Serenity Now, Insanity Later

this forest will deconstruct you

“So, Adelle, what brings you to try out for the bowling tournament?” the person at the front desk asked me as I checked in.

“My inability to wait,” I chuckled.

That wasn’t an exaggeration. While waiting for mom to get off the phone in the grocery store, I heard two teachers from my school talking about a tryout for an upcoming bowling tournament. It sounded interesting and once they were finished talking, I asked one of the teachers about when and where. She said signups were closed.

A day later, the other teacher told me two people dropped out after being hospitalized with norovirus. Without hesitation, I signed up to do the tryout.    

That brings me today. A lady with long blonde hair and Memphis print leggings walked up. She passed me a packet and pointed to the computer lab. “Here, take this and go to the computer lab,” she said, “Name at the top, sign the bottom, print the results of the multiple-choice test, bring the materials to me when you’re finished.”

I just thought it'd be the tryout, I didn't think they'd give me a written assessment.

I sat down at the computer. “The multiple choice thing is computerized,” she began, “but first, you’ll need to create an account on this thing here to get a token for MFA.”

I had a terrible time with the MFA. I had no trouble making the account, but when I tried to use the token, I would get 80% of the way through signing in and then the computer would crash.

The evaluator came back to the computer lab. “ Have you started the test?” she asked.

I had been hanging on by a thread, but now I was starting to snap. “No,” I snipped, “I can’t log in.”

The evaluator tipped her head to one side and put her right hand on her hip. “Do you mean you don’t want to?” she faked a smile.

“No, I can’t,” I shook my head, “I think the MFA is defective.”

“It can’t be,” she said in disbelief. 

“Do you want to have a look?” Even though I said that with the hope she'd actually believe me, I got a faint, possibly delusional glimmer of hope that she'd be able to fix the problem. 

The evaluator poked away at the computer. She didn't look like she was really typing. “I think I see the problem,” she said. 

“You do?” I asked. If she knew what was happening, maybe she could help me fix it.

“It's your email.”

Now, I had a tough time buying that explanation. I've heard of school software not liking an email before, but that's because the kid tried to use their personal email, not their school email. I've never heard of school software rejecting an institutional email before.

“It’s a school email,” I asked, “what’s wrong with it?”

Then the evaluator said something ridiculous. “It has an inappropriate number in it.”

While I am aware that sometimes, numbers can have a potentially unsavoury connotation, if it turns up in a school email, it shouldn't be a problem. “No, it doesn’t,” I blurted out, “I’m positive it’s randomly generated because, hey, you’d be surprised how many kids are named A Lawson here”

She wasn't convinced. “If your email address has an inappropriate number and you need to explain yourself when you use it, why are you still using it?”

I stood up. “I find it utterly bizarre to assume something in an institutional email address referred to something inappropriate,” I responded, “If it really was inappropriate, they would pull the number from circulation.”

The evaluator started to get snippy. “OK, just do the essay question.”

Now, the essay question was surprisingly easy: what was the worst mistake you ever made in your life? I wrote something to the tune of it’s impossible to say because what seems like a big mistake at first is really the universe saving us from something really bad. 

I finished writing and handed it in. The evaluator pushed it back with a ruler. “We can't take this.”

“What the hell is wrong now?” I whined. 

The evaluator pointed at the paper. “Adelle, how is your handwriting this shitty?” she hissed.

I folded my arms, “Not everyone cares more about aesthetics than the actual meaning of the words.”  

“Is this even in English? I seriously can't tell what alphabet this is” 

My handwriting is actually pretty decent…if I'm writing on the left. If I use my right, it's a bit scraggly. I'm ambidextrous, but for reasons I don’t understand, writing on the left is easier for me. “You know what,” I replied, “you can either have me write with my right or write legibly, not both.”

The evaluator began to panic, and then completely lost her temper. “You get starry eyed and when reality doesn’t pan out, you panic and lose your temper! You don’t think things through, you don’t stand for us, you’re insane!”

“Calm down”

She didn't calm down. She grabbed my arms, dragged me down the hall, and locked me in a supply closet.

This isn’t like a teen movie where the bully locks someone in a supply closet. Movies overcomplicate the problem by relying heavily on picking the lock. First, I knocked the hinges out of the door. Then, I pulled the door out of the frame. See, stuff like this is what I'm talking about when I talk about lateral thinking that isn't bound by social signaling. I can't think of anybody else that would try this.

I didn’t put the door back together after I left. I think I even lost one of the pins that goes in the hinge. I didn’t care. I was out.

I got out, but I missed the tryout. Mom was there, and she was not happy with me. “Miss Thorne told me everything,” she barked, “I know your autism makes it hard to intuit things from the social aether, but this is serious!”

I couldn’t tell what she meant. Did she mean my reaction to things not going snip-snap the way I expect them to? Or losing the hinge for the door? Forgetting to put the door back after I broke out? Pissing the person off to the point where they felt the need to lock me in a closet?

She then told me something that didn't sound real. “Adelle, you don’t understand, but that bowling tournament that you signed up for was only for kids with the top 10% grades in gym class, not for anyone who wanted to do it”

I had a ton of trouble believing that. “OK, but what about the teacher who told me about the empty spots?” I asked, “she teaches history”

“Yes, but she heads up the cheer team,” Mom fired back, “Even still, she had to get special permission from the principal to oversee tryouts because she isn’t a gym teacher but is next in line when the existing teacher retires.”

“That isn't what they told me,” I grumbled, “they said I couldn’t do the tryout because signups were closed.” 

“Are you sure?” Mom interrogated, “You heard of this at the grocery store, and you know how much trouble you have hearing there.”

“I'm positive,” I said, “No one told me it was restricted to the top students in each gym class, nor was that made clear at registration.”

Mom shook her head. “I don’t know what to say.” 

Needless to say, I got suspended for four months. My parents were not pleased. They remained upset even after it turned out the “bowling tournament” the kids signed up for was actually a protest and said protest rapidly spiralled out of control. And I am never writing an essay to try out for a bowling tournament ever again.

I don't normally get anything from Smoothie Kingdom, and I don't think I ever will again after this. 

I paid $45 for a smoothie that they called the Big Blue. They made a lot of juice and they only poured a third of the juice into a cup and planned to throw the rest out “What are you doing with that?”

Ricky, the crew member, looked at me with a rather puzzled expression. “Throwing it out?” he said, “What's it look like?”

“I paid 45 bucks for this!” I shouted, “Put the rest in another cup!”

Ricky shook his head. “We can't do that!”

“What the fuck do you mean you can't do that?” I shouted.

“We just can't,” Ricky replied. I found his lack of explanation as to why deeply disturbing. 

I got my phone at this point. didn’t Smoothie Kingdom have a campaign against combatting food waste?

Ricky saw me take out my phone. His eyes went like dinner plates. “You can't do that,” he sputtered.

“I'm taking a picture of this wasteful thing,” I warned.

“You aren't allowed to do that!”

I put my hand on the counter and leaned in. “Put the thing in the second cup, or this photo winds up on the internet!”

“Not if I fucking get there first.” someone called out. 

I turned around. The person in line behind me said, “That's right, I've been videotaping you the whole time. Apologize or your misdeed ends up on YouTube, bitch!”

I panicked. "I'm sorry," I said.  

The person behind me wasn’t impressed. "Do you even know what the fuck you're apologizing for?" 

"No,” I pleaded, “but please stop cussing me out." 

The person behind me grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me back “if you were really sorry, you’d fuck off and shut your ass.”

“But I really am!” I said as I brusquely pushed past him. 

"No,” he said sternly, “You're fawning because you're guilty and you're trying to manipulate people into looking the other way on your misdeeds. The dog that weeps after it kills is no better than the dog that doesn't" 

My grandparents had a lengthy discussion with me that evening. “I saw what happened on the news,” Grandma said sternly, “we need to talk.”

“I’m sorry, I won’t do it…” I breathlessly sputtered.

“That’s the problem,” Grandpa said, “No matter how hard you apologize, if you don't stop doing things wrong, you are not sorry.”

“Mason’s right,” Grandma looked at me and said, “If you apologize to people, they expect a good faith attempt to prevent this from happening again. If you can't do that, you aren't sorry because you've hurt yourself or others. You're sorry because they got caught and now have to suffer the consequences.”

“But I am sorry,” I replied. 

“We need to talk about what we could do to prevent this behavior,” Grandpa said, “You can't keep going on like this.”

My problem is this. I can deal with can't, but I don't deal with won't very well. A lot of the time, when people say they can't do something, they could do it but don't want to. 

Grandpa pulled out his laptop and navigated to YouTube. “I want you to watch the video and have a look at what you did wrong,” he said as he turned the screen to me and hit play.

Track Listing:

Emerald Bubbles

My school chose to cancel prom rather than relocate the venue to somewhere with accessible parking.  

I’m not upset that prom is gone. But I do wish I made a better backup plan because Mom dragged me to brunch with her friends. The place where we had brunch was a rooftop terrace that kind of looked like a French patisserie but was famous for its jumbo sized cocktails. 

Strangely enough, I always look forward to seeing my parent's friends. But the minute Mom asks everyone how they're doing, it immediately sours. 

Mom isn't here. She's stuck at work because according to her texts, her complaint about her boss wanting to go through our bills when she asked for a raise devolved into a debate with HR as to  whether the name “murder hornet” is racist. 

Wendy and Sandy arrived at the restaurant. “I have received yet another call from human resources telling me to get over my coworker taking my stir fry,” Wendy barked as she sat down. 

“Maybe it was an accident?” Sandy added on. 

Wendy shook her head. “oh, no, it's on purpose,” she bellowed, “HR says their hands are tied because Heidi’s so poor, not stealing my food means not eating.” Our server came by and brought a complimentary pitcher of margaritas that came with the brunch.

“Are you sure they're poor?” I tipped my head to one side, “I find that line very hard to believe. The chances that you have a coworker at your office job that is stealing your food to keep from literally starving to death are pretty damn low.” Also, it isn’t fair to poor people to say let them steal because they don’t know any better because they’re poor.

“You're lucky, at least you have a job,” Sandy whined, “I got canned for failing to meet a deadline, but what am I supposed to do? My boss locked me out of my files because I caught him lying his butt off about something he said mere minutes ago.”

Elizabeth showed up. She's about five years older than me, Wendy and Sandy are about the same age as my mom. “sorry I'm late,” she said as she sat down, “it's those stupid 3 hour meetings” 

“That's too long!” I replied, “Why do those calls have to be so long?”

“They don't want Carly to go to her dialysis appointments.” Elizabeth grunted, “I'm not exaggerating when I say those meetings are killer. Carly’s dead now, she died in one of those meetings.” she started to rev up and I could see tears pooling. “We can't even say goodbye because they just threw her body out with the trash!”

Sandy gestured to the pitcher of margaritas. “Margarita?”

Elizabeth poured out a glass and chugged the pitcher like prohibition is coming back. My eyes widened. “That's a lot,” I said

“Don't freak out, Lorraine,” Elizabeth said once she put the pitcher down, “I'm Ukrainian, I know what I'm doing.”

Sandy looked at Elizabeth like she was a misbehaving sixth grader. “Elizabeth, you could be from anywhere in the world, you're still too young to drink like that.”

Elizabeth put the pitcher down. “Things are bad, guys. Like, bad bad.” 

“You mean worse than the lady who falsely accused another lady of committing fraud so the first lady could summon the police because she was being abused?” Wendy chimed in.

My jaw dropped when I finally processed that. “That sounds overly complicated,” I said, “can't you just make it look like you're ordering Chinese food?” 

They looked at me like I was joking, but I wasn't. People can and have disguised emergency calls regarding domestic abuse as takeout orders.

Elizabeth kept talking. “After months of refusing to fix a missed paycheck due to my so-called lack of decorum when I brought it up, I asked for a raise. They can't give me the raise, but they promote me,”

“Good for you!” I said. I was just relieved to hear someone had good news.

“No, no, not good,” Elizabeth shook her head, “because I'm reporting to a murderer.”

“What?” I said. My eyes went like headlights. 

Elizabeth leaned back and folded her arms. “Three years ago, I finished my first week at my first job. Out of nowhere, this crazy bastard shoves me and a little girl about your age into the road, where we get hit by a taxi. I survived, the other girl didn't.” 

“Poor you,” Wendy fawned.

“There's more,” Elizabeth said, “he didn't get fired, I got put on a PIP for going on sick leave because I couldn't walk, and now with this promotion, I'm going to be reporting directly to him!”

“How'd he not get fired?” Wendy asked.

Elizabeth tipped her head back and slammed her hands on her thighs. “The fucker made up a story about his bird phobia to use as a get-out-of-jail-free card, complete with phony doctor's note.”

Sandy didn't believe a word of that. “You're saying stuff because you had  too much to drink”

Elizabeth pulled out her phone. “Am I?”

She pulled up a video and there he was. He clearly pulled his arms back and gave Elizabeth and this other kid a good, hard shove into an oncoming street sweeper. Immediately I recognized the kid whose life ended with a crunchy suction noise.

I went pale like I didn't get enough iron in my diet. “Stephanie’s dead?” I blurted out.

Sandy didn't seem to notice my distress. “They caught it on tape and he still got away with it?”

I couldn't hold it together for much longer. “That's not the point!” I exploded, “Stephanie's been dead for three years and nobody ever told me?!”

“You didn't ask,” Wendy replied. I don't think she said that to be mean, but that's how it came out.

I launched into an outburst, skipped the crying, and went straight to hurling. I had no idea where the bathroom was, so I headed for the balcony. Sandy followed, mostly to see if I’d actually vomit off a balcony. 

I remembered something I learned from a sailing instructor years ago. "If you get seasick, lean over the edge, it's called feeding the fish." 

Too bad barfing off a balcony is a different beast entirely. Nobody has to worry about another person getting injured when you barf off of a boat. 

"Nice aim,” Sandy said, “Poor guy on the bike, but nice aim" 

I laughed. I thought I was empty. Wrong!

Something happened on my way back to the table. A father and his baby blocked my way. The baby just sat there in his pram, kicking his legs. The father was busy looking at something on his phone.

My eyes bulged. I tried to turn away, but they’re still boxing me in. I leaned forward, intending to hit the linoleum floor, but a sudden, violent hiccup rerouted the trajectory.

A clear-ish fountain of liquid misery splashed the back of the baby’s head, soaking the shoulder of its tiny denim jacket. The baby doesn't cry. It just looks at me with a confused look on its face.The father stayed frozen. He didn’t even flinch at the sound. The only person who reacted was some college aged woman in a tracksuit. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?!” she exploded.

I looked up and swung my arm. “Don't worry, that one was mostly water.”

The woman in the tracksuit gestured to the pram. “You threw up on a baby!” she smacked my upper arm. I think she wanted to get the back of my head but couldn't reach due to her short arms. 

“Happens to everyone,” I shrugged 

She pulled out her phone. “Nice going, jackass,” she said, “I’m putting this on youtube. You’re disgusting.”

I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and looked at the father. Just as I began to apologize, the father finally looked at the baby. He saw the puddle. He shrugged it off. 

Tracksuit continued to film, narrating to her followers. I don't know what's worse, the fact that my misdeed was posted on the internet, or the fact that the baby's father doesn't care that someone threw up on the baby.

This starts with chicken, pepperoni, brown rice and tomatoes.  

Well, honestly, it wasn't pure tomatoes, it was pico de gallo. It was part of a gumbo recipe where the pico made the tomato soup extra tomatoey.

I made the gumbo one night when I was home by myself. It was delicious. I can't understand why mere complaining about the store bought gumbo being discontinued always segues into Mom ranting about how she's doing all this work for assholes who bully her for her appearance and height and she's not even getting paid because their payroll system is a total fuckup.  

Actually, the term fuckup doesn't begin to describe it. The computer system only pays the women only the minimum wage, not the market rate. Nobody knows why. 

And that’s assuming it works. Sometimes, people don’t get paid at all. We know a couple of folks who haven't been paid for two years. One of those people finally did get paid, but they made her give it back because it got flagged as an "overpayment" in the system.

So many have complained, but nothing is fixed. Anyone who complains gets sent to a psychiatrist who only seems to prescribe Cyanex.  

Between the bullying and the non-payment, Mom has decided she wants out of the corporate world and into writing a cookbook. Except she's too busy with work crap to do the cooking show to sell the thing, so I have to do it.  

Now, I have no idea if the gumbo recipe is in the book, but it really should be. It’s simple, it’s yummy, and it’s quick. 

The lights in the studio are a bit too bright. I stood behind a kitchen island littered with mismatched bowls. I looked confident, but I felt kind of frazzled. The guy in the control booth said, “OK, Flora, we are live in 5,4,3,2,1!”

I looked at the camera and said, “Today we’re making an everyday gumbo that’s really simple, and it’s completely reversible.”

I started by chopping the chicken and adding the cajun mix that I brought from home. Next, I reached off-camera and dragged over a frying pan. It made a loud, grinding screech against the countertop. I put it on the burners, added butter, and then the chunks. 

“Now, a lot of people get intimidated by gumbo, but you shouldn’t,” I said as I cook the chicken, “in many ways, it’s similar to a car. You’ve got your internal combustion fluids where the whole thing explodes on the highway.”

I heard two people mutter, “Speaking of things exploding on the highway,” but I tuned it out.

Once the chicken was nice and brown, I added the pepperoni. I picked up a plastic container and moved to dump it into the pot, but stopped after spotting the green paste inside. 

I looked at the container and took a massive, aggressive sniff. “Oh, that’s garlic and basil, definitely pesto,” I said right into the camera.

I set the pesto down and began taking jars out of the fridge. One by one, I opened and sniffed them to see if they were pico. Wine jelly, relish, pico.

I finally found the pico, but as I turned back to the stove, I tripped slightly over a rug. I leaned on the sink to stabilize myself. 

Now it was time to add the rice. Except, I couldn’t find it. “Wait, where’s the brown rice?” I shouted to the cameraman, “I was sure I prepped…oh”

I looked down. The camera panned to the sink. A large Tupperware container of dry rice is sitting directly under the faucet, which is slowly dripping into it. I grabbed the rice and added it to the mix.

I turned the heat down and stirred it up. “See? Completely reversible!” I said, “If you don't, just drive the car in reverse. It’s a lot easier than the duck. I mean, if you don’t like duck, you’re rather stuck.”

The gumbo came out nice. Honestly, I don’t know how I got through that without burning anything. I had to fight to locate stuff.

My spot on the cooking show became a meme. And that was where I found out that I had two pretty impressive strokes. I misplaced stuff because of a blocked blood vessel in my vision processing lobe. The non sequiturs came from a bleed in the understand-speech area. 

The damage from the blockage fixed itself six months later. I think the damage from the bleed may be permanent. Honestly, I have no idea how I’m not dead.

My single “Here Comes Nothing" is out now!

Track Listing:

Here Comes Nothing

Some things match up to our mental image of them. Others just defy that image entirely.

Take my college’s physics club, for instance. When you hear the words “physics club”, you think of bright eyed, bushy tailed young scientists working to solve the world's energy crisis. That image is beyond incorrect. 

I know because I am in the physics club, and I know what goes on here. Only 10% of our time is spent working on a project that may or may not stand up. Of the remaining 90%, watching cartoons takes up approximately 30%, Playing with slinkies, superballs, or Euler disks takes up half, and whatever's left goes to somebody having a mental health crisis.

I came back from the bathroom to hear Sheila scream, “Screw logic!”

“That’s a weird thing to hear out of context,” I responded.

“Look at this,” Sheila said as she spun her laptop around. 

I soon saw what was on the docket of today’s nervous breakdown: microbes that eat plastic.

Now, these microbes are pretty remarkable. Researchers in Germany took newly evolved microbes that eat oil and genetically engineered them to eat plastic. The microbes featured a high reproduction rate and were extremely cost-effective to store and manage. And on top of that? They excrete oxygen as a waste product. Isn’t. That. Awesome?

Sheila pointed to the laptop. “You don’t see the problem, do you?” she hissed.

I tipped my head to one side. “More oxygen means giant bugs?” I asked. 

I figured she was going to rant about how the microbes now became a "valuable commodity", how microplastic-free food and water are now gated behind extreme wealth or expensive resorts, and how governments remain too corrupt or broken to ensure the technology benefits the underclass. But that wasn’t what she said. “It’s going to get loose,” she shook her head.

I stood there in surprise. “Think about it?” she shouted, “What are biohazard suits made of? Plastic, dingus!”

“OK,” I shrugged, “time to get a suit of armor.”

Sheila moved her arms like a fan. “Well, excuse me, duchess!” she blurted condescendingly, “We aren’t all made of money, you know.” 

Becky looked at both of us with a confused expression. “Who's the duchess?” she asked.

“One of the people who lives in Sheila’s head,” Trang replied.

Sheila slammed her laptop shut and lurched over the bench. “Mock me at your own peril, wiseguy!” she screamed, “If this stuff gets in you, you’re never gonna notice because it has no symptoms! All it does is clean microplastics out of your body!”

“Isn't that good?” I asked. There's a lot of research that says microplastics aren’t good for us. Maybe giving people this bacteria as a detox would help a lot of people.

Sheila stood up and started pacing. She stared off into space. “All it’s going to take is 48 hours. 48 hours before it turns into a crisis,” she muttered, “It gets in the sewage, it gets in the air, and people cart it around with them in planes.” 

She went on about all the doom and the gloom that could come from this. Global rot of car tires, wire insulation, electronics, and furniture. Spoilage of grocery store supplies instantly as plastic packaging vanished; the lack of shipping and electricity ended the food supply chain. Collapse of civilization as communication, water, and power systems disintegrated. Something about the massive increase in oxygen levels, combined with exposed electrical wiring, led to widespread spontaneous combustion and fires, but that was more of an aside than anything else. It then segued into a long speech about how creativity is fundamentally bad because it led to the current crisis with microplastics. I couldn't follow what she was saying because it didn’t make any sense. 

And here I was worried about giant bugs. If the next generation of physicists says creativity is bad, we’re in real trouble.