"So why do people think you're weird?"

Another passage from Joe Biel’s The Autism Relationships Handbook:

A common joke in autistic circles is about the horrors of the allistic (non-autistic) disability. It goes roughly like this:

Person A: “Everyone around me has a disorder that makes them say things that they don’t mean, disregard rules and structure, not know how to ask a question in a format that will provide them with the answer that they seek, fail to focus on topics that are important’ to them, have unreliable memory, constantly express strange bits of coded language and hints, and creepily stare at my eyeballs.”

Person B: “So why do people think you’re weird?”

Person A: “Because they comprise over 98% of the population.”

I was attracted to Microcosm Publishing because of its novel subscribe-to-everything-we-publish offering, which I found by following links from Bikequity, which I found on the shelves at Librairie Drawn & Quarterly in Montreal: I’ve been a devoted subscriber for coming up on two years.

It was only recently that I learned that co-founder Joe Biel is autistic, a prolific author himself, and that Microcosm has a deep back catalogue of books by autistic writers about autism.