Made me laugh

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A computer hacker himself, Assange, 39, achieved both instant notoriety and adulation when WikiLeaks published batches of damaging US files relating to the Afghan war in July. This fame led him to Stockholm a month later to deliver a lecture entitled: "Truth is the first casualty of war." It was a sellout. One leftwing commentator likened it to "having Mick Jagger in town".

That night – 14 August – Assange stayed with the conference organiser at her flat in Södermalm, a former working class area of the city centre that has become Stockholm's equivalent of London's Islington. Three days later, in keeping with his habit of regularly changing addresses, Assange stayed in Enköping, a town 100 miles from Stockholm, with another woman who had also attended his lecture on the importance of truth in a war zone.

Assange left Sweden on 18 August and the women went together to the police the next day. According to Claes Borgström, their lawyer, the women did not know each other before going to the police. Initially, he said, the women wanted some advice, but the police officer concluded a crime had been committed and contacted the duty public prosecutor.

In court last week Assange was alleged to have had sex with unlawful coercion with a woman who was asleep and to have sexually molested the other by having sex without a condom.

A senior civil servant, who requested anonymity, dismissed allegations of political plotting against Assange, arguing that Swedish culture is often misunderstood. "Swedes do not have an iconoclastic tradition in which you build people up then demolish their reputations. Even when people are celebrities, we accept that they may have questionable private lives. Swedes are capable of seeing the advantages of WikiLeaks while conceding that Assange may have unsavoury morals between the sheets."

Linderborg, though, says there is a widespread sense in Sweden that Assange's rise to fame fuelled his libido and ego.

"Plenty of women are attracted by his underdog status and the supposed danger of spending time with him. He has several women on the go at once. One person told me he screws more often than he eats," Linderborg said

(Story found at Guardian dot com today, got me laughing, as I have so many other parallels with Assange, now this too! )

Kicking

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The part of this story I'm not real public about is I'm kicking weed.

Way back in 1995 when I lived in San Francisco, I started using weed legally as medicine, using it every day, regularly like medicine.

And I do not regret a day of it. To the end of my life, I will give medical marijuana credit for getting me through a truly horrible time in my life. I was in total body pain, crippled weeks on end, and for years doctors had been filling me up with "antidepressants for pain" and all they did was make me fat.

It was medical marijuana that got me to stop crying, and feel good enough to get up and do everything else I had to do, in order to get better.

Now it's fifteen years later and I have to admit, I'm not that sick anymore, but I'm still using the medical marijuana. It is a habit, an addiction, but I don't really need it anymore.

So I'm having to say goodbye to the lovely weed, the miracle drug, the hypnotic flower whose image alone sparks desire for more....

I'm kicking.

I'm safe kicking in Albuquerque, because if things get really bad, Medical Marijuana is legal here. I'd just have to get a New Mexico ID and bring in my records from the L.A. Free Clinic, and get legal here, as PTSD is one of the illnesses that responds well to Med MJ. I'd have to become a New Mexico resident, which I don't want to do.

Next stop on this trip is Illinois, where they are not likely to pass "Compassionate Use" Med MJ laws any time soon. So I want to quit weed while I am here.

But if it becomes critical, I have legal medical weed to fall back on. The timing is perfect, maybe even more angelic intervention.

I want my full lung capacity back. I want my stronger attention span back. And I have to admit, if I'm not that sick anymore, why do I still use the drug. At some point you have to stop medication, just like codeine after surgery. At a certain point you have to put down the drug.

This is not going to be easy, and I timed it so I can taper down, with the little bit of medicine I carried with me on Amtrak to get here. I'm going to totally run out of weed just before Christmas, when there will not likely be a lot of work on my job, so I can stay in bed and take Tylenol PM and get through the first few days.

I've already hooked up by going to one NA meeting in Abq, did not get numbers though, as it does not feel right to connect with people in NA while I still have weed in my bag back at the hotel room. It might cause people at the NA meeting trouble. I'm not an addict, I'm just kicking a medicine. So for now I don't speak at NA meetings.

But I will continue go to open NA meetings and talk more after I totally run out of medicine, go there to hear what I need to hear. Open meetings only, like the cool one I found on Saturdays at noon where they actually spend time in quiet group meditation. I will definitely go back to that meeting a few more times, just to hear what I have to hear.

I'm conflicted about being at an NA meeting and not really being a lifetime addict, but I do need to be there as I am kicking. By mid-January I should be totally clear headed again, first time since about 1994, and who knows how much better City of Angels Blog will be with me totally clean.

It's all part of the story.
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Observation, beginnings of a story

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Humans stuff their bellies behind steering wheels to go from huge wasteful house to sprawling shopping mall or work location. There 3/4 of land is taken up by concrete mass to accommodate the hunks of steel tbese humans carry with them everywhere they go, put-put things that spew poison into the air in astonishing amounts.

These humans are evolving to be round and fat and getting dumber with each generation, very funny and quite pathetic to observe for aliens from space like me.

This is just a phase, humans can survive this era.

In the future, children could ride skateboards up and down abandoned freeways and the McMansions will likely be in ruins, but humanas will survive, if they learn how to live together in cities; i.e., be civilized and let the planet provide and thrive.

Otherwise the planet will survive our stripping of its resources and bound back to life, green and lush, long after humans have consumed themselves into extinction.
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Inspired by Downsize Nation on AlterNet this morning.

More Sounds for a Future Soundtrack, from Sarah McLachlan,

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For the movie to be made someday based on City of Angels Blog:

"Heaven holds a sense of wonder, and I wanted to believe that I'd get colder when the rage in me subsides." from "Delerium Silence"



Song was already on the soundtrack of Brokedown Palace... and this video.

Just Throw Your Arms Up and Aspire

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In spite of being part of the priest rape survivor community, I still follow the teachings of Christ. I meet former Catholics all the time who think Catholics are Christians so all Christians are crooks.... the damage the RCC has done is so complicated and affects so much more than the hundred thousand or so victims that are still alive... One problem is a lot of former Catholics still buy into the lie that Catholics are the only true Christian Church when in truth, Catholicism seems to be the Church that makes the biggest aberration of Christ's teachings, I mean, all that gold and riches around them...?

I keep saying, "Wish I was born black." Imagine growing up in a religion where they played this kind of music:



"May have some scars, I am healed."

Also there are Kevin Nash's Massage archives which until they stopped in December 2008 were my staple every day. Now just have to listen to them repeated... that's cool but the archive doesn't include the gospel song Kevin used to play every day at the end of the Massage... oh well, sigh.
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Sometimes I Forget and Go Out for a Walk in the Neighborhood and…

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*UPDATE 9.19/10, just found pics on camera of this incident, see bottom of post

Saturday mid-morning, I'm feeling good, work all caught up, and it’s a balmy 70 degrees in L.A., so I dress a little nicer than usual to go out and about, "fancy pants," I joke to the mirror, and bound out the door.

Once again, I forgot about the neighborhood until it was too late.

Then I let the neighborhood turn me.

See, last year or so, I’ve taken to staying inside. Since moving here in 2005, I've had to find ways to get things I need delivered. I order online then stick a hand through the door to sign a UPS receipt. This is how one adapts to life along Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood. Going out your door is not wise.

But I'm a social animal. so inevitably start to crave human interaction, like last Saturday, I mean that's why I live in a city, isn’t it? So I put on some Saturday fancy pants, fixed my hair, and went out to do a stroll along the boulevard.

Sunset Boulevard.

Must have been thinking about last century, a movie in black and white I saw one time. This is what really happens when you go for a walk in my neighborhood today:

About a block and a half from home, a guy stopped in front of my face. He had no shirt, no teeth except one gold one in front, and a hairpick snagged in the wad on top of his head. Seems my once middle class white lady look ignited an inner hatred he’d had inside him since growing up in the projects, where he’d hear adults repeating the mantra, “White folks cause all the problems,” “White folks, white folks,” especially middle class white folks in fancy pants with sweet little old lady lipstick…

Right there on Sunset Boulevard, where several women with lunch bags stood waiting for a bus and watching, this guy attacked me. He was whacked out, probably cracked out, and at the sight of me some synapse inside his head ignited everything he hated about white people since he learned to talk

And I was there for him to dump it on.

He stopped in his tracks and hollered at me. I stepped off the sidewalk and tiptoed around behind a tree. When he realized he couldn't see me anymore he became irate and found me on the other side of the tree. I crept back onto the sidewalk on the other side and he followed close behind me, running his mouth with the mantra: “white folks” mixed with other mumblings, his voice like some kind of animal.

The light changed I scampered across the Sunset and tried to walk on down the street like everything was really fine, just a little old white lady out for a Saturday afternoon stroll.

But from there I was not in synch with the day.

The bus I wanted to catch to get out of the neighborhood runs only once an hour and it pulled away just as I was yards from reaching it. A regular bus passed close by and blew a load of debris onto me from under its wheels, followed closely by a second bus that did the same. I now had a layer of dirt particles mixed with sweat, under the sweater I thought it was going to be cool enough to wear that day.

Screw it, I thought, I'm going back home. Once again nothing in this town is worth the dreck you have to go through to get there. I didn't even want to walk all the way to the stop light to cross the street, I just wanted to cross where I was, then get back home as fast as I could.

Now, I've lived along the Sunset Boulevard corridor off and on since about 1967 and there’s always a point, no matter how much traffic, when the cars are stopped at red lights on both sides of you, just for a moment, and you can get across the street in the middle of the block. I've been doing this traffic sensing technique on L.A. streets since I was a teenager. It’s one of the few things I can do in my neighborhood where I end up feeling like I'm in my own hometown.

So today I'm going to do it, cross in the middle of the block. I wait, see red lights to my right and left, no traffic approaching, and I walk out into the intersection.

I make it halfway across Sunset and a man in a little blue sedan pulls out of a parking lot on the other side of the street. He practically aims at me as I'm crossing. Instead of slowing down, he lifts his left hand and points his fingers at me, saying shame shame shame on you for crossing in the middle of the block.

He looks like an Armenian, like most the people in my neighborhood, living on benefits that my government will give them but will not give me.

I keep walking right up to the little blue car as it passes and I SLAM my arm on his window, hard, hollering:

“You're supposed to stop, it’s the law in California, you stop for pedestrians, you Idiot!” SLAM. I shouted in a voice like some kind of animal.

In the split second it all happened I saw his mouth pop open and his eyes bugged out. He sped up and scooted away and I stood in the street hollering after him, letting out all the hate I've had inside me the last five years I've lived in this ghetto slum part of the city.

I even dug in my pockets for something heavy I could throw at the blue car. Wished I could have broken the damn car window," I said under my breath and I was all the way up to my building again before I stopped clenching my fists. I ran up the stairs and back inside my apartment in the back of the building, where I always hide, where no windows look out into the street.

And I started packing.
*
UPDATE 9.19.2010: Just realized I took pictures of the "Menacing Guy" this morning while uploading my camera. When I got across the street, I doubled back, followed him, and tried to catch a picture.


He saw me taking his picture and crossed the street.

Is he looking at me?

Yes he is.


But then by the time he got across the street...


...He forgot why he came over, so went back across Sunset and walked away...
And I'm getting out of L.A.

Eternal Obliqueness, or 86'd Again Again

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Thrown out of another joint. I should have expected it, as all pastors are the same when it gets down to boards of directors and breakfast meetings discussing policy. Somewhere my volunteer work at a Christian nonprofit nearby got stymied, and suddenly they do not need any more volunteers. "Your services are no longer needed, Miss Kay," was the word to me today, and I just knew, in my visceral way of feeling. I walked out saying goodbye to the two other volunteers who were still working there. .

The new director must have Googled my name, she saw the topic on which I write. Churches never want me around when they find out who I am, of course it would apply to nonprofits run by church groups as well. Or could be they just don't want a journalist around that much, as face it, if I see something untoward, it won't be five minutes before I'm reporting it.

Whatever, I begin to realize you can't fight the life God puts in front of you. I was volunteering mainly to fight isolation and get my head out of the topic on which I've been writing for a few hours a week.

Then with no reason or real explanation, got fired from my volunteer job this afternoon. I was volunteering to try to get out of isolation.

Well.

Writers often deal with isolation, I need to learn to love isolation, as I'm begining to realize alone-ness for long periods of time goes with the territory. In order to engage your mind as much as it takes to get out long stories, you have to be at home, alone, even unstuck in time if necessary.

And God put this topic in front of me to write as well.

So my plan to be a volunteer backfired. Pedophile priest victims who write about it and use their real names find themselves strangely cut off from many avenues in life, I'm finding.

So one more afternoon is free for me to continue to be at home where often, for weeks, the only voices I interact with are over the phone, so please, friends, call me, keep calling me.

Meanwhile, I give up on trying to end the isolation in my life and instead have to just learn to deal with it, accept the slight madness that results. Instead of hating isolation, languish and enjoy- indeed love the extra sensitivity that the isolation gives me.

Aloneness gives me a unique way of seeing things as I'm always an observer...

Whatever. It's their loss. I wanted to, as a volunteer, start a project at that Christian nonprofit getting people jobs, clients who really want to get out of homelessness, instead I'm out the door again. Inevitably I never last anywhere more than a few weeks, sometimes just days or even hours, before I'm asked to leave. It just happened again.

Again, a pattern I can't fight anymore, it's not going to stop, I have to embrace it.

Hey, getting fired all the time means I have a lot of variety in my life.

Onward

Astonished At My Own Reaction, but stand by every word I said

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From: Steve in UK
To: cityofangelslady@yahoo.com
Sent: Tue, August 31, 2010 1:40:29 PM
Subject: Father Bob Poandl

Hi, you might be interested to know that Father Bob has been cleared of all charges and the Judge who dismissed the case actually called his accuser a liar in court.
I trust that you will remove your post about this good man whose life has been devastated by this false accusation.

SD

From: cityofangelslady@yahoo.com
Subject: Re: Father Bob Poandl
To: "Steve"
Date: Tuesday, 31 August, 2010, 22:57

Can you tell me where I posted about Poandl?

--------------------------------------------------------

From: Steve
To: "cityofangelslady@yahoo.com"
Sent: Tue, August 31, 2010 3:01:34 PM
Subject: Re: Father Bob Poandl

On your blog

----------------

On Tue, 31/8/10, cityofangelslady@yahoo.com wrote:

I'm sorry, I can't find the post and don't remember it, do you have the link?

-----------------

From: Steve
To: "cityofangelslady@yahoo.com"
Sent: Tue, August 31, 2010 3:04:22 PM
Subject: Re: Father Bob Poandl

http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/04/bishop-corrada-sj-of-tyler-texas.html ...

-----------------------------------------

From: "cityofangelslady@yahoo.com" View Contact
To: Steve

Okay, it's updated, but this dismissal does not mean he's innocent. Sorry, but most the 5,500 priests in U.S. identified as pedophile predators in the U.S. are not judged guilty in our screwed up criminal court system, this dismissal does not make him innocent.

As far as I'm concerned anyone who continues to be a priest in this epidemic is as guilty as the rest, you can't be surrounded by all this filth and think there is nothing wrong, and the same goes for parishioners who apologize for these perverts.

--------------------------------------------

From: Steve
To: "cityofangelslady@yahoo.com"
Sent: Tue, August 31, 2010 3:52:16 PM
Subject: Re: Father Bob Poandl

YOU don't know this good man who has been devastated by someone seeking a large payout

---------------------------------------------

From: "cityofangelslady@yahoo.com" View Contact
To: Steve in the UK

With all the damage that was done to all of us, how dare you waste time defending one of them

--------------------
(A minute later I sent him another one:)

To you 1 priest is more important than 1 hundred thousand victims, that's why so many of us were raped to begin with. The whole church is corrupt for letting this happen, sorry you can't see that.

*********************

Phew. Wish I didn't have to quit Anger Management Class, may have to go back, and just be quiet and listen...

Still I stand by what I said. If Catholics in the church were half as concerned about the victims as they are about supporting an accused priest, when THEY don't really know the circumstances, the survivors would all be doing a lot better right now.

After all that's come out nationwide, why assume another accused priest could not possibly be guilty?

Plus, another place the past 20 years of "advocacy" has backfired: Thanks to all the emphasis on lawsuits, parishioners still think victims only come forward to "seek a large payout."

If Catholics gave one-tenth the resources to victims as they give to these priests, who all end up with cushy retirements (so they never talk) while their victims struggle to find support in nonprofits, maybe I wouldn't be so angry.

UGLY
All the way around it's ugly. And my karma to be in the middle of it, like it or not.
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Posted by Kay Ebeling, Producer of City of Angels Blog

UPDATE:
Email to Steve Sept 3 AM, not publishing his anymore:

Per Bishop Accoutability, the current John Jay numbers with newly ID'd predators added through 2008 puts it at 5.7 Percent of priests who were pedophiles. Twenty times higher than in regular population. They do not count many priests, perps like mine who was never officially accused, though my sister and I are living proof he was a perpetrator. In my research I find 1-2 more accused priests a week who are not included in the data as it is very stringent. So the numbers are still lower than reality.
Children with blood coming out of them doesn't seem to reach people, it's still abhorrent to have to end up in numbers, because the story is about children bleeding from their private parts. Most people only hear about the money, can't handle the details, so the truth is conveniently swept away.
Read something besides Catholic produced literature, which includes almost all news media as they are scared to dig into this story, so they just publish what the Church says, or what SNAP says, both of which are corporate PR statements. My blog is one of few sources of truth on this topic, including about Poandl. He was not proved innocent, he was credibly enough accused for a broke West Virginia DA's office, one of the poorest states in the US, to try to pursue the Goliath Church.
You are not getting the truth nor are most Catholics, I can tell by what they say. Your bishops are the leaders of a criminal organization, and there is probly a lot more crime hidden there, this is just what is coming out now, a fluke of our times and over sexually curious culture.
No genuine church would have let this happen at all.
To me it's a litmus test. You see the truth and take action or you bury your head in the folds of their robes and contribute to the problem. Which path will you take?

Perplexed

I wrote that Anger Management post Tuesday because not having specific therapy designed for pedophile priest victims leaves me perplexed. I go to Anger Management group therapy for help and then can't open up, can't say exactly what it is that brings me there seeking help, because I'm surrounded by people that I know won't get it in my 20 second share- or as soon as I say molested by priest as kid, the men in the group are all goign to look at me different knowing that means I must have been a slut. Whether or not that is true, it is still what happens in my head as I sit in my Anger Management group.
The point is, why isn't there a place We can go to like the pedophile priests get sent, where they can stay as long as they need to be there.
Why don't the victims of those priests have anywhere near that much help?Where is my Servants of the Paraclete Spa?

You Know you are in trouble when you leave Anger Management angrier than when you arrived

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Not at anyone or anything,

Just flabbergasted trying to explain the anger I have as a pedophile priest rape victim, without telling the Anger Management group details, because I have yet to tell anyone else in the room that's why I'm angry. I don't feel like I can just bring up pedophile priests with people, it will only make them react.

People always react to this topic. You can always feel a change in the room, rising tension, once you spill these beans, anywhere.

Even group therapy.

That's why we need Recovery Centers for pedophile priest rape victims. We need retreats like the pedophile priest treatment places, where we can go- for weeks, months, even years- to get treatment and healing. Right now there are perpetrator priests in recovery centers all over the country, with full-time support in peaceful surroundings, such as along the California coast in Santa Cruz.

Why isn't there at least a fraction that much treatment available for the priests' crime victims?

Instead we have to piece together help where we can get it.

So in Anger Management at Hope Again today we are talking about forgiveness and I'm trying to explain: When the thing you are angry about will not change, at some point you have to go past trying to forgive and instead find ways to laugh at the thing, because it is never going to respond in a decent way.

EVERYONE chimed in, "No, that's wrong, You are wrong," at me. It's not the Christian thing, they all said, you have to forgive everyone. I was all the way home before I realized the problem here.

I forgave Father Thomas Barry Horne for sexualizing me and my sister, and God knows how many other little kids. I forgave Father Horne years ago, back in 2006, I even wrote about it, posted it somewhere, and it was spiritually a turning point to forgive him.

That doesn't mean I can't still call him Father Horne-y.

I forgive Father Horne (pictured right at yet another party) because I realize he probably was pretty oppressed sexually as a young man, becoming a priest in the late 1930s. He probably didn't even ever want to be a priest. He was a sexy guy, womanizer, a heavy drinker; he probly should have been selling insurance or something, not hearing Confessions. But he was stuck in that priest role, so he drank, spent a lot of time at the country club with those Sodality gals, and took advantage of his position to get his pleasures where he could.

A recent emailer shared he knew Father Horne after he retired. He was inebriated most of the time until he died...

FATHER HORNE is not the entity with which I feel anger. It's the Catholic Church. Bishops, in this Case Cardinal Stritch of Chicago, are still beloved and revered by Catholics, just because they are bishops. I think Stitch knew that Fr. Horne was a perpetrator, so stuck him in the little rural town of Bartlett, literally a whistle stop town on the railroad to Elgin, in 1949, to start a church named after St. Peter Damian.

We know now how the bishops operated in the 1950s-60s. We saw it in the California cases in 2003, and earlier. They put perp priests in Riverside and San Diego and when those towns got to be too big, moved the perps to Santa Barbara. The bishops were the real criminals here, who picked up perpetrator priests and put them in rural parishes where they could continue to perpetrate and no one would say anything, as was the case in rural America up to the 1960s or so, when the advent of Freudian psychology got people talking about sex.

I don't think I have to forgive an entity in the same way you forgive a human, in order to heal. Because the Catholic Church is a non-human thing. The corporations that make up each Archdiocese and their little robe and diamond-gold cross wearing CEO bishops, these are not human beings worthy of forgiveness, these are corporations more concerned with maintaining their cash flow than anything like reconciliation.

Like any corporation, more concerned with covering up the crimes, still to this day, than helping the victims. If I believed the Catholic Church had opened its files and admitted all its crimes, and made restitution with all the victims, maybe I would be ready to talk about forgiveness.

But instead I see fake holy men, with the audacity to argue legally that a religion is an excuse to get away with crimes. The bishops and their lawyers tell courts they don't have to open their files or let prosecutors investigate how they handled their pedophile priests because of the 1st Amendment, their right to freedom of religion?

Add that bonus for Catholics, the priest-penitent privilege, no bishop can EVER tell what they knew, it would anger God himself.... as He created this religion with the priest-penitent privilege.

NO WONDER I NEED ANGER MANAGEMENT!!!

If a religion includes the need to keep the rape of children secret, it is not what the 1st Amendment was created to protect.
The 1st Amendment does not mean felonies are okay, as long as they are going on in a religious institution, but that is what these bishops and their teams of corporate lawyers have convinced judges and high courts to agree to in rulings.

No. I will not forgive them, and I will make fun of them and laugh at them and point out what hypocrites they are every opportunity I get. It's why I'm here, why I have this twisted sense of humor along with these writing skills, plus the fact that I'm a one of the victims and I'm sick and really can't do much more than clack away at these laptop keys and keep writing.

MOST FRUSTRATING is how truly badly deeply we need Recovery Centers set up specifically for the victims of Catholic pedophile priests. Recovery from these crimes is too complicated and controversial for me to just talk openly about what I'm going through in an open group support meeting.

If I made my Anger Management group that angry suggesting humor in place of forgiveness, when forgiveness is not possible...?

Maybe the group would understand if I told them it was the Catholic bishops who let priests rape me and a hundred thousand other children that I'm refusing to forgive and at whom I'd rather laugh. But I can't talk openly about it in Group unless it's a Group of Catholic priest rape victims. That's how I feel.

Hey, I've got an idea, let's start a natiowide network of support and hold regular meetings.

Don't get me started... here is what they handed out today and...




I need to talk about IT and I can't talk about IT unless there are people around who understand IT!!!

So while the perp priests have now been moved out of parishes and into protective environments- in retreat settings with idyllic views, maid service, and catered meals- one of their crime victimes, ME, is scrabbling around free clinics and nonprofit Christian counseling centers, trying to eke out the help and support that a real church would have gone out of its way to provide its crime victims long ago.

This is all so frigging complicated...

STEP AWAY So You Can See More Clearly

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Amazing How Stories Take Form in My Head Before They Even Happen.
At Anger Management at Hope Again today, the theme seemed to be:
STEP AWAY
So You Can See More Clearly
(I really needed to hear all of this today):

“Anger Used in the Right Way can be productive,” Pastor Ron said opening the session, and I was glad to hear that, because there’s no way I can just walk away from these crimes and start writing about something else. Writing about pedophile priests is now in my DNA. I’ve tried now about a hundred times to get away from the subject matter. I’ll see a news story or a fellow-crime victim friend will call, and the impulse to write about the crimes will come back. I'm already feeling tinges to start writing blog posts again after summer hiatus, as the fall approaches.

And anger, a justified anger is at the source of this drive to keep writing.

Ron said, something like, In the end you are best off using your time, your skills, and your handiwork to put the anger to work.
And do it right.

But if the wounds are deep- and in me, believe me, they are deep- the wounds can and probably will determine the rest of your life. When you think you are over your anger issue, it creeps back in.

Boy do I know what that's like.

Ron said, "You have to get the thing that makes you angry out there, talk about it, in order for healing to begin." (Photo found on Google images for AM, not Ron.)

The woman from Africa said, sometimes her anger arises from having expectations that don’t get fulfilled.

Boy do I know what that's like.

I had expectations of at least getting a small settlement from the Catholic Church while they were giving them out, but seems the Illinois State Supreme Court sided with the Chicago Archdiocese lobbyists and threw out any lawsuits that dated back more than forty years in that state. I've shared here before, the way that decision seems to have left me permanently in oppressive poverty has a lot to do with why I'm angry a lot.

And I mean, how stupid is that? It's only money.

Still.

In Anger Management today, as more people started sharing about their lives, and this one guy from East L.A. was going on that how he, "don't hang with them people no more,” I let myself drift into

A Daydream.

I’ll come home today and find an email saying, Church Settles Ebeling Case and I’ll finally be able to buy a condo.

I'm daydreaming that Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has been reading my blog and decided to make an exception in my case, forget the state high court deciding in the Church’s favor last September. The archdiocese is still going to settle with the Ebeling sisters, even if by law they don't have to.

Including a scholarship for my daughter.

And maybe a Roman shopping spree.

“The ABC’s of Anger,” Ron says with a lot of glottis shock so I'm abruptly back in the little room on Sunset Boulevard at Hope Again in Anger Management class again.

“A, you admit you're angry.” I write down, A=Admit.

“B, back off, step back until you can get body and soul together. C, Confess. And by confess, I mean resolve the issue.

“Then D, open a dialogue with the person or institution with which you are angry.”

I write down "D=Dialogue" and then shake my head, No, No, No.

One thing I doubt I’ll ever see with the Chicago Archdiocese is a Dialogue.

I scratch out Dialogue and write instead:

“D-Daydream.”

Then I'm back thinking about that condo I’ll buy, just two city blocks north of where I live now the neighborhood is totally different, wonderful, clean, on a whole different transit line… no human feces in the sidewalk cracks.

Once the Chicago Archdiocese admits that what they allowed to happen to me and my sister at the hands of Father Horne-y turned two intelligent, potentially successful females into aging nymphomaniacs doomed to be part of a population of older women in poverty in America in the next decades, they'll realize we just don't deserve it, we don't deserve it. And settle with us even though our case is more than 40 years old, so they think by law they don't have to...

D is for Daydream.

**********

The class ended with many forms of various maxims that pop up inevitably in Anger Management. Someone said, “You can feel peace and satisfaction, knowing they know what they did.” Someone mentioned Luke 16, I think it is, where Jesus says the stingy rich and powerful will call out to us from Hell asking us to give them at least a sip of water and we'll say sorry, can't reach you from here.

Ha ha, see, I have eternity to daydream about.

Another maxim that popped up and I wrote down: "Take responsibility for your part in what happened."

Only part I have in the whole pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church is my insatiable need to write down everything that happened.

Gotta find a way to make writing on this subject something more positive.

Or at least funnier...

Start by making it all fiction, even make up the religion, with its ancient headquarters in ... where?

How about St. Louis?
***
By Kay Ebeling
East Hollywood California
Cartoon below found on Google Images

What Did Christ Himself Say About Anger?

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In the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, starting at 21st verse:

21 “You have heard that our ancestors were told, ‘You must not murder. If you commit murder, you are subject to judgment.’[d] 22 But I say, if you are even angry with someone,[e] you are subject to judgment! If you call someone an idiot,[f] you are in danger of being brought before the court. And if you curse someone,[g] you are in danger of the fires of hell.[h]

(HMM. In Class We Only Went That Far, but at Home I look Farther and:)

25 “When you are on the way to court with your adversary, settle your differences quickly. Otherwise, your accuser may hand you over to the judge, who will hand you over to an officer, and you will be thrown into prison. 26 And if that happens, you surely won’t be free again until you have paid the last penny

***
Okay, I have to stop here and admit, the thing I'm most angry about, the thing that pops into my head four or five times a day is how unfair it is that you get a legal settlement from the Church based on what State you lived in at the time of the rape. I've found myself in the weird place mentally of saying, wow, I wish I'd been raped by a priest here in L.A. instead of Chicago, because the Church fought all the way to the Illinois Supreme Court to get cases older than 40 years old thrown out, and the state high court ruled in favor of Catholic Church attorneys and other sources of influence September 2009. The logic here is older victims, who suffered trauma for more years in a culture that totally misunderstood child abuse, are the ones who cannot get help from the church.

The total dearth of help for victims who can't bring a litigatable case is astounding. The Catholic Church truly does only help those it is required by law to help, it moves not an inch further.

So now if I read the words of Christ up there correctly, it's up to me on my own, to find a way to take the Chicago Archdiocese to the Judge, and not in court.

"Settle your differences quickly. Otherwise, your accuser may hand you over to the judge."

(Here is The Message translation on anger, forget the court stuff:)

I'm telling you that anyone who is so much as angry with a brother or sister is guilty of murder. Carelessly call a brother 'idiot!' and you just might find yourself hauled into court. Thoughtlessly yell 'stupid!' at a sister and you are on the brink of hellfire. The simple moral fact is that words kill.
23-24 "This is how I want you to conduct yourself in these matters. If you enter your place of worship and, about to make an offering, you suddenly remember a grudge a friend has against you, abandon your offering, leave immediately, go to this friend and make things right. Then and only then, come back and work things out with God.

****
In class, once again, I noted similarities in The New Testament and Alcoholics Anonymous.

You've got to make amends

Went home looking for open AA meetings in my neighborhood. It now costs six dollars to go somewhere and back in L.A. and I have become unable to get out of my neighborhood.

***
Have to break this isolation. Have to deconstruct. How did I end up once again, working in a situation where I am in a room all alone for hours on end.

Why do I keep ending up this way when what I crave is interaction with humans.

It's amazing, I started City of Angels in 2007 looking for a way out of isolation and ended up more cut off from the world than I was before.

That isolation is the problem I have that has to be solved right now, and looking in the same places expecting different results is insanity.

So for now I'm finding new ways to survive here in my thousand dollar a month squat in East Hollywood, where I can't even get out of the neighborhood anymore.

That's my life.

Disassociating...

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This passage jumped out at me at Anger Management at Hope Again Tuesday morning:

Proverbs 24:24-25
24 Don’t befriend angry people
or associate with hot-tempered people,
25 or you will learn to be like them
and endanger your soul

(That's New Living translation, here is The Message:)

24-25 Don't hang out with angry people;
don't keep company with hotheads.
Bad temper is contagious—
don't get infected.

(Amplified translation is supposed to be most accurate:)

24 Make no friendships with a man given to anger, and with a wrathful man do not associate,

25 Lest you learn his ways and get yourself into a snare.

***

In a snare, is that anything like a SNARL?

Whatever, I'm changing my perspective, stepping away so I can see better.
***
SO next day, Wednesday, the only thing I want to write is more from my Anger Management Notes.

It's OK to Not Be Right. and Keep Your Mouth Closed Tight

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From Tuesday Anger Management at Hope Again

Let Go to Get Beyond

Clenched Fists are Closed Tight so Cannot Be Refilled but when you relax and let your hands be open, New Stuff is Able to Pour In

A rear view mirror can sometimes seem more clear. Closing doors can set you free.
- Why would you want to go backwards?
- Don't let past events define you.

AGAIN
Like last week:
Let go of Needing Approval

FEAR
is a big roadblock. You have to step into your fears to get through them.

THEN
The group conversation detoured first into how today's times are Evil Times, so today especially people need to turn to God-

Then this new female participant went off on a tangent about her Catholic family not being real Catholics and arguments at home about whether a priest could remove bad spirits from their house or not, she had an East L.A. accent but said she came from Cleveland. She was sure the priest could remove evil spirits, as she's a real Catholic, her mother in law is not.

I wrote in my notes, "Don't say a word," again wishing there were recovery centers for adult victims of pedophile priests somewhere, but we do the best we can with what we've got, don't we.

-ke

NOTE: Details of female's tangent changed to protect her true identity.

Relax, You Will Hear Everything You Need to Hear When the Time is Right

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Once again heard just what I needed to hear in Anger Management at Hope Again today, all the way at the end of the session, when I had started staring at the clock and again, wondering why I am coming there. Then we got to the list of bullet points under:

“The more you have of the following, the more anger you will have.”

In the middle of the list was this item:

"Preoccupation with winning approval from others."

I had a star by this one, because I wondered, what does this characteristic have to do with anger. In the group we joked a bit, agreeing that "people pleasers" make other people angry more than themselves. But no, this is about how by being the people pleaser, you can set your own self up for feeling angry.

Then I got it: The anger is in the frustration that there are some people you just can’t please.

Your anger comes from beating up against a wall over and over again, expecting to finally please people who, like it or not, are never going to be pleased with you.

I had to admit, even though quietly and internally, I’d been saying to myself a lot lately, why do you care that the people who run SNAP don't like you. They didn't like you to from the very start, in fact, that's why it became an issue with me to begin with.

What am I doing wrong???? I wasted a good two years wondering.

I'm not doing anything wrong.

They're just never going to like me, for their own reasons.

So who cares?

Message to me: Don't do City of Angels expecting to get anything out of it. Just blog it because I wake up at 3:30 AM burning to blog it.

If somebody doesn't like it, So What? Especially since the guys who don't like it, won’t like it anyway.

Because anyone who believes the whispering behind the scenes against me instead of judging this blog based on its merit, is no one I need around me anyway.

I'm thinking about a line on a Law & Order episode recently, or it may have been a movie, an older cop delivered the line to a young rookie, who was all enthusiastic: “I have a hunch about this case.”

The older detective looked wise and said, “Problem is, boy, when a guy has a hunch, then that's all he sees when he looks at the evidence.”

Or something like that.

Point is, it’s best to just go forward and keep searching, keep digging. I don't know what is going to be uncovered. I know there’s a big effort to try to stifle City of Angels, and it’s left me way more isolated than I ever wanted to be, but hey, that's the way it is.

Thanks to isolation, I don't always have to put on makeup.

Last year I was unhappy that my apartment has no windows that look out on the street. We live kind of in the back, blocked in by other buildings, where you can’t see out into the world.

I was angry that I’d landed here.

Now, after feeling a bit threatened past few months, I realize how grateful I am that the apartment I live in has no windows that look out onto the street. Because being in this hidden unit, no one can see in to where I live from the street either. I'm safe, cocooned back here.

You never know why God puts you in places, even places you don't want to be. You just have to trust His will, and keep going forward.
**********

Old Anger Management Standby:

James 1:19-21 (NIV translation)

19. Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak and slow to become angry, 20 for man's anger does not bring about the righteous life that God desires. 21 Therefore, get rid of all moral filth and the evil that is so prevalent and humbly accept the word planted in you, which can save you.

COOLEST TRANSLATION:

James 1:19-21 (The Message) Act on What You Hear

9-21 Post this at all the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue, and let anger straggle along in the rear. God's righteousness doesn't grow from human anger. So throw all spoiled virtue and cancerous evil in the garbage. In simple humility, let our gardener, God, landscape you with the Word, making a salvation-garden of your life.

MOST ACCURATE:

James 1:19 (Amplified Bible)

Understand [this], my beloved brethren. Let every man be quick to hear [a ready listener], slow to speak, slow to take offense and to get angry. 20For man's anger does not promote the righteousness God [wishes and requires].

21So get rid of all uncleanness and the rampant outgrowth of wickedness, and in a humble (gentle, modest) spirit receive and welcome the Word which implanted and rooted [in your hearts] contains the power to save your souls.
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Hey, I'm not saying I've achieved anything like this control of wrath and rage. But nobody's perfect, you can only pick yourself up each day, dust yourself off, and start all over again.

ke
.

I watched them. The guys pouring tar on our roof instead of replacing the roof, as the landlord who owns this building WILL NOT invest a dime more than barely necessary. So the leaks in the roof just travel. The landlord sends a team of illegals over now and then to pour tar where the leak is coming through, but will never replace the roof.

One of those illegals, or a guy who hires illegals, expressed his side of the rage at my ladlord, probly being cheated out of his pay, the last day that team was out here pouring tar on the roof.

I watched him.

He pulled the tar thing over to the edge and carefully poured it so it dripped down onto the terraced walkway and courtyard below.

If you look now you can see places all over the edge of the roof where there is roofing tar spilled over and dripped. Now it's hardened and blends in with the chipped paint of the rest of the decor. He poured it out the last day they were there after about a week of tarring and re-tarring.

My daughter's room still smells like mold, it's in the ceiling of course.

Only way out for a person is to make more money. There is no structure out there protecting you, no one will go to bat for you against the corporate structure. Everything is owned by absent "stockholders" and the rest of us are just getting squeezed.

Or enjoy small victories, like that mexican guy pouring tar out on our building after probly finding out his crew was not going to be paid what they agreed to earlier, or whatever his gripe was. Only problem is there's no landlord living with the results of the crew's political stance, only me, living with hardened tar dripped all around my home.

Have to keep reminding myself, it could be a lot worse, and then keep those fingers on the keyboard...

Sick where no one sees me

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This entire lifetime has been bizarre, but currently, at age 62, well in a month 62, I'm in another weird situation, and as always there is no stability at all.

Working at home, sick as a dog, no health insurance so no real doctor care, so don't even really know what's wrong with me. No one sees me the days that I have to hold on to furniture to get from one end of a room to another, no one hears me moan in pain. Now I only moan out loud when it's sudden unexpected pain, the rest I've learned to live with. But even with only unexpected pain bringing up a moan, I moan a few dozen times a day.

Finally figured out why I'm tripping and knocking things over so much. I'm not picking up my legs when I walk, just unconsciously, because every movement adds more pain. So if there's a tiny thing on the floor, my foot still slips on it. A wire that no one else trips over, that I never used to trip over, now lands me flat every time I pass it. I finally figured this all out yesterday when once again things came toppling down on me in the hallway where I'd just tripped again.

Knocking things over is then a side effect. However, people around you only see the tripping and falling. Even me, I've been down-rapping myself for knocking things down all the time.

No one can see pain. With this disease, where I look healthy and strong just tired, no one can see that the inside of me hurts. I don't even know how to describe it. It's just, whatever part of me I'm using, that's the place it hurts, then the pain shoots out to everything else from there. So it travels. It's in the nerves I can feel that it is in the nerves, I've often felt the direct connection between stress, tension, and the pain.

That doesn't mean the pain will go away if you just calm down. That means you are in less pain if you are calmed down.

It's hard to remain calm when the medical world ignores what is happening to you. Lately I've read that the medical problems people in the Gulf of Mexico are having are similar to these weird PTSD quote unquote symptoms I've had, only theirs is likely from direct poisoning from pollution of the BP Oil Gush.

But it makes me wonder. Maybe fibromyalgia is really the result of inhalation and absorption in other ways of all the carbon pollutants we've had in our atmosphere now for way too long at way too high levels. Some people, maybe because of the PTSD, are more susceptible, so get sick from the oil products sooner...?

I've always thought pollution was at the root of this pain I've been in since about 1986.

But today, I'm so isolated, stuck in this one room I live in, unable to clean it properly so it gets dirtier and dirtier by the day. I talk on the phone to my friends, most of them live in other cities. Yesterday as I was talking to an East Coast friend who lives in the country, I was on the walkway of my building, looking down on the dripped tar, chipped paint, and wobbliness of the structure, plus the dusty trash that blows in from the street and gathers in corners, and said to my friend, yeah I wish I could come to visit.

But I don't think I'll ever get outta here.

Truth is some months I can't even buy a bus pass.

We still have birds singing here. They feed off the same trash that keeps a small part of the human population alive. I realize that because of this weird skill I developed of being able to type almost at the speed of sound, I'm trapped here in this place. Can't make enough money to get out, make too much money for social security to even consider my claim.

So I'll probly be typing here next to my bed for the rest of my life. Which will likely be shortened as to the fact I'm typing in bed sick when I should be getting medical attention. I mean, I'll be able to type when every other part of my body is not working.

I type to make a living when I'm crippled in pain so can't go out and get any other job. In a way transcribing is relieving though, as it gets my mind in the subject matter I'm typing about, and I get out of the pain for a while. It seems inhumanely cruel that a world would make a sick old lady type from home to stay alive, but reading a little literature from before 1940 you realize most humans have led lives of toil and difficulty, that's how it is on earth. It was only that short period of time- the return of the GI's from WWII and that thriving economy- to today. To today's mess the Reaganites made of that wonderful blossoming middle class, so now it's almost all destroyed.

I'm like a character in a Charles Dickens story, the aging woman, blind, still sewing buttons for a living, from her shack in the slummy section of a decaying city.

Only today it's 2010 L.A. so, instead of sewing, the aging lady types with crooked fingers on a computer keyboard for pennies a word, probly until the day I die.
*

RE: The C Church and my stymied efforts to start something about their crimes with City of Angels: They're like a virus that won't go away and I'm the penicillin that stopped working.

If There Was Ever an Anger that Called for Spiritual Growth to Appease It

It's the anger of being raped as a kid by a priest, then growing up and going to the Catholic Church for help, and getting nothing. So then you go to THE support group that magically appeared claiming it grew out of grassroots, only to find that even this support group is working with a hidden agenda. No matter where you turn, all decks are stacked to retain the status quo of influence and power for the Vatican's Church.

If there was ever an anger that cried out for biblical channels of reconciliation, it's anger that results from the mistreatment by the Catholic Church of its sex crime victims.

So I've made a commitment to go to this Bible based Anger Management group every Tuesday at 11 AM, because in that group we do things like, today, going to the source, deconstructing the St. Francis Prayer. We strive for the sanity to accept the things we cannot change, courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

TODAY:

The main message of the session was that some battles are just too large, and I don't have the resources to do more than I can do.

Some battles you have to leave for God to fight. Turn them over.

AND AS CLASS CONTINUED
this image came into my head.

I'm like one small fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico today with one vacuum trying to suck up all that oil gushing from the BP well.

The sea of data I try to surf through writing on this topic is astounding, shocking. Go to bishop accountability and see the endless lists of predator priests, under each letter of the alphabet, then see the list of documents and news stories that pertain to each priest. It becomes overwhelming, this endless stream of continuing screens of newsprint, you scroll down and there's more and more and more.

These battles in the Gulf and in the Vatican are both evoking God-sized angers, they are both biblical proportioned battles, and they are both bigger than any of us humans. At some point you do have to trust God and turn it over to him.

It's bigger than all of us.

As one blogger writing all alone, with NO NETWORK OF SUPPORT ANYWHERE, I'm like one small fishing boat in June 2010 trying to suck up all that oil gushing into the Gulf of Mexico.

More notes from Anger Management on Tuesdays will be coming here in this new Anger Management blog site on blogspot at City of Angels 14. In fact I have a stack of notes from past few weeks to type in, but I also have to get up at 5 AM tomorrow for my paid job.

For now what will keep my emotions stable is acceptance that I can only do so much in one day, in one hour, one paragraph at a time. I have five years worth of notes now, and files and files of documents to analyze. Here at City of Angels 14 with Anger Management. At City of Angels 15, watch for continued coverage of the pedophile epidemic and coverup in the Roman Catholic Church, carried over from City of Angels 8 2010, which we are going to leave for now exactly like it is.

Time to disentangle from all false relationships that developed from the false structure of a false support group for victims. Time to start over from scratch, deconstruct myself, and figure out what really happened.

Stay tuned...

Anger Management

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This is new location for Anger Management Notes