KingI watched the Amanda Knox movie again (I get weird obsessions with films I watch some repeatedly I guess it runs in the family I have Gone With the Wind memorized practically) but it makes sense of course. Foreign exchange (Foreigner ha) students particularly "dumb Americans" naive, young, malleable, confused.......are an easy target for those who'd take advantage. Also because, as I said before, what happened to Amanda could have happened to me or many others. It was simply a few factors that stood in the way of me ending up in that predicament though I had my own minor brush with trouble and the cops over there. I could only imagine how terrifying.....it WAS..... for a time I thought I'd never get out of there.....be forever stuck in this far-off place with strange cops who were unsympathetic in this land that never got hot and everyone looked peculiar and was hostile to us.....this while being taken to see movies about police in Australia and Britain brutally beating prisoners yeah enough to scare the living shit out of someone like me. But to be stuck in prison a part of me wonders if I'd have a heart attack. Only the international law stood in my favor and the cops there didn't want to mess with that. Really, a miracle. Imagine if this was a country where .....there is less law. Or none. When I went to Israel I was detained and interrogated (first time ever I've been.....I was outraged as it turns out proved me innocent thankfully.....I later saw the same reactions on Law and Order episodes "What's all this about? You think I did this?" ect) by this soldieress yes I.....they know what they're doing (probably trained by the American military) they provoke you and provoke you, trying to break you down, test your reactions, see how you respond. I can't say I was this girl's biggest fan and at the end I finally snapped (again.....sitting in a foreign airport desperately wanting to get the fuck out of there.....never been so damn grateful to get on a plane) and I was walking around Amsterdam full of rage and whimpering at being singled out.....why why why.....but I suppose I can't hold it against someone for doing their job and following protocol I understand the big picture. But.....me being American, middle class, white.....Protestant what have you, you take these privileges for granted having them and it devastated me later to hear people who do not have these advantages telling me what they went through. A girl who was of Syrian descent (which actually I have some in me my maternal great grandfather was allegedly Syrian maybe Syrian Jewish) but you wouldn't know it talking to me, talked about, this while we were in London, and she spoke with an American accent but how she was detained on an international flight to Paris (she came from money but no matter) her suitcase wrapped in yellow tape and forced to wear a gold star and all this before September 11, 2001. Right when I had that skirmish with the international phone center, after having my bag stolen in Burger King (interestingly was reading David Copperfield oops oh look! it's really happening) having no money I admit I was dumb enough to walk into this place thinking I could call collect my Dad, God bless him, on the other end at his job in Indianapolis.....then this furious guy on the phone with my father saying I owed 13 GBP ya de ya "August thuhteenth" the same day that the American embassy in Nigeria was bombed. At the time we had no internet and little access to the news and I couldn't afford a newspaper because my money was taken from me. These experiences are very common in Europe it happens to European tourists as well. So be careful. But the place I was staying in London, no joke, called the "Dimwiddy House".....in the red light district but hey if you're gonna go go in style baby, had very tight security I have said this before. But had it not certainly a break in probably would have occurred the same way it did in Perugia. Who knows why this poor girl Meredith had such a terrible, unjust end. I am sorry for that......how could anyone be sorry enough? Multiple injustices there. And no explanation.....not enough of one. Such a bizarre world, you know? It goes without saying at least Joan Rivers got to live out her life. I just don't understand it, but I suppose there is no understanding some things.....
Apparently in this neighborhood King's Cross, my father got the message I had been kidnapped.....the policeman told me there had been sirens alarms and a military style search team trying to find me.....I was escorted back to the Dimwiddy House, down the street, shaking and sobbing.....my father on the phone "stay away from Pakistani, stay away from Hindu.....they think you have money and they don't like you....." I walked into the student house, kids standing around smoking and my fellow students watching.....as I struggled to stay composed and extremely embarrassed.....telling the supervisor (a woman.....) of my group what happened.....who had been kind enough to lend me a little money as I had zero anything.....thankfully did have my passport. I had gone there having had listened to British electronic music thinking I would walk into what I saw in music videos. Yeah, I was right, but wrong part of London. My knowledge of Scotland, where we were headed next, was Braveheart (it's called highlands because? It's above the UK......? Or is it really higher, like on a mountain, in my head I pictured a city on a huge rock.....called....what? cliff?) Later on I ventured out on my own and found what, in London I mean, I had been seeking initially. I ventured off alone to some clubs (honestly, I didn't have a great rapport with the kids I went with, we just didn't mesh. At first anyway) and met real natives there. This was a far better experience. This is how I typically traveled I don't know I just had that impulse in me always since birth......to wander off.....sometimes made me feel guilty. I used to do that constantly as a little kid......in Michigan on family trips I did that making my poor mother hysterical as I was simply gone.....I'd wander into other people's back yards and go on the swings, one time in Roscommon boy did I get lost.
I ended up somewhere around this area pictured looks familiar.....years later GPS would save me but then I'd had none.....must have been a spirit or some such that did then. I was about maybe seven years old with a worse sense of direction than I have now.
Luckily someone picked me up and I don't even know how I got back.....I had been on a bicycle and spun off the I don't know where.....my mom had no cell phone did I even know my address? I think that's the only reason someone managed to drive me back. It's lucky it wasn't some fucker who picked me up but a decent citizen......
This is the little gorgeous river in Roscommon.....oh yes.....I went on a trip, a couple years before the London one, to visit family with my mother and little sister.....we went on this same canoe expedition and it started to storm then I dropped my glasses in the river. During this time I had been crying because a guy I'd been dating had flirted with another girl. Eh. History (hysteria) repeats itself and repeats itself.....Ten years later on another trip my grandfather rest his soul, who was.....a little off.....would accuse me of stopping up his toilet. Interesting.....toilet stopped then water flowing.....or.....?
