A Guide to the Perplexed

Dear Pius XII,

I need your advice on something weird. For the last 12 months random things have being disappearing from my house, toilet paper, toothpaste, laundry liquid, chicken fillets and even money. There have been no break ins, no one has a spare key and yet these things are vanishing from one day to the next. Do I have a Demon or a poltergeist and if so how do I get rid of it.”

Yours Truly,

Uncle Joe Stalin

Uncle Joe,

I have your stuff. It has been appearing without rhyme or reason on the big screened porch on the back of my house for the last year. I'm sorry about the raccoon. A critter with an electric blue strip running down his back and continuing in the same shade in a barber pole configuration around the tail is certainly distinctive. But, this gave me no idea who to call when the distressed yawls of my cat signaled me that something unusual, which turned out to be your critter's mysterious and unexpected arrival, was occurring out in the sun-room.

I don't think Kristoff would be alive today if I had not realized instantly that what he was complaining bitterly about was the unreasonable way your guy defined him as prey at first glance without even asking where he went to church or how he voted. That is considered at best rude and ,at worst, cop-like behavior where we come from. You don't just decide to kill a fellow creature just for shits and giggles without, at very least, making sure you do not have friends in common first. For all your guy knew, Kristoff could have been a Mason. We were both fine with letting him set up shop out in the back yard. There was even a dog or two that comes around that we were hoping he would take care of for us in response to our kind-hearted hospitality.

Your guy hung around for a week or so living high on the hog in our spacious and well-provisioned suburban garbage can. According to the Brookfield Zoo, there are, at present, several times as many raccoon {as with “moose” singular and plural are the same} in North America as there were when Columbus opened up a lively trade in infectious diseases that made life more exciting on both sides of the water. Also according to BZ, The preferred contemporary habitat of a race grown more cosmopolitan and civilized as they have grown more numerous is the suburban garbage can, so your guy was treated as he deserved until he decided, with absolutely no encouragement from us, to take himself elsewhere, without, I might add, doing anything about those dogs. I hope for your sake that he got bored and came home but I really would not know. Anyway”””””. Send me your address, $300 for shipping and handling and another $300 for one year's storage and I will get your stuff back to you. This is a message from God but you will need to decoder ring to get much benefit from it. I'll slip that in for free just so you will not spend your life wandering around all troubled and perplexed by life's mysteries.

Sure Hope this Cheers You Up,

Pius XII

The Stranger God

God is the concept by which we measure our pain. The Shadow of God, in exactly Jung's sense, is love. Love flows like blood from any wound deep enough to kill the idea of justice, which is finally the idea that this world makes a human kind of sense, was made for us by the same voice that spoke our souls into being. In the beginning was the word, and a dead soulless world that made the word a lie, that made what we could not go on being what we were without believing a denial of the reality of the dead world around us. Either that world or our souls could be real and true but not both. When justice dies, love begins as the ghost of something departed, becoming the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen, in so doing, turning a nevermore into a not yet, a thing lost into a thing not yet found. Love is the hidden heart of a heartless world. No one crawling on this blighted star has even seen love, nor any evidence of love. It is what we must believe in order to keep moving in any direction after any reasonable hope of prospering or finding anything in this world which satisfies has been killed by experience. We call this hope innocence. It is what we lose when we realize where we are, and that where we are is what happens when the forces that favor us are driven from the field, quarantined outside of time and space, and reduced to nothing more than a voice trapped inside our thickness of skulls and tongues, silenced and powerless outside the solitary confinement of those skulls; we are souls who believe in water because we are parched with thirst in a world as dry as the dust in some grave so ancient and forgotten that no one can name what was in that grave before dry dust.

Chekhov

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IC6W8J0j8Co

I just finished doing a conversational English session via Skype with a student in Moscow. He did not say a lot. I had to prompt him with questions. When he did speak his accent was not a problem for me in understanding him. He plays video games in English and likes American music but does not watch American Movies or TV shows. I would be tempted, next time, to send him a YouTube Video to watch before the conversation so that we can have something more definite to talk about. He was fun for me to talk to because he sounds exactly like the character “Chekhov” in the original “Star Trek” TV show that I watched as a teenager. It was a running joke on Star Trek that, according to Chekhov, everything of any significance was invented in Russia.

Rape

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/10/03/the-math-that-keeps-helping-college-rapists.html

“A relatively small proportion of men are responsible for a large number of rapes,” the 2002 study notes. “ I have never raped anyone or even had to resist the temptation. But I have lived my life in a rape culture, a culture where men so often get away with it that any women is a potential victim with every reason to be suspicious of a male stranger who is a little too friendly. I have lived my life in the culture that these few men and the ideas and institutions that let them get away with it have created. It is not a good place to be female. It is also not a good place to be male. Unless, of course, you are the kind of man who would rather get away with it than to live in a world where women do not have to fear men in general because the ones who want to get away with it and can look just like the ones who don't.

Rape Poem
by Marge Piercy

“There is no difference between being raped
and being pushed down a flight of cement steps
except that the wounds also bleed inside.

There is no difference between being raped
and being run over by a truck
except that afterward men ask if you enjoyed it.

There is no difference between being raped
and being bit on the ankle by a rattlesnake
except that people ask if your skirt was short
and why you were out alone anyhow.

There is no difference between being raped
and going head first through a windshield
except that afterward you are afraid
not of cars
but half the human race.

The rapist is your boyfriend’s brother.
He sits beside you in the movies eating popcorn.
Rape fattens on the fantasies of the normal male
like a maggot in garbage.

Fear of rape is a cold wind blowing
all of the time on a woman’s hunched back.
Never to stroll alone on a sand road through pine woods,
never to climb a trail across a bald
without that aluminum in the mouth
when I see a man climbing toward me.

Never to open the door to a knock
without that razor just grazing the throat.
The fear of the dark side of hedges,
the back seat of the car, the empty house
rattling keys like a snake’s warning.
The fear of the smiling man
in whose pocket is a knife.
The fear of the serious man
in whose fist is locked hatred.

All it takes to cast a rapist to be able to see your body
as jackhammer, as blowtorch, as adding-machine-gun.
All it takes is hating that body
your own, your self, your muscle softens to flab.

All it takes is to push what you hate,
what you fear onto the soft alien flesh.
To bucket out invincible as a tank
armored with treads without senses
to possess and punish in one act,
to rip up pleasure, to murder those who dare
live in the left flesh open to love.”

(Source: neverapologizeforstrength)

In My Language

This is In my language by Amanda Baggs. I use it in my classes because it gets the idea across that someone who is not verbal and acts very oddly can have a mind and a very rich inner life. The impression people have at the end is very different from the impression at the beginning.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc

ASD is, more than any other disorder, a difference in how one relates to other people. The argument could be made that many high-functioning autistics are limited more by discrimination based on their odd interaction styles than by anything else. This is not surprising considering that they do not do all the things that people who are neurotypical (not-ASD) do automatically to make themselves comfortable with other people and other people comfortable with them in the course of routine social interactions, so they are uncomfortable in social situations and make others uncomfortable as well. If this social awkwardness where seen as the symptom of a disorder, this discomfort would, I hope, lessen on both sides of the transaction. My housemate, who is a high functioning autistic, talks about “faking normal” in social situations and waiting for “it” to happen. “It” is the faux pas that outs him as “really weird” and starts the cycle of discomfort feeding on discomfort that will eventually make him withdraw. I don’t react this way because I see his odd interaction style as a symptom of ASD. I wish the whole world could do that. He is a brilliant guy with so much to give.

And if you go chasing Rabbits"""""

Ashford, Alabama was still a small town in the rural south when my mom and I moved there when I was four. It was a place where farmers and their families came to buy groceries, clothing and anything else they needed. My mom worked at a cotton gin that also sold pesticide and fertilizer. My grandfather owned a machine shop that existed to repair farm equipment and build peanut trailers and such other things as farmers needed. Every business in town was kept in business by the farmers. These farmers were self-employed. They had to be jack of all trades and worked doing what needed to be done without regard to 9 to 5 schedules or any schedule more exact than getting it all done. They were always busy doing things that had to get done but seldom had appointments to keep at an exact time.
 

Everyone else sold something or provided some service to the farmers and needed to be at their place of business ready to do business when the farmers needed something and dropped by to get it. For example, I worked for my grandfather every summer at the machine shop. I never saw hours posted. We were typically there by 9 am and where almost always there by ten but there were exceptions. We were all on farmer time, which is not 9 to 5 or tightly scheduled by exact time appointments but is more about being there to do your business so many more times than not when the farmer drops by that the farmer feels safe just dropping by and will be surprised and disappointed not to find you there. The occasional surprise is expected and accepted as long as you are there so routinely that not being there is a real surprise and so unusual that the farmer will still expect you to be there the next time he drops by.

I always walked fast enough in relation to other people during my adolescent years to amuse others with my obvious frustration at the way almost everyone else ambled and eased along. I could never stay with the flow of traffic, either in the halls at school or anywhere else and constantly felt that everyone else was in my way. It was not that I was in a hurry to get anyplace. I knew where I wanted to go but almost never had an appointment to keep or even any strong sense of what time it was according to the clock. It just felt to me as if everyone else just naturally oozed through the day at a pace that was totally unnatural to me.

Later, when my life changed and I had appointments with various people at definite times, I would, at first, often simply forget to show up. I was never aware of the ticking of the clock even as I was intensely aware of how much more slowly most of the people around me moved than the pace that felt natural to me. I later learned to compensate by wearing a wrist watch and looking at it often as a symptom of my low-level frustration at being out of sync with most of the people who flowed through their own lives around me as I moved through my own at a frustrated crawl from my perspective but break-neck speed from theirs. I always remind myself of the white rabbit from Lewis Carroll’s work and often describe myself that way to others as a form of self-depreciating humor intended to signal my awareness of looking silly and my lack of offense at the amusement others find in my constant, mad dash to wherever it is I happen to be going at any given time.

You Forgot to Answer

It's better that you don't answer; I will witness you as loved, religiously, with passion pure as blue flame. I am sitting by your bedside reading your dream from a book written by a wild man in the woods, birds in his hair, haunted by absent perfume. “When I remember what to say," the book begins, "you will turn and return to your senses, turn to find me standing in your shadow, chanting your true name like a ring around your finger. At a depth as rich as dark chocolate, a blind fish-mouth opens and a blood-curdling silence fills in the "why" to make all that "what", "when" and "how" fit together as a vision you are not having but deeply, blindly are. I am leaving. the closing of the door is one more tooth falling out of the head you dream with, out of the comb you pull through your hair, out of the night that, once you shut a final door, goes on forever."