/reader

The issue isn’t the heat pump. I’m all in support of heat pumps. The issue is the I guess three months (so far) of autistic burnoutwithout being given the space or time to try to carve out an opportunity to recover, and I just can’t take that degree of new disruptive weight right now.

Where the fuck would I go while they’re installing it? I certainly couldn’t stay home.

Where the fuck does my cat go for that entire day? If I’ve got to leave, so does she.

None of which even reaches the fact of all the things I would need somehow to clean before letting people in here, when I barely have the resources to just get through the day right now, and I have to spend this energy I don’t even really have on this catastrophizing because anticipation is always less of a burden than compensation. It might never happen but I have to take the time to run the scenarios now, because if I don’t and it does happen, I’m even more screwed—if that’s even something that’s possible.

Monday’s addenda remain true.

I’m tired.

I’m tired of being autistic.

I’m tired of being trapped.

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Do you floss your teeth?

No. After decades of doing next to nothing about my teeth except intermittently having them filled and pulled (my online bio once remarked that I still had “most, but most assuredly not all” of my teeth), it’s a milestone that they currently get brushed once a day and rinsed with mouthwash once a day.

Tea, coffee, or water?

Coffee. At home, it’s decaffeinated instant. At breakfast out, it’s decaffeinated drip. At coffee out to read, it’s a decaffeinated americano during the week and a decaffeinated along milk latte on the weekend. That said, I’m better than I used to be about drinking water.

Hail Juan
Full of grace
The Bean is with Thee.

Blessed art Thou among bloggers
And blessed is the fruit of Thy agriculture
Coffee.

Holy Juan
Father of twitch
Pray for us sinners
Now and at the hour of our final cup.

Footwear preference?

Shoes. At home, I’ve a paid of indoor loafers that go on when I get dressed or when I come back from being outside. When I leave the house, these days it’s a pair of FitVille wide toe box shoes that I had to get in extra-extra-wide (in terms of the shoe width itself) because I can’t seem to find a regular, medium width shoe, with a wide toe box, and velcro straps.

Favorite dessert?

Jewish egg kichel bow tie cookies, which I only get to have every rare now and again because no one in Portland makes them. (There’s a tin of this in my kitchen right now now because my mother noted me talking about them on Bluesky and this weekend is the despair pit of my birthday.) Otherwise, I typically have a package of Voortman shortbread cookies on hand, but I don’t have one every day. When I do, it tends to be while standing out front of the house, with a mug of coffee, watching the world go by. Every now and then, but less rarely than the egg kichel, I will have pie: apple, cherry, or marionberry.

The first thing you do when you wake up?

These days, there’s a fair to middling chance the answer is “be completely unable to conceive of what it looks like outside my bedroom or the front door to my house for about thirty vaguely terrifying seconds”. More typically, I wake up once early to feed the cat then go back to sleep. When I wake up for real, I catch up on overnight internet on my phone.

Age you'd like to stick to?

There is no good answer to this. I have never been a good age, because my life has never worked right. If I had to pick, perhaps whatever age is represented by the mental conception of my own body, which causes me to emotionally deflate a bit whenever I look in the mirror. Not incidentally this probably is the origin of me once considering the idea of my gender being “potato”.

How many hats do you own?

Five, I think: two Red Sox caps, a sun hat, several cheap bucket hats that are one size too small for me, and my new “jeep cap”. Mostly I just wear the baseball caps and now the jeep cap.

Describe the last photo you took

A garishly edited crop of my head in three-quarter view reflected in dark glass, and I am wearing a black “jeep cap”, a knit cap with visor, and mirrorshades.

Worst TV show

While I’m absolutely certain that I’ve described one or more shows as truly terrible, my aphantasic memory fails me here, and my Trakt history isn’t likely any good because it’s very possible that I never made it past the first episode of anything so truly terrible, and thus it never would have gotten tracked in the first place.

As a child, what was your aspiration for adulthood?

“As a child,” my online bio used to say of me, “he drew pictures of wanting to be an outer space moving van driver. As a middle-aged adult, he is not one.” This is as good a place as any to mention that when my father moved out after my parents split up, everyone was bitching about the unstable ramp into the U-Haul, until I walked over, looked, and asked him if the two hooks were supposed to be latched into the two holes. Whether in reality or merely in retrospective fabulation, everyone stopped and turned, until he walked over, looked, and said, “I’ll be damned, you’re right.” So, while this is not a childhood aspiration for adulthood, it is a childhood realization about adulthood, which is that adults don’t always know what the fuck they are doing. Not so incidentally, I told this story at my father’s memorial service, which we weren’t supposed to have because he’d long expressly told all of us he wanted a party, and I did so expressly as a sort of “fuck you”. It remains one of my proudest moments.

Thankfully, this particular blog challenge apparently does not include tagging others to participate, a bit of cognitive ranking and judgment of which I am not capable.

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Really, the only thing I wanted to say about it is that as someone who lives in a city the federal government desperately wants to depict as war-torn and -ravaged but which responded to such by instead assembling a motley crew of inflatable animal costumes—and calling up the wonder and joy that is #BananaBloc—that all began with an expressly antifascist frog who got shot in the vent with pepper spray, I greatly appreciated the fact that the people of Staten Island when faced with the first-ever Purge experiment mostly just seemed to throw block parties.

(If you’re been reading me for awhile, the idea of inflatable antifascist animal costumes and brass bands dressed as bananas should seem familiar to you.)

As in The First Purge, if the authorities here in the real world want to depict a city as riven by violence they will find a way to do so. In the late afternoon and early evening after Portland’s wildly successfully No Kings protest this past Saturday, federal officers and agents at the ICE building in South Portland did their damnedest on two separate occasions to generate footage of the street billowing with smoke, almost as if Dog-Killer Barbie had ordered war footage with which to deny that the events of No Kings had been peaceful.

Anyway, The First Purge went over well here, so I might or might not start making my way through the rest of them, although so far no one has answered me when I’ve asked them if the others in the series (and I guess there was a season of television, too) also are worth watching.

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Alex Baumhardt:

On Monday, the USDA notified states that there would be no November funding, and Oregon’s human services agency on Monday notified recipients they would not be receiving the assistance after Oct. 31.

In a reply to Baumhardt on Bluesky, I mentioned that in fact I very much have not been notified, and only learned of this from Oregon Capital Chronicle and from Alejandro Figueroa at OPB.

To make this even more ridiculous, reporting requirements continue during this lack of SNAP. While it’s technically true that it’s most likely possible to do a one-off replacement of the SNAP funds that aren’t coming in November due to the Republicans’ government shutdown, it’s also true that I’d then have to report that to the state as income, which then can impact my program eligibility level.

“I’m not sure but we will address it,” my landlord replied to me last Thursday.

This morning began with leaf blowers outside my bedroom window at 8:45 AM, and continued with the apartment renovation noises kicking in around 12:15 PM, which admittedly is much later in the day than usual but also is not “not at all”.

When I left the apartment this afternoon to go for my usual hour sitting outside my regular coffeeshop to read over a decaf americano, I noticed something new at the sidewalk. “Does the existence of a portapotty outside today answer my original question?” I sent my landlord.

Now that my fears are confirmed, I have to wonder just how much urine is outside my living room windows, because the renovations have been ongoing for a month. I should note that the guy in question is here today, which means urinating outside a tenant’s window apparently is not considered to be a fireable offense.

What’s more, now I get anxiety every time I leave my apartment or return to it and I see the guy outside. This comes on top of the ongoing, continuing nervous system dysregulation of the noise of the renovations itself, because even needing to wear earplugs or headphones all day in my own house itself creates its own psychic weight.

Just before writing this, I had to go on a quick grocery errand. Sitting here afterward and writing this all out, my heart rate remained at around 117 BPM. At publication time, it was still 105 BPM.

So, if you’re wondering how the autistic burnout is going, and the denial of any real opportunity to recover, wonder no more.

Addenda

1. Not more than about half an hour after posting this, the Health app sent me an alert: there’d been a new trend spotted in my time asleep. It seems that on average I’ve gone from 8h:34m of sleep per night to 7h:23m of sleep over the past twenty-two weeks, going back to the end of May.

   That puts the new trend starting around the time I did that big Saturday push to go to the Forestry Center for a Twin Peaks thing and then tacked on a side trip to Oregon Zoo, all of which then hammered me pretty hard. Two weeks later, I marched in No Kings and then just days after pushed to do the day trip to Seattle for baseball, all of which hammered me pretty hard.

   One month later, I laid out how dark I consider any future for me that involves having no independent movement, followed quickly by the entire “behind my back” disability lawyer thing, et cetera et cetera et cetera, all of which has hammered me pretty hard.

   Such a dramatic and dysregulating shift in sleep should not come as any surprise, but it’s always nice to have actual data to back up that something is wrong, and everyone and everything really needs to clear the fuck out of my way. Even though, as the original post shows, this clearly isn’t going to happen any time soon.

2. So, while I wait for official confirmation from my landlord that their workers have been peeing outside my living room windows, and that’s why there’s now a portapotty out front, one of them once again this evening around my dinnertime just did whatever it is they do for that 30-60 seconds between my living room windows.

   It’s bad enough that the renovation noise in and of itself is part of why I’m not able to try to recover from autistic burnout, but now I no longer feel comfortable or, frankly, safe around the people they’ve hired to do the work. It’s no wonder my heart has continued to hover right around 100 BPM for the past two hours.

   What’s more, they continue to linger out there despite the workday being done, depriving me of my self-regulating time out front reading over coffee or at least having a coffee and cookie, before it gets dark. It’s not enough for them to contribute to my increasing dysregulation, they have to steal my capacity to engage in self-regulating behaviors, too?

3. If it wouldn’t only cause me more dysregulation from being on public display, I’d walk down to Stormbreaker and ask to use the rage room.

   I’m tired.

   I’m tired of being autistic.

   I’m tired of being trapped.

4. Sometimes I wish I were suicidal. (I'm not.) At least then it would seem like there were something I could do. Instead of there being nothing I can do.

5. For the record, it is the next afternoon and I still have not had a single communication from the landlord since “we will address it” back on Thursday.

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The reason why I almost always use made-up examples in my blog posts is because the example itself is not important. It’s just a tool to illustrate a broader point. But using an actual example carries the risk of distracting people into thinking that the topic of the example itself is what matters. And that’s very rarely the case here on my blog. This is because I’m more interested in what I can only describe as meta-problems: I’m not interested in the topic that’s being discussed; I’m more interested in how we can make sure the discussion itself can happen and be productive, regardless of what’s being discussed.

The fundamental flaw in this approach is that there is no way to talk about meta-problems without talking about actual problems, because the presumptive “view from nowhere” inherent in that approach simply doesn’t exist. Concrete examples are a must-have in order to situate any sort of meta-problems in the real world, which is the only way to make discussions of meta-problems relevant and useful.

Even if there are broad generalizations or categorizations to be drawn from using concrete examples in a discussion of a meta-problem, that only can happen by actually considering the concrete examples down here in the non-Platonic world in which we actually live our day-to-day lives.

It’s in part the hyperbolic nature of the “die now and be dissolved in acid and their families be shot into the sun” aspect of Manu’s puppy-kicking conjecture that renders that conjecture functionally useless as an analysis of any kind of purported meta-problem. If the invented hypothetical is extremely outrageous, and could be thought to represent only a small, outlier minority of opinion in any real situation, then it has nothing in particular to say about our actual lives.

More simply: without specifics, no one can even tell if you’ve identified an actual meta-problem (let alone potentially the meta-problem) and therefore everyone also is left without access to the tools they deserve to have in order to judge whether or not you’ve offered up any kind of solution.

In the end, a failure to provide examples from the real world—especially because you are “not interested in the topic that’s being discussed”—mostly just serves to insulate the observer from any potentially deleterious or uncomfortable effects from engaging with the real world, but living in the real world requires risking those effects. The topic that’s being discussed, whatever it may be, simply cannot be deemed to be an irrelevancy.

We aren’t talking here about an irony such as A Modest Proposal, in which an outrageous example is straight-fadedly pitched as a real-world solution in order to illustrate a specific moral bankruptcy of that real world. Instead, here we’re mostly talking about a purely intellectual exercise that purports to offer an interesting analysis without risking anything, which in the end isn’t a view from nowhere so much as one that looks out at nothing.

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