Letters from Loonville

OK, right after July 4th, I e-mailed a note to someone I'd dated in '05. Verbatim, the note read:

"The fourth was tough. A year ago, we were together. It's not that I'm trying to conjure up memories. They just surface sometimes. We walked down your mother's street and worked on getting that shared, couple pace down ... Last night, out of the blue, I had this overwhelming and thorough memory of that, and of holding your hand and putting my arm around your waist and feeling you beside me a year earlier.

"I'm not asking for or expecting anything from you. The last thing I want is for you to feel obliged to write back. Please just know that someone, once in awhile, thinks about you and that the thoughts are positive, and then hit that delete key and get on with your life, which I hope is happy and healthy.


She wrote back three times in a day to remind me that 7/4/05 was not all as wonderful as I remembered, what with her dad being sick and what-not and discouraging me from contacting her, and finally, in the third note, telling me that, although I bring out a toxic, hateful worst in her, she has occasional positive memories of me, too.

I wrote back and apologized, noting that twice (meaning when I sent the e-mail above and a couple of months ago, when I purchased two used bulldog books and a 2007 bulldog calendar and had them shipped to her), "I have failed at not being in love with you."

That e-mail from me accidentally carried a signature that sent her to this blog site, where she recognized herself as the bit player,"Rhonda (last year, with the bulldog)," and wrote back to tell me I was crazy for disparaging church people and dog people and people taking meds for mental illness, suggesting that my father, who called me and told me he was going to commit suicide over the disrespect I'd shown him by marrying without his permission and then died of natural causes (cirrhosis and alcohol-induced diabetes) a few hours later, and whose birthday, coincidentally, was July 4th, might still be alive had he just been on antidepressants, and then the blog site comments began.

"Anonymous said ... Gee I am seeing a pattern here with the food and restaurant experiences among many other things, so when do you think that maybe it is YOU and NOT the 'crazy' women you date? And well, lumping all of the 'crazy' women you date in Loonville together and then thinking 'Gee, why do they take this personally?' Hmm, I wonder? All I can think is you are addicted to these types of women for some very sad reasons. C'est la vie in Loonville!"

"Author said ... When you follow the blues, sometimes it catches you. Hell, yes, I've had those same concerns and worried about myself and done repeated soul searching, but then I get up and go to work and pay my bills and contribute to the community and get good comments here and elsewhere, as well as "sad" ones like this.

"The pattern is in this town and the sadness is in the therapy available to people I'd rather see well here. 'Coincidence' is something you missed the first half of. Pre-existing conditions of paranoia about government agencies, severe, ongoing back problems requiring heavy pain meds that string them out and confuse them on top of the mood meds, and the specific bizarreness regarding toothbrushes, conditions shared by all the women in these certainly sad narratives, point to a 'first half' for which I was not present.
The rational mind, then, looks for what was present, and where, when these conditions coagulated. That would be the therapy in this town.

"How awful and how sad am I for being present for its repercussions? Can they, literally, take these anecdotes by reading them as personally as they take their prescribed antidotes by ingesting them?"

"Anonymous said ... My question then is this: Why on earth would the 'rational mind' keep going backwards in life to revisit the very same 'crazy women of Loonville' that he USED to date? I am guessing that it is comfortable to this 'rational' minded person, and that it is as always self serving to keep going back to the familiar so he can continue to criticize them as opposed to say moving forward to the
unknown where he might actually find a woman who is not dysfunctional in his eyes, which by the way are few and far between, but then how would he answer to his own demons? That is a tough one. So it seems
the comfort zone provides better material to write about. And I am also guessing he tells these women he is still in love with them because he doesn't know what true love is and sadly never will unless he changes."

"Author said ... Reasons for trying again? Enough romanticism to see past the illness and into the souls of women I fall in love with. Enough egotism to believe I can ride it out until they get well. Enough faith in humankind to be absolutely certain that today's chemical therapy will be looked back on in a few years with the same abhorrence that we now feel for that fellow who received a Nobel Prize in the '40s for performing lobotomies with a device resembling nothing so much as an ice pick, inserted in mental patients' noses get.

"Gluttony for love that makes me take chances on known problems in order to pursue not just a present and possible future, which is what one gets dating strangers, but a past, present and future.

"Do I know what true love is? Hmmmm, it's hard for that one to not be subjective, isn't it?

"Do I know how long a doctor treating physical ailments could go on 'treating' them without any progress and with all of his patients 'coincidentally' developing the same new infections before losing his or her license and being sued for malpractice? I have a pretty good idea that after no more than six months, that physician would be lucky to find a job as a shoe salesperson. Do I know how long how many women of my acquaintance and, sadly, attempted affection, have received 'treatment' from the same mental health care provider in this small town and, in addition to retaining each and every aspect and degree of the illnesses for which they're supposed to be receiving professional care, have also all ended up convinced of constant, malevolent government agency surveillance, terrific back pain that must be treated with more and more numbing meds and some weird attitudes about toothbrushes? I have a pretty good idea that it's been far too ridiculously long."

And then there was another wee bit of e-mail correspondence from her:

"As it is very unhealthy to be partaking in this drama I am calling a truce, on my part, cannot speak for you. So no more comments from me or 'Rhonda' as I will not indulge your fetish for criticizing anyone and everyone from churchgoers, dog owners and people with legitimate pain issues ... which maybe one day you will have a chronic pain problem and will be more sympathetic although I doubt that as you have already proven that you yourself have some serious mental health issues and yet you show NO sympathy whatsoever for anybody else with said issues ... then again, denial is a strong emotion.

"So write away ... after all the only people I assume are reading this crap are your circle of other dysfunctional 'friends' (and I use that term quite loosely). Criticize me all you want ... and hey, even use my REAL name since your pseudonyms are not that creative ... write your opinions about everyone else in the world being so far beneath you that you have to suffer by being affected by their craziness. Poor you! Hey you lay down with dogs you are gonna get fleas!

"So keep telling yourself the half truths you like to believe and live in your own created Loonville, but I am guessing you will die all alone in this world because you would rather be right than loved. I give up ... I am letting go of the anger ( because I have considered the source and it is not worth getting upset over), I am not getting pulled into your little web of lies (like the editor that doesn't exist), not going to entertain you by reading your Blog to see what nasty things you have written about me or the world, I don't care what you obviously think of me (especially this schizo-attitude of 'I have failed at not being in love with you' but I can write disparaging commentary on my blog about all my past crazy girlfriends, 'Rhonda with the bulldog' being one of them because I am a writer!)

"My goal here is to live an honest life with peace and happiness not one filled with such negativity and hatred that you seem to be so filled with. It really saddens me to see a relatively intelligent man as yourself going down such a negative path. A pity really. Maybe one day you will wake up from your Absinthe/Salvia/Yopo seed smoking fog and see that the world actually can be a beautiful place if you let it be.

"I do have one regret that I feel the need to apologize for as it has truly been bothering me and that is the comment I made about your father. I do apologize for saying what I said. That was very low ... and sadly that is the kind of space you put me in ... and I do not like how I feel there. That is why I will not continue to read your Blog or be in contact with you. I never would have said that kind of statement before ... I feel it is equivalent to me telling MY mother 'Hey you aren't my real mother!' I would NEVER do that because it is so shamefully hurtful I could not bring myself to inflict that on her. I should not have commented on your father either. So for that, I do apologize. It was cruel and came from a very angry and mean spirited
place in me ... one which you obviously bring out and I try my best to not be that cruel of a person.

"So take care and keep on keepin' on in that crazy world you like to dwell in. Oh and by the way smoking Salvia or any other 'legal' hallucinogenic is so much better than taking Prozac! Guess you didn't see the news story about Salvia causing that young man to kill himself. But hey, it is legal! So I bid you adieu ... and I do wish you more happiness in your life ... you seem to need some."

... and then I responded to her and said that she'd made it clear that I brought out a bad side of her and would leave her be, but gave her proof of the editor's existence and told her she'd caught me at a particularly bad time with the jibe about my father, as his birthday had just passed and my July 3rd date had sent me a "my blood will be on your hands" note after I'd gotten tired of waiting for dinner and having government surveillance vehicles pointed out to me from her porch and window and had my beret used to clean the TV screen and been nipped by the goddamn dog enough times and gone home.

By the way, she's OK; I saw her ex-husband leaving the County Mental Health place earlier this week, which meant that she's alive, at least, and that he had, as is his habit, driven her to her weekly appointment with the therapist who'd advised her to clean people's toilets with that same husband's toothbrush a few years earlier.

That's the way life is here in Loonville. I later found out that she had attempted suicide, using, with an irony not diminished by the fact that she'd used the same method over a dozen times over the years, pills prescribed by the goddamn doctor who was supposed to be curing her mental illness to do so, and that sure as ever-living fuck never happens with herbal passionflower or yerba mate capsules. Anyway, that response apparently incited the anonymous "Rhonda with the bulldog" to end her "truce," because the following blog site comment then appeared:

"Anonymous said ... The 'ones' that get well unlist their phone numbers, block his email, issue restraining orders and ultimately flee this idyllic paradise to 'Get Well.' The remainders commit suicide. His path is strewn with death and decay. Author epitomizes 'Creep,' a desperate evangelizing atheist, hates love, believing in nothing but his own cum. This format is his cheap variation of his own therapy for his suffocating perversions."

"Author said ... There are neither restraining orders nor suicides, other than the 15th suicide attempt in a series by someone I never knew had tried it even once when I started seeing her or when I left her house, aggravated, prior to that 15th attempt. I think that note is a bit excessive in tone, bringing up new, cheap shot issues in a maddened frenzy that is not justified by any comment that precedes it. This must be someone who's desperately clinging to the chemical therapy I'm so against, attacking me for attacking the prescribed cotton candy fog of those damn pills."

Now is it plain to the sane that I should be sick of this shit, that all this makes it clear, not that I am the fucking Lex Luthor of Loonville Lovin'‚?, but that the therapy isn't working? Where do I provoke these comments from "Rhonda with the bulldog?" Where is all this death and decay, where are the suicides, where's my belief in nothing but my own cum and where are my suffocating perversions? For that matter, where, in her heavy correspondence and commentary here is her "flight" from Loonville, to which, as it is described in these voluntarily read pages, she repeatedly returned, and where, in her hateful, hurtful messages is the "wellness?." To me, this is one more sad example of the state of this town.

Yes, goddamn it, I do have fond memories of "Rhonda with the bulldog," and I would love to be in touch with her again, and in touch with any of the other excessive number of government-program-quack-drugged-victims here that I happen to have run across and dated because the Loonville Law of Probability inevitably leads me to them because they are everywhere, because of the very conditions I'm pointing out here.

So, yes, I am sick of this shit, and of being reviled and rejected by the women I meet in the community I live with when I go up against the system that is providing them poisons and not doing their minds a bit
of good.