April 9, 2004

• The Catch in the Golden Rule

  Real life is not so simple as treating others as you would like to be
  treated.  I hear that line from my Old Fart Greyfox all the time,
  and in this instance he is right.  I even think that until he met
  me, he actually believed that “doing unto others…” was the right way
  to go.  Then he met me and a lot of his old ideas went out the
  window.  He kept “getting in trouble” (his words, as if I’m
  parent, boss, or teacher) for treating me the way he says he wants to
  be treated.

  My own personal version of the rule would have a bunch of clauses and
  subparagraphs as does the law of the land.  It would begin
  something like, “Do unto others that which reflects your highest vision
  of them and yourself; treat them with sensitivity to their
  needs….”  Greyfox tells me he had always thought of himself as a
  non-conformist until he met me.  But he also says he had thought
  of himself as laid-back.  All things are relative and how one sees
  something depends on one’s perspective.  From my perspective, he’s
  an up-tight conformist and his version of the Golden Rule is skewed and
  screwy.  If one were to assume that he follows that rule and
  treats others as he wants to be treated, as he says, then based on his
  behavior what he wants is to be lied to,  exploited, ripped-off,
  abused, treated with contempt, and aided and encouraged in his
  self-destructive behavior.

  We had some very rough years together at the beginning, before he got
  used to the idea that I would neither treat him that way nor allow
  myself to be treated that way without a fight… all except for the
  part about treating him with contempt.  I’m not proud of it, but
  his NPD and all that narcissistic crap he laid on us for years led Doug
  and me to feel and express a great deal of contempt for him  He’s
  getting better now, more self-aware and able to laugh at himself, but
  personality disorders, like addictions, don’t just go away overnight
  without a fight.  We must stay vigilant, mindful, and committed to
  the path.  Would that it were as simple as just making the right
  decision once and for all.  One must keep making new right
  decisions at every moment sometimes.

  That
  idea of making a whole string of right decisions is all well and good,
  but that man is a double Libra and getting him to make any decision at
  all is a tough thing sometimes.  Today we hassled about decisions
  from even before I started down the valley to meet him in Wasilla, do
  some shopping, and go to a meeting.  When he called me this
  afternoon, I would have already been on the road except for a series of
  delays.  They were nothing earthshaking, just one thing after
  another, such as Granny Mousebreath settling down to sleep in a basket
  by a sunny window and needing to be photographed.

   After dealing with the first few of those side-trips and hangups,
  I was trying, with my kid’s help, to get my second earring in. 
  Finding the hole in the front of my earlobe was easy enough, but I was
  poking that post around in there for ever so long before I asked Doug
  to help me find the opening at the back and get the earring through
  it.  When the phone rang, he said, “Here hold this,” let go the
  ear and earring, grabbed the phone, and handed it to me.  It had
  to be for me.  Nobody calls him.  His life is online.

  Then with my right hand I was holding the earring to keep it from
  falling out of that front opening, and using the left hand and
  ear  for the phone.  Greyfox wanted to know when I’d be there
  and what my plans were.  There’s another place where that old
  tarnished brass rule breaks down.  I hate being asked about my
  plans about as much as I hate having to make and be bound by
  plans.  He’s a planner, a plotter, a plodder (when he’s not
  hustling and bustling) who likes routine and regimentation. 
  Keeping my schedule as flexible as possible is how I cope without
  coming unglued.  Spontaneity is my thing.

  All I knew for sure was that I intended to keep my commitment to be at
  the rehab ranch in time to drive that vanload of the residents to that
  meeting tonight.  Either before that or after I returned the van
  and the inmates to the rehab center, I had some shopping to do. 
  On my way into town, I had to stop at the Willow library for a book he
  had ordered.  Greyfox said he wanted to have some dinner with me
  before the meeting and asked if I was going to shop first and pick him
  up afterward, or if I was going to pick him up at his stand and take
  him shopping with me.  I said that was his choice.  I said,
  “You decide.”   I like making my own decisions and one might
  get the impression that this was the Golden Rule at work, but in
  Greyfox’s case my insistence that he make his own decisions is a matter
  of self-preservation.  Until I learned to side-step that pitfall,
  he used to manipulate me into making all sorts of decisions for him,
  and then blame me if he didn’t like the results.  Therefore, I do
  my best not to make his decisions, and waste a lot of my breath telling
  him to do it for himself.

  Wanting to finish dressing and hit the road, I hurriedly told him to
  either stay open or close early, and if he wanted me to take him with
  me when I came by there on my way into town to be ready to go. 
  The librarian delayed me explaining the rule against letting someone
  else take a book another party had ordered without permission from the
  party who ordered it.  I tried calling him, but he wasn’t
  answering his cell phone.  We went through all that before she
  decided to bend the rules and let me take the book to him.  That
  and the construction of the new bridge over Willow Creek made me later
  still.  I was just keepin’ on keepin’ on, waiting until I got to
  Felony Flats to find out whether Greyfox was going shopping with me or
  not.

  He did the Libran decision-making process of waiting until he’d decided
  I was already late before he started closing the stand.  That
  packing-up procedure had just begun when I pulled up and he stopped to
  come over to my car and ask if I was going shopping first or going to
  take him.  I reminded him that it was his choice, and went on to
  discuss, since it was so late already, which would be more
  time-efficient.  We mutually decided it would take less time to
  take him with me than to come back for him.  I got out and started
  helping him pack up when a looky-loo came by to browse and schmooze and
  check his prices.  The guy sells knives on eBay.  So, while
  Greyfox and his not-customer looked over the merchandise, I took down
  signs, packed up rocks, etc.  Then I followed him over to his
  cabin at the other end of that strip we call Felony Flats and waited at
  his request for him to change clothes. 

  I hadn’t noticed what he was wearing, neither when I drove up nor when
  he got in my car to leave.  I did, however, notice his disturbed
  emotional state and asked him what was wrong.  After I cut through
  the first layer of “Nothing,” bullshit, he said he felt,
  “disoriented.”  I worked at pinning down what he meant by that
  until he revealed that he had
  been too worried about my being in a hurry to take the time to change
  clothes and was feeling uncomfortable going to eat, shop and meet in
  his work clothes.  Until then, I’d assumed he’d been changing
  clothes during that time I was waiting for him outside his cabin.

  We talked about choices, decisions, commitments and crap like that all
  the way across Wasilla.  I pointed out that after I’d told him to
  decide what he wanted to do and be ready if he wanted to go with me,
  he’d waited until I got there to ask me (again) whether I was going to
  take him then or come back for him later.  Then we had a nice
  meal, went out to the warehouse store on the edge of Palmer for my
  favorite brand of dark roast decaf, saw–and heard–a male bald eagle
  circling over us in the parking lot on the way in, and a beautiful
  golden retriever in the cab of the truck next to us when we came
  out.  Then I drove to the rehab, where he was going to leave me
  and take my car for a stop on the way to the meeting, at a thrift shop
  to return a grab-bag of men’s shirts that were supposed to have been
  large but turned out to be medium.

  We ended up at the thrift shop together, because neither the van nor
  the inmates were there this evening.  They had gone up Hatcher
  Pass on a sledding outing, were supposed to be back by 6, but hadn’t
  returned by 6:30 when I gave up and left.  They wouldn’t, I
  suppose, have wanted to go to a meeting after that trip anyway. 
  When I come back from sledding, all I usually want is a hot bath and
  dry clothes.

  Tonight’s topic at the meeting was happiness.  We had half a dozen
  or so newcomers, some of whom even stuck around for the “group
  conscience” business meeting afterward.  It was great seeing some
  new people come in with both enthusiasm for the program and joy in
  being clean, as opposed to the general run of newcomers who are focused
  on their pain, white-knuckling it.  As everyone shared about their
  definitions of and recipes for happiness, I was given a great
  opportunity to reflect on the wide range of personal differences.

  Then at the supermarket afterward, as we walked into the store, Greyfox
  said, “I want to keep our stuff separate.”  “Okay,” I said, “maybe
  you should get another cart.”  He said no, he was going to pay for
  it all and just wanted it bagged separately so his stuff would make it
  to his cabin and mine would end up here at home.  I said the
  checker might have trouble sorting stuff like that and suggested, as an
  alternative to his own cart, putting a hand basket (a smaller one than
  that in which we’re riding to hell) in my cart for his things, since he
  “only needed a few….”  Then he proceeded to pile heavy stuff on
  top of his bananas in his basket, so that I intervened and rescued
  them, pulling them to the top of the heap.  After that, he made a
  few impulse purchases, thought his basket looked full (no spatial
  perception nor any skill at packing and arranging things), and started
  just dropping his stuff in the cart with mine.  I said that I
  thought he wanted to keep his stuff separate. With one of his uneasy,
  “heh heh”, sounds he said it wasn’t working out that way.  As I
  unloaded at the checkstand, I asked him whether he wanted me to
  separate our things or not and he never gave me an answer.  His
  stuff went through after all of mine, but with no divider between.

  As is usual with any malignant narcissist, he took offense at being
  questioned and got nasty.  I had been trying to accomodate his
  desire to keep stuff separate and together at the same time even though
  I didn’t understand the reasoning or have the vaguest notion how to do
  what he wanted.  All last summer we had shopped together and when
  we got to his cabin I sorted things and helped him carry his portion
  inside.  There’s a big yard light right outside his cabin, making
  it easy even at night.  He sniped at me verbally through the
  checkout process tonight and used the checkout clerk as a foil in his
  jabs at me.  He explained to the clerk that he was paying for the
  whole thing but he only got part of it and wanted things bagged
  separately.  The kid said okay and proceeded to go ahead and bag
  stuff as he’d been trained.  Some of Greyfox’s things ended up
  bagged with mine, of course.  It was as I’d told him on the way
  into the store.  (Impracticality is on the NPD symptoms list.) On
  the way out of the store I asked him why it was so important to keep
  things separate and from there to Blockbuster and beyond, while first I
  sorted groceries there in the dark parking lot and then drove across it
  to the video store and on out to his place, I kept probing for his
  reasoning.

  One thing he brought up with a snotty tone of voice was the bag of
  thrift store purchases, my shirt and his two videos, that had been left
  in the car a couple of weeks ago, and came home with me.  He
  mentioned that he still does not have his videos.  From that
  occurrence, he apparently inferred that I could not be trusted to sort
  our groceries, but a hurried clerk could be.  Another item on
  those NPD symptoms lists is the tendency to not trust those you should
  trust, and place more trust in strangers than in friends and
  family.  One fact he overlooked about that incident was that on
  the night in question, when I took him home I hadn’t gotten out to help
  him.  He told me to sit, that he could get his stuff without my
  help.  He left the bag with the videos in my car.  Another
  fact he conveniently overlooked is that he was home last Monday and
  didn’t collect his videos then, nor did he add them to the list of
  things he phoned to ask me to bring in today.

  Parked there outside his cabin, he resorted to a well-worn tactic to
  throw it all back onto me.  He asked me if I had a preference for
  whether we kept our purchases together or separate, ignoring the fact
  that changing the routine tonight had been entirely his idea.  I
  said my preference was for him to make up his mind what he wanted and
  not try to have it both ways at once.  I reminded him that I’d
  warned him that the checker would have a problem handling it the way he
  wanted to do it, so if he wanted to keep things separate he would need
  to use another cart or at least a divider on the conveyor belt.. 
  I told him, too, that I would prefer, if he were going to verbally
  abuse me, that he do so in private.  I said it is a timeworn
  tradition, that if one abuses his wife he does so in private. 
  Public spousal abuse is infra dig.

  And speaking of infra digs, Felony Flats is bursting at the seams with
  springtime.    Cabins that sat empty all winter now have
  inhabitants.  There’s a family of six, four school-age children,
  in one of them.  It’s a single room about 12′ X 16′ or so, with a
  partial loft.   Down at the other end of the strip last week,
  the Troopers busted a meth lab.   Greyfox is wondering now if
  the landlord is going to be able to get the unruly bunch of drunks and
  druggies out who are living in a shipping container about midway down
  the strip.  As I waited today for Greyfox (I thought) to change
  clothes, I watched a couple hugging, kissing and feeling each other up
  on the porch of the cabin two down from his.  The young woman was
  smiling winsomely and acting seductive.  The older man, dark with
  a lean and hungry look, was running his hands all over her but his eyes
  were all over the place and he wasn’t smiling.  A troupe of kids
  were milling around them on the porch, but Greyfox says none of the
  kids are theirs.  “They just ramble,” he said.
  

  • 7:33 am
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