Kittens and Fluffy Clouds
Kittens and Fluffy Clouds
There’ve been times when I’ve seen people respond to my work with, “You’re just looking for problems.” They want me to look on the bright side. “See the good in the world!” “There are roses and sunshine!” That’s why I decided to write this piece about kittens and fluffy clouds. Who doesn’t love kittens?
The problem is — there’s not much to say about kittens except the fact that they are awfully cute and there’s not much to say about fluffy clouds either, except to say that that one looks a lot like a whale.
That’s why this piece is actually not about kittens or fluffy clouds.
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This piece is actually about my stalker/harasser/troll and since she does tend to lurk and look at my headlines, I felt it would be safer to give this one a title she would be unlikely to click on. I mean, I don’t know, maybe she’s into kittens but she does not tend to actually read so I’m burying this text beyond where’s she’s likely to look. Many a social media post will put out the first few lines of text of something, so to be safe, I went ahead and started with kittens and fluffy clouds.
If the news of this semi-famous troll stalker of mine is news to you, I’d recommend you go back and read this post to catch up. It’s a doozy.
So…that was about 2.5 years ago. After a pretty terrible couple of weeks, after I blocked her on Twitter and she finally stopped calling, I didn’t hear from her again. She continued including me in mad rants for a while where I couldn’t see them, but it stopped eventually, as far as I knew. I thought it was over.
As my phone was dying last month, I made a last push to get at least get her voicemails copied from it so if I ever had to provide evidence of the harassment, I could. I thought the whole thing was probably over — but I felt I couldn’t be too sure. I wanted to be prepared for a reappearance.
Turns out, I was right to be concerned about a reappearance. A few weeks ago, I got notice of a new patron on Patreon at a $10 per blog post level. (Amazing! My second highest pledge! That could be $50 a month!) But it turned out to be her. For a minute I thought it could be a friend playing a not so funny joke on me — the way someone bought her song on my website using her name, even though it wasn’t her. But then I saw the nasty message that came along with the pledge. It banged on the “You stole my songs” drum and several other nonsensical things that signaled her actual presence and I straight up did not know what to do.
It was Yom Kippur. She’s a born again Christian, I think, but maybe she was attempting to make some extremely ass backward atonement? Why is someone who hates me pledging to give me money every month? Aside from a weird attempt at apologizing, what could it be? On one hand, it seemed like a dominance move, a way to say that she has money and I do not. It could have been a way to gain access to me and power over me. It could have been attempt to invade a safe space. It could have been an attempt to target my income. Maybe she was planning to cancel the payment right as it was about to charge to pull a nice financial rug out from under me. I asked around and no one seemed to be able to guess what her game was.
I have no way of knowing what her thinking was (which is hard for me, because I like to understand why people do things) but I have learned that trying to figure that out is a fool’s errand. Since my initial experience with her, people came out of the woodwork to share their horror stories with me about their experiences. Tales of her not paying her musicians, harassing people selling her used CDs, forcing someone to stand in a garbage can, and much much worse (which I have promised not to publicly divulge). No matter how much I could have used the money, I knew I had to block her.
I know from my own experience that there is no rationalizing with this person. The guys at the company who helped me with the licenses tried to explain to her how licensing worked, how this aspect of the business went and found themselves surveilled and vilified, as well.
As I watched well-meaning people try to appeal to her reason or humanity last time around, it started to become clear how impossible that would be. It would be like trying to have a reasonable conversation with a tornado made of jellyfish. Not all of the jellyfish will sting you but you will end up with a jellyfish to the face at some point — and certainly the tornado will never stop to listen to what you have to say. A lot of people who tried to reach out to her with kindness ended up with a face full of jellyfish.
You might have seen a similar example of this sort of behavior in another context recently. It is not really possible to debate a jellyfish tornado.
I blocked my jellyfish tornado on Patreon, which triggered an automated email notifying my jellyfish tornado of her blocking, which, given the clicks from admin.Patreon on my blog, fairly likely triggered a retaliating accusation of some sort. In this moment, I do not know what the tornado is going to do next. But I do know that it will be neither reasonable or rational. Hopefully, it’s just moving on. But I can never be sure when she’ll be in the mood to dredge this all up again, for no particular reason.
That’s the thing that is the hardest to understand — that not everyone is reasonable — that even if the jellyfish tornado can use words and form sentences, that does not mean it is reasonable. I did not know that at first. I think I half hoped she’d read my blog, realize it was all a misunderstanding, call me up to apologize and then invite me to come sing duets with her in her studio. (I don’t think I truly believed this but my inner teen fan from 1988 might have.) But instead, she tweeted out something nasty in response and outed herself as the redacted troll mentioned within. It was an extraordinary self-own.
But see, I know she’s a jellyfish tornado now. I’m still scared of her but mostly I try to stay clear of her path. If I have to go inside and lock the door until the tornado has passed, I can do that — and I’d rather do that than go outside and end up with a face full of jellyfish. I can often tell who has run into some kind of jellyfish tornado before. They are the first people to tell you, “I can see why you think that reasonable appeal will help. But you might want to just skip ahead to locking your door because it probably won’t work. And definitely don’t invite that tornado in your house.” Once you’ve been in one jellyfish tornado, you get a feel for these things. I’m one of those people now.
I don’t know what we’re to do with all these tornados. Are they inevitable? Is there no way to neutralize them? Or stop them showing up in your neighborhood? If there are answers to that, I would like to know — because this is not the only jellyfish tornado in the world. The only thing I’ve figured out how to do is call a jellyfish tornado a jellyfish tornado when I see one and do my best to not get caught up in it. I may be tempting fate by telling you about all this. Maybe I’ll draw the tornado back in my direction by writing about it. But I’ve also learned to reach out to friends and ask for cute animal photos when the tornado appears for whatever mercurial reasons tornados have. Hopefully, I won’t need more photos of kittens anytime soon. Or fluffy clouds.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on October 22, 2020.
