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.....









">

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














the view out the window of his hotel

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

a non-writer by the bay

He is not sitting on a bus packed across the aisles on his second part of his ride home. It is not another cool evening in San Francisco. He will not eat spaghetti in an hour or so before his small t.v and then call his friends to share anecdotes of their jobs that mean as much as a pair of socks or shoelaces and will see if the bitterness can stay in check when books or writing comes up. There are not a dozen or so notebooks of thwarted ideas for conceptual work, for experimental music and odd hybids that will never be made. The notebooks spill from a non-existent dresser with

a dent on the second drawer found on some illusory unborn corner on a Sunday...all forever to float like astronauts untethered.

He does not hate the noises of the city at night, which are not to him like the chassis of a car with all the pretty glass and upholstery removed, not at all tied to a life he sees as just the dull momentum onward, the little explosions.




photo of the pile of stories written about city transit and downtown mar 07








view out of the bus window toward the stop light as drawn by his friend who also never left