Tim Barrus

The New York Times is crazy. Gateway drug to Trump. French employs one of the best masks I have ever seen. Under the mask there's an ordinary person just like the rest of us nine-year-olds. I am not complaining about the bitter way journalists can chose to speak. I think it's good because it shows us who they are. Evangelicalism just gets meaner and meaner. I would argue that when French lights up when the term dirt bag gets used -- I am a dirt bag, too -- it comes from a place of fear. In this case, a fear of working people. I am fearful, too. It's not a sin. A few working people in history have sinned. I am afraid that as a working person, I am being erased. I had some of Platner's fire as a young man. But as a dinosaur, I know mass extinction is what is really going on whether journalists can get it or not. Scale. The flinging mud landing against the opinion walls of Gatewaydrugville. French has an itch. It's sort of a hissy fit itch. Take a deep breath, and calm down. I see an evangelical emerging through the moral weeds. Is that a Bible. Here's what appealed to me at every level where I live. "Shut This White House Down." This is not a hissy fit. Shut this white house down is shut this white house down. This is not: Let's delegate this paper to the DNC Supreme Podcaster who can refer it to the Schumer Committee on Polite Purity for the Sake of Purity Party Peopleaters. I wish I could care about the sanctity of someone else's marriage, but I'm washing my hair that night. Shut this white house down.

You cannot see the turtles because they are totally camouflaged by this strange interaction between the light shower of photons reflected into our collective retinas as a reddish-gold the turtles can disappear into not unlike the tannin from a flow of leaves pushes out into Turtle Pond.

I am looking down as the turtles (they are very big) are looking up. At me. I must look to them as alien as they appear to me. I am astounded they are alive.

I have discovered one powerful trick to deal with grief. I dance on my abusers graves. I do not care where they are buried. I will travel any distance to find that grave, and I have found them all. All my abusers are dead. Plural. Just being autistic means people will victimize you with no hesitation whatsoever. The teacher who made me do stuff with other boys is dead. My parents are dead. My bosses are dead. There are more. Years of making lists. I stopped making lists of names. I tore them up. Why make lists of the names of dead people. I cannot believe I outlived them. One of the things that makes autism so livid (for me) is that I believe what people tell me. When the swimming coach says he wants to offer me extra time in the pool, I believe it. When the boss says he wants to take me out to dinner, I believe it. When your parents beat you up -- every single day -- you know for a fact you are worthless. It does not end. What ends is life. Autism is hard to live with. I ask questions. I fight for my voice. It is all I have. My battle is to not grieve because these people are gone. I lose that battle every time. My brain wants to focus on what life could have been. Maybe we could have had happy moments. When you are eleven, and someone pours hot food on your head, it's not a happy moment. There are no happy moments. There are only cemeteries. I play my music loud. I dance and dance and kick and reach and rock and roll. The police arrive. I leave. There is nothing to regret.