A quote.

Still sick, so just going to throw a quote up.  This excerpt would make me laugh if it didn't make me want to cry.

Indeed, for children with certain kinds of developmental disabilities, the inability to lie can be viewed as a symptom of the disorder. The best example is children with autism, a profound disability in which children exhibit language difficulties and such social deficits as the ability to respond to others' emotions.

Parents of children with autism often report that their children are simply incapable of lying. While at first glance unrelenting honesty might be seen as a virtue, in fact it is at the heart of the social difficulties children with autism experience. For instance, playing children's games becomes an impossibility if the games require children to engage in pretend play. Children with autism are thought to lack a theory of mind allowing them to understand that others have their own perspectives and emotions. In order for a child with autism to lie, they have to understand that two different perspectives are possible simultaneously: the true one ("I broke the lamp") and a false one ("Someone else broke it"). Not only are children with autism unable to imagine that false perspective, but they may be unable to understand that the perspective that others hold is different from their own. The inability to understand that multiple perspectives exist makes them feel that what's in their own mind ("I broke the lamp") is apparent to everyone else.

Consider the irony of the situation. Honesty in children with autism is viewed as a manifestation of their disorder. Subsequently, autistic children who were originally unfailingly honest but have begun to show signs of lying effectively are considered to be showing improvement in their condition.

From The Liar in you Life: The Way to Truthful Relationships.

So basically, autistics assume that you're smart enough to see through bullshit and so don't bother trying. Consider the irony of the situation? I think I'd rather not.

This reminds me of an incident that happened at a restaurant I was working at a couple of years ago.  It had been a slow night and I was breaking the place down with a coworker.  I noticed that a certain container was about half as full as it had been a few moments before.  Saw that the contents that had been in it was now splattered on a shelf to the side.  I mentioned it to my coworker.  Asked him when he'd spilled it.  He sat and denied that he'd had anything to do with it.  Said that it had been that empty the whole time.  I pointed out the mess that he'd missed, noted that there had only been the two of us in the restaurant for at least an hour, and said that I really didn't give a damn one way or the other.  It wasn't me, so that pretty much leaves you, I said.

Took him a good 5-10 minutes to drop the pretense.

Not really feeling it today...

But I'm going to try to make an effort to put at least a little something up every day.  As much to develop the habit and run the groove (rut?) as anything else...

I'm running a pretty nice cold and am in a medicated haze at the moment, so I'm not sure I have much of my own to offer at the moment.  So I'll step aside and throw a couple of links up tonight.  Just a couple of things that have caught my eye, caught my mind, recently.

For the first one, I'd like to introduce you to the Red Shirt Guy if you've not seen him before.   He showed up on the internet a few weeks back, maybe a month or two.  Something like that.  If you don't know what he's talking about, you're probably not alone.  He basically showed up at a gamers convention and called out the developers of the game for fucking up their own storyline.  And for doing so, was dubbed the nerd that out-nerded every nerd, ever.  There was a bit of a backlash when the video first circulated.

It was fairly obvious to a lot of the people that saw the clip that the Red Shirt Guy falls somewhere to the Asperger's end of the spectrum.  And quite a few voices started questioning whether it was okay to mock the kid for his disability.  The general tenor of their responses was one of condescending pity.  They felt sorry for the guy.

A few days after the initial video showed, the Red Shirt Guy posted a response, in which he confirms that he has Asperger's.  

You may look at the initial video and watch with a smug grin.   Or you might watch the second one and feel a sorrowful pity.

I don't think either of those responses are justified.  One of the things I love about talking to people on the spectrum...  It doesn't matter to them whether or not you think what they're doing is cool or hip or whatever.  You get their passion, regardless of what you or anyone else might think of it.  You get truth, regardless of the social acceptability of that.  And that's something I respect.  I say much props.

And as a secondary, I'll post a link to a piece that my friend Debi threw up on FaceBook today, where Jenny Browne argues that "We Should Dance While We Can."

That baby is 4 now, and we talk to her about my father, and about Wynn, knowing all she will remember are stories. We don’t talk about Scott tracing dead-end e-mail trails night after night, researching mental illness, raging at his lost brother and at me, digging futilely for answers.

We talk.  We don't talk.  We speak of.  We deny.  We acknowledge.  We ignore.

I can't help but think of Audre Lourde, saying "Your silence will not protect you."

Thanksgiving? Meh.

Holidays.

Meh.  Humbug.  Something like that.  No.  Really.

Holidays. Family. Friends. Friendship. Kindness. Honesty. Memory. Truth. Hope. Caring.

Like entering a dark room and banging your shin against hard wood.  I stumble over these words quite a bit.  I mentioned in the first post that you'll get a lot of words from me.  Thanksgiving's a day when I have a bit more time on my hands than most people, so you'll probably get even more than you normally would.

My family was never that into holidays in general.  My family wasn't that into family.  My memories of Thanksgiving as a kid were just about as screwy as every other day of the year.

One of my favorite Thanksgiving memories came when I was seventeen or so.  Mrs. Small, my brother's old homeroom teacher and my bio teacher, invited me to share dinner with her and her daughter, Laura.  We sat and ate and rocked it to Neil Diamond as we did the dishes. Which sounds about right.  Good memories with someone else's family. 

My family?  Not so much.  My parents would often use the holidays to piss each other off.  My mother would tell my brother and I that we were having dinner at my aunt's house at 1 pm.  So we'd go to my father's at 10 in the morning, not eat a thing, and then head over to my mother's side of the family.  And be told that we weren't eating until 6 and weren't allowed to have anything until dinner.

When my parents were together, it really wasn't much better.  I remember being ten or so and the dinner at our house.  Mom, dad, my brother.  Me.  Dad's dad.  And his second wife.  Pretty much every adult in the place was shitfaced.  About midway through the meal, Grandpop's wife took a nap.  At the table.  Head down.  Drooling.  I think she may have face-planted in her plate, though that may be an embellishment, a nice little flourish thrown on at the end.  I don't completely recall.

I do recall that we spent another half hour sitting around that table and acting as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening at all.  In a certain sense, there wasn't really anything out of the ordinary about what was happening at all.  You could use that as a metaphor for my childhood, but for the fact that metaphors are supposed to be about substituting one thing for another.  That was my childhood.

Most NT behavior strikes me as not much different.  An acquaintance on FB recently posted this video...

That bit that starts at about 3 minutes in is hilarious.  It also strikes me as almost paradigmatically NT behavior.  Because -

"All of a sudden shit gets real and you're like, blinders up. I didn't see shit. No. That's not my puppet. I don't know that puppet."

That woman passed out in the mashed potatoes?  What woman?  Not my puppet.  I don't know that puppet.

I repeat myself.  I often do.  I've mentioned on numerous occasions that I think that James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" is quite possibly my favorite short story ever.  There's an absolutely brilliant passage at the beginning of the piece.

I couldn't believe it: but what I mean by that is that I couldn't find any room for it anywhere inside me. I had kept it outside me for a long time. I hadn't wanted to know. I had had suspicions, but I didn't name them, I kept putting them away. I told myself that Sonny was wild, but he wasn't crazy. And he'd always been a good boy, he hadn't ever turned hard or evil or disrespectful, the way kids can, so quick, so quick, especially in Harlem. I didn't want to believe that I'd ever see my brother going down, coming to nothing, all that light in his face gone out, in the condition I'd already seen so many others...

I kept it outside of me for a long time.  I hadn't wanted to know.   I didn't want to believe.  That's not my puppet.  I don't know that puppet.  I've been that puppet.

When I was 24, my father died.  His liver finally gave out.  My family did what my family did.  And I turned to my friends.  Only to find that quite a few of them weren't there at all.  (Eric Geyer is strongly exempted from this statement.)

I was told that I was a downer.  I couldn't expect people to want to have to think about such things.  People didn't want to have to think about what it would be like to have someone in their family die.  Admittedly, it was rather inconsiderate of me to have my father die.  I promise I won't let it happen again.  But it was "blinders up" and Jesse out.  The woman that I'd been trying to date (or be friends with) for six months prior to that told me never to call her again three weeks after my father died and two weeks after she told me that I should call her if I needed to talk.  I guess she hadn't wanted to know.  She'd been lying to me, she said, because she hadn't wanted to seem like a bitch.

One girl I knew literally crossed the street the first time she saw me coming.  I guess she wanted to keep it outside of her.

One guy I knew took it upon himself to end our friendship after a couple of conversations we'd had.  I had told him that my younger brother, Ryan, had been suspended from school after cursing at a teacher.  He told me that he thought anger was an absurd response to a death.  I didn't quite agree.  Still don't.  Oddly enough, he ended the friendship after I told him that we could talk about it after he'd gone through it.  Talk to me after you bury your father, I said.  Sam was Arabic.  I was told that in his culture, even speaking of such things was tantamount to wishing them upon him.  Sam seemed to think anger a justified response in that situation.  I guess he hadn't wanted to believe that it could happen.  Not his puppet, not his father, I guess.

Many of you know that I asked Jessica Joyner out a ways back.  And a lot of you have asked me why I'm still even talking about that.  As noted before, my mind doesn't really process information in the same way most of yours does.  I'm not sure I can express what it meant to me to ask her out.  Or how hard that was.  The first time I'd asked her out, she had asked me in what sense I wanted to go out.  I told her that I'd be up for hanging out in any sense she wanted to.  And I meant that.  I'd have been as up for a cup of coffee and conversation as anything.  She told me that she was already seeing someone, so I let it go at that.

One thing that puts me in an entirely different place than a lot of you.  I don't have much in the way of family.  My brother died when I was 16.  Father when I was 24.   Haven't spoken to my mother in about a decade.  And that's a longer story than I think I want to enter with this post.  But for the most part, I don't have a family.  I've got friends or I have nothing.  My friendship isn't something that I offer lightly.  My friendships are about all I have to sustain me.

When I'd heard that Jessica had broken up with her boyfriend, I waited a few months and asked again.  It's funny.  I looked at her and wanted to be a better person than I am.  Looked at her and thought that there would even be a point in trying.  Thought that with what kindness she had shown me in the past, there might be someone who would be willing to give me a chance/hand at doing that.  I hadn't realised that what I thought was kindness was really only politeness.  There's a reason I'd asked her to be direct when I asked her out the second time.  I wouldn't be able to understand her otherwise, I said.

She explained to me that she had just broken up with her boyfriend the previous week and wasn't really up for seeing anyone at the time.  Told me that I just needed to give myself a chance.  Said people might surprise me.  I had thought that that was what I'd been asking for.  A chance to try to surprise someone.  So much for chances. She said that she hoped we could still be friends.  And I, being me, didn't realise that that wasn't kindness, but politeness.  As I've noted before, my friendships are about all I have to go on.  Words and friendships.  She offered me hope.  She offered me friendship.  I didn't realise that she wasn't offering anything at all.  I didn't realise that what I was being shown wasn't caring, but pity.  And pity was not what I'd asked for at all.

I'd say that you could take that as a metaphor for a lot of what's happening in my life, but you know, a metaphor is about substituting one thing for another.

Hope isn't something that comes easily to me.  It's not something I often allow myself to feel, as it very often turns to out to be false.

I think that one of the ways that I tend to see things differently than most.  My "now" is pretty long.  Having an excellent memory can be as much a hindrance as a help.  I can remember a conversation from 10 years ago with startling accuracy.  But in a lot of ways, I carry things forward in ways that NT people don't.  Or maybe we all carry things forward.  It seems to me that we do.  Our lives are shaped by the interactions we have with other people.  We carry those forward.

We all continue the story.  Shape the narrative.  Carry on the conversation.  Some more than others.  I happen to carry it more heavily than the typical person.   Given the nature of my mind, I'm not sure how well I'm heard.  Or if what I'm hearing means what I think it means.  Regardless, I'd like to thank any of you who take the time to listen.  Baldwin tells us that there's no way not to suffer.  So much hatred, anger and love...  But Baldwin also tells us that we can find redemption.  We can offer redemption.  We do it by listening.  You can try to keep it outside of you (not my puppet) or you can find a way to listen.  If you're out there, thanks for listening.

Thanksgiving?

I'm thankful to Jessicca Clarke Schaeffer for reading what was an email that matched this post in length and taking the time to respond.  I'd also like to thank you for working at that soup kitchen.  I spent quite a bit of time eating in them when I was younger.  I'm not sure you know what it means to be on the other side of the counter.  Or how much it means to someone like me that people like you are willing to take the time to do that.

I'm thankful to my cousin, Jessica, for everything you've done over the past three years.  My mother might be too busy paying her mortgages to offer me support or help.  You were too busy with your mortgage, yet still found the time to offer help.

I'm thankful to Mike Jones, Krystle Mikolajczyk, James Caldera and Candice Lowell-Caldera for allowing me into your lives.  I look at the four of you and the relationships you have and hope for something similar myself one day.

Thank you to Ray McElroy, Nancy Sirvent, Kat Warren and Jean Heinsohn for all of the support over the past few years.  Support is often something that seems in short supply.

I would thank Kim Pennington, but she'll probably just let it go to her head.

Thanks to Mark Potter for offering a sane alternative to the OC.  Thanks to JJ and Chad and Alex for thinking of me when the game's about to start.

I will thank Munki, Armand and  Patti for keeping it real.  I know when I talk to you, odds are that what I'm told is exactly what is.  Even if it isn't always pretty.

To all of the LT, Readerville, BookBalloon and FaceBook peeps that listen to my ramblings.

Thanks to Eric Pierce for all of the help over the past six months.  To Yolanda Bishop for inviting me into your home.  To Kate Maloy for being the adopted mother I never had.  To Cody James for being as straight up compassionate as anyone I know.  To George and Kelly Alderman, Eric and Paula, for offering me a helping hand when I needed it.  To Debi Carey Harbuck for all of the comfort offered through the years.  To Thomas Howell and Larissa Humphrey, Jesse Depoy and Christina Castillo, Brennan Mulligan and Drew Meschter and Darren Clossin and Dallas Perez for taking the time to check in every now and again.  It always helps to know that someone is thinking of me. 

In short, I'd like to thank just about anyone that's taken the time to lend an ear or a hand or read a post.  Or who take the time to let me into your lives.  Who've offered friendship or kindness.

You give me hope.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

 

Reading.

Oddly enough, for as much I've read in the past, it's not something I do much at all anymore...

I spent the better part of my high school career doing extracurricular reading in class.  Class would be going on around me, I'd be sitting with a book hidden below my desktop.  Various teachers dealt with this in different ways.  Mr. Boyd, my 8th grade Algebra teacher (and one of my least favorite examples of the profession) dragged my desk (with me sitting in it) to the back of the room.  Told me that if I didn't want to participate in his class, I could sit by myself (ostracism is an interesting tactic).  I got a hell of a lot of reading done in his class.  I suppose I could thank him for that.

Mr. Gelman, who taught Psychology, once stopped the class about forty-five minutes in, and castigated me for not taking notes and reading instead.  He claimed that I was disrespecting him by giving him my undivided attention and having the courtesy to take notes.  I recapped his 45 minutes in three and pointed out that I had yet to get less than a 95% on any test that he had given.  He thought about it and let it go at that.

Ms. Zeigler, my Geometry teacher, used to ask me one question every class period, to make sure I had an inkling of what was being covered.  Every third or fourth day, she'd take a few minutes to come over and sit by me whilst everyone else was finishing whatever assignment they had.  She'd stop by, ask me what I was reading at the moment, talk it over with me briefly.  Towards the end of each marking period, she'd stop by with the sheet showing how she determined her grades (weightings of assignments, tests, notebook (the class notebook, handed in at the end of each marking period, may strike me as one of the most pointless ideas ever)) and a small sheet telling me how many of the homework assignments I hadn't done that I would need to complete in order to get various grades.  I loved Ms. Zeigler.

I spent the first couple of years out of high school hanging around a friend's dorm room reading his books.  (People are right, you can learn a lot at a college.)  Without having graduated from High School or having gone to college, I can still get about an 86% score on a literature specific GRE.  I'm guessing that this says less about me than it does about where the bar stands on the GRE.  I'm actually more proud of the time I gave all five questions to the Jeopardy round "South American Authors" without seeing the clues.

I had a good couple of years after my father died where I'd read a book or two a day.  I actively tried to read outside of whatever comfort-zone I thought I might have.  Forced myself to read things I would never have considered picking up in a million years.  Mitch Albom (a bit trite, but not so bad nonetheless), Paulo Coelho (Very trite, and now I know why I didn't want to read it), Ann Coulter, BDSM manuals, trash romance novels,self-help, math textbooks.  Anything.

I'd walk into a bookstore and pick a random person in the store and tell them to push a book on me.  Any book.

Not so much, anymore. 

And I'm really not so sure why that is.  I guess I've already heard too many words that haven't meant much of anything at all.  The older I get, the less convinced I am that many of them do mean much of anything.  I don't know.  I used to think that amongst those pages, I'd find some answers.  And in a lot of ways, I think I did.  The thing is, they're as contradictory and meandering and meaningful or meaningless as life itself.

One thing I have learned, though, it doesn't matter how "correct" a particular piece of knowledge or information is, if you are not around people who want to hear it in the first place.

Empathy.

One of the defining tropes in conversations regarding Autism is the inability of those displaying autistic tendencies to empathise with others.   Bluntly stated, I think that this is a load of shit.

If the standard neurotypical ("neurotypical" is a term for the "normal" mindset (and I can't even begin to tell you how much I dislike the word "normal")) individual can tell me what it's like to be autistic, I'll entertain the idea that NT's can empathise.  If autistics can't empathise with others, explain to me why such a thing as Autreat exists,  Because really, what is Autreat but a way for autistics to spend time around the people whom they understand and who understand them?

Let's talk about empathy.

Scenes.

The other day I, a DJ friend of mine from the Bay Area was talking to a friend of his on FaceBook about how "sick" a certain track was.  They were laughing about the fact that music that they like is often described as sick, disgusting, ill, fucked up, rude, etc.

It's interesting.  Back in the day, I used to go clubbing quite a bit.  You'll note that I didn't say that I'd go dancing.  I'm not the most physically adept person.  And there are very few things in this world that will make me more self-conscious more quickly than attempting to dance.  I'd normally just go out and soak up the music.  Watch the people.  Sit to the side and nod my head to the beat.  Occasionally try to find a way to strike up a conversation above the din.  I originally got into listening to house music specifically because it was a very mellow scene.  Didn't matter who you were, as long as you were up for some good music and a good time.  Black, white, straight, gay, Asian, Mexican, whatever...  It was always about respecting the music and the people around you.

I really don't think I realised how far from the mainstream San Francisco is until I left.  As I've noted before, I'd heard more racist comments, more homophobic comments, and more Def Leppard in the first six months in Orange County than in the previous decade in San Fran.  I'm not in Oz anymore.

The bar behind the place where I work recently reopened as a gay bar.  The owner, Nicco, insists that he's running it as a mixed club.  He's pretty much full of shit.  (Edit - Someone has told me that this is a bit harsh.  I don't mean it to be.  I wouldn't be stopping in to see the club and Nicco if I didn't like him and the space.  And I don't think there's a single business I've seen since coming to HB that I would love to see succeed more. It's not meant to be harsh, just honest.)

I'll normally poke my head in for at least five minutes each night, just to catch what's going and see what the DJ is throwing down.

Their resident is a gay guy that normally plays a lot of HiNRG Pop shit to satisfy the owner and his friends. I went in the other night to find a straight friend of mine swapping tracks with the DJ. They were just going head to head. Chris would lay down a track. Mike would throw down a response.

They weren't playing to a crowd, because there was no one in the place. They were playing to each other. It was literally just two people dropping respect (insane fucking track, brother) and knowledge (but have you heard this shit?) on each other. I've not used words like "sick" or "fucking disgusting" to describe a set in about a decade. This was all of that and then some.

Normally Chris, the resident,throws down tracks for the crowd. That night the two of them built a groove for the first time I've seen since the place opened. It was just two people playing off of each other and not giving a damn about their supposed differences. They just sat and traded love (that shit is disgusting) and respect (fucking gnarly track, brother). They built something larger than either of themselves by playing off their love for the music.

Call. Response. Response. Call. You hear me? I'm listening. You feel me? I'm right here with you.

It was hilarious. It's the best set I've heard since the place opened (arguably, the best set I've heard in a decade), and there wasn't much of anyone in the place to hear it.

Rude is just about right. Fuck gay bars. Fuck straight bars. Fuck black people. Fuck white people. I don't want to hear any of that. You want to play me some love and build a groove, I'll be listening. I'll be right there with you.

That may be crazy, but I'll take it.

I told you I don't normally dance, but I moved that night.

I was moved that night.


If anyone wants to throw me a track and drop some knowledge on me, I'm always more than up for listening,

Words.

Some days words come more easily than others.  Some days they don't come very easily at all.  Or maybe they just come so easily that I can't even delineate specific topics or write in a straightforward manner.  I always had problems with essay assignments in high school for this very reason.  I'm not good at limiting the context of my mind.  Today is not an easy day for words.

When I was 5 or 6 years old, one of my favorite books was Jean Lee Latham's Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.  I'd probably read it something like 30 times by the time I finished first grade.  There's a little snippet of the book that sums me in a lot of ways...

Mr. Ropes strolled back to Nat's desk.  "Nat, run over to my house, and look up Surveying in the Chambers Cyclopedia, will you? Hetty will show you where it is.  Write down what it says about the start of surveying.  You'll find everything you need on the desk."

Nat hurried over to Mr. Ropes' home.  A cyclopedia?  What in the world was that?  Well, Hetty would show him...

Soon he was sitting at the desk in the library, with four big books in front of him:  Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopedia, or Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences.  He turned the pages.   Everything was here!  Everything!   I'd like to begin at A, he thought, and read right through to Z!  But now he must find out about surveying. 

The Next thing Nat knew, Mr. Ropes was striding into the library, calling "Nat!  What in the name of sense happened to you?  Did you go to sleep?"

"No, sir.  I'm copying what it says about surveying.  But there's a good bit to look up.  It's a little hard to tell where the start of it is.  I've looked up trigonometry  - that's the kind of mathematics they use - And I've looked up theodolites - that's the kind of telescope they use.  Then there's something about finding your position by sighting a star, so I got into astronomy.  I can't tell yet where surveying starts - with astronomy, or trigonometry or the theodolite, or -"

"Nat Bowditch!" Mr. Ropes threw himself in a chair and laughed until he wiped his eyes.  "Where did it start?  In what country?  That's all I wanted to know!  Give me that book a moment! . . .See?  Right here!  It says that surveying probably began in Egypt! Right!"

Nat said, "Oh... that's all you wanted to know?"

 I can't begin to tell you how many times I've had that conversation.

"How are you?" 

Well, I'd like to start at A and work through to Z.  No, just fine, thank you.  And you?

As a small aside, I was thinking about the statement I'd made the other day about not being able to separate the chapters of my life.  Not being able to box off or compartmentalise my thoughts.  Blogger tells me that I should be throwing labels on my posts. I assume that that's the equivalent of tagging them.  Not a concept I'm very good at, so if anyone wants to suggest tags for specific posts, feel free.