THE CRASH

19.07.04


I would like to confess my inability to find my bearings. One and a half year ago I had a really bad car crash precisely because I was lost. I was heading to Penteli and found myself in Gerakas, among old ladies, Albanians and Rottweilers. I didn’t know where I was and there was nobody out there to say a word. I was panic-stricken, because, apart from other things, it was getting dark and my parents had no idea of my intention to go far (I was actually scared of mom. She can make me regret even for my breath. If she reads this, she will laugh. She thinks I don’t give a damn about her because I dare to retaliate against her.).

Anyway, I was so panic-stricken, as I said, that I went back without actually looking back and that’s how I crashed the front of some other old car. (The guy who owned the car appeared in nanoseconds. I’m not exaggerating.)
He says: ‘Get out of the car’.
I am like: ‘No I don’t’.

Get out/No I don’t, Get out/No I don’t, Get out/No I don’t, And may I know why?/Because I am disabled./Oh, all right then, where is your licence and the rest? In the little drawer. I did what I had to do. Try to find them yourself (my nails had turned blue out of my fear). Instead of swearing at me, this guy started giving me consolation. So I took up the courage and asked: ‘Do you happen to know where the area of Vrilissia is?’.

In the end, my mother reacted normally. She told me: ‘If every time you lose yourself you crash someone’s car in order to find your way here, we’re dead!’. I relate this inability of mine to my poor spelling. I keep forgetting places and words I’ve seen a thousand times. Sophocles says that this happens to everybody who has cerebral palsy. I don’t know what to believe. I’m not used to blaming the ‘problem’ for everything. (Isn’t it somewhat ingenuous to name your disability a ‘problem’? Consequently, you are not defined as a person with a disability but as a person who is problematic, since you admit that you carry a problem, right?).


LABELS-LABELS (Leave the labels and get the girlies)

Good morning,

Oh Dada you make it hard for me so early in the morning. It doesn’t matter. I am really glad that you referred to the issue of the label and thus revealed that even me, a person who detests every sort of discrimination, can talk nonsense about people who I like (like you). Can I tell you what labels are? In my opinion, labels are inventions of those who comprise the majority or are beyond others or think that they do comprise the majority and also are beyond those who (allegedly) are the few and the weak or those whose part as regards the evolution of things is smaller anyway.

In fact, labels are ‘placed’ to remind some people that they are far from the main pattern of existing and behaving and therefore they have to feel subordinate to those who fulfil the standards of fully representing the human tribe (But what am I writing at the crack of dawn? Hopefully some people will desist from accusing me of my literary writing. I can write about almost anything.). On the other hand, when there are people who don’t care about labels, nothing from everything mentioned above is valid (is the spelling correct here? I am really poor at spelling and I’m not using a dictionary right now). But, since some of the people who hate labels might label others without really thinking about it (like I did in Dada’s case), everything is possible and expected to a certain degree.