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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