Autism on the Rise

It used to be really rare, then it became as common as one in eighty-eight. People have theorized why it's growing. I have my own theory.

First, let me explain what autism is. Autism, for those of you who don't know, is a form of developmental disability, characterized by an inability to deal with other human beings. It's usually associated with intellectual limitations, but there's a subset of autistics that often have superior intelligence. We are called Aspies, short for Asperger syndrome. We have our limitations, but many of us think it's worth it and value our condition. We object to those of you NT's (neuro-typicals) who want to cure us. I, myself, wear a shirt saying my autism make me smarter than you. We also can be rather obsessive over our particular interests. Nobody sweats the details like us, even if it's just a bus schedule.

 A decade ago Thorkil Sonne, a telecommunications executive living in Ringsted, Denmark, as terrified about what the future might hold for his 7-year-old autistic son, Lars. But rather than give in to despair, the middle-aged father started a company, Specialisterne (ASpecialists@ in Danish), which helps high-functioning adults with autistic-spectrum disorders (ASDs) find employment. Today business is booming. Sonne oversees branches in a fourteen countries, including Germany, England, and Spain, and is funneling workers to such IT giants as SAP. Now he has even moved to Delaware to establish a foothold in America.

We object to those of you NT's (neuro-typicals) who want to cure us. I, myself, wear a shirt saying my autism make me smarter than you. We also can be rather obsessive over our particular interests. My theory? I think it's nature taking its course. It's evolution in action! The latest research says we seem to be caused by two mutations. There are certain companies that have taken advantage of our superior abilities and will only hire those of us with our special mutations,

My theory? I think it's nature taking its course. It's evolution in action! The latest research says we seem to be caused by two mutations. There are certain companies, such as my own, that have taken advantage of our superior abilities and will only hire those of us with our special mutations.

Continuing in this vein, I figure it's just a matter of time before the government tries to register and weaponize us and tries to control us. Resisters will be chased by giant robots and men in black.

I think I read too many comic books. That's my autistic obsession.

Work Autobiography

Despite having autism and the mental health problems that went with that,

I had several minor jobs during college including several stints as a messenger and a couple as a phone interviewer for market research firms, so I thought I’d have no trouble after graduation, but college was a problem. I started with a computer science major, which I thought would get me a great job, but I wasn’t as good at it as I’d have hoped. I kept failing the advanced courses and rescuing my grade point average with English courses, which I loved. Finally, my mother, who was paying for college, laid down the law. “You are an English major. Make it official or forget about graduating”. I was really afraid an English degree would take me nowhere, but I thought it was better than not graduating at all, so I took it, graduating with a bachelors degree in English literature, a minor in math, and a plethora of computer courses.

After graduation, I tried teaching, but found out the hard way, I was terrible with kids. My license was lifted after three years of substitute teaching. I also went back to messengering. I worked for Zoom Messenger Service and found it boring and insulting. As a college grad, I didn't think I belonged in a job that included an ex con, a guy with intellectual limitations, and a migrant who could barely speak English.

I spent several years in several programs for the mentally disabled, getting into a terribly depressed state before finally finding a minor job at the gift shop of the hospital where I was being treated, South Beach Psychiatric Center. It was a ridiculously simple job. I showed up, signed in, and sat on the couch in the hall outside the shop, while the shop did it’s business for three or four hours. When it closed, I did my job of counting sales and profits, and entering them into a notebook, which took me five minutes of the hours I was hired for.

About then, a man came to South beach, looking for a crew for a new screen printing shop that was opening and would only hire mentally disabled people.  The director of this shop, Thomas siniscalchi, had a revolutionary idea. This shop, which we would call Special Tees, would hire the mentally disabled, but it would not be a shop for the mentally disabled. It would not be a sheltered workshop. There would be no piece work and the only training we would get would be on the job. It would be a real job, with real job responsibilities (be on time, clean, ready to work, no smoking till break time, etc) and we would get a real wage of $7.25 an hour. No pay by the piece here. We still would be accommodated for our various mental conditions. As a rule, we would be given time off for psychiatric visits and care each week.

“You mean I would get a job because I’m mentally disabled?”  I loved it and was happy to share my butterscotch candy with my new boss, which I’m sure helped me get the job.

Tom was as new to the trade as any of us, so, in that first year, we spoiled as much of our product as we made. We also got quite filthy with the plastisol ink we printed shirts with, so, for a while, Tom would occasionally declare that our shirts were too filthy to wear, take out a pair of scissors and cut the shirts off us as we wore them. Then we would get new shirts from the spoiled pile. This practice was ended when he started to cut off a girl’s shirt, when she screamed and ran into the bathroom. She had nothing on under that shirt!

Our first shop was all one room, so, when we had to develop a screen, which is a photographic process, we had to completely close down the shop and close and lock the outer gate, which was the only way to get the shop dark enough to develop the screens. Our future shop would have a separate developing room.

My position at Special Tees varied over the years. I started out as the shirt designer, but I got too anxious about it, not having the artistic or design experience to know what I was doing, so I was put in the production line. This bored me to tears, and I kept crying, "Why is a guy, who managed to get a degree despite serious mental disabilities, left to do such menial labor?". Toward the end of my time there, my arthritis got so bad that I couldn't stand anymore. I had to sit and clean tools alongside a guy with an intellectual disability who wished he was smart like me. I reminded him that despite my wonderful intellect, I was still sitting next to him, doing the same job. I hope it made him feel better because I felt miserable!

By September 2008, I went into the hospital for some elective surgery and couldn't bare to go back and started to look elsewhere. By this time, my former boss, Tom Siniscalchi, had become disgusted with Community Resources, the company that owned Special Tees, so he had started a new place with a similar mission, for developmentally disabled and autistic people, like myself, which he called PossibiliTees. I spoke with Tom and he assured me that I would never have to touch a plastisol covered squeegee ever again. Instead, he put me at the computer, where I found and listed customer leads. I also did some publicity work, getting us written up in several magazines devoted to autism and to the textile industry. As usual, Tom made the business lots of fun. He’s a pro wrestling fan, so during down times, he had informal wrestling with some of the other men there. Unfortunately, this ideality couldn’t last. The mission of the Immaculate Virgin, which owned Possibilitees, wasn’t satisfied with our production and sales numbers, so they closed it last December.

I shortly found work as an intern at Fine Art Fotos photo studio.  My boss, Flint, hired me almost immediately because I had impressed him with my computer skills, and this time, I didn’t even have to offer him any butterscotch candy. I laughed at my wages. When I was in Special Tees, I earned $286 a week. At Possibilitees, I only worked ten hours a week, so never earned more than $72.50 a week. Now I was a fifty six year old intern and my compensation was $10 a day, just enough for travel and lunch. It seemed as I got older and more skilled, the less I made.

Since I am in my fifties and most of the people there were other interns in their twenties or teens, I was the old man there. I loved listening to the guys as they discussed their young culture and I enjoyed telling about the history I had lived through. I was especially overjoyed that this was the first for profit business I had ever worked for, Flint and the guys knew little about autism or chronic depression and didn’t care that I had this. This was something I had always been told was impossible. I had even made a sales ad and been told to write sales scripts and make sales calls myself, something I thought was impossible for autistics like me.

As I said, what work I could do was quite rewarding, but I couldn’t do much. Because of the land lords stinginess, I couldn’t get a dependable internet connection at work. I could barely get an hour’s work done in my five hour day, so Flint sent me home to work on my home computer, but that, for me, defeated the purpose of having a job. I was there for the company of the guys, so, by March, I decided to leave.

After some help from my psychologist, I got back into Sky Light Center, a clubhouse for people with psychiatric problems which I joined twenty years earlier.  work biography sent to Outsider Press, 235 Arbor Dr NE, Rockford, Michigan 49341, or outsiderpress@gmail.com

Psychodelic Music

Does anybody remember that stuff? I was just listening to my ipod, on which I have Time Has Come Today, by the Chambers Brothers and trying to imagine a video for that, but couldn't, it's so strange. Speaking of strange, anybody remember People Are Strange, by the Doors? I have that too. And Incense & Peppermint, by Strawberry Alarm Clock. I also have the best of The Moody Blues.

What do you young people, born in the eighties and nineties, think of that stuff? Do you think we're all a bunch of drug addled old coots?

Reason for College

When I got out of high school, I prided myself on my math abilities, so when I went to college, I majored in math and computer science. Unfortunately, when I got to advanced courses, I did poorly. I spent six years taking a year and a half of calculus. As my GPA dropped, I rescued it with English lit courses, which I loved, but I didn't want to major in it because I was afraid there was no future in English lit. Finally, my GPA got so low that my mother demanded I change my major to English lit or get out of college. I did so graduated with a BA in English lit with a math minor, and found that my worst fears were confirmed..My degree was vocationally worthless. Without any experience outside of college, not even a driver's license, I spent the next ten years broke and jobless, except for short stints as a substitute teacher and a camp counselor. More than once, I cried to my mother, "What did I do this for? What is the point to a degree that doesn't get me a job?".

 After ten years, I did get a job at a screen printing shop, but my degree had nothing to do with it. I am the only one in my shop with any more than a high school diploma and many of my coworkers don't even have that.

So why did I do it? What is the purpose of a degree besides a great job? After a lot of thought, I figured some answers.

One reason I did it was because it was what my family did and, despite my disability, I was as good as anybody else in my family. My family went to college, got professional degrees and became lawyers, teachers, doctors, nurses, engineers, etc.

Another reason is it's the place for people who enjoy using their heads. Though it took me six years to study three semesters of calculus I loved the logic and reasoning it involved. When I switched to English lit, I found that I loved Shakespeare, not just the written work, but getting into the heads of the Bard and the people of his time. I've carried that joy with me in pursuits online, long after college.

There's also what some of the experts say. It teaches you how to read, write and do mathematics, not the basic stuff you learned in grammar school, but the kind of profound stuff that people want to read and gets published, like this article here.

I once bought three or four items at a drug store. I didn't know the exact price, but my simple math skills, which I'd kept in constant practice in college, told me that they didn't add up to more that seven or eight dollars, so I knew enough to challenge the cashier who insisted it must be twelve dollars because the computerized cash register said so.

Finally, there are people who you might want to impress with just the degree, even if it doesn't get you money. I got nowhere in my failure of a teaching career, but this did impress all my bosses and got me the jobs I had for eighteen years.

I've been out of work now for two years, pretty much retired, spending time making art. I'm not that good at it, so I've come back to college, just to improve my art, without any dreams of future careers. Maybe I'll get a degree. Maybe I won't. Doesn't matter. I'm looking for skill, not a piece of paper.

So, for the past twenty-five years, I've been asking myself, why did I go to college? Did I get anything from it or did I waste ten years.

Overeaters Anonymous want ad for a god

I need a god who is loving, caring, persistent, but not demanding. He must help me know when to stop, when I'm just going in circles, when to walk away and when to come back. I suppose what I'm looking for is a god to answer the Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.

Letter to Lifeline, the Overeaters Anonymous journal

I was born with autism. One of the symptoms are extreme and uncontrollable likes and dislikes. For me, that included certain foods, so it was inevitable that I would eventually become morbidly obese. My family insisted I should just control myself. We OA people know how ridiculous that is. That goes double for autistics.
Eventually, inevitably, I got diabetes. I thought I could control that disease with insulin, but after a personal party one December night, my blood sugar got above 500, that’s five times normal. I knew, right at that moment, my life was in danger, but I felt great. I knew I could have a heart or brain attack at any time, so I called an ambulance, but I was one of the happiest guys those EMT guys ever saw. I was admitted quickly and pumped full of insulin, or whatever emergency drugs they use for out of control diabetics, and was admitted. That was on a Sunday night. By Monday morning, I had to call my mother and explain why I wasn't home. I heard her cry and actually mourn for the son she knew she would lose soon. Those tears turned me. I had to try something, but I knew even the best diets wouldn't work for me. I couldn't/wouldn't stay on them for long. I've always known my disease was out of control and always would be, so I had to find a place for a person who would never control himself. Who’s that?
Then I remembered OA. I had been to meetings years ago, but gave them up, because it struck me as too religious, and I was an atheist, but I remembered someone telling me to “take a tif, act as if”. That made sense to me. Roll playing games are very popular now. Remember Dungeons and Dragons? I felt I could play the roll of a faithful person. Sure, in my heart, I didn't believe in it, but I could act the part.
I then got on the phone and looked up the next and nearest meeting. It just so happened, there was a meeting in the hospital I was in, that night. It made me laugh as I thought, God can be very convenient when your life depends on it. Ever since then, I have been in and out of abstinence, usually in contact with a sponsor with whom I work on the first few steps, and I keep coming back to those Monday meetings in that hospital.

David Rubin
15 Leverett Ct
Staten Island, NY10308-1726

Possibili-Tees

People see developmentally disabled and autistic kids and think it’s so wonderful there are so many treatments and so many “special” schools for kids like us, but once we grow up, what do you do with us? Thank G-d, we don’t get warehoused anymore. Sheltered workshops work for some, but some of us are too bright to be adding parts, assembling the latest gadgets. You’ve seen Criminal Minds? Can you picture how bored to death Spencer Reid would be? Unfortunately, we can’t all work for the FBI and not all of us Asperger autistics are geniuses, any more than we’re all so limited in intellect.

If you’re really interested, my IQ has been measured at 126, fourteen points below genius, though twenty-six points above average!

We can’t all be mainstreamed either. Many of us don’t have the interpersonal skills to be a doctor or a lawyer. I tried working as a substitute teacher. It was a horror. I had no idea how to behave as a teacher or any other kind of authority figure. My license was lifted after two years.

I spent several years as a messenger. I could certainly do the job, but I felt very over-qualified, especially considering my coworkers were an ex-con, a person with intellectual limitations, and a new immigrant who could barely speak English. Good enough for a college student, but not good enough for a grad.

I spent almost thirteen years in an earlier screen printing shop, doing nothing more than cleaning squeegees and reclaiming screens after a job. It was the kind of over-simple but tedious work best suited to my intellectually limited coworker. He once told me how he wished he was smart like me. I pointed out that, despite my intelligence and education, I was still there working right next to him doing the same work. I hoped it made him feel better, because it depressed me!

Fortunately for me, Thomas Siniscalchi understood our needs, so he started Possibili-Tees, a custom screen printing nonprofit business, made to hire people like me.

Tom and I met fifteen years earlier when he started the screen print shop I worked for earlier, for the mentally disabled. I worked there because developmental disabilities often carry with them mental disorders, such as chronic depression, which I keep under control with drugs and counseling.

Two years ago, he became frustrated with the way I and other employees were treated, so he left there to start Possibili-Tees and invited me to join him here.

Possibili-Tees is different from a sheltered workshop in that it is not a program. It assumes we employees are employees and treats us like it. In other situations, there are special counselors, trained to look over the shoulders of “mental health service consumers”, (“consumers”, for short). In the first year of Tom’s earlier shop, we were required to interrupt the day for group counseling. Tom stopped this and fired the counselor. One of our first firings in that shop was because the man went outside to beg for butts and change. Tom said that that’s consumer behavior, not employee behavior. As employees, we have to pay attention to normal, employment requirements, like grooming, attendance, quality control and attention to task, yet it still works to serve our special needs, such as allowing, even demanding, that we take the time to see psychiatrists and psychotherapists as needed.

I’ve been working here ever since, two days a week, using the internet to find possible customers and philanthropic donors.