By this time, with the manuscript in their hands, they knew I documented everything.

But unlike me (who had no intentions on pushing any “go” or “infiltrate” buttons unless they forced my hand) that motherfucking digerati team of hers handled me every step of the way as if I was preparing to push the button. They didn’t take no chances contemplating: “maybe she will,” “maybe she won’t,” “she loves her,” “she loves her not.” They treated me and this thing like I was already sitting in some Official’s office with my finger on the “infiltrate” button, but they already had the fastest fingers in this thing since the beginning-and had theirs on the detonate button called: “Interception Click. Click. Boom.”

I was sick of running back and forth from the café and the school’s lab begging Janet to “allow” me to use my malfunctioning (laptop and PC) computers. After I sent the email to Denise, I took call forwarding off my pager, turned my pager off, and as well; turned the ringers off on my home phone number and my new cell phone and number that I just bought (again).

I was annoyed with the fact that she could listen to my conversations + read my emails.  

Eventually, I stayed away from the cafe, my PC, my laptop and my other so-called friends who were falling by the wayside. I didn’t want her to have any life from me whatsoever.

For the couple friends that hung in there with me, there was no creative way to tell them how not to mention certain things on my telephone (when talking to me) that I didn’t want Janet and her buddies to know. I was tired of her knowing my: who, what, when, where, and how’s.

I was annoyed with the fact that I couldn’t check emails from my child’s teachers from the privacy of my own home without having to ask her to stop rebooting my computer. I got tired of paying the café $2.50 a wop to utilize their computers [three of the only ones I used because each enabled me to use my portable drive from them] were eventually screwed up with some kind of Sub7 virus. Those people were so tired of me and this “thing” following me. I

had to be honest with them in order to find out what was going on (ironically) with the computers I happened to be using and witnessing malfunction one by one. By this time, the owner’s wife had her way of reiterating to me that if she didn’t like me so much and understood what I was going through, she would ask me not to use their computer services completely. Denise thought that was so funny but fucked up at the same time-just like I did. I had been so fed up with looking like such a fool to so many people. Even without revealing her name, words cannot explain what a fool she had me looking like. I hated her so badly for being able to do all that she did; all the while, she hid behind this technological bullshit and still managed to get her way (and get away with it). My life just felt like each time I walked to the left, to the right, forwards and backwards; a whole other body was bumping into me: face-toface, forehead-to-forehead, toe-to-toe.

Saturday December 4th, I went up to the café. When I selected my email account that she and I was last using, I had like over 15 carefully selected advertising emails with promises to make me thin, rich, or both. She had even gone so far as to send those same emails to the email account that Denise and I would use through Yahoo. She knew I would notice the duplicated emails because she knew how anal and close attention to detail I paid to everything. 

She wanted me to make no mistake about it that the emails were sent by Yours Truly. That was just her way of saying to me: “Bitch you aint got no secret email account that I don’t know about. Quite frankly, you aint got no damn secrets that I don’t know about!” She was a trip like that. It seemed like no matter how long I ignored her; she always had some way to get around it, just to make sure her presence was known-to show that she was still in control somewhere in this. She didn’t care how far she had to go to do it, she felt no shame. It was like

she totally masturbated off her own methodology and madness. Those ongoing harassing emails gave her energy and life of some (crazy) kind—like a way of touching me, or punching me; to make her feel as though she was literally arguing and fighting me like we would do sometimes via email, her room and/or I.M. She was going to get her virtuosity one way or another, and by all methods necessary-she won’t stop.

It was a habit by now-as was I: her fix. She set herself up for this kind of psychological torture while trying to psychologically torture me. I was so tired of Janet. She sucked the life, the will, and ways out of me. My body was tired, my mind was tired-and I was beat. The one and only way I could ever accept her apologies or even be anything to her after this ordeal, was if she somehow rolled off some fucking UFO covered in green slime, with ice cycles hanging from her lashes-shivering cold-telling me how she had been held captive by that satanic cult or some little green people that forced her to do all that she had done. If she didn’t

appear to me in that state, she could completely kiss my ENtire basketballbutt-forever and keep her apologies because I didn’t want anything from her after this shit: her friendship, a relationship, a new CD, a ticket to a show, a magazine article, a television appearance or even to look at a jar of the spice cinnamon. I didn’t want anything to do with or associate my whole existence with anything that had to do with her-at all. I wanted to ignore her so far away from me until she feel her head spin like her souls twin: Raygan from the “Exorcist,” which was how I had eventually begun to see and think of her: like some demonic force of a spirit that was possessed, but underneath-somewhere else in her-was a normal sweet childlike person who had been taken over by something sinister.  

I couldn’t decide if it was irony, my thoughts about her having manifested, or a coincidence that at this very moment in time, but one of the strangest things I had never seen or heard tell of in my life, had happened. For a few days into the end of the year, there was an abnormal flock of crows that hung around my house screaming violently loud [and doing whatever it is they do]. They would start their show when the sun would go down by flying back and forth-doing out of sync calisthenics in the air in what looked like an effort to be synchronized while barking and squawking.

From where my house sat, across the street from it; there was a large tree on the left.

And on the right side of my house, another large tree sat there (that one was closest to my front porch and my deck on the back side of my house).

On December 30th, the crows really went crazy-so much so that they were flying a little lower and shitting up and down the street like rain. It was like somebody gave the crows a laxative. For the few evenings they came; they shitted so much that everybody on the street had to run and duck for shelter to come in and out their houses. My brother had stopped by unexpectedly and had to run and duck too. It freaked him out because he too, like the rest of us, had never seen anything like it before-so many crows screeching and screaming in such large flocks all at once. “You need to move! This aint normal” was all my brother could say. It was an odd thing to see and experience.

At night time, they filled the bare trees like leaves. When you would look up at both trees; it looked like the trees had leaves but it wasn’t-it was all crows! It was so many of them that it looked as if for about four days, every crow in the entire world had come to town to release to shit, participate in some synchronized flying, and live in the two trees outside of my house.

Into the middle of the night/early morning hours of December 31st, I peaked out the doorway and looked across the street at the left big tree, there were no crows-just branches.

I then looked to the right (at the tree closest to my house); and every single crow covered each branch with what looked like 50 crows to a branch. They filled that large tree so much so that you couldn’t see one single wooden branch. My mouth dropped. They all just sat there quiet, it was a spooky sight to see and mad creepy.

At about 6:30 in the morning (still a little dark outside) I peeked out my window blind, they were still quietly sitting and covering the tree branches. I trotted down the steps, into the living room and walked over to my PC. I wiggled the mouse so that the monitor’s light would come on. My hard drive came to life as if it yawned and had just woke up.

I took a seat.

I then logged onto the computer only to be disconnected a few seconds later by that possessed-spirited woman herself, as if she rolled right over, growled, hissed, and then disconnected me. That was usual. But what was really unusual was that at the very moment (that my computer rebooted), those crows started flying, screaming, and squawking like crazy-as if I woke them up too. It was like…they were her pets or something-awaiting her command

before they could fly. They were so loud that I had to look out the door again because I couldn’t believe I was hearing them awake and come to life right at this very moment in time.

They went crazy!

The girl next door to me was leaving for work but ran back up on my side of the porch-screaming scared and complaining about how she too had been noticing the crows show up out of nowhere. “They represent evil and that means the death of something, or bad luck or something! No way man! What the fucks UP with these things! It looks as if when I run to my car, they are all gonna fly down and attack me!” she shouted.

We stood on the porch underneath our house’s awning and conversed for a little while-until she got the guts to run to her car (that was parked facing the big rock wall underneath that big possessed tree on my right). Once she made it to and inside of her car, I went back into the house and slept.

At daylight I looked out and hell was gone. The crows disappeared and never came back. They did however, leave the street [from the bottom to top, every car, and the cement on the street itself] covered with those big giant golf-ball sized droplets of shit. Everybody needed a car wash, and it needed to rain or snow badly because the street looked diseased. It was a mess outside and the people on the street were talking all about it-we all were amazed.

I told myself that I must have Janet too far into my entire existence; so much so that I really think her energy was manifested into something that symbolized some kind of omen that hang right above my head-right outside of what once was my humble abode.

The thing about “omens”(by definition) is that there are good omens and there are bad omen. Considering what I was going through with that woman, I sure as hell didn’t want bad ones in my life-she had already been a mixture of the two [definitions].

These birds had everybody talking and wondering what the hell this could have meant (the fact that they showed up for a few days, and then the day before the New Year—and then they flew out, up, and away as if the mess they left + the amazement they left us in was but a dream).

Since it was hours before the New Year was to set in, I started to combat this strange happening with my yearly superstition and tradition: In order to have a good year, cook a pot of black-eyed peas and wash every stitch of dirty clothes in the house before the clock strikes 12.

This time, I didn’t bother going out to buy a bag of black-eyed peas and wash clothes like I did for the previous New Year because even after doing all that; Janet poured herself, spin cycled, and drained me such that it dispelled my superstition any further. Let me tell it, I had stirred into my house (the energy of this woman that I was destined to meet) my own personal witches brew. So considering how my year had gone, I was insistent on putting that ritual in reverse: No washing clothes and black eyed peas for me this year-I’ll go at it on faith alone.

I remembered all to well that last New Year (right into the year of Janet coming into my life), I had gone out in search of that bag of black-eyed peas. I guessed a lot of people adhered to this superstition because I had to go to four different grocery stores and couldn’t even find one bag of these funny looking beans that always sat on the bottom of the shelf, hiding. 

When I got to the fourth store, almost every dry bean was there except what I came for. I simply refused to take the drive out to another store in search of another bag, so I got down on that floor and stuck my hand as far back as I could while peeking into the dark empty shelf with one eye open. I must have looked like a life-sized frog on a white tiled lily pad-down there on my hands and knees in the middle of the grocery store isle reaching for a bag of

beans. My little fingers must’ve been like a magnet all their own because I found a stack of neatly packed beans stuffed in the very the back of that shelf. I grabbed my bag and thought to myself, “This is about to be a hell of a year for me and I’m ready!” And it sure as hell was. Nothing could have prepared me for this thing with her.

I can’t help but think now, about how stupid I must have looked on the floor of that grocery store peeping into a dark space of a shelf in hopes finding the bag of beans that I was in search of; that eventually made its presence known. The thought of that reminds me of how stupid as I must have looked yelling into her dark virtual world: “DOES JANET EVER COME IN HERE?” …wishing that she would make her presence known. Yeah she came to me all right, and set some shit off.

Because of her, I learned to be careful what I ask for, because you just might get it.

But now, I run from it and her.

I had to go. I had to leave her. I had to.

Sure, I wanted to wait around for the day that she would come running to me from that UFO, covered in that green slime with those icicles hanging from her lashes, telling me that great grand story about the green people who held her hostage and forced her to do to all the parts she played in this--that day never came, so I had to leave.

I had to make a serious decision as to whether or not I wanted to continue to make love and war with Janet, or if I wanted to peacefully co-exist in my world (the way it was before getting involved with her).

So I had to leave her.

I had been there-done everything with her and I knew all too well what happens after

the bad is made good: The good goes bad (and back again)…

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Valentines Day-February 14th. I sit here on my basketball butt, in my comfortable black Futon chair in front of a fried PC (while working on my laptop) knowing that as of now, at this very moment in time, Janet is about as much in control as I am thin, rich or both.  

I write this passage as I place a piece of chocolate to my “daffy duck lips” mimicking the line where Forrest says: “Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what cha gonna gi…i…it,” (laughing to myself). Man I’m on the floor LMAO (laughing my ass off now)…

I remember the night that Janet “the superstar/the woman/the artist” said to me in one of her many poetic moments on that May day in an email: “You are to me like a book unopened, the story yet untold…”

I never would have guessed at the time she said that to me, such a statement would manifest itself into both of our lives like such-ending up being a case of life imitating art and words having created an environment. Because also I remember the night that I told Janet and her buddies: “When the smoke clears, I am going to be standing right there.”

It was the same night that her homegirl of thirteen years said to me as she had me steaming mad and hemmed up on that telephone, taunting me with the words: Girl, please, you can’t TOUCH this staaarrrrrr!” (I almost believed her).

Well. I touched her-in more ways than one...

This is the story. And everybody knows: “almost” doesn’t count.