Nameless One in the Slave States

Once again I have been in the Big Smoke for the weekend, the last time that I will be able to get down there. It is my goal to keep things positive and my friend and his family is the most positive thing in my life.  I wish that I could take a picture and show you all, but my friend is not even on Facebook, and I know that he would object to pictures of them circulating on the Internet.  And I respect that, moreover that is my philosophy as well.  My Facebook profile does not have any pictures of me on it.  And I don't take pictures of people without their permission, which is the reason why I am not good at taking pictures to the travel blog that I occasionally try to contribute to.

Positive things in my life.  I started Role-Playing again.  You have to understand what that is and what it means to me.  Role playing is a game where one person sets a series of challenges before a group of people playing one persona apiece.  The players are playing one individual who has goals and desires that may be goals and desires that they cannot express in reality, but also live in situations and with difficulties beyond what people experience in reality and they live in fantastic settings that mirror our own reality a bit or almost not at all.  These players try to get ahead in a world where they are the most important people in it.  They are characters from the book that you are currently reading, they probably have more going on behind their heads though.

The Story Teller is the setting, the antagonists and the faceless majority that the players interact with.  He is the plot and the integration of the setting with the goals and the desires of the players.  He is the agency by which the players have fun or do not.  At the beginning of play the setting is a cardboard two dimensional thing that changes the first time that a player dons the mask of his character and makes a choice to interact with it.  The setting after that moment is forever reacting to that choice and the choices that were made from that point going forward.

I do not like playing as a player.  This is an Asperger's thing, which stems from my own difficulty with social interactions.  The hope is alway that my social awkwardness is not tied to my character and that my character will interact smoothly.  It is dependent on the Story Teller to know where I find pleasure and what sort of interaction I prefer, because I don't often tell people and I generally take up a support role in groups.

As a Story Teller I actually excell.  I tend not to play until I have a deep understanding of the setting in my mind and I can then have a feel for how the town where the players start out from, the nation state that the town resides, the trade network that the town is a link to and the world whose powers may react to the rumours of the character passing by.  When a rock skips across a still pond the ripples spread out to the far reaches and edges; the frogs and the water bugs take notice, the fly leaps out of the way and the frog eats it.  The stone settles to the bottom, after it's journey, scattering small fish.  The rock disturbs the large bottom feeder and stirs up the mud.  Such can be the passage of the player character.

My friend wanted to play for a while now, a few years actually.  He had his character made up right from the start and he chose the setting.  I just had to flesh out the setting in my mind and deal with my life in the of the past few years.  The setting I worked on and off from the start, see the post I made about the slave states back in January.  The tough part for me has always been one thing, thinking quickly on the fly and getting names and motivations of setting characters.  My strengths are modifying the setting based on character's actions.  

In this game, the player Exalted before the story started.  The game we were playing people have two souls as the Egyptians believed, a lower souls the body and the higher soul the personality and experiences.  The lower soul dies and goes away.  The higher soul, when the body die, goes to the underworld where it waits reincarnation and is remade into a living person.  The Gods created long ago a third soul that they joined to their champions to fight their own battle against the Premordials in a battle that paralleled the Greek Gods' battle against the Titans of that mythology.  This third soul boosts the character into greatness and grants them powers beyond that of normal men.  And due to the fickle nature of Gods, they were hunted down by lesser men in a period after the great war was won.  But some of the powerful third souls still wait out of circulation, until the right person comes along who can bring change in the world.  My friend's character is one such individual.

When he Exalted, burst forth with power that came with the merger of the Third and greater soul, he was being tortured for escaping for a second time both as a slave and throughing off his addiction to mind numbing drugs, he killed his captors with his barehands.  He hid his identity by murdering all the witnesses to his crime that were aware of him and his capture that night.  The night for him was burned into his mind with that of the unexpected power at came to him, but with all similar traumatic events, some of the details were obscured from his mind.

When he created his character, the setting that he chose had information about what was happening in the land and the rumours are flush through the land.  I don't like to have the characters in my settings to have to compete with the canon story of e setting.  When he read that there were a group of escaped slaves that were engaging in a desperate battle to free others and remain uncaught against the oppressive might of the Realm, he thought it would be interesting to find them and join up and to aid them in their plight.  There were rumours that the attackers would occasionally kill oppressors and leave a bloody hand print at the scene as a calling card.

When my friend's character Exalted, he was not thinking clearly.  The people that he killed bled freely and his killing was not clean in all cases.  When e scene was discovered in the morning, bleeding dying men had crawled slid through the gore, bloody hand prints everywhere.  When he killed, his hands covered with blood, evidence of his assault was spread everywhere he touched; hand prints everywhere.  The calling sign of the merciless band of exslaves may have started elsewhere and may have been mythologized through the slave populations, but never before as boldly as was done on the walls of the domicile  and impromptu torture chamber.

Without knowing so he created an uproar in the setting and was mythologized in the setting, without meaning to.  Heading back into the setting after a few months to recuperate from the strangeness of his sudden and unexpectant second birth, he tries not to make waves, but is seeking oppressive slave masters and for away to dismember the Slave States from within.  He tires to remain unobserved and he sees the nation with new eyes, not as a slave, not through eyes drugged to the gills, the populations docile and maleiable.  He discouveres that the population he thought was one thing is another.  That the oppression, while still there, has been contained behind many walls of security, passive and vigilant.  The people from neighboring communities can not speak with their neighbours because they lack a common language.  Towns are far apart and therek is untamed wilderness between them.  The cities are filled with wards where languages are different from ward to ward and communication with the Realm's Bureacracy is through written transcripts and he, uneducated, cannot read.  But luckily he does speak the language used by the administrators, the language of the Realm.  

His first foray into the city he investigates who might be controlling the land and who he must focus his attention on, he scales the local palace and administrative building to find what he can find out.  He Unfortunatly arrived when most of the head men were out of town, the local Patrician of the Realm and his family were in the Capitol and they had left only minor functionaries, monks of the Immaculate Order, the main religion of the realm is preached far and wide, but his only managed to gain a foothold outside the Realm in its  Satrapies, like the Slave states, but the monks enforce the rules of the religion upon the local spirits and minor Gods through supernatural Martial Arts, based on the Shaolin Monks.  There was one other there, the Dragon Lord.  Dragon lord means that he is the commander of a thousand  soldiers of a Realm Legion, which contains five dragons.  Leader of a dragon does sound impressive, but the full Eighth Legion is spread across the four slave states.  More impressively he is also the head of the local slave army, which amounts to about a tenth of the slave population, which number many ten thousand in this smallest slave state.  

My friend's character executed a flawless infiltration of the palace seeking out the Patrician, only to be foiled by his absence.  Seeking a secondary target, he looks for loot to steal or information that he might use for future assassination trips he finds the Dragon Lord, but does not know that he is indeed that person or what that means as his life as a slave before was that of the lowliest of the low and he had no knowledge of such things.  The Dragon Lord awakes by chance and the Nameless, as he calles himself hides behind a fully dressed armour stand.  The General, not expecting anything settles back to sleep, but is still suspicious from long years as a general and fakes sleep, gripping his knife under his pillow.  The Nameless feels that the soldier has drifted off to sleep and takes one knife from e weapons rack and steals out of the room.  The general then stirs after a minute and quickly begins to don his armour, which looks vaguely Japanese including face mask and informs the lead Immaculate Monk on the level before heading out to follow the intruder, alerting guards on his way.

The Nameless, unsatisfied with the creeps down e stairs to where his earlier sneaking revealed the presence of a guard, whom he has desired to interrogate.  He takes great care to sneak up on him quietly, which takes time if you are not using supernatural powers, which he was not, allowing the General time to don his armour.  As his interrogation wraps up the General stealthily sneaks down the stairs behind him.  Distracted be the conversation he does not notice the general's quiet footfalls.  Laying the guard's newly lifeless body upon the ground after questioning him, he turns to find general neatly drawing his sword and charging to attack.

This is a turn of events, because the character thought that he was unobserved and had been sneaking quietly through the palace.  He quickly pulls his bow from his back as the warrior charges forth with a war cry. The soldier raises his arm to cut the intruder in half as e Nameless one set an arrow in place and casually aims for the eye hole in the mask and looses.  The arrow buries itself deep into the eye and the warcry turns to a scream, but through force of will continues his charge.  The Nameless one passes under his guard and slams his vambrace into the arrow in his eye, similtaneously mushrooming the shaft and breaking the tip which was lodged deeply in his brain, pulpifying what was left of it.  The general drops dead.  Alarm has been raised as the Nameless assassin dives out the sodden walls of the palace and into the quiet of the city and soon over the walls and away.

Imagine that you have been cloistered, shut away from the world your entire life.  Imagine how your life was a slave in this fictitious nation.  You were born to a drug addicted mother.  You were likely born in a field and your entire childhood you were forced to do the most menial tasks, the ones that you could do, until you were big enough to carry heavy loads and work in the fields.  From your earliest memories you have been drugged and addled, worked to the point of weariness and fed the most basic foods, lentil mash and water, for years.  And then one day you are given chocolate.  

The Nameless stole from caravans headed to the city, foods destined for the bellies of the Patrician class.  He ate candied hams, cakes and sugar.  Luxury foods rich in butter and fat after decades of gruel.  He got to the Capitol city and found the Harbour, against the ocean, two things amongst thousands he had never seen before.  Wooden castles on the sea.  People that were white as snow, black as night, green like leaves and every shade in between.  People who have never known the cruel stroke of a whip and people who got food and drink in exchange for shiny bits of metal and small slips of paper.  Concepts like buy and sell, money, services, entertainment were all foreign to him.  

He could hunt, he could clothe himself in the skin of animals, but he knew not how to interact with these people and he saw that if he were going to tear down this society he was going to have to understand it first.  So he spent time watching people in the Harbour.  Almost all the people here were foreigners and he felt they were better than the people that he had come to destroy, so he emulated them first, but he did not feel safe around them.  Not feeling safe, he established a den far from the city in the woods amongst a thicket and copse of trees and buried his prize possessions so that they would not be found.

Quiet observation led to experimentation.  Using coins that he took from the purses of unobservant travelers, he tried one thing and another until he got the hang of things.  Then he decided that he would gain more knowledge and information if he made some friends or contacts of some of the foreign people and more specifically the kind that preferred to keep things to themselves and quiet.  

After finding the local black market, he quickly set about gaining their trust by performing any task they desired as quickly as he could.  He discovered that the movement of all people was strongly discouraged and that all free people had papers proving such and slaves that passed boarders had other papers that let them do so too.  He had no papers and in any case could not read.  Remedying the first problem was easy, as easy as attacking and killing a local slave Bounty Hunter called a Jackal, feared by all slaves as vicious hunters and killers who hunted escaped slaves.  They were the only slaves in the Slave state area that had free movement between the settlements and who could one day buy their freedom, if they could acquire enough captured slaves.  The Nameless One did not think anyone would miss one after dropping the last rock on his shallow grave and picking up his papers and equipment.  

Two sessions over five hours of late evening sessions got us this far.  I will have to do some planning to get a better story and a few names and places and objectives for my friend the next time we play.  He wants me to come and stay with them for a week in the winter and that will mean a weeks worth of role playing.  Which I am okay with.  I like making plans and executing them.  I like creating a fun filled story.  I love the way that character actions change what happens within an established setting.

Many years ago, TSR published a Dungeons & Dragons story line called The Temple of Elemental Evil.  It was a great story in a rich setting that I had memorized as only someone with AS could.  The setting was published in the early '80s, and the story in about '84 and in the early '90s an update to the world where a horrible series of wars wreaked the continent about five or six years after the original setting time.  The thing was that the story, the Temple of Elemental Evil, was wrapped quite closely to the story of the setting.  Agents of the Temple kidnapped the son of the King of Furyondy, the son was betrothed to the only child of the neighbouring Theocracy of Veluna and these two nations of light were the beacon opposing the nations of Evil on the continent, the Nation of Iuz, ruled by the Demigod Iuz a demon of immense personal power.  The kidnapped prince was held captive within the Greater Temple complex of Elemental Evil.  The demon Iuz had invested part of his power therein.  Two years later, the war would come and it would bring Furyondy to its knees and blowing out the candle of light on the continent.  Enter the PCs, Player Characters.  They stormed the Temple, they freed the Prince, the weakened the Demon Iuz.  The Prince married the Priestess, assumed the throne and united the two nations, who together fought the war from strength on a demon who was weakened.  My players knew that their characters had changed history.  I know that they all look back on that campaign and remember it fondly.

Several years later, Dungeons & Dragons was revived and Greyhawk was returned as the principal setting and we all read it again.  The setting had been changed, but something caught each of our eyes as one thing that had happened in that campaign years ago was mentioned in the setting that was so singularly unique that it gave us all a pause to see it in print in the knew setting. Perhaps I might even tell you what it was in a future posting.

My Dark Little Secret

So from my last post, you might have guessed that I was a little bit depressed.  I am still depressed because I still think my judgement was correct, if a little radical.  If I needed a little confirmation, I got it last night.  My dark little secret called me last night, Seventh.  

I have told a few people the truth about Seventh, but I don't think I told anyone here, well on here, but how does one begin to tell anyone about your deepest secret.  I may have already said too much on here and my lousy memory does not recall.  The truth of the matter is that it is nothing illegal.  Nothing.  But it could have been.

When I met her she was 12 and a kindred soul to me, for I saw in her something all of her teachers never saw, depression.  What were those signs that said to me that she was depressed was that she spent her lunches often away from other people, that she frequently changed her hair colour and that she did not smile often.  Hair colour changes is not really a biggie for most girls, but she chose to go black and she wore black, again not a big thing, but that she was alone self ostracizing herself made me watch her.  

I was an EA for a kid with Muscular Dystrophy, so I was tied to where he wanted to eat lunch so I only saw her on occasion.  The next year the Maternity leave I was filling in for was over and I had to switch jobs so I was not going to see her again and that was fine, as I was not her teacher, she was not my responsibility and that is just the way things go.  I was walking down the street and I had a chance encounter with her.  Things like that happen sometimes in the city and you have chance encounters once or twice.  She ambushed me and gave me a big hug in public and I could not reciprocate.  Surprise, one.  She was a child and I was an adult, two.  And three I was conscious that I had a professional relationship to think about and hugging little girls would have been a bad move, three.  She told me later that she was experimenting and she considered me safe.

As chance would have it, since I was not a permanent EA, Educational Assistant, I was on a short term contract until they found someone permanent.  So after two months I was gone and unemployed again, just in time to step back into Seventh's school when a different EA decided to leave with no notice, there is another long story there I might one day impart.  This time I was going to be following two Autistic children during class rotation.  They had a core class with a Special Ed teacher and a few classes with another class like music and science.  As chance would have it, this class was the class that Seventh was in.  

I tried to keep aloof from her, because I have had some experience with young girls and crushes.  Why is it that I get young girls forming attractions with me and not girls that I can actually legally see?  Turns out that the rules were actually in my favour. The law at that time said that the age of consent was 14, modified that people with power over them it was 18, teachers were considered people of power, EAs were not.  

I did not have to monitor the child with MD now, but part of my duties included lunch monitor, so I was outside and in the lunch hall every day and very often, Seventh would find me.  We would talk often.  We were friends.  The end was in sight too, I was getting ready to go to Teacher's College and she was getting ready to go to High School so I knew that this friendship was not going to last, so it was safe.  

When the last day came she showed me what she had done on the weekend, pierced her tongue.  And I was a little worried, you see there are four dangerous behaviors for young children and if any one of them are present, the likelihood that others would be present.  One does not make a self destructive child but a few of them should be considered reasons to watch them.  The behaviors are changing hair colour, body modification outside of cultural norms, drug and alcohol experimentation early and early sexual experimentation.  So she had just turned 14 on the weekend and she was changing her hair colour frequently, she was piercing her tongue and my thoughts were, "what else is she doing?"

Not something that I should be concerned about and I actually brought up my concerns for her mental health with her teachers, but they were more concerned that she wore loose blouses with deep necklines that slightly exposed her breasts, but really if they were really concerned about that they should have tightened up the dress code of the teachers, as they were really great role models in that category, not to mention pop culture.

Anyways it was the last day of school and I was never going to see her again.  She asked me for my email address.  I said no, really I did.  She asked me why, and I told her that it was inappropriate.  And she told me that her other teachers were giving out their addresses.  I still said no.  Really.  She pleaded with me and I wanted to keep in contact with her, because I was genuinely concerned for her and now other teachers were giving out their email addresses too; I relented.  

Let me be clear where my moral compass lies.  Lay.  Everything always has to be in the open.  I knew that talking to her was a fine line, but as long as I did not do anything, it was fine.  I was grooming her.  I did not know I was grooming her.  I did not want to groom her, but the effects could be the same.  I was talking with a child and I was being her outlet on her life and her problems and in a sense, a real sense she was giving me power over her life.  At first though you have to understand that I was not interested in any of that.  I was interested in not having a child suicide.  I wanted to teach her things, I wanted to make sure that her life was better emotionally than mine.

Now that I think back on it I think that perhaps, the problem with talking to a teenage girl going though emotional depression is that when you become that vent, her vent, you receive all the bad and none of the good and there is a lot of bad in any teenage girl.  So that Summer she told me that she was using Marijuana on a regular basis, that she was cutting herself and piercing herself on a daily basis.  I also found out that her aunt had given her a vibrator and was using that too.  

I wanted to hold her.  I wanted to keep her safe.  I wanted to fuck her too.  I was falling in love with her and she lived just a few hundred meters away.  I did not want to know where she lived, I did not want to have any temptation, but we chatted online every day, sometimes all day.  The truth is, for me, the fastest way to my heart is through my mind and to do that you have to talk or chat or whatever.  For me to start to have feelings for a fourteen year old I also had to build up an image of someone who did not exist.

Society was telling me that it was okay to have sex with her.  The mandatory Law class in Teachers College said that it was okay to have sex with minors as long as they were not your students and never were.  And what I got from her is that she was desperate to loose her virginity and if I had been around, she would with me.  I fought my instincts, which told me to have sex with her, and I shut her down every-time it came up.  She was going to run away to be with me, she told me that she would book a bus trip to cross the country to be with me and I told her if she did I would have to drop her off at the local police station and then kiss my teaching career goodbye.  

You see I thought that I owed it to her, if I really loved her that she have every opportunity to have an informed opinion.  Part of me wishes that I had fucked her as soon as I was able and that she did runaway with me and that I was able to groom her into the person I wanted, and to be sure I could have.  But if I had, I told myself then she would never be the person who she could be and that she would never really love me back.  Also a lie, I wanted her to grow up and take the choice away from me, like every other little girl who has had a crush on me has.  

Still we talked.  She told me about here first sexual experience and within a week she wanted to meet with me.  You can't dangle candy in front of me because I will try to eat it.  I hardly talked to her and I did not want to be around her, I was afraid that I would do something or that she would.  We still chatted and we met again months later and read Harry Potter on a bench in a park in the open.  I then went off to Smallville and gave her a chance to grow up.  I was desperately in love with her.

I did not want her to sleep with me on the basis of a crush, I am not sure if that was the right thing to do considering the results.  Truth be told I am not sure I positive impact on her life.  Let me tell you this, we were/are kindred spirits, we are soul-mates in a way, a very dark way.  People don't normally have long term depression, this is what it looks like to the depressed person.  The wold looks like it does for you, except if you look off to the left a little bit, you see a a deep tapping hole.  The hole is deep, deeper than the deepest mineshaft and it calls to you.  It whispers and tells you that your life would be better if you just jumped much better.  It is like when you approach a dangerous situation, like a cliff top or a subway platform and you hear the whisper that tells you to jump and the urge and it frightens you so you step back from the brink.  When you live with this abyss gently just to the left of you, life is a struggle.  I had lived with the hole for most of my life, and she had only just started.  The older you get the smaller the hole gets, you gain a bit of control, but occasionally it is just as big as when you were small.  When you live by the hole you do things to make you forget about the hole, some people do anyways, I just lived with my feet dangling over the side or walking its slippery slope.  People fill this void, with cutting and self mutilation and sex, anything to distract them from that hole.  Do you understand?  The hole calls to you.  I wish I answered its call decades ago, when I might have been able to do something.

In away I am happy for her that she found away to block off the hole without me, but I wish she had just filled the void with me, instead of joining a cult.  

Seven put herself into situations where she was attacked.  Not physically, precisely.  She exposed herself to innocent sexual behaviour, like one night stands with friends taking their virginity and such, innocent stuff.  She also got herself into situations where she was raped.  What I mean is well she put her self in situations where men could take her and have sex with her without her consent, sexual cutting.  I see it as doing things to distract yourself from the hole.  She has been raped by three different people, but she never saw it as rape but just as sex.  Technically, she was raped more often.  She had a boyfriend that played mental power games with her and she had a boy friend who knowingly infected her with a permanent sexually transmitted disease, because it did not kill you or injure you so you did not have to mention it.  And she was seduced by a cult.

Cults don't want you to have the tools to judge them rationally.  They want people that can not give their informed consent.  They want people like Seven who are damaged and can't defend themselves.  She was constantly in a deep cloudy haze of marijuana smoke, that numbed her mind and joined up.  They promised her that everlasting happiness was just five to ten years away when Jesus Christ was going to walk the earth and chose her, if she followed these simple rules. And with that her hole disappeared.

Life in her cult was good for not looking at her void, but bad in every other way.  She ignored her potential.  She is the smartest person I have ever met, truly gifted, if only she would have applied herself.  Not applying herself got her an easy pass into any university, but after a year of doing a cult inspired self directed Religious Studies, she dropped out. And she decided to devote herself to her cult.  

After being in for long enough they told her that she had to purge all distractions from her life.  Marijuana went out the window, alcohol went out the window sex went out the window, decorations went out the window, if it wasn't practical it was not allowed.  She had a bed and a bible, what more did she need.  Never mind that her religious leaders had cars and luxury goods and houses and probably felt good tithing the amount they earned in a minimum wage job, never-mind that that was twenty years ago and they did not work for less than fifty grand a year, probably more than one hundred, she tithed all her spare money and was mad to feel guilty with every misstep, like eating ice cream.  She is a sensualist, she liked new sensations and new things, but now they made her feel guilty.

So that winter I had some time and I was close by and I decided to try something, I still loved her, for me the feelings never go away.  MPTR had her chance with me and I had not met MagicEyes yet.  I had tried my program of unrestricted sex to try to make my relationship with MPTR meaningless and failed.  But, there was Seven.  I was not going to do anything, I just wanted her to try to explain it to me, her cult, because I knew that she could not.  Because Cults seem crystal clear in retrospect, but when you try to explain them, you can't because they don't make sense.  So I asked her to explain it to me.  She couldn't, but I got to spend time with her.  I did not touch her, but I sat next to her and watched videos that explained everything, but nothing.  I did not ask the right questions though.  The right questions were: Why?  That is always the best question.  She told me that she could not explain how it worked.  I should have said why can't you, you are the smartest person I know, why can't you explain it?  

There was a point where I could have plucked her.  Plucked her sounds repulsive.  What I mean was that we got close again, by proximity and because as I said we are kindred spirits in ways few can know.  You see love is not what people think it is.  People think that there is one true love out there.  Out there there is one true love, a happily ever after, it is just there are hundreds of them, thousands of them, in fact the you probably have met ten of them and did not know it.  You just have not spent the time to get to know them, so you never knew it.  I had convinced Seven to come home with me to Smallville for the weekend.  This was not a ploy to seduce her, it was a ploy to get her to have fun with me.  I had told her what we were going to do.  I was going to take her star watching in the snow, stars are brighter in the winter time.  I was going to teach her how to drive and let her drive in a large parkinglot.  I was going to introduce her to some friends, including The Witch.  I was going to take her out to a restaurant or two.  I was going to keep her in the second bedroom, I have one.  She asked me what I would have done if she snuck into my bed, and I told her nothing, nothing the first time it happened.  I am not sure she believed me, but I meant it.

She had agreed to come and as I was leaving her apartment, I felt it.  The way her eyes looked at me and the way her body moved, I knew that if I wanted to, I could have kissed her.  I wanted to, but I didn't and I left.  I didn't do it because every time she was in a similar situation, the boy she was with took the kiss and more and I thought it was important to let her know I was different.

She did not go away with me that weekend.  She went to her church and her cult members told her that she was being tempted by the devil and her soul was in jeopardy.  And she forbade me to talk to her and to ever come and see her.

Everytime I was in the city again I asked if I could see her, and she told me that she could not see me alone. And that she never wanted to be around me again.  

But she calls me.  She calls me when she has slipped off the path, she has slept with another man.  She calls me when she sees the void just off to the left.  She wants to know that I will come and save her should she need it.  She wants to know that if all else should fail, I would catch her; I would.  Truth is if she called me again and told me her world was falling apart, I would be there at her side and I hate it that I can't see in to the future to know when I need to be there to catch hold of her.  When she calls, I am never there, right there to catch her.  I don't know if I am caught in her web as a victim, a willing victim, but I know that I would rush to her aid.

So she called me last night.  She called me to ask if I would still catch her if she fell.  I wanted to say no, not after the way that you treated me, but I said yes, my Dark Little Secret whom I love.

Hard choices

I had a realization yesterday.  I had the realization two weeks ago, but I was waiting because I wanted to confirm it with some really deep thought; I did not want to jump off the deep end.  The realization was that my work situation, every work situation I ever had, would have better and more long lasting, if i made work a no friend zone.  I would have less friends now, less acquaintances.  I would never have started blogging and many other changes.  But I would not have been fired for those reasons.

It all comes down to Aspergers Syndrome, or Autism Spectrum Disorder as it is called now.  And my complete lack of social skills.  Okay I have social skills, I talk and I listen and I interpret, but the near total lack of personal expression and ability to read others or as it was drilled into my skull at teachers college, Non Verbal Communication, which represents an estimated 95% of all communication, means I am effectively socially disabled.  Crippled rather.  

It is intuitive.  People tell me that they don't notice non verbal communication, but it is subconscious and so they would not notice it.  But they use it all the time to judge situation and to modify their own expression.  They use it when talking to strangers, when they talk to friends and when they are alone with a significant other.  My analytical computer program in my head that governs my interactions, based on what I see and gives me a mechanical response based on failed and successful interactions from the past, is severely flawed. 

Examples, because you can't know, you can't believe unless you understand.  I am watering plants in the greenhouse and I splash a little water on a co-worker because I am slightly angry with them.  I get a facial reaction that I can't quite figure out, my reaction in my gut says do it again because it looks positive, but I stop and ask.  The truth was that the expression was the opposite and if I had followed my gut reaction I would have had an angry friend and not a playful one.  Two, I am giving a person a massage, see a previous entry and I am consciously afraid that I might hurt my subject, there is a gasp and I have to stop and ask if I hurt them, I can't tell.  I have to ask because in the past I assumed it was a good gasp and I had hurt someone.

So the troubles that I have been having at work also come from trying to be friends.  That and my Superman Complex, the constant need to help people.  I meet someone at work and I talk to them.  I help them by telling them what they should not do, like water the geraniums, because the boss likes to keep them dry just on this side of dead and the horticulturalist wants them to be big and healthy and no-one should step into that landline like I did.  I want to help them because I like them and I don't want to see them get fired because someone feels threatened by them and tells them to do something that will get them fired.  

The trouble is I want friends, real friends.  Real friends do things together.  They do things more than one place.  Acquaintances are people that you see in one location or you interact with them in one way, when that one thing goes away or changes, the acquaintance goes away with it and then you only see them on Facebook.  Acquaintances are not friends they are just people you know and they are cheap.  Extroverts don't get this.  Friends are people that you care for and that you cherish.

When I make a friend, I am making an investment and I want to protect my investment; I want to help them.  Friends mean more to me than anything in the world.  Well lovers mean more to me than friends, but I think of lovers as friends++.  

So back to work, I want people to succeed and I try to help them, so I try to help them, but I can't read them.  I can't read what state they are in, I can't react to them I can't interpret how my words are affecting them.  They can't read me, I don't express my true emotions though my actions or my body language, my voice tone is usually monotone and changes only through conscious decisions on my part.  I try to get better, but really that is just me adding to my internal mental computer program and not non verbal communication.  

So is it realistic for me to cut off becoming friends with people at work?  No not really.  Most of the people who I know who read this blog, I met at work.  Most of my Facebook friends I met at work.  On the other hand I can modify behaviour.  For instance, when I like something, an activity, I make a conscious choice to exclude anyone I meet in that activity as a sexual partner, because I am afraid that if that happens then I won't be able to do that activity again or go to that place again.  I know that this is stupid, because it really limits me, but if I like some activity I don't want to ruin it by making bad decisions.  Where I have done this in the past and present: Role-Playing, Housing Situations, Yoga and Bicycle clubs.  On the whole I am not sure if this is good or bad.  I have made less women uncomfortable by not hitting on them at roleplaying venues, I have had the hots for many yoga instructors and not acted on it.  Stuff like that.  Good things did not happen like when the yoga student asked me to skip class and go to a concert with her, I ignored crazy Landlady' s advances, but maybe that is a good thing.

The problem that I see is that, as a sex obsessed person, if I keep cutting out parts of my life that I can make friends or entertain more than friendship it is tantamount to saying that I am giving up sex too. And that I am giving up on life.

Yesterday's inter-reactions that allowed me to make my decision on this point, occurred because I was trying to help someone keep their job and ended with me causing the person to become severely angry with me and my coworkers siding with her and I felt out of my depths with despair.  I don't want to give up trying to be friends with coworkers, because I spend so much time with them and I have so few friends as it is, but I realized that it was hurting everyone involved.  

I had to leave the room.  I wanted to drive nails into my wrists and cut my arms to ribbons.  Part of me wants me to go and prepare a noose somewhere at work so that the next time I feel this way I can act on it before rational thought comes back.  Lately suicidal impulses have been frequent occurrences.  I am not sure if stopping to try to be friends with people at work will increase the urges or decrease them.  

Do you understand how bad this is?  

A work friend, who at one time thought that my Aspergers was only in my mind, is starting to understand.  That is a good thing I guess.  I can't run away from this problem, because the problem is me and the only way I can think of solving it is just to stop trying to make friends.  My friend tells me that I have to stop trying to help people, but the problem with that is that is the definition of friendship, people that you help, that you want to help with out compensation.  This is my suicide note.  I don't see how I can go on without friends, I don't see how I can keep the same number of friends if you can't make new ones, because friends stop being friends, friends die, and friends move away.

I have given up on sex too this year, now I am giving up on friendship too, how long can I last.

Brown Girls

I was thinking that I should write, but I was not sure what to write about.  I thought last night that I could write about my new insight into wind, or the way that I see things like what I see when I look at black clouds, storm clouds or other little things.  Or I could talk about my obsession: Sex.

So I was biking down the street a couple of months ago with BicycleGirl, a little scheduled ride that I was the only one to show up to.  I need to ride in a group otherwise I can't just go for a ride; there always has to be a destination. So we were riding and she was chatting with me.  She told me that she had heard that there was an attack on the bicycle path that we were riding on and I told her that I knew that, I said, two in fact.  I related two her that I was disgusted that the police were withholding that information from the people so they could let the attacker think that they were not on to him.  I heard that the attacker jumped women in a desolate part of the trail and assaulted them.  In  Boonieland when a man jumps a woman it is not an assault, but rape.  I went on to say that that sort of thing should have gone out with the lawsuit Jane Doe vs. Big Smoke Police force.  When the police did not warn people that there was a serial rapist on the loose.

BicycleGirl had not heard of either assaults.  That conversation lead to a her telling me about a television commercial, a baby shower, where the mother unwraps presents for her new baby girl.  One present contains a rape whistle, questioned by the new mom, the guest replies that she will need it one day.

Heavy words on a nice warm Friday afternoon.  On the way back she asks me The Question.  You know the question that every girl in a relationship asks a single guy, What kind of girl do you like?  

My answer was quick and not well thought out, I said the first thing that came to my mind.  I like Brown Girls.  It was truthful, but not fully truthful.  It was quick and closed the subject fast and it shut down follow up questions.  There are no Brown Girls in Smallville.  There are no Single Brown Girls in Smallville; they all arrive married and unavailable.  

The truth is I like Brown Girls, but I also like white girls, Asian girls, tall girls, short girls, girlie girls, tomboy girls; I like girls.  But I also know that I can't talk to girls.  And it is not that I like them, they appeal to me, I am interested in them, but they are all strangers to me, and I can't talk to them.  And I am really only attracted to women that I know.  The better that I know them, the stronger the attraction.  So I ended the conversation with that I only liked brown girls.

I have been trying to keep the sex talk, the sexual obsession out of the bicycle arena, because I like bicycling so I did not want to ruin it.  I kept it out of Yoga.  I try to keep it out of everything that I enjoy so there are not complications.  I have been thinking that what that thinking has done is help make sure that I remain single, then again I don't think there are any single women in the bicycle group.  I can't tell if the question was meant to find out about me or to find out why I was single.  Maybe playing it safe was the rig thing to do, from a person who can't tell if they are getting their best friend angry or not.

Here is what I know about me.  The better that I get to know someone the more interested I become in them, unless they are in committed relationships, I begin to feel amorous.  I am not good with people close to my own age, so I tend to be attracted to people who are older or younger than myself.  Almost everyone in Smallville twenty years younger than me and older are in longterm relationships, so I find myself strongly attracted to women much younger than I am.  

But Smallville is not the Big Smoke, people gossip, people will censure you on the street, people will tell your parents.  Essentially there is a shame factor.  Oh people will tell you that you are amoral.  

Here in Smallville in Boonieland, where sexual assault is still in the closet, it is considered amoral to be in a consensual relationship with someone twenty years younger than oneself.  It is simpler and less complicated to say, I am single because I like Brown Women.

Liar!

Lies, it is all lies.  I lie far too often.  I hate it and I feel guilty about it.  Whenever I lie, I recant almost immediately, because it bothers me.  I am not sure why I feel guilty, it might be because I am doing harm or it might be because I feel that I am hurting someone.  Here is a fact for you: autistic people find lying difficult if not impossible.  I don't know why. 

Why do I lie?  

1) I lie to get a rise out of someone.  I tell them something to see how they react, partially because I don't know how they will react, so I tell them polar opposites to see what the reactions are.  I almost always feel very guilty about it and I recant.  I can't do this to strangers, to superiors or the like.  I lie this way to people that I like and people that I view as equals.

2) I lie to fill in what people mean to say but did not actually say.  Today SOMEONE called in sick.  Everyone who I told about their message, I told them that he had called to say what I suspected he was doing, I might have said that he called and said that it was such a nice day that he did not feel he should spend it at work, when actually he did not say anything.  So, when people asked, I told them the lie and then after a moment I began to feel guilty and told the truth.  I don't respect this person, I want everyone to see them in a negative light, but everyone I told this lie to, already felt the same way about him.  But I still felt guilty.  

3) I lie to my friends and I feel no guilt when I tell them that someone fictitious complimented them.  Sometimes, I lie more egregiously when I tell them a specific person complimented them.  Sometimes, tell them that the person thought they did a wonderful job and sometimes I tell them that they gave them a tip.  I work in a job that involves deliveries and sometimes I get tips.  Sometimes I go above and beyond and get a tip, sometimes though people give me tips because of someone else's good service and so I pass the tip along.  Sometimes I think they did a great job, but did not get a tip, and I give them one anyway; my money, I can do that if I want to and if it makes my friend happier, a lie that makes them happier, money makes it seem less likely that it is not true.  Who would give up their money for someone else?

Sometimes when people do something that I thought was a good deed and I think they should be thanked, I will not personally thank them, but tell them that the person they helped wanted to let them know how much they appreciated them, always works best when they don't know who they are or when they don't have contact with them.

4) Sometimes when I am talking about something which I feel that the subject is less than solid, I speak as if I am speaking with authority, but I feel guilty because I know that I am not confident about what I am saying.  Sometimes I feel that I know enough that my opinion is worth something more than what other people might be; I still feel guilty.  I also use hedge words.  Sometimes I say things that I think are true, but I feel that they could be mis-remembered or facts that are possibly out of date.  Words that I am not confident fully about that I speak with authority.  I feel guilty, but I feel that it is good enough information.

Me, I feel compelled to lie in every aspect of of my life, but almost always feel guilty and confess the truth right away, unless I feel that I am helping them, but I always feel guilty.

Carless

Carless.  I am adjusting well.  Parents asked me out to dinner, asked me to ride out to dinner and I accepted; they seemed anxious for me to come out, so I agreed.  I was tired and hot as it had been a long day and it WAS hot.  My mother bribed me with Lemon Pie.  She thought it was a bribe, I would have gone out without the bribe, but I was very tired and hot.  I figured there was a guest, otherwise she would not have tried so hard.  

The trip is about 6.5 kilometers, in the boonies of Smallville and it was very hot, about 30°C and that was outside, in the greenhouse I purposely did not check the temperature.  And it was humid.  And I had missed my lunch again and a break, so it was a long day.  Forty-five minutes later, my mother called back and offered me a drive as she just checked e temperature.  I declined.  It seemed silly for someone to drive out to pick me up and then drive me home, four trip and I would be then beholden to their time schedule.  The car would have arrived at my house twenty minutes before I wanted it and likely ten minutes before I got home, as my father is always premature, early, but premature makes it sound worse.  And then I would have to go home on his schedule, and the is the chance that they would tell me I would have to spend the night because they miss me; it has happened before.

To them having a car is like making the rules.  They are from a different time, the one where the car ruled the world and having a car was a status symbol.  Granted it is that way today too, but I have somehow slipped past that need.  The day after my car died, my father called me to make sure I was alright.  He thought I would be depressed, near suicidal, because in my place, he would be.

If I were from a small town, smaller than Smallville, say a village named for a Porn-star, I might be more put out, but I am not.  When I first started working I lived with my parents in their home and there were two cars.  Both parents used them to get to work and if I left with them I could get a ride and then I would have to call them to get home, or I could ride my bike.  So I rode my bike to work and back, to town for things and eventually to school too.  My car was my bike.  My bike represented freedom from my parents.  Freedom from cars.

When I moved to the city, for school, I used my bike to get around.  I could travel  within the city, to and from school and home, around the city.  Walking was fine but slow but the most versatile.  Step into shops with your walking shoes, into a bus or subway.  Cars can only travel on the road and require special parking locations and expensive fuels and maintenance.  Cars are fast and allow you to travel far quickly.  But, the bicycle is the happy medium, fast with good range and light and easy to move.

For me there is another side benefit of bike riding.  The exercise and the personal achievement.  I see the goals of destination and goals of speed and goals of endurance.  It should be noted that if weight loss was a goal for me, an hour of bike riding burns between 1000-1500 calories per hour.  Weight loss is not a goal for me, at least not a goal that motivates me in life, my awesome legs, well that is about it.  

So far this year my longest bike ride was about 70km, and my fastest velocity was 73.8kph, down a hill and 50kph on a straightaway.  I have joined a bike group that rides once a week and that allows me to interact with new people and ride, but I wish that I could ride refreshed like most of them, my physical job then a two hour bike ride is not as fun as it could be.  

BikeSalesPerson from Smallville Bikes, was talking to a rider while I was in a couple of weeks ago, who wanted to sell his current bike and get a new better bike.  BikeSalesPerson said that Greenpsychopomp needs a new bike, I did not, but then suddenly I did need one.  I thought about it for a second and I decided that I would bet the other bike.  A newer bike for me, I could give my bike to my father and take his bike, refurbish it and give it to my sister's Nanny, because it looked like symmetry and providence.  Then I went out and bought new shoes.

New shoes that fit my feet, size 14 EEE, or European fit 47 extra wide.  They fit my feet, but they did not fit my bicycle.  Basketball shoes.  So I thought, great, an excuse to get real bicycle shoes with clipon pedals.  Recessed touring shoes so I could bike and do grocery shopping and go to work.  And touring shoes come in size 48, 48 narrow.  So I thought get the ones that fit, 48 extra volume, but they were racing shoes, cool, unrecessed.  I thought I would get used to them and beable to do what I needed to do.  But no.  I am destroying my new shoes walking in them.  So.  My plan is in the sewer, I will have two bikes a computer bike that I use with basketball shoes and a touring bike with touring shoes.  

Clip ons.  Everyone told me that everyone falls with clipons at least once.  I fell too.

I bought bicycle shorts too.  Bicycle shorts are worn next to the skin.  They have a giant pad for comfort, that off the bike feels like a diaper.  But maybe it will be better for me.  I have been having testicular troubles with my regular shorts, so maybe this will solve this issue.  But I live in fear that I will have rod problems since it is spandex and the pad is not really that big.  Usually the hard cycling means that the blood has somewhere more important to go than to embarrassing places, but my mind wanders . . ..  But in any case, the new shorts shows off my amazing legs.  Maybe I should be cycling more so I can wear an awesome jersey too, but only when my midriff matches my legs . . .. 

I am carless.  I do my shopping and laundry, gardening by bicycle.  BikeGuru, and BikeSalesPerson are talking winter bikes and I am falling for the lure.  I don't really want to buy another car, because I don't think of a car the same way as everyone else.  I don't see it as my main transportation.  I see it as something that takes me to Big Smoke once a month and because of that it sits and rots.  I will buy a new car when I can plug it in and never use it.

One drawback is that I have stopped trying to date.  Years of talking to my friends who are girls, has taught me that most girls care if you don't have a car.  And living in Boonieland I know that girls that I like live far from Smallville, even if I had an amazing car, those girls are not interested in long distance relationships, even if I am doing all the driving, so being carless helps me just face facts.

I am happier carless, but I am not sure if it is enough.  

This was started weeks ago, but finished in a coffeeshop in Big Smoke.

Small fluffy children, how I love them

It has been a month since I last posted.  I have been reading, I have been doing a little writing, very little, but it has not been here; I write but I don't finish.  I have been writing this spring for a travel blog, but I have not been finishing those either.  Difficult to say why.  It might be that I am burnt out from work in the spring but if so I have been burnt out for over a month now.  I have been playing my computer addiction, Civilization V, and I have been reading, but not like I was before.  

My writing has been sporadic and sparse.  It has also been almost non existent after a negative review by a friend, to descriptive and too autobiographical.  It was a story and I wanted to tell it to someone but in the end the story would have been a bad story, I know this now, and it is good to hear the criticism.  But I have not been writing much since then.  

In my last post I said that I was over the person who had fucked me so up and this might not be so true.  My history says that this is false: I am the one that spent eight years pining over someone who never loved me.  So when I heard from a friend that MPTR's current was plotting to leave her with their daughter, but only if he can get full custody, I stepped in to intercede as much as I could do.  And did I reawaken fantasies where I still love her, yes I did.  But I tell myself that it won't happen. 

To top it all off I have hit another desperately horrible horny stage.  Which depresses me more than anything.  Horny but knowing that sex without love is utterly unforfilling.  I want sex anyways, but there is nothing available in this town.  In the city I can pay for it, but then it is exactly like giving away my money and getting nothing in return.  Thus we are back to MPTR.  

Actually, I am back visiting friends in the Big Smoke, so I am in a place to see everything that I want in all ways, but I don't think I will.  My friends took me with their children to African Lion Safari.  I was surrounded by many couples with many children living my dream.  And the one thought that kept entering my mind was, 'I wonder if I will by chance run into India here.'. India for a refresher was the woman I pined away eight years of my life for because of one night that would not have happened if she had not been turned down by her first choice for the evening, eighteen years ago.  Does that tell you something?

I want to write.  I have a couple or so novels planned out in my head, one fantasy, one SciFi and one mystery novel where I draw upon all the horrible experiences at my current workplace to make a comic murder mystery.  I hope to make enough money so that I can get sued for making fun of living people.  The forward would say any resemblance of characters to people living or dead from this book should be a good reason to change how you are doing things or to crawl under a rock and not draw attention to yourself.  I also am secretly hoping that I get skin cancer and die soon.  The Internet says the skin damage that I currently have is NOT cancer and I was not in the slightest bit relieved.  I am not sad, I am just in a really long space of time where there has been no happiness.

One good thing in my life is that I have hooked up with a new local group of cyclists and I have been going for long rides with them.  I want to go places, I want to do things with them.  I want to keep sex out of it entirely.  Currently I keep sex out of yoga, massages and now bicycling.  Which is to say I am not looking for potential partners or opportunities, not that there are any in Smallville.  

My co-worker has found religion.  Before she was a god believing spiritualist, but now she has fallen in with the local branch of Cults'R'Us and after a brief conversation where she started it by asking what I believe in and ended with her sulking and saying that when I die I will burn in hell, just for saying I was an atheist, that by the way was all I said.  I like this girl and I was not ready to crush her with the massive weight of my belief and convictions.  I did not see why I had to.  I also realized that if I did, I would never talk to her again and that she would never invite me to go swimming again.  And she looks pretty good in a bikini, not that I think she will do that anyway now; she seems to have swallowed the cults views hook, line and sinker.  Too bad, I never swim alone and it was a lot of fun swimming with her.  She has to realize that actions speak louder than words and judge me by who I am, not what she was told I should believe in.

I still want to die, but not enough to cross the median and into oncoming traffic.  Skin cancer sounds appropriately painful and singular way to go.