What are your favorite animals?

Fair question, right?

To eat, I say my favorite is pork because I like face bacon and all those esoteric things that professional cooks eat. I like offal, but some of it is awful. My advice is that stuff like hearts, brains, and marrow might not taste good to you, but they’ll definitely taste better than kidneys and livers. I don’t eat filters (immortal words from Dana, she’s right tho). I don’t care whether we’re going to Luby’s Cafeteria or a three Michelin star fine dining experience. I am not eating liver and onions, I am not eating it dressed up as $200 fois gras. The only person that has ever gotten me to eat a second bite of fois gras is Gabriel Rucker, head chef of Portland’s Le Pigeon (do not pronounce it in French). It is not “le pigh-jhon”). It didn’t taste any less like an assload of iron, but there was so much more to explore within the flavor. The crisp edges. The raspberry jelly donut. Just….. fuck me. Yet, I still couldn’t get away from the taste of blood, and not even blood. Just the constant taste of a coin in the back of your throat, and it will stick long after you’ve finished. It’d be okay if it was the jelly donut that reappeared………..

I also love the zoo with a deep and abiding passion, particularly in the Spring because it’s free and I can go write there every single day if I want. It’s lovely when it’s between 60-70 degrees….. not so much in August. I pick a table in front of whichever enclosure pleases me, and the animals’ activity makes writing easier. When I go to the zoo, I only sometimes go during tourist season…. but when I do, those days are often invaluable.

There’s a reason for that. Sometimes I am very much in the mood for an overwhelmingly large crowd, because in that space, I am not taking it all in. I wear a baseball cap AND cans, a move score blasting so that I’m only watching the crowd, I’m not listening to it. Sounds trip me up all the time- it’s my sensory issue, from the notifications on my phone that sometimes scare the life out of me to people talking and not realizing they’re talking to me because every sound in the room is equally loud and I do not process voices in the same way I process reading. This is true of most autistic people.

Editor’s Note:

If you are struggling to reach an autistic person, try laying out all your feelings in text. Write them a letter. Use Facebook Messenger. We don’t lack empathy, we lack the ability to process it correctly…… particularly in conversation. Again, voices are hard- so much easier to process it in our own way, get back to you and see if we’ve understood.

I am using it as cover. I learned this from Jonna Mendez, actually, in one of her videos for “Wired” magazine on YouTube (I’ll put one of my favorites at the end- she is so fabulous). The funniest thing ever said in a comment came from someone who understood the assignment. He said, “she was the Chief of Disguise. I was really expecting her to turn into a black dude at the end.” I died for a second, but I know something he doesn’t. The first mask she ever made for herself that actually animated when she put it on was indeed a black dude. In her memory, it was fabulous, but she could not walk it, talk it….. because she is indeed a white woman. 😉

Her next big coup was fooling George H.W. Bush by “borrowing someone else’s face,” and as I result I kidded her in person that we had mutual friends. George H.W. Bush and I used to go to the same church…….. what is really, really amazing is that she fooled him in the Oval and not when he was director of CIA. LEGEND. The other really funny thing is that she got dressed at a friend’s house before they went to the White House, and their dog didn’t like her when she first got there and went apeshit over her in disguise. 😉 Additionally, she was working for Tony when he came up with the quick change…. that you could completely change your look in between 37-45 steps depending on whether Jonna or Tony is telling the story. The funniest part of that whole thing is that Tony and Jonna’s boss was a narcoleptic (I KNOW), and Jonna’s job was to stand at his desk and make sure he was awake the whole time to see Tony do it. He started out as himself, the spy you see in “Argo” played by Ben Affleck (much to my Latinx stepsister’s dismay and humorous consternation).

It didn’t matter who played Tony, because that’s not what was interesting about him……. and also, Tony didn’t care that a Latino didn’t play him The only thing that Jonna noted about Ben’s character had nothing to do with race. It wasn’t public at the time, but Tony had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s and his personality kind of flipped. Ben based the character on that personality because Ben and Tony spent time together. He did not know what Tony was like at the time. She said that he was more effusive with his emotions back then, and that it would have been in some ways a different movie if Ben had known Tony for many years. I’m paraphrasing her, but I am writing in the spirit of what she said. Even still, it wasn’t Tony’s personality that drew me in. He didn’t have to have that personality for me to love him. It was his brain, especially after he and Jonna laid out their thought processes so brilliantly in their books that not only do I have them all on my Kindle, my dad gifted me all of them autographed as keepsakes. And in fact, one of them I bought on my own and she signed it in front of me. It was one of the most significant moments of my life…… because I realized that even if I couldn’t be a spy, I could be them after they retired.

My idea is that I am capable of short stories where I do not feel capable as a novelist. I’d like to write Bond level stories for a chapter, and then lay out the research for why I wrote it. It would be cool to write science fiction like Men in Black, then explore why I picked their ops based on my enormity of reading…. and this is completely separate from my alternate history, because I have had the idea vetted and the red team says it’s huge; it will be a knockout if executed correctly. You can’t get that one out of me because I don’t want to give the idea away to anyone who’d publish a shittier version before I did. This idea is free because it’s universal. No two books written in both fiction and non-fiction would be the same. Even if you’ve read something like it, you’ve never heard it in my voice…… which, I think, would be “Rachel Maddow on the non-fiction parts and an amalgamation of Tony and Jonna when it’s fiction, and also me because they’re not neurodivergent (or I’m not brave enough to ask). I would write that in the inscription, to make it clear that it’s just a character and people shouldn’t attribute my indiosyncracies to her- necessary when you’re writing about someone who is still living and almost certain to read it. Calling someone autistic or coding them that way is not for the faint of heart because I wouldn’t let a dog I didn’t like be treated the way people treat me. It’s not my friends and family. It’s the way I walk in the world…… and I would die of embarrassment if I passed on the “wealth.”

I had to think about that.

In trying to hold a mirror up to the world around me, it often causes me to attribute my own idiosyncracies with someone else. I think I do it the most often with Supergrover because she is a mirror image of me. She emotes too little, and I emote too much. It is indeed the gap between neurotypical and neurodivergent. It causes issues because I tell her how I see the world and she doesn’t return the favor. Therefore, I write from my own echo chamber. We aren’t checking the stories we’re telling ourselves, and that kind of love is harmful to both of us. It is my responsibility to take care of my anxious attachment style. It is her responsibility to interrupt my reality with her story so that I am not basing every decision on what only I think. My self image isn’t strong enough for that. My history is that if I really love someone and they’re being avoidant, I’ll just cave for years on end to avoid ending the relationship.

I became aware that this story was total bullshit and realized that in order for Supergrover and I to move on, I needed a love big enough to silence the voices in my head. I needed her to tell me exactly what was up in her brain when she read it. I am neurodivergent, therefore I take everything literally. Meeting up one day was a “someday, perhaps,” and I waited five years. It wasn’t all because I was holding onto her. It’s that there was a pandemic. Why blame her for something so beyond her control? Alternatively, she didn’t seem to recognize when I shot for the moon and talked about a time in which she was retired and had nowhere to be….. anything from traveling to things neither of us have experienced to showing off our own experiences to the other to just having a damn cup of coffee together instead of in async. In short, I understood the assignment, I’m just establishing my area of operations.

I’m going to have to read “Nuking the Moon” by Vince Houghton, because I love the era of CIA involved in the space race. It is also an alternative title to this blog, apparently……. because having a relationship like ours would feel so relatable to every autistic reader. My friends become my special interest when I write to them. I don’t think of us as potentially falling in love later in life like I did with Dana. Dana and I worked on each other for a while, and she had me the first time she winked at me…… I just only know that in retrospect, because when you’re sapiosexual, someone has to open up to you over time. When you’re autistic, is has to be a forest fire to get you to notice…… and she’ll know exactly where she was when said wink occurred. It was not the same situation with Supergrover because she’s straight and she’s already met her life partner, anyway. I just like being cool enough to know her. It’s why I have no regrets at all right now, I’m just sad.).

Every neurodivergent person I’ve ever met has felt this way. Every single one. I haven’t realized my power in saying things that identify with AuDHD because I didn’t realize the rabbit hole was that deep.

Again, saying all this is not about my beautiful girl and me. It’s how perception of me would affect any character I write whether they’re fictional, living their lives, or dead now but their estate will freak. Any and all of these are bad, I assure you.

I should talk to Cora about this book because she absolutely is a novelist and creates entire fictional worlds. We could say a lot by not saying it at all. In fiction, you do things by showing. I want every character in the book to be neurodivergent and to show it by how they present. The book would basically contain how to communicate with a neurodivergent when they are trying to speak to a neurotypical. I can do this very well with spies because they are drenched in facts, not emotions.

Spies know everything, in my humble opinion. They take in too much information about the world every single day and remember random factoids all day long (e.g. American spies learning how to dress and count in Europe), allowing them to move quickly and quietly as the smartest person in the room. It’s not just Jonna and Tony that have taught me that lesson. It’s everyone I’ve ever met at the International Spy Museum or heard on SpyCast.

Even people who work at the museum are smarter than the average bear. In particular, shout out to Vince Houghton and Dr. Andrew Hammond, who both have served as the host of SpyCast. Otherwise, I would not know all this because I wouldn’t have gotten interested in real-life intelligence over Bond movie magic. Bond is the face of something very, very real…… and it has scared me more than once. I posted on an autism group that my special interest was intelligence, and the comments were varied from “oh, that’s so cool” to “does the American-based “International Spy Museum” have a wing for CoIntelPro?” Jesus God, let’s drag out every bad thing CIA has ever done right off the bat. I do not like those people. I really don’t. That’s because when you dig deep, you see that misses and wins are part of every organization. If the swing for a win is big enough, things are going to go very, very wrong- and faster than anyone would think.

But when I personally think of spies, I think about people like Julia Child, Virginia Hall, Alma Katsu (all OSS/CIA, but Virginia Hall also worked for MI-6 before she came to us), John le Carré (David Cornwell, MI-6, also a fiction author), and Jack Barsky (KGB). In terms of fiction, I’m not a Bond fan until we’re talking about the current set of movies, because the old ones are dated and incredibly misogynistic. (Pussy Galore? COME ON.). My favorite M is obviously Judi Dench, my favorite C is Stephen Fry in “Doctor Who.” And if I had to give an award to any intelligence officer in a fictional universe, there are two. I love K from MiB (“I never worked for a funeral home.”) and Carmen Sandiego (“Fedora the Explorer”).

In some ways, “Argo” is also a fictional universe because reel bears little resemblance to real. For instance, Alan Arkin’s character is completely made up, but John Goodman’s isn’t. John Chambers, his character, went on to do other sci-fi movies and his last one was “The Island of Doctor Moreau.” That being said, “Argo” is not Tony’s best book. It’s tremendous, but “The Moscow Rules” is better.

I think this is because in ’79 I was two. I don’t remember the hostage crisis in Iran. I very, very much remember “Mr. President, tear down that wall.” If you are not familiar, there used ot be a wall dividing East and West Germany. The dividing line was in Berlin. West Berlin had all the benefits of democracy and capitalism. East Berlin was controlled by communism, so this was a direct appeal by Ronald Reagan to Mikhail Gorbachev. In reality, Reagan and George H.W. Bush probably advanced the wall coming down by roughly 11 days. That’s hyperbole, but it’s the funniest line about the Cold War I’ve read so far (no past or present government employee said this; I was researching a paper in college for International Affairs.). Jonna and Tony were instrumental in all of this, protecting their assets and underlings like their own children. They also came up with two pieces of spy technology that changed the direction of the war…. and I’m saying it, they didn’t. They’re too humble.

Speaking of children, the first thing they came up with was called a “Jack in the Box.” It was literally a large version of the toy. This is because all the spies in Tony’s department (he was Chief of Disguise then) were taught that there is no distinguishable difference between espionage and magic. The area of operation is your “stage,” or your ring depending on the size of the circus. There are two operations going on at the same time. The first is that you’re trying to pop smoke (military slang for creating a distraction). The second is that you are actively saying to the crown, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Apt.

When CIA got a new building, they covered it in green glass. I don’t know what they called Langley before it was built as a code name/slang, but now it’s “Oz” (I don’t think Tony came up with it, but that’s on brand for him, clearly). In fact, one of the things that marks me as an intelligence superfan is that in “Argo,” Ben Affleck runs through the old building and ends up standing on the famous seal in the new one. I don’t know if you know that, but I know like five people who would know that…… and now I’m wondering if Zac is one of them.

ADHD moment- Zac is not a spy, but he works with the data they collect. He’s been in intelligence since he joined the military, which in my mind makes him a great boyfriend and a lucky bastard all at once. 😛 Unfortunately, he does not have the kind of badge where he can escort visitors, but he’s lucky that he doesn’t. I would have asked him to take me to a wide assortment of gift shops…………………… repeatedly. I’m lucky, though, because he remembers me when he goes. My baseball cap and “nightgown” are from the one at CIA (by nightgown I mean a CIA t-shirt that’s way too big on me), my sweat pants are from the one at the Pentagon, and I have a t-shirt from, I think, the one at DIA that’s for little kids (it’s my favorite). Interestingly enough, I don’t wear my intelligence/military shit all the time because they’re so great. It’s an added bonus that all their shit vibes with my sensory issues. If I ever find out who makes their clothes, I’d also buy a ton of stuff without the logo. This is because it doesn’t happen often, but sometimes I get treated like a human comment section. Not all of them are nice. The best one was from a tween who pulled on my coat and said, “Do you work there? I want to be CIA, too.” I freaked out because she was the most beautiful girlchilde……. a future Alpha Kappa Alpha that could one day be Tracy Walder. And by freaked out I mean that this was on the Metro platform so my emotions and sensory perception were already turned up to hell and I just cried. Flat out. But it was after she walked away. The last thing I wanted to do was freak her out, too. It was good that we were in such a public place.

When you think everyone is watching, turns out no one is.

To the rest of the world, this comes across as hilarious. To me, I just stare and quote Sarah Silverman on Jimmy Kimmel. That if she had kids, she’d tell them that “mommy believes she’s one of God’s chosen people, and daddy believes Jesus is magic.” Not sure he’s ever been compared to Jesus, but he’s a Moses in “Argo.” Sarah’s argument is valid for both of us.

Again, what I’ve learned from Jonna and Tony is moving in a crowd with my sensory issues muted by headphones and having my head covered. I can get lost in my own little world, and I generally want to because conversation is difficult for me when every noise feels the same and often drowns them out.

I was going to the zoo that day. I found that I love giraffes and kept going with my day. Not going to see me walking one down Connecticut because the zoo had “Adoption Day.” And, I would have to check with all of them, but I do not have room for a giraffe and (correct me if I’m wrong) neither do Zac, Supergrover & Michael, or Bryn & Dave. I do know enough to know that Zac, Michael, and Dave would have to convince me, Supergrover, and Bryn that no, we do not need a giraffe (they both have a heart that beats for animals). Also, I cannot afford to relocate both myself and a giraffe to Oregon. It would be easier to make friends with an Oregonian giraffe, which is a whole mood.

What would it look like to be an Oregonian giraffe? They don’t wear patchouli essential oil or hemp flip flops, do they? The only thing I know about Oregon giraffes is that they probably love The Indigo Girls. I do not say this lightly, actually, because The Indigo Girls have consistently been one of the best concerts at the zoo over the years. There’s no way that the animals don’t like the music, at least in some cases….. and Indigo Girls play acoustic just enough of the time that I can’t see how it would get on their nerves as much as electric. I love how I have worked all of this out in my head…….

If you’ve never been to the zoo in Oregon for a concert, it’s like going to Miller Outdoor Theater or Cynthia Mitchell Woods Pavillion in Houston or Wolf Trap in DC. Primates and parrots can both sing “Get Out the Map” by now. I would have enjoyed teaching it to Kevin, who is a giraffe.

Kevin and I used to hang out. The way his enclosure was built, there was a table with a bench bolted to the ground right in front of him. Like, I couldn’t reach out and pet him, but akin to being in the same bedroom or kitchen. Space, but not much of it. He always sat right in front of me, as if he knew he was my inspiration, posing for a portrait…… yet a devilish one. I have never seen a giraffe roll their eyes, but I liked to imagine that Kevin did. It fit the theme. If wishes were giraffes, writers would ride.I just called him that and now I can’t remember why. But anyway, I thought of us as tight because he heard about the rough drafts of so much that’s here now.

It’s not his real name. I was just gathering intel and needed a codename for my asset.