Visions & Revisions: An anthology of new writing by Junior Cycle Teachers [selected extracts]

Rosanne Roe Florence
domino effect. Hypertension inducing, and unfixable until the
initial offender has been removed. That person who, on finishing
their shopping, leaves the trolley a mere scraping distance away
from a full body respray. Why do people put things in the wrong
place?
But then, existence for me is filled to the brim with things
that are in the wrong place. In my dreams there can be no
ambition to plan for urban abstraction without acknowledging
the native simplicity and practicality of the grid.
God, I’d love New York!
Out and About
It’s not like I’m out and about all the time. I quite like my own
company and few people understand, that on a good day, I have
to circumnavigate the synaesthesia of my own dysfunctional
sensory modality. Sometimes, no, most of the time, for the benefit
of myself and my co-habitants, I try to escape it.
I often retreat to the lockdown style bubble of gaming that
most mothers I know irrationally despise, but it allows me to be
the one in control … the one who calls the shots, the one with
the winners badge and somewhere I’m not forced to decipher
neurotypical metaphors and moods.
Whenever I venture out, my trips are always planned and
purposeful, one might even say prosaic, but as I reluctantly sit
on the second last row of the 41C bus rehearsing, ‘The Real
Meaning Behind the Interview Question,’ and regrettably
overhear a conversation, I value the opportunities in life for selfinduced
solitude…
Two women, oh, I don’t know, middle aged people say, but
given that only 0.00095760% of the population reach 100 years
this is a highly spurious and inaccurate label. They chat and I
listen, but I do not understand.
‘Jaysus, isn’t Paddy getting a bit long in the tooth for all that.
Maybe he’s going through a mid-life crisis.’
I wince. Seriously, he could get hit by a bus tomorrow and
it would be an ‘end of life crisis.’ They continue chatting and
BETWEEN THE LINES…
I momentarily disengage … whilst my brain does revolutions.
Perhaps if Paddy were augmented with cybernetic enhancements
in the future, it might be a quarterly life crisis.
I’m keen to inform them of the inconsistencies and
ambiguities in their statement but I have been led to believe it
might be misconstrued as rude. Well, sometimes the truth hurts.
So I proceed to explain. Fifteen minutes later, I disembark the
bus. Why is the human race so utterly dense?
¹ In 2013 ‘Asperger Syndrome’ (AS) was subsumed by the diagnostic label of
Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).
² Alium cepa is the Latin term for onion, a vegetable that many with AS find
very overcoming.
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