Category: Story

…a king of infinite space…

I am certainly no king this morning as I had a very disturbing dream last night. I dreamt that I was visiting a family, I think they were friends, and their mother warned me that one of their children was special (indicating some disability) but also evil.

For context I didn’t recognise the friend, or their family, and I think I was much younger. Though I seemed to be my height.

The ‘special’ child in question was a girl, maybe eleven to thirteen, who had short dark brown hair and incredibly large round, brown, eyes. (There are likely overtones of watching Wednesday here.) She had a frown on her face and just looked unhappy. She spoke fine and we all talked about school and lessons, the only unusual thing about the girl was that her answers to questions were often abstract and she laughed at the wrong points. This didn’t seem evil, just slightly neurodivergent.

Scene change, hate it when dreams do that. Now I am in the kitchen talking to the friend and his parents. We hear screaming. At this point I discover that the friend is from a large family as there are about ten other siblings in the room we run into. The girl is there. She is wearing jeans and a lime green top and there is a spreading pool of blood on her top and on the floor from the gash where she has cut her own throat. She has a bloodied carving knife in her right hand and she is looking right at me and laughing silently.

This was disturbing enough but the dream then got worse. Another scene change and we are all dressed in black. I am sitting at the kitchen table. It is raining outside and I am looking at the rain through the window. I think it may be after the funeral. I can hear people talking but not to me. I blink and then I see the girl outside the window. Neck torn open. Eyes black and staring at me. The blood on her neck and clothes had turned black. She is grinning and laughing and she points the hand, still holding the knife, at me.

I turn to tell people she is there and they have all turned into her. Her face is on all of them and they are all laughing. As they laugh black blood runs from their mouths and is spat from their lips.

That is when I woke and I didn’t go back to sleep. It was just after four in the morning. The dream was clearly disturbing, but I don’t know what I am most upset about. The fact that someone killed themselves. The horrific style of the haunting. Or the fact that my brain was so clichéd and stereotyped it made the neurodivergent child into some horror protagonist.
I mean ffs brain, that trope surely is something you would normally rail against, it appearing in your dreams is so sad. Could you not have been more creative and less discriminatory? The horror was bad enough without the depressing social fears and historical bigotry.

Maybe they were haunting me because I assumed a role for them? Or maybeI was the only one not possessed because I didn’t give them that role and it wasn’t a horror but a plea from beyond the grave. That makes me out to be a much nicer person.
This was also part of the reason I couldn’t return to sleep…

Unabled

This post contains a story about me, but it isn’t really about me. It also contains my #2Son who is autistic, but it isn’t really about him either. It’s a little bit about some of you.*

It’s about the looks and the stares and a bit about what I feel.*

* I guess this is, really, about me, it is my story and my reactions, and how I react to others, so all still me there. But I can make it seem like other people are also involved…right?

(MDK 2019)

A Story

A few days ago #2Son got himself a little anxious. When this happens he can manifest certain behaviours, they aren’t always the same, they aren’t for anyone. But part of it becomes a loss of the ability to communicate feelings and thoughts and a general deterioration in overall control.

Like all of us it results in a wig out, but with no way of expressing the problem or coping with the behaviour in a manner acceptable to all of us in the neurotypical realm it gets fraught.

We were at a Supermarket after being out all day, this was probably part of the issue but there were other factors. Basically a minor wigging out was turning into a complete meltdown.

We have lots of, I guess tactics is the word, patterns for dealing with this, many of them are hug shaped, but sometimes I find that silly games work.

#2Son is seven but he has an older and younger brother and we have always had silly games since he was a toddler (and I still have some silly games with his younger brother and one or two with the older more serious sibling). Games like being swung like a baby in a cradle, or the Sockle Monster who hunts in pairs, or the INCREDIBLE FINGER OF DOOM THAT MUST EAT YOUR BELLY BUTTON (emphasis intentional).

So those are what we did. In the car park, and forecourt, of the supermarket, in daylight, on a busy day. So, of course we got looks…

The Looks

I am not going to discuss whether people should look or not, because of course people can look ffs. I am going to discuss what some of the looks (obviously not all of them, just the types I generally see and some of the ones today) seem to say and how I feel about them and hopefully from that you can think about how we look at people.

The Embarrassed Stare

This one is easy to spot. A stare of surprise and then a quick look away. I get it, something unusual happened, you looked and then you realised that could seem rude so you looked away.

Got to tell you, that’s fine. It’s okay to be curious and we get it, you satisfied polite social norms and all I can say is don’t feel embarrassed or distressed that you may have been rude or seen as rude, you’re not. So don’t feel bad and you can look.

The Glare

This is a hard one to deal with. I honestly don’t know how people who get glared at all the time manage not to go around punching people.

It is the hard stare. The long angry look The look that says what are you doing acting in that manner. How dare you act like that in my presence.

It may be from a mixture of fear or not knowing how to understand. It may be from a genuine distress. All I can say is that if you feel that you have to stare like this then you need to seek some help. Because nothing is going on that is a threat to you or the way you see the world. It is the way you are interacting with the world that is the issue.

The Cold Laugh

This may just be a misinterpretation, but I do see it. The cold stare with a smile that suggest some inner amusement. There always seems to be something cruel about this.

I have to say if there is an element of cruelty, if you enjoy someones distress or differences as it gives weight to a narrative of discrimination you might have, or allows you to enjoy some pleasure at their situation, then you need to seek help.

If of course you just can’t help it and this is a natural response you have then do people a favour and look away.

The Smile

So this one is a genuine smile, seems to be a knowing smile. It is friendly and seems to suggest that they approve of what you are doing. It’s almost like they cheerily called well done for interacting with your child in a manner that they seem to enjoy.

You can tell I like this one. This is what I hope most of us could do. We can smile in a friendly way at each other. Even if it’s not a way in which you’d behave, if the other people are enjoying themselves, be glad for them.

Wrap Up

So in a vague way I come to my conclusion, I am not sure I had a point or roadmap for this post just a bunch of thoughts that I have to wrap up before my reader falls asleep.

There are lots of ways you can look at people, and lots of ways I get looked at when I interact with my kids. I have a long history of being stared at, and sometimes it is when I am having fun being silly with a child and sometimes I am on my own being silly.

But what we should all probably try to do, is be happy for each other and think of how best to show that. Because you don’t know the story of the person you see being strange or different to you. You don’t always know the manner in which to interact. You may not no what the social convention is…who really does?

But you can be forgiving of their behaviour and glad for their joy.

2012 Christmas Story in 100 Words

On Christmas Eve the miser, Able, declared, “I will never receive gifts. They’re based on reciprocity. Once received you must return, continuing even when the other person does not.”

That night he heard a noise, a fat man in red stood above him, “ah, my replacement,” said the man, punching Able in the face.

Able awoke in a large, icy, cavern. Eleven reindeer looked at him. He was dressed in the man’s red clothes. Beside him were presents, billions of them, one for every person who had lived and who ever would. All addressed to Able by his new name.

Nanowrimo 2012

I didn’t think I could do it…

I know I have uttered those words before about Nano, especially the last couple of years as my life has become super full of things to consume time with. But this year I really had a bad feeling.

This was borne out as November trundled along and I had failed stories, lack of time to write and home/work duites that just mounted up. By Friday 30th November the last day I was 17.2K words down from the target of 50K. I was right, it seemed, I couldn’t do it.

Then Leigh gave me an odd look and said that she was upset because we would no longer have the same Nano stats…

I had only had 4 hrs sleep, I had a busy day, but by the time 11:40 had rolled around I couldn’t get enough work done, or that damned comment out of my head. I also felt that I would be lacking if I didn’t give this the good old Keating insanity rush.

So I poured a lot of coffee into my system, thought about where the plot had to go and how to get there and started. I would make a charge and at least finish closer than 2/3rds…

‘I bwoke my bwain’, my fingers burned, but by 21:30 I had also done the near impossible in my mind, I had made it as the comeback kid. Nano 2012 was done and I was a winner…

Next year I have to do this differently 🙂

(I also have to finish this story…)

Currant Situation (Part Two)

Well, the situation became more interesting as we discovered it wasn’t so easy to get the raisin from Ben’s nose, so now we had to take him to Furness Hospital Children’s Unit, I assume that the Lancaster ward was full.

So we had to travel to Barrow, this is a round trip of about 100 miles from Lancaster.

We drove through rain (torrential) and then sun (glorious) along the South Lakes to be admitted to the Children’s ward. We had a brief assessment and then waited only 15 minutes to see the ENT (Ear, Nose and Throat) specialist.

And he could see no raisin.

We held Ben down, a probe was stuck up the nose…no obstruction. There were two possible conclusions:

1. The raisin is hiding at the back of the nose out of sight (not very likely)

2. Ben has swallowed a delicious bogey-flavoured raisin

So, we have to wait, if it is still trapped somewhere he will start to discharge from the nose or develop a chest infection and we will have to return to the hospital. It is far more likely that he has eaten the raisin via his nose.

Oh well, it was a variance to what we had planned today…

For Nose Raisin (Part One)

(For No Reason)

We are currently sat in the Minor Incidents section, a very new section, of the Accident and Emergency Department at Lancaster Royal Infirmary.

The reason we are here is because Benjamin has managed to jam a raisin up his left nostril.

To be fair, he told us that he had done so, by pronouncing Raisin and Nose just thirty minutes previously. We first asked a pharmacist who said that A&E was required.

We were initially seen in minutes so they could assess if it could be easily extracted. This is not the case, as the juicy beggar is jammed in there tight.

So now they have to render him unconscious so they can go in and extract the raisin.

While we wait I write this first part on my phone and deeply wish I had brought my iPad and some work as we could be here some time.