IAFF Talkcast 11/Elizabeth's report
From CaseyPedia
Intrepid hater Elizabeth attended IAFF Talkcast 11 and met with Casey Serin and several supporterz afterwards. She reported her impressions on CH.C: "this experience was a lot different than I anticipated, and wasn't what you could call fun, even if it was enlightening."[1] Her story, which she describes as "to the best of my recollection, may not be strictly chronological, but is rather more associationally related" is reproduced here with her permission.
[edit] Elizabeth's Story
After the insanity trying to find out what was going on with the fraudcast location, and after trekking probably close to a couple of miles with the world's heaviest laptop bag (please play little cricket violins for me), I got to Infusion. Most of the fraudcast was over, but I managed to listen to a couple of minutes before the cafe closed down and the boot-out began. I caught Casey as he left, just as he was headed toward the truck that has been mentioned before. Turns out the wifi connection didn't reach his truck, so we ended up walking toward Capitol Garage (Casey originally wanted to meet me there after driving, which struck me as strange).
The conversation there was a bit awkward-- sort of a strange Casey-trying-to-find-common-ground thing, and I was feeling a little weird myself. We sort of talked tech for a couple of minutes, and it was pretty interesting to hear Casey talk about securing his laptop. He didn't know about BIOS passwords, which I thought was strange, and seemed surprised that a laptop could be stolen and a fresh install of XP put on just by booting the laptop from an XP install CD. I was surprised myself, since I thought he'd know more about technology than me, who is but a humble and neophyte student.
Ok, so we reach the Capitol Garage cafe, and the male supporterz, who I will call A, and two female supporterz who I'll call B and C were sitting in front, in the cafe's outside seating area. All three were in their mid to late 40's, and all three greeted Casey, which sort of freaked me out at first. And these were friendly hugging, gushing sorts of greetings. I wasn't sure if I should stick around or go for a stroll back to the hotel, since I thought it would be more than a little strange hanging out with personal friends of Casey's.
All three supporterz had met Casey at last week's fraudcast. It turns out A was a local realtor, while B, the woman sitting closest to me, was married to a man who invested extensively in real estate, and often tricked her and manipulated her into signing all kinds of crazy real estate deals. On the surface, their finances were ok, but if you scraped a bit... And their marriage was a shambles. C was a woman in her mid-40s who had been through a couple of divorces. A seemed quite evasive about his own life, and told me when we were first introduced that, "You'll be a supporter after you talk to Casey for awhile. He'll win you over."
Weird, that strange endorsement.
What I really wanted to know and understand after all of this was how Casey's mind worked and what was in his head when he signed all of his deals, rather than all of the details of the settlement, or the sale or whatever. Ogg's assessment of "Ooo, shiny!" wasn't far off, as it turns out.
Casey has a really strange view of business, as it turns out. He claims he tries to judge a person by their character, and signs contracts based on his gut feeling rather than reading what's on the paper. If an "agreement" has been reached, then it doesn't matter what the legal document says, because it can be then "worked through." During my questions, A played sort of "bad cop" with me, asking me if I ever cut corners on any jobs I did, or if, since he knew I was a student, I cheated on tests.
"Oh yeah, I cheat on all of them," I said, rolling my eyes.
The whole real estate industry seems to be riddled with the strange "everyone else does it" type of reasoning. At the time, I didn't know A was a real estate agent. Then he and Casey started discussing the movie they might make, and the novel that A was supposedly writing. I asked him if he was a writer and was working on Casey's story, since the conversation seemed quite insiderish and had a strange wrinkle. No, he's not, and it was some strange joke.
Both B and C were quite taken with Casey, and as the evening progressed, and liquor flowed about me (everyone was drinking, except me, who had a bottle of water), both somehow seemed to become consumed with sorrow.
On the real estate industry observation, I was really surprised to see someone endorse what Casey had done. It was more of that "shift the blame" action-- almost as if A had read Casey's blog and taken in that justification, only to throw it back at any doubters. Yeah, someone else did a shortcut on paperwork at work, so that justifies millions of dollars of mortgage fraud :) Frankly, I really hate that shit, but I stayed civil.
It was strange to watch and to feel the change in mood as the evening progressed. When C found out about Casey's trip to Australia, she was at first supportive until she found out he left Galina for a month alone. Then she almost dropped her drink and was aghast, and wasn't surprised Galina wasn't talking to him anymore. B kept suggesting that Casey contact Galina's pastor and use him as an intermediary to get in contact with her, since Galina's only been barely accepting e-mails from Casey. I shuddered, but C and I were on the same page as far as discouraging Casey from pressuring Galina too much.
I did hear reference to the Circus-Circus "deal" and found out that the casino owner supposedly went with another source than Casey's contact. I thought it was amusing, and I thought that deal must be akin to my magical flying horse I ride every day to school. I call her Andromeda.
A few more questions I asked involved Casey's mindset when he entered into deals and I asked him how he could enter into a settlement agreement and then void it the next day. It came down to that same strange sense of "business" that he has. Legal documents aren't just legal documents-- they're "flexible" and "creative." He asked me what I thought of Duane and LMP. I told him I didn't know what I thought of LMP, but that Duane seemed like a basically decent guy.
Casey mentioned this "internet truce" he supposedly had with Duane, and when I asked if it was agreed to in writing, he said no. I said I couldn't fully judge what was going on without knowing the full story. He mentioned that Duane had once offered him a job, and I said, "Isn't that what you did wrong? I read that his one request was that you didn't reveal what your salary would be."
"I just put out a hypothetical situation, 'What if I had $4500 a month?'"
"But that was the amount he was going to pay you!"
"I just came up with $4500 as the first figure in my mind when I made that post," he said.
"What was the amount that he was going to pay you?" I asked
"$4500.00."
"And you printed that, when he expressly told you not to."
"I didn't say it was the salary he promised me."
"But you published the figure!" I said, and A looked at me as if I were crazy for holding someone accountable for their actions.
"He could have been reasonable," Casey said.
"Reasonable" seems to be a code word for walking away and cutting your losses after meeting the disaster that is Casey. LMP, for example, was supposed to be "reasonable" and back off of trying to get Casey to adhere to a legally binding settlement.
I asked Casey what his goals were and what his values were. He mentioned the "passive income" thing again, and saving his marriage. He still didn't tell me about what he values. I'm guessing money, but I could be wrong.
During our brief talk about Casey's contract issues, I asked him, "Why didn't you at least take the settlement to your legal aid society if you couldn't afford a lawyer?"
Casey had never heard of such a thing, but asked me about some kind of MLM scheme lawyer deal where you pay a fixed amount each month for a certain amount of legal advice. I was a little baffled, but now that I think of it, there was some strange dealie you could claim as a benefit at my last job for about $11 or so a month, "legal insurance" I think they called it.
FYI, Casey, if you're reading this, here's your local legal aid society's web page:
I guess it threw me to hear someone who had such a cavalier attitude about the law and about legal processes-- it goes against every grain in my own body, just because when I got my degree, I went to school with pre-law majors. If there's anything political science teaches you, it's a sense of how legal and governmental systems work.
Casey pretty much passes off LMP as a "bill collector." But he was pretty silent on the contents of the actual current settlement, which is good. It shows, if nothing else, that he's learning a bit of when to be quiet. That in itself is a valuable lesson.
I eventually asked Casey what kind of business he'd want to get into, after he told me about his goal to have a business that would generate "passive income." ("There's no such thing as 'passive income,' I said. "Yes there is," he said. Ohkay-- I'm guessing it's sort of like my very real Andromeda.)
He mentioned technology, or web-related stuff, or finance and real estate. Still the real estate shiny thing. Sigh. But he really didn't seem to care what generated the "sweet passive income." It's almost as if he never bothered to answer in his own mind, "What do I want to do with my life?" Because as long as the money flowed, it was irrelevant just what he did to get the money going. That's been a hard one for me to imagine or to empathize with, just because my work and what I have done is intimately tied in with who I am. I couldn't try to "fix n flip" just for money, for example, since I hate doing household repairs/painting, etc. and I'm not the slightest bit interested in it. So it's weird to think that if he found something else that might potentially make money but was horrible to do, he'd still do it.
He did express a slight preference for RE/finance, which I thought was interesting, but he didn't seem that passionate about it, and he didn't light up at all, as I've heard other people say about him when he discussed RE. So I really can't comment on it much, since none of it really seemed to provoke a spark of any kind. It could also be the stress he's under.
Casey was very concerned about getting back together with Galina and asked us all for advice. I told him that everyone reaches a breaking point, and that if I'd been her, he'd have been kicked to the curb after the first lie, and that she was 80 billion times more patient than me. I told him that after the breaking point, there's nothing that can be done to repair anything, and it's over. I mentioned in brief a couple of my own experiences with relationship breaking points, and said I thought Galina had reached hers. C seemed to agree with me, and mentioned that she thought it was over also. (I forgot to mention that when Casey was mentioning how he loved million and multimillion dollar deals + the Circus Circus thing, C had the same look on her face that I had on mine-- skeptical disbelief.)
B, on the other hand, with A sort of giving her approving looks, suggested that Casey try to intervene and get Galina to talk to him by talking to her pastor. C looked skeptical at that, and I just nodded in agreement with her.
The night wore on and the topic remained pretty much the same, how Casey could "win my wife back." The light that some saw with real estate and the business, I saw to some extent with him mentioning Galina. But I saw the same thing when he mentioned his "business," or the blog. So it was like two things fired him up.
A mentioned that Casey was a fool to get rid of the blog, since Galina wouldn't come back, and then he'd be out the blog also. But Casey was adamant that the blog was going.
A eventually left, but before he left, he asked me, "Are you a supporter now?"
"No," I said.
He put his hands around my throat in a mock strangling motion and said, "Next Friday you'd better be a supporter or I'll..." Then he moved his hands a little tighter around my neck.
I don't really like people invading my space, and I was tempted to slam my fist in his face, gloves or no gloves.
I said, "My boxing gloves are waiting in the car for you."
He laughed and then left. I tried to laugh in return, but the guy sort of freaked me out. Ok, a lot.
You know, I can still feel A's hands around my neck. It's one of the most perennially strange Salvador Dali-esque feelings I've had.
Ok, here's what still breaks my heart-- eventually B spilled more of her story. She's married to a guy who has tricked and manipulated and bullied her into signing real estate documents. She has two kids, and she feels stuck in her marriage because of them. She's slowly working her way toward independence, but she hasn't been respected, and she's hurting, and hurting bad.
B has been emotionally manipulated, and her story nearly made me burst into tears. She's fragile, very fragile, and she has a very good heart. I told Casey, "Listen to her, and listen to how she feels-- she's had a lot of the same things done to her that you've done to Galina."
Casey seemed shellshocked, and I hope I saw a glimmer of understanding for once and a sense of empathy. I really hope that.
But B still encouraged Casey to work his way around the barriers Galina has erected through her pastor. They communicate mostly by e-mail and mostly about business and financial issues.
Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, and I said, "That's horribly manipulative and controlling! Respect her, Casey, and give Galina the space she needs!" C nodded with me.
"She's gone, Casey," C said.
Toward the end of the evening, Casey asked us three women what it would take to win us back if we were in Galina's shoes.
C said, "Don't talk to her for a month. Don't e-mail her, don't call her. Let her get over her anger and see if she still loves you."
I nodded in agreement, and B still suggested the pastor thing. Casey looked really deflated and defeated. Just as things were about to wind down, C got a call from her significant other, and she was suddenly furious, and when she said what happened, I could feel my ire rise. That particular guy is another piece of work quite reminiscent of A.
I hope C holds onto her anger, and lets it burn all of the attachment out of her.
Casey got up to leave, I took a quick picture, and bid him goodbye. I'm not sure what I personally think of him. He has a nice streak in him, and I sense that he has a definite capacity to love. But he's too immature and too selfish and too scatterbrained and too deluded to have a relationship work for him at this point. I didn't sense any particular disrespect from him toward women in general (for Annie), but he definitely hasn't respected Galina anything close to the way that any woman deserves to be respected, that much I can tell. And he still needs to learn about business, contracts, and get himself a moral sense of direction. He needs to sit down and assess what he needs, what he values, and what he wants out of life. Even if he can't have all of it now, at least that would provide him with a foundation that he really lacks.
B, C and I talked for a few minutes after, and poor C was in a horrible state, depressed and furious all at the same time. I hope she gives the looser she's dating the boot. He was a grade-A controlling fucktard who deserves a big fucking steel toed boot in the balls.
Anyway, that's the story.
[edit] References
- ↑ The Quicky Story + in depth to follow, CH.C, July 27th 2007
