helping autistic students

He is not getting an early night of sleep before a demonstration. His thoughts do not swirl in his mind about details, time and maybe...maybe..

He did not leave to Texas A&M to get that p.h.d to develop educational software and an alternate internet interface for Autistic children. He did not spend those 7 years working away far from family and friends deeply immersed in working with touch screens, a soup of images, sound and text to work with the non-linearity and acute awareness of sensory input that runs across the Autistic spectrum in a way to play and explore with sensory reward that would build into knowledge acquisition. He began developing this many years ago while working with autistic kids while in college and it currently is not awaiting another shot at implementation as a way to work with the Autistic mind not against it as linear software does.



He did not have epiphanies in Austin about how to make this work with math, vocabulary and geography as that spine broke years before, and that peninsula in time and across the miles from Los Angeles fell away into ruin upon the words of a single phone call.

He is not feeling that same knot in his stomach, that mix of eroding hope and dread.
The meeting that is not to be is to try to get the software to be used, to see something come from all of his study and development, to help.

The never finished programs are repetitions of images and sounds that gradually reinforce connects to words and their meanings or mathematical relationships made to model the Autistic mind ....to help....

The phone call was to a friend working under one of the nation's leading experts in Autism and education......his words were " great ideas...that is why no one will ever use them....let it go" there were others but this is their essence boiled into the bullets and their trajectory....fatal as they were....

and they ripped into bone, skin ....and spine of what could have been.....









">

color photo,bio and software description on the back of the software catalog for the series














the view out the window of his hotel

safely didn't risk the failures of so much trying.....

It is a late morning, a city, a sky of mixed clouds, it is a chain of minutes passing like box cars, it is metal, stone, cloth, oxygen, steel....

It is blood, skin, a swarm of memories, a crowd of self....

He is sitting on couch with a soda ..."he" "at"

he is full of regrets: dropping out of college, never moving away, never doing anything that was not warm and soft as the worn couch and safe as his tv dinner clicking away into simple fruition as another meal in the next room...

The night with friends when they suggested that college wasn't for him after he was on academic probation and the fact that he almost failed high school remain implanted warm
as though just uttered across a back yard on a dull July night.


He is 37 years old and works as a market research cold caller.........he rubs his belly and tries to remember the name of that woman he briefly was friends with in San Francisco before he dropped out....

He is comfortable now dull nubs come in slow dull pains at times sure, but he numbs them out with the reasoning of how painful it was to keep throwing things out there.........of questioning so many things and wanting..........

he has moved to the west valley.....that was enough...........

The microwave dings the alert that the molten miniature diorama in plastic of thanksgiving is ready to disappear in small portions...away...

and thusly it all disappears.....

......yet in the shapes of turns and the math within of what could have come to pass
he will complete this meal in a shirt and shorts in a house somewhere

never to walk

He is not rolling along in his wheelchair looking out the window of his small house by the entry ramp. His parents in 1969 did not opt for the experimental surgery, first of its kind....risky the doctors said...and unsure to work...

The man of the boy above is not feeling his hands along the metal wheels as they spiral toward a view of the grass freshly watered.

The sun is not along the glass into his small living room as he lets out small noise as he thinks of taking steps, a limp, scars like small railroad tracks,the lines and worn old thoughts thin as window glass.