people-sketch: autobiography

I have a birdhouse for a head. Entry-holes for eyes. Peg nose. No mouth.

Inside of this birdhouse sits a clock with no hands. It is antique. Gears of oak. Springs of incense.

Within the clock resides my mind: an acorn a with small window on it's side. Through the window you can see my self: a little sparrow with a stained-glass beak. It's tongue is a scrap of green velvet. It's feathers are the leaves from a long lost tree. The leaves grow golden in autumn...fall away...grow back. The bird talks to itself, chirping in the language of a clock, ticking, sounding out it's walls...pretending the echoes are an old friend.

The bird's heart is a cardboard box. Small and crumpled. Inside of it...

those are the basics, anyway. box within a bird within an acorn in a clock in the middle of a mouthless house. the rest is academic. dry like a chalk-board.

empty

[new posts resuming soon]

gifts

So I have a large extended family and a lot of cousins that are around my age. Most of them? Hyper-normal.

Lawyers. Investment bankers. Executives Not Otherwise Specified.

Nothing wrong with that in-itself, but by and large they're extremely materialistic. They're all about status symbols. Over-priced cars, brand-name clothes, absurdly expensive gadgets.

"Check out my Tommy Hilfiger cell-phone! It's got GPS! Internet! Xbox! And it makes waffles!"

Not my people.

One time a group of us were together, having a holiday meal...and a female cousin said, "M, I hear you're renting a house now."

"Yes."

"What sort of curtain pattern did you go with?"

I stared at her. She said, "I know, I know. Guys aren't supposed to be into that kind of thing. But when we moved here, Bob just took over the whole decor process. He was like a kid in the candy store, he got so into it."

Several people chimed in with their own curtain stories. "We went with this." "We chose that". Then they pause for me to answer.

The truth is that I when I moved into the house, I immediately thumb-tacked blankets over all of the windows. Thick blankets. Dense, impenetrable blankets through which no light shall ever pass.

However...this fact tends to make for awkward small-talk at holiday gatherings, so I wing it: "Blue curtains. Is that a pattern? I'm not...you know, up on the curtain lingo."

"Pattern means style. French? Country?"

"They're kind of rectangular".

So my winging it doesn't go very well and we change topics.

Nothing wrong with curtain patterns, but my family generally takes their stuff-obsession to an extreme. Televisions, cell phones, cars...everything has to be perfect, and they constantly have to buy the newest version if it. I'm almost always disinterested and lack the jargon to hide that fact.

"Hey M, check out my new hi-def flat panel."

"Wow. A hideless panhandler. Good stuff."

Anyway. The point is that I've noticed a trend: materialistic people produce materialistic children. Always. Well...almost always. That template gets rolling and it's very hard to get out of.

I've been with these cousins when their kids opened presents. In a word: disturbing. The kids tear in, momentarily excited by the unknown...yet even if they like the gift? They still lose interest within about three seconds.

The pattern of materialistic kids: frenzy...gratification...loss of interest.

Depressing. I see those kids and I think: they're already like their parents. Getting, using, feeling empty.

But sometimes I see the other kids...the ones that still have their internal compass in effect.

They tear into the package, excitedly. They play with the toy for a bit. And then...right at that moment where "loss of interest" tends to kick in...they start playing with the box. Or the ribbons. Or the Christmas ornaments. Or their toes.

For them, it's all good. That imagination is reaching out, keeping their world interesting, lively. It's always a privilege to see those moments.

After that: those moments end and I have to sit around with the family, watching football on their big screen, plasma, fusion-powered high-speed Nike toaster-visions.

Walls (part 5 of 9)

I.

So you lift your chin...you move forward...and you get hurt.

Cuts, breaks, bruises.

It sucks.

You're blinking, totally confused. It takes a minute to realize that you're on your back again. Bleeding again. But stupidly getting up, lifting your chin.

Again.

Getting hurt, repeatedly, over and over.

Sometimes when you move forward you hold your fists up...but for the fun of it, to entertain yourself. The result? It's not really going to be any different, so you're playing. Sighing, shoulders drooping...holding your fists up for a laugh.

Blinking, confused.

Getting up.

Smiles, cuts and blood.

II.

I've been referencing this: as we grow older, our social environments grow increasingly complex. Most of us are hardwired to participate in the complexity. Our body language develops, our cues and signals kick in, we communicate in increasingly subtle and non-verbal ways.

My normalcy broke. Never kicked in. So...age fifteen...I start to wing it. I pretend. I teach myself to mimic the body language of those around me.

But my social comprehension...my ability understand the nuances of body language...was completely lacking.

It's sort of like reading a sentence in a different language. If you sound it out phonetically, without understanding what the words mean: that's what I was doing with body language.

And this really isn't "What it's like to have Asperger's". This is: "How not to have Asperger's". Having a condition before it was on the books sort of turned my life into an anti-guide for the condition.

I am Tony Attwood's evil twin brother.

A completely legitimate response to Asperger's...learning useful social cues, step by step...became a maladaptive response in my case. I took it too far. I sealed myself off behind the movements...got lost in the marionette. I was mirroring conversation as well, heavily scripting all of my statements...and the detachment I was trying to avoid only grew stronger.

I wanted to hide my differences...be with others. Feel less lonely. I achieved the opposite.

III.

Those levels of complexity: with the marionette, I climbed a bit during high school, rose to a more comfortable level. I could converse well, handle small-talk, navigate average, day-to-day interactions. It was a plateau: I made friends for the first time...got by okay around others...but stalled out there. Everything remained at a superficial level.

And the next level? It was dating. That's what the kids around me were beginning to do. That's what I was utterly bewildered by.

I have no natural body language. I'm a blankling. Once I understood this, it wasn't long before I realized that I couldn't flirt. I knew it was happening with others...that it existed, was a real thing. But I could tell that it was beyond me.

And it wasn't something I could teach myself, because...unlike low-level body language and small-talk...flirting isn't something you can practice on others. If you have awkward small-talk? No big deal. It happens. If you have awkward flirting? Nowhere near as socially acceptable.

(Seriously. For the romantically awkward, there's a fine line between getting laid and getting maced.)

For the longest time, I was only aware of the most overt forms of flirting. The blatant touching. That kind of thing was available for observation, on display around me. One time...this was around sixteen...I watched a girl pick a piece of lint off of a guys sweater. I looked really close and thought, "Pointless. There wasn't any lint there at all. Unless...wait a minute...was that flirting? That was probably flirting."

I seriously considered taking lint out of my pocket and dropping bits of it on my shoulder. Bloop. "Ladies? Lint? Anyone?"

Flirting that takes place below the threshold of observation...the eye contact stuff, the vocal inflection stuff: remains, to this day, out of my reach.

It's the next plateau, the higher one that I can't seem to get to.

IV.

High school goes by. No dates, no girlfriend. The loneliness hurts terribly. The desire to feel desirable: painful.

I attend college. I do the five year plan. It's the most social time of my life. My little group of high school friends...they carry over. We hit the town, play pool, attend parties.

At my core, I am not a social butterfly, so a lot of this feels hollow, artificial. I continue with the marionette. The need to puppet my body through each interaction (mimicking others, counting eye contact, etc)...I get slightly better at it, but it never becomes more natural.

Even in this highly social environment, I fail to grasp that next level. My social comprehension just can't get there.

The mind-blindness: I'm unaware of it, not understanding what's wrong. I grow increasingly depressed. And my confidence around others, particularly women...it just erodes.

Five years go by...no girlfriend. (At college! There are women everywhere! WTF?!).

I roam around all that time, operating with an undiagnosed neurological condition. Gears spinning, mechanics in place, but lost inside of myself.

A clock with no hands.

V.

There were a few dates. Wonderful, magical dates.

I have my first date during the summer between sophomore and junior year of college. A classmate asks me out. I'm not clear on whether or not I feel any attraction, but I think, "A date! This is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing!"

This is where the not-having-body-language thing becomes a problem. We go out for dinner. I sit and hold myself in a Normal Posture. I count out the eye contact. I make listening facial expressions.

Ten minutes into the date (and this is true by the way), I think: "I'm out of body language. That's all I got. How do people move on dates?!"

I decide to hold myself in the same posture. After I ask her all of the small-talk questions, she asks me the same questions. "What's your family like?" "What other classes are you taking?" I answer. We sit. Wait.

I think, "Terrific. Now I'm out of small talk."

My posture: normal looking but never changing. What I don't understand at the time: just being there is not enough. I am failing to send additional signals..."I am interested" signals.

Ultimately, the whole thing ends up being polite and surface-level. She says, "We should do this again."

We go out again. Same posture, same type of conversation. Half-way through the date she sighs in a frustrated way and says, "You're cold...did you know that? You're just cold."

She leaves.

I felt angry with myself because I understood: her reaction is perfectly reasonable. What else was she supposed to think?

My heart hurts and I wonder for the millionth time: What am I?

VI.

I'll go into more detail about the rest of this at a later time, but I only date one other person during college...two years later, right before graduation.

It's not just awkward...it's a disaster. The sensory issues: now they come into play. I had been able to keep those to myself, hide them. Not possible when physical intimacy comes into play. Terribly confusing since I have an active libido.

The dates end almost as quickly as they begin. I leave college overwhelmed by the sense that I am something wrong...something inhuman.

I graduate and do my isolating thing. My hiding. Working graveyard shifts, reading an ungodly number of books, keeping to myself.

My twenties go by, vanish. Relationships...let me check here...nope. None.

I end up not trying to date again for ten years. Not until I get a diagnosis and The Doctor installs self-understanding and flirtation-radar.

VII.

In 2007, I lift my chin...move forward. And date a co-worker.

Bam! M! On the move! Making it happen!

And get brutally rejected, in one of the worst experiences of my entire life. It's all in play: the mind-blindness, the sensory issues, all of the difficulties.

It's no good.

The Doctor is normally quite adept at finding little lessons in everything. However...I resist finding the "bright side" on this one. She's relatively insistent that we discuss the situation in detail, basically saying: "Let's figure out what happened here so that we can learn from it."

Her optimism and endlessly constructive mindset just doesn't take this time. I tell her to drop it. I refuse to discuss it.

Period.

She relents. We move on.

Only after a year do I agree to discuss it. That's the next two posts...the sessions where we finally go into that.

Until those sessions, she and I continue to discuss body language, opening up, being known...identifying the maladaptive responses that had taken root, creating new ones, better ones. And we do all of this as I'm trying to meet new people, socialize, make new connections.

In other words: I get up. Go out. Again...again.

Over and over.

Blinking...bruised...cut and smiling. Stuck on this one fucking plateau that I can't seem to move past. Trying to find her.

(I don't know. If necessary? I may break out the old lint-on-the-sweater routine. Screw it. Whatever works.)

today: o rover

awake, lying in bed for hours

coffee, oatmeal, staring

out of pajamas, into social-clothes

outside

walking, walking

up a hill

down a busy street

down a little bar district, past the windows and lumps of others

down an emptier street of blocky buildings...apartments stacked and quiet

into the library

sit, read...get up to stretch my eyes and legs...roam around and people-watch and stare at myself in the bathroom mirror...pick lint from my sweater, swat at my hair

roam around a bit more, up and down isles, glancing at the non-descript titles of books I'll never read; wonder who wrote what and why

resume the sitting, the reading; pausing to look through the window, stare at birds and machines and rooftops and sky

reading, reading

walk back home under darker skies; cloudier...more wind...colder

when that wind picks up, it feels like something's coming; something large and hidden; something without a name

into home; on the couch with the lights off in the quiet

keyboard

clicking, clicking

post

77

I feel a bit trapped in my personality screensaver right now. No words of quality. Just shapeless sounds, empty gestures.

I'm trying to write about dating experiences...maybe that's the problem. I'm up against a topic so painful that the words retreat. They're off hiding somewhere, waiting for my writing interest to pass. To me, it feels like sharing. To my words, it feels like an ugly storm. "We'll wait it out."

I'm conflicted, at war with myself. Divided.

"Who's winning?"

Apparently we're tied. At zero.

Seventy-seven. It's an okay number...just average...but a beautiful sound.

Seventy-eight? Totally uninteresting. Seventy-eight is dead to me.

I used to watch Marx Brothers films for the gestures. I would sit close to the screen, identify useful moves, mimic them. Harpo you could never use, he was too singular a character. Beautiful, silent, aggressively playful. No one but himself. Fun to watch, but again, not useful. Groucho on the other hand, he was archetypal. You can cut and paste some of his maneuvers. He physically expresses a viral system of gestures; how to identify the social context, camouflage yourself accordingly...take it down from the inside. And, because I think about mirrors a lot, I of course like the classic mirror scene in Duck Soup. Fun stuff (frightening if you've read enough Joseph Conrad beforehand). This is the scene...with Groucho on the left, Harpo the right.

But...what was I saying? I can't even...oh! Soup. That's what I was talking about. I can't make a soup from scratch to save my life, but I swear to god I'll keep trying. This...stuff...I made the other day: unpalatable. But you know, vaguely reminiscent of French onion soup. Kind of. Anyway.

Just trying to write, keep something going until I can post the way I should be.

You're not reading this for the soup updates.

regret

Struggling to post. Mind: gone. More Proust quotes! This is from volume III:

"We do not include the pleasures we enjoy in sleep in the inventory of the pleasures we have experienced in the course of our existence. To take only the most grossly sensual of them all: which of us, on waking, has not felt a certain irritation at having experienced in his sleep a pleasure which (if he is anxious not to tire himself) he is not at liberty to repeat indefinitely during that day. It seems a positive waste."

Whee. Go Proust, go.

becoming the other

See? I told you this would happen.

I.

When I was little...maybe six or seven...there was a specific moment when I realized that other people perceived me the same way that I perceived them: as something purely external.

For me, my perspective on the world was central, the axis around which everything revolved. And it was strange to realize that other people had their own perspective on the world, one that felt as central to them as mine did to me. "I can only be an outside presence to others...an appearance...external." (or however a kid would phrase that).

We each have a brain encased in a skull, peering at the world through two eyes. And that's what hit me: "I'm the only one who can see through my eyes. And I can never see through any one elses."

So I made a game of trying to imagine what I looked like to other people. I wasn't trying to imagine what they thought of me, the goal was just to envision myself from a purely external perspective.

If someone walked into the room, I would still my thoughts and pretend to see through their eyes, picturing the room from a different angle, viewing me from outside of myself.

If I was a passenger in a car...and a car drove by, going the opposite direction...I would try to imagine our car from the other drivers point of view, as just a random, passing vehicle...and I would see how long I could cling to that other perspective, watching as my actual self passed by, my face an anonymous dot in the other car, passing, dwindling away in the distance.

"I am me. But I am also external."

A kid tinkering with perspective. We all do this in various ways as we grow older. Our consciousness expands and develops and plays around with it's sense of self, trying to see who we are, what the nature is of this existence.

II.

Over time, it was frustrating to realize that...since I only have this one perspective...I can never truly see myself as external to myself. Any imagining I use...any picture I hold in my mind of me as an outside presence...it's still me, within myself, doing the imagining. I can never completely view myself as others do.

The play of self, the tinkering, it finds it's limit: subjectivity. Ultimately, we're locked into it.

(Id est: the leaves of phenomenology fall; the limbs of existentialism appear. Or however a kid would phrase that).

III.

I was at the mall recently, roaming around, lost in thought. I was mostly looking down as I walked, using peripheral vision to navigate.

At one point, I turned a corner. As I rounded it, I was startled to see a person walking right next to me. From the corner of my eye I could see this presence, right there, very close and I jumped.

Turns out, it was one of those mirrored windows and I was reacting to my own reflection.

I had startled me.

I sat on a bench and thought about that for a long time. After all of those years of conceptual play, I realized that I had come quite close to viewing myself objectively. I had just seen me as a foreign presence, as something outside of myself.

I mean, I've looked at mirrors before, obviously...but that generally happens in a conscious manner. We go into the bathroom, look at ourselves...but that's us knowingly viewing ourselves from our perspective. The reflected self is still unified with it's subjectivity...within it.

When I startled myself in the mall? That was me...for a tiny split second...viewing my body as a thing stripped of my personal identity. As not me.

I'm sure that's happened before, me randomly seeing a reflection of myself...but when it happened at the mall, that was the first time I really thought about the significance of it. It was not objectivity, strictly speaking...but perhaps as close as I'll ever get.

It was such a quick, fleeting moment. And now that I was aware of it...had absorbed it into my subjectivity...it was gone forever. Impossible to replicate.

IV.

So Marcel Proust wrote this long novel.

Very texty.

His gift is that he articulates all of those small, secret moments we have. The little games we play with our thoughts, the hidden moments of a growing, changing selfhood. He catches these moments...examines them...and describes them beautifully.

When I came across the following passage, I was struck by how familiar it felt. It was like, "Yes. I know that moment".

This is from volume II.

The narrator is drinking champagne after joining friends in a private room at a bar:

"Not only every kind of intoxication, from that which we get from the sun or travel to that which is brought on by exhaustion or wine, but every degree of intoxication- and each should have a different grading mark, like sea depths on a map- lays bare in us, at the exact level affected, a particular sort of man.

Robert's private dining room was small, but the single mirror that hung in it was such that it seemed to reflect some thirty others, in an endless progression; and when it was lit at night and followed by the procession of thirty or more reflections of itself, the lightbulb placed at the top of the mirror frame must have given the drinker, even when alone, the impression that the surrounding space was multiplying itself along with his own sensations, heightened by drink, and that, shut up by himself in this tiny room, he was nevertheless reigning over something far more extensive in its indefinite, luminous curve than just a walkway in Paris.

And at that moment, I was the drinker in question: suddenly, as I looked for him in the mirror, I saw him, a hideous stranger, staring back at me. The joy of intoxication was stronger than my disgust; out of gaiety or bravado, I smiled at him and found that my smile was simultaneously returned. And I felt myself to be so much under the ephemeral and powerful sway of this minute's intense sensation that it is not clear to me whether the only disquieting element of the experience was not the thought that the hideous self I had just glimpsed was perhaps about to breathe his last, and that I should never meet this stranger again in my lifetime."

broken lid

Apparently I'm out of words.

I'm sitting here, staring at the computer screen. I got nothin'.

This is never good. Usually? It means I'm about to start posting quotes from dead philosophers.

When I really get desperate I tend to roll out the Proust.

(Usually I can at least find quotes that relate to the themes here. Nietzsche brings the introversion. Proust the sensory overload. Kierkegaard the alienation. Sartre...the alienation. Camus...well, never mind. An alternative is to post examples of strong technical writing...in which case I may quote extensively from the phone book. Fun times for all of us.)

I apologize in advance for my post loitering.

Unless the words happen.

Still.

Waiting.