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.....
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color photo,bio and software description on the back of the software catalog for the series
the view out the window of his hotel
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