in a town without pity

Sometimes criminals are caught.

Sometimes.

But usually well after their victims have stopped holding their breath.

I stopped holding mine long ago.

It was natural. There was no process involved. It just happened. And it's ongoing.

I just got the healthy idea to stop waiting for him to be caught.

I figured that out on my own. Without really thinking. Without so much as words. It was what I did. Instinct. An action. A lack of action.

It was how I rolled: I let go.

Have they caught him yet?

No. The answer was always no. Always followed by an apology. I'm sorry to not make you feel better right now.

(for what happened to me)

It's a bad question.

Even if he had been caught - I would have still gone through the period of not being able to eat.

Of ocassionaly forgetting how to swallow.

Of adopting the habit of walking on the street instead of the sidewalk.

Because it felt safer. Because oncoming traffic didn't scare me nearly as much as other people scared me.

Of having nightmares.

Of waking up coughing as though I had been choked - as though I had been suffocated.

That insane, animal first inhaling - Air!

Oxygen!

Unreasonable, unconditional, desperate oxygen.

But, I never expected him to be caught. What with millions of crimes. Every day. Every year. Of course they hadn't caught him.

No. All I needed was to get my shit together again. I was the only one who would end what was happening to me. He would get no credit for that.

closure = bullshit

It suggests that there is some tangible thing out there. Available to people as an ending like a period at the end of a sentence. Something that happens in some orderly way.

Like steps running in a straight line toward something better.

Ding!

And, say that you've announced in some stupid fashion that you've finally "gotten closure" (the pressure for closure being great).

And, then, three months later you realize you are back in the thick of it.

I'm sorry, due to things I never expected the previous "closure" spoken of is hereby rescinded - I apologize. I am sorry. There was no closure where there once seemed to be. Please, please - forgive me..

Then, just a few days ago, I got a call.

The person who attacked me was murdered on October 1st. He was identified by DNA.

He's dead.

Do you feel better? Does this give you a sense of closure?

Murder - make me happy?

I would rather he was caught while alive and made to answer to his crimes - and face his victims in court.

I never walked around feeling that this was something that stops due to anything outside of me. I never thought what happened to me was unique. People get victimized. People move on.

It isn't personal.

It wasn't about me.

I healed and I am not the same.

This ended five years ago.

This ended five minutes ago. Five months ago. Two years ago. Two days ago.

Because I let go; because I am letting go.

I end this. Not he. Me.

He didn't stop attacking women. He didn't turn himself in. He didn't apologize. He didn't pay for his crimes.

His death is merely an anecdote.

Yes. He will never hurt anyone again.

Yes. This is over.

That's what they're telling me.

change or die

That is what my ex boyfriend said. Millions of years ago.

He recently passed away.

Did he say it - or was it understood?

Was it understood - or was it on spelled out on some small item on his desk? On a bookshelf?

The mystery that is my real life experience - that is now so long ago that I'm left wondering.

I love mysteries.

And common place mysteries rank pretty high. As this one. And it's so simple and small.

Anyone who has ever read me knows that I can access my memory given enough time and concentration. I can.

But this. It seems I have some kind of block when it comes to certain things.

Certain things.

I simply turn my head. I can't look. It's too final.

Mark is dead.

For how long have I been saying those words?

change or die

I assign them to Mark.

I mean them when I say them. I always have.

change or die..

a mirror held up to another mirror

Blogging about my blog again:

I thought about changing the appearance of my blog. Back when I originally changed it, it was by manually changing the html code.

The new Blogger has New Templates! that are actually the same ones Blogger provided four years ago.

These new templates do provide a new way of changing one's template, however. And that sounded easy and intriguing.

But the new method is very limited with only about thirty colors, and the same six fonts as before.

I changed the whole thing, anyway.

When I was done I was nauseated by the result.

Then I had a moment of panic when it seemed I had changed my blog permanently.

Even though I saved my original template, I had no idea how to access it.

I completely freaked out. The thought of starting from scratch and tweaking my blog to get it back to square one - was daunting.

I just threw up my hands and considered walking away from this blog forever. Finally!

But then I found it. Actually, the default button. It was right there the whole time.

Another reason I can't use Blogger's new templates is that they all (that's all of them - all, every single one) contain these crazy, useless arrows.

Just arrows for no reason. Pointing in every direction. Arrows made bolder than anything else on the page - with no way to remove them.

I don't get it.

I thought about it for a few hours, too. What am I missing here? Why all the arrows?

What is the benefit of all of those arrows?

At what meeting did the idea of "millions of arrows" beat out "no arrows"?

Those arrows look insane.

I might start a completely new blog simply to change the appearance of this one.

The question is: does posting about the appearance of one's blog at all justify having a blog?

Back to html..

just let me know if you get this

Hey google, remember me?

About fifteen minutes ago I wrote you a post. Here in this blog.

I keep checking, but I haven't heard back from you yet.

What is up with that?

Maybe it's time that I finally apologize.

I realize our relationship is totally one sided, with you knowing everything about me and me knowing nothing about you.

I'd like to change that. Right now, if I could.

Maybe I should apologize for all of my abuse of google.

Like, I didn't mean to make my own algorithm that one time.

That was purely an experiment. The kind of thing that happens when one - when I become bored. I was just trying to figure out how the whole thing worked.

It backfired. And I'm sorry. Really.

And, the other day, when I googled myself - I just hope that didn't throw anything off.

I know that your history of me is detailed. I use both gmail and blogger so - that's not good. Not to mention (I really do hate mentioning it) that you've kept all of my queries.

That's years of queries.

I can already hear the snickering:

quit smoking
withdrawal from smoking
healthy eating
nutrition
recipes
raw foods
sprouts
salads
green tea
turmoil
benefits of chocolate
chocolate cake
double chocolate cake explosion
weight gain
metabolism
mystery of metabolism
exercise
health
healthy attitudes
non smoker
calorie counter
lentils
wheat grass
spiralina
cleansing
fasting
benefits of olive oil
relapse
butter
quit smoking
recovery from addiction
bad dreams
detox
support
non smoking forum
whole foods
love
healthy food
self forgiveness
self respect
healthy foods
french food
foodie
why cheese is ok
history of cheese
four cheese potatoes
cheese for breakfast
exercise
start jogging today
the joy of jogging
stiffness
pain
sharp pain
sharp knee pain
jogging through the pain
local hospitals
knee braces
low impact exercise
walking
yogurt
greens
benefits of omega 3
how to drive traffic to your blog
five reasons no one reads your blog
frankenmonsterblog
frankenmonsterblog sucks

etc.

I have to wonder if making google my home page was a mistake - like the final piece of the puzzle, or something.

And maybe banking with google (google is now my bank) - maybe that was a bad idea, too.

And now that I'm working for google, I can only imagine how this post might reflect on my performance. At google.

I am happy, though, that if anyone googles me - they get hundreds of pages of a new age author.

No. No one can google me.

ha ha

I enjoy that fact. It makes me laugh. I laugh about it all the time.

New age.

Easily digested (like cream cheese). Totally non-threatening.

Such a pretty theory (that goes so great with all of those new candles).

Something for women who - simply by virtue of being fat; simply by virtue of buying new age books - learns that she (and she suspected such!) is already wonderful, worthy, unique, and beautiful - just the way she is.

Really? No kidding.

Because that's all any woman wants to hear, anyway: that she is entitled. To be happy. Even though the evidence to the contrary keeps stacking up and knocking against her psyche.

Constantly.

Relentlessly.

Let us begin the new age lesson on quieting the truth, right now, shall we?

And, what if I want to be an author one day?

Will I - in order to have any google results of my own, need to employ my middle intial or use a different name?

Have you ever thought of that, google? Because, right now, it's all I can think about.

I'll go by frankenmonsterblog, I guess. That's how google knows me, anyway.

A woman named frankenmonsterblog.

People will love that..

searching for the past - could it be the future of search?

I'm sad to see that google's 2001 archive has been taken down.

I found important things in that archive - via what became my personal habit of cross searching in both googles.

In particular, a couple of interviews of a friend who recently passed away.

Interviews, I might add, that were nowhere to be found in the current, all too vast google.

Because - believe me, I tried.

It was with a mixture of dread and incredulousness (realizing the preciousness of these particular interviews) that I wanted nothing more than to be wrong.

I wanted to find the same interviews in the current google.

I really wanted to.

But, no. Even while employing the advanced feature, these things were nowhere to be found.

I only hope that by bookmarking these sites - I can still access them. I didn't print anything out right away.

Now with the archive down, I'm afraid that that window might be closed.

Silly me, I didn't realize that the archive was finite.

Because it seemed plain that such an archive would be a permanent. It added a strange new layer to search.

I thought google was testing something out.

As nothing more than a snapshot of history - it was unique. That alone. But then you add the fact that it was interactive.

Not that everything was available. But at least half the pages I tried to access were.

Shouldn't search be as multifaceted as possible?

Even if the 2001 archive was only a self generated history (or, maybe, specifically because it was a self generated history) it added something valuable to search.

And isn't that what google has been talking about forever: the future of search?

Google? Are you out there?

-just sayin'