Random musings of a psychopath II: childhood memories

Along the same lines as Part I, but I’ve ditched the freakier elements of the ‘stream of consciousness’ style, which I think was unpopular. Here are some select memories from my childhood (all 5 – 11 years old)

• In primary school I waged war on another kid in my class just because he had the nerve to also be called Jamie (which was my ‘cute little boy*’ name growing up). He became the target of frequent bullying and turned into one of the weird loner kids in high school. At the same time, I insisted my cousin Jamie (who is a good seven years older than me so kind of already had the dibs) be called Jim at all times when I was present. Even nowadays, whenever I encounter other people with the names James or Jamie, I can’t help but feel a certain heightened antipathy toward them just because they are using ‘my name’. Stupid I know.

• My birthday is 5th November, which is a holiday in England commemorating the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament (and the king of the day with it, who incidentally was James I. Come to think of it, it’s the 410th anniversary of the whole shabang this year, reminding us all that England’s democracy is hella old). This means that each year my birthday is marked by fireworks displays and huge community bonfires up and down the land. You can imagine how this fed into the ego of a budding psychopath. I was 10 or 11 before I knowingly met someone with the same birthday, and I reacted in much the same way as with the name thieves. She was a bitch, and she had a stupid name; Ailsa Winter. Now I think of it years later, it’s a pretty name really isn’t it? Quite literary. I wonder if she’s pretty too. Time to look her up on Facebook.

• *By all accounts I was a cute little boy. For the first six years of my life I was blond, hardly ever cried or had tantrums, had good manners and was irrepressibly talkative. I was apparently also very bossy and emotionally manipulative, but that’s by the by. At the age of six I discovered lying and from then until about eight or nine (when the other kids finally caught up) I never understood why nearly all of my classmates would own up to doing ‘bad things’, or dutifully go home and tell their mums they’d been punished. “What idiots,” I would think, “don’t they know they can get away with anything if they just keep their mouths shut or invent a story?”

• The same year, we had a terrible class teacher (who had a nervous breakdown by Christmas and had to leave, not as a result of any of us I might add) followed by a brilliant one (the headmistress of the school). I’m sure we did actual learning too, but my abiding memory is of the headteacher reading us lots of poems by Michael Rosen. They were hilarious for any six year old to listen to, especially when our teacher substituted the characters’ names for kids in the class. If you know any children around that age, make sure they become acquainted with Rosen. If you / they can’t be bothered actually reading something, he performs all his poems on YouTube these days.

Me at age six.

• Also at the age of six, I hospitalised my friend due to an experiment whereby I was trying to see how many pebbles from the sandpit would fit inside his ear. Not that many, it turned out.

• There was this boy Cameron who had behavioural problems (looking back, possibly ADHD but I had no clue at the time) and whom I loved winding up, to get him into trouble, but also because ‘Cameron wound up’ was a spectacle to behold. Think tantrums that made the classroom look like a bomb had gone off. I especially liked doing this at lunch, because this really fat no-nonsense lunchtime supervisor would go nuts at him for anything, which would trigger him to lose control and run away in a rage. So I goaded him into hitting me, then went and told Mrs Fatty, which I think was her name. Of course, he ran off, so she would then have to chase him through the corridors, breaking objects and hitting students, catch him and physically restrain him on the floor with her flabby bulk while she waited for the teachers to help her. The memories of these ridiculous scenes still bring a smile to my face.

• There was another boy, Michael, with far more serious problems than Cameron due to a brain defect which made him kind of thick as well as being unable to regulate his emotions at all. Any time a teacher raised her voice to anyone in the class, this would set Michael off crying hysterically. He even cried when his name featured in the Michael Rosen poetry readings. I took him under my wing for several years, treated him as a friend, defended him from any bullying he might have endured, and even comforted him whenever he was in tears (several times a day). He was a curiosity to me, so different, so unfathomable, I was fascinated. But as everyone grew up, Michael sort of didn’t, and by the end of Year 4 (nine years old) he was no longer interesting. The crying was old hat. What’s more, fear and intolerance toward disability (which I didn’t and still don’t share, but it is important to reflect societal norms in your outward behaviour, lest you yourself be an outcast) was turning most of the so-called empathetic children against him, so I let him go.

• Despite being thin and nerdy for quite a few years, I was never the target of bullying. Or to put it more accurately a succession of would-be bullies tried to target me once and never dared to have a second go. I dragged one of them along the ground through a lot of stinging nettles and pushed him head first into a active fox den. He came out all scratched and a bit chewed. Another ‘slipped’ on a patch of ice at the top of some steps. He walked away with a dislocated shoulder and a weird neck.

Baby Swiper says: “Leave a comment below, or I’ll go through your bins  and find something to blackmail you with.”

Boredom

“Boredom. It’s a killer. Right now I’m the most bored I’ve been in a while. It’s fucking hateful bullshit, really the worst part of being alive.” – myself (yes, I am really that arrogant)

Fuck it, I’m too bored to write this.

Psychopath meet psychopath

I am writing this in response to a comment from my favourite self-identified Human. If you want to suggest an article, you can! I’m super receptive, and shit. 

In one of my most recent articles, I alluded to being able to spot other psychopaths in a crowd. Let me tell you about a recent time when just that happened. I was going home on the tram (like a true European), and two students got on and sat opposite me. The one on the right was grinning foolishly, his head slightly bowed even though he was by no means too tall for the tram. The one on the left was sitting straight and confident, clearly not listening to the chattering of his friend. His eyes were scanning the carriage like mine had been moments earlier, and they narrowed slightly when they noticed I was watching. He stared coldly for several seconds, until his friend cracked some sort of ‘joke’ and briefly shut up, clearly expecting some sort of reaction. The psychopath smiled at him mechanically and even let his eyes crinkle to show ‘genuine’ pleasure. You could practically see the mental pat on the back he had given his friend and the cheering effect it had on the latter’s confidence. Once again the psychopath made eye contact with me, no longer bothering to keep the contempt from his face. I looked pointedly at the friend then back at him before miming a yawn and in response he smirked. Soon after was their stop and they left, the joker trailing slightly behind.

That what just a brief encounter. A silent, one-off meeting, with no further consequences. It is just one example of many moments of mutual recognition in my life, that are often followed by a mutual decision to keep a distance: “I’ll stay out of your way if you stay out of mine”.

But what happens when two psychopaths actually interact? Well, the internet has no doubt made a huge difference. Being a 90s baby, by the time I was seven or eight we had a home computer, so  I don’t know how things went down before the internet, whether psychopaths would actually meet up to discuss being psychopaths, but since it doesn’t happen much these days I would assume probably not. By contrast, in 2015 there are several active online ‘communities’ of psychopaths that I know of and probably twice as many that I don’t. Psychopaths have websites and blogs that I visit on occasion; likewise other psychopaths sometimes stop by to comment here. This can have many mutual benefits; being able to communicate openly with like-minded people is one. Discussing things that only psychopaths would be interested in is another. Honing verbal sparring skills is one that is more personal to me. And yes, comparing notes on tactics occasionally plays a role too. One thing that is not usually a problem is staying out of each others’ way. We can tolerate each other precisely because we’re not targeting the same prey and do not pose a threat to one another’s existence. It can happen online, but not often enough to comment on.

However, despite the internet’s ubiquity in the modern world, real life still exists and real psychopaths still come into real life, prolonged contact.

Matt

In my second year of university, I shared a house with nine other people (it was a big house in a poor city, so really easy for a bunch of broke students to rent). Apart from me and the six normal neurotypicals, there was an autistic person, a neurotypical with depression, and another psychopath. We’ll call the psychopath “Matt”, because that’s his name. He is from a rich family, he was enlisted in a weird officer version of the army cadets (which, if he ever joins up for real will elevate him straight through the ranks to Second Lieutenant) and there’s not much more I could say. His personality was bland, but that might just be because I could see through the mask.

There was certainly some common ground, and we did team up to pick on the weaker members of the group on occasion, but we were both possessive over what each of us judged to be our house, our toys. To paraphrase a song, the house wasn’t big enough for the both of us.

Psychopath philosopher = my kind of guy.

From the start, I had the advantage. True, it wasn’t completely one-sided as Matt is just as intelligent as, if not more intelligent than, me. And he successfully forged a closer relationship to the autistic girl, Ginny, whom he tormented. But I was better at charming the group as a whole, am much less overtly anti-social (cleaned up after myself, involved myself in household organisation – really just a way of having influence over decision-making) and my nice guy mask was more firmly secured than his. Plus I had one significant advantage, I already knew what a psychopath is, and knew that was who I was, whereas he was either completely ignorant or just waking up. And he did stupid ‘I am obviously a psychopath’ things, like reading Machiavelli’s The Prince in the kitchen, talking openly about manipulating people and not taking much care to keep his ‘relationship’ with Ginny, and all its bizarre abuse, covert. In the end, he was his own undoing. Everyone in the house knew how he’d been treating the girl by the time I acted, orchestrating in a “worried about Ginny” meeting with the two most influential neurotypical housemates. All I had to do was casually mention I’d been reading about psychopaths and thought Matt fit the bill, and the rest clicked into place. Matt was immediately discredited among the entire house, and was forced to leave within days. I had won. The house was mine. Huzzah!

And on that bombshell (RIP), it’s time to end.