Now where were we?

It seems like ages since I have actually sat down and banged out a blog entry.  It used to be that I could grind them out with a certain amount of frequency with which I thought I could at times be insightful, entertaining and sometimes even funny.    What actually happened to the good old days as it were?  Well for that kids, it is time once again to gather up ye olde Peabody and Sherman and visit the Wayback Machine.



I should start this entry off by saying my name, which is Matt Pritt and I am a manager for a couple of newsstands here in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  Many of you already know that, well maybe not the manager part, that was a promotion I received at the end of June this year and like I said, it has been a while since I blogged, some things have definitely changed since then, but some most of you know at least my name and where I am from by either reading older entries to this blog (or the previous ones on the now defunct sites of Yahoo 360 and Multiply).  I mention those facts not so much for you, but for me, since the truth has been hard to come by these last few years, I wanted to put something simple out there just to cleanse my own personal palate before delving forward into what will be a mess.

I backed away from blogging, or at least what I would consider blogging about two years ago, after I met someone.  It was a decision that I struggled with at first, but as time went by I became more comfortable with it, or just more lazy (always a possibility with me) because I didn't want too much of my relationship out there.  When I blogged before I would ramble about a specific topic at hand, or I would write a lot about what I knew best about, which of course would be me.  But now I was taking into consideration that much of my writing in detailing what my life was like was going to involve someone else, and that person may not be as willing or as open as I am, so I pulled back a smidge or three.  My blog basically became very little about me and more about just hockey videos and what not.

Well, the rules have changed somewhat, why they have changed will become readily apparent as I dive into my story.  Much like everything else I have written to this point, the names will not be changed to protect the innocent, or the guilty for that matter.  The more truth I put out there I think the better my palate, for the last two years I have had plenty of helpings of untruths, enough so that I am quite tired of them actually.

Our story begins a little over two years ago when this blog was residing on a site called Multiply.  I had posted a couple of hockey related videos when I noticed a comment on one of them, I believe the video was the Vancouver fans singing the Canadian National Anthem during the Stanley Cup finals.  I did not recognize the person that left the comment, and because Multiply allowed you to follow the visitor's avatar, I looped back to see just who it was that had visited my page.  It is something I would do a lot there, if for no other reason then to say thank you for stopping and checking something out on my page, if I saw something else on their page that interested me I might return the favor and comment on it as well.

So I did loop back and say thanks and what not, nothing too extreme but in ended up started a conversation between myself and the owner of that page, Ruth.  Over the next couple of weeks Ruth and I would continue to talk, sending each other emails and chatting on Yahoo Messenger (does that thing even still exist? lol).  I was told her name was Ruth Irving, she was a divorced mother of two boys and the divorce was nasty, it involved a physical altercation that left her ex husband in jail and her children in the custody of their respective families, one son was living with his grandparents on his father's side while the other son was living with his uncle's family on her side of the genealogical tree.  She said that she lived in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia (that's in Canada for those that are geographically challenged) and she didn't like to mention her name much to strangers because it apparently meant something in Canada, since she was related to the people who own and operate Irving Oil.  I said rest assured, I have no idea who or what Irving Oil is, so the name means little to nothing to me.

Anyway, a few weeks after we first met a story pops up on Ruth's Multiply page, it basically says that one of her son's was hurt playing hockey, he was checked rather harshly into the boards and suffered a head injury, and there was a picture to go with the story of a boy with his head bandaged up in a hospital bed. It was followed up a little later with a message that her son had passed away due to the head trauma that he suffered. Before I had even had a chance to ask Ruth about her son, she sent me a message saying that she was closing her page, she was getting too many messages about what happened but that she was glad to meet me and if I wanted too I could stay in touch.

I opted to stay in touch, if she wished to close her page that was fine, but I just liked her, I wasn't there for her blogging skills or anything, we just seemed to click when we talked.  And I did want to ask her about her son, see how she was faring and if she needed someone to just vent to, that was cool also.

Most of what I just told you however, were lies.  Some would come out in short order, some would take time, but over the next two years I would be subjected to much of what just took place time and time again until I had pretty much reached a point where nothing she said could be believed, despite the fact that her and I met; she came to visit on two separate occasions, once last November around her birthday and again this June around my birthday.  But no matter how close we would become, the lies would continue to the point I had to wonder if the very love she said she felt for me wasn't a lie also.

So let's start again, the person that I was talking to was in fact Ruth Longaphy (or Ruth Graves, her married name is still on her passport), she is a resident of Halifax, Nova Scotia (hey, at least the Canada part was true), she is the mother of one boy, not two, nobody died and nobody was living in another family member's house (though she played the  story of trying to get custody of her son out for months before she admitted that he was actually living at home).

Some of the initial lies I took with a grain of salt, would someone lie about their name on the internet, or send fake pictures of who they were, or even lie about where they lived?  I actually justified it in my head, thinking that maybe it was just because she didn't know me that well, and who is to say that I am not some crazy guy on the web.  Better to not give out too much information too quickly, at least that was what I though she might have been thinking.  But as time passed, I saw myself doing this more and more often, getting caught up in the lies, twisting and defying logic and common sense, just because I wanted to believe she wouldn't lie to me.  As a result I was handed story after story about how her son was doing at his uncle's house, how she could only see him in supervised visits, she was going to court to try for more visitation but she was afraid the hearing wouldn't go well, her ex husband 's family would be in court and they didn't like her .  I was the one trying to be the dutiful guy, standing by her side, reassuring her that everything would be okay.  Of course everything was okay in the end, because none of it was actually happening.

This is starting to read like a soap opera huh?  Well sit back kids, because the party bus has barely gotten started. I just need a Sweet Pea to come around and smash a champagne bottle over my head for being this stupid.

Ruth would venture back to Multiply after an absence, using a completely different name for her page, but at least I was informed ahead of time that she was going to open a new page.  She opens a page and there are a few friends of hers that trickle in, not many but a few.  Then Ruth starts complaining that one of the friends on her page, John Green, was sending her disgusting messages.  I said if that was the case just block him, but she was worried how he might react if she did that, she said she talked to her lawyer and he said that they needed the guy there to keep track of him.  Mind you her lawyer became the justification for many of her lies over the course of the two years I have known her.  In this particular instance I came right out and said, if that is the advice you got, then it would be the worst in the history of the legal profession.  I think we all know that when it comes to criminal activity, such as harassment, it is pretty easy for law enforcement to trace where harassing emails and messages come from,  no one needs to be kept around.  Later in our story, we will get to why John Green was kept around, but let's not jump too far ahead in the story.

Anyway, things are going pretty good between us, Ruth tells me more stories about her son (she still hasn't confessed to him actually living at home at this point), she tells me about her ex husband and how abusive he was towards her.  It is a pretty sad story, then again it is probably just that, a story, as well. But I bought it, after all, why lie about that?  But then, I came to wonder why she lied about lots of things.  Anyway, before I even say anything, Ruth tells me that another of her friends from Yahoo 360 found her on Multiply, so she added him to her page. He is a nice guy, I will like him, blah, blah blah.  Cool enough, except this friend's site on Multiply is basically a master slave site with tons of S&M pics, including some that Ruth commented on, saying they were sexy.  Mind you, this is someone who claims that her ex abused her, yet here she is saying how hot a picture is of a naked woman being choked with a neck tie while a guy drills her from behind.   Needless to say, it didn't go over well with me, if this was a nice guy I would hate to think of who she considered a bad guy.

So yes, this led to a disagreement between her and I, enough so that she ended up closing that page as well, only to open a third page that only her and I were initially on.  Not that I really had a problem with her having pages on the web, she could do whatever she wanted, but for all of the talk of John leaving her disgusting messages and now this, I can't say I was all that upset to see that page go.

Things seemed to be going okay, until one day I log into Multiply and on the bottom of my home page is a picture I recognize, it is one of Ruth's wedding photos I recognized, but I did not recognize the account name attached to it.  When I tried to link back through the avatar, the page was blocked to me.  So I questioned Ruth about the page, she said it was one for her family to keep in touch with her.  Well, that turned out to be a lie also, it was a page for her and a guy from England by the name of  Dean Welch.

Once this lie was discovered, at least at first, Dean and I got along.  He told me a little about himself, that he wasn't interested in Ruth, he was married in England, but that he had met Ruth a few years back and was there for her when she went through some rougher patches in her life prior to me meeting her.  All was cool, and the three of us coexisted fairly well, when out of the blue Jon Green would reenter the picture.

Yes, the guy that was allegedly sending Ruth disgusting messages and that she wanted nothing to do with would reenter the picture, and in rather peculiar fashion.  Apparently Ruth was so disgusted by John that she hopped onto Yahoo Messenger and proceeded to have cyber sex with him, and based on the conversation it wasn't the first time that it happened.  To make matters even better, she proceeds to give this guy her cell phone number as well.  Mind you, it took me quite some time before I was granted such privileged information, yet the first time she invites him back to chat she gives him her number.

To say I was not happy would be an understatement, it pushed me to the point where I was ready to walk away from all of it, but Ruth promised to be honest with me from that point on, so much so that she even offered me passwords to some of her online accounts, including one to her email on hotmail.  So I looked, and I wish I hadn't, because when I opened the hotmail account there was a folder of saved mail titled "Love", silly me I thought it might be cute to see what she saved from me in that folder, only to find out it wasn't messages from me, but from Dean Welch, including plenty of instances of them having cyber sex as well.

So I put out my line in the sand, if these guys are going to be around, then I am not going to be, because all I have heard about these people, from both her and from them has been lies.

I really thought that was going to be the end of it, and for a while maybe it was.  Ruth seemed to be more honest with me, including clearing up many of the past lies and I almost felt included in what was going on with her, which I thought was a huge step.   Gone were the lies about her son, her job, and all of the drama she created in her head to get attention, such as telling me her ex's family destroyed her car in the parking lot of where she worked, and they through a rock through her office window.  Yes, it was not uncommon to get plenty of stories from her.  The stories came so fast an furious that one had to either assume they were lies or that she was the unluckiest person to ever walk the planet's surface.  To detail them all would take probably hours and lots of research on my part and would pull away from the main gist of this entry, if this really has a point at all.

Okay, it does have a point, at least for me, because writing is therapeutic for me, so this is my way of getting it all out once and for all.

So, things are going well, Ruth and I are talking almost every night and she decides that she is going to come and visit me.   It certainly wasn't something her and I rushed into, it took 13 months before it finally happened (though there were plenty of stories about her and her getting her passport as well which are probably also lies) but she did come here in November of last year and stayed for a week, a week that I had thought went very well.  I took her to the Celebrate the Season Parade (the weekend after Thanksgiving here), we went to the zoo, Phipps Conservatory, Mount Washington, as well as some of my own personal hangouts like going to breakfast with my aunt and uncle at DeLuca's, visiting the Squirrel Cage, going shopping for stuff for her son at The Waterfront.  All in all I thought the visit went incredibly well, so much so that it hurt to see her get back on a plane and fly home.  She hadn't even made it halfway home and we were chatting again while she was on a layover in Philadelphia, waiting for her connecting flight back to Halifax.

I must say, at that point I probably never felt closer to her, and it was a good feeling.  The thought that all of the stuff we had been through up until that point was actually starting to bear fruit as being something more than just an online dalliance.   The only problem that came from her visit here was that are conversations when she went home weren't as intimate as they were before she came to visit, an issue that I readily took the blame for because if anything did go wrong while she was here it was that my sexual performance was not as good as it could have been.  Perhaps that was because I was putting too much pressure on myself, who knows, but it nagged at me and as a result I was spending more time thinking about that then I probably should have. 

Still we were talking pretty much every night, some times well late into the night and everything seemed to be going well.  But one night we were on Google talk, a few months after Ruth had been here and as we are trying to log in to have another evening of just talking to each other and what not, for whatever reason the connection isn't working.  Ruth suggests that she will try to log on from her work account, a gmail account that she uses for work emails and after switching over, everything works.  Well yes and no, because as it turns out someone else was attached to her Google+ on that account as well, Dean Welch.  Yes, someone who she said she wanted nothing to do with was there again, even after I had said how much I did not appreciate her staying in touch with someone she was romantically pursuing in the past, even though Dean is already married.  Instead she opted to lie and stay in touch with him.  I think it was at this point that I had my mind made up that I would never be able to believe a single word she says, the lying was never going to stop.  And it didn't.

Even while she and I were talking about her next trip to see me, she was busy adding Dean to her Facebook page, mind you this is a page she said she didn't want me on because people from work were there and she didn't want them asking questions about me, another bullshit excuse if ever I heard one, but apparently they will not ask questions about a married man that she is pining after because he was more than welcome there.  It was just like Multiply and the hidden account all over again .

Still Ruth did come to visit in June, but it wasn't like her first visit.  I guess I already knew that the same nonsense was going to continue, and if ever I needed proof of that, while she was playing on her iPhone here I noticed that right on her list of contacts was Dean Welch yet again .    So she stayed here for two weeks, then went back to Halifax again, and unlike her last trip here where we missed each other and couldn't wait to talk, after she left this time we barely talked and when we did the conversations were either abrupt or just turned into fights, because it was after she had been here that I found out about the whole Facebook nonsense, that even as I was trying to get time off of work and find things for us to do while she was here, she was still out chasing Dean around.

And so we are here today, and I ask myself why I left this bullshit go on as long as I did.  Maybe part of me just wanted to be wanted by someone so much that I was willing to put up with more than a reasonable person should have.  Maybe it was just hope that at some point the good times, like her first visit here, would return.  Whatever the reason, things have reached a breaking point where the positives don't even come close to outweighing the negatives.  I am tired of living in a world of lies, and where I can't do anything lest I offend someone.

On the plus side of things, I guess that means I am back, in all of my unfiltered goodness.  Let's see if it can be as much fun the second time around as it was the first.