Misery Loves Company

I don’t understand how some people who have suffered feel better when someone else suffers the same way they did.

I hear a lot of that kind of nonsense when people talk about student debt loan forgiveness. Some people say stuff like, “Hey, no one forgave my college loan debt. I had to work three jobs to pay it off so they should, too!”

Let me say here that I never had a college loan debt to pay off. The cost of my college education was paid in full by the state of Illinois as part of the vocational rehabilitation program.

Maybe if I had to pay off a college loan debt I’d feel differently. But I sure as hell hope I wouldn’t. It reminds me of the time a few decades back when I was involved in the fight to make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples. We eventually won, but suppose some old timer cripple had come around back then and said, “We shouldn’t make the buses accessible because I couldn’t ride them back in my day so they should never be able to either." Thank God nothing like that ever happened because no one was that much of a dumbass. If the cripples of today were still just as stranded as we were, I don’t see how that would make me feel any better.

Hell, I never even get involved in diagnosis-specific cripple causes because I’m too susceptible to survivor guilt.  I’m interested in doing stuff that makes life better for all cripples, not just those  who are crippled for a certain reason, like they have muscular dystrophy or a spinal cord injury or whatever. Imagine if a few decades back when I was involved in the fight to make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples we were fighting to only make public transportation in Chicago accessible for cripples with a certain diagnosis. If I was riding a bus that was blowing past other cripples, I’d feel like shit about it. It would take all the fun out of winning.

We  might’ve all had to carry around a notarized doctor’s note verifying that we were indeed the type of cripple that was officially authorized to ride public transportation That would’ve really sucked.

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Name that Cripple

 

I always thought that there ought to be a game show called Name that Cripple. It would surely become a craze that would sweep the nation.

All we’d have to do is line up three wheelchair cripples right next to each other on a street corner somewhere. The three cripples would be of the same age and race and gender and all so they’d all look pretty much alike. But one of the cripples would have something like muscular dystrophy and  the second would have something completely different like cerebral palsy and the third one would be your standard quadriplegic from a spinal cord injury.

The emcee would stop random passersby who are verts (which is what I call people who walk because it’s short for vertical). And if a vert agrees to play Name that Cripple, the emcee gives them three blank cardboard placards and a marking pen. And each placard would be attached to a string and the vert contestant would write something like muscular dystrophy on the placard and hang it around the neck of whichever one they thought to be the corresponding cripple.

And if a vert contestant gets all three right, they win a valuable  prize, such as a lovely new dining room set from Broyhill. But nobody will ever get all three right because it never fails that the average vert on the street can’t tell the difference between a c.p. cripple and an m.d. cripple and a quad. They can’t tell the cripples apart without a scorecard.

This always baffles me because if I played Name that Cripple I’d be the grand champion. I can identify a cripple’s genre from a mile away. If I was looking down from a helicopter on a field of cripples, I could rattle off in no time which one was which.  I think the differences between us are bloody obvious.

But that’s probably because I’ve spent so many years hanging around with such a wide variety of cripples that I’ve developed a keen eye. I don’t think I can say the same about anything else. If I was looking down from a helicopter on a field of cows, for example, they would all just look like a bunch of cows to me.

But when it comes to cripples, I can look at a parking lot full of empty cars and tell you which car belongs to a cripple and which one doesn’t. Like for instance, if it’s a fancy sports car, it’s probably not a cripple car. I never see cripples driving or even riding around in fancy sports cars, probably because doing so is too much of a pain in the ass, what with the bucket seats and all. Or maybe it’s because fancy sports cars are too expensive for most cripples.

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Self-Diagnosed Autism

 

Recent research shows that the prevalence of autism among people age 18 and over who are on Medicaid doubled between 2011 and 2019.

I wonder if this includes people with that new strain of autism that’s been going around lately. I call it SDA, which stands for self-diagnosed autism.

I notice that there seem to be more and more people running around claiming to be autistic. But they seem like regular folks.

This seems like a triumph of marketing. Because in recent years, we’ve developed a much better understanding of autism, which is a good thing. When I was a kid, autistic people were considered to be hopelessly oblivious and so we segregated them away in institutions so we wouldn’t have to be bothered with trying to figure them out.

But now,  autism is viewed as a spectrum with a lot of different variety. Autistic people are referred to as neurodivergent. That sounds much cooler. To be neurodivergent sounds like you’re a little bit weird. And it’s cool to be a little bit weird as long as it’s the  cool kind of weird and not the weirdo kind of weird.

All this makes it easier than ever to proudly proclaim that you are autistic. I’ve never seen anyone who goes around saying that they’re crippled for the same reason I ‘m crippled. No one ever claims to have what I have, unless they really do. It would creep me out if I met somebody like that, just like autistic people are probably creeped out by people with SDA.

 Maybe people don’t try to appropriate my kind of crippledness because there isn’t much that’s vague about that which makes me crippled. There’s no spectrum involved. You either have it or you don’t.

But I think the reason people don’t self-diagnose as being crippled for the same reason I am is because there’s nothing cool about it.

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Fortuitous Exclusion

 Some cripples put a lot of their time and energy into trying to make it easier for cripples to play video games. And it seems that they’re having some success. Apparently, they’ve complained effectively enough to get Sony to design a new, more accessible controller for PlayStation.

I wish them luck. This is an access battle I will not be joining.

It’s not that I don’t agree that the people who design video game stuff exclude cripples. It’s clear that they do. And it’s not that I don't agree that this cripple exclusion is bad. It is.

But this strikes me as one of those kinds of cripple exclusion that I find to be fortuitous. It’s probably a good thing for me that video games are pretty inaccessible. Because I know that if I could easily play, I’d probably spend all day playing and then I’d be super pissed off at myself for spending all day playing. That’s the reason why I stay the hell away from casinos. I know if I gave myself half a chance I’d play the slot machines for hours on end, like a fucking zombie.

Churches are another example of fortuitous cripple exclusion. When I was a kid, because I was crippled, the Catholic church gave me a pass on doing the stuff uncrippled kids had to do, like going to church and Sunday school. The Catholic church didn’t expect much out of cripples, so there weren’t many paths to participation for us. Have you ever seen a crippled altar boy?

Thus, there are also cripples who put a lot of their time and energy into trying to make it easier for cripples to go to church. And why not? If there are crippled kids out there who are bound and determined to be altar boys, I suppose they ought to have that opportunity.

But that’s another access battle I will not be joining. I want all of the crippled kids of today and tomorrow to be able to enjoy their exclusions, just like I did.

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Wiping the Master's Ass

 

I hear that in the days of U.S. slavery, working inside of the house was considered by slaves to be the  cushiest of assignments. I guess they thought that fixing meals and making beds was better than toiling in the fields in the hot sun any old day.

 But what about if the master was crippled like me? I wonder if that meant that all bets were off. Because some of the indoor slaves would have been assigned to be members of the master’s pit crew, which is what I call the crew of people I hire to help me get dressed and in and out of bed and help do all of the necessary stuff I can’t do for myself.

This would mean that the job description of the pit crew slaves would include wiping the master’s ass, as needed. Because that’s one of the things that my pit crew members have to do for me, as needed.

And I know that some people think ass wiping is the dirtiest job in the world. There was a guy I hired to be on my pit crew many years ago. He was from Cambodia and when I interviewed him for the job he regaled me with accounts of how he escaped the murderous dictatorship there by fleeing through the jungle and dodging wild animals. I figured that this guy must be pretty resilient, so I hired him. But he only lasted about a week on my pit crew because he couldn’t handle the ass wiping part. I wouldn’t be surprised if he high tailed it back to Cambodia.

So it makes me wonder if some of the slaves would have preferred to stay out in the fields rather than go inside and be on the master’s pit crew. And besides, if you didn’t wipe the master’s ass just right, you might get whipped for it. How embarrassing would that be?

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Cripples Who Speak Latin

 

My wife is a rare breed of cripple. She speaks Latin. Well, I don’t suppose she actually speaks Latin. I don’t suppose anyone actually speaks Latin. But she knows a good amount of Latin because she was in some Latin classes in school. I don’t know many cripples who did that, or at least not many cripples my age.

When my wife was in high school in the 1990s, she was invited to take part in a curriculum for “gifted and talented” students. So she spent a couple of summers taking Latin classes.

On the other hand, I went to high school in the 1970s at a state-operated boarding school for cripples that I refer to as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT). There was no curriculum for gifted and talented students at SHIT, probably because everyone just assumed that any student who was going to high school at a state-operated boarding school for cripples couldn’t possibly be talented or gifted.

By the time my wife was ready to go to high school, new law made it so she was allowed to attend the same high school that the uncrippled kids in her community went to. But because I had little choice but to attend the state-operated boarding school for cripples, I am now illiterate in every language except English. Well, I do know a little bit of Spanish because they did make us take Spanish classes at SHIT. But the only reason they had Spanish classes at SHIT was probably because it was a required part of the minimum state-approved education curriculum. Because all we inmates ever got at SHIT was the bare basics in terms of education, food and everything else. It’s a lot easier to get away with treating people like that when you segregate them away.

In the future, we’ll be able to measure how well cripples are emerging by noting how many of them know Latin.

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Too Much Trauma

Things have gotten to the point where going to the grocery store is a really traumatic experience for me. It gets me all riled up.

It’s pretty much the same as how taking my nightly shit used to get me all riled up. My last official act of every day is to sit on the bowl. This is what the new agey, self-care types would refer to as my “me” time. Except the problem was that I would also use this time to read a little before bed. And I read a bunch of lefty political magazines and I’d go to bed grumbling about how the fascists are taking over and everything was going to hell. And I couldn’t sleep so my wife decided that I needed to read something that was full of nothing but good news so she subscribed me to a magazine that was all about beer. And when I read my beer magazine, I’d come to bed in a much better mood. I guess I was soothed and reassured by being reminded that even if the fascists are taking over and everything is going to hell, at least we still live in a world where there’s a wide variety of beer.

But what gets me all riled up when I go to the grocery store are those people who park their cars in the striped area next to the cripple parking spaces. That’s even more ignorant than parking in the cripple spaces themselves because those striped areas are there because wheelchair cripples like me need extra room next to the parking space so we can deploy our ramp or lift so we can get out of the vehicle. So what happens is we park and go inside the store and when we come back out we see that someone has parked in the striped area, which means we don’t have room to get back into the vehicle. When this happens to me, I say to myself, “Didn’t that jackass see all those stripes painted on the ground? If not, they’re too blind to be driving!”

And didn’t they take a minute to consider that those stripes might mean something? They’re the same stripes that are painted in the fire lane and everybody knows that it means that you don’t park there or you’ll get towed. But you won’t get towed if you park in the striped area next to the cripple parking space.  If I complain to the manager that someone is parked in the striped area next to the cripple space, they’ll just shrug and mumble a generic apology. They don’t want to tow anybody for that reason because they don’t want to piss off customers. Apparently, they don’t mind if they piss off customers like me.

One time the vehicle parked in the stripes next to the cripple space I was parked in was a tow truck. Who do you call when you need to have a tow truck towed?

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