Hurtful Experiences: September 2009

David Seagrave's Principal Mindquakes

Stirling Green 11/9/97: Arrested for using a Changing Bag to rewind a faulty Zenith camera. Charged with masturbation in public. Assaulted thrice by the police - grievous bodily harm inflicted and also indecent assault.

Kelvinbridge, Glasgow, 1973: Plucked off Glasgow streets, by plain clothes police. Dumped in a cell in Partick police station then taken to Woodilee Mental Hospital where I was forcibly injected with tranquilizers. NO explanation given.

Banknock, 1995: Charged with breach of the peace after neighbour refused to turn off tap that led to a flood in my home and I made a sarcastic remark about Catholicism when he complained that I caused offence by being seen with empty trouser leg.

Manchester Mindquakes (1) Made unwelcome at a conference on Esperanto for parking my scooter next to Lord Mayor's Rolls and being dressed in Sprayway overclothes! (2) Met one Alan Wright then in charge of Manchester Model Railway Club who threatened to sue me for an innocent reference to him in my play NAMESAKES which suggests a way where all with common names acquire quite unique names.

Disclosure Form Mindquake: I am so indelibly besmirched by malicious neighbours from Banknock that I can never do voluntary work let alone do a full time job. See "All of David's Pain".

I might also deal with sackings-on-the-spot particularly Natural History Museum.

Sociological Interpretation of Mindqaukes - Related to the "constructed" mindquakes in "OFFENCE WAS NEVER INTENDED" and the dialogue between Alan M-W and myself that followed on from the "Toy Trams with Silly Faces" event of Jan 1995. Identifying those "tribes" or "castes" within society who live apart from normal people. The Military, Religious, Civil Service, Police, Railway Service, and Local Government "castes" - endogamous occupational groups who have corporate cognitive distortions.

Avoidance Strategies - identifying members of those castes who infiltrate leisure-related affinity groups and form cliques and sometimes create such havoc that hobby clubs fold. What to do if a fiancé(e) has parents who belong to such a caste.

Mindquake Management - need for the victim to go AT ONCE to a secular confessor like Alan Moelwyn-Wright who has to reassure the victim that he/she is still very much a pure vessel of God - ("Secular Forgiveness") and who will scorch the culprits (See explicitly the sequel to Offence Was Never Intended - which is where Alan W. scorches a woman who barges into a bedroom and sees me with my breeches down).

Mindquakes: Introduction

I have coined the word Mindquake to denote an unpredicted personal catastrophe containing a social element that conveys to the sufferer that he is irredeemably flawed. He has done something which has earned him derision, ignominy, and forfeiture of his reputation. He may have been criminally careless, or rude, or uncharitable. Perhaps it was an inexcusable lapse of "good manners" or wilful ignorance about the "correct way to behave".

I was brought up in a Christian home where both parents aped the fatuous extravagances of social fossils in Seaford, a town facing the Channel gales. In my boyhood it was cheifly inhabited by people of "superior class". I have suffered persistent mindquakes and in this treatise I will narrate them in all their horrific detail in my quest to explore the problem and evolve ways of dealing with mindquakes.

Since I was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome in 2004 I have read all I can about it and I am far better equipped to deal with them. Now and again they occur. I will be providing sociological interpretations of Mindquakes but I must now refer to my brainchild Contributionism with its principles of behaviour derived from what amounts to a liberating theology.

In 1967 I had a row with my father about religion in the aftermath of the Hither Green railway disaster. In other words I describe how I deliberately missed the doomed 743 from Hastings to London Cannon Street. My father declared my scooter had been stopped by God at the foot of a steep hill expressly so that I would have to push it for over an hour and miss the train that was preordained to crash because GOD LOVES ME. I was to REPENT, go to church without fail, go to the toilet regularly, and go to bed no later than 10pm. The accident was a warning from God!

I could not swallow this claptrap. It prompted me to think up my theology about Alan Wright, a.k.a. the Socrates of Charford, who is the purported inventor of Contributionism. This started off as a Universal Rational Code of Behaviour. For the purposes of this treatise I deal with its strict Consequentialism as the universal yardstick of all behaviours.

Good and evil are defined by the strict consequences of intended actions. When dealing with Mindquakes the strict consequences are the welfare of the sufferer. Now I have got into trouble for writing stories where Alan intervenes to stop mindquake victims committing suicide.

When I was convalescing after my amputation I wrote a series of playlets about Contributionism, and in 1985 I went to Manchester to meet a flesh-and-blood Alan Wright in the hope that he would heartily endorse my brainchild that ought to have led to a TV soap opera where my Alan teaches viewers how to deal with social catastrophes of every kind including Mindquakes. The Manchester encounter was the biggest social disaster that ever happened to me and I have to recount every hurtful detail then go on to a sociological interpretation.

In a radio dialogue between myself and Alan I narrate the occasion when I blew the lid off criminal foolhardiness and other malpractices rife amongst railway enthusiasts and how that led to a Mindquake. My short story ALL OF DAVID'S PAIN deals with my indelible besmirchment by "the good Christian people of Banknock".

I rearrange actual events in other stories based upon my Mindquakes. When I deal with the latest one I have to slightly fictionalise in case the real culprits ever find this treatise and sue me.

I can recall news stories where victims of Mindquakes committed suicide. That includes schoolchildren who were mercilessly bullied by their classmates, and people accused of sex crimes, and victims of malicious besmirchment.

I have been close to ending my life on several occasions. Insted I have written horror stories that include elements of the mindquakes. I am exceedingly proud of these stoiries. Now fellow Aspie Franz Kafka describes banal horror in his famous works like "The Trial". Whilst Christians will undoubtedly be offended by the true account and the stories, people with mature minds will hopefully appreciate Seagrave at his most Seagravesque in the material that follows this "Introduction to Mindquakes".

Alanbrooke Arms

I was told about a new modelling club at Alanbrooke Arms, about half an hour's drive from where I live. The organiser told me that they meet in the eponymous pub located on a former turnpike road amidst a hideous agglomeration built when there was a colliery nearby.

I had the very utmost difficulty manoeuvring my microcar in a cramped courtyard before unloading boxes of my model "Listed Buildings" and staggering up stairs to a former billiard room where I met about 4 nondescript men whose names I have now quite forgotten. I impressed them with the models and they seemed eager to see more of my work. They were engrossed in plastic kits of military subjects. They talked at length about military matters that went right over my head and I was sickened by how people got killed. I said that I was maimed and that's why I wear riding attire. I explained Asperger's and said that many gifted people had it.

I looked forwards to a return visit where I would discuss sharing technologies. But I had immediate misgivings as I tried to assess these people. They all seemed to have served in the Forces. On my second visit I came very close to wrecking the car. Nobody was around. I decided that I could never come back as it was far too risky to enter the courtyard and there was nowhere to park in the busy road past the pub.

So I explained precisely why I would never come back. After dark I would be quite unable to turn the car round. I brought with me a selection of model trains built of scrap materials which were greatly admired by just 3 men who again talked amongst themselves about military matters and again wallowed in gratuitous detail how soldiers got killed in this or that campaign. I said that I had drawn a line under the Second World War as a boy after our Religious Knowledge teacher had told us about such events as 'Hiroshima' and 'Dresden'. I then explained Contributionism succinctly as though I was a convert to it and Alan Wright is a flesh and blood alumnus of my old school. But somehow I sensed that these men were most definitely many cents short of a dollar.

The men in charge said that I had a lot to offer the club because it catered for all modellers. I was to ignore the perfectionists - the "rivet" counters, and I was to keep at my model making from scrap materials as it is an intrinsically worthwhile hobby.

During one of the conversations I was asked about Alanbrooke Arms and I said that it refers to the landed gentry who built the turnpike road, who came I believe from Northamptonshire where there is a village called Alanbrooke.

I remember being pulled up sharply by the man in charge, evidently a teacher because I had mixed up ALANBROOKE with a similar name, indeed a village near Northampton. The pub was named after a Field Marshal!

I crawled out of the courtyard and noticed that someone had knocked over a horsetrough containing plants. So I drive away feeling that it was utterly pointless to come back. The man in charge had my handwritten letters and I had to accept that it was far too risky to return for fear of wrecking the car.

A short while later I received a letter that took me aback by its venom and spite. I had caused the utmost offence by pseudo-philosophizing and I had somehow done something really bad by referring to the problem of turning round the car. I was not welcome and would be prosecuted for trespassing if I ever entered either the PUB ot the "settlement" for want of a better word known as "Alanbrooke Arms". I promptly wrote a short story about something similar happening to a man called Duncan Segelmacher who knows me.

Forces people are a caste within society who at times find their way onto Tory-run councils and tyrannize both their underlings, and the public. They are dangerously isolated in that they have a corporate cognitive distortion. They are the last people to appreciate art and beauty - wholly left-brain in mental development and in later life become ossified wrecks who live in the past. They are temperamentally incapable of coping with necessary changes.

Forces people inflict grievous mental harm on those of their children who do not conform to their own essentially stunted and immature expectations. They live in a socially monochromatic world. How I would advise Aspies to back out of any affinity groups where Forces people are active members as sooner or later there will be a situation such as I faced where the Forces people of the evolutionarily redundant warrior caste will become as vicious as the so-called modelmakers of Alanbrooke Arms.

David Seagrave, 1655 Glasgow-Leven, 11-8-2009.

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