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In late 2019, I obtained a domain in the .blog TLD based upon that name, at which I then proceeded to spend the bulk of the ensuing Covid-19 pandemic emergency not only newly blogging but also attempting to restore over two decades of posts from countless other sites, services, and domains. It moved around a bit, and went on hiatus almost semi-regularly. Then, in early 2024, I unceremoniously shuttered the entire thing, replacing it with some salient advice from one Franny Glass gleaned from a book I’d suddenly decided to reread for the first time in decades.

“All I know is I’m losing my mind,” Franny said. “I’m just sick of ego, ego, ego. My own and everybody else’s. I’m sick of everybody that wants to get somewhere, do something distinguished and all, be somebody interesting. It’s disgusting—it is, it is. I don’t care what anybody says.”

[…]

“I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete—that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theatre Depart-ment. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”

– J. D. Salinger

I still believe this. I still believe all of this. There’s a reason at least one of my social profiles continues to carry the hashtag, #FrannyWasRight.

Nonetheless, and with as much surprise and all attendant hypocrisy to myself as to anyone else, here I am again, half a year later, blogging.

Today marks for me the completion of having to date traveled 32,120,000,000 miles around the sun, repeatedly looping through 584,000,000 miles over and over again, year after year after year. It’s a calculation that my late father annually performed for me via card until he died in 2008. I haven’t always thought to remember to do it myself, except that for the past two or three years it’s been on my mind.

Perhaps it’s because I’m so damned tired.

Last year, I penned something of a thank you letter to the Australian teen drama Heartbreak High for depicting an autistic shutdown on the way to an autistic meltdown in a way that saw my own experience reflected back to me, despite being a middle-aged man.

I’ll come back to this.

When I’d closed up shop earlier this year, I was in the midst of what we now know was a fatigue flare. Since being diagnosed as autistic late in 2016, my life already largely had become about careful management of my physical and psychological resources: autism itself is fatiguing. This, however, seemed substantially different in both kind and degree, and indeed over the course of the year my new primary care physician and I came to agree: this no longer merely was the fatigue of living autistically in a world that isn’t itself autistic.

This now also was myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome, on top of the fatigue of living autistically.

Life, then, has become ever more so decidedly about the careful management of physical and psychological resources, or what the ME/CFS community refers to as pacing, especially since the month of August presented an even more intense flare than that from earlier in the year. In all likelihood, for whatever reason and whatever the trigger, I’m now living at a new, lesser, shittier baseline—a transition I’ve already made once and don’t in any way relish having to navigate again.

After my autism diagnosis, I took myself to Vocational Rehabilitation in an attempt to correct whatever it was that for the decades prior to diagnosis had me assuming that I couldn’t hold a job simply because I was a failure and a fuckup. Alas, my job placement quickly sent me spiraling into autistic burnout and regular depressive episodes complete with sobbing fits both in the bathroom at work and on my bedroom floor at home.

This was the first precipitous drop in my baseline. Not only did the job placement end after six months, but a year later I had to quit the nonprofit I’d help start after five years, after a spectacular autistic meltdown because the strain on my resources smothered my capacity to self-regulate.

Over the course of the pandemic emergency, I gradually leveled out into a new normal that primarily kept me to my neighborhood, although for a time I was making weekly, rather than monthly, treks all the way across town to Oregon Zoo, and my greatest exertion came to be a (mostly) daily walk of no more than just under a mile and a half, my quickest pace about a sixteen-minute mile exercise. Absent temperatures high enough for my heat intolerance to keep me indoors, this remained the case for a few years.

Then everything changed all over again early this year, when I came back from a walk feeling like I hadn’t eaten all day, and in very quick turn the walks stopped altogether because I no longer had the capacity necessary. This, then, is what sparked me to tell my new doctor that it was time to look more deeply into my fatigue rather than continue assuming its entirety was due to the autistic need for intense resource management.

After two months or so, I was able to build back to the occasional walk, although almost never were they for as much as a mile and a half, and neither were they at a pace much faster than the stroll of a twenty-minute mile. By this time my zoo trips had reverted to a pre-pandemic monthly pattern but increasingly I was having difficulty and on several occasions had to turn around and come home when I’d only just barely arrived.

This, in fact, is how August began: with a zoo trip that had me planning in advance for its impact upon my energy levels, stopping on the way to hit a food truck for my go-to restorative meal that I’d often find myself dragging to get after the zoo. Nonetheless, half an hour into my visit, I had to sit down for twenty minutes and do absolutely nothing. No reading. No scrolling. Just sit.

Then I had to gather what little I had left in the tank to make my way back out again to hop public transit back home. It took me fully half an hour just to reach the exit.

There are exactly two days every year that like clockwork make me feel the weight of living. We’ve talked about this in therapy, and I’ve made it clear that I allow myself those two days, whatever other days might or might not press down upon me during the year. I don’t force it. If it happens, it happens. I just don’t fight it if it does. This is the first day. New Year’s is the second. The ones most naturally and wearily inclined to prompt the thought, “Here we go again.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in therapy this year struggling with the possibility that the flare early in the year had not simply knocked me for a loop for awhile but in fact knocked me clear into a new normal, a new, shittier baseline. Much of this time I spent finding ways to convince myself that surely it was the former, and eventually I’d be back to the slow and steady baseline I’d achieved after my autistic burnout and over the course of the pandemic emergency.

August, however, clearly begged to differ.

My reality now is that for all intents and purposes I am trapped within the confines of my neighborhood, where I’ve started to add alternative venues for my regular, weekly brunch out. If I can’t even get myself to the zoo even just once a month, at least maybe my proximal routine can have a few more waypoints and stopovers. Despite being at what by all accounts is an even newer, even shittier baseline than the one I found myself at earlier in the year, I nonetheless kept to one annual action: filing a “Take a Breather” request with the Autism Society of Oregon, which for the past couple of years has paid for my Oregon Zoo membership.

It’s beyond anyone’s ability to tell whether or not I will be able to make much use of it over the course of the coming year, but it’s been such a critical part of my mental health regimen that I convinced myself that it’s not worth risking having a good period at some point over the next year and not having the ease of that membership.

It’s worth noting here that just as I’ve, to whatever extent, lost the respite of the zoo, last year I also lost the respite of the nonprofit alluded to earlier. Having returned to volunteer for The Belmont Goats last year in order to manage their social media presence during the herd’s tenth anniversary, I then months later quit for the second and final time. After the first severance, eventually I was able to return as a visitor. This latest having been the result of an ethical dispute, the break is clean and final.

It’s true that somehow I managed in mid-September to make it to, through, and back from the Soul Coughing reunion show at Crystal Ballroom. In the aftermath month since, however—especially after needing to push myself to clean the bathroom, on what possibly was the heaviest fatigue day I’d ever experienced, because the landlord was coming over the next morning—I’ve lately been dealing with evenings of swollen lymph nodes in my neck and shoulders.

As I write this, I’m awaiting both an appointment for a CT scan and a referral to rheumatology. While my new primary care physician and I came to an early concurrence that my lived experience reflected ME/CFS, they’re still doing all the due diligence, focused mostly with making sure that my pulmonary and lymphatic sarcoidosis isn’t masking something else—like lymphoma. I can’t, however, get the CT until late November, or into rheumatology until late December.

So, I just keep taking anti-inflammatories and wrapping my neck or shoulder in warm towels or stuffing a hot water bottle into my hoodie to keep it wedged in place. It is what it is, whatever it is.

Two months ago, I emailed my mother and my sister with my “future arrangements” First, at my eventual funeral (or whatever) the song “Spitting Off the Edge of the World” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs is to be played. Second, my eventual obituary should read only, “Bix Frankonis, resident of [place], died [day], of [cause] at age [age]. So it goes.”

At some point, I think I also expressed an interest in being disposed of through human composting, although that would deprive me of the headstone which this past week I imagined as reading, “This was an awful place to be dropped down halfway.”

This year, I wrote something of a love letter to a little-seen and critically-panned movie from 2021 that uses The Smiths and their fans to argue that what people want and need is to see and be seen for who they truly are, an accidental sequel of sorts to that post about being seen by Heartbreak High.

It’s not that I saw or see myself in Shoplifters of the World, but that this idea of seeing and being seen resonates with me as I continue my mediocre midlife and slow, inexorable slide toward financial, and then eventual if not rapid physical and psychological, oblivion.

Much like I’d sent that earlier post to the contact person for the autistic actor who portrays the autistic character on Heartbreak High because I thought it was worth it to tell them that their work made someone feel seen, I sent my post about Shoplifters to the filmmaker—in this case to say that despite the film’s wider invisibility someone not only saw it but saw them, saw what they were trying to do.

My email simply said, “FWIW.” Followed by the link.

Two days later came Stephen Kijak’s emailed response:

What is it worth? It is worth quite a lot actually. Talk about being seen - thank you from the bottom of my heart for writing this - the film was completely destroyed critically when it was released deep into the heart of Covid straight to streaming...no premiere, no celebration - 10+ years of work seemed to evaporate overnight. Every once in a while someone gets in touch with a message - not quite like this - but a message nonetheless saying that the film has touched them, connected with them. Thanks again for such a deep and thorough read of the film (and you completely nailed Billy.) All of the characters are based on me and my 80’s friends - the only complete fabrication is Mickey - and while I wrote it, Joe M (and our brilliant costume designer) really brought him to life in a way I could never have imagined. And we all had a blast making this in Troy!

The next day:

I shared your blog post with the cast and crew and it really warmed their hearts.

We just want to be seen.

Shortly before I quit blogging earlier this year, I’d finally sat myself down to binge The Bear.

One thing I noted straight away was that we should all spend more time using things like “Corner” and “Behind” and (perhaps most of all) “Heard”. I’d suggested that I might even be down for it if we all just started saying “Yes, Chef!” to each other.

I don’t mean we should be saying these exact things, these exact words, but that even just in our day to day interactions, we have a sort of duty of care to see each other and hear each other. It was the reason for my taking up the idea that blogging is the empathy engine of the web, and the reason why I’ve said over and over—even just recently yet again—that blogging isn’t dead, or even dying.

Even though my own blogging did, six months ago, because I’d deliberately killed it cold, to try “having the courage to be an absolute nobody”.

Because #FrannyWasRight.

At the very start of this year in which I quit blogging and then later suddenly resumed, I’d suggested that this was the year for the form to pump up the volume, adding irony to the fact that three months later my own volume dropped to exactly nil.

As of today, except for a batch of photography posts for which I’m still needing to solve some technical issues, what I consider my current blogging era—from 2018 until today—is restored and accessible. That’s a larger batch of posts even than where I’d left off when I quit in March. The trick will be figuring out how to make it last beyond me, when the time comes to leave something behind, so maybe the world will see me after it’s too late to matter.

Thirty-two trillion miles is a long way to travel, and that doesn’t even include the miles accounted for by Earth’s rotation, let alone the rotation of our solar system around the galactic focus. That’s a lot of mileage I’ll be accruing even as my autistic and myalgic fatigue increasingly keeps me confined within a one-mile radius here in downtown St. Johns.

The passage of every mile, be it on foot or on orbit, subtracts a portion of life. I’ve already traveled a considerable portion of the way toward my death, and now I’m closing in on the reality that I mostly will move only as the planet carries me around the sun. So, then, maybe all of this is why I’m here, once again writing into the great and yawning abyss of the web: as my real geographies contract, perhaps I’m reaching—flailing, really—toward those ethereal, untouchable geographies.

For now, anyway. Until I quit on it again, or everything else up and quits on me. Which, at some point, it will, and must. As it will, and must, for everyone.

So it goes.

Here we go again.

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First it was the suddenly-fluid plans for due diligence on the fatigue, which had been decided in-room at an appointment to be one thing and then suddenly changed to another thing without explanation. I ended up having to slowly and methodically explain to my doctor why I was confused, what caused the confusion, and then detail how at my old nonprofit even before my autism diagnosis we’d discovered that for any potential changes to processes, procedures, or plans I needed to be taken through the steps of how and why, otherwise what I now know to be my PDA will kick in and my brain simply resists.

Then it became me asking a simple question: given that when I got bitten by a cat they gave me a tetanus/diphtheria shot even though I’d asked in the room about the fact that in a few months, come January, I’d be due for the full TDAP shot anyway—given this, what should I be looking to get come January? The answer I got back was that I was up to date on TDAP, but what about the overdue pneumococcal pneumonia shot? Except that in two months I won’t be up to date on TDAP which is why I asked and anyway they didn’t respond directly to what I was asking, and also what overdue pneumococcal pneumonia shot, given that I am 54 not 65 and this literally is the very first time anyone has mentioned it to me so how can it be overdue?

Look, I get that medical professionals at most levels are overworked and underpaid. Nonetheless, I do not think it’s asking too much to have their healthcare decisions explained to me, or for them to answer the actual questions I’ve asked given that I’m providing specific details and context to why I am asking.

This decent even reach the instance in between these that I forgot about until just now, where after my doctor said they were going to refer me to get a new CT scan I messaged them back saying that all I see is an appointment ticket to rheumatology, nothing for radiology, and they reply just saying that they only put the order in so it might take a few days, when the entire point was what the hell is this rheumatology referral when no one ever said anything about a rheumatology referral?

Dealing with multiple ongoing disabling conditions is difficult enough, just managing how any given day will be is difficult enough, without also feeling like all the communications labor in my healthcare decisions is on my back. It’s especially frustrating when you step back and realize that everyone should have the expectation that their doctor’s decisions be explained to them and that their actual, specific questions be answered.

Even if you’re completely healthy with no disablements or impairments, you should have these expectations, and they should be met as a matter of course.

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Early this morning, I received two texts and a voicemail purporting to be a declined transaction notification from their fraud department, but the telephone number came up in a search for scam alerts. I tried calling the credit union at their regular number but since call volume was high and the telephone is not my favorite thing for stress, I opted instead to send a message via their app, with screenshots of the texts and voicemail message.

Then after breakfast I walked to one of my regular coffeeshops, ordered my latte, and had tap after tap after tap of my Apple Pay declined.

I told the barista he might want to pull my order out of the queue because my card had been declined and I was heading up the street to the credit union to see what was what, and I’d just leave my travel mug there in the meantime.

Short version from the credit union: the texts and call were real, and someone really did attempt to use my debit card at something called Peruvian Connection. Since I hadn’t responded to the texts or voicemail in a timely manner, my card had been turned off as a precaution. We disabled it entirely and they printed me a new card on the spot.

(Bonus shoutout here to the teller dealing with this for coming over to make sure it then got added to Apple Wallet, because he’d seen some problems with it and he just wanted to make sure I didn’t walk out and then have an issue. While their new “hole your phone near the chip on your card” process did not work, manual entry worked fine. So, I didn’t need any additional assistance, but I thanked him for thinking of it.)

Back, then, to the coffeeshop, where when I walked up the barista pointed down the counter to my travel mug, said I was all good and that my card was declined—as if I had not told him that to begin with before I left, explaining why I was leaving in the middle of an order.

(This is the same new-ish barista there who at least twice has almost made me a regular instead of a decaf, at least one of those times because he was too distracted chatting with another custom who was hanging out at the counter while my drink was being made. He’s not my favorite.)

It’s unclear to me how they got my card number. My physical debit card stays at home, because I use Apple Pay everywhere I go. I can’t even remember the last time I had to bring my card with me in case I needed it. Presumably this was part of some data breach or another. After lunch, I sat down with my accounting app to make sure I found all the places where I needed to update autopayment information, with three days to spare until the next schedule transaction.

At any rate, while I hate the entire process of having to remove my mirrorshades on the rare occasion when I have to visit my credit union branch (it’s way too bright in there for my autistic sensory processing disorder), this is not the first time what could have been an all-day affair that would try and test my chronic fatigue instead was just an annoyance, because I was smart and decided to bank local—very, very local—when I moved here.

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I don’t really talk about local politics much anymore. Were I to start a blog (I’m not, so don’t get excited), it’d be called The Thumb because that’s what our new District 2 looks like—it’s a side view, there’s even a thumbnail—and also as a play on The Finger.

At any rate, since this election ushers in Portland’s new form of city government and its use of ranked choice voting, I thought I would, I hope briefly, mention how I voted and why.

Mayor

Like most people, I wasn’t overly thrilled with our choices for mayor. That seems to happen a lot here. The most important thing here was that I did as the Don’t Rank Rene movement asked and did not rank Rene Gonzalez at all. In the end, I only ranked five candidates and my fifth was a write-in.

1. Liv (Viva) Osthus. I do not actually think Osthus is the best candidate for mayor, but I wanted to communicate two things: the lackluster field, and my appreciation for Osthus’ focus on the idea that Portland has lost control of its own narrative. Given the ways in which the mayoralty changes with the new form of government, the office really will be the sort of “Head Storyteller”, to use the phrase from her OPB questionnaire.

2. Keith Wilson. I’m loathe to back a businessman for mayor, but at the same time two things are true: the field is lackluster, and of all levels of government arguably a city is the most business-like. The business-inclined often have a harsher view of the unhoused, but at least in [his OPB questionnaire] he states that he “do[es] not support jailing individuals for simply refusing shelter”—although that leaves some wiggle room to find other pretexts to arrest. Given the ways in which the mayoralty changes with the new form of government, I don’t think Wilson is overly a risk, presuming a council ready to exercise its powers.

3. Carmen Rubio. The rest of my rankings ultimately are more about making sure I’d cast votes against Gonzalez than about any kind of enthusiastic support. Here, for all intents and purposes in my own head I ranked Rubio and Mapps equally, and effectively flipped a coin as to who’d be third and who’d be fourth.

4. Mingus Mapps. See above.

5. Phil Belmont. Enough said.

District 2

Much of my early culling for the council seats to be elected from the Thumb came from this North Peninsula Review article, and much of that came around the issue of using a vacancy tax or other tools to push back against out-of-town property owners or private equity firms just sitting on empty storefronts, including the idea of activating them with short-term or temporary project use.

Part of the argument here is that neighborhoods can find themselves in either a virtuous cycle or a vicious circle when it comes to what exists to go do and who is bothering to come out to do things. If half your downtown (like St. Johns, say) or business district is empty storefronts, it seems less like a place to be. The less that people want to be there, the less anyone wants to open a business there.

So, let’s force the issue.

When reading through various interviews or questionnaires for these candidates, I did downrank in my initial thinking anyone who couldn’t stick to word limits in their answers, but that didn’t quite as heavily factor into my final decisions.

1. Michelle DePass. As noted by Willamette Week, District 2 “includes the city’s highest concentration of historically Black neighborhoods, including Albina”, and as noted by Portland Mercury, “when she was 12 years old, DePass worked at the Black Panthers’ free health clinic on North Williams Avenue, in the heart of the historic Albina neighborhood”. DePass also made reference to a “car free downtown” on Bike Portland, and in her OPB questionnaire states that “no one should be criminalized for being houseless”.

2. Sameer Kanal. This ranking comes mostly from a combination of his OPB questionnaire and the Mercury endorsement. In the former, Kanal mentions police accountability, housing (including “market-rate, affordable, subsidized, and social housing”), not expanding I-5 as we cap it to restore Lower Albina, and supporting a vacancy tax.

3. Jennifer Park. As indicated in the Review article, Park supports “options around taxing vacancies”, while the Mercury endorsements note “her career working in nonprofits to advance social justice principles”. In her OPB questionnaire she indicated she wants to “prioritize Portland Street Response operating at a 24/7 service level”.

4. Elana Pirtle-Guiney. My final three rankings were more or less tied, but looking back at my notes again, Pirtle-Guiney probably should have been sixth on my list. I think I got a little bit autistically overwhelmed trying to find all my information while filling out my ballot today. Here it came down to a cross between her OPB questionnaire where she notes that “jailing someone for being homeless leaves them homeless but now with a criminal record”, and the Week endorsement.

5. Marnie Glickman. See above note, although looking back at my notes again, Glickman probably should have been fourth on my list. In her OPB questionnaire she notes she wants to “ensure Portland Street Response operates 24/7 with an expanded portfolio”, and on Bike Portland she notes that “Portland’s transportation system should facilitate the safe movement of humans of all shapes, sizes, and abilities”.

6. Laura Streib. See above note, although looking back at my notes again, Streib probably should have been fifth on my list. In the Review piece, Streib backed “incentivize and/or have a vacancy tax for landlords to activate their spaces for small businesses, nonprofits, or pop-ups to revitalize our downtown sectors”. In her OPB questionnaire had the right things to say about housing, including the need to “ensure we build units that can accommodate our aging populations”, backs some degree of participatory budgeting, and says she “do[es] not favor arresting and jailing people who are houseless”.

In the end here, I think I was satisfied with looking at my picks and seeing people of color and women, two things I most decidedly am not. In no way does that automatically guarantee that useful and dynamic perspectives and policies will follow, but I feel comfortable with voting to push the inaugural District 2 in that direction.

Just a few stray, remaining notes. Yes, perhaps surprisingly to some, I voted against the “rebate” measure. Although I support some sort of Universal Basic Income, this particular design is suspect, as is the fact that it seems to be an experiment on the part of California businessmen who I guess either wanted to use our state as a testbed or are just somehow fucking with us?

Finally, of course I voted for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, because our choice right now is between outright fascism and very much non-fascist liberals upon whom political pressure can be brought to bear to push them leftward on some problematic positions such as the continuing genocide in Gaza, which anyway is something on which a sitting Vice President can’t exactly stray too far off current White House course.

First, stop Mine Furor.

Then, get President Harris to protect Palestinians, for whom it really would only get much, much worse under a second Trump term.

As noted by Dave Karpf last year (and mentioned here at the time), the choice is between electing the Democrat and then “fight to articulate and pass new proposals the make the world better”, or electing the fascist and then “fight like hell just to keep the world from getting worse”. Anything else you might do with your vote for President is about your own sense of moral purity, but there is no moral purity in a presidential election.

There is only harm reduction.

So, there you have it. Your rare taste of Portland Communique —the Thumb edition—nearly twenty years later. My ballot gets sent back tomorrow, and then I join the ranks of the breath-holders.

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Even before my presumptive ME/CFS diagnosis (my primary care physicians continues to do due diligence before we lock this down, although we’ve agreed that my lived experience in recent years certainly seems to reflect that of ME), my experience of being a late-diagnosed autistic was one of needing to engage in careful resource management.

Autism, it seemed came with fatigue, essentially because our brains have to do so much more work to navigate the neurotypical world and situate ourselves within it without breaking, not to mention that as I neared my diagnosis for developmental coordination disorder the occupational therapist noted how methodically I moved because my brain is doing extra processing just to ape “normal” movement.

(It should be noted that that early source for autism including fatigue, as I later discovered, shortly thereafter was diagnosed with ME/CFS.)

Anyway, my point is that I’m fully aware of the idea that mental effort and exertion “counts” because of course mental work is work. What I got stuck on in Winnie’s post was this:

The researchers believe that by working on mentally draining tasks repetitively we can train our brains to be less exhausted, and this will translate to improvements in our physical performances.

The reason I got stuck on this was that there’s some indication when it comes, say, to our sensory environment, that autistics don’t habituate and that this is why attempts at inflicting “exposure therapy” upon autistic people might only be doing them more harm. This idea that we can train our brains to be less exhausted and so be less physically exhausted as well is completely alien to me, much in the way that my shrinking world is evidence that my problem isn’t deconditioning.

None of which is to say that these researchers are wrong when considered more generally. I’m just noting that once again what research indicates might be the normative case does not seem to apply to my autistic brain, my dyspraxic nervous system, or my chronically fatigued bodymind, and I guess I might be exercising a bit of catastrophizing in the sense that I wanted to get this down “on paper” before some doctor tries to tell me to exercise my brain more in order to build up my body.

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