5th of January 2026 // 'time-out' boxes

playlist:
untitled & untitled II (the ark of teeth)

Uh… happy holidays everyone. Jesus fucking Christ…

I’ll not be commenting on that news from about a day ago, not at the moment at least. I have very little of worth to offer on the matter. Suffice it to say that this country has provided no shortage of reasons to be disappointed in it, certainly not in the few decades I have consciously lived, but those reasons seem to be piling pretty fucking high anymore.

No, instead I’ll be focusing on another light-hearted (/sarcasm) topic from this holiday season, namely the revelation of and (justifiable) outrage over the use of so-called ‘time-out’ boxes in New York state’s Salmon River School District, as reported at length by the Times Union on December 18th. TU reporter Emilie Munson has been covering the immediate issue since October of 2025, at least, following new state reporting standards that were mandated after a 2022 investigation (a collaborative effort between multiple Hearst papers) into restraint / seclusion practices in schools.

Of a more local interest, the state of Minnesota banned such seclusion (for K-3 students, at least) in 2023, though there have been recent legislative efforts to reverse that ban, on the exception of parental consent. Great (/sarcasm). Nationally, the Alliance against Seclusion and Restraint is raising awareness towards ending such practices in schools.

Now, some personal perspective on the subject. I began my elementary education way back in the ‘89-90 term. I was not in the special education program, had no IEP, so on and so forth, but I was acutely aware of the classroom that was dedicated to it in my suburban NC k-5th school. It was off mostly on its own, tucked-away by a set of janitorial closets and not far from the art room. I was also acutely aware of the box that sat therein.

That was all that I remember it ever being referenced as. The Box. I knew it only by rumor at first, from other kids telling me about it, from other kids telling me what it was for — it was for locking up the r-words. The stories passed from six year old to six year old about that box were shocking in their cruelty (and, I hope, full of juevenile embellishments), and remain shocking to me now. Real Bedlam shit. The kind of shit that told you, in no uncertain terms, to stay the fuck in line… or else.

I don’t know what other kids took from these stories, but I took that message to heart and didn’t let it slip — to the extent that I was able — for another thirty-five fucking years. I dotted my i’s and crossed my t’s, minded my p’s and q’s, kept my shoelaces double knotted and my nose to the grindstone. From the moment I first heard the r-word, first saw my classmates slapping their chests and ‘arf’-ing like seals, first heard tale of that motherfucking box I was normal, goddammit, and no one in my life could ever have convinced me otherwise. And as my elementary education progressed I came to learn one thing above all:

Those kids you see every lunch time, led hand-by-hand from the shadows and back, those kids from the room with the box? You’re not like them, boy, and you should thank God for that.

Neat trick, I guess. But what made it stick was one simple, unshakable fact. I knew I was different. Not ‘special’ different, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. Different different. Off. Weird. Suspicious. I was allowed no positive adjectives in that regard, and so I allowed none in kind. I knew that something about me didn’t jibe with what I was seeing from the other kids at school, not most of them at least, something that became even more evident as I progressed from elementary to junior high and beyond. The reason that lesson stuck is because I wasn’t like those kids, sure, but I wasn’t like them because I was working my ass off trying not to be. In my still-developing mind the stakes were as high as they could possibly be. One little fuck-up in the wrong place at the wrong time and in front of the wrong fucking people, and I’d be right there with the rest of the special education class… in the tucked-away little room with that unconscionable goddamned fucking box.

I eventually saw the thing, in the flesh so to speak. I was in second or third grade, and either my art class or some art-minded project of one of my others found me helping to put on a puppet show for the special education class. Memories of that are fuzzy and vague, but the vibes are good. Happy faces. Fun. Indeed, it was the first positive brush with developmental disability and the developmentally disabled that I’d ever had in school (and there would not be many to follow). By comparison, my memories of the box are stark. Hyper-real. It’s made of dark painted wood and roughly twice my height, with a sliding lock and a little chain and a lightless black window cut into it about two-thirds up the door. At the time it seemed to loom over me from its place in the classroom, its window spying me like some depthless abyssal eye. I felt like it knew. I still feel like it knows.

It wasn’t the happy faces that followed me out of the special education room that school day, or the fun I’d had there, or the thrill of early creative enterprise. What followed me was that motherfucking box. It lived in me, implacably internalized, a parasitic punitive monolith of chipped sheet wood and cold shadows that served no purpose but to isolate me from any understanding of myself. It’s still there, buried at such a formative depth that I know I’ll never be truly rid of it, still doing its best to teach me the lessons intended of it by those who devised it, still trying to box me out of myself from within.

And that’s without ever having spent a second locked inside of it.

To me the shock of the reporting out of New York state was existential. The box that I remembered, the box I still carried with me, was from three and a half decades ago. Surely things have progressed from then. Surely the box is gone.

The box, it seems, springs eternal, and by any number of names. Time-out boxes and isolation rooms and on and on and on. The spirit of it lingers, in the abuse of ‘quiet rooms’ in Illinois (investigated by Propublica and the Chicago Tribune in 2019) and the ‘isolation booth’ that caused a Facebook furor from Washington state in 2012 and in the padded cells and ‘recovery rooms’ reported by Pacific Standard in 2018. And then, of course, there is the most recent widely-publicized example, which scarcely touches upon the scale of the problem in New York state. The uproars are sporadic, fleeting, sometimes productive and sometimes not. Bucks are passed. Administrators are put on leave. Politicians call for investigations. Outrage. Outrage. Outrage.

It never lasts. Nothing will. Nothing can. For this everyone is responsible and no one can be blamed. But when the outrage settles and the dust clears and that little bit of the world returns to its slow and steady hum, are we really so shocked to find, still standing there before us in all its endlessly iterable and desolate authoritative resplendence, the box?

There is a pit that dwells in our collective humanity. It manifests itself over and over again, block by block or a few square feet of plywood at time, and to it we willingly, unceasingly feed the most vulnerable among us, thousand by countless thousand. We do it in the name of 'therapy'. We do it in the name of 'care'. We do it in the name of 'discipline'. But in those brief moments when we find ourselves in a more honest affect, we see it for the unabashed punitive cruelty that it is. This, we tell ourselves, is the cost of normalcy and of order and of raising good, productive children. Most of us know that, or at least suspect it, for the load of shit it is, just as surely as we refuse the truth: This sacrifice we make and allow to be made in our stead, day after day in schools across this country, is the price we pay for being free from the singular disquiet of recognizing the vulnerable and the marginalized and the disadvantaged for the human beings they are and thus of treating them with the fairness, dignity and respect they deserve.

For so long as we refuse that truth the box will remain, quiet and patient and undying, eager to fulfill its sole, profane purpose of separating us from ourselves, of separating us from our very humanity. Just as it was always meant to.

Thanks for reading. More sometime.

~ Weltraumbesty / KRP

21st of December 2025

playlist:
slif slaf slof (mermaid chunky)
lonely beach (miynt)

Strange week. Shutdown Wednesday evening for a variety of reasons, a visit to the hospital (routine appointment, nothing worrisome) being chief among them. I am getting better at managing myself within stressful environments (carrying my noise suppression gear with me, etc), but it all still adds up. This one wasn’t the worst, though it ran about an hour and left me typically exhausted. I am making an effort to manage the more self-destructive behaviors that can come along with this for me (I have a tendency to bang my head against the wall, repetitively rap at my forehead with my palm or clenched knuckles, etc.), mostly through breathing exercises and like meditative techniques, which is certainly not the easiest in the fucking moment, but did help a bit this go around. Baby steps and all that. First shutdown I’ve had since the week of Thanksgiving, when I ran through a whole goddamn streak of them, one of them particularly public and particularly embarrassing (cafe… in-laws… flight… ugh).

Weltraumbesty stuff — surprisingly productive on this front, much more so than I’d have anticipated given the other circumstances. On the back end of things, got the site migrated over to neocities, the domain settings sorted and all that. All relatively painless. Modified the layout a bit dramatically, which I think has turned out rather well. In terms of content, several more of my old pieces have been republished from the archives of exploderbutton.com (rip) and my first new film review in more than two years is live. Going forward I am going to try to publish weekly here, with new pieces going live every Saturday. This seems doable to me at the moment, but we’ll see. Definitely do not expect a film review every week.

Watched — It’s been cold as shit, so I’ve been more inclined towards seasonally-appropriate material recently (which is why that Terror in the Midnight Sun piece randomly came about when it did). Revisited Bill Rebane’s inscrutable shoestring sci-fi Invasion From Inner Earth, which I’ve always loved despite its rather obvious deficiencies of narrative, production, etc. Also watched The Game, also by Rebane. It was the first time either my partner or I had seen it, and I don’t know that we’ll be itching to see it again anytime soon. Others — The Blob ‘88, still a big ‘meh’ for me despite a nice turn from Shawnee Smith and its obvious technical merits (I should really just give up on anything Frank Darabont related at this point — our sensibilities do not get along). Long-time favorite Night of the Comet, which we’ll probably watch again this Christmas. Began but did not finish Urban Marine Resort Story, the goofy diving themed follow-up to the bubble era-defining ski romance Take Me Out to the Snow Land (which I think I’ll be writing something about in the near future). Also continued to chew through Arrow’s Shawscope volume four with the almost indescribable Bat Without Wings. It's either the silliest or the best thing my partner and I have seen in ages, and probably a bit of both.

Reading — On a Hermann Melville kick again, which happens every couple of years. Starting with his unfinished posthumous novella Billy Budd, Sailor, which I’ve never read beyond a few excerpts back in school. The neurodivergent aspects of Melville’s prose are self-evident anymore, and in retrospect it’s become easy to see why I was so endeared to his writing from such a young age. Will be following up with The Piazza Tales, because it’s been too long, and likely another reading of Moby-Dick. I’ve also been piecing through The Adult Autism Assessment Handbook: A Neurodiversity-Affirmative Approach and Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement, because reading books about autism and the disability rights movement has become a hobby unto itself anymore. Next in the stack are John Steinbeck’s The Wayward Bus and the complete novels of Dashiell Hammett, which I will read either a couple or all of (currently undecided), and Carson McCullers’ The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

Writing — Continues apace, honestly. I felt as though I was swimming against the current for a long time in this regard, but have sixty-ish thousand (very unfinished) words across several fiction projects to show for 2025. Not bad at all, I think. I go into 2026 with a couple of draft novellas on the make, a few outlines, and a larger project trundling along through a vague and experimental phase. I feel as though I’ve finally dropped any pretense of whether or not anything will come of any of it, as I really don’t care. As such I’m back to enjoying the process in a way I haven’t since I was a literal teenager, and that’s more than enough for me at the moment.

Some stuff I’d recommend — Mostly Youtube things at the moment. Check out Jerome Weiselberry, reviewer of books and film and my new Youtube fixation for the past week or so. Thoughtful work and just good vibes all around. Autistic AF’s feature length documentary on the history and current state of the ABA industry has been out for a couple of weeks now, but is very good as well. And hey, anyone remember the TV-marketed only-on-VHS pseudo-documentary Tornadoes!! The Entity? I must have watched it a few hundred times after I got a copy for Christmas as a nine year old. I couldn’t find a full copy of the score-only version I was familiar with streaming anywhere, so I up’d one myself. So yeah, that. I also clicked the little “X" next to “trending" on Bluesky recently, and yeah, I really can’t recommend that enough.

That’s it for now. Still not sure what the hell blaugtism is going to be going forward, but nine hundred plus words is more than enough to start. I'll be making an archive of these posts eventually, unless this turns out to be the only one. In which case… this was never here, and you can't prove otherwise. Thanks for reading. More sometime.

~ Weltraumbesty / KRP

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