Broken Things

I.

It was cold outside, but not that cold. Still, the ice hadn't fully melted and pissed-off-woman wasn't real good at maintaining an upright position on the slick stuff, even with the fancy smancy ankle braces. The dog required walking and so p-o-w headed to the abandoned building where the roof overhang kept a bit of sidewalk free from the troubling stuff. P-o-w parked along side the building so she didn't have to slide across the parking lot to get to the sidewalk in question. Three women, two golden retrievers, and one schipperke were heading for the same sidewalk. None of the dogs were attached to leads. Two of the women were dragging their goldens along by the collar and the third had picked up the schipperke and was cradling him in her arms.

P-o-w stuck her head out of the car window. "Are your dogs friendly?" she asked. The three women looked at her. "Friendly?" p.o.w. repeated while pointing to the two goldens and the schipperke. "No," one of them spoke up at last. Undeterred, p-o-w parked her car in front of the targeted sidewalk, where the small party of women and allegedly unfriendly dogs had just been heading. They turned around and left. That was their right. And indeed their obligation if their dogs truly weren't friendly and they weren't able to control them.

P-o-w hung the required placard on the mirror since she had just created a parking space. She hooked up the dog and grabbed Benjamin Copernicus Galileo (the cane). She locked the car. She and the dog walked. The dog was happy and p-o-w smiled.


II.

"Are your dogs friendly?"
"No."

"Are your dogs friendly?"
"No. We happen to have the two most vicious golden retrievers with us right here. And the schipperke is a little daemon."

"Are your dogs friendly?"
"We are afraid of other dogs."

"Are your dogs friendly?"
"We are afraid of you because either you intend to kill us or your disability is contagious."

"Are your dogs friendly?"
"We aren't friendly. We don't want to talk with you at all. Your need for an accessible place to walk your dog inconvenienced us."

"Are your dogs friendly?"
"We really just wanted to be alone in this wide space and you weren't invited."

*Epic fail*


III.

Pissed-off-woman stamped out letters in the snow. The letters read: F U c k U 4 J U d g i N g M E . She and the dog walked. The dog was happy and p-o-w smiled.

sapphoq healing tbi

Survivor Needs Meme

SPIKE SELF-CARE LIST:

• play with or pet or walk with the dog
  
• play with or pet the cats
• watch the birds at the feeder
  
• sit on the deck
• watch a funny movie
  

• read a book
  
• blog or write something
  
• surf the net
• computer art
• draw or color
  

• go to a meeting
  
• call someone
  
• call someone else
• visit a friend
• go to a bookstore or greenhouse

• movement
  
• hold a frog
• take a bath
• take a nap
• meditate

• ice cream
  
• coffee
• chocolate
• power bars
  
• diner or take-out
  

SPIKE WANTS:

1. to have oodles of money.
2. to travel around.
3. to write a book that is good enough to be banned in 14 countries and challenged in 2.
4. to continue living in a house that we own.
5. to meet more of my blogging buddies.
   

Rules of the "Survivor Needs" Meme:

• Please link back to: http://survivorscanthrive.blogspot.com/2007/12/ive-created-survivor-needs-meme.html because that is where the meme came from. Marj aka Thriver created the meme specifically for survivors of any sort of abuse or assault, violence, etc.
  


• List 25 needs and five wants. Needs are the things you need in order to take care of yourself, not a list of things that other people, professional helpers, critics, and in-laws think you need. Your wants list can be anything that you want!


• Use this list to remind yourself to take care of YOU. It's nice to have other people around; however, it is not always possible. Those of us who call ourselves adults are ultimately responsible for getting our own needs met. No one other person can do it for us. Or: no one can be my everything. And I certainly am not looking to be anyone else's everything. We are all alone in our own skins. In my opinion, society as a whole needs to step away from the victim stance. Helplessness is a learned state and can be unlearned. It takes time and work. Anything worth having is worth working for.
  


• Pass on the meme and tag five people if you want to. As usual, I tag no one. Even if you are not a survivor, you can still do this meme. I'm not going to claim that we survivors have the monopoly on pain because it just ain't so.

spike q. human bean

A Murder of Crows - Volume 15

And then there was Roger. Am I qualified as a Red Sox fan to make any proclamation of Roger Clemens? I’m not really sure of that, but I am really sure that there is a circus going on in Washington that requires some sort of commentary from someone that has logic. I am not even sure if I have enough of that to deal with the situation as it is going. I know that I can shed some light on something tat many in the country haven’t really paid attention to, but has everything to do with the story. Roger Clemens was, after all a .500 pitcher when he left Boston if his stats for the last 3 years of his career here are to be examined. His 50 and 49 record over those years did not in any way dictate that he had the abilities to be the ace of any staff, much less the Boston Red Sox, and the apologists who like to point out that the rest of the team was lousy, aren’t looking at the job of an ace. Bad teams get dominating performances from an ace, and the Red Sox were getting a mediocre performance from theirs.

Most people who were not caught up in the romance of having Roger Clemens on the staff were thoroughly convinced that he was on the downslide of what was a great career, and he left Boston with a major chip on his shoulder. Who wouldn’t after being told that you were washed up? He went to Toronto and after looking every bit as bad as the general manager of the Red Sox said he would be for half of the first season there he transformed miraculously into the huge, dominant pitcher that he once was, only far more. The next season he won a Cy Young again being over the top dominant, and was sticking it in the eye of the Red Sox, which he deserved to do as he was reborn like a phoenix from the flame. Later on he moved to the Yankees to get the World Series that the Red Sox were never going to get him, and later on became the eternally youthful Roger Clemens that created a feeding frenzy every year as he would “un-retire” and come back to baseball for one last hoorah. Now he is involved in the steroid investigation, and everyone is taking sides.

I remained apathetic purely because I was jaded into believing that it was simply obvious, and Roger should have just made up a lame story about doing it 3 or 4 times and put himself on the mercy of the fans. It would have been over and done with and in 5 years they would have put him in the hall of fame, hands clean, continue. Instead he decided to do some of the most idiotic things I have ever seen, and what slays me is that people are still defending him when logic dictates that he is probably affected by steroids beyond the physical and probably mentally damaged. I would have ignored all of this if it wasn’t for the fact that prominent members of the political party I have given my heart and soul too over the last decade got involved. This is where it gets interesting because if I thought Roger Clemens was a dolt, then I would have to say that the Republican senators that he bought and paid for at that hearing were lunatics. I have blocked their names from my mind in the hopes that I won’t have to wash my eyes out with soap, but watching the Republicans acting like Clemens lap dogs was humiliating to me. The fact that tax payer dollars was spent on this is humiliating to us all.

In order for anyone to believe that Roger Clemens is innocent, you would have to believe that McNamee told the truth about Petite and Knoblauch but lied about Roger. You would have to believe that Debbie Clemens took HGH without consulting with the man she is married to, who happens to be a professional athlete. You would have to believe that Roger Clemens couldn’t remember the name of a nanny that coincidentally was invited to his house that weekend to talk about some things. You would have to believe that a man who throws broken baseball bats at people when they are running to first, or the baseball in general at their head when they “show them up” isn’t possibly having roid rage. I don’t believe that the Republicans sitting in that room believed these things in the least. I don’t believe that they ever have, and I don’t believe that I have ever supported any of those bozos.

Here’s where I part company with any of this in general, because I know that steroids is a major problem in the world, and think without general medical supervision it is a tragedy to be going on. These people that are searching for “the truth” to not believe the same way because the answers to these things are a lot easier then they make them out to be. Using steroids is a crime, and it is supposed to be prosecuted as a criminal activity. It is not in the least and it doesn’t carry the stigma of the loss of freedom associated with most crimes. I mean seriously we have heard about people flunking drug tests and facing a suspension, and it simply looks to me to be an associated “job risk” with no perceivable reason to NOT do it, and I have been rather rabid about these things for a long time now. My education in sports medicine brings me back about 20 years on this debate and I remember writing an article {that was not well received} about Shawn Ray back in the early 90s when he was stripped of the Arnold Schwarzenegger Classic title. He flunked the steroid test really badly and title was given to someone else. There was a long article in Flex magazine talking about how he hadn’t gotten off the juice early enough, and within a year he had gone back and won the title after cleaning out properly.

My reaction was black and white to this little “problem” that Shawn Ray had had, and that was that he should have been in JAIL! For the love of God, we had a man with a vial full of tainted blood and an admittance that he had been using illegal steroid, and there wasn’t even so much as an inquiry. I have been watching this whole “steroid issue” for the last two decades and as always it is just an “embarrassment” to these people to commit crimes and every politician in this country knows about it and has NO right to sit in judgment of it now. If Roger Clemens or Barry Bonds or any of these people using illegal substances end up going to jail for perjury then should we really feel bad for them or defend them? I realize that we are a nation of feelings, and not laws or common sense, but when do we place the brakes in? How am I to feel sympathetic about the children of the world and the bad messages that we send to them when we live in a lawless culture full of innuendo to the contrary?

I could care less what happens to Roger Clemens because I watched a deplorable human being, sell his own wife to the tabloids in front of the congress for no other reason then to save his own amazingly tarnished name. The senator that sat there and ranted that McNamee was a liar while Roger sat there smiling showed me beyond a shadow of a doubt that we have walked over the threshold of logic, and into the mire of spectacle for the sake of face time on the media outlets. Worse yet we have two political parties running the country, both pathetically corrupt, both damaged beyond repair, and we are at the mercy of them and the idiots that support them in lockstep. Blissful ignorance runs foul in both of them, and people are left wondering if we were not better off without a king. I only bring this up because I am sick of the princes and princesses that the media in this country are making for us anyway, and then desperately trying to tear down or bring up out of their own sport ;8o)

Other Crap This Weirdo Publishes... Mental Notes& Random Musings {Daily Blog} The Crow's Nest {The Homepage of J~ Crow}

Nothing that was printed here was intended to offend anyone, and if it did, screw ya, you begged for it. If you believe that there are some measures that can be taken to change me, then please feel free to pray for me, and while you are at it yourself, because you read this far, and if you hated every minute of it, then you are an idiot, not me, or the other people who like what I have to say! .. Jeremy

All writings Copyright © 2008 .. The Crow's Nest

God Bless ME Damnit! - Volume 2

And the saga continues …

It was now time for me to deal with something I will admit that I have ignored for the last two years. It was one of the few parts of my credit report that I knew was there, didn’t deserve to be there, and I didn’t have the patience to deal with. The credit agency now had me in the mood to start a war. A link from my friend from the land of Woodchucks brought me to a site that is totally devoted to credit and the legalities surrounding credit reporting, and law. I was amazed at all of the information there and set forth to use as much of it as viable on my quest to take on Capital One. Oh yeah, the great Satan of the credit card world. A little history on this one for those that have either been caught in the Capital One trap, or are peering into the eyes of the snake, would be in order here, so away we go.

After my second divorce, the ex took my kids, my money and most of my shit. She also took a majority of my paycheck, and the People’s Republic of Maine was there to do so every week. Oh well, life goes on, and I had to do what I could to make it by. My credit was terrible and my income was terrible as well. I took a credit card from Capital One with an interest rate of about 18 percent {which I hear is chicken feed compared to what they do now} and it helped me through all of the hard times, and I was never late on my payments etc. Two years later I was living in Mechanicville NY and I had two Capital One credit cards. A Mastercard and a Visa, because rather than giving me more credit they gave me more cards, so that they could get two payments out of me a month instead of one. That’s fine, I get it, and I was never late and I made all my payments. Simple story so far, but it gets complicated from there.

I had just sold my house and had plenty of disposable income at this time; I called Capital One and cancelled my cards after paying off the balances. It was confirmed and all was right with the world. I didn’t need two high income credit cards, so I went without them and used the debit card that came with my checking account. As some know my son burned down the apartment building that my ex wife was living in, and it was because of her neglect. I left NY {unfortunately} and moved back to NH to take full custody of my children, and I had to do it the day it happened before my ex wife took them all and moved away where we couldn’t find her. Long story, but she is a loser. I placed a forwarding address and dealt with all of my business in NY in one day, my landlord was fine with it and understood completely, my job was sad to see me go, but understood, utilities were paid, and I went back to NH and spent most of my money fighting the state of Maine for custody of my kids. The state of Maine being terrified that they were losing another one of the 80 percent of their population that lives on welfare, made sure that I was flat broke before I could win, but I won.

Move ahead 3 years and I get a phone call from a credit collection agency telling me that I owe Capital One 900 and some odd dollars. I was dumbfounded over this, and the person on the other end of the phone had no shame in telling me that a 10 dollar charge was put on the card and they added bounce fees and interest charges to it for 3 years. He pointed out to me that in my contract I had agreed that within 30 days of the account being closed that if a charge was placed on the card it would remain open. I was then told quite unashamedly again that they had gotten back all of the mail from the address that they had, but their mail was not forwarded, and that under the contract that was my problem as well. Now on top of my confusion I was incensed. I was especially pissed that they could find my phone number to call me out of the blue and never sent me so much as a warning that this crap was going on. I told him to stick it, and have continued to do that over the last couple of years when they call me, because there appeared to be no way out of that jam.

Last week I got the Better Business Bureau involved, and let me tell anyone reading this that most credit card companies have tons of complaints against them. I was told a few of the things that I read online last night, and used them to my advantage already. First and foremost I used their record keeping against them. “Show me proof that I owe this money,” is the first thing to say. 9 out of 10 times the credit card company in question has deleted their records of your claim the second the agency purchases the debt for pennies on the dollar. The credit collection agency doesn’t actually have any authority to the debt unless they actually are working on behalf of the company. Capital One didn’t actually just screw me in this instance, but they screwed the collectors.

By placing that erroneous 10 dollar charge they amassed what looked like a fortune to a collection agency for little money. The company paid Capital One 5 cents on the dollar for the debt owed at the time. I tricked the guy into telling me this when I was talking to him, but I will explain that in a minute. They ended up paying Capital One about 45 dollars expecting to have about 900 some odd dollars to screw me out of somehow. Even if they got it down to about 300 dollars they made a very good profit, and as Capital One had turned 10 dollars into about 45 they had made a very good profit. Pretty sick stuff huh?

Here’s how the conversation went as I called them armed with a lot more information then the average person has on hand. I pointed out to the guy that I would require the proof of signature of the fact that I owe the money on the original contract with their company name on it. He stated that that would be impossible, which I knew, but I continued by pointing out that I originally owed them 10 dollars on a closed account, but “might” be willing to pay them their acquisition fee of my account if they eliminate the poor credit mark but would require the original document with the sale of my account on it. He started giving me a spiel and I said {in typical credit collection agent fashion} that it was a take it or leave it on the spot, so I need to know the amount and will send in the amount upon my approval of the submitted document, but I had to know how much NOW.

After he cracked and gave me the amount they paid for the debt, I started laughing like a lunatic, and through tears said “Capital One screwed you guys, and you think I am going to bail YOU out? Take me to court so that the judge can laugh at how crooked you all are,” to which he ripped back like a child that this can sit on my credit report forever! I personally find it to be a badge of honor, and intend to call the collection agency once or twice a week to laugh at them and make fun of them. God lemons can be made into lemonade at the strangest of times. ;8o)

Other Crap This Weirdo Publishes... Mental Notes& Random Musings {Daily Blog} The Crow's Nest {The Homepage of J~ Crow}

Nothing that was printed here was intended to offend anyone, and if it did, screw ya, you begged for it. If you believe that there are some measures that can be taken to change me, then please feel free to pray for me, and while you are at it yourself, because you read this far, and if you hated every minute of it, then you are an idiot, not me, or the other people who like what I have to say! .. Jeremy

All writings Copyright © 2008 .. The Crow's Nest

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