h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I am forty-two years old, but I have the abilities, mentally, of a institutionalized 24 year old.
I can barely pay bills.
I can hardly work.
I have a dearth of real-life skills.

How did I get here?
By accident.
There are people who knew me when I was stilling living in my hometown of Mt. Vernon, Illinois during the period 1980-1984 who still don't have any idea just how little I did. I was practically nonexistent. There were people who encountered me on a regular basis who either got used to me or got tired of me. There were people who never gave a thought to who I was or what I did, because I had always been there.

So, while others went to college, I graduated from High School in 1980, got married, got a job and started families, I was living with my father's mother in a government housing project. I went to the library, I did day labor for a friend with a furniture refinishing business occasionally, and I sat around my Grandma's and smoked and watched television. I didn't even drink beer then.
My mother lived in the same town but had no life of her own, either.
She basically hid in the house when she wasn't sitting in a bar with my stepfather.
My father was just a county away for much of that time, on his second or third marriage, dealing with his wife's children, with no contact outside of accidental with me and my younger brother, who was having his own little adventure of a life, full of odd friends and activities of questionable legality.

I am aware of the gap in my journals and other writings here when it comes to my brother. I can't deal with that right now. We were eleven and half months apart and we were treated like twins, with the concomitant stupidities and blind arrogance of those who dealt with us. Even now there are idiots who, having encountered each of us seperately, accuse us of being each other. Maybe we are so alike we can't stand each other. My daughter is almost fifteen and he has only seen her once, when she was six. He was even in the same stupid town as us when she was born!

Enough of that.

Then there came a time in Austin when I was unfunctioning for almost three years. I had a job off and on, but I had my rent paid for a bit by a small inheritance from a dead granma (my mom's). While I did a lot of small theatre work, lighting and stage managing, I didn't get paid for it. I also contributed work for sandwiches and beer to a fellow with a bit of land in Leander. Ultimately, again, there were people who were so "used" to me that they didn't even think about what I was doing... or not doing.

I basically had no life. I read, I wrote, I drank beer and I smoked a lot of cigarettes. At one point, I didn't wash my dishes for six months. I ate out of the same sauce pan during the whole time.

This was just a tiny bit before I met the woman, nine years older than me, who was to become my wife, a little bit after we noticed we were pregnant. If she hadn't become gravid, we might not have gotten married, and eventually she would have passed from my life and I would have been on the next leg of the slow, repetitive journey. Instead, after fifteen years of odd marriage, during which both our sets of mental problems have made life a roller coaster, in addition to the effort of dealing with a child who just now seems to have settled down a bit, after fourteen years of teething problems with reality outside of the hotbed of weirdness at home.

I have spent a life of fear and confusion, lost on a daily basis, just making my way from my house to the grocery store or church. I have a severe geographical disfunction that applies even to buildings. I get lost easily unless I spend a lot of time someplace. Then there's the face/name thing. Unless I see you on a daily basis and you have a name tag or someone calling you by name, it might take me months to recognize you. In the meantime, you would wonder who this jerk is that keeps staring at you or doesn't seem to remember you.

So, here I am at 42, my wife left me, and I am in a hard bizarre job that I depend upon for keeping myself in food and home.
Not much better off than I was in 1984 or 1989.
I can pay bills now. That is a bit of a triumph. But I had to learn how because my wife has such sincere problems with forms and numbers. She's even worse than me, yet, she believes that she needs to control her own destiny... so, now, she's off in another house, eight blocks away, back to her old bad habits: losing paperwork that she can't understand, hiding bills that she doesn't want to deal with, and shopping compulsively whenever she feels overwhelmed.

And where are the people who are "used to me"? They are in my Sunday School. What have they done in the month that I haven't been attending? Have they called? Have they visited? No, they sent a postcard signed by everyone saying they missed me. Of course, they send one of those to everyone else on the rolls who doesn't show up. I know, I have had Teresa hand me one of those stacks of cards to sign, so many of them that I get writer's cramp.
And they send one to Uvula, too...

"I graduated from High School in 1980"

Sorry, that is in the wrong context above. I was thinking on the fly and, while that had significance, it should have been parenthetic or put in another way. Sorry for any confusion this might have caused. I wish this site had a function where you could edit your journals.

You can at least remove a journal entry - though not any conversation that goes with it - so you can re-write one.

What you say about Sunday School bears out my scepticism about 'lip-service' Christians who behave in a less christian way than many folk who are not church goers.

Glad to see you're still here.

Traveller in Time trying to hide in the crowd
"In a way we all lead just an insignificant life, and in a way we all ignore our neighbours.

It is kind of difficult to stand out by not following the path of getting born, study, get job, get partner, lose something, gain something and in the end we all fade away.

Most are not mentioned on CNN if we make a move. Perhaps be happy about that. I just found a book in the library about 'The World of Metals'."

>> I have spent a life of fear and confusion, lost on a daily basis, just making my way from my house to the grocery store or church. I have a severe geographical disfunction that applies even to buildings. I get lost easily unless I spend a lot of time someplace. Then there's the face/name thing. Unless I see you on a daily basis and you have a name tag or someone calling you by name, it might take me months to recognize you. In the meantime, you would wonder who this jerk is that keeps staring at you or doesn't seem to remember you. <<

You didn't tell me you had those too! Apparently they're called "Prosopagnosia" and "Topographical Agnosia". (Not that knowing the name helps when you're in trouble, for the umpteenth time, for ignoring someone or "showing off" by "deliberately" getting lost).

When I can remember, I will give you a list of my symptoms...

When I can remember, I will read it

Let's see:

Even with the tinnitus, I can still hear things other people can't.

Even with the damage done by vaporized trichlor when I was sixteen, I can still smell things other people can't.

I see more colors than most.

I can taste and identify a larger number of items in food and drink.

I am sensitive to clothing texture, although less than formerly.

I see complex patterns where there aren't supposed to be any, and I have trouble seeing deliberate patterns.

I can recognize most songs by their first chords.

I can hear an out of tune string on a twelve stringed guitar.

I look at people's shoes.

I look at people's clothes and some get irritated that I am paying attention to what they so carefully selected.

I have chronic allergies.

I am hypersensitive to over two dozen common household chemicals.

I can smell weather in old buildings.

I can see a cat in the dark while driving or riding my bike.

I have almost no comprehension of nonverbal body language and I have no idea what messages I am sending.

I can relate all those except for the looking at clothes.

What's vaporized trichlor?

...relate TO all those...

Do you find people sound as though they're talking Chinese?

Traveller in Time degreasing some iron strips
"Tri as in TriChloroEthylene? Giving a high when inhaled, not unlike most kinds of solvents. The average effect ranges from mildly poisonous to lethal. Tri is currently classified as a 'Category II carcinogen'. "

Only thing I ever inhaled (apart from an LD50 dose of traffic fumes) was Tippex. Does that count?

"Tri as in TriChloroEthylene?"

Probably. That or some other form of stripper compound. I was told to use it to get masking tape residue off the enamel surface in an active freezer case at the Kroger store I was working for.
It turned to vapor and I had respiratory and vision problems for days.
It also did something to my nose. Of course, in hind sight, that was probably a good thing, because for most of my young life I could smell everything.
Every time I was in a room full of people I could smell everyone, their scents, their fabric softener on their clothes, their pheromones...
I could even smell sick people, like one of my teachers, who later went on medical leave and died in the middle of the school year.

No, I've never had any problem with language, outside of slang and cultural references I was unfamiliar with. Of course, I've always spoken and written hypercorrectly.

But being able to smell sick people is so handy when you become a parent

So it doesn't take you time to work out what people are saying?
What about background noise?