Jelly Belly 'Holiday Favorites' review.

1. Candy Cane- Tastes like slightly stale peppermint. Very much evocative of a candy cane one accidentally packes up with the ornaments then furtively eats the next year like some sad animal. Good job.
2. Cranberry Sauce- Initially sorta bitter but resolves into a tart crantastic finish, like one has picked the dried juice ring from around the mouth of an Ocean Spray bottle. Chewy! Efficient execution.
3. Pumpkin Pie- Notes of cinnamon and what I can only describe as 'beta carotene taste' blended with absolutely nothing else at all. Meh. I ain't mad at it.
4. Hot Chocolate - While I do taste chocolate, the 'hot' vibe is indeed dubious. Who cares? It's Christmas!
5. Eggnog- Starts off with an urgent sour note reminiscent of a massive Mimosa induced vomiting episode I inflicted on myself last summer but upon further chewing is actually not bad. Congratulations for successfully creating, marketing and selling what is essentially a nutmeg jelly bean, guys. 🍸🍸🍸
Enjoy!

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

-Frank Herbert, Dune

Once, when I was five, I went to a funeral with my parents and grandparents in Phil Campbell, Alabama, near Tuscaloosa. The funeral was for my great grandmother, who had apparently been in very poor health for a while, according to my grandparents. The day of the funeral was warm and balmy, framed by diffuse sunlight, soft breezes and birdsong. After the burial, people lingered in the cemetery, saying hellos and commiserations to distant friends and family members in town for the funeral. Eventually, as with any family gathering, cameras materialized from handbags and suit pockets. I posed with my family in front of a frothy bank of those lipstick pink azaleas that just scream 'small southern town,' all gawky and awkward in the front row. I had no idea what to do. Two conflicting concepts drew guns and waged war in my head.

Concept #1

Smile for photos!

Concept #2

Don't smile at funerals!

Granted, these were both my childish distillations of guidelines for behavioral norms impressed upon me by my parents and grandparents. But to a five year old with a propensity for literalism, the contradiction was too much. Who was in charge here? How could these two worlds be allowed to collide? To smile or not to smile, THAT was the question! I had to decide. My aunt raised her camera. “Okay, everybody. Ready?” My head was spinning. I had to pick a facial expression and commit to it. As I often did when in doubt, I resorted to examining the facts as I knew them. The day was beautiful, the person who had died was no longer suffering (as I'd heard people say over and over all day) and my grandmother was always so pleased when I behaved like a sweet little lady, so.... This seemed to settle the whole thing. I held my head high, took a deep breath and cheesed it ear to ear.

Snap!

I never heard the end of it. When the photos came back from Kmart or wherever, my father was utterly brutal in his mortification. “I've never been so embarrassed in my life! Why are you smiling like that? It was your great grandmother's funeral!” He thrust the photo into my hand. “What's wrong with you?” I didn't have an answer for that, so I just looked at the photo I now held clenched in my fists like a subpoena. Staring up at me were four composed, somber adults and one little blonde girlchild, grinning ear to ear and making spazzy jazz hands for the camera. In retrospect, it seems like a lot of fuss over nothing and that the adults involved who got so bent out of shape clearly have some pretty big problems of their own. But none of that changes the impression the whole incident made on me. Now, when I think back through my life, I see this as the beginning.

Up to now, my blog has consisted exclusively of scraps and fragments of ideas for short stories or novels. I've used the blog format as a testing ground, a place where I could throw out an idea, get some feedback and get acclimated to the idea of other people reading my work. Now, I think it's time to level up and expand the scope of this blog as I transition towards, hopefully, writing full time. I'll still have to keep my day job for now. I hope this doesn't affect my writing too much but, since dividing time between between this blog and the novel I'm developing will inevitably be an issue, it probably will. But I'm not going to let that stop me. I know I'm just starting out, a lifelong closet writer with flaws and scars and imperfections to boot. In the past, I've let a strange fear of the mistakes I might make hold me back, keep me quiet and hesitant. But now, I just don't care anymore. All I ask is that you read what I write with an attitude of discovery and patience. These are my baby steps and I know it will get better all the time.

I've been wanting to blog about my personal experiences with autism for a while, but always felt inhibited about doing so. Maybe I felt this way because I was finishing my nursing degree and establishing a career in a small town and didn't want to be conspicuous. Maybe I doubted the validity of my experiences. That wouldn't surprise me. Once I started actually telling people I had Asperger's syndrome, I was routinely told “But you don't act autistic.” I almost felt that, at times, people were contradicting me outright. This in and of itself is interesting, as the motivation for telling someone that you know more about them than they know about themselves is unclear to me. And, as anyone who actually knows a bit about Asperger's is aware, women often present quite differently than men in that we're considered to be more skilled at mimicking 'normal' social behavior (appropriate facial expressions, tones of voice, ect.). But none of that really matters anymore. My autistic traits are part of what defines me and have been all my life, for better or worse. As I expand my pursuits in writing and art, I feel a visceral need to pull the mask away and let you see what I'm really like underneath. And since I'm just an overgrown kid who's in love with Halloween, Vodou and all things macabre and mysterious, this is a very exciting feeling. So take my hand (metaphorically only, please) as I step from the shadows into the light. Don't turn away in fear now or you might miss something good!

I was formally diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome while living in England in the summer of 1999. Pretty cool, in a science fiction-esque sort of way. Anyway, the doctor evaluating me was really surprised that I hadn't been diagnosed prior to my twenties, considering that I'd been hospitalized three times between the ages of fourteen and seventeen for exacerbation of behaviors that clearly fit diagnostic criteria. I can only assume that my father's then spiraling alcoholism and the cripplingly maladaptive coping mechanisms that my parents displayed during their involvement in my treatment overshadowed the more subtle clues on my diagnostic path. I can't help but feel compelled to assume than an earlier diagnosis could have possibly changed so many things in my life for the better, but then you never really know. At any rate, I was just thrilled to have a diagnosis. Finally, so many things began to make sense. There were actually reasons for the so much of what I felt, how I acted, what was important to me- reasons that helped me understand and accept myself more than ever before. The whole experience of diagnosis and learning what it meant to be neuroatypical has been and continues to be a revelation for me. I've devoted much of my adult life so far to learning to deal with the difficulties. Now, I've decided that the time has come to explore the benefits.

“C'mon, c'mon, c'mon, c'mon and touch me, baby. Can't you see that I am not afraid...”
The Doors

Everybody wants and/or needs to be touched sometimes. But for us autistics and Aspergians, touch can get a little, um, touchy. For someone on the autistic spectrum, the intensity of the neurological impact of tactile stimulation coupled with a propensity for accruing a build up of sensory input more quickly than a neurotypical person can make even very casual, noninvasive tactile stimulation uncomfortable. In fact, these two things often lead to an inability to tolerate all kinds of sensory input and, if not intervened upon, can cause a meltdown. Meltdowns suck. They're very fatiguing. Imagine running a marathon, breaking the finish line tape, collapsing on the ground with exhaustion and instead of everybody patting you on the back and giving you a trophy, they just stand over you and shake their heads, whispering to each other in ominous tones. No bueno. Anyway, my first memory of a serious tactile issue involves socks. Specifically, the seams that run across the toes of socks. Oh, the battles my mother and I had over how to get a sock on my foot without it feeling like I had electrified polyurethane rope coiled around my toes or something. These days, I'm happy to be a grown woman who can buy her own seamless socks, thank you very much. But I'll never forget what a big deal it was at the time, both the discomfort and the conflict that ensued from trying to explain to my parents why I couldn't stand the way they felt. Conflict is also very fatiguing. Energy spent trying to make your parents understand why you don't want to wear certain items of clothing or speak in front of a group of people or join the cheerleading squad is less energy available for things a child is genuinely interested in and when so much of an autistic child's energy is already drained by all the interaction of just a regular day at school, it seems not just foolish but a bit abusive to appropriate even more of it for power struggles and self justification. Don't get me wrong. There's nothing inherently wrong with the activities I listed or with an autistic person pushing the boundaries of their perceived limits to branch out and do things they ordinarily might avoid. I think the difference is when it's at the autistic person's choosing (which can certainly be nurtured by gentle suggestions and encouragement) rather than “because that's what everybody else does.”

Problematic footwear aside, my more profound sensory problems come not so much from contact with inanimate objects as with with anything possessing a central nervous system. I experience a sensation I can only describe as 'conducting' the other person's emotional 'energy' (for lack of a less corny word), as if I'm feeling whatever they are feeling. Even the cat laying against me as I write this, while pleasant in many ways, feels a bit like being plugged up to a battery. I remember in nursing school, there was another student that gave me this feeling to such a degree that just standing near her was like standing too close to a transformer box. I spent my whole pediatric clinical rotation trying to escape her eerily invasive aura just so I could think straight to do my work. Experiences like these lead me to question some beliefs about autism and decreased empathy. Could what at times seems like diminished capacity for empathy in an autistic person actually be simply dysregulated empathy?

Empathy is important for me in my job as a psychiatric nurse. It helps me more accurately assess patients as well as helping me understand what they need in terms of therapeutic communication. In other words, it makes me a better clinician. I've found that my capacity for empathy is not only equal to that of any neurotypical but actually stronger. But stronger isn't necessarily better, because this results in a constant barrage of empathic input that I have little ability to regulate. The more I interact, I eventually become so overwhelmed that I start to shut down. The 'shut down' that follows a 'melt down' is a defense mechanism, the brain's way of saying “enough!” and pulling the plug on sensory input. I wonder if this pattern of over-stimulation followed by the withdrawal of shutting down creates a false impression of overall decreased empathy. Certainly, a person encountered during the 'shut down' phase of this cycle would seem less empathetic. I know when I reach that point, I'm often even temporarily nonverbal. And the more sensory issues a person has, the more frequently they would go through this process. So rather than simply lacking empathy, it seems like neuroatypicals are possibly prone to dysregulation of empathy, creating a pattern 'input fatigue' that affects the person's behavior. I know there are potentially many factors involved in how neuroatypicals experience and express empathy. Author and autism advocate John Elder Robison discusses the concept of 'intellectual empathy' in his writings, where empathy is experienced more as a mental process and not necessarily expressed in an socially orthodox way. While I think that may be the case for many people on the autistic spectrum, I can't help but speculate about the overall effect dysregulated empathy could have on how we express our feelings and how we are perceived by others.

In a study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 34, No. 2, April 2004 titled The Empathy Quotient: An Investigation of Adults with Asperger Syndrome or High Functioning Autism,and Normal Sex Differences, the researchers found that, although the test subjects did seem to lack reflexive empathic reactions to various situations, when further assessed regarding the effect their behavior had on others, they expressed concern and remorse that they had caused pain or upset. This is very different to the behavior of a psychopath or sociopath, who not only can generally predict and anticipate the emotional reactions of others to his or her behavior but often uses this knowledge in a calculating way to manipulate others. I'm not sure just what this proves, besides a certain level of consistency in behavior among the test subjects, who were all on the autistic spectrum. But it certainly quite emphatically implies the need for more self advocacy on the part of the autistic community. A person who doesn't think like me, no matter how potentially intelligent or observant, will never be able to truly know and describe my experiences. Think of it this way, if a loin roars at you from behind the bars at the zoo, you can hypothesize that she's angry, hungry, frightened, frustrated, hates your stupid guts, you name it. But what you may never know is that a zookeeper just quietly transported a swan past the lion's enclosure right outside of view. You may have been oblivious but the lion knows all about the swan because she can smell it! At the end of the day, it's all about perception! I am the lion! (Note: This was a real event from my childhood, which took place at the City Park Zoo in New Orleans, LA. I was right against the enclosure fence. I felt the lion's breath, stared into her eyes and realized she would ALWAYS know more than me.)

Back to the incriminating photo. When I see that picture now, I can't help but laugh. The sad part is, I'm sure no one present gave a damn that I was smiling like I was on the red carpet instead of at my great grandmother's funeral. I'm sure my great grandmother looking on while surfing the ether didn't care, either. But I can see now that the reaction I got from my dad made a big impression on me, one that I'll never forget and apparently will work very hard for the rest of my life to transcend. All a person with autism wants is the same chances to learn and make mistakes that everybody else gets.

You may wonder how all the things I've talked about in this blog tie up. The introduction of my foray into writing, autism, sensory issues, empathy. It all comes together nicely to illustrate the ultimate point of this blog entry. Which is that I can't do the 9-5 'constant interaction with other human beings' thing anymore. It's wearing me out, physically and psychologically. I've tried very hard to fit into the neurotypical world. I've made very convincing masks and worn them well. But somewhere in the process, I betrayed myself and lost the plot. And here I am now, struggling to be someone I never really even wanted to be in the first place. Maybe I had something to prove. I probably shouldn't be so honest. Maybe it makes me look weak or unprofessional. Truthfully, you could balance the number of fucks I give about that on the head of a pin. Behold me, for I am the truth. This journey begins now, at this moment in time with these words. I might suck at this. I might fail. But then again, I might not.

#autism #aspergers #newwriter #neurodiversity #southernlit

Goth Jogging

or

I Run With the Night

There's a wealth of literature these days devoted to the everyday struggles of the neuroatypical individual. That's good though, because it educates the public and gives us a forum in which to compare notes and offer each other advice and support. But in this blog entry, I'd like to take a little time to explore one of the the pleasures I derive from my autism. That's right. Pleasures. Because the pleasures I get from my neurological differences are very real, just as real as the hassles. So I want to take you down a different path tonight. I think you'll like it. I know the path is full of shadows and we can barely see where we're going, but what if I told you I had other senses to guide us? Do you trust me? You should. I know the night like the back of my hand. If you don't mind the dark, keep reading and stick close to me.

I've always loved the night time. You see, I'm a different person at night. The sensory issues that often hold me hostage to alternating currents of overload and numbness during the day transform as the sun sets. I can only describe it as the sensation of my brain cooling down like a radiator in a parked car after a hot day on the road. To lots of people, the dark is something to be feared. To me, it's part church, part laboratory, part playground. Even as a child as young as four, I played outside at night. Roaming the streets and alleys like a little white haunt, fleet of foot and swift of shadow. I loved everything about it. Velveteen light from passing windows. Delicious cooking smells and fabric softener. Bare feet on cool, smooth grass, on razor gravel, on tarmac warm as freshly baked bread. Perfume and gasoline. Hide and go seek until you're found and kissed too quickly to protest. Freshly cut grass and cigarettes. Older men in their garages, wearing fluorescent halos as they pray over car engines. Clink and rattle of doors opening and closing, people coming and going like actors on a stage. A wonderful world of bruised skies wrapped in purple spiderweb clouds where baby spider stars sparkle like tiny gemstones. Kissing cool breezes or moist, sticky air licking my skin. Mosquitoes swimming in my smoky breath. Dappling, dancing leaves and barking dogs. No past. No future. Only right now, captured and immaculate in a veil of blue shadows. A slice of a parallel dimension bleeding through and visible to those who would look.

I looked. I saw. I still see it. When I run at night, I travel back to this time, to endless summers of gorgeous immortality and ignorance. When I run at night, I realize I never really left.

The Waiting Room

“Where are we?”

Chance and Dylan walked side by side, surfing on their silent footfalls. Streetlights bowed overhead, spraying frigid light across the tarmac.

“My neighborhood.”

Dylan stooped to pick up a small white rock. He aimed and chucked it at an garbage can. The rock glanced off the aluminum drum without complaint and bounced away, out of sight. Sky here was nothing than a black ceiling, devoid of light or ornamentation. The air was bland and still as a headstone. This place was wrong footed, like a waiting room without a doors.

“No, Dylan.” Chance stepped in front of the kid. “It may look like your neighborhood” although Chance felt no chill, she shivered. “but it isn't.” She looked around. “Where is this place?”

All told, Dylan didn't know really where they were. So much had happened tonight, he still struggled to piece it together. Light from the bathroom, deep in the night. His tender ears throbbing in time with the dripping tap as he lay in his parents' bed, next to his mother's soft pastel shape. How could he describe the pain the insistent noise caused him? He'd tried so many times. Battles lost. Words that never came and if they did, didn't serve him, anyway. Over and over until he couldn't stand it anymore and snapped, punching and kicking in the bed like a boy possessed, striking his sleeping mother. His dad suddenly filling the doorway, blocking the light but bringing a noise all his own. Then the two of them, from the bed to the floor, arms locked around each other in a rough embrace. Dylan was a big boy now, thirteen years old and roundabouts 197 lbs. But dad was pretty big, too. In his father's arms, Dylan saw stars explode behind his eyelids like dull red fireworks. The sight seemed to take his breath away. Dylan gasped for air. Darkness covered him like a cloak, put a shadowfinger to his lips.

After that, this place.

Dylan seemed to consider the question. He frowned lightly and shrugged. One hundred percent teen aged boy all over.

“Dunno.”

Houses paraded up and down the street in the dark, lit from within yet flat as magazine pages.

“I mean, it looks like my street.” Eyes wide, he looked all around “But I could be wrong. Hey, I need to tell you something.” The pair sat down together on the curb. Chance stuffed her hands in her pockets and watched Dylan expectantly. As he spoke, he cast his gaze upward, reading the matte black sky.

“Not sure why I know this” he laughed under his breath “but you need to understand some things about that guy chasing you.”

Chance blanched in the sodium vapor moonlight.

“Patrick? Oh, he's harmless...probably.” she added sotto voce.

Dylan shook his head. Blonde hair folded over his eyes like a veil.

“Not Patrick. It's a weird name. Wuster? Western?”

Goosebumps flocked Chance's arms. Who got chills in an inter-dimensional vacuum, anyway?

“Westerna?” The name rang softly in the air, sharp as fiberglass on the nonexistent breeze.

Dylan nodded. “That sounds right. Anyway, this Westerna guy, he's a stalker, right?”

Dylan's choice of words was almost funny. Why contradict him? This was more than she'd ever heard him speak and the buzz of this realization rang through her limbs like an sudden alarm. It was true. Dylan was a different boy in this place.

“Yea.” Chance kept it short and sweet. “Kinda.”

That was good enough for Dylan. He nodded and carried on. Chance watched his lips moving, his animate affect, crippled with amazement.

“Ok, so this Westerna guy is, like, a big deal. Is he rich or something? Anyway, the deal is, he wants you back. He told me to tell you he's looking for you and he'll find you whether your new boyfriend with the sunglasses hides you away or not.”

“Alex isn't my boyfriend. He's my....”

“Did you used to date this Westerna guy? Seems like an asshole” stated Dylan philosophically as he perused his cuticles, cheeky with newfound ease. He stood and stretched. “Welp, I gotta go.” In no particular hurry, he strolled away from Chance, towards the corner of the street.

Chance powerwalked behind him. “Where are you going?”

Dylan glanced at her over his shoulder and flashed Chance a smile that she felt right down to the bone. Tears clogged her throat. “Y'know. People to meet and stuff.”

“How did you know about Westerna?”

“I saw him. Alex told me about him, too. He's pretty cool, sounds like that guy from 'Shaun of the Dead.'”

“So how the hell can you see Alex?”

Reese smirked benignly and essayed an elegant shrug.

“Some people just see better at night, I guess. Take it easy.”

Arctic glare from the streetlight outlined Dylan like the pop of a flashbulb as he turned the corner.

“Dylan! Wait up!” Chance ran behind him, stumbling into the warm breeze and distant dog barks of an empty suburban street after midnight. Stars shone through the clouds like sparks overhead. She called Dylan's name once more, turning in a full circle. He was gone. In a yard nearby, crickets woke up and chirruped.  

The Downtown Mobile Blues

At Some Point Later

Flies don't usually perch like that, sitting on the soap bottle lid like a show dog on a pedestal. The fly regarded me with raspberry eyes, rubies cut so small and fine. Eyes that saw the garbage can, the corpse, the unattended tooth brush sitting beside a spotless white porcelain sink. Eyes that stared up into mine and seemed to signal comprehension, even communion. I made a face and flicked it away. How dare he? Bow up to me like that, like an equal. Saucy scavenger. Stale toothpaste eater. But is that fair to me or him? A fly is a fly and behaves like a fly. I am me. Do I not struggle at living, do I not get by? Constructing an existence from scraps of experience, morsels of memory, dribbles of knowledge.



At Some Point in the Beginning

"Hey. Hey, what's wrong?"

The girl's face hung blank before me, apple white by the jukebox light. Her eyes reflected. a phosphorescent purple, a colour the room had never seen. Light that simply wasn't there. Her lips trembled and parted, dry as strips of paper from an old hornet's nest. Air hissed from between them, a punctured gas pipe's whispered issue, a lunar wind over the grey marble of her tongue. My hands went up to the sides of her head and bunched her brittle black hair in my bony fists. Not to tug but simply to shake.


"Hey, that thing's got you. Ok? Listen to me." 


Shake, shake, shake! 



 "That thing's got you again. So listen! Snap out of it! Do you hear me? Come on now. Come on!"


I didn't even know what I meant. The words were someone or something else's words. I picked them up like a radio signal. My brain was the antennae. My mouth, the amplifier. And my consciousness trapped between the two like a hostage with a gun to his head, reading a ransom note into the mouth piece of an unfashionable model of Nokia cell phone. The purple light poured over the arc of her irises and swirled around to make a full circle of reflection, as if a black and white tv were flashing off and on just over my left shoulder.


"I said, snap out of it!"      

In an excruciating instant, he eyelids fell like shutters blocking out the moon and stars. Blocking out the bar's secrets. Two pale smudges of light. There, then gone.


"Uhhhhhhhhhh.........."


The paper lips quivered, oiled and shiny with spit.


"Uhhh? Whhhhaaaatttt? Ohhh. Um, heyyyy...."


My hands traded her hair for the tops of her arms. I kneaded the sinew and muscle and gristle and imagined I heard grinding noises.


"Hey."


I looked at the holes where eyes used to be.


"Are you, like, ok?"


Filaments of real light returned to her eyes. Hazel with pinpricks of blue from the beer sign over the bar, red from the doorway, green from the neon sign in the window. Colours with readily traceable origins. She looked at me, wondering why a strange girl was touching her, I suppose. Trying to pick an emotion and dedicate to it. Pissed off or confused? Coy or repulsed? In the end, she chose ambivalence. Finally, she answered me.


"I guess. Who are you?"


I had so much to tell her. Where the hell should I start?

The Downtown Mobile Blues

Three men sat in the room, waiting for me. I could see them through the doorway as they waited for me. Their faces were three pale orbs hovering in the dark. Occasionally, a half moon sliver of hand would rise and flicker near a face like an albino moth then settle again in a lap or on the tabletop. From my vantage point through the scuffed doorway, the only eyes I could make out were the eyes that belonged to the man in the middle of the table. For the most part his eyes were downcast but now, sensing my presence outside the door, he lifted his gaze to meet mine. My boss had warned me about their eyes and he wasn't kidding by a long shot. A cold and unwavering look seemed to mark me from the bottom of the ocean. Eyes like these would be easier to deal with if they truly were what  they at first glance seemed to be, which was simply the alert eyes of a healthy predatory animal. But it wasn't that simple. Calculation coupled with emotion was what I saw in those freaky neon blue eyes. These were the eyes of  beasts yet also the eyes of rational men. And, if the on call doctor's notes were to be taken the slightest bit seriously, these were the eyes of vampires.

"Three men, all appearing between the ages of 20 and 40, Caucasian, native English speakers but not necessarily local. They all had ID, which we now know to be fakes, since the social security numbers are for dead people. All three were identified to have been within 10 miles of The Blind Mule on Saturday night.” The investigator kept his arms folded across his chest. He looked more cold than defensive. “We need blood samples to compare to what we found at the crime scene.” He gestured towards the men. “Officer Luckett will be in the room with you.” The room was cold. This time of year, the ac is always cranked up to high indoors everywhere you went, creating a false autumn in every building in the South. Down in the basement of the Mobile Metro Jail, the chill was more insistent. The closer I got to the men, the more the chill bit in with teeth and claws.  I shivered and pulled my hoodie up around my neck. The man seated in the middle, the one who’s eyes hadn't left me since I’d first stood in the doorway, raised his eyebrows slightly and almost smiled. His hands were folded neatly in his lap. He watched as I put my venipuncture kit on the table and opened it. “Evening, gentlemen.” I always introduce myself. It’s the professional thing to do and anyway, good manners are free. “My name is Leigh Hall. I’m here to collect blood samples from each of you.” I unsheathed a 10 mL syringe from its plastic wrapper. “It won’t take long.” I chose a 22 gauge butterfly needle and attached it to the syringe with a length of thin clear tubing. “And it won’t hurt much.” This time, the man in the middle showed me his teeth. “Efficient and professional.” His voice echoed slightly in the bare room. The melodious baritone sounded as if it were coming from far away like a train whistle after midnight. He chuckled softly. “I suppose. That is, unless it’s supposed to hurt.” I stood next to him now, holding the needle in one hand, an alcohol prep pad in the other. Exhaling, I imagined I could see a frosty puff of air suspended between us, if only for a second. Him first. Why not? Let’s see just how professional and efficient I am. “Roll up your sleeve, please.” With a few flicks of his hand, navy blue fabric folded back to reveal a white forearm. Even in the rooms shadows,  networks of veins like blue tendrils stood out clearly from the surrounding skin. It was my turn to show my teeth. An easy stick. Lucky me. I tied on a tourniquet and patted the vein as much as I dared. Cool, firm skin flushed under my fingers as the vein pulsed and stood to attention. This guy was very well hydrated.

 “Well...”

 I spoke slowly as I chose a spot and cleaned it with the prep.

 “ ...I guess it depends as much on the skill of the person wielding the needle...” 

I rolled the needle between my thumb and forefinger until the bevel faced the ceiling. 

 “...as it does on the pain threshold... "

 I pulled his skin taut with the thumb of my left hand.

 “...of the patient.”

 I slid the needle into his arm and immediately saw the flash chamber darken. Very efficient. The man was still  and composed throughout all this. No little jumps or twitches. He didn't turn away from me as I inserted the needle yet he also payed the matter at hand no attention. Instead, his eyes scrutinized my face intently as if he were expecting something. Blood left the flash chamber and shot through the tubing toward the syringe. His eyes never moved from mine and that near smile returned. I shook my head and pulled back on the plunger. What filled the syringe made me hold my breath. Even in the dark of that small, icy room, I could see there was something wrong with the blood. Light from the outside office reflected off the barrel of the syringe and dissipated in the blood’s froth of bubbles. I sighed, removed the needle and taped gauze to the man’s arm before taking the syringe back to the doorway. I held it up to the light. The blood was dark and inky at first glance, like arterial blood. Only two things were wrong with that. One, the blood had come from a vein. Two, the blood wasn't red at all. It was blue. 

Stories From a Darkened Hallway

Have I told you lately how much I love my desk? I love it because it’s in my office, which is in a building on a nondescript plot of land in Daphne, Alabama. I’m aware that working in an office has graduated to clichéd middle class horror story status. If the media is to be believed, I’ll kill all of you any day now. Until then, I’ll tell you a story from my home health nursing days, where my office was my car, my desk, my freakin’ dash board. Android tablet in one hand, cell phone in the other, hurtling up and down bloody Hwy 98 like a black hearse full of, ironically, normal saline, sterile gauze and catheter tubing. I've done and seen some amazing things. Roy Batty’s quote from Blade Runner comes to mind.

 "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe..."

In truth, amazing experiences in life aren't always beautiful and some moments deserve to get lost like tears in rain. I've catherized a retracted penis while roaches crawled all over my shoes. The retracted penis was the real deal breaker in that scenario. It’s like trying to threat a big, soft meat needle On the plus side, I did a passable job of willing the roaches to get off me with my mind. I've put my entire fist into a sacral pressure wound at gunpoint. I've been attacked by wasps and chased by donkeys. I've eaten gas station food!  I've reveled in awe and disgust. If you reserve your sense of wonder in life for only the beautiful and the palatable, you will eventually find yourself in an existence devoid of polarity, where beauty has lost it's value in the absence of horror. This is a place that is at first seemingly idyllic, then merely dull, until the true nature of our universe asserts itself  and demands checks and balances in the form of cruelty and brutality. Nursing forces one to acknowledge this duality and home health nursing was truly fascinating, until I got burned out. The patients were all lovely (or bizarre or terrifying), in their way, but the burn out was inevitable. If you throw an object around at high velocity long enough, there will be damage. It's just a matter of time.

But enough of my trials. Here's the story.

 The lawn was more red clay than grass, leading up toward the front of the house in muddy red gashes. All over the yard were scattered several abandoned vehicles in various states of decomposition. Behind the house was a rusty, older model trailer, wrapped in a flimsy looking barbed wire fence. On the roof of the house, an orange tabby cat slept, stretched across the shingles sunning itself like a tiny tiger. My eyes were drawn to the cat immediately. He seemed like a totem from a parallel dimension, where dainty, elegant gargoyles guarded hideous, monstrous houses. A plywood wheelchair ramp led to the front door. Inside, the plywood continued underfoot into the front room, unpainted and unadorned except by dirt and scuff marks. On this plywood floor lay two mattresses. Lying on these mattresses in their pajamas at approximately 2:00 in the afternoon was the patient’s family. It appeared to be at least three generations with ages ranging from toddlers to school age kids to teens to twenty somethings and on to young, middle aged and older adults. They presented with a selection of various physical features one associates with, to put it delicately, a shallow gene pool. Sloped jaws gaped open and crossed eyes scrutinized me with embarrassingly naked curiosity as the family lounged on the grimy duvet covers spread over each mattress. The patient himself, who ironically was the only person present besides me that wasn't clad in rumpled sleepwear, greeted me from his motorized mobility chair. He was an older gentleman and possibly the father/grandfather/great-grandfather to the rest. He was extremely cordial, as were the rest of the family. I gingerly put my bag on the plywood floor, donned my invisible anthropologist's hat, gathered my wits and started the patient's physical assessment. As I worked, my eyes roamed the room compulsively. There was so much to take in. Random objects were stacked against the bare dingy walls, forming towers of miscellaneous crap that lead like rickety towers up to filthy, cobwebbed corners. There was no actual furniture to speak of, except for the mattresses. A dark hallway on my right cast me in deep shadows as I squatted down to take my patient's blood pressure. A rhythmic and frantic banging emanated periodically from the end of the hall.. My head snapped around with each fresh round of thumps but the hallway remained dark, inscrutable and empty. The legend of the Sawney Beane clan sprang to mind and lingered. A child smiled up at me and licked her lips. I then heard the shrill chirrup of birds close by. I smiled.

Yes! I thought. I’ll use looking at the birds as an excuse to check out the kitchen! It's bound to be, um, well, weird! 

Welcome to how my mind works. You see, going into people's homes to perform health care was, more often than not, a banquet of the strange, the appalling, the unfamiliar and the unexpected. And as a person with an appetite for the unorthodox, I did indeed feast. Oh, yes. Anyway, when I walked over to the birdcage, which sat on a shelf in what was intended to be a dining room. I was stunned. Inside, two small parrots perched in the neatest, cleanest birdcage I’d ever perused They were chubby little things with a fluffy rainbow of cotton candy colored feathers. Underneath the birds, fresh newspaper covered the bottom of the cage, littered only with the daintiest sprinkling of birdseed. From the kitchen, an older lady with long, stringy grey hair looked into my eyes through the bars of the cage and smiled toothlessly. “Aren't they beautiful?” she asked me softly. I agreed that they were as I watched a teenage boy bring bags of dog food into the kitchen. Again, that parallel universe intruded through the ether. How could people keep a birdcage so clean yet allow themselves to live in such utter squalor? Maybe they loved those birds more than they loved themselves. It's a mystery I've never solved. Nothing I've encountered in life before or afterwards offers any insight. Now, it's forever gone to the other side of the ether, visible but just out of reach.