i want to take a moment to tell you a bit about my good friend Johnny. Johnny’s a little hard to describe. Maybe if i tell you a story about him, you’ll understand.
Johnny, Djane, Slacks, and i drove over a cliff one day. i figger it wouldn’t have happened if Johnny wasn’t sitting in the passenger seat. See, the shotgun up front in a 4×4 on a dodgy road has a job to do. That job is to be the spotter, the swamper, the extra eyes, ears, and hands of the driver. In this case, the driver was Slacks, and the 4×4 in question was none other than Slack’s big black pantload Trogdor. Of course, Johnny wasn’t watching the road when we drove off the cliff.
Now, i’ve often said that we wouldn’t have driven off that there cliff if i was up front m’self, filling my usual spotter role. Djane counters that we probably wouldn’t have made it out in one piece if Johnny wasn’t up front there to provide his usual luck/unluck effect.
Johnny was filming something on the horizon, the mountain we were driving out west to climb. Johnny usually has some sort of camera glued to him, be it film or video. He just told me today that he’d found some sort of chest-harness to hold his camera so he can take pictures while biking/climbing/rally-racing/cliff-jumping/etc. hands-free. Of course, he filming when we went over the cliff.
We now have some great “impending doom” footage. My favourite shot is of the rocky creek-bottom a couple hundred feet below us, looking out the passenger-side window… framed by Johnny’s feet standing on the inside of the door. Oh yeah, that one’s worth a chuckle.
Then there’s the classic Esler Fall story. Thinking he was on belay (some miscommunication there), Johnny backed off a clifftop after a sportclimb to the top. Only slightly impeded by the drag of the rope, he fell about 50 feet to the ground. He landed on his feet, compressing himself so fully that he bounced his head off his own knee and dented the dirt with it. The spot he landed on is the only patch of actual dirt at the bottom of that climb, smack between a pointy rock and a jagged stump. I couldn’t have happened to anyone else, but then again, nobody else would have survived it. Luck/unluck again.
There’s another story from this summer, one i’m afraid to ask him about; i think the details might turn my stomach. He rapped down a couple pitches of poorly-bolted backcountry limestone with his girlfriend. Then they ran out of anchors. And rope. Johnny pulled it together and got his girlfriend off the rock, then hung in his harness on a sling for something like 66 hours before help came. Just another day in the woods. Frankly, i’m surprised he doesn’t have pictures from his time hanging up there.
Johnny is a hell of a guy, and a hell of a photographer. He’s back to South America this winter to finish his epic Pan-American journey to Cape Horn on his vintage BMW motorcycle.
If you already know Johnny, please feel free to “comment” and post a story of your own.
You are currently browsing the daily archive for October 22, 2004.
oh happy day. i’m leaving on a jetplane. the full moon is coming up soon. it’s not sunny, but it’s bright.
my friend is in pain today. i want to help her out, i do, but she doesn’t want anyone’s help.
i feel like calling, but i won’t. there’s little miscellaneousbirds in the trees shaking their heads at me.
when i’m sympathetic for your pain, dear heart, it’s not to validate your weaknesses.
it’s okay to be lonely. you’re strong, but you’re only human.
i celebrate your humanity.
you can tell me to fuck off ’cause i wrote this, but i’ll still care about you.
doesn’t that just piss you off?
ah well.
one day i saw my friend m.m. walking down the street ‘how are you’ i asked and she said ‘oh i’m very depressed and miserable this week’ and i said ‘oh i’m sorry to hear that’ and she said ‘no it’s okay it’s just a proccess i’m going through i’m really enjoying it and learning all sorts of stuff about myself’ and then we walked a bit and she was depressed and smiling while i was worried and not smiling.
the sun is behind the clouds. soon they’ll be gone.
i have so much respect for great portrait photographers. in light of my looking for “true faces”, here’s some more recent portraiture.
i’ve seldom heard Asperger’s called a “disability”. A friend of mine recently called it that (i’m sure she meant no insult), but i prefer different terms. i’ve been searching for an appropriate anaology to explain it both to myself and to others, and i think i have found it. Now, the terms i’m trying to use might seem out of place, but i think it makes sense well enough. At least, it seems to make sense to me.
(more…)
i’ve been diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. i’m finding new ways to explain it as i learn about and more fully understand what this ultimately means for me. Asperger’s is a pervasive neurological disorder, placed within the Autistic spectrum. It’s seldom diagnosed in adults, and very difficult to treat. In adult “Aspies”, neurodevelopment has usually already progressed to steady state. In effect, the AS is hardwired into the brain.
The anology i’ve come to see is one of hardware and software. i tend to think of the brain as being hardware, and thge mind as being software. Think of two different computers. We may even be as blunt as calling them Macs and PC’s; it’s not really important. Still, we have to different pieces of hardware, running different operating systems.
Onto these two computers we can load software, identical in function, but tailored to the computer they’ve been loaded onto. Say, something like MSWord. At the end of the day, all the word processing get s done on either machine in similar fashion, and the printed results are usually indistinguishable. Still, over time, operational differences become painfully apparent. If you have the only Mac in an all-PC environment, some things will become difficult for you, no matter how accomodating the Mac to cross-platform applications.
The Aspie brain is kinda like that. We’ve all been subtly trained since birth to arrive at certain conclusions in the face of certain stimuli. The thoughts and perceptions (the software) needed for this have been taught to all of us by a process socialization, implicit or otherwise. For nuerotypical persons, the software “fits” the hardware. For people with forms of autism, the software does not. There is no “flaw” to the brain, no more than a Mac is “flawed”; it is simply different. Being different, it requires different software to produce predictably “correct” results. In the meantime, a human mind in an Aspie brain seems to work in starts and fits, coming to conclusions that seem “correct”, “incorrect”, or “freakin’ unelievable!”. Speaking for myself, i sometimes find it very hard to tell the difference. Often, this running of neurotypical “software” on neuroexceptional “hardware” produces results nearly indistinguishable from “normal”. At other times, it is quite beyond any observer to understand why i’m acting or speaking the way i am.
Sometimes i feel very out of control, and hate what i am. i get extremely frustrated trying to produce acceptable “correct” responses to social stimuli. In my youth, i had the same feelings, the same questions, but no answers. Now i have answers, but no solutions.
Asperger’s is more treatable in children, especially if diagnosed early on. Young Aspies can be “programmed” with proper “hardware specific software”. Their perceptions and thoughts are not so much changed, as they are trained to use their brains to repeatedly come to the “correct” answers. This is possible because Asperger’s is a neurodevelopmental disorder; in children, the neurological connections are fluid in their developing stages, and can be trained into certain pathways. By the time most Aspie adults are diagnosed, the pathways have been set. In many ways, adult Aspies may be to used to their own brains to change.
That still doesn’t mean that the Mac can’t hold it’s own in the PC world. Some would argue that it can do alot of things even better…
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