so where do I go?

I'm at a place where, my therapist says, I'm reacting the way most victims do. So, please forgive my splenic ventings, but, y'know, Janna's probably been prepared for exposure for some time. I can't believe she didn't know this was coming, so now she's lying in a Procrustean bed of her own making. I'm sure she's as comfortable as she can be given the circumstances. At least she has a vintage quilt to wrap around her knees, the one I bought for Rhys's fifth birthday.

For me, however, this revelation was a roundhouse punch, and I'm still reeling on occasion. So, I've been reshuffling, but with reshuffling comes insight, for this navel-gazer. Ahem.

I've gotta say, the last few weeks have been interesting. I will take stock of my friends' opinions more seriously from here on. And friends, I know I do go on, so you have my permission to tell me to shut the fuck up. I might not listen, but maybe I need to be told more often anyway.

This was gonna go on the other blog, but fakey cakey is the place where fiction goes, and since this story was borne of so much fiction (at least on Janna's end), I wanna put it here.

These last few weeks I've had about a third of Janna's fictional contingent weighing in on what a horrible person I am because I, well, I don't know. She throws the word "vindictive" around as though it's some sort of bad thing. I did label myself vindictive long ago, because I know I can be, when the occasion calls for it. I can be creatively horrible to people I feel deserve horribleness aimed at them. So, I'm horrible because I called Janna a sick cunt in an email I sent her, and in public fora. I'm horrible because my friends who care about me confronted Janna, told her they knew Jesse was fake, that she'd made the whole thing up, and could she pack up her shit and get out of my house. They're the ones who told her not to contact me, that if I wanted a dialogue I would get in touch with her. They're the ones who asked her if she had any evidence, or if she had something to say to me. She refused to offer up anything. But okay, I'm horrible because my friends care, they gave me evidence and she gave me nothing.

So, angry at me why? I did get in touch with her and I did ask her to quit it, and I suppose in a way she has by disappearing from her blog. I do know that "Cakey" has another blog, a private one, so she hasn't discontinued the fantasy at all. But, at this point, whatever.

In the past few weeks, Janna St. James has, either through her imaginary aliases or as herself, usually quoting friends of hers (because Janna's character is always a very sweet, kind, too-trusting soul who'd never hurt a fly [right, Norman?]), spoken about what a horrid person I am. She's thrown up incredibly personal things about me in a revelatory manner, as though I'd never written or spoken about them myself to my friends and various other readers of my blog. Nothing she tossed out about my actions over the past twenty months was an untruth, but nor was it a hidden truth.

Her speculations about my motivations, what I did in my life or plan to do about my life from now on, well now, that's another story. That wacko stuff she cooked up about that, well, that's just straight out of the Julia Moon soap opera chapbook. It's funny, now that I know it's all a lie, I can see the similarities in her scrawlings, or maybe it's just that all her personas are blurring together forming a haphazard crazyquilt (emphasis on the crazy) in a desperate attempt at damage control. And the dissembling about her total lack of knowledge how to put my comments on another blogentry, as though something as simple as cut-and-paste is alien to her, it worked well enough when she'd send me snippets of Adventuregirl's emails to her. Lie piled upon lie piled upon lie, even when unnecessary, she continues to fabricate even her own persona. Kind, benign, totally technologically inept.

Where am I going with this? I'm just trying to get through the hurt and the anger and the, I dunno, gobsmackedness? Apologies for redundancy, you can stop reading anytime you like. I just have nowhere else to put it, and perhaps her reading enough of it will push her toward the doors of the nearest psychiatric facility. Ohwait. She's not reading my blogs. I forgot. Ah well, no hope of her saving herself, then. Perhaps "Alice" or "Cakey" will tell her to read it. Or who knows, maybe "Jesse" will rise from the dead and leave a message for me right here, hell, it's almost Easter, isn't it?

I was going through all the stuff I'd bought for "Jesse" and his family and friends that hadn't had the chance to be sent, sifting things out in to different piles (Goodwill, and foster care facilities for the kid's stuff, fuck knows what I'll be doing with all the pirate shit I bought for Janna that she didn't take with her when she left my house. Anyone want some pirate shit?). I opened the box I'd put together for "Rhys" and was holding onto since its return from Spain in November (USPS gets through, but not FedEx, hmmm). Mozart action figures because he loved "Mokzark," Lush bath bombs because his daddy loved them, little candles with wild animal pictures on them because I knew he liked giraffes, a little Buddha statue, a wobbly rubbery translucent dinosaur ring with flashing LEDs inside it, a smashed Pike's Peak penny because his daddy's most treasured items were smashed coins his deceased brother flattened on the train tracks when they were kids. Other stuff too. And a necklace for his mama, "Krista," a jingle ball lariat, one I'd bought for myself in NYC and reluctantly packed up to send to her instead because her birthday had been in July and July had been a really shit month for all of us.

All of this stuff was packed into a shopping bag that had a picture of a fire truck on it, and when you pressed the edge of the bag, a little red LED flashed and a siren sounded. Because I was worried the bag would go off in transit and that it'd be delayed by Homeland Security, I wrapped the bag and its contents securely, and packed it carefully in a bankers box full of tons of poofy styrofoam peanuts, and scattered craploads of sparkly foil confetti to make it seem more festive. I taped it thoroughly from top to bottom with colorful checkerboard shipping tape, leaving a blank space top center for the address, and wrote HAPPY BIRTHDAY RHYS in English and Spanish in various places on the checkerboard tape.

So, I wore the jingle ball lariat today, my puppy seems to love to chew on the balls (teething), and as puppy was gnawing away happily on my lap, I was thinking of all the stuff I got for everyone, from "Jesse" to Janna to "Cakey" and the rest of the imaginary bunch. It's not the money. Not one of my friends would ever say that it's about the money with me. But the thought, the care, the effort, and the chunks of my heart that went into it, I'm galled by that.

And the way Janna has conducted herself these last few weeks, the shit she's said, the lies she's still persisting in perpetuating, her armchair analysis of my actions (especially the golddigging aspect, since I earn more than I need when I work, and have never looked for a sugar daddy), and I can easily say now that this woman utterly disgusts me, on just about every level there is. She is a bottomless pit of devious psychological tricks.

I believed there was a man, with friends and loved ones around him who often didn't make the right decisions. I believed he had a therapist. I believed he had a son. I believed it all. And all of it was a lie. I'm not sure what it was that was making Janna cry when we were sitting there talking about Jesse in the house at Ojo Caliente, but I was crying at the loss of a beautiful man. A beautiful, fictional man, it turns out. Who were you crying for, Janna? John? Yourself?

So, I'm a big dummy for my wholesale belief in all of this, but the buck stops there for me. Janna Saint James bears the brunt of this, and let's just assume for a moment that I am at least 99-44/100% correct in my assessment of this situation, that Janna manufactured the whole thing. WTF does she have to be angry with me about? Because I found her out and have exposed her in the medium she works in? Yeah, I guess. Because I called her a cunt? Well, like she said, it takes one to know one.

Let's say for a moment I'm wrong about all of it, and that Janna really is protecting "Jesse," or whatever his name really is. So, this guy lied to me about his name and the name of everyone else around him, including the Irish side of his family. Okay. Even first names? Uh, okay. Those are lots of complicated email addresses then.

And it's allegedly because I'm a golddigger because I want something of his that I feel I'm entitled to. Despite being sucked into this drama for almost two years, I'm not a total nimrod. I worked for attorneys for over a decade. There's not a court in the world that would have awarded me anything. I had no claim. I didn't need to know my law to know that. And if I was such a golddigger, why was her first tack to criticize me for having no intention of ever marrying "Jesse?" I got that from "Alice" and "Cakey" and I think from her "daughter" as well (I can't remember, I've dumped the emails off my computer, but it was more than one comment about it). Surely if I was angling for his money, "Jesse" wouldn't have had to implore me to rush my divorce so I could marry him so his "father" wouldn't think he was going to hell. So, the golddigging shit doesn't really wash either. I was hopeful that "Jesse's" wish for a communal living situation at his "grandfather's" ranch would work out, and that I could spend some of my time in Colorado being amongst his friends, but that was a situation that Janna put forward, it was nothing that "Jesse" had spoken about to me. And again, I didn't really expect it to work out, fractious factions making the situation impossible.

To recap this possible reality: I was given proclamations of love by a man who didn't trust me enough to give me his real last name, or the real names of any of his friends or family. His friends all worked in sync and went along with whatever names "Jesse" told them to use, including his six-year-old son. I wanted his money, but obviously not enough to speed the situation along the road to marriage, despite his begging me to hurry up and start divorce proceedings. Nobutwait, what I really am is an internet freak that has set my sights toward destroying Janna. But for what reason? Because she says I don't want to be ignored. Because she says I'm an attention-seeking whore. Well, with that, I am what she made me. I wrote about "Jesse" in my blog because he encouraged me to, it made him go all squishy inside when I'd gush about my boyfriend, and he got a secret thrill at the way it tweaked all those other delusional women who were stalking him and didn't know how to take no for an answer.

I dunno. I would have a hard time believing all that, even if I didn't know I was 100% sure.

So here another nugget. I tracked down Annie Martel, the real Annie. I asked her about being Jesse's therapist and Janna's bestest friend. She don't know a Jesse. Don't know a Janna. No idea what I was talking about. And, I quote, "I don't think I want to know."

Amen. And hallelujah. Smart lady.

Of course, now Janna will just say that Jesse just made up the name of his therapist and that it really was just some other person, some other therapist wife of some other dead popstar. But there was so much backstory involved in so much of it, Janna worked the shit out of it. Too much to change it now to make it believable, at least to me. It probably works with other folks that don't have all that backstory.

So, I have to again reiterate. Janna lied her ass off to me from June 1, 2005 straight through February 20, 2007. And beyond, really, since she's still lying. I have a right to be angry. Vindictive? Damn straight I am. I have a right to be disgusted, at my own gullibility, sure, but mostly at her. I have a right to not feel sympathy for her illness, because she's fucked me up with stress and god-knows-what, for pretty much the full twenty months, and now beyond, as I struggle with the whys and what-the-fucks now. Plus, she's not copping to it, which leads me to conclude that's she's more in her right mind than she'd like me to believe.

It's a toss-up. Crazier than a shithouse rat, or just a miserable, lonely housewife full of soap opera stories and malice to spare? Which would you rather be? I guess her existence is wretched enough, since she's one or the other. That doesn't keep me from being angry, though. Not. By. A. Long. Shot.

I've packed up all the shit "Jesse" and the rest gave me, to get it out of my face. I'm not gonna toss or sell any of it just yet, in case I need it at a later date for legal reasons. If Janna wants to swap it for all the shit I sent "Jesse" and everyone else, I'd do that.

Did I say everything I wanted to say? I dunno. I guess I have for now. I can't promise I won't be back, but I can promise that I hope I won't. This isn't fun for me, you know.