by Travis Mateer
Before I had an ex-wife and an ex-girlfriend, I had a comfortable, conventional life.
One day in that conventional life, my wife and I hosted a potluck. The most dangerous woman in Montana was there, and so was a friend of a friend, someone I felt a shared mission with to expose local corruption.
That dangerous woman, Jane Rectenwald, is dead now, and so is my former life. The house where my kids still live is now contested terrain because I’ve learned some women are so terrified of accountability, they will do anything to avoid it, even if it means violating legally binding terms of a parenting plan.
When people know your core traumas, they have a key to destroying you from the inside out, so be VERY careful who you share your inner hurts with.
When I took my family’s payoff under extreme emotional duress, I tried finding a lawyer to defend me from the civil yoke placed upon me by a substitute judge who, despite knowing my petitioner, denied my objection of bias and gave her a legal flame-thrower to use against me, which she immediately used, innocent bystanders be damned.
I don’t have the resources for a private sector lawyer anymore, and the small degree of comfort I do have, in the form of a place to sleep that’s not a box-truck, is a gesture meant to look like a kindness, but really is just another form of control by people who really don’t want me to continue looking into our collective Missoula backyard, even IF there are bodies concealed where oblivious bystanders stroll.
The political set-up a week before Thanksgiving is becoming clear to me, but that’s because I never invested my cognitive abilities to either political cult, like so many did.
We have a poopy-pants president signing-off on missile strikes from Ukraine INTO Russia, and we have sheep-dipped media plants, like Tucker, messaging World War III, pretending to be opposition media. The goddamn thing is a sham. What’s being set-up is hot-war cover for the economic reset everyone in the know knows is coming. This means goodbye Bretton-Woods and hello digital currency paving the way to our technocratic prison.
Can this little blog continue without help? I don’t know, I’m looking at new legal threats from the punk who fucked around and found out, a business plan renewal I can’t afford, and the expiration of an adjacent website that hosted my documentary. I’m doing what I can, but the kick from the people closest to me is just too much, and something has to give. If that means this whole fucking blog has to go, then so be it. I’ve come to terms with the fact that LOTS of toxic baggage in my life has to go.
Thanks for the support over the years, I’ve appreciated it. There’s still $1,400 to go on my meager little fundraiser, which hasn’t seen a donation in 2 months, so if you’d like to help me out, Travis’ Impact Fund (TIF) has been a good option since I started it last spring, doing an impressive amount of “urban camping” cleaning.
To conclude this post, which might be my last (at least, for awhile), I’d like to use my poetic skills, honed at the University of Montana, to introduce you to a very skilled bird. What is the Killdeer skilled at? Injury feigning, a technique of pretending to have an injured wing in order to protect precious eggs. Here’s the poem:
I knew I was amazing
I knew I was THE MAN
when she communicated how
she was my biggest fan
writers need an audience for
attention whores are we—
see the twinkling lights
of the sirens just for me?
she cared and she cared deeply
she hung on every word
nesting her exquisite pain
like a weird little Killdeer bird
but I don’t care about the eggs
she’s afraid I’ll find
I don’t climb cobweb stairs
dragging wings behind
I heard demand was growing
I had important dates, for
judges and attorneys did
nibble up her bait
I cannot wait for Thursday
my friends will be impressed
she got the whole damn system
to follow me with ZEST!
writer whores and settled scores
are funny things, for court
she knew it in her bones—
her killing time was short!
but shorter is my patience
though legal hells are long
now dash along the rocks, strange bird
so I can sing my song!
Thanks for reading!