A Tale of Tapeworms:

I will not be penalised for your lack of discernment. All ways I tried to warn you about your deviant, reckless lifestyle, motivated to hang near you out of pity so much as trust, not really NEEDING you but feeling sympathy for you. I expected you to honour that trust. I supposed that our conflict was simply ideological, and at the earliest opportunity to reconcile our conflicting worldviews you would not resist. I supposed that sex would be the answer: that when finally I found the Love of My Life I would know at once the pleasures of the flesh and the reliability of the spirit. So we would both win.

This you saboutaged. I never thought it possible. I was totally devoid of expectations. I was innocent; I could not be expected to know or to conceive of such a treachery as you instated. And for what? For exercising my birth-right? Now you try to elevate your lack of discernment to an ethic, an emasculate move. You once said to me that doing Ecstasy with Laura is comparable to talking to Shiva. You muddled the temptress with the Goddess; the former had lost you the Love of YOUR Life, and the latter would have helped you to preserve that. But you were much too narcissistic to tell them apart; so long as either brought you pleasure, satisfaction, and bragging rights within your group of stoners, no one could tell you otherwise.

I had all ways been afraid that you needed our help because these habits would destroy you. It never once crossed my mind that this would hurt me or the people close to me. Why not? Because I was narcissistic? Obviously not. Optimistic? Surely, but why so? Because I was ALTRUISTIC. I all ways thought of my self last. I put up with abuse from you for years. But Alanna: she was the first person I LOST to you. And so I woke up. I could not afford to have any one else sink to your level. I was not to be blamed. Trust is not a mistake. VIOLATING Trust is.

Goodness never uses Force. I would never try to threaten you with this. But you should know that I am no longer fooled by you. And some of our associates are starting to see it too.

You were never a Free Spirit. You tried to blame me for going into the Ocean, just because your proto-Fascist “friends” did not “approve” of it, and because they lacked my stamina and courage. I can barely believe that I allowed you to tell me that any thing that I did was remotely irresponsible or wrong. I held no one to any standard that that person could not follow. I made no demands of any one. I had no expectations. There was no conflict of interests, no zero-sum game. All of that was entirely internal to you, because you were insane. The Ocean does not belong to you. It belongs to all of us, and I set an example that any one could follow just as easily as he or she could choose not to. And in such a case both paths are easy, because in a difficult situation the difficulty would lie in having to choose one over the other. And here the choice its self was easy. All one had to take was to take responsibility for it.

You did NOT take responsibility for it. You held my rights and their exercise against me for years. Like a lunatic. So what was I being punished for exactly? Alanna was not your birth-right any more so than she was mine, yet you behaved as though that were not the case, and then in your psychosis you displaced that possessiveness onto ME. The blood was on YOUR hands; it was simply on MY face. Of course: LITERALLY I bled into my own hands. But figuratively it was totally on you. It was you who chose to rob me of her. When before she belonged to us both, you took her for your own. Without consulting me or warning me. Entirely benefiting at my own expense. So many years I felt like a parasite because you held me in illusory debt to you. For what? For food and drugs, in exchange for my TIME? I offered you a CAREER. I offered HER a CAREER. And you had the nerve to ask me why YOU owed ME music?? As though it were yours to GIVE?!?

There was never a conflict of interest wherever I was concerned. Individual rights are non-negotiable; boundaries are mutual. You violated one of the most sacred boundaries, and you know this because your reasons for doing so were to save yourself from the same fate towards which you subjected ME. So you violated a principle that is not relative to us, but that is Universal. The Categorical Imperative: to treat others as you would be treated in turn. It is Universal because, like my birth-right to swim in the Mother Ocean, it does not CHANGE just because some random group of idiots DECIDES that it should be that way. It does not FALTER because a group of WEAK PEOPLE decide to CLUMP TOGETHER and to shelter themselves from the waves. It is not NEGOTIABLE just because in place of rising to the same moral heights one chooses to SULK in resentment and envy and miss nearly every opportunity to get out of it.

I made it clear to you that I did not approve of your habits. Unlike the matter of your “friends”, whom I had not even ever CALLED my own friends, you DID require this approval of me. I had given you no reason to doubt me. I disapproved because I knew it would come to nothing. You have found yourself blaming ME for what YOU had done, accusing ME of what I “WOULD HAVE DONE” in your place, all because you did not SEE what could entitle ME beyond your own self-interested madness. So now how do you answer for that? How do you comprehend the GUILT of being held ACCOUNTABLE for not ONLY the injustice, but for the attempt to displace BLAME upon the victim? Will you honestly repeat the same injustice yet again? Will you tell me to take responsibility for my condition? When have YOU taken responsibility for my condition?? When have YOU even taken responsibility for your OWN condition? The moment that your actions impact me unjustly you do not hesitate to use MINE as an EXCUSE. You do not establish a value and then seek to uphold it, even if others fall around it. You simply use every imagined offense to YOU as though it were an EXCUSE to degenerate even further. You take NO responsibility for yourself, and you do not even have the modicum of self-responsibility to admit it.

I am not responsible for what you do to me. Those are YOUR actions. But you are just a spoiled child laughing nervously at the world as it lectures you, blissfully unaware of what you are doing.

I will not be robbed of my own bliss on your behalf. I was never blissfully unaware. I was blissfully AWARE. That same Ocean I went into WITH you when you were drunk one night at the Bonfire. But you do not remember. You were wasted, and when you sobered up again you were again the same arrogant, condescending and controlling twit.

Stop texting Alanna. Stop using her. You all ready robbed her of her virtue. You all ready made it clear that you wanted nothing to do with her self-improvement.

If in all of this I find my self identifying with you, it is only because I am reminded, by necessity of having to describe it, of how long this all went on. And when it did, I identified with you as I do now. I acted as scapegoat for your debauchery, despite my own ideals. I internalized your ideals, but you never regarded mine as worthy. You were right: there was an unfair relationship at work. But YOU were the parasite, unless you mean to tell me that adopting your own ideals as my own is tantamount to some sort of blood transfusion. If so: you clearly do not want any one to follow your example, because you have no interest in the Categorical Imperative. You are not a role model. You are not a mutualistic benefactor. You preclude the possibility of a mutualistic or even a commensalistic relationship between people. Your entire worldview is that of the parasite. You never understand your host. That is why you blame him.

I identified with you and imagined you to be as good as you demanded that I be.

But all the while I was simply being drained and corrupted.

Stop talking to Alanna. I cannot threaten you with being cut off again. But I can do you the last COURTESY of pity.

Your words are really useless in this regard. I was never in your position. You continue to rely upon your Mother, etc., though you were so afraid of becoming a parent that you went so FAR as to tell me that *I* owed something to my own. It is a sacrilege. Children do not owe any thing to their parents. Their parents owe them the World. But you are still a child. You cannot understand that. And all the money that you drain, parasitically, from the system, a system I have reason to suspect of being one big bullying enterprise (for I too had case workers and mental diagnoses, teetering on the edge of being marginalized as “grievously disabled”, as Alanna herself had been), will not change your status. And since status is all you care about, you will of course cope with this fact in the only way you know how to: with denial. But I shall not delude my self. I shall simply go on. I know what works, and I need not worry all the time, looking over my shoulder to see who is hurt. My rights are non-negotiable; my values are strong. I embody the Sagittarian virtues that Alanna idealized, that she saw in you, but that you fell short of. I do not need to worry about the complaints of a few losers who are inwardly disloyal, outwardly noble, and who need to find a scapegoat for their inner deficiencies.

DM.A.A.