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Growing up, I wanted to be Spiderman. Not the Tobey Maguire metro-sexual ripoff, the real Spiderman—the one from the cartoons. “Is he strong? Listen bud, he’s got radioactive blood. Can he swing from a thread? Take a look overhead. Look out, here comes the Spiderman.” Turns out, adult autism is a lot like that cartoon heroism—minus the radioactive blood (probably). It’s not about “fixing”…

Let’s get honest about trauma – it’s not just a thing that happens to you, it can be a full-system hijack of your entire psychological infrastructure. Weird fact. Most people who’ve experienced serious trauma don’t even recognize how deeply it’s reshaping their entire existence. We’re walking around with an internal alarm system that’s permanently set to DefCon 1, and most of us don’t even know…

Weird fact. Most of us with ADHD spent years thinking we were fundamentally broken. Lazy. Undisciplined. Dramatic. Insert your favorite self-hatred descriptor here. We didn’t know we were wired differently. We just knew we were different. Some of us can hyperfocus for 14 hours straight on something that absolutely lights up our brain. Some of us can’t remember what we walked into the kitchen to…

I once worked at a job where the person in charge was a textbook sociopath.

Intelligent sociopaths are artists in their own right. They have the capacity to understand human emotions at some tainted level and are smarter than many of the people with whom they spar. To someone of this ilk people are stupid. Their experience backs this up, they know how to win. They are often more successful, more…

In The Beginning There Was Energy.

Sometimes I like to think about geek stuff, as my wife calls it. Flying from Lodi last night I was pondering the origins of the universe and quantum theory. I know just enough about those kinds of things to realize that if I had another life to live I would have become a physicist.

Everything you were taught in high school science class about atoms, about gravity, the limitations of the Speed of…

Aliens May Not Exist

We live in an amazing time. Within your lifetime we may no longer be dependent upon fossil fuels. By 2040 we’ll be driving electric cars or something even more magnificent. Tankers and cruise ships with futuristic batteries and entrepreneurs farming the plastics in the ocean for profit. Someday, in the not too distant future, they will know how to move your consciousness into something permanent…

We are in the midst of a catastrophic change in our western culture. The church, which has ruled our lives for millennia, is experiencing a mass exodus – even if it doesn’t seem that way where you live. People are free to question things they were taught as children, perhaps really for the first time.

What follows is a coming-out-party of sorts. I didn’t write this but I’ve known Jason almost my…

Vaping is a thing.

It wasn’t long ago when I was told that vaping was considered a smoking cessation tool. Much of popular culture is still under the delusion that vaping is an almost innocuous habit that is instrumental in helping people quit cigarettes. Vaping is safe, right? What we’ve been learning in the last couple of months, much…

Grabbing The Wrong Handholds

They made me watch CSI, Ginger Version. I don’t even know what the real name is but it’s the one with the redhead guy who tries so very hard to sound like the coach from Rocky. My youngest Matthew and I are forced to endure this for an hour and there has literally not been one line of dialogue that anyone would say in the real world. At first we didn’t understand. It slowly dawned on us that the…

Your Selfies Make Me Hate You.

Note: I don’t really hate anyone anymore, except that guy who kissed my girlfriend in university and that’s mainly because he had a nice truck and I was driving a $500 Biscayne we bought as our first car. Still a douche move.

In my last edition I spoke of my friend Dawn Taylor. This week again we were hard at the conversation and she mentioned that it is common for high schoolers in her world to

I’m Weirder Than I Let On.

I’ve decided to change this site up a bit. I’m the last person most people want to hear say that I’m going to loosen up a bit, god forbid, but the truth is I’ve been playing it safe.

This blog is, undoubtedly, a little weird for most people who come across me as a clinical therapist talking about serious subjects. What I’m trying to say, and I often seek to hide it from myself, is that I am even…

Getting Older – Late Night Reflections

My wife is trying to explain to me the difference between face cream and body cream. You have got to be kidding me. I couldn’t tell the difference between face cream and bear fat if you got the actual bear to fat all over me. Apparently there is a hand cream as well. Come on people, our ancestors are pretending they don’t know us right now. People used to pour on whale blubber and now there is…

It is tempting as a therapist to talk about mental health stuff like it’s a science and we’re in a classroom. People want to hear what their counselor says, right? I have all kinds of relevant articles and YouTube videos we can watch in my office. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of files with enough advice in them to keep you busy for a few lifetimes.

The longer I do this the less I believe in good…

The Part Of Addiction No One Is Talking About

As a clinician who works largely with addictions and the intersection of trauma and life, I get to be on the front-lines in a seemingly unending parade of adventure and experience. I picked up a heroin/fentanyl rig from our bathroom this afternoon. I walked around in the blue gloves offering prostate exams but for some reason there were no takers. Yesterday I spent the afternoon with my partner…

The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death

For you. We talked about this.

To my close relative: Why Aliens Probably Didn’t Help Build The Pyramids.

I love you, you know that. I believe in Santa and life on other planets (likely), and that Bucky is the best superhero (they turned the nicest guy in the world into a killing machine who is best friends with the other nicest guy in the world. It writes itself).

I want to believe in fairytale endings and the fable that there really is justice in this life, but I just can’t bring myself to believe…

What Hockey Taught Me About Life

I am a Canadian and for the most part, many of the stereotypes are true. Most of my friends say ‘eh’ and we do love hockey. I don’t watch it, many of us don’t. But put an ice rink in the middle of your block and someone will show up with beer to watch or play hockey. We will shine our headlights on the ice and let your stupid little sister play, although we had agreed that today was going to be a…