It's Fun to be in the I-O-OH P (Not!): AA= Antipathetic to Asperger's

Just back from my third (and last for this week, thank goodness!) official AA meeting. We are required to attend three each week as part of the Intensive Outpatient Program, and for this reason alone I may have to leave the program. I don't knock it -- if it works for 99 out of a hundred people, then it's doing what it's meant to do. But I strongly believe at this early point that I'm the one in a hundred that it's no good for.

The second two meetings at least were not as bad as the first, because I had the sense of get out of there before they all started holding hands and reciting The Lord's Prayer. Now there's a point in itself. They pretend to welcome all beliefs, sects, denominations -- but let's say I were a Muslim Alcoholic. Holding hands and saying the Lord's Prayer would not be cool.

For my part, when it comes to God I don't say yes and I don't say no. I say, "Whatever happens will happen." But I also say: "Don't anyone dare shove your damn religion down my throat because I'll puke it up and shove it right back at you!"

The strongest adherents of AA insist that it's not a religious organization. And yet God is all over the place in AA, and the very structure of the meetings is similar to that of a church service.

Never mind. I can deal with that aspect of it, knowing that it's there, seeing it for what it is -- and also knowing that I do have a Higher Power -- and she works in the building next door. If AA is telling the truth about letting you decide who or what your Higher Power is, they'll just have to accept that.

No, the part of me that makes AA so difficult is the part of me that is strengthening again the longer that I'm sober.

It's not that I'm an anti-social person, as so many people have misunderstood throughout my life -- it's that I'm a non-social person. Alcohol loosened and opened me up and made me much more social than I truly am. The head psychologist who spent a total of fifteen minutes with me before rushing to judgement after hearing a fraction of my issues was quick to dismiss my self-diagnosis as being someone with a mild case of Asperger's Syndrome, and gave it a completely different name -- more to prove that he was The Boss and would be Making the Calls than for any good reason. Then a third guy came to my room and gave it a third Completely Different name.

And you know what? I no longer care what anyone wants to call it. The fact is that I have a  social disorder, the symptoms of which seem to be pretty much the same across all three diagnoses.

And when I stepped into that first AA meeting on Thursday night, my heart shot up into my throat and it was just as if my soul was lifted out of my adult body and deposited back into the body of that little kid in the First Grade who sought out the most remote, emptiest part of the playground and just sat there in silence, waiting for the bell to ring.

Here was a gymnasium full of people, all of them strangers, not one of whom I could talk to.

My old instincts took hold, and I went straight to the back of the gym, where I sat with my hands pressed between my knees and my shoulders hunched.

If there's anyone left out there who doesn't know how I feel about large gatherings of Strange People (and to me, most Normal People are Strange), I'll refer them to an earlier post on this blog called "A Nightmare of Hell." I went into this meeting in a state of serenity and strength, knowing that alcohol would not be a problem for me that night. I came out of it desperate for a drink, clawed by anxiety and fear, so upset that I shouted out loud and scared Whitey.

Instead of drinking, I took one of my anxiety pills and my last mood-evener of the day, poured myself some ginger ale. By mid-afternoon of the next day I had finally regained my Happy Place, the place where I knew that I was safe from drinking.

But then there was another AA meeting last night, and another this morning, and I sure hope this gets easier as the four weeks in IOP roll on ahead of me. Because if it doesn't, I will be buyig a bottle and relapsing before you can say "Danger Will Robinson!"

Not all solutions work for all people. I understand that most Normal People like Rituals and Large Gatherings -- but I can't stand either one. And since neither AA nor I will change anytime soon, I guess we're about to find out what happens when an Irresistible Force meets an Immovable Object. . .

-- Freder.

Far from the Madding Crowd

I now suppose that it's an Asperger's thing, but I have always hated crowds. It's gotten worse as I get older: the proximity of so many bodies bothers me, but so does the noise -- with so many people yammering away at once, it is sometimes impossible for me to understand or identify a single voice, even when the person is standing right next to me.

I try to avoid arriving at work at the same moment that classes let out just because I can't stand the flow of students around me, crossing my path, cutting me off, walking too slowly, or dominating the sidewalk by walking in groups two to four abreast. All babbling on their cell phones.

Even a busy supermarket or another person in the break room is torture. So Book Rush is one of my least favorite times of year at work: virtually the entire student body will pass through the store at some point, usually in waves at the top of the hour. Sometimes it's a challenge to get from one end of the store to the other.

I've posted about book rush before, so I won't re-tread it. I just wanted to type that with the kind of week it's been, I'm not going to beat myself up about how I plan on spending the weekend.

The Plan:

1) Not to leave the house for any reason, not to see or speak with any damn person

2) Snuggle up with my Honey cat and sleep in AS LONG AS IT TAKES -- even if it's until twelve-thirty or one in the afternoon.

3) Decompress with a movie or two, Doctor Who, Torchwood and Laurel & Hardy.

4) Eat pizza and other comforting things.

5) and last, try to get a complete first draft on the Flash Gordon piece I agreed to write in a moment of arm-twisting, but not to beat myself up if that doesn't happen.

I can't promise that I'll exactly be ready for more punishment once this strict regimen is completed, but with any luck it will get me past the gibbering, twitching, shaking stage.

-- Freder.

Please, No Secrets -- Especially Depressing Ones

I wanted to write of the strides and accomplishments from the past four-day weekend, but something has come up that's sucked all the joy right out of it -- and I can't even blog about it, because I am sworn to secrecy.

Why do people do that? Why do they tell you the secret first, and then say "Oh, but you can't tell anyone or talk about it until I tell everyone else myself at the next big get-together!"

Wouldn't it be the polite thing to first ask: "Can you keep a secret?"

So that I could answer "NO!" and then the person could either keep their secret to themselves or go ahead and tell me knowing full well that I intend to blab about it at the first opportunity.

I want to blab about it, not because I want to spoil the surprise, but because I'm upset by what I was told and want to get my feelings out there, out in the air, out of my system.

First, although I am very happy for the person, that's where it ends -- and it's irritating that I'm being made to feel that I should empathically share the same level of happiness that they are experiencing -- as if their happiness and my own are one and the same. 

Actually, my reaction is the opposite. Their happiness is just a reminder that I haven't been able to achieve what they have done, and probably never will. Furthermore, I am feeling that their happiness will have a significant negative impact on my life. And now I can't even explain that statement without blowing the "Big Secret."

They explained that they only told me to "give me incentive to get my health back," in other words, to cheer me up.

... and I shot back, "You've known me for How Fucking Long? Since when have Empathy for Other People's Happiness and Keeping Other People's Secrets ever been qualities that I cheerfully possessed?"

Fact is, I hate Happy People. Everywhere they go, they're all "La, La, La! La, La, La! I'm So Happy -- and You're Not! La, La, La!" It's disgusting. Happiness is not something that can be shared, and therefore it should be enjoyed in solitude.

It's not the first time that this person has done this to me. Alone among my friends, this one flaunts every success and every milestone at every opportunity. I am the first to say that this is my problem, not theirs, but every new success cuts me, makes me realize that I am not accomplishing anything in the creative sphere, makes me feel that my life is diminishing by the day. Again, I am happy for this person, but I wish that they would show a little sensitivity once in a while. "Glad for your success, but will you please stop rubbing it in my face?"

If anything, my reaction just reinforces the certainty that I have Asperger's Syndrome, that I'm not like other people and don't react to news like this the way most people would. 

Which brings up another point of contention. I referenced Asperger's in one of my emails, and this person didn't know what I was talking about. They haven't been reading my blog. Thanks a lot, friend. I read all your stuff.

There is to be a gathering of the clan soon, and all of this has made me not want to attend. At best, because it's an Asperger's Thing, I tend to sit back, watch and listen to the others, and usually only interject when a quote comes to mind. This time, I cannot promise that I wouldn't appear morose, especially when the Big Announcement comes and I have to pretend to be happy about it.

-- Freder.

The Secret Life of Grover

Until well into my adulthood I could do a pretty mean impersonation of Grover and Cookie Monster. So good that in High School, I had friends who would call me up so that I could do Grover over the telephone to their young siblings. I still own the record pictured above, and don't need to play it 'cuz I know it by heart.

I am blooo-oooo-oooo!

Oh so blooo-oooo-oooo!

I am Blue because I don't know enough about yoooo-ooo-oooo!

*Sigh* Frank Oz was a hero of mine before he started directing movies.

I still own all of my Muppet hand puppets. Some of them are better than others. The Cookie Monster is too small, as is the Kermit, but Miss Piggy is pretty good and Animal, Rowlf the Dog and Grover are absolutely great. The day I got my Grover puppet he hugged me and I felt complete.

At Christmastime I tied a big patch of cotton under his chin and swiped a Santa hat off of one of my mother's dolls, and when my mother walked in the door Santa Grover went "Ho Ho Ho!" at her and she completely lost it. That year Santa Grover had to hand out the Christmas presents.

It got so that I spoke as Grover an awful lot. This is because I knew what Grover would say in any given situation, but I certainly didn't know what I would say in most every situation.

Asperger's. We do the darndest things.

I can't tell you exactly how long this went on. But one day I just stopped and it's been so long that I'm not sure I could do the voice if my life depended on it. Grover just left me one day, never to return. 

-- Freder.

NWO

I had ideas for this weekend, but the weather pattern and ten consecutive days on the job (including a horrific day of enforced social activity, see below) necessitated a change of plan. Besides that, I really wanted to finish reading The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome. With a grisly, drizzly day to accommodate me, I parked myself on the porch and spent most of the day on that goal. From time to time I had Patches on the back of the sofa up by my head, and Whitey and Honey on my lap. It was chilly enough that I needed a blanket, and the quats liked the extra padding a lot.

I wish you could see my copy of the book. Every fourth of fifth page has a corner turned down, book darts adorn the edges, many, many passages are underlined or highlighted. Whatever doubts I had got smaller and smaller as the reading progressed, and now they are completely gone. Autism, no. Full-blown Asperger's, oh yes. And not a mild case.

If I fooled anyone, it's because I'm a good actor. I should have followed my own instincts and desires and pursued theater as a career. It's what I wanted. But I had no support from my parents, and lacked the courage and the social skills to proceed on my own. When it came to college, my parents' style was to say "If you need any help, just ask!" They should have known me well enough by then (and perhaps they did) to realize that this was the exact same thing as saying to me, "You're on your own."

And it's just like now with the car situation. When there are too many options before me and no clear answers, and every option comes with its own set of problems or modifiers, and I'm frustrated and don't know what to do, nothing gets done.

I am going to quote just one segment, because it speaks to how I've lived my entire life:

When the reaction to Asperger's syndrome is to achieve social success by acting, using a pre-determined script and a designated role, people with Asperger's syndrome may camouflage their social difficulties but not be true to their real selves or understand who they really are. Their personality is determined by the role they take in a particular situation and imitating those who are successful in a particular situation. An adult with Asperger's syndrome who is a retired professional actor, said to me that, "It was only in my adult years I developed my identity." During his childhood through to his young adult years, he did not know who he was, other than a repertoire of roles.

To  this day, the happiest time in my life was the year that I played the John Travolta part in Grease back in high school. This was before the movie came along and watered-down the material forever. The part stayed with me when I was away from the stage. I became more confident, even popular. I became a different person.

But you can't hide in a romantic relationship, and my girlfriends, if they didn't know the cause any more than I did, certainly all figured out that a relationship with me would be far more challenging than anything they were willing to put up with. The longest I ever lasted with any of them was a year. Now I've given up trying. It seems the better part of valor. Or, as W. C. Fields so wisely put it: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it."

If anything, my behaviours and signs have grown more pronounced (aiding the self-diagnosis but making daily life that much more distressing) since I stopped drinking like the proverbial fish. I was masking an awful lot of anxiety, hypersensitivity and social unease with alcohol, not to mention depression, which I see now is not the source of my troubles, but merely a symptom, and not even the most profound symptom at that. With the alcohol taken out of the picture, the behaviours came roaring back, stronger than ever.

Now that the shock is behind me and I have some knowledge about what it is that ails me, I'm much more relaxed about it. It can't be changed. All I can do is continue, knowing what I now know.

Well, I started this post going in one direction and ended up going in another. That's me all over.

-- Freder.

Marvel's Menagerie of Miscreant Martyrs!

Benjamin J. Grimm of The Fantastic Four, crotchety hero inside, monster outside. It's
all about appearances. Or is it? From FF #51, arguably Lee and Kirby's finest moment.

My friend Donna G., who has been awfully nice to me through all of this, sent me the following extract:. I've edited it slightly for brevity:

Paul Collins, author of Not Even Wrong: A Father’s Journey Into the Lost History of Autism, interviewed on the public radio program Speaking of Faith: “[Star Trek's Mr. Spock] has one foot in the human world, and the other one isn't. He's trying to figure it out and trying to somehow reconcile this. That's one of the reasons that a lot of autistic people find him to be such a sympathetic character, because his situation mirrors their own. They are very much part of our world. And yet, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to them. And particularly ... there is so much to social interactions that can't really be explained very logically. You just have to intuit them. And when you actually try to sit down and explain it to someone, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.”

Oh, my. I never thought of it that way. But 'tis true. And the list of heroes for people like me does not begin to end there.

A lot has been written about the not-so-deeply hidden "gay agenda" in the X-Men movie series (and people like Brian Singer and Sir Ian McKellan don't deny it). . . but that "agenda" is really nothing more than a new wrinkle grafted onto an already existing subtext in the original Marvel comic books. Teenage angst comes in many forms, and Stan Lee was probably the very first to exploit it on a grand scale as the Editor-in-Chief and Global Mastermind behind Marvel Comics.

The Marvel heroes were socially awkward, but secretly powerful. Not every Marvel fan has Asperger's Syndrome, but now I understand why I was drawn to a particular "spectrum" of characters in the Marvel Universe: the Freaks.

I started reading comics in the first place thanks to a brief piece in The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section that focussed on the late Steve Gerber's best-known creation, Howard the Duck. This cigar-chomping, endearingly grouchy waterfowl who referred to humans as hairless apes was stranded in our reality when the Cosmic Axis shifted and dragged him through a wormhole from another dimension. The tagline printed on the cover of every issue could not have been more specific: "TRAPPED IN A WORLD HE NEVER MADE!"

That was just how I felt. Still feel.

Few writers in the Marvel stable really understood The Incredible Hulk; even Stan the Man himself had a hard time figuring out how to use the character at first. For my money, Rascally Roy Thomas was the first one to get it right, essentially portraying Ol' Greenskin as a full-blown Autistic, which underscores the character's dangerous element: imagine all that power literally in the hands of a five-year old with a deep set of communication and emotion-management issues. In later days, Roger Stern was the only other writer who "got" it.

Up to a point in the early eighties, I own every issue of The Incredible Hulk ever published. He was my absolute favorite. I knew all about meltdowns and their consequences. Doctor Robert Bruce Banner, who could devise the nation's first and only Gamma Bomb, can't handle basic interpersonal relationships -- and when he gets mad, you'd best be moving out of his way quickly. Banner could be the poster boy for Asperger's Syndrome.

My absolute favorite issue of The Incredible Hulk is still the one in which Roy Thomas introduced Doc Samson, a neurotypical scientist who, in the name of curing Bruce Banner, steals the Hulk's power, pumps himself up into an Adonis, and then moves in on Banner's girlfriend, Betty Ross. This pisses off Banner so much that he sneaks back into the lab and re-exposes himself to gamma radiation in order to become the Hulk again. The Green-skinned Aspie and the pumped-up neurotypical square off against each other, with the over-confident Samson not realizing that he has all the power of the Hulk -- when the Hulk is calm. But Jade-Jaws isn't calm any more. He's pissed. And, as was expressed in almost every issue, "The madder the Hulk gets, the stronger the Hulk gets."

The ehm, "disagreement" ends with the total humiliation of that sand-kicking Doc Samson. Unfortunately, when Betty goes running out onto the scene of battle, it isn't the Hulk that she goes running to. We last see Ol' Greenskin standing alone in the street, looking on at Doc Samson cradled in Betty's arms, knowing that he's lost something, but, for the life of him, not being able to figure out what that something is.

*Choke* Gets me every time.

I used Benjamin J. Grimm for my graphic this time because the image came readily to hand, and because the message reflects how Autism and Asperger's children feel. But The Thing is really a very different case -- which is perhaps why the fabulous Fantastic Four were an acquired taste for me. Ben Grimm is a 100 percent neurotypical, a jock, to be honest, who happens to be trapped in the body of a . . . well, a rocky orange thing. He doesn't represent Asperger's or Autism because he totally gets the neurotypical world. But his physical appearance is so severe that he feels humiliated and shies away from social contact. Consider it a really, really bad case of acne.

You see, Marvel Comics was an Equal Opportunity exploiter of the fears that Young People have. If you know of a child who is suffering from anxieties of any sort, I would suggest identifying a corresponding character in the Marvel Universe and putting the stories in their hands. NOT the current stuff -- the classics, Marvel circa 1962 to 1969. It's all out there.

Discovering comics, in the years after I graduated from high school, when I had already read "serious" writers like William Faulkner and George Orwell and James Thurber and Anais Nin, really opened some doors in my head. But that's for another post.

-- Freder.

A Nightmare of Hell

Oh My God!! Today was "Staff Gathering" day at the college; after three years of attending these things, I have finally come to realize that I detest Staff Gathering Day from the depths of my soul, and now I understand why.

It is 100 percent pure unadulterated torment for me, from the time I step into the Diamond atrium to find it packed with bodies, all of them talking at once, sometimes at the top of their lungs, an utterly incomprehensible wall of babble that goes right through me and makes me want to run screaming into the metaphorical night.

I literally spent the day wishing that I had a gun in my pocket so that I could blow my brains out. It was that bad. Essentially, I revert to the behaviour of my childhood and retreat to the quietest, least-populated area on the playground and hope that no one notices me there.

Strange people use my name when they speak to me, and I don't know who in hell they are. It is a horrible feeling being trapped in a room jam-packed with people, most of whom I don't know, and to whom I have nothing to say. I got my name tag, went straight to the buffet, grabbed a bagel and some wedges of melon and then beat it for the door to the picnic area outside.

At nine-fifteen everyone filtered into the auditorium; I took up a standing position at the back. Then began the annual interminable ordeal of passing the microphone along to every single person in  the room, so that they can give their name, rank and serial number. I sometimes dream of doing my Judge Judy impersonation into that mike ("You put a microphone inta my hands! NAWT SMAWT!!") or something equally silly, and in my younger days I would have done it -- but I've learned to just act normal and color inside the lines when the spotlight is on me.

A little after ten, just as the President was getting started with his speechifying, I slipped out. Thank the powers that be, I had a ten-thirty sales call with my overly perky Random House rep. It felt good to get away from that mob, good to slip behind my desk and do something more or less productive.

But by eleven-thirty that was done, and I had to return to the event. Classroom sessions in the morning, activities in the afternoon, divided by a lunch like something out of Dante's Inferno, once again the packed room, the bodies too close for comfort, the incomprehensible buzz of hundreds of people yammering all at once.

It is just exhausting for me, the last place in the world I want to be. Plus, the food was lousy. The Eggplant Lasagna was both overcooked and cold, served in a big tray like slop, and the steak was pretty much raw.

I forced down as much of it as I could than again beat a hasty retreat back into the bookstore.

My afternoon activity was a tour through the Museum, which is world-class -- but I like to go there in the summer when it is empty (ditto the campus libraries) and today it emphatically was not. There were a couple of galleries that I literally had to excuse myself from because there were too goddamn many people in there. The information provided by the museum staff was good, but I would have preferred to read it. I was reminded of why I never learned a single thing of value in school. All the great books I've read have been on my own hook, every skill of value that I have I taught myself.

At 2:30 the event was to wind down with an ice cream social out in back of the Roberts Building. I moseyed on down there knowing that I wouldn't eat anything, because by then I was feeling physically sick. Anyway, I had a plan.

I stayed just long enough to be seen, just long enough to exchange a few words with a fellow bookstore employee, just long enough so that it would register that I was there. Then I snuck into the building's open dining hall and out the side door. Every nerve in my body was twitching. As I walked fast towards the parking lot, I kept on repeating "Oh my god, oh my god, I am getting out of here!"

I'm much better now, chilling here at home, typing into my blog. . . and planning on being "sick" next year when this Day of Torture rolls around again.

-- Freder.

Meeting the Challenge

Patches, the Hypersensitive Quat. Yes, this is really kind of what it feels like.

This morning the Anxiety was more like an amlulance wail than a smoke alarm, which was confusing, because I didn't have to be in to work until 11:30, and so I was able to sleep in. Usually those mornings are the better ones. On the other hand, the quality of my sleep this morning wasn't very good. In and out of consciousness, half asleep, half awake, crazy dreams that made no cognitive sense, you know the drill. Perhaps that had something to do with it.

Whatever the reason, I could feel it on my back like a physical thing. Knowing what it is (at last) helps to deal with it on an intellectual level -- but nothing dulls the hypersensitivity itself -- except alcohol, and I'm not going there.

I've started to make some changes, though. I've gone back to shaving and showering at night, instead of straight out of bed in the morning. As soon as I read back the post in which I described the effects of morning showers on me, I felt like I was living the old joke:

-- Doctor, it hurts when I do this!

-- Well, don't do that.

It means that I have to take more frequent showers, but this morning I was able to remind myself of the benefits: today would definitely been one of those where my morning shower felt like assault & battery. I patted myself on the back for that one, and thanked whatever it is we're thanking when we thank the Powers that Be.

I'm making the time to read; not every day, but that's the goal. Much more so than any other activity, including watching a good movie, this is calming, aids in decompression, soothes the spirit and fills up the empty places. Reading is a pleasure that I had mostly forgotten over the last six years and longer. The books piled up, but there was never the time for them. I've determined that has to change.

And, just today, I've begun making lists. In my current job, the only way I have been able to survive for the last four years has been to write everything down, make lists of every task that needs to be accomplished, sometimes with details of how to do it. If I didn't have these lists in front of me, work would be hopeless. If it's not on a physical sheet of paper, it falls out of my mind and doesn't get done. I really botched up a special order for a customer last month because I neglected to write anything down while I was on the phone with her. I ordered the book, but as soon as I'd done that some other thing popped up that needed my attention, and the mental note was gone the way of the Dodo. When the book arrived, we thought it was stock and it got shelved. No paper trail is the easiest way for me to get into big trouble.

And I found that, here in my new life, some of the same things were going on. I'd spend heaven knows how much time every day spinning my wheels, trying to think, for the third or fourth or fifth time, what it was I wanted to get accomplished.

Today at work, before my short shift ended, I took some scrap paper, made my first list for home, and tucked it into my pocket.

I've only checked off one and a half things so far, but it's more likely I'll get there if I don't have to waste time re-thinking the same stuff over and over.

If Asperger Syndrome is in part about making order out of chaos, the best thing I can do is try to live more "mindfully." I'm sure that I won't make it all the time, that there will be lapses. But the past year has been all about putting one foot in front of the other, and that I can mostly do -- even on a godawful morning like the one I had today.

-- Freder.

Pass the Cheese, Please!

AH-nold hess bin ein bit off a bed BOY, laitly! Yah! Ziss is pROBE-ably vy ze zo-cahlled "AMAIRican Moofie Klessics" (vich hess been running esspezially un-klessic moofies zince ziss pairsson started heffing eggsess to it ziss yair) chose to run ze CONE-an Ze Barh-BEARian moofink pickchair ze naght beffor lest.

Ach! Vhat ein peace of shitzen! I vas most aztonished to remembair zat I did not hate zis moofie vhen it vas fairs releazed. I sink zis vas becows zis vas ein comic book movie vich took idzelf SAIRieously in ein time ven zis vas not ze commonplaize zing. Alzo, zair vas ze teeny leetle beets off Robairt E. Howard zat made it to ze screen, unt ze nize photograffink pictzairs.

Gross gut! Vhat a zilly azz I vas! Ziss mooffie is ein stinking peas off KARbage! Vy vood eenyvun try to make ein zumtink prrrrrr-VOUND outten nize zimple Vantazy Adventure like COH-nan? Vuld heff been a verrrry zimple ting to make ein gut COHnan moofie, but Milius und Shtone had ein HEADS uppen zair ashholes!

Ah! So tonight on TCM, see opportunity for humble Aspie blogger to catch up on Japanese Monster Movies not seen before today, though much read about. It is chance not to be passed up. Imagine sinking feeling descending on humble servant as evening progresses. Early scenes of all movies are well shot and dramatically sound. There is compelling relationship to catastrophic happenings both then and now to small island of good and honorable Japanese people. 

Then, rubber monster suits begin trouncing matchbox cars and cities made of humble popsicle sticks! Unlike honorable mister Kong of Skull Island, monsters have no personality to save them from special effects for which perpetrators must surely have committed hari-kari! Scales on back of Gojirra actually wobble! Rubber wings of Rhodan remind honorable reviewer of something horrible to come from German sex-toy factory!

Much time spent on Wonton -- no, sorry, honorable excuses made here -- wanton destruction, no characters of interest to cling to anywhere! Horrible dubbing with the voice of honorable Paul Frees playing every other character and the voice of honorable Keye Luke (all very recognizable to humble Aspie movie fan) playing two-thirds of remaining characters. Movies start out Most Well, but rapidly descend into such deep mines of boredom that force humble reviewer into depths of sleepishness, from which he is forced to rouse himself, shake off sleep, to crawl to computer and type hopefully offensive lines about movies which never deserved all of the typing which they have received over humble years!

O! For a chance to cleanse the humble palette with the pureness of something genuinely good! But seven AM comes quite early upon the dawn, and time does not exist for humble Aspie reviewer to do anything but mock, snort, and retire to comfort of bed to dream away bad taste in mouth of films most distressingly overrated.

-- Freder.

Memorial Day

A terrible bout of tears at 5 AM on Memorial Day when I should have been asleep.

The realization that I am "on the spectrum," so to speak, brings with it a lot answers to the questions of what a lot of "normal" people would -- and have -- judged as being an unhealthy relationship with my mother and an unhealthy reluctance to leave home.

But there was nothing Freudian about it. I had Asperger's. No one in the family had a name for it, but we all knew that something was wrong.

Mom was my Protector. Home was my Safe Haven in a world that I could not begin to understand.

How difficult, then, to suddenly have the roles reversed when, six years ago now, she had to have her right leg amputated due to diabetes, and I was suddenly thrust into the position of being the Support Person -- physically, emotionally, financially. . .

Coping, coping, coping, my life and hers became a landscape of dealing with things that were a horror to us both.

And still how much more difficult to lose her so suddenly, without significant (to me, anyway, although a neurotypical might have picked up on the signs more easily than I did) warning -- and then to be assaulted by my sister, entering My World and stealing from the estate, turning things upside down; by the legalities of death; by the auctioneers coming into my home and tearing it apart into a horror, a ruin, literally, for me, ripping my Reality into shreds, turning a rich world of organized clutter into a Depression-era state of Chaos --

A year ago today, we laid her remains to rest around the  old house. This was made necessary because Memorial Day was the only day that I could  get off from work. I was drunk, of course, as I am drunk now typing this at 5:30 AM, for the same reasons.

I gave everybody a chance to say what they wanted to say, and then I said my piece, and then in deference to my hypocrite sister, who wanted Jesus present in some form, I recited the following verse, the only verse that I know by heart, because it's from a favorite movie of mine, and as an Aspie I am good at remembering these things, even drunk --

My name is known: God and King

I am most in majesty in whom no beginning may be, and no end.

Highest in potency I am, and have been ever!

I have made the stars and the planets in their courses to go

I have made a moon for the night

And a sun to light the day also..

I have made Earth, where trees and grasses spring.

Beasts and fowl both great and small

All thrive, and have my liking

I have made All of Nothing for Man's sustenation.

And of this Pleasant Garden that I have Mostly Goodly Planted

I will make HIM gardener for his OWN re-creation.

There was a pause. Then my father said something along the lines of Amen -- and, I do not exaggerate, everyone RAN for their cars. ZOOM! There was dust in the air in the wake of their tires tearing up the driveway.

I was left alone.

I thought, Why did they all run away and leave me?

Then I went inside and poured another drink.

-- Freder.

Too many brains at the Breakfast Table

I'll be back with a real post before the holiday weekend is out, but for now I just wanted to type this interesting passage verbatim from the back end of Nick Dubin's book about Aspergers and anxiety. It comes as part of a conversation about aligning the head and the heart. Take it away, Nick:

In recent years, there has even been evidence to suggest parts of the body, other than the brain, register emotions the same way that the brain does. Dr. Paul Pearsall (1999), a respected psycho-neuroimmunologist, suggested the heart also thinks and feels like the brain. This seems like a radical notion, but he showed many of the same neural cells that are found in the brain are also found in the heart. In her 1997 book, A Change of Heart, Claire Sylvia described what happened to her after her heart transplant. According to Sylvia, after she received her new heart, she experienced a major change in her personality. Further, new memories and sensations surfaced out of nowhere. She ultimately sought out the family of the young man who had donated his heart. To her utter surprise, she found out she had seemingly acquired some of his personality traits. Even more surprising, her story is not unique. Apparently, reports of this phenomenon of a personality transfer are not uncommon among heart transplant recipients (Pearsall 1999).

Oh, great! Bad enough that all men have two brains, usually with conflicting desires -- now there's a third with a voice of its own! No wonder I always feel conflicted!

Later.

-- Freder.

Pick Your Metaphor

The four boys from Liverpool in their Sea of Holes.

Yes, I know that I typed just yesterday that my posts would be getting fewer and farther between and here I am today back again "just like a bloody great opera star always making her Positively Final Appearance" (I think that's from Fawlty Towers, but I could be wrong), but this is actually pretty big.

Call it a lightbulb or a road map. Call it anything you like.

I was reading last night about cognitive behavioural therapy as a means of helping control anxiety, and although I could understand the principle all right, it wasn't really connecting with me on an emotional level (which is how I need things to connect if I'm ever really going to fully comprehend them) until the author, who is a diagnosed Aspie, came out with a metaphor of his own.

Imagine if you had a smoke alarm that was going off all the time, even when there was no smoke.

That one dropped into my emotional understanding like a ten ton weight! Suddenly the constant morning anxieties I have had, especially in the last six or seven years of my life when I became responsible for absolutely everything, are comprehensible to me. I thought once again, as I have thought so often recently, Oh my god, that's me!

Friends and readers of this blog will know that I am emphatically not a morning person, never have been, never will be, and that it sometimes goes a lot deeper than that. Now I understand why.

My smoke alarm is going off. It's not overstating things to say that mornings are an assault on my senses at a time when I have not had a chance to gather myself and prepare for the onslaught.

I've learned to wake before the alarm rings, because it shatters me.

Even something as simple as taking a shower when I first get up can sometimes have me weeping and begging for mercy. The water beating on me, sometimes too cold, sometimes too hot, the necessary scrubbing, it all feels like I'm being worked over by two big orderlies. Now, I don't have a problem taking a shower in the afternoon or evening, or even a couple of hours after I've gotten up. But first thing in the morning it is a shock to the system, and as I go through my morning chores and think about the day to come it sometimes feels like shock after shock is being piled on, jolting through me when I am not adequately prepared to receive or cope with that input. In fact, I'm in a state of hypersensitivity.

Within an hour or sometimes 90 minutes, it starts to get better: I have been able to gather myself, calm down, my senses begin to dull somewhat.

This is THE REASON why I drank heavily in the mornings from the moment I got out of bed: it was my way of numbing my senses to a dull roar, to a point where I could cope with the onslaught of that damn smoke alarm going off constantly in my head!

See, I told you it was big.

This morning was better than normal, but, as usual for me, I started feeling a deep sense of panic and anxiety during the short drive to work. I started moaning. Then, for the very first time, I was able to think to myself: It's that damn smoke alarm going off again.


Look around you. Is there any smoke?


No. No smoke. No smoke at all.

I took a couple of deep breaths. The panic didn't go completely away, and I expect that it never will -- but the alarm turned off (or at least was reset for the next time) and I was able -- my god, as they say -- to feel like I was in control of it, not the other way 'round.

[Insert metaphor here]

-- Freder.

The Lurking Fear

I was spending my second night in a row out on the couch on my porch, with Honey sitting on me and Pooky trying to, reading Asperger's Syndrome and Anxiety by Nick Dubin, and thinking, how could I possibly convey the deep connections and revelations that I'm seeing here without just quoting passages to the point of copyright infringement, when I suddenly had an insight.

Quoting, quoting, quoting. One of my biggest problems, first pointed out to me by an old ex-girlfriend, is that I'm almost incapable of expressing myself in normal conversation without quoting,

But, quoting someone who is not exactly a friend, but whom many of my oldest friends will recognize in the words:

I would bet you "Serious. Folding. Cash" that Charles Schulz, the lamentably late creator of Peanuts, was an Undiagnosed Aspie.

It's in almost every strip that he ever created for the series, and it's also in the sheer dedication of will whereby the strip was his life and his life was the strip, to the point that his first wife divorced him over it, to the point where the notion of anyone else taking it on or continuing it after his death was almost physically repellent to him.

It's especially in the classic strip, later adapted for one of the television specials, in which Lucy, below her sign reading "Psychiatric Help Five Cents," diagnoses Charlie Brown as having "The Fear of Everything" -- and Charlie Brown literally blows her over with his cry of:

"THAT'S IT!"

Furthermore, I would bet you that the number of adults walking around out there with undiagnosed Asperger's is potentially astounding.

It wasn't an accepted diagnosis until something like 1993 -- no one was making that diagnosis when I was a little kid, and it wasn't even a glimmer in Mr. Asperger's head until, I think, the early fifties. Something like that.

Peanuts could be a rallying cry that more attention needs to be brought to the diagnosis -- not just to improve the lives of children who suffer with Asperger's, but to explain the lives of some us who always knew that something was wrong -- but never had a word for it.

-- Freder.

Oh! Ehm. . . Gee!

Some of my friends. I mean that in the nicest possible way.

What makes a good day?

I slept in until past eleven o'clock, ate three slices of white pizza for breakfast, got through my morning chores and hied me to Wallyworld, where I refilled my prescriptions for Prozac and the stomach medicine I'm on. More important, I bought two Sun Parasol plants, nine more packages of nasturtium seeds, a big bag of potting soil, and the usual staples.

Now all four of the hangy things around the outside of my house have bee-yoo-tee-ful flowas hanging from them. I'll plant the seeds on Sunday.

I had a big lunch, then decided not to work in the Studio. It's so fiddly, with so many little things to unpack, many of which carry associations. Since the theme of the room is art, a lot of my mother's things are going in there. I just didn't feel up to it emotionally.

Instead, I "finished" in the laundry room. Unpacked three big bags, two boxes and a bin, repaired a lamp and a wooden robin, got the bags up into the attic and the ironing board down from the attic, moved a chair and the dry-sink that my paternal grandfather Adolph made, all those years ago, in from the garage. Did two loads of laundry. The room is now more or less complete, and I think it looks pretty good for a laundry room.

This means that only the Studio remains, and I'll be done. I wonder what I'll do with myself?

After all of that, I strung Christmas lights all along the length of my porch. It looks like a party out there now.

Anxiety was my companion for much of the day, but so were the quats. I opened most of the windows and the door to the laundry room and they thought this was great. It was a wet, humid, "misty moisty" day, and the covers of the unread books that I have lining the porch all started to curl.

I repaired the one marble game that I had managed to save from Mom's collection and took it up to the playroom. Whitey followed me there. I dropped the marbles into the top and he froze. As they rolled down the ramps he watched them in a state of entrancement. He was so funny! When all the marbles had landed at the bottom he sniffed at them and pawed them, and I decided it was time for him to leave the room.

About the only serious worry I had is Patches. She has a bad cold, didn't eat anything all day, just stayed out on the porch, lying on the carriage seat, snuffling and snuffling.

*

When I can fit it in, I continue my reading. The Guide is fascinating. I want to know who this author is and how he knows so much about me. If I were the sort of person who used highlighters, ninety percent of the pages that I have read so far would be shimmering with a neon glow.

I read a section and am so struck with it that I say to myself, out loud, Oh my god, I have to quote this on the blog. Then I read the next section and am so struck with it that I say to myself, out loud, Oh my god, I have to quote this on the blog. Then I read the next section and am so struck with it that I say to myself, out loud, Oh my god, I have to quote this on the blog. 


You get the idea. But quoting other people is one of those habits I have to get away from.

This could be Dr. Seuss's My Book About Me. It is disturbingly revelatory about how I think, feel and act.

I will quote just one paragraph -- because it explains some of what I have written here on this blog, and elsewhere.

When such children are confused as to the intentions of others or what to do in a social situation, or have made a conspicuous error, the resulting 'negative' emotion can lead to the misperception that the other person's actions were deliberately malicious. The response is to inflict equal discomfort. . . : 'He hurt my feelings so I will hurt him.' Such children and some adults may ruminate for many years over past slights and injustices and seek resolution and revenge.

And the camera rolls in to a choking close-up of Mister Spock, who raises one eyebrow, looks meaningfully at the captain, and says:

"Indeed,"

-- Freder.

Triggered by Pancakes

Everyone in the house loved pancakes for breakfast, but Mom hated cooking them. Funny, but when the roles were reversed and I was the one doing all the cooking -- suddenly she loved pancakes for breakfast again, wanted 'em all the time.

Unfortunately, I could not cook pancakes to save my soul. The two times that I tried, I botched it so miserably and made a mess of everything and ended up in tears. It was one of those things that confirmed to me that I destroy everything I touch.

[This is why a part of me welcomes the realization that I have Asperger's, because it explains so much, while at the same time I hate it, because it confirms that I really am everything that I felt I was]

So, we ended up eating breakfast as much as two or three times a month at Friendly's, just about the only place in this town where you can get pancakes for breakfast.

Pancakes made her happy. Making her happy made me happy.

Just now, I was really set off by a commercial on TV for Friendly's. All they had to do was show the logo and I was off.

I'll never eat there again. Me, I'm more a French Toast kind of person, and I can actually cook French Toast without bringing destruction down around me.

We're rapidly coming up on a couple of rough landmarks here. May 2 will be her first birthday where she's not around to enjoy it. And just two weeks after that, she was dead. I never dreamed on May 2 that by May 16 it would all be over.

Except that it wasn't over -- it was just beginning. While I stumbled about in a drunken haze of despair, my sister began her systematic efforts to completely disassemble my life right out from underneath me. I was living in an illusion, trying to plaster over everything that was falling apart around me. Literally nailing boards over the windows that my sister broke so that she could steal from the estate, from me, from herself. Mom's death yanked the whole rug of my life right out from under me.

It's important to note that it's slowly getting better.

But every once in a while a Friendly's commercial comes along, and peels the scab clean away.

*

The books that I ordered arrived today: The Complete Guide to Asperger's Syndrome, by Tony Atwood, and Asperger Syndrome and Anxiety: A Guide to Successful Stress Management, by Nick Dubin. I've already started reading the former, while dinner was in the oven.

With every page, with almost every paragraph, I'm experiencing a surge of , , , gad, certaunly not elation. Confirmation. Yes, by God, that's me! Yes, by God, that's me! Yes, by God, that explains so much!

I am coming to realize that the anxiety and depression that I always thought were the causes of my other behaviours are in fact only symptoms of the larger cause.

I feel just as if a previously undiscovered skeleton key has been slipped into my brain, and the lock has finally tumbled, and answers are pouring out through an opening that never existed before.

My Second Self

"On the spectrum" sounds like a nice place to be, a place full of color and light. That it may be, but the closer I look at that place and the further back I go in time, the more I see the little cracks and disconnects that I've been falling through all of my life.

I actually tried to tell people at various times. I remember writing to someone that my entire life was "falling between stools." It's the reason why I'm incapable of writing in any specific genre, check out the fiction I've posted if you don't believe me. It all  has elements of mystery and fantasy and literary fiction, but it doesn't fit neatly into any of those categories, which makes it hard to get published.

I never knew what "on the spectrum" meant, although I saw it at work on books, especially Growing Up On the Spectrum. I never heard of "Asperger's Syndrome" until I came to work in my current job, and didn't know anything substantive about it until last week. I'm 52 years old. When I was a little kid, nobody was making that kind of diagnosis -- no wonder that the doctors and behaviour therapists and, ultimately, my parents, all threw their hands into the air and essentially gave up on me.

Today at work, I was deeply focussed on pulling a return when a student came up behind me rather too quickly and aggressively for my comfort zone and then paused behind me meaningfully. I immediately dropped into the character that I play in front of other people: the person who smiles and says hello, the person who seems to care about someone else's needs, the person who appears to know the answers, the professional person, the normal person.

The fact is that I don't give a good god damn about helping them, but I have to make believe that I do in order to hang onto my job. It does not come naturally or easily to me; it's a second self that has taken me years to develop, a costume that I wear when I am out among the living. It's a coping mechanism, a completely artificial construction, a cracked mask that I have to wear to "pass" in the Real World. It's one of the behaviours common to Asperger's Syndrome. I use it even with my oldest friends. The alternative would be to go and find a corner to hide in, and people who do that don't survive in the real world.

The one normal thing I do have is a survival instinct.

I was lucky today; I happened to know the answer to his question, and I was able to give the programmed response, and even fake a laugh when he said something that I didn't catch, but which was obviously intended as humor. I've learned over the years that if the response is generic enough and appropriate enough, you don't actually have to understand what people say to you. Laugh at the right time, and eventually they'll go away and leave you alone.

One of the things I read today in Growing Up On the Spectrum was that, for autistic or Asperger children, Time Outs don't work as a disciplinary measure. Boy, do I understand that! I used to love being sent to my room! My room was a complete world for me. As the book points out, Asperger children enjoy being alone. It means that we don't have to interact with other people. If you want to punish an Asperger child, deposit them in the middle of a group of strangers and order them to Make Nice.

Asperger's is made up of a list of behaviours (as opposed to symptoms) as long as your arm -- and, to varying degrees, I display them all.

A good friend asked me yesterday "Have you been to a doctor or are you self-diagnosing based on an online test?"

As usual, my answer to her is complicated. (Nothing about interacting with others is simple to an Aspie).

Sometimes you ask yourself, and sometimes you know.

If you get a pain in your side, you have to ask yourself, "What the hell is that?" 'Cuz it could be a lot of things.

But if you get a cold or the flu -- baby, you know it! You may want to go to a doctor to get something for it. but you don't need to go to a doctor to have it explained to you. It just is, right? You may even want to go to the doctor if you want to prove to an unreasonable boss that you're sick.

That's where I am right now. It's clear that if I have or want to prove to someone else that this is the case, I will have to find a way somehow (don't know where to begin) to get a diagnosis.

But I've been reading and reading and reading about this, and I've been examining my behaviours both now and going all the way back as far as my earliest memories will take me. . .

If it was just one or two things, perhaps I would still be asking, and if you have to ask, it probably isn't so.

But it's everything. It even explains the things that I thought were the explanations -- but which are really just more indications. I have a couple of books on order and I will continue to read and pursue this and try to find some clarification.

But I'm not asking anymore. I have a cold. Now to deal with it -- somehow.

-- Freder,

Fuck all

Spent my whole damn life pretending to be normal. Got so that I was pretty good at it, when in public. Never understanding why it didn't seem so hard for everyone else. Never understanding how everyone else could be so easy and relaxed when I was tearing myself apart inside. Pretending to be social when all I ever wanted was to find a hole and crawl into it. Never knowing the reason why I preferred the company of animals to that of people.

All a joke, all a fake, all for Show, a Command Performance, see the Amazing Retard Pretend to be a Real Boy. No matter what I told myself or how hard I tried, I was never going to be normal and I never had a chance. No wonder I could never sustain a relationship with a woman. I could never figure out what it was about me that frustrated them so much. I tried so hard, but trying had its limits.

Whenever I had to make a cold phone call to anyone, for whatever reason, I always had to have a written script in front of me, and even then I was so panicked that I could hardly bring myself to dial. Start to dial, hang up. Start to dial, hang up. Calling to ask women out was pure torture, and I guess they sensed it, they always said no.

Always doing things because that was how normal people did it, that was how it was done, I forced myself even though I was screaming inside.

I learned that I could be the life of the party if I recited from Bill Cosby's comedy albums, which of course I knew by heart, or from Monty Python (ditto). I learned that I could make a hit in a play if I faithfully imitated the actor from the original Broadway cast album.

Even when it came to writing, I learned by aping the style of other writers. I have no style of my own. It's all written to sound like what I've read elsewhere.

My whole life has been a bad joke, a game of "Let's Pretend," a game of "Follow the Leader." No wonder I never left home, until I was forced out. I really am all those things the other kids called me on the playground. And now I'm angry that I've spent my life trying to please them, without hope of success.

"Gooble-Gabble, One of Us. . ."

It's not so much that it explains so much of my life. It's that there's no part of my life that it doesn't explain. My habit of quoting other people all the time (my friend H_____ once ragged on me, "Take away Monty Python, take away [something else], take away Doug." I thought it terribly cruel at the time. Now I see that he's right). The impulsive ripping of skin off of my fingers. The fact that all my girlfriends dumped me, seemingly for the same reason, and yet it always came as a surprise. The always keeping as much to myself, by myself as possible, and taking everything so personally. My problems with certain subjects in school. The fact that I can't stand up to anyone, except on paper, and then usually in an explosion of pent-up rage that has more to do with past events than what's really in front of me. The fact that I can't seem to get through my morning chores without moaning, "help, help" all the time, because the simplest things seem so difficult. My trouble focusing at work (like, I'm writing obsessively on my blog right now instead of doing something that I should be doing). All that depression and anxiety -- that turns out to be just a part of it.

On the one hand, it makes the last five years and what I've been through during that time look almost heroic. If it's true, how did I get through it? No wonder Mom sometimes found me difficult.

On the other hand, I've always suspected that I was a freak. Now I know that it's true. "One of us, one of us, gooble-gabble, one of us," Christ, even most of my post titles are quotes.

I don't feel at all relieved to finally know that it has a name. Instead, I'm in despair because now I know that it's never going to get better, that I'm always going to be like this, that it may even get worse as I get older, that I could possibly wind up in one of those god-awful "assisted living" places.

That I'm incapable of creating anything truly original.

That, most likely, I am probably going to be alone for the rest of my life.

I wonder if I should tell my boss. On the one hand, her brother has Asperger's and she might be able to point me in the right direction for getting a proper diagnosis. It might explain some of my behaviours to her. On the other hand, she is my boss and the potential for her to use this against me is quite real.

Oh, yeah, the minor paranoias. That, too.

I can't think of anyone else I could talk to about it.

I'm not sure that learning about this is a great big help to me. Right now, it seems to be making things worse.

Now What?

Today I took two online tests, one for Autism, one for Asperger's.  No, I don't regard online tests as authoritative. But when the results all say the same thing, it is an indicator that I should look into this more closely and maybe get a formal evaluation.

Test #1 gave me this result:

Based upon your responses to this autism screening measure, it appears that you may be suffering from an autism spectrum disorder, or Asperger's disorder. People who score similarly often qualify for a diagnosis of autism or Asperger's.


Test #2 yielded the above graphic, a fourteen page PDF explaining what it means, and the following summary:


Thank you for filling out this questionnaire.

Your Aspie score: 144 of 200
Your neurotypical (non-autistic) score: 70 of 200
You are very likely an Aspie


So, today I found out that I could well have Asperger's Syndrome, and that I have to buy a new car within two weeks (or continue to drive my Malibu illegally) at a time when I don't think I can take on any more debt.


And I don't know what to do about any of it. The saying goes, "Life Sucks and then you die." 


Hey, Mort! Don't keep me waiting, damn it!

Connect the Dots, Lalalala. . .

If I'm looking at you with a blank stare on my face, it's probably because I didn't understand what you just said, and I'm tired of saying "I'm sorry?" or "What?"

It's been this way all of my life. It's not a hearing problem. When I ask people to repeat themselves, oftentimes more than once, they sometimes raise their voices. Someone once even said to me, angrily, "Why don't you clean your ears out?"

I can hear you just fine. The problem is, I can't understand you. It all sounds to me like the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons: "Wa WAH wa waa, wa wa wa WAH."

When I was a little kid I couldn't understand most of the dialogue in movies and on TV; I followed the story visually, and if it was something that couldn't be followed that way, like, say, A Man for All Seasons (which traumatized me as a kid because it was nothing but people yammering for two hours and then they cut off his head), I would just tune out and disengage.

It didn't start to get better until middle school, when stations started running things like Batman and Star Trek in the afternoons, and I could watch the shows as much as I liked, picking up something new every time.

To this day, I still have trouble with some people and certain words and certain kinds of voices. I don't always "get" all the dialogue in talk-heavy movies. In a group conversation, I still oftentimes miss a lot of what's said and end up withdrawing emotionally from the conversation.

It's one of the reasons I hate the telephone. I have a hard enough time understanding people when I can see their lips move. The only person I can really talk with on the phone for any length of time is my friend BC, who speaks quite clearly and distinctly.

If I appear not to be engaging with things that are being said, it's probably because I am not even "there."

As a kid they called this "daydreaming." Now I wonder if it wasn't something else.

I have to be careful here, because I don't want to make any claims, and I don't have the knowledge or experience to make a diagnosis. I'm certainly not looking for sympathy. What I'm about to type, I'm not saying that it's so.

It's just that every time I see a news story, as I did last night on The PBS News Hour, about Autism or Asperger's, I listen carefully to the symptoms and inevitably I think, "Jesus Christ, they're describing me as a kid."

When I look at pictures of those little boys, I could be looking at pictures of me.

My parents carted me to doctors who checked my hearing and told them that it was a little bit better than normal. They took me to a school behavior therapist who, as far as I know, never told them anything. Meanwhile, I lived in my own little world, read a lot, and interacted with other children only in one-on-one situations. When I got involved with groups, the other kids would inevitably make fun of me or beat me up and I'd go home crying.

The Hulk was my favorite Marvel Comics character because I could understand him: both what he was saying and what was going on in there.

Just now I Googled "undiagnosed autism in adults" (yes, I'm aware that this is about as unscientific as you can get), and once again, reading down through the articles I had the uncomfortable sensation that I was reading about myself.

Again, I'm making no claims; additionally, if this was true, then I feel it would have to be classified as a minor case -- probably trending more in the direction of Asperger's than autism.

But it would explain so much: the inappropriate reactions, the emotional outbursts, the sensitivity to heat and the sun, the frustration and anxiety, the manic / depressive spells, the feeling of constantly being overwhelmed by the daily things of life that most folks take for granted,  the occasional physical ticks and stammering, the anti-social feelings (when I was little I would actually hide behind the sofa when people came to the house; I'm too big to do that now, otherwise I would!), the single-mindedness, the discomfort I feel in group situations and the difficulties "maneuvering through complex social cues at school, at work, or elsewhere."

The things, in short, that I often write about on this blog.

Could it be? Maybe not. I'm lousy with numbers and math, no Rain Man here!

Do I even want to know the answer?

I'll have to think on that a while longer.

-- Freder.