Ten years ago today, I took my first pictures from atop my truck after emergency back surgery. Today, I took the first pictures from atop my truck in 2024. Both images were, quite appropriately, of a westbound BNSF Railway manifest train on the Lafayette Subdivision.
My last article here was only five days ago. So, today, I have only a few days of thoughts to share before I get to today’s picture.
Sunday, February 18th
I slept okay last night, but I felt quite depressed in the morning after the meeting yesterday, for many reasons. People who supposedly love me rubbed salt in the wounds. That’s what actually happened.
It’s just humiliating.
When he dropped The Bomb on me on the Thanksgiving Weekend of 2012 that this would happen, that poisoned our relationship – and permanently, which is why from that point on in November 2012, I became meaningfully more reclusive, and that’s about the time that I started wearing a hat everywhere I went. Two-and-a-half years before that, I was proud to walk around in my hometown.
I am also looking back at the other things that I did at that time, after the 2012 bomb, like trying to get into music and doing a music video, which, as we can see now, wasn’t really the right thing to do, but which was flailing that I felt the need to do at the time to try to anchor myself at home, as in as a reaction to the knowledge of what would happen to my home – of what would happen to me if I didn’t act to preserve what I had.
I am wondering what effect the knowledge of my impending abandonment had on my decision to try to do all the musical stuff.
Rich finally wrote to me last night, said that he was busy with some sort of evaluation stuff and that maybe we could meet in two weeks. Okay, maybe so, dude. I am just kind of feeling annoyed by all of this. I feel so hopeless.
So, I never had community. I realize that. It’s so clear now. I read about this from other autistic people.
So, here is another thing that really bothered me yesterday. Someone who supposedly cares about me was sitting right next to me talking really loud to me, causing me pain. I ask her to turn down the volume, and her response was, in the same volume that she had been speaking, and curtly, “I talk loud!”
That was arrogant and seriously rude, and the sound volume is painful for me. I cannot change the fact that it is painful for me, but you can change your sound volume. Like, she’s just saying that she’s going to make me feel pain even though it’s not necessary!
It’s painful for me. I cannot change that, yet she can change her volume.
It’s all of these little big microaggressions that you have to tolerate because you depend on people, and there is no way out. No wonder I have been clingy in relationships. No wonder I feel like I don’t have a community, because I basically don’t. No wonder I behave passive-aggressively.
She was being really loud. We were inside of a room, just the three of us. We were not competing with anyone or anything else for noise. She was sitting right next to me, she was talking really loudly, it was causing me pain, and it was making understanding what they were saying more difficult. I asked her to turn it down, and her response is “I talk loud”? That’s so arrogant and rude, and I can’t really say anything.
Something I was thinking about this morning is that I never have had a way of hitting back in response to what was done to me in most situations, and I also don’t have a way of hitting back when people do what was done to me yesterday. I have never had a meaningful way of hitting back, and, of course, that goes for most of my broader whole life, too. These things happen to me all the time, and there is not a way to hit back, because the entire community is either hostile or apathetic, the latter helping the former. It’s the silent people, like the Gym People Pleasers of the world. They’re not the people doing the sensory assault, but they are the people who cover for the people doing the sensory assaults, the people pleasers.
Understanding what people pleasers are and what it means helped me understand why I don’t trust anyone and have to act passive-aggressively, why I have to respond in ways that seem hyperbolic when I do make a stand.
They act so nice to you until you try to stand up for yourself, and there is no way to hit back. There is no support network. I really figured this out due to watching the way that immunocompromised people complain about how people in their own lives and people in general abandoned them treated them during the pandemic. That’s when it really hit me. These people are not by nature oppositional. Society is silently hostile to them, which makes them oppositional. It makes it look like the victims are oppositional, without taking into account the actions of the perpetrator.
That is what has been happening to me throughout my life. That happens to Palestinians and black people and poor people in general.
“You can never make an analysis of the oppressed in any aspect of their lives and leave out the oppressor. If you do so, you’ll blame the oppressed for their condition.” — Kwame Ture
Like, what if I had pushed back against her right there and said that that was arrogant? I could have, but it’s a processing issue, when I don’t think of what I should say in the moment. But what if I had said what I actually thought and called out that comment for the rudeness and arrogance that it actually was? What would have happened to me?
I didn’t choose to be oppositional, and I wasn’t born that way, either. I was not like this as a young child. This is something that others have done to me, as has been done to other neurodivergent people, immunocompromised people, transgender people, Palestinians, black people.
The validating part of this meeting was that everyone agreed that the relocation was colossal mistake, but that makes it all the more stupid that they felt the need to “remind” me of the reason for my situation, as if to put me in my place.
Not only do I know that, not only is that the reason that we’re having this conversation in the first place, not only do I have no choice but to think of that every day, all the time, but, also, it would still be true even if we were living at home, where I wouldn’t have the problem that I have now.
Anyway, in other news, David Roberts is getting annoying.
Tuesday, February 20th
After walking for more than an hour, starting before 06:00, I was just thinking about how, when I went to work at that first professional job that I had after college, and I was essentially fighting against the way that plenty of kids were and trying to mold them into what I think people should be, I was essentially fighting against neurotypicality, the neurotypicality that I had opposed and that had opposed me prior to me getting a teaching job, and it seems that that may have been a motivation for me to become a teacher, to fight neurotypicality, to use that job to fight against the elements and the mentality that had always fought against me, and, of course, at the time, I might have called it human stupidity, which it kind-of-sort-of is, but, now I have a more accurate understanding of what I was fighting. So, maybe part of the reason that I broke down and couldn’t keep doing it is that, actually, the factory school system itself is a component of neurotypicality.
So, it’s like trying to go work at a prison if you wanted to address the problem of overincarceration.
I started cooking down onions this morning in the pan. I turned the fire on on the range probably around 04:00. So, I got an early start on that.
An appointment to see a cardiologist in New Iberia today was rescheduled for Thursday morning.
Yep, I was fighting neurotypicality when I went to be a teacher. I see it all so clearly now. I might have been fighting neurodivergence, too, because I was a heavily-masked autistic person, and I was using a blunt instrument of neurotypicality.
Today
So, this morning, I was in New Iberia, and, railroadwise, I found the place to be quite boring. This is quite a contrast from how fascinating I found the railroad scene in New Iberia when I first visited there more than 20 years ago!
I came into town on Highway 14 and crossed the Midland Branch at about 10:03, and I saw a headlight to the north, but I didn’t bother to check it out because I was in a hurry, and the view wouldn’t be good anyway. So, I decided when I got to the mainline track at Highway 14 that I had just enough time to go and check out the interchange yard; so, I did.
There was not much really interesting there, just a bunch of carbon-black hopper cars, a few bulkhead flatcars that I didn’t even bother to see whether they were loaded or empty, some graffitied boxcars, and some of those sand hopper cars. I don’t remember seeing any tank cars. It was just kind of the same old stuff.
I took a picture of a Norfolk Southern locomotive, NS 8020, parked at the western end of the Louisiana & Delta Railroad interchange yard, which must mean that it is the power for the Union Pacific Railroad local train.
I have somewhat given up hope on this place, like railroadwise. I am not interested, not nearly like I was two decades ago, at last. I am here because of an appointment with the CIS, apparently due to heart palpitations, and it will be the first time in my life that I see a cardiologist.
I am discovering from Highway 182 that there are some good views of the track that could be useful in the future.
That CIS place where I am going sent me a text message with a link to pre something paperwork, like pre-complete registration, but the link that I visited didn’t work when I tried to open it on a computer, and that kind of annoys me that you get asked to do stuff on your telephone that could more easily be done on a computer and that could be done on a computer if they just let you do it. Nah, I am not doing that.
I have been awake for a long time today. Really, I don’t think that I have been asleep since around 02:30ish, 03:00ish at the latest. I did 12 hours of fasting yesterday and 12 hours of fasting the day before. So, I am hoping that it does something.
I got there at 10:26, barely on time. It was a 10:45 appointment, but I have to do paperwork at least 15 minutes ahead of time.
My appointment went well. I had another EKG. There are palpitations. They are scheduling me to come in tomorrow to be fitted with a thing, a monitor, to wear for 48 hours, and I am supposed to return at some point for an ultrasound.
I then got some food.
I got a Mexicali wrap. It was good!
So, after I got my food at Subway, I ate it as I was driving westward. I took a few more pictures at the interchange yard.
About the most interesting thing there is that set of bulkhead flatcars, but it’s a damn shame that they, too, have graffiti on them.
Then, I went to the ARA spur; I found a job working there.
Somebody waved at me. I think that it was CV. I am not sure.
It looks like he may have been getting his lunch out of the locomotive and going sit in the cab for lunch, because it was about that time.
So, I just took a few pictures and didn’t talk to anybody.
I got a few, for lack of a better term, old-school-railroad pictures of and from the other side of the Carbo Ceramics place.
I wish that railroads here moved more sustainable products.
It’s a nice view, though.
I went ride around looking for the First Solar place and didn’t find it, at least not to my knowledge, and I noticed that the Airport Boulevard crossing is closed, probably permanently, and then came back east to go to the gym, and that’s when I saw a westbound train and photographed it by the Popeye’s with no time to spare.
I love those old-school coil cars.
They are much better than the modern coil cars!
That is all for SLR-camera pictures for today. It was getting warm, and I had the air-conditioner in the truck on.
So, I went to the gym.
After I got out of the gym, I went to walk around downtown New Iberia. I don’t have much to say about the pictures. So, I’ll just present them here as a block. The reason for the library picture is that I went into the library, and the reason that I went into the library is that I had a sudden need for a toilet.
So, that’s a variety from downtown New Iberia.
That’s all. Have a nice day.
I definitely relate to what Doctor Ruba is saying there.
We live in a sick society.
I want to improve society, but so many people are fighting that, it makes me feel hopeless.
Well, that’s all for now. I hope that I can get more pictures and share them with you soon.
Jim
