The hate crime no one talks about

Oh yes. Oh, yes, Captain Kirk, and his noble soliloquy in perhaps my fave original Star Trek episode, Miri. The one with all the kids on that planet, you know, all by themselves cuz the adults all died, and they get all gross when they hit puberty and Yeoman Rand's leg looks like a major cigarette burn. I watched it at 13, tape recording it as I usually did on our old reel-to-reel Webcor with the fan-shaped microphone. Kirk wasn't ridiculous then, he wasn't a joke, he wasn't a buffoon and to date, he had done no Loblaws commercials. Kirk was just Kirk.

But his immortal line, "no blah blah blah!" has taken on a special significance in my mind over many decades of observation.

Do you know what I'm talking about? Happens so often I want to yip with irritation. In fact it happened yesterday:  we're in Denny's eating our veggie omelettes with hash browns, when I hear a familiar drone coming from behind Bill's seat.

Umbumummm-bumbumbummm-bumdabumdabumdabuuuuuuuum.

I -

UMMM da bummada bummda. Mm-mmoom-dah! Da bomada bomadadamda bom.

A - 

Bum BUM DA dum dum, demda dum! Dem -

So you get the idea by now. It was one of those totally one-sided conversations you constantly overhear (without meaning to: this is hardly eavesdropping, as I would have loved to shut out all this blathering) in restaurants or theatres or other public places. 

One person is blathering on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and - sorry, my hand just fell off - but as this blathablathablathablathablathablatha goes on, all of it self-referential, all of it self-serving, all of it self-entitled, all of it related to the blatherer's intense suffering at not being treated like a crown prince/ss, I can sense the listener/receiver's blood volume being slowly, slowly, and surely sucked down and siphoned out.

When they leave the restaurant, the blatherer will be hugely inflated with self-righteous helium and all ready for the next deadly gas attack, but the victim (for that is what it is) will be but a pale shadow of his/her former self. She will be so anemic, you'll be able to see through her. She'll have to go home and lie down for a month or more, maybe get a transfusion.

But the thing is, they'll still go out again next week for lunch. The same thing will happen all over again. He or she will tell the same pompous, pointless stories, the same tales of persecution. No one even notices how soul-destroying the experience is. The entitled one will be bursting with hemoglobin by now, ready to explode like some honey-forced queen bee or ruptured giant termite. The victim will now weigh 37 pounds. Doesn't matter how many pancakes she puts away.

I heard it yesterday and I heard it at the mall food fair the day before with a similar booming, thrumming, droning male voice, this time with some sort of European accent. Bom-bomda-BOMmmdaa-bommmm-daBOMmada-bonga, etc. etc.

This is not a conversation. This is a monologue. The monologuist has no idea that it isn't a conversation and in fact thinks he's a very good conversationalist, very smart and sharp. His blathering about camping equipment or the plumbing in his house or his car troubles or the asshole at work who got the promotion he should've got (or his bitch of a wife, always a favorite) strikes him as scintillating discourse sparking a lively debate, an exchange of witticisms rivalling the Algonquin Round Table in sheer witti-blah-tudinous-ness.

He doesn't know, because his brain is made out of shoe leather and his psyche is about as penetrable as a block of obsidian. I would like to start carrying a baseball bat around with me to play whack-a-mole with these characters, but there are just too many of them, and besides, then *I* would be considered obnoxious and antisocial, hitting these poor innocent guys who weren't doing nothin'. 

This is abuse. The endless, boring, repetitive blathering with only the occasional squeak out of the audience/receiver/victim/codependent masochist.  This person NEEDS this sort of ego-stroking, this constant reinforcement of his (or her: one of the worst I've encountered is a her, droning on for 45 minutes about her Grade 11 science teacher and what he wore to class) innate sense that his every word is interesting and useful and even enlightening, when in reality it's a torrent of horseshit more horrific than the result of opening Mr. Ed's stable door.

There is nothing to be done. Stay away, that's all I can say to you, try to stay away and not call them friends. A friend does not stick a drinking straw in your jugular vein and begin to vigorously suck. Blatha-blatha-blathata-blah.

I don't know if this codicil belongs here, but I might as well tack it on. It's the self-proclaimed expert who charges into a room full of chemo patients and bellows, "TAKE MILK THISTLE AND YOU WILL BE CURED!" The person so sure of (his or her) convictions that they force them on others as absolute, unassailable gospel truth.

One doctor I know is a doozie. Educated, an "expert" on many things, in fact famous.

"Illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"No, you mean: I believe illness means you've repressed your emotions."

"There's no debate about this, it's simply true."

"So everybody else, everyone who believes something different from you, is completely erroneous and full of shit?"

"I didn't say that! Don't be so defensive. It's just an opinion."

"Then why didn't you say so?"

"Because it's an opinion that happens to be true."

"Jesus, don't you hear yourself? That's total arrogance!"

"Obviously you have issues with authority figures."

"No, just with YOU, asshole!"

(That last line was fantasized, but isn't it great?)

I once attended some sort of workshop (it had something to do with my sick and dying church trying to manage a last-minute, futile resurrection) where the facilitator said, "Tell me the difference between these two statements: Divorce is terrible."

(Slight tremor in the room, caused by minute vibrations from the divorced people trying not to spit at her.)

"MY divorce was terrible. Which statement is easier to accept?"

Wa-a-a-a-al.

But people don't do it that way! They stride in and say, "Everything happens for a reason/God never gives us more than we can handle/It's all in God's plan." This person has never suffered a major hardship, and in fact has led a charmed existence.  God's will has been, at least up to now, a piece of cake. (Secretly she/he thinks it's because she prays a lot and "surrenders", so God favors her.) But never do they say, "I've come to believe that - " or even, "It's my conviction that - ". No, they just take one of those thingamabobs they used to tamp down powder in a cannon, and casually shove it down your throat.

"I was about to die in a car crash, but my angel saved me."

"God must have intervened."

"It was meant to be" (but NEVER with reference to anything negative. Only positive things are "meant to be". No sense of entitlement here.)

"It was God's plan that little Timmy survive being run over by an express train 47 times."

Oh yes? What about this couple over here, dying of grief because God DIDN'T save their son? What about the man whose wife actually did die in a crash? Didn't she believe enough, didn't God love her enough, didn't she have the right mojo or put enough on the collection plate?

It's really just more BLAHBLAHBLAH, of a particularly toxic variety. It's toxic because it is so un-thought-out, so carelessly said. So smug. So entitled ("see, God loves me enough to pull me out of flaming wreckage. What's wrong with you?")

I wonder sometimes if even half of what people say is really considered, or if it just pours out of them like so much raw sewage. They snag on to jingles, axioms, homilies, catch-phrases, churn them around unexamined, and spit them in your face. They never preface these statements, just jam them up your nose as "fact".  It's easier than thinking, easier than feeling empathy or compassion or any of those dangerous things that require a little stretching of the soul.

The blatherers of the world are verbal thugs. When you see one, whether it's in Denny's or the hardware store or your local church or synogogue, whacking the palm of his hand with a lead pipe and wearing a smug self-involved smile, there's only one thing you can do.

Ru-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-u-n!

When all the joy within you dies

It's not often I find something this good on Facebook. In fact, it's not often I find anything at all. I have learned to "unfriend" boring, draining and/or toxic people, but you can't see their ugly insides, at least not until much later, when they post something so casually offensive it makes your hair stand on end.

There's a special circle in hell for people with toxic relatives. These are practiced happiness-suckers who siphon the life out of you, then ask you why you look so drawn and tired.

These are the twisters - the emotional corkscrews who have a phenomenal way of turning their abusiveness around and insisting that you abused them. How dare you accuse me of being abusive!  Obviously you're vindictive, heartless, and a liar to boot (they inform you, while you slowly bleed to death from the corkscrew stuck in your heart). 

Oh. The happiness-suckers. Schoolteachers: you couldn't get away from THEM, could you? Their shaming tactics, their favoritism (merely a weapon to make the marginalized, persecuted kids feel even worse) their petty dictatorship to make up for the complete lack of satisfaction in their lives. 

Spouses. This can be exquisite torture that goes on for decades. I've known more than one widow who could barely disguise her glee at her husband's memorial service, then immediately booked the cruise she was never allowed to take while she was oppressed by a sour old tyrant.

But the worst is. . . this.

When it's your friend. A close friend. A friend you used to share so much with, it seemed you could almost read each other's thoughts. It can't go on that way forever, can it? It can't. Worlds go by, days and nights, and at some point, one of the two begins to fade.

Something is happening, a growing joylessness, a caving-in. The desperately hoping friend (thinking, surely if I just try harder I can re-set this) just amps up her attempts to connect, scouring the internet for links to things her friend used to be interested in. But there is never a response to any of it. If they connect at all it's on the phone, and those calls are nothing like the soul-deep, stimulating discussions they used to have. They're perfunctory, and the passive friend asks all the same questions over and over again, ostensibly to display her interest but in actuality so that she never has to talk at all.

But then there are the longer emails. What are these about? People she does not know and does not care to know, the small-town small minds. Her friend frankly hates them, rants and seethes and spews bile, yet insists that she is always friendly with them and never says anything critical to them at all. Then signs off with, Thanks for listening, I feel so much better now!, the perfect hit-and-run.

The choked-off conversations become chronic, her acid criticism of everything and everyone acting like so much weed killer, destroyer of all enthusiasm.
Does she even realize what is going on? It might be like the proverbial frog in warm water, who does not notice the gradual increase in temperature until it is cooked.

Why does someone give up? Why does someone just accept their discontent and not fight against it, or not even acknowledge it or believe it's real? More to the point: why is this so draining to be around? Why is there a sense of a dusty drawer with nothing in it? 

Dead dreams are awfully inert, and posing is hollow. You can't hitch a Clydesdale to a race horse. But why does the race horse feel so bad? There is nothing more pathetic than a one-sided conversation, with one person running frantically back and forth hitting the ball from both sides of the net. It is humiliating; desperate. While the other person says nothing: not so much not caring as not even even noticing what is going on.

When you have been raised with silence and rejection as the norm (and by the way: the opposite of love isn't hate, as most people think, but indifference, just not caring one way or another), returning to it is agony. They say (and just who are "they" after all, a bunch of executioners?) that you invariably recreate the dynamics of your childhood in your adult relationships.

For years you play along, because for years you really did have a wonderful connection, but it dwindles and dwindles, and you feel a certain expectation to dwindle along with it. And you won't, because you can't. And then, when you finally do say something because you can't keep it to yourself any longer, you are subjected to disbelief (what are you talking about?), guilt, a sense of betrayal, a wounded (though perhaps never uttered) "how could you?" Or, even worse, an awful, artificial attempt to get the thing going again, inventing a sense of interest, asking after your dentist or the guy who fixes the roof. 

Life seems to kill some people, to steamroll them, but then again, some people's courage just collapses, and from then on they do life by rote. Risk nothing, gain nothing. And you realize you can't do it any more, especially not after you find out that your friend's husband casually hacked your emails and has been reading what you've been sending her. 

Friendship can be thrown into reverse, and it's an awful thing. It just hurts like hell, and of course YOU are seen as mean and selfish for claiming things are no longer satisfying. Bob Dylan said a couple of things - how is it Bob Dylan always knows how to hit it brilliantly on the head?: "He not busy being born is busy dying." And another one: "Her sin is her lifelessness."

After being destroyed in the fire of religion, I have no God left except life. But I know now that if you sin against life, there will be a cost.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm

Pretty poison

Maybe I should title this post "nasty behaviour from nice people". Or at least, people who truly believe they are nice, and who have convinced everyone around them that they're nice.

But what's that smell?

I'll tell you. They exude just a trace of toxic fumes, just enough to unsettle those with a good enough olfactory sense to pick it up. This is confusing because it doesn't match up with their social gloss.

Sociopaths? Of course not. This could be your Aunt Edna - in fact, it probably is your Aunt Edna.. Do these people even know they are taking people by the nose and twisting it as hard as they can?

Probably not. Their self-awareness is close to zero, whereas their ability to size up and minutely analyze their prey is astonishing.

The better to eat them with.

The first example, which is often quite subtle and usually happens over the phone, is one I call "and how is". This person incessantly asks after others. Your husband, your brother, your children, your gynecologist, your garage mechanic. You sort of go along with it, feeling increasingly squirmy and not knowing why.

I WILL TELL YOU WHY.

When a person incessantly "asks after" people, it makes them look super-polite and interested in other people, which is always a good thing, isn't it? Admirable, isn't it? Then why does the person posing all the questions never actually SAY anything? And why, when you finally hang up after 90 minutes of "and how is", do you feel like you could drop dead in your tracks?

Because they have siphoned you, that's why. Pretty Poison people are emotional vampires, and they know all sorts of subtle ways to suck your vital energy so that it becomes their own. "And how is" means they never have to say anything, so YOU have to do all the talking (read: self-revealing). After a while you realize you can't get out of this. You are forced to tell, tell, tell, until eventually you're telling them things you never intended to reveal to anyone.

Meantime, the person on the other end remains in a secure and invulnerable fortress, completely safe from any kind of probing. He/she has just laid the other person open, even gutted them, while remaining completely defended and protected. Genius, isn't it.

Oh God, we're just starting here! I'll never get them all in, but I'll try. Turning it around. This was a favorite ploy in my family of origin. I knew I had been emotionally abused as a child, and my sister even acknowledged it years ago. But when I stated it a little more firmly in a letter, there was a huge outcry that I was being horribly abusive. How could I even think of accusing anyone in this family of anything except loving kindness? My Dad's alcoholism, which my sister had clearly acknowledged on paper, was suddenly sucked back and no longer existed. The wagons went in a circle and I was shut out. Later I discovered that when my mother died, my name was casually left out of the obituary as if I had never existed. The record had been wiped clean.

That's what you get for messing with such "nice" people.

I'll make this one short, but it's especially awful: a thin girl says, "oh, I'm so FAT" in front of a girl who truly is fat. I don't need to add more to this one, as it happens all the time, with adults as well as children.

"You're too sensitive." (Corollary, kicking it up a notch: "You're crazy.") This too-sensitive amateur diagnosis means the other person has license to treat you like shit stuck to somebody's shoe. If you react at all, you're obviously fucked up. Another nice way of abdicating responsibility and making the injured party the source of the problem.

There's one I call "vague-ing". Pretending not to remember things, commitments, messages, etc. and claiming these things either never happened, or were so insignificant as to not even register. Often these are related to having your basic needs met in the relationship (chief among them acknowledgement that you exist). This involves ignoring, consistently losing or "misplacing" important things: "oh, did you send me something? It's just that I get SO many emails, maybe yours just got lost."  But if you call them on all this toxic swill, suddenly YOU are being unkind and hypercritical. "Why are you picking on ME for something so petty? I really think you need to work on your abandonment issues." (Assuming the role of "healer" when you're hopelessly fucked-up yourself deserves a post of its own.)

Dumptruck Syndrome. This occurs especially after a breakup. The phone calls gradually escalate and become more and more one-sided, but it is impossible to get away without just hanging up. Winding it up is agonizing, and the call "ends" about fifteen times before another freshet of self-pity cascades down and washes your vitality down the drain. These can also come by email, usually from the person who completely ignored your messages because they "just get so many emails, they can't keep track of them all" (see above). And yet, strangely enough, they suddenly tell you that "you're the only person in the world who understands me" (often accompanied by vague threats of suicide). So how can you fail to support them in their hour of need? What's the matter with you - how heartless can a person be?

A related syndrome is Human Vacuum Cleaner. Often you don't even know you're being sucked. This is usually an especially nice, compassionate person who is essentially alone except for her cats. Every time you try to have a conversation with her, it immediately slides into "drone mode" - endless chains of boring drivel about her Grade 10 biology teacher and the color of tie he wore to school, or the symbolic dream she had last night about her cats standing up on two legs and walking around, or New Age crap books you wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole. (Later she will press one of them into your hands, leaving you with the uncomfortable feeling that you "owe" her, and ask you incessantly "how much you liked it".) You start to feel an actual, physical sucking sensation, being drawn into her astonishingly dull orbit, and on the phone it's so bad you disappear into the receiver and can't be found. She never states outright that you are her only friend, but one day she unleashes a torrent of dark childhood memories and recounts all the gruesome forms of self-mutilation she has never told anyone else about. This is just before referring to her cat as her "spouse".

If one of these parasites saw this article, they would probably say, look, you'd better read this one, it sounds exactly like you.

Jesus! It sucks.

http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.ca/2013/04/the-glass-character-synopsis.html

http://members.shaw.ca/margaret_gunning/betterthanlife.htm