Alan’s father was a mountain, and his mother was a washing machine—he kept a roof over their heads and she kept their clothes clean. His brothers were: a dead man, a trio of nesting dolls, a fortune teller, and an island. He only had two or three family portraits, but he treasured them, even if outsiders who saw them often mistook them for landscapes. There was one where his family stood on his father’s slopes, Mom out in the open for a rare exception, a long tail of extension cords snaking away from her to the cave and the diesel generator’s three-prong outlet. He hung it over the mantel, using two hooks and a level to make sure that it came out perfectly even.

so do i.

i have a lot of land, and a tractor, and not much money.
stonework is very expensive, because labor is too expensive.
gone are the days when you could find cheap labor to dig rocks.

i live in new england, and every yard is full of rocks.
you dig them up, they grow back.
old tales talk of devil rocks.

no matter how much you dig them up to grow your gardens,
the rocks always grow back.

there is some reason, but i don’t care.

i love to dig up rocks.
it relaxes me, for reasons i don’t understand.

cutting trees and working the garden just don’t do it.
it has to be rocks.

i make stone walls, without the mortar.
they look like walls from colonial times.
nobody even guesses they are not.
people then would dig rocks.
you put little rocks between the big rocks, to make them stay..
you fill the holes, slowly, little rock, by bigger rock.
then you can place another really big rock.

i make little walls around the gardens.
sometimes i don’t even bother to plant the gardens.
i line the walkways with my little stone walls.
my property front looks like a the remains of an old stone fort.

on the driveway end, at the main road, i built a stonehedge.
a celtic artwork, with very heavy rocks.
the biggest my tractor could move.
sure, the little town thought it was insane, the first year.
the second year i planted yellow tulips around the ring.
the third year i planted clover in the center.
it now is beautiful, and everybody in town loves it.

now i’m collectig rocks to resurface the outside of my house.

i just love to work with the rocks.
when i get home from my computer engineer job.
i just want to take my huge iron pike, and find a cool quartz rock.
or maybe a red granite one.
or go where the stream dried up, and pick smooth brightly colored.

i don’t know why, i don’t care.
i’m past the hump where people laugh.
and it still makes me happy.

When I line up objects or stare at them, or focus completely on taking apart a circuit, or show an “unusually” deep connection to fiction (etc.), people tend to claim that I’m “withdrawing from the real world again”. This is far from the truth. If anything, I *need* objects to find some sense in the general chaos of the physical world, as you said.

I’m still fundamentally confused about why it’s considered so vastly much worse to perceive communication, thought or emotion where it might not exist than to deny it exists when it does. I’m reminded of an article I read once in a magazine where some “expert” was insisting it was bad to “anthropomorphize your pets” (which seemed to mean, in this context, believing they were capable of thought, emotion, and attachment to humans at all, not believing that their mental states were exactly the same as humans’), and someone pressed him to come up with an example of a negative consequence that might come out of this, and he said something like “well, uh, people overfeed their animals because they think they’re asking for food.” Overfeeding versus inflicting physical and emotional suffering on something because you don’t believe it’s capable of feeling that suffering… oh, yeah, that sure is a difficult choice to make. In the case of people who are considered to have “no conscious thought,” the worst that happens is that you just waste your time trying to communicate with someone who can’t comprehend it. I’d rather err on the side of caution and waste my time than condemn someone to that suffering.

And for all the much vaunted “Theory of Mind,” I think there’s something like a theory of mind missing when someone has difficulty perceiving communication in anything that doesn’t look like a human, or in humans who don’t meet your criteria for what people “should look/act like.”

vis. 60 minutes on daniel tammet http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/01/26/60minutes/main2401846.shtml ; the most interesting quote there: “[Daniel] He believes his large family may have actually forced him to adapt. ‘Because my parents, having nine children, had so much to do, so much to cope with, I realized I had to do for myself,’ he says.”

Thank you for your contribution and sharing your thoughts.
I am glad that you chose to learn how to type and communicate within our community. I pray that your lesson is seen and heard and understood by multitude of people.

P.S.
I thought your poem was beautiful.

“You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars;

you have a right to be here,

and whether or not it is clear to you,

no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”

From “Desiderada”, Author Unknown although some maintain that this piece was written by Max Erhmann.

You rock. How is your dog/cat/asthma situation? I read about it yesterday, and I hope that you have some trustworthy friends to help you with a solution. It’s essential that you keep your companions, even if the doctor doesn’t understand that.