Hearts and Flowers

. . . and now with our pow-wow of the weekend behind us, my typing fingers are freed and I can safely reveal that my friend of approximately 32 years, one of my best friends in the world -- BC, I've referred to him numerous times on the blog -- is getting married.

And my reaction, my feelings, as you already know, are exceedingly mixed.

There is the part of me that is genuinely happy for him. This is something he's worked on for a long time.

And on the other hand, there's the part of me that's going: What the fuck??!! Where in fuck's name did that come from??

But even the shock is secondary to the feeling I can't shake, that I am losing one of my best friends ever, that my life is being diminished yet again.

And don't give me that line about "Oh, you're not losing a friend, you're gaining another friend!" That line is such a load of cod's bollocks that even the people who spout it don't believe it. Fact is, this changes everything from here on. There's a reason why the tarot card named "Le Morte" always features a scythe-swinging skeleton. Death and Change are the same devil.

And I guess that's where a lot of the anger that flashed through me when I heard the news came from. Still mourning one loss. Didn't need another.

Well, that and the fact that I thought I'd reached the stage in my life when I would never have to attend another fucking wedding, ever again. To steal from my friend EWR's vast catalog of colorful sayings, I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon.

But there's more. Those of you who have been reading here for a while must know by now that I am quite the perverse and capricious bastard.

I'm jealous. What's he got that I ain't got? I'm at least as good a catch as he is, warts and all. How come he can make this happen and I can't?

Fact is, I have never walked out of any relationship. I'm always the one who gets dumped. I've tried to learn from the mistakes of the past, but it always ends the same way.

The one I lasted with longest was Lorna. We lasted barely over a year. She had a bad case of "Guess What I'm Thinking" and "Guess Why I'm Angry at You." Had I known then that I had Asperger's I might have been able to make a better case for myself. As it was, I used to beg her, "TELL me what you're thinking. TELL me what you're feeling. DON'T make me try to guess. I can't read your mind." Truth was, I couldn't read her face or her body language, either, and now I know why.

She told me early on that she never wanted to get married again, because her first marriage had been such a terrible experience. Her first husband did things like throw bricks at her, or strangle her until she went unconscious and then anally rape her while she was out. I listened to all this and took her at her word.

As time went on, I kept getting a vibe from her that I couldn't understand. Because I took her at her word, I didn't even want to mention the M word. One day when she was particularly cranky at me I said, "I would marry you. . ."

And she said, "That's not what I want."

I wanted to shake her. I wanted to say, "What do you want? Just tell me!"

One afternoon I called her and she said, "We have to talk."

I was so stupid in those days that I said, "About what?"

So that was it. She broke up with me over the phone. I wish I could say that I never saw her again, but we worked for the same newspaper, and with all the daily stress of banging out advertising on the tightest of schedules mixed with my sadness over losing Lorna, I eventually had a nervous breakdown and walked out of that job.

Which was a mistake, really. I'd have been so much better off staying there. I could have managed it without the complications. Never date anyone you work with.

Strangely enough, that lesson still hadn't sunk in when I started seeing a lovely lady that I worked with at the first bookstore that I worked in. We lasted about three months. I had it in my head that I had lost Lorna and a couple of others because I was too withdrawn, too reserved, and so I dropped the "L" bomb early on.

Now, mind you, I don't understand to this day why the "L" word should be so toxic. I've loved a lot of people in my day -- doesn't mean that I wanted to jump into a Marriage Ceremony with them. But, oh dear, suddenly I was a threat to her freedom. I went over to her house one evening bearing pizza and a movie, expecting a nice, normal casual evening, and instead she broke up with me.

I went out into the dark and sat alone on the front steps of her house. I could physically feel something breaking inside of me. It wasn't my heart. I know this because my heart still troubles me with feelings of wistfulness on a daily basis, feelings that can't be pursued because That Way Lies Madness and, perhaps, an appointment with the tallest building in town. What was breaking might have been my last connection with the world that Most Everyone Else lives in.

That was a decade ago. I haven't had a relationship since. I'll probably be alone the rest of my life. In the words of The Great Man, W.C. Fields, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No sense being a damn fool about it."

So Anyway.

Although they have little reason to know it, as we see each other seldom enough and when we do get together I am usually withdrawn and distant in the manner of those who share my disease, I value my friends highly. It's a blow to lose this one.

-- 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.

It All Comes Out in the Wash

The last few days have been bags that were too mixed for my taste. I know it can't be helped.

On Friday my new washer and dryer were delivered, so I am back in the washing business again after too long. Finally able to change the covers on both living room sofas, which needed changing badly (I'm doing that today), finally able to change the sheets on my bed after I won't say how long. But when I moved here into the new house, I deliberately did not use clean sheets on the cot because I wanted the cats to have some familiar smells around the place, and until this past Friday they still hadn't been changed out. 

Things are getting much less gamey around here.

The delivery crew were easily the best and most professional people that I've worked with through this whole process, but did they have to be so young? I'm used to workmen being older than me, or at least my age; now it seems that I've crossed the line, these guys looked like college-age kids to me.

It was so cold that day that something had frozen deep down inside the washer, so the water couldn't drain out. I had to wait a couple of hours for it to thaw out. To aid this, I opened the door that connects the laundry room with the kitchen, and it was clear right away that the screen I put up to keep the cats out was not going to work at all. So most all of them got to check out that room, and Whitey was so funny about it. He loved the washer! Was it the loud purring sound that it made? He was spinning around, wiping his face on its corners, whipping his tail about, kneading the floor with his front paws. Whazzup wid dat?

The washer itself is one of those newfangled low-energy, high-efficiency, low water use models. You even have to use special detergent with it. I almost didn't buy it for that reason, because now I have almost a whole box of detergent that I can't use. Then I realized that nearly all the machines were of the same newfangled breed, and the ones that weren't didn't have the capacity I wanted (I have a couple of comforters that wouldn't have fit). So -- eh, what's a box of detergent against the benefits? 

I read the manual while I waited and I was glad that I did. It pointed out that "you might hear different sounds than what you are used to in your old washer."

Indeed. I would have been terrified that I'd broken the thing!

I stayed out there and stared at the washer, like an idiot, for the whole first cycle. It's worse than watching a kettle boil. I kept wishing that I could open the lid to see what was going on in there.

When the first load was behind me and I knew that everything was working, I was hit quite suddenly and quite hard with a terrible depression. Dropped on me just like those 16-ton weights in the Monty Python sketches. I've tried hard to understand these things, but I could not understand this. This was a good, big task to get done. I should have felt exactly the opposite. 

Instead my whole body began to feel heavy, like a load of mud. Is there such a thing as post-washer depression? It wasn't a tearful kind of thing. I felt dazed and sad and burned out. The music I was playing didn't help: the back half of Renaissance: Turn of the Cards is almost unbelievably depressing, but it had been so long since I'd heard the album that I'd forgotten this. I ripped it out of the player and went through about five more disks trying to find something that wouldn't drag me down, without success. Even the cheerful music made it worse.

It was all I could do to keep from reaching for the vodka bottle. I could not stop thinking about it. Only the knowing that it wouldn't solve any problems, and the line that I drew in the sand months ago about not drinking during the day kept me from doing it. 

I did all the right things. I kept busy and made some progress both upstairs and with the laundry. It got a little better by late afternoon, then worsened again in the evening. I meant to go to bed early, but once again got caught up in another late night of tracking down old songs on the internet. One of the scores I made was Nat King Cole's rendition of "Stardust." Possibly the loveliest recording ever made. That helped.

To try and wind down, I took a quick, late-night stroll around the block of my new neighborhood. It was a freezing, bright night. Plumes of smoke rose out of the chimneys of most of the houses, including my own. I walked up and back, past the high school, then down and around to my own home. I stood out there looking at it for a little while. It's tall and somewhat gothic in shape, if not in materials. I like the looks of it a lot.

By the next morning, I was in full anxiety mode about the public event that I was responsible for that afternoon at the store. I was as well-prepared as could be, but the anxiety was strong enough that it made getting through my morning chores that much harder, which only added to the frustration. 

Worry about my boss was part of it. BS (yes, those are her real initials) is such an intense, controlling micro-manager that she drives nearly all of us crazy -- but recently she has been leaving me alone, and for this event she did not involve herself at all, even when I asked for input. In fact, waiting fruitlessly for answers to some of my questions actually contributed to the anxiety factor by forcing me to cut the deadlines dangerously close, and then having to make the decision myself under time constraints and hope that it was the right one. I'm not normally afraid of making a decision, but I am when it comes to BS, and there isn't a single person who works in the store who doesn't understand why.

With anyone else, her sudden and unannounced shift to non-involvement might be considered a show of confidence. But I have a strain of paranoia in my blood, and can't help but think that her motivations have more to do with distancing herself from my department so that she doesn't get cut when the long knives come out.

The first hour at work was a little frantic, but I slowly got my bearings, and my students were mostly wonderfully cooperative and helpful. One of them even brought her roommates to help out, and they did a great job, too. The event came together really well, and the relief was palpable. You can see it on my face in the picture I had taken with Arthur.

But attendance was down over last year, unit sales were down over last year, and by mid-afternoon I was letting all that get to me. Once again last night I was depressed and tired, and once again I stayed up too late scoring music. This time it was Clannad: Past Present (the first CD I ever bought. I foolishly gave it to an old girlfriend only to lose both of them!), and a compilation of Patsy Cline songs. Eclectic is an overused word, but it describes my musical taste perfectly well. 

Today I slept in an extra hour, and have been taking it easy, puttering around with the laundry, writing this post. When I'm done here I'm going to go into the kitchen and make up a big bucket of popcorn, maybe see what's on TCM. Sometime this afternoon I need to run out to the store. 

Next week ought to be easier.

-- Freder.

The Human Whirlwind

I accomplished so many goals this weekend that I deserve a gold star!

I also learned that it's pointless to clean around boxes, because the minute you get those boxes out of the way, the floor is dirty again.

My house is notably less strewn with boxes than it was going into the weekend. Mind you, there are still boxes. But places that were barely navigable are navigable again. Progress is being made. Of course, sometimes this involves taking certain things out of one box and putting them into another, or just throwing them on a dresser or a bed, kicking those decisions down the road; but the overall trend is in the right direction!

I found the nuts and bolts for my drawing table and last night, until well after one AM, I reassembled the bloody thing. And re-assembled it, and re-assembled it. I kept getting parts backwards. This is not because I was hitting the bottle too heavily. But it had been y'know, more than three months since I took it apart, and the design is almost counter-intuitive, I had the base pointing in the wrong direction to start with, and that had a ripple effect through the whole process. The first time I put it together it would have worked great -- if I had wanted to draw lying on the floor! The second time it faced backwards and would have required the artist to become a contortionist.

I can have a salty tongue, and as this went on you would swear (the operative word being swear) that I had opened a fresh canister of Morton's Iodized and dumped it into my mouth. By the last round I wasn't even attempting to string the cuss words into a coherent sentence, it was just Verb, Verb, Verb, Adjective, Verb, Noun, Noun, Noun.

But I got the damn thing together -- and suddenly, my notions for the room were pulled into focus. I stood in the doorway and admired the view. It didn't matter that there were still boxes and things all anyhow. I had a drawing table and a chair in front of it, an art cabinet at its side with a light on it, suddenly the room said  "Studio." It's the sunniest room in the house. It has shelving and storage and I even found my scrapbook and laid it open across the table.

It was RIGHT.

I worked a little in the Halloween room, got that bed made, got some things placed, it's looking good, too. The back bedroom is still another matter, I've done nothing in there.

I hung a lot of things downstairs, refining the design of three rooms, and decided where to hang some of the rest.

I found several things that were missing. There are still some items that have gone AWOL, but finding what I did makes me hopeful that the rest will turn up.

I scored some vacuum cleaner bags, so I'll be able to do that when the time is right! And I redeemed almost four months worth of bottles.

(Sometimes when I do that, I think back on the year when I was conducting a long-distance relationship with a mostly great gal from Virginia. It lasted about five minutes, but while it was on she made one trip up here to New England, and one day we were driving down the road and passed a bottle redemption place. She saw the sign that said REDEMPTION, and where she came from, redemption meant only one thing! I had to explain to her that no, the people in that house weren't snake-handling or speaking in tongues.)

And I hied me over to one of those Big Box Home Improvement stores and ordered me up a clothes washer and dryer.

I'd like to know how they found out my name and address and the fact that I'd just moved into a new home. But find out they did, and almost one of the first pieces of mail that I got here was a ten percent off coupon on any purchase up to $2,000. I knew that would come in handy, and kept it in a safe place.

Nonetheless, when the time to use it came around, I forgot to bring it with me and had to run back home for it.

The good news is, home was five, instead of twenty-five, minutes away.

I spent too much time looking at all the different models. The front-end loaders looked so cool that I was tempted to go that way. But for about half the price (with the help of the coupon), I has able to get a high-capacity, low-energy, low-water, high-efficiancy washer and dryer, and get out of it for under nine hundred smackers.

My credit card definitely thinks I made the right choice.

After this weekend, I begin to look at my life and the place I am at and compare it with my life the way it was six to nine months ago, and the difference is stark.

I still have flashes of sadness, but it's not the same.

From mid-May until the chaos and stress of the move overpowered it (and sometimes even then), I was, I think almost literally, a prisoner of my grief.

As the new house began to take shape, the sense of newness unfolding fell into place beside the grief. The two emotions are growing together. The one takes the hard edge off the other, and the other reminds me that this particular hit of the restart button came at a horrible cost, and that to fail to take full advantage of it would dishonor my mother's memory in the worst way.

I was going to add a soundtrack here, to share with you what I was listening to this weekend, and to reward your attention for wading through all this drivel, but Fairpoint is rearing its ugly head, the interwebs are not cooperating, and I'm unable to upload the file. Tomorrow, for sure!

-- Freder.

A Whole New World

I might as well blog about this. L_____, especially, has nefarious ways of finding things out, and she can't be trusted with a secret. So everyone is going to know about it anyway, and they'll all have a good laugh at my expense, and I'll blush and get over it and carry on.

The virtues of living in town are starting to manifest themselves. Last night I went out for dinner with two old friends from the bookstore trade and two other friends of theirs whom I'd never met before.

In the old world, this would not have been a happening thing. While my mother was alive I was her only company and she knew how to slather the guilt on if I took too much time for myself. Besides which, if I didn't get home at a reasonable hour, everyone starved. I was the only cook, cleaner and dishwasher.

But this isn't the old world. This is the World version 2.2.1 Snow Leopard Update.

I was able to stop off on the way home from work, feed the quats, give them a pet and a talking to, then drive not more than a mile to the restaurant, not even being the last one to arrive, have a really fun, nice evening out in pleasant company and still be home by seven-thirty-ish!

????!!?? Say what?

Now here's the part that L_____ and E_____ are really going to rag me about. Although they've probably guessed already. Some things don't change.

I was quite taken with one of the women I met last night, she's smart and cute and has a real sense of mischief, which is a powerful attraction for me as L_____ and E____ both know. But of course, she's seeing someone else as of just three weeks ago (three weeks! I couldn't have met this person a month ago?), someone, apparently, named "Rooo-OOO--oob!"

The old me would have just gone home and forgotten all about it.

No, that's wrong. The old me would have gone home and stewed about it. And when I get stewing on something, no damn good ever comes of it.

But this isn't the old Doug. This is Doug version 2.2.1 Snow Leopard update.

I thought, Three weeks isn't a relationship. Three weeks is a long date! Then I thought, L_____ has got to have "friended" her on Facebook.

And because my computer is also not the old computer, I was on Facebook in seconds and sure enough there was C______. I put in a friend request right away. When I checked back in at  11:30 she'd responded in the positive. (I thought, It couldn't have been such a hot date with Rooo-OOO-ooob if she's on Facebook by eleven thirty! Yes, C______, I really did think that. I can be a jerk.)

I didn't have a phone number (and anyway it was 11:30 at night) so I shot out a personal message and asked her out.

By morning I had my answer. It was no. Like I said, some things don't change.

But, you know, it's out of my system now, and I've added a couple of new friends to my collection (can't ever have enough of those) and there will be other C______s down the road (one hopes) and sooner or later, one of them is going to say yes.

Or not. I'm good either way.

Mountains to Move and Thanksgiving Redux

Well. Thanksgiving.

I am actually thankful that I have a lawyer who is a nice person and was concerned enough about me to invite me to her festivities. And I'm thankful that Whitey and Honey, at least, loved the turkey I gave them.

The actual festivities. . . I've had better, I've had worse.

The worst ever was a holiday fete at least a decade ago with my then-girlfriend and her extended family. This was like something out of H. P. Lovecraft. They all looked exactly alike, as if they had been deeply inbred, and this impression was reinforced by my then-girlfriend's confession, prior to the event, that while in her twenties she had conducted a lengthy sexual affair with her own cousin -- and had gone back to him after her divorce from her first husband. And, yes, the guy was there at the family event.

I can think of one really good word to describe the affair: **SQUIRM!**

The only really squirmish factor about this Thanksgiving was being the odd man at a family gathering. J____ had another guest, thank goodness, K_______, a woman visiting for the week from Florida. She had a deep Southern accent and turned out to be quite social, even forward. You might even say that she was close to being a Dirty Old Woman!

But I learned that between 2008 and 2009 she had had herself a Bad Year that put my Bad Year of 2010 to shame. Her husband died, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, her younger brother killed himself, her nephew died playing something that she called "The Choking Game," (I do not want to know the details), and more.

She must have the Cheerful Gene to come through all of that and be as open and upbeat as she was.

I do not have the Cheerful Gene, as those of you who know me are well aware, and I tend to be Eeyore in the best of times.

There was one more nice thing about the afternoon. One of the people was a thirty-something woman, and midway through the afternoon she started looking at me. That way. I didn't discourage it. It's been years and years since a woman looked at me That Way. I'll admit I enjoyed it.

Of course she's married to my lawyer's son, so it's a complete non-starter, but that's okay, too. A little innocent flirtation never hurt anyone.

I came home, gave the cats their treat, made myself a pizza, had my movie night, and didn't fall asleep on it.

The next day was All For Packing. The new house had better actually happen, because I have started to pack For Real and in ways the make the house even more depressing. I have one room basically done, and a good start in several other rooms.

Mainly, yesterday was all about packing up boxes full of books. I went through most of my mother's books and sorted what I wanted to keep from what I wanted not to keep, then started in on my own shelves. I packed up eighteen large boxes of books, carried them downstairs to my "staging area," and guess what? If you look at my shelves you would never know that I had packed anything at all. I realized that "I Have Not Yet Begun" to pack books! Funny -- it was so easy getting them in to the house!

But -- that picture up above? That's all boxed up and the shelf is down in my mother's bedroom, waiting to be loaded up. As soon as the Closing happens on the All-New, All-Different Duck House, I will be ready to start moving.

Fingers Crossed, I hope that it happens this week.

Hope all of you out there in the interwebs land had yourself a good holiday.

-- Freder.