Showing posts with label full of sad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label full of sad. Show all posts
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Horror: Part Two
This one just makes me want to cry, or possibly put my head through the wall. The only--the ONLY--positive thing I can say about this is, at least it wasn't her mom's mother's female parent's idea.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
One of My Weird Fixations
Most people who know me well, know that I have an odd range of interests. Stephen King, in a foreword to one of his books, explained it pretty well--it's like everyone has a series of filters in their heads, which all your thoughts and all outside input has to go through. Some ideas pass through the filters and other ideas get caught in them. And what catches in my filter, might pass right through yours, and vice-versa.
When I was much younger, I was a nearly-obsessive keeper of pop music statistics. Every New Years' Eve, I would hunker down in my bedroom with a transistor radio and a portable cassette recorder--this was before boom boxes--and listen to the entire "Big 89 Countdown" on WLS Radio. I would painstakingly write out the list, song by song, as they were played, and I would record the ones I liked, sitting in motionless silence so the tape recorder wouldn't pick up any unwanted noise. At the end of the song I would play DJ, reading off the title and the artist with a sense of deep gravity. I dreamed of a career in radio.
During the other fifty-one weeks of the year, I was no less obsessive. I would pick up the WLS weekly countdown sheet, with the top 45 singles and the top 33 albums, every time I went near a record store, and follow my favorite songs' progress up and down the charts. But even that wasn't enough; though I couldn't afford the $100 for a subscription to Billboard, but I had the next best thing; each Sunday, the Chicago Tribune printed the Billboard Top 10 in their "Arts and Fun/Books" section. I would snip the Top-10 chart out (I left the Country and the Adult Contemporary charts alone--who wanted THOSE?) and add it to my collection.
It was on one of these Sunday-afternoon chart-snipping expeditions that I first encountered the story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels school. I was about twelve years old, and on the same page as that week's charts, there was a review of a book called The Fire That Will Not Die, by Michele McBride, who had survived the fire. I read the review, and somehow the story really hit me hard; maybe because I was twelve years old myself, it caught my interest, and so I mentioned it to my parents, who told me the story.
The story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels is one of those tragic stories which every big city seems to have. Back in 1958, before fire drills were mandatory for schools, and during a time when Catholic schools were mostly filled beyond capacity, a fire broke out in the school basement on a Monday afternoon, about forty-five minutes before dismissal. There was a rule that only the principal could pull the fire alarm, and so was some delay before the Fire Department got there; rather than risk an unauthorized evacuation, the nuns who were teaching the classes told their students to stay in their seats and pray until the firemen came to rescue them. It was the 1950's; children obeyed their teachers, especially Catholic children, especially when the teachers were nuns; in the end, 92 children and three nuns died as a result of the fire.
I was horrified, when I heard the story; I was an obedient child, for the most part, and I couldn't imagine how hard it must have been to stay there. I always wanted to read "The Fire That Would Not Die", but that was awfully harsh reading for someone so young, and so my parents never bought it for me. I tucked the story away in my subconscious, and there it sat for another thirteen years.
Unlike my parents and the rest of their generation, I was fairly uninformed about the Catholic geography system of Chicago--in my parents' day, you were not identified by what neighborhood you came from--Beverly, Marquette Park, Logan Square--but by what parish you lived within--St. Barnabas, St. Rita, and so on. My parents and grandparents could tell you where ANYTHING was, as long as they knew the parish name. I, however, had grown up without that system of landmarks, and so I had no idea, really, where Our Lady of the Angels was located...
...until a late-winter afternoon in early 1995. JP had heard from someone that there was a really incredible heroin spot at Chicago and Lawndale, and so we drove over that way. As usual, we circled the block a couple of times. We pulled around the corner, and on a wall of sky-blue tile, I read the words: Our Lady of the Angels. "Oh my God," I said. JP, of course, had never heard the story; he was the first of several people to whom I'd tell it. It felt strange, to me, circling around the block where so many innocent lives had ended; it felt a little profane, even, to be buying heroin within sight of the building itself. (It wasn't the actual school building as it had stood in 1958; that building had been torn down and rebuilt.) But of course, we continued to do what we were there for; it was just another way the past and the present were dovetailed together.
A few months after JP died, when I was still living at my mom's house and had about four or five months sober, I found that someone had finally made an effort to tell the whole story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. A book--"To Sleep With the Angels"--was a definitive account of the disaster. It was written by a former fireman, and filled with recollections from people who were actually there, who had survived, or who had lost family members or friends.
Needless to say, I bought the book. Bought, and devoured, and analyzed, and in some cases memorized. My collection of "disaster" books expanded from that point onward, but OLA, as it was called by its students, was always the first story, as far as I was concerned.
December 1st was the 50th anniversary of that fire. In some ways, fifty years seems like an impossibly long time ago; then I consider: The children who were involved in that fire were between 8 and 14 years old. This would make them between 58 and 64 years old now; the survivors, the friends and siblings of the ones who died--even the parents of some of the younger children could conceivably still be alive. Suddenly fifty years isn't that long ago.
We had our yearly fire drill at work this week. As hundreds of people filed out of the building, I heard one of my co-workers say to another "Hey, did you know last week was the 50th anniversary of that fire?" The person to whom he was speaking had no idea what he was talking about, so between the two of us we went on to explain: this is why we have fire drills, fire stairs, panic hardware on the doors. Most of the things we take for granted about fire safety came in part from that fire. There are children in schools in California and New York who have no idea why they have fire drills; fifty-one years ago they wouldn't have had anything to wonder about, because there were no laws mandating such things. (My colleague was unimpressed. "Government intervention at its finest," he concluded, but then again he's a contrarian; we've learned to expect these kinds of comments, from him.)
I don't think about "government intervention", though; I think about ninety-two children and three nuns; about their ninety sets of parents, untold numbers of siblings. I think of the two families who each lost TWO children in the fire--I cannot imagine losing ONE child, let alone two. I think of Mr. Raymond, the janitor, who was blamed for "shoddy housekeeping"; I think of the nameless twelve-year-old boy (now dead) with a history of firesetting, who was widely believed to have set the fire in a trash-barrel in the basement so he could get a day off school. I think of the ones who escaped with burns and broken limbs, and the scars they carried for the rest of their lives; I think of the ones who escaped with no visible wounds, who still panic when they smell smoke, or hear a siren. I think of the hundreds of children who were told "God took them to heaven to be his angels," or "only the good die young"--and who spent the rest of their childhoods wondering why, then, they were left behind.
Many of the friends and families who spoke years later said that the fire was the beginning of the end for that neighborhood. Grieving families moved away, and those that stayed seemed set-apart. Then, of course, the 1960's intervened, and the same scare-tactics which led to the so-called "white flight" on the rest of the West Side were repeated in the OLA neighborhood. By the time JP and I made our circuits of the neighborhood, it was indistinguishable from any of the rest of the West Side--unless you knew the story, of course.
People who know me well, know that I don't make a profession to any particular religious faith. I don't think, despite what Tim says, that I'm an atheist; I'm more a "recovering Catholic" with an unhealthy level of skepticism as regards the afterlife. I try not to get my hopes up by thinking of an eventual reunion with our lost loved ones, for reasons I'm sure will be fairly apparent; likewise, I'm not willing to embrace the concept of reincarnation, for much the same reasons.
But....IF I believed in such things as reincarnation, or remembering past lives, or such-like...I would be inclined to postulate that in some previous life, I was somehow involved in the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. Between my early interest in the fire itself, and my almost-immediate love for the neighborhood (when I started house-shopping, my original intention was to buy in the square mile surrounding OLA. Unfortunately I was priced out, at that point--but that was where I wanted to live)--plus a few other things I haven't mentioned, like my lifelong fear of fire...I can't explain it, and if someone else claimed such a thing, I would probably quirk an eyebrow at them and wonder at their sanity, but it's one of those unprovable thoughts that have come to roost in my strange little brain.
The school was rebuilt after the fire, but once the real-estate vultures and the crack epidemic had blighted much of the neighborhood, sometime in the 90's the parish was combined with another, and the parish school was likewise shut down in the mid-90's sometime. I believe the building now houses a charter school--but to those who know, it's still OLA, still hallowed ground. For many years there was no memorial anywhere to the victims of the fire; now, recently, they've dedicated a memorial...several miles to the south and east, at Holy Family Church--in a "revitalized" neighborhood, where those who would want to see it wouldn't have to travel to some "scary" part of the city. It makes me sick, honestly; I hope someday the memorial will find its way back to the neighborhood where it belongs.
And if I ever buy another house in the city, I have promised myself that it will be somewhere in the area of OLA. Whether it's real or not, whether it's memory from several years back or the memory of another lifetime--I love that neighborhood, and even though I've never lived there, it feels more like "home" than any of the places where I -have- lived. I can't explain it, but that's nothing unusual; there are a lot of things that I can't explain.
When I was much younger, I was a nearly-obsessive keeper of pop music statistics. Every New Years' Eve, I would hunker down in my bedroom with a transistor radio and a portable cassette recorder--this was before boom boxes--and listen to the entire "Big 89 Countdown" on WLS Radio. I would painstakingly write out the list, song by song, as they were played, and I would record the ones I liked, sitting in motionless silence so the tape recorder wouldn't pick up any unwanted noise. At the end of the song I would play DJ, reading off the title and the artist with a sense of deep gravity. I dreamed of a career in radio.
During the other fifty-one weeks of the year, I was no less obsessive. I would pick up the WLS weekly countdown sheet, with the top 45 singles and the top 33 albums, every time I went near a record store, and follow my favorite songs' progress up and down the charts. But even that wasn't enough; though I couldn't afford the $100 for a subscription to Billboard, but I had the next best thing; each Sunday, the Chicago Tribune printed the Billboard Top 10 in their "Arts and Fun/Books" section. I would snip the Top-10 chart out (I left the Country and the Adult Contemporary charts alone--who wanted THOSE?) and add it to my collection.
It was on one of these Sunday-afternoon chart-snipping expeditions that I first encountered the story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels school. I was about twelve years old, and on the same page as that week's charts, there was a review of a book called The Fire That Will Not Die, by Michele McBride, who had survived the fire. I read the review, and somehow the story really hit me hard; maybe because I was twelve years old myself, it caught my interest, and so I mentioned it to my parents, who told me the story.
The story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels is one of those tragic stories which every big city seems to have. Back in 1958, before fire drills were mandatory for schools, and during a time when Catholic schools were mostly filled beyond capacity, a fire broke out in the school basement on a Monday afternoon, about forty-five minutes before dismissal. There was a rule that only the principal could pull the fire alarm, and so was some delay before the Fire Department got there; rather than risk an unauthorized evacuation, the nuns who were teaching the classes told their students to stay in their seats and pray until the firemen came to rescue them. It was the 1950's; children obeyed their teachers, especially Catholic children, especially when the teachers were nuns; in the end, 92 children and three nuns died as a result of the fire.
I was horrified, when I heard the story; I was an obedient child, for the most part, and I couldn't imagine how hard it must have been to stay there. I always wanted to read "The Fire That Would Not Die", but that was awfully harsh reading for someone so young, and so my parents never bought it for me. I tucked the story away in my subconscious, and there it sat for another thirteen years.
Unlike my parents and the rest of their generation, I was fairly uninformed about the Catholic geography system of Chicago--in my parents' day, you were not identified by what neighborhood you came from--Beverly, Marquette Park, Logan Square--but by what parish you lived within--St. Barnabas, St. Rita, and so on. My parents and grandparents could tell you where ANYTHING was, as long as they knew the parish name. I, however, had grown up without that system of landmarks, and so I had no idea, really, where Our Lady of the Angels was located...
...until a late-winter afternoon in early 1995. JP had heard from someone that there was a really incredible heroin spot at Chicago and Lawndale, and so we drove over that way. As usual, we circled the block a couple of times. We pulled around the corner, and on a wall of sky-blue tile, I read the words: Our Lady of the Angels. "Oh my God," I said. JP, of course, had never heard the story; he was the first of several people to whom I'd tell it. It felt strange, to me, circling around the block where so many innocent lives had ended; it felt a little profane, even, to be buying heroin within sight of the building itself. (It wasn't the actual school building as it had stood in 1958; that building had been torn down and rebuilt.) But of course, we continued to do what we were there for; it was just another way the past and the present were dovetailed together.
A few months after JP died, when I was still living at my mom's house and had about four or five months sober, I found that someone had finally made an effort to tell the whole story of the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. A book--"To Sleep With the Angels"--was a definitive account of the disaster. It was written by a former fireman, and filled with recollections from people who were actually there, who had survived, or who had lost family members or friends.
Needless to say, I bought the book. Bought, and devoured, and analyzed, and in some cases memorized. My collection of "disaster" books expanded from that point onward, but OLA, as it was called by its students, was always the first story, as far as I was concerned.
December 1st was the 50th anniversary of that fire. In some ways, fifty years seems like an impossibly long time ago; then I consider: The children who were involved in that fire were between 8 and 14 years old. This would make them between 58 and 64 years old now; the survivors, the friends and siblings of the ones who died--even the parents of some of the younger children could conceivably still be alive. Suddenly fifty years isn't that long ago.
We had our yearly fire drill at work this week. As hundreds of people filed out of the building, I heard one of my co-workers say to another "Hey, did you know last week was the 50th anniversary of that fire?" The person to whom he was speaking had no idea what he was talking about, so between the two of us we went on to explain: this is why we have fire drills, fire stairs, panic hardware on the doors. Most of the things we take for granted about fire safety came in part from that fire. There are children in schools in California and New York who have no idea why they have fire drills; fifty-one years ago they wouldn't have had anything to wonder about, because there were no laws mandating such things. (My colleague was unimpressed. "Government intervention at its finest," he concluded, but then again he's a contrarian; we've learned to expect these kinds of comments, from him.)
I don't think about "government intervention", though; I think about ninety-two children and three nuns; about their ninety sets of parents, untold numbers of siblings. I think of the two families who each lost TWO children in the fire--I cannot imagine losing ONE child, let alone two. I think of Mr. Raymond, the janitor, who was blamed for "shoddy housekeeping"; I think of the nameless twelve-year-old boy (now dead) with a history of firesetting, who was widely believed to have set the fire in a trash-barrel in the basement so he could get a day off school. I think of the ones who escaped with burns and broken limbs, and the scars they carried for the rest of their lives; I think of the ones who escaped with no visible wounds, who still panic when they smell smoke, or hear a siren. I think of the hundreds of children who were told "God took them to heaven to be his angels," or "only the good die young"--and who spent the rest of their childhoods wondering why, then, they were left behind.
Many of the friends and families who spoke years later said that the fire was the beginning of the end for that neighborhood. Grieving families moved away, and those that stayed seemed set-apart. Then, of course, the 1960's intervened, and the same scare-tactics which led to the so-called "white flight" on the rest of the West Side were repeated in the OLA neighborhood. By the time JP and I made our circuits of the neighborhood, it was indistinguishable from any of the rest of the West Side--unless you knew the story, of course.
People who know me well, know that I don't make a profession to any particular religious faith. I don't think, despite what Tim says, that I'm an atheist; I'm more a "recovering Catholic" with an unhealthy level of skepticism as regards the afterlife. I try not to get my hopes up by thinking of an eventual reunion with our lost loved ones, for reasons I'm sure will be fairly apparent; likewise, I'm not willing to embrace the concept of reincarnation, for much the same reasons.
But....IF I believed in such things as reincarnation, or remembering past lives, or such-like...I would be inclined to postulate that in some previous life, I was somehow involved in the fire at Our Lady of the Angels. Between my early interest in the fire itself, and my almost-immediate love for the neighborhood (when I started house-shopping, my original intention was to buy in the square mile surrounding OLA. Unfortunately I was priced out, at that point--but that was where I wanted to live)--plus a few other things I haven't mentioned, like my lifelong fear of fire...I can't explain it, and if someone else claimed such a thing, I would probably quirk an eyebrow at them and wonder at their sanity, but it's one of those unprovable thoughts that have come to roost in my strange little brain.
The school was rebuilt after the fire, but once the real-estate vultures and the crack epidemic had blighted much of the neighborhood, sometime in the 90's the parish was combined with another, and the parish school was likewise shut down in the mid-90's sometime. I believe the building now houses a charter school--but to those who know, it's still OLA, still hallowed ground. For many years there was no memorial anywhere to the victims of the fire; now, recently, they've dedicated a memorial...several miles to the south and east, at Holy Family Church--in a "revitalized" neighborhood, where those who would want to see it wouldn't have to travel to some "scary" part of the city. It makes me sick, honestly; I hope someday the memorial will find its way back to the neighborhood where it belongs.
And if I ever buy another house in the city, I have promised myself that it will be somewhere in the area of OLA. Whether it's real or not, whether it's memory from several years back or the memory of another lifetime--I love that neighborhood, and even though I've never lived there, it feels more like "home" than any of the places where I -have- lived. I can't explain it, but that's nothing unusual; there are a lot of things that I can't explain.
Saturday, November 15, 2008
One of Two Things Is Happening Here
Either a) I really, REALLY need to be on meds again, as in "more than even I suspect", or b) the human race at large is devolving into an irredeemable pack of heartless fuckwads.
Normally, I'd put the probability ratio of the two choices at about 50-50, or maybe 60-40. But in the case of the item that inspired this post, I'm going to have to rethink my optimism and call it 90-10, if that.
Here is the article. As you might imagine, I find it heartbreaking: three ostensibly smart kids, who have already overcome many of the difficulties of growing up in a rough neighborhood, who are on their way to greater things, die because they made a silly misjudgement in a moment of fun. I would cry at THAT no matter what.
But go to the end, and read the comments, and you'll see why I'm more depressed by this article than I would normally be; why I'm pretty much ready to write off the greater part of the human race as heartless assclowns. What on earth would possess these jerks to write such cruel things about people they don't even know--people whose families could very well be reading that website--that article--those comments?? Whatever happened to not speaking ill of the dead?
I am finding it harder and harder to deal with the human race in aggregate. Again, this may just be the absence of antidepressants...but I don't think that's the whole story. People have always been cruel; but lately, I think, they're getting crueller and crueller. That, just as much as the tragic story, makes me cry.
Normally, I'd put the probability ratio of the two choices at about 50-50, or maybe 60-40. But in the case of the item that inspired this post, I'm going to have to rethink my optimism and call it 90-10, if that.
Here is the article. As you might imagine, I find it heartbreaking: three ostensibly smart kids, who have already overcome many of the difficulties of growing up in a rough neighborhood, who are on their way to greater things, die because they made a silly misjudgement in a moment of fun. I would cry at THAT no matter what.
But go to the end, and read the comments, and you'll see why I'm more depressed by this article than I would normally be; why I'm pretty much ready to write off the greater part of the human race as heartless assclowns. What on earth would possess these jerks to write such cruel things about people they don't even know--people whose families could very well be reading that website--that article--those comments?? Whatever happened to not speaking ill of the dead?
I am finding it harder and harder to deal with the human race in aggregate. Again, this may just be the absence of antidepressants...but I don't think that's the whole story. People have always been cruel; but lately, I think, they're getting crueller and crueller. That, just as much as the tragic story, makes me cry.
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Malaise
I actually had written most of a post about today, and how I'm trying not to give in so much to the anniversary blues...Unfortunately it turned into exactly that, and I'm just tired of it. I'm in...a "rut" doesn't describe it, really; it's more like "a Chicago-area main-street pothole in March after a full winter of freeze-thaw cycles and a bi-weekly parade of semi trucks." I hate that JP is gone, and I hate that I'm alone, and blah, blah, blah, haven't we been through all this before? I actually did spend the day trying to do stuff to improve my outlook a little; I did all the laundry--you would think one person wouldn't generate much laundry, but then again the person you're thinking of probably does her laundry more than once every six weeks or so--and I took apart my bedroom and vacuumed all the fluffy corners and dusted all the dusty stuff. My environment looks great; my attitude, not so much (though part of that has nothing to do with the anniversary and everything to do with The Godforsaken Itch. TGI has improved, yes--except for my back, and my shoulders, and behind my knees, and.... Finally today, I couldn't stand it anymore and called the allergist my doc referred me to; she said, and I quote, "No antihistamines for three days before your appointment, please." My appointment is Tuesday. Technically, I COULD take some tomorrow, but since I'm now out of Benadryl anyway, there doesn't seem to be much point. I hope I don't go completely insane by Tuesday morning--judging from today's scratch marks, it's a very real possibility.)
I'm tired of my rut, tired of my outlook, tired of my misery. I want to be happy. I want to feel normal--like I'm part of the human race for a change. I would like to have SOME hope that I could possibly attract a partner someday; that, maybe, most of all. I want to be able to look at all my wonderful options and all the great ideas I have, and actually FEEL something--excitement, hope, optimism, ANYTHING. Right now my life puts me to sleep, and I don't even know how to make that better. I know how fortunate I am, how blessed, how lucky--whatever you want to call it--but that knowledge doesn't really do me any good; sometimes, in fact, it makes it even worse. I've got all these things going for me, and I've been given so much...so why, again, am I so miserable?
Mostly I'm lonely, and tonight, at least, that makes sense. I can't believe it's thirteen years since I lost JP; it seems like a billion years, maybe, or maybe just a day or two. I'm amazed at how meaningless those thirteen years have been, how little I have to show for them--not materially, but emotionally. I try not to think about the next thirteen years, or the next. It scares me to think that this is really it--that the rest of my life is set up before me, no surprises--just more of the same. I don't think I could stand knowing that for certain.
I'm tired of my rut, tired of my outlook, tired of my misery. I want to be happy. I want to feel normal--like I'm part of the human race for a change. I would like to have SOME hope that I could possibly attract a partner someday; that, maybe, most of all. I want to be able to look at all my wonderful options and all the great ideas I have, and actually FEEL something--excitement, hope, optimism, ANYTHING. Right now my life puts me to sleep, and I don't even know how to make that better. I know how fortunate I am, how blessed, how lucky--whatever you want to call it--but that knowledge doesn't really do me any good; sometimes, in fact, it makes it even worse. I've got all these things going for me, and I've been given so much...so why, again, am I so miserable?
Mostly I'm lonely, and tonight, at least, that makes sense. I can't believe it's thirteen years since I lost JP; it seems like a billion years, maybe, or maybe just a day or two. I'm amazed at how meaningless those thirteen years have been, how little I have to show for them--not materially, but emotionally. I try not to think about the next thirteen years, or the next. It scares me to think that this is really it--that the rest of my life is set up before me, no surprises--just more of the same. I don't think I could stand knowing that for certain.
Friday, October 10, 2008
Untitled
I'm having a bad night.
My work schedule has been shifted for the next couple of weeks, and so I'm downtown every evening til late. The city at night is different than the city in the daytime. During the day you know people are on business, or for the most part you can at least convince yourself of that. But very few people, especially on a Friday night, come downtown for any businesslike purpose. They come to hold hands and walk down Michigan Avenue, or take their kids to see plays, or go to bars and restaurants and there is nothing in the world like walking unnoticed through all those connected, happy people to make me realize how completely, crushingly insignificant and alone I am. Even here at work, there are pictures on all the walls of people who have done something with their lives, people who have made something of themselves--won Nobel prizes or gotten books upon books published or founded entire philosophies, and here's fat little old me in a t-shirt and jeans, walking through the hallways pushing a cart filled with paper to stuff in the printers. On a Friday night, in Chicago, at 38 years old.
I found a friend online tonight. I've mentioned him here before; he's from a long time ago and he was significant in pretty much everything that went on. He's in California now; I think he's living under another name, and if his MySpace is any indication I can sorta understand why. Now, as then, he's fucking gorgeous; unlike when I knew him, though, he's got (it seems) a lot of friends. A lot, a LOT of friends. On my MySpace page, I have seven friends; he has 958. I wonder what JP would say about that.
And here's the thing: when we were in school together he and I were just alike. We were both these smart, nerdy writer kids. We both had friends, mostly the same friends: nerdy writer kids, theater kids, math kids. Of all the people I went to high school with, I would have never imagined that mine would have been the life that would turn out like this. I always thought my life would have some...you know, LIVING in it.
This is not what I wanted. This is not who I wanted to be, where I wanted to be, what I wanted to be doing.
I really don't know where to turn anymore. All the things I tell myself to make it better, they've all stopped working. It gets harder and harder to hold back the...the what? Fear, maybe--despair, somewhat--complete fucking bewilderment at the wreckage of what started out so promising? Yeah, that too. There are people in my life who would offer me an easy answer to "how did I get here?"--people like my mom, who (and this is just a tangent) has had more to do with it than anyone else, including those who she feels are responsible for screwing up my life--but although I've made mistakes, THOSE are the things I've done that have made me feel MOST like a normal human being. It's times like this, when I'm doing all the "right" things and all it does is make me numb and make me hate myself, that I start hoping there's a new mistake around the corner. At least if there's a little drama, I know I'm alive...
I wonder who I would be if I didn't have to answer to anyone but myself.
My work schedule has been shifted for the next couple of weeks, and so I'm downtown every evening til late. The city at night is different than the city in the daytime. During the day you know people are on business, or for the most part you can at least convince yourself of that. But very few people, especially on a Friday night, come downtown for any businesslike purpose. They come to hold hands and walk down Michigan Avenue, or take their kids to see plays, or go to bars and restaurants and there is nothing in the world like walking unnoticed through all those connected, happy people to make me realize how completely, crushingly insignificant and alone I am. Even here at work, there are pictures on all the walls of people who have done something with their lives, people who have made something of themselves--won Nobel prizes or gotten books upon books published or founded entire philosophies, and here's fat little old me in a t-shirt and jeans, walking through the hallways pushing a cart filled with paper to stuff in the printers. On a Friday night, in Chicago, at 38 years old.
I found a friend online tonight. I've mentioned him here before; he's from a long time ago and he was significant in pretty much everything that went on. He's in California now; I think he's living under another name, and if his MySpace is any indication I can sorta understand why. Now, as then, he's fucking gorgeous; unlike when I knew him, though, he's got (it seems) a lot of friends. A lot, a LOT of friends. On my MySpace page, I have seven friends; he has 958. I wonder what JP would say about that.
And here's the thing: when we were in school together he and I were just alike. We were both these smart, nerdy writer kids. We both had friends, mostly the same friends: nerdy writer kids, theater kids, math kids. Of all the people I went to high school with, I would have never imagined that mine would have been the life that would turn out like this. I always thought my life would have some...you know, LIVING in it.
This is not what I wanted. This is not who I wanted to be, where I wanted to be, what I wanted to be doing.
I really don't know where to turn anymore. All the things I tell myself to make it better, they've all stopped working. It gets harder and harder to hold back the...the what? Fear, maybe--despair, somewhat--complete fucking bewilderment at the wreckage of what started out so promising? Yeah, that too. There are people in my life who would offer me an easy answer to "how did I get here?"--people like my mom, who (and this is just a tangent) has had more to do with it than anyone else, including those who she feels are responsible for screwing up my life--but although I've made mistakes, THOSE are the things I've done that have made me feel MOST like a normal human being. It's times like this, when I'm doing all the "right" things and all it does is make me numb and make me hate myself, that I start hoping there's a new mistake around the corner. At least if there's a little drama, I know I'm alive...
I wonder who I would be if I didn't have to answer to anyone but myself.
Monday, October 6, 2008
Chicago Has a Sad, Part Two
Yeah, I have to admit, I sorta saw this one coming. Or maybe it's just Chicago Post-Seasonal Baseball Neuropathy--we've all been kicked so hard and so often in October that we really don't feel it too much anymore.
Saturday, October 4, 2008
Chicago Has a Sad, Part One
It would have been so nice, to do it this year--the symmetry of it, the whole "Team of Destiny" motif finally carried to conclusion...
Of course, 101 is a nice number too.
Friday, August 15, 2008
Oh, Dammit All To Hell...
Kasey's a Republican.
(From www.nascar.com)
Um...Kyle? Let's talk politics, sugar, could we???
(From www.nascar.com)
A color that does suit him however is red -- the red on his No. 9 Dodge, but also the red of the Republican Party.:::deep sigh of despair:::
Add politico to the list of factoids you didn't know about Kahne.
While marketers are content to paint Kahne as an object of desire for tweens and soccer moms across the nation, he prefers they admire him for his work in our nation's capital.
Since December of 2005, Kahne has been pushing President George W. Bush's agenda for increased volunteerism and good will among Americans. Appointed to the president's Council on Service and Civic Participation with other dignitaries such as philanthropist Evern Cooper Epps, Ohio's First Lady Hope Taft and University of Texas chancellor Mark G. Yudof, Kahne is an ambassador tapped to represent his home state of Washington and the sport of NASCAR.
"We have meetings in Washington and I think it's unique, because I get to sit down with President Bush and listen to his ideas about giving back to the communities and how we can get people to do more like the fans in NASCAR do," Kahne said. "They like to hear ideas of how drivers like me and Jeff Gordon get people involved in volunteer work, things we do at the tracks."
His most recent two-year appointment to the council, the only racecar driver to earn such an appointment, stems from his ability to be a role model as well as the charitable work he performs through the Kasey Kahne Foundation.
Um...Kyle? Let's talk politics, sugar, could we???
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Screw My Trifling Bullshit...
...and go hug Amy.
No man, no drama, no crappy boss in the world could ever live down to what she's going through.
I don't pray much. This is an exception.
No man, no drama, no crappy boss in the world could ever live down to what she's going through.
I don't pray much. This is an exception.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
Well.
I was in the process of writing a very bitchy post--I've had a very bitch-inspiring few days, the past two particularly--when my mom called.
I don't know if I've mentioned it, but my mom is a very, very devout church-goer. I mean, she goes to church EVERY...SINGLE...DAY. If she misses a day, it's generally because she's hospitalized, the car's broken down, or the house is buried under eighteen feet of snow.
And of course, today being Sunday, she was going to Mass anyway; however, she went to a different church than usual. She had stopped going to the church I grew up in several years ago because she disagreed with the pastor about...everything, pretty much...and started attending a church about a mile away; but today she went to the old church, because there was a Mass in honor of her friend who died last year.
She's telling me the story of something that happened during the service that upset her, when she mentions that the Mass was being held for two people: her friend, and "Tim Thomas" (obviously a pseudonym). Well, that just happens to be the name of a guy I went to grammar school with, and it's a fairly uncommon name. So I said "Not Tim Thomas, the one I went to school with?"
"Yeah," said Mom, "he died. He had cancer, you know." I HAD known--but when I'd seen him a couple years back at the reunion, he looked okay. Not great--none of the guys looked great!--but healthy.
The thing is, he had been probably my first true heartbreak, way back in fifth grade. I had a huge crush on him, and he'd chosen one of the popular girls to "ask out" (whatever possible meaning that could have had for two ten-year-olds back in 1981; we were pretty innocent then, even the "fast" girls. If I had a ten-year-old daughter NOW who said she was "going out" with a little boy, I'd seriously consider discussing safe sex.) I remember spending Valentines' Day 1981 in a deep despair, having learned this news at a Girl Scout party the night before.
And we all grew up; I'm sure that little girl who I envied so much has had her traumas too. I don't know what became of her; contrary to my direst fears, they didn't grow up, get married, and live happily ever after.
After my mom told me that he had died, I did a search for his name in Google; I found out that he'd died back in the fall, and that he left behind a wife and a small child...a little girl, who's autistic.
I didn't feel so much like writing that bitchy post, after that.
I don't know if I've mentioned it, but my mom is a very, very devout church-goer. I mean, she goes to church EVERY...SINGLE...DAY. If she misses a day, it's generally because she's hospitalized, the car's broken down, or the house is buried under eighteen feet of snow.
And of course, today being Sunday, she was going to Mass anyway; however, she went to a different church than usual. She had stopped going to the church I grew up in several years ago because she disagreed with the pastor about...everything, pretty much...and started attending a church about a mile away; but today she went to the old church, because there was a Mass in honor of her friend who died last year.
She's telling me the story of something that happened during the service that upset her, when she mentions that the Mass was being held for two people: her friend, and "Tim Thomas" (obviously a pseudonym). Well, that just happens to be the name of a guy I went to grammar school with, and it's a fairly uncommon name. So I said "Not Tim Thomas, the one I went to school with?"
"Yeah," said Mom, "he died. He had cancer, you know." I HAD known--but when I'd seen him a couple years back at the reunion, he looked okay. Not great--none of the guys looked great!--but healthy.
The thing is, he had been probably my first true heartbreak, way back in fifth grade. I had a huge crush on him, and he'd chosen one of the popular girls to "ask out" (whatever possible meaning that could have had for two ten-year-olds back in 1981; we were pretty innocent then, even the "fast" girls. If I had a ten-year-old daughter NOW who said she was "going out" with a little boy, I'd seriously consider discussing safe sex.) I remember spending Valentines' Day 1981 in a deep despair, having learned this news at a Girl Scout party the night before.
And we all grew up; I'm sure that little girl who I envied so much has had her traumas too. I don't know what became of her; contrary to my direst fears, they didn't grow up, get married, and live happily ever after.
After my mom told me that he had died, I did a search for his name in Google; I found out that he'd died back in the fall, and that he left behind a wife and a small child...a little girl, who's autistic.
I didn't feel so much like writing that bitchy post, after that.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
"Weird" Is Not Even the Word
Aaaaaaand it gets weirder.
I'm having a difficult time wrapping my brain around this situation, so I'm going to relate the facts as I understand them.
At 6 this morning, I awoke to a tap on the leg from Tim. We'd both stayed up late last night, drinking beer and just generally relaxing; I'd finally fallen asleep around 4, so I was apparently pretty difficult to wake.
"Um, can you give me a ride? Squeaky's in the hospital again," he said.
We drove to the hospital--not the same one we'd taken her to the other night, but one a fair bit closer to home--and I dropped him off. We were both assuming it was Squeaky's stomach again.
I stopped at McDonalds and picked up some breakfast and came home. There were a couple of messages from Squeaky's dad, asking if she was here; just as I finished eating, he called again, and I told him what I knew--that she was in the E.R, probably with her stomach complaint again. He said she'd gone out last night with his upstairs neighbor--a woman he's apparently known for about a year--and that she hadn't come back. I assured him that I knew where she was, and that she'd probably call him soon. I sent a text message to Tim for him to call Squeaky's dad, and then about 8 AM, I went to bed. I set my alarm for 10:40, since I had a noon appointment with Dr. J on the north side of the city.
At a couple minutes after 9, the phone rang. "Hey, um..." said Tim. "Listen, I don't have my bus card, and anyway they wouldn't let Squeaky on the bus because she doesn't have any shoes, and they're gonna discharge her in a few minutes....she's really fucked up..."
"What, did they give her pain meds or something?"
"Nah," he said. "She got raped by them Kings over in Humboldt Park. They drugged her up, too. Drugged her up and raped her."
"Holy shit," I said. "Damn. Yeah, I'll be there in a little bit."
I pulled up to the hospital and Tim and Squeaky walked out. Or rather, Tim walked; Squeaky leaned on him. She was moving very slowly, obviously in pain. While we drove home, she made a couple of phone calls; from what I overheard, I gathered a little of what had happened. She told someone "Yeah, I relapsed last night," and made arrangements for her dad to pick up some of her belongings from a friend's house, which Tim was supposedly going to get later. I dropped them off--Squeaky needed substantial help from Tim to get out of the car and up the steps--and went to my appointment.
I came home, fixed a sandwich, and went straight to bed. I slept like a stone for quite a while, and came downstairs around 8 PM. Around 9, as I heated up some leftovers, Squeaky emerged from Tim's room, on her way to the bathroom.
"How you doin', lady?" I asked.
Her voice was hoarse. "I have bruises all over my body and I feel like shit," she said. She showed me her arms; they were covered with bruises, like big finger-marks, all the way from the upper arm to her hands. "And I can't use this hand because it hurts so much. Do you have some ice I could use?"
I fixed her an icepack, and she went back into Tim's room for a while. When she came out, she started telling me what had happened.
The story she told was so crazy-sounding, so fantastical, that she said she knew nobody would believe her. It started out normally enough--she had left her dad's place with his upstairs neighbor. "My dad trusted her, so I figured I could trust her too, right? He was okay for me to go out with her..."
At one point last night, around 10 or 11 PM, Squeaky had called and said she was on her way over--that this woman was going to give her a ride over here. Then that plan changed, and Tim said she wasn't coming after all because "the girl who's driving wants to go see her baby-daddy," Tim said.
What neither Tim nor Squeaky knew was that the baby-daddy in question lived in Humboldt Park. *note below When they arrived, Squeaky protested, repeating that she really, really wanted to come over here and see Tim instead. "No, no," the girl apparently told her. "These guys are cool."
This is the last point at which the story makes perfect sense. From here, it gets dodgy. Not that I disbelieve her--I want to make that clear. I don't doubt that she THINKS some of these things happened, but...
I'm ahead of myself.
There were apparently several people in this place the neighbor took her, and at one point one (possibly more) of the guys wanted Squeaky to come for a ride with him. She didn't want to go but the neighbor said he was okay, that she should go with him and just relax, and that nothing would happen because if anything happened, Squeaky's dad was going to blame HER (the neighbor). Squeaky resisted, saying she still would rather go to see Tim, but the neighbor was adamant and said that if she didn't go, it would mess up her (the neighbor's) relationship with the baby-daddy, and blah blah blah. So against her better judgement, Squeaky went with the guy.
ALSO against her better judgement (she claims), she was persuaded to have a couple of drinks. She says she really, really didn't want to drink--she's been sober for a couple of months now--but that the guy pressured her. She said that after the drinks, she started feeling really strange--like her limbs were going numb, and her brain was fogged, and all sorts of other uncomfortable sensations. (I'm thinking the guy slipped her something in her drink.)
THEN, she says, he started trying to make a move on her, and she told him not to touch her--that if her "man"--meaning Tim--found out that he'd done anything to her, Tim would kill him. She fought him off, she said. Later, she says, he stopped to get some weed, and she took two hits.
This was where things got really, REALLY weird.
She claims she jumped out of the car at a stop sign, because she had called the neighbor to tell her to come rescue her, and when she asked the guy where they were, his answer didn't match the street signs she could see, so she got out of the car to check for herself. She claims she passed a cop car, but when she told them she was in trouble they said "I don't give a shit" and "Don't make me shoot you" and such; that they were in marked police cars but wouldn't show her a badge and wouldn't help her....
The story went on like this for a long time. At one point she was in a church that wasn't a church, because there was one white person speaking English and a lot of black people speaking in tongues, and they tied her down and put some sort of liquid on her which made her skin numb, and some guy made her repeat something after him...and there was an ambulance, except the people driving it weren't paramedics, and she said they were going to set it on fire...and on and on.
My suspicion here is that either her drink, or the weed, or both, contained some sort of hallucinogens--PCP, maybe, is Tim's guess. I'm pretty sure that all sorts of seriously-disturbing things happened to her, but that the cult/church and the fake cops and fake paramedics and being chained to the rails inside the ambulance...that all of that was the result of her seriously-altered perceptions. (Even when she was staying here before, I'd commented to Tim on her seeming inability to tell fact from fiction and reality from unreality; I'm sure THAT little quirk of personality is involved here as well.) She swears up and down that all of these things happened, and I'm sure, in her mind, that they did.
What is NOT called into dispute, though: the girl is COVERED in bruises. She was clearly hurt, and she clearly gave a good fight. She said she was combative in the hospital when she finally woke up, even to the point of yelling at Tim, when he arrived, that HE was part of this big conspiracy too. (She had convinced herself, at some point, that there was a small group of people who were in on this plan to hurt her; she says that the people she saw at the house when she arrived were the same people who were supposedly paramedics and police; that this same group was in the "church" and on the streets in the area. I don't know WHAT to make of that.) I'm sure some of the bruises were from the medical personnel trying to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else. She also says it took them a couple of hours to get her name and contact info out of her, because she was convinced that the people in the hospital were part of the plot as well. She says she thought they were going to kill her, and that she also thought they were going kill Tim, and she begged them not to kill Tim, to kill her instead.
She's absolutely devastated, to say the least. She's scared to be alone, and claims she's never going anywhere alone again, ever. She's very obviously been traumatized--there's not the slightest sense that she's faking. I don't know how much of what she says is true; the bulk of the story, as far as I can see, is the result of horribly-distorted perceptions caused by whatever these assholes spiked her drink or her weed with. She swears they're not--she is absolutely SURE that everything happened exactly as she remembers--which, to me, would be enough reason to be traumatized all on its own! But it's very obvious that she was victimized in some manner. I didn't press for info about the rape--whether the hospital had done a rape kit or anything--but I did ask if the police were called, and she said no. She has no recollection of how she even got to the hospital; my guess is that the "fake" ambulance, supposedly part of the plot, was actually real.
The hell of this? According to Squeaky, her father is still defending the upstairs neighbor--the one who brought her into this situation. Tim, of course, is livid. I'm hoping HE doesn't do something stupid as "revenge".
I told her I'd give her a ride up to her dad's tomorrow, so she can collect her stuff; before this happened, Tim had approached me with a request: that Squeaky be allowed to stay here til we move, to make it easier for her to get to the job that's waiting for her (downtown) and so that she can give a Chicago address to the social-services agencies; apparently some programs are only available to city residents, and her dad's address is in the suburbs. I told him yes, but SOLELY ON THE CONDITION THAT her residency with us ends the moment we move, and that any attempt to extend it beyond that point will be considered a dealbreaker as regards the continuation of our roommate-ship. He agreed to that condition--and several others, such as "she has to bring her own toiletries, because I'm tired of her using all my shampoo".
This new development, as I told Dr. J today, will not shake my resolve. (I was proceeding on very sketchy reports of what had happened, but I'd seen enough to know, even before I got the story, that something bad had clearly taken place.) She can stay til we move--which will be happening by the end of October at the VERY latest--but once we move, if Tim wants to live with her he'll have to get them an apartment together, because I'm not going down that road. That's what I told him in the first place, and that doesn't change because of what happened to her.
But oh, my god, do I feel bad for that poor girl. All my animosity towards her has gone; I just feel really, really bad for her. Nobody should have to live the life she's had; no matter what percentage of the bad decisions have been hers, that doesn't excuse the bastards who have taken advantage of her. Like everyone else, when she said "No" that should have been respected; like everyone else, no matter if she'd made a bad decision, she's still a human being and should have been treated as such. I can't begin to describe how sad her story makes me, or how angry--or how lucky I feel, to have had the life I've had, because no matter what has happened in my life, it's mostly stuff I've brought on myself--not stuff that other people have inflicted on me.
And again: she's only nineteen years old. I know some EIGHTY-year-olds, and not ONE of them has had HALF the bad things happen to them that have happened to Squeaky in those nineteen years. No matter what part she's played by making bad decisions--nobody, NOBODY, deserves the things that have happened to her.
*Non-Chicagoans--Humboldt Park is a neighborhood in Chicago, about a mile to three miles north and two to four miles east of where we live. It's predominantly Hispanic; though it's been in the process of gentrifying for about fifteen years now, there are still very rough patches here and there. JP lived in Humboldt Park when he and I first started seeing each other, back in 1994, and when my ex found out where I'd been going every night, he referred to it as "a demilitarized zone". Tim has an instinctive fear of H.P., because it's predominantly Latin Kings territory and Tim affiliates himself with a rival organization.
I'm having a difficult time wrapping my brain around this situation, so I'm going to relate the facts as I understand them.
At 6 this morning, I awoke to a tap on the leg from Tim. We'd both stayed up late last night, drinking beer and just generally relaxing; I'd finally fallen asleep around 4, so I was apparently pretty difficult to wake.
"Um, can you give me a ride? Squeaky's in the hospital again," he said.
We drove to the hospital--not the same one we'd taken her to the other night, but one a fair bit closer to home--and I dropped him off. We were both assuming it was Squeaky's stomach again.
I stopped at McDonalds and picked up some breakfast and came home. There were a couple of messages from Squeaky's dad, asking if she was here; just as I finished eating, he called again, and I told him what I knew--that she was in the E.R, probably with her stomach complaint again. He said she'd gone out last night with his upstairs neighbor--a woman he's apparently known for about a year--and that she hadn't come back. I assured him that I knew where she was, and that she'd probably call him soon. I sent a text message to Tim for him to call Squeaky's dad, and then about 8 AM, I went to bed. I set my alarm for 10:40, since I had a noon appointment with Dr. J on the north side of the city.
At a couple minutes after 9, the phone rang. "Hey, um..." said Tim. "Listen, I don't have my bus card, and anyway they wouldn't let Squeaky on the bus because she doesn't have any shoes, and they're gonna discharge her in a few minutes....she's really fucked up..."
"What, did they give her pain meds or something?"
"Nah," he said. "She got raped by them Kings over in Humboldt Park. They drugged her up, too. Drugged her up and raped her."
"Holy shit," I said. "Damn. Yeah, I'll be there in a little bit."
I pulled up to the hospital and Tim and Squeaky walked out. Or rather, Tim walked; Squeaky leaned on him. She was moving very slowly, obviously in pain. While we drove home, she made a couple of phone calls; from what I overheard, I gathered a little of what had happened. She told someone "Yeah, I relapsed last night," and made arrangements for her dad to pick up some of her belongings from a friend's house, which Tim was supposedly going to get later. I dropped them off--Squeaky needed substantial help from Tim to get out of the car and up the steps--and went to my appointment.
I came home, fixed a sandwich, and went straight to bed. I slept like a stone for quite a while, and came downstairs around 8 PM. Around 9, as I heated up some leftovers, Squeaky emerged from Tim's room, on her way to the bathroom.
"How you doin', lady?" I asked.
Her voice was hoarse. "I have bruises all over my body and I feel like shit," she said. She showed me her arms; they were covered with bruises, like big finger-marks, all the way from the upper arm to her hands. "And I can't use this hand because it hurts so much. Do you have some ice I could use?"
I fixed her an icepack, and she went back into Tim's room for a while. When she came out, she started telling me what had happened.
The story she told was so crazy-sounding, so fantastical, that she said she knew nobody would believe her. It started out normally enough--she had left her dad's place with his upstairs neighbor. "My dad trusted her, so I figured I could trust her too, right? He was okay for me to go out with her..."
At one point last night, around 10 or 11 PM, Squeaky had called and said she was on her way over--that this woman was going to give her a ride over here. Then that plan changed, and Tim said she wasn't coming after all because "the girl who's driving wants to go see her baby-daddy," Tim said.
What neither Tim nor Squeaky knew was that the baby-daddy in question lived in Humboldt Park. *note below When they arrived, Squeaky protested, repeating that she really, really wanted to come over here and see Tim instead. "No, no," the girl apparently told her. "These guys are cool."
This is the last point at which the story makes perfect sense. From here, it gets dodgy. Not that I disbelieve her--I want to make that clear. I don't doubt that she THINKS some of these things happened, but...
I'm ahead of myself.
There were apparently several people in this place the neighbor took her, and at one point one (possibly more) of the guys wanted Squeaky to come for a ride with him. She didn't want to go but the neighbor said he was okay, that she should go with him and just relax, and that nothing would happen because if anything happened, Squeaky's dad was going to blame HER (the neighbor). Squeaky resisted, saying she still would rather go to see Tim, but the neighbor was adamant and said that if she didn't go, it would mess up her (the neighbor's) relationship with the baby-daddy, and blah blah blah. So against her better judgement, Squeaky went with the guy.
ALSO against her better judgement (she claims), she was persuaded to have a couple of drinks. She says she really, really didn't want to drink--she's been sober for a couple of months now--but that the guy pressured her. She said that after the drinks, she started feeling really strange--like her limbs were going numb, and her brain was fogged, and all sorts of other uncomfortable sensations. (I'm thinking the guy slipped her something in her drink.)
THEN, she says, he started trying to make a move on her, and she told him not to touch her--that if her "man"--meaning Tim--found out that he'd done anything to her, Tim would kill him. She fought him off, she said. Later, she says, he stopped to get some weed, and she took two hits.
This was where things got really, REALLY weird.
She claims she jumped out of the car at a stop sign, because she had called the neighbor to tell her to come rescue her, and when she asked the guy where they were, his answer didn't match the street signs she could see, so she got out of the car to check for herself. She claims she passed a cop car, but when she told them she was in trouble they said "I don't give a shit" and "Don't make me shoot you" and such; that they were in marked police cars but wouldn't show her a badge and wouldn't help her....
The story went on like this for a long time. At one point she was in a church that wasn't a church, because there was one white person speaking English and a lot of black people speaking in tongues, and they tied her down and put some sort of liquid on her which made her skin numb, and some guy made her repeat something after him...and there was an ambulance, except the people driving it weren't paramedics, and she said they were going to set it on fire...and on and on.
My suspicion here is that either her drink, or the weed, or both, contained some sort of hallucinogens--PCP, maybe, is Tim's guess. I'm pretty sure that all sorts of seriously-disturbing things happened to her, but that the cult/church and the fake cops and fake paramedics and being chained to the rails inside the ambulance...that all of that was the result of her seriously-altered perceptions. (Even when she was staying here before, I'd commented to Tim on her seeming inability to tell fact from fiction and reality from unreality; I'm sure THAT little quirk of personality is involved here as well.) She swears up and down that all of these things happened, and I'm sure, in her mind, that they did.
What is NOT called into dispute, though: the girl is COVERED in bruises. She was clearly hurt, and she clearly gave a good fight. She said she was combative in the hospital when she finally woke up, even to the point of yelling at Tim, when he arrived, that HE was part of this big conspiracy too. (She had convinced herself, at some point, that there was a small group of people who were in on this plan to hurt her; she says that the people she saw at the house when she arrived were the same people who were supposedly paramedics and police; that this same group was in the "church" and on the streets in the area. I don't know WHAT to make of that.) I'm sure some of the bruises were from the medical personnel trying to keep her from hurting herself or anyone else. She also says it took them a couple of hours to get her name and contact info out of her, because she was convinced that the people in the hospital were part of the plot as well. She says she thought they were going to kill her, and that she also thought they were going kill Tim, and she begged them not to kill Tim, to kill her instead.
She's absolutely devastated, to say the least. She's scared to be alone, and claims she's never going anywhere alone again, ever. She's very obviously been traumatized--there's not the slightest sense that she's faking. I don't know how much of what she says is true; the bulk of the story, as far as I can see, is the result of horribly-distorted perceptions caused by whatever these assholes spiked her drink or her weed with. She swears they're not--she is absolutely SURE that everything happened exactly as she remembers--which, to me, would be enough reason to be traumatized all on its own! But it's very obvious that she was victimized in some manner. I didn't press for info about the rape--whether the hospital had done a rape kit or anything--but I did ask if the police were called, and she said no. She has no recollection of how she even got to the hospital; my guess is that the "fake" ambulance, supposedly part of the plot, was actually real.
The hell of this? According to Squeaky, her father is still defending the upstairs neighbor--the one who brought her into this situation. Tim, of course, is livid. I'm hoping HE doesn't do something stupid as "revenge".
I told her I'd give her a ride up to her dad's tomorrow, so she can collect her stuff; before this happened, Tim had approached me with a request: that Squeaky be allowed to stay here til we move, to make it easier for her to get to the job that's waiting for her (downtown) and so that she can give a Chicago address to the social-services agencies; apparently some programs are only available to city residents, and her dad's address is in the suburbs. I told him yes, but SOLELY ON THE CONDITION THAT her residency with us ends the moment we move, and that any attempt to extend it beyond that point will be considered a dealbreaker as regards the continuation of our roommate-ship. He agreed to that condition--and several others, such as "she has to bring her own toiletries, because I'm tired of her using all my shampoo".
This new development, as I told Dr. J today, will not shake my resolve. (I was proceeding on very sketchy reports of what had happened, but I'd seen enough to know, even before I got the story, that something bad had clearly taken place.) She can stay til we move--which will be happening by the end of October at the VERY latest--but once we move, if Tim wants to live with her he'll have to get them an apartment together, because I'm not going down that road. That's what I told him in the first place, and that doesn't change because of what happened to her.
But oh, my god, do I feel bad for that poor girl. All my animosity towards her has gone; I just feel really, really bad for her. Nobody should have to live the life she's had; no matter what percentage of the bad decisions have been hers, that doesn't excuse the bastards who have taken advantage of her. Like everyone else, when she said "No" that should have been respected; like everyone else, no matter if she'd made a bad decision, she's still a human being and should have been treated as such. I can't begin to describe how sad her story makes me, or how angry--or how lucky I feel, to have had the life I've had, because no matter what has happened in my life, it's mostly stuff I've brought on myself--not stuff that other people have inflicted on me.
And again: she's only nineteen years old. I know some EIGHTY-year-olds, and not ONE of them has had HALF the bad things happen to them that have happened to Squeaky in those nineteen years. No matter what part she's played by making bad decisions--nobody, NOBODY, deserves the things that have happened to her.
*Non-Chicagoans--Humboldt Park is a neighborhood in Chicago, about a mile to three miles north and two to four miles east of where we live. It's predominantly Hispanic; though it's been in the process of gentrifying for about fifteen years now, there are still very rough patches here and there. JP lived in Humboldt Park when he and I first started seeing each other, back in 1994, and when my ex found out where I'd been going every night, he referred to it as "a demilitarized zone". Tim has an instinctive fear of H.P., because it's predominantly Latin Kings territory and Tim affiliates himself with a rival organization.
Sunday, July 29, 2007
This Made Me Cry.
(The poet in this story, Donna Humphrey, was the mother of federal judge Joan Lefkow. Lefkow's husband and her mother were killed by a man whose suit had been decided unfavorably by Lefkow.
If you're not familiar with the story, here are some articles about the Lefkow murders... one two three four.
It's a very sad story to begin with. And to me, a repressed ex-poet myself, this article makes it unspeakably sadder.)
*****************************************************
Poetry tells story of judge's mother
Mary Schmich (mschmich@tribune.com)
July 29, 2007
Donna Humphrey loved her desk. With its broad top, wooden drawers and inlaid leather writing pad, it made her, a woman who had never gone to high school, feel she really was a poet.
Not many people thought of Humphrey as a writer during her single moment of renown, however, or even fully registered her name. On the day she died so brutally, in February 2005, she was just Judge Joan Lefkow's mother.
Humphrey was 89 at the time, and she appeared almost as a footnote in the media accounts of the man who broke into Lefkow's Chicago home, shot the federal judge's husband and mother to death and left the bodies in the basement for the judge to find.
The photos that appeared of Humphrey after her murder—a gray-haired woman who, like so many older women, would be easy to overlook—gave no clue to the complex life she had recorded in her poems.
In her last phase of life, Humphrey had lived alone in a suburban Denver townhouse. Clearing it out after her funeral, in the den that contained her beloved desk, her children found her lifetime of writing.
Poems lay in boxes, folders, desk drawers. There were poems written in the 1940s and ones written much later, like one called "Widows." It starts like this:
We are everywhere
We with our little perms
Our little purses,
Our careful steps
Supported by our walkers
Or our canes.
We are the survivors.
Years ago we laid our men away
And though
We did not know it then
Our own significance
As well.
Growing up, Humphrey's children knew she wrote poems, though they never saw her writing. She had no desk on their Kansas farm. Lefkow guesses she composed poems in her mind at the ironing board or with pen and paper on the dining table after the kids went to sleep.
A few were even published in small journals. Once she won a gold watch for writing a jingle for Perfex detergent.
"That was such a thrill for a farm woman," Lefkow says, "a Bulova watch arriving in the mail."
After Humphrey's death, when some of her friends from church asked for copies of her poems, Lefkow and her sister Judy Smith began to think about publishing a few privately.
But for a long time, Lefkow couldn't even read the poems.
"I felt looking at them would be so painful," she says.
She was afraid she would confront not just reminders of her mother's awful death but also of her hard life.
Humphrey had spent much of her life depressed, regretting paths not taken and opportunities denied, finding solace in little but her poetry and her conservative Christianity.
Here's a poem about selling the family farm where she'd grown up, next to the land where she reared her own children:
Goodbye, old home, old farm,
Goodbye to elm trees, wind-battered, brave,
Cloaking nakedness each Spring
With gallant greenery. Your branches held
our swings
And sheltered shyest dreams doomed to
impossibility.
Those shy, doomed dreams kept young Donna company on the lonely farm, where as a girl she spent her days making beds, mopping floors, scrubbing clothes and hanging them to dry.
She was the fourth of six children, among them Willis, her bedridden brother, dead by age 11. She remembered him in a poem:
. . . how tired he was of being sick. He told
Of days when he, too sick to play, would sleep,
And of a dream he had of playgrounds
Like any girl, Donna wanted to be pretty, and so she wept when she was forced to wear black, high-top corrective boots for the weak ankles that afflicted her until the day she died. She wept again when her father told her she was needed on the farm and couldn't go to high school.
College was one of Humphrey's shy, doomed dreams. She wanted to be a teacher. She was happiest when she was reading. Books, magazines, newspapers—she read everything her grandmother, another self-educated farm woman, brought into the house.
When her grandmother discovered a correspondence school in a magazine ad, the two of them went to high school together, by mail.
In that way, young Donna learned to write.
And, finally, more than a year after her death, her daughter Joan was able to read her poetry.
"I got through some other things I was struggling with in terms of closing out the two lives that were lost," Lefkow says.
She found poems written in a plain, lyrical style. They told stories. They mused on age and God and children.
In one Humphrey writes wistfully of a youthful romance while she was married; in another of an abortion in midlife.
With raw truth, her poems evoke a woman's life in a place and time that was hard for everyone, especially sensitive, ambitious women.
"But they weren't as dark as I expected," Lefkow says. "A lot of it was sweet, so humane and powerful in some fundamental way. That was reassuring to me, that there was joy in her life."
There wasn't a lot of joy, but there was this about the freedom young Donna felt riding a horse named Bill:
….girl and horse
Beyond the sight of elders, streaked through
pastures,
Jumping ditches, risking life and bones
At breakneck speed and then, sedately,
home again,
Bringing the cows for milking.
Last year, Lefkow met Suzanne Isaacs, who runs Ampersand Inc., a private publishing firm in Chicago. Isaacs offered to help publish her mother's poems.
So in September, 500 copies of Donna Humphrey's poems will be in print. Many will go to friends and relations, but some will be for sale.
It's Lefkow's way of saying "thank you" to her mother, and "I'm sorry."
"It's a way of remembering her, assuring that her descendants remember her and know that she was a person of value, a woman of value."
It's the reward Donna Humphrey couldn't imagine in 1959 when she wrote "Frustration."
I long to be a poet; and once, I thought I would
I'd write of Life and Love and such
As no one else quite could.
And so I wrote my patient lines
I bared my secret soul
Poured out my heart in anguished words
Sure that I'd meet my goal
Of published works and public praise
But now, at long, sad last
I know the truth; it shall not be
No words of mine shall cast
Their deathless spell on future minds
In this or distant lands.
(link to original article)
******************************************
If you're not familiar with the story, here are some articles about the Lefkow murders... one two three four.
It's a very sad story to begin with. And to me, a repressed ex-poet myself, this article makes it unspeakably sadder.)
*****************************************************
Poetry tells story of judge's mother
Mary Schmich (mschmich@tribune.com)
July 29, 2007
Donna Humphrey loved her desk. With its broad top, wooden drawers and inlaid leather writing pad, it made her, a woman who had never gone to high school, feel she really was a poet.
Not many people thought of Humphrey as a writer during her single moment of renown, however, or even fully registered her name. On the day she died so brutally, in February 2005, she was just Judge Joan Lefkow's mother.
Humphrey was 89 at the time, and she appeared almost as a footnote in the media accounts of the man who broke into Lefkow's Chicago home, shot the federal judge's husband and mother to death and left the bodies in the basement for the judge to find.
The photos that appeared of Humphrey after her murder—a gray-haired woman who, like so many older women, would be easy to overlook—gave no clue to the complex life she had recorded in her poems.
In her last phase of life, Humphrey had lived alone in a suburban Denver townhouse. Clearing it out after her funeral, in the den that contained her beloved desk, her children found her lifetime of writing.
Poems lay in boxes, folders, desk drawers. There were poems written in the 1940s and ones written much later, like one called "Widows." It starts like this:
We are everywhere
We with our little perms
Our little purses,
Our careful steps
Supported by our walkers
Or our canes.
We are the survivors.
Years ago we laid our men away
And though
We did not know it then
Our own significance
As well.
Growing up, Humphrey's children knew she wrote poems, though they never saw her writing. She had no desk on their Kansas farm. Lefkow guesses she composed poems in her mind at the ironing board or with pen and paper on the dining table after the kids went to sleep.
A few were even published in small journals. Once she won a gold watch for writing a jingle for Perfex detergent.
"That was such a thrill for a farm woman," Lefkow says, "a Bulova watch arriving in the mail."
After Humphrey's death, when some of her friends from church asked for copies of her poems, Lefkow and her sister Judy Smith began to think about publishing a few privately.
But for a long time, Lefkow couldn't even read the poems.
"I felt looking at them would be so painful," she says.
She was afraid she would confront not just reminders of her mother's awful death but also of her hard life.
Humphrey had spent much of her life depressed, regretting paths not taken and opportunities denied, finding solace in little but her poetry and her conservative Christianity.
Here's a poem about selling the family farm where she'd grown up, next to the land where she reared her own children:
Goodbye, old home, old farm,
Goodbye to elm trees, wind-battered, brave,
Cloaking nakedness each Spring
With gallant greenery. Your branches held
our swings
And sheltered shyest dreams doomed to
impossibility.
Those shy, doomed dreams kept young Donna company on the lonely farm, where as a girl she spent her days making beds, mopping floors, scrubbing clothes and hanging them to dry.
She was the fourth of six children, among them Willis, her bedridden brother, dead by age 11. She remembered him in a poem:
. . . how tired he was of being sick. He told
Of days when he, too sick to play, would sleep,
And of a dream he had of playgrounds
Like any girl, Donna wanted to be pretty, and so she wept when she was forced to wear black, high-top corrective boots for the weak ankles that afflicted her until the day she died. She wept again when her father told her she was needed on the farm and couldn't go to high school.
College was one of Humphrey's shy, doomed dreams. She wanted to be a teacher. She was happiest when she was reading. Books, magazines, newspapers—she read everything her grandmother, another self-educated farm woman, brought into the house.
When her grandmother discovered a correspondence school in a magazine ad, the two of them went to high school together, by mail.
In that way, young Donna learned to write.
And, finally, more than a year after her death, her daughter Joan was able to read her poetry.
"I got through some other things I was struggling with in terms of closing out the two lives that were lost," Lefkow says.
She found poems written in a plain, lyrical style. They told stories. They mused on age and God and children.
In one Humphrey writes wistfully of a youthful romance while she was married; in another of an abortion in midlife.
With raw truth, her poems evoke a woman's life in a place and time that was hard for everyone, especially sensitive, ambitious women.
"But they weren't as dark as I expected," Lefkow says. "A lot of it was sweet, so humane and powerful in some fundamental way. That was reassuring to me, that there was joy in her life."
There wasn't a lot of joy, but there was this about the freedom young Donna felt riding a horse named Bill:
….girl and horse
Beyond the sight of elders, streaked through
pastures,
Jumping ditches, risking life and bones
At breakneck speed and then, sedately,
home again,
Bringing the cows for milking.
Last year, Lefkow met Suzanne Isaacs, who runs Ampersand Inc., a private publishing firm in Chicago. Isaacs offered to help publish her mother's poems.
So in September, 500 copies of Donna Humphrey's poems will be in print. Many will go to friends and relations, but some will be for sale.
It's Lefkow's way of saying "thank you" to her mother, and "I'm sorry."
"It's a way of remembering her, assuring that her descendants remember her and know that she was a person of value, a woman of value."
It's the reward Donna Humphrey couldn't imagine in 1959 when she wrote "Frustration."
I long to be a poet; and once, I thought I would
I'd write of Life and Love and such
As no one else quite could.
And so I wrote my patient lines
I bared my secret soul
Poured out my heart in anguished words
Sure that I'd meet my goal
Of published works and public praise
But now, at long, sad last
I know the truth; it shall not be
No words of mine shall cast
Their deathless spell on future minds
In this or distant lands.
(link to original article)
******************************************
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