A friend and I were recently joking about how we were psychopaths. I wonder how much we were joking. Psychopathy isn’t about being a serial killer, though many serial killers are psychopaths. It’s a lot more complex. According to many online tests, while I don’t qualify as a psychopath, I do have psychopathic tendencies.

Character 8: Psychopaths

Ever since I was in college I knew there was something a little off about me. I really liked sex, and I really liked violence, though I don’t like to mix the two. I’ve beaten up more people than most people will in a lifetime, and I once screwed a girl 18 times in a single day, not counting blow jobs. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to cum that many times in a single day, but after about 12, it doesn’t even feel good anymore.

I went into the arts because I was afraid of what I would do if I went into engineering or politics. I spent my childhood obsessed with nuclear weapons. By the age of 12, I could in fairly specific terms tell you how to construct a hydrogen bomb. Had I done something in those fields, I could have hurt a lot of people. Art hurts no one. Instead, I went into advertising. It gets me off to no end to manipulate 100,000s of people to do what I want. Buy shit.

The mental health community is divided on whether psychopathy is a real thing. They no longer call it psychopathy, in the same way that they don’t call Hyper Sexuality Disorder nymphomania anymore or Substance Abuse Disorder addiction anymore. The old terms have been used as slurs too many times. Technically psychopathy has been divided into four Cluster B personality disorders:

Antisocial Personality Disorder (Patrick Bateman)

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (Donald Trump)

Histrionic Personality Disorder (Scarlet O’Hara)

Borderline Personality Disorder (Wynonna Ryder)

Usually, people diagnosed with Cluster B disorders fall into all four, to one extent or another. There is a high degree of overlap.

It’s been my observation, that people with psychopathy generally are attracted to creative fields and generally have very high IQs. Remember, before he went senile, even Donald Trump was a successful artist and business developer. Even now, he’s successfully leading the country straight to hell, which is no small feat.

You can use a transcranial magnetic stimulation to temporarily induce psychopathy. You simply zap a bit of your brain that sits right over the top of your mouth. It’s not that you completely lack empathy, but your emotions become muted, or they are very extreme. According to one reporter, it’s like being drunk but without the sloppy depressant effects of alcohol. To quote Die Antwoord, “So, how do you feel now that you have your new dark powers? (Aah, feel pretty good, not eh, not scared at all, I just feel kind of, I feel kind of invincible)”

Psychopathy isn’t all bad. In many cases, the fact that you are charming and willing to take risks gives you a huge advantage. I doubt humanity will ever breed out psychopathic tendencies, simply because they make you attractive to potential mates.

Case in point, I recently met a friend for dinner. It wasn’t a date, but the situation does illustrate my point. She was very pregnant.

After we left the restaurant, I was walking her to the train. We were accosted by a crazy guy. I’m not sure what was wrong with him, maybe he was on drugs, maybe he was schizophrenic. It didn’t really matter, he was following us only paces away screaming and ranting at us, following us and refusing to go away. He was a young black guy wearing nothing but overalls. His rant was incoherent, but I believe he was blaming us personally for the systemic racism in our society. An unfair burden to bear for just two liberal white people.

She was terrified, both for herself and her unborn child. I instinctively positioned myself between the two of them, to shield her. She repeatedly asked him to go away. I remained silent, sizing him up. First to see if he had a weapon, then to come up with a plan to kick the living shit out of him. In stressful situations like that, I don’t go into fight or flight mode, I go into predator mode. Vampires are a good metaphor for psychopaths for a variety of reasons, and my fangs were coming out.

My plan was to slam him into a building, preferably something with a sharp metal edge to give him a good head wound. Once he was down, I’d stomp in his ribs and face. He was giving me an amazing opportunity, to beat someone up and legally get away with it. Dishing out that sort of punishment feels better than sex. No jury on earth would convict me for defending a pregnant woman.

Fortunately, an opportunity presented itself so that I didn’t have to. My friend would have been horrified if I had. I saw a bar that I’d been to before, one that stretched the length of the building and had entrances on both sides. I waved her into it. I figured that if he followed us into the bar the staff and patrons would give us back up. I hate a fair fight.

He didn’t follow us in. She used the bathroom, as pregnant women often need to do, then we went peacefully about the day. We slipped out the back entrance to avoid the guy.

Dating psychopaths is interesting. I’ve dated several, all women. In general, the further up the spectrum they are, the more difficult they are to deal with. Two of my ex’s were more or less on the same level of the spectrum as I am. Moderate and high functioning. One was full blown.

The two moderate ones were both wonderful people, except when you crossed them. They have both been featured in previous stories. The one liked to construct jewelry that are also weapons, rings with metal claws on them mostly. She loved edged weapons in general.

The other, I once helped her beat the shit out of a guy that tried to sexually assault her. I didn’t have to do anything, just stand there and make sure that he didn’t fight back. She threw him to the ground and kicked the crap out of him. I laughed and took video, for posterity.

The full blown one is more difficult to deal with. She is immensely selfish, to the point that I don’t think she has any concept of other people’s feelings. She can’t even fake it. I once described her as having the emotional intelligence of a sea turtle.

The one thing they all had in common though, was that they were all amazing in bed.