A couple months ago I met with the General Manager of Oak Ridge Convention Center in Chaska, Minnesota. I wrote a several-page proposal about how Dolce, Oak Ridge's parent company, could improve upon its facilities and services, catering to the health and wellness goals of both employees and clients, as part of its new branding vision. I guess I should tell you that I know all about it because I work there (here, the place where I am as I am writing this) part time as a night security guard. Mr. Carl Blanz, our General Manager, responded by saying to me, "You built a fantastic rocket ship. But now you just have to figure out how to get it off the ground." Well, being an audie I knew one thing intimately well: that this has always been, and continues to be, the story of my life! It's like a perfectly written book that never gets read because nobody ever heard of it. Well, it's not "like"; it IS. And so the headbanging routine continues.
My attention has now turned to a different project, another rocket without an engine. Back in December I designed a class for community education entitled "Living With An Autism Spectrum Disorder." I taught the class four times so far, once in Ellsworth, Wisconsin and three times in Hastings, Minnesota. The last class I taught was made up mostly of caregivers of adults with autism from a group home in Apple Valley, Minnesota. One of them said to me, "You should offer this as a continuing education class." That's all I needed to hear to set me on a new venture. I developed the class into a three-hour seminar, complete with PowerPoints and videos. Now I am self-promoting this seminar to every school and facility I can think of that might have anything even remotely to do with dealing with people with Autism Spectrum Disorders. But self-promoting is basically tiring and unproductive. Once again, I have created an amazing rocket ship with no way to get it off the ground.
My wife Bianca is so amazing -- to have seen me create so many rocket ships in the eight years that we've been married so far only to have them end up as scrap metal. She certainly knows better by now not to get hopes up and not to pay much attention to the hours I spend at the drawing board coming up with new ideas. But she's been riding this wave for only eight years. I've been riding it for forty-seven. I've never given up though, and I never intend to. I know that what I need is a collaborator -- not one who tells me what I should do differently, but one who knows how to attach engines to rocket ships and make them work. Finding such a person to work with is actually part of the headbanging routine. It just doesn't happen.
My headbanging routine began when I was a toddler. I LITERALLY used to bang my head into the headboard of my crib. With the crib sitting on a hardwood floor, it would wander around the room as I rocked back and forth, banging my head over and over again. I don't know if this particular behavior could be considered "stimming." I don't know what kind of stress I could have been under as a toddler! My parents would strap a pillow to the headboard so I didn't hurt myself. Nonetheless, I kept banging away. If my memory serves me well, I actually became upset when they put the pillow there because banging my head was so much more enjoyable when I had something very hard to hit against. Maybe this routine was a sign of things to come -- living a life full of creativeness that severely lacks implementation.
And so the art of building rockets without engines continues. Forty-seven years and counting.
