mental hell

propaganda lives

2011-12-19T04:52:00.000-08:00

monday 19 december 2011

Just read a post by another blogspot writer. Very angry at The Amerikan Dream. I relate. I share this anger. I too have been left behind by that thing that so many attain, but not all. And those of us who don't get The Amerikan Dream are led to believe by those who do that it is somehow our own fault.

For too many years, I believed I would get some version of that Dream. I grew up with that damned dream. My own parents achieved a version of it: moved beyond the poverty in which they'd been raised; had a house and three children; had cars and television and a decent lifestyle. I was born in the fifties. I grew up with that dream made flesh in my parents and in most of the adults around me. I did not doubt that my idea of the Dream would be had.

Things happen in life. And other things don't happen. What many people call luck I choose to call the randomness. The randomness of living. If I cared to take the time, I could cite you many examples of people besides myself who took many steps and made many efforts to achieve their version of the The Amerikan Dream, and failed. Not for lack of effort, not for lack of desire. For lack of helpful randomness. If you are one of those who would blame us for our own dreamlessness, then I think that my immediate response to you would be: stuff a sock in it.

The Amerikan Dream is an effective propaganda with which many generations have been raised (brainwashed, duped), and presumably more generations will be raised with it as well. If you get the dream, you regard the prophecy as truth rather than propaganda. Those of us who don't get it are, I think, entitled to regard it as a lie, a con, a great slinging of societal bullshit.

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read... Streams four... Twenty-ninth december...

read... Sehnen... Poison and snowflake trees...

~~~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

oddballs

2011-08-13T06:05:00.000-07:00

saturday 13 august 2011

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From 2002 until she died in 2008, this domestic grey goose in the photo lived wild in the Connecticut River here in turners trolls. She became a bit famous in these parts, but I never found that out until 2004, after having spent two years believing that the only human friends she had were me and a Russian man who used to visit her most days. But no, she had a good number of human fans, and I got to meet some of them. I heard stories about the various times her photo had been in the newspaper, which I don't read, so I never knew. I even heard a story in 2008 to the effect that she was across the water in the cove with her children -- she had had a family. The only geese available for her to mate with were the Canadian kind. Had this mating actually happened, or was it suburban myth. Don't know. In any case, I was very much in love with this goose, and very much in synch with her status as oddball: the only domestic animal among the wild ducks and geese and swans and cormorants. I'm an oddball myself, what with Asperger's and several other alienating issues. I know what it's like to be off-kilter in any group. And Goosie was always off-kilter there in the wild. Not exactly like the other geese, but enough like them that they in fact recognized her as goose-folk, but not really quite one of the clan.

One question that has never been answered: did she simply get tired of the life she had as a domestic animal on someone's farm, run away, and find herself a new life? Or did the humans who owned her get tired of her and dump her into the river? I suppose I'll never know that now.

Well, it's just about three years since Goosie's death, and here we go again. This year there are both a domestic white duck and a domestic white goose living here. I had my first sighting of the duck back in the spring; the goose I only discovered about a month ago. And yet again, my heart is deeply magnetized to these oddballs, these intrepid soldiers against conformity. I adore them, I envy them, I worry about them if I don't see them on any given wander-walk. They have achieved what I never could: they've found (or been forced into) a niche, and they're doing well there: making friends, eating well, flying free, retaining their essential selfhood. I root for them fanatically, their biggest cheerleader, their staunchest friend, and they know, of course, none of this.

If these birds decided to run away from home in search of greener pastures, then they have found them. They are adventurers, and rebels against the status quo. If they were forced into the river by human trolls who failed to keep their commitments to their animals, then they are victims of ugliness who have landed in a niche where they can turn their victimhood into freedom, happiness and family.

My envy smoulders inside me. They are odd and offbeat and happy. They landed in a place where they can make a good life out of their oddness. All this that I've never accomplished, and never will. No one holds them down or holds them back, now that they live wild. I will never, ever be able to live wild enough to prevent any human from ever holding me down or holding me back again. But in the case of two big geese and one big duck, I can fiercely envy and fiercely love at one and the same time. This is a feat I can't achieve with humans, because with humans, the moment the envy heats up, love becomes just about impossible.

I saw them only inches apart for the first time last night, this white duck and this white goose. They don't seem to be friends, since the duck swam off a few feet when the goose got so close. Maybe they're not friends, but they didn't fight. Just a yielding, a moving off to allow the goose passage. No war.

These oddies will go on living there among those who were born wild for a long time, it is my hope. And I will go on loving them, cheering them on, and envying them with a regret-fire that is as unquenchable as their delicious new freedom now is.
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read... Neverending solitaire... Cutting the pie...

~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

orange and raccoon

2011-07-24T05:40:00.000-07:00

sunday 24 july 2011

Once again, I hauled myself to the river early this morning. Earlier than I usually make it out nowadays: five o'clock. For four and a half years it was routine for me to go out at five with my dogs, but that's all four years gone now, and five o'clock is often unappealing now that I have no dog to walk with. Mental hell.

Making it even less appealing today was the extreme humidity. In the last seventeen days, we have had only one day off from the monstrous wet air, and I simply can't take it. The longer such humidity lasts, the more irritable and physically sick I become. The less willing I become to move at all, because literally the instant I move, I'm covered in sweat.

It was only the memory of my dogs... my great, great dogs... that got me out the door at five a.m. in this vicious weather. Hating to face the stifling air and already exhausted from working on a song for three hours yesterday, and another two hours on a drawing. But because I happened to be awake, and because it was my old dog-walking time, and because I need to remember my dogs, I went.

I had no intention of staying out there very long. Just a quick tour along a part of my old dog route, then back inside this ponystall with a fan blowing on me. Those were my intentions. But you never know what nature's intentions are, and those can change from one moment to the next.

I was out there an hour, and it was all because of raccoons. I haven't seen a raccoon since 2002 (nine years!), and this is nearly shocking when you consider that between 1985 and 2002 I saw raccoons in this town all the time. In my yards, on porches, murdered in the streets by drivers. All the time. So to go nine years without seeing even one raccoon is maximally weird. And I didn't just see one raccoon on the riverbank at about 5:20 when this day began... I saw five. More raccoons than I've ever seen in my life all at once. The one and only time I've ever seen a mother with a litter. I spent about forty minutes watching those animals, talking to them, until they went back to their den to go to sleep. I saw them walk all in a line behind their mother, saw them all five up a tree while I stood there studying them and talking to them, saw the eastern sky behind them and their maple tree turn orange: five masked faces watching me from tree crotches against a background of unabashed orange.

I saw the children climb all over the place, heard the mother make a noise like cat purring in her throat, watched her nurse a baby right there in the tree. Afer they'd come down from the tree and crossed the street (mental hell: will they get across safely?), I saw them sitting in a row on top of a sort of fence, just sitting there relaxing. And I, on the opposite side of the road, am anxious: No, no, I say. Don't sit there all in a row like that in full view of the humans. You don't know what they'll do to you. Go now, go back to your den. It's daylight. It's time for bed. Don't let the humans see you. As if she'd heard and understood my words, the mother climbed down with the kids following after, and they went back into their den. Now I know where it is. My lips are sealed.

Brief research I just did yields disparate results: some folks say baby raccoons are called kits (like foxes), others say cubs (like bears). Since pandas and raccoons and bears are all related, I make the unilateral decision to call their children cubs. The only foxy thing about them is the triangular, pointed face. When you watch them move, they move for all the world like little bears. Bears with tails; tails with black rings around them.

Whatever other things a walk at the river may be for me, it is always mental hell. Because I walk there alone now, without my dogs. Because my last two dogs were stolen, hidden, and killed by vicious, spiteful, ugly human beings. It is always, without exception, a walk in mental hell.

But my love for animals and my fascination with them is so great that even in my hell, my rage and grief, I am charmed, dazzled and transfixed by the creatures around me. Even as I rage at the theft of my two dogs with every step, I stand in front of the maple tree full of raccoons and study them, love them, talk soothingly to them. I'm dazzled and can't tear myself away, though breathing the noxious air is making me suffer. I hold my breath while they cross the road, fearing an ignorant and nasty human behind the wheel of a car. I thank them, repeatedly, for being there. Thank the mother for bearing the anxiety my presence is causing her, apologize to her that I can't yet bring myself to walk away.

They're safe in the den now, sleeping. I want them to be safe forever, to live to be very old raccoons and die peacefully in their sleep. I want them to have plenty to eat, and some fun, and good water, and any other blessings I could wish upon raccoons. All in vain. Because they live in the center of a town, not in some remote woods. Because humans in general hate raccoons and love to hurt them if they get the chance: I've seen it all my life. Because they drive their bleeding cars and don't care. So many of them barely give a dog or a cat a chance, let alone some wild animal.

I send my wishes for them into the new-morning air, into the orange, into the nearly colorless haze when the orange fades away. I try to fill every molecule of the air, plants and trees with my raccoon wishes, with my dog rage, with my love for all that's beautiful and my loathing for the vast seas of ugliness that gush from humankind.

In readers, my distaste for homo sapiens will be resented, is always resented. I tell the truth in my blogs, my books. And one of my truths is my dislike of the human race. If you can't read my writing and understand how I've come to this repugnance and bitterness, then I can't help you expand your capacity for understanding.

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read... Stolen stars... Spite and malice... Soulcast...

~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~

smoky

2011-05-23T05:44:00.000-07:00

30 may 2011

The fourth guinea pig of my years. Half-way to Princess Shiloh-Chailin, the one I have now. Short-haired, all black, no rosettes (supposedly decorative cowlicks). Born late in 1984, and from January to June of 85, he belonged to my parents. They'd got a pair of pigs for themselves composed of male Smoky for Dad and an orange and white female called Peach Blossom for my mother. When my daughter was out for a summer visit with my parents, she returned with Smoky. Not having been present, I don't know whether Dad simply offered the pig (my father was never much into caged animals, though he was kind to them), or if the daughter wheedled to get Smoky. Whichever it was, he became ours. He was the beginning of the second continuous animal family of my life, the one in western Mass. The FIRST continuous animal family had extended from my birth until the age of 31, when the last cat of my eastern Mass life died. Then my daughter and I moved west when I was 32, and Smoky was the first member of the second continuous family that would go on until 12 March of 2008.

He was smart, he was good, and he was fun. And while he remained an only child, he was king of all he surveyed. In the spring of 1986 I got him a buddy, as I hate to see any animal living without another one of its own kind. And what did they have in the pet shop in Hadley but a nearly full-grown male, short-haired with no rosettes, and all WHITE. I loved the idea of the all black and the all white, so home the new guy came with us. I called him Snowball.

I repeat that male guinea pigs can't share a cage once they both reach sexual maturity. We had a few months when they could be snuggle-buddies, the all black and the all white, but when Snowball became a man, we had to separate them. I put their two cages side-by-side so they could still always see each other, lie down side-by-side with the glass between them. And there were supervised playtimes of freedom on the floors.

On 31 May 1988, Smoky died. It wasn't wet-tail, but I don't know what DID take him. He was three and a half years old, and at that point in time I had never had a guinea pig live longer than that. The three before Smoky had all died at almost exactly the same age.

He began a second animal family that I thought would persist for the rest of my days. On the day Smoky died in my hands, I couldn't foresee the mafia-chick or the psychotic landlady or the spiteful, lazy caseworkers of the Department of Mental hell who would one day demolish that family that Smoky had begun, and demolish me with them.

read... Spite and Malice... Stolen Stars
~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

julia

2011-05-09T13:04:00.000-07:00

tuesday 10 may 2011

Julia, or Juliana, or Yuliana. Her name mutated throughout each day, depending on what I felt like calling her. She ended up being buried in my plot in the community garden. Not my usual practice, but since there were urgent bullyings going on from the landlord -- that was the alchoholic landlord that time -- I wanted Julia safely buried someplace nice before a disaster might occur. I dug up a young iris I had and buried Julia beneath it. That plot was taken away from me two years later by the wisdom of certain turners falls twitidiots who decided that since I'd been sick for three months and hadn't been able to garden, I didn't deserve to have the plot anymore, after six years. Anyway, since a zebra finch, as I've said before, only weighs about an ounce, I'm sure two years were enough time for her compounds to peacefully return to the soil and the air.

Julia was the too-late wife I'd bought for finch Zachary in 2001. By rights she ought to have lived a lot longer than two years (most of my finches did), but birds are prone to various parasites and a host of viral and bacterial infections. Back in the early 90's I found in a used bookstore a copy of Robert Stroud's Diseases of Birds (at least I think that's the title). Stroud was the famous (to certain generations) Bird Man of Alcatraz. A murderer serving a life sentence in the prison at Alcatraz. I'd heard of this man since childhood, and had always been interested in the idea of someone like a murderer wanting to study bird biology while he was in the slammer. By the time I found his long out-of-print book, I was a birdkeeper myself, and decided to buy and read it.

So many possible diseases, and so little time. I'm sure that by the 90's many of the diseases pet birds can contract have been eradicated, and I felt I could dismiss as outdated certain ailments discussed in the book. But there are enough left to give me a fright, and it did.

So which of these ailments took Julia? I don't know. But I carry the remorse for a mistake I made in her treatment that may have precipitated her death, or halted a slow recovery, or both. One important task in treating sick birds is to keep them very warm, and I'd been doing that. Julia was in a little hospital cage with a heating pad under it and a light blanket covering it, vitamins and antibiotic in the water, etc. But on the day in May on which she died, the outdoor temperature had taken a spike upwards, the apartment had got uncomfortably warm, and I was afraid there would be TOO much heat for her, just when she seemed to be making steady, if slow, headway. So before bed I turned off the heating pad, fearing to give her heatstroke, and in the morning she was dead. I know from talking to other finchkeepers, and from some reading, that it's a real crap shoot with these little birds. Some of them live five or six or seven years with not much effort on the human's part, and others die suddenly and young. The hospital techniques save some, and don't save others.

Julia was my last finch. Haven't had another one since her death. If I ever get myself moved out of this ponystall the guinea pig and I now inhabit, I want to have a pair of finches again. I love the chattering they do, and their tiny but energetic bodies. Bodies may be small, but their spirits are large and sweet and fun.

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read... Lifelines... All my stars
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(photo: enhanced detail from greeting card)

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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peter II

2011-05-09T12:55:00.000-07:00

monday 9 may 2011

This particular Peter was one I got for my daughter when she was three. He came from a farm near a friend of ours, and there were lots of young bunnies, so we wandered among the cages until kid decided which one. The bunny was still pretty small, so child got to think of it as a baby, which, of course, children like. He was short-haired, colored in grey patches and white patches.

Myself was 29 at the time, and had previously had three different rabbits, but had had them when I was quite young. I didn't KNOW much about rabbits. We went to a farmy sort of store that my dad knew about to buy a cage for the rabbit, who was going to live in the screened-in patio attached to our breezeway. The man who owned the store told us we had to watch the teeth, that rabbits' teeth keep growing and if they get too long they need to be cut. I'd never heard of this looming menace before. My first two rabbits had been killed in their hutch by weasels, both at once. And my third rabbit had lived to be seven, in a hutch beside the garage. Now I had something new to get anxiety over.

Little Peter was often brought into my daughter's room to hop around and interact with us, and for a while things went fine. Even the farm store guy had thought there would be no real trouble, since Peter had a wooden cage that he could chew on any time his teeth needed it.

His appetite dropped, his spirit dropped, and then I remembered the tooth thing. Dad and I looked at the teeth, and they did seem long, so he cut them. But Peter died anyway, on mother's day 1983, when he was less than a year old. Daughter didn't seem much bothered by the death, but I, naturally, was brought very low. When we went back to the farm store, the man said the teeth were probably cut too late, and that in the meantime Peter, in his compromised state, had contracted some rabbit bacterium or something. Even then, in 1983, you did not take rabbits to the vet in the area where I lived. There were no vets who treated them. Vets who treated guinea pigs were still fairly new. When you had a bird or a rabbit who was ailing, the places you went to for advice were farmers and breeders. And considering the experience I've had with vets vis a vis rabbits SINCE then, the farmers and breeders didn't do badly at all.

Twenty-eight years it's been, and I can still see Peter lying on a red and pink towel at the base of the willow, just shortly before he died. I wanted him to die outside, breathing the outside air and hearing the breeze and the birds around him. I was there too, sitting on the ground beside him, petting him and talking to him until there was no more Peter. And I still, twenty-eight years later, get the lump in the throat and the little sting in the chest because I didn't remember the tooth thing sooner. That whip comes out, the whip of remorse that I blew it. I'm not complaining. I believe that people should feel remorse. This is, like many of my other convictions, absolutely passe and despised in the hollow human ambience we dwell in in 2011.

~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~
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read... Stolen stars... All my stars
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antoinette

2011-04-12T13:39:00.000-07:00

tuesday 12 april 2011

No, she wasn't named after the French queen who said "if the poor have no bread, let them eat cake," and was ultimately guillotined by the proletariat. Why would I name one of my animals after someone like that? No, her name came about as the result of a traumatic event in her life.

In September of 1992, when Antoinette was a little over a year old (and I'm ashamed to say I hadn't yet named her), I let her and all the other little zebra finches out of their cages for their play. The larger birds got their turns on different days. This was a long-established routine in our family, and had always gone reasonably well. Among the larger birds who watched while the little ones had their play were some lovebirds, who, as I've said elsewhere, are notorious biters of feet and legs. But there had never been any serious injuries, and I had come into a complacency that believed there never WOULD be.

I had checked on the finches a couple of times and found nothing amiss. But when I went in to round them up and get them back into their cages, I found blood. Blood on a windowill, on the window, and a number of other things. It was a LOT of blood, when you consider that a zebra finch only weighs about an ounce and can lose a life-threatening amount of blood very quickly. And birds can go into shock very easily as well.

Having found all the blood, I still had to find the bird that was producing it. Several finches were hunted, caught in my hand, and examined before I found the right one. A little off-white girl without a name. And there it was. A leg, I'm pretty sure it was the right, bitten very high up near the hip. Bitten NEARLY clean through, but not quite, and dangling by a very thin thread of what? Skin? Tendon? I wasn't sure. The thread was so infinitessimally thin that I hoped the thing would just break off on its own.

This was a Saturday afternoon. My mother was staying the weekend with my daughter and me, but it was no ordinary visit. We had big plans. Big for US, at least. On Sunday we were heading off very early in the morning for a bus trip to the Bronx Zoo. This trip had been planned for months, and my mother had paid for most of it because I was a poor single mom out of work, and we were all three looking forward to it. A big day out for mother, daughter and granddaughter.

It's agonizing for me when I have to choose between an animal and the humans, and I almost always decide in favor of the animal, but this time was different. I was willing to ruin my OWN trip to the zoo (but not exactly happy about it) by calling the vet, having my mother take me and bird over there, and using my zoo spending money to pay the extra for an emergency vet appointment for this bird. But as I thought about these things all that afternoon and evening, I found I wasn't willing to risk ruining the trip for my mother and daughter. If the vet had said the bird needed to be watched very closely for a couple of days, and needed this or that medication every four hours, I would have stayed home from the zoo, and I doubt that the others would have gone without me. I was the mediator between them. And even if they had gone, they wouldn't have had a very good time without that mediation.

So I took care of my bird myself, keeping her very warm, putting antibiotic in her water and making her drink little bits of it through a dropper, until early on Sunday morning when we had to leave. I left her with huge reluctance, fearing to find a dead bird when I returned. I put on a good front for mother and daughter all day, and of course I did enjoy the zoo. But in my mind every few minutes all day long and into the night: is she all right? is she still alive?

Late Sunday night we got back. She was still alive. She was warm and eating and managing to move from perch to dishes with this dangling leg, but it wasn't easy. Next day she went to the vet, but there wasn't an opening until the afternoon, so every hour of waiting seemed like three.

That leg just has to come off. There's no fixing it. This from the vet. I start asking quetions. When can you do it, what do you use for anesthetic, bla bla. Vet says we'll just do it right now. It's just a snip and a stitch on the little stump. No anesthetic for a brid this small. We'll wrap her in a towel and that will keep her dark and calm until it's finshed. There are very few nerve endings in a bird's leg.

I paced the parking lot smoking cigarettes, certain that that tiny little bird had already had way too much stress, and that being held and wrapped and snipped by strangers would just finish her off. Heart attack of the massive type. This is a very easy thing to happen to a bird, death from stress.

She, my plucky little soldier, did not die. She seemed, in fact, extremely happy that that dangling thing had been taken away. There was no post-op infection or faiing, the stitch was removed when it was time (and I think I did it myself), and all ended happily. As I watched her through the remaining five and a half years of her life, I did so with enormous pride in her survival, her courage through massive blood loss and stress and strangers and snipping and stitiching. Not to mention the compensations a bird with one leg needs to make in order to balance and jump.

Overall I'm a depressive, cynical, serious individual. There is not a long list of things in this life that cause me to feel joyful, but seeing animals overcome obstacles is right at the top of that list. I feel that joy every single time I watch that animal overcoming that obstacle, and so it was with this little bird. The same is not true of humans. You don't like reading that, I'm sure, and think me an unappealing shit, I'm sure, but it's the way I was made. Animals have always been fascinating and loveable and desirable to me, whereas humans are difficult,nasty and unreliable.

The year before the biting of the little bird leg, this same vet had amputated the leg of a guinea pig I had who was called Tony. At the end of the bird amputation, we were setting up a file for the little finch, and the vet asked her name. She doesn't have one. Let's call her Antonia, after your other amputee. So the file was set up for Antonia the finch. Over the next week or so, I decided I liked Antoinette better, and that's what I always called her. Antoinetti, to be precise.

And that's how she got her name. Because a lovebird bit her leg nearly off, and this bite resulted in amputation, and a guinea pig who'd ALSO had an amputation was called Tony. A circuitous and odd route to something as routine as a name.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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read... Stolen stars... Mugsy's book
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(fairy at www.toscano.com)

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coco

2011-04-12T13:22:00.000-07:00

tuesday 12 april, 2011... turners fails

Coco was a little brown mouse that I bought in 1995 at the request of my daughter's boyfriend, who was staying with us at the time. While there were many pets in our home, he didn't have one of his own, and he asked for the mouse. So I bought the mouse and the wheel, etc, as a gift to him.

Eight or nine months after getting Coco, this seventeen-year-old boyfriend decided to return to his parents. Fine, don't have a big problem with that. What I have a problem with is that he left his mouse behind. Not because I didn't want her; on the contrary, I loved her and was happy to have her. But all this love and adoration that boyfriend spoke of over all those months seem to have been what? An act? A temporary infatuation? Or was he afraid his parents wouldn't ALLOW him the mouse, and he'd only have to bring it back to me? He never has explained to me why he walked out on this animal he played with nearly every day, and so I'm left to speculation. I'll say on his behalf that his parents were very twisted people who made him very unhappy, and I can certainly picture his mother screaming "You're not having a dirty mouse in MY home!"

So she was mine after his defection, until she died on 12 April 1996, a sunny Saturday afternoon. I can't speak for others, but for me, INSIDE me, all animals, people and objects take on the flavor of the circumstances that existed when they entered my life. And if those circumstances cease to exist, as they usually do, then the person or object or animal that remains still carries that flavor, that time and place. The parting between my daughter and the boyfriend was fraught with tension, and so he made no return visits to us or to Coco. Every day that I cared for her after he was gone, she was a little brown handful of life and beauty, but also of his going, and of his never coming again, and of his turning his back on her, whatever the reason. When SHE died, another piece of HIM, and of our time together, died along with her.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(stars from a greeting card)

read... All my stars... Stolen stars
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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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ginger

2011-02-20T04:23:00.000-08:00

sunday 20 february 2011

Yet another zebra finch, and yet again I don't have a photo currently to hand. Ginger was the light-grey variety of zebra, and she's the only one I ever had with a white dot on her forehead. She was also one of the zebras I actually purchased, as opposed to all of those that were produced for me by my two breeding pairs. I went out shopping for another female and came home with Ginger. Because of that little white dot.

Zebras tend to be jaunty little birds that chatter quickly and move the same way. Ginger was a little different. Not defective in any way, not TOO slow or TOO mellow, but there was a very slight slowness and mellowness to her that made her an individual.

And there was something else unique there too. For most of her life, Ginger always had in her eyes this little expression of amusement. As if she found everything that went on with her and her cagemates, and everything that went on in the rooms and the apartments around her, just slightly funny. And HER amusement always became mine too, because whenever I saw that expression in her eyes, it made me smile. Those of you who know I have Asperger's and have read elsewhere that I don't smile much might find this strange news. But all the laws of my internal physics are DIFFERENT with animals than they are with people. And while it's not terribly frequent that a human will elicit a spontaneous smile from me, animals can do it a hundred times a day.

I never got any chicks from Ginger. It's always puzzled me that from close to thirty finches that I had at the apex of my finch-keeping, only two breeding pairs established themselves, and both of them contained the same male.

Ginger died in January of 1998 when she was close to seven. Another star in this Aspergian sky, with a little white "star" on her forehead.

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read... All my stars... Braonwandering...

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

(russian penguins at www.signals.com)

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

bandit

2011-02-15T05:21:00.001-08:00

Page

sunday 20 february 2011

Not a name I would have chosen for any animal, but I say again that I had a small child, and children like to name animals. I got to choose his MIDDLE names, which were Blandiens Bendybones Bum. Yeah, yeah. You like the KID'S choice better.

We got this little bandit out of the laundromat in the first week of September 1986, a basically white cat with large patches of dark-brown tiger. Child and I were there doing our usual Saturday stint with laundry, and there were these two rather infamous townies in there with a kitten sleeping in the woman's lap. The kitten was wearing a flea collar, and I naturally assumed that that kitten belonged to that woman. But when she left, she and her companion got up and left the kitten in the chair. He didn't stay asleep long once he'd lost that warm body.

So, of course, the next humans he came to flatter were my kid and me. Blandiens, that name you don't like, is the Latin for "flattering." Bandit was an inveterate flatterer. When he wanted something, he would rub up against you oh-so-adoringly, and make these sweet little high-pitched sounds in his throat. As far as I ever saw, it worked every time. The woman who owned the laundry said she was sure the kitten belonged to no one because he'd been hanging around for several days. I argued that he was wearing a flea collar, a sure sign that he did, in fact, belong to someone. But she defeated my reasoning by saying that whoever it was obviously didn't want the kitten anymore, and that people in downtown Turners were forever getting cats and then tossing them out forever when they were tired of them. Really? say I. I'd only been in Turners a year, and spent little time there, as my weekdays were spent 9-5 on the campus of UMass. There was a lot I didn't yet know about the town. A year or two after this day, I had learned to advertise on radio and in the paper before I kept any lost animal I found. I didn't want to take an animal someone loved and missed. But on this particular laundry Saturday, I took this woman's word that someone had rejected this kitten, and we took him home. He was smuggled up the back stairs in a brown paper grocery bag so no fellow-tenants would see him. I hadn't yet asked the landlord if I could have a cat, and I didn't want some asinine butt-brain getting to the landlord before I did.

When I reached him a few days later, he said the cat was okay. So began Bandit's time with us.

I don't know how many weeks went by before I was standing on my back porch and saw at the edge of the woods a cat who was the spitting image of our little Bandit, except that he was full-grown and dirty. I called my daughter and pointed out the cat. She makes a blase face. Ya ma, I know. That's Brandon's cat Bandit. That's why I named the kitten Bandit, because he looks just like that one. There had been a method to her madness, after all.
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read... Sehnen... Neverending solitaire...

~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

the fishes

2011-02-08T05:28:00.000-08:00

tuesday 8 february 2011.... turners turds

Yes, you can use the plural fishes when you're talking about more than one SPECIES of fish, and that's what I'm going to do.

I was a fishkeeper from 1987-1998. Freshwater, not salt. Five gallon tanks, ten, twenty, and for a while a thirty-eight gallon gem. The beginning of this era was thrust on me by someone else, who gave my daughter a five-gallon tank and heater and filter and pump, plus a couple of fish, for her birthday. It all started so simply. And escalated. And kept going.

Prior to this fish-birthday, I'd only ever had goldfish in bowls. Had never had tanks and all their equipment and all their headaches. I still maintain, however, that the headaches are worth it, because the fish are both beautiful and fascinating. And like potted plants, the waterworld of an aquarium provides a miniature OUTDOORS indoors.

There are certain horrors, too, to fishkeeping. At least to someone as sensitive and invested in animals as I am, they were horrors. Really I don't even feel like going there now -- maybe another time. Today I just want to stay with the pleasures of fish. This quote from the naturalist Konrad Lorenz (from his book King Solomon's Ring) will give you a hint of what you must face when you keep aquariums: "...there is no other group of animals that, even in nature, is so plagued with infectious diseases as the fish." Now back to the pleasures.

How many kinds did I have over the years? Reticulated catfish, angelicus catfish, albino catfish, algae eaters, guppies guppies guppies, swordtails, mollies, many varieties of tetras, including the lovely little neons; gouramis, bettas, angel fish, and more. Interesting, graceful, different demeanors in different species, and so on. An underwater adventure.

I salute every single one of the hundreds of fish who lived in my tanks, from the tiniest baby guppies to the largest angel fish and gouramis. I'm glad to have known each one of them.
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read... Mugsy's book... Mishibone...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

on poems

2011-02-04T14:39:00.000-08:00

friday 4 february 2011
turners tricksters

Anyone who's done any wandering around on my website knows already that poetry has become very tough for me, both reading it and writing it. In the summer of 2008, when the stealing of my animals was very recent, I was still able to deal with poetry for a number of months. But since the end of that year it has become a progressively more difficult thing to do.

I continue to cite other people's poems on my blogs, but I can't tell you how hard it is. To read poems is nearly as rough as writing them. Expression in a poem is very different from expression in prose, and that is poetry's chief value, its mode of expression. I still turn to that value, but it has become an effort and an ordeal that it never was in the 46 years before the theft of my animals, when I read and wrote poetry nearly every day. When poetry was as regular a part of my life as eating meals.

I wrote one poem over this past November and December. Not because I forced myself to the job, but simply because the first few lines came to me, and I didn't want to just let them go. Over a month or so, more lines came, two or three at a time. Slowly, reluctantly.

And then today, something a bit bigger than a few lines appeared in the brain. Appeared when I was out walking at 6 a.m. in the two-degree air, walking the steps I used to walk in the early mornings with my dogs when we lived beside the river. I have no idea how many people reading blogs are fond of poetry, but today's lines that showed up in my cold-walking brain are part of my blog-life now, and have no title beyond today's date: fourth february.
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read poems... Scealta liatha... shadowpoems...
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

matthew's apotheosis

2011-01-21T04:47:00.000-08:00

friday 21 january 2011
turners trogs

~~~ Has he reached it yet, I wonder? That glorious day when he can finally see himself as, if not an actual god, at the very least some dazzling sort of macho hero-saint. Because that, according to my senses of him, is what he's after. It's what his ego needs, and needs frantically: to elevate himself above the rest of us, above his undercover colleagues; far, far above the norm. He can't, without this transforming elevation, see himself as valuable and meaningful. ~~~

You don't know how difficult it is to write about him. I have to. There's no way out. I'm working on a book that includes him, and words he said to me, and things he did. This underworld that Matthew pulled me into on the heals of my illegal eviction is part of the human behavior, directed precisely at ME, that I address in the book I'm slowly working on. I must write about him. Spite and Malice, composed of blog posts, and because of that book, I have to write about him. The book is one part of the history, the truth that I want to leave behind me when I die. But you honestly don't know how hugely difficult it is to write about people whom I consider to be evil. No, I don't believe in god or the devil, heaven or hell, but I do believe in human evil. I believe that most of us have this evil in us, including myself. It's what you do or don't do with it that is the telling thing, the defining thing.

Matthew's quest for transcendence to a level far above the rest of us; his ego's insatiable need for gratification. For the first time ever, Matthew stayed out of my face for four whole months. From 2 September to 31 December. When he did this, of course I was very grateful, and I also thought it was just another of his steps on the way to glory. I thought he had finally, after two years, decided to honor my request that he stay away from me, believing that if he honored this request to stay completely away from a woman he loves, it would add to his superiority and his hero-hood.

Well, whether it was another of his steps to glory or not, it seems to be over. The last three times I'v gone to Greenfield (Dec 31, Jan 4, and yesterday), he's put his carcass in front of my face again, knowing full well that just seeing him, even if he doesn't speak, causes me an anxiety attack. What a feeling of personal and male-ego power that must give him, that knowledge that just the sight of him will ruin my entire day.

He calls what he feels for me love. But what Matthew Lacoy feels bears no resemblance whatsoever to any definition of love that resides in MY heart. What Matthew feels for me is born of his ego, and born of pheromones, which we cannot control. His pheromones and my pheromones seem to hit it off real well. But love is made of more than reactions of invisible chemicals collected in the skin. At least for me it is. For me love is also made of kindness, and tenderness, and loyalty, and a certain amount of self-sacrifice. He has almost NEVER displayed any of those qualities in his treatment of me. Truth is another creature that belongs in love, and Matthew has only ever given me truth in very tiny and very infrequent doses.

I both love him and despise him. Bifurcation is all that's possible for me with people I love who consistently treat me badly. I hope one day to be cured of the love, but have no desire at all to be cured of the loathing.

Once he attains his apotheosis, if he hasn't already, he must strive and struggle daily to keep it. What a way to exist. What a waste. What a lot of ego-driven crap.
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(clip art photo)

read... Spite and Malice... Sehnen...
~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2010 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

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how old are you now

2011-01-18T03:33:00.001-08:00

tuesday 18 january 2011
turners troglodytes

How old? As old as glacial ice. As old as nightmares. As old as ignorance, and a teaching of Socrates: always quesion.

It's 6:35 in the morning, and we are having a weather. I've already spent seventy minutes in the dark morning at the river, trudging through the snow, looking at swans, listening to ice-sounds, being snowed upon, wiping tears. Trying to look at snow crystals with my new magnifying glass, which is apparently not a strong enough model, though it was the strongest our drugstore had. Didn't take my glasses. Thought I wouldn't need them with the magnifier, but guess I do.

And I was there last night as well. Before the snow began, while the one-hair-off-full moon was staring down, while the swans were closer to the shore, and therefore larger in my eyes. Whistling my long-established song for water birds, wiping the same tears. They are always the same tears.

Since my way of life and everyone I love was taken from me in March of 2008, I have had three ugly, alien, burning birthdays. I say sardonically that they have been adventures in barrenness, adventures in abandonment, adventures in emptiness. Let me say yet again that my eviction was illegal, and again that I always paid my rent, and again that I had a huge social service dinosaur that was supposed to prevent the homelessness, and say that they sat on their brains and their hearts, and did nothing.

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On the first, turning 56 in 2009, I was living in a hell-hole of a shelter in Norhampton Mass. Run by ServiceNet. I've stayed in two different ServiceNet shelters, and they were both hell-holes. This would lead me to conclude that ALL homeless shelters are hell-holes, if it weren't for the fact that I stayed in one in New Hampshire that was a lot better.

It started snowing the night before my birthday, and was still snowing vigorously in the morning. It was a Sunday, and on Sundays we had an overnight worker at the shelter who tried to be a kinder, gentler shelter worker. Normal kick-out time in the mornings was seven, but Riley would let us stay in as late as ten, if she had no pressing things to do in her personal life. Especially if there was weather. She let us stay in on my birthday. But I didn't take much advantage of that grace. Horrible, ugly as the birthday was, I figured I at least deserved a nice breakfast after everything I'd been going through for ten homeless, loveless months; and I had no intention of eating my birthday breakfast at a freaking shelter.

I ate it at Kathy's diner. Eggs and pancakes and bacon, if memory serves. I hung there as long as I dared for the money I'd spent, though Kathy never said anything. Maybe till 9:00 or so. This is your lifestyle when you board at a shelter that does not stay open all day. You are kicked out in the morning and let back in at suppertime. In between you hang. And this costs money, because you just can't hang in an eatery for hours without buying something. I would generally hang at one place for up to three hours, then I'd move on to another and spend more money eating things I didn't want. All the eatery people know who the shelter ones are: they're the ones who hang and hang and spend as little as possible. There is endless, meaningless hanging. And for me there was in this hanging, as in so much else about homelessness, endless shame.

There's no clear memory of where I hung until lunch time, after I left Kathy's. Bruegger's Bagels is the most likely place, so that must be where I went. I wanted to buy myself a set of art pencils in the art store, but I had to wait for them to open at 11 or 12. I also wanted a carnation, but the florist wasn't opening till late either. Carnation is the flower for January birthdays, but I wasn't buying it for my own sake. I wanted it for a birthday that had been the day before mine, the birthday of three loved friends. I remember sitting on a bench on the sidewalk outside the art store, burning a stick of Nag Champa and smelling the carnation, wiping those famous tears. The snow had slowed a great deal by late morning, but I sat there with incense and flower and cigarette and snow, simmering shame and loneliness, grief and rage, while I painted on myself a phony placid face.

For lunch I further treated myself to sweet and sour chicken at the Teapot. I sat alone at a table in front of the window, staring out at Main Street as if there were anything of interest or meaning to see out there, when I already knew full well that there wasn't.

The shelter wouldn't open again until 6:OO, and it was probably only 1:30 when I finished lunch. I felt I'd already spent enough money that day. Where was I going to hang that was free. No library on Sundays. Only the laundromat.

And so I hung in a drab, messy laundromat on the day I turned 56, staring out the large windows, thinking about my REAL birthdays, the ones in the life that had been stolen from me, wiping more tears. Eventually I needed a bathroom, went off in search of such, bought yet another cup of tea, and back to the laundromat for the duration. The sun had come out weakly after the storm, and I watched it go down on the birthday, watched the dusk and the beginning of the blue point. Tried several times to reach an acquaintance in Greenfield on the phone, but she never answered. The darkest shade of blue comes, the day is on the brink of night, and it's back to the hell-hole I go.

Later I lay me down to sleep in the bottom of a bunk bed; lunatics, alcoholics, addicts, criminal recitivists all wheezing to their creepy beds around me. Not one human being -- no relative, no so-called friend, -- had called me on my birthday. As on many, many nights, I made a birthday wish to die quickly, quietly in my sleep.

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In 2010 I became 57. Living in a rented bedroom in Greenfield. Infinitely better than any shelter, but not without its hardships, and not without its shames. One hardhsip was that I wasn't allowed any space in the kitchen to store food, or any use of the stove and microwave. All my meals had to be composed of things I could keep unrefrigerated in my room, or gotten out. This birthday was supposed to be less bleak than the one before. My friend was going to bring me to Turners to visit some places my animals and I had loved, and then we were going to her place for supper and movies. And I had my new guinea pig, so I was not completely without animal life or completely without companionship in my rented room. Did that lessen the grief and rage for the fourteen animals who were stolen and killed? Not one iota. But it did make a very small dent in the loneliness.

The morning was my own -- my friend never got up and running until early afternoon. It didn't snow, but was instead a bright, fresh January day with former snow already on the ground. I had planned on that morning to walk to the hotel in Greenfield where I had walked and medicated my dogs for the last time. That walk took me forty minutes each way, made a good exercise binge. But when the day came, I woke with an attack of palindromic rheumatism in my legs. Walking was a study in stiffness and pain and joints swelled with fluid.

It wasn't going to steal my memory walks from me. Not the walk to the hotel, and not the shorter walks I would take in Turners. I took prednisone. I took what felt like pounds of aspirin. About 11:15 I set off. When I reached the hotel parking lot, I did my ritual. Found the parking space where the van had been; the van with all my animals inside. Found the spots where I let the dogs do their potty. Found the place where we stood when I gave them their pills and some canned food dished out on the pavement. After forty minutes of walking, the attack was much worse. I was breathing hard from the pain.

I dragged myself into Dunkin Donuts for a late breakfast and some sitting down. I was having trouble getting my voice up because of the pain, but on the second try, my order was heard. After the food I needed to pee, and in my efforts to raise myself from the chair and start walking to the ladies, my body started heading for the floor. I caught myself before the fall was complete, but not before a man came over to me and asked me if I was okay. I lied and said I was just a little stiff. Stiff drunk, they all thought. I could see it in their faces.

On the trek back, I found Matthew Lacoy squatting in front of the health food store. Not unusual. We saw each other from a great distance, as we most often do, and he watched my every tread, as he most often does. When I passed him -- hauling my almost non-functional legs and huffing with the pain -- I glanced at him only briefly. This Matthew, who, according to his own mouth, is an undercover agent who loves me, had not one word to say to me on my birthday, not one word to say to my obvious physical pain, though he watched every step I took for blocks. I glanced at him only briefly. If looks could kill, I would have killed him then and there.

Just minutes after I passed by this agent in love, my friend called me. It's party time, says she. Was I ready to come over. I wanted to know if we could have going to Turners as the first activity so that I could then sit down for the rest of the day. I've looked at my finances, says she, and I'll take you to Turners if you want to give me some gas money. I fumed into the winter air. She had already told me two days before that she would take me to Turners and that it would be a birthday present. The distance between the center of Turners and the center of Greenfield is something like five miles. How many drops of gasoline are we talking about in a four-cylinder Subaru? This friend had already ruined both Christmas and New Year's by acting like a bitch constipated full of sulphuric stinking crap, and now it looked as though she'd got the same plug in her anus for my birthday. Just as on Christmas and New Year's, I refused to play the passive-aggressive game, the meanness game. If she couldn't be kind on my birthday, be an actual friend, keep her word, then I wasn't going to play. I'd damned well stay in my room with my crippling pain and swelling, and my guinea pig who loved me. I don't see why I have to pay for something you said was a birthday present, I say. But I hadn't checked my finances when I said that. She says the word finances as if we're talking stocks and bonds here. She lives on the exact same monthly disability pittance that I do. I tell her to forget it, and to forget the birthday. I hang up on her and go back to my room.

Mostly I am conked out until supper time. Between the pain and the new dose of pills, I finally thud-bump into some sleep. After sleeping and sweating, the attack is less severe, and I'm able at 5:00 to walk to the free poor people's meal at one of the churches. Eating my birthday supper with loons, alkies and addicts, yet again. More humiliation. I could have eaten at a restaurant, but I didn't want to spend anymore money that day. Walking back after the meal, I call my daughter. She doesn't answer. She won't return my call. She just about never does.

But I get to my room and she does call back. I think we talk about an hour. For most of it she's rather bitchy and snipey, but while it hurts, it's no great surprise. Even in the years when we lived together, she would always sabotage my birthday in any way she could.

I go to sleep with those other birthdays, the ones in my own stolen life. Seeing the same stolen faces and saying the same stolen names; wiping away the same grieving, raging tears.

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And now I've gone 58. Living in Turners again, the town where the memories of me and my animals are. The town that contributed to our demolition. Living in, not an apartment, not even an efficiency, but a space, as I've said before, the size of a ponystall. A space, as I've said before, that I wouldn't give a good-sized dog to live in. Claustrophobia niggles at my nerves and cells and emotions constantly. I made few plans for this year's birthday, and that was deliberate. I planned several of my memory walks, but due to another birthday storm, only two were possible. I had lunch at a bakery nearby. At four my one friend called, and later my daughter. No nasty stuff; she was pleasant the whole time.

The walks I couldn't do on the day itself got done the next day. The walks in the places that have a meaning and a presence and a history particular to me and mine. Those walks where I feel less distant, less dismally far removed from the life and the loves that were mine. If I had died in my sleep on birthday night, so be it. If I die that way tonight, I die with my hatred and my rage intact. My loathing for every single individual who had a hand in stealing and hiding my animals, who had a hand in killing them, who had a hand in making me and leaving me homeless, who has knowledge at this very moment of where and when those animals died, and will not tell me. If looks could kill, I'd waste you here and now. Many happy returns of the day.
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read... Braonwandering... Stolen stars...

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2010 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

christmas day heart attack, 1986

2011-01-17T09:56:00.000-08:00

monday 17 january 2011
turners stale

My daughter and I came to live in Western Mass in April of 1985, though not to the psychological cesspool that is Turners Falls until August of that year. Homesick as we were, we made the 240-mile roundtrip back to our hometown fairly often until the fall of 1986. That's when I came down with palindromic rheumatism and chronic fatigue syndrome, both at the same time, and the number of trips home dwindled with my unreliable energy.

At Christmastime that year, though, I was able to make the trip, helped by lots of caffeine. We left on the 24th, early in the day, since both of us were on school vacation. Pictures in the memory tell me that that year was one of our snowless Christmases, but I'm not absolutely certain on that.

Evening came on. We usually opened one or two gifts on Christmas Eve, and that year was no exception. My mother and daughter and I were all in the livingroom, deciding which packages we wanted to attack, when my father came into the room with both a gift and a state of low-level agitation. Not anger, but a kind of nervous urgency.
He badly wanted Mum to open HIS present first. This was unusual for a couple of reasons. First, it had been years, I believe, since he had chosen a gift for her. She usually told him what she wanted, and he bought it. The first ten or so years of my life, money was on the tight side for my parents, and in those years my father made Christmas for the kids his priority. This left my mother with either only one rather inexpensive gift, or no gift at all from him. She did not take this with equanimity, and when finances improved, she assured herself a suitable gift by telling him what she wanted. And the second strange bit was that if he did in fact ever choose her gift himself, he would give it to her as soon as he bought it, rather than saving it for the day itself.

So here he was on Christmas Eve with a gift he had chosen himself and had actually saved for the right time, urgently telling her to open his gift first. There was a little whiff of pride, too, mixing with his nervousness. I was sitting beside her when she opened it, and he was standing on her other side. When I saw that the box said Towle Silversmiths (a very old and prestigious Newburyport firm), I knew he had spent some money. But the shocking part was that he had acutally gone to Towle's and picked out something.

Inside the upscale box were two silver bells, about six inches tall. One was an actual bell that could be rung (with a lovely sound), and the other had a music box in it that played a song. What other song would it be but Silver Bells. My father's cheeks were pink with excitement. He was waiting for her to gush, to be delighted. She said Oh thank you, dear in a high-pitched pleased voice that I myself knew to be phony, and he probably did too. He said a few more things, pretended he believed she liked it, and went off to his bedroom.

When he was gone, she turned to me. Why did he think she would want these bells? Because you love silver and gold, I told her, and because you've always loved the song Silver Bells. She would not relent. I wanted to brain her. The gift was unsatisfactory to her, and furthermore, he'd been acting strangely for a couple of months. Strangely how? She couldn't describe it, but he wasn't himself.

Later we all went to bed, colored lights burning inside and out. It was about 1:00, I think, only an hour into Christmas day, when I heard my mother at their bedroom's private exit saying What are you doing out there? What's the matter? My father had got up out of bed and rushed outside in his underwear. I got up. What's wrong? He's outside in his underwear. He says he can't breathe.

She called an ambulance. I can't remember now whether or not he had fallen to the ground. It was decided that she would go with him and I'd stay with my sleeping child. She would call me when she knew anything.

I don't recall how long I waited for the phone to ring. When it did, I was told it was a heart attack; what the doctor called a SILENT heart attack, without any left arm pain or chest pain or other common symptoms. It was caused by congestive heart failure, but that wouldn't be known for another day or two. And congestive heart failure was, the doctor said, what had caused my father not to be himself for a couple of months.

Relatives needed to be called when the morning was at a decent hour, and I believe I had to do that. Most of the calls were long distance, and I don't think Mum could do that from the hospital. Whenever that was finished; whenever I had my kid breakfasted and dressed; whenever I had let her open at least a couple gifts and told her that Grampa was in the hospital and we were going to see him, we loaded his gifts and her gifts into the car and went along.

Naturally he was in ICU. They would let two of us in at a time, once an hour for fifteen minutes. My daughter opened and played with her Christmas presents in the ICU waiting room. We ate our lunch and supper there. Throughout the day and early evening, relatives arrived, stayed a while, then left. On our first trip in to see him, daughter and I took in some of his presents. He was so weak he could not unpeel tape and untie ribbons. He tried, but his hands were too weak. I did it for him. He didn't even give a crap about the gifts, I could tell, but he was trying to act Christmasy for my daughter's sake, who was seven years old at the time. He also put on an ultra-cheerful if wan performance every time she showed him one of her own gifts. I'm pretty sure he even apologized to her for getting sick and screwing up Christmas.

My father had a very sheepish air about him most of the time that day and evening, and I, if no one else, knew why. My father felt loved that day. That all these people would come on Christmas day to a depressing ICU and visit him made him feel loved. This was a thing that didn't happen terribly often for him. He was a difficult person in some ways: fussy, nervous, and quick-tempered. It was often hard to feel relaxed enough to behave in a loving way with him. But there were times when it could happen, as on this day, and he would almost always go sheepish. As if it overwhelmed him to see that he might just be loved.

We are not the only family ever to have had a Christmas medical emergency, and we were not the last. But any of you who HAVE had such an emergency know how much weight is added by the fact that it is Christmas day. The one day of the year when you most hope things will go well. They did go well. He didn't die. And the fact that we spent most of Christmas day and night in ICU and didn't cook our Christmas dinner and didn't have a normal Christmas in any way is, and was, irrelevant to me. What mattered to me above all things was that he must not die. That was my most important, most lasting Christmas gift on 25 December 1986.

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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read... Lucked out... Lifelines~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(stained glass at www.signals.com)
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(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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holiday hell

2010-12-28T04:38:00.000-08:00

tuesday 28 december 2010
turners trash

It was three years ago today, our last Christmas together. I'd like to say that it was harassment-free, free of meanness from any quarter, but it wasn't. At least the beginning of it wasn't.

Many times in my blogs over more than two years I've mentioned the absolutely insane behavior I was subjected to by Judith the mafia-chick and Lolly the landlady, but I've written very few details about these behaviors. This is because it's so onerously difficult to write about what my animals and I had to go through. To dig all that human insanity and human ugliness out of my memory and write about it.

There was a tremendous variety of actions that Judith devised in order to torment me -- yes, torment -- over seventeen months. Most of them still await their posts in the future. It has always amazed me that someone who is so dull-witted that she can't think her way out of a paper bag, is nonetheless able to be endlessly inventive about cruelty.

By the time November of 2007 came around, she had already come up with a tremendous list of nasty things to practice on me. I guess in that November she decided that something new and fresh was in order. Certain things had already been settled, presumably, back in July: my animals and I had to leave the property by February 13, 08, while Judith and her boyfriend-on-leash would move out at the end of August 07, to their new establishment.

But Judith and leash-boy never left. The end of August came and went, and I was still being harassed. The end of September ALSO came and went, and the end of October, and the end of November, and she did not go. No matter how many times I called the landlady's lawyer and said: You told me in court she was going, and he said: I'll check into it (lawyer-speak for shove it, lady, I guess), she did not go.

About the 7th of November she came up with her fresh, new torture. Her apartment was very large, taking up most of the house. The entire time she'd lived there, 14 or 15 months, she had had her bedroom in the center of her pad, well away from my own bedroom. But now she moved it. Into the room right beside MY bedroom, with her bed on the other side of the wall from MY bed, which is to say about four inches away. Now I had to sleep beside her and her boyfriend.

I had hired a lawyer very short-term (which was all $500 of the landlady's pay-off money could buy me), and when I told him about this new development, he was very sympathetic and agreed that it was intrusive and nasty, but unfortunately the housing laws didn't allow for him to call the other lawyer and have him tell Judith to put her bed back where it had always been.

It was the last straw. I had been pushed around and lied to and stolen from and otherwise abused by these two psychotic women for a very long time. By putting her bed right next to mine, Judith had naturally found a new way to invade ME, but she'd also at last given me a way to invade her back.

And so I did. I stooped to her level because I had been mistreated too much, without any lawyer or social service agency or cop or anyone at all doing anything to help. I stooped to her level because there weren't many reasons NOT to. For six weeks, from the 8th of November to the 25th of December, I insulted her day and night. And I kept leash-boy from getting his sleep (psychotics don't NEED much sleep, so none of this bothered Judith much, but it FRIED the boy on the leash). I knew the boyfriend usually got up at 6:00 in the morning and went to bed 11:00 at night. Every morning at 5:00, I put my cordless telephone to my ear, sat in my bedroom chair, and talked at full volume. All about him, all about Judith, all about the landlady. I pretended I was yacking with a friend, and I'd do it for at least two hours, so that the boy couldn't go back to sleep before he went to work. Then I'd start again about 11 at night, when he wanted to go to sleep, and keep it up at least two hours more. I insulted them and mocked them sometimes with great big intellectual words that they couldn't even understand, and sometimes with plain old dirty words that they could understand very well. A couple of times I heard him say on the other side of the wall: Let's just move into the house and get out of here. I can only guess that Juidth's reply was No. She whispered her replies so I couldn't hear them, but they did not leave.I watched the boy go to work every morning, observing that his face grew more tired and drawn every day. And I rejoiced. Judith had interrupted my sleep almost every night for 15 months by banging on the walls or letting the dog out at 3 a.m. to bark outside my window. How did little boy like it, not being allowed by his neighbor to sleep?

On Christmas day, he must have put his dainty foot down, and apparently she could no longer wheedle him to her way. About 8 in the morning, he loaded a double bed, a big dresser, a night table with drawers, into his pick-up, drove off in the direction of the house someone (the landlady?) had helped them buy, and these two pieces of filth never again lived in our building. They left most of their stuff in the apartment, most of their stuff in the cellar, most of their stuff in the yard. They even left Judith's white chariot. Once in a while they would come over and take away a small load, but not much. Two and half months later, on the day the deputy came to throw me out, most of their things were still on the property. But they never LIVED there again after Christmas morning.

When they were gone, I eventually called my lawyer and told him what I had done. He laughed and laughed, and then said: Good for you. As an attorney, I could never have advised you to do such a thing, but I'm awfully glad you did it. What's sauce for the goose, is sauce for the gander.

It was a tiny victory, as anyone with even half a heart will know. Yes, my animals and I had the rest of our last Christmas day in peace. Yes, we had our last two and half months to spend without the mafia-connected, alcoholic, drug-using, drug-dealing Judith and her boy-on-leash. But if I spent roughly 162 hours pretending phone conversations in a loud voice to get their bed away from MINE, that was 162 hours that were stolen from me and my animals. Stolen from our last holidays, from the last few months that we had to be together.

And in despair I bowed my head,
There is no peace on earth, I said.

(tradtional)

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read... Spite and malice... Kaikenlainen...

~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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chani and chailin

2010-12-27T05:47:00.000-08:00

Monday 27 December 2010
Turners twits

In 2008 I was writing posts about the fourteen animals who had been taken. Writing poems for them too. I did get all the poems written, but not posted. And the notebook with those poems still sits rotting, I guess, in a person's barn, and will I ever get it back. Another project never finished back then was the prose writing. Twelve of the fourteen got done, but before I could finish, I lost my ability to write about these stolen friends. I can write about any other animal, but for more than two years, writing about those fourteen has been nearly always impossible. Far too much pain involved.

And yet there are two who have never been done, who've never had much of anything said about them in my blogs, and it gnaws at me that this job, this tribute, is incomplete. Especially now at the holidays.

So today I try to say whatever small things I can manage about Chani and Chailin.

They weren't related to each other. Chailin, when she finally finished growing, turned out to be the largest female cat I've ever had. She must have weighed near twenty pounds. Not just fat, either, but a big frame as well. Like her mother and brothers, she was very shy, and a one-person cat. I was the human in her life, and she wasn't in the least interested in any others. She remained close to her mother till the day the deputy came to evict us, at which time she was twelve years old. When I went out for evening dog walks, she would very often sit in a certain windowsill and watch for us to return, and sometimes I'd stand outside with the dogs, tapping on the glass and thanking her for watching out for us. Sometmes she would answer me.

For a while in 1998 we lived with someone who did not want my cats inside, so they had to be outdoors all the time. This wasn't a terrible ordeal, as there were lots of trees and lots of land and a barn, and the street was very small with little traffic. It was just that my cats had never been denied access to me and to the inside before, and that part was hard on them emotionally.

Chailin and her two brothers all developed the habit of hiding somewhere on this property for several days at a time. They never vanished all at once, all three of them, but one at a time. One would be unseen for two or three days, reappear, and then a different sibling would go missing. When the BOYS showed up again, they would walk right up to me, say a few words, let me know they were back. But Chailin had a different approach. I'd be out on the property calling her, she would answer me. I always knew it was her: her voice was very much her own. She would answer and answer, but she would not show herself. There was a lot of woods on this property, and even though I could hear her, I was determined each time to see her with my eyes and assure myself that she was okay. So I'd have to go hunting. Following the sound of her voice as she spoke to me, until I finally located her. Sitting up straight and tall in some patch of woods, and looking up at me as if to say: Hey, ma. Where've you been for three days?"

Chani was another extremely shy cat, though she had completely separate parents. And in contrast to Chailin, Chani was very small-framed, less than standard for a cat. She was so shy that sometimes I felt as though I hardly knew her, since she was much more a cat-cat than a people-cat. About once a week she would have a great desire for me, come to me and walk all over my chest, rubbing and purring and being petted by me, but otherwise she kept her bonds to her two brothers as the primary ones in her life. On the day she was stolen she hadn't yet had her eighth birthday.

While her mother was still alive, Chani also maintained a very close relationship with mom. In fact, I'd say that her bond with her mother was the deepest one Chani ever had.

I was never one to try to change too much about my animals' behavior (unless it was dangerous), especially with cats. Since a little girl I had respected the independence of the feline nature, and had pretty much let them be who they were. Cats who were aloof were allowed to find their own spot to curl up in all by themselves. Cats who were people-mushers were allowed to crawl on me and sleep on me and lick me and so on. And cats like Chani, who were cat-cats, were allowed to form their deepest ties with other cats. It cost me something, of oourse. Now that Chani has been stolen and killed somewhere, I wish I had had affection with her more than once every week or two. At least about half of me wishes I'd sought her out and made her tolerate my attention for a few minutes every day. But the other half of me is still glad that I accepted her as she was, and that I let her be herself.

On eviction night, it was decided by a certain Turners lunatic and her smarmy, lying, sneaking priest that my animals should be kept overnight in one of the smarm's two garages, till the animal officer could come for them in the morning. It was also decided by them where I myself should be kept overnight: in a hotel in Greenfield, far from my animals. Though I asked permission to feed my animals their supper, I was not allowed. The lunatic and her equally mental son would do that.
Because they were both loons, and because they had no experience with animals, the feeding took from eight o'clock till midnight (I was told the next day), and five of my animals were allowed to escape. One dog off running loose in Turners all night and all the next day, and maybe more. Chailin and Chani and her two brothers escaped into the other garage, which was packed to the rafters with crap for a yard sale. The four cats were uncatchable in all that junk. Our eviction was in mid-March. A full two months later, I was told that the cats were still in that garage. No heat, no love (was there even a litter box?), nothing at all that was known and comforable and normal. I can still hardly withstand thinking about it.

There are people in this poisonous town who finally got those cats out and took them somewhere and had them euthanized. They will not tell me. My need to know where my loved friends were taken, and where and when and how they died, is absolutely irrelevant to these sick-minded christians. They keep their secrets locked up tight from me as effectively as any mafioso keeps his secrets. I wish them misery every single day that I breathe. No, I ain't one of them airhead forgiveness dudes. Those who do evil, to me or to someone else, are held accountable in my heart and in my mind.

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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gloria in excelsis... the heights of your wazoo

2010-12-22T11:42:00.001-08:00

wednesday 22 december 2010
turners tyrants

Today Cathy, or Kathy (I really don't give a fig) gave me a Christmas card. I've known Cathy for a lot of years, though only fairly casually. But she HAS known for quite some time that I'm an atheist. I have said it to her myself, on more than one occasion.

Now, handy little Cathy makes her cards herself. This year she did it with rubber stamps. The stamp she used for the FRONT of the card was all right. A manger scene, true, and just slightly insulting to an atheist, but not too bad. No magi or anything, just little kids kneeling at a manger, a few animals. Nothing I would have made any issue of. No, it was the INSIDE of the card that lit the fuse (as it was intended to do). The rubber stamp used inside was something to the effect that I would have the love of christ at this time. I said a very insincere thank you and went on about my computer business. But the more I thought about that message over the next two hours, the more insulted I became, and the more I realized what a deliberate little jab of the knife of ignorance and meanness that message was.

The card was given about 10:00. Two hours later, Cathy was gone, and I had a moment with another woman. I showed her the card and told her how insulting it was, and that Cathy has known for a long time that I'm an atheist. I told her: this is what I mean when I talk about how I've been treated here for 25 years. Outright meanness and attacks, and nasty little passive-aggressive things like this Cathy stunt. And she says to me: Just stand tall and defend yourself. I told her that I HAD been defending myself in 2007, against two profoundly disturbed and ruthless women, and that's how my life got destroyed. I told her I was going to Cathy's house to leave the card in front of her door. I wrote a note on it: No thanks, Cathy. You already know I'm an atheist. This I did just before 12:30.

I'm sure Cathy-defenders, and people who don't believe in passive-aggressive acts, will whimper: but maybe those were the only stamps she had. If so, then she should have hand-written the message. Seasons greetings, or some other neutral, non-religious thing. She's perfectly capable of writing. Save your whimpering. I'm not interested.

This is the kind of garbage I've taken from the uneducated, unevolved, uncaring baboons of turners falls for twenty-five years. they just won't let Nakis be. they have to jab, from the kinds of moves like the one Cathy made today (she could have skipped giving me a card at all, rather than give an insult), all the way up to the life-destroying actions of the mafia-chick and the mental landlady. I wish them misery on christmas and every other day. I wish them suffering. I wish them hurt. I wish them all the things that most of them have always given me in such abundance: ignorance and meanness.

shove your message to the heights of your wazoo, Cathy. gloria in excelsis.

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read... Poison and snowflake trees...

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

this sunset

2010-12-17T14:29:00.000-08:00

friday 17 december 2010
turners trogs

this afternoon I went again to one of my old haunts, one of the places I used to go to in my own life. deliberately I went there at the time for watching sunset over the water, a thing I used to do frequently, but now, since the ravaging of what was my life, most often find too painful to do. it was a december sunset I was after, in memory of the many sunsets in december that I saw when we lived right there, when we, my animals and I, were a daily part of the life of that water and that piece of sky.

I sat there on a railroad tie, wondering for at least the thousandth time, exactly why my body hasn't simply shut down all systems and died in the nearly three years since the most devastating loss of my life, and the most unscrupulous cruelty. when carrying so very much pain of the heart, why don't the cells themselves become totally infected by the brain chemicals of sorrow and rage, and just erode the functioning of every system and organ? why does my body, or anyone's, keep functioning under such an onslaught of damaging chemicals? why am I still alive in the absence of every single thing that mattered to me in life?

and also I wondered for the umpteenth time, why I couldn't bring on that ending myself, and make december 17, 2010 my LAST sunset? why in the nearly three years since the end of what was my world, have I not been able to say: This is enough and I'm not doing anymore. why can I not kill the only person I have a moral right to kill -- myself? There I was in my full-length wool and cashmere coat, my velour clothes that can soak up a lot of water, rocks all around me with which to fill the pockets; my inability to swim. it would have been so easy, so do-able, to emulate Virginia Wolfe, fill the pockets with the rocks, step into the water and let the fabrics drink it in, weigh me down, and make an end of misery. so easy, if I were made differently. if I didn't have this maddeningly tenacious inability to kill.

seeing that once again I couldn't do it, I got up and went gathering solstice berry plants. if they were living in a woods, they would have their bright red berries now, but the condtions on the banks of the canal are not optimal for these little shade plants. I gathered them and wrapped them in pine needles, to bring them back to the ponystall and try again to raise them indoors. yet again I have made my own name for nature, not having any idea what these lovely plants are really called.

I watched the sun get lower, and then gone. watched the speaking geese fly over, watched the speaking ducks swim towards me, watched clouds turn orange and coral and pink, and watched to see these colors repeated on the face of the water.
then the time for me to go; reluctantly, with a heavy heart, wanting to stay into dusk and into the blue point, to the richest indigo of that blue phase of dusk, listening to the bedtime chatters of the ducks and geese gathered together on the water. but there were things to do, and I couldn't emulate Virginia, and so I had to go.

maybe I won't see even one more canal sunset in december this year, or ever again. it's rare that conditions in my body and conditions in the weather dovetail benevolently enough for me to accomplish such an outing. whether I see another one or not, I came away, as always from a memory walk, with that taunting, constant wish that I could end the thing.

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read... Being toward death... Lifelines...

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the last christmas

2010-12-16T04:11:00.000-08:00

saturday 25 december 2010
turners tears apart

It was 2007. The last Christmas that bore any resemblance at all to all the Christmases before it. The last Christmas that mattered. For which I still had my own way of life, and the ones who mattered to me, to whom I mattered. There was still all of our December music, and our walks, and all the pleasantness involved in the giving of gifts to each other in our home. Snow and full moons and meteors and deer were still adventures. It was a Tuesday. Christmas ended for me, in almost every way that holds significance and value, in December of 2007.

In that final December, I spent more money on us than I ever had. I did it because I could, because out of the $7000 my landlady owed me for infractions of my tenants' rights, I was given less than half. But that money made a more beneficent last Christmas for us. I also did it because of intense fear: the Department of Mental Health had for nine months done just about nothing to find a place for us, or for some of us at least, and the middle of February was our eviction date. I did it in case it was good-bye. And as it turned out, it was.

I made us more feasts that last holiday season, from November 1 to the middle of January, than I'd ever done before. Lamb and beef and turkey and pork and custards and noodle puddings and bacon and eggs, and more. And all of it was shared with the dogs and cats. The birds got vegetable feasts, and their very favorite treat, cooked pasta.

There was more music than in any holiday season ever. The CD's and homemade tapes played more often, radio shows heard and taped and heard again. And I had bought the instruments right before the holidays: the lapharp, the tin whistle, the chime rack, and the handbells. I wanted to play music for the animals myself before we ended, however poorly I might do it. I already had the keyboard and had played that off and on for years, but for our last time I wanted more.

Every snowfall those last months was precious, every candle-flame I lit a plea for this devastation not to happen. But it did.

I've said before in my blogs that I've experienced more than my share of bad luck in my life and more than my share of cruelty from other people. I've known a small number of others over the years who had had more than their share of the crap,
too, and far less than their share of the good things. What is the insulation against some of the sting of these things, what is the consolation and the comfort? Garrison Keillor provides an answer in his book Wobegon Boy:

The stream of insults that life directs at you
cannot be vanquished by skill or cunning. You
can't fight your way clear, you can't outsmart
life. The only answer is to be loved, so that
nothing else matters so much.

And even that, human beings had to take from me. The ones I loved, the ones who loved me. I wish those people nothing but an equal share of misery to the one they gave me. On Christmas, and every day.

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read... Stolen stars... www.experienceproject.com (sehnen)

~~~~~ website
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jingles and joy, just memories

2010-12-15T12:28:00.000-08:00

wednesday 15 december 2010
turners tesseracts

I've been informed by someone that this year's Solstice will be a whiz-bang event. Not only the second yearly standstill of the sun, but also a full moon and a total eclipse of same. It was a truth that in my own life, which no longer exists, I would have had a great holiday for such an event. There would have been music and cooking and photographs out in the cold. And dog walks under the eclipse. And happiness, at least for a day. It's not true now......

There were two possibilities for visits from people this Yuletide, at least in theory. One person from one place, one person from another. I wasn't, of course, forward enough to ask for such visits. It was something I hoped would be offered. But neither theoretical possibility panned out, and so, at this first Solstice/Christmas/Yule that I live in Turners Falls again, but this time without my animals, there will be no one. No one to eat with, no one to talk to, no one to understand the devastation of this particular Yule: the first in Turners with the animals all gone and killed.....

I was fond, for all my life, of this time of year. I loved to give gifts, and wrap them, and receive them too. I loved the music and the lights. I loved the celebration in the early winter. Something to lighten things once the leaves had gone and the sunlight had started making only short appearances. I loved the trees: decorating them, and sitting before them in evening, looking at the twinkle lights. I was fond of bells and songs.....

But mentalhell is a very different place in which to live. And emotional hell. And a blackworld of aloneness. Can you know this? Can you imagine yourself into this blackworld if you've never lost everyone you love all in a moment?
In this kind of world the bells have all gone tinny, and the songs only sing of those who were stolen, and there is no more tree, because there is no more family to love it with you. And the crystalline, fascinating magic of snow is now a haunted white emptiness that will never again be punctured by the ones who walked the snow with you...

And no one will come to offer a little company, a little comfort, in all of this grief that goes on. No one says: what if that were me.

Yuletide Yups
Christmas Carol~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

juergen

2010-12-01T14:04:00.000-08:00

wednesday 8 december 2010, turners tesseracts

Juergen Jergen Oppenheimer was his full name. I was eighteen when I got him. And if you find his full name a tad too much, think on the fact that the one before him was, in full, Jeffrey Jeremy Hilary Boob Jason Julian Chaucer. I was a teenager, for heaven's sake, and a teenager with Asperger's at that. Take a gander at some of the names Opal Whiteley gave her animals: Peter Paul Reubens, Lars Porsena of Clusium, and Thomas Chatterton Jupiter Zeus. And she was just a little KID with Asperger's. By comparison, I wasn't that bad. And by comparison to Jeffrey, Juergen got off easy.

He was a gift, of sorts, from a sibling. One summer day, 1971, I'm there in the livingroom, and sibling squeaks open the heavy front door, tosses something onto the rug, and says "Here's an orange cat for you." Orange was my favorite color for male cats in those days, and the previous one, the aforementioned Jeffrey, had died earlier in the year. Then sibling shut the door again.

Juergen was probably less than six weeks old at that point, very puzzled to have landed in this strange place. He would prove to be calm and quirky, and almost all the time an introvert.

So who's the kid in the photo with the interesting face treatment? I'll call him Joey. He lived nextdoor and was great pals with Juergen, the only one of my cats who was laid back enough to be friends with a four-year-old. As I myself had been, Joey was not what you'd call a mainstream sort of a four-year-old, but he and I were different from the norm in mostly different ways. Joey was often very serious, even moreso than I was at seven, but once in a while he would come out with something that was a howl.

One spring someone buys Joey a plastic fishing pole, with a plastic and magnetized worm on the end, and a separate, magnetized plastic fish. Joey was bored with the plastic, lifeless fish, and seemed to find it much more fun that Juergen came along one day and went after the bait. After that, it was THEIR game. One day my father saw them at it and said "Catfishin' Joey?" And with a completely straight face, staring down at Juergen in the puddle, Joey says "Yup." And the cat, despite his general dislike of water, never hesitated to roil around in the puddles to catch that damned plastic bait.

Another of Juergen's much-loved games was to sit in my lap while I ate and be passed goodies from my plate. His favorite hand-outs were plain donuts. The old-fashioned kind, made in an old-fashioned donut shop.

Joey's about 42 now, with kids of his own. I don't keep in touch with him and couldn't ask permission to use his picture, so I've concealed his face. I'm 57. Juergen, of course, is gone a very, very long time, having died on 8 December 1984 at the age of thirteen.
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(photo by l. billard)

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

the unfinished noho threnody

2010-11-24T09:08:00.000-08:00

Wednesday 24 November 2010.... Turners tongues

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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read... Lucked out... Cutting the pie...

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

chloe

2010-11-22T10:49:00.000-08:00

Page Seventy-five

No picture of Chloe today, though there may be one or two in my storage unit. Many times I wonder, really wonder, if I will ever indeed SEE my own belongings again. See them, touch them, and live in all the memories that they will waken, both in my mind and in my heart.

Chloe was born on 7 August 1992, along with her five brothers and sisters. Like almost everyone in the litter, she was grey and white, built small and compact. She lived with us until the first week in January 1993, when she and her brother Brucie went off east to live with my parents. Like Mugsy and some other animals, Chloe would become a victim of my mother's extreme psychological changes in the year 2000, and there would be a sad ending to a life that began so happily.

Before that time, though, Chloe had a good life. She was adored and pampered by me and my daughter, and by her feline mother and grandmother. She was the most shy and reticent member of the Maman family, and always had to be treated with a bit more delicacy than the other cats. As for the outdoors, in those first five months of her life that she was here in the Turners miasma, she didn't care much for the outside. A little time outdoors was fine for her, and after that she liked her creature comforts. She was especially close to her sister Zoe, who also didn't need much of the outside world until she got older, so they chummed around together a lot in the apartment.

I loved Chloe and Brucie in the same way that I loved all of my other animals, and the only reason I could let them go at all was because they were still going to be part of my family, though at a distance. I would never have given them to anyone but a relative, and I knew they would have a great life with my parents. Whatever else my mother was before her terrible crash in 1997, she was almost always excellent to her animals, and I had no worries for my two kids on the day they drove off with her (though I still cried for days for missing them).

I had no crystal ball. I couldn't see the big black wall of shit that was to come. Many times since 1997 I've attacked myself, wondering, SHOULD I have known that such a thing might come? I'd surely seen certain traits in my mother all my life that hinted at danger. SHOULD I have figured out that such a day could come?

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read... Sehnen... Lifelines...

~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

robin

2010-11-17T15:15:00.000-08:00

Page Seventy-four

saturday 20 november 2010
turners unfeels

Do I have to say what kind of animal Robin was? Born in spring 1990 and died in November 1994. Brought to me as a nestling by my loving cat Melinda. I do indeed have a photo, but it will have to wait. Haven't been able to use the scanner for three days.

Nestling means that Robin was all feathered in when Mindy brought her, ready to learn to fly but not there yet. Unable to get her own food. Still pulling the head back, opening wide, and cheeping when she was hungry. Like all young members of the thrush family of birds, she had a white a breast with black spots. As far as I know, robins are the only thrushes that lose these spots with the first molt.

We had gone on a trip down to Disney World in 1990, returned around the tenth of June, and only a few days later, no more than a week, Mindy brought this young bird to the bottom of the stairs. I was already in possession of a female sparrow that Mindy had brought as a nestling the year before. Mindy seemed very eager to help me increase my number and knowledge of birds.

I fed the little bird myself, on wet bread and baby food, and she survived. Most often they don't, but she did. There was one little glitch that I hadn't encountered with birdlings before, and that glitch was lice. An unbelievable number of the tiny little buggers. In the nest, the mother bird takes care of de-lousing, and since I was now the mother bird, I had to think of something. I didn't want to use chemical, store-bought preparations, either on the bird or in the room where I was keeping her. I had read more than once that many bugs don't like garlic (right along with vampires), and so I made garlic water by soaking diced garlic in jars of water for a day or two. Then I washed the bird, her box, her bedding, and wiped down all the furniture in the room with garlic water. It worked, folks. Only had to do it twice, and all the little lice was gone.

Unlike all of my other birds, who lived on seeds of various sorts, Robin consumed mynah bird pellets, which had been doing well for my mother's blue jay for ten years. But the blue jay would eat them dry, whereas the Robin would eat very few of them in the hard, dry state. Not surprising, I guess, since robins seem to live on moist foods most of the time. I had to soak the pellets in water until they were soft, and then all was well. This was the mainstay of her diet, with occasional pieces of wet bread, which she liked, or blueberries, or hamburger.

Robin's is a death I feel at least partly responsible for, and therefore it's hard to write about. Not because I don't want to admit my mistake, but because a dark ball of self-disgust rises up, and extra pain on top of the normal load that I live with every day.

She shines, like all the others, as one of the bright stars on the map of the years I've lived, and I miss her, like all the others, still today.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read... All my stars... Stolen stars...

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

spotty

2010-11-10T09:15:00.000-08:00

Page Seventy-three

wednesday 10 november 2010 .... turners festers

~~} Bold yellow sun lights the land where you run,
~~} burns so bright all its shadows are black.
~~} You rest in the shade where the danger lies wait:
~~} how long will it let you come back?

He was yet another grandchild of Maman, that mother extraordinaire. I have no picture to show you, but he was a small cat, white with grey patches. Hence the name. And I must have named him in a period of great fatigue, because I usually came up with names slightly more original than Spot. That's as bad as Fido or Rover. But most of my animals had multiple nicknames, and for him these were: Spotty, Mr. Spock, Spocky boy.

Like everyone in his family, Spotty was a home boy. Even when free outdoors, these cats never strayed very far from home, unless something really out of the ordinary happened. And the family also tended toward smallnes, which in the case of Spotty's litter was smaller still. None of the six ever got to what you'd call a normal size for an adult cat, and I think this might have been because their parents were half-siblings.

Sixteen years after his death, I still sadden to say that his life was a short one. In the debate between indoor-cat and outdoor-cat, there are good points on both sides. And I have argued the question within myself thousands of times over the years. In most times and places, I opted for outdoor cats. And the indoor people can rant and say that I'm wrong, that I shortened my cats' lives by letting them go outdoors, and in the latter point they are correct. But I had reasons, reasons which I consider just as valid and well-considered as anything they can say, for deciding on outdoors. Not going to elucidate them here, as this is supposed to be Spotty's post, but maybe I'll go into them somewhere on my website, at some future time.

Two years and three months was the amount of time he lived. A short time, but a happy one. He was happy. The dark cloud in his life was the cat next door, a particularly aggressive tom called Skip, who would come to our porch and beat on Spotty, who was only half his size. I tried not to get TOO furious with Skip, because he belonged to people who didn't take very good care of him, and I think this contributed to his generally unhappy nature (he belonged to the same crowd that Rabbit did, and they didn't take much care of HER either). But I did get SOMEWHAT furious when I would hear snarls and shrieks from Skip and Spotty's very unique, loud hum of terror coming from the porch. We all know the expression "scared shitless." This is what happened to poor, timid Spot every time Skip came to the porch to assert dominance. I'd rescue him, of course. And as I've said, this was the only dark cloud in Spotty's otherwise happy life.

read... Shadowpoems... Extemporaneana...

~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

2010-09-29T07:04:00.000-07:00

Page Seventy-two

wednesday 29 sept 2010 turners turning fall

for several weeks now, acorn time has been in full swing here in new england. the acorns look a lot smaller than they have in past years, and a great many more of them than usual are falling without their caps.

(avanti greeting card)

and who needs the acorns? the squirrels, of course. and the squirrels lose all their normal sense of caution regarding traffic when acorn time comes. it's programmed into them to store as much of this food as possible for the coming winter, and to do it as fast as they can. they are running and racing across streets willy-nilly to take the food back to the nests, and this is the time of year when more squirrels are run over by drivers than at any other time. that's not a scientific study; it's just what I've seen all my life. the hurry is another genetic thing: you are NOT the only squirrel gathering acorns. many others are doing so too. the faster you go, the more you are likely to get before they are gone.

one acorn-hunter, at least, has already been killed by some buffoon here on Avenue A in the poisonous land of turners fails. the speed limit on said Avenue is fairly low, as it's the main street of the burg, and there are traffic lights on it. in theory, no one should EVER be driving so fast on that street that they aren't able to stop. but what the hell, a squirrel is only a lousy squirrel. plenty more where the dead one came from.

to which I could respond: What the hell. a moron is just a moron. plenty more where YOU came from if I should decide to run over YOU.

give them a chance at acorn time. they're only trying to survive. a human goes to work and busts its butt for money, because money is survival. well, when winter's coming, acorns are dollars to a squirrel, and the difference between living and not living to see another spring.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... All my stars... Stolen stars...

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

nxonfu III

2010-09-08T15:55:00.000-07:00

Page Seventy-one

wednesday 8 september 2010
turners thugs

Oh, why not another Nxonfu post. I'm pretty sure that Robert Louis Stevenson is the author of these words, but I'm not at all sure that I've spelled his last name correctly. I've changed his pronouns to suit my meeds: I've taken license.

Ur inavfurq va gur fbhaqvat gbja.
Jvyy ur eerzrzore gbb?
Jvyy ur erpnyy gur rlrf bs oebja,
Nf V erpnyy gur oyhr?

Nxonfu I and II
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Scealta liatha...

(clip art photo)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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once, in a greener day

2010-08-31T09:21:00.001-07:00

Page Seventy

website

ANIRON

So why is this tree here. It's here for the same reason that every single image on my very large website is here: it has something to do with the life that was stolen from me in 2008.

another season

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on twitter @annegrace2
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read... Lifelines... Extemporaneana...
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

cormorants et alia

2010-08-25T09:11:00.000-07:00

wednesday 25 August 2010 turners loons

Well, yesterday I noticed that the cable strung across the river, held on either side by two utility poles, is suddenly gone. It was still there Saturday. For more years than I know of (at least since 2000), the cormorants have been using that cable to perch on, as it gives them a wide vista of sky and river and aids in their fishing. Well yesterday it was gone, and the cormorants were all perched much lower down on the string of ugly buoys that keeps the drunken boat operators from sailing over the dam. Really a terrible fishing position for them. So I wonder if the flaming, empty-headed yuppies have decided that they not only don't like Canadian geese getting on the land and walking about, but they don't like cormorants sitting on cables, either. And there must be a hell of lot more flaming yuppies working for the electric company than there used to be, because they didn't USED to do the kinds of things they're doing to animals THIS year... Don't know whether we have any varieties of AVIAN loons in this burg, but we certainly have a huge selection of the human type.

(this ain't a cormorant, it's a crow. but cormorants are black here, and this is what was handy. in slightly different tones, it was done by susan dorf. you can see it at www.gaelsong.com)

And today? Today is the 25th anniversary of the very first time I moved to this town called Turners Falls. I thought a lot about that day last night, when I was trying to fall asleep. It seemed so innocent. Moving into an apartment in a town I'd never heard of, living there for a few years to do grad school, then going back east where I came from. How bad could it be? How much damage could a few years do? What were these people like? I thought they'd be more or less like the people I grew up around, people who were also citizens of a small town in Massachusetts. Innocent idiot, I was totally ignorant that day of the huge chasm between the western mass small-town psyche and that of the east. Night and day. A descent into palpable ignorance, jovially practiced meanness, and generationally entrenched pride in their backwardness.

How can you know on a certain day that seems to have minimal, manageable consequences embedded within it, that that day is actually the day that will lead to the destruction of your life and of everyone you love? That that day will sink you into an ever-thickening miasma of human meanness and aggression and stupidity? I've said elsewhere on this blog: I despise these twisted people.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... All my stars... Mishibone... Soulcast...

on twitter @annegrace2

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

lovetaste

2010-08-17T07:41:00.000-07:00

(the crow is by susan dorf and available from www.gaelsong.com)

Page Sixty-eight

tuesday 17 august 2010
turners molders

I love blueberries, their taste, texture, even the way they look. But this morning I got blueberry blood on my nearly pristine white hand towel (can a thing be nearly pristine?). It annoyed me. My Asperger's klutziness annoys me.

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

The continuing micro-saga of bill:

bill was the grampire vampire

more bill

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

I started a blog on a different site back in October 2008, while I was living outdoors in this poison-haven called Turners Falls. Let's call it the J.blog. I considered it to be different than the others I had at the time because I didn't have any plan. It was just a place where I could sit at the keyboard, let my mind wander a few minutes, and see what came out. A sort of vacation from the ugly stories of the Department of Mental Hell, and Matthew and his "protectors," and my disappeared animals. All the things I was discussing in some detail in my other blogs. Not that these subjects didn't also come up in the "vacation" blog (they did), but I approached them there in a much more extemporaneous way. So here's what came out on the very first post, and the blurted-out poem is indeed for Matthew, and for all who talk a good game about love...

14 Oct 2008

Go tell Aunt Rhodie
the old grey goose is dead

I fear she is dead, the old grey goose who lived in the river these past years along with all of the wild water birds. She moved in from somewhere and became the boss of the ducks. I think she died around two days ago. I saw the beginning of her death, attacks by a Canadian goose trying to usurp Goosie's position. They do this when they sense the leader is dying. She cried out to us, her human and duck friends, on Friday the 10th, but there was nothing any of us could do. She's been my friend since 2002. I didn't want her to die before me. I wanted to go first, and go knowing that she was still there in the river, a domestic barnyard goose, bossing all the ducks around.

Kimmy, another lost friend, today's your date, but not your day. You were real and true and completely yourself. When comes a new October/and I walk the wild inferno of the trees....

There is no collapse in a closed system, says Goldstein, says Bohm, but I can't keep my systems closed. They are open every minute to attack, and to entropy, and thence to collapse.

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

put your love on this plate
and I will eat of it
if the taste is too sour
I have to get the sour gone
before I choke and blue and die
put your love on the sand
and let the broken waves lay over it
will it disappear beneath their weight,
or is it deep, deep enough
to be there when the water inches back
put your love in this candle-flame
and let it slow-burn loyally,
and if you never blow it out,
and if you hold truth to the flame,
and if the flame is warm,
then maybe
maybe
maybe....

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

read... Extemporaneana... Mishibone... Soulcast...

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

2010-07-21T08:41:00.000-07:00

Page Sixty-seven

wednesday 21 July 2010 turners faltering

I've said in other places on my online journals, which are still all being inter-linked to form one website, that since my animals were taken in an illegal eviction more than two years ago, I can no longer pursue many of the interests that were an ongoing part of my life as I previously knew it.

One of those interests was photography. But now, aside from pictures of my guinea pig or animals outdoors, I no longer take pictures, and certainly not what I used to refer to as my "artsy" ones.

The two things I was most driven to photograph -- and I mean driven -- were water, and the sky (which is just more water). Water as liquid, as ice, as snow, as mist. Nothing but animals fascinates me more than the way different qualities of light act on water in all its forms. So...

In 1998 I became friendly with a woman who owned a bookstore and had me as a part-timer there. We didn't know each other terribly well yet, but were spending a lot of time together. One evening in summer we went to supper at a place that had outside picnic tables (I had my dog and one of my rabbits with me), and when our order was called, I went to get it. I'm returning to the table and I see Elizabeth pointing a camera up towards the sky. Do you take pictures of clouds?, I ask her, and she looks immediately both embarrassed and guilty. Well, sometimes,, she says in a meek little voice. And I tell her no, no embarrassment, that I take pictures of clouds too, but I've never seen anyone else do it, and I'm really pleased that she does too. It was, at the time, just another odd thing that made me believe that Elizabeth and I should be friends for life.

I'm sad that in the end, we did not stay friends for life, but it wasn't for lack of me wanting it. I still miss her. And of the many things we had in common, cloudminding was the one that surprised me the most.

I can't put one of my cloud pictures here, as they are all locked up in storage waiting for the day (if such a day ever comes) that I live again in a real apartment, rather than a ponystall.

read... Braonwandering... Being toward death...

~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

meandering among friends

2010-07-21T07:22:00.000-07:00

kimmy

chan

tuuschi

lizzie

mandy

judah

to a search

mugsy

frosty
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

romance undercover

2010-07-02T09:57:00.000-07:00

friday 2 july 2010, turners falling

Yes, it's about 1:00 pm and I'm computering here in Turners. But earlier I was in good old Gruenefeld, computering away there. Had a surprise waiting for me on the sidewalk as I approached the library in that other town.

And the surprise led to panic, and sadness, and the old trying to write as much of it as I could out of my system on a blog post.

This Matthew Lacoy, who used to say he loved me (and maybe, in his own completely unacceptable way, he does) was the surprise on the sidewalk, there on the sidewalk doing parts of what is his job. I have seen these undercover antics so many times before, and when I saw him there with one of his colleagues, both waiting for me and doing the pacing-smoking dance, which Matthew alone must do wearing a heavy winter parka fit for a blizzard, there I saw that in this sick-club way, he was telling things to me, as well as to others around u. To me he was saying: it's a bad day, and I myself have come down here to this sidewalk to take charge, and to speak to you, and to impart to you with various elements of body language that you learned two years ago, that today is a bad day.

He spoke to me twice, and looked into my eyes, as is often his way, and waited for an answer. He didn't get one. There's no point saying things to him that I've already said, things he either refuses to understand or really doesn't understand because he doesn't have Asperger's, and I do; or because his way of being in the world is so ego-driven and mine is much more soul-driven.

So, here's the post I wrote there in Gruenefield to try organize the great caldron of feelings that arise in me every time I see Matthew Lacoy.

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

read... Sehnen... Braon...

~~~ website ~~~~

emily and I

2010-06-16T08:07:00.000-07:00

This is an old post from the original Mentalhell blog, which is now just about defunct, so I've moved this here.

thurs 17 april 2008 greenfield

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem that begins something like: I'm nobody, who are you?/Are you nobody too? I am nobody now, even more so now than I was before the DMH got done with me. And like Emily, I'm a reclusive person who also writes poetry and wants to keep separate as much as possible from everyday human doings. It just isn't for me. Thus the animals, all of my life. But I guess Emily's family had some money and she could get away with being odd. When you're poor and you invite the DMH mind-police into your life, you can't get away with the great crime of being who you are. Of course I didn't KNOW they were the mind police and the self-appointed controllers of where and how I would live, and with whom, when I invited them into my life. No one had ever told me the REAL mission of these mini-dictators. I was told I would get ASSISTANCE.

So they did what they did, they destroyed my life and left me with nothing, homeless, 55 years old, physical illnesses, PTSD, anxiety, depression, and they helped me right out of my life. After all the trauma I'd already had in my life, they delivered me the worst one ever, the king of pain, the queen of grief.

Here's a poem I wrote years ago, but it now runs through my mind just about every day:

I have come where mountains cry,
where tales of failure wander by
and fill the sundown sky with streaks of grief.
I've sung a strangled, unloved song,
but I can still those notes before too long,
since everything was wrong, and strange, in me.

If you see me on the cliffs of stone,
remember that I've bled and screamed alone,
and earned the right alone, to jump and die.

The poem is only partly factual: I was alone in the realm of humans, but I always had the animals, and they did love my song, and they were a large part of what always stopped me from jumping. Now the DMH has robbed me of them. Some have been killed, though I'm not sure how many. The others have been adopted to other people, and I don't know who or where. This is one of the things I used to say to them:

I love you as big as the sky,
as big as the sea,
as bright as all the light that ever was.

It's still true.

Update 28 July 2009: I have come where mountains cry... I will never leave the place inside me where mountains cry, no matter where I go. It's very hard to produce actual tears on celexa, the antidepressant. I noticed that side effect when I took it back in 2003, and that's why I eventually stopped taking it: it felt too wrong not to be able to cry. But though my eyes produce few tears, there is a constant crying inside me, even screaming, and a dark emptiness. Will I jump? It's not too likely. I tried several times last year to end myself, to get out of the hell of having lost everything that mattered, and the hell of being in sneaky, undercover federal protection, and the hell of having people show up in Greenfield who wanted to kill me, and the hell of the ignorance of Greenfield and Turners Falls. I tried to jump. But something in me won't do it. Maybe I have too much of an aversion to killing, even when killing is the only thing that makes any sense.

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read... Scealta liatha(poems in english)... website...
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another round of fire

2010-06-02T08:44:00.000-07:00

wednesday 2 june 2010 turners turned stony

Well, as the result of recent things that have gone on behind the scenes of my various blogs, I feel it necessary yet again to address the subject of whether or not I am delusional... delusional vis a vis Matthew Lacoy and the things he told me about my life and my grandfather.

I have to say in complete truthfulness that I deeply resent having to continually go over this again, both verbally and in print, more than two years after this Lacoy person said the things that he said. I am furious and MYSTIFIED by the fact that supposed ADULTS can't seem to distinguish between delusions and believed statements.

So, an object lesson: If someone that you know only casually one day invites you to their home and gives you shocking news about your own life, what do you do? Let's say the person tells you that your mother and his father had a secret affair long ago, and the two of you are siblings. I use this example because I've actually known people to whom this has happened. What do you DO? What do we as sentient (supposedly) beings do when someone is talking to us? Ok, I'll tell you. We evaluate a variety of factors going on in that person: 1. the actual words they are saying, the particular words they choose 2. the tone of voice and inflection they are using 3. their body language: is there a tightening of the jaw, a hardening of the eyes? You evaluate these things every single time someone speaks to you, whether you are consciously aware of it or not. And this is what Anne Nakis did on the days Matthew Lacoy told her these things.

And having performed this evaluation that we all engage in AUTOMATICALLY, I decided that he was not lying, that he was telling me truth, and that is what I still believe. If anyone ever proves to my satisfaction that Matthew Lacoy was lying to me, then so be it. But no one has proven that thus far.

So, let's allow for the possbility that he WAS lying. What does that make ME? What does that make ANYONE who believes a lie someone told them? Gullible? Dumb? Too trusting? Mistaken in their judgment of this person's sincerity? YES, damn it; any or all of those things. But not DELUSIONAL, not IRRATIONAL, not INSANE. When did the DSM definition of delusional suddenly become: anyone who believes a lie someone told them?

And why do I continually try to stick up for myself, for two years continually try on the internet and in real life to expunge this notion of DELUSIONAL from people's minds and from the twisted little papers they fill out about me? Because the word is insulting to me, and because it's a lie. It's an insult to my integrity, my sanity and my intelligence, as I've said before and will no doubt say again. And because it's a lie. It isn't truth. NO ONE wants a lie circulated about them. NO ONE wants complete fabrications believed about them in this town and that town and this office and that office. You wouldn't want it either, if it were happening to YOU.

Am I angry about all this? Absolutely. With no apologies or excuses. Anger is not a mental illness, despite what the psychobabble boneheads would have you believe.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Spite and malice... Braon...

~~~~~ website ~~~~~ on twitter @annegrace2
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved)
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turners falls, tarting up

2010-05-19T14:51:00.000-07:00

wednesday 19 may 2010

So, folks, google Turners Falls and see all the invented glory that comes up. They are trying so very hard to increase tourism and get "quality" (read: monied, shallow, hollow-brained yuppies) to move here, that the town is advertising itself in most mendacious manner on the internet, complete with black fishnet stockings, red lipstick, spike heels, and all the other tools of the hooking trade.

Don't be fooled!

You'll read nothing on the internet about the high rate of alcoholism and drug use in this pit, or the high rate of business failure. Nor will you read about teenagers beating other teenagers to death with baseball bats while still other teenagers look on. You won't read about the abysmal school system, the pregnant teens, and so much more fun.

A whore, after all, when you remove all the fake stuff, is pretty much like any other whore.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Poison and snowflake trees... Braonwandering...

~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

2010-04-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

wednesday 21 april 2010 turners flails

They call this area of Massachusetts the Pioneer Valley, the valley being that of the Connecticut River. It's that for me, of course, loving water as I do. But it's a valley of trauma too, a valley of dirty, ugly souls.

I live here in this town again, as of 31 March, and it's nothing but torture. I chose this town -- I wanted to be with my memories. But it's even more pain than I'd envisioned it would be. I despise these wretched people so much.

I've said before over my two years of journaling on the internet (and on more than one blog) that you won't get new-age, touchy-feely, forgive, forgive, stuff-your-dark-emotions-and-pretend-they-don't-exist prattle from me. You'll need to read other people's blogs to get that.
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read... Sehnen... Don't ask...

~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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from here on...

2010-03-05T08:33:00.000-08:00

friday 5 march 2010 turners fails

Sitting here today, I'm not sure how much longer I'm going to go on with this blog. But that may change, and I may keep going. After all, I don't have a life. Someone stole that.

Next Tuesday is the second anniversary of being removed by a sheriff's deputy from my apartment. Do I need to say that this anniversary weighs on me as heavy as a sea, that grief is how I live, and bitterness? Those are among the emotions amerikans don't want to acknowledge feeling, or talk about, or hear about. But I'm an atypical amerikan in a whole variety of ways, and I started blogging to talk about my grief, and my outrage, and what corrupt, largely unregulated systems can do to one individual when they answer to just about no one. And I stay on the internet to keep writing about those very things, and about who I was before my life as I knew it was destroyed.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
read... Sehnen... Braon...

~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

emptiness

2010-02-18T10:22:00.000-08:00

18 february 2010 turners falls

Is that too depressing a word for you, emptiness? Too corny? Sorry I can't find a more interesting word to describe for you what my daily existence is. Sorry the story I've had to tell on my blogs for the last twenty-three months is so sad, so depressing. But I didn't make the story; the people who took control of my life did. If it's sad and depressing to read, how terrible do you think it is to be living all this.

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read... Spite and malice... Braonwandering...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

website link

2010-01-21T09:13:00.000-08:00

thursday 21 january 2010, turners flails

Today someone helped me set up a blog-based website. Click here to go there.
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read... Mugsy's book... All my stars...

(tapestry available from www.gaelsong.com)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2011, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.
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wednesday 30 december 2009

2009-12-30T08:32:00.000-08:00

turners falls

See ya later, 2009. I ended 2008 deeply disappointed in trying to communicate with people on the internet, and now I end 2009 the same way.

I write 5 on-line journals on 4 different websites, and now am knitting them together into one conglomerate website. I've hoped for nearly two years that I'll find people about my age with about my interests, and people who might be just a bit peeved about what was done to me and my animals. But it simply doesn't happen. I go on writing for other reasons now, but it's not easy. Like standing at a podium, speaking to an empty room. Or a room full of the deaf.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Mishibone... Neverending solitaire...

~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

monday 14 december 2009

2009-12-14T12:38:00.000-08:00

greenfield

Why do I continue writing these on-line journals, I often wonder. I don't write the kinds of things that people are looking for: entertaining things, things of interest to people 35 and under. So why?

During the long time I've been writing these real-life events on the internet, I've had different reasons for going on. But now I go on for my death, which I'd hoped to be able to bring about myself, but so far... My relatives have no interest in these journals now, while I'm alive: I'm not taken seriously as a human being, as far as I can tell, by anyone related to me. But perhaps when I've died there will be at least some meager morbid curiosity about who this woman really was. As long as I breathe they define me, and I'm not allowed to define and describe myself. Maybe when I no longer breathe there will be a change, but of course I can't be sure.

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

read... Lifelines... Lucked out...

~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~

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

anne nakis, or nemo

2009-11-07T06:41:00.000-08:00

Saturday 7 Nov 2009, Greenfield

I can't haunt the streets of Turners Falls today, the ghost, the Nemo (no-one), the frantic Demeter searching, and scourging the earth over her lost Persephone. There are no buses today.

I've called myself no-one on this blog, and on another I've called myself sehnen (longing). I'm both of those things. And if my personal archetypes have become Demeter frantic over her stolen daughter and Deirdre of the Sorrows, crying for 12 years over her murdered love and in the end killing herself, it's because of the last 12 hell years. I haven't gone into much of the hell pre-dating the stealing of my family in 2008, but those years actually began in 1997, and culminated in the destruction of my life last year. But all of my on-line journals, whatever I'm talking about in them, give clues to the damage that's been done over the last 12 years.

(resin figurine at www.toscano.com)

Click here to more about Deirdre.

read... Braonwandering... Spite and malice

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

wednesday 4 november 2009

2009-11-04T08:11:00.000-08:00

Turners Falls

Ah, all the updating of last year's blog posts. This is the blog I've been the slowest with. It's a lot of work, and a lot of thinking about things from last year that still hurt a great deal. From time to time I'm burnt out and have to take a break.

Last year at this time I was living in Peskeomskut Park in Turners Falls, whereas now I'm living in a rented bedroom in Greenfield. But two years ago, in November 2007, I was still in my own life, in my own home with my animals, living the last November we would ever have together. Three Novembers, so different from each other, and yet each bloated with pain in its own special way.

website.

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

saturday 17 october 2009

2009-10-17T07:02:00.000-07:00

Page Fifty-two

Greenfield...

All is status quo. I go to Turners to haunt what was my own life. I wait on a waiting list for a tiny apartment in a small institutional building in Turners, which I will hate. I've never lived that way. There will be no animals. I'll continue murdering minutes away as I've done for the past nineteen months, but I don't live. Not in any meaningful sense of the word. I exist. Matthew is still here, and we are still estranged, which we will remain. I have the one human friend, D.

My daughter's father has killed himself, and I grumble in a dark envy that this long-absent person was able to do what I haven't been able to do: to end the misery. I'm much smarter than he was, and educated, and much more sensitive than he was. Why could he do this simple and final ending of misery, and I can't.

Not Human
website

wednesday 7 october 2009

2009-10-07T09:04:00.000-07:00

Page Fifty-0ne

Greenfield

Nobody Nowhere. The title of a book I've recently read. But also the title of my existence since 12 March 08, when my whole life and everyone I love were taken away. Nobody nowhere has been me for the last 18 months. In many ways, Nobody Nowhere has been me my whole life. Me vis-a-vis other people: nobody much. I take the anti-depressant, I take the anti-anxiety, but these don't give me back my life and my loves. These don't turn me into somebody again. They don't make the enormous grief just magically go away. Nor would I want pills to do that. I'm not a believer in stuffing emotions down, or pretending they're not there to begin with.

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

wednesday 23 september 2009

2009-09-23T08:30:00.000-07:00

Page Fifty

Turners Falls

Back here again haunting my memories, yet again. I come as often as I can. Very, very few people in Turners Falls speak to me now, this year, and I don't speak to them. They did, after all, leave me living outdoors for two months. There are some, after all, who know what became of my animals and will not tell me.

Still working on updating all of the posts from last year, but it's a long job. Sometimes I get burn-out and have to take some time off from all the updating, from all the digging out of memory words, events, people that I chose to keep quiet about in 2008.

Still living in a rented bedroom. Matthew is still in Greenfield, as am I. It's still painful on several levels to see him, but when I move back here to Turners, I won't have to see anymore this man who has loved me so badly. I have enough grief to carry, enough loss, and enough other memories of meanness.

Website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(greenman from www.gaelsong.com)

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

wednesday 9,9,09 -- blackworld

2009-09-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

Page Forty-nine

Turners Falls

Visiting again today the place where I had my own life, such as it was, for nearly 22years, and where it was torn apart 18 months ago...

Blackworld. That's how I started out on this journal many months ago, and it has only become blacker over time. I don't write popular on-line journals, and I've said this other places. I'm writing about things that are sad and depressing and angry and hard... I'm writing the truth of who I am and what's happened to me over the last 18 months. It isn't snappy and entertaining. It isn't clever or cutesy. It's a pretty ugly reality, and people are not hovering over their keyboards waiting for the next installment.

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

saturday 22 august 2009

2009-08-22T06:43:00.000-07:00

Page Forty-eight

Greenfield

The words "mental hell" with which I began this journal more than a year ago, still apply. I am in many ways a ghost. For all I know, I am still a worm. Matthew and his boys are still here. I asked him on April 27 if this was over yet, this "protection", and I didn't get an answer. Just as I didn't get answers to many questions I've asked him over more than a year. But I don't feel particularly human, and I certainly do not feel like the anne I was for 55 years, when I had what was my way of life.

Not one of the four on-line journals I began last year has the entire story of what I've been experiencing, especially in terms of Matthew and all that drama. The best way to gain a total picture, and my reactions to these various insane and grossly insensitive behaviors on the part of other people, is to go to my website and jump around among all the interconnected blogs.

(picture frame at www.gaelsong.com)

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

wednesday 12 august 2009

2009-08-12T09:07:00.000-07:00

Page Forty-seven

Turners Falls

I'm here in this town again today, where I no longer live, haunting my memories again of what was my own, real life. I've written about the reason I'm here today on braonwandering.wordpress.com.

I wonder where you are, other people with Asperger's, or other people who feel for animals the way I do and dislike human beings as much as I do, or other people who've had their lives destroyed.

I wonder if there might be people who read this now and then who find their adventures where I did when I had my life. The adventure of watching a sunset with dogs and cats. Or the adventure of finding toads with your dogs and telling them sweetly that we're not going to hurt the toads, we love them. All my adventures, for years, were found not usually in human activities, but primarily in nature, with my animals or by myself. And I hated humans interrupting my adventures. Coming along and chasing away the squirrel I was feeding, or yakking loudly some trivial nonsense while I was trying to listen to the water. And so on ad nauseam. But now that my real life has been taken from me, even nature adventures are darkened and saddened, because I no longer have my animals to share them with.

more about adventures.

tues 4 aug 2009

2009-08-04T07:49:00.000-07:00

Page Forty-six

anne nakis... unacceptable, unlovable in the human sphere. it's always been that way. apparently it always will be.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

ghost

2009-07-23T07:47:00.000-07:00

Page Forty-five

Thurs 23 July 2009

I've made eight trips to Turners Falls in the last ten days, though today I'm writing in Greenfield. I'm the ghost of Turners Falls, the empty one who goes to haunt the streets and the buildings and the waters where her life was, where her love was. Though I had periods of great emptiness back in the years that made up what was my own life, I've never been as empty as now. And though I had periods of wrenching loneliness in my own life (even with the animals), I've never been this alone. I wasn't built for this much loneliness. I do very poorly in it, both physically and psychologically. I care about nothing but the past, and the one human friend I have. Ghost.

(e. balivet tapestry at www.gaelsong.com)

website

uphill battles

2009-07-18T07:37:00.000-07:00

Page Forty-four

Sat 18 July 2009

AtomicPunk, if you're still blogging and reading, I'll say again that I'm sorry I missed your message for over a year. I really am a techno-failure. If you're still around, please write.

On other blogs I'm still working on details about the protection experience that Matthew said was going on in my life last year. These are details I didn't provide last year, for several reasons. I'm still trying to get down the facts of things he said and things he did, because I'm still trying to fight the delusional label. It seems I'll be fighting that incorrect and insulting label for the rest of my life.

I went into an extreme state of anxiety and anger during those "protection" months, after Matthew said and did the things he said and did. And because I lacked detailed information about how many people were protecting me and how it worked and how long it would last, in my anxiety and anger I pulled many people and events into the protection thing that I now realize didn't belong there. But I was never delusional. I was in an unbelievable situation that you never expect to happen to you, and right after having lost my home and everyone I love. I was extremely stressed and uncertain about who the people around me might me, but I never made anything up or dreamed anything up. It was a flesh and blood human being who is still in this town, though his real home is somewhere else, who told me people wanted to harm me, and that I was being protected by "feds," and that my grandfather had been in organized crime and betrayed them. Real words came out of a real mouth, and I believed them.

website

to greet atomicpunk

2009-07-16T07:20:00.000-07:00

Page Forty-three

Thurs July 17, 2009.... greenfield

AtomicPunk left me a nice comment, apparently over a year ago, and I only just found it a few minutes ago when I was trying to edit one of my earlier posts. I so seldom get comments, especially decent ones, that I forget to check for them.

I would like a lot to hear from you AtomicPunk, I think we could have things to talk about. And believe me, I'm still trying to figure out what happened with all this protection stuff too, but Matthew won't cough up anymore information, and certainly he won't cough up anymore of his purported love.

website

(pendant at www.gaelsong.com)

tuesday

2009-07-07T08:26:00.000-07:00

Page Forty-two

7 July, 2009... Greenfield

I don't feel like updating any of the earlier posts today. I'm tired. Just wrote, on a different blog, a longish post about the strenuousness of trying to fight the label "nuts."

Four blogs to update, to supply explanations I didn't supply the first time around because I had to just dump my emotions on the page every day in order to carry on. And only 1 hour a day on the computer. It's a huge job that will probably never be finished. It's not like I have anything else to do, since others chose to destroy my life, but I don't have a way to get more computer time. And anyway, as I periodically have to say in my discouragement, who are the blogs for?

website

(opal pendant from www.gaelsong.com)

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

anne as nemo

2009-06-30T10:14:00.000-07:00

(this tiki is available at www.toscano.com)

Page Forty-one

Tues 30 June 2009, Greenfield

Myself as nemo, as no one. No meaning and purpose to my days, since that all came, always, from animals. No one, with no home. No one, with life as I knew it for 55 years laid waste. No one for this no one to take care of, to nurture. There is so very much nihil, nothing. And I feel completely a nemo, a no one.

The human world has made me hollow, with its meanness and indifference.

website

long absence

2009-06-15T08:35:00.000-07:00

Page Forty

Mon 15 June 2009 Greenfield

It's been a very long time since I've written here. I'm going back over my writing from 2008 and updating each post, adding things that I didn't, for a number of reasons, include the first time around.

I am still homeless, after 15 months, and am living back in the rented bedroom that I had for a while last year. Matthew is still here in Greenfield -- hasn't gone back to his real home in Deerfield, but he will not tell me why I was never located anywhere by himself and his colleagues. I'm looking on my own again now. There are many things he won't tell me, and then there are the things he did tell me last year: that people wanted to harm me, that I was being "protected" by people from the fbi branch office in Burlington, Vermont; that my grandfather had been an organized crime figure. Is he really one of these protectors, or did he just hoax me? You'll decide that for yourselves, I assume, and most of you will no doubt decide he's a liar. People don't want to believe that what Matthew told me had happened to me can happen to anyone, ever.

And why haven't I written here since January? Just another one of the ugly mysteries that have been going on for a long time, and one I can't bring myself to address right now because of the mental stress involved in talking about it.

(tree man is available from www.toscano.com)

braonthree.wordpress.com

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

dante's 9th circle for each of them

2009-01-29T10:37:00.000-08:00

Page Thirty-nine

thurs 29 jan 2009 Northampton

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE ...j.p.sartre

and I could add: especially an egomaniac named matthew. not to mention his misogyny, which I have now mentioned. particularly angry at him today

Update 21 Aug 2009: I've read recently about people with Asperger's having shutdowns (I have those all the time) and meltdowns when too much anger, stress and anxiety have accumulated. I was living in meltdown for many months, but I wasn't delusional. I've also read recently that it's not uncommon for people on the autism spectrum to be labelled as some kind of psychotic when they meltdown.

Matthew was a special target for my rage. Both because he was the only "protector"(if the things he told me about my life were true) who was allowed to spend a lot of time with me, and because he had said he loved me. There are many posts on the blogs I wrote last year that are full of anger at this bizarre, ugly situation, and Matthew was often the target. As he remains.

website

how many of us might there be?

2009-01-21T10:00:00.000-08:00

Page Thirty-eight
Wed 21 January 2009 Northampton

How many people are there in amerika who are completely innocent, non-criminal people, who've had the sick bad fortune to end up with serious criminal types wanting to get them, and are in bizarre undercover "protection," whereby they are simply the property of infantile people who have no more conscience than the criminals themselves? And these would-be heroes have protected me against NOTHING else: not against homelessness, nor living outdoors, nor trauma, nor humiliation and degradation, not against loneliness or despair or grief. Not against hunger, not all the time.

I would say, at a guess, that maybe there are 10 or so people like me in this latent-fascist haven we call amerika. And I'd further guess that of those theoretical ten, most of them didn't already have PTSD when "protectors" took possession of them, and that NONE of them had Asperger's. I think the chances are quite good that I'm a one-of-a-kind amerikan, in the WORST possible way that you could be such a thing.

Update 22 Aug 2009: I wrote this during my second stay in Northampton, which was longer than my first. Again, the anger: it's a dominant theme in the journal writing I did last year and early this year. Because I always found Matthew's news about what had happened in my life believable, I believed absolutely that these "protectors" had taken over my life in a greater way than I had first thought. Matthew was no help there: he never told me how large or small the protection was, or how long it would last. I myself still believe the things that he told me -- too much that was bizarre happened around me and to me, and M. did things that I can describe in no other way than that they were things undercover people would probably do. If you want to conclude that M. played a big head-game with me, then that's what you conclude. I see that as only remotely possible, but others will have other thoughts. In any case, I was never delusional. I never heard voices in my head or dreamed up any of this stuff.

~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~

(bird at www.toscano.com)

powerlessness can kill you

2009-01-20T11:20:00.000-08:00

Tues 20 Jan 2009 Northampton

Page Thirty-seven

I'd like to move to Canada. Anyone out there who can help a person who can't work get a visa?

Ten months and nine days of my life have been stolen from me by other people, as of today. I might be bait, shark chum. Matthew's never disputed that. I'm still not a human being, WHATEVER is going on.

Unlike others unjustly imprisoned by our government (and more and more I perceive this illegal, undercover "protection" as a prison), I am not allowed a lawyer or the press. Powerlessness can kill you.

Update 25 Aug 2009: The anger, the stress, had been accumulating for so many months by the time I wrote this, that I just wanted out. I hated this country (because I had believed the things Matthew had told me). I hated the fascist abuse of power that could do to an innocent citizen what I believe the "protectors" might well have done to me. I didn't want to live in a country where such things had been done to me, or where they could be done to any innocent citizen. I can't say I feel much different today. Antidepressant and anti-anxiety notwithstanding, I still feel dark and black about staying in a place where I may well have been treated in such a way. And Matthew and his boys are still here in Greenfield, so what does that mean? You decide what you think about my long-running situation. But the best way to do that, if you have the interest, is to go to my website, braonthree.wordpress.com. You can't just read part of it. You need to read in all the blogs I started in 2008.

anne nakis and the feds? unending

2009-01-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

Page Thirty-six

tuesday 13 jan 2009 Noho
So it's 2009. And it all goes on. No home, no freedom as far as I can see from the illegal undercover "protection." You don't want to believe your government is capable of the things like this, and I myself haven't wanted to believe it, either. But I still DO believe the things Matthew told me, and I can't live in the fallacy that our government wouldn't DO this.

CANADA, PLEASE, PLEASE

Update 27 Aug 2009: I was staying in the Northampton shelter for the second time (Jan 12 to Feb 9)when I wrote this. I was 5 days away from a birthday I didn't want, a birthday I was angry to still be alive for; angry that I hadn't been able to end myself and escape the existence that wasn't my life as I'd known it for 55 years. That I hadn't been able to escape the life without my animals, without a home, and burdened by a "protection" about which I had only very minimal information. I was still in mentalhell, and hadn't been able to free myself.

~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~

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

not delusional, but I AM worthless

2008-12-15T08:38:00.000-08:00

Page Thirty-five

Mon 15 Dec 2008 Respite, Greenfield

So, so, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I conclude, based, true, on very limited but very damning evidence, that Matthew himself is probably the DECIDER. You know, like georgie bush. That Matthew decided that the best way to "protect" me (read: catch-heap-big-fish-and-be-even-heap-bigger,-cooler-undercoverman-than-ever) was to deprive me of home, loved ones, privacy, dignity, my legal right to give consent to being bait, my right to make decisions about my body, etcetera. He took control. And that was BEFORE he'd ever met me and fallen in love (sigh). Matthew himself, the man in love, may well have been holding the reins of my nine months of homelessness, and if that is his idea of love, then it's sick and twisted and of course I want nothing to do with it. He is SUCH a control freak that though he's known since late August that I don't want to talk to him and don't want to have him in my face, he KEEPS putting himself in my face. It Will Be HIS Way Or NO Way, as it has been all along. When you are loved by someone like Matthew, it's an ownership thing. He owns you. Shove it, Matt.

Update 3 Sept 2009: The day after I wrote this post, the respite people would tell me they were kicking me out the next day (the 17th). I've mixed up the days a little in other places where I've written about it, but here's the right way: they told me on the 16th that they were kicking me out on the 17th, so on the 16th I walked out the door without a word (leaving my stuff behind), and got on a bus for Boston. I stayed in Boston 23 hours, and on Dec 17th went to Northampton.

As for the things I said about Matthew in this post, I'm leaving them. I was angry, stressed-out, anxious, exhausted, and unsure about how great his role in my life before I knew him might have been. I'm still unsure, still don't have those answers, so I leave my statements as made. I certainly have no proof all this time later that he wasn't the one who made these various decisions. I asked him once in 2009 if he were the Decider, but all I got for a response was the undercover drivel.

website
(clip art photo)

latent fascism in everyone

2008-11-04T07:45:00.000-08:00

tues 4 nov 2008 Living in a park in Turners Falls
Page Thirty-four

It's nearly 8 months that I've been waiting. Until June I waited for the Department of Mental Hell to find me a place and give back some of my animals. After July, when Matthew told me those other dark things about my life, I began waiting for my "protectors" to locate me somewhere and return some of the animals. I still wait.

If Matthew told me the truth, then I've come to see precisely how fascist and lawless our federal law "enforcers" are, and it is a great shock. What is equally shocking is to see the latent Nazi blooming in every single regular citizen in Turners Falls and Greenfield, who turn their backs on me and my animals and my homelessnes. This is shocking in the extreme. I thought there were some citizens around here who had more backbone and more conscience and more principles than that. Not for me, they don't.

As I've said before in other journals: I have been betrayed by absolutely everyone around me. My government, my "friends," my doctors and therapists, local law enforcement, my child, my fellow citizens. Such a massive and unanimous betrayal can only make you feel like the lowest creature crawling on the planet, the most worthless blob of pond scum. And as worthless as they have deemed me to be, as viciously and shamelessly as they have all treated me, just as worthless and inhuman do I deem them. I despise them all.

Update 9 Sept 2009 -- Here is the anger, the hurt, the resentment I lived in all the time, and still live in to a different degree. If this protection was truth on Matthew's part, then at least the police forces in the two towns had to know about it, if no one else. But I was swimming in a sea of uncertainty, since Matthew would never give me more details: how many people are "protecting" me; how long will it last; who knows about it in the community, etc. Who did know about it? I didn't have a clue, so everyone was a possible "knower." I'd already been made to feel inhuman and worthless by the Department of Mental Hell when they sat back and let my life be destroyed, and then for Matthew to tell me about this protection thing that was all undercover and behind my back, made me feel still more inhuman and worthless.

~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

a worm?

2008-10-24T07:55:00.000-07:00

Page Thirty-three

fri 24 october 2008 Peskeomskut Park in turners flails

Am I someone's juicy bit dangling on a very painful hook? I'm still left to sleep outside, 55 years old and lots of chronic illnesses.

Many of the people in this town are so religious. Or at least, they are SUPERFICIALLY religious. I wonder what their god thinks of their participation in my degradation. I kid you not, not one of these people, some of whom have known me at least casually for over twenty years, will even give me a hot meal, nevermind a place to sleep. While I wait for Matthew and his germs to locate me somewhere.

Update 11 Sept 2009: I started writing in bold in all the journals last year at this time. The bold was to symbolize my anger and frustration. And I started ignoring things like capital letters because I wanted to break rules. Today I've put the capitals back in and removed the boldness. I believed the things Matthew said, so I believed in this protection, and I believed that because I was "protected" in such an underhanded way, I was bait. I am still not sure that I wasn't bait, because Matthew won't answer any questions anymore (not that he ever answered very many). As for the citizens of Turners Falls, I still bear them the same ill will. Their religiosity didn't prevent them from leaving a 55-year-old woman in a park. Even if they thought I was a loopy delusional, they knew I was harmless. No drugs, no drink, no violence. Someone could have offered me a room, or at least a couch. What would their Jesus have done?

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(oak leaf jewelry at www.gaelsong.com)

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

as ever, the hollow men

2008-10-21T07:53:00.000-07:00

Page Thirty-two

the leaves are falling all around and into my "home" in the bandstand in Peskeomskut Park, in the holy haven of Turners Falls.

tues 21 0ct 2008 living outdoors in Turners Falls

I keep forgetting whether it's Tuesday or Wednesday -- that's how tired and worn out I am.

I've said this in other places: a man in Keene, New Hampshire, a psychiatrist, no less, told me that if federal people were protecting me while at the same time using me to catch certain fish, without my consent, that this was ILLEGAL. Is this true, or was this professional man, fully trained and licensed and all that, just getting himself some jollies over my "delusions?"

They are no longer human beings in my eyes, Matthew and his fals,as I apparently have never been one in theirs. They are the quintessential nazi soldiers following orders, no matter how cruel and abusive to the innocent those orders are. They can all rot, these purported protectors, and I have no moral qualms whatsoever about saying that. They have no qualms in my direction. Leprosy would be nice -- then they'd literally rot. But does anyone actually get that anymore in amerika? Cancer, bullets, ebola virus, whatever. They are not human, not at the level of conscience and morality. They're a plague to be eradicated. If they've used me this way, I am furious. Furious and without recourse. I've been told by any number of people that if these big-cop types mess you over, there's not a thing you can do about it. Are they right?

I hang on this hook for your pleasure,
your plans, your parasite pride

Update 26 Sept 2009: It's still true. If they used me this way, I am furious. As I think MANY people would be.

~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

protecting?

2008-10-11T07:41:00.000-07:00

Page Thirty-one

sat 11 oct 2008 Living on the canal in Turners Falls

I've been asked to leave the laundromat (though I was behaving myself there in a perfectly civilized fashion), so now I'm camped out on the canal. People who've known me for years in this town know that I don't drink or use street drugs or commit violent acts or steal, but no one can see their "Christian" selves clear to giving me a spare room or even a couch. To wit: "Going to church doesn't make you a christian anymore than standing in a garage makes you a car" (@scrapbookallday).

It's seven months today since various people destroyed my life. To this very moment, I continue to be homeless and to live with the likelihood (in view of things that Matthew Lacoy told me) that I am some kind of bait. When I started this blog in April, Matthew hadn't yet said any of these things. I thought that the DMH sitting back and delining to help me was the only bureaucratic millstone I was carrying. It was only in late June that I figured out there was something criminal going on, and Matthew, when questioned, admitted it right on the sidewalk. From that day on, he had little bit and pieces of other ugly things to tell me.

Update 7 Oct 2009: Some days, on some journals, I could mention things like exactly where I was sleeping in the great outdoors, and other days I couldn't. I was too ashamed. And once again I'll explain why I wasn't looking for my own place to live, why I'd stopped doing that in early July. Once Matthew told me I was being protected by people from Burlington, Vermont from another set of people who wanted to do me some serious dirt, I stopped looking for a place to live. All I'd ever known about this kind of "protection" was that you couldn't choose your own place to live: THEY had to choose your location. I was still waiting for them to put me where they wanted me, and Matthew knew it. I kept telling him to get his friends to get the lead out, as I was sick of having no apartment.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

still the rabbit hole

2008-10-04T07:38:00.001-07:00

Page Thirty

sat 4 oct 2008 Sleeping in a laundromat in Turners Falls

I've been hanging around here in the library. Always have to find places to hang. The high school just put on some kind of a parade, and the floats were all of fairy tales and children's stories -- three little pigs, cinderella, etc. Reminding me once again that I fell down Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole late in 2006, when all kinds of official and social service type people -- who are meant to help --started lying to me. The DMH lied and disappeared everyone I love, leaving me a homeless bum. And then Matthew adds his own gruesome tidbits to the already grim story of my days. No one will say where the animals are, if dead or alive, how long this "protection" might go on, how it works, etc.

Update 9 Oct 2009: A year later, it's all the same. I never, it seems, escape Alice's rabbit-hole world of nothing being as it seems and no one telling much truth, until death. I'll say again that I fell into Alice's rabbit hole, into a world of lies and smoke and mirrors and meanness and surreal illogic in November of 2006, and I'm not out yet. Maybe I never get out.

website

the hollow men

2008-10-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

Page Twenty-nine

wed 1 oct 2008

Last night I slept outdoors in good old Turners Falls

So it could well have been some ice-cold colleagues of Matthew's -- along with the Department of Mental Hell --ripping apart my life and my heart all along. I've known this since late June, but for a lot of reasons haven't written about it as openly as I wanted to. But now, in October, I do. I have been betrayed by what appears to be a whole host of humans belonging to several organizations, and I no longer wish to be secretive about ANY of it.

Update 17 Oct 2009: I didn't write openly about all of the things that passed between me and Matthew last year. Probably this is one thing that fed into the erroneous notion that I'm "delusional." I was trying, in some things, to protect the source of my information about all this criminal crap in my life, which led many people to believe that I didn't have a source, that I was either making it up or dreaming it up. But the words came out of HIS mouth, whoever and whatever you believe him to be, and I never dreamed up or invented a thing.

(oz folks at www.whatonearthcatalog.com)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

no rights, no say

2008-06-27T06:51:00.000-07:00

Page Twenty-eight

fri 27 june 2008 Greenfield

I don't think I've ever mentioned that according to the mob-chick, she and the landlady had a deal. I heard her say it. It was 13 months after she moved in, and she was outside my window talking to a friend in her shrill, scratchy, fish-wife voice, and they were drinking wine. Always when she was running her sociopathic mouth outside my window, I'd turn up my radio, since I had not the slightest interest in any sewage issuing from her mouth. But I didn't get to the radio fast enough, and I heard. The deal was that if the chick could make me have another nervous breakdown and go to hospital, leaving the animals free to be taken, chick could live her whole time there rent-free. Her whole time there was 17 months. A sweet pair of ruthless females, don't you think? My sisters. If I HAVE mentioned this before, please excuse the redundancy.

So... it's very possible that EVERYONE had an agenda. Mob-chick certainly had hers: to make me have a nervous breakdown. Landlady had hers, but she actually had MORE than one. The building inspector and board of health had theirs. The selectmen and the police had theirs. The DMH and CSS and sheriff's department had theirs. My OWN agenda was to be found a place to live with at least half of my family, to be present at the euthanasias of whatever ones could not be saved, to maintain my privacy and reclusiveness, and my way of life: animals, art, books, etc. Minimal contact with most humans. And I make more redundancy: my tenant, civil, client rights were all violated, as I am a powerless person on the public dole and am very weird with my PTSD and Asperger's and rare immune sysytem disorders, and I can't afford a lawyer, and the entire town of Turners Falls has always felt that a nothing like me could be treated any old way that popped into their extremely muddy and callous heads.

Voila. The destruction of one human being (though I am apparently not that in their eyes) and the 14 innocent animals whom she loved more than her own life. Voila.

Update 19 October 2009: Because this was written in June last year, I believed there were only certain people from certain organizations who had all participated, behind my back, in this eviction and the disappearance of my animals. I wouldn't find out until July (from Matthew), that, according to him, even more bureaucrats were controlling my days. Now, if he was telling the truth, I had a whole lot of different people messing with my life that I hadn't known about before, and the ones I'd known about had already done enough damage: they'd destroyed my life. Matthew and his ilk were, and are, no better than the various other cruds who thought they could do anything they wanted to me, no scruples involved.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(dorothy a www.whatonearthcatalog.com)

wrongly and cruelly done

2008-06-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

Page Twenty-seven

wed 25 june 2008 Greenfield

To reiterate: Whatever the landlady, and the Turners Falls town officials, and the police, and the sheriff's department, and many more have been doing in relation to me for the last seven months (or more) and for whatever reason, it has been wrongly and cruelly done.

Whatever they have been thinking about, they did NOT think about me. As a citizen, as a renter, as a client, I had a right to have the bylaws of the town upheld in my behalf. I had a whole series of rights to be upheld: human, civil, tenant, client. They have largely been totally ignored, totally broken.

They did not think about anything they have done to me. For the first time in my life, I don't have animals. No one to say good-bye to when I leave, hello to when I return. No one to love, and love me. No meaning and purpose in my hours. No joy. No hope. The many, many people who have deceived me, controlled my life behind my back, disappeared my animals and told lots of lies about it, and much other despicable unlawful, immoral weasling... those people still have their homes to go to, still have what's dear to them, still have meaning and purpose and whatever in their lives gives them joy. They do not have two towns worth of people tearing apart their mental and physical health, tearing apart the fabric of their lives. This has all been wrongly and cruelly done, and if it had been done to YOU, I'm pretty sure you'd be feeling similarly to the way I do.

Update 20 October 2009: All I can say, all this time later, is ditto ditto ditto. And the consequences of these people's actions and their lack of compassion and their abrogation of my rights go on and on inside me, without relief, in spite of antidepressant pills. Two days before I wrote this original post, I finally figured out that there was something criminal going on in my life. A day or two later, Matthew Lacoy confirmed that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

(celtic knot at www.gaelsong.com)

immer noch dein raetsel

2008-06-20T06:32:00.000-07:00

(tree, right-side-up, at www.signals.com)

Page Twenty-six

fri 20 june 2008 Greenfield

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
More Bill.... what can I tell you today, nameless receiver of messages -- I'm tired enough that my brain is mush, anitbiotic makes it worse...

Bill on the submarine, and you came that time too. I could never have lived that way, would've gone stark raving bonkers, but he loved it. I loved the submarine too, and everything about it, but I couldn't have lasted more than a week. What about you? I didn't ask at the time. Could you have gone to sea in that thing? ...
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you're a glutton for more of this Bill you don't know, knock yourself out: one bill, two bill, three bill, four bill, five bill.

Update 22 Oct 2009: This post was written in a kind of private code for a certain person. I didn't explain it then, and I won't now.

When I wrote this post I was only days away from figuring out that something criminal was going on in my life, and having Matthew admit that. I was living in a rented room in Greenfield (the same one I'm living in again), and I had just dumped the Department of Mental Hell earlier in the month of June. My plan was to look for my own place without any social service "help," but in early July that plan changed when Matthew told me I was being protected by him and others from people who wanted to hurt me. All plans were suspended while I took time to absorb this information. By the time I had made a beginning at that, Matthew had told me yet another thing that squashed my plans further.

~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

a href="http://twitter.com/share" data-count="none" data-via="annegrace2" data-related="ziidjian:outre tweeting">Tweet
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

murdering minutes

2008-06-16T06:47:00.000-07:00

Page Twenty-five

mon 16 june 2008 Greenfield

~~~~~~~~ Bill bleeding his head at the landing... ~~~~~~~~~~

Another message for someone who'll continue to remain nameless. Anyone else, ignore. You wouldn't understand it anyway. But if you want to torment yourself with things you don't understand, you can follow Bill around: one, two,three,four, five.

Tick-tock. Murdering minutes away, any way I can, one endless minute at a time, every day since March 12, when my life was robbed from me.

~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

in memoriam

2008-06-10T06:03:00.000-07:00

Page Twnety-four

tues 10 june 2008 Greenfield

homeless 14 weeks today, 3 months tomorrow...
time for a poem. it's a longy.

Number 28

On the last Memorial Day
of my life,
I sank to sleep (2 a.m.)
without you,
woke 4 a.m. amid a dream of you,
without you.
Fifty-five such days before today,
all with your breaths,
your small beating hearts,
surrounding...
until now.

On this day
that I will never see again,
I sit in a cafe --
knowing, scrying, divining
in my realest self --
that this is not my life,
my place.
My life and place
are both at home with you,
and all my love,
and all my best,
and the sad leftover dreams
I had.

But there's no longer home,
no longer you,
no longer pretty dreams or sad.
All the space of soul is black,
cold,
lonesome as a grave.

And it's grave day today:
I cannot take part.
Inside me I visit them all
in a welter of flowers and tears:
our murdered child
and his suicided father,
our young man
dead away in Mosul
on the sand,
our friend, brain-dead on the pavement
right up there,
a suicided, murdered father of my own,
and all, and all the animals
I have laid gently, morosely, forever
into soil.

I'm powerless on grave day,
powerless as ever,
and we powerless
can follow neither heart, nor dream,
nor gift without assistance,
and you,
the stolen, vanished candles
were my last assist.
It's grave day.

2.

On the last Memorial Day
of my life,
I drown in random images
of all the ones before:
dad on parade in his whites
(how many years?),
cookouts and badminton games;
grown-up us with our babies
offered to grammy, matriarch,
at tables under trees
where chicken and steak were laid,
and all our little customs,
grown always more searing
by their loss.

When all of that had gone,
there was still you.
Memorial Days my soul
weighed like granite
for the want of all that was gone,
and you felt it, my granite soul,
my hard sorrow.
I cried or raged,
I lay in a zombie heap
or paced the floor,
and knew, divined
with unshakable knowing
that you were what kept me alive
among all the shards of breakage
on all those days of graves.

I rallied --
for you.
Cooked us something special,
listened to all the war songs,
soldier songs,
sang.
Lit candles for our dead,
walked under the stars.
Grateful for each one of you
still outside the grave.

Where are you to sing to?
They've kidnapped from me
all your willing ears.
Can't sing where have all the flowers gone,
ain't gonna study war no more,
johnny I hardly knew ya,
my bugle call of peace.

My existence has been nothing
if not war.
And all those battle-years
my patient, stalwart, truthful
troops marched with me.
Marched and loved
and loved my love
through fifty years of
ambush,
through every burning scar it left,
through every pool of blood,
the crippled limping of my legs,
and swollen lungs,
and pain that left me senseless in a heap
of screaming cells.

You were the last assist.
You were the troops
for whom I strove and soldiered on.
You were the stars and candle-flames
lighting up the soulscapes
of my nights.

Cold now, and dark,
the spaces where you were.
Where are you now?
If my soul can reach
to yours,
pretend I sing,
pretend we're still together:
gonna lay down my burden
down by the riverside
down by the riverside,
gonna lay down my sword and shield
down by the riverside,
ain't gonna study war no more. --- copyright 2008 by anne nakis

Click here to the poetry page of my website.

Update 12 December 2009: When I wrote this poem last year, I did so in Bart's Cafe, on Memorial Day itself, waiting for PN to come and visit and help me get some things out of my storage. We had a very good visit that day, an authentic one; one that rang of true friendship and not just the surface kind. When I wrote this, I didn't expect to be alive for another Memorial Day without my animals, without my own life. I believed fully that I would either die of grief or kill myself. As I did in fact try a few times to kill myself in ways that others wouldn't discern as suicide, and couldn't do it, I realized more fully than ever that I cannot kill. Even when killing is the best solution. Then there was only grief. I believe that the cells follow the soul, and that if the soul is dying, the cells will do the same. So I am disappointed that I was alive for a second Memorial Day in hell, and that I'm still alive now, approaching my second Yuletide without them, without me. Me as I was before human beings took everything away.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

nemo, braon, sehnen, mishi

2008-06-05T06:55:00.000-07:00

Page Twenty-three

thurs 5 june 2008 Greenfield

anne nakis: nemo, braon, sehnen, mishi. these are my phony names on my on-line journals.

Back long ago when I repeatedly asked the DMH and the CSS for a network, a word-of-mouth network of talk-to-talk-to to help find a home for me and the animals, they couldn't bloody well be bothered. But now that they've destroyed my life, destroyed me, NOW they can get together a network. And it's good-sized. All the clients they have walking these streets who are drinking, drugging, stealing, prostituting, beating on each other, and yet there's a network for little old sober, law-abiding (mostly) me. Isn't that amazing? Isn't it nice that they can get off their lazy, moribund keesters AFTER they've sat around drinking coffee, letting my life be destroyed. They collect their pay from the taxpayers for being lazy, dull-witted, and for FAILING to do the job their paid to do: help.

Update 10 December 2009: The things I didn't know when I wrote this... Later in June I would find out. The people watching me and following me were not working for the DMH after all. In July Matthew Lacoy would tell me that they were working with HIM, and that there were very bizarre reasons for these people being in my face everywhere I went. I had thought they were DMH people because I couldn't find any OTHER reason for it. I had reported the dismal "service" of the DMH to the governor's office several times, and to Health and Human Services. I'd also said I wouldn't survive the loss of my animals for very long, as this is what I truly believed. So when I developed an unwanted entourage, I thought the DMH, with the governor's lackey breathing down their necks, were keeping this ridiculous eye on me.

I don't apologize for the anger here, as I don't apologize for it anywhere. My whole life had been taken from me by a collection of reprehensible people, and as if that weren't enough to bear, I found myself watched and followed by yet another collection of reprehensible people. If you believe that federal people are fine and upstanding in some way, you're very much mistaken.

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

messaging

2008-06-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

Page Twenty-two

4 june 2008 Greenfield

another message:

bill said: a la casa linga (sic)

Again, this isn't for everybody. It's for someone specific. If you want to read these cryptic messages even though you're not that someone, fire away: bill here, bill there, bill again, more bill. and more.

thirteen weeks tomorrow

2008-06-02T07:12:00.000-07:00

Page Twenty-one

monday 2 june 2008 Greenfield

Disobligata II

inter stellas negras
alma mea remota
lacrimans
noli eam revocare

sub luna tenebra
alma mea semota
ululans
noli eam revocare

I reiterate: don't owe the neurotypicals who've generously showered meanness and hurt on me all my life a goddamned thing.

Update 3 December 2009: I don't owe any human anything, with very, very few exceptions. My soul is going to the only place it wants to go: to the past where I had my animals and I was myself, at least as much others allowed me to be, which wasn't too much. Noli eam revocare. Don't try.

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

who cares

2008-05-31T06:57:00.000-07:00

Page Twenty

sat 31 may 2008 Greenfield

I have to leave a message for someone here:

Bill said: Stop runnin' around like a fart in a windstorm.

Done. Rainpain, snowpain, sunpain, moonpain. Sorry folks, human beings are mostly repulsive to me. Always hoped I'd find one or two that weren't, but nullo modo. And i'm just as repulsive to them, judging by the evidence.

Update 24 November 2009: There's nothing to add but this: human beings are more repulsive than ever, after the events of the last 20 months.

I do have one person who seems to be sticking most of the time. But attempts to find a second have all failed.

Rainpain, snowpain, etc. go on without relief.
Thanksgiving is upon us, my second without my animals and my own life.
In the human arena, I'm the perpetual ugly duckling.

~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~

noli me tangere

2008-05-28T06:31:00.000-07:00

Page Nineteen

Wed 28 May 2008 Greenfield

It's yet another anniversary, the heinousest of all. And the symmetry of it is probably diabolical. Eleven years ago today exactly, on Wed 28 May 97, the universe in its perversity threw me into what I with bitterness and rage and intentional acerbity call the Hell Years. The quantum energy field has had a great deal of assistance from vicious humans along the path of these eleven years, and now, thanks to the DMH and CSS, the hell burns hottest of all. I feel nothing but contempt for anyone who participated in doing this to me, and to my innocent animals. I don't apologize for rage, or bitterness, or contempt. After a lifetime of abuse, I've earned those dark emotions. Last year, maybe, I heard a writer discussing some famous person on the radio, but I didn't get the name of the famous person. This writer had written a biography of said person, and said of him "He started out life a very gentle person. But if you hurt a gentle person too much and too long, maybe what you get is a monster." If I am a monster now, then it was all the bullying, stupid, mean-spirited neurotypicals of my life who created me.

Tempus fugit, so let's have a poem:

Disobligata

in undis
alma mea semota
natans
noli eam revocare

sub mare
alma mea demota
ululans
noli eam revocare

here to another poem: Sehnen

If you're dark and serious and enjoy reading depressing stuff, I remind you again that you can find links to other pieces in this ugly story that is my true, actual existence at my website braonthree.wordpress.com.

I don't owe any neurotypical human being a bloody thing. I don't owe the quantum field that made me a bloody thing, not anymore.

Update 21 November 2009: A year and a half after writing this, I can say only that my feelings are still the same. Yes, I take an anti-depressant now, and an anti-anxiety, but my feelings remain the same.
And in May of last year I didn't yet know about the criminal angle that had emerged in my life. Matthew Lacoy hadn't yet told me about all that. I found what he said believable, and still do, until someone can unequivocally prove to me that he was lying, playing a hoax. And if what he said was true, then I can add the FBI to the list of individuals and organizations that treated me as if I were less than human.

the phony police chief

2008-05-21T06:46:00.000-07:00

Page Eighteen

21 May 2008 Greenfield

Well, about an hour and a half ago I was re-hurt by another character in the saga of destroying me. This time it was the phony police chief. On the morning of March 12, the morning that I had to sign my animals away under extreme emotional and physical duress (the worst I've ever experienced), there was an animal control officer there, and another man that the animal control officer kept calling "chief". He even said to me, "we gotta settle this about the animals before the CHIEF chews my ass." Well, right then the "chief" came over to me and started the ass-chewing on both of us. I knew instantly that this man wasn't the police chief of Turners Falls, because I know who he is. I also knew instantly that I KNEW this man, but I was so tired and physically ill and traumatized that it took me probably 45 minutes to remember who he is. He's a deputy with a certain division of the local sheriff's department, and while I was being harassed by the psycho-chick and illegally evicted by the psycho-landlady, he was supposed to help me. These deputies are in the division called Triad. Their job is to visit elderly and disabled people in their territory to see if they have any issues they'd like help with. The first time he visited me he was full of tough talk about the things he was going to get done about the crime-chick who was harassing me. The second time he came, he just shrugged and said he could do nothing about the crime-chick or the eviction.

This I knew was bullshit. I had personally known people in the past who had been helped a great deal by Triad deputies in matters of getting both evictions and any kind of harassment stopped. But not for me. All of a sudden, after all his tough talk, there was nothing he could do.

But on that worst day of my life on March 12, there he was yelling at me, telling me lies about myself that came right out of the mouth of Cry Baby at the CSS. So these agencies that could never do much at all - almost nothing - to stop the harassment, to deal with the landlady, to find me a home where I could save as many animals as possible, to let me be present at the deaths of whatever animals could NOT be saved; these agencies (DMH,CSS, Sheriff) that could barely be bothered to help save my life, could all participate in this grand play-acting on that day (and a whole lot of other play-acting over the last eight months). THAT they had the mental resources to do: lie and play-act and let everything that was dear to me be destroyed. But they just couldn't bestir themselves ahead of time to try to save us.

I knew this deputy and the animal control officer were lying and play-acting. One reason I figured this out was that they kept laughing. This guy would holler at me, then turn his back, bend over, and have a laughing fit. Also, they delivered their lines as stiffly and phonily as bad actors in a bad play. I knew they were acting, but what I didn't know was why.

So this actor drives right up to where I'm standing, about 8:15 this morning. I'm standing on the steps of the house where I rent a room, smoking. He drives right up and starts his mouth at me. Only this time he's playing the sweet act. I looked at his face only once or twice for a nano-second, because looking at ANY of the characters in my destruction gives me chest pains and stomach pains. I said only a very few words to the crap he was spouting, then held up my hands in a gesture for him to go away and leave me alone. The whole lot of them took part in the destruction of everything that kept me going through 11 abysmal years. GO AWAY AND LEAVE ME ALONE.

Update 20 November 2009: That was the last time this man and I ever spoke (May 21 last year). This sheriff's deputy who was supposed to give me regular security visits while the psycho-chick was harassing me, and didn't. Who was supposed to get something done about the harassment, and didn't. Who then suddenly appeared playing a police chief on the day my animals were taken away (that he could manage). We never spoke again. He died last year, September 7I think, of stomach cancer. That's one whose face I'll never have to be triggered by again, but only one. The rest are all alive and kicking. If all of this sounds harsh, it is. What this dead man and a whole lot of others did to me, and my innocent animals was harsh, and traumatic, and irrevocable.

Recently my current therapist told me that the DMH did start out with some kind of a plan to get me a place and re-unite me with at least some of my animals. A plan that fell through, but he wouldn't tell me why. So this play-acting that went on on March 12 must have had something to do with this plan, and with keeping it secret from me. Why did the plan to do something decent for me and my animals, to provide the service I asked for from the DMH in the FIRST place, have to be kept secret from me? Why all the lying and acting that had gone on for months? Why all these so-called adults behaving like sneaky grammar school kids playing a prank on someone they didn't much like? No one at the DMH or ServiceNet will tell me.

~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

part of the book Spite and Malice

poem sixteen

2008-05-17T06:52:00.000-07:00

Page Seventeen

Saturday 17 May 2008 Greenfield

On April 24 I met a woman who turned out to belong to a NEW pack of mental health workers (the Recovery Learning Community), and they say they're going to help me find an apartment and find out how many of my animals are still alive, and where they are. But they are not as talented in the field of acting as they perhaps think they are, and there's a variety of facial expressions (badly acted), over-empahsized words, etc., that ring very false with me, very off-kilter. And as it turns out, their funding comes from the DMH, the walrus that destroyed me and destroyed my life. Will anything come of their promises to help?

Last Sunday was the first Mother's Day of my entire life without animals. An exercise in pain, that day, but then again they all are now. Tomorrow's another special Sunday. Exactly 33 years ago, on Sun 18 May 1975, I graduated with my first college degree. I was 22, the future was before me. I did not train for a career while at college, I only studied what I liked, so on that day when they put that degree into my hand, I had no idea what the future would BE, but I did believe that there would be good in it. I did believe I would have a husband and a house and children like everybody else I knew. I also believed that marriage might end in divorce, like so many, but I at least believed it would happen. At 22 I knew that I was odd, that I was in some puzzling way different from other people, but I didn't know yet how vast my difference was, and that IT, together with my raging immune system, together with the cruelty of the neurotypicals around me, would lead to 33 years of failure and poverty and trauma and loss. I didn't know on that day that I should have taken that new degree, run across the esplanade, and drowned myself in the Charles River right then and there. I didn't know that all that lay before me was failure, and poverty, and worst of all, the cruelty of other people. How COULD I know such a thing on such a promising day....

This failure mommy marches on in bumhood and soul agony. Nearly 11 weeks homeless, and to my knowledge, the Department of Mental Health and the Community Support Services in Greenfield, Massachusetts have not done ONE thing to find me a place to live. Around the end of March Shirley Temple made some mutterings about some things she MIGHT do, but as far as I know they were never done. And they think that no one dies of grief....

The other day I saw the sociopathic landlady for the first time since sheriff day on March 11. Still fat. Still bleaching the hair. A professional person in the Turners-Greefield community who has everyone convinced (as she once had me convinced) of her sweetness and sainthood. But there is no law she won't break to get her way, and there is no unethical or immoral thing she won't do to get her way. And there's no amount of money she won't spend to get her way....

We should have a poem. Time isn't as reckless as it used to be...

Number 16

I dream.
Sometimes of you, the stolen,
I dream.
Sometimes I dream of the thieves.
Dream only in the night now,
only in tossing sleep.
Daydreams are all away,
vanished,
pilfered,
like you.

Remember? Do you recall
how many were the daydreams
I could make?
Do you recall
how very good I was
at dreaming?
Absent now,
the pages torn.
Like you.

to the poetry page of my website.

Update 18 Nov 2009: The Recovery Learning Community did not help me, anymore than the DMH had. The RLC had said they were going to locate my animals and stop anymore killings, and they were going to help me find a place to live with whatever animals were left. They did nothing. Once again I was led around by a string and then dropped like a hot potato by a social service agency. To see any of these people on the street triggers me, if you know how that word is used in relation to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. To see Matthew triggers me, and the psychotic, criminal landlady, and the mafia-connected tenant. Trigger, trigger, trigger, every time I walk out my door.

no money, no rights

2008-05-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

Page Sixteen

Wednesday 7 May 2008 Greenfield

So it seems that in the eyes of the DMH I did not have the right to have more than 2 animals, or the right to choose to be reclusive, or the right to have a lot of personal belongings, or the right to say that I did not want to live in public housing. I had at least two strikes against me when it came to having the right to decide these things for myself. One strike, I'm poor. Coudln't by my own house and do what I damned well pleased. Two, I have the dreaded mental illness label. Depression, anxiety. We're not talking what they call Axis 2 stuff: the things like multiple personality and other things that move into the bizarre. We're talking Axis 1. It isn't bad enough that society at large tends to view mental illness with a gimlet eye, but we have to have the Department of MENTAL Health discriminating against us too, denying us both our human rights and our rights as their clients to expect that they will be helpful to us rather than destructive. I go to them with PTSD and a long history of repeated trauma in my life, and they deliver unto me the worst trauma ever, the queen of pain and grief.

And I myself, having been raised in the society that views psychological issues this way, ALSO have certain conditions that I look at with a VERY gimlet eye. Sociopathy, for instance. One that has appeared in more than one person in my life, and these people have inflicted serious trauma. If I've mentioned it before, well, I'll do it again. There's a decent book - though not as extensive as I'd like it - about sociopathy written by a psychiatrist. Her name is Martha Stout, and her book is The Sociopath Next Door.

Lines from poem #8, which I think I already put into this journal whole:

My name is enfiled by you,
and the day I was born.
(Who will tell you the day I die?)

Update 16 Nov 2009: I've said in another on-line journal that a short while back my current therapist told me there had indeed been a plan by the DMH to get me an apartment and let me have at least 2 of my animals back (2 of 14), but this plan fell through. He said he didn't yet know what the plan had been or why it had fallen through. I wonder if he knows now -- I'll have to ask him. My anger at the DMH, this juggernaut of a state-wide social service agency, is enormous. And almost every DMH employee I ever spoke to -- in Greenfield or Boston or Northampton -- seemed to have an intellect and sensitivity that would qualify them to do bricklaying or janitorial work. The state of Massachusetts doesn't hire the cream of the crop (they hire the dregs, largely) because the cream do not want to work for state pay. So when you go to the state, what you get is the bottom of the barrel.

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

my sisters: right

2008-05-06T07:02:00.000-07:00

Page Fifteen

Tuesday 6 May 2008 Greenfield

Eight weeks today since the sheriff's guy came.

It was a gaggle of women who did this to us. Landlady, psycho-tenant, case manager, goon at CSS: a gaggle of women. Back in the 70's, in the heydey of our country's most recent women's movement, we were all encouraged to think of other women as our sisters, and some part of me has always held to that. You can have whatever you can have with men, but we women are sisters. It's only in the last 4 or 5 years that I've begun to realize how truly vicious most women are, given the right stimulus. And they are very often jealous, self-centered, phony, whiney, and aggressive.

My only true sisters were my female animals: Brainse the dog, Lizzie and Canajoharie the birds, and the female cats: Shiloh, Judah, Chailin, Chani. Shiloh, I'm told, was executed. Judah is in a foster home "somewhere," but if I don't find a home where I can have her by May 14, she is maybe executed too. And Chani and Chailin, last I was told, were hiding out in a priest's garage in Turners Falls, and I don't know what the hell became of them. These were my only sisters, and one of the last dreams I had left in life was to see each of my ageing animals to their natural deaths. DMH and CSS shattered that one.

Women, you are not my sisters. You are childish and insufferable and sneaky. My true sisters have been stolen, and all of them most likely killed...

Update 13 November 2009: The same, the same. The way I feel about women in general and the women who destroyed us in particular is the same. The way I feel about the female animals who were stolen from me is the same. And it remains true that all this time later, no one has told me what became of any of my animals except the three who were slaughtered at the animal "shelter." The posts I made in 2008 were all made in a state of very high anxiety, and anger, and grief, and confusion. The confusion was not endemic to me: it was caused by all the lies and half-truths people had told me, and by the things Matthew Lacoy had told me about my life.

I used my on-line journals last year to just dump whatever was bothering me the most at the moment, so that I could carry on with each insufferable day. This year I've been spending a lot of time providing details and contexts that I did not provide last year.

~~~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

imagine

2008-05-05T10:37:00.000-07:00

Page Fourteen

Monday 5 May 2008... Turners Fools

I'm a person who has to apply artsy and otherwise imaginative things to all of life: music, colors, images, etc. To ensoul the ordinary, to turn the ordinary into a little magic, to let my imaination have its fun.

For instance, fairies. In my own life that is now gone, I was wild about fairies, but only pretty ones. All my fairies had to be pretty. And I chose to envision all fairies as kind and benevolent, even though this is by no means the case in Celtic myth and folklore.

And I chose to see all pretty fairies as symbols of all the good things life can have. And so on. Ensouling everyday life. Adding a little magic to the mundane. This is a very different thing from delusions, please note, and from the popular psychiatric disorder that is commonly called "magical thinking." This is a conscious choice to PRETEND, because normal pretending is safe, and sane, and fun, and good for the soul. One book in which you could read more on this subject is The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life, by Thomas Moore (a psychologist, by the way).

I did this in my conversations with my animals too. In the years that my cats and I walked along the canal in Turners Fools (where I'm visiting today and typing these words; where my family and my life were demolished), I named various spots along the canal with our own names that no one else knew: the sunset hill, Zoe's lookout, Shiloh's lookout, etc. I did it again with my dogs in the woods at the address we were just thrown out of. The fairy well, the hill to the morning, the little hemlock, the little singing stream, and more. My dogs, Brainse and Mishi, learned these names for things very quickly, and loved for me to say the name of each place when we reached it. Brainse liked to take it one step further. She would stop at each place, often getting there ahead of me, and she would not walk further until I said the name. Sometimes I'd be lost in my thoughts and I'd forget to say the name. Mishi and I would keep on walking a few feet, and then I'd notice that Brainse wasn't with us. I'd turn around, and there she'd be, sitting or standing at a certain spot that was special to us, looking at me as if to say "You didn't say the name, Mom." Then I'd apologize and say the name, and she'd smile and wag her tail and trot forward to meet me. Putting a little magic into everyday things. It's all gone. And the DMH and the CSS sat back on the cheeks of their brains and let it all be taken from me.

Update 12 November 2009: I've been thinking a great deal lately about those dog walks in the woods and all the things we named there, and the sweetness of our time together there. But I cannot yet face returning to that woods.

I have, though, returned to the canal and the river in Turners Falls, where we also walked and named things and had sweet times. The pain of the loss of those times is greater than ever. The pain and rage that still, after 20 months, no "christian" souls will tell me what happend to my animals, is enormous.

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

part of the book Stolen Stars

psychotic spawn from hades

2008-05-05T06:47:00.000-07:00

Page Thirteen

Monday 5 May 2008 Greenfield

I talked about this before, on an older blog that I'm getting rid of. The destruction of me and my animals began on a certain day, with a certain person. Lots of other characters joined in the moral farce before it was over, but it all began with this one sociopath. And how could I know that then, on that one single day, with this one single psycho-bitch, that everything that mattered to me and kept me going in life would be destroyed.

It's Saturday the 15th of July 2006, when she appears on the scene. I'm out in the front yard gardening and this bleached chick in a white convertible drives by and waves at me as if I'm her long-lost best friend. I've never seen her before. A short while later I'm inside my kitchen, and psycho-woman drives up to my kitchen door and wants to know about the empty apartment. And there it all begins.

This is the acoholic, drug-using, drug-selling, delusional vermin who will torment me for over 16 months, in a great variety of ways, including never letting me sleep. She will (or so she later said) make a deal with the landlady to drive me to another nervous breakdown (the landlady doesn't like me and wants me out), and in exchange she lives in the house rent-free. This piece of crap joins together with another one, the landlady, in loathing me. They are both sociopaths, conscienceless with absolutely no sense of right and wrong. They form a team, and it begins.

read more about the mafia chick.

Update 14 August 2009: That's exactly how it began. Nothing I've said about it has been lied or imagined. I'm running out of computer time, but if I weren't I'd delineate for you some of the ingenious and relentless ways this bleached chick came up with to harass me and make me physically ill. Maybe another time. And she is not in jail. Harming me was nothing special to the law, but she did other things that were illegal, but Matthew and his pals have never cared about getting her into jail. It's some of the people she's connected to that they want.

part of the book Spite and Malice.

tuesday again

2008-05-03T06:42:00.000-07:00

Page Twelve

Sat 3 May 2008 Greenfield

No, it's not Tuesday. But I'm reflecting on something I wrote on Tuesday 22 April, when it was six weeks that I was homeless and six weeks since my life had been destroyed. I was talking about all the "forgive, forgive," literature and talk there is in our society today. Believe me, I've read it all and heard it all. But if you're looking for post-modern happy talk, you won't get that here, and maybe you shouldn't be reading this. Because I despise completely anyone and everyone who had anything to do with destroying my life and taking the ones I love away from me. And since the DMH has absolutely bathed me in lies and fairy stories, I will probably never know who all the participants in this trauma were.

Update 13 August 2009: These words, opinions and feelings are as true and as with me today as they were when I wrote this post more than a year ago. I'm in Turners today, visiting for the last couple of days the anniversary - 17 months - of the stealing of my life. The Tuesday trauma. You still will not get any post-modern, quasi-eastern, happy forgive talk from me. I forgive no one who had anything to do with the stealing of my life.

~~~~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~

rainpain, snowpain

2008-05-02T10:24:00.000-07:00

Page Eleven

Friday 2 May 2008 Greenfield

No, it doesn't snow anymore now, but it did off and on during the first week I was homeless in the middle of March. Everything, for my whole life, was shared with my animals. Rain, snowflakes, snowballs, icicles, sunrises, sunsets, lunar eclipses: everything. Now nature itself is an enemy all around me, sending knives into my heart with every move it makes because none of nature's goings-on are shared with my companions anymore. I walked in nature with cats, with dogs, with rabbits, with a possum. I talked to them about everything: the names of the plants and trees, the names of stars and planets, if I knew them. I always went out to have moonshadows with my dogs. If there was going to be a good moon at 3am, I'd often set a mental alarm, or an actual one, to wake up and go out and have the shadows with the dogs.

What did the DMH allow to be ripped away from me? Just a bunch of "pets"?

Update 12 August 2009: What did the DMH allow to be ripped away from me? Everything that mattered to me the most. Everything that made my life my life. I already had chronic depression and anxiety, and I already had post-traumatic stress. How much worse is all that now, now that the DMH "helped" me in 2007? Click here to the DMH page of my website.

slainte

2008-05-02T10:06:00.000-07:00

Page Ten

Friday 2 May 2008, Greenfield

So the DMH thought it was a fine idea to leave a 55-year-old woman with several psychological conditions and several physical illnesses homeless. Their plan for me was a homeless shelter. A person who is ill, and afraid of people, and very reclusive, and the DMH wisdom was that I should be thrown into a group. And what kind of a group? Well, I'm sure that not all of the people in the shelter are the way I'm about to describe, but many of them are. I know. I hang out in some of the same places they do. They ask me for money and cigarettes on the streets. I hear their stories of the kids being taken away, DUI's, drug rehab over and over again, arrests, not paying rent. I am afraid of people who live very average lives, so how much more afraid am I of people who don't? And I haven't lived my life in the ways these other shelter people have, and I haven't acted out my unhappiness by getting arrested or not paying rent or whatever. I've led a very different kind of life.

So the DMH "assisted" me (and I was told by two therapists that I could get "assistance" from the DMH) in these ways: They did not find me a place to live with even half of my animals. They left me, the animals, and lots of belongings for the sheriff. They let be torn away from me my whole identity and personal space and my family (the animals), and whatever measure of auotonomy and personal choice I had in my life, which wasn't a whole lot.

Let's raise a glass of non-alcoholic beverage to the wisdom, empathy and "assistance" of the Greenfield MA Department of Mental Hell. Slainte.

I get more tired every day from leading this rootless street existence that isn't my life. I get more sad and more depressed every day from the loss of the ones I love. Slainte.

Update 7 Aug 2009: All true. I've written more about these state employees, and their conduct of my case, and the complaints I made against them (to no avail) on updates on my other journals, all of which are part of my website.

When I originally wrote this post, I hadn't yet stayed in any shelter. Later that would indeed happen, and I would learn exactly what sorts of people there are in the shelters, as I stayed in three different ones.

~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~

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

here in the cavern

2008-05-02T07:39:00.000-07:00

Page Nine

Friday 2 May 2008 Greenfield

So what's the cavern? The cavern is where this particular person with Asperger's lives. A song I wrote back 10 or 12 years ago has a verse:

I cannot gain a candle,
much less a candle throng,
here in this lightless, flameless cavern
in which I wander,
perhaps belong. .....

Anyway, the sense of isolation, the lifelong sensation that I wasn't like other people in some mysterious, hugely important way, has been with me all my life, and always growing stronger.

Everything I've ever written about isolation or alienation has been talking about my experience with humans. In the animal realm, I have never been isolated and alone and shut out until now, until the loss of them, until the DMH's exercise in control.

Now, without the animals, the cavern I've always lived in is deeper, darker and more dangerous than ever before. These cauliflowers at the DMH, who are supposed to be helping people with psychological problems, appear to understand nothing about serious depression, or about Asperger's syndrome, or even about the effects on a person of long-term, severe physical pain caused by my over-zealous immune system. Maybe my metaphor is unfair to cauliflowers.

So where are the words, muse, the right words to describe the extent of the depression, the extent of the pain, the extent of the loneliness? I can't find them. But I do know this: Nobody belongs in this kind of agony, and the DMH increased my hurts and traumas a hundredfold.

Update 5 August 2009: I think this post describes as well as I can the devastation of losing all the animals, the bitter resentment of having gone to a huge social service agency for help and being for the most part ignored. And then later, after Matthew's news about protection and all that, I developed a great belief that they would locate me somewhere, because I truly believed that's what they always do for people in protection. And I had much more faith in them to give me back some of my animals than I had had in the DMH. All down the shoot: belief, hope, the reunion with even one or two of my dear, dear friends.

~~~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~

(photo from greeting card)

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

being unimportant

2008-04-30T06:50:00.000-07:00

Page Eight

Wed 30 April 2008 Greenfield

I wonder, over and over again, why saving my way of life for me was not at least a little important to the putzes at the DMH. I'm not a likeable person, I've known that for years, I understand that. But they are being paid by Massachusetts taxpayers -- and we poor folk pay cigarette taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, etc. -- to assist the mentally ill, to help them preserve and improve their mental health, and yet saving the life of Anne Nakis, an unlikeable, reclusive, animal-loving, people-hating weirdo, did not matter. I told them for a year that losing the animals would be a trauma I couldn't survive. Someone else who's known me for twenty years told them so too, in a letter. They even had me "evaluated" over the phone a couple of times by their so-called crisis people, who tried to convince me that of course I could survive. These penis-breaths who never met me, knew nothing about my 55 years and the traumas and the immune system crap and my life-long dependency on bonds with animals, were trying to tell me how my soul is made, what it can withstand and what it can't. IT'S ALL ABOUT CONTROL, ABOUT ASSERTING YOUR WILL OVER THE CLIENT'S. Saving my animals, and therefore my life, didn't matter. Only asserting their will. This word thisgoes to the DMH page of my website.

Let's raise our glasses of non-alcoholic beverages and drink a toast to arrogance, and a toast to lightning bolts sent by Zeus to zap those who practice hubris. Skol.

Update 29 July 2009: I feel the same way, all this time after first writing this post. I wasn't taken seriously by the very social worker types who are supposed to take seriously the mental health needs of their clients. I didn't matter. They were arrogant enough to suppose after their relatively brief exposure to me that they knew how my psyche works better than I do. They knew my self better than I do. Zeus has thus far sent no lightning bolts to damage these people whose arrogance has so badly damaged me, and I don't imagine that he will. And I would repeat yet again: if you or someone you care about are considering getting mixed up with the Mass Dept. of Mental Health, please don't. Please find other ways.

Related Posts: Threads ~~ Little Kids ~~ Weaving ~~ Crassy ~~ Ugly Story ~~ Social Non-service ~~ Moribund

number fourteen

2008-04-28T06:53:00.000-07:00

Page Seven

still Mon 28 April, 2008 Greenfield

Another poem from the little, growing book...

Number 14

Bring light here,
bring here the flame.
Those words from my hand,
once upon a time,
when you were young.
Bring light here,
said my hand,
while the darkness all around us
tumored larger every passing year.
Bring here the flame,
I said,
while you grew up
and I grew more afraid.
The more the tumor grew
on people's ignorance and bile,
the more I lit the flames,
clung tighter and tenacious
to our love;
the more I dragged out
all the light I knew.

And still
the tumor swallowed us.

the poetry page of my website.

Update 22 July 2009, Turners: That tumor. It was made, in the end, of mental instability, hatred, lies, and maybe even some jealousy. It was made of money and power. All congealed in two very disturbed people, the landlady and the mafia-connected dealer that moved into the building. And I would not give very many cents for the mental stability or intelligence or compassion of my former case managers at the DMH. Not that I don't have my issues too. I guess the one that annoyed landlady the most was that I withdrew from her more and more all the time. This is what I do when a person is behaving in a way that I don't understand and don't know how to handle. Nevermind, though, that she withdrew from me first. That didn't count in her mind.
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(candle stand at www.toscano.com)

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failure mommy

2008-04-28T06:32:00.000-07:00

Page Six

monday 28 april 2008 greenfield

Failure mommy. That's my greeting banner on my cell phone. Those are the words I see every time I open it, so I won't forget. A mommy who can't protect her children is a failure. It's a stupid mommy who trusts the wrong people. It's an incompetent mommy who can't buy a house in which to protect her children and her life. A stupid, incompetent failure. Whatever else I am, good or bad, I am a failure.

And human beings, in their infinite meanness, never cease to remind me (for many years now) that I am a failure. "You're so gifted, so educated, you have so many talents...", and then they go on in smarmy, roundabout words (never direct) to say: Why are you a poor slob on disability with no house and no car and no anything? Why do you need to borrow $20? Why do you need a ride? Why do you need a cheap rent? Why haven't you made anything of yourself with all your brains, for christ's sake?

So... ask my raging immune system that question. Ask it why it made me too sick and too tired to keep working. Ask the people who never hired me for the better-paying jobs with good benefits when I did work, why they didn't want me (I'm brilliant but weird; I don't shmooze or fit in). Ask my human family why they can't look after me some, the way a lot of other families do for their disabled members. Don't ask me, humanity, why I never made anything of myself. I tried. And every time one thing didn't work out, I retreated into my wounds for a while and then got up and tried something else. I don't personally know anyone who tried as many times and as many ways not to be a failure as I did. Shot down every time.

So... here we are in amerika, where if you don't have at least a certain societally-determined amount of money and a house and car of your own, you probably can't protect your right to choose your own lifestyle, and you probably can't protect what's dearest to you. I certainly couldn't.

Update 18 July 2009: The feelings are still the same. I failed at everything you need to do right in order to protect yourself from the psychological garbage of other people. I failed in money, and so could not buy my own home and live my own way. I failed to marry and get my own home that way. I failed in being able to blend in smoothly and participate lightly in all the social flimsiness that people practice. I failed not to be autistic. I failed the fourteen animals I love as big as the sea.
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read... Streams four... All my stars...

~~~~~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

hell is a real place

2008-04-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

Page Five

saturday 26 april 2008 greenfield

in his play no exit, jean-paul sartre says that hell is other people. for me at least, people have always been more hell than heaven. I'm nervous, frightened and irritated around people, even people I like. I think this is part of the asperger's-autism thing to some degree, because I was always like this, even before there were repeated traumas and more traumas in my life. PTSD on top of asperger's makes for much-increased anxiety, even fear, around people. nature, animals and the arts were always the places where I wasn't bored, or irritable, or afraid.

but there's another thing that hell is, too. when your whole life and identity are ripped away from you. your private space, your belongings, and the ones you love. and let us not forget that I have the department of mental health here in greenfield to thank for this hell I live in: the people who were supposed to care, and to help.

I've always been a questioner. it's the kind of brain I have, I guess, always wanting to know why and wanting to figure things out. this is another quirk I've taken a lot of criticism about. nonetheless, I have always wanted to know why. if people find me so strange and hard to be around, why don't they just leave me alone and let me be weird? why do they so often take a sadistic pleasure in actively hurting me?

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read... Neverending solitaire... Mishibone...

~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

mental devastation

2008-04-25T06:50:00.000-07:00

Page Four

friday 25 april 2008 greenfield

I don't know how to describe things inside me. No words seem to match the emotions. And who would possibly identify with me, even if I had the right words? Who feels the complete bonding with animals that I feel? Anybody? Who feels as fearful and bored and uncomfortable in the presence of humans as I do? Anybody? Who's been screwed in every possible way by humans, as I have? Anybody? Tell me if you know.

Number 15

Explosions.
No one hears them,
nor imagines they exist.

Volcanoes erupt in souls
and go, for the most part,
unremarked.

Complexities
inside us,
seismic events
and black holes,
the kaleidoscope parade
of chips that make a soul
are left to the buffoons
who set up files,
proffer pills,
misdefine you,
and flee.
~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~

poetry page of my website

Update 16 July 2009, Turners Fails: After the DMH and CSS sat back and let my life be destroyed, I still am very bitter about social service agencies, and don't trust them (what reason would I have to ever trust one again?). I'm working with a new one now, but am very wary. And the grief that was in spurts and was distracted by all the anxiety caused by the things Matthew Lacoy told me, is now in its full spate. Where it should have been last year. Living is emptier than it's ever been. --- Greetings to AtomicPunk.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Spite and malice... Fourth february...

~~~~~~~~~ website outline ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

meandering

2008-04-24T06:47:00.000-07:00

Page Three

thurs 24 april 2008 greenfield

Meandering through the streets of two towns is mostly how I spend a good part of each day now, having no life that is at all recognizable as my own. As of eight days ago, I live in a rented bedroom. No apartment, nothing of the life of a grown-up. Still the homeless bum that the DMH made me. Still waiting for them to come up with some kind of apartment and give back at least some of my animals from wherever they've hidden them. My heart meanders among grief, rage, depression. My eyes meander over human faces and see how bland and uninteresting they are compared to the expressions on the faces of animals. So it has always been, as far back as I can remember. I have Asperger's Syndrome. Animal faces have always been fascinating to me, and beautiful. Whereas the human face has always been partly frightening, partly boring, partly too duplicitous.

And on computers I meander among my blogs and wonder if anyone in the readership I have can understand -- even a little -- how I feel.

Update 30 June 09, Greenfield: My eyes were also meandering over certain human faces (Matthew's included) that were popping up in MY face way too often, much more often than the laws of chance would allow. Some of them pretending to be insane (including Matthew), but I could look in their eyes and see that there was no insanity there. They were playacting: but why?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Kaikenlainen... Extemporaneana...

~~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(stone spiral at www.gaelsong.com)
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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

the green-eyed monster

2008-04-23T06:37:00.000-07:00

Page Two
website

wednesday 23 april 2008 greenfield

Do you ever envy certain other people so powerfully that you could lie down and cry? Envy is one of those dark, unattractive emotions we're not supposed to admit to. I think it was Shakespeare who first called it the green-eyed monster, but I could be mistaken. Or perhaps he was referring to jealousy. Anyway, I envy, and for better or worse I admit it. I envy people who've had relatively easy lives, who've grown up without being badly traumatized by their families, whose paths in life have been mostly downhill and paved with relatively good luck most of the time. My life, and those of others too, has been so much goddamned hardship, so fraught with struggle and failure and trauma of all kinds, that I envy the easy people so hard my stomach hurts. And now, now that the agencies that were supposed to help me, that were being paid to at least PRETEND that they cared about me, have delivered me the worst trauma of my life, the envy I feel for the "easy" people all around me makes me want to fall down another rabbit hole -- one that's dark forever, with no humans in it, and from which I never come out.

Wed 21 Jan 2009, Northampton --- now I am ten months and ten days still homeless, still not a human being. And now there is more envy than ever in my life, for now I envy every single amerikan who has not been subsumed as property by the federal law kids (as Matthew has said), who has not had their whole life and many of their rights taken from them by these particular sociopaths. Undercover protection, which this Matthew Lacoy person told me I have and about which no one has convinced me that he's lying, is as fascist as anything nazis dreamed up. Now I envy every single amerikan who walks down the street without this protection in their lives. How many people are there in the country like me? People who are absolutely innocent, but have ended up in trouble with big criminal-types and treated like bait by the feds?. How many of us ARE there? Six? Ten? Fewer than that?

Update 25 June 2009, Greenfield: As I've said in other places, and will continue to say, Matthew never told me how many people were protecting me, how many people were around who wanted to hurt me; how long the protection would be needed and how it worked. And so with only a modicum of information, in my tension and strain I'm sure I pulled many more people and events into this "protection" situaion than truly belonged there, and I daresay that in my position you might well have made that exact same mistake. And I still believe strongly in the possibility that I was used as bait for some amount of time, particularly since Matthew, when I would bring that up, never once disputed it.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

read... Spite and malice... Mishibone...

~~~~ website ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2008-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

mentalhell... and ten months later

2008-04-19T06:53:00.000-07:00

website braonthree.wordpress.com

Page One

saturday 19 april 2008 greenfield

Living in mentalhell, falling down the rabbit hole. Life destroyed by the Department of Mental Health, and a couple of others. No more songs, no more birds, no more dogs and cats. Oddballs are forbidden by the Department of Mental Mind-Police.

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

That was what I wrote the day I began this blog in April of 2008. Now it's much later (Feb 2010), and much more has happened. In July of 2008 a man told me people wanted to harm me and that I was being protected by federal types from Burlington, Vermont (where I've been told there's a federal branch office). He also told me my own grandfather had been in organized crime. The stress, anxiety and depression that this information caused was added on top of the damage the Department of Mental Health had already done by sitting back and letting my whole way of life be taken from me. Writing about these things -- the people, the events, the emotions -- is the only way I've been able get through each arduous day of the last twenty-three months.

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read... Sehnen... Spite and malice

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