Went to the doc today, the sooper-spiff psychologist who’s the rock-star specialist in Asperger’s syndrome. He says my self-diagnosis makes sense. I’m going to take a battery of tests to find out for sure.

He also says that, given a positive diagnosis, I’m probably way, way up at the very top percentile of the functional spectrum of Asperger’s. This is a mixed blessing… He kept using the example of Rain Man, and made a poignant comment that echoed some things I’ve written here. Essentially, the idea is that Rain Man’s not in any pain, since he doesn’t know what he’s missing. I do know where my dysfunctions live, so they’re painful for me.

I’m guardedly hopeful, however. I don’t want to say I’m around a corner, but not because there’s no corner and I’m not around it; I don’t want to say that because it’s just so cliche.

In the dream I was travelling with my parents in a car. We were on a huge rural plain, where only grass and high-power pylons grew.

My dad showed me a map that demonstrated what he was saying; he was saying that we shouldn’t go to the Golden Gate bridge because its planks had been rotting out. Then he showed me a corner of the map that had the visitor’s center of Merv Griffin’s estate. It occupied a large section of the map.

Dad turned back into conversation with mom. They began discussing my aunt’s problems at work. Since 9/11, she had started a petition around the office that anyone found with explosives on the job should be fired. Apparently the news that she was the one who started it had gotten around, and so everyone was treating her poorly.

While they were discussing this, I noticed something by the road. It was a huge roller-coaster. But not just a huge roller-coaster, a huge roller-coaster on a huge metal pylon up in the air. A pylon the size of a skyscraper with a full-size roller-coaster on top. And a few other coasters winding around inside. There were about five sets of cars winding their way through the structure, none in any danger of getting all that close to any other.

Three things occurred to me: 1) I imagined myself held into a coaster car with only a seat belt, exposed to the elements, as it rounded that first curve, 50 storeys up in the air. 2) I imagined a string of cars coming off the track up there, and how long it would take for them to fall to the ground. 3) I wonder who was stupid enough to build something so dangerous, and why anyone would be attracted to riding the thing.

For some reason, this coaster creeped me out. Its implication terrified me.

Here’s a tip for when you’re buying frozen pizza:

Freschetta advertises itself as having crust that rises when you cook it. This is true; it actually does rise when you cook it. But the reason it rises when you cook it is that IT’S BISCUIT DOUGH. It’s like opening a package of frozen biscuits, making a pizza-shaped crust out of it, and putting some toppings on.

And it’s naaaasty.

Here is their marketing web site, called ‘LIFESTYLE By Freschetta.’ Yeah, the lifestyle of someone who likes to eat 8-inch biscuits!

I can’t sleep, and I haven’t ‘blogged much lately, so here goes.

Yesterday I went and ate dinner with Chris, a friend of mine in Houston, from back before I left. Afterwards, we paid a visit to Donna. Bright geeky people. Donna showed me a few episodes of Invader Zim, which I hadn’t seen before. Clever show, if a little too hyperactive for me.

I’m tired of being in Houston, but I’m here seeking the holy diagnostic grail. I went to see a neurologist who interrupted me all the time and totally ignored what I was trying to tell him. I made it to the appointment, though; the anxiety attack occurred inside the office while waiting for him to show up. I blame the horrid fluorescent lighting. He walked in to find me drinking water out of the sink with my cupped hands, trying to dilute my brain chemistry. (If you ever find yourself emotionally overwhelmed, drink lots of water. You’ll need to pee, but you’ll feel better.) It was all downhill after that until I got back to an even keel. Even still, he interrupted me throughout the whole thing, even while I was asking him to not interrupt me.

Feh.

The bright side, though, is that the next one can’t be as bad. Er, I hope.

Blue Orpheus

by Todd Rundgren, from the A Capella album

If you want to cry
You can always find something to cry about
It’s so easy to be wise
Over someone else’s tears
But you have a gift
That the rest of us just can’t live without
And it’s something in your voice
When you tell us how you feel

‘Cause we’ve all loved something and lost it
And it’s burning my heart
I can’t open my mouth and just let it out

But when I hear my Blue Orpheus sing
I know that life is a wonderful thing
Somewhere there’s love and perpetual spring
I know life is a wonderful thing

Seems so long ago
The sound of your joy filled the atmosphere
We can make it on our own
But the road is so rocky and steep
And when you feel lost
No one tells you what you need to hear
And the only dream you have
Is the one that’s in your sleep

‘Cause we soon forget what we’re here for
I need someone to say he’s got dreams of his own
I’ll know I’m not alone

I want to hear my Blue Orpheus sing
I’ll know that life is a wonderful thing
Somewhere there’s love and perpetual spring
I’ll know life is a wonderful thing

Sing
You will one day be together again
Though you can not see her
Sing
She is somewhere in the world

US Patent Office’s Homeland Security logo. An animated cartoon eye peering through a keyhole.

One of my favorite things in the whole world is Charlie Rose. I’ve been traveling, so I haven’t seen his show lately.

Tonight I found him on the Houston PBS station, except he wasn’t there! Some guy said, “I’ll be filling in for Charlie, who is recovering from elective heart surgery.”

Elective heart surgery?? Charlie! Don’t leave us! This is my cry of desperation! You’re the last person on TV who isn’t stupid!

I’m still in Houston. It’s a nice familiar (in the strict sense of that word) place, and has helped me get back to center.

See, in New Braunfels I had a bit of something approaching an anxiety attack. I spent most of my time there in the motel room, trying to get my feet out the door.

This isn’t a new thing for me. In fact, it’s kind of the defining dynamic of my life, unfortunately. It can take me a few days to get over such an episode, and I think I’ve managed it, and now I’m full of energy waiting to be turned to momentum.

Now to figure out where to put it.

Being in Houston always fills me with plans. I find it easy to think about business ventures and all kinds of projects. And this is why Houston’s a sad place for me. The uphill battle aspects of my life always come into sharp focus, because the plans seem so clear and manageable.

I think this planning and scheming is an old habit from when I lived here full-time. I got myself into the habit of seeing what was possible, in order to motivate myself towards anything. Make too many plans, fail at most of them, succeed in one or two. It turns out this isn’t a very good strategy for me, because I get overwhelmed by options.

I have to retain focus. That’s what happens in Seattle, I think. I’m more focused on one or two things instead of the zillions of ideas I’m in the habit of having here.

Or maybe geography is just a convenient scapegoat. I dunno.

I’m in Houston again. It’s a nice place to live if you’re a single-occupant vehicle. If you’re a person, it rather sucks.


On the way back to Houston from New Braunfels, I stopped off at a place called the Katy Mills Mall, in Katy, TX. Katy is about 20-30 miles west of downtown Houston on I-10, and the west side of Houston is developing rapidly. The big city is on the verge of swallowing Katy. So, natch, someone built a huge (I mean HUGE) mall to attract business.

The developers of Katy Mills mall have taken a cue from Douglas Adams. The doors talk to you when you go through them. You’ll recall (or maybe you won’t) that in Adams’ ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy,’ the doors on a certain space ship remind you that it was a pleasure for them to have served you. The doors at the mall say this:

“You are at exit two, neighborhood two, sponsored by Memorial Hospital.”

These doors have sponsors. They are ADVERTISEMENTS. The entrance to a metaphorical NEIGHBORHOOD is an ADVERTISEMENT. Forget for a moment the absurdity of a door that tells you where you are, because that’s not such a bad idea, really. Get it through to your mind that the entrance TO A MALL is SPONSORED.

I’m not easily confused by malls. I get overwhelmed, but I understand the layout without looking at map, through some eerie process of intuitive reverse engineering osmosis. But this mall confused me.

There were giant screens suspended from the ceiling, and they were showing a rock band performing somewhere in the mall. I wandered around for a little while, through a couple of these ‘neighborhoods’ and a food court, and I never found the rock band. I would have to be content with mediated experience.

The food court was nice. There was a decent bar/grill with a facade that looked like a cross between a New York walk-up and a decaying industrial-age factory. Attractive in the way that such fake things are attractive.

Went into a bookstore called Books-A-Million! I’m not excited about the place; the name has an exclamation point in it. Noted their lousy selection of anything interesting, and noted their huge selection of crap. Got some magazines, including the new Technology Review, because I’m a sucker for a cover story that asks, “Why is software so bad?”

“When the flood comes
You have no home you have no warmth
In a thundercrash
You’re a thousand miles within a flash
Don’t be afraid to cry of what you see
The actor’s gone, there’s only you and me
And if we break before the dawn
We’ll use up what we used to be”
–Peter Gabriel, ‘Here Comes The Flood’


My parents’ vacation house is in the middle of a solitary road through a river valley between a dammed lake and a sizeable small town. When things are fine, you just go there and it’s nice and pleasant.

You don’t concern yourself with whether there’ll be electricity or a phone line, and you know you’ll be able to get potable water. You drive there, because there’s a nice road. You’ll drive slowly because the whole valley is lovely, even if the scene is marred by brightly-colored inner-tube and canoe rental ad signs. It’s pleasant, even in the middle of July, when all the party animals in Texas have rented a special inner-tube for their ice chest and are floating down the river getting drunk and hooting and hollering and laughing as only a drunken inner-tuber can. It’s even nice then, because you’re in the shade, on the screened-in porch drinking a Shiner Bock, munching on some kolaches you got at Naeglin’s bakery in town.

And you take it all for granted. You drove across two bridges and a road that runs right next to a river, in some places only a few feet above the waterline. The power and phone lines follow the same route. The dam upstream is feeding a carefully regulated amount of water into the river, which flows by at around three-hundred cubic feet per second.

Then there’s a flood. One so huge it overflows the dam’s spillway, creating a new channel for the river below. The porch where you enjoyed your beer, and the rest of the house, and the road leading to it, were all underwater for three days at least. And not just underwater, but under water moving at around eighty-thousand cubic feet per second.

Houses leave their foundations and smash into other houses under this kind of pressure. Cars end up in the tops of trees.

The water picks up everything and drops it. That’s the job of a flood; to rearrange the world. The main thing that gets rearranged is the earth. Topsoil and gravel and rocks and boulders end up somewhere besides where they started.

Where you were drinking your beer is now a hydraulic feature called an eddy. Imagine a clothes washing machine the size of a room, and it’s the spin cycle. Wheee!

The main force of the flowing river is buffeted away from entering the house itself. Some of the energy enters through broken windows and doors, but through an accident of engineering, the house is set at such an angle that the water moves around it rather than through.

Still, though, energy comes inside and rearranges the furniture. The silty water enters with force and slows down inside. Guests had always said the house was relaxing. And just as guests release their cares, the water releases its silt, which builds up on the floor, right on top of the carpet. A foot thick. Very rude.

This same dynamic happens outside the house, too, on the downstream side. A foot-thick semicircular deposit of red-brown mud, as wide as the house, is jostled by an eddy out of the hands of the river to rest atop the grass.

So today, when you go to the river house, there is no electricity. There are no phones (though this isn’t such a big deal in the era of the ubiquitous wireless phone). You have to take your own water. In fact, you have to take your own clean place to sit down, because everything, absolutely everything, is covered in mud. And you’ll have to wait until the road crews have filled in the roads where they washed away from the bridges.