On Taking A Break Before I Do

by Travis Mateer

I think you can learn a lot about this Missoula community by examining the response to Eva Prather, who is officially dead. Particularly interesting is the rampant speculation that Eva’s husband, David, was somehow nefariously involved in her death.

Ammi, a good friend of Eva’s, wrote an article for The Pulp, titled The slow unraveling of Eva Masin’s mind. As you can tell from the title, Ammi doesn’t think David killed his wife, she thinks Eva slowly got more unstable until the night she walked out on her family.

Thanks to the quality of investigators in Montana, here’s what I think is going to happen: BOTH scenarios will be true to the people who think they know what goes on this world, and without any conclusive information coming from the “investigators”, that will be it. Life goes on.

This week is fun for me. I’m wrapping up the book I’ve been writing since July, which touches on some of the hell I’ve been going through, like transitioning from one woman who thinks a technical reading of the divorce settlement will insulate her from the actions she has taken behind my back, to the “other woman” who thinks perjury will protect her from her own actions, which helped take a weak marriage and utterly destroy it.

It was pathetically easy for her to do this because I was the worse kind of man, the kind of man known as a NICE GUY. Nice guys are the biggest liars because they ultimately lie to themselves about what they want from life, therefore they lie to everyone else around them. Now, I’m what’s known as THE ASSHOLE, the kind of man who no longer regards the feelings of weak people as worthy of consideration. If you have feelings about what I’ve written about, and what I’ve exposed regarding the power dynamics in this town, here’s my suggestion: FUCK YOUR FEELINGS.

I’m at the oxygen mask point of my own personal plane crash, realizing I have to take care of myself first if I’m to do anything effective during our chaotic descent, and trust me when I say, regardless of the election outcome, WE ARE STILL FALLING!

I wrote about how the Rebekah Barsotti case contributed to the failure of my marriage last October, but I have never explained explicitly how the woman who knew my family through our church gleaned information about me from those closest to me before making her moves. Could I have acted differently? Of course, I made my choices, and those choices were huge mistakes, but the price has gotten so absurd, no one who actually knows me thinks I’m getting what I deserve.

If Missoula needs a scapegoat for why people can repeatedly die under mysterious circumstances in this state with no serious fucks given by those in position of influence and authority, then I’m your man. I’ll be the asshole who says publicly, under my real name, what I see happening because I don’t just sit on some barstool complaining about it anymore, or grovel before Council begging them to vote differently.

But, for right now, the frequency of my biting commentary has to cease, and not because of any actual cease and desist orders. I was happy to hear a judge tell the attorney for the woman trying to destroy me that it doesn’t matter if her file on me and what I write weighs over 5 pounds, there is still something called the FIRST AMENDMENT in this country, and that’s what I’ve been using to show my readers how ugly our mountain paradise has gotten.

Thanks for all the support, it’s gotten me farther than those running this town thought possible, and there is still SO MUCH FUN exposing to be done, but if I don’t take a break, a break is going to take me.

Money can still be sent to Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF), and there might be stuff here and there that pops up, but not at the frequency I dedicated myself to maintaining when I left the non-profit sector to pursue a different life for myself as a writer. That’s why I always say…

THANK YOU FOR READING!