Weltraumbesty is Born Again
by Weltraumbesty / KRP, 5th of September 2025
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I have never recognized my self in a mirror. My body, sure. My face, absolutely. I can feel the expressions I make, and see them reflected there clear as day. They’re mine after all. I practice them often, a bit impulsively perhaps, but mostly for the fun of it anymore. They’re all second nature by now. I’ve laughed and cried and smiled and scowled and cringed as I’ve studiously flossed my teeth, but in all the hundreds of collective hours I’ve stood before a mirror my self has never crossed that curious plane.
I turn forty-one soon, and will doubtless be that and more when most of you read this. For forty of those years I’ve felt... incorrect, for a lack of better words. Disconnected in a way that I was never able to put a voice or a reason to. Confused to the point that I was intractably convinced that a serious and undiagnosed underlying mental health condition was at fault. Clinical depression, perhaps a bi-polar disorder. As adulthood crept into middle age I came to be fearful of my own mind, for it seems to be in our nature to fear that which we do not understand.
When I was ten years old I became impossibly, if momentarily obsessed with the 1995 televised mini-series adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Langoliers. I do not know why, but I showed it to everyone I knew. I talked about it for weeks on end. I rented it from the video store and watched it dozens of times. And then, just like that, it was over. Something in its half-baked CGI animations, its vacant yet crunchy-munchy sound design and its tracking shots of sickly wavering high tension towers sticks with me yet. It’s a texture collected and cataloged in a variety of sensorial dimensions. I have thousands of them.
Earlier still, when I was five years old, I had an emotional meltdown in response to seeing the river of sentient pink slime in 1989’s Ghostbusters II on a cinema screen. My mother was kind enough to remove me from the theater, explain herself to one of the theater employees and secure us (late) entry to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. This I was fine with, for the most part. There was no pink slime, no sewer, and it had enough courtesy to save its severed heads until the fucking end.
For as long as I can remember I have called my parents by their first names. They were good enough to have never corrected this, as I’ve heard other parents violently threaten to since. And why should they? It’s what everyone else called them after all, and it felt like an issue of respect. Their names were who they were. “Mom” and “Dad” seemed like impersonal and nigh offensive whats. Their names became the first of many of the “Kevin” things I said. To their credit, my family has taken most all of them in stride.
...though one point of clarity is deserved to my father, who once chastised a twenty-something me for using the word “c*nt” in front of him and, as parents are wont to do, asked where I ever learned to say a word like that.
So just for the record I learned it from you, dad. ...all the way back in ‘89 or ‘90, when you watched Steve De Jarnatt’s Miracle Mile on the family television while I doodled something from my spot on the floor. I might even have been under the coffee table. Kurt Fuller utters the fateful word near the end of that picture, drugged out of his mind and waiting for the nukes to fall from his doomed perch atop LA’s Mutual Life building. The word burrowed deep into my brain along with the rest of the film, which I rediscovered in my early 20s, and which remains a favorite. It’s one of the most singular films I’ve ever seen, an alternative classic well worth remembering. Well worth revisiting.
I remember Sylvia Kristel as well, though her short hairdo is the only asset from Goodbye Emanuelle that seems fit to print here. I remember Nothing But Trouble and the traumatizing tele-nightmare of its bespoke punitive roller coaster Mister Bonestripper. Another singular film. Very alternative, though perhaps not so classic. I own a copy, of course. There are dozens of other examples, too many to bother listing here. Some appropriate. Most not. It’s hilarious, honestly. That you thought I wouldn’t notice. That you thought I wouldn’t remember.
I remember little pieces of everything, and I remember big pieces of plenty.
My mother’s oversight was more age appropriate, though it catered to her taste as much as dad’s did his. She scoured television guides back when I was too young to do so myself, finding this shit or that to record off of our enormous black satellite dish. Godzilla on Monster Island in its long-vanished G-rated American theatrical version, The Secret of NIHM, Joe versus the Volcano, the still-incredible The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Fred F. Sears’ ill-advised and inimitable The Giant Claw... favorites all to this very day. It didn’t take long for me to learn the trick and bury myself in early programming from the brand new Sci-Fi Channel. Irwin Allen’s colorful genre trifecta Lost in Space, The Time Tunnel and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. Dr. Franklin Reuhl’s exciting alt-reality talk show Mysteries From Beyond the Other Dominion (where I first learned about spontaneous human combustion). Land of the Lost. An endless stream of weekend matinees... The Deadly Mantis, The Giant Spider Invasion, The 4D Man, The Projected Man, The Thing That Couldn’t Die, Destroy All Monsters in widescreen and questionable English, and all of the syndicated Sandy Frank Gamera features except Gamera vs Guiron, which I was forced to catch up to on overpriced and barely-operable EP VHS. I bought it while Hale-Bopp was in the sky, preparing to carry Marshall Applewhite off to his promised land. I currently own eight copies of that film across four different home video formats.
Much of my childhood is remembered through objects first. Books. Movies. A giant glazed doughnut from a long-forgotten shop that was almost too big for my hands to hold. A yellow and blue blanket that I blissfully misidentified (did I call it Red?) and delighted in rubbing under my nose. A set of illustrated Transformers briefs that felt like absolute dogshit against my skin. A small ovular metal trash can at my grandmother’s home that sat by the exterior wall of the spare bedroom and that I once puked in. The yellow-orange label of a Kodak brand VHS tape that read Ghidrah the Three-Headed Monster in my awkward third-grade handwriting. The words on the label were inaccurate, not that I needed them to be otherwise. The tape had been recorded over soon thereafter, first with a TBN showing of Gorgo and most of an episode of The 700 Club, and for most of its tenure actually contained a recording of 1960’s Mysterious Island from TNT and a library-cued short cut of 1925’s The Lost World from the Nostalgia Network. For most of my post-3rd grade school life I carried with me a well-worn copy of Melville’s Moby Dick from the budget publisher Wordsworth Books. I thought the John Houston film of that was pretty good, if necessarily abbreviated, and liked that it had both Gregory Peck (who fought Moses in The Big Country) and the Admiral Nelson from TV. The copy I had on tape, again recorded from TNT, had a fun promo for Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? during one of the commercial breaks. One of my aunts had a copy of the novel that was based on sitting on her bookshelf when she was in her twenties, not far from the iconic mass-market paperback of Whitley Strieber’s Communion. I remember seeing them both while waiting to go out with her and some guy to see Batman Forever.
It goes on and on and on and on.
I was never screened for autism as a child. I was born far too early for such screenings to be widely recommended, and my young parents missed whatever signs there were that I should have been. In retrospect, I thank them. My first year in elementary school often saw me pass by the special needs room, which was awkwardly stuffed into a dark corner of the building near the back exits and a set of janitorial closets. There was a wooden box in there that was large enough for a man, but it wasn’t used to contain men. My mother has since told me that, even if I had been screened... whatever the outcome, no one would have put me in a fucking box. She’d have seen to that, she said, and I believe her implicitly. I cried at this, though I didn’t let her hear. I’m crying at it now, but it’s okay. It’s a happy sort of crying.
Instead of autism, I was screened for something else and became enrolled in my state’s Academically and Intellectually Gifted program. I always spoke well after all. Years of mirroring adults will do that. My memory of the Kindergarten-era examination is all words and thin-lined shapes, and led to about a dozen years worth of glowing reports on my standardized testing scores. The program itself has long-since faded into the nebulous unimportant, and the only moments I really recall of it are a few boring hours spent in the library writing a rather shitty report on the Lewis and Clark expedition. That Superman show was on TV at the time, but I wouldn’t recommend looking up what its star has been up to lately. And so I went to school with all the other kids which, despite my internal difficulties, was probably for the best. There were others who were not so lucky, and who would have benefited much more than I did from the cool indifference that comes from being seen as “normal enough”. I saw them every day of my first few years in elementary, filing through the hallways with their caretakers, listening to the words my classmates were calling them, watching the cruel imitations. Remembering it all and learning.
That was my real education, not, with all deference to the NC DPI, the AIG horseshit. My classmates taught me the fatal importance of being “normal”, of not standing out, of not letting a single pinhole pierce the veil I had even then been long about constructing, lest it be revealed for what it was. And I got good at keeping my self from the light, keeping my self from suspicion, so good that I lost all track of what the fuck my self even was for the vast majority of my lifetime. I could not see my self in the mirror, sure. But the mask was real enough, comprised of real flesh and teeth and bone, and so complete and so precise in its production that no one else could see my self either. That was what was important. That was how I stayed safe.
I became the mask, but the mask was never me.
In many ways I have been incredibly lucky. In most of the ways that matter this is an incorruptible truth. In piecing over what brought me to my current position, even to this essay itself, I find it remarkable that I ever arrived at all. I’m very happily married, have a supportive family, own a home, have two very silly adopted dogs and a hybrid SUV in the garage that has six thousand miles on it and needs a fuel up every eight months or so. Along the way I’ve accumulated a little too much of a whole lot of things. Analog cameras in 135, 120 and 4x5. Laserdiscs. DVDs. Blu-ray discs. Computers, which I love to build (btw I use Arch). Books. Vinyl records. CDs. Vintage portable televisions in monochrome and color. Turntables. Theatrical posters, most of them Japanese. Laserdisc players. Headphones. Hi-fi equipment. Enough media cables to stretch to my hometown and back. That last one is a joke, figurative hyperbole intended to indicate that I have many of them. It’s true. I do.
Those weren’t the only signs, of course, and in retrospect I should have known much sooner. I practice every interaction I ever have or might have with everyone I might encounter in my daily life. Lately I’ve been having practice discussions with my GP, with whom I don’t have an appointment for more than half a year. I practice talking to neighbors. I practice talking to friends. I practice talking with the barista at my local coffee shop on the off chance that I swing by for something. I try to pick an order in advance that I think won’t draw too much attention. It’s an enormous part of my waking life, one which has long-since slid into idle habit. It does not bring me anxiety, not often at least, and when it does it’s easy enough to stop. Stimming helps, and a quick sharp snap usually suffices to turn my brain to other matters. A single clap of my hands. A quick drum of my fingertips across a table top.
I find it difficult to read expressions, particularly those of people I am unfamiliar with, and I am utterly ignorant to flirtatious advancement (my wife and others can attest to this). I am quite loud, particularly when excited, and have considerable trouble moderating the volume of my voice or articulating desired tonal emotional signals. My natural inclination is against prolonged eye contact. I avoid it where possible, but have become well practiced at forcing it during social interactions. The flitting my eyes do during less stressed communications would otherwise give me away, sure as dammit. A pinhole in the veil, a possible threat exposed. An other.
As I said earlier, it seems to be in our nature to an extent to fear what we don’t understand, and so I have built an entire life around being understood. Not in any true sense, mind, but in being understood to be “normal enough”. Safe. One of the good ones, ya know. To present as anything else has been out of the question for a very long time. The very thought of it was terrifying to me, enough to keep me up through the long hours of the night in anxious worry of the inescapable what-if?
And so for the last several years, following Covid and the tragedies it brought with it and the aftermath of tragedies that it did not, I became increasingly concerned that I was going quite literally insane. My mask was immutable, the only way I presented myself to even my closest family and friends, but my hold on it was slipping. My wife knew something was up, but what she could never have realized is that she didn’t know me. How could she? I did not know my self, so we’d never really met. Maintaining the mask became an agonizing preoccupation. The foundation was as weak as it had ever been and I was absolutely crumbling under the stress of it, under the stress of not knowing what was wrong, goddammit, under the stress of being revealed as... what, exactly? I could scarcely imagine. Somewhere along the curve of space time I had bundled my self into the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota (what on Earth would make a man decide to do that kind of thing?), and in the face of certain psychic destruction I made its disentanglement my top priority.
I often speak in religious terms, notably those familiar to American Evangelicalism. I do not believe, and I never have, but I am none-the-less fascinated by it. How could I not be when I grew up surrounded by it? I even married a religious studies major, who also doesn’t believe and who is none-the-less likewise fascinated. We used to watch Jack Van Impe together. I have been remarkably lucky. I never knew a thing about autism, not beyond 246 toothpicks and stopping in the street for “DONT WALK” signs and being an excellent driver. Everyone in the ‘80s and ‘90s saw Rain Man. Young me was no exception, and the perception of autism it created did plenty to keep me from ever considering it as a possibility for myself. The RAADS-R changed all that, as I suspect it has for plenty of other individuals in my position. It was my first step towards being born again.
I decided to fill out the RAADS-R practically on a whim, after intending for a while to unravel that fucking ball of twine and being catastrophically unaware of how to begin going about it. The questionnaire came up in a discussion on a Discord channel I frequent and I thought, Autism, eh? That doesn’t seem likely. But it’s a place to start and you might as well rule it out. And hell, maybe it’ll even push you in a direction you hadn’t considered!
That thought was the understatement of the goddamn century, and though the RAADS-R was only a first step the things it asked of me——some of them quite rude, mind——were enough to set that twine unraveling but quick. Turns out the ball was never even twine, fuck it all. It was just the biggest blind spot in Minnesota. C’est la vie.
And now? For the first time in recent memory, I’m happy. Genuinely, truly, irrepressibly happy. I feel as though I’ve been dutifully writing down my coded messages from Pierre Andre for forty goddamn years, and now my decoder ring has finally arrived. The answers aren’t always what I want them to be perhaps, but whenever are they? The idiosyncrasies of executive dysfunction mean that I can crack out this essay in a couple of hours, but that brushing my teeth twice a day (and flossing, by god, flossing) or taking a shower or choosing which pan to use when I make dinner can sometimes seem like insurmountably difficult tasks. I still get overwhelmed, and my brain-engine hitting the red leaves me in an utterly inoperable state until I can idle in the dark, watch some records spin, and get on with my life. I still talk over every discussion I think I’ll ever have in my life. I still info-dump on my interests, just like I did with the fucking Langoliers all those years ago. That’s still a fun word to say. Langoliers. Give it a try sometime. It’s far more enjoyable to say than to watch, and far less involving of your time. I still repeat the fun things I hear. Sounds, words, lyrics, phrases, notes. From people, from television, from music, from movies, from my wife, from the dogs, from everywhere. I speak in a sort of English pastiche, a voice distinctly my own and accented with recontextualized phrases from books and films and songs and in bits and pieces of every conversation I’ve seen or heard or been involved in over the last four decades. These are all deeply interwoven in my mind, cross referenced with the sensorial experiences I’ve had by commonalities of sound and spelling and pronunciation and the adjectives I share between them. Hot. Cold. Warm. Soft. Hard. Sharp. Angular. Dense. Rough. Gritty. Crunchy. Violent. Full. Bright. Dull. Flat. I still repeat my first words. I learned them from my mother half a lifetime ago, when she was just stepping into her twenties and I had just stepped into life. They were my first step towards understanding myself and towards understanding the world around me and towards being understood in kind, and I will never forget them.
“I saw a thing.”
I hear the voices of my friends and of actors and broadcasters and artists I’ll never meet and of my family as I speak and think the things they’ve said, because the interactions we have with those around us are ultimately what make us who we are. That conceit just happens to be as literal as it is figurative in my case.
It’s an incredible privilege to finally know what I am, know why I am, to be able to live the rest of my life with that knowledge and the wellspring of personal understanding it has allowed for and will continue to allow for. I have been remarkably lucky. I still don’t stand out much, and I’m still afraid of doing so. The box is out there yet, a looming simulacrum of malignant misunderstanding, prejudicial assumptions and the same slithering, simmering resentment of the other that’s blighted humankind for centuries untold. I don’t know what the hell to do about that, and it’s another bitch of a ball of twine for sure. Hopefully this essay helps to unravel a bit of my share of it. I hope it will help some of you get to work on your own.
I turn forty-one in a few weeks, and I will do so as the autistic person I’ve always been yet only recently come to know. I still can’t see my self in the mirror, not really, but that’s okay. I know I’m there regardless. And I know I’m doing all right.
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~ Weltraumbesty / KRP
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