It's so funny to me how when you're inside the United States, it feels like the entire world is actively thinking about your country's ridiculous politics at all times. But no.
Last year, around this time, I was in Tokyo when the Charlie Kirk thing happened and I was fixated on it from a distance, but only in so much as no one around me thought anything of it, and it felt like the cleave of fascism was sweeping obsequiously by an invisible hand.
Now it's a year later, and I'm walking in Newtown, Sydney's equivalent of San Fran's The Mission, dropping into an anarchist bookstore where an old man is listening to American NPR, the two cohosts are debating Lindsay Graham's sister's weirdly abrupt political career and questioning whether Graham was a "colleague" or a "comrade" (and these two things have different nuanced meanings) and yet no one is really paying attention to the show. The store owner has a conversation with a customer looking for a book on Thai language that veers into their opinions on the beauty of Sanskrit. The radio host goes on about how Trump has a lot of money but doesn't like to spend money, how he hoards it. A woman wants a book about Sartre.
No one cares.
And like, why should they? American politics bare absolutely nothing on their lives. There's practically no American tourists here either., so much that when I talk to a stranger, they pause and don't even know immediately what my accent is. I have to tell them where I'm from.
When I was 10, I had to go with my mom to visit family in Indiana that summer. And I thought, still think, Indiana's just about the most deeply uncool place someone could spend their time. Not a good representation of me or anything I stand for. And so I told my friends that I was going to Australia for the summer. And they believed me, But then Donald Laster called my house asking for me, and my dad, who stayed home so he could cheat on my mom all summer like the giant dickhead he was, fucking told Donald where I really was. Like why? I'd never do that to Henry. I'd just let the kid have his fantasy. And I guess a little piece of me has continued to believe that I have to go to Australia for 10-year-old me's benefit. And I think 10-year-old me would be pretty chuffed to know she got to go to the anarchist bookstore even.
I take the ferry over to Manly and walk my way up to the overlook to watch the sunset on the other side of the bay. A van full of intellectually disabled adults showed up, most of them with Down's Syndrome, but there was an autistic guy in their group. And he was talking to another guy who he had just met and he started to rapid-fire iterate through a list of questions: "Do you like the Beach Boys? Do you like the Beatles? Do you like the Beegees? Do you like... ?" It went on and on, faster than the guy could even respond. The guy can't have a normal conversation so he's trying to calibrate himself socially with someone by finding a common interest.... by naming all options he knows of.
It reminded me of an episode I watched of Love on the Spectrum, where one of the cast members did something similar on a date. I wanted to stop listening but I couldn't--the ADHD part of my brain unfortunately cannot filter out noise... instead I'm forced to process all nearby audio concurrently with equal priority and it drives me insane, causes me to have misophonia as well.
So I'm sitting there wondering if the only thing between me and this guy's rapid-fire questioning is a comorbid intellectual disability. On one hand, I had nothing against any of these people, but on the other, there's a fine line of recognition and being anywhere near it makes me viscerally cringe in fear that other people perceive me similarly to how I perceive these people.
Shortly after my mom died, I had vented to Joel a little about how difficult it was to accommodate her. She didn't understand basic directions. I couldn't trust her to be alone with my son when he was a baby. She just always seemed so lost in herself, so helpless. And I couldn't remember if she had always been that way... I felt like the adult in the parent-child relationship going back as far as I could remember, but she also couldn't handle that either, couldn't handle the fact that I had outpaced her personal limitations and would be, I think without realizing it, cruel to me, bitter about how I was growing up while she was stuck emotionally as a child. And Joel said that he always thought my mom would have done really well in a group home.
And I felt really offended by his remark, but couldn't articulate why to the degree that I wanted, so I just nodded, because some part of it did in fact feel like a satisfying assessment.
But I just can't shake all the what-ifs of who my mom could have been if the world had been better to her. And part of me asks the same about myself. But somehow I'm in Australia on a trip by myself. Somehow I'm surviving in this world that really doesn't seem to like people like myself, somehow I continue to stand in one place when people can't even be bothered to tell me to my face that they wish I would disappear. But sometimes I wonder if by wanting to do and see it all, I'm somehow giving those people exactly what they want too.
