#324

Dear heavens! The crushing silence of nonproduction! It howls without sound. Well, a lot's been going on, completely apart from apocalyptic ice storms that left us without power for four days straight. Let me tell you, we got off easy. 

*

Been on break from school this week, and even this blest reprieve has not filled my body with gumption and celerity. Indeed, I've mostly been sitting. Got plenty of work to do for school, but I haven't moved on it one bit! Nope, just sitting and looking at comics. It's high school all over again, sans consistent and actionable erections.

We got bigger micro SD cards for our Switches, so I spent a lot of yesterday archiving, moving, and redownloading games. It's all on the giant new card, with seventy gigs to spare, and my old card lies empty and waiting for new harvests in a neat little case for them that Ezra found online, reminiscent of a green puck-style weed grinder but instead containing two rows of very tiny slots. And sooner than sanity or reason would deem appropriate or healthy, it may well be necessary; the new crop of Resident Evil games, new Zelda, more Kirby, and a host of other shit I'm extremely interested in are all clamoring for my attention. Most of these games aren't out yet, you understand. But they exert their wicked magnetism on my brain nonetheless; Tears of the Kingdom in particular is poised to destroy my life and I can feel its tonnage hovering above me like a certain celestial body in certain other Zelda game.

Wistfully, when withdrawing the tiny little wafer of potentiality from its plastic chrysallis, I remembered the end of my time in high school, when I was looking at external hard drives, expensive affairs, expensive because they had recently been designed to store a whopping fifty gigabytes of data and released to the bleeding edge of the consumer market. These days, I would expect a hard drive of comparable physical size to hold all recorded human achievement, including DNA libraries. No one even sells a product anymore that holds only fifty gigs--even a pen drive has to hold triple that to be worth pricing dollars. I used to swap a two-gig pen drive back and forth with my ex-girlfriend so we could share music. This represented a huge leap forward from being in middle school, when our age group was mostly stuck burning CD's at each other. This new micro SD card of mine holds two hundred and fifty-six gigs, which is about a hundred and forty more gigs than all the music I had accumulated by the time I left high school.

*

Boy, mentioning high school that many times sure left me in a position where I have to tell a story from high school, basically! Strap in. For a story from middle school, though.

*

Thinking about this one lately because it's such a juicy cut of how being on the autism spectrum can ramify into your life and you can remain unaware of it for years, even more than a decade afterwards. No shit, you can be a grown man, going about the business of men, and suddenly realize, "ah, no, that was a perfectly readable and even extremely plain interaction, and I was fundamentally unequipped for it."

Also known as "oh, wait--I was the weird one after all. I was the weird one this whole time."

Invited to a birthday party by a girl. To begin with, I did not fully understand what this even means, nor did I realize it was something to which I might want to devote a few thought-cycles to. I didn't know her very well, we had a couple of classes in common. What this means, in practice, is not that she wanted to be friends, or was trying to be friendly, which was my interpretation at the time, nor was it the second possibility in my mind--that a criterion of presence was in use, such as, inviting everyone in one or perhaps a certain few of her classes. What this truly means is that I was included for a specific purpose, indeed, a machination. Ignorant of this possibility and thinking nothing of personal wants or possible gains, I merely accepted because it would have been impolite to refuse.

Showing up on time, bearing a birthday card and some nice chocolate from Venezuela as a gift--another piece of evidence bearing the stamp of my total naiveté--made me the first person present outside of her closest friends, who had of course been there all along to help her set up the party and prepare psychologically. Prepare psychologically for a Teen Party held by American Youth, something I really had absolutely no experience with even tangentially. The Animorphs didn't really go to teen parties--their narrative was taken up with somewhat less idyllic concerns. There was one pool party, but two of them were there as mice and the party was destroyed by a massive extraterrestrial beast. I digress, but so that it is understood that this was the piece of culture that had furnished me with the absolute most context for what I was about to experience.

It is understandable--I don't look like how I write. I don't look how people expect an autistic-ass nerd to look. I write, and perhaps it would be fair to imagine a kind of grub, hands ensconced in those carpal tunnel things, with no hair growing where my headphones constantly press against my scalp. Instead, because of genetics--my parents are very beautiful--and a penchant for taking care of my body, I look like I should get laid at parties. I have healthy head of hair, symmetrical features in fair proportions, etc. So, again, it is understandable that people would try--before they knew any better--to get me to parties in order to fill out the party's general sexiness quotient. I can't help that, and believe me when I say I take no pleasure whatsoever in typing it out. 

In this case, no sooner did a certain other girl arrive at the party than she made a beeline for me. I was already sitting on a couch, totally alone, fully ignored by the hostess. The new arrival, a girl from my advisory class that I knew from elementary school the year before, put a song on the boombox and sat next to me in such a way--how shall I describe it? She wasn't bad at it. Her posture showcased the length of her legs, which were folded up onto the couch with her knees almost touching my thigh, her torso turned on the axis of her hips so her breasts, such as they were, were pointing directly at me, with one arm behind her, and her face slightly turned away while maintaing eye contact. It's not how people usually sit, is what I'm saying--it was a calculated posture. Most people reading this can probably infer its purpose. This didn't really register with me at the time. Rather, I wondered if she was accustomed to sitting on couches or if perhaps this was one of her first times. 

See? See how things stood? It would never in one million years have occurred to me that I could ever be the oblivious idiot, which is part of how I so often was.

The song she had put on was "What's Your Fantasy", by Ludacris, featuring Shawna. 

"This is my favorite song," she said silkily, looking directly at me.

"Yeah?" I responded, utterly nonplussed.

"Yeah. I just love the words so much."

Listen. The song is literally, without preamble or disambiguation, about wanting to lick someone from their head to their toes and asking about sexual fantasies, presumably in order to fulfill them with alacrity. Not real complicated. I have never been made of stone--quite the opposite. I knew what sex was, and I was anything but immune to the allure around the concept. If she had sat down and said "Joseph, you are attractive to me and I want to explore our budding sexuality. I want to make out with you and feel your hands on me," I would have been like "Yes. You too are attractive, that sounds both pleasurable and educational, and I am one hundred percent up for it."

That is basically what she was trying to tell me with the tools our culture and her socialization had made available to her, yes--I see that now. At the time, I merely thought that she was trying to convey cultural information about herself and her taste in music, to which I didn't really have much to say--I primarily listened to movie soundtracks at this point in my life. I think I might have told her that. She pretty much left me alone after the song was over, as we had listened to it in strained silence and then I told her that it was a pretty good song, I guess? 

Most of the party I spent right on that couch, receiving an education in the popular rap stylings of the early aughts while everyone else danced badly and socialized happily, saying absolutely nothing about anything that grasped my interest. Didn't even really want to eat or drink anything they were serving; I suppose if it had been the kind of party where illicit alcohol was snuck, I would have gotten drunk. This probably would have changed the trajectory of my social life radically. As it was, only when they finally got around to showing 8 Mile on a big television did I make the bold and radical move of switching couches. The movie was also very educational, in its way.

Homegirl never came onto me again. Unless I missed another couple instances, who knows.

Next week, at school, the birthday girl and her best friend cornered me to ask why I had gifted her such shitty chocolate. I told them there was no way the chocolate was shitty and they assured me that it was, a bad texture, bad on the palate. I told them that it wasn't the kind of chocolate you chewed vigorously, it was the kind you let melt in your mouth. They looked at each other, then at me like I was a space alien, then walked away without saying anything else.

people are so weird, I thought to myself.

*

Before I release you from my eldritch, thrice-cursed grasp--lo! Books I have recently purchased with nowhere to put them and totally cognizant that I should not be spending the money they cost. I buy prunes from amazon, because that is the place that has organic prunes to which no sugar has been added. Prunes are very good for the body. Less good for the body is dying of exposure because I can't pay my mortgage, but most times I'm on there for my healthsome prunes, books tend to get added to the cart. It's like they know all of my weaknesses, or something. The psychic puncture and resulting bloodshed can be wallpapered over by telling myself they'll be useful for school. Some of them, anyway.

The Nonexistent Knight, by Italo Calvino

A Small Place, by Jamaica Kincaid

Not-Knowing: the Essays and Interviews, by Donald Barthelme

Regarding the Pain of Others, by Susan Sontag

The First Idea: How Symbols, Language, and Intlligence Evolved From Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans, by Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.; and Stuart D. Shanker, D. Phil. (One of my favorite books about brains ever!)

The Art of Cruelty, by Maggie Nelson

The Aeneid, by Vergil, translated by Shadi Bartsch

*

BAM! KAPOW! FUCKIN POSTED!!!

--JL