My Pacific Circuit
Last week I read two books about the supply chain: Annalee Newitz’s Automatic Noodle (high-five if you were among the “late-night friends on Mastodon” mentioned in the acknowledgements) and Alexis Madrigal’s The Pacific Circuit. What I want to talk about here, though, is Kurt Vonnegut.
Late in the Madrigal, he mentions a story Vonnegut once told in an interview on PBS—it shows up so much online that it’s been fact-checked. (He mentions it as well in his recent appearance on the Newitz’s podcast with Charlie Jane Anders, Our Opinions Are Correct.) It’s a story, ostensibly, about envelopes.
BRANCACCIO: There’s a little sweet moment, I’ve got to say, in a very intense book — your latest — in which you’re heading out the door and your wife says what are you doing? I think you say — I’m getting — I’m going to buy an envelope.
VONNEGUT: Yeah.
BRANCACCIO: What happens then?
VONNEGUT: Oh, she says well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know…. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.
It’s well established here that I am financially dependent upon my mother, my sole remaining parent, who for some time now has lived in her own quarters, so to speak, in the home of my sister, brother-in-law, and nephew back east. Once that support is gone, as it stands now I’ll have less than six months of financial support left until everyone expects me to take her place although that doesn’t actually “solve” anything but the matter of not instead simply ending unhoused somewhere on the streets of Portland. Given the methodical destruction of what little safety net we have in this country anymore, we can’t even expect that I’d anymore even have the food stamps required to actually feed me.
The word “solve” is in quotes there because for me it isn’t any kind of a solution at all, and the reason is somewhere up there inside Vonnegut’s envelope.
If there’s one thing I have despite the financial dependence and the welfare support, as stunted as sometimes it can be what with the autism and the fatigue, it’s independence. I’m temperamentally unsuited to live with other human beings (just ask those I’ve lived with as an adult), and in fact I’m emotionally unsuited to have a social circle of what you’d term friends (versus intermittent acquaintances), but my relative sanity itself does depend upon the fact that I live in a Portland neighborhood that’s somewhat akin to a small town where I easily can walk to coffee, or brunch, or a movie without needing to stroll beyond a six-block radius.
I don’t need close attachments but I do need these loose, sociable if passing and fleeting connections of the kind Vonnegut valorizes as being of such fundamental human importance.
Those quarters foreseen as passing from my mother to me, it’s no exaggeration to say, would be among my worst nightmares, as suddenly I’d be forced to life in very close proximity to others when really I’m only as self-regulated as I am because I don’t have to closely (I’d argue, for me, claustrophobically) navigate a life of other people, and I’d be entirely and completely dependent upon those very people—whose mere presence would be dysregulating for me—to ever see and experience anything at all outside the home.
Those daily, weekly, or monthly routines of coffee, brunch, and movie in effect are my pacific circuit—regular acts of sociality if not direct sociableness that help regulate my nervous system and, for lack of a better term for it, my general levels of peace.
This all is further fed by the fact that recently I was thinking again about how the disability determination consultive evaluation after my post-diagnosis Vocational Rehabilitation job placement showed work was impossible for me yielded a report which instead said that while due to that job experience I had acute adjustment disorder, because I did so well on during two-hour exam clearly I can work just fine, and definitionally screwed me forever. There is no path ahead that results in me obtaining disability benefits, because of this original sin on the part of Disability Determinations Services that now and forever presents an insurmountable hurdle.
Complicating the idea of my pacific circuit is that through either resilience or resignation, as my world shrinks due to the still-undiagnosed fatigue, I keep marking most days as having been “neutral” (my general target for overall state of mind) despite, for example, not having been to the zoo—a once weekly, then monthly, activity—since May and not having blogged—until right now—for two months, when those things were of a self-regulatory nature. It’s entirely possible that through such resilience or resignation I’d continue grading on this kind of curve when imprisoned in that room somewhere in New England, but as much as this dynamic makes me sad now it would only make me all that much sadder then.
The other day I received the news that The Belmont Goats had lost another member of the herd, bringing it down from its high of fourteen to just nine. Bambi, a Nigerian dwarf goat and the first (along with her brother, Cooper) who joined the herd as a kid and bottle baby (which made them the go-to goats for taking to events), turned twelve in April. She could ask for attention like a cat, and insisted on being a lap goat for as long as she could, until she had to be content with just sitting in chairs by herself. Bambi’s passing comes in the days and weeks before the project moves into my neighborhood after seven years just across the railroad cut, to a space intended to be where that nine will live out the rest of their lives. That project itself for several years was a not insubstantial part of my pacific circuit.
By the recent, long-awaited return of the phenomenal podcast NeuroDiving to discuss empathy I was reminded of how to a significant degree I live my social life through a sort of process of “out of sight, out of mind”. For reasons, I think, of self-regulation even if entirely unconscious, whenever I need to make a break from something—family because I moved west, fandom because it just sort of wound down, from the goats because of an ethical dispute—I make sharp breaks because I’ve never had the mental temperament or dexterity to mix and match or compartmentalize. In the never-ending battle of resources versus demands, what’s in sight is about all the demand I can manage.
(The autistic person with whom NeuroDiving discusses empathy at one point says—although I’m not really convinced this has anything to do with empathy, per se—that when they move away from somewhere, they don’t miss anyone. This is significantly the case for me, although it can be somewhat moderated by time and distance. To wit: I don’t spend my days missing my family back east, but I might sometimes miss the old Comic-Con crew—the difference and distinction being that I was attending Comic-Con ever year for some time but once I’d moved west I basically only went back for my father’s death.)
This was on display when I was texted about this most recent death in the herd, because I generally don’t really have the bandwidth capacity to maintain acquaintances beyond the lifetime of the circumstances in which they were formed—or, at least, especially when the nature of the break with those circumstances were negative, even if not all acquaintances were directly implicated in that negativity.
(Contrarily, this also is why whenever I was broken up with I had an aggravatingly difficult time letting go: they weren’t “out of sight’ so I couldn’t put that no longer valid version of them “out of mind”. This is all pre-diagnosis, so I had no concept of autism’s monotropic tendency and the challenges of getting one’s mental and emotional processes off one track and onto another.)
While I appreciate getting advance word when a goat passes, this is one-sided sociality, and presumptively unfair, but I simply don’t have anything to give back.
How does all of this square with my views on kindness, though? Late in Sue Burke’s Usurpation (the best in her Semiosis series), a character makes an observation that stopped me in my tracks. “You were kind to me,” they say. “That’s how I knew you were real.”
It’s true that I’ve two favorite literary quotes: one of which is about the need to be kind, especially given the other which is about being dropped down halfway. It’s true, too, that I believe everyday courtesies mean something, given living in a universe in which nothing we do matters and so the only thing that matters is what we do. Which, however, is less kind: to cut people off because you know you can’t manage the reciprocal demands, or to try to fake it so they don’t feel cut off?
To what degree is that incapacity a result of knowing that I’ve a tendency to become too overwhelmed by the states of others to be able to navigate either their state or my own? I’ve got to take care of me, else there’s nothing to go around. My own particular variety of autistic empathy perhaps necessarily is one that only can operate at arm’s length.
Even absent specific, circumstantial breaks, my acquaintances tend to become intermittent appearances over time, and there are parts of my pacific circuit which I’ve come to travel on longer timeframes than the daily, weekly, or monthly.
Just last week I thought to put this year’s Portland Polish Festival into my calendar well in advance so I would not somehow forget. For more than a decade, there’s been a fair to middling chance that I’d run into a longstanding if increasingly intermittent acquaintance who stretches back to my MindVox days more than two decades ago. In the past, there were at times several, different such yearly touch points: the Adult Soapbox Derby, National Pie Day, the Polish Festival, and the occasional birthday.
Imagine the dislocating disorientation, then, when on Tuesday evening I logged into Instagram to see said Ryan Lloyd in the list of recommended accounts (I only use the site for knowing what my local, neighborhood businesses are up to, since they constitute almost the entirely of my world), and upon clicking through finding what at first appeared to me to be a flyer to a birthday celebration but turned out instead to be the notice of a memorial gathering. Anything I did over the next hour found itself interrupted by the sound of my own voice exclaiming, “What the fuck?!”
Quite the opposite, then, of a birthday.
Following the death of David Lynch, I took a walk in the woods. Next month, at the Polish Festival, I suppose I’ll have to grab a placki.
(Incidentally, he also once saved me from an unfortunate confrontation with a corporate landlord by repairing the hole in the drywall of an apartment I made when I threw a shoe at the wall because my neighbor for the umpteenth time was playing his keyboard at one o’clock in the morning. While I say this is incidental, if you follow the chain of links on Instagram you find that seemingly half the bars (and a piercing shop) in Portland are waxing nostalgic about the fact that Ryan could, and did, build or fix just about anything.)
I’ve talked here before about my occasional bouts of death anxiety and existential angst. Late last month I’d somehow managed to follow up a podcast episode about the philosophy of weirdness with one about why the universe began, the former of which essentially concludes that whatever underlying physics or metaphysics you choose to ascribe to existence cannot help but be in some profound and underlying sense deeply weird and beggaring of belief. It’s the nature of what happens when you try to eff the ineffable.
Two deaths of different valences in a matter of days, then, each substantial in its own way, is nothing if not a thanatophobic gut punch. Ryan’s death necessarily implicates all my own thoughts about mortality and meaning, and has somewhat colored, complicated, and confused how this post about my pacific circuit (notes for which actually go back almost a week) eventually came together, or in some ways did not. It doesn’t, for instance, actually have much of an ending.
In fact, like life, it just stops.
