November 19, 2003

• Not long ago, I wanted to tell everyone everything. I sent out the telegrams to everybody, here on the 'blog, in email and usenet and over the phone and in conversations in the middle of the night and with total strangers who might not even be able to care less.

  I just wanted everyone to know, in the way you know things about someone when someone else tells you about them. Like, you find out that someone's an alcoholic because a third party tells you so, and you base the validity of the information on your evaluation of the third party. There don't seem to be any third parties in my life, which worried me, because that means everyone who has an indirect opinion about me can't possibly really know.

  So I told everybody. I laid it all out, like the big fabric disk you put under your Christmas tree, decorated with snowflakes and reindeer. Spread out to display the truth and keep the needles from getting stuck in the carpet.

  Only, the fact of the matter is that everyone makes up their own story anyway. No one seems to feel safe in assuming that my narrative of my own life is any more trustworthy than that of a third party. Most frustrating of all, most people aren't even aware that they are evaluating my narrative in this way; they think they're being objective.

  (One might say that the preceeding attitude is informed by my Aspie tendency to have a horrible aversion to being misunderstood and misrepresented. But that's just another narrative.)

  I haven't had much to say around here, because I'm burned out on introspection, and I'm burned out on telling people things they'll misunderstand anyway. I'm burned out on trying to make the connection. I'm burned out on wishing it could be better, easier to quit being so alone.

  I think that, ultimately, the problem is that no one has come up with a better narrative. They've come up with narratives of denial, where I don't really have the problems I have, and they've come up with narratives of celebration, where I am a beautiful and unique snowflake, and all I have to do is keep banging my head against the problems I have in order to be recognized as beautiful and unique before I.. well.. melt. They've come up with narratives where I spend too much time in my head, where I harbor a secret resentment, where I'm a partisan hack, where there's nothing I can contribute.

  If any of these narratives were anything besides formulaic plot lines delivered from Dr. Phil to my ears, it might be interesting. But the sad fact is that very few people have risen beyond that level of triteness, and here I sit waiting for input, because the narrative from where I sit is far too interesting and removed of cliché to really help me. I'm more William Burroughs than Charles Dickens. Hard to read, leaves you feeling creepy, alters your perception of space-time.

  I mean really... Don't they teach people to write any more? Do people feed their minds with anything besides Oprah, Jimmy Kimmel, romance novels and action films nowadays? How hard can it be for people to keep up with an outspoken pan-sexual autistic writer programmer civil libertarian progressive greenie inventor philosopher photographer? And that's leaving out the really difficult stuff.

  I need a narrative for myself. A revision of the code. A new CVS commit. One that isn't blurted out, but allowed to be seen in patches and keyholes. A narrative that includes the lens to hand the other person so they can look through it to me and see what needs to be seen. The concerns an autistic person might have, I suppose.

  It reminds me of a quote from one of my heroes, Kate Bornstein (approximated here): "When people look at me, I have no idea what they're seeing, but I do know that it's cute."

  • 4:30 am
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