I Should Begin With Synopsis. But No.

We know this: America seems to want our death. I have always lived with that, and it is not dissimilar to living with nuclear inevitability. I am autistic. A high functioning autistic. I will not tolerate any Homo sapiens with their various and often wild takes on disability. I will not tolerate any of the autism entourage explaining to me what living with autism means. I already know the rhetoric. The rhetoric itself is a placebo. What you are afraid of is that you might get the disease. And you might. It’s not a germ. It’s not a virus. It was just a few years ago we learned there was something going on with Adult-Onset-Autism. You do not just come down with the disease go boom. You are genetically disposed. I do not like and I do not trust other human beings. I know who you are, and I know what you are. You don’t know what to do with me. The game I am compelled to play in is the one where I am supposed to look into your metaphorical eyes. I am looking at your shoulder. All I see are shoulders. In order to read, I have to be in a completely empty room. I cannot work by a window. I’m different. The New York Times despises me and my work. I am a radical. There is no place at the table for me. I will do my best to be civil here. The New York Times bans me on an average of once every four days. For the past year. Can anyone you know create context and make it speak in — how many pages, and is it acceptable. I do twenty three pages in thirty minutes and all of it — every word — is acceptable even if the vaunted New York Times refuses to cop to the fact, that there are people it just doesn’t like. I am the committee’s chairperson. I have been knocking on their door for over thirty years, a door that has been arrogantly smashed into my face, how many hundreds of times. This is all I am allowed. Comments at the New York Times are the lowest of the corporate low. The New York Times puts comments and marketing into the same bed. Because no one else can be considered a journalist. Comments are about to disappear (ask your managing editor). Risk analysis (all of them) teams point to comments as an indicator of financial ruin. How many people are employed by the publication to act as comment moderators. Why are they sacrosanct. They pass real judgements on us and our work if we have real opinions that are hardly affected by ideas of etiquette. You may not think comments are heavy lifting. Because you are not allowed to see or listen to heavy lifting. You are the reader. You don’t just decide to leave a surly comment. The ones I read are thoughtful. But Free Speech is more than surliness. It implies a structure for the reality of free speech, even if that speech costs and costs. That is the real price we pay. Its value is to be found in the extent to which you are listening. The AARP’s newsletter subscription list has less numbers of elderly readers than the New York Times. Ask them. Bring them lunch. Liberalism will will regard with distaste assigned placements where your work goes to expire. But this liaison is ephemeral. Conservatives will not even recognize your work exists. They do not read comments, and if they say they do, they’re employing cute falsehoods we dare not label prophetic. Rape isn’t rape. It is conversation. Death is not death. It’s transition and you are not allowed to vote. No one listens to the dead. At the New York Times, no one listens at all. We are read to. Perhaps this is how any version of journalism — to journal or not to journal suggests a verb does not mean an adjective — works and competes and develops it own voice as to cause us to simply look around. There are no radical voices at the New York Times. They would rather give us a more centralized focus than acknowledge that the margins are filled with people who think, too. The FAR right. The FAR left. Moderated by you guyz. Not moderators. Writers. As moderators versus your handy choice of  moderators who are entrusted with gatekeeping, I strongly suggest that perhaps gatekeeping is the job of the bar bouncer who oversees everyone who gets to sit at the table of the New York Times. I have learned in this process, I am irrelevant. I have learned that my work is irrelevant. I have learned to never knock on your door because it is self-defeating. The New York Times has called me unreachable in print. This is silly slander because I am quite reachable. You might have to work at it. But how can you “work at it” when you are only allowed a dialogue limited to yourselves. I am forced to live in spectrums. I don’t read body language because I can’t. I don’t have humility. What is it. I live at the top of a mountain in Appalachia so I don’t have to see people who spit on my life with impunity. You all know it’s about competition. The competition of ideas. But you have a timid take on that. Your voices are center stage. Our voices applaud or they don’t. Your moderators are all (yes, all) of the opinion that the reader is coincidental. Kinda the enemy. The patriarchy is beneath contempt. The sway is actually to the right. Elon Musk or no Elon Musk. This will now be the era of comment moderation. This also will be the era of no comment moderation. But why is moderation considered to be so unimportant. It’s editorial. Your editors will scream that this is not so. It is so. Editorial has a relationship with the voices who read your stuff. I do like those pictures. They want to articulate that black and white exists. Good and not so good. This is a conflicted theory. Because readers are going to read. Anyway. Your job is to keep the bad ideas (according to who) out. No, no, no, they tell me. Okay, guyz. Yes. Yes. Yes. The intransigent attitude that moderators (I pity them) are instilled with, conflates the enemy with readership. I read every word — including — so, and, but, the, is, pop culture. Pop anger, pop bias, pop the bubble. Does this make me dangerous. Yes. Why. Because no one listens. We must not be validated.

But the center cannot hold.