A D Journal 2012

  Maybe her troubled look at the meeting had to do with her constant struggles with anorexia – a condition she claimed plague her since childhood, and briefly mentioned in that book about her and the school she once taught in. The book talked about her meeting a girl there with a similar condition, she recognizing the signs – the girl apparently not complete comfortable with the revelation – and perhaps she’s not comfortable with the condition herself. She looks at videos on YouTube dealing with the subject and how people struggle to get over the condition. I remember when I was at her apartment, she briefly talked about it, pointing out the assortment of jeans she kept, some as warning signs when she exceeded the weight she wanted to maintain, folded jeans lined up from top to bottom in a six-foot-high shelves, almost like a department store. The writing life is difficult because we spend so much time in front of a computer or out in the world where people are constantly e...

    She looked bad when I saw her again on Tuesday, even though she had all her usual elements in place. They just didn’t come together as they usually did. It was something different in her expression, a look that our former temporary boss once described broadcasting intense pain. Her face tends to change depending on time and place, or even the role she is playing – such as that brilliant performance she put on during that day I accompanied her to the high school to watch her teach. She can be teacher, writer, party person, close confident, a cub in search of a mentor, a vulnerable soul in need of protection. Sometimes, she lets the mask slip, as she did a few times when we were in the bar and she played the role of barfly – most memorable that time outside the German bar when she went for a cigarette, her mouth puckering and eyes narrowing so that I saw something almost ruthless in the void beyond. Street smart, but also scared. Once or twice at meetings her mask ...

    I deliberately went to the main office yesterday (Monday) just to prove I could. At some point, I needed to make it clear I was going to be working there other days than just Tuesdays. And this may explain why she seemed more out of sorts than she had on Tuesday. I don’t think she expected to see me there and had not prepared the appropriate face. This was accompanied by the fact that the male owner had taken his usual week off to go out west and could not be reached. Since our former temporary boss doesn’t come in until Wednesday, the two of us were essentially alone in our department, adding no doubt to her agitation. She is rarely in on Mondays, and often takes off on this day, which is a puzzle as to why she didn’t. Influenced too much by my old psychology professor, I wonder if her life is a constant struggle to fill the gap left by her father’s leaving her when she was a child. GA, who seems to know more about what goes on in our office than I do, thi...

    It’s hard to figure out what the inspiration for the poem she posted today. Perhaps it was a recognition of how her family claim together in her time of need. Other than that, the poem seems to have risen above the conflicts of the last few months to look back at her heritage. Roughly translated as “Crossing Over,” the title symbolizes a number of aspects of character, of moving on while holding onto important elements of the past. The poet looks out over the landscape at sunrise and the New York City skyline visible from her building, and it is for her a time of reflection and peace, something private, something she finds only at this moment during the day when ordinary life stirs around her, the bakeries putting on their product on the shelves, old women hanging their laundry onto window sills (an image of almost every immigrant community in every urban area dating back to after the American Civil War). She envisions herself going back into time, walking those co...

  I thought she was hitting my website when I saw the web address as one of the towns she covers as a writer. Whoever it was used an iPad like the one she uses. Then, I got a number of hits from an address in Passaic and realized that the mayor of the town she covers is also a doctor, who works out of St. Mary’s Hospital in Passaic. Since he’s noted to plunder the websites of political enemies, it may be him, or someone associated with him and her. I can’t imagine the mayor considering me a political enemy, but some of the people in his administration might. I normally recognize her web signature, and unless she’s using someone else’s, she hasn’t been to my site in over a week, possibly assuming that I won’t be posting anything she considers offensive. I do not have access to the addresses of those who view my video blogs. But the invasion of my site from her town and from Passaic suggests someone is till trolling me, still looking for evidence no doubt incase I dec...

   One of the other writers is leaving from the main office. The two owners came down to see me at the auxiliary office to tell me they will not be offering me the position. So, it appears I’ll be stuck here for eternity, which I already expected and so I’m not greatly disappointed. They made it clear that it would be a bad idea for me to work at the main office full time considering the issue I raised with them two weeks ago. But they gave me a consolation prize, telling me I could spend more time there provided it doesn’t increase tension. It is something I will not likely due until I come back from vacation. The whole birthday issue still haunts me. GA told me how to track people who come to my blog, and I’ve found that the volume of hits has increased after the birthday debacle, especially from her or someone close to her, perhaps looking for more evidence she or they can use against me. I knew when I wished her happy birthday she would freak out, I just di...

The poem she posted today echoes in tone if not in content that of her quicksand poem. While as short at the previous poem, this poem about compassion is much more structured, using parallel phrasing to give it power and impact. Yet despite its brevity, it is incredibly complex, and creates a number of possible alternative interpretations, depending partly on for whom the poem is written. My ego (my narcissistic self as she referred to me in an earlier poem) would like to think the poem is directed at me, and so like the poem about quicksand, offers a certain measure of condolence or compassion for a clearly defeated man. But the poem may well also be directed at herself, about the idea of compassion or perhaps pain. While the overtly it claims to be about compassion, in fact, the poem goes beyond both pain and compassion and may well allude of a philosophy of survival. As with the quick sand poem, this poem seems to be offering advice, although less fatalistic. The most ...

   Two days after getting bushwhacked by her family, she posted a short but poignant poem that on first reading seemed like she was taking a victory lap. It essentially seemed to say, “The more you fight, the more you lose.” And in my initial journal entry I called it “a parting shot and a victory trot now that she’s finally backed me into a corner from which I cannot escape.” In this earlier reading of her poem I said, “She seems exuberant, even kindly, giving me a nod as if to say, now that she has control, we can finally have peace.” The poem surprised me because I assumed once I surrendered, she would shut down everything and I would cease to exist. The whole point of the conflict for me from the start was not to have the door slammed in my face when I believed I did nothing to deserve it (although I clearly did things since as knee jerk reaction.) Mary Ann, my oldest friend and a poet living out west, believes much of the conflict on her end is less about is...

   Pity or manipulation? We come back to the main office, and I don’t know what to expect. Will it be open hostility? Or will I cease to exist? I knew I had to keep my head down to avoid her stare and not look at her if I could help it since she claimed I stared at her at the office. So, I had to deliberately look elsewhere. I hunker down at my desk beneath the stairs – feeling more than a little like Harry Potter – to wait out the inevitable staff meeting where we have to deal with each other across the table. I collect my notes, bring it up to the conference room, put it on the table, and then retreat back to my desk. She passes me as she makes her way down the stairs and outside for a smoke. I stare straight at the computer screen, barely aware of her passing since she is only a blur in my bad eye. She pauses just long enough, as she has done before, perhaps daring me to look up, perhaps testing my resolve to remain oblivious to her. A short time later we ge...

   Will she, or won’t she? That is the question.   Have we reached her limit of tolerance after my wishing her a happy birthday on her birthday? It is put up or shut up time, make good on the threat or stop threatening. But she’s not the kind to shut up. So, I have to wonder if this is finally the end of the road? I either comply or see my life in ruins. The whole texting exchange whether with her alone pretending to be other people or with her actual family members was an utter over reaction, but also an attempt to continue to build a case against me she didn’t have before. I set myself up because I wanted revenge for the arrogance of her poem, when my best course of action would have been simply to have written an equally scathing poem. But as Mary Ann, my oldest and dearest friend, pointed out after I showed her the text exchange, “You’ve never been one to take the safe road about anything.” Revenge has a price. And now we’ve come to the point of cease and ...

  I won’t feign innocence. I knew perfectly well how pissed off she would be the moment I texted her “Happy Birthday.”   Mary Ann, my west coast poet friend who’d known me since we went to kindergarten together tried to talk me out of it. But she also knew how enraged I had been over the arrogance in the Forgiveness poem. I figured I’d take this one last shot to get even before complying with her list of rules. Two simple and ironic words and I’d be done. I never expected the deluge of text messages back, not from her, but from other people, one who claimed to be her step mother, another her father (no he isn’t dead), and two others, one of which I later learned from tracing the phone number, was her brother or at least his phone. Her brother struck first: Brother: So, you want to talk to someone? I’m free for a chat. Father: So, you wanna chat. We can chat. Bring it on. It took me a moment to connect these with her, though I could not imagine at first who th...

   The owner ran out so fast, people in the office almost didn’t see him go. Meanwhile, she was scheduled to come in late, but apparently decided not to come in at all – a mortal sin on a Friday when everybody is supposed to be in at 8 a.m., our company’s perverted idea of summer hours. And having both of them out of the office at the same time started the gossip mill running. How real any of this is, who can say? The two main gossips invent as much as they repeat, and it takes a master code breaker to tell fact from fiction. But the owner is acting strange which feeds into the rumor mill. He’s out of the office almost as much as he’s in it, and when he’s around, he clutches his cell phone as if his life depended upon it. He still makes me uncomfortable whenever he and I occupy the same space. I keep thinking he’ll find an excuse to fire me. When he called me Wednesday, I panicked, only to hear him rant and rave about the lack of quality of the office phones – ...

   It’s hard to read the situation as the main office, or how accurate my assessment of what transpires there. But silence is golden when it comes to my survival. The owner is suspicious, and I can’t tell whether he thinks he made a mistake by not firing me or he has something to hide – and thinks I know more than a really do about it. What goes on in his head, however, remains a mystery, but something I have to be wary of. I do not want to give him any excuse to fire me – and he seems to be looking for one. Whether on his own reckoning or on behalf of someone else. There’s no way to find out either. Even the office gossips aren’t trustworthy when it comes to him. He is a closed book he lets nobody read. The gossips only tell me they are puzzled about why he is acting so strange. When I describe it as a fog, they agree. Nobody can go to the other owner to ask questions. Even if she’s noticed his peculiar behavior, she isn’t going to divulge her suspicions to any ...

  The male owner has picked up a new habit during the weekly staff meetings he hadn’t had previously, checking his cell phone’s messaging app -- more so this week and I wonder if it has anything to do with her not being at the meeting. She was out on some assignment she had discussed with him earlier and perhaps texted him to keep him apprised of her progress. Looking back to earlier this year, his behavior mirrors mine from back then, as if he’s anxious for the next message to arrive, regardless of what it says. He seemed very distracted by it, even to the point of missing what we reported and forcing him to have us repeat what we said. Having read the synopsis of my journal, he should have had fair warning and found a way to avoid the fog I walked around in – but clearly, he seems as out of touch as I was at that stage. A few times during the meeting, I found him staring hard at me, as if trying to read something from my expression, or perhaps he feels a bit threatened....

  I have to stop reacting to what she posts on her site. I keep re reading the Forgiveness poem and get enraged over the assumptions she made and the attitude she’s adopted, the presumption that all the blame is on my side, when it is not. Mary Ann calls it “passive aggressive,” in that she apparently gets to play victim while is actually the orchestrator. I’m not sure I’d go that far, even though at times over the last six months some of her actions seemed calculated. Yet just as often, she seemed to be a different person at different times, almost scripted for the occasion. I can’t tell if this is intentional or merely how she copes with the world. She spends a lot of time self-promoting, perhaps – as my old Freudian Professor Thomas might have claimed – in desperate need of love. The salesman at the office sees her as some kind of magnet. Men are drawn to her, and she seems to accept that as natural, the right and proper way of her world. She gets upset when someon...

   As I wrote earlier, her poem “Forgiveness” pretty much said it all: Okay, you’re forgiven, go away and don’t bother me.” What should have sounded like a reasonable request came off as arrogant since there were no innocents in the parade, and she has yet to admit culpability to her part in all this, while I did my best to admit mine, only to have my own words used against me. Here, she dismissed me as if I was a guilty child. I suspect Mary Ann, my poet friend out west, may be right in that this is all about control. For the most part, I have gone away as commanded, except at work where interaction is unavoidable, and even there, this attitude of superiority taints things – such as when she lied (but she doesn’t lie she says) about contacts I needed for a story. Mary Ann thinks she wants to control what I put up on my personal website – at least in regard to things about her. She apparently stopped looking at my site for those few days when I posted only innocuou...

   The popular salesman elsewhere on the third floor of the office called her “a strange bird,” though he was clearly impressed with her ability to sing. She was his third choice of a staff largely made up of pretty women, an evaluation given me without prompting, during my weekly visit to the main office. We had stepped back from the edge of nuclear war, although my whole time there I was on edge, made even more manic when the male owner called my extension and I saw his name and extension of the phone ID – thinking he had thought things over or had been convinced to and had decided to fire me after all. I finally called him back; it turned out to be routine, his concern with the local hospital and a story he wanted me to follow up on, apparently one of our staff had had a heart attack, had been rushed to the hospital and saved, and he wanted me to do something to glorify our biggest advertiser. Yet, I could not help getting the feeling the call was more than just a...

  After more than a week since her last posted poem (an opus on Forgiveness or perhaps lack of it), she posted a very short, but also very revealing poem, less arrogant, while reverting to an earlier theme: immunity. There is some irony in the title because it comes a short time after she read me the riot act and issued her list of demands, a list of things Not To Do, any of which would bring down the wrath of God on my head if I violated them. You would think from the title she had reached a level where she truly believed herself immune, while the body of the poem suggests just the opposite. In it, she comes across like a punch-drunk prize fighter still staggering from a nose-to-nose confrontation with a tough opponent, a fight in which she came out as a technical winner, yet to her does not feel like a victory. She puts a foot forward while the world spins around her, she on the verge of falling down, grateful for the fact that gravity “does not affect your soul.” And a...

  My big concern about meeting with the owners is that I was still not sure of her relationship to the male boss – although for weeks when we still talked, she spoke frequently about needing to get more money and her plans to ask him for a raise. She asked me how she should approach him, and apparently made the same request of our former temporary boss. Something kept her from approaching the owner several times, but apparently, she eventually did. When still on speaking terms I texted her, asking if she had gotten the raise, and I received a single one response of “yes.” An odd circumstance if true, since others with more elevated positions in the company had tried and failed, sometimes even encouraged afterwards to find other employment elsewhere. This coupled with the open flirting I had seen going on between the two in the office, she once tapping him on the top of his bald held with her pad. But our former temporary boss apparently believes she did not get the rais...