Been listening to an audio book by David Grohl. For those of you who don’t know he was the drummer for Nirvana and has since been the lead for Foo fighters. He also had an epic drum battle with Animal (from the muppets). I always thought his name was pronounced “Growl” because, well, he can seem like a bad mother fucker playing those drums or singing his proverbial heart out but “Grole”? I mean, who Groles at another person? Certainly not me, even on my best of days.
I don’t know why, but when I was on the treadmill today I was thinking about people from the past, specifically my past. Oh yeah, he was talking about a girl name Sandy that broke is heart in 1982. He met her at a bar in his twenties then they had a big hug at a Foo Fighters concert much later. Somewhere in there the girl had her arms raised (I think during the concert), a smile on her face, and worded “Fuck you” to Mr. Growl. So I was thinking how nice that must be to meet people from your past who are going out of their way to see you. Because that kind of thing doesn’t happen to me.
The last time I was surrounded from people from my past was at my dad’s funeral. The next (and probably last) time will be at my mom’s (that is if I don’t die first). I don’t see a lot of people from my past. I don’t have a lot of people from my present, for tha matter. A lot of reasons for it. Certainly not going into them all right now. I will say that when you suddenly start looking back at your life through the prism of being austistic you start to see that all the people that left you in the ditch may have done so not simply because you were weird and tough to handle, but because you were autistic (therefore weird and tough to handle). I’ve seen plenty of documentaries where austistic adults with all the same needs of a neurotypical don’t have friends but want the same kinds of connection anyone else does and it feels like I’m looking in a mirror.
I was also thinking about how my mom and dad always seemed to have friends. I remember at Christmas how my mom would display all the Christmas cards she’d gotten from friends all over the world and there would often be a string of fifty or sixty of them. Me? I usually get one at the end of the year, from my dad’s cousin and his wife (amazing people btw). And every vacation we were driving to see friends and family. It’s nothing like my life now. I have a wife. I have cats. Besides the outing to the local bar where I know a couple of the regulars, I literally have no IRL social life.
Part of that is, admittedly, my fault. When I was in my twenties I’d been keeping a handful of relationships on life support. I was like a puppy with it’s owner and would travel over a hundred miles just to see a friend I missed, only to sit in the back of his cigarette smoke filled room watching him play some video game for the eight hundredths time–then learn when he was in my neck of the woods he wouldn’t stop by. So I said fuck this, I’m not going to put myself out there if people aren’t for me. And I did it in a purely autstic fashion. If they reached out to me once, I’d return the favour. Keep the math equal. It was the only way I could see, objectively so, that I was reaching out to people five, ten, twenty times, for every time they gave me the time of day. Later, as I’d have professional aquaintances who seemed like friends, until the job or I moved on, and experienced the same thing, I said, “No more making friends with people I work with.” I was done with that shit too.
So yeah, that’s all on me.
And of course, when you have a disease like Lyme for a decade you don’t exactly make friends. Even those times I really needed someone during those times, to say do a kindness like grab me groceries or pick me up after a surgery, weren’t just in short supply. They didn’t exist.
I may have had a point to all of this. Or not. I just remember reading about Grohl and thinking how nice that must be. I felt a bit envious too, deep down, you know, where it hurts. Not that I don’t want him to have positive experiences in his life–but because I know experiences like that aren’t likely in the cards for me. Lots of people I’d like to see again or hear from. Some people, I’d like to just give a stern talking to (Teague fucking Yonkers). Many I’d want nothing to do with (abusers out there, you know who your are) while others I’d spend the night partying and getting naked with if I were in an open relationship. I think that’s another autistic trait, this willingness to step out of boxes with people, which I’m not going to try to explain right now because this was meant to be a mid-length freewrite and while I did not have anything mind blowing to share this evening, I wanted at least to take a moment to share.
Back to my books and my movies and my wife and my cats and hopefully a few days of rest and relaxation before the grind begins again.
Cheers and goodnight,
…asm…