It is very sad. I've got a few bones to pick with a few aspects of it - it seems like the plot contorts itself to all but let Ash off the hook at the end - but you know, humans are human and what happened is believable enough as presented.
Believable, and tragic.
A beautiful book. It was recommended to me only this year, by the most beautiful girl I know. So for me, it has quite happy associations!
I'm guilty of having trusted and cared for you. Period.
And, TRUTH? I've kept on TRYING to repair this fractured thing because your voice shook on the phone that night...because you were human & nervous & therefore couldn't be the monster you seem to really be. And because you called back so quickly when we were cut off. To later say "I love you." Even if we only meant it as friends.
So, yeah, I'm guilty of being a fool, Joe.
For anyone who finds this or our other conversations, I am Jamie Weeks. My blog is www.finishedwork-rjw.blogspot.com. Better Than We Know. Pay close attention to my posts during the period of Saturday, July 11, 2009 through Thursday, July 23, 2009. Anyone who cares to look will be quite amazed if they compare my posts to Joe's posts and poetry during the same time. Check posting times! Please realize that Joe & I were not talking during this period but he finally lured me out when he posted about people with problems & Those Who Care. I emailed him & left comments. He chose to ignore them instead "answering" in posts. Until he finally decided to humiliate me in his comments section and Stalker posts. Read my blog, Dear Reader, Read Consider. Joe & I were great, good friends once. You can tell by the number of comments he deleted. If you're lucky, you'll find the ones he missed on here. We talked about friendship, and honesty, and love. We, at least me, opened up our hearts and foolishly shared personal information about things that are so private I cry to remember how I trusted him. BEWARE, Dear Reader!! Everyone you meet can't be trusted...even if they say, "I love you".
Joe, as to sin...God has forgiven me. You & I know that. Done deal at the cross.
As to my sinning against you? I apologize. My only excuse is that most people will strike back at some point. I'm only human. Sorry to disappoint you. Once again, you can rest secure in never having any culpability or doing any wrong, I guess.
I'll let you end it:
Used Without Permission
I violate your copyright infringe your mark of trade your reputation is abused by these cheap moves I've made I've ripped and burned your great good faith and pirated your soul your limpid eyes I've plagiarized your love, I've stolen whole each little bit I counterfeit makes my you more my own. And still you walk serenely on as if you've never known - - - ! Posted by dogimo at 9:48 PM
Let's let it end then, please. Anyone wants to go looking can find whatever they wish. It's more than bullshit for you to apologize, to say mea culpa as you have several times, when never once did you accept or even seem to seriously credit the possibility of the truth of what I've been saying all along: I haven't been reading your posts and I haven't been "mirroring" them. What the heck are you apologizing then? You continue to blame me and accuse me! There's no apology there to be accepted!
If you for one second accepted the truth, you'd see your actions - and how you've been treating me - in a despicable light! Again, the offense you accuse me of would be no offense - reading, and posting a very tangentially related post. But again: I wasn't reading you, and I *know* that! Whatever you saw is whatever you put into it.
For several months now, you have HOUNDED me, you have HARASSED me with bizarre and unpleasant e-mails, cryptic threats, laughter and scoffing when I beg you to leave me alone. If it offends you that I posted a couple posts crying for help over being stalked? Too bad! You are the one stalking me! I was not e-mailing you or contacting you in any way - except this alleged symbolic attack which is b.s. I needed to help, I didn't know what to do, and others who've been in similar positions helped calm me down and restore some perspective. If what you've been putting me through surfaced in a few wry poems, well good lord, how can it not surface? You have been a living nightmare to me for months and I have done NOTHING to deserve it! None of what you claim I've done begins to justify what you've kept up and kept up, the campaign you've been waging and laughing about - having a GRAND OLD TIME, you! I have not been!
I will do my best to help. To anyone interested: to the best of my recollection, these are the "mirror posts" Jamie has emphasized as proof that I'm "harassing" her (and again, by her own accusation my harassment consists entirely of A. reading her blog and B. making occasional allusions to her blog in mine - this, to her, is harassment). If anybody wants to take a look and see how similar the timing and content are, to judge for yourselves, knock yourselves out - I'm not interested. It's trivia to me when I know for a fact it's not true.
1. Jamie posted something about rain. I posted a poem about rain (actually, I've posted many times about rain over the years).
2. Jamie posted something about birds. Later, I posted a nonsensical rant about birdwatching - it was practically verbatim a re-post from something I'd previously posted on frenzforum.com. I've posted here about birds periodically. I love birds and rain. Who thinks they have a monopoly on such topics?
3. Jamie published a post called "Waiting." The topic, I don't know. I published a post called "Why are we waiting / waiting for what." The post title is a line from Dave Dobbyn's song "Loyal," the video for the song is practically the entire contents of my post. Can I assume that her post has nothing to do with mine, except the coincidence of one common English word in the post title?
4. Jamie posted pictures of a storm. I posted a video of Crowded House performing their song "In My Command." No, I don't get the connection there, either. She claims it was a response. I posted that song twice, and I'm not sure which instance constituted the offense she is citing - click on the 'Crowded House' label to see both.
5. Jamie posted about visiting a naval base where they keep nuclear subs. I posted a dream I had once where I was British guitarist/superspy Richard Thompson. You can see for yourself how prominent the nuclear sub was in my post.
There might have been others but those were the ones Jamie brought up most vehemently. I post hundreds of posts and I cover a stupid array of topics. Her criteria for a "mirrored" post can be as slim as a one-word overlap between posts - with nothing else in the post remotely reminiscent. I can't conceive that the content overlap of any of these posts is anything more than very slight.
So those are the best example coincidences, to go by what Jamie has emphasized most, most recently.
The last time I was on Jamie's blog, to delete my comments from there, I *did* notice some poems and items of hers that looked to me to be direct answers of mine. I don't care. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. If she read something of mine and wanted to post something similar - WHO CARES? I didn't bother to check the dates to compare, because anybody can make their post date say whatever they want. I'm not interested in this conspiracy crap. I know what I did and didn't read before making any post. I very often read something someplace and it inspires a post of mine. I very often get inspired and run off at the tangent. There's nothing offensive there, nothing sinister, nothing ulterior. But it doesn't matter because I shit sure haven't been reading her blog! I have gotten ZERO inspiration from her blog, and only HORRIBLE, BAD inspiration from her!
And I am sorry if I appear sanguine over this, but I don't even want to get into the specifics of this siege I've been under. She'd lay off for a week or so then start back in - I guess, when a new "coincidence" set her off. I don't want to get into it, because I'm not trying to bad-mouth anyone, I just want it to stop - I have begged her to stop over and over. I'm absolutely at wit's end.
Jamie I'm not interested in cataloging your further far-flung coincidence hit list. That's going to have to serve as a representative sample.
As hard as this is for you to accept, I have not been reading your blog and trying to communicate back to you through mine. I can't understand how you think anyone would ever arrive at such a ridiculous and benign means of HARASSMENT. For real harassment, compare with your treatment of me.
Will you please leave me alone like I've been begging you to for months?
And Jamie: your sin against me was not "striking back." It was striking without provocation. I've done none of this crap you accuse me of.
At the time you talk about I was posting from cloud nine, on a wonderful high about a wonderful good that had come into my life - I was very much on oblivious, writing poems and happy random nonsense posts and my joy was all about someone other than you. The last thing on my mind was reading the blog of someone I'd been begging to please not contact me anymore. It grieves me that you basically co-opted it all, and that you thought I was messaging you that whole time, with those posts.
But it doesn't grieve me anywhere near as much as it FREAKED ME OUT when you came in to "claim" it all as yours, barging back in on my life AGAIN, making demands, telling me you love me and are secure in our future, that my messages have been received, telling me all about our "understanding" - all with me completely oblivious to what illusions you'd been laboring under! How crazy do you think that was for me to deal with, out of nowhere?
You won't believe me, you can't. You can't even entertain the possibility I'm on the level.
Sorry...final thought...if I AM what you say, WHY have you continued our conversations for so long after you labeled me STALKER?!?
And why delete EVERY comment I made that you could get your hands on but leave these loooong comment threads for people to find? Why would you do that, Joe?
Oh. To make me look crazy? LOL :)
Maybe it'll build my readership at Better Than!
True Love vs. Unconditional: I have both in my husband. He has stood by me through this insanity with you and loved me despite my foolishness. UNCONDITIONALLY. That is true love. It doesn't consider itself. Period.
Joe, I don't think you'll ever see a child of your own being born or hear your house ringing with shouts of laughter and joy and that makes me sad for you. I was sad when I met you, remember? It seemed you had no friends to comment. I'm sorry you're alone but I think that isn't going to change. Now, I know why. It still makes me sad and that is why I'm a fool.
Jamie, I deleted your comments because you're not my friend. Since you've been tormenting me, they have nothing but ugly associations.
I left up 2 (now 3) threads because at first you seemed to be willing to listen to reason, and to be asking for an explanation. Stupid fucking Joe. You never had the slightest willingness to hear or accept what I was saying was true. You just wanted to keep on steamrolling me.
Well if you look crazy, it's not my doing. I let you have your whole damn say.
The fact is, Jamie: your say looks crazy. Your say is that it's some vile trick that a person might read a post and then go on to post anything very tenuously, tangentially related. That's crazy. And your say is that the thinnest of coincidences in a few post topics, on a blog that has hundreds of posts per month, with a guy whose topic labels run damn near into the thousands - that level of coincidence constitutes some sinister and deliberate proof of the vile trick (which again: reading, posting something very tangentially related). Crazy.
And then you say that I have the slightest interest in reading your blog. That's honestly the craziest, but you can't see truth from where you stand.
I did my absolute best to convince you I knew nothing about this bullshit. It ought to be to my credit that I leave your arguments up! I even made an effort to support your proofs for you.
I checked the lyrics to "In My Command", Jamie, and they have nothing to do with "storm pictures" - which is what you say it was answering back. It sounds like to you, those lyrics would have been a "response" to you no matter what you'd posted. There were plenty of those unrelated, non-"mirrored" posts, by the way - where you submitted comments (rejected) on posts that have nothing to do with you, staking your cryptic claim to the contents of the post. Posts that even now you have never claimed were "mirrors" - you just wanted them to be about you. To you, everything I post has to be about you.
You desperately need to keep proving to yourself that I'm the one obsessed, because if you admit the truth, then you are a psycho ditzwitch bitch who has been harassing a completely innocent bystander whose only crime was to tell you to buzz off (after REPEATED forgiveness and REPEATED bouts of your obsession relapse).
So that's that. COMMENTS CLOSED here, too. I can't see there'll be any more worth saying on this topic.
One last thing: I can't tell you how many times you've complimented me on how convincing my lies are, how rational I sound, how you would almost have believed me if - IF - you would have believed I was telling the truth! If only you didn't know for a fact what a liar I was.
And you knew that how? Because I won't admit I'm secretly reading your blog like you say I am.
Circular reasoning much?
Wow. Thank GOD you figured out what a liar I was! Otherwise you might actually believe the truth when I tell you it TWENTY TIMES.
13 comments:
This is a wonderful book. Quite possibly my favorite, but so sad. The power of words...
It is very sad. I've got a few bones to pick with a few aspects of it - it seems like the plot contorts itself to all but let Ash off the hook at the end - but you know, humans are human and what happened is believable enough as presented.
Believable, and tragic.
A beautiful book. It was recommended to me only this year, by the most beautiful girl I know. So for me, it has quite happy associations!
Jamie said...
How lovely for you. I cried until I was sick.
I hope it has been worth it for you.
I'm guilty of having trusted and cared for you. Period.
And, TRUTH? I've kept on TRYING to repair this fractured thing because your voice shook on the phone that night...because you were human & nervous & therefore couldn't be the monster you seem to really be. And because you called back so quickly when we were cut off. To later say "I love you." Even if we only meant it as friends.
So, yeah, I'm guilty of being a fool, Joe.
For anyone who finds this or our other conversations, I am Jamie Weeks. My blog is www.finishedwork-rjw.blogspot.com. Better Than We Know. Pay close attention to my posts during the period of Saturday, July 11, 2009 through Thursday, July 23, 2009. Anyone who cares to look will be quite amazed if they compare my posts to Joe's posts and poetry during the same time. Check posting times! Please realize that Joe & I were not talking during this period but he finally lured me out when he posted about people with problems & Those Who Care. I emailed him & left comments. He chose to ignore them instead "answering" in posts. Until he finally decided to humiliate me in his comments section and Stalker posts. Read my blog, Dear Reader, Read Consider. Joe & I were great, good friends once. You can tell by the number of comments he deleted. If you're lucky, you'll find the ones he missed on here. We talked about friendship, and honesty, and love. We, at least me, opened up our hearts and foolishly shared personal information about things that are so private I cry to remember how I trusted him. BEWARE, Dear Reader!! Everyone you meet can't be trusted...even if they say, "I love you".
Joe, as to sin...God has forgiven me. You & I know that. Done deal at the cross.
As to my sinning against you? I apologize. My only excuse is that most people will strike back at some point. I'm only human. Sorry to disappoint you. Once again, you can rest secure in never having any culpability or doing any wrong, I guess.
I'll let you end it:
Used Without Permission
I violate
your copyright
infringe your mark of trade
your reputation is abused
by these cheap moves I've made
I've ripped and burned your great good faith
and pirated your soul
your limpid eyes
I've plagiarized
your love, I've stolen whole
each little bit
I counterfeit
makes my you more
my own.
And still you walk
serenely on
as if you've never known - - - !
Posted by dogimo at 9:48 PM
Grace, Joe.
Always, me
Let's let it end then, please. Anyone wants to go looking can find whatever they wish. It's more than bullshit for you to apologize, to say mea culpa as you have several times, when never once did you accept or even seem to seriously credit the possibility of the truth of what I've been saying all along: I haven't been reading your posts and I haven't been "mirroring" them. What the heck are you apologizing then? You continue to blame me and accuse me! There's no apology there to be accepted!
If you for one second accepted the truth, you'd see your actions - and how you've been treating me - in a despicable light! Again, the offense you accuse me of would be no offense - reading, and posting a very tangentially related post. But again: I wasn't reading you, and I *know* that! Whatever you saw is whatever you put into it.
For several months now, you have HOUNDED me, you have HARASSED me with bizarre and unpleasant e-mails, cryptic threats, laughter and scoffing when I beg you to leave me alone. If it offends you that I posted a couple posts crying for help over being stalked? Too bad! You are the one stalking me! I was not e-mailing you or contacting you in any way - except this alleged symbolic attack which is b.s. I needed to help, I didn't know what to do, and others who've been in similar positions helped calm me down and restore some perspective. If what you've been putting me through surfaced in a few wry poems, well good lord, how can it not surface? You have been a living nightmare to me for months and I have done NOTHING to deserve it! None of what you claim I've done begins to justify what you've kept up and kept up, the campaign you've been waging and laughing about - having a GRAND OLD TIME, you! I have not been!
But I will do my best to help.
I will do my best to help. To anyone interested: to the best of my recollection, these are the "mirror posts" Jamie has emphasized as proof that I'm "harassing" her (and again, by her own accusation my harassment consists entirely of A. reading her blog and B. making occasional allusions to her blog in mine - this, to her, is harassment). If anybody wants to take a look and see how similar the timing and content are, to judge for yourselves, knock yourselves out - I'm not interested. It's trivia to me when I know for a fact it's not true.
1. Jamie posted something about rain. I posted a poem about rain (actually, I've posted many times about rain over the years).
2. Jamie posted something about birds. Later, I posted a nonsensical rant about birdwatching - it was practically verbatim a re-post from something I'd previously posted on frenzforum.com. I've posted here about birds periodically. I love birds and rain. Who thinks they have a monopoly on such topics?
3. Jamie published a post called "Waiting." The topic, I don't know. I published a post called "Why are we waiting / waiting for what." The post title is a line from Dave Dobbyn's song "Loyal," the video for the song is practically the entire contents of my post. Can I assume that her post has nothing to do with mine, except the coincidence of one common English word in the post title?
4. Jamie posted pictures of a storm. I posted a video of Crowded House performing their song "In My Command." No, I don't get the connection there, either. She claims it was a response. I posted that song twice, and I'm not sure which instance constituted the offense she is citing - click on the 'Crowded House' label to see both.
5. Jamie posted about visiting a naval base where they keep nuclear subs. I posted a dream I had once where I was British guitarist/superspy Richard Thompson. You can see for yourself how prominent the nuclear sub was in my post.
There might have been others but those were the ones Jamie brought up most vehemently. I post hundreds of posts and I cover a stupid array of topics. Her criteria for a "mirrored" post can be as slim as a one-word overlap between posts - with nothing else in the post remotely reminiscent. I can't conceive that the content overlap of any of these posts is anything more than very slight.
So those are the best example coincidences, to go by what Jamie has emphasized most, most recently.
The last time I was on Jamie's blog, to delete my comments from there, I *did* notice some poems and items of hers that looked to me to be direct answers of mine. I don't care. It doesn't bother me in the slightest. If she read something of mine and wanted to post something similar - WHO CARES? I didn't bother to check the dates to compare, because anybody can make their post date say whatever they want. I'm not interested in this conspiracy crap. I know what I did and didn't read before making any post. I very often read something someplace and it inspires a post of mine. I very often get inspired and run off at the tangent. There's nothing offensive there, nothing sinister, nothing ulterior. But it doesn't matter because I shit sure haven't been reading her blog! I have gotten ZERO inspiration from her blog, and only HORRIBLE, BAD inspiration from her!
And I am sorry if I appear sanguine over this, but I don't even want to get into the specifics of this siege I've been under. She'd lay off for a week or so then start back in - I guess, when a new "coincidence" set her off. I don't want to get into it, because I'm not trying to bad-mouth anyone, I just want it to stop - I have begged her to stop over and over. I'm absolutely at wit's end.
Jamie I'm not interested in cataloging your further far-flung coincidence hit list. That's going to have to serve as a representative sample.
As hard as this is for you to accept, I have not been reading your blog and trying to communicate back to you through mine. I can't understand how you think anyone would ever arrive at such a ridiculous and benign means of HARASSMENT. For real harassment, compare with your treatment of me.
Will you please leave me alone like I've been begging you to for months?
And Jamie: your sin against me was not "striking back." It was striking without provocation. I've done none of this crap you accuse me of.
At the time you talk about I was posting from cloud nine, on a wonderful high about a wonderful good that had come into my life - I was very much on oblivious, writing poems and happy random nonsense posts and my joy was all about someone other than you. The last thing on my mind was reading the blog of someone I'd been begging to please not contact me anymore. It grieves me that you basically co-opted it all, and that you thought I was messaging you that whole time, with those posts.
But it doesn't grieve me anywhere near as much as it FREAKED ME OUT when you came in to "claim" it all as yours, barging back in on my life AGAIN, making demands, telling me you love me and are secure in our future, that my messages have been received, telling me all about our "understanding" - all with me completely oblivious to what illusions you'd been laboring under! How crazy do you think that was for me to deal with, out of nowhere?
You won't believe me, you can't. You can't even entertain the possibility I'm on the level.
Anonymous said...
Sorry...final thought...if I AM what you say, WHY have you continued our conversations for so long after you labeled me STALKER?!?
And why delete EVERY comment I made that you could get your hands on but leave these loooong comment threads for people to find? Why would you do that, Joe?
Oh. To make me look crazy? LOL :)
Maybe it'll build my readership at Better Than!
True Love vs. Unconditional: I have both in my husband. He has stood by me through this insanity with you and loved me despite my foolishness. UNCONDITIONALLY. That is true love. It doesn't consider itself. Period.
Joe, I don't think you'll ever see a child of your own being born or hear your house ringing with shouts of laughter and joy and that makes me sad for you. I was sad when I met you, remember? It seemed you had no friends to comment. I'm sorry you're alone but I think that isn't going to change. Now, I know why. It still makes me sad and that is why I'm a fool.
Jamie, I deleted your comments because you're not my friend. Since you've been tormenting me, they have nothing but ugly associations.
I left up 2 (now 3) threads because at first you seemed to be willing to listen to reason, and to be asking for an explanation. Stupid fucking Joe. You never had the slightest willingness to hear or accept what I was saying was true. You just wanted to keep on steamrolling me.
Well if you look crazy, it's not my doing. I let you have your whole damn say.
The fact is, Jamie: your say looks crazy. Your say is that it's some vile trick that a person might read a post and then go on to post anything very tenuously, tangentially related. That's crazy. And your say is that the thinnest of coincidences in a few post topics, on a blog that has hundreds of posts per month, with a guy whose topic labels run damn near into the thousands - that level of coincidence constitutes some sinister and deliberate proof of the vile trick (which again: reading, posting something very tangentially related). Crazy.
And then you say that I have the slightest interest in reading your blog. That's honestly the craziest, but you can't see truth from where you stand.
I did my absolute best to convince you I knew nothing about this bullshit. It ought to be to my credit that I leave your arguments up! I even made an effort to support your proofs for you.
I've been more than fair.
Will you please leave me alone?
nOT AS LONG AS YOU AGGRAVATE THE FIRE OUT OF ME! hELL NO! sO, KEEP TALKING...IT'LL KEEP ME AMUSED WHEN i'M IN MY APARTMENT. :)
iT'S THE LYRICS TO THE cROWDED hOUSE SONG AS IF YOU DIDN'T KNOW. dITTO THE OTHER SONG...LAY YOUR HANDS ON ME.
YOU ARE SUCH A GOOD LIAR. dANG. i'M AMAZED.
i ALMOST BELIEVE YOU AND i KNOW THE TRUTH. JEESH!!
I checked the lyrics to "In My Command", Jamie, and they have nothing to do with "storm pictures" - which is what you say it was answering back. It sounds like to you, those lyrics would have been a "response" to you no matter what you'd posted. There were plenty of those unrelated, non-"mirrored" posts, by the way - where you submitted comments (rejected) on posts that have nothing to do with you, staking your cryptic claim to the contents of the post. Posts that even now you have never claimed were "mirrors" - you just wanted them to be about you. To you, everything I post has to be about you.
You desperately need to keep proving to yourself that I'm the one obsessed, because if you admit the truth, then you are a psycho ditzwitch bitch who has been harassing a completely innocent bystander whose only crime was to tell you to buzz off (after REPEATED forgiveness and REPEATED bouts of your obsession relapse).
So that's that. COMMENTS CLOSED here, too. I can't see there'll be any more worth saying on this topic.
I'll re-create the real post later.
One last thing: I can't tell you how many times you've complimented me on how convincing my lies are, how rational I sound, how you would almost have believed me if - IF - you would have believed I was telling the truth! If only you didn't know for a fact what a liar I was.
And you knew that how? Because I won't admit I'm secretly reading your blog like you say I am.
Circular reasoning much?
Wow. Thank GOD you figured out what a liar I was! Otherwise you might actually believe the truth when I tell you it TWENTY TIMES.
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