chani, two

Page Fifteen

I edited this cut badly. sorry. chani the vibrant-colored calico at age 7 and a half, shortly before she was stolen. today would be her twelfth birthday, and on a very unusual june 20 summer solstice.

Today I try to say whatever small things I can manage about my second cat called Chani. It’s so difficult to write about this pilfered family on any day, but especially on their birthdays.

Chani was another one of those extremely shy cats, and as is my wont, I mostly let her be the way she was made. She was much more a cat-cat than a people-cat, and so I rarely tried to force physical affection between us. She had had a great bond with her mother, Laxa, but after Laxa’s death by the driver of a car when Chani was three, there was a time of lost-ness for her. Eventually she intensified her bonds with her two brothers, Aram and Abel, and filled the space left when her mother was suddenly gone.

About once a week she would have a great desire for me, come to me and walk all over my chest, rubbing and purring and asking for petting, sometimes sleeping on my chest a little while. But otherwise she kept her bonds to her two brothers as the primary ones in her life. On the day she was stolen she hadn’t yet had her eighth birthday.

Like her brothers, Chani was abjectly terrified of the outdoors. Was this because they were never introduced to the outdoors until they were three years old? Their mother certainly had had no such terror. Because I hadn’t yet had her spayed, Chani’s forays into the outdoors had to be brief anyway, so she wouldn’t wander off looking for men. But I needn’t have monitored her at all. After a mere five-to-ten minutes outside, Chani would be clawing at the door, climbing up it, and crying as if she were being flayed alive. What the hell are you doing this to me for, mom? I was doing it to give her, however briefly, the joy of nature, which I strongly believe cats need. To an even greater degree than dogs do. But not Chani. Nature held not one measly iota of interest for her. After about a year of these periodic forays, I gave up. Chani wanted the inside, and that was that.

Letting cat-cats live according to their own lights cost me something, of course. After they died, or after they were stolen, I craved another chance for more physical contact than I had got. I wished/wish I had tried to force it more. But forcing animals, unless they are in danger, is not my way. The cat I now have is another aloof one. She rarely sleeps with me, and I make no attempts to force her. I will regret it someday, I’m sure, as I regret it with Chani and some others. But my innate conviction to let animals be who they are with interference only when necessary does not leave me over the long years.

On eviction night, it was decided by a certain Turners lunatic and her smarmy, lying, sneaking priest that my animals should be kept overnight in one of the smarm’s two garages, till the animal officer could come for them in the morning. It was also decided by them where I myself should be kept overnight: in a hotel in Greenfield, far from my animals. Though I asked permission to feed my animals their supper, I was not allowed. The lunatic and her equally loopy son would do that.

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Because they were both loons, and because they had no experience with animals, the feeding took from eight o’clock till midnight (I was told the next day), and five of my animals were allowed to escape. One dog off running loose in Turners all night and all the next day, and maybe more. Chailin and Chani and her two brothers escaped into the other garage, which was packed to the rafters with crap for a yard sale. The four cats were uncatchable in all that junk. Our eviction was in mid-March. A full two months later, I was told that the cats were still in that garage. No heat, no love (was there even a litter box?), nothing at all that was known and comfortable and normal. I can still hardly withstand thinking about it.

There are people in this poisonous town who finally got those cats out and took them somewhere and had them euthanized. They will not tell me. My need to know where my loved friends were taken, and where and when and how they died, is absolutely irrelevant to these sick-minded “christians.” They keep their secrets locked up tight from me as effectively as any mafioso keeps his secrets. I wish them misery every single day that I breathe, and if you find that sentiment repugnant, then you should not read this book. Those who do evil, to me or to someone else, are held accountable in my heart and in my mind.

Are you dead or alive today Chani, on your birthday, on the soltice? Were you taken to that vet in Vermont to be adopted out, or to be killed? The guilty will not tell me.

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read…   Cutting the pie…    Shadowpoems…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

bullying is for real

Page Fourteen

Those of you who do not have Asperger’s will no doubt not believe it when I say, yet again, that many people with this form of autism experience bullying all of their lives. This harassment may be physical, or mental, or both. Mine has largely been mental, has been lifelong, and has been administered by a wide variety and large number of my so-called fellow humans. In 2008, this bullying, in its most extreme form to date, resulted in the destruction of my life as I knew it and of the animals about whom I’m writing this book.

I’m not a likable person. The longer I live, the more concretely this is proven to me. This state of unlikability results in acute isolation and loneliness among my own species. That is certainly bad enough, enough to suffer as a result of being universally unlikable. But some bullies are not content to just dislike me and walk away, leaving me in the isolation and lonelines, which is a cruel enough thing to do in the first place, in my own opinion. Some bullies have to attack, and will not be sated until they have seen their attack bear destructive fruit.

It is because the landlady had to attack that this book even needs to be written. The landlady who herself is delusional and suffers from multiple personalities, a psyche that is not all of a piece. It is because the other tenant in the building — very obviously mafia-connected (she made no attempts to hide it) and dealing drugs in the back yard — had to attack. It is because a case manager at the department of mental health had to attack. Her particular attack was directed against me, but in her rationalization and making excuses for her dishonorable behavior she convinces herself that she acted for my animals. She made the usual yuppie judgment that someone poor like me shouldn’t have more than two animals anyway, and that my animals would be better off dead or with strangers than that we should be kept together as a family. This employee of the mental health system didn’t give a tinker’s damn about my mental health, or even about the hearts and souls of my animals.

In the wake of this worst trauma of my life (and my animals’ lives) I carry with me enormous grief, bitterness, and rage: a list of emotions the airy-fluffies of the modern era neither want to admit to nor discuss. But I also carry huge self-recrimination. After all, on one level the whole thing was my fault. It was because I was despised that this trio of mythological raging, demented furies did what they did. Just because I was being my autistic, atheistic, PTSD, anxiety and depression self that these horrors were thrown at us. Just for being me, Anne. And because I obstinately (to other people) insisted on the right to be myself, my animals and I had to be destroyed by the bullying impulses of three women whose psyches are nothing but sewage. The weight of darkness that exists to realize that if I weren’t me, if I were mainstream and one of society’s fitting-in sheep, these ugly things never would have been done to us, is a weight so heavy that I often wish I would just die under it and be finished.

I feel the remorse every single day of the last four years. Right along with the grief and the rage and the bitterness.

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read…  Spite and malice…   Poison and snowflake trees…

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shiloh

Page Eleven      (from the 2008 blogs)

still sat 7 june 2008   greenfield

Shiloh was one of the three cats slaughtered by the  local “shelter,” along with her two cousins. She was born Aug 7, 1992, the last of a litter of six. And yet again I saw the “runt of the litter” predictions come true. She remained her whole life not just the smallest member of her litter, but of her entire extended family. She was the size that most kittens are when they’re maybe eight or nine months old, for over fifteen years. And so no matter how old she got, part of me always thought of her as very young. At least until about 2006, when she was fourteen. Finally I could see signs of aging in her that had really been a long time coming. She stayed so much the same for so many years. She was gentle, and funny. And also sutbborn about certain things, like many animals. She was a people-sleeper. Not all cats are. Her father wasn’t. She had her family’s greater-than-average curiosity about the world, and she had her grandmother’s intense love for home and humans. In the 90′s, Shiloh was one of the cats who used to walk the canal with me in turners falls, that town of trolls, trauma and toxicity. They have these cement pillar-type things along the canal (I don’t know what they’re called) and there was one particular one Shiloh            always had to jump onto and roll around on. They’re not very big on the top, and I don’t know how many times I had to catch her in her roll so she wouldn’t fall into the water. I named that pillar Shiloh’s Lookout. We moved away from the canal in 97,when the hell years began, but whenever I make it back there, Shiloh’s Lookout is always one of the stops I make. I haven’t been back there yet since she was killed. 

There was another trait that her particular family had in abundance, and that was the love of running water. Most of my cats over my lifetime didn’t give a hoot whether they ever sat on a sink and watched water run from a tap, or hung out with me in flowerbeds to watch water pouring from the watering can. But all of Shiloh’s family were very keen on watching running water, as long it was a modest amount. If the flow got stronger, then the normal feline dislike of water would kick in.

When Shiloh’s dad was eight, he began demanding his drinking water from a tap about forty percent of the time. When he was thirteen, he began making this demand almost one hundred percent. Shiloh did the same thing. For the time that her father still lived, she allowed him to have the bathroom sink as his drinking property, but as soon as he died, she claimed tap-drinking at the sink for herself. She was thirteen, the same age he had been when he went completely to tap-drinking. She continued to drink her water only from the bathroom tap until the day two and half years later when a parcel of scheming, deceitful humans took her away.

Update 20 June 2009:  Shiloh and her two male cousins were murdered by this wonderful animal “shelter” on March 24, 2008, only two weeks into their “foster” care. I think of the ending they had with shame and rage: two weeks of stress, living in cages, being handled by strangers who didn’t love them, then death. And I wasn’t even with them when they died. If we had stayed together, Shiloh probably would have died sometime last year anyway. She was nearly 16. But she would have lived her last days with her family, in love, and I would have been with her when she died. Her two cousins were only 12, and would still be alive if we had stayed together. All three of these cats had been with me and with each other since they were born. I think of everyone who had anything to with what happened to my family with dark contempt: the landlady, the psycho-chick, the DMH and CSS, the “shelter.” That building is empty now, the one where my three cats were murdered — the “shelter” has moved to a new location. I sometimes ride by that place on the bus, the now-vacant one, the place where three cousins who loved me, and whom I loved, were sentenced to death. There’s only darkness there on that little hill, only darkness in those people who worked there, only darkness in me, when my eyes look up to tha building. Yet another example of how the Department of Mental Health “assisted” me. 

Since I first wrote this post, I have been back to the canal and Shiloh’s Lookout a number of times, including this past Memorial day. So many emotions trapped inside me when I visit: the humor and the happiness of those lost days on the canal with my cats; the sorrow; the contempt for the humans who destroyed my life and for those who destroyed my animals.

And today, 20 June 2009, is the ninth birthday of three more of the stolen cats: Aram, Abel and Chani. Or it would have been their ninth birthday. I have reason to deduce that these three cats living in a garage full of yard sale crap that belongs to an extrememly unethical priest, were rounded up in cat traps by a certain woman in this town and taken to a vet friend of hers in Vermont to be killed. But when this was done, no one will tell me. They won’t even verify that it was done.

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read… Being toward death…   Spite and malice…

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

 

the right to be oneself

Page Nine

 

I heard a news story the other day relating to the murders of Afghan villagers by an amerikan soldier. One man lost eleven members of his family in that massacre. They were interviewing him through a translator, I think.

Eleven loved ones gone all in a few minutes. And I was thinking “that man would have some kind of understanding of how I feel.” And this past Christmas day, a woman in Connecticut lost her three children and two parents in a house fire. She would know how I feel. Many readers would no doubt argue that those other people lost human beings, whereas I only lost animals. To which I would retort: it matters not one iota. Cataclysmic loss is cataclysmic loss. And if you are me (which you are not) — autistic, wary of the human race since birth, connecting well and completely only with animals since birth, the recipient of life-long bullying and trauma at the hands of humans, then the loss of fourteen animals all in one half hour is every bit as demolishing as losing the same number of humans in the same viciously brief period of time.

And then flip back to my previous page: the lack of closure. The obstinate refusal of so-called “christians” to tell me what happened to eleven of those animals.

It never ceases to completely baffle me that people are insulted and/or disgusted by my post-cataclysm attitude towards humans. Being that I do have Asperger’s, that I do have PTSD, that I have experienced psychological bullying and much worse all my life at the hands of human beings, what attitude, exactly, do people expect me to have towards the human race? Whatever attitude it is that they expect, I would define their expectations as irrational, selfish, and one hundred percent lacking in anything one could remotely call empathy.

I quoted the lyrics from a particular song way back in my early post-eviction blogs in 2008. I regret that I haven’t brought the poet’s name with me today, but maybe I’ll bring it next time. His words are worth quoting a second time. A tenth time. For as long as I live:

                    There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.

                    There’s a pain goes on and on.

                    Empty chairs at empty tables,

                    now my friends are dead and gone.

 

 

                                ~~~~  anonymous

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

eccentricity

Page Four

14 April 2008, Greenfield (animals, books, lousy mental health care, photos)
Tags: animals, books, my family, photos     (from the blogs)

What’s so wrong with preferring the company of animals to that of people? It’s not average, it’s  not mainstream, but I don’t think it’s any worse than “odd” or “eccentric.” Maybe you’d be surprised if you knew how many people over 55 years have mocked me, treated me like a flaky child, or outright attacked me in some way over my love of having a lot of animals, and my obvious choosing of them over most human beings. Or maybe you wouldn’t be. You’d think I was a child molester or a drug dealer, or some other reprehensible beast. I prefer animals to most people. That has made me a target — many times.

These are their names, the fourteen family members, friends of mine who vanished because the Department of Mental Health couldn’t be bothered to find us a place to live:

 

Mishi and Brainse, my dogs 

The cats: Shiloh, Chan, Ziidjian (killed)

        Mandy, Judah,                    Chailin                                                                                                      

          Aram, Abel, Chani

                   

The birds: Lizzie, Tuuschi, Canajoharie

I’ve been told a variety of different stories about the eleven animals who haven’t been reported as killed yet. There isn’t much truth being told to me by anyone  in this personal devastation. I begin to wonder if people even know what the word truth means. I don’t what to believe about their locations, and about what’s going to be done with them. I have never been allowed to visit them in the places where they’re being kept.

A week ago, one of my doctors patted me on the shoulder and said with a happy smile, “We’ll have to get your animals back for you.” What did she mean by that?

(pearl at www.gaelsong.com)

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.

 

 

gone

Page Two

 

sehnen posted on May 05, 2008 | views: 69 | Tags: failing^x   

^{(from one of the blogs, less than two months after the eviction)}

                                                                                                              

Still, still Monday 5 May 2008… Turners

It’s a failure Mommy who can’t protect her children. It’s an incompetent Mommy who has such a raging immune system that she can’t work and buy a house in which to keep her family safe. It’s a stupid Mommy who trusts the wrong people. It’s a chicken Mommy who is so afraid of things that other people do all the time, that she couldn’t be tougher against the world of humans and maybe save her family. Whatever else I am, and I am some very good things, in my own opinion, I am also a failure, and incompetent, and stupid about people, and a person with a whole lot of fears about other people.                                                                          

Update 30 May 2009: Oh, they’re gone. It hurts so much, I can’t desribe it. My failure to be able to make it with people. My failure to be able to butter up the landlady, even after her erratic emotions and prodigious lies had come to frighten me. My failure to get the idea of pills: maybe the pills I’m taking now would have helped me bear up better in an emotionally charged situation. I really fall apart in situations like that. My failure to hang on to the letter of complaint I wrote about the mafia-chick. If I’d done any of these things differently, there might not have been an eviction, and I might still be living with my family now. But on the other side, if the landlady disliked me so much, why couldn’t she just have ignored me and collected my rent? No, she had to be so vicious as to destroy me. People who choose vicousness and cruelty always could make a different choice. They choose aggression because they enjoy it, it gives them a feeling of power. And if there’s one thing my ex-landlady loves, it’s power.

 

(r.monti sculpture at www.toscano.com)

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all photos, graphics, poems and text copyright 2011-2012 by anne nakis, unless otherwise stated. all rights reserved.