Sheri-D Doesn’t Like Me Anymore
What she sold was her seductive, charismatic, narcissists charm. It was like sleeping with Donald Trump.
We spoke on the phone. I was in her favourite cafe that she told me about years ago. It is close to my gym, quiet and a good place to write. I thought I would try it out and while sitting there Sheri’s phone number popped in my head. So I called it.
I have been doing this for 40 years off and on, calling Sheri. We have had talks that went on for hours. She never once called back. Once we had abysmal drunken sex and have never had companionship. Once I managed to get her to attend a dinner at my home as a pleasant distraction and evenings entertainment for me and my newly terminally diagnosed wife. She showed up late, drunk, with beau du jour in tow so pissed he could hardly walk. Imagine a loud garish drunken Donald Trump in your quiet home.
So what with a lack of communication, companionship and sex over the years it made for a terrible friendship to start with. What she was doing with me I suspect was fishing, using her seductive, charismatic, narcissists charm as the bait. Fishing for what? Creativity, ideas to steal. Like the crack-ho art ‘teachers’ at the Alberta University of the Arts cruising the studios of the students and feeding off their creativity.
The rich families in the western European countries traditionally sent the inbred morons they spawned to the monastery as a preferred career choice of some status so they wouldn’t fuck up the family business and fortune. These days they send them to the art school and buy them a guaranteed master's degree with large donations. Or an honorary doctorate if they were too stoned and drunk to stay in school. The cast-off offspring then ‘teach’, cruising the studios and classrooms of future artists casting hooks of narcissists charm for student ideas to pilfer.
With real art students you don’t teach, you give them space and permission, then get out of their way. They cannot not make art. Then mentor them as artists have been teaching each other, recognizing and nurturing talent for 800 years or so, as a professional responsibility.
The mutant crack ho’s get shows in the galleries (or books published) because they have a rich family to buy or promote their ‘work’ to the rich and influential. This is typically nothing more than some one-trick pony technique practiced over and over by rote for life, I mean a monkey could do it. Also known as rubber stamp art. The gallery owners and publishers love it. Predictable products and moron markets to pay for their Lexus. Nothing challenging goes over the couch or in the boardroom bookshelves.
‘You are too creative’ - read uncontrollable - has often been my rejection letter of choice from photoshop ad agencies and brick and mortar mutant galleries both as often as not run by creatures that were kicked out of art school in the first year for fear that they would degrade the credential if they graduated.
Happily, for me, and with much gnashing of teeth by my local loser rich family colleagues, organizations in New York like Photographize love my work and I’ve created professional friendships such as relationships with Paddy Johnson who gave me great advice for internet fundraising when I suffered a stroke, enabling me to get out of being homeless in hospital.
So, I’m sitting in Sheri D’s home coffee shop feeling a tad lonely and vulnerable and decide to give her a call. Much to my surprise, she answered. I told her about my year in hospitals learning to walk again, she responded that she was working on a 300-page poem, as her warm empathetic response.
So I asked her what was she pissed off about. The author of A Girls Guide to Giving Head accused me of being inappropriate, but she couldn't remember the details. Mark Twain once said something like inappropriateness was the basis of all humour. “The humorous writer professes to awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness — your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture…”- “Notes on Thackeray’s Essay on Swift”
So I asked Sheri what she meant by inappropriate, what did it mean to her. Typically a narcissist when you ask for something, usually it's to deepen the relationship, they have nothing to give and they leave, undervalue dump smear in that order. Sheri screamed something unintelligible and disconnected.
I sent her a link to my AA essay as I once heard that she was now a member of the 12 step cult. My efforts to “awaken and direct your love, your pity, your kindness — your scorn for untruth, pretension, imposture…” resulted in a terse one-word reply.
Blocked.
As Dr. Tara says: “They hate us for our empathy, it makes them look bad. “
