Friday, March 25, 2005

A little more about that PowerPoint essay from yesterday.

There is a lot more to see than today's edition of the Daily Post.
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Friday, 25 March 2005

So what did you think about yesterday's blog?

Slide 14 Posted by Hello
Pretty cool, huh? I thought I pretty much had it nailed when I wrote it. I remember that moment really well. Marcin Drazek's sister Ella was helping me out that day. We were sitting at the internet cafe on Nove Swiat street and we were plowing through the documents trying to put the pin on Zaremba. But that whole business was really so small and stupid. At the meeting in June of 2002 when supposedly I was first meet my attorney- another piece of misinformation there. At that time prosecutor Wiesniakowski showed me the photos of the car that Zaremba had taken on the 15th of May. I took one look at them and told him that the damage was old. It was that fast. He looked at them again as if he was startled. I told him there were, and these were my exact words, "water marks on the hood" and that they proved the damage was old. Just like that. And then I handed him back the photos. I guess he didn't get it. But what he did was to tell Zaremba what I had said, I don't know when, but possibly just before our meeting on August 30th when I was upstairs having my lawyer try not to let me read Zaremba's estimate for damages. That was the one he had made after a second accident in June for which he also wanted to blame me.

Anyway, we came back downstairs for Zaremba's interview and Zaremba, without prompting of question- like I said he was told about this beforehand:

"If we are speaking about the mark on the car that was not found by the inspector, he probably missed it because the report was made in the rain and the car was wet."

Now that "black mark" (See the "Angle of the car" essay, the last third or so for more about the infamous "Black Mark") he was speaking about is yet another little tidbit from Zaremba's wild idea of story telling. But how he framed it all up, fabricating an entirly new event so to both diminish my objection and to try and make his own story more believable, was obviously something he thought pretty slick. And it was kinda slick too, by Polish court standards. But what his making-up-shit-up-while-smiling-in-my-face actually did for me was to simply make me angry and to want to prove that it was bullshit and rub his nose in it. Hence Ella's and my sitting at the internet all afternoon trying to figure out how to put the kibosh on this son of a bitch.
Actually, there wasn't that much drama to the moment. In fact, whether or not it had actually been raining was the first question I asked and that "Weather Underground" site was the first place I looked. Life should always be that easy. And I think that it was so easy that prompted me to want to answer any possible objections that might come up such as him saying "Oh, well it was raining when we drove to the police station." Or, "I moved the car and it was raining then." But we found that those 'time stamps' on the top of his police reports in about 5 minutes too. So really all in all there wasn't that much drama involved at that moment. Only that I felt kind of cool for having figured it out.
But what I didn't know was that none of it mattered because everybody knew he was lying anyway. They were just interested in trying to fleece me, which was what all this was about anyway.
Acche…

Getting back to the farm…

No, on second thought, there's more to say... I will try and talk more about the farm tomorrow.

My friend Bill told me that those 30 slides made for a long read. And I would have to say that I agree with him. If I were to do the same thing again, I would have made a presentation much shorter.
But you have to understand what it was like at the time. I mean, I was so isolated. There was no one to trust and no one to talk to. People told me that I should reconsider even sending such a thing to a judge because it was improper form. And maybe they were right about that too. But I was just so… sick. I was just so full of rage and anger over my situation. How could they allow, and this was according to my own lawyer, how could they refuse to allow any of Zaremba's actions to be a part of my trial. Can you understand this? I was told this by the judge the first day of court: Only speak about my actions in that moment. This is the way the prosecutor had set up the case and no one ever argued that besides being morally reprehensible, it was absolutely horrible jurisprudence! There is no way to judge the cause of an incident involving two people without considering the actions of both.
Sorry, folks, that is just not right.
But this is what the police decided to do on the first day and how they ran the entire business to the end and the rest as they say is Polish history.

I don't know how the prosecutor somehow convinced everyone to simply forget that I might have had my own complaint that first day (I did) or that Zaremba should in no way be accountable. I know that the prosecutor himself wanted money because had that conversation with me where he implied that he was underpaid and that he could be bought for the price of a gun- or whatever. I mean that was clear enough. But did they all think that there was money to be made from me? How rich did they think I was?
But anyway, that's what happened. And so regardless of that little bit of detective work I did, or how talented I might be at PowerpPointing, they didn't give a shit and just went right on screwing me. Sick stuff.
So, let's put them all in a book or a web site and let everybody know all about how it is and who they are. Let's just do that and if we do maybe a few people will decide to take the boat from Germany around Poland instead of wasting their time on a really boring and socially reprehensible place. Don't waste you money there: They ain't worth it.

OK, that's enough. I think I wrote about 50 of these essays for the Blog during my first session. Sometimes I thought it was healthy and that I was blowing off steam. But mostly it just made me sad and sick again. But I will tell you, printing that PowerPoint essay felt good. I like it. I like the colors and the little stars where there was supposed to be punches. I like that it is a little sarcastic and ironic. And yea, I wrote it for someone who thinks like a child because that was who was supposed to read it.

I promise to get back to writing about the village tomorrow. In fact, I will start you off with a name:
Yasha. All village gossip begins and ends with Yasha, so I will toss off his name first, and tomorrow I dish dirt.
Oh, and as a parting note: In Belarus, just saying someone's name implies that there was something not right in there… local subtlety that.

More tomorrow