Ponderings of a Paranoiac or Organized Stalking?

Ponderings of a Paranoiac, or Observations of an Astute Victim?

One night, during a time when I was feeling like I may be bordering on complete lunacy, I stumbled across an article called " Organized Stalking ".

The article described a range of strange "observations" made by people who felt they were paranoid, as did others, but who turned out to be anything but, when they later proved they were being stalked by a gang of organized spies.

It seems that organized stalking is more common than most would think. These spy rings can be run by organized crime networks, business corporations, extremists or even government organizations.

Due to my own experiences with a string of exceedingly "odd" events, reading the article set my already over-active mind into overdrive as I then began to consider the possibilities of any likely purpose that would relate to my own situation.

Unfortunately, none of my questions were resolved in the end, and if anything, I ended up with more questions than I had started with, and I was left feeling even more confused. The mind boggles....

To be crazy, or not to be crazy? That is the question...

"A question that sometimes drives me hazy: am I or are the others crazy?"- Albert Einstein

Anyone else ever get to the stage where you feel like you are being spied on by organized stalkers?

For instance, after the initial 4 weeks of calm and quiet that followed when your ex was served with the Final Violence Restraining Order, things seem to all of a sudden become rather noisy again.

You start to notice that although you never see him, you do see a couple of different middle aged blokes each day walking down your once quiet cul de sac, which consists of only 12 houses.

You also seem to notice that every day there is a different guy walking down the street as you pull up to your kids' school in the morning to drop them off, and each of them seem to look at you with a half smile, like they know you, or know something you don't...

You go from marveling at how little traffic you hear in your quiet little spot to hearing lots of cars driving up and down your street every day. At least half of them are V8's so you wonder if one of your neighbors has suddenly decided to become a full time drug dealer.

On top of this, you are being woken anywhere up to 5 times a night by cars doing burnouts in and around your street, and for reasons you simply cannot fathom, every Tom, Dick and Harry seems to have all of a sudden decided to go and buy a 2 stroke scramble bike.

Their reasons can only be guessed at, because their sole purpose seems to be riding up and down your street and around your neighborhood at 7pm, 9pm, 11pm, 1am, 3am, 9am 12pm, 4pm and 6pm every dam night and day even though it's the middle of winter and it's dropped to a chilly 4 degrees C. You wonder where the hell they were in summer? Maybe they are running drugs for the new drug dealer? Hopefully it's just that more people are becoming environmentally conscious.

The list of strange things goes on and on but you don't speak about any of it to your family and friends because you realize that you would sound like a complete fruitcake.

Three of your family and friends tell you how their tyres got slashed "at random" one night and you sympathize with them politely, even though all you can think of is how odd it is that the last time you heard of anyone's tyres being slashed was when you were 16, and how back then, it was never "random"...

At the same time, you go from getting the odd private-number-caller-that-hangs-up phone call to getting up to ten times a day/night. Annoying, yes, but hardly reason enough to start panicking...

You chuckle to yourself when you realize that those dam sales pitch calls that harass you a few times a week, where they tell you, in an Indian accent, that you are sooooo lucky because they have a "free mobile phone" for you, have actually become something you look forward to, as they feel comfortingly normal compared to the sudden influx of calls you get from your own city.

These latest "random" calls from local call centers are usually some Aussie guy who is representing some "well known" corporation, the name of which you never quite manage to catch, despite asking them to repeat themselves three times before they then go on to ask a heap of questions that make you say "Why in hell would that information be relevant, sir?"

Of course, you never get your answer, because the call always somehow disconnects at just that precise moment. You google the number, but there are zero results, and you wonder why their "prestigious" business does not even have its contact details on the web?

To skip to a totally unrelated pondering: You try not to think about why you are so irrationally annoyed that the 40-something year old guy, who you've never seen before,  who has suddenly become obsessed with playing with his remote control car out the front of your house, usually twice a day, and most often around school start and finish times.

You feel guilty when you later catch yourself thinking about sniper-ing him with a home made ging and some marbles, knowing that such an action would in no way be justified simply because he has caused your kid to become a menace in asking for his own remote control car 30 times a day. You don't really care that your main reason for disappointing the child is that you have no intention of letting him even think about playing out the front when there is some strange, overgrown, wanna-be-a-kid-again-or-do-I? bloke hanging around....

Besides, you're practically bankrupt from the extra fuel costs of the never ending therapy, group support and lawyer appointments you and your kids have had to attend ever since you-know-who finally exited stage left eight months ago...

Coincidentally, although quite a few of your neighbors have always had dogs, and there have often been times when they have all barked together at night (especially when you can hear a police car chase in the distance), they have never before been what you might call "excessively"  noisy.

Just lately however, they have all suddenly become problem barkers. Your neighbors seem just as perplexed.

Every so often, when you are sitting outside at night with your cuppa, you think that you hear a really low pitched whistle, and then just as you start to dismiss it as being only your imagination, seven of the neighborhood dogs start barking, as does your own who is sitting right at your feet.

Of course, you get such a fright that you spill your coffee all over yourself.... again.

Then you try not to dwell on the fact that your kids' vegetable garden got raided last week despite the fact that you have the world's biggest dog, who of course has a most disconcerting bark to those who do not know him.

What's more, he has never exactly been that tolerant of uninvited strangers, although he has been known to knock friends over in excitement and then proceed to almost lick them to death..

But even this does not really seem to surprise you, as lately the dog has seemed to be constantly and uncharacteristically exhausted. In fact, the other day he was asleep for so long, and took so long to wake up when you called him that you wondered if he had been drugged.

You dismiss this as simply the ponderings of a paranoiac however, and instead hope that it was simply the after-effects of his recent string of late nights, which, while they have been annoying, you can't really blame him for, as being a dog he would only feel it is his duty to chase off the extraordinary amount of brain damaged cats who have mysteriously started landing in your back yard...

(Brain damaged cats you ask? I'm referring to a fairly recent phenomenon. It has started raining cats in my back yard - yes, I mean literally raining cats.... or perhaps it is more like there has been a sudden influx of flying-then-crash-landing-cats!)

(To explain:) Imagine sitting in silence out in the back yard, having a smoke and a coffee, and then you hear this sound that is so strange that you begin to wonder if the aliens are finally invading....

Perplexed, you listen to the sound as it passes overhead "mrrmmeeeeeeooaaaooooohh". Then this stupid cat lands in the middle of your back lawn (which is a good 20 meters away from the nearest tree or fence), looking like it doesn't know whether it's Tom or Jerry, and then totally sh!ts itself at the sight of your dog.....and it's the third time it's happened this week?

You try to tell yourself that stranger things have happened, and that there must be some simple explanation, but then you remember that your infra red video cameras that you recently installed out the front of your house and attached to your computer to monitor through a security software program that monitors up to 4 cameras at once and has a motion sensor that causes a snapshot to be taken and an alarm to sound (you've turned the alarm off due to it causing an extreme lack of sleep however) have been effective in taking 10's of shots a night. Unfortunately, the only cat burglars in the pictures are actually of the pet pussy cat variety...

This just compounds your feelings of madness, convincing you that you are indeed a paranoiac. Not one of the 13 different cats you've now identified in the pictures belong to any of your neighbors. What's more, the 2 cats who do live in your street seem to be infinitely smarter than these 13 cats, because they have NEVER come within 15m of your front verge since the day you first moved in and your dog proceeded to chase them up the nearest tree.

You try to solve the mystery of the 13 stupid cats by looking in the lost pet classifieds, but the only photo's you can find that resemble your retarded stalker cats are of cats from homes in suburbs that are at least a 40 minute drive away by car...

By now you are really beginning to feel like your losing your mind, yet at the same time you have the mental resources to consider the fact that you have never before actually had a cat in your back yard. At least, not once in the 6 years since you got your dog anyway. You can only wonder at the irony that in the last 3 weeks you have had to take 2 petrified, half bald cats to the the local vet after your dog managed to turn them into rag dolls....

Afterward, the vet told you they were underweight and had previous injuries, and that they were therefore probably both strays. Of course, all you managed to say to him in answer was  "Oh, OK... Bit odd isn't it?"  at which point the vet looked at you strangely and started to back away slowly with his palms open in supplication,  while he wished you "A pleasant day..."

The sand slips through the hour glass and life goes on, as do the days of your life. Then one afternoon you go for a walk with your dog and notice that, even though it was raining the day before, there are once again at least 10 fresh menthol cigarette butts at the entrance to the pathway at the end of your street. Thing is, he doesn't smoke menthol. You also know that none of your neighbors smoke either!

That night there are so many strange noises that you just can't handle it anymore, so you put your music on and turn it up loud.

You sit there feeling quite pleased with yourself for solving your problem before it made your paranoia even worse, and cheerfully continue on with some email you are typing. Next thing you know speakers start making that funny noise that usually means your mobile phone is about to ring...

It doesn't ring, but you pick it up anyway, expecting a message to come through. Only then do you realize that you had turned it off 2 hours before because some dick (who was obviously with a really low grade phone company who was experiencing network and equipment problems) had continued to try and ring you despite the fact he had not been able to connect at least eight times in a row. When he did finally get through, the moron had his phone on mute, so you figured it was best just to turn your phone off, because you would have felt really bad if you had lost your temper with some poor mentally challenged individual due to your excessive paranoia making you think it was you-know-who harassing you instead!

Anyway,  you go back to surfing the net and singing along to your tunes when you hear the noise again, so you hit the pause button, just in time to hear "beep-b-b-beep.... beep-b-b-beep"  (like when you receive an SMS message).

You check your phone again but it's still turned off...

The beeps were so loud that you can't help but look over your shoulder, just to make sure no one is in your office with you...

With much relief, you see that you are in fact alone, and then you smile to yourself as you wonder if those "acid flashbacks" your ex used to tell you about are perhaps somehow contagious...

Time keeps on ticking away while you do your best to ignore it all, but eventually your supposedly super-intelligent brain (which you doubt despite the evidence shown in your IQ score of 160) begins to protest violently to such deliberate thought suppression. You start to feel like you are going plain plum crazy.

You even start to wonder if your psychiatrist of the past 5 years was in fact  playing some kind of sick, cruel practical joke when he vehemently insisted that you are NOT crazy, but merely an astute and rather gifted AD/HD-er who has unfortunately developed Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, reactive depression and situational anxiety....

Then you realize how absurd that would be and draw the conclusion that such ponderings are obviously even more paranoid than your original paranoia, so you say to yourself "Just don't go there! Trust your professionals and your intuition instead..."

This acceptance does little else other than leave you in a state of mild apathy, and you lament the fact that your once highly colorful and prolific vocabulary is now mostly reduced to benign comments such as:

• "How bizarre?"
  
• "That's.. strange!"
  
• " Hmm... odd!"
  
• "The mind boggles..."
  
• "Now that's just plain nasty!"
  
• "OMG- He's usually more subtle than that..." 
  
• & (my favorite) "WTF? Seriously- WHO DOES THAT?"

You think about it all for a few hours and experience a strong feeling of de ja vu as you suddenly recall that the only other time anything like this has ever happened in your life was 8 years ago, around 4 weeks after you took out the first Restraining Order against your twice- stalker, er, I mean twice- ex.

After much deliberation, you conclude that perhaps some of it is paranoia and some not, but that in all honesty, it doesn't really matter either way. Besides, surely the paranoia must be at least partly justified...

You once again make a mental note not mention it to anyone, because the last person who you dared to discuss it with, had a look on their face was asinine enough to make you blush for three days straight, not that you feel you can really blame them. As you-know-who has managed to reduce your support network of friends to less than you can count on one hand (by convincing them that you are in actual fact the one who is a delusional psycho), you decided it would probably be best to not risk losing any more....

Instead, you try to do some exercises in positive thinking and visualization .

This turns out to be a great idea, because in no time at all you are lost in a wonderful day dream, wherein you are attempting to concentrate your amazing powers of thought on winning lotto so that you can buy you- know-who that dam luxury yacht he always fantasized about.

You imagine telling him he can have it on the condition that he happily sails off into the sunset after signing a Legal Contract agreeing to never bother you again.

Unfortunately, his complete lack of ethics and morality rudely intrude on your daydream at this point, but you've never been a quitter, so you go with the flow and adapt your happy dream to fit this intrusive line of thought by having the yacht fitted with a special electromagnetic force shield that will literally bump the boat away every time he sails within 1000km of soil you are standing on, or sleeping on, or sitting on, or flying over...just in case!

It's not long before you are once again dwelling on your paranoia, and soon you are thinking that the whole dam trip seems like a story straight out of Roald Dahl's Tales of the Unexpected.

Ever an eternal optimist however, you try to find a silver lining to this new dark cloud. Eventually you think to yourself: "Hmmm...  perhaps one day I can write a psychedelic movie script based on these colorful experiences?"

LOL - You have a good chuckle at this (How could you not?). Who knows, maybe it could even be a block buster hit. You could even earn millions of dollars which could then be used to run the biggest awareness campaign the world has ever known... (Sound of a crowd cheering in the background)

A week or so later, you are considering an article you just read about organized stalking. You begin to wonder if any of the dad's groups over here would be capable of such a thing?

Considering that you have read lawyers articles in these father group forums in which they state in black and white that the best legal strategy is to launch a counter attack by mirroring all allegations, you figure that such a conspiracy may not be that far below their already ridiculously low ethics belt.

It would not be that hard for them to do. Think about the fact that whenever another whinging father says "child support is taking all my money again", it is no secret that the most common pieces of advice offered to them is "go on the dole". Further more, most of them actually do, so they would certainly have the time to do it wouldn't they?

Funniest of all is that you-know-who used to go on and on about wanting to be a secret spy....

You search the web trying to see if you can find any hint that they do indeed have this kind of (hate to say it) brilliantly cunning, scarily premeditated, strategically organized and criminally versatile support network, but for some reason you cannot enter into any of the pro-dick/ "daddy's not really a psycho" type group websites....WTF?

Last thing you ponder before you finally go to sleep that night is that perhaps you are not crazy after all, but at the same time, you kind of wish you were ..... After all, which would be better:

• being crazy
• or being 100% sane but being stalked by someone who is obviously trying to make you go crazy? It makes sense, doesn't it? At least to me anyway...
  

The mind boggles....

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_{All names in this article have been changed for legal purposes and to protect the privacy of the Author. Except where otherwise credited, or where text forms part of an external link, this article is under the following copyright:}

_{Copyright © 2010 Mel Stewart, "safe-at-last", of Perth, Western Australia. All rights reserved.}

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_{Copyright © 2010 Mel Stewart, "safe-at-last" and Licensors Nodtronics Pty Ltd. All rights reserved.}