NON-SEQUITIRS

My cat Otis is a mellow, fun-loving cat. Male cats are very affectionate, but Otis is a straight-up attention-whore. Anyone who has ever met him, especially females, know how flirtatious and touchy-feely he is.

Well, for the past week and a half he's had a guest in our home: his sister, Jenny.

Jenny is my friend Beth's cat, and it was Beth who gave Otis to me so many years ago. Jenny saved Otis recently by donating blood for his transfusion, and they lived together at Beth's apartment for over a year when I was living with my family-- none of my family members wanted to take my well-behaved and adorable cat in, so I had to lodge him with Beth and Jenny until I had my own place.

Anyway, the first three days Jenny stayed in my closet, hiding out, as cats are wont to do. Otis would try and see her but she would hiss and scare him away.

I remember one time, when I lived in Sherman Oaks. Beth brought Jenny by my apartment to visit. Otis and Jenny hissed at each other at first, but after about ten minutes Otis warmed up to her. He pulled out a crumpled-up piece of paper and pawed at it in front of her, inviting her to play with him. She didn't bite-- she was too skittish about not being on her home turf.

When Beth left with Jenny, my poor little Otis ran all over the apartment, looking for her.

He's such a lover.

When he lived with her, he was okay with it. The only problem was that Beth's roommate at the time was my ex, Amy Coates. And Amy had an awful, ugly, overweight cat named Puppy who was disagreeable to say the least. Otis and Jenny had to team up in order to deal with Puppy's tyranny.

My theory here is that cats are very much like their owners.

The other day I came home and saw that Jenny was now out of the closet and socializing with Otis. He has been a gracious host, and he really cares about his sister. I caught him licking the top of her head as she slept one night-- it was too cute for words.

Still, Jenny is not comfortable being away from home-- the only reason why she is with me is because Beth had to move, and didn't want Jenny freaked out over the move until everything was settled. Tonight, Beth is coming over to pick Jenny up, so I will no longer have to watch over her.

Jenny and Otis had it out this morning, because Otis loves her so much that he forgets about respecting the personal space of others. He gets in her face with good intentions, and she gets mad and shoos him away.

And that, for all intents and purposes, is how I am, as a man: I get too close, I make the girls freak out and get hissy, because I don't know my own limits and I tend to be intrusive without thinking about how people will react.

Poor little Otis is going to miss her, I know it. Tonight and for the rest of this week I'm going to have to show him extra attention, show him more love than I normally do. The little guy just doesn't understand that, sometimes, other beings (myself included) need some time by ourselves. I find myself shooing him away often, when I'm trying to read or play music, and I hate it because I really love the furball but he gets in my way often.

He can't help it-- he has a lot of love to give.


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I've been thinking about different types of narcissistic personalities. I find that there are two notable extremes: that of the practical joker, and that of the serial killer.

On the one hand, you have people like Hugh Troy, a famous practical joker who attended Cornell in the '30's and is a legend for his elaborate pranks and jokes. He would do things like purchasing a park bench from the city, then wait for a policeman to walk by as he and his friends would pick up the bench, in a park or on the street, and walk away with it. When detained by the cops, he would wait until the right moment to produce the receipt, which would exonerate him and make the Jakes feel dumb.

A classmate of his owned a wastebasket made from the foot of a rhinoceros. The classmate was throwing it out, but Troy asked to keep it. During the snowy season, he stayed out all night, leaving rhino tracks in the snow leading to a hole in an icy pond. The next morning, scientists were dispatched to investigate the tracks, and when it was revealed that they belonged to a rhinoceros, people started to complain about their water tasting like rhino.

His most famous (or infamous) prank involved setting up an exhibit of his own at a museum in New York which was debuting the works of Van Gogh for the first time in America. His exhibit: a piece of dried meat in a wooden box, with the caption "This is the ear that Vincent Van Gogh cut off and sent to his mistress" or something to that effect. Crowds of art patrons gathered luridly around the exhibit, which was proved to be a hoax within days.

That last one is reminiscent of some recent jokers who have placed their own works of art in museums as of late. The value of that prank never seems to get old, and in a way it is a work of art unto itself.

From Alfred Jarry to Andy Kaufman, artists and performers have straddled the line between their art being a joke and their jokes being an art. What makes Hugh Troy notable is that his jokes, while sometimes having a sobering effect, seemed only to perpetuate the myth about himself that had grown with each prank. The practical joker, in his attempts to show the hypocrisy and absurdity of modern life, has to constantly outdo himself, and in a manner that is unexpected. If the joke is easily attributed to the person who perpetrated it, the value lessens. There is a constant need to take things to the next level, to the furthest extreme.

This points to a personality at odds with society, an anti-social personality. The jokes are friendly manifestations of this need to be outside of society's norms and expectations. Surely, Hugh Troy felt no pride more rewarding than pulling the wool over the eyes of people who normally garner respect and admiration from the rest of society. It was his way of thumbing his nose at what he perceived as injustices and biases in the world.

Never is this more evident than in one of Hugh's better pranks. He was studying art at Cornell and was invited, along with other artists, to attend a swanky party held for the stinking rich and town elite. The hostess of the show wanted the artists to create works right there on the spot-- she even provided canvases and paints. But her condescending attitude irked Troy, who decided to add some spice to the formal proceedings by painting, in big block letters on the largest available canvases, signs that read "WELCOME TO THE CARNIVAL! FREE RIDES! BRING THE KIDDIES! FREE DRINKS FOR ALL! PICNIC PARTIES WELCOME!"

One of my favorite punk rock singers, Jello Biafra, once said, "Anyone who doesn't use art as a weapon is not an artist." I agree with this assessment, and apparently Hugh Troy would've concurred.


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On the other hand, you have the narcissistic tendencies of the serial killer. A good example of this type of personality is Theodore "Ted" Bundy.

I was watching A&E Biography last week, where the emphasis was on serial killers. They profiled Jeffrey Dahmer, who was a curious sort of serial killer in that no one knows exactly what drove him to cannibalize his victims. It's hard to put him through the narcissistic lens because he avoided the limelight most of the time. In fact, it was Dahmer's lack of an ego-driven personality that allowed him to get away with his heinous crimes. He was close to being caught a couple of times and got away with it, not by virtue of his outward charm but because he didn't seem like he could hurt a fly.

The well-known tale of how one of Dahmer's victims escaped and went to the cops, who were convinced by Dahmer himself that it was a bout of rough gay sex that got out of hand, is less a study of a deceitful mind at work than it is an indictment of the cops, who wrote it off mostly because the victim was Filipino and barely spoke coherent English. Had Dahmer chosen an articulate victim, maybe the cops would've seen through the story and investigated it. But if it seemed like a gay lover's spat, the police probably felt it wasn't worth their time.

On the contrary side is Ted Bundy, a good-looking, well-spoken, politically active college student who aspired to be a lawyer. It was all a mask that Bundy projected to hide his insecurities. As a boy, he had a stutter and was abnormally shy. In the Biography segment, it is said that Bundy's first victim was a preteen girl who lived down the block from him. The fact that the teenage Bundy was never suspected of this crime must have had some type of effect on him, possibly causing him to believe that he could get away with murder.

As he grew older, he experienced mature relationships with attractive women and outgrew his shyness. This was part of his reinvention as he entered college, but no amount of making over could undo the damage in his mind. To make matters worse, he discovered the truth about his family: the woman he had thought was his sister for all of his young life turned out to be his birth mother, and his parents were really his grandparents.

(It bears noting that Jack Nicholson, a celebrity who has had reportedly violent brushes with women as well as deserved fame and fortune, underwent the same discovery in his own family at a formative age... and I think it's safe to say that Jack, as cool as he is, qualifies as a narcissist of the highest order)

Such a violation of the fragile sense of identity that Bundy possessed no doubt caused him to go crazy and start killing women, especially after the first woman he ever loved dumped him. She was one of his first adult victims, and the physical description of almost all of his subsequent victims were similar to hers-- straight, long brown hair parted in the middle, same age range, same features...

Here is another personality at odds with society, thinking himself to be better than others, almost as if he is above the law and entitled to more than he has been allotted. What's funny (or unfunny) about Bundy, though, is that he chose to try and adapt to the society he loathed by incorporating himself into its trappings. He helped Republicans raise funds for their campaigns. He studied law, and in fact he was also working in forensic science fields when he was at the peak of his killing, an occupation that allowed him to stay one step ahead of the authorities at all times.

When he was caught, he escaped from jail a number of times, which built up his image as an outlaw and allowed friends, family and supporters to feel that he was wrongly accused of a crime he didn't commit. He went so far as to defend himself in court, acting as his own counsel.

Ted Bundy had groupies during his trial and even after his conviction. It is said that he fathered a child with one of his groupies shortly before he was executed January 24, 1989, two days after my 15th birthday.

Even the trial judge, in his reading of the sentence, said to Bundy that it was such a shame that he was found guilty, because he might've made a good lawyer one day. Obviously, he wasn't that good of a lawyer, but it certainly took some balls to even attempt it in the first place.

I have a hard time believing that Ted Bundy felt any remorse for his actions. In contrast to Dahmer, who was very forthcoming about his problems after his conviction and actually demonstrated some remorse to his victims' families, Ted Bundy seemed to be content with the path of his life. He accepted it as such and made the most of it. If he had to kill a bunch of people along the way, it was worth it to him.

Yet, in the minds of many, Jeffrey Dahmer is the bigger monster, because his crimes were so unspeakably gruesome that human beings have a hard time sympathizing with him. We find Dahmer repugnant and disgusting because he ate his victims and had sex with them when they were dead, sometimes keeping their remains in the apartment.

But Ted Bundy often went back to the crime scene, before the bodies were discovered, and did equally horrible things to them. As terrible as Dahmer's deeds were, you get the sense that Dahmer was a man with absolutely no understanding of himself. With Bundy, you get the sense that not only did Bundy understand himself, but that his self-loathing fueled his desire to take as many people with him as he could.

Jeffrey Dahmer never advanced beyond a certain stage, whereas Ted Bundy advanced past that stage and into a whole other state of being.

Dahmer didn't know how to control himself, and might've done something about it had he known what to do. He candidly spoke, in jail, of not being able to stop the thoughts that entered into his mind. It was as if he was programmed, against his will, to commit the atrocities that he did. His murders were hardwired to his sexual desires, like Bundy, but in a compulsive manner that someone like Bundy would've considered weak or decadent.

Ted Bundy didn't care about stopping the violent thoughts, or rather, he figured the only way to make them momentarily stop was to kill women.

What's ironic is that Dahmer's jury found that he was not insane, because he knew the difference between right and wrong. Bundy argued that he was innocent from beginning to the end-- to plead not guilty by reason of insanity was a worse fate (in his mind) than pleading complete innocence. Therefore, I have to wonder if he knew what he did was wrong. If he thought his actions were not wrong, doesn't that make him insane?

With Dahmer, I feel pity and compassion, despite the fact that he showed neither to his victims until after it was too late. With Bundy, I feel anger and resentment, because he really did have it all going for him but he couldn't escape or correct his warped pathology. His ego wouldn't allow it.

Even their respective executions are marked by contrasts: Bundy was murdered by the state, an institution he would've surely belonged to had he not been exposed as a serial killer; Dahmer was killed by a black inmate whose nickname was "Christ", a fitting sobriquet because Dahmer admitted that he often thought of himself as The Devil.

But the thing they had in common, besides homicidal urges, was their narcissistic detachment from the rest of the world. Dahmer's personal hell was hidden from view, Bundy's was seemingly out in the open, but both of them were tyrannical rulers in their imaginary realms. They had the power to take away human lives, and in their minds there was no conscience to restrain them from doing what they did, no voice in the back of the head telling them to stop before it goes too far. The narcissist, because of his attachment to his own desires and fears, never knows when enough is enough.

If only they had been artists-- maybe they would've channeled their demons into something positive. Remember, Adolph Hitler was an aspiring artist once upon a time, but his full-blown narcissism couldn't deal with the rejection. The true narcissist cannot accept their own shortcomings, and they make desperate ploys to compensate for their inadequacies... sometimes at the expense of the world as we know it.

I feel that our current President is a narcissist, in many ways. He has never had anyone challenging him in his life, and so it is no surprise when he says these inhuman things and expresses these banal sentiments that so often slip from his mouth like dry turds. He has no empathy, and he possesses an exaggerated notion of his actual abilities. He didn't get elected President because he was a good candidate-- hell, he didn't even get elected!

Therefore, as an artist who wants to use this forum as a weapon against injustice and bias (and who also wants to feed his own narcissism), I say we adopt a new name for our President.

I've been calling him President George W. Nixon for some time, but it hasn't caught on. How about we call him President Bundy? That seems to fit, for more than one reason.

Or maybe President Serial Killer. How about President Sociopath?

Naw, he might enjoy being called by that last name...

President Bundy it is.