This Spectrum Thing Can Be A Drag

Once in a while this autism thing decides I'm too comfortable and reaches out and bites me in the ass!

Yesterday, as part of an otherwise typical 70 mile round trip shopping thing to restock on tomatoes and cleaning chemicals (I don't know what's in the CLR we use for removing lime, calcium, and rust left behind by our hard well-water, but the person that brings it out to the curb-side has to verify you're old enough before handing it over.) we made a stop at Hobby Lobby for beads (The Wife)

and a few bits-n-bobs to finish up the Halloween vignette for the display case (me).

True, Hobby Lobby pretty much ignores Halloween because it doesn't align with their version of God, but they have loads of other things that, with some imagination, can be repurposed.

i.e. This little red Christmas tree truck which I can re-use later in the year. But for now I can bend the tree forward and use it as a support for a flying witch silhouette cut from black foam-board. (Yeah, I know, I need to scale that drawing down a bit to make it work.)

Hobby Lobby has a decent web-front store but that doesn't always work when you're trying to be creative. Sometimes you just have to bite the bullet, go inside, and browse the shelves and aisles to find things that you didn't know you need but are perfect for the project. (Turns out Poly-Fill teases out into spooky puffs of creaping mist much more effectively, and way more cost friendly, than cotton batting. Something I would never have figured out at a keyboard.)

But that doesn't change the fact that the place is inevitably full of people. Many of them, like me, old and blocking the aisles right where I want to go. Too many of them over-active, and loud, kids (Why do people keep having those annoying little rug-rats?!).

So that’s how I came to be standing in the too-long, too-slow checkout line while the really inefficient checker (I mean how many times do you have to look at the lable on each item? Once damnit! Pick it up, check the lable, key it in, put it in the bag. Stop fiddling around with the damn thing and get on with it! And by the way, this is a retail checkout line, not a craft seminar, so this long-winded exchange between customer and checker about the finer points of quilting technique is totally inappropriate!) plods agonizingly slowly through a simple task, while I'm getting more jittery by the second, when The Wife casually, innocently, wonders if a local restaurant we haven't been to since before the COVID lockdown started still has the pick-three appetizer we used to get.

A simple enough question, but it raised the possibility of an unexpected deviation from our normal routine, and that was enough to plunge my brain over the edge towards a full-blown meltdown. Between over-activated sensory systems and trying to mask - you know, so people wouldn't know I'm slightly wierd - I could barely function by the time it was my turn to be the served customer. And it wasn't untill we were back inside the safety of the truck that my brain backed far enough out of fight-or-flight (or curl up into a little ball and whimper untill the world goes away) mode to allow me to look up the restaurant's menu on line and confirm the pick-three appetizer was still there. (After all The Wife deserves her little pleasures too and my issues shouldn't interfere with that.)

Remember the robot from Lost in Space? The one that was constantly saying "danger Will Robinson"? Well I think my brain is a blood relative of that robot, like a direct decendant. All too often it's waving its arms around spasticly while seeing horrible things behind every rock, most of which were never there in the first place, and trying to convince me to fight dragons that were never there.

Autism isn't all bad. It's what keeps the two of us from attending events that are potential mass-shooting venues, but sometimes I can't help but wonder what it would be like to be 'normal'.