*****
(Fiction in Editing phases, SNARL's backstory)

BLANCHE wanted so much to be a nun, except the part about being celibate. She revered the church but also had that glow of sexual attraction you find in pedophile priest sex crime victims, the overproduction of pherenomes that seems to plague us. So even as Blanche studied social work at a Catholic college, then labored for almost no pay in a Chicago Archdiocese charity, she always dressed and looked like a nun. Still she managed to acto out sexually.

Like a lot of pedo-priest victims, Blanche had a confused reverence for her religion at the same time as she wanted to make love to the priests and other men who were at the top of the religion.

Then at one point Blanche had a spiritual awakening. Suddenly she made the connection. She reconciled her sexual attraction to the priests with whom she worked to incidents that happened when she was a pre-teen girl, molested by a priest in rural Pennsylvania.

It was early 1980s when Blanche realized the reason she was so promiscuous with certain men was the molestation by that priest at age 10-11 or so.

Now in her late twenties, she realized that the experience as a young girl with that priest now was driving her sexual confusion.

Since she was working at a Catholic Charity, Blanche went to a bishop she knew thruogh her job, to talk about this reconciliation slash spiritual awakening she was having. She spilled out her soul to the bishop in a sort of private Confession, then a few days later, found herself being called in to interview with several other bishops.

Then they offered her a wonderful job opportunity.

It seems you are not the only one, they tell her. There are likely a few hundred more like you, people who we call "survivors' who realize in adulthood that pedophile Catholic priests raped them as children.

Blanche had no idea there were so many. But go on, she says.

The bishops tell her she has a wonderful opportunity here to work for social justice for the victims and still protect the good of the Church. They explained to Blanche that the bishops would form a support organization for the individuals around the country who were molested by Catholic priests as children, the few who would likely come forward in the next few years.

And SNARL was born.

And it rocked along for about five years, growing faster than the bihops thought it would.

Because people were finding each other on the Internet.

So in about 1995, the bishops realized that even though they were running SNARL from the top, they could no longer keep the total message about Catholic priest sex crimes under control. They could no longer keep the crime victims under control.

"This new thing out of California, the internet," grumbled the bishops. "They're finding each other in spite of what we do to stop it, especially in San Francisco.

"We've got to do something more," said the bishops.

Worse yet, One of the crime victims who was also a priest had started a genuine grass roots group for the victims, and he was using this new internet, plus making savvy use of other news media. The bishops saw victims were gaining strength through their numbers, exactly what the bishops were trying to stop.

"We gotta put someone stronger in there running SNARL," said the bishops.

"Yeah but what about Blanche, she's not going to want to step aside."

Suddenly Blanche got busy elsewhere. She began law school, followed by graduate school, plus her new work for SNARL kept her traveling overseas.

San Francisco SNARL members in 1995 when I was one of them were stunned and surprised. This announcement just came from St. Louis instead of Chicago, saying that this guy no one knew, Darren Clockwork, was now the new president of SNARL.

"Who is he?" was the word going around SF SNARL meetings. Word was he came from a PR firm. "Who put him in charge?" people asked at San Francisco SNARL meetings.

Then one by one, each member of San Francisco SNARL suddenly had disrupting events in their home or work lives, and it suddenly became impossible for them to continue to do advocacy work with SNARL anymore.

Suddenly, the young priest who was running the genuine grass roots group for victims became ill and died, when he had been healthy and thriving just weeks earlier. All the files from that grassroots group were inexplicably stolen in a breaking and entering that took place while victims were mourning at his wake.

Meanwhile Blanche went on to earn two PhDs, in Social Work and Theology, on top of her law degree. There was always enough money to pay her school fees.

Her study of theology took her on voyages to the Near and Far East, also paid for by the bishops. They told her it was training she needed in order to continue her work. Blanche developed an inner peace, knowing that everything she was doing would in the end save the Church.

Meanwhile the new man who the Bishops had installed, Darrel Clockwork, was at the helm of SNARL.

Blanche soon learned to channel her confused sexual-religious ideas into a new level of strength, combining ancient Eastern and modern New Age techniques. Her body stayed perfect and thin, her skin stayed young. She was deeply tanned though her home address is in the Midwest.

When Blanche made a press appearance, her unique combination of spiritual eminence and public speaking skills played out as a hypnotic charisma.

Blanche is much like Anna on the TV show V, a Sci Fi series currently running on ABC. Blanche's face shines down on the "survivor community" she helped create through SNARL. Blanche has a stunning hypnotizing effect and whoever hears her follows her.

An critical element from the very beginning of the bishops' plan was this kind of crowd control, this numbed brain blind following.

"Hey, most these victims are also Catholics," the bishops laughed. "It'll be easy to get them to latch onto a messiah-like figure they get dependent on. Just make sure she looks good on camera."

Laughter rolled through the bishops' planning meeting.

The bishops conjured up this whole plan back around 1984 or 85.

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


While Blanche is off studying Theology and taking seminars, plus organizing an annual conference, a full time job in itself, she's assured that Darrel Clockwork is running the support organization for priest crime victims like, well, clockwork. Blanche has said in public that she is the founder and creator of SNARL so many times now, she's come to believe it herself.

Her replacement, the director of SNARL Darrel Clockwork from St. Louis, also uses a hypnotizing technique to do his deeds. His main strategy is to pick out select individuals from the survivors who show up at local SNARL events. He runs all the background checks he needs to do to know which persons should be encouraged, which newcomers should be shown the door.

He's good at what he does. Clockwork speaks in a low soft gentle melodic voice, usually over the phone sometimes in person, to his select few. Clockwork has been known to fly in to town on a moment's notice, to see these select few survivors. His phone bills show numerous calls between them, several times a day Clockwork talks to survivors he's picked, in that low melodic soft voice, that a listener soon craves to hear again. They crave his phone calls, become almost addicted. Clockwork talks to his select few several times a day.

Soon those select survivors are only saying what Darrel Clockwork says to say and only doing what Darrell Clockwork says to do, and if the select one is also a SNARL regional leader, they will forward all information that comes from local crime victims to Clockwork, agreeing to not contact any of the new SNARL contacts on their own.

"It's how we've always done it, so how we are going to continue to do it," Clockwork repeats.

Clockwork will decide who gets called back.
.

If regional leaders (Clockwork's select) ask questions about this Modus Operandi, SNARL in the form of Darrel or Blanche, assures them, always conveying the same message: "This is the way we've always done it so this is the way we are going to continue to do it." Any time a regional leader suggests a new strategy or project, the answer from SNARL is, "We don't do that."

If regional leaders continue to ask questions, SNARL surreptitiously removes them from the select group of regional leaders, and often cuts them off completely.

No one wants to be cut off from the Bliss they feel they get from being in the presence of Blanche and Darrel.

***
BACK TO REAL LIFE, no more fiction for now
***

My daughter has a new boyfriend who I do not trust. The way she met him was strange, he has money coming from some unexplainable place. He's filling her head with ideas that inevitably cause her and I to argue: she's becoming an Ayn Rand fan, which is alright, but she's also has the DVR set to record every right wing show she can find, a new direction in her life since this fellow I do not trust came into her life.

Yesterday, Thanksgiving, I was gone a few hours, and the two of them and another of her friends ended up spending time on my bed, because my office-bedroom is very close to the kitchen (the dining room in our one-bedroom apartment). When I woke up the phone was disconnected, and when I used the phone which is part of the bed-office, it was making a clicking sound.

A new more invasive sounds of people tapping the phone, sounds that were not there before my daughter's current boyfriend was sitting on my bed, while my daughter and her friend often were off in the kitchen basting the turkey, preparing salad...

This boyfriend she's brought home is hostile, he glares at me, snarls when he should be smiling. Plus he is turning my daughter against me. He is a fundamentalist Christian political right winger, the broke homeless guy I described earlier, who reads books by Ron Paul in the tent where he sleeps nights, under a building in the Culver City part of town.

With his chin jutted out he narrates his extreme right wing ideology to everyone he meets, and now wonders why he can't get a career going in the film business, or at least that is the story he has my daughter believing.

I think the Catholic Church planted him in her life to get to me. And he's such a whore, he is even having sex with my daughter to get to me.

He is from Virginia, says his father does something vague in the Navy.

I won't leave the house until she gets him out of here.

*******
As to the phone being tapped, oh well, another tap on the phone. After I'd been doing City of Angels a year or so I started hearing noises on the phone. Whenever I say certain key words- Sodomized, Archbishop, Mahony, the Vatican- I hear this sort of wave, swoosh sound on the phone.

A lot of felonies get described on my phone when I'm interviewing pedophile priest sex crime victims around the country.

I just hope one of the parties tapping the phone is the U.S. Department of Justice. As long as I know everything I am doing is legal and justified, I don't care who is tapping my phone. If it is private eyes hired by the Catholic Church, I just hope that after they hear what survivors tell me on the phone, they will start wanting to work on our side and turn on the Church.

Oh and another note, after seeing the performance of WikiLeaks yesterday, remember , City of Angels is here all the time for anyone inside the Church who wants to leak documents, without the paragraphs redacted.

***********

Friday after Thanksgiving:

I finally got Mortimer out of the house. Daughter now sizzling angry, will probly be screaming mad when she returns, so I have to remember to just stay quiet.

I had to get Mortimer out of our house. I really suspect this guy, I think he was using Lizzie to get into our house and look for stuff. If nothing else, I have no respect for him. Anyone who can plop down in our house, three nights, and never think to offer some help, with ANYTHING. You can throw your eye in any corner or wall of the house and see we need muscle, we need a strong arm to push this thing and replace that thing, our home is ramshackle right now. Lizzie put up the curtain rods, my arms don't have the strength. As a result the curtain rod is part held up with tacks, part just tied to the window stands. So the rod sways across the window and the curtains hang slipshod and unevenly.

Anyone walking in the door can see five places where these females obviously need a man's help in their house.

And Mortimer lies in my daughter's bed, for 3 days. During that time my daughter and I both got up and went to work, at great difficulty because it's a holiday and we'd rather be laid back, anyone would. And Mortimer for 3 days never gets out of my daughter's bed.

Except once.

I'm at my computer working and mysteriously Mortimer walks by, his head not even turning to me, just walks by, then he's out the front door and down the stairs, and even Lizzie doesn't know where he just went. I jut hope he's not coming back, but his mountain bike is still parked against the couch.

I continue at the comptuer, then think to go down and get the mail. Outside, down the stairs, I approach the mailbox which is by the front entrance, and I hear two men speaking in low voices. They have eye contact with me, I see it's Mortimer and a white guy. Suddenly the tone of their voices changes. They're suddenly discussing movie making and writers' strikes, loudly.

I get my mail, return to our apartment, Mortimer follows way too close behind me on the stairs, but I'm still trying to be polite to this latest in a long string of boys my daughter has brought home. It's hard too because I can see that this one is even lying about his age. She's 21 and he's got to be at least 30, though Liz said, "I think he's 26, 27," one day concerned because he had told her he was even younger than that.

This is the Broke Right Winger I mentioned earlier who is filling my daughter with Glenn Beck talking points, a development that has caused great rancor in our little two-person family the last few weeks. I mean she enthusiastically said to me, "I'm getting you Sarah Palin's book for Christmas."

Still I try to stay off the topic of politics, while getting him to leave my home.

"He's a grown man," I finally get through to Lizzie, "I'm not going to have him wandering around the house while you are at work and I'm asleep. I'll be sleeping with one eye open."

"Mom, how can you be so mean, it's late, how can he get all the way to Culver City?"

Earlier she explained to me that Mortimer the right winger does not even believe in transit, so he only rides his bike, does not believe in ANYTHING that is supported through mandatory things like the 1.5 percent sales tax I think it is we pay to keep transit going in L.A.

The self made man, too proud to ride transit, thinks nothing of leeching off the sick old lady and her beautiful young daughter for three days.

I have to defend my right to privacy to my daughter:

"You've known him 3 weeks, you don't even know his age for sure, or how to spell his name." What I don't say is, I don't trust this guy.

He finally gets up and leaves, she goes too, but I know she's on her way to work, she'll return in the morning with tales of product stocking overnight in this super store where she works.

He rides his bicycle all the way to Culver City. Maybe he'll figure it out that people in the big city use public transit and it doesn't make us all socialists.

He has been filling my daughter's head with all this Objectivist Ayn Rand stuff, while at the same time he is able to lie in a girl's bed for three days while both she and her sick mother get up and go to work two times? And it doesn't dawn on him to ask, is there something I can do to help out? Would Howard Roark be in my kitchen helping himself to leftovers and waking me up? Would Ayn Rand let someone wait on her for 3 days while she lied in bed totally healthy, just chillin'?

And who was the guy Mortimer was talking to down on the street? In this neighborhood, a white guy, English speaking and looking well fed and educated just happens to walk by when Mortimer is outside and Mortimer just happens to know him?

There are almost no English speaking people in this entire neighborhood, except the crack heads and guys in the halfway houses just out of prison. No one comes into this neighborhood unless they have to.

Who was Mortimer really?

Is the Church really even willing to use my daughter's over dependence and neediness around men to get inside this house and find stuff? Plant bugs?

Will I ever be able to trust anybody?