You can call me Rhett. It'll be weird, because nobody else does.
I just turned 51. I was diagnosed with a condition that would have been called Asperger's in 1964 if anyone had known what it was. It has made for some mighty challenges during my life, and I had to learn to cope or face the alternative. For a long time, I went with the alternative. Since learning about AS, the descriptions fit what my life has been like so closely, that I will be going for an evaluation later this month.
I was born in Canada and lived there until I was 39. Now I live in Florida. Against all odds, I found a kindred female spirit, and we have been married for eleven and a half years, without an argument, I might add. She lived here; I left Canada to come here to be with her.
I have no degrees. I had a terrible time at school, from the beginning. My mother taught me to read, write and spell before I went to kindergarten. You might think this would have been an advantage, but it went totally the other way. In grade 2, the school board sent me to the mental hospital on Tuesday afternoons for testing and evaluation. The next year, they sent me across town to the other school to take grades 3, 4 and 5 in two years, and then sent me back to my previous school for grades 6 - 8. I was a year or two younger than everybody else, and a grade ahead of my peers. My life went downhill from there. In short, they created this program for me, gave me no direction during it, and turned me out at the end with no followup. Thanks a lot, guys. By the time I was in Grade 12, things were so bad I had to quit school and escape from my little town. I was pretty much homeless for the next 16 years.
I have no political or religious affiliations.
My obsessions are all musical. I play keyboards, drums, bass and guitars. I collect records and CDs. I'm currently filling in a database of the CDs, and there are over 5500 of those. I haven't started on the vinyl yet, and there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 pieces of that. One of my hobbies is to restore old records on the computer, removing every last click, thump and noise, leaving only the music. For Christmas, I am getting a Korg M5061 workstation. This is a keyboard that has thousands of sounds and a way to layer and record them, and it interfaces with my computer. I can't wait! Finally, I will get all that music in my head out in a form where I can hear it coming out of speakers! I may never go outside again...
I work in radio, as an announcer, program producer and sound engineer.
As you may have guessed, all this other stuff I do leaves no time to watch TV. For 16 years I didn't have one, and now it doesn't occur to me to want to watch it. I do have a large VHS collection of stuff I recorded off TV after I got one, and a small DVD collection. Most of it is music-related. The only video game I've ever played was Pong, when it was new.
The computer is my favorite piece of equipment. I learn information on it, and record music on it, and connect to the world on it. I don't connect with anyone I used to know on it, because none of them seem to have joined the digital age. Several years back, my oldest friend, dragged kicking and screaming into computing, sent me an e-mail virus that wiped out my hard drive and several years of work. Everyone is blocked from my main e-mail address now except for two people and one company. The other e-mail accounts I have are anonymous.
Places I've been: I hitchhiked from Windsor, Ontario to Vancouver, BC and back in 1976, with a detour to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan on the way out. Beyond that, I've only been to a couple of cities in New York state, to Los Angeles, and Florida, no further south than Orlando. My wife and I plan to visit England and Scotland, and maybe Wales if we have time while we're there.
I don't drive a car. I haven't driven since 1975. It's the closest thing I have to a phobia. Sitting at the wheel makes my knees quiver uncontrollably. I am terrified not to die in a car accident, but to live through one, all mangled up. Where I used to live, there is excellent public transit and I never needed a car, not that I could have afforded one anyway. Where I live now, the drivers are horrible. We see accidents all the time, and I'm not getting on the road with those people! My wife is a great driver, though, and I'm a great passenger. She comes from a place where it's necessary to have a car, so it comes naturally to her.
Well, see ya around the boards. Thanks for having me.