Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

I’ll cheerfully admit that I waste a lot of time writing about a person who, in addition to being uncommonly malicious and motivated by imaginary offenses against her, is clearly disturbed. She isn’t likely to curb her behavior as long as she has a man with particular sexual tastes providing her with food, lodging and Internet access. She has very little to lose by continuing to wage war against facts, decency, and reality itself; as she is well aware but would never admit, it’s not as if she has, or ever will have, a professional reputation to protect, and everyone who is familiar with her has known for a long time that she is somewhere between vaguely antisocial at best and the kind of person you’d never want young children or even pets around at worst. Since I’ve started blogging about her, a few people in her former running club in Central Massachusetts have shared with me impressions they had of her without knowing her especially well, and have assured me that, while the things I’ve described in the past 2 1/2 years on my blogs and website have been eyebrow-raising in scope, none of her actions toward me are especially surprising in light of what these observers already perceived. In short, Kim has always been a jabbering fuckup, and it’s not as if she could hide this even if she wanted to.

One might make the argument (though to my knowledge no one has done so) that I’m just pouring gasoline on a tire fire by continuing to deride her here and on Twitter. But the undeniable reality is that Kim rants about me even when she doesn’t think I’m watching. Even ignoring the fact that she started all of this shit almost five years ago merely because I fired her as a non-paying, non-training coaching client who only wanted to use me as an audience-of-one for her ranting about her boy-problems and her struggles with drinking, this is not a symmetrical dispute. This is because, simply put, when Kim shuts up, I quickly start to forget she’s even out there even though her unseemly carcass is planted only a mile or so from where I live. I do, unlike Kim, have work to do, friends to see, hobbies other than online trolling to pursue, and a beautiful dog to spoil. Kim, in contrast, has been lying and complaining about me without pause since she moved to Boulder toward the end of 2014 — a move I’d bet my life savings would never had happened if I hadn’t already been living there myself.

For example, having worn out her welcome on various running forums long ago, she took to Reddit in 2017 and started in with her shit about me there. Again, remember that she didn’t think at the time I would ever see this stuff. (In a few cases, she was almost right, but I have friends in Boulder who read Reddit when they feel like surveying what the Internet’s anonymous trolling forces are up to, and Kim’s electronic ass-prints are unmistakable when you’ve had any exposure to her manic, disjointed rambling and the things she can’t help but mention.)

Again, please keep in mind my main point here as you read. Yeah, it may look like a case of he-said-she-said on the surface, especially if you don’t know the whole backstory (though no one I’m aware of has suggested as much). But not once have I posted about Kim spontaneously, or merely because it occurred to me that she’s probably sitting around being a piece of shit because that’s what she’s always been and all she’s capable of being. Everything I’ve written has been a reaction to some kind of bullshit she’s lobbed onto the Internet, or an e-mail she’s sent to spread lies about me.

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Well, she managed to get booted from a forum specifically set aside for the full-throated tearing apart of other people. That qualifies as hilarious, even if Kim Duclos‘ intentions are always anything but funny.

I’ve finally accepted the most likely explanation for why Kim — last seen wandering the Meadows Plaza shopping center looking like about 170 pounds of shit jammed into a sandwich bag — refuses to stop lobbing turds in my direction, and why she persists despite her salvos not merely being ineffectual but clearly backfiring. (In addition to “Because she’s a fucking psychopath,” I mean. There are levels in play here.)  The explanation I’ve come to terms with not only is unsettling, but also has become increasingly impossible to deny. I’ve tried to reject the whole idea despite compelling evidence in its favor. because it makes me literally nauseous, and I’m using the world “literally” with full command of the implications.

Kim has always been vicious to the women I’m close to because of garden-variety jealousy. She’s jealous of most women, but virulently angry at the women she knows or knows of with whom I’ve associated with me in a romantic way. (That ain’t a super-long list of women, in case you were in suspense about that.)

Numerous people have told me that this actually couldn’t have been more obvious from the very start, and they have laughed at my efforts to dismiss it. My own therapist has begun trying to persuade me of what she sees as plain-vanilla reality. I can now appreciate why, as I’m accepting that all of these people are correct. Why else would Kim harbor so much undisguised vitriol toward these women — who, by the way, never had a bad thing to say about Kim until she started in with this horseshit?

At any rate, it’s become undeniable. The facts are that Kim 1) doesn’t merely lie, but asserts the precise opposite of reality at every opportunity — I’m still not convinced this opposite-girl stuff doesn’t give her orgasms — and 2) has made repeated recent mention of how many times she supposedly “turned me down.” Taken together, these facts point at a conclusion is as clear as it is revolting, even in the absence of any knowledge of Kim’s attitude toward my lady-friends. I won’t explore it any more than I need to, which is to say that I would begin removing parts of my anatomy with a sharp implement before agreeing to have any “relations” with Kim Duclos for any amount of money. Hell, I don’t even think she’s any more capable of giving informed consent than a prize Holstein.

Anyway, enough background. Kim posted this on Reddit today:

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In May 2017, I was contacted via Facebook Messenger by a television producer from the Pilgrim Media Group about being in a prospective History Channel documentary about the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, which killed a teacher at my high school along with six other astronauts. The producer had found my posts on this blog from 2007 (aggregated here) and assumed, correctly, that I would be willing to appear in the documentary, assuming it was in fact produced.

We spoke on the phone for over an hour. Despite how often I have revisited January 28, 1986 in the past 32-plus years, I found myself far more expansive and animated at times than I ever expected to be, as well experiencing a wider and more potent array of emotions. As it happens, writing about something is not nearly as evocative of memories and feelings as is discussing it, even on the phone and even with a stranger.

Unfortunately, as happens so often in the TV business, the documentary – which would have aired on Jan. 28, 2018, the 32nd anniversary of the disaster – was never made, and as a result I obviously didn’t appear in it.

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Kim Duclos wrote stuff.

SUMMARY

Paragraph 1: Kim, with an astonishing lack of comprehension of how insane her output appears even to a Kim-naive observer, tries to convince herself that none of what I’ve written about her bothers her, that no one who reads the stuff believes it, and that she has allies in her fight against “abuse.”

Paragraph 2: Kim — a social recluse who has no contacts in Boulder I know of and probably none that I don’t — invents a local ally who sympathizes with her, doesn’t like me, and has the influence to limit my social contacts. This is one of her recurrent themes: She doesn’t have any friends besides Sean, who is really more of a caregiver than a boyfriend to Kim, so she overreaches by a factor of about 50 in trying to portray herself as having defenders.

Paragraph 3: Another reiteration of “He doesn’t bother me or interfere with my amazing life at all, so I’m just gonna rant every day about him until he stops.”

FIGURE 1: A crazy mofo is on another determined Reddit roll Read the rest of this entry »

Kim Duclos, a flagrant liar and shitbag who takes exception to being called a lying bag of shit, doesn’t like it when people make fun of the absurdities she posts to Reddit, the one place she feels safe spinning and spouting angry fictions about leading an amazing life despite the devious ways of her loathsome adversaries. She’s used no fewer than seven Reddit handles in the last year: duclok2, i_climb_rocks_a_lot, Kitty_BunBuns_, HungryBuffsDriver, Legal_Throwaway34, Literal_Crap_Bag, and iCodeToYachtRock. She used duclok2 to lie about her academic history, whereas she’s dedicated the others almost entirely to posting lies about me and my friends.

She has recently settled exclusively on iCodeToYachtRock even though she knows I and my friends are having a field day on Twitter with the garbled-ass nonsense she catapults into Reddit-space using that moniker. For a while, I, not knowing what it’s like to inhabit the mind of a mentally troubled moron, couldn’t help but wonder why she didn’t at least create yet another handle so that she could try to fly under the radar for a while. But because of my inexperience at being a worthless loon, I had it all wrong. You see, it doesn’t bother Kim that no one actually cares about her fables, or that any discerning person who reads her posts even without any foreknowledge of her antics can immediately see that she’s both full of shit and utterly bonkers. All that matters to Kim is that she gets to say something dishonest on the Internet and it won’t be deleted as long as she doesn’t name names.

This is basically the life Kim has settled into for good: Get online every day and courageously continue to craft a life that bears little relationship to reality, and blame every single one of the many things she’s fucked up on someone or something else. She is the epitome of someone who has absolutely no worthwhile purpose except for playing out the string until the lights blessedly go out for good (more on the dire implications of this later in the post). Read the rest of this entry »

(TL;DR version: Is my own life imitating my own art? I’m tempted to call the cops to tell them that an established nutbag who lives a mile from me is chasing me around with a camera and claiming this is evidence of me stalking her.)

Kim Duclos, having given up last spring on posting her delusional output under her own name, has found what she feels is a comfortable enough home in the one Internet wildfire where no one gives a fuck if you’re lying, and where outrageous bullshit is in fact widely encouraged: Reddit. Absent anything better to do when her carcass isn’t being trundled to edifying events like Burning Man or death-metal concerts, she frequents an impressive range of subreddits, usually but not always under the handle “iCodeToYachtRock.” Here, her efforts to pose as an authority on the topic at hand are unintentionally hilarious thanks to her constitutional inability to perceive how her garbled rambling presents to people who are actually knowledgeable about these topics.

While Kim’s attempts to impersonate a future computer-science doctoral student and someone with a current programming job are good theater, she has so far reserved her best work for the subreddit called “Narcissist Abuse,” where people who believe that they have been traumatized by dangerous, self-absorbed people post like dangerously self-absorbed lunatics. Okay, not all of them do, but it’s fair to say that after a certain point, if you think your ex is a total narcissist, you might want to ask why you’re on an Internet forum complaining vociferously about his or her supposed fixation on you. And I’m probably being unfair to some real abuse victims by lumping them into the same category as Kim, whose only experience with a narcissistic mind is the feeble one trapped inside her thick skull.

Check out this thread. The original poster’s situation is irrelevant to Kim, because she just uses the presumably real pain and grief of others as a springboard to launch into her own lies, being, you know, not just a flamboyant liar but a grade-A fucking narcissist.

I really don’t think exhaustive table-setting is required to convince anyone that sane people do not churn words and phrases and ideas like this.  Read the rest of this entry »

A year ago today, Kim Duclos had a classic meltdown. She had just learned that Lize, Brad and I had co-written a book called “Young Runners at the Top” and had given a public talk about the book at the Boulder Bookstore five days earlier. Kim, whose already lackluster life stalled completely when she gave up serious running before she was even 30 and has been going in reverse ever since, absolutely couldn’t abide by people she likes to trash for no good reason being recognized in a positive way, so she did one of the few things that affords her a special-needs adult’s equivalent of sexual gratification and took to Letsrun.com for another classic rampage.

I’m not sure what her initial post consisted of because the Letsrun mods — who, while unconcerned with shitflinging on that message board in general, have been wise to Kim Duclos’s bullshit for years — deleted it before I or anyone I know could spot and collect it. But a friend diligently began capturing the inevitable HOW DARE YOU DELETE THE FUCKING LIES I POST HERE, YOU DICKWADS outbursts that followed. Read the rest of this entry »

Kim Duclos is never going to stop lying, any more than any other addict will quit indulging in a free and ubiquitous vice. She once declared to a good friend of mine, who’d been nice enough to let her room with her in Indiana, “I lie because it gets me what I want.” This was not long before she fled town owing my friend rent money and adding her to the interminable list of people she despises for no reason besides basic jealousy. The fact that Kim has undeniably reaped a great deal of pain from her dissembling habit, and has arguably ruined her own life beyond repair in the process, isn’t even on her radar, because she refuses to connect the dots between her own behavior and its negative consequences.

And really, watching her lie about her accomplishments and skills under various handles on Reddit (at least seven in the past eight or so months alone) is kind of funny. Reddit is a giant oozing anal wart of bullshit, anonymity, and resentment, making  it a perfect landing spot for her insatiable need to not only create an alternate reality, but publicize the details. When she burbles on with great confidence about things she knows next to nothing about, it’s like watching an oblivious character in a Judd Apatow or Coen Brothers film go on about his own panache and greatness even while the rest of the cast guffaws or gawks in horror. She’s back to pretending she has a full-time job in a tech field while pursuing the computer-science degree she’s been lying about chasing for close to four years now, all while not understanding or caring how the totality of her own comments across subreddits torpedoes her various claims — even in a shithole like Reddit where no one cares what you’ve supposedly done because so many others are also lying. She can prate on all she wants about the fictional existence she’s crafted in defiance of the reality that she’s a pissed-off stay-at-home toper and layabout who stands no chance of becoming an engineer; that’s her business and it doesn’t really hurt anyone else.

But, of course, most of her online flailing about is not so benign. She hasn’t stopped trying to interfere with my life in the exquisitely petty way of the powerless moron. She monitor my online tiffs with other drones and quietly gets involved, she tries to dissuade business entities from working with me, and she even attempted to get my website taken down because I have, you know, factual information posted about her there. This is all just in 2018.

Now there’s this beaut last from night Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve recently been watching someone use Reddit, the world’s largest and deepest online swamp of anonymous jibber-jabber, as a vehicle to propagate fantasy life but two (in one of them, she is supernaturally well adjusted, hands out advice no legitimate adviser would, and is a flagrant know-it-all; in the other, she’s a recently terminated drunken construction worker who only a few months ago was a luxury condo developer in the Boulder area).

Living under the illusion of being more accomplished, more loved and admired, more generous, more intelligent, more knowledgeable, and more goal-oriented than one actually is might be an amazing way to live if it were possible to maintain it. I suspect that many of us often rewind the tapes of our lives to some critical point, substitute a great outcome for the poor one that actually happened, and play the tape forward to the present just to imagine how things might be were it not for that one possibly awful choice or event. But most people aren’t loopy enough to transform “might-have-beens” or pipe dreams into online resumes or other fictitious accomplishments, because when people try to interface with the world as someone they’re not, the world tends to offer resistance.

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(This post has been updated multiple times.)

One of my Boulder friends who’s become familiar with my dealings with Kim Duclos through following my writings and listening to my on-the-run stories was checking out the Boulder subreddit and happened across some comments that triggered his suspicion. He sent me a couple of screen shots and asked, “Don’t you think this sounds like Kim?”

I didn’t even have to look closely.  At some point in the not-too-distant past, Kim had “I code to yacht rock” in her Facebook introduction, and when I scanned the account’s comments page, I saw that one comment actually provides Kim’s former address in Worcester. Reading further, I quickly discovered exactly what I knew I would: a bunch of drivel in a subreddit for people who are victims of others’ behavior (yes, really) about how an unnamed drunken homeless schizophrenic pill-popping physically abusive liquor-store-robbing narcissist with bipolar disorder on welfare and food stamps (and yes she really said all of those things) was holding her back in life.

“Facts are your defense.” She has this part right, but she’s never in possession of actual facts.

Not that I need to say this, but I haven’t sent Kim any messages since I ended our coaching arrangement over four and a half years ago, and that was a formality since she was drinking, wasn’t training, and wasn’t paying me.

This is at least the sixth Reddit account Kim has created in just the past eight or so months that she’s used to jabber about me. The others are, let’s see, i_climb_rocks_a_lot, HungryBuffsDriver, Legal_Throwaway34, Literal_Crap_Bag (which she’s been using in parallel with iCodeToYachtRock), and Kitty_BunBuns_. She also used duclok2 for a while to lie about her academic history and aspirations.

The most jarring claim in her basket of lies is the one about how I was sexually interested in her and she rebuffed me several times. That’s not only extremely gross for obvious reasons, it’s also disturbing to know that the idea of the two of us being involved is clearly on her mind a lot. I never got the idea from her that she was interested in me in a “romantic” way (I use quotes because Kim is not capable of enjoying relationships that conform to any meaningful definition of romance), but we also spent virtually no time in the same room. Even today, outside of the time I had to sit in court with her crazy ass for a few hours after she lied to the police and on a restraining-order affidavit, I’ve only run into her in real life about four times, and only once since 2010. So who knows what she thinks. But the notion that she hopes to separate me from my exes or girlfriends, whom she calls “victims,” is troubling.

It is also funny that she claims to go months without looking at my accounts, yet somehow knows that my “social media is now everything loving dogs.”

She is a flamboyant and obvious liar, and she really can’t see that no one possessing a smidgen of discernment would believe her stories. The insane jibber-jabber she continually ejaculates only renders the few accurate things she says (usually by accident) almost as unbelievable. The Humane Society of Boulder Valley actually does conduct background checks on volunteers, but Kim wouldn’t know this because she’s lying about ever having applied. And the idea that I’m living on the streets wasted, yet somehow able to charm people on social media, is pure Kim; it reflects her own life of being wasted all the time and lying her ass off on social media.

This bit, back in the Boulder subreddit, really underscores the point:

Yeah, an apartment complex would be OK renting to a felon convicted of armed robbery, but the domestic violence on top of that would put the kibosh on the deal.

She writes, “I don’t use his past as a form of revenge. I would just use it privately in  situations such as that mentioned about.” This is true. Instead she uses lies about my past and present as a form of revenge for things I never did to her in the first place, and does this in public forums.

The depressing thing is that she’s been lying for long enough about all of this to appear convinced of the veracity of the core of it. Despite being routinely presented with the literally graphic evidence of her own lies (which is half the reason I write about her online),  she’s not dissuaded. This again comes back to the fact that while she is a shitbag of a human being, she’s also off her rocker, sometimes more than at other times. Whatever the balance of that mess is, it’s not going to go away because her useless boyfriend/caregiver isn’t interested in putting a dent in it as long as he can still enjoy some seriously kinky stuff with her (stuff she shared with me that I wont’t detail here). So this lunacy is just going to keep on keeping on, and I’ll keep finding ways to frame it as more funny than upsetting.

Update 1, July 20, 5:30 p.m.: Within the past hour, Kim has returned to her usual deranged nattering about carrying on some secret, meaningful life other than her actual one, which consists of being carted around to concerts and amusement parks between feedings and alcohol-soakings. This laughable claim to be employed is right up there with the fairy tales she was writing last summer about winning prize money at road races under fake names. She obviously doesn’t think at all before she rattles these tall tales off, because even though she is not very bright, she would at least be able to see that it’s not internally consistent in the least. “My lawyer just contacts anybody who might have to deal with stalker crap”? English much, Kim?

If she doesn’t want me “stalking” her, she should quit writing malicious lies about me and my friends. Simple as that. The fact that she doesn’t have a single person on this Earth who gives a stinking shit about her other than her caregiver/beau is her own goddamned fault.

Update 2, July 21, 7:40 p.m.: Kim, not surprisingly, deleted the above screed late last night or this morning. Also not surprisingly, she has replaced it with something equally stupid.

It’s true that it’s not possible to contact Kim’s friends or employer or say where she’s in school, for the same reason it’s not possible to contact unicorns or dragons or specify which NFL team I’ll be playing for this fall. It continues to amaze me that she persists with this bullshit while knowing that everyone she’s targeting with these details is laughing at her. This is someone who claimed last year to be winning money at road races under a fake name. This is someone who wrote on Twitter she had flown to a different part of the U.S. for a race and then was drunk and stupid enough to post a video of herself at a bar in Boulder that same night. This is someone who claimed for over a year to be employed at a Boulder business even though 1) this was absurd on its face, because Kim can’t do the sort of work this job would have required, and 2) she kept saying it was “in the canyon” (west of downtown) even though the business is actually in East Boulder. She also described doing things on the job that had nothing to do with this position. Finally one day for the fuck of it I contacted the business and let them know a flagrant lunatic had been claiming on a LinkedIn resume for at least a year to be employed by their small operation. They were not happy, and within a couple of days, no more LinkedIn resume. 

All of that lovely stuff about having a social life is what she desperately wishes she could enjoy, but she can’t, because every characteristic she attributes to me is actually one of her own defining traits: intoxicated, mood-disordered, and literally delusional at times.

Elsewhere on Reddit, Kim, in addition to rambling about her favorite liquor stores, is also jabbering on like a colleague to people who actually know or are legitimately studying computer science. Kim claimed in 2014 that she had enrolled at C.U. and would be completing a C.S. degree by the spring of 2018. Guess what? That time has come and gone, and she admitted last year on Reddit under a different username that she had “tried” a class at Front Range C.C. That’s it. Her pretending to have intentionally posted incorrect details about her plans to throw people like me off is a howl, given that she had no idea any of us were even looking at Reddit the whole time she was doing it. She was busted, she’s angry about it, and instead of giving up and accepting reality she’s doubling down on the lies.

You see, Kim is never going to be a computer programmer. Even without the boozing, she’d still have flagrant, uncontrolled mental problems. Even if some miracle drug was invented that could help her and she was actually compliant in taking it, all that would remain would be a relatively stable mind ill-equipped to handle the demands of higher-level math and logical frameworks in general. And she’s lazy anyway. As long as she has a caregiver/boyfriend willing to fund her life in exchange for whatever unmentionable favors she performs in return, that’s how she will exist, It’s a finite scheme — Sean won’t tolerate that mess forever — but for the time being it suits her purposes nicely, so there’s that. In that limited sense, she’s “winning” at life. Unlike most of us, who really do work and pay rent and behave somewhat responsibly, Kim receives booze money and sleeping quarters in exchange for cooking up revolting food and doing…other stuff. She might as well just admit this flat out instead of tacitly, because it’s the only way she’s going to have a place to stay.