At what age grey area? kids on the spectrum (and some adults for that matter) are well known for loving small enclosed spaces. I'd often pull the drawers out from my bed far enough so that I could squeeze into the frame, or when I had a one-bunk bed as a wee nipper that needed a short integral ladder to get up to, I'd take my quilt and pillow and go sleep in the space that was used to keep certain aromatic plants, well known for having serrated, although not sharp, multiply fingered leaves and lots of resinous trichomes. I'd go and sleep next to the growlights after they were turned off, and be lulled to a most restful sleep, when I had difficulty sleeping as I often still do, by the warmth of the turned off light setup helping evaporate some of the most scrumptiously scented sweet, resinous spicy aroma of said 'certain plants', even when not yet budding, and certainly not ready for harvest, curing and toking up, which makes for a rather effective manner of aromatherapy, very relaxing, as legend has it (and I doubt somewhat) sleeping in a field of opium poppy is reputed to be too.That though I rather doubt, because the smell of fresh, un-prepared, undried opium latex is actually pretty fucking awful. Ever made opium poppy pod tea? it smells absolutely foul, as does getting the latex on your hands and fingers, and makes the kitchen smell ranker than satan's morning after sharting after a rotting skunk vindaloo with a dressing of alkyl isocyanide of choice. served with a dressing of ammonium selenide (I would say the telluride, but I have never prepared that, since absorption of even traces of Te lead to production of volatiles like dimethyl telluride and dimethyl ditelluride, that persist for a LONG time, and are so unspeakably terrible in terms of the stench they pack, that 'tellurium breath' has forced books they have touched to be replaced, and some poor bastards afflicted by tellurium-breath as its 'affectionately' nicknamed amongst chemists have comitted suicide because of it, or so I am told. Generally where the corresponding oxygen compound doesn't smell bad, the sulfur one is pretty nasty, the equivalent where selenium replaces sulfur is horrific, and that of the next chalcogen down, tellurium is so appalling there aren't even words to describe it. Bad enough that one incident, involving a chemist of IIRC german ancestry, traveling via train, unfortunately for the rail company, dropped the vial of dibutyl telluride he was transporting. And it couldn't be cleansed, the entire thing, the train, had to be scrapped, because it simply could never be rendered enterable again, let alone fit for use by people or goods.
And I can well imagine, having smelled some pretty nasty selenium compounds and myself once been the victim of to coin a term 'sulfur breath', when something itself with a quite pleasant and completely non-hadean smell, a scent rather than a stygian abomination, odd, but by no means at all foul, unfortunately metabolized into some other sulfurous, although unspecified compound or compounds and for over a week I couldn't change clothes, because anything I wore would have had to be gotten rid of. And it came out in sweat, shite, piss, even tear fluid, SALIVA and goddamned NASAL fluid. Thats right. Producing a horrific stench bad enough to make people cross the street, turn round and go the other way from several hundred meters away, INSIDE my fucking nose. And the same outfit, thankfully nothing precious to me or expensive, bar a spiked leather belt I rather liked although not too pricy, the only items salvageable were my shoes. The rest had to be stuffed into multiple layers of bin bags, and taken out into the middle of nowhere, taking as soon as possible, back-trails through what round here is the closest to countryside locally, and burn the lot. Because I could no way in hell, earth or both have let them reside just multiply bagged up and stuck in the outside wheeliebin.
Didn't know what was the cause at first, because it came and went, at very first, faintly, too faint to be foul and faint enough, on and off, that others couldn't smell it (I could, however, since some of it was coming out in my damned nose (or if not damned, it must surely have thought it had entered hell:autism:), then stronger the next day, after more of the parent compound metabolized to some things or other generally classifiable into 'that which should not be' and generally a wrongness committed against the natural order by their existence, then whenever I took a leak, it came back, still didn't connect it, until a little later, sufficient traces of whatever metabolic breakdown products of the haloalkylthiazole compound it or they claimed ancestry thereof to send people running away, literally, when I had no choice but to leave the house.
The worst was probably a doctors appt I had to go to, unavoidable and needed, although not about becoming, temporarily, the living incarnate vessel for all the virulent stench of hell rolled up into a neat, utterly abominably stench-emitting, although nevertheless rather good looking, in a rakish sort of way:autism:
I couldn't even go into the waiting room, I had to hide in the toilets and lock the door so nobody else would either start spewing their guts up, or be subjected, especially kids to the horrific stygian abyssal retch-inducing reek. With Se compounds being worse than sulfur, if it had been Se in place of S, I shudder to even contemplate how traumatic that would have been, and with what I've heard of Te doing the same thing, only so SO much worse, it makes what I went through look like happy smiles in the land of fwuffy ikkle kittens in comparison.
I can WELL imagine that people have killed themselves and become social pariahs (although presumably not in that exact order mind you) because of 'tellurium breath', because whilst contact with S or Se don't do that (this had to be prouduced as a metabolite rather than through merely touching traces of Te or its compounds, or things those have themselves touched, or had transferred from objects which have, it doesn't just come out in breath, it comes out in EVERYTHING, all of you.
I showered at first for HOURS, used several bottles of lynx shower gel, even going through a fair bit of shampoo as well to try and rid myself of it, but to absolutely no avail whatsoever. I thought myself simply to have gotten something like it on my skin or clothing. But not at the time realized it was coming from and continually being biosynthesized from within. And the sulfur compounds where there are Se and Te equivalents are, aside from the usually stenchless oxygen counterparts, the gentlest, least noxious of the lot.
Granny got off lightly, never being near that, worst she ever got was me going postal with a load of shower gel, bubble bath, spray foams and such all over the bathroom, making a nicely scented,
bubbly, postapocalyptic mess
She didn't live with us, and she got off VERY lightly, never having been in the proximity of any of my early science experiments, save once my eating stinkhorn fungus egg stages, which were reputedly edible, but made me sick as a parrot, as they say, puking my guts up and with a rotten stomach ache and nauseous as fuck all night long.
