holiday hell

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...

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chani and chailin

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.

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gloria in excelsis... the heights of your wazoo

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

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

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)

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jingles and joy, just memories

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

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.