No Thrones. No Crowns. No Kings. →
On October 18, millions of us are rising again to show the world: America has no kings, and the power belongs to the people.
The psychodiagnostic evaluation paperwork which three years ago established me as autistic was given to me in mid-November, but was dated just one day before my forty-seventh birthday. It’s taken me nearly three years of both acceptance and struggle to find that I am a heretic: were I able to wave a magic wand over the past fifty years and erase my undiagnosed autism, I would do it. Arguably, many other things would be erased along with it, including Portland Communique, Can’t Stop the Serenity, and perhaps even The Belmont Goats (at least as we know it). Then again, each and every one of these things left me with nothing. I’m a middle-aged man who not only is not successful, but in fact is—by any measure relevant to someone about to turn fifty—a failure. Were I to erase the autism I didn’t know I had from my life story, who would I be? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be this.