the onset

Page One

                     I shudder when relating it.

                                          ~~~  virgil

Spite and Malice is the name of a card game I used to play with my fiancé and his mother, long ago in the dark ages of the 1970’s. I don’t remember now how to play this game, but only recall that you could be going along okay, and then there were these few moves your opponents could make that would rob you of points and cards and any hope of catching up.

rob you of points, which are treasures in card games. rob you of cards, the tools you use to try to rebuild, and you can’t rebuild without them. rob you of hope. this is what a set of people did to me: robbed me of my treasures, robbed me of my rights, robbed me of my home, and dignity, and love, and hope. I’ve named two of my blog-books now for card games. why not. life is a lot of risk, and a lot of randomness that’s commonly called luck. some people get a more or less equal measure of good and bad randomness in their lives, and some get mostly good. then there are those of us who get mostly the sour kind.

this is a true story of devilish randomness and devilish human beings, as they appeared and behaved in the real lives of myself and my innocent animals. it’s an ugly true story, like so many I’ve had to live through. it has changed me forever, and not for the better.

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

how did it all start…  well, the beginning of hostility toward me by my landlady, and the beginning of my fear of her, began early in 2004, when I initially got mixed up with her. it seemed like a good thing in my life at the time, maybe even a great thing.

my animals and I were living in the home of my housemate who had died. his father was evicting us, and while he was a fairly malicious person himself, the eviction was legal and necessary for him because he wanted to sell the house. as I certainly couldn’t afford to buy it from him, the eviction had to happen.

this person who would soon become my landlady has a business, and since 1995 I had been an occasional client in that business. in january 0f 2004, four months after my housemate’s death, I again had reason to go to this woman’s office. in conversation I told her about what was going on with me and the animals: Rick’s death, the eviction, the fact that so far I hadn’t been able to find us a place and that most of the animals were probably going to be given the lethal injection. she became impassioned over this situation, said she was going to help us and that no animals were going to die. she told me to look for a small house to rent where I could have the animals, and she would help pay the rent.

I was stunned by this for several reasons. first, you don’t expect someone who only knows you casually to help you with such a big issue. second, though this woman and I had had this long, intermittent business relationship, I’d had the feeling for about three years that I wasn’t her cup of tea, that she’d be just as pleased if I took my business elsewhere. why would someone with that attitude want to help us? and third, it felt like a miracle for me and my animals. someone wanted to help us stay together, and staying together was what I wanted and needed most in life, since the other things I needed as badly were already being kept from me by other unbalanced people.

only a few months later I would learn in conversations with this woman that this messiah thing was a pattern in her life. periodically she would latch onto someone, shower them with financial bounty and make their lives (in her own mind) heaven on earth. I would learn personally about three other people she had done this with. her ego, I believe, and her need for denial and delusions, caused her to have a great compulsion towards dramatic rescues and money-spending. she needed to believe that she was generous and caring and a saver of human lives, when in fact she is none of those things. she is thoroughly self-centered, without conscience, without even one consistent set of traits that you could call a core personality. these are my own assessments from my dealings with her, my observations of her, and things other people whom she once “saved” have said. I really like the succinct way my daughter put it two years ago: she put on her jesus sandals, and then she took them off again.

because the messiah impulse did not spring from a true core of kindness and empathy, but rather from her ego’s need for drama and fairy tales, she would eventually tire of the people she saved, and then cut them loose. in one case this took thirteen years; in two others it took nine years. with me, it was less than a year. I’m a depressive with asperger’s and other weird traits, so getting tired of me goes a lot faster with a lot of people.

that day in january of 2004, when I got mixed up with this woman over the issue of what would become of me and my animals, was a day that in the moment looked like a miracle for us. within six months I would know that that wasn’t true. and over all the months and years that have wound out since that day, I have had to see, and to experience, that getting mixed up with her was a descent into a miasma of mental illness, cruelty, lies, and psychological damage to me that goes on to this moment right now, this moment typing at this computer.

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

read…    Neverending solitaire…    Mental hell…

a href=”http://twitter.com/share” data-count=”none” data-via=”annegrace2″ data-related=”ziidjian:outre tweeting”>Tweet</a><script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js”></script

Share  ~~~~~~  website  ~~~~~

 

facebook:   laura lessing

tumblr:  anne’s blog

twitter:  @ziidjian, @annegrace2

email:  annenakis@yahoo.com