Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the 27th of June (I’ll reluctantly presume that you know the year and the era), and it’s time for another edition of what is now my weekly blog post.  I’m on my way to the office and writing this on Google Docs on my phone.  I will have to use my little laptop computer to confirm the specific stats on my fiction writing over the last week, but I’ve done significantly more than the previous week, adding more nearly 5,000 words, bringing the total to over 66,000, and the current page count to 101*.

There were even a few mornings this week on which I felt the urge to write more than a page, and so I did.  The story is very nearly done‒the first draft, anyway.  Of course, there will be many changes to be made during editing, or at least much shaping of its rough-hewn ends.  And though, obviously, this will never be a short story, I do plan to shave a good 10,000 words off the final product.  That may sound arbitrary, but I’m almost always wordier than necessary, and there are frequent little thoughts and comments from the characters that don’t really add much to a tale other than perhaps giving a little color.

In any case, I should be able to publish it as a novella, in paperback in addition to the Kindle version, assuming I live long enough.

That is far from certain.  Just yesterday, I had to leave work shortly before lunch, because in the morning, while writing fiction and then getting an early start on payroll and other office-related stuff, I was having a lot of back and hip pain, and I was slightly more sleep-deprived than usual, so I was not clear-headed.  As a consequence, I think I took a double dose of aspirin and possibly Tylenol as well.  And I take 3 aspirin at once normally, so 975 mg instead of the usual 650.  Even as I took the (presumed) second 975 mg dose, I thought that maybe I had already taken some, but I decided that I didn’t really care.  I was miserable and in a lot of pain, and I didn’t much mind if I poisoned myself, a bit or a lot.  I’ve been courting and investigating (and even investing in) far more potent and nasty toxins; aspirin is frankly mild.  The addition of Tylenol (when my pain didn’t lessen) was just a little icing on the analgesic cake, even if I did take 4 extra-strength tablets in relatively quick succession.

Anyway, by the time I got done with the payroll, I was feeling extremely foggy and sleepy, and also mildly queasy, and I could not easily focus my mind on anything.  It was an interesting experience, especially the part about actually feeling sleepy(!), so I told my boss that I wasn’t feeling well and asked if he minded if I left after half a day.  He was fine with it, as was the coworker who shares some of my tasks.

I also told my boss why I felt ill:  that it was because I had more or less accidentally taken more than double the recommended dose of aspirin and possibly of acetaminophen.  I think I was kind of hoping that he might recognize that there’s more going on than a one-off mistake in my bigger picture…or that someone would.  But alas, no such luck has prevailed so far.

I get it; no one wants to deal with me saying anything about how I feel‒present company excluded, I guess.  They certainly don’t want to take it seriously.  I mean, earlier this week, I was trying to stretch sideways in my chair to relieve some serious tightness and pain in my back, and two coworkers/friends‒my two closest office friends‒were walking past.  They asked me, “You okay, Doc?”  I gave the simple and honest answer, “No.”  I meant it on practically all levels, and tried, at least a little, to make that general fact evident.  But the response from both of them was to say, almost dismissively, “Yeah, I know how you feel.”

No.  No, you obviously don’t.

So many times in recent years and especially in recent weeks and months, I’ve felt that I was sending out painfully loud signals that I was in distress.  I’ve felt that it all must be written all over my face, and in my body language, and even in the actual words I say, such as, “I hate my life, I wish I were dead.”  But somehow, no one seems to notice, or perhaps they think I’m joking, or that I’m exaggerating.

It certainly seems clear that I at least have the attribute (associated with ASD) of not being readily able to express or communicate my emotions‒often I don’t even recognize them.  But it’s terribly frustrating, especially when one tries to put not-too-subtle signs up, such as buying two different ropes and tying them into nooses, then leaving them that way where people can see them, or buying a whole plastic “can” of sodium hydroxide (lye), or breaking up a cheesy old shot glass into little shards and splinters of glass.

Each of those latter two substances can be (and has been) put into gel capsules from which the psyllium they originally contained has been emptied.  Then the new handful of capsules can be put in an easily accessible place, in case an emergency exit (or just a gamble on a possible emergency exit) might be necessary, severely painful though it would probably be.

But nobody takes very strong notice of such things; it’s just Doc being weird, like he’s always been his whole life (though the people at work haven’t known me nearly so long, it’s nevertheless true that I have been weird my whole life).  It’s just Doc’s dark sense of humor‒which is apparently often quite funny, and certainly catches people off-guard, especially since my delivery of jokes is often dead-pan, appropriately enough.

I guess a part of me‒not a small part‒doesn’t want anyone to grasp the urgency of the situation until it’s too late.  Goodness knows I don’t like the idea of being a burden to other people, especially people I like, and I’m already such a burden on them and on the world at large that it’s hard to justify.  And I certainly don’t think there’s any sense in which I deserve help of any kind.  I’m a pretty vile and horrifying creature.

Maybe it’s good that my thoughts don’t show on my face, because often my thoughts are just urges or wishes to enact stunningly violent retribution on idiots.  As I noted in my meme from last week (playing on the line from The Guardians of the Galaxy, Volume 3) it seems that I was not born to be a dad, but that I was born to be a destroyer.

Maybe it’s just as well that no one recognizes the danger I pose to myself.  Maybe it’s best if finally, someday very soon, the structure of me fails catastrophically and I vanish.  This will cause some minor, very slight and localized disruption here and there, but it’ll be like ripping off a Band-Aid.  It’ll certainly be better for everyone than anyone wasting their time and energy trying to help me.

Anyway, I hope at least to finish the first draft of Extra Body, but after that, I’m making no predictions, and I’m certainly not making any promises.  Maybe, if nothing else, if I don’t get it published myself, someone else can clean it up and publish it.  As “my little green friend” said, “Always in motion is the future.”  That is, until it comes to a halt, of course.

TTFN

*The exact numbers are: 4,877 net new words since last blog, and a current word count of 66,494.  101 pages is correct.