Neurotypical slurs.

Read this article. Three paragraphs in, the author slurs autistic people twice in just one sentence. This sentence being

He suffered a severe form of autism and was unable to communicate verbally.

But really, you can cut this down to 

He suffered a severe form of autism

And it is two slurs in just seven words. Now, before the jump, I am going to warn in advance. I have not one fukking thing to say about Avonte Oquendo. I am sure his family is suffering terribly, but this is completely irrelevant to what I have to say.

When things go bad. Stereotyping part blech.

I make no secret of this fact. I read a lot. I read, and read, and read, and then I read some more. Interestingly, I tend to read at a rather slow pace, as opposed to the speed-reading people claim to do. This might be for a lot of reasons, I cannot say for certain. One of them has to do with the way in which information gets “tracked” in my brain. But beyond that, I cannot really be specific. You see how much more productive it can be to research a “difficulty”, normies of Central Western Sydney?

Thank you, K.

Neurodivergent K, as she prefers to call herself in her online writings (and I intend to respect that preference), recently posted this article concerning why people who have no intention of changing or even acknowledging that they have done wrong solicit forgiveness. This, in itself, would not be remarkable.

No, I am not happy or well. Thank you for not asking.

I have made a lot of angry, spiteful, and even violent remarks concerning what I see as unjust behaviour on the part of others. That is true. Like, for example, when London police saw fit to force a severely disabled boy who, according to the article, has a mental age of five into handcuffs and leg restraints. As one woman who commented on a Fudgebook link put it, she would really like to hurt people who hurt children and “special needs children”. She asked if this was possibly “mother instincts”, but I disagree. I think this is what I call “decent Human being instincts”. And really, if a police officer things it is somehow warranted to hurt a child in this manner, I suspect perhaps they need to consider another career. Shovelling fish guts, for example.

What makes me me? Rage, hatred, quite frankly…

Note: the following is an outpouring of rage at a person who has caused this author nothing but pain during his life. That the person in person happens to be a masculine parental entity is beside the point. It is extremely nasty, to the point where murder sounds like a logical outcome of the conversation these statements would form part of. Do not clink on the full link if you are not a hundred percent sure you can handle it.

A number of times, I have used the words “Powell Aspie” or “Powell type” in this journal. The fact that there are all so many different kinds of autistic adults with different quirks and personality traits is something that we could write encyclopedias about. But trying to write explanations of what different types of anything are is a tedious endeavour with little in the way of returns. So instead, I will do what I am actually good at. Focusing on what I am or why.

The process of character construction, a reflection

When I create a character for use in my own work, merely starting the process begins a lot of asking of questions. Probably the first and foremost question when writing any story is “how important is this character going to be to the story?”. In the cases of characters like Linula and Ruby Amelda, the answer is exceedingly obvious. They are the entire basis for the story, and in one case, the story is going to be seen almost entirely through her eyes. The first of the stories in which Linula and Ruby appear is in part a meditation on the fact that the things that make us different (one is from an abusive, self-righteous asshole family, the other a loving successful commercialist family) are just as important, if not more so, than the things that make us the same. So constructing these two characters is a painstaking process in which many questions have to be asked and answered.

Hate, part one

Lydia Brown, the author of the Autistic Hoya journal, recently published a photo on Fudgebook. This, in itself, is unremarkable, of course. People post photographs on their Fudgebook pages all of the time. But what makes this particular photograph worth noting is the content. In the photograph, both arms are crossed at angles across her torso. On the upper arm is a message in Arabic. On the lower is a message in English. According to Lydia, both have the same meaning. Being that I do not speak Arabic, I can only take her word for it. Whilst I have only been reading her work for a handful of weeks, I have yet to encounter any evidence of dishonesty being in her nature. But all waffling aside, the English version of the message reads “I don’t understand how many people can hate”.