What’s in a name?

An older man was walking his dog in front of the pharmacy when I arrived today. The dog came up to sniff my ankle so I stopped to say hi.

“He’s cute! What kind of dog is he?”

“A mutt,” says the owner. “Mostly terroir, though.”

I know the word terroir only because it’s one of those specialty words that occasionally come into vogue among the general population. The definition, so far as I can tell, is roughly “I know more about wine than you because I can use the word terroir correctly in a sentence,” and it is almost never used correctly in a sentence.

“I think you mean Terrier,” I replied helpfully.

“No son, terrier is a jet.”

Where I live it’s still common for older men to refer to younger men of the same race as “son” without a fight breaking out. I let it pass.

“Harrier.”

“Huh?”

“The name of the jet you’re thinking of is Harrier.”

“No, that’s a hippie girl. You know. ‘Cause they’re harrier than a normal girl. Down there,” he replied with a lascivious grin, pointing somewhere between his crotch and his knees.

I wondered briefly whether he was pantomiming a very short woman or simply lacked the proprioception to accurately point to his crotch.

Not wishing to stick around and find out, I pulled out my phone and pretended I was getting a message on it. “It looks like my prescription is ready. Nice chatting with you,” I said over my shoulder as I made a hasty retreat toward the entrance door.

The old guy went back to walking his dog without acknowledging me.

Thing is, I’m not sure he was messing with me. Being eccentric is a privilege you earn with old age. I’m not close to his age and I mess with people’s heads all the time, especially people who get too nosy. But at least when I do it the lie quickly becomes too outrageous to be believable which is how I let my victims off the hook.

This guy was convincing as hell.  If he was messing with me he’s way out of my league. I didn’t know whether to be in total awe of his quick wit and deadpan delivery, or check to see if there’s an Amber alert out for a very large senior citizen who, abetted by his very small mixed breed dog, managed a daring escape from the assisted living center.

Either way, I figure he gives me something to aspire to in my advancing age.

Chronic Asymmetry Syndrome

There was a period of about 10 years during which I dyed my beard and mustache.  This wasn’t vanity, but rather that the gray came in so lopsided that the asymmetry drove me crazy.  From a distance it looked like a lizard was clinging to my upper lip, with most of its tail dangling down one side.  I don’t know if it’s the OCD tendencies that accompany my autism or if this would be equally disturbing to neurotypicals, but when the gray was all on one side it was hard to reconcile my image in the mirror as being me.  So I colored it and all was well in the mirror again.

Augmenting cat reality

If my wife’s experience is representative of cat owners, then the enjoyment of selecting, buying, and gifting of toys to one’s cats must be one of the great rewards of cat ownership. She buys on average a cat toy or two each month, a number that has dropped considerably from the early kitten days. Our oldest cat is 16 years old which is 192 months, and you can do the rest of the math.

As you might imagine, Casa de Wyatt is awash in cat toys.  My wife wants to replace the rugs but I say we should just sew all the cat toys together because when arranged in a single contiguous layer they would cover about the same surface area.  There is some karmic justice in the idea because we wouldn’t need to replace the rugs if the cats had not scratched through them in places, puked up hairballs and worse on them, and occasionally subjected them to some out-of-the-box thinking.

The cats of course are under no obligation to return their toys to where they found them.  On the one hand this reveals cat migration patterns based on the distribution of toys around the house over time, if you are into that kind of thing.  On the other hand it sets a very bad example for our grandson Matt who believes that he too should be able to play with all the toys he keeps here, then leave them where they drop.

We insist that he pick up after himself and he interprets this as the cats having more privileges than he does.  When I explain that with greater intellect comes greater responsibility, he counters by trying to demonstrate less intellect than the cats.  This downward behavioral spiral vividly demonstrates the dangers of letting your kid, or grandson in this case, fall under a bad influence such as that of a gang of cats.

The biggest problem I have with the cat toys is when strangers are in the house.  I always feel compelled to explain that it just LOOKS like we are collecting cats because of the astronomical toy-to-cat ratio.  My fear is that without such an explanation the visitor is likely to report us to the Humane Society or nominate us for an episode of Hoarders.

“Yes, I suspect they are keeping more than 100 cats in there.”

“You ‘suspect’ this? Why? How many cats did you actually see? Do you have any proof?”

“There were only two cats in the house but based on the number of cat toys laying around  I’m pretty certain they were hiding the other 98 cats during my visit.”

“Thanks so much for the report. You did the right thing.  We’ll send one of our producers out there for a surprise visit next week.”

After watching Ready Player One over the weekend I think I finally have the perfect cover story for any visitors based on how the cat toys tend to cluster in certain spots.  I plan to tell visitors that each time a cat loses one of its 9 lives, all the coin and objects it was carrying fall in the spot where it died.  Those clusters of cat toys around the house mark the spots where a cat lost one of its lives.  The sheer volume of toys reflects both the advanced age of our cats and the high number of lives they’ve lost in that time.  Visitors will be asked to show respect for the dead by trying not to disturb the shrines and watching where they step.

I have a lot less anxiety about strangers in the house now that I have a plausible cover story that explains all the cat toys in a way that makes us seem perfectly normal.

 

My flying saucer encounter

As an IT Security guy I tend to get called a tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorist a lot.  So I appreciate the irony that I feel pretty much the same about people who claim to have been traumatized by encounters with flying saucers. I hereby apologize to all those people today, having finally had my own flying saucer experience – one that will probably leave me with quaking nightmares for some time.  Read on at your own peril.  You have been warned.

Big thanks for March For Our Lives

This is to thank the students from Marjorie Stoneman Douglas and from around the world who protested today. It turns out you were marching for my life today, too.

As a school kid I had epilepsy which was diagnosed, and Asperger’s which was not. That combination made me a bully magnet. What were, in the hindsight of an adult diagnosis, typically autistic traits were treated by teachers and even my parents as character defects. My stimming and spontaneous unfiltered utterances were the acts of a willful, disobedient, incorrigible kid as far as adults were concerned, so they tended to turn a blind eye to physical abuse by my classmates, and there was a lot of that. It started early and grew worse as I got older. By 9th grade it had become life-threatening.

When I was 13, a couple of boys from the neighborhood caught me at the local 7-11, threw me in the dumpster behind the store, and wired the lid closed. Florida sun turns a metal dumpster into an oven so when the sun rose over the roof of the store I started to bake. By mid-afternoon I was too weak to scream for help anymore, or even sit up. After I puked, pissed myself, crapped my pants, and puked again, I thought “this is how I die.” I laid down, closed my eyes and hoped the end would come quickly.

Some hours later I was roused by the sound of the store owner cursing about the dumpster being wired shut. He was cleaning up to close which meant I’d been trapped for over 12 hours. This was my first, but not my last, near-death experience at the hands of bullies.

The culture in which I grew up was very protective of the “us” group but treated “them” with a brutality so casual that it seemed almost normal. Between the epilepsy and the autism, I was never in anyone’s “us” group so I lived as a prey animal both at school and in my own neighborhood. A few of the football players even had a point system for the types of injury they might inflict on me. Lowest points were for a shoulder check. More points if I was knocked off my feet. More still if I had to go to the school nurse afterward. Whenever I was among people, I was either looking around the corner or looking over my shoulder.

A few months after the dumpster incident one of the football players attacked me from behind, shoving me face-first into a brick wall. My forehead was split open to the bone, and my upper lip was split to the gums. My nose was broken and one nostril torn. There were cuts ringing my eyes where my broken glasses had dug in. Despite the 10-day suspension, my attacker was allowed to keep his athletic eligibility and make up his work to preserve his GPA. When I found out I made my own plans to go shoot up my school, starting with my attacker and then as many of his buddies as possible.

After I calmed down I went a different direction and tried to commit suicide instead. I dropped out of school the following year.

As soon as it was possible, I moved to a different town, changed my name, and built a new life. I distinguished myself as a Computer Operator, then as a Programmer, in a field with lots of diversity and in which my autism was more of a benefit than a burden. I allowed myself to believe the past was behind me. Or at least that my hometown, a regional Klan headquarters, was an outlier and not representative of the country.

Then Trump announced his candidacy and suddenly it seemed the whole country turned into my hometown. The decades I’d spent overcoming the emotional and physical abuses of my childhood disappeared and suddenly I was that kid again, that prey animal. Except now that casual brutality inflicted on me in my youth was aimed entire populations of people. People of color. Women of any color. Muslims. LGBTQ. The disabled.

Being autistic, social media had been a refuge for me. The place where I was able to find community and be part of someone’s “us” group. That ended with the campaign and the total abandonment of any civility of discourse. No matter how well researched and reasoned my argument, I was a “libtard,” a “snowflake,” a “cuck” and worse. When I reported a Facebook group advocating incarceration or murder of all autistic people, jailing or killing people like me in other words, Facebook’s initial response was that it didn’t violate their Terms of Service. Contempt had become the new normal.

My last hope was that this would all die down after the election, but then Trump won and all hope was lost. I had no idea what we’d become with Trump as President, I just knew I didn’t want to live to see it. My wife said I should give it some time. Once I got over the shock, she assured me, I’d see that all the good people who had been there before were still there. Everything I valued was still there.

After I promised her to stick around, things just kept getting worse. Every day that passed in the Trump Presidency was another day trapped in that oven of a dumpster, clawing for the light, screaming into the void, eventually passing out exhausted. Except that in this version I wake up in the same nightmare the next morning and a bit worse off. Stephen King’s version of Groundhog Day.

Then this evening the first thing I saw when I turned on the news was Emma Gonzalez holding the podium in complete silence. I missed the first part and didn’t know what was going on. You never see dead air on TV but there she stood commanding our attention, and the camera didn’t break away. I didn’t know what this was but I understood instantly that it was important.

I sat down, eyes glued to the screen and watched. When Emma finally continued tears started streaming down my face as she recounted the timeline of the shooting. Then came the clips of Naomi Wadler, Jaclyn Corin, Yolanda Renee King, Edna Chavez, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Alex Wind, and so many more.

My wife was right. I just needed to wait. If this movement can arise in the trump era, if these leaders can spring from the halls of high schools and middle schools, then we are going to be okay after all.

I was still watching the news when my Matt came in to say goodnight. He saw the river of tears and was concerned.

“What’s wrong, Grandpa?”

“Nothing, buddy” I said, wrapping him in a big hug. He hugged me back. Then I held him at arm’s length so I could get a good look at our future. “Not anymore.”

Gentlemens’ club plans cancelled

My new gentlemens’ club concept has possibly been the most badly-kept secret ever so now that the investors have all backed out it seems easier to post publicly about what went wrong than try to explain to my friends individually. The concept is, in my estimation, visionary and ground breaking. The backers unanimously said it wasn’t practical. I have to take this on faith since they are the experts in running nightclubs and I’m an old computer programmer.

It was a good day

On the scale of days, today was a good one for me. I saved the lives of an entire family, repaired part of a French drain in my yard, finally completed the replacement of a bathroom exhaust fan in the attic, and scratched two items off of my to-do list.