easy pickings

10:15 AM 6/29/10

Warning, this one's really long.  I couldn't stop writing.  Today, I actually put the tag 'true romance' on my blog, because I looked at a true romance magazine yesterday, and I saw that this really is the genre that I am writing.

The 'easy pickings' strategy.

They woke me up this morning with the 'psychopath' feeling. There is this 'feeling,' a very specific feeling, a feeling of profound and extreme distrust, which represents the idea of a psychopath. I had to fight against the 'psychopath' belief system.

The 'psychopath' idea started a long time ago. I remember when I was a teenager, I was probably being interrogated by some attacker, but back then, I thought that it was a 'psychic' experience that I was having when I talked to voices in my head. I was being interrogated by someone who wondered if there was such a thing as absolute evil, and they were distrusting, and they asked me if *I* was evil. A soulless robot, unable to feel guilty about anything. Everything it does is insincere. Everything it does is manipulative, done to accomplish a purpose. I was aware of this idea all the way back when I was a teenager. I remembered it again in 2000 or so when I read John Douglas's books about serial killers. (It can also be called a sociopath. There are some slight differences between them.)

Maybe they woke me up with that feeling today because yesterday I wrote about the 'killing your best friend' dream. I'm not sure if I'm the best person to explain this, since it's not really 'my thing.'

If I wander too far off topic, I won't be able to explain the 'easy pickings' idea. I'll just say that really quickly and then go on to the other subject. The 'easy pickings' idea is this: Curtis is impossible to reach, by phone, email, text message, or even handwritten note. He responds to them, by changing his behavior, by being more trusting and affectionate towards me after reading a note, but he doesn't respond to direct questions or do things I ask him to do.

I see him as an 'at-risk youth.' He doesn't mind the idea of going into the military. He doesn't wear a seat belt. He gets drunk and goes driving his car. He lost his license but I know he is still driving, so sooner or later, he might possibly have another conflict with the law again.

Some of this might possibly fit the description of 'poor judgment,' in the description of what happens to a fetal alcohol syndrome baby. It changes the brain in ways that cause a person to have learning disabilities and poor judgment. His condition is mild, because they say that the more facial deformities you have, the more severe it is, and his face is relatively normal, except that he might have a cleft lip scar - there is a scar above his lip and I don't know if it was caused by an accident or cleft lip surgery. He might have a slightly reduced philtrum, the groove that runs from the nose to the lips, but if I recall, it looks like he still does have one. I'm not sure. I can't usually get a close enough look. Okay, I looked at a photo, and he does have one, but it isn't a very deep one. It varies from person to person anyway.

The TV show that I watched at Peter's house a few weeks ago showed 'at-risk youth' going into the military, and some of them came home and committed crimes and ended up in jail.

I don't want anything to happen to him, and it's clear that he is an 'at-risk youth.' In that respect, he is a victim, someone born with a problem or tendency that isn't his fault, born into a world that wasn't able to fix the problem. At the same time, there is only so much that I can do. I'm too poor to bail him out of jail or buy him new cars. I can only provide moral support. I can be someone he runs to whenever his girlfriends break up with him. But I live too far away to easily give him rides in my car, and anyway, I don't want him getting any drug residues on his shoes, and I'm the weird lady with plastic all over her car seats, so it wouldn't look good to have me driving him up to his friends' houses or wherever he was trying to go. So I can't even do much for him. And if I can't contact him and get a reply by any means, email, phone, or anything, then I can't even talk to him and find out what kind of relationship he would be willing to have with me.

So when I say 'easy pickings' I mean that sooner or later I just can't waste any more effort trying to do something that can't be done. I can find easier people to 'hang out' with, people who I can actually reach by phone or email. Even if it's not his fault, even if he can't answer the phone because he's being attacked, even if the phone calls don't get through, and those things aren't his fault, still, I can find people who are easier to reach. I can't do much for him anyway. I can enjoy his company, and he can enjoy mine. Other than that, I can't do much.

'They' have this idea that he represents 'the enemy,' in a way - that the button-pushers, as I call them, the people who are actually operating the electronic harassment equipment, the computers and devices and weapons being used to attack me, are in a lot of ways just like him. That sounds like 'the military' to me. The 'at-risk youth' go into the military, and they do what they're told, and they can't build a better life for themselves because they have reading and writing and math disabilities, and poor judgment, and poor self-control, and the military offers them a better paying job. And apparently the 'button pushers' are in a similar situation. They get paid to do what they do. So 'they' want me to see him as a lovable version of 'the enemy.' Look at what your enemies would be if they were cute and lovable and someone you felt attracted to and devoted to, someone you couldn't help loving no matter what they did to you.

I have to quickly mention the reason why I made the name 'button-pushers.' When the attacks first began, I assumed that the voice I heard in my head was actually being sent to me by the person who was saying whatever I heard. Like, if you heard a famous celebrity speaking to you (and no, I didn't usually hear the voices of celebrities, but this is just an example), you would believe that that person, theirself, was operating the equipment and talking to you. (I'm having a grammar problem. I don't like how English doesn't have a genderless pronoun for 'they' and 'them' with 'self.' You can say 'themselves' if it's plural, but you can't say it if it's singular. I want to say 'he or she himself or herself.' You know what I mean.)

To make that more clear, let's imagine that I said something to somebody else, like 'Hi, how are you?' and someone else recorded me saying that. Then, somebody plays back the recording, and beams it into somebody's head, so they mistakenly believe that I'm the one pushing the buttons on the device that's beaming it into their head, and I'm right that very moment saying 'Hi, how are you?' I would get blamed for talking to them, because it was MY voice they heard in their head. It's a way to trick someone into attacking innocent people. 'I kept hearing YOUR voice in my head! You must be an attacker!' But actually that's not true. It was recorded earlier, and even though it's my voice, I might have nothing to do with it at all. I'm not the one who tape recorded it and then beamed it into someone's head. The voice you hear might not actually be sent to you from the person who spoke the words.

After my cat Alexander died, it was a week or two later, and somebody beamed a recording of Alexander's meow into my head. His voice was recognizable. You can recognize a cat's individual voice the same way you recognize a person's. It was perfectly clear. Obviously, since I had seen Alexander's dead body and buried it myself, I knew Alex wasn't alive, and he wasn't meowing to me, and he certainly wasn't pushing buttons on an electronic harassment weapon. That's a clear demonstration showing that the voice you hear might not be the same person operating the equipment.

So I had lots of times when little scripted scenarios were going on in my head, in the beginning, especially back when I was using St. John's Wort, and I would fight with the voices and tell them I wanted to kill them and I would fantasize about killing them. They would respond by doing even more things to torture me and make me enraged. That is why I call them the murderers, because they REALLY DO try to enrage the victims and make them go postal and go out and shoot people. They REALLY DO try to make you do that. It has happened to me, except usually when they do it to me, they claim they're trying to protect me and prevent me from doing anything. I think that I have had an easier time than many other electronic harassment victims who describe much more horrible things happening to them.

The scripted fantasy scenarios would often involve a 'nice' person who was trying to help me, and I would respond by getting enraged at that person and threatening them. After a while, I realized that the 'nice' person probably wasn't the one actually pushing buttons on a device to put their voice in my head. In fact, the 'nice' person might, for all I know, be someone far away who thinks he's having a 'psychic experience.' He might fantasize that he's astral-projecting into the mind of someone who 'needs help,' when actually, a 'button-pusher,' the person operating a piece of equipment, is recording everything he says, beaming it into my head, and beaming my replies back to him. He and I are talking to each other through a system controlled by the murderers, but neither of us are actually operating the system. We both might interpret it as a 'psychic' experience.

That's the reason why I made up the phrase 'button-pushers' to refer to the people who are actually operating a piece of equipment, as opposed to the people who are speaking, the voices I hear, the people who interact with me - they might innocently think they're just having a 'psychic' experience with me.

Every time I write about something like this, I get attacks from people who try to imitate whatever I was describing. But those imitation attacks are usually the cheap, low-tech attacks, the kind of equipment that you can build in your own home. The attacks that I'm describing are much quieter and more subtle. The low-tech attacks usually silence my entire brain, put me into a trance for a second or two, and override everything I was thinking and doing, for a second, and if it goes on too long, I forget everything that they said to me while I was in the trance. I can only remember the last little bit of what they said. And it often has poor audio quality, like a badly tuned radio with static. Those are the low-tech attacks.

The high-tech attacks are much quieter, and they don't put me into a trance quite as badly. I feel like I can still remain conscious and functioning while I talk back to them, instead of being completely silenced and disabled. So I can have an actual conversation with the voices, while still being awake and not getting my brain 'shut off' and put into a temporary trance while a badly-tuned audio voice blanks out everything in my mind for a few seconds. It feels more 'real,' like 'psychic' experiences would feel.

I remember reading about a spelling bee contest. There were only a few kids left. When the one kid went up and it was his turn, he started to fumble on a word he couldn't spell. Suddenly, he collapsed to the floor. Then he stood up, and miraculously, he was suddenly able to spell the word he couldn't spell! It came to him in a vision when he fell to the floor. Can you say 'blatant, broad-daylight, cheating?' Somebody was betting money on him, I'm sure, and to win their money, they would use any means necessary to tell him how to spell his word. But the particular type of attack that they used is a blunt, clumsy, low-tech attack that causes you to black out and go into a trance, instead of being able to continue standing up and staying awake. Most of the time when I hear voices, I'm able to stay awake and look like everything is normal. But the spelling bee kid - and yes, I think he won the competition - was attacked by someone who didn't have the means to do a more subtle attack.

(The same kind of thing is able to help you win or lose a sports bet. You can cause someone to trip and fall, do something clumsy, that kind of thing. There are many ways electronic attacks can influence a sporting event. It would be like Hermione using a Confundus charm - except this is muggle magic. And they like to see themselves as doing magic, and they like to make references to Harry Potter, but in reality, it's a much more sad situation than that.)

Well, I am going to go back to the beginning and pick up a topic I left off. This is the topic I didn't feel like I was an expert on. I can give it a sympathetic view now.

When I first started noticing the computer harassment, it was the year 2000, and I had started visiting chatrooms and talking to Nerdman. Nerdman did a few things to me that I didn't understand, and wasn't expecting, back then. For instance, he talked about sex in a symbolic way, and I took him literally and didn't notice the sexual symbolism. It was his way of being secretive and superior to me - he ALWAYS used a secretive, intellectually superior way of talking, using big words and obscure references to literature, to say things without saying them, and I found it annoying, because sometimes I would figure out that it was sexual symbolism, or at least, later on I figured it out. He was talking about a 'goat', and the 'goat' fell into a 'hole', where it 'died.' And actually, I find this very annoying and irritating when I write about it - I can't even laugh about it now, years later. That's how annoying it was to me. I HATE when people are being secretly symbolic and using it as a way to be superior over me when I'm taking them literally, when I am a trusting innocent person and someone else is secretly insulting me, thinking he's superior because I'm too stupid to understand what he's talking about. The 'goat' was a penis, the 'hole' was a vagina, and 'death' meant that the penis had an orgasm and wasn't erect anymore and became soft again. To me, goats, holes, and death were all literal. So I was chatting to him in the chatroom and I was upset because he was talking about the cute little goat dying again and I just thought he was being weird and I couldn't explain it. Ha ha, very funny.

Well, one day, I forget how it started. Something happened that caused a disruption. I forget what it was. I said he was having trouble writing, or something, and there must be an earthquake going on and the building was going to collapse, or something like that. I was being literal and I was pretending. But he responded to this by starting up his sexual symbolism again. So he went along with the pretending and then he said that I, Nicole, was in the building and a piano fell on me and I died.

I wasn't expecting that he would kill me in a chatroom fantasy. I didn't know about electronic mind control back then, so I can't say whether my feelings and emotions were real or fake. But I felt an intense, humiliated, violated, traumatized feeling, and an extreme distrust and fear. I started to think that he actually might be a serial killer, someone who enjoyed killing people, for fun, for sexual entertainment. I felt extremely disrespected. To even TALK about killing someone, to talk directly to the person about it, to say things like 'I'm going to kill you,' is very disrespectful.

That was when I started reading the John Douglas books. I also read fiction books that Nerdman himself talked about. One of his favorite authors was Richard Powers. In the Richard Powers books, there were several scenes where a woman died, and the narrator of the story was fascinated with the woman's death. Nerdman also talked about other movies and stories that involved the death of a woman. There was one, and I hope I can remember the name of it - 'In Dreams.' It's a movie about a teacher who starts having a psychic connection to a serial killer. She uses the psychic connection to go find him, and I'm giving a spoiler here, but, in the end, she dies, although he does too, and it's supposed to be a happy ending because the serial killer is defeated. But in reality, the death of the woman is the main focus of the movie.

Back then, when this was going on, when I felt extremely disrespected and traumatized because of Nerdman talking about my death, and giving me references to fiction books and movies about the death of women, I started to *HATE* anybody who connected death and sex.

There are actually lots of movies and stories that show the death of a woman, and that death is the highlight of the movie, the most important thing in the movie, the thing we were all eagerly waiting for. Some people watch the movie, and see it as a tragedy, and say, 'Ugh, I didn't like that movie, that was a terrible ending, I wish she had survived.' That's *MY* response when I see those movies. And some people just like tragedies, and they enjoy being sad and miserable, and even if it's isn't a sexual fantasy, they just want to see a movie with a sad ending because they like sad endings. They watch Romeo and Juliet and they think it's 'cathartic', and they think it's romantic that Romeo and Juliet are 'together in eternity.' (I'm thinking of 'Don't Fear The Reaper,' a Blue Oyster Cult song, and I actually like that song. There was a remake of it recently.) Other people, however, think it's a happy ending BECAUSE the woman died. To them, it's the sexual fantasy that nobody else can see, and they're secretly enjoying it while everyone else is responding in a different way.

Well, over time, I gradually stopped worrying as much about this. I found out that I was being electronically attacked, and mind control was real. I used to fear that I was being stalked by a serial killer, but when I found out that mind control was real, I decided that if they wanted to kill me, they could do it anytime they wanted to, and I had no control over it. So why worry about it. There's nothing I can do. They can push a button, and cause me to have a car accident. They can make me sleepwalk, and go kill myself in the middle of the night, without knowing I did it. Maybe they can push a button that will directly shut off my brain or suffocate me or make my heart stop beating. I don't know what they can do, but I know enough to realize that if they wanted to kill me, they would and they could, at any random moment. That actually made me LESS worried, strangely enough. It was a sort of grim resignation. It was the realization that there are people attacking me and it's up to them whether I live or die, because I don't know who they are and I can't retaliate, I can't fight back. I can only focus on those things that I have control over, instead of worrying about things that I can't control.

It can give you a false sense of security. You might think you're safe from everything, because the mind controllers are watching you constantly. But that's not true either. You still have to take care of yourself. They don't control every molecule that moves in the universe. They don't control every random accident that happens. And there's more than one group of people controlling things. There isn't a monopoly, one single ruler of the world controlling everything. Instead, there are different groups and individuals fighting for their territory, fighting to control particular people, fighting to 'own' particular 'slaves' who are high value to them. One person's slave might attack another person's slave. It isn't all controlled by the same person. There's more than one 'ruler of the world.' There are many, and they're not all friends with each other.

Over the years I mellowed out a little bit and I don't worry so much anymore if I see people connecting death and sex. It's actually pretty common. There are different ways people do it. There are subcultures and fiction stories and movies that do this in different ways. Vampire culture, vampire movies and stories, that's a way of talking about erotic death. I don't freak out about it as much as I used to.

They brought Curtis into my life, and I say that 'they brought' him, because, by coincidence, he suddenly started working with me right after Martin left, and the voices talked to me about him immediately, and he was exactly the kind of guy that I would like, and I liked him as soon as I met him. He has this status: 'Curtis can do no wrong.' No matter what he does, I always like him again, and I can't help it.

I've seen his MySpace page, briefly, although I can't go there now, and he has erotic vampire-goth images on there. He also has similar things in his facebook page.  I have to add something that I forgot to mention.  Although it sort of seems like erotic death, it is also an expression of his own unbearable pain and suffering.  I had to go look at the images again, on facebook, and some of it is about suicide.  It fits with the 'screamo' genre of music, some of which I listened to, that expresses the unbearable pain by screaming.  This is something that I sympathize with.  However, in this blog I was focused on the 'erotic death' interpretation more than I was focused on the 'unbearable suffering' interpretation, but I had to mention it.

Some of it came from his mother, and it's an accepted thing in their family. His mother seems to be a sexual instinctual type too, and she has lots of tattoos, and some piercings, and she accidentally attracts men without wanting to. It happened when she worked at Nittany Mall McDonald's with me, years ago, for a short time before she quit. That's how I met her. She used to talk in a flirtatious way with the boss, but she might not have realized how flirtatious she was being, and how much she encouraged him. It wasn't long before the boss did a real-life, blatant, sexual harassment incident with her. (He did similar things to a couple of other women who worked there, too, but fortunately, he didn't do anything to me - I wasn't his type, and he wasn't mine, and I couldn't stand him, and I found him sexually repulsive.) She was doing overnight cleaning, and he asked her to meet him in the bathroom for something, in a few minutes. She assumed that he wanted to show her some task or cleaning project she was going to do. It was unexpected. She walked into the bathroom and found him standing there with his shirt off, and he asked her to massage his back. She told me this story, and she was ashamed and disgusted and afraid. I don't remember if she actually DID massage his back, or if she walked out, or what. I don't know. After that, she was talking to me about it, and other people, and she didn't know what to do, and she wanted to tell some authority about it. And I don't remember who she told, but she just quit and left after a while. It happened to some other people too, and that manager still works at McD, but he went to a different store.

I didn't know she was Curtis's mother. Once, I saw her walking around Weis, before I knew Curtis, before he worked at Weis. I saw that she was walking with a young guy in his teens, and for some reason, I thought he was her boyfriend. I'm not joking. I really, actually believed that she had a very young boyfriend. I didn't know he was her son. When I saw them together it seemed like they were dating, not family. One reason that I didn't understand was because he seemed too old to be her son. She's in her thirties, and he's in his late teens, so she had him when she was in her young teens. Something about them, their behavior, their intimacy, gave off boyfriend-girlfriend vibes when I saw them, and I felt a combination of disapproval, envy, and amazement. (Yesterday when I was writing about the 'weird dream' idea, where something really strange is happening but everyone thinks it's normal, the voices were mentioning another 'weird dream' idea, which was: 'You mean, I can fuck my mother FOR REAL, like I always wanted to?' That was partly referring to his mother, but it was also referring to me as an older woman only one year younger than his mother.)

So after he and I knew each other - I didn't recognize him as 'the guy I once saw walking around with Sabrina' - he informed me that I knew his mother, Sabrina, and she worked with me at McD years ago.

When he told me this, I was shocked and stunned, and then I became distrusting and afraid. I had a very intense reaction of fear and distrust. I remembered Sabrina getting sexually harassed, after openly flirting with the manager, and encouraging him. I had already gotten a crush on Curtis, who did the same thing, openly flirting with me and encouraging me. So I got scared that he was going to turn around and say that I was sexually harassing him. I felt very afraid and distrusting after that. I reacted very strongly when he told me who his mother was. He seemed to enjoy my reaction - he smiled, I think, if I recall correctly, because he could see that I was shocked and surprised - but he didn't understand all the things I was thinking and all the things I was afraid of. I can't remember why I thought he enjoyed the reaction. To him it might have seemed like I was afraid of her, afraid of Sabrina somehow. I think that's partly true, I probably am afraid of her somehow, or threatened by her, and jealous of her. I can't explain why but he seemed to enjoy my reaction.

The vampire-goth culture seems to come from her, and I don't know how much of it comes from within Curtis himself. Some of it might be because that's an accepted thing in their family. Tattoos are an accepted thing in their family, and she has lots of tattoos. I don't like tattoos, and 'the voices' were threatening me, telling me that they were going to force him to get the urge to get more tattoos. That scares me, because I see it as permanent destruction of beauty - I don't see it as making him more beautiful or more attractive.  He has freckles all over his arms.  He has tattoos on the underside of his arms, but if he got new ones on top of his arms, it would destroy the freckles so that you couldn't see them anymore.  And not just his arms, but all of his skin, I see it as being destroyed instead of enhanced by tattoos.

Some of the vampire-goth culture, in his pictures, in the images he collected off the internet, has erotic death themes. Or not necessarily erotic, but creepy death fascination, a focus on death, an interest in death and corpses. I saw this early on, in his jewelry - I loved his jewelry right away, and I was always asking him about whatever he was wearing. He has little metal skulls attached to his shoelaces and I remember commenting about those a long time ago when I was getting to know him. Somehow, 'Curtis can do no wrong.' When HE has an eroticized obsession with death and goth and skulls and vampires and blood, somehow it's sexy when it never was before. He once told me that he wanted to buy a hearse, and put a coffin in the back of it (and although he didn't explain this, I understood that you're supposed to have sex with someone in the coffin in the back of the car). He put dark tints on the back windows so you can't see inside. He's decorated parts of his car with neon lights, and he's put in his own stereo with a sub-bass, and he showed me these things. I never cared about those things before, I never liked neon lights added to cars, I never cared about what kind of stereo someone has, I never cared about tinted windows, but suddenly, when HE did it, I liked all of those things, they were great, they were sexy.

I had the same reaction to his image collection. I liked all of it, even though years ago I *hated* anybody who connected death/murder with sex in any way at all. He has one image of a man and woman kissing while one of them holds a gun, and the other holds a knife, if I recall, each one about to kill the other. It actually reminds me of an image I drew, years ago, when I was painting with the Caran Dache aquarelle crayons. I drew two people kissing and I drew their tongues twisting together, and it was a beautiful, sexy, erotic picture. I want to scan, or photograph, my paintings and put them on the internet someday, but right now, they're in a box in the storage unit. I used to draw and paint a lot and I sometimes drew erotic pictures, sometimes pictures of people kissing and touching each other. The images he collected reminded me of my own drawings, except there was the goth-like, vampire-like focus on blood, death, murder, suicide, and similar themes. But I felt the sense of them, the passion they express, and I understood it.

I just remembered two things that happened. Don't let me forget - one was the butt tattoo, the other was the handcuffs. I have to tell both stories. There was a girl who worked with us for a short time, and her name was also Becka - there were two people named Becka. She saw me talking to Curtis, and I hadn't mentioned anything to her at all about having a crush on him, about how much I liked him. I hadn't said anything. But she saw the way we talked to each other, and she said, 'Nicole's going to get your name tattooed on her butt.' When she said that I started laughing uncontrollably. It was so perceptive and accurate even though I hadn't told her anything. I was embarrassed, but I had to admit she was right, it was true. I didn't say anything to her, I didn't tell her how I felt about him, but she could tell by watching me.

The other incident: Christina was talking to me, and I forget why she said this. Something about committing a crime, or getting in trouble for doing something, or having to call the police. We were joking. She used to live next door to Curtis before they moved, and so they knew each other for years, and she's friends with his mother, so she's been to their house and she knew about his collection of knives, swords and other things. So she blurts out something like, 'We can go get Curtis's handcuffs,' or 'We can put Curtis's handcuffs on you,' something like that. My reaction was to get very embarrassed and I started laughing. The next thing she did was call him over to talk to us, and she told him that I wanted him to put me in his handcuffs, and I said, 'SHE'S the one who said that. *I* didn't say that!' I was laughing. 'Mortified' would be the word to describe it. This was another one of those rare exceptions. I never thought about handcuffs before and I wouldn't have wanted to be handcuffed, but with him, the idea of it was sexy.

I said that 'button-pushers' refers to the people who are operating the mind control equipment. But I sometimes say it in a metaphorical way too. He pushes all the right buttons in the right order - whatever he does it somehow works out and I like it.

I don't remember if I was supposed to go back to an unfinished topic or not, so I have to reread this...

My understanding of the death-sex connection is that ... well, this is hard to explain. Sometimes, something reminds us of something else. Or it's an image, or feeling, which is exaggerated or made more extreme. There was a word for this. I was reading about it recently. I was reading about instincts and about how animals respond to certain triggers or images. If you exaggerate the trigger image, they will respond more strongly to the fake thing than they do to the real thing. An example is a brightly colored fish. The male fish is brightly colored, and any males who see him know that he is the enemy, and they will attack. But if you make a fake fish, and the fake one is even more brightly colored than the real one, they'll attack the fake fish and ignore the real one. If you exaggerate or intensify the trigger image, they'll be more interested in the fake thing than the real thing. You can also put fake pheromones on something, and animals and insects will be more attracted to that than they are to the real animals putting out their pheromones, because the fake ones are so much stronger.

Some sexual fetishes, in humans, seem to be like that. It exaggerates something sexy, making it more extreme, so that you like the exaggerated fake image more than the real one. It's not just images, it's also sensations and ideas. If you make them more extreme or more exaggerated then they trigger sexual feelings more than the real world does. I respond very strongly to the image of pregnant women's bellies. The bigger they are, the more erotic it is. When I see it, I'm not thinking in a lesbian way that I want to have sex with the woman. I'm thinking of my own desire to have sex and get pregnant. I feel a sort of empathic sensation of my own belly being pregnant, and a feeling of envy, when I see someone else's.

It's similar to the gluttony fetish, but not exactly the same. The gluttony fetish exaggerates or makes extreme the sensation you feel in your stomach from eating. It happened to me the other day. I had just eaten and I took a walk, and one of the places I went to was a park with swings. I always like to swing on the swings. But swinging with a full stomach gave me an intense tickling sensation in my stomach, and it was somehow extremely pleasant, and extremely unpleasant at the same time, so I stopped swinging. That tickly feeling is involved in the gluttony fantasy and with bingeing and purging behavior. I'm phobic about vomiting, and I will do *ANYTHING* to avoid vomiting, but at the same time, I know how it feels to get a sort of 'reward' sensation after vomiting, maybe an opiate release? I don't know. A feeling of great relief and pleasure after the vomiting is over, a flood of numbness and relaxation - still, for me, it's not worth it, and the fear of vomiting is much worse than any 'reward' for vomiting. But some people don't mind it and they don't mind bingeing and purging. The gluttony fetish exaggerates and makes extreme that tickly sensation in your stomach from eating, and it exaggerates the images, and the empathy you feel with those images. It's not just the stomach, it's the entire abdomen that's able to feel that way, and it can sometimes happen with hormones or drugs too, anything that's an aphrodisiac.  The aphrodisiac can make your abdomen feel that way even if you haven't eaten much.

So I think that the death-and-sex connection is something similar to that. After an orgasm your entire body relaxes and becomes limp. It was an extreme experience similar to dying, similar to being killed. That is how I understand it.

Other people interpret it differently - to them, if you kill someone, it is about domination and power, about ownership, about being superior to the person you killed. That was how I felt whenever Nerdman pretended to kill me in the chatroom, when I wasn't expecting it - I felt that it was a terrible, disrespectful act of domination, something meant to humiliate me and make me feel small and helpless, and I did *NOT* enjoy it. It wasn't erotic at that time, in that way.

It's hard to describe where the boundary lines are, where the gray areas end, because the vampire-goth fantasies also have some domination and control themes, but it's much milder and it doesn't offend me. This is partly because vampires are doing something that I actually enjoy: biting people on the neck. That by itself is erotic, and it's enjoyable to the person being bitten. Nerdman, on the other hand, was just interested in the death itself and it didn't even have any connection, by my understanding, to doing something that would have been enjoyable anyway. With him, it was clearly meant to make the other person feel inferior, stupid, worthless, small, helpless. I can't really explain. Some of it might even be because the vampire images are usually people who I see as sexually attractive. Being dominated by someone sexually attractive is different from being dominated by someone sexually repulsive.

I just remembered a story I read somewhere which was supposedly true.  There was a guy exploring in Africa, and he was attacked by a lion.  The lion grabbed him in his mouth and shook him.  He described having a sensation of being pleasantly relaxed and submissive and helpless, like it wasn't real, and like he wouldn't mind dying.  He wasn't afraid, while it was going on.  I forget how he survived - maybe someone else was with them, and the other person killed the lion or something.  I can't remember where I read this story.  But I think that somehow, people know about that feeling, and it's involved in domination/submission fantasies and vampire fantasies.

I can't even really talk about these things without worrying that they will be taken the wrong way. I don't enjoy being humiliated. But for the past couple days, the voices have been talking to me about someone enjoying humiliation. It's because I laughed at Curtis when he walked up to me and was talking to me and calling me a nickname - there's a word for this that I can't remember. What are those nicknames called? There's a word for affectionate nicknames that lovers use for each other. Pet names? Something like that. I like the ones he uses - they're actually meaningful. It's not something like 'hello, my little love muffin,' or something like that. 'Love muffin' just doesn't sound sexy to me. I really WOULD laugh if someone called me that. When he calls me names, I laugh, but not because it's a ridiculous name like 'love muffin.' I laugh instead because the name is too flattering, too much of a compliment, something too good and too nice to be true.

Like imagine that there is a very fat woman, and I don't mean to insult fat people, and actually I'm interested in what causes obesity, and I don't think it's the fat person's fault at all - so I don't like to insult fat people, ever, although I called Carrie fat in my blog, after she advised me in an email that I should get rid of my mustache, and she labeled Curtis 'the dumbass'. But imagine there is a fat woman, and she's a terrible dancer, but she pretends to get up and dance around, and she's not really serious about it. But someone watching her says to her, 'You are a graceful ballerina,' and he says it in a dead serious voice, and he means it, and she bursts out laughing/crying because she knows she isn't really graceful, isn't really a good dancer, isn't really a ballerina, she's just an ugly, fat woman pretending to dance as a joke. And again, please do not take this as an insult to any fat people. I am just trying to think of the best example that I can, and this is always the example that I think of. Maybe it's something 'they' put into my mind. But that's how I feel when he calls me the flattering nicknames that exaggerate how beautiful and wonderful and special I am, when I'm not really as beautiful, wonderful, and special as the things he says I am.

But I feel like I really AM special and wonderful, though, because I choose life, and I am surviving something terrible. I feel that I am a unique, wonderful person that nobody understands, someone undervalued by the world. So when he says that I'm special and wonderful and unique and rare, I feel like it's actually the truth, like he can see inside me to where I value my own life, where I value myself, where I choose to live. But he couldn't possibly understand that. He couldn't possibly see that. He can't see inside my soul. No one can see my soul, because I am the victim of a crime, I am a mind slave, I am a zombie, with my soul suppressed by the constant attack following me 24 hours a day. So I laugh because it's impossible, and I cry because I really, really need it to be true. I want someone to see me and understand me and value me the same way that I value myself. When he says these things, it seems like he does understand, but I think he can't really.

I want to find another boyfriend, someone easier to reach, someone who will actually answer me, meet me, talk to me in person, when Curtis won't or can't. That's what I meant when I said that sooner or later I have to give up and go after 'easy pickings' instead, because it's impossible to actually be with Curtis in the real world, when I can't get him to respond to me except at work. I need someone to get to know the real me, to know the hell that I live in every day, not just from hearing voices but mostly from the drug residues and chemical sensitivity and chronic fatigue - to see through all of those problems and see that there is still a living soul underneath it - to see into my cage, to see that I am still alive even though I look like a zombie on the outside and I cannot speak my own words or make my own choices while being controlled.

I think that's enough for now.