A D Journal 2012

   She posted her second positive poem in a row, alluding to what she once claimed was here favorite poet. William Blake In referencing one of the most iconic poems in English literature, she is making a powerful statement on the nature of good and evil. In his poem, Blake is questioning the wisdom of God in much the same way Job did in the Bible, asking how the same hand that made the sheep also make something as dangerous and evil as the tiger. At the same time, Blake admires the potency and power of the tiger, an alluring symbol of strength. In her poem, she draws on this same potent image of the tiger, creeping into her life at night “that carries me with all its might,” full of fear, terror and yet a sense of incredible strength. It is easy to read into her poem the comparison between the tiger and her ambition, and the flame that – even in her most pessimistic outlook – cannot be or has not yet been extinguished, and even in the deepest dark of night, she sti...

  Everything comes in ebbs and flows, even for her, who so desperately needed an ego boost and apparently got what she needed. As the smallest and most insignificant fish in a pool full of sharks, she seems to be constantly looking for a way to stand out, and did this week, though the question remains how she can maintain it. She seems to have come back to where she started and may well account for the positive shift in tone in her most recent poems. Her recent successes have allowed her apparently to begin building a network of powerful men and women from whom she might be able to draw on for a rebirth. This is far different from her days in the past when she depended on the good will of others. While her current gig may have started out with the Virgin Mayor feeling sorry for her, she seems determined to make it into something all her own, a power base that won’t depends on RR or his mirror image The Private Detective in the town next door. Some of the players she broug...

  Day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, our office falls to pieces. But I’m out of the line of fire for the moment, “D” confirmed that she set up and ran the international women’s day event, though D also made it clear how out of touch the Virgin Mayor – from remarks he made at the event. She seems to be in control of the situation at the moment, although I suspect she isn’t gloating about it, feeling a bit less sure of herself than she might make out. She’s still lot in the same league as the mayor’s criminal elite, and this gathering of angels may be a good start towards building her own credibility, she may have to do something more in line with politics for them to take her seriously. Meanwhile, our male owner had gone off on vacation again, refusing to tell anyone where he went or who he went with, and he won’t let anyone contact him while he’s away. I suspect he doesn’t want to piss off the staff by informing us about his latest elaborate trip. He underpay...

   D – her replacement in our office – was very impressed by the international women’s day event she put on, something she apparently convinced the Virgin Mayor to allow her to do, and which put her in touch with a number of the most powerful political women in the town if not the county. After weeks of wondering how she was going to justify her appointment, she came out with a very impressive effort, something she needed to do to quiet the whispering critics in townhall who had wondered what exactly she was doing for the money she earned. D is quite taken with her, and praised her event not just in print, but in private as well, telling me how well she had done in pulling it off. This fits the pattern – in which she starts off with a bang, even if it took a few weeks for her to get her wheels in motion. She needed to establish herself as a viable power player, needed to stand out from the crowd, and needed to impress the all-boys network by establishing a power base...

  (At some point during all of the craziness, I started a parallel journal that depicts the activities that went on during at the office – with the ultimate goal of doing a book my time there. I won’t retrace steps and post the second journal prior to this but pick up the second thread here – to sort of give a backdrop to the overall insanity).   With (A’s) leaving, another place becomes vacant at the table and the scapegoating starts in Management’s desperation to find someone responsible other than those who are actually responsible, namely themselves. So far, the angel of death has passed over me. But these days, the two owners have found a new scheme for scapegoating, looking at the other writer working the north county beat who they claim is a piss poor writer and needs a lot of editing. But she appears to me to do a pretty good job covering her beat – and now she’s being asked to cover three towns, when in the past we used to have one writer for each town – altho...

      (This is the second analysis of the same poem – more detailed about who she is writing the poem for)   When everybody else lets her down, when her whole world falls to pieces, she goes back home to her longest friend, something she grew up with, went to school with, and someone she has come to rely on through thick and thin. He is someone she graduated high school with and went to visit him in Philadelphia last fall when things fell apart at our company. Her latest poem appears to have been written to him, and her seeing him again over the last few days suggests she may once more be in a crisis (something her other recent poems have not suggested).   The two of them got together over the weekend for a chat over Chinese food. The love in this poem is unmistakable and it is clear from frequent viewings of his videos and her trips to see him that she clearly trusts him above all other men in her life. She has never let him down the way other men...

  (This is the first of two entries written about the poem she posted, each has a different take on the poem and its meaning, so I’ll post both, even though both make assumptions that may not be valid)   I like to think true love has won the day final, if her latest poem can be accepted at face value. Has she finally found the protector she has spent a life time seeking? Can she finally fine peace, at least, for a brief moment? The poem is directed at this person, thanking him the way a young child might (during bedtime prayers) thank her guardian angel. It is easy to picture here seated alone in her apartment, thinking about him, who while not physically there, clearly at her beckoned call if she needs him, a reassuring scene after years of living in far, and needing to double lock her apartment door. This is a dramatic change from poems she’s posted over the last few months. This is a poem rich with the feeling of safety, knowing that “You’re still there watc...

    No real reason to update since nothing has changed from what I can see from the outside. She remains in the Virgin Mayor’s inner circle, if only in a peripheral way. It is impossible to tell if she is still connected to RR, a relationship that appears to go back to the early days when she first started at our company. Best guess is that they are connected, but not as intimately as they had been, both grateful for getting their slice of the pie. I still wonder at her dislike of the Neighboring Mayor, and whether she resents him because she once tried to get in on his inner circle, only to find him unreceptive. He trusts very few, and only lets those he’s known for years get close. But it is clear, that she is tight with the Virgin Mayor’s closest people, perhaps hoping that if she ingratiates herself to them, they will give her more clout than her current position as special aide does. From outside, it is difficult to know exactly what role she plays, although it ...

   I got careless and clicked on an icon to become her friend on Facebook from a site that had allowed me to access some of her postings. It was something had had been concerned about previously because on the small screen the icon to log out was near where the friend icon was, and I clicked on the second when I meant to click on the first. Dr. Thomas would dispute my claim of this being an accident, maintaining that I had some unconscious desire to reveal myself to her, perhaps in the vain hope she might have forgiven me my past transgressions. If so, it was a vain hope, even unconsciously, which became evident when my handheld device ceased having access it had had the day before, although I still had access that night on another computer – only to become completely cut off by morning. While I haven’t had access to her inner realm (those parts of her page accessible only to those she accepted as friend), she had displayed enough information on her public page to al...

  I keep looking over my shoulder expecting to be caught in a trap, when there is most likely no reason to. Even though I keep thinking back to that poem in which she called me a clever, illusive imp (at least I think she did), I suspect I’m not important enough to her to bother with. I just keep reading things into the coffee grinds at the bottom of my breakfast mug and suspect they might be real. I’ keep thinking she wants to draw me out into the open in order to prove to her new found friends that she was right about me the whole time. I keep suspected she is laying booby traps for me, when she most likely isn’t. You can deal with a trap – when you know it is a trap – in two ways: you can spring it or leave it alone. Best to avoid it if possible. Unfortunately, I have that cat and mouse personality that won’t let me leave things, so I almost always have the urge to spring it. But yanking a chain with nothing on the other end (meaning it isn’t a trap after all) would ...

  It’s always a mistake when reading her poems to read too much into them, especially in thinking any of the most recent ones have anything to do with me, even when as in one of the most recent ones, the situation strongly resembles what we might have gone through. I already pointed out how similar the language is in some of the recent poems to poems she emailed me a year ago. My bruised ego, of course, would love to think that this and other of her most recent poems is a reflection of the past. But to think of it as anything more than coincidence is a mistake. This, of course, raises the specter of a much more serious issue, which my old mythology professor, Dr. Thomas, would find immensely interesting. He was a Freudian, sloshing through people’s unconscious desires with hip boots and fishing tackle, determined to find the hidden meaning behind even the most trivial of things. Why do we keep getting into the same situations, and why do we expect a different result? I ...

   The mystery of her suddenly establishing an art’s page may have resolved itself, and to my relief it may have nothing to do with our company’s owner and an alleged plot to bring her back as the company photographer. She was recently thanked for “wonderful day and night” by a husband-and-wife design team from the town where she works, an Arab couple, the wife of whom appears to be the one thanking her – though it is difficult to tell with so little real information. Did this encounter with the wife or husband or both inspire her to dig out her old art projects and put them on display, a possible backdoor out of her current situation? Maybe this will evolve into a new career (and if history is an indication), a new romantic entanglement, since she seems unable to separate the two. Yesterday, she posted a new poem and a new video on her public Facebook page, and since she has not yet cut off access to me from it, it is difficult to know if she meant for me to see it ...

 Written March 2013   Salmon nearly kill themselves for it, this thing that drives us – the male of our species – crazy from something we inherit from birth, making us leap up falls we ought to fall down, humping up impossible leaps to get back to that place where everything started. We are consumed with trying it all again, drunk on perfume or the look in her eyes. Not just me, all of us, as if just a glimpse of her image scends us into a feeding frenzy, so utterly predictable, caught in the net of her gaze. She doesn’t snare men. We snare ourselves, pained when she casts this one or that one aside because this one or that one just won’t do, the outcasts caught in some dead pool eddy, going round and round, and the most foolish of us, lingering near where the clear water still flows, desperate for a glimpse of her as she carries her net on to someone else, we who might have had, but just weren’t good enough. For the first time after all these months, I understand the ...

    Her latest post on her personal Facebook page still bemoans her lack of fame., saying that she feels as if she has no place in this world. She expresses jealousy of those who have succeeded and get to live the luxurious life – as referred to in that 2003 poem about change of perspective. She wants to be one of the jet set, and get to shuffled ahead of the crowd, even though as that poem pointed out, she used to hate those kinds of people. The fact that she can’t get there (or perhaps back to it) despite all of her talent and how she had done to achieve really, really frustrates her. She just doesn’t seem to be able to come up with a formula for success. I feel sorry for her, partly because if she can’t get what she wants with all of the talent she has, and her ability to work her way up (trickle up) in whatever structure she finds herself in, it is possible she may never get there, having some fundamental flaw that keeps her from finding the right door and the ...

    At some point in all of this mixed up, jumbled up world of hers, she posted a saying by Paulo Coelho, which said, “If you’re brave to say ‘Good Bye’ life will reward you with a new ‘Hello’.” Coelho de, born in August, 1947is a Brazilian lyricist and novelist and a member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters since 2002. Coelho wrote the best-selling novel, 'The Alchemist,' which sold 35 million copies and is the most translated book in the world by a living author. He has been frequently described as an author that “thrives on contradictions and extremes,” which may well be why she is attracted to him, and why she recently got into the role of Mata Hari in her real life, perhaps influenced by Coelho’s fictional take on the well-known temptress and spy. Born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Coelho attended Jesuit schools and was raised by devout Catholic parents. He was obsessed at an early age with the idea of becoming a writer, something his parents frowned on, and his ...

    I keep making reference to her new arts Facebook page, I suppose I should describe it a bit before it goes away like some of her poetry does. This arts’ page as alluded to earlier contains the controversial photos of the gas line installation the owner is constantly on my back to obtain. It also includes her music, and a lot of her fine art. Many of these pieces are studies in human anatomy, and in some cases, still-life works. I had previously seen one or two pieces of hers hanging on the walls of her apartment; seeing a collection of them, however, is a whole new experience. My favorite of these are her self-portraits which appear to be both water color and pencil or charcoal sketches. The water colors seem to be a homage to Cezanne and Frieda, especially those that are up close studies of her face. In one or two sketches, she has a study of herself in the nude, although smudged out the facial features. These are classic art school nude poses, although she av...

   As I pointed out in these pages yesterday, almost anybody reading her poems on her blog might think these poems are written about him (or her). Certainly, her Brooklyn stalker did. So, you have to wonder if maybe this is intentional on her part, stringing this small army of admires along, a kind of passive-aggressive provocation that keeps them intrigued when they are clearly no longer in favor. She is an amazing talent, capable of crafting pieces that have multiple layers of meaning and can easily be mistaken to mean something other than what they really mean, metaphors that seem to say one thing, but really mean something completely different, and only a careful reading of each poem can steer a reader to the correct interpretation. More than once, I have written something in these pages that I’ve had to take back after I went back and read her work again, a kind of literary slight-of-hand that often led me up the wrong path, from which I’ve had to retrace my steps...