The Lawyer Novelist

This will be the last post on this blog

2005-09-05T12:28:00.000-07:00

I spent the morning finalizing submission packages for the novel. The first batch will go out this week.

The law practice seems to have reached a point where I need to start thinking about support staff. I had hoped to avoid this in order to minimize overhead, but as I scan the mounds of files in my dining room, I realize that this can't be done.

Once again I find myself in La Canada and, for the sake of my boys, I have decided to remain here.

It seems an appropriate time to end this chapter. I will be starting another blog next week. You can find it at http://quietdesperation1.blogspot.com/.

For those of you who have been so supportive, I thank you.

I am still not sure that I am capable of successfully juggling the conflicting demands of being a lawyer, novelist and father. However, I shall keep at it. And I'll blog about it.

Good Bye For Now

2005-08-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

I'm taking a break from blogland.

I do it for the kids

2005-07-21T22:14:00.000-07:00

At the end of the day, when we look through that darkened window and see our reflections, we see the truth. It's all about the kids. Even when you don't want to admit that to yourself. Trying to stray from that will rip your soul into shreds that cannot ever be sewn back together.

I may hurt others - others whom I love more than life itself - but my kids come first.

Anyone who thinks otherwise has never had kids.

I Don't Want To Fill This Blog With Negative Energy But . . .

2005-07-16T08:38:00.000-07:00

This just has to be posted:

Cops: T-Ball Coach Took 'Hit' On Challenged Player

(from thepittsburgchannel.com)

NORTH UNION TOWNSHIP, Pa. -- A T-ball coach seeking to keep a player with a mental disability off the field allegedly asked another player to hurt the boy, state police said Friday.

The alleged incident happened June 27 at R.W. Clark Little League Field in North Union Township, Fayette County, police said.

During pre-game warmups, Mark Reed Downs Jr. offered one of his players $25 to hit the 8-year-old boy in the head with a baseball, according to a police news release.

After speaking with Downs, the second player hit the victim near his left ear and in the groin area, leaving him unable to play in that night's game, state police said.

"The coach seemed to find excuses not to play this child because he wasn't that talented," Trooper Thomas Broadwater told Channel 4 Action News. "On the 27th, the child was basically beaned in the head with a baseball."

The injured boy's mother was suspicious, so she approached the player who threw the ball and he told her about the payment offer, Broadwater said.

Downs, 27, of Dunbar, was charged Friday with criminal solicitation to commit aggravated assault, corruption of minors and reckless endangerment. He is free on bond and faces a preliminary hearing on July 28.

Some Good News?

2005-07-14T09:35:00.000-07:00

Number of Autism Cases Declines in Calif.
Number of New Cases of Autism in California Declines for the First Time in More Than 10 Years

The Associated Press picks up story, gets national distribution. http://abcnews.go.com/Health/print?id=937092

The number of new cases of autism in California has fallen for the first time in more than 10 years in what may be a bellwether for autism rates nationwide, according to new data compiled by the state Department of Developmental Services. The total number of autistic children receiving special education services from the state continues to grow bringing the current total to 28,046 but the rate of increase peaked in 2002 and has dropped slightly since then.
California has the best reporting system for autism in the United States because it guarantees special education services for autistic children. Because of its tracking system, the state is generally considered a predictor of what is to come for the rest of the country.
Experts said, however, that they don't know what's causing the numbers to fall off.
"Perhaps whatever caused (the number of cases) to go up ... is no longer present," said Dr. Robert Hendren, executive director of the University of California, Davis MIND Institute, which researches neurodevelopmental disorders. "It's all speculation. I wish we had good studies." Parent activist Rick Rollens of Sacramento, who played a key role in the creation of the MIND Institute, said that the trend roughly corresponds to the removal of mercury preservatives from pediatric vaccines. Many activist groups say that the use of mercury in the vaccines caused the sudden increase in autism cases.
Federal scientists, however, have continually said that the evidence does not support such a link.
The state data do not include children under the age of 3. About 90 percent of all autistic children are entered into the system before the age of 6, the department said.
According to the state data, 2002 was a record year for new autism diagnoses, with 3,259 cases. In 2003, the number of new cases slipped to 3,125. In 2004, the number was 3,074.
For the first half of 2005, there were 1,470 new cases, compared to 1,518 in the same period in 2004.
Information from: Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com

***

Now, this could be complete ignorance on my part, but could the rates be declining because those doing the counting don't want to admit that the problem continues?

In California, it is my belief that the data on the rate of autism is collected from the various regional centers, which are the entities contracted by the state to provide services to residents who have specified developmental disabilities, such as autism. The problem is that because of the budgetary crisis in California, the regional centers have been forced to curtail services.

My clients are uniformly finding it harder and harder to get regional centers to agree that their children have autism even when they have assessments from recognized experts in the field.

So is there a true decline, or is California simply turning a blind eye for short term financial savings? "Savings" that are going to ultimately cost this state in the long run.

Call me a cynic.

The Numbers Continue to Rise

2005-07-13T09:17:00.000-07:00

Autism in Hawaii Nearly Doubles In 4 Years

By Associated Press http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/living/health/12116935.htm

HONOLULU - The number of autistic children in Hawaii's public school system has nearly doubled in the past four years, state education officials said.
There were 1,143 students diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders last month compared to 656 students August 2001, officials told the Board of Education on Monday.
Autism includes a range of neuropsychiatric disorders affecting a person's ability to interact socially and communicate, causing unusual and repetitive behavior.
Dr. Paul Ban, director of the Education Department's Special Education Services Branch, said although autism is on the rise, the percentage of students with learning disabilities and other special-education needs has held steady at around 12 percent.
Hawaii's increase follows a national trend, but the state's numbers are "on the high side," said Marilyn Jakeway, the department's education specialist for autism.
The increase may strain schools, which already are facing a teacher shortage, especially in special-education teachers.
Ban said Hawaii has been a little behind in trying to make up a "5 to 7 percent" state shortfall of special-education teachers.
The Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act of 2004 requires that all special-education teachers be "highly qualified" under a range of criteria. The law went into effect July 1 and the Department of Education has a year to meet the teacher requirements.
Although autism is on the rise, the percentage of students with learning disabilities and other special-education needs has held steady at around 12 percent of the 180,000-student population, Ban said.
The state in 2001 began the transition in care for autistic children from the Department of Health to the Department of Education. Some parents have been critical of the care during the takeover.
Maung Kyi, who has a 14-year-old autistic son, said a lack of continuity in providers has hampered his son's progress.
"We get a lot of promises from the DOE about this and that, but all we want is continuity. That's the most important thing to an autistic child," he said.
Ban said the Department of Education's takeover is in transition and said that there is high turnover in personnel, which he blames on "burnout" in those dealing with autistic children.
Much of the care is handled by private contractors, but the Department of Education plans to move to a system of more direct care, he said.
ON THE NET State Department of Education: http://doe.k12.hi.us/

So, Let's Try This Again

2005-07-10T11:41:00.000-07:00

Turmoil is a word a friend recently used to describe my life. And, she is correct. But no matter how horrid the turmoil, I can't give up, no matter how seductive that sounds at times.

I've started a second novel. I've finished my submission letter and synopsis of the first in the hopes of finding an agent. Not too bad.

The new federal laws and regulations related to educating children with disabilities is now effective. And as I said a few months back, they are not good, but not the disaster they might have been.

So, enough wallowing. Time to move forward.

(And I commit to myself that I'm going to post here more often.)

Is There A Connection

2005-04-20T09:29:00.000-07:00

The link between thimeresol, a mercury based preservative used in vaccines, and autism is subject to debate. Like many parents of autistic children, my autistic son's mom firmly believes that his autism was caused by his MMR vaccine. I remain a skeptic. However, when I read articles like the one below, my skepticism wanes.

For your consideration:

The Age of Autism: Julia
Part 2 of 2.

By Dan Olmsted. Weblink not available at press time.

UPI - Three-year old Julia is napping when I arrive at the spare, neat, cheerful house on Musser School Road near the town of Leola in Lancaster County.
She is the reason I have driven through the budding countryside on this perfect spring day, but I really do not need to meet her.
In the last column, I wrote about trying to find autistic Amish people here in the heart of Pennsylvania Dutch country, and noted there should be dozens of them -- if autism occurs at the same prevalence as the rest of the United States.
So far, there is evidence of only three, all of them children, the oldest age 9 or 10. Julia is one of them. I found out about her through a pediatrician in Richmond, Va., Dr. Mary Megson. I had been asking around for quite some time about autism and the Amish, and she provided the first direct link.
Megson said she would give my name to this child's mother, who could call if she chose. A few days later the phone rang. It was Stacey- jean Inion, an Amish-Mennonite woman. She, her husband Brent and their four children live simply, but they do drive a vehicle and have a telephone. After a few pleasantries, I told her about my trying to find autistic Amish.
Here is what she said, verbatim: "Unfortunately our autistic daughter
-- who's doing very well, she's been diagnosed with very, very severe autism
-- is adopted from China, and so she would have had all her vaccines in China before we got her, and then she had most of her vaccines given to her in the United States before we got her.
"So we're probably not the pure case you're looking for."
Maybe not, but it was stunning that Julia Inion, the first autistic Amish person I could find, turned out to be adopted -- from another country, no less. It also was surprising that Stacey-jean launched unbidden into vaccines, because the Amish have a religious exemption from vaccination and presumably would not have given it much thought.
She said a minority of Amish families do, in fact, vaccinate their children these days, partly at the urging of public health officials.
"Almost every Amish family I know has had somebody from the health department knock on our door and try to convince us to get vaccines for our children," she said. "The younger Amish more and more are getting vaccines. It's a minority of children who vaccinate, but that is changing now."
Did she know of any other autistic Amish? Two more children, she said.
"One of them, we're very certain it was a vaccine reaction, even though the government would not agree with that."
Federal health officials have said there is no association between vaccinations and autism or learning disabilities.
"The other one I'm not sure if this child was vaccinated or not," she added.
During my visit to their home, I asked Stacey-jean to explain why she attributed the first case to vaccines.
"There's one family that we know, their daughter had a vaccine reaction and is now autistic. She was walking and functioning and a happy bright child, and 24 hours after she had her vaccine, her legs went limp and she had a typical high-pitched scream. They called the doctor and the doctor said it was fine -- a lot of high-pitched screaming goes along with it.
"She completely quit speaking," Stacey-jean said. "She completely quit making eye contact with people. She went in her own world."
This happened, Stacey-jean said, at "something like 15 months." The child is now about 8.
For similar reasons, Julia Inion's Chinese background is intriguing.
China, India and Indonesia are among countries moving quickly to mass- vaccination programs. In some vaccines, they use a mercury-based preservative called thimerosal that keeps multiple-dose vials from becoming contaminated by repeated needle sticks.
Thimerosal was phased out of U.S. vaccines starting in 1999, after health officials became concerned about the amount of mercury infants and children were receiving. The officials said they simply were erring on the side of caution, and that all evidence favors rejection of any link between Autism Spectrum Disorders and thimerosal, or vaccines themselves.
Julia's vaccinations in China -- all given in one day at about age 15 months -- may well have contained thimerosal; the United States had stopped using it by the time she was born, but other countries with millions to vaccinate had not.
Stacey-jean said photographs of Julia taken in China before she was vaccinated showed a smiling alert child looking squarely at the camera. Her original adoptive family in the United States, overwhelmed trying to cope with an autistic child, gave Julia up for re-adoption. The Inions took her in knowing her diagnosis of severe autism.
I tried hard -- and am still trying -- to find people who know about other autistic Amish. Of the local health and social service agency personnel in Lancaster, some said they dealt with Amish people with disabilities, such as mental retardation, but none recalled seeing an autistic Amish.
Still, I could be trapped in a feedback loop: The Amish I am likeliest to know about -- because they have the most contact with the outside world
-- also are likeliest to adopt a special-needs child such as Julia from outside the community, and likeliest to have their children vaccinated.
Another qualifier: The Inions are converts to the Amish-Mennonite religion (Brent is an Asian-American). They simply might not know about any number of autistic Amish sheltered quietly with their families for decades.
It also is possible the isolated Amish gene pool might confer some kind of immunity to autism -- which might be a useful topic for research.
Whatever the case, Stacey-jean thinks the autistic Amish are nowhere to be found.
"It is so much more rare among our people," she said. "My husband just said last week that so far we've never met a family that lives a healthy lifestyle and does not vaccinate their children that has an autistic child. We haven't come across one yet."
"Everywhere I go (outside the Amish community) I find children who are autistic, just because I have an autistic daughter -- in the grocery store, in the park, wherever I go. In the Amish community, I simply don't find that."
UPI researcher Kyle Pearson contributed to this article.
This ongoing series on the roots and rise of autism aims to be interactive with readers and welcomes comment, criticism and suggestions.

Art and Autism

2005-04-15T08:56:00.000-07:00

As some of you may know, I spent a month "behind the iron gates" almost a year ago working on the novel. As some of you may also know, my elder son is autistic. So, as is routine for parents with autistic children, I talked about it to Eileen. It seemed impossible not to do so, even when I felt like I was boring her to tears.

To my surprise, E has taken up the autism advocacy mantle with her unique flair. She has written a chap of poems that have are on one or more levels autism related. She has mentioned autism on her blog. And when I mentioned that there was an Art and Autism exhibit at a gallery in NYC, she marched to the gallery and sent me back a report.

Then she took it to the next level.

John Patrick McKenzie was one of the artists whose works were shown at the exhibit in NYC. I had not heard of him prior to E buying some of his works (some? Try half of his output for the last 5 years. E does not do things by halves, I think she bought his entire output.). Then, she wrote a marvelous essay which can be found here.

http://www.oovrag.com/essays/essay2005b-6b.shtml

My First Encounter With A Disabled Person

2005-04-14T11:58:00.000-07:00

Today would have been my brother's 41st birthday. He died in a SCUBA diving accident a decade ago. He was diving to try to make a living for his family.

My brother suffered from dyslexia and what would now be known as severe ADHD. He also had problems with his feet growing up and he was forced to wear special, and especially painful, shoes for several years.

I remember one school threatening to expell my brother unless my parents put him on Ritalin. They refused. (I find it sad that parents are still being coerced into medicating their children by school district representatives. In fact, a bill to outlaw such actions is up for vote in the Florida legilature next week.) I remember my parents fighting with schools to try to get help for my brother.

Funny how some things never change. Parents fight, districts refuse.

Every thing was hard for my brother. But he overcame his handicaps despite the complete lack of support from public schools. He finally learned to read, somewhat, and obtained a GED. He drifted into the Marines, was wounded in the first gulf war and ultimately discharged. (Had my parents acceded to school demands to medicate him, he would not have been allowed into the Marines. He credits that organization for turning his life around.) He drifted from job to job, married a very nice woman and had two sweet children.

Yes, my brother was the first person I ever met who was disabled. And a few months before he died we had a long conversation in which I realized that he was a very happy person. Dirt poor, but very content. That surprised me. For I, at the time, was quite well to do; a successful big firm lawyer, Ivy League grad. But I was increasingly disatisfied and suffering from growing bouts of depression. Interesting my mindset at the time. How can someone who is disabled be happy? But there was my disabled brother giving lie to my preconceived notions about happiness.

No one should ever judge another person's quality of life. No matter how disabled that person appears. And there is a growing movement to do just that. Quality of life euthanasia.

I miss my brother terribly. It would be nice were he around to give me advice on happiness.

I'm not dead yet

2005-04-13T18:24:00.000-07:00

I’ve been busy.

I didn’t realize how busy until Eileen linked my blog to my name in a recent post of hers. I cannot believe how long it has been since I last posted.

So, what’s been going on in my life? Version 1.1 of the novel is done and I’m shipping it off to another author for review and input. While that is going on, I’m going to get a package together to find an agent. And, thus the real struggle begins – finding someone who will take a flyer on one of the myriad unknown novelists out there.

Thanks go to Jean and Tom, who accepted a submission of mine into the first Hay(na)ku anthology. Six little words written in two drafts made me about as happy as I can be. Getting an acceptance is a delectible rush.

The practice seems to be reaching critical mass – not something that I had hoped would happen so quickly. I wanted the lawyering to be my day job while I continued to write fiction and poetry, but this day job has taken a turn for the 24/7. Balance seems to be missing in my life.

Speaking of Eileen and Tom, any of you who still read this should take a look at Tom’s interview with Eileen over on his fantastic Will to Exchange Blog. Actually makes Chatty seem like a mature, serious poet. Nah . . .

More soon. The parents of another client need to talk.

Almost Missed The Today Show Series

2005-02-20T17:44:00.000-08:00

I'm not a fan of the Today Show. But, if I owned a television, I'd check it out tomorrow morning.

NBC's Today show is preparing a 10-part series that will run the week of February 21 airing at 8:10 AM and 9:10 AM. The series will look at autism from a variety of angles, with segments exploring topics such as etiology, diagnosis, treatment, educational programs, affect on siblings, and how to be an advocate for your autistic child. Be sure to tune in for the "How to be the Best Advocate For Your Child" segment airing on February 24 featuring Autism Coalition board member, Gary Mayerson. He will be interviewed on hisnew book, "How To Compromise With Your School District Without Compromising Your Child."

The Disabled Were Used To Test The Gas Chambers. Don't Tell Me That They Are Useless

2005-02-11T23:03:00.000-08:00

(CBS) Karen Alves was just 10 when she lost her baby brother, Mark Dal Molin, in 1961. As the oldest of four, she says her fondest childhood memories are of doting on her little brother. "One of the things we looked forward to, when we came home from school, was to play with Mark," she says. But life would be a struggle for the Dal Molins because Mark was born with cerebral palsy, a condition that cripples the body, but not necessarily the mind.

"In the '50s, cerebral palsied children were considered to be developmentally disabled, mentally retarded," says Alves to correspondent Vicki Mabrey. "I never believed he was mentally retarded. When you looked into his eyes, he communicated through his eyes. … He'd laugh and giggle and kick, and just screech when he saw us."

But by 3, Mark could neither walk nor talk, which meant his mother, Rosemarie, had to care for him. "We know he recognized everybody," says Rosemarie. "He would laugh or he would cry if he was unhappy." The children's father, Bill Dal Molin, felt that Rosemarie was neglecting their three daughters, because of Mark.

"His mother was very, very much attentive to him, and the girls, I felt, were like troops to her," says Bill. "She was very hard on them, the girls."

Doctors advised the Dal Molins to commit their son, so Bill told Rosemarie they had to send Mark to an institution. It was November 1958. "I just remember one day coming home from school and the house was very quiet," says Karen, who never got to say goodbye to her brother. "I don't remember much after that. It profoundly affected me."

Rosemarie had committed 3-year-old Mark to Sonoma State Hospital, the largest institution for children in California. At the time, the hospital housed 3,500 children with diverse needs, from babies born with minor defects, like a cleft palate or a club foot, to children with epilepsy and Down syndrome. While the severely disabled languished in overcrowded rooms, the able-bodied were put to work in the institution’s dairies and orchards.

Rosemarie did something more that other parents who had committed their children to Sonoma State did not; she visited her son every Wednesday. "It was just a small thing that I can still do is to go see him," says Rosemarie. "Because most of these children, they never see parents again."

But those visits came to an abrupt end on Memorial Day, 1961, when Mark was 6. "I picked up the phone and I heard a voice say, 'Is Mrs. Dal Molin in?' and I just knew," says Karen. "They didn’t even say where they were calling from. But I just, this dread came into my heart, and I got my mom and I left. I ran. I hid. Nobody told me. I knew he was dead." From that day on, Karen and her sisters, Chris and Gail, say they never spoke Mark's name again. They buried their grief, grew up and had families of their own. But after 40 years, they still struggle with the decision to institutionalize their brother.

"It pretty much blew the family apart," says Gail. "I believe that Dad did what he felt was best for the family. In my heart, I know that is true. But the impact of it on each one of us and the family was devastating."

In 1994, haunted by thoughts of her baby brother, Karen decided to devote all her spare time to answering the question that had burdened her for decades: how exactly did Mark die? "I just needed to know and, no matter what it was, I needed to know. So I went to the recorder’s office," says Karen. "There was no death certificate. One of the clerks came over to the front desk, leaned over and said 'When did he die?' And I said, '1961.' 'Well, when did he go into Sonoma State?' And I said, '1958,' and she said, 'You better look into it, because strange things happened there.'"

Things got stranger still when Karen noticed an article in the local paper saying 16,000 people, including children, had been used in radiation experiments.

"Out of curiosity, I started to read it, and they mentioned patients that were in state-run hospitals being used," says Karen. "And I just go, 'Oh my God.' This could be it." Then, President Clinton had just ordered thousands of secret documents on government-sponsored human radiation experiments declassified and made available on the Internet. Karen found a study funded by the federal government involving 1,100 Sonoma State cerebral palsy patients from 1955-1960. One document she also found showed that her brother had been part of the study, assigned Specimen #8732. Karen wasn't able to find out what tests, if any, Mark was subjected to. But some of the patients in the Sonoma State study were put through painful procedures like the pneumoencelphalogram, in which air is injected into the brain before a series of X-rays.

"Imagine puncturing someone’s spinal cord, drawing fluid out and putting a foreign substance in there. Gas," says Karen. "When they trap air in your body, you’re in pain, excruciating pain, for days." "They were the raw material of medical research," says Susan Lederer, who teaches medical history at Yale University. She was a member of the presidential committee that investigated the radiation experiments, and she says she wasn’t shocked by the findings

because researchers have been using disabled children in experiments for over a century.

"Children in orphanages, children in homes of the mentally retarded, these are all good populations from the sense of medical research, because you have an easily accessible group of people living in controlled circumstances, and you can monitor them," says Lederer. Lederer read the study that was conducted at Sonoma State Hospital, and says the children underwent painful experimentation "for which they received no direct benefit."

"It seems clear that these were intended to enlarge knowledge about cerebral palsy," adds Lederer. It did not produce a breakthrough, although Lederer says studies using mentally retarded children were critical in creating vaccines for polio and hepatitis. Lederer says using captive populations meant big money for medical researchers: "It would even be an advantage in applying for grant money, because you don’t have to go to the problem of recruiting subjects." In the case of Sonoma State, records show that when the study began, cerebral palsy admissions there jumped by 300 percent.

"One of the ways that medical directors of such institutions sort of connected themselves to the world of medical research was simply to provide their patients as commodities," says Lederer.

"I mean, we can provide this many guinea pigs for you." Sonoma State is now known as Sonoma Developmental Center. During her 12-year search, Karen repeatedly wrote to the current administrator, looking for information about Mark. She was told that there were "no records on radiation studies at Sonoma," and that there was "no record that your brother was involved in radiation research." "And I'd say, 'Just go to the human radiation Web site and put in Sonoma State Hospital in your search and documents come up," says Karen. "You’ve gotta have something there. No. They deny it. Deny it. If I called her right now, she’d deny it." Administrator Theresa Murphy has worked at Sonoma State for 30 years. She said she didn't have any information about the medical experimentation that was taking place at the institution. When asked if patients at state hospitals were used in medical research, Murphy says, "I've read that there has been things like using rattlesnake venom of epilepsy. But you know, there's just nothing in our archives about the research you are talking about." "If these studies were being done, if there are patients from here being sent for radiation studies, is that a stain on the hospital record," asks Mabrey. "I think in the history of people with developmental disabilities, and there have been some dark times. I truly believe that," says Murphy. "And it wouldn't surprise me that there were things we would find - consider questionable today." It took two years and a court order for Karen to get Sonoma State to turn over Mark’s medical records. Though not complete, records did show that Mark Dal Molin suffered unusually high fevers the last six months of his life before dying of a seizure.

"He ran extremely high fevers that none of us here right now would live through," says Karen. "Swollen eyes, seizures, those things can fit in with radiation poisoning."

Mark's records contained another shock.

Karen found not one, but two autopsy reports, one for his body and another for his brain. Karen says that Mark's brain was removed after he died. "They took my brother’s brain without consent, and the doctor, in his obituary it said that he had one of the largest brain collections," says Karen. "And if there’s any way for me to find that, I would like to put him back together." 60 Minutes Wednesday learned that between 1955 and 1960, the brain of every cerebral palsy child who died at Sonoma State was removed and studied. Rosemarie says she never gave them permission to take Mark's brain for research purposes. "I came from Europe after the war, where all these horrendous things happened," says Rosemarie. "I never dreamed that in this country, they would do experimenting children. Handicapped children." Unless their families claimed them, the children ended up in a community grave with the ashes of 500 other people, or buried in a empty field without a headstone to mark their passing. Theresa Murphy showed 60 Minutes Wednesday the final resting place of 1,400 Sonoma State patients. "The folks that remain here are undisturbed and available for family visitation," says Murphy. But Mark Dal Molin's family was able, at least, to spare him that fate. They had him cremated and placed his ashes in a private mausoleum.

Yet Another Statistic

2005-01-23T20:58:00.000-08:00

Interestingly enough, I have my first client whose parents are not divorced. They are both caring, loving and fully aware of their son's needs. They are in a tough situation. And yet, they find strength in each other. In my, perhaps narrow, mind this is the way things should be.

How ironic that I should get a retainer agreement with two signatures on it as I walk out the door to my home forever.

The Lawyer-Novelist is filing for divorce.

Dreams die.

I've heard that the divorce rate among parents who have kids with disabilities is high. Among parents with kids who are autistic, I've heard statistics bantered around as high as 90%.

I'm now a statistic.

Somehow, I must remember that the novel is equally as important as the practice.

I sat out in one of the most beautiful places on earth on Thursday. In May, I watched two hawks mate in mid flight. The daring and acrobatics were as amazing as they were erotic.

On Thursday, I watched two vultures circle around the same spot dreaming of the dead.

Long, But Interesting - And I Completely Disagree With The Premise

2005-01-16T23:39:00.000-08:00

My comments will be posted seperately:

Autism: What's Sex Got to do With It By: Robert Kunzig

Summary: Are you empathetic? Or are you a systemizer? That's the fundamental difference between women and men, according to a prickly new theory from psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. To him, autism is a case of the extreme male brain.

On the day after the hottest day in British history, in a small, stuffy office at the University of Cambridge, Simon Baron-Cohen’s empathy is being put to the test. He has already sent his secretary to hunt down one of the few available fans. Crawling under his desk to plug it in, he has abandoned whatever donnish dignity he might have preferred to convey. He has shut the door, in spite of the heat, to keep hallway noise from troubling my tape recorder, and we have begun our interview—only now we are both hearing the relentless hum of the fan. Whuppa whuppa whuppa whuppa. “It’s OK,” I lie. Baron-Cohen says, “I’m not comfortable with this. You’ve come such a long way.” He gets up and switches off the fan. An autistic person would not have done that. In spite of my sidelong glances at the tape recorder and my furtive efforts to nudge it closer to him, an autistic person would not have been able to see through my polite fib, put himself in my shoes and decipher my concerns. And, anyway, he wouldn’t have shared my concerns. Autistic people, says Baron-Cohen, a psychologist who has studied and treated them for 20 years, lack empathy.

But they have a surfeit of something different—what Baron-Cohen calls “systemizing ability.” They are lousy at understanding people but relatively good, he says, at making sense of the world. Some of them have a disablingly low IQ, and in such cases the systemizing may take the form of a seemingly purposeless obsession—they may stare for hours, say, at the veins of a leaf, or they may memorize train schedules or license plates. But in others, such as a mathematician Baron-Cohen knows at Cambridge who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome—a disorder at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum—that same systemizing ability can lead to work that is rewarded with fame. (Asperger’s is a mild form of autism in which individuals are able to function normally, but have difficulty reading the emotions of others.)
Low-empathizing, high-systemizing: That, in a nutshell, is Baron-Cohen’s theory of what characterizes autism. Those traits span the autism spectrum, from people who are mute and unable to function to people who find a niche in society. Moreover, Baron-Cohen’s theory embeds this autism spectrum firmly in a much larger two-dimensional continuum—one that includes all of us. The essential difference between men and women, according to Baron-Cohen, is that women are better at empathizing and men at systemizing—on average, he stresses. There are plenty of male brains in female bodies, and vice versa. There are even female autistics, but there are many more male ones: In Baron-Cohen’s theory, autism is a case of the “extreme male brain.”

In the back of Baron-Cohen’s recent book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain, you can fill out questionnaires that allow you to determine your Empathy Quotient (EQ) and Systemizing Quotient (SQ). Baron-Cohen himself can’t take the empathizing and systemizing tests, because he wrote them. But from all appearances he may be one of those fortunate individuals with a brain that is equally balanced between male and female. People who know him place him far up on the empathizing axis. “When you go into a meeting with him, you always feel good afterward,” says one graduate student. Says another, “On the one hand, he’ll coach us very closely, but on the other, he leaves us lots of space to do what we like.” Yet Baron-Cohen is pushing a theory that attempts to capture the full diversity of human brain types in a single X-Y graph—and if that isn’t male systemizing, what is? “We all have some autistic traits,” he says. “It’s just a matter of degree.”

“I am interested in knowing the path a river takes from its source to the sea. Strongly agree? Slightly agree? Slightly disagree? Strongly disagree?”—from the Systemizing Quotient questionnaire

Baron-Cohen is 45. He grew up in Golder’s Green, a middle- class and strongly orthodox Jewish neighborhood in North London. His father worked in the family menswear business; his mother taught dance. His first cousin, Sacha Baron-Cohen, is Ali G, the notorious assault comedian and on-air deflator of pompous windbags. Simon, in contrast, seems like he would be polite even to windbags. He is around six feet tall, with narrow, sloping shoulders and short, sandy hair that is beginning to show a male pattern; on the day we met he wore a blue short-sleeve shirt over khaki pants and sensible black shoes. The photo on his book jacket shows him without his wire-rim glasses, but he looks more natural with them on. His voice is mild and measured. Nothing in his bland and tidy little office—a Cezanne print, a few framed book covers—provides any obvious clues to where he is coming from.

Baron-Cohen himself offers one: He grew up with an older sister who is severely disabled, both mentally and physically. Today she lives in an institution, is confined to a wheelchair and has a very low IQ. “Yet despite that,” says Baron-Cohen, “as soon as you walk into the room, she makes eye contact, her face lights up. Even though she has no language, you feel like you’re connecting to another person.”

In other words, she is the opposite of autistic. Autism is perfectly compatible with a high IQ—yet some degree of social disconnectedness, of extreme self-centeredness, has been a core feature of the disorder ever since it was first described in the 1940s and given a name derived from the Greek word for self. Baron-Cohen first encountered it when, fresh out of Oxford with an undergraduate degree in developmental psychology, he went to work teaching autistic children one-to-one at a small school in London. It was then he realized that autism is fascinating as well as sad. “I was struck by this dissociation between intelligence and social development,” he says. “It became glaringly obvious that they are two different things.”

Thanks in part to Baron-Cohen, that understanding of autism is now widely shared—which is one reason the number of children diagnosed as autistic has risen so dramatically in the past decade. Autism was once almost invariably associated with a below-normal IQ, and its prevalence was said to be around 4 in 10,000. Nowadays, ten times that many children are diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder, many of them at the high-functioning Asperger’s end. With the explosion in diagnoses there has been an explosion in research. Geneticists are looking for genes linked to autism, which surely exist; the disease has been known to run in families. Neuroscientists are looking for the anatomical or physiological irregularities in the brain that must result from the anomalous genes.

Baron-Cohen is engaged in genetics and neurobiology, too, as codirector of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. But his background is in cognitive psychology; he seeks to identify the basic mental processes that are common to all cases of autism and that link autistic behavior to its biological roots. In 1985, while still a graduate student at University College London, he made a breakthrough discovery of one such process. With his advisers Uta Frith and Alan Leslie, he presented autistic children with dolls named Sally and Anne, and the following story: Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves the room. Anne takes the marble and hides it in her own box. Sally comes back and looks for her marble—where does she look?

A normal 4-year-old child says that Sally will look for the marble where she left it, in her basket. The child may even giggle at the joke on Sally. A kid with Down’s syndrome will get it right too. But autistic children don’t get it right. They say Sally will look in Anne’s box—because after all, that’s where the marble really is. They have no notion, Baron-Cohen discovered, of where Sally might think the marble is. They lack a “theory of mind”—abstract jargon for the simple realization, which the normal child comes to at around age 4, that other people have thoughts and intentions that may differ from his own. And that figuring those thoughts out helps him to understand what those people say and do.

Baron-Cohen later coined a term for this deficit: “mindblindness.” In 1989, Uta Frith proposed that autistic people’s inability to derive a theory of mind from their experience of the world was just one aspect of a broader deficit: the inability to draw together information so as to derive coherent and meaningful ideas. Frith’s weak central coherence theory explained why people with autism remember strings of nonsense words almost as well as they do sentences, or why they do jigsaw puzzles without the picture: They just don’t seek the pattern in a mass of details. “Their information-processing systems, like their very beings, are characterized by detachment,” Frith wrote. A rival theory, which has proponents today, attributes the narrow interest in details, as well as other symptoms of autism, to executive dysfunction, a very broad inability to plan, to control impulses and to switch attention as needed to solve a problem.
Neither weak central coherence nor executive dysfunction, though, explain why some autistic people do so well. And in the 1990s, after Baron-Cohen had moved to Cambridge and begun seeing adult Asperger’s patients, including many high achievers, at his own clinic, he became increasingly aware of that gap. Furthermore, he says, nobody seemed to be addressing another key fact: Autism affects far more boys than girls. At the Asperger’s end of the spectrum, the ratio is about 10 to 1. The sex difference, says Baron-Cohen, is “one puzzle that has been completely ignored for 50 years. I think it’s a very big clue. It’s got to be sex-linked.”
“When I read the newspaper, I am drawn to tables of information, such as football scores or stock-market indices. Strongly agree? Slightly agree? Slightly disagree? Strongly disagree?”—from the Systemizing Quotient questionnaire

In The Essential Difference, before getting to his extreme-male-brain theory of autism, Baron-Cohen combs the psychological literature for evidence that normal sex differences in empathizing and systemizing are real and rooted in biology. He expected this claim to be controversial and was surprised and a little irritated when he read, “Didn’t we always know this? Didn’t our grandmothers tell us this?” Proving with scientific data that sex differences in behavior are innate is notoriously difficult. But Baron-Cohen, understandably enough, spares his popular audience the data. Indeed, the conclusions alone do have a familiar ring. Girls like dolls, boys like trucks. Girls like to gossip, boys like to roughhouse. Girls are more verbal, boys are more spatial, right through the SATs. Girls attack one another indirectly and verbally (which requires them to know how their victim feels). Boys are direct and physical, and when they reach manhood they are far more likely to commit murder—“the ultimate in lack of empathy,” as Baron-Cohen puts it.

On the other hand, men are also far more likely to be mathematicians, physicists or engineers, as well as to be better at throwing or catching balls. Those things are all examples of systemizing, according to Baron-Cohen, by which he means “the drive to understand a system and to build one.” He defines a system as anything that takes an input and transforms it into an output according to some rule. For instance, a baseball’s trajectory depends in a predictable way on where the pitcher places his fingers—so it’s a system. Baron-Cohen’s empathizing-systemizing dichotomy is far broader than the spatial-verbal one that has long been a feature of sex-difference research.

He has done as much as anyone lately to push the evidence for sex differences in behavior right back to the womb. In one recent study, for example, his graduate student Jennifer Connellan gave 1-day-old babies a chance to show a preference for looking at Connellan’s face, at a distance of eight inches, or at a ball of the same size mounted on a stick. Connellan’s face moved naturally, the ball more mechanically.

She found that 19 of 44 boys looked at least 10 seconds longer at the ball than at the face, while 11 preferred the face and 14 had no preference. In contrast, 21 of 58 girls preferred the face, while only 10 preferred the ball and 27—the largest group—had no preference. Earlier studies had suggested that women tend to make more eye contact and are better at decoding the language of the eyes. This study, Connellan and Baron-Cohen concluded rather daringly, demonstrates “beyond reasonable doubt” that “female superiority in social ability” is “in part, biological in origin.”

What’s more, says Baron-Cohen, that superiority may have something to do with how much testosterone a female fetus is exposed to—which is much less than a male fetus with functioning testes. At a Cambridge hospital, Baron-Cohen and his colleagues have access to a bank of frozen amniotic fluid samples, taken from women who, in 1996 and 1997, underwent amniocentesis before giving birth. When the children were 12 months old, Baron-Cohen and Svetlana Lutchmaya videotaped 70 of them (1 at a time) as they played on the floor of his tiny office and counted how many times in 20 minutes each child looked up at Mom. Later, when the kids reached 18 and 24 months of age, the researchers mailed questionnaires to their parents, asking them to evaluate their child’s vocabulary. Meanwhile, the amniotic fluid revealed how much testosterone each child had been exposed to late in the first trimester, a critical time for brain development.

“When we got these results, I had one of those strange feelings, like a shiver down my spine,” Baron-Cohen writes in his book. “A few drops more of this little chemical could affect your sociability or your language ability. I found it extraordinary.” It would indeed be extraordinary if it were that simple. But to prove that more fetal testosterone (FT) is what makes boys less verbal and less interested in faces, you need to exclude the possibility that some other biological difference between the sexes is responsible. You need to show, for instance, not just that male fetuses have more testosterone than female fetuses and that boys turn out less verbal than girls but that the correlation holds within a single sex—that a boy with more testosterone will tend to have a less-evolved vocabulary than a boy with less. Baron-Cohen doesn’t yet have that evidence. In their research papers, he and Lutchmaya state that they found a within-sex correlation with fetal testosterone only in one case: Boys with less FT—but not girls—were more apt to look up at Mom.

Mild-mannered and understated as he is in person, Baron-Cohen is willing in print to draw big conclusions from small studies—but he knows he needs larger studies to confirm the findings. One of his current graduate students, Rebecca Knickmeyer, is now laboriously tracking down 3,000 children who correspond to 3,000 amniotic fluid samples in that Cambridge hospital freezer. If she succeeds, she’ll have a large enough group to say something firmer about fetal testosterone and social development—and in particular, about fetal testosterone and autism. A group that large should include around 15 children with autism. Baron-Cohen’s working hypothesis is that they will have had the highest exposure to fetal testosterone of all.
But fetal testosterone is just one possible biological mechanism for generating an extreme male brain; Baron-Cohen’s autism theory doesn’t depend on it. That theory is a psychological one, and the evidence for it is psychological. On a wide variety of tests that distinguish normal females from normal males, he says—from eye contact to language development to understanding facial expressions to intuitive physics—autistics of both genders lie beyond normal males, on the other side of the spectrum from females.

That holds in particular for Baron-Cohen’s EQ and SQ questionnaires. Though he sometimes presents them as measures of empathizing and systemizing ability, it is perhaps more accurate to see them as measures of interest. The SQ questionnaire, for example, doesn’t determine whether you are actually good at math or even at keeping football statistics and stock quotes in your head—only whether you say you are interested in those things. But it and the EQ do separate the girls from the boys from the autistics on an X-Y graph—at least in the relatively small studies that Baron-Cohen has done so far.

“I tend to notice details that others do not. Strongly agree? Slightly agree? Slightly disagree? Strongly disagree?”—from the Autism Spectrum Quotient questionnaire

People have realized for decades that autism entails a deficit in empathy; that’s not what’s new about Baron-Cohen’s theory. He and a young clinical psychologist named Ofer Golan have come up with a novel way of helping autistic people, though: a computer program. On a CD-ROM, trained actors demonstrate the facial expressions and vocal inflections that correspond to 412 distinct emotions or mental states, arranged under 24 headings, such as “sneaky” or “happy.” The idea is that people with autism can bone up on their mind-reading skills without the stress of having to attend a group-therapy session. (“One of the things they report is that they feel flooded,” says Golan.) When they do well on a quiz, the software rewards them with images of things they like—classifiable things, moving things, mechanical things or, ideally, things that are all of the above. “Stars, butterflies, things that move under a microscope,” says Golan. “And trains.”

What’s novel about Baron-Cohen’s theory of autism is how it portrays these characteristic obsessions. Autistic people and their families face enormous problems. Besides the universal social impairment, many of them suffer a devastating array of symptoms—mental, neurological, gastrointestinal—that may have nothing to do with their autism per se but nonetheless go along with it. What Baron-Cohen’s theory says is that autistic people also have something positive: They’re good at something. They’re obsessed with systems, and they’re good at systemizing, even when they don’t happen to be mathematics professors or savants.

“You know,” Baron-Cohen says, looking around his office for a ready example, “you and I just say, ‘It’s hot, we need a fan,’ and turn it on. That isn’t systemizing. A child with autism would look at the fan, and very likely would become fascinated by the rotation. What happens when light hits the blades, the kinds of reflections you get. So the child ends up staring at the fan for hours every day, because it is a form of mechanical motion that is systemizable—and that obsession gets described as purposeless. I actually think the child is doing something very intelligent.”

Which is more or less the feeling I have about Baron-Cohen as I take leave of his office and his obsession: Right or wrong, his approach to understanding autistic people and how they fit in with the rest of us is intelligent—and empathetic.

Robert Kunzig is a science writer based in Dijon, France.

Sad, but True

2005-01-14T18:03:00.000-08:00

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/01/12/EDGSMAO5GN1.DTL

Achilles, Autsim and the Novel

2005-01-13T13:13:00.000-08:00

I note with amusement the "Wierd Peep’s” comments relayed on the Chatelain’s website. Obviously, the person has read Behind the Blue Canvas once too often, given the bondage, s/m references. He or she also must live in St. Helena, because this person has certainly seen Ms. Tabios and her beloved pooch interact. I can attest that the Chatelaine actually peels grapes for her beloved Achilles. And hand feeds him wet dog food. Such is the benefit of adoration . . . woof.
#

Spent last night at a seminar on autism hosted by the Foothill Autism Alliance. The speaker was the head of the U.C. Davis M.I.N.D. Institute, Doctor Robert L. Hendren. The institute focuses exclusively on neurodevelopmental disorders, including autism. Unfortunately, the news he relayed was not good.

Autism continues to be on the rise. M.I.N.D. has examined the increase in light of claims that the increase was due to an influx of autistic children into California from other states and that the increase is due to a change in the DSM IV definition of autism. They have found that neither of these factors explains the increase. What we have is an epidemic, both in California and in the United States.

Autism continues to be a condition measured by behavior rather than by any identifiable genetic difference or organic factor. As the speaker mentioned, there are 30,000 or so genes and we’ve identified 130 that are different in people diagnosed with autism. This only confirms my lay theory that what we describe as autism is in fact multiple differences that show similar behavioral traits.

Autism continues to be non-treatable by drugs for the most part. The speaker went through a pharmacologist's dictionary of drugs – from SSRIs to Dexidrine and Ritalin, to Resperdal to Risperidone, to Lithim to Topomax, none of them show significant improvement in the overall symptoms, though they do help certain individuals with some symptoms.

Interestingly, however, there is some promise being shown by a non-drug therapy. Injections of Methyl B12 seem to decrease many of the negative behaviors in autistic children according to anecdotal accounts. The institute is going to study this one more thoroughly. But, so many therapies have started out with great anecdotal evidence, such as secretin, that most remain skeptical.

Another problem is the near impossibility of doing double blind testing on children or isolating one treatment method. How does a scientist tell a parent to stop all therapies for a year so that said scientist can test the effectiveness of a drug?

Fortunately, the M.I.N.D. Institute continues its research and remains well funded.

#

I have not mentioned the novel in a while. Frankly, it had not been going well. I found editing to be about as pleasurable as sticking needles under my fingernails. Until yesterday. And suddenly, every thing clicked. My characters started to talk to me. Frankly, I no longer even saw my fingers on the keyboard. I saw the action taking place between the characters and somehow the descriptions made it into the computer. Was a very exciting time. Getting into that zone is one of the most pleasurable feelings I've ever had.

When Technology Fails Us

2005-01-09T13:17:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in front of my computer in an absolute panic. My email is down. Earthlink has no eta on when it will be back up. They do, however, thank me for my patience. Instead or replying "Patience my ass . . ." I started thinking about how technology has changed communications and relationships.

I recall that when I started practicing law, there was no email. Facsimile was relatively new and my letterhead actually still had a teletype address. Perhaps it is simply the old guy mis-remembering, but there seemed to be a little more civility in the practice of law. There was more face to face, there was less of a "do it now" "24/7" mentality.

I went to lunch with a friend recently. He is a partner at a mid sized firm here in Los Angeles. He has a blackberry. Half of lunch was spent watching him respond to emails with his thumbs. Looking around, I realized that this has become the norm - most of the people at other tables were doing the same thing. The inherent rudeness of this seemed to have been lost on the participants.

I have also noticed that clients with whom I have never met face to face are more demanding of my time. This is similar to my days in "big firms" where I worked with attorneys across the country. They, cut off from face to face contact, assumed that I should be there when they were and when I was not, the complaints were loud and immediate. However, those times when I met these attorneys or stayed in New York for an extended period of time and worked side by side with them, the missing element of humanity was found and the subsequent email relationship went much more smoothly.

On the other hand, email has allowed me to expand my friendships. I regularly communicate with poets and writers whom I have never met. Email has allowed me to redevelope a relationship with a dear friend with whom I had lost touch.

So, in the end, I'm still wondering - has email made for a more or less civilized society?

Random thoughts while watching Los Angeles float into the sea. Apologies if this fails to amuse.

Help for All

2005-01-05T13:30:00.000-08:00

Tsunami Families with Autism

[From an announcement by Unlocking Autism.]

We are sure that you are as saddened as we are viewing the devastation that has taken place around the Indian Ocean area of our world. The loss in lives as well as material necessities is unbelievable.

At Unlocking Autism our hearts go out to the parents of children with autism in those affected areas whose world is even more confused because of the lack on continuity and stability. The autism community is worldwide and does not know the boundaries of the borders of the United States.

To this end we are encouraging our community to reach out with the generosity that we have seen in the past and in a concerted effort, together, make donations that will be directed specifically to the children with autism and their families in Indonesia. Unlocking Autism has two UA Representatives in Jakarta, Indonesia who have volunteered to find parents of children with autism whose families were specifically affected by the earthquake and tsunamis and direct the funds raised to them to help them more quickly rebuild their lives.

The National Autism Association is joining us in this effort. If you know of a specific family in this region that was affected, please write Nancy Cale at NANCALE@aol.com. Otherwise, please stay tuned for forthcoming information on how you can help these families. Once we have been able to find them we will send out a call to you for help.

[Editor’s note: we have some readers from that part of the world and subsequently they will get this message. –LS]

Random Thoughts

2004-12-09T11:09:00.000-08:00

So I want to stress the importance of the wish . The real magical element is the wish , and if we don't know the wish then we stumble about and we accept entrapment because we don't really know what we are going towards. Then we have no strength, we have no inspirational visions.

Anais Nin

Took this off of Pelican Dreaming this morning. Seemed to resonate with me for a lot of reasons.

Depression is a devistating illness that I have experienced first hand over the years. The cost to the individual and to society is staggering. Fortunately, society has learned to accept that depression is a medical condition. I say this because 4 of my clients are also battling depression to one degree or another, either as the primary diagnosis or as a secondary. They are each fortunate because their parents are quite attuned to the devastation that this illness can cause. They are also getting the services that they need, thanks to their great parents (with a little help from yours truly).

With this little blurb, I am going to take a break from the Lawyer Novelist for a bit. I'm not ending it, I just want to be able to make this a positive site and I'm just not able to do that right now.

Dodged a Bullet

2004-11-18T22:42:00.000-08:00

The combined Senate/House bill is a done deal and will likely be passed tomorrow.

There is a lot of bad in the bill. But it is a lot less disastrous than attorneys who represent kids had been prepared for.

Still, this soon to be law hurts the disabled.

But it could have been worse.

I want to thank a staffer who listened and I want to thank a congressman who helped. The staffer was willing to pick up the phone at a moment's notice, was willing to listen and was willing to let me know what was going on in Washington. She deserves to be recognized. And as soon as I get over the exhaustion of having battled the battle, I'll let her boss know.

Mickie Work

Staffer for Joe Wilson, Congressman from South Carolina. Mickie, you deserve to be praised to the stars. Thank you so much for the last three days.

I must sleep now.

Kids have lost rights, but they are still protected. Just as Ms. Work told me they would be on Monday.

Now For Something Completely Literary, A Man With Three . . .

2004-11-16T18:28:00.000-08:00

This blog is the Lawyer Novelist. However, there has been far more lawyer than novelist lately. That said, I do still read and, on occasion write, non-legal stuff. On the reading front, check out the Chatelain's blog today. It is a very nice short story, but sort of ho hum when compared with the raw eroticism and rich detail of -pick your story- in her great collection "Behind the Blue Canvas".

I always find it amazing to see the development of an artist, and this comparison is worth the look. I am looking forward to seeing Eileen publish her other recently excavated short stories so as to compare her development as a prose writer. Having spoken with her about her prose, I am always amazed at her (gasp) self deprecation over her prose. Completely unwarranted in my opinion. E should be as preening over her short stories as much as she does her poetry.

Another incomparable read is The Kite Runner by Kaled Hosseini. Perhaps all youse literary types read it already, but I am very taken with this book, which I picked up in the Burbank airport last week. It is the story of growing up in Afghanistan prior to the Soviet invasion and the horrible price that the characters pay as a result of the upheaval caused by that event. But it is more than that, much more. The author is truly talented and the story is captivating. For you poets, I'll give the following passage that made me chuckle; both from personal experience and from my assumption that others of you have been there, done that and got the t-shirt:

"Of course, marrying a poet was one thing, but fathering a son who preferred burying his face in poetry books to hunting . . .well, that wasn't how Baba had envisioned it, I suppose. Real men didn't read poetry-and God forbid they should ever write it! Real men-real boys-played soccer just as Baba had when he had been young."

That hit home for me. How 'bout you?

Speaking of t-shirts, got my official "Easy Ride for Autism" t-shirt in the mail tonight. Didn't get mine at the October 14 motorcycle ride for some reason. Black, of course. Matches my Harley. Will get much use.

116 of Y'all an Not One Republican?

2004-11-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

The Lawyer Novelist hops out of his black pickup truck, takes off his official "W" baseball cap and hangs it lovingly on the ballistic nylon stock of the shotgun ensconced on his gun rack. He pulls out a cigar, snips it with his clippers, strikes a match from the heal of his shark skin cowboy boots and stares at the stranger in front of him.

"116 of you?"

The stranger nods.

"All special ed. lawyers?"

The stranger nods.

"And not one Republican?"

The stranger nods.

The Lawyer Novelist puffs lovingly on the now lit stogy. Blue smoke surrounds his face. "Well, ya got one now." The Lawyer Novelist looks the stranger up and down. "Are you wearing Berkenstocks?"

The stranger nods.

The Lawyer Novelist puffs and continues to stare at the stranger. "Guess I'd better make some phone calls," he says finally. The Lawyer Novelist wipes some mud off of the NRA sticker on the side window of his truck. He pulls out his cell phone and starts dialing 202 area code numbers. . .

#

The House and Senate conferees are very close to finalizing the IDEA reauthorization and hope to have it done by November 17. The Bill does much to hurt the rights of children with disabilities. It makes schools less accountable while, oddly, giving them more money. In effect, the Republicans are handing money to the very organizations that have worked against them for 20 plus years and saying "don't bother to tell us what you did with the funds."

I don't get it. But I'm doing my part to try to stop it. Or at least reduce the damage.

Not sure I understand this one.

2004-11-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

You are Sharon Olds, master of the everyday,
explorer of the female body and family.

Which 20th Century Poet Are You?
brought to you by

Tom? Not sure I understand this one. Though looks like I'm a shoo in for your next poetry contest.

How to Disarm an Atomic Bomb

2004-11-13T15:43:00.000-08:00

A frenetic week that was supposed to be something of a vacation.
Napa, San Francisco, Palo Alto and Simi Valley.

Memories of my drive up and back through California’s “red” counties:

A hundred acres of freshly plowed dirt, the parallel lines perfect in their sameness. In the middle of this land, a man stood smoking a pipe, his blue flannel shirt shifting in the breeze. No truck or tractor in view, he looked like some sort of tobacco infused toadstool newly sprouted from the tilled earth.

A pink and blue sign bearing the words “ABORTION KILLS” that served as a tombstone for two stray dogs crushed by passing freeway traffic.

Massive walls of cotton the exact width, depth and length of cargo containers. They looked like semi’s on some marshmallow-land freeway.

Radio noise. Salsa Music, Marenge Music and 6 other styles unfamiliar to me. Country western music. Gospel discussions, Bible Readings and reruns of Rush Limbaugh competed for my attention. But Fresno’s “Alternative Rock” 104.1 stole me away with some of the most pounding, driving music I have heard in a long time. Foo Fighters, Chili Peppers, Velvet Revolver, Hole, Evanescence. . . and U 2. I’m no critic, but U 2’s upcoming album is going to be as big as Joshua Tree. I turned the music up so loud that the entire car became one big subwoofer and it became painful to touch anything metallic.

I realized that, even though I vote like a denizen of “red” America, it is an alien planet. And the miles passed quickly as I sat the cruise control to 90 to get away from that place.

In Napa:

Healing -Tears, wine and the cocooning comfort of Galatea have closed a gash in my heart. By Thursday, I no longer dreamt of a three year old boy in a beige cowboy hat driving a Humvee into oblivion.

Rewriting twelve pages on the novel. Would have been more, but the laptop did it’s typical dying swan. I’ve got a proposed logo for Dell Computers:

“DUDE! YOU BOUGHT A DELL? WHAT WERE YOU SMOKIN?”

Pondering love. Love and death, love dying, love in rocky soil that can never bear fruit. Then I realized that the best grapes in Napa are grown in rocky soil . . .

Checking off one of the things on my to do list - An interview with the Culinary Institute of America. Thought about chucking the law business to become a chef. Then I discovered that I made as much in the first 6 weeks of my law practice as a chef earns in a year.

Realizing that having children precludes some of the life paths I would like to walk down during the second half of my existence.

In Simi Valley:

In the middle of my week I had to fly down to meet with school officials who, when forced to the table, did the right thing. I longed for a megaphone to stick into the face of the school principal to ask “WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?” I’m still dumbfounded at school district stonewalling.

In San Francisco:

Fantastic sushi for lunch.

The best Moroccan food I’ve ever eaten. Thank you, Tom. You are a gracious person. It is great to see that nice guys finish first sometimes.

Realizing that it would be hard for me to live there given the noise factor. But at the same time envying those who do. It is a city beyond compare.

In Palo Alto:

Discovering, once again, that I put 40 to my stern a while ago, to paraphrase Jimmy Buffet. Had heart palpitations at a poetry reading and wondered if I should get a hold of a cardiologist. Then I realized I was sitting next to two talented, witty and beautiful women. It’s been some time since that has happened.

Eileen - Gave her typically profound reading and commentary. She also demonstrated once again two things I learned long ago (hint – 25 years ago, not 20). 1. Her literary knowledge is boundless. 2. Don’t try to debate with her. She’ll slice you up . . . and do it with wit, charm and stainless steel.

Barbara Reyes – Ebullient and effusive with a raw, street-wise bit of attitude thrown in. Then she got behind the podium and became more so. Do yourselves a favor and see Barbara read. She is a good poet who has the potential to become a great poet. And her delivery is a lot of fun to observe.

In La Canada:

Grounded and revived, I return to So. Cal. to push that rock up that hill once more.

And now I’m going to learn to play the flute.

And how was your week?