nothing

nothing

returning to typography : no more dreams of the ocean and that soup of faces

detailed painting given to him by his friend of the boat they were on together until the injury



He is not working on letter forms again. An unseen swarm of molecules is not twisting and bending like locust in arcs and turns, atoms not amassed in a pen, a piece of paper, a worn chair, and 8 fingers.

There was a boat in 1989. It had a captain and small crew. It was and may still be some color if not under the cold waters or long splintered against some dull rocks.
The men would have been faces, arms, legs, names, but they are not and due to two minutes across a phone line will never be more than a fog if even that.

There was to be a 3 month agreement. It was found by a friend in the back of a magazine with a name of some kind and a readership of some number, these details forgotten, submerged as unimportant in time along with so many other things.

The length of several phone calls with the friend may still remain in old records, perhaps on oversized floppy disks in storage, or in a newer transfer of unused information buzzing away near invisibly numerically in some database of no clear purpose any more but remaining.

The possibility of injury such as the loss of fingers (or worse) becoming clear and one last 2 minute call, its blasts of air deflecting off plastic now long thrown away to decay, in some moment errant and impulsive at 19, this did not lead to missing digits, a need to return to a love of typography and font making born out of dull, repetive physical therapy and time.

He is not staring at that letter, perhaps an R that just never looks right...blows the whole alphabet, makes it disposable and not to use.



latest page of fonts ... 50's office door letter forms and something more of the shapes of old technology...

the window to the bottom of the ocean/ psychologist on Ventura Boulevard

The man born from the boy above is not up late reflecting on his life. He has not been a Psychologist for several years. He has not earned a private practice, a nice office on Ventura boulevard, a receptionist and a view of the cars whizzing past the courtyard. He has also not had those nightmares. He does not dream of others moments that he can not speak of or of drowning slowly in storms at sea. He did not take the ability to interpret symbolism, body language and personalities and behavior and make it his career all this time.

He did not carry the ballast of other's pain. At least not this way.

He changed his major back to English after that one semester nearly 20 years ago. The decision came oddly out of a clear blue day of calm sitting on the campus lawn eating a salad. His mother was dying. She had attempted suicide just 2 years before. This brought many dreams of winds blowing out windoglass into snow in slow motion onto her...he unable to stop it.......of her mouth that for many years could not say words speaking.....saying short phrases that made him awake cold and in tears.

The office thus untethered, is divorced from gravity and atoms. This moment now floats in a trillion particles in the ether, gnats from what might have been.

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.....









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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

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.

the tired academic outsider who fought to relearn math to see slot machines in archaeology and paleontology

The man grown from the boy above is sitting in a room at another conference in another city. He is tired from jet lag, but also from opposition. He spent a summer as a teen studying game theory and switched his major. First he went back and had to relearn the basics after being such a poor student in high school. Math no longer was the enemy born of a mean little gnome of a man in tenth grade that punished him for not showing his work, the man that was for a decade a bit player in stress dreams, his derision floating past amidst failed tasks, breaking bridges, piles to clean.

He is tired because his ideas of using the methods to beat slot machines in Archaeology and Paleontology have been basically received as oddities, curios, bearded ladies of academia at best.
He spent so many years studying math to look at how if many people have similar hunches or outcomes and if they are fed through a program to look at pattern emergence, some sort of larger theory could emerge. He gave up the odd impulses to write long ago. It was too distracting, too easy and thus clearly of little value.

He is a youthful 37 in appearance but he sometimes jokes to himself that his skin is a pathological liar born of some one else's genes. He should be heading to room 206 for his panel, but he is in stasis by the coffee and cookies. It is safe here. He daydreams of some writer daydreaming about math that would have occupied these same eyes and lets out a small laugh, black and low.

And it all breaks...atom by atom......second by second......like ice cubes.....

this moment speculation veined and breathed by what would have come to pass....

the room breaks into geometry and away....filament by filament.....







his doodles in the conference break room while procrastinating





a photo of him presenting his lecture "the game within the bones: pattern recognition software, computer modeling and the fossil record" at Iowa State June 2004






Copy of his dissertation turned to page one with written note to then girlfriend