A Smart Ass Cripple Tip for Young Criplets

 

I always love giving tips to young criplets about ways I’ve found to navigate through the world as a cripple. I strongly believe that young people represent the future and it’s not  just my obligation but my honor to use the benefit of my experience to help them get ahead.

 So my tip for today is: Save your empty mayonnaise jars so you can piss in them. When you reflect back on it years later, you’ll be glad you did.

One of the first life challenges every wheelchair cripple faces is finding an adequate vessel to piss into. We wheelchair cripples (who have penises) piss from our wheelchairs, sitting down. I pissed into a mayonnaise jar when I  was a kid. But I’m not suggesting that all you criplets reflexively do the same just because I  did and I’m your role model because you admire the shit out of me. Consider the sound reasoning behind it.

The mayonnaise jar must’ve been my mother’s idea. She had good instincts as a mother of crippled kids. She probably calculated that a mayonnaise jar was precisely the right receptacle for her dear son to piss into.  A pickle jar was too bulky. The opening on a pop bottle was too narrow, leaving very little margin for error.

But my mother’s primary motivation was probably her legendary frugality. She wasn’t cheap. She was frugal. A cheap person does everything they can to keep from spending their money. A frugal person tries to get the most out of their money. A good way to accomplish this is to figure out ways to get more than one use out of things. That’s why my mother loved shopping at resale stores.

My mother approached problem-solving from this frugal perspective. So I imagine that one day while contemplating how to reuse an empty mayonnaise jar, a light bulb went off in her head.

I don’t piss into mayonnaise jars anymore, but I do retain my mother’s frugal value system. And I defend my actions by saying that I am being an environmentalist. Like for instance, when I  get carry-out food and it comes in plastic containers, I keep the containers  for a while and use them for storing other leftovers in my fridge,  thus shortening the time  these containers are cluttering up some landfill. I’m waging war against the destructiveness of America’s disposable consumer culture. I’m saving the earth, just like I was doing when I pissed into a mayonnaise jar.

Take This Social Security and Medicaid and Shove it

I saw a weird poker game on one of those obscure sports channels buried on cable in the wee hours of the morning. It was called the Social Security and Medicaid Championship Tournament.

The contestants were a blind guy, two guys in wheelchairs and a Down Syndrome woman. The grand prize was that the winner got enough money to be able to tell both Social Security and Medicaid to fuck off.

Because if you’re a cripple who needs to collect Social Security and/or Medicaid to survive, you have to be broke ass and stay broke ass. If you start making much money at all, you get kicked off because in the eyes of the law you don’t need Social Security and Medicaid to pay for all your shit anymore because you have money now so you can pay for it all yourself.

But that’s like being pushed off of a cliff because being crippled is expensive as hell. You  need things uncrippled people don’t have to worry about like wheelchairs or you may need to pay someone to help you take a shower or drag yourself in and out of bed. And you have to figure out a way to pay for all that. So just because you’re making money doesn’t mean that you’re still not broke ass and you don’t need help paying for all your shit anymore. About the only way for a cripple to suddenly leave all the  public support programs behind and still function is if they suddenly become a millionaire.

In this poker game, the pot was a million dollars. These contestants were the final four. They looked at their cards intensely. The blind guy felt the Braille bumps on his cards. He opened the bidding by throwing in five chips. The Down Syndrome woman and one of the wheelchair guys folded.

But the other wheelchair guy matched the bet. So the blind guy went all in. Not only did he push in all his chips, he also reached in his pocket and took out all his food stamps and threw them on the pile.  Then he revealed his hand. He had three kings. The wheelchair guy only had two pair.

The blind guy leapt up from his chair and raised his fists in triumph. He ripped up his food stamps and threw them in the air.

The cheerleaders did somersaults of joy. Confetti rained down. The band played a version of Take this Job and Shove it. Except the lyrics were Take this Social Security and Medicaid and Shove it.

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The Legendary Neighborhood Autistic Guy

I was pissed off because all the accessible parking spaces were occupied at Trader Joe’s. Whenever all the accessible spots are taken like that, I always suspect that the people clogging them up aren’t entitled to be there because they lack the proper cripple credentials, such as a license plate with the wheelchair stick figure guy on it.

Anyway, that’s why I was pissed off. We had to park on the lower level, which has no accessible parking space. We made do with a regular space. I felt like a commoner. But as I entered the store a guy wearing a Trader Joe’s work shirt and nametag bellowed out, “Welcome to Trader Joe’s!”

This must be the autistic guy I’ve heard so much about, I said to myself. He’s kind of a neighborhood celebrity because he was written up in a local publication because he’s autistic and he works at Trader Joe’s. Our societal opinion of crippledness has advanced to the point where possessing either of those characteristics unto themselves doesn’t make one particularly newsworthy, but when you put together the two, that’s a human-interest feature just dying to be written.

How did I know he was the legendary autistic guy? I mean, autistic people  aren’t immediately obvious. You can see a wheelchair cripple coming from a mile away. And blind people  are a dead giveaway with their white canes and dogs.  But people with autism aren’t as easy to peg. I’m told that some of them are wild eyed and snort a lot. (Or is that Tourette’s people? Or maybe that’s schizophrenics. I get mixed up.) But this guy didn’t display any of that. And he certainly wasn’t wearing a button that said HELLO I’M AUTISTIC.

No, the reason I figured he  must be autistic was because he was so enthused about working at Trader Joe’s.  I know that’s screwed up of me to assume that if a person  is excited to  be working at a place like Trader Joe’s they must be autistic. But really, the only other people that are really enthused to be working at corporate places like Trader Joe’s or  Burger King are people in commercials.

But actually, why is being enthused about what you’re doing such a bad thing? Isn’t that what we all want, to be happy and content as much as possible? I could stand to give myself a break in that regard. I’m always finding myself trying hard to resist enjoying simple things, I guess because I have this dumb idea that enjoying simple things means I ‘m a simple person. I don’t know what prize that attitude will win me in the end.

The autistic guy (alleged) hustled ahead of me and pushed the elevator button. The door opened and he welcomed me in with a swoop of his arm. As we rode up in the elevator, I was star struck to be in his presence, like he was Brad Pitt or something.

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