Walk That Lonesome Valley All Alone

I haven’t met anyone who wants to talk about late-diagnosed autism in older adults. What I have discovered is a geek chorus of folks who want to assure me, with great and passionate intensity,that autism is a disease of children who don’t talk and bang their heads against the wall until they become savants and get rich counting cards.

It’s not something for old people. You can’t steal a perfectly good childhood illness, probably caused by multiple vaccinations, and use it to promote your own selfish liver-spotted agenda. Just imagine the pain of finding an infant under the Christmas tree, expecting it to be a wholesome and active little Vikings fan, full of energy and ambition and wearing a bonny cap of some kind, and chewing gum loudly, and dipping girls’ pigtails in the inkwells– and instead finding a little selfish shit who won’t talk to us because we’re ignorant peasants.

Imagine the heartbreak and trying to figure out what to do with it, especially after watching “Eraser Head” four or five times.

Well, yeah, as a matter of fact I CAN imagine that, because I lived it. I was that bundle of evil energy that caused my intellectually challenged parents to howl up to God– “Why, oh why, have you sent us this obnoxious little brainiac who thinks he’s better than we are, and refuses to bend his knee to tyranny even when we use the belt??”

Why indeed.

The answer, my friend, blew in via Youtube right after I had completed a video where I ‘splained that I JUST CAN’T make a video AND do my model building AT THE SAME TIME. Right after I made that video, I found a video on “monotropism” and had a Eureka moment.

That man is me. I am that, Arjuna. I am a spectral specter who has had to fight an army of hostile normies from day one. I’m Spartacus, and I’m Autistic as fuck.

So I’m working on coming to terms with this, even as my network of supporting friends and family attempt to be as supportive as one can be to a person who has declared independence from all the right-thinking behaviors that all normal people endorse. But I’m NOT normal. I don’t play that way.

People like me, whatever we are called, have the ability to focus, with “laser like” intensity, on any task. It’s like a “super power.”  But it seems so easy to us that we make the mistake of thinking that with just a little encouragement, Joe Dirt could do this– no problem. But Joe cannot do it. Joe’s brain doesn’t work that way. Joe will be forever distracted by that good-lookin’ chick or a tom turkey or Wild Turkey or whatever. He wants to paint that canopy, but his mind wanders at the critical time.

This is where the airbrush hive mind steps in. Instead of being abused by those damned know-it-alls who can focus, Joe can get an airbrush and some masks and start masking and, eventually, get better results than any weirdos who can focus more than a decent Christian man should focus.

So on top of finding out that all my tools and materials have gone off the market, I also have to come to terms with the fact that I’ve been trying to teach pigs to sing “The Star Spangled Banner.”

So I have a lot to think about.