Sad Stories

I have to get this out of the way early, and judging by what I’ve read recently, it might not go over well with some folks. In case you haven’t caught on yet, let me be clear: the stories here are about someone with Asperger syndrome.

I’m not on a spectrum, and I’m not autistic, so those terms won’t appear here connected to Asperger syndrome. Other authors use the terms interchangeably.

My belief is: Asperger syndrome is a distinct human variation.

I’ve christened it Variation-A.

Autism is something altogether different.

Utilizing the word spectrum as an analogy or visual aid is problematic, because it would have to include everyone, rendering the word spectrum useless.

I limit references in my writing to salient stereotypes and diagnostic criteria where I feel the story reflects either an affirmation or refutation. This is an effort to point out the unique interaction of AS with the anecdote without weighing the story down with technical detail.

This is not a treatise on Asperger syndrome, but anecdotes of my life with just enough info sprinkled in to show where one element affected the other.

I’m working on the Asperger syndrome book.

I’ve dispensed with buzz-words such as neurodiverse and neurotypical, because I frankly haven’t been able to find as many as two consistent definitions of any of these terms.

To me anyone who is not an Asperger is referred to as a normal person.

Anything else becomes too convoluted.

Society seems preoccupied with the words normal and not-normal.

I know I’m not-normal, and based on what I’ve seen in my lifetime, I really don’t want to be.

Don’t expect anything I write to be.

I read a lot of sad stories on the various groups/blogs online.

I’ve lived 72 years so far.

I have lots of stories.

But, I somehow missed the sad ones.

I don’t know how that could be possible, though.

There must have been something sad in that 72+ year timeframe.

Maybe this has something to do with it:

When I was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome in 2014; I was 60 years old.

My doctor told me that people when diagnosed have one of three reactions:

“Woe is me, whatever shall I do?”
“Not me, I don’t have that.
“Oh, is that all it is. Where’s the manual?”

I had the third one.

I had lived to that point wandering what was wrong.

The difference was, I wondered what was wrong with all the people around me.

Fighting, running their bikes into cars, stealing, drinking, watching football, you know, that stuff.

Here’s an excerpt from my first book. It’s about my age group.

People lump us in with the baby boom.

Here’s what you don’t know: (Italics are from my first book.)

“I’ll paint a picture…

The term baby boom is thrown around like it was a singular event. There were actually two baby booms. The minor boomers were WWII babies. The BOOMERS were Korean War Babies. Many in both tiers of the boom were parented by the Greatest Generation.”

So what happened is that the birth rate increased in the years just after WWII, but so did the economic boom. So:

The WWII guys:

“…drove the greatest surge in the U.S. economy ever seen, with the Silent Generation [and the WWII boom] the initial beneficiaries.

Life was good … new houses with new cars in the driveway, vacations, new bikes, new clothing, plenty to eat, and schools, well laid out, with lots of resources and appropriately paid teachers.

“…the expectation [was that] that plenty-of-extra would continue. They expected their classrooms would never be overcrowded, trollies and busses would have enough seats for everyone, and there would never be a time when theaters were full.

Then we were born!”

Ruh-roh:

“There were 2,785,456 U.S. births in 1945. A number, steady since 1930. When we were born in 1954, we were part of the BOOM of 4,078,000, representing a 45% increase in the number of children competing for everything.”

“Suddenly, more desks had to be crowded into the classrooms. The trollies and busses became standing-room only. Theatres that once had plenty of seats were now sold out on a regular basis.

And guess who got blamed for this! Not the people who created the situation, noooo!

It was our fault!”

The thing is; it really didn’t bother us.

Even with the 100 kids in our first grade classroom.

It bothered the people born prior to the year I was born 1954, but the people in my era, those born during the biggest spike in births before or since in the U.S. i.e., between 1954 and 1957, got:

More comradery and niceness from my group than any of the older ones. And, seemingly from many of the younger ones:

“My best guess is with the increased pressure from the outside; we had turned to one another for safety and comfort. I don’t mean we stood outside one another’s homes with pitchforks to ward off evil, but we certainly had a better appreciation of each other than I saw from the other age groups.”

“… for whatever reason, unlike other AS stories I read, I was not bullied or picked on systematically in school. The social system at large is set up for an atmosphere of bullying for anyone different, but among my classmates, it simply didn’t exist.”

Or, it could be just me.
That “Oh, is that all it is. Where’s the manual?” attitude.

Somehow my brain always seems to go to the “What is the good in this?” area vs. the “OMG how terrible” side.

Some examples? Here you go:

The BOOM, i.e., the group in the middle of the boom were for the most part, middle-children.
First born children always get the normally perceived advantages:

Undivided parental attention
Maximum parental focus and effort
A defined identity from the start
Alignment with authority
Earlier responsibility and trust
First access to resources
New, not inherited, material environment
Full narrative focus
More documentation and attention to milestones
Influence over early family routines
Benchmark status
Clear position in the hierarchy

And, the whining starts with many middle children there, but with us we realized that the silver lining was:

An established household
Experienced parents
A functioning system to observe
Defined roles already occupied
Immediate exposure to hierarchy
Built-in peer environment
Less direct supervision
Less rigid rule enforcement
Shared attention as the norm
Second-pass resources and experiences
Reduced pressure of being “the example”
Reduced pressure of being “the baby”
A need to define a role
Practice navigating between positions
Early pattern recognition
Adaptation over control
Less narrative spotlight
More internal reference points

Hmmm…The good list for us is 30% larger than the one for the other group.

Yes, we got hand-me-downs, but we got lots of them.

Lots of choices and many, many books.

The older kids got books one at a time; we got complete libraries.

They got individual toys; we got full toy boxes.

My older siblings each got a bike.

When my time came; I not only got my own, but since they had outgrown theirs, our basement looked like a bicycle store!

Here’s another example:

I drove to Comb’s College of Music one night, to go on a double date. I was not an insider. When we got there it was obvious something was going on. Bright lights illuminating the walks and limousines delivering people in tuxedos and evening gowns.

The event was a $2,000 per plate fundraiser, spotlighting a visiting celebrity.

That’s equivalent to almost $25,000 a plate in today’s money.

We were there picking up my date’s sister and her boyfriend.

My date said, “They probably won’t let you in tonight. You’ll have to wait outside!” (Rude!)

When we arrived at the main entrance, the dean was on the stairs greeting the arrivals.

This was not a big school, so the dean was familiar with me and my date, and as she predicted, he told her to go in to get her sister, adding, “Michael will stay here with me.”

He winked at me and said, “Wait here in the green room.”

So, I took a seat on a couch in the green room—a room off the main hall, which turned out to be an elaborately outfitted parlor/library with bookcases of leather-bound classics built around huge stone fireplaces opposite settees for reading and conversation.

And shortly thereafter Marian Anderson was shown in.

She sat on the couch with me and we chatted for ½ hour.

The people who paid the $2,000—the insiders—got to see her from the audience.

And, the outsider, that would be me, got to have a nice exclusive chat with her in the parlor by the fireplace.

And, probably because I am me, and don’t have the normal human whatever, I just talked to Marian Anderson like she was someone from the old neighborhood—which we established during that conversation, that we were.

We were both born and spent our childhood in Southwest Philly.

There are more examples in my books, stories, just stories.

I guess some would consider some of them sad, but to me they were just things that happened.

I see a lot of this type of sad statistic also:

Only 40% of people with Asperger syndrome are employed and the other 60% are in pedestrian jobs.

I started out in pedestrian jobs, became a cop, then a detective, both in Philly, moved into to Fortune 50 companies, worked with other celebrities, ending up retiring from huge Wall Street firms.

In that 72+ years I alluded to above, I’ve only been unemployed for a period of two weeks.

In a previous essay I wrote: (An idea I got from Dr. Thomas Sowell—the last part—I added the part about the Honey Badger.)

Hey, if there’s a place on the planet for the Honey Badger, there’s a place for everything.
Go find it.
Figure out what you’re good at.
Find someone who will pay you for it.

That’s all I did.

Well, that’s not all I did. I also was able to recognize opportunities. Some were valuable, others not so much.

When I was on field training in the police academy, one supervisor, in an effort to get rid of me said, “Go over there in the corner and learn how to use the computer.”

This is when a dumb terminal was connected to a mainframe and we learned to code from a manual as big as a phone book, you know, as thick as a half-dozen computer tablets piled on top of one another.

Something said, “This’ll be useful someday.” Glad I listened to that voice.

I also found that programs that no one wants anything to do with sometimes present an opportunity.

I posted a resume with just the name of a program on it one time and got same day employment.

There was a time when big companies would pay for school.

If that ever comes up and you don’t grab it, well that’s on you.

I finished my undergraduate and graduate degrees on the company dime.

Do they all pay off? That’s a loaded question.

Does knowing one of those obscure facts from school; you know the ones that people say, “What will this ever be useful for?” Those ones.

I can honestly say that in 72 years, I’ve been able to find an application for almost all of them.

One that springs to mind is proportions.
What could be more random than that?

Everyone said, “What a waste of time.” But, were you ever in a store trying to figure out which item is cheaper—the 20 oz. size of ketchup or the 32 oz. size?

Knowing the origin of the expression “Rule of Thumb” can be very useful during a debate, if your opponent uses it.

As, is the origin of “You have to break some eggs, to make an omelette.”

Knowing where those came from can win the debate for you when you confront your opponent with the facts.

The last one will certainly put egg on their face.

The U.S. army has a saying, “Complaints have zero velocity.”

In the German army if you have a complaint, it has to be written, sealed in an envelope, and date stamped. Then you have to wait ten days before turning it in.

More than 90% of them never get turned in.

I’ve been known to ‘whinge’ (Google that word.) but, I’ve found serious complaining to be a waste of time.

The whinging is just for my benefit.

I did eventually grow out of it.

Now for those of you with your ass on your shoulders at this point, let me leave you with this example of Glück im Unglück:

I had a stroke in April of 2024.

It really sucked.

Knocked me on my ass for a week in hospital and then three weeks of in-house therapy.

And, after it was all over I thought about it.

They really didn’t know what caused it.

I mean they knew there was a vessel blocked, but not why it happened.

But, the doctor, thinking that high cholesterol, which I had at that time, might have been a contributor.

We attacked that and now that level is ideal.

And I thought, “I might actually live longer now that we fixed the cholesterol issue.”

Written May 20 2026