Today’s soundtrack: maximum big surprise, she knows, something new
Today at 12:02am: Living out my vigilante fantasies on a PS2


In parallel universe #15523 I live in a small town and date a girl named Jane.

I drive a pickup truck and have a medium-sized dog who rides in the back and no one cares I’m not white.

The dog, his tongue hangs out when we drive. Jane makes a mean steak and she drives an old Pontiac. It breaks down a lot. I spend every other weekend lying underneath the Pontiac, getting my hands dirty. Sometimes the store in town doesn’t have the right part and we have to wait for it to come in the mail.

In this universe I live in a big city and date a girl named ______.

I drive a small five-speed. Small so it’s easy to parallel park, manual so I can choose which gear I will use to cut that taxi off. I lack dogs.

I can’t wait ‘til I can own a dog because I love them. Not all dogs; if you have one of those little scruffy ones, man I hate them little bastards. I don’t care what you say, they’re patently unloveable.

One day I will have a medium-sized, tan-colored dog with a black snout and short hair. If I’m still in the city I’ll take him to the dog run at Washington Square. The other owners will think their dogs are better in some way but I will know the truth.

Today is MLK day but I had to go to work. Freelancers know no holidays but their own and I had economic incentives to be in the office today.

Sometimes I wonder What Has Happened To My Life. I don’t mean that it’s bad, I just wonder how things got this way. Did you ever wonder that? Don’t lie to me.

Today I saw a paper shredder that shreds credit cards and CDs. I coveted it.

I was in high school when CDs came out. Up ‘til then you had to carry twelve inches of vinyl back from the record store. So these little silver discs were amazing.

I can’t believe now you can make them yourself, and even put sensitive business data on them. In 1989 if you told me “One day you will be able to buy a machine that can destroy CDs” I wouldn’t have understood you. I would have told you to get away from me and then I would have driven off in my Datsun cranking Billy Idol and giving you the finger.

On the subway today I was reading this article in The Economist. I’ve got no business reading The Economist because I’m actually not that smart, I bet I’m in the bottom 10th percentile of Economist subscribers. But I hope I can get smarter. I’m going to start telling people that at cocktail parties. Oh who am I kidding, I haven’t been to a fucking cocktail party in ages.

Anyways this article, right, was about autism. I dunno why but autism fascinates me. (Businessgirlfriend postulates it’s because of the Rain-Rainman connection but I disagree.)

Generally speaking, autistics have problems functioning in society because they are unable to empathize. They also cannot decode facial expressions to tell if you’re angry or happy, etc. and as children they fail to make eye contact, unable to recognize eyes as portals of emotion.

Autistics also tend to systemize things, it’s the only way they can understand the world. And autism happens to boys three times as much as girls.

So here’s where it gets crazy:

Women (not autistic women, “regular” women) are typically empathetic. Women are generally more in touch with their emotions than men.

Men (“regular” men) typically systemize things. Men tend to categorize in order to solve.

A recent theory goes that autism afflicts fetuses when they receive too much testosterone in the womb. These researchers are postulating that autism is the ultimate Male disease--essentially saying having autism is like having a bad case of Man.

There are some heavy implications here, and if I was just a little bit smarter I could tell you what they are.