Prison Camps

They've asked me several times about my mentioning a holocaust-like image, of trains filled with people, in the poem I wrote. It's hard to answer that question directly, because whenever I write those poems, I'm under the influence of herbal drugs, and I'm incorporating words and phrases that were said by voices I heard. So the poems don't originate within me by myself. I do the hard work of making them have a little bit of rhythm and rhyme and grammar, and making one idea lead to another, and that counts as being responsible for the poem. But the ... I don't like to use the word 'inspiration' here, because it's not really like that. But the original source of it, the person who said this or that phrase, was external.

The holocaust image, they're saying, seems unusually extreme. The holocaust involved the murders of millions of people, and my experiences have been nowhere near that terrible. I agree that it hasn't been as bad as that.

When I read my own poems, I actually find them embarrassing, and I avoid reading them again after they're done and posted on the blog. It's definitely not normal for me to express myself in that particular way. I have intense feelings but I keep them to myself. If I do write about my feelings, I don't try to force other people to read about them, but instead keep them on my computer.

This is causing some conflict, or some urging, from the people who have read what's on my computer and see it as valuable information. I know how Obama feels, when he put his prayer on the prayer wall, and somebody took it and read it and told the whole world what it said. Sure, he didn't say anything shameful or abnormal. The content of the prayer was just a nice, normal, religious thing to say.

That's kind of like what happened to me a few years ago when I first became aware of the phenomenon of computer hacking. That story leads directly into the recent events, but the story is very long. I'd have to deliberately shorten it. It's crucial to understanding how I gradually became aware of 'the voices' and related phenomena.

The short version of this story goes like this.

While living with a former boyfriend, in the winter of 1999-2000, I felt depressed and lonely one night while he was at work. So I went to an internet chatroom. I learned immediately that if you become emotionally attached to total strangers in a chatroom, they can disappear suddenly without warning and you have absolutely no way to ever contact them. Since I had no experience with chatrooms, I had no idea how bad it would be.

(I'm shortening the story! I go over the details of it in my mind, and more and more stuff appears.)

I met more than one person and then very quickly lost them, in a very brief period of time. This went on over a period of months. Then I started talking to a guy who called himself Nerdman. We had several conversations, but a few things went wrong, very early on. It's hard to remember exactly what was wrong. He was somehow being evasive or indirect with me. He spoke to me in symbols that I didn't understand, in such a way that it made fun of me. I hate to use the 'n-word,' naive, because it expresses contempt towards the person who was so-called naive. When you use that word it means that they ought to have known better, that they did something stupid, that it's bad to be naive - it's one of the words that bitter, cynical old people say to young people, to destroy their innocence. I think that being innocent is a good thing, not something to make fun of. So, I know OTHER people would have called me naive, but that's not the word I would use. I was trusting, and trust is a good thing, not a bad thing.

This type of incident is the exact reason why fans of the Myers-Briggs test, on the forums, have major flamewars over the intuitive/sensing variable. Intuitives speak in symbols. Sensors take things literally.

For instance, one of 'them' the other day wanted to give me a 'random phrase' using two totally irrelevant words that meant an impossible thing that couldn't exist. This was in the 'freefalling' blog. I caught it as soon as they said it. The random phrase was 'Siberian Butterflies.' Siberian butterflies? Impossible! There are no butterflies in Siberia. End of story. When I hear something like that I just dismiss it as random, and I pay no further attention to it. In that way, they put offensive, insulting symbols into my writing without my being aware of it. 'Siberian butterflies,' translated literally, means 'Frigid Female Genitalia.' And this type of 'encrypted' message happens all the time. They were making fun of me because of all the 'female problems' I was having with the tooth fillings.

In a mind control situation, or even in a real-person relationship, symbols can be used to secretly control and humiliate someone and make them look stupid. It works best if somebody else nearby is able to understand the meaning of the symbols. If you try this and it's only you and the victim, nobody else can appreciate how 'superior' you are. Imagine that I'm standing with two other people, both of whom are 'in on' the secret symbol jokes. One of them starts talking to me about Siberian butterflies. I have no clue what I'm talking about, so I innocently chat about Siberian butterflies, in my world where 'sometimes a cigar is only a cigar,' as Freud said. Meanwhile, the two other people are laughing over me because I have no idea that I'm actually talking about frigid female genitalia. Ha ha ha, we made Nicole talk about sexual organs when she didn't intend to talk about that.

So I distrust symbols because they're so often used to insult and degrade people. At least, with mind control victims, they are. If I had freedom of association - the freedom to spend time with people I like, and avoid people I dislike - I would not spend time with people who did that. But in a mind control situation, you have no choice about who you spend time with. You spend 24 hours a day with people you loathe. The criminals attacking you are disgusting, evil people who don't feel any guilt about ruining people's lives. I know it because I have lived through years and years of this and I have seen that they don't mind MAKING PEOPLE DIE. They really do not mind killing people. For victims who are more unfortunate than I have been, the result is a suicide or homicide. I was lucky to have just enough social support that I did not become completely, totally isolated - from likeable people who I CHOSE to spend my time with.

Not all symbol-users are malicious. Many of them, or most of them, are kind, loving, intelligent people who just think in a different way than I do. It's just something that the Myers-Briggs system explains. However, it only takes a couple of malicious jerks to ruin the privilege for everybody else. I hate all symbols because they're been used to make me look stupid or used as sexual harassment.

Well, getting back to the chatroom guy. He started doing things like that. He was talking about a goat. To me, a goat is only a goat. So, for some strange reason, we imagined this goat. But then he would tell me that the goat fell into a hole and it died. I got upset because the cute little imaginary goat got killed. I saw it as something like one of those little cyberpets, the cartoon animals that you click the mouse on and interact with them. Meanwhile, he was actually talking about sexual organs. That was his way of feeling superior and making fun of me, while avoiding talking about sex directly.

The intuitives (in the flamewars) would object to this description. They'd say 'It's supposed to be FUN talking to each other in secret symbols!' Yes, but that assumes that you both know what you're talking about. It isn't fun if one person takes it literally and the other person means it symbolically.

I can't even say the word 'flamewars' without worrying, now, because I just recently watched the movie 'A Series of Unfortunate Events,' and I've read all the books a while back and I know everything that happens in them. There's a lot of stuff about fire.

Nerdman used to be fascinated with nuclear bombs. To me, nuclear bombs were nothing but nuclear bombs. To a symbol-user, nuclear bombs are orgasms. I love the song 'We become silhouettes,' because it has a beautiful melody, and the content of the song seemed really sad, and somehow it triggered my feelings of loss and longing, very directly. I have that feeling, that millions of lives are being lost, people are dying and disappearing, people are taken away from me. I went to a webpage and read comments by some other people, and they loved the song exactly the same way I did, and they talked about how sad it was. But then, 'the voices' informed me that actually, he's talking about two people having sex, and the nuclear bombs represent orgasms. (He doesn't mention bombs directly in the song, although I haven't seen the video - maybe it's shown in the video. But 'silhouettes' comes from the observation that people and objects destroyed in a nuclear explosion sometimes leave recognizable shadows on the surface behind them.) That would mean that somebody out there is making fun of us, all of us who interpret the song as 'very sad' instead of 'very sexual.' Ha ha ha, all those ignorant fools think it's a sad, tragic song about grief and loss.

I've gotten used to the new interpretation, now, and it doesn't bother me as badly as it did in the beginning. But the 'original' interpretation is gone. I can no longer listen to the song and cry while imagining that it's the end of the world and people have died. There is relief in watching a 'tear-jerker' movie, sometimes - you need to be able to cry. I felt like that about that song.

I'm able to see it having both meanings at the same time, though. The interpretation can be non-logical. It's a bunch of contradictory interpretations thrown together that are 'additive' instead of logical. All the various ideas are together, not linear. It could be about a relationship that was lost and they used to have really good sex, or something. Or he doesn't have anybody, and he wishes he did.

For me personally, it was like a song about being stuck indoors all the time and avoiding the rest of the world because it wasn't a good place. The world might be collapsing and falling apart out there. I take walks sometimes, and I go shopping, but I almost always avoid socializing with anybody or doing anything fun, especially in recent years. I did more stuff when I was in college, when I lived in a dorm and had a group of friends nearby. But I didn't try to stay connected with them when I left college, because actually, they didn't respect me. I was really hyperactive back then and they thought I was just a silly, contemptible, weird person who didn't bother doing my homework. Some of them looked at me with envy and said, 'I wish *I* could just skip my homework!' There's nothing enviable about dropping out of classes, being unable to do what you want to do, and having no idea how to solve any of your problems. They thought I was LUCKY because I didn't care about anything. They thought that, of course, Nicole can't understand any real-world issues - she's naive. So that's why I didn't bother keeping in touch when I left school - you don't really want to continue talking to people who have no idea what your world is like.

Well, so here's what happened with Nerdman.

And this is obviously no longer a 'short version' of the story, since it went off into irrelevant tangents and my wordcount has exceeded whatever maximum wordcount I should have had. I've thought about doing that, just giving myself an arbitrary maximum number of words to use, no matter how difficult it would be to express it with that few words.

So, he was doing that secret-symbols thing, and I never really caught on to it. But I just started getting a bad feeling. I started getting a little angry but I couldn't explain why. It wasn't only the 'secret symbols.' He had a condescending attitude towards me.

I didn't do this consciously or deliberately - it was something that I did almost automatically: one day I went to the chatroom under another name, something he wouldn't recognize, and I just watched when he came in and he started asking around trying to find me - I just watched. I don't remember how I felt when I did this. I don't remember whether I felt numb - that's probably it. I also don't know whether this was something I did voluntarily, on my own, or whether I had begun experiencing 'puppet' phenomena yet. There's probably no way I'll ever know.

Well, I started talking to other people and avoiding him. And I left the chatroom for a week without warning him. I hadn't given him an email address. He had no way to contact me. So all he knew was that I was suddenly gone and he had no contact information. Then, I came back, but I went to a different room (at the same site). He found me in that room and we talked again. We finally gave each other our email addresses. It had been like something deliberate: we had avoided emailing each other, all those weeks, while talking, and it was based on mutual trust.

So we emailed each other a couple of times, and then, all of a sudden, he stopped replying.

I remembered something he told me. He told me that he had loved this one woman, once, but she had done something to insult him, humiliate him, really badly. He told me that he had 'punished' her by ignoring her forever afterwards while she desperately tried to apologize and make up with him. I understood this to mean somebody else, somebody he had known a long time ago.

I knew that that's exactly what was going on here. He stopped replying to my emails. It took a few tries and then I realized he wasn't going to reply anymore.

(It's interesting. I read a news article related to him. He was a teacher at a particular college, and the news article said that a friend of his committed suicide shortly after deciding to study psychic phenomena. I don't mean it's his fault. I just mean that he was associated with people interested in psychic phenomena, and that whatever the guy experienced, it was bad.)

So for a while, I was able to stop emailing him. I gave up and I was able to separate. But then, things started happening on my computer. Things started happening that led me to believe he was 'hacking into' my computer whenever I sent him emails. Back then, I knew absolutely nothing about computer hacking. I'm 33 years old. In my generation, we were only just beginning to get computers and the internet. Hacking was seen as something extremely rare and unusual that only happened with geniuses who had spent their entire lives obsessing over nothing but computers. I saw a couple movies that involved computer hacking: for instance, Wargames, and Ghost. (Ghost wasn't really about hacking, but it involved someone using a computer to steal money from bank accounts.)

So, back then, I had no idea that computer hackers had already gotten into every single computer system on the entire planet: the internet, the telephone systems, the videocamera systems, the cable TV and satellite systems, the credit and debit cards - everything. I gradually learned this, one attack at a time, one harassment incident at a time, as they demonstrated, one thing after another, this message: no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I see you, I watch you, I know what you're doing, I am superior, you are helpless and inferior, you cannot escape, it's hopeless. Your rage, your anger, your frustration, your ignorance, are all laughable, petty, ridiculous, contemptible. That is the message they sent to me.

So I observed things going wrong with my computer. Sometimes I misinterpreted ordinary events as being caused by hacking, when in fact they were my own fault. But other times I'm definitely sure that somebody was messing with the computer. I learned how to recognize things I was doing wrong, versus things that I could not possibly have caused to happen.

They started using it as a way to harass me, to get me angry and upset. If I stopped sending emails to Nerdman, they would do things to my computer. They gave me harassing telephone calls that could only have been arranged if someone had hacked into lots of OTHER computers, like the telemarketers' computer at credit card companies, or companies taking surveys. They were very specific. When I received the harassing phone calls, they would always be about something relevant, something I had been doing online, something I had written in an email to Nerdman, something they thought was entertaining or exciting or funny.

This is why I NEVER answer my landline phone. I don't have caller ID anymore on that phone. You know why I don't have caller ID anymore? Because they started using the caller ID as a means of harassing me. The information itself, on the caller ID message, would be something meaningful to me, even if I refused to pick up the phone. This isn't a real example, it's just something I'm making up, but imagine if I had written him an email about Siberian Butterflies. The phone would then ring, and the caller ID would show something having to do with Siberian Butterflies. I wouldn't even have to pick it up, I'd just read the caller's name, or whatever showed up on the little display.

They did the same thing to my Zone Alarm firewall. I used to try to understand the attacks on my firewall, when I first got it. But then, they would do these attacks where the information itself was meaningful, in whatever type of attack it was - I'd go to the zone alarm website, and I'd read that the attacker's location was Siberia. A real example: I went to Burlington Coat Factory once, and afterwards, I started getting calls and attacks that said 'Burlington.'

So I don't pick up the telephone. But they try to trick me into it. Nowadays I hear voices telling me that somebody really is trying to call me, and I'd really want to answer the phone, and they're desperately trying to reach me. But I know from past experience not to believe that for a second. It's happened many, many times before. They'd trick me into thinking it's Nerdman calling me, and I'd pick up and it's some telemarketer trying to sell butterflies (continuing on the 'Siberian Butterflies' example). They especially do that kind of thing if you're in the bathroom. They make the phone ring while you're in the bathroom, and they try to convince you that it's somebody you really, really want to talk to. If you were ever stupid enough to try to go answer the phone, it would be the harassing telemarketers as usual.

Then, somebody out there is laughing at me for being fooled by this trick for the 10,000th time, all over again. When they lie to you, you believe it. You can't help believing.

I developed a condition that psychologists call 'learned helplessness.' It means that something makes you so helpless, for so long, some kind of horrible traumatic abuse, something you can't avoid, that even if you are set free from the trapped situation, you just sit there and can't do anything, even if you're no longer in the cage. You could get up and walk away if you wanted to. The door is open, the grass is green, the sun is shining, and you could just walk out. But you don't, because from past experience, you know that it will all be a lie, everything will disappear, and someone will be laughing at you again.

For instance, I used to try fixing my computer, to get rid of viruses. I thought all hacking required a virus to be sent to the computer. I didn't know that there are a million ways to do it, and it isn't as simple as just a virus. (I read a book called Counter Hack which explained some of the techniques.) So I would scan for viruses, but it would show nothing - and then one of the incidents would occur. Or I would erase my whole hard drive and reinstall Windows - only to have another 'incident' as soon as Windows started up, when I had not yet even connected to the internet. I remember doing more and more extreme things to clear the viruses out - for instance, I learned that you must unplug the computer until the power shuts down completely, to get rid of anything in the memory, at a particular moment while you're doing the procedures to clean off the hard drive. Otherwise, the memory could have a virus that would reinstall itself on a new clean hard drive.

I gave up on all that, because no matter what I did, no matter what I learned, no matter how thorough I thought I was, they would instantly do more attacks to get my attention, or find new ways to send messages to me indirectly. No matter what I did, they ruined it immediately.

So what does this have to do with the holocaust? And the intensity of feeling? The level of abuse, the horror of it, the fact that it was not at all trivial, it was in fact very severe and very serious, even life-threatening?

Who was doing it? I don't know. Of course I thought it was Nerdman. But over time I started thinking it was probably somebody else, some opportunist. Someone had walked in, seen what was happening, and decided it looked like a fun game to play, so they would add fuel to the fire and watch what happens. So really, it's more likely an unknown person, or several people, or lots and lots of people by now.

I started thinking that there was only one way to get out of this situation: I had to abandon my identity, change my name, give up my social security number, and leave the United States and become a citizen of another country. I started making plans for how exactly I was going to do this. It was extremely difficult. I found out that you can purchase citizenship in another country, some tiny little place in South America, for $40,000, or something - at least, that was true several years ago - I'm sure it isn't anymore. I researched methods for creating a fake identity. Again, it's not easy to create a fake identity. I wanted to make a fake ID so that I could continue using things like the telephone system, and the hackers wouldn't know who I was.

I changed my telephone number multiple times. I changed my email address over and over too. Every time I did, the phone calls and harassing emails would start again.

As I tried to tell people what was going on, they told me I was paranoid. They thought I wasn't observant enough to truly understand the difference between random accidents, mistakes I had made myself, versus actual hacking and harassment - but I did, in fact, become very good at telling the difference between accidents and attacks. They told me that computers just spontaneously did random things, with absolutely no cause whatsoever, out of nowhere, and that it was not possible to comprehend the series of events that led to the incident.

But I was the best at understanding computers, in most situations, when I worked at temp jobs in offices. Aside from the official tech support people, the official IT department, the guys hired to do that particular job - aside from those people, I was always the convenient, unofficial, local expert on 'What do I do when the computer does THIS?' Where did that icon go when I clicked and dragged it over on top of that other icon? Why is the window so small? Why won't this Excel file print at the right size? Anytime those trivial things happened, people always asked me how to fix it. I didn't have a lot of training in computers, except for the programs that I had been taught at the temp agency - how to use Excel, etc. I was just observant.

Maybe I'm bragging about that, maybe I brag about being good at something or intelligent about something - but that was an issue over and over again. People were always telling me that I could not possibly know what I knew, that I couldn't possibly be right about anything I observed, that (they implicitly meant) I could not possibly be intelligent enough to really understand what I was talking about. There was no respect at all. When I 'brag' about being smart at something, this is happening after years and years of people telling me, 'no, you're not - you're stupid, you're incompetent, you're ignorant, you're crazy, you're paranoid, you're mentally ill.'

The anger and rage that I felt got worse and worse. I told people about it, and they said that I was 'scared' of the hackers. But I wasn't scared at all - I was furious. I wanted to kill someone to make the harassment end. All I can say is that I'm lucky I found out the things I know now.

Whenever I'd really insist on quitting the emails - whenever I was able to stop writing to Nerdman - something would happen. I would start to feel a physical sensation, an emotion, that felt like somebody was really sad and hurt and lonely, like a cute little kid I would feel sorry for. The feeling would become unbearable. The sad little kid would be so painfully lonely that I MUST write him a letter. If I didn't it would be terrible. Later on, I learned that this is actually an electronic harassment attack. But back then, I just thought that I was 'psychic.'

The phones would ring, the electricity would turn on and off, and other strange things would happen, and I would resist writing a letter. They started doing things to my family members instead of me, and then my mother or somebody would call me on the phone, and innocently, not knowing the significance, they would casually tell me, 'Ha ha ha, I just got the funniest email about Siberian Butterflies!' Or it would be something they couldn't have even emailed. They would just make people say things, directly - and I would try as hard as I could to rationalize some explanation for how they could have known about this thing.

But the longer I resisted writing emails, the more extreme the demonstrations would become - and they would show me just how many various systems they controlled, and what they could do. So I learned that anything that runs on electricity can be hacked, basically - that's a good rule of thumb. Anything connected to any kind of network, or, anything NOT connected to a network! Everything. But that was only a more recent learning - I wasn't aware of that stuff at first, the physical attacks on physical objects. Like the clicking noises. And the voices in people's heads, and the physical attacks on their bodies. That was the last thing I learned about, all the psychotronic attacks.

It was a long series of events, one after another. That's why it was so hard to explain to anybody. I had to start at the beginning, and, using a chronological, linear story, I had to say 'First this happened, then this happened, which proved X.' The chronological stories got longer and longer. If you tried to explain something, starting in the middle of the story, then people couldn't even begin to understand what on earth you were even talking about. (How exactly do you know for sure that Siberian Butterflies really means frigid female genitalia?)

Each demonstration proved to me that they were capable of hacking this or that particular system. I thought the phones were safe until the proved that they were hacking the phones. I thought the electricity had nothing to do with hacking, but they made the electricity go on and off. And so on. Everything that I thought was safe, they demonstrated to me, one thing after another, that it was being controlled by somebody malicious, somebody who wanted to say 'ha ha, I'm better than you are.'

It wasn't just about them being better than I was. It was about people being taken away from me. I felt loss and grief because I missed Nerdman - or, rather, I mistakenly THOUGHT that I missed an imaginary representation of him, which wasn't really him. He became just a symbol for somebody I missed. Every time the attacks occurred, they tried to tell me Nerdman was the one doing it. But that's the worst part of it: somebody is right there, interacting with you, but you can't reach them. He was watching everything I did, and I just wanted to have a real, human friendship with him, but instead he just harassed me on the computers, and avoided me as a real person.

So I decided that the opportunists must have taken over, and they knew that actually, I didn't want them. I only wanted the original Nerdman, not them. So they hid themselves, so I wouldn't see who it really was - I'd believe it was Nerdman, but actually it was random guy #209387.

Well, that was how I learned to hate hackers as I hated evil incarnate.

It was only in the more recent years, after I learned about mind control, that I finally mellowed out about computer hacking. Mind control is much worse than computer hacking. Computer hacking is somewhat avoidable. But you can't avoid mind control attacks.

I learned that nowadays people just download programs and methods to look into other people's computers and it doesn't require a genius to spend his whole life studying nothing but computers in order to know how to do it.

They still think that I didn't quite explain how exactly the holocaust describes this feeling. It's a feeling of being enslaved, made to do something horrible that you don't want to do. The abuse is unavoidable and it ruins every moment of your life, both awake and asleep. It's a feeling that every hour of your day, you're actually stuck in a cage, a zoo, where somebody sees everything going on, constantly, every second, and there's not a moment of being alone. They don't merely watch - they interact. If they only watched, it would be less bad. But they never stop attacking.

Everything I know about the holocaust, I learned from Schindler's List. Those are the images in my mind. I don't study the holocaust, I don't read about it, I don't focus on it very much, I don't know much about it - but I've seen that movie, and I really like the movie. And seeing people as slaves, as tools, as puppets, in a situation they can't escape from - when their potential is suppressed - who would these people become if they lived without the puppet strings? What would they do, what would they feel, what would they say, what would they care about?

When I see people that way, it DOES feel like Schindler's List. We don't see the overt violence. We don't see people being shot and killed or people being burned. We don't see actual concentration camps. We don't see that kind of thing here. Instead everything going on is happening in some invisible way, in some other place.

I feel like the people here, the puppets, the mind control victims, the pawns in the game, are someone's slaves in the concentration camp. We're starving, deprived, suffering, alone, sleepless, harassed, abused, helpless. You lose people, for reasons you can't control, but then you're led to believe you'll get them back if only you jump through eighteen flaming hoops, to do exactly what they want you to do - and if only you fulfill those conditions, you'll get what you want, and it'll be a nice 'reward' for you.

What if the 9-11 hijackers came to this country to avoid something similar going on in their country? What if they were merely puppets of somebody else, led to believe that if only they could destroy this or that particular building, it would bring down the system? If only they could do that, it would save the lives of everybody else? What if everything I feel, when I feel locked in a prison, harassed and abused all day and all night, is exactly what they feel now, in Guantanamo, in Abu Ghraib, in all the other abusive prisons where, in reality, we probably aren't learning much useful information by torturing them anyway?

Who knows where 'it' comes from, the mind control? Who knows how it's being done? Who knows what exactly is the system that needs to be brought down in order to end the attacks?

I'm worn out - it's late at night - and the story isn't even close to the end. It doesn't really end. It reaches the present time. And once it does that, you can go back again and find more stuff to tell. Something interpreted differently, something forgotten. So I'll work on it later, some other time.