Trash in a Ditch, Pt. 1 (Fiction)
[check out this part on my personal page, where it looks better]
The conveyor belt slid the next metal piece into the field of vision my tinted lenses cast in gray. My gloved hands hooked the cable pins into their holes and verified that no previous operator had ruined the work, while I measured my movements to prevent any later operator from blaming me for holding up the line. I pressed the button that ran the belt. The piece slid off to my right, lurching forward and stopping like a car stuck in traffic.
I rested my gloved fists on the edge of the table. The conveyor belt whirred, its segments blurring past. I already knew the shape of the piece that would stop at the center of my vision a few seconds later.
Seated across from me, Héctor yawned, warping that bray into an announcement that he needed to take a leak. Someone stopped the belt. A metal piece was left stranded halfway between Héctor and me.
The familiar sequence of motions for assembling each piece sedated my mind, dimming it to black, but now my thoughts were stirring awake. How long would Héctor take in the bathroom? Sweat had slimed my forehead and neck, and my underwear clung like a soaked pad, even though the air-conditioning units hanging from the workshop walls droned on tirelessly—our only defense against stewing inside this metal sarcophagus.
Christopher, seated ten feet to my right, stretched his neck to look around at the other crews. The jagged, arched scar on his scalp stood out pink against his brown skin. For the hundredth time, I pictured a surgeon pressing a stapler to Christopher’s skull until it clicked, branding both sides of the seam with jutting, pointed ridges—a zipper of scarred flesh.
“How strange that the coordinator’s absent,” the man said.
John, or Joseph—whatever his name was—ambled behind Christopher to stretch his legs. He rolled the sleeves of his coat up to his elbows, but the right sleeve got stuck on the gray, bulbous growths that deformed that arm. His genes had gotten mixed up, producing enough skin and flesh for three people.
“He quit a couple of months ago.”
Christopher hunched over, frowning as if thinking hurt. He toyed with the raised seam that cut across the side of his head.
“I knew that, right?”
“It’s no big deal.”
Three minutes later, heavy footsteps announced Héctor’s return from the bathroom. He circled the worktable, dropped onto his stool, and pressed the button that got the conveyor belt moving again.
A metal piece halted in front of me, its black cables overlapping and crisscrossing like arm hair. I checked every connection. I unhooked a couple of cables Héctor had misplaced, and fastened them into different slots. One day, they would invent robots to replace us.
Forty-three minutes before the shift ended, the conveyor belt stopped, jamming pieces at intervals between the operators. I waited, slouching, letting my gaze relax on the sections of belt in front of me. The next piece should have arrived by then.
To my right, Christopher glanced over at me, checking if I was the one holding things up, but across from me Héctor had slumped forward, resting his chin on his chest. The black-haired jowl bulged out. He had closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and tangled his gloved fingers in some cables on the piece he’d been working on. His black Queens of the Stone Age T-shirt, printed with a horned hand, had ridden up over his belly, and through the gap between shirt and pants peeked a swarthy fold of flab dotted with bristling hair.
When the horn signaling the end of the workday blared through the workshop, I sprang up and walked around Christopher toward the locker room, but he tapped me on the shoulder.
“See you later.”
I went on with my eyes locked on the locker-room door as workers filed in, opening and closing it behind them. The smell of hot rubber and metal stung my nostrils. What did he mean by “see you later”? Had he made up some plan for after work?
By the time I walked into the locker room, my pulse was shaky. After opening my locker, I took off my coat, folded it, and tossed it inside. I grabbed my pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, and slipped it into my shirt pocket. It was hard not to light up right there, but at least I’d finished another shift, scratched another mark on the wall, and I was about to claim the rest of the day for myself.
An electronic crackle buzzed. Everyone in the locker room turned toward the loudspeaker mounted in the corner.
“Alan Kivi, to the supervisor’s office, please,” a singsong female voice said.
I froze with one glove halfway off. What did she want? What had I done? I tossed the gloves on top of my coat and locked the locker. Coat and gloves put away, locker locked—my excuse to refuse overtime.
Shaking my head, I opened the door from the locker room to the workshop. In the supervisor’s office window, which rose above the shop floor like a second story, the glass blurred the figures of the four people gathered. Even though Christopher’s neck was hunched and his shoulders slumped, he still stood a head and a half taller than the others. The thick, barrel-shaped outline of Héctor fiddled with his phone. The supervisor, her hair down to her shoulders, leaned in close to each worker and touched them. She reached across the desk and lit the candles of a cake with a lighter.
I froze beneath the locker-room doorway. An operator from another team stopped in front of me and gave me a look, wanting to go inside, but before he could say anything, I stepped back. I paced in front of my locker. I fished around one pants pocket until I found my keys, and I fiddled with the cigarette filter in my shirt pocket as if I could sneak a drag.
How had the supervisor found out? If she noted my birth date when she hired me, she would have ambushed me last year to celebrate. In these past few days, she must have pulled my file, run her honey-coated fingers over it, and spotted the day I was born. I shuddered like someone who’s realized, while sitting on a public toilet, there’s a camera filming. Any private detail of my life worked like a tail sprouting from my coccyx for them to grab and hold me in place.
I hurried to the door leading out to the yard. I stepped into the dense, overheated air that smelled of scorched earth and traffic. I was heading for my car alongside the dispersing workers, but Caroline distracted me like a neon sign.
She was standing on tiptoe, bent over into a waste container. When she straightened, she was holding a plastic valve-shaped part with a cracked casing. She turned the piece over in her fingers, her lips moving as though greeting it. Her chestnut hair, tumbling halfway down her back, had frizzed the way it does on a day that threatens a storm. Beneath her bangs and between the strands framing her face, her skin was tanned like someone who labors under the sun. The floral pattern on her white dress had faded. It suggested that in the seventies it had belonged to some collection, only to be abandoned at a flea market. Her pockets bulged with broken machine parts, lost keys, odd stones she salvaged from dumpsters, ditches, landfills. Even from ten yards away, I noticed that horizontal tears had ripped open the dress’s sides and the flare of the skirt, as if Caroline had snagged them on bushes. Her cheeks were puffy and flushed. Her eyes, slanted and alien, glistened wet. Either allergies were hitting her, or she was stockpiling tears for the next time she burst into sobs.
While the sun pounded my forehead as though I’d pressed it against a light bulb, I slowed my pace to keep Caroline in sight through the stream of workers leaving the lot. She might have believed herself invisible, and the way everyone else ignored her only reinforced that notion. Caroline drifted around the waste container as if floating there—a specter that once lived in the house torn down to make room for the workshop. You’d expect a cold breeze to precede her, and I was surprised no one paid attention as they might if a dinosaur appeared out of a primeval jungle.
One of my coworkers—or the supervisor—might come looking for me. I reached my Chevrolet Lumina, but the moment I dropped into the driver’s seat and shut the door, I’d trapped myself in a sauna. A mistake I made every three or four days. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out to breathe while the seat roasted my backside through my pants and underwear. The air inflating my lungs coated their lining with the smell of overheated plastic.
I started the engine amid sputters and a gust of smoke. Once the dashboard lighter heated up, I lit a cigarette, drew on the filter, and blew the smoke out the window into the scorching air. The engine rattled phlegmatically as it accelerated toward the city center. Hanging from the rearview mirror, my vial filled with bits of shrapnel shivered while it spun.
On my left whizzed low-slung shops and single-story offices—white-painted corrugated metal walls that flashed under the sun, forcing me to squint behind my tinted lenses. On my right stretched the flat, orange-tinged desert, dotted with a few scraggly shrubs. Against a heat-warped horizon stood miniature telephone poles. Soon, the hunched silhouettes of oil pumps appeared, nodding like hammers in slow motion, their gears groaning and creaking—a herd of elephants drinking from the cracked earth. The desert’s immensity shrank the buildings, roads, and cars to dusty specks scorched by the sun.
Another year of this boiling air, of these people.
As I reached the city, I waited at a red light for ghosts to cross. A few yards ahead, a child crouched at the curb with a bored expression, pressing the tip of a metal rod against a flattened explosion of entrails and white-and-gray feathers smeared on the pavement.
Traffic thickened. Pedestrians roamed the sidewalks. I drove on to an In-N-Out Burger and joined the line of cars. Lounging against the seat, I smoked while the sunset sun beating through the windshield heated my face and hands.
A group of office workers in white shirts and dress pants walked by on the sidewalk. They followed one another like ducks. They had cloned each other’s hairstyles and that look of fatigue and resignation. A father carried his daughter on his shoulders, held his son’s hand, and used his other hand to grip a bulging bag. Next to him, a woman talked as she pointed to the end of the street. The man’s mouth hung half-open, and his features were weighed down by a week’s worth of exhaustion.
On the adjacent sidewalk, two groups of thirty-somethings ran into each other. Half the men wore Dallas Cowboys shirts or caps. I could have dubbed in real time exactly how they greeted each other and the small talk they exchanged. I could have predicted a split second early how their heads would nod, how wide their smiles would stretch. At some mention of where they were headed, someone in the other group laughed as if at a joke. There was only one group of thirty-somethings in hundreds, maybe thousands of miles around, even if they tried to fool me by changing outfits and bodies.
Did those people see their choices the way I recognized them? Their lives resembled museum galleries. They chose which corridor to walk down or linger in, while I wandered inside a cage. A prisoner locked up for decades in a six-by-eight cell, a person whose name got lost during a staff turnover—none of the new employees had bothered to learn his name or find out when to set him free.
Yet in the faces of those passersby—businessmen, office workers, families, couples—and in the faces reflected in the mirrors of the cars waiting in line for takeout, I recognized exhaustion. They had resigned themselves to the road they ended up on, knowing that if they dared veer onto a different path, they might land in a dead end. Other routines, other partners, other children.
What could anyone want of humanity and the systems that chained them? To deal with other people, to sacrifice their days working—just to start a family, spit out offspring, save for retirement? Those goals satisfied the ghosts around me. But if the emptiness, the desolation, and the lack of meaning in each maneuver to wade through these societies nagged daily like a dislocated joint, what was there left to do?
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, about ten years ago.
Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Custom Concern.”
I feel like I need to explain myself for this one. First of all, I had completely forgotten about every single detail of this story so far. It was like reading it for the first time. As I read some parts, I did get some faint recollection of having “seen” them before, but I don’t remember having come up with nor designed those characters. This story was very personal for me, and perhaps that’s why I haven’t revisited it even in my mind, as it closed a period of my life I’d rather forget.
You see, I was diagnosed as autistic when I was 26 years old or so. That came after a few failed jobs that proved I couldn’t work a regular job due to my autism-related peculiarities. So when I got diagnosed, I had hit rock bottom, and I didn’t see myself adjusting to society at all. I lived like a recluse, the pee-in-bottles kind, except for my therapy sessions and the group meetings with other adults on the spectrum (I ended up leaving those group meetings, ironically, because one of the psychs, a thirty-year-old woman, was overtly hitting on me). A local organization offered me to take part in a course to help disabled people rejoin society and get hired.
Because most social workers are apparently retarded themselves (I swear I’ve never met any of them I could respect) and into the whole “everyone is equal” shit, they lumped together people with intellectual, social, and physical disabilities. We had people whose limbs didn’t work right having to be told how to talk with an interviewer in a way that a Down Syndrome fella would comprehend. People with social disabilities such as mine weren’t particularly tolerated either; a few of the disabled there, one diagnosed with paranoia and persecution syndrome or some shit like that, and another with fetal alcohol syndrome due to what a bastard her mother was, kept railing about some autistic guy at their workshop, and how autistic people were this and that. I didn’t interact much with them, but at least I got some sense of satisfaction when we “had” to reveal our disabilities and they realized that the guy whose disability they have kept shitting on every day heard it all.
You see, one of the things that bother me the most about the imposed public perception of disabled people, and I mean from the moderately disabled (among which I include myself; I’m 52% disabled) to the hyper disabled that you only see in such centers, is that social workers and such pests have forced a vision onto society that disabled people are all so resilient and understanding and kind to others because they endure such trauma and discrimination. Well, plenty of the people I met there were fucking bastards. Some real nasty ones too. There are details that I decided not to include in this story because it would seem like I was insulting people with such disabilities, even though it actually happened; for example, a Down Syndrome guy routinely waltzed over to groups, ripped the loudest farts, and casually left. Another guy kept calling everyone a faggot. Someone else seemed to be converting to Islam, and regularly claimed that priests and such ought to be killed. It wasn’t particularly surprising that some of the particularly vulnerable disabled would convert, because the fucking moronic social workers put illegals with a jihadist mindset among genuinely disabled people, under the category of “risk of exclusion,” as if wanting to conquer this country for their religion was a disability. Is it really a wonder that I was regularly enraged?
Anyway, that organization showed me a workshop similar to the one featured in this story, an offered me to work there. But I couldn’t due to the extreme noise, my intestinal issues, and other stuff. I did learn plenty about how they experienced that life, though, and it resulted in this story. Whatever good it did.
Anyway, I dare you to enjoy it if you can.
The conveyor belt slid the next metal piece into the field of vision my tinted lenses cast in gray. My gloved hands hooked the cable pins into their holes and verified that no previous operator had ruined the work, while I measured my movements to prevent any later operator from blaming me for holding up the line. I pressed the button that ran the belt. The piece slid off to my right, lurching forward and stopping like a car stuck in traffic.
I rested my gloved fists on the edge of the table. The conveyor belt whirred, its segments blurring past. I already knew the shape of the piece that would stop at the center of my vision a few seconds later.
Seated across from me, Héctor yawned, warping that bray into an announcement that he needed to take a leak. Someone stopped the belt. A metal piece was left stranded halfway between Héctor and me.
The familiar sequence of motions for assembling each piece sedated my mind, dimming it to black, but now my thoughts were stirring awake. How long would Héctor take in the bathroom? Sweat had slimed my forehead and neck, and my underwear clung like a soaked pad, even though the air-conditioning units hanging from the workshop walls droned on tirelessly—our only defense against stewing inside this metal sarcophagus.
Christopher, seated ten feet to my right, stretched his neck to look around at the other crews. The jagged, arched scar on his scalp stood out pink against his brown skin. For the hundredth time, I pictured a surgeon pressing a stapler to Christopher’s skull until it clicked, branding both sides of the seam with jutting, pointed ridges—a zipper of scarred flesh.
“How strange that the coordinator’s absent,” the man said.
John, or Joseph—whatever his name was—ambled behind Christopher to stretch his legs. He rolled the sleeves of his coat up to his elbows, but the right sleeve got stuck on the gray, bulbous growths that deformed that arm. His genes had gotten mixed up, producing enough skin and flesh for three people.
“He quit a couple of months ago.”
Christopher hunched over, frowning as if thinking hurt. He toyed with the raised seam that cut across the side of his head.
“I knew that, right?”
“It’s no big deal.”
Three minutes later, heavy footsteps announced Héctor’s return from the bathroom. He circled the worktable, dropped onto his stool, and pressed the button that got the conveyor belt moving again.
A metal piece halted in front of me, its black cables overlapping and crisscrossing like arm hair. I checked every connection. I unhooked a couple of cables Héctor had misplaced, and fastened them into different slots. One day, they would invent robots to replace us.
Forty-three minutes before the shift ended, the conveyor belt stopped, jamming pieces at intervals between the operators. I waited, slouching, letting my gaze relax on the sections of belt in front of me. The next piece should have arrived by then.
To my right, Christopher glanced over at me, checking if I was the one holding things up, but across from me Héctor had slumped forward, resting his chin on his chest. The black-haired jowl bulged out. He had closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and tangled his gloved fingers in some cables on the piece he’d been working on. His black Queens of the Stone Age T-shirt, printed with a horned hand, had ridden up over his belly, and through the gap between shirt and pants peeked a swarthy fold of flab dotted with bristling hair.
When the horn signaling the end of the workday blared through the workshop, I sprang up and walked around Christopher toward the locker room, but he tapped me on the shoulder.
“See you later.”
I went on with my eyes locked on the locker-room door as workers filed in, opening and closing it behind them. The smell of hot rubber and metal stung my nostrils. What did he mean by “see you later”? Had he made up some plan for after work?
By the time I walked into the locker room, my pulse was shaky. After opening my locker, I took off my coat, folded it, and tossed it inside. I grabbed my pack of cigarettes, pulled one out, and slipped it into my shirt pocket. It was hard not to light up right there, but at least I’d finished another shift, scratched another mark on the wall, and I was about to claim the rest of the day for myself.
An electronic crackle buzzed. Everyone in the locker room turned toward the loudspeaker mounted in the corner.
“Alan Kivi, to the supervisor’s office, please,” a singsong female voice said.
I froze with one glove halfway off. What did she want? What had I done? I tossed the gloves on top of my coat and locked the locker. Coat and gloves put away, locker locked—my excuse to refuse overtime.
Shaking my head, I opened the door from the locker room to the workshop. In the supervisor’s office window, which rose above the shop floor like a second story, the glass blurred the figures of the four people gathered. Even though Christopher’s neck was hunched and his shoulders slumped, he still stood a head and a half taller than the others. The thick, barrel-shaped outline of Héctor fiddled with his phone. The supervisor, her hair down to her shoulders, leaned in close to each worker and touched them. She reached across the desk and lit the candles of a cake with a lighter.
I froze beneath the locker-room doorway. An operator from another team stopped in front of me and gave me a look, wanting to go inside, but before he could say anything, I stepped back. I paced in front of my locker. I fished around one pants pocket until I found my keys, and I fiddled with the cigarette filter in my shirt pocket as if I could sneak a drag.
How had the supervisor found out? If she noted my birth date when she hired me, she would have ambushed me last year to celebrate. In these past few days, she must have pulled my file, run her honey-coated fingers over it, and spotted the day I was born. I shuddered like someone who’s realized, while sitting on a public toilet, there’s a camera filming. Any private detail of my life worked like a tail sprouting from my coccyx for them to grab and hold me in place.
I hurried to the door leading out to the yard. I stepped into the dense, overheated air that smelled of scorched earth and traffic. I was heading for my car alongside the dispersing workers, but Caroline distracted me like a neon sign.
She was standing on tiptoe, bent over into a waste container. When she straightened, she was holding a plastic valve-shaped part with a cracked casing. She turned the piece over in her fingers, her lips moving as though greeting it. Her chestnut hair, tumbling halfway down her back, had frizzed the way it does on a day that threatens a storm. Beneath her bangs and between the strands framing her face, her skin was tanned like someone who labors under the sun. The floral pattern on her white dress had faded. It suggested that in the seventies it had belonged to some collection, only to be abandoned at a flea market. Her pockets bulged with broken machine parts, lost keys, odd stones she salvaged from dumpsters, ditches, landfills. Even from ten yards away, I noticed that horizontal tears had ripped open the dress’s sides and the flare of the skirt, as if Caroline had snagged them on bushes. Her cheeks were puffy and flushed. Her eyes, slanted and alien, glistened wet. Either allergies were hitting her, or she was stockpiling tears for the next time she burst into sobs.
While the sun pounded my forehead as though I’d pressed it against a light bulb, I slowed my pace to keep Caroline in sight through the stream of workers leaving the lot. She might have believed herself invisible, and the way everyone else ignored her only reinforced that notion. Caroline drifted around the waste container as if floating there—a specter that once lived in the house torn down to make room for the workshop. You’d expect a cold breeze to precede her, and I was surprised no one paid attention as they might if a dinosaur appeared out of a primeval jungle.
One of my coworkers—or the supervisor—might come looking for me. I reached my Chevrolet Lumina, but the moment I dropped into the driver’s seat and shut the door, I’d trapped myself in a sauna. A mistake I made every three or four days. I rolled down the window and stuck my head out to breathe while the seat roasted my backside through my pants and underwear. The air inflating my lungs coated their lining with the smell of overheated plastic.
I started the engine amid sputters and a gust of smoke. Once the dashboard lighter heated up, I lit a cigarette, drew on the filter, and blew the smoke out the window into the scorching air. The engine rattled phlegmatically as it accelerated toward the city center. Hanging from the rearview mirror, my vial filled with bits of shrapnel shivered while it spun.
On my left whizzed low-slung shops and single-story offices—white-painted corrugated metal walls that flashed under the sun, forcing me to squint behind my tinted lenses. On my right stretched the flat, orange-tinged desert, dotted with a few scraggly shrubs. Against a heat-warped horizon stood miniature telephone poles. Soon, the hunched silhouettes of oil pumps appeared, nodding like hammers in slow motion, their gears groaning and creaking—a herd of elephants drinking from the cracked earth. The desert’s immensity shrank the buildings, roads, and cars to dusty specks scorched by the sun.
Another year of this boiling air, of these people.
As I reached the city, I waited at a red light for ghosts to cross. A few yards ahead, a child crouched at the curb with a bored expression, pressing the tip of a metal rod against a flattened explosion of entrails and white-and-gray feathers smeared on the pavement.
Traffic thickened. Pedestrians roamed the sidewalks. I drove on to an In-N-Out Burger and joined the line of cars. Lounging against the seat, I smoked while the sunset sun beating through the windshield heated my face and hands.
A group of office workers in white shirts and dress pants walked by on the sidewalk. They followed one another like ducks. They had cloned each other’s hairstyles and that look of fatigue and resignation. A father carried his daughter on his shoulders, held his son’s hand, and used his other hand to grip a bulging bag. Next to him, a woman talked as she pointed to the end of the street. The man’s mouth hung half-open, and his features were weighed down by a week’s worth of exhaustion.
On the adjacent sidewalk, two groups of thirty-somethings ran into each other. Half the men wore Dallas Cowboys shirts or caps. I could have dubbed in real time exactly how they greeted each other and the small talk they exchanged. I could have predicted a split second early how their heads would nod, how wide their smiles would stretch. At some mention of where they were headed, someone in the other group laughed as if at a joke. There was only one group of thirty-somethings in hundreds, maybe thousands of miles around, even if they tried to fool me by changing outfits and bodies.
Did those people see their choices the way I recognized them? Their lives resembled museum galleries. They chose which corridor to walk down or linger in, while I wandered inside a cage. A prisoner locked up for decades in a six-by-eight cell, a person whose name got lost during a staff turnover—none of the new employees had bothered to learn his name or find out when to set him free.
Yet in the faces of those passersby—businessmen, office workers, families, couples—and in the faces reflected in the mirrors of the cars waiting in line for takeout, I recognized exhaustion. They had resigned themselves to the road they ended up on, knowing that if they dared veer onto a different path, they might land in a dead end. Other routines, other partners, other children.
What could anyone want of humanity and the systems that chained them? To deal with other people, to sacrifice their days working—just to start a family, spit out offspring, save for retirement? Those goals satisfied the ghosts around me. But if the emptiness, the desolation, and the lack of meaning in each maneuver to wade through these societies nagged daily like a dislocated joint, what was there left to do?
-----
Author’s note: this novella was originally self-published in Spanish in a collection titled Los dominios del emperador búho, about ten years ago.
Today’s song is Modest Mouse’s “Custom Concern.”
I feel like I need to explain myself for this one. First of all, I had completely forgotten about every single detail of this story so far. It was like reading it for the first time. As I read some parts, I did get some faint recollection of having “seen” them before, but I don’t remember having come up with nor designed those characters. This story was very personal for me, and perhaps that’s why I haven’t revisited it even in my mind, as it closed a period of my life I’d rather forget.
You see, I was diagnosed as autistic when I was 26 years old or so. That came after a few failed jobs that proved I couldn’t work a regular job due to my autism-related peculiarities. So when I got diagnosed, I had hit rock bottom, and I didn’t see myself adjusting to society at all. I lived like a recluse, the pee-in-bottles kind, except for my therapy sessions and the group meetings with other adults on the spectrum (I ended up leaving those group meetings, ironically, because one of the psychs, a thirty-year-old woman, was overtly hitting on me). A local organization offered me to take part in a course to help disabled people rejoin society and get hired.
Because most social workers are apparently retarded themselves (I swear I’ve never met any of them I could respect) and into the whole “everyone is equal” shit, they lumped together people with intellectual, social, and physical disabilities. We had people whose limbs didn’t work right having to be told how to talk with an interviewer in a way that a Down Syndrome fella would comprehend. People with social disabilities such as mine weren’t particularly tolerated either; a few of the disabled there, one diagnosed with paranoia and persecution syndrome or some shit like that, and another with fetal alcohol syndrome due to what a bastard her mother was, kept railing about some autistic guy at their workshop, and how autistic people were this and that. I didn’t interact much with them, but at least I got some sense of satisfaction when we “had” to reveal our disabilities and they realized that the guy whose disability they have kept shitting on every day heard it all.
You see, one of the things that bother me the most about the imposed public perception of disabled people, and I mean from the moderately disabled (among which I include myself; I’m 52% disabled) to the hyper disabled that you only see in such centers, is that social workers and such pests have forced a vision onto society that disabled people are all so resilient and understanding and kind to others because they endure such trauma and discrimination. Well, plenty of the people I met there were fucking bastards. Some real nasty ones too. There are details that I decided not to include in this story because it would seem like I was insulting people with such disabilities, even though it actually happened; for example, a Down Syndrome guy routinely waltzed over to groups, ripped the loudest farts, and casually left. Another guy kept calling everyone a faggot. Someone else seemed to be converting to Islam, and regularly claimed that priests and such ought to be killed. It wasn’t particularly surprising that some of the particularly vulnerable disabled would convert, because the fucking moronic social workers put illegals with a jihadist mindset among genuinely disabled people, under the category of “risk of exclusion,” as if wanting to conquer this country for their religion was a disability. Is it really a wonder that I was regularly enraged?
Anyway, that organization showed me a workshop similar to the one featured in this story, an offered me to work there. But I couldn’t due to the extreme noise, my intestinal issues, and other stuff. I did learn plenty about how they experienced that life, though, and it resulted in this story. Whatever good it did.
Anyway, I dare you to enjoy it if you can.
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