A Compass for Where the Wasteland Ends

I've decided to put the "Whoville Chronicles" to bed, for the time being at least. I have the feeling that what's left to say is more of the same. The Whos and the Spencers have been outlined, and their dysfunction and insanity has been exposed to the internet. Revenge is mine!!! The broader subject that deserves specific attention is my attempt at escaping this thing called The Matrix, or the American Hologram. It's a story that encompasses more than just the first place I landed after my escape, the Whoville sector of Palookaville, and more than just the people who reside here and their ridiculous antics. To continue with this specific story I would most certainly have to begin fictionalizing it, and I have contemplated doing just that, but I've finally elected not to. I've been told by just about everybody who knows me well that I should write a book. I always respond with, "I have written several books." What they mean is that I should publish a book and get paid for my efforts. I'd love to get paid for writing, but I'm afraid that's not in this deck of cards. I'm just too pessimistic to believe that publishing a book, especially in today's world, where everything is monetized, is worth the effort.

There is the incessant rub; money appears to be the only thing that The Hologram cares about. How simple of an epiphany to make, and yet it has been almost 33 years in the making for me. I can tell you that by the age of 18 I had already made the majority of the "epiphanies" I would make in my life. It was like I had already formulated the chapters of my spiritual and intellectual life, and what was left was for me to understand them all with more depth. You can drink a wine after a couple of weeks of fermentation, but if it's done right, after years of resting in itself properly, it will taste magnificent. Still, you have to have the refined palate to taste the subtle and nuanced differences. In the beginning, after the initial fermentation process, it's still fundamentally the same substance it will be after years of resting, yet it's not the same is it? It is qualitatively very different. Now, when I read what I wrote from the view point of an 18 year old, I can appreciate that I really had no idea what I was talking about, yet I did. I understood in a very single visioned, flatland, horizontal, Cartesian and youthful way. How could I understand any differently? The lion's share of epiphanies have to be lived.

I struggle with the need I have to read and write. What I've come to understand is that what matters most in life is how you conduct yourself. What do you spend your time doing? That is how you are the change that you want to see in the world. What can be more important than that? I've read a lot of books and written thousands of pages searching for that one epiphany. What matters is what you do with your time. When I'm reading, or writing (or participating in my favorite escapism which would be movies), what am I doing? I'm sitting on my ass not being the change that I want to see in the world. Yet it doesn't have to be as rigid and defined as that, and it isn't. I can just as easily argue that the sage sitting in meditation in a cave is changing the world in the most important way possible...spiritually. The answers I have come up with to the question of what change do I want to see, are mostly a product of Permaculture. The reasons for that being my answer are many, but Permaculture is also not my destiny, and if it is than I can't see it. If it is my destiny then why have I landed in Whoville?

I can't state with enough conviction what it means for me to have finally realized that there is a reason why I have always felt so different from my fellow human beings. It feels like a homecoming, and it makes me very emotional, which is very ironic given the specific condition I'm referring to. This condition makes it impossible for me to register unspoken communications that are supposedly received through things like facial expressions and body language. Now, I have learned how to read these things over the years, but I am unable to read them in any way other than intellectually. It's not something that comes naturally. This deficit goes a long way towards explaining why I have always avoided people in general. Again, probably as a matter of survival, around 17 years old I developed an intense interest in understanding human psychology. Now I know that I was searching for the protocols that would allow me to "fit in." All of this is only gained in retrospect after receiving the key that belongs to the lock that has kept me in this cage. With Aspergers exposed to the light of my conscious awareness, I feel like I now have the last remaining puzzle pieces to the puzzle of my life.  It feels like figuring out my destiny has gotten much closer.

The thing is, I have had my entire life to adapt to this condition. Psychology was one of my intense obsessions. I learned how to hide in societies day light. I waited tables and tended bar successfully (of course I think my regulars were just entranced by my eccentricities and that's why they continued returning...cause they couldn't figure me out). These are activities that somebody with this condition are not supposed to be able to do seeing as how they deal with other people. I do just fine with people, so long as it's one on one, or it's a well defined social situation. Put me in a group of people that I'm supposed to interact with (like the permaculture tribe I spent time with this year) and a minute feels like an hour. I feel like every person in a group is a vampire that is feeding off of me, but that can't possibly be true...and it's not true, it's just my way of being in this world. To be clear, I have not been diagnosed, but I know it's true like I know that I'm a male human being on planet Earth. I know it with enough certainty to know that I don't need to waste my time, and lack of money, on paying professional shrinks with certificates and licenses to verify it for me. Although I imagine I'd get a LOT of money from the government due to their failure to detect it while I was in military entrance processing. Definitely since I got kicked out with an "other than honorable discharge" when it should have been a medical discharge for psychological reasons. I also don't want some incompetent ass hole telling me that I'm wrong and sending me back into that cage of lonely isolation.

When I was growing up, my mother used to repeat to me "it's not what you say it's how you say it." I never could understand what the hell she was talking about, and it always just pissed me off even more. "What the hell are you talking about...how I say it...how the fuck am I supposed to say it," followed by storming out of the house to escape in my newly acquired personal transport vehicle to do something crazy like jump off of a rail road trestle head first with a bit of rope and metal. In my marriage, my wife has been brought to the brink of insanity for the same reason. It just doesn't register with me. It's cold, calculating, and rigid reasoning. I could make the best defense attorney the world have ever known if I didn't have a soul and could play the game. Or is it just because when I was five my father abandoned me? It's all bound up and hidden in the dysfunction of my own life. Yet I know it to be true, and the fact that my half brother has been diagnosed is enough of a diagnosis for me.

My son is different already. He's two and a half and Wendy and I both know it as well as we know it of me. Sometimes he covers his ears up for no apparent reason. He walks up to adults at the park and sits in front of them and babbles on as if he knows them. He refuses to be contained in one space and likes to run off to the fringes when in a group of people...like a wild animal trying to escape a cage. He already has an obsession in all things king. In a bit of synchronicity, at the park the other day, a ten year old girl with Aspergers showed up. She walked up to me and started telling me about a little girl who was running around the park with no underwear or pants on a few days prior. Her dad instantly pops off with "she's talking about that because she's autistic." I responded with "aspergers?" He looked at me as if I was psychic. How could I have known that after only a minute of interaction. It's easy, I recognized it in her because it's in me as well. I was just recognizing my own kind. How mysterious that is to me, to be around somebody that I recognize in that way. Did I mention that she's ten?  Her and Ayden hit it off like fleas on a furry dog.  

How does this all fit into permaculture and what my destiny is? Asking me to be a community leader is sort of like asking a fish to live out of water. I'm simply not cut from that cloth, and now I understand why. They say that Aspies should concentrate on their abilities and not on their disabilities, and my ability is not in groups of people. If I could take the community and explain it to them each one on one, maybe, but that's not the way it works. It simply takes too much energy from me to be responsible for fostering community in person. It takes too much talking to people about trivial things.  I would rather dig a very deep hole all day long.  Writing on the other hand. I am definitely suited for rallying the troops in this form, with the written word. The irony is that the one thing I have determined is needed in this world is the one thing I am simply incapable of. I can do Permaculture, but I can't be concerned with convincing the zombies of the hologram that they should do permaculture. Yet permaculture is more than just putting the right plants in the right places while capturing rain water and building soil. It's about a way of life that centers around community.  

When I become interested in something, it quickly becomes an obsession. I read about it and do everything with it until I am exhausted and bored...usually. Permaculture is starting to fall into the exhausted with it category, and yet it can't be because everything I know intellectually says that it can't be. I came to Permaculture because of my obsessive study about the future of our planet. Yet what am I, one man, going to do about it? Plant some trees in my yard, grow some soil, collect some water? I want the entire thing intellectually, but in reality it's the last thing I want. It's like I told Dylan, one of the instructors of the Permaculture In Action class I attended, "I'll dig a hole a hundred feet deep wherever you want it for permaculture, but don't ask me to talk to people." I don't know, it's a conundrum for me. I've painted myself into an intellectual corner.

The "Whoville Chronicles" are now complete. Epiphany Now has never been about anything other than my epiphanies. So it is, and so it shall continue to be. I'm not sure where I'm going now, but I want to know my destiny, and so I have to figure it out. Unfortunately money has something to do with where I'm going, and that has nothing to do with what I want, because money is the last thing I want to be concerned about. Yet, I'm a husband, and a father...with another on the way, and the hologram does not care about my ideas about the change I would like to see in the world. I can't move to where the permaculture is right now because of money, and I can't spread it in Whoville because nobody gives a shit, and dealing with people in a community way is just not possible for me.

It appears that my destiny, at least in the near term, is to re-enter into the Matrix for a prolonged mission with the objective of money extraction. That means downloading some more credentials from the mainframe. It appears that come January, days before my 33rd birthday, I'll begin the download. The program is called EMT-Paramedic, and it's my families meal ticket. At least until the world starts caring about the future of our planet, sustainable food production, and our progeny's survival in the not too distant future. I'm not returning with my tail between my legs, and I think it's important to put that out there. When Neo was learning how to bend the rules in the Matrix, after he had unplugged, he hit the asphalt after falling from a building. It bloodied his nose, but he learned. Justin of the blog "Americana" said as much in a comment to one of my blogs. It's true. One thing I've learned from my resignation, and my dealings with the inhabitants of Whoville, is that the skills to reside outside of the Matrix require that bloody nose. This is by no means recognized by me as a defeat. Quite the contrary, it's only made me stronger.