The Return To Innocence

For those who have been messaging me asking to share my words along with the "I Will Not Keep Calm" meme, the answer is yes, you may share. In fact, to make it easier, I'll make everything shareable as one.
***

EXACTLY.

(I'm not going to back down when you tell me that autistics are cursed and suffering. I am not going to back down when you tell me that people like me must be experimented on just to see if we feel pain. I'm not going to back down when you tell me I don't have a right to speak up about my needs as an actual autistic, that your right as "someone who works with autistic peoples/a parent of autistic kids" means you know better about my brain than I do. I'm not going to back down when you blatantly announce that people like me should not exist, that our very selves should be eradicated just because you don't like how our brain works to the point where you will falsify data, lie socially, commit fraud, spread toxic propaganda, and act like you know better than me concerning my personal interests. I will not keep calm. I will not be nice. I will not tone done my anger. Until you are able to accept autism as a divergence and not a disease, I will not stop poking and aggravating and annoying you. I've had some really good teachers. I have a chosen brother who is a self-proclaimed asshole with a heart of gold, who has shown me what it is like to explode rhetoric properly, and I know how to choose a battle to fight using proper logic, reason, fact, and science. And there are many people behind me. Do you know how many autistic adults are out there? You don't. Because you don't care about the ones who can and will speak up and speak out. And I am going to help change that.)

(Addition: Because I have cerebral palsy, I will add that other disabilities, such as other neurodevelopmental disabilities, could be included. I, personally, am proud to have cerebral palsy as a part of me. Same with autism. If you want to remove my disabilities, you want to remove me. And I like me. )



Yeah, life. It does things as you get older.

"everyone can't be right
but everyone will decide

i'm not afraid of the price i pay
i won't lie down as you walk away"



Shh. I'm being sneaky!

Yup, it still kills me every time.
*hits replay*



http://meowaum.com/1378-very-cute-kitten-grooming-by-herself/

Oh my gods, I have watched this four times and I will watch it again and again because awesome. They are so adorable. I think most of this must have been unscripted, especially Quinto laughing at Nimoy acting out Spock's radiation death scene.
The nerve pinch bit might be my favorite.
Also, Leonard Nimoy singing his old pre-Trek Bilbo Baggins song? AWWW.



My ex-Marine friend A. owns a custom Audi named Amy, and she really is a nifty car. On our first outing, after I told A. that high speeds freak me out, we got on a highway and he told me to close my eyes and guess how fast we were going. I guessed sixty. He told me to look. We were going ninety. I hadn't even felt a thing. Amy is custom-made for him because he is paralyzed in his left arm and shoulder, so he needs computerized lots of things, and Audi is his favorite car, and he has a trust fund and help from the military and disability insurance and such, since his car is considered specifically to help his disabilities. I find that fascinating. But yeah, Audi cars are really smooth.

Bright eyed, bushy haired, bright colors, babbling due to painkillers and happy muscle relaxants and healing gemstones and all that weird pseudoscience silliness that I believe in despite my atheist agnostic upbringing.

I've been pagan since I was a teenager, so hah. Polyagnostic polytheist pantheist eclectic witch who will believe even if proven completely wrong. Even when my atheist skeptic parents insist that it's just my brain and that psychic powers don't exist, I will agree because that is true, too. There are so many truths out there. I love quantum everything.
See, I follow the Discworld concept: Even if a deity manifests in front of be and insists it is a great god, I will tell it "That's nice. Just because you exist doesn't mean I believe in you. I believe in my Higher Brain smushed with my Subconscious, which you possibly came from. But since you are here, let's party anyway. Red wine?"

I also follow the concept laid out by Neil Gaiman in "American Gods." I firmly believe that Man created God, and the Universe created both Man and God, and all gods everywhere sprang fully formed from Man's brain because Man's brain is more complex and extreme than we can ever conceive. The universe is bigger than everything. And we are all made of bits of the universe, and if we create a belief system with gods and spirits and entities, the cosmic consciousness of the Universe will go, "Huh, they really want this stuff, don't they? Well, shit, why not?" And the bits of our brains connected to the Universe will make our gods and entities real to those of us who truly want and desire the realities of those gods and entities. Like, our Higher Brains and our Subconscious Brains smash together to create a whole knew kind of brainpower, with psychic knowledge and spiritual knowledge and such.

So. I believe that humans can be psychic. I have had psychic experiences myself.
But I am actually skeptical whenever someone says they can easily predict the future. Time is always moving, see. The future is extremely fluid and rather non-Newtonian, simultaneously. No one person can consistently know the exact future without fail, because every possible future is slippery and plastic (not the polymer plastic, the physics type of plasticity: "In physics and materials science, plasticity describes the deformation of a material undergoing non-reversible changes of shape in response to applied forces. For example, a solid piece of metal being bent or pounded into a new shape displays plasticity as permanent changes occur within the material itself. In engineering, the transition from elastic behavior to plastic behavior is called yield.").
So, precognitives can see several futures at once, but it's all flexible. Like, predicting lottery numbers would be rather implausible. Knowing a precise fixed group of numbers at an exact time in a specific future is really hard to nail down. That's why the classic skeptic question "Well, why haven't any psychics won a big lottery?" is essentially technically correct. It's hard to nail down such a small, specific thing. And then there is seeing a changeable future: Seeing bits of a future that can be prevented or altered. Is that actually predicting the future? Which future is it predicting if the predicted future was changed? I do believe in forms of precognition. It's just that precognition in general is so hard to pin down all the time.
See how complex it all is? It's like quantum physics. Psionics really is no different from deep quantum physics. Can we truly prove what we cannot see or measure? I completely believe in clairvoyance, telepathy, retrocognition, psychometry, communication with the dead, and other such powers. It's all quantum, and the human brain is quantum and insanely complicated.

And I have also always believed in All The Gods, so whenever someone asks me if I believe in God, I always ask "Which one?" which leads to confusion and people thinking I'm, like, evil or something and must be saved or whatever that means. *shrug* I don't care. I like what I like and I don't want to push it on anyone because my faith is mine and your faith is yours.

I just ask that you please please do not attempt to convert me to Christianity, because nope nope nope. I am fully Pagan, as I have said. But I am also Jewish on my mother's side, which makes me fully Jewish*... and I know that Christianity is a Jewish heresay: Yeshua (that Jesus guy) was just a highly intelligent Jewish man who explored various belief systems, including paganism and Buddhism and Hinduism and such, and then returned to talk about it all, since he was never part god, he was just a very good human orator with mild psychic abilities.
*(I should add that my heritage is also Russian/Romanian/Hungarian on Mom's side, with Sicilian/Greek on Dad's side. So I would say that I'm Jewish with Sicilian, Greek, Russian, Romanian, and Hungarian heritage. I choose to have no part in the Jewish religion or culture, but I have deep respect for said culture.)

So, no. I am who I am and if you leave me alone I will not roll my eyes and facepalm at you. I love you all, I always will... but I can love everyone without being bothered by proselytizing. Love is love is love is love. There is no wrong or right, there is only love. Also books. Books are love. Stories create us the way we create stories.

Well, then.
Spears raised to the sky, screaming hard enough for the gods to hear my battle cry.
Covered in blood and dark and pain and scars and insanity. Teeth and talons bared, skin flayed just enough to show how I can still stand and fight. Do not back down. Stand up until my body collapses on its own. Find a safe place to heal and rest. Gear up again and rush out again. Over and over, on and on, for the rest of my life, this will never end. Spears and swords and armor and power and intensity.
I am not strong. I just want to live.
This is not about bravery or inspiration. This is not about using my disabilities to show or prove anything to anyone.
This is about my life. This about my battles. This is about my fellow warriors, who I will support until I fall, and if I fall I will crawl to throw the final spear.
I just want to live. I don't care what is normal or crazy. I just want myself back. It will take the rest of this life and beyond, but I am prepared.
My monsters will always be there to damage me. I will always be there to damage my monsters. Welcome to life.
I will stand. I will fight. I will hurt. I will heal. I will crawl. I will return. I will fight on and on because it is all I am. I will fight.
I will stand up.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWqmRGnqYpw

The Spear Theory.
(http://brightrosefox.livejournal.com/1520669.html)

Because hells yes.

So, I have been a fan of Tangerine Dream since I was very young. I don't remember when I first started listening to their music, but I remember being pleasantly surprised to hear them during the film "Firestarter" (I loved the book and was amused by the movie). I watched it as a preteen and then as a teenager, and I was convinced that Drew Barrymore would go on to do great things (I was right, yay) and that shooting fire with your brain while also moving everything with your brain was one of the best superpowers ever. In fact, the book and movie helped awaken my love for the idea of paranormal powers in humans.

When I was 18, in 1997, I found a cassette tape (you remember those, right?) of The Dream Mixes One. This instantly became my favorite album out of the one hundred plus albums that the group had put out throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s (they started in 1967 and they're still at it, with at least a thousand songs). I instantly fell in love with the songs "Little Blond In The Park Of Attractions" and "Change Of The Gods" because of the fantastic danceability and the way both songs blew my writerbrain wide open so words would spill out and my levels of serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and endorphins would skyrocket and go dancing and it was marvelous.

After all the CDs came out, I bought as many as I could from secondhand shops, because when I was in my late teens and very early twenties, there weren't very many internet stores; Ebay, Amazon, and SSL encryption were just babies. I personally had Hotmail and AIM and that was all (which helped me keep my long distance with Adam as close as possible beyond phone calls). Yahoo had only been out for a scant few years, and I only used for backup email. Google barely existed and and Wikipedia didn't happen until after I graduated college. We even did all our studying with, like, real books and floppy disks video tapes and stuff. Ah, the late 1990s, how little we had.

Anyway. "The Dream Mixes One" was one of the dozens of CDs I bought and listened to while writing my short stories for my college writing courses, since my major was Creative Writing and I had to be Creative. The songs on that album helped me craft what would become the dark futuristic supernatural fantasy novel that I'm still working on.
So, guess what I found on YouTube after looking up Tangerine Dream's gorgeous rendition of the William Blake's "Tyger Tyger" poem?



This is ALL THE SONGS.

I. Am. So. Ecstatically. Happy. I just listened to the whole album and I want to fly. Those neurotransmitters are now spinning and dancing and raving like dancing ravers at a dance rave. I think I can kill this migraine I'm having just by laughing at it, I swear. I'm going to go WRITE. Because I am made of WORDS.

Granted, I am still in pain all over, but it's okay. Because music will help soothe it all.

Music really can heal. It just has to be the right music for you, the music you love, the music that you personally cherish. This is mine.

Whenever I'm starting a new scene, a new chapter, or a new story, I shall play this.

These are the songs that I dance to when I must dance away my pain or be carried away screaming. I cannot explain why these pieces affect me the way they do. But to me, these pieces of music help me break free when I am trapped, burning, frozen, flayed, tortured, locked, electrocuted, and drowned by my own central nervous system, musculoskeletal system, and neuromuscular system.
So, yeah. That.
So, I dance, even if it's only in my head.