Night of the Living Condoms

The whole reason I wrote the post before this one was so that I could write about this. I couldn't write about anything so silly without first getting into the not silly reason for not writing. But now I am free to write, I am being stalked again. Somewhat less gravely yet more oddly. A march of used propylactics is beating its way to my door.

I moved apartments (and shook my human stalker hopefully for good) the day before leaving town for a tournament in Oregon. On the first day of play at this tournament I shortcutted to the portapotties through a thin glut of trees (thin enough so that watchful owners were comfortable tethering dogs there). On the way back I noticed in the ruff the largest condom I have ever seen, a magnum on jumbo juice. We are talking a three inch diameter when relaxed, and it was quite relaxed having obvisouly already performed the service for which it was designed.

Stranger still was that not 5 feet away was the Stuart Little of condoms also on the ground. This one had probably been sold in a box that also contained a wide-eyed Barbie learning about ghonnorhea. I was pretty sure it was not actually a condom but a similarly designed piece of latex with a completely different purpose, expcept it was so close to The Great One.

This is where I made my big mistake. I looked back at the other condom, to confirm the gross oddness of it all. Never look back at the other condom. I did not retrace my steps, I did not bend over; I simply turned my head. This was enough, apparently, to let all the used condoms in the world think I took an interest in them. Or perhaps it is a not so subtle attempt by my mother to gain the some grandchildren by disgusting me from safe sex forever. Or perhaps lovers the Pacific Northwest over have started living in fear of rogue bands of devout Catholics rummaging their trash bins and have started spreading their party favors out of incriminating distance of their homes -- a perimeter that apparently crosses my daily beeswax. it may be only a new awareness on my part, a sixth sense of things having to do with sex (when do you see them? all the time).

Whatever the reason, for the last month I have stumbled onto a dried condom about once a week. This is worst possible frequency because it is long enough that I forget about them and get surprised all over again, but soon enough that I can reactively conjure the image of the last one seen, forming a chain in my brain. The longer it grows the more secure the picture of each of them gets in my memory matter. I can picture the first few but don't remember where I saw them. the last two were behind the building where I work and on the crosswalk I use to get from the busstop to home. On the crosswalk. Was it actually used in a moving vehicle before being thrown out the window? Or did some guy strip it off after an especilly quick evacuation from the boudoir? And why my crosswalk?

When I was younger (really about five minutes ago and probably also currently depending on my serendipity meter) I had the feeling that my chance experiences actually were figures that summed up to my life's quest. I was too close to them to know what it was, but by staying aware I could pick up enough clues to get to wherever the great force of my life wanted me to go. The seeming coincidences in my life were actually the music of the spheres expressed in earth form.

I would rather disregard the condoms than enter them in my proofs of greater cohesion in the world, but their case is becoming pressing. My life is weaving with the paths of too many spent lovers these days for it to only be chance. Do they know each other? Do they work at my grocery store? Is finding used condoms my prelude to figuring out the cure for cancer? I am looking to shriveled latex for connections and answers (looking in my head looking, not looking at the sundried condom on the street looking). Of course, there is nothing there but what is there, but who am I to deny cosmic forces at play? so the semen whisperer walks on.

The girl's guide to getting stalked

Just when I was getting a blog-rythym down, my exploitation of the internet as the biggest blank piece of paper ever was cut short by a stalking experience. Starting mid-May a man began making nocturnal slow-mo break-in-and-enter visits to my SWF apartment. When I was home, when I was sleeping, 2 feet from my head. The first time i nearly managed to convince myself it was simply a very large, very aggressive person-shaped cat. The veil fell away when I returned to the apartment in the harsh light of day (after an early evacuation to the nearby quarters of a very helpul despite answering the phone at 4 AM friend) and saw the rear bedroom window screen pried halfway off. This was my "The hook was stuck in the door!" moment. And if you have never sat around a story-driven campfire on the east coast and so have no idea to what I am referring: Get thee to wikipedia, go! Try most famous scary campfire story ever.

But back to the truth that is much more of a hastle than fiction. The non-cat man came twice more. Once the very next night when I had locked myself in the bathroom after hearing what I again had convinced myself was an aggressive cat (apologies to all the really good natured and innocent cats out there). The same helpful friend from the night before drove up and saw the man trying to get into a second bedroom window. My friend manned up and flung about the front seat of his truck for a weapon that said, "I am so scary you can be garunteed to not have to use me." A sneaker was looked over, a medicine ball tested and dropped, the strangely super-sized tire iron that hung on a before-unnoticed mock rifle rack behind the seats triumphed.

Said friend armed with said tire iron charged from his truck, causing the man attempting with the utmost casualness to get into my bedroom window to slowly step back, slowly bend down, and slowly pick up his orange and black backpack. By the time my friend got to the window, the man had gone around the corner of the building. Since the only thing more dangerous than a stranger with candy is a stranger caught in the act of trying to rape your ex-girlfriend who flees to the other side of a blind corner, my friend did not follow the guy immediately. Instead, he gave my apartment wall some solid whacks with the tire iron, a scare tactic akin to the ape-behavior in the opening scene of Space Oddyssey 2001. In the bathroom, again the veil of the nothing-but-cats fantasy fell away. I broke inside.

My breaking was like that of the glowstick you bring home from the circus and keep in the freezer for freshness until the inevitable day when you can resist its dayglo lure no more (cause, c'mon, you're eight). Except my metamorphesis was not to something glowy and possibly toxic. A vial labelled "victimhood" broke and spilled inside me. I immediately felt the stress on my vascularity as its smoky contents tried to hide from all my other anatomy. When the stuff seeped into my identity I wanted to retract, every bit of open sapce became a vaccuum for evil. The event of someone completely disregarding the simple confidences of personal space, privacy, and safety gave me the feeling that horror could approach me on any and all sides at any time. This feeling necesitated a lot of crying.

The bedside manner of the reporting midnight policeman was to assure me that petty theft happens regularly in the warmer months in my neighborhood. Though the cases he described, practiced petty burglers perching on the edge of a property utnil the owners were out for the evening and then feasting on dainties of ipods, laptops and other satchel-sized electronics was not the case before us. This man came repeatedly to a lighted window to watch a girl and then slowly moved towards her against the intervening windowscreen (there had been quite a few other nights when I had heard "cats"). I would have preferred one of the laptop guys, but we get the crimes we get.

The victim thing is weird. The third time the man came a friend who was serving as protector, or at least dissuader, for the night warned him off. This friend assured me that I could totally beat the guy up, possible blindfolded. My feeling was that I was powerless with him because he saw me as powerless enough to be interfered with and disregarded. Like when your mortal kombat character is getting beaten so hard that pounding the buttons does nothing.

You are relieved from reading further metaphors, because the thrid time was the charm. I moved. For obvious reasons, I will not describe my new apartment (or maybe it is a condo or house) on this public forum.

I affirmed some things about myself through this affair. Cheifly, that I deal with even the most stressful and dangerous events by telling funny stories about them. In retrospect, it seems twisted to have your friends laugh at any story whose cheif character is dubbed, "my rapist-to-be." But laughter is the sound of coping. The thing I learned was that this system only holds out for so long. Once the victim was back in its bottle, I faced some long dark nights of the closed,locked, and curtained windowed soul. My PTSD peaked just in time for me to take the wellness assessment levied on all employees by my new boss, King County. I got my personal road map to wellness in the mail today and it includes a lot of stress management: "You feel like you are not in control of your environment. Is there someone you trust who can help you? I mean, besides PBR." PBR is close to laughter for coping. But is only equally sustainable and generates a lot more gas.

If you like endings, there isn't one really. The police called me at 3 AM on the Saturday after the last visit, but I was not near my phone and missed the summons to make a positive ID on a guy with an orange and black backpack they confronted near my place. When I got back to my contact officer he assured me that stern-talking-tos had been talked. Well that's a relief.

I actually think I saw the guy about a month ago when I was driving onto the U-bridge. My skin went taught before my brain could corroborate the image my eyes were sending. I pulled over my car and walked up to the guy, levelling my straight and determined eyes at his sunken and stooped ones, in a brief fantasy. Really, my victimhood rattled its glass and I continued on the bridge and then on and on and on after that.