27 (March 2025) pt. 2 in 27 / 27 / 27 / 27 / 27 / 27 / 27 / 27 / 27

Ok. Look. I know I said “tomorrow” I would do a part 2, but I gave myself a little more time to get my head cleared up and organized. I’ll cherrypick some points of interest. Got a lot to say about Texas, though.

Edit: I did type so much about texas that I’ll actually be stopping at just two stories and may drop a pt. 3

…

So there I was, wide awake, watching the dull white light fixtures of the hospital cieling roll by as they wheeled me into the surgical room for my scar revision surgery. My results overall were great, but there were a few places at the edges of the incision that had “dog eared” and subtly puffed out like little nipples and the surgeon was appreciative I’d let him work on it. (That surgeon previously told us he was so thrilled to see transmasc patients because most mastectomies he had to perform were not desired, but when he does it for us, it’s like giving us brand new life, lol. Love him to death. So knowledgable and enthusiastic.)

We enter the big room, where I spread my arms out T-Pose fashion and had them strapped down as I was informed that I’d be fully awake for the revisions. They put a sheet down so that I could not see the operating area (my own body lmao) and began several rounds of localized anesthesea. The nurses chatted with me, since I’d be awake for the whole thing, and the surgeon warned me he’d probably chat me up too. After a moment, they determine I was numb enough to start and he asks “what kind of music do you listen to?” I thought it was just small talk. I chuckled and said just “metal.”

He spins a 180 on his heels at the tableside and shouts out “ALEXA! PLAY METAL!”

…and there I was, being cut into by multiple people while some unpercievable speaker filled the room with Dio, Sabbath, Judas Priest, and more. When they were stitching me back up, they went outside of the numbing zone in the soft tissue under the armpit for several of the last stitches on the right side, and I can’t even put the pain to words. Three things simultaneously exploded into my mind, and all three were harmonious in what they implied I should do:

Thought 1: “Ow. Ok. If you show signs of pain, they may put you through another numbing round over there and that also hurt. You’d also have to pay for it. Maybe just bear down and deal with it.”
Thought 2: “…it would be the badass power bottom thing to do, wouldn’t it? To bear down and take it as you’re being stitched back together? It’s kind of metal as fuck, tbh.”
Thought 3: “What… which Priest song is this… is that fucking Painkiller? Playing NOW??”

I actually can’t confirm if it was Painkiller, lol. I ended up forgetting by the time I was home because I had a huge nausea reaction to the numbing agents and collapsed in the hospital floor waiting on the elevators while mom hovered over me going ‘are you sure you don’t want me to run and get someone!?!?’ and me groaning ‘i’ll be fiiiiiiiiiiiiine....’

10/10 Experience. Weird af and could probably only happen to me.

At one point, the team started talking about the music, saying metal wasn’t a choice they usually got. The surgeon indulged me in a story about the weirdest request he’d gotten, where he was doing breast implants for a woman in her twenties who shyly asked for church music, specifically choral, and, when Alexa started playing a list of hymn he said he’d never even heard of as a Christian, she, while being operated on, begins singing along in a perfect churchified choir voice. He said it was one of the most surreal moments in his life lmfao.

…

So, right after I got diagnosed with Autism, I took my first train ride and coincidentally found out I really, really liked everything about it. I looked at the Amtrak routes and found one between Little Rock and Texarkana, so I booked one round trip ticket set for just me and contacted my Texas family that I would come down if they can get me from the station. Both trips were extremely early or late, so I only got a little visual exposure to the paddocks and towns going by me. I hit a lot of Pokestops on Pokemon Go and sent my friends some really cool postcards on it, and when I wasn’t playing that, I was blastic last year’s Eurovision lineup (sans Hurricane, iykyk) with a special focus on looping Joost Klein’s Europapa.

I thought I had got tickets to stay two days and leave the third, but doing the math again, I realized I’d have to wait one extra day for my departure trip. I realized this after getting a taste of where I’d be staying. I wanted to die. I went back specifically to see my old stomping ground again and take pictures of the old pastures, barns, farm equipment, and my grandma’s and dad’s houses for memory’s sake, but it felt like preparing for a memorial.

My eldest cousin (four years younger than me, so he was almost 30 at the time) is who picked me up, and he took me to my grandma’s house, where I’d spend the four days, and it felt like that house was in its dying throes. Every single surface, especially all fabrics and furniture upholstry, were coated in a thick, sticky wax of dog dander and filth. Thoroughly soiled puppy pads were strewn about every single room, covered in ferret piss and shit. On top of those sensations, the house also smelled like human piss and rotting wood. My grandma “can’t hold her pee anymore,” my cousin said, before saying, a bit disheartened and with a seriousness that made me want to strangle him twice over, “I have to mop a lot…”

He didn’t once mop while I was there. Every time she got up from her chair in front of the television, sliding out from under her massive pile of dogs, she’d grab her walker and drag herself to the only restroom in the house, leaving a trail of urine down the hallway straddled by soaken bare footprints. To use the toilet in this house, you had to stand or sit in fresh piss. To add insult to injury, I was too concerned with taking up a block of time large enough to take the shower since she could need to use the crapper at any given second, so for four days, I sat thorouoghly inundated in piss and sticky wax and dirt and filth without being able to shower. To grind salt into same said wound, on my second day, one of the rat bastard chijuahuas pissed all over my bag with my fresh clothes in it.

…had a R.A.M. moment… randomly accessed memory… I tried to read the book Shogun in the school library once. I stopped at some point beyond page 200 and never picked it up after the author made his third goddamn piss reference. I was hyperfixated on historic Japan at the time and even my autistic zeal could not get me beyond it. It just felt like a fetish at some point. Guess that isn’t exactly random if I was talking about piss. Anyway, if golden showers, watersports, humiliation, or whatever is your fetish, you’re welcome for this segment of the entry.

I spent all four days on a futon escaping reality by journaling and writing in my private prose discord and hoping he remembers that humans need food. Occasionally, he’d have to run into town or beyond for computer repair work and he’d bring back a “Mexican Horchata Mocha Latte” from a local coffee joint that, for a “frou-frou” drink, as my cousin called it, it was the best damn thing I’d ever had. Then again, I was experiencing the whole four days like a movie played in slow motion with a black and white filter, so the latte being the only thing I could see in color? That thing brought me back to life a little. I had at least three of them while I was there.

Another moment that brought me back to life was hanging with my middle cousin (6 years younger than me.) We all went out to eat at a fancy overpriced brewery in Texarkana and I finally, after all these years, got to have my favorite beer again (red irish, it was the first beer I ever got a sip of, when I was like 13 at a Celtic festival in Monroe, Louisianna.) We ran some errands, picked up some booze (bless wet counties) and hung out with my middle cousin and his wife at their place beyond midnight, talking about Grindr mayhem, old music videos, Junji Ito, you name it.

Very little was said about my younger cousin while I was there. He got busted last year for kidnapping a ton of local dogs (even picking them up off of FB Marketplace) and murdering them behind his house. Apparently he’d been doing it long enough for a pile to accumulate in various states of decay, some bones, some bloated. He would choke them to death. I’m just like… saw him becoming problematic from miles away and no one did a damn thing to stop it. Hell, last update I’d gotten, he got caught stealing someone’s trailer (like the kind you hitch to a vehicle, not live in) and stashing it in the pasture across from my grandma’s house. The only reason they didn’t report him was because they were afraid the law could hold them all responsible since it was found on their property. That and the bitch was on heavy hard drugs. So anyway. Yeah wasn’t much of a whisper about him.

I visited with my biological dad twice. The first time, I got him talking about the book I brought with me (we’re into ancient civilizations, and I had gotten my hands on an expensive out of print book on the archeology of Urartu, which I will properly geek out about at some point, don’t worry.) We compared knowledge because, while he’s got a flawless track record about being wrong when it comes to anything related to humans and emotions, I figured he’d be one of the only other people I’d have the chance of running into who even knew those people existed.

The second time, my cousin and I walked through the pasture we used to walk every weekend between my grandma’s house and what used to be mine. The ruts we used to walk along left by my grandpa’s truck were long gone, replaced with weeds, towering cone flowers, dense patches of briar, and escaped dill from my grandma’s old garden that was far taller than either of us. It was actually really stupid. The rattle snakes in that shit must have been insane. Dad had just ran over one in the road on the way to visit me the day before lmao.

Anyway, I walk in to the glorified ruins of my old house. Only one light is on. The floors are stained to shit with spilled black coffee from my dad hobbling between the pot and his recliner. He has both spina bifida and scoliosis; his life saving operations happened in the 60s and his doctors warned him that once he hit his 30s, his body would go downhill fast. It did. I’m bringing it up to say that one of his legs are a lot shorter than the other, very noticable to the blind eye, so that’s why he hobbles badly without shoes, that added with his back being very stiff. He always had this weird smelling opague white rubber block carved into a wedge that he’d put in his work or hunting boots to level his height. Haven’t thought about it in forever.

Anyway, he was practically nude, as usual. Started talking about idiotic shit immediately, like economics and politics, which rolled into talking about my autism diagnosis (e.g. me enduring the constant implication that I’m not autistic because he’s a fucking narcissist and it’d somehow reflect on him.) A green anole popped out from behind the stove and ambled down onto a burner to stop and do push ups at me, so I broke away to get some glamor shots of him (the lights were too dim sadly but I did get pictures of him.) This forced the conversation to what I do for iNaturalist and geeking over having sent wasps through the mail for DNA processing. Once he was forced into more positive conversation, the rest of the talk was smooth sailing. I showed off my surgical scars to both him and my cousin, realizing in mid conversation I hadn’t been back to Tay Haw for over a decade so maybe they haven’t seen them since it happened two years ago or whatever lol.

(OH right, I forgot, that was the third visit… he did pick us up and take us to a restaurant on day 3, where he disgusted me by being the fat gross old man who won’t stop flirting with the poor woman server trying to do her job. Little productive came of that except that I got real food.)

Oh yeah, the only food I got that wasn’t from town was uh… my cousin flexing his “amazing sandwich making skills” but giving me some ham, cheese, a mix of salad toppings, and minced garlic squirted from the bottle as dressing. I… yeah. I had to remind him I had to eat to get those sandwiches, ultimately.

So anyway. The experience was an ugly version of a standard ‘no way back’ movie trope, where the hero goes home only to find they have no home anymore (or that it’s changed or corrupted irreparably.) I complained to my partner over discord the entire time. I could hardly sleep while I was there. I took the pictures I came to take, but they weren’t what I’d came for. The pictures were the portrait and my memories were Dorian fucking Grey. I’d come for a refreshing of childhood memories of my happy places, but I left with photos of the open casket.

I rode the train back smothered in dog piss and ferret shit and some strange alchemical wax all over me that could only be properly bathed off with aqua regia. I threw away my piss soaked socks and shoes without question the moment I got home and then crashed for a proper sleep. That trip fundamentally bothered me so bad that I have hardly acknowledge the existance of my family in TX since, and that was last June or July and lit the fire under my mental state that would finally break it.

I do consider the trip itself a success. I had just started coming to terms with the autism diagnosis and decided that I could handle the trip alone if I adjusted my social strategies with my new knowledge, and that part was a big win. I overheard a long phone conversation that put my budding knowledge of Spanish to the test. I exchanged confusion with a lady over whether we had stopped at Little Rock or not, and I chatted with a roaming hippy type man at the Texarkana stop about getting off down the trails in Arkansas and handled the harrowing experience at the old homestead with more grace and maturity than I feel was merited.

…and that has been way too much talking about Texas. Gave myself extra time to ruminate on the matter and still managed to just brain dump all of it.

It’s getting really late, so I’ll cut it here and leave you with my train song. I saw the official video for the first time on the way to Texarkana.