Pretending To Pretend

I write about being autistic sometime. It exhibits itself in ways I can't always explain. Many time it emerges as a certain type of selfishness, but it's not an accidental thing that merely occurs occasionally. Some might say it's more pathological than that, but that's just another opinion. I don't like remembering my first marriage very much. I was twenty-three years old when the ceremony happened, and my autism showed up often under the stress I hadn't anticipated marriage might bring.

I didn't seem to consider what that girl/woman may have thought about how I conducted my affairs. Which were actually "our affairs" because we really did get married. She and her family insisted on doing it in the church she attended from birth until she married me. It wasn't all that long before it became acutely embarrassing for her to show up with me in tow after that. It was a fundamentalist type church with very strict rules. I seem convinced that she wanted to marry her to take her away from that world. If that's true, then naturally, again, I failed that good woman.

Of all the conflicting aspects that occur in my astrological natal chart, the weirdest one is the opposition of the Sun to the eastern horizon when I was born. I can't think of a better way of describing how paradoxical this situation is than to quote some lyrics from the hit song The Pretender sung by some beach music group, maybe The Drifters, "I am a great pretender. Pretending that you're still around. I pretend to be what I'm not, you see, I'm wearing my heart like a crown. Pretending that you're still around."

That's one of the songs from my youth that keeps playing in mah haid, I've always known I am is pretending to be this or that. I know ten ways to skin a cat.

"I pretend to be what I'm not, you see..."

I think that one sentence/lyric has haunted my life. I can't think of a better way of expressing a facticity I can't get around. I can't pretend I'm not pretending that pretense is what I do best. I can't pretend that the rest of the world isn't pretending right along with me.

I know how people oughta act when they find out that everything I've represented myself to them as has been a sham. I know how I act when I run across somebody just like me, in this regard. Regarding my disgusting indulgence in pretense, at times, which really amounts to every chance I get. Nobody knows.

People in general and in particular only see what they would be doing if they acted like they think I'm acting. It never seems to cross their mind that I'm not. Not, that is, doing what they would be doing if they were me. They're pretending to be me. What? You don't think I know one when I see one? I am is the great pretender. Every pretender is just a variation on the the-me of the original me.

I lived with that woman for nearly eight years (off and on) and she thought I was as innocent as a newborn for all that time and more. I'm glad I wasn't around when London Bridge came tumbling down, and she saw me for what I really am. I took the best of two women's lives. The world is lucky I feel guilty about it.

To this day I don't think either of the two women I was married to for about the same amount of time regret having spent that time with me. They could have been smarter than they were about fooling themselves about me. Neither of them put up much of a struggle about living together. They were probably more proactive in getting the marriage to happen than me.

Only the first one really thought our marriage was forever. It flabbergasted me that she felt that way. I didn't figure it out until the chance was gone. I didn't really think that was possible for anybody to make a decision like that and be prepared to abide by it. If I couldn't consider it because I know how I am, how could anybody else?

That's the deal with the autism. Sometime people are just dead to me. If they're real troublesome, I just write them off. My ability to shut people out of my life allows me to focus on troublesome things for as long as it takes. Don't tread on me.

Some people don't think it's healthy for me to isolate myself instantly by whatever means it takes for long periods of time. I have, what for me, is a good reason for adopting these odd strategies. I have to be alone to contemplate reality. I don't experience what most people think of as reality in real time. Only later when I'm alone.

Then, I bring the entire period of what has happened before me as if in real time and analyze it frame by frame. I have to be alone because I don't like the results I have to deal with when I allow someone to watch my rituals. I've just become familiar with the concept of time-shifting.

Ostensibly, I've been aware of the concept of time distortion for a distortedly long ti-me. I initially became aware of it when I took Harry Aaron's courses in his school of hypnosis. Harry demonstrated this by choosing this beautiful strawberry blonde student to show the rest of the class how it worked. He also asked for two different people who had watches to time what was going to happen.

Before he helped her attain a somnambulistic trance to show how time distortion works, he asked her if she had seen the four hour long movie Gone With The Wind. She had seen it several times. All the better.

Harry helped her get to that deep state in hypnosis called somnambulism. After demonstrating to her and to us that she was indeed in a very deep state of hypnosis, he told her that she was going to the movie theater to see GWTW. He instructed her to purchase a ticket and find a comfortable seat in the theater.

Next, he told her that when the movie started she was to let him know by raising her thumb on her right hand, and when the movie was over she would lower that thumb to let him know when the movie was finished.

It wasn't long before she raised the thumb on her right hand to indicate that the long movie had started. The amazing thing was that her thumb only seemed to be held up for a few seconds when she put it back down again. Harry then woke her out of her trance in order to ask her questions about the movie.

She enthusiastically recalled details of the movie as though she had just seen it. Several of the class mates asked her questions about what she experienced, and she didn't seem to understand why they might doubt that, as far as she was concerned, she had just seen a four hour movie from start to finish. What she didn't understand was that it only took seven seconds on both timer's watches for that to happen in real time. Time distortion. Ya gotta love it.