The creepy guy

On the way to his executive function coaching session on Sunday, we passed a guy in his 20s walking down Curtis. Pale guy, blonde hair. Graham said that he often saw that guy walking right about there when he left school to walk home from Phillips, that the guy never said anything to anyone, and that he was a little "creepy." As we went past he looked at our car with a faint smile of recognition.

Fact is, the guy looked like he might be neuroatypical in some way himself. Who knows what the guy's deal is, maybe he's slightly schizoaffective and on meds, maybe he's autistic himself, maybe he's... whatever. Certainly we have no evidence of him ever having done anything to harm anyone. All we know is that he walks around fairly regularly by himself, so the odds are pretty good that he's lonely.

I explained to Graham that "creepy" is a pretty strong word and that we really don't know much about him at all, but that these kinds of names were how the cycle of isolation and shame envelops people who are different. Probably we should talk to the guy sometime. But then you run the "friend for life" risk that sometimes can happen when you pierce that veil, as kind of happened with the autistic genius math triathlete who lived across from David and Carol in Princeton. He didn't know how to make small talk and move on, so I'd get trapped in a 20-minute conversation every time I said hello.

Life is complex.