The Isolation Comes with Aging, then Add On having lived a weird life like mine...

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The music was inspiring, plus free donuts. Still in the middle of Church that Sunday, I just … realized I totally didn't want to be there.

In his “teaching” the pastor said, "We came to California to plant churches in the inner cities, so now we're opening a new branch in Northridge.”

I almost laughed out loud. Maybe to people who moved here in the past ten years, Northridge is a city. I mean there are some big buildings there now, but man, Northridge is, is, is…

It’s the San Fernando Valley, the north end!

Then I looked around the auditorium where this church meets so I'm able to stand being there, because it’s not a church building it's a school building. There was not one other person there with one gray hair or one wrinkle.

I used to pat myself on the head for being such a young thinker I only feel comfortable in a church full of twenty-somethings. But truth is, there is no feeling of community for me there. No reason really to even be there, since I find God, in our personal relationship, walking in the breeze listening to music.

So I got up and left. No one stopped me and asked me to stay as I walked away, the “prayer team” members in the back just looked at me with the same perplexed sense that I seemed to have.

I don't fit in anywhere.

This church is another one of those Church Plants you find around Los Angeles, and I'm told other inner cities, today. Totally non denominational, kids winging it with a microphone and garage band. Kids with guitars and the Bibles, trying to figure out new ways to do Church.

The music’s great at this church which meets, funnily enough, in the Michael Jackson Auditorium of Gardner Elementary School in Hollywood behind the Guitar Center.

I have to go back to get a picture of the plaque: Michael Jackson Auditorium, where my church meets...

I walked right by the “Prayer Team” members, past the plaque commemorating Jackson. Out through the doors into the unseasonably cool and refreshing breezes we're having in L.A. lately.

I'm the little old lady with gray hair now almost totally white. How do I explain Joni Mitchell and Love-Ins at Big Sur in the sixties to these people who think Old School means Madonna?

Music in my headset, I'm walking around the streets of L.A. again, trying to accept my situational uncorrectable aloneness in this already isolating city. I mean, the older you get, the less people there are around that are your age- they drop dead every day. So you have to be grateful just for being able to chew food anymore.

I see other people with wrinkles sitting across from me on the Metro and I want to pull them aside, compare lives. How did you make it this far? Were you in San Francisco or Hollywood in 1966 or 1967, did all that stuff really happen?

I spend my Sunday walking around L.A. with music in my ears discretely smoking.

***

Haven’t been to the Farmers Market at Ivar between Sunset and Hollywood in years, so wandered there that Sunday morning, thinking the handful of change in my pocket would buy me a tomato or two. It was more like nine dollars would buy me a sack of organically grown produce manured by happy cows, or something like that.

The blocked off streets of the Farmer's Market, with newly built high rise luxury apartment and retail buildings all around it, was jammed.

Proprietors of the ramshackle lean-to sales outlets were not friendly to me at all, as it was obvious I wasn’t there to spend money. My shoes, my hair, hands, all show I don't have any "disposable income."

Around me was a bustle of people, curiously many of them Asian, with shopping bags bulging, buying gallons of raw milk, masses of carefully assembled nine dollar sacks of produce.

I just wanted a place to sit down, some shade.

There was nothing there for me.

Well, there was a 3-piece jazz combo, a guy my age there singing sleazy blues-jazz songs with another guy on keyboard and a bass player, set up in one of the farmers' stalls, with a hat in front of them to collect dollar and coin tips. I tried to lean on a pole and watch them perform a song, and almost pulled down the Santa Barbara Pistachio Farm stall.

The singer finished his song and got real aggressive about wanting coins and dollars. I wandered a few feet out of range, and he said, “Well if you don't have any coins, why don't you take me home with you?”

I was stunned. Thirty years ago I would have taken him up on it. Today standing there in the heat, I felt the remnants of my old life in my sweat left over on me, residue from a hundred or so men with skinny bony bodies like the guy flirting with me from the makeshift stage.

I shivered, and really didn't want to be there anymore.

My sister would have stayed until the fare close and taken the singer home.

We two adult victims of Father Thomas Barry Horne of Chicago, 1940s-70s.

I walked up the slight grade of hill between Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood, so tired it felt like San Francisco topography, but at least there’s shade up on the Walk of Fame. Still no place to sit for blocks. I walked, I walked.

Then at last, comfort: A wrought iron bench. I sat down finally, it felt almost soft. In the shade, that cool wind massaging me, I gazed up at the Capitol Records building, remembering that time.... I could sit here for hours, I thought, just continue to discretely smoke, using my visor to hide the pipe and block the wind. Gaze at people walking by, enjoy the day.

Then three recent arrivals from some Southeast Asian nation squeezed onto the bench next to me and asked about the bus. I was friendly, tried to be hospitable, but on a Sunday, them waiting for a bus, they could be there another hour.

So wandered on to Argyle and caught a Number 180 home.

Stopped in the Armenian grocery where they really are trying to keep the floors clean now and keep the fruit from rotting. Bought some Liqueur and Vodka Chocolates and spent the rest of the day at home. The closest I’ll ever get to a park and shady place to sit in this city is probably the small square of yard in front of my apartment building. As long as I live in L.A., I have to accept that if you want greenery, or anything resembling a park, you have to buy your own real estate.
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Aftermath from Recent Offer Dangled in front of Me that Would Have Solved a lot of our Problem$ but Seriously Compromised the Truth.

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I walked out of there with my integrity. Holes in my clothes, but I still have my integrity.
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We are Under Attack by a Foreign Oil Company, Ecological War, After Last Year a Financial Attack.

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They won’t let us know what they're doing or how much oil is pouring in. They're not letting the U.S. government in to monitor or take any action. The dispersant is actually pouring more toxicity into the Gulf of Mexico and they're refusing to stop using it.

This is War, people. We are under attack by a foreign entity. They got to us last year electronically with the disappearance of trillions of dollars from the American economy, that people have not yet really grasped.

Now this attack on our coastlines and with full force in the Gulf, and they are using the item that makes them despise us the most to attack us, the oil that fuels our lifestyle, ten times better than anyone else’s in the world.

People, we're being attacked. They're not letting us onto the place where the attack took place.

In 1980 I joined the Naval Air Reserve, mostly because of a confused compulsion I had to be around people in high places, astronauts on my job in Houston, and Naval pilots on my drill weekends. When I got to Naval Air Station New Orleans, I found about half the units there, drilling and serving fulltime, were doing Intelligence work.

All wide eyed innocent and Annie Fannie, I asked, why do we need so much intelligence here on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana?

They informed me, there’s a huge amount of oil under the Gulf of Mexico, huge amounts that people don't even comprehend, and as a result, the Gulf of Mexico was one of our most vulnerable places for attack.

But it was 1980 and everyone knows they will never attack on U.S. land. Right?

The amount of oil in the Gulf and all the intelligence around it was a quiet thing, known to this community that drilled in buildings on the air base that I never got to go into. This humongous amount of oil that-

In the last two decades of privatization Americans have insanely allowed to be drilled, with no real oversight. Huge careless mile deep suction devices stuck into this vast sea of oil under the Gulf that used to be a high priority for Naval Intelligence.

Then, oh what a surprise, one explosion at the bottom of an unmonitored deep drilling device, and toxic oil is pouring into the Gulf and eventually the ocean.

Will we ever know what caused the explosion that caused this well to become the worst disaster in American history? Why did this drilling device explode, when there have been other wells deeper and more dangerous operating from off shore platforms all over the world now for decades?

There are a lot of unanswered questions. I'm beginning to feel eerily that this is too much like a sci fi movie, the part where the government is keeping the people from knowing what is really happening. Only it’s not our government doing it, it’s this foreign oil company.

Uh, Ocean Temperatures?

ONE MORE THING has anyone thought about how much it’s going to contribute to the rising temperature of the ocean, when the summer sun starts to beat down on all the oil that's coagulating in the Gulf of Mexico right now, along with the billions more gallons that are pouring in? In fact, oil spills are a large part of what caused ocean temperatures to get hotter recently, now the temperature of the ocean will be increase tenfold.

It brings to my mind images of artists' renderings of Venus, with its boiling ocean of toxic elements...

In California, we've had sloppy oil drills and barges pouring oil onto our coastline for decades, most of the leakage owned by foreign oil companies.

The ship that decimated the coast off San Francisco November 2009 was owned by a company in Dubai. And the press totally snoozed through that disaster.

I think it’s time we all wake up and realize, we have been attacked, first economically and now ecologically.

And the fact that Bobby Jindahl is even waiting for a permit first to build barrier islands off the coast of Louisiana is just another sign of how much our system has broken, that allowed us to be vulnerable and to be attacked in this way.

It’s war, people. We have to start realizing there is an enemy doing this to us.

Meanwhile, I’d say get away from coastlines, if you want to survive.
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Anger Management Notes, cont'd.

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(Didn't make it to Anger Management last week and boy does it show... Last session, the guy who's told this story two times now told it again:)

I did the time for the crime that he--

So two or three years down the line, I see the cat in the Parole Office. Now I could o' taken him outside, you know.

Instead I just said, hey, it's all good, man. I did the time, it's over, behind me.

He looked at me and gave me a hug. Now whether he continues to do what he do, that's him.

But I'm glad I saw him 'cause I can only get it off of me.

***
Someone mentions how so many people BS their way through life, and the Moslem guy says:

"God never falls for it."

And I write down in careful letters, "God never falls for it."

***
Pastor Ron who runs this group says:

"Continuing to be angry is like drinking poison and expecting the other guy to die." And:

"What that person is angry about may not even be about us. We are just caught in the crossfire." And:

"Before you give in to the anger, stop to think, Will this matter five hours from now?"

They all seem to agree that most things won't matter five hours from now, but I wrote in my notes, "What if it WILL still matter five hours from now, or five days, or five years?"

Ron says, "Meanwhile the other guy you're angry at has long ago moved on."

And into my head pops an image of Father Thomas Barry Horne, old and drunk, cracking dirty jokes, nasty jokes with sexual language, the priest shocked people within earshot all the way up to the day he died. And got respect 'til he died, because he wore a priest collar.

It doesn't just go away for the victims.

Best punishment for the perpetrators - all of them - would be no more respect.

They deserve no more respect at all.
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What's Going On Right Now

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K: I'm real sick, so try to do everything by email these days.

Q from several readers: How much does a doctor charge out there? Do they have any walk-in clinics? If so, what do they charge? Also what is the cost of your meds, not including the medical weed?

K: I go to the L.A. Free Clinic and they did enough lab work to know I need more tests that they don't have resources to do. They referred my case to County for a colonoscopy and County did not even ever call to set up the appointment. Your case, your file, all get lost in the chaos. Thousands of people needing help and no one to give it.

All the free and sliding scale things that used to exist in L.A. for low income people are almost gone. Thanks to my weird job where I make a lot by the hour but there is only about 10 hours of work a week, I'm barely paying my rent and bills, no cash at all left.

There is a place that does "discount" colonoscopies for $650. Good for them.

Charity has disappeared from American life. Even the food banks have no food. It's america today. i'm hoping the bowel problem is just PTSD and so just trying to clean up my diet. Do Yoga. Free health care available if can you learn how to breathe and do Yoga, all you need is a towel on the floor.

You can go crazy comparing your life to other people's, or get more sane. At least I did not pay into an insurance policy that was now turning down my treatment, as so many other people have.

I'm trying to just say, it doesn't matter. It's only a few years shaved off my life. Other people have it much worse. I could have died numerous times before and instead I still lived. So this is bonus time already.

Now I'm real sick and I still have to work and keep my bills paid as well. Everything sucks right now. Since I work at home, no one notices how sick I am.
Oh, one more thing. i tracked down a new federal program, tracked down a U.S. Nurse working on the new Federal program to stop colon cancer. Guess what they do:

"Education."

The U.S. Government Nurse called me back and wanted to talk my ears off about how important it is to get a colonoscopy but they can't tell you where you can get one without insurance.

I had to beg her to hang up finally, because i was on deadline and had to get back to work, didn't have free time to chat, as did this salaried, insured, government nurse.

I'm almost glad i'm dying early... this country sucks today. I used to be patriotic, I fucking served in the Navy for a while, not long enough for Veteran's benefits, just long enough to act out like a priest rape survivor and be put on "inactive" status until my discharge.

What can a person do? If i bitch and moan all i'll get is bitch and moan karma. there is no help out there. Just don't let me get too far away from a toilet, and I'll make it to the end.

Thank god I can still at least buy legal weed now and then to make it less horrible

PS: The L.A. Free Clinic keeps giving me free antidepressants. I can't take them, they give me heart palps. But I think it's weird that they will give me armloads of free antidepressants, but can't get me diagnostic tests. I keep telling them, these pills make me feel like I'm going to have a heart attack, and they still keep giving me these "reuptake inhibiting tricyclics" or whatever they are. I throw them away after three days as the palps are scary.

It's like the government (or someone) wants me to die.
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(Don't trust anyone, the V's are everywhere. Sit still and breathe.)
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I Will Not Be Silent, SNAP leafleting at First Communion is Beyond Insensitive, Outright Crude

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Sickened. I'm sickened at the thought of SNAP leafleting outside a Sunday Mass in Chicago last weekend, during First Communion ceremonies.

Apologies to individuals who took part, but that bristles to me as a totally wrong thing to do, an inappropriate place to hand out material about pedophilia. Shows an insensitivity that to me is totally counter intuitive. Not only insensitive to all victims who never want to step on or near church property, so they are automatically eliminated from the processs.

But First Communion, all those kids wondering what that piece of paper was that made their parents so angry. To me, this sends a total wrong message to church goers, a message that "survivors" in SNAP are callous and insensitive.

I don't want to be represented in this way. I wonder how many other of the hundreds of thousands of crime victims, if nine thousand of them really are members of SNAP, how many have asked SNAP to stop leafleting at Sunday masses and elementary schools and places where the leaflets get into the wrong hands.

One, leafleting on church property does NOT get the message to new people who can actually do something, church goers if they haven't gotten the message by now are likely unreachable. All that time and energy should be spent reaching out to law enforcement. Why hasn't SNAP started leafletting in front of U.S. Attorneys offices around the country asking for more grand jury investigations? Trying to actually accomplish something.

But 2: This handing out leaflets about pedophilia to families on Sunday with all those little children at First Communion...

How is that showing any sensitivity?

It shows NO sensitivity, it's... to me it's re-perpetrating, perping back, which some of us do not want to do. The churchgoers do not deserve their Sundays interrupted so harshly.

SNAP does not represent me, never has. I've tried to express this very sincere and genuine concern about the way SNAP leaflets at churches NUMEROUS times to the SNAP hierarchy and they just turn their heads, refuse to listen, and continue to- re-perpetrate. That's what it is, sorry, that's how I see it.

Leafleting at First Communion, the kids get their hands on the leaflet, it's so inappropriate!

It really bothers me that SNAP claims to represent survivors, because tactics like this are the OPPOSITE of what should be going on right now in a network of crime victims rebuilding their lives.

Why isn't there a group health isurance plan? Why isn't there a couple of recovery centers around the country by now? What has SNAP really accomplished other than getting its name in the news over and over again, with no substance behind the press statements?

They bring in $750,000 in a bad year, according to their own statements and IRS papers, and there is absolutely nothing of substance to show for twenty-one years of SNAP that's Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests, for Google to find

After 21 years, there is not even a genuine network of survivors.

It's all been one big press event, with nothing behind it, there is not even a man behind the curtains to pay no attention to, just empty space. Survivors have all learned to accept that, as just what SNAP does, press events, and we tolerate it, take part in it, or abhor it, as I do. Press events are NOTHING, empty space. But hey that's what SNAP does and I've learned to turn my back.

Except when they do really damaging things, like leafletting at First Communion ceremonies. That just pushes the SNAP disconnect beyond acceptability at all.

Kay Ebeling.

Pay Attention

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The V's are the Vatican in real life, including the guys they placed into Snap and other places to f--- with survivors. Get clues on how to deal with it here:

Watch Full Episodes & Shorts - ABC.com
Watch full episodes and shorts from your favorite ABC programs online. ... V; /watch/v/240273; Today, the world woke up to find spaceships over every major ...

MORE:

ABC's 'V' climbs
ABC's "V" -- on the bubble for a renewal and approaching the finish line for the season -- climbed in the ratings Tuesday night...

Shh. Don't trust anyone...

For the Record. Birth Certificate and Military Discharge Papers Stolen Recently

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Lucky for me I had scanned these docs earlier:

44,000 People Will Die This Year from Not Having Health Insurance, and I May Be One of Them

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Three years ago I went to County USC Hospital complaining of chronic stomach problems. In that three years I've been to four free clinics. Now at the place I go regularly that runs on donations, they are just now realizing the stomach problems I've had all this time are really serious.

Here is the scenario: In 2007, after sitting in the ER waiting room about 12 hours, honest, I finally got to see a doctor who told me, sorry, if it’s a chronic problem we can’t help you. This is for emergencies only.

I got irate. I started hollering, Why didn't they tell me that when I got here twelve hours ago.

The doctor shrugged and went to leave. I got mad. I started crying and babbling in confusion.

They said, straighten up, lady. Do you want us to put you in the hospital?

I said, Yes, Yes put me in a hospital even though what they meant was a psych ward. In 1987 when I checked into Thalians at Cedars Sinai near Beverly Hills, they gave me a series of medical tests in the periods of time between Art Therapy and Group. So I thought I'd finally get tests I needed on my stomach at the psych ward.

Not when the county locks you up.

They kept me for six days in this horrible place with one beaten up paperback book and a TV room for therapy. I had to stay six days because the doctor who could release me was on vacation. Not once in those six days did they order any medical tests. When it became obvious my stomach is bad, they gave me Immodium. That made me nauseous so they gave me an anti-nausea drug. Then the nurses would go back and sit in their station and I'd go back to the ward and read the one bent up paperback book.

They filled me with psych meds so by the time I did see a doctor the sixth day, I’d forgotten about the diarrhea I’d had for a year and a half that brought me to County in the first place, I just wanted to get the hell out of that ward, where genuine crazy people followed me around, one lady collected her mucous and then chased me around the ward trying to smear it on me.

I showed them. I took that paperback book with me when I left.

Anyway. Point is at that place, no one checked into the stomach problems that brought me to County to begin with. And it got worse. Since then I've been to a few other free medical places around the city, and no one seemed even to be alarmed at a person having diarrhea every day for two years, then three years.

Diarrhea is part of having PTSD, they all told me.

Now this date it’s four and a half years of pretty much liquid shit every time I eat a meal, unless it’s plain rice, which means probably what I need to do is switch to just eating rice…

Anyway.

So finally at the Free Clinic last February I went to get the muscle relaxant that helps me stop the other problems I've got.

Every three months when I go to the Free Clinic for my geriatric care checkup, I mention the chronic diarrhea and no one thinks it’s an issue.

What, do I look like I'm lying maybe?

Anyway.

Wait a minute, why would someone lie about a thing like that?

Anyway. Finally at the Free Clinic last February they order a smear test, which I think a decade or so back was part of your first visit to a doc office, but now it’s what they think of two years later. So I did the smear test last visit, and they got alarmed and ordered another one. When I saw it, I got alarmed too and said, please contact me right away if there’s anything wrong with test results.

No one called.

So I waited patiently for my next three month checkup to talk about the results instead.

That was yesterday.

I go and find out the results are alarming and they want me to go right away for a colonoscopy and possibly surgery.

Guess where they're sending me.

County USC Hospital.

I'm thinking, why couldn't they have just given me this test three years ago, why did I have to live with this horrible pain and symptoms for three more years and also let the condition get three years’ worse.

What if it was a tumor three years ago that is now cancer? The arrogance of medical people in the world of no health insurance is horrible.

Three years ago that doctor who shrugged at me could have had me do a smear test, one little smear test, and gotten me started finding out what's wrong with me three years ago.

The arrogance. It’s like, if they aren’t going to get paid as much as the Beverly Hills doctors, they don't want to bother with you.

It’s like, anyone who looks healthy and complains of a health problem must be lying.

See I don't look sick. Whatever is wrong with me, it doesn't show. Plus I've learned to fake a positive attitude and happiness as it produces endorphins and really does make you feel better. So even when I'm in so much pain I can barely walk but I have to take Metro for some reason, sometimes I have to argue and fight to get someone to give me a seat.

They say, you don't look disabled.

It’s not just doctors who don't give a damn about old women who have no money.

Soon after that debacle of being locked on a psych ward for six days with no medical attention to the stomach problem, I was back home and heard on the news about the woman who died in the ER at Martin Luther King hospital here in L.A. They described how she was moaning and groaning even lying on the floor, complaining of stomach problems. At one point a medic there dressed all in white actually stepped over her while he was in the process of ignoring her. And she died, right there on the floor of the ER waiting room.

It made the news.

The County of L.A. responded right away.

They closed down the ER at ML King Hospital and created nothing to take its place.

Nobody cares about health problems of people with no money.

They are letting me die right here on the floor in front of them.

I can’t stop thinking that's what's happening.

As soon as I saw the statistic last year during the health care political debates, I knew.

They said, 44,000 people will die next year from not having health insurance.

I knew right away when I heard the number, that I was going to be one of the 44,000. (Then ran to the bathroom to squirt.)

Whatever was wrong with my stomach in 2007 HAS gotten worse, I can feel something wrong inside. I used to teach Advanced Hatha Yoga, I know I'm sick I can feel it.

Yoga and Dance is also why I have muscle tone and strength, so when you look at me, you don't see a sick person but I can feel something is wrong in me.

I know there were about a hundred opportunities for doctors to do something about my stomach in the last three years, and none of those salaried, insured medical employees at any of the centers I went to wanted to take the time to give me a simple smear test.

Now I'm supposed to go to LA County Hospital for further testing and if needed surgery.

County Hospital on the East Side, the only place in all of L.A., with all the movie stars and producers and Charlie Sheen types making a million dollars a month, and there is no place on this side of town to get a free colonoscopy. It's going to be great when I'm finished with the test that puts a tube all the way up my a-- coming home afterwards on a three hour bus ride.

I may not even bother to do the test.

Because County will then send the results of the test to the Free Clinic who will then just ignore them anyway.

I almost would rather just get sick and die like people used to do before the miracle of modern medicine. I'm scared I'll end up in surgery at County hospital where I'll contract some other worse disease. I wish the Chicago Archdiocese would get around to giving me a settlement, as that's the only hope I have, and as far as I know the Church thinks they don't have to help me either.

I had health insurance on my last real job, the one I lost in 2006 after flipping out when I saw Deliver Us from Evil and realized the Church could have stopped the pedophiles decades ago. I got fired for crying too much at my computer while I was working.

Now I've learned, when you're poor and show up at an ER with an unusual health problem, like ones that develop from prolonged PTSD, they don't know what else to do with you but lock you up in a psych ward.

With that PTSD diagnosis, they can ignore everything else wrong with you, say it's just the PTSD.

(Whoops, wait a minute, gotta run again to the---)

You can’t go through an experience like this without feeling like the world just sees no value in you at all. My health is not worth the trouble to waste some cardboard and five minutes of a lab tech’s time to give me a smear test when I first presented to County with Chronic stomach problems in 2007?

Well, maybe diet and Yoga will keep me alive. I don't want to turn my health over to these people, so they can lock me down in a hospital bed and continue to neglect me.

I'm really distracted by this, and the fact I'm still running to the bathroom four or five times an hour. It’s become worse gradually, I'm just now realizing how bad it’s gotten over the past three years, me thinking it must not be anything wrong or one of those doctors I spoke to about it would have done something.

Something.

NO, they don't. Free clinic doctors are distracted, not listening, pissed at the endless flow of untended humans.

People don't want untended humans around. In L.A. you have to find a way to tend yourself, no one is going to do it for you.

Yoga and diet. Screw County USC hospital, they're not getting my body again.

What should I do? Where can a 62 year old gal get a good colonoscopy in this part of town?

Wish I could join the new L.A. trend and go to Mexico for health care.
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More Anger Management Notes

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The guy across from me wears headdress and his beard decorated, trimmed, in a way that is either Moslem or Deep South Central L.A. He talks of the place he lived before coming to Hope Again on Sunset Boulevard. At his old place "the brothers were in The Word all day, but they also smoked, smoked and smoked." I'm wondering if he's talking about tobacco or weed, but don't ask.

To his left a guy tells his tale of forgiveness, how after getting out of prison, in the parole office, he met the guy who really did the crime for which he'd just done time. "And I forgave him," he said, "I said, it's cool, bro."

We all talk I listen more than talk and take a lot of notes, jot things down.

The former Moslem guy says, "That's just how people are."

That's just how people are, I write in my notes in curly letters. Sums it up.

The guy who leads Anger Management at Hope Again is Pastor Ron, I've known now for more than five years. He's my age, grew up in L.A. near where I lived, but he grew up in a totally different L.A. than me. His parents were Christian preachers as well. Ron just gets it, he's embued in it, he's so ... calm.

He says, "You have to forgive yourself first," and I write down, "Let go. Stop beating myself up."

And I start daydreaming about the lies people have said about me to try to discredit me, that I'm "not a real journalist." Oh, and my favorite, which apparently comes from a couple board members of groups that allegedly advocate for victims, which is really mysterious: "Kay Ebeling is conducting a behind the scenes smear campaign to harm survivors," or words to that effect.

That stings. It rankles worse than if Mahony said it.

I jot down in my Anger Management notes,

"Truth = Freedom"

In big letters, then beneath it:

"They can lie about me all they want. I know I'm telling the truth, no matter what happens here temporarily as a result."

Just before the session started, there was a Bible on the table, and I opened it to Proverbs randomly, as it's always good to read a proverb when you have a few minutes of extra times.

The one I turned to was Proverts 24:24 which in the Amplified translation reads:

24 He who says to the wicked, You are righteous and innocent- peoples will curse him, nations will defy and abhor him.

25 But to those [upright judges] who rebuke the wicked, it will go well with them and they will find delight, and a good blessing will be upon them.

See, I think I'm seeing another layer of wickedness here, even lower and deeper than the pedophiles, and the bishops who enabled them. Most other people don't see it yet, and I'm being condemned for saying what I'm saying.

Ironically the persons condemning me most for saying it are the ones from whom who I see evidence of great wrongdoing. So I can't shut up about it, just have to keep reporting it as it comes up, as it is appropriate to report. And yes, there are a whole bunch of people who insist on continuing to glorify the wicked.

Here is Proverbs 24:24 from The Message translation:

"24-25 Whoever whitewashes the wicked
gets a black mark in the history books,
But whoever exposes the wicked
will be thanked and rewarded."

AH this translation works even better, New Living Translation:

"24 A judge who says to the wicked, “You are innocent,” will be cursed by many people and denounced by the nations. 25 But it will go well for those who convict the guilty; rich blessings will be showered on them."

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It's sundown. My sabbath starts now.
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Cut Paragraphs for May 1, 2010 story

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Cut paragraphs actually are here. That's the fun of a blog, I can say and do whatever I want. The reputation of City of Angels lies totally on my integrity. Plus you can always count on more stuff here at City of Angels 2, even though I don't tell you about it at the main page.

PARAGRAPHS CUT : From:
No, City of Angels Would Not Make A Good Book Because...
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I didn't even tell people I was a journalist for a while. Because the conversation would then go to NASA and it was just easier not to mention I used to work at NASA, than to try to explain to people why I left NASA. I’d also done some freelance journalism, but to be honest, before I got sober and recovered the memory of what happened to me at the hands of a priest at age five, my thinking was much more skewered.

I’d write these opinion pieces that would get published, I think only because the editors knew the opinions would arouse strong opposition, lots of angry letters. Like the Newsweek My Turn I got published in November 1990. It was supposed to be comedy, Newsweek re-cut it and made it sound like serious journalism, and I got boxes- BOXES- of hate mail forwarded to me from the magazine.

Around the same time my neighbors were getting boxes of Christmas presents delivered I had boxes of hate mail come right to my door by postal delivery, forwarded from Newsweek. Whole university classrooms got assignments to write a response to this Newsweek My Turn by some bitch Kay Ebeling out in California.

It was supposed to be funny. That's why I have the stupid expression on my face in the picture. The bastards edited it wrong and it looked like a crazy lady spouting weird politics.

I didn't write another word after that for 7 years. No 17 years (god my math is bad). A couple letters to the editor. My letters always get published, so sometimes I’d write them during political campaigns I cared about and feel glad that maybe I influenced one or two more votes by getting my feelings into print.

But after the newsweek experience, and the way it played out locally in the town where I lived, Arcata, CA, where old hippies and liberals have gone to hide out while the rest of the state goes Republican, when word got out that there was a woman living there who wrote an anti-feminism article in Newsweek, well, I stopped writing checks at the grocery store, I didn't want people to see my name.

So I isolated, went into the Redwoods, got sober in AA along the way, and then as my daughter turned five, I started remembering what happened when I was five with the priest, and my motor started running again.

Still I wasn’t doing journalism for a living. Instead, we migrated again to L.A. where I got a job that required a “degree in communications.” Most people who do this job have bachelors in RTF from back east, they come to L.A. thinking a college degree will open doors, and end up in that job I've got, sweeping through the babbling of reality TV participants making sure everything they say gets taken down so it can be made into a script by another staff person. (See reality TV is really a way to get rid of unions in tv production, by creating new jobs that aren’t unionized and then having everyone work from home so they can’t meet and organize.)

OTHER CUT 'GRAPH

First of all Snap emailed me saying I was “harming survivors” by writing about the hearings, which is a phrase Snap uses with survivors whenever one of us strikes out on our own. Funny, since we only strike out on our own because we are frustrated Snap won’t entertain any of our ideas. For example, they said I was harming survivors by writing City of Angels, and they said Jim Robertson here in L.A. was "harming Survivors" by doing a demonstration that got into the news without Snap.
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So I do City of Angels from a Matt Drudge style slum with no resources at all.

It's all part of the story.
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