How to cry on cue…

…whenever you need to

Boo hoo hoo! From toddler tantrums to sophisticated pity play, knowing how to cry at the drop of a hat is a cornerstone of any manipulator’s arsenal. Read on to learn how to get those tears to flow. You’ll weep with gratitude, I promise.

Practice makes perfect with this one. A mirror and a well-lit room are your friends. Perfect your cry face first as, believe it or not, this is the hard part. Make sure it looks natural by comparing it to real crying episodes as well as the work of skilled actors. In general, it is the whole face (not just the mouth) which sags when somebody is sad enough to cry, so bear this in mind. Put in any sound effects you want at this stage, sobbing, sniffing, shuddering et al. While you are doing this, you may find real tears come naturally. If this is the case, congratulations! You have just manipulated yourself. If not, don’t sweat it, as tears are easy enough to generate by slowing down your blinking to about one every ten seconds. When you feel those tears welling up, blink once to let them fall. If you blink more than once you risk drying your eyes out again (this is after all one of the functions of the eyelid).

As already noted, this requires practice in order to improve. Soon, you will not need nearly as long for tears to come, and you are free to turn those waterworks on and off like a tap (or “faucet”, as I’m told you Americans call them, because why the hell not).

Take a look at this toddler’s funny and not-at-all manufactured hysterics. A budding psychopath in the making, perhaps? BTW, that photo kid’s resemblance to me at that age is uncanny, right down to the stripey 90s fashion statement.

Caption Contest – enter your submission below

My attempt: “Hey, I heard turtle neck sweaters are coming back in too”

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Holly “Cargo” Harrison manages to squeeze a lone tear out at the 2:56 mark. Take note as a singularity in this path’s lifelong path…

Postcard to myself

There are venomous snakes in this box. You think it’s chocolates and that I’m sorry, but I’m not and it’s snakes.

I have been going through some cards, letters and postcards from my life up until now. My old room is getting ripped out and replaced with something new, to cater to my parents’ obsession with decorating and modernising their house, so all these forgotten bits and pieces have been coming to light for the first time in 10, 15, in some cases 20, years. What can I say? I’m a magpie.

And there’s this stash of old post, which has given me a new perspective on my upbringing. Because I was relatively late to become aware of psychopathy and specifically that it pertained to who I am (this I discovered at the age of 18; I’m now 25), I have been under the impression that other people in my life were similarly clueless about my nature. Not so.

There’s the card in the picture, sent to me one Christmas by a school friend, who wrote that it “reminded me of you… happy Xmas, you weirdo.” There’s another card, sent by family friends, with reference to an atlas they bought me: “You always said you wanted to take over the world. Let this inspire you.” Rereading that today reminded me that, yes, I was a megalomaniacal motormouth at one stage of my childhood, and had evidently revealed some or all of my plans to this family – rookie Bond villain mistake. And that is why I will never get the chance to be tried for war crimes in The Hague.

Then there was this bizarre Wallace and Gromit birthday card, sent to my grandad from all of my family, which read inside, in my mother’s spiky handwriting: “Happy birthday, Dad. This card was chosen by Jamie on the understanding that you’ll post it back to him.” It was dated 1997; I was three. Little control freak.

Sure, so there’s no smoking gun. No “Ohhh my God, my baby’s a psycho, what do I dooo?” letter. But there’s knowledge – and acceptance – of my personality. I’m lucky to have parents who have never tried to deny who I am, and who have supported me from the start. It just goes to show that sometimes close friends and family know you better than you do yourself.

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In the same pile, I also came across a postcard from Montenegro, sent in 2008 by me… to me. It was postmarked and everything, sent par avion across Europe from the tiny Balkan state to my home in England. This is it, folks – peak narcissism:

Dear future self,

Ha! Ha! I’m on holiday, you’re not!

Classy.

It goes on –

Hope the ol’ ear has cleared up by the time I get this.

Oh, that’s right. I got an ear infection from the poorly-chlorinated swimming pool. I had to get some strange ear potion from the apothecary in Kotor. Yes, apothecary;  Montenegro’s a hell of a place.

I am sitting on my apartment’s balcony. Jealous?

Yes. Fuck you.

Anyway, fuck you.

Be you later,

James

Great, well thanks for that, 15-year old James.

The moral of the story? Never meet your heroes, because they’re sure to disappoint.

Grief

The way other people treat the deaths of celebrities is grief at its best, according to this psychopath.

My Aunt Teresa died on Friday. It was the end of a short and sudden battle with an aggressive cancer. Not a bad way to go all things considered, as you hear of people fighting a painful, drawn-out cancer over a number of years, with multiple remissions and recurrences before it finally getting the better of them.

However, the speed and abruptness of this (just over eight weeks from diagnosis to death) has hit members of my family hard. Her husband, my uncle, is heartbroken. My grandfather, who celebrated his 90th birthday in May, is especially devastated, having already lost another of his children to alcoholism about seven years ago. My mother and my other aunt, who are the eldest and have always been closer to each other than to their other siblings, are in shock.

Well, what can I say? Ever since we got the news about the cancer, I have watched my family go to pieces in disbelief and shock, which has been quite alienating because I don’t feel the same way. I can’t say I was expecting the illness, and then the death, but equally it’s not as though these things are unheard of. Why shouldn’t it happen to someone we know?

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time at Teresa’s house in the countryside near the coast. It is – or was – an ideal place to get away, as the house is big, and both my aunt and uncle liked their privacy so we only saw each other for an hour or two in the evening on some days. However, being well-educated they were interesting people to talk to. There is great hiking countryside around, so I could disappear all day doing that, or one of them would drive me into Eastbourne or Brighton so I could go hunting girls and/or guys with a wadge of their cash. She liked having me around as she had no children of her own and I could make her laugh.

At about the five week mark of her illness, I visited Teresa in hospital to have what I expected – and turned out – to be our last conversation. I informed her that since she was dying, she might as well know I was a psychopath and didn’t love her, but that I had genuinely enjoyed my visits to her house and that I hoped she would consider leaving some money towards my future, the plans for which I divulged. She was all weak and drugged up so she didn’t say a great deal, but did tell me she loved me no matter what and had already written me into her will. I guess I’ll find out whether that’s true within a few weeks.

A couple of days later, I went on a two-week holiday to Lanzarote and enjoyed myself immensely exploring the volcanoes, watching some rare birds, and eating seafood.

I’d been home a week when Teresa’s husband phoned to tell us the news. That day I spent some time thinking about my aunt and what she had been to me, remembering the interesting conversations we had had and thinking it was a pity there wouldn’t be any more visits to her house now that she was dead. In other words, I mourned.

The next day was Saturday, and I got on with my life. The sun was out and I had a book to read, and places to be that night. The phone calls from tearful relatives did somewhat test my patience, but overall it was a satisfactory weekend.

The funeral is next Tuesday, but I need to be free for job interviews so am not going, and to be honest the job interviews are just an excuse because I’d rather attend my own funeral than bore myself at that emotional shit show. Should probably send flowers to make people think I mean well.

At this point, I am seriously sick of the histrionic drama of my mother, grandfather, alive!aunt and all the rest of them, so am glad they will all be elsewhere for a couple of days. All this random crying and sullen silences is very dreary when you’re the only one feeling upbeat, and it’s all utterly pointless, because Teresa is gone and not coming back. I don’t believe in the afterlife, but maybe it really does exist and she’s been saved! More likely, she no longer exists and the fact that she’s dead matters not one jot to her because there is no “her”. Nothing.

Now I know our brains are hardwired differently so they physically can’t react like me, but I honestly think it would be simpler for them if they could have just spent a couple of hours on Friday remembering/discussing the good times they had with Teresa, celebrating the life she had, and then paying someone to dispose of the corpse in a way that would be appropriate and that would give us all a good laugh – maybe donate it to the Wolf Conservation Trust (she loved those animals) or launch it with a trébuchet into the sea from the cliffs near her house. Alas.

This blog post will, I hope, be the last time I give more than a second’s thought to my dead aunt, but I’m writing it specifically because French singing legend Charles Aznavour has also just died; they ran a 30 minute feature on the radio celebrating his life. It was brilliant – they summed up the sort of man he was, brought out Paul Gambaccini to recount the first time he met Aznavour, and played some of his biggest hits. It was short and to the point, giving those of us who knew of Aznavour a chance to feel sad he was gone and informing those who didn’t why they should care. Tomorrow, the news cycle will roll on, and that’s how things should be for all deaths, no matter who it is.

In fact, since Monsieur Aznavour actually left behind some music that can still be enjoyed, perhaps he’ll be in my thoughts more often.

Aunt Teresa, this is for you:

Emmenez-Moi means “Take me away”. Off they go.