There was a large party in NW on Saturday night. I was talking to two friends I hadn’t seen in over a year, when you came up and starting throwing the charmer moves. You had one of those family names that were at one point male, but are now usually female, like Ashley (but not Ashley) – and you felt the need to interject a few defensive sentiments about it, even though no one was ridiculing you. Then you introduced yourself to me, held on to my hand a little too long, and really started with the praise.

“You’re so beautiful! So radiant!”  So this! So that!

You were at least fifteen years older than me, and this level of come-on was too much, so I inched closer to my friend. You remained on the porch, dramatically telling everyone about your likes and interests. “I am an actor!” you declared. Obviously, not a great one. “I love theatre! I love Shakespeare! I have studied Shakespearian theatre!” You never mentioned anywhere you actually studied or any show you’d actually participated in, and I knew that you were lying. You asked me my feelings about Shakespeare, and whether I had studied anywhere.

“I have a master’s in literature,” I said. “I’ve read a fair amount of Shakespeare.” For emphasis, I recited a few sonnet lines.  Meanwhile, my friends got up off their bench and went inside, saying they’d meet me momentarily. You sat down where they had been sitting, moved way the heck over to one end, and extended your arm in an invitational gesture. I kept standing, moving closer to the door.

“Well,” I said – and reached for the handle.

“Listen,” you said. “I have a question for you.”

I turned around. You were trying to pin me with your eyes.

“Do you know what the two greatest discoveries of science are?” you said.

“Uh,” I said. “I think that’s probably somewhat subjective.”

And out of nowhere, you underwent the trademark I-Am-A-Wife-Beater Jekyll/Hyde transformation, and you started shouting at me.
“You think that science is subjective?” you yelled. “Can’t you even recognize the truth? You can’t even admit the truth?”

“You appear to be angry,” I said. This obviously made you more angry, as you started shouting even louder.

“All of you women and your high and mighty shit – I am educated! I know what I’m talking about! You can’t even look at the truth! You won’t see the truth!” And then you launched into a sentence that I doubt I’ll correctly replicate (and I doubt you could, either) – but it went something like this: “The spherical unity of the nature of humanity must absolutely be subjected to universal correctness.”

Then, you started – is it challenging? – me. “Define universal correctness!” you yelled at me. “Define universal!”

“Hm,” I said. “I think I’d rather not engage the anger.”

Meanwhile, your very out-of-context and loud shouting had attracted the attention of two girls down the porch stairs, and another one of my friends came up to us on the porch and stationed herself in front of you, more or less between us.  “What’s up?” she said.  So you started shouting at her.

“Can you accept universal truths?!” you shouted.

“Um,” she said. “I don’t know.”

It was at this point that you reached into the box of Coors Light sitting on the bench next to you, took out a beer, shook it, and proceeded to cover my friend and the two girls at the bottom of the porch with beer. Ironically, the one person who had pissed you off – me – was far enough to your side so that you missed me completely, and wound up soaking the one person who hadn’t been talking to you at all.

Luckily, you’d come to a generally drama-free group. Now that the finality of your stupid action occurred to you, you were temporarily stunned into silence, and my friend held up the hem of her shirt, looked at you, and said, “Look at this. Look at what you did.”

You started yelling again, and she interrupted you.

“Look again. Look at this. Look at what you did. Look around. Why did you do this?”

Surprisingly, you actually did look, this time. There was a long silence. Then, still holding on to the hem of her shirt, she said, “Now, apologize.”

There was another long silence. Finally, you cupped your hands in front of you like Oliver Twist, and in the most sarcastic tone you could manage, said, “I’m sorry.” But then you didn’t say anything further. You got up, and then defeated, you left, probably to continue scouring the city for prey.

—

I feel for women who encounter men like this, and don’t recognize the patterns of abusive behavior. It’s always the same, and the great thing about alcohol is that one gets to see the Ugly Faces of Drunks long before one ever would in a regular social situation. Ashley, the second you opened your insecure mouth and actually thought you could start an argument over something as ridiculous as the “Two Greatest Discoveries of Science”, you morphed in front of my eyes, from a human into a thing – a lab rat – a situation to be studied and analyzed for further emphasis. See Abnormal Psychology section 4. Put the rat in the maze and see how agitated it gets when it isn’t sure which route to take. Shock it whenever it pets a white rabbit. Look – it’s fulfilling the characteristics for eventual violent relationships.

The thing is, I know you – and based on my very profession – I’ve read works by my students that, terms and years apart, repeat the same systematic patterns that eventually led to broken bones and black eyes. Ashley, I had a student hold up a hand to a thick black scar that disappeared underneath her eyebrow, and say, “My ex-husband. He didn’t like the beer I got, so he broke one of the bottles on my face.”

My grandfather always said, “Beware of charmers. Charmers are liars.”  And they are. They are predators and their women are prey. They seek women who need to be validated – usually intelligent but insecure; usually with a history of a nurturing, caretaking role – ones that are willing to forgive. And it always starts the same, and ends the same. Oh, Ashley.  You’re not only a thing, you’re a thing that’s a statistic! Here are the combined stories of maybe fifteen students out of over one thousand, who lived this life.  Sound like yours?

Shower her with flowers, gifts, compliments. All eyes on you, girl. You are the central star in the sky, you are the light of his life and fire of his loins, you are with somebody who cares enough to shower you with flowers. And you buy it – the compliments, the flattery – you don’t see why being the only thing in someone’s world is ultimately destructive, and you don’t see that pretty words and pretty things mean nothing. Instead, you’re finally the one that has the attention – *his* attention.

And usually, the first slip-up is accidental, or non-physical. He says something utterly disrespectful and tasteless, out of nowhere. One of my friends was with a guy for four weeks, and one day they were watching TV, when he said, “You know, all you’re good for is sex.” When she was late for work, he started throwing cold glasses of water on her face in the morning. And it STILL took her another two months to leave him.

Or he throws something and in the process, it just *happens* to hit you. A vase. A porcelain doll. Immediately he apologizes, he’s just got X and Y stressing him out at work, you know how much he loves you, yada yada. You think it was a random event but lady, there are no random events. Everything goes back to wonderful-cookies-and-puppies for a while.

And then one day, just when you’ve adjusted, you iron the wrong dress shirt or misplace the ballpoint pen, and he explodes, and strikes you, or pushes you. It’s brief, and when the color comes back to his eyes, he apologizes profusely.  It’ll never happen again; just the one time. And by this point, you’ve been with this guy long enough so that he’s a longtime boyfriend, fiance, or even husband, so you forgive this event because you feel that you have to. You tread on eggshells. It was your fault, after all.  You’re the one who misplaced the ballpoint pen. You’re always giving him a hard time when he’s had a hard day.  Hell, you couldn’t even remember what kind of beer he liked, that’s why he hurt you!  So for several months everything readjusts, and when you’ve finally convinced yourself that it was just The One Time, it happens again.

Of course, there are other issues he gradually develops.  He hates himself, woman, and he wants you to hate yourself as much as he hates himself every moment of every day. He hates you talking to your family and friends, and he’s usually distant and angry, so you start spending less time with your mom on the phone, less time with your friends on your days off. If you come home late, he accuses you of running around, even though you’re way too scared of him to consider it.

So anyway, one of two things happens. Either the man succeeds in damaging the woman’s self-confidence so thoroughly that she essentially becomes a thing and a statistic, a shell – or she eventually realizes that the guy is a horror and takes off.

That’s you, Ashley. And the second that your eyes became swollen with rage over nothing, I saw my students’ stories written across your face. At heart, you are a weakling, and you couldn’t very well perform an act of physical violence without being beaten to a pulp by the men who actually lived at the house. So, you did the next best thing appropriate for an insecure dumbass; you attacked – with beer! And then, drunk and dumb, you sat there blinking.

You aren’t most men, Ashley. Most men, at the very least, aren’t violently-inclined Frankensteins, and in my experience, most are just good, everyday folk. And it’s true that there are plenty of abusive women out there. However, if a man resorts to fisticuffs, he’s likely to cause more damage. I’m under 100 pounds. I can no more physically battle an average 150-pound guy than he can hope to get pregnant someday. Unless, of course, your balancing tool of choice is a Colt 45.

Ashley, I wanted to tell you that I pity you. Pathetic – a man nearly my father’s age so insecure about himself, that he has to argue over large, irrelevant issues to feel like he’s not the loser that he knows he is. And I hope that more women out there can see the warning signs long before they turn into a pattern of abuse. When it starts becoming angry, observe it.  See how it struggles to find the entrance in the little cardboard maze. Remember. . .nothing that comes out of its mouth has any relevance to anything at all, because that thing hates itself for being the thing it is.

You, Ashley. A middle aged child, too broken to ever be fixed, and doomed to keep missing your connections.

–”The Elegance of the Hedgehog”

This reminded me that I have a drummer friend (as of four years ago, anyway) claimed to have never experienced déja vu, and to the best of my knowledge, he still hasn’t.  He revealed that fact while we were on a long road trip, the kind where you talk about everything and nothing for hours on end; it’s one of the best things about being on tour.  One of us in the group – there were six of us riding together in a motor home – had a déja vu and described to the others, and that’s how the subject was started.  The drummer claimed not to have had one, and we all fell about with shock.  “Really?  How is that possible?  How can you have made it into your thirties without having one?”

At that point, he asked us what the feeling is like, and we had a very funny time trying to describe it.  Each of us said miniscule variations on the same theme.  “It’s like you’ve experienced the situation you’re in. . .before.”

“Somehow you just know that you’ve done this thing, whatever it is, before.”

“You feel it while it’s happening; that it’s happened before.”

It was like trying to describe an orgasm, or what it feels like to be drunk or high.  Each is very difficult to explain to someone who’s never experienced it.  For the record, I’ve had plenty of orgasms, and been drunk plenty of times, but still never been high, which is probably a whole separate story in itself.

Monty Python has a classic Flying Circus episode called “It’s the Mind” that explores this phenomenon in a very funny way.

Oh, and if you’re my drummer friend and you’re reading this (assuming that you still haven’t experienced déja vu), it isn’t really like that.  It’s more like. . .you’ve experienced the situation you’re in. . .before. Somehow you just know that you’ve done this thing, whatever it is, before.  You feel it while it’s happening; that it’s happened before.

Tune in next time when I describe what an orgasm feels like.

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veni, vedi, vici

not quite there yet

Ethiopian wedding

Hydrox

George Harrison

beach trip

halfway through

the mental game of music

synchronicity

still don’t smoke

quite a group

lovely day in Seattle

Amen

happy as we are, thank you

Silver Falls

Port Townsend trip

dream girl

non-nostalgic nostalgia

wedding, play, garden, hike, learning

Of Yakima and Feces

the Oriental Chicken

Catherine Burton (Bunton?), R.I.P.

Oceanside

mona lisa

lots of big musical news, and links galore

a very coherent narrative

what if it is?

apples and bananas

cello scrotum

by way of example

flirtation versus pedantry

communication breakdown

Enjoy!