My son, Trent, has the autism. Or more specifically he falls under PDD-NOS, which stands for Pervasive Developmental Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified. I say he has the autism and not that he is autistic because it is something you have, not something you are. There is no need to be defined as a person by it. He is what they call "high functioning", meaning he goes to regular classes at his high school with only a few minor adjustments such as having a longer time to write class tests. He also has a learning disability called dysgraphia which makes it difficult to put his thoughts down on paper with writing, so he has a laptop with a very cool voice-to-text program on it. This way, he can simply tell the computer what he wants to say and it writes it all out for him. He has friends, but often misses social cues (but hey, don't we all sometimes?), and doesn't like to be out in public for long periods of time.
He has this unique way of thinking that tends to make me think as well. This was one of our conversations late last year when he texted me from school:
Trent: If I ate myself would I become twice as big or disappear completely
Me: Good question. you wouldn't become twice as big unless there was another one of you. You wouldn't disappear completely because you'd die half way through eating yourself, but then if you survived it, you'd have to shit yourself out
Trent: But I wouldn't disappear so there would be nothing left but my mouth because my mouth can't eat itself
Me: Right
Trent: But then there would still be the parts that I ate so I don't really know
Me: You'd die of blood loss before it was just your mouth left
Trent: But if I didn't die
Me: True. You can't eat your own mouth. You can't double in size though because it's still the same amount of mass. It won't double.
Me: Is this for class?
Trent: So nothing would really happen
Trent: No I was just curious
Me: I love the way your mind thinks
Trent: Thank you
Yes, that's right, I thought there had to be an actual reason for his line of questioning but he was just wondering. These are some of the other things he says to me:
-If I punched myself and it hurts, am I too weak or too strong?
-If you think about it, birthdays are like a satanic ritual. Think of it this way, a small gathering of people huddled around an object that is on fire (the cake), chanting ritualistically a repetitive song in unison (happy birthday) until the fire is blown out and the knife is stabbed into the object
-Fingers are weird, they are like your arm splitting off into smaller arms
-What if when you put on a shirt your belly button screams because it's afraid of the dark
-I wonder if the Romans called their buddies "Romies" instead of Homies
-I was thinking about when I played with plastic dinosaurs as a kid and I realized that plastic is made from oil which is made from dinosaurs from millions of years ago. So technically the plastic dinosaurs are made from real dinosaurs
-What if pop cans are alive and when you take one from the pack and open it, you're snapping its neck and drinking its blood in front of its family?
-Every book you have ever read is just a different combination of 26 letters
-How do your eyebrows know when to stop growing?
-In the Pixar intro who do we just ignore that the lamp murdered the "I" and then looks at us as if he was going to say "You'd better not say a f*cking thing or you're next"?
And my personal favourites:
-What if the only reason we can't walk through mirrors is because our reflection is blocking us?
-What if oxygen was like a drug and everything you ever saw is a hallucination?
-What if we are all characters in a book and when we forget what we were about to say, it was the Author backspacing
I'm not sure if it is the fact that I'm a grown up, or the fact that he has the autism, but I sure wish I thought the unique way he does more often!
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