the 400th story...

This is the first slide from my Power Point presentation to the Polish courts. The caption reads: In the next few pages I am going to try and show you what happened to me on May 15th. I'll show you my story and I'll show you Zaremba's story. I am going to show you some things I believe to be true. And I am going to show you some things I know to be true. Later on I'll try and explain what the last four months have been like for me. But here, I am just going to try and make things clear.

This is the 400th post for The STORY. I seem to have several milestones going on around the Being Had webspot. I hit my 300th post for the Polish Police and Administrative Corruption page about a week ago. And I think within a week or so I will have posted my 200th BEING HAD Times. I guess if you were to put them all together, and maybe add in the Karlin Gazette's 99 posts, I am closing in on my 1000th blog post. I think I might have to do a little research on this to see if I can get an accurate count, but basically this is the story.

But rather than get all nostalgic about it, I think I would like to say here that I am not a blogger. I think blogging is great and I admire folks like Pete Beatroot, Kim Zigfeld or Robert Mayer for having created real forums of opinion and information. Perhaps under different circumstances I might have taken up blogging as a pastime and tried to make a forum about biking or maybe about Belarus. I think it would have been cool to offer a place where people could vent their emotions and express their opinions publicly. But this is not really what I do.

I am also honestly and truthfully not this introspective. I know I have been going on and on about myself and the world directly around me, but this is also something I never would have done. If anything, I used to like to write plays. That was my real form of artistic expression. That and playing the guitar. To sit around and talk about myself or my feelings- This is simply not who I am. I mean basically I just work. I am pretty boring in that respect. I was just a bike seller and rider. I know I came to Belarus and perhaps that is interesting to people, but the original reasoning there was not so outrageous: My family is from here, my New York business got trashed after 9/11 and I met someone here. I just wanted to make a little bike shop. Maybe write for the local theatre. I had no real expectations of wealth; it was just something that seemed a cool thing to do. It seemed satisfying.

And then Poland happened. And that whole year of sitting there and getting shit on by those vampires and leeches was like every nightmare I have ever had in my life. And it just went on and on and on. And worse, it still hasn't ended.

I started this Blog as a way to tell people what happened. I didn't start this to be a blogger or to stroke my ego. I didn't start it to entertain people. I didn't start it to show people how smart I was. I didn't even start it to talk about Belarus. And for sure I didn't start it to draw attention to myself for any selfish reasons. I just wanted people to know what happened in Poland so that I might be able to bring a wide public with me back there for the fight that needed to be fought because I can't fight their legal system legally. I just wanted to make them tell the truth aout what they did. That's all this ever was.

I hope you can understand what I am saying. And to tell the truth, I would love for this to end.

I would love for my life to become private again, to be able to think about other things for a change. A friend asked me about taking a trip someplace, just for fun, but I turned him down. I told him that I don't want to see anything while I am in chains. I know I won't have a real life to live until I receive what was taken from me back again. And this is only possible with real vindication. I can't go on without closure for what happened.

I don't know what I would do if all of this suddenly got to stop because the situation got better. I am talking about blogging specifically. I might make a simple blog and talk about Belarusian politics. Or maybe I would start one about Biking. Or maybe I would just do what Tobias Ljunval did and just quit being responsible and start writing comments on other people's blogs. Or maybe I wouldn't even do that and would just cruise around the web whenever I felt like it; use it for recipes, e-mails and sports scores like everyone else. Or maybe I would keep it up and do the social advocacy think for corruption and biker's rights and ecology and social fairness. I really don't know.

But in any case, I would be lying if I said that I really like this because I don't. I only do this because of what they did to me and because I don't know any other way to keep the story alive. This is really what I am doing here. This is what Being Had is. It isn't funny. It's agony.

Ok, so here are the real stats. According to the blogger dashboard, this is the 400th post for The STORY who's first post was really December 13th, 2003. That was the day I posted the book. 10 days later I started posting little rants in support and later, because the book kept getting pushed further and further down the list, I broke the blog into two parts, one for the blogging and another for the text of "Being Had". In January of 2004, by way of trying to make the point even more available, I added on all of the papers and documents from my case and gave each of them its own blog page. Later I added a home page and a questions page. And that was the Being Had Blog until February of this year when I opened beinghad.com and put everything there under one roof. I started the BHTimes on September 10th of 2005 and the Polish Corruption page soon after.

So add to the 400 stories 196 BHTimes, 300 corruption posts, 99 Karlin Gazettes and, if you add in all of the original blog pages which are now over on the beinghad.com website, the number is well over 1000. Yea…

Thanks for reading me. Hopefully someday, I might have something to say.

More soon…