I know, it's been a while. Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans.
I need to catch up on a bunch of emails, I see. I promise I'll get to them over the next few weeks, unless something in my real life interrupts.
Here's a little fun fact for you to chew on. John M is not only still alive, he's a happily married grandfather. Not surprisingly, he looks like "Jesse" but older.
He dodged a bullet getting Janna out of his life before she could wreck it completely.
And, ladies, so did we.
Showing posts with label revelations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label revelations. Show all posts
Sunday, April 21, 2013
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
so, that happened
I've been having such a great time away from this blog, sorry guys. But wanted to update and let you know that the appeal has been heard by the IL Supreme Court, and we're just waiting for a decision. So only the Shadow knows...
In other news, I did hear from one of Janna's schoolmates that Janna was ditched by John M back in the late 70s and was moved back in with her mother in Illinois for about a year before showing signs of being heavy with child. So who's Jessica's baby-daddy? Is it John Myrtle? Or perhaps this is where the St. James name comes in. Or maybe Janna simply doesn't know who Jessica's father is. There is a definite resemblance between Jessica and John M, though. Perhaps Janna went back for a visit to use John as a sperm donor (John Irving would approve). Does John M know Jessica exists? Vice-versa?
Janna seriously didn't need to invent people with soap-opera lives. She lives her very own. How sad.
In other news, I did hear from one of Janna's schoolmates that Janna was ditched by John M back in the late 70s and was moved back in with her mother in Illinois for about a year before showing signs of being heavy with child. So who's Jessica's baby-daddy? Is it John Myrtle? Or perhaps this is where the St. James name comes in. Or maybe Janna simply doesn't know who Jessica's father is. There is a definite resemblance between Jessica and John M, though. Perhaps Janna went back for a visit to use John as a sperm donor (John Irving would approve). Does John M know Jessica exists? Vice-versa?
Janna seriously didn't need to invent people with soap-opera lives. She lives her very own. How sad.
Sunday, January 8, 2012
to erase any doubt
Way back in May 2006, when "Jesse" was emerging from his own personal soap-opera-like hell, Janna and her best friend Annie Martel, who had once been "Jesse's" therapist, took him on a Memorial Day vacation to Beaver Island in Lake Michigan. After "Jesse" died, Annie posted this on his tribute blog.
Isn't that fucking touching? Brings a tear to your eye.
Here's the other part of that story. One photo amongst several that have been sent to me since Janet Hopper's youthful indiscretions were brought to light.
Holy fuckballs. First of all, did EVERYBODY wear jeans in the 70s? Second, yes. That would be a photo of a twentysomething Janna with her husband John M. Ain't they cute?
And it's her psychotic attention to detail, the little embellishments like "We don't know for sure, but we think it might just be the last image ever taken of him." I mean, way to pile it on.
Janna's sleazy deception just gets grosser and grosser with each revelation. "[A] bad, dark, grainy dinotechno picture phone photo" equals "low-rez scan of a decades-old Polaroid which is grainy because I cut myself out of a photo with my husband and blew it up to torment an innocent woman for my own personal gain."
Whoops forgot the "while impersonating John Denver's ex-wife on a tribute blog to someone who didn't exist."
Happy New Year!
Worth the Wait
My name is Annie and Jesse and I spent some time together figuring things out. I'll have some more things to offer about him once I determine what the boundaries are. I didn't know him like the rest of you did. I knew him in solely a clinical sense until Memorial Day of this year, mere weeks ago. At that time he was tired of talking about himself and his "little miseries," "all the time." So I dropped my guard and headed out into a social situation with Jesse and some friends.
The benefit for me was complete. I saw him as whole person for the first time, not just the sum total of his traumas. Of course I knew he was special, but there were moments that imbedded in me just how exceptional he was outside my office or a hospital room. I watched him entertain dozens of children in a skateboard park while fireworks fell behind them. I ate his delicious cooking. I watched him swim in big water with three horses he'd just met. I've been around horses for 35 years but would have never attempted that. He was a horse whisperer. A dog whisperer. A llama whisperer. A fire whisperer. A child whisperer. A people in general whisperer.
One of the things that struck me the most was the fact I never really saw Jesse smile until that time we spent away from the office. I'd seen his famous wry smile. His famous devilish smile. I'd seen his sad little resolved smile. But never a full, easy, natural grin. Until that time we spent together in "the free world." Then there it was. All over the place. A 1000 watt smile. I chose to capture it with my camera phone. I don't really know how to use my camera phone. It took three people to get the picture from there to here, but here it is. Jesse's full, easy, natural smile. We don't know for sure, but we think it might just be the last image ever taken of him. It's just a bad, dark, grainy dinotechno picture phone photo, butI hope so, because in that instant he was comfortable being Jesse.
Isn't that fucking touching? Brings a tear to your eye.
Here's the other part of that story. One photo amongst several that have been sent to me since Janet Hopper's youthful indiscretions were brought to light.
Holy fuckballs. First of all, did EVERYBODY wear jeans in the 70s? Second, yes. That would be a photo of a twentysomething Janna with her husband John M. Ain't they cute?
And it's her psychotic attention to detail, the little embellishments like "We don't know for sure, but we think it might just be the last image ever taken of him." I mean, way to pile it on.
Janna's sleazy deception just gets grosser and grosser with each revelation. "[A] bad, dark, grainy dinotechno picture phone photo" equals "low-rez scan of a decades-old Polaroid which is grainy because I cut myself out of a photo with my husband and blew it up to torment an innocent woman for my own personal gain."
Whoops forgot the "while impersonating John Denver's ex-wife on a tribute blog to someone who didn't exist."
Happy New Year!
Thursday, May 5, 2011
a little bit about me
I'm a storyteller. Not as in a writer, although when I was little, I always assumed I'd be a writer when I grew up. I admired them, I always did. Still do. I also assumed I'd marry Jack Lemmon someday, and we can see how well that turned out.
But I've always told stories. Not lies to others, but stories in my head, to myself. I'd see a worm in the rain, and he'd have a name (Fred, after the father I never met who wasn't my father) and a backstory (he was braving the elements to bring back provisions for the wife and little worms but he really wanted to work at a big company like CC Baxter) within a minute. I make up stories for everything - animal, vegetable and mineral. Is it any wonder that Hans Christian Andersen was my read of choice as a child? Still is, did you know I visited his house in Odense? No, you didn't, because you don't know anything about me.
I become immersed in good art the same way. I can see what the artist had in mind, I'm inside that hot, dusty room, hearing the dull sound of the tools in Caillebotte's The Floor Scrapers. I can smell the tang of the suddenly exposed wood. And the sweat.
Good movies and television can also wreck my head, because I embellish - I finish the filmmaker's sentences. I see where they're going, or maybe it's just where I'm going. I started weeping during the first five minutes of Amelie because the way Jeunet writes the beginning, telling people's life stories in less than a minute, that's the way I think most of the time.
In my face-to-face dealings, say a job interview or even just meeting someone new, I still go through dozens of different scenarios in my head, working out the different ways a conversation might go, to prepare myself for any eventuality. I analyze everything, and most of the time I believe in Occam's Razor: the simpler answer is often correct.
This works evidently in my disfavor also, in the case of "Jesse Jubilee James." The TV show Deadwood sucked me in, the density of the story, and how beautifully it was shot and acted. I wanted to talk about it with others. And then I met "Jesse." Who had a story, quite a strange one, but I've known real people with stranger stories. And stranger names. (No llamas, though.)
Why am I a storyteller? What made me like this? Who knows? I'm an only child - lots of only children have to spend a lot of time entertaining themselves. I had bad shit happen to me as a child, lots of upheaval, maybe that's one of the ways I dealt with it, and now it's just a part of who I am. My therapist says I have excellent coping tools, perhaps because they never stay in the shed long enough to rust.
Don't get me wrong, I have a great life, an awesome life. I'm not a sad sack who generally sits around moping about what Janna did to me. I deal with the aftershocks of Janna the way I dealt with the aftershocks of the rest of my life. The difference with Janna is that most of the other bad shit was accidental or exceedingly brief. They were short sharp shocks.
What Janna did to me was intentional and orchestrated to hurt me, over a long period of time when she was aware I was fragile. Who invents a purported love of someone's life and then has them DIE? Janna could have closed up shop anytime she wanted. All I had for "Jesse" was a cellphone number and PO Box address. She could have disappeared at any time, or said "hey, y'know, I found a nice local girl to date." I would have chalked it up to disinterest and forgotten about it. But she milked this, she fed off my grief with the personas of more than a dozen people. She watched me get sick and, impersonating "Jesse's" doctor friend, diagnosed me. (don't worry, it was a weekend when I couldn't see my regular doctor, and I did see him right away that Monday, I'm not that stupid). She could have not given me an address, or accepted any of the gifts I sent, or at the very least, not encouraged me.
It's the malice aforethought I have problems with. I was on that message board for a year before Janna showed up. She watched me, she learned things about me, and then she struck.
And yes, perhaps Janna and I are two sides of the same coin, perhaps that's how I fell for her scam - by being the kind of person who fills in the blanks, and for trusting that since every other individual I'd actually met in person from this message board had proved to be real, that "Jesse" would be too. And because, who does that? The other women that Janna scammed, I think they're all storytellers too. I think she chooses us for that reason. It makes her job easier.
Janna's a storyteller, too, but she uses her talent to take things from others under false pretenses. Doesn't that deserve punishment?
I've tried to be patient here, I really have. I've answered many questions over the past several weeks. Because it doesn't seem to be letting up and I'd like to continue to remain a non-sad sack, I'm going to step away from this for a bit. Rest assured, I'll be back at some point, and I'll try to answer your questions in a civil manner.
If something interesting happens with the case, I'll update, of course.
But I've always told stories. Not lies to others, but stories in my head, to myself. I'd see a worm in the rain, and he'd have a name (Fred, after the father I never met who wasn't my father) and a backstory (he was braving the elements to bring back provisions for the wife and little worms but he really wanted to work at a big company like CC Baxter) within a minute. I make up stories for everything - animal, vegetable and mineral. Is it any wonder that Hans Christian Andersen was my read of choice as a child? Still is, did you know I visited his house in Odense? No, you didn't, because you don't know anything about me.
I become immersed in good art the same way. I can see what the artist had in mind, I'm inside that hot, dusty room, hearing the dull sound of the tools in Caillebotte's The Floor Scrapers. I can smell the tang of the suddenly exposed wood. And the sweat.
Good movies and television can also wreck my head, because I embellish - I finish the filmmaker's sentences. I see where they're going, or maybe it's just where I'm going. I started weeping during the first five minutes of Amelie because the way Jeunet writes the beginning, telling people's life stories in less than a minute, that's the way I think most of the time.
In my face-to-face dealings, say a job interview or even just meeting someone new, I still go through dozens of different scenarios in my head, working out the different ways a conversation might go, to prepare myself for any eventuality. I analyze everything, and most of the time I believe in Occam's Razor: the simpler answer is often correct.
This works evidently in my disfavor also, in the case of "Jesse Jubilee James." The TV show Deadwood sucked me in, the density of the story, and how beautifully it was shot and acted. I wanted to talk about it with others. And then I met "Jesse." Who had a story, quite a strange one, but I've known real people with stranger stories. And stranger names. (No llamas, though.)
Why am I a storyteller? What made me like this? Who knows? I'm an only child - lots of only children have to spend a lot of time entertaining themselves. I had bad shit happen to me as a child, lots of upheaval, maybe that's one of the ways I dealt with it, and now it's just a part of who I am. My therapist says I have excellent coping tools, perhaps because they never stay in the shed long enough to rust.
Don't get me wrong, I have a great life, an awesome life. I'm not a sad sack who generally sits around moping about what Janna did to me. I deal with the aftershocks of Janna the way I dealt with the aftershocks of the rest of my life. The difference with Janna is that most of the other bad shit was accidental or exceedingly brief. They were short sharp shocks.
What Janna did to me was intentional and orchestrated to hurt me, over a long period of time when she was aware I was fragile. Who invents a purported love of someone's life and then has them DIE? Janna could have closed up shop anytime she wanted. All I had for "Jesse" was a cellphone number and PO Box address. She could have disappeared at any time, or said "hey, y'know, I found a nice local girl to date." I would have chalked it up to disinterest and forgotten about it. But she milked this, she fed off my grief with the personas of more than a dozen people. She watched me get sick and, impersonating "Jesse's" doctor friend, diagnosed me. (don't worry, it was a weekend when I couldn't see my regular doctor, and I did see him right away that Monday, I'm not that stupid). She could have not given me an address, or accepted any of the gifts I sent, or at the very least, not encouraged me.
It's the malice aforethought I have problems with. I was on that message board for a year before Janna showed up. She watched me, she learned things about me, and then she struck.
And yes, perhaps Janna and I are two sides of the same coin, perhaps that's how I fell for her scam - by being the kind of person who fills in the blanks, and for trusting that since every other individual I'd actually met in person from this message board had proved to be real, that "Jesse" would be too. And because, who does that? The other women that Janna scammed, I think they're all storytellers too. I think she chooses us for that reason. It makes her job easier.
Janna's a storyteller, too, but she uses her talent to take things from others under false pretenses. Doesn't that deserve punishment?
I've tried to be patient here, I really have. I've answered many questions over the past several weeks. Because it doesn't seem to be letting up and I'd like to continue to remain a non-sad sack, I'm going to step away from this for a bit. Rest assured, I'll be back at some point, and I'll try to answer your questions in a civil manner.
If something interesting happens with the case, I'll update, of course.
Monday, May 2, 2011
a little bit about Janna
Because this does bug me a bit, I'd like to clear something up that one of the LJ people has assumed. Some folks didn't like that I mentioned Janna's weight here. But what you all need to understand about Janna is that nobody hated on fat people more than Janna St James. As her alter egos, "Bean" and "Alice" amongst them, she would say hateful, scathing things about herself, all to do with her weight.
As some of her other alter egos, she'd talk about how beautiful and skinny and wonderful she was till those nasty Mexicans raped and nearly killed her in a cornfield. Janna would say to me as herself that she weighed 112 all her life until that rape, and she gained all that weight because she was in a hospital bed recovering from many plastic surgeries and operations and now she only had a single lung so it was hard for her to exercise blah blah blah.
Janna told me that she tried Weight Watchers, but they didn't like her because she wasn't born a fatty, that she had no respect for them because they were fat by choice and not by misadventure like she was. Not once did I care about Janna's weight, although I was sympathetic that she was upset about it. When I met her, I confess I was a little taken aback at her size, but only because I was trying to work out in my head how someone could go from 112 to 250 over a ten year period, especially when several of those years was spent eating hospital food, and some of that time her jaw had been reconstructed and she could only have liquid nutrition.
Of course, when I found out that all of her backstory was a lie, there was never a rape, never any sort of hospital convalescence, and she was obese for her entire adult life, I realized that she was completely obsessed with her own weight. Yes, my comment was mean, it was meant to be, but please understand it was meant to tweak her because of this history.
I can't speak for Josh's motivations in taking that angle, since he has never discussed his article with me at any length whatsoever. But for the record, yes, he is kind of an asshole, and everything is about him.
As some of her other alter egos, she'd talk about how beautiful and skinny and wonderful she was till those nasty Mexicans raped and nearly killed her in a cornfield. Janna would say to me as herself that she weighed 112 all her life until that rape, and she gained all that weight because she was in a hospital bed recovering from many plastic surgeries and operations and now she only had a single lung so it was hard for her to exercise blah blah blah.
Janna told me that she tried Weight Watchers, but they didn't like her because she wasn't born a fatty, that she had no respect for them because they were fat by choice and not by misadventure like she was. Not once did I care about Janna's weight, although I was sympathetic that she was upset about it. When I met her, I confess I was a little taken aback at her size, but only because I was trying to work out in my head how someone could go from 112 to 250 over a ten year period, especially when several of those years was spent eating hospital food, and some of that time her jaw had been reconstructed and she could only have liquid nutrition.
Of course, when I found out that all of her backstory was a lie, there was never a rape, never any sort of hospital convalescence, and she was obese for her entire adult life, I realized that she was completely obsessed with her own weight. Yes, my comment was mean, it was meant to be, but please understand it was meant to tweak her because of this history.
I can't speak for Josh's motivations in taking that angle, since he has never discussed his article with me at any length whatsoever. But for the record, yes, he is kind of an asshole, and everything is about him.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
wow
I don't know who all you folks are who're still reading this blog, but hey, I hope none of you are new victims of Janna's.
But still, I'm super-happy that I'm getting more hits on my business website than this blog here. For a while it wasn't that way.
I have been asked this, and I've worked it out a bit in therapy, so I want to put it here, by way of explanation as to why this blog exists. In my journey in learning about Janna's background, I have met other people she has done this to in the past. While I appreciated their assistance and their candor, I could also see how revisiting the dreadfulness that Janna's monstrous mendacity created made them relive it all over again. I felt enough of that while simply going through my receipts for taxes and coming across gifts I'd purchased for Janna et. al. last year.
So, in addition to really truly not wanting anyone else to go through what I've gone through these past few years, I also really truly do not want to get a phone call or email from someone in ten years' time, asking the question: "sorry to bother you, but I think I've been the victim of internet fraud by a woman called Janna Saint James Priggie." I would rather put all of this out there now and be done with it. I don't want to be thinking about Janna ten years down the road.
Get it? Got it? Good.
But still, I'm super-happy that I'm getting more hits on my business website than this blog here. For a while it wasn't that way.
I have been asked this, and I've worked it out a bit in therapy, so I want to put it here, by way of explanation as to why this blog exists. In my journey in learning about Janna's background, I have met other people she has done this to in the past. While I appreciated their assistance and their candor, I could also see how revisiting the dreadfulness that Janna's monstrous mendacity created made them relive it all over again. I felt enough of that while simply going through my receipts for taxes and coming across gifts I'd purchased for Janna et. al. last year.
So, in addition to really truly not wanting anyone else to go through what I've gone through these past few years, I also really truly do not want to get a phone call or email from someone in ten years' time, asking the question: "sorry to bother you, but I think I've been the victim of internet fraud by a woman called Janna Saint James Priggie." I would rather put all of this out there now and be done with it. I don't want to be thinking about Janna ten years down the road.
Get it? Got it? Good.
Saturday, September 1, 2007
catch you on the rebound, talk to you later when I have less time
So, then. This will be the last lengthy post, unless something utterly amazing happens, like Janna St. James suddenly coming clean in public fora.
I've given up waiting for the article about her to appear. High-powered legal beagles futzing over minor contract points is ridiculous and bound to be protracted. When the article does finally make publication, I'll post a link here. Probably in 2011, knowing the way goddamned lawyers work.
I've said a lot already, but a few things need repeating, I think, and a few things need stating.
Janna's biggest danger is that she tries real hard to create an alternate reality that shows her as a loving, kind, unlucky person. We joked at the beginning, "Jesse" and I, about how I was probably a wizened man with bristly hair in my ears and plaid pants hiked up to my armpits, emailing from my senior care center in Sarasota, and that "Jesse" was probably an obese housewife in Chicago. Well, guess what? I think that was the first and last time that "Jesse" was ever honest with me. Janna is exactly that. Exactly that, but she'd regale me with stories about how she never weighed more than 105 pounds until she was gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead in the middle of a cornfield about ten years ago by three Mexican men. But thanks to "Jesse," he sent her to the best doctors in Europe for reconstructive surgery, and slept on the floor by her bed in the hospital room, when even her husband didn't do that. "Jesse" would always talk about how wonderful and clever and brilliant and beautiful Janna was. Blah blah blah blah blah. It goes on and on, about how tiny and petite and pretty she always was and now she's a huge hideous house and the Weight Watchers people don't understand or sympathize with her because she hasn't been fat all her life. A million stories, a million excuses for why she is the way she is. I really never gave a shit what size she was, or for how long. I never asked for explanations, but was a huge issue for her. Huge. She had to convince me that she was once attractive, desirable, sexy, and that it was misfortune rather than one too many supersized McDonalds meals that made her the way she was. We all have things we wish we could change about ourselves. I'd like racehorse ankles and calves that boots could fit over. It don't mean I'll pretend I once possessed these things (well, maybe I did, when I was nine). I'd also like to be nicer to people, but the fact is that I'm not a very nice person, and I'm happy to be a bitch when bitchery is called for, and as far as Janna is concerned, she deserves a shitload of bitchery.
Janna lied to me for twenty months, and then once she was found out by my friends, she lied for a few more months, about me. And probably still is lying now, and will lie tomorrow, and the day after that. She's probably right now studying some new fashionable illness that she can give her next Perfect Man, and god knows, she's probably absorbed some of my life into her new Mister Right. She may be sick, but she's also fully cognizant of what she's doing, because the calculated way she tried to tear me apart following her outing was utterly spectacular, and hey, talk about mean. I've spent my time since February rethinking everything I've known to be true and cannot find it in my heart to forgive Janna for any of this. I can't even say with assurance that if she'd been up-front with me prior to, or even following, her unmasking by my friends, that I would have been less angry with her than I am now. I also can't guarantee that if I ever run into her that I won't want to give her a serious slap across the face. Maybe two. I do know that she should count her blessings that so far her victims have been relatively benign, because even here, with my friends, she was thisclose to getting herself a righteous ass-kicking by a couple of my (normally pacifist) friends. Next person Janna does this to, she might not be so lucky.
I really hope that this blog serves its purpose and warns anyone else who gets tangled up in the Janna St. James web before emotional harm is inflicted upon them. But since Janna is in deep, deep denial, and who knows how much she's fucked up her own life, I reckon she'll just keep herself out of the next deception and reconfigure Mister Right for some other unsuspecting person who trusts just that little bit too much. I've done what I can, and it's up to those who love Janna to keep her from pulling this kind of cunning stunt again. I just hope that there is someone out there who loves her enough. Or at all. Otherwise, I guess I'll just see her in hell.
-------------
*note to Janna, who I know is reading this, either as herself or as a Jannafestation: I know Tom Waits and you are no Tom Waits [with apologies to the late Lloyd Bentsen]. He has talent. You have limited creative typing ability.
I've given up waiting for the article about her to appear. High-powered legal beagles futzing over minor contract points is ridiculous and bound to be protracted. When the article does finally make publication, I'll post a link here. Probably in 2011, knowing the way goddamned lawyers work.
I've said a lot already, but a few things need repeating, I think, and a few things need stating.
- I think Janna Saint James really thinks she did something good for me by pretending to be "Jesse" and his random coterie of faux friends and relatives. I would like to state unequivocally that she did nothing good for me. All she did was make my job more difficult by distracting from it with "Jesse's" various trials and tribulations. All she did was disrupt my sleep with worry and eventually grief. I fully believe that she contributed to (if not outright caused) the illnesses that befell me following "Jesse's" death by weakening my immune system with all the grief and guilt and days without sleep. All she did was try to screw up friendships I had with my real-word friends. All she did was make my home life uncomfortable at best and unbearable at worst. She did not "free" me, which is what I think she comforts herself with when she's alone with her private thoughts. All it was, all she did, for nearly two years (whoops, sorry, a year and a half), was shovel the bullshit on, and it's that crap-covered yardstick I use to measure those twenty months by.
- Last month I sent Janna's daughter Jessica an email, to an address I believe is her own, although who knows to what lengths Janna has gone to deceive? I will assume that Jessica received it, and would hope that she read it, and this blog, and has taken appropriate action in getting her mother to the nearest psychiatric facility. Of course, it could very well be that she was in on this whole scam from the beginning, and is happily availing herself to some of the many gifts I showered upon "Jesse". Still being the cockeyed optimist that I am, I'd like to think that there's at least one normal one in the St. James family and that she's done the right thing with her demented mother. If not, well, maybe she didn't get the mail. Or maybe she doesn't care. Or maybe it really just is all Janna. Maybe there's not even really a Jessica. If there is, and she's reading this, mazel tov, move as far away from your nutjob mother as you can after the wedding. I suggest Europe. And keep her away from your kids. She's obsessed with child molestation.
- I have decided against pressing charges, although a lawyer in Chi-town will be sad to not soak Janna for her car, fancy Indian silver jewelry, and other assets. He'll have to make do with the retainer he's been paid. My main reason for wanting to sue Janna was to get the courts to rule that she see a shrink for at least a couple of years and to limit her computer usage, but that kind of thing is virtually unenforceable by the courts. I'm hoping that by giving Jessica the information about what Janna spent her time doing for nearly two years that she cares enough about her mother to do the right thing.
- Going through all my receipts for taxes, and going further back into 2005, I spent WAY more on "Jesse" et al than I first (and second) thought. All that stuff at the beginning, a personalized iPod and all the accoutrements for $650 (which, yeah, "Jesse" reimbursed me $300 for, but I didn't reveal how much I spent because I like gifting those I love), expensive bath stuff from Lush, the sterling silver handmade bracelet for $300 that "Jesse" asked to be cremated with, a $600 reservation at a Laguna Beach B&B that had strict no-refund cancellation policies (cancelled because "Jesse" had to voluntarily check in to a psychiatric hospital to avoid his sister committing him), that $550 R/T nonrefundable plane ticket to Denver that I never used, $100 worth of organic asparagus ("Jesse" liked asparagus), $250 for toiletries bags with the Jesse prairie dog photo on them, one for me and one for Janna, $200 to FedEx the birthday package to Spain for "Jesse's" "son," which was of course returned to me (and in fact phenomenal amounts of shipping charges for all those items I sent to "Jesse" and Janna via Priority Mail and FedEx), $600 in moving boxes/packing to put my stuff in for my move to Colorado, $400 for a few bottles of "Jesse's" favorite wine, so I could drink it in tribute after he died, $40 for a goddamned clothes shaver, and another $40 for a backup in case "Jesse's" "son" burned out the first one, horseback riding lessons and the fucking useless boots recommended by "Cakey," the entire New Mexico/Colorado trip, outfits I bought on ebay thanks to "Jesse's" prompting, and all those little stupid things that time and trauma had erased from my memory banks. Teetering at the ten grand mark. Over two years -- sorry -- a year and a half.
- I've gone through all the stuff I bought for "Jesse" and his "family" but hadn't had the opportunity to send before "Jesse" died, as well as some things I received. I'll be selling most of it, with the proceeds going to a couple of local organizations who help abused kids. Most of the stuff I got for "Jesse's" "son" has already gone to these shelters. The things I don't sell I'll destroy, if I haven't already - I enjoyed shredding that bullshit prairie dog giclee with the bullshit sentiments written on the sides. I'll have a pass at selling that painting of Doug that Janna did, if nobody wants it, I'll shred that too. As much as part of me thinks that I should sell these items to recompense myself for the money conned out of me by Janna Saint James, I'll just think of it as a pricey life lesson. I don't want that money, because it has the stink of bullshit on it. And especially after Janna sucked up sympathy from so many for poor poor "Jesse's" abuse by his mother's husband and the drug dealers he was traded to, I think it's about fucking time some poor kids who really did have to go through that shit get something positive from this icky negative.
- I know that I'm sane, rational, and honest, all things Janna is not. I don't even think she's that smart. I was impressed by "Jesse's" breadth of knowledge as a 35-year-old man who'd spent half his life drug-addicted. Not so much when you find "Jesse" is a fiftysomething Batavia, Illinois hausfrau who has all the time in the world to read histrionic tomes and watch Oprah while chowing down on Hot Pockets.
Janna's biggest danger is that she tries real hard to create an alternate reality that shows her as a loving, kind, unlucky person. We joked at the beginning, "Jesse" and I, about how I was probably a wizened man with bristly hair in my ears and plaid pants hiked up to my armpits, emailing from my senior care center in Sarasota, and that "Jesse" was probably an obese housewife in Chicago. Well, guess what? I think that was the first and last time that "Jesse" was ever honest with me. Janna is exactly that. Exactly that, but she'd regale me with stories about how she never weighed more than 105 pounds until she was gang-raped, beaten, and left for dead in the middle of a cornfield about ten years ago by three Mexican men. But thanks to "Jesse," he sent her to the best doctors in Europe for reconstructive surgery, and slept on the floor by her bed in the hospital room, when even her husband didn't do that. "Jesse" would always talk about how wonderful and clever and brilliant and beautiful Janna was. Blah blah blah blah blah. It goes on and on, about how tiny and petite and pretty she always was and now she's a huge hideous house and the Weight Watchers people don't understand or sympathize with her because she hasn't been fat all her life. A million stories, a million excuses for why she is the way she is. I really never gave a shit what size she was, or for how long. I never asked for explanations, but was a huge issue for her. Huge. She had to convince me that she was once attractive, desirable, sexy, and that it was misfortune rather than one too many supersized McDonalds meals that made her the way she was. We all have things we wish we could change about ourselves. I'd like racehorse ankles and calves that boots could fit over. It don't mean I'll pretend I once possessed these things (well, maybe I did, when I was nine). I'd also like to be nicer to people, but the fact is that I'm not a very nice person, and I'm happy to be a bitch when bitchery is called for, and as far as Janna is concerned, she deserves a shitload of bitchery.
Janna lied to me for twenty months, and then once she was found out by my friends, she lied for a few more months, about me. And probably still is lying now, and will lie tomorrow, and the day after that. She's probably right now studying some new fashionable illness that she can give her next Perfect Man, and god knows, she's probably absorbed some of my life into her new Mister Right. She may be sick, but she's also fully cognizant of what she's doing, because the calculated way she tried to tear me apart following her outing was utterly spectacular, and hey, talk about mean. I've spent my time since February rethinking everything I've known to be true and cannot find it in my heart to forgive Janna for any of this. I can't even say with assurance that if she'd been up-front with me prior to, or even following, her unmasking by my friends, that I would have been less angry with her than I am now. I also can't guarantee that if I ever run into her that I won't want to give her a serious slap across the face. Maybe two. I do know that she should count her blessings that so far her victims have been relatively benign, because even here, with my friends, she was thisclose to getting herself a righteous ass-kicking by a couple of my (normally pacifist) friends. Next person Janna does this to, she might not be so lucky.
I really hope that this blog serves its purpose and warns anyone else who gets tangled up in the Janna St. James web before emotional harm is inflicted upon them. But since Janna is in deep, deep denial, and who knows how much she's fucked up her own life, I reckon she'll just keep herself out of the next deception and reconfigure Mister Right for some other unsuspecting person who trusts just that little bit too much. I've done what I can, and it's up to those who love Janna to keep her from pulling this kind of cunning stunt again. I just hope that there is someone out there who loves her enough. Or at all. Otherwise, I guess I'll just see her in hell.
-------------
*note to Janna, who I know is reading this, either as herself or as a Jannafestation: I know Tom Waits and you are no Tom Waits [with apologies to the late Lloyd Bentsen]. He has talent. You have limited creative typing ability.
Friday, April 13, 2007
it's not just the feet that are clay...
I was thinking today, while I was driving, which is when I do my best thinking. I decided the reason Janna St. James is so vindictive, and so angry at my friends (and by extension, me) is because she was exposed, sure, but more because they suddenly made this beautiful story she concocted into an ugly one.
I'd use a best-case/worst-case analogy, but I'm hard-pressed to decide which one is best or worst in this case, since they all suck, at least for Janna St. James, and for me too, while I was on a bipolarcoaster with a complex man and subsequently grieving over his death. So let's just lay it out.
On the one hand, we have Jesse Jubilee James, or the guy I thought was called Jesse Jubilee James. Playing let's pretend again (after all, this is the land of fakey, so pretend is always comfortable here), if Jesse was real, he's been exposed as a lying shitheel who told not one ounce of truth to me or anyone else, so the George Washington-esque, noble, yogic, journalist-fireman-cowboy was nothing he claimed to be. And all his friends that talked to me were all in on the huge deception also. A conspiracy that fuckin' rivals the assassination of JFK. It ain't just the feet, this idol is clay from stem to stern. Soooooo, if that's the truth, it logically follows that Janna is a liar too, because she perpetuated the lies of a liar.
On the other hand, we have Janna St. James making all this crap up, which still makes her a lying sack of shit.
Funny how that works.
Either way, she's fer shure a lying sack of shit who watches too many soap operas (and Oprahs), and leads a life that leaves her unfulfilled, hence her fictions about Aspen and her life as a crack journalist/editor for the Associated Press, or wait, maybe not them. There was some smarmy snipe in her blog some time back about how AP wasn't the only news service out there, as though I inferred something that was not implied. But with Janna, obviously everything she and her Jannafestations spew forth are metaphors, just because she says she interviewed Ted Bundy for Associated Press and opened their Aspen office, what she really meant is that she interviewed Ed Gein for Reuters and opened their Fargo office. And when Jesse Jubilee James says his name is Jesse Jubilee James and his sister's name is Alice Aloha Toklas James Jameson Kuippfer, and his brother's name was, presumably, Starshine Saffron James Jameson, really they were Bob, Mae, and Jim Smith. Silly me for taking things at face value.
Still, because I know better, in this case, Occam's Razor is the way to go. There's no big conspiracy. A tiny one, all in Janna St. James's head, and as I've said before, quite badly written, but she didn't really have much time to hone it, not like the nearly-two years she had to string me along with hard-luck story after hard-luck story.
A sad but beautiful story of a starcrossed love was turned into a tawdry pulp fiction, but either way, it was one hunnert percent bullshit.
Fogelberg people? I have some photos I'd like to show you, just in case they ring any bells.
And by the way, Janna, Reuters don't have an Aspen office either.
Janna St. James = lying sack of shit.
I'd use a best-case/worst-case analogy, but I'm hard-pressed to decide which one is best or worst in this case, since they all suck, at least for Janna St. James, and for me too, while I was on a bipolarcoaster with a complex man and subsequently grieving over his death. So let's just lay it out.
On the one hand, we have Jesse Jubilee James, or the guy I thought was called Jesse Jubilee James. Playing let's pretend again (after all, this is the land of fakey, so pretend is always comfortable here), if Jesse was real, he's been exposed as a lying shitheel who told not one ounce of truth to me or anyone else, so the George Washington-esque, noble, yogic, journalist-fireman-cowboy was nothing he claimed to be. And all his friends that talked to me were all in on the huge deception also. A conspiracy that fuckin' rivals the assassination of JFK. It ain't just the feet, this idol is clay from stem to stern. Soooooo, if that's the truth, it logically follows that Janna is a liar too, because she perpetuated the lies of a liar.
On the other hand, we have Janna St. James making all this crap up, which still makes her a lying sack of shit.
Funny how that works.
Either way, she's fer shure a lying sack of shit who watches too many soap operas (and Oprahs), and leads a life that leaves her unfulfilled, hence her fictions about Aspen and her life as a crack journalist/editor for the Associated Press, or wait, maybe not them. There was some smarmy snipe in her blog some time back about how AP wasn't the only news service out there, as though I inferred something that was not implied. But with Janna, obviously everything she and her Jannafestations spew forth are metaphors, just because she says she interviewed Ted Bundy for Associated Press and opened their Aspen office, what she really meant is that she interviewed Ed Gein for Reuters and opened their Fargo office. And when Jesse Jubilee James says his name is Jesse Jubilee James and his sister's name is Alice Aloha Toklas James Jameson Kuippfer, and his brother's name was, presumably, Starshine Saffron James Jameson, really they were Bob, Mae, and Jim Smith. Silly me for taking things at face value.
Still, because I know better, in this case, Occam's Razor is the way to go. There's no big conspiracy. A tiny one, all in Janna St. James's head, and as I've said before, quite badly written, but she didn't really have much time to hone it, not like the nearly-two years she had to string me along with hard-luck story after hard-luck story.
A sad but beautiful story of a starcrossed love was turned into a tawdry pulp fiction, but either way, it was one hunnert percent bullshit.
Fogelberg people? I have some photos I'd like to show you, just in case they ring any bells.
And by the way, Janna, Reuters don't have an Aspen office either.
Janna St. James = lying sack of shit.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
and another thing
So I've figured out that Janna St. James was motivated in part by greed, I mean, who doesn't like getting gifts, right? Especially when the gifts are hundred-dollar notebooks with skulls on them, or shiny pink barbecues, or Coach bags, or pretty glowy LED purses purchased at considerable expense from Italy. And also when the gifts are things like attention, pretty easy when you're upward of a dozen personas.
I think she spent a long time staking out the Deadwood message board before she made her presence known. I think she saw I was a soft touch after I got ripped off by a boardie, and homed in on me, hoping she too could get her mitts on some material goods from me.
I think part of her was also motivated by some sort of sick lust also. She's spent so much bandwith denying her lesbian tendencies, when not one person brought that up, that I have to assume that she's a little oversensitive about this. As a wise grownup said to me when I was a mere child, a fox smells its own hole.
And about that I say, once again, eeeeeeeeeeew.
Yeah, so I said I was done with this blog, but obviously going through all the documentation and writing an outline of the whole sordid escapade has clarified some things for me. Not to mention packing up the many hundreds of dollars of stuff purchased for "Rhys" that I'd been holding on to for almost a year, which is now going to be dropped off at Goodwill this week, along with the special medical sliding shower bench I bought specially for Janna's visit in February, so she could get in and out of the tub.
The dollars keep adding up, as do the affronts. Janna is a grotesque, not because of the size of her ass (another thing she claims she has no problems with but clearly does), but because of how fugly she is on the inside.
I think she spent a long time staking out the Deadwood message board before she made her presence known. I think she saw I was a soft touch after I got ripped off by a boardie, and homed in on me, hoping she too could get her mitts on some material goods from me.
I think part of her was also motivated by some sort of sick lust also. She's spent so much bandwith denying her lesbian tendencies, when not one person brought that up, that I have to assume that she's a little oversensitive about this. As a wise grownup said to me when I was a mere child, a fox smells its own hole.
And about that I say, once again, eeeeeeeeeeew.
Yeah, so I said I was done with this blog, but obviously going through all the documentation and writing an outline of the whole sordid escapade has clarified some things for me. Not to mention packing up the many hundreds of dollars of stuff purchased for "Rhys" that I'd been holding on to for almost a year, which is now going to be dropped off at Goodwill this week, along with the special medical sliding shower bench I bought specially for Janna's visit in February, so she could get in and out of the tub.
The dollars keep adding up, as do the affronts. Janna is a grotesque, not because of the size of her ass (another thing she claims she has no problems with but clearly does), but because of how fugly she is on the inside.
Saturday, March 31, 2007
As Shakespeare once said...
...the lady doth protest too much, methinks.
But, to paraphrase an old vaudeville joke, that was no lady, that was my internet freak!
It's funny, for all Janna's blowing smoke up my ass about my motivation for being with "Jesse," when I start going through all the receipts of the things I bought for "Jesse," "Rhys," and all the friends and family associated with him, and Janna and all the friends and family associated with her, I've actually spent a ridiculous amount on all of them, which really means Janna and Janna alone. Not that I would have cared, if her intentions had been honorable. I sent "Jesse" a vast amount of gifts, and "Rhys" got his share also. I spent a massive chunk of change on their Christmas presents, as well as all the movie merchandise I sent to "Jesse," and friends. I spent close to a grand on all of the Christmas presents for Janna and her family. I'd say over those twenty months Janna St. James was pulling her con on me she got at least five grand's worth of gifts out of me.
She pisses and moans about how my gifts made her feel uncomfortable, but I never got anything returned to me, so I guess she wasn't that uncomfortable. Certainly she encouraged me at times, she sure fucking didn't dissuade me from sending the giant Christmas package to her, either this past year or the year before that. Didn't stop her from ogling the stuff I gave her upon her arrival at my house last month.
I know. I spend time and dedication and money on people I think are my friends. Go figure.
Yeah. So who's the golddigger here? Hmmmm. Enjoy all those presents, Janna.
Zol er krenken un gedenken. Gonif.
But, to paraphrase an old vaudeville joke, that was no lady, that was my internet freak!
It's funny, for all Janna's blowing smoke up my ass about my motivation for being with "Jesse," when I start going through all the receipts of the things I bought for "Jesse," "Rhys," and all the friends and family associated with him, and Janna and all the friends and family associated with her, I've actually spent a ridiculous amount on all of them, which really means Janna and Janna alone. Not that I would have cared, if her intentions had been honorable. I sent "Jesse" a vast amount of gifts, and "Rhys" got his share also. I spent a massive chunk of change on their Christmas presents, as well as all the movie merchandise I sent to "Jesse," and friends. I spent close to a grand on all of the Christmas presents for Janna and her family. I'd say over those twenty months Janna St. James was pulling her con on me she got at least five grand's worth of gifts out of me.
She pisses and moans about how my gifts made her feel uncomfortable, but I never got anything returned to me, so I guess she wasn't that uncomfortable. Certainly she encouraged me at times, she sure fucking didn't dissuade me from sending the giant Christmas package to her, either this past year or the year before that. Didn't stop her from ogling the stuff I gave her upon her arrival at my house last month.
I know. I spend time and dedication and money on people I think are my friends. Go figure.
Yeah. So who's the golddigger here? Hmmmm. Enjoy all those presents, Janna.
Zol er krenken un gedenken. Gonif.
Monday, March 12, 2007
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.
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.
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