this week in SFWeekly we learned that Academy of Art student Samantha Spiegel is a hybristophiliac. This week on The Office we learned that Meredith is, too. so Samantha Spiegel is not in elite company.
we now know two things about Meredith: she was raised a Catholic and she was sexually abused. this is according to data used by SFWeekly, data found to be true of women who seek the affection of dangerous men. hybristophiliacs. this data is what you might conservatively call public domain.
Samantha Spiegel writes letters to killers, like the literal Charles Manson, and tries to get them to like her. (“she purchased a handmade floral stationery set…on its delicate paper, she composed more than a dozen letters.”) she got Richard Allen Davis, the most nightmarish child-murderer ever, to write back and say LOL.
the piece is so symphonically campy (“a young woman in black descends a winding staircase…her dark, wavy hair bounces atop her small frame”), it’s like Mia Farrow phone-ordering bathroom fixtures. Samantha is currently getting killed by commenters, most of whom are still missing the point: that this chick, while a nutter, is no crazier than every other hypertense sexual black hole 19-year-old selling stuff on Etsy and chain-smoking outside Matador. they’re just trying to get scummy hipsters to notice them, that’s all.
all the most important people in New York are nineteen, Matt Berninger wrote in “Val Jester”, but that’s laughably untrue in San Francisco. this garden-variety bipolar case is not news. not a single new. there are thousands of girls like this in the City and all of them go to AAU. for the next SFWeekly i’d like to nominate my most recent sort-of x who was biracial and traumatized and dependent and autoabusive with a whole horror-house of predilections. there’ll be a floor fight with every sketchy dude who knows a lot about fonts, nominating their own sort-of x’s.
i submit that a lot of this is true because of how men were in the eighties. i’m convinced that most men who had daughters in the eighties were fucked up about it in some way. or maybe it was because of how women were in the nineties, subjugated to the self-help empire. i’m convinced that women weren’t really given the language to talk about their issues until the nineties, and the language they were given was a false one. of course, as Chazz Palminteri said in The Usual Suspects, i can’t prove any of this. (or i could. brb, applying for grants.) women are fucked up, and men did it to them. i can’t remember who first posited that. Dave Chappelle?
something about the story tonally made me think there was a parallel disclosure happening, that Samantha Spiegel shouldn’t get the attention she’s out crusading for and the writer was constantly aware of it. (leastways, i’d love to believe all those awk. modifiers weren’t because she likes them so much.) either way someone got played and i don’t like stories like that unless they’re in NYMag.
anyhow, i am not minimizing other people’s severe depression. SFWeekly is. Samantha Spiegel, in her victim’s quest, just got a new sponsor. as for Meredith, she made it through another Christmas party; we can only hope she is finally at peace.
