crows use tools and like to slide down snowy hills. today we saw a goose with a hurt foot who was kept safe by his flock - before taking off, they waited for him to catch up. there are colors only butterflies see. reindeer are matriarchical. cows have best friends and 4 stomachs and like jazz music. i watched a video recently of an octopus making himself a door out of a coconut shell.
i am a little soft, okay. but sometimes i can't talk either. the world is like fractal light to me, and passes through my skin in tendrils. i feel certain small things like a catapult; i skirt around the big things and somehow arrive in crisis without ever realizing i'm in pain.
in 5th grade we read The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-time, which is about a young autistic boy. it is how they introduced us to empathy about neurotypes, which was well-timed: around 10 years old was when i started having my life fully ruined by symptoms. people started noticing.
i wonder if birds can tell if another bird is odd. like the phrase odd duck. i have to believe that all odd ducks are still very much loved by the other normal ducks. i have to believe that, or i will cry.
i remember my 5th grade teacher holding the curious incident up, dazzled by the language written by someone who is neurotypical. my teacher said: "sometimes i want to cut open their mind to know exactly how autistics are thinking. it's just so different! they must see the world so strangely!" later, at 22, in my education classes, we were taught to say a person with autism or a person on the spectrum or neurodivergent. i actually personally kind of like person-first language - it implies the other person is trying to protect me from myself. i know they had to teach themselves that pattern of speech, is all, and it shows they're at least trying. and i was a person first, even if i wasn't good at it.
plants learn information. they must encode data somehow, but where would they store it? when you cut open a sapling, you cannot find the how they think - if they "think" at all. they learn, but do not think. i want to paint that process - i think it would be mostly purple and blue.
the book was not about me, it was about a young boy. his life was patterned into a different set of categories. he did not cry about the tag on his shirt. i remember reading it and saying to myself: i am wrong, and broken, but it isn't in this way. something else is wrong with me instead. later, in that same person-first education class, my teacher would bring up the curious incident and mention that it is now widely panned as being inaccurate and stereotypical. she frowned and said we might not know how a person with autism thinks, but it is unlikely to be expressed in that way. this book was written with the best intentions by a special-ed teacher, but there's some debate as to if somebody who was on the spectrum would be even able to write something like this.
we might not understand it, but crows and ravens have developed their own language. this is also true of whales, dolphins, and many other species. i do not know how a crow thinks, but we do know they can problem solve. (is "thinking" equal to "problem solving"? or is "thinking" data processing? data management?) i do not know how my dog thinks, either, but we "talk" all the same - i know what he is asking for, even if he only asks once.
i am not a dolphin or reindeer or a dog in the nighttime, but i am an odd duck. in the ugly duckling, she grows up and comes home and is beautiful and finds her soulmate. all that ugliness she experienced lives in downy feathers inside of her, staining everything a muted grey. she is beautiful eventually, though, so she is loved. they do not want to cut her open to see how she thinks.
a while ago i got into an argument with a classmate about that weird sia music video about autism. my classmate said she thought it was good to raise awareness. i told her they should have just hired someone else to do it. she said it's not fair to an autistic person to expect them to be able to handle that kind of a thing.
today i saw a goose, and he was limping. i want to be loved like a flock loves a wounded creature: the phrase taken under a wing. which is to say i have always known i am not normal. desperate, mewling - i want to be loved beyond words.
loved beyond thinking.
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as our resident Casey expert i wonder what do you think would have happened if marc and casey competed against each other? since casey retiring is so important for marc coming into motogp im always thinking abt the what ifs...
my initial instinct with this hypothetical is always 'that sounds horrible', though I do have more thoughts and opinions about it than that! marc obviously would have loved the chance to race casey, and casey has even been one of his picks of 'guys he would've liked to be teammates with' before, so, you know, clearly something there - and he does very much respect casey as a rider. I think it's quite likely that by the time marc entered the premier class, casey had already developed... I don't know if wariness is going too far, but maybe a little bit of unease or caution where marc was concerned. marc already very much had a reputation based on his 125/moto2 track record, and some of these incidents were controversial enough that the motogp riders commented on them. so take the phillip island 2011 incident where marc rode into the back of another rider:
the valentino quote serves as a bit of a benchmark here, given he was generally pretty pro-marc. yes, casey's phrasing is perhaps a little harsher, but unsurprisingly none of the riders were big fans of marc's behaviour in that particular incident
on the other hand, it's not like casey never sided with marc. take catalunya 2012, where marc was slapped with a controversial post-race penalty:
yes, casey's main complaint was about inconsistent stewarding - but still, he believed marc had been unfairly treated here. feels like these incidents were some of the only things casey and valentino actually agreed on in those years, so that's nice
that being said, it's hard to see how casey wouldn't have his issues with marc and marc's whole approach to racing. I did include some thoughts on the teammate question here, but mainly I'm going to pilfer the relevant autobiography passage:
"if a rider doesn't care about his own safety then it stands to reason he doesn't care about anybody else's either"... there's nobody really who embodies the 'doesn't care about his own safety' maxim better than marc. he was the young rider desperate to win, and I can't imagine casey would have enjoyed actually racing him much. casey mostly didn't enjoy racing valentino, after all, who is a generally a lot more selective with his aggression than marc is (though casey did have to experience some of the worst valentino had to offer in that regard). casey talked in his autobiography about getting a sense when he just wasn't really able to trust another rider on the track, how much it bothered him - and that exact lack of respect is something that's been pretty closely associated with marc. that doesn't mean he would immediately declare marc his enemy... he'd just want marc to change, to learn, to grow up, to start treating his competitors with a little more respect. the way casey talks about young riders, there is a sense in which he has more time for them than he does for valentino - whose lack of respect casey views as more integral to who he is as a rider. valentino isn't a bully on track due to the exuberance of youth, he's a bully on track when he thinks he can use it as a tactic of intimidation. then again, marc by this measure is worse... and I think very quickly casey would have grown pretty disenchanted with how marc approaches all his wheel-to-wheel racing, especially when it becomes more and more clear marc does not feel particularly inclined to change
it's always important to remember how recent the trauma of losing simoncelli was for the whole sport, and it coloured both dani and jorge's wariness of marc... but also (in my opinion anyway) their restraint in how they dealt with him. how they tried to stop themselves from actually making an enemy out of him, in part because they'd just had an experience of harshly criticising a rider for a whole year and then having to process his death. both dani and jorge actually had more public and more serious disagreements with simoncelli than casey did, but I reckon there would have been an element of that restraint with casey too... on the other hand, his experiences with marc would have left him feeling even more alienated from the sport than he already was - at times frustrated (like jorge was) less with marc directly but more with the regulatory bodies for not holding marc back, for not giving him a race ban or whatever to teach him a lesson. that being said, marc's shamelessness vs casey's stubbornness means that if they had direct on-track encounters and casey didn't like marc's post-race response... well, I certainly think that'd end up being a pretty tense situation, even if it falls short of active hostilities
worth including irl!casey's take on marc in 2013:
which, you know. it's not just that marc's a hard racer - casey is accusing marc of deliberately wanting to make the defeats extra painful for his opponents, of wanting to not just beat but humiliate them. anyone else that reminds you of? someone who is as motivated in securing his psychological victories as his actual ones? perhaps someone who has a bit of a history himself with casey?
let's bring in valentino. it's not that casey would really have begrudged marc his friendship with valentino, and he generally kept his hatred of valentino quite 'clean' in that he wasn't conducting any proxy wars or anything (for instance, I don't get the sense the vale/sic friendship ever affected his view of simoncelli... though I have very little to go on here either way). also, if nothing else in this timeline changes, we're assuming valentino in 2013 is fairly clearly the... fifth? best rider? kinda depends where dani would have landed I suppose (casey's retirement announcement did save honda from a bit of a headache)... but anyway what this means is that valentino probably wouldn't initially have been much of a competitive threat to casey. mostly he would have been consigned to the sidelines
that being said, I doubt casey would have massively enjoyed the whole laguna seca saga. unfortunately, we don't even really know what real life casey's stance on the copycat move situation was... though if I had to guess, in this timeline I'd say his position would've been, a) marc could and should have carried out that overtake two corners later, there was no need in that race situation to take that risk, b) still, it was valentino's slight error as he attempted to reclaim the position (in what was a pretty aggressive manner, it has to be said) that led to them both ending up off-track and fuck that guy, and c) the problem with 2008 wasn't just or even primarily the corkscrew overtake and it's annoying that that's the only bit everyone talks about. of course, there's also the question of whether casey would have bought marc's explanation that it was totally by coincidence that the overtake happened there... and again, complete guesswork, but my sense of casey is that he would have assumed marc was being at least a little bit dishonest. (which, you know... laguna's not an easy track to overtake at, but marc did prove with the bradl move that he was perfectly capable of overtaking after turn 8 - might not have been planning on the off-track excursion, but he was still attempting to overtake just ahead of a blind crest that happened to feed into the corkscrew lol.) I think casey by his honda days had calmed down a bit (though he still certainly had some conspiratorial tendencies), but I also don't think it's a stretch to imagine that he would've felt like he was a victim of a joke between the pair of them... not ideal
overall though, I reckon casey's main frustrations would have been less with the move itself and more with how it was discussed. in the presser, while joking with marc, valentino does take the opportunity to get in a jibe at casey for old time's sake. there's this clip, where he directly addresses livio suppo (at ducati in 2008, by then at honda) - specifically about how both casey and suppo criticised him for that overtake. in response, suppo says something about how he's grateful to marc because they finally got payback. valentino is later asked directly about casey's complaints in 2008 in this clip, and replies with the following:
would valentino have said this stuff with casey still in the paddock? well, yes! honestly, given valentino did very quickly lay off needling casey once he had retired, there's a good chance he would have said something worse. and marc would have laughed along at the whole thing. I don't know, I just don't see casey taking particularly kindly to that... he can hold a grudge, that man can, and at a certain point he'd probably be increasingly less willing to give marc the benefit of the doubt. interesting situation though, laguna seca '13 + casey is a very juicy scenario that could play out in several different ways
but I'm guilty of burying the lede here - there's a far more obvious reason than anything I've described above for why the casey/marc relationship would have turned sour. it's the simple fact that they would have been teammates which would do the damage all on its lonesome; they have radically different conceptualisations of how that dynamic is supposed to work and would inevitably have clashed as a result. the one commonality they do have is they don't see their teammates as potential friends, which is... also not helpful! I think they'd probably initially be fine on the interpersonal level - and, actually, given how the casey/valentino relationship played out and marc's general approach to his rivalries, I can see marc/casey more or less being able to maintain a minimum standard of politeness towards each other even at their worst. like, I still think they'd be able to smile at each other and do some small talk when face-to-face, but I also think everything else would be a complete disaster. I talked a bit about how marc approaches his teammate relationships in this post - and I'm not going to rehash too much of what irl!marc got up to, but I'll include some bits relevant to casey
from marc:
related to casey:
and dani comparing the two:
we do obviously even have actual real life controversy wherein casey thinks marc felt threatened by him and forced him out of honda... and this in a timeline where they weren't even direct competitors! if this is the level of tension a test rider role can generate, then if they'd actually been teammates...? yeah, no. casey thinks that teammates should cooperate - and he thinks that riders enforcing divisions within the box are essentially doing so because they are "afraid". marc has openly admitted to lying about what parts he likes to make sure his teammate doesn't get any edge over him. this is the thing, right: marc might think casey is a cool rider, would've liked the chance to race him and even be teammates with him... but this is the stuff he did to dani, who was one of his literal idols! this is his understanding of competition - (like valentino) he might love the fight, but simultaneously he'll do pretty much whatever it takes to win, because he considers this stuff fundamentally part of the game. casey does not. to casey, this kind of victory is dishonest. any kind of gamesmanship is a sign of weakness... the victory is worth less if you're accomplishing it like that
now, hey, maybe marc would never have been able to go as far as he did with dani because he wouldn't have the kind of performance edge that allows you to definitively impose your will within the team. I think it's a popular interpretation that marc wouldn't have won the title in 2013 if casey had been there, which... I mean, I think it's true that it would have been less likely - in that in a season with that much volatility, the more plausible championship contenders you have the less likely it is that any single one of them takes the title (same goes for instance if you add in a valentino who had not gone to ducati for two years and would have presumably been more competitive in 2013). but it's not like casey would have been the defending champion and the clear class of the field... partly due to injury, he ended up finishing in third in 2012. jorge and dani didn't win the 2013 title in part as a result of their own injuries, and who knows how casey would have fared... like sometimes it's just luck of the draw really. you can be the better rider and still not win the title, shit happens. I think for as long as a more or less healthy-ish casey stays in the sport, it would have been unlikely that marc establishes quite the same performance edge as he did over dani... but, well, if anything that would have meant he would have fought even harder out of perceived necessity to win the internal honda wars
it's the kind of thing that can make a relationship quickly deteriorate, especially with a prickly character such as casey, and it's entirely plausible that dynamic would have become strained at best and horrendously toxic at worst... sooner rather than later. and the thing is, this environment would affect marc considerably less than it would casey. again, it's the fact that he relishes the fight... he's very good at shrugging off (most) criticism and thrives in that kind of tension. the emotional fatigue that this scenario generates would be painfully lopsided, where casey offers harsh criticisms and means them and is endlessly frustrated with marc's approach, while marc... doesn't really care. at least dani also had a questionable manager who was conducting behind the scenes warfare on his behalf - casey doesn't want to play these games at all. he just wants to ride a bike, and marc is never going to allow him to live in peace as long as he's an internal threat. if casey were exposed directly to all of that from marc, I doubt he'd walk away from the experience with a particularly positive impression of him
does he walk away? I think there's a decent chance that casey would have ended up so disillusioned with the whole thing that this would have been what pushed him into retirement. if he wants to get out of that mess, let's say after two years, his options would have been pretty limited. yamaha is closed off and I'd struggle to think of a scenario in which either jorge or valentino would have been particularly interested in a direct swap (also, if you're sick of being marc's teammate, you're probably not gonna be jumping at the chance to be valentino's instead). I suppose you could go back to ducati (which he did return to as a test rider so it's not like those bridges were permanently burnt), and maybe casey could do something special even with *gestures* that version of the bike. really though... I think enough would have been enough for him. regardless of the actual balance of success between the pair of them, my guess is marc wins that war because he's happier to get nasty and because he wants it more. casey has his two to four titles... he's done. let him go fishing
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