Category Archives: writing

from Chapter 39

Fifteen weeks later this dawned on me one day, the point of this chapter:


My actual terror is not of incoherence itself, but of implacably angry incoherence in the service of a tyrannical will. It is the forced imposition of a counter-factual reality represented by incoherence that terrifies me, because there is no discussion, persuasion or compromise possible with incoherence. The really fearsome thing is the angry will demanding unquestioning adherence to a narrative that makes no sense. The incoherence is the handmaiden of a willful tyrant’s eternally demanding will.

If the clear truth of something you need is inconvenient, like the indisputable fact that we all need to be listened to and heard by loved ones when we are in pain, simply say “NO! You will not be heard, whiner. Being heard is for closers, like coffee, you fucking fuck, like your smelly mother, who had much more pain than you ever will, and managed to whine much less. You’re a hostile, childish asshole, jackass, and wipe that sullen look off your face, you’re the one with a problem hearing the goddamned truth, pant-load.”


The point is, just say anything, it matters not what, to keep the mood going and your will dominating. Your inflamed will is not persuadable, your mind is clenched, you will say anything, contradict yourself over and over. It doesn’t matter at all what you actually say, the point is to just keep angrily denying and attacking, whether it makes sense or not. Keep the other person on the defensive, by any means necessary. Incoherence means never having to actually account for anything you do. That’s the key: do not concede accountability for anything, admit nothing.


My deepest terror, it turns out, is the insane, demanding will, and the readiness to do anything in its service, that made Adolf Hitler a household name. The incoherence is just the infernal music they play while bending others to that will. The genius of it is that you cannot argue against incoherence.


Set and match, bitches!

Two basic orientations toward our fellow creatures

(from Chapter 36 of The Intimate Lynch Mob)

There are two basic orientations toward our fellow creatures available to us, open or closed, predisposed toward healing or harming. We can behave with openness and vulnerability or protecting ourselves, projecting strength and a determination to never be hurt. We have a reflex toward healing, ourselves and those we care about, or protecting ourselves at all costs, even if it means harming others.

We can listen with patience, and react honestly, or close ourselves off, secretive, foreclosing dialogue and remaining protected, even if it means being dishonest and causing damage to others. To the latter type, the reflex to dishonesty is no vice because the stakes are your precious heart and soul, the essence of every sentient creature’s being.

To those oriented toward repelling threat, every bit of energy will be directed toward self-protection. Vulnerability is seen as weakness, contemptibly pathetic and even suicidal in an infinitely dangerous high stakes contest for dignity where only the strongest prevail.

To me, and pussies like me, the only prize truly worth having is someone you love feeling safe enough to make themselves vulnerable, because they know that the first instinct of your love will always be to protect them.

Then again, consider the source. This is coming from the insane bastard who sadistically tortured his best friend for over a year and refused to forgive him for some unspecified imaginary crime, so take it with a few grains of salt, eh?

Insecurity on steroids

The thing with someone who can never acknowledge they were wrong, or behaved hurtfully, is that it comes from a terrible insecurity. We all have insecurities, it is part of the human condition to wonder and compare yourself to an ideal you have of how you should be able to act in the world. People who can’t be wrong live in a different world than the rest of us fallible earthlings.

If you admit you’ve hurt somebody, it makes you a bad person, in their crabbed, black and white worldview. People who hurt others are bad, they need to be perfect, so it is impossible that they could have hurt someone without a very good reason. That reason is always the same: “that person who claims I hurt them, that liar, actually hurt me, really, really badly. I am the victim, not them! How dare that morbidly oversensitive defective attack my perfection, and expect me not to react!”

“I was only reacting, like any normal person would, reflexes got the best of me. You made me shoot you in the gut, because I was rightfully afraid you were going to attack me. You didn’t see that terrifying look on your face, I had to stand my ground. Everyone has a right to self-defense, that’s all I was doing when I shot you a few more times just to make sure you couldn’t get up and beat the living crap out of me, pistol whip me with my own gun. Don’t pretend that’s not exactly what you were thinking as you were lying there, fake bleeding!”

In my personal life I’ve recently experienced this insecurity on steroids, in my face so constantly I had to grapple with the underlying principle of how these emotionally driven motherfuckers truly believe they are acting righteously. Coming from a loved one, someone you’ve long trusted, it really fucks with your mind. A person who is sometimes wrong, who apologizes from time to time, cannot understand that for someone with crippling insecurity these simple human acts are impossible. The logic is not hard to understand, once you grasp the basic principle.

I am so insecure that any criticism or complaint against me is a deadly attack. I cannot be wrong, because everyone loves and respects me. I am an exemplary person. I will not be attacked by people with mental problems. You are insane if you don’t understand that you are wrong and I am right, no matter what.

You can’t reason with these good folks, they are beyond the reach of introspection, empathy or the ability to see nuance or take responsibility for the harm we all sometimes do to others. All they see is deadly threat, competition to the death and victory. Once you realize this about them, how paralyzed they are by insecurity and anger (which hardens immediately into implacable rage) during even the most minor conflict, the only thing you can do to preserve your integrity (and what’s left of your sanity) is follow the advice of the second best fortune cookie I ever opened:

The best throw of the dice is to throw them away.

The subtle details of long-term damage

I just thought of something that happened to me more than sixty years ago, and it sheds light on my present day sensitivity about not having my feelings taken seriously. The lack of empathy shown after this long forgotten incident appears rather subtle, in a way, and petty to remember. Except for the deep impression it seems to have made, as I feel any time my feelings are dismissed by others.

My childhood best friend, Michael Siegel, who lived across the street and was two years older than me, had a vivid imagination and a great sense of adventure. He and I would roam the neighborhood, claiming new forts in the spaces between garages. We would travel surreptitiously from one fort to the next, navigating a dangerous war zone like two well-armed expert spies. Each fort had a name, Green Gate and Bramblebush are the only two I recall. We had to carefully navigate a low, spiky, barbed wire-looking brown coil hedge that looked like the Crown of Thorns, to find safety inside Bramblebush.

We also had the Waterbug Club, whose charter demanded that we jump through any sprinkler we passed on our way from fort to fort, or chasing the ball during our one on one baseball games in the street in front of my house. We did a lot of chasing, because the street sloped down to Union Turnpike, which was behind the home plate he’d painted in the street one day. Where the seven or eight year-old got a can of green pain, or how he painted home plate so perfectly, I never learned. When the sprinklers were running a river ran down our street toward the Turnpike, against whose inexorable flow we always hurried to build a heroic series of dams out of twigs and mud.

We used to regularly patrol the alleys behind the stores on Union Turnpike. These alleys, for some reason, always contained empty deposit bottles. There were the two cent regular Coke bottles and the larger sized ones which fetched a nickel. We were diligent collectors and eventually had over a dollar in our coffers. We decided to go to the candy store and spend the whole bundle on candy. In those days, 1961 or so, you could buy a ton of candy for a dollar. A Milky Way, Mr. Goodbar or bag of M & M’s cost a nickel.

Michael hatched the plan. The candy store opened early. On Saturday we’d get there as soon as the store opened, buy a shit ton of candy and eat it all. At five or six I didn’t have an alarm clock in my room, or even a clock, but Michael figured everything out. He must have known how to tell time and had an alarm clock. We’d tie a long rope to my ankle, I’d go to sleep with the rope hanging out of the window, and in the morning Michael would give the rope a yank, I’d wake up, get dressed and off to the candy store.

The only weak link of this plan was that we didn’t have a long rope. We managed to get a bunch of ropelike material, more like very flexible long plastic straws than rope, but there was no reason it couldn’t work. We tied enough of them together to make a long rope. We made a loop at one end, which I inserted my foot into, and I went to sleep, excited about the brilliant plan we were about to pull off.

I woke up the next day with the loop still around my ankle. Michael had come by early, as he promised, and yanked on the “rope”. The rope came apart in several places, as we confirmed later. Five and seven year-olds are not always intuitively expert knot tiers, it turns out. I was pissed off about the failure of this brilliant plan. I guess I shared my frustration with my parents.

They might have found it mildly funny, how pissed off I was, but what I remember is for years afterwards my father would bring up a similar moment of frustration I’d expressed. “You were inconsolably angry because it RAINED,” he’d say, shaking his head with a dismissive smile. The rain had apparently canceled something I’d been looking forward to. I was upset and frustrated because something I’d been excited to do had been washed out. “You were in a rage because it RAINED,” said my father, many times during my childhood, demonstrating the ridiculousness of my disappointment and the irrational anger it caused.

From my irrational feelings about an act of God it was easy to trace all of my other frustrations and anger to this same need to rage for no reason. As an old man now myself it is easy enough to see that my father had never experienced empathy as a boy. In his mind I was a spoiled middle class kid who expected his excited plans to work out. He’d survived so much worse, that my childish disappointment was something to dismiss, mock. The pain he’d been forced to endure rendered him incapable of ordinary empathy. Profoundly sad thing, that.

The painful challenge of the adult child of a narcissist

When somebody who can’t be wrong feels challenged, defied, they fly into a rage. It is embarrassing to lose control like that, humiliating even, and this type will blame the person they raged against, every time. “You did this to me, I just reacted. I did nothing wrong, you did everything wrong. You owe me an apology.” If you are a child, and this person is your parent, you stand up for yourself at your psychological peril.

No allowance. You’re grounded. You’re in my doghouse. You don’t love, or deserve to be loved. You can’t forgive. You cling to your hurt like a baby. You’re crazy. You don’t have the slightest clue how the world works.

This last bit is true. These types literally run the world, because they are deadly determined to always be in control so as not to risk being humiliated. It was their early life humiliation, and that terrifying feeling of powerlessness, that created their zero-sum worldview and tyrannical personality. My way or the highway, asshole. I’ve cut people dead for less than what you did to me, you ungrateful piece of shit. They demonstrate their terrible power by making good on their threats to exact payment for disobedience. If you want to be dead to them, keep insisting they had no right to rage at you.

The adult son is locked in a psych ward after some dramatic display of desperation, two days after arriving back at his childhood home. You, my friend, would be desperate too, if, whenever you needed support, one parent always blamed you for their rage and the other one always quietly agreed with the abusive parent. “We have to present a united face, so as not to confuse the child, it’s just basic good parenting” the abuse enabling parent will explain to others.

To his son he will say “your mother needs to be right, and she is right. She is used to being the boss, she took charge of her devastated family at age twelve and has always been in charge. You need to accept that she can’t be wrong, because it’s true. You are dead wrong if you think either of us is ever going to tell you that she was ever wrong, let alone abusive.”

Not surprising that two days after the adult son moves back into his parents’ home the weight of it all comes crashing down on him. I don’t know how he got to the mental ward, but I know he stayed there until they could stabilize his mood well enough to send him back into the place where his soul was crushed from the time he let out his first unanswered cries for empathy.

It is the biggest part of my current torment, to have the keys to his cell in my pocket and no way of getting them to him.

The Great Dictator

Nowadays, for anyone who wants just to write, and forget about having millions of readers, someone who just needs to write everyday and make that writing accessible to others, this is a golden age.

Any schmuck with a smartphone and an app can sit in a recliner and make like the great dictator. I talk to this phone the way Adolf Hitler talked to loyal halfwit Rudolph Hess, who transcribed Hitler’s incoherent gibberish in a way that was also completely unreadable.

This phone allows me to go back and make any number of editorial improvements with the keyboard. The result is prose of the highest quality that I am capable of producing.

In this chair, pontificating, I am the great dictator, literally. I dictate these words into my telephone. I will then take the Rudolph Hess-like transcribed gibberish and render it back into the English that I spoke into the phone.

It’s a refinement that, sadly, Adolf Hitler could not avail himself of there in Landesdown prison when he produced his masterwork “My seven years of struggle against the lying, filthy Jews, Communists, homosexuals, and other inhuman, maggot enemies who stabbed the victorious German army in the back!!!!” [1]

That dramatic Hitlerian title was later prudently shortened to Mein Kampf (My struggle). Picture being the editor trying to argue with fucking Hitler.

Hitlerious, no?

[1] Wikipedia corrects my recollection:

Hitler originally wanted to call his forthcoming book Viereinhalb Jahre (des Kampfes) gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit (Four and a Half Years [of Struggle] Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice).[8] Max Amann, head of the Franz Eher Verlag and Hitler’s publisher, is said to have suggested[9] the much shorter “Mein Kampf” (“My Struggle”).

Trauma and immature parents

I’ve got to keep writing the same idea until I get it into a gentle enough form that it might be heard and considered. My credulous former friends are just what they are, there is no reaching those who uncritically embrace hateful lies, angrily close their minds, or what’s left of their minds.

I’m trying to reach a young man who is living in hell, the identical hell I escaped decades ago only by the best of luck. He is living with parents who had no hesitation to fly into a rage at a hurt old friend, arguably their closest, and embark on a deliberate campaign of lies, to destroy my good name among our fellows, when I needed to talk through a conflict with them. This poor guy is their oldest son.

Trauma, observes Bessel van der Kolk, is when we are not seen or known. When a child is upset, and parents look away, wait for the bad mood to pass, will not yield in any way, there is your basic recipe for trauma.

No reason can explain why the kid is acting this way, no explanation or understanding is possible, the crying simply must stop. Parents act this way only if they suffered similar abandonment when they needed to be comforted as infants.

An inconsolably crying child presents a challenge to every kind of parent. Emotionally immature parents, who have been damaged by the same kind emotional distancing when they were crying children in need of comfort, feel embarrassed at their helplessness. It makes them look terrible in public, too, not being able to control their child. The upset child is now assaulting the immature parent’s image as a great parent. The situation instantly becomes about the parent’s feelings, not the child’s.

It can take you decades, if ever, to recognize a basic fact about your childhood. Your strong-willed parent, who can neither be wrong nor apologize, may turn out, when you add up years of evidence, to be a bully. Bullies are created by abuse that damages them to the point they lash out at others whenever they feel threatened.

A bully is, obviously, not a good parent, they are too hurt themselves to help anyone else in trouble. They will do terrible damage they can never acknowledge or take responsibility for.

The best you can hope for, if you do enough hard work and have enough help and luck to untangle complicated emotions, is a deathbed reconciliation with the bully, full of regrets as they are about to leave this world.

I had a deathbed reconciliation with my father, a raging, frightened bully. I felt it was a beautiful mutual gift at the time, a blessing, but his “I wish we could have had this kind of talk fifteen years ago, but I was too fucked up” is about the most poignant line I can imagine a dying father saying to his son. That I can’t cry about it to this day is one of those mysteries of being a male in our toxic society, but the line is no less tragic.

If your parent is still angry at their own mother or father, in adulthood, chances are they will not be able to give you the kind of nurturing they never experienced. They will demand obedience in all circumstances and blame you as defiant and irrationally angry if you show any hesitation or resentment.

Parents who need to be right will not tolerate that kind of behavior for a minute, it will enrage them. The child learns early to avoid this rage any way they can. In the end, expressing true feelings becomes futile.

The damage is done, congratulations, the bullying parent insists they are fully justified, and now your challenge begins. You will be second-guessing your true emotions for the rest of your life, trying to avoid conflict. You may be subject to episodes of mania, rage or depression. Strictly speaking, it’s not your damaged parents’ fault, but that’s cold comfort, I assure you.

A rage to be right

There are some people, you’ll discover, if you ever have a conflict with them, who are incapable of ever being wrong. These can be close and loving friends, it turns out, and everything will be fine as long as you are always conciliatory and never make a fuss about the occasional mistreatment you may experience. Their tragic, aggravating flaw is that they cannot compromise because such weakness is intolerable to them.

When real conflict arises, and you don’t pretend not to be irritated, you will suddenly see that you are up against a monster, because to them the stakes are not the human ones of sometimes feeling bad about being wrong, but utter humiliation for them. They simply cannot tolerate being wrong and they will kill you, if necessary, to prove that they are the most loving and perfect people ever created.

It’s tempting to call these kind of people psychos but I prefer to think of them as extremely damaged. The problem comes when these damaged people become destructive, as they always do when they feel threatened. They are hypervigilant about threats.

They act with no regard for the brutal harm they inflict because they are always justified in their rage. Their only interest is in being above reproach, being right, being superior. They cannot control their fury to “win” and will do whatever it takes to prove themselves perfect and beyond reproach. They are some of the most dangerous motherfuckers in the world. They tend to write, and rewrite, history.

My two closest friends, for literally decades, turned out to be people who cannot be wrong, people who, if they are wrong, will prove themselves right by any means necessary. After a nightmarishly tense long weekend in a rented vacation house they barely made eye contact as we said goodbye. The anger I had witnessed between them in that house required the end of our relationship and my removal from our circle of friends. They made it very clear to me that unless I admitted that I was the cause of all anger and bad feeling in that house, we were not going to be friends.

Somebody else would have told them to go fuck themselves, and would not have been wrong to do so, but, out of love for them, and valuing our long friendship, I spent over a year trying to make peace with them. It was possibly the most difficult year of my life. I did learn a few important, painful things. One is that you can’t make peace with people who can never be wrong.

Long periods of angry silence did not cure me of the need to talk about the hurtful events of that vacation from hell. Threats to walk away from our friendship, for the unforgivable things I had done (unspecified) did not deter me. I sent letters they claimed never to have received. They got angry whenever I tried to talk about healing our friendship. They began lying.

After a joyous wedding we attended with a group of longtime friends I got a text saying we could only talk to each other in front of a mediator. When I suggested a meeting to agree on facts to present to the mediator they agreed. Covid was still raging so we sat outside to talk, as the temperature dropped. It was literally cold as hell as they squared off with me. They both were angry during the conversation, resisting everything I said. There was no fact they’d agree to, facts would be left up to the mediator.

This type sees people like mediators as tools to prove themselves right. Why not let the professional decide who is right and who is wrong, that’s what mediators do — according to people who cannot be wrong.

If two parties go to a mediator with no agreement about the nature of the conflict, or what their respective interests and positions are, the mediator cannot possibly help mediate any kind of compromise. That’s not the point for people who can never be wrong.

These two would present reasonable, successful, normal faces to the mediator, complain that I, an unreasonable, unsuccessful, abnormal and tormented person simply refused to accept responsibility for being an asshole, and that they greatly loved me in spite of that. The mediator might be convinced. Then, in their mind, I’d finally have to shut the fuck up. Set and match.

When it became clear they would fight every attempt to heal, except for their fail safe mediator ploy, I told them it was useless to go to a mediator. A month of silence followed.

During that month they got busy, working on all of our mutual friends. The story all of our mutual friends heard was that Eliot sadistically tortured them for over a year trying to bend them to his will. Not only that, his rage was unappeasable. He refused their desperate last ditch attempt to heal with a professional mediator. They had apologized to him over and over and over but it was never enough. So Eliot was also unforgiving, inhumanly so. Eliot was so enraged at them, because of his childish childhood pain, that he simply could not recognize how much they loved him, how hard they were trying to convince him of their love. Eliot had made it literally impossible for them to live. Eliot had killed them, Eliot was a murderer and a lawyer specializing in denial, distorting the plain facts to make other people look like liars. Eliot had laughed as he slashed them to death, laughed and joked as he was slaughtering them. You think Eliot is an easygoing, philosophical guy with a quick wit, but that’s his mask. Eliot is a cruel, vicious, venomous monster. Once you are determined to “win” at all costs, trifles like truth and lies be damned.

I’d like to say that these long-time mutual friends all called me and asked me what the hell was going on. None did.

In fact, they all told me that I had nothing to say, that they were not prepared to listen to my longwinded protests about what I claimed actually happened. They spoke in one voice: unless I was ready to do the hard work to heal from my irrational childhood pain, and honestly forgive people who loved me dearly, I was as good as dead to the rest of them.

And so it was, and so I am.

One could say I’m better off, not having these brittle friendships in my life anymore. I’m not so sure. We shared a lot of love and many laughs for 50 years, and none of us is perfect (outside of the two assholes who smeared my good name).

But if you can’t be wrong, and you’ve lived your life acquiring the power and the manipulative skills to do so, you will kill anybody who threatens the image of you as a perfect being. Such is the treacherous world we make our way through on our journey toward death.

I’ve got to talk to my shrink

Note: I originally wrote this many months ago, maybe nine months or more, while I was still wrestling with an insoluble conflict that I have since recognized was insoluble. That particular day my mind and soul were smarting from the ongoing fucking they’d endured for many, many months.

I came to see that recognizing that the people I was in the conflict with were not capable of resolving conflict was the only exit from that conflict.

I kept intending to come back and rewrite this piece, edit it a bit, but I never did. I put it on auto publish for a remote date. That day turned out to be today. Anyway, here it is.

When I’m wrestling with something that upsets me, for example a long dispute over whether it is reasonable for me to feel upset — no matter how intolerable a situation may have become or how long it is extended — I have to be judicious in what I say to the few good friends I still have.  Sekhnet can understand a good deal of what I’m upset about, but she reaches a breaking point, as we all do, trying to think about a conflict so seemingly straightforward to resolve but mindfucking in its prolonged difficulty to put right.    

There are contradictions in human behavior that can drive us mad, people cannot process such difficult things, or even sit with feelings about them for very long without getting frustrated.  Frustration is a short step from anger, and that flares easily enough when confronted with a problem without a solution, or a problem whose only possible solution lies in remaining supernaturally patient, kind and understanding, no matter what the other parties to the conflict do to make that difficult. 

If your patience is rewarded with ongoing accusations of ill-will, it is very hard to remember that everyone is truly doing the best they can within their limitations.   It is not fair, after a certain point, to expect others to be of much help with things so personally painful and so long impossible to fix.   At such times, seeing I am placing an impossible burden on someone I love, I have to remind myself to shoulder the fucking thing myself, which I am still not good at doing.      

“I’m going up to sit down with my shrink,” I said to Sekh just now.  And here I am, sitting in front of this page.

In writing, thinking, rewriting, we can often see things more clearly than when senselessly arguing with people about views they need to dispute every detail of.  Shouldn’t sitting down to write be the end of it, write in my diary and learn what I can from the exercise?  Why post these sessions for anybody to see?  Aren’t these private thoughts about interpersonal pain that are nobody else’s business but mine and whoever it is I claim acted poorly toward me?   They are private thoughts about painful feelings, but, if unexpressed, these feelings will literally choke me to death. 

The reason I post them is to be aware of every word I write, to weigh my experience against counter-arguments, to write as though the whole world is watching, so to speak, causing me to choose my words with care.  I write to clarify, and simplify, things that are impossible to make clear in the snarl of understandable defensive rebuttals.

The only antidote to forced silence during a conflict is dialogue, and if speech is forbidden, or topics placed out of bounds, and a written attempt to begin reconciliation is ignored, the only way for me, personally, to avoid choking to death on that conundrum is to post my wrestling match with those concerns here, in generic form.   If my need to make myself clear, to understand something that has become maddening, is more important to me than making sure people who are keeping their distance from me would not be hurt to read these words, it’s a trade off I have to make, to preserve what’s left of my sanity.   A calculated risk I have to take sometimes because this exercise is essential to my ability to remain at all calm in the face of prolonged demands to understand others while the simple reciprocal good will I need is dismissed and I am blamed for all the bad feelings anyone has.

Few people read these posts anyway.  Names are not mentioned.   The likelihood of anyone I am in conflict with clicking on anything here is very small.  What they read may make them feel defensive sometimes (as I’m told the title of a previous post on friendship, I hope this doesn’t sound judgmental does — in fact, without the title it drew a snide comment), but we are already in a burning emotional cul de sac, a massive shit fire with no way out except through talk, which has been delayed for many months, for a variety of sometimes perfectly good sounding reasons.

Another reason to put these issues here is to set out thoughts that can hopefully be useful to others who may find themselves in a similar predicament.  It’s a relief to read something that makes you realize you are not alone in something mind-fuckingly hard you are going through.   Nothing that happens to any of us is unique to our lives, there are variations of things that cause us our specific pain all around.  It can be helpful to read somebody else’s best ideas about dealing with something you may have gone through, are going through.  We are all damaged, in different ways, all human, we all fall prey to various weaknesses that keep us from always acting the way we hope to act. 

There is no shame in failing to remain your best self at all times, and no harm, as long as you can acknowledge it when it‘s necessary, make amends and try to do better.  Denial and counter-attack don’t help much, to state it as nonjudgementally as I can.

Many people have been raised by parents who were immature, unable to rise above childish reactions to their frustrations.  Only a lucky few have been raised by gentle, always kind and thoughtful parents who generally know what to do when their child is upset, or needs something from them they feel challenged to provide.  Such parents knew how to do this because they were lucky enough to be raised by such parents, or other family members or supportive adults or they had great therapeutic insights after a ton of hard work.   

Most children have to accommodate themselves to whatever their parents’ weaknesses are, accept being unfairly blamed, hit, snarled at, cursed, faulted for things that were only in small part their fault, expected to accept a story about them that makes little or no sense and take the adult’s shady version as the final word. 

Life itself is a sometimes shady story that seems to make little or no sense at times.   We puny earthlings are sometimes forced to do things we can’t really defend, our emotions get the best of our better impulses, our temper flares and afterwards we feel forced to somehow justify things we know we shouldn’t have done.   It is hard to admit you hurt somebody you love, hard to live with the guilt of being reminded you allowed a bad impulse to lash out, so we create scenarios in which we are actually the victim of the person who hurtfully insists we hurt them.   Many people simply hunker down behind their walls, wait for the hurt party to finally realize they are never, ever going to be fucking heard, clam up, and hope that once enough time passes in silence, everything will somehow be OK with that wounded loved one. Sounds like a reasonably insightful plan of action, no?

The only solution, sometimes, is striving to remain the calm adult in a room full of hurt children, suffering over emotional pain they have never been able to get any kind of useful handle on.  Try that one sometime, hardest fucking thing I’ve ever tried to do.

Thanks for being there for me, Doc. I can see our time is up. The check’s in the mail, and this time I’m not lying.

The challenging need to be authentic

As much as we need connection to others, attachment, to live full, healthy lives, we also need to be authentic — to act in accordance with our deepest needs and beliefs. If you can’t be honest with people you are attached to, you are in a vise that, eventually, will squeeze the life out of you.

So if you need to express something that may affect your attachment to people close to you, and you’re aware that the expression will place pressure on the relationship, you might as well just express the full thing as clearly as you can. If you try to hedge, be polite, respect the feelings of people who can’t accept you as you actually are, well, you’re probably already being sucked toward that treacherous waterfall anyway.

If you say gently that you’re having a hard time living with certain untruths that have been told, you are already gently assenting to your own punishment which is as sure to follow as night follows day. If someone is lying to you and expecting you to silently agree that the lie is necessary and proper, there’s not much point being attached to someone like that.

So whether you gently object, or make your objection as plainly and unmistakably as you can, the effect will be the same. Someone who knowingly lies will not tolerate a word like “untruth”. Anodyne expressions like “debatable”, “questionable” or “not necessarily true” will strike them as forcefully as the proper word, adorned or unadorned, a fucking lie.

In the end, no matter what you do, you cannot convince someone who has already decided that you are dead that there is really no reason to kill your memory too. There is every reason to! You are coming in after the conversation is finished, as you yourself are also finished. Nothing infuriates righteous killers more than when the accursèd dead insist on fucking speaking.