AD Sullivan journal 2013

      More than likely, RR came up with the original concept of using her to control our editorial output – though others have since sought the same, most recently, the R campaign which seems to think we have more influence than we do. “RR is an evil man who will do just about anything to anybody,” said one of his stanches critics. RR is a man who will entrap someone and then blackmail them into get at someone else, this same critic said. Since it is clear she was under RR’s influence almost as soon as she began working for us in late 2011, you have to wonder did he have something on her that he used to force her to do his bidding? Or was she so infatuated with him that she remained blind to just what a confidence man he was? She did at least three puff pieces on him and how he planned to get his position back on the police department. He also severed as her primary source for the Virgin Mayor’s legal troubles, he getting win of his indictment from the FBI, a ...

      I don’t know if it means anything, but she was quoted yesterday as the official spokesperson for the Virgin Mayor’s city in regard to the reopening of a park. After nearly six months in the position that allegedly has her as the press person, this is the first public announcement she’s made – with the exception of the political photographs she did at one of the Virgin Mayor’s fundraisers.   Does this mean she’s finally made the grade and come into her own as the official press official? This may also be a biproduct of her PR boss’ new role as the campaign manager for R in Hometown. It may be a trial run for her, although it also leaves open the question about the role her drinking and barhopping buddy A will play, since it is clear that the former Hometown reporter has ingested the R Kool Aid, at least from what she talked about during the awards ceremony last month. Again, the question remains will she (our poet and personal mayoral aide) play a ro...

    Looking back to a poem she posted in late April 2012; I realize she had already expressed some doubts about what transpired between us. This is brought out in my journal entry on social engineering. She clearly thought she knew me and what I was about from her research, something she did with other people in the past and again with the temporary boss who she apparently planned as my replacement. Yet she was surprised by what transpired afterwards. Instinctively, I knew she was manipulating me, and my gut reaction was to pull away. She also confused me or at least my response to her did. Had I been wiser, the way our temporary boss was wise, I would have accepted her affection for as long as she gave it and then quietly fallen into the less intense role as one of her friends, like her husband did. like the author who wrote about her career as a teacher did. I might even have continued as of her working things out of affairs and enjoyed all she had to offer. But as...

    She posted this poem about marriage during our month of so-called bliss, a year or so ago last April -- and like the poem with me as the one eyed pirate, she included a warning about who she is and what she wants and what she does not want. At the time, the poem appeared more or less innocuous though looking at it through the lens of a year and considering some of her other poems printed since this poem has a haunting quality. In a later poem, posted last August she compared marriage to death saying she had bought the farm once, a harsh retrospect of her life after a bitter and brutal struggle with me over the previous summer. yet this poem posted in April demonstrates that her view of marriage as a trap did not come out of that conflict. She seems to have been wary of the institution well before that, something of an irony considering the several of love poems she posted earlier this year and also explaining why she hesitated when her lover apparently offered to j...

    I went back to the beginning, to the first poem I am certain was written about me or to me, a hopeful, perhaps too hopeful poem she posted a day or two after she started texting me in March 2012, telling me “I’m really into you.” Since she later yanked down this poem from her blog when things grew tense between us, the poem must have said something important to her, and something she needed to take back, having – perhaps – exposed her inner sense and her motives too clearly. I resurrect this poem at this time because it reveals some od her intentions at that time which I failed to grasp early on. In some ways, this poem dispels some presumption that everything she did in regard to our office was calculating. Or perhaps, gives evidence to the mixed motives and her inability to separate what she wanted professionally from what she needed personally. Since she posted this so soon after we connected, I assume she did not expect for me to have read it immediately,...

    Truth be told, I haven’t a clue as to the inner workings of the Virgin Mayor’s office except for the handful of cutthroats that latched onto him when he unexpectedly won as mayor two years ago. I am making the assumption that she operates in that venue in the same manner as she did in our office, and perhaps even in jobs prior to the one with us. Her ability to trickle up in each institution seems to rely on keeping all the players involved in the dark. She also seems to have worked her way up through three towns during her employment in our office, as well as through our administration – and had her plans at our office foiled at least in part by me.   But also because of her unbridled ambition, and that of others, that eventually brought her into the unenviable position of having to rely on one primary source of power: the Virgin Mayor. I can’t say who the married man is that she got involved with earlier this year and who she is still mourning the loss...

    You have to wonder if she has trickled all the way up to the Virgin Mayor, what’s left for her? I mean, where does she go from here when there is nobody beyond the mayor. For a time, I suspected she may have gotten involved with the Neighboring Mayor – a much more powerful mayor than the Virgin Mayor is, and a powerful state senator as well. If so, then things went sour for her a while ago, which may explain the bad feelings between them, and why she called him corrupt and why she spread rumors about his allegedly getting an underage girl pregnant and hiding her in a housing authority apartment. Trickly up is apparently tricky business. It is one thing to latch onto a relatively inexperienced politician like the Virgin Mayor, and quite another when it comes to a truly powerful person like the Neighboring Mayor. And this is made worse by the fact that nobody yet knows whether the Virgin Mayor will be forced to resign if his legal case goes badly. Our former ...

  I keep going back to some of her older poems partly because they reflect clarity that her most angry poems lack. I also like the fantasize that she is talking to me in some of these poems, even when I know the poems are not about me, a kind of progress report on her inner being only great poetry can provide, and even when some of the poems express deep emotional turmoil, like the “down” poem she posted last month. The poem seems to sum up a love story that has been ongoing for months, where she clearly has lost herself, unable to steer her life in any direction, defining the intense sadness she feels over losing someone who might have become the love of her life. It is a heart-wrenching poem, even when she manages to disguise some of the anguish in metaphor, and in the aftermath of the shipwreck of a romance, she seems lost at sea. I’m tempted to translate this as a comment on her life in general and her inability to get what she set out to get, but it is clear this i...

She is no stranger to Hometown. She lived here for a time before she got married and went out on tour. She apparently worked as a bartender at some pub inland from the waterfront and the main drag. It is unclear if this was while she still attended college in New York City, although clearly after her teaching gig upstate. Hometown is very convenient for people seeking to further their careers in the big apple, a mere train or ferry away, and yet far cheaper than Manhattan rents, yet still allowing someone to feel they are part of the urban mix. Since I worked out of the Hometown office back then, we might well have passed each other on the street. While I would have taken notice of her, I would not have remembered it a decade later when she took up a job with us. She knew the social scene, while I spent almost no time in the pick up and fuck bars Hometown was famous for. This knowledge of the scene – even a decade later – might make her quite useful to those power seeki...

  I trust almost nothing I hear about her, and only a portion of what she says about herself in her poetry. This is not because I think she’s being dishonest when she puts pen to paper, but there are things she’s afraid to admit, even in the cryptic venue of verse. In her most recent poem, she had taken a step back from her previous poem (in which she accepted fate) and seems to indicate that things are worsening for her. She still seems to be in the Virgin Mayor’s camp but seems to suggest she might have to abandon him. This may have to do with his legal troubles, or perhaps something beyond my resources to identify (an unexpected darkness) and she struggles once again to remain calm. As much as her poem from Sunday seemed to put a positive spin on her surrendering to the inevitable, this most recent poem seems to say she’s still on the deck of a sinking ship with some new dark revelation making her lose faith as she plans her escape. Yet, where does she leap? All ...

    More than a whole year later, and it only begins to dawn on me just why she said what she said back when we first got together, and also perhaps explains what she is trying to do in continue to post her poetry. I recalled how shocked I was with just how up front she was in regard to her sexuality, especially when she talked about her use of a hair brush in one cast, and her need to get her share of dick, or how powerful she felt when she used a strap-on. The most disturbing of these was the night – after parting from me – she went to a local pub where she picked up a young rapper, who admitted he had been (wrongfully) charged with rape. She assured the affair meant nothing to her, just working things out sex. I think now she must have been shocked about my feeling shocked back then. It occurs to me today how much she needed someone she could trust to stay things to, someone trustworthy, unjudgmental, a role I clearly failed to live up to n expectations. This ma...

    As much as she has revealed about herself through her poetry over the last year, some darkness still haunts her, and I hope this is not me. I still resist concept that some of her more recent poems are directed at me, or that after eight months, I remain the boogie man in her closet, someone she has come to hate so thoroughly, just the mere mention of my name causes her to freak out. The mood swings in her poetry are dramatic, from the intensely sweet love stuff she started out with in the new year, to a much darker and scarier landscape in her most recent poems. Of course, I don’t expect her to shift from the intense hatred she expresses prior to her resignation from our office last October to a shrug of shoulders in less than a year, but I suspect there has to be some moderation – although several poems hint of a “let bygones be bygones” philosophy, which I no more trust than if she posted a poem full of roses and chocolates. Several of her last poems I might...

    If there was a positive note in her last poem about surrendering, her latest poem appears to dismiss that notion, taking a longer look at the plight humans like herself face. The more I reread her poetry, the more I am convinced her literary efforts are a kind of self-therapy, allowing her to reflect on her current situation, while at the same time, providing some kind channel for others to glimpse some of what goes on inside her head. Unlike the previous poem where she saw hope in surrender, here she talks about how the conflict inside her should have calmed with the coming of “cooling of the night” only there is darkness “we” have not reckoned with, things that drag out of the closet that bring back the knowledge that she (or we) are mere mortals, and remind her of the “plight” (again she uses the word “we” must contend with, “We soon forget allegiance when the huge face of fear, it rears itself.” But if she stays quiet, this fear flees. There are several hints contained...

    I keep going back to the poetry she has posted since the beginning of the year, trying to find a common denominator, and deciding once and for all that only a few of the poems (those over the last month and a half) had anything at all to do with me. My theories about those romantic poems may be completely wrong, but clearly poems like the one she wrote about a moment in the sun were clearly dedicated to someone special, someone she has been close to physically, and someone got deeply involved in before the whole affair fell apart. In reviewing some of these poems, I still can’t come up with who it is she got involved with, although the list of possible candidates is relatively short. This list does not include our former temporary boss or our owner, although one former employee of our company did see the owner and her together at a fancy restaurant recently. Although it is possible this romance involved RR, the timing is all wrong. I suspect whatever she had goin...