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Who starts a new blog for the year on the second day of the year?
Me.
That's who.
I just watched the most amazing movie that I have seen in a while. It is called "Shaded Places". Most of the actors in it, aside from Christina Applegate and Molly Ringwald are total unknowns to me, but it was a very good movie.
It is about the main character "Emily" played by Christina Applegate. Emily invites all her friends to her house up in the mountains for the weekend and it is about ten years since they were all together at school but she had kept in contact with all of them over the years. But individually the contact between all the others was not kept that closely, except for two sisters.
So all of her friends arrive for the weekend but Emily is not there. During an earthquake on the first night at Emily's house, Emily turns up and without a word to anyone hangs herself from the swing in her front yard.
To begin with, no one seems to know why Emily did that.
As the movie progresses the different characteristics of the different friends slowly emerge and some you like and others you think are just downright losers. But it is not until the very end of the movie that you realise who is telling the story and why Emily killed herself.
I am not going to say why Emily did that because I think that if you can find the movie, then you should watch it. It has some very funny moments in it and also some deeply sad ones, but the overall message is profound.
Emily was the glue that held all of her friends together and without her, none of them would really have cared for any of the others, but by the end of the weekend (the earthquake caused damage to the road so they could not get down from the mountain) that all changes.
The end of the movie made me cry because it really was quite beautiful and unfortunately very unlike what life is really like but then again, I like a movie that leaves you with that feeling of, "if only life was really like that" and that is special, I think.
Well, the new year is underway and already we have a major conflict in the Middle East...Israel bombing Gaza and killing many civilians, the majority of the world condemning what they are doing but factions of the American government condoning it. The mainstream media propaganda machine is alive and well and because that is mostly what the world feeds on, a lot of people are confused and still view Israel as innocent and the Palestinians as nothing but terrorists, which couldn't be further from the truth on both counts. But I don't really want to get into it because anything I might say could well be taken the wrong way and anyway, the world does not give a flying fig leaf what I think about anything really.
Onto other new issues that have assaulted my brain and demanded my full and undivided attention.
A friend of mine has quite viciously, to me anyway, attacked another verbally and I am at a loss as to what to do about it. I feel disppointment and indignation all at the same time.
What to do. What to do.
No, that wasn't a question.
YouTube is busily and happily shredding my YouTube channel, thanks to some major falling out that they have had with the Warner company, so I have had to download my videos out of YouTube so that at least I can still keep a copy of them. Fortunately all of the David and The Giants music is owned by David And The Giants, so those videos are safe.
I think YouTube is quickly getting past its 'used by date' in regard to censorship and other such things. My account isn't under threat of being canned or anything, but there are a few people that I know in YouTube whose accounts have been completely obliterated and canned, which is sad and disappointing, but what can you do?
Someone should start a new web site like YouTube because YouTube is no longer what it once used to be.
That is the trouble with companies like that. They get famous, make loads of money and then become gods unto themselves. Then they die and go broke and then wonder why. I can only hope that YouTube does meet this kind of fate, for it is people like me who have made YouTube what it is. WE the PEOPLE ARE YOUTUBE...YouTube is not US!
laterz
"Long Time Coming"
by
"David And The Giants"
Made 29th December, 2008.
Saturday 3rd January
Do you ever feel like you are just a crap human being? I mean really gutter, garbage crap human being because no matter how much you try to live this sinless life you sin all the more?
I was reading something today and I had this really crap thought. Not about anyone or anything. The thought merely pertained to me and I could not believe that I could think something like that. Afterward I was totally shocked and I was like, I am such a crap human being.
If on judgement day God reads a ledger of absolutely everything we did or thought wrong, I am going to be in so much doody it isn't funny.
I do not know why I thought the thought that I did. It was totally out of left field and I just kind of fell into it. Does that ever happen to you? You're cruising along fine and dandy and suddenly whammo, you think a really stupid thought?
I have determined that I will not ever think it again, so as long as I stick to that all will be well with me.
We are such a weird creation us human beings. We are born to be good but our natural proclivity lies way outside of anything good and we constantly have to watch ourselves. It is so easy for us to fall to the wrong thing and it is not the easy path for any human being to determine to be better than his natural incliniations are.
I am not a bad person, it is just that I am not as good as I would like to be and not as together as I would like to be either. I have this ideal about the sort of person I want to be, but I am miles off the mark in a lot of ways. Sometimes I wish I was a little kinder to myself too because I tend to be very hard on myself, not sure why that is. Every time I make a mistake I always feel as though I should have known better.
I suppose that if I had been more sheltered from the storms of life and cushioned from the blows life can deal us when I was a much smaller human being, being this adult human being in this odyssey called life might not be such a tough deal. Maybe if it had been okay to make mistakes somewhere along the way I might be better able now to forgive myself them. I don't know.
Maybe I simply think about things too much and analyse things way too deeply when I ought to just turn my back and simply say, "Okay, won't make that mistake again."
On another issue there is something that I need to say to someone but I am afraid that it might end up being one of those aforementioned mistakes after which having blundered ahead and made I will relentlessly kick myself for ever after. I hate not knowing what to do and what to say.
I hate wanting more and finding that everything is kind of stagnent and sometimes pointless. People do not think like each other much of the time. What one person sees one way, someone else perceives in quite a different way. That makes it hard to know when, if or how to say what you want to say and it makes me feel very indecisive when actually that is rarely a weakness of mine. Or maybe it is and I simply have not noticed?
I think I will cease writing now. Nothing is coming out as I intend it to and in this I realise that yet again I have made a mistake in mentioning it at all.
Laterz
Friday 9th January
Okay, carbon footprints...the tax that it is proposed that we must be charged least global warming get out of control due to the dreaded Co2 emissions us ghastly humans insist on spewing into the atmosphere.
First of all almost all life on earth is carbon based, so how in the world can they tax us for the way that God created us.
Second of all, global warming is the new hoax.
Just as with the ozone layer, for years some scientists cried out in the wilderness that the ozone layer was not depleting that, in fact, depending on the time of the year the hole in the ozone layer becomes bigger and then becomes smaller again. It was not human behaviour based, but nature based just as God intended it to be. Being that their cash cow ozone lost its punch, they foundf something new.
Global warming.
There is a slight problem with this global warming scam. Since 1998 the planet has actually been in a cooling phase and this proves to be correct when you look at unbiased scientific research. Because the global warming experts could not argue with this data, which was also physcially evident by world temperatures, coldest winters on record ect, they are now claiming that global cooling is one of the consequences of global warming.
Think about that for a wee moment.
Can you not see the ridiculous doublespeak at play there? That's like saying we are getting warmer because we're getting colder. Does that make any sense to you at all? If it does make sense to you, then I give up!
I do know how statistics can be used fraudulently to create a desired impact. Such is the case with some of the global warming data. It is possible to prepare a graph, or chart, in such a way as to maximize an impression, that the author is attempting to create. Much of the global warming data is propagated through graphs and charts, which are dishonest.
The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine this week ( the week of May 19, 2008 ) announced that 31,072 U.S. scientists signed a petition stating that "...There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate..."
I noticed that misuse of Global Warming data, long before I heard Joe Coleman's recent statement. I have felt from the beginning, that global warming was nothing more than a scam, perpetrated by dishonest professors and politicians, to give them AN EXCUSE TO DEMAND MORE OF OUR TAX DOLLARS. And, sure enough, that is what is happening. The submissive sheep in our society,- those who swallow everything the news media gives them, and spend all their time watching sitcoms, are rolling over and saying, " Take away this awful disaster. " Here's my money.
The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine this week ( the week of May 19, 2008 ) announced that 31,072 U.S. scientists signed a petition stating that "...There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will cause in the future, catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate..."
Many have noticed that misuse of Global Warming data, long before they heard Joe Coleman's recent statement. They, along with me, have felt from the beginning, that global warming was nothing more than a scam, perpetrated by dishonest professors and politicians, to give them an excuse to demand more of our tax dollars. And, sure enough, that is what is happening. The submissive sheep in our society, those who swallow everything the news media gives them, and spend all their time watching sitcoms, are rolling over and saying, "Take away this awful disaster. Here's my money."
And what is it that they want to tax us for? Well aside from all the bizarre stuff, they want to tax us for exhaling. That is right, people. They want to tax us for breathing. If you can somehow work out how to take less breaths per minute, then your carbon tax bill will be much lower. Of course death is not an option for escaping this tax because I am sure that there is some nasty way that your decomposing human coil will add even more of those nasty carbons into the air thus causing the planet to heat up just a little more. Especially if you opt for cremation...you selfish people you!
They want to tax you for what God created you to be; a living breathing human being. Even sitting still will not be a way to beat the system when it comes to breathing tax. You see, if you sit still and never move you will get very fat, thus your body will have to work harder to distribute oxygen around your buxom body, therefore you will contribute more carbon than ever!
They will get you at every turn.
How disgusting is that? Perpetrate a lie and then tax everyone for that lie.
That is a bit like the Aspartame research. They researched it alright. Every animal that got a tumour from it, rats that it, they cut the tumour from their body and declared them unharmed by Aspartame. Any rats that died as a result were struck off the list as though they had never been a part of the research in the first place.
When an independant researcher found all of this out and placed it before the FDA, Aspartame was deemed too dangerous to be unleashed upon the general public. So the manufacturers had someone who was supposedly independant to examine their research again and the person deemed Aspartame to be safe.
What they didn't tell anyone about that researcher was that he was connected to the Aspartame people very closely and had a financial vested interest in Aspartame being passed as safe by the FDA.
And so the deaths from Aspartame have ensued and still the makers deny any lonk between Aspartame and these odd cancers people who drink it are coming down with.
FYI Rumsfield, that would be Donald, received a 12 million dollar bonus when Searle, the inventor of aspartame was sold to Monsanto. Google it and see what happened.
If you are on a diet, Aspartame, artifical suger, is a the perfect way to ensure you lose weight, of course you will lose the most from your premature grave.
Aspartame is in everything diet. Everything. Ice cream, lollies, jelly, drinks, chewing gums, biscuits, cakes and other such products. Anything with artificial sweetener has this poison in it. The more you drink the more likely it is that you will get very sick. It would be better for you to smoke a pack of cigarettes than it is for you to drink or eat anything with Aspartame in it.
The active ingredient in Aspartame is Methynol, the anti-dote is Ethynol and if Apspartame had a higher part Ethynol than it did Methynol then all would be well with you, but it doesn't. It has nothing at all by way of Ethynol in it. Unlike nature. Oranges have a percentage of Methynol in them, but theri Ethynol levels are higher, therefore oranges are perfectly safe to eat, but God is clever like that. Man is not.
And if Methynol was the only dangerous ingredient in Aspartame minus the Ethynol, then it might not be so tragic, alas there are other poisonous chemicals in it too.
Pick your poison Aspartame/Sucral/Equal/Sweet 'N Lo/Nutrasweet/E951 whichever cool name you opt for, it is all the same.
Do you know what Aspartame was originally designed for?
From memory it was discovered by accident by James Schlatter, a chemist of G D Searle Co. in 1965, when he was testing an anti-ulcer drug.
Given a choice as to whether I would give my children diet coke or whiskey, I would give them whiskey...so long as it wasn't "lite".
Insane!
Don't you think that it's insane?
We live in a world where truth is called lies and lies are called truth, where good is called bad and bad is called good, where men are lovers of darkness and haters of light.
Sad really.
Laterz
Thursday 15th January
It seems we spend life learning strange and sometimes even bizarre lessons about people.
A while ago I met someone on the net. Well, "met" in the internet sense of the word.
I did not approach the person, that person approached me. They claimed that God had led them to me and it was ordained by God that we be friends and these things were said very early on in the piece.
That still small voice inside sounded a warning, steady as she goes and I was like, "yes, I know."
Being that this person is a female the alarm bells were ringing anyway because let us be honest, a lot of females are fickle at the best of times.
Very early on I got the impression that as much as this person beseeched honesty in all things, up to and including opinions upon any and every topic, that it might not actually be a good thing to follow this advice. In fact, that still small voice again suggested proceeding with caution.
I like to think that I heeded the still small voice inside and exercised caution but really, my version of exercising caution can be quite lame. You see, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt even when all signs declare loudly that this is probably not the most sensible option. Call it a personal flaw of mine. And it is. I know it is.
I do not like automatically distrusting people, even though most of my life lessons have indicated that it is in fact the absolute best policy to adopt when dealing with new people. However, that's just not me.
With this person it was all way too much way too soon. I went from new friend to sister so fast that it almost made my head spin, but I told myself that she would soon tire of this and move on to the next one, but she didn't.
Was not long before I disagreed about something with her and got the distinct impression that this was not allowed in the friendship. Agree with her or get into some kind of ping ponging of personal opinions, which I hate. If I don't agree with someone on something I am of the firm belief that it is sometimes better to agree to disagree, respectfully, and move right along.
Not this person.
The disagreement moved to personal insult on her part really fast. On the second occasion it moved from personal insult to really personal picking apart and I could not believe it. So, I decided that it was quitting time.
You see, in some instances in life, people can only do to you what you allow them to do to you. In some situations you actually do possess the ability to halt certain things being perpetrated in your direction. That is what I have done. I have decided to stop those things being sent in my direction.
For a few months the warning signs were there that this may well happen. As the months progressed things happened that made the warnings sound a little louder and then the big cruncher happened. She ran down someone who did not deserve it at all. Not only did she run them down, but she cast doubt upon their motives and was almost threatening.
Then she turned on me. Twice.
I must admit to having been somewhat shocked by the big cruncher, a little less shocked on the first turn that she did, and completely bewildered by the third. But whatever her reasons were/are for the three events, the issue is that I can stop it happening and thus I have.
I feel kind of sorry for her. I can see just how hard it must be for her to get along with others and it is apparent how she can have so few friends. If we were in person, I do not think we'd last five seconds either. She would want to be right all the time and I would buck her efforts at every turn. It is just what she is. It is just what I am.
Such is life.
Laterz
Friday 16th January
I am feeling very much like photograph 1 today and I am not really sure why. I felt a bit this way yesterday too.
Maybe it is that I am mourning the loss of friendship. I always do that, you know. I do not ever walk away with a smile on my face when friendships die or fade.
Who does?
Actually, in my life, a few of the people I have known have had that capacity. The ability to lose a friendship and not care at all but to be relieved that it is over. It is a type of ambivalence I guess; not caring one way or the other. Sometimes I wish I could be that way and yet most of the time I am glad that I am not that way.
Imagine the prerequisites of human nature in order that you be able to lose people from your life and feel nothing but relief. Imagine never feeling any remorse. Would that be indicative of no conscience?
I do not know.
But to the other side of the ten cent piece, is caring too much indicative of too much sensitivity? Caring too much. Is it possible to care too much?
I don't know the answer to that either.
I suppose it would depend upon the why.
Why do you care that the friendship is lost. Could it be that it leaves me feeling lonely. Could it be that I miss the other person because I need them. Or is it that I simply came to care for them and loss simply equates to loss and all those natural emotions that come with it?
One thing is for certain.
I bet that person is not sitting around feeling sad like me. I am inclined to think that they have simply moved along and gotten on with something else.
That is sad, I think.
Sad for them and for me.
Laterz
Saturday 17th January
Sometimes I despair about the sort of person I am. Sometimes I despair that I am not good enough for God. By not good enough, I mean that I do not measure up.
Most of the time I do not feel this way, just every now and then and I wonder if it is normal to think and feel this.
You see my friendship ending with the person I spoke about yesterday happened for several reasons. At least I think it has ended, I am not entirely sure of the intricacies of the whole issue of whether it is over or not. But by her silence I presume that it is.
First of all she ran down someone who did not deserve it and made observations about him that could not be further from the truth if she tried. I do not think it was a deliberate attempt to defame him, by this I mean that I do not think it was intended in a malicious way. However, it was clearly misguided and wrong and I told her that.
Second of all she sent me an excerpt from an email that was written by a woman who has a son in the military. The email referred to Iraqis being crazy because they fight the occupying forces. It went on to say that the Palestinian people are madmen and cannot be negotiated with.
I sent a rebuttal to those two statements that pretty much stated that there are faults on both sides of both arguments. That neither side is completely wrong nor completely right. I also told her that if our PM had asked our boys to go to Iraq and fight that I would have protested against it because I do not want my boys going to Iraq or anywhere else to fight for that matter.
Anyway, the whole thing got out of hand and she accused me of saying that military men and women were not honourable and basically finished off by saying that she has nieces and nephews in the military so what would I know. Obviously it was much deeper than that, but that was about the crux of it...after saying "did a cat crap in your oatmeal this morning, sure sounds like it to me."
I was offended by that remark, as you can imagine anyone would be.
I have a son in the military.
He was in the New Zealand Army and much to my relief recently got out...only to enlist with the New Zealand Airforce into which he has been accepted, so the whole military thing is back on again and he leaves on the 10th February. It scares me senseless that he might eventually be sent away to fight in someone else's war and it all culminating in my son dying for some rich man's greed. That is mostly what war is about. Greed and/or power. They are almost always started because one side wants something that someone else has and they start a war to conquor and get whatever it is that they covet.
Show me a war that didn't start because one man wanted what another man possessed.
I hate war. I cannot help that I hate it. I have never liked it and I never will. War does not determine who is right, it merely determines who is left. The first time a man dies in a war, both sides have lost. Humanity has to do a disappearing act for any human to be able to look at another and take their life. Humanity has to be switched off and the person the gun is pointed at must only be viewed in one term; the enemy. Not a man, not a woman, not a child, not a thinking, feeling human being but simply the enemy. How else could anyone point a gun at another human being on the say so of their Goverment and pull the trigger?
Can you ever imagine that Jesus would have put his hand on the shoulder of any man who killed another and said, "Well done, my good and faithful servant"?
I don't think so.
Everyone wants God on their side but really, does God choose sides in war? In a war that is waged because one group want what another group has? No matter who the group starting the war? I don't think He does. And if he does not take Britain, America, Australia, Canada, New Zealand's or any other Western World country's side, does that render Him a terrorist?
Come on, think about it. I know I think about it all the time and none of it makes any sense to me at all.
Anyway a few days later, after this thing started blowing over in its own good time, she sent me an email with really inappropriate content. I don't want to explain explicitly what the image was of, but it involved a very young naked male child. The child was not known to her, so it wasn't some cutesy family photo.
I failed to see how she could find the image funny. More to the point, I could not believe that she thought it sound judgement in regard to humour to even forward the image on to others. I nicely explained to her that I did not find it funny and that I would really appreciate it if she did not send me anything more like that. Aside from the fact that this country has pretty strict rules and laws when it comes to images of little naked children being sent via email.
She responded that she did not see the harm in it and probably I did not find it funny because I had been abused as a child. I take issue with that; I would not have found it funny regardless of my upbrining and I doubt too many other people would find it terribly funny and I would personally question the judgement of anyone who did. Especially being that the image was of a child not known to anyone and the graphic nature of the picture.
She went on to be very condescending and making awful attempts to be funny at my expense. After that, I don't know, I just didn't want to deal with it anymore. I didn't want to deal with her.
Who knows, maybe other people will think me to have overreacted to the picture too if they were to see it. I just do not think it had any place outside of the child's family album and even then I would be a bit iffy.
But what if it is just me?
What if there is something wrong with my perceptions and my assessment of what is right and proper, good and decent? What if my perceptions are screwed up? I do not think they are, but I suppose that there is always that chance.
That is why I wonder sometimes if I measure up to what God wants. That and the fact that I seem to do things wrong with stunning regularity. It is as though I have this giant ledger inside my head and I am keeping score on me. I do not think that that is a good thing but then again, maybe it is? Maybe it is a good thing to be totally aware of your vast failures and the things that you do right? Are we supposed to think this way about ourselves?
Is this the true meaning of working out your own salvation with fear and trembling? I know that this verse is in the bible somewhere, New Testament, but not sure which book.
Sometimes I want to cry out to God to make me perfect so that I do not have to think on all that I have done wrong all the time. So that I do not have to feel like the shark who has to keep moving.
I do not know what is wrong with me, but what ever it is, it makes me want to cry sometimes and it makes me feel despair. I like that verse from Psalm 61. "When my heart is overwhelmed lead me to the rock that is higher than I."
Seems to be my constant prayer at the moment. I feel so overwhelmed by everything.
Laterz
Sunday 18th January
My daughter raised an interesting question during our early morning chat today.
She asked, "Mum, why do you think cats have tails?"
I thought about that for a moment and I said, "You know what, I don't know why they have tails."
I have heard it said that cats have tails to help with balance, but I do not understand how that can be true because we have a couple of tailess Manx cats and their balance is actually more reliable than our tailed cats. Our cats with tails are forever knocking stuff down off shelves and falling off things themselves, so clearly their tails do not help them with their balance.
I suggested to my daughter that it is to make them look pretty. I couldn't think of anything else and she responded with, "Maybe they are some kind of secret radar."
Her kitten Esmee was playing on the bed and so she held the pen behind her near to her tail and said to me, "Let's see if she can sense the pen."
Esmee did not sense the pen so her radar theory went out of the window pretty fast.
She finished off her list of potential theories as to why cats have tails with this; "You know what, mum. I think cats' tails are the left over pieces God couldn't be bothered putting back into the box."
I laughed at it at the time because it sounded funny. Imagine God sitting there creating cats and finding Himself with all these left over pieces that look exactly the same and as He twiddles one piece in His fingers while looking at the others spread on the floor before Him He thinks to Himself, "I know, I will stack them one upon another and call it a tail."
I don't know.
I would be really curious to know how God came up with all His ideas for each animal because a few of them look a little weird. Look at the duckbilled platypus. Have you ever seen one? They are one of the weirdest creatures I have ever seen. Hyenas are pretty interesting as well. I think the most fascinating thing about His creation of animals is that one depends upon another, almost like building blocks. If you entirely removed just one species from nature then it would have a catastrophic effect upon the rest.
Amazing really.
I would also be very interested in knowing how He decided upon colours.
Anyway, that was our conversation this morning and I found it pretty interesting and kind of funny too.
laterz
Monday 19th January
I once knew a girl. Her name was Dj. She was nothing out of the ordinary and yet in other ways she was quite unique.
Dj was a nice girl, at least she seemed to me to be a nice girl, although it is true to say that not many other people viewed her this way. It was not that they knew her not to be a nice girl, it was simply that they did not know her at all nor did they really take the time to try.
She was seventeen at the time and she had just gone out into the big world on her own. Dj initially felt as free as a bird who had escaped a cage of sorts. But she did not really understand the concept of cages, not then. The truth was that she was still a bird and the cage had merely changed shape.
Seventeen seemed so grown up to her at the time, and to me too I suppose, but really, when you are seventeen you are still a baby in many, many ways. But Dj did not really know that and neither did I.
Dj didn't really belong anywhere. She had not lived anywhere for too long and she pretty much had absolutely no roots, nothing to ground her in anything and all the rules of life that she lived by she had devised inside her own head pretty much. She had devised these rules from the experience of many different adults. When I say "many" I am not kidding. And when you think about that long enough, it is a wonder she devised any rules to live by at all. It is amazing to me that she believed that human beings deserved to be trusted and to have others be loyal to them.
On the flip side of the ten cent piece, Dj was far too trusting. Her human radar was pretty buckled and she never really saw trouble coming. Not law trouble, just human trouble. Oddly enough she distrusted nice people far more than she distrusted obviously mean people. I never understood why at the time, but I think I get it now.
Dj knew that with nasty people she must always keep her head together and her heart guarded, but nice people, it was so easy to lose your head and your heart and besides that, most nice people did not really want to invest time into her anyway because she was seemingly not their kind.
Dj used to feel very lonely. She knew that she was alone in the world and many things around her served to accentuate the sense of loneliness that seemed to permanently dwell within her heart.
Dj used to dream about running away.
What she was running from could not really be run from at the time, but she did not understand this and neither did I. But she dreamed of getting on a plane and flying to another country and starting fresh. Somewhere where no one knew her amongst people who might accept her and see her as something different than what the people around her viewed her as. Trouble with that is that Dj didn't really know how people viewed her. She simply presumed to know and that was a mistake in some aspects but a perfectly sane and rational thing in others.
Other kids her age used to be her friend, but their parents never approved of her.
Dj was trying to be unique. Dj was trying to be very different to everyone else. I am not sure why.
But Dj had five earrings in each ear and one in her nose. She had two toned hair and a couple of tattoos. This whole exterior image made her appear to be something that was in total opposition to everything that she actually was.
And what was she?
Not sure that I can evaluate that at this point, maybe later.
Dj's friends parents used to tell them that they didn't want them hanging out with her. The boys were told that she wasn't a "nice girl". None of their parents wanted her in their house least she steal from them and some thought her to be a liar. Dj was a lot of things to be sure, but the two things she was not was a liar or a thief. Oh yeah, she told the odd lie like any other teenager but, for the lack of parents and a family, she might have lied about as much as any other teen. No, her biggest undoing was that she told the truth and her appearance was an honest reflection of how she felt on the inside; different.
That truth was a lot of why other teenagers were discouraged from hanging out with her.
As a child Dj used to watch other parents picking up their kids after school in their cars and she used to wish that someone was there to pick her up. But no one was ever there. Every day after school it was almost the same; she walked home alone and often to a house filled with people she longed to escape. The house was never hers and the people inside not her kin and that made it much harder to make that long walk home every day. Some days she felt like she just wanted to sit down on the ground, curl into a ball and completely disappear such was her despair and as a teenager out on her own, she felt much the same.
She walked the streets at night just so that she would not be sitting alone in the place that she lived. Somehow being out on the street in the dead of the night walking past houses made her feel a little less lonely. Sometimes she would walk into town and walk up and down staring in the glass windows of shops. Just dreaming, thinking, hoping and praying that one day things would be very different and yet I think knowing that they never really would be. She would get older and the reality would simply take on a slightly different form.
At least I think she thought this.
During the day when she got to be with her friends she would see their fathers and mothers staring at her disapprovingly and she hated them while at the same time admiring that they cared for their kids. She wished that someone cared for her like that.
She longed for a father who would scream at her when she disappeared out of the house at midnight to go walking. She would have given her right arm for him to be screaming at her asking her what the hell she thought she was doing. But every time she returned from her ventures she was met with only the same kind of silence that she had been hearing all of her life really.
The silence that is loud, overpowering and screams at you your insignificance and the fact that you have been forgotten seemingly by life itself. The same kind that likes to constantly remind you that you have been forgotten and that you could fall off tomorrow and truly no one would notice. And Dj was totally aware of the silence.
She used to try and fill the silence with music. Dj had a great love of music. She always had. It was the one thing that always filled the void of silence and somehow made it easier to cope with. Easier to ignore. But it was the same story every time, as soon as the music stopped the silence returned even louder than it was before.
Sometimes she would fall asleep listening to the music and somewhere between being truly asleep and awake, the music would somehow make her see the reality of her life and it was so shocking to her. Dj was frightened by the reality of what life really was and those moments between sleeping and waking were the most terrifying of all.
She was seventeen and she felt desperately terrified of life and the very long years that strecthed ahead of her like somewhat of a deep kind of abyss that she was destined to fall further and further into. And she knew, as she slowly began falling into it, that there really was no escape.
Well meaning Christian people had often reminded her that if she accepted Jesus that the loneliness would go away, but what they did not understand was that Dj had accepted Him formally when she was thirteen. But she knew Him well before that.
Dj had always known Him, but even knowing Him did not ease the loneliness of being in this world the way that she was. It did not erase the terrifying loneliness and the deep heartbreak of the deafening silence. She knew that without the love of Jesus that she would completely fade away to a shadow of the shadow that she already was and that is the only reason that she never let go. And trust me, she thought about it. Back then in those days when the deafening silence could not be ignored she thought about it every day. She thought about it almost every hour of every day.
She had only one person to leave behind if she did that and that person was Jesus, but no one ever understood that she truly understood that. She didn't want to leave Jesus. Dj understood that to leave the world by her own hand might mean that she would no longer have Him either and He really was all she had.
Jesus was Dj's truest friend. Her most trusted and loyal friend. When she was happy, she shared that with Him. And when she was sad, she shared that with Him too. When she was lonely she questioned Him about it. She talked to Him all the time about purpose, meaning and even about the deafening silence. She used to beg Him to take the deafening silence away and when He did not take it away she got mad at Him. She got really angry at Him, but He never took it personally. Dj was His child and He understood where she had been, where she was and where she was headed. She trusted Him enough to hide nothing from Him. Nothing at all. He got the good, He got the bad and He got the ugly. But He got the beautiful too and Dj could be so very beautiful inside herself. Such was the beauty that dwelt within her that I think it almost a shame that no one ever really recognised it.
Dj's beauty, the beautiful side of her nature, it was always displayed in great secrecy in ways that probably would not mean very much to you, but I think it meant a lot to Him. I think it meant a lot to Him because there was no logical reason why she should have even had anything of a beautiful nature left by the age of seventeen. Dj should have hated the world and everyone in it. She should have been madder than a wild cat at God for the hand that seemed to have been dealt out to her and I suppose there were moments where she was, but mostly she still believed in people to a point. And she still believed in dreams and happy ever after.
Not the kind of Cinderella happy ever after, but a happy ever after where the deafening silence was gone. I wonder what she would have thought if she had come to understand that the deafening silence was something that would always be with her? Sure it would have seasons where it was not so loud and maybe even seasons where the happy noise around her would drown it out enough that she could ignore it, but one way or another, even if only by virtue of memory, it would still be with her.
I don't know why, but for some reason she was able to believe that things would not always be the way they were when she was seventeen. She believed that one day the reality of seventeen would become a faded memory and something seldom thought upon. Could she have survived those darkest days had she have known?
Anyway, her demands of life were few. Someone human to love her. Someone human to care. Someone for whom it would not matter what she did wrong that they would always be there for her and for her to love. Not a husband or a boyfriend, but her father.
She didn't know why that was so important to her. I do not either. All I know is that it was. I think she always believed that that impossible dream would one day fade into obscurity too, and she actually hoped that it would. It became her fervent prayer to her best friend, "Please take away my longing because it is too much to carry. I would rather never need or long for it at all than to long for it and need it and to know always that it will never ever happen." But it was destioned never to be that way. It was something that stayed with her and rather than it fading into obscurity, it only became stronger despite her prayer and sometimes she thought it to be a wicked trick on the part of life. Some cruel joke at her expense or experiment. How much could she take? How much could she endure before she'd break?
And yet she knew that her God was not that way. That He does not let His children be used in cruel jokes of life nor twisted experiements of fate. So all that was left to her at seventeen was the terrifying deafening silence of obscurity to anyone's heart and her need to run far from that thing yet knowing that she could never outrun it because it was a part of her. Not like fingers and hands which can be lived without if necessity dictates that it must be so. It was more than that, much like a heart or a brain, something that the human coil needs to be able to sustain life, so she could never be rid of it. Not by hope, vain imaginings or even prayer.
So much she wandered. So much she looked. Half the time she did not even know what it was that she was looking for. It truly is a miracle that she never turned to drugs nor alcohol to halt the deafening silence. It would probably have worked pretty well at the time, but Dj just somehow knew that it was not a cureitall. Jesus was the only cureitall by way of hope and she knew that if He did not take it away then nothing else could. She was very fatalistic in her faith in God and His son. If they could not cure something, fix it or halt it then it simply could not be done by other methods and in some kind of odd way, that kept her safe too.
But she was not above accepting human comfort when it was offered. And it was offered with stunning regularity on the part of males who could, by her appearance, see her weakness. And even though it was wrong and she knew it to be wrong, she allowed it.
Every time she allowed it she was taking a chance, a slim one to be sure and for certain she absolutely knew this, but she took a shot anyway. Maybe he would be the one to care for her. Maybe he would be the one to shut off the deafening silence?
But he never was. Males like that never are. But she was seventeen and she did not understand this. I guess it was like kissing toads, sooner or later one is bound to come up a prince, but that only happens in stories and Dj's life was no fairytale.
He wanted what he wanted from her, no matter who he was and he sought it from her because he knew it to be an easy ask of her. She sought only to make people happy having long ago realised that having an opinion or saying "No," really only had one of two affects upon males of that ilk. One, they would walk out the door or two, they would get really angry and then walk out of the door. So Dj tried the, "give them what they want and see what happens" approach. She didn't realise that she was stymied seven sides of Sunday taking that approach. She didn't understand it at all.
The reality of the situation was that at least if she had let them walk without giving them what they wanted then she would have retained at least an ounce of dignity and the silence would not have continued to become louder. Dj didn't understand this. Dj did not understand this at all and I kind of feel sorry for her on that score because I know what was in her heart and it was as far from wickedness as you could get. She just wanted to be loved by a human being. She wanted to matter.
But every day she got up, stared at the blue sky and knew that it was going to be yet another day of the same. Another day of longing for that which was probably destined never to be hers.
That is true loneliness you know. Knowing that you do not matter. Knowing that you never really will. That is the deafening silence. That is the terrifying silence that only gets louder and louder.
But when a kid is still seventeen the potter still has much time to rework the clay and I suppose in an odd kind of way, Dj is still on the potter's wheel, as are we all I suspect. Well, those of us willing to be reshaped and reworked by the Maker's hand. And I suppose that is the true sense of the word "hope". A willingness to endure as the Saviour asks us to, no matter what does or does not happen. No matter what dreams do or do not come true. No matter how defeaning the silence might become.
Laterz
"I Am Persuaded"
by
"David And The Giants"
Wednesday 21st January
She had a little red coat. It was an ugly old thing with faded patches and ugly brown fur around the collar yet she thought it beautiful and she liked it very much.
Katie was five so what did she know.
To Katie the world outside her house was a big expanse to investigate and to wander. Katie wandered and investigated all the time and she always did so alone. She was always alone and yet it never really consciously occured to her that she was indeed alone. By this I mean that Katie never felt the loneliness. Perhaps it is that she did not recognise the feeling of being alone or it could be that she was so used to it that she simply thought it normal. Alternatively, it could be that she never gave it a thought at all.
If Katie had been born in the late years of the 1800s she would have been considered a street urchin. At least I imagine that she would have. She was the sort of child that adults gazed at and at first glance desired desperately to avoid. Her hair that, for lack of care, would have been beautiful was dirty and her scalp covered in sores. Her little legs and arms were spattered with the odd boil and Katie was small and scrawny. Katie was way too small for her age and so instead of seeing a five year old child wandering the streets, people thought her to be three or four.
Katie was unaware that anything at all was amiss with her appearance or her life. She was completely unaware that anything was wrong. Why should she have been aware, she was just a baby.
Katie was quite versed in the art of self amusement. She had learned how to amuse herself from the very first moment she landed in her cradle. Her mother was completely disinterested in her and left her lying there for days on end sometimes. Katie would lie there staring up at the ceiling and only the good Lord above knows what must have been going through her mind. As a baby Katie seldom cried and never made a fuss. Even if she was hungry, sick, tired, lonely or bored, Katie never made a sound. I think she learned right from the start not to do that. Being that she had been left alone so much in those critical early years Katie perfected amusing herself with whatever might present itself.
Katie was a keeper of secrets. Katie was not even aware of this but she was. Within her little heart lived truths that she was better off not knowing and inside her little mind there were images captured that no child should ever have to see. Inside her mind were memories of things that had happened and slowly some of them were already trying to bury themselves in the deep dark recesses of subconsciousness. Those memories did that in order to allow Katie to survive.
Again, Katie was totally oblivious to this.
Like all other children, Katie was very much in the here and now; in the moment. And like all other children she followed the moment wherever it might lead never suspecting danger, totally unaware that by the design of human hands she was completely at the mercy of the world. Katie wandering aimlessly following the moment while her mother sat at home with her other three children; her perfect family when Katie was not there. At times I suspect her mother hoped that any given day might be the day when the police would come to her house to inform her that Katie had been abducted and murdered or perhaps had even fallen into a river, stream or pool and had drowned. Whatever the method, she did not care, but she secretly hoped that it would happen, for once it did, Katie would no longer be her problem; her burden.
And that it never did happen that way can only be attributed to the miraculous because Katie faced danger every day. Being that Katie was just a baby, she did not know how very close to danger she danced, yet still she did.
Wandering along the streets lost in whatever thought had taken her fancy, people would stop in their cars, almost always men, and offer to give her a ride to wherever it was that she was headed. Katie was never headed to anywhere in particular but she always, absolutely every time, got into the car with the stranger and he took her to wherever it was that she wanted to go and that destination was usually selected by Katie as she stared out of the car window until something took her fancy.
Katie was unafraid of strangers. It never occured to her that they might hurt her. The male strangers in the cars gave her lollies and sometimes even food or money and Katie always took it seeing nothing wrong with it. Katie had no concept of what was right and proper.
How Katie survived this dangerous behaviour can only be attributed to God.
Katie knew Jesus. She knew Him very well. He was her constant companion and friend and He was always on her mind and in her heart somewhere. In everything that she saw, she saw His beauty. She felt His love. Katie had heard the story of His birth inside a stable and the way that He had lain in a manger surrounded by farm animals. She did not know where she had heard it, just that she had. To Katie's mind that scene was beautiful and He was beautiful.
Katie had always known Him. Ever since she had been able to think conscious thoughts and retain memories, He had always been there, that ever present friend and Katie could not recollect a time when He had not been.
Katie had an affinity with stray animals. Cats or dogs, it didn't matter, Katie naturally and always loved them all. She was unafraid of them, always going straight to them and cuddling them. Sometimes she would even walk with them for a while. Katie longed to take them back to the house where she lived, but she knew never to do that. She had seen what "he" had done to their own little dog and even though the memory was very much in the process of burying itself in those dark recesses of forgotten memories, Katie somehow knew that the house was not a safe place for them.
Katie was afraid of the dark and yet she was only afraid of it when left in her room alone at night. Outside of the house during the evenings the darkness did not bother her. She watched the neighbourhood husbands returning to their homes for the night to be with their wives and children. Sometimes those men stared at her, but it was usually only brief. I do not think they gave her too much thought other than to acknowledge that she was the little urchin from up the street.
They thought her mother to be crazy.
She was.
Over the few short years of Katie's life since they had lived there those same men had heard the screams of the child as she was beaten and goodness only knows what else. They heard the screaming and swearing of the fights had between Katie's mother and step father. They feared him and so never ventured into the mix. When the child screamed and cried they shut their windows and turned the TV up just a little more. They knew she suffered but they were ambivalent. It was not their fault. It was the seventies and a man was to set his mind to his own business. One man did not get himself into the mix of the affairs that occured between another man and that man's wife. It just wasn't done and as for interfering with the raising of his children, to go there was to go where even angels fear to tread. That was the mindset, so Katie had absolutely no allies.
Even when the strangeness continued well after the step father was gone, the neighbours still did not interfere with the crazy woman up the street, except to complain about Katie of course. Katie wandering the streets sitting outside in the gutter staring at their house. Katie picking up their cat or walking onto their property to pat their dog. Whatever infraction Katie committed, they relayed that to the crazy woman up the street.
It was like some sort of insanity really. They never complained about the other three kids, but Katie was a no holds barred kind of deal. Everyone disliked her and no one advocated for her so it was a freeforall; fine for everyone to pick at her for no one would ever stand up and take issue with it. No one would defend Katie and those adults had to know that if Katie's mother was crazy then what might she do to Katie upon receiving those constantly negative reports?
But Katie did not know that her mother was crazy in the truest sense of the word. She did not really think very much of anything outside of fear when it came to her. She did not love her mother, but she did not hate her either; she was just "there". Katie was aware of her mother's one passion in life and she did not understand it very well although, as she got older, she learned to resent the object of her affections and yet she did not resent her. Odd I think.
But by the time Katie came to truly understand and resent what her mother held precious, it did not really matter nor make a difference anymore. It was really just another distraction from whatever else might be going on at the time.
Katie used to play in the graveyard that was situated across the road not far from her street. Katie loved to be there because it was peopleless and peaceful. None of the other children would go there because they feared the unknown element that might lurk there. They feared the dead and they feared ghosts. Katie did not fear those things. To the contrary, Katie was fascinated by the people who were buried there. She would look at their headstones, some of them very elaborate, and she would wonder of their lives. Who were they? What did they do? What did they look like? Katie would listen to the breeze in the tall trees as she sat in that refuge of peace and she felt safe.
The children at school hated her. They hated her because they were given licence to. Her own siblings belted her at will and treated her as an outcast so if they could get away with it, other children felt it perfectly acceptable to do the same. And really, they were only babies themselves and they did not understand what cruelty was. They had no concept that what they were doing was wrong. It was fun to them. Like a spider Katie was something to hunt and torment and that is exactly what they did. The kids chased her on the way to school and if they caught her they were not above slapping her, kicking her or pulling her hair. Sometimes as a group they formed a circle around her and cheered on whatever child was in the middle giving Katie a taste of "what for".
The children yelled at her and they never called her Katie, they mostly called her Fleabag. That was her name.
"Fleabag".
They did the same on the way home too and Katie used to be quite frightened by it; especially the older bigger boys terrified her, so she would run as fast as she could to the graveyard knowing that none of them would follow her in there. She would hide behind the headstones knowing that sooner or later they would tire of waiting for her to come out of there and they would go on their way.
One time on the way home one of the older boys ran her down with his bike and he took her bag and ran over the bag wrecking everything inside it. Another time at school they got her in the place they called the pit. One child wrestled her to the ground, took a hold of her long hair and dragged her across the grass by it. While Katie screamed and cried all the other children chanted the name "Fleabag". No one tried to stop what they were doing to her and even her own siblings stood there cheering the abuser on.
Katie soon learned to avoid her siblings and the other children on her way to school. She would lag behind her siblings who preferred it that way anyway and once she was a sufficient distance behind them, she would hide behind a tree or fence until they rounded the next corner. Once they were out of sight she would make her way to the graveyard or sometimes the park and she would hide there until she could see no other children walking along the streets making their way to school. Once they were all gone she would slowly make her way to school. She almost always arrived very late and got into trouble but that trouble was the preferred option in a world that placed her only choices smack bang between the devil and the deep blue sea.
One time whe nshe was wandering along the road late to school as per usual she came to a crossing that had not been there before. As she went to cross it a man asked if he could take her photo as she walked across it. Katie told him yes. The man took her photo and low and behold the next day it was in the local paper.
Katie's mother went mad at her because in the photo Katie was wearing her scraggy old red coat and her hair was a mess. Her mother beat her for publicly embarrassing her before the entire neighbourhood. Katie did not understand what it was that she had done wrong.
On the way home Katie would try to hide and escape her siblings and the other children, which only served to make her late home and thus sent to bed with no dinner. That was a regular occurence, being sent to bed with no dinner. The hunger was a misery that Katie did find hard to ignore and it got to the stage where she could eat almost anything to make it go away.
Katie ate wallpaper and other times she ripped off pieces of her blankets and ate that. Her mother thought her disturbed and for some reason could not connect her unwillingness to feed Katie with Katie's desire to eat anything else that could be consumed in order to chase the hunger away.
The only time Katie liked school was when they did singing or when the lady from the church came to their class and spoke about her friend. During the classes where the lady sat on the chair at the front of the class, Katie sat at attention her mind completely enthralled with the stories about the man Jesus whom she had always known. The stories only served to further make her love Him. To the teacher's utter amazement Katie's attention was so taken by what the woman spoke of that it was as though Katie were not even there. Inside class time, normally Katie chatted non stop about senseless meaningless things but when the lady came to speak about Jesus, Katie was eerily silent. At least the teacher found it eerie.
It is funny what people assume about children sometimes don't you think?
Katie loved to walk the streets in the summer. Often if she was hungry she would pick grapes off a grapevine on the way to school when they were in season. Another house grew corn and she sometimes took that too. Other times she sneaked into the shop by crawling under the buzzer and stealing food from the counter. She knew it was wrong but hunger always assuaged any guilt that she might be feeling. As for the taking of the grapes and the corn, they were just there and she naturally assumed that it was okay to take them.
The world was Katie's playground and she often loved much of what she saw. Trees, animals and flowers, but Katie never craved human comfort and never even sought it out. She was never hugged and rarely nicely spoken to, but it was as if she did not even notice those things.
Katie, despite the reality of her life, was a happy child. She was content. Little things brought her happiness like feeling the fur on her red coat with her hands, running her fingers along the green tin fence down the street and listening to the tap, tap, tapping sound that her fingers made as they bounced between the grooves of the fence. She loved the colour of it too.
At night when the moon was high in the sky, she stood at her window hanging onto the windowsill staring up at it. She was fascinated by the moon. When the moon was not out but the sky was clear, Katie would stare up at the stars. She loved the stars and thought God very clever for having made them like that.
A lot of people thought Katie's childhood to be a tragedy, but Katie never saw it that way. Katie did not even know what tragedy was. She was a very happy little girl and the things that were missing from her life did not bother her. When you are small and living in the moment, the things that are absent are not noticed and the things that are present reasoned away in a manner that might even stun a wise man. Katie was completely unaware that life was not at it should be because she had a friend, she had Jesus and for Katie, He was enough to ensure that she survived.
laterz
Thursday 22nd January
When Katie was fourteen she moved in to a house where a lot of other children lived. It was a dumping center for those no one else wanted.
The foster mother and father in that house were called Aunt and Uncle to the children who did not belong to them.
Uncle was a quiet man. He went to work in the morning and came home at around five every day. He always wore the same clothes and he had two hats. One was for summer and the other was for winter.
The summer hat was a denim cap. Blue and yet covered in all kinds of grime. Katie could not tell what the grime was but it looked like oil. Uncle's winter hat was a green and black striped wool pom pom hat and it was as grubby as the summer one.
Uncle went to work in the morning, as I earlier stated and at night he came home around five. He walked in the door without saying hello to any of the children who were not his. He said hello to his wife and went and sat down in the lounge. Uncle always sat in the same chair and that was where he stayed until dinner time. After dinner he returned to his chair in the lounge and sat there until late at night. All the while he sat there he said little and all he did was watch TV, drink cups of tea and smoke his Camel cigarettes.
Katie didn't dislike Uncle. She didn't really like him either. He was just there.
Aunt was the one who wore the pants in the house and she controlled everything and everyone. Her moods were more changeable than the weather and about as reliable. When Katie walked into the house after school she would not know what kind of mood her aunt was in until she said hello to her. And Katie always said hello to her when she walked in the door after school.
I do not know if it was a case of good manners or Katie's need to try and find out what she might have to contend with during the entirety of the coming evening. It may have been a little of both.
If Aunt looked at Katie and smiled nicely while saying hello back to her then Katie breathed a huge sigh of relief. If Aunt refused to look at her and mumbled something quite inaudible to Katie, then Katie knew that the evening was going to be unpleasant. This behaviour from her aunt soon proved to be taking a toll on Katie. Walking home after school, the closer Katie got to the house the more nervous she became. By the time she got to the house, she was wound up like a spring and often on the verge of tears. Katie hated unreliable people. Katie liked to know exactly where she was with people. Aunt made it impossible for Katie to ever gauge this with any accuracy without first saying hello to her when she arrived home from school each and every day.
Katie was at the end of her tether anyway when she arrived at the home. That place was Katie's third foster home in eight months. The first in that line had been one that was a born again Christian home where the rules were very strict, even though some of the people did not really abide by them in a way anyone could call remotely biblical. She had lived there for almost four years. When taken from that home she had been taken to a home where they did not believe in God at all and her new step father had made her his latest playmate. He had plied her with booze and dope and quite confused Katie beyond measure. So when Katie arrived at the third home, she was pretty much fried. Her Aunt only served to further make Katie sink more deeply into the abyss.
Aunt loved to pick on children, but never hers and only one at a time. The rule was that if Aunt gunned for one of the children then you must do the same. If you did not, then chances were very good that Aunt's guns would be turned on you. When Katie finally learned the rules of pack hunting, she did not dare to venture outside of those confines. She did whatever was asked and followed along with whatever was done.
Katie despised herself for this behaviour because to be cruel was not in Katie's nature. But Aunt ensured that she learned and that she learned quickly how to shut off conscience and do things that do not bear repeating. Her previous foster father had well introduced her to the concept of "if it is them then it is not me" and Aunt served to teach her to act upon that mentality. And becoming a part of the pack was an insanity that Katie had never really understood before. It was easy to be cruel to another when everyone else is doing it too. Katie found it was easy to turn off or ignore that still small voice that told her it was wrong.
But it was not long before it was Katie's turn to be pack hunted and when it happened and the former victim turned on her as well, she did not blame him in the least. To the contrary, everything that he did to her, she believed she deserved. But it was through that experience that Katie determined never to be involved in pack hunting again.
There was one problem about Katie being the one who was being hunted and tormented at every turn, it never stopped. For some reason Aunt enjoyed the results the they got from being vicious to Katie and so it became an ongoing thing.
Katie very quickly withdrew completely into herself and she began to self destruct. It all culminated in Katie trying to kill herself, but that direction did not provide for Katie any relief. To the contrary, it simply gave her hunters more ammunition to use against her. And they did. Mercilessly.
It went on for almost two years.
There were periods of time where they focussed their attention on someone else but, when Katie refused to join the gang, it was always turned back upon her.
By the time that Katie was fifteen and only about three months shy of her sixteenth birthday, things began to take a slight change in direction. Katie was a good student at school. She worked hard and was doing very well. Katie never got into trouble and she was always very quiet, so people learned to pretty much ignore her and Katie liked it that way.
Until "she" arrived.
Her name was Kim and Katie had known her from when she was much younger. Katie knew Kim from when she had lived on the farm for almost four years. Kim had been the adopted daughter of friends of Katie's foster parents and for some reason her adopted parents sent her away, even though she had been adopted into their family as a baby.
Katie found that to be a cruel thing that had been done to the girl, but she soon began to lose all compassion for Kim.
Kim made friends with Aunt's daughter when approached, but Kim did not know why Aunt's daughter had been so quick to befriend her. She had done it so that Kim would not befriend Katie. Samantha was like that. She was a spoilt, selfish, spiteful girl and her nasty behaviour was always either ignored or rewarded by Aunt.
Kim, upon deciding what school to go to, decided to go to the same school as Samantha. Katie sat there staring at the girl knowing that she was making a tragic mistake in her choice. Katie knew that Kim's choice would come back to haunt her very soon, but she said nothing to her. Kim was by then firmly under the influence of Aunt and Samantha and Katie knew that nothing would be achieved by speaking with her and trying to get her to change her mind thus saving herself. Kim would simply have run back and told Samantha what she had said, thus providing more ammunition for them to use against her.
When Katie had arrived at that new home she was most relieved to discover that all the children in the home went to the other school and not the one she had elected to go to when she had been given the choice. Her Social Worker had asked her, "Katie, which school would you like to go to, H or W?"
Katie had thought about it for a moment and for some reason had chosen H. Later on when Katie had been moved to the home, she thanked God and attributed her former choice to His influence because choosing H had saved her so much more grief.
As it was Katie could hardly sleep at night any more. Just as she was dropping off to sleep her hands or feet would twitch or other times her entire body would suddenly jolt, jerking her out of sleep and it used to get so bad that Katie would lay there and cry. She was so exhausted and yet her body refused to allow her to sleep.
Samantha was a tattle tale. Every day after school she arrived home and reported to her mother all of the antics of the other children at school. Katie thought her a snitch and was glad that it was one thing that Samantha could not do to her. When Katie went to school every day, she truly escaped that house and everything in it and connected to it. So when Kim chose to go to W, Katie just stared at her thinking her to be a fool.
Within days of Kim arriving, despite the fact that in former years Katie had been kind to her, Kim joined in with Samantha in tormenting Katie. They did everything that they could think of to drive Katie crazy and to make her cry. They stole things from her room, snuck into her diary, called her disgusting names and banged on her door every time they went past it. Kim thought she was such a hero and she thought herself to be untouchable because Aunt and Samantha liked her. She did not understand that it was simply a season.
Silly Season, Katie liked to call it. The small amount of time where a new girl would be favourited and befriended by them both while it suited their purpose. But it never lasted. It never did. The gloss could take anything up to a couple of months to wear off, but it always wore off and then suddenly the favourited one would be cruelly betrayed by Aunt and Samantha. Of course during that time the favourited one would have confided all of her secrets in Samantha and once the gloss wore off, it was no holds barred. Those secrets would be thrown back in her face without an ounce of mercy!
Katie stared at Kim and would have felt sorry for her but for the fact that Katie thought that Kim should have known better than to turn on one of her own kind. To make matters worse, once it was apparent that Katie was going to be leaving the home to go and live with people who had been relievers for Aunt and Uncle, Aunt decided that Katie was not so bad after all.
Suddenly Samantha and Kim were alone in their quest against Katie and so Samantha and Kim had to be very careful not to be cruel around Aunt. Samantha was very livid with Katie because the people that Katie was going to live with were actually people whom Samantha liked very much. Samantha was extremely jealous that those people had decided to take Katie into their home and she decided that Katie would pay for it.
Katie knew that Samantha was angry and jealous with her and in a way, it served to make Katie feel empowered. Samantha hated that Katie was going to be living there and there was absolutely nothing that Samantha could do to stop it happening. to be certain, it provided Katie some much unexpected personal satisfaction, as wrong as it may have been for Katie to feel. At the end of the day, without having done a thing but be herself, Katie had defeated Samantha by inadvertently taking something that she herself held precious and Katie could not help but secretly smile.
For two years Katie had sat at the table while Aunt placed lovely little gifts that she had bought while out shopping beside the plates of all the other girls, but never did she place one by Katie's. Ever. Katie used to sit there feeling so embarrassed and small because it was Aunt's way of letting Katie and everyone else know that Katie meant absolutely nothing. Katie hated being made to know that she meant absolutely nothing. She hated being made to feel small and she hated public rejection.
Suddenly little gifts were appearing by Katie's plate at meal times and Aunt wanted Katie to sit next to her during meals. Every day after school Aunt was pleasant and she no longer sent Katie off to bed at the usual bedtime, opting to allow her to stay up well after Samantha and Kim were sent to bed. Katie was given chocolate biscuits when Aunt and Uncle had them, but not the other children and Aunt made her coffee when she had never before done that either.
Katie should have been happy with that turn of events, but she wasn't. She knew that if she were not leaving the home that Aunt would still be being cruel to her or allowing the other two girls to be cruel to her. Katie accepted Aunt's gifts and kind attention, but she did not trust it, appreciate it nor really want it. Mostly she was merely relieved and the only emotion she felt about the whole new situation was to despise them and all that they stood for.
Just before Katie left the home, the very night before, Aunt put on a special dinner for Katie; presents included. Katie was totally shocked because Aunt had never done that for a child before. Always the child who was leaving was ignored and sent off with little acknowledgement at all, but not Katie. Aunt pulled out all of the stops and Katie was completely at a loss as to why she would do that when she had never done it before.
Katie found herself wondering whether Aunt had in fact liked her after all. But Katie shook her head chasing that thought from her mind, for she knew it not to be true.
On that last night at the dinner table during the farewell dinner that Aunt had put on for Katie, Katie became aware that somehow at some point during that last week, Kim had fallen from favour with Samantha and as it happened, with Aunt too. Katie stared at Kim as she sat there staring at the table feeling totally miserable and Katie knew what life was going to be like for Kim from that point on.
Kim would endure what Katie had endured for the past two years. Kim would be tormented, teased, set upon, ignored and treated like a lepper. Her things would be stolen, broken and all of her secrets would come back to relentlessly haunt her. Kim would have to also endure the visits from Aunt and Uncle's older son to her bedroom late at night while all others slept. She would have to endure him kissing her and touching her...his dirty hands wandering freely all over her body, his stinky breath in her face as he slobbered all over her and she would have to endure it in silence.
Just as Katie had.
Kim would never be able to tell anyone what was being done to her because no one would ever believe her. That piece of crap male would be able to take whatever he wanted from her and go as far as he wanted with her and Kim would be able to do absolutely nothing about it, not even speak.
As Katie sat there staring at Kim she felt her stomach swimming and she became frightened that she might even vomit. Katie stared at Kim and she thought about the times when she had locked herself in the bathroom in that house and ripped all her wounds open just so that she could chase the emotional pain away. Katie remembered the way that she had watched the blood trickling down her arms and wished that she would bleed to death. She remembered the loneliness of never being hugged of never hearing kind words and of putting up with the emotional and psychological violence. She thought about the way that Aunt and Uncle's son had abused her. The way he sneaked into her room or waited behind dark corners and jumped out and grabbed her. The way he had forced herr to let him kiss her and touch her wherever he pleased; knowing the fear that if he was caught that she would be the one blamed, not him. She would again be called a s**t, a w***e and any other disgusting derogatory name that they could summons up from their narrow vocabulary.
She stared at Kim and she wanted to feel sorry for her. She wanted to pity her, but she could not find an ounce of those emotions for Kim within herself.
Katie hated herself for it, but all she could think about was the things that Kim had done to her. The things that Kim had said to her. The dreadful secrets that Kim had learned about years before in regard to Katie that she had shared with Samantha and then tormented Katie with.
At the end of the evening Katie simply felt relieved that her days in hell on earth were over and as she thought about the fact that Kim's days in hell on earth were just starting, all she thought was, "serves you right."
It is probably fair to say that Katie, for a short period of time at least and only inregard to one other human being, lost her sense of humanity.
After school the next day Katie's new foster father turned up right on time to pick her up from the home. Katie was very nervous while she waited though. She tormented herself with all kinds of thoughts; what if they have changed their mind? What if they did not come to take me away?
When Katie saw her foster father's bright yellow van pull up in the driveway she felt her heart skip a beat. "It's almost over," she thought to herself.
The five minutes it took for her new foster father to get to the front door and knock on it seemed to take a lifetime to Katie. She tried to hold in the fact that she was very relieved to be leaving. She tried to hide her elation at knowing that the pain and torment was almost at an end. She did not want to give Aunt or Uncle any satisfaction in knowing just how miserable they had really served to make her feel over the almost past two years.
Then it happened.
Her new foster father was standing in the doorway staring at her. He was offered coffee but declined wanting simply to take Katie and leave.
That suited Katie fine.
Her new foster father packed all of her things into his yellow Combi van and once all her things were in there and the door shut, Katie, her foster father and Aunt and Uncle all stood there staring at each other in an awkward silence that had somehow descended upon them.
Aunt wanted to hug Katie, but Katie did not want her to touch her in that way. She had never once hugged Katie in the past two years. When Katie was hurt and suffering to the point where she had tried to take her own life, Aunt had scorned her for it, nothing more. Aunt had never once tried to comfort Katie through anything and so Katie was determined not to make a mockery of her feelings now. Katie extended her hand for Aunt to shake, if she must. Aunt looked a little embarrassed and yet took her hand and shook it. Katie did the same to Uncle. She put her hand out and he shook it. When he was done, Katie stared at him and for the first time saw how weak willed and puny natured he was.
He had sat back knowing exactly what was going on and he had not been man enough to stop it. He had watched Katie struggling and he had done nothing to help. Never a kind word or a kind deed had been extended to Katie from him. The past week of being the flavour of the month because she was leaving had done absolutely nothing to salve the damage that Aunt and Uncle had bestowed upon her by their actions or inaction.
Katie walked away from them and got into the van.
As her new foster father backed the van out of the driveway she saw the window to her bedroom and she was glad that she would never have to see it again. As her foster father turned the van around so that the house could no longer be seen, Katie wasn't sad.
For the second time in her life she was elated to be leaving a house. For the second time in her life she felt so relieved to be leaving that she was fit to cry. The only difference between this time and the last time was that this time Katie was actually able to appreciate it to its fullest extent.
Katie knew, as they turned out of that street, that Katie was now free to be Katie. But as she sat in the van staring at her new foster father she wondered, who am I?
Who is Katie?
laterz
Friday 23rd January
The drive to the new house was not far, but it was the most peaceful journey in a vehicle that Katie had taken in a long while. As they travelled along the streets away from the home Katie thought about how she would never have to walk those streets or see those places again. It filled her with relief to think upon that.
Then her mind went to Kim again.
Katie thought about how miserable Kim must have felt to see Katie leaving. To see Katie escaping that place. So many times in the past two years Katie had watched other kids leaving that place never to return. Katie never dreamed that one day her turn would come. She had thought that it would never happen. Not for her.
Most of the children who left that place returned to their parents and Katie knew by then that that was never going to happen for her and by that stage, she didn't want it to happen for her. There was no way she wanted to go back to the house of her siblings.
Katie remembered the misery she felt every time she had watched kids leaving that home. It used to gnaw at her and make her want to cry. Katie thought about how Kim must be feeling and as she thought upon her, slowly yet surely a small sliver of her humanity returned because Katie felt sorry for her. While feeling sorry for her, Katie thought once more upon the unfairness of life. Life could be cruel. Life could be extremely cruel. Katie shook the thoughts from her mind and stared once more at her foster father who had just asked her a question. She had not heard him and he did not repeat the question.
Katie's new foster father was a closet hippy.
Actually there was nothing closet about him, he was a remnant of a bygone era and exceptionally unperturbed by the fact that everyone could tell. He wore a cap with buttons that had Greenpeace logos on them. Some of the other buttons were logos that screamed out "No Nukes" and "Save the Whales" and "Go Green".
His hair was very long and even his clothes were directly out of the hippy era, but Katie didn't mind his unusual appearance. In fact, Katie quite liked it.
The only thing that concerned Katie about her new foster father was that he worked as a teacher at the same school as her foster father who had made a playmate out of her. Katie suspected that her new foster father might have heard things about her from her old foster father. She wondered if he knew exactly what had gone on in that house?
She hoped not.
When they got to the house her new foster father carried all of her things inside and her new foster mother rushed out to hug her and welcome her home.
Katie was mesmerised by their house. It was rural and old. It was gorgeous and welcoming. Katie loved the way there were trees all around it and she loved the smell of the house.
Inside the house were things that Katie had never seen before.
They had a computer and Katie had never seen one of those at that point in her life and they also had a microwave oven. Katie was fascinated by the oven and her foster mother explained that she must never put metal objects in there. Katie nodded but thought she'd never be brave enough to try and use it anyway.
The first evening in that cottage with those lovely people was the most serene and sedate that Katie had experienced for a very long time. Being able to do whatever she wanted was kind of strange though.
Her foster father had an awesome stereo system and a load of records and he told Katie that she could play whichever she wanted to whenever she would like. He also had a set of headphones, so Katie put on Seals N Crofts and disappeared into the music. Her foster father was an avid Beatles fan so she played his Beatles records too and became quite fascinated with "I Am the Walrus". It was a weird song but somehow got under Katie's skin, which was unusual for a song like that.
That first night Katie woke up several times bringing her foster parents running from their room. She was having nightmares about being returned to the home. In her sleep she murmured and cried. When her foster parents woke her and asked what was wrong, she could not tell them.
She said that she did not know what was wrong.
The next day her foster mother spoke to Katie about the people at the home. She told Katie that she thought that Katie should go out and buy them a gift to say thank you for having her live there.
Katie shook her head vigorously because the last thing that she wanted to do was thank them. But her foster mother insisted that it was the done thing and that Katie should do it.
Katie went out with her foster mother and shopped for a gift for them. The whole time she was out looking for the gift she felt sick. They had not had her in the home because they wanted her there. She was there because the authorities had nowhere else to dump her. Aunt and Uncle had not been kind to her and they had done few things that could be even remotely construed as kind.
In defiance, Katie settled on an ugly set of drinking glasses and she still did not feel any better about giving it to them. She felt even worse about having to go back to that place to see them. Katie never wanted to see that place again!
Immediately upon being taken back to that place by her foster mother, Katie began to resent her. Katie resented that her foster mother was forcing her to be nice to people who had been anything but to her. Why should she thank the enemy? Why should she have to be thankful for their cruelty?
Katie didn't understand or respect it one little bit!
After that episode, Katie naturally gravitated toward her foster father more than her foster mother. It may have been that it was a natural course of events anyway that Katie gravitated to him more, but he sensed that Katie was always nervous around him. Did he know why she was nervous? He suspected why.
In the evenings, knowing that Katie liked singing and music, he got out the guitar and played Beatles songs and Katie sang along with him. Katie loved those times with him. It was like disappearing into another world just sitting there while he played guitar and they both sang.
For a while life was perfectly abnormal for Katie because Katie was happy, content, felt reasonably safe, wanted and loved. Her foster parents liked her and Katie liked them.
Not long after she arrived her foster mother and father told her that whatever she was feeling that it was fine to show it. It was fine to just be Katie.
Katie was very reserved about it, but the longer they made it okay for Katie to express how she felt, Katie began to show it.
For the past five years her feelings had been suppressed. Things had been done to her that she had held to her heart like one tends to do with dark secrets. The few times that the secrets had began to come to the surface, Katie had been punished for it. For the past five years, it had not been okay to be Katie. It had not been okay to show her true feelings.
When her foster father and the other two men from the church had hurt her, she had had to hold it in. The guilt and anger had been buried replaced by self blame and self recriminations. She had been blamed for the two espisodes that they had known about at the time, so one incident had remained a very dark secret.
At her other foster father's house, he had done and said things to Katie that alos had had to remain secrets. For her own safety, by his very own mouth, Katie had had to suppress them. Then there had been the home and everything that had happened there.
It had been a very long and weary previous five years and added to that madness was the year before she had gone to her foster parents on the farm who went to church. She had never been able to do anything about "him" either, so the most overriding emotions inside Katie when they began to surface was frustration and rage. Pure and unadulterated rage.
Katie went from being a happy settled girl to becoming a very angry and sullen girl. Katie was so filled with rage that she was almost blinded by it. Her foster parents had allowed it to come to the surface but when it did, they did not understand where it was coming from nor why.
When Katie's rage exploded she never took it out on them physically, but she took it out on herself verbally or she hurt herself by doing stupid things. If they spoke to her at the wrong moment she hysterically screamed at them, even though it had very little to do with them. Katie was so angry that it defied almost all logic.
Every time Katie got angry in regard to her foster mother all she could think was, "You made me reward and thank those people for what they did to me."
Katie was really angry with her foster mother for making her thank the people who had hurt her and yet she could never tell her that. She could never make herself speak the words to her at all. And she never did.
Katie's foster father was eventually pushed to the point of complete frustration and he snapped. He grabbed Katie by her arms and dragged her down to his bedroom. That scared Katie a lot. She wondered why he wanted to take her into their bedroom alone. Katie did not want to go there with him and so she dropped to the floor. He seized her by the arms and dragged her there and once in there he slammed the door so that she could not leave.
Katie backed up against the wall and he began to speak loudly to her and then his voice calmed some, but Katie was so frightened that every word he said bounced off her back at him without meaning. The next day when Katie awaoke she discovered bruises all over her arms where he had grabbed her. His finger marks were imprinted on both arms. The bruises were dark and ugly.
He never said anything when he saw the bruises, but Katie was very angry with him for doing that to her. For marking her that way.
Katie had forgotten her best friend by then. She seldom spoke to Him nor acknowledged that He was even there or existed. Katie involved herself in reckless behaviour and the fact that she was not killed is miraculous. Clearly, although she had forgotten her best friend, He had not forgotten her.
Things became worse and worse after that. Katie had a boyfriend who was nothing short of a schmuck and she was disappearing until all hours of the night with him. At one stage she even ran off with him and her foster parents could not find her anywhere. By that stage Katie had had an abortion too and she was filled with self loathing and despair. Not a week after Katie's seventeenth birthday she took a bottle of sleeping pills determined that this time she would not screw it up.
Katie was almost successful that time. It was an extremely close call and it was during that time that Katie remembered her best friend. She nearly died and she remembered it clearly. As she lay in the bed in ICU she could hear all the machinery that was on her beeping and doing their thing, ready to scream out an alarm if something within Katie's body should begin to malfunction. And then it happened. Some alarm went off and Katie felt as though she was being sucked through the bed and falling into darkness. Katie was very aware of the darkness and was extremely terrified by it. In the darkness she screamed out that she wasn't going anywhere!
She did not know how long it took for her to come back out of the darkness but when she did, she opened her eyes and looked at the doctors and nurses around her bed. "I'm not going to die am I?"
Katie stared at one of the doctors and he honestly replied, "I hope not."
Over a year before Katie attempted to take her life her foster parents advised her that another girl was coming to stay with her at their house that was by then in the country as they had moved house to another area. They told Katie to see if she liked the girl.
Suzy was fifteen days older than Katie and Suzy seemed to Katie to be pretty normal really. Katie didn't know Suzy's history and the unwritten rule between foster children was that you never asked where someone had come from or what they had endured. You simply did not do that. But Katie did not need to ask as Suzy was quite open about things.
Suzy had been sent to live with her current foster parents when she was two years old. Her own mother was a drunk, a drug addict and a prostitute. The woman had nine kids to nine different men and she really did not know who any of the fathers of her children were. God alone knows what Suzy's mother went through that she ended up that way. But, as the years went by and Katie began to grew up, she came to suspect that she knew exactly what had happened to Suzy's mother.
After the weekend that Suzy spent with them Katie's foster parents sat Katie down and said to her, "We have been asked to have Suzy permanently, but if you do not want her here then we won't take her. It is your choice."
Katie had never been presented with many choices at all in her life let alone one as major as that. If Katie had done what she truly wanted to she would have told them that she did not want Suzy there. Sure she had thought it would be fun to have a friend where they lived, being that it was so isolated from other people, but there was something about Suzy that wasn't right. Katie had no idea what it was that was wrong, but she simply sensed that Suzy might mean trouble of some kind. But then Katie thought about Suzy herself. What right did Katie have to deny Suzy a safe home? What right did Katie have to have any say in the matter at all?
Katie felt sorry for Suzy and she did not want the responsibility of denying Suzy anything and so she told her foster parents that she didn't mind if Suzy came to live with them.
So Suzy moved in that very week and the fun started.
The very first night that Suzy was there she ventured into Katie's room and got into bed beside her to talk about things. At first the conversation was light and Katie was quite enjoying herself because she had a friend. But then Suzy began to speak of things that made Katie very nervous.
Katie never spoke about the abuse that she had experienced at the hands of men to anyone after the one time that she had been brave enough to tell her Social Worker about what her Christian Church Elder foster father was doing to her. The Social Worker told him and Katie's Christian foster father put a knife to her throat. Katie had been permanently scared silent on the topic.
When she had tried to take her own life when she was fourteen and had been hospitalised they tried to get Katie to speak. They made Katie see a shrink every day while in the hospital. Every day for a month he asked her the same questions. He asked them backwards, forwards, sideways and sometimes even upside down. But even then, Katie never breathed a word of it to him. Katie was careful never to be tripped up by him. Never to be tricked into saying something that she should not. He had thought he was dealing with a retarded girl at that stage. Everyone thought Katie slightly retarded back then; 'of below average intelligence' they called it. But Katie was far from it. Katie was very smart and she knew how to stay safe. Their weakenss was their belief that she was stupid. Katie's strength was knowing that they held that belief.
So Katie was quite stunned when Suzy began to speak of her abuse as though it were normal, even though for girls like Suzy and Katie it was a normal part of life because it happened to a lot of them at one time or another. It was unusual to find a girl who had not been sexually abused to some degree.
It was not that all foster parents were bad; they weren't. The trouble was that they did not do Police checks on people back then and so anyone who feigned a concern for children could pretty much get one. Added to that was the belief that all foster children lied, especially the girls! Children were rarely believed and it made it so much easier for men who had abused girls to talk their way out of it. Almost always they talked themselves out of trouble and girls like Suzy and Katie got left to carry not only the scars of abuse but also the guilt born of being blamed and/or called a liar.
So while Suzy spoke to Katie, Katie sat there having an out of body experience. Katie felt as though she were floating on the ceiling staring down at the two girls sitting in her bed speaking. The more Suzy spoke the more Katie began to feel as though she were drowning or choking. She wanted Suzy to stop, but she could not speak the words at all.
Suzy had been living with her previous foster parents for thirteen years. Katie and Suzy were both still fifteen at the time that the conversation was had.
Suzy spoke of the way that her foster father had been making her have sex with him for as long as she could remember. It had gotten to the point where Suzy no longer rebuffed his sexual advances; to the contrary she welcomed them and other times even instigated them. But it wasn't Suzy's fault. She had been given little choice by the man who was supposed to be her father, her protector. He had betrayed the sacred bond of fatherhood. Katie knew that was the way of it, but hearing Suzy speak of it caused a churning within Katie that seemed almost an innate reaction. Katie felt as though there were something familiar in all that Suzy was saying, but Katie had no idea what.
All Katie knew was that the more Suzy spoke of it the more Katie felt as though she was being strangled or suffocated.
In the end suzy stared at Katie and said, "I am a daddy f****r. Hey I wonder what it would be like to kiss H?" Then Suzy laughed as though it were funny. As though it were some kind of joke.
Katie was very disturbed by all that Suzy had shared with her, but particularly by the last thing that Suzy said and the way that she had said it. The fact that Suzy found it funny made Katie want to throw up. Her stomach churned and complained well after Suzy took herself off to bed.
Katie knew that she should not speak of what Suzy had told her in regard to her old foster father. That information was to be kept in the sacred bonds of deep dark and terrible secrecy. But what about the other things that she had said?
Should Katie tell her foster mother?
What if Suzy did try something with her new foster father? What might happen?
As the months went by and both girls turned sixteen, Katie was extremely angry by then, her true feelings finally finding their feet. Suzy was passively hostile about all that had happened to her and she reacted in a way that was so strange to Katie that she hardly understood it at all.
Suzy's reaction was first noted by their foster mother. Katie was a hard worker and had always sought out ways to earn money through working for others. Already she was the local babysitter, helper at docking and ear tagging time during lambing season come lawn mower extraordinaire.
One person she mowed lawns for lived about 2kms away form them. No neighbours lived close. Katie mowed the lawns for an eighty year old man every Satruday. Being that Suzy was bored, she decided to tag along while Katie mowed the lawns one Saturday. While Katie was outside working in the ever so slightly warm winter sun to earn her ten dollars, Suzy was inside having sex with the old guy.
Katie was not aware of what was going on until their foster mother arrived to pick them up and Katie was still mowing the last part of his lawn. Their foster mother went into the house to see the old guy and to wait until Katie was finished. She walked in and caught the two of them at it. Katie was no longer allowed to mow his lawns because her foster mother and father did not want her exposed to some man who thought it perfectly fine to have sex with a fifteen year old girl. Suzy was never allowed back there again for reasons that are pretty obvious.
Katie never went back there.
But Suzy went back. Suzy went back again and again.
Every now and then their foster parents took Katie and Suzy into town to have dinner and to see a movie. The first time that they took Suzy with them Suzy said that she wanted to see a different movie to Katie and her foster parents so she went to the other theater while Katie and her foster parents went to another. When their movie was done they went to the other theater to pick Suzy up, but Suzy was not there.
It was mid winter and the temperature about minus one and all they wanted to do was get into the van, flick on the heater and travel back home, but they could not leave without Suzy. Katie's foster mother drove the van around town looking for her while Katie walked down one side of town looking down the side streets for her. Katie's foster father walked down the other side of Main Street looking down the side streets for her. In the end Katie's foster father was the one to find her and what he found shocked him.
He found Suzy leaned up against a wall in an alley, her pants around her ankles with some old whino guy doing...well...you can guess what he was doing.
Katie's foster father was shocked and appalled.
Katie was stunned and sickened and kind of angry.
They took Suzy with them after scaring off the whino, got into the van and drove all the way home in an eerie thick silence.
Katie's foster parents spoke to Suzy privately and out of earshot of Katie when they arrived home. All Katie knew was that Suzy had been grounded forever, but that did not curb Suzy's behaviour. Not one little bit!
The next episode involving Suzy being caught happened under the stage in their school hall with an older boy. Suzy and he were caught butt naked doing the wild thing under there and he was not the first. He was only the first to get caught.
Katie was mortified and the incidences of Suzy and the boys travelled around school like wildfire and it affected Katie to quite a marked degree. All the girls thought that she was the same in that Suzy had told everyone that they were both sisters.
The girls called Katie names and the boys made lured suggestions in voicing what they would like to do with Katie also.
Katie came to hate Suzy.
Even though it was not Suzy's fault that she did those things, Katie believed it was and she became quite unforgiving of Suzy's antics. It all culminated in her punching Suzy out in the hallway of their house.
Her foster parents were appalled by the violence as they were passive people who did not believe in resorting to violence on any issue. Katie, being angry and frustrated in general anyway, clocked Suzy and did not see anything wrong with having done it.
It was at that point that Katie and her foster parents began to slowly go separate ways.
They were kind and caring people and they wanted only the best for Katie, but it was too late for Katie. It was far too late for Katie by then. The deception and bitterness birthed in former years made it impossible for Katie to truly trust them.
Katie by then hated the world and everyone in it. She was especially angry at her foster parents, but not because they had done anything wrong. Katie was angry with them because there really wasn't anyone else to be angry at and they were right there in the firing line. They were someone for Katie to direct her anger towards, even though they did nothing to deserve it. Katie was out of control emotionally and she was dicing with danger daily and doing everything she knew would totally piss them off, especially her foster father. Most of her anger was directed at him and it was directed at him for no other reason but that he was a man. It got to the point where everytime she looked at him all she wanted to do was punch his face in, such was her rage. Katie had never felt rage like that before; ever.
When Katie ended up in the intensive care unit of the hospital, she refused to even see her foster parents. She did not want to see them at all and her Social Worker did not force her to see them. He told Katie's foster parents to go home and leave Katie alone for a while. His advice was to let Katie recover in hospital alone; to just give her time. That if they gave her time, Katie would chill out a little and everything would normalise.
But he was wrong.
He could not have been more wrong if he tried.
What he did not realise was that life had taught Katie that when things go wrong you simply erase them. You avoid them and never see them again. Katie had been expendable all of her life and now all that she had been taught about being expendable was about to pay terrible dividends.
Katie stayed in the hospital alone for about a month and during that time she refused the visits from her foster parents.
There was nothing that anyone could do and Social Welfare had to find Katie a new home. But I know that all Katie's foster parents would have needed was five minutes to talk Katie around. Five minutes would have secured Katie's attention. Katie would have responded, but Katie's Social Worker decided that Katie needed to feel empowered. Katie needed to be able to make choices and have those choices respected.
Suddenly what should have been given Katie years before was being given to her now. Trouble was it was the wrong time, wrong place and way wrong situation. The last thing that Katie should have had in that situation was choice. Katie had no idea what good choices were and so she was destined only to make the wrong one.
laterz
Saturday 24th January
There is somewhat of a blind siding war being waged. It is not nice when that happens. It is not to say who is right or who is wrong in the war that is being waged, what is to say is that the war itself is wrong.
In a blind siding war it is sort of obvious which direction the ammo is being fired from, although it is much like missiles that burst into life from a sudden direction. The actual source of the ammo, the take off place is very hard to see, but still those being fired upon have a reasonable idea.
What you do know for certain is who is firing the ammo. Of that there is absolutely no doubt.
The why of it is a little more subjective.
People might think that they know the why of it, even though the why might make little or no sense. Those being fired upon understand that those firing upon them may be acting out of misunderstanding or perhaps even spite at some imagined impunity; that is to say that they feel impuned by those upon whom they are firing.
Those being fired upon, despite their guesstimations and assumptions, are probably no more than a little clueless as to why it is happening and that makes it all the more banal, and yet at the same time hurtful.
And how long might it go on?
Well that depends upon the ones in receipt of the fired ammunition. Sometimes it pays for them to simply pretend that it does not matter, even though it does. To pretend that it does not hurt, even though it may actually hurt mightily. If the target, the object of the derision is able to keep firmly focussed upon what matters rather than the ammo being fired upon them, then perhaps the ones who feel that they have been impuned, be it real or imagined, will eventually run out of energy in regard to waging their blind siding war.
Let us face it, there is nothing more distressing to an enemy than being ignored. And I am not talking about countries. I am speaking of people.
laterz
Sunday 25th January
Suzy.
Unlike Katie, Suzy took a very different path in life and yet while she was on that path, for a very long time Katie tried to help her whenever she could.
Suzy didn't know how to love people and more importantly, Suzy didn't know how to love herself. Katie was not even sure whether Suzy realised that there was even a Suzy in the picture at all.
People used to say that staring into Suzy's dark brown eyes was like staring into two wells of nothingness. When Katie stared into Suzy's eyes she tried to tell herself that she saw nothingness, probably because what Katie really saw when she looked into Suzy's eyes was a two huge deep dark wells of pain.
Eyes like twins.
She saw the same thing in Suzy's eyes that she saw in her own when she stared into the mirror, except her wells were blue. Katie didn't want to see reflected back to her what she already had more than enough of, so she told herself that she saw nothing at all.
Childhood, close your eyes just for a moment and the moment's gone.
Sometimes people lose sight of the fact that it is their own kind of behaviour that constructs the wells in other people's eyes and the very same that proceeds to fill them to overflowing. Suzy was robbed at a very young age of everything needed to be able to become a whole person. Her innocence was stolen, her virginity, her heart, her soul and even her mind. Beaten, battered, abused, hated, loved the wrong way, rejected and blamed.
During those times the excuse echoed by Katie and Suzy over and over again all of their lives until one of them learned better, 'daddy ain't that bad he just plays rough.'
Suzy never learned better.
Suzy left school and had a baby. She was uncertain who the father was but eventually it was worked out. Suzy was unable to be much of a mother to her child and so in the end the father's parents took the child from her. Suzy rarely if ever saw the child again.
Suzy disappeared to the city not long after and before anyone knew what was happening, Suzy had taken up the oldest profession of time. Suzy became a prostitute. Not only did she do that but she began taking drugs. Hard drugs. Straight into her veins she shot the poison and she did not seem to care.
Suzy's life, or what was left of it by then, slowly crumbled to the ground and she didn't even know it.
Suzy sold herself to men but not at the high end of the market, not that it really matters I suppose, prostitution is prostitution; six of one and half a dozen of the other really. Katie found it terribly difficult to imagine how she could stand to do that. Katie could not imagine anything worse.
As the years went by Katie got used to Suzy showing up every now and then. Almost always Suzy showed up when she needed money and Katie always gave it to her. But after about 15 years Katie lost her patience with Suzy.
Suzy turned up out of the blue as per usual and did not have anywhere to stay; other people were no longer tolerant of Suzy and her ways by then and refused to even have her in their house. But Katie's patience seemed to go on and on and in the normal fashion, Katie let her and her latest boyfriend stay for a while.
Everything was going fine until one morning Katie's two year old daughter walked out of the bathroom holding a syringe. A needle that had been used by either Suzy or Suzy's boyfriend. That was it, Katie said that Suzy had to leave, but Katie soon found herself over a barrel; Suzy and her boyfriend needed money to leave.
Katie very begurdgingly handed her 300 dollars. She demanded that Suzy promise to pay it back; every single cent while at the same time knowing that she would never see a cent of it again. Katie was angry that she had to give Suzy money that time. It felt like blackmail to Katie, but she gave it anyway knowing that it was probably the only way that some kind of peace and safety would be restored to her house.
Katie went out while Suzy and her boyfriend packed up to go.
That was a mistake.
When Katie returned later in the day to find Suzy gone, that was not the only thing gone. Suzy had ripped Katie off. She had taken her bracelet, camera and some other quick flick items. Fairly untraceable things that would fetch a reasonable price by those who cared not where the things had come from.
Katie was livid.
Even though Katie should have seen it coming and was kicking herself for not expecting the worst Katie still felt livid and betrayed. She vowed she would never do another thing for Suzy again; ever. And she didn't, for a long long time.
Just before Katie's wedding almost one year later, Suzy showed up in town. Katie's old friends caught up with Suzy without Katie knowing and told her to leave town and to leave Katie alone. They told her that Katie was getting married and that Katie was happy so simply leave her alone.
For the first time Suzy actually listened and she left town without disturbing the peace of Katie's life. Like a tumble weed rolling in and quietly rolling out again and the fact of the matter is that everything around Suzy almost always seemed to have a desert like quality.
Some years later Suzy had seemingly gotten her life together and began writing to Katie and so Katie wrote back to her and for a while things were okay. Then Suzy disappeared only to turn up a few years later in a hospital almost dead. She had blood poisoning from a dirty needle and the infection had gotten into her lungs. Suzy was inches away from death and as it turned out, Suzy had another child.
Katie gave money to the appropriate people so that Suzy's son could be flown up from where she was to where people could temporarily care for him. If the worse were to happen no one wanted the child permanently and so Katie offered to take Suzy's son into her family if anything happened to Suzy. That was so like Katie, no matter what happens, Katie still cares and tries to do the right thing no matter what is done to her.
Sometimes people think that Katie floats around somewhere between a fool and a sucker.
As it turned out Suzy recovered and took her son and disappeared again. Seven years and all was quiet, other than the news that not long after her recovery, Suzy was back out on the streets again plying her trade.
Katie often wonders why Suzy turned out as she did and why Katie did not turn out that way. All the statistics dictated that Katie should have turned out exactly as Suzy did and yet there Katie is. And there also is Suzy.
Suzy is like the little bird whose wings were purposely broken and her life is lived like that little bird twittering around on the ground somewhere between danger and peril. Nothing more. The saddest part of it all is that Suzy actually thinks she's the cat eyeing the little bird twittering around on the ground helplessly.
Sometimes people lose sight of the fact that it is their own kind of behaviour that constructs the wells in other people's eyes and those same people who then proceed to fill them to overflowing so that people like Suzy can slowly drown. Suzy was robbed at a very young age of everything that was needed to become a whole person when she grew up. She was denied the right kind of love. She was not nurtured as she should have been; in a way that is the birthright of every child born to this world. Her innocence was stolen, her virginity, her heart, her soul and even her mind.
They tried to steal those things from Katie too and to be certain there is a fair amount that they managed to make off with. As sure as the sun rises every day they stole her innocence and her virginity. The same as Suzy, those things were stolen before Katie could ever really form words or memories. They tried to steal her heart, yet the best they managed was to do was to dent it and cause her to keep it very guarded. They tried to steal her soul, but it was never theirs to take and when they tried to break her spirit and warp her mind, as much as they tried, they did not succeed because for some reason Katie had a friend whom she believed in. He buffered her against their attacks. I am most convinced of this fact. Maybe it is through the prayers of some unknown Anglican Priest that she had Him. Maybe it is because once upon a time when Katie was very small someone else cared enough to pray. I do not know anything for sure. The only difference between Katie and Suzy that I can see for certain is Katie's acceptance of Christ and it seems that Katie's acceptance of Him made the world of difference between the two.
Why did Katie accept Christ and Suzy didn't? I do not know. Maybe Katie's will to believe, desire to trust, hope and faith in something far bigger than herself was simply just that little bit stronger.
Life is so strange sometimes.
laterz
"Magnificat"-
"He is the Resurrection"
by
"David And The Giants"
Monday 26th January
I do not know who is coming in here and reading this, but whoever you are, I suppose I should apologise for speaking about Katie so much. She seems to be on my mind a lot lately. Sooner or later I will move on I suppose and then maybe later on I will venture back again.
Dj and Katie are the same person, but maybe you guessed that already. I should simply go back and change the name from Dj to Katie in that one, but I just can't be bothered. I rarely venture back and read what has been written, if I did I would probably erase everything and there'd be nothing here but a blank page. Suzy is not Katie though, Suzy was Katie's foster sister for a time.
Katie had many, many foster brothers and sisters. A quick head count places the number at around 51 but there were definitely way more than that. I believe a fair guesstimate would be around 65.
A lot of the kids she knew came from absolutely devastating home circumstances although the majority of the situations had seen things hit crisis and their removal from their own home was often temporary.
The interesting thing about all these kids was that Katie thought they were all in care because their parents no longer wanted them. Outsiders often assumed that the kids were in care because they were naughty and their parents were drunks and druggies who couldn't control them and to be honest, nothing could have been further from the truth in a lot of the cases.
Katie saw some sights with other kids too. One boy had chain imprints on each arm where his father had beat him so badly that the chains left link bruises. Katie never spoke to him about what happened. None of the kids ever spoke to each other about where they came from or what they had been through or seen. You would think that it would have been natural for them to discuss it and yet they never did. Katie shared a room with one girl for almost six months in one of the homes and the entire time all she knew about the other girl and where she had come from she learned from others. Not from her.
And as for that other girl, Katie never told her a thing at all. The only things she knew about Katie were what she observed and what she assumed.
To be one of the children who lived in the state homes known as Social Welfare Family Homes was a delicate balancing act. For some reason the children were on display if they lived in one of those homes. Every move they made and every word they spoke was scrutinised. They could not behave in anonimity like other children and they were watched closely. According to those in charge of their lives, they were representative of the Home and of the system and thus everyone who watched them judged all others on what they saw them doing. Sort of like a model who represents a chewing gum brand or cosmetic company, but without the perks.
Katie and a couple of the kids once got grounded for eating pies as they walked through town. It was the middle of summer and they had gone to the public pools for a swim. On their way home they were hungry and so they stopped to buy a pie each and they ate it as they walked through town on their way home. Their foster mother, known as Aunt, was enraged.
How dare they eat pies in public making it look as though she did not feed them well enough?
Mine is not to reason why she zeroed in on that but it was probably in part something to do with her guilty conscience because she didn't feed them properly.
During the school terms they were given one piece of paper a week to wrap their lunch in and if they lost it then they could not take lunch to school for the rest of that week. Often times their Aunt and Uncle left them lying in bed until around 1.00 on the weekends so breakfast was something that rarely ever happened and lunch and dinner almost always consisted of bread or toast. Their Aunt was not fond of cooking.
She did not like the children to help themselves to bread or milk between meals and would rather let the bread go mouldy or the milk go off than to let the kids eat it or drink it. It was common for food to spoil before the kids got within booey of it.
Katie solved the hunger dilemma by getting a job. Actually when Katie was fourteen she worked three jobs and went to school. All three jobs were part time but they saved her having to go hungry or having to guard one piece of lunch paper a week with her life. As for the other kids, Katie, off and on, had known what it was to go hungry, so she knew that they were probably feeling quite miserable. Katie even joined a sports team so that she would not be stuck in bed all day Saturday.
She played soccor.
Katie was not good at soccor. She didn't even understand the rules and I do not know what possessed her (aside from escaping the house) to join a team because she was not really very fond of being stuck in large groups of girls, but she enjoyed it just the same. No one ever came to watch her games and she was always acutely aware of it. She was also acutely aware that the coach knew where she lived because when they asked for parents to give a hand with driving them to out of town games, Katie was never asked if her parents could help out. She did get asked to take a turn to wash the team jerseys, which she willingly did. I wonder if they would have still asked her if they knew that she had had to wash them all by hand because Aunt refused to allow her to use the washing machine?
At fourteen Katie did all her own washing. Her uniform and all her clothes she washed once a week by hand because Aunt refused to do it and refused the kids the use of the washing machine. Katie did not even think there to be anything wrong with it at the time. She just did whatever she had to do to keep the peace.
After Katie refused to have anything to do with Aunt's pack hunting ventures Katie became a very strong advocate for those who could not speak for themselves. One little boy was not quite two, Aunt and Uncle were particularly nasty to him at times and did things that Katie knew to be cruel. Katie went to the Social Welfare office and told them about it, but as per usual, they did nothing. But it did not stop Katie trying to help him.
Once Katie returned home from the hospital from her suicide bid and was accordingly and endlessly punished for having done so, Katie went into survival mode. She put her head down and she got on with life in the only way she knew how. She worked, played sport and when she was home she stayed in her room hardly ever venturing out unless it was necessary. Mostly Katie realised that if she was out of sight then nine times out of ten she was out of mind. This did not always pan out correctly, but a lot of the time it did.
Katie spent hours and hours doing jigsaw puzzles, listening to music and dreaming about other places. She thought about other people constantly too. Not anyone in particular, but people in general. Her existence during that time was quite isolating and cold. She did not feel very alive, but in the few moments where she did feel alive, she felt incredibly alive.
Fo the entire year of 1981, Katie saw a shrink once a week and in that entire year he only ever knew two things about Katie and they were the things that he knew right at the start. The first was that Katie had been self harming. The second was that Katie tried to take her own life. Aside from that, he knew nothing about Katie. He did not know who she was, what she was, what brought her joy or even what made her sad. He knew little of where she had come from aside from the basics and Katie never gave anything away. She had pretty much worked out that it was a pointless venture to spew out the truth. And Katie was very aware of the irony of her existence.
It was brought home to her quite sharply around mid 1981.
Katie had made a friend Jani. Jani and her were walking back to school at lunchtime from Jani's house when a man stopped in a car and asked for directions to the main street in town. Katie was immediately suspicious but Jani was totally clueless.
After a few moments Katie noticed that while standing on the footpath talking to them he had his pants undone and was actually "flashing" them. Katie turned her head but Jani had not really noticed and was still talking away to the guy. He wanted Katie and Jani to get into the car with him to show him where the street was, but Katie was not going to be a part of that at all.
Anyway they got back to school and someone overheard them speaking of what had happened on the way back to school at lunchtime and suddenly they were being yanked out of class and taken to the Principal's office. Not long after that the Police arrived at the school and Katie was absolutely bewildered by the carrying on.
Her Social Welfare officer was all upset and horrified at what had been done to Jani and Katie and Katie did not understand what was going on at all.
Katie was reminded of the time that she had told on her foster father and how they had totally ignored her aside from warning her foster father that she was talking.
Katie sat there in the office staring at the Policeman and the Principal and she could not believe the level of fuss that they were going to. They were worried that Katie had been injured by what she had seen!
Katie injured by that?
What about all the other things!
Of course Jani was traumatised because she had had the kind of childhood that had ensured that she was completely protected from any and almost all harm. I do not think Jani had even seen male anatomy by that time in her life; not even in books! Jani's mother was truly horrified by what had happened as was Jani's father. Both of them constantly asking how a man could do such a thing?
All Katie sat there thinking as she stared at them was, "Very easily."
Katie wondered what they would say if they knew what had been done to her by the age of fourteen? Then another thought occured to her. Maybe everyone was making a fuss simply because Jani had been with her? Katie did not know what to think but Jani's parents were very kind to her during that time, feeling very sorry for her too that she had been injured like Jani.
Katie saw the irony in all of it in regard to her Social Worker.
A couple of weeks later Jani and Katie saw the guy who had done that thing to them again and so Jani wrote down the licence plate number and the Police were called.
The Police came and picked the girls up in a car and drove them to the place where the car was registered to and Katie and Jani were asked to identify the car for the Police. They then took Katie and Jani from the scene while Police went in and arrested the man.
Katie couldn't believe it! She had had way worse things done to her and those men had gotten away with it scott free. She almost felt sorry for the guy.
But then the case went to court and she had to stand up in court and testify against the man who had exposed himself to her. She testified first and Jani second. Jani was not in the room as Katie testified and Katie was not in the room while Jani testified.
While on witness stand staring at the lawyers and the judge in his black robe and white wig, she felt like screaming at them. She felt like screaming out all the other things that had been done to her. She wanted to scream at them, "Why convict him when other people do worse things and get away with it?"
But she didn't.
Katie did not like being the focus of attention and standing in the witness dock did nothing to make her feel comfortable. Her mouth became dry, her words got stuck and half the time she could not speak at all. At moments she felt as though she might drown with all those people staring up and over at her waiting for her to answer some rather personal questions about male anatomy and such things. Katie couldn't wait for it to be over.
When it was all over and the man was found guilty and convicted the Police commended Katie on her conduct in the court. They thought she had been very brave and should be very proud of herself. But she hated the whole thing and she disliked very much the way that justice worked in her country. To her mind, at the time, what that man had done was nothing and most certainly not something that he should have been arrested for, let alone dragged into court, found guilty and convicted for.
The worst of it was that by then everyone knew what had happened and Katie could hear her foster father's words rining in her head, "little girls sometimes do stuff to make these kinds of things happen."
Katie wondered what she had done that time.
Jani simply moved on.
But so much that went on in Katie's life contradicted other things. Much that was said to her almost always contradicted something else that had been told to her as truth and she was most confused. You see, people are vastly different and the things that they value and hold dear are vastly different to the same measure.
What was okay to do and say in one house was not necessarily okay to do and say in another. She got screamed at by a Christian uncle once for saying "shut up" to her foster brother! She did not understand why. In other houses people said way worse things than that and yet, as the Christian uncle told her off, Katie felt as though she should have known better.
Katie was eleven then.
When she was ten she was joking around with the pastor after church one Sunday and she flicked water in his face thinking it to be a funny part of the joking around they were doing. Her Uncle took her behind the church and spanked her for it. Katie did not understand what she had done wrong then, but she did not hate her Uncle for it because she knew that he at least liked her. Well, he always acted as though he did and he never did or said anything inappropriate to her. Not ever, so she trusted him to an extent. But the point is that Katie was subjected to so many rules in life based upon different ways of living that she was really quite confused as to what was or wasn't appropriate and no one ever really understood that facet of Katie.
They never understood it at all.
Laterz
February
Monday 2nd February
Wow when did this happen?
February already? Can hardly believe it. The months and years seem to pass as fast as lightning these days, or perhaps it is just me?
No.
I do not think it is just me. Many people comment on how fast the years go. Even my daughter comments on it and she is only eighteen. When I was eighteen the days, weeks, months and years all seemed as long as they did when I was a kid. Time seemed to speed up after my 25th birthday. I believe it had something to do with a card I received for my 25th.
My then mother in law sent me a birthday card and inside it the message read, "the first 25 go the slowest".
I remember sitting there thinking about it for a little while and then it was almost like someone set up some kind of zoom field around me because from that very day on the years have just zapped past so fast. I have had cause to wonder whether it is simply a case of mind over matter. You know, the power of suggestion?
But then again, I am not the only one who seems to notice that the years seem to be going by faster. Obviously they are not getting any shorter, in fact in a leap year they get a day longer and yet somehow they seem to pass by so fast. Could the answer lie in science?
I am sure that someone has come up with some answer that they believe to be perfectly logical, alas, it is probably not an idea that I am likely to buy into.
Somehow I am reminded about a verse in the bible. Matthew 24:22 "And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect's sake those days shall be shortened."
Is this weird idea that the time is passing by faster, thus the days seem shorter, could this actually be a fulfilling of prophecy? You know I am not saying that it is. I am simply playing with an idea.
Look at the state of the world. It is in as bigger mess as it has ever been in all of history. We have wars, hunger, famine, plagues, disease, societal breakdown, corruption in the church, fasle teachers, false prophets and we are, at the writing of this, headed on a collision course with economic depression. And not to be forgotten, they believe that the depression to come will make the 2nd World War depression seem a kindness.
It is almost as though those riders on their horses have been loosed upon us already. I am wondering if the seven seals, trumpets and bowls might already be simply waiting on the cusp of being unleashed. If that is the case, if it is so, that the first two riders of the four horsemen of the Apocalyps (or whatever you would like to refer to them as) have already been unleashed then perhaps the days really are being shortened? Perhaps time is moving past us faster in order that some flesh be saved?
I do not know.
I honestly don't.
These are just ideas and thoughts. But they are about the only ones that make sense to me when I notice that the complaints of the days, weeks, months and years going faster are being made by the very young too, well, it makes me sit up and think about it. Think about what might be going on.
Being that I believe in God, He is the only place that I can look to and even start to find some rationale for what is going on. But not to be mistaken, there is not much in regard to prophecy that really seems very rational to people who do not believe in God. To those who believe in science or evolution I have to admit it, my theories, ideas or thoughts are way less whacky than theirs.
There is no way that this earth and the things that live upon it are some freak accident of nature. That is way more bizarre than believing that a great, powerful and majestic God of the heavens made this place and us. It makes so much more sense. Well, to me it does.
I do think that the days, weeks, months and years are going by faster. I do not know that my idea holds much water, but I think there is probably a very good reason for this and I believe that the answer lies in the bible somewhere. Whether it is important for us to find it or not, I do not know. I guess that it is up to you. But what I do know with absolute certainty is that with every day that flies by, we are one day closer to the return of our Lord and I cannot wait for Him to return.
God is in control of everything.
Anyway, that is about all for now.
laterz
Saturday 14th February
I had the strangest dream last night.
Not only was the dream strange, but when I awoke and went to sleep again I fell straight back into it.
While I was dreaming it I was telling myself that I didn't want to see what was happening and that it was only a dream. During the dream I knew that if I did a particular thing that I would immediately wake up, and so I did. The dream was horrible and I did not want to dream it.
I was awake for about ten to fifteen minutes before I went back to sleep again, but as soon as I fell asleep, the dream picked up where it had left off, which was a huge disappointment to me, let me tell you.
More disturbing than being unable to escape the dream even by interrupting it was the nature of the dream. It was really quite firghtening although the fear factor may well be lost in the retelling.
I was in a public place at night with a whole group of people whom I had never met. All of us had our attention taken by something that was happening in the sky. It is probably key to mention here that in the dream I had a baby, but it was smaller than a newborn. It was about the size of a four month old baby still in the womb and I did not know its gender. I had hidden it in a pile of towels in a rest room near to where I was standing with all of the other people staring up at the night sky. I do not know why I had hidden it.
Suddenly the sky lit up and there was this whirlwind type fire cloud in the sky. It was red, orange and surrounded at times by very dark grey smoke. The cloud itself was whirling around in very fast circles while emitting huge bolts of lightning in all directions.
No one was hit by the bolts.
Everyone was mesmerised by what was happening in the night sky. They thought it beautiful, almost majestic. But as I looked at it I got a terrible sense of forboding that this spectacular sight in the sky was anything but beautiful. I got a sense that it was evil, tricking people, almost luring them into some kind of trance that they would find difficult to escape, or that it was designed to mesmerise the people long enough that there would be no time to escape once its true purpose was revealed.
I stopped staring at the sky and noted all the people standing there staring motionless at the sky. I yelled at everyone to run and to take cover, but no one would move.
I knew that I was in a dream and I knew that soon everything was going to turn very badly and so I began to flee into the bathroom. As I began to run some woman who was there also broke out of the trance that she was in and screamed at everyone to run. She was running beside me through a sort of archway. As I said I was headed into the bathroom, but she was headed out through the other side of the archway to find a place to hide.
She was screaming at the people behind us who had also finally awoken from their daze to hide in the tunnels or to get to higher ground. I was just opening the door to the bathroom when I saw what was on the ground. There were little red shadows sliding across the ground. I immediately knew them to be demons. Deceptive demons. They had eyes and I could sense that their intent was malevolent. As I thought about that, while still riunning, I saw one overcome the woman who had been running alongside of me.
I raced into the bathroom and over to the pile of towels. I lifted the towels and retrieved my very tiny baby from beneath them and as I turned to exit the bathroom I saw that the red demons were already coming into the bathroom and I knew that I would be destroyed.
At that point I thought about all the movies I have seen over the years and how no matter how far people try to outrun evil it always seems to catch them in the end. I decided not to fight them. I decided not to run.
Knowing that I could make myself wake up any time and knowing how to do so, I threw my baby to the ground and watched as a red shadowed demon went to devour it and I immediately awoke, just as I knew that I would. But as I awoke I felt guilty that I had allowed the innocent to be devoured in order to save myself from the dream. At least that was what it seemed I had done, but as I awoke further it came to me that the baby in the dream was representative of me trying to save something or someone who simply could not be saved.
Once I was awake I was struck by just how deceived everyone had been into staring up at the sky instead of taking the opportunity to run and seek some kind of shelter or protection from the terrible things that were going to ensue. The people didn't even see the danger. They did not sense that anything was wrong and the evil overcame them so fast that it astounded me. I lay in my bed for about ten minutes thinking upon those things and then I fell asleep again.
Once asleep I found myself right back in the dream but from a slightly different place.
I was in a high rise building with some friends. It was obviously, in the dream anyway, the next evening because one of them, a male, said that the fire cloud was going to appear again that night. This scared me because I had seen how fast it had overtaken everyone the first time. But he said not to worry because the demons could not reach us up high where we were. He said that we were protected from them from being up high. Just as he finished speaking the dark sky outside lit up with the same fire cloud as I had seen when I was down on the ground with all the other people the previous night.
The fire cloud behaved exactly as it did the first time, but instead of being beneath the cloud when I was down on the ground, I was actually getting a side view because I was up so high. I walked over to the huge glass windows and stared out at the fire cloud as it emitted huge bolts of lightning in all directions whilst whirling around at a great speed. As I stood there staring at it, I knew that I was safe from it. I knew that it could not harm me while I stayed there.
Strange dream I know.
The biggest sense I got from the dream, by this I mean the things that astounded me the most and stuck in my mind were the following:
1. The people did not recognise danger.
2. They became mesmerised by it.
3. While down on the ground beneath the fire cloud they were unable to see it for what it was and were unable to discern anything in it but beauty.
4. They had no time to run.
5. For those who could run, there was nowhere to go to escape it once it unleashed its fury.
6. Up on high ground people were safe.
7. Few were on high ground.
8. People who were taken by the demons were overcome so fast that it was almost unbelievable.
9. There was no escape for those caught up in it.
So what did it all mean?
I think it was a lesson in discernment for the days that we live in now. I think it was a warning about how fast people will be overtaken by what is coming. Those who do not know the truth. Those who have not taken refuge in Christ...in the real Christ, not in a christ representative of false religion and New Age teachings. For those who had sought refuge in the Christ of the bible; in the Son of God, they discerned evil, they sensed danger and they knew to get to higher ground where the evil could not overcome them. I think the higher ground was representative of Jesus Christ.
You might think that this is whacky and that is okay. I have dreamed dreams like this all of my life.
Laterz
Tuesday 17th February
So many things about this life make absolutely no sense and if I were to take God out of the equation this life could only be described as some bizarre trick of the universe.
This life is filled with so many opportunities for vain hopes, useless wishes and grievous disappointments. Sometimes we do not even choose the aforementioned things. Sometimes they simply happen before you even realise what has occured. I cannot remember if occured is supposed to have two rs or one. I hate it when that happens. Quite often I stumble on words that have two of the same letters in them. Words like happen or happy, they are straight forward. But words like traveller or occured, I can never quite remember. And it is not for lack of not practicing. I write all the time, but some of those double lettered words really mess with my head.
Perhaps I should visit www.shoosh.com, that way I would be saying nothing at all and all those double lettered words could simply let me be.
Life is a crock of horse dung sometimes. I am not entirely sure why that is, but sometimes this life really makes me feel tired. In moments of weakness I truly wonder what it has all been for. But in moments of great strength, the purpose does not really matter to me too much. it simply "is" and that's okay.
That's another word I struggle with. Some people spell it 'ok' and other people, such as myself, spell it 'okay'. Which is the right one?
Why do I not know the answer to that question?
Does it really matter?
Probably not.
And anyway, why do I almost always answer my own questions?
I do not know the answer to that either.
Remember that higher ground dream I talked about the other day? Higher ground is a very strange thing. It seems to me that, some days at least, the more I try to stay on the higher ground the more I slip away from it. I wonder why that is?
Lily died last Wednesday. It was really horrible!
I hate death. I mean I really hate it. I hate that things have to die. That all things must die. It seems so pointless. The only things that may never dies are the things that really don't matter. Inanimate objects. The only things that matter; living things, they are destined to be destroyed by years and forgotten by time itself and I hate that. I suppose death is no big mystery but really, what is the point of life when it can only culminate in death? Do the experiences of certain living things matter at all? What does it all count for in the end?
I got a new kitten and I named her Lilah. She is dark grey and gorgeous. She is very little though. She cannot be more than five weeks old. She sleeps on the pillow beside me and during the night she cuddles into my neck and buries her nose in my hair. It feels very weird.
Had another pretty weird thing happen tonight and I only mention this because it too felt very weird. I was in the kitchen, having just come inside from looking for Forrest and feeding Inteejah and Inyetu (resident Newfoundlands) when I felt a tickling sensation on the back of my neck. I had my hair in a ponytail plait thingy so I knew that it wasn't my hair. Not wanting to be a wimp and finding myself in need of a waaaaaaaaaaambulance, I chose to ignore the sensation. That was until it happened again.
When it happened again I thought, okay maybe I would not be being paranoid if I were to swipe at my neck just in case it is a mozzie swooping down for a free feed from the Sarah bloodbank. So I did just that and much to my horror the biggest ugliest black spier that I have seen, since the movie Aranchnophobia at least, landed on the bench beside me.
As far as I remember I simply stood there in stunned shock staring at the ugly thing but I must have screamed because my kids came running down the hallway to the kitchen to see what was wrong with me. I pointed to the spider speaking rather incoherently and one of them grabbed a size fifteen Rebok sneaker, brought it crashing down onto the ugly creature which by then had landed on the floor, and then same child jumped repeatedly upon the sneaker that had the ugly creature concealed beneath it.
When I saw its squished body on the kitchen floor I felt no remorse. I simply felt pure relief. But that did not stop me from getting in the shower and washing my hair thoroughly just in case its brothers and sisters had joined it on my hair or neck.
It is really creepy to think that that big ugly spider was on me!
That happened to me one time when I was ten. I had put on my raincoat to go catch the school bus and once we got to school I took my raincoat off in the cloak bay and just as I went to hang it up I saw the most ugly spider climb out from under the hood. I shrieked my lungs out! That spider was way bigger than tonight's spider, although I was much smaller then and so perhaps the spider seemed bigger than it really was. Who knows.
What I do know for absolute certain is that spiders and I cannot co-exist in the same locale. One of us has to go and I am not going anywhere!
I made another David And The Giants video and posted it in YouTube. Will post it in here beneath this entry.
laterz
Even in my life's confusion I still feel you near
In my dreams telling me you're not illusion
I believe in you in my heart
I still reach for you from afar
All my life caught between rhyme and reason
Tell me the answers my heart will never see
Reaching for them and dreaming of me
Seeing you fade and letting it be
Wish that we could dance upon the water
In the instance that we knew what love was
Even though we knew that it would never last
Pieces no longer fit and words don't rhyme
When looking back upon us in that time
Wednesday 18th February
I had the weirdest dream last night. Have you seen that new movie called Twilight? I have seen it at least three times and finally the darn thing has seeped into my subconscious.
I do not quite remember the entirety of the dream but Carlisle Cullen was in it. Carlisle Cullen is the foster dad of all the teenaged kids in the movie. The dream dealt mostly with issues to do with outrunning an enemy and hiding. Beyond that, I do not remember much.
I was parked outside of a fish n chip shop at around six tonight and I was watching this mother with her little girl and it was all very lovely until I heard her call the little girl a b***h. I was really shocked but then I heard her call her a mongrel.
That totally flipped a switch in my memory let me tell you. I hadn't heard that name used in that context for years until I heard that lady say it to her little girl, who must have been all of three years old if that.
My birth mother used to call me a "little mongrel".
It was her way of telling me that I was a lower form of life and something disgusting that she just could not be bothered with. As I sat there I wondered how anyone could stand to say that to their child or to call them that name? To me it seems worse than swearing.
I suppose to other people it might have been no big deal, maybe it was even funny, but to me it was simply offensive and awful.
I am listening to Elton John tonight. Rocket Man, Daniel, Your Song, Song for Guy, Jeannie, Someone Saved My Life Tonight, Island Girl, All Quiet on the Western Front, Spiteful Child, Legal Boys and Empty Garden. But somehow, in the mix that I created, Aubrey by Bread has gotten muddled in there.
I remember being at a church camp in 1978 and listening to The Best of Bread. A girl called Brenda had brought it with her. I loved every song, even some of the ones that I had never heard before.
Way back then, despite what I was going through, there were windows of childhood where the world seemed good, almost safe. At chruch camps I could avoid those people whom I didn't want to see, up to and including my foster father. They used to sort the kids into cabins by themselves, but they mixed the ages of the kids up so that there were older girls and some younger girls together. That was the same weekend that Brenda gave me all of her Bee Gees pictures and posters. I do not know what made her give them to me. She was the younger sister of the guy who attacked me in the haybarn the year before. She was older than me by about four years.
I remember that weekend away at church camp with such clarity. I felt safe and like I belonged. Everything seemed almost perfect. I do not know why, it just did. I remember how we walked on the beach, played basketball and ate in the big hall together. On Sunday afternoon after church and before everyone set off for home we were sitting on the beds in our cabin and Brenda put Bread on to play. All us girls just sat around listening. It was raining that day and it was the first time I remember hearing London Bridge.
I was so happy during that weekend. I remember wishing that it didn't have to end and I remember feeling very sad when it did. We went home and that night I lay in my bed and cried because I missed everyone from my cabin. I missed the sense of togetherness and I missed belonging.
Then Monday swung around and life was suddenly one big nasty game of avoiding situations with people that I did not want to be with again. Starting early morning with my foster father and ending late in the evening with him too. Then there was all the stuff in between. It is times like these that I remember that I always felt so grown up and responsible. I do not know if there was ever a time where I didn't. Maybe I was born old?
Listening to Rocket Man. You know, I cannot actually remember the very first time that I heard this song. It is almost like one of those songs you just always knew. Kind of like the Hollies. No, Elton John is not like the Hollies, what I meant is that some of their songs seem as though they are almost imprinted upon you. You know, you kind of know all the words but don't know why!
I wonder what it is like being Elton John? Not the fame or money side, but actually being who he is? It must be very difficult.
I find Yellow Brick Road to be a very haunting song. I do not know if it is the lyrics or the music. Perhaps it is the combination of the two. Sometimes the most poignant part of a song can be the smallest part. Always On My Mind by David And The Giants has a tiny piece in it like that. Everything kind of stops and there are these two solitary piano notes. I do not know why, but that part of the song sends chills down my spine because those two solitary notes contain so much, like a million miles of thoughts, emotions and memories that all seem to come together and collide in the second and a half if takes for the two notes to be played...actually pianos have keys, but you know what I mean. Or maybe you don't! I know that that might sound odd, but I know what I mean and I suppose that is the main thing.
Thing is, that I really do not have anyone to talk to. I mean I have a couple of friends, but they are not the kind that you can speak anything of any deep substance to. I am guarded with them and careful about what I do or do not say. There is no one in the world to whom I can say exactly what I mean. Well there is, but he doesn't answer most of the time. I miss conversation. I miss being talked to. Mostly I get spoken at. I just do not seem to matter too much to anyone really. At least not to anyone who will listen to anything much past the weather and what is going on in their lives. Sometimes being me is a very difficult thing to be. Longing for that which will never happen, knowing it will never happen and yet still hoping just the same, even though I know that it is a complete and utter waste of time. Sometimes I want to scream at people, "Hey, hello, I'm alive and I have feelings too!" Trouble is that no one really gives a fig leaf. It can be very lonely sometimes, so I come in here and I speak the things that no one ever hears. The things that no one wants to hear because few people even view me as anything significant in their lives. For some I am a wall to speak at when things go wrong. For others I am someone who hangs around on the peripheral whom they can ignore or acknowledge at their will, never mine. I hate that. I hate that I make it so easy for people to do that and yet what choice do I have? My choices are to be that or to be nothing at all.
Oh I know my place in the big scheme of things. Don't you worry about that. I know what I am and I know my place. I know it well. I have always known it. And I will never forget it.
Sometimes, not very often, but once in a blue moon I just want to let go, you know? I just get so tired from all the wishing, hoping and praying and the hanging on and on and on to just simply end in coming up to remembering that you are still zero. I can see how people get so tired that they just give up. I am not saying that it is right nor advocating that it is in any way the answer, but I can see how it happens. Sometimes I can almost consciously start walking to that place myself. I always stop before I get there, but sometimes loneliness gets so heavy that I can't carry it. Just goes to show that even when you have Christ, as a human being you can still feel very, very lonely upon this orb that we call earth.
I have to make so many things fervent prayers in order to keep on top of everything. Of particular significance to me is Psalm 71:1 'In thee, oh Lord, do I put my trust; let me never be put to confusion.'
As Elton says, life is a delicate thing!
laterz
Thursday 19th February
I have a blood type that is so rare that only 0.7% of the entire population of the world has it. Rare and yet there are no prizes for that.
I have a ligament deformation that only 7% of the world's population has. Again, it is reasonably uncommon and yet, in this case also, there is no prize.
But you know what, if there was a prize for the most stupid, idiotic person who ever walked the plant, I'd get that prize for sure.
Sometimes I am so desperately idiotic that I surprise even me.
There are times when I look in the mirror at myself and I find myself asking, "just who the heck do you think you are?"
You know, if the world ignores you long enough then sooner or later you have to come to the conclusion that maybe they just might have a point. If people in your life or those whose peripheral you exist on hardly care if you are there or not then sooner or later you have to accept that there just might be something to it.
I always thought that the scripture about the sins of the father revisiting the son down to the third generation was taken out of context. I always assumed that people believing it to be a punishment or curse of some kind to be an erroneous conclusion to have come to. I always preferred to interpret it to mean the consequences of the sins of the fathers can be revisited upon the son down to the third generation. But now I am not so sure.
Maybe for some people they are not able to be punished, so their offspring are punished by proxy? I honestly never really believed that there was any truth to the aforementioned assertion, but these days, in looking back, in being retrospective, I think maybe I was wrong to reach that conclusion.
Could it be that somer are being punished for their father's sin? By this I mean, that they have inherited the grievous consequences of his terrible sin? It is an arguement that could be had and it would be an interesting one at that.
I do not even know why I kidded myself into believing that one human being could ever simply just care for another for no reason but that they need caring for. Why do I put such high expectations upon myself, my behaviour and how I treat others and yet I hold a totally different set of standards for how they should treat me? The standards by which I think I should be treated are so much lower than I expect of myself towards others. Why do I do that?
Why do I always feel as though I have no choice but to do that?
I always tell myself that as long as I do not treat people that way then everything will be fine. My conscience will be clear and clean and that is all that matters. But sometimes I wish that I could simply let go and tell people exactly how I feel. And yet I feel as though I do not have that same right. In some ways it seems such a wrong thing to do, to let loose and tell someone exactly what I think. I hate hurting people. I suppose in some ways it is cowardice. In an odd kind of sense that makes me a coward.
I just wish that someone, anyone could love me for me and expect nothing more than me. I guess I wish that that was enough, but it never is. It never has been. Everything always seems to slip through my fingers like so many thousands of grains of sand. This happens for many of us, I think.
I hate being acknowledged with silence and yet there is absolutely nothing that I can do about it but live with it.
laterz
Friday 20th February
Chuck goes to hospital tomorrow to have sugery. Been praying that he is in good health for the op and that everything goes as it should. He has heaps of people around him so at least he will be well looked after and attended to etc.
Glad its not me or I'd be in a world of shit!
I know, I should not have sworn. I should not do a lot of things and yet I do them. I'm having one of those days where you throw your toys from the cot and do and say all the things you normally wouldn't. Okay well not all just one!
It has rained all day here to the point where the pool has flooded. At least it is good for the gardens. Yeah I am still being a little green fingers out there. The tomatoes are finished and most of all the other stuff. I have planted winter spuds and some silverbeet. I need to get my act together and plant more things for the winter. I been busy putting in flower and yukka gardens out the back by the pool so the vege garden has gotten a little neglected. Things are still growing, I am simply not paying it much attention.
The Obamanoids are going crazy still claiming him to be a god who can all but walk on water. He just passed some new legislation there that will see the depression really take a hold. Funny thing is that most people think that it is going to pick the economy out of the slump, but it won't. The hole will just get deeper.
Oh how I wish God would just tell Jesus, "off you go, son. Go down there and bring them all home!"
Sometimes I think that is all I am waiting for because there is not really anything else to look forward to. It feels like that is all I have been doing for a long time. Filling in time with one thing and another just waiting for Him.
laterz
Tuesday 25th February
I hardly ever watch TV. When I say hardly ever, I mean hardly ever.
There are many reasons why I do not watch TV and one of them is that there simply isn't much that takes my interest. Sometimes I watch documentaries and the news, but not often; maybe once in a blue moon.
I did watch a program tonight of a girl who was searching for her father and she found him too. He stated that the reason he left all those years ago (22 years ago) was because he didn't want to pay child support but, somehow during his meeting with her, he managed to convince her that she was not the reason he ran away to Australia. I do not know why but somehow the guy came across as a schmuck!
Tonight on YouTube I watched a episode of the American show Wife Swap.
The only reason I even watched it was because I happened to see a story about one of the men who appeared on the show in my MSN news updates. The update mentioned that the man, Stephen Fowler, had managed to make himself the most hated man in America, so obviously I was curious to know how he had managed to achieve this great thing. So I watched it. I have only one word to descrobe what I saw.
Unbelievable!
Stephen Fowler displayed the absolute worst behaviour I have ever seen from one human being toward another. He was so rude that I wanted to smack him in the face!
The woman he ended up with for two weeks as his wife was from the Mid West. Now I admit it, I do not really know what the mid west is, but I suspect it has something to do with the bible belt of America and maybe the accent is different.
Whatever, the woman sent to be his wife for two weeks, Gayla, she was very nice. I do not know how she made it through the two weeks with this guy without at least thinking about hiring a hitman. Obviously Stephen Fowler thought she might though because at the end of the show he asked her to make sure that none of her sons tries to track him down with a shotgun in hand.
After his behaviour toward their mother, I can safely say that there are few Americans who would blame Gayla's sons if they did just that.
I cannot even begin to adequately describe to you just how arrogant and haughty Stephen Fowler was. You would have to watch the show for yourself. Just go to YouTube and put into the search engine the name Stephen Fowler, trust me, you'll find plenty about him as well as the entire episode of that particular wife swap.
Got a vicious migraine tonight. Do not normally get them that late in the afternoon, but the eye disturbance lasted much longer than it has for quite some time. Lasted maybe half an hour, if not slightly longer. The headache is masked somewhat by the panadol that I took but I can still feel a little bit of the headache through it and I feel slightly nauseated, so it must be a doozy.
Been doing a fair bit of writing lately. Nothing I hope to publish, just a story I have been working on for years. I am up to book twelve of the story which I started back in, I think, 2005. It is almost two million words or so now. Why do I do it? Because I like it and it is a way for me to unwind. How can you keep a story going for twelve books? It is not really that difficult.
When I started the very first book, I did not think that I would make it past page 10. I had a friend who is a writer and back then he encouraged me to try to write some fiction, so I did. I was utterly stunned when I managed to make it past 50'000 words. Twelve books later, it just seems normal to turn to writing it when the urge takes me. The interesting thing is that the male characters in my story, the nice ones at least, they are not based on males that I know. They are more based on the way that I think men should be, and yet few are that way. As I read back through the books, and I do read back through them from time to time, I see where I have incorporated experiences from my life but did not really realise it at the time.
It is an interesting process. I can see my failings as a writer too. One of the things that frustrates me with some shows and part of the reason that I do not watch TV is that sometimes they take so long to make a point that I get bored waiting. "Lost"is a perfect example of this.
I watched the first season and sort of got an inkling then that it might be the kind of show that would drag on forever before it actually made a point. When the second season started and it was a whole remake of the first season of Lost but from the perspective of the others on the island, I was totally gutted. I wanted to know what had chased the first lot through the jungle. By the third season I was beginning to lose my patience with it and by the fourth I just gave up altogether.
The fifth season in on TV here now and I might watch it tomorrow night just to see what is going on, but I doubt it will hook me in. My fave character on the show was definitely Hurly and my most fave moment in the show was when he was sitting on the beach listening to his walkman. The music was really nice and I actually thought it was the show making the background music for the scene. However, it was actually Hurly's walkman that he was listening to but you did not know that until the batteries went dead and he lifted it up to check what was going on. I had to laugh at that.
Desmond is pretty cool too. I think he came into it when Charlie or one of the others were at an empty sports stadium and ran into him. I cannot remember if the show wrote Desmond as Charlie's brother, had by his father through an affair. It has been so long I hardly remember much of it. If that is not the case then clearly my imagination is doing some kind of illicit dance with my memory!
Anyway, this post is filled with a whole bunch of nothings really, although one must point out that the man who acts as Desmond has the most gorgeous brown eyes that I have seen in a while. Seen him in other things before, just not sure what.
Oh well, that is it for me for now and I will catch up later.
laterz
March
Friday 6th March
March.
MARCH!
When did THAT happen?
Wow the year sure is flying past at a fast rate. I can hardly keep up! Wow!
Anyway, in keeping with the "M" theme, I'm thinking about a guy called Mark.
Mark was born in England and had lived there for his whole life up until about a year or two before I met him. I was thirteen when I met him and yes, it is true to say that I never really saw Mark coming.
It was 1980, the year of Asian Paradise (Sharon O'Neil), Video Killed The Radio Star (Buggles), Halfway Hotel (Voyager), Dream Weaver (Gary Wright), Refugee (Tom Petty), Sara (Fleetwood Mac), Lost In Love (Air Supply), Into The Night (Benny Mardonis), Jeannie (Elton John), Turn Of A Friendly Card (Alan Parsons Project) and I could go on, but I won't.
Anyway, I was caught up in music, as I always was. It kind of kept me sane while everything around me was spinning out of control. I had just moved out of this staunchly Christian family. To get the picture on the level of staunchness you really need to know that they came out of the Quaker movement.
Just about everything was taboo, although some of them they relented on because basically they were forced to, but they did not relent on much. For example, I got to go and see the movie Grease. All was fine and dandy with that until my foster mother heard about the scene with John Travolta on the swing. She lost the plot and yelled at me that I would NEVER be going to see another movie like THAT!
It was Grease!
Hello????????
Anyway, and they belonged to the same kind of church that burned books, Beatles records and the odd witch. Okay, so maybe no witches were literally burned, but figuratively speaking, it would be true to say that there was a barbeque or two along the way! One of them was mine, but that's another story. Seen the scene out of Shrek where they all run into the swamp to get Shrek? Yeah, well it wasn't like that. ha ha ha.
Crikey I have gone off topic already. See!
Okay so anyway the point of all the above was that I was no longer in the right kind of mindset to be ready for someone like Mark. Well, okay, on some kind of level he wasn't a complete surprise, but it was the WAY he went about things that I was not really ready for. You see, I wasn't well versed in head games. I wasn't well trained in the art of reverse psychology. In fact, it would be a certainty that I had never even heard of the concept of reverse psychology. Who has at thirteen? Okay, well maybe Einstein, Freud and Money, but that's about the extent of the potential list. Off topic, yet again!
Anyway, I had never met anyone like Mark before. Or maybe I had and simply had not noticed or been old enough at the time to recognise any dead give aways that any man is a schmuck!
At thirteen there was a part of me that still did not believe the Jeremiah warning, "The heart of a man is deceitful but above all desperately wicked," and that until you knew someone really well, then one should always keep that in mind. I was simply not that cynical yet, or maybe I was, but again did not notice because who understands the true meaning of cynicism at the age of thirteen? But I probably was cynical at thirteen but I am willing to bet that I was cynical about all the wrong things at the most inopportune times. Whatever the case was, at the end of the day, it is still true to say that I did not see Mark coming.
Mark was all about Mark. If it was good for Mark then it happened. If it wasn't good for Mark, then it didn't happen, but even that was not a hard and fast rule that anyone could directly depend upon with any kind of even remote sense of certainty. This was further complicated by the fact that some of the things that were good for Mark were not really that swell for anyone else, and this was particularly true if you were a girl child and dependant upon Mark. I do not mean dependant upon him for favours, well he considered a roof over my head, food and a bed to sleep in favours, but I didn't. And like all favours, every single one of them had a price attached.
But I did not know that at the time.
I didn't know a lot of things at the time.
Mark was an expert at what he did. He had spent years pulling the wool over people's eyes. Mark knew exactly how to get what he wanted be it legal or not, with little or no personal risk to himself. Mark used people, but only ever people much younger and smaller than him. People who had no agency. People whom he deemed had no worth and meant little to anyone within a 1000 mile radius of said smaller person.
Mark was a joker. But Mark was a mean joker. He would say something to you and twenty years later you still will not have come to a conclusive conclusion as to whether he was playing or being seriously nasty. Chances are he was being the latter, but with Mark, nothing was ever absolutely definite.
His wife didn't even know what she was married to, but again, Mark picked his wife as carefully as he picked his smaller people. She was more than ten years younger than him and slightly more than ten years older than me. Generation gaps all round really. But for Mark, generation gaps are particularly essential in his line of...work? No, work isn't quite the word I am looking for. I can't actually find a word that describes what I am trying to say. If one comes to me, I will let you know. In the meantime, onwards and upwards.
Mark was either exceptionally clever or incredibly lucky, again, I cannot say which one he was with any kind of certainty because the truth of the matter is, that at the end of the day, I never really knew Mark at all. It would be a number of years after the fact that I would even begin to get even a small inkling of an understanding of what it was that Mark actually was. In fact some days, to this very day, I am not totally sure I understand him yet. And it is a certainty that I am defintely undecided as to whether I actually ever even want to understand someone like Mark.
Anyway, clever or lucky, whatever Mark was, his life was designed with intricate attention to detail or dumb blind luck! Either way, his life was absolutely one hundred percent tailored to his needs.
He was a teacher and held a most trusted position within the school that he taught. Outside of school he tended bar at the local pub. These two jobs served a duel purpose. At school he had access to small people. In the other, he had access to those people who would provide him the means to control smaller people. He also had access to some of the scummiest people on God's green earth but in Mark's line of...work?...that is also an essential facet of life.
Mark had everyone fooled.
The hob nobs thought he was just wonderful! Well what teacher back in 1980 wasn't? That also helped him fool other angencies such as Social Welfare, psychological services, police and the likes. This opened even more doors for Mark.
On the flipside, every druggie in town knew Mark. The poorest people in town owed him big...tick never disappears, it only acrues(sp) interest. And it availed him of people to essentially do some of his dirtiest work.
Mark could pretty much do and say whatever he wanted to anyone at any time without fear of any kind of serious consequence.
When I first arrived at Mark's house in May 1980 my idea of a good time out was riding my horse in the sun on country roads listening to my radio, dreaming of other places and people.
By the time I left Mark's in August of 1980 my idea of a good time out was waking up one morning only to discover that I was dead!
Before I arrived at Mark's, my idea of getting away with something was midnight walking with a friend who had stayed over, spying on the neighbour from his garden and smoking illicitly gained cigarettes on the bridge to nowhere while listening to music in the dark.
By the time I left Mark's my idea of getting away with something was getting stoned and/or high on glue and/or drunk, throwing a huge rock through a factory window and running fast enough to escape being caught by the cops or the security guard when the alarm went off and then hiding up behind the railway tracks in the long grass with my Rastafari friends laughing hysterically at the law while they tried to find us.
Before I arrived at Mark's I never wanted to get into trouble by being caught doing anything wrong let alone anything illegal.
By the time I left I prayed that I would be caught because that was my idea of giving everyone the middle finger salute.
Before I arrived at Mark's I firmly believed in God.
By the time I left I was having a few niggling doubts.
Before I arrived at Mark's I still believed goodness resided in everyone somewhere.
By the time I left I was not so sure.
Before I arrived at Mark's I still believed in happy ever after.
By the time I left I had learned to accept that I would always be the stranger passing through.
Before I arrived at Mark's I was the kind of kid that bullies picked on.
By the time I left I was the kind of kid who picked on you.
Before I arrived at Mark's beer bottles were something you looked through at the sun to prove to your friends that it wouldn't make you blind.
By the time I left they were my drinking vessels.
Before I arrived at Mark's I thought a doobie was a brother in a certain band from Southern California.
By the time I left, a doobie was worth five bucks!
Before I arrived at Mark's, grown woman were, although in my personal book essentially untrustworthy and sometimes nasty, I considered a select few of them strong, clever and sophisticated.
By the time I left they were ALL weak, dumb, stupid and not worth the time of day.
Before I arrived at Mark's I had snippets of a view to childhood from time to time.
By the time I left, I was an old woman!
That was pretty much the effect that Mark had on any child who was unfortunate enough to be three things. Firstly a girl, secondly not his and thirdly, subject to living in his house.
Mark was clever and cunning. I do not think I have ever met a more cunning man since. No, I do not believe I have. A quick scan of the past twenty years assures me conclusively that I have not met any man as cunning and as successfully manipulative as he was/probably still is.
The thing is that the intricacies of what Mark did are not as important as the intricacies of what Mark was. And the fact of the matter is that he was an incredibly smart man. He knew what he wanted, he knew what he had to do to get it and he knew the risks. He calculated those risk factors in and he beat the odds every time. Even when he got caught with both his hands in the cookie jar, he got away with it. For some reason men like Mark have been born with the knack of being able to land on their feet whilst still smelling like a rose and I am darned if I have ever understood how that happens.
I never told on Mark for a very long time. I was too scared. The warning he gave me the day that he dumped me at the Social Welfare home rang in my ears literally for years. That had some good side effects though. I tended to steer clear of drinkers and druggies. (When I did get involved in those things, I went solo) but for the most part, I wanted nothing to do with them. I did not see those things as clever, smart or spohisticated. To the contrary, those things always reminded me of Mark and so I made an effort to avoid them and people who abided them. As I got older this only became worse.
And let us be honest here, when I finally did get up the nerve to "out" Mark, it did me no good anyway because events conspired to cover his butt yet again. The Department did not want to pursue it. It was an election year and the Party in power was determined to win another term. What had happened to me had made the Department become national news and they needed no scandal.
(And what was the scandal they were trying to avert? I was not the only one to come forward. A few years before I came forward two other girls who had lived there and whom I did not even know, came forward and made statements. The Department made those files disappear, stupidly, into the back of my file when I made my complaint. Years after my complaint was made and scandal avoided, my file turned up with the other two complainant's complaints written in black and white. How did they come to be there? Easy, when I came forward they found all the other complainant's information, collated it all, buried it, avoided the scandal and placed it all back in the dead file room inside MY FILE, which I got hold of years later. In effect, Mark's criminal behaviour was protected by the very agency he offended against so that the agencie's incompetency would not be publically exposed so close to an election, and the victims were made to appear liars and made victims of again.
New Zealand's justice system is GREAT like that. We love and take especially good care of our criminals! And here I go off topic again. Am I mad about the last part still, being whitewashed while the offender was protected? Of course I am. Who in their right mind would not be a bit miffy about that?) Okay, back on topic, sort of.
I once dated a guy for about three months some years ago. He was my ideal man, you know? He had dark long hair, brown eyes and olive skin. He was gorgeous, but he told me that he did not drink. When I asked him, "never?"He replied in the affirmative and for almost three months he seemed to be a man of his word. Keep in mind, if he had said to me that he was a social drinker who had a beer every now and then, I would have probably been okay with that, but when a guy says he NEVER drinks, then that is what I expect him to do. And as I said, for three months things seemd almost perfect.
There is only one problem with "perfect" in this world and that is that it almost always turns out to be a sham at best.
So that Saturday afternoon when Mr. Perfect walked into my lounge Jack Daniels in hand, reeking of it having driven right across Auckland City (he was a Westie), I was a little miffed.
No, I was not a little miffed. As soon as I saw the bottle I was like, "Oh no!" . As soon as he kissed me and I smelled his breath I was like, "Oh no here we go again!"
Two seconds later I was like, "Oh no, we are NOT going to go 'here we go again'. I'm getting shot of this guy!"
I calmly looked at him and very nicely said, "I would like it very much if you would leave."
He was confused.
Don't know why, but he was. Isn't it funny how a lot of guys think women do not mean what they say and get so shocked and confused when she turns out to have meant exactly what she said?
That was him.
He rang me the next day and he said, "Sarah, you really need to sit down and think about what it is that you want."
My reply?
I was like, "Hello, I told you that I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted but was absolutely certain without a shadow of a doubt as to what I don't want. It is YOU who needs to sit down and think about what it is that you want."
I really liked that guy. I mean he was the sweetest guy, but I couldn't deal with the lie. I couldn't compromise on honesty. I won't because it is far too important. If you say you are something or present yourself as someone who does not do a certain thing, then boy you had better stick to it. You could be a good looking Henry Cusick/Gerard Butler/Ralph Feinnes type of guy, sweet to a fault, but if you lie to me about anything, then you are history my friend, plain and simple.
Men must be men of their word. Be a man of your word because if a woman can't trust your word, then what can she trust? That is unless of course you are the type of woman who is married to a man like Mark. And to be honest, I was her for a while in my life too, although my husband did not have a penchant for underaged girls.
Over a period of time, Mark and men of his ilk really helped me to decide what was right and yes I was kind of a bit older before I got it right enough to stick by it, but by golly I stick by it now. But I do not thank those men for it. I thank them for very little and feel great pity for the women out there still tolerating them and their brand of fun and games.
I am merciless when it comes to issues of truth/honesty/trust between a potential mate and myself. I have a zero tolerance policy for dishonesty and I expect him to have the same when it comes to me.
Mark is still out there somewhere doing what Mark does best. I would like to think he learned his lesson through several frights and near misses. But the truth of the truth of the matter is that men like Mark do not stop until they are absolutely caught or absolutely dead!
Laterz
Sunday 8th March
I had all these things planned out that I wanted to talk about, but I went and did the dishes first and wouldn't you know it, I have forgotten them all.
Oh wait, okay, I remembered two of them. The first was a movie I saw and the second kind of leads out from the first, which is about the movie I saw. And the third thing was actually a topic that runs out from the second.
Now, it should be interesting to see if I stay on topic having planned the order of my topics out before I even begin. Actually there might even be a fourth that may well lead out from the third, but I do not know that I will remember everything and not go off on a tangent and talk about something totally different, thus by passing all aforementioned possible topics.
Now, what was the first one again? I actually have to go back and read to remember.
Oh okay, the movie.
It is called 9 Tenths, which is basically a half title because the actual saying goes, "Posession is 9 tenths the law."
The movie is pretty much also about that very topic.
Scenario: Good looking couple race out of the city because the fabric of society falls apart by way of threats of bombs from terrorists exploding everywhere. Good looking hubby has bought a run down old farmlet in the middle of nowhere.
Hubby is a rich exec, although the movie doesnt directly tell you this; it merely hints at it. But essentially the hubby is a rich man who is used to paying everyone else to get things done for him. In the world of business, power brokering and money, he's the boss. But in the real world, the one that most of the rest of us live in, he's a chump. He can't do much of anything and he relies heavily on the internet for the answers to some of life's most interesting problems, such as how to fix a water heater and other such things.
Wifey is no better. She cannot even cook. No, not Sarah can't cook type of disability, this woman cannot cook anything. Period!
So her and hubby race off into the middle of nowhere both unable to take care of themselves independant of a local deli and internet connection and even that is probably an understatement.
When they get to the house there is a man already living in the house and so ensues the battle of them trying to get rid of the man. He wins. He can hunt, cook, fix waterheaters, phones and pretty much anything else. He is everything in the ordinary world that hubby isn't. Hubby is everything in the business world that Mr Fix it could never even aspire to becoming.
But they are stuck in the middle of nowhere in the real world.
Anyway, long story short Hubby ends up having to pimp his Wife out to the other guy in order to get food because Mr Fix it, after a series of events, kicks both of them out of the house. Hubby comes of as just the whimpiest man alive. And the woman becomes the one who learns to adapt to their situation the best. Hubby gets stuck on pride and it definitely goes before his fall. Whereas Wifey does what's got to be done, which makes her much more of a survivor than Hubby. If it were the real world, Hubby would have lasted about two seconds had Mr Fix it been a particularly mean man, which he wasnt, but he had his moments let me tell you.'
The weird thing is that I found myself quite attracted to the sophistication of the hubby, his attitude to begin with was impressive too and he was kind of funny, but I soon came to despise him for the pathetic whimp he was and my attitude toward him only degenrated from there to the most deep sense of pathtic pity. Thanks goodness it was only a movie.
As for Mr Fix it. I hated him to start with and then I began to admire him and the more that I realised that he was the alpha male between the two of them, I started to like him more. Even though he was mean to Hubby, I came to the point where I despised Hubby so much for his weakness that I almost believed that Hubby kind of deserved it. But I did get to the point where I wanted Mr Fix it to stop it and give poor Hubby a break. And the most crying shame thing about it? Hubby was drop dead gorgeous!
Anyway, that leads into my second topic.
This movie made me think about women and alpha males. Woman, as a rule, generally do not like weak or stupid males. I mean weak as in they cannot stand up for their women and stupid meaning that they cannot provide for her or look after her.
Oh yeah, wait a minute, yeah I hear you.
Woman's lib and all that. Trouble is that I am a part of a dying breed. I think women should stay at home and raise their husband's babies and that he should be the provider for the family. That's just me, so I am quite within my rights to flout every women's lib rule ever invented, oddly enough, by men themselves.
If I was to find myself in the same situation as that fictitional character and I had the choice between being with a man who could not do anything at all and one who could feed me, protect me and all of that, I would naturally incline toward the alpha male. That is what he'd be and survival instinct would dictate that move as essential to the furtherment of my life. But before I saw that movie, I never thought that way.
The movie made me think about things in a way that I have never considered before.
Okay, third topic: Men who are not alpha males. I know one in particular. I think I mentioned him a while back in 2007 or something. I used to play agony aunt to him. Okay, that is hardly fair, however, it is true.
When I met him he was being spat out the end of a rather nasty relationship but was hanging on anyway. The picture that used to come to mind every time I thought about him and that relationship was this: I imagined a man who had been accidentally flushed down the toilet and as he headed out the pipes to sea he was trying to grab hold of something to stop that happening. Just as he was being spat out the pipe into the sea, he kind of got a grip on the side of the tunnel and held on while all this human waste rushed past him. But rather than simply letting go and taking the journey through the messy water that would soon turn to clear, he held on hoping that the human waste might stop rushing by and maybe one day he might just be able to climb back through those pipes and crawl up out of the toilet again.
I know, seriously disturbing analogy. Or is it a metaphor? Not sure. Is there a difference? Perhaps there is but maybe it is only slight and not great enough to mess up anything I said one way or the other.
Anyway...and I must be totally honest here but secretly I actually quite liked him. I know, what a surprise, Sarah batting for the non alpha male. Anyway, that aside, I was a good friend to him and listened to literally hours and hours of his sad battle with love that simply was no longer being recirpocated. But he didnt get it.
It is fair to say though, that in the end he let her go. And, after a suitable period of time had elapsed (3 weeks DOH!) I kind of came right out and told him how I felt about him, the non alpha male. No, I did not tell him that he was a non alpha male, I am not that mean...yet, but I was getting there.
Anyway he basically said something like he was going to spend some time just him and God and sort himself out. This is the part where I almost got mean enough to yell at him, "You're not an alpha male so why would I want you anyway!"
And no, it would not have been a question he needed to answer and, as it turned out, he never got to answer because I never asked him. No all I did is ask myself that same deep and meaningful question that I have asked myself on more than several prior occasions, 'where have I heard this before?'
You see, I have heard them all. Any great excuse you might care to come up with or even invent on the spot, I've heard it Mister, you better believe it.
Anyway so I knew what that meant.
In maleanese it meant, "Oh no, oh no, I gave her the wrong idea, she's not my type. I do not even like her. I would die before I ever dated or got involved with someone like her."
In womanese, what he said meant, "He doesn't like me. I'm not his type. He is going to hang out for the BBD." What is the BBD, I hear you asking yourself. BBD=Bigger Better Deal.
Now, why oh why would he think that about nice little me? That is very easy you see, I am an alpha female!
What? What? You ask in your fake Chris Rock accent.
I am an alpha female because I can take care of myself independant of a man. I can mow my lawns, build a fence, grow a garden, hunt, fish, change a lightbulb, and on a good day probably even fix my car. Guys find that threatening because even though they want their woman depending upon them, they do like them to be able to take care of themselves, but on the other hand they don't. And they say that women have trouble making up their mind! You see, a woman who can take care of herself is refreshing and cute but threatens to render the alpha male obsolete. Sometimes the independence of a female becomes a little annoying to the alpha male and even more threatening to the non alpha male.
An alpha female is also very decisive about what she does and does not want in a man. She doesn't hide it either. So in a way, me and that guy were complete opposites. I was what I wanted him to be and he was what he desired me to be, which is probably why we are both better off in our own company!
No, that is not entirely true. My point is that I can take care of myself and I do not take any garbage from men. Period. He didn't like it. I am also not possessive of my man when I have one (which admittedly has not been for an awfully long time, like since 2000...the new millenium has been a little unkind...ha ha ha.) He can go where he likes, do what he likes and hang out with whoever he likes. The reason I say that is because I learned, through very bitter experience, that there is absolutely no point in trying to own a man. If he is going to play up then he is going to play up and there isn't one darn thing that you can do about it except kick his sorry butt to the curb when you catch him out. And let us be honest, what human being wants to be in a relationship where they are owned to the point where they cannot breathe?
So, now, what was my point?
Oh right, the guy. Yes well as sure as the sun shines most days, what he did was go out and find another girlfriend. The BBD, which I was pretty certain he was going to do anyway, which also begs the question why did I bother telling him I liked him? I don't know, call me stupid!
So, and this is where the kicker comes in and it is really funny ha ha on me. He meets a new woman who does exactly the same thing to him as the last and now he's hanging onto the side of the sewer again. I feel kind of sorry for him, again. I shouldn't, but I do. I can't help it. Anyway and here is that little kicker I referred to just before. I left a comment on his MySpace and he wrote back telling me he couldn't allow it to show on his page as his girlfriend, the one who flushed him, aha, the very same one, will throw her toys from the cot and he might never get back with her. But hey, Sarah, he goes, "Mind helping me out to find some free footage and pictures so that I can make a video to go with my new song?"
Did I forget to mention that part, that he is a musician?
Yup, he surely is.
Every guy I ever dated when I was younger was a muso. No, I know, in looking back I hardly believe it myself. And what did every single one of those musos do? They left me because, well one of them needed space. The next needed time with just him and God (Oh yeah, my non alpha muso male friend was not the first to use that line with me) and the third? Oh, I believe I might have actually been the one doing the dumping there, for reasons I decline to offer. But I believe it had something to do with him being a non alpha male!
And Ps on me doing the dumping for a change, no, it did not empower me on any deep or meaningful level. It served up to me no sense of satisfaction whatsoever. Sometimes you just have to do what's got to be done and that really did need to be done. Trust me on this!
I know, I am absolutely hopeless! No wonder I have been single for nine years!
But are you now coming to understand what I mean about me always being on the peripheral of people's lives. They only seem to want me around when it suits them. What about me? Hello, I am a human being and I have feelings too!
But, according to most of the world around me, I don't. I am simply someone who is handy to have around every now and then but who is also polite enough to have the good sense to get lost when something better comes along. Oddly enough, this has been a recurring theme in my life and I kind of get what it means to be truly lonely. But it is okay. Well, like what choice do I have, really? Like I can tell other people to get lost? I'm not that mean.
Fourth topic? I have forgotten what it was, but we got three, so all is well that ends well.
I know it might seem all a bit dreary, but I am mostly writing this with a smile on my face. I am so pathetically predictable it isn't even funny, I say laughing!
Laterz
Monday 9th March
I have been feeling really tearful today and I could not for the life of me work out why, but then it came to me.
Am I going to share what it is that made me feel like that? No. All I want to say is that human beings should be really mindful of how they treat others. I was reminded yesterday, or the evening before, by someone, a non alpha male who shall rename nameless, that yet again, I was not good enough to be anything that might publicly link me to him in any way but that I was good enough to be asked to help him out in a way that no one would know that he had even spoken to me.
Not that it was that issue specifically, but it was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. Not that I am a camel or bare any resemblence to a camel. But maybe he thinks I do, maybe that is what is going on with him. I don't know.
I remembered the fourth topic from last night and it was the topic of the perfect man, which came to me when thinking about Hubby from the movie 9 Tenths, which I sort of disected in my last blog. Blog? Why do I have to call this darn thing a blog? When I was twelve this very same kind of thing was called a diary.
Anyway Hubby from 9 Tenths made me think about the perfect male and really, that movie shattered the illusion on both fronts. The exe Hubby was a weakling, prideful but he was also very sweet too. The other dude, Mr Fix it, the rustic meanie who was also kind of sweet, they both proved that all types of males, alpha, non alpha and wannabe alpha males, not a one of them is a perfect male. So, that in itself can't really be a topic because, as such, the perfect male doesn't actually exist does he?
I think he is a thing of myth and legend. You know, we see a character in a movie who may even be based on some character out of a story of old and we think that he would be the perfect male. But that character was made up probably by some non alpha male (I'm kidding) in the first place.
No, seriously, you have to feel just a little bit sorry for the modern man. He has pretty much been rendered obsolete because there are not many facets of the perfect male that cannot be substitued with something else via a credit card.
You can hire a man to mow the lawns, fix the car, babysit the kids, donate the means to get the kids that you'll eventually hire the male sitter for, and you can even buy a guy to date. And all of those aforementioned males are perfect and they are perfect because they fullfil the specific function that you paid for and that is it.
Perfection=fullfilling their intended role
In the real world, you won't find a man who is perfect. Sure movie stars are sometimes quite appealing, but think about this for a moment. That man earns his living by pretending; by playing. I mean, isn't that every man's dream? Okay, well not every man's dream, but let us face it, the most seriously good looking men who walk the plant have been zapped up by the world of acting. That too can be said for the most seriously good looking women amongst us.
I am the first to admit that the concept of 'good looking' is subjective. I do not in any way find Brad Pitt good looking. If I got to choose between going on a hike with the Hunchback of Notredame through sleet and snow or going to dinner with Brad Pitt, I'd be more moved by compassion rather than aesthetics and would go with Hunchy. An evening with Brad Pitt is not something I would be interested in in the least.
BUT, offer me a dinner date with Gerry Butler or a hike with Hunchy, then, so long as Gerry agreed to make it pizza on the beach, then Gerry would win that one.
The point being that when I say most of the good looking men have been sucked into a life of pretense and acting, what I mean is that a broad spectrum of the good looking men who appeal to a broad spectrum of woman have been...Well, you get my point.
So that leaves the rest of us average Joes. Okay, so there are a lot of beautiful people out there who are not working in the world of pretense. A lot of them live in the real world, but they are not perfect.
And back to these male actors, who wants to seriosuly date a man who is an expert at pretense, who can turn the tears on right on cue? Now everyone will be thinking that I want to date Gerry Butler but am afraid that I am not good enough or that he will cry to get out of it.
Listen to me and listen to me good, I could give Gerry a run for his money any day of the week and probably come out on top...ha ha ha. No, I am not really the kind of girl that has that kind of attitude. What I mean is that it has nothing to do with whether I am good enough for Gerry Butler. It has nothing to do with me thinking that I'm not either. It really has nothing to do with Gerry at all.
It has to do with this image of the perfect man that ordinary men simply cannot compete with. But thing is, guys, we KNOW that the perfect guy doesn't exist and we are not ACTUALLY looking for him. And yet men act as though we are and sometimes we treat them that way. Although you will never hear me scream at the guy on a date, "GERRY BUTLER WOULD NEVER DO THAT!"
Mostly because I rarely date.
Last date was...hm...a while ago. 2000 I believe.
Begs the question of why I am even speaking about finding the perfect man as it seems that I do not possess the ability to find any man, Gerry, perfect, imperfect or otherwise. But the truth to be told, I got a bit tired of the whole thing and it seems I have stayed tired of it. Maybe I just found other things to occupy my time.
The pursuit of the perfect man is something all women do indulge in at some point or another. And initially when we meet that new guy who makes us go weak at the knees, who has the most gorgeous eyes, handsome face and beautiful hands we do perceive him as perfect. That's what we tell our girlfriends, "Oh Gerry's perfect."
But once he has forgotten to call a couple of times, yelled at you for scratching his car or taking too long to get ready to go out or for eyeing up the waiter (whatever) the gloss soon wears off and Gerry becomes an ordinary guy once more. And hello you, Madam, you no longer possess the ability to walk on water either.
I think I know why non alpha male upset me so much. He reminded me that Gerry Butler's not perfect! ha ha ha ha ha ha.
laterz
Friday 13th March
I just got done reading my post from the 9th. Seriously, whatever medication I am on, I need to take more! Ha ha ha.
I do not know what possessed me to go off on a rant about alpha males and the perfect man. I do think that Gerry Butler is awfully cute for a blue eyed man and I am single, so I am allowed to think that. Even if I were married, would it still be okay to think he was kind of cute? I don't know. When I was married I was so busy trying to keep up with my life with my husband that I hardly had time to sit down and think about much of anything.
I used to write when I was married. I wrote a lot but I never once allowed my husband to read anything that I had written. Something really funny happened once though while I was engaged to him when he DID get his hands on something I had written.
My husband, well he was my fiancee at that time, was looking through some of my stuff one day, you know, the box of junk you carry around and you don't really know what's in it? The box you carry around and when your boyfriend/fiancee/ significant other/husband asks, "Why do you keep this?" You respond to him, "Tradition mostly."
Anyway so my fiancee went through my box of junk and found something in there that even I didn't know was in there. Keep in mind I am talking about 1992 at the time. He found my diary from 1984.
I was seventeen in 1984.
You know, the book type that you used to write absolutely everything in and used to hide like it was the Holy Grail and would die trying to protect? The one that needed no password to get into. The one where just a push of a magic button was not enough to make it instantly disappear from prying eyes. Wow, I wish in 1984 I could have seen my fiancee coming. I seriously do, well I did in 1992 around the 4th of April at around 8.00pm one raining Autumn night.
I should have known that something was up. My fiancee had been sitting there for quite some time simply reading. Now, my fiancee NEVER read. He hated reading and was, in fact, not terribly smart when it came to reading, and my first clue should have been the fact that the book in his hand was entitled, "Transandental Meditation." Now, he was not even smart enough to be able to read the title of the book, nor would he have even been able to tell me what it meant. He was great with numbers; brilliant in fact. But as a reader, he was about as smart as a marmite sandwhich, which, alas, rendered him smart enough to read the rantings and secret thoughts of an insecure seveteen year old girl, which he had hidden inside the book he was holding.
So he had my diary. It was a little red book and I always hated that diary because it was so darn small. Anyway so I was colouring in a huge poster thing. I was into those doodlearts, the really huge ones back then and was sitting at the table.
Anyway, suddenly out of nowhere my fiancee asks me, "Remember that night at the pub when I pointed that guy Nathan out to you?"
I look over at my fiancee and ask, "Who?"
He goes, "Nathan."
I'm like, "What in the world are you talking about?"
He gets all exasperated and snaps at me, "Nathan C. Remember that night at the pub when I asked you if you were ever intimate with him?"
I look at him and go, "Ah, THAT Nathan."
He smiles and nods. "Yeah. Well, you told me no you weren't, right?"
I sense entrapment and danger in the air. Not sure why and so I fumbled and mumbled some kind of incoherent non commital response to him.
Doesn't work. He says again, "You told me you were never intimate with him. Right."
I put no question mark there because he wasn't asking me a question, he was accusing me. But I answered as though it was a question and I lied my face off, just as I had the very first time he ever asked me about Nathan.
We were in the pub and Nathan was staring at me. My fiancee noticed and asked who he was. I made the dumb mistake of saying, "Oh, that's Nathan C." When I should have just said, "Dunno!"
He was like, "How do you know him?"
I gave a non commital shrug. That was when he posed the question, which I lied about.
I lied because by then I knew my fiancee pretty well and I knew what would happen to Nathan if I had done anything but lied. I was protecting Nathan more than anything.
You see, my fiancee was not the perfect man. Far from it. He was a cheater, a drinker, a gambler and a bald faced liar. He was also extremely possessive and many a man got his chops beat, literally from even just looking at me at the wrong time. I also got my chops beat on several occasions for accidentally happening to be looking at something on whose path some poor man happened to be standing on. The rule with my fiancee? The biggest rule of all? I had no past.
So, I am sitting at the table and he is looking at me. "Well? Were you intimate with him or not?"
I sighed loudly as I looked at the man sitting on the couch. The man I had loved. The father of my youngest child. The very same man who was masquerading as my ever loving fiancee in the hope of becoming my husband one day (aren't you supposed to marry first and then have the baby?...anyway) and I did the only thing I knew how to do in order to stay safe. I lied. I looked straight at him and said, "Of course not!"
This was around the same time as a little red book came flying toward my face at a fast rate of knots. The same little red book I had forgotten I even still had. The same little red book I had been meaning to burn for quite some years if I were ever to actually see it again. I mean, who misplaces a diary for crying out loud? Doh! Me, that's who.
My fiancee screamed at me from where he was sitting. "YOU WERE SO! YOU WERE WITH HIM IN 1984!" My fiancee jumped to his feet and screamed and yelled at me some more and slapped me and called me a host of unusual names, none of them nice.
Do you know how pathetic that sounds, "Yes you were, in 1984," when it is now 1992 and you have only been with the guy who is screaming this at you for just on two years? If I had not known him thoroughly by then I might well have laughed hysterically until I was a human ball of of shaking laughter hunched up on the floor.
Alas, it was no laughing matter then, but on any other day, it is funny as and I am laughing now!
At the time though, I didn't even bother trying to point out that it had been in 1984, not yesterday, last week, last month, last year or even five years ago. I knew that there was no point.
As he was standing over me slapping me, swearing at me, calling me names, pulling my hair, trying to shove me off the chair and vowing revenge upon Nathan, all I could think about was the whereabouts of my green diary from 1985!
Ah, them were the days.
But some men are funny like that aren't they? They do not like you to have had a past.
I got into trouble on many occasions with my husband for having a past. One time was particularly nasty. I had a lovely friend called Eddie. He was a male model and he was gorgeous. But, Eddie was just a friend.
Anyway, I was out at the pub (we didn't go often to the pub, at least I didn't and I only went to play pool) with fiancee when out of the blue, Eddie shows up. He had been down in Wellington working or whatever. Anyway, he saw me sitting at the table with fiancee and he gets a chair and plonks it right in between us and sits with his back to my fiancee. Eddie had heard things about him and he didn't much care for him. One thing about Eddie, he always exercised good taste!
So Eddie sits there speaking to me while fiancee is sitting behind him absolutely fuming! I dared not to look at my fiancee at all. He had this look he would give me when he was real angry with me. The look not only let me know that he was angry, but it also informed me, in explicit detail, what was going to happen to me at his hands once he got me alone. Scary stuff.
After a while Eddie decides to take me up to the dance floor to dance and so we did. I had a great time with Eddie. I already knew that my goose was cooked, hung for a sheep as a lamb and all that. I already knew what was going to happen to me when we got home, if we made it that far before my fiancee totally lost it, so I danced with Eddie for a while. In my own way, I kind of wanted fiancee to know that he was not the only man who found me desirable. You see, he had this annoying habit of, when he was mad, telling me that I was lucky to have him as no other man would ever bother with me, which begs the question as to why he even cared if there was some other guy taking an interest in me back in 1984, but whatever. And at the time, in 1992, I thought it would do him well to have a wakeup call. But seeing me dancing with Eddie wasn;t his wakeup call, it actually turned out to be mine because later that night he tried to break my neck. The only reason he did not succeed was that he was stone drunk and I was stone cold sober. If I had been drinking and gotten mad at him while he was attacking me, he probably would have killed me.
He was a lot of the reason I did not drink. Not even socially. I have always been well aware of just how unpredictable people can be under the influence of alcohol. Most people just get a little bit happy or maybe a little silly, but every now and then one or two humans get angry. My fiancee was that type of drinker and so had my step father been. I knew that if I were to drink, even just one drink around my fiancee when he was tanked that if he went me that I would go him right back. That I would become ten foot tall and bullet proof and would not think too far ahead of the consequences. I knew that I had to keep my whits about me when around him and thus when he did lose it and start hitting me, I could stay in control and not do anything to provoke him to further or worse violence against me.
And yes, knowing all of this I married him.
When asked why a woman went ahead and married a man like that, most women will respond, "But I loved him."
I did not love my fiancee the day that I married him. There was maybe a small part of him that I still loved. The gentle man that every now and then put in an appearance. But even sober my fiancee could be very cold, cruel and calculating and there was little about him that I even liked any more.
I married him because I was scared.
You see, I had no father to notice what this man was doing to me. No father to notice or care that his daughter was afraid. No father to say, "Sarah, you don't love him, he hurts you and I'm going to end up killing him if you stay with him, so if not for your sake then for mine, leave him and come home."
There was no home to go home to. No family to run to. No father or mother to do anything about anything. My fiancee was it! I knew what would happen to me if I married him. What I didn't know was what would happen to me if I didn't. Not knowing was far more scary than knowing. Sometimes better the devil you know than the one you don't. At least that is what I thought when I was 26.
So I as I am walking up the aisle I'm staring at this man who is about to become my husband and I am hating him so badly! It had been my hope that maybe things would break down before we actually got married. That maybe he would meet someone else and leave me.
He didn't.
I hardly remember a word of our vows, although what I do know is that I went into it with every intention of somehow making it work. I had married him forever. I knew that and I had accepted that. I meant my vows and while I was with him, I kept them always.
Needless to say, it didn't work out and he left me in the end. Well, it is hard to say who left who, not that it is a competition. I kind of just let go of him and let him do whatever it was that he wanted. I ended up moving out of our house and in with friends. He spent some time trying to get me back. I told him that he would have to attend marriage guidence with me, parenting classes, AA and anger management. He asked me, "If I do all of that, will you come back to me?"
I replied, "If you do all of that then I will think about coming back to you."
He said, "Oh well I might as well go and shoot myself."
I replied, "Oh, can I watch?"
That was the end of that.
Perfect man? Who knows, maybe he IS out there somewhere.
Laterz
Saturday 14th March
After I wrote the entry dated the 13th I went away thinking about some major things that really did not make sense to me anymore.
Don't get me wrong, they once made sense to me, Maybe it was a long time ago and I was a way different person back then, but still, they made sense. It is truth to say that I am glad that they no longer make any kind of logical sense to me now but still, I am trying to understand the person back then whom I obviously once was.
What woman stays with a man who abuses her in every facet of their relationship. By this I mean he is physically abusive, psychologically abusive, emotionally absent to a degree, drinks to the point of stupor, gambles and has affairs?
What kind of a woman stays with a man like that?
The first time he ever hit me I should have left. By staying, I was silently telling him that hitting me was okay.
The first time I ever found out that he had cheated, I should have left. By staying I let him know that it was okay to disrespect me like that.
The first time he called me names and swore at me I should have left. By staying I sort of let him think that I had no self worth.
Let us face it, when a woman stays in a relationship like that, she enables the man to continue on in his abusive behaviour. She gives him permission to keep on doing those things because by staying, she makes it okay.
Someone once said to me that you have to start out how you mean to continue and they were right. Whatever way you start out, chances are that that is the way that it will always be, but there are always exceptions to the rule.
So why did I stay?
Partly, to begin with, I was in denial about the sleeping around that he was doing. I used to tell myself that I could not convict the guy just on someone else's word. I used to tell my friends that when I actually caught him in bed with another woman, then and only then would I leave.
That's a cop out on several levels.
First of all you know that he is never going to be stupid enough to allow you to catch him in bed with another woman. Second of all, when you do catch him you simply jump to the next thing that allows you to reason it all away, and that, my dear friends, is second chances. You give him so many second chances that by the time you're done, he has slept with every woman in a 30 mile radius of your house and you are still with him!
Friends told me that they knew who he had been sleeping with, when and where and yet still, I disbelieved them and believed him. Disbelieved everyone who had nothing to gain from lying and believed the one who had everything to gain by lying. Even when he was caught out absolutely without a shadow of a doubt, I still stayed.
How did he get absolutely caught out? He got my best friend pregnant. I found out when the child was three months old, that is how deep my denial was. I was the kind of person whom so long as it wasn't in my face I could ignore it and pretend it away. When the baby turned out to be his I thought, "Okay well he definitely did it that time, but that might have been the only time and besides, it was twelve months ago."
As for his hitting, that was kind of on the same level as his cheating although it was a little harder to ignore. Most of the times he hit me or lashed out at me he was drunk. That would make no difference to me now, but it did back then. I used to convince myself that if I had just kept my big mouth shut and not annoyed him at the wrong time then I would never have got hurt. Somehow I convinced myself that it was me who makes and wakes the monster. I was good at that and he was good at agreeing with me. Most guys are usually very sorry after they have hit their partner or at least they have the good decency to pretend to be sorry and apologise whilst promising never to do it again. My boyfriend/fiancee/husband never did.
That was the difference between him and other men. He never apologised, never feigned remorse or promised never to do it again. I do not know if I respected him for his strange kind of honesty or hated him for being a right brute. To this day I do not know.
Getting into a screaming match with him when he was drunk was not a smart option to take and it took a few beltings before I cottoned on to that. Having yelling matches when he was sober was not really something that I could entertain either, even though in a war of words I would win hands down, because when he was drunk one of those conversations might come back to him and I would get mine then.
This is not to say that I never engaged in a war of words or never entered into conflict with him when he was drunk. I did. I stupidly did that every now and then because sometimes I just got so mad that I had to express what I was feeling consequences be damned. But most of the time, if a girlfriend was over visiting and he had been out drinking I would look at my friend and say, "This is where we shut our mouths, say nothing and just let him stagger off to bed."
My friends found that solution disgusting and declared that I was letting him away with blue murder. It was at that point that I would explain that if we did not do exactly as I said then there would actually be blue murder. Mine, to be precise.
Oftentimes he would go out and not come home for days at a time. By this I mean that he would take the car keys and tell me he was just going out for cigarettes and then he wouldn't come back. One time when he went out for smokes he was gone for five days! Of course I was really mad by the time he got home. I usually hadn't slept or eaten while he was gone and had basically survived on cigarettes and coffee so was overtired, super hyped up and angry by the time he showed up.
We'd get into a huge fight and I will admit it, I instigated those fights at that time. I was just so mad that he could be so careless! He'd take it for a little while and then he'd snap and put me back in my place. When he put me back in my place I almost always ended up apologising to him.
What for?
I have no idea.
But somehow, after the fight, it always ended up somehow being my fault. And I am a peace maker. I have always been that way. I hate conflict and I hate bad feelings and find them almost impossible to live with.
Knowing that he had been with other women made me feel quite sick. It especially made me sick when after we had the ugly "welcome home" fight, I would have to be intimate with him to appease him and to broker peace for the rest of the house. He'd fall alseep and I would sit out on the couch feeling more miserable than I did the last time it happened.
And the lying.
He was a professional liar and it used to be terribly hard to catch him out and even when I did catch him out, it did me no good anyway. What was I going to do with the truth? I mean where could I go with that? That's right, nowhere!
Eventually a situation like that takes a kind of toll on the abused. After five years of it any love I had ever felt for him had been successfully snuffed out by him and all that was left was hate and loathing. Yes I hated him and it is very lucky that we do not have the right to have guns here in New Zealand or else I would be in jail right now doing twenty years for because I am telling you, there are a couple of occasions that I can remember feeling quite at peace with the idea of causing him great and permanent harm!
Especially after being hit, screamed at, called names and all the other things that he used to do. In those moments I could quite easily have gotten pushed too far. Fortunately I never did, but I used to find myself hoping he'd have a car accident and never be heard from again, which is awful I know, but I did.
I was so concerned about those thoughts that I mentioned them to the marriage guidence person I saw when we split. My husband never turned up to one meeting, but I went to about three before I gave up. But at one of those meetings I said to the guy, "Sometimes I worry about my thoughts."
He asked me, "In what way?"
"Well," said I, "sometimes I wish that he would have an accident and disappear forever."
The guy smiled at me. "Sarah," he says, "every woman in a marriage such as yours thinks that. It is perfectly normal. Why, if I had five cents for every woman who has said that to me, I'd be a wealthy man."
I sat there staring at the guy thinking, "Wow, you must have really peeved off a lot of women!" But then I realised what he meant. He meant that I was not the only one to think that and in fact it was quite a normal reaction. It doesn't last though. It washes away with some distance between the abuser and the abused and it did wash away after a few weeks.
It washed away even more when I saw how he was treating the new woman he was with. The new woman was my best friend who had gotten pregnant to him. He treated her worse than he ever treated me and he got to the place where he was doing it to her faster than he had with me. I drew some kind of strange comfort from that.
Not comfort from the fact that she was being hurt, but comfort in the knowledge that the problem was probably mostly him and not actually me. I had thought that I had caused everything that he was doing. It was a relief to discover that I had not. But I have to admit that it put me off male relationships for quite a time. I have never really gotten into a serious relationship since I split with him in 1994.
Sure I have attempted at least one relationship with that Westie guy, but it did not last long and was over as soon as I saw any kind of warning signs that it might be a repeat performance. I swore I'd never live like I had again and that I would stay with no man who gave even a hint of being that way. So I guess I learned something. I guess I learned to be strong.
I do not recognise the person I was who was with the man I married. When I look into the mirror I can see no hint of her at all. How could I stay there and let him treat me like I was nothing?
That's insane!
laterz
Sunday 14th March
Do you ever find yourself wondering how life worked out the way that it did? Do you ever find yourself wishing it had turned out differently even though that is kind of daft on a whole bunch of different levels that I couldn't even begin to explain them all and why.
Have you ever had your heart pine after something so badly that it aches and your stomach is in constant knots and you can't eat right or even sleep well. And all the while it is going on you know that there isn't a darn thing that you can do about it.
No, they weren't questions. Merely statements of fact worded like questions and yet not presented as such via the absence of question marks because I know that there aren't any answers. All I seem to want to do right now is cry. Nothing feels right any more. Everything feels like it is up in the air and yet nothing has really changed all that much. Not sure what is wrong with me at the moment.
I am reminded of something that the character of David Gale said just before he was executed and yet, oddly enough, I cannot remember how it was worded and I do not have the DVD any more to even go and check. Maybe I could google it? Yeah google, the master of the virtual universe. Need any answer relating to anything internet-ish and you can go and ask the grand master google.
I went to google and pretty much looked up everything but what David Gale said in the Life of David Gale.
Okay so I went back to google and found the quote. It goes like this: 'Then there comes a point - a moment - in life when your mind outlives its desires, its obsessions, when your habits survive your dreams...'
I thought that that was quite profound when I first heard it, but now it strikes me as somewhat quite silly. I do not even know whay I bothered to go look it up. But I think in essence what he was saying was that he was tired of life. That life no longer possessed the lure that it once did. You know, kind of like striving for dreams and goals just didn't hold any appeal, as though they were redundent as a reason for being alive. And if that is the case, then what is next?
And is it a conscious thought or a result of emotions that are just so strong and so sad that he no longer possesses the energy to think beyond the sadness to the dreams and ambitions?
I do not know.
Just something about it struck a chord with me when I heard it and I actually cried because it was somehow the way I feel every now and then. Glimpses of happiness are not enough. We wish that happiness was the big picture, know what I mean? No, that wasn't a question either, not really. Life cannot be all sunshine and roses, we know that, but when the mind becomes tired and the heart grows weary, it is all you can do to even try to muster up a thought for life that needs tending to. The things we do that go to make up a life; eating, sleeping, praying, dreaming, doing, playing, fighting, crying and whatever else things we humans engage in. I think that is what David Gale was saying. Or maybe it was simply the character's way of calmly resigning himself to his fate.
It is an interesting movie though so if you ever get a chance to watch it I highly recommend that you do. I always spell that word wrong, recommend. I have a sneaking suspicion that it is supposed to be spelled reccomend. Who knows?
Yes, that last one was a question.
I deliberately and calculatingly exercised the devil of memory today by watching some videos in YouTube on women who had survived incest. That is that they had been attacked by their fathers, okay, raped by their fathers and listening to their stories left me feeling incredibly upset.
But what happened to me was not really incest because the man was no blood relative of mine whatsoever.
Does that mek it any better? I dont know. It is amazing what things human beings can convince themselves of when it becomes necessary for survival to do so.
I have been crying now I guess for about an hour. For me it is difficult to contend with the memories because I have only snippets of memories of it happening to me and yet I have the knowledge that it absolutely did happen and the only one who did not know for sure was me. Everyone else from back then who was there knew that it had happened.
To think upon it, I feel very betrayed. I do not know by whom, just that I feel very betrayed. I know that my step father put my birth mother on notice that he was going to do this to me, but I do not feel angry with her because she behaved in the only way I ever expected that she would. That is that she let him. She stood back and she let him hurt me in that way glad for the opportunity to exact some revenge and because it is about the level of behaviour that I would expect from her, I do not feel betrayed by her. She did not disappoint my level of expectation upon her. That sounds so awful, but it is true.
How can you be disappointed in a person when they act in the only way you know that they will act?
I know that people are very uncomfortable with this topic. I know that they would rather that victims shut up, put up with their memories and move along like nothing ever went wrong. I know that that is how I feel about it and because I cannot remember a coherent entire episode with my step father, I tend not to think upon it either and perhaps pretend it away like it never happened.
The problem is that it did happen and I know that it happened and I cannot imagine how one is supposed to contend with that knowledge. I do not know how one is supposed to reconcile themselves with it. I find that I spend a little while staring at it as though it is an oncoming truck. Yeah, kind of like a rabbit who sits on the road in the path of the truck and watches it racing toward them. Unlike the rabbit though, I never let it hit me. I jump out of the way just before it gets me. I do not know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.
You see, when the rabbit stays in the path of the truck, the rabbit get squished. End of story. Perhaps I am afraid that I will get squished too and that is why I jump out of the way. What might happen is I stay there and let it hit me? I do not know and I am too afraid to try and find out.
Anyway.
So, you see, because I had snippets of memories of these terrible events, I knew that it was someone close to us that had hurt me and for some reason I got it into my head that it must have been my mother's father. My Papa. I put a storyline together in my head, that made sense, about who did it to me. I suppose I did it to create some kind of logical process to this whole thing, and even that is not what I mean. I syppose I tried to make a coherent picture out of snippets of pieces of the puzzle. I supposed that because my Papa had lived with us until I was just five years old and yet I have not one memory of him I kind of wove that into this coherent picture that I was trying to form in my mind. I had not one memory of my Papa. My siblings, whom I lived with on and off for the first seven years of my life, they all remember him, even my younger sister who is younger than me by seventeen months. I pretty much worked out that if she could remember him clearly, then I most certainly should. The fact that I could not left me contending with the idea that I did not remember him because I blocked him out. When I asked myself why I blocked him out, the only answer that I could come up with was maybe I blocked him out because the memories I had of him were too horrible to remember.
When I found out last year that it was my step father and not my Papa I felt terrible on many levels. I felt guilty because I had blamed a man whom everyone else had said was a decent and good man. No one ever had a bad word to say about him. I know this because some years ago I went on a kind of adventure to find out what I could about my Papa. No one had anything bad to say about him, not even remotely. And even though his personality type did not seem to fit the profile of an abuser (is there really any reliable abuser profile?) I did have my doubts as to his guilt. But when no one will tell you anything then all you can do is slowly try to fit the pieces together yourself and that is very dangerous ground, as I found out early last year.
When the truth was told to me, it was told so calmly, as though the person were speaking about the weather. My little sister made one of her mercy dashes to my house...she always does the dash part and I always do the mercy...She only ever comes here when she needs something. But anyway she came to the house. I had spoken to her on the phone about two nights earlier about the fact that I had worked out or somehow remembered that it was my step father who had abused me. She had gotten onto the phone to her older sister who confirmed that yes he had done that to me. She had known about it for years and yet said nothing.
When my little sister got to my house that night she confirmed to me beyond all reasonable doubt that yes it was him when she told me what her older sister had said.
Within moments of her speaking those words she moved onto the next topic, the reason for her visit, as though we had just spoken about the weather. While she was calmly moving along, I felt my entire world come to a screeching stop in much the same way as a car stops when it hits a concrete wall doing 100 kmph. I wanted to vomit, cry, scream and pass out and all those other horrid emotions you feel when receiving news like that. Well, you know what? I do not know if they are the normal emotions or not. I do not personally know anyone who has received news like that so I have no benchmark by which to measure the normalcy of my reaction.
But the point is that she moved along like it meant nothing. I kept staring at her and I kept trying to say, "I just can't believe it." Which in Sarahnese means, "This is just so horrid and even though it is true and I know it to be true, pinch me just to see if I really can't wake up from the nightmare this time or not."
But she didn't seem to notice or care. It was almost as though it brought her some kind of satisfaction, or she had just become so hardened to the traumas of this life that she no longer reacted to them. I am not sure which one. We have never been close enough for me to work out some kind of benchmark by which to measure her reactions either.
We do not see each other enough to really work out anything about each other. Maybe once a year in a good year.
Anyway, I am not really sure what I am trying to say at all, so maybe I should simply stop now.
Again, not a question.
Laterz
Saturday 21st March
I got paid the nicest and yet scariest compliment today. A person in youtube sent me a message and she said, "You are truly a proverbs 31 woman of God. Proverbs 31:10
10>Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies."
When I first read that I felt like she had gotten me all wrong. Very wrong. And immediately to mind came all the people I thought that that was probably way more appropriate to describe as.
You see, I screw up all the time. All the time I get things wrong or I do things wrong or I say things the wrong way. I seem to concentrate so much effort on not screwing up that I seem to make things worse. But then I thought about it some more, and I wondered if it isn't actually about how many times you fall down, but how many times you get back up again. Maybe that is what it really is all about. Maybe that is what means more to God, that we get back up again?
I do not know. I am simply thinking out loud. But I know that I desire to be the person she described me as and maybe I am like that woman but I am just too harsh on myself to see it?
I am my harshest critic. I am my worst enemy. I know this well. I look at other people when they make mistakes and I understand it, forgive it, forget it and move along. But with me, it is like I keep this ledger or something about how many times I get it wrong and how many times I get it right and I'm telling you, I am way in the red some days. Way in the red.
Maybe I take everything too hard? Maybe I am too hard on me. I don't know.
When I was a kid and foster placements used to fall over and I had to be moved, no one ever told me why and so I used to make up the reasons why in my head. I always blamed me. I thought about all the stuff I did wrong, things that other kids do wrong too, but somehow it seemed so much more serious when I goofed up, and I tried to invent an answer that made sense. And not being told what went wrong or why the placement was over, that was hard for me because I have always needed answers. I suppose we all do.
Maybe I blamed me all the time because it was easier that way. If I blamed me then that meant that I had had some control where I actually had none, but convincing myself that I had control and that I caused it made me able to live with it.
Maybe I owned the cause and the consequences of what went wrong because that way I only had me to blame. I did not have to accept that some people are simply shits! Excuse me, I probably should not have used that word but another more appropriate term fails me for the moment, brotha.
It seems so pointless for things to have happened for nothing and maybe owning what went wrong made it not for nothing. I do not know and I am not asking. Again, I am simply thinking aloud.
I used to wonder what I had contributed to the situation to make it go so bad. And I never let myself off the hook.
You know I'd come home and without warning find the welfare car outside the house on the curb or in the driveway with all my stuff loaded into it and the very first thought I had was, "Uh oh, what did I do wrong this time?"
And yet, in looking back, those situations, every single one of them, were so complex that the why is so convoluted that I do not think anyone could ever truly work it out. So it seems pointless to me now that I ever asked myself why it happened and always tried to pin the blame on me. I was kid, for crying out loud, I had no control.
And yet, that kind of thing established the pattern of when a compliment is given I automatically think, "No, you have it wrong. That isn't me. I don't do anything right." And I often think that even when, upon honest evaluation, I find that the compliment was actually deservedly given.
I do not know. Sometimes I confuse even me! But I would like to know what God thinks and I did ask Him to tell me. But even with an answer I find myself wondering, "Was that God or just human coincidence?"
And I ask this even though I have always been a firm believer that coincidence is actually God's calling card. His way of saying, "I heard you and I was here."
I don't know. Maybe I should just shut up now, brotha!
laterz
Sunday 22nd March
I was thinking about a whole bunch of things today. One of them was that I married a man who played Toto's "I Think I Can Stand You Forever" as our song to walk out of our wedding as new husband and wife to. And he married a woman who let him!
What made me think of that?
I don't know.
Why?
Don't know that either.
There was all kinds of things I was going to talk about but once I got here, I just couldn't think of a one.
Laterz
Monday 23rd March
I was listening to a song today and it reminded me of something that most of us would prefer to forget.
That gut wrenching breakup with somone of the opposite sex whom you absolutely adored. The one that you highly suspected might actually have been “the one”.
You know, the one who makes you go weak at the knees and, from a girly point of view, is so good looking it seems almost a sin, beautiful kind brown eyes and gorgeous hands. I know, so sappy, but they are the things I look for in a guy first. Well, obviously it is totally cool if he is good looking, but the eyes and the hands are the first benchmarks for me. If he passes those, then there is hope.
Anyway, you know what I mean. For the first little while you feel nervous around him all the time. That is one of my benchmarks too, in finding out if a guy might be “the one”. If I do not get butterflies around him, then obviously he’s not that special. I know, I probably have it totally barking wrong, but I never had a mother to tell me what it is supposed to be like, so my benchmarks are self-designed based on personal previous experience which, at this point I must agree have, at times, been total unmitigated disasters. But I am a tryer and you have to love a tryer, right?
Not necessarily. But we will get to that later.
You know, “the one”.
The one you can’t wait to get phonecalls from, if you actually have a phone. And every time the phone rings your heart leaps into your mouth and then when it is not him, your heart sinks right down into the soles of your shoes. The one who could turn up to your house dressed only in a sack and you would think he was still the niftiest dresser in town. The one who, no matter what he does, no matter how stupid or goofy, it’s okay. The one who causes you break into a rendition of Jodeci’s Cherish because you are walking on air and, despite the content of the song, you actually feel extremely happy. The one you can imagine growing old with. The one whom no one else after him can ever quite measure up to.
Anyway, I think you get the picture.
Well, I had one of those, believe it or not. The guy I thought might have been “the one”. I did not see him coming and that was kind of nice.
I met him at a barbeque with some friends. I wasn’t looking for him and I didn’t even notice him at all while we were there. But he saw me and he apparently liked what he saw. He liked what he saw enough to ask someone else who was there who I was and where I lived. This was pre-celphone days. Getting a phone number back in them days was slightly more tricky than it is today. No internet, no celphones. People pretty much lived in snowdomes then. Especially if one did not actually have a landline or for you English folks a hardline.
Funny, over here where I live, a hardline is something that is drawn as a last resort and you had better not cross it Mister or else. It is definitely not something you use to call someone. I wonder what a landline is in English-ese?
Anyway so he found out who I was and where I lived and I was totally oblivious!
I got home after the barbeque and settled down to watch a long boring evening of TV, yes this was back in the days where I still watched TV.
I had just gotten comfy on the sofa when there was a knock at the door. I was a little perplexed and thought maybe my friends had come back for coffee or something. I opened the door and there he was standing there. He had the most beautiful brown eyes and gorgeous hands and he was cute. He was so incredibly cute that I cannot even begin to tell you just how much. But instead of getting a friendly hello out of me, my mind instantly registered him as someone I had glanced at at the barbeque and I very suspiciously asked, “What do you want? What are you doing here?”
He looked at me and smiled (my knees like totally almost buckled when he did that) and he said, “Thought I’d pop in for coffee with you.”
I thought to myself, “This one’s a brave soul.”
Think about it.
How many guys are brave enough to turn up to a girl’s (whom they do not know) place just because he’s taken a liking to her and knocks on the door? Not many, brotha. Not many at all.
I looked at him for a few moments while a tetragillion questions about him instantly flashed through my mind, as they tend to do in moments like that. Or maybe they don’t. Maybe it is just me. My suspicious nature and all that. My over analytical mind. Thinking things to death in an instant as opposed to just thinking, ‘Okay, this is nice. Kind of exciting.’
So he comes inside. I take him to the kitchen and tell him to take a seat and I put the jug on. It boils and I make him coffee after asking him how he takes it and he cutely responds, “In a cup!”.
I laugh, trying to be cute and are taken aback when I realise it actually came out goofy! I glance at him and he doesn’t seem to notice or maybe it is that at that very moment in time a tetragillion thoughts flash through his mind, the top of the list being, “What the heck was I thinking!”
So I take his coffee to the table while goofy laugh still rings inside my head. I sit down opposite him and stare at his cute face and his brown eyes and the butterflies start and I’m like, “What am I doing?” I look away and then look back at him. Then and only then do I think to even ask him his name.
He tells me his name and it is the most perfect name I have ever heard. And, fortunately, for him, his name was not Brian. Had it have been that name then I would have immediately escorted him out of my house, but that is a whole other story.
So I sit there thinking about his name, his eyes, his face and his hands and I start imagining what it might be like to kiss him. The fact that I am sitting there thinking that whilst staring at him suddenly penetrates my brain and I remember that two seconds ago his lips were moving, indicating that he was probably asking me something and I totally missed it. So he is staring at me and I blush and he wonders why. He kind of smiles and I think, ‘Oh no, this guy can read my mind.’
He tilts his head to one side, smiles and asks, “Well?”
I was way too busy staring at the way his fingers curled perfectly around the coffee mug. I was watching the way he ran his fingers down the sides of his face every now and then, indicating to me that at some point this guy sported a beard. I was thinking to myself that I am really glad that he shaved it off. I was watching the way his slight Adam’s Apple moved as he gently spoke. I notice the way his hair falls just above his eyes every now and then and the way he pushes it back. I watch the way the reflection of the light dances in his lovely eyes and I am totally mesmerised by him.
I stare at him totally lost again so he repeats the question and to this day I do not remember what it was!
The coffee is over way too quick, but he asks me out before he leaves. To me, that is a very good sign.
I lay in bed that night thinking about him trying to remember having seen him at the barbeque. I was wondering why I could not remember him even being there. Yet I knew that he must have been because I recognised him as soon as I saw him on my doorstep. I lay there laughing to myself about how lost in my thoughts I got. The goofy laugh. The losing track of everything he was saying. The way the light danced in his eyes. His gentle voice. His polite manners. In the end I shut my eyes and drifted off to sleep.
Anyway some weeks zoom by getting to know him and when I say zoom, I mean that they zoomed. He became a part of my life very quickly. I fell head over heels with the guy. I was smitten. He was ‘the one’.
Every time he took me out somewhere he was just so polite. I had never known a guy to be like that. He opened doors, always asked if I was okay, if I wanted or needed anything. Was I warm enough, hungry, bored whatever. He seemed aware of absolutely everything. He was just so...perfect.
Then came the weekend away with him.
Well ‘away’ as in I went to his house for the weekend.
It is at this time that I must point out just how different our perceptions can be to someone else. I mean you think everything is going one way and the person you are with for all those hours perceives that it is going in the total opposite direction. But you don’t talk about it. You both keep going until suddenly you discover that you a careening toward something quite horrid.
I saw the brick wall that we were headed toward while he was driving me home from his house. We hit it suddenly and without warning. He’s driving and I’m staring at his hands on the steering wheel and then at his face, side on profile obviously.
Suddenly and without any hint of a warning he turns to me and says. “This isn’t going to work.”
I look at him as the shock kind of grips me and I’m like, “What?”
He repeats what he says. He adds an addendum to what he has said. “Don’t bother crying because it won’t change my mind. This isn’t going to work and we shouldn’t see each other any more.”
We get to my house and I am still looking at him trying to work out where this all came from. He simply stares at me and says, “See ya.”
I watch him back out of the driveway and that’s about the time the tears do hit me. I go inside and I sit down in the lounge wondering what in the world just happened. I go over and over the weekend in my mind trying to pinpoint exactly what it was that I might have done to cause him to do what he just did. I want to pinpoint it so that I can fix it. I think I stumble upon it and by then I had a landline, so I call him. He doesn’t answer.
A couple of days later I manage to get a hold of him and he tells me he doesn’t want to talk and not to call him again.
I feel sick. I feel desperately sad. I want to kill Jodeci. I feel as though my world has come to a screeching halt. I wonder what it was that I used to do before he showed up on my doorstep and then I wonder what I’m going to do for all the coming years where I’ll never be with him again. I curl up in a ball feeling lost and sick. I want to stay like that forever.
Some weeks go by and I am slowly starting to lift out of the sadness. I still miss him, but I’m doing okay and only crying about eight times a day now. Well, you know what I mean. If you have been there, brotha, then you know.
Suddenly one night out of the blue there’s a knock at the door.
I get my sorry self up off the couch and go answer it expecting it to be Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses or something. Even though it is almost 9.30 at night, I still imagine it is someone like that knocking at my door. I unlock the door and slowly open it. When I see who it is, I cannot believe my eyes. It is him!
I stare at him for a moment, just to be certain he is not wearing a suit and a name tag with Brother Something written on it. Sure as I stand there he has no mate waiting at the bottom of the stairs also wearing a name tag with Brother Something written on it.
I force a smile.
I actually want to scream at him. But I don’t.
I should have.
But I didn’t.
I assumed that he must have had a change of mind. That he had discovered that he missed me as much as I missed him.
He doesn’t wait to be invited inside. He gently pushes past me and goes to the kitchen. I walk into the kitchen and he doesn’t say a word. No, he just grabs me, kisses me and slowly backs me toward my bedroom.
I stupidly let him.
When all is said and done, he gets up and puts his clothes on. I watch him wondering what in the world is going on. As he walks toward my bedroom door he looks back at me and says the most heartbreaking thing I had ever heard to that point in my life; “This doesn’t change anything.”
He opens the door to the porch and is in his car before I even make it to the bedroom door.
I go back and sit on my bed and cry, wondering what in the world just happened here. Why did he come here. What did he really want. I was so totally confused. But the next day my confusion was to be cruelly cured.
My friend who I went to the barbeque with calls in for coffee. She smiles at me and says something like, “You are so toally predictable. Do you know that?”
Clearly at that point in my life I didn’t.
She smiles at me and says, “You had a visitor last night.”
It isn’t a question.
She laughs and adds, “Yeah, he was over at our house last night. M betted him 50 bucks he couldn’t get you into bed again after dumping you like he did. He betted 50 that he could. And judging by the look on your face, he won 50 bucks.”
I simply stared at her.
The rest of her visit was a blur and I do not recall what else we talked about.
I cannot even begin to describe what it felt like to know that he had done that to me. That he had turned me into a bet and thus a joke. If what goes around comes around actually does happen then I am sure that if I thought about it long enough I could find something that I did that might have deserved that kind of treatment at his hands. I know that now and I thought that then. That is why I didn’t get mad at him.
I got mad at me for being stupid, gullible, foolish, unsuspecting and for trusting him. I berated myself for years over that. It was something I never told a soul until a few years ago. I was so embarrassed and humiliated by him. The worst of it was that everyone knew. Everyone.
Anyway, a couple of years later he met his Miss Perfect and she was a nightmare to him. An absolute living breathing nightmare. His life turned to total garbage at her hands and all my friends were saying, “He should have married you.”
All I thought was, there’s no way I would ever marry someone like him.
I ran into him about seven years later. Yes, it is amazing how you can live in a very small town and not see someone else who lives there too for seven years.
At that point I had just been shot rather forcefully out of the butt end of a very bad marriage, but I was feeling pretty good by then. I was going to the gym every day, training hard with no particular goal in mind, but training just the same. I was looking pretty fine then too. In shape, still pretty and able to laugh and have a good time with friends without feeling awkward. Anyway, so I walk into the gym and start doing those pull ups on the bar after a few other things, and I look in the mirror and that was when I saw him.
He saw me too and he smiled.
I looked away and as I continued to do those pullups I thought about what he had done. I glanced at him again and I noticed that he had aged a little bit. His eyes were no longer cute, they were stressed. I finished my pullups and turned around so that I was facing him.
He smiled again.
I didn’t smile back at him.
I looked away at something else and I walked straight past him like I hadn’t even seen him.
Some of the other guys there thought I was pretty cute and they used to teasingly talk to me about going out sometime and that. I remember looking back at them and saying, “In your dreams.”
When I looked back at them I noticed that he was watching and I might have been imagining things here, but his eyes looked sad.
I thought about him a lot around that time because I was training five days a week and he seemed to be there every time I was. I never spoke to him or even acknowledged his presence, Not even once. I played around with the guys and enjoyed the fact that he could see that other guys thought I was something special. I was hoping that he was looking at me and thinking, “Wow, I really blew it.”
I do not know if he did or not, but for me, he was “the one”.
There has never been another “one” since him.
Not even close.
Laterz
Monday 30th March
We all have defining moments in our life, some are stranger than others to be certain, but we have them nonetheless.
Brotha, I'm not talking about that defining moment where you absolutely knew without a shadow of a doubt that you were going to grow up to be a nuclear physicist (did I even spell that right?), the biggest rock star in the word, the most famous actor that ever graced the screen or Prime Minister. It is highly probable that those kinds of defining moments do happen to people along the way, just not to many that we actually personally know. In my case, none at all.
Actually brotha, as a sidebar, if I applied Stanley Milgram's/Kevin Bacon's Six Degrees of Separation theory to my life, you would be stunned at just how close my links are to quite a few famous people, but being that I'm not into that whole, "Do you know so and so," gig, I never talk about it. But if I was to talk about it, you would be amazed! For example though, I have a friend in that state of Missouri who used to take reasonably regular lunches with George W Bush, back in the days that is, not that that is anything that one should take any pride in admitting being how he went all Ghengis Khan on the Constitution. My original point being though that we do not really know too many people at all who had a defining moment that indicated that they would be famous that actually came to pass.
The defining moments I am speaking about are way bigger, in that they really grab your attention, are less important and yet somehow have a greater impact than any of the other possible aforementioned defining moments.
I remember one of my very first defining moments. Okay well maybe defining moments is the wrong terminology, but nevertheless I can find nothing else that explains what I mean.
But the actual moment itself is filled with one element that is inescapable for the person experiencing it and that element is bald faced, cold, hard truth.
Now I am not talking about the kind of, "yes if you jump off that cliff God may well forgive you but you will still be subject to the laws of natural gravity even though you were forgiven" kind of truth. No, that truth is simple and kind, sort of.
The type of truth that I am speaking about is the kind that smacks you in the face so harshly that you think about it for weeks to come and even once you do not think on it so much any more, it still is as much a part of you as your fingers and about as inescapable. In those dark, quiet hours of the night that defining moment that contained that element of bald faced, cold, hard truth revisits every once in a while and it is no less upsetting then than it was when you first realised it.
That is the kind of defining moment that I am speaking of and like I said earlier, maybe 'defining moment' is not quite the correct terminology.
Well I had one of those one Saturday when I was eighteen years old.
I had a group of friends who were bikers. No, they were not Hells Angels or something. They were just a group of guys who owned big bikes and liked to ride around to different places together. They all owned a GSX1100, okay so in the world of big bikes they might seem small, but when I was eighteen, they were massive and I loved them! The bikes, not the guys.
I mean I liked the guys too. They were neat friends and I was always willing to hit the road with them over the weekend and I was usually the only girl allowed to go because I was basically one of the boys. In that group anyway and I admit it, I used to flitter from group to group from time to time. As Mr Burns would say, anyhoo, the guys rocked up to my place on the Friday night and asked if I wanted to go to Thunder Park with them. I had nothing else planned and had just gotten off work for the week and so opted to go.
Thunder Park was about three or four hours away from where we lived by car, which in GSX 1100 terms meant about two hours, so long as there were not too many cops on the road. I had relatively little or no fear in regard to motorbikes and the accidents that can happen on them at that stage of my life. I even used to be a passenger during the drag races we used to have along the loop line out the back of where we lived. One mistake during that and I would have been history but I clearly had friends in high places back then because I never had an accident doing those dangerous things.
So we ride all the way up to Thunder Park and book into a motel. The next day we go out to Thunder Park because one of the guys with us wanted to enter the drag races in his class of bike. There were people everywhere and the place was totally packed out. While the guys sat down near the track I became a little bored with it and decided to go for a walk.
Now, not to be unduly kind or terribly unkind, but I was neither pretty nor ugly. I was not fat, I was kind of skinny but you could tell I was a female. Some guys said I was pretty, but I never really believed it. Just clearing the air here so that you know that I was no Barbie doll or alternatively I was not a Godzilla either. Not that there is anything wrong with girls who look like Barbie or Godzilla, each to their own I say. My point is that I am trying to say that I was not neither or either. At that stage I was just kind of there, you know what I mean brotha? Just there.
I walked a wee way away from where the guys were and I happened to notice the most gorgeous guy that I had ever seen up until that point in my entire life. He had dark hair, brown eyes, he was tall and unfortunately he had the most stunning looking girlfriend that I had ever seen also up until that point in my life. I mean she was gorgeous!
He was standing there and she was standing in front of him. He had his arms draped around her and it was all very cute and nice and all that, but mostly I could not help staring at him. Then I looked at me in my jeans, my boots, my black jacket and I looked at her.
You know, she was one of those girls you look at and you think, "I wish I could get away with what she is wearing and I wish I looked half as good as she does," and yet the same girl that you know that no matter what you do you ain't ever going to look remotely as good as her, missy!
That realisation depressed me...very momentarily of course. Anyway so I kind of leaned against something where I was standing just staring at this gorgeous guy and suddenly he looked sideways and stared at me.
The look in his eyes was unmistakeable! I could pretty much read his thoughts because he could not have been more obvious if he had screamed the words at me. He looked at me like I was a worm! I am laughing as I write this, but it is totally true. He looked at me like I was the most horrid thing he had seen since Godzilla...okay, King kong...whatever. But he did not like what he saw.
Then he looked away.
My moment of truth came when he locked eyes with me for that split second. In that split second the bald faced, cold, hard truth of the matter smacked me right between the eyes. I knew in that moment that I was never going to be the kind of girl who ever got a guy like that. Sounds really harmless, I know. It sounds so insignificant and silly, but that little piece of truth really knocked me for six because up until that moment, I had believed that I was worthy of any kind of guy. I know how that sounds, but what I mean is that I had not realised or acknowledged that there was this silent class issue that goes on between human beings. Well I suppose I did know, I just had never really applied it to that situation as seriously as perhaps I formerly should have.
By this I mean that you have classy guys and girls, dweeby guys and girls, nerdy guys and girls, uptown guys and girls, downtown guys and girls, gang guys and girls, biker guys and girls. And the fact of the matter is that when I was eighteen, I fitted in best as a gentle version of a hard biker girl because I was tomboyish still. Whatever I was, I was not what one could ever even remotely define as a classy girl or even a girly girl. Probably because life had toughened me up somewhat by then anyway and so the softer feminine side of me had pretty much done a bunk for a while.
But the look in that guy's eyes that day. Wow, it is something that I have never forgotten.
Isn't that funny?
No, what would be extremely funny would be if he had never even been looking at me at all and had been gazing at something just past me. I suppose that might just be wishful thinking on my part, but imagine if he had not been looking at me? That look I detected that he was giving, sent me a message that was so loud and clear that I never even bothered approaching any guy who was too good looking. I was scared of them because I thought I wasn't good enough for them. You know, not in their league, brotha.
I remember seeing this movie once, I think it was a John Cusack movie, where he said that, in dating, we have all got to learn to punch our own weight, but I do not really agree with that because I have seen the movie Pretty Woman!
Again, I am laughing, brotha.
But what John Cusack said in that movie sort of has an element of truth to it. I mean, I do not know any prostitute that has accidentally met up with some really classy guy, been swept off her feet and he has fallen in love with her and both lived happily ever after. For that matter, I do not know any prostitutes or rich classy guys, so I suppose that limits the odds of it ever actually being something I could really see happen to either of those two sets of people, but still, ya know, brotha?
Movies leave a lot to be desired! Have you noticed even in TV shows that only beautiful people end up with special powers, get stranded on an island in a snowglobe or experience a terror attack and live to tell the tale? It amazes me, truly it does. I think beautiful people should be outlawed! Ha ha ha.
laterz
May
Thursday 28th May
I see my heart slowly land
in your outstretched hands
And I softly land
in your outstretched arms
Í get carried away
by the raging tide
It gets harder to say than hide
all these feelings inside
Nothing's more real
than my feelings in this moment and time
Nothing's more real
I will stay where I stand
loving for the sake of love
No matter where I land
I'll get caught up in your open arms
So I run from room to room
try to avoid the void
Try to keep an open mind
Want to respect you
love and protect you
Or leave it all behind
You bring the stars
You bring the rain
and you don't need the pain
And when you're running
I'll be your shelter
Because nothing's more real
than these feelings in this moment in time
Nothing's more real
(The Feelers)
Jason
June
Monday 8th June
I have been thinking about things, what a surprise. But I have been thinking about them in context of what we think about things that are said to us.
For example, two things were said to me on Friday night that had a progressively worse effect upon me with each passing moment.
The first thing.
It was not so much what was said but the way in which it was said that upset me. What upset me was the level of the voice, the fact that I was not expecting such a reaction from that particular person, the fact that it echoed sentiment that seemed to me to contain a fairly obvious level of anger/resentment and the fact that it gave me a hell of a fright. Not only that but I felt completely debased. I could not think straight or feel straight for a few seconds when the old familiar numbness hit me. When that wore off I almost cried and I felt the tears stinging at the back of my eyes and my throat started to hurt, but I didn't cry. Not then.
Eventually the moment passed and became distant enough for me to just let it go and move beyond it, and the person who caused it seemed totally oblivious to what had been caused, but that incident reminded me of instances in the past where I had also learned to switch off feelings and to chase away the associated physical outworkings of said emotions felt as a result.
Well, about an hour later something else was said to me. It was not said nastily, at least not initially, but the finisher to what was said was pretty nasty, although I do not think it was intentional, or maybe it was. How would I know really? We all know how buckled my reality receptor is when it comes to males.
Anyway, I pretended that what was said was okay and I excused myself to go to the ladie's room. I got inside a cubicle, locked the door, put the seat down on the loo, sat on it and cried. I cried quite a bit. In fact I was in there so long that people waiting for the loos began commenting on how long it had been since the door to my cubicle had been opened, so I got my act together and left. I didn't want to though. All I wanted to do was sit there forever and never return to the scene that I had just departed from.
When I went back to the source of what upset me, I again pretended that what had been said had not bothered me in the least.
I do that a lot.
When it comes to really big issues, I deny my feelings and turn them inwards which is really stupid, but the thing is that in this life, I do not have a whole bunch of options. If I reject what is said and make a scene, all I will end up doing is hurting myself. I am a firm believer that, despite how hurtful some things that are said to us are, it is probably fortuitous to simply let some things slide or let them go altogether because there is little to be done about them anyway, beyond hurting ourselves.
