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5:17am
April 6, 2015
This rock is the best fucking rock. It’s the best colour and it’s frosty which is my favourite and it makes these super cute stalagmites that look like Mario hills. It’s called Chrysocolla and it’s amazing.
1:45am
January 13, 2015
upside-downchristopherrobin replied to your post: Actual conversation between me and a h…
What colour did you want, just out of curiosity? :)
Green, blue, or purple, but ones that faded in specific ways and not others (preferred purple to fade to blue, rather than to hot pink, for instance).
2:39am
December 9, 2014
I think this is my favorite dad shirt so far. It’s very hard to pick favorites, though. Also the purple striped one was a dad shirt, not a mom shirt.
4:40am
October 13, 2014
Once upon a time, I was in great pain. None of my medications would touch it. It was creeping up on a nine on the pain scale. Not a number I throw around lightly, I have enough neuropathic pain including trigeminal neuralgia, to know what ten means. I could barely move and was right on the edge of delirium. Then, seemingly miraculously, I dropped off to sleep.
I slept with the full awareness that my body was in immense pain. Yet I felt no pain in the dream. It was as if something was telling me, “Enjoy this. Appreciate what you have, right now. I am giving you a break. It won’t last forever but it will renew you for the next round of pain.”
I spent the entire dream exploring a city. Just walking around exploring. That had been one of my favorite activities before I’d been bedridden. Just walking around exploring. In the dream, I did not tire, I did not get bored, I wandered around in a state of bliss and gratitude for what I had. You can’t be grateful for lack of pain if you don’t know that you’re in severe pain as you speak, and somehow through the sleep process you’re not feeling it. Even though such pain has been known to wake you up from dreams before.
The color of the sky in the dream was, uniformly, the glowing blue you see close to the building in the first picture. That’s why I took that picture when I was out tonight. There’s also a little of it in the second picture.
I woke up from that dream and was immediately hit by a wave of pain, but I also felt happy, refreshed, and able to cope with anything the pain could throw at me. And I was able to handle it until the pain subsided.
I have recurring nightmares about the house I grew up in. Sometimes there’s people but often it’s just the house. I hated that house and took any opportunity, no matter how dangerous or ill-conceived, to get away from it. It was one factor in two separate decisions to go off to college when I was not ready. It was the reason I moved out on my own, not particularly young for a neurotypical, but certainly younger than my brothers, who were both far better equipped to live on their own than I was. I knew that if I stayed in that house, I would end up in a mental institution again. Something about the place has always rubbed me the wrong way.
This is the house in San Jose, mind you. Not Campbell. We lived in Campbell for a couple years when I was little. But this new place, it was in a pocket of San Jose surrounded on almost all sides by Campbell. So out mailing address was Campbell but our physical address was San Joss and we voted in San Jose elections. We had to count down houses from the side of the street to figure out what school district we were in, and my brothers went to two separate high schools.
So when I moved to Vermont, my nightmares about institutions stopped immediately, only to be replaced by nightly, horrible nightmares about the house. It felt like the house was telling me I’d never get away from it, which sounds silly in real life but creepy as hell in a dream. I learned to leave the house the moment I recognized I was dreaming. Sometimes I’d be able to make my escape, other times the dreams tricked me: I would be surrounded by houses just like that one. Or I would spend the rest of my dream running through my life. I felt like Arnold Rimmer when his subconscious tormented him in games that were supposed to give you your deepest desires. Except my subconscious, if it’s not just a. Figment of Freud’s imagination, does not hate me. But it definitely felt like being pitted against an actual intelligence.
One night I had a dream I was in the backyard of the house. It felt different this time. There was a shrine in one corner of the yard, and I was encouraged to pray for guidance at the shrine. So I did. Soon, I was getting “lessons” in how to take on the various obstacles the house threw in my way, from stupid horror movie tricks that would only work on a sleeping person, to more sophisticated psychological horror.
Anyway, as I was learning these things, I looked up. The sky was the same exact shade of blue.
I don’t know what I believe about anything watching over me. But I have a feeling if there were, it would be like this: it would never talk to me directly, it would stand in the background and give only as much help as I needed in order to help myself. And in this case, I Imagine, it’s heavily associated with one particular shade of blue. I have come to love that shade. It’s not just this shade of blue itself. It’s the fact that it always looks backlit. Like after the best sunsets and before the best sunrise. In fact I have come to love this twilight shade of blue, more than I love the most spectacular sunrise or sunset.
Sometimes — often — I visit the redwoods in my mind. I’m still fully aware of my physical surroundings, this is not an out of body experience. But I can bring the redwoods to me, or bring myself to the redwoods. I can be in bed and curled up at the baser of the Mother Tree, at once.
Whenever I do this, the sky is always that perfect shade of blue.
This is one reason I love lapis lazuli. It captures that shade of blue pretty well. Well enough for me to carry around a lapis lazuli ball at all times so I can be reminded of all this beauty in the world. I pull it out and remember I am never, ever alone.
TL;DR: I love this shade of blue because it shows up in my best dreams ever, and seems to be associated with goodness and love and a very hands-off style of protection. I keep a lapis lazuli ball in my pocket to remind myself that I’m not alone, ever. Other rocks have similar meanings to me, but lapis lazuli is the only one that recalls that shade of glowing twilight blue.
1:15am
October 8, 2014
A long, long overdue (10 years) translation.
I had a meeting to go to. It was an important meeting. Things would be decided there that could set my life on a completely different course. My anxiety was through the roof, and therefore so was my catatonia. I could not type unassisted and I could only move in certain very specific ways without a good deal of assistance. Luckily, I had two friends with me, two good friends, to provide that assistance. But this isn’t about that.
This is about the pattern blocks. I used to carry old wooden blue pattern blocks in my pocket. They’re the diamond-shaped ones. I’d hold them, click them together, they were perfect. I’d had them since childhood, and they were absolutely wonderful.
Throughout the meeting, I kept handing my friends the pattern blocks. It wasn’t just handing them over casually. There was a sense of urgency to it. They picked up on the urgency, but they couldn’t make head or tail of what I was trying to say to them.
At which point they said possibly the most important thing you can say to a person who is nonverbal, has hard-to-understand speech, or otherwise having trouble getting across what they mean.
They said “I’m sorry, I know that whatever you are trying to say is important, but I can’t figure out what you mean, for the life of me.”
Even if I could have typed perfectly and quickly without laborious effort and having my arm held up at the time, I would not have been able to give them an answer. Because the thing I was trying to communicate, is not an easy thing to put into words.
Sometimes it takes me years to put something into words. Please note that the incident in question happened in December of 2005. It is now September of 2014. That means it’s been almost ten years, and this is the first chance that I’ve been able to communicate what I meant by something back then.
Please remember that, when you tell me that if I wanted to, I could make words out of my thoughts. Please remember that, when you tell me to hurry up and communicate something. Please remember that, when you tell me that I’m lying when I say I can’t condense my long posts into short posts without a good deal of effort, and often not even then. Please remember that, in other words, any time you’re tempted to doubt that I have a severe communication impairment. Being eloquent in words in some contexts does not remove severe communication impairments in other contexts, it only masks them. And it only masks them for people who are inclined to believe that communication is a single skill that you’re either good at or bad at, rather than the convergence of dozens of skills that any given person can be good at or bad at individually, and whose skills can change day to day, hour to hour, year to year.
So here is what I meant:
I am here. I am alive. I am giving this to you because it is a part of me. I want you to have a part of me with you because I exist and I am alive. And you exist and you are alive. And if you hold onto a piece of me, maybe we can make it through this. I have held it certain ways, clicked it on certain surfaces, to show you its physical properties and how they interact with my own physical, emotional, and cognitive properties.
I know that you are unlikely to be able to take all of that in. I know that you are both ACs, but you’re not like me in certain ways, and my communication through objects is not intuitive to you the way it would be to certain people. Hell, if I handed this to you in another context it could mean a totally different thing, and you wouldn’t know, and I get that. But for now, I need a powerful acknowledgement of my existence. I need to burn so bright during this meeting that they won’t be able to ignore me. I am scared. I am scared and I am asking for your help. I am asking to be distributed among more than one person, so that together I can be more than I am as one person. And I am asking you to see your connection to me, to see me, to see me at my core, where the fire burns, where our fires can burn together.
I am asking you to see who I am, reflected in the way I handle this pattern block, and the way I hand it to you. I am asking you to see me. I am asking you to shield me when I need to be shielded. I am asking you to help me find words when the words are not there for me. I am asking you to help me when I need help. I am scared, I am asking for your protection should anything go wrong. I am asking for you to stand in front of me should anyone start attacking me verbally or otherwise. I am asking you to tell them what I am thinking, when I am unable to do so myself. I am asking you to elaborate on the very short answers I can give by typing slowly with support while my body is trying to freeze up.
There are people who would have gotten every word of that, just from the way I handled the pattern blocks. The people I was with that night, could not. They could tell I meant something important. But they couldn’t tell what I meant. And fortunately, they didn’t pretend to know what I meant. People who pretend to know what I meant make communication impossible. My friends were honest with me, and while they didn’t know what I meant, they helped me communicate and advocate for myself perfectly.
But now I can say what I meant. So that’s what I meant. And that’s how much information can be carried in a single set of seemingly simple motions with a pattern block, or a rock, or a stick. It’s good to get to know what meaning an object has to the person, because that can factor in. But it doesn’t always. Sometimes an object has a specific meaning, sometimes that exact same object is a stand-in for something broader. Everything depends on context. And if you can’t understand, that’s fine. Not everyone can understand this stuff any more than everyone can understand speech or language. People more likely to understand are people who for any reason at all have been forced to use highly nonstandard ways to communicate at some point in their lives. The longer they’ve had to, the more likely they’ll get it.
So there. That’s what I meant nearly ten years ago. Please don’t tell me how easy I find communication. I may be good at it once I get there, but getting there is a long, tortuous journey sometimes.
TL;DR: Sometimes it takes me a long time to communicate something. About ten years ago, I handed my friends some pattern blocks in a way that had a lot of meaning to it – during a time when I could neither speak nor type. They didn’t understand the meaning, and told me so. I was unable to convey the meaning until today. That’s how long it can sometimes take me. Or longer. I wonder how many times autistic people do things like this and are treated as if we have no communication at all. I’m lucky I can claw my way into words for long enough to talk about this stuff.
10:45pm
October 4, 2014
Beautiful purple and blue boulder opal and opalized wood…cut by Bill Kasso
