Oh Lord. I’m not quite sure how to handle the guilt. Will I need therapy? Drugs? Electric shock treatments?
I considered going to confession. But as a lapsed Catholic I didn’t want to risk it.
You can’t be too careful
What will happen to me? To my family? How will my husband, my son, my brothers, live with the shame of being family members of one such as me.
And what if I go to jail? I’ve never been, but I’ve watched enough prison movies to know I wouldn’t do well there. I won’t last long at all. The other cons will hate me and make sure I pay dearly.
But it’s not my fault. I didn’t know. If I had, I know I’d have lived my life differently.
You see today I learned that I am a serial killer. You’d think I might have noticed before now, wouldn’t you? That I’d be scurrying around, digging holes in the basement floor or the back yard. That I would be having all sorts of bonfires. That at a minimum I would have purchased a wood-chipper to dispose of the evidence.
Nope. It wasn’t necessary.
You see, I have been carrying the bodies around with me for decades. No wonder I’m tired all the time.
I know you didn’t listen to the video. But you should have. Because then you’d know that because I have used birth control pills – contraceptives – Pastor Kevin Swanson thinks I am a serial murderer with a uterus filled with dead fetuses.
Ewwwww. Got any Massengil?
Make mine a double!
* * *
Tell me, is there a contest going on to see which right-wing fanatic can say the stupidest thing ever heard by mankind?
It isn’t often that I agree with seriously right-wing politicians. But today is an exception.
You see, Maine Governor Paul LePage told a group of school kids that newspapers are dangerous. And I have to agree with the Gov.
My concern doesn’t come from the fact that, like Governor LaPage, no newspaper has ever, or indeed would ever consider endorsing either of us for public office, although that’s true. No newspaper has ever endorsed him for so much as dog catcher. No newspaper has ever endorsed me either, but that’s less awkward since I’ve never run for public office. And he, ummm, has.
I’m pretty sure that a newspaper was never involved in an actual threat to LePage’s personal safety, though. I can’t say that I have remained personally unharmed, unmolested by the press. Because that would be a lie.
You see one morning I was held hostage by the Washington Post. I’m serious. I’ve never told the story before. It’s too traumatic. Too terrifying. Too humiliating.
The Culprit (Google Image)
It was a long time ago. So long ago that the Post was still a reasonably unbiased paper, before it became the tool of the neocons that control it now. So long ago that its investigative reporters still investigated politics and corruption and didn’t simply reprint GOP talking points. So long ago that the Post only cost a quarter.
The trauma haunts me to this day.
I was late to work that morning and flew through the Metro’s turnstile and down the escalator. Of course I’d just missed a train. But at least I had a moment to catch my breath and buy a newspaper.
I looked at my watch: 9:45. Shit. I had a 10 a.m. meeting.
I walked over to a newspaper vending box and inserted my last quarter, pulled down the door, took out a newspaper, and let the door go. They have a spring-loaded gizmo so they automatically close.
Google Image
What happened next appeared dreamlike, in slow motion.
The door closed ever so slowly but inevitably. And just before the door’s final slam, the strap from my purse fell off of my shoulder and down; down to the inside of the machine’s door. The door closed with a slam, with my purse strap closed inside.
I was trapped. I couldn’t get my purse strap out of the machine. I couldn’t get the attention of the Metro guy because he was too far away, and I didn’t want to leave my purse unattended. I didn’t have another quarter to re-open the box.
Worse, I was alone, it was late morning by commuter standards. There were no other commuters in sight. No one was coming down the escalator. No one to rescue me. No knights in shining armor. Nobody even wearing a three piece suit.
So I started to laugh. The silliness of being held hostage by a newspaper vending machine made me laugh so hard that tears streamed down my face. I laughed so hard I snorted; I cackled. Had there been any children present they would have been terrified of me. I couldn’t breathe and began frantically trying to catch a stray bit of oxygen now and then.
After several minutes, a few people came down the escalator but they avoided me. Clearly they thought I was a lunatic. They bought papers from other machines because I was laughing too hard to ask them to please, please release me. Laughing too hard to explain just how funny life can be. Laughing too hard to explain just what I was laughing about.
Eventually, exhausted, I spied one lone man coming down the escalator, and asked him to please, please help me out. Please buy a paper because I really did need to get to work. He bought a paper, and I was freed.
When I finally got to work, I went into my meeting late. My makeup was smeared, and I looked like I’d been crying. Everybody was worried about me.
“What happened to you, Elyse?” They all asked. “Are you alright?”
Instead of starting to tell the story of what had happened, I immediately started laughing-crying again, so that it took a while for me to explain that I had been held for ransom by a Washington Post newspaper box. Not much work was done because everyone was too busy laughing.
“You’re the only person I know who has adventures everywhere they go,” said one of my co-workers.
“So, Elyse,” asked my boss, the head of the department, “how much ransom was paid for your release?”
“A quarter.”
He roared with laughter again.
Sigh.
So you see, Governor LePage is right: newspapers can in fact be dangerous. You never know what’s going to happen when you try to pick one up.
Before 1986 there were two things in life I was certain about. Things I never got wrong on a pop quiz. Things that I could recite in my sleep.
First my name. Elyse Ellen E….
When I got married I didn’t have to change my name. That was until the woman I worked for at the time announced that I absolutely could not change my name. So naturally the decision was made and I changed it.
Besides, nobody ever pronounced my maiden name correctly; it drove me crazy. Nobody pronounces my married name right either, but it’s John’s name not mine, so I don’t care. Butcher away, folks.
The second thing I always got right was my birthday. January 18, 1957. Simple. Easy. I had a document from the State of Connecticut with a raised seal to prove that I was born on that date around 3 a.m. in the morning (sorry Mom and Dad). But I didn’t know that I would end up changing my birthday when I got married too.
Actually, I can blame this one on the same boss. It was Anna’s fault. Yup.
The summer before we got married, I was working as a high level lobbyist and John was a lowly government employee. OK, actually, I was a lowly lobbying flunky and John was pretty high up in the U.S. government. But still.
One afternoon when I was supposed to meet John for some wedding prep stuff, something earth-shatteringly important happened involving my job. It was so vitally important to the rest of the history of the world that I can’t at this moment quite put my finger on just exactly what it was.
Anyway, we were supposed to go to the DC City Office and get our marriage license. Now stop it, readers. This event was nothing like you see in those old movies, with movie stars in great hats.
Really, there was nothing romantic about it at all. I don’t think. Not so I’ve heard, anyway.
So anyway, John got our marriage license, and we got married a month or so later in a lovely church service in the church where John’s parents had been married 40 years earlier. Family and friends were in attendance.
All was good until my birthday rolled around, when John made a major confession.
“Ummm, Lease,” he said quietly. “When I got the marriage license, I mistakenly put down January 17th not 18th as your birthday.”
“You what?”
“Yeah. Oops. I guess that means that either your birthday is January 17th or we’re not married.”
“No, I’m pretty sure it just means that I married an idiot.”
We would have happily left it at that if it hadn’t been for my family. They betrayed me. Each and every one of them called me on the 17th to wish me a Happy Birthday that year — thinking my new husband would be taking me out to dinner on my actual birthday January 18th.
I have a large family. Even distant cousins nine times removed called on the 17th.
“See,” John said proudly, “I was right. Your birthday is obviously on the 17th because everybody is calling to wish you a happy birthday!”
This scene has been replayed every blippin’ year for 25 years. This year it will be an even 26 birthdays. And never a call on the 18th.
To make matters worse, though, I put the final nail in my own coffin myself last year. You see, I wanted to let all my bloggin’ buddies know it was my birthday. Plus I needed to address the glaring issue of my stupid blog name. And so I wrote this post: People My Age.
And because I didn’t know how to schedule posts in those days, and because a lot of my readers were from Europe and Asia, well, I posted it on January bloody 17th.
So this year I’ve given up. My birthday is January 17th from now on. Or the 18th. Whenever. Gifts will be gracefully received all month long, however.
When I wrote a post on the night of the shootings about the fact that members my family grew up in Newtown and went to Sandy Hook Elementary School, I was touched by the comments of most of you.
One commenter I’d never heard from before, took the opportunity to make my comments section into her platform for how very safe she feels because she packs a gun. I tolerated her for as long as I could, mostly trying not to vomit at the comments. She berated me for my opinions, telling me in bad grammar that I was ignorant.
I am not ignorant. I have done the research. I even put some of it into the comments that she found so ignorant. Here’s the post, although the comments, which were mostly answered in those damn Word Press bubbles, do not appear in the order they were received. And since some of them required me to breathe deeply into a paper bag filled with Xanax, they were answered fairly randomly.
*****
As a news junky I am constantly reading about the incredibly stupid things normal people do with guns. People who mean no harm, who only mean to keep themselves and their families safe.
There was the man I wrote about in my first piece on gun control, Gunsmoke. He shot himself in the femoral artery while unbuckling his seat belt in a grocery store parking lot. His wife was inside shopping, and their four kids watched their father die stupidly.
There was the guy who was hanging out with his friends and demonstrated the infallibility of his gun’s safety by putting the safety on, pointing the gun at his temple, and pulling the trigger. His friends were quite impressed, I’m quite sure. He will never know.
And then along comes this guy, who gives a face and a voice to everything stupid about the crazy gun crowd.
In case you are on the fence on whether or not assault weapons should be banned, take a listen to someone who thinks they should not.
And then see if you can believe badly enough of George W. Bush, that you will go along with Alex Jones’ depiction of what happened on September 11, 2001, and therefore, why, really, we all need assault weapons.
*****
I’ve begun to believe that it is not necessarily mental health that needs to be evaluated before a person can purchase a gun.
We need to test their intelligence. Because there are way too many stupid fuckers out there with weapons.
In the spring and summer of 1986 random parts of my face started growing for no apparent reason. I would be at home, on the subway, or off working somewhere around DC.
First it was a swollen eyebrow. Then that would go away and a day or two later, my cheek would grow so that I couldn’t see well out of one eye.
Mostly it was my lips, though. They would grow, sometimes individually, sometimes together. I looked like a duck.
Did I mention I was also getting married in September? That September? And while John and I had a fairly small and simple wedding, I was unenthusiastic about going to the altar looking like a daisy. Especially this one.
Of course, John’s lips would have been normal. Mine? Not so much.
But work was so completely crazy that I ignored it. I was a lobbyist/flunky at the time, and was spending long days up on Capitol Hill working on the Tax Reform Act of 1986. (And it was the perfect assignment for me; I did my own taxes – on the U.S. Government 1040-EZ form. Tax Returns for Poor Dummies.) I was in over my head, didn’t have a clue what was going on, what was important, or which way was up. I was a wee bit stressed.
Plus that summer we decided to buy our first house just so we could send my stress level through the roof of my brand new adorable little house.
But back to my problem. My ever changing facial features.
People were looking at me strangely which I understood – I often and suddenly looked really odd. But even stranger, they stopped talking whenever I would approach. These were people I’d worked with for more than six years. Something weird was going on.
And I found out what that was early one morning as I stood talking in the front lobby to my boss, also (irritatingly) named John. He was giving me instructions on that day’s most important issues, when to pay especially close attention, when to call him immediately with an update.
At the beginning of the chat, my face was normal. But as we talked, my lips spontaneously grew larger and larger. More duck-like.
“Elyse,” my boss said, “what’s happening to your lips?”
“They’re growing. Spontaneously. I don’t know why. But you’ve seen me with a swollen face off and on for the last couple of months. Haven’t you noticed? And it keep on happening. Luckily, John has promised to marry me even if I look like Daisy Duck when I arrive at the church.”
The look of relief on his face was instantaneous – he joked with me about the fat lips, about stress, about what I might be allergic to. He’s a really nice guy, and he cared about me. But it wasn’t until much later when I realized just why he had looked so relieved.
He thought I was being abused by my husband-to-be. And he, a very powerful Washington DC lawyer, who knew/knows everybody in town, had no idea what to do. He didn’t ask me if anybody was hurting me. He didn’t threaten to report John, or try to find out discretely whether folks in John’s office thought John might be abusive. No, my boss talked to other folks who also cared about me and who also didn’t know what to do to save me from what, had it been true, would have been a huge mistake.
(In fairness, they didn’t know my John at all – it wasn’t a very social office.)
And once I made the connection, I remembered feeling similarly helpless once. I thought about a secretary named Kelly who had worked with us briefly a few years earlier. She and I had become a bit friendly, even though we worked on different floors and in totally different departments. We both loved to play softball. One day I saw Kelly with an enormous black eye.
“I was playing softball with my husband’s team,” she said, shaking her head. “I should have caught the damn ball.”
“I once caught one with my left thigh,” I responded to her, truthfully, but naively. “You could see the stitch marks on the bruise.”
The next day she was gone. Obviously to everyone else her husband had been beating her, and she got help and got away.
The image of her face has haunted me. What would I have done – would I have been able/willing to help her? Would I have ever figured out what was happening to her?
My story ended well. I hadn’t had time to eat properly and subsisted pretty much on a diet of Milky Ways for two months. Woman cannot live on Milky Ways alone. Maybe ducks can. I stopped eating chocolate and looked OK at my wedding. Or at least, I didn’t look like a duck.
I don’t know how Kelly’s story ended. I never will.
* * *
Yesterday, the GOP in the U.S. House of Representatives allowed the Violence Against Women Act, which had been law since 1994, to expire. And they let it happen because it would have expanded coverage of the law to more women including immigrants and Native Americans.
Perhaps you don’t know what the Violence Against Women law does.
My bible, Wikipedia, says that it provide programs and services, including:
Community violence prevention programs
Protections for female victims who are evicted from their homes because of events related to domestic violence or stalking
Funding for female victim assistance services, like rape crisis centers and hotlines
Programs to meet the needs of immigrant women and women of different races or ethnicities
Programs and services for female victims with disabilities
Legal aid for female survivors of violence
But what it really does is help abused women. To let them know that they can get help. That they are not alone. And it can also give their families, friends and co-workers vital, life saving information about how to help. How to act. What to do besides wonder amongst everyone else but the person most impacted. Literally.
Now tell me, what’s not to like about this law? It gives vital assistance to vulnerable women – those who most need it. A place to go where they can take their kids, get help.
It gives folks who don’t know what to do or what to say a clue as to how to help women in need.
Where they don’t have to give up that last little bit of their heart.
I have stated this more often than I can stand, but the men in the GOP are not on the side of women, or on the side of men who respect women.
GET THEM OUT OF OUR LIVES
Then, Damn them to Hell where they belong
***
What you and I can do:
Contact your representatives in Congress and demand they pass the Violence Against Women Act as it stands today with expanded services: http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
FiftyFourandAHalf 