I received the following comment in response to my experience with jury duty and the PTSD it triggered:

Obviously there are/were other problems involved. I was beaten, slapped, spanked very hard, and repeatedly punished by stern parents – yet I hold no ill-feeling toward them as they did what they thought was best. But have someone simply touch a ‘bad spot’ and they seem traumatized for life because society expects it or other mental problems exist that may have lead to the perpetrator thinking the person was vulnerable. I was also raped, molested, and out-right tortured by a male babysitter for two years, but I hold no ill-will toward him either. I was vulnerable to it as much as a wife that is repeatedly beaten and stays in the relationship. Sorry, but get on with your life….in Boise.

It was signed “Randy in Boise Idaho, USA”.

Rather than ‘approve’ this comment, I’ve decided to address certain points here.  Why?  Because I want to, and it’s my gods-damned blog. Some folks need to be reminded that e-mails and comments take on a life of their own — the instant it’s out there it’s no longer yours to control:

“… But have someone simply touch a ‘bad spot’ and they seem traumatized for life because society expects it or other mental problems exist that may have lead to the perpetrator thinking the person was vulnerable.”

[First, that whole sentence is weighted down by a bunch of WTF non sequitur.]

Forced, non-consensual sexual penetration of a prepubescent child is distinctly not ‘someone simply touching a bad spot’.  It’s child-rape.

“… I was vulnerable to it as much as a wife that is repeatedly beaten and stays in the relationship.”

These incidents occurred during childhood and adolescence, a span of years in which custodial adults were in control of my life.  Leaving was not an option, though I dreamt of it constantly.  And the instant I could leave, I did.

“… Sorry, but get on with your life….”

Was that intended to comfort, or was it just a trivialising parting shot?  Instead of being empathetic or commiserating, the whole thing reads more like “Oh, you think you had it bad?!  Just listen to this –!!”

‘Sorry’, it says.  Why don’t I believe that?

Two days ago I came across a blog entry by SF writer Jim Hines on the subject that April is Rape Awareness Month — the guy had been a rape crisis counselor a while back — and there were several worthwhile comment-responses to his post.

Yesterday I answered a summons for jury duty. I’d been dreading it because of the tedium involved in the waiting for jury selection, and the time taken away from work. Then I bucked up and figured whatever came of it might be something I could use in my writing. So the seventy-plus of us summons respondents sat around in the jury room, biding time in our individual manners.

A judge gave a sort of introductory pep-talk, and promised us no grand jury selections would be made at the time. We all sighed in collective relief.

After about an hour and a half, the first round came. Thirty names were called out, and thirty folks stood and went to the courtroom designated for the jury selection for that trial — I think it was a civil suit, but I’m not certain.

So the rest of us waited a while longer, but not much. More names then were called out, mine amongst them, and the forty of us then filed out to go upstairs. Once a cluster of us were stuffed into one of the elevators, we unhappily noticed that the floor we were going to was labelled ‘grand jury’ — I had an uneasy flutter until we remembered, again collectively, that we’d been promised no grand jury selections for that day.

But it was going to be a criminal case, all the same.

The forty of us filed into the courtroom and then played musical benches until we were seated in the ‘random’ order the computer system had made. We were given another sort of briefing, and then we rose for the entrance of his honour. After the introductions of his honour, the court recorder, the attorneys, and the defendant, we again sat.

Then his honour spoke to us potential jurors for a few moments, explaining the process of the law, and the ‘assumption of innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt’. He told us that some cases, though, could prove intolerable for some jury candidates because of personal beliefs, prejudices, and experiences –

And that’s when we learnt the defendant was a convicted sex offender. He was in there for failing to register himself as a released sex offender, and for failing to inform the correct authorities of a recent change of address –

I was in the same room as a convicted sex offender — which in some deep part of my mind and my psyche immediately translated into ‘rapist’.

Palpitations hit me, like my heart was trying to beat its way out of its cage, and I couldn’t calm myself. My mouth went dry and my hands began to shake uncontrollably. My PTSD had been triggered,….

I was completely and unpleasantly surprised, and significantly incapacitated, by this very visceral, gut reaction.

His honour then asked if any of us would have difficulties with being fair and impartial with this case — before I’d even finished consciously processing his question, my hand was in the air –

The body remembers.

No matter how desperately the conscious mind may deny, no matter how deeply the subconscious mind may try to bury, the body always remembers.

But I had to wait to state my own case as I sat in the third of the four rows. He politely asked these folks, one by one, to give sound reason why they should be excused from this case.

The first one had a husband and a son who both had been convicted of sex crimes — I don’t even want to think about her home life. The second had a family member who’d been victim of a sex crime. The third had strong religious convictions that precluded even a pretense at impartiality. The fourth’s neighbour had been a victim of a sex crime.

And then his honour pointed at my raised hand.

It simply wasn’t possible for me to announce my reasons in front of all those strangers. What had happened to me — what had been done to me repeatedly when I was a small child, and repeatedly during my adolescence — was not of my doing, but I just couldn’t blurt it out to a roomful of strangers, strangers who were watching and listening.

People look at you differently, once they know,….

I asked his honour that I be allowed to speak to him discreetly. He agreed, and the two attorneys and I approached the bench. My legs wobbled beneath me as I tried to walk instead of running the way I wanted, as I passed the defendant. I was shaking so badly all over that I could barely speak to tell them that I am a sex abuse survivor, and that it was absolutely impossible for me to be fair and impartial.

My agitation must’ve been evident. Both attorneys immediately agreed I shouldn’t be subjected to this, and I’m grateful for that kindness. His honour showed concern and asked if I needed to sit down, or if I’d like a glass of water. I declined as politely and respectfully as I was able at the moment, and his honour then excused me from this duty and told me to return to the jury room. I thanked him and fled that courtroom, not giving a damn how it might’ve looked to anyone.

I went to the elevator and pushed for the first floor, leaning my head against the cool wall above the elevator buttons, shaking, trying to calm myself. The doors finally opened and I stepped into the car — but it stopped at the next floor down, and three other people stepped in. Once again my body responded without my conscious thought — it didn’t want to be in that small and enclosed space with anyone else — and I stepped out before the doors had a chance to close.

I stood there a few moments, embarrassed by my primal and animal-like fear reactions, and angry — at whom, I don’t know — then decided to walk down the remaining flights of stairs [an old-style atrium staircase instead of a claustrophobic stairwell] to burn off some of the flight-response collecting in my muscles.

Back on the first floor, I returned to the jury room as instructed, and just blindly walked in past the receptionist. She called out to me, as I’d failed to check in with her as I was supposed to — I went to her desk and apologised for the breech in protocol. She scanned my temporary ID badge, checked it against some data on her monitor, and told me his honour had excused me from any further jury selections that day.

By this time a kind of numbness had set in — I thanked the receptionist and walked toward the lobby and the main doors of the courthouse, fumbling with my cellphone to text my S.O. for our rendezvous. My messages, I’ll admit with some chagrin, were brief to the point of being terse — I just wasn’t up to typing out full conversations at the moment.

pre-dic-a-ment |prɪˈdɪkəm(ə)nt|
noun

1 a difficult, unpleasant, or embarrassing situation : the club’s financial predicament.
2 archaic Philosophy (in Aristotelian logic) each of the ten “categories,” often listed as: substance or being, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, posture, having or possession, action, and passion.

ORIGIN late Middle English (sense 2) : from late Latin praedicamentum ‘something predicated’ (rendering Greek katēgoria ‘category’ ), from Latin praedicare (see PREDICATE ). From the sense [category] arose the sense [state of being, condition] ; hence [unpleasant situation.]

source: New Oxford American Dictionary

I don’t get it. Maybe I’m just not able to sufficiently commit a willing suspension of disbelief. But somehow I’ve never been frightened by zombies as presented in later movies. Zombies, by the original definition, were mindless meat puppets, utterly will-less free-labour slaves of their masters — it was their psychopathic masters that you had to watch out for.

If zombies ever invoked anything in me, it was pure pity:

funny-pictures-cat-controls-zombie-human.jpg

Now, however, they’re willfully diabolical and nigh unstoppable cannibals.

Er-rrr, what?

My friends who are into this kind of stuff, zombie flicks and such, don’t grok why I don’t get all worked up over it the way they do. Now, maybe if I were the sort to turn a blind eye — or had no curiosity about anything — I might be gullible enough to fall for it. But I’m not, so I don’t.

You see, it all has to do with the human brain. The human brain requires quite a lot of different things, just to keep the body functioning at a mere minimum. We’re not even talking about the higher functions here, just the mechanics of getting the limbs to move and for the equilibrium to establish and maintain itself for the sake of locomotion.

The brain has to have oxygen. Oxygen is just as necessary to the brain as it is to fire. Oxygen gets to the brain via blood. If the heart ain’t pumping, then no blood is going anywhere.

The brain needs fat to maintain its mass, and as a medium for synapses and neurons and all those nifty little blood vessels that bring all the other nutrients in, like calcium which is required for the synaptic jumps, like salt whose deficit can bring about paralysis as well as promote dehydration.

This isn’t about brain malfunction, this is about brain failure. If the engine dies, that car isn’t going anywhere. No oxygen? Brain death. No artificial life support — lungs and heart both pumping — for the body housing the dead brain? Body death. And body death is immediately followed by decomposition.

Trying to bring a fried hard-drive back to life is an exercise in futility, and it doesn’t even decompose. It just sits there, collecting cat-hair and mocking your dependence upon it, with its ghost laughing at you because you are so going to miss that scheduled chat. [poor monkey]

So if the ‘zombies’ in current fiction and movies eat only the brains of the living [going for human brains only, 'cause critters are too smart, too quick, and they know to obey instinct], then they’re not going to get enough water to maintain the solubility that muscles need just to keep moving, nor to keep the blood thin enough to get to its destination.

And what’s with the super human strength that zombies exhibit? Dehydration also saps muscle strength. And the calcium the brain needs? The bones need that, too. Weak bones snap all too easily, and teeth fall out. And what’s that toothless zombie going to do to you? Gum you to death?

Once decomposition has set it, it doesn’t stop for anything, baby. The stuff that requires the most water goes first, and the brain is in that group. And the speed with which some of these zombies move? Nuh-uh, no way. All that, and you can smell their approach, as the reek of rotting flesh is not discrete. There is no stealth mode for zombies.

Speed, strength, endurance, and quick-jerk reflexes are among the first victims of a failing body — just ask anyone with a head-cold.

Oh, and that [un]dead dude you want as a lover? Don’t get excited, honey — that’s not a hard-on,…

… it’s just rigor mortis.

Cobwebs?  Here?!  Damn.  Willya just lookit this place?  How long ago since I was last in here, now?  [checks calendar]  Oh-hhh, fuck. [rubs back of neck]  Alright, then.  [sighs, shrugs]  Mea culpa.

How to explain the prolonged absence?

It’s like this:  I can write about writing, or I can actually write — you know, work on the manuscript[s].  And that’s what I’ve been doing.  There are only so many hours in a given day, and many of them are by necessity spent in the pursuits of keeping body and soul together — it’s that Working for Money thing.  Gets in the way, every frakkin’ time.

And who cruises the blogs of unpubbed nobodies, any ol’ way?

At any rate, I’ve got several thousands more words to the story [arc] down, figured out a lot of back story for individual characters as well as cultures/societies — so it isn’t like I’ve been twiddling my thumbs.

Still working on all the books simultaneously.  Got no choice.  That’s the way my Muse is sending it to me.

The American economy is a mess. Again. Unemployment in America is at crippingly high levels. Again. The prices of oil-based fuel are skyrocketing, and showing no signs of slowing down. Again.

The cries of the American people are being ignored. Again.

Juxtapose all that with the big, ’spectacular’ wedding for Jenna Bush, daughter of the current U.S. President. So many distractions,…

All while the ecology of the whole world is collapsing around our ears.

But, no, the sky isn’t falling.

It’s dying.

Oh, this makes me laugh *so* hard!! Ricky Gervais is a pure and unadulterated genius! A genius, I tell you:

Now what I want to know is this –

If creationists really, really believe in the bible’s explanation of life, the universe and everything, don’t they ever worry that that their God might get a wee bit miffed at all the damage they are doing to His world?

Rather like Mom and Dad taking off for a holiday and saying, “No parties”, only to come home to all the boorish evidence of all your friends’ teen-aged debaucheries. [face it kiddies, pissing in your own salad bar is just stupid]

Being fashioned after their God, by His own hands, carries great expectations from you on His part and big responsibilities on the part of humans. [Oh, well, so much for that.]

If creationists really, really believe that their God made all humans [all of 'em, not just the white men] in His image — and I suspect that goes into the metaphorical, as well — isn’t it past time that they start living up to their own hype?

Just wondering.

WordPress is my preference for blogging, as it lends itself to my current writing style so effortlessly. At the same time, though, in the spirit of experiment and exploration I’ve recently begun an auxiliary livejournal blog

I’ll basically be cross-posting between the two for a while, just to see how things go, to learn what the possible differences in draw and audience are, and how possibly differing groups may respond to my writings.

The problem with maxims is human arrogance. All too often they’re voiced by men who presume to speak for all of humanity. Or, worse, a god.

I love this:

“The process of plotting consists of creating problems and introducing them to your characters. Problem, meet character, character, meet problem. You’re not going to get along.”

The entire bit can be found here: Bohemian Word Werks – How To Write A Novel

It’s strange, I know,…

My head is full of people, all who want their stories told.

 

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Wrandom Wisdom

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. ~ Galileo Galilei

Categories

What am I Reading?

The King of Elfland's Daughter / Lord Dunsany

On Writing / Stephen King

Italian Folktales / Italo Calvino

The Hellbound Heart / Clive Barker

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new thresholds crossed:

  • 11,479 and counting.

Such a clever man:

Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public. ~ Winston Churchill