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If you’re the sort of shit cake who wanders around life telling everyone who has any problem, “Oh yeah, that happens to me too!” or “I was like that and I got over it!” then this is for you.

If you think Asperger’s Syndrome is cool, or if you’re telling everyone that you have it, or you’re proud to have it, or you think it’s the next step in evolution (you plank), then you probably don’t have it. You’re probably just a freelance asshole or an antisocial prick trying to sleep better.

If you think Asperger’s Syndrome is a pain in the ass, if you hate talking about it, if you wish it would just fuck off so you can live a normal life, if it’s destroyed your relationships and friendships, if you hate the way you seem to be constantly hurting and misunderstanding everyone around you, then you might just have it. Sorry.

I’ve been getting pains in my chest for the last ten years or so. I didn’t want to make a big deal about it because I thought they were heart attacks and I’d have to adopt a healthy lifestyle, eat proper food and get more exercise. And to hell with all that.

It happens maybe one every month or two. It’s a sudden attack when I’m at rest, excruciating pain in my left upper chest area. When it happens I have to stay very still. I can’t even breathe; breathing causes a terrible pain. So I have to hope that the attack doesn’t last longer than I can hold my breath.

It’s that bad.

In 2007, I knew something had to be done. I was watching television when American Idol came on the television. As I reached for the remote, this thing hit me like a spiky, violent brick. It was horrible. The pain was bad enough, but I had to sit jerkily trying to not inhale through ten minutes of revolting, badly-covered pop songs by a collection of dignity-free fame whores.

I went to the doctor and told him everything. I told him about the stage lighting, the generic backing track, the horrible judges, the stupid sound design, the garish sets, everything. He told me I had pleurisy.

I have pleurisy.

Pleurisy used to be serious business, a precursor to dying of tuberculosis or pneumonia. Nowadays, not so much. It’s caused by lung membranes called pleura becoming inflamed or rubbing up against each other. In my case, although it’s excruciating, it’s perfectly harmless and doesn’t mean anything at all. They can do surgery to fix it, but it’s such a small thing that the doctor recommended that I just put up with the pain every so often; surgery comes with its own risks.

So I decided to put up with it. I seem to be collecting conditions that live in that extremely rare intersection between “very painful” and “not serious enough to do anything about it”.

A friend of mine works in a vegetarian food company, and they supply to various locations around Los Angeles. He wanted someone to help him deliver some boxes, so he asked me. We spent the day driving around Los Angeles and environs, lifting (heavy-ass!) boxes from the van into Chinese restaurants and other vegetarian safe houses. My friend can speak Chinese, which is just as well, because all our calls were Chinese people.

Here is a quick tour of my 11th of May, 2012:

Los Angeles: Our first stop was in the Warehouse District of Los Angeles. The guy there said he couldn’t take any boxes from us unless they were loaded onto a pallet. We didn’t have a pallet. This was a problem. My friend called back to home base. They got an angry Chinese lady to call the guy. He changed his mind and told us we could now load our boxes without a pallet.

El Monte: We make another stop. There is some confusion over money. It gets sorted out, but not without leaving the impression that there are a lot of angry Chinese people in the world.

Hacienda Heights: We stop at our first Buddhist temple. This place is what one would expect to see from something calling itself a Buddhist temple. It’s in Rowland Heights and it has large, Japanese-style roofs with bright orange bricks, and the whole thing is built into a hill. There is a sign telling people not to walk on the grass, but I can only surmise that they don’t get too upset about it if you do. I feel slightly uneasy around vegetarian food that is specifically formulated to mimic meat products. I think it defeats the purpose. But these Buddhist monks love it! So what the hell do I know?

Rowland Heights: We stop at our second Buddhist temple. This one was in a residential neighbourhood, and looked for all the world like a regular house. But then we went inside, and there is a large courtyard and perhaps a few more chairs than would make sense for a normal house. The lady there is very nice, but speaking a lot of Chinese to my friend. It turns out that she’s trying to sell us enlightenment and bribing us with free food. My soul cannot be bought by your admittedly delicious Thai/Vietnamese fusion dishes, Chinese lady! There was a statue of the Virgin Mary stamping on an apple-eating snake by the front door, which I explained may be distracting to her target market. She laughed when I suggested she dash it on the ground or throw it in the trash. “Respect other religion,” she said, showing a degree of forward thinking that they would surely not show to her.

Somewhere on the wrong side of the I-10: It was around this time that Our Lady of Reliable Directions, who lives in my friend’s cell phone, stopped answering our prayers. She just stopped. No error message, nothing. My friend guesses it was due to a satellite triangulation problem, but I think her recalcitrance was more political, as, up to this point, we had been using her like a cheap slut, with nothing in the way of thanks or even acknowledgement. Once we learned our lesson, she started telling us how to get places again, but with a noticeable edge, sending us down unnecessary side streets and occasionally “recalibrating” on long straight stretches. It’s OK; we deserved that.

San Dimas: Our third Buddhist temple was a bit crazy. It was more like a massive compound. They had private security at the gate, and hot and cold running squirrels all along the barely-gravelled drive. Once inside the compound, it had the definite feel of somewhere middle-class white people might send their troubled teens. There were slightly alarming banners throughout of young people raising their hands in concert. As my friend said, apparently reading my mind: “Seig Heil”. This is not a feeling one is supposed to get from Buddhism. They were clearly shooting for calm, welcoming, healing and brotherhood of man, but all they managed was sterile, wealthy, sinister with a strong undercurrent of subdued menace. I was glad to be out of there.

Then I came home and had a shower and went to involuntary sleep for two hours. Everything hurts, my back, my arms, but it’s sometimes it’s OK to be sore. I had good day.

I went to a jobs fair yesterday in Baldwin Park. It was arranged by the Baldwin Park City Council and to be fair, they did the best they could with limited resources in a world without magical solutions. I wandered around with Christina picking up brochures and talking to relentlessly upbeat recruiters. I’m terrible at being a fake. I’m terrible at selling myself. I can’t even fake being a fake. I also respond very negatively to fakery in others, and at the first sign of manufactured amity or counterfeited glee, I visibly recoil.

However, I don’t need a pep talk; I need a job. I don’t need to be told how over-qualified I am for your position; I need a job. I don’t need something else to make this work as a set of three for rhetorical purposes; what I need is a job.

My situation is made difficult because I am 36 years old and they seem to be more interested in recent graduates. Also, I have no work history in the US; some companies do not recognise other parts of the world. Also, I have no references, because any employment I had was self-employment (I ran my own business, very successfully, for ten years). So although I have more than one skill set to apply to any number of situations, I have a hard time selling that as a reality as opposed to something I just made up on the way to the interview.

Sometimes I feel worse after those inspirational talks which made me feel more like a bullied high school homosexual than a job seeker. I was pretty much OK with the idea of being an unemployed nobody, but then these people fill my head with all sorts of gibberish and information and options and medical benefits and overtime and training and the whole thing just makes me want to crawl into a hole and die. At least until the effects of the “motivation” wears off, and then I can go back to being nothing again. This can’t be what the Buddhists are referring to when they talk about nirvana: the total annihilation of the self. But I’m working on it.