Hi, everyone! Today, I got my first SLR-camera pictures of 2024, and it was on a trip to far-off places out of state.
Today, I am ending the day out of state, in Texas, and you’ll see some pictures from this trip.
First, though, since this is the first blog article since the Friday before Christmas, I have plenty of thoughts from the last month to share. I want to share these thoughts, but, if you’re here just for the pictures, I guess that you can scroll past these thoughts, which are on the subjects of neurodivergence, autism struggles, and the photographic content of this publication, among other things.
Monday, December 25th
At 06:46 on Christmas Morning, unsurprisingly, it was very quiet as I walked in the neighborhood on this cloudy, cool, somewhat-cold morning. It was predictably quiet, with very few automobiles on the highway. We could do this more often!
This was relatively late for me to be walking, as I awoke relatively late, after 05:00.
What did I do yesterday? not much other than washing a big pile of dishes, rinsing and chopping lettuce, chopping and dicing a big pile of onions that I must put in the pan to slowly cook down, doing file transfers on computers, and, also, work on shots from 2009, from April on that Georgia trip to the end of July in British Columbia.
I can’t stop thinking about something, and it’s bad; it’s so obsessive.
I feel like I shouldn’t take a trip to Thibodaux at the end of this month just for one simple reason, just so that I can get all of the shots and the blog work done before the end of the year. It’s a lot to do, and making that trip would very much preclude my ability to get that done. It’s the grand finale, baby, and I have to be really on it.
I see why I have fallen so hard for them and that, when it falls apart, I feel like I am just lost at sea. Both happen for the same reason. It’s because I have no real support network, because I am traumatized, and, now, I know why. I had that realization this year from the gym, from the Gym Lady incident, the trauma from it. So, I went to the gym in Lafayette this week, and the people there, including the employees, were very nice to me, but they might turn on me at some point. When I am being made to needlessly suffer, they will let it continue. I read another tweet this morning from someone who feels like society has just turned her down after the pandemic.
I have so much work to do.
I can’t wait to get this project in Morgan City going. I am going to love that, plenty.
Wednesday, December 27th
I went to work on this day, shadowing.
I awoke before 04:00, and I did walk briefly, about 20-25 minutes. I did walk the whole neighborhood once, my usual parts of it, not the stubs.
I didn’t even bring my camera with me today. I was busy trying to do a bunch of work at the house, that I just mentioned, before I left. Had I not been busy doing that, I may have tried to get some shots by the track in Lafayette before work today, but maybe it’s a good thing that I am not worrying about that.
When I wrote yesterday the January 2004 essay, I wrote about the Close Up experience and how it changed my life and how it is why I don’t have pictures from the last week of January. Also, recently, when I went through my 2009 shots, I went through my shots of the Close Up trip then. It’s funny, because my four Close Up trips as a teacher happened within a span of slightly more than five years, last week of January 2004 to the middle week of 2009. There were two Presidential elections in that time. It’s weird now that I am almost 20 years from the first one and almost 15 years from the last one, it’s now all jumbled together. When the last one happened, it was like, wow, cool, and the first one seemed so far away, and now they are kind of together and this thing of the past, and I don’t even think about the time that I was there in 2011 working for Close up, and that, too, is more than a decade ago. So, that itself is now closer in time to the teacher trips than it is to now.
So many meaningful things in my life that are just increasingly far into the past. Talking to her about feeling “miseducated” about politics, it’s coincidental that that is how I felt after my first Close Up trip, and that is what inspired me to really learn plenty. It’s so much that I am not doing anymore, except the things about it that I am doing. Anyway, it’s all things that I can’t discuss with people with whom I work here.
Thursday, December 28th
Any time that we go over 30 inches for the footings, we put rebar cages. That’s what TQ said to me in Denham Springs. We then went eat at a place in Youngsville called Morvant’s. He then dropped me off at the office as he was on the telephone with Stephan.
I was kind of glad to be off. There was not a cloud in the sky. I didn’t have my DSLR-camera equipment with me. My telephone was broken. There was plenty of light left in the day, and I was here without camera equipment. There was no train. The L&D job had shut down for the day. This was not an Amtrak westbound day. There really was nothing else to photograph.
Monday, January 1st
Yeah, it’s New Year’s Day, and it’s depressing.
It seems that this is when I discovered the source of the problem of the date on my voice recorder reverting to factory settings, which happens when the batteries are disconnected.
I walked for about 40 minutes on this morning.
I am hopeless. I want to cry right now. That experience that I had this past year with the People Pleasing Gym Lady really made me realizeeverything, it helped me understand everything, why I have struggled so much in this society, how it’s mostly not my fault, and how it actually always was largely hopeless.
The Port Trio came here yesterday. I didn’t see them, though, because they didn’t ask me if it was a good time to visit me, and it wasn’t. I had already told Jenny that I was going to accept her invitation to go to her house, and I wanted to go to her house, because I hadn’t yet met her family, which I did yesterday.
Dammit, my neighbors are jerks! They are randomly popping off loud fireworks without warning.
Yes, that looks pretty, but it’s really loud and abrupt.
These jerks with the fireworks kept me up last night.
I was able to get done the January 2014 Sampler essay last night, scheduled to publish this morning. So, I was just working nonstop. So, what did I do today? I walked almost 40 minutes, the first time that I walk for that long without interruption since before Christmas. I may have walked that much in spurts in my recent shadowing work.
I also did almost all of the writing for and I completed and uploaded the pictures for the February 2004 images essay. So, that one is now scheduled to publish on February 1 at 04:00, regardless of what I do in the interim. I could die right now, and it would still publish. So, the next thing that I want to do is work on one like that for March, then work on one for April.
I don’t want to work on Photoshop today, but I will have to clean that desk and then work on 2019 pictures, which is going to take a while.
I am just feeling exhausted right now. I did rest today, and that’s something that I needed to do.
Jesus Christ! Fireworks scaring the crap out of me. It’s really wrong that people are allowed to do this.
I want to go home. This is not a bad place to sit outside. I like these open lots here.
I could talk to Jenny every day.
Those fireworks are kind of pretty when I am expecting them. I don’t know where they are coming from, though, just to the southeast of me.
I have been yawning all afternoon and drinking Gatorade to try to wake up.
Tuesday, January 2nd
On my morning walk, the temperatures were in upper 30s.
I was just thinking about how I always say that if more people “suffered from” the issues with which I suffer, or I am made to suffer, fewer of us would actually suffer from them, because society wouldn’t be so hostile to us in the first place. We suffer less because of some innate disability or physiological condition and more because of the harsh societal expectations. That issue with The Gym Lady is a perfect example. In that situation, there is nothing wrong with me. Nothing. Nothing whatsoever. I am just trying to go to a gym and work out. It has nothing to do with music. I am perfectly fine at the gym and doing workouts themselves.
So, this brings to mind that whole question of whether vaccines cause autism and how the premise of that debate is that autism is bad, and how plenty of liberal and even progressive people might just argue that, no, vaccines don’t cause autism, which they think is a vaccine-supporting thing to say, and maybe it is, but they are leaving unchallenged the premise that autism is bad. What you permit, you promote.
So, my thought recently is that, if vaccines caused autism, that might actually be a PLUS for vaccines. We would be creating a society that likely would be less hostile to people like me.
If more people would be autistic, I wouldn’t have to deal with so much of the oppressive crap that I have to suffer in this society. I’d be able to go to the gym and work out in peace, and the same thing would be true for paid jobs. People would have to be more cooperative and less hierarchical in order to get stuff done. I am thinking about Pathological Demand Avoidance, or Persistent Desire for Autonomy. So, I am thinking about all of that with all of these construction managers with whom I was shadowing who are thinking about doing what is best for the company.
So, what if vaccines caused autism? That would be great, except that I have to think about the severe-and-profound dudes, like the ones who make plenty of noise and lack self awareness. I have to keep in mind that I am a particular kind of autistic person, made it well into adulthood before realizing it, heavily masked, can kind of fit in temporarily. Always remember that those hand-flappy dudes who make irritating noise are my brethren, in a sense.
People shooting off fireworks at 07:00 in the morning on January 2. There have been discussions on Twitter recently about how this is a rude, barbaric practice, and I agree.
I have so much work to do.
I need to talk to Bill.
The neighbor has COVID. She didn’t get the latest booster shot, but she supposedly had the original ones a couple of years ago, and that supposedly helped her.
Saturday, January 6th
I took a walk on this morning, my first morning walk since the morning of the 2nd. The reason for the delay is that, at around midday of the 2nd, I got the COVID booster shot, the flu shot, and the tetanus shot while at it. I have been recovering from them over the last few days.
I have been allowing myself to sleep late lately due to the recovery, but I have to stop that. I am not totally normal now, but I can feel the normalness coming back. I feel like I can feel the negative effects of the vaccines working their way out of me. I had bad headaches yesterday until some time in the afternoon when they fairly quickly stopped.
I drank nothing but Gatorade today. I think that I will be normal when I stop feeling the need to drink Gatorade all the time.
Cigarettes are terrible.
Sunday, January 7th
A connection was just made in my head. I was looking at some 2019 Jimbaux blog posts, and, because of that, I am coming across an October 2019 conversation in which I participated.
Someone said of a conversation that she had with her daughter’s teacher, “She can look like she is paying attention, or she can pay attention. What is more important to you?”
the former, apparently
So, I responded about how teachers’ job performance is judged. I talked about how the school system encourages and basically requires this kind of behavior from teachers, and that it is part of why I left the profession. Teachers’ job performance is judged in part by classroom observation from administrators who count the number of students not “engaged” in the lesson.
So, there are some things that I am pondering from this. The first is that I was participating in anti-autistic oppression, even though I was autistic, because that standard guided by own behavior. I structured my lessons in such a way that the students would be engaged by the school’s standards of being “engaged” – which is to say, so that the kids would be looking at me. It almost encourages a certain kind of narcissism. I couldn’t really do group work.
So, I have also been thinking recently about how the whole education plus entertainment thing and how, in my last year, I was maybe too much of an entertainer more than a teacher, but, now, I am thinking that, if you are an entertainer, people are looking at you. Everyone is looking at you. You are a “character”. This is such an important insight. This idea that student engagement means looking at the teacher almost encourages this kind of narcissistic behavior. The factory model encourages that standard. The schools cannot really get rid of that standard without getting rid of the factory model. If you have a factory model, you have to have that sort of engagement standard where “engagement” is defined by kids looking at you if not some work that you have assigned them.
This morning, I worked on shots from August 2019.
I made an important programming note on the Facebook page tonight.
Monday, January 8th
I was quite bundled up on my morning walk this morning before 06:30, and it was a tough walk because of the stiff breeze. It was exhilarating!
I worked on shots this morning from the first half of September 2019, and I may get the rest of the 2019 shots that I am going to process on this run done today, and I say “that I’m going to process” because I am not doing every presentable 2019 picture, obviously. I am doing just enough for the social-media one offs and enough on the big posts that I can make montages, and also the posts that have only a few shots.
I posted some autism content on Facebook yesterday after I went to the gym and to the grocery store. I had a good chest-shoulders-triceps workout, but, then, I returned to the house and was a little bit sore and really tired, just didn’t want to do anything at all. It was tough, really tough.
I made an almost-$150 purchase at Walmart yesterday. It’s crazy. I guess that I’m going to do fasting today while I work on blog stuff. I do have plenty of blog stuff to do. I am pretty tired of working on shots. Yep, I am, and I don’t know when I’ll photograph anything again. I don’t know when I’ll do anything for the Guild again.
I was thinking last night and this morning that, given all of the boundaries that I didn’t realize that I had and that I generally respect in others, I was thinking about how one constant in my life, one thing that hasn’t changed about my entire life, and something that I am now realizing is not a bad thing and not unjustified but is something that I didn’t understand well and now understand better and need to understand better, is that I am sort of like . . . and this is very reductive, this might have to be nuanced out … I am now less trusting of people who like the same stuff than I am of people who dislike the same stuff that I dislike. Obviously, there can be exceptions, because someone might dislike something for a very different reason that I dislike it. Especially for romance, someone who likes the same stuff that I like isn’t necessarily going to be compatible, just because the person doesn’t have the same sensitivities and probably won’t have solidarity even if I might defend that person; that person won’t necessarily defend me.
I’ve been thinking about how it’s probably not a coincidence that, as I have come to recognize, establish, and stand by my own boundaries, I am now better able to recognize the boundaries of others, because I am now able to even recognize them as boundaries at all, because, as neurodivergent people, we were not really taught about boundaries, because we had ours violated all the time. So, we kind of don’t necessarily see a problem in violating the boundaries of others, because that is, supposedly, how you treat people.
So, it’s rational for me to feel like I can trust only the people who hate the same things that I hate, because they are likely to be the people who will understand me and defend me when my boundaries are violated. What made me think of all of this was seeing tweets this morning about Mardi Gras and how wonderful it is to be able to park your automobile and walk for a mile and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with crowds and do this for weeks.
It’s like, “uhh, what? No!” So, someone who hates doing that is someone who is more likely to be someone who would defend me and understand me and be forgiving and accommodating of my sensory needs in other areas. This makes me understand now why the fact that Sarah had come into town for JazzFest when she met me more than a decade ago made me feel uneasy and insecure, because she is a JazzFest goer, and the fact that she could just do that bothered me, apparently.
I didn’t understand these emotions back then, and it’s bad that I didn’t, because it led to resentment and passive-aggressiveness, but I think that I understand them now. It’s difficult to explain, but it’s like someone who goes to JazzFest, who flies into town to go to JazzFest, and who calls herself an extrovert, is someone who will blame me and who will therefore then leave me for someone who doesn’t seem as “dramatic”, because other events in my life have convinced me that I will be harshly judged and sanctioned for my own needs.
So, I realized that my sensory needs and my assertion of them comes across as dramatic. As a matter of survival, I have had to create an image of myself as a well-put-together straight white guy, but what that also means is that, when I suffer from overload, I am perceived as being dramatic, uncooperative, entitled, whiny, and, even, hostile and threatening, because I have, by necessity, helped to create this image of myself as a somewhat-robust person who can take a lot of stuff, you know, I go to the gym, I lift weights, I do construction, I travel, including to places that other people are afraid to travel, I am “hardcore”, but then I can’t handle sounds that other people can handle.
I have so much to do. I hear birds chirping; that sounds nice.
Yeah, I mean, I am living in a society that is not built for my sensory needs and also doesn’t really care about them, is also hostile to them. That Gym Lady incident really explains my whole life and all of society, too. That incident makes me believe all of these complaints from immunocompromised people and all of these people with dietary restrictions and such things about how society basically leaves them for dead, oppressing them.
Wednesday, January 10th
The reason that I am walking late is, of course, that I worked on shots this morning. Specifically, I worked on the 2020 January 30 shots this morning, I think a very good set, one of the best sets of Abbeville Branch pictures, the one that was also my last night in New Orleans. It’s crazy how that works, you know. It’s just an amazing thing.
So, I am thinking about pretty soon making an Abbeville Branch page on jimbaux.com, with links to all of my Abbeville Branch pictures. Maybe I should do that for trains of Port Rail and even the Acadiana Railway Crowley Branch, too.
Yesterday or a day or two before, I had to take the units to that annoying, ableist office, and, of course, what I remember most from the trip is the really annoying television to which they insist on subjecting us, like with the noise and Steve Harvey and all of this crap, and it’s like, I didn’t tell them to turn it off, but I’d have been the bad guy, because people were watching it.
It annoys me more than the absence of it annoys you.
To hell with people. Seriously, something is wrong with them. If not having that TV on is somehow vexing you, then you are the one with the damn problem.
So, I think that I am going to work today on the February 2014 Sampler essay and then, if I have time, do every one for 2014 after that, but I am thinking that because February 2014 is when that incident happened with my back and I had to have emergency surgery, it made me think that I have to write about that, but it also made me think about some insights.
Specifically, I have been thinking about how, prior to me having back problems, I would . . . it’s hard to explain, but it’s like I would have that ableist mindset of “well, the people with these problems, they did something wrong, they are not trying hard enough,” and, also, the image of me as a put-together guy and, say, I don’t help someone lift something and I would get judged harshly for that, like, look at that guy, he didn’t pick up something heavy for the old lady. Like, you can’t see why I am not doing it. So, I have been thinking about how that image of the well-put-together guy creates problems, not the image that creates problems but other people who create problems and their judgments, for autistic stuff, especially for sensory issues.
It was when I started having back issued in 2013 that I started feeling that judgement from myself, like “you’re not helping this person move stuff,” and realized that I had harshly judged others before, perhaps because I had been conditioned to think that way.
Friday, January 12th
I want to get the February 2014 Sampler essay done, but that requires some in-depth thinking and writing on the lessons that I have since learned from my back situation, even though the lessons started to be learned the spring before, in 2013. I remember talking to The Feather about that stuff.
Really, it makes more sense now due to my understanding of autism – and my understanding of society that stems from my understanding of autism.
Thursday, January 18th
Today was the day of a funeral that I was prevented from easily attending – and, therefore, did not attend – because of what was done to me by my own family.
So, I had a couple of realizations yesterday. Thomas Jefferson did not clean Monticello, almost certainly. Almost certainly, some women and-or girls, whether or not enslaved, cleaned it for him. The reason that I thought of that is Thomas Jefferson’s belief that halls were a waste of space, which is why there were no halls in Monticello.
Friday, January 19th
I had a haunting realization just as I am thinking about all of the photo processing that I have been doing and how much time it has been taking.
Even though I am a year-and-a-half away from the 20th anniversary of the July 2005 pictures from when I went digital, especially if I expect to get the 2023 and even 2024 backlog done before I start that, I may not have time to do that. All of the picture processing that I am already doing is just sapping the life out of me, and the other thing is that, if I do do those 2005 shots, I am going to want to keep going, to maintain the momentum, but what that means is that I would have to keep going with all of that until 2013. There would be a few exceptions in 2019 and 2012, like the spring break trip that I published two years ago, but, other than that, everything from when I started digital in 2005 up until 2013 when I am at my current processing standards (because I processed them only last year, as I got to those standards) is not done.
So, I cannot afford the time suck, really, and one thing that I am thinking is that what I could do is delay everything until not the 30-year anniversary but the 25-year anniversary, since that is like a good anniversary year, way more than 15 years. Okay, fine, in 2030, maybe I’ll start publishing those 2005 full-day images, and that will give me some breathing room, you know. I just thought of that as I just said it.
So, that might be what I do, I don’t know, maybe out of necessity. We shall see. I don’t know. I really hope to keep taking pictures and get a film scanner, and I have other things that I want to do in life between now and then, and we’re in the second half of January now, and pretty much the only thing that I have accomplished so far this month, this year, has been working on shots from 2019 and 2020 and uploading the 2019 ones to the blog, and working on the JIMBAUX’S JOURNAL Facebook page, which, as of now, is paying me about $2 or $3 per day. So, I cannot justify it even in financial terms.
I would like to get new lenses and even a new camera and take pictures, more of storms now than trains, but, whatever. I don’t know. I don’t know. So, yeah, maybe that is what I will do, do the posts on the 25-year anniversaries. The big problem with that is that it’s delaying the publication by five years, meaning that I could die, and the world would never see the images, which is important to me. The other problem is that the name of the years won’t rhyme. The thing about posting pictures 10 years or 20 years later is that the year of publication always ends with the same digit as the year that the image was made. It would be 2005 pictures being posted in 2030. It would 2006 pictures being posted in 2031.
But I don’t know. Okay, so, I think that what I am going to do is, once I get done these 2020, 2021, 2022 pictures, the latter just being montages, then I can focus on the current backlog, get that done, I can slow down the pace after I get that early February post, I think the 6th, done. So, that would be good.
The reason that I thought of this reason for despair about these old pictures and the processing and posting of them was that I was thinking about something that is actually great, something that made me happy, which is that, now that I am doing this montage thing, I have a chance to improve the presentation of so many of my classic sets of pictures really throughout my life, throughout the time that I have been taking pictures.
So, I started going through the years and thinking about all of the montages that I could make from those days when I took plenty of pictures, plenty of good pictures, and then I realized, whoah, I have plenty of pictures to process! If I want to get all of my old backlog out on the 20-year cycle.
Anyway, that’s going to be really tough, really tough. So, that’s that, I will just say. That is just that. Allright. Anyway, I have been losing weight the last few days. Unfortunately, I went to Burger King last night. I got a Texas Double Whopper, but I fasted yesterday and ate green beans, just didn’t have blackberries and didn’t think that a salad would fill me for the night.
Later on, as I was driving to the gym in the cold just after 10:00, I had some more thoughts. I was just thinking about something that I saw on Facebook, a share of a tweet that said to be careful about telling people to love themselves when, in so many cases, what they need and what they lack is community love. That definitely applies to me. I figured that out due to the revelation that I had this past summer due to The Gym Lady and the gym situation.
I don’t think that I mentioned this on a previous recording, that, on that note, I had a realization in the last few days that so many song lyrics to which I related in my earlier life are based on self-criticism that, actually, I am coming to see, is undeserved! I was thinking about the Metallica song “Bleeding Me”. I was listening to it a few days ago. I was thinking of that lyric “this thorn in my side, this thorn in my side is from the tree, this thorn in my side is from the tree I planted. It tears me, and I bleed.”
I am finally now realizing that, no, I am not bleeding me. My issues will not be solved by self love. My issues would be solved by society ceasing to be hostile, and what hurts more isn’t the people who do the things but are the people who aren’t doing the things but then blame me. They take an act of the perpetrators and act like it’s an attribute of the object. So, a situation in which people rudely subject other to excess noise or cigarette smoke becomes a situation about me being too sensitive or whiny.
So, again, they attribute an act of the actor to being an attribute or characteristic of the recipient or the target.
So, yeah, as per my realization this last summer, it’s both validating and hopeless. I get to stop blaming myself, but it also means that there is no hope for this to change in my lifetime. There is no hope for this to change in time for me. It’s not me. It’s not because of me. It’s not because of autism. It’s not because of sensory processing disorder. It’s because people are absolutely horrible, including the people who blame me for how the horrible people treat me.
Monday, January 22nd
So, last night and this morning, I am once-again thinking about my idea of rebuilding the Choctaw Route but having it go to San Diego via new tunnels and a bypass around the mountain on the western side of Phoenix.
It’s totally a crazy idea, but it’s a good idea!
Today, Friday, January 26th
So, today, we went to Texas for a funeral tomorrow, and we went the long way. We left the house at 07:21.
I mean, I am somewhat going through the motions. If this blog didn’t already exist, I would not create it, especially given the problems that I am having with virus warnings. It’s just that keeping up here is a real pain.
So, here we are in DeRidder, the units’ first time going there.
Yeah, there is this neat coffee and ice-cream place right by the track!
Here is the old Kansas City Southern Railway stainless steel caboose on display by the old KCS passenger depot.
Okay, now, I am on the southern side of the old depot, looking southward.
Here comes a train!
This was a southbound Canadian Pacific Kansas City Limited railroad grain train, likely going to Mexico.
As I posted on Facebook tonight, this is my first action railroad picture of 2024, and this is a very strange way for me to start the railroad photography for a year.
Such is my life and what it has become, however.
We went into the old depot, which is now a museum.
I don’t think that I had been inside this place in the two previous times that I have come to DeRidder, both last year, first on March 31 and then on September 14 when I was on my way to Texas for a very similar reason as we are today.
So, yes, here is the caboose.
There is another train coming!
I am south of the railroad depot, and these jerks are blowing cigarette smoke toward me. There is a southbound train, but maybe it’s stopping.
I already photographed a train here today, before we went in the depot, a southbound loaded grain train, and, now, there is this other train that appears to be stopping.
The horn blows!
Well, no, the train is coming!
I wish that I could see more of the train with this shot.
Well, our visit to DeRidder was nice!
At 11:22, we entered Texas on US Highway 190, about four hours after we left the house.
We stopped at Elijah’s Cafe in Woodville, which was my idea and a surprise for the passengers.
This was my first time here myself, and it was due to a recommendation by Jimmy Barlow.
Here is my meal.
It was good!
The food was good, and the experience was mostly good; the staff was sufficiently friendly, but the acoustics in that place are quite bad. None of the patrons were loud, but it definitely was a sensory assault. Being no longer hungry was not the only reason that I was relieved to leave the place; my ears had had enough. The sound of clanging of dishes is painful, and the place wasn’t even that busy; I can only imagine how painful it would be when the place is packed.
Perhaps management can line the kitchen area with some sound-absorbent padding, or something like that.
That was fun.
We had to stop in Cleveland for a bathroom stop.
That was a relief!
This is a recently-relocated former Santa Fe railroad depot!
It’s of the same Santa Fe line that reached DeRidder.
That’s all for the pictures for today. We arrived at our host’s house at 16:40.
We’ll see what we can get on the return trip tomorrow.
Jim
