Genetic Malfunction

There are people in my world who love and adore me regardless of my crazy that I don’t always keep tucked in. I love them and am grateful for them. But there are occasions where I see the facial expression on the person I am interacting with (loved one or stranger) where they fail to hide the thought that is bashing against their conservative skulls – and that is: This chick is mental.

For example. I had to go to a doctor two days ago for something, and she is a feisty Greek woman who I love because she is unflinching when I behave badly in her office. This last visit I cracked a joke about how she had left me alone with her prescription pad, especially knowing my history.

She swears like a trooper but there was one moment where I  leant over abruptly to borrow her pen and she reflexively moved back and for a nano second failed to hide the fact that she does actually believe I am mad and unpredictable – despite it being endearing when she is on the opposite side of the desk.

A few months ago at a different doctor my mother felt it necessary to be the buffer between my timid doctor any my abrasive questions. She made a comment about how much I smoke and how bad I smell…    and although its true, you cant smoke 60 cigarettes a day and not smell like an ash tray – but I took offense because her face contorted in disgust. My mother instinctively put her hand on my leg, unconsciously trying to slow down my anger or diffuse it all together.

So, are you telling me I smell?

Uhm..

It’s a simple question doc. Are YOU offended by the smell of cigarettes, even though I am paying over a thousand bucks just to be sitting in your posh office?  Want to open a window??

At which point my mother said: What she means to say is…

No. I said what I meant. Don’t lace it up for her. You are an ear, nose and throat specialist and you are only asking me NOW if I smoke because you cant do surgery if I smoke that much? You have to smell it before you ask??? And YOU were top of your class??? Heaven help us all…

*sigh*

Or if in a public shopping store. There are three types of people. First, the kind that zip in and zip out, they don’t want to browse. Second, those that move slower but still are aware of the people around them, which they read labels or whatever. Then there is a the third kind. Those that park their shopping carts DOT BANG in the MIDDLE of the aisle. And are OBLIVIOUS to the four people waiting so politely to get past.

I am not good at waiting. Not at all. There are times when I am able to do a u turn and go the other way – and there are days when I really would rather bash my way through and bleat obscenities at the guilty party. One one day in particular the woman saw I needed to get past, looked me up and down (bare foot and mostly in my pajamas) and decided I wasn’t worth moving for. I emptied an entire shelf of contents into her cart while asking her if she drove a car the way she drove a trolley – because if she did – she was probably responsible for at least 45% of the total head on collisions in the country…   and then did a u turn.

My mother often asks me what the point of going postal is. Its not like its going to ‘fix’ anything. I don’t really understand that question. I am aware I can not fix stupid people, but it makes me feel MUCH better to tell them they are stupid and why and to get it out of  my system even if in a temper tantrum like manner. I have road rage of epic proportions – even as a passenger on behalf of other people.

I was in the car with a friend of mine and a lady cut him off and gave him the finger. We pulled up behind her at a traffic light and the first things he did were to lock my door, lock my window and to tuck his machete further under his seat. Granted, he was wise because I was already trying to get out the car to go and kick dents in her head…   and I knew the machete was there.

I would have felt a whole lot better. I know this to be fact. I was in a car accident in my early twenties and the paramedics eventually gave up trying to get me onto the stretcher. We were cut out of the car and I was injured, but my priority was getting to the drunk fuck that drove into the back of us. In amongst all the lights and tow people (vultures) and the ambulances and fire truck…  I saw him. Smug bastard telling someone else that his sister was a lawyer and this wouldn’t be a problem. My grandfather who was driving was badly hurt, my father in the front seat was hurt, and my mother, my friend and I had to be cut out of the back of the car. I recall looking back at my loved ones on stretchers and getting a ringing sensation in my ears and I was overcome with the desire to hurt him. While being held back by the same paramedics who tried to get me to lay down… I managed to kick a few dents in his car and tell him I would find him…

Having made a mental note of his number plate I went and lay down on the stretcher. The paramedics were tickled pink that it had taken two of them to stop my getting to him, and that I was reciting the number plate over and over and over…   determined not to forget it.

I am told often that I am just like my grandmother. I am not happy about that as she is insane and one of the most maliciously manipulative people that I know. When I was a small kid she made me watch ‘Pet Cemetery’ the horror movie and then took me to a cemetery to see if I could see dead people. Then on our way home we pulled up beside the house of the man she was having an affair with and she wanted me to throw a brick through the bedroom window of his bed ridden dying wife. So ya… I am so happy that people tell me that I am just like her.

I am passionate about the ongoing debate about genetics vs environmental factors. I maintain that narcissism runs in my family. The mean spirited full on ‘I will maim you if you get in my way’ kind. We have a lawyer, a doctor, an ex cop, and a CEO of a pharmaceutical company. One is a communist Nazi obsessed guy who is sharp as they come. He speaks fluent Russian, German, Polish and Hebrew.

I have become accustomed to navigating his layers of ego before he relaxes and talks to me having decided I am not stupid.. he is an advocate now so he fancies himself as being superior. The doctor is a kind man but has very little empathy – which none of us do. My father was a sniper and lead a narcotics division for a long time, and I think his adrenal glands are missing. He is fearless. I know this because I have seen how he (like me) loses his sense of what is rational and what isn’t when he gets angry. He rips peoples indicators off if they clearly don’t know how to use them. He hog style cable tied an ex boyfriend of mine who tried to kill me and dragged him down 5 flights of stairs face first before snapping his leg in half at the knee to get him into a police van.

My grandfathers mother may as well have been someone who made lamps out of human skin, and my father’s sisters.. . hectic. Its arguable that they ALL have the same narcissistic traits – but I would be inclined to argue that they do. My father is one of seven… and truthfully…  its quite something to navigate.

Having said all that – I am known as the crazy of the family. I am okay with that. Mainly because I don’t like most of them anyway and the feeling is very mutual. One of them decided to call me out on Facebook for having a cigarette in my hand in a photograph when I was supposed to be setting an example. What would my parents think?? So I just reminded her that her son had warrants out for his arrest on several rape charges and that had she not abandoned him when he was a young kid maybe he wouldn’t be where he is. I asked how proud she was of him??

Don’t shit on someone else’s lawn, woman.

My aunt G put 5 kittens in a tumble dryer and turned it on and then told my mother is was me. She also used to cover herself in red paint and rip her clothes and crawl around the house like she was dying. I was 5.

So…. genetics? Yeah, I think so. We are all cooked – and are capable of great and immense calculated cruelty if we so decide. There are only a handful of us who seem to be able to be kind or at least diplomatic. But we are all ‘touched’ with the brush of madness.

The exact moment I realised that I was very different (though I didnt know if that was good or bad) was when my staff at the nursing home (when I was a manager there) brought me a man who had an axe sticking out of his head. It was proper IN his head, and he was glowing crimson.

I wasn’t scared. I didn’t panic. I was, instead, morbidly curious about how hard someone must have had to swing to get it that far into his head. I was disappointed that I knew better than to not fiddle with the axe and I called an ambulance. But I remember noting afterwards that I had not comforted him or asked him his name. I was just focused on the axe and how ‘cool’ all that blood looked on his skin and on his clothes.

There is a power in understanding the human body and how it bleeds. How it bruises and how slow or fast it will move under certain circumstances. Does that make me a sick puppy? Maybe…  but I don’t think so. I think that my being partial to the darker more bloody grotesque is a normal human thing for someone who has been physically hurt and has the scars to show it.

The kicker though… the facial expression that I will never forget, is that of my baby brother when he came to spend the night at my house because I had been broken into and James was away. He felt it was his obligation to come and protect me.

He silently watched me place cable ties, knives, hammers, duct tape, and all manner of things including pliers, a cleaver and a machete in various parts of my home. When he did eventually ask what the hell I was doing, I should have thought my answer out more clearly.

Me: Well, lets say there is a struggle and the perpetrator accidentally falls and slams his head into this marble kitchen counter, we would have to subdue him. But all you have to do is lock yourself in my room and phone the police.

Brother: What will you do?

Me: As much as I can before the cops get here, and you wont have to see any of it.

THAT FACE. I had to drug him to sleep because he was determined not to leave me alone after that conversation. The sleeping meds worked eventually and he did pass out but he slept with his phone in his hand, and I sat up, at the side of the window the whole night… hoping someone would come back to try to finish what they started.

Crazy? Who knows…

For a long time I struggled with the idea that I was a lunatic and that I was in fact just like my grandmother or the narcissist addicts that had died gamblers or drunks, or of drug related complications.

Two trips to rehab and a lot of research and self discovery has led me to this truth:

I am a slice short of a pica.
An olive short of a Martini
A button short of an elevator, and lots of
Icing short of a cake

And I am cool with that.