The Sheila Variations

Sometimes a pencil is just a pencil--and you are very funny.

I just realized that those top photos look like one of the photos on your old blog.

And, of course, I must don my large-collared leather jacket in order to give full vent to my horrible pencil grief.

oh, red. i'm so sorry about the pencil.

and you're very sexy when you're wailing. i mean that in a most straight way.

To:sheila
re: Your Leslie Van Houten comments
why: my manson family psychology research project

You really got it right with your first stab at their psychology. Charlie had too much of what they had too little. They were already a bunch of outcasts from their own families, and probably for good reason. They were charlies kind of people, less than whole, already well into the mirror world of dual diagnosis personality disorder and drug abuse/dependency, so its not surprising charlie was one strong drug for them. But key is what you caught, Van Houten's lack of empathy and Susan Atkins knack at depersonalizing a corpse she created as a "thing". This is key, because what they all had in common, the one thing that linked the whole gang together was their family hobby of as a compulsive theft ring. They stole credit cards and cars and people's lives en-masse. Check me on this. They did it in volume. So they take all this stuff because they don't have normal interpersonal boundries as like cons, they assume everything belongs to them including the air, trees, water and animals. Its just amazing except for one thing, and that is they cannot create things on their own. So what do they do when they realize they can no longer physically be in the society they so robbed? Go to flickr and see the photo's of desolate dark dismal Death Valleys isolated par excellance Barker Ranch. Its literally on a moonscape so out of the human fold that charlies rationale is that is where they will find a way back into the maternal womb, the underground cavern where they will hibernate till all the people they burned are gone from the coming race war. Its really both very personal and apocalyptical in its duality and its the kind of paranoid faux deau? their type of cult mentality can concock on a dare and then adopt it wholly. Separate from the interview you saw there is a whole library of videos on all the key players including parole hearings and interviews in their own words. Its no wonder that in the popular youth and goth culture their alienation would be empathically felt giving them a somewhat better than pathetic status. Manson always said he just mirrors what we see in ourselves, a kind of scientology pop-psychology mind game that sorry to say goes on. But as a full card carrying con artist he conviently reflects all personal responsibility back at the viewer, who unfortunately happened to be a bunch of acid wired rejected kids with dual personality disorders. Its his natural wiring to do this as he himself was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and a delusional disorder and now has tardive dyskinesia from all the meds. For these people to feel any personal responsibility for what they did is singing in the rain. But your right empathically you can feel Kernwinckle's realization of the true horror of it all. I think she was perhaps the sadest case of them all being mentally disadvantaged and vulnerable to someone like manson, who if she never met might have ended up with a sort of ok life. Interestingly, Van Houten was the girl friend of Bobby Bouselouil(sp) who was a devout satanist and rock musician who was probably even more classically criminal than manson. Manson can always fall back on he is and always was crazy and a nobody reject ward of the state. So Van Houten was already with a criminal before she ever met manson. So yes your right, leslie is hardcore and her lack of empathy is just whom she is and she is one of the more amoral ones. In the case of Tex Watson. He is amazingly amoral and hard core and in a fugue state as he is convienently split from the serial murdering person who he was and still is and has never delt with that. The state of California in all its wisdom allowed him conjugually to father four children and to run a prison ministry for a livelihood. Sandra Goode actually had a lot of murder in her soul while being obssessively preachy but was never thought to have killed anybody, just write literally hundreds of death threatening letters to the upper class. Out of all of them Squeaky Fromme seems the most otherworldly because she truely believes in another reality that weirdly mixes art with violence in a most unpredictable but sincere way. She is no posure or a traditional criminal type. Of all the family she is the most off-the-reservation and appears one of the smartest stupid persons i have ever come across. In the revolutionary war she probably would have been a heroic patriot but terribly clumsy. The tragedy of what they stole from Doris Tate and others is on our, the civilized world's side of the equation. Anyways, I really appreciated your take on it and I think you got it 100 percent right and you have a great writing style and sense of humor. You might find Van Houtens parole hearings amazing on Youtube and they have a great series of tapes. Personally though, you can see the parole board is serially putting her through hell but in a velvet lined buearcratic way. Atkins and Tex Watson's and manson's tapes are on there too and you can see the progression of manson's parnoid schizophrenia over time and compare it to his counterculture talk in the 60's.
They are close but measureably different. They put him in solitary for extended periods and now we know that brings out p. schiz in some people as it damages the brain further. I think a good guru walks a fine line having a high functioning level of p. schiz or whatever, mixed in with a dynamic salesmanship personality. Its the contradiction Bugliosi noticed in manson that he had two things you never find in one person, a talent for captivating a group of people, at the same time an intense hatred for them. I think the behavior of jim jones and david koresch was very similair as they all led their flocks into the abyss. brian LA

DBW - yeah, this is part of that whole same series - I found the contact sheet today - it's hysterical. I rolled around on the floor like that for ... 2 hours? An insanely long amount of time. The tears kept drying up on my face under the lights so the makeup chick used this glyceriny-waxy stuff to keep them sparkley and dribbly. It was so much fun!

sarah - hee hee Thank you!

Brian - your comment interests me intensely. I wrote that post about Leslie van Houten years ago and I notice, in my little web traffic report - that it still gets a bunch of traffic on a dailiy basis. It's really quite amazing - the interest there still is in these murderers. Especially in hER ... not in Susan or Patricia ... it seems like Leslie gets the press that she is the most "rehabilitated" and I call bull shit on that. I'm glad the Tate family is so persistent and fierce in their fight against Leslie. And the whole Tex thing - and how he has so completely cut off from himself back then - is, I agree, chilling. Truly chilling. And Sandra Goode has always scared the shit out of me.

You can email me here: gibsongirl@sheilaomalley.com if you would like to discuss further.

You have lost your cookies.

Brilliant.

My favorites are the last two -- where the grief seems to be at its peak. Hahahaha!

Jaysus Christ, you are gorgeous. Seriously - you're just breathtakingly beautiful.

What Sarah and RTG said... and, for both, the phrase "Takes one to know one" applies.

That said, my wife has a dish with over 70 pens I have "lost" in the last 2 years (and I'm not exaggerating). Sure glad none of them was my favorite, don't think I could take that much anguish

Actually, I didn't really lose my pencil. I don't ever write with a pencil. I just wanted to choose an event so trivial that bursting stormy sobs in response to it would be funny.

If I lost my favorite PEN ... that might cause me to weep. But again - it wouldn't necessarily be funny.

The funny comes from the trivial nature of the upset.

"I broke a nail. WAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH"

etc.

You are so insensitive! How dare you mock those of us who really have lost our pencils? Do you even care that you're causing us more pain by your incessant ridicule?

"incessant ridicule"! hahahahahaha

If you feel such pain - I suggest you roll around on the ground, wearing a leather jacket, and wailing. It seems to help!!

Phhhhtttt!

Positively Hepburnesque, Hepburnian, Hepburnanoid...had Hepburn ever worn a large-collared leather jacket, anyway.

Hokay I'm'a shut-up now.

I had to order a replacement nib for my favorite fountain pen recently (it is not good to drop one's pen point-first on to a tile floor...learn something new every day). New nib cost as much as the durn pen did back when I bought it. It's just a Phileas, the cheapest Waterman, but even that is an extravagance for a schleprock such as I.

I didn't wail, but I did call myself various reproachful names from Ham Gamgee's large paternal word-hoard.

Only on Sheila's blog can we get the juxtaposition of The Tragedy of the Lost Pencil, and the Manson family....

Das why we luvs our Sheila.