Resurrection Slightly Behind Schedule!

WELL HELLO SEXY!

What with Easter just behind us and the Spring Equinox just before that, it seemed like a good moment to kick my own ass and get this blog back up and running. To my 7 loyal readers who have pined for my words during this lengthy silence I can only apologize and make the excuse that I was out of the country for two months at the beginning of the year and had to have foot surgery in Mexico. That saga will soon be forthcoming, complete with bloody pictures! But, nitpicks the inner critic, that excuse only takes us back to the beginning of the year. The last blog post was for the Knox-Sollecito acquittal of last October. Well, um, I got busy and then a few days became a couple weeks and then I didn’t know where to begin and then there was that whole Christmas thing and, well, after that we’re into January, Mexico and the foot. There, satisfied! Like you care anyway!

I have lots of stories and pictures to share of my somewhat disaster-prone adventures of the last few months and will be doing so in coming days! In all truthfulness, many terrible things have occurred but I find that when I tell others of all the awful things that happen to me, in hopes of receiving sympathy or cash donations, these friends are frequently to be glimpsed stuffing rags into their mouths in efforts to suppress the apparent hilarity that my tribulations induce in the listener. So perhaps hearing about my rotten luck can brighten your day and put a smile on your face. If so, it’s well worth it.

I had to start somewhere and although this is not really a proper post at all, it is at least dated April 12, 2012. Thus, tomorrow, I will feel less pressured to close the enormous 4+ month gap (I just couldn’t bring myself to type “5 month gap”) and this will have the perverse effect of inducing me to make another post. And then the day after that, another one!

I was never a daily blogger (I know, that’s supposed to be the point, shut up) but now I WILL BE.

For at least one week anyway. So that someone just looking at my bog, I mean blog, will see several recent entries close together and not think I’m the sort of person who just lets their blog sit there corroding for 4+ months, like some kind of electronic barnacle.

Also, I think it is apt that this is the first entry since the righteous acquittal of Knox and Sollecito because they’ve been back in the news again, due to both of them signing book deals.

Naturally, some haters out there begrudge this maliciously wronged pair the right to profit from their ordeal, conveniently overlooking the enormous financial costs their families endured and the emotional hardship for which they’ve not been compensated.

What is wrong with some people?

A couple of days ago some total cretin of a guy wrote me an abusive email in which he called me a silly bitch and then stuck in at the end that Knox was definitely guilty and it was a travesty of justice that she got out. As if he thought this would get my goat; as if his uninformed opinion would bother me!

Actually, it did bother me.

But not for the reason he obviously hoped; I did not feel personally attacked or insulted and had absolutely no inclination to bother to set him straight. No, what bothered me was that he (a yobbish English guy, guessing from the one time we spoke on the phone) felt justified in even having an opinion on the matter, when that opinion had doubtless been formed by the types of newspapers that used to be more suitably employed as ad hoc packaging for fishmongers (before Health & Safety put a stop to the ancient practice).

To be falsely accused is horrible. I know because it’s happened to me. To be falsely convicted and imprisoned for years for a horrific act one is completely incapable of performing must be one of the most agonizing of all human experiences. The injustice of having to read the nastified depiction of one’s character by sleazy tabloid hacks; the distortion of one’s life and thoughts into something hideously unrecognizable; one’s personal and private actions and holiday photos turned into condemnations by the black arts of gutter journalism…it’s almost unthinkable how a person could stay strong through something like that.

Yet Amanda and Rafaele were both model prisoners by all accounts. Amanda never got into a single argument with guards or fellow prisoners in 4 years and when she left, the 600 inmates crowded the tiny windows of the prison waving banners for her and shouting with joy that someone who deserved to be free was going free. Witnesses said it was like seeing a football star walk out onto the pitch only with 10 times the emotion. To win the love of 600 people in a prison one should never have been in is an impressive testament to the fundamentally good nature of this accidental cover-girl.

With all that in mind, it makes me sad that guys like Arsepus (sorry, I know that’s childish but I can’t put his real name and that is close enough), guys like Arsepus – who probably devoted 40 minutes of his entire life reading about the case in one of those rags that have topless chicks on page 3 – can feel so confident in voicing their stupid conviction that the guilty have been freed.

It made me wonder if other creeps out there were still banging on in that vein so I looked on the web and was disheartened to see that the sick and pathetic websites insisting on Knox and Sollecito’s guilt are still up and running with plenty of new entries. Plenty of idiots here in the UK, including (sorry to have to say it) the victim’s family are still refusing to accept the truth: that Kercher’s murder was mundane.

It wasn’t the sensational stuff of best-selling crime novels. There was no satanic orgy, no threesome, no pretty American student hiding homicidal urges behind a winning smile, no shy Italian student with a secret knife-fetish, nothing but an embarrasingly politically incorrect scenario of a robbery/rape/murder committed by a guy of African descent. Those stories don’t grab headlines for long.

Sorry, but that’s the truth. Move along people. Nothing to see here.

To me it seems like the Kercher’s oft-expressed desire “not to let Meredith be forgotten” has gotten the better of their judgment and they’ve decided to keep her name alive by any means necessary. Even if that means ignoring the boring facts and backing the salacious fantasy that kept the story on the front page.

I don’t know what’s in it for the trolls who have jumped on their bandwagon though; I guess the same thing that motivates all trolls – increasing pain for people already in it.

Some say I shouldn’t criticize the Kercher family, that their loss puts them above reproach. To that I say bullshit. All it would take to shut up the trolls would be a statement from them that they accept the acquittal was correct, that they know Knox and Sollecito had nothing to do with it, that they were misled by an insane prosecutor.

But they haven’t. They were clearly hoping for Knox and Sollecito to lose their appeal and have backed the deranged Mignini from the beginning.

As someone who spent hundreds of hours wading through the published evidence, I am really looking forward to both forthcoming books. In particular it will be fascinating to finally learn more about Sollecito, whose wrongful conviction and ordeal were practically overlooked, even though his possible connection to the crime was even more wispily tenuous than Knox’s. His was a quiet but strong presence throughout and I for one can’t wait to finally get to read his side of the story. Amanda’s prison diaries will also be a fascinating read.

They both deserve their multi-million dollar book deals and only a troll would deny them a compensation that goes nowhere to restoring the 4 years they already lost and the lifetime of compromised privacy which faces them now.

See you tomorrow!

Tags: Amanda Knox, Rafel Sollecito