Playing the Tard Card

My late daughter Molly had Special Needs (specifically a severe form of autism, functionally nonverbal, with a bonus serving of seizures).

When you have a kid who rides the short bus to school, you end up knowing the other families, so I knew a lot of parents dealing with the same sort of things. And you end up, as a parent, having to be an advocate for your child, ask for accommodations when necessary, that sort of thing.

I was on a date one time with the mother of an autistic girl, so naturally we had lots to talk about on that front.

Like Molly hated the 'sensory friendly' movie screenings. These were showings of family films where they left the house lights up and encouraged the kiddos to just do their thing. Molly knew the protocol for a theater, and despite how obstinant she could be about babbling on, that kid just sat down and shut up for the most part. Seeing other kids violate the rules of the theater only stressed Molly out. She was like, Dude, I'm the one everyone talks about right in front of me, and I know how to act in here. Get it together!

My date was an advocate of making all your matinee family film screenings be in the supposedly spectrum friendly rules and lighting. She felt all kids needed to be free to squirm and speak and not sit like little zombies. I was like I'd end up taking Molly strictly to R rated movies because the matinees would drive her to distraction with all their autism-friendliness.

But she had a great line about what she felt when advocating for things like this for her daughter. Asking, can we not kill the house lights because my kid has sensory issues, asking for acommodations of any kind because of your kids' special needs, was "playing the Tard Card."

I know, we're not supposed ot say the R word, but in this case I think it's both hilarious and a little justified in terms of, that is how people react to such requests. Most of the special ed parents, whether they wanted the same exact things for their kids or not, at least understand that you're not asking to be a pain in the ass, our kids really are different and they deserve to have a positive experience just like everyone else. It's to the oblivious ones, the families whose kids all pass for neurotypical, because you can get someone to quit saying a word, the R word, the N word, whatever slur you want to target.

But just because they don't say it out loud, doesn't mean they don't think it. I'm glad Molly was a good movie companion, there were things I couldn't take her to do because of her limitations. For years I kept an AMC Stubs membership for each of us, and Saturdays meant Daddy and Mo go to a movie. For a good five to seven years we saw every major release with a few exceptions.

Straight up dramas didn't work for Molly. She loved slapstick, action, horror, everything that didn't focus on deep interpersonal interactions. Office politics, straight romance, blech! But if shit's getting blown up or threatening the entire world, she was all about it.

The Well Rounded Outcast

If you've read the earlier posts of this blog, you know I have radical tendencies in my politics. I'm that libertarian guy in pretty much any circle I'm a part of, the real thing, votes for third party candidates, engages in real activism and even ran for office one time.

And obviously my politics evolve over time. I fancied myself a Marxist for a minute or two in high school, though Hunter Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke soon blew away the competition. Marxist revolutions always suck for some reason, and Marxists always seem to think the problem is with leadership. If I were king, and king I will be, there shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold for a penny and so on and so forth. Which is a Shakespeare quote and that's what I came here to talk about.

Not Shakespeare per se, but the way I think. I think the reason my own radicalization has never been dangerous has a lot to do with the broad exposure to literature I stumbled into as a curious and precocious child.

Dad was a high school teacher who had, at some point, thouight he might aspire to doctoral endeavors, become an English professor. It's not what he was cut out for, he'd have probably been very happy and successful as an engineer. But he accumulated the books, I doubt he read half of them. I do the same thing, I hoard books, buying books with every intention of reading them along with the dozen others I haen't gotten to. I purged a lot of paperbacks in my divorce, but I come by my hoarder tendencies honestly, and I spent a lot of time in the stacks downstairs rather than being bullied out in the neighborhood.

And what a library it was! There was Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, etc., but there was also Trout Fishing in America and Robert DePugh's Blueprint for Victory. Before I was initiated into the Science Fiction Convention scene, Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Roger Zelazny. I was describing my dad's library to the late Rich Nadler and he observed, "Your dad was kind of a head."

Which, I still laugh out loud at, literally. My dad is a lot of things, but a head is not on the list. I know he taught the Martian Chronicles to an English class, so I'm sure he read some Bradbury, but I'd be shocked if he could tell you who Philip K. Dick or Roger Zelazny eve are. I don't know why he had those books, but I think exposure to such a broad world of ideas fortified me against the worst dangers of radicalization.

Another example of how I'm That Guy, and I'm telling you, all the That Guys that you know are probably as susceptible to radicalization as me or Ted Kazinksi or whoever you want to pick who did something horribly consequential for ideological reasons. But susceptible to radicalization doesn't mean dangerous. Most of us are just obnoxious Sovereign Citizen types. Just bring up Orwell around me.

I love George Orwell, and not for the reasons you think. Because I've already identified myself as a libertarian or some sort, one would expect me to love how Animal Farm and 1984 critique socialism. Don't get me wrong, those books are great at exactly that, and I'm glad they teach those books in school but it's not enough Orwell for me.

Down and Out in Paris and London and Road to Wigan Pier should be taught as well. They are very, very different books from the two you're familiar with. My elevator pitch is this: If you think he hates socialism, wait til you get a load of Orwell on capitalism. Orwell was a committed socialist and you don't have to agree with him about that, but you should hear what he has to say.

Which is what makes us True Believers such a pain in the ass at parties. We actually study the opposing view. To be sure, we do it to armor ourselves for battle, know your enemy, all of that. That's why Charlie Kirk's death is a sobering thing to me. The cunt who shot him is one of us, of course, but so was Charlie. I identify with Charlie Kirk because while I've never been racisit the way he was, I've certainly been a less successful version of Charlie back when I worked for Rich Nadler in the right wing press. I think it's horrible that he was killed that way, I also think that Charlie himself would give the scene high marks for irony, he was in the act of running his mouth combatively on the subject of gun law when he was shot by an unhinged lunatic.

And that lunatic was probably just like me if I hadn't been exposed to so many philosophies and extreme ideologies in my dad's musty book hoard.

I lived next door to a hoarder who didn't lock their front door and had an arsenal of firearms ranging from black powder to high power rifles just lying around, and when I was eighteen I had romantic notions about the Irish Republican Army. But this is why my exposure to ideas kept me harmless, there was almost nothing I hadn't looked at from both sides by the time I was in adolescence. I might change my mind about where I land on an issue as I learn more things, gain nuance and understanding, but I know the broad outlines of why almost anybody is advocating anything.

I think that's also why it's important to push back on censorship. It does matter what ideas kids are exposed to in their libraries, but that's the reason to include more diverse viewpoints, not less.

Spotty Photographic Memory

I remember this circus act when I was a kid. The motorcycle was on a high wire, directly over me. The sound was enormous, the stench of fuel laden exhaust, and off it went across the high wire.

There was a cage built around the cable such that if the acrobat lost it, the motorcycle itself would dangle from the wire rather than crashing onto the spectators below.

It would be an unremarkable memory except for how early it is. When I was telling my mother about it, she remembered the circus but didn't think I could, because she wasn't even pregnanat with my kid brother at the time. Which means I wasn't even two years old.

18 month olds don't remember shit, right? So I've been lead to believe my whole life, but here I am with a vivid memory of what was likely Michealangelo Nock or a Bauer brother doing a motorcycle high wire act in 1971.

There was also candy. In my dad's desk at the bottom of the stairs in a house we lived in until I was five. It was a caboose made of hard licorice with a small toffee hammer for breaking off pieces of the candy. My mom doesn't remember it but my dad does, it was an ad specialty left over from when he tried to sell farm supplies on commission.

Again, a powerful memory of something incredibly stimulating. I would have been a toddler in all likelihood, and knowing there was a secret stash of candy in Dad's desk would have been high octane information with a powerful, random positive reinforcement that on occassion Dad would let me break off a piece of that candy.

And hard candy licorice is intense. It's a polarizing candy, part of why I have to special order the shit off Amazon because it's almost non-existent on store shelves. I don't mean ropes, 99% of what is sold as "licorice" doesn't taste anything like the real thing, I'm talking lump of coal black, hard candy with that intense anise/licorice flavor and aroma. It's borderline medicinal.

I don't even know if I like the stuff so much as I just have really positive memories associated with that taste and texture. When I think about it, licorice is nasty shit. An acquired taste? Perhaps, but if there is such a thing I acquire tastes almost instantly. Unfortunately that extends to things like spirits, I never didn't find whiskey an agreeable experience, see also gin, tequila, everything except vodka. The alcohol alone wasn't appealing until I was fully addicted to booze, at that point I'd trink 100 proof McCormick vodka straight if that was what was available.

I think this explains a lot about me (not my alcoholism, though it accounts for that in a way). I never thought of myself as having anything resembling PTSD, but I think it's because my memory is so specifically spotty. I remember intense experiences with a borderline photographic memory, but that memory is spotty at best because mundane experiences are barely recorded at all. Like, it borders on dementia symptoms and it's not new.

It's a lot of what fuels my writing, if you were memorable I just about can't forget you. Which means you were exceptionally kind, possibly. Generosity is remembered but cruelty is too. My childhood couldn't possibly have been the string of pure rejection punctuated with occasional ecstatic joy that my memory would indicate.

Which, in writing fiction, I default to changing the names of the real people who inspire the narrative. I'm not as autobiographical in my focus as David Sedaris, but to me he is more of a fiction writer than anything else. Creative biography, and it has alienated some of his family because they didn't sign up to be lampooned and caricatured.

Most fiction is just biography/autobiography in disguise. You change names and places, even set the story years in the future or the past, and of course you refine. Never let facts get in the way of a good story, and of course anything can be allegory.