Fries with your Aspurger? (Coz)

Dear Coz,
° Or, as dictionaries will have it, Asperger’s.
° Don’t know about you, but I’ve never been able to resist a list of symptoms. I’ve never failed to discover them in my own body within minutes after reading.
° So when I first encountered Asperger’s Syndrome, during an interview with Gorilla Girl on NPR Crazy Radio one Sunday night, I was in hog heaven.
° "I disliked the feel of cloth against my skin, and was forever taking off my clothes." I myself sleep in the nude, and Shetland wool itches me half to death.
° "I was forever telling the plain truth." O me too!
° "I used to have temper outbursts." We McLey males trace our famous tempers back three generations, it’s a sign of genetic continuity!
° "I was forever being beat up at school." Eighth grade, little Lanny Yardass, all 200 pounds of him. Used to beat us all up by turns, and sexually assault us as well, recess after recess.
° "I used to have trouble knowing where my body ended and others’ began, so I was forever running into folks." I myself--am very nearsighted.
° "Life as a teenaged outLesbian in my small town became dangerous." Well as signs of dementia go . . . .

° Yet the gist of her complaint was that she had always suffered from social dysfunction, from profound outofthegroupness. At 15 she ran away from home, drifted, became a successful poledancer, and that led to a job tending gorillas. In a world free of human language, she finally found peace. Spent five years achieving a diagnosis of Asperger’s, married (o joy of Sapphic love!), wrote book, flogged same.
° For her, an official diagnosis of Psychiatric Strangeness increased her contentment.
° Would it have for me?

§

° Might it still?
° Here’s the official checklist.

Problems with eye contact. (Me me me, I used to feel folks could detect my mental reservations if they looked into my eyes. In fact, it was the shiftiness itself that betrayed me.)

Failure to develop peer relationships. (Me me me, as long as I was young and collegey, I was perfectly content letting others seek me out.)

Lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment. (What? Was this true even of Gorilla Girl, didn’t she have at least one friend? Was the town that small?)

Markedly impaired expression of pleasure in other people’s happiness. (What?)

Inability to return social or emotional feelings, ritualistic. (O yes, love Solemn Mass, Vespers, unfaked Benediction.)

Repetitive finger flapping. (Great Garthuselah, how do you flap the fingers?!)

Obsession with train schedules, phone books, stamp collecting, ecc. (Me me me, for I use a phone book to look up numbers to this day. And I used to moon over steamship schedules, for returns to Italy.)

Preoccupation with parts of whole objects. (Me me me, for I am more a chestman than a buttman or legman or eyeman or--.)

Repetitive self-injurious behaviour. (Me me me, for I never learn a blessed thing from bad experiences.)

Six out of nine, I’m a victim of Asperger’s Syndrome. What a relief! Now I can, I can, I can--well really, what difference would it make?
° I’ve learnt on my own to look into folks’ eyes, Piers’s seagreeners enticed me, only took five years.
° I’ve learnt on my own that I’m not in a college dorm any longer, and that my physical value in America is less than my physical value in Italy. Must have some invitations engraved.
° I’m still like Justine, I tend to have the same emotional experience over and over and over, and never learn. Or do I just really like that particular experience?
° And if liking boobs or back or gams makes a guy nuts, no wonder the world’s in the shape it’s in.

§

° And yet, I was so very unhappy for such a very long time.
° And yes, I believe I could’ve been diagnosed with Asperger’s if I’d tried (or if a parent had wished it.)
° And no, I don’t think it would’ve given me the least bit of comfort, pace Gorilla Girl.
° For I plainly perceive that what I lacked was selfconfidence (I always understood keenly how very much I did not know, and overestimated the competence of others.) I was not an external selfstarter, cioè, I was almost entirely an interior person.
° I lacked a mentor, a firm and rational wellwisher. On the other hand, I escaped an amorous priest or scoutmaster.
° And pretty much on down the list. I lost what the Psychiatrists wish me to have, and gained what they fail to envision as possible to have.
° Intendimi chi può, che m’intendo io.

§§§§§

° Kinsey, the golden age of Sex. That toobrief couple of decades after penicillin had been discovered and before Venereal diseases had reasserted their suzerainty over humankind. For a grand total of twenty years, out of a million or more, folks could share every bodily fluid they could ooze without danger. Pain peeing? Penicillin. Chancres coming out the wazoo? Penicillin. Heartbreak of psoriasis? Penicillin.
° Well those days are gone forever.

° The movie made Michael Medved, Maggie Gallagher, all the Pharisees madder than wet hens. "How dare Hollywood glorify such a man as that! Why doesn’t Hollywood focus on the eros of married love?"
° They must not’ve seen the Kinseys’ honeymoon, after they finally worked their way through the hymen. Talk about wild monkey love! Talk about married eros!

° But the Pharisees were right to be defensive against Kinsey. For the man, in spite of all the titillation, had one core insight, which he’d intuited from his study of his first 100,000 specimens of gall wasp:

"There’re no two alike. No two gall wasps, no two humans."

And this is the profoundest rebuke, a common sense rebuke, to all the Pharisees that ever have been, from Moyses’s deuteronomical scholiasts to our own suborned Legislators, who never rest as long as there is one natural, Godcreated human difference uncodified, uncensured.
° Even in Manolos, not one size fits all . . . .

° Full of Bocaspurgers, your cousin, Giac.

P. S. If temperatures remain cold, but not freezing, prepare to lend a hand at hogkilling. I absolutely refuse to clean the chitterlings this year! Buon compleanno!