A thought, once it is thought, hangs like a note on time’s bulletin board. So keep thinking.
Tag Archives: Asperger
Lurking inside religious belief
is pain and disappointment
in how human beings behave
toward one another.
The response of many religions to this pain and disappointment is to advocate for the increase of evil in the world.
Words to live by: Fundamentals
Road Tar
In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true.
Gautama Buddha c. 556-480 BCE
Quote / Buddha
Telemarketeer (circa 1997)
“Wyoming never was anyone’s destination.” Guzman
In my now-and-then capacity as a telemarketer for the local newspaper, I have been addressed as Sir, Son, Ma’m, Dear, and Dude. The confusion produced by my telephone voice began when I was about ten years old, the result of an innocent quirk of nature (an alto voice) that caused my mother so much embarrassment that she directed me to speak in a higher, more feminine voice, insisting that if I did so, the change would become permanent. Her idiotic suggestion did not win my compliance, and to this day, the people I ring up on behalf of the local newspaper call me Sir, Son, Ma’am, or Dude and I let them think whatever they wish.
As TV journalists like to say, “the vast majority” of copies of the weekly consumer flyer designated The Guide are delivered to residents within the only two towns in our county. Of the 30,000 copies printed each week, 350 must be mailed to outlying households, a service for which the United States Postal Service charges the publishers $125.00 per week. The postal authorities have decided that we (that’s me) must obtain the names of 8,000 people who will admit that they wish to receive The Guide, otherwise the Postal Service will no longer permit the 350 copies to be mailed at bulk rate.
About Our County (not the entire state, just our county)
Imagine an area the size of Massachusetts. Remove the vegetation, the thriving cities and towns, the ethnic culture, the restaurants, the shopping, the seafood, the numerous institutions of research and higher learning, the cultural arts, professional sports teams, and all but 35,000 of its people. Add bitter alkaline soil, a uniformly high and lifeless plateau (average altitude 6,100′) and precipitation on a par with the Mongolian Steppe.
True, a river does flow through the area like the Nile crosses Egypt, but without delivering a single bucket of fertile sediment. Too barren for cattle, Pronghorn, coyote, and rabbit compose a tentative fauna. Hordes of sheep are trucked in during February because the vast public lands mean they can be rotated to a different grazing patch every two to three days. I wrote a poem one day while honking my way through a confused mass of mutton that was blocking the road.
The sheep have returned; white lice in Paradise.
Over the brief time that I’ve lived in Wyoming, contact with my neighbors has for the most part been via the phone calls I make on behalf of the newspaper’s ongoing survey. When someone answers the phone I say, “This is The Buckaroo Guide calling to verify that you still wish to receive The Guide.” The usual response is uh, or uh-huh, both of which mean yes, so I quickly confirm the address as it appears in the phone book. Good enough, but in an extraordinary number of instances, the phone number does not belong to the person listed in the phone book. This invalidates the response, and I must ask the person to reveal his or her correct address and identity. Shockingly, he or she invariably complies. The percentage of disconnected numbers is also high: area jobs depend on oil and gas production and coal and trona (baking soda) mining, industries that guarantee a transient population.
About half the respondents don’t recognize the free paper as The Guide, so I prompt them with, “The free Tuesday paper, the shopper’s guide, you know, the one that has the TV listings inside?” Everyone gets it then, although a few say, “Oh! That thing I find in my bushes every Tuesday.” Which is true. An alarming number of residents fear that we intend to take it away from them or that we will start charging for it. One woman said, “Well, if it’s a bother, I guess you can stop bringing it.” Another meekly replied, “No, I don’t want it anymore – is that OK?”
Some say positive things such as, “We love that little paper.” “I sure do need that TV Guide,” and “Don’t leave me without the grocery store coupons.” A teenager responded wryly, “My mother and her husband aren’t here. Call back.” Stereotypical husbands must “ask the wife.” “I’m not in a decision-making position in this house,” admitted one.
“My wife just got laid off and I’m kinda gettin’ that way too.” What this had to do with receiving a free paper, I’m not sure. I worry about folks who contrive to make me decide whether to say “yes” or “no” for them, and about a man who shouted, “Come over for a soft drink, a cup of coffee, and Ritz crackers.”
A high percentage of those who wish to stop delivery cite failing eyesight or blindness. “I always have the TV on, why do I need a TV guide?” an elderly gentleman asked. Despair overcomes me whenever I intrude on what imagine to be a tiny human black hole at the center of a room-sized galaxy, surviving on energy sucked from an excruciatingly loud television set, with the furnace set on Hell, and in the company of a sole surviving houseplant that was packed into potting soil in 1952, its one withered leaf gasping for the CO2 that the old human can no longer supply in sufficient quantity.
The phone book is crammed with names that are new to me: Likwartz, Labuda, Bodyfelt, Copyak, Bozovich, Blazovich, Chewning, Bilyeu, Crnich, Cukale, Delanneoy, Depoyster, Fagnant, Holopeter, Jauregui, Jelouchan, Lovercheck, Manhard, Warpness, and more. Between 1850 and 1950, this corner of Wyoming attracted an international ensemble of men looking for the worst work on earth; mining, logging and the UPPR railroad. Alas, names are the only lasting evidence of a diverse cultural heritage, which is not surprising in an environment that defeats human effort and paralyzes the psyche.
A friend who grew up in a coal camp north of town contends that by the 1950’s, everyone had become the same. “Everybody just looked and sounded the same,” he said. “Bleak, beaten up, defeated.”
I continue to jot down amazing names: LaDonna LaCroix, Season Lower, Ty Harder, Larry Hell, Numa Grubb, Jack Leathers, Bert Mexican, Edwardo Wardo, Osmo Ranta, Clint Chick, Caddy Cackler, Fyrn Coon, Rhett Coy, Theron Dye, Deena & Alle Jo Butters, Kamber Bink Backman, Wanda Hodo, Hushlen Cochrun, Tex Jasperson, Cyma Cudney, Bubb Buh. And the surnames – Uncapher, Sweat, Warpness, Chitica, Laundra, Tonette.
Another melancholy evening as a telemarketer: one phone exchange took off on a sad energy of its own. I don’t recall what set the woman off, but she said that as a young bride, she had agreed to follow her husband into the Colorado mountains for a three-month try at a mining job. The pair stayed to raise four kids before moving to Wyoming.
“Eighteen years in Colorado, eighteen here,” she said. A symmetrical life at least. Her husband still works as a miner and drives a “twelve-mile-long dirt road with 291 ditches” to work and back, which worries her. “I can’t believe that my life is all gone,” she sighed. “After eighteen years we still don’t know anyone in this town,” she lamented. Me neither; my rubber dingy ran aground here a short two years ago and I’ve been busy getting to know the landscape.
“We’re sorry, you have reached a marriage that has been disconnected or is no longer in service.” No longer connected are Duke + Sandra; Don + Darla; Eldon + LaRie; Cactus + Tammy; Amber + Travis; Hava + Holly; Jay + Dee Dee.
It could be 1955 outside the newspaper office, except that this was an exciting town back then. Editions of the newspaper from that time are characterized by enthusiasm and pride; by advertisements for roadhouses, dance halls, and social clubs that catered to every interest, age and hobby. There were restaurants and stores. A full plate of gossip and local news kept people connected. Flipping through the newspaper archives makes me wish I had wandered here a half century ago. Today’s main street is a dreary alignment of gas stations, concrete block motels, and tire and auto body shops, punctuated by weedy lots and businesses that stick to the Interstate interchange at either end of town like cultural antibodies guaranteed to fight off growth and prosperity.
Journal / Telemarketeer
Inappropriate Materials
Bridge embankment drain pipe
Who I was Supposed to be.
The Dreaded VBS
My cousin Bette hated her curly red hair, but her mother and the other females of the family told her that her hair was beautiful and that she’d love it after she grew up, but they lied. Women lie constantly because they think doing so will make their children feel better. My mother was the only one who wasn’t lying. She loved Bette’s impossible hair, but regretted having given birth to my fence-straight bob. The lie didn’t stop Bette from shrieking and whimpering whenever my aunt yanked a comb through her Orphan Annie halo, or whacked her with the hair brush, a stroke of love which was supposed to stop her tears. The result was that Bette’s adult life was wasted in a sad quest to have someone else’s hair.
My cousin’s hair had nothing to do with an unexpected event that changed my life, except that it occurred during our yearly visit to my mother’s relatives. I don’t recall the version of Christianity her family followed out of the thousands of micro brews available. My uncle was a little Scotch bastard, so they may have been Presbyterians. Fortunately for the rest of us, he disappeared on Sundays in his black and red Mercury convertible to play golf. It would have been like him to demand that the family go to church while he drank scotch at the country club bar. My relatives’ place of worship didn’t hand out ‘Get-out-of-Hell-Free’ cards for a weekly donation, and the congregation didn’t stand, kneel, or sing much. In lieu of wine, grape juice was passed through the pews in small paper cups like the ones dentists used to provide, followed by trays of white bread croutons. My mother, who was a fan of high religious frou-frou, was scandalized. How could materials available in any grocery store be expected to turn into the blood and flesh of Jesus Christ? From her I learned that if one is dressing God’s play, one had better provide quality props.
My mother was paid to sing at weddings and other church-hosted events before she married my father, a vocation that exposed her to a range of worship styles. Based on this early market research, she chose to ally our family with the Episcopalians, who dressed well and sang the beautiful songs that she liked to sing, plus she got to share coffee and donut holes with exceedingly prosperous people, a ritual that helped her to push aside her childhood poverty for a few minutes. My mother never questioned the church’s edict that women must cover their heads in the sanctuary; poverty and abuse had prepared her to accept shame. She and the other women did subvert the prejudice by turning the ban into a fashion hobby. I liked her multitude of fancy hats, regardless of the complex sociology involved.
“Wear the Donald Duck hat,” I would say when she couldn’t decide which one to wear and we were late. Dad, the engineer, believed that Newton’s laws were as applicable to human psychology as to aircraft design, so instead of wasting energy opposing mother’s inertia, he sat at the kitchen table like a big dog waiting to be taken for a walk. The famous Donald Duck hat was shaped like a pancake with a projection in front that resembled a duck’s bill. My mother adopted my nickname for the hat, which pleased me. Too often she took offhand comments to be criticism. My mother badly needed to lighten up.
I might have developed into an acceptable American had my mother heeded my plea for lenience regarding Vacation Bible School that summer. “School? It’s supposed to be summer vacation.”
“Your cousin Bette is going, so you are going.” My mother had noticed a reluctant streak that appeared whenever I was asked to participate in group activities like Brownie Scouts or school plays. What would be next, a boycott of beauty pageants? The previous year she had shoved me in front of the cameras, and shockingly, I became the local Kiwanis Club’s Miss Peanut. When shown my idiotic picture in the newspaper I seethed with embarrassment: had my parents been aware of such things, they would have recognized that their female child was the reincarnation of a stodgy old Roman whose core directive was gravitas, but they weren’t. The thought that I might fail to socialize in the accepted feminine way caused my mother to push back sporadically, while my father encouraged the trend, probably because she made him wait for everything. My mother recognized that she had given birth to a child that she didn’t like and it made her furious.
Bette’s older sister, who was soon to depart into an embarrassing adult life as the wife of a bigamist Venezuelan deep sea diver, dropped us off at the church, where we were seated with other kids our age at a table set on the lawn. Adult supervisors handed each of us a blue felt board and paper cutouts of Jesus and several loose sheep. Jesus had those spooky Sunday School eyes that look nowhere and everywhere, letting kids know that like Santa Claus, he knows if you’ve been good or bad. The sheep gazed upward with unmistakable religious fervor. It was just too obvious.
Spooky Jesus
The adults instructed us to press the paper figures to the fabric until they stuck. I looked to my cousin and the other children, expecting one of them to ask why we were doing this, but they were busy making decisions: should Jesus float high above the flock or should he take an egalitarian stance among them? I tilted my board to study the symbolic problem. An errant breeze caught the paper cut outs, which fluttered momentarily, then fell onto the grass. Cousin Bette and another girl began to shriek. “Look what you did! You let Jesus touch the ground.”
“Hurry! Hurry! Pick him up.” they screeched, as if the three second rule applied to images of deities.
“Stop shouting,” I told my cousin. “It’s just a piece of paper.”
“No it is not!” she screamed. “It’s Jesus and you let him touch the ground and you are in big trouble!”
“God is gonna punish you,” gasped the other girl, who apparently expected a bolt of lightning or other crude Biblical barbarity to take me out in front of her very eyes.
A bad feeling passed through me, a feeling that would become familiar; a sinking feeling, as if a scary universe had been substituted for the familiar one. In this other universe grape juice and crackers turned into blood and 2000 year-old human flesh was eaten – ordinary people volunteered to be cannibals, and this was supposed to make them happy. The discovery that religion wasn’t a harmless piece of theatre made me question the motives of adults. Everything they presented as absolute truth was suddenly open to discussion. Bette and the other children had been taught that pieces of paper had the power to hurt them. What was worse, they believed that a small girl deserved to be punished because the wind blew a picture of a man onto the ground.
How I Became a Renegade
Chevy Day
The ’72 Chevy started up after some vigorous stomping on the gas pedal, so Dexa! dog and I went for a lovely drive-walk under bliss-inducing blue skies.
WYO FACTS
Sagebrush covers 58,201 SQ/M of Wyoming.
Less than 5% of Wyoming land has been plowed.
Sunday in Wyoming
It does not reduce the importance of spiritual experiences to correctly locate their place of origin in the human brain and not in an external and supernatural dimension.
Living where we don’t belong
There is nothing like a string of subzero days and nights to awaken the mind to hard core truth. Humans are still tropical animals, molded by evolution for life within a consistent and moderate temperature range under sunny nourishing skies, equipped for a life shaped by ease and plenty. A perpetual cheese and wine party punctuated by afternoon naps, walks on the sea shore, craft time, oodles of festivals and rituals. Naked fun! Art! Music! Jewelry!
We draw smoothly curving lines of human dispersal ‘out of Africa,’ as if any wandering group of humans that strayed far enough north to encounter snow, iced-over rivers and lakes, long periods of darkness, and death by freezing, looked upon the land and unanimously declared: “We like this! Let’s stick around.”
Every one of them would have promptly died of hypothermia or starvation. Homo erectus apparently ran up against a climate barrier and kept to a southern arc across Asia and into the SE Archipelago and Southern Europe.
General limits of H. erectus
Humans who wanted to migrate into hostile country had to be prepared first; had to have developed rudimentary technology. Thousands of migrants in the 1800s died when trying to cross the western deserts and mountain ranges of the United States because they were totally unprepared and ignorant of the endurance the trip would demand. There had to have been much seasonal migration to northern lands, with returns, both temporary and permanent, to warm climates, before settlement outside the evolutionary comfort zone could take place. Let’s face it; without fire, food acquisition and preservation, tools and warm clothing, humans could not have broken the climate barrier.
Modern humans face the same situation. Our bodies have only superficially adapted to life outside the tropics. Colonization of cold mountain climates (and desert, and arid plains) has only been possible by means of technology. Fire, clothing and food preservation may seem primitive to us, but the refrigerator in my kitchen keeps food from freezing as well as rotting, and the heater that sits in my living room is little more than a campfire fueled by natural gas. Despite adopting a cocoon of parka, hat, gloves and insulated boots, I’m like an astronaut leaving his or her spacecraft to enter utterly hostile conditions when I leave my house.
The steep (and untenable) rise in world population is the product of fossil fuels.
I began thinking about this yesterday when I looked out a kitchen window and saw a tiny woodpecker banging away at one of the trees. It looked so vulnerable and lost – as if it should have migrated south with most other birds that summer here. But then I realized, it’s ‘out there’ in sub zero weather and I’m essentially stuck in my artificial environment, in my life support system. And I thought of the deer, pronghorn, elk and moose, of the wild horses scraping the snow for dried grass, of the intense stinging cold that comes at night, which would freeze a human solid as a rock if he or she made a simple mistake and could not get back to ‘civilization’ – which in Wyoming isn’t much, but our human outposts provide what is necessary: warmth and food.
The bad news is that humans today exist in artificial, depleted, or hostile environments, and exist on the chain of energy and products, including medicine, food and clean water, heating and air conditioning, and transportation, that is derived from fossil fuels.
Other than a few tribal groups, all modern humans live where we don’t belong.
While arguments over climate change go nowhere, we can see that it’s become irrelevant. Our fossil fuel technology has built a house of cards that mere chance will topple. Happy New Year!
Photo Day / Brrrrrrrrrrr!
It’s not snowing: the moisture in the atmosphere is frozen.
Photo Day / Next Services
Next Services Douglas 120 Miles
I finally know something about most of the people and places that eventually produced me. I found a family, but only by skipping my parents’ generation.
I was the only member of my family interested in tracing genealogical history. My father kept his ancestry secret, except to say that he hated Germans; his mother was German, and he hated her. This was irrational: He was German. And why hate an entire nation of people just because you hate your mother?
My Welsh ancestors experienced the takeover of Britain by my Anglo-Saxon – Dane ancestors
My mother’s family were poor Welsh people who had come across the sea in stinking little ships like millions of other immigrants around 1890-1900, in order to escape the coal mines and British oppression. My grandfather found work pulling giant sheets of tin off rollers in a mill 12 hours a day. It wrecked his health and the family was still poor thanks to greedy and brutal factory owners who saw immigrants as cheap exploitable labor (like Americans see distant populations in poor and totalitarian countries today.) The old Welsh ladies couldn’t remember much of life in the ‘Old Country’ and didn’t seem interested in genealogy at all. Life began when they stepped off the boat in Baltimore.
My father’s mother’s ancestors weren’t difficult to find. A ship of Bavarians and other Germans arrived in Patterson, New Jersey in 1854. A young man and woman met on board and married. He worked for the Erie Railroad, then moved on to railroads in Ohio. She produced ten sons who all lived to adulthood and became railroaders. My father’s mother descended from this line of successful people. Why would my father be ashamed of his ancestors? His father’s family was another story; misinformation, wrong leads, veiled secrets, a blank page three generations back. Three males: a father and two sons “farmed out” as indentured servants to separate farm families. My father’s misrepresentation of his father’s line as suspicious and untraceable threw me off as he intended.
Our surname is not common, and only one distant family turned up as a possibility: Germans who helped establish Germantown, PA, but had Anglicized their name. This couldn’t be the bunch of riff-raff my father alluded to! I worked forward from that end and found that indeed, our line was connected, but apparently ‘we’ were less successful descendants that moved to Ohio from Pennsylvania; a common result of land division. But there was nothing to be ashamed of – these were hard-working pacifist farmers that typified the American story.
I’m currently tracing a sliver of ancestry that I had ignored: It turns out I’m partly Anglo-Saxon after all.
An old saying: Keep a bad man on your side.
Saturday in Wyoming / Discovering my Ancestors
Sometimes one catches the domestic dog showing signs of contemplation, of thoughts mysterious and deep, but then one remembers that their awareness is overwhelmed by images, chemicals, sound waves and instinctive impulse, and they are not thinking in abstractions or words, ever.
Fred and Dexa!
The Mysterious Thoughts of Dogs
From: Eagereyes, a Visualization and Visual Communication blog.
“Infographics today are mostly pointless decorations around a few simple facts that add nothing meaningful. But information graphics once deserved their name with dense, meticulously-drawn, well-researched information. Here is an example from 1944.”
“…this Chart of Electromagnetic Radiations…was originally published in 1944 (by W.M. Welch). It’s a beautiful example of the kind of poster or magazine fold-out that was fairly common during the golden age of information graphics, from the 1940s (if not earlier) to the early 1990s. As a kid, I’d spend hours poring over books and magazines with detailed illustrations and explanations of all sorts of technology, from power plants to the Space Shuttle.” More at easyeyes.
The chart is huge: 60″ x 42″ These two graphics are small sections. A restored version is available for purchase online. Originally published by W.M. Welch Scientific
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Contemporary poster (from Wikipedia). Wow! What a poor presentation. 
This isn’t merely a matter of which type of poster is attractive. Visual thinkers interpret and arrange science – math information for students and other learners by connecting the abstract math and science concepts to real world objects and phenomena. This is an art that has been lost. The attitude is, “Everyone owns a smart phone; who needs to understand anything?”
Science Graphics / Electromagnetic Radiations 1940
How Psychologists Destroyed Public Education
A group pf psychologists were were the first to re-enact the formation of the Grand Canyon. The historic event occurred in 1940 thanks to a grant from the National Park Service.
NOVEMBER / A high school in Arizona
Back in the classroom after lunch, I can relax. The TA for the period is using one of the computers. I set my coffee on the desk and dig through a pile of papers and magazines set to one side. I strike intellectual gold, American style: a set of exercises designed by psychologists to “support” togetherness among staff and students.
THE PLAYPEN- Establish the boundaries of a playpen large enough to accommodate the group members, and allow group members to interact as babies and toddlers in the playpen. Establish the rules of no slapping, or biting, or hurting the other children. Let the interaction flow. SHARE.
NONVERBAL SHARING- Have the group stand in a circle. Each member, one at a time, non-verbally transmits a feelings message to each member of the group. SHARE. Option: May be done with eyes opened or closed.
HAND EXAMINATION: Instruct two people to non-verbally (!) examine each other’s hands. Ask them to to decide which one will “examine” first, and to allow at least 3 minutes to touch and look, before instructing the other partner to be the examiner. Ask each to verbally share the experience and specifically what they were able to discover about the partner. SHARE.
GROWING OLD- Ask two people to pretend they are very old. Insert cotton balls in their ears, dim the lights, and ask them to converse with each other. Give them a topic, eg, “Discuss what is going on in your life.” SHARE.
By this time I’m snickering and kicking the desk, and the TA looks my way. I ignore her because it just gets better:
RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVE- Enact a situation which symbolizes a religious truth or teaching. Establish the time, place, circumstance and people and allow the action to flow. EXAMPLES: 1. Moses receiving the 10 C’s from God. 2. Jesus healing the sick 3. Embody the spirit of Bhudda 4. Be your God. SHARE
SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE- Present an enactment which best describes a scientific or physical phenomenon. Allow the action to flow. EXAMPLES 1. Portray parts of the body (legs, liver, heart, eyes and explain the structure, functions and relationships to one another. (Let each person link with others and speak as anatomical parts.) 2. Portray Copernicus trying to tell 16th C people that the sun, not the earth is at the center of the solar system. 3. Embody a seed in the ground and act out the growth process. 4. Enact how sandstone is formed.
I’m pounding the desk and snorting, but wait, there’s more! 5. Create vital organs linked to one another and ask one member to be a drop of blood circulating through the system. Ask the drop of blood to non-verbally interact with organs to establish their function with the drop of blood. 6. Show the formation of the Grand Canyon. SHARE
My hysterical laughter unnerves the TA; I apologize for disrupting her computer game and continue to pound the desk while screeching. Outside the building the sunlight suddenly withdraws, and a group of short football players in squash yellow jerseys and brown pants fades against the gravel practice field. Heavy gray clouds loom between the oleanders which border the building and the low roof overhang outside.
Empires eventually disintegrate, but the American Empire will be the first one to be taken down by psychologists.
I grow old learning something new every day.
Solon 636 BC~ 558 BC, Greek Statesman
One can read the obvious in this statement, something like, we’re never too old to learn, but it suddenly occurred to me that the burden of age can be those things that you wished you had never learned, especially about how badly humans behave toward each other.
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Periodically I check in with what ancient writers had to say about conditions we find ourselves dealing with today. If only American politicians and corporate leaders could grasp these ideas:
Those who know how to win are much more numerous than those who know how to make proper use of their victories. Polybius (205 BC – 118 BC)
The humble suffer when the mighty disagree.
Aggression unchallenged is aggression unleashed. Phaedrus (15 BC – 50 AD) (Greed is a manifestation of aggression.)
A man’s character is his fate. Heraclitus (540 BC – 480 BC) (How did we forget that character is necessary to leadership?)
We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty. Marcus Fabius Quintilian (35 – 90) Roman orator. (Nothing gets done in the USA because the smallest tasks have been made as difficult as possible to achieve, through layers upon layers of irrelevant policy, obstructive laws and the refusal on the part of leaders to be leaders; no one is held responsible for outcomes.)
What power has law where only money rules? Gaius Petronius Arbiter 27-66 A.D, Emperor Nero’s advisor (How ironic!)
There is nothing so easy but that it becomes difficult when you do it reluctantly. Publius Terentius Afer Where are those leaders who are committed to their jobs, and not merely to “cashing out” and abandoning the country?
Words to live by:
A Riesling vine in my yard has survived fifteen Wyoming winters.
This summer was the best yet for grapes: deer ate every one they could reach.
Photo Day / The Grape Vine
Each person has a valid interior life
How could I be in pain? How dare I ask for help? No one saw me; they took one look and concluded that I had everything. I wasn’t human; I wasn’t allowed to be human. I suffered alone. I had to fight for a diagnosis, alone. Shrinks and doctor’s weren’t much help. They said things like, “I have patients who are really sick.” I suffered and I worked and studied to find answers for myself. And finally, a diagnosis, but no cure for the mean-spirited attacks on ASD individuals by the social-normal “caring industry.” So it’s grit your teeth, use your intelligence, find how to live, and forget about empathy, compassion or even shallow sympathy. Normal people aren’t nearly as nice as they think they are.
If someone tells you they need help, believe them.
Artsyberger: Images & Words Aspie Style 