Today, Tuesday 26 September 2023, we went to Lake Charles. However, since this is my first blog article here in 11 days, and since the most recent was of the second day of my overnight Texas trip, I want to recap some things since then.
Recent Days
That trip was great. Because I didn’t arrive at the house from the trip until 00:10 on the 16th, I slept until almost 07:00 that day and was awakened by the sunlight, which is quite unusual for me now!
When I awoke that morning, I couldn’t get a grip on thinking. It reminded me of how much I need to be awake before dawn in order to have a grip on the day. I ate a relatively early breakfast, did not fast. I ate eggs on top of grits.
It wasn’t until the next morning, the 17th, that I made my first walk in the ‘hood since before the trip, viewing the neighborhood where I have been stuck living for a while through the lens of what I saw and did on the prior two days in Texas.
In those days after the trip, I was thinking plenty about that Texas crew. It’s another thing to figure out who I am by comparing myself to other people, which brings to mind a Twitter thread from David Roberts about seeing the Barbie movie.
Someone texted me and thanked me for coming and said that I did a “good job,” which is a weird thing to say about attending a funeral. I wish that I could have gone to his brother’s services if for no reason other than to see their father one last time.
I was thinking about my perception of this ‘cool’ guy throughout my life and what it has meant for me. Really, I had been avoiding that branch of the family since the Trump Era but even before that due to the shame that I feel about my situation, a sense of shame that didn’t really exist in 2009 when I last saw him.
I sat at the table and was treated very well by people who try to harm me.
It was a good learning experience.
It’s also a nice thing to do for a few people who, in this specific moment in time and context, like AMM, I am inclined to do something nice.
I say that I wanted to attend their brother’s funeral, but I just would not have and didn’t, for those two reasons, shame and Trumpism. Also, we were just in a bad situation with the house being built. I could have come, though. So, my own explanation doesn’t add up even to me.
It would have made this trip a few days ago a little bit less weird and would have meant a trip to Texas in 2022, all consecutive years since December 2020, when I broke my long streak of years of not going to Texas.
The ‘rents are talking about wanting to go stay at the Texas house, and this recent trip of me alone is a good trial run to do that.
I got seafood poboys that night (the 16th), which I wanted after the beefy Texas experience that I had had.
I didn’t fast that day, but I did on days after.
The Gruff Guy is irritating in multiple ways.
I’m now finally at a point in my life when I’m giving myself permission to say “That’s not good for me” and “I don’t like that and don’t have to like that.”
Anyway, the footballer was a hero to me, as I am now realizing, even though he was a hero to me, someone I barely knew.
Given that family’s Republicanness and the betrayal that I feel by all of that that, there is an analogy to the relationship that I had with another family back home and always trying to please them, kind of like that revelation that I had in February 2021, that I was always trying to please or impress them even as they are part of the movement that denies humanity to people, including to me, and even though I always felt uncomfortable around them.
I was trying hard to be cool in their eyes.
So, I had this weird – but, really, not weird at all – fandom of the that university in Texas.
I talked to Cora on the 20th, and she was reeking of cigarette smoke. It was gross; it was awful.
Whether it’s dealing with smokers or dealing with people walking along with automobile traffic, you have to hold your ground the first time, rather than yield and then try to assert a boundary later.
On September 23, I saw at the gym the gym person who betrayed me and caused me sanctuary trauma about the gym. She would be a person whom I could ask about my contractor question, but, now I can’t, not because of my autism but because of her ableist cruelty and oppression.
So, it’s not to other people’s merit that they never get into situations like mine. I totally get now that the oppositional ‘nature’ of some disabled people really isn’t nature at all but a rational and justified response to how society treats them. Neurotypical and abled people are privileged enough to be callous to sensory input and almost never find themselves in such situations in the first place.
The situation is not just defined by the physical harm. It’s also defined by being an oddball who is considered the problem, even though the problem is what they are doing to you.
Today
We took the southern diversion, of course. The drive in was uneventful except that the ‘rents really liked the new roundabout at the intersection of Highways 14 and 397.
I stopped at the convenience store at the end of East McNeese Street to take a leak, because I didn’t want to have to deal with that quite-literally-pressing problem when we encountered the cousin that we were trying to visit.
I drove in front of ‘the house’, which was uneventful, and we noticed how low the water was in the artificial lake.
Then we went out a new way that didn’t exist when we were there but was being constructed, that neighborhood to the east, with all right turns back onto East McNeese Street.
We went to the Seafood Palace. He embarrassed me, as he has done.
At first, the restaurant service was rather bad, like slow, but that ended up being because some customer had a health emergency, and staff had to be on the telephone with first responders, which took up plenty of their – and, as such, our – time.
The food came.
We left, and we went to the new track on the northern side of West Sallier Street west of Barbe Street, supposedly part of a project to build a bridge across Bayou Contraband, which is crazy and will screw up the whole experience of trainwatching right there.
The above view is looking to the east, while the below view is looking to the west, toward the port that is the reason for the existence of this track.
Yeah, I posted about this on Facebook.
We then continued westward to check out the port, where I saw only one Port Rail locomotive, the switcher. There was plenty of lumber at the port. There was no sign of wind-turbine parts, and the lighting wasn’t good for any pictures.
We then went eastward on Lakeshore Drive, where I got some pictures.
There is still damage downtown from Hurricane Laura.
Here is a view toward the infamous Interstate Highway 10 bridge over the Calcasieu River.
The clouds worked in my favor today, as they would miles east of here after these images were made.
Here is a more zoomed-in version, showing the Capital One Tower and the convention center.
The Capital One Tower is the tallest building in Lake Charles, but it has been unoccupied since being heavily damaged by Hurricane Laura in 2020.
I turned off of Lakeshore Drive onto Barbe Street, and, then, at the intersection of West Sallier Street and Lake Street, I saw this.
Then, we went in the direction of Harbor Yard.
We saw a headlight when I got to that bend in the track around Enterprise Drive, a headlight in Harbor Yard. I stopped at Second Avenue as if to set up for a shot of a westbound train, but that’s when I remembered that it might be the Union Pacific Railroad’s local train, going no farther west than Harbor Yard, because it’s there to interchange with Port Rail.
I drove all the way to Harbor Yard and went to the parish-government place south of the tracks, the first time that my passengers visit there.
At 16:30, we passed by the Farmers Rice Milling Company mill, where there were about 36 cars at the rice mill. At the time, I assumed that the UP local train was in Harbor Yard, which made me think that those 36 cars, which is plenty to be there at one time, included inbounds and outbounds, like as if the train had dropped off the inbound cars and went to Harbor Yard with plans to grab the outbound cars on the way back.
Then again, maybe the UP local train hadn’t yet been to the rice mill and was going to work it on the way back.
So, then, we leave town, and we take the long way, a southern diversion. We then went on Manchester Road north to Collins Road, then eastward from there to I forgot the name of the road, to then go north to get to Highway 90, then to Welsh to catch Louisiana Highway 99. The Duke wasn’t feeling well.
These two scenes are from Louisiana Highway 1142 near its intersection with Louisiana Highway 99 south of Welsh.
Ten minutes later, we stop west of Thornwell.
We are on Louisiana Highway 380.
This is the only state highway in Thornwell, a very small village.
As you can garner, we are stopped to photograph the interesting skies!
The Southern Pacific railroad’s Lake Arthur Branch from Lake Charles came through here.
The below view is a north-northeastward view.
The below view is an east-northeastward view toward the center of the village.
As I did in May, I am becoming less interested in photographing trains – now that trains are less interesting than they were years ago when I photographed them more often – and more interested in photographing stormy skies, and this is especially true now that my RAW-image processing skills have improved recently.
Here we are coming into the village.
There appears to have been some railroad carload service on the SP Lake Arthur Branch here. The branch was abandoned more than four decades ago.
Check out the rice-agriculture equipment, as raindrops fall in front of all of it.
Here is the only image that I took east of the village, and it’s our last image of the day.
We had plenty of rain fall on the automobile. The Duke was in plenty of pain.
So, I was thinking lately, earlier this week, about “Eesh”. It is an early example of echolalia for me, and the earliest that I can remember, even if I learned only recently of the phenomenon and the name for it.
I repeated “eesh” plenty in elementary school. I repeated it mostly if not entirely in the presence of older students, a fact that has become relevant to me only recently. That means that I was trying to interact with them in lieu of interacting with kids my age, a subject of unschooling and Peter Gray, how the best schools have mixed-age groups. It made me think of my experience at VAL and then MJ, with kids at the latter acting awful but then not so when dealing with elementary kids.
High school was the first time that I heard “Eesh” derisively.
I should have been an architect.
I just thought of something! I should reach out to architects.
Okay, this is all for now.
Thanks for reading, and take care.
Jbx
