"Occupational Hazards"
It was rather interesting growing up with what you would call "A Pervasive Developmental Disorder" that most of the establishment medical community was aware of, but didn't have a strong grip on at the time. But you can bet that cases of autistic spectrum disorders are skyrocketing across the nation. It happens, in particular, when people who already were "kinda geeky" and don't cut dashing figures at singles bars or parties already tend to run in similar circles-- even meeting on the internet that takes much of the risk, death, and reward out of relationship-seeking and pairing up with geeks just as half-assed and candy-corn as they are. This is especially true of the technology fields and the liberal arts where the parents' putrid genes are handed down to the youth.
My parents were no exception, and were never exactly the most hard-driving people "who faced up to things" and solved the problem, carrying the ball on the way to victory like sports heroes, motivational speakers, or icons of business standing on top of their field like "Colossus of Rhodes".
Their attempts at remedial therapy "for my little problem" were half-assed at best, like those half-baked "Head Start" programs that give liberals an ego-boost of moral credibility but really don't "take it to the mat" with hard-core truths. When I was very young, I was taken in for some occupational therapy to address some of my issues of poor coordination by doing tasks that were disguised as games-- led by a woman known as Mary, a kindly therapist in her late '50s who rewarded my progress with a Catholic grin of soft-spokenness that was almost Saint-like. Think of a naturalist training Koko the gorilla at the age of 4 or 5 with a poster for UNICEF up on the wall.
But later, when I was 8 or 9, things got especially well-intentioned but meaningless. Every Saturday afternoon I was driven out to this house in a sleepy, tree-lined business district of St. Louis county where a swinging sign was posted in the grass-- an apple with a bite taken out of it, meant to suggest educational resources and "that little bit of extra help" for your boy, spoiled as he was playing Nintendo and farting on his little brother's head like a pouting, misshapen Quasimodo.
On the second floor, myself with two others boys sat around a conference table like grave Soviet men at the politburo, not quite understanding "why they were there" but listening to a bear-like counselor of a man named Tom lead a session, occasionally asking for our input and going "Dang" a lot. We would talk about issues, kind of a chummy "little league", green sweater, "Father Knows Best" session over a can of soda, entitled to one apiece-- which were on hand in the back room, piled in mountains of cheery red Coca-Cola 12-packs. It was the sugary treat of hanging out and not having to do "a whole lot of work".
I suppose, you could say-- that there was a misfit in the class even worse off than I would prove to be in the unfolding years of underdeveloped social muscle. He was a short, stooped over little guy with buzzed blonde hair and big, thick glasses with a countenance whose truest nature was perpetual dazedness. He was "wired" differently than us, remarkably so, but was part of the gang as his over-excitable mother picked him up every afternoon with such effervescence, making up for this strange absence in her son's eyes that belied her slow, sinking feeling.
Obviously, he suffered from learning disabilities as proven one Saturday when Tom lost it. Evidently, our junior Terry Nichols had tremendous difficulty adding numbers in a column and carrying the sum over. He wrote out a problem and demanded that the boy solve it. But he couldn't; he was caught in a rut that he couldn't climb over. Tom explained the principles behind this simple mathematical process. The kid stared hard down at the paper, trying to understand but it wasn't punching through. Tom tried to explain again, but the boy was stuck.
And then the adult, "our sane voice of reason", kept getting more and more flustered and excited, hammering home the principles even as the kid wanted to understand, meant to understand, or only half-understood. Caught in a bad place, me and the other boy in the conference room were looking around-- not understanding why this issue had to be such a cosmic battle. The misfit "was put on the spot" in the very worst way possible, and I knew personally that getting verbally beaten like this would have never done anything for my understanding. . . . . let alone self-esteem.
I looked at the kid and accepted that he was not proficient in math like we were. Just as I looked at myself and accepted the fact that I was not coordinated and particularly good at sports. As the fat, clumsy kid "with no wind" and few allies on the school yard, I was always the last one picked on the team and it galled me. But that was as inevitable as my deeper, quirky level of consciousness that beheld the world differently than my peers and caught adults off-guard.
"Dang-ity Doodle!"
Whatever you wanted to call my bipping 8-bit Nintendo conscious, I picked up on things without being quite able to explain them with all the mysteries of life in America circa 1989-1991. You had an edgy scene, where some aquatic water insect like Johnny Depp could actually sell himself for what he was. Rolling Stone captured this vignette perfectly when a homeless, Jesus lookin' character was standing out in the godforsaken, "Street of Dreams" on Sunset Boulevard with a sign that said the end of the world was coming. In a perfect cinematic moment that only someone like Johnny could pull, he would go up to him and offer a cigarette, taking one out like a hustler in an alt-film. Thinking better of it, he would offer him the whole pack for what are material goods and caffeine fixes and money but snow that flies through the true romantic's life like a crying wind of meaninglessness? Then out of nowhere, a producer pops into the scene and offers to buy homeless Jesus' life story like the ultimate moment of late 20th century existential completeness as he continues to stare on vacantly like a sign of the southern California death-cult apocalypse that certainly seemed imposing at the time.
One had an image of a quirky alternative comix writer scribbling away at his craft-- and for all I knew, scratching his his pen around in spirals in his version of a hypnotic postmodern vortex where the reality of back-breaking, stooped-over work was lost to "a lazy little punk" like me, more infatuated with "the attitude" and "the pose" that sold things.
However, always at the end of Tom's sessions we would each have a turn at a computer game of our choice on an old monitor that sat on a desk in the corner. My favorite was always the one of this mountaineer climbing a cliff-face slowly and methodically like a black silhouette of unhip, "early '80s man"-- the primeval geek who actually put in all this labor that gave rise to these tasty treats we skimmed off the top of like postmodern relishers. Leave the more serious issues to the computer wonks in the bowels of "The Defense Department", counting that someone more iron-jawed than us "were keeping watch".
The humor of the game, was that the poor climber would advance at infinitely slow, infinitely patient rate and then get knocked down by vultures and snakes and rock slides and go falling back a distance with a pathetic shout where he'd have to do it all over again, locked in his compulsive task that he could never win. It seemed to sum up the futility of effort, and we'd keep torturing our virtual avatar until he fell to his death at the bottom of the mountain "and didn't move anymore" like the finality of the grave and a winking "Game Over" screen before you repeated our 20th century existential fable to howls of "Bart Simpson" laughter.
I was occupied with more important things, perhaps infatuated with a cute girl with big, magical eyes like a swan-necked "Mogwai". . . . . the cutest pet you had ever seen. You would take real good care of her, take her home, clean her cage on occasion, and let her throw up her hands in celebration with a rancid explosion of wood chip confetti.
Perhaps a better guardian than over that hamster which had died of thirst when you went camping with Dad over the weekend at Quiver River state park, its partially mummified body laying on the floor of it's cell-- it's four pink claws that passed for feet curled up morbidly like a Chinese acrobat who was never going to take a tumble again. This, as it stared at you through its dead, slit eyes as a testament to neglect. No, prayer will not bring back a dead hamster as you left your Dad to dispose of the corpse with a frown of absurdity that winked at your wailing penitence.
But the room stank anyhow, and you might not have "known the difference". I was graced with an ultra-fear of H.R. Giger's "Alien", and was utterly convinced every night around 10:30 or later that something hulking was standing outside my bedroom door and breathing heavily as it extended its inner jaws, drooled, and cocked its head, I would take to voiding my bladder in a water glass on the nightstand-- hoping, praying, that I didn't "go over". Thing was, I would forget to empty it and occasionally knock the glass over.
My lair smelled like a bus station in Panama-- where Gampy Bush, our clueless dorky grandfather, would send out troops to dispose of our former CIA asset, Noregia over the Christmas holiday of '89. Yes, sitting there in "The War Room" in a stocking cap with two red socks-- one that read "Merry" and the other that said "Christmas" in curling, mistletoe trim as he tossed back popcorn in his mouth and whinneyed out a horse-laugh.
Unsaid was that Noregia was our tacit drug-dealer and if someone had rallied against this "in the name of freedom" back in the 1970's while Bush was the head of the CIA, a Panamanian local would have been locked in a cell like a hamster-- and if they really made noise, their assholes would be slit open with bayonets not unlike an overdone hot-dog splitting apart in the microwave with a "piffff".
Then there
were the kind of books and movies would offer a kind of "comfort food" and say
that everything would work out o.k. It was like being raised with Disney fare
like "Honey, I Shrunk the Dick" with Rick Moranis that pretended that
nerdy fucks like him had a future instead of growling to themselves outside a
Radio Shack or running a website that rottenly serenades a consummately
unattainable Mogwai of an actress.
I remember reading a book that was clearly about an autistic geek who lived in his parents' basement, who had a crush on the most popular girl in high school, meant "to show courage", made a complete ass of himself, and in the end the girl redeemed it all by coming up and saying
"I secretly cared about you all along and you didn't have to do that".LIES, LIES, LIES!
She would not have even known he existed, and when he fell gasping at her feet in some strange, unnatural contraption of stilts or being lowered by a cable from the ceiling because he could not simply face her directly, she would regard him like shit on her $55 tennis shoe.
Cursed are the pitiable, for they shall not be pitied. Cursed are the meek, because they are as beaten-straw. Cursed is a lamb, for he shall be rendered in the lion's jaws like a blood sacrifice to
"THE GODS OF MIGHT". Or at least not get the promotion at work.
Much of my tortured high school experience was akin to the unnatural, uncanny presence of "Cousin It" from "The Addams Family" whose energy was "slightly-off-key", made more so because of typical teenaged insecurity not unhinted at by a certain actress.
When you look older than everyone else, it's strange when you're emotionally younger. . . . . made so because you're socially inexperienced. . . . . made so because you're self-conscious about being "off-key". . . . . which is an endless cycle that leaves you as squeezed out of the loop as what Michael Jackson has become.
Kids sense that they can poke "Cousin It" with a stick to get a reaction out of him, which is very amusing as he "bleebs" in another language. If he pleads like "The King of Pop" that he is a sensitive, wounded creature and says that
"my true fans understand me", the kids laugh and point out "that you have no fans" and slash at the white, exposed underbelly.Eventually "Cousin It" gets angry and knocks them down, hopping up and down. But the school expels this mutant, thinking that
"it's strange and violent and unreliable" while not seeing how the class tortured this poor creature.Yes, "Cousin It" is crucified by society. . . . . but seeing that he doesn't have arms to speak of, they put the little guy in an iron maiden.
(-- I sure wouldn't want to be the guy in that suit!)
Maybe if "Cousin It" had eyes and a face, or at least one that responding to social stimuli "a bit more appropriately", or had been a bit more relaxed and natural, he wouldn't have been treated the way he was. You think?
One of the big jokes in "The Addams Family" movie was a reunion happening down at the manor and "Cousin It" stopping by to make a brief appearance, two buxom girlies on his arm (?) and the limo driver waiting out front. He obviously had "more kickin' places" to be, because he got back in the car and drove away with the rap hit, "Funky & Mysterious" whammin' through the night like the hidden history of hip's "secret cachet".
Perhaps I did not understand the true pathos of that gag. Like "Mr. Mountaineer" on the computer being tortured by a bunch of bored 8 year-old's. Upon this primeval slab of existence, we must take care to bargain from a position of strength and find ourselves neither at the whim of wild animals nor gruesomely smiling children by honoring our inner warrior and transcending the bonds of the 60's. Which, ultimately, got us into this mess by implication.
And I will take good care of that Mogwai!
(-- Oops, wrong one!)
(-- That's what I'm talkin' about!)
*******************
"You want a-nuther song? Well I ain't plain' one mutherfuckin' note until someone comes up here and puts sum money in my god-damned tip-jar! You know I only came here for one purpose. . . . . to take yor fuckin' cash! Why, I could make more profit puttin' out my meth-head neighbor's asshole and ringin' a bell, hollerin' 'Man for sale! Man for sale!'
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
(Rheeee of Crickets)
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
("I heard that, Missy!")
© 2010 by Insufferable Industries
Drop "The Bard" a line at