A Portrait of the Autist as a Young Putz
I wanted to be a paleontologist when I grew up. I also wanted to be a gastroenterologist. When I read the book Jaws at the age of ten I decided to be a writer. I wrote a short story called Bear Kill about a bear that attacks and kills people. My mother told me it was too much like Jaws. I got in trouble in Hebrew School quite often. I called a friend of mine a homosexual. The rabbi confronted me and I lied. I said that I had called my friend a homo sapien. When I was eleven, I began to question the existence of God. I don't know why I did that. Feminine intuition? I was a kleptomaniac and a pyromaniac when I was young. I used to recite the Witch's chant from Macbeth to my camp counselors in 1975, and they thought I was out of my mind. I have always had a rather touchy relationship with honesty throughout my life. I cheated my way through seventh grade math and paid the price for it in eighth grade. I used to think prep school ruined my life. Now I know that I ruined my life. I have a really bad memory. I remember way too many bad things. There are total strangers who insulted me decades ago and I still can't forgive them. I may lack the forgiveness gene. I do not understand the concept. I have strange dreams at night. I am brain damaged from drug abuse and old age. No one will ever really know about my dreams. They fade away. Most of my life will fade away, too, when I am dead and buried. People may hold my life against me, but they cannot touch my dreams. I try to keep my friends and family and lovers separate. When I am in a room with my best friend and my girlfriend and my mother, I want to crawl under a rock. I do not suffer from split personality, but I undergo a subtle shift in persona to suit the occasion and the company. I go for months and sometimes years at a time without getting laid. Sometimes I think this is a terrible waste. Sometimes I think this is quite as it should be. Testosterone is a blessing, and a curse. In general, I don't care for humans very much. In general, I don't care for myself very much. I used to be relatively thin. Now I am fat. How did such a thing happen? I barely every watched television in high school and college and graduate school. Now I watch television a lot. Sometimes I like baloney. Sometimes I don't. I would like to leave my brain to science so they can see if there is anything wrong with it and then let me know what the problem is. As a rule, I don't like breast enhancement. Half the time, children are sweet and cute and charming. Half the time, they are satanic. I like to watch pretty girls make out. That's sensual. I have known four men who died of AIDS. A guy I really admired in high school killed himself after his freshman year in college. I don't know why. Dinosaurs are just about the coolest things alive. When I really like a girl, I want to kiss her on the lips. When I don't much like a girl, I prefer not to kiss her on the lips. I sweat a lot, more than a man should. Someday I would like to win an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay. I don't believe people most of the time. I think they are basically full of baloney. I am often full of baloney, but usually I am aware of that fact. I would like to be more self-deluded, but it's hard work. I enjoy moderate temperatures. Too hot and too cold both bother me. In this respect, I am like Goldilocks. Sharks are almost as cool as dinosaurs. At times, cooler. I don't care for random nonsequitur stream-of-consciousness blogs. I believe in structure and organization. If a writer wants to be taken seriously, he should communicate efficiently and make himself as coherent as possible Usually, I get tuna sandwiches at Subway. I used to like pepperoni and sausage on my pizza, but now I tend to order vegetarian. I dated two vegetarians and tried to date a vegan, unsuccessfully. I hardly ever recycle. Some day I will have to invent a unique way to feel better about myself. I have lived in the same apartment for over eighteen years. You could fairly say that I am both stable, and unstable. I used to be a really good speller. Now I am not. My memory is going, but not fast enough. If I didn't have books to read and movies to watch, I would die of boredom. That is why I hope I never get captured by the Vietcong. If you become Manson's therapist, do you say things like, "Just be yourself, Charlie, and people are bound to like you?" People shouldn't pick on Wickipedia. You can find disinformation just about anywhere these days. I think seals and dolphins are beautiful creatures. Insects are significantly less beautiful, but I respect the heck out of them. Death scares me. I am attached to my animal body, however ugly and useless it may be. Arms and shoulders are very lovely on a woman, and quite underrated. I am head over heels in love with a young woman right now, but she is not in love with me. Such is life, bittersweet. The good folks at Safeway think my name is Mr. Foster. A psychotic woman who lives near me thinks my name is Owen. If I ever commit a notorious crime, my defense attorney will call these people to the stand and there may be a mistrial. I know that I am in love with this new girl in my life because I drive a lot to be with her. I drove a lot for Katie Walsh when I was mad about her. I fear cars, and I hate traffic. I only like driving in the middle of the night on deserted streets. If I drive in rush hour traffic to be with a girl, that's proof I am smitten. Right now, while I am typing, I am waiting for the girl I adore to call me. It is an awesome and wonderful and torturous thing to be in love. Wow, here's something real freaky. I just had a short visit with my beloved and I think I fell out of love with her. Just like that. Amazing and depressing. Nothing is real. I always suspected that. I am as alone as I have ever been in my life. I used to think that only beautiful women could control me, but actually many ugly women have gotten under my skin, too, and they are just as cruel and just as crazy as good looking women. I see clearly now, as I have seen quite clearly for many years, that my useless life is nothing but eating, sleeping, waking, shitting, showering, walking, reading, writing, over and over and over again, until my life finally ends. I want to be cremated right away, as soon as I am dead. No autopsy, please. No grotesque coroners prowling around my obesity. Come to think of it, I should probably crash a college bonfire party and throw myself onto the pyre, just like an old-fashioned Hindu wife. Kill two birds with one suttee. I am no longer a young putz. I am middle-aged, assuming that I die in my 80's. If I kill myself tomorrow, then I am quite old. Putz is too harmless. Usually I am something quite a bit worse than a putz. No doubt some of you think that I have been wallowing in my misery out of sheer perversity, because I am too in love with my own angst. My father encouraged me to see a therapist when I was 19, and I got some value from it. My father and I did family counseling together a few times when I was 30 or so, I can't remember exactly. My father was a depressed alcoholic who never stopped drinking, even when attending AA meetings. I have no idea how he died, since there was no autopsy. I will probably die of obesity, or diabetes, or a heart condition, or suicide. One of my many crazy ex-girlfriends told me that we had to do couple's counseling. I paid for it, naturally. A judge ordered me to do anger counseling when I threatened this same ex-girlfriend's life. I am still angry. She is dead. She killed herself last year. Therapy can be useful for some people I suppose. But I have tried it, and I don't think I am capable of any significant change, and I believe I am incurable. Life is cruel, quite often. Sometimes I wonder if this life is my fate. Sometimes I wonder if I was born to this useless existence. Was there something specific that I did wrong many decades agao that set me on this destructive path? Is there something specific that I can do now that will redeem me, change me, save me, give my life some value? How nice it would be to have real Faith with a capital F. Somtimes I wonder if I'm a very old soul, or a first time soul. There are things I seem to understand better than anyone else, and other things I can't grasp at all. If this current soul is the only one I've ever had, and the only one I will ever have, boy oh boy, did I ever make a mess of it. I had one of those horrifying moments today. Since I was 21, I've had those moments about 20 times or so over the years. That absolutely horrifying feeling in your very gut, in the innermost part of you, that tells you that you are going to die someday. It is not rational, not intellectual, not at all intentional. It is something that shoots into your very soul and stops you dead in your tracks for about five seconds. Then repression takes over, and you can function again. But those five seconds are like an eternity of dread and fear and anxiety. The sheer pointless grind of it all. Just imagine if I actually had a life worth keeping. Just imagine how bad it would be then. I am 43 years old this morning. Usually I turn off my ringer on my birthday because I am too depressed to speak to my very few well-wishers. Today I think I will stay home and speak to everyone kind enough to call. I am feeling quite low and I think it would do me good to speak with people who care enough to remember my birthday. I am in love with a girl who is not in love with me. This is a very tough proposition. Sometimes I feel like I actually dislike her, but that may just be the love talking. At times I feel wonderful in her presence, sometimes quite awful. I had a mature thought when I woke up this morning, about acceptance and resignation. I have to accept the fact that I cannot control my own feelings, and I certainly cannot control the feelings of other people, especially beautiful young women. To stay sane, I have to deal with the fact that some days I may imagine she feels nothing but contempt for me. When I most need her attention, her respect, and her love, she may be in another emotional zone. Ah well. All my life I have desperately tried to cling to the most absurd, naive, romantic, and unrealistic view of love. I want everything to be sunshine and lollipops. No conflict, no enmity, no confrontation. I realize now in my dotage that this kind of bliss is nearly impossible between any two human beings, and even more impossible between lovers. I understand now that you can hate someone you are in love with, you can be bored by them and disgusted with them, you can want to be apart from them. It's just the sad nature of the beast. My word, I've dated women who claimed to love me, claimed to want to marry me and have my children, and these women made me feel like a piece of shit on a regular basis without even trying. Sometimes I even felt as though they saw it as their right to put me down and degrade me, simply because we were in a love relationship. As if that is a proper kind of revenge for "loving" another person. Now I am crazy about a young girl who could easily walk away from me tomorrow without a sad thought. Is it any wonder that my love for her is also filled with emptiness and depression? What is worse, to feel as though you are nothing to a stranger, or nothing to a lover? Last year on my birthday I was suicidal. This year I am philosophical. So, an improvement. Well, that didn't last long. I am suicidal again. And nearly homicidal, too. Until I met the girl I am in love with, I was suicidal regularly for the last few years because I had absolutely nothing in my life I could value. After I met her, I was happy to be alive. Now I am suicidal again, because she is so very much a part of my life, and so clearly not a part of my life. I wait for her to call every day. Sometimes she does. We get together, and I realize I am spending time with her because she is the closest thing to a girlfriend I will ever have again. But she is not my girlfrriend, not at all. I'm not sure she is even a friend. I am useful to her. I am the guy she calls early Sunday morning because the three adults she lives with either can't or won't drive her to work. I drive her because I have nothing better to do. I drive her because it may be my only time to see her that day. I am the guy with a car, and with money, and with the desperate urge to spend it on her because I have no other means to express my desire for her. Would she like me better if I had a wife or a girlfriend? Would she like me better if I had been a dick to her from the beginning? Would she like me better if I assaulted her like her father? She writes songs about her abusive neglectful father, just dying for his love. What do I need to do to get her to write songs about me? No. There is nothing I can do. I cannot make her love me, not with time, not with attention, not with love, not with money. I was the nicest kindest man to her for four months straight, and that only made me contemptible in her eyes. And then I was a dick to her for a week when my resentment became uncontrollable. She wasn't impressed with my "dignified anger." She was ready to discard me for good as soon as I stopped being perfectly nice and accomodating. I wake up every night now, seething with resentment and desperation. How did I ever sink so low? Is this the fitting punishment for my many sins? What a pathetic worm I am. It is quite clear that women have always been the bane of my existence. This is not to blame them for being what they are. I am at fault for my weakness and my stupidity. What if I had been an asexual creature? Would I have been a great artist, and a happy man? Freud would say no. Freud would tell me that I didn't have enough talent and I didn't work hard enough to turn my morbid sexuality into romance and art. I had another bad dream about this girl last night. I never used to dream about her at all. I spent so much time thinking about her in my waking life that my unconscious never gave her a thought. Now she is in my dreams often, conflicting, confrontational. I fear the inevitable end of this situation. I fear what will happen if I continue to degrade myself in this way. But what is the alternative? She is the only woman who wants to spend any time with me at all, whatever motive she has. Crushing loneliness or romantic humiliation. Such a dilemma. There are times when I forget how deeply I have sinned, and then I actually wonder why I am in such a sad position. Most people have conveniently bad memories, or no conscience at all, or they have developed great rationalizing talents. Soon enough I remember what I have done to deserve my place in life, and then I almost smile with recognition. Yes, this is the way it is, and the way it should be, and there is nothing I can do to change it. The phone is a wonderful mechanism for passive-aggressive behavior. You can listen to it ring and not answer it. You can turn off the ringer if the noise annoys you. You can erase all of your messages without listening to them. You can turn the volume down completely on your answering machine so you don't hear people leaving you obnoxious messages. You can leave the phone off the hook. You can put the phone down quietly as soon as the asshole on the other end starts getting confrontational. He or she will think you are still listening to the abuse, but you will actually be in the other room, watching re-runs of the Simpsons. You can slam down the phone to make a violent point, and you can hang up anytime you want. The other person is somewhere else, and he or she can do nothing to battle your passive-aggressive behavior. Thank you, Alexander Graham Bell, for your wonderful contribution. A terrible and vicious absurdity hangs over my life. The trivial and the significant are blending together and becoming indistinguishable. It is theatre of the absurd, with bad acting, bad writing, bad directing, devoid of meaning and insight and even humor. When I was 13 years old, I saw Devo on Saturday Night Live, and I was very scared. I've returned to the same very sad and dark place that I was in before. I am not sleeping enough. I have aches and pains in my body that won't go away. I am filled with pointless rage that I am too cowardly to relieve except in depressing chat rooms, where I hide behind my fake pictures and profiles. I am no longer in love. The girl I adored for months has been reduced to someone I spend time with for lack of anything better to do. Most movies don't thrill me anymore. My brain is unfocused and distracted, and I can barely read. I am afraid to get a job. What can I do when I am either too tired or too wired or my hands won't stop shaking and sweating? I am obsessed with death. I am surrounded by idiots. I am an idiot. Everything is quite useless. When I was in middle school, my parents sent me to this professional advisor, someone to tell me where to go to prep school, and where to go to college. Nice office, this clown had. God only knows what he charged rich Greenwich retards for advice they didn't need. When he found out that I had been typing since the 6th grade, he actually advised me to make a few intentional mistakes on my prep school applications, just so the admissions people wouldn't assume that my parents had typed my essay for me. Wow. I can't even begin to respond--28 years later--to such frightening cynicism and idiocy. It wasn't until very recently that I even remembered this moron and his horrible advice, which I didn't take. I met a horrible woman named Andrea back in 1994. She told me several times that she still lived with her ex-boyfriend but they hadn't slept together in over a year. After having sex with her for the first time, I got a call from...you guessed it... her boyfriend. She had left my number in a place where he could find it, and he called to find out where she was. Please explain to me why I didn't hang up the phone without a word. Please explain to me why I didn't tell this clown to never call me again. Please explain to me why I became flustered and guilty and actually felt the need to lie to this guy, when I had done absolutely nothing wrong. Please explain to me why I didn't knock Andrea over the head with the receiver. Because I truly don't know what makes me so bafflingly pusillanimous. I feel quite isolated and depressed. It is a terrible thing, to have no future. These are the limits of my sad and shallow life. Someone somewhere is curing cancer; someone somewhere is desperately in love with someone else, and that someone else is desperately in love, too; someone somewhere has faced bravely and boldly the absurdity of his trivial existence, and he is smiling calmly. I am reading Faulkner, trying to get to know the man so I don't embarass myself when I teach him in a year and a half. I am taking walks every day to prevent my obesity from turning into morbid obesity. I am in love with a girl who probably finds me rather foolish and grotesque. When I touch her, perhaps she has to force herself not to recoil. I am not completely alone. But I am essentially alone.
