Meet the Neighbors

I barely know any of them, have only lived here three and a half months, yet I already have bones to pick with all of my neighbors.

My east-side neighbor looks like a Nazi. He's definitely at type A personality. He has extensive gardens in his back yard, and is building a garage (apparently, all by himself) on a parcel of land that used to go with my house. His gardening style is particularly Aryan. He doesn't tend his garden, he attacks it, as if it were the enemy. He never gets down on his knees, but stands and really puts his back into it, stabbing with a pitchfork. He might as well be bayonetting the ground. The other morning I spotted him in a patch of wild, wooded ground that I thought still went with my house. I could be wrong. He was attacking the trees with a gigantic set of pincers, snapping off all the lower branches as far as he could reach, and also snapping at any shrubbery that was growing from the ground. I wanted to holler at him, "Stop it! You're turning a nice wild area into something tame!"

But I held my tongue. Direct confrontation is something I've always had trouble with.

The next time I saw him, he was stalking around his new garage-in-progess with a tool belt around his waist, driving screws into door and windowframes. I wanted to say to him, instead of doing that, why don't you use some of that Germanic energy to get up off your butt and put some siding on that eyesore? Even the backside of his house has bare unsided walls. Let your poor garden grow and do something to beautify the community, Kaspar!

Worse are my Western neighbors. To use the terminology of my new Mutant Brethren, they are obvious neurotypicals. Normal People with a capital "Nor!"

They're so damn friendly, and they love to make small talk. Over Easter weekend I was working in my yard, minding my own bidniss, when I was hailed -- by name -- from their porch.

I've met them twice and I can't remember their names. I'm no good at that.

It was the woman of the house. I would have been perfectly happy with a wave and a "Nice day, isn't it?"

But no. Every time I see these folks we have to stand around and talk about nothing at all. Before I knew it, her husband came out to join in. Then her mother came out.

I do not know how to interact with these people. We must have "talked" for ten minutes and none of it was worth saying. They said that if they had known I was alone, they would have invited me to Easter dinner.

No, no, no, no, no, NO! Easter dinner with people I know only from two casual meetings-in-passing? Talk about a stranger in a strange land! Just because we, by chance, live next to each other does not make us intimate. Leave me alone! 


"That's a lot of house for just one guy," quoth the husband. That's getting into the realm of too personal a comment for someone that I don't know at all.

Worse yet, are my Northern neighbors. It was this family that had the medical emergency a while back. The father came through it all right, and I'm glad for them. In fact, I really had nothing against these people -- a casual hello here and there, they minded their business and I minded mine.

Until yesterday, when I saw that they had chopped down one of the lilac trees that separated their yard from mine. I would have sworn that it was my lilac bush -- but let's assume that it was on their property line . . . I certainly don't know for certain where it falls.

Even so -- why would anyone cut down a perfectly good little lilac tree that was just starting to send out some leaves for the spring? Especially when it was one of the very few things that was shielding you from your neighbor?

I just don't get such a random act of cruelty. I regard lilac bushes as one of the better things in life. Anyone who would maliciously chop one down like that needs a punch in the snoot.

Everyone kept a low profile during the winter, but now the fur is starting to fly!

My neighbors had better start to Shape Up and Fly Right, lest they set off the notorious ire and Ill Will of the Amazing Aspergian Boy!

-- 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,

That's Gotta Hurt...

The Man Who Laughs must be one of the most casually grotesque movies ever made. Excepting only Mary Philbin, everyone in it is hideous, especially including Olga Baclanova, who could be prepping herself here for her work in Tod Browning's Freaks. The light that comes into her eye as she forces Conrad Veidt to lower his cloak is probably the most horrifying thing in the picture.

Even with Paul Leni at the helm to explain it, it's hard to believe that this is a product of Hollywood. The Man Who Laughs is as German as they come, baby, and no two ways about it. It's Caligari with a budget.

And yet I found it curiously uninvolving. I've had that problem with Leni's work before. Everything about its appearance is terrific, but Appearance is all that it's about, and we get the message early on. At an hour and fifty minutes, I found it impossible to get through in one sitting. The parade of grotesquerie combined with the inevitability of the plot was just too much.

It's possible, too, that the type of disfigurement is a problem. Why is the Hunchback of Notre Dame sympathetic, while The Laughing Man is not? Is it because Quasimodo is so challenged that he doesn't even understand why he's being whipped, while Gwynplaine, the title character here, is intelligent and seems to be asking for what he gets? We are repeatedly asked to feel his pain, and I wasn't buying.

The one thing I was not expecting was a Happy Ending. A final fade-out with everyone reunited, hugging all around weeping tears of Joy -- in Victor Hugo?

Thankfully, the DVD includes, as an extra feature, some text from the end of the original novel, where it's revealed that Leni and Universal didn't so much change the ending as lop off about four pages of Hugo's Purple Prose. Oh yes, everyone is Happily reunited -- but then the girl dies of a heart attack and Gwynplaine throws himself into the ocean and drowns. Now, that's more like it!

You left out those minor, nagging details, Leni! And, literally, in the end it kills your picture.

Conrad Veidt gets a special medal for his performance as Gwynplaine. Most likely, it should be a Purple Heart: the device that distorts his mouth has got to be an instrument of torture. And to convey so many other emotions with, essentially, the whole lower half of his face taken away as an instrument had to be a challenge. Veidt delivers, and it's hard to understand why this picture didn't make him a major star.

Just by the way, is there anyone out there who does not know that Jerry Robinson used Veidt as his model when he created The Joker? Just thought I'd throw that out there as my daily entry into the Bleedin' Obvious.

The Man Who Laughs is probably not a movie that I should be watching at this moment in my history. I ordered it up about a month ago, before the latest blow came. That I wasn't particularly bothered by it says more about the movie's failings than it does about me. It's all face, no feeling.

-- 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!