July 16, 2011
Last night, as I was almost back to the shelter, I saw the assistant director of the shelter getting out of his car, holding a bunch of sunflowers. He saw me and smelled one of them.
When I went into the house after he’d been there, I saw that he’d put the flowers in a large, yogurt container above the sink.
I recently wrote about a male resident of the shelter who works at the Price Chopper and who had revolted me by taking a yogurt container out of the refrigerator a couple of mornings in a row and saying “I’m going to eat this for breakfast.”
Two residents, of any gender, aren’t allowed in the basement of the shelter at any time, together. I doubt that relationships between residents are officially supposed to be getting encouraged, and so I really think that it’s inappropriate for the assistant director of the shelter to encourage my being abused by a male resident whose several advances I’d already rejected, and who had been subsequently more abusive toward me after I’d rejected him.
Copyright L. Kochman July 16, 2011 @ 12:57 p.m.
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July 16, 2011
--I know that the assistant director wants me to leave. He's been going out of his way to behave in ways that are unkind and degrading and to encourage others to do the same, for a long time.
I don't know what to do about getting a job. Anywhere that I go is going to be famous as soon as I work there. The phones are likely to be tapped. At least all of the Internet and electronic transactions of everyone who works there are also likely to be monitored by the big harassers and by others.
If the person who hires me owns his or her own business, he or she is likely to get hassled at least by the big harassers, and probably also by local businesses and people who like what the big harassers are doing. If the person is a manager of a local branch of a corporation, the manager could get fired, or not promoted, receive no raises, and get otherwise hassled by the higher-ups in his or her company, in addition to the same people I listed in the previous sentences.
I realize that all of those things may have happened or be happening to the management of the shelter, but I can't help that.
--Two elderly people showed up tonight to donate macaroni and cheese to the shelter for dinner.
It's always a weird feeling when old people show up to do things such as to commit sexual harassment. It's as if they're performing a weird ritual that they think is good; something that lives in their psyches as if it were a sacrificial rite from an ancient society, for which the steps of the process for killing people is in their knowledge base alongside things such as the steps for creating picture collages and care packages to send to their grandkids and the rules for playing canasta.
I avoided their donation and had something else. After I'd brought my plate out into the backyard and was sitting on the back steps enjoying the beautiful evening at the end of my long day, a male resident walked out into the backyard also. He and I have talked before; we've almost always had ok conversations. This time, he sat in one of the garden chairs and started a conversation with me, and then he brought the conversation around to make one harassing reference after another.
There was something about the way he did it that seemed unexpectedly vicious because of how calm and quiet he was while he was talking. He was as casual and deliberate as could be.
Copyright L. Kochman July 16, 2011 @ 9:55 p.m./edit @ 9:57 p.m.