…that I’m not talking about right now. Tomorrow the plan is, for the first time in 2020, to bring Dar to the beach to play with other kids. We’ll see how it goes. Also tomorrow wife and I are trying to go to a restaurant for the first time since March. I’ll report back next week! Stay safe everyone.

I rarely talk about it here, but we watch autism-related movies and shows. I often think about Dar’s brother, who I refer to here as R, and his relationship with Dar. I see how it is now, and I wonder how it will be when, in the course of normal events, Irena and I are dead and R has to manage Dar’s life by himself. R and I recently watched Pixar’s new short cartoon Loop, which the company is promoting […]

“Introduced first in 1927 by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg, the uncertainty principle states that the more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be predicted from initial conditions, and vice versa. “In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle (also known as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities[1] asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which the values for certain pairs of physical quantities of a particle, such as position, x, and momentum, p, can be predicted from initial conditions.” – […]

I’ve created a monster. A monster of regression? Dar’s latest thing is coming up to me and saying “nuh” in an apparent effort to get me to say “no” in response. Is this as bad as a global pandemic or systemic racism? No, but others are better positioned to speak about those. How did this latest thing start? Well, it started because Dar asks for things. I sometimes refuse those things. I try to refuse in the nicest possible way. […]

Sometimes in my job as a film professor, the topic arises: why show certain things at all? For example, does any movie really need even a discreet rape scene? Why not just a title card that says “a rape happened” and move on? Why did anyone ever make The Human Centipede? Why show certain things, aren’t they only gonna give us nightmares? This is also known as My Mother’s General Case Against All Horror Movies. These days, I am so […]

This time, I’m not trying to be funny with the title. I mean it. Recently, a loyal reader told me “you’ve written a book” about Dar here. You won’t believe this, but I hadn’t really thought about it. I should try to compile this into a memoir…lord knows other parents of autistic children have done more with less. And by that I mean less words, less narrative, less compelling stories. Not lesser kids. I think they tend to like a […]

Longtime readers know that I never use a blog post just to link to other sites. Other blogs do that, but I’ve been updating this blog (usually) weekly for six years and haven’t done that…until now. I mean, if this virus can disrupt everything else, why not this blog? Just thought you might want to know what we’re reading that’s about autism and the coronavirus. Is it hard to be in a house 24/7 with Dar? Sure. And maybe reading […]

This week this blog is a COVID-free zone. For some, that’s not working. For others, that’s absolutely working. If you’re in the latter group, read on, MacDuff. I have always felt a special affinity for animals, especially mammals. I knew well before I got my first tattoo that it would have to be of a mammal, preferably one that nobody else had a tattoo of. (It’s a walrus.) I wanted my first kid’s name to refer to that guy who […]

Dar was rushed to medical care yesterday! Like you, I’m guessing, we have been so, so, so, careful not to get sick since the quarantine began. Wearing socks in the house at all times. Drinking fluids like they’re going out of Netflix. Et cetera. It all reminds me of my protocol the day before an international flight. I don’t skip stairs, I grip water glasses carefully, I don’t touch common surfaces, I avoid suspicious food. Probably I’m a lunatic, but […]

I want to start with so much love and gratitude for health-care workers and hospital workers as well as all the delivery drivers and various service providers that are all risking their lives for the rest of us. THANK YOU AND WE OWE YOU MORE THAN THANKS. Welcome back to the blog! I have fixed the mobile settings so that now when you bring it up on your phone, you shouldn’t see four-year-old articles and should instead see something like […]