HVOM Prequel

I have mentioned before that I once deleted the earliest posts in my blog. I had deleted the content but I kept control of the domain name. After a while I started posting again but did not restore the previous content.

I have made some references to some of the content before but not until now have I republished the entire content.

Also, recently I noted that the column on the right-hand side with the titles of the posts is not a complete list. I haven't determined yet what its limitations are but I know that it lists only a partial set of the titles.

Nothing really that important here but I wanted to make it available since I still have it all.

There is also that theoretical divergence point I have been searching for and this content is before that day 10 May 2006 and that might have been the divergence point. Something definitely happened to my mind that day.

This single post will eventually get buried in the massive content of this blog but I am going to include a link to this content on the right-hand side of this blog.

When I started this blog I had no idea I would be still working on it to this day.

Listed below this line is the very first post I made and the entire content follows of those posts I deleted.










Crossroads

I have been undecided about describing my situation in a blog. Nothing else is working though, so I might as well.

I choose to title my blog Homeless Veteran of Microsoft because my journey into this world of hurt began there, at Microsoft. I suspect most of you reading this already know the story. Maybe you don't, maybe you would lie to me rather than admit you do. Either way, I only need one of you to tell the truth. At this point, I just need one person to step forward and serve as a witness.

I need someone to admit they have been spying on me all these years. Either by spying on me directly, or by receiving the information about me the spies have been disclosing.

I am not sure if this first post will actually be my last. I am comtemplating bailing out of this homeless shelter and going back to the streets, sleeping in the tall grass at night. I hate it here. All these years of having people spy on me every minute of the day just makes me feel claustrophobic in enclosed places like this. At least being homeless on the streets I have some semblance of freedom. When you lose every shred of your private life, any freedom you can find is very valuable. But I may stay around here a couple more days, hopefully tomorrow will be the day someone finally acknowledges that they have been hijacking my private life. Maybe tomorrow.

And if you think this is all funny and you enjoy seeing other people suffer, then the hell with you. If the truth be told, I sort of envy you. Life must be very uncomplicated for people like you and all the others that are spying on me. Life is uncomplicated for people with the empathy of a sociopath.

posted by H.V.O.M at 1:38 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, August 30, 2005










My Name.


My name is Kerry Wayne Burgess. My email address is kerrywburgess. I have created this blog to describe the situation I am experiencing. While my problems don't seem as bad as the people of New Orleans seem to be experiencing, judging by what I see on CNN, I have had enough of what is happening to me. It has been going on for over 3 years and I am sick of it. All I can figure is that I must have pissed off some really powerful people and they are making me suffer for it. I will include more details here and everything I write is what I believe to be the truth. Of the people that I will mention by name, I have been trying to get an answers from them but they have been unwilling to cooperate. I can only assume that my questions have put them on the defense because they know they have some liability in this situation.

posted by H.V.O.M at 2:48 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, August 30, 2005










Hostile work environment

Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 19:20:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: "Kerry Burgess"
Subject: Hostile work environment
To: steveb@microsoft.com

Several years ago, while an employee of Microsoft, my manager showed me a pornographic video. I was in a performance review meeting with Kirk Tavener and I gave him details about the compensation increases that I was requesting. His immediate response was to show me a video where a guy was asking for sexual favors. The title of the video was “Priceless.”

I want to know why this happened to me. I still have not received a satisfactory answer from Microsoft. I have tried very hard to get Microsoft management to take this issue seriously. The only conclusion I can reach is that advancement at Microsoft is not based on merit, but rather on secret favors. I can only conclude that the incident with Kirk Tavener was standard operating procedure with Microsoft management and was no anomaly.

I want to know when I can expect to receive an answer. I want to know how much more damage to my personal and professional life I will have to suffer through as a result of that incident.

I want a full accounting of the investigation Microsoft conducted, or did not conduct. I want to know every single detail that was compiled on this issue. I want every single detail about this issue that Microsoft is keeping from me.

I want to know why Microsoft was watching me at work with hidden cameras. I want to know why people at Microsoft were gossiping about my personal life. I want to know why Microsoft was spying on my personal life as well as in my home. I want to know when it will end. I want to know when I will get my life back.


Kerry W. Burgess
1301 North 200th
Shoreline WA 98133



posted by H.V.O.M at 3:09 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, August 30, 2005










frighten into submission, compliance, or acquiescence

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apfeature_story.asp?category=1120&slug=Prank%20Arrest


Lyons was charged with criminal attempt of robbery by intimidation, said Savannah-Chatham Metropolitan Police spokesman Bucky Burnsed.

"You can't yell 'fire' in a crowded theater, can't joke about a bomb in your luggage at the airport, and you can't write notes to cashier that say 'This is a stick up,'" Burnsed said.


http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=intimidation
intimidation
To make timid; fill with fear.

Synonyms: intimidate, browbeat, bulldoze, cow, bully, bludgeon

These verbs all mean to frighten into submission, compliance, or acquiescence. Intimidate implies the presence or operation of a fear-inspiring force: “It [atomic energy] may intimidate the human race into bringing order into its international affairs” (Albert Einstein). Browbeat suggests the persistent application of highhanded, disdainful, or imperious tactics: browbeating a witness. Bulldoze connotes the leveling of all spirit of opposition: was bulldozed into hiring an unacceptable candidate. Cow implies bringing out an abject state of timorousness and often demoralization: a dog that was cowed by abuse. To bully is to intimidate through blustering, domineering, or threatening behavior: workers who were bullied into accepting a poor contract. Bludgeon suggests the use of grossly aggressive or combative methods: had to be bludgeoned into fulfilling his duties.

Example:
Anybody would be intimidated by a manager making his subordinate watch a pornographic in response to a request for a salary increase.

posted by H.V.O.M at 3:23 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, August 30, 2005










Today

I've got some other thoughts to express but it's hard to dwell on my problems with all this stuff I see in New Orleans. I find it especially hard to imagine what it is like to have to stay in that Superdome. I am reminded of my own experience with Hurricane Hugo in Charleston, SC, in 1989. But we endured nothing like these people are going through now. I lost my pickup to the storm surge, but other than that it wasn't so tough. Thinking of those people in the Superdome also makes me think of something I went through recently when I was homeless out on the streets of Seattle. I'll write about it later. I'm still hoping today is the day I get some answers from the people that are keeping me in the dark.

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:44 AM | 0 comments

Wednesday, August 31, 2005










Better days

With no end in sight to this ordeal, I like to think back to better days. The good life for me is when I can train for my triathlon and marathon hobby. It is no fun though without having a job to go to everyday. Without doubt, the best day of my life so far was in June 2004 when I completed Ironman Coeur d'Alene. I remember standing there on the beach rubbing my toes in the sand at 6:55 am waiting for the cannon to go off. I was still kinda nervous, with over 2000 of my closest friends standing around me, ready to start beating the water and everything in their way. It felt like time had slowed to a standstill and then the cannon went off and they started playing some lyrics from that U2 song, "Beautiful day." I remember hearing only that part of the song, about it being a beautiful day, and then I was in the water, thrashing my way towards the end, 2.4 miles away. Here's a photo of me during that race on the bike course:




















Photo by Action Sports International


The following photo was taken during my first attempt at the Ironman race distance at Ironman Utah in June 2002. The day didn't turn out as planned because a tremendous storm hit us on the lake just after we started the swim. We lost one of our fellow racers when he drowned during the storm. This photo was taken at the start of the run and I was very happy to be on the last leg of the course. I was also just happy in general to be out there with all those great people.





















Photo by Action Sports International


Better days.

posted by H.V.O.M at 1:16 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, August 31, 2005










Conspiracy Theory


Date: Sun, 28 Aug 2005 15:55:11 -0700 (PDT)

Dear Senator Murray,

I am writing to you again because my situation continues to deteriorate. The reason I am telling you all this is because I am a law-abiding citizen as well as a U.S. military combat veteran and I request assistance from the government since I am up against an unknown foe. I am not expecting special treatment due to my military service record but I mention it because I believe it demonstrates my commitment to the ideals of the United States of America. Those very ideals are not being respected by my adversaries. I choose to label the unknown forces behind this situation as adversaries, enemies even, because they will not stand up and identify themselves and meet me face to face.

I was concerned for a while that it was the U.S. government behind all this, but after carefully reviewing the circumstances and the evidence I have collected, I concluded that it must not be the government. Unless someone in the government is engaged in a cover up to protect themselves from justice and the penalties for their actions.

Another theory that has gained weight as I gather evidence is that I have a gay stalker. There several reasons I suspect that is the case and I think it started when I was at Microsoft. An overt example was when my manager, Kirk Tavener, showed me a pornographic video with a guy asking for sexual favors. The video was shown to me immediately following my request for an increase in compensation. The HR department and other management did nothing about it and I even had to continue reporting to him and meeting with him in private for several weeks afterward. My greatest mistake, I guess now in hindsight is that I did not file a complaint with outside authority. I did not want to believe that something like that could happen at Microsoft and especially to me.

As I have tried to figure this out, I have been baffled as to why not one person has stood up and spoke up. I believe there are many, many people that are tuned in to this situation and are following along. Then it dawned on me the other day: my adversary in this situation is someone with a lot of power and/or money. These adversaries know that if they are identified as the cause of this situation, I will have no problem finding an attorney to work on contingency. As it is now, I have no access to the legal system. I can’t even pay the filing fees to file a lawsuit on my own and stumble around on my own through the court system. I’m probably better off not taking that route though because I would probably just mess up my case by making some basic procedural errors that any first year law student could take advantage of. I would lose not on the issues, but because I do not know how to work the system.

So I started thinking about who could possibly be the stalker. This situation feels familiar to me because I experienced something similar at another company about ten years ago. I was working for a company named Universal Financial Products, based in Elmhurst, Illinois. I worked in a field office in Greenville, South Carolina. We had a support contract with a local company and I had a lot of friends with the customer. I grew to suspect that my manager was spreading gossip about me to the people we worked with. Later he revealed that he was gay and that he had been trying to cover it up. I suspect that he was trying to get my friends to talk me into being gay.

So at Microsoft, I was seeing people gossiping about my sexuality too. There is no question that I am heterosexual, but I have grown familiar over time how gay stalkers operate and this has all the signs of that sort of situation. But something else has been bothering me for a while about all this. Why is this so big? Why do I see so many people out in the world that know who I am? That just doesn’t add up. If it was just my manager doing this, then why would there be so much attention to it? He is nobody. He is not someone that would cause people to be shocked to learn that he is a closet gay because no one would care. His wife would probably care, but not all these other people that seem to follow this like they would a tabloid story. And so it dawned on me that it must be someone else that is very well known. I am growing increasingly concerned that it is someone like Bill Gates, if not him. I haven’t heard any rumors that he is secretly gay but then I do tend to stay away from gossipy people and I am usually out of the loop on such matters.

So then I started looking at it from that angle. It could have all started back in 2000 when I sent an email to his office. That may have put me on his radar screen, so to speak. I was an ambitious person anyway so I probably was just adding fuel to it all by capturing people’s attention.

Eventually I quit my job at Microsoft and moved away to another town to get away from it all. I was really getting creeped out by all of it. But then, after I arrived in Spokane, where I planned to start over again, I realized it was all still happening. People were still reading my personal emails and hacking into my computer. Then I realized that people were following me on the road. I could not go into any store or go any place without realizing that people there knew who I was. I would go through the drive-thru at a fast food place and I could tell they knew who I was. It is maddening. Even now, as I draft this letter and collect my thoughts, people are reading the draft versions through interception by hacking my computer. I know they are doing it.

But back then, through all of it, I just knew it could not continue forever. Even people with the empathy of a sociopath would realize eventually that this is an unsettling experience. But it continues and shows no sign of stopping. So that means several things. One is that it supports my theory that my adversaries have unlimited resources. Someone like Bill Gates. He could spend a billion dollars on lawyers just because he wanted to. If he thinks he has the right to treat his employees like animals, then I believe he would indeed spend a billion dollars to fight this just because he can. During my first days of employment at Microsoft, my manager was telling me about how Bill Gates would date people in the company. I haven’t heard any rumors that he is secretly gay and I got the impression she was talking about him dating women, but then again I have heard closeted homosexuals refer to men as women, just to avoid revealing their preference. So maybe he was preying on Microsoft employees all along but no one wanted to risk losing their job by talking about it openly.

And then it seemed highly suspect when Mayor Jim West of Spokane was outed as a closet homosexual. I suspect that it is how all this followed me to Spokane last year. I have been trying to figure out how all these people could know who I am and what means of communication they are using. If I have a gay stalker, they are all secretly communicating through some channel that gays use for communication. The internet makes all this possible now for anyone anywhere to communicate easily and generally privately. I was thinking that everyone knew that everyone else knew how people knew about this, but then I began to suspect that it was all being spread around by rumors and on different websites. Where I was thinking there was a central organization controlling it all, it was actually some kind of grass roots effort or some kind of internet phenomenon. And then I was seeing signs that even George W. Bush knew who I was.

I got that impression one day when I was in Spokane. I was watching CNN or something one day and I saw Bush making some comments about something. I commented out loud to myself that he looked terrified or something like that. For a while after that, the reporters were talking about how his press conferences were not going to be televised. I suspect, strongly, that I have been secretly monitored in the places I live and they have been listening to every sound I make. For some reason, Bush has an interest in what I say to myself and when I commented about him looking scared they decided he shouldn’t be seen for awhile until he could get control of himself. They wouldn’t want to embolden the terrorists by showing that he was getting rattled by it all. So maybe it isn’t the government that has been spying on me, it is some kind of stalker that is reporting the information they collect to websites. And maybe Bush knows who I am because he is tied into those gay websites too like Jim West and that is how he knows about me. I have some other evidence to support my theory, but needless to say he isn’t going to risk being outed like West was. They will probably end up secretly murdering me before that happens.

I know that people that talk about stuff like this are usually labeled as delusional crackpots or worse, but I believe strongly that all this is really happening to me. And just because a story sounds crazy doesn’t mean it isn’t really happening. There are people out there that can corroborate what I am saying; they are just too scared to speak up.

And why is it still happening???? I know for a fact that people are still reading my private emails and I am certain that my computer is hacked. Why are people so interested in what I have to say? I don’t know why it is happening but I can sum up in one word what the intentional effect is: stealing. The government has another way to describe it:

18 U.S.C 2511. Interception and disclosure of wire, oral, or electronic communications prohibited
http://www.usdoj.gov/criminal/cybercrime/18usc2511.htm

People have for years been intercepting and disclosing my wire, oral, and electronic communication, which is all punishable as a cyber-crime. To put into perspective, try to imagine if this was happening to you and your staff as you are engaged in legislative activities. Imagine that someone, possibly another legislator or even a lobbyist, was intercepting information from your computers as you and your staff worked on new legislation. The rivals may be interested because they oppose the legislation and the lobbyist may be interested because they are working on behalf of interests that may not want to see the legislation pass. Imagine they are intercepting your work because they want to gain an advantage over you, which they could do by knowing in advance what you were planning to do.

If people want to hear what I have to say, they only have to ask. If they take it from me without my consent, consent which no one has, they are stealing from me. This is not a hard concept to understand. This is not an issue that is happening because the people involved are not sophisticated enough to understand they are doing wrong. Each one of them would object if people were invading their privacy without consent. This issue has a negative impact on every aspect of my life.

This situation is taking a serious toll on my health and I was recently in the VA hospital, as well as other hospitals, for treatment of the stress and anguish. The day I was discharged from the VA, a couple of strange things happened. One is that someone rushed into my room a few hours before I was due to check out and told me that I had to leave at that moment. The other strange occurrence was that I saw on the news later that evening that you had a press conference that morning outside the VA hospital. I suspect that the people at the VA learned you would be there and rushed me out early so that I wouldn’t be seen. I guess they didn’t want me to see you either. But why would they do that? I actually need solid support like that. I don’t need the drugs I am taking from them. All the drugs do is cloud reality. The reality is that I need the people that are abusing my rights to control the direction of my life to leave me alone. And the best medicine for me is to find support from people with the authority to make my adversaries leave me alone and give me back my life.

Of course, it has gone beyond all that now. I will never again have the kind of life I was trying to create. All I face now is years, if not a lifetime, of lingering insecurities from all this.

I have been trying to get people at Microsoft to cooperate but they show no intention of helping. The only response I got when I questioned CEO Steve Ballmer was just a standard denial from a HR spokesman. They know I don’t have the resources to challenge them so they can say anything they want to. It is common knowledge that businesses will lie to protect themselves. The rationale is that punishment, even justifiable punishment, is not in the best interest of the company due to the subsequent penalties and therefore lying is an acceptable means to avoid penalties. A good example is from a recent New York Times article about KPMG with an excerpt below. I believe it is an example that illustrates how it is common for businesses to avoid the truth until they are met with overwhelming force. Who among us can bring such force against a company like Microsoft to get them to admit the truth? I certainly don’t have that power. The U.S. government could do it, but why would they do it for my issue?

Months earlier, Robert S. Bennett of Skadden, Arps had inherited what he told people was "a disaster of a case," with "the I.R.S. like bees" about KPMG. By June, he was pleading with the Justice Department not to indict the firm. He succeeded, but only after the firm made an extraordinary and unusual admission of "unlawful conduct" in the tax shelter business by former partners between 1996 and 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/business/28kpmg.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5043&en=f557083993f77c2f&ex=1125892800&partner=EXCITE

I suspect that every employee at Microsoft knows about this but will not speak up about it. Maybe not everyone knows about it, but I suspect there are a lot of them. What I feel the need to do is capture the attention of them and force them to speak up and thus corroborate my story. Otherwise I am going to be trapped in limbo for the rest of my life, and things feel like they are just going to keep getting worse.

Surely this cannot continue happening to me forever. Surely I will be able to get some answers and get back some control over my life.

Sincerely,


Kerry W. Burgess
1301 North 200th
Shoreline, WA 98133



posted by H.V.O.M at 4:18 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, August 31, 2005










On the road again

Well, they are kicking me out this place in a couple weeks so I guess that settles that. Something about me not having the kind of problems a typical resident would have and I have to have the kind of problems they know how to find solutions for.

Maybe tomorrow is the day I get some answers. I still can't understand why no one has responded to me. I always tell people what I know and what I don't know when they ask me a question. With all the weird stuff going on around me these past few years, I can only conclude that they will not respond because they have something to hide.

I hate spreading rumors but since it has a direct bearing on my life, I will throw it out. I was reading on the Mini-MSFT blog that the HR VP Ken DiPietro was fired from Microsoft because of sexual misconduct. I don't know for certain if that is true or not, but it does support my theory. It is my theory that sexual harassment of Microsoft employees is condoned at the highest levels. The only reason he got fired, I guess, is because he got caught. I could not care less about them firing people. Except that is does show there is a problem.

I know there are other people at Microsoft that have experienced sexual misconduct by managers, because you've told me about it after you heard about my experience. I guess I can't blame you much for not standing up and supporting me now, because you can plainly see what is happening to me for complaining about it. I wouldn't wish this on my greatest adversary. Well, maybe. Depends on who it is. None of them will stand up to me face-to-face.

It feels like I am taking on the Mafia. It doesn't matter how right I am. They are still going to make me bleed just for standing up to them.

posted by H.V.O.M at 7:29 PM | 0 comments

Friday, September 02, 2005










Everybody loves Truman

How well I remember being on the street. There was this one time earlier this summer. I had been homeless for a few weeks. I hadn't showered in weeks. I hadn't eaten anything in I don't know how long and I didn't care. I am walking along the Burke-Gilman trail one weekday afternoon. I've been awake for 30 hours, just walking. I had walked from Redmond down to Gas Works Park because I was going to sit there for a while and then I was going to jump off the Aurora Bridge. I sat there in the park for the next 24 hours thinking surely someone walk up to me and finally clue me. Maybe like Kafka's Josef K. was thinking, it was all some big joke. But while I feel like I am Josef K., the cops just tell me I am paranoid. If the feds had a Most Un-Wanted list, I am certain I would be on it. So I sat there all day,waiting for someone, anyone to show up and clear away the clouds from the sun. I sat there looking at the bridge. I wasn't entirely sure it would be fatal. I've thought a lot about drowning since my combat experience in the Persian gulf so it didn't seem like a bad way to die. But if I am going to do this thing, I want to be sure it is fatal. So my plan was to get completely drunk to the point of not caring about whether the jump would be fatal. I had walked all the way down there with several beers and a fifth of Jack Daniels in my backpack. I figured if I was drunk enough, the fall would surely knock me out and then I would most certainly drown. I could imagine there were a million sets of eyes watching me that day, some of them with hope in their eyes, hope that I would finally go through with it. But I just couldn't get drunk enough to do it. Not only did I feel like I had too much to live for, too much else I wanted to accomplish, I was also starting to feel angry again. The only time in the past fews years when I have felt alone was when I was on that bridge. If feels like people's prying eyes have permeated every shred of privacy I have but yet standing there on that bridge, I felt like no one was around. I knew they were watching, but for once, they weren't crushing me with their presence. It made no sense. So I started walking back along the B-G trail to Redmond to see if my Jeep was still where I had abandoned it a couple days earlier. I hadn't eaten in days but yet I can somehow walk all the way back there, it's about 25 miles. I started back about 4 in the morning. My plan had been to wait until about 3 am to jump because that it when I figured there wouldn't be much car traffic. I didn't want people around as I committed the only thing I seemed to have control of anymore. So I started back and I'm glad it's not raining anymore, I only had on sweatpants and sweatjacket. It takes me 22 hours to shuffle my way back to my Jeep. Weird(er) things happened to me on the way back. I was really wanting to get back because there was food in my Jeep that a social worker had given me. But I didn't know if it was even there anymore or if it had been towed. I only had some change in my pocket, not even a full dollar. And I could tell people knew who I was. I cannot begin to describe how agonizing that feeling is. There were several instances, but the one that really stood out was when I was stumbling along in between Woodinville and Redmond; I had a serious rash on my legs by this time because this was the first exercise I had had since Ironman CDA 2004. Two bicycle riders were approaching from in front and I overheard as clear as a bell one of the persons ask the other, "Is that him?" Can you grasp what that means? People know I am out here. I am living in the mud and grime and people look at me as some kind of trivia. I will never forget that. I have always had a positive view of the world, I know from experience that there is a lot of bad in this world, but I always looked for the good. But here I am, I have become "Truman Burbank" from "The Truman Show" and people are watching me in this agony and it is entertainment for them. What kind of world has it become? Are people themselves in so much agony and misery in their own lives that my misery makes them forget about their problems?For those last twelve hours or so and I shuffled a long, I could barely put one foot fully in front of the other, I am thinking about not only getting some of that food in my Jeep, but I also have this new feeling coming over me. I start to fantasize that there is going to be some kind of party waiting for me to return. There are going to be big white tents and music and brights lights and a whole lot of people I don't know. My mother is going to be there. She has some good news for me and she bought a new RV for me to rest in as she takes me back to Texas where I can get away from all this. For some reason, I think the Secret Service is tracking me while I am shuffling along because they want to protect me from whatever dangers are hiding in the bushes I pass by. I shuffle along, thinking about how nice it is going to be to take a shower and then go to sleep in the bed in the RV. I was thinking about all the food I am going to eat. Finally about 2 am, it is dark and cold and I walk along the last mile of the trail, a section I know very well from all the miles I have run on it in training for Ironman. First I notice there are no lights. I hear no music. There are no clapping and cheering crowds. I see no big RV waiting for me with its relaxing luxury in the parking lot. My mom isn't there. My Jeep Wrangler (which I have since lost) faithfully sits by itself where I left it. I climb inside, open a can with some fruit in it, accidently cut my wrist slightly on its sharp edges, and go to sleep in the driver's seat to wake up in the daylight.

posted by H.V.O.M at 8:35 PM | 0 comments

Friday, September 02, 2005










Tomorrow

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I'll hear something tomorrow.

posted by H.V.O.M at 10:41 PM | 0 comments

Friday, September 02, 2005










The Running Man

I have always read a lot, since I was a kid. When I was in the Navy I read a lot of books when we were out to sea and one of my favorites authors during that time was Stephen King, not to mention Tom Clancy and Louis L'Amour.

One of King's book that has been on my mind a lot over these past few years is The Running Man. You may have seen the movie, but the book is a lot different and I think a much better work. Anyway, there have also been a lot of similarities between my experience over the past few years and that of the protagonist character in the book.

One notable event happened a few years ago when I was still working with Microsoft, although was soon to quit, and I was living in an apartment in Redmond. Noises bother me a lot and the people in the apartment above me were causing quit a commotion. It sounded like they had a lot of people in there and they were all stomping around. I went up there and knocked on the door. Before they opened it, I heard someone on the other side say, "Shh, it's the running man."

That stuck in my head for a long time. Ordinarily I probably wouldn't have given it a second thought for several reasons. One is that I was literally running a lot because I was training for my Ironman triathlon. But how would they know that? From their apartment, they couldn't see me leaving mine to go out running on the Samm. Trail. Plus that, they were new to the building.

And then I remembered The Running Man by King and that really worried me. It was crazy but it made sense.

So, anyway, there have been about a million little things like this that have led me to where I am now. I know what I heard and I know what I've seen. I still believe without doubt that I will get answers to all this, I just wonder if I am going to have to wait until I am 90 years old before that happens. My best years were ahead of me. There is still a lot I want to accomplish. None of this is helping.

Interesting commentary about The Running Man I found on the web:

http://rense.com/general63/sstep.htm


But other early writings of King (Bachman) have proved even more prescient, perhaps none more so than the action-packed novella, The Running Man (1982). Here, King foretells of the coming "reality TV" craze, where human beings risk life and limb for a shot at a little money and a little fame.
The protagonist of the Running Man is Benjamin Richards, an out of work breadwinner in a barren economy, forced to compete on a macabre game show where the losing contestants are murdered. Richards' task is to elude capture for 30 days from law enforcement and a group of trackers called the Hunters.
Citizens are told that Richards is a criminal (terrorist?), and will receive cash rewards as "great citizens" (patriots?) if they turn him in. If Richards remains free for 30 days, his prize is a billion dollars. If he gets caught, he will be executed in the most violent manner imaginable.



Do the reality shows of today match the sheer barbarism of The Running Man and The Long Walk? Actually, one can argue that some of today's shows are WORSE, because the participants are UNWITTING and NON-CONSENTING. For instance, on the Sci-Fi channel's Scare Tactics, jokesters set up their "friends" for extraordinarily ghoulish and realistic pranks. In a particularly grisly episode (Season 3), a group of young men out for a joy ride get pulled over by the cops. The young "mark" witnesses one of his friends flee from the "police," only to be shot in the back by a remorseless officer. The "mark" says tearfully to the cop, "I can't believe you just shot that kid!" The officer then directs the young man to "turn his back," to which the boy replies, "You're gonna shoot me, aren't you?" The officer then trains his gun directly on the boy and says, "I'm gonna do what I have to do." Seconds later, he was given the delightful news, "You're on SCARE TACTICS!" Har-de-har-har, indeed.

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:11 PM | 0 comments

Friday, September 02, 2005










Stalking The Running Man

I had good reason to think that people were following me. I was seeing patterns, instinctive at first, I could sense that something was wrong. The first time I really put my finger on one of those patterns was when I was getting in my Jeep after stopping at Starbucks. There was a guy standing outside that I had walked past and he was talking on a cellphone. He also had his hand partially covering his face. I realized that a lot of people around me had been doing that. Then I started experimenting with it. I started carrying a digital camera around with me and taking pictures of faces and license plates. And people were defintely hiding their faces when I went by them. And then I noticed that the suspicious cars that seemed to be following me started showing up without license plates after I started taking photos.

So I started asking the authorities about it. And I got nothing from them. All they said was that I was paranoid. But they didn't even investigate it so how do they know? They didn't do anything that could even give them an informed opinion.

And I was overhearing people saying things that stuck in my mind. A person in line behind me at Starbucks on February 7, 2004, (I remember the date because I quit Microsoft the day before) comments to another person, in the only words they shared, that "after all that, he quits." I thought about that for a long time.

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:42 PM | 0 comments

Friday, September 02, 2005










Doing the right thing

In an earlier post, I mentioned the rumor that DiPietro, the HR VP, was fired because of sexual misconduct. The subsequent newspaper article about him said only that he was leaving for unspecified reasons and that it was a mutual agreement between him and Ballmer. Of course, they aren't going to admit it because is would only add weight to my allegations that advancement at Microsoft is not based on merit, but rather on the types of connections you have.

Part of the reason I have come to that conclusion is based in the details related to my own experiences. As I mentioned earlier, during a private meeting, my manager, Kirk Tavener, showed me a pornographic video immediately in response to my request for an increase in compensation. Nothing happened in response to my complaint to HR. I even had to continue reporting to him for weeks afterward. I had to sit behind closed doors with him in private meetings where he tried to talk me in to recanting my complaint. I had told his manager that I did not want to meet with him again but nothing happened about that as well.

His manager was supportive at first. In my first meeting with her about it, she told me that he had been a bad hire. She even documented it all in an email to me and even got a copy of the "Priceless" video he had shown me. I thought she was doing all the right things, she was formerly an actual HR employee after all. But then that changed. It wasn't just the conspicuous statements she made to him when they were in the hallway outside my cube. I think she got in trouble; probably for documenting the incident in email. I began to think that the purpose of HR was not to resolve issues like this, it was just to sweep stuff like this under the rug.

Nothing substantial changed until I walked into Kirk Tavener's office and mentioned that something illegal was going on in his office. A few days later, it was announced that we were all going to be reporting to another manager. Kirk Tavener was going to become a Services Executive, whatever that was.

I was given two back-to-back promotions following that incident but they were the only two promotions I got in my 5 years at Microsoft. I suspected they only gave them to me because they wanted to show that I did not suffer any damage or retaliation following the "Priceless" video incident. At one point, I told my managers manager that I wanted to give back the promotion I had received because I was very suspicious of my managers motives. She told me that I deserved the promotion and I left it at that. Later I would read an article about how sexual predators at work would target competent people so that the promotions and rewards the affair produced for the subordinate would not cause suspicion among co-workers.

But at this time it was gnawing at me. I am an ambitious person and I wanted the increase in salary. But salary is about accomplishment. The more I accomplish, the more I earn. This was confusing for me. Was I getting the promotions because I earned it or because they screwed up? These questions just kept chewing at me and I was trying to find answers but I was not getting the information I expected.

Making matters worse, I remembered other details that produced conflicts within me. I had accepted her statement that I had earned the promotions but then I started to doubt her. The reason was that, before all this unpleasantness had occurred, I had asked her to participate in a feedback process called a 360 Review. I had asked 21 people to fill out a questionaire about me and all in the space of a Friday afternoon, 14 of them completed and returned the lengthy form. She was one of the 7 that declined. She explained to me in person that she had not worked with me enough to provide that kind of feedback.

So then I remembered that when I was thinking about my promotions. That means she rubberstamped my promotion, if not all the others. That means my manager could effectively promote anyone for any reason that he wanted to. I was further shocked by that realization. Promotions are a big deal. Those promotions are deciding factors in where a person goes within the company, at least that was my perception. And here it was that I saw it was just one person making those decisions. Advancement was not about merit or ability or skill, it was about who liked you. I never could disprove that theory and it gnawed at me for a long time.

So Kirk Tavener took on that new role as Services Executive. He did not have any people reporting to him, as I had suggested. But after a few months, he was back at my desk talking about a team that he was setting up. I suspected that he did not have a guilty conscience simply because what he had done was tolerated and condoned at all levels of management. We were basically livestock that any manager could prey on for their personal desires. Another employee, I guess after hearing about my experience through the rumor mill, confided in me that she had experienced something similar. Microsoft had a sexual harassment policy, but obviously it was not being enforced. I would have believe they intended to enforce if they would have at least had some kind of sexual harassment training for the group after what Kirk did. And I knew that the incident was being spread around by rumor. I only talked about it with one of my trusted peers, but somehow it was getting around which caused even more frustration for me considering that I was suddenly getting promoted.

So I began to believe that they put rules on the books with no intention of enforcing them. The rules were there simply to refer back to when an incident actually occurred. The rationale is probably something like since we have a rule against that type of behavior, then don't blame us if it occurs. My argument then became down to about what is even the purpose of HR? What is the purpose of managers? Are we individual contributors there simply for the entertainment of managers or are we there to solve the problems the customers have with our software?

Finally, I quit Microsoft. Things were just getting too weird. Everywhere I went, whether it was overhearing whispers about "the running man" to all this stuff, it just felt like every single person in the world knew who I was. Among the many theories I would form in the following months, one was that I had triggered some kind of lawsuit against Kirk Taverner and his defense lawyers were looking for a way to discredit me by monitoring my private life. I also thought I was going to be offered a greater role within the company. I felt like they were vetting me for an executive position. An admin commented once that I was going to be a Vice-President. I didn't know where she had heard that, rumor I guess. I was expecting them to tell me that I was "pre-approved" to be an executive. But screw that. If Kirk Tavener was any kind of example, it told me that they not only needed new blood in the company, but the hell with jumping into that snake pit unless they were also bringing a lot of other new people. I also was serving as some kind of whistleblower about a particular business problem I had taken on my personal initiative to solve since my first days in the company. My first manager asked me if I wanted to go on a "jihad" to solve it and then she put me on a team that focused on such issues. It was a complex and complicated problem that had been talked over to the point of losing sight of the real issue. I didn't want to leave or move to another group until it was solved. I wanted to leave that organization a better place than I found it. But I finally just got sick of it all. By itself, I could have kept at that problem for several more years, but all that other stuff going on was just too much. I was looking for management to restore my trust in them but I never did hear the right words and so I quit without even another job lined up. But I believed I was doing the right thing. And I still do. I just hope it doesn't kill me.

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:48 AM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 03, 2005










Miles to go before I sleep

My trip to Gas Works Park wasn’t the first time I made a date with a bridge. To date it has been the last. I have become quite the expert on west coast bridges thanks to the internet. When I first made the decision to end my suffering, I didn’t yet know how I would do it. I had several ideas. One was just to cut my wrists. Another was carbon monoxide poisoning. I don’t have any guns so that was out, although it was the method I would be most confident about being fatal. There were some days early this year when I would have certainly used a gun on myself, it was just that painful to me feeling like I had no privacy. One of the first days when it was really excrutiating to me, this feeling that I had no privacy, I started writing about it in my journal. I was losing it. After a while I abruptly decided to just leave and go drive around for a while. As soon as I walked out of my apartment, a van with markings on it indicating it was from some mental health hospital turned the corner and drove right by me. You just can't tell me that was a coincidence. I had been seeing too many things like that happen, like the purple van. I don't know if some bonehead was try to "send me a message" like some moron that doesn't know how to talk, but all it did was reinforce the feelings that people were following and watching me. It also reinforced something else I had learned. Every time I caught them off-guard they screwed up just enough to give me some new clue. If not for that, I probably never would have noticed them. Eventually I became consumed with being unpredictable. But that also produced a lot of stress and anguish. All this anguish I was feeling was from the pressure of all these people watching me from the shadows. I have completely lost my private life. I feel like even my dreams are manipulated. I have seen too many examples to prove that loss of privacy.

So eventually I settled on jumping off a bridge. Something about drowning seemed like a fitting way to go out. I thought about just walking into Lake Coeur d’Alene and just hold myself under the water, but I decided against it. I had given that method of dying a lot of thought in the years following an incident where the Iranians nearly sunk us with an anti-ship missile in the Persian Gulf and from the months of wondering daily if we were going to silently run into an anti-ship mine just like our fellow ship experienced halfway through our deployment and from the distant thumping sound of countermeasures launching when an enemy fire control radar scanned us and from the unmistakeable machinery noises of the missiles going to the rails at any hour of the day or night while I lied there staring in the semi-dark at the ceiling of my coffin-like bunk six inches from my face wondering if the next sound I heard would be the sound of our missile igniting or whether it would be the sound of a bulkhead exploding from the impact of a missile on us or whether I would just hear nothing at all. The only bridge I knew about was the Golden Gate Bridge in S.F. I started researching it and found a lot of information about it and I was convinced the jump would be fatal, either from the direct impact or because it would knock me out long enough to drown.

So I left my apartment to drive down there and get it over with. But first I decided to stop out at my favorite little resort city of Coeur d’Alene because I have such good memories there of the Ironman triathlons I have been in. I was also going to stop about halfway out there in the middle of Washington state and look at some cliffs I had read about. Maybe those would work. I found some, but I wasn’t sure about it. I could just see myself jumping and then lying there in the sun for a few days with a broken back and vultures pecking at my eyes. Later I would reflect to myself that the problem with cliffs is you don’t know you are at one until you are looking over the edge. So I keep traveling and stopped in CDA, going down to sit by the city beach where the Ironman swim starts. And then the weird stuff starts happening again. I am completely absorbed in my problems, but then I start seeing weird things happen. I count four distinct groups of people that I can tell know who I am. Their behavior is a direct result of me being there. I had been so absorbed that it caught me by surprise to see what these people were doing. As I was driving away later, I would think more about it. And I realized what was happening. They were staging something around me and someone else was taking pictures of it from behind me. I have noticed a pattern of people taking pictures of my back. Here is a link to a photo of me in a 2003 triathlon where you can only see my back. I am the one on the very right edge, second from the top. I am mostly submerged in the photo but there is enough there for me to recognize. Even at that time I had a strong suspicion that people out there knew who I was. I think this picture may have been the one that started the trend because I made note of it when I saw it.

So that just gave me more reason to keep driving and get this over with. This is insanity. I am nobody. Why does it feel like people know who I am? I feel like I have crashed on to The Planet of the Apes. Then something else happened. I had crossed the state line into Oregon and I was heading west along the interstate making my way to the Portland area where I would turn south. I was in Oregon, it was night, and I stopped at this convenience store. There were two people behind the counter and one made a strange comment to another that I initially dismissed but then it started gnawing on me as I was driving. One asked the other something about whether she wanted to help somebody or another. The other replied that she “didn’t care”. I thought about that a long time because something about it was nagging me. And then again I realized they knew who I was. I had no idea where I was, I had never even driven through that area, I couldn’t even pick it out again on a map, it was just a random stop I made at some store, but yet these people know who I am. It is staggeringly insane. I am Truman freakin’ Burbank. So I thought more about those comments. I realized that they knew who I was, they knew I was on my way to die, and in response to a question about giving me any help, the answer is “I don’t care.” That really hurt. Even after all this anguish I had been feeling, something new would come along and teach me another lesson about pain.

I would keep thinking about it more but I later reached a different conclusion. Maybe they didn’t actually know where I was going. Maybe they didn’t know my plans. They knew who I was but they didn’t know what I was planning to do. They thought I was just taking a road trip to try to clear my head or something. I was still a trivial person to them in the sense of leaving me alone, concern for my private life was just a triviality, but maybe what the other person meant was that she didn’t care about my private life. She was trying to express that she objected to the way I was being treated and she didn’t want to participate in it. Later, when I was near Portland and literally at another crossroads, going south meant death, turning north meant going back to my apartment to continue looking for clues that would steer me out of this tormenting experience, it was that alternative interpretation of her comments that made me turn north, along with another reason I will describe later. I had to give it a lot of deliberation because I was almost out of money and if I wanted to go south again, I would have to do it on foot.

That wasn’t the last time someone’s behavior influenced me into not jumping. Something like that happened early into my journey to Gas Works Park. But I’ll write about that later. There are some other details about that trip through Oregon that I want to describe, but I’ll save that for later too. This is exhausting. I have been fighting with this for years now. I just wish I could get back to work and feel again like I am making a difference. Only then can I get back into my Ironman triathlon pursuits. I was planning to complete at least one Ironman triathlon every year until I get too old to finish one. That is the good life for me. This, today, these past few years, is just torture. What have I become? Who am I? Is this all happening because I have become The Runaway Geek? When will I know what is going on? I don't care whether people stop doing what they were doing, giving me all those clues, it is too late for stopping to do any good. What I have to know is why they were doing it in the first place.

posted by H.V.O.M at 3:03 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 03, 2005










This is just insane.

Saturday, September 3, 2005 · Last updated 3:28 p.m. PT
New Orleans left to the dead and dying
By ALLEN G. BREED
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

NEW ORLEANS -- Thousands more bedraggled refugees were bused and airlifted to salvation Saturday, leaving the heart of New Orleans to the dead and dying, the elderly and frail stranded too many days without food, water or medical care.

No one knows how many were killed by Hurricane Katrina's floods and how many more succumbed waiting to be rescued. But the bodies are everywhere: hidden in attics, floating among the ruined city, crumpled on wheelchairs, abandoned on highways.

And the dying goes on










In Mississippi, a feeling of neglect

“We understand that New Orleans also was devastated by Hurricane Katrina, but surely this nation has the resources to rescue both that metropolitan (area) and ours,” the newspaper editorialized, saying survival basics like ice, gasoline and medicine have been too slow to arrive.

“We are not calling on the nation and the state to make life more comfortable in South Mississippi, we are calling on the nation and the state to make life here possible,” the paper wrote.

posted by H.V.O.M at 3:41 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 03, 2005










Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe I'll hear something from somebody tomorrow.

posted by H.V.O.M at 5:59 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 03, 2005










Henry laughed defiantly.

Literature Network>Jack London>White Fang>Chapter 2
Henry laughed defiantly. "I ain't been trailed this way by wolves before, but I've gone through a whole lot worse an' kept my health. Takes more'n a handful of them pesky critters to do for yours truly, Bill, my son."


Last summer, when I was feeling more confusion than despair, I put that excerpt into my journal to try to cheer myself up. The better part of my youth before the military was spent trekking through the wooded swamps of south Arkansas evading the cottonmouths and copperheads and other pesky critters in pursuit of adventure worthy of a Jack London novel. That was freedom out there despite the danger. My favorite story from London was To Build A Fire. I thought about that story a lot during my youth as I stood at my deer stand with frozen toes. White Fang is a close second and I remember admiring Henry in that story.

I was reminded of that journal entry I made last year when I was reading yesterday about the Google-Microsoft lawsuit over one of their suits. There is something in there about Google wanting to chase that guy "like wolves" and it just reminds of how much I wonder who was reading my journal. I've known it was happening for a long time, I just didn't know who was doing it. Eventually I would realize that I have the same level of privacy as Truman Burbank. And it just keeps getting worse. I can live through this I think, but damn, you spying bastards could at least do something to take the edge off all this. I can visualize you all out there scratching your heads saying to someone else "We've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas."

posted by H.V.O.M at 6:54 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 03, 2005










Chechaquo

This is an excerpt from To Build A Fire that made an impression with me early on and has felt especially relevant for the past few years:

But all this--the mysterious, far-reaching hairline trail, the absence of sun from the sky, the tremendous cold, and the strangeness and weirdness of it all--made no impression on the man. It was not because he was long used to it. He was a new-comer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter. The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.

posted by H.V.O.M at 7:30 PM | 2 comments

Saturday, September 03, 2005










Everybody Was Kai-Fu Fightin'

This article leads me to believe that Ballmer isn't the jolly, diplomatic leader that I assume his image consultants want him to be. The article makes him sound more like the Mom character from that cancelled-by-evil-monkeys TV show Futurama. Say, why can't Ballmer become Truman for awhile? I'm tired of playing of this game. I would take my toys and go home if I still had any, not to mention a home.

Excerpt:

The details about Ballmer were in a declaration by former Distinguished Engineer Marc Lucovsky, who in November 2004 told Ballmer he was leaving for Google. Lucovsky said Ballmer threw a chair across his office and cussed out Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt, saying, "I'm going to ... bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going ... to kill Google."

posted by H.V.O.M at 10:02 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 03, 2005










He said what?

This article gives us more information on what Ballmer allegedly said to Lucovsky. I can visualize him saying all this while he jumps around his office the way he used to jump around while coming out on stage at the company meetings. Also, they blanked out the expletives he used, but for anyone who cusses a lot, like me, it is easy to decipher the words he was using. It's funny to hear that from him, I asked the p---- some questions a couple years ago and the p---- didn't even have the b---- to respond to me in person. What a f------ p----.

Excerpt:

"Ballmer said: 'Just tell me it's not Google,' " Lucovsky wrote.
"I told him it was Google.
"At that point, Mr. Ballmer picked up a chair and threw it across the room hitting a table in his office. Mr. Ballmer then said: 'F------ (Google Chief Executive) Eric Schmidt is a f------ p----. I'm going to f------ bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f------ kill Google.'

posted by H.V.O.M at 1:54 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, September 04, 2005










Maybe tomorrow

Maybe I'll finally hear something tomorrow.

I haven't written much publicly yet about the dream manipulation I mentioned earlier. It has been highly frustrating trying to explain this to other people and they just outright dismiss what I am talking about. I know it sounds crazy but I also know for a fact that it has been happening. The information they have been given me hasn't been so bad. It has been more like someone keeping me up-to-date on some kind of situation that has been going on. It has been like someone talking to me while I sleep. I don't remember actually hearing the voices, I just remember the dreams that were produced when my sleeping mind interpreted what I was hearing. I just remember feeling that something was wrong with it all. Some of the dreams just didn't feel like dreams my mind would normally produce. The dreams in question felt "suggested." I believe it has been happening since 1999. I remember there was a woman that I was dreaming of a lot. I remember many times waking up in the night and calling out her name because I felt like she was right there in the room. I felt like someone was telling me things that were all right to do. They were trying to talk me into asking her out or something. I never did initiate anything. There are a lot of other details that I am not ready to reveal, but that is basically what was happening. I was living in these cheap apartments most of the time and even the slightest external noises could be heard through the walls. I think someone somehow was talking to me while I slept to try to put ideas in my head. It has been an unsettling experience considering all the other strangeness I have experienced. It just doesn't make sense. I could understand it if I was someone like a celebrity or even that Runaway-woman a while back whose pictures were plastered all over the media. At least she knows why people recognize her because she has even seen her photos in the paper, in the news, etc. I have seen nothing like that, my photo, and I am certainly not complaining about that, but it just makes no sense. I know it is happening somewhere, I just don't know where. It is maddening. I am exhausted. So, anyway, I started seriously researching dream manipulation today for the first time. I grew even more unsettled at the realization that it had not occurred to me to research that topic considering how much other, even minor, stuff I look up on the internet every day. Why did I just today think about looking it up for more clues? I have been aware of it for years now. Why just today? That worries me because it makes me think they programmed my subconscious to avoid that topic. Now I worry that, since I mention it here, there are people silently taking related documents off the internet so I won't find them and find the clues that will help me unravel this maddening experience. But earlier today I did find some actual U.S. patents that detail processes for behavior control. That is where I started. I found some other astro-spiritual-type nonsense that I labored through reading and while it seemed kooky to me, I realized that it doesn't matter if I believed it, all that matters is whether the people tormenting me believe it. It wasn't all that long ago in this county, practically yesterday in terms of the history of man, that people were burning other people as witches. It didn't matter whether they were witches or not. It didn't matter if the crazy killers were right or wrong in the end; the victims were just as dead. I don't think people think I am a witch (whatever the correct term is for a male - warlock?) but when I was out walking around and I knew that people knew who I was and I knew they were talking conspicuosly because I was around, I heard some pretty strange stuff. Some worriesome stuff. Fortunately, I don't have any serious mental abnormalities, I'm just very stressed by it all, like someone that really needs a vacation, even people at the VA acknowledged that my problems are being produced by factors in my environment which are obviously beyond my control, otherwise I probably would have found it all very disturbing. The hardest part of it all, is that when I have seen concrete examples of strangers talking conspicuously about me, I become overwhelmed by all the other conversations. They are all clues. The world has become full of clues. Maybe tomorrow someone will give me the final clue that unravels all this. Or maybe someone with a goddamned spine will stand up and tell me why they hell they are doing this. As for me, I've got to go downstairs now and scrub the goddamned pots and pans again. Reminds me too much of when I was a teenager in the military.

posted by H.V.O.M at 8:21 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 05, 2005










Dream manipulation

I've still got a lot of work to do on this topic. Here is the first detail I found that seems to be a credible source to support my suspicions that someone has been interfering with my dreams for the past several years. Primarily what I am trying to document at this point is that such a thing is even possible.

Excerpt:

Events occurring around the sleeper during dreams are often incorporated, so that, for example, the words 'Robert, Robert, Robert' spoken to a sleeper led to his reporting a dream about a 'distorted rabbit'."

"The Oxford Companion to The Mind" by Richard L. Gregory

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:57 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 05, 2005










Nothing today

Well, it's after 4 pm already and I haven't heard anything. I guess they are going to keep me in suspense for another day. Maybe tomorrow.

posted by H.V.O.M at 4:11 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, September 06, 2005










This is g------ b---s---

It's not like I'm waiting for some d---a-- to call me back about a f------ job interview g------it. I'm waiting for the m-----f------ to tell my why they are f------ around with my f------ private life. I also realize now that I have a rather limited repertoire of curse words, especially for a former sailor. I guess I need to find a mentor on that and improve my capabilities.

posted by H.V.O.M at 4:49 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, September 06, 2005










On being homeless

The downside about being homeless is that I probably won't get to follow along the new episodes of ABC's TV-series Lost. I sure do like that series.

On the upside of being homeless, I now know my way around the streets of downtown Seattle. I used to never have a g------ clue where I was when driving around down there. But after wandering around down there on foot earlier this summer, I know the place like the back of my hand. So I got that going for me.

posted by H.V.O.M at 5:19 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, September 06, 2005










The Formation of Dreams

In the introductory chapter[1] we examined at length the opinion of scientific writers on the role of somatic stimuli in the formation of dreams, so that here we need only recall the results of this inquiry. We have seen that three kinds of somatic stimuli will be distinguished: the objective sensory stimuli which proceed from external objects, the inner states of excitation of the sensory organs, having only a subjective reality, and the bodily stimuli arising within the body; and we have also noticed that the writers on dreams are inclined to thrust into the background any psychic sources of dreams which may operate simultaneously with the somatic stimuli, or to exclude them altogether. In testing the claims made on behalf of these somatic stimuli we have learned that the significance of the objective excitation of the sensory organs -- whether accidental stimuli operating during sleep, or such as cannot be excluded from the dormant relation of these dream-images and ideas to the internal bodily stimuli -- has been observed and confirmed by experiment; that the part played by the subjective sensory stimuli appears to be demonstrated by the recurrence of hypnagogic sensory images in dreams;


Wow, I'm not sure if the Poindexter that wrote this article actually knows how to speak English, but I do get some idea that he is talking about how noises can influence a sleeping persons dreams. Furthermore, I assume this information is accepted scientific info and not just from some crackpot author on the web.



The old physiologist Burdach shows us that the mind is quite capable even during sleep of a correct interpretation of the sensory impressions which reach it, and of reacting in accordance with this correct interpretation, inasmuch as he demonstrates that certain sensory impressions which seem important to the individual may be excepted from the general neglect of the sleeping mind (as in the example of nurse and child), and that one is more surely awakened by one's own name than by an indifferent auditory impression; all of which presupposes, of course, that the mind discriminates between sensations, even in sleep. Burdach infers from these observations that we must not assume that the mind is incapable of interpreting sensory stimuli in the sleeping state, but rather that it is not sufficiently interested in them.

There is something here that makes me think about the reason I started noting the strange dreams, the ones that didn't seem normal. It is because I became interested in them. They were clues. It was information that I needed and was interested in. And yes, I have often questioned myself about this, about whether it is just a figment of my imagination. But I know there is at least one person out there that can corroborate all this. I have just seen to much weird stuff going on over these past few years. At one point, I was sleeping in basically a cocoon of aluminum foil to see what kind it of effect that would have. It didn't have any effect and I continued having the strange dreams occasionally. That made me think that, unless there is something else going on, that it was something as simple as someone on the other side of the wall talking while I slept. I wondered if they were simply reciting a list of words to me that I interpreted or whether they were reading some kind of script dialogue to me.

Observation shows that external stimuli do not oblige me to dream, even though these stimuli appear in the dream-content as soon as I begin to dream -- supposing that I do dream. In response to a touch- or pressure-stimulus experienced while I am asleep, a variety of reactions are at my disposal. I may overlook it, and find on waking that my leg has become uncovered, or that I have been lying on an arm; indeed, pathology offers me a host of examples of powerfully exciting sensory and motor stimuli of different kinds which remain ineffective during sleep. I may perceive the sensation during sleep, and through my sleep, as it were, as constantly happens in the case of pain stimuli, but without weaving the pain into the texture of a dream. And thirdly, I may wake up in response to the stimulus, simply in order to avoid it.

In case you're following along as I make a post, you'll notice that I sometimes modify a post and add more information to the original post. I've thought about creating a new post for each detail I find later, but I find this easier to manage in terms of organizing this information. Anyway, this excerpt below supports my theory that I started listening to the people trying to communicate to me through my dreams because I wanted to know who the hell they were and why the hell they think they can screw with my head like this.

Yet a third alternative is possible- and it is the most probable of all- namely, that now and again special motives are operative to direct the attention to the visceral sensations which are constantly present.

I don't know what the author means in this next part about "psychic motives" but the rest of it is notable to me. For one thing, noises that I can't control bother me while I am awake and I assume bother me when I am asleep. I am thinking I have a reason, or motive, to listen as much as possible while asleep, to sounds around me. And I think it has something to do with the little noises, or the minor noises, that one might normally dismiss. I suspect it goes back to being in the Persian Gulf and hearing those countermeasures launching. They were a lot less noticable than say, the missile launchers, but they had a completely different meaning. It was easy to not hear them because the noise wasn't as intrusive as the other noises. If you weren't listening for it, you could miss hearing them. It was a bad noise to hear because it meant bad things were about to happen. And compounding the problem, we rarely fired them in practice, unlike the machinery of the missile launchers which we heard a lot when trying to sleep. And I had actually seen the countermeasures fired when I was on my first ship. So anyway, I think my mind is tuned to listen for minor noises and I don't know how to turn it off because I haven't had a good nights sleep in decades and that is how they started getting into my dreams. This is like some kind of freakin' cult is after me or something, some kind of freaky hippie Helter-Skelter bullshit. It is also makes me think of what London was trying to say in that excerpt I listed below. I think he was saying that sometimes people survive by blind luck and other times they survive because they were sweating the details.

In my own case, since I am an excellent sleeper, and obstinately refuse to allow myself to be disturbed during sleep on any pretext whatever, this intrusion of external causes of excitation into my dreams is very rare, whereas psychic motives apparently cause me to dream very easily.

posted by H.V.O.M at 6:04 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, September 06, 2005










Trauma of Katrina may last a lifetime

Trauma of Katrina may last a lifetime
Post-traumatic stress disorder will likely be widespread, experts say


Boy, I can relate to that. I don't think I will ever again have a happy day until I am out there fighting the clock on some Ironman triathlon course.


What is PTSD?
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to a terrifying event or ordeal in which grave physical harm occurred or was threatened. Traumatic events that can trigger PTSD include violent personal assaults such as rape or mugging, natural or human-caused disasters, accidents, or military combat. PTSD can be extremely disabling.

PTSD can be complicated by the fact that it frequently occurs in conjunction with related disorders such as depression, substance abuse, problems of memory and cognition and other physical and mental health disorders. The condition is also associated with impairment of a person's ability to function in social or family life, including occupational instability, marital problems and divorce, family discord and difficulties in parenting.

After I left the VA, based on some information I found, I determined that they are treating me for PTSD. They just won't give me an official diagnosis because that means I could get disability payments for it and it seems the government is tightening the criteria for who receives the payments. On one hand I talked to people that were getting the payments, something like $2300 a month, for experiences a lot lighter than mine, but on the other I don't really care. I am not disabled. I am just experiencing some kind of restriction, some kind of external influences that restrict how I control the direction of my life. And even though I suffer from PTSD which is accompanied by depression, the PTSD is not that severe, although the depression has been at times over the past decade. I was getting a handle on it though but I don't tolerate this meddling into my personal life by you spying bastards. I suspect it was the very fact I was working through these problems with depression without the need for medication or other treatment that generated the interest in my personal life. As long as I can get back to a stable life, without the feeling that people are trying to interfere in my personal life, as long as I can get back to doing something productive and especially get back into Ironman physical condition, I will be fine. So even if they were to give me an offical diagnosis of PTSD I wouldn't accept it because disabled people, not to be confused with people with handicaps, do not do Ironman triathlon.

posted by H.V.O.M at 7:59 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, September 06, 2005










Storm clouds

G------ I hate this blog. This is the last g------ thing I want to do, to draw even more attention to myself. I don't know what else to do though. It feels like this is just going to keep dragging on and on and on. It is not even a matter of patience or a lack thereof. I have a great deal of patience. But I have been given no indication this will all end at some point, whatever the h--- this is. Having patience is the ability to wait until the end. I don't even know if there is an end to this b----s----. Who do I have to throw a g------ chair at to get some g------ answers?

posted by H.V.O.M at 8:51 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, September 06, 2005










So I got that going for me too.

I now began to consider seriously my condition, and the circumstance I was reduced to, and I drew up the state of my affairs in writing, not so much to leave them to any that were to come after me, for I was like to have but few heirs, as to deliver my thoughts from daily poring upon them, and afflicting my mind; and as my reason began now to master my despondency, I began to comfort myself as well as I could, and to set the good against the evil, that I might have something to distinquish my case from worse; and I stated it very impartially, like debtor and creditor, the comforts I enjoyed against the miseries I suffered, thus: -

Evil: I am cast upon a horrible desolate island, void of all hope of recovery. Good: But I am alive, and not drowned, as all my ship's company was.

Evil: I am singled out and separated as it were, from all the world, to be miserable. Good: But I am singled out, too, from all the ship's crew to be spared from death; and He that miraculously saved me from death can deliver me from this condition.

Evil: I am divided from mankind, a solitaire, one banished from human society. Good: But I am not starved, and perishing on a barren place, affording no sustenance.

Evil: I have no clothes to cover me. Good: But I am in a hot climate, where, if I had clothes, I could hardly wear them.

Evil: I am without any defence or means to resist any violence of man or beast. Good: But I am cast on an island where I see no wild beasts to hurt me, as I saw on the coast of Africa; and what if I had been shipwrecked there?

Evil: I have no soul to speak to, or relieve me. Good: But God wonderfully sent the ship in near enough to the shore, that I have gotten out so many necessary things as will either supply myself even as long as I live.

Upon the whole, here was an undoubted testimony, that there was scarce any condition in the world so miserable, but there was something negative or something positive to be thankful for in it; and let this stand as a direction from the experience of the most miserable of all conditions in this world, that we may always find in it something to comfort ourselves from, and to set in the description of good and evil, on the credit side of the account.



Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe



I was setting in some park in Seattle a couple months re-reading this book as well as strongly expecting that at any minute someone would walk up to me and give me the information I need to get back to my life. I realized this is another one of those passages that struck a chord with me long ago. And oddly enough, of everything I've read lately, this seems the most familar. While the circumstances are different, and aside from the superstition aspect, this passage really seems to capture the essence of my existence over the past two years. I would gladly trade places with Robinson Crusoe right now - he has it pretty sweet.

Just like Crusoe was describing, I can usually find some positive aspect to any negative situation. But I like to sometimes throw in some sarcasm to it, I find that helps me cope, especially in situations like this because I can't help but laugh to myself when I reflect on the ridiculousness of it all. A simple example is telling myself that being homeless is good because I get to catch up on my reading, so I got that going for me.

I am finding it hard though to find the 'good' lately in my deteriorating predicament. They are kicking me out of here in less than ten days. And while I hate being in this shelter, it is not this shelter I hate, I just hate being in a shelter. This is probably by far the best shelter around. It is definitely better than the other shelters I have been in this summer. And so my condition is only going to become worse when I leave here regardless of where I go. The only way it could get better is to get back to the life I was trying to create.

It would be easy for me to stay here. All I have to do is come up with some kind of measurable goal, such as something like getting back into running, something that will show some kind of progress, but that is only a secondary goal at this point. I know how to manage my life and live independently, I don't need a manager for my personal life. But that isn't really the issue, the issue of someone trying to manage my personal life in the context of this shelter. What I do need is for the people that have been spying on me to step forward and admit it. That is my only goal. That is the only objective I will focus on; finding out who it is. Nothing else matters.

posted by H.V.O.M at 9:55 AM | 0 comments

Wednesday, September 07, 2005










Runnin' Down A Dream

Runnin' Down A Dream
It was a beautiful day, the sun beat down
I had the radio on, I was drivin'
trees flew by, me and Del were singin' little Runaway
I was flyin'
Yeah runnin' down a dream
that never would come to me
workin' on a mystery, goin' wherever it leads
runnin' down a dream
I felt so good like anything was possible
I hit cruise control and rubbed my eyes
the last three days the rain was un-stoppable
it was always cold, no sunshine
Yeah runnin' down a dream
that never would come to me
workin' on a mystery, goin' wherever it leads
runnin' down a dream
I rolled on as the sky grew dark
I put the pedal down to make some time
there's something good waitin' down this road
I'm pickin' up whatever's mine
Yeah runnin' down a dream
that never would come to me
workin' on a mystery, goin' wherever it leads
runnin' down a dream


Damn, I love that song. I remember very well when it was released. It was 1989, I had about six months left in the navy. I spent those last six months deployed to the Mediterranean, departing the U.S. shortly after Hurricane Hugo. I listened to that Full Moon Fever cassette over and over, almost constantly. This song was like my theme song for the foreseeable future for when I got out of the navy. This song made me think of freedom, I was going to get some kind of cool convertible like maybe a Chevy Chevelle and just drive. I got a super-cool, red, 1990 Mazda RX-7 instead and while it wasn't convertible, it did have a good sunroof. Damn, that was a great car, it should be a crime they discontinued that model. I enjoyed the Full Moon Fever album so much it even changed my music preferences. Up til then I had been primarily interested in country music but that changed after Full Moon Fever. And thus I became the sophisticated, international playboy you all know and love today.

posted by H.V.O.M at 9:47 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, September 07, 2005










Maybe tomorrow.

Maybe I'll finally get some answers tomorrow.

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:40 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, September 07, 2005










Nothing today.

Another day of trying to breathe through this block of carbonite. Maybe they'll unfreeze me tomorrow.

posted by H.V.O.M at 9:36 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, September 08, 2005










M.C.

Washington and Demme grant Marco with a helplessness that seemed to be lacking in Sinatra's portrayal; his broken man Marco is a far cry from Sinatra's in the fact that while Sinatra all too easily asserts himself from the experiments conducted on him, Washington makes us know that such things always haunt the person -- seeing his home in disarray, obsessed with what happened to him while on duty, looking like a man who is about to lose it at any moment. It clearly becomes his story as he is its soul, and ultimately, Shaw's liberator.


Watching this movie last year gave me another clue about the nature of my problem. There was a scene in the movie that I made a direct connection to. It was when the scientist-guy was telling Denzel’s character that maybe all this was the dream and he was still in the war. I had written about that very thing earlier in my journal. I had written about the recurring dreams I used to have where I would wake up back on the ship and we were still in the Gulf. I had dreamt all this life, it was still 1988, but I had dreamed ahead a few years. It was an unsettling dream. So anyway, that told me, combined with everything else going on, that this movie had something to do with me, such as the writers were tracking me somehow, for some reason. There was something else about it. I got the sense there were three factions out there that knew who I was. Until I saw this movie, I was only thinking of two, both at Microsoft. I also wondered about the coincidence of M.C. for both the title of the movie and for Microsoft Corporation. So anyway, I started thinking in terms of three factions. One faction was my supporters at Microsoft. The second faction was my detractors at Microsoft (why I had detractors, I didn’t understand.). And the new third faction I was seeing was a group of people that supported me but did not support Microsoft. I don’t know who they were, but I sensed their presence after watching this movie and I felt some kind of connection to Denzel’s character. It was especially relevant to me because I was feeling really disturbed about those strange, seemingly “suggested” dreams I was having. The dreams weren’t telling me to do anything wrong, but just imagine something like that is happening to you. It doesn’t matter if they are telling you to do something wrong, all that matters is that the people responsible are arrogant enough to think they have a right to screw with your mind like that. The other connection I felt was that part with him sitting in the library with the headphones on researching news articles while a camera looks down on him. That was me and they were watching me.

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:03 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, September 08, 2005










Tangible Employment Action

Interesting reading. This is the first time I have read through this document about employer liability on sexual harassment by supervisors. There are many, many sections I would like to excerpt, but to avoid cluttering up this page, I have listed a select excerpt below. This document is good to read, but it also gives me reason to worry. It tells me why they have continued to spy on me all these years. They are trying to get something on me to use as what they call an "affirmative defense". They know they are liable because my manager undertook a "tangible employment action" after he showed me that pornographic video asking for sexual favors. That action included the immediate and unusal promotions I received following the incident. The promotions were given to me to improve my mood and to generally appease me into not complaining further. The long-term impact was to make me highly distrustful of management. Not to mention that I almost ran my legs off to relieve the tension and stress and depression that incident caused me. After that incident, I completed 5 full marathons (26.2 miles) as well as participating in another Ironman triathlon and some shorter triathlons IN ONE YEAR. Maybe that is why I heard them call me The Running Man. I was planning to do even more marathons during that year, but it proved to be beyond my physical capacity. I also remember how he told me my complaints were preventing him to getting a managers job in another group and he suggested that if I were to recant, I could get a job in that group at a much higher level. I remember even in 2003 he was still begging me to recant and I remember sending him an farewell email that he had been asking for. I did not recant. Over the past few days, I have started wondering what would happen if he were to lose a lawsuit over this. I wonder if he would have to register as a sex offender. That would seem extreme. Even after all this experience of mine, I just think it would be wrong and something like that would not be appropriate for what he did. True, he did something that was sexually offensive, but I just can't see him having to go through life with something like that tattooed on his forehead. Now, if he had been a teacher and he had molested a child, then I definitely think it would be appropriate. But not for something like this. Unless - maybe - he has a history of this kind of behavior. Reading through that document, I started remembering some details - details that can be corroborated - that maybe he had done something like that before to other people he had authority over. And he made it clear on many times that he had ultimate authority over me, my employment at Microsoft was at his pleasure. I was talking with someone from King County about this yesterday and I was thinking about why what Kirk Tavener did was so offensive to me. It is because I think about something like that happening to my mother and it just infuriates me. She had to work really hard in her youth to support my sister and me and the thought of some wormy little jerkass doing something like that to her just sent me over the edge. I would say that was the basis for my reaction. It also made me wonder strongly if there was any honor at all in this company. I heard management from the top down talking all this stuff about the importance of customers, but it seemed to me that customers only mattered in terms of how much money we could squeeze out of them and get away with it. Someone told me that Microsoft likes to think of itself similar to the military. My response was that the military has honor, and if anything, Microsoft is like the pirate military. I have also heard that Bill Gates likes to fashion himself as Napoleon. I'm not sure where I heard that, I do remember reading it while at Microsoft, in some Microsoft document, perhaps it was in one of those oral histroy documents. That makes me think of something else I read: Everyone thought Napoleon was a genius until he lost. And then I thought about how for every Napoleon, there has to be a Wellington. If Gates is Napoleon, then someone else must be Wellington although I don't know who he or she is.



First Prong of Affirmative Defense: Employer's Duty to Exercise Reasonable Care

The first prong of the affirmative defense requires a showing by the employer that it undertook reasonable care to prevent and promptly correct harassment. Such reasonable care generally requires an employer to establish, disseminate, and enforce an anti-harassment policy and complaint procedure and to take other reasonable steps to prevent and correct harassment. The steps described below are not mandatory requirements - - whether or not an employer can prove that it exercised reasonable care depends on the particular factual circumstances and, in some cases, the nature of the employer's workforce. Small employers may be able to effectively prevent and correct harassment through informal means, while larger employers may have to institute more formal mechanisms.53

There are no "safe harbors" for employers based on the written content of policies and procedures. Even the best policy and complaint procedure will not alone satisfy the burden of proving reasonable care if, in the particular circumstances of a claim, the employer failed to implement its process effectively.54 If, for example, the employer has an adequate policy and complaint procedure and properly responded to an employee's complaint of harassment, but management ignored previous complaints by other employees about the same harasser, then the employer has not exercised reasonable care in preventing the harassment.55 Similarly, if the employer has an adequate policy and complaint procedure but an official failed to carry out his or her responsibility to conduct an effective investigation of a harassment complaint, the employer has not discharged its duty to exercise reasonable care.

posted by H.V.O.M at 4:58 PM | 0 comments

Friday, September 09, 2005










Don't tell me what I can't say.

Someone asked me recently what it was that finally became intolerable about working at Microsoft, what was that "straw that broke the camel's back."

It was having something important to say and being told by a senior manager to watch what I say. That was the final straw.

No one tells me to be quiet when I have something important to say and so I quit, all the while thinking they would eventually take my complaints seriously.

posted by H.V.O.M at 7:46 PM | 0 comments

Friday, September 09, 2005










My Future's So Bright

You know, this would actually all be kind of fun. All this stuff happening like the example I gave below about the Manchurian Candidate movie. There have been many other connections I have observed. I don't have the concrete evidence to prove it all yet, but as long as there is air in my lungs I will believe it is personally connected to me somehow. If it wasn't so destructive to my personal life, mainly because I just have no experience at this kind of thing on this level. If it wasn't for this black cloud (yes, I saw the two of you on the beach last time I was in Coeur d'Alene) over me, this would probably be pretty fun. Who wouldn't want to have the kind of influence I seem to have? But, for some reason, I am not supposed to know about it. I can't fully explain that part. It's all kinda cool, but believe me, I do not want it and will actively try to keep it from continuing. The absolute last thing I want is to be a public figure.

I still can't explain why it is happening to me, but I do understand why I eventually recognized it. It reminds of other times I have experienced something like this, but the other times have been on a much more limited scale. On a basic level, this reminds me of a time long ago. My mother remarried and we moved to another town in Southwestern Arkansas and I started 9th grade in that new town. I experienced the phenomenon of being popular because I was the new kid. I kind of liked the attention but I was very shy and didn't really know what to think about it. Among the most memorable experiences was when a teacher was making a big deal about the results of some kind of essay exercise. Apparently, several, I don't know how many but it must have been a lot based on the way the teacher was going on about it to not just my class but also to other classes, girls had written about me for their essay. I think my own essay had been about some kind of tale I had made up about some grand adventure my step-brother and I had while out hunting in the woods. He and I were the real-life version of Jack London’s Bill and Henry. He was killed in a car wreck years later when I was home on leave and I blamed myself for his death for years afterward because I thought about how I initially planned to drive myself that night but then decided against and rode with him and if he had not had to drop me off at our parents house later that night he would not have even been on that road where he crashed after a strong storm came through and I thought about the other times on that same road when we were in danger of crashing with me driving such as the time when the hood flew up on my pickup as we approached a big curve and I would remember when I was at his funeral that just the year earlier when I was home on emergency leave for another funeral he had told me that he was sorry that my dad had died. I still miss that kid. Anyway, I kind of liked the attention of being the new kid, but being very shy I didn’t know what to think of it. But I gave it a lot of thought over the years, much like my exercise in writing tales of adventure has given me a greater sense of the difference between truth and fiction.

One theory I have had in all this is that some fictional characters I am seeing, in movies like the Manchurian Candidate, represent some attributes of my personality. In other words, one character's strongest trait reflects one of my traits and another character represent one of my other traits. Still other characters may reflect another actual person that is somehow connected to me. I think it was Manchurian Candidate that started me thinking in these terms because it was easy to pick out a lot of my own characteristics. I wrote earlier about those and another one I have been thinking about was the character Rosie. There was a similar girl in my life recently before this all turned so weird that I was crazy about. But it felt like someone was trying to thwart us. That was unsettling and I certainly didn't want to get her involved in this craziness. Then I started thinking about the significance of the Shaw character. I started thinking he might have something to do with me as well. I started thinking this is all about Microsoft. I suspect they started some kind of campaign to let people watch Microsoft people at work. We were zoo exhibits and the audience got to watch us in our natural habitats. We were goldfish in a bowl that people could see into but we could not see out of. But I suspect what happened is I became popular and that made me a political target, or so is one of my theories. It sounds paranoid but it makes sense to me and I will believe to my dying day there is someone out there that can corroborate all this. So anyway, the politicians took notice of me, probably the Republicans because anyone listening to me would probably classify me as a Democrat although that is not necessarily true and I am more of a centrist and could fall into either category. My misfortune is that I had not sworn my allegiance to any particular politician and their associated party so that made me someone to keep an eye on and if I am becoming popular, then I needed to be marginalized until they know which side I am on. I think they call this kind of person in the political arena a "dark horse." I certainly wasn't a political candidate but yet it felt like I was. It made no sense. I literally felt like a political candidate last year for some crazy reason and I know for certain someone out there can corroborate that. So anyway, that is what the Shaw character was supposed to represent. It represented Microsoft putting me on the public stage and I believe with the intention of turning me into a public figure and into politician, representing their interests of course. But me, I am Denzel's character trying to shoot Shaw's character because I want nothing to do with all this especially because they are trying to do it all by manipulating me.

Yesterday, one of the staff here suggested that I write a screenplay about all this. Initially I dismissed the idea because I explained that I don't write screenplays. I have no idea how to write a screenplay. If it was something I was going to do it would be something I would have to study for a while. I also explained another reason, which is the primary reason: I don't know the ending to all this yet. I said I might do it after all this has ended. But I thought more about it later and it became an intriguing idea. I thought of a way to do it without having reached the end. At the risk of creating something cheesy, I decided I would model the story after a recurring dream I was having for years after leaving the navy. In my recurring dream, I would wake up back on my ship, the USS Wainwright (CG-28), and it was still 1988 and we were still deployed to the Persian Gulf as part of Operation Earnest Will and Operation Praying Mantis. In my dream, I woke up and realized that I had dreamed all these years afterwards. All this life had never happened, existing only in my dreams, and I was still in reality in the PG. It was unsettling. So I'm thinking this story or screenplay as they call it does the same thing basically. You don't really know if I ever left the Gulf. The beginning and the end both feature scenes where I am standing on the deck of the ship looking down on the water and the following scene is me standing on a bridge looking down on the water. Did I survive either one? I just don't know.

If I write the story with the ending known, it will be modeled after the recurring dream that the first recurring dream turned into. The later recurring dream is about going home. Most of my free thoughts while in the Persian Gulf was about going home. I had a great vacation planned when this was all over. I was going back home to Arkansas and I was taking my girlfriend with me and I was especially looking forward to seeing her again because her support had been beyond expectation while I was over there. I remember shortly after she and I met, I had to leave on a short deployment to the North Atlantic and I was actually looking forward to being away from her because she was bugging me but not really in a clingy way but more in a zany way. But by the time of Persian Gulf, I was in love with her and my world was going to revolve around her. The best day of our deployment was the day we left the PG and made our way back to our homeport, about a month away. On the way, we stopped in my favorite port of Palma de Mallorca, Spain, and it was certainly an extreme from Bahrain, our only port call in the PG. Life really starting to take a turn for the worse beginning when we were less than a week from returning home. It was July 3, 1988. That was when the cruiser that relieved us shot down a civilian airliner. I may write more about this later in the context of how that may be something affecting my situation even today. At that time, we didn’t really know what had happened and I remember one of my peers describing how they Iranians had flown F-14’s behind commercial airliners while we were there in order to avoid detection. Later I would see news video of sailors on that ship that really etched into my mind. The first detail I noticed was that the guys on the ship in the news video were just wearing t-shirts. Our captain had been very strict about us having to wear long-sleeved working uniforms while in the PG because it would prevent burns if we were attacked but I found it annoying. The next thing that struck me was seeing them standing at a radar screen and cheering when they saw their missile hit the aircraft. That reminded me very clearly of a time only a few months earlier when I had been cheering when our first missile was fired at the Iranian military. Then we got back to port and there seemed to be a million people on the pier waiting for us to arrive and welcome us home. I stood there on the bridge as we arrived and had the strongest feeling that we were the returning football team, returning after victory in the championship game. As a foreshadowing of things to come, everyone else’s wives and girlfriends were there, but mine was nowhere to be seen. I was…I don’t know what I was feeling. After what seemed like an eternity, they called me up to the quarterdeck and there she was standing in the helo hanger. We spent the weekend together, but then things turned weird. The first thing that hit me was that she told me she wasn’t going to come back home with me. Everything seemed to fall apart after that. We all wanted to take leave after returning to port but someone had to stay on the ship, so half of us got to take the first two weeks off while the other half had to wait for them to come back. I was on the second rotation and had to wait two weeks before I could leave. I had to stay on the ship in the days but I could leave in the evenings. It was good to just be back in Charleston and even just being on the base seemed like a vacation. But it was somewhere around this time I realized to my great despair that my pickup’s license plates had expired. I really, really wanted to just get out and drive and drive around to anywhere and nowhere. But I was stuck. Fortunately my mom sent me the renewed tags from Arkansas before my leave started and I started my road trip back there. I can’t remember exactly when she told me, but some time around the time we returned she told me some even more startling news. She and my step-father had split up and they didn’t want to tell me until I got back from the Gulf. They sold the house we lived in while I was in high school, my home. The significance of that change didn’t fully hit me until I finally got back to my hometown of Ashdown and I had to drive around looking for this new place she was living. She had moved into this little apartment in town and I had to drive around looking for it and I even had to walk up there and knock on the door of what I thought was her place. This was a drastic difference from all the other times I had come home. That house we had out there in the country was the only home my sister and I had ever known. My step-brother and I worked liked dogs fixing that place up. It was spectacular after we got through with it. I could not have been more proud of it. All the time in the PG I had imagined being back there just like the other times I had come home on leave when I was on my first ship, USS Taylor (FFG-50). The summers were incredible there sitting out there in our huge, green yard with the wide open fields in the back and the deep woods of my youthful adventures and a wooded area in the front that I called the “pin-oak flats.” I can’t even begin to describe how relaxing that place was to me and that was all I had looked forward to when I was in the PG, going back there with my girlfriend and relaxing. I was remembering how I used to come home back there on leave and sneak in late at night and my mom would wake me up in the morning smiling and glad to see me and telling me I should really wake them up when I come in because if there is a fire or something they need to know I am there. I was sure glad to be back there all those times. So here I am, never in my life have I had to knock on my mother’s door and I know at this point I will never go home again. That place didn’t even exist anymore because the people they had sold it to let it burn down at some point. So I stayed there with my mother at her apartment and I was glad to see her. She had apparently been there for a while because she told me about when she heard about our action against the Iranian military while she was in this apartment. She told me the details and I could imagine her there alone while, as she told me, she was lying in bed with the radio on and her eyes flying open one morning when they announced “The USS Wainwright was sunk in the Persian Gulf today.” She told me she was glued to the TV for the next 12 hours waiting for CNN to report something about it. I have wondered many times whether she found out then that we were indeed safe or whether she had to wait until my letter arrived, probably weeks later, reassuring her that we were unharmed. I was really hoping to see some of my friends from high school while I was there but everyone seemed to be gone or married with kids. I needed to blow off some steam. I drove to the usual hangout in town and tried talking to someone I knew from high school but he didn’t seem to even know who I was. I was looking for a good buddy of mine that my step-brother and I used to run around with while I was home on leave but never did find him. After a couple days I met a new girl and spent the rest of my leave hanging out with her and pretty much staying drunk. Soon I was back on the ship, but I still had some pretty low points to reach yet, relatively speaking for me. Much of my off-time when we were in port was spent getting drunk and I was drinking almost a case of beer every night. I would start off drinking a twelve-pack, smoke a lot of cigarettes, and then usually go get another six-pack and drink it before passing out. Eventually, things would level out and I pulled myself back out of that hole but I really wasn’t the same after that.

So anyway, I wish I knew who to thank for this great privilege of living like I am some kind of freakin’ zoo exhibit for these past few years. So there are all these negative consequences to all this. All those people following me around is just too weird. For the most part I have viewed them as necessary for some reason, as if they are there for my benefit, they are on my side. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it. And in my more paranoid moments, I have been especially distressed by it all. The most notable incident to highlight the uncertainty of it all occurred last year, in what seems like a lifetime ago. I was grocery shopping at a Wal-Mart, it was one of those super stores. I enjoyed shopping there because they had the best prices in town and I was trying to stretch out my savings as much as possible. Back in those days, my reserves of optimism, which produced hope for the future, was still running at levels near 100%. I guess I am down to about 2% at this point. Anyway, I just knew, as I have every day since then, that any day someone was going to step up and explain this all to me. There has got to be a reason they are keeping me in suspense. I figured two more months at most. At worst, there is just no way this all can last past the end of 2004. So anyway, I liked shopping here because of the prices. I was in there shopping one day, walking down an aisle and I walked past what looked like a laptop bag on a lower shelf by itself. I continued walking around to another aisle wondering why that would be there and my thoughts soon turned to how that shouldn’t be there and then it struck me: that could be a bomb. It was such a crazy time with all the politicians trying to scare people as much as possible about the terrorist threat. By the time I circled back around to take a closer look, two basic theories had formed in my mind about it being a bomb. One was that it was there to blow up with me next to it. Later, when I had more time to think about it, that theory would have less weight because it did not go off when I first passed it by but I would think of other possible explanations. The second theory was that it was a trap. It would not go off when I was there, but rather after I had left. I had a paranoid image in my mind of security camera tape that was conveniently edited to clearly show me walking away from it and then the bag blowing up, probably with other shoppers walking by it. With those thoughts in my mind, I decided this was my problem. It was there because I was there. People were in danger simply because I was there. So I leaned over to pick it up, it was heavy, and carried it out in front of me by the shoulder strap while pushing my cart with my other hand all the while my brain was screaming at me that I am really screwing up. That is all I am thinking about at this point, about how I am screwing up. I have no idea if this thing is going to go off, either from remote detonation or from being moved around, and all these other people around me are about to get blown up because I am such a dumbass for moving it. I walk it back to the entrance to the warehouse-area because it if explodes, at least there won’t be nearly as many people back there. I hand it off to some guy and tell him they probably don’t want this thing lying around out there making people nervous. I leave and go back to shopping. That guy walks by me a few minutes and I know what he is doing but I won’t detail it here. I expected the police to question me about it before I left the store, but they never did. I was really becoming concerned about predictability by this time. People were following me and watching me and now this happens. Sometime later, I was back in there grocery shopping and I walked down another aisle, not the same one, but maybe one over, and there is another one of these damn laptop bags. But this time it is sitting in an empty grocery cart. I am relieved that I at least don’t have to pick it up this time. But as I walk towards that warehouse-area entrance again, pushing my cart ahead and pulling the laptop-bag-cart behind me, my brain is screaming at me again about screwing up. It feels like there are a million people around me. I wasn’t really looking at people because I just wanted to get this thing back there and it feels like every single person in the store is staring at me. One woman was walking right towards me and would walk right by me and it seemed like she was smiling at me which was strange but that word doesn’t begin to describe how I was feeling at seeing her smiling at me when I wasn’t sure if this thing was going to blow us both off the map. But it didn’t and I left it setting in there and went back to my shopping and I was thinking surely they are going to ask me about it this time. But they didn’t. And then I started feeling angry. This is bullshit. Then my rational side started telling me that if this happens a third time, I need to tell someone in authority. Something is very wrong here and people are clearly in danger. But it didn’t happen a third time and no one ever asked me about it. But from then on, my paranoia grew by an order of magnitude. From then on, every time I started my car, I wondered if it would explode. I had no idea. That went on for months. And months later, I decided to experiment with it and I wrote about it in my journal. And sure enough, they tested me on it. I won’t detail it here yet, but they tested me twice. And then I realized, those incidents in Wal-mart were probably just tests too. But why? And most importantly, and incredibly aggravating, the next time I see an unattended bag like that, will it be a bomb or not? What a bunch of bullshit, a load of manipulative bullshit. All I know now is that if I ever have a car again, every time I start it I will wonder if it will explode. And even now, I suspect it probably will someday. In the future, I will be thinking of ways to avoid having other people ride with me in my car because I worry that it will explode. That is craziness. And I know it is all just because I was being manipulated.

What a crazy, crazy world this has become.

I dream of home.

posted by H.V.O.M at 9:13 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 10, 2005










Work of the devil

Here is an article to support my theory about Microsoft's Manchurian Candidate. I think it was supposed to be me. I have the video game experience they need, I have some world experience that would at least get me noticed. They need someone with more experience than just playing video games. They need someone that has that video game mentality but that also has some real world experience. Microsoft obviously can't buy a friend in the U.S. government so it is my strong belief they wanted to place someone in there as their representative, their own Manchurian Candidate. I believe it was supposed to be me. Heck, I might have even gone along with it if not for their "Communistsoft" approach to this with a bunch of out-of-touch dictator-types trying to control my mind with a plan that would make Stalin proud. That reminds of something else I was thinking of last year when I felt like I was connected to everything going on. If I was forced into becoming some kind of political candidate, I could imagine there would be "Perrys for Kerry" and then there would have to be "Perrys Against Kerry" or something like "Fast Frigate Veterans For Kerry", etc. Pretty funny stuff.


Even if gamers are not quite as out of it as the popular imagination might suggest, they should realize that many people would probably agree with the senator. Most of the people who actually run this country did not grow up with the electronic literacy of the current generation. As a result, many modern technologies, like video games, can be legitimately threatening to them.

Doug Lowenstein, president of the Entertainment Software Association, put the entire issue in perspective.

"This is a classic case of one generation attacking the media of a younger generation," he said. "There are all of these people who may be mortified by the Godfather video game because it's too violent but then they'll go out and buy the Godfather trilogy of movies and let their kids watch it because they consider that great art. Many of the people now attacking video games screamed and yelled at their own parents for saying that rock 'n' roll was the devil and was leading to the destruction of American values. A lot of those people ended up going to Congress, and now they are saying the same thing about video games."

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:42 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 10, 2005










Art thou pale for weariness

I was reading this article yesterday about Dell and it made me think of two things. First, is a theory I had long ago and that theory is that I am caught up in some kind of effort to oust Bill Gates from control of Microsoft. Why I got caught up in it, I do not know, maybe because I already was The Microsoft Candidate. So anyway, the way I read this excerpted section below, along with some clues that were given to me even when I was at Microsoft by someone in the shadows, I suspect there is some friction between Ballmer and Gates.

"People always wonder how well a transition like this will work when the founder is staying very involved," Mr. Ballmer wrote in an e-mail message. But when people work together as well as Mr. Rollins and Mr. Dell do, he added, "it actually helps that the founder is staying involved, because you can continue to draw on each other's strengths." Mr. Ballmer has worked closely with both men, given the pre-eminence of both companies in the personal-computer universe.

As for the second thought this article gave me, that last excerpted sentence reminded me of something that happened while at Microsoft. I described this experience to someone else as the day the Sirius-starlamp dropped from the sky just like in The Truman Show. I was standing up in my desk talking to someone that was standing in the hallway 2 cubicles away. I won't name him here, but I used to sit across from him in my previous cubicle. I was talking happily about a new USB Flash Drive I had. I received it when I was at a conference a short time earlier, it was some kind of Information Worker conference I attended because that is my speciality, creating custom solutions for Microsoft Office applications. So anyway, I was standing there talking about this cool 128MB drive that was small enough to put on your key ring, and then I looked down at my Dell Dimension PC and I said, I don't know why Dell even puts floppy drives in these things anymore. I felt almost like I was dreaming when I read that very same thing in a CNet article the next day. Judging by the date on the article in question, listed below, that conversation at Microsoft must have occured on Feb. 5th. After reading the article, I wondered about who all was standing there listening to me because I assumed one of them must have something to do with it. But I couldn't think of anyone that had those kind of contacts. I had never heard of anyone talking about having that kind of influence. So that reinforced my suspicions there were hidden cameras around me. Just like with Marco in Manchurian Candidate, I could see some hidden camera in some dark, recessed hiding place watching me all the time. And I am convinced it was happening. They just won't admit it because they know it was wrong. And I am convinced even Ballmer knew about it even when I was working there. Then I remember other things from that time, just like in Manchurian Candidate, there was a Rose in my life, and just like Rose, she was named after a flower although it was a very obscure one that I doubt most people ever heard of. There is method of symbolism I like where one object represents another object, but they are very different. Just as one object is very well known, the other object is distinctly unknown and therein is a kind of symmetry that I like. There were other clues that were thrown in there too that were symbolic but not in a symmetrical manner and I don't want to give away more at risk of identifying her. Those were more of what I would call something like substitional symbolism. So anyway, before I get too far off on a tangent....

It was just this very minute, as I researched back to CNet's site to find the article to use as reference for this post, did I notice that the CNet article was published on February 6, 2003. I had not noticed that until now. It is quite the coincidence that I quit Microsoft exactly one year later. That also makes me feel suspicious because I had referenced this article before to other people and I wonder if the date on the original article has since been modified. I just don't know. I suspect they may be doing something like that to deflect attention away from possibly being caught up in all this. After all, they did publish this information. Maybe they published it because Dell told them about it, or maybe the reporter was the person that told Dell about what I said the previous day and then Dell decided to go along with it. So the train of information could have been me at Microsoft to Dell to reporter. Or it could have been from me at Microsoft to reporter to Dell. Or, hell, they could all have been watching The Kerry Channel at the same time, because Everybody Loves Truman. I am living in Bizarro World, I dream of home.

Dell foments floppy's fall
Published: February 6, 2003


The PC maker, which currently ships a floppy with every Dimension desktop, believes that the drive is no longer necessary because of the availability of better storage devices. But it plans to gently nudge customers toward that philosophy. The floppy option on 8250 PCs is the first step.
Round Rock, Texas-based Dell plans to offer its $20 USB Memory Key storage device, which holds 16MB of data, in place of the drive for the 1.44MB floppy.

The Dell USB Memory Key uses flash memory and works by plugging into a PC's USB port. When connected, the Dell-branded device appears on a computer's desktop as a removable hard drive, allowing people to drag and drop files for storage or to move them to another computer. When not in use, it fits into a shirt pocket.

posted by H.V.O.M at 6:53 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, September 11, 2005










Grace

I gave a lot of thought as to why Microsoft management was not taking my complaints seriously about what Kirk Tavener did. And so, I think I figured it out.

I'm not sure yet when I became The Microsoft Candidate, which would be important to the timeline on all this. I suspect it was in the year 2000. That is when I remember management telling me I am "a diamond in the rough." I can trace the dream manipulation stuff back to 1999, but maybe the role players in all this didn't get together on it for a while yet. So anyway, to avoid going off on a tangent, I'll make this as short as possible. I think when Kirk Tavener showed me that video, I was already The Microsoft Candidate, but maybe only a candidate to be The Microsoft Candidate, much like a person in Trump's pool of Apprentice's. I suspect Tavener was trying to get me on tape in a compromising position so he could sell it on eBay or something because he knew it would be valuable someday when this all got wrapped up and I was officially The Microsoft Candidate.

The reason management was not going to admit that it was sexual harassment, among another reason such as The Microsoft Candidate was still under wraps, but also because this was going to resonate throughout the company, and I assume with most of the women. I was just assuming this stuff mainly happens to women but someone told me the other day that isn't true. For a long time, even back to 1999, I sensed there was some kind of discussion going on about me and I assumed it was probably some chat-room equivalent type of discussion. I didn't really mind it too much because I have experienced that before and if women want to talk about me, I don't mind it that much, as long as they don't get into my private affairs. So anyway, after I left Microsoft, I remembered there was a social alias at Microsoft that was created for women. It was named after Grace Hopper, something like "Hopper DAC" or something like that. They chose Hopper I guess because she was a pioneer in the software field. But there is something even more compelling: Hopper was not only Navy, but the computer she worked on was a UNIVAC. Just like me. My system in the Navy was a UNIVAC too (link to 1218, which was similar).

If I was becoming The Microsoft Candidate, which to me felt more like being Borg'd just like Jean-Luc Picard, then everybody already knew these details about me. And my complaints are going to resonate with a lot of people in the company if Microsoft acknowledges that Kirk Tavener's actions were the worst form of sexual harassment possible and was essentially a form of extortion. I suspect management is doing that a lot at Microsoft and what Kirk Tavener did to me is just the tip of the iceburg.

Yesterday, I started thinking that maybe no one is going to just give me the explanation I have been waiting on. Instead, what I think is going to happen is someone is going to hand me a set of keys and say "Here you go. One shiny, pre-owned Microsoft. Have fun." I just wonder if Bill Gates is a smoker and if so, whether I will be able to get that smoky smell out of it before I take it for a drive.

posted by H.V.O.M at 9:36 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, September 11, 2005










Borg'd

Though anticipated, it was far ahead of the expected time, and caught the Fleet off-guard. The Enterprise-D spear-headed counter measures, but Captain Picard was captured at the beginning of the offensive and assimilated instead. After the initial nano-probes and implants preparation, Picard was subjected to further surgery to become Locutus of Borg, spokesman and intermediary for the Borg and humans. The Borg had wanted to provide the humans with a more acceptable face for the Borg and so they minimized his facial alterations, making Locutus the most recognizable of the Borg, next to the Queen herself.



Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply.



posted by H.V.O.M at 9:48 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, September 11, 2005










confronting attacks

The truckers are suspicious of everything else. Any piece of roadside trash might be hiding a bomb, the soldiers said. Anyone from an Iraqi police officer at a checkpoint to a ditch digger might be collaborating with the insurgents.

Despite the dangers, Howe said many of his soldiers would rather go on missions than stay on the base.

"Guys get hooked on it. They gotta go," he said.


I can relate to this. It sounds a lot like my life for the past year or so. Except I don't know for certain there are people wanting to shoot at me. All I see is people following me and that seem to be watching me. The craziest time was after that incident in Wal-Mart where I carried away what I thought was a bomb. That was last summer some time. After that, I really started thinking hard about all those people. Every person on a street corner with a cell phone was someone talking about me. I could just imagine there was someone sitting back somewhere else writing something in a log book: "Passed 2nd and Main at 12:33pm heading north." There were two types of cell phone talkers. One type had their faces partially covered and the other type would have their back to me so they would be facing me as I passed, I guess to see my license plate. After I decided that the suspected bomb had actually been a test, I realized they knew to put out the bag where I would see it because they were tracking me all the way into the store.

Up till then it had been kind of a game. I was still optimistic and that I would shortly know what was going on. It was a game to shake the people following me. There was one time I used a quarter-tank of gas just to drive 3 miles to Starbucks to get coffee. It was then I realized I couldn't afford to play that game for very long. Gas was pretty expensive back then and I sure couldn't imagine having to do it now.

I know that I have supporters in government, and while I want to detail that support, I am afraid if I do, they will be marginalized by my adversaries, who-the-hell-ever they are. I don't precisely know who my adversaries are, but they are certainly the poster-boys of cowards. They are so cowardly, I started thinking these people are terrorists. I started remembering things like how the Iranians vowed we would never leave the Gulf alive. I remembered how they had shown me on the news on the bridge of the Wainwright when we returned to port and that was right around the time of the civilian airline disaster. I don't know who these people are in the shadows, but if I die as a result, my only regret will be that I was killed by cowards.

posted by H.V.O.M at 11:21 PM | 0 comments

Sunday, September 11, 2005










Tired

My thoughts don't feel as organized today. Very tired. Most of all, I hate having to write about this stuff in this blog. I hate it more than anything. The real problem though is that this blog feels no more public than my private email accounts. In other words, for a long time, for much too long, it felt like my private email account was a public blog. I could write about this stuff by sending it to myself in an email or I could write about it here in this blog. And there is no difference in terms of privacy. If you can read it here, you can read it in my private email. I don't know who is doing it, but I am convinced that someone is intercepting my private email and disclosing it to unknown people. It made me feel like my landlord was unlocking my apartment when I wasn't there and then gossiping with people about my private life, such as how I don't make my bed in the morning. For years, I have been living with absolutely no private life. It is exhausting.

This reminds about how it seemed no one ever understood what happened in the Persian Gulf. At least I don't think about that as much nowadays, so I got that going for me. With all this going on, and no one understanding what it is doing to me, and with a world that respects no privacy other than their own, at least I don't think about the Persian Gulf as much anymore. Lucky me.

I wrote earlier about my game to shake off the people following me. I found it somewhat humorous but slightly annoying when I saw a car commercial with a real celebrity (reminds me of Shelley's Among the stars that have a different birth by virtue of them knowing why people are following them) racing away from paparazzi while he is also taking pictures of them with his camera. I believe they were doing that because I had written about that in my journal and they read what I wrote, not to mention those commercials came out after I launched my efforts to take pictures of the people following me. Maybe they are supporting me with something like that or maybe they are just standing on my shoulders. And so after I just wrote that sentence, I realized that doing things like that have absolutely no support value to me, rather they are indeed putting more weight on my shoulders.

So going back to how cars were following me, something new happened one day. I walked out to my Jeep and one of the tires was going flat. For several days, I just keep putting air in it because it wasn't so much a slow leak, but then it wasn't so much a fast leak. After a few days of that, I walked out one morning and it was completely flat. So I changed it and took it to a nearby tire shop to have fixed. They took the tire and told me to come back later.

Eventually I came to suspect a tracking device had been put in the tire while it was there in the shop. Probably some kind of GPS unit that would record my every movement. I had another clue to support that theory but I will not mention it here, only when I get these bastards in court. What worried me more was what would happen if I had to use that tire. I imagine that device was pretty good sized, if I am driving on the interstate is this thing going to rip through my tire?

My suspicions were reinforced one day when I returned to my apartment. I was living in Kent, WA, by this time. The Wal-Mart incident as well as the flat tire and the paparazzi-types were all out in the Spokane, WA, area. Anyway, on this day in Kent, I had just returned from a road trip, don't remember where I went, but I may have gone back out to Coeur d'Alene. After I parked in front of my apartment, I went inside. But then I walked back outside to my Jeep. Anybody watching me and learning my habits would know that I rarely come back outside after parking and going inside. So I walk outside and there is a purple van parked behind my Jeep. As soon as they see me, they speed off. And there was something suspicious about the behavior of the guy in the passenger seat. He looked surprised.

I was taking some stuff out of my Jeep and the van stopped briefly at one of the other buildings down the road and dropped off the passenger. He started walking into one of the apartment buildings and he even turned around to see if I was watching him. I think they pulled up behind my Jeep and were downloading the GPS data out of the device in my spare tire but I startled them by coming back outside.

Last year, with all this stuff going on, I became convinced that Orwell's 1984 had arrived, just 20 years late. That was another book I enjoyed in high school. I think it initially caught my attention because 1984 was the year I was going to graduate high school. I have been careful to not let my imagination get the better of me but the evidence is just inescapable. Eventually, the people responsible will have their day and court and will be able to explain why they shouldn't go to jail, but the longer this continues, the less weight their excuses will carry. The excerpt below is a good summary of my existence over the past few years. The only difference is that, based on my electronics education, I don't believe it is possible to turn a regular television into a telescreen. I have heard some paranoid-types talking about this, but I don't believe it is possible. Instead, I believe there have been small hidden cameras around me. At Microsoft, I think they put them in the smoke/fire detectors. I was looking at them on numerous occasions but couldn't tell anything. I knew if I tampered with them to determine if they contained a hidden camera, they would probably just put me in jail. I also remembered how I came into the office one Saturday morning and some guys running cables in the ceiling looked surprised to see me there.

The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it, moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized. Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.

posted by H.V.O.M at 12:52 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 12, 2005










Sanity was statistical

He had capitulated, that was agreed. In reality, as he saw now, he had been ready to capitulate long before he had taken the decision. From the moment when he was inside the Ministry of Love -- and yes, even during those minutes when he and Julia had stood helpless while the iron voice from the telescreen told them what to do -- he had grasped the frivolity, the shallowness of his attempt to set himself up against the power of the Party. He knew now that for seven years the Thought police had watched him like a beetle under a magnifying glass. There was no physical act, no word spoken aloud, that they had not noticed, no train of thought that they had not been able to infer. Even the speck of whitish dust on the cover of his diary they had carefully replaced. They had played sound-tracks to him, shown him photographs. Some of them were photographs of Julia and himself. Yes, even ... He could not fight against the Party any longer. Besides, the Party was in the right. It must be so; how could the immortal, collective brain be mistaken? By what external standard could you check its judgements? Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought. Only!

There is a part in that excerpt from 1984 that really hits close to home. It is the part "Sanity was statistical." I heard that very same thing when I was in the VA. Fortunately, it wasn't from a doctor though. What I heard someone say, when I was reasserting my belief that all this is indeed a conspiracy, was that they are treating me on the probability that what I am saying is not true. So that also reinforced my theory that if you are in the mental health system, is it assumed mental health problems are causing your problems as opposed to external environmental factors causing the problems. However, I did see indications they were listening to me and that they thought what I was saying made sense. I have no complaints about my treatment at the VA.

But as I have learned from this infuriating chapter of my life, there are problems that produce mental health issues and there are mental health issues that produce problems.

If they treated 100 people for the problems I am describing, it is probable that 99 of them would be delusional. But my argument has been that I am that one person that is not delusional. Sure, I am feeling paranoid, but it is a healthy paranoia. It is a normal reaction to a threat in my environment. How many more years am I going to have to live thinking no one understands?

This excerpt also describes something else I picked up on. I could just imagine all these people out there reading my private emails and scrutinizing every word I wrote. I could write enough to fill a book about my thoughts on that. And then there is the part about the photographs. I know someone has been taking photos of me for a long time. This one guy with a telephoto lens even made it obvious a couple times in Coeur d'Alene. He stopped in the middle of the road there next to the CDA beach and was standing there with his camera and telephoto lens. He even drove a black Jeep like mine. I thought that was a good sign, that he was revealing himself. It meant they were wrapping things up and would soon be in contact with me with explanations. That was over a year ago.

posted by H.V.O.M at 1:31 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 12, 2005










FBI abuses

FBI agents often violate bureau's rules for handling confidential informants that were revised after FBI abuses in the 1990s, the Justice Department's internal watchdog said Monday.

A review of 120 confidential informant files from FBI offices around the country found violations in 104 cases, or 87 percent, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said. His 301-page report, parts of which were blacked out, examined FBI compliance with rules that govern most criminal investigations.

The report said agents failed to assess informants' suitability or get permission for informants to engage in activity that otherwise would be illegal. Agents did not convey proper instructions or tell prosecutors when informants had committed crimes that were not authorized by their FBI handlers, Fine said.


Something about this article bothers me. I suspect it has something to do with me. I suspect that, basically, I pissed off Microsoft, so Microsoft turned the FBI on me. But then other people, rational people, looked at what is happening to me and said that what they are doing is highly illegal. So now, Microsoft is saying that the FBI said it was all ok to do this to me. But then the FBI started saying that they didn't approve what Microsoft is doing to me. And I am caught in the middle. All I want to do is get back to a paying job so I can afford some seclusion again. I will never again experience the kind of privacy a normal person has, but at least by having a paying job I can rent an apartment again and get away from all these people in this shelter. I am a loner by nature and this is killing me. I can easily tolerate being around people at work but in the place I live is just intolerable. But how the hell am I supposed to get a job now? There isn't a company out there that is going to touch me. And it doesn't matter how well people think of me personally. No company wants to be in the spotlight that is shining on me. If the spotlight is shining on me, it will shine on whoever is around me. No one wants every single detail about their business scrutinized and analyzed and debated by who knows who. I am just someone else's problem. That is the summary my life has become: someone else's problem.

posted by H.V.O.M at 2:24 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 12, 2005










Who do you want to assimilate today?

"A celebrity allows the woman at home to identify with someone, which you don't get with a traditional model," Louvet said.

This point is for illustration of my theory about why I became The Microsoft Candidate. Who can relate to Bill Gates? And do most people even know who Steve Ballmer is? And if they know who Ballmer is, can anyone relate to him? The reason it matters is because a lot of people think Microsoft is evil. To change that perception, they needed to introduce the world to Microsoft people that are not evil. So they used their evil, by hijacking my private life, with absolutely no consent from me, to try to show they are not evil. Which in fact, they only proved they are evil. It is a culture of evil. That was further demonstrated to me in February 2004 when that senior manager told me to not talk about an important issue. I told her I was not going to participate in the review process until that problem was resolved and she suggested that I would get a negative review just for not participating. I don't respond well to threats, especially veiled threats. I sure miss having a job, though, but not as much as I miss my sense of privacy and my peace of mind.

posted by H.V.O.M at 5:25 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 12, 2005










Lord of War

A wily arms dealer dodges bullets and betrayal as he schemes his way to the top of his profession, only to come face to face with his conscience. But it's not easy to leave a life of girls, guns and glamour when no body wants you to stop, not even your enemies.


This looks like a good movie. Fortunately for me it opens on Sept 16. Since that is the day they are kicking me out of this shelter, I'll need to find something to do.

posted by H.V.O.M at 5:33 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 12, 2005










Maybe Tomorrow

Maybe I'll hear something tomorrow.

posted by H.V.O.M at 5:55 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 12, 2005










You belong to us.

Fierce, driven, proud, he still does it for the love of the game - even if it can all sound a bit corny: "At Microsoft we have and will continue to genuinely engage in making the world a better place. We can change the world; our products change the world; our industry changes the world."

I remember writing almost those exact words to someone at Microsoft. I don't remember who I emailed it to, maybe it was to Ballmer. I wonder if that is why the author included that in this article, to get me to draw attention to the article or for some other reason. I can remember clues when I was at Microsoft where someone was testing my ability to recognize my own work. Later, I would worry that they were trying to patent my thought processes or something like that since I am mostly self-taught. I realized I may be viewed as representing what is probably the largest group of programmers. There is a group of programmers that I view as proficient at writing kernel-level code. Even though, like a lot of other programmers, I could write kernel-level code, that doesn't mean I should be doing it. I think I represent a group of programmers that is probably larger in terms of the number of individuals than the kernel-level coders. We are the ones that VBA is intended for. It is actually anybody that uses Microsoft Office and creates their own macros without using the Macro Recorder feature. Some elitist types refer to that as hobbyist programmers but I don't use that label. So anyway, I felt they were studying me and that they might even had designs on my style of code writing. Not just the code itself I produce, but they wanted my thought processes that produced the code. Then, they could use what they learned from me to teach others. But what I worried about, once they assimilated my technological distinctiveness and added it to the corporate collective, so to speak, I may not be able to find work elsewhere. Something about "inevitable disclosure."

posted by H.V.O.M at 6:45 PM | 0 comments

Monday, September 12, 2005










Maybe tomorrow.

Nothing today. Maybe I'll hear something tomorrow.



Epic poetry agrees with Tragedy in so far as it is an imitation in verse of characters of a higher type. They differ, in that Epic poetry admits but one kind of metre, and is narrative in form. They differ, again, in their length: for Tragedy endeavours, as far as possible, to confine itself to a single revolution of the sun, or but slightly to exceed this limit; whereas the Epic action has no limits of time.

The Poetics - Aristotle

posted by H.V.O.M at 6:31 PM | 0 comments

Tuesday, September 13, 2005










The joy of seeing a ship

I cannot express the confusion I was in, though the joy of seeing a ship, and one that I had reason to believe was manned by my own countrymen, and consequently friends, was such as I cannot describe; but yet I had some secret doubts hung about me - I cannot tell from whence they came - bidding me keep upon my guard. In the first place, it occurred to me to consider what business an English ship could have in that part of the world, since it was not the way to or from any part of the world where the English had any traffic; and I knew there had been no storms to drive them in there in distress; and that if they were really English it was most probable that they were here upon no good design; and that I had better continue as I was than fall into the hands of thieves and murderers.

Let no man despise the secret hints and notices of danger which sometimes are given him when he may think there is no possibility of its being real. That such hints and notices are given us I believe few that have made any observation of things can deny; that they are certain discoveries of an invisible world, and a converse of spirits, we cannot doubt; and if the tendency of them seems to be to warn us of danger, why should we not suppose they are from some friendly agent (whether supreme, or inferior and subordinate, is not the question), and that they are given for our good?

Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe

posted by H.V.O.M at 1:27 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, September 14, 2005










Home

I've written several times of this experience in terms of that Star Trek:TNG episode where Capt. Picard is assimilated by the Borg. While I do not consider myself a "Trekkie", I like the Star Trek series because I am a fan in general of science fiction, and because I like any good story that captures my imagination. There was a follow-on episode to those episodes of where Picard is captured and it was titled "Family." While I typically like the episodes with more action, I always get a kick out this episode because Picard's brother reminded me so much of my sister, in terms of obvious sibling rivalry. I also found myself envying Picard's character for being able to go back to a home like that, where he has roots. I was watching a movie a few months ago based on John McCain's POW experiences and I was thinking of how a lot of it seemed similar. I was most interested in what it was like for him to come back home after his 6 years in captivity but the movie seemed kind of light there. I also found myself envying McCain for his family, especially not only being third-generation Navy but a family of notable service to the Navy.

The original air date of this episode was October 1990, and my formal discharge from the Navy was May 1990. I'm not sure when I actually watched this episode though; probably around the 1994 time-frame. It reminds me of a pivotal point back in 1990. I was leaving the Navy and I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do. I had spent the last 6 months overseas so there had been no way to even do any interviews until I was actually out of the service. As luck would have it, a buddy of mine, who I had worked with on the USS Wainwright, recommended me to a company he was interviewing with and I got that job. I got out of the Navy on a Friday and I was working there that next Monday. Coincidentally, the same thing had happened six years earlier where I graduated high school on Friday and was in Navy boot camp the next Monday.

Synopsis
After taking the U.S.S. Enterprise to an Earth-orbiting spacedock for repairs, Picard, still recovering from the injuries he suffered at the hands of the Borg, returns for the first time in twenty years to the 19th century French village where he grew up. He is greeted warmly by his sister-in-law and nephew, both of whom he has never met. However, his meeting with his older brother Robert, who feels that Picard is arrogant, is filled with animosity.


Back in his village, Picard receives an offer from an old friend to head a project on Earth, and is shocked to find himself seriously considering the job. While Picard anguishes over the decision, his brother seizes the opportunity to torment him, telling him he has changed from the unflappable achiever he once was. The argument leads to a brawl that eventually leaves the sibling rivals laughing and covered in mud. They share a tender moment as Picard reveals the guilt he feels over his inability to fight the Borg after they kidnapped him.

As the U.S.S. Enterprise prepares to depart, it is apparent that more than just the starship was repaired. Worf shares a final tender moment with his parents, Wesley says goodbye to a father he finally feels he knows, and Picard, reconciled with his brother, begins his psychological recovery from his trauma with the Borg.

posted by H.V.O.M at 4:22 PM | 0 comments

Wednesday, September 14, 2005










Family

I had never given much thought to my family history, to the genealogy of the name Burgess. I didn't have the typical (whatever that is) family life growing up. I didn't know my father very well. He was killed in 1985 when I was out to sea. I was just getting old enough to start thinking about asking him why he was never around. I feel close to my mother and sister but I haven't been in contact with them for a while. With all the weird stuff going on, I certainly don't want to get them involved. The nature of the media presence I sense is just too much, none of us have the experience or knowledge to deal with something like that. I wish I could see them all again soon, and my grandfather, whom I really miss.

So anyway, a few months ago, as I was searching the internet for clues, I found a family tree for Burgess. It starts with William Burgess who I guess would be the first American Burgess and then ends with the 6th generation, which includes my paternal grandfather, and would make me the 8th generation. I thought this was very interesting, and I certainly admire all the hard work it must have taken to put something like this together. Later I tried connecting a person named Colonel Burgess from the 1600's to the William Burgess of 1760 but it is pretty tough to find that kind of information.

I think that never really having what I perceived as the normal family when I grew up is what makes it harder for me to settle down. I guess I am afraid of not being able to create the kind of family I want to have. My only real long-term experience with marriage is just that it ends at some point. I have no idea what a family is supposed to be. I care about my mom and sister because we grew up together and went through a lot together. But I think about my future and reading through that family tree just solidified the thoughts I had been having for a long time. What is my contribution to all this? The lineage doesn't end with me, but still what do I contribute to it? Does my story end with the actions of my life? Or will I have offspring of my own to continue our part of the name?

I could have offspring of my own if I wanted to. But why? To become my own father? No, if I have kids, I want to do it right and, while just being a good father is no assurance of raising good kids - I guess - I don't want to raise kids just to let them fend for themselves. I have also heard people say they weren't in love when they got married and that is probably the single point of difference from me. I have always insisted to myself that we are both in love before getting married. But then I grew worried that, while I may be in love, how do I know she is in love with me or that she just sees me as a "donor, as I used to worry. I worried about women that were marrying for kids instead of for love. For me, there was an order to it. You fell in love, you got married, then maybe, probably, you had kids. That was absolutely the only way it was going to happen with me.

And I often worried about how I don't have the first clue about raising kids. Or maybe I do. I don't know. I know they should be good role models. But what do I know about role models? The role models from my early youth were Superman and Batman. Superman I liked and wanted to be because I knew no one could hurt us if I had the strength of Superman. Batman I liked because he was smart. I liked both of them because they were loners for the most part, especially Batman. Superman had Lois Lane, but it was more of a fantasy than a real relationship. Batman was just angry at the world and he didn't want to depend on anyone, although he felt obligated to help the people he could help.

So anyway, if I was a super-hero, I would probably feel comfortable raising kids myself, but that is just a lot of responsibility for a mortal.

posted by H.V.O.M at 6:53 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, September 15, 2005










In the seventies

In the seventies, Batman began his transformation from the campy Caped Crusader of the sixties television show into the grim Dark Knight of the nineties' motion pictures. This action-packed book includes the greatest adventures of that era which helped to reshape this legendary icon. Featuring Batgirl, Robin, the Joker, Man-Bat, the Huntress, and Ra's al Ghul, BATMAN IN THE SEVENTIES is an outstanding opportunity to look back and enjoy the tales of the past that are now the foundation for the future.


I was very disappointed with the Batman movies that started in 1989. That first one in '89 wasn't as campy as the later ones or as campy as the 60's, but it was really hard to take Michael Keaton seriously as Batman. This recent movie was much improved as was more in line with the Batman I remember from the Seventies.

posted by H.V.O.M at 7:15 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, September 15, 2005










A normal human being

I haven't read one of these comic books in years, but it still sounds fascinating.


An important part of the mythos is that Batman – unlike Superman and most other costumed heroes – is a normal human being who does not possess any superhuman abilities. However, he has elevated himself to near-superhuman status through years of rigorous training. Batman is typically portrayed as a brilliant tactician and peerless martial-artist, possessed with a stoic personality and a strong desire for justice. In recent comics, Batman has often been presented as having an obsessive, humorless personality. Like Superman, the prominent persona of his dual identities has varied with time. Present comics seem to favor portraying the decadent playboy aspect of his character as the facade, while the masked and particularly dark, grim vigilante is marked as the "true" man. Usually, Batman is further separated from Bruce Wayne by the raspy voice he assumes while costumed.

Being only human, Batman doesn't have any unusual personal physical strengths or weaknesses, like Superman's weakness to kryponite, but has character flaws that can be exploited by enemies. In recent comics, Batman is shown as being vastly paranoid by nature and tending to not trust other heroes beyond those he has known for years like Superman or Robin. Batman, also in recent comics in particular, has a deep mistrust in metahumans, similar to that of Lex Luthor, and is very suspicious of Supergirl and Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) especially. This often causes conflicts among his peers, who wonder what measures he has taken against them (eg. the recently discovered OMAC project). Some enemies have used this to isolate him and play games with him. Batman (as recent comics portray him) is also very arrogant and treats many of his allies with a hint of disrespect, being that he is often the smartest person involved. He also sometimes overestimates his own abilities and allows foes to take advantage of that. All of these traits are a reversal of more traditional (pre-1990s) portrayals of Batman, which usually tend to show him as more willing to work with others, much less paranoid, and more trustful/respectful of his allies.

posted by H.V.O.M at 7:45 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, September 15, 2005










Behavior control

Had some weird dreams lately. I think they are in my head again. How they are doing it I do not know. I have searched the internet for a long time to get more clues on it, primarily to find other instances of something like this happening. As I documented earlier, it is known that external noises can influence a person's dreams. What I have been trying to do is determine whether someone is trying to control my mind. I don't think they are controlling my mind and that everything I do is my own free-will, but it just all really agitates me. I have actually found U.S. Patents for devices and methods to control behavior, but whether this stuff really works, I don't know. Most of it sounds like a bunch of X-Files-nonsense to me. Here's one I found with a short description for U.S. Patent 6,258,022:

Behavior modification of a human subject takes place under hypnosis, when the subject is in a relaxed state.

The complete description includes a device which isn't present in my situation, but there is a lot of other similarity to make me wonder. Last year, I read about a device that can channel sound like a spotlight does to light. It creates a narrow beam of sound that can be projected to a specific location. I suspect they are using something like that in my situation. Or maybe I am psychic, hell I don't know, I would pretty much believe anything at this point, even though I don't believe in supernatural stuff like that.

I am going to describe a dream I had earlier today, because as strange as it seems, I think I am supposed to. I think someone is testing me and they want me to relay to them what they sent to my sleeping mind. I guess they want to see how much detail I remember when I am awake or something like that. It has happened a couple times lately but I have resisted writing about it. Mainly because it agitates me so to be manipulated like this.

I had that dream again about the house I bought in South Carolina back in the early '90s. I loved that place, it was quiet and relaxing. That house is always the central element in dreams I have sometime. There are usually variations to the situation, but the house is always there. And there is usually another element to the dream. In the dream, I discover that I still own the house and I can go back there any time I want, even at the very moment I realize it is still there. It is a great feeling to know I can sleep there that very night if I want to.

In this dream last night though, there is something about my nieces. One of them has bought the house and will live there now. This is one of ten houses that one of ten nieces is getting. Not sure what that means, I only have two nieces. So anyway, I have two cars parked outside. One is that Mazda RX-7, and just like re-discovering the house in the prior dreams, this car is suddenly mine again and I am very happy to see it. I faced a dilemma though about how to get two cars back to my place, whereever that was. There is a lot of food in one car and I am transferring it from one to the RX-7. It was dark. Then I found myself at what seemed to be my own place in the country, the grass was very high. Never seen this place before, but there seems to be something slightly familiar about it. Next image I remember is my Jeep blocking the entrace of my driveway. But the postman has driven around it and is delivering the mail. He has a lot to deliver. At one point, he walks up to the house, or the garage, but I do not talk with him. Before this, I had been walking around the property and there are a lot of other buildings with purposes I don't know but they have a lot of objects, tools and such, cluttered around. I am standing on the porch about to go in and a woman throws open a hatch on the porch and starts climbing up from under the porch. She is carrying a fishing tackle box and something else I don't recognize. She is a scientist or something. She is on some kind of expedition to go out and cause frogs, I think it was, to contract the "mumps." I don't know why she was doing it, but she said they weren't doing it themselves. I woke up at this point and I could hear some loud-mouth in another room on this floor talking loudly next to his window about how he never contracted the mumps when he was a kid even though he had actually tried to contract it by getting into bed with someone that had the mumps.

I'm not sure if this dream happened after I went back to sleep or it had occured earlier, but I was in that unfamilar house there in the country and I was trying to get ready. I was meeting some family members in town for lunch but I kept getting interrupted. At one point, the clock read 1:38 pm but I had to be there at 2pm and I had not even showered or shaved yet. I didn't know how to get in touch with them to let them know I would be late.

The other dream I had was about fighting some kind of aliens. I'm not sure if this dream happened before the one I wrote about above or if it happened later. In this dream, I am still in the Navy, but I am wearing some kind of camoflauge uniform, maybe army or marines. These aliens have invaded a subway and there are a lot of travelers around in danger. I am about to drop from exhaustion after 36 hours of fighting, we have been retreating and I am separated from the other soldiers. I am carrying two heavy packs, trying to find another unit to group up with, with passengers stream through the facility, they are even getting on the trains as some of them are still coming through. I have lost my rifle somewhere. I still have plenty of ammo, but I can't find a rifle. A woman at a coffee kisok says something to me that I don't remember, she has dried blood on her hands as she is preparing coffee. Then I am outside and I have found an armory where I get another rifle. I start heading back to the subway. A woman drives up in a car and asks me if I am who she thinks I am. But I can't remember seeing her actually in the car, all I can remember is seeing her buried in the dirt with only her talking face exposed. That is all I remember.

posted by H.V.O.M at 8:28 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, September 15, 2005










Series Finale

Well, it's almost that time. They're supposed to be kicking me out of here tomorrow. This will probably be my last post before I go off the air. They mentioned something about getting me into another shelter, but they haven't said anything else about it. They also said something about being in-patient at the VA again, but what is the point to that? I haven't heard anything in the past few days about any of it.

For the past few hours, I have been thinking of something that happened last time I was on the streets. I was sitting somewhere in Seattle reading Robinson Crusoe, knowing that people with answers were watching me and wondering why they aren't telling me anything, and then a bus went by me. As I looked up, a woman on the bus was looking at me. She was smiling or laughing, I'm not sure which one, it felt like she was laughing. I thought about that for a long time. I thought to myself about how she knew who I was. Why would she be laughing at me? She knows I am living a nightmare, the kind of nightmare people have in their sleep but don't even remember in the morning, and she is laughing at me. That was a new feeling to me, of people laughing at me like that, especially of someone laughing at my misfortune. Not to mention, laughing at me while I am in the middle of experiencing such misfortune, such epic misfortune. What is funny about someone having to stumble around through the dangerous streets waiting for that inevitable moment when some group sneaks up behind you late at night and hits you over the head for the change in your pocket? I thought at first that maybe it was just a coincidence, that it was just a random occurrence, but there has just been too much stuff like that happen. Eventually I would decide that she was laughing because she knew everything was going to be ok for me. She knew who I was and she knew I could weather this storm and be the better person for it in the end. That's what I hope for at least. That is what I continue to hope for though as I was expecting some improvement at any moment and I continue to expect that at any minute I will get the news that turns this all around and I can get back to my life. I just don't know. What a wretched existence this has become. I don't want to go back to the streets but I can't stand it here. If I just knew there was an end to all this, it would be so much easier to tolerate. But living here or living out there isn't much of a difference, either will end up killing me.

posted by H.V.O.M at 10:48 PM | 0 comments

Thursday, September 15, 2005










Epilogue: Last Day

After some delay, I am finally down to my last couple hours in this place. They have a new place for me to go, but my condition is only a tiny degree removed from being on the street, with its danger and privacy and frustration. A long time ago, in another life, I once felt resentment for those that would not speak out but now I understand why they would not and I can't really blame them because they were obviously smart enough to know that doing so would only lead them to this point I am at now. I certainly couldn't blame the ones with kids to support, with nothing really to lose myself in terms of that kind of responsibility, I don't even really think of the risks, although up to this point, I have never really lost so badly as now, I have never lost so much. I wonder if I will be alive this time next week, or even this time tomorrow. When I would wake each day and wonder if today would be the last, will today be the last. It used to be a question, not so much wondering if it would be the last, but a question of what I would use that day to accomplish. But now, it is just a matter of surviving, because I still expect it to turn around at some point. At some point, one day, it will turn around and start getting better but for now it just keeps getting worse.

posted by H.V.O.M at 1:53 PM | 0 comments

Saturday, September 24, 2005










HVOM Prequel content ends.



- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 2:23 PM Pacific Time Spokane Valley Washington USA Wednesday 13 April 2016