Zoe E. Whitten's Blog, page 83

Minor yay…

Today was a minor victory for me, a day when I got up in a rage. I was wound up so tightly that I chose to stay offline to avoid any stimulus. This was not good enough, and I spent the first three hours of my day staring blankly ahead, breathing slow, and avoiding provoking myself. I even avoided hubby, so I wasn't jumping him.

I wrote some angry bad poetry and then I went to the living room to pop in LIPS and sing my heart out. My sister-in-law came for lunch, and she'd said yesterday that she wanted to see me sing. So as soon as she arrived, I put on a mini-concert. I'd already warmed up with a few practice tunes, but unfortunately, I had trouble keeping my throat wet, and that made it damned hard hitting lower bass notes. I still slayed a round of Coldplay's Yellow and another of Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus. I finished with Tears for Fears' Shout and really pushed for maximum volume and good pitch. Got my highest score so far on that song, and I felt a lot better. Well, except my throat, which felt a bit battered. But it was a good pain…I hope.

Over a late lunch of pasta salad and mixed cheeses, we watched Zoolander. This is a guilty pleasure of mine, and I love watching it over and over to cheer myself up. It worked, as usual, and hubby and me both demonstrated the Kinect's features with some rounds of Kinect AdvToday was a minor victory for me, a day when I got up in a rage. I was wound up so tightly that I chose to stay offline to avoid any stimulus. This was not good enough, and I spent the first three hours of my day staring blankly ahead, breathing slow, and avoiding provoking myself. I even avoided hubby, so I wasn't jumping him.

I wrote some angry bad poetry and then I went to the living room to pop in LIPS and sing my heart out. My sister-in-law came for lunch, and she'd said yesterday that she wanted to see me sing. So as soon as she arrived, I put on a mini-concert. I'd already warmed up with a few practice tunes, but unfortunately, I had trouble keeping my throat wet, and that made it damned hard hitting lower bass notes. I still slayed a round of Coldplay's Yellow and another of Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus. I finished with Tears for Fears' Shout and really pushed for maximum volume and good pitch. Got my highest score so far on that song, and I felt a lot better. Well, except my throat, which felt a bit battered. But it was a good pain…I hope.

Over a late lunch of pasta salad and mixed cheeses, we watched Zoolander. This is a guilty pleasure of mine, and I love watching it over and over to cheer myself up. It worked, as usual, and hubby and me both demonstrated the Kinect's features with some rounds of Kinect Adventures and Dance Central. Then when Milli left, I wandered back to my room, turned on my tunes, and dropped into a cool bath to rinse off the sweat.

So I managed to distract myself out of a severe rage, and I turned this into a somewhat positive day. I didn't get anything written, but the muse took off because I made her mad. (This happens every time I ask her for something that might have a hope in hell of real success.) So if you think I'm just annoying you lately, nuh-uh. Even some of the voices in my head have gone on hiatus to give me some space.

But today was a minor victory, so I'ma cling to that victory like a drunk to their last bottle of rum.entures and Dance Central. Then when Milli left, I wandered back to my room, turned on my tunes, and dropped into a cool bath to rinse off the sweat.

So I managed to distract myself out of a severe rage, and I turned this into a somewhat positive day. I didn't get anything written, but the muse took off because I made her mad. (This happens every time I ask her for something that might have a hope in hell of real success.) So if you think I'm just annoying you lately, nuh-uh. Even some of the voices in my head have gone on hiatus to give me some space.

But today was a minor victory, so I'ma cling to that victory like a drunk to their last bottle of rum.

This shell

Look at the shell, pretty but vacant

Don't get too close, the illusion is fragile

Closer inspection finds the flaws and fractures

What appeared hollow is instead full of darkness

Listen to the cries, but never hear the message

Praise the victims, but don't let them air outrage

Destroy monsters without seeing they were victims

And then tell me you love me and won't do this to me

I'm an animal caged by fear and expectation

If I fail, I'll be destroyed like any other monster

This is my fate given at birth, and I never escaped

But somehow I must find happiness in this trap? How?

Look at this fine shell, riddled with scars

The soul inside is so old now and withered

There is no hope for cures, or for forgiveness

There is only helpless rage for a life I can't steer

Yearning…

Today was supposed to be a good day, as we went to Pavia to look at kittens. But even before we'd left, I'd felt possessed of a melancholy, and I couldn't shake it. Central to this blah feeling was the question What do I have to look forward to? No matter how many times I asked, I had nothing.

There used to be a time when I could pour myself into my work and forget my depressions, but now I have no job, nor even plans for a sustained income. I tried to replace a job with hobby writing, but with every release, I've found I have less and less enthusiasm for the process. Peter the Wolf was the last new series launch coming out that I'd had my fingers crossed for a reaction, but that first book sold as poorly as the two series launches before it. Wendy's new trilogy will start in Winter, but judging from the reaction I get to announcements about the book, I don't think it will sell either.

I dunno, peoples. What am I supposed to be doing, aside from waiting around to die? What is it I'm supposed to embrace and believe in that could take away this feeling of always being worthless? If I have nothing to offer in this life that anyone else cares about, then what am I supposed to care about until I check out?

I do know that I'm sick of this depressive cycle. So although I will continue with my plans to launch one title a month, I'm not going to bother promoting those titles, or any titles. I'm not going to bother joining more social networks or forums, and I'm not bothering to pollute the airwaves with more begging that no one sees anyway.

But I don't know what to do with myself after this. Do I keep writing and releasing stories one after another to a storefront that nobody visits? I can keep trying to send out new story launches, but I've dropped three in as many months, and nothing worked. What's really left in me now are sequels and spinoffs, continuations of the stories I've already got running. But if I write these, I do it on the understanding that there will be no promotion campaigns, no glowing reviews, nor even scathing reviews.

There is nothing else. There is just 10-15 years of waiting to die and finally find out if God is the bastard I'd been told about as a child. Am I really going to burn forever because God always hated me? Is that the punch line here? That after a painful life in this hell with insane "normal" people every damn day, God will reveal that he really hated me? So that's why my whole life had to suck, to prepare me for an eternity of even worse torture. Or is the truth even worse, and I'll reincarnate back here to be tortured again?I don't know if I'd want to come back as another transsexual in yet another life not good enough for others to even look down upon.

Today was supposed to be a good day, except I can't be here in the present because I can't find peace in my future or in my past. I feel restless desire to do something to change the balance of the scales so I won't always feel inferior to everyone else. But nothing will take away this feeling that I'm not going to be good enough even after I die. My whole life sucked. Why should death be any different, right?

There has to be something else to keep me going and give me a reason to want to be here and fight. But every cause I've tried to gather energy, I'm told not to bother. I have nothing to sustain my spirit, and I'm burning out on everything, on everyone. Is this really all there is, just day after day of watching people torture each other and then justify it on the evening news?

Warped in my social reflection

I want to expand on my previous ramble, because I got too wandery last time, in my opinion. I may have looked drunk, but that was actually written after a grueling Kinect workout. So my brain was blown out, just not for any druggy reasons. It was a healthy blow out…and I'm already wandering. Fuck.

This problem of image online confounds me at every turn because I've lost control of who people see me as. I thought I'd made myself pretty clear over the years, but with every exposure of my past or my inner self, there's a flurry of minor explosive reactions. People express shock that I'm not who they think I am.

Many tell me they can never talk to me again because they "just don't know me," and I fail to understand how they could have misunderstood me when I've been bluntly honest from the start. But part of the problem is, new people joining into the stream don't scroll very far back in my blog and Twitter archives before they've already built up a false story around me. As I chip away from their false image and show them the real me, they get upset and shut me out.

Which is why I work so hard to be honest all the time, because the people who stick around knowing the truth are the folks I want to reach with my work, in theory. Problem is, a lot of people who stick around say "I'm not a reader," or "This isn't for me." So the theory is admittedly looking pretty weak, thus far. .

As an artist, though, I feel I've come closer to representing an honest look at the shattered lives of myself and my friends. Which would be great if my readers also saw that. Some of them do, but now I'm also hearing that the stories I want to share aren't "good" enough, meaning my characters behave too badly for their lives to have any literary value. I'm hearing how I'm training perverts through my characters, or "glorifying corrupt lifestyles."

This is not my intent, but I'm no more in charge of this image than I am of the people who say I'm an entitled arteest, or the people who say I'm a brave role model. And this is why I'm withdrawing from the public a little more with every failed attempt to reach you. Because despite my efforts to get you to see me, you only see what you want to project on me.

As stories like Books of Daniel, Penny for Your Debts and Red, Redefined come out, I expect even more people to shout that I'm pro pedophile, because I'm making up these molester characters and then getting in their heads to explain what makes them act out. I'm an expert on these things, and probably one of the few trying to look at the problems objectively. At the end of the stories, there's no prison sentence or graveyard for the vile perverts. I even dare to suggest that sometimes bad people have happy endings too. But of course, we all know evil people don't have real lives like that. They just spend all day plotting against good people.

I want readers to see my characters as being in need of real treatment options instead of hate, fear, and threats of prison rape as methods of aggressive suppression. But many of you want to see evil monsters so terrible that you'd rather read about disemboweling and other mutilations. You can kill as many people in a horror story as you like and be a-okay. You can describe violence in graphic detail and get a rave review. But if I touch one little girl fictionally in a dark fantasy exploring the worst aspects of human sexuality, I'm a friend of the freaks. Nice. Can't wait to see how y'all react when I actually do write something pro pedophile with the express intent of pissing you off. That book probably won't sell any copies either, but it would stick in your side just for existing. And that might make me smile, knowing that you jerks were feeling bitter hate for me.

But hell, in truth I might not write that story. I'm just pissed that the only people who get to sell stories about sexual predators and deviants are the ignorant folks who do no research, spread misinformation and FUD, and who help perpetuate cycles of violence by advocating violent solutions in their fiction. And, those are the guys who sell well. If that's the culture I'm supposed to appease, fuck it, I don't want any part of that market. I've had it up to here with people who worship mindless violence and yet treat deviant sexual behavior as a white elephant that sullies real literature with its presence.

The people who will dictate the direction of this conversation will not see my efforts to explain a monster to the public. They will see me trying to defend that monster and make him acceptable, maybe even likeable. This could not be farther from the truth, but even as I'm explaining my views in detail, the lies being spun around me are accelerating. I say, "this is what I believe," and in an hour some asshole is quote mining me and going, "but what she really means is this!"

So I'm giving up on y'all. I'm lowering my standards to accept you for the shallow image worshiping posers you really are, and I'm walking away from you as a market.* I'm picking up my reputation as a friend of your enemies and putting it on. I am the Lomax, and I speak for the freaks, and I don't really care if this means you won't buy me. You folks threatening to withhold sales or friendship really aren't seeing me at all, or you wouldn't bother making these ridiculous threats.

As a transsexual, I had people tell me all the time to act the way they wanted to see me, or they would abandon me. And this was from loved ones, people I knew and really cared about. But my need to be a complete person came before their needs for a comforting false image.

It's the same with you folks, but you're complete strangers trying to make the same demands that my loved ones did. And I'm sorry, but if I only know you from a forum, and your private correspondence to me suddenly takes on a lecturing tone because I'm not acting good enough or professional enough for you, I'm tuning you out. You don't know me, and you don't know anything about me. Your image of me is as false as the one you project around yourself. I can't be who you want, because I'm too busy being true to myself.

*I just know someone is going to be pissed that I'm hitting on "everyone" again, so let me remind you, I'm only talking to the jerks. If you aren't a jerk, and you know this isn't about you, please don't take offense at me speaking directly to the jerks. I promise, I'll have some posts up for the rest of you soon.

Spit and polish or spit and scowl?

This post is inspired by another blog post from writer Tony Noland, who was in turn inspired by the article, "Faking it : The art of perfection in social media", by Lauren Fisher. The article is talking about how many people are faking a more positive self-image than they ever would before, mostly for fear of turning people off of their "brand." Tony's post talks about the separation of a social life with a professional life, but I want to tackle this from my own perspective as an alternative indie in a landscape of indies. (Which I mean broadly to cover all indie artists in all media forms.)

For one thing, it should be obvious even with a casual glance through my posts that I have never been concerned with cultivating or projecting an image of moral goodness. Quite the opposite, I want you to understand my experiences so you grasp that I'm writing what I know, even if what I know is pretty damned disturbing by any rational definition.

I've tried labeling myself as an indie alternative writer, and I've tried to make clear how I'm covering the kinds of characters that other writers are perhaps afraid to tackle because they fear the heat of being told they've gone too far.

But for as much as I've told my audience how I want them to see me and my characters, I've had a third party narrative assigned to me that isn't remotely close to reality. When I violate the spirit of my "character" to outsiders, I get lectures about how I'm not promoting myself right, or how I'm not taking the right tone in presenting my case.

So to my mind, how this looks is, all of you people who choose to tell pretty lies to make fake friends are jumping on me for not drinking your Kool-Aid and joining your cult. And maybe that's not how it really is. I'm just saying, that's how it looks from my angle.

People are so concerned with what should be public and private, or what kind of attitude everyone should project, regardless of their product or shtick. If Poe and Howard were alive and online, they would be hounded by their friends and family to just cheer up and stop being a downer all the time. (Actually, I doubt Poe would be anything but a POD joke after y'all found out he married his cousin.) Even other people struggling under mental illnesses these days are ready to join in the fake positive vibes for the sake of making sales or friends. And some of the people saying "It's not all bad," I feel so bad for because they are deluded. It is bad for them; real, real bad, and they still won't stop with the positive vibes. It would be admirable if they didn't ruin it by lecturing me to do the same thing.

Anywho, I don't want friends that come from my online rambling. Or, I do, but not faceless online friends who like me just because they think I'm funny. Those kinds of friends can become disillusioned all too quickly when they realize my jokes about mental illness aren't just sarcasm. They assign a false value to me as a good person, and then everything I do that makes them uncomfortable is a tick off my virtual score. When I get close to the bottom of my quota, many people even write to me and warn me that I need to act right if I expect them to stick around. Again, to me, this is saying "I don't like the image you're projecting. Lie to me in a way that is pleasing or I will threaten to withhold sales."

When it comes to sales, I don't just want someone to buy my book and toss it in a pile just because we know each other. I have plenty of friends on Twitter who will never read my stuff because it isn't for them. I don't jump them and say "Hey, you, if we're REALLY good friends you'll read my stuff!" We can be friends even if they never check out a blurb. In fact, just recently someone said, "I don't think your books are right for me." And, knowing them, I agreed that I had nothing up their alley. And, we're still friends. Gaspers.

Only a shallow person would say, "Hey, I pretended to like you, so now you should do the same and buy my books!" Despite my jokes, I am not a shallow person. In fact, it should be clear that I have frightening depth in areas most people will never explore in person.

When someone buys my book, I don't want them going in expecting to read about heroes and good guy versus bad values. Unfortunately, I can't convince people to leave their preconceptions at the door. So even if I say "this is a book about a monster," many people ignore me and think I'm just downplaying my stuff. That I'm not seems to be an even ruder shock. But I can't write about the stories that appeal to mainstream folks. That's not the life I lived, and it's not the kind of stories I want to tell.

But, the thing is, even if fake positive online behavior is destructive and a little neurotic, many folks have taken me to task because my choice to be more open and honest is seen as negative and harmful to my "brand." I really don't see that. I write about troubled but self-aware people and disturbing subjects. I claim to be cut from the same cloth, so I fail to see how my behavior is disparaging my online character.

I try to keep my work from being too dark by injecting my quirky humor into my stories, but once you get past the jokes, the subject matter I'm exploring should make a reader squeamish, even in my lighter works. I'm an alternative indie writer, a rank amateur who would never pass myself off as avante garde or ground-breaking. But I CAN say I'm doing something different. Whether that something different can be seen as something helpful by others is not for me to say. I can only offer what I have inside me.

While everyone else works on perfecting that great first page to suck readers in instantly with a likeable main character, I've instead been working on perfecting the slow, awkward introduction to someone you probably wouldn't want to know in real life. While others cultivate an air of knowledge about their promotional methods, I'm the first to admit I don't have a clue what I'm doing. And while others work so hard to present themselves as wholesome, trustworthy professionals, I'm still wearing my spikiest armor with my war face on. Like my aunt Joyce sometimes said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, come sit next to me!"

And maybe I'm doing it wrong, and all those people spit polishing their images online are doing it right. But while I was being nice and blowing sunshine up peoples' butts, I got worse traffic, and worse sales. These days while I'm being a whiny whiner and applying tarnish to my image, I'm making regular sales each month. Just, you know, not on the titles I'm promoting. (Still don't grasp that, but thanks for the sales anyway.)

It does often bug me that my negative missives generate more attention than anything good I do. But hell, I'm not a good person. If I complain at you to look only at my good side, I shouldn't be surprised if you have to struggle to think of something nice to say. I'm like Halliburton asking, "Hey, can't you find something nice to say about the rape clause in our contract? You should tell people about how many men it's helped to get laid!"

But maybe there's a middle ground somewhere in between, where I'm not all doom and gloom 100% of the time, and my readers can one day accept that "alternative indie" isn't just my attempt at a pompous individual streak.

A meandering walk through Devine

I talked about Rachel leaving Devine, and I suppose I should talk about the rest of Devine too. It was a small town that I'm told has expended a bit here and there, but which remains mostly the same. The town left such an impression on me that when I needed a quiet rural backdrop, Devine became my only choice for where to start The Lesser of Two Evils. In fact, the house Wendy Stoffel lives in is a real place that I lived in too. It can fairly be said that TLoTE is my most accurate book for matching real world locations to fake scenes.

In our time there, we lived in four houses, with each of them fucked up in their own way, and with the last being fucked up because we were right across the street from the police station. I'll end up in the station in this story eventually, but I want to back up to explain my money making patterns for several months. You see, being out in the boonies, bus stop scams are notoriously ineffective because there's no bus. I was reduced to picking up cans off of dirt roads and cleaning mud from them with a screwdriver. Bro sometimes went with me, and we'd take our honest earning to one of two recycling centers, which were next door to each other. One took in only clean cans and other metals, but the other place was a scrap yard that would even take in cars, engines and broken car parts.

Out on this one property, bro had located a dozen parked vehicles, not a one of them running or ever having a hope in hell of running. And bro says, "The center buys batteries. So these all have batteries."

Bro's plans always sucked a dick. Bro likes to call himself a smooth criminal in his stories to his friends, but let us review facts. Bro has a record as long as his arm, and I have a clean record despite running into the cops or confessing to them…oh hell, I've lost count how many times. Suffice it to say, any plan bro made had flaws, and this petty crime plot had two biggies.

First of all is, vehicle batteries are fucking heavy. And when you only weight ninety pounds soaking wet, a truck battery is an Olympic-level weight to pick up cleanly. Which leads to problem two: batteries are full of acid. Do you think it was bro who learned this? No, of course not.

I had a battery about halfway to our red wagon, scavenged from a pile of rusting bike frames at the abandoned house next door*. I lost strength in my left arm and the forearm dipped, spilling acid over my forearm and wrist. Fortunately, we had drinking water there, but I didn't get the acid off before it burned me. So all the way to the shop, I was panicking and trying to find water hoses to rinse my arm with because I didn't recognize that I'd been burned. I thought the acid was still clinging to me, and I was going to become as retarded as my cat, who had been splashed with acid on his head before I found him and nursed him back to health. (This cat is the inspiration for RT, Tommy's cat in Changeling.)

(*Oh, incidentally, all those properties around us were empty because ALL the houses were infested with snakes, scorpions, and spiders, both brown recluse and black widow. FUN. Some of the snakes were copperheads. Mom almost had a shit fit when she opened a cleaning cabinet and found a nest of snakes balled up for the night.)

Right, so we get to the center sans drinking water, near heat stroke, and both of us complaining bitterly at whose fault this plan was. All that work for this plan netted us $4. Motherfucker.

About a week later, my step-dad Marc takes a motorcycle radiator to the same recycling center, and he got $6. Well, I thought how light those radiators are, and I thought about those trucks, all lined up with radiators.

Admittedly, I didn't think about walking 1.6 miles in the baking sun with two radiators, but we took four big honkers in and got $20. All, right, not bad, and worth a few days of entertainment at the local rates for video game rentals.

As I was walking out, I noticed the stacks and stacks of huge diesel rig radiators at the scrap yard, and then I spotted the hole in the fence, big enough for an adult to walk through.

Although I usually follow my rule about never hitting the same target over and over, this was a scam too good not to keep going in on. So this one scheme kept me "employed" for quite a while.

Rachel and her sister moved in, and they even went on some runs to the scrapyard with me. But for the most part, I considered them more of a problem than little helpers, so I preferred working alone.

I think they'd been moved away for around three months when I got busted. I was just walking away from the scrap yard when I heard gravel crunching under a wheel, a vehicle driving very slowly behind me. In a little redneck town, there's no kidnappers in vans driving like that, leaving only one possible suspect.

So I put down my ill gotten gains without turning around, backed up, put my ass on the hood, and then turned around and put my hands on the hood. Then I looked up at the cop, who smiled as he got out and said, "Done this before?"

"Nope, but my brother did," I said.

"Ayup," he said, because he already knew my brother well. In a small town, a bad criminal gets well-known fast, and bro was awful.

But anyway, my polite surrender allowed me the privilege of riding up front without cuffs, or even the Miranda reading. It was hardly a proper arrest. The officer said, "I don't think you'll try to run away." And he was right. I was sure running would just lengthen my sentence.

I told myself I'd face up to my crime, "like a man," and since bro considered himself a man, I guess I succeeded. Because I did exactly what he always did, and I broke into tears and told a sob story about being poor and just wanting Christmas money for my dear, sweet parents. And the owner of the scrap yard was so moved, he gave me a job. No, for real. That was my punishment for robbing the place. They had me strip copper from solenoid coils, but for a reduced price, factoring in my crime. I got mentioned in the paper, but not by name.

The only other time I went to the police station was because my mother accused me of taking drugs. At first, I laughed at her, because where in the fucking middle of nowhere was I going to get drugs? And besides that, I had no money. I'd given up all scams and was trying for once to live an honest life. But mom said my eyes were red, so that must mean I was stoned. Couldn't be hay fever? No. So I eventually blew up, stomped across to the cop shop and began angrily demanding a drug test. They calmed me down, sorted out what I was blubbering about, and then went to my house to tell me mom "This kid isn't on drugs." And I wasn't. A steady drug supply wouldn't come until two years later. (Bro was my dealer.)

After Rachel left, I dropped into a depression. Some of the kids at school noticed and adopted me. While in their crew, I hung out during breakfast and played portable LCD games. Since all our games were one screen, one game consoles, we had to trade games to keep things interesting.

During this time, a popular game was "FAGIT/MAGIT" But FAGIT is "female ass grabber including tits." We were sitting around playing other games when this fad came to our table, and EVERYONE looked at me and went, "Of course you're a MAGIT, dude." Then they started signing, "You're a MAGIT, You're a MAGIT!" So I shouted, "No I'm not, I'm a FAGIT!" In a full cafeteria. Oy.

There was one silver lining. Being in a redneck town, all of the boys took up the strange notion that touching a gay person could turn one gay. And, because of this, it was a very rare instance where anyone tried to hit me. The two times someone tried, I hit back, and they went away. What I'm saying is, the backwoods redneck kids treated me way better that the big city kids. After people thought I was gay, even the teasing became milder and easier to bear. It didn't mean it didn't bother me, but comparing some name calling to previous yeas with broken bones and ghetto stomping and concussions, I was happy to have some relief.

I, was not a good student. I'm sure you can guess that, but at one point, my principal challenged me to prove that I really knew what I claimed and I wasn't just full of shit. He claimed that if I could give them just one six week period of good grades, he would have me tested for advanced placement in a higher grade. Why, I might even get out of high school early. Motivated by this chance for early release from hell, I applied myself and got straight As. I even got an A+ in my writing class. So I took my report card in, and the principal said, "Now if you just do this every semester…"

I tuned out the rest. I tuned out a lot of what he said, and after the counselor showed me her gun and told me she wasn't afraid to shoot niggers, I tuned her out too. Her, though, I at least pretended to like. The principal became my enemy, and I wasn't afraid to call him out. I'm probably the only student who ever called him a jackass to his face and didn't get thrown out with a permanent suspension.

Bro got busted for breaking into the post office, and that was a crime so big, he couldn't cry it away. So for a time, it was just me in town, alone. That sucked a dick. When you're like the town pariah, and the only person who will talk to you is the town drunk…and he only wants to talk about sex. Oh yeah, real fucking awkward staying away from him. Everyone else told me he was harmless, but the constant "flirting" told me otherwise.

Bro came back, and then he had some trouble with some of his friends. They showed up and cornered us in a convenience store, Pico. They said they were going to kick bro's ass, and I stopped thinking. I decked the biggest kid. So outside, the three of them kicked the shit out of me. Then they and my little brother went off to find trouble together. They found it.

I limped home alone. Mom came home and found me, and she started in with the alcohol and cotton balls to dab on the deeper scrapes. Then all of the sudden, my step-dad storms in and says I'm getting my thieving ass up, and we're going to the police. Why? Because I had just narrowly escaped arrest somehow while bro and the guys were busted for another B&E of the school district's stadium snack stand.

And, I HAD been there four weeks previously, when bro had first discovered the lax security standards. I had some chips and soda while bro hunted in vain for a cash box. Oh, also, I stole a pickle.

But, seeing as how I was quite impossibly beyond fast flight, and as how I wasn't going down with the assholes who had just rearranged my entire body, I got up in my step-dad's face and we had a screaming match until I convinced him to really look at me and see how badly injured I was. Then he found out the guys who beat me were the ones sitting in the clink with bro. So he calmed down and left.

Twenty years later, I found out that the police let my step-dad take bro out of the jail, and he hit bro up side the head with something, making him bleed. Bro still has deep scars on either side of his cheekbones because of this attack. During this time, my step-dad was telling bro that the cops arrested them because I called them. He was trying to guilt trip bro into confessing that I was there. Instead, he planted an idea in bro's head that made him hate me even worse. To this day, bro thinks I'm the spawn of Satan who was plotting against him. That's why he HAD to make preemptive strikes and keep attacking me throughout my teens. And people sometimes still wonder why I live on the other side of the planet from him.

My school knew about all of this drama. It was a small town, and rumors get around. I'd been in the office many times, often becoming confrontational. After I was accused of attacking a kid who I hadn't touched, I exploded at my principal and told him, again, in a full cafeteria, to sit his fat ass down and shut up for once. He just stared at me, and then he said, "I think you need to leave." So I did, to a standing ovation. I really thought that shit only happened in movies.

They got a shrink to try and prove I was unfit for school. The plan backfired because I confessed to my shrink about my past, and he felt so sorry for me that he told the principal they HAD to take me back.

I lost my rep as a homosexual in band class. I played xylophone, badly. The band auditorium was being renovated, so we were taking lessons on the stage in the cafeteria. (Most of my best Devine stories take place in that one room.) As the class was coming to a close, our substitute teacher said, "Class, remember to go home and practice your fingerings."

I turned to the guy next to me, the snare drummer, and said, "I thought only girls had to remember their fingerings."

The girl in front of me turned around and said, "No dear, you have to remember my fingerings too." Then she got up, sat in my lap, and pulled a back stage curtain around us. She unbuttoned her jeans and stuck my hand in. I froze like the classic deer in the headlights.

I'd just recovered my senses enough to test my new friend's resolve, and the substitute called my name. Because I was on the lunch program, and instead of reading cards from the top down, he pulled mine from the bottom. "Whitten! Whitt—hell, where's Whtten?"

"He's back here!" the kettle drummer shouted, and then drew back the curtain. And the whole cafeteria looked around, and there I am with a hot girl in my lap, my hand down her pants. The teacher wrote a fast note, held it out and said, "Office, now."

So we get to the office, and I'm getting prepared for World War Three. But my principal opened the note, laughed and groaned, "Oh, thank God." Then he set down the note and waved at the door. "Get out." Then he laughed some more.

I didn't get another chance with the girl. Teacher moved her seat far, far away from me, and I never even got her name.

At graduation, I thought I was going to be a summer school graduate. But I passed my year end exams, so the district chose to send me on to high school even if five of my six semesters were flat zeroes. I turned in no homework, refused to interact with my teachers unless I was forced to. I hated them, and I'm sure the feeling was mutual.

The night of my graduation, my principal handed me my rolled up diploma, took my other hand and pulled me in close. "I'm finally getting you out of my hair," he said.

"But sir," I said, "You're bald."

Which is why he's purple in the picture, and I'm red. Because I'm red trying to contain my laughter, and he was purple trying to avoid the urge to kill.

And that was my last good time in Devine before I moved back to Denison to live with my dad and bro again.

Another painful trip down memory lane…

Thinking about Cherry has me depressed, but I've gone and made things worse by thinking about Rachel. If there's anyone in my past who can tear me up worse than Cherry, it's Rachel. Because there was only one chance when I could have done the right thing, and to do that, I would have had to confess to Rachel's mom that my little brother had blackmailed me into seducing Rachel's sister. By then, bro was already back in juvi for shoplifting again, and I was pretty sure I'd be joining him soon if Rachel talked.

Rachel caught me messing around with her older sister, and she wanted to be in on "the game." That's what bro had me call his plans. It wasn't proper sex though, just nude heavy petting. That's what bro preferred, I guess. I never saw a reason to push for more, especially since I was feeling guilty over what bro started. But not guilty enough to turn myself in. Part of that had to do with how bro looked when he got back from juvi; bruised and cagey. I wasn't looking forward to finding out how to get a matching set of bruises. Which is funny, because I got them anyway.

In any case, when I balked at Rachel's demands, she called her mom. She was right up to the point of telling her mom that her sister and I weren't wearing any clothes before I relented and told her she could play with us. I was near the tail end of 11 at the time. She was in the middle of 4.

I'd watch over the girls a few months at a time, and then their mother would have to move somewhere across town and I wouldn't see them for a while. We'd moved closer, or they would quickly get out of a bad place and bounce over to live with us for a few weeks. In this way, Rachel and her sister became regular fixtures in my life for just over three years. When we moved to Devine, they moved with us in our…third house, and the second owned by the same landlord. During the last few months of our relationship, when she was 6 and I was 14, she slept in my bed with me. We never had real sex, but I considered her my first wife.

That was a strange time for me. Until that last year, I hated Rachel. She decided what we did, when we did it, and where we did it. Once the game started, nothing deterred her, not even after my little brother told her that I was a pedophile, and that I'd tricked her and her sister. This is why he told me to tell them it was a game, so he could later look like a hero to the older sister. This plan briefly worked, until bro went to juvi again. Then she ended up drifting back to me too. And I wanted her, but I didn't. Because of that, I was emotionally cold to her, but just as aggressive in pursuing her. I'm sure it made her hate me. Everything was so messed up our relationships, and I just wanted to be done with the constant pain and humiliation.

I remember one day when Rachel was being really stubborn. We were alone and she wanted to play. I really did not, so I unloaded on her about how much I resented her for using me like her personal toy. My tantrum came because she'd gone down on me outside a storage facility, in broad daylight and clear view of the house next to the storage bays. While she was doing this, I watched a woman wash her dishes. If she'd ever once looked up, she would have caught us. And yet, she never raised her head even though I stared right at her. When she finished, she bent over to put something under the counter and walked away.

So yeah, I felt justified in exploding. But when I'd spent myself, Rachel's eyes walled up with tears, and she went to pieces. I'd finally reached her and made her see me, but then I think on a certain level, she realized how messed up both of us were.

I calmed down and then I calmed her down. Things changed between us, and we started sleeping together. We didn't play the same games, but we were still making out. I think we were trying to adjust to the idea of mutual respect, and in those final few weeks, I allowed myself to love her in a way that I never could before. Not with physical acts, but with genuine emotion.

Near the end, her mom noticed us in bed, and she commented how we made a cute couple. I lay there with my eyes closed, thinking how strange my life was, because I could never talk about it to anyone. The boys my age in gym bragged about their hot girlfriends and how they were going to see a naked girl soon. And I'd think how I had seen two naked girls, for the third time in my life, no less, but I couldn't tell anyone about my past without them thinking I was sick.

And of course by then, I really was getting pretty sick in the head. It wasn't just the sex fucking my brains up, though. All around these horrible sex stories, I was peeling myself off the ground and limping home with fractures, bruises, contusions and a few new goose egg head wounds. This was when counselors rolled their eyes if I admitted feeling like a girl, with teachers who told me I had those beatings coming. And I'd think of Rachel and her sister, and I'd think that maybe they didn't know the right reason, but maybe I did deserve it.

One day, Rachel's mom announced that they were all moving to Florida, and I never saw her again. Her sister was glad to be rid of me. I know that. But I don't know how Rachel felt about me. I only know that after she left, I stopped being able to sleep at night. I just lay there, wondering over and over, What have I done?

I think about her all the time, about how little I liked being with her as a partner. I wonder if she hated me too, and she just did it because she thought it was some grown up secret she'd been let in on. I wonder if she grew to hate me half as much as I hate myself. I wonder if I ruined her the way she ruined me. Does she have to lock herself in a room to avoid other people too? Does she feel sub-human? Is she stuck in this endless cycle of guilt and depression like me? Or is she somehow worse then me?

It bothers me that there isn't one day of my formative years that aren't upsetting to normal people. There isn't one story that isn't somehow tainted by insanity. Even the days that are happy memories have something attached to make them bad for me. Every trip down memory lane leads somewhere ugly.

I think about the one time I ran away after I'd just turned 11, and the cops took me right back home even though I begged them not to. I wonder, if that cop had listened and got me away before I'd ever met Rachel, before I'd even taken that disastrous babysitting job with "Boo," would I be better? Would I be sane? Would I not see myself as a monster? Or was the damage already done by that point?

I've met lots of people from my past online, and part of me hopes that one day, I'll get an email that says "I'm doing okay, much better than you, it seems." But a larger part of me fears that the message will say, "You ruined me, and I blame you."

And that's fair. I blame me too.

And, for the record…

I know that I've been angry a lot about the people who ain't doin' shit except taking up space, but I guess I do need sometimes to say, "I know not all of you are so messed up." It does bother me how many of you will engage me, but won't engage more hateful people with better resources. I'm a flat broke tranny, with issues. Hell, with subscriptions. I get up in the morning with a few million people hating me on general principle, and all it really takes is one blog post or hateful comment to set me off and ruin the rest of my day. But when I see fit to complain about my faction's particularly shitty hand, it isn't my enemies who show up to tell me how to speak or how to think.

There's a LOT of you who read and just walk on. And yeah, at times, even that bothers me. But it bothers me a lot less now. Because you could decide to say something spiteful, just to see if you could get another reaction. So, comparing trolls to lurkers, I'm finding myself preferring the lurkers more.

Some of you out there donate to charities, speak out on issues, write to your elected officials, and pat the heads of baby turtles as you block traffic and wait for the others to cross the road. Some of you put Mother Theresa to shame. (And recall, she asked for a pardon on a ponzi scheme criminal, without hearing any particulars of the case, simply because he'd let her ride in his private jet. His fleecing people for millions was a-okay, because it enabled her to jet-set to the world's poor for her photo ops.)

But I don't talk to you. Nothing I say on this blog is ever intended for you. Put bluntly, you're not my target audience. I really don't see a point in talking to you, or in praising what you do. What I do to help, I do in private. I don't do it for praise or an award, because doing good so you'll be recognized for it is not a healthy motivation. I've got good backup on this opinion from a former pastor named Jeshua.

I don't talk to you about doing more. You're doing more than enough. You're doing more than your fair share, and kudos to you for your hard work. If you're really doing the things you have to to make this world a better place, then please, ignore my rants and let them slide off you like rain off a slicker. These words aren't meant for you if you're doing all you can for your people and your world. They're meant for the people who do nothing, and constantly ask, "Hey, what do you want from me?" My rants are my answer to their question, whether they wanted a response or not.

But sometimes, I will try to remember the rest of you and point out, yes, I know some of you are trying. The problem is, it's not my job to keep track of what you're doing. My job is keeping tabs on the other guys. Which means my feed is often full of doom and gloom. I'm sorry for that. But it won't change because there does need to be an outlet for this stuff. Plus I'd rather deal with my rage issues here, so in my writing I can try to express some sense of hope even for the worst monsters in our society.

I know you genuinely good people are out there. But my blog is not for you, and I won't change it to suit your tastes. I'm sorry, but if you want something more positive from me, you have to buy a book.

No more comments…

As of two weeks ago, this blog picked up a "helpful" stalker who delivers pithy sheltered advice that usually ends with "seek therapy. You are good person, just confused." BUT last night, this helpful therapy referrer said "Seven million people on this planet, four are surplus…" And fuck you. You told me to get therapy, but you just dehumanized fully one half of the planet? No, fuck you, douchebag. You don't get to make any more comments to set me off. In fact, no one gets to comment ever, because of you.

The rest of you, I'm sorry, but it's not like comments here have ever been busy or vital. If you want to talk to me, there's still email: zoe (at) zoewhitten (dot) com.

This isn't a forum, nor is it a public platform for a celebrity. This is my journal and personal blog. It is the writing space of a person with mental problems, with physical holes in my head made by plaque scarring. My random and sometimes corrupted thought streams can be offensive. That's why there's a warning right at the start of my blog that I can be offensive and reader discretion is advised. Some of what I discuss will offend you. But if all you want to say to me is that you're offended, I don't care. You don't have the right not to be offended. You only have the right to go somewhere else if you don't like my message.

Oh, and before you question my morals, let us be clear. I live in self-imposed exile, and have for most of my life. My morals may be messed up, but I can at least understand that and keep myself indoors. What's sad is, I work so hard not to attack or molest anyone, and there's dickheads walking around who would happily nuke half the planet to satisfy their privileged view of the "order of things". But they're "sane" for wanting to kill, and I'm crazy for wanting to keep complete strangers safe from me.

People like this sociopath tell me I'm confused about how the world works. But I'm not confused. The world doesn't work, and never has. It hobbles along with us doing everything we can to prevent real progress. We're hateful beasts looking for some excuse to go on the attack. Yes, me too. Some of you ain't so bad, and you try to keep that lizard-brain part of you in check. But some of you need to get in touch with your human sides. Preferably before you begin advising the mentally ill on topics you're not qualified to discuss.

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