or lack of experience.

You think I don't tell myself these things enough already, every time I do something stupid and reveal myself as the coward I can't remember never being?

Shorty stories 2

2010-11-10T04:29:00.003-06:00

While watching any historically-set movie, my dad will constantly pause to explain the nuances, background, and inaccuracies of whatever's happening on screen. He also does this during Lord of the Rings.

---

I used to take garlic pills as part of an herbal remedy regime to help my lungs. I just thought you ought to know that somewhere out there are people subjecting themselves to a hard lump of pure, condensed garlic every morning.

---

Speaking of medication, Nasonex metabolizes into alcohol in me for mysterious reasons (confirmed by my doctor). I was mildly alarmed when I was becoming drunk on a shot of nasal spray. Nasonex: all the discomfort of instant intoxication, and none of the good taste!

---

My website is Death by Coffee, my screen name is MochaKimono, and I'm wearing a shirt that says cafe du jour on it. I actually don't like the taste of coffee.

---

The only video games I've beaten in my entire life are Unreal Tournament '99 and Dungeon Siege+Legends of Aranna.

Shorty stories

2010-11-09T04:23:00.003-06:00

When I was 12, my mom wanted to buy her friend Holly some flowers for her birthday, and asked me to use my kid charm to find out what her favorite flower was. Holly at the time was a florist. There was pretty much no way for it to be any easier to work in that question.

---

At around the same age, whilst Civil War reenacting and hanging out with two friends Sonia and Deedee, we were playing on a sandy hillside and digging holes in the sand, when Deedee started crying suddenly. Turned out we had unwittingly dug into a red ant nursery, disturbing the larvae and getting Deedee inflamed bites all the way up both arms.

---

When I was very little I had a cat named Esther, who was named after the Esther from the Bible (Daniel and Micah were also named after Biblical figures). All I knew of Esther was that she "saved the Jews" from something, somehow. Not that I knew who they were either. I also, somehow, believed that the two Esthers were one in the same, and tied my leg to a desk and called out to my cat for help, believing she was some kind of superhero and would "save" me from being tied to a desk. (She didn't.)

---

Speaking of Bible characters, when I was about six I had a Bible coloring book. As I turned the page over to a picture of Jesus, blood appeared on the page! I thought I was having some kind of very religious experience or receiving a sign of some sort. As I immediately realized however, I was just having a nosebleed.

---

My Korean neighbors Grace and Martin in Oregon taught me a few questionably useful phrases in Korean, which I have no idea how to properly spell but I'll give it a go: moyo, meaning "what?", gonji, meaning "vagina", and "hijima dopongu", meaning "Don't do that, fart-face." Truly my cultural horizons have been broadened.

But I can think about Zoe now

2010-08-18T04:05:00.003-05:00

I can think about her and it doesn't make me cry.

When I was holding back the memory, it got worse. I had dreams about her that always made me cry whether they were nightmares or not -- I just missed her so badly and thinking about how she died made me furious and sad.

But then I wrote about it. I brought back every horrible detail and wrote it down and I ended up surprising myself by writing about my grandfathers' deaths and the death of two previous cats, Micah and Esther, as well. I suppose that was just my post where I finally got it all out, all my rage and despair over every person and pet I had lost. I did it while I was home alone and I sobbed over every word. That blog post is more tear-stained than anything else I've written before. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to look at it again, for fear of becoming emotional. But...

But I can look. I can think about it. I cleared it out and restored some kind of balance to my mind. Now I can look past her death and fondly remember her again, because I couldn't even do THAT before; even happy memories made me sad. And that was wrong. I buried the very thought of her to the point where I couldn't even let myself think about how much of a good and pretty cat she was and how she made every moment of my life better just by being there for me. It's wrong to let something die twice like that. In minds is the fountain of youth, in memories is immortality. That is how we honor them; by letting ourselves be glad that they were here.

So even though it looks like all I do here is post unhappy things, it's helpful, and I don't mention as much as I should how much it clears my head, once I've put down my unpleasant memories it allows me to access the pleasant ones instead.

Darn heart

2010-08-06T07:29:00.004-05:00

I'm mostly writing this because it's bothering me at this moment, even though it's been a long-term issue. I'm frustrated at my heart right now. Not for emotional reasons but because it hurts in an entirely non-metaphorical sense.

You know the way your chest shivers when it's cold out, making it hard to breathe? That's how it is right now. Every so often it will thump a little more painfully. It's shivering. When I stand, I'm suddenly dizzy. When I sit back down, I can barely breathe, it's like drowning with a pounding head. The dizziness isn't too extreme right now. I haven't outright fallen -- this time.

When I was about ten or twelve I started getting a small heart murmur. I had just recently heard about my great-grandmother having one as well, so I assumed I was imagining the symptoms and I ignored them. But they persisted. They increased in frequency, length and pain. Eventually I told my parents. They didn't really do anything. I don't think they believed me. I didn't want to mention it anymore because they tend to get angry when I have health problems and either tell me I'm faking it, imagining it, or that if it's real that it's all my fault somehow. So I didn't bring it up, for years.

I could hide it. It wasn't severe. The episodes were somewhat infrequent. Then when I was 14 and at college, I was taking with several people and gasped in pain in the middle of my sentence, my hand at my chest. They worried over me; I passed it off. Chip asked me about it later and said he had the same problem. There wasn't anything I could do about it, however.

It happens while standing, moving, sitting or lying down. It happens when I'm talking or not. It happens when I'm excited, happy, angry or bored. It happens whether I've had caffeine or not. It happens whether I've taken medicine or not. It just happens.

The episodes got worse... GET worse, over time. Sometimes it's like being suddenly punched in the chest -- those are the "gasp" episodes. Sometimes it's like now, the quiet shivering in my chest. Sometimes it's like a trilling drum, like the sound of rolling your Rs.

I've been tested for things. Anemia I get tested for by every doctor that sees me; they don't believe me when I tell them I already know I don't have it. I still don't. Blood cell and electrolyte counts are all normal. X-rays reveal nothing. However, there's a strong history of stroke and heart issues on both sides of the family.

I've concluded it's likely a side-effect of my long-term use of Albuterol asthma medication. I've been using it since I was five. I get more episodes after I use my inhaler. Immediately after use, it causes tachycardia. I've heard that using it for years can cause these complications. Yet, I have no choice. I can either inflict chest pains later, or asphyxiate presently.

When my blood pressure -- or whatever -- gets wonky, it's a little dangerous. I'll stand, and everything's feeling innocuous and then a moment later my vision explodes with flashes of neon green, as it feels like all blood and feeling have jumped to my feet. Sometimes I manage to find a wall or table to lean against. Sometimes my entire body simply goes limp and I fall over. I've been lucky enough not to injure myself this way yet. Once I fall -- or, if I sit back down -- my blood rushes into my head and throbs loudly, my pulse races like a roadrunner, and I gasp for breathe as if there isn't any around me. Eventually it fades. But it's disorienting and disquieting nonetheless.

Sometimes my left arm hurts. This is unsettling. It hurts for a long time and nothing helps. I take Bayer when this happens.

I think I might have had a heart attack once. I was at work, and suddenly, my heart started to hurt worse than usual, I became dizzy and short of breath, it was pretty bad, and I had to stumble into the bathroom to lean on the sink and try to catch my breath, but it didn't work; it persisted, hurting and hurting. I forget if my left arm hurted at this time too, but I wouldn't be surprised. When my breath gets short I tend to lose details in my memory, they have a hard time sticking to an oxygen-starved brain, I think.

I probably should have had a manager call 911 then, but I'm too poor for that. I already have an appendectomy bill to haunt me to my grave. That's how it is. I can't get tested or treated.

I live with it, and I complain on my blog when I'm feeling especially grumpy about it.

The End of 2007

2010-05-27T00:46:00.005-05:00

It was a very bad year for me.

My Nana was in a home and dying of Alzheimer's, her condition failing rapidly.

My cat had just been mauled and killed by dogs in our own back yard, dying of sepsis three days later.

My two best friends had a falling out with me and stopped talking to me.

Yet another birthday went by where no one came, no one cared, I had no one at all. I turned eighteen and no one came to commemorate.

Yet another Christmas went by where no one got any presents because we were too poor. People would tell me about the great things they all got and then asked me what I had gotten -- and the awkward moment of their pitying face that followed was worse than the lack of gifts themselves.

People pitied me and I pitied myself and I hated the world.

I lost almost all traces of appetite, hardly eating and forcing down what I had to when the hunger pains started up. I broke down in tears once a day, sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes about the unfairness of Zoe's death, sometimes about the painful decision we had to make whether or not Nana should be DNR, sometimes the worst of all was the thought that I might never talk to Heather again in my life. Nothing and no one left. It was the worst place I had been, emotionally, in my entire life.

I barely dragged myself to work and when I got there I avoided it at all costs. I'd disappear into the bathroom for an hour just to get away, not to do anything there. I'd stare longingly out the back exit towards the woods and the cemetary, thinking, "I could run away right now and no one would notice until I was already far away." I'd volunteer to take the trash out to the dumpster a lot, because it let me get out of the building. It let me scream where no one could hear me.

I remembered getting rebuked for coming in late one morning, simply telling my boss, "I'm not happy here, because I'm not happy anywhere. I don't want to be anywhere anymore." And then I took painkillers just to escape from my own thoughts, just to let the haze wash over me and not be able to think concretely anymore.

I remember standing in the rain at night one day at work, staring up at the Heavens and screaming in a rage at God for what he taken from me, with every obscenity I had to use, until management got worried and came to find me.

The months went by in a blur of constant sobbing and nightmares, one bad thing after another, piling up and up.

There's no real point to this post. I had been working up to it for a long time, but it's difficult to say these things. They're just terrible memories I need to put to rest by writing them down. There isn't always a point.

Zoe

2009-11-29T05:00:00.003-06:00

This is part of what made 2007 a very bad year for me.

I've been trying to push this memory into the furthest corner of my mind. I don't want to think about it, I don't want to feel so sad for so long. But I feel like I'm disrespecting her when I pretend it never happened, so here it is.

Zoe was my cat.

We bought Zoe and her twin sister MoonUnit as kittens in 2002, the same year the last of our original three cats (Micah, Esther, and Daniel) finally passed away. Our house feels empty without cats; it's how it's always been.

Moonie has a beautiful black-and-silver marble pattern with a white belly, collar and socks, and a white 'angel' shape on her back; Zoe was all white, with sandy round patches and van-point markings, and black tabby stripes on her tail. They both have/had bright green eyes. My mom named Zoe, meaning "life" in Greek. (MoonUnit was named after Frank Zappa's daughter.) Originally they had been dubbed Angel and Joy by the old lady we bought them from, but we thought those names didn't fit them.

Zoe was the sweetest cat ever. She followed me everywhere and couldn't stand to be apart from me. Every night, she'd sleep on my chest or on my feet. Whenever I sat down, she was there to curl up in my lap, purring and kneading me with her front paws for hours at a time. She didn't vocalize much and had a soft, light little meow, but a rich rumbly purr you could hear from yards away. Sometimes she'd only need to look at me and she'd start purring on her own. She had big saucer eyes just for me and would sit and look at me with the kind of adoration and affection that was unbelievably un-cat-like. She was very skittish and afraid of me at first, and clawed me often; we think the two of them had been abused by whoever abandoned them (the old lady found them in a box). But soon she was as close to me as a personal symbiote.

With my first three cats, I loved them like siblings, because my parents bought them when I was only an infant and I grew up with them. With Zoe and Moon, they're more like children to me. A lot of pet owners call their pets their "babies", something I never understood until I got these two. They were small enough to fit in one hand of mine.

I raised them. I trained them. I taught them to wear collars and walk with me on a leash. I taught them to sit and beg, and Zoe would even jump for me. I even learned from them: I began to recognize the specific meow-calls they had for each other, and for me, whenever they got lost in the house and started calling out.

Now, I know that I said Zoe was timid, but it turned out the opposite was true. She and her sister fought alot, but Zoe was always the victor, and had first dibs on all the food and good sleeping spots. She was very fat as a result.

She was also fiercely protective of her home and defensive of the rest of us. When a stray tom cornered and attacked Moon one day, Zoe bolted out of the house without a pause and chased him off the property, then returned to make sure her sister was alright. However, it was this fighting instinct of hers that ultimately led to her death.

It was Friday night, October the 12th. I was taking a bath. We had the front and back doors open for the cats to come and go as they pleased. They never left the yard, and we thought they would be safe.

I've actually tried to write this entry before. I never made it past "I was taking a bath".

I heard dogs barking and growling. I heard my mom get up and run outside. I hear her run back in yelling, "She's been attacked by dogs!" At first, I think it's our neighbor Nikki. Only when I hurried out of the tub did I realize the truth.

Zoe's flank was covered in blood and feces. She was cowering in fear. My mom was yelling in the yard. My dad got an aluminum baseball bat and charged the dogs; they scattered, and he chased them for at least an hour, probably more. I wanted to go with him. My mom said, "No, you don't want to go. He's going to be killing dogs." I said, "I know. I want to kill them too."

If I had ever run into any of those dogs again, I would have killed them. Ever. There is no doubt about this -- in fact, I cannot say for certain I wouldn't do it even now, if I encountered them at this time. Even if I was unarmed, I would do it.

At the time I was full of so much more violence and rage and vengeance. I needed to tear the dogs' throats out with my bare hands and bash their skulls into the pavement. I needed to pull them apart and crush them. I needed to avenge her.

But more importantly, I needed to stay behind and try to save her.

We couldn't take her to the vet because they were closed except for one that would have taken an emergency during the night or weekend for fifty dollars we didn't have.

The next couple of days were an extremely unhappy blur. We tried to clean her wound out but it wasn't enough. We held her down and put antiseptics on it and she screeched and yowled. We force-fed pain medications down her throat with liquified food. She wouldn't come out of the garage, so we put down a blanket for her to sleep on. She yowled constantly. She shifted her weight when she could stand it, but mostly she lay still. Sometimes she tried to crawl away to escape the pain, trying to hide under furniture we had in there. She only really quieted down when I was in there with her, even if I wasn't doing anything. As long as I was there and she wasn't alone, I don't think the pain bothered her as much.

So I spent most of my time in that garage, trying to coax her to eat little bits of food. I took a dish of lukewarm water and got a washcloth damp in it, and I took a comb, and I carefully, slowly, gently cleaned her fur.

What had happened is that three feral dogs jumped her in the back yard. She was either in the middle of pooping, or was so startled that she defecated on herself. She was covered in mud, blood, feces, and the horrible stench of dogs.

I hate the damn smell of dogs.

So I stayed with her and groomed her like a mother cat might, only with a washrag instead of a tongue of course. I cooed and hummed to her to calm her down when she started crying out. Her back leg was stiff and there was a gash there. I tried to clean it, and...

Something...made a squelching noise, and there was a thin vein, purple in hue, like the kind you find in low-grade tuna, caught in the teeth of the comb. It squelched and I almost vomited and I started crying and I had to stop and leave. I think I knew right then that it was too late. She smelled like the animals that the cats would hunt; the way the animals would start to smell when they were hurt badly and ready to die. She smelled like death. The way she tried to crawl into corners...it was her instinct to find someplace to make her grave. Her eyes began to fog over on the last day. She didn't move or yowl anymore. She laid there on her blanket next to the nightstand with the low shelf and blearily watched me hum to her and clean her and stroke her very gently on the head.

I tried to spend as much time with her as I could, because both my grandfathers and two of my previous cats had died alone, with no one there to be there with them when they went. When my grandfather was dying I sat in his bedroom and read him stories I had written and held his hand for hours while he slept, because he didn't want to die alone. And he did anyway. He died and no one was in there with him. And Esther died of diabetes on the bathroom floor, and no one was with her either. And Micah was hit by a car and we only found out when the neighbor found his body.

I tried so hard to save her. We did everything we could. But it wasn't enough. It was never going to be enough.

And she died alone in the middle of the night with no one there with her, on the 14th. She was in pain for two days and died alone. Like a wild animal, attacked by wild animals. They weren't even hunting; the wild dogs in this state kill for sport. She wasn't a wild animal, she was a pet, a loved one, my baby, and her death was unfair and horrible. I felt like she hadn't passed away; I felt like she had been stolen from me maliciously.

I went to see her body the next day, when we found out. She had gotten onto the low shelf of the nightstand and died there. I was...horrified when I saw her. Her body was bloated out, her limbs stretched and stiff, her mouth hanging open, her mouth black with those white fangs showing against the blackness, and I couldn't see her eyes, just that mouth hanging out with its fangs, and she looked like a monster then, a horrible monster and I was terrified as if I were a child. I wanted to touch her, like I had gently given Esther one last hug before burial, I was suddenly frightened irrationally that the bloated corpse would come to life and bite me, and blame me, blame me for letting her die.

We wrapped her in her blanket like a shroud and put her in a cardboard box and gently put her in the trash can, because we had nowhere to bury her and nothing else we could do. We stood out there and cried and talked about the things we would miss about her, and one by one we went inside, and one by one we separate to cry alone. I've never cried so much or so hard for one cat before. I'm not sure I've cried so much or so hard for one person's death either. Everyone, everything I've known has died of old age and chronic illness. Never murder. Never killed and taken from me.

I cried...so much, for so long...So did my parents, though my dad was the most private and never let us see him do it. I don't remember a whole lot about the next few months, because a lot of bad things kept happening all in a row and I went into a downward spiral of depression, the second worst depression in my entire life. I remember sometimes when my mom was driving me to work, when we'd be at a stop-light, she'd think about it and out of nowhere she'd angrily spit, "Fucking dogs!" And I think I did it too sometimes, but it's hard to remember. I just...blamed myself so much. I felt so inadequate. I told my friends, but I didn't really tell anyone the full story with all the details. Even to this day, there are a lot of people I know who don't really know what happened, because I've tried so hard to block it all out.

I dream a lot about Zoe, though much less so than before. Not long after she had died, I had one in particular that will always stay with me.

I was sitting in the living room and my mom was in the other room when I fell asleep. It was the middle of the day and I wasn't actually sleepy. I didn't even realize it had happened until after I woke up.

In the dream, I was still sitting there. Zoe appeared, and jumped up onto my lap, and I froze with terror. I knew she was dead. But she was so real...so perfectly vivid. The slightly course texture and off-white color of her fur; the low rumble of her purr; the huge saucer eyes, staring up at me, and the kneading of her paws, the weight of her body as she curled up on me...It was more real than most dreams in my life. And it terrified me, because I didn't know it was a dream, but I knew she was supposed to be dead.

I started crying and telling her to leave, saying, "You don't really exist! You're not really her, you're some monster, some demon who's taken her form, pretending to be her so you can torment me! As soon as I touch you, you're going to turn into a monster and bite me! You can't be Zoe, because if you were her, then that would be worse -- the real Zoe would bite me too, but only because she's angry with me for letting her die --"

But she just stayed on my lap, purring, looking up at me with the same love as always, and I cried until I woke up crying, just as my mom came into the room. I explained to her my dream, and she said that if it was more than my guilt giving me the dream, if it was really Zoe, that it was a sign that she wasn't upset with me. It comforted me, and more importantly, it changed my last memory of her from a terrifying corpse to the same way I knew her in life. It placated me, and it made the pain a little more bearable. Maybe it was my imagination trying to pat myself on the back in comfort; maybe it was really her spirit passing me by on its way to the afterlife; maybe it was God, trying to give me a dose of dream-medicine.

In any case, it did help a little. I still cry whenever I think about her and what happened -- I've been weeping non-stop during this entire writing -- and I still have those vivid, one-minute dreams about her sitting on my lap, but...I don't know. I think what I needed to do was stop refusing to talk or think about it. I needed to admit my failure, and speak candidly of what happened to her. Anything else would be dishonorable to the good cat she was. She didn't ask for death and she certainly never would've wanted to be killed by dogs -- though, she died defending herself, bravely fighting back and not backing down. But it isn't her fault or mine; to try to bury her memory wouldn't be right.

I love her. I always will, like I will always love every pet and person I've had in my life.

She was the sweetest cat ever, and her death was unfair.

I love you, Zoe. I hope you are at peace now.

On Food Poisoning

2009-11-17T01:59:00.004-06:00

Everyone's favorite topic! But really, there are some dire warnings here of which you must take heed.

I will begin by saying I had a run-in with Food Poisoning once, and we've never really been on good terms since; if I see him I cross the street to avoid him, though it's always really awkward when we like, go to the same cafe and we're literally adjacent to each other in line. I just pretend to be really engrossed by the bookmarks with the 'witty' one-liners on them and he carefully studies a jar of biscottis.

Anyway, there were a few factors that led to my...misfortune. For one, I drink chocolate milk. I'm pretty avid about it. Yeah, I like milk straight up (g), but there's something really terrific about the choco part of it. Not too much, I don't want to feel my teeth rotting out of my skull in the process of drinking it. A beige-colored mix. The problem being is that once you start de-purifying the milk with things that don't taste like milk, you lose the advantage of your two basic Food Poisoning forewarning sensors, the nose and tongue. It smells and tastes like chocolate. It could be bad, bad, bad, but it will still taste like chocolate and it will be delicious and horrible.

For two, I have intermittent episodes of pretty bad dysosmia. In other words, sometimes my nose freaks out and everything smells like shit for no reason whatsoever. I kid you not, I'll be fine one minute, then I blow my nose and it tweaks something in my right nostril and suddenly -- burning garbage, for three days straight. Everything.

I stopped trusting my sense of smell -- I've had dys/phantosmia for five years now, I got kinda used to it. So I didn't always smell my milk before I drank it. This was a baaad idea.

So, I made myself a delicious bottle of chocolate milk. If it even smelled funny before I added the chocolate, I would've counted it off as my nose being wonky.

The next twelve hours are best described as somewhere between "just about like the worst flu ever" and "oh mercy what's happening inside me". I spent most of my time on a toilet or crouched cautiously in front of one (just in case).

Since then, I always give the milk a whiff before I add anything to it.

We checked that jug I had served myself from afterward. It was curdled. It was half-chunky-soup. Like I said, the chocolate will hide anything.

That said, here's another warning sign:

If you have your perishable food sealed in a container, and then, when you go to open that container, it explodes, that food is pretty likely very bad. In more science-y terms, the bacteria that curdle and mould good food are farting as they lay waste to it (trivia: this is why you get bad morning breath!). If the container is air-tight, the millions of tiny little farts are being pressurized inside it. And then you open it and BAM. Food-fart, and quite possibly, food/drink all over you.

You'd think it'd go without saying that explosive food is bad for your health, but I want to make absolutely certain no one repeats my bad experience, so I'm giving you all the warning you can get.

Unless you are looking into experimental new forms of maximum-strength laxative*, please do not consume spoiled foodstuffs.

*No. This is a very bad idea and I do not endorse it.

About my comics...

2009-10-28T10:25:00.002-05:00

I have a bad habit of starting creative projects and not finishing them. I've actually penned two full novel-length books but grown dissatisfied with them and never fixed them up. There's always sketches I never finish. Things like that.

When I was ten I actually did "Mango Manga", not published anywhere, just a comic for me. It was in manga style, of course. It was horrible and cheesy, but I did 50 pages of it (which, cramming lots of panels onto one sheet of printer paper, was quite a lot of Mango's adventures).

Even before that I used to do "Buggy Town", about a town of bugs. There was Anty and his sister Salant, and Butterfly and his son Butterball, and the bees who worked at the honey factory, and a caterpillar, and Spider who frequently tried to eat the insect children of the town and his wife Mrs. Spider who kept a broom mounted above the mantel, with which she used to beat him whenever he tried to eat the townsfolk. There was also a random mouse living there too, who came from out in the fields/swamp, where other mice and rats lived in their own separate society. This was all pre-Pixar mind you; no A Bug's Life influences there.

I tried my hand at another crappy, cheesy manga called Ashida which I gave up on after a few pages. I think I tried some others that I never did anything with.

I started the Doodlies and ran it nearly to 300 pages, more on it later. From the Doodlies spunoff Tivik, a dark and serious comic with a plot and pre-written scenes mostly consisting of confusing dialogue. I ended Tivik without warning when I just got tired of it and realized that none of what I had written before made enough sense to try to fix up by adding more to it.

The Doodlies almost completely ended unceremoniously in 2007/2008 due to my depression brought on by a lot of bad things happening all at once. What hit me hardest was my cat Zoe's death. She was a comic relief cast member of the comic, who was one of the talking animals in the cast. She was very sweet and her death was very violent and very unfair. No one else who's appeared in the comic has died. Granted, we are humans and some characters are entirely fictional, but it's...too jarring. What's worse is that I had two plotlines planned to happen in the Doodlies: one about my romance with Ian, and one about Zoe and MoonUnit suing a coffee company for not serving talking animals, which was mentioned as a throwaway joke when someone else got turned into a critter and tried to buy coffee. Then Ian was an asshole and I broke up with him, and Zoe was killed by a pack of dogs.

All of a sudden there was a horrible and ironic and mean void in my plans for the comic.

I had actually posted one comic about Ian and I promptly deleted it. He didn't matter to me enough to show that, and it was too awful to keep posted when it meant nothing anymore. Only Austin, of all the people I've dated, has had the honor of both appearing and remaining. Even though I did kill him off in the comic...but I guess in the back of my head he just respawned someplace as always, like the running gag always had him do; I just never illustrated this. Maybe I overreacted to him breaking up with me. It was my first love and the first time I'd had to lose love. It made me weird.

In any case...after Zoe died I barely updated. I officially declared the comic cancelled for a long time. Then I uploaded a handful of pages...but none of them were me. None of them were anyone. I stopped making comics about real people or even myself; just stick figures, fictional caricatures, non-people...

Maybe I'll try to carry it on, but it won't ever have the same tone anymore. The Doodlies were something I started when I was 12; most of them capture the innocence and bounciness and sociality I had in those years.

I'm not inspired to continue it on any kind of a serious schedule, and I don't bother trying to think of plots for it. I'm not motivated to work on it anymore. I'm sorry.

Music

2009-10-07T05:19:00.002-05:00

Music has always been a part of my life. Since before I can remember, my mom would sing to me, and when I hear the songs again they evoke a little spark of memory that I can't ever quite place, but is comforting nonetheless.

My first memories revolve around my Papa and his piano. I don't think I enjoyed anything quite like sitting and listening to him play. Though I am told I was mischievous and would switch out his sheet music in the middle of a song; I don't think I meant it to be insulting, I think I was trying to challenge him to keep up. I can only speculate on something I don't even remember doing, though.

Fur Elise and Turkish Rondo were the first classical piano songs I really became acquainted with because his piano was electronic and had a setting where you could press a button and a song would play. I always liked the rondo better; I can't say why, I just do. They're both pretty repetitive now that I think about it.

My dad has a huge and still-growing music collection, and from a very young age I was exposed to Bobby Horton, Bob Marley, The Beatles, The Grateful Dead, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, The Who, R.E.M., Cream, The Guess Who, Yes, Sinnead O'Connor, Sarah Brightman, The Eagles, The Rolling Stones...the list goes on. I was always more comfortable as a child listening to the oldies station (at the time it was Nine-tee se-ven oh one, KIS'N FM~) and my pop music familiarity extended only to the latest Britney Spears hit. Which, I admit, I still have on CD somewhere. Hey, they're catchy and "Lucky" is actually kind of moving; why throw away something someone has put effort into creating?

I've mentioned before that, during Civil War reenactments, everyone would take out their instruments and play and sing and have dances late into the night. Some of my best memories are those nights.

When I was about 11 or so, my dad spontaneously purchased an electric bass guitar. I thought it was hasty, but I didn't know he was already skilled in music. Not only was my Papa a pianist and my great-uncle Don a harmonica player (and my great-aunt Anne a pianist, banjoist, and fiddler), but my dad is a skilled guitarist and bassist as well. (There are more musicians in my family, but those are the ones I've met. Also my maternal half-brother plays piano and guitar as well.)

So, suddenly I became used to the sound of live music. Just not him practicing in the house (and now I can identify many classic rock songs by their bassline alone!), but also bands he joined coming to practice with him, or us going to their houses to listen to them play. All the musicians' families and friends would gather, and sometimes small acoustic instruments were handed off to the wives and children to play along. His first real band was the Rockhounds (originally Mojo Aman, named after a misheard lyric "Jojo was a man"), primarily a classic rock cover band. After that it was Sacred Fire, a Santana tribute band. After that, it was Irony, a blues and rock band that did all-original songs. They were all very skilled, and we have CDs from all of them.

At this time my mom became a booking agent for all the local bands in Oregon (though some of my dad's bands were after we moved to California; I speak of before the move). She coordinated with many venues and bands and set up concerts and, after 9/11, a massive five-location rotating-bands concert fundraiser. She was so driven to do this that she managed to pull it off in less than a few weeks' preparation.

I got used to going to places to listen to live music, of all kinds. Mostly rock, blues and jazz, and some reggae and big band swing as well. I got to collecting CDs and autographs, hoping each person would become famous. We knew pretty much every band in Oregon and some of Washington as well.

When I was 16 I got a violin; a bit later I got a better one' I'm about moderate at it. We still have Papa's piano, and I've learned it to an extent. I've never performed publicly except for one recital (and in church choirs, vocally only). I've downloaded a program called Anvil Studio with which to compose music, albeit all in midi form. I don't do it with any intention of making money at it. I simply enjoy music; I enjoy the capability to express myself in sound.

There isn't a point to this post other than to talk about something that makes me happy. As relieving as it is sometimes to get all my unhappy burdens off my chest, there just isn't enough joy being spoken about in this blog.

Old self

2009-10-07T05:12:00.003-05:00

I think at one point every person grows to where when they refer to "my old self" it could be many different people whose only consistency with one another may be name...if that much.

Sometimes I say my old self meaning when I was a very young child. I was both hectic to deal with yet at the same time increasingly quiet and eager to please.

Sometimes it's when I was a teenager, which depending on year or even month could describe an old self of mine where I might have been a social butterfly, friendly and flirtatious, or an embittered and self-destructive hermit.

Sometimes I mean before I was five, and sometimes I mean before I was eight, or twelve -- all ages which held tremendous milestones for me, not all of them good ones, yet not all of them bad ones either.

Sometimes I mean a week ago when I had a flu, or two weeks before that when I was on holiday. A person never has one old self; they have many.

Of more concern is how many new selves are we going to become, and how proud or ashamed of them will we be, considering how proud or ashamed we are of who we used to be before?

The Wind and Sun

2009-09-29T10:37:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite things is being in my living room, whenever or whatever my living room happens to be, and watching the light dim and brighten in waves. At one moment all the walls are glowing with golden warmth, and the next cast into a peaceful gray that hedges on dusk but far less forboding. Gray and gold, gold and gray. A sunbeam lances through the shades and I see a slanted pillar of apricot motes moving lazily as if through water; the sunbeam fades and I feel the air cool pleasantly, like the seasons themselves are pressing their cycle through the minutes. I hear nothing but the wind that moves the clouds before the sun, sometimes the trees moving with them. I like it when this happens because every time it does, coming to mind is every other time it's happened before; it lets me feel like I'm in all of my homes again, one of the very few things that has remained constant from my earliest memories. The wind and the sun are ever the same anywhere in the world, in whatever conditions I'm living in. Everything else changes: where I am, what I look like, who is still alive or who has become alive, and what I expect to happen tomorrow, if there is enough stability in my life to even manage to expect anything at all. But the wind and the sun -- I know that wherever I go, they will be the same, and they will always let me remember something better when I might not like where I am right now.

Not that it's really your fault, though.

2009-08-25T03:13:00.002-05:00

I hate it when people I have feelings for tell me about how great someone is that the have feelings for. I can't tell them how I feel because I know they will never, ever reciprocate. I have no illusions about the fact that there will never be anything between us due a wide variety of circumstances but mostly it just boils down to them just not feeling that way about me. If all other circumstances were fixed and everything was right -- it still would change nothing. I try to tell myself this, to turn off my own affections, to reduce it down to the platonic feelings that were there originally, but I've noticed that once you find yourself accidentally falling for someone you can't snap yourself back out of it.

I hate that as candid as I might be on this blog I can still never be completely honest about the things I want to say. So many Thems and This Persons where I might otherwise put an actual name; so many things that have to be left completely vague for my own sake and theirs. For my dignity, mostly. For our friendship as well. I value both greatly.

I can't tell you not to talk about these things to me because you trust me as the kind of person you can say these things to, and I feel so honored to mean even that much to you that I dare not remove myself from that circle and push you away from me just to protect my own feelings, even if I just want to ask you to please shut up about the other person and let me go cry like a coward.

I can't tell other people about these things because I'm afraid they might secretly feel the same way for me and I don't want to put anyone else through the same pain.

Of the numerous complaints I have in my life, this is a pretty minor one, but occasionally it doesn't feel so minor.

If you're someone I know and you don't know what I mean by all of this, it isn't your place to ask. If you know what I mean, it isn't your place to tell anyone else.

I'm sorry. It's one of those things I'm just going to have to be closed up about. Maybe far in the future there will be an opportunity to talk about it openly...but not now, and not here.

Heather, part 2

2009-07-31T07:38:00.002-05:00

The things that went wrong were so soft and subtle we did not place value on them until it was too late.

Small arguments between her and other people...specifically, between her and the males in the role-playing group. Reading extremely vitriolic misandronist writings for more than curiosity's sake. Becoming angry at small things. Being in a bad mood constantly. Troubles with her family, troubles with her boyfriend, troubles with her friends. Admitting she almost killed herself. Admitting she was drinking without social purposes. Small things, things that nobody knew all about, because not ONE person knew EVERYTHING about her at one time. Individuals knew individual things, and we didn't share her secrets with one another. There was no big picture for us to draw. We didn't know what it was leading to.

She was the de facto leader of the group, only because, if she decided someone was on her personal blacklist, then that person was on ALL of our blacklists. It should be of no surprise that all of the people that were shunted from the group this way were male. We did not want to argue with her. We wanted to be on her good side...suddenly, she'd become a force to be reckoned with, in a strange way; the person whose alliance made you safe and powerful, and whose anger made you alone. But her anger was sometimes random and unwarranted; we didn't know where it was coming from. It was turning us against each other, unwittingly, unintentionally. People fought amongst themselves, influenced by her growing bitterness, and no one really understood where any of anything was coming from.

At last, there was a final argument. Evan had made a chatroom and had not invited her...Sometimes, this happens. Sometimes we just forget. Sometimes we don't invite people we're not close to (Evan and Heather don't talk privately). Sometimes we don't think a person WANTS to be invited (she had been in a bad state lately and had at times turned down invitations; we thought we would leave her alone and not irritate her by making her play with us). Sometimes you just assume they'll get invited by someone else instead, in a sort of chain of invitations. Whatever the circumstances, he did not mean it to be insulting, but she took it as such. She berated him publicly in the chat, unapologetically, rather...the cruelest we had seen her. It was not a gentle ribbing or a light teasing. She was trying to make him feel horrible for something that had never been malicious nor intentional.

I called her on it, taking it to a private message and telling her that whatever was bothering her in real life had to stop coloring her vision, and that Evan, Curtis, Brian, Kyle, and all the other boys she had been kicking around lately were NOT her enemy. I told her that Evan was clearly sorry for not inviting her, and I pointed out that she did not get so angry when a -girl- forgot to invite her. She used everything I said as an excuse to get angrier, to become more acidic, to lay upon hate and anger against us all. I tried to calm her down, to tell her that none of us wanted to fight with her, and we were all sorry for hurting her, even on accident; I told her that the presence of her molester in her household was probably making her ansy and that she needed to sort things out with her family before the anger made her do anything she regretted. She rebuked me for suggesting that she was in the least affected by what had happened to her, but at some point I realized that she wasn't really making any sense anymore, she was just yelling, just saying angry things for the sake of being angry. And there was nothing I could do. She wanted to see me as an enemy I could not find my way back inside again.

The most painful thing I have ever had to say in my life was to tell my friend Heather to go away and fix her own wounds. I had to tell her I couldn't help her. She went away, and all of a sudden I was left with the nearly-as-painful and difficult task of explaining to the rest of the group that I had just made her leave. Suddenly there were dangling plot threads in the role-play and unfinished conversations and gaping holes where Heather would have been, and every time one of these came up I unpleasantly remembered that it was my fault. I had never told anyone to go away because their troubles were too much for me; I felt terrible. I cried that night, and I cried for a lot of other nights and days, and it started to hurt worse as time went on, worse than if she had died; it felt like I had killed her. Not just for me, but for EVERYone; I had sent away our friend of five years.

And that is part of what made 2007 a very bad year for me.

Heather, part 1

2009-07-31T07:12:00.003-05:00

It's taken me a very long time to try to get back to 2007, which was easily when I had one of my worse depressions, partly because of the highly personal nature of all that went wrong, partly because it's so painful to talk about, and partly because of it's so layered and convoluted and it was just a mess of multiple circumstances running together to explode into many painful losses at once. And, also, because I haven't wanted to hurt my friends' feelings when the time came to mention the trouble I had with them -- trouble we've since gotten past, but which is still awful to think about. But, now, I think I may be ready, at least, to talk about this one. I asked her how much she would be comfortable with me saying, and she said that anything would be fine, and that there was no need for secrets if I had to get things off my chest.

I met my friend Heather online back in 2002, when I met my other online friends. She and I had been introduced by a mutual internet friend Lauren who met us both on Neopets back when Neopets allowed you to post advertisements for AIM role-playing groups. Heather was 14 and I was 12; she seemed infinitely more mature than I and I simultaneously admired and envied her. Her characters had rich backstories and she posted in gray or gold sans-serif font and her screenname had the words Infinity and Dream in it, and it all gave an image of wisdom and grace (as much as you can, on the internet, when you can't see faces or hear voices). We didn't actually talk much at all back then; we participated in the same chatrooms sometimes, but her characters usually had the more interesting plotlines going on with the other older players, while me and the other "babies" of the group had silly roleplays on our own that were mostly just an excuse to giggle and make dirty jokes.

She was the sort of person that you always want to be "inside" with...you can sense the distance and fortress-in-the-sky solitude and height of their character, and more years in their memory than they've actually been alive for, and such a coolness and confidence you can't help but want to be the person they talk to when they finally need to speak. Everyone knows people like this; they are the people to which the world is held eternally on the outside, and their words and memories are metered, the dosages of affection and secrets given are carefully monitored and no one can ever really know them, ever really touch them. When I was that young I didn't know why this was.

Of course, since then I realized I've become that way to some other people, and I've seen the invisible ladder of hierarchy of more and more untouchable people. I realized that it was only extremely personal trauma that does this. I noticed that to some people, I am that person who holds them on the outside -- but looking upwards, I see the gray layers of stone and the levels of an infinite social city of more and more layered fortress walls where people who've suffered much worse reside, and only very rarely do they invite people to see them in their privacy when they are most vulnerable.

You see, when I was five, my grandmother Kathy beat me during a summer vacation to her house. I was no longer on equal footing with other children my age from then on. I have never been on equal terms with anyone ever again, because experiencing that has erected an invisible fortress wall and pushed me on the ladder. It was an old and sometimes hard to remember event and it is a very small one compared to most people who live in fortresses, but it's put me at a distance from anyone who's never been hurt before. It's made me meter who can be "inside".

Heather was molested by her brother-in-law when she was 13, and a few more times since then. A family friend also raped her at some point after she was 13. It is why she lived in a fortress, in the sky, so high up on the ladder that most of us could barely see her feet. It was where she was safe. None of us knew what had happened to her until a few years after it did, and she did not tell her family until years after that. When the news finally reached her family it caused an explosive fissure of emotions and divisions between people who believed her, and people who didn't want to believe her. I don't know that this is something I can ever fully empathize with, for once I told my parents what had happened to me, they accepted it fully as the truth and have never doubted it -- partly because Kathy also beat my mom and uncles for all of their childhood as well.

Heather and I, over the years, became closer friends, and soon we were Those One Persons to each other...the one person who knows all of another person's secrets. You see, many of my friends know many things about me, but not ONE of them knows EVERYTHING except Heather. It is not something I do to hurt them, and oftentimes, I wish I had the willpower to let them in and let them know everything...but the wall of stone will always be there, keeping them out, making me meter how much of myself I can ever give to anyone. For Heather, that stone is thicker and colder, the wall is higher and harder to climb. Even for those of us living on the inside of the impregnable castles, it is just as difficult to escape to the outside world as it is for the outside world to get inside. I know I don't know everything about Heather, but I learned to accept that and to love her as deeply as possible regardless of what she tells me, or doesn't tell me.

It is why it was so difficult to lose her in 2007...the one person into whom I had placed all of my collective secrets, one of the very few people I had managed to keep close to me without pushing them away or letting them drift away.

In the summer of 2007, the fissures that had cracked her family life had affected her so deeply without the rest of us knowing that it was about to place a division between her and all of us that we never knew, at the time, if we would be able to get her back again.

When I was five I hit my best friend

2009-07-03T21:06:00.004-05:00

My best friend in kindergarten was Nikki Cunningham. This was in Lynden, Washington. She was blonde like everyone else in town, but I don't remember much more than that. I think she wore a braid and she liked pink. It's all pretty vague.

We were in line to leave for recess one day. We had to get in line for the teacher to inspect us to make sure we didn't bring anything to the playground we weren't supposed to (the last person in line got the reward of getting to feed the fish tank. I was never so privileged; the teacher didn't like me -- I'll talk about her more in another post).

Nikki had a new toy, a little pink plastic cellphone. Fake, of course. She fussed and whined at the teacher and begged to be allowed to bring it out, but Mrs. Muran was firm about not letting her.

At that moment, I felt a surge of sudden rage and hate for Nikki. It didn't matter that we had been friends for almost a year then. All I could think of was what a bad child she was, how she didn't know how to listen, how she should just shut up and follow the rules and stop making a scene, and that she was stupid for bringing her toy to school in the first place. I wanted to hurt her.

Suddenly recess is over and I'm back inside and Mrs. Muran is scolding me in shock and that look on her face that she got when I did things that were particularly untoward for my age -- something offensive, something that threatened to upset the order in her world.

"Why on Earth did you hit your best friend, Joelle?!" she was saying to me. I'd never been violent before, I don't think I'd even exchanged mean words before except maybe once telling Travis to shut up, then saying sorry afterwards.

I don't think it mattered a lot to me that I was trouble. I don't know if I was specifically seeking it, or if I just hadn't thought ahead when I allegedly hit Nikki (for that part of my memory -- the entire recess -- is blocked out to me, though I believe it happened), or if I just didn't plan on getting caught.

I just said coldly, flatly, to Mrs. Muran, "To teach her a lesson."

After all, this was a perfectly valid excuse to harm a child, according to my recently altered perspective. If you had the might, you had the right to execute and pass judgment. Not that I could express it in so many words, and I wasn't philosophical back then; I just remembered hating Nikki and wanting to punish her for being disobedient when I left for recess.

I don't remember what Mrs. Muran said after I said that, but I remember saying, "Why don't you just spank me and get it over with already?" After all, I thought anyone had the authority to do that to me. And it didn't even scare me as much as it normally did. At that moment I wasn't feeling much of anything.

Her shocked, scared look returned. "We don't HIT children here! And I would never punish someone for hitting BY hitting them!" I think maybe she had realized something was really wrong and that I had come back subtly, but at the same time, quite drastically different, from my summer vacation. She was probably trying to get through to me about the no-hitting policy -- trying to imply that this wasn't just a school rule, but a general matter of right action. I'm glad she said it, because I did take it to heart, and I've always tried to remember it; "Do not do unto others what they have done to you."

If you see someone who does a respectable deed, you should emulate that behavior. If you see someone who commits reprehensible actions, you should avoid it, even in anger or when seeking justice.

Nothing justifies the physical harm of children. Nothing.

The Tent, Part 2

2009-05-12T16:59:00.002-05:00

For the record, that heat wave had been 102 degrees at its peak.

I woke up that afternoon, my parents standing over me. MoonUnit had made it. I had never felt so relieved.

We managed to get her to drink more water and eat more food after that, and eventually she started using her litterbox again, and she was comfortable enough with the tent to sleep with us so we didn't have to lock her in the van anymore.

The heatstroke had some lasting effects on me, however. For the next few days I was very sensitive to the heat. I got fevers and chills, and I was extremely fatigued. It was not fun.

Even despite our situation, we had to keep going about our lives as usual. We used the restroom across the park to go to the bathroom. My parents also used the showers there, but because those showers were infested with cockroaches, I opted to hose myself off in my clothes at the campsite instead. We still had to work every morning, but at least I was waking up before sunrise because of the heat, so I was always ready on time. We still had to go to school at night, though I was always exhausted and my homework was often late. I had to do my homework in our other tent, a white canvas fabric tent where the foodstuffs were stored, because it was -mildly- less hot in there and there was a cooler I could use as a writing surface in there.

There is something very exhausting about not having a normal home to live in. Our provisions were one tent with blankets and a few changes of clothes in it, one tent with some food in it, an old rickety picnic table with hygiene products on top of it, and a van with our sentimentals locked inside. We had a couple folding lawn chairs as well.

Every day we woke up before dawn and had to fight off the tons of mosquitoes. I think I got about 35 bites all over my entire body, and I'm the kind of bug-allergic person where my mosquito bites swell up into white lumps as wide as dimes with a red inflammation an extra inch or two wider than that. In the morning we'd eat a little and brush our teeth, and then sit in the chairs reading or otherwise trying to occupy ourselves while keeping in the meagre early sunlight. Then once the sun really came up, the morning chill went away, and we had to keep moving to stay in the shade. Even doing that, I ended up with bad sunburns on my legs and arms...you know, to complement the bugbites.

It was just the struggle of EVERYthing that made it so tiring. Having to keep moving, having to go through coolers and boxes to get food, having to purchase large bags of ice and carrying it all uphill to keep the food cool, and having to use a little gas stove when we actually wanted something cooked...No television, radio, or computer access, either, which was mostly just inconvenient rather than tiring. It was just...If you've ever tried camping out before, pretend you're doing that, only this time you can't go back home, and you still have to go to work and school every day anyway.

I was wearing thin. My self-esteem was horrible because all of a sudden I was A Homeless Person. When people found out about it, they got uncomfortable at best, and mean-spirited at worst. I was a dirty hobo. A tenter, a squatter. I was always sore and aching. I could feel the hard, rocky ground under my 'bed'. My skin itched and hurt. I was just hounded by a constant, unending fatigue.

And it was like that for ten days, THE longest ten days of my life. Four days before we would've gotten evicted from the campground, my parents found an apartment. Non-smoking, pets allowed, two bedrooms, affordable.

I slept and for once found it very strange not to be able to hear millions of crickets, hundreds of night birds, and the crackling of animals stepping lightly in the woods around us...

2008 - Heatstroke in the Tent

2009-05-11T05:11:00.003-05:00

A couple years back, the printing company that my dad worked for went out of business, and he lost his job. Our landlords were patient and waited for us to try to find more work, but the sinking economy and outrageous unemployment rate (which is just about the worst in Tennessee) made it impossible to find work that paid enough for all of our expenses. He and my mom both became couriers (deliverers), but it wasn't enough; the payment didn't compensate for the gas used for the driving. He got odd jobs at other print shops, all of them paying very little and quite a few of them little more than sweatshops, run by crooked owners who turned out not to have money of their own, forcing large groups of people to work in sub-par conditions with barely any elbow room in the cramped rows of printing presses, and the presses themselves were old and hardly functional.

We were paying the utilities and other bills, but the rent was too high -- we lived in a commercially zoned neighborhood. All the other houses were actually businesses. Actually, all of the businesses have pretty much all gone OUT of business as of this writing; nearly the entire neighborhood has become empty of both workers and residents.

A year passed. I got back my job at the theater. We asked a friend for a loan. We sold a lot of belongings, and didn't purchase anything but very cheap food and just enough gasoline to get to work and back. I had to beg people to purchase my art for a little bit more money. We couldn't find any work; I was only able to get my job back because they knew me already. We kept asking for more time -- after all, we were paying for ALL of the other bills, just not rent yet. Finally the landlords became fed up and told us we had thirty days to leave or else.

We looked for places to live. They were tainted by smoke and so uninhabitable (this might seem an exaggeration, but I'm likely to die if I spend too long inhaling cigarette smoke; I've been hospitalized by it before). Or, they were too expensive. Or, they wouldn't take pets -- we still had our cat, MoonUnit. I suggested we get a single-bedroom, and I could sleep on the sofa. But as it turns out, there's a "two-heartbeats-per-bedroom" law in Tennessee to prevent this from happening.

As a last resort we approached the leaders of our church and begged them for help...enough rent for one month at least, at any place, even if it was awful. They said they'd pray for us. They said they needed a budget plan. They said they'd need to think about it. They told us we should just sell everything we own, dump the cat at a pound, quit college, and live in a hovel in the slums. We told them fuck you and we never went back to that Goddamn church or any other since.

We put out things into storage. We cleared out the house. I came home from work that night to find it empty but for a couple chairs we were going to leave behind, and a single storage trunk. My parents left to keep...searching? Packing? I don't remember, I was tired and frightened. I curled up on top of the trunk and slept fitfully, not wanting to be on the floor because of the various bugs infesting the house. The water was turned off, and I couldn't flush the toilet. We didn't have food left. It was an awful sleep. I felt abandoned by everyone, by society...all of a sudden we had been swept discreetly under the rug because of circumstances beyond our control. All of a sudden, no one was really our friend anymore, no one could spare a time, or anything at all. I wondered if I was destined to die that way, if we were going to end up in a gutter, forgotten and starved, just another casualty of economic crisis. I felt unsure of my place in the world, honestly frightened that all of my life had been leading up to a pitiful, uneventful death thousands of miles from where I had been born, in an unfamiliar territory around people I didn't know or trust.

This was the first time we were honestly homeless. No hotels, no old buddies' pads to crash at, no spare trailers to park in, no last-minute help from nowhere. No miracles. We unceremoniously left the house with nothing but our van packed with sleeping supplies, a little bit of food and water, a couple first aid kits, and a few sentimental things we wanted on hand such as books to read and my violin (I couldn't stand the thought of bow bugs eating away at it in storage).

We went south to Smyrna, at a KOA campground we had lived at before, only back then we owned a trailer. This time we had a tent. Unfortunately as the rules go, you can only tent for two weeks; trailering is as long as you can afford.

I barely slept that night. I woke up well before dawn. The cat had been left in the van for safety, she yowled in terror throughout the night. I got up and walked around in the chilly twilight, feeling strange and thankful to walk over my familiar haunts again. It was a lovely park, shaded by many trees, full of grass, with a pebbly streambed winding through it with wooden bridges over it. But, none of my old friends were still there. I didn't have a trailer to shelter in anymore. I was in a tent on the edge of the forest, with no heat or air conditioning, being bitten constantly by bugs, listening to birds and animals all night long. You might think it'd be nice, but it's not nice when it isn't a vacation and when you are all too aware of the packs of wild dogs and coyotes that frequently attack people and pets in this state.

I walked in the twilight. The sun rose. It became hot. It was summer, and it the worst heat wave of the year.

My parents had to go do...stuff. I have a hard time remembering what was going on, really; they were just searching. We still had school, work...we needed a home, we needed better jobs...We needed food, we needed help...I stayed "home" with the cat, to take care of her.

She panicked all day. The heat was extreme. I put her on a leash and took her outside, but she ran willy-nilly looking for shade and cool rocks to lie on. She spooked at dogs' barks and children's screaming and laughing. She clawed me, she fought and was afraid. I wasn't afraid at first, until 10 AM when it truly became sweltering.

Her search for shade became weaker; she collapsed next to a shed and her sides heaved with her rapid breathing, her tongue hanging out as far as she could put it. She squirmed uncomfortably and rolled side to side and then lay still for long moments, panting, crawling, overheating. I took her back to the tent and tried to coax her to drink water, but she refused. She hadn't eaten, drank, or used the litter box since yesterday. Terror crept into me.

I had to take her somewhere safe, somewhere she wouldn't die of the heat. We had no AC, nothing to use...But! there was a public restroom down the hill at the far end of the park, made of stone and cooled by an AC unit. It would be safe there.

I scooped her into my arms; by then she was too weak to struggle. She was limp, and frightened, and trusted me implicitly to save her. The path down the hill was open to the sunlight and swarmed with cars and people as they milled about.

Still with the leash on her, I ran across the park. I made it into the restroom with her safely. I set her on the cool stone floor, and she crawled into the darkest corner to rest. No one came in to bother us, at first.

When she emerged, still restless and uncomfortable, I put her on my lap and used cold water from the sinks to gently stroke her fur, as if I were a mother grooming her. She calmed down, but then she got a chill. I quickly dried her off and hugged her as she shivered. I drank water, and tried to get her to drink some too, but no go. I stayed in there for hours, just keeping her cool and safe.

Eventually, the manager of the park came in and told me to leave. "No pets are allowed in here. It's a health code violation."

"But we have no shelter," I pleaded, "We're both overheated and dehydrated. We could both die out there."

But she walked off halfway through my words. Health code violation my ASS. She had brought her yappy little dog into the very same restroom when we all sheltered there during a tornado warning! I never liked her much, she had always been condenscending towards me. And now her health code was to endanger our health.

I took Moon back to the tent. It was the hottest hour of the day, just about sunhigh. The heat beat down upon us as heavily as if the air were made of damp, hot quilts. MoonUnit started to hyperventilate again; so did I. I finally made her drink water by putting copious amounts of catnip into it, there creating a cold narcotic tea. She lapped up some but then lay back in the corner of the tent and stared at me with the same panic and trust again, wanting me to help her again. But I couldn't.

The same thing kept running over and over in my head again: Zoe's long death, my inability to save her, Zoe's round soft eyes staring at me with the same pain and panic and trust in me, wanting me to save her, Zoe's puffing, feces-smeared corpse in the garage the next morning, telling myself I could have done more, should have tried harder...Looking at MoonUnit looking back at me, and thinking and crying aloud, "I can't fail again, I can't let another one die, I'm responsible for them, I have to protect her, I can't fail again, I can't fail again..."

I called my parents, sobbing in fear and grief, telling them things were dire and I needed help. They told me things would be fine, but I was actually having heatstroke already and was getting delirious and completely terrified for both our lives'. I begged them to come back and help us. I was too weak to do anything else.

After the call, I got enough energy to drape a wet towel over MoonUnit. I was too tired to keep crying by then. The bright colors of the tent filled with sunlight blurred into a strange haze. My muscles and brain had quit out on me. Sitting on my blanket staring helplessly at MoonUnit, I fell back onto the blanket and fainted.

Before I was five

2009-04-21T17:45:00.003-05:00

Before I was five years old, I was the kid that learned to tie a self-tightening knot so I could sling it over a picket fence and scale it. I didn't want to run away. I was never so disturbed as to feel that I'd want to leave my family. I just wanted to get to the neighbor's house and play with Quinn.

Before I was five, I'd only gotten into a few spats with other kids, just normal bratty stuff. I wasn't afraid of anyone or anything back then. I didn't cringe when anyone yelled at me or get a sudden knot or flight of butterflies in my stomach at the sight of someone getting angry. I didn't know what getting hurt felt like; the worse thing I'd experienced was a severe case of head-to-toe chickenpox, and a bump on the head when I was very little. But chickenpox doesn't change you.

Before I was five, I'd never heard anyone say to me, "What happened to that happy little girl I used to know? Where did she go?" or, "You used to be so confident. Now you jump at your own shadow," or, "Why do you keep crying during class every day for your mommy?"

I never heard those things, then. I didn't have to worry about feeling ashamed because I thought I had a personality disorder because I was called a coward and a crybaby. Of course, I was a coward and a crybaby, but already I couldn't remember what I used to be like before that. I used to cry before that, but...always about things that made sense to me, things I could say to people...sudden nightmares about monsters with huge teeth and mouths, or when the cat scratched me on the hand, things like that, things that I didn't care about five minutes later...those were the only reasons I used to have for crying. And nothing ever scared me when I was awake. I knew that once the lights came on, all the monsters were really gone, because there was no such thing as a monster disguised as a human. There was nothing violent left around after I woke up, pretending to be my family. Grandparents were people that, like all elder family members, were inherently made to protect you from harm.

That's what I used to believe, before I was five.

I Lied

2009-04-21T17:43:00.001-05:00

I'm not really posting these in the order I said I would.

There's still a lot of things I need to get off my chest that will probably take a long time to getting around to addressing. I have a bad habit of suddenly deleting all of my journal entries out of shame and fear, and I'm trying really hard not to rush myself with this one so that I don't get the urge to wipe it clean.

Civil War Reinacting

2009-04-10T07:52:00.002-05:00

Most people don't know this, but my parents and I were civil war reinactors for most of my childhood. We started when I was too young to remember, and stopped when I was 12, when we moved to Yuba City (where there weren't any local reinactment groups). We did most of our reinacting in the Northwest club, in forests, parks, and at actual civil war forts all throughout Oregon and Washington.

Now, what does one do at a reinactment?

Well, we would be informed of when all the events happened and where. They usually lasted one weekend, or sometimes an entire week. Occasionally there were single-day events such as large formal balls. Then we would pack up everything we needed -- clothes, mostly, though the tent (canvas, with thick wooden beams to support it, and iron tent stakes) was extremely heavy. We also brought any other supplies we needed for camping, such as food, toothpaste and such (to be used when tourists weren't looking), and when I was younger I would bring toys and books. A toy rifle or pistol was a must for every child. We'd buy tiny packets of gunpowder to simulate firing and everything.

Anyways, the men would put on their woolen uniforms and wake up just before dawn and march around doing drills until the afternoon, when a huge battle on a field would take place. They'd ue dud ammo which produced the same amount of bang (and smoke, which would soon fill the entire campground), but which couldn't harm anyone. Let me tell you that a cannon firing is the loudest thing I have ever heard -- it always set off all the car alarms. Then the men would come home, break out the instruments at night once the tourists all left, and sing around the campfire until they fell asleep and snored loudly.

As for the women, it would have been historically inaccurate for them to have done the war stuff, though a few women did by crossdressing in a male uniform and hiding her hair under a kepi. As for children, their options were limited to playing the fife and drums until they got old enough to wield a weapon.

Mostly, the women did pretty much what women really did back then...They sat around sewing, cooking, making arts and crafts, shopping at the sutlery, and going to fashion shows while waiting for the men to come back "home". If you're wondering about the cooking, yes, it was all done accurately over a fire and everything. Let me tell you, nothing smells better in the morning than fresh hay, gunpowder, and freshly-made coffee and bacon! Of course I usually ate granola bars while hiding in the tent.

What did the kids do? Well, we usually explored the forests and the forts, and also went to the sutlery (huge canvas tents selling clothes, food, toys, etc. Mostly catered to tourists, but had some good stuff. The best honey, raspberry and clover varieties, I had there.) Mostly the kids longed for the GAMES.

There were historic games such as yard bowling and that one where you throw a stick through a hoop, and then of course, WAR. We'd all take our fake firearms, run off to the nearest fort/forest/hill with a landmark on it (such as a port-a-potty), and battle for hours. Turncoats were made. Invisible blood was shed. Dresses were gotten incredibly dirty along the hems. It was terrific.

At night, since we couldn't see at all (no electric lightning except that one guy who broke out a bug-zapper), we'd either tell ghost stories, or play games that involved things that glowed, such as twirling burning sticks to draw shapes on the air, or playing volleyball tag with glowsticks in a field. Sometimes we'd have sleepovers in other kids' tents and look at Mad Magazine, which was the dirtiest thing we'd ever seen at that age.

Also at night, there were usually dances -- old-fashioned ones, of course, such as the Virginia Reel and others involving the phrases "sashay" and "dos-e-do". We'd do these on the grass, because there weren't any indoor areas except the forts (which were creepy as hell, and completely unlit). The waltzes and such were usually done at the larger balls, which happened indoors.

On Sundays, there was church. A "chaplain" for the company would give a sermon and all of the attendees would sits on chairs or logs, whatever was available. Even being far removed from civilization didn't stop us from our religious practices.

(If you're wondering whether non-whites were allowed to join, yes, they were; there were no limits. Historically, this is accurate, for BOTH sides of the war; it just isn't as documented. There weren't too many in our club, though, just because the local demographics was mostly white. This is probably different in other areas, though.)

Anyway, I hope I've educated you about this "nerdy" hobby. I was always surprised about people making insults about reinactors since it was such a huge part of my childhood, and my family and I made so many friends there (Doc, Peachfuzz, Slappo, Spoons...did I mention they all gave each other bizarre nicknames?)

1998 - San Jose

2009-03-18T09:07:00.003-05:00

We were moving away from Ferndale, Washington, down to San Jose, California. We were chasing a job opportunity -- my dad had been promised a graphic artist position at a print shop in San Jose, which happened to be the same city I was born in.

You may wonder why we moved to that awful house on that awful farm in Ferndale in the first place. It's because my dad, after working as a pressman in another print shop in Lynden, Washington for three years, had been fired. I remember it being a celebratory occasion, though. I never thought of life as dangerous. Randomly getting up and relocating out of the city didn't seem odd to me; it was an adventure (I had a lot of fun at Ferndale, I just didn't care for the neighbor kids or the illness). I remember when my dad got fired (which I think was shortly AFTER we moved to Ferndale), my parents celebrated. They said, "Yay, he doesn't have to work for that guy anymore!" And they gave me half a glass of red wine.

Anyway, a few months later, we went to San Jose to chase that job. You may have seen a poem I wrote that mentions it in what seems like heavy metaphor. It isn't. It really was midnight on the interstate, me sitting bright-eyed in between my parents in the little U-Haul truck, when they told me it was my birthday. They sang happy birthday to me down the road. Then we stopped at a truck stop and they bought me a couple toy cars. I asked for some other toy at another store that day, and they scolded me for asking for so much. I sullenly thought to myself, "You already forgot it was my birthday? It's just one more toy."

Something wrong happened though. We didn't move into a house of our own right away. We had to find a hotel. We didn't have money. We had to call my grandparents in the middle of the night for a money transfer or something. I remember my mom cursing and throwing her purse at a window as we stood on the sidewalk in the middle of the night, being rejected from a hotel. All of a sudden I started to feel afraid about a roof over my head for the first time of my life.

We had to call up some old friends of my parents' and ask to crash there for a little while. My mom says she could hear the wife in the background saying, "What, NOW?! They won't still be here by Thanksgiving, will they?!" because the wife didn't know she could be heard. Yeah. Nice friends. They didn't want us to be around to ruin their family get-together. They tolerated us staying in a spare room for a week or two. I played with the Legos left behind by their now-adult son. I watched Christmas specials on tv. I accidentally broke a little China cup on a shelf in the hall; it had a little wax ear of corn in it, and I liked the texture of the wax very much, and I have a compulsion about touching things with a nice texture. So when I passed it by, I'd ever so gently, just with the very tip of my fingernail, lightly touch the wax. I was very careful, but one day I guess my finger caught the cup when I pulled away, and it fell and broke. I started crying and saying I was sorry. She heaved a heavy sigh and picked it up and said, "Oh, that's alright, it was only priceless and delicate..."

I remember staying up all night on the cot, unable to sleep, just feeling vaguely afraid and not entirely knowing why. Staring at my parents on the other cot, wondering if they were awake too, wondering if their eyes were open in the dark and watching me right back. Feeling strange looking at someone else's belongings lined up against the wall in the shadows. Seeing the sky lighten all throughout the night...

Eventually we had to leave their house and stay at another friend's house, a single woman with a little dog named Willie that hated my dad for some reason. It was an irritatingly white, featureless, clean house.

I remember waking up at the crack of dawn, with big beads of dew still sticking to the palm trees and big-leaf bushes and ferns, and a crisp mist, and wet maple leaves all over the streets. My dad finally got a job, but something had gone wrong -- it wasn't what they promised. Just another pressman's job. He shuffled through a few jobs there. I remember going to the city, the biggest city I'd ever seen, and feeling that the buildings must be about to fall on top of me. I remember being parked across the street from a big empty dirt lot filled with thorny tumbleweeds as tall as me, eating a strawberry NutriGrain bar for the very first time and liking it even better than candy.

I remember meeting non-white people for the first time, seeing homeless, scraggly people for the first time, people who didn't wave back when you waved but just glared accusingly at your greetings, and being told that unlike the little town of Lynden, you couldn't just say hi to people anymore.

I remember driving out to a shabby little building to cash a check. I remember thinking that a few hundred dollars seemed like a hell of a lot; I remember thinking we must be rich, and being so surprised when there never seemed to be a net gain.

We did get a house, finally. I mean, an apartment. I have only lived in three houses, but I call them all houses nonetheless. They're not really "homes" to me.

I remember being incredibly depressed and stressed all the time. I cried myself to sleep constantly. I wanted to run away, and I don't know why. I just hugged my favorite stuffed animal, Tiger, and cried and told her how bad I felt and that she was the only one there for me. I've done this for years, to be honest. I remember not sleeping, just lying there restlessly, sometimes crying, sometimes feeling frightened, sometimes letting the cats in secretly so I could pet them and let them comfort me, sometimes sneaking out to watch late-night tv from behind my parents' chairs.

There was a massive infestation of large roaches living beneath the refrigerator. I have never seen anything so creepy in my life as a hundred cockroaches, each one at least an inch long, running in a starburst shape across the kitchen floor. My mom screamed and dumped a bucket of bleach on the floor, and it smelled awful. The scent of bleach has forever filled me with deep disgust.

It didn't really matter that we had roaches, because there was nothing for them to eat. We had a hot dog or two a day, sometimes a bowl of pop corn. We had some beverages. I drank milk constantly to keep cool. It was the first place I experienced +90 degree heat, which I'll address in the next post, as well as talk about the people I knew there in the apartments.

2007 - Ian

2009-03-10T02:05:00.002-05:00

Oh do I regret him.

First, I met a boy named Cory...in 2005, I think. Maybe 2006. I forget; either way, by then, I was no longer with Austin. Cory wanted to see a movie, Narnia. I said yes, as long as I pay for my own tickets and we see it in a strictly platonic fashion, seeing as how nothing more than a movie was ever, ever going to happen. He said he was "used to people" like me, "trying to pay their own way", and then we ended up in a fight over poverty...he was one of those spoilt upper-crust middle-class boys who honestly believes that anyone who is not as extravagantly well-off as he is exists in poorness because of their own inborn retardation, and that anyone who has money (even through inheritance) is born inherently smarter and more deserving to have money. He even said poor people ought to go to poorhouses and prisons or die -- and he didn't get the joke when I quoted that same thing from A Christmas Carol, as Scrooge said it. We also got into a fight over church. He basically said because I prefer not to attend a church where I am repeatedly burned and scoured by flaky, shallow, Sunday-Only-Christians, but only to worship in the privacy of my home where I am not judged by people who've never even opened a Bible, that he thinks I cannot actually BE a Christian and that I'm missing a valuable social aspect of it. The social aspect of perpetual rudeness. Yes.

Anyway, I went to the movie because I just really wanted to see Narnia, we got into more fights and I told him to piss off and never talk to me again.

I mentioned him, because it is through him that I met McGrew.

It's too bad how it went. McGrew was actually very good looking, and had a great sense of humor, was rather intelligent, and I did enjoy spending time with him...but...as time went on, it became more and more apparent how not nice of a person he was. His racism surfaced...his sexism...his furryism, his pedophilia, yes, he showed tendencies to be aroused by such fare...He became critical of me, telling me I didn't dress femininely enough for him, and when I said that sometimes I did actually dress nicely and put on make-up, he just hadn't been there to witness it, he called me a tart instead. This was all said in front of my parents, no less. I began to feel sick and worried to be around him; I didn't feel safe. He had that way about him, the leery and disrespectful way, that made me feel afraid to think of being left alone with him. My parents told him to leave me; when I turned 18, he contacted me again, obviously just seeking...what men of his sort only ever seek. I told him to piss off and never talk to me again.

I mentioned him, because it is through him that I met Ian.

To be honest, Ian wasn't as good-looking. He wasn't as funny. He was a little spastic sometimes; he got caught up in his words and slurred unintelligably when he got too excited trying to tell a joke. But next to McGrew, he seemed more moral. He wanted to be a cop. He believed in dreaming. He wanted to change the world. At least those are the things he told me, and I ate it up like an idiot. Two years had gone by since Austin, the first and so far last and only person I have felt romantic love towards. I'm sure that will change in the future, but not so far. Oh well.

I knew Ian for a while. Finally, when I was 17 and he was 25, we started dating. He moved quickly. Within weeks I had hickeys. He tried to touch me when I told him not to. He asked me to touch him when I told him I didn't want to. He pressed against me even when I froze in discomfit and a bit of fear. I don't know why I was so caught up with him. But two weeks in and I felt sick and awful with myself. I became nauseous after I kissed him, dizzy and reeling from...I'm not sure, horror? Shame? My body's way of trying to make me stop myself before it went too far? I don't know. I felt less like a person, like anyone with a name or identity, and more like a collection of usable parts. Distinct bits and pieces to be roved by him at his whim. Within weeks we no longer spoke. We could never get through a video game, an anime, a movie, a conversation. He only wanted to be physical. The wannabe cop was gone. The guy who liked ghost stories was gone. It was just me, a minor, and him, an adult always trying to touch me.

He never introduced me to his friends or family. He never wanted to. We ran into them once on accident, and he introduced me as his "friend". I got revenge by introducing him to my coworkers as my "friend".

I told him I didn't want to lose my virginity when I turned 18. I didn't want to lose it any time soon; that's not who I am. I never let him touch me below the waist; I never touched HIM below the waist. This was three weeks into the relationship. It was when it fell apart.

We would make plans. He would disappear. I would get a call in the middle of the night or morning, him slurring, a party in the background, or the sound of traffic and tunnels going by. "Oh, me and my friends decided to go out of state for a big frat party. I can't make it tonight. I can't make it tomorrow, either, I'll be hungover." He told me he worried he would be an alcoholic like his father: I don't think he worried at all, or he would have cared about BEING an alcoholic like he WAS. He was always in the drink.

I'm sure he was cheating on me, too. He had previously confessed to ending up making out with strangers at parties where he was drunk. What a shit.

Finally, we made plans for Halloween to go to a Harry Potter themed costume party. I got together an outfit: dark navy pleated skirt, tall gray socks, black Mary-Janes, white long-sleeved dress shirt, gray button-up vest, gold-and-black-striped tie, black witch's hat. I even had a magic wand.

He called me hours before the party telling me he was already there and asking if I was going to show up. I told him he already knew I didn't have a car and couldn't get there by myself, he'd have to come get me, like we arranged beforehand. He didn't give a shit. I hung up. I tried to call him back to dump him; he wouldn't pick up. I sent him an e-mail telling him to piss off. I never talked to him again.

Asthma

2009-03-05T21:58:00.002-06:00

The first time it happened, I was actually still living in the house before Papa and Nana's. The second time, I think we lived there. It was the smoke. We didn't know I had asthma.

Honking, barking, gasping, wheezing. Horrible sounds, inhuman sounds, coming out of my mouth. I can't even talk. I can barely sit up, I'm already so dizzy, and everything's so dim. The lights don't seem very bright. I can only cry and look at them and barely squeak and beg to go to the doctor's. I don't actually remember asking to go to the doctor's, because my memory blacks out and picks up much later.

The doctors having to pin me down and stab me with an epinephrine shot in the leg so hard it hurt for days.

Wearing big, heavy tubes on my face. A funny whooshing sound and a puff of white steam when I exhaled.

The doctors giving me a weird floral-print yellow stuffed cat as a gift or a bribe for taking my vaccination, even though I had fought them and screamed, because I couldn't see things right and I thought it was a pair of scissors they had and not a needle. I would not have been reassured either way.

Coming back down and limping and feeling sore and tired and crappy all over, a dull exhaustion, feeling resentful for reasons I couldn't name. Learning it was the smoke, later on. Nana's smoke made me sick. We had to move in with them later anyway, out of desperation, so they curtained off half of the house and they berated and scolded me if I even walked further than the front living room, and Nana stayed in the back and smoked. No, she didn't quit. She wasn't a bad person but smokers just don't give a shit. The addiction comes first. So I had a second attack and I don't remember it at all. My memory tends to black out when I have attacks, because I get very little oxygen to the brain, and a weak and suffocated brain has trouble getting memories to stick.

Nana finally quit years later when the Alzheimer's robbed her of her memory of smoking at all. She forgot she was addicted. Her health was amazing after that.

More About Nioma

2009-03-05T21:43:00.003-06:00

I guess in retrospect it sounds weird for me to call my grandmothers by first name. With Kathy, my maternal grandmother, it's because I hate her and I want to disassociate with her and the fact that we're related. With Nioma, it's because she had Alzheimer's and forgot we were related. I called her Nana when I was little.

We lived with Papa (Alan) and Nana (Ni) when I was very little. These were some of my first memories -- further back than that and it gets strange, hazy, gray, and warped into odd proportions and unrealistic shapes, more like a dream or a hallucination than an actual memory. I was four years old, I think, when we moved in with them. I never found out until much later that we did so because money was tight; maybe if I'd known, I would've gotten used to the fear and exhaustion that accompanies poverty much sooner. But maybe not. Maybe it was better for me to have at least one memory where I didn't go to bed frightened and sad for things I couldn't control. After all, I wasn't five years old yet. I'd never been hurt: I was the spitfire kid that bullied OTHER kids, kicked them when I didn't get my way, and had some weird naive bent on taping or clipping things to our poor pet cats because I didn't understand what it was like to feel physical pain.

Anyway, my memories back then are a little weird. I just remember incidents. I remember waking up at ungodly hours, either because my parents insisted on waking me up to put me in the empty living room to watch tv while they worked, or because I woke up earlier than everyone. In the latter case, I'd set down my multi-colored railroad alphabet pieces and walk carefully on them until I got out the door. I had an obsession in my mind that I could not touch the carpet in my bedroom when I woke up until I made it out of the door. This carried on for years, to the point where I'd have my parents carry me out if I didn't have stepping stones handy.

I remember once, the room seemed to jump two inches to the left. Just like that. Everything in the whole world blinked and jumped. It happened more than once, actually. I thought it was normal.

I first became aware of the funny film grain that lay over my sight. I thought this, too, was normal. When I was very little, though, I thought it was millions of microscopic bugs flying in swarms. Now I'm used to it. Reality never blinks and jumps anymore though, thank goodness, but I do see glowing, squirming spots on occasion.

Nana and Papa took care of me then. Papa was overweight and I always called him fat, because little kids don't understand what it's like to be insulted and think adults should have their flaws pointed out to them. I thought Nana was ugly and I told her I hated her for it. I wasn't a very pleasant child to anyone.

I remember Nana only seemed a little bit off back then. Her mind was still relatively whole. She knew who everyone was. She knew her parents were dead. She knew her sister was dead. She knew she used to own a teal '52 Mercury, or something named after a planet. She didn't know I knew it, and she kept telling me about it, because Papa had given me a lot of model cars and I had her exact car, only in a different color. When I dream about them, I dream about that teal '52 Mercury, parked somewhere on the edge of the scene. I might not be recalling what kind of car it actually was.

I remember Nana smoked. They curtained off the aft side of the house, where she smoked and watched tv alone. Papa played piano. I loved listening to him play piano more than I loved anything else in the world. I didn't like watching television, but I felt it was my duty, because my parents turned it on for me. I liked walking around in the wilderness. But I mostly liked listening to Papa play piano.

I remember I woke up with my throat swelled shut and I was making a raucous honking noise like a donkey or a goose, tears streaming down my face, and I was getting dizzy and everything was dimmer and blacker than it should be, it was still night, after I'd gone to sleep, and I woke up and I couldn't breath no matter how hard I tried...

2007 - Part 1, Nioma

2009-02-12T00:21:00.003-06:00

The phone rings. I pick it up. It's from Live Oak Manor. It's about Nioma Haskell. No they can't tell me what happened, my name's not on the list of people that they can tell anything when something needs to be told, are Colleen and Les Haskell available to talk to? No they aren't, they're down the street, let me run the phone to them, please don't hang up.

Nana was going downhill for a while. They couldn't tell me if she was even alive or dead. I assumed the worst but what killed me was not knowing.

I ran the phone down the street and burst into the house where everyone was playing board games, I was out of breath and very cold, and shaking and ready to cry. My grandmother might be dead and no one was allowed to tell me.

I handed the phone to my parents and breathlessly told them, "It's from Live Oak". Then I waited. We waited. Gamers were staring at me; I hadn't been showing up to play games in a while. I wasn't in very nice clothes because I wasn't expecting to be going anywhere that night. I was still shaking.

Nana was still alive. She was just getting worse. That was all.

"We'll put you on the list of people they can tell," my parents assured me. That way I can be told first if Nana's died, if I'm the one who picks up the phone.

And that was just one of a lot of things that made the latter half of 2007 a very bad time for me...

Ferndale and the Farm of Death

2008-06-01T20:52:00.007-05:00

In 1997 I lived in Ferndale, Washington. We didn't live there for very long (I didn't have any birthdays there), and I'm glad, because the place was terrible.

It was a two-story house on farmland, with a few trailers scattered around nearby that other people lived in. It was rather lovely, with a big field, and a forest in the distance, although nothing that compared to the 80 acres in Bonners Ferry.

Quickly after moving in there, the horrors it would play on my allergies became apparent. I woke up with my forehead swollen down over my eyes. My windpipe was often narrow and wheezing. I had frequent, heavy nosebleeds. And why? Because the house itself was extremely old and filled with mold and mildew, and the previous owner had been a smoker. The wallpaper was stained yellow from years of tobacco damage. Under the kitchen was a miniature swamp and frogs lived under the sink. Not to mention all the hay in the barn, and my allergy to cats. We owned two cats -- and twenty more lived on the property.

The cats were in poor health. Daniel, ours, was plagued with fleas. He was always covered in scabs, and we had to give him a syringe of medicine. I heard cracking as the needle pierced the scabbing. The other cats on the property were sick because they were barely taken care of, only minimally fed by the Crazy Cat Lady who was the landowner of the property. She had about twenty more cats at her own house, down the street, and it reeked of urine constantly.

The food was in a small greenhouse, which smelled like dead things, and when walking about the apple orchard I often saw bloody stool. This was from all the cats. They were all sick. One stray kitten ended up with uncontrollably diarrhea, always squirting the crap out at all times, hardly even seeming to notice.

It wasn't just the cats that were ill, either. The farm was a magnet for animals on the verge of death. One of the dwellers there once caught a skunk in a cage, in the barn, and shot it...and left the corpse there, addling the entire area with skunk musk. At another time, a cow wandered from the field up into the junk yard right behind our house, and fell over dead. No one ever came to clean it up. The maggots did, though. The corpse was a squirming mass of maggots that probably weighed the same 1,000 pounds that the cow did. The stench was horrific, and our house was unerringly downwind of everything that died on the property.

Speaking of the invertebrates there, the outer walls of the house had a plentiful population of fat barn spiders, with huge spherical abdomens, and the lawn was swarming with hundreds of craneflies every evening. The previous owner had owned a dog with fleas, and so this is how our house and our cats and WE got fleas. The little bastards were everywhere, biting us. That is, until...the ladybug army landed.

At first, it was only a few ladybugs, and we thought they were taking shelter from the cold. Then it was ten. Then it was dozens. Before we knew it, the entire upper story of the house was externally coated with an impenetrable swarm of tens of thousands of ladybugs. They seeped in the windows and doors, and in the corners of every room could be counted thirty individual bugs. At one point I did try to count all of them that were indoors and I lost count at 200 after the living room and kitchen only. At least all the fleas were gone. I now am terrified of ladybugs, though.

The plumbing was terrible. The water came from a well into which everyone dumped their trash. As such, anything that came from the sinks, toilet, and shower was brown and bad-smelling. The mold in the shower was so intensely overgrown it looked like many huge black slugs were sitting stationary against the walls.

Our refrigerator broke in the summer there. The food and milk spoiled. The farmer girl who owned the cattle offered me some milk fresh from the udder, and it was still warm, and rather thick, and I had a strange allergic reaction to it. I should never have trusted any edible that came from those sick animals. Not only did they randomly drop dead with surprising frequency, but ravens and vultures were constantly circling the area, especially our house, and it was intensely creepy.

In one of the trailers lived two children who had mythical parents I never saw and a grandmother who I thought was dead, for she sat motionless all day in front of the television, making no noise, no movement, and never responding to anything anyone said. The younger child was a four-year-old boy who, at first, was something of a friend of mine and I enjoyed playing with him. That is, until he got creepy. He asked me to show him my rear and genitals, and then he asked me to take off my pants and sit on his face. I didn't and I never played with him again. His older sister was a really bitchy little brat who would sometimes be nice to me and then mostly tell me she hated me, that I was banned from being nearby, and that she would feed me a knuckle sandwich if I disobeyed her. I stopped playing with her, too. And thus I had absolutely zero friends in this carcass-littered wasteland.

I have been saving up this part for last because it's the most chilling and really sums up the "Farm of Death" title I've attributed to the place so aptly. See, I didn't realize the truly poor state of health the cattle were in until my mom and I took a walk across the property. What I saw is vivid in my memory.

Dead cattle lay about, fresh and uninjured, so newly dead that the maggots hadn't gotten to them yet and the buzzards hadn't landed. Except for one: I glanced at it as we went by, and I noticed that its eye had been plucked neatly from its head. Right as I looked at it, a stream of blood trickled from the empty socket, leaving a scarlet trail down its face. I think I started crying then, but I can't remember. All I remember is seeing it. And the creepiness gets worse.

We continued on, towards the forest, and the further we got, the more death we found. Now, instead of fresh corpses, we found old bones, picked clean. Do you remember The Lion King, and the Elephant Graveyard? This was the Bovine Graveyard. The bloodless skeletons of many cattle were everywhere. The forest, in reality a marsh as we learned, had the skulls and ribs and legs of the beasts half-mired in the muck as far as the eye could see.

Not only were the animals sick, but so were the people. As I've mentioned, half the people weren't all there in the head, and I had a young case of depression myself. I also had horrible stomachaches that would seize me for endless hours it seemed. They came from nowhere, with no apparent cause, and I only remember staring at our tacky bathroom wallpaper so often the pattern is burned into my memory (whereas I cannot even remember what my bedroom looked like, except for the blood stains on the floor where it fell from my nose). Ferndale itself may not have been a sick place, but our home and the farmland was a sick land, seemingly cursed to kill or drive away any that tried to live there.

The Forests of Oregon

2008-05-29T05:13:00.005-05:00

I will fill out the descriptions of my Tigard neighborhood (in all its oddly diverse diversity for being so close to Washington), in brief, and move on.

There was Monica Noe, and her older sister Frances, who were half Chinese and half Puerto Rican, if I recall correctly (but it's been six years, so it may have been Cuban or something else instead on their father's side). Monica was another jock, a tomboy with her hair in short pigtails, always on a skateboard or skates and wanting to play kickball or wall-ball or race.

Then there was Martin and Grace, whose last name I can't remember how to spell, whose family was Korean "and a little bit British" but where the little bit came from, I can't say. Martin was a bit of a nerd, the most excited of his family when they bought a computer, and an avid Star Trek fan. He and Monica are the ones who first introduced me to Pokemon, though I'm sure I would have discovered it sooner or later. Grace hadn't really found her niche yet, she was the second-to-youngest, only half a year older than Raistlin (who was five years younger than me). She seemed content with anything anyone wanted to do.

And so that was my group of friends back then. There were some others -- kids at church, kids from over the OTHER fence that no one ever crossed, kids who moved in and out quickly in the little shack on the edge of the forest -- but maybe I'll mention them in the future. For now, I'd like to describe some of the beautiful forests I've explored in Oregon. There were so many, and they were all so gorgeous and unique, and I've never been to any forests as great anywhere else.

For one thing, Oregon has a heck of a lot of forests. Trees just grow everywhere, all the time, and you can't stop them. You can't walk through a plain field of grass without stumbling upon a clutch of pine tree and maple saplings, inches tall, struggling to stiffen before the next wave of the lawnmower. And no matter how many times you mow, those trees will pop back up again, more persistent than the dandelions and blackberries. There was a large percentage of Tigard (a city, mind you) that was nothing but forest in the middle of the suburbs. Oregon was extremely fertile, especially compared to the chokingly dry and hot California and the bitterly wet and frigid Washington, its neighbors on the south and north. Oregon rained a fair amount but its rains were frequently warm, and it didn't get cold enough to snow more than a few days except on the mountains. It didn't get too hot, either, although I may have preferred that because I'm fond of heat. Still, Oregon was ripe, wet and temperate, and green in every patch of dirt or dust that was left to sit long enough to seed.

One forest I visited my cousins in, where they were staying at a cabin, was so thickly overgrown you could not see nor touch the ground floor. The ferns were knee-high and impassable, and my cousins and I could over explore by walking along fallen trees, suspended upon each other like an old fence, criss-crossed and hovering over the forest floor. We walked their thick red trunks like the nimble children we were, cool in the shade of the pine canopy. And sometimes, you could see shadows dart beneath you, what we were certain must be foxes whisking through the undergrowth.

Another was one beside a small chapel where I attended a wedding. There was a sharp and steep, but not too large, mountainous hill that the forest grew all on and around. The trees were taller here, but thinner too, and deep, luminous mahogany of the bark. The ground, too, was red, made of the mulching shed skin of the trees. The path I walked wound in spirals up the mountain, but no matter how high I went, the trees were taller and blocked the sun, though their trunks were based deep in a valley I could not see the bottom of, ever on my side. This forest was silent but for a beehive that dogged me halfway through the hike, and again as I returned. I met an old man and his dog walking there by chance, and we walked together and talked there, and then never saw each other again.

There was also Cook Park, within walking distance (for me, one who loves to walk, walking distance may mean anything from a few minutes to an hour to reach on unresting foot, and I can't remember how far Cook was, only knowing it was at least a few blocks from our home). The park was on the edge of a river and many odd paths cut off from the main, shooting away, the roads less travelled, into darker and thicker parts of the wood. But my parents never let me walk them.

There was a thin, deciduous forest next to the library, but its paths were cement and the trees were not tall. It was pleasant enough but I prefer the most wild places of all. And that brings me to my next forest to share.

The reason we were there in the middle of the country marked by wide fields and deep forests, was because of our Civil War reenacting. Occasionally, the reenactors, all good friends, would have large unofficial parties with each other. Sometimes these were balls and dances, sometimes simple Halloween shindigs at our apartments -- and sometimes, like this, Thanksgiving slumber parties in a three-story mansion in the woods that lasted for days. The women all baked delicious goods, and we had turkey, possibly one from the wild flock in the forest that pecked seeds at the foot of the porch. I slept in a spire, the top story with a turret on it, with the other pre-teen girls. There were video games to be played, and in every room were people of all ages sitting and telling jokes, telling stories, singing and playing games, playing music -- they brought instruments, violins and harmonicas, guitars and banjos, lutes and zithers, and there was a piano, and they would play together as the used to when gathered around the fire pit in front of the dark old military bases once used in the actual Civil War.

And so, my parents and I were invited to this massive slumber party in this massive house in one of the most spectacular and varied forests I had ever seen. At first chance I wandered off alone to explore, at once free with the land that was mine to roam, no more being told to stay to the well-worn trails. I took no trails, I only walked unhurried in the foggy dark place of hooting and howling.

First I walked in the less wooded place nearest the house. There was a grassy hill there, with a low stone wall, and an artifact Civil War cannon mounted behind it, aimed at the road we could not see, but empty and unarmed.

Then, I went to a strange sort of wood I've never seen the likes of more. Thin, bent trees formed caves and tunnels, their bark white, leaves frosty pale, and curtains of aqua moss hung down from the bowing branches.

Eventually, some of the other children joined me. We walked out along the road, where a creek flowed, and we followed the creek back onto the property and deeper into the land, far from the house, where it fell out of sight and sound, where the woods were thick and pathless. Massive ferns and broad-leaved bushes damply brushed our hips, and the trees, both evergreen and deciduous, blocked the sunlight. There was fog, chill on the November air, and white as ever. The ground was slick and coated with many autumn-turned leaves. We hurried on as if wolves chased us, eager to follow the sound ahead, for we had lost the creek along the way and now heard it again, rushing and roaring like a river!

We ran, all of us, perhaps numbering eight in all, slipping on the mud as the forest floor banked and ran sharply down in a steep grade and we grabbed onto trees to steady ourselves. We kept onward towards the sound, eager to see what the waters looked like now. They sounded frothy and wonderful!

And we came to it. A clearing, large enough only for us all to stand there, and the creek spilled with a roar thickly over a hill nearby and clashed away pure white across jagged rocks and disappeared deeper yet to places we could not safely follow. And there, next to it, was a dead tree, still standing but clearly lifeless -- and on its broken empty branches were the skulls of many animals! Beads and string decorated them -- elk, horns intact, at the very top, looking down at us with black sockets, and other, small deer too, and things I can't remember.

We were silent and then panicked. Suddenly, we felt, we had intruded on something special. Someone else's land was here, obviously, and this place had been marked. Signs of someone we never met, perhaps, or perhaps the house-owner's signs, but we never asked. Somehow, the skulls terrified us, as death should frighten children unaccustomed, and we felt we were standing on hallowed ground and that we were being clearly told by that beaded elk-head to turn around and go back to where it was lighter and greener, and not explore the impenetrable darkness below. And we did, shouting to hurry and flee, hastening with fear instead of eagerness, and we never returned and never did learn of who put those skulls upon the tree.

And that's all I have to tell of Oregon for now until perhaps some time in the future.

Neighbors in Tigard

2008-05-22T16:28:00.004-05:00

My friends in Tigard were like one of those "World Rainbows" you see on cheesy public broadcasting, with all the multi-ethnic children laying down, holding hands, forming a "rainbow" over the world. I'm not saying it was a bad thing, I just find it humorous that I could easily write some sort of children's show based on our adventures and not have to change anyone's appearance to satisfy the executives.

The first one I'll mention is Raistlin Otto, because he was the first kid I met when I moved there. I think I may have met him on the very first day. He was an adorable little kid, five years younger than me almost exactly (he also had a November birthday), with big brown eyes that he'd always bat at you when he wanted to look cute, and a messy mop of light brown hair that his mother shaved off the summer. I have to admit, I have a lot of guilt over him. He unerringly stuck by my side, and he was very nice, and generally complimented people as opposed to criticizing them, but he often ended up teased by the other kids and sometimes I just couldn't help but join in. That's part of the reason I'm putting his (and everyone's) full names on here, so if they ever Google themselves they can find me (he'd be 13 by now, so I think that's old enough to start using the internet).

Raistlin's mom was, I guess in some ways, a hippie stereotype. She had the very long blondish hair, the long ruffled skirts (and I think she may have wore tie-dye too). She always had Reggae music playing at full volume in the house. She worked at a bar&grill. Their furniture included bead curtains for doors, wicker oval-shaped chairs, and this little glass coffee table with feux-ivory elephant statues as the legs, as an allusion to the myth that the world is supposed on the backs of four elephants. Her name was Michelle, and she was very friendly. The father wasn't in the picture but for as long as I knew them, she was dating a man named Josh, and maybe they're married by now. I certainly know Raistlin wanted them to be!

Raistlin got his name from, in case some of you didn't catch the reference, a fantasy novel series called Dragonlance (by Weis and Hickman). In it, Raistlin is the name of a brooding wizard that turns evil partway through the trilogy (and that's not a big spoiler, don't worry, you can see it coming from a mile away).

To really make them like an after-school special, Raist was frequently babysat by a lesbian woman named Jenny, who had a foster son named Jace who was slightly mentally handicapped (he acted normal most of the time, but then he'd do something frightening like torture a small animal to death...)

Then there was Jadia, who lived in #11 and so was right next to us. She was actually an adult, and we still are in contact, so I don't need to say her last name. I met her a year after I moved there, when she was just walking around in a blue dress and sandals, and I ran over and asked her who she was. But of course, when you're a kid, it's okay to do that. "Hi! I'm Joelle! Who are you?" I miss that, actually. It was a lot easier to make friends back then.

There was also *deep breath* Destiny Chante-Marie Belhumeur. She was half a year younger than me, lived Across The Fence, and was an African-American girl adopted by a French-American family. So, more...after-school special stuff. She had adult older siblings, Chaz and Lacy, and a mom, Laura, and a dad who was always away on business trips. Laura never talked very nicely about him, but I met him and he was a nice guy, and he brought Destiny gifts from his travels. Even he was home, though, he seemed like he couldn't sit still, and I'd always see him walking around the neighborhood. Not heading anyplace, just walking for the sake of it.

Destiny was actually pretty spoiled by her family, except Chaz, the grumpy older brother type. Laura loved her babies to death and was always worried about their safety and defending them if the other parents said anything remotely bad about them, and she always made sure there was a hefty stash of junk food on hand. Des had an enormous Beanie Baby collection I was always jealous of, but her bedroom was smaller than mine so it evened out, ha ha.

I don't know why or how she and I became best friends. I met her through Monica (future post), but otherwise we would never have crossed paths since kids from Durham Apartments never went Across The Fence because most of the kids over there were snobs and jerks. Des and I shared almost no interests in hobbies. I was into art, sci-fi, fantasy, comic books, and classical music, while she was on every single sports team in her entire school (tennis, soccer, basketball, volleyball, etc.) and she denounced taking violin as a sissy thing she'd never allow her kids to do. She had a four-pack at ten years old and could probably outrun and beat up everyone in Durham, and she always won in bicycle races. But, of all the kids, I spent the most time with her (except maybe Raist). We constantly fought, and once it escalated to a point where she punched me in the chest and I wasn't allowed to play with her for a long time, but we always smoothed things out and became best friends again after these incidents.

If only it weren't for that crazy dog.

Her sister Lacy had this angry, untrained German Shepherd named Maximus. He'd freak out and attack the doors and windows when I rang the doorbell. Even when on a leash, he'd jump on you and claw you up. Sometimes he got loose, and he would run around by himself, and we all had to run and hide because that monster could probably try to kill us if he caught one of us alone.

I remember one specific incident that was really amazing to witness. One of the jerk kids from across the fence, Nate, was over on our side leash-training his new kitten in the field. All of a sudden, Max gets loose from Laura and bounds over, jumping and barking at Nate and trying to bite the kitten in two. Nate, calm as ever, picks up the kitten in one arm, and starts swinging its leash like a lasso and snapping it whip-like at the dog. Max doesn't back down, so Nate picks up a huge stick (I think he'd going to beat Max with it, at first), and he tosses it as far as he can. Max runs after it, and in the time he's away, Laura finally gets on the scene. Max runs back over, running in circles around Nate, while Laura tries to chase him in her high-heels, going "Oh! Oh! Come back here! Oh!", just running in circles around this stoic pre-teen in what was one of the most comical things I'd ever seen.

Getting Settled In Tigard

2008-05-21T16:14:00.005-05:00

I could (and might) fill many posts with tales of Tigard, Oregon. After all, I lived there for three years (1999-2002), and that's a very long time for me to live anywhere. I had just turned nine years old when we arrived (also, a useful note: the last digit of my age is always the same as the last digit of the current year, until late November; the first digit of my age is equal to the second-to-last digit of the current year, +1, since 2000. So, my age in Tigard was 9-12).

I remember our arrival. It was night, so I couldn't get a good view of the area. My dad had been staying with a friend of his until my mom and I could catch up. To explain this, when we were in Idaho, we were flat broke. I'm not sure how we scrounged up the cash to escape at all, but eventually my dad managed to get a job in Oregon and move there. He stayed with his friend until he earned enough money to rent an apartment, come back to Idaho, and bring Mommy and me to him. The worst part of this is that we moved up there just barely after my birthday, and Christmas, which I think he spent actually celebrating Hanukkah if I recall correctly, because his temporary roommate was Jewish.

Anyway, the the apartment was actually, officially, called a "townhouse", which I guess differentiates it from "apartments" in that it wasn't stacked on top of them, they were all lined up side-by-side like someone got to building duplexes and just kept going. I remember being so excited to move into such a big (by my low standards) place. The carpets were white and clean. The door could be closed. The windows were intact. There weren't any mice. It had electricity. We could go to the bathroom, IN the bathroom, instead of using the sink counter as a refrigerator when it froze over in winter. Trust me, when you live in the conditions that we did in Idaho, you could move into a crapshack studio apartment and think it's the freaking White House.

The next day was really beautiful. It being in the cold months still, Oregon was basked in white fog all over. My dad took me outside to walk me around the area and tell me where I could or couldn't go, and to let me see the new home better.

Apartments 2-10 (10 was ours, 2 was Raistlin's, I'll get to him in the next post) were all in a row, side by side, sharing walls. #1 was a separate tiny house in front of the street; our townhouse rows were set back and the sound of traffic was dimmer back there, in part because the large lawn in front of us was covered in pine trees. We faced south, and to the west was a rather huge pine tree bona fide FOREST that dominated most of the block and it was the most awesome thing ever. To the east was a narrow strip of grass between #10, and a fence. Across that fence were a slightly more expensive bunch of townhouses, and it's where Destiny lived, who will also be mentioned in the next post. All the kids eventually just called it, "Over-The-Fence Land", or "Across-The-Fence", despite there being fences of all sorts everywhere.

To the north (the back of the townhouse row), were our backyards all separated by fences, then a narrow gravel path, then a row of garages, then the narrow parking lot in-between, then ANOTHER row of garages, another narrow gravel path, another row of backyards, and the third row of townhouses. (Ours was the first row, and the second row was in that big front lawn, perpendicularly angled to us. It's where Jadia lived. Next post.) In front of the third row was a field with some maple and cherry trees in it. It was owned by The Church. I can't remember the name of the church, but it was the only one on the block, and it had a playground, a field, a big garden, and an elliptical parking lot perfect for racing bicycles around on, and it also had a Wacky Wednesday night for kids' activities. Everyone played at the church and everyone went to Wacky Wednesday even if they normally attended some different church altogether on Sundays.

Now, back to that first day after the first night in our new home. I could hardly see anything for all the fog. We were just a single townhouse lost in a sea of cold, quiet white. My dad pointed down that long grassy path along the fence and told me that I could run and play all the way down to the end of the complex. But, being a kid and in this big, new, strange place, I didn't really feel up to going that far afield. But it all looked so mystical and beautiful.

Egregiously Dangerous

2008-05-17T17:27:00.005-05:00

And now here is some reminiscence of an old home and some of the humorously painful experiences I had there. My parents and I were living in a tiny trailer with the windows broken and the door unable to be locked, on an 80-acre farmland, upon which was the house in which my grandmother Kathy lived. Her son, Joe, also lived in on the property in a trailer and his was much nicer and larger. Also, take note, that this was the Idaho panhandle (aka The North Arm Poking Canada's Underbelly) and it gets ridiculous amounts of snow in the winter.

The property itself was beautiful. As far as the eye could see was a expansive field of wild wheats and grasses. There was a large sand dune randomly sitting in the field behind the house, and next to the house itself was a large willow tree that I loved to climb before a bunch of bees set up residence in the trunk. To the south was the straight dirt road shooting through the countryside, and across the road was a forest. To the north was most of the field, and a pond, with an island in the center of it. In winter you could walk across the ice to the pond which we once did for the purpose of a funeral.

To the east, more field, and then a tall grove of trees (beech?) surrounding a little marshy area. My cousin Billy once managed to climb to the top of one of those trees. His parents were not pleased. In that general direction was also a half-collapsed burnt old barn, and a large junkyard with some sheds and old cars that were very fun to climb on and play in. There was also a completely overgrown orchard that no one tried to control anymore, including one apple tree bent over (broken by lightning) that was uninterestingly ugly in the summer but formed a beautiful dry cave coated by ice in the winter. It had room enough for me and Uncle Joe's Labrador to play inside without bumping the walls.

To the west was the best part: the forest. Huge pine trees, so tall and so dark and full, that there was not enough sun for an understory or ground foliage of any kind even through the tree trunks were fairly far apart from each other. So the forest floor was empty, and dark red with mulching bark and pine needles. Our property border was in the middle of the forest, and the rest of the forest ascended right up a mountainside. Sometimes my parents and I would cross the fence and hike up the mountain. Sometimes we'd turn north and find a creek that marked the border between the farm and a neighbor's, and my cousins and I would take our shoes off, hop in, and wade around catching frogs and turtles in the mud.

My cousins, known as William and Randall formally and Bill and Randy normally, were at times my best friends and at times my worst enemies. I was younger than both of them and they sometimes enjoyed rubbing it in my face, until I ended up becoming smarter and I figured out how to tease them and hit all their buttons (hint: Bill hates being called Billy. Guess what I always called him?)

Now, one day (this was actually before I lived there, when I was about five years old) we three were walking in the forest. It was summer, and the ants were vivid that time of year. These are the really huge ants that come in both the red and black variety, so they are a rather scary version of the tinier sugar ants. They were harmless at the time, though, and they were building nests on the tree trunks. Every other pine tree had a 2.5' pile of pine needles around it, swarming with the huge scary ants. Since the trees are so far apart and the ants so docile, we could easily avoid them.

Then, Billy decided to be a little buttmunch. While Randy and I were standing pretty close to one of these anthills, Billy picked up a short branch, stood back a distance, and chucked it with all his might at the center of the anthill. Pine needles and ants flew EVERYWHERE! We screamed! Billy laughed! Poor Randy was covered with the little bastards and getting bitten by them all over because now they were pissed off. I only got one on my foot (wearing sandals; I was, that is, not the ant), and it chomped my on the ankle.

Now, back to what I was originally going to tell, the purpose of the title, and why I mentioned the ridiculous level of snowfall in Idaho. The house had a front porch that stuck out to the side beyond the house's wall. There was a chain link fence that went from the porch all the way past that big willow tree. So in other words, if you wanted to get from the front of the house to the back of the house, you could either walk through the building, go around the far side, go around the fence, or just hop off the back of the porch (and coming back, I would just climb back up).

This was safe because it wasn't too far of a drop, even for an eight-year-old. Then winter came. For the most part that wasn't too bad either. I had jumped off that porch hundreds of times. Landing in the snow was no problem.

Then one day, I leaped off, and instead of landing on the snow and dirt, I was filled with excruciating pain in both legs. When I looked I saw that buried in the snow for no reason at all in that particular spot, was a chainsaw and an open metal box full of rusty nails. I am not even kidding. More oddly, I didn't cut myself at all, but I did bruise my shins. I don't think I ever jumped off the porch again after that.