Rollercoaster Therapy

 

 I’m surprised nobody has invented rollercoaster therapy for cripples yet.

I mean, somebody came up with horse therapy, right? You know what I ‘m talking about. Some people bring around a saddled-up horse and their mission is to take cripples horseback riding. And they’ll do whatever it takes to make that happen. Even if three other people have to ride the horse with you to keep your limp and floppy crippled body from falling off, they’ll gladly do it. If they have to rig up a saddle contraption that looks like a giant child’s car seat encased in steel girders to hold you upright when you ride, they’ll gladly do that, too.

And it seems like the more crippled you are, and thus the more uncomfortable and terrifying it is for you to ride a horse, the more the horse therapy people seem bent on trying to sign you up. I guess they think the things cripples miss most are the things we are least able to do. They must think that if we find that we really can do those things, sort of, then maybe we’ll believe that we can do anything.

Well, thanks but no thanks, at least not for me. I let myself be talked into riding horses back when I was a kid at cripple summer camp and all it did for me was scare the shit out of me. I was glad when it was over and I could get back in my wheelchair.  I still carry that fear to this day and I don’t wish to expend any energy endeavoring to conquer it. It’s a healthy fear. If not being able to ride a horse is part of what it means to be a cripple like me, I’m fine with that part of what it means to be a cripple like me.

 When riding a horse, I felt like a rag doll tethered to a bucking bronco. There is no fun in that. And that’s how riding a rollercoaster has made me feel, too, the time or two that I’ve tried it. The way it whips my wet noodle body around, I feel like a crash test dummy in a car that’s tumbling down a cliff. That’s not my idea of a good time.

So I’m surprised that no one has concluded that since riding a rollercoaster is probably the thing cripples like me are least equipped to do, it must be the thing we’re most longing to do. And so they’d make it their mission to arrange cripple field trips to amusement parks where they would do whatever it takes to get us all to ride rollercoasters.

Well, the good news is Medicaid probably wouldn’t pay for this kind of therapy. So we’ll have a good excuse to get out of it.

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Sharing my Crippledness

 

I’ve met tons of cripples  of every shape and size in my day. Yessir if you name a variety of cripple, no matter how obscure, I’ve probably met one.

 But the one type of cripple I've never met are those fake cripples that are allegedly going around pretending to be crippled just so they can tap into stuff like Social Security and Medicaid. If there are any people like that, there can’t be very many of them and they aren’t too smart because you won’t get rich pretending to be crippled. It violates the first rule of successful gold digging, which is to  always dig where there is gold.

Actually, I have to take that back because you can get rich by pretending to be crippled. But first you have to be a famous actor. If you’re somebody like Tom Hanks or Al Pacino or Daniel Day Lewis you can play a crippled protagonist  in a movie and everyone will say what a marvelous actor you are and there’ll be all kinds of Oscar buzz.

 But if you’re not one of those guys, trying to mooch your way onto easy street by pretending to be crippled is a stupid idea. So I don’t worry about it. It’s like worrying you’ll be gored by a unicorn.

Maybe that’s why I don’t feel all selfish about sharing my crippledness, like some cripples I know. Whenever these cripples hear about someone with something like schizophrenia proclaiming to be crippled, they scoff and call them a fraud. They don’t want to admit them into the cripple club because they think it will cheapen their own crippled stature, I guess.

I think these cripples are listening too much to the republican and neoliberal types. When they want to cut the hell out of stuff like Medicaid, they try to tell all the panicky cripples who rely on stuff like Medicaid to stay alive not to worry because it won’t hurt them one bit. Even though they’re cutting millions, the cripples who are truly deserving won’t notice any difference. Only those make a mockery of what it means to be crippled will be cut loose.

I guess they want to start a cripple civil war. They want us to believe that there’s only so much pie to go around so the more cripples there are, the less pie there’ll be for us genuine cripples who have paid our cripple dues.

But I don’t know about all that. I’ve always felt like the more people who fit the definition of crippled, the merrier. I figure the more of us there are, the more we’ll be taken seriously.

If there’s not enough pie, then make more pie. 

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Those Amazing Telepathic Service Dogs

I’ve heard about those amazing service dogs that somehow communicate telepathically with the crippled humans they serve. The dog senses that the human is about to have an epileptic seizure and it jumps up and knocks the human to the ground and  lies on top of them until they stop lurching around so they don’t hurt themselves , or something like that. That truly is amazing. Even Lassie couldn’t do shit like that.

I wish there were service dogs that communicated telepathically with other types of cripples who don’t have epilepsy. There were times when I sure could have used one.

Like for instance, when I was a kid, I had a terrible addiction problem. I was hopelessly hooked on those claw machines where there’s a bunch of stuffed animals in a big glass box along with a crane that looks like a claw.  You drop money in the machine which buys you about a minute to operate the claw with joysticks and try to grab a stuffed animal and drop it in the slot so you could reach in and grab it and take it home.

Whenever I passed one of those machines, I couldn’t resist indulging and I’d blow all my money. It would’ve been great to have a service dog that sensed telepathically that I was about to do something stupid and stopped me by knocking me out of my wheelchair and lying on top of me on the ground until the impulse passed, or something like that.

Or as an adult, I’ve been in that situation everyone ends up in sooner or later, where you’ve broken up with someone but in a  moment of weakness you get back together. But then it doesn’t take long to remember why you broke up in the first place. It sure would’ve saved me a lot of grief had one of those amazing telepathic service dogs been around when I was about to make that drunken phone call at 3 a.m. to knock me out of my wheelchair and lie on top of me on the ground until the impulse passed, or something like that.

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I Think I Got Away With it

 I was talking to a smart young woman who is a high school senior. She told me she's  applied to 12 colleges and is waiting to hear back from them so she can choose which one to attend. She asked me how many colleges I applied to when I was a high school senior. I said I applied to one.

People said I was a smart kid when I was a senior but my college options were limited nonetheless because I was crippled and that was 1974. That was the year after the passage of The Rehabilitation Act of 1973, the federal law that said entities receiving federal money couldn’t discriminate against cripples. The Rehab Act hadn’t had time to take root yet so there weren’t a lot of cripple-accessible college campuses. About the only college that was accessible enough for me to attend was Southern Illinois University so that’s where I applied and luckily enough I got in or I’d have been screwed.

I laugh hard when I hear those scandalous stories about people who are rich and/or famous doing stuff like paying bribes and cheating to get their kids into some hot-shit college, like Stanford. I laugh hard because I think about how ridiculous it would be for anybody to pay bribes and cheat to get into Southern Illinois University.

But actually, I’m lucky I didn’t have to cheat or bribe my way into Southern Illinois University. The high school I attended was a state-operated boarding school for cripples, which I refer to as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology, because it forms an acronym that conveys the quality of the education I received there (SHIT). But the real name of the place was the Illinois Children’s Hospital School, which is even worse. That’s the name of the school on my high school diploma. It hardly sounds like an elite college prep academy. And my grades were mediocre, because I was a teenager and I didn’t give a shit. And my score on my college entrance exam was mediocre, too, because I was a teenager and I didn’t give a shit.

So I’m still amazed that the person at Southern Illinois University who reviewed my college application didn’t stick it right into the shredder, after sharing it with all of their coworkers for a good laugh. But for some reason they accepted me. And it’s too late for them to take it back. I think I got away with it.

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When the Bottom Isn't the Bottom

According to the dictionary, there is such a word as subminimum.

I wish the dictionary was wrong about that, but, sadly, it is not. Subminimum should be enough of an oxymoron to invalidate itself as a word. Minimum means bottom and sub means beneath. So how can you go beneath the bottom? Is the bottom the bottom or isn’t it?

 I hear the word subminimum a lot, but only in reference to the wages some crippled workers are paid. There’s a provision in the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 that allow employers to pay some of their crippled employees less than they’re allowed to pay their uncrippled employees. That’s why I’ve heard a lot of stories of crippled workers being paid pennies per hour.

And so when it comes to paying crippled workers, the bottom isn’t the bottom. The example sentence in the dictionary that uses the word subminimum ought to be,  The cripples starved because their wages were subminimum.

Some people in Congress have tried to change the law to get rid of that stupid provision. But their legislative efforts have died of neglect in committee. Believe it or not, there are some heavyweight political forces that make it their business to ensure that the law doesn’t change, (I suppose that’s not that hard to believe.) I won’t share with you the altruistic rationale they present for paying cripples shit. That would be like dumping a bucket of horseshit over your head and I know you get enough of that as it is. I like to think of Smart Ass Cripple as a safe space for people seeking refuge from horseshit—a horseshit-free zone, if you will.

Suffice it to say that there are a lot of greedy-pig “nonprofit” organizations that could lose big money if they have to pay cripples no less than minimum wage. Maybe the example sentence in the dictionary that uses the word subminimum ought to be, Bosses who pay cripples pennies per hour have moral and ethical standards that are subminimum.

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Stripped of My Courage Award

  If you are crippled by Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, aka Lou Gehrig’s Disease, you could win a Courage Award.  It seems there are two organizations that give out an annual Courage Award to somebody with Lou Gehrig’s .

But as far as I can tell, no organization  gives out a Courage Award to people who have that which makes me crippled. And even if there was such an award, I sincerely doubt they would give it to me. And if they did give it to  me, I’d wonder about them. Like Groucho Marx said, I wouldn’t join any club that would have me for a member.

And I’d probably be all stressed out if I won a Courage Award because I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Because I’d figure it would then be my responsibility to go around being the symbol of cripple courage all the time and that’s sounds like a lot of work. But then again maybe it wouldn’t be much work because it seems like cripples don’t have to do much for some people  to think we’re courageous except sit there and be crippled. That automatically makes us courageous.

That’s the problem. I don’t know what it takes to be the symbol of cripple courage. I’m not sure anybody does, not even the people who give out and receive Courage Awards. I imagine that cripple Courage Awards don’t come with an expiration date or anything like that. It’s not like you’re the symbol of cripple courage for a year or so and then you’re off the hook. No, you’re probably expected to be the symbol of  cripple courage for the rest of your life. And so I’d be constantly worried that I would inevitably say or do something that would be considered to be decidedly uncourageous. And then I might be stripped of my Courage Award. How embarrassing would that be? I bet that’s never happened to any cripple ever. 

What a disgrace.

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The Brain is Weird

 

 

There are a lot of things that you can’t make easy jokes about anymore.

Like for instance, some old television shows and movies and comedians used to get a lot of joke mileage out of getting drunk. But since then, much has been made of the pain drunk people have caused others, like drunk drivers, so you can’t be so quick to make jokes about drunkenness or it might seem like you’re making light of that pain.

And blows to the head aren’t considered to be as funny as they once were. The Three Stooges constantly played blows to the head for laughs. Bowling balls would roll off the edge of a shelf high on a wall and bounce off the head of some poor sap below. Or Moe would get mad at Larry or Curly and hit them over the head with a pickax or sledgehammer.

But comedians don’t do that kind of slapstick these days. Maybe it’s because we all know that in real life blows to the head can cause brain injuries and brain injuries cause people to say and do weird shit and it might seem like you’re making light of people who are crippled because of brain injuries.

I suppose that’s a good thing to be mindful of, but I still tell funny stories about people with brain injuries. One of my favorites is about when  I was involved in a sexuality workshop for cripples decades ago. For the first session, the facilitator wrote names of body parts on the board and told us all to say slang names for these body parts. This was an ice-breaker exercise. The facilitator’s goal was to make everyone feel comfortable discussing sexuality openly and frankly.

But two of the participants were guys who were crippled by brain injuries. I guess they had the kind of brain injuries that dull one’s inhibitions and impulse control.

Because the facilitator began by writing on the board the word breasts.

And the two brain-injured guys enthusiastically responded with, “Casaba melons! Golden bozos!”

Vagina.

“Spasm chasm! Love canal!”

Penis.

“Joystick!”

I’m sorry, but I think that’s funny stuff. What’s funny about it to me is that it shows how weird the human brain is. It’s so elaborately balanced and interconnected that if you mess with one part even a little bit, there’s no telling how much it’ll throw the rest of the brain out of whack.

And it’s also funny because it shows how much we mighty humans are slaves to our brains. If our brain  tells us to say or do something, we’re pretty much powerless to resist. But it sure as hell doesn’t work the other way around. Those brain-injured guys in the sexuality workshop both walked gimpy, too. That shows what a stubborn sonuvabitch the brain can be sometimes. If it doesn’t want to do something, like tell the legs to quit screwing around and walk normal, there’s not much we can do about it.

Let's be honest, there’s plenty funny about the brain.

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