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4 Copernicus, 35 A.T./Jour du Genie, A.R. CCXII (Sept. 18, 2003) - 6:14 p.m. In which our plucky young zero hopes this one speaks for itself.Once we were all telepathic. Then at some point we decided it was a good idea to invent speech, and facial expression, and gesture, and a thousand little tricks to suppress telepathy, and force them on all new humans at birth. What makes you think there wasn't a damn good reason? First, I owe a lot of people an apology. Because I blogged about the con when I was tired and frazzled, I apparently gave the impression that I wasn't enjoying it at all. To the contrary, it was good fun all around. I got to meet Patrick Nielsen Hayden, from whose blog some of you may well have come here. He was remarkably patient with me and my whitterings. He even recognized the name "Tuxedo Slack" when I introduced myself by it. I'd say I was a celwebrity, but Drake Raft coined that word, so the less anyone uses it, the better. My mind moves from one object to another in a series of blank factual stops. — William S. Burroughs, "The Dead Child," The Wild Boys: a book of the dead Let's see now: "I frequently get so absorbed in one thing that I lose sight of other things": check That, for those of you who came in late, is the "autism spectrum quotient" portion of a quiz from the issue of Newsweek that was waiting for us when we got back from the con. (The complete quiz can be found at Newsweek Online, but it's in their archives now, so requires registration and a minipayment.) Now, to be sure, this is only a sample of the quiz, and it specifically says "These quizzes are not medically diagnostic." It doesn't specifically say anything about one's answers being indicators of autism either, only that "Men are more likely [than women] to agree with these types of questions, and are four times more likely to have autism." But when one gets the kind of results I got (nine or ten out of ten), one notices a trend, or at least I did. Moreover, the previous page (in the print edition) provides a list of five "red flags" that could diagnose autism at an early age; when one's kindly gray-haired mother remembers one displaying all four of them and isn't sure one way or the other about the fifth ("does not babble at 1 year"), well, it may be an unscientific diagnosis, but it's certainly a compelling one. Not to mention that I knew exactly what Dave Spicer (whose name I seem to recall seeing mentioned before, in another magazine's article on Asperger's syndrome) meant when he likened his experience of social situations to "a square dance where the caller is speaking Swahili". As it happens, at the SCA event the parents attended this past weekend, Dad wrote down the name (misspelled, but it gave a clue) and hometown (well, city of operations) of a psychiatrist they think might be able to prop me up. And the article mentioned a community services outlet for people with autism-spectrum disorders that's within a reasonable driving distance, and that matches autists with the kind of detail-work jobs that drive people in the normal spectrum quietly spare. (I could get a job fact-checking the dominant conservative media culture, if the thought of having to read that much of their bile, unmediated by the words of rational people, didn't make me literally physically ill.) Then again, for all we know, I may not be far enough into the autism spectrum to qualify for their help. Certainly CB was sceptical when I told her about earlier amateur diagnoses of my autism (if she's changed her mind, the subject never came up). If that's the case, you can blame (or credit) the aforesaid kindly gray-haired mother. When I was about two-and-a-quarter and "beg[a]n developing language, then stop[ped] abruptly"; when I "[didn't] answer to [my] name, but [had] normal hearing"; when I "avoid[ed] eye contact and cuddling" — they assumed I was mad at them, for something they'd done, not (as seems more likely to me) frustrated beyond endurance by my inability to communicate my wishes with these "words" they wanted me to use. Kindly, not-yet-gray-haired mother would tuck me in, see me lie there ramrod-stiff, then crawl in beside me. She'd awaken some time later, see me sleeping like the baby I was in body, and slide out without waking me up. She tells me she kept this up for at least three months, maybe six. It never occurred to her that my problem might be anything a doctor needed to hear about. It might not have occurred to a doctor that it was anything he could prescribe for; I seem to recall that consensus medical opinion at that point was to blame bad parenting for autistic behavior. But, in fact, it's probably thanks to that early amateur intervention that I communicate my meaning even as well as I do. Superscribe has often written on his journal about his autistic son(s) — one now dead, one still living. Jamie was, and Eric is, much further down the autism spectrum than I — Eric is almost completely preverbal, and Jamie was (as I recall) the same, though possibly without the "almost". A lot of the time, his faith in a specific solo deity seems simplistic to me, but without faith in something, I don't know how he'd manage in the face of that particular trial. He's writing about it all again, but I've already violated his privacy enough just linking to NN. (Digression: There was a sidebar on a book, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, about a young autistic boy investigating the death of his dog. I was intrigued to read on The Leaky Cauldron a few days later that it's the next project for Steven Kloves.) So there it is. I'm not that much closer to solving my problem, but at least now I have a name for it. A name that doesn't make me feel like I'm the bad guy just because I miss subtext and other social cues. (I get the impression that people think I'm doing it deliberately to piss them off. Or maybe that's just a lingering impression from high school days when people really did think I was doing it deliberately to piss them off.) A name I probably needed to hear a long time ago, when I could have been helped a lot more easily. But now that I've got a map of where I really am, not of some other place, maybe I can find my way out. And, on the other side of things, I'm going to consider myself set free to write about whatever takes my fancy. It could be politics. It could be authors. It could be blogging about blogging. The point is, I'll be updating more often, more like the frequency I had when the Shack was just getting started. I give you fair warning, though... -30- � last time, on The Slack Shack - our next inciting exstallment 
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