Metaphor

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I see inability to process metaphor listed as an Aspie trait and I THINK it may be the biggest AS trait I don't exhibit.

Granted, I like observing, processing and taking in things literally for a chuckle.

There was a sign I saw once that said: "I lost 20 pounds, call me for samples." I found that DISGUSTINGLY hilarious and most people don't get it.

Occasionally, I'll chuckle at people's use of expletives because I sometimes take them literally at first.

I'm also accused frequently of abusing other people's metaphors by taking metaphors or analogies in a conversation past the breaking point.

However, when I write, I'm accused of tapping into these very deep or unusual metaphors that most people don't quite get. If I'm AS, I'm probably on the Hyperlexia side of the spectrum. I love words and the idiosyncrasies of words. I love finding an unusual or archaic word or making up a new word from Greek and Latin roots. Sometimes I do this unconsciously.

I once said "chonambulator" when I blanked on the phrase "time traveler".

But I love USING metaphors and I don't think my use of them is BAD. I may border on synesthesia at times with my metaphors but... Let me use an example from a story I wrote:

“Where the Hell is my flying car…?”
Sol Eckhart scowled as he surveyed the parking lot of the coffee shop.
It was 2006. It was summer. The air was hot and sticky and the smell of raw sewage permeated from the gutters to undercut Sol’s rhetorical exercise in disillusioned futurism.
He was weaned on Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. Rod Serling’s cigarette smoke was his Kabalistic breath of life. Smiling clipart men and women in black and white films had promised his generation flying cars and space needle houses, not war and death and homeless street prophets dying in gutters.
It was the year of our Lord, two thousand and six.
Where the Hell was his flying car?
Where was his jetpack? Where were the genetically engineered dinosaurs? Where were the robotic maids and cybernetic policemen? Where were the alien saviors and circus strongman gods and portals to realms unthinkable?
For that matter, where were the earthy rolling hills of wine country? Where was the Mom ‘n Pop General Store where you could buy a malted milkshake for a dime? Where was the farmland where the starlight crystallized and you could fall asleep covered in the sweat of a hard day’s work to the lull of chirping crickets?
Above all, why was he standing in front of a rusty champagne-colored Honda in the middle of the faded, godforsaken suburbs?
Sol Eckhart stared up at the sky and muttered some prehistoric bit of profanity he’d gleaned from an archaic dictionary, culled from the dusty shelf of a thrift store.
It was the day before his thirtieth birthday.
It was time to grow up.
It was time to put the toys away.
Time was slipping away and if he didn’t take some definitive step of maturity, he feared that he might not have any kind of life whatsoever if he clung to his dime novel utopian ideals of the good life.
He almost, almost shed a single, warm tear of nostalgia for all the sun-splashed daydreams that he resolved to abandon but his consciousness, in a defiant moment of petulant idealism, crafted a hazy image, a half-formed idea that somewhere in the quantum foam, through the veil of probability, there was another Sol Eckhart in another universe who drank bubbling rainbow nectar and lived as a sorceror amidst setting stars that cast an octarine glow over alien soil and gleaming chrome buildings. This hypothetical Sol Eckhart had a pet tyrannosaur named “Bob”, dressed in the full regalia of a Victorian gentleman, and a robot butler and a black hole in the basement of his plutonium mansion where he lived happily ever after with his wife, an exotic fairy princess raised by interstellar gypsies. And in this gossamer world, so delicate that a single shard of logic could destroy it, Hypothetical Sol Eckhart and his magical gypsy princess knew true love and that sustaining truth held their implausible alternate reality together like a safety pin.
This was all well and good for Hypothetical Sol Eckhart. However, Real Sol Eckhart, caught in the dying pangs of nostalgia and wanderlust, found this strange image of his alternate life to be painful. He was lonely and, like all people in plausible universes, was slowly dying. He didn’t have any more time for rainbows or fantasies.
That night, leaning against the warm surface of his car just outside the coffee shop and beneath the orange glow of a setting sun, Sol Eckhart made two phone calls.
The first would change his life.
The second would end it.


I toss this out there to get AS feedback. Does my use of language seem more AS or less? Do your eyes glaze over? The "metaphor" issue is probably my own single greatest doubt on the subject of whether I'm AS and should pursue an autism specialist.

Patrick,

ALL MY life I have been told I couldn't do stuff because I was:

TOO YOUNG
MALE
HUMAN

Ironically, the "geek" stereotype has been the ONLY one to kind of fit me! You know the type:

FAST FOOD
HARD WORKER
TECHNICAL
RECLUSIVE
A BIT ODD
DOESN'T COOK OFTEN

Frankly, I don't know WHERE those idiots come up with such things. I CAN understand abstract reasoning. EVEN as a little kid! I even knew right and wrong! Like you, I originally, and for quite a while, saw the literal meaning FIRST. Sometimes, I still do!

Do I see the world as NTs see it? I guess not.

BUT, it is kind of like the feminist view that all men ever think of is sex and that is the only reason men are interested in women, etc... Well, I know that is certainly not true of me.

Steve