My mother is a rotten cunt, a narcissist sociopath, a liar. She’s typically thriving when getting away with lighting the family dog on fire, planting cameras in my room- watching me masturbate, covering up my psychic abilities, controlling finances, or destroying everything in the vicinity.
A narcissist feels no empathy, trapped to a world of subconscious anger due to repressed emotions toward the primary object (mother), and its unfortunate to have one for a mother. She found a codependent, my father, somebody weak, and leached into the family system. A narcissist requires a cloak, a mask, SOMEBODY to help hide. Camouflage.
Imagine being told you’re a gifted child, graduating law school with stellar grades, taking decent jobs, only to marry a sociopath and throwing your family’s future down the drain?
Ask my father how he’s handling the situation.
The worst part of confronting narcissism is how nobody will believe you, and even if they do, they’ll be too fucking weak and pathetic to actually help you, preferring the comfortable bosom of the vile narcissist.
Staying married to a narcissist is constant ass covering: rehabs, child behavioral problems, lack of identity, lack of self esteem, and creating excuses and compensations to ever address the REAL CAUSE of your crumbling children, your crumbling castle.
THE REAL CAUSE, THE NARCISSIST.
My life is pointing at somebody going “LOOK, THE MONSTER”, and getting the pitchfork in return.
The main reason: it’s difficult for my family members, particularly my siblings?
How can you confront Mom when Dad was always the “bad guy”.
A narcissist needs… REQUIRES a weak co-dependant partner… somebody they can emotionally manipulate…even creating an Oedipal Complex amongst the children, turning the children against the opposite sex parent through mind games and manipulation. Preferring the same sex parent, maybe even sexually.
It’s impossible to rule out emotional incest, how the parent utilizes the child for emotional satisfaction — a younger, easier shaped replacement for the spouse.
My father, an emotionally weak and fragile individual, was perfect for the undertaking. My siblings and I grew up attending therapy, complaining about the maltreatment from my father, the verbal abuse, anger tantrums, even physical abuse.
And although the behavior appears narcissistic, we’re actually dealing with a CO-NARCISSIST, the personality who defends and upholds the reality of the narcissist, by any means necessary.
The co-narcissist is well-aware of their narcissistic partner, but it’s the love language they KNOW. It’s their PROGRAMMING — their world.
You have to be careful pulling people from THE MATRIX. How do I know?
The response to confronting narcissism is a weaponized reaction from the narcissist and co-narcissist.
My father called me crazy, delusional, told me I needed medications, doctors… that I was insane and needed help.
My brother called the police twice during two verbal disputes, illegally hospitalized me, and attempted a Protection From Abuse from the courts.
Why?
Because I verbally confronted my substance-abusing brother who crashed multiple cars, injuring bystanders– who collapsed into a pharmaceutical relapse due to his toxic relationship.
Each time, the police let me go, or even asked if I wanted to press charges when hospitalized…. an ordeal I refused because I didn’t need my brother arrested and taken back home. My brother and his wife decided to live from his car after intentionally starting fights at 3:00 AM, doing construction in his room to cause noise, to start fights he would end by calling the police.
I was finishing my last year of felony probation, five years, originally facing 10-14 years in prison for manufacturing/distribution of MDMA charges….
He was well aware.
The lengthy sentence was dropped due to lawyers and technicalities during the investigation… I’ll touch on this later.
Many YEARS were spent confronting narcissism, to no avail, fighting with each member of my family in the process – or being avoided entirely.
My mother and I were all ready fighting constantly, so the nudge in modern psychoanalysis was all I needed to see clearly, to reach the revelation my mother was a narcissist sociopath.
However, the process was more difficult for my siblings and father, who cowered at the opportunity to hold my mother responsible.
Covid was the eye opening experience… that my father wasn’t the real patriarch of the family, and that somebody else was pulling the strings.
Dilapidated fences and runaway dogs was the initial start…. Night after night, morning after morning, day after day… my dogs were placed outside without leashes onto a property with a dilaptiating fence.
Everyday the dogs escaped, and everyday there was no solution. I was currently in the peak of my therapy, coming off medications, and financially dependent — making it difficult to initiate any response, and almost waiting on my parents to “do the right thing”.
They never did, continuing to allow the dogs onto the back property with no containment, causing the dogs to escape, to dash onto busy Providence Road, to cut themselves, and eventually injure their joints and ligaments.
MULTIPLE veterinary trips to assist dislocated joints in MULTIPLE dogs, a result of diving underneath a half broken fence while chasing animals. How about when the dogs needed veterinary assistance? For instance, when my dog was trembling in his own urine, an injured joint – totally immobilizing.
My mom left him in the urine, saying he must’ve gotten “wet outside”. I still have videos of my dogs whimpering, limping, and covered in scrapes….
Not to be confused with the scars my mother intentionally inflicted on the animals, primarily using her nails and lighters.
My parents did nothing while I attempted to scrounge money to buy fencing materials, which often accomplished nothing due to the severity of the damages.
WHY?
Who’s the bad guy when somebody’s throwing temper tantrums over a broken fence and hurt animals? Well apparently, in my family, it’s the guy throwing the temper tantrums… it’s not about the cause.
Plus it was easier to address Nick’s CRAZY, out of control response than to address the narcissist who refused to address the broken fence, who CONTROLS the finances, who continues to bring more dogs onto the property even though the fence is broken.
In the midst of the dogs escaping, my mother said she’d watch a family friend’s dog, who escaped and caused a massive panic attack between my brother and I…
The incident caused a fight, and I eventually punched a vase in anger, resulting in scars and tendon damage that never healed, why, because somebody thought we should be dog-sitting with no leashes and a broken fence, leaving my brother and I with the dogs while they went to dinner.
The fence and my dogs initiated the conflicts between my mother and I, proving herself a narcissist by the way she treated my dogs and handled them escaping.
Not to mention the bloodied wounds I found on my dog, the mysterious scars, and the weird, creepy excuses from my mom….
“Oh that’s a skin tag” “Geno was stung by bees”
“The dog was playing in thorn bushes”
REMEMBER, hurting animals is a sure sign you’re dealing with a narcissist. In fact, I’m pretty sure my mother tortured my dog with anal cancer, in order to quicken his death.. WHY?
Because his death and behaviors were exposing my mother’s narcissism, primarily how my dog behaved narcissistically, mimicking my mother… and how the dog required compassion, energy, but most of all, money to keep him alive.
The dog was ultimately put to sleep early, a neurosis. Instead of dealing with my mother’s narcissist behavior, my family became obsessed with her narcissistic dog towards his final days, who displayed narcissistic qualities, who ultimately thought he was better than my family. A pompous poodle, raised by my mother, who displayed little empathy and bullied other dogs, even other members of the family.
I’m just getting started… I have a lot to say, but trouble getting anything across… Everything has to be the best thing ive ever typed, the best message to ever come across paper. How obnoxious?
While my mom is cutting off my finances because they’re investing in a “new fence”, it appears the perfect time to reminisce on the damn fence and all her glory.
Many years fixing the fence…. many goddamn years.
My mom doesn’t need any dog’s, she’s a big enough bitch.
If I want to prove my intuition, it might be imperative that I blog my reactions to the stimuli.
Because after all…
I’m still learning how to read my intuition after years of being brainwashed by my sociopathic mother. A process that is ultimately confusing and difficult to understand.
Was I really this psychic my whole life?
How did I not notice?
I’ve refused to start this blog out of fear of imperfection. How lame.
Especially when all I need to do is show up, be present, write.
The world is in disarray.
It’s the least I can do, right?
I guess.
Why?
What’s the matter?
What if I told you there was a narcissism pandemic?
An outbreak of narcissistic personality disorder ravaging every crevice on the globe.
A continuation of the patriarchy, the suppression of women, the adoption of repressive cultures and religions, the attachment to gender hierarchies and norms.
These are my observations from five years studying modern psychoanalysis as an intuitive empath.
Took me 5-6 months of constant pressing from my therapist before I woke up to my intuitive abilities, and honestly I’m still waking up.
I was really fucking brainwashed.
Nothing is making sense.
My childhood is a blur of nonsense and stimulation.
I’ll be writing about everything.
Every memory, every conflict.
No exceptions.
I’ll be leaving behind my diary of intuition, in hopes it awakens or aids another soul.
It’s a tricky topic — psychic powers, and it’s a long road to convincing people what’s happening — narcissism.
It’s a long road to convincing myself what’s happening.
How do we solve the narcissism pandemic?
By becoming conscious, healing our traumas, and implementing the teaching to our society — by living in alignment, living by example.
Just some thoughts.
Thoughts while I can’t sleep.
Thoughts while Russia threatens to use nuclear missles against imposing forces.
Thoughts in the age of conflict escalation.
Thoughts while our country remains president-less, leaderless, alone.
Are these insane times, or what?
I’m going to be writing more, even if it’s from my toilet at 6:46 am.
In a previous post, I wrote about my departure from live music journalism due to distance, troubled finances, disappointing DJ dominating lineups, and a personal bout with mental exhaustion. If you’ve been following the story, you witnessed my escape from cockroach motel, avoided chaos living on the road, and numerous confrontations with my parents – Eventually landing in a tiny Poconos community.
Misty mountain tops, lake beaches, and cold beer by the fire, right? Wrong.
My parents bought a cabin against my best wishes, I felt a bad vibe and have spent four months fighting for clean water, suffocating from gas leaks, moldy insulation, dead mice, and clogged sewage without ventilation.
Not to mention my PennslyBama neighbors.
The process degraded my mental health – the cherry on YEARS without proper sleep. Constant wars with family members, police intervention, homeless excursions. I just wanted a place to lay my head.
Not yet, said the universe. Whatever, learned how to stick up for myself more. Especially when the most basic of needs weren’t being met.
I took a break from shows, and opted for discovering new mediums.
Without a studio for recording music, constant rain, and backlogged anger, I was desperate for a form of expression. I texted my therapist complaining that my mediums were too tedious…. video editing, electronic music production, glitch…. these mediums aren’t always the most immediate and expressive. Sometimes I need to release energy without hesitation, without dialing audio levels and FX, or neurotically trimming clips.
Anger is explosive. Why hold it back? Instead of producing music, I drove around the Poconos filming Vlogs and drawing on free priority mail stickers, a trick I remembered from the street art documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop”. Painting BADBOOB.COM along with demons and devils, paranoid avatars, and gritty figures alike. Ejaculating them upon my choosing. Philadelphia street corners, Appalachia alleyways, highway rest stops, WAWA parking lots, and porta potty’s are all viable locations for STICKER SLAPS.
The idea arrived while shipping eBay returns and t-shirts (merch), and became a regular form of self-expression. Sharpies, acrylics paints, and priority mail stickers. Through the exploration of this medium, I encountered a discovery. The less thought, the greater the art. Intuitively, my mind scribbled graffiti-style cartoon characters. An unconscious repetition from bored years behind a school desk. Trapped with only pencil and paper.
The graffiti aesthetic echoed early hip hop and hardcore punk influences, listening to artists like Odd Future, Tribe Called Quest, KRS-ONE, Minor Threat, The Descendants, The Sex Pistols, and Black Flag.
Sharpie’s sprint across laminated priority mail stickers, spewing ink across government tax dollars hard at work. There is great enjoyment from slapping stickers across your local town, big city, anywhere really. Find a location, thumb the corner, peel the laminate, SLAP.
Why not give it a try? What’s stopping you?
Just grab a stack of FREE PRIORITY MAIL stickers from your local post office, or even better… order a stack from USPS.com… for free!
Sticker slaps not only assisted anger release, producing hundreds of stickers in a single session, but also assisted my overall message.
Street art often portrays themes, messages, talking points, criticisms.
Have you seen the work of BANKSY?
Bristol based street artist, BANKSY, known for displaying political themes and controversial messages, primarily taking shove at power structures, the military industrial complex, corporations, and dark human psychology.
Using a childish, naive artistic style fused with elements of graffiti, punk/metal, and freehand grit, I’ve been able to explore themes like the Oedipal complex, childhood developmental disturbances, narcissism, the mother complex, and childhood trauma.
A college friend relayed a message regarding the illustrations, “they definitely make you feel a type of way when you seen them which is good or bad.”
A lack of artistic brilliance is replaced by raw, unhinged emotion, expressionism; primarily repressed anger towards my sociopathic mother and codependent father.
While placing stickers in the streets of Jim Thorpe, I was beckoned by a woman – thrilled to catch an artist in the moment of mounting his work. However, the woman’s smile alchemized into a frown after making contact with the silhouetted woman glaring from the glossed paper.
“Is there a message behind these”, she asked intuitively. Sure, I thought, as another woman, covered in black – goth, peered uneasily into the drawings, shifting nervously.
“I like your shirt,” I said, eyeballing the surrealist monster climbing from the void presented on her charcoal t-shirt. “What is that?” “Goth band,” she said. (Sorry, I don’t remember the name) “Damn, that’s cool.” “I know,” she said, ” I have to get back to work,” and slithered from the local whiskey still.
A brief moment in contrast, as the two people standing before the woman couldn’t be anymore different in energy.
Narcissists are everywhere.
There’s no shortage.
The goal is to poke and prod the unconscious mind, to penetrate the deepest crevices, to unlock memories and trauma. To get people talking.
I don’t expect to be greeted with roses and wine, but I did take a few moments to test the whiskey’s provided by the woman working the local Still, who, for the love of God, wished I’d leave.
It’s not easy being THE BADBOOB. It’s not easy being the contrast in people’s lives. But this is the job of the intuitive empath, light work, to brighten the darkest places. To carry the torch under raining stones.
Additionally, the mounting EP’s, singles, and eventual album will require visuals to complement. Glancing at the Youtube channel, I realized video content was rather lacking. I opted for long format visualizers versus short form content, which slowed traction and prevented the initial launch.
Oh well, I was thrilled with how the visualizers appeared minus the conditions they were produced: moving constantly, state of chaos, uncertainty. However, I was able to produce a majority of my EPs plus visual content.
Recently, camera clutched in hand, I ventured to small mountain towns and sceneries: Weatherly, White Haven, Francis E. Walter Dam, using my camera for practice: taking photos, searching for cinematic angles, learning how to use the damn thing again.
Through this process, I learned how natural the camera felt.
How each shot felt connected to an intuition.
I’ve been using cameras to express myself since 2006, using a flip phone to capture lego annihilations, ketchup; and all, eventually receving a Canon ZR830 after receiving straight A’s in sixth grade.
Horror movies, Lego animations, and action comedies. The summer of 2006 was exceptional for creative exploration. I discovered a craft, draining hours of the day producing stop motion, editing fake trailers, practicing visual fx, fastening blood squibs to my brothers, screaming “ACTION”.
I think I’ve been neglecting this part of myself…. although the audio exploration wasn’t a waste, providing me with the much needed John Carpenter education; movies like Escape From New York, Halloween, Into the Mouth of Madness were childhood favorites.
I think it’s time to switch lanes a little bit. I’m having difficulty breaking onto the EDM scene, primarily because of politics; also because I produce ambient/cinematic thought-pieces. Following artists like G Jones, Eprom, tsuruda, Chee, Noer The Boy, and Little Snake, I haven’t delved into total IDM (intelligent dance music), but am surely tip-toeing the boundaries of experimental bass.
Instead of melding into the EDM scene, the ability to remain solitary allows for more exploration into my identity, my sound, and where I’d like to steer this project, THE BADBOOB.
Honestly, I’m not sure I want to be classified as “EDM”, instead drawing inspirations from Death Grips, Autechre, Woulg, and Flying Lotus’s label ‘Brainfeeder’, exploring the wild, weird, and experimental.
Together, the surrealism-horror visuals combined with the gritty-guerilla style filmmaking, raw glitch beats, and lifelong knowledge of film might aid the unravelling of what I’m ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO BE DOING.
Because I’ll be honest, I still haven’t connected with my true purpose yet. If it’s not yet apparent, i’m going through a trial and error process, testing different mediums, forms of expression, styles, and building the arsenal of what works best, what screams NICK RUBINOFF.
I do not expect to discover the answer immediately:
Isn’t this a part of life; discovering who you are?
If so, why should I expect immediate results?
I don’t, so in the meantime expect more trial and error, more random uploads, more play. Because isn’t that what it means to be an artist, to find love in your work, in the words of Alan Watt’s:
Random thoughts, 9:23 AM. Tuesday, September 10th, 2024
The morning dab alleviates the trembles, dulling vibrations penetrating my etheric body. I filmed a Vlog on Bear Creek, claiming I’d address this problematic relationship with cannabis, smoking everyday. Wake and Bakes. Globs. Dispensary dashes. Wasted earnings.
When will it stop?
Especially
High concentrated cannabis – wax, crumbles, shatter, resin, rosin, diamonds, sauce, sugars…. the good shit. PURE THC. The sizzle of the heated nail against refined cannabis oils. The roar of the rig. The tightening of the lungs. The closing of the eyelids. The exhaling of the cumulous cloud. The high.
Euphoria burrows into my chest like a squirrel for hibernation.
Climbing through the throat, expanding upward into consciousness, the warmth pierces my vision and dissipates intruding thought-forms, lightening the load accumulated from the astral plane during sleep.
A remedy for recent events.
I moved to the Poconos in search of peace and tranquility, instead finding chaos and upheaval as my parents purchased a dilapidated cabin.
A crooked cabin kit with moldy and rotting insulation, crumbling foundation, clogged and unventilated sewage, banging water pipes, bacteria and dirt clogged water, mice, and four months of leaking gas.
Only the foundation was reported on the home inspection, leaving another ten thousand dollars in unreported issues. My cheap parents were not impressed.
Any problems were met with resistance from my parents: weeks or even months of fighting before discovering a solution, because as far as they’re concerned, “it’s not that bad” or “that isn’t happening”.
I didn’t have the oven expected for gas until four months of living like an idiot – leaving my house, working from state parks, and eating in Wawa parking lots and Pennsylvania State Game Lands.
Avoiding the wretched smell of propane leaking into the wood cabin.
We thought it was dead mice. I found poison scattered throughout the property, rat cyanide, and assumed they died in the walls after discovering holes beneath the sink.
Dead mice were also discovered in the bathroom, kitchen, and attic. A war, it seems, and I’m relieving exhausted troops on the frontline. Except I just got done fighting cockroaches; plus the cockroaches and mice I encountered living on the road. I’m over this, honestly.
But after months of pest control, bait boxes – an arsenal of perimeter boxes placed around the cabin. The mice disappeared. The smell remained.
I contacted my general contractor who investigated the smell.
“Gas,” he said surprised. “Gas?” I thought, remembering the laundry list of text messages and phone calls pleading for help, and the memories of leaving my house everyday, sleeping in a tent, struggling for food without an oven, cooking outside. Passing out, falling asleep multiple times, feeling lightheaded, sick, headaches on top of my concussion.
Since I’m the BADBOOB for exposing my mother’s narcissism, this is well-deserved, a revenge if you will. Payback.
Not to mention…. I smoke weed everyday, possibly too much. I light incense and sage….everyday, all day. And it was almost fireplace season.
Kaboom.
I feel betrayed, ignored, angry.
But this isn’t anything new and i’m not surprised. Unfortunately, I haven’t been journaling like I should, so I don’t have the history documented in writing.
However, I did start Vlogging, which conveyed ideas while ungrounded and documented the scenario.
The constant intuitive-warnings, wild sprints across the Poconos, constant confrontations, and general unstableness was escalated by political upheaval. Joe Biden dropping out from the presidential race after an embarrassing debate performance, immediately affirmed years of media/establishment gaslighting. Kamala Harris hurdling any electoral process to secure Democratic candidacy. Fictitious felonies placed against Donald Trump, ‘trumped’ charges weaponized by establishment democrats in order to prevent a candidate from presidency. Memory-holed assassination attempts. And RFK Jr. joining the Unity Party alongside Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk.
The vibrations are dense.
And a double shooting in my small Pocono mountain town wasn’t on my radar while sorting through the distractions.
I was posting for weeks, SOMETHING IS COMING. Sure enough, a neighbor nearby went on a shooting spree, taking aim at local homes and property. Nobody was injured, but three local police departments and the Pennsylvania State Troopers were in attendance. Not to mention a neighborhood man was killed by PA State Troopers in a showdown earlier that day. Strange for a tiny town like White Haven, Pennsylvania.
“Things don’t happen around here often, but when they do, it’s loud,” said Toni (spelling?), local firewood providing resident.
I heard the shots while trying to take a nap.
Thick thumping in my stomach and then “pop, pop, pop”! The development is home to vacationers, neighborhood children, hunters, so I thought nothing of the commotion.
Was I out of tune?
Should I have seen these events coming better?
Again, it’s difficult to know what’s happening when you’re sorting through political and personal upheaval on the intuitive plane; which is why understanding your body is imperative.
Also, have you tried picking your battles?
Unnecessary battles cause unnecessary noise.
The secretary at our HOA office warned me, “Some of your neighbors don’t get along” but I never anticipated gunshots, SWAT teams, and police investigations.
The man was a resident of our community, the shots were one street over. The brooding, anxiety, anger were palpable over the past weeks.
Between all of these situations, events, conflicts…. I stay rather high on concentrated cannabis.
It produces the cleanest high so I’m able to write blogs and address work. I prefer to stay productive and honest, and writing while stoned is better than not writing at all, right?
Stumbling upon a Theo Von interview with Ruby and $crim from $uicideboy$, I was surprised to hear the pair discuss New Orleans. $crim recalls the emerging SoundCloud movement, rappers like Bones, Yung Lean, Xavier Wulf, and how $uicideboys$ achieved outside success before gaining acceptance in their hometown of New Orleans. $crim says, “We got poppin in all these other places first. It literally started from like Russia, and then came back… New Orleans was the last place”. Followed by Ruby, “The advice was don’t go local to international. Do the internet and attack the international crowd first because your hometown is going to be the last place that fucks with you, and it’s true because they still don’t fuck with us, deadass!”
Does this sound familiar?
While complaining in my previous blog, I stated how political commentary might’ve snubbed initial local success. However, I think it’s the name of the game, an archetypal pathway. (Obviously I haven’t been producing long either). There appear to be multitudes of reasons why artists confront resistance? I’d say resistance depends from person to person; however, how much is envy? I’m not saying this is something I’m currently struggling with entirely, but many talented artists face backlash from their communities.
Originally from Pittsburgh, when I discovered Mac Miller’s early work and Facebook messaged my old homies, they responded apathetically, “Eh, he’s a private school poser”. Granted, Mac had been a student of Taylor Allderdice for a couple years, my grandparent’s alma mater, a public high school.
Easier to hop on the hate wagon? Doesn’t require any listening, lyrics, music video watching, deep analysis, original thought, or work for that matter.
Just a repetition of words. “That guy’s fake.” “Yup!” It’s a bit lazy, but also highlights the emotion envy.
Why should somebody deserve any more success than me? A nasty emotion, envy finds roots in the work of Melanie Klein, prominent psychoanalyst and contributor to object relations theory. When confronted with difficult emotions or narcissism, the infant will split the identity of the primary caregiver into two separate identities during breast feeding, the good mother and the bad mother. This is reflected by the infant’s treatment of the caregiver’s breasts. The infant may bite, tear, or strike a breast, while showing affection and gentleness to the opposite breast. The child splits the caregiver into separate identities, a good breast and a bad breast.
Why does the child split the personality? The child is preserving the caregiver as “entirely good”, to shield the child from the realization their caregiver isn’t meeting needs and expectations, the realization the caregiver isn’t perfect or even a narcissist. The greater traumas, anxieties, and unmet needs present themselves during breastfeeding, the greater a child may develop “splitting”— viewing people, situations, life as unidimensional, instead of a complex, multidimensional wholes. The child was unable to confront the caregiver, and subconsciously buried the emotions, negatively rearing the infant’s brain for adulthood.
How does this relate to envy? The persecuted artist becomes a projection of the “bad breast” (failures, insecurities, negative emotions) instead of being recognized as an integral whole of the community. Why should they make it, when I deserve so much more? An unhealthy comparison between me, mine, and the other.
This versus that.
The underdeveloped ego fragments their fellow man as competition, a narcissism that drags everyone downwards, instead of banding together and rising the tides, because rising tides lift all ships. What if I told you this Bad Boob mentality leaks into the collective consciousness? Holocausts, genocides war— Us vs. Them. A society void of multidimensional thought, projecting negative emotions onto scapegoats— them, the other, the bad breast? Clues of the narcissism pandemic: envious, unidimensional, unoriginal thought.
How much of the problem is also rooted in society’s view of the arts? I personally spent a great deal of childhood fighting for the attention of my parents, producing short films, writing short stories, and playing the drums. My efforts were largely ignored and viewed as hobbies, not careers. Interest in film school and creative writing were met with sighs, not outright disapproval, but sighs. Originating from a family of professors, lawyers, and small business owners, the financial outcomes of an art career looked misfortunate. Ironic, given my dad’s weekend spending habits: concerts, movies tickets, and live entertainment. Again, how much is correlated to envy? “Why does he get to paint pictures, write stories, and make music while I negotiate deals for a hospital?” Have we lost scope of the full functioning society? The lawyers, doctors, accountants, developers, owners… but what about the plumbers, contractors, electricians?
Do we respect the working class community like we should? Pay them like we should? Doesn’t everybody feel under appreciated to a degree?
From an art perspective, the process is extremely under appreciated until you find “success” aka until you make money. Most likely because it requires help. Theo Von Gogh, younger brother of Vincent Van Gogh, supported his brother through art trading connections, advice, and money. The Medici Family supported Leonardo Da Vinci through purchases. Kierkegaard was born into a wealthy family. Claude Monet was often funded by his father, received a will, and often required assistance from his wife. Edgar Allen Poe regretfully enrolled help from various family members, often tumultuous. Thanks to Max Brod, the works of Franz Kafka were posthumously published instead of burned. How many underground musicians required a couch to crash on between shows, albums, etc? I suppose artists meet great resistance due to the platform, the potential fame? The artist may become a celebrity to whatever degree, and why do they get the chance but not me?
Despite the pushback Mac Miller received as the private school crossover, high school drop out, corny white rapper, he represented Pittsburgh throughout his entire career, highlighting the cultural possibilities of a small, Pennsylvania city — writing Blue Slide Park into the international vocabulary, and establishing Pittsburgh as a musical landmark. Mac Miller helped make Pittsburgh cool, man. Shit rolls downhill. The city and all its inhabitants become that much more enriched in history. The town Woodstock and surrounding areas shine as artistic epicenters to this day— fall out from embracing their local art community and music festival history.
Are we really going to ruin cultural opportunities based on unhealed parts of ourselves, based on envy? Is that the appreciation we show towards art?
Is that the appreciation we show toward our fellow man?
Or does hometown hate motivate artists to make even greater art, speak more freely from the heart?
Suppose it’s case by case but…
Next time you complain about your “dumpy small town”, why not think twice before shitting on your local artists?
Surfing the boardwalk, my thumbs slapped the shimmering reflection of my iPhone. Scrolling, searching for a song to captivate Ocean City, New Jersey on a sun-scattered, Sunday afternoon. Winds ricocheted against my black Nirvana t-shirt, hoodie around my waste, as I maneuvered through pockets of pedestrians embracing the unusually sunny, March day. The rays peered behind transparent clouds, illuminating a once barren boardwalk — elderly couples, families, dates, children, and surfers alike.
You may be familiar with this situation, scrolling through song after song, only to realize you’re stuck recycling the same playlists, the same artists, the same tracks: the most recently played. You’ll know when it happens, and if you’re like me, it’ll make you slightly uncomfortable.
“The world of music at my fingertips and I’m listening to the same Grateful Dead tape (Dick’s Pick 33: Oakland Coliseum October 9th -10th, 1976, highly recommend).”
The walk, an attempt to induce sleepiness and hunger, was grasping effect.
My stomach churned against the scent of boardwalk fries, oven baked pizza, melted mozzarella, and the brutal lines for ice cream.
“Maybe its time to head back?” I thought to myself, “I hardly have any cash to spend. Boardwalk’s expensive.”
True enough, I was dependent on my parents, something difficult to communicate or confess. Especially if you know my past, the lengths I exceeded to maintain financial independence from Mark and Betsy. Eventually landing in legal troubles, which unfortunately resorted in even more financial dependance.
I spent over three years grinding the restaurant industry during peak COVID: delivery driver, dishwasher, busser, runner, bartender, server, food prep.
During my time at Anthony’s, I was prepping ingredients, bartending, taking tables, running food, bussing, and cleaning the guest’s dishes, all in one shift. Essentially a one man show alongside a manager and general manager. Despite the hard work, I encountered a theme of narcissism and codependency that prevented any upward mobility, eventually being forced from job to job at high turnover restaurants. Does this have anything to do with my psychoanalytic education, anything to do with the fact I’m educated in why these managers and owners are burning down their restaurants in self-destruction?
Do they notice?
Am I perceived as a threat?
I asked my last manager during a heated argument and he never said no.
This is subject for an entire essay, so I’ll return shortly to discuss narcissism and codependency in the workplace.
Trouble with work and various life situations occurred, I was jumped on my birthday after an altercation, receiving a concussion and broken hand. A drunk driver totaled both cars while returning from Dead and Company, slamming my head multiple times against the roof and headrest, a confrontation between my prescription-pill-popping brother, his wife, and my parents where police and courts were summoned to clear the dust, and climaxing with a cockroach contaminated apartment.
I negotiate enough money to stay off the streets, feed myself, and continue working on my art — my chosen career field. I could’ve lived out of my car during the winter months, but actually found it moredifficult and moreworthwhile to negotiate support and avoid burning bridges.
A lesson I’ve been learning: How much are we able to accomplish with the help of our fellow man, how much easier would COVID have been if people and corporations actually assisted each other instead of accumulating profits?
However its a tense situation. I recently find myself in Ocean City due to lack of affordable housing near French Creek and the Poconos, my determined final resting place due to scenery and lack of people.
I have specific housing needs. My search for housing is a character arc itself extending from the age of five years old dealing with health issues, visiting countless primary care physicians, psychologist, psychiatrists, specialists, surgeries, inpatient, outpatient hospitalization. This is an incredibly personal journey, and I have to know what works best for me. I’ve already been forced to move from the last two locations in my life. So I’m sorry if I look like a rich kid on vacation right now, I have to know my self worth with the resources available. Like any businessman.
I will be returning to discuss abuse at the hands of the medical establishment, and resentment toward an upper-middle class upbringing. They are connected.
Walking for over an hour, my legs drudged over wooden planks, muscles tightening to my hips. Time to head back. I trudged along the boardwalk, allowing the salty breeze to clear my recently infected sinus’s — spying surfers in the distance.
They ambushed the pressing tides, whipping around storm drains and gulleys, washing up on sand-stained shores, crowds spectating in admiration.
In the corner of my eye, a bench protruded from the edge of the boardwalk, vacant, beckoning to melting thighs and aching feet. I placed myself against the wooden frame, enlisting the help of Alice In Chains to set the mood, MTV Live’s Unplugged. As Lane Staley’s hoarse, angst-embraced vocals soothed my ear drums, I heard a muffled vibration — a figure caught the corner of my eye.
“Whersav-Sdfaf—fd!”
“Huh?” I said, removing the earbud from submersion.
A bulky gentleman, five o’clock shadow, black sweatshirt over black sweatpants, worn tennis shoes, clutching a Dollar Tree plastic lunch-bag approached the boardwalk bench.
“You got the best seat in the house, I was here earlier. Bathroom.” he said hovering over the bench.
“Would you like me to move?”
“Nah man…It’s all good, best bench on the boardwalk. Five-O-One, Fifth Avenue, first bench — surfer’s bench,” he said taking a seat, “You know how to surf?”
“Can’t say that I do.”
“Usually we surf on the other side, but recently a lot of guys come here. I’m a big boy though, hardly fit into a wet suit anymore, gotta lose a couple pounds. Old man. Won’t catch me surfing near rocks and storm drains like these guys either. Young man’s game — didn’t mean to interrupt you. You can listen to your music.”
Half tempted to replace the ear bud, I sat frozen, aware of the possibility of conversation. A theme: encounters with strangers who shed light on specific ideas I’ve been ruminating in Modern Psychoanalysis. The crashing waves embraced a moment of silence, as the gentleman eyeballed Nirvana’s “In Utero” on my black t-shirt.
“I love the sixties, seventies, and eighties music man. The stuff that really rocks. The music they played at Woodstock; Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young, The Who, Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young; guys like The Eagles, The Cars, ZZ Top, Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Led Zeppelin, Bob Dylan, Dire Straits…even Ravi Shankar… I saw his daughter play the sitar once — music where they actually care, ya know?”
Recently visiting Woodstock this summer, I jumped eagerly into the conversation.
“Favorite band?” I asked.
“Too many. Depends on the day, the mood. Anything with real intentions, where they care about the rock n roll. Something pure. I’ll go as far back as Earl Scruggs and some bluegrass, to Chuck Berry, early Rolling Stones — better than the newer stuff, maybe some Jethro Tull. Have you ever listened to their first album? Better.”
“Incredible, bluesy with the harmonica,” I said.
“Yeah man, and the flute— ‘My Sunday Feeling’. People don’t listen to that stuff, always the radio songs. What’s you name?”
“Nick, you?”
“Ronny…Ronny Longboard Shwartz.”
We shook hands.
“No ninety’s music?”
“Nirvana is too weird for me, but I like Alice in Chains.”
We discussed music for almost an hour. Favorite musicians, Woodstock, discographies, blues, bluegrass, the invention of the synthesizer, the history of Bruce Springsteen and Atlantic City surfer culture, racist banjo tunes of the twenties. After a lengthy conversation, my stomached roared. I was preparing to leave when Ronny divulged about growing up in Atlantic City, moving to Ocean City, promising never to return to casino stacked skies, escort muddled streets, cracked out corners.
“A small town with big city problems,” he said, “all thanks to those damn casinos. I remember when they first opened. We were there. At the ribbon cutting. How much good those did…” Ronny explained how casino culture killed his hometown, increased alcohol consumption, gambling addiction, drugs, crime. “I’ve lived a hard life. Everyone grew up with a skateboard, surfboard, and an instrument in their hands. First they traded it for a bottle of liquor, then a needle of heroin. Peer pressure, always. I never met my dad. Called a Vegas gambling missionary and found him there, never met him. I don’t need that in my life right now.”
“You sure know a hell of a lot about music, did you get into a music career?”
“Nahh…Not exactly. Just day by,” said Ronny.
“Certainly know quite a bit. Who got you into music?”
“Myself. I was the lead singer of a band too.”
“Play any gigs?”
“Ha! Hardly, garage band. Just some local guys having a good time.”
Ronny focused on the surfers floating against the tide as a bicyclist slammed his breaks, eyeing Ronny from the throne of his bicycle — Tour de France bike suit and all.
“Yo Ronny, what’s good my man?”
“Yo, buddy. How are we today?”
“Good man,” said the bicyclist, “Haven’t seen you at ACME in a bit. You still over there?”
“Nahhh, I got fired.”
“Anyway you can get your job back? I’m sure they’re looking for every dick they can find!”
“Yeah,” Ronny said, Yeah.”
The bicyclist departed after a brief intrusion, as Ronny sat perched against the wooden bench, accompanied by his Dollar Tree lunch bag. The seagulls chirped overhead, casting shadows that whipped the wooden planks. Ronny continued.
“I don’t believe in religion,” he began, “religion is nonsense, controlling.” Ronny shifted toward me, hesitating. “You wanna hear something crazy?” Peering over each shoulder, Ronny paused. “ I guess I’ll just say it…. Fuck it, Despite everything I know there’s something up here,” Ronny circled the left side of his head with a finger, pointing to the empty space joining his ear. “I don’t know what it is…I was walking beneath the spot where my friend’s brother died, killed by lightning, leader of the local Neo Nazi’s, electrician. I don’t go back there often, but when I do, sometimes I feel him.”
Ronny hesitated for a moment, discovered I was still listening and continued.
“My friends are dead. I survived and I owe it to whatever this is,” Ronny pointed toward the empty space next to his head, signaling towards the other. “A hand grabbing my neck, telling me to go over there, stay away from that, ignore that, no, over here, idiot…. Sometimes it feels like my dead friends, my mother who recently passed, sometimes it feels like this one woman…”
“What woman,” I asked confused.
Ronny paused before removing a black brick from his hoodie pocket, a relic from the past, a flip phone. “Don’t mind me. I’m high energy, low tech.” He searched through his phone, returning the screen with a black and white, Marilyn Monroe-esque, photograph of a woman posing, faded, circa 1960’s?
“I don’t even use streaming services for music, just YouTube on my broken laptop, but here she is… I saw her photograph one day and decided to call her, let her know how much I appreciated her early work… before it got smutty and risqué. Not a fan of the slutty pictures. She wasn’t really there when I called her… dementia… I mean the photograph was thirty-forty years prior but I let her know. I’d call her from time to time, found her number online. When she passed away, I could feel her along with the others.”
Ronny pointed to his ear once more.
When Ronny mentioned the smutty picture and his preference toward purity, he provided a perfect example for the Madonna Whore Complex — the inability to view a woman as BOTH a caring, compassionate wife and sexual partner. Did you know a great portion of men are unable to perform sexually after they marry their wives? This is known as the Madonna-Whore Complex, stemming from the infant’s attempt at preserving the innocence of the primary caregiver. Melanie Klein, prominent psychoanalyst discovered that during breast feeding, a child would bite, tear, and punish only one breast; while finding great comfort and admiration in the second breast.
A ‘good breast’ and a ‘bad breast’ resemble the infant’s attempt to split the identity of the caregiver into two polarizing identities, bad and good instead of a multidimensional human, somebody who isn’t perfect. This occurs when the child’s emotional and physical needs are unmet and the child becomes overwhelmed with negative emotion. Instead of blaming the caregiver, the child splits the caregiver into two separate identities to preserve the child’s identity of the caregiver.
This phenomena translates to incredible problems in society. For example, one of my major inspirations in life, Ken Kesey, suffered from a Madonna Whore Complex. How? Maybe it had something to do with Mountain Girl, the young teenager who slept with Kesey during the Electric Kool Aid Acid years, who conceived his child while Kesey had a wife and family at home. In Tom Wolfe’s book, Faye Kesey is continuously projected as this Mary Magdalen, do-no-wrong, woman duty-fulfilling, child rearing housewife. However, Kesey seems unsatisfied, searching for an emotional outlet in teenagers. Mountain Girl and Kesey eventually split, leaving Kesey’s child to be raised by Jerry Garcia. While Kesey is pushing consciousness, spirituality, and a higher plane of existence, he’s simultaneously caught inside a childhood repetition which endangers the family model. Behavior that encourages the repetition of the Oedipal Complex, as Kesey’s children are witness.
The Oedipal Complex foreshadows difficulties with gender identification, the feminization of men, infantilization of children, preference of narcissistic love objects, and overall is a nuisance to developing society.
If you’re like me, you accidentally made a whore a housewife — Women who constantly look for sexual escape, incapable of unconditional love, bouncing from love interest to love interest, narcissistic. Were these girlfriend’s capable of providing real, unconditional love and support? In one example, the cheating, ghosting, and abandonment of our six year relationships should be the indicator. However, unconsciously this is what I was looking for: unloving women to debase and dominate as a sexual object, an oedipal revenge against a mother figure from childhood. The act of physically controlling a woman for a moment and casting her aside to prevent any vulnerabilities. Many times after having sex with a girlfriend or any woman, I’d feel a compulsion to drive her home, tell her to leave, go to sleep, even break up with her.
I also had trouble masturbating while thinking about certain women, as if I were “degrading them” or making them “unworthy”. One woman for sex, another for the home.
However, most relationships, I’d find myself sleeping with a woman only to run away until it was time for sex. Tinder and dating apps were incredibly enabling. It’s not proud behavior, but its a defense mechanism against my sociopathic mother — a subconscious recognition that women are possibly dangerous and must be treated as such.
My grandfather, when acting out during his marriage with my sociopathic grandmother (history repeats), brought his affairs to the dinner table. Literally.
In an act of self-destruction, my grandfather would actually bring his mistresses home and introduce them to the family. This is a revenge act against women in general, using them as objects, but especially my sociopathic grandmother — along with a cry for help. I grew up hearing about how my grandfather was a narcissisticasshole, a piece of shit who cared more about sex and himself than anything else, but after psychoanalysis, I believe my grandfather had a Madonna-Whore Complex — married to somebody with absolutely no ability for love or compassion — trapped with a sadist, looking for a way out.
It’s important to identify how narcissists and codependents share similar behaviors when self-destructing. The analysis of the self, family history, individual personalities, and individual behaviors allows access to the full picture. Without a properly trained analyst, somebody skilled in understanding resistances and unconscious motives, history may be lost.
Ronny also mentioned his skinhead friend who died from lightning (what are the odds). This provides evidence for the root of scapegoating, tribalism, and prejudice within the “the good” and “the bad” breasts. An infant will exemplify the same splitting behavior, not just within women, but races, religions, anything. Even how Ronny kept explaining every artist’s first releases were “better than the rest”.
Ronny’s automatically classifying a specific release as better than “the other” releases, solely based on order of releases. While I won’t disagree, AC/DC’s ‘Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap’ is a great album, is it better than Back in Black?
Jethro Tull’s ‘This Was’, more inspirational than ‘Aqualung’?
Suppose there’s no right answer, music is subjective, right?
Do you see the “This vs. That” mentality, at least?
How about the voices in his head?
It could’ve been easy to laugh at Ronny when discussing the orb of voices encircling his skull providing him with proper guidance, the deceased friends and family, the woman from the photograph, Raquel. However, Ronny didn’t explain the situation with a psychotic gibber jabber, he didn’t break from reality, he didn’t form word salad. You may be familiar with these phenomena if you’ve ever encountered a psychotic episode. Ronny carefully explained his perspective of intuition, listening to the inner voice, staying alive, and why he’s the sole survivor from his friend group, a burden he carried like the plastic Dollar Tree lunch bag.
It became more apparent when I tried to leave, and every time I said goodbye he rang me into the conversation. A man who’s lived a difficult life, few family, dead friends; freshly fired from his ACME day job, living vicariously through a group of young surfers in a body too big for a surf board. But a shimmer of light sparked from the corner of his eye, a relaxation when speaking, and a smile that hugged his prickly, oval face. A stranger, but no stranger to strangers.
“I’ve really gotta go.” I said, stomach twisting, eyelids cement.
“No worries, about time I hit the bathroom again. Been a couple hours. Just stay up, man. Don’t let anything or anybody get you down. You wanna learn how to surf, I’ll be here. Five-oh-one, baby.” He jumped from the bench, standing tall against the Atlantic City skyline lingering in the distance.
“One last thing,” I asked Ronny, “ Shwartz, what is that?”
“Hundred percent German baby!”
“Sounds like something out of Space Balls.”
Ronny sighed, “Never was a movie guy… more into music… Especially a movie where the yudin are tryna make a few bucks off a guy like me.”
A laugh struck me by surprise.
We shook hands under the flocking seagulls, amongst the first crowds of the beach season, basking in a beautiful spring afternoon.
“I’ll catch you later man!” I said, “thanks for the music suggestions!”
Amongst the crowds Ronny punched two fingers into the sea breeze, the sign of horns and bellowed,
“Keep rocking and rolling, Remember Ronny….Ronny Longboard Shwartz!”
One final attempt. The paper plate fluttered against moist embers, casting dust and debris into brisk winter winds. I gasped and heaved for ignition – praying for the wet wood to spark. A source to cook my dinner. Nothing. Glancing around the campgrounds, there was no escaping the record rains and flooded waterways engulfing French Creek State Park. I was forced to comply with the flooded conditions and recently purchased, sponge-soaked firewood. Great. The sun crawled beneath the prickled tree-line, drowning in a moonlit sky.
Time was against me. Darkness and no flame. Hungry.
A collision sounded from the adjacent cabin, penetrating a thin wooden frame. An argument, shaking the serenity of the cabin campgrounds. Minding my own business, I tended to the miserable fire, embers fizzling and smoke ascending amongst the onslaught of recycled forest droplets.
Too wet, I thought, screams reverberating against towering trees, Just my luck.
Glaring into the blackened logs, defeated, I examined the medical marijuana container resting on the picnic table. Removing the cap from the glass enclosure, a boulder slammed the pit of my stomach. The concentrated cannabis, welcoming with its fruity essence and sparkling aura, was replaced by scentless, microscopic specks.
No weed, no fire, and a choir of shrieks from the neighboring cabin.
I should’ve planned more efficiently, I thought, wasted time bouncing from storage unit, to hotel, to campground, to storage unit, to Facebook Marketplace buyer, to post office. Christ. How could I fuck this up?
Spending my days bouncing across southeastern Pennsylvania, I was exhausted and overstimulated, exchanging hotels and state park reservations in attempts to cut costs from vacating my recent cockroach-ridden apartment. Selling items from my storage unit to fund the expedition, asking family for assistance. Hotels are expensive right now, and if you manage to find something cheap? Good luck, there seems to be a bed bug and cockroach infestation sweeping the hospitality industry, even found them during my stay at Nockamixon State Park. Walking into a hotel without reading Google reviews is a job best suited for the Men In Black.
Do I drive to Pottstown? I pondered, while examining the empty marijuana container. I’d rather not, I just spent the entire day driving. Maybe I’ll just make ramen noodles or a PB&J? I should have something laying around he—
“Hey, what’s going on over here?” Expecting my conflict-stricken neighbor from the adjacent cabin, I was surprised to see a stranger, smile emanating from his beard, one hand outstretched, another entombed in a winter coat.
“Over here?” I asked, eyeballing the dysfunctional cabin behind him.
Did he mean the yelling?
“Trouble with the fire? Hey, my name’s John.” The outstretched hand maneuvered into my grip, as we shook hands underneath the moist canopy.
“Saw you over here, thought I’d say hello. I just moved down here a couple days ago. Scouted the area beforehand. Not bad.”
“Nick,” I said, shaking John’s hand.
“How long have you been out here? I asked a few other campers, varying answers. That guy over there, he told me he’s here on weekends. The couple next to me… they’ve been camping in a tent for months. Husband’s a manager at Turkey Hill. Looks cold in that tent.”
“Whenever there’s vacancy,” I said, pointing towards the rented cabin.
“How much?”
“The same as full hook up, minus the running water.”
“That’s not too bad. Yeah, my wife and I are splitting up,” the man interjected, “I’m out here with my camper. It’s not entirely winterized, but it’ll get the job done. Let me know if I’m being too much. People tell me I’m too much. Might be on the spectrum, a bit.”
“Sorry to hear,” I said, how long have you been together? The man shifted confidently in my direction, eyes shimmering behind a pair of glasses.
“Its okay, its my fault. It’s always my fault. I’m a bit difficult. Ten years…. I told you, if you’d prefer I leave, just say somethi — Hey, you need help with your fire?”
Smoke-stained logs peered from the fire ring, as the wind slapped our winter coats. Eyeballing the defeated logs, I asked,
“What do you have?”
“Yeah, one second, I’ll be right back. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” I stood watching as the man bolted from the cabin site, descending into the darkness of night. When he returned, John placed a six pack of Lagunitas IPA’s, folded cardboard, and a handheld device shaped like a butane torch.
“Wanna see something cool?” John ignited a switch on the handheld device, delivering a roar, which suctioned the nearby air, and dispensed punishing winds onto the ember-soaked logs. Flames embraced the wood, snapping against damp tree bark, mounting the steel enclosure. Fire.
“What the hell is that?” I asked, glancing toward the pistol shaped device.
“Multi-purpose air gun, useful for air mattresses and campfires. Want a beer?”
John passed me the Lagunitas, which I accepted.
“Are you hungry? I’ve got campfire nachos.”
“Absolutely,” he said, “But if I’m being obnoxious or taking up your time, just let me know, okay?”
I agreed, spreading tortilla chips, dicing jalapeños, green peppers, olives, and onions; scattering nacho cheese, cheddar, salt, pepper, a layer of taco seasoning. To compensate for the lack of protein, I doubled the portion of vegetables, tossing the cast-iron tray over the flames.
We discussed state parks, national forests, backpacking the Appalachian trail.
John’s an outdoorsman, spent much of his childhood camping with his family, later investing in his own camper, his home currently.
“From outside Reading,” John said, “I’ve been all over the area, but surprisingly never to French Creek.” Words arrived easily, comfortably for John, who found no worries divulging personal information to a total stranger. “We had three miscarriages, my wife and I. Maybe it’s a sign from the universe, right?” John peered into the campfire nachos, cheese fusing and bubbling amongst the heat. “I mean, I’m not easy to be with.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. I’m antsy, a bit intense. You know… you can tell. I’m difficult.”
It was true, John was a bit intense, extroverted, but was he menacing? Did his personality threaten me with the possibility of theft or violence? While I admit, I didn’t let him into my cabin… this was a rule of mine, no strangers in my bedroom —
I didn’t feel threatened. The man offered me beer and fire while essentially homeless during the impending winter months. In fact, he played a role I was all too familiar with: The self-attacking, low self-esteem, blame-taking codependent.
John was most likely confronted with a narcissist. How?
From his living situation, to the constant “I’m difficult”, the beers he explained he carries backpacking, the smile plastered to his cheeks, there appeared to be somebody in John’s life he had difficulty confronting, at the least.
“What do you do for work?” He asked.
“Restaurants, figuring it out ” I said, what about you?”
“Interesting,” he said, eyeballing my Honda Accord Hybrid parked in the cabin lot, “I’m a teacher.”
“Teacher? I come from a family of teachers. What do you teach?”
John took a swig from his amber beer bottle, eyes lingering against the flames.
“Pre-crime, a high school over in Reading.”
“Pre-crime, what the hell is that?” I inquired, picturing Tom Cruise from Minority Report, pre-cognitives floating in water, high tech surveillance gadgets.
“Reading’s gotten bad over the years. Real bad. Ghetto as shit. Where are you from? You said outside Philadelphia? So you know.”
Picturing the town of Media, Pennsylvania, A Christmas town, string lights illuminating State Street, the families in fifty thousand dollar SUVs, fastened designer bags, eight dollar beers. The homeless living in their cars behind Double Decker Pizza.
I shrugged, “Depends”.
“A lot of our kids are high risk for gangs, violence, jail and prison. Its a program designed for troublemakers.”
“Really, does it work?”
“Sort of, hard to say. Eh, Usually not. You have to know how to deal with troubled kids. They all have something to prove, they all want to look cool in front of their peers. You know how you handle them?”
“How?” I asked.
John emptied the beer bottle down his esophagus.
“You gotta give them a taste of their own medicine!” He chuckled, “they tell you to go fuck yourself, you send it straight back.”
“That works?”
“It works better than getting pushed around. It’s a balancing act.”
John didn’t know it, but he was channeling psychoanalytic insight.
Dr. Hyman Spotnitz, founder of Modern Psychoanalysis, developed a method for dealing with narcissists and patients called “eliciting the toxoid response”.
Spotnitz confronted patients while mirroring a caregiver or primary object within the patients past, beckoning an emotional response normally suppressed. The patient’s confrontation with their analyst bridges the unconscious material hindering their emotional progress. For example, an analyst may talk over the patient during session, tell them their ideas are silly and incompetent, show little interest in their session, or even mimic the patient.
The analyst attempts to embody a primary object or relationship from the patient’s life, or even the patient themselves.
What is the analyst looking for? A response.
Spotnitz believes repressed emotions, primarily negative emotions like anger, are trapped within the individual’s psyche. When the patient is confronted with the analysts behavior, they may eventually feel compelled to express themselves. The expression and identification of emotional triggers ultimately heals the patient over time by reverting them to the “pathological state”, the mirroring of situations and responses that molded the patient’s neurosis and illnesses. The patient exorcises unconscious, negative emotions, and directs them to the frontal lobe of awareness, and back onto the analyst. Energy may not be created or destroyed, only transferred and transformed. Law of thermodynamics.
Have you seen David Fincher’s Netflix show Mindhunters? The show resembles John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, FBI investigators from the emerging serial crime unit. While interviewing narcissistic, sociopathic, and psychopathic serial killers, the investigators become strikingly aware their conventional methods of communication fail to achieve results. Finally, the investigator played by Jonathan Goff attempts a different approach. He asks the prison guards to remove the shackles of notorious serial killer Ed Kemper, building trust between the killer and the investigator. The investigator proceeds to engage in lively conversation, asking Kemper how good it felt to murder those women, to defile, and embarrass their corpses. Instead of treating Kemper like a specimen, he forms a relationship, prying into the killer’s mind, allowing him to talk, and going as far as ordering pizza for interviews with Kemper. Investigators discovered a tight-rope when confronting narcissists, a tug of war between asserting dominance and allowing the imprisoned killer to talk freely.
Confrontation is imperative in modern psychoanalytic thought. When the patient first arrives in treatment, they do not view the analyst as a separate human being. The analyst first allows the patient to speak uninterrupted, forming a closeness in identification to the patient, dissolving the ego boundaries between the two. After many sessions, the analyst will provoke the toxoid response in order to assist the patients emotional outlet, to exemplify and initiate confrontation, to identify the separation between analyst and patient — to gain awareness of the suppressed emotion and the origin. This process of confrontation mimics the identification of self in childhood, predominately because a child’s ego first identifies with the primary object, eventually developing an individual sense of self through healthy maturation, through the freedom to discover and explore their own personal interests.
Have you ever met a child in the midst of the terrible twos? This is the child exercising their new knowledge of separation. They are saying “No” because they can.
“No” is the beginning of the child’s understanding they exist outside the primary object, caregiver, typically mother. A “No” is an establishment of the self. Improper understanding of this troublesome developmental stage may further repress the child’s developing sense of self. A caregiver may misdiagnose the child’s actions as “bad behavior”, instead of allowing the child to negatively express themselves, rationally.
Issues with this developmental phase may fracture the child’s identity or even cause gender dysphoria, especially if the child exhibits closeness with the identification of a specific parent. This is one reason why two parent households are so important, the child, especially a male, breaks their identification from the primary object, and requires an exemplary member of the opposite sex to solve the Oedipus Complex — the lust for the primary object. More often, the child mistakenly assumes responsibility for their parents emotions, becoming parent (people) pleasers, neglecting their own emotional needs for the needs of the caregiver.
(Another blog post about transgenderism soon).
While FBI investigators fell under increased scrutiny for ‘conversing’, ’entertaining’, and confronting societies worst, they eventually discovered a useful modality for conjuring informative interviews, along with a theme of harsh, conditionally loving mothers amongst serial killers —Ed Kemper, who engaged in sexual intercourse with his mother’s severed head.
Removing the cast-iron tray from bursting flames, I placed the campfire nachos on the wooden picnic table. Nacho cheese popped and geysered steam into our nostrils. We sorted tortilla chips onto paper plates, cracked fresh cans of beer, and sat by the fire’s warmth.
“So you come from a family of teachers?” John asked.
“Father is a lawyer for Thomas Jefferson university, both grandpa’s were local law/political science professors, grandma was an English teacher and guidance counselor, other grandma is a pastor, Aunt is a math teacher, cousin is a professor of music at North Carolina – Greensboro, Uncle and Aunt were professors at University of Toronto.”
“Wow, that’s pretty cool. I mean, what are the chances? Me, a teacher, meeting a descendent of teachers, in the middle of the woods, like this?”
A chill ascended my spine, tickling behind my ears, radiating to the top of my head. A reminder, that despite the cockroaches, despite the conflicts with my family, despite the financial ruin, the near homelessness, I’m right where I’m supposed to be: Tucked beneath the stars of Appalachia, munching home cooked campfire nachos, sipping Lagunitas beer, and sharing the company of a stranger during hard times.
“Ahh shit,” I said, glancing at the time projecting from my iPhone.
“What’s that?”
“Any dispensaries open at this hour?”
John excavated the trenches of his coat pocket, removing a black USB-shaped device.
“Here you go,” he said, “puff it long and hard brother. Live resin… yeah, yeah.. high school teacher smoking pot. It should be legal. Better than drinking. Seriously.”
Removing the device from John’s grip, I noticed the cannabis insignia painted across the black battery, medical marijuana, and live resin at that!
“Do you like teaching?” I asked, pressing the marijuana cartridge to my lips.
John glared into the fire-pit, a smile wiped his beard and without hesitating he responded,
“I love it.”
My lungs exhaled the herbal vapors which protruded against the moonlit evening, against the glow of the roaring flames.
The night was quiet and still and I was full and stoned.
Slam. A steel door penetrated an uncanny moment of hotel silence, awakening anticipated sleep, and plunging me into the chaos of shared living. Fumbling in the darkness, eyes scanning, I realized nobody entered the room. A fear when living in public spaces. A real fear. One “housekeeping” away. Trust me.
An ensemble of slamming steel doors thundered from the hallway, as truckers, vacationers, and passing strangers vacated their rooms. Holiday remnants.
Reaching for my iPhone, I peered at the clock unfazed. Ten o ‘clock in the morning. Early….erhhh no…late… difficult to say when forced captive by insomnia. Life becomes a game of addition, mounting individual hours of sleep in the holy attempt to gain a full night’s rest, usually unsuccessfully.
Glancing around the hotel room, a relaxation caught my breath, replaced by gnawing frustration. Why am I here, what am I doing, what the fuck?
At least I knew who to blame. For what? For moving into a cockroach-ridden apartment, which my landlord Julie Calboli knew before signing the lease. How did she know? It definitely wasn’t the cockroach gel left in the closet, or the clogged drains with battery-operated flood alarms, or the broken-decaying dishwasher with moldy vegetable specs, or the dilapidated oven, or neighbors claiming “the bugs are better than before”, or her refusal to ever meet face to face, stating “this has never happened before”… from afar.
Morgantown, eight minutes outside French Creek State Park, cordially became home after an exodus and months of location hopping – and it’s not perfect. Weekends are bombarded with sport teams, drifters, and the attached expo center magnetizes crowds across the state. The increased foot traffic means the increased slamming of doors. Typically begins around six-thirty in the morning and ends around four o’clock in the afternoon.
A recipe for disaster when dealing with insomnia.
Why don’t you just go home? Home. Sure, and simultaneously sacrifice any emotional well-being for the comfort of my sociopathic mother and codependent father. Yeah, that’s a great idea. I’m sure nothing can go wrong. I’m sure my physical and emotional health won’t pay the toll. I’m sure they haven’t all ready.
Too many emotional and physical scars to return. A sentence to insanity at best.
The gaslighting, physical abuse to animals, invasion of privacy; the constant games of mental chess, unlimited lies, fear of retribution, and the wire-rope of conditional love. The pettiness of discovering your chargers unplugged from power strips.
I’m good.
Awoken for the fourth time, bloodshot eyes, fingernails digging trenches, I yanked my phone from the table and took to social media. An outlet for my anger – An immediate, short form response compared to the screwdriver forehead-fracturing tactics of blogging. I honestly do not enjoy writing. Lets make this clear. God, I’ve been avoiding it. With everything I have. Fuck. However, unfortunately for me, I believe I’ve encountered a few opportunities to communicate a story. Not entirely my story, but the stories of people I’ve encountered on the road. They individually mirror a theme or person(s) from my life, ideas and archetypes I’ve encountered during my process with modern psychoanalysis.
This healing process: modern psychoanalysis, simultaneously ignited the fiercest conflicts I’ve ever known alongside the liberation of my unconscious mind.
A natural reaction, the mind becomes aware of the programmings of the programmer. Does this always warrant a negative reaction, well how malignant and improper were the programmings? And how nearby are these people during this process of unravelling?
Unfortunately, in my case, the parental programming was malignant, improper, and the unraveling process took place within my parent’s household… primarily during COVID. Confronting my sociopathic mother and codependent father is the greatest life altering situation I’ve encountered, and I’ve fought a lengthy prison sentence for a nonviolent drug crime.
Punching the purple Instagram icon, my thumbs ambushed the internet. Drawing from my discussions about narcissism, I posted various public messages regarding the unconscious presence of narcissistic personality disorder, the absence of a biological cure, and the subsequent invasion of our families and institutions.
I pounded keys furiously, projecting my anger regarding forced living conditions into the heart of what I thought to be the problem. Narcissism. A biological surrender to the frustrations accumulated within a child typically two years and younger – when negative emotions have no escape, where do they go? Dr. Hyman Spotnitz believes negative emotions, primarily anger, are hopelessly redirected back onto the child’s ego. This tornado of anger and self-destruction formulates a spectrum of narcissism, ranging from healthy perceptions of the self, to the self-destructing codependent, or to the egregious desolate depths of the malignant narcissist, psychopath, and sociopath – A dense self-hatred projected against the world.
The structural basis of narcissism being what? Repression, mainly. An inability to discharge negative emotions. Trapped psychic energy. Instead of being met with love, compassion, understanding, nurturing, an opportunity for self-expression, the child is confronted with an apathetic energy, uncaring, short of patience, demanding, or even downright unreliable. Relationship and career conflicts may also intervene with proper attention and development, preventing the child from meeting their emotional or physical needs. When the frustration or anger is unable to be communicated, the energy becomes trapped within the psyche. This is a lesson in the law of thermodynamics, Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred and transformed.
With my psychoanalytic education and my own distaste toward my current state of affairs, I decided to declare my unconscious conscious. Posting images littered with my psychoanalytic insights and personal history, I rejoiced in the revenge for my lost sleep.
Concluding my doctoral thesis, I grabbed my bong and medical marijuana, heading for the designated smoking section adjacent to the hotel. Finding a spot on the curb, I finished my post before getting medicated for the day. Still attached, I know.
Cementing myself to the concrete, I punctuated my final phrases for a few instagram followers and prepared to smoke the cannabis leaves, watching as a family unpacked from their travels. My thumb hovered over the “SEND button” as the doors breached open to the parking lot. A woman jolted from behind reflecting glass doors, blonde hair hooding her eyes, an inside-out sweatshirt stitched to her frail figure. The woman lit a cigarette, and the family headed inside.
Pressing “SEND” on my iPhone, I observed as she inhaled and tip-toed to the curb, positioning herself next to me. Exhaling the cigarette smoke, she brushed dirty blonde hair from her face and asked,
“What are you running from?”
“Is that the vibe I give off?”
The woman inched closer, exhaling cigarette smoke, which surfed the breeze directly into my face.
“I’m running,” she said.
“From what…”
“From my abusive husband…”
A crimson crust protruded from her nostril, bloody, battered.
“Are you okay?” I pulled the medical marijuana closer, nervous, observing her slender fingers like twigs clutching the cigarette upright.
“No… I’m running. I’m not going to stop,” she said.
“And how far do you think you’ll get?”
She didn’t answer, instead she sat idle, glaring into winter’s leafless horizon.
A silence lingered.
“What’s your name?” She asked.
“Nick, you?”
“Audrey”
“Where are you going?” I asked.
She didn’t answer. Silence.
“I’m getting a PFA, she said.
“Protection from abuse,” I said, “are you getting that done here, at the courthouse?”
(I only just recently learned about PFA’s, and I’ll have another blog directly related to my brother and his wife filing a false PFA and hospitalization against me).
She didn’t answer so we sat in silence.
“Do you have kids?” she asked.
“No…” I answered.
“Then how could you EVER know what I’m going through?”
“I guess I don’t….” I responded, as she turned away disgusted.
“Where are your kids,” I asked.
“With my husband.”
“Umm, are they safe?” I asked confused.
“Yes,” she said confidently, before a frown smeared her lips.
“How many kids do you have?”
“Three…”
“And you’re sure they’re safe?”
“Yes,” she repeated annoyed.
An alarm sounded in the caverns of my subconscious, a tiny alarm. If your husband was abusive, why would you leave your three children behind? Why would you leave on your own… to find help?
And why so secretive, sketchy, and annoyed about topics you’re bringing up. You approached me after-all.
The man, previously unpacking the car with his family and wearing a Kutztown Cannabis Festival t-shirt, exited the hotel doorway. He noticed my attempted disposal of the bong, but reassured me, “It’s all good brotha,” before igniting a one hitter in the passenger seat of his Dodge SUV.
“I’m going to start running again, maybe right now,” she said, dramatically dropping her cigarettes and lighter, stumbling into the parking lot, and vanishing behind a row of parked cars.
In her disappearance, the gentleman and I discussed medical marijuana and the Kutztown Cannabis Festival. The contrast in energy between the woman and the gentleman were palpable. The upbeat, fuzzy intoxication of marijuana versus the cold, dire, and ominous situation presented by the woman. Talking to the gentleman, I noticed the lighter and full pack of cigarettes. She’d be returning. Do I leave? I took a picture of the cigarettes and placed a follow up post on Instagram regarding my strange encounter. Where’s the connection, abuse? Slightly intrigued, I decided to smoke a bowl of marijuana.
I’m in the middle of a scene, I thought filtering seeds and stems with my thumbs, and pounding diamond laced-gooey leaves into the glass slide. Ken Kesey would be proud.
The discovery of the film, the scene within our own lives, and the cannabis too.
I began to smoke but was viciously interrupted.
“You asshole!” The woman descended upon me, arms extended, fists flailing, tearing at my hoodie.
“What?”
The woman reemerged, striking me by surprise, hands clasping my wrists, tugging close…and closer.
“You asshole… just… hold me,” forcing my arms to the side, Audrey closed her eyes, maneuvering her lips closer to mine.
“Whoa, whoa… what’s going on here?”
“Please… just come closer. Hold me. Kiss me. Please…” Alcohol vaporized my nostrils as I carefully pushed the woman away.
“Hold on, what’s going on. Is this the best idea?”
Frustrated, the woman pulled herself away.
“Why won’t you kiss me? Is it because I’m ugly?”
“No it’s just – ”
“Then why won’t you kiss me? Please.”
“How about we sit here and smoke instead? I’ll keep you company.”
I positioned myself next to the lighter and pack of cigarettes.
“What?” She answered disgustedly, “COME HERE,” the woman said throwing herself into my lap, melting, burrowing her head into my chest, yanking me to the warmth of her limp body.
“Will you come up to my room with me?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I responded, gazing nervously into the parking lot.
“Please,” she said while clutching both of my legs.
“Its just — ”
“You don’t want to sleep with me because I’m ugly.”
“Trust me, its not that. I’d love to sleep with you, I just don’t think its a good idea. It’s early, why don’t you go back to bed?”
“I’m literally asking you to go to bed with me.”
“Yeah but… without me….”
The woman snuggled into my being, alcohol permeating the winter breeze. An overwhelming desire to comfort Audrey ignited my veins. A desire to hold her tightly, to reassure her, to place a kiss atop her forehead. The desire for a man to be with a woman, to provide and care for her, and yes, with the possibility for sex. It’s been years since I’ve really been with a woman, four, maybe five years? I discontinued relationships and dating to focus on myself and the analytical process, to eradicate myself of codependencies and the Madonna Whore Complex (blog coming soon).
Of course I miss sex, who doesn’t?
In the intensity of the moment, I snatched my bong and held it to my chest. A shield. An escape. The alcohol stung my nostrils and watered my eyes.
“Are you coming up with me?” Through frazzled blonde locks, the woman peered at me with puppy dog eyes, a whimpering scarred lip, and the crimson crusted nostril.
“I’m sorry….” I said.
Immediately she unfastened herself from my embrace, snatched the pack of cigarettes, the lighter, and stumbled for the glass doorway, departing as quickly as she arrived.
I stood, seemingly naked in the brisk winter breeze, bong clutched in my hand pants down.
The realization dawned on me, quite suddenly, that I’ve met this woman before. I’ve lived with her, and therefore I’ve all ready slept with her. The ghosty white flesh, slender frail figure, menthol cigarette sucking, succubus. An ex-girlfriend.
During my furious posts to Instagram I mentioned narcissism, sociopathy, psychopathy, but I failed to mention another Cluster B personality disorder, borderline personality, BPD. And here arrives the universe with a dangerous and callous reminder.
If you’re familiar with The Sopranos, you’re familiar with borderline personality disorder. Tony’s god awful, wreck of a mother who auditions herself as the star of every tragedy. Gloria: Tony’s short-term mistress with an erratic, drama dependent, conflict-causing, seemingly irrational personality. Gloria in particular, who literally stalks trouble, following Tony’s mob-boss wife, chucking roast beef at his skull, and the never ending supply of temper tantrums, the “why me?” After intentionally sparking conflicts.
Borderline personality is a “splitting disorder” where people are viewed as entirely “all good” or “all bad”. This is a defense mechanism developed during childhood against a difficult primary object. The child divides the primary object (typically mother) into two separate classifications which extends from the child’s perception of the mother during breast feeding. The “good” mother and the “bad” mother… the “good” breast and the “bad” breast. This theory was developed by psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who observed how the child preserves the image of the primary object through a process known as “splitting”. Important to note that one doesn’t require borderline personality disorder to exemplify “split thinking”.
“Jews run the world”, “All Muslims are terrorists”, “Trump supporters are racist Nazis, “Democrats are paedophiles,”. These are examples of mislabeling an entire group of people based on tribal classifications. His tribe…bad! My tribe… good! Tribalism.
When dating somebody with borderline personality, you fluctuate between being a savior, hero, and dream partner to dictator, tyrant, and abuser. One of the most prominent weapons utilized by somebody with borderline personality disorder is sex.
The amount of phone calls and sit-downs I received from friends regarding how my girlfriend was cheating, the spontaneous fights causing her to “disappear” for days on end, only to find she’s been shacked up with somebody new and temporary, the sexting on snapchat, the “don’t worry about him”, the refusal of sex for months even years, and especially intense fights before intense physical sex.
Many times this would be an act of self-destruction, especially right before a vacation, concert, or birthday. The borderline person has a “splitting” disorder, which means they have a problem connecting, just like somebody was unable to connect with them as a child. Borderline individuals mimic a childhood revulsion from connection and love by self-destructing and pushing people into the “bad” identity. This identification preserves the child from ill perceptions of the primary object or caregiver, and mirrors the the history of detachment.
For example, a mother brings her child to the park, where the child picks flowers and excitedly presents them to his mother. In response, the mother does not show appreciation, maybe she ignores the child, empties the child’s palm and washes his hands, behaves in a particular way that undermines the bond and boundary dissolution of a loving relationship. This splitting behavior symbolizes a deeply rooted fear within the borderline and narcissistic person, the fear of love and the fear of dissolving one’s ego and self. Another example of this phenomenon occurs during the psychedelic experience. Narcissistic and borderline individuals find themselves bait to “bad trips” caused primarily by the exposure of their trapped, anger-stricken subconscious, and find difficulty “letting go” into the ethereal realms of love, bliss, and the other.
“Audrey”, raised many red flags: The alcohol abuse, sexual promiscuity, abandoned children, discombobulated story, the desperation yet annoyance I won’t partake in her scheme, Audrey leaving when the Cannabis shirt man appeared, the anger and departure upon refusal of sex, even her blowing cigarette smoke in my face. This was all telling.
“You asshole,” I’m in a time machine, watching a woman pound against my chest, slapping me across the face and accusing me of cheating, before she disappears with her friends, destroys our plans, and books the nightly dick-down from one of numerous disposable flings. A creation of conflict, where I’m suddenly the “bad boyfriend” and she’s suddenly pardoned, immunized by victimhood.
The problem arises when the borderline person discovers a malleable partner, a prey. Judging by the cuts and scars trailing the woman’s face she had discovered just the partner. The predator is searching for an emotionally weak, fragile individual whom they are able to control. This is why emotional intelligence is so important. If you are unable to recognize the mind games, you’ll actively find yourself on the losing side.
The costs of losing? You’ll find yourself slowly decaying, dying, or even imprisoned like a coworker friend of mine, with your bank accounts recently emptied, and your lover on the run with somebody new.
A narcissistic, borderline person requires a partner in their game of charades. How well do you think an emotionally weak individual will take to the news of infidelity, manipulation, or cunningness? The woman of your children is whoring herself and its entirely your fault! The narcissistic, borderline individual screams “abuse” after they’ve intentionally incited a terrible reaction. The borderline person is counting on this.
Here strolls Audrey, claiming she’s been abused, abandoning her children who she probably has no real attachment, drinking at eleven in the morning, and convincing a much younger stranger to sleep with her after inciting violence, most likely caused by a similar situation of infidelity. The excitement she twiddles, debriefing her husband about the twenty year old she fucked in a hotel room outside Morgantown, PA.
How did she know to find me, so quick for discussion, did she spot me from the window in her room? Predator and prey.
Within milliseconds of posting to Instagram, I encountered Audrey. A sign from the universe, or am I forcing my delusional, isolated perspective of narcissistic invasion down your throat? Did I misread the encounter?
Am I making this up for attention? I’ll leave that up to you.
When my friend asked, “How do you smoke with your medical card,”
I replied, “Smoking section near the parking lot. Honestly, I’m interested to see if I meet anybody over there.”
A joint lesson in manifestation and narcissism.
Palming through double glass doors, I emerged below mountaintops and a star threaded sky. A glass pipe dispelled from its holster, emerald trees packing the cylindrical slide. The parking lot still, asleep beneath the nightlight of McDonalds arches and a single stuttering lightbulb. Resting my bottom against the cement curbside, I drew the lighter and fastened the pipe. Alone, I thought, spotting the butt end of a Marlboro Menthol cigarette.
THE BADBOOB 