Other States, SNAP curious pattern repeated all over the USA

.
This is Chapter 3, Chapter 2 is here and Chapter One here and all of it is in process of being written now (Oct. 2011).

***
We were happy the four or five of us that we had put together this media event on our own, that the Pope’s statements show so little concern about the kinds of sex crimes that had taken place against children in the Catholic Church, and how damaged we all were now as adults with that experience in our childhoods as a result of it.

We were in front of the L.A. Cathedral and we thought we were spontaneous, a group of survivors who’d just gotten in touch with each other and decided to picket in the same place all the SNAP media events had taken place in the previous seven years, though the group had recently disappeared from Los Angeles.

Finally maybe we'd get a chance to speak.

Then as the hour drew near, to all of our dismay, a guy showed up from SNAP to make the “official press statement” and it was like the news media had been informed only to talk to him.

I know this guy and only a week ago he had told me he hadn’t read anything about the pedophile priest issue in months maybe a year, he was so tired of it, and now here he was our designated spokesperson. Dutifully most of the survivors took a position behind him as he took the center stage, and all the news cameras and microphones pointed at him. We had announced the subject of the press statement was new victims coming forward in Europe and how these new allegations show that the Pope had been in collusion with the crime cover-ups for decades, each of us was brewing with rage and had plenty to say about it.

The SNAP spokesman takes control of the event and reads from the prepared statement: “To all the victims in Europe. We feel your pain.”

Not much more than that. “We feel your pain.”

An audible groan came out of me, and I went off to a spot of shade on the sidewalk and dropped out of the event, which resulted in a watered down version of our outrage being broadcast in the news. The rest of the group gathered at the cathedral, most having been raised as good Catholics who don't ask questions, stood dutifully behind the spokesman as he read again, “We feel your pain.” I wasn't raised Catholic after age 13.

****

"Do NOT write church officials. At best, it’s a waste of time. At worst, information you provide might be used against you or others." (From SNAP Spring 2011 Open letter to concerned PA citizens & Catholics)

They say "Do not write church officials" as they will use what you write to them against you. Instead write to SNAP.”

Problem is then SNAP keeps everything as secret as the church.

*********
If I were the only victim to have a bad experience with SNAP I would not write this story today.

With about a hundred thousand victims in the USA of pedophile priests, why do only a handful appear when SNAP holds a media event? Where did everybody go?

*****

May 12, 2008 1:00 PM Harrisburg Pa, capitol rotunda

Rally re HB1137 which will open a two window plus extend the SOL by 12 years. I called someone in PA:

"My pet peeve is we have all these groups that speak out and when it comes time to actually do anything their actions are nil.

"I called SNAP, I couldn't get anybody organized to go up there with me, if the people do not rally at the capitol, it will die in committee." (Ref WTFIT?)

******

(Insert here, what happened to Robert Costello's project when the Pope visited New York; the way SNAP defeated efforts by survivors to hold a vigil in Chicago Easter Weekend 2006; what SNAP leaders said to and about Jim Robertson after he made widespread news by handcuffing himself to Cardinal Mahony's throne at the L.A. Cathedral, and other ways SNAP stops any victims from doing activism outside SNAP's agenda and control.

And finally re The Hague, since German lawyers were alreday working to prosecute the Pope at the International Criminal Court, and efforts were already underway to have victims contact the ICC, why didn't SNAP mention, in its September 2011 media blitz, any of that work to prosecute the Pope that was already in progress?)

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

'SNAP tries to malign me, and as far as I'm concerned, tries to malign anybody that gets between them and a TV camera or microphone.'

(Once again, I find in my notes, I'm talking to a survivor about “our issue” and without provocation or prompting, the survivor starts talking about their problem with SNAP to me. I’ve changed the location of the interview quoted here, and hidden the speaker’s identity, because he relates an incident similar to what I heard from people in several cities.)

A pattern repeated by SNAP in city after city:

Words of One Unidentified Survivor:

We have a very bad problem with SNAP so we created our own meeting, we call ourselves -------------

One of the women that came to the meeting when it was a SNAP meeting wasn’t a survivor. She was very hostile towards members and when I brought this to the co-chair’s attention, I said, a lot of the members are complaining about this woman. But the co-chair wouldn't agree to tell her to stop coming.

We had to start an additional meeting.

Barbara Dorris came into the picture and said that's not going to happen. (Dorris, of St. Louis, is SNAP Outreach Director.)

We said we voted on it.

She said call yourself whatever you want but you're not SNAP, then she started to accuse us of tax evasion and misrepresenting ourselves as SNAP leaders.

We're more about healing than hurting people.

We don't want anything more to do with SNAP.

We'll support them to out a priest but...

COFA: WHO WAS THE WOMAN AT THE MEETINGS?

This woman, she was part of Voice of the Faithful and I guess has a very big ax to grind with the Church and joined us because she felt SNAP was more involved in confronting the Church.

Then in meetings she would challenge people, speak sarcastically to the survivors who were sharing.

She’d taunt, I’d say, you gotta stop, if you don't agree, tell me or them after.

The local SNAP leader then wouldn't do anything about it.

It was just- we had to start a new group, we're still reaching out to other survivors.

SNAP tries to malign me, and as far as I'm concerned, tries to malign anybody that gets between them and a TV camera or microphone.

They're intimidated by people like you and me and others that speak out and sometimes speak out louder than SNAP does, SNAP doesn't like that.

You have to realize who you're dealing with, I know enough about SNAP that I know I'm not going to align myself-

Then on their website months later they still had the old meeting at a different place. I called Barbara Dorris, and said, you have survivors that could be going to the wrong building where we don't meet. She says, I’ll take care of it, but the thing is, the wrong address had been up there on the SNAP website for months.

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

(From November 2007 interview with DOEM of Pennsylvania:)

COFA: IS THERE AN ACTIVE SNAP GROUP BACK THERE?

DOEM: You know what I initially met with the president when we were even heavier in the media, probably around 2002?

COFA: BLAINE?

DOEM: No it was Clohessy and I wasn’t very thrilled with his follow through as far as Pennsylvania, you know. But it’s an entity in itself and wherever their focus may be I don't know.
But
COFA: SO SNAP ISN’T PART OF YOUR STORY AT ALL?
DOEM: No, that's just it. I mean, I just recently discovered there was a guy that handled a chapter for SNAP and he went off and spun off his own, you know, survivor network you might say. It’s just I don't know. Hold on- [OFF TOPIC CONVERSATION]

(DOEM in follow-up 2011: Re SNAP in pa, "There is no ongoing group, nobody has ever followed up with us.")

...

Woman survivor who had dropped out by April 2008:

Sol in Ohio, their [SNAP] tactics wrecked it. They didn't do what they did in Boston. We wanted it abolished, but at least we got length of time extended,
But folks in Boston engaged all the groups who were victims...

*****

Also from April 2008:

Spoke with GG, one of the L.A. plaintiffs, on April 16 in the evening. I called him as he was once an L.A. contact with SNAP. I wanted him to help me find persons involved with the Salesian trial. [GG is not his real initials.]

We were talking about the upcoming trial when he volunteered almost off topic that he’d gotten a bad taste about SNAP. He’d been an activist with them for years.

One Sunday evening a while after the settlements went out, he got a call from Clohessy and Blaine saying, hi, we just showed up at the airport, let’s meet someplace for dinner, you name the place.

GG felt flattered that Clohessy and Blaine would be wanting to meet him, so packed up, left his family for the night, and met with Clohessy and Blaine for what turned into a sales pitch, complete with “So tell me how much will you be donating this evening,” type pressure used as a sales closing technique. [NOTE: L.A. plaintiffs got settlement checks in early 2008, averaging $1.2 million each.]

GG felt it was Tacky and as he described it, so did I. So tacky it could have been designed to turn people off and be tacky. Clohessy and Blaine apparently raised little money on that trip, instead turned off GG. He said he made lots of recommendations on better ways to raise money and Clohessy and Blaine said, great, we'll meet soon and do all that, and never talked to him about it again, although he did make several appearances for SNAP, including travel at his own expense. They never entertained an idea he put forward.
.
*********

The image of SNAP leaders appearing at plaintiffs' doors fundraising brought to my mind this image from The Others



Then I started thinking, when people got settlements, SNAP would be there hands out almost demanding donations from the settlements. Then SNAP keeps its financial stuff pretty secret, you never really know how much comes in and where it goes...

What a perfect setup for a crime syndicate. Pay out settlements in lawsuits to be forgiven your crimes, then strong-arm the plaintiffs for big chunks of that cash back, through an illusive and indistinct nonprofit.

Get the cash back, as much of it as you can, like a Mario Puzo godfather...



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

In a January 2008 interview (to be published early 2012) Jim Robertson told CofA:

SNAP was going to ask the cardinal to dedicate one of the chapels in the new cathedral to the victims.

But the cardinal jumped the gun.

He found out we were going to make a request, and he dedicated a chapel to the victims without talking to any victims.

We went down to the cathedral and the cardinal is putting a cross in the chapel for victims but that's an event once again designed to make the church look good and nothing for us.

That's when we started to get pissed off

**********

I asked Jim Robertson what happened with SNAP after he handcuffed himself to Roger Mahony’s throne in July of 2005 on the altar of L.A. Cathedral. Hearings about the misdemeanor Disturbing a Religious Gathering began two months later and Jim’s case was going set to go to trial in December.

CofA: HOW SUPPORTIVE WAS SNAP?

I was attacked for three hours on the phone by Mary Grant.

8 AM the day after, I get a phone call -- I’d been getting lots of calls, in fact I’d been doing interviews, I did the early AM drive time radio interviews. There had been a camera crew there filming the Mass, and the incident was on CNN but I didn't know that would happen. Amy Berg was there interviewing for her film.

Anyway, Mary Grant calls next day and says, I just want you to know you ruined the demonstration and so many people are angry

She said, So many people are angry and they're never coming back because of what you did.

Then David Clohessy wrote that this demonstration was spoiled by one person’s selfish gesture, and it was passed out at the next “support group” meeting at Grant’s house.

They put this out about me after the event.

Yeah, Grant calls me after the demonstration and her tirade goes on for three hours

I mean.

They were all cheering me when I passed by in the squad car.

But here’s Mary Grant telling me I had fucked up.
Failed
Done a bad thing to the movement.

I tried to reason with her, I had no idea all these people would show up. If anybody was offended, I'm sorry, but I had no idea they were offended.

In the end, I said, if anybody needs me to apologize give them my phone number

In the next three years no one ever, ever, ever told me they were angry at me for handcuffing myself to Mahony’s throne.


A new friend in Albuquerque late 2010 is source of this exclusive photo at City of Angels Blog, from the day in July 2005 when Jim Robertson (pictured left) when he handcuffed himself to the throne-like chair on the L.A. Cathedral altar reserved for the Cardinal. The incident was part of demonstrations re the L.A. Clergy Cases, most of which settled in July 2007.

Jim talks a bit about the experience in a 2008 interview quoted below.

Photo comes by way of two plaintiffs in the L.A. cases, one lives in Albuquerque the other in L.A. (how those priests did get around). Read more here http://cityofangels8.blogspot.com/2010/12/photo-jim-robertson-cuffed-to-mahony-on.html )

*********

Me, I'm wondering, who gave SNAP authority? We had started out as a grass roots movement, but now these people from St. Louis are in charge? Who put them in charge and who is their boss?.

******

Somehow the Cardinal in L.A. always knew in advance what SNAP would be doing. (Write here the CNN experience in 2010)

*
The more I learned over four years interviewing pedophile priest victims,
the thought of how much evil it would take to pull off this entire false advocates scenario sickened me.

***

FOUND
November 2011
In CofA Blog notes from June 2008 or thereabouts:

Can I run this?

I don't think it’s any accident that the first time I broke through and wrote a negative paragraph about SNAP it was in the same post as Thousands more children will be raped by priests "

In that post I wrote: “The organization that produced more than four thousand pedophile priest felons and is not being thoroughly investigated is the Catholic Church"

In the same post I wrote: "But SNAP only appears to be there for those crime victims with lawsuits."

BECAUSE both the Church and SNAP had the same goal in their efforts in the USA from the mid-1980s to present:

In the end the civil lawssuits across the country made survivors look like we're all just out for money
In the end the persons who get money from the church retreat after being warned by SNAP about friends who come out of the woodwork, asking for cash, after you get a settlement.
In the end lawsuits pit plaintiff against plaintiff and plaintiffs against survivors not able to be a plaintiff, not necessarily a personality thing. It's just the difference in the financial status of victims who get settlements and those who don't that makes us not be able to interact with each other anymore.
In the end lawsuits perpetuate secrecy about these crimes
In the end lawsuits pit plaintiff against plaintiff as they ended up competing for their share of cash, so were afraid to let another plaintiff know how much cash they got, so dropped out of any movement that was developing.

-- The reason both church and SNAP policy that hurt victims came up in the same story is they are connected

At the top

WHY CAN’T OTHER PEOPLE SEE IT????

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




Above: (Soundtrack for 1969 story that used to be at this link but has now moved to a work platform for rewrites.)

********

More stuff found in files:

Not going to say who said this, but I can attest it was someone with a lot of experience.

"1st SNAP convention 2003 was in a St. Louis hotel, Blaine et al stayed in a different better hotel, away from the bulk of survivors."

***
Blaine was in Tampa with Dutch Film crew in 2010. (Doesn't any reporter think it's strange that she’s almost always standing there alone running a “network”? Where are the rest of the hundred thousand of us?)

SNAP Half-Amped: My 2008 Conference Experience

.
(TK Chapter 4 or 5??? the other SNAP conference story)

******
The Post at this Link Used to Be:

Life in a Tupperware container, 1

I was going to write about how great I'm doing. Finally I can go to sleep without television or radio on, after years of needing some media in my head until I fell asleep, otherwise my head would fill up with my own thoughts and I’d never get to sleep. For years, if I made the mistake of just lying down, or letting a video play out, before I knew it, I wouldn't be asleep, I’d be sitting up, clenched, squirting tears. My face goes into this total twist thing as I realize the horror and shock of my own life. Some incident will enter my memory and before I know it I'm running the details in my head, and that leads to all the physical stuff that comes with triggered memories. Total body pain.

I was going to write that I'm Cured, it's stopped, but actually there have been two episodes now since I got to Albuquerque. Maybe it’s the sheer white of the Motel Six design style of my room, for some reason I'm real clear in here, when the episodes happen, when the line gets crossed between emotional and physical pain. I've experienced it live in person on myself here now twice in less than a month.

Yesterday it was so weird, I totally understood the part about needing media to occupy my brain or else. It was Sunday and I don't like to have to work on Sunday but yesterday I had, instead, more work than usual, on the show "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," work that had to be done by early afternoon. So I got up my usual 4 AM and did it, transcribed at full attention at my little laptop, at my little perch on this tiny round table that is the only furniture in the room practically.

The interview was an hour and a half of another one of these incredible undereducated,incurious women who end up being featured on "I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant," whose Season 4 now kept me tied to my laptop on Sunday. More than six hours straight listening to a monotone voice saying, I don't know, what do you mean, I don't think so. The new mother was so DUMB.

Hey, realty TV keeps me working, I should be grateful.

Anyway. Just at about two in the afternoon as I'm finishing up work, I'm thinking there is nothing I’d like more than to lie down and watch a movie, and the cable goes out, third or fourth day in a row, same time, just as I'm finishing work. But not being totally addicted to television, I thought, no big deal I’ll watch a movie on my laptop, nope, gave all the DVD’s to Lizzie when I left L.A. No problem, I thought, I’ll listen to the radio, but the connection was not good enough over the hotel internet ISP to get in the station I listen to on Sundays from L.A. KJLH

So here I was in this blank white room with no TV, no radio, no one I felt like I could call*, and within an hour I was tearing myself apart. Squealing, twisting my face, crying so much that when I woke up later in the night, and saw myself in the mirror, I was shocked. The clouds of puffed skin all over the face, not just puffy eyes, but all the way down to the cheeks, just huge lumpy folds of creased puffs, with little slits at the top where the eyes would be, and from those slits my beady little eyes beamed out, looking angry. *Once an episode starts I can’t call anyone, that's part of the episode….

Wow. No way I went out of the room looking like that.

So cried in here because I'm so lonely instead.

The first episode in this room was totally connected to the recent incidents in L.A. from living in an apartment owned by a slumlord. I don't think people realize how much having a slumlord for a landlord can affect a person, but it got me in ways I didn't realize until the second week I was here, when I asked the hotel people to let me move to a room on the top floor, so I could have a better view.

It is a better view in this new room, lots of twinkly lights.

But this is not the kind of hotel where a bellman shows up and packs your things and all you have to do is ride the elevator up one flight of stairs, tippling on four inch stilettos, petting a little Pekinese that lives in your handbag.

No, here at the Motel Sic, I had to lug all my stuff to the elevator, wait, ride, lug all my stuff to the new room. I don't know how I managed in a week to acquire so much more stuff, more than the 70 and 58 pound suitcases I had to repack at Amtrak to get here. I had Amazon send a coffeepot, a hand-held vacuum (I'm too OCD to only have housekeeping once a week like they have in these hotels and a programmable coffee pot is mandatory when you get up at 4 AM for your job). After being here only a week, I’d acquired kitchen stuff, bags of it, from the Dollar General Store. Anyway, it took 2 hours of continuous pulling and packing and shoving and unloading to get my stuff up one flight of stairs, while the guys who run the hotel stood outside tapping their feet waiting, and I so wished I was at one of those other kinds of hotels….

Not this lifetime.

Anyway, inside the room I had to unpack everything again, so by nightfall I was wiped out, and only then realized the heater in the room was broken. I called and the maintenance guy came and said, it's not broken, sometimes with these heaters you think they're broken, but they aren't and I agreed, even said, hey you don't want a room to get too hot, it can ruin your computer equipment.

But at one AM as I shivered in the little bed you get for $200 a week here, the heat didn't work, and I was more worried about the computer equipment freezing by that point,

It was the first night this season that Albuquerque went below 30 degrees.

My 4 AM I had pushed the little hotel room table into the hotel room kitchen where I kept the electric stove on all night by turning the timer back on every half hour.

And I went into a total episode, this one trigged by slumlord landlord memories, thinking I was in the same mess now again, only now in a hotel in Albuquerque. From 2-5 or so AM, I relived everything we went through in L.A. with the guy who ran his rental business out of a high rise office building in Beverly Hills. There by the heat of two electric stove burners, I remembered how we went one whole summer of 2009 without an air conditioner, spending hours each day immobilized covered with sweat, in that apartment that cost me $1300 a month. When the slumlord finally replaced the AC, it still did not work, so I spent the summer of 2010 sweltering immobilized, not all day, just a few hours a day, but I was still at the mercy of this slumlord landlord who would respond to maintenance requests with months of arguments that made no sense.

“We need pipes replaced in the bathroom.”
“Miss, Ebeling, it's come to my attention that you have a cat in your apartment, now that goes against your lease....”

That kind of thing, fights back and forth with the landlord about total irrelevant topics, just to get basic maintenance done, after a while you stop bothering to even ask, just live with everything falling apart around you.

I was so sure I'd left that all behind me.

Then I sat here in this motel room with no heat remembering the months we lived with feces stains on our bathroom floor, in that apartment in L.A. When “maintenance” finally came in and fixed the pipes, they left the stained linoleum behind. I’d had to call the Health Department to finally get the bathroom floor replaced, but never stopped smelling feces coming from beneath the floor.

Somehow the landlord from hell in L.A. tied in with today December 2010, in a hotel room in Albuquerque with no heat, and I turned back into this impotent, battered, broken woman who could do nothing but simper and whimper in the kitchen, waiting for the hotel office to open. Then at 7 AM or so the housekeeper knocked on the door, I was still in this oblivious state, frozen, immobilized, and told them about the heater,

and

Ta Da

Within a half hour the hotel guy was there with a new heater, the maintenance guy took out the old one and replaced it with a new one, in seconds. And I had heat again.

So I was going to write today about how much better I'm doing. I can finally sleep without media in my brain, but that's not true, because last night I didn't make it.

The total body pain that started right in the middle of the episode yesterday, I felt it, the poison, go from my brain where it had me twisted, to everywhere else in the body, and I could not stop it.

Now pain has got me slammed down here in Motel Sick for a couple days.

Good thing the heater works.

Life in a Tupperware container will be continued.
.

I have to brag on my daughter a minute

.
She toddled right up to each person at the meeting, held out her hand to shake theirs, went onto the next citizen, shook their hand, onto the next. Lizzie, barely walking yet, already knew how to work a room.

When Lizzie was about age two we lived in Arcata. I had run away from L.A. when she was just weeks old to bring her up in small town Northern California, got a little job on the little weekly newspaper there, The Union, writing a column about being an ex-pat Angeleno. One night I was going to a political meeting, Concerned Citizens of Arcata, local Arcatans meeting in a community hall to share their irateness with Arcata’s liberals proclaiming the town a sanctuary in the Gulf War, refusing to participate in America’s war effort, I think Berkeley did it as well and Ann Arbor (?)

For The Union I wrote a column on the editorial page so figured it was my beat to cover the meeting. As often was the case I had no babysitter for the evening, so brought toddler Elizabeth with me. At that age she was just walking. It must have been 1990 fall or 1991 winter, as those are the months of the Gulf War, and Lizzie was born in July 1988, so she was still very young the night of that meeting.

When we arrived, most the people were sitting in chairs lined up along the wall. My toddler in leggings, a dress, and a head that had not yet sprung all its hair, pulled off my arms and climbed down to the ground.

She must have seen a local politician doing it.

It was like Lizzie knew exactly what to do.

She toddled right up to the first Arcata resident sitting along the wall. Lizzie, put out her hand, shook the person’s hand, then walked down to the next person, shook their hand, then walked onto the next person. Of course, she must have seen someone else at this local political meeting doing the same thing, and she just jumped in and took on the behavior, but to everyone watching it was like it was what she was born to do.

Several people in the room joked, laughed, “She’s a future politician this one.” A lot of comments like that went around the room. And it was true, my daughter just knew by instinct how to go in and work the room.

Now I'm in Albuquerque and my daughter stayed behind in L.A., where she’s walked right into a world of comedy production, set design jobs, some costume design, some Production Assistant work, and taking improv classes. She’s also in that horrible city so I worry about her, but she’s doing what people stay in L.A. to do. As long as she’s entrenched in a population of colleagues, she’ll be okay. People who work in production in L.A. have fences and guards keeping everyone else from the city out, it's about the only way to live safe in that city anymore.

So I know Lizzie will do well. I’ll be watching her on YouTube from a hotel room anywhere in the world I want to be.

***

Whew, just went to take an early morning walk and the amount of car exhaust in the air here is astounding, like walking out into an atmosphere of poison on a planet not meant for human habitation. I'm glad my hotel room encloses me as if I were in a Tupperware container. No air at all from outside gets in and the fan on the wall seems to filter out a lot of the muck, as honestly, as I ventured out this ayem, wanting to just take a sunrise stroll, I had to cower and run back for cover inside. I'm close to a freeway, it's not only sunrise, but also morning commute time.

Sometimes I think I'm more Native American than a lot of Native Americans, just because I can’t take part in this car thing. When I see a freeway, I see concrete loaded down with roaring fossil fuel burning monsters. I feel like Earth cries out in agony in areas where freeways and overpasses pour the car people all over the place, and nowadays everyone must be burning cheaper gases, as the exhaust in the air is much more deadly than a decade ago.

Like I said earlier, Albuquerque is like L.A. exploded and part of it landed here and became Albuquerque, with everything you have in L.A. but in microcosm (macrocosm?) form.

*****

Thinking a lot about my daughter and what happened in the 1990s that caused me to drop out of the movement, so to speak. I had been running a SNAP group that met in the public library downtown San Francisco at noon twice a month, and as a result I was getting the survivor phone calls. My daughter must have been hearing my conversations and picking up bits of information, she was middle school aged, nine or so.

There on the wall of the hallway one day a friend of mine found pencil drawings of naked people. Lizzie had drawn naked dancing people in various forms of celebration and happiness bounding all the way down the hallway, a child’s imagination turned loose with the strands of conversation she was overhearing from me running a SNAP group.

They were a lot like drawings I used to do as a child, and I was molested. So little Lizzie was experiencing part of the molest in my life, just by being around me at that time.

My response was to stop running the SNAP group and drop out of things and I didn't come back until around 2006, when Lizzie was in her late teens.

By the late nineties, Lizzie had seen more than I ever saw at her age, not because of pedophile priest stories, but because we always ended up living in slummy neighborhoods. In San Francisco it was Webster near the corner of Haight, very inner city. At that intersection, the projects were about to be torn down. They backed right up to our building, so from our apartment we listened and looked over the last straggling families that refused to move out of the empty projects, staying there as long as they could for free.

They dealt drugs, loudly.

They held dog fights.

Lizzie and I had no choice but to listen to the sound of dog fights from our apartment.

Two dogs would be snarling as they tore into each other, then one dog would squeal louder than the other, stop squealing, and become silent. Then male voices would cheer as the victorious dog howled.

It was horrible. And it provided for me the backdrop, the soundtrack that ran in the background as I got these calls from survivors coming out for the first time as victims of pedophile priests in San Francisco.

Still dog fights over the back fence were not the worst things Lizzie ever experienced; the worst was exposure to my oldest sister, who lived in a state of prolonged resentment that, I think, dated back to the early 1950s, the period when my middle sister and I were getting inordinate attention from Father Thomas Barry Horne-y.

Oldest Sister did not suit the priest’s tastes. As a result, first-born grew up to be totally different from middle sister and me, the youngest, because she was cut off, separated from us in ways no one can ever explain. Middle sister and I were like a carbon copy of each other in everything we did, thought, believed. And then oldest sister was this oblique overweight awkward person, who by adulthood lived in a nonstop state of rage.

Exposure to the antagonism of oldest sister in Orange County in 1998 was worse for the development of my daughter than listening to the dog fight sounds coming from the Projects in San Francisco a few years earlier. Indirectly it's all the fault of the Catholic pedophile priest epidemic.

See, now to Oprah it sounds like like I'm stuck in the blame game. In the real world the blame game is real and denying blame exists allows perpetrators to maintain power.
.

Thank God for Emails or the Mystery Lady would be Insane

.
Adjusting to this life living in a hotel anywhere, it's so much more like I'm on a space station now than it was doing City of Angels Blog from L.A., because there, even though I was cut off from the world in the back of an apartment building, in the courtyard every day were these Armenian women drinking coffee, and gossiping. Their warbling soprano voices often would drown out the audio on the reality TV show videos I work on. Today I'm in a hotel room in any city anywhere, this month it's Albuquerque, working on the same reality TV show videos, just putting on a jacket when I go out to walk later in the day.

Just south of here is Roswell, New Mexico, known for its residents who communicate with space aliens, and when you look at the topography of this area on a Google map, you can see why spacecraft would choose this site for landing. The private sector Go into Orbit for Vacation project is also nearby, the entrepreneur founder of Virgin finished building a landing strip for the venture just last month. Maybe in a few decades they'll actually launch.

Point is I feel like I'm so much of a space alien myself, I fit right in here. As I ride around town staring at things I've never seen before, my little brain that never stops starts analyzing everything. You can see the Navajo influence, the Pueblo influence, feel its continued presence.

Story continues after this picture of a downtown Albuquerque bail bonds shop a block from the courthouses.



Then as you ride around town, on the landscape is the aberration, the slick, clean, more wealthy than the entire rest of the neighborhood, Catholic Church. I rode by one where I know James Porter of Massachusetts fame was allowed to perpetrate freely while he was an out-patient with the Paracletes just yesterday while out riding the Number 10 bus, just to see where it goes. Need to go back there and take a picture soon…

I went downtown to see the courthouses, one of which holds an archive of documents that I will dive into later on this trip. The real reason I went downtown yesterday was to see how people dress here as that's the kind of person I am, I don't want to show up looking all L.A. So I stood outside the courthouse yesterday to see what other women wear here, so I’ll know what to wear next time I come, as that's how space aliens blend in. I need boots and long skirts.

URBANE LADY on an outpost in space

I'm not really here, I'm just in a hotel, here to do my work, but still absorbing this geography at the same time I'm absorbing the horrible facts about what priests did to kids in this region, twelve-fold number of perpetrators per person compared to the rest of the country, at least it seems that way. More I learn about what really happened here in New Mexico, I can’t ignore the addition of a racist, who gives a damn about all these brown people, attitude that seemed to go with the turning loose of Servants of the Paraclete priests on these parishes.

In my hotel I'm isolated, cut off more than ever, but it feels right. From here I talk by phone and email with the world, I'm even geographically closer to the center of the country. I need to get even closer to the center. Maybe next year I’ll make it to Illinois.

Two or three times a week I file my report from the space station in the form of posts at City of Angels Blog.

I noticed it when I looked in the mirror the other day, I even look more and more like a space alien. My eyebrows have disappeared as my hair has gotten white. The white hairs are of a nature that will not absorb color from dye or even darkening with eye brow pencil, the eyebrows just aren't there, making me bear a strong resemblance to ET, the character in the Steven Spielberg movie.

My eyes now have this staring, penetrating, probing look to them that they never had before.

I can make this whole experience even more fun by pretending to be a mystery woman, hiding out, “I ‘vant to be alone’ acting as I venture outside my hotel room like there’s someone I'm hiding from, someone looking for me. So have to keep my identity secret, keep my location secret, and when I go out, interact with hardly anyone, just walk to the bus stop listening to Randi Rhodes on my radio, ride the bus around town as Progressive Talk Radio KABQ 1350 that sounds eerily like KTALK Los Angeles goes on to Ed Schultz. I have this ongoing relationship with the world that goes on only internally. Back to my hotel room, I'm hooked up to the world by internet connection, but never feel the human sensation of touch.

I'm that mysterious gray haired woman who around four AM you can see a glow of computer screen through her curtains. She has a job she does online, something to do with TV shows, working on videos that stream into her computer from Los Angeles. She’s done with her job around 10 in the morning, then spends a lot of time on the phone and riding around town taking pictures. That's her, walking with the hood from her jacket pulled over her face, always has earphones on which is another way to keep from making contact with anyone she passes.

That's me right now, the mystery woman in Room ___ at Hotel _______ who spends long hours behind a closed door, her head in her laptop. Sometimes from outside the room you can hear her breaking into uproarious laugher, sometimes she throws herself on the bed spasming in tears.

That's me right now, with this story to write.

Meanwhile I'm scared to get into cars even of people who are my friends. Hey, no one said I was sane.

Leaving L.A. was so hard, but so worth it

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“You got a few dollars you can give me?”At the Amtrak station last week I heard, “I need ten dollars to catch a train to Oceanside.” Her voice came over my shoulder as I was bent over readjusting my pile of carryons. I looked up into a face you see a lot in Southern California, the aging crack head. Angular cheeks, rash-y skin, mouth indented due to missing teeth, a face that may once have been pretty but now reflects years of tricks at truck stops and Inland Empire street corners. She speaks with that accent you hear a lot in the lower rent areas of Southern California, the under-educated mangled word structures. Lots of “ain’t doing nothing’s” and “you know’s” and “I'm just saying’s.”

She put her forearm in my face. “These abscesses hurt so much,” she says in a cooing voice, “they hurt so much,” she repeated and I stared at her forearm, lined with scars of a junkie. It like a shock choreography shot in a Tarantino film, right in my face. Some of her abscesses were healed and hardened, some recently scarred so still red and brown, some fresh and oozing. I stared and stared, then thanks to my survival instincts I looked down and realized-

With her other arm the junkie was reaching for my laptop which was at my feet, as I’d been in the middle or readjusting my carry-ons when she approached me. I grabbed the laptop as her hand was just inches from it, put it back on my shoulder, and slipped out of the seat in the Amtrak waiting area to get away from her.

It was about the fourth time someone had asked me for money as I waited for my train out of L.A. last week. I went over and joined a guy who later sat next to me on the train and I realized his way of avoiding ever getting up until he got to his destination was to wear adult diapers. Hmm.

My departure from L.A. came with a comic routine as you can’t take bags on Amtrak that weigh more than fifty pounds. When I arrived I found out one of my bags weighed seventy something pounds, the other was 14 pounds over. So I'm on the floor in the Amtrak ticketing area, rearranging and rearranging my suitcases and everything got scattered, my clothes were thrown slipslod sloppy around in the suitcase and I think some stuff spilled out and got lost forever somewhere in the ether of the train station floor and people surrounding us. I ended up right there on the floor packing an extra bag that weighed forty pounds, and it would just cost ten dollars to send it extra, but then I couldn't check it because it was plastic, which they said would tear too easily.

I said, no problem, I’ll just add it to my carry on. If all I had done is go sit in a chair and wait for my train to come, the extra 40- pounds of carry-on would not have been a problem. But I'm so neurotic and wasn’t wearing an adult diaper and wanted to get away from L.A. so bad, I asked my friend to deliver me to the train station four hours early just to get out of my apartment as quickly as possible because I hated that place so much. So I mean at some point I had to go to the bathroom. Then every time I walked, the pile of bags on the carry on cart kept toppling more to one side or the other.

Why was I carrying so much weight with me?

I packed the scanner and brought it with me to Albuquerque.

I had packed my HP Inkjet 5600 in a large suitcase, and stuffed it tight with sweaters. Then in all the frenzy of getting the bags down to under 50 pounds, I threw the inkjet back into the suitcase without tightening the zipper tighter. So I spent four hours in the Amtrak station and later 16 hours on the train worrying that the scanner would be broken by the time I got to Albuquerque because it would be jiggling around, and it was all because I felt so rushed at the ticket station, when I shouldn't have felt rushed, I mean, I had four hours. If only I’d packed it tighter, if only.

Damn should have tightened the zipper on the suitcase, I kept repeating to myself.
But it's fine as you can see from the post I am about to put up at City of Angels 8.

I hate L.A. As I waited for my train, lugging around that extra 40 pound bag that kept overturning my whole carryon wheeler, five times someone came up to me asking me for money, not spare change but dollars. The woman who was telling me how much the abscesses on her arm hurt as she was using the other arm to reach down and grab my laptop was just the last person from L.A. I saw.

After another foray around the Amtrak station forever rearranging my carryons, having them topple over in doorways landing me on the floor repacking, I'm daydreaming about the days you see in black and white films, when gentlemen would never walk by and leave a woman buried under heavy suitcases, but not today, not in L.A., in L.A. if people see you struggling, they stand alongside and watch, waiting for you to drop something, so they can scavenge it.

At one point with that carryon that kept toppling over and I'm an old lady with gray hair and wrinkles, I was having so much trouble, all those people just kept walking by me, like I was invisible doing all that struggling. If only, if only there were some civility left in the world.

“These abscesses really hurt,” she said and put her forearm in front of my face, so I was looking at these pussy scabs up and down her veins. Then my eyes were riveted, just like she wanted, with her other arm she was reaching down for the laptop I’d set on the ground next to me. Goodbye L.A.

Now I've been in my Extended Stay room in Albuquerque for one week, and last night I wrote, “I'm so looking forward to getting up tomorrow morning, my coffee pot is set for four AM but I know I’ll be awake in the minutes before it begins to perk, just waiting for it. Here I am on my outpost, my space station, this splash of city thrown along a flat part at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.”

I'm doing what I always wanted to do. I'm set up in a place where aside from my little transcribing job, I have nothing else to do but write. Part of that 40 pound overflow in my luggage was caused by the book manuscript I have with me now that just needs a good rewrite. It's all here beside me in boxes here in my hotel room in Albuquerque.
I feel so at home here, in a way I feel like I'm still in L.A., which is my hometown, like it or not. This little city Albuquerque is like a tiny L.A., so much is the same here, just cooler and smaller. I get on the city bus here and the same exact voice announces the next stop, and “Please use rear exit.” They have the same machines by the driver where riders press their passes on an electronic thing and it gives out the same exact “beep.”

To me, Albuquerque looks like L.A. exploded and a splotch of it landed here at the foot of the Rockies and just kept on with daily life like nothing ever happened. But since from one end of the city to the other is only about 10 miles, it's like a little version of L.A. that's so much more manageable. I can get from one side of town to the other on the bus in an hour for 35 cents as they recognize I'm a senior citizen here, and they don't in L.A.

So here I am in this nice clean hotel where I pay about 70 percent of what I paid to live in L.A. and I can still do my job, that's why I was able to make this trip, plus I took Social Security early retirement, no I didn't get a big chunk of cash from someone as people in my emails and phone calls seem to be inquiring.

I can walk in this neighborhood without getting accosted.

After being in Albuquerque less than a week, already something is changing in me. I'm eating breakfast. For years I couldn't get anything passed my clenched teeth until late in the afternoon every day. Three days in a row here in my little hotel room, I've not only gotten hungry but been able to eat in the morning. I think that's a good sign.
Can’t believe how hard it was to get out of L.A. I talked about it almost nonstop beginning about 2006. I finally did it.

Here is another pic and a video from last Saturday. In Albuquerque riding hot air balloons is part of the lifestyle.



Watch the video of balloons going across the sky posted earlier today.

Albuquerque Sky on Saturday

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I love it. Hot air balloons are part of the landscape.

Walmart Zombie, Liz Ebeling Halloween Costume 2010

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She gnaws on a 99-cent store rubber foot. My daughter plays a Walmart Zombie employee named "Brains" this year. When Walmart asked her name, all she could say was, "Brains." Liz Ebeling on her way to an Improv Comedy Halloween party.



The WalMart Zombie stops when she sees her mother's camera, gnaws on the oozing foot in her hands, and snarls, then goes on to her Improv Class Halloween party

Yikes Part 2: More HLR stories from the nineties by me

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I just realized (Oct 2011) there is another Human Life Review story I wrote in the 1990s that I did not copy in yet here. I will add it soon to this post even if I have to find the original and scan it over. -ke)

(Part 1 is here) I wrote this story that was in Newsweek November 1991:



Then wrote this piece for Human Life Review about the backlash to my Newsweek piece:












HERE is cover and title page. All being scanned here as I continue to empty out the file cabinet and get ready to take City of Angels out of L.A>




Onward

Yikes! Ann Coulter and Me on the same Cover (I was so confused those days)

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I just realized (Oct 2011) there is another Human Life Review story I wrote in the 1990s that I did not copy in yet here. I will add it soon to this post even if I have to find the original and scan it over. -ke)

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Packing to leave L.A. I found an article I got published in Human Life Review in 1992 in a file cabinet, here is the cover, article scanned in below:


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Ryan Bingham is so right when he says, "Moving is Living," in the George Clooney movie "Up In The Air."

My file cabinet is now empty. I'm about to move to Albuquerque to write about Servants of the Paraclete, and then go to points onward, to blog about pedophile priest crimes all over the country. So I have to keep my load light, scan in memorables, then trash them, like the story below I wrote for Human Life Review Spring 1992, and I see now, I shared the cover with an up and coming conservative journalist Ann Coulter.

Yikes! I shared the cover of a conservative review with Ann Coulter in 1992: The apex of my confused era, before I realized it was the sexualization by a Catholic priest at age five that had screwed me up, not the feminist movement as I was trying to explain in muddled free lance articles I was writing at the time to support me and Lizzie, who was then about three years old.

Last week, cleaning up, packing, I found this story among several I got published in HLR when we were living in the woods of Northern California.

This was the period before my daughter turned five when we lived in an environment sterile with isolation. After the episode described in the article, I got clean and sober, then after two more years, my daughter turned age five. Then I remembered what happened to me when I was age five, that had made me this compulsive person from age five on.

The months right before the repressed memory came in and totally changed my life, I was writing all kinds of weird political essays, trying to find some explanation in social sciences for the mess my life was in.

One result was this story published in Human Life Review, below from spring 1992, which I forgot about until I just now found it, with me promoted on the cover along with another pretty much unknown writer at the time, Ann Coulter. HLR asked me to write a response to the Susan Faludi book Backlash, as I was in the "pro life" movement at the time.

To this day I hate abortion, but today I realize the medical procedure has to be legal for women's protection and health, and am glad I have never personally been faced with a question of whether to get one. Right after Lizzie was born though, after so many people chided me for not getting an abortion as a forty year old single mom, I got adamant and anti-abortion for a period, even went to demonstrations and sought out work writing on the topic, hence the relationship with Human Life Review:

Here is the story on Susan Faludi's book Backlash from HLR, more to come:












So glad I lived long enough to find out what the real cause of my problems was, and as a result, have this incredible story of pedophile priests in the Catholic Church to write... God is good, and all that jazz.

How did I end up writing for HLR to begin with?
First, this article ran in Newsweek. I was trying to find a humorous way of blaming the world for my horrible circumstaces, and decided it was all feminism's fault, or at least thought it would be funny to say so, didn't really believe it, didn't believe anything at the time, I was so lost in these years. First the Newsweek piece I wrote that started the whole thread in HLR.

Newsweek piece November 1991


The Newsweek piece led to a relationship that developed between me and Human Life Review, through degrees of separation that may come up some other place in this story at City of Angels 2.

Next assignment I had for Human Life Review was a story on the way the world reacted to the above Newsweek piece, which is scanned and posted at Yikes Part 2 at CofA2

I Shared a Cover with Ann Coulter in Spring 1992, Yikes Again!

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"Moving is Living," says Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in Up In The Air. My file cabinet is now empty in preparation for my move to Albuquerque to write about Servants of the Paraclete, and then more moves to points onward, to blog about pedophile priest crimes all over the country. So I have to keep my load light, scan in memorables, then trash them, like the story below I wrote for Human Life Review in Spring 1992, and I see now, I shared the cover with an up and coming conservative journalist Ann Coulter.

Oops posted this twice, read this post here Yikes! I shared the cover of a conservative review with Ann Coulter in 1992. The height of ...

And Part two of this Story was posted Oct. 23rd.
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Message Getting Out that Pedophile Priests are More than a group of perverts, re Aberration of the Bible

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"We see pedophile priests allowed to escape punishment, we see prosperity preachers telling us that if we just repeat a phrase about Jesus, he’ll make us rich and happy, just a tiny portion of what goes on in this world regarding the Bible and people who claim to follow it. It partially sums up what we, in our present culture, feel about the issue. It is a tragedy.
The whole thing seems like a big joke played on people for centuries. It has to be.

"But it’s not.

"None of the above represents God’s message in the Bible. None of it is what he said.... "

(Continue reading here)

Yikes, Frying Planet, NWS device explodes in L.A. 3 hours before highest temp

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This really happened today: Los Angeles, CA
Monday
113° high temperature
67° low

It's so hot the official thermometer broke. It might have been even hotter, as at 113 degrees the measuring devices shattered, per L.A. Times:

"It was so hot Monday that it broke the all-time record — and the weatherman's thermometer.The National Weather Service's thermometer for downtown Los Angeles headed into uncharted territory at 12:15 p.m. Monday, reaching 113 degrees for the first time since records began being kept in 1877. Shortly after that banner moment, the temperature dipped back to 111, and then climbed back to 112.

"Then at 1 p.m., the thermometer stopped working." (Read More)

Everyone who lives here knows, the heat just keeps getting hotter all afternoon, the hottest time of the day is around 4-5 PM then around six o'clock it finally starts to break, if it's going to break that night.

So the high temperature Monday Sept. 27, 2010, in L.A. is unknown, three hours of frying hotter than at around 1PM when it reached 113 degrees and the measuring devices exploded.

So glad City of Angels Blog is leaving L.A. soon.

But where can you go to stay cool?

It Never Fails to Happen, even among the dissenters

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People form groups to buck the system, and then as their group becomes successful, those same people take a big gulp and join up with the system. I've seen it happen a thousand times, dissenters in suits with designer briefcases, ending up in places the people they "advocate" for would not even enter. That's why I don't join anything to begin with.

Another Eerie Thing found as I pack, from Austin c. 1975

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Going through files been carrying around for a long time, as I have to thin my load, I'm soon getting on the road. Found this, which eerily reveals facts about the "Taken" incident I wrote about on this blog here a few months back. These pages I found as I pack to move, reminded me of two more incidents that I haven't revisited on these pages.

So revealing of the effects being sexualized by a priest at age five had on my life, for decades. What gave me shivers as I read this was the "How Do I Forget" stuff at the end of page 2... and everything in between.



THE RAPE BY FIVE INDIANS was on Mount Shasta 1969, in one of the other many times I've run away from L.A. From there it was Boulder for the Holy Man Jam (see previous post), which landed me in Texas. There was this transition I went through while I was in college in Austin. It seems to begin in this note to myself.

It had to do with realizing my sexuality was so different from most people, and trying to live with it.

I was so lonely and out of place in Texas.

Boulder Whole Earth Festival 1970

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I was there, got hold of a typewriter soon after and wrote about it. Today, I found these pages as I started packing to take City of Angels out of L.A., and scanned them here to serve as a segue in my story, from 1970 California by way of Boulder, to Texas, where I ended up pregnant. Then I ran back to Northern California, but later back again to Texas to be with the baby's father, who took the baby away from me, so I went to college in Austin and really dug Astronomy, and that's how an ex-hippie named Sunshine ended up working at NASA.

And always, just under the surface, I was in pursuit of the priest.

This Really Happened: