Good morning from the Blue Ridge mountains,

I lied. Was Punished. I only look at noses. You think I am engaged with you while we are talking but I am not seeing you, I can eliminate the visions of crowds. They disappear. The world is numb. I’m not engaged with you. The you of you. The everyone is a You. Sex work. Will teach you a lot of things about species. I did not think we were going to survive this. I just don’t understand how it works. Works for who. In high school, I strapped my hunting knife to my leg. I told them, do not fuck with me because I will gut you without a thought to it. Those kids backed, way, way down. They no longer even saw me. I was a pain in the ass. No one would deal with me.

I wrote comments. The Gatekeepers hate my guts. I never know what they are going to come at me with. But it’s there. 

If what I did was so life-and-death, no one sued me. They changed their Wikipedia posts on me, a total of nine times. Going to Wikipedia to quote sources is dangerous. Someone said I was probably abusing my students. That was the last straw. I set out to own Wikipedia. They totally backed down.  

My pets were strangled with piano wire. I was attacked. Verbally, not so verbally. I had to fight back and did. First, I bought several guns. Those of us who live here studied how to use them. This is Appalachia. We have guns. We have stills. We have so much racism, in such a little Southern Town. Imaine that. I will protect myself. I will fight back. One way to fight back is go for the throat. That jugular soft vein of tarnish.

The media had so fanned the racism flames. I learned a lot. That doesn’t mean anything. No one has ever — not even once —  asked if there was a flip side. There is. A flip side is usually around that no one wants to hear. I am still blacklisted, and now it has reached the level of the New York Times. At first, the Gatekeepers were mildly amused. Comments were the only thing I had left. I took it on. They hid behind the word civil. I publish photographs, too, and I know that I was wrong. But it would have killed me, and I understand how apologizing works. I gave Esquire an interview, and it was the wrong, wrong thing to do. I apologized and apologized. My apology was characterized by Esquire as We Do Not Believe Him. Wolves. We believe Wikipedia.

Wikipedia was never in my house when he would strip me naked, push me up against the wall, and whip my back with a bull whip. I have scars you would not believe. I put a gun in my mouth every morning and it speaks to me of Wretch. Then, it was Wikipedia’s turn, and now it was my soft jugular, but I managed to tone it down. I had very seriously put into motion the beginning of the darkness, the darkness I had caused, and without my stalwart companion, my dog, I only wanted to crawl into a corner and die. I so wanted that to happen.

I never thought hate made anything better. But now my autism was out of focus, again. I could look at those books I am told I wrote, but I do not remember it. I remember burying my animals. The people behind the scenes had an entire playbook of Bring Him To His Knees. Their baseball bat was the ability to wrangle an entire community of readers who only knew little fragments into a rage. Often, those fragments were served up as evidence that I was a racist just like all the other racists. It made me pause. And think about what I had done. I apologized and apologized. I am sorry I sent work to Esquire. I am sorry I lived on an Indian Reservation for years. I wish I had never gone there. I wish I had just died because it was bearing down on me like a freight train. I still get hate mail by the ton. Media publications went to my old high school and walked around and they didn’t understand that no one there had ever met me, had no idea who I was, but the teachers knew who I was, and they were mortified I might slip through the schoolhouse door. Some of the people who were interviewed in nursing homes where the old folks were really old. And some demented. I’m demented. I had not seen this abusive place for no less than forty years. It might have changed a bit. My teachers were retired or dead. I have not seen that city in so many years and decades, I would not recognize it anymore. People I had never heard of would claim an intimacy that was so bogus, it even shocked me. I have never had sex with any of these people. I DO NOT KNOW THEM.   

That they would regard my family as having cash, then why was I feeding the family. We were dirt poor. I had nothing. We were hungry. I would get abcessed teeth so acutely that my entire head swelled up to the extent my eyes were welded shut, too. We had lived on the fish I caught. No one believes that but it’s true. I was eight. I worked in grocery stores bagging food. I had to pay my way. They were not going to help anymore. I had to pay rent. The folks who went for my throat haven’t stopped for fifteen years. If you cannot form strategies to beat back the monkey grinder, you will not survive this. Some editor called me up, and wanted work. He was publishing a book about the ten most radical individuals in the world. I was at the top of the list. He had a real framework for what he wanted to publish, and how he wanted it, but I cannot follow the orders because they just shut me down.

Why am I bothering, and what does civil mean. No one at the New York Times knew. Cherrypicking is what Gatekeepers do. My writing style is direct. Sometimes too direct. But I can only focus one day at a time. It drives publishers Miss Sugar Nut. The radical piece I was supposed to write, I wrote. I was insane so why not go with it. When a person has nothing to lose, all bets are off. You become unpredictable.

I am unpredictable. I’m sorry about my ability to focus and push the rest of it out into a moon glow blur. I am trying to survive, too. I, too, am driven by ideas. I want to hear them, I seek reciprocity. Sometimes I rock. I tried to put an end to that. But stuff gives way and easily. It’s like pressure brings back so many self-defeating road trips that I want to go one. I want to go on any road trip, and I will write about it because that is what I do. I was even attacked by gay writers who claim I have an effeminate voice, and they hated it. And me. “He speaks like Truman Capote.” I knew Truman Capote, and you Senator, are no Truman Capote, and if his voice made your skin crawl, that’s on you. Not Truman.

Can any of these people understand that when you are autistic, you can be mainly remain totally unaware that there is a problem because there is a problem. I am sorry that my voice offends you.

How do they get away with refusing to deal with disabled writers while at the same time, using disabled people you work with in a PR context. There are people at the New York Times will not even speak to people who are obviously poor. There is no such thing as poor if you can write. Write about being poor. I do. Can you imagine the idea of the rich and the poor fighting to the death. I can. The New York Times awarded me a Most Notable Book. The gay writers who hate me for my voice went Miss Sugar Nut, and they are filled with We Are Going to Get You One Way Or The Other. Let it be the other.

I am disabled. There are a few writers at the New York Times. Who are disabled. The New York Times gave me a rave review of one of my many books.   

I do not do interviews anymore. What is the point when they only want to drag you by the throat around the cornfield. You are not going to stop them. I want my pets back.

There is no hiding place. People in grocery stores can become quite animated. I didn’t mean to hurt your lives. I was Nadijj for ten years. He was a lot of work. I wish I had never created him.

You have your apologies. What More do you want from me. I’m sorry. I said that. You come around here looking for animals to kill to make a point to me. I get it, okay. I do not GET human relationships. I’m sorry.

Esquire made it clear. They did not believe a word of my version about how it all went down. The three book projects I have worked on for ten years are total and utter fiction. Writing nonfiction was a black abyss with no bottom. My critics were not there. The media is the Great Machine, and it will grind you up and How Do They Know for a fact that I have no remorse. I live with remorse. Words were put into my mouth. I write about HIV a lot. That is because I know more about how HIV works than they do. But even public health dropped me. Every doctor in the liberal state of North Carolina threw me out the door. For one thing, I was dying because there was no access to medication unless you could pay for it upfront. This was before the ACA. No insurance. No meds. In those days what writer could afford health insurance. No one would touch us. The meds were out of reach.

One single pill is going to run into a hundred bucks a shot. I walked into a hospital, sat down on the floor, and announced I wasn’t leaving this space until someone talked to me. It was a sit-in of one. I learned pretty quickly a sit in of one would confront various institutions but they did not really care. Just to go get treated, and there was a nine month waiting period, obstacle after obstacle, I did not have nine months. I needed to pay for meds now. Not in nine months. So I did what I had no idea would be taken to the extremes where I was attacked, and how do you kill pets. I hated life. I still do. I don’t want to be here. Homo sapiens do not imbue me with any awareness beyond We Are Going To Get You. Good for you. Stick your gun in my mouth. Then, the day arrived where my neighbor let loose his pit bull. The first bite on my leg brought me to my knees. I could only surround my own dog with my body. The mauling was a lot like publishing. I was rushed to the hospital where I bled all over the floor. With heart disease, pacemaker, now, blood thinners. It means I will still bleed all over your floor. But I look at that in metaphoric terms because it is worth writing about.  

Get in line.

Today, I am wearing my hunting knife strapped to my leg. I am not allowed by the New York Times to submit comments around opinion pieces. I am booted from comments. Just knowing me is hard. I understand that. But I am not a demon. I can’t even make comments. I am organizing a boycott of reading comments. Don’t go there, Then, let’s look at those figures. I lost that privilege. Today, I am still punished. I know nothing about quantum blood. For one thing, I am what the spectrum call a high functioning autistic. I understand exactly what that means. When I am screamed at to get out of publishing, I can go so deep within myself I lose myself. I become mute and incomprehensible. I have no idea where I am. I only look at noses. I will never go inside your eyes to dance around darkness and it gets very dark out there. I was going to bite the war dust because there was no access. I had to do the one thing I knew how to do. Write. But this time, every word would count. I was either going to publish this, or die in the attempt. I am sorry. I did not mean to hurt anyone. We just don’t have that much time on this earth. I only look at noses.

Tim Barrus