Regina Noctis

I don’t, as a general rule, do memes much anymore. Sometimes I’ll fiddle around and take the online test just for fun, but I don’t really post results anymore. I got tagged with this one. And even though I’ve flatly refused when tagged by others, I’m doing this one. Why? Because you folks who’ve tagged me in the past have been around for some time, and know that I don’t do the meme thing anymore. But I decided that someone relatively new to my small segment of journal land gets a freebee. You know, someone who hasn’t seen me periodically saying something about how I don’t generally do memes.

So, since I was tagged, here it is.

tagged by

Here is the game:
1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your LJ along with these instructions.
5. Don’t you dare dig for that “cool” or “intellectual” book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.
6. Tag five people.

The uncertainty principle reveals that as we penetrate deeper and deeper into the subatomic realm, we reach a certain point at which one part or another of our picture of nature becomes blurred, and there is no way to reclarify that part without blurring another part of the picture! It is as though we are adjusting a moving picture that is slightly out of focus. As we make the final adjustments, we are astonished to discover that when the right side of the picture clears, the left side of the picture becomes completely unfocused and nothing in it is recognizable. When we try to focus the left side of the picture, the right side starts to blur and soon the situation is reversed.

—–The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav

And I’m not tagging anyone. If you wanna do it, do it. If you don’t, then don’t. I don’t like giving orders (unless it’s to tell to go do some dishes). ;)

I got pointed some time ago to the Grants Pass anthology a while ago. The woman putting it together was looking for authors, and suggested that I write something and send it. I wanted to, but life was crazy at the time. This was just before I started losing my mind from an incredible stress overload at the end of last semester. I went off to my vacation in the Bay Area, thinking that I’d destress and get at least some of my mind back while I was there, but instead got thrown into the midst of even more stress and drama thanks to the friends I was staying with. I came back home from that to even more insanity from the grandmother and the psychotic cousin. Dealing with that left me no time or ability to even think about writing anything.

Finally, with my trip to Seattle looming, I unwound just enough to finally come up with a concept for the story. It developed a bit while I was there, and I thought that I’d finally be able to write it when I got back. My week and a half in Seattle eliminated most of the high-stress-related problems I was experiencing. Well, other than one phone call from home a day or so before the end of my trip, which had me on the warpath and trying to convince Sylvan to come steal a car with me so we could drive to California and commit murder.

I found out when I got to Seattle that the Grants Pass anthology was closed now. But I met the author putting it together (Hi, !) and she told me that if I could write it quickly enough and get it to her, that I could still be considered for inclusion. I had planned to get the story done as soon as I got home, since I can write short stories in a matter of days when the concept grabs hold of me hard enough, as this one had.

But I got home to more insanity from the cousin and the grandmother. And Mom wound up having to go to the hospital, and I’ve been taking care of her since, as well as doing what I can to keep the household going. Now we’re in the midst of gathering the evidence and filling out the paperwork to get the psychotic cousin sent to jail for his second felony. (Only need one more after this. Thank you, California Three Strikes law.) I just haven’t had time. What’s more, I haven’t been able to do anything other than stare blankly at a blank screen when trying to write, while clouds of intense anger, worry, and stress swirl around and completely occupy my mind.

Tomorrow is the first day of the new semester. It’s a light semester, thankfully. Something to get me back in the swing of things, since my subconscious seemed to have associated my going to school with the stress and feeling like I was dying by inches last semester. I was having panic attacks any time I tried to register. I finally managed to register for one, and only one, class. Something light, relatively easy since it’s mostly material I already know but need the class for my degree, and only on two days a week. Just to show my stubborn, irrational side that it’s not actually school that made me so seriously ill by the end of last semester. Even just thinking about going back to school tomorrow has me shaking as things stand now. It sucks.

What with one thing and another, I’ve decided that I have to give Grants Pass a miss. I would have loved to write for it whether my story was worth acceptance or not. And it’s one more clue as to why I probably would not be any good trying to write professionally. I can fight off stress for artwork, even use it to help me de-stress somewhat. A high enough level of stress, however, always stops me dead in my tracks if I try to write. Maybe because artwork has always come naturally to me, while writing does not so much. I just have to look at this journal and the relative scarcity of posts to it for the last few years. There was a time I’d post something quite regularly, sometimes as much as five or six times a day. Now I just can’t write, even here, all that much. This journal comes easier than writing fiction, too. I’ve always had an easier time ranting about something than writing fiction. Take that as you will as an indication of how much writing fiction has suffered under the massive amounts of stress, anxiety, and fear that I’ve lived under for the last few years.

I may still write the story, assuming that the concept still has hold of me when things resume something of an even keel. It’ll be the only way to get that insistent voice in my head to shut up. But even I have to recognize that it will have to be for my own pleasure (or whatever you call it) rather than in hopes of acceptance to the anthology.

Thanks for being willing to take a look at the story if I got it done relatively quickly, . I think I’ll have to pass. :(

I just picked her up from the hospital.

They took a number of x-rays and ran a CT scan, as well as taking blood and urine for tests.

Nothing showed on any of the tests. Not a damn thing.

All we’ve got is the doctor’s theory that it was an air pocket in the lungs that burst. This sometimes happens as a precursor to or in the early stages of emphysema. It has to be, if this is correct, a precursor symptom, because Mom has none of the symptoms of emphysema and the tests showed none of the signs of it.

They gave her synthetic morphine at the hospital, and prescriptions for pain pills to control this while she heals.

Thank you to everyone for all your good thoughts, vibes, prayers, and wishes.

Now I leave you to your regularly scheduled friends list.

I just got back from taking Mom to the ER.

She was sitting at her computer, when she felt this horrible pain in her back. “Like something there broke,” she said. And then she had difficulty breathing. It hurt for her to expand her rib cage enough to breathe.

She’s been admitted at the hospital, and was being taken to x-ray when I left so I could update my grandmother.

More as I know it.

While I was in Seattle, the psychotic cousin had everyone here so stressed that my mom was physically ill the entire time I was gone.

Since I’ve been back, he’s been over here every day, and the arguments, insanity, drama, and massive amounts of stress have been daily.

Today Mom was balancing the books for my grandmother, and discovered that psycho had changed the amounts on two checks they’d written him in July – one from $20.00 to $200.00, the second from $15.00 to $150.00. This on top of the checks he’s stolen and forged, and the credit cards he’s stolen and run up thousands of dollars of charges on. The argument started up between him and my mom again, and I had it. I was not going to let this go on.

There are problems with me getting a restraining order. One is that the only thing that he’s done that harmed or threaten me directly in quite some time is that he stole my old DVD player while I was in Seattle. That isn’t much, and difficult to report to the police since I wasn’t here, didn’t see him take it, no one else saw him take it, and the player itself was old and broken. It had been stored in my grandmother’s room pending contact with a neighbor of ours who’s good at fixing things. So yeah, not something the cops are going to bother with. The only reason I wanted to report it was so that I’d have something more recent to put on the restraining order, and it would be backed up by documentation.

So, instead, I rather obviously and ostentatiously started getting ready to go out. I then talked with Mom just loudly enough for the psycho to overhear the words “going” and “cop shop.”

Tomorrow, he will be released from probation for the last time he was arrested. He’s obsessed with getting out of trouble, as if being on probation is what makes him incapable of getting and holding a job or acting in any way like a tolerable human being. If he’s not arguing with someone over something, making threats, or picking a fight, he’s been obsessing on this coming day since I got home. So I knew quite well exactly what kind of pinnacle this represented in his mind.

He was begging with me not to go, and asking if there was anything he could do to make me change my mind. So I told him I’d make a deal with him. I told him that there was one thing, and one thing only, that would stop me from going to the police right that minute. And if he made the deal and then violated it, nothing would prevent me from talking to the police about everything he’s stolen from me and mentioning everything he’s stolen from everyone else here, even though I had no legal standing to press charges on those things. He said, “Alright, a deal. Anything.”

So I told him that the deal was that he had to leave the house right now and never come back. Not ever, not as long as any of us live here.

Three times while I was in Seattle, he drove his car until it ran out of gas, left it at the side of the road, and came back here to get someone to buy him gas and take the gas and him back to his car. The third time, he was refused. So he just left the car on the side of the highway and it was impounded. His first reaction to the deal that would keep me from going to the cops was, “Then how am I supposed to get my car back?” Meaning, of course, that he was expecting my mother and grandmother to cover the (by now) well over thousand dollar price tag to get it out of impound, and if he couldn’t ever come here again, then he wouldn’t be able to convince them to do so. I told him that his car is his problem. For the first time ever, he agreed that his car is his problem and not someone else’s. And then he asked for two cigarettes and left.

Peace and quiet for the first time in days.

I know he’s not going to live up to the deal, and will be back. But this will at least get us a few days to de-stress before he breaks the deal. And because I set the boundary when I spoke with him, if he violates the deal, I will go to the cops. And I will point out to him exactly how additionally stupid his deal-breaking is, because I have been making tapes of the rants, verbal abuse, and fights. In every one of them, he openly admits to the things he’s stolen, destroyed, and done that caused the argument to start in the first place. He has felt perfectly safe to, knowing that Mom and Grandma won’t go to the cops, and I have no legal standing to do so. But I will take those tapes with me when I go. In one of them, he even owns up to fantasizing about raping his three underage daughters. He follows it almost immediately with a denial, and then an admission again, and then denial, etc. The cops will probably very much enjoy hearing those.

I have power, idiot psychotic cousin. There’s a reason you used to dream that we both had guns, that mine was bigger, deadlier, and cooler than yours, that yours disappeared and you desperately wanted to steal mine but you never could. And now I’m gunning for you.

When I saw the post on your LJ, I could only assume that the person you were talking about was , and that it was who warned you about him, and told you a little of my past with him. If I’m wrong in that assumption, then read further at your own risk, since it’s a lot of really bad stuff that you may not want to know in detail about silverstorm2013 (or even about me on such a short time knowing me).

I met silverstorm2013 nearly 20 years ago. I bring this up as a warning, really. In the beginning, he can seem very kind, very charming, as most sociopaths can. That is the crux of the problem. He is a sociopath. No empathy, no conscience, and no real concept that people are real, with their own thoughts and feelings. We are all merely toys and actors on the stage of his personal epic, and he is really the only thing that is real to him. He has merely learned to emulate those things he lacks. He does it so effectively that it takes time (years, even) to even recognize that the problem exists, much less how deep the problem runs. Though I understand from people who have had dealing with him more recently that he’s lost some of the ability to seem so charming and good, so you’d probably have picked up on the underlying wrongness even on the first meeting.

He didn’t usually let that wrongness out until he’d known someone long enough that he felt safe to slowly start revealing what really lurked beneath. Since he’s known you to a degree by talking with you on LJ, he might even be more like his real self on a first face-to-face meeting. You should probably avoid that meeting in case I’m correct on this. If you feel that you want to or should meet him anyway, do so with other people there, and in public. Never allow yourself to be alone with him. At the very minimum, he goes out of his way to violate boundaries whenever given the chance. The safer he feels around someone, the more likely he is to do this, and the more extreme the violation of boundaries. The combination of his ability to “sell” his apparent kindness and worth as a friend kept me trying for a long time, even when his violations of boundaries was getting intolerable, as indicated in this post where I was trying to work out a way to deal with him without damaging him. (As if he deserved that kind of consideration.)

He is, to a large degree, a coward. He would be unlikely to attempt anything like what he did to me – the abuse, the rape, or the later attempted rape – unless he was sure he either had some kind of hold over you or you were relatively helpless and unable to fight him off. When he was physically and emotionally abusive toward me, he knew that I wouldn’t fight back because I was already deep in battered woman syndrome from living with abusive relatives during high school. When he raped me, I was so sick with a fever that I couldn’t move and nearly died. If you’re really (or morbidly) curious, that little story can be found here. When he attempted to rape me, I was deeply asleep after being up and on the go since about 6 the previous morning. That is buried in the middle of this post about helping Sylvan deal with the death of his mother. I’ve been debating about providing these links, since it might be entirely TMI, but I figured you should have the option of seeing more first-hand accounts of what he’s like. While, as I said, I feel you should definitely avoid meeting him at all, the decision is yours and I want you to be fully informed before you make it.

What isn’t in the journal anywhere, since it was already more than a decade in the past when I started this journal, is the extent to which he can be physically abusive if he feels that you are helpless enough that he can get away with it without retaliation. I won’t go into a lot of detail about it. It might help you ballpark it if I tell you that if I said or did something he didn’t like when we were dating, his favorite way to let me know he was displeased was to dislocate the first and second fingers of my right hand. I was an art student at the time, long before digital graphics were any kind of real option. My hand was damaged so badly I had to give up the career I’d wanted all my life and dropped out of college because I could no longer study animation. If you really want to know more, feel free to ask. I don’t mind talking about it. It’s long in the past, and I’ve dealt with the emotional fallout. I just don’t want this to turn into a great, big, long whine about me me me me me. I also don’t want to seriously exceed your comfort level, so I’m making at least some attempt to be cautious here.

You should also know that he has a tendency to become very obsessive and stalkerish. I still, after these years, get reports from people who’ve talked to him that he says someday, somehow, I will be his again and he will marry me and never let me get away again. Since I’ve threatened restraining orders and baseball bats to the head, he does this less than he used to. But that obsession might go somewhere else, and he tends to want to bring strong women down and make them his subordinate little slaves who kowtow to his every whim and have no thought or personality of their own. If he’s finally moving away from obsessing on me, he will probably find a new focus for his obsessions. I’d really rather that his new focus not be you.

And be prepared for consequences if you don’t meet with him and stop talking with him on LJ. Nothing is ever his fault, and you will find stories being spread that paint you as an evil bitch who screwed him over. I’m running into this even now about that attempted rape. It is now entirely my fault that he is unjustly accused of attempted rape. The stories he tells get back to me, and according to what he says now, I put on this see-through pink nightie, tried to be all seductive, and then got pissed off and cried rape when he responded naturally. This is typical, and is actually a part of how he sucked me into his influence when we first met and I started dating him. He’d supposedly been so badly hurt by these evil, bitchy girlfriends before me. I got all protective and forgave him things I wouldn’t otherwise have tolerated because I felt I had to be the one who showed him that not all women were like that. I allowed myself to be fooled by his fragile, injured, sweet, rare creature act. I was the one he damaged the worst, and now I’m supposedly the biggest and worst bitch of them all. So yeah, be prepared for stories making you out to be cold-hearted and out specifically to cause him pain if you decide to cut off contact with him. He will use it as fodder to make you seem horrible and himself like a poor, innocent martyr.

To be fair, the other side is that he can be amazingly thoughtful if he decides he wants to be. He did some very good things for me during the time we were friends after we stopped dating and he seemed to have finally done some growing up. For years, between the time we were dating and the attempted rape in 2001, he was a wonderful friend and helped me out of some really bad spots. It wasn’t enough for me to remain friends with him, but I feel I have to be fair and make it clear that he is not just pure, distilled evil in rotund form.

If you read all that, I hope it wasn’t something that seriously exceeded your comfort level.

If you avoided reading all that, a more general comment: My advice is, regardless of who the attempted rapist is, that you avoid meeting him. If you decide to do so, then make it a very public place and have friends along as backup and deterrent. Do not let it become a serious friendship or more. If you choose to keep in contact even just on LJ, keep it firmly in acquaintanceship or, at best, distant friends. My experience is that the more trust/friendship/caring a potential abuser or rapist feels he has earned, the more leeway thinks he has to move closer to his propensities toward violation and violence.

Sorry for the length. When talking about him, I tend to get very ranty.

It’s been so long since I was even somewhat unstressed and relaxed that I’d pretty much forgotten.

I got home today from my week and a half in Seattle visiting , , , and (among a large cast of supporting players and kooks). It was a lovely, relaxing time. I would say that I’d chronicle it here sometime, but I never do, do I? I will say this much, though: While we may not have spent a lot of time wandering around and seeing the sights in Seattle, I got to do what mattered most to me. I got to spend time with people I love very much and see far too seldom.

I also got to see ’s ass brownies, got pegged oh but once again as bisexual (which I always find amusing), and got told by one boi that he wished he could find a version of me that has a cock (which is a damn cool compliment as far as I’m concerned).

And now I’m home. Sad because the visit’s over, but very happy I got to spend a week and a half with such wonderful and amazing people.

Now to go buy chloroform so I can knock my mother out, and then ship her, the cats, and myself back there permanently.

Got a few errands to run, and then a bus to catch to get to LAX. And then it’s climb aboard a jet and head for Seattle. Off to stay at and ’s place there, and won’t be coming back until the 12th. So many people up there I haven’t seen in far too long. I’m really excited about this trip.

Hey, , drag yourself to Sylvan’s, would ya? I’d love to see you while I’m in Washington. I miss my Miss Kitty.

I probably won’t post much (if at all) here while I’m gone. But that’s not really any different from things as they are now anyway, is it? I hardly ever write anything anymore, even though I read what everyone else said on a daily basis.

So, finally, some time away from the stress. The trip to the Bay Area for BayCon did not qualify as a vacation from stress. I even broke one night while I was there, because the stress I ran into there was just as bad as it was here. It was just different stress from trying to deal with irrationality and psychosis in members of the family here. But I made Sylvan promise me that he’d keep all drama a minimum of 30 miles away from me at all times. There was even a suggestion of pitching anyway who broke the no-drama rule down the stairs at the house.

I injured my hip nearly a month ago, and it’s finally showing some signs of healing. I think that, even though I know there are things that Sylvan wants to show me in Seattle, I’m going to request that the first day or three we don’t do a whole lot. I want to give the healing process a chance to finish.

Anyhow, off to get things accomplished so I can get out of here. My bus to LAX leaves at 2, and I need to pack, get things accomplished, and get to Bakersfield in time for the 1:30 boarding. Bye bye for a week and a half, LJ land. I’m flying the coop. (heh)