You may have seen a post on social media that's been kicking around recently from the data scientist Christopher Penn which beautifully skewers the beliefs of anti-vax wingnuts and reads,

"Just remember that given the abundance of neurodivergent people in science, it's far more likely that autism causes vaccines."

I've been thinking about that comment a lot. And because I'm me, that really means a lot. I've been doing so because lately I've been asking myself what the point of my existence might be. I've been kicking around on this planet for nearly sixty-six years now and the question of whether that has been a benefit to anyone else or not is always at the front of my mind. This isn't driven by anything as pompous as considering what my "legacy" might be, though. Rather, it's fallout from the insights that learning about complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or cPTSD has given me about how my mind works. I've been reading a lot about the condition lately and it's been unsettling to recognise just how many of my thoughts stem from the way the human brain has evolved to deal with bad things happening to it. Imagine seeing your innermost thoughts written down in a medical textbook and realising that not only are they not original, they're common enough to be a predictable result in anyone who has had similar experiences. To be honest, it feels a lot like somebody telling you that you're living in a computer simulation rather than reality and then informing you that, actually, you're not even one of the protagonists. Instead, you're one of the Non-Player Characters (NPCs).

What little there is left of my ego and sense of self-worth took quite a hit from that. So for the past couple of months I've been casting around for things that are—for want of a better term—what we might call Autistic affirmations. Penn's hypothesis is a good place to start, but I wanted to find things that have a little more heft than the standard "Autistic superpowers" clichés that drove the plot of Rain Man, though. Possessing lightning-fast pattern recognition skills, having mercilessly logical thinking patterns or perfect pitch can all be a curse rather than a blessing. What if there was a real point to being Autistic? Something a bit more fundamental than just being strongly attracted to science subjects at school? How might that manifest?

I recently read a post by Raphaël Pinson which concluded a fascinating series of essays about autism awareness that he had written for Autism Awareness Month. In it, Raphaël hypothesises that the reason that Autistic traits haven't died out (and let's face it, they don't do us any favours when it comes to romance) is that people with such traits provide additional protection against failure modes and cognitive biases which often affect social groups as well as individuals; the most obvious example of this is groupthink. When I read Daniel Kahneman's epic work Thinking, Fast and Slow I realised that humans are nowhere near as rational as they think they are (if you're unfamiliar with his work, I highly recommend the book. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the subject which it summarizes). More recent research, such as this paper by Gerd Gigarenzer, has tried to categorize the different ways in which neurotypical brains turn out not to be quite as smart as they think they are, but I was surprised to see that even though Gigarenzer discusses a bias called the Do-what-the-majority-do heuristic, which is what underpins the tendency of organizations and societies to lapse into groupthink, none of his categories considers the social dimension of such thinking.

Pinson's hypothesis is that Autistic members of groups have minds which are wired sufficiently differently that they will call out logical errors and they often do so regardless of personal cost. The part of our brain that is driven by getting the right answer fires first, and the part of our mental system that is supposed to weigh the potential benefits or penalties for speaking up fires later (or not at all). This behaviour, he argues convincingly (IMHO) has significant survival value for the group as a whole.

Just not necessarily the individual. And yeah, that tracks for me, particularly (as I said last month) once HR get involved. But I find myself wondering: with the amount of groupthink and in-group versus out-group bigotry going on right now (as extending empathy to people outside their personal in-group is another very common Autistic trait) perhaps now is our time to shine?

As you can see from that post, I'm still far from regaining equilibrium this week. I don't drink a lot any more but I ended up self-medicating yesterday with a number of mojitos (which are even nicer when you can make them with fresh mint picked from your garden) followed by a couple of glasses of Malbec, because by late afternoon I was feeling absolutely wretched. I'd completely run out of steam and I was feeling very sorry for myself.

I figured that I'm allowed to do that every once in a while, because it allows me to damp down all the stuff going on in my skull for a few hours and drown all of the feels that are overwhelming me, replacing them with detached numbness. At times like this I think I can see why my father ended up an alcoholic, because not feeling all the emotions that make me who I am is an extremely addictive proposition, but I have no intention of going down the same self-destructive path that he did.

Not only that, but I can confirm that getting drunk never really solves anything. I was still awake at three o'clock this morning and still feeling miserable.

"Write more music instead," Helen said. And I will focus on doing just that, because she is wise.

I was very sorry to hear that Anthony Head passed away from complications of pneumonia this week. He was only 72. From the tributes paid to him by co-stars he'd worked with over the years, he was clearly much loved.

This week I also found out that one of my greatest cartoonist heroes, the creator of Ogri Paul Sample died in January. His work had as profound an influence on my drawing style as Jean "Moebius" Giraud or Hergé and even though I never had a motorcycle of my own, I would avidly read every issue of Bike Magazine just so I could savour each of Paul's full-page comics there (and such was the level of detail, with countless Easter egg gags worked into the background of every frame, that each strip took him a week to draw).

The RSPB has suspended its sale of peanuts and bird seed until Ocober 12th. This is intended to limit the spread of a highly contagious disease that affects birds that is called trichomonosis. The UK population of Greenfinches and Chaffinches in particular have been affected by it; Greenfinch numbers have dropped by 65% over the last three decades.

The RSPB recommends offering small amounts of suet pellets and fat balls instead, and not leaving food on flat surfaces like bird tables.

Today I learned that the character Karen Plankton first appeared in Spongebob Squarepants in episode 3b of the show's first season, with actress Jill Talley recording her dialogue in September 1998 and the completed episode first airing in May 1999. (Incidentally, Jill's husband is Tom Kenny, who plays the show's eponymous hero.)

Why did I bother finding out this breathtakingly obscure item of data?

Because I was wondering whether Karen was the origin of the racist, over-entitled white woman Karen meme (which first appeared on Reddit in 2014). The Business Insider article in that link suggests that the meme might have originated from Amanda Seyfried's character in the the 2004 movie Mean Girls, or—and they consider this more likely—from this routine by Dane Cook from 2005 (and quite frankly the screaming audience in that clip epitomises everything I loathe about American stand-up).

I think they might be wrong.

Reading my very first blog entry with the enhanced perspective that I have on my life these days, it's clear that I was aware of being neurodivergent at some level or other back then. The paragraph including the observation "I'm terrible when things like this happen. What would be a simple task becomes stretched over hours of tinkering and fiddling" stands out in particular, as it's as good a description of Autistic hyperfocus as you could wish for. And it's totally accurate, too; since I installed my first Linux OS (and I've installed several since, on a number of different machines) I have barely left the house, at least when the option not to was available.

The last few days have been hard work. I had another counselling session on Tuesday and it stirred up a lot of feelings and strong emotions that have taken a few days to process. I spent most of Wednesday in a highly dissociated state: staring into space, completely shut down. I couldn't form much in the way of coherent thoughts, and to be honest I don't remember doing much of anything apart from listening to CDs and watching Jerry Rothwell's unsettling but life-affirming 2020 film of Naoki Higashida's book The Reason I Jump. Yesterday was a bit better; I felt a bit more with it (the coffee always helps) and I was able to make some progress on the music I'm working on at the moment. Making music always manages to ground me in a way that nothing else that's available to me ever does. Being able to drop into that hyperfocus mode I mentioned just now not only helps to stop the whirring tumult of ADHD and suspend time for a few hours so that I can get to see what it's like to simply live in the moment, it also provides me with a much-needed hit of self-actualization and god knows I need as much of that as I can get right now.

I'm reading a book about recovery from complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (cPTSD) at the moment and that has been helping me to see that healing is possible and that there is potentially a way out of the mess I'm in, but it has also contributed to my current disturbed state. As I tried to relate to the book's content by thinking of experiences from my own life, I found I had stopped reading. Not just because of all the memories that were triggered, but also because several times I found myself becoming aware that I was staring at the page with absolutely no idea of what had happened in the last quarter of an hour. I was relating to the book all right—way too much. I was overwhelmed, and if I'm honest, I still am. I don't have any spare spoons at the moment.

I know that these days I'm incredibly lucky to be able to do the things (like making music) which stave off the feelings of worthlessness that my trauma has left me with. And I know that if I was living a normal life, it's highly unlikely that I would have had any of the incredible experiences which I've had over the past few years. But there are times—and there have been many this week—when I find myself thinking it would be lovely to have a taste of normality every once in a while.

Is that really too much to ask?

As you can see from the banner, this month marks the twenty-third anniversary of me deciding that I'd like to try my hand at blogging for a few months so I could keep Rob and Ruth up to date with what I was doing and share anything interesting I'd found on the Internet. I had no idea back then that I'd still be doing that all these years later. But here we are. Rob and Ruth are both grown up, living with partners, and having interesting adventures of their own. I still code every page by hand using Netbeans, and I know a darn sight more about CSS these days than I did back then when I thought that using a table in HTML was the height of high-tech web savvy.

The blog has gotten way more introspective over the years. In the early days I was more interested in writing about daft social phenomena like flash mobs than I was in examining my thoughts and feelings. But as I got older, I became much more open about the poor state of my mental health, and I've shared more than one phase of severe depression on these pages. I didn't really have a choice about it, because at one point things got so bad that I was forced to take a protracted leave of absence from the blog which lasted for seven weeks, and believe me, that was no fun at all. It's only in the last year that I've begun to figure out what's been the root cause of all of my difficulties all along, and last month was the first time that I've written in detail here about my experiences. The feedback I've received about that piece showed me that other people valued what I'd written considerably more than I expected them to. It was the right thing to do.

I guess the blog has always been a means of self-actualisation for me. To my knowledge, it doesn't have a particularly large readership (even if I do get occasional spam emails asking me if I'd ever consider carrying sponsored posts here and I would rather gouge my own eyes out than do that) but it lets the world know I still exist, and that has to be enough. I often think about friends I'm no longer in contact with, and I find myself wondering if any of them have ever stumbled across these pages and discovered what happened to that weird bloke they used to know, back in the day. It would be nice to hear from them.

After ten years of blogging I started posting links to the music I'd made public on Bandcamp and has it really been that long since I started doing that? My musical activities have remained a constant here ever since, and those humble beginnings have taken me further than I ever dreamed possible. These days I am comfortable identifying myself as a musician and a composer, and it's incredibly satisfying to be able to do that.

And so the blog continues. I've given up trying to figure out what lies in the future for me (or indeed for anyone else) because my life gets more and more crazily unpredictable with each passing year but whatever happens, you're likely to find me blathering on about it here. Don't forget that there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to which will let you know whenever the blog gets updated with a one-sentence summary.

Yesterday afternoon, after spending a happy couple of hours in my home studio working on a new piece of music, chatting with my brother in New York on WhatsApp, and having a meeting on Zoom with a muso pal to plan what our next collaboration sessions should focus on, I shut all of the gear down and came downstairs to chill out for a while.

But without consciously thinking about it, I suddenly realised that I had decided to tidy the living room up a bit. So more sorting, filing, binning and shredding ensued and a couple of hours later, several piles of books and Blu-Rays which had been living either on the floor or on the coffee table in the living room had been cleared away to the shelves where they should have been kept in the first place. There's another big pile of cardboard in the kitchen, waiting to be recycled. And the dining room table is completely free of clutter, which is extraordinary and lovely and incredibly satisfying.

This is the second time in a week that I've found myself tidying up. The first time I had a course of therapy back in 2015 it had the same result but it's still most unusual behaviour for me. I'm not sure how long this feeling will continue to win out over my ADHD but I think it's a good sign, as is the fact that once again last night my watch gave me a sleep score of 100.

This "feeliing okay" lark is weird. I'm not used to it at all. But I'd like it to continue, please.

After the blog had been running for twenty years I found myself writing about how my Internet presence had gone from a 14,400 baud dial-up modem to an always on, Fibre To The Cabinet (FTTC) connection that was giving me speeds of 70 Mbps down and 18 up. Since then, I've upgraded to Fibre To The Premises (FTTP) and the speeds I'm getting these days are ridiculous. I ran a speed test this week and quite honestly the results I get now are more than I could ever manage to max out: 870 Mbps down and 109 up. Latency is 17 ms, which is nuts.

I noticed as I wrote today's post that back in June 2023 I'd blogged about getting an Aeron chair and I can report that it's still going strong and still as comfortable as ever. I'm sitting in it right now, in fact. And the Mirra 2 in my studio is even more comfortable!

And no, Herman Miller didn't pay me to post that.

Seriously, though—the amount of advertising on UK television these days is sickening. Worse, most of the channels synchronise their ad breaks, so you can't escape by switching to a different station. And dear God, if I ever meet the person responsible for those credit card adverts that are "sponsoring" showings of Star Trek and Stargate SG1 on weekdays at the moment, I swear I will not be held responsible for my actions. They are disturbing the balance of my mind.