Re:B!RTHDAY.

You have no further justification. Alanna admitted that she loved me. That she might have lied to you only reflects upon intentions which I know about, alone. I cannot vouch for her vindictiveness, but that is only because where she would be subtle in exacting vengeance I would have been more direct, on her behalf as well as in her place for my own sake.

She’s visited me since. Her presence is a state of mind in and of itself. I used to think she was haunting me in search of blood. But it was not so. She was guiding me towards greatness. To leave you behind, though she could not.

Why should I doubt it? Have I ever taken more from the collective jar than what was due to all of us? Have I asked more of life? I speak in metaphor only because the logic on its own is far too obvious; if you’ve not figured it all out by now, I will gain nothing by explaining it to you.

You will not darken my view of the world by acting as though any public would defend you. That something slipped past a defense and cannot be reversed does not mean it will ever be condoned. Any attempts you make to scapegoat me for narcissism will be totally transparent, as will be attempts to scapegoat me for scapegoating. Your attempts to demean me have been psychopathic, and if I were to internalize them I would be psychotic. No one has ever deserved the fate I’ve had to go through. No public would defend it. My virginity remains as testament not only to my dignity but to your own attempts to undermine it; paradoxically, had I lost that same virginity, I would retain the dignity, for I would lose it by legitimate means, and within my means. Yet the fact I’ve not lost it yet shows you have robbed me of the opportunity, and that I’ve taken no chances within the place of this legitimacy has preserved my dignity. But you cannot know what that’s like.

This I know not only because I made sure of it, but because, even in the wake of catastrophic failure, she reminded me.

I did nothing wrong. I need not pretend towards humility. I have it, without any pretense. I did not expect matters to favor me, but I knew they would sooner favor me by rights than they could favor you. I did not hold you in such low esteem so as to think you’d try to turn them in your favor. I simply knew my turn and opportunity once I saw her. You simply let your pursuit of a nihilistic excess rob us both of Life. But I survived her Death, and by so doing I have mastered Death. Death is no problem to me now. She has returned to tell me what it truly is.

It is fantastic. But I’m in no hurry. Maybe you should be. But maybe not.

Dm.A.A.

CR!S!S:

CR!S!S:

What the Future Fascists of America seem to have forgotten is their actual role in the Human Network. They do not work solely in the agricultural industry; they work in the agricultural SECTOR of the SURVIVAL Industry. All human life and a great deal of domesticated animal life depends directly upon the production of food by agricultural means, so it follows logically that the farmers of the United States are responsible directly for the security and welfare of all such life WITHIN the United States, as well as a great deal of it without, (depending upon what science and politics can fathom) and any LOSS of life by avenues of malnutrition, food poisoning, and competition over resources would reflect poorly upon the Survival Industry, which of course includes not only the agricultural sector but all so military, police, and scientific research, all three of which ought to be the Tool of the People in reinforcing the Ideal of Survival. In short: when someone dies, someone ought to get fired.

At some critical juncture in my maturation I came to the realization that the point of life was to Create. All human beings are by trade creators. Farming is an art, and no one has contested in our recent time that warfare is as well. Our president at present would contest that salesmanship is artistry, and even someone in the unskilled labor field (no pun intended) might proclaim that sexuality is art.

Martin Heidegger said that human beings were those beings who build. He was answering an age-old question: what ARE human beings? Are we those beings who think? Are we those beings who write? His answer was a decent and fairly inclusive one for someone who had Nazi inclinations: we are those beings that build. Want to get more inclusive than just that? After all: by his generous definition, we are kin to birds, and birds are human beings. Okay: we are those beings who CREATE. And the artist is the pinnacle of that. All of our lives, in every time and place, in every culture, under every superstition and in spite of each oppression, have been aimed at leaving behind one great legacy: the work of Art, the opus, our stairway to the Gods, something familiar yet totally unique and novel. All of any young man’s life should have this as its solitary focus: to ensure that as much of his inner vision is made flesh, in preferably harmless form, as is possible. Even sexuality is only the beginning of creation. Hence we call it “procreation”. Even entertainment is only a way to make one’s own return from work to play; hence it is “RE-creation”. Our minds are WIRED to be artists; the most staunch realists expose the most absurd of fantasies because their own creative minds, pushed into the Unconscious Sector, cannot help but to revolt in the most riotous of ways.

Fascism has all ways oppressed and tried to put restrictions upon Artistry. But all of the greatest dictators our history has seen were artists or at least great connoisseurs. Hitler was a painter. Stalin was a writer, a romantic poet. Kim Jung Il boasted the widest choice of films the World has ever known. In some ways, he surpassed the U.S. Government.

And Fascism can fool people into believing that they HATE something. Hence North Koreans protest Modern Art, as though by their own will. Like most protestors in America today, their revolution is surely a scripted one.

AT some critical juncture in my maturation I realized all or most of this. But then I looked about me. Just outside my window, there was talent going down the drain like water in a reckless drought. The finest artists I knew in my graduating class had turned to drugs or, worse yet, jobs to cope with living. Artistry was not revered but shamelessly condemned, and even those who practiced it religiously did so within the confines of a clergy who defined their every brushstroke from a tender age. People began to work for MONEY rather than for the CREATIVE ACT ITSELF. And though I hated them, as much as I was capable of hatred then, for doing so, I could not help but pity them and search for someone to protest to. Where was the Complaint Department?

As it turns out, the Survival Industry had failed. The People were about to elect proto-Fascist Donald Trump, a salesman who, to my mind, only made one work, a show called the Apprentice. It was a most moving drama about corporate capitalism, fully adorned with heroes and recognizable villains. Omarosa, whose name Microsoft Word inexplicably forgets and underlines in red, was likened to a Disney villain, though I still recall an episode in which her discerning Bohemian eye helped usher her team towards victory. She prided herself in her knowledge of the Fine Arts.

People make Art to make a living, but people don’t realize that people make a living just to live for making Art. In ancient civilization, the Ruling Class ensured that the Survival Industry accounted for the welfare of the State, for only by so doing could the Creative Industry fulfill the Kingdom’s TRUE Purpose: to become Human. Art was not for the entertainment of the working class, even less so for subjective and equivocal derision, rendered inferior by its subjectivity. The value of a work of Art was not disputed but ordained, whether by the monarch or by the Gods who had helped shape it. Art served the entirety of Human Progress, and the entirety of Human Progress served Art in turn.

This is all so why the staunchest totalitarians are so artistic. When the monarchical ego overtakes the personality, when it is married to the machine of State in the first coronation, what is repressed is the tender and human drive to create. This is perhaps why even genocide can be said to have been elevated to a High Art in the Twentieth Century.

You can’t stop this train.

Why then, I wondered, did my colleagues have to sell their Souls to make a living? Where would Art be without Soul? How DARE they to USE Art for their own purposes? Had our wisest teachers not taught them to NEVER do ANY thing as a means towards an end?! And who would be so CRUEL as to ROB them of their freedom to LIVE, REGARDLESS of the consequences which they were forbidden by nature to seek, FORCED to STOOP to the level of USING their own God-given blessings to COMPENSATE for the shortcomings of the System?

Of course, it was the Future Fascists of America.

People who had worked in the Survival Industry began to think, somehow, that what they had created would BELONG to them and not to those who needed it. They turned on their true purpose and abused their privilege, insisting that all Artists become servants to the FARMERS, and not that the both of them should serve the Common Good.

It was for this reason that I had the quite mortifying luxury of speaking with a farmer and a member of the military who had spoken of ART as a luxury afforded by survival. Yet when I spoke of survival with him, asking what was to be done about the people dying even in the midst of great, egregious wealth, he only had to say he knew plenty “good” people who would never work for free.

There are no good people who never work for free. This is because without things being given freely, there can be no freedom. And without freedom, as it was pointed out, especially in works like A Clockwork Orange, it’s very difficult to Be Good.

My freedom was stolen by these deviant ingrates and Fascists.

It’s time that we start using our creativity to take this power back.

After all: one way or another, God’s chosen people have now been reduced to their own Survival.

Dm.A.A.

NEED:

People should be compelled to serve the needs of people, because people need it, and without the meeting of one’s needs the consequence is suffering, and suffering should be avoided, since it indicates deficiency and hence it makes reform imperative, as well as healing. If some people cannot be compelled by their own feelings, then their feelings are misinformed, for they remain ignorant of suffering in the outside world, which is of course no different than the inside world. In such a case, the use of force is ethical, because there simply is no reason why force SHOULD not be used. All values stem from the will to live, and implied in the will to live is the will for others to live, for fundamentally there is no difference between the experience of being an individual and that of being all of humanity, including any other individual. The use of force is no different from an individual will, so long as it is motivated by the same overlying principle of human life, which serves as the prerequisite for all moral discussion, and without which thus no just use of force, even in one’s own defense against a greater force, can be. So long as the needs of the beneficiary are greater than those of the deviant whose actions are corrected by just force, the use of such a force is justified within the confines of those needs, just as one may have to risk injury in saving life in any other set of circumstances. There is simply no intrinsic value to the individual will except in its orientation towards an overlying process of healing, and without this overlying process of healing the assertion of any deviant will becomes negligible. Regrettably, those who are justified in their defiance are robbed of a voice by those who are unjustified, and those who are unjustified, since they can find no other purpose to be deviant, tend to become monarchical and hypocritical while those who would defy authority in serving Something Higher tend to remain flexible and vulnerable to the sufferings of their fellows. No part of their project can be criticized, for it is devoid of personal self-interest; self-interest itself is defined only by CONTRAST with others’ interests, and those who serve others deserve to be served thus in turn, so long as their needs are sufficient. No part of this can be personalized as the expression of a private will to power, because it is the private will, to control “one’s own life”, a product of the will to dominate, that is in fact under attack by all altruism, whether it’s forced or given freely.

Dm.A.A.

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.