Introduction v0.8

Today, Clarence sat down with George Bailey and told him he had some problems to work out, but that he's a real sweet person, folks want to like him, and they'd miss his input if he were suddenly gone.

That's the real shock for me. The idea that if I withdrew people would consider my absence a loss, and not simply due to meticulous and anxious financial bookkeeping, is an idea which does not come easily to me. Don't feel bad, there's almost literally no way to express to me this fact short of outright saying it, which should not be an expectation of anybody. Such is work for a therapist. I'll get back to that.

To me it's already obvious from my opening statement that I think in a manner foreign to the rest of humanity. Say what you will about modern medicine, it has its uses; it took a decade and a half, but in my teen years I was finally diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a syndrome new to Yankee shores at the time. Since those bygone days in the late 90s, the diagnosis has exploded in prevalence and become something of a joke, but until that time I had no context for my inferiority whatsoever.
I wish to emphasize that point. I spent a decade and a half believing myself mysteriously inferior. This was not the fault of my mother, who did her best to cultivate my talents, whatever they may be, nor of literature, which has often been my friend; as a fan of science fiction I had no shortage of snarky outsiders, martyred or exalted. We listen to our peers, though, who were absolutely certain of my condescending, witless mediocrity.
In sixth grade I even had an EEG, an electroencephalogram. That's where they stick electrical sensors to your head to produce a series of waves indicating in broad strokes where your brain is most active; rather than for a scientific purpose, it is for a diagnostic purpose. We were trying to find out, what is wrong with Mackie?
It found nothing of interest, by the way, which left us optimistic, since my accidents were not the result of epilepsy, but meant whatever was wrong with me may still have no "external" cause; Jung spoke of the burdens we take on as children, and Bradbury fans may remember The Miracles of Jamie. We also were left at that time with no obvious course of treatment.
An IQ test followed. We found nothing wrong. I was a perfectly healthy fellow who was incapable of the simple task of humaning.
After a brief adventure in the subtle art of medically-induced insomnia, both failed and successful, we settled on ritalin, a familiar medication which is very useful for a great many people. It curbed my enthusiasm, allowing me to interact less with other people and thus risk fewer missteps, and also drastically worsened an existing lifelong predisposition toward depression.
My mother, of course, was undaunted. As Anne Shirley said, 'I'm glad she was satisfied with me, anyhow.' After a great deal of research, she found a list of diagnostic criteria which fit me perfectly.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, version 4-R, defines Asperger's Syndrome's diagnostic criteria as follows:

(I) Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following:

    (A) marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction
    (B) failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level
    (C) a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interest or achievements with other people, (e.g.. by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people)
    (D) lack of social or emotional reciprocity

(II) Restricted repetitive & stereotyped patterns of behavior, interests and activities, as manifested by at least one of the following:

    (A) encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus
    (B) apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals
    (C) stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms (e.g. hand or finger flapping or twisting, or complex whole-body movements)
    (D) persistent preoccupation with parts of objects


(III) The disturbance causes clinically significant impairments in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

(IV) There is no clinically significant general delay in language (E.G. single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years)

(V) There is no clinically significant delay in cognitive development or in the development of age-appropriate self help skills, adaptive behavior (other than in social interaction) and curiosity about the environment in childhood.

(VI) Criteria are not met for another specific Pervasive Developmental Disorder or Schizophrenia.

I have never found a way to adequately express how wondrous it was to have a name for my most egregious faults. It wasn't me. It was my Asperger's Syndrome. For at least a year, I used this knowledge as license to be a raging asshole, unwilling to work in any way against the hand dealt to me now that I had finally been allowed by medical science to see it.
Nevertheless, in time this phase came to an end, and I was left synthesizing a new sense of self. I knew why I was bad, but the cause wasn't external; it was visited upon me unwilling, but it was nevertheless part of what made me what I was.
It also failed to explain everything. It explained why I was unloved by my peers, but did nothing to explain why my mind's eye was plagued with evil visions. On a daily basis my imagination was haunted, as if by unseen forces, by blood aerosol on walls, of graphic deviant sexual behavior, of a dreadful perversion and violence which seemed to be visited upon everybody about me, mostly but not exclusively my peers. How does one speak of such a thing? A deep, dark secret such as this, some unexpressed tendency toward horrific violence and lurid, immoral paraphilias, is not something one shows to others. To this day I cannot imagine, had I not eventually discovered in my late 20s the nature and source of these dreadful images, how I would tell anybody of the awful things which crossed my mind.
This is not to say they didn't have their outlets. If I had long ago given up on being loved and accepted by my peers, I at least wished to be left the hell alone.
This is an absurdly difficult condition to achieve.
Of the externally visible markers of my mental illnesses, the following were glaring:
Sudden paroxysms of extreme violence, bouts of which I professed no memory and no small remorse on average.
Smaller bouts of deliberate, calculated violence, engineered to reduce social interactions to conceivable matches of strength and endurance.
Occasional fugue states, a disassociative condition where one mentally or physically wanders away from a dangerous or undesirable circumstance with no memory of the event or the passage of time.
Extreme obsessions with UFO phenomena and alien abduction lore.
The simple and straightforward inability to blend in with human beings.
Little or no joy in life or its activities.
And, of course, the occasional graphic description of the violence which seemed to come unbidden into my imagination, so long as I thought it served the immediate purpose of halting an undesirable conversation.

It should come as no surprise I became exceedingly good at making my peers very, very uncomfortable. This somehow never caused them to leave me be until May of 1998, when Kip Kinkel, a student forty miles away from me, shot his parents and several students. While the nature and cause of his act of terrorism is questionable, suddenly it seemed to my peers that the hunters might become the hunted, and that they were vulnerable to the predations of any outsider in their midst, rather than merely the other way around.
By 2000, I finally had my solitude.
Around this time I also stopped taking ritalin. Having occasionally accidentally forgotten it and finding on such days that the days were not a flat, emotionless, dreary grey, I mentioned this to my mother and she said I should immediately quit the medication. As this is not usually a rational response to a prescription side effect, I can only assume this was a final straw; I never thought to ask at the time. As a result, what few pleasant interactions I could scavenge from my peer group of two or three now felt less like a waste of time, and more like a life, if not worth living, at least not best abandoned entirely.
This is approximately when I met the woman who would, after misadventures best left out of this narrative, later be my beloved wife.