Little Things

A bad mood can spread like wildfire. But at least kindness can light up like fireflies. I am an online yahtzee addict as my loyal readers all know. I play probably 6 hours a week total. I don’t like to chat, just play. The second someone says “asl?” I clench up, ignoring them the rest of the game. But every once in a while, someone says something that causes me to respond, and we have a little chat afterall. I was just playing a woman whose heart was broken because her son just turned 18 and he was arrested yesterday. It was the first time he’d ever gotten in trouble and it was breaking his mother’s heart. I told her I got arrested for something stupid when I was 17, and I aint been in trouble since. Scared me straight or whatever. That made her hopeful. Her son still has another year of high school left after this one. I didn’t ask why, just said I hoped he could stay reasonable enough to finish. She said he wanted to finish, so that was good enough for me. Then she told me he is autistic, so that doesn’t help. She said it’s only a very mild case, but that it’s where a lot of his trouble comes from. “That sucks,” I said. Shit, what else can you say? But then I asked if he likes to read, and she said he does, but not enough. I told her there is a great book called The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime that is a fiction book about an autistic teenage boy that is a great fucking book. I said he might really like it. Also that it is very easy to read, which it is. She said she’d buy it from ebay for him. I said it won literary awards and was a bestseller, which rarely happens to the same book.

The game was already ending as we were getting to the book, and she thanked me again, and I told her to have a good day and good luck with everything and she thanked me again and told me to have a good day and she’d see me around soon, and I said “ty” and “k” and then I sat there, and she didn’t leave the room, so finally I got uncomfortable and left the room, and while writing this I realized she was still in the room because she was scrolling up to get the name of that book to get for her son.

So I have done a good deed, and now I can sit here and imagine all the benefits, or not. Autism is a shitty disease where the person is literally stuck inside themselves and has a hard time relating to the outside world, especially other people. Now I feel that I should have told her that some great writers were/are borderline autistic, because that is true. There are some places where autism is almost a bonus, I guess.

I wonder if she’ll tell her son where she heard about the book. “Some girl on yahtzee told me you’d like this.” Is that what she’ll say? God, I hope not.

I am a proponent of kindness to strangers when I’m not being cruel. I guess I have my own sort of disease. With my greater capacity for good, I have a greater capacity for evil. All Star Wars fans will verify this general state as fact. So will some philosophers. I wonder how many dogs I will kick today because I was nice to a stranger online…