I'm in a big crowd watching a long parade. Elephants with riders peel off and stroll through the crowd. Lounging on one pachyderm back is Doctor Dolittle the famous linguist, and a squawking menagerie: all his animal friends. Wow, this administration's luring out everyone with unusual skills or powers--even fictional characters.

Next, officials set out banquets in the streets and parks; free food for all!

Now the Queen herself appears. She and her courtiers are fey, beautiful, ageless and inhumanly tall--eight feet or so (250 cm?) I avoid her and all the Court--feel they're dangerous. They have a reputation for collecting famous and talented folks, whether or not they want to be... collected.

The Queen roars "SILENCE!" No need for a loudspeaker. She announces a new royal edict. "All metal is hereby confiscated!" Consternation. Bafflement. ALL?

All. The one-page flyers spreading through the crowd say it's not just iron (as if she were a Celtic fairy allergic to ferrous stuff) but even zinc, tin, aluminum. Everything down to buttons and tinsel!

What's she UP to?

My friends and I theorize that the royals either fear the metal because they're alien beings who can't tolerate it, or they plan to use it all in some continent-sized spell. Either way, trouble for all of us.

A courtier overheard us. Even speculation is treason, it seems. I'm dragged in front of the Queen herself.

She wastes no time. "Talking treason? You shall learn the value of speech--by relearning it!" With a touch, she does something to me that leaves me mute and illiterate--a spell stripping language. I can learn it again, but that'll take years.

I return to my friends in the underground as a broken man.

Half-broken. Turns out I was resistant. I can still read numbers and understand spoken language and even reply inside my head. It's just that forming sounds is no longer automatic. Don't know if I can read letters yet. Oddly, my own shorthand is legible and writable; so's Cyrillic, and Chinese. I try to recall Morse code. Yep. A bit spotty, I forget the rare letters like Q and Z, but I always do. Am I ready to try reading English? Writing it?

I leap months ahead overnight--try speaking short words aloud by echoing each sound I hear in my head, consciously. Slow and clumsy at first...but I can!

Next day, at a banquet, I pretend I'm still totally mute. No one recovers this fast, so they all assume I can't understand. I eavesdrop for news of the Queen and her plots. I hear nothing plausible about the metal-collection yet...

An old enemy sits down by me. He mocks my muteness the way he's always put down every perceived weakness.

At last I quietly and fluently tear into him, ending with "...and you MIGHT want to question how it is I can speak at all just one day after being muted, and then reconsider your assumption I lack OTHER abilities." Even as I speak, he can barely believe what I'm doing. It's just not possible.

I'm surprised, myself. No groping for sounds now. It's as if the Queen's curse never was. NO ONE throws it off this fast!

Throws WHAT off, exactly?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• That crowd's auras felt familiar. full of a beefy energy but somehow half asleep too. What's wrong--something absent, or present? Are they ALL under spells?
• Undo a curse causing neurological damage: I have a recurring long-term infection that doctors never identified. Maybe Lyme; let's call it that for brevity. During attacks, I get mildly tongue-tied, but the most extreme symptom it that I suddenly can't type or play piano: the circuit translating letters to finger-strokes just crashes. A few days later, it comes back! Weird.
• Linguistic & social deficits: autism? I'm on the spectrum, though milder than many.
• How much of my isolation "due to autism" is really Lyme leaving me tired & overwhelmed? How much Lyme clumsiness and brainfog is really autism? Hard to separate problems from two variable, underdiagnosed, poorly understood conditions.
• ACTION: Keep doing the antibiotic herb-rotation I developed by trial and error--it IS working. I'm way better than most of the Lyme patients OR autistics I know (yes, I know both. Big city.) And I may get still better.

Diet: high protein, low starch, rich in greens, berries, nuts & seeds. No gluten (wheat, oats, barley); many autistics (not all) can't tolerate even small amounts; and Lyme loves carbos.

Vitamins/minerals: 5000+ IU vit A, 1000+ mg C, 2000+ IU vit D, 25-50 mg zinc (to taste--if sweet, increase; if metallic/bitter, decrease). I need extra iodine too (from seaweed or thyroxine).

Herbs: 2 grams each of Siberian ginseng (Eleuthero sp.; a general strengthener), cat's claw (Uncaria tomentosa; wide-spectrum antibiotic), sweet wormwood (Artemisia annua; animalarial and antibiotic), and powdered milk thistle seed (Silybum marianum; liver protector). Using these, my inability to type or play went from chronic brainfog to three-day attacks to mild one-day attacks--just a bit achy and clumsy.

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