An Open Letter:

Dear Alanna:

I had to write to you. This letter shall be transcribed from its written form and sent as an e-mail.

A week before last Sunday, I found a new band. They saw me singing at a bar called Pounders.

In a fit of ecstasy, inebriated, I professed my worldly feelings for a friend of mine named Emma.

This was over text. I then instinctively turned off my phone. It has been off since.

I just finished reading East of Eden. Parts of it I’d never gotten to in high school, owing to some complications not excluding my own father’s arrogance and obstinance. I say that boldly now, because I’ve found identity within the novel.

Certain passages I’d left unread now seize my very Soul in such a way that all the vapid social rationalisations cannot touch them or my own convictions.

As a spoiler, for I doubt you’ll find the time for six-hundred pages of Steinbeck’s allegory (though you HAVE read even longer books by Wallace), Cal betrays his father Adam. He is vengeful and envious, consumed by jealousy, so he introduces his favoured brother Aron to a whore: their Mother, Cathy. This shock would ultimately result in Aron’s death in war. The theme of one twin dying in a war is mythologically ubiquitous and should sound eerily familiar.

When Adam rejected Cal’s gift, I was usurped. I felt a pang of envy and jealousy as no work of literature had ever made me feel before. I was in a state of panick. I began to pace my bed-room. As I did so, I would wonder if this room had once before borne witness to the same devouring jealousy. You know that I refer to Sunday Night, more than a year ago.

Of course, it was my very con-science that had sprung me out of bed.

And so all though I instantly, instinctively and immediately recognised that I was not at fault for having harboured such jealousy, and by that I mean that I never DID, I could only rationalise my position with unconvincing defensiveness. Yet after a while the dust settled. I know now that had it been 2013 I would have instantly identified, with clinical precision, the distinction between how I felt on Sunday Night and how I felt upon reading Cal’s story. The clinical name is: ‘Introverted versus Extraverted Feeling.’ In other words, it was my long sought-after answer to this question: How is sympathy distinct from empathy?

Recalling Sunday Night, I note that only once before had I felt in a way akin to how I felt that Night.

Back in 2013, I worked closing shifts at Joann Fabrics. A co-

worker had once noted that I was one of two people who enjoyed my job; the other was my manager, with whom I shared a distaste that I can only hope to have been mutual.

By this point in the year, I’d learned to ‘deal with’ Jean, yet some thing chronically would trouble me during the closing hours. This depression that set in had no definite cause that I could identify at first. Its most troubling symptom was a tendency to cycle through old problems and neuroses that I’d all ready by then resolved. I say now with the usual defensiveness that these were NOT unresolved problems that simply would go on to solve their SELVES. These were but banal questions I all READY knew the answer to, regarding situations that had past out of control and relevance (from my position; I wish not to sound narcissistic, though apologising doesn’t help.). For a shrink to tell me just to change my thinking would have been Absurd; if I could have changed, the thinking would have stopped ENTIRELY. Yet after some time I realised the problem: these feelings were coming FROM OUTSIDE.

My mind, accustomed to a Reason for each Affect, was shuffling through old quandaries in a sort of bureaucratic desperation.

So if the impetus was not internal, a reaction to a personal problem (of mine), where did these feelings EMANATE from, then? It turned out, or so I deduced, that they were all coming FROM JEAN. I’d leave the store those nights drained, though I did not feel depressed but rather VIOLATED. In Jean’s presence, I might feel depression, yet it never FOLLOWED me after I left her, as my own depression could, some times for years after the fact. So it was HERS. The sense of being-violated was because her own depression had IMPOSED ITSELF upon ME.

I was not the one who had felt jealousy that Sunday night. I’d felt it rather in the very walls, not of my Heart but of my bedroom.

It SURROUNDED and ENGULFED me, so much so that my nose started bleeding and my head had started spinning. My own passions I could handle; some one ELSE’S were too much, especially if those very passions were AGGRESSIVE TOWARDS ME.

And this scorn came that night by a passageway that I had been all too familiar with. When negativity came down this aqueduct, it was accompanied in intellectual life by dogma and dismissal, apathy and animosity. It meant that some one knew that by each conceivable measure, formal and informal, agreed upon and not, I was in the right, and yet it would use its autonomy and barbarism to turn righteousness against me as a mark of shame, so I would stand alone in my convictions with ‘only my self to blame’. This was the aqueduct I shared with Kresten Taylor.

I had said in my last texts to him that he had all ways envied me. This thought had not occurred to me before that conversation; how then did I know it?

What he held against me was a childish feud from five years prior, of which I had not even been once aware, for he did not feel obligated to tell me.

He had coveted Alexandra, and my successes with her no more gladdened him than my eventual failures saddened him. Of course, his claims to entitlement are absurdly skewed and countersensical. If four months was too SHORT a time for me to court her, then a month was surely not too LONG a time for me to court YOU, and three paltry DAYS that he took to seduce YOU were of course a scandalous outrage by ANY standard, not just his own. (If three months are much too hasty, WHAT’S THREE DAYS?)

Besides: He’d known, or might have known, or SHOULD have known, that it had been a year all ready since Ally had deliberately decided to estrange him. Yet he STILL felt self-entitled to her, like he ‘knew her first’, and this conviction lasted all of five years, so that where you were CLEARLY my prospective partner, he could feel that no prior feelings mattered, even MINE, for five years prior his had been dismissed.

Some people are so outrageous that you’d rather just have called them crazy earlier and thus been done with them.

It had been *I* that had the nerve to re-unite Kresten with Alexandra. It was I who trusted you and him, inviting both of you to Kettle and then to my house, two places I had come to view as sanctuary.

Kresten did nothing after my break with Ally to restore a spark of passion there. He had five years to do so; she had not been quite as desperate to block him from ‘her life’ as she had been to barricade ME.

Yet instead he chose to spend the years in decadence. I don’t know if I told you:

After Ally split I had no one to go to.

All my favourite teachers were retired, and that bitch with her two sisters seemed to hate to see me haunt their classrooms.

(like: what did those chicks think? That I was up to no good?) My best friends had split. Kresten, who set a record when he called me a ‘fair-weather friend’ within only one year of KNOWING me, seemed never to prove one to set an example of consistency, availability, and loyalty.

It was due cause to be suspicious of him from the very start.

Tony might yet remember when I came up to the two of them as summer of 2010 was waning. K. had heard all ready gossip of my facebook posts, (I’d taken to a style of avant-garde poetry that my peers did not approve of, long before I could call it ‘Joycean’.) and he did not hesitate to tell me that the ‘Nicholsons [did] not want what I [was] selling,’ and they thought I was a ‘crazy person’. Moved by this, though desperate for company rather than retribution, I implored him to listen to me. I made to grab his jacket, and he changed reactively.

He threatened to call the police. I stood there shocked, taken aback, as he and Tony disappeared into his Mother’s Condo shack.

Andrew was not an option. Ally had disliked him, as had her sister Carla, and I felt inclined to blame my break-up partly on my friendship with him, of which no one in their family approved. I have to hand it to them: Ally had been right about Andrew. Sure:

he would go on later to do me the favour of calling her a ‘crazy bitch’ one fateful night at the Rancho Bernardo Denny’s. Yet from that point forth he snappingly refused to speak with me about her, at least in so far as her criticisms of him were concerned. You know: like it was HE whose social life was RUINED by her and her mother and who had to endure years of humiliation and abuse by his own family under the auspices of Claudia’s professional, manipulative opinions on psychiatry, claiming this to be for my OWN good when in fact she simply wanted her daughter to know the joys of life without a man to have to ‘deal’ with*. Andrew had known none of this, except that I’d gone through it. The most that the Nicholsons had ever done to him was to reject him.

The sheer absurdity of Andrew’s response to Ally’s criticisms only serves to under-score those criticisms. Kresten was wrong; Andrew was not ‘biased’. Ally WAS crazy, and her mother was a text-book paranoiac sociopath.

(after whom Ally consciously modeled herself).

Yet they were right that Andrew was immature, self-entitled, and draining, inventing problems just so as to feed off of pity.

I say this because it has not changed.

*Or a WORLD with which that man is pre-OCCUPIED, for that matter, unless we are to presume upon the psychiatric lie that there’s no world beyond the self.

The last friend I had to go to, prior to my hospitalisation and following my break, was Monty Hall.

Yet Monty had his OWN problems. Tiffany Lahe, who had promised to have sex with him, broke up with him, promptly pre-cluding the agreed-upon intimacy. Monty descended into isolation from all friends save for a few. I was not one of them.

So towards the end of that same summer I wound up at a sleepover at the home of a former neighbour named Tyler Hager. Over facebook, I sought shelter in two female voices. The first was Tiffany Lahe. The second was Bianca Vo.

It was well into my mistaken treatment plan that I dared set foot onto R.B.H.S. ground again. There I saw Kresten again for the first time in some months. He’s started dating Tiffany.

She took his virginity.

If all this seems just to be anecdotal trivia by now, you’ve missed my point entirely.

Kresten had spent the five years of our friendship seeking every indulgence that good luck and deviance could afford him. He descended into sex and drugs, and in the process Rock and roll was lost to him. I was content to fade into obscurity, relying on him only when I had some thing to offer: vision. Opportunity. Camaraderie. Respect. So why was *I* not entitled to the love of either brother or woman? Why should *I* be not rewarded for my patience and my trust, but PUNISHED?

When I wanted to talk to Ally about our love, months after our break-up, I approached her Mother’s house one night. I had a shoe-box full of love letters and poems in my hands. My mother later told me that Claudia thought that I might have a gun.

CAN YOU FUCKING BELIEVE THESE SPICKS??

Ally had said once she loved Cal (from East of Eden; not the University.). It worried me. I might have warned her that I was like Aron. At least ARON would have opened the damn door that night.

He would have seen it as his Christian Duty to treat every neighbour as being innocent until proven guilty. It would not have occurred to me that ANY one would not risk her own life for that ideal, ESPECIALLY Mrs. Love herself.

(Now Mrs. Love-Her-Self.)

The only presumption that I make now is upon my own victimhood.

The dichotomy is simple: Either people love or hate you. You are a witness to their virtue; every action is a measure of how it affects YOU. If my parents knowingly accommodate me by lowering the noise level so I can read with total attention, then they are being moral. If they make noise despite my wishes, then they’ve given into hatred, and I’m faced with the decision to correct this immorality or to diminish my own stature. There are no in-betweens and no excuses.

If all life is centred on the Other, and communication is receiver-based, then I as their Other and Receiver can receive one of two signals: Love or hatred.

Why deny it? Every year I seem to meet people who do. Yet this is all that our relationships boil DOWN to! It’s not even reductionistic; it’s much too SIMPLE to be reductionistic. This is direct objectivity. All gestures are communications with one’s fellows, the primordial, proverbial Thou of Martin Buber’s pheno-menology.

And it is far from any sort of a theoretical ‘Narcissism’, for only one who lives in Constant Consideration of Others would feel the overwhelming Pain of their rejection.

This is not jealousy; this is betrayal. Saints do not aggrandise us in expectation that we may surpass them, nor do we become their equals by foregoing these ‘excessive’ expectations. So what is narcissism? It’s a mask.

Self-interest and whim are all transparent masks to hide one’s TRUE motives: to inflict HARM upon a BETTER and MORE SENSITIVE and NOBLE person!

One can try to IGNORE the pain, yet such IGNORANCE makes one LESS of a person. Only the pure and open of heart are ever victims. This has never changed.

But one character still gives me pause. And that is Abra, a girl described as having been a woman since birth.

“ ‘All right then. It’s hard to say now. I wish I’d said it then. I didn’t love Aron any more.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’ve tried to figure it out. When we were children we lived in a story that we made up. But when I grew up the story wasn’t enough. I had to have something else, because the story wasn’t true any more.

‘[…] Aron didn’t grow up. Maybe he never will. He wanted the story and he wanted it to come out his way. He couldn’t stand to have it come out any other way.’

‘How about you?’

‘I don’t want to know how it comes out. I only want to be there while it’s going on.

[…] He was going to have it come out his way if he had to tear the world up by the roots.’”

Keep in mind that this had all ways been a mild boy who had barely any hobbies and who was described as watching ant-hills while his brother would have stomped on them.

Abra, though, manages to rationalise all this away:

“‘When you’re a child you’re the center of everything. Everything happens for you. Other people?

They’re only ghosts furnished for you to talk to. But when you grow up you take your place and you’re your own size and shape. Things go out of you to others and come in from other people. It’s worse, but it’s much better too.’”

The way she speaks you’d figure ARON was the narcissistic, self-involved manipulator. But that claim would be delusional next to Cal.

She concludes:

“‘He couldn’t stand to know about his mother because that’s now how he wanted the story to go – and he wouldn’t have any other story. So he tore up the world. It’s the same way he tore me up – Abra – when he wanted to be a priest.’”

And finishes:

“‘Tell Lee I’ll come. I feel free now. I want to think too. I think that I love you, Cal.’

‘I’m not good.’

‘Because you’re not good.’

Well. You can imagine my immediate response:

What a bitch! What a corrosive, swindling back-stabbing and amoral whore!

I hated her, at that moment, worse than I hated Cathy.

I have felt this hatred haunt me as despair for the past several hours, even as I write this to you at 5:43 am, trying to find meaning in the synchronous digits of the clock.

Her words: I feel FREE now. I want to THINK too.

All of them reminded me of you and Ally. And then finally:

‘Because you’re not good.’

The death note for humanity.

Akin to what you said the night that you met Kresten, as I lumbered in bewilderment behind you:

‘You’re an asshole, but you’re an INTERESTING asshole. And oh yeah. Dmytri is not an ass hole. But he’s still interesting.’

WHAT DID I DO?
How could you let him HEAR that?

What had *I* ever once DONE to HIM?

To YOU?

What was it?

WHY?

Dm.A.A.

Post-Scriptum:

Thankfully: We need not live in Steinbeck’s world.

According to Charles Reich, old America was soaked in selfishness. Our generation will not have to ‘grow up’ into this. Abra is not at fault; she is a victim of her time. In better times she would have HEALED, yet without mercy, but the Sternness of a Mother Goddess.

OUR story is still true. We CAN pull the world up by its roots. We CAN be good, and beautiful, and true.

Because we ARE, each of us, a CENTER of the Universe.

Victimhood need not happen.

And I forgive you, Alanna.

Sincerely and with Love and even gratitude,

(when virtue allows*.)

Dmytri A.A.

*

Let me surrender all the sentimental cynicism for a little bit of RUGGED PUNCTUATION.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asoc61rcz0c