But the Navy has “boot camp”, just like all the other services, and they do have to get you ready, if needed, for war.  They have to make you learn to “Obey,” as priority one, and “Obey without question, without hesitation” being priorities two and three.  American boys being the spoiled little brats they are, it takes a lot of beating down, as with a blacksmith’s hammer, to forge a fighting man.  Heat is applied, then pressure, rinse and repeat.  It tempers the steel.  If you screw up, the Company Commander punishes everyone, and he reminds them to thank you later.

It happened to some other guy first, while our boy Normie just watched.  They went to this guy’s bunk after lights out, threw a blanket over him, carried him to the showers, and gave him the standard issue “blanket party,” which consisted of being wrapped in a blanket and thrown in the shower, and guys with cloth bags filled with bars of soap flogged you with them.  And that was just for getting caught talking while “in formation.”  It happened to someone else when it was revealed that he hadn’t been taking showers, and the Commander had pronounced him a “scrounge.”  It was evident when the fuzz line of his T-shirt neck hem consistently failed inspection.  When Normie heard that this guy had gotten an “Undesirable Discharge” and sent home, he was very, very afraid the same would happen to him, and he would never be able to face his father again.

Well, he managed to avoid being the honored guest at a blanket party, but did manage to accumulate a lot of demerits in other ways.  One day, he was marching along, really letting his body carry out the orders, while doing a little talking to his inner self.  That’s something he had always done, this inner dialogue thing.  He failed to hear the order to “About – march!” (reverse direction), and his only friend and bunk mate got punctured between the eyes by the sight on his rifle.  He felt really bad about it, but much worse after the Commander got right up in his face and shouted all kinds of nasty things, and then handed down his punishment, something of interest to the entire company.

That was really the beginning of the end of his involvement in that company.  Nobody likes to take a 10 mile march, on top of everything else, just because some jerk-off screwed up.  Things snowballed, and he was transferred to MIC, Military Indoctrination Company, for further instruction and evaluation.  They were about to decide his fate, whether they would kick him out as an Undesirable.  The heat and pressure was immense – they broke him, but this was exactly the result they wanted, as they could now pour him into a new mold.  By every outer measurement, he became like everyone else, and he finally graduated from Boot Camp, 6 weeks after the guy he had joined with, under the “buddy system”.

He was assigned to attend a Class “A” School, to become a Personnelman, an office worker and keeper of enlisted service records.  While on leave between assignments, he first heard of the “Gulf of Tonkin incident”, and the wisdom of his choice of the Navy was apparent.  With the Army or Marines, even the Air Force, the likelihood of going to ‘Nam was extremely high.  His deal with the Navy called for him to spend his entire enlistment at a shore station, in Norfolk, Virginia.  Nice duty station, at the office where all enlisted men of the Atlantic Fleet were assigned sea duty billets, EPDOLANT, or Enlisted Personnel Distribution Office, Atlantic Fleet.

After his promotion to Seaman, he got married.  The less said about that, the better.  When he was promoted to 3rd class, he was reassigned to the office of CINCLANTFLT, or Commander in Chief of the Atlantic Fleet.  He was the only enlisted man in an office consisting of 2 Lieutenants, a Commander, a Captain, and CINCLANT himself, the Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, who later became Chief of Naval Operations, and then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.  Admiral Moorer congratulated him when his son was born, one morning after he brought the Admiral his coffee.  He did all the typing, and had a “Secret” clearance.  As “squared away” as a sailor had to be to work at CINCLANTFLT, he had no problems there.  His uniform was always crisp and clean, and he was always freshly shaved and showered.  No problems with his co-workers either, as they were all officers and gentlemen, and he was as servile as required.  He really liked the brand-new IBM Selectric they gave him to use, so much better than the clunky old style!

But the Navy reneged on their deal with him, saying that “current personnel requirements dictated that blah, blah, blah,” and they had to reassign him to a sea duty billet, on a ship supposedly going to Vietnam.  Well, he had only found out a few months before that he had a major back problem, they called it “scoliosis”, that caused him a lot of pain while sitting to type for hours on end.  When the Doctors told him that it had shown up in his initial physical, before he had actually joined, but hadn’t told him the results, it really pissed him off!  He told these Doctors that they could either fix it, or let him out.  They explained the procedure; that they would have to install rods in his back, he’d be in the hospital for at least 6 months, and he’d probably come out worse off than when he started.  That’s when he knew he “had” them – they weren’t about to offer that surgery, because if he spent 6 months recuperating, there wouldn’t be enough time left on his current enlistment for him to be sent to ‘Nam.  He spent the next year fighting for his second Discharge. (He had already re-enlisted once.)

When he got out, he rejoined his wife and 2 children, and finally got a job as a parts clerk at a car dealership.  After 6 months or so of that, his mother’s new husband helped him get a job at an iron ore mine where he also worked.  After only a week on the job, he got into a terrific accident, was lucky he didn’t blow himself up in a fuel truck crash, but after only 5 months of recuperation, returned to work, and continued working there for about 3 years.  It was there that a friend first “turned him on” to smoking weed, and for the first time since Boot Camp, he was able to find his way back to his inner self.  He began to remember who he was…

Disclaimers:

1. My real name is not, and never was, “Normie”. Mine was worse.

2. This is not to be considered an “autiebiography”. Large portions have been left out, and the author doesn’t guarantee that he didn’t take some “poetic license” here and there. More of an encapsulation.

3. It’s also not to be construed as any sort of encouragement of drug use, even by adults, but especially by minors. I believe it would be disastrous for a person who had not yet achieved a level of emotional maturity to try anything at all. There are real dangers involved in that scene, especially for one who might be seen by others as vulnerable.

Normie appeared originally at Clay’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

For a year before he went himself, he had walked two of his sisters to school every day.  It wasn’t very far, they lived on the corner of the same street as the school, it being in the middle of the block.  The older of these two, (there was an oldest, who was by then attending junior high), decided to set him up with an even worse appellation, by telling him that the older girls he obviously wanted to impress would respect him if he dug up some worms, and chased them with them.  Sounded plausible; he did it.  And was forever after referred to as “Wormy Normie” while he attended elementary school.  Maybe not everyone knew of it, but enough to give him grief.  This sister even spread it around the family, on a Christmas visit to their grandfather’s house. So all the cousins knew.

When he complained to his father, who had divorced and left his mother a year or two before, his father told him to tell people, “The name’s ‘Puddin’ Tame’, ask me again and I’ll tell ya the same.”  To him, that did not sound plausible as a way to make friends, and he chose not to do that one.  When he brought it up with his father again, years later, his father told him, “If it had been up to me, I would have named you ‘Percy’.”  Apparently, his father was a devotee of the “A Boy Named Sue” philosophy.  It took him umpty-dozen years before he figured out that both of his parents had occasionally taken out their vengeance for each other, using him as a pawn.

In school, he found that he was far ahead of his classmates in reading; it was really tortuous for him to hear them “sounding out” their words.  And it annoyed him when the teachers usually wouldn’t correct their pronunciation, because she figured at least they were reading.  But he also found that when it came to arithmetic, he just wasn’t getting it.  He invented his own system of putting dots on the numbers, to aid him in addition.  It took him a lot longer, but at least this way he had a shot at coming up with the right answer.  It did get to be cumbersome though, when his 6th grade teacher thought it would be interesting to make up long columns of 4 and 5 digit numbers.  You’d think he’d eventually learn how to add, say, 5 and 38 in his head, but you’d be wrong, because his mind just couldn’t work that way.  He had to count the dots.

The real cause of his problems wasn’t known at the time, and he didn’t stick out too much as being different, because in elementary school, friends are only friends until somebody gets hurt, or angry about something, and then they make a big point of avoiding each other.  So his experiences didn’t seem too different, except that he was unusually quiet, for a boy.

Junior High was kinda brutal.  There was this thing that, if somebody came up and put their hand near your face, and you flinched, they were allowed to call “Two for flinching!” and punched you in the upper arm, hard, twice.  They were doing it to everyone, but it seemed they were doing it to him even more.  It was like there was this formal ‘rule’ that everyone had to do this.  Who comes up with this stuff?  Ah well, at least he got through before somebody came up with “wedgies” or “swirlies”.

For Senior High, the last 3 years, he had transferred to a small rural school, because he had gotten into an argument with his mother at a bar she had dragged him to, and then told him to “Go home”.  He did, but not to hers.  He was past the age where he could decide which parent he wanted to live with, and he made his decision.  Of course, at the new school, the pecking order had to be established, but he defaulted every challenge, having decided not to join in their reindeer games.  He had made a few friends, a very few friends, but not the long-lasting sort.  He was glad to graduate, even though he knew he would have to get out of his father’s house, as his sisters had, as soon as they graduated.

continued….

Normie appeared originally at Clay’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Coincidentally, Clay has also recently made mention of Liane Holliday Willey’s Pretending to be Normal, an obligingly temporizing tome erected on the foundation of Asperger’s Syndrome.  He and I both read it when it came out a decade ago, but I’ve never had my own reaction to that book summed up so succinctly as when Clay wrote, “… it bored the hell out of me.”  Which is a shame, because the title has always deserved to be put to better use than Willey put it to.  The costs I’m talking about, the costs which Willey so obligingly painted over and swept under the rug, are the costs of pretending to be normal.

Not to be disrespectful to Ms Willey; she wrote her book, she told her story, but maybe the reason we were bored was because it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for.  To me, (and apparently to Mark), the most important thing to say about pretending to be normal is the cost of that pretension.

Those of us who have been able to “pass”, have done so at a tremendous cost to the soul.  Always pretending to be someone we’re not, it’s very easy to lose track of who we actually are.  It’s a 24/7 job, this pretension, and if you do it at school, at work, at home, do you set out a time to be yourself—and how do you get there?  We’ve been role-playing since Kindergarten (or before).  These masks we’ve been holding out, and hiding behind, seem more real to us than that “still, small voice” inside who knows better, knows that we are not, in fact, the persona we have been attempting to portray to parents, siblings, school mates, work mates, all the people we know, and it knows that all these people don’t know who we really are, because we haven’t let them know.  We’re sure they would reject us if they knew.

Not without good reason; we’ve seen what they do to those who have more difficulties than we do.  Some of us were lucky enough to avoid being “low man on the totem pole” in school, at work, or wherever.  Some of us were smart enough not to join in on the teasing and making fun of whoever was the low man.  Few of us ever joined forces with the low man against the rest.  That requires courage, of the sort that I don’t think anyone is born with.  To take a stand against hatred, prejudice, injustice, one needs to at least be convinced that he is right, and that his opinion counts for something.  Aspies don’t typically get the kind of nurturing that leads to a positive self-image.

We all have relationships, and those relationships are the fabric of our lives.  Whether it’s with a parent, sibling, friend, lover or spouse, when these people tell us they love us, we don’t really believe them, because deep down, we know that they don’t know the real “us”.  We know we’ve been holding up this mask, this facade, and the person they think they know doesn’t really exist.  On a personal level, the cost of that is so high it would rival the National Debt!

I’ve known several men who, to assuage the pain caused by the stress of pretending, the results of pretending (that they’re aware of only in their inner psyches, when they allow such communication), had turned to drinking.  Yeah, that always works to anesthetize pain, for awhile.  It also leads to more relationship problems, and possibly legal problems.  Luckily for me, I never took that route.  I had seen my parents drunk too many times for me to fall into that trap.  I did, however, spend most of the 70’s being stoned on pot.  In a way, I regret the money and time spent on it, but I also credit it with opening my mind, and giving me a lot of relaxation, without the usual stress.  It also allowed some of the best moments of ‘friendship’ I’ve ever had.  I often wonder how much the cost of that has been, how much I’ve spent on getting stoned. I’m pretty sure that if it were all returned to me, I could buy a nice house.

Whatever that amount was, I can add it to the cost of “pretending to be normal”, because that was its purpose, to allow me to fit in with a certain subgroup of coworkers.  I was never so foolish to try other drugs, things like cocaine or meth, or ecstasy, those things that cause real medical problems and early burn-out.  One time, a “friend” gave me a joint that was laced with opium, not telling me that it was.  I realized something was up right away, as a feeling of utter bliss descended into the core of my being.  I started to get angry, but couldn’t say so, because it felt so good.  I did remember it though, and never trusted him again.  Friends don’t do that.

A real friend wrote, in a comment to that Shift piece:  “I don’t dismiss the difficulty in wearing that mask, in putting it on each day and navigating the social waters many of us have no choice but to swim in.  Some of us do this with far greater ease, but with no less a soul-cost.  And others find a way to be true to who they are and a place where they fit or are free not to fit.”

I would urge anyone who is still “pretending to be normal” to stop for a moment and take stock, do a little cost accounting, and tally up what it’s costing them, in the amount of stress they have, in the nature of their relationships, and in their own images of themselves.  To me, it was a bill that I simply didn’t want to pay, and found it much easier (and psychologically cheaper), to just drop the facade.

Who ARE You, Really? first appeared at Comet’s Corner.

In the same way, we find it easier to think things that we’ve already thought.

We set up familiar thought patterns; we already know what we think about politics, religion, civil rights, disability, autism.  We have already cleared our own particular paths on those subjects, and arrived at the destinations we intended.  The fact that we’ve been influenced by information mainly from one “side” of the discussion escapes our notice.  We feel that we have adequately researched the subject, and have reached a conclusion that seems reasonable and desirable to us, and are satisfied.  A peculiar failure of mankind is that, in our desire for a particular outcome, we seek information from sources that we pretty much already know we’ll agree with, so as to avoid any cognitive dissonance.  We don’t like unanswered questions, we refuse to believe that to some questions … there is no answer.

When faced with such a situation, it feels as though we were standing in an interminable field of weeds, taller than we are, and we see no way out, no path to follow, and we need a machete to cut our way through.  I suppose that’s what it feels like when parents learn that their child has autism.  “Autism?  What’s that?  Isn’t that where a kid is lost in their own world, unable to speak, hear, think, do anything a regular child does?”  Their pediatrician has no answers for them, can offer no hope, and they find themselves stuck in that field of weeds.  It’s human nature, I suppose, to seek someone, or something to blame, but what?  All too often, the first source of information comes from some charlatan who says he “has the answer”, and promises a cure.

Oh, they gussy it up, come up with a theory that sounds all plausible and scientific, write pages and pages of fancy words designed to impress, show off their credentials, and make promises.  But you never see any “money-back guarantees.”  If it doesn’t work, they’ll claim that you didn’t follow the program correctly, it’s not their fault if your child didn’t become cured, and by the time that you realize that their system isn’t “the answer,” you’ve already spent thousands and thousands of dollars, but your child is the same as s/he would have been without the expensive effort or treatment.

Most likely, your child has improved, because autistic children will learn and grow anyway, just as other children learn and grow, though on their own schedule.  You might even credit the treatment you’ve chosen, and write a glowing testimonial to persuade other parents.  This will give you the satisfaction of having found “the answer”, and assuage the sinking feeling in the back of your mind that you’ve just been played for a sucker.  I wouldn’t blame you, because nobody, and I mean nobody ever wants to feel that way.  It’s human nature.  We all do it, to some extent anyway.

Uncharted Territory of Autism first appeared at Comet’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

The variation is more like if you put a few drops of blue food dye into a completely still backyard swimming pool.  For awhile, you’d be able to see it, mostly hanging together but slowly becoming diffused with the surrounding water.  Eventually, it would seem to disappear, but in fact, it would have a slight effect on the entire pool.  It could be that in a hundred (or a thousand) generations, no one will appear to be autistic, or “aspie”, but the entire population would be different in some way than how they are now.

I have no pretensions of being “scientific”, and no credentials whatsoever, but I have an intense interest in the subject of evolution.  I devour the stuff. I will state that I believe that human evolution is still occurring, and maybe at an ever-increasing rate.  If anyone believes that the present state of mankind is the pinnacle of possible human intellect and achievement, I suggest they take another look around.  Some species don’t seem to have the capacity to evolve, as I understand that the lobster and some sharks have remained essentially the same for like, 100 million years.  It could be that they just didn’t have the motivation to evolve, as their environment has remained unchanged.

I saw another documentary show last night, on the History channel, “How The Earth Was Made”.  It showed how they took deep ocean drillings and determined that the Sahara Desert first developed 3 million years ago, because the wind-driven sand that blew into the Atlantic first appeared at that depth.  Then they showed how, because of the wobble of the Earth, there were 20 thousand year cycles of wet and dry in Northern Africa.  They found fresh-water shells and whale bones, remnants of ancient human habitation in the desert, and determined that the end of the last wet period was only 5,500 years ago.  When the huge lakes and grasslands dried up, the inhabitants migrated to the east, where they found a generous river – and Egyptian Civilization was born!

Man is a highly adaptive creature, and our environment is constantly changing.  We even change it ourselves.  It could be that a major impetus for change is just around the corner.  I expect to see it.

If anyone wants to argue anything, please, at least watch the show in the link first.

Gotta give a link here to an excellent blog post, But you LOOK “normal!!”

What Darwin Never Knew first appeared at Comet’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

In the first place, no one is attempting to “speak for” any 10 year old child who can’t speak for himself.  What we would like to do is to help that father understand his child, because he doesn’t seem to have a clue, and we do have a clue, because we’ve lived it.  I would tell that father, “You don’t know what we were like when we were children, what we were able or unable to do.  You also have no idea what things we still have difficulty with, because you only know what you see here online, and that just isn’t enough to know anybody.”

Now, you might think to ask us, “Why would you even care?”  Answer: Because we know what it’s like to grow up entirely alone, not understood, misunderstood, not invited to other kids’ birthday parties, left to watch TV alone because you don’t know how to talk with us, picked on and abused by family, close relatives, kids at school, teachers, everybody one comes in contact with who has a chip on his shoulder and wants to make himself feel better.  We’d like to help you to have a better relationship with your son, because you’re the one he depends on, the one who can help him the most, and you (and your wife) are all he has.

And you sit there moaning, “Why Me?“  You spend a fortune on ABA “therapists” who are only too glad to take your place in teaching him, their profession is well-paid, and they’ve sold you a bill of goods.  You’ve already missed out on a lot of good things you could have shared with him.

As for those who think they know all about autism, that it’s a terrible thing that leaves a child without any sense, smearing his feces about, never learning anything of value, and that’s all there is to autism, they don’t know a damned thing.  They refuse to recognize that Asperger’s has anything at all to do with it, think that we’re all “fakers” who have glommed onto a popular Dx, as I suppose “Indigo Child” was at one time.  (It was never a serious diagnosis, just a crazy fad.)  Some have even suggested that autistic advocates are actually shills for the pharmaceutical companies, who’ve paid us to “glorify” Asperger’s, confuse everyone about autism, all to cover up their continuing misdeeds, (which may or may not be a Commie plot to overthrow the US).  Trust me, there is at least one mad hater and a few online groups who tend to think that way.

As for the relationship of autism to Asperger’s, that’s where the relativity part of my story comes in.

Statement: In essence, they are the same.  I just can’t say it any clearer than that. I’ll offer an allegorical representation of their relationship.  Go open a can of Campbell’s chicken broth.  Put it in a sauce pan and heat, and then taste it.  Now fill the can with water, and pour it in the pan.  Let it heat up again, and now take a taste.  Did it change?  No, I dare say that if you gave a spoonful of each to a blind-folded person, s/he wouldn’t be able to tell any difference.  That’s because they’re made of the same stuff! Does that mean that I’m saying that Asperger’s is watered down autism? Not at all, and anyway, the broth was already mostly water to begin with.  What I’m saying is that the essence of Asperger’s is the same as the essence of autism, whatever can cause the one can cause the other, and though it’s all the same, it manifests differently in each of us, because – because we’re all different anyway.  There never was anyone exactly like you, and there never will be.  Sometimes I think that genetics is an exercise in statistics, with endless permutations.

Alright, call it “The Theory of Relativity of Autism and Chicken Broth”.  I don’t care.

Disclaimer: I’m not a Doctor in real life, and don’t even play one on TV. 

Note: It’s rerun season, and the preceding was a rerun originally scheduled on 20 Sept 2009. Hopefully, new readers will find it interesting. Andy Warhol would be pleased.

Autism, Asperger’s, and chicken broth first appeared at Comet’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Homo Habilus, two million years ago

The other day, on “Cat in a Dog’s World“, Sarah takes to task the originator of “The Neanderthal Theory”, Leif Ekblad.  His theory is the result of his desire to justify his ideas of Aspie Supremacy, and not based on any sort of fact.  I commented there, and made reference to a PBS show I had seen recently.  Please watch it, if you are at all interested in the subject of evolution, because it encompasses all that we know on the subject, and that’s quite a lot.  There are also links to Parts 1 and 2.
It’s really very informative, it tells about how half a million years ago, a creature called Homo Erectus began to leave Africa, slowly spreading across Asia as far as Indonesia, and also going up into Europe, becoming Homo Heidelbergensis.  This breed developed into Neanderthal man, while those who remained in Africa evolved into Homo Sapiens.  About 60 thousand years ago, some of these too began to leave Africa, and for quite a while, they co-habitated Europe along with Neanderthal man.  They had many advantages, and began to push Neanderthal into marginal areas.  The last evidence of Neanderthals was on the island of Gibraltar, and that only 28 thousand years ago.  They had existed for about 400 thousand years.

Our scientists have the Neanderthal genome all mapped out, and are certain that there was no cross-breeding between the two.  And now I’m going to do a little reckless speculation.  Wouldn’t it be interesting if they could reconstruct the Neanderthal DNA, put it in a human egg, and create a test tube Neanderthal baby?  (I’m not saying it would be ethical, but it sure would be interesting.)  We could find out all that we want to know about them.  At some point, it may be possible to do.

And if it were possible to create such test tube babies, there’s another experiment that simply must take place.  I’d like to see the same experiment done with DNA taken from the skeleton of a 20 thousand year old Homo Sapiens.  What would that show?  Well, Homo Sapiens has been around for 200 thousand years, and for the first 190 thousand showed very little progress.  It was only in the last 10 thousand years that we developed any kind of civilization, and the bulk of that only in the last 3 or 4 thousand years.

What changed 10 thousand years ago?  The North American glaciers melted, releasing cold fresh waters into the Atlantic, changing the climate in Europe and the Near East, making agriculture possible.  The first remnants of civilization are in Jericho, where they say cultivation of wheat began.  Was it the change in diet, or the cultural change from hunter/gatherer to agriculture that made the difference?  The change in diet wouldn’t have been complete, I’m sure they still ate meat, as they couldn’t subsist on only wheat, but they ceased to be nomadic.  Still, I wonder, if they made a test tube baby from a 20 thousand year old skeleton, would they find any significant difference?

No, I’m not selling any theories, like “intelligent design” or even “divine intervention”, I’m just looking for a rational explanation of why Homo Sapiens went 190 thousand years without making much progress, and then suddenly progressed in leaps and bounds.  At what point in our evolution did we cease to be mere animals, and become “human”?  Was homo erectus human, or Neanderthal, or that early homo sapiens?  I don’t know, that’s why I’d like to see the results of that experiment.  Or maybe Nova will address it in a Part 4.

Comments are welcome, as always.

Becoming Human first appeared at Comet’s Corner, and is reprinted here by permission of the author.