It began on 5th July in the current year of 2011, this most recent screwing I’ve received from yet another seriously unstable turners falls landlord. He’s a small man, and as so many small men suffer so much ego damage from being small, this could be one reason for his mincing and toxic psychological landscape. Another reason could be that he was, I’ve been told, spawned and raised in this place. Generationally and perhaps also genetically old-time turners ignorant and old-time turners nasty. Did I mention duplicitous, like every troll in turners? I’ll call him Minnow Slisky.

On July 5th, a woman who knows I’m looking to leave this ponystall and who also knows Minnow, told me that he had a sudden vacancy in his building. On the 7th I went to the place where this woman works with her boyfriend to get Minnow’s number. And here comes trick number one. Instead of just giving me the number, boyfriend, while girlfriend and I are yakking, calls up Minnow and tells him I’m right there, and in a little while, Minnow shows up on his bicycle. Ambushed I am. Why not just give me the number and let me proceed from there? No, no the three of them have to trick me into this surprise encounter, when I have already made it very clear to boyfriend and girlfriend that I want the first contact to be by phone. I’m not granted the respect these three people would give any other adult: to let the adult handle the situation in their own way. No, there must be an ambush because three ignorant and controlling denizens of turners falls decide that that is what they want.

This encounter doesn’t go well on my part. I’m angry that I’ve been ambushed in this way, I speak rather sullenly, I do not make a socially acceptable good impression. It turns out that Minnow is a very long-term fixture here, and I recognize his face as one that I’ve seen from time to time since 1985. But I’ve never known his name, or that he has rentals, until now. After Minnow sails away on his bike, girlfriend says sarcastically, Well that went well. It most certainly did not, and she knows it.

I pass Minnow’s phone number and some other information on to the social worker who is supposed to be spearheading this apartment search, and then try to put the apartment out of my mind, because the ambush did not go well.

On July 10, a mere three days later, I see Minnow again, swimming down the sidewalk on his bicycle again. He is distinctly chilly, keeping his face pointed groundward in a hard sternness, saying Morning to me in a rather sarcastic tone. I say to myself, that’s that. He doesn’t want to rent to me.

It should have ended right there, after wasting only five days wondering if I would get this real apartment and be freed at last from the ponystall. But no. Despite the fact that he seemed not to be at all interested in having me as a tenant, Minnow apparently needed for his own disturbed reasons to prolong both the drama and the discomfort for me. I kept in touch with social worker, but for a week there was no word from Minnow.

On Saturday the 16th, all out of the blue, there’s an email from social worker saying that Minnow is showing her the apartment on Monday the 18th. They have set this up completely without consulting me as to whether or not Monday at ten is a good time for me. Again I don’t matter. Again I don’t get the courtesy or respect they would grant any other adult. Nope, he is showing her the apartment, and if little old me wants to tag along, well fine.

I tag along. There is a lot wrong with the apartment. It’s clear he hasn’t put a nickle into it in decades. It’s very dark, with few windows. The stove and tub I’m certain must be official antiques by now. The linoleum is ugly and dark. There is virtually no counter in the kitchen. There’s no porch. All of my apartments in turners have had porches, and I long to have a porch again. No porch. No yard. Yes, there’s a postage stamp of grass out back that one of the other tenants has already commandeered for herself and her grandchildren (this female is one of those long-term turners falls hunts).

I tell social worker to proceed trying to get this place. It is depressing in the extreme because of all its negatives, but I have been in this claustrophobia pit that the government tossed me for sixteen months and I want out. I want space to move around in. The ponystall is actually quite light and pretty, but a stall is a stall and a cell is a cell and I do, in fact, have claustrophobia. It’s not just some sardonic thing that I toss out. I also want a dog and a cat. If this landlord, despite his oddness and the drawbacks of the apartment, will allow me a small family, then I will go there. Having a family to ease some of my extreme isolation is more important to me than any feature in any apartment.

I go to the library to use high-speed internet for a while on Friday 22 July. Who’s sitting at the computer beside mine — Minnow. He tells me he’s received my social worker’s message that I’m interested in the apartment, and he asks me for her email address. I give it to him. On Monday 25th, only three days later, I go to the library again and there he is. Gives me a big smile and says Hi Anne and says he’ll accept me as a tenant, and that he is filling out the landlord paperwork for the Housing Authority. I tell him they will need to inspect the apartment before I can move in, but he knows this. He’s had rent subsidy tenants before.

A mere three days more, July 28, and I get an email from him. I’m nonplussed by this, because I have never given him my email address. I realize the only person who could have done so is my social worker, whom I’ve already asked not to give out personal contact information for me without my consent. She did it anyway. She says he wrote to her on the 28th saying he was renting the apartment to someone else, and she didn’t want to give me the bad news. It’s been a week since then. She’s apologized numerous times for giving him that info, and I think she truly is sorry and realizes she made a big mistake, because now this man won’t leave me alone.

On August 1 I get an email from him saying that the “other people” (who never existed, by the way. who were a complete fabrication. I went by the apartment often between 28 July and 1 August: no one was moving in) changed their minds and the apartment was still available. I write back to him that I need his answer regarding pets before I can proceed, and I ask him to write his response to my social worker, not to me. 

There’s a response next day, sent to both my worker and to me. He wants a letter regarding a psychological need for the pets. We have already shown him such a letter on the day we viewed the apartment. He didn’t even keep it, but tossed it back into the worker’s folder after he read it. I don’t see this August 2 response until August 5th, as I am boycotting my email account for fear of more crap from a person who should not even have my address in the first place. August 5th is today.

This morning I read his response, and what he was trying to say wasn’t clearly expressed (he can’t spell, either). He wanted a different letter about the animals, but I wasn’t sure if he meant one letter covering dog, cat, guinea pig and birds, or one letter for each. I asked him to clarify, and again asked him to reply to my social worker. 

This afternoon I decided to go to the library for the high-speed again, and I deliberately went for 2:00. The other times I’ve seen Minnow there, he’s been done by 2:00. But at 2:30 he swims in, swims by me and says Hi Anne, but this time I can see distortion and nastiness in his face that had not been present before. He wrote me an email at 2:36, as soon as he sat down, but I didn’t find it until I got home to the dial-up on my own computer. He continues to write me emails, despite the fact that I’ve twice asked him to stop. He tells me in this email that he wants one letter for each pet.

This is what I write back to him, here at the dial-up: Mr. Slisky… I don’t believe you wish to rent to me. This up and down, yes and no treatment has been going on for a month. If  this is indicative of how I would be treated as a tenant, this constant silliness, then I do not wish to walk into such a situation. Please dispose of my email address and cease using it.

After that, I wrote to my social worker. I told her what action I wish to take if this very small, demented fish doesn’t stop writing to me, and that I’d like her to take that action with me. We’ll see what he does.

Any of you who read these posts and refuse to believe that the trolls of this town are as toxic as I say they are, you are practicing denial. All I did was look for an apartment where I could have a rent subsidy and a few pets. All he had to say was No, at the beginning, if he didn’t want to deal with pets and with Housing Authority rules. But his choice was to dance me around for a month, jerk my chain, lie, etc. Meanwhile I’ve heard from five different people who know him the following things: Several buildings he once owned have been taken away from him. He doesn’t make repairs. He has a bad reputation both with tenants and with the Housing Authority. And he’s another stinking, sneaking, lying christian, active in one of this burg’s churches. Spare me the bloody sick christians.

All I was doing was looking for a place, and what do I reel in? Yet another deeply disturbed, deeply nasty turners falls troll, dressed in a minnow suit. Yet another. It’s twenty-six years this month since I first came here. In all that time I’ve had only two landlords whom I would term sane. I’m not talking about nice landlords, or conscientious ones, or landlords who treat their tenants like human beings — maybe landlords like that don’t even exist. I’m just talking about sane.

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Update:  … today is august 27. three weeks since I wrote this post. three weeks since I went to the email account where minnow reeves was writing to me. haven’t been able to face going in there since that day. to deal with the anger if there should be a new email from him. so today I went back to that account. little christian, deacon minnow slisky, swimming along on his bike and doing the god-thing on sundays, is nasty and dishonorable and a scuzz. I wonder how that fits with his churchy teachings. he has hacked into my email account and deleted every single message he ever sent me. from that account, he can read all my incoming and outgoing messages, and he can find out about every website I use. and if any reader wants to dispute with me the fact that this turners trolls “christian” minnow isn’t a garden variety piece of toxic filth, you would have no luck making a case for that with me.

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read…    Scealta liatha…   Lucked out…

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After five pages of human poison, it’s high time for some snowflake trees.

In 1991 I at last stopped fighting my body and decided to pursue a disability claim more diligently than I’d done before. I didn’t want to be disabled, to admit that I was defeated as a wage-earner. Since the fall of 1986 I had doggedly kept trying: part-time school and part-time work. Every time it was the same: after about six months I’d be so ill that chronic absenteeism set in,  and falling way behind in my university work, housework, everything. Pretty much constant exhaustion and pain. I took care of my animals, slowly, over the course of a day, but I wasn’t capable of much else. In December of 1991 I gave in and started a new claim with Social Security.

Two months later we moved from one relatively ugly neighborhood (both aesthetically and in terms of the humans), to one that was much prettier, seemed peaceful, and planted within me the silly notion that the neighbors in such a milieu would be better than the ones we were leaving behind. For the first time in ten years, I had time with a capital T. I couldn’t accomplish much in all those free, ungoverned hours, not the way a healthy person could, but there the hours were. I had time to wander around with my cats again, and my mother started me doing flower beds for the first time in my life. In an eye-blink I became a die-hard gardener, and remained so until summer 2006.

And it turned out that we had moved right beside the canal, which I didn’t even know until my daughter found it and took me there. Though we were very close to the water, some woods and another road and the drop in ground level between the road and the water resulted in the fact that, as close as we were, we couldn’t see the water from the street. The canal became our wandering place.

During these strolls I examined every growing thing, pulling up many samples by the roots to see if they would survive in my new flower beds. One of my discoveries was the tall plant that’s common name is meadow rue, but I had no idea of this. I’d never met this plant before, found it lovely, and gave it my own name: snowflake trees. It has small leaves with three scallop-like shapings on the ends, and tiny flowers formed from multiple needle-shaped petals. These flowers remind me of both snowflakes and twinkling stars. And I did, after many attempts, get two of them to survive in my yard. It would be several years before I learned its mainstream name.

Since coming to live in Turners Fails for the first time in 1985, I had been aware at the edges of my consciousness that the natural realm of the town was full of beauty. Busy and sick and a single parent, I hadn’t been able to really scrutinize that beauty in the way I wanted to until I gave up fighting my illnesses so stubbornly. Now, in this new nieghborhood, in this new abundance of time, I was being constantly awestruck, and that’s not too precious a word for it: water and plants, rocks and animals, sky and mists affect me that profoundly. More than once as I lollygagged on the canal with my cats, I wondered how people who lived right smack in the middle of so much charm and wonder and sheer prettiness could be so moldy and ugly inside themselves; so petty, sneaky and deceitful. I’m still wondering that to this day, nineteen years past my first walk on the canal.

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read…   Lifelines…      All my stars

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More haunting.

That blog post about Richard was written this past December, thus my wishes for a happy Christmas for him. This book is not a linear narrative, it’s a pastiche. Pages that were originally written in my blogs over the last three years, and pages newly made especially for this book.

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Richard was one of the realities of this town that tore my heart over the years, and also helped infuriate me to my current state of bile against the people here. Many, many children and animals were living daily burdens of abuse and/or neglect during my first twelve years in this town, and while my make-up led me to save as many of the animals as I could, I only tried to take somewhat under my wing two children, and Richard was the second of those two. The first had been a little girl called Tanya. It is very hard to do anything long-term and substantial for a suffering child if you’re not a relative, and when the Greenfield social service elves who are in charge of such matters are generally unintelligent, lazy and loathe to believe in any kind of abuse that doesn’t involve sex or bad beatings. And neglect? Forget it. Maybe it’s changed now, I don’t know. But the chances of helping a child in this town that you weren’t related to were slim indeed from 1985 to 1997.

I spent, no exaggeration, many hours on the telephone with such elves in 1996, and all over Richard and his sort of stepbrother. My evidence was credible stuff, as I lived right downstairs from Richard and his “family,” and I babysat him nearly every day. Eventually the social service elves came out, and everything was denied, of course, by the “family.” Elves went away and never came back. I tried also with the landlord, telling him over and over about the drug-dealing upstairs, and the child-beating, and the child neglect, and the time Richard’s “stepmother” threatened to kill me (she was both high and drunk at the time). He chose not to believe me. He chose to decide that I was just being a catty bitch because I didn’t like the woman, and because he liked her blonde hair and blue eyes and big tits and regular rent-subsidy check, and didn’t want to evict her.

The time came when all kinds of ignorant trolls suddenly had to jump up off their indolent butts and snap into action. Richard’s caretakers were arrested in possession of a lot of illegal white powdery stuff. Children were taken into social service custody and made wards of the state. Blonde hair and big tits was evicted. But this was by no means the end of the suffering for these two little boys. I can’t tell the rest of what I know about these children. It’s just too hard. I can only re-iterate that I loved Richard to pieces.

He was/is blood relation to two generationally ignorant and locally spawned families of Turners Falls trolls, some of whom keep popping back up over and over again in my life like the moldering bad pennies they are. It’s two of his aunts that I can’t get rid of, short of their dying. Every time I think I’m quit of them, one or the other of them pops back into my sphere. Aunt number one became very close with my mafia-connected fellow-tenant in 2006 and 2007, and sometimes joined her in harassing and taunting me and my animals. Because of a few things that have been said to me over the last three years, and because of her past history involving unwanted cats in this town, I have good reason to believe it very likely that Aunt number two removed my four cats who were imprisoned in the smarmy priest’s garage in 2008, and took them to a vet friend of hers in a neighboring state to be killed. No one has ever absolutely confirmed this for me (they have vaguely eluded to it), but it is indeed the most likely fate that those four trapped, deeply loved cats of mine would have met.

Just a few days ago I ran into Aunt number two, whom I call Tippi Gritt. This troll fancies herself a great animal person. She now, over the last six months, fixes me with a gaze of great arrogance whenever she sees me, as if to say to me: I didn’t do nuthin’ wrong, ’cause I never do nuthin’ wrong, and I’m never gonna admit to you what I did and when your cats died. And so I have always known her to be, since I became acquainted with her in 1991: dishonorable, disloyal, lying, sneaking (even to the point of betraying her very best friend), ignorant, and able to shut off her conscience any time she likes. If indeed she has one. She is quintessentially typical of the trolls here whose families go back generations in this town.

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(shelf elves at www.gaelsong.com)

read…  Braonwandering…  Judahblog…

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Two days ago I was talking to a woman who said this, just about verbatim: I came here three years ago when I fled my ex-husband, and my life has done nothing but go downhill since I’ve been here. I’m doing everything I can to get out.

And I did that too. For years. After I’d been in this town about the same amount of time that she has, I wanted out. And I tried for years to get out. Finally, in 1997, I escaped back to my original home in eastern Mass, and found utter mental chaos going on in my family home. So again I tried and tried and tried to find another place to live, but one out there. To stay in eastern Mass and never cross route 128 again. But it didn’t work. After thriteen months, my daughter found me a place in Turners Falls that I could afford and would accept my animals, so after only a brief escape, I was back. And I was back with a very heavy heart in many ways.

In 1992, when I’d been here for seven years, I had the idea that I’d write a book about this place with the title Poison and Snowflake Trees. I even began work on this book, but that particular word processor disk is one of the many, many objects that other people have deprived me of since 1998. For me that title completely nails the painful dichotomy that has always been life in Turners for me: the undeniable, mesmerizing beauty of the nature, and the equally undeniable, tenacious ignorance and meanness of the people. Poison for the humans, snowflake trees for the nature.  All these years later, I’m starting that book again, structuring it as a collection of vignettes that are the blog posts I’ve been writing about Turners for close to three years now.

Now it’s April 26, and the snowflake trees have sprouted to six inches high along the canal. The cherry trees (the center of Turners is full of them) and the lilacs are blooming. The ducks want people to feed them. There’s a black squirrel living near the library. The Turners spring I know so well is in its happy throes. I have been living back in this town again since April 1.

I walk in places where my animals and I used to live, where we used to walk, where we were so happy in each other’s company and so fascinated with every molecule of nature around us. I walk and cry and remember. And if the nature that we loved together for nearly twenty-two years is still here, still all around me as I walk and cry, well so is the poison. It emanates from every human body that I pass; it is in the words from their mouths; it is in their behavior.

                ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~                     this year’s crop, 2010      

I can just hear the wheels turning:  There’s no such thing as snowflake trees. This broad’s really nuts. No, as far as I know, there is no such thing as snowflake trees. The common name for this plant is meadow rue, but when I found them I didn’t know this. It would be two or three years before I would find out the plant’s actual name, and in the meantime  — with my Asperger’s penchant for naming people and things in ways that fit them better than their real names — I called them snowflake trees. I’ve been naming things my own names for years.

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The snowflake trees and butterfly flowers (also known as milkweed) are blooming now; now being June 16. Nothing of the snowflake flower’s grace and nothing of the magical scent of the not-much-to-look-at milkweed flower can stem the human toxicity here. I’ve always wished that it could. That the sweetness of lilac scent and laurel scent and milkweed and rose could somehow alter the wormy psyches of these people. That the soft mist rising from canal and river could wash the nastiness out of them. But such has never happened, and I don’t suppose it ever will.

read…  Neverending solitaire…  Scealta liatha…

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Turners Falls:  The enchanting beside the sickening. The peaceful beside the aggressively nasty. The naturally beautiful beside the personally toxic.

Such is my experience in this Western Mass town on the Connecticut River. So it has always been, for twenty-five years thus far. Others have had different experiences here. Bully for them. But there have been some I’ve known over the years who have felt the same way I do about the people in this place and the treatment received from them. Those folks have been able to get out, and wanted to get out. For years I wanted the same thing. Now it’s all changed. Now I can’t leave.

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Well you can’t get what Socrates asked for in toto. As people we are all possessed of anger, of envy, of the temptation to lie or to stick it to someone else, and other unpretty emotions and urges. The hope is that people will be on the lookout for these things and mitigate them by means of their moral code and by means of their conscience. At least, that’s always been my hope.

There is a dark, low-class seediness about most of the people in this town (even in the ones who are not poor) that I have never found in such nasty abundance anyplace else I’ve ever lived. And as I’ve said, other incomers over the years have agreed with me about this, and those who agreed with me got out, never to return. You will no doubt scowl and call me a variety of names and point out how sick and twisted I am to blithely condemn an entire town. Scowl and berate away: I cannot care about your denial that such diseased towns can and do exist, nor can I care about your new-age, politically correct “everybody is good” vacuity. Everybody is not good. Everybody is not redeemable. Everybody is not just insecure, or without manners instruction from their parents, or any other excuse repertoire that the politically correct can devise. There are, in actual fact, people who are nasty because they enjoy it, because they know they can get away with it (particularly in Turners), because they know that the culture they live in (Turners) will not hold them accountable.

I grew up in a small town, a bit smaller than Turners in those days, but not now (the influx of yuppies that is now happening in Turners and Greenfield happened out east about fifteen years ago).  And in that town we had our few loonies, our few intractable drunks, our few child and wife-beaters, our certain teenagers destined for a life of crime. We had shocking divorces after many years of marriage among the town’s upper middle class. We had families whose money was so old that its original owners had come over on the stinking Mayflower, I kid you not.  And we had some people so poor it made me cry, even as a child. We had what you have in any New England small town: a microcosm of the culture and problems of New England as a whole. But what we also had, which is almost totally lacking in Turners Falls, was a certain civil level of decency, and of compassion, and of kindness. There were certain limits beyond which most citizens would not go against another citizen, even if they couldn’t stomach each other. There were kindnesses offered during illness or injury or death that were part of this civility, even among people who couldn’t stand each other. There are no such limits and no such practice of compassion in this place that reminds me of nothing more than it reminds me of a cesspool.

For all the years between 1999 and 2008, I had a terror of dying here, of never being able to get myself and my animals out for good. Hell, I didn’t even want anymore of my animals to die here, or to be buried here, or anywhere near here. I was desolate at the thought of ending my life in this horrible place, whether that end was brought about by my own action, or by one of my various physical illnesses. I wanted to go home, or at least far enough from Turners that I couldn’t smell its psychological stink anymore. Now I know that I will in fact most likely die here, or in the town beside us. I will die among people I mostly despise, who mostly despise me (those who didn’t dislike me before now have jumped on the bandwagon, largely due to this website and all the gossip about it that circulates in the screamingly efficient, salivating TF grapevine).

The juxtapositions that always haunted me in this town, have scratched at my mind like something very wrong that needed to be put right, haunt me more forcefully still since 2008. The unresting, restless contrast between the beauty of the nature here, and the landscape, and the buildings, set against the great psychic ugliness of the people. In 2008 I was illegally (not to mention immorally) evicted from my apartment. I couldn’t afford an attorney to help me fight this illegal eviction, but I did have a huge social service agency that was supposed to help me, which instead completely betrayed me. And so at the age of fifty-five I was thrown into the street, quite literally, my belongings packed into a storage unit that I pay a ridiculous fee for, and my animals taken from me (after the signing of a piece of paper that itself was not legal), hidden in various places (I was not allowed to visit them), and eventually killed. I only know death facts for three of those fourteen animals. Just yesterday I heard a man on the radio whose middle-east dissident father disappeared twenty-one years ago say that when someone you love just disappears, and you don’t know where or when or how they died, the grief is different than regular grief, and the pain is different than regular pain. The yuppies would say that people like this radio man, people like me, do not have closure. Whatever. But there are a certain few people in this town who know very well where my other eleven animals were taken, and how long they were allowed to live, and where and when they died. And in their very typically ugly, mean-spirited, ignorant fashion, these people deny me this information for three years now, and counting.

Why can’t I go? Why don’t I go? Why don’t I get clear of these trolls who visited on me and mine one ugly act after another over nearly twenty-two years, until in the end they destroyed us? It might be because I’m a person with PTSD, have had it for years. And on two days in March of 2008, the very worst trauma of all the traumas that came before it was dumped on me by this town, and by a lazy and incompetent pack of social workers. This event was a crime in both the legal sense and in the moral sense as well, and I now can’t leave the crime scene. I can’t remove myself from faces and bodies and sick personalities that make me cry, or cringe, or shake, or get nauseated as I walk down any street. I can’t leave the poison because the snowflake trees of my Turners years were here too, and those I can’t turn my back on, not now that the animals have been stolen and killed. Those snowflake trees were an actual plant, and they were, by metaphorical extension, all the moments with all my animals over all the years since 1985. The dull, everyday moments; the funny ones; the sorrowful ones when an animal died; the moments spent out beside the water with cats or dogs, or wandering a woods. The irritating ones when a certain animal is driving you bonkers. The moments I sang to them, or cried to them, or went frantically hunting for someone gone missing. Many, many animals over the Turners Falls years, up to and including the fourteen who were stolen from me in 2008. I can’t leave the scene of the crime, which is also the scene of loves and of a way of life that I had for fifty-five years and was stolen from me here in this place.

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(gecko at www.whatonearthcatalog.com; glass at www.toscano.com)

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 read…  Lifelines…  Don’t ask

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

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