It was an ordinary night for a child who had grown accustomed to the unordinary. My dog Justice trembled under the bed, while Led Zeppelin vibrated through the wall. Inside the sheets, all wrapped up in Mother’s essence of bath oil and sandalwood, I tossed and turned. Then I laid listless and awake—a lump of boredom. I could smell the funny smoke again and hear bottles clinking.
I pleaded with God, “Please make the people go away.”
All at once, a melodic voice called out, “Hello, Little Girl.”
But I knew the voice wasn’t God.
I was certain my God didn’t have a Jamaican accent and dreadlocks. “We didn’t know you were in here, Pretty Lady. I’m sorry if we woke you,” the stranger apologized, as he approached Mother’s bed.
I leaned over casually on my arm, wanting to seem mature and interesting enough to earn his attention. “You didn’t wake me,” I responded, with a fake yawn, tapping my little chin with my tiny fingers a few times. I was accustomed to seeing strangers in the house, but not at my bedside. Still, I wasn’t nervous in the slightest degree. I’d liked meeting Mother’s friends. They were all interesting in that odd way…
The rest of this story can be found in the book Everyday Aspergers
Compared to my other posts, this is very mature. Part of my journey to wholeness and self-love has involved documenting events of my past. The short stories are a form of art work to me. They feel like art, as they are scribed through strong emotion and creative flow. However, the words are no longer a part of me. The little girl’s experiences are forever lost on the pages I typed.
This is not meant to be sad, but shared as a possible peer into another part of me—the melancholic artist, perhaps. Or a mature woman sharing her truth, so others know they are not alone. I have many pages of similar events, but shall not post on this blog because of the maturity-level. Someday the missing chapters, I suppose, may appear in book form as a collection of many of the thoughts in this blog.
The Sound of Nothing
My new sitter was Jessica Jensen. I called her Jess.
She was much the complete opposite of the obtuse and sedentary babysitter Mrs. Stockman. Jess was a long-limbed, freckled-faced high school freshman with thick reddish-blond hair and a ruddy face infested with whiteheads.
Initially, I wanted to make Jess my best friend, but Jess had different plans. She wasn’t mean or anything. She was actually quite tolerant. However, she was short of being my friend. During our time together, Jess feigned interest in me, in the form of an over curious stare or raised eyebrow, but within a few minutes she was focused on something else, like her fingernails or the person on the other end of the telephone. Nothing I said or did truly seemed to impress Jess. She thought I was smart and funny, and told me so. But her real interest was in her boyfriends and teenage mischief, all of which I was much too young to understand.
Jess was a roamer, and in a way I was her little naïve sidekick. I’m sure it crossed Jess’s mind several times to leave me behind somewhere, but to her credit she always kept me in close proximity. She didn’t know what she was doing most of the time. She was just some teenager from a broken, druggie home, who didn’t know better, a girl who had far too much freedom. We attended movies, where Jess covered my eyes so I wouldn’t see the full screen of naked breasts, and then afterward we’d hitchhike about town, bouncing from one kid’s house to another. Jess was in search of something, maybe an escape or a rush, something to make her forget about where she’d come from and what she’d seen.
I stood by Jess, no matter where she took me, because, like her, I had no choice. Choices are for bigger kids, once they realize they are worth something, once they know their value, once they can look at themselves and smile, liking what they see. Jess and I, we just hadn’t gotten there yet.
I followed Jess into a world that seemed a distant land from the home I once knew with my stepfather Drake. It was a place of no good and ugliness, a world with molding mattresses stretched out under the overgrowth of a beat up magnolia tree, where the backyard fence was bent and broken in all different places, where the house with the peeling yellow paint and exposed boards stank even from the outside, maybe even from the next house over—a raw smell, a dangerous smell that I imagine dogs would whimper and slink away from.
And there, I’d find her oldest brother, or better yet, he’d find me—a long-haired, high school dropout named Rick: a teenager roughened by an absent father and a strung out mother, scraped up all over on the inside like a bristle brush to stainless steel. An aimless boy who roamed a place where beer bottles lined the back porch and stray wild cats, some pregnant, some close to death, slithered in and out of open basement spaces like hairy serpents.
Inside Jess’ house were threadbare couches, half-busted televisions and food, but not the type of food anyone would want to eat, just leftover spoiled junk, crushed potato chips and cookie remnants, and bowls of sugary cereals molding in spoiled milk. It was the type of house that needed to be quarantined, sealed off with yellow tape and bulldozed down, or burnt into smoldering ash. No good was in the house. No good at all.
Rick liked to play doctor, a confusing game wherein he touched me in places a little girl should never be touched. And Jess, he’d do the same to her, that’s what I suspected, though I never said so. I just kept my mouth shut, let him do what he needed, and left, went out and found Jess, like nothing had happened. He never laid himself on me, nothing as crude as that, and he was just a child himself. He didn’t know any better; just like Jess, he didn’t know any better.
I didn’t feel nothing. No pleasure, no guilt, no disgust, felt like I would after playing a game of Twister or the Game of Life. That’s what it was, just another game of life.
One time, in the early spring, I clutched Jess’ hand in her backyard while watching the slimy-brown juices of chewing tobacco seep out the side of Rick’s cocked mouth. “Get the hell out of here!” Rick yelled, fixing his cold-hazel eyes on scowling Jess.
Jess stood her ground.
“Didn’t you hear me?” Rick continued, kicking up pebbles with his muddy old boots and letting loose a wall of dust. “Get the hell out of here!”
“You are an idiot,” Jess said. “It’s my backyard, too.”
“Screw you!”
Jess clenched her teeth. I stepped back and started counting the multitudes of dandelions. At the same time, Rick removed a chipped brick from an outdoor wall.
Jess screamed, “You’re going to get arrested!”
“Mind your own business,” Rick said with a heated gaze, adding more spit to the puddle in the dirt. “Just get out of my sight. Go back to humping your fat loser of a boyfriend!” With that said, he pulled out a dented tin box which had been stuffed in the space behind where the old brick had been. He then opened the box and pulled out a pile of compressed twenties. He fanned out the money, stopping to toss a smirk Jess’s way, and then shoved the box and brick back in place.
Jess squeezed my hand, and shouted again, “If Mother finds out, she’ll kick you out on your ass again!”
Answering back with a stiff middle finger, Rick headed out the busted back gate. “Whore!” he hollered from over the broken fence. “Stinking Whore!”
Jess turned round to find me. I gazed up at her and I thought for a moment she might grab some money for herself. Images of Budd’s ice cream cones and bean burritos danced in my head. But Jess didn’t take any money. She didn’t even go near the brick. Instead she led me inside her house to the grime-covered kitchen.
“Come on,” Jess said. “Let’s get out of here.” She grabbed a hotdog off of a plate and took a bite, then proceeded to chew with her mouth open. My mother taught me to always close my mouth while eating. I watched as Jess’ food slid about, until the hotdog moved to the side of her blushing cheek. “Now, what did you see? You didn’t see anything did you?” She swallowed and took another mouthful. A frantic look crossed her face. She paused between her words to chew. “Because… if you saw… or heard… anything… anything at all… it’s not… true.”
“I didn’t see anything,” I said, wide-eyed and innocent. I started counting with my fingers. I figured there was at least a few hundred dollars in the box.
Jess swallowed again. “Good. Good. Let’s go then. Come on.”
As Jess walked a few strides ahead of me, I could hear her disjointed whispers. A block away, she stopped and turned to me. “Never mind,” she said. “You’re too young to understand. It’s too late, just too late to do anything now.”
Further up the sidewalk, Jess stopped dead in her tracks. Her lacy halter flapped up in the wind. I reached over and attempted to pull her top down. She didn’t notice, and the wind blew the halter right back up again. Her sheer pink bra was showing. I studied the thin material. Jess faced sideways and cupped her hand to her ear. “Listen. Do you hear a police car? Do you hear that?”
I gazed into the crystal-blue of her wild eyes and considered what Jess had said. I didn’t hear anything. We waited without moving, stood still—didn’t move an inch, just like those pill bugs do when they’re playing dead. For a few seconds I believed Jess might well be a bionic babysitter endowed with supernatural hearing. I waited patiently for the sound of the police siren or the sight of a patrol car. I waited and waited, but in the end there was nothing.
1) When a young man says, “I’ll call you,” the statement is often equivalent to “See Ya.” It’s another form of goodbye, where you never see the person again.
2) Just because a man goes to couples counseling with you doesn’t mean he’s not married and also going to couples counseling with his wife.
3) People will most definitely look away and cringe, if you share up close photos of giving birth or breastfeeding. Then they won’t want anything you offer them to eat.
4) When you are a restaurant hostess at a popular night spot, even if your boss says to be honest with the customers about the wait time for a table, do not smile and say: “That will be about 137 minutes.”
5) If one hairdresser tells you that you should always wear bangs, that doesn’t mean you have to wear bangs for the next five years.
6) If a dentist says, “In order to blend in your dead front tooth with your other teeth, the best method would be dyeing all of your other teeth darker,” run and don’t look back.
7) When the orthodontist tells you, as a teenager, to wear the headgear and neckgear for your braces to middle school, don’t!
8) If a boy calls you cow eyes, don’t go home and cry, punch him.
9) When you are little, don’t wear the same hippy dress you love two years in a row for school photos.
10) Don’t play tunnel tag in the short, Italian wool dress your grandma gave you , unless you wear shorts underneath.
11) Tell your mom when you get your period. Don’t wait three months, and don’t use the free, plus-size, super absorbent, expandable tampons that the gym teacher passed out!
12) Don’t buy life insurance and agree to automatic payments from your bank account, and then wait three years to research if the company exists. It doesn’t.
13) If you have just given birth, and you are sharing a hospital room with a new mother who talks nonstop on the phone into the late hours of the night, complain.
14) If you are an elementary school teacher, and spend three hours on a letter of recommendation for one of your fifth grade students, make sure you spell the student’s name correctly, especially if you don’t want to irritate the parents.
15) While a student in middle school, don’t draw pictures of different boys’ body parts, label them with names, descriptions, and insults, and then leave the illustrations behind at your desk on accident.
16) Even if you have dyslexia, don’t put the spelling words for the test inside the pleats of your cheerleading skirt. You will greatly disappoint your teacher.
17) If you have big ears that stick out, and people laugh at them, wear your hair down until you have high self-esteem.
18) If Italian in America, pluck thick Italian eyebrows, and remember Italian only has one letter l.
19) Don’t save a drowning honeybee in a swimming pool; sensing danger, he will buzz super loud warning his friends. His friends will land on your arm and sting you!
20) When a fake blonde, with a fake tan, and fake nails tells you, “You would look pretty with highlights in your hair.” Don’t say, “I prefer the natural look. I don’t like fake things.”
21) If your boyfriend’s mother invites you to a private lunch, with just you and her, and then says in confidence, “Don’t date my son. You are too good for him,” listen.
22) If you have the flu, and are ghastly sick, don’t beg your boyfriend to take you out-of-town to meet his parents for the first time.
23) Don’t date your weight-lifting trainers. Just don’t.
24) If you are getting a haircut as a teenager, and the hairdresser ignores you long enough for your wet hair to dry, before she returns, leave.
25) The movie Fargo is not a good first date movie.
26) Ask Dad before rearranging his entire dining room and living area.
27) Ask Dad before bringing the puppy home.
28) If you are going to miss one day of college for a funeral, you don’t need to write a letter and then cry to the professor in the hallway, in order to be excused.
29) French classes in high school and college are useless as a second language when you live in California.
30) When you have a long-term boyfriend, and you meet someone at the public swimming pool, you don’t give another boy your phone number and say: “I have a boyfriend, but let’s be friends.”
31) When a young teenager says he’s going to travel from his town 100 miles on his bike to come see you, he might just do that. Better to tell him ahead of time, you have a boyfriend and you aren’t interested.
32) If a young teenager says he’s going to drive his car across country to see you as soon as he gets a job, his license, and a car, probably not true, regardless of what he promises.
33) If you write enough letters to a school district office about the hard water from the sprinkler system damaging the paint on your new red Mustang car, when you park in the parking lot at the school where you work, the district will pay for all the employees to have their cars detailed; however, the superintendent of the district will not smile at you ever again.
34) If you consume too much Excedrin, iced tea, and soda at the same time, you will have a caffeine overdose; and to avoid a thousand dollar hospital bill, you will have to convince the health insurance company the trip to the emergency room wasn’t due to a panic attack.
35) If you’re a teacher and the principal says to you, “You should choose between raising a family or being a teacher, you can’t do both well,” sue him.
36) If an acupuncturist tells you about his failed marriages, his mortgage, his childhood, his parenting woes, and then spanks his wife on the butt in front of you, all while you are under treatment atop the table, don’t go back to that acupuncturist. And don’t feel guilty about not going back.
37) Doctors are practicing medicine.
38) You will offend a LDS person by calling them LSD, even if you have dyslexia.
39) Not a good idea to say, “That pisses me off,” in front of an entire fifth grade class, when you are a teacher.
40) No amount of protesting and letter writing or phone calls will keep a principal from assigning you to teach seventh grade, instead of elementary school, if she thinks you are a good teacher, even if you cry and tell her you hated middle school as a child.
41) If you kiss a mean ugly man enough times, he remains a mean ugly man.
42) When you ask a boyfriend, “Should I get a shorter haircut,” and he says, “That depends.” And you answer, “That depends on what,” and he responds, “That depends on if you are planning to lose weight, or not,” run away from the relationship.
43) The joke: When you’re dancing with your honey and your feeling kind of funny, and your nose is kind of runny, but it’s not, isn’t funny after the age of ten.
44) Don’t read your personal diary to fickle teenage girls.
45) When you are a kid, don’t announce to your seventh grade class you are wearing your first training bra.
I just discovered the word fore-play can only be used in one way!
In California slang: Oh, My Gosh!
And here I was thinking I could use the word to mean: the time before I played or the time leading up to play.
(I’m hyphenating the word fore-play, in hopes of avoiding the p-er-v-s that might use the search term. No offense if you used that search term and were just looking for tips with your Honey. I don’t mean you. But maybe I do. Can’t be too sure, these days…now I’m realizing I just typed p-e-r-v-. I give up.)
Writing is an act I generally enjoy. Not so much yesterday’s post, but overall, writing is like PLAY to me. I believe I ought to be able to write fore-play to imply the play time leading up to my writing. But it looks like I’m out of luck!
I am picturing myself in a crowded room (heart beating fast) and having a small-chat-chat with a stranger (heart beating faster), and casually offering, “My writing involves a lot of foreplay.”
At this time, I would probably start obsessing about my heart beating so very fast, and start hypothesizing all the ways in which I could be dying, e.g., heart attack brought on by genetic mutation, clogged arteries, and my favorite, that Sir Brain continually obsesses about—heart suddenly explodes for unknown reason!
As I was obsessing, I’d likely miss the nonverbal clues of the person standing next to me, who was processing my statement.
I’d miss the person raise a brow or I’d miss him/her attempt to raise a brow. (I can raise my right eyebrow super high, and forget others don’t have my same skill set.) I’d miss the quizzical-who-the-heck-are-you-smile. I’d not realize a tape (CD for younger generation) was playing in the stranger’s mind.
Perhaps something like this: “Is she naïve, uneducated, bold, or just plain stupid? Or maybe trying to pick me up?”
I’d miss the follow-up smirk or wink—dependent upon interpretation. And I’d mosey along towards the food table, entirely oblivious of the person’s response to my utterance, while gorging myself on prawns and crab-cakes, in an attempt to subside Sir Brain’s rapid thinking on death.
They know what I'm talking about!
Words like fore-play get tangled in my mind.
I love words. I am fascinated by words. They are brilliant and beautiful. And I love to paint pictures with words. Words are my primary colors blended into soothing pastels, when they merge with the white of my computer screen.
Words are my friends. And they are also my enemies. I keep words close. I watch them carefully and with awe. The slightest change, just one little letter, alters the whole meaning. Just a slight dab of painted word, a speck in the corner of the canvas, transforms the entire picture.
I still don’t comprehend why the word fore-play can’t be used in other ways.
The word fore can mean: the front, that which is in front; the future. A method of proceeding. Before. Previously.
The word Play means: Engage in activity for enjoyment or recreation rather than practical purpose. Usually involving children.
But when I combine the two together, they don’t mean: the play you do before the play. This is confusing.
Why can’t the word combo mean the play writing I do before the writing? I love to play write before I write. I usually write a half page or more, before I find my voice and know what I want to write about. Then I delete, and begin again.
Some people, reading this post, are thinking, really? This is the best you got after you played and deleted?
Yep. This is ME!
I wanted to call this post the Origin of Fore-play. But I didn’t want to attract creeps.
Just putting that out there.
It is a funny and intriguing title, after all.
Be forewarned, don’t go digging into the word origin of fore-play, unless you want an eye-full. Neither do you want to search for images or search for examples of what p-e-r-v means. And YouTube—you know how Crazy Frog likes to find associated videos for my posts. In relation to this post, AVOID YouTube searches. LV is still hiding in shame.
You might be wondering about the point of this here post. How this could possibly relate to Asperger’s Syndrome.
Let me point out what this post demonstrates:
Words mean a lot to me.
Words are confusing, especially when they have multiple meanings, or when society has combined two words to mean something different than expected and/or that don’t make logical sense.
I confuse words.
Confusing words can cause embarrassment.
I am often unaware I ought to maybe be embarrassed.
My actions confuse others.
Confusing others can ostracize me (or make people like me even more).
I can pretty much write about anything given a particular topic.
I’m a risk taker and have a hidden talent for finding cool videos.
The combo of Green Tea, chocolate cookies, and the supplement Gaba make me even more interesting.
You Tube Links You Might Enjoy
Sometimes certain words leave me feeling unsettled. If you’re like me, this is to relax you.
For those of you who were really hoping for more out of this post, here’s a frisky dolphin.
And music, we have to have music!
Now I’m wondering about the words play toy! And thinking about when I was 18 years of age, a college freshman, and how one of my first college courses was all juniors and seniors, an upper division class, that I had no idea I ought not to have signed up for. And I’m thinking about the videos in that class, and the topic, and how my face was always beet-red.
Everyday Asperger's 