Little Nash Rambler

This will be all over the page, apologies in advance.

In May and early June, I had occasion to do a lot of solo travelling, and hadn't fully explored Sirius radio yet, and made the mistake of allowing myself some introspection.

Oh yeah, this is gonna be one of those posts, I advise you to flee now.

So, I got to wondering about why I've been living in River city for nearly a year now, and not even asked anyone out on a date. I mean sure, I've been burned rather badly, but the fire is enticing as all get-out. A few 5th degree burns ain't stopping any sane person, right?

So I got to wondering just how conventionally sane I am, and I discovered something. That old adage that 'crazy people never question their sanity' is likely a crock of shit. Then again, I really didn't come up with a diagnosis of 'crazy', more like 'emotionally autistic'. I seem to be burdened with a staggering abundance of empathy, if someone around me is experiencing an emotion to any significant degree, I react to it as strongly as if I was affected directly. This happens whether or not I like or even know the person, or they me. Apparently, most people find this objectionable. I'm guessing that they either think I am mocking them, or I'm trying to kiss ass. Me, I don't know what the hell I'm doing when I do this, maybe I'm trying to be supportive, maybe I'm just groping for an appropriate reaction. And apparently I've done this all my life.

Honestly, you people confuse the shit out of me. A smile means a million different things, and so does every other facial expression. Can't you just look mad when you are mad, sad when sad, happy when happy, etc... so I have some damn clue how to act? It takes me about a month to figure out one person's base set of emotional cues to a point where I am even remotely comfortable talking to them one on one. It is by far my preference to have someone I know how to read present with strangers to interpret for me.

*rolls up sleeves*

Let's discuss my childhood. My earliest memory is of my two older brothers nearly killing me. the next one after that is of two strange girls trying to finish the job. My brothers basically were digging rocks out of dad's taters, and I trundled up looking for someone to play with, and they decided that I would make a dandy moving target. The little girls pushed me off the top of a rather tall slide (and not down the slide either) to land hard in the dust beneath it.

From there, we segue into kindergarten-high school, which to me is a long blur of pain, shame, and humiliation. Girls pretending to pass an invisible Lysol can around and spray where I came near them, gangs of 3-4 boys holding me down for a round of punch-the-wimp or stuff-a-wimp-in-a-garbage-can. Of the four crushes I had, two went spectacularly south after assuming pear shapes, the last, I simply hid to avoid the pain.

I'm not sure exactly when I gave up any hope of having a friend in school, but I think it was sometime around 2nd grade, when my one friend (crush #1), a girl named Bonnie, simply up and vanished sometime during the summer break, leaving me completely friendless (all the neighbor kids near my age were in different grades). At this late remove, I can say that our relationship was more like I was one of her favorite pets that didn't live in her home, but at least she didn't consider me a pariah. After that, I just did my best to avoid contact with other students outside class, and was at one point at least a decent prospect for Olympic Race-walking. Had it been an event back then, I might have moved on to bigger and better things with an athletic career. Alas. Needless to say, with my Olympic hopes unrealized, there was no incentive to develop either social skills or a personality. I spent my summer vacations doing things like reading dictionaries (no shit), practicing cryptanalysis with my oldest brother, and staying in the confines of family and neighbors. I can't even remembering wanting to meet other people or befriend them.

Crush #2, a particularly vicious ...person named Tammy (lol, no one I know now) basically encouraged me to openly profess my feelings, and once I had done so, proceeded to unleash a perfect storm of humiliation on me. As I recall, I sort of did an emotional equivalent of blinking once or twice, and simply turned the whole thing off. I pretty much stopped seeing her. And when I say 'stopped seeing her', I don't mean I stopped dating her, I mean I put up a mental block so strong she dropped off my perceptions almost completely. I don't think I acknowledged a word she spoke ever again.

Crush #3 I simply went and did a foolish thing, providing written evidence of my feelings, and it went public, and I got some ridicule. She was far too nice to be mean to me (which I think was a far larger reason for me liking her than her appearance, although she was kinda cute), but she had a boyfriend in another school (or maybe grade), and that was that. Crush #4 never found out how I felt, because I was simply no longer willing to bother trying. The cost-benefit analysis came up strongly negative.

And that's how it went for me. About 9th grade, I discovered RPGs, although I would net no friends, only other players/DMs, for a couple years yet, it did open up a means to escape, and I converted fast. About two years after that, I was on the bus, with the same bastards I'd always ridden to school with, when I noticed that that one kid who was even weirder than me had some D&D stuff in his books during a brief altercation over whether or not I could sit with him (he won as I recall). And that was how I met Charlie.

Charlie and I were closer than brothers, or at least, we were closer than I ever was with my brothers. He was, for lack of any better term, my boon companion, a kindred spirit. I can't say for sure in his case, but for me he was flotsam in a stormy sea. At last, at long fucking last, I had a friend. We were geeks, no doubt. We played D&D, fiddled on the computers of the age (Commodore 64s), went to geek-oriented movies, all of that. But he was my shot at a real teenage life. He was the guy who got me to agree to go on a joyride in his folks Blazer (we just ran down to the all-night gas station for some junk food and soda, but my God the freedom!). We bullshitted about girls, honing our lies about Canadian chicks we banged while away on vacation (apparently every guy in any state near the Canadian border simply has his pick of any desperate Canuck trim he wants, if our lies are true), we had those discussion that most people require pot for while stone cold sober, we had geek debates about the relative merits of Star Wars vs. Star Trek, all of it.

And then he died and took it all away from me again. And I have still not forgiven him for that. I met Orlo and Og, and Log and Tonga and even Bunnyman in the year after his death, through answering an ad for gamers on a local BBS (1992 people, the Internet was called Fido back then). But I had learned my lesson by then: no one can ever be trusted, they all leave you in the end if they don't actually deliberately betray you first. So I kept them all at arm's length for a long time. I also met Dan, who was my housemate for several years, and who saw in me someone with no personality at all, a dishrag to be used to sponge up whatever personality traits he chose to drip into it, a lackey in the making. And he got good use out of me, paying half his rent and utes for seven years or so until I caught him in a fairly monstrous betrayal of me and his current girlfriend, whom I then treated rather badly myself at the time. If I had that period to live over, I'd have done it so differently.

Around that time, in 1999 or early 2000, I found myself in a 'relationship'. Meaning well, my friends helped me woo a girl at work. Little did they know, she was just opening the door for opportunity. I lost my virginity, $400, and the last few dregs of my self-esteem in that fiasco. If I had know she just wanted money, I would have asked her rates, and then balked at realizing she was charging $2/lb and chosen a real professional. At least then I might have enjoyed it a little.

Not long before that, Bunnyman had departed for Florida, and I found myself adrift again. And Orlo and Jojo stepped up and adopted me, nursed me back to the semblance of health I'd fooled everyone at the time into believing was normal for me, and got me back on my feet. A few years later, Dan's ex fixed me up with my ex-fiancee, and that was a damn good two years. It's simply amazing how much good a nymphomaniac can do for a guy's self-esteem. If you have the opportunity, I can't strongly enough recommend availing oneself. It ended badly, my dad died, I got depressed, stopped performing, and she sought greener pastures. At the time I was doubly devastated, but from here I can see that she simply needed something I couldn't give her at the time. I could harp about how I was there for her when her papaw died, but what good would it do? It was time to move on any way, I realized after she was late once that I wouldn't want her to be the mother of my children, and thankfully that never happened. And I learned Pillowing to Master rank, you can damn well believe that!! Whoever's next better have a strong heart, that's all I got to say...

But, when you add all of that up, it's not hard to see that I have trust issues. For a damn good reason. Several dozen damn good reasons actually. Couple that with my inability to read people, and I got some hurdles to jump.

Or, you know, I could just tune out the world and play WoW some more. All the social interaction online is in writing. It's the next best thing to Heaven for me. No damn riddles, someone writes a message, or challenges you to a duel, you know where you stand and what they want. Worst thing I have to worry about in Azeroth is a ninja looter. And I got Ignore on a macro for those assholes.

*EDIT*

Heh, it occurs to me that that's a bad place to finish. Yes. I know. MMORPG socialization does not count. I need to get outside and interact with real humans face to face. The above is my self-examination of why it is so hard for me to do so. It's also an acknowledgement that my choice to go away from the epicenter of most of my interpreters may have been poorly thought out. But it's done, and I will simply have to adapt. It's a lot easier to deal with a problem once it has been acknowledged, I hear. This is my auto-intervention.