Chameleon: An Interactive Exploration

Part VI -- Reminiscing Anecdotally

"The world of books is the most remarkable creation of man. Nothing else that he builds ever lasts. Monuments fall, nations perish, civilizations grow old and die out; and, after an era of darkness, new races build others. But in the world of books are volumes that have seen this happen again and again, and yet live on, still young, still as fresh as the day they were written, still telling men's hearts of the hearts of men centuries dead."
-- Clarence Shepard Day, Jr., once-reknowned author, poet, artist, and outspoken supporter of women's rights

"My love for you is like the ocean: vast, volatile, and potentially deadly."
-- male cartoon character to his woman friend on a valentine card he's made for her

"The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. The way to be happy is to make others so."
-- Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899), a Civil War veteran, political leader, and orator who presented what were then considered radical views on religion, slavery and women's suffrage

"For you shall go out in joy/ and be led back in peace./ the mountains and hills before you/ shall burst into song./ and all the trees of the field shall/ clap their hands."
-- Isaiah 55:12

"In the midst of movement and chaos, keep stillness inside of you."
-- Deepak Chopra, medical doctor, author and speaker, pioneer in the field of mind-body medicine and named by Time magazine among the "Top 100 Icons and Heroes of the Century" in 1999, "the poet prophet of alternative medicine"

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I, A Woman

Prelude (Abbreviated Synopsis of the Synopsis of Technology and Me) -- Strophe -- Growing Up Rich (To The Manner/Manor Born) -- Manhattan! -- Music and Hippiedom -- Settling Down and Yuppiedom -- Technology and Careerism -- Wilderness Basics (Beasts and Heathens Part 1) -- Art and the Internet (Beasts and Heathens Part 2) -- Epic Coitus Interruptus -- Town/Community Life -- Frivolities -- Beasts and Heathens (Finale) -- Recoveries -- Reprise -- Joie Plaisir Eibr -- NOW (New Original Word)

A Place Called Eternity

"She's a big teaser/ She took me half the way there/ ...She was a day tripper/ One way ticket, yeah/ It took me so long to find out/ and I found out/ ...Tried to please her/ ...She only played one night stands/ She was a day tripper/ One way ticket, yeah...."
-- Day Tripper by Lennon/McCartney

"And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise."
-- Luke 23:43

"I work hard every day of my life/ I work till I ache my bones/ At the end I take home my hard earned pay all on my own -/ I get down on my knees/ And I start to pray/ Till the tears run down from my eyes/ Lord - somebody - somebody/ Can anybody find me - somebody to love?"
-- Somebody To Love (Un Uomo Per Me) by Freddie Mercury, performed by English rock band Queen and featured on their 1976 album A Day at the Races

"It was just one of those things/ Just one of those crazy flings/ One of those bells that now and then rings/ It was one of those things/ It was just one of those nights/ Just one of those fabulous flights/ A trip to the moon on gossamer wings/ It was one of those things..."
-- Just One Of Those Things by Cole Porter

"I've been there/ With my heart out in my hand/ But what you must understand/ You can't let the chance/ To love him pass you by/ Tell him/ Tell him that the sun and moon/ Rise in his eyes/ Reach out to him/ And whisper/ Tender words so soft and sweet/ Hold him close to feel his heart beat/ Love will be the gift you give yourself/ Never let him go/ Touch him/ With the gentleness you feel inside/ Your love can't be denied/ The truth will set you free/ You'll have what's meant to be/ All in time you'll see...."
-- Tell Him by Thompson, Afanasteff & Foster sung by Celine Dion and Barbra Streisand on the album Let's Talk About Love

"This is a man who thinks with his heart,/ His heart is not always wise./ This is a man who stumbles and falls,/ But this is a man who tries./ This is a man you'll forgive and forgive,/ And help protect, as long as you live.../ He will not always say/ What you would have him say,/ But now and then he'll do/ Something/ Wonderful./ He has a thousand dreams/ That won't come true,/ You know that he believes in them/ And that's enough for you./ You'll always go along,/ Defend him where he's wrong/ And tell him, when he's strong/ He is/ Wonderful/ He'll always/ Need your love/ And so he'll get your love./ A man who needs your love/ Can be/ Wonderful."
-- Something Wonderful, from the musical The King And I, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

I have dreamed that your arms are lovely,/ I have dreamed what a joy you'll be./ I have dreamed every word you whisper./ When you're close,/ Close to me./ How you look in the glow of evening/ I have dreamed and enjoyed the view./ In these dreams I've loved you so/ That by now I think I know/ What it's like to be loved by you,/ I will love being loved by you."
-- I Have Dreamed, from the musical The King And I, by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II

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Summary: Fort Valley VA resident homeowner and businessman Hank Zimmerman and I started an animated and energizing personal/professional correspondence in the spring of 1996, which evolved into a lovingly passionate relationship over the years of sharing with mind, heart, body, spirit, soul and imagination, but involving very minimal contact on the physical plane, never even a kiss or holding of hands. As we were both married to others initially, that situation interrupted, interfered with and distorted our communications off and on over the ensuing years, worsened to near-extinction by a series of misdemeanors and felonies (physical and verbal threats, defamation, trespassing, perjury, enslavement, libel, forgery, slander, rape, property and identity theft, vandalism, stalking, and harassment sexual, personal and professional) directed against me and what belonged to me physically and spiritually, my external possessions and personhood/personality, most particularly as a result of calling Page County VA EMERGENCY 911 in October 1997.

Very soon after creating OSCR in 1996, I met the man who became the love of my life, Hank -- a Navy veteran six years younger than me and a supportive, caring father of now-grown children, a daughter and two sons, who has a bachelor's degree in Communications/Journalism from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, a professional background in radio technology and broadcasting, music (piano and fiddle), management, writing and computer hardware and software, recreational interests in biking and sailing, and a long history of professional and personal volunteer activities for neighbors, church, hospice, politics, education, and the arts, including now serving as a Trustee for the latter two, and business ownerships, the second son, third living child, of an Allentown factory machinist and a country club waitress -- by e-mail-- and also raised like me affiliated with the Evangelical Congregational Church, and his wife and mother of his three offspring, Laura, with whom I tried to be friendly and complimentary. In the process of attempting to understand her home life perspective on people and world, I created the site's "Homespun Humor" section, now partially in ACR's archives and replaced recently by one called "Jubilation." I found a wonderful California writer named Debbie Farmer to fill the original section's pages with funny articles about housekeeping and raising children, as well as working remuneratively. Hank also contributed an early essay depicting insightfully and poetically country living and people.

We met originally because, in the process of requesting and receiving links to OSCR from other regional sites, I contacted the webmaster of the one for the Woodstock Chamber of Commerce, who wrote back to say he already had one on its first page because, in particular, he had so like the "ode to spring" that introduced OSCR at its incipience, and seasonally thereafter: "Here in the Shenandoah Valley, spring creeps up from muddy high rivers and across boggy bottoms. Onto stone-strewn hills tendrils of green and pastel reach up in delerious disorder to assault the strict grey-browns of winter. The river turns green as the grass. Catfish bite. Virginia peepers sing through the night. The moon is full. Anything is possible now."

During our initial e-mail "conversations," Hank commented on my "pretty name" and warned of the dangers on-line for women of sneaky and lurking male cyber-predators and offered to be my "shining knight" protector there in any situation that might arise to threaten my safety and comfort in the murky new world of internet bits and bytes where anyone might easily present a false impression of themselves and their intentions. As a nearby geographic neighbor within essentially the same fairly closeknit and transparent community that seemed to me at the time a reasonable and well-intentioned suggestion. Actually as a lone, if married, working woman the subtle and not, uninvited, unencouraged and unwelcome "passes" in my direction from male Valley residents, most of them married also, in the course of my work, travel and professional interaction were cloyingly and distractingly common if extraordinarily inappropriate and unanswered as a rule. My determined focus and singular motivation was success, popular and financial, withOSCR and in my creative writing.Since Hank struck me as the quintessentially representative Valley male, I made him my imaginary audience as writers do to get oriented in their craft.

Having said he didn't care whether I was "an old hag or pretty and young," at some point Hank asked me to send him a graphic photo of myself, which I declined with the advice that I had none, asking jokingly if pressing my face against the computer screen instead might work, and proceeded to describe my physiognomy as well as possible accurately in words with the assurance that most people considered me "pretty," and my correct age, 52 at the time. He responded with a request that I talk with his wife about his son Eddy's condition, requesting my telephone number so she could telephone me in that regard since the call would be long distance. Unconcerned with the cost, I offered to call her instead, a fact she said later he'd not apprised her of. Once (or twice), I wrote Hank "fussing heavily" about various events, and he sent back an e-mail that began, "Still here...." In response to a personal question about myself, I demurred saying that my life and personality were on-line within OSCR, to which he responded, "Yes, but I wanted to know the person behind the website." And 986,756,326,797,656 words, 864,765 graphics, and 97,765 unusual events and happenings later, he may. Be careful what you ask for.

After perhaps a month of e-mail correspondence and my communicating that a woman friend from AMS was planning to visit me for the weekend, Hank wrote suggesting that the two of us get a motel room in Front Royal on the evening he and band Fifth Avenue were playing there. I declined that questionnable suggestion. Around that time he also wrote saying that my now-ex and I seemed very happy and assuring that he would never do anything to interfere with that. On yet another occasion he wrote a strangely long and somewhat incomprehensible e-mail, also, detailing that near-strangers might not trust each other but that I should feel confident in trusting him, his motives and intentions. That turned out not to be true and a version of "he protesteth too much," which I noted, perplexedly, at the time since most of my experiences with residents there had been reaonably honest and honorable and I'd neither voiced or hinted at any suspicions. Hank said additionally that he'd become friendly with another woman over the internet, "but fortunately she was in California, " yet I was right there, just over the Massanutten. It had an eerie ring to it that I didn't understand at the time but developed into meaning the excitement, danger and adventure for him of seducing someone geographically closeby and having an intimate relationship that combined cyberspace and ground. As only slightly distant neighbors in a relatively small community, I assumed without reflection that our dealings would be reasonably up-front and dependably civil. When I suggested in terms of a preliminary meeting lunch at a restaurant somewhere around Route 11 for discussing his suggestion of a business partnership in developing local websites, he demurred, writing that he wasn't sure that was "proper," but insisting instead on a private venue. When I invited him finally to the A-frame and cordially assured him his wife and children were welcome also, that we might even go canoeing, he insisted on arriving by himself, although admitting that he "had to get his nerves under control first."

Later I realized that his wife's conception was that, as he said, "He could go where no man's ever gone, but no funny business," meaning that it was acceptable and actually preferable to her for him to "mess around," but it was to be no more than that as she needed his support financially and didn't appear to be the kind of person who'd make it on her on singly. When I wrote something subsequently and innocuously indicating a caring, truly friendly relationship between us, that unnerved her as threatening although actually it wasn't, or meant like that at all. But his "extracurricular activities" were to be purely sexual and usurious, as hers actually was or had been with him, for money and conveyed status in "being the wife of --- the rock musician." And, admittedly, he's good-looking also. Superficial marriages of convenience aren't uncommon there between individuals who aren't really close personally, and theirs was and is hardly the only one that is more form than substance. She did like to believe that "all the girls were after him," which reflected well on her as having "the prize," and even managed once to insinuate that I was "a groupie," although in point of fact I was comfortably, if not spectacularly, married myself and very committed to working on my website with no interest or inclination to any outside private connection, at least initially and for quite awhile. Additionally, even then, it was not me who broached the subject or possibility but Hank because I was developing the web business, which took considerable time and energy and study and thought and hard work. Around the holidays Hank mentioned having to rent a veicle commodious enough to accommodate his family for transport to out-of-state kinship festivities with his numerous rural Pennsylvania in-laws from whom, unusually, his wife had learned no gardening or housekeeping skills, including cooking. He did assure me once when I had qualms about relating to a near-stranger personally that he "wasn't an axe murderer." He promised that was true, and I believed him with usual caution that you never really know what you're getting into until you're there, and then it's too late to make a decision you've already decided.

I wish I could relive now as a new, fresh experience being seduced by Hank initially. It was amazing. At the time in attempting to describe it accurately to myself, I noted that I felt "ravished," with no desire or will to decline or end that sensual slide into awareness and awakening knowledge. We hadn't at the time met in person, I'd no idea his physical conformation and visa versa, not much about him personally, so the irrisistable attraction was more ethereal, spiritual, unquantifiable, somewhat linguistically indescribable and poetic. It has seemed to me sometimes like the interaction of molecules in natural chemical composition that bond by intrinsic design -- as magical and mysterious, deeply unknowable and uncontrollable as the origins of the universe and life itself. Inexorable. Destined,along perhaps with all the incredible events around it, in that shifting, nebulous, art-full place where free will meets destiny, divine purpose and plan.

It was apparent from some pointed comments and his general behavior that Hank was sexually and intellectually dissatissfied and frustrated in his marriage which exuded no fond or friendly interactions in my experience. He once alluded to the epic Russian revolution novel "War and Peace" in describing that volatile and obviously hostile situation. Once "the misses" assured me they weren't monsters, that she hadn't a third eye in her forehead -- a reference to her proclivity for reading surreptitiously mail not written for or addressed to her sphere of knowledge and understanding, breeding and background or education and lack of sophistocation in her attempts to head him off at the pass" from any sensual satisfaction. On the other hand, Hank assured me he too was not a monster, with "a probiscus protruding" from his forehead -- a reference to his interest in and and search for on-line sexual gratification. They lied. Both were and are monsters, with monstrously evil and ugly, dire and vile aftereffects in the destructive swath of their deranged and demented paths together, which cried out for professional counseling and treatment to protect innocent bystanders and passersby, even their own children. On the other hand, my ex and I were friends who shared common interests and aesthetics, religious values and enjoyments such as gardening, property upgrades, animal raising, fishing, boating and entertaining friends and neighbors. We also shared a non-spectacular, but satisfyingly affectionate, healthy sex life.

I did note to myself at that time that the Zimmermans seemed to have no real friends -- a contrast to my life and marital relationships which abounded with profusely diverse companionship. It was startling to have Hank make a personal intimate confidante in a time of unusual stress for them of a complete stranger, me, whom he'd just met on-line in the course of business, but in retrospect I understand why folk more knowledgeable kept their distance from the dangerous and potentially lethal brew of that family's interactions and collapsed ethical and social system, personality distortions and dis orientations whose source I gathered was familial and generational. In another of the phone conversations she initiated inappropriately in their personal nature and timing to my home while I was trying to work on what they both knew to be "the original Valley's home page," Hank's wife referred to them recently as having "been in a bad place" in their relationship and interactions. I had the impression that he'd wanted out of that situation but she'd not agreed, had fought that and made it practically impossible. I also had the impression that he felt trapped, as I did increasingly in the unpleasantly uncomfortable games played between the two of them into which the unwarily naiive might be lured as potential prey, grist for the game. In the words of a famous movie and as was commonplace inthat region, Hank was his wife's "rice bowl." She had no notable market talents or skills, certainly not in saleable social/professional interaction and was dependent on his income for her financial survival. It was apparent she had no real concern for his health and overall well-being or professional suucess, all which she undermined with seemingly suicidal and senseless determination.

Putting a positive, innocuous-sounding " spin" on the creepy horror embedded in Zimmerman interactions and predictable consequences, Hank described them as being "too weird for normal folk and too normal for weird folk." It is true that I encountered in that region indigenous living conditions and bizarrely abnormal, distended and distasteful familial and social relationships that made my consciousness cringe,but I kept my distance from it all as well as possible, knowing it to be potentially sickening and harmful. For instance, one young visitor beset by virulent and despondent alcoholism had been sexually molested regularly as a youngser by own blood-kin father. Incest affecting young girls and boys was not uncommon there and seldom prosecuted seriously nor addressed effectively otherwise as a social malaise. The saying "If she ain't good enough for her own kin, she ain't good enough for me" was made for and possibly born in Valley hollers where houses minimally presentable on the exterior were often oddly jumbled and ramshackle on the interior. A few even lacked indoor plumbing and many still employed primitive and sometimes inadequate alternative heating sources.

In offering me unsought business advice, Hank warned I might find myself as he had in his previous tech shop partnership working long hours for less than minimum wgage on average. Having run a reasonably successful, financially and in positive community reception, painting contracting enterprise myself, I was conscious of the necessity to watch and control one's financial receipts and labor/expense outlays. I had kept track of those religiously, ascertaining hourly rates and making future adjustments where advisedly necessary. Any solvent commercial enterprise requires diligent accounting and perceptive oversight of those figures to survive and thrive.

Hank referenced on occasion that he'd read the sustaining home garden magazines of the time, but that theirs hadn't been successful, and he referred also to the "doom and gloom" of the 60s with which I didn't identify since that hadn't been my experience of those years at all. Of course, I'd been in Tennesee at the time, but gardening is not an overly-taxing endeavor if one reads carefully and pays reasonable attention to basics that certainly don't require a college degree as many farmers past and present can attest. Since his wife, the youngest of thirteen, was raised in the countryside of Pennsylvania, it's additionally mysterious and especially since there were young mouths and stomachs to feed also that a diligent and productive effort wasn't forthcoming. The second son of three children born to an Allentown factory machinist, the pair reminded me of a minister's warning years ago that the sometimes spoiled and selfish, egocentric "babies" of families tend not to make good marriage partners. He did mention that there were times when their groceries came from what he made playing music with local bands, although Avtex did provide avenues for generous overtime to other employees I knew, including my then father-in-law, and it was apparent from the condition of their house that funds had not been invested in maintenance or upgrading. After twenty years of his working there, Avtex was finally closed by the EPA, having been a top Superfund site for polluting the river and groundwater, finally near-catastrophically in a fairly massive kill of aquatic life. The plant itself was abysmal, rundown and dangerous in appearance for pools of what appeared to be toxic fluids and loose roofing. Hank referred to his job there as "working as a proletariat," his Allentown kin family of older brother and sister and parents as "dysfunctional," and his recently-deceased father as having been an emotionally undemonstrative "paranoid schizaphrenic." In preparing a 1998 resume and subsequent professional activities, he left out his years of Avtex employment as being unhelpful to professional advancement in technology.

To myself, I used to refer to Hank's wife as his pit bull because, nearly right from the beginning, she kept attacking me verbally -- and probably anyone else that got anywhere near him in any way really. He was naturally gregarious, friendly, talkative, sharing, funny, enlightening and inspiring, as well as intelligent, well-educated and multi-talented, but he did seem lonely and isolated in some ways. One time he wrote, under unpleasant pressures from his contract job, saying, "Will somebody just talk to me PULEEEEEZE????" I don't think he and his wife had a lot of interests and knowledge in common. For instance, when I mentioned the four of us going canoing together, Hank said I wouldn't be able to get his wife into a boat in any way, and I don't believe she knew much about music or programming and computers, either.

He said something about opposites attracting once, and no two people, perhaps, seemed more opposite in every way than they. He and I, on the other hand, had a lot of interests, beliefs, education and personality traits in common, so I almost felt he was the mirror image of me in the other gender. We shared an interest in writing and history, additionally, and are both hard workers at what we choose to do and accomplish productively. He said, also, that she was his "ground," although I can't honestly imagine one muddier or more murky, since she continually misrepresented him to me, me to him, and herself to everybody, apparently.

Hank sent once a digitized graphic of a professional photograph showing him and his wife -- both with expressions of unhappiness, if not downright misery, etched on their faces which I attributed (somewhat erroneously) to the harms and horrors of their sons' recent automobile accident -- in Confederate dress, taken during a business trip to Hampton Roads, and surrounded by a slightly sarcastic ditty he'd written as accompaniment, commenting that he'd altered the photograph enough finally to satisfy/please his spouse -- a goal I gleaned from subsequent comments was not easily attained in any endeavor, be it financial, social or romantic. One of his saddest statements from my point of view explicated the slightly medieval concept, shared by too many, that having a pleasantly happy wife, and therefore life, might be the product of supplying her with enough money -- real love, care and friendship being frivolously expendable to the serious financial business of marital relations and relationships. It should be relatively apparent that this is an evil and usurious approach to intimacies that are meant to be profoundly sensual, sensate and personal, if not passionate also -- sanctified and blessed by God, not mammon.

I inferred from that and some other asides also that she was somewhat vain and overly concerned with her appearance. He sighed cybernetically at one point in lament: "Vanity. All is vanity." He sent also a software program he'd written, he said, to impress me with his skill and consisting of a screen where a small figure appeared holding up a sign that said, "Hello." On a still later visit to their home, Hank's last words in saying farewell were, "Don't forget about me." And I haven't despite many painful and other joyous consequent mysteries over the years to follow. It's been a memorable, and unusually vividly-documented journey.

On the occasion of Hank's visit to the A-frame I was, as usual, braless in a t-shirt and shorts. Backcountry life afforded the comfort and practicality every day of casual dress without concern for cosmetics or coiffure, and I was hardly alone there in making the choice for informality of appearance and interaction. An outlook with which he seemed to concur, and has frequently since that time fairly persistently, in insisting on stopping by his residence to change from formal business attire into jeans and a casual shirt. Since then also in moments when I've disliked voluably his business and personal personna as less than genuine and real, I've bought him a well-patterned designer silk tie in protest. He has around sixteen here now adorning various furnishings. Before visiting back then his property and with his wife he managed to convey in writing her censurious conventionality of thought and behavior and that, for the sake of affability, I needed to conform my couture which I did, successfully I believe.

At one point somewhat early on, Hank admonished in regard to the website and its associated subsidiary businesses, "You're in a tough game." I didn't understand the reference to my life, work and self-support as a "game," had never heard before that kind of worldview in terms of other people's professions and property although the inhumanely dire consequences of it became widely apparent soon thereafter. He also advised that I not do any work for free, a slightly odd recommendation from one who'd volunteered his own time and talents variously. Another regional techie active then in local Web business and contracting declared firmly that he was going to "drag the place, kicking and screaming if necessary, into the 21st century." It turned out he'd been too kind and optimistic by a few centuries or more in assessing its current time and socio-economic orientation. We were cruising unbeknownst at full speed straight ahead and through instead to perhaps the 14th.

His wife called and wrote me several times with aggressive hostility and misinterpretations of e-mails I wrote to him, not her, all of which she read and some of which he may never have received via her interceptions and interruptions of natural flow and congruence. She meant to thoroughly derail any relationship, however healthy and positive, we might have, including caring friendship and thoughtful help. Her directions were hateful and sick, psychologically and socio-economically. My third husband described her, after meeting, as "ugly," meaning disagreeable and unpleasant. (He also described my mother as "evil," and Hank as "a nice feller, but awfully nervous," and once as "an asshole" for something unfortunate that he did.) As things developed, I was afraid my third husband, with a sudden, violent, vicious and ruleless temper, would find out about my evolving relationship with Hank and hurt him out of jealousy, so kept it very much to myself as well as I could. I consigned any obvious errant behavioral aspects of being in love to "symptoms of menopause," obfuscating the situation and confusing even myself sometimes. During another one-sided telephone exchange initiated by Hank's wife, she recounted his attendance with, as I recall now, an orange wig at a kind of costume party held by his employer and complained that he arrived home late and intoxicated, a state in which she bemoaned his children had never encountered him previously.

Shortly thereafter and during one of several one-hundred-year floods, the electricity and telephone service to the A-frame was cut off for at least three days, so I couldn't of course use the internet. I could sense Hank's rising concern and finally communicated with him metaphysically that everything was fine. When service was restored and I read his e-mails over that period, they reflected all of that, including a calm at just the right time. So that method of relaying information worked, as it has many times since, at least off and on. A few times we've also gotten our wires very thoroughly crossed, too, due to interference of extraordinarily unfortunate kinds, effects and durations. He took an interest in OSCR right from the start with enthusiasm and made many suggestions as well as providing emotional/cognitive support and encouragement along the way during my up-and-down interactions with people and things, including most amusingly Nancy Sottosanti's new riding mower which I accidentally backed into and dented one day. My insurance covered it and Nancy was a little distressed briefly but okay. The most important suggestion Hank made was that I concentrate on content and securing the best, that that would be the biggest problem requiring the most attention in creating a worthwhile and successful site enterprise. It was also his opinion that I had "beat the Big Boys" in timing and might very well be carrying OSCR to great financial, as well as popular heights, if I did it all right. Unforeseen, however, criminalities deflected that accurate insight. In introducing me earlier to his family through e-mail, Hank had described the Zimmermans accurately, it turned out, as being " too weird for normal people and too normal for weird people." Naturally he made no mention of what developed into their near-worldending abandonment of, or perhaps unfamiliarity with, generally accepted morals and manners amongst adults living and working surviveably within a similar geographic area and continguous social community. He did express displeasure then at demonstrative hypocrits at some Christian churches.

After visiting once with Elizabeth Cottrell at her invitation, I wrote Hank explaining that I wasn't intending to steal potential website work from him and he wrote back saying, "Steal away," referencing his "empty pockets" with a "*frustrated sigh*" but, although some material from her Shenandoah Seasons hardcopy publication was incorporated into OSCR with her permission, I never did any contract work for her and neither did he to my knowledge although they later collaborated criminally together in Shentel's facetious for-profit claim to have "the original Valley's home page, " an unattractive and inherently uninspired web presence and presentation of that region's reality and positive possibilities.

In regard to the practical exigencies of his Fort Valley life, Hank wrote that once he was "so desperate," he tuned Elizabeth's piano and that there were times when he and his family ate on provisions from his weekend gigs with a series of performing bands that traversed the region's byways late into partying evenings. He referenced religiously-attended weekly practice sessions with those musicians as a welcome relief from the sometimes unanswerable pressures and problems of day-to-day life. " We just jam," he wrote.

When I moved the site to a new server, Geocities, he never updated OSCR's address, despite my occasional reminders, although all the other websites linked to it at the time did. Rejecting the idea of an introductory get-together lunch in a restaurant somewhere, he insisted upon visiting my home, and I finally agreed. As we got to know each other through e-mail and our relationship progressed more intimately in natural but surprising to me action and reaction, he sent at one point a message saying, "I have a programmer's mind. If, then, else." It was meant to explore consent and I responded affirmatively, feeling somewhat hypnotized and ravished at the time, a very positive and welcome new experience. Despite my inviting his whole family, he arrived alone at the A-frame fairly late one evening with a technical book to loan and talked mostly with my now ex-husband, mentioning a conversational chat area called The Park, whose introductory theme song was the rock band Queen's rousing "We Are The Champions," that he frequented during a discussion we three had about the new phenomenon of internet sex, and assuring me privately that "what we do in our heads doesn't hurt anyone." Apologizing for not hearing a comment I made, Hank gestured to his ears once and said, "Too many guns going off," referring to his service on aircraft carriers during the Vietnam War -- a pretty amazing diminishment for an excellent musician. Of course, Ludwig von Beethoven was completely deaf toward the end of his memorable career as a composer of some of the greatest sonatas and orchestrations ever known, another example of powers and abilities frequently untapped unless called upon by love and exigency. Perhaps we never know what we can really do until pushed to limits, or limitlessness, the true marvel of being fully human still undefined and unbounded. Walking with Hank toward the A-frame's front door as he was leaving, I wanted to hug him but couldn't, so we just said our goodbyes as he bowed slightly, either because he's very tall or in courtesy, and returned the next day to our e-mail interactions. Apparently Hank misunderstood the real gist and import of my invitation, at his insistence, to visit the A-frame. His first question was, "Where's your husband? In town?" I laughed at the thought I'd allow that with essentially a stranger and answered, "No, he's just gone down the road to a neighbor's for a few minutes," but I believe in retrospect that Hank had bought the vain myth shared with his wife that "all the girls were after it," conveniently forgetting upon whose repeated suggestion he was there at all to begin with. My now ex appeared shortly, they chatted mostly with each other, and he commented therafter that Hank "seemed like a nice guy but was awfully nervous," which is completely understandable, of course, when you're after another man's wife, in close proximity to the husband, and intent on hiding your real inclination and motivation.

When I reminded Hank that he'd not yet added an OSCR link to the Woodstock website, he wrote back to say he was "totally embarassed," that he'd forgotten its internet address, which I promptly sent again, the first of three as I worked to find a dependable free provider and finally ended up with Geocities. Earlier when I'd complained that he never read the site content, Hank replied that he did peruse all of the it except the cooking section, which he found uninteresting. He'd been a cook during his Navy service, so perhaps those duties turned him off to the possibilities of cuisine and, of couse, in an area of militant machismo it wouldn't be wise to admit a "unmanly" fondness for pursuits generally considered there exclusively the province of female interest and competence. Hank also advised that I'd get discouraged in the course of building up OSCR's business, which is easy to predict when you're one of the ones whose behaviors will prove to be discouraging in terms of being unconscionably and inhumanely underhanded, dishonestly ugly and murderously criminal in the competitive marketplace of small business endeavor in similar fields.

Hank's wife was the most outrageously disagreeable person that perhaps I had ever met. To myself, I called her "the pit bull," because she was always attacking where there was no reason to do so, and I thought of her as diseased, rabid. My ex-husband, after a one and only meeting in person, pronounced her "ugly," which in country parlance means unpleasant and/or hate-full, although she wasn't physically attractive either. Our first conversation happened by telephone because Hank asked me to talk with her helpfully about their son -- since I have a clinical background in child disability, trauma and therapy and he was concerned about the situation -- who had received a head injury in a car accident and was having a few problems recovering. I called and the gist of it all was that she had all the help that she and her son needed. She always referred to the two sons and a daughter as "her" children. Once I suggested that we communicate weekly or so informally by e-mail and she demurred, saying "Oh no. I'm a very private person." Despite that, she read all of my messages to Hank and frequently misinterpreted what I said, partly because it wasn't addressed to a person with no technical or educational or business background to speak of and she seemed pretty incapable of civility or intelligent discernment. Once she told me, "Hank likes to make women fall in love with him and then he drops them." I didn't give that any weight because it didn't sound like the person I knew who was very interested in becoming involved in the internet and at one point wanted us to be partners in consulting and web design, by his suggestion and before we'd ever met in person. In a later instance she commented," He's such a child," and I thought, but didn't say out loud, in response, "Seems like a man to me." On another occasion, he referred me to his neighbor Elizabeth Cotrell to begin work in his stead initially on a website for her fledgling business, a hardcopy publication entitled Shenandoah Seasons. I made an appointment to visit her, drove across the Massnutten to her home in the countryside near Woodstock, discussed the web possibilities, and left some literature for her. She subsequently returned it all by mail with a brief note stating that Hank had informed her he hadn't authorized the contact with me and she didn't want to do anything behind his back. That all turned out to be a fabrication on her part as she had a personal and intimate interest in him, of which completing the website for her business was a lure into closer proximity. I didn't, of course, know that at the time and simply answered an apology that there had been a misunderstanding and miscommunication, obviously, between Hank and myself in regard to all that. She was unaware that we'd become fairly close friends and that did disrupt the relationship for awhile, as I wrote him that we apparently needed to go our separate ways -- and later reneged on that in inviting him to visit the a-frame as he'd requested several times.

The state of filthy disrepair of the interior of the Zimmerman home place shocked me beyond coherent commentary on my first and only pre-aarranged visit. Old paint peeled over a trashy open kichen area. The other rooms I was led through were relatively bare, as were the floors, of furnishing and unappetizing, coldly uninviting in appearance, completely lacking in good cheer or wholesome color or interesting wall appointments. Public dog kennels appear more welcomingly comfortable, pleasantly maintained and decorated than their and too many other disreputably decrepit Valley "homeplaces." In a region with much substandard housing, most hidden from tourist view as theirs was, to accentuate dissonantly well-maintained mansions old and new, they could be said to have been "land poor," another common regional circumstance as that distasteful once-white wooden structure stood on 14 land-locked, rock-strewn, generally infertile, unattractive acres.

As a recipient of taxpayer-supported veterans benefits, including four years of college education and home ownership assistance that sadly disreputable situation was as unpredictably surprising as Hank's 20 years' service for an equally disreputable local corporation, Avtex, as he put it "as a proletariat," and his choice as crudely and rudely undereducated bearer of his name and children.

In a milieu of well-known and rampant drug use, prescription and street level, amongst all strata from parenting laborers to medical and business professionals "winked at" by complicit law enforcement personnel who frequently are imbibers themselves, display of oddly aberrant behaviors are the accepted norm rather than the exception. Pills washed down with a swig from a fifth of Jim Beam dull the line perceived between sane and lame, crude and civil, acquiscent and dissenting, pernicious and permissible in activities and interactions. Combined with geographic isolation from more civilizing centers of accepted and acceptable standards of civilization, chronic error and mental disease breed on themselves compounded with the determined insouciant insularity of closed systems that are subconsciously aware they cannot survive as is any break in their dike against more honorably traditional mainstream mores and manners. Predictably under those conditions there was considerable "stonewalling" against mass introduction to the educational possibilities inherent in the world wide web and backlash against the internet in general and its technicians except where their endeavors concerned the marketplace per se.

At one point, since our interests appeared to be compatible and I knew that in the male-dominant atmosphere of the Valley, I'd have problems on my own, I wrote Hank offering him a partnership in OSCR where we would share the responsibilities, work and profit -- very similar really to his earlier suggestion that we cooperate as equal partners on developing websites for clients in the area. Hopeful of a positive response, I opened his return e-mail and realized at once that it was a polite, let-you-down-easy refusal due to its length and verbiage and based rationally on his strenuous financial and work commitments with the Northern Virginia Daily installation and support contract and obligations for rearing, monetarily and personnally, his two teenaged sons. The last two sentences read, "Remember how we discovered that we were friends and kinda celebrated it? Nothing about that has changed." He was referencing an unusual, to me, positive and pleasurable sexual interaction that existed between us spontaneously without reference to geographic location or conscious choice or endeavor, although it's impossible to explain to anyone who's never experienced that phenomenon how it occurs or why, the reason being I don't really know. It just is. For awhile I thought maybe we'd been married in a previous life and that's why it all seemed so comfortable and right if completely inexplicable in terms of that particular time and place. Still later, I theorized it had to do with molecular physics and the splitting of an atom forever attempting, successfully and not, to reconnect with its twin part, reflecting and mimicking each other naturally and involuntarily as part of fundamental natural law.

I am relatively certain, especially in retrospect, that the uninvited, unwelcome, forceful, and in this case brutally criminal, insistent interference of others not privy to or cognizant of interactions that are as much spiritual as material, and completely personal, between those actually responsible and involved is universally cataclymic, catastrophic, disastrous -- and of course anguishingly and excruciatingly painful, if not completely fatal for all. These are matters only for God, not for man, to approve and construct or not. The fearful hubris of, among other things, "Christian" Gentiles (and the real source of their historic and frequently hysterical anti-semitism) in protecting their stolen turf -- the prestige and profit that belong by truth and right to African and Semitic Jews as the first prophets, disciples and apostles, and to Jesus -- and their phony, vacuous, inherently contradictory claim to superiority and righteousness in the process of behaving otherwise for nearly two millenia now -- has brought us to an undeniable verity, or many of them actually, that can be ignored only to our great peril on earth at least, and perhaps more widely. We have indeed opened up the Gates of Hell and only real truth will bind them.

Invited to their home subsequently, my third husband and I visited in Fort Valley with him, his wife and two sons, sitting on chairs set outside on the lawn drinking wine and nibbling on hors d'oerves she'd fixed, as I talked mostly with her. Their daughter, Lisa, was working that evening at her job as a clerk in a local store. At Hank's suggestion, his son Eddy, who'd been somewhat brain-damaged from a very bad automobile accident in which his brother, Ben, had been the driver, brought out a few of his fascinating but repetitive in concept drawings to show me. I admired them and Hank later expressed his concern by saying, "There must be something for a boy to do who draws the same thing over and over and over again." Although I have a degree and clinical experience in Psychology, I'd never encountered by experience or study the symptoms Eddy presented in his artwork, so had no viable suggestion or avenue for restructuring a behavior that was similar to early cartoonists making detailed sketches, each with a slight variation on the previous and which, when put together and automated to film, created and told a story, a skill since replaced by computer graphics software and technically-astute artists.

During that one visitation, Hank's wife behaved as many country women there do, in public anyway. She said practically nothing, despite my repeated attempts at conversation, but simply smiled and nodded her head over and over again. That is considered generally acceptable behavior in the company of men who take precedence in everything including locution. Since I believe in healthy public education with helpfully involved parents, students and teachers, I asked if she didn't think her sons were missing out on some of the non-academic social benefits of interaction and even extra-curricular activities. Her response was an immediate and adamant negative that I didn't pursue. At that time in particular there was a major problem with bullying in the classrooms and on buses for transportation. They were hardly the only parents who chose home schooling for a variety of reasons including safety and/or more devoted and attentive instruction. Hank and Elizabeth had both served once on the School Board together and there had been some dissension between them at the time, whether related to policy or personality. His comment about that had been merely that she was like a sister with whom he he was not always in agreement. At one point she suddenly asked if I wanted some chickens. The question was so disorienting in the context of what I'd been saying, and to which she'd obviously not been listening or comprehending of, that at first I thought she was offering me cooked chicken, to eat at moment. After some verbal fumbling during which I believe Hank jumped in to clarify the communication, it turned out there were fowl belonging to her son that she wanted to get rid of, and I accepted at the time although later backed out because I really didn't need or want anymore to care of and they're difficult sometimes to integrate into an extant flock, in addition to advice from Elizabeth Cottrell that I might be overextending myself in terms of obligations and tasks, to which I agreed but expect in retrospect she had other ulterior motivations for that suggestion also.

Elizabeth's husband was a local doctor who provided her with a good-sized home and extensive rose gardens around it. She commented once that Shenandoah Seasons was putting him in the hole financially, in other words it and she were not self-supporting which was more the rule than the exception in a place where women tended to gauge their worth by their husband's income and social status rather than their own accomplishments and financial/professional independence. Despite having a master's degree in a scientific field, Elizabeth never to my knowledge became a self-supporting professional, relying instead for official appointments and financial maintenance as a local Tourism Director and later to the Board of Shentel on her social status there as a physician's wife. Later, Elizabeth employed herself with an enterprise comically -- given her history related here of intentionally manipulative misdirection, factual obfuscation and criminally contempuous subterfuge in business dealings -- called "Heart Spoken," offering counsel on how to express one's self caringly to others in personal and commercial relationships. The exact physical location of what she considers a Heart" is not specified although I believe her degree, at whatever level of understanding and expertise, has to do with Biology. To reference an "old saw," buyer beware. Objecting naturally to her official association with Shentel's criminal claim to have "the original Valley's home page" and their for-profit collusion in the criminal enterprise of E911 services there which initiated the destruction of the real one, along with its owner's home and personal property, I was served later in Tennessee with six fraudulent felony warrants in her name alleging my complaints of her consciously compliant for falsely-claimed profit and prestige criminal activities constituted harassment. Doctors and lawyers, however disreputable and corrupt,and their spouses were at the top of that rigidly maintained social strata along with what was left of the jaded "southern gentry" in land and financial assets, which placed no particular value on education and none at all on morality, but had a veneer of social graces that wore off quickly to reveal the unrestrained and unconscionable beasts inside. Several physicians were cited, fined and restricted repeatedly for Medicare and Medicaid fraud as well as malpractice. They and the attorneys had perfected over decades methods of relieving without payment older residents of their property and many were owners of vast tracts of land there and elsewhere. A few younger and dedicated physicians served out their obligation to work in rural areas there but few if any stayed beyond their allotted time in an atmosphere that can only be described as generally and determinedly "sleazy," if not "filthy," as well as xenophobic in the interests of maintaining its corruption and misrepresentation of itself publically. A network of "under the table" and questionnable if not criminal "favors" linked residents and families to each other in a grid of falsehood and superficial representation that bore little or no resemblance to their real identities, relationships, motivations or abilities and talents, supporting an unegalitarian economy based most profoundly on unethical and illegal activities supporting those who controlled most of the material assets and therefore the power political, economic and otherwise in that process. That it was unabashedly sexist and racist in the "breadbasket of the (neo-)Confederacy" was a given accepted by nearly everyone there and reinforced violently if necessary by those who benefitted materially from those attitudes and behaviors, however discordant they might be with facts and realities. On the occasion of Hank's sons' near-fatal auto accident, Elizabeth's heart spoke itself to the bereaved father exclusively in the verses of a commercial condolence and sympathy card hand-mailed locally.

Once Hank described playing with his band, Fifth Avenue, at a gig that wasn't very well attended. After the performance they apologized, he said, to the owners for its scant audience and offered to play for them for free as a bonus. With that accepted, the couple danced together delightedly alone to the live music for awhile, leaving I'm sure a very beautiful and unique memory.

As a reward for his efforts toward wellness, Hank took Eddy flying in a private airplane over the central Valley and still later treated the whole family to a Florida Disneyland vacation, leaving at my suggestion his laptop computer at home so they could all concentrate on enjoying their time together, which they did according to his first e-mail upon returning to the Valley. Hank was working on a programming and support contract with Northern Virginia Daily newspapers in Front Royal, creating some other websites for hire, and playing piano professionally with "Fifth Avenue," an all-male Southern rock band with drums, bass, guitar, and an excellent African-American singer, on weekends, practicing every Tuesday evening together and promoting it through a website he created. He also performed as a volunteer for some old folk in a home and took his boys canoeing.

At his enthusiastic invitation, my now-ex and I drove to The Grapevine in Front Royal one Friday evening to watch and listen to "Fifth Avenue" perform to a very good-sized and energetically dancing crowd. They were great. At one point, Hank stood and played a fairly long and expert solo. I always think it's brave when any performer gets out there alone and admire that courage always and everywhere. Laura and Lisa were also there for awhile and I went over to their back table briefly to speak with them. For the rest of the time, we sat up front very close to the stage and enjoyed the antics of two overly-excited women sitting next to us, along with behaviors of the rest of the audience. Once during a break, Hank and I went out to my car in the parking lot to retrieve the book I'd borrowed. I was hoping he'd kiss me but, being nervous, I couldn't stop talking, so he probably couldn't have even if he'd wanted to. It's hard to hit a moving target, as they say. He came over to our table between sets, saying that the next one was the best selection. It turned out to include a rollicking version of "Can't you see (what this woman's been doing to me)," and an interim tour de force solo by him. When I told Hank, laughing, that a woman there had asked me to dance with her, he responded, "Why not? This is the 90s." My disinclination, however, was based on the perception that a formally dressed and harshly made up, somewhat brittle-sounding female was not company I'd enjoy on the dance floor or elsewhere. Naturally, being a "child of the 60s," and the 50s for that matter, I've danced with women friends pleasurably and enjoyably many times and have nothing against the experience.

After the last set, I walked over to the dance floor where he was knelt down pulling up electric cords and told him how much I'd enjoyed the performance. He was somewhat uncommunicative verbally, so I soon said goodbye and walked back toward our table to get ready to leave for home as the establishment was closing. On my way there, a male patron sitting on a bar stool by a small table stopped me with some greeting. As we were talking, Hank walked up behind, spun me around quickly and hugged me very passionately and desirously. Right as my hands slid up his arms in reaction, he let me go abruptly and strode back toward the dance area. Reorienting somewhat dazedly, I too turned and walked back toward my husband-at-the-time and we left very shortly thereafter.

Hank expressed sadness about the breakup of his software and hardware enterprise with a local partner and pride in their partial performance sponsorship of the reknowned annual Music Festival at Orkney Springs one year. He'd been able to pay off his home with the proceeds from that business dissolution and procure private contracting employment as a result also, asserting his determination verbally in the process to "remain independent" in work when that was completed. A twenty-year veteran of the infamous and mainstay area employer Avtex -- a production and assembly plant near the top of the EPA's national Super Fund list of extreme polluters for a long time until it was forced to close, having exuded toxic chemicals contaminating private wells and causing massive fish kills and disfiguring disease -- in Front Royal, he valued the freedom of self-employment despite its requisite hard work and long hours.

From his responses to a few of my statements, I inferred that Hank was no more interested in or sympathetic with traditional gender role stereotypes and definitions of behavior and attitude than I was or had been for many years, being actively devoted to knowing and exploring tasks and presentations typically considered "male," professionally and personally -- e.g. business manager/owner/technician and "head of household" homeowner knowledgeable and skilled in various kinds of maintenance for structure and grounds. To Hank I described that chosen direction, commitment and inclination as a natural, if subsumed androgyny that I believed would lead to happier, more self-fulfilled and "actualized" individuals and more constructively wholesome, peaceful and equitable relationships in work and social environments and in ways not unfamiliar to me from past positive experiences in labor, performance and play.

Under a lot of stress from personal and employment realities and responsibilities, Hank mentioned once that he was going for an appointment to have a colonoscopy because his father had died of colon cancer, so that possibility was in his genes. He said that physicians "put you under" for the procedure and commented, "Amnesia. Sounds good to me." Earlier, he'd commented that he was "dragging himself around," and once that he "didn't even like his music anymore" in reaction to exhaustion, pressures and problems on the ground. He also stated his desire and determination to remain independant as a private tech contractor and business owner rather than the constrictions of being an employee.

Obviously in retrospect, the Zimmerman family needed expert and effective psychological and spiritual counseling, which they never sought to my knowledge, before the psychoses in their relationships and the situational effects surrounding the sons' auto accident irreparably harmed others uninvolved essentially.

At least one time subsequently, I tried to find him at The Park and on another chat website he used, but failed, the first time because it turned out he was performing somewhere and the second due to technical problems with hardware. An evilly distorting conversational interference by Laura, who had also called me several times with some misinformation, abuse and criticism personally, later ended our internet relationship while dislocating criminalities by the Page County Sheriff's Department and legal professionals soon precluded further earthly encounters I envisioned which might have cleared up the confusion in his mind over what had really been happening. Because he was under so much personal and professional stress, I hadn't wanted to do anything that would add to that and never told him until this past year what had really occurred so many years ago, to his anguish and distress now because he had been so badly misled by lies and prevarications in going toward totally the wrong directions. Real natural attraction, love and honesty are fragile, especially in an increasingly determined evil world. It's a very sad story in all of its consequences for good people, good work, and good things everywhere, all around the world really if you stop to consider that OSCR and ACR were, and will be again, an international presence in acclaim, excellently talented and supportive, actually grateful contributors and devoted readership reach.

It's worth noting, perhaps, that premeditated murder for money and/or hire is a capital offense in the U.S. of A. and punished, after usually many years of imprisonment, with execution by the gas chamber, electric chair, lethal injection, or even hanging still in a few states. Of course, no one really involved expected me to survive what I lived through and/or be sane and rational enough to remember clearly and cogently in the process of testifying to what really happened, and who said and did what where. But God, obvious on-the-ground history, founders of this country, all of my ancestors and good, supportive friends everywhere, most particularly in the Mountain Empire, were and are not on their side. In the end, it's a losing game and one that should never have been played anywhere.

All of ACR/OSCR's writers worldwide from as far away as Australia, and now China, from the oldest -- Bunny Stein, an early contributor from Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains, who e-mailed me around 2005 expressing support for my keeping ACR/OSCR on-line and offering more of her funny articles for publication -- to Debbie, the youngest, were and are talented and hard-working people who shared that freely and joyously because, of course, artists want to be known and appreciated, just like other people. I'm awed and humbled by them frequently and feel very blessed to have and have had the opportunity to publish and present them as lovingly, gracefully and encouragingly as possible, as well as knowing many personally and, in some cases, as close and equally supportive friends.

Finally, Hank wrote of feeling ill and attributing that to the stress, particularly, of dealing with the aftermath of his sons' very serious and nearly fatal automobile accident. I wrote back suggesting he might want to "talk" by e-mail about that, a commonly accepted therapeutic method of dealing with post-traumatic stress syndrome. Laura read my message and responded to me by e-mail, "DON'T EVER bring my children into your game." I tried to explain, also by e-mail, calmly, logically and coherently that I wasn't playing a game, nor bringing anyone's children into one, but attempting to provide a sympathetic ear, an avenue of healthy release and healing. It is the field of my college degree (with high honors) and some intensive professional expertise, as well as personal caring. She never responded, but apparently misinformed Hank of my intent, resulting in a cryptic and distancing e-mail from him which said: "I don't quite understand what went on between you and Laura, but it doesn't sound good. I can't allow anything to interfere with the peaceful domain of my home and family. I was hoping we could all be friends. I wish that that situation were different." Not wanting to be a party adding to the stress he was under, I didn't write him again. Instead, I kind of went into shock and some mental, emotional and physical disarray. And cried a lot. Once much earlier, when Laura called me at home and was fussing about things, I'd offered, somewhat depressedly, to stop writing to Hank and she responded at the time, "No. You're friends." He had been, among other things, my best friend and supporter in cyberspace. After reclaiming my criminally plundered home the following January, I began writing him again, without necessarily expecting a reply and just telling him facts of what had been and was going on with myself and other friends. He told me somewhat early on that he had a good and evil side, as we all do and hopefully, but not there, do our best to curtail and control the latter. Unfortunately he chose it for quite a long while to the detriment and harm of many good, invaluable and irreplaceable things and people.

After moving to Jonesborough in 1998, when I finally received an e-mail response from Hank, not knowing at the time of his shenadoa.com Shentel employment, his only comment on all the treasonously criminal and agonizingly painful events that had transpired was a cold, "It sounds like you had a bad time. I hope you heal." Particularly irked later on that that commercial Valley website, shenadoah.com, owned by Shentel -- one of whose co-owners was, and maybe still is, an attorney apparently ignorant of the Constitution and laws governing fair commercial competition between businesses in the same markets, and put on-line in late 1997, a year-and-a-half after mine, claimed to be "the original Valley's home page," although they later retracted that, something in me finally snapped near the fall of 2002 for wanting truth, law, love, and a better ending to prevail for everything. So, I "threw myself on the Grail," as I described it at the time to Gwen Fortune, knowing I was fighting a losing battle of protest against many, many things that were wrong and sick. And I remember thinking to myself at the time, "Who do I give myself up to?" It turned out to be, on Earth, authorities from the state that had instigated an unconscionably illegal and impossible, improbable, disgusting mess to begin with, compounding their abusiveness to a fatal climax in the end. It had been, of course, a particularly disorienting and nauseating shock, especially since I'd continued writing friendly and informative e-mails to him off and on, to discover earlier Hank's name listed as the Internet Project Manager of that site, a position he held for around ten years. I had noticed that his resume on-line omitted his 20 years of factory work for Avtex and intuited that he wished to make a break from that part of his life for something more in line with advanced education and his interests in technology, management and writing. At that time, I'd sent a cryptic e-mail to him saying simply, "Nice site," and Elizabeth sent back a few days later a chain "friendship" e-mail with some personal details of her life including that her son had been removed from a sports team for having tested positive for marijuana use. Still later, I found her name listed amongst those on Shentel's Board of Directors, complained that she was obviously well-aware that site was not "the original Valley's home page," as advertised, since material from Shenandoah Seasons had been part of OSCR, and noticed at a later date that name removed for whatever reasons.

In response to query sent him by John, forwarded to me, Hank responded that I "had been spamming him and his wife[in protest of their criminally diseased abd deeply injurious and fraudulent behaviors]and that it was disturbing,but that he'd been advised to ignore it," which he did, it being more profitable and locally prestigious to coninue on with his errant course of activities.

My internet provider here called with the advice Hank had telephoned and was "very upset" ( as was I and many others adversely affected, and would be any sane and rational individual in that inhumanely criminal sitution) and wanted me "off the internet" for protesting his illegal activities. My ISP failed to comply with that self-serving request of a charlatan claiming at the time my rightful place commercially with OSCR and to not to know me personally in light of what is described herein, and receiving revenues from that and for his knowledgeably criminally complicitand unpleasantly uncivil family and neighbors.

Once during that time and in response to a forwarded e-mail from me to John Waybright voicing some anguished, heartbroken protest to Hank's claim thru Shentel to have "the original Valley's home page" and all that represented in underhanded criminality and personal back stabbing against me and the work and investment I'd put into OSCR and bounteous good will and trust I'd placed mistakenly in him, and others there, he responded by e-mail to John's questioning, "I can't explain why this is happening. She's been spamming me and my wife for quite awhile. It's disturbing, but I've been advised to ignore it." Leaving the fraudulently erroneous impression he hardly knew me and that I had no personal or professional, or legal, grounds for complaint or dissent. Since I still had the disk saved backing up our original e-mail communications, business and othwerwise, I printed those and mailed them at some expense due to their bulk to Shentel's Christopher French as proof of our prior acquaintance for which delivery his secretary signed acceptance receipt.

As was increasingly apparent from some of their behaviors and speech, and definitely accommodation, the Zimmermans are and were profoundly what we term "lower class," determined to claw their sneakily underhanded and unprincipled and manipulatively usurious ways, however criminally and callously, "up" the socio-economic ladder of the "right wing," Neo-Confederate and (misnamed) "Born Again" Valley during the "internet boom" -- Constitution and country be damned, like too many others there and nationally, during our "nightmare" ("Lost Decade") era. Subsequent events and personal choices and private decsions have been greatly effected by the spotty amnesia, physical disabilities and conceptual disorientation resulting from the monumentally unthinkable and unrelieved complex of violent crimes, including near-lethal psychotropic drugging and "brainwashing," forced on me for four unrelieved and seemingly interminable years and to precious, beloved personal properties and friends. As I've regained health and clarity and concrete information, more of the pieces of horror to a deadly and nightmarish puzzle have fallen into place comprehensibly for me and others harmed, heartbreakingly and inexcusably. Throughout late 1997, 1998-2002 and 2007-2011, I shared details of my social life, events and companions, personal emotions, private thoughts and experiences in regular emails to Hank who seemed to be held incommunicado through normal channels by pernicious hostile forces -- a situation to which we both made unusual and mutually satisfactory, in the main, accommodation in joint creative construction, positive endeavor, and fruitful inter-communication.

Since I had initially offered a full partnership to Hank in the real "original Valley's home page which he declined lengthily in favor of personal intimacy introduced by his choice and actions in our relationship, his subsequent behaviors quasi-professionally seemed an especial travesty and violation of trust. Although since I've asked, pleaded actually with, Hank to help out with the horrendously harmful physical and financial burdens his criminality have caused me and others here in East Tennessee, he has determinedly declined from that conscienceless place in his heart, soul and mind that caused him to behave inhumanly, inhumanely, and vastly irresponsibly as he has since around Christmas 1997. Whatever demon has charge now of him has utterly destroyed and warped the person I once knew to the present awkwardly shameful and unmanly, dishonorable cariacature of someoneI once loved who was so much better and worthier. Unfortunately, the criminally demented, psychopathic "right wing," "neo-Confederate, widely and welcomingly racist and sexist Shenandoah Valley considers his self-centered demonstrations of deceptive and prosecutably criminal abusiveness and callousness, his greedy usury "hip and cool" and rewards that with official sanction and community "prestige," including honorary public positions and awards. Obviously, by consciously choosing to trade my health and liberty, home and personal property, remunerative business, reality and truth and law for a criminally-complicit job with Shentel, Hank is no better, and in many ways worse (especially personally and surreptitiously) than Gary Frink who traded all of that, by his admission at the time, for salaried local political appointments. That's the kind of regrettably pathetic "men," and criminally collusive families, that live and work in the miserably filthy and ugly, criminally corroded Shenandoah Valley. John Waybright made similar criminal accommodations for minimal paid employment by the owners of Luray Caverns and finally switched political affiliation to the perniciously prevailing "right wing" Republicans. By their acquiescence and participation, these "men" and their collusively corrupted families and hideously sick and abominable communities support and preserve an undemocratic, prosecutably sexist and racist, anti-capitalist system that hardly brings the best people and products to the top, in fair and open competition, to the benefit of all, including them and their children and this nation and world in the long-run. Of all the places cross-country, I've lived and worked over six decades, Valley repugnant residents are indisputably and undoubtedly, demonstrably the absolute worst: the most vituperatively criminal, disagreeably hypocritcal, self-righteously abusive and often violently repulsive in manner and attitude and sometimes in appearance, aggressively uncooperative, sneakily suspicious, maliciously gossipy, and generally undesireably unpleasant in interaction of any kind. They win from me and others who've experienced their effects an educated, knowledgeable "booby prize" personally and professionally. I, and my heritage and personal possessions, have traveled and worked healthily intact and growing through abodes as diverse as Fort Lauderdale FL, San Francisco CA, Chicago IL, Cleveland Heights OH, Boston MA, Johnson City and Jonesborough TN, Manhattan NY, Charlotte and High Point NC, Athens GA, metro Washington DC and Richmond VA, but not through and away wholesomely from the stickily filthy morass of the psychopathically ugly and hate-full Shenandoah Valley's shamelessly criminal residents and institutions. The practical everyday horrors consequent to ever having lived or owned or worked there or encountered any one of its residents seem unending. I do regret ever having been there; it wasn't worth it in the long run for any valuably good person or thing anywhere.

This is a love altogether once delicately constructed and shared like a perfectly prepared and presented gourmet meal that has decayed and molded in exposure left to derisively unkind insentient elements, once beautiful that has become monstrously hideous for lack of careful preservation in a profoundly rude and crude place nauseatingly inhospitable to higher functioning and finer feeling or reason.

At the time of my return, escape to Jonesborough I'd been forcibly drugged, brainwashed nearly to physical death for four years -- all this announced in local newspaper and television channels, so none can plead innocence based on ignorance of the facts -- with the compliance of miserable Valley thieves like Hank who believed they had great deal to gain materially and in unearned glory by claiming false identities and past behaviors. As my drug-induced amnesia, partially consequent to medical shock no doubt from exposure to persons and activities horrendous and horrid to me and others, including children I care about, faded my nightmares during sleep decreased and detail memory improved, affecting naturally my emotional and rational reactions to recalled events and persons and locales involved. In determining who is experientially well-prepared for what, it's significsnt to note that Hank graduated from college, with a "B" average while mine was an "A" average, paid for solely out of my of my own funds through employment and cautious inheritance investment. Additionally, I have highly-lauded and generously-remunerated by reputable professionals experience as an employee in tech mangement and as a succesful business owner and a history of healthy relationships personal and social. On an intimate level I've been blessed with the affections and voluntary attentions of extrardinarily accomplished and capable men and women cross-country throughout my lifetime. My two acres fronting the river were highly-desireable real estate in their naturally lush pastoral setting unlike Hank's jointly-held property of fourteen infertile acres of cold and dry stone. My soley-owned lovely two-bath home afforded amenable views and invitingly easy access to field and river bounty.

When I returned to Jonesborough in 2007, more dead than alive from the cumulative toll of multiply exponential crimes forced on me and my home and other properties by criminal and criminally complicit residents of the Shenandoah Valley, my mind and body were completely debilitated by four years of forced life as another entity than my own well-known and well-documented one and psychotropic drugging for supposed psychological problems never scientifically tested or adequately, accurately analyzed, I lost consciousness several times daily, could barely walk from overall weakness and shock, and still had problems expressing myself and relating events linguistically. With essentially no memory and the remnants of those drugs in my blood and veins in nightmares still awake and sleeping, I concentrated on mere survival at first and then recovery, revival of my life and that of others adversely affected as well as possible, restoring, resuscitating prior friendships and regaining my real identity and theirs. After finding a comfortable residence, I needed next to replace all my furnishings purloined variously by Valley thieves with official sanction from its and state an federal levels of "law enforcement" community. That turned into a pleasant and enlightening, enlivening and energizing experience due to the unusually quixotic items and venues of this region and the Mountain Empire generally of which the Valley is not a part being wholely small-town Southern and Confederate in its deepest and darkest parts, and "heart" -- an historic incubator of sedition, slavery and sacrilege. The 19th century Confederacy only existed, of course, for four years officially as a quasi-legal entity of widespread internecine warfare, fratricidal killing, mass property destruction, financial devaluation, community, familial and market disruption ending in surrender of arms, lands and insurgents to the victorious Union, superior in morality and materiel. It's an odd era of criminal chaos, loss and heartbreak to wish to embrace or recreate.

"He looked down into her brown eyes,/ Said, 'Say a prayer for me.'/ She threw her arms around him,/ Whispered, 'God will keep us free.'/ And they could hear the riders comin,/ He said, 'This is my last fight./ If they take me back to Texas,/ They won't take me back alive.'/ She reached down and picked the gun up,/ That lay smokin in his hand./ Said, 'Father please forgive me,/ I can't make it without my man.'/ And she knew the gun was empty,/ And she knew she couldn't win./ But her final prayer was answered,/ When the rifles fired again./ And there were seven Spanish Angels,/ At the altar of the Sun./ They were prayin' for the lovers,/ In the valley of the gun./ And when the battle stopped,/ And the smoke cleared./ There was thunder from the throne./ And seven Spanish angels,/ Took another angel home."
-- Seven Spanish Angels by Eddie F. Setser and Troy Harold Seals, performed by Willie Nelson and Ray Charles

Before packing up and moving back to East Tennessee, mother asked me about some behavior she didn't understand and I answered, truthfully, "I'm in love," to which she responded promptly, "Well. marry him." I said, "I can't. He's already married," to which she rejoined, "Well, marry somone else then. An art professor or something," and proceeded to hound me and others with the importance of that, about which I thought to myself eventually, " What is it about 'in love' that you don't understand? I don't want to marry anyone else." And, being independently self-supporting (and for decades) with a network of good friends in a safe place, there was no reason for me to do that, other than social convention about which I had no interest or sympathetic admiration. To my mind and experience marriage or not is an intimate decision and relationship beyond the reasonable bounds of uninvited interlopers, whether they be family or neighbors or police or attorneys -- who don't have to live personally with the everyday consequences of their unwelcome and necessarily inappropriate inteferences.

A few months after moving back full-time to Jonesborough, Tennessee in late August 2007, and incorporating ACR, and in the process of curiously investigating what he was doing now, I stumbled across Hank's photo by accident on-line, looked into his eyes in it, to see if he was still there, I guess, and realized in surprise, "I'm still in love with him." Still later on, I thought, "I have no brains at all. How am I going to live without intelligence? This is a hopeless situation." On reflection, I realized again that I'd never really been in love before, that it was still and always a totally new, unexplored and occasionally terrifying territory for me. "What's gonna happen next?" I wondered, "and will I survive it? No one ever told me about this before." All being a reiteration of comments to myself twelve years earlier as, in a sort of astonished daze, I walked into walls and experienced various other errant expressions and behaviors, causing some people to believe I needed psychiatric intervention. But I knew that wouldn't help. So, despite Biblical and worldly injunctions and determined notes to myself that I was not going to write or talk to him again, in December 2007 I e-mailed one day a no-pressure and open-ended, very clear and precise, well-thought-out and detailed invitation to resume communication and personal contact, if he wanted to, which, answered affirmatively, helped greatly in alleviating and curing my psychiatric and physical disabilities, enabling me to write poetry and prose again fluently, fluidly, insightfully, as well as engage in other skills, and to participate in day-to-day activities and events on the ground with joy and delight. I attribute all of this to male magnetism, which has influenced me previously but never to the same, sort of universal and totally mystifying extent.

I have, however, in the process of these experiences, and complicated by natural symptoms of aging, been a little disoriented and forgetful off and on. Driving away one evening last winter from Virginia's Emory and Henry College, after a performance there by the Harlem Choir, on a narrow two lane road leading toward Route 81, my little Grand Am suddenly lost power nearly completely and the battery and oil lights came on. I pulled over as best I could onto the grass and turned the engine off. Then I stopped the first car that came by. It had a youngish country boy and woman in it. They didn't know anyone I could call from the cell, sort of grudgingly said they would get help for me and drove off. Another car stopped in a few minutes, and I told that man that help was supposedly on the way. Quite a few minutes later, yet another nice-looking, middle-aged man stopped, with a woman in his car. He insisted on pushing my vehicle completely out of the road with me steering, somewhat confusedly. When it finally got completely onto the grass, I told him that had been "exciting." He wanted me to get in their car to warm up, but I told him I was fine. He said it was only 15 degrees, and I couldn't stay there like that, brought me a blanket from his car. He looked at the engine lights, said maybe it was the alternator, which would be trouble since it was Sunday and tomorrow would be a holiday, Martin Luther King Jr Day, and he didn't have his tools with him.

He looked at the gas gauge, which was nearly empty, on one-eighth, and said he'd be back in five minutes with a can of gasoline. While he was gone, I contemplated freezing to death, saw my life flash before my eyes and decided that I was content and satisfied with what I knew, that I was tired, and that it was okay if I died at that time. But I knew that man wasn't going to let me get away with it. He was too concerned with saving me. I wondered if the $14 cash I had with me would be enough to pay him. He returned with two gallons of gas from his house, because the station didn't have a carrying can, and put that in. My car purred and started up like a happy kitten. He wouldn't let me give him any money for the gas or his time, so I asked his name. He said it was Tony. I thanked him and said I'd pray for him. He looked very serious and said, "Thanks. I'd appreciate that." He told me to stop in Abingdon for more gasoline because I wouldn't make it to Jonesborough on what I had. As I was driving down Route 81, I noticed that his blanket was still in the car.

A few days later, I had dinner with friends at an Indian restaurant in Johnson City. I told them all about Tony, his generosity of time, labor, and materials, and all of us prayed gratefully for him. Some weeks later, walking toward an art show downtown, I passed a street person with long white flowing hair and a mustache. He called out, "Hey, darlin'! Can you spare any change?" I always fall for being called "darlin'," anyway, and always think that maybe the men are old vets, so I gave him all the coins I found in my coat pocket. As I walked back later from the gallery, he called out with surprise in his voice, "Did you know you gave me almost a dollar?" It didn't seem like much to me and I laughed, said "You asked for my spare change," and went on toward my car and home to Jonesborough again. When I was a child, I wasn't allowed to give money to beggars on the sidewalks, or even look at them, so it gives me great joy and contentment to do that as I've grown up and become independent.

Another evening, having driven back from Johnson City, I stopped by the neighborhood grocery store nearest my apartment to pick up some necessary things. As I was throwing ice cream into the cart, a sweet little, slightly distressed-looking girl came up to me and said, "I think you have my grandmother's grocery cart." I looked at her blankly and she added, helpfully, "See, her pocketbook is black, just like yours." So, I looked down and there surely was an unfamiliar pocketbook in a cart that definitely wasn't mine. I followed her back to the pork chops where her wide-eyed grandmother and my cart stood. We apololgized dazedly to each other and wandered off in separate directions. I laughed so hard in the parking lot, and back at home, that tears streamed down my face and my stomach hurt. The next time I went grocery shopping, I barely made it down the aisles with a straight face, remembering what had happened on my last visit.

O Shenandoah! Country Rag has a beautiful atmosphere, country pure, pristine, innocent, loving and open, cheery, good-willed, creative, expansive, humane, "lyrical," poetic, sensual and sexual in a healthy way. Tyrants hate the latter, want cupie and Ken dolls, mechanical men and Stepford wives instead. I guess they never really loved a woman or a man, or had sex with a real one. Poor them. They'll never know what they're missing and go to their graves without ever experiencing that. If they weren't so awful, I'd feel sorry for them, but they deserve that deprivation. I wouldn't give it up, knowing or having known it, for all the money in the world. And totally recommend it to everybody: loving abandon and selflessness, adventure, sacrifice, trust, self and other exploration. It's like making love in the air off and on with no gravity at all.

I still can't believe sometimes I found the man of my dreams and that he loves me as much as I love him, sometimes more or visa versa. Dynamism. Dynamite. Occasionally, I've felt I wasn't good enough for him, and also visa versa: ego problems brought on by parentage, marital dysfunction, circumstance and atmosphere. But we're both pretty fabulous, really, in somewhat different ways: words and music. I never felt remotely toward or with anyone as I do with him, in a very, very good way. So, fall in love, brothers and sisters. It's good for you, and good for the nation and world, too. Give yourself up to someone you really love. Allow yourself to be imparadised. You'll be amazed what happens and what you learn. You'll never have felt so good, or so bad, and there's nothing I recommend more heartily. It doesn't matter whether it's with someone of your own gender, or the other one.

It's the experience itself that counts and is totally worth all the pains and delights, losses and gains, ecstacy and fright, ignorance and learning, passion and reserve, hallucination and reason, togetherness and separation, endlessness and finality, hurts and healings, creativity and crashing, laughter and tears, misunderstanding and clarity, affirmation and negation, organics and orgasms, identity and universality, sharing and claiming, argument and reconciliation, devotion and denial, anguish and tenderness, magic and materiality, savagery and serenity, symbiosis and obliteration, faith and shattering, emotion and numbness, growth and cramping, surety and surrealism, scathing and redemption, expressiveness and stricture, craziness and solemnity, mystery and magnetism, dizziness and grounding, experimentation and explication, timelessness and minutae, desire and satisfaction, death and rebirth, triviality and essence, mortality and eternity, everything and vacuity, divinity and humanity, heartaches and bliss.

So, be One with someone. Kiss a frog today! Get a princess or a prince, in someone else and in yourself. It's what life is really about, and more love than you've ever believed or known possible, without boundaries or measure. It's a surprise and blessing without end. I can't think of anything more profoundly meaningful and worthwhile that I could wish for you. Le monde sans la fin.

Amidst amnesia, as well as cognitive and physical illnesses brought on off and on by continuing shock and trauma reactant to lawless and loveless Valley attitudes and behaviors, I've failed until very recently to recognize that the people and place once extant there, and all still available for reminiscence in the archives of OSCR and ACR by a more-or-less miracle of God despite illegal dislocations and disorientations of me and most of my property, have been "paved and turned into a parking lot" for very blatant and obvious violent and vicious felons, their co-conspirators, and misled and misinformed idiots apparently unaware of regretful resultancies which are unavoidable and undeniable in their cause and exhibiting no real insight at all into who and what the region has really done and become for everyone. It doesn't take but an average intelligence to realize that what has happened there is wrong -- an insistence on falsity, phoniness, murderous and theiving criminality -- which has had unfortunate and deleterious consequences worldwide as well as regionally and in this nation. The collusion of oath-sworn Deputies and Sheriffs' Departments against provisions of the Constitution protecting and serving citizens and their property is the initiating, spreading harm and ludicrous arrogance of some people there with misplaced power assuming they are more intelligent and correctly directed than framers of our world-reknowned Independence and well-storied Republic with its very respected laws governing individual, property and market interactions between human beings.

While I couldn't possibly represent or promote the Valley as a place to live, work, visit or buy with any integrity at all, then or now, and that being my reasoned motivation for leaving in the first place in 1997-1998, I do wholeheartedly and enthusiastically support, share and disseminate the Constitutionally-inspired values, principles, ideals and inspirations of the Mountain Empire, East Tennessee, and Jonesborough, my favorite town for many, many years before ever settling here permanently to employ myself and others constructively and productively in worthwhile endeavors for community, country, continent, planet, universe and God.

It's a region that has fought very hard and valiantly for truth, reality and positive directions for everybody, earning in the process recognition and admiration from many, many people planet-wide. The new Horizon Project of the International Storytelling Center is an outstanding example of its commitment to healthy, healing and liveable connections between history, land and people. ISC is also working with the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress to develop a national and international program for collecting, preserving, and disseminating information and materials about the traditions, practice, and application of storytelling with a repository at the International Storytelling Collection located in Washington DC's Library of Congress, which will provide on-site and online access also to the collection in ISC's Jonesborough facilities. I'm so very, very proud and happy to be, and have been previously, a very tiny and involved part of Mountain Empire aptitudes and altitudes for mind, body, spirit and heart here and universally.

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