Signs That There's Something Seriously Wrong With Me

I had noticed that over the course of the last year or so, I had begun to harshly criticize atheists much more often than religious believers, but recently it occurred to me that I had been spending less time with time with believers, and almost no time discussing religion with believers. it may well be that

1. I criticize everybody. All the time. Excessively. Very excessively, maybe.

I started watching "The Big Bang Theory" when TBS started showing it in syndication. It took me a while to get over my annoyance at the show's laugh track -- it's the 21st century, for crying out loud -- but right away I identified strongly with the character of Sheldon Cooper, and thought: He's so wonderful, such a brilliant autistic genius.

2. It took me over 20 episodes to realize that Sheldon constantly annoys all of the other characters on the show. Severely annoys them. This annoyance, Sheldon's social dysfunction, is in fact the biggest driving force of the action of the series. And all I could think, 20 shows long if not longer, was, He's so like me and He's so wonderful. Self-absorption and lack of self-awareness calling, will I accept the charges?

3. Over the past 35 years, I've never maintained a romantic relationship for more than 3 months.

4. Over 35 years ago, when I was a teenager, I maintained a relationship for 2 1/2 years, but recently I completely forgot about that when thinking over my relationships, and considered my longest relationship to have lasted 3 months.

And so, to some up,

It seems I may be a real bastard, an extremely annoying old fart who does not even honor the best things which have happened to him. This would explain some things like why I'm so lonely.

I really don't like to think of myself as nasty old bastard -- but seriously: who does? I'm guessing: fewer than the actual number of nasty old bastards. It's not at all pleasant to think of myself in this way, but here, as always and everywhere, recognizing a problem and facing it squarely is essential to any hope of ever solving it.



Okay, I may have achieved one insight from this exercise already. Maybe not a big one, I don't know. It's just that I can keep in mind how harsh my criticism feels when I focus it on myself.

Keep that in mind when I'm talking to others.

Some Aspects Of My Autistic Experience Of Life

On "Homeland," Saul once said to Carrie, "You are the smartest and the dumbest fucking person I have ever met." The producers apparently liked that line: they added it to the audio of the next season's opening montage. (I like how cable series still have what would have been considered "full-length" opening montages on network TV until 1990 or so, when the networks started making them shorter and shorter, and/or running the main credits over the beginning of the episode, sometimes eliminating the opening montages altogether, not to mention what they do with the closing credits. All to make more time for commercials. NOT TO MENTION RUNNING GODDAM COMMERCIALS DURING THE SHOWS, POP-UP COMMERCIALS ALONG THE BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN, THAT ARE GETTING BIGGER AND BIGGER AND LONGER AND LONGER, AND MAKING OUR LIVES MORE AND MORE CLOSELY RESEMBLE CONSTANT NIGHTMARES. Maybe 1990 was when the MBA's started to take over network TV from people who actually knew something about TV and to systematically ruin it, as they've ruined so much else in our lives. Anyway, although I like how cable shows still consider opening credits to be worth doing, it disappoints me that they tend to run identical opening credits every season. The only exception I know is "Homeland," so good for them.)



Anyway, the line struck me too, because more than once someone has said the same thing to me. One difference is that it hasn't been said to me when I was a top-echelon CIA agent by my good friend, a former and future Agency Director, but when I was working for minimum wage at McDonald's, or for 50 cents an hour above minimum wage at a national-chain bookstore, or for 2 bucks an hour above minimum wage for a year-round outdoor graveyard-shift job in Alaska. Yes, it was colder than a welldigger's ass. Colder than penguin shit. Colder than -- well it was pretty cold, and I had chronic bronchitis, so I finally had the sense to quit before it literally killed me.

But I'm accepting that I've had it this way because I'm autistic. Not because I'm lazy or something like that. On some of the aforementioned entry-level jobs, some co-workers, emphasizing my exceptional intelligence more than my exceptional stupidity, assumed that soon I would be moving up in the world. They seemed to take it as a given that I was going to be doing something much more interesting and making much more money doing it.

Over and over I encountered such assumptions about myself, and before I was diagnosed, these assumptions puzzled me. I always felt more convinced by the assumptions of different people, who assured me that I would never amount to a sack of shit. Now I know that I'm autistic, and those two radically-different attitudes toward me and my aptitudes, taken together, make sense. Am I a genius? No. Am I a moron? No. I'm a genius and a moron. I'm a mutant. An alien in your midst. (Have no fear: I come in peace.) Sometimes I can solve a problem that's had you completely stuck and sometimes you'll need to explain something to me like I was 5 years old.

Some autistics have elite, top-government-clearance jobs. I don't think Carrie Mathison is autistic, but she's definitely neurologically divergent, and being atypical on a fundamental, neurological level often brings with it being very smart and very fucking stupid compared to average. Some autistics die homeless or in institutions and will never get even the lowest-level government security clearance. Most autistics my age or older haven't been correctly diagnosed. Consider Rain Man: correctly diagnosed even though he was older than I in 1988, smart enough to help you count cards in a 6-deck shoe, but too stupid not to tell the casino that you're counting cards. Didn't even seem to understand that he'd done something wrong by letting them know. The Feds aren't going to give him any kind of security clearance. In fact, it's pretty hard for me to imagine any sort of job for which Rain Man would be suited, other than charging admission for people to come and observe him. And believe me, I've given it a lot of thought. Why? Because I have a lot in common with him.



My arithmetical ability to do things like count cards in a 6-deck shoe and multiply 4-digit numbers in my head is somewhat less than Rain Man's, but it's way, way above average. And my tendency to tell the casino that we're counting cards seems to be very high -- my sense of what is appropriate or inappropriate to say in a given situation is very weak, that is. I'm guessing here, going over events in my mind which completely puzzled me at the time and trying to figure out what happened. Sometimes I'll figure out years after the fact that I should have said something at a particular point, or shouldn't have said what I did. After years of pondering it the way Rain Man ponders Abbott & Costello's "Who's On First?" sketch without getting it at all. Sometimes years after the fact I'll figure out something that someone said in a joking way.

For example, about 15 years after the fact, I finally put it together that a guy I'd known had been making fun of me by comparing me to Rain Man. (Politically-correct folks: sit the fuck back down and shut the fuck up, this was a very nice guy, an extremely nice guy, a perfect example of the point I often try to make in this blog that you can be extremely politically-incorrect also and a loving, generous, caring Left-wing Democrat staunchly opposed to all bigotry and prejudice, or politically-correct and also a hateful asshole.) That's why he would often mimic Rain Man and say thing like : "Yeah... Yeah... Yeah, definitely." He was mocking me, because, apparently, sometimes I act a little bit like Rain Man. Or maybe much more than a little bit. This was 1997, 10 years before I was finally diagnosed.

After 15 years I figured out he did his Rain Man routine in order to mock me, which gives me hope that eventually the real Rain Man, with the loving, dedicated, although occasionally impatient and not necessarily always politically-correct help of the young Tom Cruise, may finally figure out what the "Who's On First?" sketch is about. It does not give me a lot of hope that I will ever be a certain sort of sparkling social butterfly who gives inspiration to the next Noel Coward. I'm more likely to inspire someone like the next Mel Brooks or the next Farrelly brothers. (And that's okay.) Like Sheldon Cooper on "The Big Bang Theory," I have a crazy-high IQ while at the same time there are very important, basic areas of human intelligence in which I'm very, very stupid. No doubt there have been very many incidents in which I have behaved very stupidly and never noticed that something was wrong. Sheldon's Mom had him tested but she didn't follow up with that specialist, so I've had several years' worth of opportunity to become more aware of my neurological situation. I don't have a prestigious job like Sheldon, but I can drive (3 speeding tickets and 0 collisions in 39 years). I don't know Klingon but I know Latin. Sheldon's pronunciation in German is just freaking terrible for someone who insinuates that he's read Einstein untranslated.



Where was I? Just recently I've become aware that I constantly go off on tangents and that this is common among autistics. Been doing it all my life, just very recently became aware of it and began to ponder the consequences of it in my social interactions with the Earthlings.

Then there's eye contact: I'm not so good with the eye contact. Back in 1988, that acting teaching in Acting 101, did he tell us about how we could look at another actor's forehead onstage, and to the audience and even to the other actor it would would look exactly as if we were making eye contact -- is that something he always said in Acting 101, or did he toss in that tidbit because he noticed that I pretty much couldn't maintain eye contact for more than a second or so at a time? I've been working on eye contect in therapy, but I don't see any reason to expect that I'll ever become normal in that respect. "Look me in the eye, boy!" "Nossir, don't think I'll be doing that."

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Valete. E pluribus unum. Aio, quantitas magna frumentorum est.

More Adventures In Autism

Blog more about being autistic, they ask me. Okay:

You may be wondering how many other autistics I've known. Yeah, I wonder that too. Please keep in mind that the great majority of middle-aged and elderly autistics in the US are undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed. (Diagnosis of those age groups is much better then in the US in some other countries and much worse in others.) One person I knew very well, who died a number of years ago, was one of those misdiagnosed people, profoundly autistic, it is clear in hindsight. I've spent some time in chess clubs, and it seems to me that the percentage of autistic people among serious chess players must be higher than among the general population. I'm thinking in particular of one gentleman who ran a chess club I belonged to, ran it very well.

That is, he ran it very well in my opinion, but then, I'm autistic, and if you asked several other people you might possibly get quite different answers. Things which annoyed me, such as too much noise during club meeting -- including too much whispering during tournaments -- were dealt with well by him. It could be that for neurologically-typical people, his strictness was much more annoying that a great deal of noise would've been. In any case, he and I got along very well, he was very kind to me, and the best chess mentor I've had. And he didn't charge for the lessons. Chess coach is a profession.

I used to participate in an Internet forum which was very close-knit socially. I always felt like a bit of an outsider, and eventually left because I felt I was causing too much annoyance to another member of the forum -- who had Asperger's Syndrome. The thing is, since leaving that forum years ago I've begun to wonder whether perhaps most or all of its members had an autistic-spectrum condition. Or at least, more of us than just he and I. This was the forum I'd been urged to join by members of another forum, urging which caused me to call myself The Wrong Monkey, as I described in this post. I was The Wrong Monkey in that forum before I had this blog, and before I even really understood what a blog was. It was a member of that forum who explained to me how blogs worked and suggested a blog might be for me, thank you very much again for that, former fellow forum member.

The thing is, I sometimes forget that many autistics are much, much, much, much less reticent about saying "Hi there, my name is ______, I'm autistic, how are you?!" than I am. Well, that's just one of the things. Another is that one of the things I probably could've done better at that forum is that by the end I had put way too many of the others on ignore, so it's entirely possible that a lot of them had tried to tell me that they, too, were on the autistic spectrum. It's quite conceivable to me that one of them had explained to me that the forum was basically designed as a meeeting-place for Aspergers and asked me how I had managed to miss that, and also that the folks from the first forum, the extremely-polite one had suggested I look into the second one, had recommended the second one because it was known as a gathering place for Aspies, and that they hadn't been suggesting I leave their forum at all.

So in answer to the question of how many autistics I known or have know, there are two potentially huge unknowns: lack of proper diagnosis, and lack of people necessarily wanting to share that diagnosis with me. Well, three factors: the ignore function on certain forums. I've really overdone it with the ignore function, so it's entirely possible that people have told me a great deal of very useful things and mistakenly assumed I heard them. Live and learn! Excelsior.

So I've been watching a lot of "The Big Bang Theory." Between CW and TBS it's on TV A LOT. (Because of a huge fanatical autistic fan base, many of whom don't suspect in the slightest that they're autistic? Just guessing.) Some big differences between Sheldon and myself: I've never taken an IQ test which scored as high as 185 if you ace it; Sheldon is very successful professionally; I have had to fend for myself much more than Sheldon, and so never developed habits of dependency such as demanding that he be chauffeured around by friends and associates. I believe I'm more self-aware than Sheldon, but that's very difficult to gauge. Isn't it? Isn't self-awareness difficult for oneself to gauge? Similarities between myself and Sheldon: difficulty understanding when people are being sarcastic and when they're not; annoying people without understanding what we did wrong.

Then there's the eye-contact thing. This is interesting. IMHO most fictional autistic characters on TV and in movies -- for example, the title character in "Bones," and Chloe and Edgar in "24," make much more eye contact than most autistics do. They make almost as much eye contact as the neurologically-typical characters. *LOUD BUZZER SOUND* Wrong! Notable exceptions: Rain Man, Claire Danes in the title role of Temple Grandin, the little kid in Mercury Rising, although many other details of that character were very unrealistic -- and Sheldon Cooper in part of one episode of "The Big Bang Theory," the flashback of when Leonard moves in and the elevator gets destroyed. When Leonard and Sheldon first meet, I was all: Ah-HA! Yes, there we go! That's a convincingly autistic avoidance of eye contact on Sheldon's part, wonder why TV shows and movies, including this TV series, don't get that right more often? Maybe the producers judge it to be too distracting and/or creepy. Maybe they just missed that detail, just plain got it wrong. Maybe Jim Parsons, who plays Sheldon (and does a splendid job) got that detail right, but only after several episodes had already been filmed, and so he -- and/or the producers -- decided he could get it right, but only in the flashback, so as not to disturb the show's continuity.

Maybe I have a degree of difficulty with eye contact very unusual even among autistics, what do I know, why're ya buggin me about it?

(Yes, I know Sheldon's not real, thank you.)

Then there's the controversial topic of which famous people of the past were autistic. Surely James Joyce and Ludwig Wittgenstein were. In Einstein's case -- I realize that everybody wants to claim Einstein as one of their own, and I'm not immune from such fallacies. Also, Einstein seems to have had a very active sex life. Many autistics do -- but not most. Most are all *DON'T TOUCH ME* most of the time. But there was undeniably something very unconventional about Einstein' way of thinking, and it seems quite possible to me that he was autistic. But I'm not going to go out on a limb and flatly assert that he was as I do with Joyce and Wittgenstein. I'm unusually open about my autism, so if you were assuming I'd express myself in an equally public manner about my sexuality, the ending of this post may disappoint you.

Is It Me?

Do I struggle so to explain simple things to simple folk because of some flaw in my pedagogical technique? If so, and if that flaw is obvious, please tell me! Once again, for your amusement, The Wrong Monkey offers an unaltered transcript of my struggle to communicate with someone. Maybe it's me. Maybe it's been me all along:

HIM: (reacting to an article about how the age of the Gospel of Judas manuscript had been confirmed) Who cares?

ME: It's a manuscript which appears to be over 1700 years old. That's kinda cool.

HIM: What's cool is that it's a fake which naturally means con artists have been around forever.

ME: In this case, "authentic" means over 1700 years old -- regardless of the manuscript's content, the character of its author, whether Judas, or Jesus, ever existed, or what you want "authentic" to mean.

HIM: In other words if it were 1699 years old in wouldn't be authentic, but at 1701 it would? Good grief. I was curious if that was true or whether you were loony, maybe even both. My thesaurus has similar words for "authentic" from accurate to valid and lots more in between. But there is never a mention of any particular age the subject must be. And if you'd care to validate that just find an authentic thesaurus and you'll see.

ME: No, if it were 10 years old, or 150 years old, then it would be a fake, a fake which had been made to look like it was 1700 years old (GIVE OR TAKE!) And yes, I am loony. My Mom had me tested. By a specialist.

HIM: Are you suggesting if I were to build a fake Ferrari from one of those kits that are seen in all car magazines, when that fake Ferrari becomes a particular age, in this case 1700 years old give or take, it ceases to be a fake Ferrari and then somehow becomes an authentic one?

ME: No. It would never be a real Ferrari. But 1700 years from now it would be an authentic 21st-century artifact. Something built 1690 years from now and artificially aged to make it look like it was made in the 21st century will never be a 21st-century artifact.

At this point, to my astonishment -- I had been settling in for a long, long haul -- he said he understood, and who knows, maybe he really does. Could it be that my pedagogical technique, although still abysmal, is improving? It still seems that I may be enraging people when I'm trying to explain something. Sheldon, on The Big Bang Theory,seems to constantly enrage other people in the process of explaining things to them. But then Sheldon doesn't seem to care about his effect on others, or perhaps it's more that he rarely notices it. Maybe I need to be much, much more discreet about such explanations, and only offer them when requested. Maybe so, but the effort which would be involved in such a great change in my behavior, and the distress I would feel in seeing uncomprehension and doing nothing about it, makes me cringe already. Again, your feedback is welcomed.