😣Meghan's fake "STANDING OVATION": get me the sick bag!🤢

Meghan and Harry just assume this standing ovation at Royal Albert Hall is for THEM (when everyone was applauding BEFORE they even barged in, late). Watch the man to the right of Harry - his facial expressions are hilarious! Everyone around them looks annoyed and offended, while Meghan beams, nods, even CURTSIES as she accepts the "adulation" of the crowds. The press widely reported they DID receive a standing ovation, I guess just for breathing and standing up, though clearly they crashed the party and made the most rude and narcissistic assumption possible. Poor Harry looks profoundly uncomfortable through it all.

Are we all narcissists? I don't think so

This post resulted from comments I made on YouTube videos about the subject, which somehow evolved into longer chains of thought that I felt might have some value on this blog. It's easy to come up with examples - hundreds of them - of how the narcissist in the family manipulated, damaged and vampirized both friends and enemies, ate their young, and attempted the kind of dominance usually only equalled by totalitarian political leaders.

My sister the narcissist (13 years older than me) did something so inexplicably awful that I still have trouble wrapping my brain around it. She wrote my mother's obituary, imposing her own agenda on it, for my mother was on her deathbed. 

I was not in my mother's obituary. I had been stricken off the record and, according to that document, had never been born at all. 

As cruel and indifferent as my mother could be, I do not think it was her idea. It was my sister's ultimate act of malignant jealousy and hatred of me, an attempt to literally "unmake" me. Of course I was devastated at first, but then I had this thought: no matter what my kids did, even if they were murderers, even if they murdered ME, in no way, shape or form would I ever even think of striking them from the record, because they are MINE, my beloveds, I birthed and raised them, so this malignant hatred was NOT transferred to me. 

It did not happen by itself, as you can imagine, but through years, and years, and years of therapy, falling into addiction, mental illness, suicide attempts, etc. - BUT, somehow, always coming out the other side. I showed the obituary to my adult daughter, who snorted and said, "That says everything about HER, and nothing about YOU." She also said, and I liked this, "Don't give it another thought." In other words, don't let this nasty lie rent any more space in your head! Garbage is garbage and should be thrown out. I couldn't have said it better myself. 

As a P. S.: a high school friend phoned me and said, "I am sorry to read about your mother, but why aren't you in her obituary? Was it some sort of oversight?" I said, "no, it was quite deliberate," and my friend was so horrified she couldn't speak for a while. And people squabble and complain when they are left out of the will! But that attempt to erase my very existence turned out to be pretty laughable, after all. I managed to have two wonderful kids who also turned out to be wonderful parents. That doesn't happen to someone who never existed, does it? I don't think so.

Narcissism has lately been exposed in the popular culture as never before, but suddenly it has become too prevalent and is being rendered meaningless. If everyone is a narcissist, then no one is a narcissist. It's like saying "we're all geniuses" and other absurd generalizations. Human beings are far more complicated than that. Nor is it inevitable for narcissism to beget narcissism down the generations. It CAN be stopped and rooted out, but only if it is recognized and no longer tolerated. 

I know a lot of wonderful, even selfless people, and I married one, even while being exposed to hateful narcissism in my childhood. We gravitate towards who we are ourselves, or perhaps (in my case) who we would like to be. I know people who grumble "there are no good marriages," but inevitably their own relationships are chaotic. People I know with stable marriages are puzzled by this and always say most of their close friends have good marriages.

But the problem now is how easy it is for a narcissist to exert influence over others on a mass scale. A narcissist can very quickly attain world prominence on social media and become an "influencer" (incubus/succubus) and thus wield enormous economic and even political power (Kanye West for President??) on a global level. And you do not even have to spend a cent to do it. Twitter is the great equalizer.

Meghan Markle is a chilling example - she is now called "the most talked-about woman on the planet", and I agree, there are mainstream news items about her every day now, in which she is usually shown in a totally benevolent, humanitarian light. She has cultivated "friends" who are so well-placed (Oprah, Gayle, Ellen, Elton, George and Amal, etc.) that she almost cannot fail. If she rises to political prominence as she seems to want to, God help us all, we will have another Trump on our hands.

When I watch true crime shows like Dateline, it shocks me how often the victims of horrendous violence will say "I forgave him". I do not like the current emphasis on what I call the "forgiveness agenda". Supposedly, you "MUST" forgive the people who have wronged you, even if they have murdered your children, or else you will be filled with anger and rage and bitterness for the rest of your life. 

People who say they have done this are treated like living saints, and it creates pressure on others because it becomes a "should". I disagree. To survive and ultimately thrive, you've got to get away from malignant narcissists, escape with your life, and concentrate on reclaiming yourself. My therapist said about forgiveness: "Don't make an issue out of it" - in other words, you do not HAVE TO do anything! No other person has the right to dictate how you heal yourself, because it is an absolutely sacred process known only to yourself and whatever the healing agents are in your life.

What actually happened over many years and even decades of struggle is that I went from total disgust and contempt for my abusers to a kind of measured pity. I DO feel sorry for these people, because they are truly pathetic human beings. I cannot imagine anything worse than being that sort of person, even if they are not the ones who suffer most. Nor are there any of those kinds of people in my current circle, nor will there ever be. 

But this hard-won pity is NOT the same as coerced forgiveness, which is NOT necessary to avoid a lifetime of bitter rage. Don't let anyone pressure you into something that feels wrong to you! The "forgiveness agenda" may well be yet another attempt to silence you, because people are profoundly uncomfortable with your pain and anger and don't want to hear about it. Their motives are entirely selfish. People have largely lost the ability to bear witness without judgement, which is what all wounded people/all people need. "You must forgive" can just be another way of saying "don't talk about that any more." It's cowardly, selfish and not what is called for. I am not impressed by it. But pressure to forgive is sanctified and bulwarked by basic Christian principles, which makes it even more potentially powerful and even deadly. 

In my own former so-called-liberal Christian church, we struggled and wrestled with the concept of forgiveness as a "must" in Christian faith. If you can't forgive, the myth went, then you are not a true Christian. You must at least "try", struggle and strain, and reproach yourself continually if you can't do it. It was very important not to feel "comfortable" in our faith. It was work, and I now see it as thankless work and a waste of energy and time. We were even told "God will only forgive you if you forgive everyone else," which is an abomination and the most coercive idea I have ever encountered. It's one of the more insidious forms of religious abuse, and I somehow tolerated it for fifteen years for the sake of "belonging".

If God does not play dice with the Universe, as Einstein claimed, then God doesn't force people into uncomfortable and unhealthy patterns through coercion or "guilt trips". The Christian God no longer makes sense to me, and I feel if there is any benevolence at all in the Universe, it must come from us and travel from heart to heart. God's grace, if you want to call it that, is lived out through those difficult acts of compassion which force us to stretch beyond our own little universe of closed thoughts and wrongheaded ideas.

We cannot wait around for Big Daddy to fix things, or even fix us. Jesus at least tried to get this across, but no one seems to have heard him. The hardest thing in the world is to bear witness to another's pain silently and non-judgementally. Don't say anything, for once! Don't even think anything. Don`t try to fix it. Just sit. It is what 12-step groups attempt to do, usually imperfectly, but they at least try. To bear witness often means to just not bolt out of the room, or make all sorts of frantic attempts to get the person to shut up and follow THEIR hidden agenda. How rare it is, and I believe it is the only key for human beings to truly help each other in a world full of anxiety, stress and daily predictions of doom.

Internet ambush: the poison pill

(This started off life as a journal entry, but as it evolved I realized this is something I really need to post. It deals with a subtle form of psychological abuse on the internet, in which someone offers you something and makes it almost impossible for you to say no, even if deep down you are uncomfortable with that person and don't want to play. In some cases, there is bad blood in the past which is being denied, glossed over, or twisted around to be your fault, while excusing the perpetrator as having only the best motives at heart. I had an example today on YouTube, just a small one, but my alarm bells went off like crazy.So this is more personal and emotional than most of my blog posts.)  

I had a strange offer this morning from a woman who, like me, has a YouTube doll channel (specifically, troll dolls). She has been very nice in praising a couple of my videos, but then offered to send me a troll, and I refused it. I won't give out personal info, but it was more than that - I could feel a hook in it.  I know I`ve been suspicious before about things that turned out to be OK, but I don`t know this woman, and sometimes fulsome praise (I mean fulsome in the sense of much-too-muchness) IS suspicious. Yes, she has come up to me on the playground, skipping along in a gingham dress and pigtails, etc., and said, "Let's be friends!", and here I am being all suspicious. 

But my God, the CRAP that goes on on the internet, and sending me something like that out of the blue makes me beholden in some weird way, even guilty and feeling I maybe "owe" her something, which of course I do not. Over-gifting or completely unexpected gifting is aggressive at worst, even an ambush, though it also makes the recipient feel THEY are crazy or "off" for being suspicious of a generous gift which has been freely given. What is wrong with you to think there are strings attached?

I don`t know this woman from Adam, or Eve, or anyone else, and she has hardly any videos on her channel at all. That alone is reason to be wary. She referred me to her website, which is generally a sales pitch. Sending me a troll after seeing only two of my videos is an odd thing to do, and even if it didn't lead to "you owe me", psychologically it DOES do that. It`s also real Nigerian prince stuff at its worst. Falling for it leaves you feeling angry, ripped off and ashamed.

I don't want to give her my personal info, least of all my mailing address. Then she will know where I live. A complete stranger. I have heard of the most diabolical things coming from letting your boundaries down, though to be so wary of her makes me seem weird and over-suspicious. She also said, rather snippily, "that is, IF you're interested" in a completely different tone, implying that if you're NOT, you're not being very friendly to a fellow enthusiast.

It's better to err on the side of caution, I think. So I think I handled it right in graciously declining and telling her I don't give out that sort of information. My troll channel is meant to be pure joy, and if someone likes it, thats great. But it is set up a certain way. No commerce, no freebies, no offers or trades, no buy and sell or even being made beholden by sending ME something I never asked for and really do not want. It`s actually pressure on me to MAKE me be interested in her work (for surely I must thank and praise her profusely when I get it!), or making me feel guilty if I am NOT interested in her work, which at the moment I am not. 

So there may well be more snippiness ahead. "That is, IF you`re interested" had a nasty core to it, coated in sparkly sugar.  Postal stuff is dicey at best, especially with the border closed, and I don't know where she lives, but I assume it's the States.  I don't want her finding and criticizing the stuff I post about the States. It could start a war. She may be one of these DETESTABLE Paula Deen-like Southern women, a type I need to stay miles away from. A large number of crafty women on the internet are, maybe because they are traditionalists and egocentric busy bees.

This is the etiquette I think is sensible: don't offer something free, it'll make the other person feel they "owe" you something even if they insist you don’t. Don't agree to receive something when it is offered out of the blue by someone you do not know. When you get that twinge of quease in your belly, something subtle but unhealthy is going on.

That quease means you are sensing a manipulative ploy from someone who doesn't know you from Adam (OR Eve). When I see the nasty leech behaviour of Lynne, my former high school friend, who stood by and silently watched while I was systematically eviscerated in front of her close friend Lori – WHY ON EARTH would I want to connect with her again? But that was exactly what she wanted to do, and insisted on it over and over and OVER again.  If I feel uncomfortable with her and choose not to connect, she should accept it as my decision without questioning it, not pursue me all over the internet, finally driving me to explode and then REALLY be the villain.

I did not stay on my hometown Facebook page (which is the way Lynne somehow connected with me again, trampling the boundary of my blocking her a couple of years ago) for more than a few days, before realizing everyone had their head up their ass and was obsessed with the past. She took my brief interest to mean I wanted to endlessly reminisce about a place that nearly destroyed me. In retrospect, certain things can look very different, and now I see that what she did was every bit as savage as what Lori did (prompted by nothing, by the way), or worse, because her utter silence and total lack of ANY semblance of defending me was making her complicit. Quite simply, she literally stood by and watched.

I don't want that energy in my life, but the way it panned out made it, guess what, ALL MY FAULT for refusing her 'concern'. But even that didn't stop her. By some devious means, she found my YouTube channel (which goes by the name of  ferociousgumby) and left a comment on a video about side effects of meds, telling me I should taper off! If a person blocks you, GUESS WHAT, they do it because they are uncomfortable with you. Those times she visited (she invited herself to have coffee with me twice when she was in town from Ontario), I did not want to see her and did not enjoy the long conversations about Chatham and the past, which is where everyone STILL lives now, including telling me in detail about one person I barely knew who committed suicide. The rest was about how no one in the school system understood her son. Her conversation was one-sided, a monologue, and a drag on my spirits. I felt awful, yet relieved when she left. I did not know how to say no in those days, at all, and now that I DO know, it still causes an interior struggle.

I don't know why I tolerated it, except SHE phoned ME, assuming we were still "best friends" or even friends at all after decades, with a lot of bad blood in the past. Later I dodged the bullet, but as usual with these things, I was left feeling bad for what I had to do. I saw just the beginnings of a tirade from her on Facebook messaging (and HOW can you message someone when they have been blocked??) and didn`t read it, knowing what it would be like and how I would be cast. And how it would leave me feeling, basically ruining my day.

When someone says no, when someone erects a barrier or a boundary, you MUST accept they have their own reasons for it which you may know nothing  about (and are NOT owed an explanation for because it is none of your business), and respect it. Otherwise you don’t respect the person, and then why are you even trying to get the so-called friendship from decades ago (laden with bad blood) going again? Why try to trample down those barriers, and just arm-twist and arm-twist until that person says, Oh, forgive me, I was wrong! I DO want to be your friend again! Let me just push down this barrier I erected because I am so DAMN uncomfortable with you. And kindly do not twist this around and leave ME feeling bad, when the violation is YOURS.

I guess these people just HAVE to win this somehow, to push themselves on you repeatedly until you give way, or even tackle you in the name of friendship. 

I have learned from Linda L. and that really insane Terri chick who was obsessed with Harold Lloyd that you MUST be careful not to get swamped or even sucked into a little whirlpool that has its own sick agenda. There is this bizarre sense that time has stood still (which it apparently HAS in Chatham) and youll just happily fall into step again and be best buds, which we never were. At all.

I am actually shocked at what she did, but what with her, Linda L. and that HL-obsessed chick, I am now much more careful. They were much more blatant examples of actual mental illness, personality disorders, but I learned from them (mostly, what to avoid). And what do I lose? Nothing at all, though having to push back on the troll offer left me feeling subtly dampened during an already hard time. It just left a bad taste in my mouth, something I did not need on a grey day like this.

But it's all a potent reminder that no matter how the internet has evolved, it is still the wild west, and right now it seems to me it reflects the worst of human nature far more often than the best.

I loved two men

There are strange, strange things that happen, things so inexplicable you can only understand them after years have gone by. The camera zooms away, or zooms upward, so that more and more of the picture is revealed.

I loved two men. Loved – that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t a sexual thing, I swear, because both men were known to be gay. They were also arrogant, fiercely intelligent, and possessed of a certain social and media-related power. They were tin gods, in other words, and how I could have remained so attached to them, for so long, I will never know.

Maybe I was flattered when they allowed me to sit at the edge of their bright circle of influence. Maybe. I certainly courted their attention, and got bits of it, crumbs. When I was about to walk away in rage or dismay, I’d be tossed another crumb.

Where do I start? The parallels between these two just came to me tonight. It seems incredible I never saw it before.

For one thing, they’re both dead. They both died of sudden, violent, catastrophic strokes, literally dropping in their tracks. They were not young, but neither were they terribly old. Before they died, they both said and did things to me which now make me gasp at the level of casual cruelty.

Paul was my teacher, so many years ago now it seems like another lifetime, another universe. It was back in 1991. He taught anthropology at a community college in a small town, a strange thing, because I was to find out later he had two Masters degrees and a PhD. If he was so brilliant, as he seemed to think he was, why was he stuck in this backwater?

The Anthropology of Religion wasn’t about religion at all. It was mostly about Haitian voodoo and the power of certain plants to paralyze and zombify – for the great zombie tradition comes from Haiti, where death can be created at will, then revoked with a snap of the fingers.

I was enthralled. In the classroom, this man was charisma personified. He just seemed to know so much. When I saw Paul do mediumship at a spiritualist church, I was enraptured. I had never known anyone like this, a veritable sorceror, and he was actually allowing me to sit at the same table and talk about the same subjects. More or less.

How I stayed friends with Paul through the years is simple – I put in virtually 100% of the energy. Had I let it drop, the whole thing would have fallen apart. Why was I so desperate? I don’t understand it, looking back, except that I wanted some of his zombie power. I already had power of my own, but I didn’t see that then. Whenever it threatened to show itself, Paul would summarily clap it down.

Meanwhile, another friendship – this one really not a friendship at all, but a correspondence, for I never actually met the man. Call him Lloyd, because that was his name, so we might as well use it. He had been drama critic at the local paper for a thousand years or so, then music critic, more or less staying in the same job for all of his working life. Not turning left, not turning right.

As a critic, he could deal blows and thrust his sword with a nearly-indifferent cruelty that was sometimes breathtaking. It was enormously entertaining for people to watch Lloyd eviscerate other people – a blood sport. When they themselves were the subject, their enthusiasm withered somewhat.

One day, wanting to entice him or at least attract his attention, I sent Lloyd a column I had written in my local paper – what was it about? Elizabeth Taylor’s visit to Eaton’s, I think – and to my surprise, I got a very nice handwritten reply, quoting some lines from my column and saying he was going to steal them: “I only steal from the best.”

After that initial contact, it wasn’t as if we passed notes in school or sat around the campfire roasting weenies. As I said, it wasn’t a normal friendship. We never had coffee, never even talked on the phone. But the correspondence went back and forth for more than fifteen years. Mostly forth, for if I hadn’t kept it going it would have immediately died. I don’t know why I let myself in for such treatment, but I did.

In both cases, the connection waxed and waned, but there were bright moments. Occasionally Paul the medium acknowledged that I maybe-just-maybe had had some valid psychic experiences of my own (but more often than not he dismissed them as “dangerous” or “just a fantasy”). Lloyd sent me Christmas cards – yes, he really did, handwritten, cheery things that you would never know came from someone most people perceived as a heartless Scrooge.

I will cut to the chase, because this could become book-length. There was a breaking point in each case. I had lost touch with Lloyd after he finally retired from his only job, tried to leave a message on a blog he was keeping, and heard nothing. Then suddenly – and this was unlikely, because he hated technology – there he was on Facebook! Stupidly, I messaged him and said, “I hope this gets to you.”

What I got back was, “This was a mistake. I’m not on Facefuck, so you can go fuck yourself. I hope this gets to you.”

I spent considerable time spinning around in confusion, telling myself maybe it wasn’t really him (it was), and then – one day – receiving a kind of vindication when a friend of mine – OK, a psychiatrist – said, “It’s well-known that this man is the most sarcastic, vindictive, narcissistic, selfish, ruthless, heartless. . . “ – and on and on. OH! I thought I was the only one, and here this man’s patients – apparently more than one – had been seared as well. In fact, maybe that’s what sent them to the psychiatrist.

I can’t remember ever being that angry, but I had a plan. Paul had taught me all about it, in The Anthropology of Religion. I wasn’t trying to do harm – of course not. My plan was to show Lloyd  the error of his ways, to hold up a mirror or a magnifying glass, and to make him feel even a degree of the pain that he had caused other people. I had no idea if I was applying the principles correctly, so I winged it, using Haitian music, a great deal of jewelry and beads and crosses, candles, incense, dance, and written statements of intent. Silly, really, but  I just had to do something - he had just told me to go fuck myself! I thought he was my friend, or my "something" at least. When I made the doll it seemed extreme, but what is a doll but a toy, an effigy, a likeness? This wasn’t him. The person I was trying to reach was probably unreachable.

So what happened? Exactly nothing. So that was that. I filed it under "useless attempts to get someone's attention". 

Fast-forward several years, and the news came (in the paper he used to write for) that he had suddenly died, and his life was gone. The saddest thing was realizing that his colleagues (most of them dragged out of retirement for comment) had to awkwardly scrape together nice things to say about him. I didn’t react well and posted something pretty harsh on my blog, which I took down when I realized it was hurting people who had cared about him.

But suddenly, now that he was gone, he was this bon vivant, this sparkling wit, this Oscar Wilde of the Lower Mainland, and far from hating and fearing him, performers had lined up to receive his vicious barbs as a sort of badge of honour. Right. Others said he had wasted himself and should have written for the New Yorker or some other publication that mattered. The saddest thing of all was when someone said that after working with him for 25 years, no one knew a single thing about him – where he was from, if he had a family or an education or any working experience prior to his decades at the Sun. Outside the office or the concert hall, he was a cipher.

My anger fizzled out in pity. My mojo seemed ridiculous, which I suppose it was. I had not affected the outcome of this strange, sad story. But stranger still was what happened years later, and that’s the thing that makes the hair on my scalp prickle. Paul’s death was so similar, it was downright eerie.

Paul too was celebrated in his tiny circle, but his wit was known to be cutting. He seemed to love busting people down to size. Like Lloyd, he had his limited little fiefdom, and stomped away from the spiritualist church he had founded when the other members didn’t want to do things his way.

He lived far away by then, and we had an on-off correspondence, but when I excitedly began to write to him about some information I had received about George Gershwin, at first he seemed supportive and almost enthusiastic. I sent him several documents about how friends and family members had actually “seen” him after his death – a dire and restless death, the kind that sometimes leaves behind that unhappy camper known as a ghost.

I wanted to know more about it, and surely Paul was perfect to ask about ghosts. Mr. Medium himself!  But then I sent something that wasn’t an attachment, but included in the body of the email. His response told me that he hadn’t read any of the other stuff at all.

He told me that, “speaking as a psychotherapist” (which he wasn’t), I should “approach such manifestations with extreme caution. They may either be mere fantasies to restore a sense of personal power and worth, or out-and-out delusions born of your psychologically fragile state of “

BLAH, BLAH, BLAH.

I don’t know what it is about me and assholes, me and men like that. I didn’t marry one, at all, and I don’t think there are any left in my life – for Paul just dropped in his tracks, like Lloyd, in a stroke.

But not before my mojo. For after all, Paul taught me about mojo, and how to create it. I was very specific. I wrote out my wishes, and specifically stated that I meant no physical harm to either Paul or his partner (also named Paul). But it was full-on, and I made a doll in his likeness, with his face on it. It was part of the ritual.

But I never expected anything to come of it. It was mostly a catharsis for myself.  It felt eerie when I heard he had died like that, with a lightning-stroke like Lloyd whose little empire crumbled straight down like a tower being demolished. I did not feel good, I was not glad. It felt even worse to find out that his devoted spouse of 25 years had been left completely in the lurch. He wasn’t just left with no money. He was left with a yawning abyss of debt, something like $200,000.00, which he had known nothing about. The spiritualist church had decided to put the past aside and try to help “young Paul” (for he was much younger than the other Paul, and somewhat intellectually challenged, certainly no threat to his many-degreed spouse).

Something woeful had been revealed, not just about these men and their talent for turning their pain outward and inflicting it on others. There was something shadowy about both of them - they were not what they seemed. But what I really didn't want to see was what it revealed about me. Why did I ever suck up to people like this – not once, but twice? These weren’t powerful men at all. Their darts had entertained me – for a while. Casual cruelty can be vastly entertaining, as long as it's not about you.

There will be no more mojos, no more dolls, nor any of that stuff, ever again. I don’t want to need it, and I won’t. I only did it because I felt so damn powerless, and regretted my attachment to a couple of arrogant assholes. I don’t know why all these parallels, for it looks like there are quite a few, and why I did not see any of this until just now. But I do know something for sure, something I have believed for quite a long time now, and as years pass I believe it more all the time.

The way you die is the way you live. It’s an accurate reflection, like a tree reflected in water. Energy, charge, karma, charisma, whatever it is, can only build up in the machine for so long before it backfires. If someone holds up a mirror or a magnifying glass, the concentrated rays can set the person on fire until they are completely consumed.

I had watched two parallel examples of how a person’s life can implode by the way they conducted their life. It was a very strange kind of self-destruction, not by cigarettes or alcohol or drugs, but by a sort of personal self-immolation. I don’t think I stood there with the match, because I don't have that sort of power, but I was powerless to put the fire out. They had created it, fed it, banked it. I don’t know what kind of brokenness lay behind that level of rancor and bile, and I don’t care now because I am busy living my own life. But empty is empty. Leaving the person you love the most in massive debt is not love, nor is leaving your friends with no clue, no trace of who you have been. It’s abandonment. Abandonment of life, abandonment of self, abandonment of those who have made the fatal mistake of caring whether you live or die.

POST-BLOG.  A couple of times I've had to take posts down because people bolted in the other direction. But I simply needed to write this, though I know it is odd and a bit creepy. Long after Lloyd died, I found some references to his death and the way it was perceived that I found intriguing, not to mention revealing. They mostly highlighted his great narcissist's talent for throwing people off-balance, in life and (incredibly) even after his death. One writer was incensed that people had said things like, "He should have been writing for the New Yorker!", implying that he had ended up in a permanent backwater. The protest kind of proved the point, exposing Vancouver's "world-class" pretense like the raw nerve of a tooth. Another person stated in their blog that they were grateful to Lloyd for teaching them to write, but made it clear that "he wasn't a perfect person, and would have been insulted to be portrayed that way". She then went on to say that he was difficult to deal with, isolated himself for weeks at a time, cutting people off and making himself unreachable, and was known to inexplicably dump longtime friends as casually as Sweeney Todd dumping his victims into the pit. 

Are You Lost In The World Like Me

Just stumbled on this when looking for something else - specifically, the animated Facebook cover for Meowingtons (which I MIGHT be able to post a link to). This just started playing on Facebook, as videos are wont to do, and I was snipped. I mean, snapped - I mean, soaked into it, because it is so very real. It humbles me to think that a real cartoonist (someone named Steve Cutts) animated this, when I aspire to make jerky little figures move with a rinkydink gif program. It's based on the animation style of my beloved TerryToons from the early '30s, with a macabre side of Max Fleischer expressionism, but its message is as "right now" as it gets. It expresses everything I feel about Phone Culture, which I still refuse to join (though I do have one, and you'll never guess what I do with it!. . . That's right.)

Watch this more than once. More than twice. I'm going to watch it again later. And again.

My response to a narcissist

My last word to a narcissist I have known.

What goes around

This started off as a tack-on for my last post on Sunflower, but then I realized that, even for this blog, which trades in twists and turns and irrelevancies, it was just too irrelevant to be there. 

But I have to deal with it, somehow. 

This is something of an update on another tack-on from my Bob Dylan post, Darkness at the Break of Noon. Yes, my former friend is dead. He is not asleep; he is dead. At the end of the Dylan post, I wondered what exactly had happened to him: his longtime partner, someone I have never connected with (they were, strangely, both named Paul), emailed me to say he'd had a stroke and was "not expected to survive the weekend". It was a mass email that went out to a couple dozen people, none of whom I knew.

Nothing came after that. I didn't feel comfortable answering the email, and I needed to know, so I had to do some detective work. I found out on the Facebook page for his former church (which he founded and made himself the head of) that he died on Easter Sunday.

Is he in the Afterlife, whatever that is? I feel him batting around me like a fly. It's a nuisance, is what it is. Not a good energy, if it IS him. Black magic - was there some black magic going on here? Nonsense, I know nothing about it, even though I took his class in traditional/aboriginal medicine many moons ago. That's how I learned about curses, poisoned darts, boiled toads and datura. So it's interesting that if - a big if - an impossible if - IF there were any black magic going on at all here, the source of it would actually be him.

What happened for me was anything but magic. His was a particularly fine-edged abuse: take an interest at first, be kind, be helpful, be supportive even, and then, for reasons impossible to ascertain, or for no reason at all - chwwwwwwt! (The sound of a guillotine blade making a lizardy little breeze). I only know that, having set himself up as an expert on certain things I was interested in, he said some hateful, hurtful, condescending, even contemptuous things about me and my beliefs. 

Yet everyone thought he was the most wonderful, big-hearted, kind - but here, I am not sure. He left that church at some point - "retired", but if I knew the man at all - knew the hole in the centre of his sureness - I think he left because he lost control of the whole thing. No one was falling in line any more. He had ceased to be the Little Prince, holding sway over his own little spiritualist fiefdom.

It was a long time ago I met him, I was a different person then, and I would never let anyone like that into my life now. I had enough of it growing up in my family of origin, thank you very much. (But then again: most of THEM are dead now, too. Funny how, in a strange sort of way, death solves everything.)

But it's unpleasant, the way things come back to me, disparaging things I put up with: having my own spiritualist experiences, which I was testing out because I wasn't sure what to make of them, dismissed as "oh I don't know, it's probably just some kind of fantasy", said in a bored sort of voice. Whereas he would go on, and on, and on about his own experiences, with the assumption that all of them were bona fide. Did anyone even need to question it?

The Gershwin thing hurt and angered me. I am the first to say it may well be 100% imagination, but my exploration at first seemed to be greeted with enthusiasm and even fascination. I started sending him things. I don't know when, exactly, the turning point came, but it's hard to hear that nasty little metallic "chwwwwwwt!" before you've even had breakfast.

No, this doesn't sound authentic at all. No, I could check with some of my friends who know something about this, but I know what they'd all say. Don't forget, Margaret, that you don't really have a grounding in this tradition and that I trained myself for many, many decades to blah blah blah. I don't see anything here that blah blah blah blah blah.

He did not have to say, "Oh yes, write a book about it, why don't you." But the sudden trap door opening under my feet reminded me of another vicious sadist, a man whom I later found out was virtually sociopathic in his cruelty to others. I actually found it out from a psychiatrist who had "inside knowledge" that I did not doubt. Later I found some blog posts from people who turned themselves inside-out apologizing for him because he was dead, but then went on to compare him to Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, with his lethal trap door. A direct quote from a dear friend of his (name changed to protect the innocent, namely me):

My good friend writer R. D. died last week. This is not an obituary. Nor is it a paean to him. He would have hated that. R. was not a perfect person. He was funny and kind but he frequently isolated himself and he cut off some friends like Sweeney Todd dispatching a client.

He was also deeply private. As he lay dying of a stroke at age 67, colleagues were arguing about the particulars of his life. Did he have one brother or two? Had his father been a school teacher or farmer? Did R. really play the cello and, if not, how did this small town Prairie boy develop such a profound knowledge of music?

I hope that, when my time comes, work colleagues don't stand around my deathbed trying to piece together my life, trying to determine if I had anyone in my life at all (which these rather chilling words imply). Obviously they were attempting to scrape up particulars for his obituary, having no one else to ask. I think this goes beyond being "deeply private". I wondered at first if someone had found him weeks later, as sometimes, sadly, happens with people who "frequently isolate themselves".

I also hope there are no comparisons in my obituary to Sweeney Todd, who slit people's throats in his barber chair, slid them down a trap door, had them ground up into meat and made them into pies that people then purchased and ate. 

(Sidebar: in the usual published tribute, someone at the Sun strongly implied he had been wasted in the backwater of Canada and should have been writing for somebody important, like the New Yorker. I'm trying to figure out who this says the most about: R. D., the commentator, the Vancouver Sun or the New Yorker.)

And a curious thought: both men died of sudden strokes. I don't want to go too far down the road of what that might mean symbolically. Neither of them were old: seventy-ish, if that. In fact, R. D. was maybe 67. First there is a person, then there is no person, then. . .
The last email I ever got from Paul I deleted unread. I already knew what was in it. I just pushed the whole thing away from me. Part of me wanted some kind of revenge - I admit it now! And yes, I admit that at that particular point, I had my mojo working.

What does that mean, exactly? What that means, and all it means, is that one holds up a mirror.

One holds up a mirror, and whatever bad vibes that person is emanating, they bounce right back at them and hit them in the face.

You don't have to do anything, not anything at all. That's the way it works.

That's why I opened this post with Celie's famous statement from The Color Purple. It's the scene in which she gets her power back. I got mine back a very long time ago, but it is nasty to be reminded that someone, anyone, can toy with it and do damage the way Paul did.

I can't sit here and say I'm glad he's dead, because surely he did have people who cared about him, and I wouldn't insult them. But I am glad that the nastiness in him, unacknowledged by anyone around him, is dead. I am glad his pomposity and intellectual bullying and constantly pulling rank on people to make himself feel better is dead. I am glad that peculiar form of sinking dismay will never happen to me again. 

I know I have learned from him, but not even remotely what he thought I would/"should" learn. From him I learned I can step around narcissists who seem to believe they have special knowledge, wield special power, and are thus innately entitled to tell you that your own beliefs are ill-informed and of no value.  From him, I learned what to avoid - what to ignore - and how to keep on walking.

But meanwhile. . . LET'S SING!

Seems a downright shame

Shame?

Seems an awful waste

Such a nice, plump frame

Wot's his name has

Had

Has

Nor it can't be traced!

Business needs a lift

Debts to be erased

Think of it as thrift as a gift

If you get my drift, no?

Seems an awful waste

I mean, with the price of meat

What it is? When you get it

If you get it

Hah

Good, you got it

Take for instance, Mrs. Mooney and her pie shop

Business never better using only pussycats and toast

And a pussy's good for maybe six or seven at the most

And I'm sure they can't compare as far as taste

Mrs. Lovett, what a charming notion

Well, it does seem a waste

Eminently practical

And yet appropriate as always, it's an idea

Mrs. Lovett, how I've lived

Without you all these years, I'll never know

How delectable, also undetectable

Think about it

Lots of other gentlemen'll

Soon be comin' for a shave

Won't they?

Think of all them pies

How choice

How rare

For what's the sound of the world out there?

What, Mr. Todd?

What, Mr. Todd?

What is that sound?

Those crunching noises pervading the air

Yes, Mr. Todd, yes, Mr. Todd

Yes, all around

It's man devouring man, my dear

And then who are we to deny it in here?

These are desperate times

Mrs. Lovett and desperate measures are called for

Here we are, now, hot out of the oven

What is that?

It's priest, have a little priest

Is it really good? Sir, it's too good, at least

Then again, they don't commit sins of the flesh

So it's pretty fresh

Awful lot of fat only where it sat

Haven't you got poet, or something like that?

No, y'see, the trouble with poet is

'Ow do you know it's deceased? Try the priest

Heavenly

Not as hearty as bishop, perhaps

But then again

Not as bland as curate, either

And good for business too

Always leaves you wantin' more

Trouble is

We only get it on Sundays

Lawyer's rather nice

If it's for a price

Order something else, though to follow

Since no one should swallow it twice

Anything that's lean

Well then, if you're British and loyal

You might enjoy Royal Marine

Anyway, it's clean

Though of course it tastes of wherever it's been

Is that squire on the fire?

Mercy, no sir, look closer

You'll notice it's grocer

Looks thicker, more like vicar

No, it has to be grocer, it's green

The history of the world, my love

Save a lot of graves

Do a lot of relatives favors

Is those below serving those up above

Everybody shaves

So there should be plenty of flavors

How gratifying for once to know

That those above will serve those down below

Now let's see, here we've got tinker

Something pinker

Tailor? Paler, Butler? Subtler

Potter? Hotter, Locksmith?

Lovely bit of clerk

Maybe for a lark

Then again there's sweep

If you want it cheap

And you like it dark

Try the financier, peak of his career

That looks pretty rank

Well, he drank, it's a bank

Cashier, never really sold

Maybe it was old

Have you any Beadle?

Next week, so I'm told

Beadle isn't bad till you smell it and

Notice 'ow, well, it's been greased

Stick to priest

Now then, this might be a little bit stringy

But then of course it's fiddle player

No, this isn't fiddle player, it's piccolo player

'Ow can you tell? It's piping hot then blow on it first

The history of the world, my sweet

Oh, Mr. Todd, ooh, Mr. Todd

What does it tell?

Is who gets eaten, and who gets to eat

And, Mr. Todd, too, Mr. Todd

Who gets to sell

But fortunately, it's also clear

That, but everybody goes down well with beer

Since marine doesn't appeal to you

'Ow about rear admiral?

Too salty, I prefer general

With or without his privates? 'With' is extra

What is that? It's fop

Finest in the shop

And we have some shepherd's pie peppered

With actual shepherd on top

And I've just begun

Here's the politician, so oily

It's served with a doily

Have one, put it on a bun

Well, you never know if it's going to run

Try the friar

Fried, it's drier

No, the clergy is really

Too coarse and too mealy

Then actor, that's compacter

Yes, and always arrives overdone

I'll come again

When you have judge on the menu

Wait, true, we don't have judge yet

But we've got something you might fancy even better

What's that? Executioner

Have charity towards the world, my pet

Yes, yes, I know, my love

We'll take the customers that we can get

High-born and low, my love

We'll not discriminate great from small

No, we'll serve anyone

Meaning anyone

And to anyone at all

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