1. Computer Space

When I was in second grade, my teacher sent a note home to my mother. I had recently been skipped ahead from first grade to second grade and the new teacher was worried about me. I was keeping up with the class fine, I was having no problem with that, she said in the note, but she was worried about me because all I would ever write or talk or draw about in class or in my journal or for homework were video games. They seemed to be the only thing that I thought about. She wondered whether maybe there might be something wrong with me for me to be so obsessed with games.

In the opening scene of the film, a boy is wandering along an empty stretch of highway, the frame filled with waves of desert heat. His face is blank and he carries a metal lunchbox in one hand, swinging it back and forth as he goes. He is no older than six or seven. The batteries of the sun are slowly dying; heat waves play with the orange light, bending it into shimmers. As the last credits fade into the skyline, a policeman in an SUV pulls up alongside the boy and asks him where he thinks he's going. "California," the boy says. His face is blank, his eyes ciphers. The policeman keeps talking to him, but all the boy will say in response is "California."

"When [he] was born, in 1971, his steel blue eyes seemed crossed in an unusual way, drawing immediate concern from his parents. A local pediatrician…dismissed [their] worries, ensuring them that the boy had a lazy left eye that would improve with time…. Finally, an ophthalmologist diagnosed retinoblastoma, a dangerous cancer that strikes one in twenty thousand children.... Doctors removed the boy's left eye, to prevent the tumor from spreading.... Before he turned two, [he] was fitted with a glass prosthesis. It was an approximation of his natural eye, the best they could produce at the time, but it had no movement, making it quite obvious."

I was born with a bad left eye. The eye was called "lazy," as if it were a sign of poor moral character instead of a glitch in the coordination of one or more of the half-dozen muscles of each eye. My lazy eye limited my depth perception and made things hard for me during PE class and at recess. At softball, I always struck out, no matter how I swung: on the basketball court, chest-passed balls hit me full in the face and this was sometimes because of my poor vision and sometimes because they had been intended by others to hit me full in the face. Every day after school, I sat on the carpet in our living rooms and played video games on our Genesis. When I played video games, my lazy eye didn't matter anymore because the screen I was playing the games on had no depth; it was flat. I could move through this sixteen-bit pixel world as well as someone with perfect vision. Maybe even better.

The next scene takes place in a psychiatric clinic, where the boy sits quietly playing with plastic blocks on the floor as his mother and stepfather talk with his psychiatrist about the boy running away, which we find out is a thing he does often. The boy arranges the colored blocks in interlocking patterns on the carpet; from them, he builds towers that rise up above his knees, as high as his chest, but he refuses to speak. He will not say anything to anyone, not a word, except "California." His stepfather reminds the psychiatrist that it has been this way for two years, since the death of the boy's twin sister in an accident, that in two years there has been no change.

"His depth perception was poor. Intense pain in the socket often forced him to leave the class to visit the school nurse. One day in second grade, older children gathered around, cheering him to 'take it out, take it out.' Reluctantly, he complied, drawing even more unwanted attention….'I never had more than one or two friends, if that,' [he] recalls. 'I was always a bit of an outsider.'"

When she read the note, my mother wasn't too worried. She didn't think the video game thing was a problem because boys will be boys and she had two of them to deal with, after all, but she told me that maybe for a while I should try writing and drawing and talking about some different things at school, because then my teacher would be less concerned and also because, of course, there were other things in the world besides video games. I nodded my way through her speech and said "yes" and "okay" and "I understand" and when she was finished I went back to the living room, where the game I had been playing was paused, waiting for me.

"Though [he] is a heavily traumatized boy, he has a certain fixation with building, stacking things," the psychiatrist says. The camera cuts away to the boy, building the tower from blocks on the carpet. It rises skyward, one block on top of the other; the boy seems completely focused on the activity, oblivious to the fact that people are talking about him. "These little monuments he makes," she says, her voice breaking, "I like to think that they mean something."

The world's first commercial electronic video game, Computer Space, was released in 1971. The world's first electronic stock market, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ), opened in 1971. The world's first scholarly journal devoted to the study of autism and autism spectrum disorders in children, The Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, published its first issue in 1971.

The boy's stepfather wears a black suit and has a black briefcase which he fingers as he talks to the psychiatrist. He drinks coffee and paces around the conference room; this is a waste of his time, he needs to get back to the office. He tells the psychiatrist that it's been two years with no change and that they've decided it's time to move the boy into an institution. In the next scene, which takes place in a dingy working class kitchen, we find out that the boy's birth father thinks that this is wrong, that the boy should be at home with his family, but that he can't really do anything about it because he can't afford another mouth to feed or a custody battle to fight, because he's just a blue collar guy dressed in a stained polo shirt, powerless against the power suit.

"[He] quickly became enamored with making money. Sometimes he'd wash dollar bills, drying them off with a towel and placing them between the pages of thick books on his shelf to make them look crisp and new. Working odd jobs on Sundays and holidays, including an $11-an-hour stint at a local IBM research lab, he built a small savings account that he began to invest in mutual funds."

My favorite game when I was in second grade was called Kid Chameleon, which was a game in which your character, traveling through a dangerous virtual world, could take on different identities by collecting masks. The masks changed your character; they changed you and allowed you to do different things, to be different than the person you were normally. I wrote about the game and talked about it and drew about it every day at school because I thought it was important, more important than anything else in the world. You put on the masks and you were made different; you were yourself but you were also something else, someone else, different. I couldn't understand why everyone else couldn't see how important it was.

Since I'm a graduate student and drunkenness on a Thursday night is practically required, last Thursday I was terrifically far from sober and, as a direct result, read an article about Das Racist. I read this article because whenever Das Racist pops up on my radar, I read about them, like I read about MGMT even though I've only ever listened to MGMT once, and that was their song “Kids,” and, when I listened to it, it was about two years after “Kids” was a hit. I try to avoid dwelling on Das Racist, but, like I said, last Thursday I was drunk. Even when I'm not drunk, I have this terrible compulsion to read everything ever written about Das Racist because we all went to the same college, and because that fact signifies to me something particular, some life I wanted and didn't have. This particular article said that Das Racist was pronounced Da-as, as in "That’s," and it occurred to me that I’d always pronounced it in my head Dass, like "Ram Dass," and how horrifying, because the members of Das Racist were practically in my year. (My internal voice is slightly histrionic.) Which at my university actually meant something, since it was a student body of 2,800 and everybody there seemed to know everybody, except for me. READ MORE

A room full of depressives, schizophrenics and recovering addicts will almost never agree on what constitutes “Must-See TV.” The only options that night were "American Idol" and a Mel Gibson movie, the one where the kids make tinfoil hats to ward off alien mind control. Watching anything brain-related in a mental hospital—forgive me, behavioral health facility—is pretty much verboten, so we decided on "Idol." Personally, I was more interested in my proximity to Mike on the couch, and how his hand had crept toward mine under the edge of the stiff, synthetic blanket on my lap. It was August, but you wouldn’t have known it. The air conditioner was set to “arctic,” and the skylight in the rotunda only registered day, night and rain. READ MORE

It starts at a very young age. The summer after third grade, my parents sent me to Jewish sleepaway camp. I was deeply homesick at first and cried a lot in my bunk bed, but by the end of the month I didn't want to leave. So I went back, summer after summer—boarding the plane with a few other Jewish kids from my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio, and flying to Appleton, Wisconsin, with a stop-over at O'Hare, where a volunteer from Hadassah would meet us at the gate and try to keep us from the moo shu pork at Wok-N-Roll. READ MORE