Emma Bastard

ALL YOU NEED IS PAIN

Are you tired of being ignored by others? Fed up with strangers walking away from you at parties? Exhausted by taking personal responsibility for your actions? Fear no more as the instant victim generator is here to change your life! Studies by well-known scientists have shown that victimhood is the shortest and fastest way to improve your life, increase your social standing, and make yourself the centre of attention. Would you benefit from being a victim? Take this easy test to find out. While out with friends at a restaurant, which is a more interesting response to an offer of asparagus?

A-No thank you. I don’t like asparagus or

B-No. Asparagus reminds me of the pain I suffered as a child during Satanic ritual abuse.

If you chose the latter, then you are a candidate for instant martyrdom. (Please note: Those who have suffered horrendous experiences need not apply. True victimhood is only for the slightly maligned.)

Step One: Exploration Find a registered therapist, preferably one with dubious credentials or practices. Pour your heart out to said professional. Try to recall each and every demeaning and/or painful experience in your life, regardless of where it happened. Question the connection between those events and your current problems. For example, being forced to kiss a boy during a game of spin-the-bottle may have led to your current fear of intimacy. The taunts of Shamu in the schoolyard have almost certainly caused your eating disorders. Please don’t leave anything out. Each memory is yet another thread in the tapestry of your upcoming victimization. If you can’t afford professional help, visit a mega-bookstore for the latest pop psychology bestseller. The shelves of your local book vendor are packed with volumes of self-help literature and you are bound to fit into one of their homogenized moulds. If all else fails, consult “Men are from Mars: Women are from Venus.” You are likely to fit into one category or the other.

Step two: Diagnosis Get your diagnosis: True victimhood is useless without a label. For instance, is it easier to say that you are a woman who loves too much or explain your habit of stalking men who dump you, going through their garbage to prove once and for all that they are unfaithful? Don’t forget that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can enhance any label. This condition, once the exclusive domain of war survivors or the truly traumatized, can be used to change your miniscule flashlight beam of pain into a grand spotlight of victimhood.

Street Credibility- It will be necessary at this point to broadcast your pain, either through word of mouth or through the media. Ensure that your caption on Sally states your pain appropriately, with your name spelled correctly. Do not, at this point, wimp out and wear a disguise on the air. This defeats the purpose; your story could help countless others find their own path of victimhood. Another way to develop your sense of victimhood is to attend survivor’s groups. How can you possibly handle this twenty-year old incident on your own? Not only will you meet others for whom your trauma is new and interesting, but also you can learn the jargon of victimhood. How can you be a proper victim if you don’t know how to use the phrase “low self-esteem” or “impact” in a conversation? Additionally, those meetings will provide you with all the knowledge necessary to sue your school, friends, family, society as a whole, or God. Experts say that lawsuits are necessary to provide closure.

Live Life to the Fullest- Truly integrate your victimness into your every day lifestyle. Ensure that during this time you do not take personal responsibility for anything you may have done or will do in your life: Such actions will negate all of your victim work and losing that may mean being normal, thus boring, again. During this time, keep a pain journal to document the hurt in your life. You may find some fertile ground for new and more exciting disorders. Sure those memories of black robes, candles, and incense could be a recollection of Catholic Mass but they could also be rituals by a satanic cult. If you can’t remember anything, you may be a candidate for repressed memory. Consult your therapist for further clarification on this matter. Remember that they are the professionals in this area.

Conclusion: You have attained true victimhood. Go in peace. You are a special and unique person who no longer needs to take responsibility for your actions. People find you profound and forlorn, which translates into interesting and exciting in the social area. Do not try to recover on your own. That’s why you attend group meetings and therapist sessions and any progress towards happiness must be discussed with them first. You are a fragile and complex person for whom recovery could be a negative experience. If you do accidentally recover, keep digging at that subconscious. Something’s bound to come up.

FROM THE DESK OF.........OUR BUREAU CHIEF WITHOUT PORTFOLIO

WINDOWLICKING AND OTHER MODERN SOCIAL DISEASES

By Dr. Susan Barclay

My boyfriend and I found that my car tires were getting flat and, as any normal person would do in the situation, drove to the nearest gas station to pump them up. Lo and behold a mammoth car, the kind that real men drove in the 1970's, parked behind me blocking my path of exit. I politely asked the driver if he could move his car to a more convenient location. This request was met with a stream of profanities that would have caused the most hardened rapper to re-evaluate his position on cursing in music. In short, he indicated that I could put my car somewhere that would be most uncomfortable and impossible, given the size of said vehicle. I politely declined to perform said act and punctuated my second request by honking my horn most vigorously in his direction. He let forth with another barrage of slander, most of which implied that my lineage was marred by those who were interested in goats. Choosing this moment to act, he stormed over to the car, pounding on the windows with fervour. Fortunately, we knew the first thing to do in a crisis situation - lock the doors and roll up the windows. My little 200 SX metamorphosed into the impenetrable Nissan of Death. Thwarted, he licked the window and walked away.

Now, you may be thinking, is this not the lick of death that is foretold in Mafia folklore? Should this writer cower in fear when, in the future, she passes pizza outlets? No, this was not the lick of death. The lick of death uses only the tip of the tongue while this was a full frontal lick, one that exposed every taste bud to the horror that is my window. What would prompt a sane man to press his tongue on a window that has previously carried such substances as bird droppings, car wax, and gum? Idiocy: The scourge of the nation. I have come to the unpopular but obviously correct conclusion that idiocy is on the rise and there is only one possible cause. It's a virus. A virus that even the arguably intelligent can catch at any given time only, in this man's case, he has gone chronic. When a Nobel prize winner blows over the legal limit for DWI or a grade six teacher falls in love with a student, blame it on the virus. But what can be done?

A nutritionally sound diet, exercise and healthy, clean living doesn’t seem to stem the spread of this illness. (Although, considerable amounts of red meat, cigarettes, and alcohol might prevent it. Studies are in progress at this time on bohemian coffee-shop types who spent their days smoking, drinking, and discussing why everyone else in society is so ignorant to find out why they seem immune to the lure of the Spice Girls.)

Very few of us are immune to this insidious parasite. The symptoms are easy to spot: revelling in the misery of others, participating in the most inane trends the advertisers are shoving down our throats, and behaving egocentrically. Some have argued that we are all infected as adolescence, with some becoming chronic cases that plague us through life, resulting in incarceration, commitment, and huge contracts with major league sports teams or record producers. This virus is the key reason that People magazine continues to flourish while “Spy” and “21C” have gone out of business.

In recent years it has spread to members of the publishing industry, once thought immune, where huge sums of money are thrown at celebrities for instant biographies, and members of the recording industry, who offer every pre-packaged band wads of cash to spray their fresh faces or bad reputations all over the tabloids. Movie producers have had it for years - some theorise that the virus started in Hollywood, calling for a quarantine of California in general - paying unthinkable sums of money for “talent”, while ignoring the basic movie storyline. It doesn’t really matter though, the public has it too, which explains the continued interest in books such as Puff Daddy’s autobiography and opening night box office receipts for movies like “Starship Troopers.” Symptomatically, failure to question the status quo is the least of our problems. Narcissism is the true cause of most of our problems as a society: Road rage, child abuse, addiction issues, and adolescent acting out all stem from a failure of the infected to consider the feelings of others before behaving.

From the woman who stands in the “fifteen items or less” line in Safeway with twenty-three items, hoping no one will notice, to the adolescent who brings a gun to school, this virus has worked its way into our society on a wholesale level. Everyone is “special” now, with the unique delinieated by gender, sexual orientation, disease of the week, and mental status. As a result, no one needs to worry about the other people out there; you’re so special that nothing should stop you from doing what you really want to do. Good Samaritan laws, forcing innocent bystanders to offer help to those in need, are an attempt to legislate the consideration of others in a possible attempt to arrest the effects of idiocy, to no avail. There are times when personal interest is overridden by the needs of the few, such as when a child needs a bone marrow transplant, but otherwise the call of the public is for less welfare for the needy, lower medicare costs, and fewer programs to help those who truly require charitable assistance. How to know if you are infected? If you accept the concept that celebrities are good and fine people because of their position in life, find yourself in a book store holding Jenny McCarthy’s autobiography, honestly believe that a Ginsu knife can change your life, or think that Beanie Babies are a sound investment for your retirement, you’re one of the millions with chronic idiocy. What to do? Take a healthy dose of reality and check back with me in the morning.