Do You Believe?

I woke up this morning with a start.  It was later than I usually wake, around 9:15 am.  I had been awake for part of the night/morning and finally fell back asleep somewhere after 7 am.  Immediately I realized my heart was racing.  I had been dreaming about my friend J who passed away in late March.  We were sitting at a kitchen table.  If I really look around it was not my house, it was not her house.  It was not the house I grew up in, which is where I usually dream dreams of being at home.  It was my Grandma's kitchen.  I don't really know why I would dream us in my Grandma's kitchen, J had never been there. But if I had to guess I would say that it indicates that J and Grandma are together.  But I don't know.

I had so many questions for J, mostly about what is going on with her family.  Very recently I have been aware of a situation within her family that is most unfortunate.  It happened after she passed.  So I asked her about it as I fussed around trying to make coffee or something.   She sat at the table, looking so beautiful and so peaceful.  If I really think about it and concentrate on this dream, someone was in the living room waiting, and I think it was my Grandma.  Sure wish she had come into the kitchen to say Hi, but I think she was there for moral support for J. 

We spoke about the situation and she told me how she knows her son will get through it, that he is strong and has good support in his dad.  I was relieved to hear that because watching from the sidelines has been difficult and I keep wondering if I should reach out to him and see if he's OK.  It cannot be easy for him to be going through this so soon after he lost his mom.  She told me that he has, of course, moved back home and things would be OK.

We didn't talk about her but I could see by looking at her and being near her that she looked at peace.  She told me she was fine.  She looked the same as always.  She had her hair, she wore her glasses.  She was my J and she didn't want to dwell on herself, just wanted to assure me her son would be fine.

So, do you believe that was an actual visit or just a vivid dream?  I believe it was a visit.  It's happened to me before with a friend who had passed away a long time ago.  M was only 21 at the time, I was 22.  He died of a brain tumor and I was devastated to lose him.  I had a very hard time coping.  It was my first serious brush with losing someone so close to me.  It was several weeks, maybe even months after he passed away that I saw him.  I could not get him out of my mind and cried a lot.  Then one morning, as if in a dream, he appeared to me.  He sat on the edge of my bed looking almost luminescent.  He told me he was fine, to stop worrying about him and to go on with my life.  I was filled with such peace after that and was able to move on.  I've never forgotten him or that visit, obviously, but I was able to move past it. 

I think you have to be open to such visits for them to actually occur.  I would give anything to have them more frequently.  I would love to see my Grandma, J, M.... hell even Butthole can come visit me if he wants to!  It's beautiful and meaningful and has given me a sense of calm about losing J.  Seeing her looking well and knowing my Grandma is with her, showing her the ropes if you will has been amazing. Maybe it's crazy to believe that, but if something like that can give me peace, so be it.  I'll take the crazy label.

Flee

I have had an AMC website since November, 1998.  It's a long time and I modestly say it's one of the best AMC sites on the net.  You don't keep readership and longevity if your site is crap.  But as such, a lot of people tend to think you're their buddy and come to expect things from you.  I've had countless people ask me where I get my information or want more than what I post.  I've had people who want to work for me, I've had people who want to be partners.  None of these people had anything to offer me in return for what I would be giving them. Nothing.  They just wanted or thought it would be fun.  Well, it is fun most of the time, but I don't do all the work so I can just hand it over to other people.  Most people realize this and are very understanding.  And then there's Flee.

It started out innocently enough back in 2002.  I was on AOL Instant Messenger back then and people would IM me quite often with questions about AMC.  It's a role I've always been OK with.  Flee was one of these people.  But he soon turned bothersome, relentlessly asking me where my information came from, how he could also get it or if he could work for me.  But the main question over and over and over again was "where do you get your information?"  I gave him my usual two responses, the nicer, "Through the years I worked very hard to cultivate sources.  I have several places and people I get information from," and for the ones who keep asking after that answer,  "I can tell you but then I'd have to kill you."  These answers were never enough for Flee.  He just kept asking.  And I tried to be kind, telling him that even my closest friends don't know where I get information and they are people I trust.  He insisted that I could trust him, begging me to let him prove it to me.  How?  I don't know.  He told me his name, where he lives, what school he went to, etc.  Believing that all this information would suddenly make him my AMC confidante.  And it didn't stop there.  He begged me, daily, for a chance to be the one I could trust with all my secrets.  I repeatedly said no, and the more I said no, the more abusive he got and the angrier I got.  Whenever I told him to "fuck off" or "leave me the hell alone" or anything he threatened to post everything I said on my message board so my "fans" could see what I was really like.  Here's a little clip:

Flee:   lets let the people decide
Me:    oh a threat!
Flee:   on your message board
Me:    go on
Flee:   OK give me a sec
Me:    do it,  watch me ban you. cuz I can. easily
Flee:   ban me?
Me:    you think I'm going to let you trash me on my own board and not ban your ass?
Flee:   you think I shouldn't tell everybody all the nasty things you have said to me???
Me:    is it someone else's business?
Flee:   well its hurtful
Me:    and just what nasty things have I said to you anyway?
Flee:   well you have hurt my oh so immature 19 year old self many times
Me:    I'm fucking hurt by people every damn day of my life you little shit!!!
Flee:   little shit now huh
Me:    do you think I go off and blab it all over fucking creation
Flee:   well all I ever wanted was to be friends and you act like I am asking you to cut off brad pitts penis
Me:    what the hell does that mean?

Yeah, I was pissed.  He never shut up.  He became so bothersome that I blocked him.  But a Flee cannot be gotten rid of that easily.  He just got a new screen name and started again.  The same idiotic behavior, the same threats to tell my message board how mean I am, the same begging to be trusted and given information about AMC.  The dude was really really crazy.   And it got even worse.  He claimed I was so mean to him that he was going to log off and commit suicide.  And then, a day later he had three or four of his friends IM me and ask me if I had talked to Flee yet that day and that they had heard something terrible happened to him.  I ignored all the messages, but they all eventually told me he was dead, and that he had killed himself the night before after he spoke to me.  It was, of course, a big fat lie.  Flee thought he was teaching me a lesson.

He and all his friends and all the other names of his that I knew of were permanently blocked.  I blocked his email address from my email.  I blocked his screen name and email address from my message board.  But alas, none of these things are fool proof and Flee certainly was a fool.  He would use different screen names and email addresses to sign up on the message board and he'd post really creepy messages like... "Why hello there Lalia, did you really think you could get rid of me that easily?"  I'd delete and block everything he signed up with but I could not block his IP, which would make it a done deal.  He was on AOL and when you block an AOL IP, you block many many people, not just one.  So I had to make due with blocking him each time he came back.  And it never worked completely.  He kept trying to talk to other members of the message board in an effort to get them to talk to me on his behalf.  This went on for two years!

It was clear I needed help here.  My pleas to AOL to remove him went on deaf ears.  I wasn't an AOL subscriber, I just used their freebie chat app so they didn't give a shit about my complaints.  So I went to my friend C.  She is my cyber guru and has helped me with countless problems on the internet, with computers and with crazy people.  So I asked her how I could get rid of this guy once and for all.  I told her everything I knew about him since he told me a lot about himself in an effort to win my trust.  And through our research on Flee, we found a picture of him on his college's website and immediately honed in on the fact that the dude had one eyebrow.  Not a unibrow, he was actually missing one.  Nice look.   C had a plan and told me to relax, she'd take care of it.  This is a woman I trust and I did relax and waited to hear how things went.

C started to IM him.  He didn't really seem to put together, at first, that C was my friend.  She chit chatted with him a little and then when he got comfortable with a random person IMing him, she was able to convince him to show her a picture of himself and found out that he had one eyebrow because the other mysteriously fell out.  Yes, it just fell out!  We suspected he either had the mange or ringworm.

So it went on for a few days, and C would IM him and say hilarious things like "Hey, how's the brow?" and he would just chat with her.  And she'd ask him crazy stuff like, "Hey, have you ever had head cheese?" and inevitably he would have no idea what she's talking about.  She went on to explain to him what headcheese is, "well, let me explain it, first you find a small woodland animal in the forest and then you kill them (fox/rabbit preferably), then you dress them (Just like Ed Gein field dressed Bernice Worden) and you scrape out the insides of the head and mold it together to make a block of spongy stuff... which you slather onto melba toast, it's tres delicioso."  And most of the time he would just laugh at her or pretend he knew what she was talking about.

And then she went in for the kill, here's a little bit of what C did to him:

C: I was thinking, do you like to sew?  Do you have a dog named precious?
Flee: no
C: I do. I have a poodle named Precious.
Flee: cool
C: I love to get naked, tuck my peepee between my legs and dance around naked in front of a video camera.  you'd make a great coat, darling, such white smooth skin think we can meet up?
Flee: your peepee?
C: yes, I have a penis. I'm pre op.  didn't I tell you this?
Flee: nah
C: oh yes.  i love skinny little white boys.  taste like keebler club crackers           
Flee:  OK you are crazy.  later 
C: me crazy?  hahahahahah.  roflicious.  WWF ROFLMANIA
C: goodbye my friend. I will dream of you in a well
Flee: who the fuck are you
C: Jamie Gumb, Private Investigator
Flee: LOL how did you get my screename
C: I grow special Death Moths
Flee: you are obsessed with silence of the lambs
C: I told you that already, can't you remember things? Do you do drugs? Drugs are bad...mmmkay.   Kittens everywhere have appealing eyes.  TURKEY WOMBAT!

He took off after that but she wasn't through with him, oh no, she wasn't!   But he was actually getting scared.  She continued to IM him with Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs references and he got more and more freaked out.   She told him to rub the lotion on his skin.  She told him to "put the lotion in the fucking basket!"  She was as relentless with him as he was with me and finally he was so freaked out that he was afraid that she was going to try and kill him.  To which she replied with her absolute best line ever and complete tour de force, "I never said I wanted to kill you, I said you'd make a great purse." 

 

And after that, I was never ever again bothered by Flee and I am forever in C's debt for ridding me of that insect!   There's never a dull moment in the land of soaps or it's fans!