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A lot of people have reached out to me since I unveiled my AuDHD diagnosis, to offer support, share their own experiences, and say "welcome, join us!"

I remember being in college in the early 90s, and having this recurring experience:

FRIEND: I'm gay. I'm coming out.
ME: Wait, you were in?

Well, I guess the closet's on the other foot now, because a lot of folks told me they were not at all surprised.

I think perhaps one of the clues might have been how I have a history of getting obsessed with a topic, sometimes for months or years at a time. I mean, I'm the kid who, when my parents told me I was required to have a bar mitzvah, agreed on the condition that it was Star Trek themed. Yup, all of the tables were named after locations on the Enterprise. And, well, when I turned 21, I got a Klingon tattoo.

I just thought I was enthusiastic. But some of these things are starting to look suspiciously like special interests.

Opening Day

Last week was baseball opening day. And for the first time, I'm starting to think about the New York Mets as one of my special interests.

Because while I enjoy baseball, I find it difficult to watch a game in which the Mets are not playing – although I make an exception for the World Baseball Classic, which is a party no matter who is playing (as long as it's not Team USA).

I am a second generation Mets fan, raised to it by my parents, especially my Dad. They both grew up in the Bronx, and were indoctrinated early that no matter what, you did not root for the Yankees.

Oddly, the first baseball games my Dad took me to were actually Yankee games. Something I've only realized in the past couple of years is that he may have been boycotting the Mets after the Tom Seaver trade. I wish I could ask him.

I didn't like Yankee Stadium. It was loud and scary. Or maybe I was picking up on my Dad's ambivalence. This would have been around 1979 or 1980.

I think the last game we went to at Yankee Stadium while I was a child was a playoff game in 1981, when he, somehow, got us tickets in the notorious right field bleachers. The seats were hard plastic benches with no backs. We were surrounded by screaming maniacs (and not in a good way.) This is my signal memory of the old Yankee Stadium, the time when Graig Nettles hit a home run into our section.

What you can't see in the image is that the ball bounced past all the bleacher creatures, took a big hop, and rolled down the ramp into the stadium conscourse. I ran after it.

I was the third person down the ramp. The first two, grown adult men, were on the ground wrestling with each other over the ball. Punches were thrown. One of them tried choking the other. And during the tussle, the ball squirted free.

For half a second, I thought maybe this was my chance. But then I watched as the ball rolled into the women's restroom. I was nine, and one thing I knew with certaintity was that going in there would get me in trouble. I stopped short. A guy came streaking past me, jumped over the men wrestling on the ground and barreled into the bathroom. Two others followed in hot pursuit. I didn't stick around to see if the fighting continued.

That's the closest I've ever come to catching a ball at a game. I would not set foot in Yankee Stadium again until I was an adult.

If my Dad was actually boycotting the Mets, it didn't last. He took me to my first game at Shea Stadium probably in 1980 or 1981, and I loved it instantly. It didn't have any of the gloom or menace of Yankee Stadium. As we might say today, the vibes were immaculate. I never looked back.

Shakes-ball

Another monotropic focus I developed early, which has waxed and waned over the years but never gone away, is Shakespeare. But this isn't one of those "I need to learn everything I can about the entire subject" kind of special interests. Every so often, one play will grab hold of me and I will spend months or years immersing myself in it. I've been through at least three cycles of that just with Hamlet (and who am I kidding, I'll probably have one or two more.) I've had shorter dalliances with Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Much Ado About Nothing - when the Branagh film adaptation came out I saw it six times in the theater. This scene remains an all-time fav.

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Two things happened in the year 2000, when I was still living in New York, that collided to sent me down one of the deepest rabbit holes I've ever been down. The first was that I got the chance to see a Shakespeare play I knew nothing about.

Coriolanus is one of the Bard's least popular works. Rome's greatest general is nominated for consul, but he can't keep his contempt for the common people secret. The people revolte, and Coriloanus is exiled. But he teams up with his former enemy to lead an army back to sack Rome. Tragedy ensues. The main character is completely unsympathetic. Its got a mordant, cynical take on politics, and an intense psychosexual undercurrent running in several directions. It's tricky and weird.

That September, knowing nothing about the play, I went to see the Almeida Theater's touring production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, with Ralph Fiennes in the title role. To this day, it's one of the most memorable performances I've ever seen. And for several weeks after, I was unable to stop thinking about it; maybe the very fact that something about the play just didn't make sense, didn't fit together, kept me worrying at it, trying to peel back its layers. Or the way Fiennes embodied the role as someone fighting a never-ending internal battle bewteen who he was and who the world wanted him to be.

So Coriolanus was at the forefront of my mind when, at the end of September, the second thing happened: the New York Knicks traded away their franchise star, Patrick Ewing, and he was practically chased out of the city.

I was only a casual basketball watcher, but it was impossible to avoid the saga unfolding over weeks on the back pages of the tabloids, screaming about how he needed to go, rejoicing when he was finally traded. And quickly followed by a sense of "oh shit, what did we do?"

The parallels were obvious. (To me anyway.) A thought popped into my head: "I wonder if you could do a loose adaptation of Coriolanus, but set modern day where sports, media, and politics intersect." And since my interest in basketball paled in compared to my Mets fandom, I would shift it from basketball to baseball.

I noodled on this idea for several years. Eventually, it became the first feature screenplay I wrote after moving to Los Angeles. For a while it was called "National Pastime," before it became "Head Case."

I learned a whole lot of lessons from writing this script. The most important being, when you're in a general meeting and someone asks you what you're working on, never, ever, ever, EVER say the word "Coriolanus." Unless you want the meeting to end immediately.

It's easy to look back now and see how for those years, this was one of my main special interests, and it only waned after I put the script away.

I haven't thought about "Head Case" in a while; doing so now brings up some new, interesting thoughts. In some ways, the central problem of Coriolanus is about masking. In his world, there's a prescribed mode of behavior, and if he would just follow the script, everything would be okay. He just cannot do it.

Looking back across all the stories I've written over the years, you could read many of them as being about someone masking, or trying to mask, or failing to mask, or the consequences of not masking correctly.

Although I suppose you could say almost every story is about masking in some way, a character's inner life and outer life coming into conflict and needing to resolve somehow. I don't know, maybe I'm just doing that classic move of the newly-out, seeing my identity in everything and everyone else.

"Sleepy Hollow, 1998" certainly will continue this theme. Of that you'll see more anon...

What are some of your special interests? What rabbit holes have you fallen down and stayed down in for years at a time?