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Tuesday, 22 April 2008

Well, at least I didn't turn into a daffodil...

I've been in the land of the insane this week. Or at least the seriously disturbed.

I managed to catch a cold from a teller in Asda's (and what was worse, I knew I would and was too socially programmed to ignore my instincts and go to another till). Hardly had said cold took hold than I came down with some odd bastard species of cystitis. Feeling shivery, spaced out, in pain and incredibly tired, I down-tooled on Cult Fiction (that poor thing is blighted, I tell you) and decided to move away from the computer and do something else.

'Something else' turned into me buying books on narcissist families and immersing myself in the 'madness' that was my "family of origin" as psychiatrists love to call it. (As opposed to your family of rental, or your family of adoption for the day, perhaps.)

In the strange ways of the universe, I have no idea exactly how I came to the narcissist thing. I know I was looking at books on shame on Amazon and I'm guessing one of them sneaked in there. It rung a bell because I remember my brother throwing it into the mix of Ways My Sister is Insane and Therefore My Parents are Not, and My Life is Unchanged… No, Really.

They tell me some narcissism is healthy, but it crosses into pathological narcissism when people can't empathise with other people. There's even some division of thought on when a narcissist morphs into becoming a psychopath – but, hey, they're all the same in my book.

Kidding.

Still, it wasn't comfortable and I do kind of wonder what drove me to do it. You'd think maybe having a little festival of Marx brothers movies or some such might have been a better idea.

I have to admit that although I still feel like crap (the sleep deprivation alone has ensured that) I do feel better for having read them (three of them in a week). But has it helped any?

Yes and no. I do seem to be a rarity in the heady world of Children of Narcissist Parents, in that I recognised early on a lot of the things that others seem to take a lifetime, or two, to spot.

I seem to be even rarer in that I dumped mine, realising that they would never be any use for anything. One of the books I bought actually spends around half the time telling you how to "deal" with these madly abusive parents so that you can have a "relationship" with them.

I think that could probably be adopted as the new definition of insanity to replace the 'doing what you've always done and expecting different results' maxim currently in use.

Of course, it is a form of doing what you've always done, but what they advise is changing your usual behaviour for new behaviours that create a different, supposedly less mad-making interaction with said narcissist parents.

And I say, Why, God, why?

I will never, ever understand people wanting to hang onto families that don't – and, worse, can't – love them. Why would you do that? What in the name of all that's holy are you getting out of the relationship if they don't love you, don't even really know you exist and recognise you solely as a way of off-loading their bad feelings about themselves onto you?

So, any of you fellow Children of Narcissist Parents™ (let's trademark that), if you feel you can argue a good case for why you are hanging onto a dead but painful relationship that still gives you endless grief no matter how much you adapt your 'behaviours', tell me about it – I'd really love to know.

So what of me then? Did I see myself writ large on every page?

Yes, pretty much. It's disconcerting and unnerving to see family scenarios, nearly all set in America, that might well have been played out in the Henery household. To discover that your parents are nothing but a psychological stereotype and that your own behaviours are nothing but bog standard reactions to that behaviour is completely underwhelming. Looks like none of us are as original as we like to think.

Conversely, it's also comforting: to know that you haven't imagined it, to know that you haven't exaggerated it, to know that your realisation that it wasn't 'normal' is immensely reassuring, in a depressing kind of a way. Depressing because you wonder how human beings can be so dumb. This has always been my problem with my family. After a lot of hurt and rage you start to see it in a more detached way and you realise just how breathtakingly dumb their behaviour is (if only it was so easy to see how dumb your own behaviour is).

Take but one tiny example off the stock-pile of my parents' greatness.

My mother had a thing about stuff. She couldn't part with it. She was, and is, a truly bizarre mix of someone who will kill for stuff and who equally well doesn't give a toss about stuff. She's like some ancient biblical painting of good and evil having a wrassle over a man's soul.

My mother couldn't give you anything. No, I don't mean emotionally (that was a given), but she actually couldn't hand things over. This meant in practice that when I went food shopping for the family I had to buy four of everything, because she couldn't cope with the insecurity of not having her share. This also meant there was a rule that you only ever ate your piece. You couldn't have an extra one because four were bought and the four were designated to each individual. If anyone (and it didn't happen often) accidentally ate my mother's piece then she would go deadly silent.

This wasn't a sulk, it was a glacial withdrawing. My mother could be silent for weeks at a stretch if she felt slighted. If it was very bad she would use someone else to communicate – you know the old joke, "Go and ask your father if he wants his supper" when he's sitting right there.

None of this was comic, understand. It was deadly serious. Trust me, a mother who was already 99% absent going for the full Monty was no joke.

This problem with giving also meant she faced a terrible dilemma in any other sphere where it might be required of her. She couldn't give presents. She had two techniques for dealing with this: 1) give very cheap, freely available presents so that she didn't feel that anything 'special' was being given and therefore she wasn't, by implication, being somehow deprived. Or 2) take the present back.

My mother regularly took clothes and dress fabric back off me after it was bought, on various grounds, such as "It's too old for you" (green lurex, Chinese pattern satin, some nice pastel psychedelia), or in the case of clothes: "You never wear it", or that good old stand-by – no reason at all, just take it.

I didn't truly see a pattern in this until I was in my early teens and witnessed it operating outside of my relationship with her, giving me some much needed perspective on what was actually happening.

One year when we came back from a holiday in Czechoslovakia, my mother brought home with her a present for a work colleague. That was unusual in itself, my mother had no woman friends and didn't give presents. I don't know whether she had promised this woman something, or it was a game of one-upmanship, but a present was duly bought, a fancy-worked copper-coloured bracelet.

Now, it's important to understand here that my mother never wore jewellery, neither valuable nor costume. When she went out at the weekends she'd wear large, glitzy 60's/70's earrings, that being the fashion then, but otherwise, no jewellery, ever.

Now she brought this bracelet home, took it into Centre 1 (tax office) where she worked and that was that.

I have no idea how I learned this, but I assume I asked her how her friend had liked the bracelet. My mother confessed she hadn't given her it. I have a feeling she either said something odd here, or I somehow twigged it, but I realised for the first time how absolutely insane her behaviour was. Never, ever, would she wear this bracelet (and she didn't), but she was physically unable to give it over to this woman.

I have a feeling she told her she had forgotten to buy her a present or that she'd lost it. I remember her confessing that it was still in her work drawer. I remember her rationalising it: that the woman wouldn't like it, it would be wasted on her, she'd never wear it. Ironic given that it was brought home and put in my mother's jewellery bowl where it languished, unworn, but safe from the horrible fate of being given to another.

My mother never even attempted to overcome this problem. In fact, I don't think she even recognised it was a problem. This, of course, being the problem with being a narcissist – you don't have a problem.

In practical terms this meant that my mother gave me nothing, from cuddles and kisses (awwwwwwww….) to reassurance, compliments, advice, help, presents, not even the bare necessities.

The only clothes my mother could bear to give me were school clothes – so I lived in school clothes. My mother never touched me and disliked being touched. My mother couldn't give help or reassurance, always telling me instead that I didn't need it. My mother was afraid of sickness and avoided the sick room with a repugnance that was almost obsessive, thus meaning that if you were ill you were on your own. Presents meant the cheapest thing she could buy at the newsagent at the last moment and leave in the bag, or wrap in some old 10-sheets-for-10p Xmas wrap. Any request for help, disguised as advice-seeking (the only way you could get her to notice your problem), was always met with a strange and subtle bragging about how she didn't need what you were asking for so she couldn't advise you on it.

My mother was superhuman, beyond perfect. She didn't get ill, have period pains (her periods were well-nigh invisible, so low-profile did she keep them), she always beat everyone at everything she did or died trying.

She's still like that now. When I was in Orkney I started having what I thought was pre-menopausal symptoms. I decided to phone her up and ask her about her menopause. I hadn't had any contact with her for years but we'd been briefly brought together by Max's dad – an aberrant guilt-trip I should never have allowed myself to be sucked into, but that's another story.

Anyway, in the course of the conversation my mother told me that her menopause had lasted only around a year, with virtually no symptoms, and then it was over – painless and a piece of cake. In fact, a typical old Mary Henery I-am-de-greatest summation.

The truth was, though, that this time I could remember some facts that she seemed to have conveniently forgotten. She had, for example, at least once bled non-stop for three weeks. So badly, in fact, that my father had asked me to try and talk her into going to the doctors. Completely unheard of in the shamed and repressed Henery household to actually voice such a squeamish horror, and from my father at that – that's why I remembered it.

She had also conveniently forgotten that she'd had headaches so severe that she'd once been reduced to tears. It was the only time that I ever recall seeing my mother cry, and it was sufficiently shocking that it was carved into my memory.

Oddly, she remembered the headaches when I reminded her, but she had no memory of the crying, only that she'd had to go to hospital for brain scans – a fact about which I knew nothing. Secrecy was our other great fun family game.

But the fact was, even in her seventies, my mother was still acting out Perfect. It was far more important to her that she be seen as indestructible than that she should share anything with me that might help me. There was no mother/daughter bond and never would be, she was too busy winning an imaginary game of one-upmanship with me.

Such, dear friends, is the life of a Child of Narcissist Parents™.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

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To subscribe to this blog on Blogspirit (my base camp) without divulging your email address click on the Newsgator button on the left-hand sidebar (on the Blogspirit site) or simply post the following text into your RSS browser: http://www.poisonpixie.com/chanceryblogfeed.xml

Not yet discovered the wonder of The DANNY Quadrilogy? You can check out all the volumes in print now at Poison Pixie where you can read an extract of Volume 1 for FREE! Or start your collection on Amazon here where you can also buy a print sampler, entitled CULT Fiction, containing an introduction to the DANNY series and an excerpt from Volume 1, for only £2.99.

You can also see me in person on my YouTube site (as well as DANNY's various trailers and ads) here or you can see the same material on the Poison Pixie film site where you can also hear our Mr Scratchmann read his delightful comic verse in his podcasts.

Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.

18:06 Posted in Blog , Books , Leisure , Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this

Tuesday, 15 April 2008

Brigitte Bardot - One Suicide-Bombing, Motherfucking Racist Bitch

I'm reading tonight that Brigitte Bardot is up for the fifth time – yes, you read that correctly, fifth – for "inciting racial hatred", said "racial hatred" being, apparently, a dislike of Muslims and, specifically, the influx of Muslims into France.

As an animal rights activist she doesn't like their habit of slaughtering sheep for religious festivals, but I am also 'reliably' informed by the same news bulletin that she "published a book attacking gays, immigrants and the unemployed, in which she also lamented the "Islamisation of France"."

Waaaaaaay! Go long, Brigitte, go long! You've got to admire that. Not just the Muslims but throwing in the gays and the unemployed too. I like someone dedicated to their dislike, irrational or otherwise.

There seems to me to be something deeply ironic in the fact that she keeps finding her ass in court (the prosecutor is quoted as being "a little tired of prosecuting Mrs Bardot") when the internet is wall to wall – or ether to ether perhaps – hatred of just about every kind, colour and depth you can imagine, but nobody seems to be doing very much to stop any of that.

Could it be (say not so) that it's easy to target Ms Bardot whose fat, rich ass is up there for all to see – and line their pockets with. I mean, on the inciting racial hatred front, a mad Frenchwoman (and let's fact it – that's what we think of her, isn't it?) who lives reclusively with her cats, wittering on about animal rights, isn't exactly going to whip up a feeding frenzy of Nazis, is she?

Can you see Brigitte storming through her retirement community on her Zimmer frame, yelling for the partisans to take to the streets and lynch them a few towel-heads?

So I think it's alright for Brigitte to whip up racial hatred?

I don't know – do you think it's alright for the National Enquirer to whip up Britney hatred? Or the world and his dog to whip up fat hatred? How about Eddie Murphy's hatred? I think Norbit pretty much whips up fat and women hatred. How about taking Norbit to court?

Oh, that doesn't count, that's entertainment. Well, for all you know Brigitte laughs her guts out when she's writing bad shit about Islam – is she not allowed to be entertained?

I'm only asking because I wonder why she isn't allowed to vent her spleen on a group's blood-thirsty religious practices when it's okay for everyone on the web to hate an individual for markedly bloodless brolly-bashing. I know if I was standing before God I'd rather take my chances on justifying whipping up hatred against slaughtering sheep than hitting cars with brollies.

Unless, of course, it was the old testament God. In which case I'd recommend telling him you rounded up every whoring little slut from here to Memphis and the hell with a few sheep. I'd say the old testament God is more in line with the Muslims any day, and it surprises me he hasn't struck Brigitte down before now – the fat slut (two strikes right there).

Am I the only person in the world that finds it odd that Brigitte indulging in a little reactionary (or heartfelt) disgust for the ways of Islam is prosecutable, but that Islam strutting around, often in someone else's country, screaming the odds about our behaviour (those slutty women again) and inciting just about anybody to take up arms against the infidel, doesn't seem to find itself in court?

Oh sure, if they build a few bombs, get a gathering of local dentists (why do they always seem to be innocuous dentists? Is it a sadism gene?) to talk about the next suicide mission, we whip their asses into court, but talking, or even writing about it? I don't think so. We have to respect their religion, you see. Doesn't do to offend someone's religion.

Well, I don't know about you, but I've never seen an offended religion. I've seen some damn antsy papists in my time, and some downright vicious protestants, but an offended religion? Not in my lifetime.

What I can't stand about this is the rampant double standard.

Let me give you a very specific personal right-on-your-doorstep example.

About a year after I came to Aberdeen I was in a thrift store. It didn't belong to a high street charity; it was just entitled Charity Shop on the sign. It was a big, clean shop with lots of donated goodies (it still is – it's still there, thriving away). Behind the counter was an 'Asian' man of indeterminate origin, but he looked Middle Eastern, not Indian or Pakistani. I paid no particular attention to him, being drawn, as usual, to the jewellery cabinet. I asked to see a couple of pieces and he stood talking to me, perfectly affably and politely friendly.

He went into the back shop after a while and I realised I could hear an odd tape playing in there – odd because it was part in Arabic and then in English.

After a while of eavesdropping it became apparent that what I was listening to was a translation, rather like a French lesson – écouter et répetér (listen and repeat for those of you who hated French). I, being me, and always caught on oddity, started concentrating on what was being said and discovered a whole new world I wasn't sure I had ever really believed in until that moment – me being a good woolly liberal and all.

This was a 'sermon' by a religious leader. He was extolling young men to be careful in their 'ministry', when trying to follow the ways of Allah, that they were not seduced by the women of their 'enemies'. He actually used the word enemies. He wrote a whole imaginary scenario for his keen young disciples, visualising them finding these poor women wandering the streets, 'orphaned' by combat and suggesting that they might take them in out the goodness of their hearts – but that they shouldn't. They should beware of this "temptation", because their 'enemies' had sent these dangerous women in amongst them, to lead them into sin and vice, so that they would stray from Allah.

Now, putting this into a real world context, what he was actually saying was, "In our 'holy war' you will find women, destitute, traumatised, wandering homeless in the streets without help and family. You should ignore your natural human tendencies to be a good Samaritan, because remember, your enemy will attempt to seduce you, because, let's face it, he's Satan. So don't be kind, and don't do good, because your enemy doesn't deserve it. And, anyway, enemy women are sluts."

Such is the magnanimous heart of religion. Founded on moral principles my ass. Anything that extols unkindness to people in need is neither good, charitable, nor godly. Unless, of course, he is that old testament God that we all fear so much – the wrathful, punitive one that always seems to want you to "take up thy word and slew mine enemy". Why doesn't he slew his own enemies if he's so damn powerful?

But the long and the short of it was that's where the money was going from anything I or anyone else bought in that shop. The bloke in the shop was perfectly nice and affable, but he still considered me the 'enemy' and that as a woman I'd be likely sent to try and seduce him and other good Allah fearing men off the path of righteousness. If I was in pain or distress he wouldn't lift a hand to help me – his preacher had told him not to. And he was listening to this bilge masquerading as righteousness in full hearing of a shop full of (at that moment) white people (aka 'enemies') like myself.

He obviously saw nothing wrong with that. After all, he was just practicing his religion and he has a right to that.

But what I want to know is this – why doesn't he, or the many like him, find himself hauled into court with Brigitte Bardot for "inciting racial hatred"? Perhaps because he's not famous and rich?

No. That would be wrong.

After all, he wasn't fat.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.

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Wednesday, 09 April 2008

100 Reasons Why I am a Genius - no, really...

In the strangest of strange places right now. I'm chiefly engaged in writing new features for Cult Fiction to make it an "all new, all singing, all dancing" kind of publication.

So far, I have a new bio of me which confesses to my ownership of The Dirty Club – a child sex club that isn't nearly as perverse as it sounds, or is possibly more perverse than it sounds, depending on your point of view – then I have the Will I Like DANNY? 'criminal profile' i.e. a Cosmo style (not) listing of Are you the 'typical' (there's no such thing) DANNY reader? Then we have the Read a Good Movie feature which is a list of the 'if you like X movie, you'll like DANNY' variety and, last of all – at least so far – a feature entitled Subverting the Genre, about how DANNY subverts just about any genre you care to name.

And that's as far as I've got.

It's a strange place because I'm doing something I've never really done before – I'm using me as my Perfect Reader. We've had so many misfires with DANNY publicity that we've decided to throw caution to the winds and model the perfect DANNY reader on my likes and dislikes, the places I'd go (IMDB & Amazon, pretty much), things I'd see and do.

The only real basis we have for this breathtaking strategy is our most 'successful' fans share a remarkable similarity of taste in 'fiction' to mine, and our most 'unsuccessful' fans have had preferences and tastes where I'd never venture in a million years, so we figure, walk towards me and away from them and we're heading in the right direction.

Hey, it's a plan – the best one we've had so far – so don't knock it.

We've been sitting on advertising campaigns for IMDB & Amazon for ages – too scared to spend the budgets in case we cock up, or they are not the right place – but we've got to let go some time and that would be now.

Or, at least, after the 4th of July when DANNY Volume 1, the Revised Edition, officially hits the US.

It will be available here too, by the way, should you want to read The Version With More Commas as I've come to think of it. Truthfully, it will be a slightly better edition: easier to read, more graphic cover, better design generally, plus, of course, it may have some of the original beginning reinstated.

Still not entirely sure on that. After all, I cut it out the first time – must have had a reason. Personally, I think I just got the Must-Have-Striking-Opening-Scene disease and went a little nuts when I was editing it. But we'll see.

So, what other news? Well, the free extract of Volume 3 is up and running finally. You can read this via the Secret Site portal on Danny-is God (you'll find the link down below). Unfortunately it still has bold type on the first page because Mr Scratchmann has been doing a load of commissions in the US (he recently placed an online portfolio on the i-Spot after deliberating on whether he should for a mere 10 years). He was immediately inundated with work, which was nice, but which came on top of a load of commissions in the UK.

Still, never complain about work – you never know when it will dry up again. I will, however, keep chivvying his ass about getting it fixed to make it a more comfortable reading experience.

I, for my part, have decided finally to put the DANNY Elite Discussion Board (not sure it is a discussion board, but can't think what else to call it at the moment) on a whole new site, which is at neither MySpace nor Livejournal but is, instead, on Blogger, a Google site. And here is The Dirty Club.

It has been named in memory of the above-mentioned child sex club which I, disappointingly – (once again, or not) – ran as a child, and which got me into no end of trouble. Now, as then, I am going public, but we will definitely not be indulging in any actual sex, just talking about sex and its ramifications as viewed through DANNY – and other academic-sounding and fun polemics, of course.

As you can see, you have to be a member to get in and we will set up a page on DANNY-is-God in due course to let you join up.

The very rigorous testing will involve truth drugs, eyeball scanning and an oath of allegiance to the Lithuanian flag, plus some indisputably filthy hazing rituals and the sacrifice of your first child or a small pet – whichever the phase of the moon proscribes.

More details of that once we've set up the painstaking entrance exam (and I've actually written some content).

So that's my excitement for the week.

God, what a sad life I have.

Been watching Heroes and enjoying it but, dear God, it really does have fanboy coming out its ass. It's as if they sat down and thought "How can we capture that huge fanboy market out there?" and wrote an identikit story where all the fanboys get to play a part and sad losers get to have the dreaded "special powers".

As I am enjoying it, I consider myself very lucky that I saw a few episodes when it was just starting to get famous here, on the strength of which I got the box set for my Xmas. If I'd come to it from the fame end, as it were, I'd have undoubtedly run away from it screaming.

On the face of it, it seems like a nightmare scenario: geeky kids; comic artists (nooooooooooooooooooh!); Japanese geeky kids in comics (nooooooooooooooooooh!); doughnut-eating-decent-policemen-with-nasty-friends-and-adulterous-wives; cheerleaders who spend the whole thing in split-front mega-short skirts, and who look like some terrifying cross between Shirley Temple and Amber Bosoms the Teenage Slut Porn Starlet from Texas whose web cam gets more hits than Youtube, and who may regularly get burnt/beaten/broken but who never loses the curl in her hair and whose lip gloss still shimmers in 1000 degree furnace fires; evil men who have huge art collections (why?); evil English men (I would say why again but we all know it's the accent) who chop vegetables; the Petrelli brother incestuous touchy-feely thing (oh, I'm the pot and it's the kettle); the evil über-villain who absorbs power to become über-villainous so that he can rule the world and reign supreme as The Evil One Who Feels "Special".

What? You might as well put The Evil One Whose Mother Preferred His Jock Brother.

See, that's what I mean, wall-to-wall geek. But, hey, it's good wall-to-wall geek, so more power to them. I suspect that the two Japanese boys, much as they are by far my favourite thing in the show, are raging racism of the worst kind, but what the hell – we're white, right? We can say anything.

So, the inexplicable title of this blog? I wrote a piece called 100 Reasons Why I am a Genius then decided I'd never publish it, but I so loved the title I thought I'd put it on here.

Got to give you something to wonder about me in your idle moments.

P.S. The child sex club mentioned in this blog DOES NOT exist, nor has it ever existed, anywhere, ever. It is A JOKE. Tasteless maybe, but still a joke. The Dirty Club™, is a discussion forum for readers of DANNY by Chancery Stone and has nothing to do with child sex, anywhere, ever. There is no such thing as child sex.

You can now read this blog at the following locations:-

Blogspirit

Myspace

Lastly, there is an independent DANNY Discussion Board run by fans, C Stone's DANNY where anyone is welcome to go along and chat about the book till their guts bust.

20:05 Posted in Blog , Books , Film , Leisure , Shopping , Web | Permalink | Comments (2) | Email this