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.
THE BADBOOB 