Category Archives: “funny”

Repetition Compulsion and me

A longtime friend, Mark Friedman, was the most dramatic example I ever met of someone with a repetition compulsion. Psychologists tell us that the compulsion to repeat the same painful pattern over and over is an attempt to resolve some injurious conflict that tormented us in our childhood.

In Mark’s case, as near as I could figure it, it had to do with feeling that his father never respected him, and that his mother could not love him enough to compensate for this. The primal wound he suffered is somewhat subjective and I don’t want to sound judgmental, but that he was compelled to repeat the same three act play throughout his tormented life is something I saw up close for many years.

The shape of the story was always the same, the three act tragedy identical each time.

Act one was great admiration, enthusiasm and pure enjoyment of a person who was finally able to provide everything he’d been looking for. This person was cool, smart, funny, ingenious, talented, charismatic and a great friend, the very best person he’d ever met.

During Act two cracks would predictably appear in this exaggeratedly perfect facade, which would become increasingly worrying to Mark.

Act three was the final, unforgivable betrayal of Mark, which happened every time as regularly as the sun rises and sets each day.

I don’t know of another case of repetition compulsion as dramatic as Mark’s. It was so clear to see, and so frustrating to me that as otherwise smart as he was he simply couldn’t see it. He’d get furious, in fact, if you pointed out any similarity in his crashed relationships. That, as much as anything else, was the cause of our final estrangement. Which, of course, fit the pattern, betrayal by his trusty longtime best friend was dictated by the three act structure.

While Mark’s self-destructive pattern was easy for me to see, the compulsion is much harder to recognize in oneself. Why was it that I was always attracted to smart, tormented, bitter, angry, darkly — sometimes sadistically — funny people throughout my life?

It was an attempt to work out with them what I could not work out with my own smart, tormented, bitter, angry, darkly — sometimes sadistically —  funny father. In the end each of these relationships ended in a bitter falling out that I tried, sometimes for years, to prevent.

The lesson that was so hard for me to learn was that these people I cared about so much were literally poison to me because they could never give me what I was looking for, what I tried so hard to give to them — the benefit of the doubt, empathy and friendship.

Without empathy or the benefit of the doubt we don’t really have friendship. If somebody is incapable of these crucial things, out of their own injuries, we often won’t notice it until conflict arises. They say conflict reveals character, and it’s true. Under pressure things you can’t see when everything is fine will squeeze you to death. While everyone is laughing together it’s easy to feel like great friends.

And it was this laughter, this often dark, cruel humor, that bonded my father and me in between our long sessions of brutal combat. These moments of shared laughter were a great release, a relief, as well as providing the giddy hope of finding any kind of understanding with my supremely difficult father.

So these sardonic characters who were my closest friends for many years shared this bond of black humor with me and made me feel I’d found indispensable friends and was not doomed to interminable, senseless mortal combat.

It has taken decades for me to finally learn this sadly simple lesson: just because somebody smiles wickedly and laughs at your sense of humor doesn’t mean that they are your soulmate. Funny as it may seem reading these dry, serious pages I post here, I am a very funny motherfucker and make many people smile wickedly and laugh. It has taken me half a century to untangle reactions to my sense of humor from the deadly limitations of some of my onetime closest friends. Droll, eh?

Marjorie Taylor Buttplug

Marjorie Greene, the unapologetically passionate face of the balls to the wall MAGA party, gave some fiery remarks at a gala in New York City the other night as she accepted the annual Richard M. Nixon patriotic democracy-loving American politician award from New York City’s Young Republican Club. During her remarks she said that had she and Sloppy Steve Bannon organized the January 6th riot, well here she is (as reported by the fake News New York Times):

“And I want to tell you something, if Steve Bannon and I had organized that, we would have won,” she told the audience. “Not to mention, it would have been armed.”

WE WOULD HAVE WON. Not to mention, it would have been armed.

You know, it’s not like Steve Bannon was in the War Room at the Willard Hotel on January 6th or anything like that… but as important as that comment/admission was, she went on to talk about her intimate shopping habits at Target and CVS.

Addressing an audience on Saturday night after being given the Richard M. Nixon Award—assigned by the New York Young Republican Club to “a citizen who exemplifies the fundamental ideals of Americanism,” Greene told those gathered: “By the way, you can pick up a butt plug or a dildo at Target and CVS nowadays. I don’t even know how we got here. This is the state that we’re living in right now.”

https://www.newsweek.com/marjorie-taylor-greene-sex-toy-comments-spark-avalanche-jokes-memes-1766285

USA! USA!!!

A sad finale

An old friend broke his silence of a month, calling me on this rainy Friday afternoon. After a few moments of small talk about our upcoming biopsies and other medical procedures, the concomitants of living to the ripe old age we have reached, he came to the point of his call.

“I’m not going to be responsible for trying to fix this,” he said. “I’ve done everything I can. I want to be friends.”

So you’re not going to take responsibility for your own actions this last year and a half?

“Don’t put words in my mouth, that’s not what I said,” he said, saying it all. “We all did things to each other,” he began.

I haven’t lied to you once in all the years we’ve known each other. Every time you got upset in the last year and a half I behaved like your friend, heard you out and calmed you. You have never answered a single question that I’ve asked in the last 15 months.

“And I’m done with being questioned,” he said. “I guess I got my answer.”

I offered one last slightly acerbic rejoinder, which, under the circumstances, I thought was pretty good.

“I’m going to hang up now,” he said, as I disconnected the call.

American Exceptionalism #43

You’re goddamned right we’re exceptional, this is the only wealthy country in the world where every old person is guaranteed the right to have no teeth. Every American knows that teeth and dental care are no more a part of a person’s health than the ability to see, no matter what the so-called scientific community might have to say. Insurance carriers have the last word here and even government insurance, unless you’re dirt poor and qualified for Medicaid, does not cover so-called dental and so-called vision.

Two things that rarely afflict seniors anyway, losing teeth and failing eyesight. We salute you here, from the land of the toothless and the home of the blind.

If you live long enough, in the land of freedom loving mass shootings.

Bezos newspaper describes Elon Musk

From last week’s Washington Post, in an article about Twitter suspending the account of swastika posting genius Ye. Note the pathologically greedy Jeff Bezos’s generous framing of his fellow suremely entitled psychopath

Musk purchased the site for $44 billion in late October, and has moved rapidly to shift the company in the direction of his free speech ideals.

Free thinking idealists, one and all. Democracy dies in darkness, y’all.

A nice understated invitation to exchange fisticuffs

The guy from Procol Harum who wrote the Bach-like intro to A Whiter Shade of Pale sued the other members of the group, all of whom had made millions from royalties on this universally played wedding tune, for writing credit.   A British journalist interviewed him on the eve of his lawsuit.  The guy explained how he’d written the iconic opening and had not been given songwriting credit with the others.  No credit, no royalties, on a song that is apparently among the most played tunes in history by wedding bands and other party bands.   

The reporter said: “so, you’re saying they could have been more generous with you?”

The British musician answered with beautiful British understatement “they could hardly have been less generous.”

An old friend, after fighting me for many months to establish that I’d hurt him much worse than he and his wife had ever hurt me, eventually conceded that telling me “you have to understand that I am too upset by what you did to listen to your explanation about why you were upset” was wrong, and not an act of friendship.  Though it took a long time for him to be able to admit it, I felt like an anvil had been taken off my chest when I heard that.   It was a phantom anvil removed from a phantom chest, as things turned out.

Months later, after a second ugly attempt for the four of us to discuss the original upsetting events, the long ongoing silence and discomfort, anger, denial, cover-up, blame, constant reframing and so forth, I realized the problem underlying all this hideous, insoluble tension is beyond my ability to even try to help solve.  I am, after all, in the eyes of my old friends, their threatening common enemy, therefore  my insights, such as they are, can only make things more dangerous for everybody.  I told my old friend I was not encouraged by the second angry session, even as I had largely refrained from showing anger of my own, instead literally banging my head against the wall by the end of another senseless argument over who had a right to feel more hurt.

He wrote to tell me that the second session had been difficult, but important for our friendships and a step forward.  I answered that it felt like a big step backwards to me.  He responded that he was sorry I felt that way and then offered me this marvelous bit of understatement:

Yes it’s important to have people there for you as you deal with trauma.  To use his dog bite example [parents immediately comforting a child just bitten by a dog, preventing lifelong trauma], I could have done better [when I told you I was too upset by what you did to hear why you were upset] on our walk or soon thereafter.

I could have done better.

Done better than being wrong and not showing a trace of empathy and righteously, angrily clinging to that view for eight or nine months?  You don’t say!  How petty of me to overlook how difficult it must have been for you to avoid kicking, punching or even stabbing me, in addition to not showing a hint of our long friendship, or even a casual one!

Jeez, what an unforgiving cunt I am!