Saturday, September 3, 2022

Monsters of her own making Sept. 8, 2012

   

Two revelations hit at once.

Someone continues to fix the hit count on the company website, and in this case, the count got fixed for a story about one of her friends.

It’s easy to do, and out of frustration, I spiked another writers’ stories, so that the count kept changing on both stories until everything suddenly stopped.

This morning the other writer’s story got taken down, most likely when the owner checked out the IP addresses of those hitting on it.

Fortunately, I didn’t do any of the spiking from my home computer and used several portables, a phone and several friends to spike the story to make it look like the hits came from multiple places (which in regard to my friends – my poet friend out west, my best friend in northern Jersey and several others from the local beat – the hits did.)

It was a curious experiment to see how long the one-upmanship game could go on, and why someone felt the need to keep her stories on the top of our most viewed hit list.

I mean what is the point?

Again, I keep coming back to that poem she yanked off her site about tricking up, an odd play off the old Ronald Reagan bit about wealth trickling down, and how society trickled down into “this thing” that frankly she never dreamed she would be, so to counter it, she did the opposite, trickling up.

Yet it’s all so strange to think that having her stories on the top of the hit list week in and week out is getting her anywhere, and I wonder how many friends did she need to employ to get that result, some perhaps even the same people who texted me on her birthday.

This led to the other revelation that some issues in her life I know nothing about contribute to her out of the blue attacks at me, as if she is desperate to have an enemy, she can focus her outrage on when other things go wrong in her life.

The intensity of this makes it clear that there can never be peace between us, even on a professional level, and that somewhere deep in her imagination, she actually believes some of the things she says in her poems, a dread that is so intense it blinds her to reality.

She is truly terrified by monsters of her own making, and in her life, she sees only two kinds of people, those who are knights in shinning armor or those who are evil dragons that need to be slain, and I’m one of the latter.



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