Understanding Narcissism

[Gemini]

He told me I would be a world class computer gamer and win tournaments online, he told me my electronic music would become extremely successful and he told me I would become rich playing professional poker. He told my brother his art was not just amazing (it really really is, my brother's art is amazing) but he also said he would be the next Leonardo Da Vinci.

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My dad wouldn't just not accept liminations but he wouldn't accept ordinariness. That's why he was always proud of being weird, wacky, zany, different. He instilled that in me so hard that I don't like being ordinary myself, in the sense that ordinariness bores me. I love weirdness.

But he went further than finding ordinariness boring. He was against healthy balance and moderation and normality, he'd rather fail than be average. He said that 99% of people are like sheep and are stupid and that him his wife and his children were part of the 1% who are geniuses and different.

That kind of manic egotism, dyfunctional as it is, is well regarded within religious communities. It served my Dad pretty well. But even an offer to work a steady job writing curriculum for fundy schools was too passé for him. He was on the radio, briefly, but he didn't get the opportunity to become of those obnoxious conservative christian radio personalities due to the fact that he clashed so much with his boss. Over trivial stuff. How to say "W." My Dad was just going to do it his way, and in the meantime the family had to hike out through the woods to the grocery store because we didn't have a working car.

My dad too. Merely the crazy goal-setting itself is enough to send him on a high until he inevitably has to deal with his highly idealistic delusion of grandeur, get depressed again and then move onto the next crazy goal.

You ever seen that episode of The Simpsons where Homer joins a Biker gang and says something like "A gang! That's the answer!" and Lisa says "answer to what?".

My dad was doing that all the time. When he was on his next high it would start with "Aha! THAT'S the answer" before he inevitably realized it was all bullshit and recharged before moving onto the next "answer".

Answer to what? Life the universe and everything. His favorite number was 42 after all.

He's an extremely interesting human being... but not always in a good way!!!!

If my Dad were a bit more intellectually curious then he could have been interesting, but as it was, he was mostly a boor. I took after my mother for the most part. She read a lot. Dad was too self-absorbed to have much of an affect on us once we reached our teens; it's really like he's stuck in a very childish mindset. Which makes him a nice Grandpa, for my boys. When he pays attention to them. Usually his visits consist of him reading his email or long monologues about the project he's working on.