Autpocalypse

Content: graphic descriptions of child abuse, child murder, death imagery, and structural ableism, racism, and cissexism

In 2013, Alex Spourdalakis was brutally murdered by his mother and godmother. They drugged him. They stabbed him repeatedly. They slit his wrists. They cut until they had nearly severed one of his hands.

This story, as we so frequently encounter it, is not about Alex. It is, rather, about his mother and godmother. This story is about those noble and tireless caregivers who had it so rough — who had it so rough because Alex was autistic.

This is not a new story. I read about Alex’s death and his caregivers’ autistic-life-induced suffering, and my body summons the visceral gag reflex, that tongue-fuzzing, gut-gnawing, blood-rushing memory of Melissa Stoddard. Melissa Stoddard was brutally murdered. Her stepmother tied her in four-point restraints and duct-taped her mouth shut. Melissa, totally covered in bruises at 11 years old, suffocated to death. Melissa was tortured for weeks and was then murdered.

When I think about Alex, I think about Melissa; when I think about Melissa, I think about London McCabe, or Nicholas Richett, or Jaelen and Faith Edge, or… the names would go on forever.

As many autistic bloggers have noted, these stories about caregiver murder are often justified through appeals to parental exhaustion and lack of social support. The murder of Alex Spourdalakis is in many ways a case exemplar of such rhetoric. Prior to killing her son, Dorothy Spourdalakis had famously sought out Andrew Wakefield of anti-vaccination fame. When Alex was facing a psychiatric hospital stay, Wakefield filmed his visit with Alex, at one point pleading, “This is not the future for Alex. It should never be the future for any child, this condition.” Wakefield’s reference here, to condition, is meant multiply: he is not only linking autism to what he calls “grim prospects,” but he is linking residential care to a status worse than death. The offensive documentary Who Killed Alex Spourdalakis? serves another case in point: When parents murder their autistic children, they are not the ones murdering, for autism unto itself is death. One cannot murder a corpse.

The argument that autism is a kind of living death — and thereby worse than death (because it is symbolic death, a death in which organs and body meat keep churning while the external world remains beyond grasp) — fuels homicidal logics. Media reports of caregivers murdering autistic people have become so commonplace that in 2012 the Autistic Self Advocacy Network instituted an annual Day of Mourning in remembrance of disabled victims. Each year, the list of murders grows longer.

More often than not, autism organizations authorize caregiver murder by using such stories as ploys for raising funds. (Notable exemplars are Autism Speaks and the Autism Society of America, both of which are led by non-autistic individuals.) The feature image of this blog post, an Autism Speaks sign that spouts a false 80% divorce rate among parents of autistic children, emblemizes the supposed horrors of autism: We autistics fuck up all institutions with our living lifelessness. We, the neuroqueer, threaten your marriages and your reproductive futures. 

In what ways is the autistic made absent — both rhetorically and pathologically — in these death-wishing stories? What humanity or agency does the autistic possess when hir existence is figured as apocalyptic, as a fate worse than death? How do these stories take on different, more violent meanings when their autistic subjects are persons of color, queer, nonspeaking, and/or poor? Toward whose bodyminds are we compelled to pay attention?

As a means of reinforcing these points, I offer two caregiver narratives, narratives in which parents relate — and normalize — fantasies of murdering their autistic children. I focus on these two narratives in particular because, while each represents a distinct moment in time (1987 and 2006, respectively), they perpetuate the all-too-common refrain that autistic life is worse than autistic death. They are simultaneously historical and contemporary, reinforcing how little autism metaphors have changed since Bettelheim’s prisoners of the fortress. The first story I share hails from an influential parent narrative on biomedical approaches to autism, and it is on this one which I will linger longest. Mary Callahan’s Fighting For Tony, published in 1987, relates a mother’s journey to recover her young son from autism by means of food deprivation. Importantly, Callahan’s narrative was well-publicized at the time: She appeared on the Today Show, Oprah, and Phil Donahue. And, more notably, her book was featured prominently on the autism conference circuit, having been lauded by Bernard Rimland, founder of the Autism Society of America (Rimland, ARRI, 1987; 1994). In short, Callahan’s book was roundly praised and served as an ominous forebear for parent narratives of later decades (in particular, Jenny McCarthy’s work).

What’s relevant to our conversation here, however, is Callahan’s graphic and sustained focus on filicide: The first half of her book squarely centers on her desire to murder her two-year-old son. Her descriptions are among the most graphic and premeditated I’ve yet to encounter among parent memoirs — and they are hard to endure, hard to digest and listen to. Nonetheless, I share these details not only so that we might bear witness to abuses that disabled people routinely endure; but I also share these details because, when disability enters the fold, rarely are these violences considered violences. They are understandable, inspirational, and completely unconcerned with the perspectives, feelings, and lives of autistic people.

In her memoir, Callahan’s disaffection toward her son quickly takes on violent imagery. In one such moment of contemplated violence, Callahan describes a family visit to a friend’s ranch in New Mexico. While there, Tony, who is two years old, will not sleep. Callahan doses him with Benadryl, which takes no effect, and Tony screams into the early hours of the night, keeping the entire house — hosts and all — awake. Reaching a breaking point, Callahan writes,

I was so angry that I walked over to the crib and slammed Tony down onto the mattress. He popped up, screaming in my face, without missing a beat. I slammed him down again. I started talking quietly through clenched teeth: ‘You stupid, fucking little brat. Don’t you ever shut up? Don’t you know I can’t stand you anymore?’ (p. 51)

The following night ends up being a replica of the previous one: Tony screams through the night and keeps the entire household awake with him. Callahan’s violence toward her son transposes from verbal outcries to baby-shaking and threats upon her son’s life, as she tells her friend, “[If Tony] keeps us up again tonight, I’ll kill him.” (p. 52) Callahan’s statement about killing her two-year-old son isn’t meant to be taken metaphorically in this context — she means exactly to articulate a kind of murderous desperation, the sort that can only be induced by an entity as relentless as autism. When she and her husband, Rich, later debrief on Tony’s night-time screaming and Callahan’s default role as autism caretaker-slash-supermom, Rich confesses to his own set of homicidal thoughts: He claims that he does not enter Tony’s room, nor does he spank his son, out of fear that he won’t be able to stop himself from beating his child to death (p. 52).

Instead of self-reflecting in horror to her husband’s statements or even her own, Callahan proceeds further in her plotting. Soon, their toddler’s screams become the least of his problems. Tony begins head-banging, severely bruising his face. He resembles, Callahan notes, “a battered angel” (p. 55) — a none-too-subtle allusion to a son she views as already-deceased. Days later, after Tony has a meltdown in the grocery store, Callahan resorts to physical violence as she places her children in the car: “I strapped Tony in just as calmly [as I had done for his sister]. Then I slapped him across the face three times. It felt good to see those red marks on those fat little cheeks. God damn him” (p. 56).

At this point, Callahan comes to the realization that she is escalating. She has gone from privately cursing at her son to publicly beating and berating him. Moreover, her physical abuse has grown calmer, more methodical. What began as unplanned and momentary lapses in judgment have now transformed into measured and collected decisions to injure — even fatally — her son: “Next time I might not stop at slapping him. The next time might be that afternoon” (p. 58). And yet, instead of seeking external help, Callahan resists it, believing that institutionalization would be worse than murdering her son, a point on which her husband Rich agrees. In the midst of their exhaustion, the couple fantasizes about a life without their son:

“I’d rather see him dead than strapped down,” Rich said quietly.

Instead of horror, I felt a slowly growing sense of relief. There was an alternative after all.

“We could kill him.” I was the first to say it.

“We could,” Rich answered, looking down at his hands. “You could get something at work, couldn’t you? An injection of something?”

“Yeah, but it would show up on autopsy. And if the drug didn’t, the needle hole would.”

We sat in silence a while longer.

“He could have an accident, like drowning in the bathtub or something,” Rich said.

“Yeah, that might work. But do you think you could really do it? Do you think you could keep holding him underwater even when he struggled? I don’t know if I could.”

“I could if I had to. I’d just picture him strapped down in a nuthouse and I could do it.”

“We’d go through life knowing we’ve killed our own son.”

“We’d know we did it for him.” (pp. 58-59)

I’m not sure that any language can accurately convey the viciousness of Callahan and her husband’s conversation. Ultimately, Tony “recovers” from autism (i.e., Tony starts imitating neurotypicality well enough to allow his parents to convince themselves he’s not autistic). Consequently, Callahan expresses relief at not needing to kill him — intimating that had Tony remained autistic, she would have done everything in her power to ensure that he no longer remained alive. If we think back to Andrew Wakefield’s videotaped contention that autism represents “no future,” we can see in Callahan’s work a seedling for murder fantasies (and murder realities) yet to come. 

It is important to remember that Fighting for Tony is an early biomed book — it represented, in many ways, a proto-Mother Warriors. Ultimately, through biomedical treatments, we are led to believe that Tony has become non-autistic and thus alive and human once again. Callahan is Tony’s savioristic Andrew Wakefield: she has recovered her son, and thus no longer has need to kill him. Callahan claims Tony’s descent into autism was caused by a “cerebral milk allergy” and that Tony’s “miraculous” recovery was facilitated by eliminating milk from his diet. 

Though Callahan’s was arguably among the earliest parent memoirs to authorize biomedical views of autism via the figure of autism-as-living death, Callahan was certainly not the first person to claim a causal relation between diet and autism, nor was she the first to conflate autism with living death. A decade before her book, for example, then-ASA president Mary Akerly wrote the preface to a single case study on allergies, fasting, and autism. Authored by an autistic child’s parents and published in the Journal of Autism and Childhood Schizophrenia, the authors claimed that their son’s autistic behaviors were the result of numerous atypical allergies to foods and chemical additives (Fields, 1976). Not only were the scientific claims of their child’s allergy-induced autism dubious, but the methods by which they claimed to have tested and treated their child were termed “cruel” and “inhumane” by a number of experts and parents (Hart, 1993). Among other things, the parents in question hospitalized their 12-year-old son and made him fast for five full days. After five days, they began reintroducing foods, one at a time, and then medicated the child to induce purging (supposedly done so as not to “taint” the results from subsequent reintroduced foods). As with Callahan, the parents in question legitimated risking their autistic child’s health and life because autism, to them, posed the worst of all fates.

Shortly after the book’s publication in 1987, Callahan defended her filicidal fantasies, abusive methods, and alarmist representations of her autistic son. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, Callahan claimed, “[We] have nothing to be ashamed of…. What we felt was normal” (Gramza, p. G7, 1987).

Were we to fast-forward two (or even three) decades, we would see that these fantasies persist unabated, often transcending fantasy and reaching deadly completion; and, so too do broader, non-autistic audiences reinforce the “normalcy” of wishing one’s autistic child were dead. In 2006, Autism Speaks began actively promoting their newly released documentary, Autism Every Day. Alison Tepper Singer, then-Executive Vice President of Autism Speaks, gained notoriety for her role in this film, which features autistic children screaming and acting violently. In a peak moment, Singer, while in the presence of her autistic daughter, claimed that she had at one point fantasized about driving her child off the George Washington Bridge, but only decided against it because of her other, neurotypical daughter. Present-day, Singer directs the Autism Science Foundation, and has notably never retracted her death-wishing comments — indeed, at many junctures defending the sentiment.

That same year, Harry Slatkin, a board member of Autism Speaks, claimed that he at times hoped his son would drown in their backyard pond, noting, “you wouldn’t want him to suffer like this all his life.” And, in an August 2006 segment on Good Morning America, Autism Every Day producer Lauren Thierry claimed that Singer and Slatkin’s admissions were common feelings among autism parents: “I have heard Alison’s sentiment echoed many, many times, because that is how deep the despair can go, and that is how isolated autism can make a family.”

Autistic people have said a great deal about parental fantasies of murder, much like they have said a great deal on the idea that autism is a living death. Despite the wealth of autistic-authored discourse on autism — spoken, written, signed, gesticulated, ticced, stimmed — non-autistic people continually fail to listen to autistic people. In these parental narratives, autistic children are physically present; their bodies are tangibly and rhetorically made visible through narration and image. And yet, we do not know these autistic people — not because they are autistic and shrouded from communication, but because anything short of “living death” would contradict culturally authorized narratives of autism. We are blight, and ours is a condition meant for “the history books,” to invoke a quote from Autism Speaks.

Caregiver murder fantasies are authorized not only by the autism-as-living-death metaphor, but by a set of intersected oppressions. It is not coincidental that Callahan, McCarthy, Singer, Slatkin, and other highly visible parents-slash-martyrs are white, affluent, and presumably cis/hetero. Autism’s tragedies are inseparable from racist, classist, and hetero/cis/centric values that privilege whiteness, reproduction, and economic mobility.  

And so again I ask: What humanity or agency does the autistic possess when hir existence is figured as apocalyptic, as a fate worse than death? It is impossible to center autistic people in any conversation when we are figured as ghosts, husks, corpses, and rot. Our metaphorical living lifelessness takes material form as slow death:

— autistic immigrants and refugees are routinely denied social services — or even entry itself — because autism is so terrible. Autism kills more than children. Autism kills non-autistic people’s checkbooks.

— autistic people are pitted against the broader public health, shown as exemplars of society’s decay — we are what happens when technology goes dystopic (cell phone towers and television cause us!); we are what happens when children receive vaccines (better to die from meningitis than to become autistic!); we are what happens when women are “allowed” to choose their partners (selective mating will kill us all! control the gene pool! bring back the social customs of the 1950s!); we are what happens when transpeople are granted the rights, humanity, and justice due them (transness and autism are correlated! gender-nonconformity will turn children into Neuroqueer Agenda Zombies! hormones! something about hormones and The Children!); we are what happens when institutions are dismantled, when classrooms are de-segregated, when workplaces welcome us (autism rubs off on other people! young children mimic anti-social behavior! autistic people are violent!);

–autistic people are what happens when anything goes wrong. We are a common metaphor in economic theory, psychoanalytic theory, literary theory, cinematic theory, and philosophical theory. Non-autistics are very creative with their invocations of our inner deadness.

autistic people of color are habitually profiled, arrested, beaten, raped, tortured, secluded, ignored, underserved, imprisoned, and murdered. Racism proffers the lie that autistics of color are doubly (or multiply) dead in their aliveness.

— autistic people who are non-speaking are systemically treated as everything the word vegetable has to offer disabled people. It is autism’s fault, of course, that non-autistic others would think of an autistic person as a vegetable. Why change social structures when you can cut into a vegetable?

— cut, cut, cut.

— how can one injure a corpse?

Popular discourse on autism forwards alarmist logics. More people are becoming autistic; therefore, more people are becoming non-people. Zombies, vegetables, tsunamis, and changelings: When autistic people are positioned as here but not really here, as present but absent, as living while dead, then it is all-too-easy to suggest that murdering us does the whole world a kindness.

Nipple play

Content: psychiatric abuse

I am thinking about a field. This field is filled with pinwheels. I stim in this field. Hands wrenching, full and swaying body movements, words that are cool and crisp, words like pulchritudinous, all echo-localized, parallelism is repetition but repetition isn’t always parallel, pinwheels, pinwheels, pinwheels.

I am lately working on a book project, a book project about the neurologically queer and how we crip rhetorical traditions. In support of my book project, I’ve had to read a great deal of psychiatric literature. By psychiatric literature, I mean the kind of literature that beholds the mentally disabled as though we are animal crackers. The gaze, the psychoanalytic gaze: Autistics are anthropomorphic cookies, and doctors will probe and digest our body parts, piece by piece.

Somewhere in the field, a pinwheel crumbles under the weight of painful metaphor.

Daily reading, part one. Ivar Lovaas constructs his shock room in the late 1950s. He lines the floor with electrodes. He sends in a child patient, a child patient with a flappy, swaying, stimming body. He flips a switch. The child convulses. She learns a lesson, until she stims again, until she finds her neuroqueer self wiggling and spinning in clinical spaces with shocking gazes.

Pamela, an autistic child, writhes from being shocked
Photo from Screams, Slaps, & Love, 1965, Life magazine

Daily reading, part two. Frances Tustin in 1972 declares that the nipple is an autistic object. I first read Tustin while in the field, my hands roaming, fingers tangled in rubber bands. “The nipple is an autistic object,” she writes. Several years earlier, Bruno Bettelheim analyzed drawings from his “feeble-minded” child patients, in search of nipples. Nipples he found. Nipples, and breasts, black breasts and white breasts, racialized interpretations of autistic drawings, nipples, finger paintings plentiful in nipples, oh, the rhetoricity of the nipple.

A child's drawing. The whole page is covered in dense, thatched black lines, except for an empty spot of white toward the top of the page -- what Bettelheim presumed was a nipple.
From The Empty Fortress. Bettelheim captioned the drawing with the following text: “Drawing probably symbolic of the ‘white’ breast — that is, the good one.”

I am stimming as I read of these things, clinicians and their autistic objects. Tustin suggests that stimming, that autistic gesture writ large, is a kind of psychogenic nipple play. Autistics are always searching for breasts, for that which we supposedly lost. While I ponder Tustin in the field, I channel SAT prep books. Breasts are to autistics as car keys are to neurotypicals. Analogies abound. I imagine Tustin rummaging through a pocketful of breasts, a fruitless search. I look at the dust jacket on my book, where a reviewer in 1995 notes that Tustin’s work is still relevant “today.” How long must we dwell in “today”?

Part three, 1967. Bertram Ruttenberg and Enid Wolf declare that echolalia — the repetition of words and phrases — is a kind of autistic autoeroticism. (Or, is autistic autoeroticism redundant?) Nipple, I mutter to myself. Nipple, nipple, nipple. I think about arousal and the so-called prison that is autism, a prison so-called by breast-obsessed shrinks and the proteges of B.F. Skinner. I think about rhetorical arousal, erotic rhetorics, autistic eros, the electric current that narrates our history and our present. I wonder about the nipple as an autistic placeholder: the meaning in movement, the queering of pinwheels in a field, where autistic objects of all sorts commune.

A field of pinwheels
Sexy pinwheels spin in a field. But maybe these pinwheels symbolize breasts. If they were taller breasts — erm, pinwheels — they might even make electricity.

Self-indulgent narratives

I’ve been reading a lot of stuff lately — and by stuff, I mean several articles that, per academic ritual, I should probably cite right here — stuff that deals with the role of the author in a narrative, with identity and positionality, with the influence of the researcher upon the researched, with authorial interpretation.

I’ve noticed a lot of theoretical overlaps between the readings from my independent study on autistic narratives/rhetorics and the readings from my Race & Literacy course. All of these readings, whether implicitly or explicitly, deal with issues of representation and community, as well as issues of authorship and subjectivity. To borrow a question from Jacqueline Jones Royster, who can/should/does speak for/with/about whom?

Royster’s question seems especially pertinent in the writings and conference presentations of Paul Heilker, who, in claiming that autism is a rhetoric, is careful to delineate between autism communities and autistic communities — the former composed largely of parents and charities, the latter composed largely of individuals on the spectrum. These two communities, as one can probably gather from the unrelenting snark that has come to constitute my blog, are “warring” factions. Both claim representation rights; both claim to be voices of/for/with/about autism. The Autism Society of America claims to be the voice of autism; Autistics.org claims to be the real voice of autism (Heilker, CCCC 2008).

Interestingly, the primary audience of most large autism charities isn’t the autistic individual: by and large, their audience seems to include everyone but the autistic individual. Parents, teachers, supporters, doctors, researchers, students, any NT with spare pocket change — these are the bodies that such organizations strive to reach. Thus, ASA, for example, assumes its role as the voice of autism, rather than the autistic voice, because they imply that autistics, whether speaking or non-speaking, cannot autonomously self-advocate — for autistics to do so would go against the DSM IV criteria, or somesuch nonsense. Moreover, in highlighting autistic testimonials on their home page, ASA suggests that individuals on the spectrum need an NT voice behind theirs in order to “function.” We autistics are high-functioning only inasmuch as we have NTs to brace us: note the lining up of ASD narratives next to narratives of NT mothers and NT speech pathologists. (Of course, I should here note that ASA is a lot more “ethical” in its operations and approach toward autistics than, say, Autism Speaks and other cure-autism conglomerates. Still, note the scare quotes around “ethical.”)

Voice and representation are likewise large issues in writings that concern race and literacy. Morris Young, in Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship, contends that the literacy narrative, as a genre, has the potential to allow Others to project their voices, to position themselves as individuals against their communities, to analyze the hegemonic functions of literacy, to “become minor” in the process of writing. The dominant theme in Young, as well as in John Duffy’s Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community, involves the relationship between self and society.

Autism is derived from the Greek word autos, which means self. Kanner, Asperger, and Bettelheim frequently described autistics as being inherently self-centered, trapped in their own worlds, imprisoned in their asocial bodies. Simon Baron-Cohen propels lack of theory of mind as an accurate description of autistic selfhood, this inability to empathize and recognize the intentions of others serving as a large marker of autistic existence. Ann Jurecic and Lisa Zunshine, both scholars in English Studies, also herald theory of mind in relation to autistic identity, bringing up issues of mindblindness and autistic egocentrism.

If autistics are seen as self-centered, self-absorbed, and self-isolating individuals, it’s little wonder that the idea of an autistic community — in contrast to an autism community — seems paradoxical. How can a bunch of self-absorbed selves form a community? How can a bunch of self-absorbed selves relate to a bunch of self-absorbed selves? How can a bunch of autos, autistic voices meld into a (semi)unified, real autistic voice?

I think it’s important to note that these questions largely stem from autism discourse, rather than autistic discourse, and perhaps this is why so many spectrumites loathe “person first” terminology, preferring “autistic” to “person with autism.” The phrase “person with autism” suggests that, should the autism be removed, a “real” person will emerge — without any trace of that asocial, autos garbage. It denies the intermingling of the autistic autos and bodily self. It denies the intermingling of autos and voice.

All of this rambling brings me back to the title of my post, to the idea of the self-indulgent narrative. In Literacies, Experiences, and Technologies, Sibylle Gruber writes,

I would like to argue that I don’t use the personal for capital investment, that I don’t use the personal as a mirror reflection of a self or culture, that I don’t slot myself or others as being able to speak for a group, and that I don’t disembody the personal…. But it is also important to acknowledge that personal narrative — or self-reflexivity — can become ‘self-indulgent or narcissistic’ …. In other words, despite conscious efforts not to use identity politics for individual gain, it is often difficult to escape the unconscious or subconscious tendencies to justify, defend, and promote an individual, albeit theoretically founded and supported, perspective. (22)

Throughout her book, Gruber positions herself, as a foreign researcher, in the contexts of those she researches. Gruber contends that personal biases are a real part of research, and she thusly justifies her use of personal narrative. Yet, she also fears narcissism, that her narratives about her ESL status are misplaced, autos-ridden tidbits of the personal.

Similarly, in “Tender Organs, Narcissism, and Identity Politics,” Tobin Siebers writes of the ways in which personal narratives of disability are often conflated with narcissism:

It is wrong to study what you are. (41)

But I also think that people with disabilities need to resist the suggestion that their personal stories are somehow more narcissistic than those of able-bodied people. If we cannot tell our stories because they reflect badly on our personalities or make other people queasy, the end result will be greater isolation. (50)

Now we of the tender organs need to introduce the reality of disability into the public imagination. And the only way to accomplish this task is to tell stories in a way that allows people without disabilities to recognize our reality and theirs as a common one. For only in this way will we be recognized politically. (51)

I worry that my writings about autism are, or will be, perceived as the self-indulgent, narcissistic writings of a pathological person with autism. As a I read over my previous post, a post that is rife with the personal, I wonder about what I should strive to be. Is this a personal blog or an academic blog? When the autism community reads my writing, do they immediately believe that I lack a theory of mind? Am I too autos for the masses — do I need to de-auticize myself in order to be seen as a voice of/for/with/about autism? In what ways can I be an autistic voice who writes for/with/about/to/at the voice of autism? How do we begin to bridge the realities of autistics into the public imagination of autism?

Paul Heilker and Jason King suggest that the end to the autism/autistic war — or, more likely, the beginnings of an autism/autistic truce — may involve Krista Ratcliffe’s concept of rhetorical listening. Rhetorical listening, unlike empathy, invokes understanding commonalities and differences. Ratcliffe claims that

understanding means listening to discourses not for intent but with intent — with the intent to understand not just the claims but the rhetorical negotiations of understanding as well. To clarify this process of understanding, rhetorical listeners might best invert the term understanding and define it as standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all our particular — and very fluid — standpoints. (28)

Notably, Ratcliffe does not claim that the solution to life’s problems necessitates peeking into the mind of the Other. Rather, she stresses the necessity of difference, those autos features that particularize us as individuals.

I find it ironic that, in this discussion of the necessity of difference and personal narrative in disability writing, I haven’t been very personal. As a result, I now share this photograph, which is also meant to break up the textual monotony of my blog:

Some of my ELO collection -- albums, posters, t-shirts, and a clock!
[A portion of my ELO collection: my perseveration of choice]