I dreamed I went to an alternate Earth or a future one. There I was taken in by a group of people with criminal connections.  They weren’t organized crime, but many people in the group were corrupt. I’m not exactly sure what kind of group they were; I don’t think government, but something in a similar vein because they had many of the same privileges. The group wanted me because they wanted to know how I could travel to other worlds.

But one of their group went rogue or was a double agent and convinced me to escape with him, even though no one in the group had threatened me (yet). We went driving down the wrong side of a very busy highway, but this was permissable because of his status within the group. In fact, it was a common occurence for people within the group to drive against oncoming traffick…

Then I dreamed my sister wanted to walk to a convenience store, but it was a very cold night and she was dressed in a semi-fancy dress without a coat. And the convenience store was several miles away. So I insisted that I’d drive her, even though she didn’t want the ride.

When we got to the store, she disappeared, but I went to visit a friend who lived nearby. When I reached her home, I couldn’t communicate with any of her family, and they didn’t seem inclined to talk to me either, but she said not to worry because they were French. I told her my sister didn’t have a coat and asked if I could borrow one. She said sure, and led me to a box of coats, but when I pulled one out, there was a litter of pigs in the box and they scampered all over the place like kittens.  They were adorable and my friend asked me if I’d like to keep one, even though her family stood around like extras from a Tale of Two Cities frowning at me as if I’d done something wrong.

**  **  **

Nothing new on my family situation. My mother and her boyfriend went to a psychologist yesterday. My mother cleans for the lady and she traded pay for a session. My mother said it was good just to have someone listen to them.

Did I say my sister freaked out on me? I forget. She called for my mom, and I told her as I took the phone up to my mother that I didn’t believe what our brother had been saying. She practically screamed at me that she wasn’t taking sides, but if she was, she’d side with my brother whether she believed him or not. Hmmm, that’s not taking sides, eh?

My mom told me her BF’s thrown out all his porn and told her he was sorry he had ever brought it into her house. He also apologized to me for “ever doing or saying anything to make me feel bad or uncomfortable.” Exact words. I wonder if the psychologist suggested that. My brother got released from his “evaluation” today. Not that he actually got evaluated, as far as he’s told my mom. I assume they’re at the same psychologist my mom and her BF went to yesterday.

My mom’s BF is still very quiet, hardly speaks. He’s eating a little more than he has been, but not by much. (I’ve seen him feed most of it to the dog when no one’s looking.) He came home from work this morning, so I’m not sure what’s up with that. Maybe he was just feeling too weak from not eating and barely sleeping… not a good combination for carrying around heavy materials and climbing ladders to work on roofs.

I hate my brother. The more I have thought about his accusations and his general character, the more I believe he is a liar. I still don’t like my mom’s BF, and I know he has acted in what I would consider an inappropriate manner toward me, but I have never seen him behave in any way inappropriately to a child.

Apparently, my brother told my sister that my mom’s BF started behaving inappropriately from nearly the instant he moved in with us (when my brother was 12). At that time, my brother was staying in his room even more than I did (or do). In fact, he was pretty much permanently grounded because he refused to go to school… for almost three years. To really drive home the severety of his introversion at that time… my mother told him not to come out of his room except to go to the bathroom or get food. So he didn’t bathe or move from his room for that entire time. He has frikkin growth marks on his knees from sitting in his bed with his knees folded up to read. He didn’t obediently stay in his room because he has mental problems (though I’m sure he does)… he did it because he’s a stubborn little monster who likes to punish my mother by “punishing” himself. My mother believes he has Aspbergers syndrome. I think he’s just a stubborn little sociopath with no feelings for anyone but himself.

So how could it be that my mom’s BF was discussing anything with him when my brother wasn’t talking to anyone. I know he didn’t speak to me for all those years, because I refused to cater to his “oh, woe is me” attitude. School was no picnic for me, but I went until I could legally get out. His experience was no where near as bad as mine. He was just too lazy to bide his time.

So when he says that all this started ten years ago, I don’t know how anyone can believe him. He didn’t socialize with anyone at that time, let alone my mom’s BF.

Given our family history, my brother knew exactly how to get my sister to back him up. My sister would stand behind anyone who alleged child molestation. Because my mom’s BF is the most vocal about my brother getting a job and getting out of the house (remember, he’s been living on our sofa for about six months), my brother launched an attack at the one person putting the most pressure on him. What he would most like to see is a breakup between my mom and her BF. Well, who wouldn’t really? But this isn’t the way to go about getting that.

So, knowing my brother as I do, I know he’s not above making things up, if not to drive my mom and her BF apart, then at least to make everyone around him miserable. He’s said some pretty outrageous things over the years, and he’s done extremely weird stuff too (won’t go into details). Given his past and his penchant for opening his mouth and letting whatever vileness was in his head spill out, if my mom’s BF had really done anything, I think my brother would have said something long before now.

Since my last post, my brother punched my sister, and she threw him out. He tried to come back here, but my mom told him he can’t expect to live under my mom’s BF’s roof after the things he said. That’s when her BF found out what my brother had said. Now, if he had freaked out, I might have leant credence to my brother’s accusations, but instead, he’s withdrawn, hardly speaks, and has barely eaten anything in two days. He doesn’t act guilty, and doesn’t *feel* guilty to me.

So now my brother is in a hospital for psychiatric evaluation, but he says they’re not doing anything with him. I imagine it’s because he doesn’t have any health insurance, and he’s not excessively crazed… no voices or acting out. He’s been there for two days, but evaluation is seventy-two hours.

I’ve asked my tarot cards repeatedly, and they are emphatic. My brother is lying. It’s complete fantasy. They also indicate that my sister will eventually stop believing him too, and that he will have a long road to walk before things turn right for him again. But in the meantime, my sister can’t bring her baby over any more because she’s trying to get sole custody from her boyfriend and after my brother’s accusations, her bf could use that against her.

Sometimes I wish I was an only child. I’ve never made any problems for my family. It’s always been the other two, and I’d be hard pressed to say which has made more. They make me want to bang my head on the desk, or maybe their heads on the desk. Sigh. I feel like I am living in a soap opera… and I HATE the soaps.

I’m… not exactly sure how to begin this. It’s awkward and personal, but I feel a need to vent in a way that will not get back to my family.

I don’t remember if I ever brought some of these issues up here or not…

My mother had me when she was sixteen. I’m the oldest of her three children. She’s never treated me like a child, and in fact, she’s often said things like “you were never a child” and used to call me grandma upon occassion and threaten to get me a rocking chair. Like my siblings, I was an accident.

My sister, born one and a half years after me, “stole” my mother. But not really. What really happened was, my mother finally left my father almost a year after my sister was born. My father had beaten and abused her from the moment they married. So when she left him, she also left us (my sister and myself) with our grandmothers. She traveled from one side of the country to the next, often sending for money to “come home” but in reality, just to go further.

In the meantime, our father loved us soooo much, he took us back from our grandmothers… and promptly deposited us in foster care. I don’t remember anything of my early years, but I know some things about what happened to me there. I know for instance, that they tried to force me to go to Sunday school and when I didn’t want to, they grabbed me by my hair and ended up pulling a large chunk of it out. It is still much thinner on one side than the other. Perhaps for this reason, I am extremely particular about who touches my hair. And that’s just something I’ve been told. I can’t even imagine what I don’t remember.

Our mother didn’t come back till I was three going on four. My sister was still small, cuddly, still babbling. I wasn’t. I was walking, talking, independent. I didn’t need her, least not like my sister did. So my sister “stole” my mommy, but really, my mommy abandoned the both of us and never could regain whatever connection we may have had before she left. My sister was still impressionable, while whatever impressions were to be made upon me were set. So my mother never treated me like a child, and so I have never acted like a child. I’ve always had a maturity beyond my years and acted with a poise that is otherwise lacking in my family.

My mother’s first husband was abusive and vicious. Her second, the father of my brother, was just as bad. She came home with him, and both of them went to jail less than a year later, for selling pot. It was in the cab ride to our grandmothers that my sister, refusing to sit, flew into the back of the cab seat when the driver slammed on the breaks and received a crescent moon shaped scar next to her eye. This was my fault. My four year old self failed to make my three year old sister sit after we’d seen our parents taken away by the police. I don’t remember anything more in my life until I entered school.

Husband number two was Hispanic. He was an ex-druggie and lived for many years on the street before meeting my mother. They married when I was eight because my mother had accident number three, my brother.

My stepfather was never what I would call loving. Or maybe I’m just not an affectionate person. At any rate, I told my mother not to marry him. I didn’t like him, despite the fact that he was pretty much the only father I’d ever known. I didn’t trust him, but I had nothing to base those feelings on. This was years before I knew what a burden empathy was and how much I would come to rely on my “gut instincts.”

My stepfather didn’t beat us, rarely spoke to us. All his attention was focused on his son. My brother is still spoiled rotten to this day. The youngest, the only male, and blonde haired and blued eyed to boot, everyone in the family adored him. He’s never recovered from that adoration.

When I was ten, my grandmothers and my parents bought a house where we all lived. When I was ten, the abuse at school started in earnest. When I was ten, I retreated to my room, which came to be called my “gloom” by my birth-father on his rare visits. So when my step-father ran off when I was fourteen, embezzling funds from the cleaning company he and my mother had started and leaving my mother the burden of back taxes to the government, I was completely taken by surprise. Apparently, he had started doing drugs again, and then had taken up with another man and drug-dealer and run off to Florida. That had to be a blow to my mother’s self-esteem. Her second husband left her for another man.

Then it turned out that he’d also molested my sister, which is why she’d been acting out and staying out with friends more often than coming home nights. My mother also suspected he had molested my brother, but my brother denies it to this day. Me? I don’t know. So far as I can remember, he never touched me. But memory’s a funny thing right? Considering how sporadic my childhood memories are. But my mother never came out and asked me if he had molested me. She just told me, point blank, what he had done to my sister and what she thought he had done to my brother. I wasn’t like her daughter at all. I was a confidante.

After losing the house, we eventually moved in with this horrible little man my mother met through a personal ad. When she left him almost two years later, he tried to steal her frilly underwear…

And finally, my mother ended up with her current “boyfriend,” only they’ve been together more than long enough to be common law so she insists upon calling him our step-dad and even takes his last name where she can get away with it. He’s a complete pervert, an ignorant sexist bigot, and I despise him.

He knows it too. I don’t remember if I ever mentioned the reason why. It would have been about a year ago, when he kept walking about the house with his penis hanging out his pants. Never when my mother was around. The first time he did it, he darted past my open bedroom door to get to their room. I thought, OK, accident, I just looked up at the wrong time. I’ll have to keep my door shut from now on.

I guess because I didn’t say anything about it, he thought it was alright. He started leaning against me sometimes when we were alone, and generally being more touchy-feely than I allow even friends or relatives to be. The second time I was making lunch, and he walked into the kitchen with it hangin out. I refused to talk to him, basically ignored his presence, and escaped to my room ASAP. I told my mom. It happened again, and I told her that if she didn’t say something I would. Basically, she didn’t believe me and assumed it was all an accident/misunderstanding. But she agreed to talk to him, and so it stopped. Message received. Hey, I’m thirty. I’m not a little kid. I should get the H*!! out, and I wouldn’t have to deal with his $#!7

Well, now we get to current events. My brother, screwup that he is, couldn’t cut it in the army and they sent him home. Couldn’t even get through basic training. He’s been living on our sofa since June. Yesterday, he was visiting with my sister and made some unusual comments to her boyfriend. First, that my mother’s Bf had taken him to Blockbuster for some videos and started talking about porno, etc, and then asked if he was getting an erection. Then, that my mother’s Bf gave him some porno mags and that when he went down into the basement (where he keeps his video games and camps when my mom’s BF is in the livingroom), my mother’s BF crept down the stairs and peeped at him masturbating. Eeew, I know. Yuck. Eeew.

So my sister, called me at work to tell me all this. I think the only reason she called me first was because of my own experience with my mothers BF. Why she chose to call me at work, I have no idea. It wasn’t an emergency. She could have waited till I was on my own time. Why she chose to call me at all, I don’t know. What am I supposed to do? Her first thought was that mom’s BF would do something to her baby when we watch him for her. Despite the fact that both my brother and I are adults. In my book, that makes my mom’s BF a pervert. It doesn’t mean he’s going to molest a baby.

So I told her to call our mother and talk to her. Her BF was out of the house, so he wasn’t going to overhear anything. There was nothing I could do, and nothing I could say. She had to talk to our mom, because our mom was the only one in any position to say or do anything.

This morning I woke up before my mother left for work and went downstairs. She said my brother will be staying with my sister. She also said if she doens’t leave her BF, it’ll look like she’s siding with him over my brother. She wanted to talk to my brother and get all the facts before confronting her BF about it. I was noncommital, went to the bathroom and back to my room. I don’t think it even registered on her what she said.

I refrained from saying what I wanted to say because she has enough on her plate. I mean, if she leaves him, we’ll have to find a new home. It’s his parent’s house, and he’s currently trying to buy it from them.

But can you guess what I wanted to say??

I wanted to ask how she could worry about siding with her BF over my brother when she had already sided with him over me? I can’t even begin to say how deeply offended I felt. But it really drove home the fact that I am not like a daughter to her. I’m not even like a sister I think, or a friend. I’m just invisible until she needs someone to complain to or to depend on. My feelings don’t even matter. I have never felt more alone.

I dreamt I was a prodigy child. I was all of five years old, but I was pretty much given the run of my own education. My room was full of books, and I could go anywhere and do anything I chose.

In the neighborhood, an old Jewish scholar died. His family saw no value in his possessions, so they were giving everything away for next to nothing. So I, the child prodigy, went to his little basement home which was full of bookshelves and knickknacks. His children and grandchildren were there, but they just stood there and looked sad. I asked if I could have all the books and bottles, and they just shrugged and nodded.

So I went through the numerous bookshelves, but there was nothing of particular interest there. I was just about to leave with nothing but a few nondescript books and old bottles when I saw more books on a coffee table, covered over by old papers and dirty dishes. I don’t remember all the titles, but there were about five occult books there and one with the title Daemons, which is Greek for Angels. Yeah, I know Daemon looks like demon, but the Greek word for demon is Cacodemon… trust me, I know about this. heh

So I left with my books and bottles, but then for some reason I went back. The little cellar room was all cleaned up, and this time all it contained was a neat little bed and an old Compaq computer like they had when they had just started using them in schools… big computer, small screen, lots of wires.

Funny thing, the computer was also a video answer machine. I sat down on the bed and a little light was blinking, so I hit the play messages button. Suddenly, the screen lit up and the Sargent of Scotland yard started talking, revealing secrets, etc, showing secret passages as if he expected the old man who had died to go on some kind of secret mission for him. (I don’t even know if Scotland Yard has Sargents! lol) What was even more interesting was that he kept referring to the old man as Sherlock Holmes.

So the message ended, and I was about to leave, when the Sargent came in, very surprised to see me. He had just heard about the old man’s death I suppose and he had come to destroy the message he had sent before anyone saw it. Only I had seen it, and I admonished him to be more careful in sending such information laden messages. And then he recruited me for the secret mission, but I woke up before I got to find out exactly what it was.

By now everyone knows the rat-faced sociopath has been re-elected. Or has he? Does it seem like a conspiracy to anyone else? Was there a reason he seemed completely confident in being re-elected despite seeming like an inarticulate imbecile during the debates? I mean does anyone actually know anyone who voted for him?

And while they are insisting that there were no problems with the polling machines, am I the only one who caught the short blurb about the woman in Florida who requested a machine be removed because it switched all her choices to republican? How many other people used that machine before her? How many other machines did the same thing without anyone noticing?

I am so ashamed and depressed. What the rest of the world must think of us… We’ve supposedly just re-elected one of our most hated presidents to-date. Am I evil for considering calling upon Kali to kick his greedy, sycophantic ass from here to the next Age?

I feel so helpless. This is as bad as when I was a child during the Reagan admistration. I worried every night before I went to bed that they were going to drop the nukes while I was sleeping. Now I have that feeling all over again. And I’ve been binge eating…

Something needs to be done, but I don’t know what to do. I’d like to move to another country, but apparently no other countries want us. And as had been pointed out to me, leaving won’t change anything, though it would be an excellent and unmistakable political statement on an international level if a large chunk of the US population left en masse.

I don’t know whether to advocate staying where we are, scattered throughout the US, to better influence our individual communities, or banding together in select areas simply to find comfort in our similarity of thought. If we did move to be together, while remaining in the US, I imagine they’d think we were some kind of militia or terrorist organization and imprison us. But we can’t move to another country because no one wants us, though by the time Bush is done with his second term, we might be able to apply for political or religious refuge.

It’s just this horrible, vicious circle. We can’t change anything from the inside and we can’t leave either.

Would you believe I wanted to be president once?