Criticism / I can't take my eyeball out you guys

For the first time in my life, at age 53, I just got cable TV. And one of the first flicks I saw on it today was “Brother From Another Planet.”

I didn’t quite understand the ending so I Googled it and found only about  5 reviews, including one at the IMDB, which I never take too seriously, since for 3 years I was the only one with a review of “A High Wind in Jamaica ” on it, so I realize they can be written by anybody.

In this case all the reviews were like college class perspectives; the sociological  meaning behind it all. So none really did explain the ending. But all agreed that the movie was “about” people making people they didn’t know a thing about (in this case, the mute alien) into who they wanted them to be, or thought they were, and then treating them as if they were that person.

I’d been seeing a cute, mute, child-like black  guy running from two weirdo white aliens who ordered beer on the rocks and tried to find him by claiming they were from immigration, then asking a black guy in a bar where his green card was when he questioned them; a mute cute black  guy who ate a head of cabbage as he walked down the street trying to be like the others he sees;  who took out his eye and put it in a plant to see who the heroin dealer was who was killing kids  in Harlem so he could suffocate him in a baggie of it . But I hadn’t seen anything unusual about people deciding they had his game when they knew nothing about him at all.

Well, gee.  That’s because I’m there constantly. No wonder I lcompanion movie-watcher, saying “What kind of movie is this?” and “Oh my God this movie is crack!” as the characters displayed how they each  figured him out wrong  with their individually unseeing eyes and own judgemental personalities.

I don’t sit mutely with a rather infantile facial expression as people ask me what I am, then agree that I’m whatever they guess I am, like The Brother did. Nontheless, people constantly decide for me who I am, what I’m all about, without consulting me , and then tell me that I’m what they’ve decided is me.

This has happened to me mostly only the last few years, but in all aspects of dealing with society. I once arrived at my pain management appointment only to find there was no doctor there that day , and the new girls behind the counter (there were new ones every month) had, they thought, called all the patients who’d had  appointments that day, earlier in the week , and rescheduled them.(Nobody had called me.)

“We were patients  but he hired us because all his workers were trash,” they bragged when I asked who they were.”They couldn’t do the job right.”

I said , “Nobody called me.”

These two women, way over-done in the make-up department and in sleezy revealing clothes befitting the type of employee found at a pain doctor’s  who ultimately gets arrested for giving narcotics freely to all junkies who can pay (called “writing doctors” in my day), had already sized up their boss’s clientele as a mess of junkies  pretending pain to feed addiction or access drugs they sold at good street prices.

Some of the reasons they made this assertion included that the doctor apparently hit on all his workers for sex as a pre-requisite for employment, which caused the high turnover rate, but which these two had apparently complied with, when it all came out in the wash; that he’d been arrested for sharing a 14-year-old prostitute with two lawyers ( which I hadn’t known until his bust brought all these facts out in the media), freely gave drugs to his employees who satisfied his whims (something else unknown to me but they’d, perhaps of guilt, assumed all of us knew about), and catered mostly to the poor people in pain --those like me on Medicaid, most of whom talked  in aints and he don’ts and chain-smoked on a bench installed outside while waiting their turn; talked to each other freely during their average 2-hour wait about their lives and where you got the least trouble getting good dope at and how they beat the social security system and lost their kids to child neglect courts and were trying to get them back , and boasted about how many drugs they could take, or were on-- those with the patches wearing sleeveless shirts to show them off like tatoos; and explaining to one another how to maximize the oxycontin high by chewing the little white balls in the time-release capsules, thus getting aroung the time-release measures the pharmaceutical companies had devise conscientiously;  and even selling each other pills in the parking lot and trading phone numbers for pot connections.

Most had blackened and/or missing teeth, dirty hair, unkempt bodies, hillbilly lingos,  large vocabularies of swear words, and that indignation the drug-abuser carries around with him that anyone dare treat him like a person who likes narcotics for fun rather than needing them to get through the devestating pain he’s in.

There is a type of human being that many of us identify as a street person with an addiction or alcohol problem due to his/her clothing, tatoos, lack of make up and beauty-parlor-made hairstyles, unkempt fingernails, bad teeth , and crabby, pointedly bossy voice and manner of speech. What we don’t realize unless we get there ourselves is that the poorest citizens of our country cannot afford beauticians, manicures, dental work, nice clothes, new clothes ( in today’s fashions), today’s fashion of purse, decent or somewhat costly shoes instead of thongs, and maybe even cleanliness ( because their water has been cut off for a week or a month or they are living in their car on smelly big quilts and blankets that are too expensive to clean enough,  so smell moldy and, so,  make their hair and clothes  smell mildly moldy).
  
We are a very busy people, what with our jobs, children, hobbies, own illnesses and must-see telvision shows, etc.; and so we don’t spend a lot of time or have that kind of deeply sensitive mind that studies people but, rather, we quickly catagorize folks based on some of the parities they share.

Therefore, a person with 2 or 3 of the qualities of those we know to be drop-out, attitudinal “scum” addicts “for the desire of it” will quickly go into that compartment in our minds we define as loser addict types.

Far be it from us to take the time to understand that the poor and the deliberate, non-professional job-holding drug addict can have totally different value systems, backgrounds, desires, respect for others, depth of character and religion , and satisfaction with our position in life, sharing merely similar  situations at  that  moment we encounter both.

So these two ladies who I’d call floozies even after all I just said, by dent of the way their minds worked, decided then and there that I was one of doctor’s “addicts” too bullish to take no for an answer and ready to start trouble.
mamas sane and calm again, so Papa quickly went to the druggist for more of them;  to people in 2007  who’ve gone over 24 hours without the dose of narcotic they’ve had in them for six years  non-stop—is irritability. People shouldn’t even be allowed to work the front desk of a pain doctor’s
practice until trained to keep these folks calm by not egging them on and deliberately agitating them when they are coming down off high tolerances to narcotics.)

(Which is another whole thing in itself. People working in pain management need to be taught to understand that people going cold turkey off of narcotics are going to be, no matter how much they don’t want to be, apprehensive, upset, irritable, and  more irrational than they normally are. They can’t help it. It’s the by-product of the drug being craved by their system and being unavaliable to them . A symptom 100% will share, from mothers in the 1920s before we were aware that narcotics were addictive and that’s why “Sloan’s Remedy” made upset, crazy-acting

But there’s no law, and these two women immediately saw trouble, at one point even saying that I was the third “bitch” that day they’d had come in raising cain and “acting up”. The difference might have been that the other two cussed up a storm and threatened them, I don’t know, but I didn’t “bitch” yet  clearly they expected that from me when my face crumpled and I said “But what do I do? I can’t quit this drug cold turkey—I’ll go into heart failure!”

They  asked my name  and time of appointment, and  as I dug in my purse to fish out the card in the handwriting of their office worker of the previous month stating that my appointment was at 9:00 a.m. that day,  they read a ledger (that was not the usual book appointments were made in and that I had watched the Asian man write my name in the previous month for 9 a.m.; but a collection of loose sheaves of paper) and said, “You weren’t even scheduled for today—Anne Olewich was the 9 a.m. appointment!”

I said “I saw the man write my name in the book after ‘9 a.m.’; what you have isn’t the same  book you always use.”

Then I found the card with my appointment, but they did not give me the opportunity to show it to them (something you ought to very politely do, to someone coming down off narcotic addiction), but said triumphantly,”That’s the second lie you’ve told today—we’ve never even had a man working in this office.”

I’m thinking, oh, come on, you are the two who have never worked here before, Scotty’s been here at least 3 years now. I  said ,”There has too.  He’s worked here a lot since I’ve been coming here!”

One of them responded , “If you don’t turn around and get out of this office now, we’re calling the sheriff and reporting that you came in here causing trouble—”

By then I was holding out the paper with Scotty’s handwriting, as he’d written my name,too, and it would have held up in any court , as they definitely had plenty of examples of his handwriting. I was looking at it as my proof I had an appointment; not even remembering that it wouldn’t do me any good, as there was no one there who could write my refill.

But instead of reading it, one picked up the phone, dialed it, and said “Yes, we are a doctor’s office and a woman just came in here off the streets yelling and screaming and raising cain; demanding narcotics from us and we asked her to leave and she refuses, frightening all our patients.”

(The office was empty save the three of us.)

“You’d better high-tail it out of here, she just called the police,” the other advised me.

I didn’t know what to do. When you go through detoxification you have irratioal thoughts, but I had by then become rational enough to know that nothing I did there was going to help me get my refill because there was no doctor there, and staying wasn’t going to get me my needs met, so I left. I returned to my husband on his portable oxygen in the car, crying hard, sobbing to him what was going on.

He said we should go to an emergency room and explain. As we rounded a corner we saw a sheriff’s cruiser and so flagged it down.

I told the sheriff’s deputy driving it what had happened, showing him my card. He said he was circling that very doctor’s office right then , not because they’d gotten a call about a disruptive woman off the streets, but because 10 minutes before, he had driven by and seen two women loading a blue Pontiac with piles of doctor’s records in manila folders and he was suspicious. That doctor, he said, was known for suddenly folding his practices and fleeing with his medical records, making it very hard for his patients to get copies to get treated at other pain clinics.

He wanted me to return and demand my records. He  told me they were mine and I had a right to them right then and there, adding that he wanted to see if they stil had mine or had removed them from the premises so he could take action if those ladies were actually emptying the building of all medical records.

I said I didn’t want to be the center of a controversery and wind up on the news in my condition and needed to get to E.R. because I really would die. He was sorry I could not help, but didn’t stop me from leaving.

The hospital gave me the drugs I needed after a call to the pharmacy proved I’d been getting 40 mg. of oxycontin mnothly there for over 3 years. Later that day the sheriff’s major called me and asked me what the hell I was doing seeing that doctor after all I knew about him.

Now,that wasn’t fair.I knew nothing about him. The major appaprently did , and assumed all the patients weent there because they did, too.

“Well, I’ll tell you what,” the major said. “He stood in that parking lot in front of other patients the other day describing your condition and full name  and yelling at me that my deputies walked in on him and you when you and he were alone together and you had your underwear half -down getting a shot for pain. It is illegal in this state to give out patient information to anyone and he was telling other patients--if I were you, I’d sue.

He made you appear to be less than ,shall we say, appropriate, to be in such a condition alone in a room with a doctor.”

I denied it hotly. Yes,  sheriff’s had walked in on him giving me a shot , but no pants had been down. The sheriffs would have written so in their report, right, I said?
He said exactly, and they had said nothing of the kind. “If it didn’t happen that way, he was slandering you, and you should sue him,” he said. But had I won money I’d have lost my Medicaid and not had enough to cover my medical needs, so I could not consider it.

It took them 3 more years to get a case on the guy good enough to arrest him for. But finally he gave an underover narcotic’s officer a preescription for Vicodin, a “new patient” with no records of any proof of pain who clearly stated that he “liked Vicodin.”

It was on the news daily for over a week, because there were 5 or 6 parents and sisters to interview who stated he’d killed their loved ones with  overdoses of drugs and they’d been wating for vindication for a long time. He’d  given men huge doses of oxycontin and methadone simultaneously; one had taken half the bottle the day he got it and died.

That doctor  disapppeared. What didn’t disappear was my hurt from that phone call those women had made telling police “There’s a woman here who just walked in off the street…”. Over and over those words found me, in my dreams, in my lowest moments, even while talking to a new pain doctor, they’d haunt me. I had so NOT “walked in off the street.” I had made it very clear right off the bat I was their first appointment of the day. To say that of me was so brutal; it hurt me so bad. To me, it was the worst part of it all, and saying “That’s lie number two” a close second.

They had been so wrong on both counts, and to say that to someone who’d been going through drug withdrawels for 12 hours or so , totally bad practice in such a type of doctor’s office, even if they HAD thought I was lying and had walked in off the street. You do not aggravate someone going through detox. My God! I wanted so badly to prove to those women that they’d been totally wrong on both counts! That they had me figured so wrong!And that they should not egg on people who were “sick” with withdrawals, as irritability and feelings of low self-worth went with that package.

Then it happened again. I wasn’t getting near enough pain medication as I needed at   my new pain management doctor’s ; an  office famous for newspaper articles saying how they worked with patients to keep them pain free no matter what it took, it was their main object in life….The doctor wouldn’t return my call asking if I could increase my dose to cover my pain.

I assumed he’d call and say yes,  so took more than prescribed, so ran out exactly 3 days early. Luckily I had made an emergency appointment for three days early, so I wouldn’t detox.

But when I got there, the doctor flubbed, writing me a prescription for the same amount as I was on, just three days early. As I tried to leave the office with it, some big guy dresed in camo, not as a doctor at all, took my prescription and said it couldn’t be filled because the doctor had not changed the dosage.”All you did was take more than prescribed , and run out three days early,” he accused me.”You can’t just do that. If no doctor told you to increase your dose, you had no right to. Don’t ever try to come back here early again—we aren’t going to help you get away with such errant behavior.”

“I thought he’d say yes,” I prtested, distressed because I’d gone through sweats all night, had been unable to sleep, and every second had been like a year waiting for 7 a.m. and my appointment. “And he more or less did, by allowing me to refill the drugs today.”

“You forced him to refill the drugs today by running out early,” the man said bitterly, “and you’re not getting away with it.” He tore up the prescription in front of me. “You come back Monday, when you were supposed to. You’re not getting any drugs till then. if you take them too soon or give some away we are not going to be here to help you get away with it. Don’t you ever come here early again!”

“I’ll die!” I said.”I’m a heart patient and going through detox for 3 more days will kill me!”

“That’s your problem” he said coldly.”And if you try to get them through an
emergency room, when they call us we’re going to tell them that you used them up 3 days early, or sold some, or gave them away, and they aren’t going to help you, either.”

“I can’t detox,” I pleaded, but he said if I didn’t leave right then, “Becky” was going to call the police. Deja vu…

I left crying, went home and tried to sleep through the detoxing, which involves every cell in your body awakening, demanding it’s dose you are tolerant to, filling with the water the narcotic had dried up in you. You sweat, you shake, you feel horrible, as if you are dying, and since you are not used to sweating (narcotics keep you too dry to), it is really torture to be dripping with water off your face and all over your breasts and underarms .

The next morning when I awoke, my guardian angel was there, or I wouldn’t be here.

I could only say three words—-it’s amazing I could speak at all, since I couldn’t breathe and didn’t talk again for 3 days. It was incredible luck that God had refused to answer my prayers to get my little girl her own bedroom all those years and so she was in bed next to me when I awoke. Had she not been, I’d have died.

Because she was, someone was there when I awoke and managed to get out “Call an ambulance” before I went unconcious from my inability to breathe. It hurt so bad to breathe I just could not do it again. I just somehow managed to speak the 3 words; only God knows how. (The next time I came to, it was days later.)

I was in severe heart failure and unconcious in the hospital for 2 days before my ex-husband thought to tell them that I was on a lot more morphine than they were giving me.

They were giving me 5 mgs. I  had been taking 60 mgs of time-release morphine daily plus 3 15-milligram pills of instant-release morphine  for “break-through” pain.

As soon as he told them , they gave me enough and I came to , and by the next morning when the doctor stepped into CICU , he took a step backwards in amazement. “You’ve got color! You’re sitting up! You’re alert! Your’e talking like a normal individual! It’s a miracle! You’re 180 degrees from what you were yesterday! I’ve never ever seen someone recovered from such a bad state so quickly in all my years!”  (He was old, too.)

Still amazed, he released me by noon. All I’d needed was to stop going through detox. Because I have heart failure, the rapid shift of fluids to my lungs had nearly killed me. It took me several months to get my strength back, by degrees.

The pain doctor apologized for “Ben’s” behavior, saying that he sometimes went a little overboard trying to protect the clinic from trouble with police for giving drugs too freely.

It seems pain management is legal here, and must be done through a pain management facility, but then the state is turning around trying to shut all those facilities down as soon as they can for giving people  pain medication. I just somehow got caught up in the middle twice--well, I guess I know how--I have poor dentrtion, as my cardiologist calls it as he writes to everyone all over the state for me , trying to get me dental work no one wants to give someone with a heart as weak as mine.

There were other doctors  who judged me by my missing teeth, old clothing, lack of a hairdo. One wrote in my file that I “refused” to get dental work he’d ordered me to get so he could  upgrade me to a better pacemaker-defibrillator, AFTER I’d even fallen into tears while explaining to him that there was only one oral surgeon in the county who took Medicaid and he refused to touch me or even see me the past three years  because my heart ejection fraction was 15%, meaning anesthesia can kill me.( No other dentist could pull my broken teeth—they were all broken off below the gum line.)

Ignoring my story, the pacer doc permanently put in my files that I refused to get urgent necessary dental work. I guess because people like to say one of their buddies is a doctor, many people would lend a doctor the money to pull his teeth, so he assumed it was  that way with anyone. He told me to borrow it; he told me to hold a job “under the table.” (I told him that even if I had the health to, if I got caught  doing the latter I’d lose all my  medical for 3 years automatically, and by the end of that, be dead for sure . But he decided that it was my “lack of cooperation ” that kept me from getting the money to pull my teeth.

He also added in the file that he seriously believed I had ” early cirrhosis ”. When I asked my cardiologist, who had the practice with him, what that meant, at first he tried to calm me by saying “How long did they say you would live when you first got this?
Remember?”

“A year,” I sniffled.

“And how long have you lived?”

“Ten years.”

“Then why do you believe what they say now?”

But I couldn’t let it rest. I really wanted to understand what led the pacemaker doctor to think I had cirrhosis of the liver. I was frightened. My twin sister had just died a horrible way of that only 3 months before.(Which I’d also told the pacemaker doctor.)

My cardiologist, a wonderful , charismatic man who I (and all the other people  who meet him) just love, tried again to make me think practically. “What would a pacemaker doctor know about livers? Why would you pay any attention to what one says about your liver? He’s not even a gastroenterologist. How could he know about livers?”

But I would not stop worrying, so finally, he had to tell me.” It is a shorthand way of telling other doctors that he thinks you drink or use drugs or party somehow, which he is assuming because you’ve got so many bad teeth. No one is going to pay any attention to it.”

“It means I party?”

“Yes. That’s one way to clue another doctor in on such a suspicion; another is to say that you are disheveled. That is how they tell each other how small their minds are when confronted with a 5-foot-nine, 126 pound beauty with broken-off teeth who can’t get them fixed.”

I mused for a minute, then burst out with a laugh. How small their minds are! I liked that.

“They can’t think of any other reason why,” he said,”such a beautiful woman is not being taken care of by a good gentleman. She must be a bad woman, see, that no good gentleman would want. You did not live ten years by believing what small minds say about you, I know that without asking you. Don’t even think about it again.”

But one more doctor had to go for my throat. Not as bad as this one had, but still.

She was my cardilogist’s replacement when he chose to leave the practice he shared with the small-minded pacemaker dude. The place he moved to did not take Medicaid at first. In fact, not for a whole year. He wanted me to continue on with her, he said, “so I would “not fall thorough the cracks.”

Medicaid lets me see a cardiologist four times a year. On my last visit to her, as I said something , it made her think of something, and interrupt me. “When were you diagnosed with this?” she said.

” September  1996,” I answered.

“You mean 2005.”

“No, I mean 96.”

“You couldn’t have been diagnosed with it in 96 ,” she said irritably. “You mean 05.”

“No-”

“I’ve SEEN you before September. You must have been here in June. I know your September visit was not our first meeting,” she argued. Real anger came out in her voice, mood, and face, taking me by  complete surprize.

I was so taken aback I forgot to call her ” doctor ” . ” Ma’am,” I said, ” This is TWO THOUSAND and six! “

Her eyes creased towards each other. ” You mean, ” she said at last,” You were diagnosed with this TEN YEARS AGO?! “

“Yes.”

“No one lives ten years…” she started, then stopped herself. She needn’t have bothered. I’d heard all about it, read all about it, and knew. In court, a doctor from Duke University had testified that 25% of us died the first year of diagnosis, 50% were gone the second, 75% the third, and 100% by the fourth year.

“You mean Miss Young’’s chances of being alive in the year 2000—” the attorney had begun.

“Are nil,” the highly reputed  cardiologist had said .

All that anger, bitterness at me because she thought I kept saying the wrong year! And  me with every right to be the bitter, angry one, that she’d treated me 4 times without even looking at my medical records.

Was that why she’d been letting me live with swollen feet so long—she thought I was dying on the normal timeline for this disease? Had she missed opportunities to switch my brand of diuretic? Should she have sent me to a hospital for tests 3 months ago? Why the hell wasn’t the woman familiar with my case? Had I gotten the proper treatment from her at all? She didn’t even know I’d had an ejection fraction of 15% for ten years without swollen feet! What good was she for me?

And what was her problem, anyway? What did she think I’d been doing the last 10 years while all my teeth fell out? Refusing to hold a job? Drugs?

There we went again. She really thought I’d been fine until a year ago but had let my teeth get this bad all this time. What did she think I was? An imbecile? The old drug addict bit. Probably compounded by the fact I ruptured 2 disks in my back in September 2000. So my records show I’ve been on morphine, and she automatically pictures me as one of those “fake pain” patients who talk “writing doctors” into heavy drugs and get out of work for many years before my heart goes bad.

For the first four years I had this bad heart, I had never even taken a pain pill heavier than a tylenol #3. It was the ten years on toxic heart meds that that did in my teeth—and she thought I’d only been on those a year. But that  I’d been on pain drugs for 6 years. Quite obviously, then, she must’ve marked me as a total flake-off, on heavy-duty morphine for years before I had heart trouble.Someone so obsessed with narcotics I’d spent every day procuring them instead of brushing my teeth; or every cent procuring them instead of paying for dental care .

What was I doing with someone who thought so lowly of me as my main doctor?
The movie, The Brother from Another Planet, had quite a good moral tale to tell, come to think about it.

And thinking a little more…

Being as ill as I am, I don’t have much opportunity to deal with anybody, and so that is why all the people who have put me in drawers with labels have been in the medical field. But there’s been a few other ones.

There’s the 18-year-old girl who’s father remodeled my house 9 years ago, then decided after he’d removed the siding that costs were going to go thousands of dollars beyond his original estimate and when I did not have thousands of more dollars, took off leaving my house in tar paper.

I tried to take him to court, but he quickly ended that by having his lawyer inform me that he was not a legal contractor and hadn’t gotten permits for the work and so the city would make me tear down all the work he’d done as soon as they found out, leaving the now broke me homeless and since personal homes are exempt from bankruptcy, he’d just declare bankruptcy, get to keep his home , which was all he had, pay me nothing, as he had no money, maybe do a little penalty jail time but that would do nothing to get me out of my homeless condition, so I’d better just disappear.At least now I had a home, with new walls, floors, ceilings, windows, carpet, porch,sinks, tub, toilet, lighting,  wiring, etc.

If I took him to court I’d have nothing and no money to get anything with.

Part of my side’s story had included the fact that he had left me in that position while I was terminally ill and could not work to save up the money to purchase siding from anyone else. His kid was 9 at the time. As soon as she was “liberated”; that is, turned 18 and I guess he could not tell her what to do, she wrote me a nasty letter referring to my “fake heart condition”. It was signed “The REAL good Catholic, something you only pretend to be.”

Now truly my face looked like the Brother From Another Planet’s when I got to that line. Here she was , assuming I’d lied about my physical condition because I was still alive, when I have so many doctor’s letters and records to proove it plus I’m not even sure I’ll last a few more months , the way my feet have stayed swollen the last two; (I’d sure love the security of being reassured I will !)- and she leaves me no address to send copies of my proof, show her she’s got me all wrong—but then decides she’s the good Catholic, even though I have a different opinion: I think the Catholic priest and the prayer group up at a Catholic Church in the Bronx whom I have never met and who help me give my children Christmas every year are the good Catholics I know of.

But there, she’s got me all figured out and has let me know—-I had to be lying; there is no God , no miracles. She, the good Catholic, should know.

And then along comes another hurt. It’s little; I shouldn’t let it bother me, I’m going to have to copy the Brother from Another planet and not care about people’s mistaken ideas about me. It’s this: I joined a group of people who read each other’s poems, stories, and non-fiction and get points for reviewing them; the points are used to pay to “unlock” the reviews they recieve so they can see what people say about their own work..I have 21 poems,1 haiku,  4 stories, and 3 nonfiction items  in this place. 18 poems have had no readers, 1 had 11, 1 had 4 , 1 had 2 , and 1 had 1. 2 stories had no readers. 1 had 2, and 1 had 1. 2 nonfiction items had no readers, and one had 3.

Fifteen of the things I put on there I consider my best,  and most want to share with the world . Those are the things I didn’t just write for this place just write for this place but wrote before I heard of the place, and  have been hoping to publish,   some for years. Since I might not  be alive in a year, I wanted to know what people thougt of it now, if it touched any one or made sense to anyone or was just dumb. I also  wanted help making sure it was ready to mail out to top magazines.

2 stories were never read, one read by 2 people, 1 read by 1; 2 nonfiction pieces had no readers and one had 3, and of the 8 poems I hold dear, no one’s seen 5,11 saw one, 4 saw the haiku, and 2 saw 1. I put those 8 up first and after a month of no one reading them, made up the other 10 , which no one read either but I don’t care, they mean nothing to me. But I  really wanted to share with the world the 8 poems, 4 stories, and 3 nonfiction items.

Instead, I shared them with 23 people,11 all just reading the same poem , giving me 12 people in my whole life who have read anything besides that poem. Except for the one time i ever had a readership before: when I wrote a poem in high school, a college student liked it so much she gave it to her professor . He asked my permission to put it on the final exam , making its analysis worth one-third the grade of that exam. But I never got to saw what all those students thought or said, so I have never had direct feedback --I just had the delight of knowing how much the professor had valued and respected my ability with one poem. (John Terry Young--April 14, 1959-November 1, 1970—I typoed the wrong year in the title on Urbis.)

Since then I never get any readers. So I have no reviews to unlock and no way to spend all the points I saved so they just sit there so I’ve lost interest but have been enjoying reading other people’s work sometimes. I never think about oh wow I’ll get all these points I can’t do anything with if I write real verbiose reviews! I never even read the part that says how many points I can get. But twice I’ve been told that I write real wordy reviews just to collect a bunch of points. Actually, I just like to write, I like to communicate with others, and I like to help others write better. I didn’t realize it cost people a lot of hard work to unlock my wordy reviews so instead of just saying “Use punctuatiion right”, I would  gaily edit their missplaced punctuation for them so they would get what I meant.

I figured that someone who couldn’t grasp what a complete sentence was, so kept on writing run-on sentences after being told over and over that she was, who still kept having them in her 2nd and 3rd revisions, did not know  terms like “dangling participles” and “predicate”, so wrote down 30 examples of where on her page to put a period and capitalize the first letter of the next word , have her subjects agree with her verbs (“got dressed, not dress,” I’d say) and strengthen her week verbs (“slowed down and caught her breath” I wrote where she’d put “slowed down and was catching her breathe”, correcting a misspelled word simultaneously.)

I then kindly put “Now that you are 100% grammatically correct with this page, I can read it, so I want to  tell you how great it works. I could see the bands of heat around the barrios making the dark legs under the cut-offs glisten  with sweat and the pastel shell hair-pins seem moist with sea…great choices of words , you have a lovely poetic eye for those details unique to your location, bringing it alive for armchair explorers…I felt I was getting a secret glimpse into this world and culture, as when the sister asked them to bring up 3 cans of Spaghettios for the children’s dinner and Mia slid a piece of toilet paper onto the toilet seat before using it after describing the unkempt tiny bathroom.

Every word worked to bring the story out and further it to that sad ending where Mia , on vacation from college, realizes she is no longer sharing a common life with the high school buddy who has stayed behind, never finished school, and already lost a boyfriend to a street gang , who’s blood she must walk across daily to get to her front door surrounded by terra cotta planters of wilting plants.

Mia’s self-concious  rejections of the things Anna keeps offering her--tequila, beer, a joint from the pan under the couch--continue to move the story by showing the ways the two girls have changed perhaps irritrievably from being able to be best friends. Although once the colorful, children-filled barrios was a way for Mia to esacape her sullen, non-speaking mother, she has now escaped in another fashion and unfortunately , going back to a life with Anna will only bring hers back down, even while she uncomfortably compares her crisp linen pants and pumps to Anna’s tee-shirt with the Barbie doll crossed out and “bitch” wrtiten under it , and the mop water at her feet that makes Mia want to vomit from its smell, as well as Anna’s foul-smelling, messy car filled with scrap metal to turn in, and all the other things destined to become merely memories for the rest of Mia’s life.

To me, the title works but no one reads my writings so I think I must be pretty bad at titles, myself. Perhaps think of other songs  from 1990s high school days and phrases from them that are not so over-used..I think of that one by Vitamin C, “As we grow up, we remember …”

I thought I was helping her in terms she could understand. I did not mean to be too wordy!

I was twice  troubled by people writing like they are going to commit suicide, and tried to tell them there was a lot out here. One person said the internet  was a void and impersonal and I tried to tell them how many exciting different things it has on it—I was told I only said all that to get a whole smear of points. If anyone ever looked at my account they’d see I have no reviews to unlock so why would I care about collecting points?

What hasn’t been read in 4 weeks isn’t going to be read now, it’s already had it’s time and new things are coming up every day; no one’s ever going to see it now. When the writing is newly posted it rolls around on this page and you can pick one and review it.  I guess you don’t try to figure out what a person is saying at all, and if they sound depressed, you don’t try to tell them it’s not so bad. You just offer stuff like “you said fucked twice in the same sentence—try another similar word the second time, like screwed…” You are to critique the writing, not respond to it. I guess; anyway, that was another one I was told I wrote just to get points.

Nothing says  what they want to know, and it says they didn’t state any goals like publication for the poem . I am having to figure this all out. I feel bad because everytime I write it’s because I like to write and each time I  am getting told that I am a jerk and my smarmy tactics won’t work, I don’t understand . and then they’ll say you know what you’re doing like they know I do when they don’t, because I DON’T. That really hurts.

If only the people telling me that would look at my page and realize no one ever reviewed anything of mine so I have no reason to want points. I would talk to the person for free. I guess I think I’m talking to them  in response to what they’ve written and someone else thinks I’m just this jerk trying to say a lot of words to get points.

And I never think about points and I told them so but then they told me again I did it to get points and in a way that really hurt me. It was like “We’re onto you,” and they were 100% wrong. So I am afraid to do anything again. I obviously don’t get it at all. Everyone else must have had those kind of creative writing classes where they comment on every other kid’s papers but I never got to do that. I keep reading the rules and I keep reading things like “copying and pasting a bunch of the person’s words won’t get you any where and give the person constructive criticism and say something that prooves you read their work, don’t be general like this is good or this is awful.”

So I try to be very specific and then “Oh you were so wordy you snake you ,you’re not going to get points that way you creep you sneaky person we know all about your kind.” I don’t. I never once thought anyone reviewed me to get points until recently when I was so happy someone finally read the poem about my grandmother that’s been on my web site for 10 years and no one’s ever emailed me that they like it.

I’ve gotten lots of letters from as far as Sweden saying  they do their best fishing with my grandfather’s rods and think it is wonderful that a granddaughter would devote a website to her grandparents; emails from the leader of the Trout Unlimited chapter named for my grandfather saying he saw my site and wanted to talk with me about doing a piece on my grandfather and using some of the pictures I posted, even a letter from the late baseball star Ted Williams saying he was happy to read  that my grandma was still alive and he now lived close to me and perhaps sometime we could do lunch together—then he described a fishing trip down here with grandpa. But no one mentioned my poem to grandma. I couldn’t wait to read what the person who finally did on Urbis, said! Then I read “It sounds true to life.” That was it—all they said. period.  That was a weird review, because it was of course all true but what about the way I did it? Did I do grandma justice? I didn’t like it that they didn’t say anything else but that it sounded true to life. It was all true, that made no sense.

But what about how I said no one comes back as a bird, of course,  but someone special as Grandma might get to be all the birds around me—someone who seemed to have a magical life from its start , someone as grand as she,  for whom everything went so perfectly,  maybe she could be birds—did that make sense or make me sound like a nut job?  

I’d wanted a reaction to my whole poem, how I made her half tart (lemon), half butter , like you cook a trout she’d caught in—had I done a clever thing? So I asked for my points back like everyone does to me. And then the person got real mad and said this ruins my house  of cards  or something I didn’t understand at all.

I didn’t know we were holding hands of cards, balances, balance beams, gunpowder scales. Algorythym  is Arabic to me;  whatever I did to the poor person  I would not have done it --I thought they just lost maybe 20 points they could pick up in 15 minutes by reading someone else’s poem. I didn’t expect the names they called me. I was freeked. And then I started getting told here that  I was giving these cheap shots or being a cheat or shooting street signs instead of cans on private property or something,  something  I also didn’t understand at all-—it’s all points points points with everyone and it really hurts when they say that’s all I’m thinking about because I ‘m starting to guess I’m the only one who is paying absolutely no attention to points and balances and all that math stuff. I’m the one here who’s never thinking about points , every  other person seems to be all about that.

I’m just dying ; and dying to have my stuff read and remarked upon. If I  get a lot of reviews and I don’t have enough points I’d give reviews for points. But I’ve always had enough points for any review I got.  

I gave them 10 new poems no one read after no one read all my great works I’ve had on my website for years, no one reads me no matter what I say.

What do I care anymore I mean I think I  figured it out—-you have to have a real catchy title. And I’m not going to do that. Art is art. It’s not a card game or a poker hand or whatever people think I’m thinking it is. I guess this isn’t the place you go if you don’t have long to live so I am going to just do  what I have to do with my life .

It doesn’t take a genuis to realize your poems or tales  are no longer on that circulating page for people to review , if they ever were, when not one person reads them in 2 months. Unless that’s what I’m not understanding about all this. Maybe points means they put your non-fiction tale about how the HMO killed your sister  on that circulating page only when you have 80,000 of them and that’s why no one has read it yet--I never had enuf points. Maybe that’s what you try to get points for--to get your work on that circulating page. Because if it isn’t there,  no one’s going to read it anyway.

Maybe one day I’ll feel like playing a game like that. But I just always now think of how I spent all night helping a lady with her story about a cat and it’s been 2 months and she’s never read my review.It made me not so happy anymore about writing helpful reviews if you spend all night at it so she can publish it and then she never even reads it. But then I hadn’t understood at the time how many reviews she had to do to unlock my review—and I know she can’t review.

She wrote in a black idiom that was kind of cool for a colorful children’s picture book about kids in another culture but wouldn’t have worked without correcting every single sentence any other way. She’s not going to be able to tell others how to correct their work.She speaks a beautiful but different English than we do.

That’s why I look like the Brother From Another Planet. I’m so confused, I’m so different from all the rest of these people, I don’t know how they eat cabbage here.
And they’re saying I do.                                                                              

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