Because of my brain damage I may not get this story told properly to begin with, but I will keep at it. I hope.
Because I've just lost in court, I find myself asking if the court system remains useful to people who are not wealthy, who do not have the money for lawyers, who can be deprived of their Constitutional rights, without being able to get the courts to deem this of importance.
I want to say that the court system is no longer for ordinary people. That it is now for the one person in a million who lawyers deem worthy of the multi-million dollar suit for damages for McDonald's serving coffee that's too hot.
Or maybe it's for the people who control the money, who lend and then foreclose in actions which the legal professionals tend to say are ones for which there can be no defense.
The first time my condo was foreclosed, in 1997, it was a result of having been put out of business by the IRS. I have that story told in my Bound Letters in my IRS Stress pages. But, basically, the IRS collected for 1984 twice. I was two months late paying $23 because I'd misunderstood how to calculate that much of my tax, and I wanted to get it right. The IRS records show that I paid the majority of my tax on time. Sadly, when IRS hounded me to amend my tax form, I made the amendments on my original 1984 return, and have no copy without the changes, so it looks as if I was entirely late. But really, I was only late with the $23, which is a fact the IRS tax account records show.
The things that stand out about that experience of abuse by IRS, are that IRS refused to correct its error, that I could not sleep for about two years, that is, I would get three hours of sleep and maybe an hour during the day, until gradually my bones hurt so so much.
During that time I wrote a lot of letters about the need to reform IRS. I literally sent out a couple thousand letters. The first thing I bought with any money I got, was stamps. I didn't need to spend much on food because I was eating beans which were about thirty-five cents a pound, and I flavored them with thyme, sage and rosemary from my garden. They smelled wonderful when they were cooking, and they were wonderful.
There are a lot of people, authoritarian people mostly, who say I should not tell anyone about the number of letters I wrote because it makes me sound crazy.
In actual fact, though, a lot of the letters were copies. I copied letters I liked to a lot of different people. I'm admitting, you see, that each of the thousands of letters was not an original written especially to one person.
I've wandered a bit, but not as much as it may seem. I want to say that one thing I remember clearly is that it was so little money that I needed to go on. I needed $630 in order to pay my Realtor MLS dues, and $60 for my license. I simply did not have those amounts. I knew lots of people with more than enough money to borrow those small amounts. For instance, one of the women who had bought property through me, and sold it, was a part of the largest trust Bank of America had at that time. She and I had become friends because she had lived in London, as I had, so we had many things in our common past to talk about.
But, I couldn't ask Linda, I just could not ask for money I did not think I could repay.
I felt, I mean I really felt this as deeply as anyone can feel anything, that if IRS could take my commissions and leave me penniless, then they could do it again without warning, and so there was no way of being able to count on making money as I previously had. And that meant that I couldn't promise to repay someone because I wouldn't know if it was going to be possible because IRS could just take my money.
I think that if I'd been levied because I hadn't paid 1984, that I would have felt differently. I would have been to blame.
But, I had paid 1984, except for the $23. And IRS had no procedure in place to correct their error. They appeared bent on having to enforce against me no matter how many times I showed them the facts, because they had no other procedures in place.
As I look back, I find it quite amazing that I feel warm about that time, feel that it is a time as dear as when I was young and enjoying Monterey, California, and Carmel. I had not realized that I would feel this way.
In any case, I think the prolonged absence of sleep, adequate sleep, is what caused my B12 levels to fall so low. If I had not fastened upon the image of me being a soldier of sorts, fighting the IRS, and that I was willing to put my life on the line, I would not have learned that I was B12 deficient in a serious, health altering way.
I remember how they foreclosed my condo in 1997, after I had been writing all these letters, many of which said that, once I was foreclosed or ran out of money, I was prepared to kill myself to demonstrate how serious the abuse by IRS was.
I had thought I would run out of money. As I think back, I really have no idea how it was that I did not. I know I kept three pennies on a railroad tie in my garden. I never spend those three pennies, nor apparently did I need to.
Sometimes I would go outside and there would be a brown bag full of freshly prepared food on my car. I didn't know about food banks. I used to heat water to bathe by setting it in the sun. That was after my gas had been turned off. I remember burning many books in my fireplace, for warmth. And papers. I burnt so many papers. Now, sometimes, I would like to look back and see who I helped with real estate transactions, but I burned most of the files. I would watch the news clips of people in Croatia burning their furniture to keep warm. And I would think how I didn't really have that much furniture. I would think about how one Easter I was visiting my paternal grandparents in Chicago, and the winter Olympics were in Yugoslavia, which is the old name of the country before Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence in 1991.
(I can't remember things when I want to. Specific things. The name of the specific city that was shown most often on the news will come to me later. I think it is confusing to people that I can remember so much, and still say I have brain damage and a disability. But even to me it's surprising that I can remember so much when I'm just saying whatever comes to mind, and so little when there are specific things I need to say. Today, I was thinking about how I was walking toward my far bathroom, and I could think about how it looked, I could picture it in my mind. That is not something I could do for a long, long time. I couldn't picture things in my mind. I had to see things to have them in mind. I think I'm going on about this for far too long.)
While I was watching the Olympics with my grandfather, Tito came on the screen, either being honored or officiating at some ceremony. I forget. My grandfather said, with the decisiveness of a man exhaling cigar smoke, that he had spent a day with Tito once. I was visiting in Chicago because I had chosen the Field Museum's collection of Bodhisatva paintings over a spring break in Florida. I had a choice because the kids in the off campus housing pilot program where I was the student counselor had asked me to come to Florida with them. It is amazing to me that they did, except that I loved them so much. I learned many deep lessons from them. I hope that I can weave one of the lessons in, later.
So, I didn't run out of money. I was foreclosed. There was a lawyer, Bill Sawtell, who tried to help me. He was a really nice man whom I met when I was referred to him about some land he wanted to sell. He just died this week, he was 89 or 90.
But I didn't know much about court, and I didn't realize that once he was helping I wasn't supposed to write things to Court anymore. When he saw that I had written something he said he couldn't represent me.
Really, that was lucky. Because you see, there was the foreclosure and there were errors in it so I got the condo back, but not before I tried to kill myself. If I had not tried to kill myself I would not have been taken to hospital and I would not have been tested for B12, and I would not have learned that I was deficient.
When I think about that I can see how it could happen that when I flipped a coin asking if it was really all right to kill myself -- I wanted to be sure I went to heaven, which I was sure I would since I was thinking about everyone and not just myself -- that the coin landed with the side up that I had assigned to "Yes, I should kill myself."
It was my mistake to think that the coin and the words attached to it meant that if I set out to kill myself, that I would die.
Two things come to mind at this point, one is that I hope you are not disappointed that this isn't short and that my cousin, Bill Golomski, who was a statistician told me that the way to write was to do three pages a day.
I'm not sure, but I think this is about three pages.
