Category Archives: musing

Energy Vampire

Years ago an old friend, let’s call her Gina, decided that her old friend was not her friend anymore, in fact, that they were never really friends, in spite of their closeness in former times. She told others that the woman, in whose apartment she lived for a year or two decades earlier, was an “energy vampire” and everyone simply accepted that, like any of us, she had an absolute right to choose her own friends.

The old friend she rejected, and smeared as an energy vampire, was understandably devastated by this sudden repudiation. In my experience she is not an energy vampire, but the charge was enough for people who barely knew her to assume that Gina had every right to cut ties to someone who was demanding and emotionally draining. I had zero insight, at the time, into the narcissistic psychopathy of dear Gina, the woman who decreed her former close friend a life-draining energy vampire.

Fast forward a decade or so. I now have 100% insight into the raging personality problems of this damaged, controlling, easily enraged, terminally insecure woman of great charm, and former beauty. I, in fact, was reckoned far more dangerous than an energy vampire and she and her sychophantic [1] husband (she holds a humiliating secret over his head and she’s not shy about playfully flaunting it) deliberately assassinated my good name among a group of old friends.

I had a call the other day from a friend in France. At one point he mentioned a satire of a reality TV show called What We Do In The Shadows. A film crew lives with a group of vampires. He was laughing that the most feared vampire in the house doesn’t drink blood, it is an Energy Vampire. He’d never heard the term, he loved it, and he described the creature beautifully.

The energy vampire finds an empathetic listener, plays to the person’s kindness and then proceeds to latch on and suck them dry by droning on with the most boring possible monologue for hours on end. The energy vampire preys on its victim’s empathy and is expert at eliciting sympathy as it moves in for its long, painful drink. Once it senses kindness it gets its hooks into the person and never lets go until it has drunk its fill of the nice person’s empathy.

If we are too nice we can fall victim to these creatures, sure enough. That’s why maintaining healthy boundaries is so important.

Thinking more about energy vampires, and that unfair charge my old friend Gina made against her old friend, I realized how ironic Gina’s smear is. For one thing, Gina is not the least bit empathetic, though she does a convincing performance of it socially. Feelings make her very uncomfortable and she is adept at making anyone who needs to talk about feelings feel weak and pathetic. Energy vampires are powerless against someone like her, they will die of thirst if she is their only target.

Additionally, in her need for admiration, Gina is far more of an energy vampire than the woman she smeared as one.  The moment you question Gina’s right to control everyone else, she rages.  In her inchoate, irrational anger she is capable of things far worse than sucking someone dry of energy.  She is capable of anything any tyrant ever thought of.  I’d rush into the arms of an energy vampire to get away from someone as damaged and soul-destructive as her.

[1] sycophantic

  • Of or pertaining to a sycophant; characteristic of a sycophant; meanly or obsequiously flattering; courting favor by mean adulation; parasitic.
    Similar: parasitic
  • Given to obsequious flattery.
  • Attempting to win favor by flattery.

The GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English •

Deleterious Cognition finally defined

I had a concept in mind, since taking my first philosophy course at City College: deleterious cognition. I knew what it meant, knowledge that can only hurt you with no possibility of helping. I like deleterious cognition as a phrase, but I always had a devilishly hard time defining it (just like ‘catastrophizing pain’, a potentially revolutionary modality for pain management, but for the lack of an agreed on definition). The chairman of the philosophy department, KD Irani, after listening with a furrowed brow to my struggle to define my term, suggested that I might be referring to cognitive dissonance. I wasn’t, but, at nineteen, I couldn’t explain exactly why.

The other day, after an alarmed, alarming call from a kidney specialist about things that showed up on a recent CT scan, I had a moment of insight.

Deleterious cognition is a rumination on actual known facts with no hope of coming to anything but more fear, anxiety and other psychic harm.

In other words, had I taken up any of the numerous email invitations to see the full results of these worrisome scans, I would only open the door to deleterious cognition. I’d be looking at cold scientific facts, context free, with no option but to worry more. Hence, any cognition based on a scary report I have no intelligent way to interpret would be deleterious. Better to wait for a medical consult with someone who can put the scary facts into perspective and offer the best options.

A stickler would quibble about ‘cognition’ in that phrase, since the word means “mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”. Can a terrified worst case scenario reading of scary medical information, without context, be called ‘cognition’? Who the fuck knows?

All I can say is that pondering the worst facts presented to you, fully considering each terrible piece of information and all of the inevitable extensions, reasonable or not, without the proper training and experience, can only lead to deleterious cognition.

Terror of humiliation leads to violence

Some people who experience trauma as young children never escape the cycle of emotional violence and neglect they were raised in.   Parents who routinely neglect or humiliate a child do this because of their own inescapable pain.  Why wouldn’t a parent incapable of nurturing a young human being seek help?   It is humiliating to them to admit they are not perfect and all-knowing, and besides, our culture doesn’t offer this kind of help to “losers.”  The child, therefore, is the problem, demanding, weak, selfish, needy, emotionally draining, never happy, critical, hypochondriacal, crazy, ungrateful, unfair, vicious, etc.

Much easier for someone who can never be at fault to have a long list of their child’s critical defects, never mind that the child is three months old, or a year old, or three days old, for that matter. It is well known that some babies are born placid and “easy” while others are more agitated and “difficult”. It is the pure bad luck of a parent who can never be wrong to have the latter kind of baby and absolutely no fault of their’s if the child grows up to unfairly harbor ill will toward them.

I don’t have much sympathy for the authoritarian personality.  I have almost none.  It is a shame, terrible, regrettable, lamentable and to be mourned, seeing a parent like this with her child, but sympathy for the moral dilemma of the snarling, other-blaming autocratic parent?  None.

I’m sure most childless cat ladies and cat men, and many parents, feel the same way about domineering parents who angrily insist on blaming their children for the parents’ unresolved issues and inadequacies.

Imagine my horror, sharing a vacation house with a couple of old, dear friends who were seething at each other day after day.  Watching the manic discomfort of their oldest son when he came by, the mother’s clear inability to connect with this unconventional young man, the father’s amiable attempts to be a good guy, even though he was unable to protect the kid from even the worst abuse when his son was young, or ever. 

As their anger at each other simmered and escalated, and I later found out they often go days locked in a silent battle of the wills, I fell deeper and deeper into the quicksand of someone else’s unresolvable pain.  I had seen too much, too clearly, too horribly, humiliatingly.  In the end, if I didn’t stop insisting on my own right not to be abused, which I eventually was, I would have to be killed.  They made it crystal clear.  Every single time.  They would rage, storm out, insist the only problem was me, that I am unloving, unforgiving and disloyal.   I suppose witnessing their rage at each other made me all of those things.

So when the lynch mob of the rest of my old friends came for me, disorienting and painful as it was, I could only thank God for a neck made super strong and resilient by decades of working to restore my neuroplasticity, the ability of the emotions and intellect to roll with the fucking punches without getting destroyed.

I find it is helpful, when facing an unfair attack, to keep in mind that “all violence is an attempt to replace shame with self-esteem.”

Your medical files speak the truth

Dr. D. talked me out of the biopsy my urologist had sent me to have. He’d looked over my medical records and told me he was confused about why I’d been sent for a biopsy. He said if he was me, and I just had a clean MRI, and my PSA had been steady for years, that he would put off having a biopsy of his prostate unless there was clear indication that one might be diagnostically helpful.

Since there was no indication that a biopsy was immediately necessary, the doctor told me, and since at my age any prostate cancer is going to be slow growing, there is no reason not to put it off until there is a clear indication of the need to do a biopsy.

Then he described the pain of the procedure and week of discomfort that is the normal after a needle biopsy takes twelve slices of your prostate, through your anus.   He convinced me there was no medical urgency to the biopsy, I thanked him and left without having the needles delicately inserted up my ass. 

The next time I saw my long-time urologist he immediately asked me why I didn’t have the biopsy. I told him the doctor he sent me to had talked me out of it.  I described our conversation. He pointed at his computer screen and read from my medical notes: “patient refused.”

Of course that’s what my medical record at the corporate hospital said. Phrasing it that way was the prudent, liability-avoiding way to notate our conversation. It was not false that I’d declined, or refused, the biopsy, though misleading. The medical record, after all, never lies. Put it on the witness stand, if it comes to it, and it will always say exactly the same thing.

The bit of self-protecting wording is also a nice snapshot of the essence of corporate narcissism.   The corporate bottom line, and only line, so ruled by the Supreme Court while creating this “person” out of legal fiction and political calculation, is profit and avoiding accountability/loss, after all.

What kind of person is a corporation, if not a single-minded, predatory psychopath?

Still, nice of Dr. D. to spare me the unnecessary hassle of that prostate biopsy. I sure hope he was right and I didn’t make a mistake refusing the treatment he was offering and ready to provide.

Faith can blind us

Toward the end of my slow recovery from a frustrating and fatal conflict with my two closest friends, with nonnegotiable sides drawn by a unanimous group of our oldest friends, now mutually dead to me, I heard a political scientist say this:

People get so invested in their belief system that they don’t care what’s true.

The simple truth of this hit me hard, explains so much about our tribal species. The dear old friend of fifty years who accused me of sadistically torturing her poor husband, my closest friend, “to bend him to my will”, is known to everyone as someone with a very strong will. People tend to do what she wants, it’s always easier than locking horns with her. If anyone was bending anyone to their will, it was far less likely to be me than her.

Then there are the facts, a year of cause and effect, my continued attempts at healing a conflict, her silent, steely ignoring of each try, punctuated by fits of rage, her determination to silence me, to be right no matter what. 

The alternative to my death and banishment from our group was unthinkable to her, the humiliation of being exposed as an angry, deeply damaged person incapable of vulnerability, or acknowledging fault when conflict arises.

Of course, when you are part of a cherished group and filled with attachment and belief, as in unquestioning love for a charming, charismatic friend who endearingly needs your admiration, you do not care what the “truth” is.  Her hurt is all that matters.

Faith is the strongest force in human affairs, it is rarely subject to the back and forth of discussion, persuasion and compromise.  Things that should be easy to resolve, in light of clear cause and effect, and empathy for the weakness each of us has, become impossible to ever fix. 

If there is unquestioning emotional faith on one side, and a strong need never to be wrong, no matter what, faith erases any “truth” that might call its rightness into question.  

There in a nutshell is the tragedy of human history.

Beautiful short meditation on gratefulness

The beautiful soothing voice and profound common sense of this Benedictine monk will restore your soul for an interlude of sanity, wonder. You will feel gratefulness for this breath and the next ones you take in. Take six minutes to yourself to let his message flow over you. His life affirming message, spoken against gentle music, is accompanied by gorgeous photography of our miraculous world. I have listened to it so many times over the years I can almost recite it with him.

However pessimistic the amplified ugliness of the lowest human impulses, hatred, intolerance, greed, rage, envy, stupidity and smirking cruelty might make you feel about the world, this is also true, and right, and very important to keep in your heart. It is good to remember the many blessings of our lives, every day.

The gift and curse of writing clearly

If you have something to say, and believe it is important, you can often express it most clearly in writing.  Writing helps you organize, clarify and provide context for understanding and expressing things that can be complicated to sort through while speaking.  Write every day, as a daily practice, and after a number of years, you will hone your ability to set out your beliefs, ideas and feelings clearly in writing.   It feels like a wonderful blessing of my life, that I have acquired this ability.  I would recommend a period of daily writing to anybody who likes to read, think and learn.

To people who are insecure, or angry, or highly competitive, or who don’t share your views, or feel unable to write themselves, receiving something that is written clearly and expressively can be threatening, even infuriating.  It can sometimes instill a desire to take revenge on the fucking arrogant smartass who smugly sets out his thoughts and feelings so clearly, with an overbearing confidence that must be very galling to someone who does not practice this antiquated form of communication.   

When this happens, you will often get silence, which can come for  many reasons, some quite innocent.  Sometimes you will get a polite categorical statement to the effect of “I will never discuss any of these things with you. Please do not send them to me ever again.”  

The identical message can be clearly sent in a more passive, deniable way, simply by never responding to anything you receive from the “writer”.  It is this seamless eternal silence by way of reply that was my father’s pet technique for expressing contempt.  It is one unfailing calling card of the narcissist, a potent weapon everyone who can never be wrong, and will kill you to prove it, keeps sharp and at the ready for the moment it’s needed.

The world is ruled by passion, whatever we are most passionate about engages and moves us the most. People have widely different strategies for dealing with conflict, fear, vulnerability, isolation, anger, grief, taking care of loved ones, health concerns and other challenges.  Better to describe these coping strategies through observation, than to judge them critically.   We are all doing the best we can under often difficult circumstances.

For me there is no replacement for writing down the things that move or perplex me, particularly if they may not be spoken of, or if you are otherwise held powerless.  I feel this way regardless of how often things I’ve written have alienated me from certain people over the years.  

That I tend to think of those who became angry because of something I wrote as largely irredeemable assholes is a character flaw of mine, I suppose.  If you won’t talk about a subject, and get pissy and hostile, or simply silent or categorical, over something I wrote, that’s pretty much all she wrote, as it is written.

Why I hate irrationality

When someone asserts their will without any reason other than “I am asserting my will no matter what, and you may not fucking question or defy me” understand that you cannot reason with this kind of person. No appeal to fairness, decency, reasonableness, empathy, friendship, kinship, mutuality, morality or anything else will make any difference. There is no negotiation with people who are irrational, particularly when these fuckers are in a rage. Their “arguments” are incoherent, there is no conflict that can be discussed, no possible compromise, no possibility of future understanding. Still, it can take decades to understand what you are up against when you suddenly face this implacable truculence in someone you care about, are connected to, have a long, fond history with.

I recently sent several chapters from the second draft of my manuscript to an old friend who asked to read them. I sent them after explaining that I needed her comments, no matter how brief, to let me know she’d read the pages. I told her how hard it is to get feedback from readers, and how necessary such feedback is to understand how certain writings land with a reader, what needs to be fixed or otherwise clarified. Hearing nothing in a week, I sent a follow up note. After another follow up several days later, with no response, I started to get pissed off. It was tempting to write something angry and dismissive. I note that all of this happened during a few weeks of escalating medical troubles and nights of poor sleep.

In the end, I was glad I’d held my disappointment and temper in check. I wrote this to her, after a phone conversation that helped me greatly from a medical perspective (she’s a retired doctor who did research as we spoke and came to a logical conclusion as to the source and cure of my present autoimmune situation), to help her understand why silence by way of response is so intolerable to me.

As you described, when you were upset as a kid you closed yourself in your room and did math.  You were good at it and immersing yourself in it took you away from your hurt feelings and helped you regain a sense of order and control, a very important thing for us puny earthlings, particularly when we feel under attack.   My escape was always writing, drawing and playing guitar in my room.  All of these were things I controlled, and got better and better at, all things that took me away from my unfairly battered feelings.  Writing has been so important since my banishment from the group of rabid lemmings who expressed great love for me over the last fifty years.

My father’s most effective weapon of abuse was silence.  I’d talk to him about something that bothered me, worried me, tormented me, and he’d reframe it, bat it away, blame me, etc.  When I wouldn’t let him hijack the conversation, he’d go silent.  No response at all.  It was, and still is, kryptonite to me.  

Gina, after assuring me she was “happy” to hear my concerns, gave me complete, total, unbroken silence for four months (followed by an enraged teenaged/two year-old’s temper tantrum when I forced a meeting by insulting Flack’s fragile manhood).   Her hapless puppet, the “homo”, made excuses, blamed me, got offended, had hissy fits, defended his wife’s right to be an enraged, abusive bitch, got mad, calmed down, insisted over and over on irrational points, made incoherent comebacks, etc. but his periods of silence would only last a few weeks at a time.   Letters, texts, WhatsApps, phone calls from me were all ignored by the two queens, the homophobe and her pathologically obliging mate, during this ugly transition from friendship to eternal hatred, hatred spread generously throughout a large group that comprised most of my close friends and their now adult children — all revealed to be as emotionally/morally malleable as any lynch mob anywhere.

That is why after I told you I need acknowledgement before I’d send you my chapters it was so hurtful not to hear back day after day, even after I sent a few follow-ups.   Every day when I checked my email it would be like another little silent kick in the nuts, so familiar from anyone in my life who had malice or passive aggressive anger to let me know about. The intent isn’t relevant really, the effect is the same, particularly with my stress level turned up due to ongoing and new health threats, 80% disability, medical negligence, etc..

Anyway, fucking read that short bit I sent you again today.  It will take you about 6 minutes.  Then write “nice”, or “oh”, or “I think this will interest a literary agent” or “I’d suggest changing this, adding this” or “well-done” or “you really have an inflated sense of your literary abilities, pal, dontcha?” or “Bitter much?” or “I think you could lose part 3” or “I think this is so-so, even though the writing itself is OK” or “I know nothing about these things, but good luck” or … you get the point.  Anything but nothing.  Without reader feedback I’m working in the dark much of the time in how this material might land and getting this feedback is generally about as easy as pulling out my own wisdom teeth.

And so, we were able to come to a better understanding of each other and preserve a relationship that could have easily been severed forever. She emailed that she found my chapter about the unreliable narrator, the one a perverse but perceptive friend urged me to write, portraying myself as a despicable villain well-deserving of my punishment, very funny. Several people have found this chapter about my unpardonable faults funny. There’s no accounting for taste, I suppose. But I take this all as progress, boys and girls, and another living example of living and learning to do better, and using Reason and an appeal to empathy to work through tangled, inflamed emotions with someone capable of responding in kind.

Cults, embracing lies as loyalty, the sting of death

Every cult is based on embracing the infallibility of the cult leader. This asshole is usually a charismatic (to some) narcissist, a person who can never be wrong, will kill to prove that, and who rewards any follower who swears undying loyalty to them with an assurance of (usually transactional) love. For the most part.

The cult leader, being infallible, doesn’t need a reason to throw somebody out of the cult, but for the most part, they tolerate cult members who are undyingly loyal.

For anybody who does not go along with a cult leader’s infallible, indisputable so-called lies, taking a self-described moral stand in the name of some asshole abstraction, like “truth”, there is only death. If apostates, heretics, dissidents and critics are not always killed by the leader, and made grim examples of, the spirit of questioning and undermining authority grows like a poisonous weed in the cult. The death inflicted on the questioner is usually spiritual, the hated apostate may never be spoken to, or of, again. Within the cult, this is the functional equivalent of death by physical killing.

 The sting of death is the absence of the person you loved, absolute and eternal, silence that can never again be broken with a laugh or anything else.  With death all possibility for a better mutual future, for reconciliation, for greater understanding and peace is crushed into bitter dust. The bitterness of willfully annihilated love is impossible to describe, though many of us know well the awful taste of it.