Just finished in 2022. Even has two submarines for guests. Upward bound St Lawrence, April 28, 2022.
Thursday, April 28, 2022
Monday, April 25, 2022
Saturday, April 23, 2022
CAPE 2022 - Cornwall & Area Pop Event
Dr. Stevil
Care Bear
Stacey Case, author, "Who's the Man? Billy Van!" about comedian Billy Van, best known for Hilarious House of Frightenstein. Oliver confirmed the story that I'd always wondered about Van's house, which was on the Scarborough Bluffs but had to be abandoned as the sand slipped out from under it.
Young Joker and Robin cosplayers
And from the next day, April 24:
Mrs Incredible and baby
You Cant Do That On Television original set, with Abby Hagyard
Magician (I don't know if this is a character) John Constantine, Batman and once more Mrs Incredible.
I talked with the sound engineer who saved the set - he told me that CJOH and other CTV station were independent and had their own productions before consolidation under Baton, which is why You Can't Do That On Television, The Galloping Gourmet, Kreskin and many other shows were produced in Ottawa - only Regional Contact, a light news magazine, is made there now.
Saturday, April 9, 2022
Ofra Harnoy, Mike Herriott, Jeanie Chung after their first live concert since the pandemic.
This cheered me up - I have not seen Harnoy since the Guelph Spring Festival of 1983! |
| Ofra Harnoy, Cello, Mike Herriott, brass and piano and Jeanie Chung, piano, after their first live concert since the pandemic. |
Krystal
Krystal in kimono, 2015. This kimono was made especially for her by her husband's family to welcome her after she was married in California in 2013. She said they had made kimono for the Tokugawa Shogunate, the political rulers of Japan until the Meiji restoration deposed them in 1868. She directed the photo herself and it went up in the photographer's studio in Japan and might still be there. Her in-laws thought she looked like Jackie Kennedy. Those might be white forget-me-nots on it. They have the same meaning in Japanese as English.
Very typical of her sense of humor! 2019
Princess Leia cosplay? Unknown date
Still sad about my friend Krystal Watanabe who just died. After her son Hitoshi died of SIDS, she wrote about seeing beautiful snow on birch trees and being sad he could never see it. I thought the same thing about her yesterday when I looked at a double rainbow that stretched across the sky. She never even made it to 40. I can look at books on my shelf that I bought longer back than she was alive. Even this blog has entries dated older than her. When she was on the bus to Minnesota a few days ago I played her the theme to the Mary Tyler Moore Show that has Moore moving to Minneapolis and ends with the line "You're going to make it after all". She knew a ton of TV trivia and told me that the original version used in the first season went "You might just make it after all." The less hopeful version was true for her. She died alone in a motel room after the promise of a place to live had fallen though, with everything she had in a carryon suitcase that I'd bought her for the move. My poor girl. I'm glad I told you I loved you the last time we spoke.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYgKcUDZ-E0
I saw this rainbow just after I learned she had died.
Krystal mimed shooting herself in the head with a pistol when religion came up on in the comments during a live Facebook chat in 2019 and said: "Believing that you are going into nothingness after this is scary. To me it's actually a fucking relief. Just black, fade to black, not even fade, I just want the curtain to fucking drop and nothing...what's gonna live on is things I make,.. stories I've told that might get repeated by other people...that's all that's necessary...I want to leave something tangible on the earth and it's not gonna be a child or a family."
And that's the way she died, just a curtain dropping, people who survived what killed her say.
--- Delete Key ---
Crack the mirror. I don't want to see. What this world has made of me. Leave me blinded. Go and set me free. From the haunting, daunting memory.
Give me something that's illusory. An alternative to the reality. A sense of purest serenity. Make me ignorant, so blissfully.
Crack the mirror. Fucking let me be. A ghost, no shadow cast beneath me. Not a trace of soul, just body. Wandering this world aimlessly...
(poem by Krystal)
She said she wanted to be remembered, and she "hated the obituary for my mother. [Donna Farchi, who died in 2013] It told you nothing about who she really was." Krystal had given me tons of information about herself, even old newspaper clippings, legal documents and medical reports that I never asked her for and that I otherwise couldn't have found, and I think she recruited me to write her story like she did the writers on her horror site twenty-two years earlier. She showed me everything about herself - one day it would be photos of her baby, the next her screaming at her husband about how she had to climb the stairs in great pain when she was pregnant that he was walking away from her on, and videos of her cheating on her husband and doing BDSM. Even Google Streetview images of her high school and her old home on "Foxhollow Way" in Roseville, the sort of name that evokes 'Merrie Olde Englande' that property developers in California liked. The things in this article are what she told me, but she had mental health problems including schizophrenia, and some of the things she said I've found are definitely not true, but her reports of things like being abused should not be dismissed out of hand. Some of the worst things I've left out if they didn't help to understand her.
"I wanna hear laughter when I die...tell stories about me, I don't care how dirty they are...from hell I'd be looking up and saying 'fuck you guys, you're doing me a disservice if you're not telling some dirty stories about me.'" She said she did that when she eulogized her mom and "I dropped a very pronounced F-bomb in the church." She was quoted in articles about accidently walking in on her parents having sex and finding her mom's sex toy, and often told the story about being caught herself as a teen having sex in the play area of a local Burger King (No, not in the ball pit, although that was a frequent question). She and her boyfriend had ridden their bikes there from their homes and when the staff caught them they made their parents come pick them up. She squirted milk from her breasts sometimes just for a laugh. I was taken by surprise by one sex video she started showing me which had a white skinned goddess planting her golden brown thatch which grew like an exclamation point on top of a guy lying in bed when I suddenly realized it was her! And she recounted jerking off her husband on an airplane under a blanket when they were returning from Japan. "He was helpless!"
Her name was legally Krystal Lee Watanabe, shortened to Krys or just K (by her father) but she started out Krystal Hanson, then Krampits, which she started writing 'Krampitz' to be more German (She said her father's family was from Stuttgart), Krystal Lake and WhoGirl online, and Krystal Malone. From the beginning she was a child of the mass culture age. Her single mom had given her the name Krystal, which came from a soap opera character, Krystle Carrington, played by Linda Evans on Dynasty, the prime time soap opera about two rich families, that aired in the 1980s. She used the name Blaize Carrington, with Who drummer Keith Moon as an avatar, as a sock puppet account on Facebook. Her mother's family was Irish, and her only tattoo was a four leaf clover on the nape of her neck. She said it was for the "Irish being freed from slavery", a rather unpleasant myth circulated by white supremacists, and she was frightened that it would be seen when she was in jail as it looked like the shamrock tattoo used by the Aryan Nation prison gang. She wasn't actually that German - apart from being Irish on her mother's side, her great-great-grandmother and great-great-grandfather Krampits emigrated from Germany (neither from Stuttgart) in the 19th century, but her paternal grandmother wasn't of German ancestry and her paternal great-grandmother was only partly German.
She didn't think she would live that long - she smoked a lot, she'd already had a heart attack when she gave birth, her liver function was seriously impaired by the painkillers, her heart was enlarged and both her parents were already dead. Her father had his first heart attack at 39, and she said she used to go into his room every morning expecting him to be gone. She also had migraines, was deaf in one ear (from all the rock concerts, she said), and couldn't walk very far due to her chronic pain. She showed me her resting heart rate on her Apple watch just before she died. It was 100!
I had written some obituary/news pieces for the Toronto Star, but this is something I hoped I wouldn't have to write.
She was brilliant and funny, with such a quick wit, but there was a strange sort of innocence between us. We liked each other somehow, even though we seemed so different, but I could see something of myself in her, like the way she obsessed over love. She waxed lyrical when speaking, describing a deer running past her in the woods that were next to her suburban home near Detroit "It was exhilarating to be in nature, to feel the chaos". She threw the deer overripe fruit from her balcony and they grew to be unafraid of her.
She posted some funny things in Facebook groups I was in, The Kitsch Meow and Gilbert Gottfried's OFFICIAL Amazing Colossal Listener Society, so I friended her because she was bright and had a Japanese name, as I'd been learning Japanese. I thought she was Japanese-American for a long time and the avatar she used of an elegant woman with long reddish-brown hair was something she'd found on the web, maybe an album cover:
Facebook
"Mark-chan, totemo sugoi desu ne!" "Mark, that's really great!" she says in Japanese on hearing I liked Takeshi as well.
Boston
With father in Carlsbad (?) Cavern, July 1988
Sometime around 1992, Stony Man Trail, Virginia
With her brother in front of a "No Dukes" license plate on her dad's car. "Your dad didn't like the Dukes of Hazzard?" I asked. "He didn't like Michael Dukakis", 1988 Democrat candidate for President and former governor of Massachusetts. No Nukes was an anti-nuclear power slogan in the 70s and 80s. She'd spent a lot of time as a child with the youngest of her half-brothers, who was only a few months older than her, and wanted to reconnect with him and try to resolve their family history after he messaged her. "The Brother thing is huge and feels like fate guiding me because of the timing of him hitting me up." was one of the last things she messaged me.
Krystal said most of her childhood photos were destroyed when her mother's house burned down in California in 2018, during the Camp wildfire that destroyed the town of Paradise.
She went to Harrington Elementary in Waltham, a suburb of Boston, a progressive school for gifted students where she played violin, keyboard, xylophone and drums, something she kept up on even in Japan:
And she said she got hit by her 3rd grade teacher for going on about Rush Limbaugh! She roasted the teacher in two videos thirty years later, wearing a Snapchat filter that gave her glasses and a double chin, because the teacher had "...the class write a report on what they wanted to be when they grew up, she wrote 'Comedian' and I told her to pick a real job! You know why? Because I was a miserable cunt and was unhappy at her station in life and I like to kill the dreams of children". She also was mad at the teacher because she only gave 'satisfactory' as a grade to her in behaviour, and that meant she didn't get money as a reward from her grandfather, and she said "No pay for me = No food for the family a couple days a week." She stayed conservative, like her father, and she was a registered Republican when she was old enough to vote, and had an autographed copy of Real Peace by Richard Nixon and who would rant about comedians not being able to say things because of 'political correctness'. Her father watched Fox News so much the logo was burned into his TV screen, and Krystal had it on much of the time in her motel in Detroit. Her father was even obsessed by QAnon and Alec Jones' INFOWARS, a step too far for her.
She used to go to a lounge near her home in Novi, MI, probably the Breaktime Billiards Sports Bar that was on the other side of Walled Lake from her rented townhouse, that the security guard would let her into during the daytime while her husband was at work. She'd play pool and get up on the stage, sometimes to dance, sometimes to livestream, with no one else in the place. So she got to do standup.
She usually spoke with a nonspecific North American accent but had a Waltham accent, which she said was distinct from Boston proper, that was so strong when she moved to Georgia her 5th grade teacher wanted her to go to a speech therapist. She practiced saying her Rs, but sometimes would drop into her native non-rhotic Waltham, like when she shouted at a pregnant and mentally ill prostitute who was outside of the gas station, her head in a traction brace that looked like a crown of thorns, near the Telegraph Motel in Detroit, who threatened to stab Krystal with a syringe "Ya a dahty fuckin Detroit hoa! Ya gonna die a losah! Ya've always been a losah!", and when she was sad she'd talk about her 'Fathah' and 'yard' came out 'yaahd'.
Her father would do the accent sometimes;
She said the Boston accent was authentic Elizabethan English.
She said her family were well connected to Boston politics and that her grandmother had even dated Ted Kennedy for a while.
Atlanta
Grade Six, Holcomb Bridge Middle School, Alpharetta, Georgia, 1994
Her family moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 1992 - she said it was to Roswell, but it was really to nearby Alpharetta. This might have been a joke on her part on being an alien, as in Roswell, New Mexico. She was a very competitive sportswoman, even playing powderpuff football and loved hard contact on the field. There's a newspaper article from 1994 (The Revue, October 21, p. 15) showing a mop-haired (her hair naturally grew in loose curls but she usually straightened it with a hot comb) Krystal holding a bowling ball, after she was the top scorer in her age group in the Atlanta region. "The boys think they're going to beat me because I'm so much shorter than them - No, they usually won't talk to me after I beat them. They usually just walk away" and the article goes on to describe a 6'4" 17 year old stalking away after she beat him. She said she wanted to go to the Olympics in 2000 in Australia if bowling became a medal sport there, and she hoped to become a meteorologist. She said "I like tornadoes and hurricanes." and other storms, like here in California in 2011:
A quarter of a century later she still did, and stood out in a thunderstorm in Arizona: https://www.facebook.com/Krystal.Watanabe/videos/214731753865065
--- Meteora ---
Thunder erupts music.
Torrential downpour orchestra.
Electric light show. Hail rock stars.
Air quakes energy.
Buoyant resonance.
Fiery bass Gods.
Free drinks abound.
No ticket required.
California
Roseville High School, some time around 2000
thanks to Music
They moved to California and she finished high school and lived with her father, Fred Krampits, who died last year, until she was 30. She didn't work outside of her home or go to college or university, although she did make the honours list in Eich Intermediate School. I'm not sure if she graduated from High School.
In Grade 11, Roseville High School, 1999
original pic courtesy Roseville Historical Society
Her dad was a software engineer for Hewlett-Packard, writing the drivers for their printers, and also took her to the computer room when he worked for Time-Warner. He also worked for Little, Brown publishing and Bose (I'm not sure if her father worked for Bose or just her grandfather. She remembered flying a kite outside their plant in Boston when she was a child when her grandfather worked there.). She said her maternal grandfather, David Hanson, who also worked at Bose and also died last year, invented their Acoustic Wave technology, which produced better sound from a smaller speaker. "My Grandfather invented the Bose Acoustic Wave Stereo System.....He was looking at some Venetian blinds and actually *saw* blue ripples of sound washing over the blinds, spawning the idea for the ribbed and curved inner-speakers.
If he told a psychiatrist that, they would diagnose him as ~something~ and medicate his unique ideas away. Instead, he told a scientist, who gave him the opportunity to create a piece of technology almost everyone in the world has heard of.
Genius looks like insanity to those who don’t understand it." she said on Facebook in 2019.
But this isn't true - the Acoustic Wave system was really invented by Amar Bose and William R. Short. "The Acoustic Wave work was done with a relatively small team, and I do not recall that Dave was a part of that team." Short told me. "Probably everyone at the company had a hand in the development at some point, including Dave, since the project was deemed to be important, but most folks had primary responsibilities elsewhere during this time...Needless to say, Dave was a major contributor to other projects at Bose during his career there."
 |
| Bose Acoustic Wave II, Arbour Gallery |
Working with her father on his Horrortalk site, she learned about the emerging technology of the Internet. "He basically turned me into a little girl version of him with better tits." she said. She used computers her dad had his company donate to the school in the second grade and she'd been on the Internet since the 90s. "The Internet was the wave of the future and my dad instilled that and he was right. So I taught myself HTML and Graphic design, picking the things that fed my creative urge without getting on a stage. I could do it in my pajamas too." She said she designed banners ads for a friend's porn site in the 90s when she still was in her teens. In the early 2000s she had been a webmistress (her word) for Horrortalk, where she used the name 'Krystal Lake' (like in the Friday the 13th series) . She talked like the site was all hers but it looked like her dad was in charge and she disappeared from the staff list in 2009.
Her Krystal Lake avatar from Horrortalk. She said most of her photos had been lost and were scattered across the world on hard drives. This one she had to recover as a tiny .jpg from the Wayback Machine on Archive.org.
She contributed a lot, more than 12,000 entries, to forums on DVDTalk. She did not write for HorrorDNA, which had some writers from Horrortalk, even though she claimed she founded and edited it on her Facebook. On a DVDTalk forum some of her earliest entries live 'tweet' the 9/11 attacks as they happen. She stayed at the Marriott World Trade Center between the two towers two or three weeks before the attacks. She went to Holcomb Bridge Middle School, Alpharetta, Georgia, in the early 90s, and fittingly for someone writing about Horror and Sci-Fi, on Classmates.com she said she'd gone to Roswell High School in Georgia, but that must have been a joke. She really went to the confusingly similar in name Roseville High School in California after going to Eich Intermediate School in the same city. She used the handle "WhoGirl" on DVDTalk, not for Dr. Who, but for The Who, which she was a life long fan of. Three of her posts on her last day on Facebook were about Pete Townshend. She also like to play drums like Keith Moon, and shared his appetite for drugs. I asked her why someone so young knew anything about bands that were big in the 60s, and she said she spun a lot of her dad's LPs at home. He had a 7.2 "yes, two sub-woofers" according to Krystal, sound system. "I had 6000 DVDs and Blu-Rays in California." She would watch some adult films and horror movies with her dad, but she said he always explained how the scary special effects were done.
So she had kind of retro tastes in films and TV, having watched a lot of Nick at Night. She remembered being roasted in the audience at a centre left table by Don Rickles who said "You a kraut?" "Yeah." "I know you're not Jewish, cause if you were, you woulda had better seats!"
She had a whole series of these - some dressed as a schoolgirl. Early 2000s
thanks to Nick Danger
Dated sometime in her early 20s. She sent me this one because she wanted to show me her.... Three Stooges photos on the wall of her room which her dad called 'The Den of Iniquity' in Roseville. She was a teenage boy in the body of a woman, which made her lots of friends in the mostly male world of the internet groups she was in. She was also a Rush fan and every few years would watch all James Bond films in chronological order, shattering other stereotypes about women. She made model cars as a teen, like a Shelby GT500 1967, and she got gag names inscribed on the Perseverance Mars rover (NASA let people submit their names to be engraved on the rover they sent to Mars), so on Mars right now, there is a plaque with names like Phillip Mayaz and Myrock Hunt.
And like a teenager, she put off doing things that worried her, like opening the divorce papers she was served for weeks.
She described herself as a shut-in, and avoided going out, unless at night to feed stray cats. "When I graduated, (from high school) I stayed home to take care of him (her dad) and learn online shit because I discovered I hated being around people a lot and had agoraphobia. I read lots of medical books on this shit. That's big. But oddly can do theatre in front of 1,000 people with zero fear. But ten people or so? Fear. Classrooms like college? Fear." and she said "It’s why the Internet is so crucial to me. That’s my gate to the world." She lived in Detroit for years but did not know about the Renaissance Center, the complex of skyscrapers that dominates downtown. But she went to about 300 concerts, and media events. When she was 10 she went backstage to meet Spanky McFarlane when she was singing Mama Cass's part in the The New Mamas and the Papas, and her first rock concert was KISS in 1996. She said that her dad wanted to take her to Roy Orbison but her mother complained and he gave away the tickets and Orbison died shortly afterwards so her father took young Krystal to as many of his idols' performances as he could, and as her father knew a concert venue owner she got to meet Peter Noone of Herman's Hermits, Paul Revere and the Raiders, Donovan "and his guru. I've got a story about that.", and in wrestling, she met Randy 'Macho Man' Savage. She learned from her dad that it was worth trying to meet celebs by going backstage "The worst they can say is 'no'", something she applied to her life.
Her father was a fan of Japanese movies and someone compared them to the Lone Wolf and Cub series of manga and films that he liked, a lone father raising his child by himself.
Others said that her father would always try to meet the celebs at concerts. Krystal sang a song about the Hawaiian singer Don Ho whose signature tune was "Tiny Bubbles":
She liked dressing sexy, but it drew unwanted attention and jealousy, and I said the figure she'd developed at 23 (even in her late teens she was a B cup and had been thinking of getting implants) which she called "my cartoonishly oversized breasts" seemed to be a drawback as well as an advantage. She answered "When they are a fucking E cup they can. Blessing and curse I would not change. Their name is officially 'my backstage passes'" and said she usually could walk through security to meet celebrities, but people have told me it was just her dad who talked his way backstage. "I was told by Russ Meyer at a horror convention that I would be perfect for one of his movies because I used my tits so well at horror conventions and stuff to get attention and meet fascinating artists whom I admire. I think it's fascinating what two pieces of fat can do to you." she said. And here she demonstrates in a campaign ad:
from DVDtalk, sometime in early 2000s
She didn't work at Hooters! She remembered the name of the person who sent her the shirt years later.
"Blessed in the chest and that's the best" - Krystal. She said her husband, who was an engineer, had her put them in a bowl of water so he could figure out what their volume was, and a boyfriend had wanted to make a cast of her vulva.
She managed to touch Kanye West by charming her way to the sound engineer's booth, where she knew from experience that West likely would come to check things. She'd made friends with many people in the entertainment industry, like Eric Burdon of the Animals, Steve Hibbert of the movie Pulp Fiction, who remembered her as a "cool and vivacious woman", and writer/actor Dino Stamatopoulos. Her favorite improv comedian was Paul F. Tompkins. Her drawing of him:
Meeting Tompkins in 2016.
With her father Fred and Pat Priest of the Munsters
With Butch Patrick of the Munsters
With Ken Foree - Krystal had asked him to put her in the chokehold!
With Sid Haig
She also met Bruce Campbell from the Evil Dead franchise, Michael Berryman, from The Hills Have Eyes, and a lot of people who did the SFX in horror movies. like Greg Nicotero and Tom Savini, who she said "let me touch The Sex Machine (the revolver codpiece) from From Dusk Till Dawn!". She also said she saw Telly Savalas in 1992,when she was 10, watching the L.A. Riots on TV in their hotel lobby when they were in L.A. "Animals, just animals!" she quoted him as saying.
She'd even been in a short movie called "Clean" (2002). The editor, Matthew Pevic, remembered Krystal as "a very kind, very giving person and she did a great job on the short film." and she had been in productions of The Music Man in 2001 and Sweet Charity, at The Roseville Theater in 2003 with The Magic Circle Theater. She said she also played Prospero in the Tempest.
Cast photo, courtesy The Magic Circle Theater, early 2000s. Web site was still up and running
more than 20 years afterwards, even though the theater closed and the site hasn't been updated since 2005.Krystal's most prized possession was a souvenir program from Citizen Kane. :
She could recite from memory the lyrics of the Charlie Kane song that was sung at the party scene in the film that the White Stripes, another favorite band, incorporated into their song The Union Forever, and she made the same mistake of saying 'traction magnets' instead of 'traction magnates', a name for capitalists who established monopolies on streetcars, that they did.
Japan and the great Tohoku earthquake
Kinkaku-ji Temple, Kyoto, Japan, sometime between 2011 and 2016.
She lived through the great Tohoku earthquake in 2011, and when the the tsunami was rushing in, they took off for higher ground and she told me when I asked her about it and whether earthquakes in California feel different from the ones in Japan: "I lived in Northern California, so you kind of asked the right person (though I never felt a big one there, I felt a decent ~4.5 while on vacation in LA April of 1992, which was also when the LA riots broke out. I have had the best worst luck in the world. Also stayed at the WTC Marriot three weeks before 9/11. I’m cursed. 😶 )
Earthquakes. So, in California they feel more fluid, where as in Japan they feel more jerky. That’s the best way I can describe it.
I felt my first real quake two days before 3/11. It was a ~6.0, and they say that there’s often a smaller precursor quake for the big ones, and it was true here. It’s actually the only note or whatever they’re called on Facebook. I was freaked out and logged in to tell friends I was safe.
Now for the big one. I describe it like this: It was like a child shaking a dollhouse. I was on my then-boyfriend’s bed Skyping with my dad when it struck. As soon as I felt the first tiny bit of shaking I ran to the doorway like they always tell you to do. (My dad heard about 45 seconds of the quake until the power went out, and he found out it was a 9.0 before I did. He thought I was dead.)
The dresser had drawers on rollers, and those were opening and closing all the way, just slamming hard over and over again. After about a minute when it wasn’t stopping and I felt I had my bearings I walked to the window and looked out. The world was moving like water, and the telephone poles were swaying hard. The neighborhood I was in was all brand new housing, and the Japanese build their houses on specialized wood beams to take huge earthquakes, so I was in about the best place I could have hoped for.
Then the shaking just wouldn’t stop. I ran back to the door and braced myself again. After it stopped I ran downstairs and pulled out my camera and started filming. It actually helped me detach from the situation because I felt I was documenting the damage for others. So I was making jokes (it’s my coping mechanism. I sang a bit of The Who’s “Shaking All Over.” It’s just what I do. 🤷♀️)
Anyway, it felt like the quake went on for five minutes but I thought to myself “That can’t be right. Earthquakes don’t last that long. It must be the trauma slowing time.” Nope. It really lasted a full five minutes. I knew it was a big quake, and I knew we weren’t in the most hot of spots for quakes. Then it dawned on me that somewhere else this was much, much bigger. I immediately went into survive mode. Then the town alarm went off, and it was the scariest siren I’ve ever heard.
A woman’s voice came on in Japanese. I joked to the camera “Speak English!” Again.. coping. I didn’t speak much Japanese at the time, but I understood “TSUNAMI.” I started grabbing my stuff and getting ready to evacuate because I knew my boyfriend would come home immediately after a quake like that. When he got back he told me he called my dad and let him know he was going to take care of me. (Cool guy. Still my friend.) Within maybe fifteen minutes we had everything absolutely necessary and evacuated to his friend’s house because they were on higher ground. I filmed a goodbye message to my family while we were driving, telling them that I died happy and 'I had a good run.' I stand by having had a good run. 🤷♀️
We made it to his friend’s house and about a half hour later we felt what we thought was a big aftershock, but turned out to be the tsunami hitting. **That** felt different than a normal earthquake, and there was a sound to it that I can’t describe. Deep, watery thunder in the Earth. It was dark where we were. It felt like it echoed. "
She said she also had photos she wanted to share of boats driven miles inland by the waters of the tsunami, but they were in Japan.
Before I got to know her well, I thought she was either military or from a military family, since there is a large US base in Misawa, where her father was born. In fact she lived with her Japanese boyfriend, who she said was Yakuza, in an old discothèque, probably the Carbs Bar , a short distance from the base's main gate, which she loved. She later lived near Nagoya, I think somewhere around Inabe in Mie Prefecture, with her husband, another Japanese man that she'd met online, and started raising staghorn, Goliath, Mars, Rhino, Palawan, Westwood and other beetles for sale, which are popular as pets in Japan. She said there still is a line of beetles in Japan named after her. They took more than two years to mature. She was bitten by a Mars beetle larva: "These were big motherfuckers, OK, they weighed 180 grams...it doesn't sound like a lot but for a larvae is a fuck ton...the biggest, fattest fucking larvae, I was picking him up....normally they don't fuck with you, but it was a new breed for me, and I didn't know these motherfuckers were known for being specifically aggressive as larvae.... It bit into my finger and ripped out a good chunk of it in its claws.... Big white maggoty looking larvae... Motherfuck, it took everything to not throw that motherfucker instinctively because it had my flesh in its maw gaping and I started profusely bleeding ...I put a fucking red label on that cocksucker's cage... and I never named him...I never did anything to him....I held him with that reverence and with that respect too, that motherfucker, he was magnificent."
She fished a lot in Japan. She would go out at 10 pm and come back at 6 am "just eel fishing in Japan... it was nice to just chill out, watch the bobbling lure".
Detroit
I think her life was happy in Japan and she talked about wanting to go back there. Her husband got a job in the States and moved to Novi, a wealthy Detroit suburb with a large Japanese ex-pat community and many Japanese corporations, in 2016, where she lived until last year. She wanted to stay in Japan and get Japanese citizenship, but her husband wanted US citizenship for himself. She had a son named Hitoshi in 2017, and she light-heartedly announced on Facebook that everyone should say "Hi, Toshi" (like the character in American Dad, one of her favourite cartoon shows) to introduce him to the world Sadly he would only live a few weeks and this I think was her biggest blow.
Krystal and Toshi, 2017. She shared this photo with everybody! In one live video from 2019 she took us into the room that was going to be his nursery and showed it to us. It had been turned into a nursery for plants. At least it's still for growing things, she said.
She wrote a Facebook entry about his death in 2017 and talked about it to me in heartbreaking detail. She loved playing with kids but she also said being with kids would put her in a bad frame of mind after Toshi. I didn't know her then but people said her mental health became very bad after his death.
She took this photo from this blog and used it as a model for her own painting and sent it to me. I realize the photo would have been taken when she was 10!
So, I did something different this time. I used the pencil tool to sketch out Mark Bellis’s wonderful photograph, which he was awesome enough to suggest and let me use. 
. I’ll post his original picture below with a link to his photography blog. Check him out. Thanks, Mark!!She made this Facebook video for me. "Iggy Pop, with my theme song 'Five foot One' cause I'm only 5' 1" and had back and neck pains: "And I wish life could be Swedish magazines...I wish I knew what he meant by 'I wish life could be Swedish magazines.'" she asked. It refers to pornography - in the 60s and 70s Sweden was well known for publishing hardcore porn mags.
For the next two years I thought she talked like Iggy Pop, until she called me!
And her Christmas Card to me for 2021:
Her version of The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai.
She said "This is my synesthesia art. A bit busy but simple geometric shapes with contrasting, but complimentary colors. I can explain but even the most die hard synesthesia folks have trouble explaining it to people without it. I asked the group "In two or three sentences, how do you explain this to people without it?" And they mostly said "Don't bother.":
Inspired by Andy Warhol:
She had an interest in, well, a fetish for knives - this one is a large Japanese knife she owned that had a wooden scabbard:
She also liked guns and had a shooting gallery set up in her basement for air guns and collected survival gear and ordered a tactical vest from a website that sold guns called 'cold dead hands'.
She liked The Prisoner and wore a jacket with piping that looked like the ones in the TV series. I showed her my Portmeirion plates that are sold at the village in Wales where it was filmed.
And of course she loved her cats - my big fat calico would come and rub my phone when she heard Krystal's voice.
Friend's cottage in the UK: Named after Isis, who was the Egyptian goddess of cats, appropriate for Krystal!
And looking back on our Facebook posts and conversations, I see she told us she wanted 'Supper's Ready' by Genesis to be the last song she would ever hear, "You ever see this? It’s my favorite concert ever. The live 26 minute long version of Supper’s Ready is amazing."
And she wanted "Always look on the bright side of life" by Monty Python played at her funeral.
She'd organize game nights online for her friends as far back as the early 2000s on DVDTalk. and, oh, could she be funny!
And being Mrs. Roper from Three's Company. 2021
Photo and video from JenniferA bit vindictive too, these are videos and posts from the great Facebook war of 2019:
And just plain vindictive:
And viciously vindictive:
I didn't see any bad behaviour on Facebook from the person she's replying to. That doesn't mean she was inventing things, but here it's like she's really talking to the guy she was obsessed with, who was also dying.
And some heartbreaking ones - here she realizes her marriage is ending and takes off her rings as she contemplates checking off 'single' on a form.
She even started a podcast series on the Lyft drives she'd taken, but only the pilot podcast is still there.
She remembered even small acts of kindness. The last video she posted was of her singing 'If I could talk I'd tell you' by The Lemonheads while paging through a notebook. She used to call this "your notebook" when she talked to me. I didn't know why, but then I saw I'd bought it for her at Walmart in October, and she still remembered that after I'd forgotten.
*********
I'm going to talk about some dark stuff after this which involves Nazism, abuse, suicide, self harm, child loss and drugs, so if you've had problems with these things, please stop reading. If you want a short answer to what happened to her, she met a bad person online who exploited her and got her addicted to opioids after her son died and her marriage began to fail. They met in a private Facebook group, so none of the people who were her old friends could see what was going on until it was too late, but she was grateful to the people who helped her, even though her mental state made it hard to say it. She already spoke about these things on her Facebook, but I'm trying to give them some context and avoid giving publicity to someone who caused her a great deal of harm.
I was Facebook friends with her since May 2018, but I never spoke to her until the middle of last year. I really wish I'd gotten closer sooner or realized how bad things were going for her earlier. She went from being a suburban housewife who she said spent most of her time shopping to someone hovering on homelessness in a large decaying city. She called me most days that she could, but it was her doing nearly all the talking - she got scared of being alone and sometimes asked me to leave the call on when I slept. Although a shut-in, being alone also scared her. After she broke up with her husband it was the first time she had lived on her own, and her father, who she had lived with until she was 30, had just died. She was a bit bipolar, sometimes she talked like she was conquering the world, sometimes she'd be in a pit of despair. I'd seen the diagnosis of schizophrenia on one of the forms she'd shown me, but she disliked that and said she only had PTSD. But she had definite symptoms of schizophrenia. Sometimes she would be disassociated and babbling nonsense about people watching her, and sometimes she was even catatonic, unable to speak, but she could still communicate, like she once invited me into a live video to show me an adapter for her iPad she was having trouble with. She wasn't able to speak and was breathing heavily, and then switched to her face staring at me, then some effects and her turned upside down, I think to say she was confused why the adapter didn't work . She'd been in solitary after being arrested and that made her hallucinate. She said she'd had chronic back pain since a cop had thrown her up against a wall hard, I think at a bowling alley, when she was 12, and this got worse after an attack by a German Shepherd when she went out of her house and a dog that lived at a house nearby pulled itself loose from the line it was tied up to at "6:45 pm", she remembered the exact time, February 9 when she was 27, and jumped on her, knocking her down and injuring her vertebra, and pulled down her pants and bit her on the ass. The attack gave her thoracic outlet syndrome, a form of nerve compression that causes pain and numbness, and it also gave her a fear of dogs. She said she insisted in her lawsuit that the dog be euthanized as she thought it might attack children in the future, and if it killed one, "It would be on me." I couldn't find a reference to the case in the county court system Roseville is in.
She said she was losing her vision as well. She burst into tears when she could not turn the key to open her door because of the pain. She used large amounts of painkillers since then, and her health suffered greatly. I think that this was the cause of her problems - she was unable to rest properly and spent hours pacing around her room - lying down would be so uncomfortable and she'd pop back up again. But I've subsequently learned that another form of catatonia involves the relentless pacing she did, and that some people can have a mixed form of catatonia like she did. She'd sometimes go for more than 24 hours without sleep and then crash for a few and start the cycle over, "I was up for about 40 hours with only an hour's sleep in between, plus I have to take some fairly strong medicines for my back problems" she wrote in 2006 after spending the time playing a Nintendo DS game, (honestly she acted more like a teenage boy than a middle aged woman - the last meal I saw her eating on April 1 was a bag of Oreos, and yes, I told her she needed better than that to no avail) and the lack of sleep probably made her have the angry outbursts that alienated her from her friends. She said she actually did better on codeine as an analgesic along with marijuana - both are available without prescription in Canada. She did quite a lot of marijuana when she came back from Japan, where it is very illegal and she did not use. She would take "Rick Simpson Oil" a high THC form that was a paste that came in a syringe dispenser, swallow that and continue puffing on a pipe of bud. THC has some association with developing psychosis in schizophrenics. Prescription meds she used for chronic pain were: Methadone, Soma, Norflex, OxyContin. Fioricet, which she said killed Marilyn Monroe, although it was not available in Monroe's time (it was likely Nembutal, now no longer available in pill form, that killed Monroe), for ocular migraine blindness, pseudoephedrine to keep awake, Ativan
and Ambien (for sleep). Zoloft and Clonazepam (prescribed as Klonopin) as needed for PTSD. She was also prescribed Trazadone and Zyprexa in hospital, the first likely was an antidepressant and the second for schizophrenia. She liked LSD, mushrooms and ayahuasca, but disliked cocaine, and said she also could cope without heroin if she could get mushrooms. Her favorite whiskies were Woodford Reserve bourbon and Suntory Toki, and liked Sonoma wine.
She said she was a 'trip guide' for people on hallucinogens: "I know what it’s like to have men weep at my breast and see God in me thanks to drugs and shit like this." She wanted to try DMT and see the 'clockwork elves' that run the universe that people say they hallucinate when on it. She'd been given morphine in the hospital after a tonsillectomy and and a biopsy and she said "...and I took advantage of every chance to get more of that shit since I knew I'd never do it otherwise. It's safe and controlled in a hospital." Sadly the 'never' was not to be true. When I talked to her on the phone in Detroit, she'd be chopping chunks of heroin into powder to snort - in Wyoming it was cold remedy pills that she still snorted. She used a 10,000 yen note that she used to use with the abusive partner. She'd also be smoking pot and cigarettes non-stop, sometimes the very cheap 'Smoker's Choice' cigarettes which are billed as cigars that she got in the hospitals, since she said they didn't stay lit that well so were less likely to start fires. After her heart attack she cut back on smoking, but he got her chain smoking, because that's what he did. She would wait outside the Telegraph motel for the dealer to pick her up and make the transaction in the car, never in the motel, which could have gotten her evicted.
She said that smoking pot with high THC provided her with almost instant relief from ocular migraines.
She did not want children and was on the pill and did not know she was pregnant for a while -" I didn't find out about him until I was already about three and a half months." She told me and her close friend she did not want the baby, but she said to me she did it because her husband wanted her to, but to someone else she said "I wasn't interested in having kids but it it was it just happened, and I embraced it once I found out. I didn't have it in me to do that (have an abortion) I was so far into, it you can see everything on the ultrasound, you know it was breathtaking - that moment I'll never forget" Her pregnancy was high risk, and she developed diabetes and extremely high blood pressure and gained 100 pounds. "I had gestational diabetes, had to inject myself five times a day in the gut with fucking insulin shots and I'm afraid of needles but I did it for my kid - I carried to about eight and a half months and then I...had to be induced because my body was just failing and it took five fucking days of them scraping and scraping and trying and not dilating and eventually catatardic (not sure what she meant, maybe tachycardia, high pulse rate) in my heart, My heart was beating at 180 pulse per minute and they rushed me for an emergency C-section where I lost two-thirds of my blood",
Her blood pressure, December 15, 2016 - 180 is considered a hypertensive crisis which requires immediate medical care.
She had a heart attack and needed a blood transfusion. "Fortunately, though my son lived.., he survived the fucking process of of all of that!" When she was called a hero, she said "I just did what a mother was fucking supposed to do, I'm not a hero...I did what biology intended."
Over the weeks her son lived, she watched in frustration as he failed to thrive. At one point she wished "he'd just die already." and this came back to haunt her horribly. She told me about waking up to find her son cold and blue beside her. She screamed for her husband, they went to the hospital and the doctors tried to revive him for hours. They gave him a wrist tag. "They wouldn't do that if he was already dead." she thought, but finally they came to tell them he was gone. "I did everything right, no blankets or toys in his crib, he was wearing a suit to keep warm." she said. She realized her marriage would end with Toshi's death. "Within 24 hours I did have that feeling of, well, oh no, it's all over, not only did I lose my son but all of this is going to fall apart too." She blamed herself for his death, and she said her husband did as well, saying directly that she'd killed him and calling her "only half a woman". She regretted not getting a baby monitor that had an alarm in case breathing stops, but according to this article, the monitors available at the time were not effective in preventing SIDS. Before he died, she got him an outfit like the boy street thugs in a British TV series. "I bought him this awesome suit, he was going to be like 'Peaky Blinders' - I got a nice hat for him." She wanted to have a photo shoot of him dressed like that, but "I used it for the funeral.", and she had to put his body into the crematorium herself, following Japanese custom, and she put in a little plush white owl that was his favorite toy.
She often blamed herself for things, like when she heard the prostitute in Detroit she'd had a fight with had killed herself after Krystal had told her to (she had no proof she actually had done this) she felt guilty. Later her enemies trolled her over her son's death, setting up a fake Facebook account called "Casey Wantababy", referencing the story of Casey Anthony, who was accused of murdering her baby. "Fake accounts made by psychos who have been making accusations that I murdered my son." she said, saying they were from a Facebook group she'd joined in 2019.
She usually kept the hurt of Toshi's death closely hidden, and got angry when people tried to console her, but often when she sent me screenshots from her phone I could see she'd been looking at photos of her baby.
By 2019, she was talking openly on Facebook about getting divorced and moving to L.A. to be with her online boyfriend, a successful TV producer: "My little secret - it's why I'm happy all the time - that's my Master!", who she said encouraged her creativity when she was doing lots of videos. She was living in the basement of her townhouse, her husband upstairs, and he would complain when she would be talking loudly on live video "It's 3 a.m. Don't you have decency?" he asked her from an upstairs window as she stood outside talking on a live Facebook video that anybody in the group could see to the man who would get her addicted to heroin, to both her and that guy's laughter. She constantly asked people in the Rogan Facebook group to get him onto her live chats, and made videos to get his attention.
She'd get into fights with people online like in her old DVDtalk forum, which she returned to in 2019 after years away to criticize old members who she said mistreated her at the turn of the century, but at the same time was compassionate to an old friend who lost their father. She was expelled from a Facebook group we were in over a fight with an older man who she said was sexually harassing and threatening her. He was in failing health and is now dead and the admin thought he could not be a serious threat. But in a strange contrast I couldn't understand, she tolerated the guy that got her addicted to heroin posting stuff like "I would do you both at once, then make you do each other" on her Facebook photo of her and a friend a year before he moved in with her.
She made enemies. Reddit, c. 2015
I guess the vast amount of video and chats she recorded in 2019 really were her "Not Waving but Drowning" as Stevie Smith wrote. She was trying to get help.
She got into a physical fight with her friends in Minnesota, police were called by neighbours and more drama on the internet. This was around the time that guy, a musician she met in a Facebook group, that she ultimately picked over the producer, who she said had a 14 million dollar studio ("Yeah. Fourteen million reasons not to but money isn't everything. I needed [that guy]'s dominating spirit ultimately." she said), was influencing her more and more. I don't know when he succeeded in persuading to stop taking her psychiatric meds, but she was behaving more erratically in the latter part of 2019. She said he had pedophiliac fantasies about her. There was some form of sexual abuse when she was young that she alluded to a lot, but never told me what had happened. She said her friends in Minnesota were fans of him and the woman told her after she went back to Minnesota for the last time, that she'd also had an online sexual relationship with him, and that she, not Krystal, was his main interest. "That's not true. I was his final Queen." she told me, using a BDSM term, as she did often near the end of her life. After she died, her friends wanted to know if that guy's book was going to come out...
She tried to keep an online image of herself that was very different from reality. She posed by cars and motorcycles that were owned by someone else that she couldn't actually drive because of her ocular migraines. In the summer and fall of 2019, Krystal looked to me from what she posted in the group I was in and on her public Facebook like a successful person who was about to start a new career in southern California. "I need to be there to accomplish goals" she said. But that wasn't true either. She wanted to be with the studio owner, then after that that guy, and she'd never worked outside her home, so I don't think she had jobs lined up there, or even the means to support herself.
Then she got into a fight with her husband, went to jail, her enemies put a mugshot online of her in a burgundy prison issue tunic and wearing her prescription glasses, something she almost never was photographed wearing, and a video of the fight got out in the group she was in, supposedly she sent it to the guy she was obsessed with and it got out that way - he shared erotic pics of her, screenshots he took in spite of her asking him not to, to the group as well, as he did with some other women. Then she was homeless, which meant she had to leave a shelter at 7 A.M., and wander around until 7 P.M., fearing being raped, when the shelter reopened. She kept a penny she found on the ground in her pocket so she could say she had some money, and she said she'd go into a washroom, locked the door and masturbate on the floor so she could feel something. It was getting cold so she checked into a mental hospital - then since she was offline people claimed she was dead. She was suicidal. One of the drawbacks of being a shut-in was most of the people she knew were online and couldn't help her much because they were far away from her. After a few weeks at the hospital they gave her a course of ECT, shock therapy. "I had 'drug resistant depression' They pumped me with drugs. Forced me to interact with mentally ill people in close quarters. I got worse. So they said I could either leave and be homeless or stay a month. I had no option. 2020 New Year’s Pontiac Hospital for two months total. I thought that year would get better. It gave me a chance to try and fail to get benefits. These are supposed to be ground zero for this. I needed help. They zapped me twelve times. It felt and feels like systematic abuse of a human being. I can’t get over it. You have no idea how much smarter I was before ECT. It killed me. Took my spirit away. My inner voice was gone. For a year. Still disappears sometimes." "Physical pain is one thing. Mental pain is worse. I try to hide it and hate talking about my brain trauma. But it’s true. I had a serious medical procedure that tinkered with my brain. I’m so frustrated and this shit is why I think dark shit. When your brain feels broken you’re trapped in Hell.". She said the ECT left her with brain fog and even two and a half years later she had trouble with numbers and other basic tasks. ECT is also used to treat catatonia, and I have seen her catatonic more than once.
After the hospital she moved into a suburban motel a short distance from her home. This was the first time she had ever lived by herself.
She felt her husband had abandoned her, and she feared being abandoned by people she loved. In the 00s She had a boyfriend who she thought she was going to marry, and was living with her with her father for a while but eventually dumped her. She announced the engagement on a thread she started on DVDTalk, which is where she met him. He announced its end three years later in the same place. And after that "... I swear I went four years from age 25-29 I didn’t have sex. Or masturbate! I think after my fiancé dumped me it damaged me." she said to me.
"Awwww!" I commiserated.
"Yeah, it began my abandonment issue. I always fear everyone will leave me because they always have one way or another. Even my blood family. So. . ."
And this might explain the worst thing that was to come, when she hooked up with the musician, who she later said was dying of cancer, and "Yes. We had a suicide pact, Mark. And he almost got me." she said "He was going to kill himself. Decided not to ON A WHIM ... before coming to die with me." she wrote. Before he came out to her from California, when she was still living with her husband, he wanted her to 'Goebbels', in his words, her five cats, kill them like Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels killed his six children when the Allies were closing in on him in Berlin, and come out to live with him. She loved her cats, and her husband still took care of them and sent her photos of them after she left their home. He wanted her to finish a book he'd been writing (he originally dedicated it to a former girlfriend) that was a bad William S. Burroughs pastiche - the idea was he'd kill himself, then she'd follow him after the book was submitted for publication - she said he'd written out a list of famous suicides, including Hitler and Eva Braun, favourites of his, and added his and her name to it. She had been suicidal for much of the time after the separation from her husband. She only put it on Facebook well after he died, so I don't know if she'd put her or their names on it herself. She didn't know who most of the people on it were.
They had unprotected sex, even though she thought he had hepatitis and might have been HIV positive, and of course another pregnancy could have been fatal. He'd gotten her to stop taking her psychiatric medications and start using heroin too, a goddam greyish powder that he fatuously called 'China White', which was an old name for high purity heroin from Southeast Asia. Krystal told me he'd done heroin for much of his life, but had had been on Dilaudid, a prescription opioid, in recent years. He started both of them doing street heroin when he came to Detroit - the much more powerful and dangerous drug fentanyl, which has also been called China White, has frequently been added to street heroin, and he may not have known how strong it was. She said he told her his death from cancer would come soon, but she claimed he lived with her for five or seven months, (in reality it could not have been more than three, and she only said on Facebook he was living with her at the end of the month before he died) not taking any treatment for cancer until he died from an accidental overdose and he was overweight and did not have jaundice, as one would expect for someone dying of liver cancer, in photos and videos she showed me of him from that time.
"Stage Four (cancer)" was one of the phrases she repeated a lot. She told me about one of the symptoms that her doctors discussed with her was echolalia, also called perseveration , where she often repeated words and phrases. In 2019 she made a joke about stage four cancer in the vintage ads she liked to rewrite, "I dreamed I was informed that I have stage four lung cancer in my Maidenform Bra.” after a friend suggested it in another joke.
She said he had the idea that she should start doing sex work. Maybe she wanted someone to punish and kill her, since she felt miserable and guilty after her son died and marriage ended.
Krystal said to a lot of people he died in her arms, but she said to me she found him dead after she came back from the store. "He was supposed to die fucking me. Missed it by about seven minutes. He snorted about 200 bucks worth of dope, then I did the same as I talked to God about killing my only son." but the dose didn't kill her, and she flushed all the dope left before calling the police. There were rumours that she'd killed him or he'd committed suicide but I'd messaged her two days before his death, and she said "He’s had a couple good days! That’s what we hang our hat on. Each day one at a time." so his death seems accidental.
Krystal claimed on Facebook that writing the book(s) kept her from committing suicide but that was not true - she had made several attempts during the last months of her life. Some of what she put online that she attributed to him seemed to be her writing under his name.
The grayish lumps in the smaller bag was how she got heroin in Detroit - then she would chop it into a powder and inhale it - normally she used a 10000 yen note but here it's a straw. Fall, 2021
Krystal: "Did you know heroin dealers have business cards sometimes?"
Why only 23 hours?
She believed him when he told him he had some kind of special ability to determine what dope was safe and he taught her how to know what was safe as well, and she did large amounts. "I have the tolerance (reduced reaction to drugs) of legends and it kills grown men to take what I do." Krystal said. I replied "And it's prepared in a sterile lab without any impurities with regular FDA inspection by Hobbits in Middle Earth....?" "That's what you tell yourself. Yep." Krystal said, but it was fentanyl that killed her in the end. She said someone had given her a number for someone who'd sell her LSD or psilocybin - she might have thought the fentanyl was either of those, or she may have thought she was buying heroin. She had not done any heroin for about six months since leaving Detroit, and would have lost her tolerance to opioids. I don't think she would knowingly have taken fentanyl, as she found when she had taken heroin that she thought had been contaminated with it she felt very ill, but some people have told me she was seeking a lethal dose after she got to Minnesota and found no place to live. She was in constant pain from her thoracic outlet syndrome, but she usually told someone if she was going to take heroin, and be online with them in case she overdosed, and the person who usually sat up with her said she didn't call him on that day. I didn't think she could find opioids that quickly in a new city, but I was wrong. I'm not sure who gave her the fentanyl - she knew several people in Minnesota and she could have found a dealer online.
She was still wearing her trademark scrunchy when she was found.
And all the lousy little poets
Coming round
Tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson
Yeah, the white man dancin' - Leonard Cohen, The Future
He was heavily into BDSM, and she said he had injured a previous partner so badly she had to go to the hospital twice, and he groomed Krystal by giving her Sacher-Masoch's Venus in Furs before they hooked up, which is about a guy seeking to be totally enslaved by a woman, and I think that played into her fear of abandonment - A man who wouldn't leave her, and who wanted to die with her. He also sent her works by de Sade and Pimp, a book allegedly written by a pimp, both of which were misogynistic and encouraged an exploitative view of personal relations. She'd already been interested in BDSM and Nazism, having seen "Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS" and other Nazisplotation films in her dad's collection and read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in primary school. One sad video she showed me was one of her flogging one of her friends, an older man who panhandled from passing cars on the street around her motel, with a belt, and looking into the camera and saying "Hello. I am Ilsa of the SS. The She Wolf." She said she needed to do it because she was mad at her husband for divorcing her, even though she had been talking about divorcing him for months in 2019. That guy also put her on Fetlife, a dating site for BDSM and other kinks, with a user name that was from a Nazi euphemism for an early mass murder of Jews that played on her name, which he spelled wrong. (He claimed to be 44 on the site, and told her he was 54, when he was really about 64). He had used screenshots of her and other women and set up accounts and was the real person who responded to some of the messages. He mostly enjoyed raceplay and talked to blacks who wanted to be humiliated by a woman. To their credit, Fetlife took down her profile when I asked them to.
The username he'd given her on Fetlife was Kristalnacht, a misspelling of the Nazi massacere of Jews. Krystal had spelled the word correctly, when she denounced the 2018 Pittsburgh Synagogue shooting,
But a few years later, after hooking up with that guy:
He also spelled and pronounced pervert 'prevert' so that's the way she spelled it too.
They met on a Joe Rogan Facebook group where she would get into pointless fights reminiscent of junior high school students with people, and she would say things like "Some people just let their words spill like cum out of a cunt hole after a night of working the streets". She became friends with not one but two flat earthers in that group. Her friends in the group that I was in with her, who were mostly writers, didn't know about what was going on, but one member of the Rogan group, a black man she did a number of 'lives' with, was concerned and asked her "Hey Krystal you don't think that n**** isn't treating you like a puppet and pulling your strings?" but she said she could handle him. He macked on women in the group and on some of Krystal's friends, with Krystal's help, adopting the same kind of bullying tone he would use on Krystal, and collected pix of them with their cleavage out. He would have to have known Krystal's mental health was deteriorating. Some people in the group joked about it.
Krystal in the Rogan group.
But in February 2020 he had blocked her and she said in a video he outed her as a supposed relative of Hermann Göring. He described himself as the Charles Manson of the grope (sic) and he said that "I make you all do horrific things without ever getting my hands dirty." and they both got into a lot of drama in it. She said "He stabbed me in the back, which I should have expected cause he was a sadist, but you know you trust the wrong people some times, and it was a time where I was in.. so yeah, (he) definitely took advantage of the fact that I had low confidence at that point but he provided me with great wisdom... I hope he friends me cause I kind of, you know, worship the ground he walked on." I think it was the ECT that made her confused enough to hook up with that guy. She still was confused to the point where she did not remember the age of her own son and she got the idea to hook up with him while she was on acid. He made her adopt a new Facebook last name that was taken from an actress he liked, and put a phrase on her page he'd had tattooed on his arm. He told her it was written in runes under a "Luftwaffe Eagle", showing the general ignorance that neo-fascists cultivate - in point of fact it was written in Black letter (Gothic) under the wings of the parteiadler eagle the Nazi Party used, but without the swastika in its claws, something neo-Nazis in Germany and Austria do to avoid being prosecuted for using that symbol. She said the phrase, 'Blue Diamond Horizon', was his name for the area of North America that would be ethnically cleansed of Non-whites and Jews after the racial holy war neo-fascists believe is coming. He also had a tattoo in what he told her was a line from one of his poems translated into Arabic, but was really a nonsense string of Arabic letters in the isolated form, the wrong form for making words and sentences. In a post he said it was backwards, but Arabic is written in the opposite direction from English anyway, and reversing it still didn't make any sense, and the horizon thing was a mantra for a death cult he said he founded, and the eagle was from a 'Nazi Futurist' (Hitler condemned Futurism) poster. She even let him get away with mocking her dead son's Asian features by saying "'that kid is not white! Sorry. Your husband diluted your gene pool' and that I lost the genetic battle in this war." she told me, even though her son had the same reddish-brown hair and blue eyes as she did. She acted like a teenager with an abusive boyfriend, explaining all of his behaviour away as jokes or acts of a genius the rest of the world couldn't understand. He'd play "Jewpardy" or "Who's a Jew" with her, asking her to guess which celebrity was Jewish. In one video she filmed of him, he says to her "If you got one percent of Jew blood in you, to the fuckin' hoosegow for you. To the holding pen until we sort you out. through a series of tests to find out how tricky you are -
find out how big a liar you are." She wore his clothes and jewelry after he died and a friend said it was like he was looking out from her eyes, and she would go on Nazi inspired rants against Jews and minorities, and would sometimes wear two Nazi Party armbands, a pin from the Hitler Youth and a miniature Mutterkreuz, a civilian decoration the Nazis gave out to mothers who had four or more children, and she sent him a Nazi Party long service pin. She had no idea what the medals meant or that the Hitler Youth was only for boys, but she got them to impress that guy, who "really liked the Proud Boys", a right wing all-male group designated as terrorist in Canada and New Zealand. She wanted to write a book at his suggestion called "Arbeit Macht Frei", after his idiotic idea that it had some kind of positive meaning. Krystal let him use her sock puppet account, and it was used to post a song by Prussian Blue, a twin sister duo of 11 year olds who adopted their name from a Holocaust denial meme.
But before that guy, she hated Nazis, including Hitler and her alleged uncle Hermann. Mel Brooks was the person she was proudest of having friended on Facebook. Brooks' The Producers was her favorite movie. One of the people who gave her the most help in the last years of her life was Jewish.
The videos she had been posting on Facebook in 2019 and early 2020, which were mostly her singing, doing short comedy routines, dancing to pop tunes using Snapchat filters, or talking to people, sometimes using 'Wanton Abbey' as a play on her real name and the popular series Dalton Abbey, stopped. In 2019, she could walk around exhibitions and festivals and was planning on moving to LA and she said had some jobs lined up, but by 2021, all she could do was go to either the gas station next to the motel or the one across the street and said she wasn't able to work. After living together for a few months, the videos that resumed were nearly all about him, with her sitting and reading in his clothes.
She'd developed violent sexual fantasies for his entertainment and acted some of them out, even dangerous ones. sometimes as Hitler and Eva Braun, ungrammatically calling each other 'Meine Liebchen'. At times she wanted him to strangle her to death when they were having sex. Some fantasies were deeply racist or pedophilic as well, and in some of the videos she made in 2019, her bare feet were front and centre in a nod to his foot fetish. She often talked about being creeped on by men who she said acted like pedophiles grooming victims, but when I told her that him having sexual fantasies about her at 13 or 14 and about kidnapping and abusing a young girl meant that he was a pedophile himself, "...fantasizing about you as a 14 year old is creepy as fuck." I said. "This is why I don't tell you shit." Krystal answered. "You tell me lots because I tell you the truth." I said.
She said she was a woman "On a journey to find out why she loves BDSM and hurting people and being hurt by others because what the fuck is up with WANTING to be whipped by powerful, intensely sexually perverted men?"
Why was this guy so evil and manipulative? He'd played with Grammy winning musicians in his early days in the 70s and early 80s, but only one or two times with someone and then he'd be with someone else. Krystal said he'd done coke onstage and it was caught on the Jumbotron, "He didn't care!" Krystal said, but I'd imagine that the band's management did, and likely suggested they could get another second keyboard player who wouldn't give probable cause for a search warrant. His later work was with more obscure artists and some self-published stuff. She said he was bitter and angry towards the people he used to work with at the end of his life who she said he felt had not given him proper credit or compensation, and blocked people, including Krystal once, on Facebook. He had been living in a luxurious mansion with his wife, who was a succesful professional, but she divorced him a few years before this, and after the divorce he called her a "whore" in the Facebook group.
The fetish dating site led her into more disturbing things - she showed me photos of self mutilation from someone who wanted to be castrated by her that she considered living with and pictures from another person masturbating to her photo on a cell phone, and them in a chastity device and sucking their own penis.
She even put him as a hero in her writing, avenging her against those who sexually assaulted her. She always had troubled relations with sex and her own gender - she liked being sexy but she said to me "Do you know what it's like growing up with literally everyone wanting to fuck you silly and rotten? Everyone. No one does not want to fuck me and I hate it. From age 11."
"I hate depending on men because I’m a fucking cripple. It’s the worst....I hate women. Yes. That I am the worst of them all. They were monsters and I fucking hate all the women centered shit so much and fucking hate being a woman. I feel weak. I can’t work. This is a fucking nightmare....I never correct my pronouns and use the masculine sometimes for myself because I feel more male than female. Flat out said yesterday 'I am a transvestite, and hate being a kept woman sometimes. . . So I wear my men's clothing to throw people off.' "..."I had no female friends in hospital and they were hostile to me as many are. Because guys fawn over me and they did there."..."[A family member] wanted me to be a girly girl who wore dresses and I refused. She always sent me clothes only to her liking that I expressed a dislike of. I have always been a tomboy. A transvestite if you must label it but it's rarely used for girls dressing like boys. Not transsexual. Transvestite. I do not believe I am really a man, I just think like one and prefer suits."
She was interested in True Crime - particularly the Black Dahlia murder, whose victim, Elizabeth Short was found mutilated in Los Angeles in 1947. Short, like Krystal, was born in the Boston area, and went out to California and lived with her dad after their parents had broken up. Krystal wanted to be an actor, and Short was reported, probably falsely, as wanting to be one.
After a Facebook broadcast with her cleavage out she wrote: "Tits were on display. 7k viewers.", which was true, without them out, sometimes it was just me talking to her. She'd said she always been interested in BDSM, but had only done it with a previous boyfriend later in life: "I was 35 or so. But my first experience was at eleven when I was aroused by a scene in Basic Instinct I saw and barely touched myself and came.NO NOT THE BEAVER SCENE." "Leslie Neilson's finest work" I said. She laughed, and continued "Michael Douglas threw Jeanne Tripplehorn against the wall and fucked her hard." This is not giving away any secrets - she spoke quite openly about this on her videos. She said she had online relationships with a dozen subs. One who she said she'd designated as her legacy for her iCloud to finish the book she was working on showed little interest when I told him she was dead, but another was quite saddened by her passing.
She watched porn and posted comments from Pornhub to a Facebook group she was an admin of and gave a long description of a six man on one girl video.
After getting deeper into BDSM she saw the whole world through it - she described everybody as a sub or dom in their relations, even if it had nothing to do with sex. "It is the only framework at this moment that I understand."
"I have very peculiar tastes in what I like...I like a darker, sinister kind of guy....that's a little sadistic."
Towards the end of her life she'd been sexually exploited, if not trafficked, not just by that guy, but by people she thought were her friends. The man she was riding in the video she'd shown me she'd never met before, and neither had she met the other woman in the bed with them, but he was a business associate of the people she was visiting, and the man who set her up with a couple she'd read beat poetry she'd improvised to while they fucked and flogged the woman seemed to have been a pimp, even though she didn't realize it. She had sex with him and called him by the same name that guy used. He still owed her $100 for pot he never gave her. I don't think she could have ever done sex work deliberately - she cried when she told she let someone feel her boobs to get marijuana when she was short on cash at the Telegraph motel.
Somebody who had schizophrenia and PTSD, was struggling with the loss of her child and end of her marriage and was living in a dirtball motel couldn't cope with being a hospice nurse and sex partner to someone who was dying, and having to become a heroin addict, which is even worse for a schizophrenic, but his plans for her were that she would die shortly after he did. She made it to 11 months.
She was a good writer and had been writing and editing for websites for years, but she said that that that guy 'mentored' her to become a writer, and he also taught her self defence, even though she was a red belt in the Black Belt Club, which meant she had learned all of the black belt moves in Karate and only needed to do more studio time to get the actual qualification. She also was an instructor. He 'taught' her some ridiculous fictional nonsense, saying in a whining junkie voice sprawled on a motel bed that she needed to learn if she was to
'follow him', but she only followed him by moving with him from a Red Roof Inn near her home where she stayed after the breakup with her husband into a cheap motel, The Telegraph, a motel, now renamed, at 16920 Telegraph Road, in a section of Detroit where drugs were easy to get. Even when I started to get to know her well, I imagined that the motel was something like the Chelsea Hotel in New York, a place for artists. It wasn't. It was in a bottom-of-the-barrel street prostitution and drug district, and she even thought of moving into a trap house, slang for a drug den, at 400/month that was nearby. The trap house looked like a wreck inside, but she was short on money.
Krystal reflected in door, probably in the trap house she was visiting.
photo via Sophie
She thought that the book she was supposed to get published, which was just a collection of decades-old notebooks written out in pen which he never got around to publishing himself, even though he said it was due out in 2018 on his website, would make her a fortune, although he never had any success as a writer. And she said he did not leave a will giving her rights to the book, and as she was still married to another man at the time of his death she could not be considered in a common law relationship and have a right to his works. She said there might have been something with his lawyer, but she said she never saw it. She was obsessed with finishing the book but also never set up anyone to take over for her who would be able to get the job done, like the many competent writers she knew, and get it published. She just hoped some people who really had trouble writing simple sentences that she had online sexual relationships as a dominatrix with would do it, so I wonder if she didn't realize that what he'd written wasn't good enough to be published, and that he'd stuck her with a pointless task. She knew that her posts with her transcripts and his readings on YouTube weren't getting many views, and she spent her own money getting Facebook to boost the posts, which only brought her criticism from people who didn't see anything good about his poetry.
I never met that guy. He seemed to me to be rather boring, and tried to sound intelligent by dropping names like Kierkegaard in a context where it didn't belong, and using foreign words which he mispronounced ('Adieu' became 'Ad-Doo') or long words he didn't understand, like 'hidden semiotics', when he really meant 'hidden meanings' - he'd confused 'semiotics' with 'semantics'. She thought he was a 'walking Wikipedia' who she thought was so much smarter than real doctors because he thought the amygdala was what made people vomit when they took heroin (it isn't) and wouldn't believe he could be wrong or lie to her. Even when she found he'd lied to her, it had to be reality that was not telling the truth, not him. When Krystal saw his mother's obituary that suggested she'd died of Alzheimer's at an advanced age, she left a message in the condolences telling people to look for the book he had been writing and she was editing and adding her own writing and some things she'd salvaged from his cellphone to, where she said he claimed his mother committed suicide when he was young after several attempts in front of him. She thought the book would be like the child she would never have and he didn't have, even though there was an indication he had at least one child, now an adult, that she must have known about. She said that he was a 'rock star' and 'a pop star in Japan' even though the most notable thing he'd done was some keyboard work in the late 70s and early 80s on some live jazz albums where other people were the stars. And she was supporting him - " I starved myself for five days before. I just gave (him) food. I really sacrificed everything for him. " and she burned through the nest egg she'd saved from breeding beetles in Japan. He'd lived with a wealthy wife, but didn't seem to have any money at all after she divorced him. I'd sent her money in the last weeks of his life - I didn't know then what was really happening. She spent the rest of her life talking and posting obsessively about him. I spent a lot of the time with her on Facebook messenger. Sometimes I'd be crying trying to convince her to stay alive or not do something crazy. She still did heroin after he died. Heroin made her feel like she was in love, something addicts often say. It's not true for most people - I actually dislike taking opiates and skipped the morphine my doctor offered me after an operation - I don't get nausea from them, but they make me feel like I'm wrapped up in cotton wool, a feeling that I've heard addicts say they like.
She left Detroit for Arizona for a brief while after he died, where she stayed with someone but returned to the same motel in Detroit after she said the man she was with had made unwanted advances and behaved inappropriately around a child. She got into an online fight with a gossip columnist who had been a friend of hers over this.
Krystal talking to me from a psychiatric hospital, Detroit area, 2021. Her shoelaces were taken away and the furniture has all rounded edges. The pants belonged to that guy, and she wore his clothes a lot for the last year of her life. She told me she had sex with one of the nurses who looked her up after she got out.
photo via Sophie
She was stressed because the therapist that she liked wouldn't return her messages.
As part of her 'experience' as a writer she wanted to try IV heroin use like he did, but as far as I could see from the photo she'd shown me, she'd missed the vein. She'd also started an online relationship with an Aryan Brotherhood member that guy liked who claimed to have been an 'enforcer' in prison who murdered pedophiles that and said she was being an 'embedded journalist'. I asked her if he killed people in prison she should be able to find published accounts about it. "You always ask for proof..." she said.
 |
| Helping someone she called 'Weatherman' to beg outside of the Telegraph Motel, 2021 |
She got most of her food from the two gas stations by the Telegraph Motel. Photo by Krystal - I don't know who the woman crossing the street is.
photo via Sophie
Wyoming
I was trying to help her out of Detroit and paid for her flight to Wyoming, where she stayed with one of her oldest friends. In Wyoming she couldn't get heroin, and so was using a lot of over-the-counter painkillers. Her behaviour got more erratic than in Detroit, to my surprise, as I thought the move would make her better, but she still wouldn't take her psychiatric medications or go to counselling for her addiction. When she was in hospital and taking her meds, she was always lucid when she spoke with me.
She got into a physical fight with her childhood friend, and then jail and hospital. She stayed at another person's place, but became very delusional. She said she wandered into someone's house, sat down and talked with a couple until another man came into the room with a gun and told her to leave. She said she'd been held at someone's house, a friend of the woman she stayed with who had SS tattoos and Nazi paraphernalia in his place, which sadly was something she still was interested in, and been forced to give him money, and been raped and beaten, losing one tooth and was even tortured with a blowtorch. She said her martial arts training didn't help. She tried to kill him during a struggle by putting a gun to his stomach. "I pulled the trigger - nothing happened" she said. Automatic or revolver? "It was a revolver" "Ok, promise you'll avoid neo-Nazis from now on?" I asked. "Yes" "OK, it was a single-action revolver, you have to pull back the hammer to cock it to shoot." I'd passed the information she gave me on to the medical examiners and tried to give it to authorities in Wyoming but my emails didn't seem to get through - I think the spam filters got them as I was writing from outside the USA - I finally mailed the police a letter and found out the police in Minnesota had already very properly passed the information I gave the medical examiners to them, but they said since Krystal had died, the information could only count as hearsay legally.
After the woman she lived with had gotten her out from the Wyoming neo-Nazi's place and to a homeless shelter, she was hospitalized again. I tried to get her a place in the town where the hospital, the Wyoming Behavioral Institute, was so she could recover her passport and try to get into Canada, but the hospital would only discharge her if she got on a bus leaving town. They wouldn't even discharge her if I drove to the hospital to pick her up, she said, and they discharged her without any follow up plan for recovery. I don't know if they gave her naloxone and test strips for fentanyl, which they should have, given her history. She was suicidal after she learned there was no place for her when she got to Minneapolis, but she was willing to go on social assistance or into a hospital when I spoke to her last.
End of sensitive subjects
*******
Bloomington, Minnesota
At 4.15 am local time on April 1 she sent me 12 messages on Facebook, but then unsent them. I didn't ask about that when we spoke later, but she was upbeat and was happy that her half brother, who was six months older than her, and his wife had contacted her. She said she was "In very good spirits and feel good about myself... The Brother thing is huge and feels like fate guiding me because of the timing of him hitting me up." She spent time with him during her childhood, and proudly showed me a picture of him with his daughter, who looked exactly like her at that age. She also has a second half brother four years older than her by another mother that she only learned about later in life. She had been estranged from her family, (yes, because of that guy - She remembered her father dissing him and "...my little old grandmother saying, and I quote: 'Fuck (him). Fuck the (title of the book he was trying to publish).' And she never swears.") and I kept encouraging her to get in touch with them again. Her father Fred Krampits died while she was in a psychiatric hospital and she only learned of his death several days afterwards. She seemed to have blocked her father at some point earlier that year on Facebook.
She was also distraught that her divorce decision did not provide support - she'd filed an online response, and showed me the proof of service she'd got back but the court did not seem to have gotten it - she said her millionaire grandfather sponsored her husband for US citizenship in exchange for a promise he'd always support her.
The last time I spoke with her on April 1st, she had a 'flat affect', another symptom of schizophrenia. She sounded devoid of emotion and had no emotional expression on her face. This was the first time I'd seen her do this, so I wonder if I shouldn't done something for her like call mental health support for her area, but I don't think she would have liked it if I had.
She also had trouble bathing - some junkies find water painful, even warm water.
I believe she died by accident, like the coroner reported - She said she was tripping the last time she spoke to me, but did not say on what and she was not despondent when I spoke to her, but she'd had a fight on the phone later on that day with her friend. She said before she left Wyoming for Minnesota that "they really are my best friends and understand my relationship with (that guy) since they knew him and saw his magic." She said they said they had a place for her to stay, but when she got there, they didn't. She was struggling with mental health problems and was not getting any treatment - I was trying to get her help from agencies in Minneapolis. I tried to get her into Canada last fall but she wouldn't get vaccinated. She listened to Joe Rogan, who spread disinformation about the Covid vaccines on his podcast (and that guy was a Rogan fan), and also believed the hepatitis vaccine might have caused her son's death. This might have been his influence - before she started living with him she did believe in vaccines and recognized COVID-19 was a serious pandemic.
Last year I said she could stay with me for a few months, but we were probably incompatible and it wouldn't work in the long term, and I didn't think she could stay indefinitely without a visa. I also meant that I would not let her be homeless and she could always stay with me if she had nowhere else to go, but I shouldn't have told her that we were incompatible without even giving her a chance to live with me. When she did get vaccinated in March she had lost her passport. When she got to Minneapolis I suggested that she move close to the border where I live so I could help her get aid and a new passport, which would have worked better, she could have visited me and have a place of her own. I wondered whether she could have just kept leaving for the US every six months and coming back with the temporary visa. She could reconnect with her family since there was an airport nearby with regular flights to Boston, but she wanted to try Minnesota. I was really scared of her coming to live with or near me, since the last times she lived with someone it turned into disasters, so I am ashamed to admit I felt relieved when she said no. And yet I wish so much she said yes and was near me and safe. I should have driven to see her in Minneapolis.
Krystal Lee Watanabe, born June 19 (She told me June 19 when I was helping her fill out some forms, but it's June 18 on her Facebook), 1982, Lexington, Massachusetts, died officially on April 2, 2022, but probably on April 1, Bloomington, Minnesota.
Krystal leaving Wyoming for Minneapolis, March 25, 2022
It is the last photo of her face she sent to me, with the greeting:
"Hello bitch.
I’m back in the saddle again."
On the bus she wrote "It does seem weird and oddly nice bare assed on the toilet going this fast. I feel a breeze on my twat. Points for my use of 'twat'
Lol"
She's smiling here but is using a scarf to conceal her missing tooth. She's also copying that guy's look - he'd sometimes cover his face or talk to people on Facebook with the video off. At the end of her life she looked like the little girl in Grade 1, but this time not proud of her missing tooth. Sadly she often wore the scarf like that because it was what the that guy did, and it had been his scarf. She was still feeling positive about starting a new phase of her life. She often looked rough and scary in the last part of her life.
I like this photo because it shows her without the filters she used in her last year to cover up the damage dope use and neglect had brought on her. This is how she was, a 39 year old woman sprouting some grey hairs who had been through hell but resolved to give life another shot.She looked so young to some people that a few days before she died she was refused liquor at Friday's because she did not have ID!
I wanted so much to help her get better. I don't know if I could have done anything, since she couldn't even get along with childhood friends at that point.
"Wish I could cry it out but the tears don’t come, only terror. Shellshock. The worst case scenario realized and I feel alone yet need to be alone to process and need music and shit."
"But. . . I’m making up and my mind on things too. Options suck. I’m being tugged in a million directions and my perspectives are dim and grim."
I don't know what would have happened if she had come to "live rent free/On Loyalist land" and it would have been a contrast for someone born of Irish Catholic background a short distance from where the American Revolution started to visit a place where the Orange Lodge used to be a strong political force, and was settled by American colonists loyal to the crown who were refugees from the revolution. Because of her thoracic outlet syndrome, she could no longer bowl with a large ball like she could when she was an 11 year old champion, so I wanted to try Canadian five pin bowling with her, as the ball is much smaller than a 10-pin ball, just a bit bigger than a candlepin bowling ball, of which her top score was "About 40 or 50 when I was 9 years old" in her native Boston, so she thought she might be able to play.
Recently I heard from her friend that she had done one year of sobriety from cocaine thanks to Krystal's encouragement.
Lessons Learned:
I learnt that, though trying to help somebody who was mentally ill can be exhausting, it opened me up to new perspectives - I'd do it again.
BUT I'd get more support, like from the CMHA in Canada or other groups for friends and families of schizophrenics or drug users, like Nar-Anon, and I was going to try and network with her other friends to help her. There is also Learn to Cope , a peer support group for families of people with substance abuse problems. (USA)
I should have asked what was really wrong, after a cooling off period, when she got nasty to me over bonsais. Maybe I could have helped her before things got bad.
It's not a war. I was thinking "the sea shall not have her", but it wasn't a case of fighting any enemy - the person that did the damage was dead. She was her own worst enemy. What she needed the most was a space to heal and grow again.
You should tell anyone with a opioid addiction that they can call you
anytime if they are going to use, especially if it's after they have stopped for a while, and need someone to sit up with them in case they OD, and have a Naloxone kit handy.
Keep checking - unless you know for sure they're in a safe place, they might not be - I thought she was back in the hospital when she was really in danger.
You can try your best and still not save them.
Please don't comfort people who've lost suicidal people they loved with words like ''they're in a better place" or "they're at peace" - very likely the people who've been close to anyone contemplating suicide have been trying to convince them that life was better than death.
And the last word to Krystal, if someone's dealing with depression: "Have them play with the pet, watch a movie, go for a walk, play 20 questions, or ask each other silly questions about the world and debate for hours." Buzzfeed, March 1, 2016
ERRATA -
*
One thing she used to say was that she was related to Nazi leader Hermann Göring - sometimes she'd even say she was his great-granddaughter or grandniece, which would have meant a pregnant teenage Edda Göring, his only child, who she said was her grandmother, or whatever Göring niece it was supposed to be, would have had to have gone from Germany to Japan to give birth on a US base, where her father Fred was born, without attracting any attention, at the height of the Cold War, and would somehow get him adopted by an American airman and his wife. She said her grandfather, the same one she said invented Bose's Acoustic Wave system, said he had proof of her being his descendant. Records show neither Göring or his brothers or sisters were her ancestors, but her great-great-grandmother Emma Krampits' maiden name was Goehring, which is a common German family name, and she was born in Erfurt, Germany in 1873, well before Hermann's birth, so Krystal could not have been immediate or once removed family from him. And she said her family came from Stuttgart, while Göring was born in Bavaria. She did bear a resemblance to Göring, especially in profile, but looking at photos of her parents, I'd say it was from a chance combination of features that came from both sides of her family. Her high cheekbones, similar to Göring's, were from her mother, not her father. She said she suffered quite a lot from guilt, even as a child, from thinking that he really was her relative. I told her about her great-great-grandmother, but she still believed she was related to Hermann and that her granddad had the proof somewhere, and she claimed that people in Germany knew about her as his descendant. She said her grandfather also had psychological problems and had been hospitalized for them.
I did Nazi it. Yes, that was one of our jokes.
She was happy that I told her about Albert Göring, Hermann's much better brother who worked to save Jews, who I thought looked more like her and dressed sharply in business suits, in contrast to his brother's taste for gaudy uniforms with a jewel-encrusted baton. She also liked wearing suits, Christian Dior style as well as men's jackets. She hadn't heard of him before that, nor could name the sibling of Hermann that she was supposed to have been a descendant of when she was saying she was a great-grand-niece.
Albert Göring, 1936
*
Most images and videos Krystal Watanabe
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)