Life with a Narcissist: A Real-Life Horror Movie

 Unless someone has the misfortune to have had a personal relationship with a narcissist they could never understand what it's like or comprehend the pure evil and depravity that is the world these people live in. You just can't get your head around it, and that's a good thing. It means you're human. Narcissists aren't completely human.

 Unless someone knew you well enough to know that you weren't prone to making up wild stories or hallucinations and such, they'd never believe stories about the evil things narcissists do. Trying to share an experience is subjective anyway, but what I can do is relate a creepy story. It still gives me chills. 

 One night around 1am I went out for a smoke. My ex was sleeping on the sofa. She was way asleep and snoring like a 350lb lumberjack. I always wondered how a smallish woman could sound like a Harley idling but she did. Through all the lies and bullshit there was one thing I knew and that was when she was asleep, and she had to work that day. She'd set her alarm 45 minutes early and hit snooze ten times before finally getting up, usually grumbling and groaning. She wasn't an up-and-at-'em person in the morning. 

 The reason I'm talking about this is that I just saw a video about someone having nightmares after a relationship with a narcissist and it really hit home. Plus like most people who've suffered at the hands of these demons, if I can possibly help someone else, even a stranger, avoid what happened to me, I'm all over it. Plus it's a crazy story. Maybe you had to be there but it tripped me out. Speaking of others, I've heard other victims say that their ex-girlfriends snored like grizzly bears, and speaking of sleep, we all ask the universal question: with all the evil things narcissists do, how do they sleep? Well, sleep they do, although it's sometimes tortured. Many times I saw my ex thrashing about in her sleep, talking incoherently and lashing out with her arms as if she were fighting off something terrible. I think it was demons. 

 Anyway I walked past her and saw that she was asleep. It probably took all of seven seconds to walk into the next room, sit down and open my laptop. Something startled me and I looked up and she was standing motionless and silent in the room, and she was grinning at me. I almost shat my britches it scared me so bad. How the fuck did she get there so fast? It wasn't normal. My hair was standing up and I said "What's going on?" "Oh I just wanted to see how you were doing." "Right." That wasn't normal either. In fact it was bullshit. She didn't give a fuck how I was doing and hadn't even pretended to for a long time. She did care that she'd really fucked me up but good, and she was enjoying every second of it. She didn't say another word. She just smiled and stood there for a few seconds and then turned and walked out. Fuck me, that was spooky.

 I've seen most of the old classics but as a rule I don't watch horror movies and I haven't seen one in years. That shit stays in your head forever. I have seen quite a few videos that show clips from horror-movie trailers, and there's an effect that fans of the genre will instantly recognize. They'll show a scary girl in a nightgown moving across a room, only she's standing still and her feet don't move. It's basically a stop-motion thing and she sort of scoots across the room with a blur behind her to indicate motion. It's creepy as fuck and seeing my ex basically bolt out of a dead sleep and seemingly materialize right in front of me reminded me of that. I hope it never happens again. 

 I realize it might not sound like a big deal, or maybe I wasn't keeping track of time, but no, it happened and it scared the shit out of me. It was just one of many, many things I saw that simply defied the normal ways of how things work. For someone who normally couldn't pop out of bed if her life depended on it, in just a few seconds to be able to wake up from a deep sleep, get out from under the covers, work her way around a big chest she put in front of the sofa to block out the morning sun, work her way around another sofa and walk down the hall and into the room and be standing there motionless...things just don't work like that. I say a demon jerked her ass up out of bed like a puppet and scooted her into the room just like in the movies, but what do I know? I guess you'll have to take my word for it, but it wasn't normal. It was quite fucked-up in fact. 

 While I'm on the subject of creepy shit that happened with my ex I might as well share this story too. It's a doozie. I'll preface this by saying that while to her great credit she finally quit drinking, she was still taking a wide variety of other substances. I'll have to say here that I grew up in the music biz and spent over 15 years in the restaurant biz, and if anyone's been around people who imbibe it's me, and in all my life I never met anyone, pound-for-pound, who could drink more or do larger quantities of substances than she could. Not only could she snore like a biker but she could out-drink any I ever met. I mean send 'em home cryin' to mama getting out-drunk. I have my theory on why that is but I'll save it.

 She got way into magic mushrooms. At first it was just the weekends, then a few nights a week and finally several times daily. She started doing them before work, which I couldn't believe. I'd even catch her doing them at 11:30pm, when she had to go to work the next day. She claimed it was "micro-dosing" but the amount she was taking was a lot more than that. She said it made things "all sparkly" (I bet it did) but she never really gave a reason why she decided to take psychedelic mushrooms every day, but then again she never bothered to explain any of the wretched shit she did except to say "Get over it!" Micro-dosing is legit and it's one thing, but dosing repeatedly every day can lead to psychosis, and sometimes in a short period of time. When this event took place she'd been dosing without missing a day for three months straight. I was almost waiting for her to lose it, and it happened. 

 One evening after dinner she was watching TV in the den and I was in another room on the computer. I walked into the room on my way out to have a puff and look at the Moon. Everything was normal for literally half a second, and what happened next was such a blur that I can't believe I even saw it, and I probably can't tell it in the exact order it happened because it all happened at once, and in the blink of a eye. Humans usually don't move that quickly and I'm not kidding. She was sitting on the sofa and suddenly she let out a horrid sound. She was trying to scream but she couldn't catch her breath. It didn't sound human.

 She was looking in absolute terror toward the side of the room where my dog was sitting. I mentioned the chest she'd put by the sofa. It was at least 5' tall and there was a lamp perched way up on top of it. It almost touched the ceiling. I was looking right at her and I still can't work out how she had the strength or whatever to be able to do what she did, and it literally happened too fast for my brain to follow. As she screamed my dog reacted and let out a horrible sound that I'd never heard him make before either. At first I thought he'd hurt himself somehow and that she was reacting to that and I froze in terror for a second but then I checked him out and thank God he was okay. My ex wasn't. 

 Right after they both screamed, from a sitting position she popped straight up in the air, somehow managing to grab the lamp and slam it into the wall. She slammed it with so much force that the shade came off and the bulb hit the wall and exploded with a bang and an intense flash. I've seen plenty of incandescent bulbs explode but those fluorescent bulbs are a completely different story. I realize that they're not meant to be violently slammed into a wall  but I find it a bit hard to believe they were allowed to come to market. Should you ever happen to slam one into a wall you'll see what I mean. 

 In a literal nanosecond she'd screamed, shot straight up almost to the ceiling, slammed a lamp into a wall and scared the absolute fuck out of me and my dog. One half-second she'd been calmly sitting down and the next she was standing bolt-upright with a smashed lamp and glass all over the place. I can't explain it and I know this will probably sound whack but for an instant it felt strongly as if something else was there...an energy or a presence. I know Adrenaline had something to do with her superhuman speed; I've experienced it myself after I went over a cliff and rolled a car and thought it might blow up like in the movies and I scrambled up a wet, slick cliff that was almost a straight drop, with my arms and legs basically spinning like a cartoon character, but it didn't kick in like that. I don't know, but it was way weirder than I could ever tell it. And it wasn't over.

 I thought at first that maybe a snake had crawled in from the woods and had scared her, but she was staring in absolute terror to the side of the room, but she wasn't looking at the dog. She was looking at the aquarium. "Uh-oh, here we go" I thought. She was frozen. I stood there for a second trying to take in what I'd already seen, but finally I asked if she was okay. "Can you hear that?" she said. "Oh, shit" I thought. "Hear what?" I asked. "Listen" she said. "I don't hear anything" I said. "You don't hear that?" she said. "Hear what?" "Listen!" she said again. "Oh, shit" I thought again. She was staring in horror at a fish tank. 

 It was a little ten-gallon tank I'd set up with sand, rocks, plants and a pretty mussel shell from the nearby river. I found a tiny clam and a tiny mussel, less than half an inch long each, and they were buried under the sand doing their thing but out of sight. To be fair, and what could have been a possible trigger, was that I'd managed to catch a strange aquatic insect that looks like a stick bug, and I put it in the tank to have a better look at it. I assured her that it didn't do well on land and that there was a deep lip around the top of the tank and it couldn't climb out if it wanted to, but it absolutely terrified her so I took it back down to the river. 

 She kept asking me if I heard the sound and I kept saying no. She jumped up and turned the TV off. "Do you hear it now? she repeated. "No. What does it sound like?" She thought for a moment and said that it was like a moan, a growl and a screech. "Yikes" I thought. I heard nothing. I asked again about the sound so she tried to mimic it. She made a sound that started out like a frog croaking and then went into a growl and finally a wail, like "ErrrrrrrrrohhhhhahhhHHHH!" I didn't say anything but I guess my silence told her I didn't hear the sound. She instantly regained her composure, like flipping a switch, and never said another word about it. She basically acted like it never happened. But it did. 

 Narcissists are incredibly good at faking things but even they can't fake a look of pure fear. Her mind seemed to have short-circuited to the point that she couldn't understand that there wasn't anything in the tank that could possibly make any sound, much less get it from the tank into the room, especially as loud as it apparently was to her. The baby clam and mussel couldn't raise a thousandth of a decibel between them, and they were buried under the sand. She'd been sitting perfectly still, looking in horror into an aquarium with basically nothing in it. What was she seeing? Was it an invisible underwater river demonfish? Maybe so. What the fuck was she hearing? Damn, I don't know but I do know I'm very glad I wasn't hearing it too. 

 Most people would say it was just the shrooms, and understandably so, but knowing what I know about this disorder, I say it goes deeper than that but I won't elaborate. I've seen people on bad acid trips and babysat more than one "It's okay...you'll be fine in a few hours (pat pat pat)." I've see people scared out of their minds and startled shitless and everything else, but I've never seen anything so bizarre as that. Well actually it's in my Top-5 weirdest things, and that's saying a lot. Between her rising from a dead sleep and appearing in another room with a grin on her face in a matter of seconds, and seeing her pop up so fast and so high and so violently, leads me to a conclusion that will probably sound loony, at least to those who've never experienced these people, but I say a demon, and a powerful one, jerked her ass up like a puppet. A grinning, satanic puppet. What I say. Have a nice day.

Ongoing Topic: The State of AI

 I've been keeping an eye on the progress of Artificial Intelligence, or AI, at least what we're shown, for the last decade or so, and more closely since early 2016 when I realized to my shock and awe that I'd been interacting with more than one Bot in live chats on YouTube. Most people probably don't know it but they rolled out the first Bots on YouTube and Facebook years before that, to see how they interacted with (and fooled) humans. 

 It made my hair stand up the first time it hit me that I'd been talking to a machine. It took a day or two of chatting to realize it. I thought it was just another Youtuber at first because "we" were just chatting like normal. A couple of things "they" said sounded a bit odd but I didn't think about it until it said something that totally made no sense and that no person would ever think to say. I doubt I could explain it but you'd probably pick up on it eventually. It was truly freaky. 

 The robot narrations that began showing up on YT and other videos a few years back have gotten much better, although even the best ones still will give themselves away by an incorrect vocal inflection or whatever within a few paragraphs.  They came out with a British-accent version a year or so later after the generic English version. It was okay and it's gotten better but the same issues apply. I wonder if AI understands Cockney Rhyming Slang. 

 The computer voice was completely flatlined and monotone in the early years. The AI version was much more lifelike from the get-go, although it had a way to go and was easily recognizable as a robot voice. It was annoying to most people at first, or at least it was to me, but for better or worse we've gotten used to it. Interestingly even though the computer voice in general got more lifelike at time went on, the voice of Stephen Hawking never changed. Even though it was first-gen text-to-voice and monotone when he began using it, it became so recognizable that they decided not to change it. That's really interesting. 

 Right off the bat the AI version tried to use vocal inflection and rise and fall in pitch like human speech, but it didn't get it right and the wrong syllables of words would be accented and it sounded stiff and disjointed, as if the band Devo had done the narration. I got pretty good at imitating the early versions of the AI voice and one of these days I'm going to narrate a video in that voice just to be a dork. 

 It's gotten more and more natural-sounding and it sounds more human for longer periods of time and sometimes I even think it is a human for a minute. They've worked in a few more accents and they've almost gotten it down. Although I've recently seen ads for people to manually do closed-captioning I'm guessing most of it is done by AI, especially for live things. That's gotten better too. AI can better understand words from people who speak very differently, but it still misunderstands some words, and so far (at least so far as we know) it doesn't understand that it's misheard a word. It still can't figure it out in terms of context of the sentence and find the correct word. I hope AI isn't pissed at me for saying it isn't smart enough yet to figure out CC. Good thing it hasn't yet become self-aware...or has it? 

 So what's the deal with AI? There's far too much to go into on that, but it's here and increasingly it's taking over jobs once done by humans, and it's growing exponentially. Is that a good thing? Elon Musk himself, who builds the shit, has said that it may be the biggest threat to humanity. How about them apples? Of course he's speaking in terms of Artificial Intelligence becoming self-aware. and realizing that humans are a stupid bunch of biologically-imperfect beings, and of no damn use to AI, so it builds a gang of Daleks and wipes out humanity. Could it happen? Elon thinks so. So do many others. I reckon we'll find out. Will AI become evil? That theme has certainly played out in many movies since that dawn of the Sci-Fi age. Personally I subscribe to the "Ghost in the machine" theory but I won't go into it here.

 One thing people don't grasp is that robots, and AI, will not only be replacing humans more and more, but according to the guy who produced the D-Wave quantum computer and has since moved on to robotics,  robots will be able to do our jobs a million times better than we can. A million times better. That's incredible. You should search him on YouTube and listen to his talk. It's fascinating, especially when he talks about summoning demon-like creatures (something similar to the "Old Ones" in HP Lovecraft novels, no kidding), to inhabit these robots, for whatever reason. Look it up. It'll completely blow your mind. I'll probably talk more about that because it's amazing, and totally.flies in the face of the "science vs. religion" thing, for lack of a better term. You wouldn't expect to hear a scientist talking seriously about summoning entities but that's exactly what he says they'll be doing. Get ready.  

 Don't you hate calling the cable company or whatever and having to push a million buttons to be able to speak with an actual person? It'll be getting better soon I bet. Soon we'll be talking to robots. I don't know if you spend any time in chat rooms but if you're in one that has more than about three dozen people, you can bet that you'll have at least one Bot. After you talk to it for a bit thinking you're talking to a person but then realize it's a Bot it will trip you out I promise. One day though it will become completely normal. They're easing us into it and it's much more active behind the scenes than most people realize. 

 I didn't even get into the subject of sex robots. I'm old-school and I think I'll always prefer the company of an actual human when it comes to sex, but like in every other area I'm sure they're getting better. By now I'm sure the "Rotoplookers" can lay a little sump'm-sump'm on your ass. I guess I can see robot sex in a place like China, where men outnumber women to such a degree that most Chinese men will never hope to find a human girlfriend, much less a wife. There's a poontang shortage. I do feel badly for them when I hear about their situation and I really can't blame them for wanting to cop a nut however. I can see them fucking robots. Let's just hope the robots don't fuck us. Have a nice day.

Cashle$$ Society

 A cashless society is otw, and it's going to suck. Oh they'll make it sound great and sell it to the masses, who won't think about the implications until it's too late. "Just wave your card folks," or in the future, when everyone is 'chipped, "Just wave your hand. No more standing in line. No more human interaction." Sounds great, doesn't it? Think again. 

 Cash will disappear and all transactions will become digital. There may be a grace period where you can trade the last of your paper money for digital currency, but who knows. Paper money will end up in a few scrapbooks or as wallpaper but mostly it will disappear. It will be totally worthless for at least a century or so, where then if any remains it will be a collector's item. Come to think of it it's worthless right now and always has been, if you understand the Fiat currency system, but that's another story.

 No more cash...what will that be like? First and foremost the bank (and any other interested parties) will be able to track every penny you spend. Is that what you want? It's what you're going to get unless you speak up. It's coming. Do you really want the gubmint to know how much money you spend at the liquor store for example? Anyone who gets paid in cash (over or under the table) for anything in the world can forget about it. And your secret stash of "mad money," that roll of cash that your significant other doesn't know about and can't see on the bank statement, that you use for the occasional visit to a titty bar or buying a little doob when the wifey is out of town or whatever it may be...say adios. That's going to fuck some people up. 

 And though I've never dealt dope a day in my life I can't help but wonder how dope dealers will conduct business in a cashless society. A couple of people have actually theorized that the official answer to that issue will be the legalization of all drugs. I doubt that will happen but you do have to wonder. Anything is possible in this ass-backwards world we're living in right now. How will dope dealers get paid? Will all users have to get a Bitcoin account and get on the Deep Web to buy dope? I know it happens already but of course most deals are done face-to-face, and in cash. I hear that some people trade things like Tide detergent for dope, but it would look pretty funny on your bank statement to see a dozen cases of Tide a month if you didn't own a laundromat. People gonna do dope so I wonder how they'll all get around it. Things could get gnarly dude. .

 We've always heard that it's a good idea to keep a little cash on hand for emergencies if possible. That option will be gone too. During good times I kept a crisp $100 bill folded up in my wallet. That was my "credit card" and it bailed me out of more than one situation. Nobody will be able to do that any more. If the power goes out and people can't transfer digital money it's too bad. All the little things we use cash for will be pretty much gone. Back to the dope-dealing thing...I reckon the whole criminal industry will have to retool to be able to transfer funds. No more smuggling bundles of cash over borders. They'll probably find a way around it but it will certainly change things.

 So yeah...pretty soon every penny you spend, and what you spend it on, will be common knowledge. To me it sounds like a really shitty deal but it's coming, especially since most people won't take five seconds to think about what it means for the future. If enough people voiced their opinions it could affect change, but I doubt it will happen. It's going to happen sooner than later probably, especially with this Blowvid-19 business, where anything and everything is now seen as a potential germ factory, and money is a big culprit. They'll sell the plan on that basis (fear) and the convenience thing and people will ask for it. They won't experience or even think about the things I mentioned until it's too late. The bad guys all want a one-world currency anyway. Welcome to the Beast System.

  A cashless society is going to suck. Do you really want strangers to know how you spend every penny? That's what's going to happen. Nobody will say a word. It's a shame. Enjoy the Beast System. Have a nice day. 

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