Bring Me the Head of Abed Nadir...

The following is an essay I wrote a few years ago about how much I relate to a character on a TV show. That TV show is called Community. The character is named Abed. I love that TV show.

Bring Me the Head of Abed Nadir...

Just make sure it’s still attached to the rest of him because I think we could totally hang out.

My buddy Luke is my best friend in the world. I met him when I was a junior in high school and he was a freshman. Over the last couple decades we've been classmates, housemates, and co-workers at three different jobs. We co-created a short-lived micro-press comic book series (three issues of Captain 9-Ball, circulation: 30). He has tolerated my pedantry on all subjects nerdy and academic, even those about which I know less than he does. He sadly shook his head and kept his mouth shut when I got back together with my first girlfriend (the girlfriend I couldn’t quite break up with because I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to convince anyone else I was boyfriend material). He put up with a few full-blown tantrums over his tendencies to leave the living room looking as though guys in their early twenties lived in our house (we were, in fact, in our early twenties). He got internet ordained to perform the ceremony for my first marriage, nursed me through the divorce, encouraged me when it was time to try dating again, and gave me the best damn Best Man's toast when it counted. 

He’s also the guy who introduced me to Abed.

I was about a month or two into my first serious binge into research on Asperger’s and autism. What brought the research on was a panic attack relating to the facts that, 1) I was having a lot of trouble communicating with the instructor of an online class I was taking, and, 2) I didn’t have a clue what I was supposed to be doing as I was meeting with potential cooperating teachers for my student teaching internship. In the throes of confusion, I happened to catch a radio interview of writer Tim Page, who was diagnosed with Asperger’s in adulthood. What I heard Page describing was just too similar to what I had been going through my entire life. I took a break from my classes and plunged into the available reading material.

I started soft with Wikipedia and a Facebook meme of a widely used autism diagnostic tool. Then I moved on to a couple titles I picked up at a local used bookstore, titles I had known about for years, but was afraid to look into. With good reason, it turned out.

My reading binge confirmed that Asperger’s was me. No doubt about it. I am a person who has these issues: a tendency to monologue without regard for my audience’s lost interest; a fascination with minutiae; motor clumsiness; difficulty reading the intentions of others; and, yeah, a lousy track record for romantic relationships.

Luke was my best friend from forever. My best friend even though sometimes months would pass without us actually speaking. He’s the first person I talked to outside of my family about my Asperger’s suspicions. He knew a bit about the topic, and enough about me, to accept what I was saying as truth. He also knew that I was still the same person I always was, just with a handy new set of nouns adjectives at my disposal. Nouns and adjectives that described the stuff I’d been doing for as long as he’d known me.

A couple weeks after I’d shared with him my self-diagnosis, he said to me “You should watch Community. There’s this character, who, well, they only say the word once, but, yeah, he’s got Asperger’s. You’d like him.”

He was talking about Abed Nadir. Now, at this point, I could monologue at length about the NBC sitcom Community, giving you airdates, character and actor bios, and my own take about why former show-runner Dan Harmon was fired and what that means for the show. But, I know enough about myself now to know that this isn’t necessary. If you’re reading these words, you have internet access. You can open your own tabs for Wikipedia, YouTube, and IMDB. Go ahead and do some background research if you want. I’ll be right here, silently scrolling my monologue through my head, till you get back.

(Time passes… or not)

Right, so now we all know that Abed is a quirky member of a quirky community college study group who makes meaning out of the world by filtering real life experiences through his encyclopedic film and television knowledge. One of his main motivations for joining the group, besides a universal desire for friendship, is that the setup reminds him of the John Hughes movie Breakfast Club. It’s quickly revealed, however, that study group instigator Jeff Winger is neither a certified Spanish tutor, nor actually interested in being part of a study group. He just wants to get into the blonde girl’s (Britta Perry’s) pants.

Abed expresses his disappointment at this revelation by telling Winger, “I thought you were like Bill Murray in any of his films, but you’re more like Michael Douglas in any of his films.”

To which Winger replies, “Yeah? Well you have Asperger’s.”

Rather than leading into a stilted and forced explanation of a trendy new movie of the week subject, the study group descends into the lowest form of comedy: underwear area jokes. (And thank god for that, because we already have Parenthood being preachy on the subject, and that’s enough.)

The pilot episode of Community is the only time the syndrome is mentioned in the series. And it’s the only time it needs to be mentioned. This is not a television show about how everyone copes with their friend who’s kind of autistic. It’s a television show about seven disparate individuals, each with their own strengths and flaws. And everybody’s flaws get equal time. Kind of like Mtv’s the Real World, only better.

Abed shows early on, that he knows his own strengths and flaws all too well. We see this in the first season episode, "Physical Education," when the group tries to help Abed get a girlfriend. It’s help he hasn’t asked for. It’s intrusive, disrespectful, and, as Winger reminds the group, doomed because any plan to superficially change someone to fit your own idealized version of what a person should be is doomed.

But Abed is game He goes to his strength and accepts this complicated social ploy by framing it as a movie set-up. “You’re going to Can’t Buy Me Love me,” he says, referencing the one 1980s high school movie not set in McHenry, Illinois. (In fact, it was set in Tucson, Arizona at the same high school I attended. Not when I was there, but when one of my older cousins was. However, my enrollment did overlap with that of Joe Torres, a cast-member of the very first Nickelodeon produced sit-com, Hey Dude. But, that’s all beside the point. Note the parentheses.)

The point is Abed knows who he is. When the group tells him the best way to approach a girl is to just ‘be yourself,’ Abed does so without missing a beat. He stares off into the middle distance and remains in his seat at the group’s table. Group member Troy Barnes, who will go on to become Abed’s best friend, roommate, and blanket fort rival, realizes a clarifying prompt is necessary.

“Go be yourself by Jenny,” Troy says.

“But I wouldn’t go over there.”

“How do you know that?”

“A lifetime of observation, mostly.”

Abed knows who he is and he knows that approaching girls is not something that he does. The group feels like they need to push him to help him grow socially. They ask if he can imagine a version of himself that would be near Jenny. Very quickly he decides that the version of himself that would do this would also be a vampire. He apes the posture and facial expressions, not of dreamy Edward Cullen, but of the pestilential titular character from Nosferatu.

(This entire exchange echoes scenes from my own life when friends would learn that I was still a virgin at 24. They kind of marveled that it wasn’t for religious reasons, gave me some tips, and took me out to clubs with them. Mostly, I learned how to drink gin and tonics. I might have been able to make the vampire thing work, though. This was the late 90s and Buffy the Vampire Slayer was picking up steam.)

Abed plays along with the group’s efforts to get him a girlfriend, even though he knows it’s more important to them than it is to him. He’s following the arc of what he recognizes as a typical sit-com plot development and is happy to do so. It’s comfortable for him (just how, in the late 90s it was comfortable for me to soothe my own uncertainty in social situations by repeating the mantra ‘It’s just a TV show’). The inevitable sit-com plot reversal comes, revealing the dramatic irony that Jenny already has a boyfriend who happens to look like a white version of Abed. 

Abed takes it in stride. The rest of the group, however, is worried they may have destroyed Abed’s self-esteem.

Abed reassures them that he has “self-esteem falling out of (his)butt.” He also reveals some things he knows about himself and how other people relate to him.

“Everybody wants to help me,” he says. “But, usually, when they find out they can’t, they get frustrated and stop talking to me.”

Although Abed knows he is socially impaired, he is, like all humans, a social creature. He wants to be part of the study group. He does not want this group to get fed up with him and shove him in a metaphorical locker (as seen in season three episode “Virtual Systems Analysis”). He tells them directly, and unashamedly, “when you know who you are and what you like about yourself, changing for other people isn’t such a big deal.” This causes the group to reevaluate their own motives and gain a new admiration for who Abed is.

But, despite what Abed says, changing for other people is a big deal.

In between my first girlfriend and my second, there was someone who almost was. I was using my mantra hourly, and sometimes every minute.

(

It’s just a TV show, I’d tell myself. Keep following the arc until the commercial break. Collect yourself, and get back in there for the big reversal and the resolution. Thirty minutes. It’s just a TV show. You can do it.)

I told this almost-girlfriend about my mantra, because I didn’t really have any kind of filter on my thoughts then. No real conscious grasp on which of my thoughts would be good to share and which would just be off-putting. She thought my mantra, my social crutch, was absolutely ridiculous. “But life isn’t a TV show,” she said.

And no, it isn’t. It’s this terrifying thing where you never really know what’s going to happen next and people don’t make asides or soliloquies and you can’t hear their pre-recorded inner monologues, so you never know what they’re thinking. TV shows are much more comfortable. Reliable. You know that, no matter what happens, at the end of thirty minutes things will return to a sort of stasis in which the characters and their relationships come to the same equilibrium that existed before the beginning of the episode. Unless it’s a two-parter. Then you have to wait a week.

With the almost-girlfriend things started to get romantic one night until the point where I asked, “what do we do next?” and she started laughing. It wasn’t a mean-spirited laugh, but it was pretty much the end of it. Reversal. Equilibrium. Role end credits. And that ending was actually very comfortable. That evening’s episode had arrived at a proper sit-com ending. It was good. It worked. The at-home audience was satisfied with their entertainment (and, in those days, I often truly did determine an interpersonal exchange’s success by what I judged would be its entertainment value for the invisible at-home audience). I was left feeling that, just maybe, I could handle something more. Maybe a mid-season cliffhanger or a three episode story arc with a new recurring character. I was growing, just oddly.

Soon after this, through improbable circumstances, I met the official second girlfriend, the one I ended up marrying. This time I dared not tip my hand or share my mantra with her. I did my best to follow the role of awkward, quirky boyfriend according to the rules of sit-com plot development. And then, one thing led to another, and a child was conceived.

Life really wasn’t just a TV show.

At this point, my mantra had run its course. I couldn’t take it seriously anymore, and I had to look for strength elsewhere. Luckily, I found strength in my stubborn determination to be a version of me that would also be a really great dad. And, it turns out, that version's really not a version at all. I can do that. Other things I'm not so good at. Like shopping for groceries without looping through every aisle several times before remembering three of the five things I absolutely need to get while I'm there. Or making a good impression at job interviews.

Years passed, I learned some stuff, figured out some interesting and sometimes absolutely terrifying things about myself (facing that you have Asperger's can be absolutely terrifying), and, in 2009 my best friend, Luke, insisted I meet Abed. I’m glad he did.

I like to follow the exploits of Abed Nadir, because, of all television characters, he’s the one I know I could hang out with. He loves TV and movies with a depth and passion I can appreciate. He says the kind of things that I might say. He reacts to the people around him in ways I might react. He does things that I would do, if only I had self-esteem falling out my butt (and sometimes I do).

I also have a new appreciation of my buddy Luke. He’s known who I am for years. He’s seen all my autistic quirks and all the different versions of me I’ve attempted to be. And he knows that all of them do have a genuine piece of me in them. He’s even seen the worst of the wannabe bar trash asshole version that neither one of us really liked. But he’s been my friend through all of it, long past the point where he should have gotten fed up and shoved me in a locker. I watch how Abed’s friends both value him, and are frustrated by him. How, even after he’s been his most obnoxious, they still love him. I get a better idea of how Luke sees me, and why he’s always been my friend.

I guess that makes Luke kind of like my Troy, only better, because we can hang out in real life and not just on a TV show. Also, he helps me remember that this is not the darkest timeline, which is something we all need to be reminded of from time to time.

Bricks were made for building

There's comfort in architectural details
There's solace in the unbroken line
Of the crown moulding
Looking at bricks over and over again
As if bricks could talk
There's comfort in architectural details

I used to wonder if I was schizophrenic
There was a really weird number
On my MMPI
And I knew I didn't see the world
In a way similar to other people

But I never saw anything that wasn't there
No matter how hard I looked

I never stopped looking for someone else who saw
The pressure of conversations
The burden of always wondering
The grasping at intangibles

I chased and chased and chased
After meanings that escaped me
Meanings that are oh so obvious
To everybody else

(Somewhere there must be an angel)

I followed the lines in the highway
The stripes in the parking lot
The grids of human consumption
The Realtor's leftover scraps
Of Manifest Destiny

Grids upon grids
Lines upon lines
Sewers and electric
Gas and water
Subterranean
And hanging from poles

(Somewhere there must be a person)

It could never matter
As much as it mattered to me
The color of bricks
Their warmth in the sun

Brick after brick after brick
Stacked and purposeful
The only things that made sense
As the sea of people flowed around

I looked in people's eyes
Because I read in a book
That's what you're supposed to do
And, damn, did I look
But I never saw what I was
supposed to see

I suppose the sea was supposed to see

(Somewhere there must be an analogue)

Bricks were meant for building
Brick by brick, I build myself
Everyday, and again, everyday
Still looking for a perfect angel
Or am I looking for a perfect angle?

(Somewhere someone knows what I mean)

The Treacheries of Disclosure

For those of us who manage to reach adulthood before realizing that autism is the thing that explains why everything's always been off, it's hard to know who it's safe to come out to. It's hard to know which situations are necessary. Does your employer need to know? Does your healthcare provider? At what point do you tell the person you are romantically involved with?

In some ways I envy the people who get their diagnoses in childhood. Their parents get to field the disclosure question. Other times, I think those of us with the adult diagnosis might have the better end of the deal. We've had to learn how to navigate the neurotypical world on our own terms and often we draw strength from that fact.

But when you suddenly know what kind of different that you actually are, and it's simultaneously the most terrifying and most validating thing in the world, how soon do you share this information?

Sometimes I feel very much like Winston Smith from George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. The pains Winston goes throw to hide his thoughts, his true self, from the Party, is quite analogous to how I go through my day. By and large, it is the neurotypicals who decide whether or not I go to work tomorrow. It is the neurotypicals who decide if I fit in well enough to their social structure to earn an income. It may not matter that there are certain things that I can do better than most other people, if they feel I might be legitimately too weird to be trusted, they could just not call my back to work.

The job I have is of an on-call nature. I'm hoping for a more permanent position, but, in this economy, aren't we all?

While there are certain legal protections in the workplace for people with disabilities, I have not legally established that I have a disability. All I have is a psychologist's (and my own) opinion that, yes, I do have a brain that goes about things in an autistic way. And I'm still a bit too stubborn in my sense of identity to pursue the status of 'disabled' because I can do a hell of a lot if you give me a chance.

I'd love to be able to just run up the flag that says, 'yes, I'm an aspie and I kick butt at some stuff that you find difficult and you need me!'

But I'm scared. And the prevailing wisdom is that you don't disclose until you've established a relationship of trust.

So, in real life, off the internet, I don't disclose very often. My closest friends know. My family knows. The people who are my Facebook friends should know, but it's hard to tell if they even see my status updates.

In real life I've tried to tell my physician, and he was taken aback for a moment but quickly catagorized it as a problem outside his domain. The same with my ophthalmologist, although I do believe I have some sensory issues that an eye-care professional could possibly help me with. If I want to pursue it, I'll have to educate her on the areas where Aspergers/autism and vision issues may overlap.

When applying for an individual health plan I disclosed on their medical history survey. That proved a difficult step. I was initially denied coverage for having a pre-existing condition and had to appeal. The appeal was successful, but the process left me a little gun shy.

Now, I'm looking for a job in a new town. I'm in a new town for rather complicated personal reasons. But mostly because I'm too stubborn not to be near my daughter. But I need a job to keep this up.

In my last job I worked in an amazing high school program for students on the spectrum. I found that position as I was finding out about myself. After failing as an English teacher in a regular education setting, I found I worked quite well as a paraprofessional in an autism classroom. It makes sense. They're my people.

I know that's the kind of job I want to do here. And I know part of why I do it well is because of my own spectrumy nature. But I just can't throw it right out there on the job application. I have to get the job, then slowly build the trust.

So right now I'm subbing as a paraprofessional in a beleaguered school district where the predominant strategy toward special education is to try and keep as many kids on the conveyor belt as possible. In truth, this might be the most effective way they can use the resources they have. In practice, I feel like kids on the spectrum are getting lost in the mix. I know there are better things that can be done for them. And I know why I know this. It's who I am. But I'm just to scared to say it.

What if I get 'pre-existing conditioned' out of a job I know I can do better than 99% of other people?

Haircuts are Weird

A lot of times I really don't want to do it. I'll go months, and sometimes years between professional haircuts. For most of the 90s I'd shave parts of my head and cut what was on top by shear guess work. It had a kind of D-I-Y mystique.

But now, most of the time, I feel a bit old for that. I save it up until that moment when I look in the mirror and realize I look like like 1978 and something really needs to be done about it. So, I flip the switch un my head that says "it's haircut time," and I take care of it. I also prepare myself for inevitable disappointment.

I'm probably not going to be happy with what I get.

And the experience itself is difficult. Not as difficult as for some. I don't throw tantrums. I like the sensory experience of the clippers but not so much the scissors. It's not too bad for me, but I can totally see how it could be a million times worse for someone with a stronger sensory reaction.

My first trouble is that, sitting in the chair, I just can't explain what I want. So the barber or stylist just does what seems natural and I usually end up with either a 'big boy haircut' or the Anderson Cooper. What I want is something different, but I lack the words to explain it.

And maybe there aren't words. Maybe there's just this internal sense of what it is I want my hair to be that just doesn't match the training and the expectations of the stylist. In some ways, what I want is a crazy manga haystack of hair. What would happen if I said that? But I never can quite say that, probably because of the second thing.

The second thing is the physical proximity to another person that I don't know so well. It sets off a lot of weird things inside me. When I go to the dentist, my gums swell from anxiety and are prone to bleeding. That's another story.

The barbershop is a very different environment than the dentist office. It's less clinical, better music, and the stylist always is ready to chat. The conversational aspect is the killer. It's easy to be taciturn with a chatty dental hygenist, because your speaking organ is compromised. There is no such built in defense against the small talk of the hair stylist.

And the stylist is so, so close. Touching my head and really getting closer to me than I'm used to lately. And it's confusing.

In a way, it feels very intimate. But I don't know what to do with that feeling. It's a misreading. The stylist is doing her job. Today it was a her, which simultaneously makes it easier to relax and easier to get confused about the misreadings caused by proximity.

With a male stylist, I know where I stand. I've long since figured out that I'm not attracted to men. Long ago I gave the question a proper amount of objective consideration. I can be okay with knowing who I am in that interaction.

With a female stylist, especially an attractive one who seems to fall in the same general age bracket as myself, signals start getting sent. Not of a creepy variety, so much, but just of the kind that, well, hell, it creeps me out. I don't know who I am in relation to this person who is putting her hands on my head. Especially since small talk is part of the exchange. Is there some underlying hint within her question about what I was planning on doing that evening?

Probably not. Now I can see it as probably not. Or was it? It doesn't matter now, but at the time I was confused. Was there some sort of perfect answer she was hoping for and if I'd said it we could have ended up hanging out after her shift watching reruns of Doctor Who? And is that the kind of thing I want out of a trip to get a haitcut?

I suppose this is it. When people get that close to me, I cease to be able to figure out what they want out of the interaction. There is too much information all at once for me to sort through, and I can't even figure enough of my way through it to be able to say 'no, not so short with the bangs.'

When I was married, it was easier. It was easier to know who I was in relation to other people. Certain levels of intimate connection were out of the equation as soon as I said the words 'my wife.' But now I don't know. I could be anybody.

That's the most terrifying thing about getting a haircut. Someone is so close to me, way inside my personal bubble, physically doing things to the outside of my head. If I don't know who I am, could they be doing things to the inside of it, too?

It takes a lot of work to get to know someone well enough that I can trust them to be so close to me. Getting a haircut forces me to shove all that reluctance aside. And maybe that's really why I'm always so disappointed with the results. They remind me that I don't know who I am when I get too close to a stranger. When I don't know how my story plays out with their story. When I don't know what they want from me and I can't figure out what I want from them.

But I have to get haircuts sometimes.

How HDTV Made Me Realize I See Things Differently

...and other thoughts about sensory issues

I'm feeling a bit of confusion lately because the APA's diagnostic manual is changing its language and that's getting people agitated. The big headline that was going around last week was that the Asperger's Syndrome diagnosis will be dropped from the DSM V. That makes me feel unsettled because I've built up a certain sense of identity around having Asperger's. I have a better idea who I am through the lens of the Asperger's diagnosis. However, my traits are mildly expressed, and I sometimes worry that I'm not spectrumy enough to belong to the club.

And then, every once in a while I'm in a room with one other autistic person and twenty or so garden varieties (or whatever you want to call 'normal' people). Inevitably, the autism spectrumy person says something that makes the other twenty people cock their heads like they didn't hear it right, but I laugh, almost too loudly, because I totally get it. 

Technically, my paperwork says Autism Spectrum Disorder, not Asperger's, so I should just calm down. And even if I somehow were to get re-evaluated and I were determined to exist on the wrong side of the DSM V autism line, I'm still all in with the neurodiversity camp. Neurodiversity is a club that includes everybody.

So, to try and reel this in to what my title is about, the new DSM autism guidelines specifically include sensory issues. From my understanding, this is new. Sensory processing issues used to be considered common co-morbidities for autism, but now they're part of the diagnostic checklist. Brilliant!

However, "hyper- or hypo-reactivity to sensory input" is a pretty broad way to put it. And how do you test for it? Some expressions of hypo-reactivity are more obvious, like the kid who doesn't notice that he's cut himself until someone points out his shirt is soaked in blood. Or the little girl who screams and arches into bridge because the car seat is way too hot. Others, however, really aren't.

Because autism can limit your perspective to your own experiences, it's hard to know how your perceptions may not match up with those of others. Someone with milder visual or auditory processing issues might not even realize that they're having an issues until well into adulthood, when they have accreted enough information to realize something funny is going on. At the age of 38, I've finally connected enough dots to realize that I've got a bunch of quirks in my perception that most likely add up to general sensory processing issues.

I'll list a few. I would also like to point out that these issues tend to manifest themselves more profoundly when there is extra stress going on in my life.

Auditory

First, when I was in 7th Grade, I noticed the ringing in my ears, or tinnitus. I hadn't been listening to loud music. In fact, I never really liked loud music. Earlier on, I'd insisted that I not participate in a recorder lesson in Sunday school, because the tones of the recorders hurt my ears. After noticing the tinnitus, it was also hard to put up with the high-pitched squeal that the CRTs in the TVs and computer monitors of the day would make. But I loved TV, so I forced myself to acclimate to it.

As I grew older, the tinnitus made it absolutely pointless to go to any place an amplified live band was playing. All the music turned to static in my head and I feared my eardrums would explode.

When I was 20, and going through a lot of confusing health problems, I brought up the tinnitus with my doctor. She said there wasn't anything to do about it and implied it was the consequence of rocking out too hard. She obviously had no idea what my situation was. I never brought up tinnitus with a doctor ever again. 

Later on, when I was making one of my big pushes at trying to be more social, I discovered a couple drinks would kick the tinnitus in the background, and I could actually hang out in a club with loud music for a while.

Visual

I have similar visual issues. It's hard to talk about, mostly because people get confused and worried when I do. I'll ease into it.

Sometimes, when I'm in a new place or situation, it's like I take a thousand polaroids and then throw them all over the floor at random and, until I can assemble it into some kind of a photomosaic, I really have no idea where I am and what I should be doing in the place. It takes a while to put the puzzle pieces together and figure out what's going on. I wonder what this looks like from the outside. I must project some sort of vibe that makes it seem like I'm on official business. I've often totally blown by the guy collecting the cover charge without consequence simply because I didn't realize he was there.

I'm not exactly sure if the polaroid photomosaic counts as a sensory issue, or a processing issue, but related to it is the fact that, sometimes, when a lot of things are going on in a situation that I'm supposed to be involved in, everything goes white. It's not that I can't see, but my ability to make sense of it goes away. There is no distinction between people, environment, and the damned basketball that I'm supposed to be passing to somebody. In my head it can all register as a timeless flash of white. This is a big part of why I don't like to drive so much, and especially not at rush hour. I had one of those timeless flashes of white back in February. It ended up with me being in an upside-down car.

Another visual issue that I've been recognizing more and more, but has been with me for quite a while, is visual snow. At some point, when I was a teenager, I noticed that my vision would be kind of fuzzy sometimes. I did get glasses, and that corrected very mild myopia (so mild that I've always passed the DMV vision test without my glasses), but things still seemed a bit ghostly out of my left eye in particular. I was interested in the supernatural at the time, and I started really trying to see auras. And I definitely started seeing auras around anything that was against a dark background. I saw halos around lights. I'd see things flickering in the corners of my field of vision. I would also see little sparks flitting from the corners of grid like patterns, especially 1 inch square bathroom tiles. At the time, I thought I was learning how to see magic.

That experience kind of faded into the background as I became very worried about what life was going to be like after high school. Visual issues would continue to show up in little ways, usually when I was exhausted or over-extending myself. Resting, reprioritizing my projects, and avoiding bright lights has usually done the trick. It has been worse at times when major changes have been going on in my life. I've seen ophthalmologists a couple times about this, only to be told there was nothing physically wrong with my eyes. Perhaps I just didn't have the right vocabulary to explain what is going on. But knowing nothing physically was wrong was a relief itself and helped alleviate the symptoms.

When HDTVs started becoming the norm, I had a bit of a reaction. At first it was really hard for me to look at an HDTV with my glasses on. Things were too sharp and too not the way I'm used to seeing them. I gradually adjusted, but ever since then I notice how, to me, real life often looks more like it's shot on lower grade film stock from the 80s than the glorious HiDef presentation of the opening ceremonies to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

This past summer, as I was in the midst of every major life change you could think of, it got really bad. I started googling my symptoms and found out that 'visual snow' was consistent with what I was experiencing. I also found out that three groups seemed to represent a lot of the sufferers of visual snow: people with Asperger's, and people who have done way too many hallucinogenic drugs. Although people have often asked if I have, I've never done any hallucinogens, mostly because I've always suspected my brain was weird enough as is. 

Pain

The sensation of pain is always a bit off for me. When I was married, occasionally my partner would notice nicks on my hands and ask me how I'd cut myself. I'd have no idea.

I've also had chronic muscle and joint pains that have lasted for years. For quite a long time, I was unable to turn my head very far to the left. Doctors would prescribe anti-inflammatory drugs and I'd try special pillows and ginger pills and a host of home remedies. Then, after five years of avoiding dentist visits, my new dentist thought it was time to have an impacted wisdom tooth pulled. Like magic, after the extraction, my neck pain disappeared. Perhaps the tooth was causing pain in my jaw the whole time, but it wasn't registering right, and instead my neck was seizing up. I'm not sure. All I know is that I take dental hygiene seriously now.

In another dental situation last year, it turned out I had an abscessed tooth. Again, I didn't feel any pain in the tooth, but I had been feeling very run down and a little woozy for a month or so leading up to the regular visit where an x-ray revealed the infection. It was curious that I had a raging infection inside my head and never felt any pain. I'll have to keep an eye out for that.

In general, I've also found that I have an odd relationship with NSAID pain relievers. They do the job really well, but when the medication wears off, the pain comes back worse than when it started and I need to take more meds. For the most part I've stopped taking meds for my muscle and joint aches since I realized this was a cycle. My muscle and joint pain has significantly decreased.

Nothing is consistent

I've noticed other sensory quirks, but the one thing I've noticed above all else is that none of them are 100% consistent. It seems like multiple variables are at play when it comes to sensory issues. Familiar environments and a general sense of well-being with my place in the world makes a lot of the symptoms disappear. Fear, anxiety, unknown situations, being out of my routine, changes in the season, worrying about getting a job can all build up and tip it the other way.

In the end, I think the best way to manage sensory issues is to know yourself, know what you tend to react to, and know what you can do to regulate your internal situation so you can better process the external situation. Take breaks when you need them. Eat good food. Get exercise. Those are the big three that seem to help everything.

Over-Generalization Problems

Over-Generalization is the thing every high school English teacher warns the class against when they are studying the unit on persuasive writing. And, I'm not making a sweeping generalization here. I'm a certified English teacher. Avoiding generalizations is part of every pursuasive writing curriculum I've seen.

It always seemed ridiculously easy to me not to generalize. Actually, it was kind of hard to generalize, although I didn't realize this. Every situation and every person was it's own discrete entity that had to be figured out individually. It makes it really hard to start conversations, because I have trouble making assumptions about what people might like to talk about, and I really hate making a guess and being wrong.

This totally doesn't bother most people, though. Most people are natural generalizers and will be quick to make assumptions about other people. If those assumptions prove to be wrong, people either adjust, or don't even register it. It's amazing how many people seem to not pay attention to the things I do to figure other people out. At the same time, however, I'm totally lost on the subtle cues communicated in body language and, sometimes, tone of voice.

Perhaps generalizers are getting plenty of other information that either reinforces, or helps them readjust their assumptions. I'm willing to entertain that notion.

However, there is a domain, divorced fron body language and social cues, in which over-generalizations become glaringly, and sometimes painfully, obviously wrong. The written word.

This is my domain. The written word is easier for me to communicate with because the written word stays. It's not like a spoken word that might flit past my ears too fast for me to understand (I eventually do, but sometimes it's a week later). The written word is pinned down and on display. I can refer back to it. I'm learning how valuable this truly is. Sometimes I totally misinterpret a written message on the first pass, but it's right there, so I can doublecheck.

So, in the domain of the written word, over-generalization is especially conspicuous. These things can be fact checked and disputed. An entire thread of the Pursuasive Writing unit has to do with identifying logical fallacies, which are largely based on different types of over-generalizations that line up pretty closely with psychologically researched decision making heuristics.

Basically, most people need to learn how to look past over-generalizations in order to make informed decisions.

Having said all that, I saw something in a bookstore yesterday that really upset me. I happen to live in the town that has one of the strongest surviving independent bookstores in the US. I love that place. I love bookstores in general because tge experience of books is very visual, tactile, and olfactory for me. E-books only give me one third of the experience.

So, I have tremendous respect for this store, and I don't want to seem like I'm bad-mouthing them. I won't even mention them by name.

In fact, I regard the upsetting thing as a typical example of neurotypical over-generalization in action. It just happened to occur in a spot I care deeply about.

One thing about this particular store is that it can be hard to find books on Aspergers on its shelves. I assume that's because the titles they do get in quickly sell online. They don't stick around in the brick and mortar for very long. I used to work for this company, and I'm familiar with how their online sales are fulfilled. This is a very plausible scenario for me.

On my last visit, I was pleasantly surprised to find a robustly stocked couple of shelves labeled 'Aspergers.' I even found a copy of Tim Page's "Parallel Play" which I've been meaning to purchase for my own personal library for quite a while.

I was pretty happy.

And then, I saw the upsetting thing. A couple psychology textbooks with the title "Mental Retardation" were placed in this section. I checked their barcode labels and, no, this was not a mis-shelving incident. The labels read 'Aspergers' and this was wrong.

Super over-generalization strikes again. Aspergers is not MR. This scares parents and promotes unfair prejudices. Not only is MR an out-dated label (differentiating between specific intellectual disabilities is much more helpful for everyone) but Aspergers is NOT MR. Not even a little bit. It's sensory issues, and noticing different details than most peopel, and trouble filtering out non-social information from social information, and having anxiety from being misunderstood all the time, but it's not mentally retarded. We're processing information at least as fast as neurotypicals, we're just tuned into different wavelengths, different bandwidths. The neurotypical world would be missing so many things if we hadn't pointed them out. And the missapplied MR label has crushed so many people. So this really offends me.

If a bookstore needs to generalize to keep a section full, I'd totally support includind Aspergers in a general autism section. That fits. Or a general special needs section. That's okay. I wouldn't feel bad about seeing Aspie books near Down Syndrome books near ADHD books in a Special Needs section.

But when a bookstore narrows down the focus of a section so tightly that it's just Aspergers (still a broad category within itself... you meet one Aspie, you've only met one Aspie, we're all different) a twenty year old textbook on MR absolutely does not belong there.

Inappropriate over-generalization hurts. And it doesn't help people understand those who are different from them. And on some levels, we're all different. This kind of thing hurts all of us.

Looking for Signs

This is a slightly modified version of a piece I wrote for my old work's website about five years ago. At the time, I thought it was about my relationship with zines. Now I've got a more precise idea. It's about how I used zines to help me overcome my Aspergian difficulties in social arenas. Zines might be a bit of a dated concept, but I still love the format. It has the potential to be at once more expansive and more intimate than anything on the internet. And I like the physicality of them. I think they can still be a powerful tool for teenagers and young adults on the spectrum to overcome the social thresholds that are excruciatingly difficult to cross. A zine says, "here's a piece of myself. It has some words and thoughts I might have trouble digging up in realtime. But when they're out here on paper that we can both see, it's easier. Want to get coffee?"

  

I’ve tried four or five times to begin this article, an article about a thing I do that takes a lot of time and care, something that somehow is such a part of who I am, a natural extension of my being, that I have trouble describing it. In a way it’s like explaining why I wear shoes or metabolize hydro-carbons. Why do I make a zine? What is a zine?

It’s a kind of insanity surrounded by little scraps of paper I’ve photocopied and cut out from old books. Pieces of letters and postcards from friends. Original drawings, some comics, a kick ass cover illustration I really should have had to pay money for. Stories from friends who I’ve asked to give me stories because I know that life is more than just playing video games and drinking beer. It is, you know. Am I crazy for saying that?

Am I crazy? I spend a lot of time and a lot of money, money I could have spent on beer, photocopying and pleading for submissions and mailing and sharing a 40 page photocopied publication that has a new issue about once a year. It’s a zine called Bony Landmarks and people tend to tell me they like it. Perhaps they’re just being polite because they know I’m crazy.

But, seriously, you ask, what is a zine?

 I’m not sure I can do the paper and staples artifact justice on a computer screen. I think I can only really give you a clue. A clue and a quote.  The clue is that a zine is a very special kind of publication that relies much more on the creativity of those with big dreams and limited means than it does on advertising sales and circulation. You can’t find them at Barnes & Noble or Borders, but you just might find them amidst the jumbled reading materials in the corner of your favorite coffee shop. They pass between peers on high school and college campuses. They wind up on merch tables at punk shows and in anarchist infoshops and radical bookstores. And if you can find an independent record store, you just might find some in there. But most of the time, for me, they come in the mail because I’ve sent someone a couple dollars concealed in an envelope you made out of an abandoned art project. Or I’ve sent them my own zine to trade. 

I got my own start doing zines back in the 90’s. I had been playing around with making mini-comics. I had learned how to successfully fight the self-serve copiers at Kinko’s and make them do what I needed them to. Making comics was really time-consuming and my drawings were crude, but I really liked the finished product. If only I could make them faster. 

One day, I ran into a friend on the bus who handed me a zine. It was half the size of my last comic, but it didn’t matter. The thing had energy in its collages and its typewritten pages of true-to-life, aimless teenage wandering in a desert city. I realized that the free-reign and open possibilities of cutting up and photocopying together whatever the hell I wanted was a lot more exciting than just making comics. I could do it. I could make them different sizes, different shapes. I didn’t have to worry about what people might expect a comic book to be.

Around that same time I picked up a copy of the long since defunct Factsheet 5 from the used magazine racks at, you guessed it, Bookmans. Factsheet 5 was the zine community resource of its time. They reviewed absolutely everything and if you sent them $3 they’d send you a priority mailer stuffed with zines that they were done with. It was a crash course education on the possibilities.

Inspired, I ditched the mini-comic format and made something called the Twilight Zine. It was full of my semi-autobiographical fiction and comics as well as a couple light-hearted jabs at the alien abduction phenomenon that was going around at the time. I printed my friends’ rants. I satirically skewered my enemies, both real and imagined. I tried to be funny and smart and meaningful. I was trying to change the world, tear down the system and all that. Plus, I figured it would help with meeting girls.

And it kind of worked. Having a copy of the Twilight Zine in my hand gave me something, besides my cultivated veneer of zero self-esteem, to represent the best and cleverest of myself at a first meeting. I might not be able to come up with immediately snappy conversation, but I could hand over my latest tract of what it was like to be an unpaid intern working at the Aliens’ secret ChupacabraCorp headquarters. It eventually earned me some cool points with a couple indie-rock girls. Through various twists and turns of teenage/twentysomething drama, this somehow led to me crashing on a friend’s couch in Portland and somehow spark a relationship with my friend's housemate. I stayed there a week, but before I left, I gave her a copy of the Twilight Zine with my phone number on the cover. One thing led to another...

A couple years passed as I moved to Portland and found myself very involved in being a dad and a husband and working in used bookstores. I tried to keep my hand in at writing, but we were washing our own cloth diapers, putting together the most awesome DIY wedding, and of course I had that Sunday morning volunteer shift at the food co-op. Let’s just say having a baby is a bit more time consuming than anyone thinks it will be. We did, however, make it to the first Hip Mama Gathering in Portland, which fanned the lingering zinester ember within me. 

The next year I managed to scrounge enough Twilight Zine back issues to stock a table at the Portland Zine Symposium. I split the table with one of my first zine friends, Dr. Verno the Inferno. (A funny story about Dr. Verno. When he was still undergraduate Verno the Inferno he started sending his zine to my P.O. Box. It was full of some crazy shit. And some of the stuff in his accompanying letters were pretty specific to things I knew about and it almost made me feel like I had a stalker. How did he know this stuff about me? It was quite a few weeks before I realized that we both worked at the same movie theater. And had some of the same friends. And everyone assumed I knew he was making Spleen Zine. It was probably obvious, but I totally missed it.)

          

The year after that, we moved to Tucson. For me it was a return to my hometown. We staked a claim at a crappy apartment complex and I landed a job at Bookmans.

          

We only had one car at the time and I rode the bus a lot. One of the things that happens when you ride the bus is that parking lots become the enemy. Especially in summer. Parking lots are these huge, desolate sources of merciless blackbody radiation that you always have to cross to get between the bus stop and wherever it is you’re going.

         

It might have been heatstroke, but I began to see parking lots from the distanced perspective of an armchair anthropologist from the year 3100. Because the parking lot had no relevant function in my own life, I began to wonder about the curious customs of the great civilization that had left behind these monumental earthworks. Unsuitable for agriculture and prone to flooding, perhaps these structures served some ceremonial purpose. I wondered if it was something I could write a book about.

I decided I probably couldn’t make a book, but maybe I should try making a zine.

My Grand Unified Field Theory of Parking Lots never came together, but I started thinking more about the things around me as being cultural artifacts. And each of these artifacts could lead to some kind of meaningful interpretation of the lives of the people who created and used them.

This was part of the strange inner dialogue I had going on during my first year at Bookmans. I suppose I was really trying to come up with some kind of meaning for my own life. Sifting through the books on the trade counter, pricing them in the back room, shelving them on the sales floor. I was constantly in touch with so much information. There was obviously some meaning in there. There had to be signs. I was looking for signs.

I absolutely had to start doing a zine again. But how was I going to fit it all in. Spare moments only came in fits and starts and life was a constant struggle. Could I even come up with enough content on my own? And I really wanted to make an impressive, thought-provoking zine. Something even better than if it was my old semi-autobiographical, ranty fiction.

I wanted more people involved, and I wanted real stories. I wanted to document cultural artifacts, and, following a fascination I had developed for one of Bookmans’ non-fiction sections, I wanted true adventure. And I came to the conclusion that I needed to form an art collective.

I sent e-mails and asked friends if they’d like to join my art collective because I wanted to make a new zine about true adventure and cultural artifacts. I have some really trusting friends because I’m sure they had no idea what the hell I was talking about. 

In the end, my friends played along and we called ourselves the Look for Signage Art Collective. We put together three issues of Bony Landmarks between 2005 and 2007. They were pretty cool. And I met a few new friends through the process as well. They are friends who are scattered around the country, and I've never met some of them in person, but every now and then one of us makes a zine. And I keep looking for signs.