[SOC]

I notice that all my SOC posts start out with some cry about the need for my coffee. Coffee looms large in my thoughts when I haven't had any. Right now, I have had zero coffee. This is the C-man in the uncaffeinated state. Not pretty, is it? Fuck you. Oh, I'm sorry. That was rude of me. Fuck you again. FUCK. I need some motherfucking coffee. I will be nicer after the java. I promise. Off to the Mister Coffee for some java bean goodness.

Coffee is brewing now. It takes time to make that shit. I have no energy. My brain is not in the optimal state. It needs its stimulant. I will proceed with the SOC as much as I can as I try and exist without caffeine. Fuck fuck fuck.

I don't write about the one thing that is always on my mind because I prefer to keep this one thing to myself. I am selfish like that, but I feel that it is for the best. I am not alone anymore, and that is a good thing.

I recently received an email where the person expressed thanks for something I had written. Apparently, this person was having problems with family members, and I basically gave some liberation with my post about why your family is fucked up. The gist of my advice is that if your family makes you miserable and does bad things to you that you should disassociate yourself from them. This brings up the whole topic of forgiveness. It is something I have thought about considerably.

There is no love without forgiveness. This is because when you love someone you are going to have to overlook things about that person that may bother you. People make mistakes, and they are clumsy sometimes. They say the wrong things that offend you, or they have certain habits that annoy you. I call these things "misdemeanors." You should never end things over misdemeanors. This is petty and stupid.

Felonies are much more serious. The difference between a misdemeanor and a felony in personal relationships is intent. For instance, if your significant other accidentally dings the paint job on your car, this is way different than if that same SO took a screwdriver and gouged a gigantic scratch in the paint. One is accidental. The other is on purpose. We always forgive misdemeanors. Felonies are another matter.

You can't just let felonies go. Sweeping shit like that under the rug is not going to improve things. Instead, it just encourages more felonious behavior. Ultimately, you end up with what you put up with. Right now, if it is discovered that Bill Clinton had another extramarital affair, I am not going to feel sorry for Hillary Clinton.

I don't think you are obligated to forgive felonies. People who go out of their way to hurt you or destroy you are way fucked up. It would take one long redemptive path to ever overcome some of the things people do to others. Adultery is one of those things. This is why I am not too sympathetic to adulterers. Adultery is where you take a person's love for you and wipe your ass with it. I find that the people who commit adultery tend to be narcissistic, vain, and without conscience.

You can't paper over a felony. Felonies grow and fester like a putrefying sore. For instance, I don't see Bill being beloved by the Rodham clan. I might be wrong, but if you do a woman wrong, you shouldn't expect to be loved by her people.

But there is another class of actions that defy the misdemeanor/felony thing. This has to do with repeated behaviors. To go back to the car analogy, this would be the significant other that repeatedly dings your paint job. It is unintentional but habitual. This is where estrangement comes from. No one time act is enough to destroy a relationship. It is the accumulation of repeated events either misdemeanor or felony that result in a permanent break. As a friend of mine put it to me recently, "I wasn't mad at that person, and I am not mad now. But you can't keep putting up with it either."

Habits are what make or break you in this regard. For instance, a person who is a hoarder living with a person who isn't a hoarder will eventually lose that relationship. The same thing applies to a drinker, a lazy person, a belligerent asshole, and the like. This is why people who cut it off with someone seem petty like an episode of Seinfeld, but people don't see the habitual behaviors that led up to the break. For instance, the wife that leaves the husband after he glances at the delicious ass of some shapely female might seem petty, but we don't see the stacks of porn on his computer or his roving eye that is going 24/7. On the Polaroid basis, she is just a petty bitch. On the weighing scale basis, she has been very forbearing.

This comes to an important issue which is the judgment of other people. I know. Judge not lest ye be judged. The reality is that we all judge one another. We have to. The main thing isn't that we judge, but that we are consistent and fair in our judgments. For me, I do not judge people based on singular events. I weigh people over the course of time. Good people prefer this weighing approach. Bad people despise it. Bad people want Polaroids.

Polaroids can make anyone look good or bad. It all depends on timing and framing. This is why when you break with someone they pull out their Polaroids and keep the good ones while discarding the bad ones. Suddenly, they look awesome while you look like a piece of shit. The collective weight of years is ignored and forgotten. This is what we know as shallowness. Bad people are shallow. It is their nature. They are oblivious to all of it. They only see the edited collection of Polaroids.

The biggest trick I see from these people is the Selective Memory. Everyone has a bias when it comes to remembering things where we always look like the hero while everyone else resembles villains. I know I have this bias which is why I compensate with huge doses of self-deprecation. I would rather people think worse of me, so I can surprise them later rather than have them think well of me only to have me disappoint them later. But I digress. . .

Selective Memory types can never remember their bad actions, but they can always remember yours. They also tend to be whiny and claim persecution. "Everyone is out to get me. You just want to see me fail. Blah blah blah." This gets old very quickly. The best thing you can do in this situation is agree with the narcissist and let them be. Stop talking to them. This might make you feel some guilt, but it shouldn't. This is because the narcissist doesn't care about you. They can't. They don't have this ability. This is what makes them narcissists.

Families tend to be collections of narcissists and altruists. The Kennedy clan is a prime example of this as the menfolk tend to be narcissistic types who marry doormats they can step all over. I see this thing in a lot of families. As a former altruist and doormat, I can tell you that being a doormat to a narcissist is pure misery.

I don't believe in being either an altruist or a narcissist. This is a thing I picked up originally from Camus and expanded through Ayn Rand and libertarian writers. This is how I pull off the trick of being both a gun nut and an antiwar type. I don't want to be a master or a slave. Or as Camus put it, "Neither victims nor executioners."

When it comes to family, you don't want to be the asshole, but you don't want to be the doormat either. You teach people how you want to be treated. Ironically, it isn't the narcissists but the altruists who turn on you. This is how you find yourself disowned for refusing to be a doormat. This would be the dutiful wife who finds herself despised by her family for refusing to overlook her husband's infidelities. Yes, it gets that fucked up. Families are weird like that.

For me, the measuring stick is a simple one. Ask yourself this question. If this person was not related to me, would I be friends with them? On the friendship basis, few of our relations would pass the test. This is because family members are inherently shitty to one another. Knowing someone will put up with your shit has a way of making you shit on them. The liberation I give to people is to show them that they don't have to put up with that shit. You are better off alone than being with people who treat you badly.

Posted in: