I have tried, and I do mean tried, to write two more posts that might mean something to anybody. But I just cannot at present. It is difficult enough to write when one is feeling relatively okay inside and has a collection of ideas (or even just one idea) to write about.
And let us not kid ourselves here. Ideas are in very short supply in my household these days. When the unspoken message that one receives from the world around them is that they do not count, that their feelings do not matter, that making any pretense of effort to integrate them with the rest of the place they live in is not a worthwhile endeavour, let us just say that abstract thought tends to get dulled quite a bit. That is why the vast majority of scripts for films about social issues such as living on the autistic spectrum are written by rich little shit white boys without a solitary clue concerning the subject, such as Ronald Bass. It is very difficult to have any cognitive resources to spare for writing a 50,000-100,000 word story when much of your cognitive functions are simply straining themselves to filter something less hurtful out of everything that comes in.
I think I have said this a number of different times to people. People who might say they bear some familial relationship to me, professionals engaged in healthcare, you name it, I have told them this. Every individual’s sense of trust, love, and friendship works on an accounting system. Every person we meet, even if we only interact with them for a handful of minutes, gets an accounting statement or its equivalent. (I should point out, as I have explained in other entires too numerous count, that contrary to the stereotype out there in force, I fukking hate mathematics. This is a metaphor.) In one column, we have all of the positive stimuli we receive from that person. In the other column, we have all of the negative. And since I am such an anti-mathematical person, I would include a column expressing in simple numbers the size of the difference between the two values. Hell, let us get even more analytical and add a positive and minus symbol to make the size and direction of the deficit clearer.
I will not make any bones about this. As I have admitted before, I pass a lot of time by playing the frustratingly-designed Internet-based videogame called World Of Warcraft. I do not really want to mention names or aliases here, but I did start to engage in some positive interactions with another player whom I have been in continual contact with since before I started this journal. The engagement started out in a typical manner for me. For those who have never played the game and have never read about anything to do with it, one of the features that was added a couple of years ago allows users to sit in a queue and be randomly assigned to a group with other players, then transported to a dungeon in order to play through said dungeon. During one such group assignment, out of boredom with the game in general, I began to manually type a series of generic actions revolving around taking walnuts and pushing them up the derrières of the targets.
The response from the four other players in the group ranged from the usual revulsion one might expect to hear to more a certain level of amusement. And I cannot remember who contacted who first, but this person took the bold step of taking the time and effort to interact with me. To understand what a difference this makes, one needs to understand how after years of abuse and failure to spew the “happy happy happy fun fukk club” speech the norms apparently like every time I speak to them, one gets used to people behaving like one is not even there. During one of my failed, miserable attempts to have any fukking thing to do with norm school again, I was literally on the brink of suicide until one person whom I had began to take notice of due to their displayed intelligence actually deigned to speak to me. To a certain extent, that is what occurred in my conversations with this person on World Of Warcraft. And through a facility that was added to the game more recently, I did what I could to interact with them more regularly.
There’s a lot I could say about this in an effort to make it seem like a healthy, normal thing. But I am not going to bother. I do not think that anything I can do anymore, in terms of interaction or emotion, can be said to be in the same sport as healthy or normal. But the point here is not the specifics. The point is that the deficit I spoke of a little while ago is so far in the negative in terms of interaction that just the merest conversation that does not involve intimated violence or disparagements of my person sends sensations running through my veins like heroin. I am experiencing similar effects from the acquisition, viewing, hearing, or reading of media that reassures me the world is not full of norms who cannot even function in a world where not everyone is exactly like them. The first time that I read the novel To Kill A Mockingbird, as an example, I wept small tears of joy that somewhere in one of the most densely ignorant places of our world, someone could write a meditation on the fact that ignorance is only blissful for the ignorant. And sometimes not even then.
That, to draw the metaphors together, is what occurs in the recesses of my brain when I come across a person, whether it be online or in person, who does not leave me utterly flabbergasted that one person of a comparable age could possibly so ignorant and stupid. It is like I expect Charlie Sheen feels when he puts enough of South America up his nose to keep five families eating for a week. It is not just a feeling of happiness or pleasure. It is like one’s whole world has changed, even if only for that brief half-second.
That is partly why I am having so much difficulty getting words out a lot of the time at the moment. Everything I write, say, or photograph, I feel a need to filter through an audience, however small as that audience might be. It has to be a select audience, too. If I do not respect you as I do the two people I have described in the words preceding this sentence, then chances are that when you tell me X or Y element does not please you, I am not going to give a fukk.
Unfortunately, and this is where we get back to the whole deficit concept, the deficit between one and the other has become so great that I do not believe I am exaggerating when I say that I know how heroin addictions get started. For the vast majority of the past thirty years, the vast majority of the sensory input I have received has been incredibly negative. Bullying throughout childhood from one element is bad enough. Bullying from peers, from “academic” staff, from parental units, from authority figures, all on top of one another, is more than anyone should be asked to tolerate. (¡Remember, boys and girls… killing a bully is not murder; it is fun!) Put on top of this being subjected to medical procedures for abnormal cellular growths and having no meaningful positive interactions at close range. Just try to imagine it for a second. Actually, do not. Imagine for a second what it would be like to be locked inside a white concrete room with no interaction other than food being pushed at you through a tiny opening. No incoming voices, no sound, no changes in the environment. Nothing. Aside from someone feeding you from outside of the room, you have no idea that there really could be anyone else in the world at all.
Would this cause serious and everlasting pain to you in an emotional sense? Actually, do not bother answering. Unless you are a fukking idiot, or your name is Denise Guy (the two are mutually inclusive as far as I am concerned but bear with me), you already know the answer. I know the answer because I live with it every second of every day of my life.
That, in a nutshell, is why I am so incredibly disappointed that the last two moles I had excised from my body were both declared to be benign. This, in spite of one in the side of my torso having grown a pink ring around it that looked like sunburn. Or the other having changed to such an extent that, during a moment when I scratched an itch in that shoulder’s rear, the surface of the mole in the question literally came off. Both of them are benign. What in the unholy fukk? Anyway, although it has been made clear to me that dying from a melanoma or three is actually a pretty unpleasant way to go, truth is that I would prefer it at this stage. Better dead in a couple of years at most, and I would be refusing treatment with both fingers raised in salute, than living like this for another thirty or forty. If you know me in person (or closely enough to resemble the aforementioned fellow World Of Warcraft player), you know that I lay awake at night contemplating how my only reason to live that long is that I might see my male parental unit die. If there were justice in the world, he would be diagnosed with some form of terminal illness (leukaemia springs to mind) and learn that I am the only genetic match alive who is close enough to donate what he needs. I live to see the look on his face when I tell him that I want to see him die screaming and pissing his last through a tube into a bag. The fact that yes, I really do hate his passive, suck up to Dean’s abusers, everyone is right when they contradict Dean arse that much is a given.
But the thing is, when one hates their male parental unit to this extent, and for the reasons that I do, no amount of band-aiding in the form of aural-visual stimulation, drugs, or what have you can make up the deficit. None of it. It is like the nuclear disasters that have befallen Chernobyl or Fukushima. Some asshole turned their head the wrong way for a few seconds at just the right moment, and now those parts of the world will be dangerous to inhabit for such a length of time that, given our overpopulation problem, might extend past the extinction of the Human species. There is nothing that we can do that will heal these gaping wounds in our world. The Chernobyl accident site demonstrates just how futile our measures to negate these problems really are. The solution effected by the Soviet authorities was to encase the site in a sarcophagus made of concrete. Concrete, although fragile compared to certain types of metal, especially when exposed to water, is one of the better materials to encase a reactor spewing radioactive material. And the Chernobyl sarcophagus was already showing signs of serious breakdown after as little as twenty years. So as I said, the species we are a part of may well be extinct before these sites ever become safe for our species to inhabit again.
My analogy therefore might be off in terms of magnitude, but certainly not in principle. I will die before I ever feel safe in my own home without an axe or a gun somewhere nearby. I will die before I am able to feel the touch of another Human being without having to check the impulse to punch them around the head and upper body until they start to twitch. I will die before I will be able to go to sleep without feeling an extreme fear of what I might see, hear, or react to as I am asleep. And given that the people responsible for the abuse still have a position of major influence over my life, I do not believe I will ever be able to see any of this differently. If Thomas Edwin McIntosh is reading this, then read this, too: the entire world now knows you are a child abuser and false imprisoner. Death is too good for people like you. Dying of radiation sickness would be too pleasant for people like you. Even nature has yet to come up with a punishment befitting an utter piece of shit like you.
Mark my words, everyone else out there. When you maintain a person’s life with such a severe deficit between pleasure and pain, these are the consequences. Hence, if you do not like the fact that I am posting shit like this, I suggest you go find the “person” (and I use that word very loosely) I have just mentioned, and have a very strongly-phrased word with him about it.
I Still Find It So Hard... 