In the late spring of a bitter windy day, I wiped the grits of sand from my face and stared down below to the foggy beach. This would be the first time I’d see flaccid bodies all lined up in a row, bloated and an almost-blue. I hadn’t wanted to watch or even glance a little. I’d wished to run away or at least close my eyes, but I had to see. This was another coming of a dream. Some seven days had passed, seven long days of waiting and wondering who would drown. I knew enough from my past and the way my dreams played out to realize death would be arriving on a Saturday—on a cold, cold Saturday.
I wondered as the workers desperately pressed and pumped on the already dying flesh, why life, or God, or whatever essence gave me these glimpses of future events, wouldn’t also go one step further and allow me to serve some purpose and exist as more than a detached helpless onlooker. Had I had a magic button to stop the dreams, I thought at the time I would have. But then I thought I would have missed the dreams in the way I would have missed my arm, or leg, or eye; the dreams were so much a part of me, a needed part, something I’d been born with which had served me in some sense; even though I couldn’t comprehend the reason, even though I cursed the visions and the following reality, I knew enough, innately or perhaps spiritually, to know the dreams were necessary.
The dreams would serve a higher purpose someday, I was told. Not directly, but in whispers, gentle reminders to be patient, to be watchful, and to wait. I would cry then, in my teens, in the same way I cry now, when the weight of the world is so heavy upon my shoulders that I wish for nothing but silence and the unknowing, to be like the mother across the street satisfied with her scrapbooking and classroom volunteering, and yearning for nothing more than the simple.
That’s what I longed for: the sweet simple.
Those dead bodies below on the beach had been a family, the emptied vessels now covered in black bags on the sands below had been minutes before living tourists who hadn’t heeded the warnings posted at Dead Man’s Beach about the dangers of the ocean currents and under-tow. One boy had fallen in off the rocks, and in response, each family member had leapt to their own death.
I have been terrified of the ocean, ever since the tragedy at Dead Man’s Beach. Add this to the horrific flesh-eating fish dreams I’ve had since I was three, and the time my mother’s boyfriend saw a shark take a chunk out of his best friend. (His friend died.) And I’ve been able to justify not going in the ocean for about twenty-five years.
Yesterday, I overcame my great fear of the sea. As I paddled out into the ocean on my surfboard, I was terrified. I trembled. I almost cried. I almost turned back. But I paddled onward.
I wasn’t planning on surfing at all while visiting Maui. But there I was, regardless of all my fears and misgivings, flat on my belly, in a borrowed, rather-stinky surf shirt, paddling over the waves. And I got up on my surfboard, not once, but at least five times and rode the waves.
They may have looked like little waves to the observer. But to me they were the biggest darn waves of my life.
I’ve realized I have spent much of my forty-some years living on my own Dead Man’s Beach. I’ve been counting my days. Worrying about lurking dangers. Terrified to be happy.
This evening, as I sat in a local bar having yet another fruity rum drink (a new thing for me), the musician played Here Comes the Sun, and I was brought back to a summer day in Oregon, when at the age of nine I was riding in the back of a pickup truck listening to that song. I remember at that age I had an intense feeling of happiness and freedom. It was one of the last times I remember feeling so elated.
Yesterday, when I rode the waves, I returned to that sunny day in the back of the truck. I walked off of Dead Man’s Beach and I found my sun again.
A wise man once told me that he asks everyday: “How can life get any better?”
The dreams I had last night! Slumbering images that stretched into the night. Dreams in which I floated weightlessly in delight. Dreams in which some entity telepathically painted living pictures containing the secrets of the universe before my mind’s eye.
Before you second-guess my experience, note that I did inhale a half-bar of chocolate with espresso chunks yesterday, and I am on this new pig hormone for my hypothyroid, so I can only conjecture what is occurring at a cellular-level.
Crazed by caffeine or hormone overdose, or not, the dreams were mighty spectacular. Beings of light revealed that the world as we know it is a grand illusion! We are creating our reality. They explained that through my thoughts and where I choose to travel in my thoughts, I create my experience in this world.
In my last dream I was a passenger on a large windowless tour bus at a wildlife park. I was struggling to take photos of the upcoming buffalo and my camera battery was missing. A man sat across the aisle examining my actions. I quickly pulled out a notebook and began sketching the buffalo, until the man across the way said gently, “Just be. Enough. Just be.”
by Samantha Craft
I awoke with a greater understanding that my current sense of reality is based on my perceptions and established names and labels. My mind accepts a proclaimed and/or majority-recognized truth as a fact and a reality, and continually partakes in a constant quest to organize, categorize, and understand. Having a brain with “Asperger’s” traits, I imagine my brain is working double-time to sort out fact from fiction, all the while knowing everything factual is dependent upon the observer and the collective history of the observer.
I am awakened to a new truth, whether a passing, a fleeting, or a permanent truth, I do not attempt to know. My truth lies in freedom, in an understanding that freedom is created when I allow self to be. Or more specifically, not even allow, but just be.
To obtain peace, the baffling-cycle of trying to understand my life and my self must be released. The more I attempt to process and solve, the more confused and agitated I become. For every step forward in thought, I move backwards two steps in agitation.
At the moment, I am pondering this notion of nonexistence, the nonexistence of time and the nonexistence of months, and the nonexistence of anything and everything. I am examining the manifestation of reality: how words and symbols, and sounds, create. I’m thinking on my middle son’s recent inquiry: What if an animal exists that is a different color or form than we know, and we don’t yet have the capacity to see those specific colors or forms? Is the animal then invisible to us because we don’t recognize those aspects? And in truth, does the animal even truly exist, if we cannot conceptualize it?
I’m wondering about society. Wondering if the act of plastering more and more warnings about illness, war, and fear in our mailings, in our media, on our shirts, on our billboards, in our books and documentaries—is by default creating a reality filled with more suffering. If words, symbols, and sounds create, then what is our society creating? Perpetuating? Bringing to life?
I’m wondering if we were saturated with positive messages, symbols of love, uplifting affirmations, and confirmation of our safety everyday of our lives, if we could create a world blossoming in calmness and peace.
I’m thinking society has had some things backwards for a very long time, now.
A corner of Buddhist philosophy explains how we can never quite see the whole of ourselves, and postulates, if we cannot see the whole of our being, then we cannot with validity claim we (as a singular being) actually exist in whole. The whole of me is impossible to capture on camera, in the mirror, or even from the viewpoint of an observer. There is always an aspect of me missing, perhaps the sole of my feet or my backside. I am never in completion. And nothing I set eyes upon is in its entirety either. As hard as I try, I cannot see the whole of you. I cannot see the whole of nature—the whole of a tree or a flower. However I search, there is always an element of the wholeness missing.
My mind, too, will always find the element of the wholeness of reality missing. Because the wholeness is not there to find. My mind attempts to construct and complete the picture of wholeness. My reality is constructed to completion only inside my mind, not outside my mind.
In reflection:
(1) I have been trying to figure me and life out like some gigantic puzzle. Only all the puzzle pieces aren’t available.
(2) I have been so seriously attached to finding solutions to life and following manmade rules that I have built a lifetime of memories of no fun.
(3) Since I have collected hardly any happy-go-lucky memories, my mind has no place to retreat to except to the wicked, sad, dismal past or the fears of the wicked, sad, dismal future.
(4) In order to find retreat in the present moment, I would benefit by establishing happy moments and releasing the analytical, fight-or-flight based existence.
(5) I honor my journey, where I have been, where I am going, and where I now stand.
(6) Everything is unfolding at the absolute beneficial time.
(7) I set myself free to be a passenger of life and not a solver of life.
(8) I don’t have old baggage; I have an overstuffed, overused backpack of notes and observations.
(9) I give myself permission to leave the backpack behind.
(10) I give myself permission to do nothing more than to watch the buffalo.
“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.”
–Albert Einstein
by Samantha Craft
One of the best movies of the 1970’s. Bless the Beasts and the Children
Except for the light from the slivered moon the road was black. My foot hit the pedal and I sped up faster and faster towards the tracks. Mangled is what I wanted. But I wouldn’t have the nerve to stop, to wait for a train. There would have to be another way. Perhaps a motel off the interstate, perhaps some pills and a forever sleep. I shook away the thought and breathed a prayer. “Please, help me.”
The ache of the past had become my own Siamese twin. So much so, I didn’t know where my pain stopped and my true self began. I was pain. I was the past. We shared the same blood. Everything and anyone could conjure up bitter memories, especially certain sounds and smells. Everyday was yet another rerun of all the misery I’d viewed before. The scenery and characters might change, but the plot and outcome never altered. I knew all the psychological jargon, the self-talk, the imaging, meditation, and so on; and they served as my air so to speak, the invisible space which kept me temporarily afloat as I waved back and forth in a stormy sea clinging to an inflatable raft filled with holes…
The rest of this story is in the book Everyday Aspergers
by Samantha Craft, April 6, 2012 (Based on True Events)
I was an only child. But I wasn’t a lonely child. I always had some type of friend; whether a cousin, a daughter of mother’s friend, a neighborhood kid, or an imaginary spirit friend, I always found company. Making friends was never an issue, before I hit puberty. I had a natural cheeriness and good nature, and downright quirky humor that kept people about. I was clever, too, creating skits and recitals on a whim, and performing for whomever would listen. I still appreciate the young couple, our landlords, we had for one year, when I was about nine, who painstakingly listened to me sing You Light Up My Life, whenever I saw them. I couldn’t hit the high notes of the lyrics without a terrible screech—still can’t for that matter.
Though I had friends, I was often alone in the afternoons after my three-mile hike home from middle school. I remember there was a pointy-teethed German Shepard that lived at the top of First Street. He growled at me whenever I walked by, and then darted out clanging his lengthy metal rope with him. It took a lot of courage for me to walk home. Not because of the ferocious barking dog but because of home itself.
Things had a way of following me from house-to-house, and I do me things, as I never did figure out what else to call them. These things kept happening to me.
The things came to the upstairs duplex I occupied in Palo Alto. There was an afternoon when my babysitter and I were sitting on the living room couch and heard a circular sawing sound directly above our heads. Only when we ran outside onto the balcony to see what the noise was, nothing was there. Confused, we walked back inside, but as soon as we sat back down the sawing sound began again. We spent the next several minutes playing a game of running outside to find the noise and then running back inside to hear the noise. No explanation was ever found. Soon, we lost interest, and as children do, turned our attention to afterschool television specials.
That same house is where I discovered my imaginary spirit friend whom I named Buddy One. To this day, I’m not sure if he existed or not. I do recall one time reaching up for a bottle of wine vinegar and losing my grip. The bottle came rushing toward my head, and then, somehow, the bottle moved in the shape of an L and landed gently on the kitchen counter. I remember televisions and phones going wacky and all fuzzy on occasion; and I remember how the faucet in my bathroom would turn on when no one was about. There were knocks at the front door at night with no one behind the door. After a couple of years of living on the property, between the occurrences and my continual nightmares and premonitions of our pets dying, Mother was spooked enough to have a priest visit with holy water in hand.
Later, in my teenage years, when I belonged to a local Catholic youth group, I’d attend meetings in an old yellow Victorian building that used to be a nunnery. That house always spooked me. I couldn’t use the bathroom there. And twice, when I entered the empty kitchen, the faucets turned on.
One of the creepiest happenings took place at my father’s in the Central Valley in California, when I was in college. Dad worked nights, so I was typically home alone. One late night, after I’d watched the Silence of The Lambs at a local movie theater, I entered the house spooked by the whole movie. I flicked on the television for comfort, and right after I turned the television on the stations started flicking from channel to channel, one after the other, nonstop. I couldn’t get the television to stop, even when I used the remote.
But of all the places I lived, the duplex at the bottom of First Street on the Monterey Peninsula was the scariest. The house had a way of calling things to it. It was during this time, during my middle school years, I had horrible nightmares of being speared with a stick and roasted over an open flame by demons. This was the time I’d wake in the middle of the night feeling as if something was pulling me down the bed. A time when I didn’t change my clothes at night because I was afraid of the darkness that came when I lifted my shirt over my head. A time I slept with the light on, the television on, and my nana’s rosary around my neck.
One day at the duplex, I remember a tall stranger came whom had claimed to be a painter. My friend Renny and I were sitting on the back deck, when he sauntered through the yard with a wide and even gait. I can still hear the gate squeaking, the iceplant crunching beneath his boots and his deep voice clearing.
Stopping at the bottom step of the deck, the stranger had glanced across at us two girls with a cool smile and said, “Hello.” It was a simple calling, as if he hadn’t a care in the world. As if the backyard belonged to him. It was Renny who moved first, sitting upright and giggling, blushing like the word Hello had been a compliment.
Inside of me, I felt a need to run, to escape.
“I was asked by the owner to paint the house,” he said.
Wanting to leave and go inside, I had tried to catch Renny’s eye, but she was too busy looking at the blonde stranger.
The man tapped his boot on the step and shifted his weight. He was silent for the brief time he took to scratch his head and sink his hands into his overall pockets. Then he looked out with a rather empty stare. “You two ladies go to church?”
“No,” Renny answered.
I was inches away from the doorknob. “Sometimes,” I said.
The stranger leveled his eyes on Renny. “That’s interesting.”
“Not really.” Renny retorted.
“Don’t you think it’s time you made a decision to commit yourself to something other than yourself? Now you two, let me guess. It’s probably all about boys for you. Am I right? No time for God. But plenty of time to do things you ought not to be doing.”
Renny’s red ears were poking through her hair. She shrugged her shoulders at the man. I remained frozen.
The stranger continued: “God isn’t something to take lightly. Do you want to burn in hell?”
My toes felt numb. There was something terribly wrong with his tone, like he was trying to inch his way inside me with his words. Watching Renny begin to tremble, I remembered back to my friend Jane, when we’d been beaten with the board.
I shouted, “We’re leaving!” and grabbed Renny’s hand. Renny didn’t hesitate to follow. We were through the backdoor quicker than the man could utter one more word. And we left him there, good and lonely, not wanting a single thing to do with him. About an hour later, after Renny and I had escaped inside my bedroom, I gathered enough nerve to look out the kitchen window. The backyard was deserted.
Most days at the duplex, I got the sense I was being watched. It was a terrible frightening feeling. I can’t think of anything worse than the fear I had of entering that duplex. Nothing worse than fearing home: the one place that was supposed to be safe.
I spent most of my afternoons when school let out outside on the back deck, on our flat roof with the ocean view, or on the small front patio. There was easy access to the roof. I only had to climb through our upstairs bathroom window. Out on the patio, a space no larger than two pizza boxes set side-to-side, I’d watch television through the open front door or pull out our extra-long orange cord and talk on the phone.
One cloudy day I ventured inside the duplex to grab a snack. I immediately did what I always did—I opened all the draperies, the front and back door, and clicked on the television.
While I was in the kitchen, rushing about to find something in a hurry, I heard a strange and unfamiliar sound. At first I thought the sound was coming from the television. Some haunted house event on Sesame Street. But the sound didn’t stop. It was a loud throaty breathing, a very scary sound, I will never forget, and can still imitate with a chill-rising tone. The sound was comparable to Darth Vader’s breathing, only more pressing. I’ve only heard the breathing replicated once accurately, and that was when I was watching a ghost hunting show.
On hearing the breathing, I ran to the living room to turn of the television off. I couldn’t stand the noise. I wanted to jet out of the house. However, when the television was off, the noise remained.
I recall turning around frantically to find the source. Not believing the sound could still exist with the television off. It was then, as I began to panic, I heard the sound again. This time right before me. Suddenly, in front of my eyes, a gigantic wall of static formed from ceiling to floor. The static hissed something terrible.
Trapped and cornered, I clamped my eyes shut. When I opened them, the static was surrounding me. The deep throaty breath pulsating through my entire being
As I trembled, I heard words, words that sounded as if they were filtered through a thick mask and felt tube-fed into me: “Get out! Get out! Get OUT!”
As if on cue, at the same time as the words Get Out were voiced, outside the thunder rumbled and the rain poured down. Fearing for my life, I burst forward through the static and dodged around the corner, sprinting out the backdoor at full speed.
Terrified, I screamed at the top of my lungs, and ran and ran up the hill. Finding myself a block up from the house, on the top of an unfamiliar flight of stairs, I leaned against an apartment door and wept. Then without thought, I pounded on the door, still screaming. A young man opened the door and brought me inside.
Ten minutes later, Mother arrived. Taking me by the hand, she led me through the rain down the street and back inside the duplex. Mother listened to my story but blamed the event on my over-active imagination. As twilight approached, she wouldn’t give into my screaming demands.
“Just go to bed and stop letting your imagination get the best of you. If I let you sleep with me, what’s that going to teach you? I’m doing this for your own good.”
My black-beaded rosary, a gift from Nana, was swinging around my neck. I held firmly to Mother’s doorknob. “Please let me in. I’ll be quiet. I promise.”
“Let go of this door and go to bed!” she insisted.
“But the ghost, the ghost is in the house. Please!” I begged.
Mother pulled harder.
“Mother you don’t understand. It was real. I don’t want to be out here alone. Please let me in. Please help me!”
Mother shook her head and glared at me.
My hand slipped from the knob and Mother’s door slammed shut.
I ran downstairs, grabbed the phone, pulled on the cord, and ran outside to the small front patio.
I dialed my father. Before I had spoken more than a few sentences, Dad suggested I stay at Nana’s house.
“Did Nana teach you the Lord’s Prayer?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Use it,” Father said.
“Okay.”
Father cleared his throat. “You have to know something. Today I was staring at a photograph of you for over an hour. I don’t know how, and this has never happened before, but I had this sense some evil force was attacking you. Your nana’s mother used to have dreams and sometimes she saw spirits. Last week a psychic told me to destroy a painting I’d made. One with a gray house set up on a high hill. She said to paint candles all around it because she believed it was a portal to another world. Anyhow, I painted the candles, and threw the painting away. Right before you called. I can’t believe this. It’s very strange.”
Dad went on, for several minutes, explaining about how a spiritual group had recently tried to recruit him claiming they believed he had spiritual gifts. Dad, never one to talk on the phone for more than a few minutes, quickly ended the conversation with some more nervous laughter and some pleasantries. Then, after wishing me luck, he hung up.
I sat on the patio listening to the dial tone for a long while, still wiping my tears, and twisting the rosary in my hands. I thought back to all the times before—the nightmares, the stranger, the unexplainable happenings.
I ran into the house, quickly grabbed the old afghan off the couch, and ran out to the backyard wooden deck. I could sleep there, I thought, at least until the rain came.
Attention folks. I’m using my teacher voice here, and then I will be checking for understanding, and administrating a pop quiz. If you have not read many prior posts, you might want to press the LINGO BUTTON. Repeat back what I said, to avoid further confusion. Thank you and onward!
Side Note: I will be venturing deeper into the realm of my Aspie mind and touching base on more serious issues soon (as in someday), but at the moment, Crazy Frog is buffering me from the insanity that has surrounded me in the last few weeks. So, stay with, if you can, until Crazy Frog retreats some, and we can get down to more serious business. Or not.
I figure one medium-sized chocolate-chip cookie (130 calories of gooey, pure heaven), that I devoured at 5:00 in the evening yesterday, is equal to the loss of thirty-five minutes of sleep. I had three cookies. Plus my earplugs are defective; that, or my husband, having returned from his leisure business trip, picked up a multiple-of-two on his visit to Arizona, and attached said multiple to his snore factor. Regardless, I couldn’t sleep last night.
And I had chocolate-induced dreams, where I think, if I remember correctly, I was some sort of Star Trek Borg (cybernetically enhanced beings who assimilate other races into their group and devour everything in their path) hooked up to the genius-stream of the all-knowing Google God.
My husband’s snoring sound ZZZ-Zzzz-ZZzzz-hn-oink-GGggoofffh-Ppwwbhww- zZZzzzZZ was the source of the Borg’s power. Right now LV theorizes she can use Borg and Star Trek as search engine terms for this blog, and pick up some more traffic. Attract people to the Geek Posse (Lingo), like those cool characters from The Big Bang Theory television show. Currently, the Big Bang Theory is LV’s and Sir Brain’s salivating-worthy fascination.
Did I mention it’s 5:00 in the morning! I’m thinking Sir Brain is up because of the upcoming IEP meeting (Individual Education Plan) for my middle son at his school this afternoon; that and the fact that LV had this running dialogue (hamping) about our life-forces dependency on my internal organs, and how at any second our heart could decide to give up, or even explode. Sir Brain wasn’t totally freaked out, until LV added the whole aneurism (brain explosion) probability to the equation. That’s when Sir Brain packed two rectangular-1950’s-style suitcases and stood up on his toothpicks legs and said, “I’m out of here.” Until LV explained that he was the brain and couldn’t leave. Which bothered Sir Brain to no end, as he didn’t understand how he wasn’t a separate entity beyond a body organ. LV and Sir Brain are still debating on that one.
I wrestled with the thought of staying in bed, until LV brought me back on the hamster-wheel, and reviewed repeatedly, (think copy machine spitting out 1000 copies), the fact that I didn’t show up to my afternoon college course yesterday.
Thus, I rose with puffy, slit-eyes, appearing as if I’d been born and raised on a planet without sunlight. I mounted the stairs, walking like a zombie, while listening to LV chatter it up, in her California, valley-girl dialect, about how I don’t have to be from another planet, because I live in a little town in Washington State, which is primarily absent of sunlight.
And now I’m here typing, while LV goes over with Sir Brain, (who is frantic about exploding), about how yesterday was the first day in my (count them) 7.5 years of college that I missed a class. I haven’t missed a class (not big into rule breaking), since that time I was a freshman and broke down in front of the professor babbling and bawling like a Fool (picturing tarot card), because I needed to go to my beloved Nano’s funeral that was two-hundred miles away, and I wouldn’t be back in time for the next week’s class. That was in 1986!
So, understandably, LV and Sir Brain are a wee bit perplexed about me basically playing hooky from school. Although, they are quite aware that we have left the university but can’t withdraw officially yet, because we’re waiting (and waiting) to hear back from the authorities that be, to see if I have to spill the beans about how I was woefully treated, before I can get my tuition, (the equivalent of two-month’s mortgage) reimbursed. I’m thinking it’s not too early for a glass of wine or a horse tranquilizer. What’s your opinion?
I had something I was thinking about typing about when I was tossing in bed this morning, but the thought is beyond me now. Prophet in my Pocket is still in his 18th century pajamas and nightcap, attempting to sleep. LV is in la-la land wanting to travel with Sir Brain and his suitcases off on some tangent. And I’m thinking I’d like to take a ride on Elephant and get the heck out of Dodge. (Which I now know the meaning of, thanks to one of Brain’s prior followings of string.)
Thank my lucky stars. I just ran to the phone and received an automated message: Do to icy roads there will be a two hour late start at school.
Crazy Frog just woke up with a jolt. He’s a morning frog. Wide awake. He arose to tell me he is super excited about going back to sleep. He found a song! Almost three million people have seen it! It’s a perfect video: it’s weird, talks about sleeping, and the guy walks like a borg! The first one Crazy Frog found.
I’m not going to let Crazy Frog edit this prose or rouse me any further, as I’m taking Prophet in my Pocket’s cue, and crawling back in bed. “Don’t wake me, I plan on sleeping” (song lyrics). Oh, before I go. One thing that made me laugh this morning, besides the processing of my own brain:
When I was looking up ideas for snore sounds (because I don’t really have a life), I found this article about this lady’s husband who is a chronic snorer. And this novice lady author, she’s rambling on and on, going way off tangent; and then right in the middle of the article she writes, “…and my husband, he’s had lots of wives.” And I stop. Backspace. Reread. Chuckle. Reread again. And pause frozen, completely unable to read the rest of the article, because I’m thinking this chick definitely has Aspergers.
Crazy Frog does how a softer side. He found this. Make Yourself Sleep in 40 Sec. (Don’t show this to children.) Thanks Crazy Frog! You Boob!
Spastic-Colon (my dog) just busted out her doggy-door and is barking at the sunrise. Now she’s back. Must add her to the lingo dictionary, after I get some shut-eye. Which is odd when you think about it, because our eyes never shut—they just get covered in a flap of skin. Ironically, my alarm clock just went off in the other room. Time to wake up! Myttin da! (That’s Cornish for good morning.)
Everyday Asperger's 