just another web stalker narrative

As far as stalkers go, I know I've gotten off relatively easily. I don't even know if you could call what I've got a "stalker." He's something less ominous than that-- annoying, but not scary, really. He's a "harasser," maybe. I've never felt like I was at risk of physical injury to my person because of his existence. My narrative of feeling infringed upon isn't anywhere near this bad. But nonetheless, I'd just as soon this person not assert his existence upon my awareness every so often. I really would.

A lot of well-meaning friends have strongly advised me against writing a post like this. Most of me thinks they're all right. I even went so far as to ask the only one of my friends who I know for sure owns the proper equipment to promise to flog me soundly were he to catch me engaging in any sort of public repartee with this fellow. Because, I mean, I do recognize that what my harasser wants is to drag me into some kind of conversation. He wants me as more than just an object of his fantasy. He wants me to be a participant. And the wise, rational part of me knows that acknowledging his recent resurfacing in yet another new web incarnation is a piss-poor idea.

But here's the thing, folks: the day this blog becomes something other than a place wherein I can fully, openly speak my mind is the day I may as well pack it in and close up shop. This space is good for my soul in that I make every effort to tell the honest truth of the moment here. And if I find myself self-censoring to evade the attentions of a man who I wish didn't know my name, I've lost a big part of that battle. It's not his invasion on my consciousness that I find disempowering, after all-- it's the prospect of silencing myself and my own fury at him in service of trying not to provoke him. So, I know writing this post is going to look an awful lot like I'm falling for his bait, but this is on my mind tonight and I can't pretend like it's not.

It may not look like much, but this little plot of digital square-footage is the one public forum over which I have complete control. I rule this kingdom and I get to decide who addresses the queen. To that end, I had to change the comment setting this morning. I've always tried to keep my comments open to all, because, on principle, I don't much care for doing things like censoring commenters who just happen to disagree with me. But it seems I've come to the point at which, if I'm going to have my wishes respected, I'm going to have to do a little more hands-on policing.

And because I intend to firmly re-plant the brown rabbit flag on this land, I think it's only right that I now relay the story of my misbegotten association with this particular unsavory of unsavories. Maybe you can all forgive what I hope are only occasional forays into pettiness-- but, at this point, I'm pretty sure I would enjoy running my Microplane over this guy's armpits and then pouring apple cider vinegar into the abrasions. I'm sure you all will soon empathize. Besides, I want my version of this story to become the official one. And so I set to recording:

About 5 years ago, I'd just finished my MFA and couldn't get a job to save my life. I had an MFA. Go figure. I began doing some contract work for a company for which I'd briefly worked a few years before. I had a knack for the (very easy) work and quickly worked my way through the ranks. At some point, I worked on a project with my soon-to-be harasser and apparently, I caught his attention. Catching a co-worker's attention at this particular job wasn't terribly unusual. I was one of a handful of women under 50-- and one of only 3 or 4 in my 20s. Daily, old men fell all over themselves trying to start awkward conversations with me. Being the deeply introverted person that I am, I often dreaded going to work because I felt eaten alive by so much unsolicited attention from skeevy men 20, 30, 40 years my senior. In fact, my friend Jon and I bonded almost immediately upon meeting because a) he was one of only a couple guys my own age who worked there and b) he had observed what a target I was. Once I zeroed in on poor Jon as an ally, I could hide behind him and, because most folks assumed we were dating, his mere presence helped me fend off the lion's share of the attention. Of course, a couple of pointedly staged scenes of us making out in his car in the parking lot helped all that too. What? You do what you have to do.

But the truth is that I didn't take much note of my harasser. He was just another gawking old dude who happened to attract a little more derision that some, due to his frequent display of plumber's crack, the exploding gin blossoms all over his face, and his general slowness on the uptake that led him to say things on an awkward-making speech delay. I do recall him once sitting beside me on the sidewalk on a lunch break, though. I was reading some nerdy poetry book or other, and he decided a great way to start a conversation was to (Holy Pet Peeve, Batperson!) read over my shoulder and make supercilious comments about work that was clearly over his head. But most of the time, he quite simply did not enter my mind unless he was directly within my field of vision.

But this, apparently, was not the case for him, with regard to me. My first clue that something was a little off-kilter was this letter that appeared on my chair at work. As you can tell from my very catty commentary on that letter, he was talking about some mysterious event that had transpired without my notice. I posted it here, way back in July of 2006, without really thinking that he'd ever find this blog. I don't know if he's read that post or not, but, at the time, I was really just trying to be funny. I thought the letter was weird, for sure, but not really reason enough for me to pointedly shame him or hurt his feelings. Not yet, anyway.

In subsequent months, I continued to believe that he was just another wiggy old guy at work. Nothing to worry about, really. But then... he started in with the gifts. Someone had given me an avocado pit and I was trying to coax it to life. It was named "Mostly Harmless." Though it had been perched on toothpicks in a cup of water for weeks, it was doing exactly nothing in terms of the expected germination. And then, one night, someone on the cleaning staff swept Mostly Harmless off my desk and into the round file. I never saw it again. Ostensibly to assuage my grief, my harasser brought me some flowers from his front yard. Still, I didn't think it was any big deal. At that point, he was technically my supervisor--- and I was being a relatively terrible subordinate. I sat in the back of the room with my very queeny friend Jason, and the two of us spent our days giggling, discussing eyeshadow and anal penetration, and not doing our jobs very well. Still, my supervisor brought me flowers instead of chastising me for behaving like the juvenile brat I was, so who was I to change my ways?

But then, a couple of weeks later, when I was working on a completely different project, a little box wrapped in gold foil appeared on my desk. It contained a little stonewear jewelry box and a tacky little brass necklace with a dragonfly pendant. Finally, a gift of cheap jewelry set off some sirens in my head. I wrote him a terse note, informing him that it was inappropriate to give gifts of jewelry to women at work. I stated as clearly as I knew how that it made me uncomfortable and that I sincerely hoped he would never bring it up again. I left the note, with the box and the necklace on his desk while he was on a break, just so I wouldn't be forced to confront him.

But I was stupid to hope. Within a day or two, I found a post-it stuck to the driver's-side window of my car that begged forgiveness and said he couldn't figure out why I was so mad. And the fact that he thought he'd provoked an emotion so passionate as anger in me creeped me out all the more. I went to my new supervisor, who informed me that he was confident I could handle this situation on my own. He said, "Just reason with him. I'm sure he has no idea you're uncomfortable." Assessing that there was no help to be found there, I went over his head. The woman who was my supervisor's supervisor told me that she felt confident that my firm rebuff should have done the trick and maybe I should start dressing a little more conservatively. Oh, yeah. She said that. Mind you, I wore jeans, t-shirts and flip-flops every day to this job. I was not, as they say, working it. Given, my current job remains the only one at which I have not yet gotten in trouble for my clothing-- not because the clothing is so revealing, but because, I maintain, the girl inside the clothing refuses to compartmentalize her sexuality whenever she leaves the warm womb of her home. It's part of me. I can't hide it. I don't think I should have to. But I've digressed.

So, needless to say, though I followed all the office protocol, I had no help whatsoever from the people in charge. So I commenced to the ignoring. However, when you're dealing with someone who is absent a sensitivity to the usual social cues and who is generally fairly dim anyway, ignoring may well prove to be too subtle a tactic. He kept trying to butt into conversations I'd be having with other people. He assailed me in the hallway a few times. Finally, he flat-out cornered me with a bright red folder in hand. He insisted I read whatever was inside and offer "feedback." He knew I wrote stuff and he fancied himself a writer too. I felt so trapped, I really had no idea how to refuse. So I took the folder from him, read the enclosed passage on a break, was so horrified/amused by the deeply empurpled blatherings of a madman that were enclosed therein (that made no sense whatsoever, by the way), that I handed it back to him the next time I saw him, saying, "I'm really not the person to edit this for you." And I turned tail and walked away. Quickly.

Very shortly thereafter, I got a job in DC and moved away. I didn't even consider whether or not I'd hear from him again, so far from my thoughts was he. But within a couple months of my departure, he tracked down my email address-- gods know how. He sent me a long, word-saladish yet impassioned diatribe, begging my forgiveness and swearing up and down that he had no idea what he'd done wrong. Then, as now, I engaged when I shouldn't have. I said I wasn't "mad;" I just didn't didn't have any reason to participate in what, increasingly apparently, was a very detailed fantasy he'd invented surrounding the very cursory interactions he and I had had. The email thread got longer than it should have, until I finally got sick of working so hard to not hurt his feelings and told him that he was, under no circumstances, to contact me ever again. I realized I was communicating with someone who could not rationally process the fact that he'd wholly invented a reciprocity of feelings on my part and I suppose that scared me a little. So, my hope was that the firmness of my disavowals would discourage him. And they did. For a little while.

A couple of months later, a friend of mine (one I'd also met at the same job) emailed me that she'd gotten a weird comment on her own blog from someone she didn't know, saying he didn't understand why we all couldn't be friends. Immediately, of course, I knew who the commenter was. And, oh, my god. Pestering me is one thing. But pestering my friends to get at me? Wow, dude. That is way uncool. Then I discovered that the comment he'd left linked to a blog of his own-- wouldn't you know? On that blog, I found a long post that was ostensibly addressed to me, again begging for some sort of reconciliation. Clearly, he'd commented on my friend's blog to get my attention. Had he done it on mine, yeah, I probably could have ignored it and that would have been the end. But the idea of him going to the trouble of tracking down and then bothering a close friend to get to me? Yeah, that just burned me up.

I wrote a comment on his skeevy post, telling him that if he was any kind of man, he'd leave my friends alone and deal with me directly if I was the source of his beef. But I also reaffirmed my stance that he should fuck off even anyway, as there was nothing to "reconcile" in the first place. He took my comment down. Then he took his own post down. Then he replaced it with another one. I took screenshots of the replacement post, as I figured it was definitely time to start documenting. In this second post, he described some moment in which he perceived "an exchange of erotic charge" between us from across a room. At this point in my narrative. I'm sure I don't need to state this explicitly, but that did not happen. Truly, it was his total detachment from reality that really made me begin to worry. I mean, it's one thing if a bumbling, dumb guy gets the wrong idea. But a bumbling, dumb guy who continues to insist that stuff happened that simply did not? It was unnerving at best.

Then I wrote this post on my own blog. And he followed that up with several more posts on his blog that detailed a crescendo of nastiness with me as its target. And then he took it all down and his blog, entirely dedicated to love-hating me, disappeared. Because he was linked on a blog of another mutual acquaintance, I knew when he started writing a brand new blog, but this one wasn't about me, so I figured he'd finally gotten the picture and wasn't going to pester me anymore, so I stopped paying attention. The story of the stalker became an amusing anecdote I told on dates. Ha. Ha. This crazy old dude once proclaimed love for me in some goony emails and then wrote a whole blog about what a whore-bitch I am. Isn't that hilarious?

Cut to two days ago. I found a bizarre, slightly bitchy comment on my last post. I responded, not knowing who it was at first. But the comment was linked to yet another blog-- a blog filled with this dude's trademark word-salad-like schizoid ramblings, alongside some claims of aspirations to "artistic writing" or some such. Now, I've had a few slightly strange comments from an "anonymous" over the last couple of months and I had been a little suspicious that it was he, my not-secret-at-all admirer/castigator. Based on IP addresses and the aforementioned crazed and very bad diction, it all seemed to fit, but I hadn't given it much thought. Well, now I have good reason to believe that my troll is, indeed, the self-same harasser who I'd shamed into retreat nearly two years ago.

Now, the thing is his recent comments have been as ignorant (Think advocating climate change denial. What a crack-up, this guy!) as he ever was, but they haven't been sexual, nor have they been predatory. I'm inclined to describe them as downright innocuous. Except for one thing. Countless times, I admonished this person to never, ever contact me again. Not through any avenue. Not in public, not in private. I was very clear. I was not polite. And I did not waver in that demand. All I really wanted was to go back to the point at which he didn't enter my thinking unless I was in direct conversation with him-- which would be never as we live nearly 700 miles apart. He had made himself into a nuisance and I was the one who had to deal with it, through no fault of my own. All I wanted was for that to not be the case anymore.

I am wholly unaccustomed to having folks utterly disregard my wishes, it's true. That's not to say that I don't have to deal with all the usual unfairnesses innate to human existence. But usually, if something is important enough for me to go to the trouble to specifically state my wishes, it's rare for the people around me not to at least try to respect them. Perhaps it's because most people I know are neither insane nor rude that I find the imposition of one for whom there is standing evidence that he is both of those things to be so damn infuriating. Really. It makes me angry in way on which I'm having trouble keeping perspective.

It's clear that, two years later, this guy's ego has healed enough to where he feels confident enough to initiate a conversation with me again. He's even started posting some sick, kooky, Republicanish misinformation on his own blog in response to posts I've written. Which is fine, I guess, except for the fact that I know about it. He made sure I knew about it by linking his comments on my blog to himself. And that operates in direct opposition to my vehement request that he never, ever contact me again. And that's why I've been fuming for the last couple of days, wondering what the fuck is wrong with this man that he just can't get it through his girthy cranium that his desire for interaction with me-- even harmless, casual internet dialogue-- is not a desire I feel in return. He's creeped me out once-- well, a few times-- and that's enough for me to feel that way evermore. I am now duly resentful of even the smallest reminders of his existence.

Now, he's welcome to obsess about me all he wants. Again, it's just that I don't want to know about it. I can't prevent him from reading my blog. And I can't even really prevent him from trying to contact me. But I can prevent him from commenting and I sure as hell can prevent myself from answering (though, well, we all know willpower isn't my strong suit-- hence this post).

I don't know. Maybe this post will set him off on another series of near-psychotic rants in tribute to my witchy allure. Maybe it'll shame him into another couple of years of silence. Undoubtedly, he is too loopy for me to attempt to predict his next move. But this is still my space, not his. And therefore, it seems only right that I'm the one who decides what gets said here. Including pissy, ill-advised posts that'll doubtlessly win me a lashing, either metaphorically or literally, from some friend or other. Ah, well. I'm pigheaded. So be it.