Clem Snide

A few nights ago at work, I was watching this very low functioning kid trying to remember what the hell he was doing in the hallway.

A couple of months ago, low functioning kids started to trickle in because, as it turns out, there was really no other place for the courts and case workers to send them.

The vast majority of our residents are non-violent offenders, which means that if you absolutely have to send a developmentally disabled youth who would face a pretty hellish existence at any kind of facility where he's surrounded by aggressive, physically violent kids his own age, we're about as good a choice as any.

The bad thing is, most of us aren't really trained in dealing with residents who are so low functioning they have trouble performing even the most basic tasks. A few weeks ago, I literally taught a 15 year old kid how to tie his own shoes. That said, I've injured myself three times since early summer trying to extract English muffins from my toaster, so I'm perhaps uniquely qualified to help some of these kids out. It's a kind of "learn as you teach" situation.

The nice thing about dealing with low functioning kids is that you get to see real progress, especially in the first month or so they're in residential treatment. Often their home lives were so chaotic and unsettling that just by placing them in a stable environment in which people are patient with them you can experience what feels like years worth of development in a very short time. It reminds me of what David Foster Wallace said once about how much he enjoyed the time he spent teaching basic grammar to community college kids, because the progress was so immediate and measurable.

So a few nights ago, I was watching a very low functioning kid trying to remember what the hell he was doing in the hallway. This particular kid does this pretty frequently. He blunders out into the hall and then stands there for up to a minute, looking around, trying to remember what he wanted. He'll look up and down the hallway, grin vacantly at anybody he sees, and eventually remember what he wanted. Or not. Sometimes he just goes back into his room. I'm told that, whatever other progress he makes, "standing around trying to figure out what he's thinking about" is probably the way life will always present itself to this kid, so the best thing to do is just let him do it and then be as cheerful and encouraging as possible when he remembers what it was he wanted.

As he was standing there on the night in question grinning at the water fountain, I remembered the phrase "thought bubbles swell" but couldn't remember what it was from. It was days later when I finally remembered, while eating some avocado slices, that it was from a Clem Snide song, which reminded me how much I liked Clem Snide before I somehow forgot how much I liked You Were a Diamond and Ghost of Fashion before I somehow forgot about the records completely at some point.

So lately I've been listening to Clem Snide and reading that new biography of Anne Frank. Oh and watching the UK Life on Mars, which is also pretty brilliant and which I want to post about later if I have the chance.