July 16, 2003

• The squeaky wheel gets the grease and the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

  
  

  This is really hard to write, and that’s what clues me that I really need to write it.  I let myself get set up again… actually was a participant in setting myself up, and so soon after the last time, too.  I’m tired of it.  I’m trying not to over-react, striving for a balanced perspective here.  It’s hard.

  
  

  The “last time” I alluded to was a horrible mess I’ve been quietly dealing with on KaiOaty’s site.  It blind-sided me just like the new business today.  I have been asking myself if it wasn’t better, in a way, when all I really wanted was to kick my drunken narcissistic old man to the curb and let him rot in his own filth.

  
  

  Then, almost two months ago, he got sober… not just sober, but CLEAN and sober, quit sneaking cigarettes and bringing the allergenic smoke in on his hair and clothes to make me sick, quit risking the health and freedom of the whole family with weed.  And, perhaps even more significantly, got hip to his own narcissistic and histrionic personality disorders and started working on changing that behavior.

  
  

  I was still very guarded for a while.  Years of lies and abuse tend to make one cautious.  That, I can understand.  What eludes me right now is how a few weeks of ups and downs (after years of mostly downs with very few ups at all) and a bit of evident progress could have made me so incautious.  It is all about expectations, I know.  I was expecting things to be better all ’round because they are better between us.

  
  

  It’s a crazy sort of chain reaction, an indirect fallout effect thing that has been catching me off-guard.  Greyfox and I are getting along fine.  He’s still narcissistic and histrionic, but now he is open to hearing about it when I tell him that’s what is going on.  He used to clam up, pout and isolate himself if he didn’t get his narcissitic supply or if he took a narcissistic injury from our (my and Doug’s) failure to support his false persona.  Now, he listens and can even smile and joke about the breeze he feels when we pull his covers.  He knows I love him and that Doug is willing to put up with him for my sake.

  
  

  However, Greyfox is not so open to accepting narcissistic injury from others, and he is as likely as ever he was to go around handing out narcissistic injury to the other narcissists he encounters.  That was what happened at KaiOaty’s site.  A few of the kids from totse.com that got their egos hurt because Greyfox didn’t crumple under their scorn for all things shamanic and metaphysical, and I responded to their bullshit with some in-your-face scorn of my own, started challenging and trying to test us.

  
  

  It was a clash of narcissistic personalities.  With Greyfox away most of the week and getting in to the public library’s computer to post at totse, I didn’t get a chance to confront him on his unprofessional behavior until a day or two ago.  We talked it out, he acceded to my reasoning, and we put the immediate fires out.  I am not kidding myself that there may not be further repercussions, but for now the mess is manageable.

  
  

  And now there is a whole new mess, another clash of narcissists.  I didn’t even identify it as such at first.  I saw it as a routine consumer complaint.  I had, at Greyfox’s request, placed an online order for some stock for his stand.  It arrived damaged because of sloppy packaging, small boxes just dumped loosely into a bigger box, no packing material… and to top things off, some “complimentary” advertising throwaways that the postal service prohibits sending through the mail:  several packs of matches and a butane lighter.

  
  

  On his way back to town today, Greyfox stopped at the post office.  From town, he called me to say that they recommended calling the Postal Inspection Service, and so I did.  From someone in Seattle, I learned that those things are indeed not allowable in the mail, but that, “the Inspection Service will not at this time do anything about it.”  Bigger fish to fry, I suppose… anthrax and such is my best guess.

  
  

  Greyfox had told me on the phone that when he called the customer service line, “the guy copped an attitude and hung up,” on him.  That sounded like lousy business practice to me.  On top of the damaged merchandise, the lack of insurance on the parcel and consequent lack of recourse for us, plus the Postal Inspector’s lack of interest–in other words, no help from official channels–I decided to take some unofficial action.

  
  

  I went to thesqueakywheel.com and paid my five bucks to have my say.  Then I started getting emails.  The very angry email from the man who had hung up on Greyfox made the whole thing clear.  He quoted Greyfox, and sounded so much like the old fart’s histrionic narcissistic bullshit that I could have no doubt that he had been quite thoroughly provoked.  And then he went on to tell me that he owns the business and will cop any attitude he damn well pleases, and I finally realized where I was.

  
  

  I’m caught between narcissists again.  The first incident, with the kids at totse, didn’t clue me.  I had sorta thought that as Greyfox loosened up, lightened up and wised up that he would learn to avoid this shit.  But I neglected to consider that our relationship is a special case.  He can smile and joke about my pulling his covers because he trusts me.  He knows I love him, and that allows him to avoid taking narcissistic injury at every little slight to his ego from me.  It doesn’t work that way when other people don’t give him his narcissistic supply, and it certainly doesn’t keep him from giving narcissistic injury to others.

  
  

  Now I need to give some thought to how I can stay out of the middle of these little NPD battles.  Making him do all his own consumer complaints seems like a good place to start, but there is a lot more to this than just customer relations.  I’m open to suggestions.

  
  

  

  • 8:34 pm
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