You Can Put Your Pitchforks Away Roanoke

Well Roanoke, you did it. After beating me down for 19 years, you've gotten your wish, I admit defeat. Put a fork in me...I...am...done. This last year has been hard, and the last couple of months particularly brutal. Details are forthcoming, but not on this blog.

This valley has sapped my strength and suffocated my soul to the point I can't write, can't create, shit, I can't even blog any more. I can barely live day to day. My only glimmer of hope is knowing I will be getting away from here and going back home. And a cheer arises from Roanoke.

I was never accepted, and have become so hated, that twice in the last two months someone, a mother of one of my daughter's drugged-out "friends," has tried to get me arrested. Both times for doing what a mother should do...watch out for her child. Neither time was successful, but the last one came with a price, a very heavy price, and not monetarily.

Too bad the cops failed to catch the "hot-headed, crazy, Italian from Brooklyn" in any crime. I think that one particular ignorant cop thought he was going to have a mafia arrest under his belt, I mean all Brooklyn Italians are in the mafia, right? After waking me up after midnight, and then insulting me, he followed with, "I'm Southern, and we do things differently around here." Well that shows just how fucking stupid and racist some of the people can be if you are not born and bred here. By the way, after believing a false report, checking my husband and I for bruises and abrasions on our hands, and refusing to even entertain the thought that there were crimes committed, but not by us who weren't even in town when they occurred, and that possibly he was being irrational and being used as a car service, if he meant "wrong" when he said "differently," then yeah, Southerners do do things "differently" all right.

It's all going to come out, all of it, and it's going to be stuff I never thought I would write, nor wanted to write, but I have to. Once again, I live in a fucked-up, bizarre story, and will tell the tale in hopes that someone else will not find themselves in the same position. But I won't be writing it from here. I'll be writing it from home, Brooklyn. And yes, that means I'm leaving the family behind, but not forever. I will be commuting back and forth. There are some people, and a puppy, who do still love me, but they see my misery and know if I stay here full-time I will sink into the pit of despair. I am grateful that my husband finally understands, but heartbroken that it had to come to this latest debacle before he finally got what I've been saying all along.

So, dear Roanoke, you'll have to find someone else to...stop your cell-towers from radiating your children, take your elderly in, care for them and check on their well-being, make sure the neighborhood pedophile doesn't hang out in the park near the elementary school, stop the commercial trash from being picked up in the wee hours of the morning, make sure your electricity stays running when those trees threaten to take the wires down, clean up the dog shit on the greenways, leave cookies for the mailmen and sanitation workers, report dangerous intersections, stop your neighbor from burning down the forest with their defective fireworks, fight with your cable company until they find the broken wire down the road so your service is not interrupted constantly, speak up for you at your Board of Supervisors meetings, and whatever else I've done to try and make this valley a better place to live. So put your pitch-forks away, this Frankenstein is leaving the village idiots.



Yup, you won't have me to kick around much longer...and I'm counting down the days.

P.S. Not every person I've come into contact over the last 19 years has sucked, just most of them. And I do want to thank the few folks who have been kind to me and/or took pity on me. Sorry if I was such a burden...