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That's All We Are, Dan
Feb. 21st, 2009 09:31 pmCurrently on books #38 and #39 of the year—Essential Marvel Horror #1, mainly starring those crazy Hellstrom kids (Daimon, Son of Satan, and Satana, Daughter of the Devil), and The Bone Woman by Clea Koff. The second is utterly fascinating, in a really bleak way; Koff is a forensic archaeologist specializing in osteology who’s worked at genocidal massacre sites all around the world, starting with Rwanda, and many of her weirdest moments have more to do with the “normal” day-to-day detail of her life than the gruesome facts of her work. At one point, for example, she talks about having only brought two bras to her first site, a mass dump outside a church in Kibuye (which I know I’ve seen footage from, as part of a documentary I once covered)—one became her official “grave bra”, packed away in a bag full of Woolite at the end of every shift, and rendered unwearable anywhere else by its ingrained stench. Now she brings multiple bras on every assignment, ranging from work bras to just-hanging-around bras. The things you don’t think of…
Cal, meanwhile, is doing this thing now that’s rapidly becoming very hard to take: Whenever you ask him to do something he doesn’t want to or explain what he means, he starts screaming “YEAH? ALL RIGHT! YEAH, YOU’RE RIGHT! YEAH, IT’S OKAY, YOU’RE RIGHT!” It’s a tic, and it means absolutely nothing—it doesn’t mean “I acknowledge that you are, in fact, correct”, so much, as “Leave me the fuck alone, and stop doing what you’re doing, too”. And oh my Jesus, it makes me fucking crazy—it comes up most when he’s under stress, but he uses it consistently as a way to not “have to” answer (fairly simple) questions like “What do you want?” “Are you hungry, thirsty?” “Are you tired?”…questions, in other words, which revolve around him needing to articulate his own wishes, rather than expecting us to read his damn mind.
As ever, I’m left caught between supposing I should be grateful he’s learning new stuff at all and wondering why it’s always confined to tactics designed to avoid language rather than advance his own use of it. That’s basic brain mechanics, not “willfulness” or whatever, and it scares me that he’ll apparently go so far in order to stay mute, dependent and (essentially) feral, if not savage. What does he get out of it? I hated being dependent, when I was his age.
Otherwise: Tired, and my sickness seems to have finally shifted down into the nether regions, which might be good or bad. Last night Mom took Cal, so Steve and I were able to order sushi and watch a few movies (The Midnight Meat Train, in which I liked everything but the beefed-up girlfriend role added to pad the original narrative out to two hours, and the sweetly smutty Zack and Miri Make a Porno). We stayed up way too late, but I’ve still managed to do a bit more hammering on “Strange Weight”—1,099 words thus far—so at least I don’t feel like a failure in that respect. The end is very much in sight.
Cal, meanwhile, is doing this thing now that’s rapidly becoming very hard to take: Whenever you ask him to do something he doesn’t want to or explain what he means, he starts screaming “YEAH? ALL RIGHT! YEAH, YOU’RE RIGHT! YEAH, IT’S OKAY, YOU’RE RIGHT!” It’s a tic, and it means absolutely nothing—it doesn’t mean “I acknowledge that you are, in fact, correct”, so much, as “Leave me the fuck alone, and stop doing what you’re doing, too”. And oh my Jesus, it makes me fucking crazy—it comes up most when he’s under stress, but he uses it consistently as a way to not “have to” answer (fairly simple) questions like “What do you want?” “Are you hungry, thirsty?” “Are you tired?”…questions, in other words, which revolve around him needing to articulate his own wishes, rather than expecting us to read his damn mind.
As ever, I’m left caught between supposing I should be grateful he’s learning new stuff at all and wondering why it’s always confined to tactics designed to avoid language rather than advance his own use of it. That’s basic brain mechanics, not “willfulness” or whatever, and it scares me that he’ll apparently go so far in order to stay mute, dependent and (essentially) feral, if not savage. What does he get out of it? I hated being dependent, when I was his age.
Otherwise: Tired, and my sickness seems to have finally shifted down into the nether regions, which might be good or bad. Last night Mom took Cal, so Steve and I were able to order sushi and watch a few movies (The Midnight Meat Train, in which I liked everything but the beefed-up girlfriend role added to pad the original narrative out to two hours, and the sweetly smutty Zack and Miri Make a Porno). We stayed up way too late, but I’ve still managed to do a bit more hammering on “Strange Weight”—1,099 words thus far—so at least I don’t feel like a failure in that respect. The end is very much in sight.
