It’s 2:30 AM. I just watched a number of chunks of a number of movies. Why? Because in between watching those chunks of movies, I was swapping cables around, trying to integrate our new housemate’s DVD player and TV into the Monster Home Entertainment Thing downstairs.

So bits of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,’ ‘The Thin Red Line,’ ‘The Matrix,’ and ‘Fight Club.’ There’s definitely a theme of violence, but not mere violence. Stylish, poetic, gruesome violence providing social commentary and insight into the larger human experience.

Of course, when you’re testing to see if the cabling works, you say to yourself, ‘Naaaah, this part’s boring. Fast forward to the part where they KICK ASS!’

My favorite part of ‘The Thin Red Line’ is before the real fighting starts, though, so no biggie. The part where Witt is narrating and he says, “Maybe all men are one. One big soul,” while we see him cleaning the blood off of a stretcher and helping a shell-shocked soldier. I wish I could watch that whole movie within the course of a half-hour, kind of like Reader’s Digest. I’d watch it every couple of days. But no, it’s three hours long.

Also, while I was making sure the TV tuner was getting to the stereo, right there on channel 28 was a documentary about the career of Akira Kurosawa! Testing stopped for the next hour and a half while I soaked that in. Of course now I want to buy his whole catalog on DVD. You folks now know what to get me for Xmas.

Have you ever wanted to see a map of the internet?

Right now, one of the local NPR stations is playing some swingin’ big band jazz. I’ve discovered that I’ll unconsciously start tapping the mouse on the mousepad in rythm, which makes it hard to click and drag.

What a drag, maaaan…

I have a new pet peeve:

Spam emails with really old send dates, that make you go hunt for them in your in box.

FYI: The Neil Finn song quoted in the previous ‘blog is about mortality. That is, if you can accept that you could die at any moment, you might feel like you’re in love with a stranger you’ve never known.

I feel like I’m in love
With a stranger I’ve never known
Although it’s still a mystery
I’m so glad I’m not alone.
–nf

One of the things I managed to get at Ikea was some windowshades. They’re cotton cloth blinds. Yellow-orange. When the sun is from the west, the room seems to be filled with amber, and I’m a bug caught in it. And today, I napped for a few hours when the amber light started shining, so I suppose I can understand the bug’s motivation.

I had a co-operative dream. I have those sometimes. I get the sense that I’m dreaming with other people, and that our mutual dream is like a jazz piece. Dream Jazz.

This one was quiet, and the part I remember was in a hobby store. The oldest sepia-toned hobby store in the universe. Imagine that my dream was a made-for-TV movie, and that someone had written on the script ‘[Dream Sequence FX].’ A little vaseline on the lens, a nice orange filter, streaky side lighting…

And there’s the owner now. He’s in his 50s. He’s spry, and has a kind face. He’s wearing an apron. He probably fought in Viet Nam. He probably voted for Reagan the first time, but not the second. He’s not tall, but don’t ever tell him he’s short. He asks me what it is that I need.

I forget what I told him. Whatever it was, it was right there on the shelf next to me. And then he asks me, “Anything else?” And I say, “Yeah, sodium stearate.” I have no idea what sodium stearate is, or if it’s even a real compound. In the dream I needed it, though. He knits his brow, brings his index finger to his lips, looks down at that spot people look down to when they’re concentrating.

“Right over here,” he says. “I only have a little left. I have another shipment coming in tomorrow.” We reach the place where the sodium stearate is. It’s a little blue plastic jar that’s mostly empty and has a faded and peeling label on it. I hold it and shake the jar and hear a clumped-up powdery substance inside. It’s good enough for me. “Usually people need more than that,” he says. “That’s why I’m low.”

We walk over to the cashier counter. He tells me when the next shipment is due. I reassure him that this is all I’ll need, really. Thanks. I feel more than a little uncomfortable with the way this is going. For some reason he’s put a t-shirt on the counter, as if it goes with the sodium stearate. Then he says this:

“Yeah, it’s really hard providing water these days.” In my mind, I think, ‘Is sodium stearate somehow related to… uh… coral? Coral, in salt water? Water hard to provide?’ This is where the jazz happens. He’s throwing me out of my boundaries, whoever he is. I say, “Water?”

He sees the look of confusion. “Yeah, you know. Sewers and municipal water supplies and even rainwater. Uh, that’ll be…” and he names a total for the sale. I flubbed on the riff. Back to the melody.

I open my wallet and there’s more money than I thought would be there. “Hey. They gave me fives instead of ones at that last place.” I take the money out and start unwrapping it. It’s rolled and taped up with masking tape. Pulling the tape tears it until all I have is shreds of money.

He says, “Ralph’s having problems.” I think he might be talking about me. I also think he’s saying I’m Ralph Wiggins, from The Simpsons. I think about the Ralph line that has always struck me as funny: ‘My button tastes funny.’ I feel a little insulted. “Ralph’s your son?” I ask.

He doesn’t answer the question, but looks incredibly sad. My money issues aren’t interesting to him. He’s heard that riff before. There in the orange glow with the shredded money and the t-shirt, he looks at me with a certain look, like you might see a teacher give a gifted student who’s struggling. I know that look because I’ve been a struggling gifted student. He sees so much down the line for me, but how will it all happen?

After I woke, I thought to myself, ‘God owns a hobby store. He sells you your little kit and you put it together and then go back and get another one.’ But then I realized that Store Owner Man isn’t god; he’s just better at dream jazz than I am, at least inside his store. The store is his domain. Even though it’s old and yellowed, it’s clean and orderly. He’s courteous and friendly and willing to jam. The store is the premise only, and I mistook it for the conclusion.

Here’s a creepy picture of our President.

The Further Adventures Of Autismo!

So while I was in Texas, I went to a conference on autism. Here’s what I learned by attending:

I’m pretty well certain my self-diagnosis is correct. My main reasons for this have to do with sensory input and overloading problems. I knew that, as a nervous system trying to get along in the world, I had one or two things going on differently than everyone else does. But I didn’t fully realize how different.

For instance, one of the speakers mentioned having a generalized numb pain throughout his body, one that was paradoxically numb and ‘open’ in some way, as if the barrier between his body and the rest of the universe were evaporating. The cure for this feeling was to be constricted. Light touch made the symptom worse, and partial touch (as with loose clothing) wasn’t enough. I feel that all the time, and until very recently assumed everyone else felt it, too. I also get a lot of comfort from certain kinds of constriction, such as wrapping up in a thick blanket in bed. Any parts of my body not touching the blanket seem to be open to the whole universe by comparison.

There are many other comparisons that map. Maybe I’ll talk about them later.

I also learned a thing or two about the public’s general understanding of autism. See, the word ‘autistic’ is an adjective. It means that there’s a sensory disconnect that in some way ‘traps’ the person inside themselves. Most folks don’t understand how wide the autistic spectrum is in a diagnostic sense, or how wide the range of people who could be considered autistic.

Suffice it to say that the world pities people who are (ironically enough) ‘outwardly’ autistic, as in unable to speak, or otherwise obviously a victim of their own senses. However, much of the world struggles to believe that there are people who are ‘high-functioning’ autistics, and that anyone could even be described in that way. I talked to a number of well-meaning friends about going to this conference, and they said they didn’t think my self-diagnosis was accurate (to put it charitably). And why might that be? Well, glad you asked:

It’s entirely possible that a person with an undiagnosed high-functioning autism would rather crush their own soul than appear to be abnormal, especially if they’re diagnosed later in life.

My friends didn’t disbelieve me because they were stupid (or they wouldn’t be my friends). Neither was it because they’re poor judges of the symptoms of autism. No, my friends didn’t believe me because I’m incredibly talented at passing as one of you earth people.

I’m putting on a show you puny earthlings can’t even begin to understand, and it’s all for your benefit. All this time I thought I was just not able to deal with what everyone deals with as a matter of fact. It turns out, though, that I’m the one who’s doing the good job of coping! Even though I can’t live the life everyone else wants me to live.

Hah!

Today I did something I never thought I would do.

I ate at Ikea.

I went there to scope out and see what furniture I might be able to score for my new room. Found a bed I liked, a rug, maybe a bookshelf, window shade, room divider, a wooden cube with drawers on castors, that sort of thing.

See, being me, I have to go and scope it out. I have to have an idea of the possibilities, so that I can mull it over endlessly before actually making any purchases (or, in fact, Getting On With The Rest Of My Life). That’s how my mind works. There’s an element of safety in the rehearsal, ya see. And we’re talking about Ikea here, folks… How dangerous can it be? Well, tell it to my neurology!

Anyway. There in the middle of the perfect furniture-buying experience is the restaurant.

Maybe I’ll digress about how perfect this furniture-buying experience is. There are no salesfolk, or at least, they hide and watch you until you look like you have a question. Ikea is not the land of the hard sell. No, Ikea is Furniture Play Land, where your inner child is free to fuck around with everything. Sit in every chair. Pretend to type at those fake keyboards on the display desks. Fall asleep on every bed. Pick up, hold, and then put down every kitchen utensil. It’s a visceral place. It’s also arranged in a huge labyrinth of consumables. I could write a whole other essay about the progressively-ramped expectation induced by this twisty-path approach to marketing, and I might one day, if I ever get a job designing Ikea stores.

So in the midst of my reverie on the simultaneous genius and malevolence of the mind-control techniques at work in this fucking store, there I am staring at the Ikea restaurant sign. My belly grumbles, with its own genius and malevolence. The restaurant is in the exact center of the twisty path through the store. You’re in for a long walk out either way, conceptually, and if you’re hungry, and you were going to eat some fast food anyway, you might as well eat there. (Sure there are short-cuts through the store, which can take you out within seconds, but recall the ramped expectation I mentioned earlier; it’s a potent juju!)

The restaurant is cafeteria-style. I get in line, which is blissfully short and uncomplicated. I get a dessert first, a cute round vanilla cake baked in a pastry with icing on top, with a nordic-sounding name. The woman in line ahead of me orders the store’s signature Swedish meatballs, and substitute fries for the potatoes, please. The server asked, “10, 15, or 20?” The woman looks puzzled. “10… Fries?” “No, meatballs.” All was explained. There is a metric system for meatballs at Ikea.

I ordered meatballs, too. I got the 15. I counted them while I ate. I was like The Count from Sesame Street… “Eleven! Eleven Swedish meatballs! Muaaahaha!”

The other thing about today’s Ikea trip was that there were a zillion crying babies everywhere. Just everywhere. Like they pump something into the air there, to make babies cry. Finally, having heard enough, when a woman with a little foghorn of a baby in a stroller joined me in the hooks and pulls section, I addressed the problem. I waved at the baby. He immediately stopped crying and looked at me. Mom looked at me, too. I said, to the baby, “Hi. Having a bad day?” He sat up straight in his stroller. Mom continued to look at me. Why wouldn’t she? “Well, it’ll all be over soon. You’ll be back in the car seat before you know it.” He started laughing. The mom said to the baby, “Hey, looks like you made a friend.”

That kid’s a genius. And I’m not just saying that because he likes my jokes.