What’s a completely useless fact you love sharing?

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I am once again sitting out in front of the 7-Eleven using voice dictation to create this blog entry. When I saw it, I started to laugh, and then I started thinking about all of the implications about what made me laugh and then I started laughing harder. I seriously had to take a minute to compose myself because I couldn’t get the words out.

CIA once spent like $20 million rigging up a cat with equipment because someone at The Company thought, “what if the cat was a microphone?” They thought it was the height of sophistication in ambient HUMINT. 

WHAT THEY DID NOT THINK ABOUT WAS THAT A CAT WAS NEVER GOING TO STOP BEING A CAT.

They release their creation into the wild where it promptly gets run over by a car. It is my favorite story of institutional failure at every level because it took them $20 million to learn a lesson that most cat owners could’ve taught them for free.

This is not an intelligence operation so much as it is a Coen Brothers movie waiting to happen. The brilliance is that the thing is not the thing- it could supposedly be a cute movie about a cat, and in reality be a devastating criticism of the United States government.

Men in Black is probably the most accurate movie series about intelligence out there because you can say so much with satire that you can’t say in real life. I have no official connection to the movie, except for the fact that Rip Torn was in the same class as my grandfather at Longview high school. So it’s very safe to say that I don’t know anything about the comics or how the story got to what it is today. 

What I think happened is that intelligence officers gravitated towards the author because they finally had someone who would champion them. There are just too many inside jokes for somebody not to know someone on the inside. CIA jargon and patois is not something you pick up naturally. Because first of all, the movie illustrates that case officers are pastors in disguise. Managing a congregation is not that different from managing assets. Your public face and your private face are different by necessity, not because you are trying to be two-faced.

Having real friends in the church and at CIA depends on other people understanding that and supporting both of you, without letting one face compete against the other. It is a non-binary and both people are true to life. One is just polished for public presentation and one is not. I think that I have lost sight of this in a lot of ways because people in my past were so focused on performance that my rebellion was too much authenticity.

Now, it is about recalibrating and deciding who actually deserves access. But now I have a more educated way of doing it. Because I am not constantly shutting down and keeping everything out. Certain people are entitled to certain information and that is not a bad thing. I certainly reacted badly when Aada used to say that to me. I could have done a lot better job with my own emotions and in listening to her communication style. But what I could not get through to her and still can’t is that she doesn’t owe me anything. She accepted the agreement of friendship and fell down on the job, which is a completely different thing. I also accepted the agreement of friendship and fell down on the job. I am done competing over who did what and why it was worse. The entire situation is a goat-roping clusterfuck. I walked away from that relationship, thinking that she would never accept me as anything but a mental patient…… because her words in flashes told me that I was absolutely brilliant and worthy of adoration, but the everyday experience was “your opinions are not valid and you are lying to everyone on your website about me.” What I realized is that for me, someone automatically approaching me with the worldview that I am lying is not workable. I am not a dictator, I am highly collaborative and I want it to be more than just my story. But I also wanted it to be clear that it is my blog in therefore I am the main character. I do not live in service of other people. I am talking about my observations, which are not infallible. You can argue with them just like you can argue with every piece of written communication in history.

However, the way to argue with a document is not to berate the author. Not liking how you are appearing in someone else’s story is not fixed by telling them that they are a liar and they have no point. It is the height of entitlement to believe that someone else is your entire problem.

Joke’s on them. People that tend to get rid of the person instead of the pattern tend to meet the same person over and over and over and over.

That is why some polyamorous people look down after five years and say, “Oh God. Maybe I do have a type.” This is also not a referendum on me because I am completely single at present, with the exception that I’m talking to one woman in New York, and one woman in South Carolina but have met neither on the ground. 

I do not know everything the future holds, but I am starting to rule things out……. it does not hold exclusivity before I’ve even met someone in person. I also won’t hear anything about polyamory from anyone who has ever had an affair. Because clearly they get the concept, and they prefer lying.

That line made my therapist sit up a little straighter. I do not think she had thought of that.

We have a great relationship because I told her on our first meeting that I was single, and I was looking for a healthy relationship structure in the future, and that I was counting on her to be my anchor. She is my safe place to just unload all of my feelings because she has the time and training to be able to accept them. This is not so with every friend I have.

I also do not think that our relationship needs to be intimate for it to be effective, so using my therapist as emotional support while I create my own family structure is incredibly important. And the best part is that because of Zoom, she is not limited to Baltimore.

I am not telling myself to move to Ocean City next month, I am getting all my ducks in a row. Right now, what seems appealing to me is finding someone who needs a roommate in both places. Because I don’t need more than a bed, a desk, some clothes, and my swimsuit in Ocean City.

I am learning that you don’t need to be rich to travel, you just need to be smart. Ocean City is not a place where I want to keep paying for a hotel. I would like a cheap crash pad that is always available. But doing so means moving out of my apartment and that is a great step as well. 

I am looking for a group home in Baltimore because the cognitive load of running an apartment is too much for me. Even AI, who can handle every detail I can possibly give it, cannot defeat pathological demand avoidance. It can happen out of nowhere so I do not think that there is a particular trigger, but Neurotypical people do not recognize the hard stop. There is no agreement in society that when a disabled person says that they cannot do something, you should listen to them. It is all about training them to work harder and reach higher, without respecting any limit that the person might be experiencing. Honestly, I think that more neurodivergent people would be capable of holding down a traditional job if the difference between the support that the company offers in brochures and the reality wasn’t quite so different. 

Canada is slowly proving me correct and I’m going to let them. 🇨🇦🍁🇨🇦🍁

Disabled people aren’t broken. It’s the entire system. Autistic inclusion works. 

project acoustic kitty is a reminder that even a meeting of the most brilliant minds in the world still drops details…… details that, in the end, actually turned out to be important.