A day like many others. A Saturday, so naturally sad. But today has been humid. Thunder and downpours are promised but have yet to arrive. Cross-country drive this evening and I stopped to watch the lightning, maybe 30 miles west. Felt the breeze turn slightly cooler, and the smell of it had that tang. Stood at a farm gate to watch the distant show and wished I had a simpatico, gorgeous women standing next to me. To want to share is to be human.

Not a bad day yesterday all told. Sober the previous night, so felt clean and fresh at work.

Close to my darling friend and ally Jill. We chatted a lot today. We get on so well, and it feels so natural when we talk. Sad in a way that there can be no more, but then again, I think it's better that way. She's a sister, not a lover. It does feel odd that I have reached a relatively mature stage in life to realise that a platonic friendship is possible with a woman, even if there is an underlying mutual attraction that must be ignored. I am a late developer as I remember my father predicted, although he would have been surprised to find quite how late.

Humour abounded. Love to laugh, and love to make others laugh,

A bad weekend, but thoughts turning positive. Got to get out of the hole. Saw my daughter for an hour on Sunday and I felt so alive. She's going through the silent, introverted pubescent stage, so me saying five times "I love you" and hearing the reply " I love you too", rather than the usual "Hi" or "You're ugly" was shockingly profound. Glad that at least one person on the planet misses my absence. Little darling.

Monday, hungover, despite promises not to drink. However, I drove to work very fast and felt good. Listening to banging, early 90's trance helps, as do The Who and Pink Floyd. Radio 4's Today programme was my usual morning fix once, but the news brings me down so hard nowadays that I avoid it.

Fantasy woman loathes me, or mistrusts me, or is waiting for me to make the next move. Who knows? I have that magical effect on women I like. She looked absolutely stunning today. Bare shoulders, that Latin tan and a scowl ('specially for me?) that would sink Triremes at 100 furlongs.

Luckily, due to the Schengen agreement, beautiful Slavic prostitutes are available for a reasonable sum. Roll on payday.

Wow, what a bleak day. Just about as down as it could be. Internal conversations, the black dog biting and sickness spanned across the hours.

Then I stood in my shirt, in the August drizzle and felt alive.

A fine, beautiful, slutty tramp of a woman gave me the time of day again. Don't know how to handle her. She has a partner, yet she wants something, and I know what it is. But how to broach the matter. How to be cool. Fucking ASD. Confusion, poured upon confusion.

A darling of mine came-a-calling and I talked to her for so long. Will treasure these conversations for ever.

My dream girl was, as always, unobtainable. uncomfortable and awkward. How to be as normal and charming and sincere with her as I am with other women? Feel so difficult to talk naturally with this one, because of the lust. But she is so clever, which is a more than magnetic draw. She is also a metaphorical vampire, which maybe worries me. I am too, which would make a bad combination. 

She has such a great backside.

An Introduction.

I'll start this blog with an apology or two. Sorry for the verbosity of this introduction. I'm learning brevity of prose, so hopefully this is a temporary state. Secondly, there will naturally be mention of others. I will never use names, or at least, not real names. However, please understand that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and events can only be written as we see or remember them in our mind's eye. I will never knowingly misinterpret events, but cannot promise that others might not see them differently.

It was never intended that this blog should begin in so morose or so navel-gazing a way. Plans, however are subject to change, sometimes by events outside ones control. I intended to begin writing back in January of this year. Feeling pretty good, or rather, relatively good about life back then. Oddly, that feel-good period conspired to make writing seem an unnecessary hindrance. Much better things to be doing, like forgetting, or looking forward to new frontiers. Now, a few months later, life has reached a new low and I need to get some thoughts down in text by way of drawing a line in the sand. Here's hoping.

By way of setting the scene, my family life disintegrated forty-four months ago, exactly on my 40th birthday. My wife left me, or rather I was told to leave after yet another mad, bad argument. So I left. A period of three years passed, a time of painful adjustment and self-doubt, one that many will be familiar with. I rented unsatisfactory rooms, and visited the family home for a few hours a week to see my children, which I didn't enjoy, but now, looking back, treasure. She, it turns out, increasingly hated the arrangement, and me. After three years, I began to feel better. I joined a gym and slowly started using it: very slowly at first. Then, a young, stunning, musical, clever, buxom, exciting, exotic, vivacious, headstrong woman, and in fact, just about my dream girl came to work in my office. At first, I had no special feelings, but then she seemed to take an interest and I was hooked. Confused, deluded, middle-aged man that I was (and am). Aside from doubts about a 17-year age gap, my fantasies ran wild. We men do so make ridiculous imaginary plans. I'd already started dreaming of buying a house on her island, of meeting her family and all the rest within days. She asked me to see her play, she pressed up against me, she followed me, but all the while I was in turmoil about letting go of the past and of cutting loose. However, I hit the gym big time and lost a lot of weight. I felt so alive. Testosterone started flowing and I cut back on the booze. Even my facial hair grew twice as quickly. It was all-told, a very odd experience. A new and unexpected novelty was that other women seemed to take an interest and I made the most of a few opportunities, whilst at the same time the fantasy woman receded. As much as I tried, I could not make her want a friendship. Always. always that distance. I probed and I prodded, far too much in hindsight, and was always faced with excuses and that apparently insurmountable feminine wall. In the end, nothing happened and nothing will, but it was a life-changing lesson, a re-remembering of things learned 20 years ago, and through the abject complacency of marriage, forgotten.

Still, whilst I spent naive, hopeful, hopeless months making up fantastical what-ifs, I always tried to be positive. Someone else will turn up, I thought in my more realistic moments, and I will find a friend. I started opening up to people, after years in a very closed, family-oriented marriage, and made some allies, if not friends. Never invited anywhere of course (except by dream-girl to see her play, and then never exactly welcomed, but faced with a degree of mistrust, like I was up to no good), and therefore no opportunity for familiarity outside work. 'Home' life was just a void, filled with drink, lethargy, confusion, self-pity and occasional, opportunistic womanising.

The simple reason for this is, I think, after much consideration, that elephant in the room, was and is and will forever be Asperger's Syndrome. I've always been a bit strange, a bit aloof, a bit separate. Not by choice but by circumstance. In hindsight, armed with the knowledge I now have, I can say with certainty, by nature. I only became aware that ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder) existed a few years ago when my son was diagnosed. When I was his age, they'd never heard of it. The head-tick I suffered throughout my teenaged years went undiagnosed. “He'll grow out of it”, the neurologist said. To be fair, I did. Now, as a grown man, I love fun, but sometimes too much on my own terms, and I like companionship as most do, but can be awkward in casual conversation and feel uncomfortable at times, yet never shy, in unfamiliar or unexpected social groups. In fact, I crave companionship and look upon how others turn casual conversation into friendship with a sense of awe, confusion, and base as it may be, with jealousy. This simple but life-affirming event never happens to me however much I try to make friends. I can make people laugh, oh how I can make people laugh? A sense of humour drier than Saharan sand, and an urge to push boundaries and say the oddest things. With confidence and will, I could have been a professional comedian and be admired. Alas, in the workaday world, it's a skill that only goes so far. It doesn't ensure that others are drawn to me. I don't have charisma, that natural humanity that allows people to want to be with me, except for the unusual few. I still don't know to this day what that something might be. A lightness of being, a ready smile, a warmth? Who knows? Whatever it is, it is that to which I aspire and hope to learn. Armed with those skills, I will be devastating. But, like all those with an Autistic-spectrum condition, there is no knowing that I will ever find them. On the good days I live in hope, and on the bad days, I feel a bleakness akin to that known to the unfortunate who've been told they have only a short time to live. A life sentence in other words, but in my case, with no imminent finality, no hoped-for reconciliation with oblivion, unless I choose that path myself. On the other hand, life can be hilarious. I'll try to reflect this in future posts.

So, the point of this blog will, I hope, to be a mildly diverting, and at times entertaining ramble, one which might shed some light on the daily life of someone at the milder end of the Autistic spectrum. Someone who seems likable, but different in a few important ways. I don't promise that it will be an enjoyable read all the time, but I will try to balance it with some happy anecdotes that will perhaps help paint more detail. A lot of what will come will take place in the past. We live in a time in which it is fashionable only to dwell in the present. A paraphrased misunderstanding of Buddhism is at the root of this; but without acknowledgement of the past, or planning for the future, there can be no meaningful understanding of the present. We are not all ascetic monks in an eastern culture, willing to place our trust in the hoped-for benefactions of strangers. Besides, I doubt many monks on the physical road to enlightenment had Asperger's. If they had, they would have been monumentally screwed.

All the very best.