Hello, everyone. It’s been a rough year. I’ll get to the main point of this post soon, but first, I’m going to spend a few paragraphs on catch-up for all two of my loyal fans.
I’m doing okay, post-February. I’m still hanging out on the Golden Pedestal, but as usual, not posting very much to the ol’ blog here. I’ve stopped worrying about it so much, because I haven’t exactly been changing the world with it or anything, and this year has been full of a lot of deaths. I kind of hoped that Pop would have been it, but as they say, “Death Comes In Threes,” and in this case, a heck of a lot more than that, so I’ve been pretty preoccupied. One of my best friends had his father die not long after mine, my girlfriend’s father passed in August, and one of my dearest friends (who was also my Go teacher) just passed away last month, and that has been very hard for me. At his memorial, I could barely squeak out my speech, and had to stop before I was finished, because—for the first time in recorded history—I lost the ability to keep my shit together and speak in front of a room full of people. I’m sure I’m accidentally omitting someone’s death from this list, because I know there were more in a “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” way, but like I said; there’s been a lot of death this year. I’ve been busy.
Author’s Note: I just realized that typing out, “There’s been a lot of death this year. I’ve been busy,” makes me look like I have been running around town, trying to meet some sort of death quota. I’m going to end up on a watchlist, aren’t I.
In non-death news, I’ve moved yet again, (keeping up that frustrating average of moving every 2.5 years,) which kept me busy in April/May, and I’ve barely been working on my existing works-in-progress; instead, I’m finding myself more focused on myself than ever before. Most folks who know me are saying, “How is that possible?” But believe me—if anyone can find new and exciting ways to focus on themselves, it’s me. During this past few months, I was officially diagnosed with ADHD, and I’ve been studying that to the best of my ability. Turns out, a lot of the way I am—and have been my whole life—can be attributed to this undiagnosed disorder I’ve been unknowingly struggling against since I was a child. To be fair, when I was a kid, this was not a thing people really looked into. They labeled people with ADHD as “weird” or “hyperactive,” and we were simply forced to try our best to suck it up and deal with it.
Although, I’m going to be honest. This post from 2020 probably should have clued me in a lot harder that there was something bigger going on.
So, while I haven’t changed on the outside, I’m constantly, excitedly jabbering to my friends and my dearest beloved (and patient) girlfriend about all of these behavioral connections I’m making, and how I’m learning a lot about myself that I should have already known, but didn’t. It’s like meeting myself for the first time, while also already knowing so much that has been silently working against me my whole life. (Think of it as equal parts “fun adventure of self-discovery,” and “sobering window into a silent, internal, ongoing battle against a serious, genuine disability.”)
I guess that’s all the catch-up I have for you folks right now. Time to pivot into my main story!
For those who don’t know, I have a son who is, at the time of writing this, twenty years old. He lives in Canada with his mother, and is the single greatest thing I have ever helped bring into this world. I love him more than I can ever say, because they haven’t invented a measuring metric for it yet. He is the best, and if he’s reading this, I hope he knows that I miss him every day, and he makes my world a better place just by being in it.
He has autism, so when he was little, (and still living in the U.S., and at my house every other weekend,) he had trouble with certain concepts; like reality vs. fiction. Sometimes, he genuinely didn’t understand that what he was seeing on television wasn’t real, but he loved it, and was hooked on a certain Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon I had on DVD. He would binge-watch it over and over, (because that’s how autistic kids work,) or he’d have it on in the background while he was playing something else. Sometimes I had to beg him to switch to something else, for even a little while, because I was going crazy.
One of the other things that happens with autistic people is that they see things in very black-and-white terms. This came back to bite me. I used to casually use the phrase “my Spider-Sense is tingling,” whenever I was suspicious of something, or had a bad feeling on a subject. At some point, in front of my son, I said it in regard to something (I don’t remember what it was exactly,) that I thought was going to go badly, and it did.
When you combine “trouble with reality vs. fiction” and “black-and-white terms,” while actively demonstrating a super power in front of a seven-year-old, you end up in a situation that my best friend and I have dubbed, “The Spider-Man Tests.”
My son had just seen me use Spider-Sense. The science was all there, and demonstrated successfully right in front of him. To him, I had just cemented the fact that I was Spider-Man. This was no longer a question in his mind; there was no doubt his dad was a super hero. However, having watched so much Spectacular Spider-Man, (and absorbed so much Spidey media in general,) he knew one, inflexible fact: I would never reveal my secret identity, because it could put my loved ones in danger. It was now clearly up to him to trick me into revealing my secret.
I had no idea that this was going on in his head at the time. So—completely ignorant of my son’s belief that I was a wall-crawling, web-slinging vigilante—I found myself the unwitting and unwilling subject of “The Spider-Man Tests.” At first, it was just odd behavior. I was in the kitchen at one point, and he said,
“Hey, Dad. Could you lift the refrigerator for me real quick? I have to check something.” (Truly a master of deception.)
“What? Are you crazy? I can’t lift the refrigerator by myself,” I said.
“Are you sure? Sometimes we don’t know we can do things until we try. You should probably try.”
Author’s Note: This was some fatherly advise I’d given him once, which he just tried to weaponize against me. The boy was ruthless.
“No; I am not going to lift the fridge.”
“DANG IT!” he yelled, as he stormed off.
“Yeah, I’m real sorry ol’ Dad isn’t giving himself a hernia for you, kiddo.”
In another instance, I was walking down the hall, and he kept getting in my way.
“Hey bud, I have to get through,” I said.
Thinking he had me stumped now, he said, “You should probably just climb the wall to get around me, right?”
“What are you talking about? You need to move.” So, I picked him up, turned around, and put him down behind me to be on my way.
“DANG IT!” he yelled, as he stormed off again. (In retrospect, he probably believed it was my Spider-Strength that allowed me to lift a seven-year-old boy so easily.)
There were multiple times where I’d be sitting at the computer, and he’d sneak up behind me and pitch a random small toy at the back of my head. He was expecting my Spider-Sense to kick in, and I would instinctively dodge the toy. It never worked, obviously, but you can imagine my confusion when I’d be minding my own business, and my sweet little boy would bounce something off the back of my skull. While I was saying, “Oof! What the hell, man?!” he’d just shout “DANG IT!” and march out of the room in frustration. I was baffled, and Spider-Man had cleverly foiled his efforts yet again.
At one point, he asked, “Hey Dad, can I see your web-shooters?”
I thought he was talking about a toy, which I didn’t have, so I said, “Sorry, bud. I don’t have any web-shooters.”
“Mmm-hmm. SURE you don’t.”
I thought it was a little weird that he thought I was holding out on him about a Spider-Man toy, but didn’t really think much of it beyond that. Eventually, after a few days of odd behavior, I got a call from his mom.
“Do you know that your son thinks you are a super hero?”
“Sure, don’t all kids think their dad is a super hero?”
“That’s what I said; but do you know what super hero specifically he thinks you are?”
She had gone on to tell me that she was driving him around one day while running errands, and he piped up with:
“Hey, mom—my dad is a super hero.”
“Yes, sweetie; all little boys think their dad is a super hero.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. A little further down the road, he added in a hushed stage whisper, “…But he doesn’t tell us, to protect us from his enemies.“
“Wait, what?” she asked. She told me she even had to pull the car over and get some clarification because, as she put it to him, “…Either you are very confused about something, or Dad is doing something really stupid in his free time.”
Author’s Note: At the time, it was not unreasonable to suspect that I might be donning a homemade super hero suit and foolishly trying to fight crime as a hobby, so she wasn’t wrong to get clarification. For the record, I wasn’t doing that, but I was giving the idea some light, playful consideration, despite having no abilities or skills of any sort in that arena. What can I say? I was fucking stupid.
So, she explained to me that our son thought I was Spider-Man, specifically. (At this point, all of his odd behavior over the past few days suddenly clicked.) She tried to tell him I wasn’t, but he figured she just wasn’t in on the secret, and “The Spider-Man Tests” had to go on, now more than ever. From that point on, any time I told him I wasn’t Spider-Man, he would humor me with some variation of, “Oh, no. Of COURSE you aren’t Spider-Man,” and smugly strolling away, secure in the knowledge that he was onto me, and I was a terrible liar.
He came out to me one day with some drawings he’d done. They were Spider-Man villains, with little crosshairs drawn on them. They were very good for a seven-year-old, in fact.
“Hey, Dad—recognize these guys?“
“Yeah!” I said. “Those are pretty good!”
He smiled. “…I thought you might!”
“NOT BECAUSE I’M SPIDER-MAN!” I said in exasperation.
“No, obviously you’re not Spider-Man. But I made these for you to test your web-shooters out on.”
“I do not have web-shooters. I will not be target practicing on these. I AM NOT SPIDER-MAN.”
“No no. Of course not,” he said, as he gently lay the drawings on a box next to me. “I’ll just leave these here, just in case.” He then slowly backed out of the room, and pulled the door closed, leaving a little crack of space for him to peek through, expecting me to suddenly bust out with some acrobatic, web-slinging target practice or something when I thought I wasn’t being seen.
“I’m not Spider-Man,” I called out to the watching eye, who thought itself invisible.
“DANGIT!” Cue door slam.
Stuff like this went on for weeks. He scoured the apartment “looking for something” without explaining what it was he was looking for; under beds, in the cabinets and closets, up the chimney, etc. Turns out, he was hunting for my costume’s hiding place. He’d ask me what web-slinging was like, and if my arms got tired doing it. He’d ask me to do backflips. I would tell him I’m not Spider-Man, and he would humor me; of course I wasn’t. Eventually, however, the longer this went on without results, the more desperate my son became. He hadn’t seen me go out to fight crime for a month and a half, and as we all know, “With Great Power, Comes Great Responsibility.” He was genuinely worried that I was shirking my ‘great responsibilities’ as Spider-Man, in order to maintain my secret identity in front of him. So much crime was going unstopped, and something had to be done.
Obviously, he needed to try harder.
One day, while I was at the computer—he liked to wait until I was preoccupied with something to run his experiments—I heard my best friend, (and roommate at the time,) come into the room and calmly ask my son,
“Um, what the hell are you doing?”
I turned around to see my son standing behind me, in his ‘toy throwing stance,’ with a butcher’s knife from the kitchen in his hands. He quickly tucked it behind his back. “WOAH!” I said. “WERE YOU ABOUT TO THROW A FUCKING KNIFE AT ME?!”
“NO!” he said, quickly adding to his cover with, “…I KNOW YOU’RE NOT SPIDER-MAN!”
…A smooth and clever deception indeed, knife-wielding child. Clearly I would never catch on to your schemes now.
Turns out, his theory was that the toys he’d been throwing at my head weren’t dangerous enough to trigger my Spider-Sense, which is why his previous efforts had all failed. Obviously, after that, I had to have a talk with him and explain that he cannot play with knives, and it is absolutely not okay to throw knives at people, whether or not that person may or may not have been Spider-Man.
Author’s Note: He reluctantly agreed to stop attempting murder, so I’d like to think that was some good parenting on my part. Have any of you convinced your seven-year-old not to hurl fucking knives at people? Didn’t think so. Dad of the year, right here.
The troubling part was that he was genuinely getting stressed out by the weight of “knowing” my secret identity, and the guilt of thinking I wasn’t fighting crime in order to keep up appearances in front of him. Later, (I believe that same weekend,) we were walking home from lunch at a nearby pizza place. Our apartment was near a small airfield, and the two of us saw a small Cessna fly overhead, low over the trees, toward the airfield. My son was immediately very visibly concerned.
“Uh-oh, Dad! Looks like trouble!”
“No, they seem to be doing okay. I don’t think there’s a problem.”
“I don’t know, Dad; it looks bad! I think they’re going down!”
“No, I think they’re just flying low. It happens a lot around here.”
“We shouldn’t take chances! You should probably go help!”
“Why would I go– I’M NOT SPIDER-MAN!!”
He was so agitated by my inaction that he practically snapped. “OKAY! I GET IT! BUT IF YOU ‘HAD TO GO,’ THAT WOULD BE OKAY! YOU HAVE TO SAVE THOSE PEOPLE!” This was said with quotation fingers around ‘had to go’, again as if humoring me about my secret identity.
It took a lot of explaining to get him to drop the subject of a plane crash that wasn’t happening. I ultimately had to fib, and tell him it wasn’t crashing, because there was no smoke, and that’s how plane crashes worked. It seemed to be enough to sate him. At that point, when we got home, I called his mother and requested that when she picked him up to take him home later, we sit him down and really talk to him about the fact that I am not—in any way, shape, or form—Spider-Man.
It was heartbreaking. He listened to us, we explained that I wasn’t Spider-Man, and that’s when he told me he saw my Spider-Sense working way back when this first started. I had to rub my fingers up and down the wall to show him they don’t stick, and it was like telling a kid that Santa Claus was dead. (Ironically, he never really believed in Santa Claus, because the mythology made no sense, but he was willing to believe I was Spider-Man.) There was crying, and snot-bubbles, and so much disappointment. It was so rough to see. He got over it, though, and he sort of stopped watching Spectacular Spider-Man after that.
Dads, you will have no idea how hard it is to tell your kid who thinks the world of you that you aren’t an amazing super hero. To be fair, this was probably all my fault anyway; when he was still in the womb, I dragged his very pregnant mom to the movies so that my unborn son could watch Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man with me, just a month and a half before he was born.
And my son’s middle name is Parker.
…Seriously, though. I’m going to be on a watch list.