Have You Ever Seen a Dog Fight?

When I lived in Riverside County in California, nearly everyone on my block owned a pit bull. I saw one dog rip the side of the other’s face off. They chomp down, hold on, and shake it until it rips. The dog sits there with a long strip of skin hanging from its jaws. Then it drops that and goes for another piece of its adversary. It keeps ripping and tearing until the losing dog is a bloody ruin.

I have always been a scrapper, but life took that and made a pit bull out of me.

It was not courage and strength that set me free, it was tenacity. I chomped down like that dog and I held on until I ripped a hole in my adversary’s defenses and escaped, taking my daughter with me.

Dagstine upped the ante at Shocklines. Philbin joined in. I had a four year war with Pacione. Now he mostly leaves me and my daughter alone.

Now, I intend to chomp down on this talentless wannabee king of the hive and do what dogs do.

Welcome to my world and my war.

Review of “Being Michael”

Being Michael

This story deserves a Tomoview.

First off, Dagstine always has this flaccid way of depicting women. The story is first person from a female point of view. The character is whiny.

It is old, but Chris Cornell is what I need right now to help me through this angst.

Nobody talks that way. Nobody thinks that way. Oh, dear, I have such a bad case of angst! Right, dear, take two aspirin and call me in the morning.

I am so depressed. I must not have such a hopeless feeling, but I do. Maybe if I prayed. Maybe that would help.

Please God, let Michael live. Even if he has to live in a hospital and be quarantined, even if we have to have doctors and nurses every day. Let me, his only sister, have more time with him

Okay, supposedly this person is the older sibling of a twenty four year old man who just happens to have some mysterious reaction to a “toxin.”

The next day the inevitable that my family―that I―had hid from has happened.

There was never any sense of hiding from this. It’s all tell and no show. The shallowness of the writing, the poor sentence structure and the unconvincing voice of the POV makes this constant reader want to throw up.

Surprise. Surprise. Brother was a soldier. So what? All we get is a long whiny series of Mary Sue poor me’s. There is no story here. There is nothing interesting. No profoundity. And, Frankly speaking, not much intelligence.

Dagstine is a middle class boy who has never lacked for anything in his life, and he’s like a blind man trying to describe the colors of a flower.

I imagine that the worst thing that ever happened to old daggy as a stubbed toe.

Dagstine’s depiction of women in his fiction reminds me a lot of what I have read by male to female transsexuals who have a stereotype of what they believe women to be and then act the role out in their writing.

Body Shock Reaction

There are many kinds of violence in the world. Each person deals with it differently.

Physical violence never seemed to bother me as much as the emotional kind.

Someone yelling at me, getting in my face with rage, close in on my personal space — it always produced a kind of Body Shock Reaction.

When H went into his rages, sometimes frothing at the mouth, getting right up against me, his face inches from mine. It always produced this reaction in me. I would feel as if I had been hit in the solar plexus. I could not breathe, I could not think. My head would echo and get a cottony feeling inside it.

if he tried to hit me or did hit me, my reflexes and training took over and I decked him.

However, I had no reflexes to deal with that kind of rage.

In the beginning, the trigger word was’ normal’; later it became ‘evi.’

I had therapy sessions. Every so many weeks, there would be a group therapy and the spouses were invited. I got along with the other patients and their spouses. There was one guy in those sessions that was a large Native American. He had been born with a cleft palate and been through so many surgical procedures to repair it since childhood, that he had developed a panic syndrome about doctors and one more surgery was scheduled. H came to only one of those sessions and never went back and pulled me out of them.

The reason was this: H went to that session. When it came time to talk, he said, “yes, but the this is still not addressing the fact that she’s evil. You can’t address the rest of her problems without first getting her to face the fact that she’s evil.”

The big Indian attacked H in a rage on hearing that. The other men in the group had to physically restrain him to prevent him from demolishing H.

Because I had edited so many self help books, I tried to conscientiously apply the techniques in them to get through to H. He would listen to me and then write off everything I had said with a casual, “Yes, but you’re evil.”

As the situation worsened, I went from illegal drugs to alcohol. The pattern went like this.

I would be standing in the kitchen doing dishes and he would come and watch me. Then he would begin a tirade on how evil I was that might last an hour or longer without a break. By the time he finished, I would be shaking so hard I could barely stand. I kept the bottle of cheap vodka under the sink. i would pour a double into a glass and drink it straight to stop the shaking.

When I was working fulltime, i would come home, make myself a screwdriver that as half vodka and half orange juice, drop down in front of the tv and play ninendo games and hope he left me alone long enough to unwind.

In order to sleep through and around his bouts of screaming, I would drink enough booze to knock me out. After a few years of that, the first thing I did in the mornings when I got up was pour myself a drink.

Alcohol did not take away the pain the way that the meth/cocaine had, but it deadened it enough to get through. I went back through my diaries recently and found the pages where I had made a coded chart. After all these years, I have forgotten the codes to some of the main entries. The chart happened to be one that came back to me easily.

Over the course of a year, there was only one day that he did not go off on me. There were only seven days in which he went off into a rage at me that lasted less than four hours all together in a twenty-four hour period.

The one day that he did not yell at me was because he had spent it with his current mistress.

The “I Love You” Afghan.

I clamped down very hard to survive the events that followed as result of my drug abuse and suicide attempt. Survival became paramount. My child was so shaken up by what happened that she was afraid I would leave her.

So I made her two promises.

i promised that i would never leave her. No matter how hard it got, I would be there for her.

i also promised to always answer truthfully and completely no matter how much it hurt me to do so.

I kept my promises.

I wanted to give her a symbol of my promise, so I made what I called the “I love you” afghan. Granny squares in a rainbow pattern. She watched me make it, fascinated by the process. We rebuilt our relationship and trust. She would hug the squares as they were finished.

As the squares were assembled, Sovay stopped feeling so terribly worried and nervous.

I made the afghan large enough to cover her bed and drape down toward the floor. The first night that she slept under it, I also handed her my favorite teddy bear, Nudgins No-Tail. Her smile was beatific as she snuggled down beneath the afghan with the bear in her arms and I told her stories until she fell asleep.

Sovay reinforced my growing rejection of her father’s assertions that I was expendable.

My husband informed me the first day I was out of the hospital that I was no longer a member of the family, but only there on his suffrage.

I felt distanced from myself at first, unable to deal with a lot of stress, and taking turtle steps forward out of sheer tenacity.

While I was in the hospital, H’s wealthy father got him an attorney. Within an hour of my return home, they whisked me down to the courthouse and forced me to sign a paper that, I was told, gave H full custody of Sovay. I was still too dazed and out of it to know what was in it. As soon as we were out of the courthouse, H took my copy of the papers out of my hands and I never saw them again.

From that day forward, my daughter became a hostage. I did what i was told or I would never see her again. I could leave, but I could not take her with me if I did so.

As I made the afghan, I knew just how trapped and cornered I was. The shadow of those papers would hang over me for five years.

It’s one of those bad nights.

PTSD is an odd creature.  One of the side effects is flashbacks and insomnia.  They go together.  Once the flashbacks get triggered, I can’t relax enough to sleep.  Putting my head on the pillow is just asking for another one.  The only way to ride them out is to stay so compulsively busy that eventually my body can override my mind and memories.

I fought it.  I always do.  For a little while, I thought I had managed to derail this round, but about six o’clock, i discovered that they had me by the heels.  I know what set them off, for all the good it did me.

When Dickstain (and i’m certain this will make him very happy) threw that meth picture at me in response to my comment “transgressive is no excuse for bad writing,” I felt like I had been hit in the solar plexus.

As of last Friday, i’m between books.  It takes me about a week to gear up for the next one.  i read through two different roughs, and tried to gear up fast enough, faster than usual, in order to put the flashback energy (if you can call it that) into fiction.  However, I was not fast enough.  So it’s going into blogging instead.

It’s what I call ‘binge writing,’ and usually the binge is fiction.

So i guess this could be called ‘binge bloggin.”

The Hollywood Angle

In January of 1984, we moved from Virginia Beach, Virginia to Los Angeles.  I had gained a minor reputation for my short stories, but a larger reputation for my literary criticism.  One morning, I noticed the Cinefantastique market report in Science Fiction Chronicle, and I got in touch with them.  My first assignment involved student films based upon Stephen King shorts.  My articles for Cinefantastique gave me an in with Judith Sims at Movieline.  i was the first journalist to say that Frank Darabont was a genius.  Back then he was working as a set dresser.  But when I saw Woman in the Room, I knew he was going places.

I both loved and hated Hollywood.

If you wanted to network, you went to parties.

The parties were pretty much as you might imagine them.  Drugs, alcohol, and sex.

But the literary side of Hollywood was just as bad.  The best way to get invited to parties was to bring the drugs.  After the first year there, the person bringing them was often me.  Especially to the literary ones.

The one thing that I will not do in this blog is to name names when I talk about how I flushed my life down the toilet.  You don’t need to know who was at those parties.

Suffice it to say, “it was part of the scene.”

There is rarely a single cause to anything, but a collection of causes.  You can come to your own conclusions about what the percentages were.

Let’s talk about my drug abuse.

Since it has become the Legion’s favorite thing to slap me around with online, much like Pacione does with The Fandom Writer, I’m going tell the public how it came about and what resulted from it.

Let’s lay the ground work for it to put it all in perspective. I have full blown post-polio syndrome. I have always had problems with my energy level, chronic fatigue and such as a result of it. It showed up early in my life. I was in an abusive relationship that I could not figure out how to escape from at the time. Someone without my physical difficulties would have been able to get out of the relationship far easier than I did.

My drug use took years to build up. The first time I used meth, it was to keep me awake. My ex needed help with a manuscript he was editing. His handwriting was illegible and I was one of the few who could read it. He had penciled in his corrections on the manuscript and it had to be fed-ex’d the next day to the author.

He told me that if it did not get out on time he might lose his job. We needed his income because my income from freelancing was not enough to cover everything. I had a year old child to consider and the prospect of him losing his editorial job frightened me. His comments, corrections and such were enormous. The book was non-fiction by a Ph.D. I corrected and fixed his handwritting, putting the comments in legibly in ink and erasing his pencil until my hand hurt. I was already exhausted when I started and it would mean going without sleep for 24 hours to get it done.

He had anticipated my lack of energy and acquired some meth. “Here, this will make a normal woman of you.”

Every time he wanted me to get more done, and his demands increased over the years, I did whatever form of speed/meth/cocaine he acquired for me so that I could meet his needs.

Toward the end, I was working fulltime, doing all of the housework, chores, errand running, and yardwork, despite the fact that I was disabled. In addition to this, I did a large portion of his writing and editing.

I needed more and more drugs to keep my failing body from collapsing. If I got sick or too tired to function, I had a choice of having him stand screaming at me for hours while I tried to sleep or taking drugs and meeting his needs and demands.

I would go days and days without sleep, using and using, and still he would scream that I had not done enough. That I was not providing for our child by sleeping. I became desperate for sleep.

Eventually I became desperate for death. On August 19th, our wedding anniversary, in 1988, I had gone five days without sleep to get everything done that he wanted me to. He started screaming at me because he was late on a writing deadline and claimed I had not done enough and that I was expendable.

An hour later, I filled a bunch of empty capsules with two grams of cocaine and swallowed them. That numbed out my insides nicely and I followed it with a bottle of Lemon-scented Mr. Clean.

After all, as he kept saying that day, I was expendable and my daughter’s life would be better without me.

Expendable.

it’s gone now

Matt, at Shocklines, deleted all of the posts except for a tiny few.  Of course, all of mine are gone.

More fun and more drug allegations against me from Dickstain

http://shocklinesforum.yuku.com/topic/4031/master/1/?page=1

http://shocklinesforum.yuku.com/topic/4036/t/Sex-Horror.html

http://shocklinesforum.yuku.com/topic/4010

I replied to the thread on Philbin’s chapter where Dagstine responded with a cover that renews his allegations concerning my drug use.

Mikakke’s new novel, Planet of the Owls: A short review

http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=119678285&blogID=389091919

So now we have the second “exclusive” chapter from Mike Philbin’s new novel.  I expect that we will soon have the third, fourth, fifth, ad nauseam “exclusive” chapters to follow.

Trite, stupid, shallow.

Although it is written in first person, there is no feeling of connection with the character.  There is no emotional reaction from the protagonist.  It is very under written.  The visuals don’t click.  The story is constantly interrupted for meaningless joe-explainerisms that cause a disconnect from what little flow there is.

Badly written, Mikakke.  Comprende?