The Best Revenge?

Three weeks ago I presented my music for Joe’s Game at Palomar College. Most of my fellows were nervous speaking on stage. I had rehearsed my speech. I made the audience laugh, telling them that if they felt nauseous, as though they were fighting their ways through a sewer, then I succeeded as a composer. The crowd loved the song. The mix was just right. Tom took my request for the E.Q. into consideration, lessening the bass so that the audience might hear the trebled frequencies. I didn’t hear a single word of criticism for it. Gabe’s Mom liked it. Tom liked it. Kouji liked it. Several people asked me when the game would come out. I told them I’d keep them up to date. Mom and Dad loved it; they were proud of me, for once, again. And they were happy with the illustration that my sister made for it. Though personally I wish that she’d made the hair less dirty blonde and closer to the platinum hue that I described. But she knew it would not be perfect.

Friday I came in to finish my lab hours for that class. There was only one guy there: the proctor. He was about nineteen years old. I showed him all the music that I’d made in Doctor Byrne’s class that semester. Gabriel joined us after some time. We rocked out to psychedelic classics by Air, by Pink Floyd, by Funkadelic, etc. At some point Gabe and I left for thirty minutes; I know because “Moon Safari” was paused twenty-nine minutes in. Our little session brought Z out of his shell. When we returned from our free lunch with food for the proctor, he was listening to Z’s most recent mix. The girl’s vocals weren’t up to par. But Z would fix that.

Saturday my parents came for the first time to see me play xylophone. It was the first time that I let them watch. They did not know I had a solo. My blood pressure spiked during the slow oboe solo leading into mine. But I nailed it. Tom again went out of his way, even in the midst of business, to commend me. Mom’s pride went through the roof.

Up on stage, I did not think of Kali. I did not think of MacKenzie. I might not have even thought of you.

I am still convinced that Kali loved me, though it’s easier for petty girls, however talented, to blame me for it. It was never I that knew she had a boyfriend. That was her cross to bear; she had simply to pretend that it was ME sending HER the “vibe” and not her projecting her own affections. Any projection by its nature comes with some degree of “creepiness”. The Personal Unconscious is one scary place. Why else would people neglect their dreams? At least my sister has the honesty to confess her fears of studying them.

Your letter helped me with the confidence. It all ways does.

Monday I hung out with Joe all day; we set a record for ourselves. I talked him down from his episode. I administered some herbal tea. He played Spyro the Dragon and then joined me upstairs for a musical consultation session. After we had our plans in order for the soundtrack, he drove me back to his house to play Doom. We had the fanfare we had written stuck in both our heads, even if it occupied different rooms within our brains.

I would have left his house after Doom drained me, but I chose to stay. He talked me through some dark forebodings. When he drove me home, I was refreshed. All though he fought off all my optimism and good graces, I told him that I saw good in him. I told him I saw good within myself, as well. I was a positive influence.

This was more or less what Ben told me time and again. He came down Tuesday, as planned, all the way from Oceanside. He was still working at the same restaurant. All the bartenders were fired because of a case of --------. George got promoted after sleeping with a new girl. The new girl got fired. She spilled the beans after the fact about the other bartenders. George moved back to Ohio. He plays with his old band again.

Christian joined us soon thereafter. I treated him to herbal tea and what remained of what my sister would call “oven pizza”. We hung out downstairs for about half an hour prior to rehearsal, getting acquainted. As Christian wrapped up his pizza I took both of his guitars upstairs. We jammed for two and a half hours. It was the longest recording I had ever made. We were all ecstatic and tired. Ben even left without his effects pedals, though my father noticed them just in time so that I might call Ben and return them to him. He appreciated that. I’d never let something like that just sit around in my home without making an effort to return it. Not if the man had a use for it outside of hoarding.

I still think of you each night. I tell myself what you told me. I guard it religiously against the World.

I have concluded that vengeance would be too easy. Even my successes cannot be considered acts of spite. Moments of joy are so complete and precious that our foes don’t cross my mind until they’ve run their course. External success is so fleeting that sometimes I forget I over had it, and when I’m disgusted by humanity I hear the voice of failure in my ears. Our foes want me to bear the burden for their failures. They’ve all ready figured out just how to blame me for them, arguing at the same moment that they blame me that it’s me that’s blaming them. I guess that this must be what snipers do when they take someone’s life for “being a threat” to their own lives. Joe called it “intimate”. For me, the distance is the very epitome of intimacy. Only a coward would stoop so low, even if he were firing from on high. At any rate, it only works if I forget what I’ve accomplished. I must make myself a target for the bullet to hit me. The moment I remember who I am and what I’ve done without them, I am sheltered from the sniping cowards.

Vengeance is too easy. Success does not satisfy it, for success is too great to be contained within it. And vengeance would not satisfy success. Yet it is comforting to know that if this project fails, and if I fail to do what you had TRULY wanted of me, the foundation of a local scene of artists, then I would be protected. There is nothing they can do to me. They’re cowards. Even if I had to go against the World in its entirety, I would have YOUR World to look forward to in death. Its fleeting intimations colour every day of productivity and wonder. And I know that if that world should fall from sight, and I am left only in agony and turmoil, there is nothing I need to keep secret from this fallen world. I can be ruthless to my heart’s content, for they that wronged us have no recourse. There is no authority they can appeal to without furthering their own exposure. I control entirely their image, which is all they have. And it is only out of that same mercy that you praised in me that I leave that image alone, confining it only to those small crevasses that only they would haunt repeatedly, when I could tell this tale on a much larger scale, met with applause. This is why their final words to me are weak and feeble, tugging at my pity. Joe is right; who ARE these people? It’s beneath a man.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

P.S.: According to Ben I’m thought of fondly by the servers at the restaurant. When I asked him if my return would be awkward at all, he was surprised to think I’d think that. When I asked him who it was that spoke so well of me, he mentioned Holly and, after a pause, MacKenzie. Maybe it is time to pay a visit. Maybe she will finally serve me.

Overstanding:

The first thing that you have to understand is that human beings are interdependent organisms. There is nothing you can do that does not depend upon some sort of support from others.

The narcissist has only one true “skill”: the ability to read the hopes and fears of others, coupled with the inability to care for them except as means towards ends. He can reinforce those hopes or fears in you at any moment, and if you pay close attention you will hear him condone this, since he cannot help but to brag about his conquests and accomplishments. By contending with his criticism you contend with yourself, at times perhaps overcompensating in confidence and then crashing into grief. Nonetheless, the careful cultivation of self-knowledge, even at the expense of self-sacrifice, will arm you against misguided vainglory or self-deprecation. It will render you immune to secondary criticism. You will all so be able to think critically of the narcissist without feeling like a hypocrite for rejecting his hypercritical and skewed lies. He will cease in absence to amplify the toxic and destructive voices in your mind. And you will cease to blame yourself for his victims, for where you might have reinforced those voices in their heads by accident, he will have done so on purpose.

The second thing that you must understand is that we are doomed to whatever society we find ourselves in, and a mature man might find himself in the company of children. Yet to blame him by denying these social facts, pretending towards independence of them, you simply establish yourself as one of the children.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

POST ONE THOUSAND: P.O.T.

This weblog is a work of fiction.

Any ssemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental and should not be inferred nor imbued with mystical significance.

All agents of action that can be called protagonists will receive retribution (their “comeuppance”) in due time.

R.G.

BREAK THROUGH:

I am a survivor of several abusive relationships with narcissistic women. The first of these was with a woman who learned the destructive behavior from her mother. As the result of this mother’s meddling my own family had me hospitalized long before I learned what Narcissistic Abuse Syndrome was. I was misdiagnosed as having Manic Depressive Disorder. I was put on experimental medications. To this day, I am struggling with the trauma. It is difficult for me to express sexual feelings in a “normal way”, in large part because the mother of my ex-girlfriend had such a repressive and incriminating attitude towards it, and in part because the girl herself, reacting to this attitude, used her precocious sexuality to dominate and emasculate men, hiding behind the veneer of Mother’s Perfect Girl so as to make all sexual confusion the man’s fault.

This is all so why I am not a feminist.

Dm.A.A.

APATHETIC LOVE:

Of COURSE I do not care what THEY feel. I LOVE them. Why would you EXPECT me to care what they feel about ME? Oh, right. You want to believe that that’s some sort of contradiction. Now I’m not playing by the “rules”, as though you ever said that there were rules in love. But if you’d think about it for a moment, if you’re capable, you have to admit this: if I love them and they hate me back, why should I acknowledge their hatred? I wouldn’t even NOTICE it. That’s what it means to love someone UNCONDITIONALLY. There IS no barrier between your feelings and her own. Hatred perceives that barrier; hatred thrives off of it. But love does not. So hatred cannot comprehend it, and Love can’t comprehend hatred. Hatred makes Love into another distant Other, whereas Love knows no Others. Love simply sees hatred in passing and looks right past it. It does not even perceive the SOURCE of hatred. It knows no Others.

But you see: that’s inconvenient to you. You WANT to believe that everyone who loves you has to feel all of the really base and negative things that YOU feel. You WANT to believe that you’re ENTITLED to that. And why? Because you don’t love people back. Because you don’t HAVE Unconditional Love. You all ways wanted something in exchange for everything. You never cared to have good intent, so good intent is without value to your mind. You never had to ignore abuse, so you could not tolerate abuse, even if to your mind “abuse” is simply the ignorance of negativity. *I* know how to ignore abuse. I know how to ignore negativity. But you absorb it and it BECOMES you because you FEAR people. Anything to get an outcome that will benefit you. If it doesn’t, then you shed all ties and act like you did something “tactful” and attractive. You didn’t. You just proved what we all knew deep down: that for all your preaching about the Feelings of Others, you gave up caring about all those feelings when you could afford to stop pretending. And then you were left only with your own emotions, just like all of us are, except that yours were based and uninformed by Love, Goodness, and Beauty.

Emotions are fairly useless. They do not form ethics. You cannot predict them. You cannot control them. You can only ride them. Like a wave. But they are not imperatives. They’re not as strong as Love. They can only be as strong AS Love is, though they will never be as strong as Love Itself is. You can’t measure a finite feeling against an infinite Source. So how is it that you can expect me to care that my ex hated me? That’s on her for being a hypocrite. I had that love that she only pretended to. More power to me. That’s why I’m still here. Because I stayed true to my word, and my word was a Loving word. I wouldn’t want people to feel all that I feel; that’s not my goal. And I don’t care whether they love me back or not, except for just a few, and only because they’ve accepted that as their responsibility.

I welcome any feelings from a loving partner. Those I can allow; those I can manage. I offered her love and she returned her hatred. How can you accuse me of having been insensitive to her? It was she that ignored an opportunity for greater sensitivity. It was she that gave up. And if you still maintain that to love is to empathize, then know this: she never really cared for my feelings, either. They were clearly much too deep for her to understand. So be it. What she feels about me will haunt her. What I feel about her will only empower me now.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

L!FE:

If a Human Life is an inalienable value, and if this value is the basis for an ethic that preserves a Human Life, and if this ethic is to have any practical application whatsoever, resulting in the preservation of a Human Life, then all agents of action must be held to this standard. It becomes fruitless to speak of the “integrity of the individual will” once one begins to conceive of a situation wherein an Individual becomes aware of the danger posed to that Life but willfully abstains from its salvation. The same principle that is binding upon the man who discovers the danger and feels compelled by the entire force of dignity to redress it is therefore binding upon all other men, including those that left to their own devices would be unwilling, because to refuse such a service is to disadvantage not only the life in danger but all so the well-being of the conscientious actor who aspires to save such a Life. Because both Life and the means for preserving Life are inalienable values, these two individuals, as representatives of these two values, the respective ends and means, are of a superior value to any man’s will that is deviant from this binding ethic. It follows that ethics of any import must be Universal rather than relative to the actor. This is most noteworthy in situations wherein a Life is put in danger or remains in danger because it is taken out of the supervision of a conscientious man and put into the hands of an unconscientious agent with ulterior motives. Because it is human to demand justice in this situation, and because it is practical to do so, because all ethics strive towards a teleological goal, such as the preservation of Human Life, and because only the lesser part of human nature which does not serve this teleological goal can stand in opposition to it, the transgressor is all ways bound, whether by force of his own conscience or by force of external will, to act as a redresser for the grievances of all afflicted parties. Hence the critique that “being forced to do the right thing” is perverse becomes absolutely and unequivocally null and void, and upon recognition of this fact force is permissible, by extension, in silencing the question entirely, for it is of a lesser value than Human Life and all so stands in direct and parasitic opposition to it. Most human beings, furthermore, would gladly submit to Authority if they are convinced that the Authority is working towards the Common Good, whereas they grow dismissive of all pretenders to authority when those same agents falsely accuse them of seeking the depravity of self-interest. Exploitation can only be felt when one is falsely accused of working for one’s self rather than for the Greater Good, for only then is one forced into isolation and marginalized. Most people would sooner elect to be threatened by force to do the Right Thing than threatened by force to do the Wrong Thing, simply because the possibility of defying authority is only tempting if the “authority” in question is corrupt. It makes sense to defy a tyrant that tells you to kill your best friend, but it makes no sense to defy an authority that forces you to feed and house him, only because you would do so anyway and, in the authority’s position, you would do the same thing as the authority has done to you. There is nothing in the Human Soul that would die just to kill someone else; survival itself becomes absurd under such circumstances, and Human Life would have no meaning because it would itself have no value. Only SOME human beings would survive, left to fabricate artificial meanings instead of performing the only Intrinsic Human Duty: to preserve the lives of One Another, for by so doing the Individual transcends the illusion of his own isolation and vindicates his own existence by extension. There is no self-interest in this vindication, because it is simply consistent with the Absolute principle that that Individual upholds. This principle cannot be called arbitrary, simply because it is literally given by Nature and precedes all rational thought. Not only is it true that I think, therefore I am. It is all so true that I AM, therefore I think. Hence all values stem from Life Itself, and as such the negation of all values do so as well. Even if Death is regarded as a part of Life, to that same extent its contemplation must serve the will of the Whole of Life; hence Death cannot be cited as the source of Life’s negation, and professors of Death are still bound by Life to be agents of Life. Only the Death of the Ego can be conceived by the Rational Mind, because beyond the threshold of Death the Rational Mind cannot reach. And it is only the half-life of the ego that pretends that these facts are not so and that keeps the will in a state of perversion, to the detriment of All Beings.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

A GOODE MAN:

They all ways try to turn this into a morality play, sooner or later. The pretense is that had I simply stopped caring about my own being, directing my focus outwards, living for others, altruistically, then I would find a love and solidarity I’d never hitherto imagined. And the cycle then begins again. I find a company that I respect more than I can respect myself. I do not let it frighten me into submission; I simply fall in love with the idea that all its tenets are worthy ideals, even if I might laugh at just how great the margin is by which my fellows fall short of it. I begin to walk on eggshells, priding myself in my patience, following the rules with decorated awkwardness. When we first finished the New Hire Orientation (four hours of sensitivity training, basically) I all most forgot her name. She stood right there, beside me, waiting for the order, and it was not that I spaced on her name but rather I did not dare even to THINK it, lest the Boss heard me. And I reported to him promptly, submerging any suspicion. When I saw her outside again, I had to shake all suspicions about me. I had all so to rationalize, to myself, my own reserve earlier at the Back of the House. I had to believe she saw me, wanted just as desperately to say Hello as I did, but held her tongue for the same reason that she would prize me for holding my own. I went with the flow, letting them assign me to another table. I continued to do this, admiring her from afar each time, making my way about her friends. It all ways had to be this way. I all most had her table a few times. But just as I learned how to find my way around the Front of the House the consequences came. I’d hidden my tracks too well. One of her coworkers took less than kindly to my casual flirtation. The bramble that I used to hide as I approached the Grand Tree became my snare. So I only ever had her serve me once: when she brought me that glass of wine. I heard, in a timid child’s voice, “here is your Murphy, Good Sir.” It was only later that I discovered this to mean “here is your Murphy Goode, Sir.” Murphy Goode was the name of the wine. She was being exceedingly formal. It’s not impossible that she rushed in and out of that encounter owing more to recoil than to reticence. She might have not been shy at all, but rather I repelled her.

It all ways happens this way. I think that I’ve found Solidarity and Virtue. I believe at first that this is only a means to an end. Then just as pragmatism peaks I find myself a sudden martyr. I did not expect the late hours, the injury, both physical and psychological, nor the verbal abuse. It simply happened. So I ran with it, telling myself all the while that this is what a man MUST do for his Family. I never had any real extended family. I thought this must be what it feels like. I was one of the Clan, for lack of a better term.

It all ways follows this formula: you start with altruism, then you fall in love. At least, that’s how the cynics see it. What starts out as service to Others takes on an ulterior motive. Your craving for a taken woman colours everything that you perceive and do. It all becomes a Show for Her, a seemingly self-sacrificing venture that has a single, hidden goal for personal gain. Citing my virginity would not help; it would only serve to prove my desperation and thus set the old example for new critics to follow: the superstition that I am unlovable and would do everyone a service if I stopped trying to change that fact or to feign ignorance of it.

But that is not the whole of it. That’s just a symptom of abuse. Falsely accused of loving someone I was merely flirting with, no one even knowing that the flirtation (though not the person) was simply a means to an end, I internalized again the old notion that I’m forbidden to love. If I cannot love this decoy, a mere temptress to my eye, what can make me worthy of the Goddess?

But that is not the true formula. The true formula is thus: that you start with self-interest, fed up from having your kindness taken advantage of, time and time again. Then you fall in love, and She informs All That You Do. Inspired by her unassailable kindness, her unequivocal beauty and her indominable Spirit, you find a new Role Model. The patience with which you train yourself to wait for her (especially: to wait on you) becomes the pace at which you work. Your work becomes a form of karma yoga: a Service to Shiva. Every motion is imbibed with a tenderness you cultivate that she might one day feel your touch to be a home. And everyone, no matter how rotten, becomes your family so long as they speak well of her.

Can that be called a crime?

Whatever the formula, the outcome is the same. Whether they know the True Identity of your New Muse or not, your love is suspect, since your fellows celebrate self-love so much that any unrequited love is not perceived to be love at all. A narcissist can’t love a woman who will not return his love, so any one that loves him he pretends to love, regardless of his hollow heart, to spite the men who love her, even if they’re friends of his, and to dishonor love and friendship all in one he does nothing to save her from the self-destruction that loving a narcissist is heir to. This, too, seems to be an immutable pattern.

So here I am again: found guilty of self-interested love, falsely accused, for I am not a narcissist, and mine was not self-love but rather love that did not alter when it alteration found. What was that alteration? you might ask. I learned she had a boyfriend. It did not change how I felt at all, except that now I must remind myself that this same “man” laughed at her when she got a hook stuck in her sensitive skin. A gentle man would have removed that hook gently. And I think on her pale skin, which turned red at the slightest fluctuation of temperature. I think of how I asked about it and she spoke of its sensitivity, and I replied, “that’s Good.”

I wish she saw me to be Good as well. But I may never know whether she meant to make a pun on Murphy Goode or not. I’ll never know whether she saw the pattern in the whiteboards in the kitchen: how they all had something to say by allusion to HER, if anyone took the time to unriddle them.

You want gossipers to do their research. At least: you want to BELIEVE they do.

So now I have again to start anew, to feign forgetfulness of my lost love, to write it off as selfishness on my own part, for having had the NERVE to contest a “sacred pact” between her and her loving beau.

But I know that such high-minded thinking is too lofty for this place.

I know that he is probably an alcoholic and a narcissist. I know that she is probably too Murphy Goode for him herself.

And I know that I won’t fall out of love with her. I know that were she not too good for him she would not be with him.

And most importantly: I know now that she’s not too Goode for me.

That’s why I will continue on my path, knowing the true nature of the cycle:

You give all you can for a Love the likes of which men have so forgotten that they mock it. The weak of heart try to use the words of goodness and accountability against you. Laughing inwardly, you take your leave with a broken heart, but one that still bleeds love and sympathy and mercy, gushing adoration episodically.

You all ways were too Murphy Goode for them. May you not be remembered as a whiner, but rather a fine wine.

Dm.A.A.