Born in Brooklyn New York but spending the majority of my life in New Jersey, my childhood was marked by chronic illness treated -from the moment I was born- by round after round of all-too-casually prescribed antibiotics -something which today would be regarded as malpractice but which was the norm at the time. By adolescence this chronic illness had become accompanied by a growing assortment of food sensitivities and a steadily increasing general malaise with terrible social consequences. Being overweight is reason enough for persistent abuse by ones peers but add to that the stamina of an elderly person, a tendency for spontaneous illness, a level of intelligence above the norm (I was reading at college level by age 7) and you have a formula for perpetual alienation.

Throughout my childhood I was dragged from one physician or psychiatrist to another as my parents futilely searched for an explanation and treatment for my steadily worsening health. This was a constant drain on family resources made worse by my mother's own situation as a single parent with two children, no child support (thanks to an Oregon judge summarily absolving my serial bigamist father from his responsibilities on the grounds of his 'prostate trouble'), and her own chronic health problems due to diabetes. By the time I entered high school it was clear there would be no money from home for a college education but I still felt my prospects to be reasonable. I was not yet fully disabled and, though my poor health was a constant problem, I was already a very accomplished autodidact who had independently become well versed in the emerging technology of computers. I harbored aspirations -now seemingly irrational in retrospect- of attending MIT and pursuing a career in industrial or computer design. But it was not to be.

The building where I attended high school was already notorious, having given me an extreme case of pneumonia when I attended an 'early bird' summer science course there. The building was one of those 'high efficiency' monstrosities commonly built by American municipalities in the late 1960s and had a reputation for high vandalism, violence, and attempted suicide rates. The reason for this was its lack of windows. Only a few out of the several dozen classrooms had any windows and in winter months students could commonly go from sun-up to sun-down without ever seeing the light of day. Bomb scares were frequent due to a common student fantasy of bombing the building -not to cause death and destruction but simply to let the sunlight in! To make matters worse, the building featured a closed air recirculation HVAC system which never saw nominal maintenance. The fumes from unventilated science class experiments, piles of never-washed dissection trays in biology labs, photography darkroom work, perpetually running mimeograph machines, intense cleaning solutions, frequent repaintings to cover vandalism, and the latent cigarette smoke from staff and students alike (the school giving up on trying to control smoking in the building and just building smoking lounges for students and staff in an attempt to contain it) all circulated perpetually in the buildings' environment. Not surprisingly, I was stricken ill from my first freshmen day and the deterioration of my health proceeded at a steady pace. To make matters worse, I faced constant abuse from peers and staff alike for my frequent illness as well as my radical insistence on pursuing independent studies far beyond what was considered appropriate for my social class.

As with most suburban communities, this one building was the only game in town. There were private schools, of course, but there was no money for it and I'd already had one very nasty experience with that route during childhood when my hyper-religious great-aunts had paid for me to attend a nearby 'Christian' private school. I was removed after being beaten with a boat oar by the principle for making the mistake of befriending the school's token disabled child who staff had decided needed special isolation from the rest of the students. (the idea that the disabled are being punished by God for the sins of their parents is still common one among religious conservatives in the US -the root of much subtle discrimination here) With no definitive medical explanation for why I was so frequently ill, there was no alternative but to try and stick it out. But I still felt confident that if I could just make it through the ordeal I would be fine. My own personal studies went far beyond the simple high school curriculum, my after-school hours spent in various independent studies, local 'night school' college courses, and hands-on computer training at the nearby Bell Laboratories where I was a member of the 'Explorer Scouts'; a branch of the boy-scouts where kids were brought into corporate centers and given experience with the latest technologies by volunteering engineers. For me high school was merely a redundant bureaucratic formality. Once free of it I would be fine -or so I hoped.

But as time wore on the toxic environment and utter lack of sympathy or support from the staff took its toll on my attendance and performance. With no official diagnosis to explain my condition I was labeled a 'faker' and pleas for help ignored or even mocked. And in general the school system -heavily geared toward treating students according to the social status of their parents- had no time or concern for the children of less than executive class parents. Indeed, in my last couple of years I was left without even a shared locker, the staff claiming a lack of space but I being apparently the only student left out. I roamed the halls like some homeless person, a suitcase full of books in one hand, a big red toolbox for my electronics classes in the other, draped in any winter gear I might have worn to school -just more reason for me to be singled out and mocked. I stuck it out as long as I could but in the last week of the last year came the inevitable collapse. My body finally gave out completely in a bout of illness so severe I was left bedridden for a month and unable to leave home for months after. There were no calls of enquiry from my school or my few friends. Sometime later I learned from a neighbor's son that the school staff had simply declared me dead, telling as much to any students who enquired. Years later one teacher still had the gall to hold a sample of my classwork before her students to mock it -all because she'd never heard the term 'cybernetics' before and decided I had made it up, her pride too great to allow her to even look it up. When my health had recovered enough from this crash I applied for and took the General Equivalency Diploma exam offered by the state. There was an immediate investigation as my score was considered far too high for a 'drop-out'.

By this time my very survival seemed to be in doubt, let alone any possible future education or career. More of my parents' meager funds were thrown into the black-hole of an incompetent health care system and again I was bounced from doctor to psychiatrist to doctor in a futile search for diagnosis. At one point I was put on a regiment of 'mega-vitamin therapy' by one dubious physician which only amplified my illness so dramatically that I was briefly hospitalized for the resulting loss of electrolytes. In another instance a psychiatrist accused me of being a drug-addict, despite the fact that I could tolerate few prescription drugs, let alone illegal ones, had no income at all and was utterly house-bound and thus had no way to obtain drugs. In another instance I was put through grueling tests by a neurochemistry specialist from the UK who was doing research at a prominent psychiatric clinic in my region. He diagnosed me as having clinical depression but with no definitive cause, then secretly put in his case notes the suggestion that I had a brain tumor -something he told neither me or my family and which I only later learned of in an SSI hearing. Even my immediate family began to grow weary of this futile game and started to persecute me for it.

Finally a revelation came in the form of a CNN news broadcast featuring an interview with a newly famous physician who had published a book on what he referred to as an emerging epidemic called Systemic Candidiasis; an illness resulting from an abnormal infestation of yeast bacteria. The symptoms this physician described paralleled mine perfectly and, after contacting this doctor, I was directed to a colleague specializing in this illness in Pennsylvania, where a preponderance of cases had emerged as a side-effect of the large brewery industry there. After some study and positive response from trial treatment, I was finally formally diagnosed as having Systemic Candidiasis as well as Multiple Chemical Sensitivity resulting from the immune system breakdown caused by decades of going without proper treatment. In review of my medical history, the physician concluded that the polluted environment of New Jersey had left me prone to frequent sinus and respiratory infections -a common problem for children in the Metropolitan region- and that the abuse of antibiotics by pediatricians had resulted in Systemic Candidiasis. Without proper treatment the result was a vicious cycle as the Candidiasis made me even more prone to infections and thus subject to even more antibiotic use. The prolonged damage to the immune system this produced resulted in a host of allergy-like sensitivities, culminating in general Multiple Chemical Sensitivity after the total health collapse of my last high school year, that Kafkaesque institution and its filthy environment being the most likely cause for the crash. There is also a possibility that my predisposition for these illnesses may be traced as far back as a pre-birth incident where my father attempted a home-brew abortion on my mother when she was in one of her frequent diabetic shocks using some kind of acid douche- a fact only revealed to me by my mother late in life. I was born jaundiced and subject to weeks of intravenous antibiotic treatment right from birth. This Pennsylvania physicians immediate advice? "Get the hell out of New Jersey." Alas, such things are easier said than done.

At last I had an explanation and diagnosis as well as some kind of treatment which was actually working. Though I was still left disabled and, because of NJ's pollution, mostly home-bound by random bouts of illness, I was stabilized and able to work out some way of coping with my situation. My first thought was my education but, with the aid of school financial aid consultants, I soon discovered that this would be impossible by any conventional means. This was before the introduction of the Americans with Disabilities Act and equal access to education for the disabled was rather low on the list of priorities for the US government. After WWII there was an epidemic of mail-order education scams designed to exploit veteran education financial aid programs. By the 1960s this had become so bad that the government outright banned all access to financial aid for any education conducted off-campus -even though this meant that all home-bound disabled people would be effectively barred from access to college education. Since there was no form of home-based employment at the time that called for a college level education anyway, the government did not consider this to be any particular disadvantage or discrimination. (this long before the personal computer or the idea of telecommuting existed)

Effectively barred from access to higher education, my dreams of MIT destroyed, I resolved to conduct my own course of study focussed on what seemed to me to be the most likely area of employment for a home-bound disabled person; computers. This was a time when 'Third Wave' and 'Electronic Cottage' were the buzz-phrases of the day and it seemed a perfectly logical choice of career for a disabled person. The many emerging stories of new Information Age entrepreneurs who turned simple innovations into fortunes despite a lack of formal education seemed to suggest that we were entering an age where, perhaps, knowledge and inventiveness might actually count for more than social status and high-priced degrees. Though my resources were quite limited -my family by then completely impoverished by medical expenses- my resourcefulness was great. Unable to obtain second-hand textbooks from an elitist community of local colleges and universities who refused access to their bookstores for 'non-students' (not to mention, suburban public libraries more interested in stocking coffee-table books and romance novels than serious texts), I cashed in bonds, sold older books and records, and even borrowed against my life insurance for the educational materials I needed as well as my own personal computer. I also learned to cultivate a convincing corporate facade which won me access to free technical journals and texts normally reserved for executives and corporate engineers. Occasionally, I was able to obtain academic discounts on software and the odd bit of donated equipment. Sometimes I was even able to barter my growing computing skills through temporary consulting work for the occasional piece of hardware.

But I also faced further complications due to my disability. My choice of personal computer hardware was limited to the Macintosh simply because, early on, it had the lowest emissions of airborne PCBs and other fumes of any computer. It took some time before new power and materials standards made the more common yet also generally more crudely manufactured and power hungry PC tolerable to me -though I never had any particular difficulty learning the basics of all computer platforms, having cut my teeth on the likes of PDP/11s running UNIX. Often, the educational materials I struggled to obtain were likewise a source of illness because of the chemicals which are commonly present in newly printed books and the dusts and fungus which collect on them as they age. I had to keep my many books contained in polyethylene boxes when not in use, making it difficult to reference them on demand. This compelled me to pursue a particular direction in my computer studies which I hoped could be used to overcome this; the development of paperless Digital Books. Ultimately I became the first person to develop a specific design for a handheld digital book device -featured in a pair of articles in early issues of Midnight Engineering magazine- as well as the first specific E-Book software platform -which was featured in a library technology journal once published by Apple Computer. In conjunction with an Apple engineer who had first proposed the product concept in that company, I also proposed the first production desktop touch/draw-tablet display which I had hoped Apple would sponsor my own small home business manufacturing. Unfortunately, this was a product concept that the company's executives -even to the present day- could not appreciate.

Despite these problems I feel my course of self-education has been relatively successful. Though it means little to the corporate world without the costly work license of a college diploma, its practical value was clearly established by the vocational experts of Welkind Rehabilitation Hospital who, under contract of the State Department of Vocational Rehabilitation, documented my job skills and declared them worthy of a US$40k minimum starting salary in any Fortune 500 corporation. Alas, that might as well be an honorary doctorate from Clown College for all it means on the job market. My one regret with my self-education is the lack of success with the higher mathematics which I attribute to a broken early math education. I was one of the countless victims of the ill-conceived New Math and it seemed that many of the most abusive and cruel teachers I faced throughout my school years were math teachers. I sought the aid of college and university professors in overcoming this deficient area in my studies but I was, again, a 'non-student' and thus not worthy of even having my calls or letters acknowledged. My pursuit of higher studies has never ended and I continue studies in a great variety of subjects to this day, though eventually this had to give way to the more pressing concerns of employment and housing.

In addition to my program of independent education, I also began what proved to be a lengthy battle for Supplemental Security Income. I had a formal diagnosis now but it was for illnesses the bureaucracy -typically 20 years behind the current state of medical science- had never heard of. And this was an 'orphan' disease, subject to perpetual dispute and controversey within the medical community. To make matters worse, the New Jersey branch of the Social Security Administration is notorious for its habit of blanket refusals of all applications not made with the aid of lawyers. This is in defiance of law and the agency has been sued repeatedly over it but has never effectively changed its practice, since the bureaucrats themselves are never directly punished for it. The consequence of this was a six year battle accompanied by a grueling ordeal of repeated medical and psychological examinations by a rather motley crew of dubious medical professionals. Ironically, the poor quality of these consultants actually worked in my favor as the majority of them were incapable of turning in an intelligible report no matter what their opinion of my medical condition was. One wonders just how many millions of dollars a year Social Security must waste on consultants who are effectively illiterate despite having a medical degree...

My chief mistake, though, was attempting to represent myself in my initial application. The lawyer who had originally agreed to represent me on contingency pulled a 'bait and switch' at the last minute, suddenly demanding a untenable sum up-front. I was forced to assemble and present my own case in the span of a week and, despite my nearly passing-out at the hearing, it was decided that no one who could prepare such case material in such a short period of time by himself could, in fact, be disabled. After all, it is a common attitude among many Americans that all disabled people -regardless of their type of disability- are mentally retarded. (a fact the venerable members of the Service Corps of Retired Executives once went to great length to enlighten me on, advising me that my only hope of ever winning loans or investment for a home business was to get a wheel chair and fake being a mentally retarded paraplegic -well, these were retired New Jersey executives, after all...)

With the help of Legal Aid, who apparently spend 90% of their time on SSI applications in this state, I was eventually finally able to gain SSI, though it has proven a mixed blessing. It was plainly obvious that no one could actually live anywhere in this country on the amount of money SSI provided. It could not cover rent or mortgage on any kind of conventional housing, let alone afford the non-toxic housing someone with MCS needed, and came with a host of restrictions that seemed tailored to keep the disabled helpless, hopeless, and homeless. Thus my priorities shifted from education to the issue of home-based employment and the goal of freeing myself of reliance on this inadequate source of income. Little as it was, SSI was at least of some aid to this. I could at last afford a proper compliment of basic office equipment, Internet access, and the like which could aid in a concerted search for employment.

In addition, winning SSI also meant becoming an immediate client of the Department of Vocational Rehabilitation which ostensibly promised much help in finding employment and achieving self-sufficiency. But as with most promises made by government agencies, I quickly came to realize how little help they were really willing to offer. My need for home-based employment left the agency rather befuddled since, despite the popularity of the concept of telecommuting among the popular media of the time, they were of the opinion that no such work actually existed or could ever exist. In fact, they seemed to treat my insistence on seeking such work as a sign of some kind of mental illness and thus I was once again subject to another round of psychological examinations culminating in my being sent to Welkind Rehabilitation Hospital for vocational aptitude evaluation. Contact with this organization proved to be something of a revelation to the people at VocRehab who, apparently, had never had actual contact with any true professionals in the field of rehabilitation before. (the fact that VocRehab's attempts at 'job placement' basically amounted to sending me newspaper clippings advertising envelope-stuffing mail-order scams made me wonder if they'd had any experience with reality at all...)

The evaluation by Welkind opening the eyes of VocRehab to the reality of the computer as the basis of actual work, the agency was compelled to look into the matter a little further whereupon I was directed to contact an organization called Lift Inc. Lift Inc. was a supposed non-profit organization which promised disabled people training and job placement in telecommuting employment with partnered Fortune 1000 companies -exactly what I was looking for! The woman representing this organization -apparently the only person in the organization anyone could ever talk to- was quite the charmer and had been making the rounds of the state's political circles to the point that the then governor was actually considering making Lift practically a replacement for VocRehab state-wide. But the people at Welkind were already well acquainted with this organization and warned me not to get my hopes up. Apprently they had dubious acceptance standards and in one instance had 'failed' one of Welkind's patients despite the fact that, until becoming a quadriplegic after an accident, he had been one of the country's most accomplished computer software engineers. Forewarned is forearmed and as anticipated Lift immediately started throwing obstacles in my path to application. They insisted that I could not qualify without an exam taken under scrutiny of state certified teachers at their facilities -which of course didn't technically exist as they only borrowed office space from rehab hospitals around the country. I countered this by gaining the assistance of a state certified teacher who administered the exam under their strict requirements in her nearby home. They then sent me a letter saying I had failed the exam but without disclosing my score. My insistence on seeing the test results were ignored so I turned to a local Congressmen whose demands for answers from the organization resulted in an appointment at one of their more nearby borrowed offices for a 'debriefing'. There I was told by that same woman who was their only contact that I had not actually failed the exam but that the description of my home they required indicated that I lacked the necessary space to actually perform telecommuting work, the computer hardware being too big and needing too much desk space for my home to support. I countered with the explanation that I had been using computers in my home for many years and that, in any case, mobile carts that made even the most elaborate personal computers and terminal hardware fully self-contained were readily available from any number office furniture suppliers. The woman angrily insisted that this suggestion was 'impossible' and I was dismissed from the room. I reported this bizarre encounter to the congressman who, now angered, delved further into the organization. It is not clear to me what happened after this other than that the organization fled the state for parts unknown. (I later learned from officials at Goodwill Industries, which once had their own computer education program for the disabled, that Lift's reputation may have caught up with them. Corporations in other states that had 'partnered' with them to host disabled workers had suffered so much disruption in spans of just a few months that entire computer departments had to be rebuilt from scratch at a cost of millions)

VocRehab seemed to suffer some kind of embarrassment from the outcome of this Lift fiasco and I soon found it increasingly difficult to obtain their help. I was labeled as having 'unrealistic expectations of employment' and was sent to psychiatrists with the intent that they teach me to become resigned to my hopeless situation. Taking matters into my own hands, I learned from people at Welkind of another program being developed by the nearby state college. A thoughtful professor there had established a CAD training program intended to provide the disabled with CAD based work, giving them an official CAD training certificate and job leads with affiliated companies. Unfortunately, the college -built at about the same time as my high school- had the same unhealthy architecture and I could not tolerate its interior environment for more than a few minutes at a time. The professor was willing to accommodate my special needs by letting me take the course at home but it was utterly dependent on the use of a very costly model of CAD workstation manufactured by Hewlett Packard. I contacted the division of HP that marketed that workstation and personally negotiated a plan between them and the college whereby HP would offer the workstation and its software to the school at cost for me to use at home for the duration of the course program, the machine then being moved to the special class with the others. The college agreed to this but only on the contingency that VocRehab demonstrate recognition of this by footing part of the bill for the machine. And this, of course, is where the deal fell apart. They refused to support this plan and some months later I was sent an official letter explaining that it was the position of VocRehab that they could not spend any money on education for the disabled because education offered no guarantee of employment.

I was outraged, not only because of this ludicrous position but also because the agency had now embarrassed me in front of college officials and the executives of a major corporation. I sent copies of this letter to both my local congressman and the governor's office and this resulted in the most bizarre and humiliating experience with American bureaucracy I have ever had in my life. Late one night, just as I was getting ready for bed, I received a phone call from a person claiming to be a representative of VocRehab in the state capitol but who refused to otherwise identify himself. In a conversation lasting for about half an hour, this unknown gentleman told me that I was hopeless, worthless, and had no possibility of ever obtaining a job and that I should simply resign myself to my fate, stop bothering important people with my petty problems, and commit suicide. My outrage beyond words, I reported this incident to my congressman but all that ever came of it was a letter, many months later, stating that VocRehab was closing my case on the grounds that I was officially unemployable.

Once again left to my own devices, I began my own long -and ultimately futile- search for any kind of home-based employment. Prospects did not look good. At the offices of US Job Service -the national organization for job placement maintained in conjunction with general Social Services- I was repeatedly told that no one had seen any kind of home-based work in 30 years. But this was a new age of telecommunications and I began, logically enough, with a search of companies that had already gotten some media attention for starting their own telecommuting work programs. Shortly after the success of Alvin Toffler's The Third Wave, many American corporate executives decided it was time to give the concept of telecommuting some serious study. The large insurance companies were particularly interested in this concept and so many of them were the first to establish test work programs -though, of course, none of these were ever done in New Jersey. Curiously, computer and telecommunications companies -long the loudest advocates of this concept- were some of the last to do any serious exploring of it for their own operations. Most books and articles on this subject have noted that these initial test programs were almost universally successful, demonstrating that telecommuting not only worked but that the workers experienced much greater work satisfaction and achieved vastly improved productivity -so much so that some detractors warned that telecommuting might lead to American workers being worked to death as with the notorious stories of Japanese salarymen. But as I contacted each of the companies with these test programs in turn I learned that, after their initial success over six months to a year, they were all terminated without much explanation.

It wasn't until I managed to convince a couple executives for whom telecommuting was still a new idea to consider giving me a shot that I started getting a picture of what happened. It seems that, once I had convinced some top executive to consider hiring me as a telecommuter, their interest would be killed by members of middle-management who would insist that, for security reasons, I could only do this work if my terminal was connected to the home office by ridiculously costly leased lines that somehow magically insured greater security than a mere call-back modem arrangement. There was never any compromise in these demands due to the power of the Big Bad Security Bugaboo and, of course, this insured my employment was impossible because it would invariably cost more for this connection service and hardware than my own salary would be. I later learned from articles written by computer industry pundits following the history of telecommuting that this scenario had been repeated in almost all the cases where telecommuting was tested. After the first round of outstanding success, middle-managers would become fearful of their own jobs because the great productivity boosts observed hinted at the drag redundant levels of management actually had on a company. Thus they invented exaggerated security issues that could only be resolved at untenable costs which, of course, insured that telecommuting was too expensive to ever implement comprehensively -thus protecting their own redundant jobs. As a side-effect of this, telecommuting transformed from the new wave in mainsteam white-collar work to an executive perk since the cost of implementing it could only be justified for people of highest importance. Top executives who once had to pretend to work in an office environment could now pretend to work from home, gaining the prestige of employing high tech while at the same time further reinforcing their personal isolation from the 'unwashed' they employed. So much for The Third Wave...

As my search for work continued I was confronted by even stranger behavior in the corporate world. At one point I contacted a start-up computer company which was re-manufacturing the early Macintosh computers into a new kind of tablet computer for school use -this long before Apple itself had any kind of portable Macintosh models. I had contacted them hoping I could get one of these machines donated to me for use as an electronic book platform, easing my problems with paper-related pollution in exchange for providing them with beta testing for the product. But after some conversation with its president I seemed to have made a great impression and was offered a job, though one not quite clearly defined as the fellow needed to discuss the details with his colleagues. I was given appointements to call and further discuss the details of this job but each time I called the fellow was too busy to do more than give me a brief comment and promise of details to follow if I could call a day or two later. This went on for months and eventually it got to where I was simply left on hold indefinitely. The man who I had personally reached with just a cold-call out of the blue was now impossible to reach. Over time I gleaned from hints by secretaries that this was not unusual behavior for the fellow and I was eventually forced to conclude I was simply being strung along for his own sadistic amusement.

In a similar incident, a local computer company working with a bizarre legacy platform that built a whole elaborate accounting and business management system on a Basic interpreter offered to hire me as a programmer but the company president, supposedly doubtful about my ability to work from home despite my disability, insisted on giving me a variety of programming skill tests over a span of weeks. These became increasingly more involved until I eventually had the entire source code for the company's key product dumped in my lap with the order to debug its vast mess of hopelessly convoluted spaghetti code, by hand, without even one of their machine to work with -all this without me actually being hired! I refused to do it without being paid and was discarded. The company went bankrupt a month later.

I also encountered similar bizarre behavior with prospective government employers. I was the first to propose a specific platform and program for digitizing the contents of the Library of Congress and was invited to apply for a job with the Library in order to implement it. However, after being put through a grueling process of examination and review, I was ultimately rejected on the grounds that the Library had no pre-established job title that fit the task they had considered hiring me to do.

I was eventually forced to conclude that, despite all the promises of economics and IT luminaries, prospects of computer related employment for the disabled were in fact nill and I expanded my search to include any kind of work which might be feasible to do at home. But the bizarre behavior of executives didn't stop outside of the IT realm. For instance, I once contacted the US manager of a French company which had opened a number of boutique shops in the Metropolitan area selling avant garde novelty items. Briefly visiting one of these stores, I had observed they were selling remanufactured radios and televisions which took OEM electronics and placed them in new lucite cases accented with neon lamps and novelty lights. Being transparent, it was easy to reverse-engineer their manner of fabrication and I quickly realized this was something that lent itself to piecework assembly. Interrogating the store manager, I learned that they were assembled for the store at a plant in PA and given the company's contact information. The Frenchman who managed this plant was very open to the idea of my doing piece-work assembly of these products from home as long as I could demonstrate I was reliable. Unlike the US, such work arrangements among the disabled are apparently not so unusual in Europe. But once again things went awry when I was told to to call the next day to schedule my visit to the plant for instruction and and pick-up of my first batch of parts. I called as instructed but the manager was MIA and no one knew who I was or what I was calling for. I called again and again for weeks only to encounter this same thing and eventually gave up. The weird part of this story, though, came two years later when, late one evening, I received a call from that same Frenchman. He acted as if I'd called him just the other day and asked me if I was still interested in doing the piece-work assembly job I had proposed. I was certainly willing and, again, I was told to call the next day. Again, I was greeted with the same response of bewilderment by the people at the plant, that manager again gone MIA. And once again I wasted weeks futilely calling them in the hopes of catching this elusive individual.

Years of outright rejection spiced with many more such weird and frustrating encounters ultimately forced me to give up any hope of salaried employment and I began to drift toward the idea of self-employment. I'd enjoyed marginal success as an occasional computer consultant even before leaving public school but found it impossible to develop a sustainable business because of my suburban location and the high cost of purchasing and maintaining computers of many different platforms. I briefly tried my hand as a home computer consultant, rather than a business systems consultant, but there was no market as the convention among suburbanites was to rely on computer store dealers for 'free' advice, even when it routinely resulted in unnecessary purchases and premature obsolescence of perfectly good computers. (after all, a dealer's job is to sell you things so his 'solutions' invariably involve buying something else) I also tried my hand at grant supported research, submitting proposals for SBIR grants and applying for various Diversifying my approach, I explored a vast assortment of home business concepts; everything from hand crafts to vertical application computer products to computer games. I even tried breaking into pornographic computer game development. But I was constantly stymied by the same set of problems; the stigma attached to being in New Jersey (which sometimes made dealing with out-of-state wholesalers and other businesses impossible -sometimes they would just hang up the phone the moment the name of my state was mentioned!), the inability to find affordable tools, components, raw materials, or support services in New Jersey, the lack of local markets in the suburbs, limitations in the kinds of work I could do because of intolerance to chemicals and latently toxic materials, a lack of work space, the barrier imposed by being unable to travel to communicate face-to-face with clients or business associates, and the critical obstacle of an insufficient income with which to start-up even the smallest business. To date I have yet to find any viable home business and continue to search for something within my means. But this search has, in recent years, been forced to take a back seat to the much more pressing issue of housing.

Which brings us at last to the present and my current quest for a non-toxic home. Though little of significance has changed in my life for many years -indeed, I often lament that I could have been in a coma for the past 30 years and still be pretty much where I am now- life moves on in the world around me. In recent years suburban sprawl has accelerated drastically in New Jersey. The once sleepy bedroom community I reside in has been swallowed up by the amorphous semi-urban zone that now spreads like a fungus over most of the US East Coast. With this has come a steady increase in the number of automobiles and primitive oil and gas powered homes along with their attendant pollution. For the past several years my once stabilized health has returned to a steady decline in proportion to this increase in urbanization as well as the deterioration of the crudely fabricated Depression-era home I share with my one remaining elderly great-aunt. (as is common with the elderly, she has abandoned any investment in the basic maintenance of her home due to increasing medical expenses and a growing expectation that it need not last for much longer anyway) My diabetic mother is now in a nursing home in another state and my aunt, now in her 90s and my only remaining relative in this state, has perhaps only a few remaining years. Should she be forced into a nursing home, this home will most assuredly be immediately liquidated to pay for it leaving me immediately homeless. The same result is likely should she die before the usual exploitative nursing home stint. My few more distant relatives have no space nor income to spare and would be of little help in any case as they reside in the even more toxic environment of Staten Island New York. (famous home of a garbage dump so large it can actually be seen from space...) My time is running out and thus my need for non-toxic housing has reached a point of crisis. All other activities have now taken a back-seat to this quest.

It has become increasingly difficult to work even within my home as I now struggle again with growing malaise and increasing cognitive difficulty made worse by grossly inferior health care since the state transferred all Medicaid patients to a handful of reluctant HMOs few physicians will participate in. (I recently had to sit through a rant by one sinus specialist who bitched and whined about the HMO sending "those kinds of people" to him against his explicit instructions to restrict his referrals to higher class patients -this after I had to wait months for treatment of an ear infection. I now have chronic inner-ear congestion in that ear and no one to go to about it since he was the only sinus specialist the HMO had left in over a hundred mile radius. No wonder NJ ranks 35th in the country in health care...) I am still under the care of a prominent regional specialist in MCS but that care has been rather limited since he won't participate in Medicaid or their HMOs, I cannot afford the costly experimental treatments he has prescribed, and cannot even afford the price for his routine office visits. Essentially house-bound, my daily life is today reduced to basically a commute between bed and computer workstation interrupted by a brief excursion for my single meal of the day. (my home no longer having a functional kitchen) My needs are simple but also inflexible. I am a person who owns a thousand books, a high performance computer, and one pair of shoes -and I'm proud of that. That epitomizes the character of a truly civilized 21st Century person. But my non-toxic lifestyle and it complications are hard for others to comprehend, accept, or accommodate and, in fact, my current home -even though it was built before most of the toxic products of modern home construction were introduced- has never been adequate because my more elderly relatives -the home-owners- were too set in their ways and too difficult to negotiate with.

Socialization is limited entirely to the Internet and a small handful of friends I have corresponded with for decades, many of them in other countries and all of them too poor to afford me much help. My elderly relative is generally lost in her own world and conversation with her has become futile -though frankly that has been the case since my childhood. I have no recreation beyond the occasional time spent with computer games or listening to music, the majority of my time spent on my quest for housing. Fibromyalgia has made sleeping difficult and driven my waking and sleeping patterns many hours past the norm.

Loneliness and alienation does not trouble me much since I've been resigned to that since childhood. This is why the prospect of a solitary life in the deserts of Arizona or New Mexico is not a particularly daunting one to me. What troubles me most emotionally is the fear of impending homelessness that has dogged me for decades and now become more palpable than ever. It's not even so much the prospect of homelessness which troubles me so. It's the total loss of hope and dignity that accompanies it. The dehumanization. The reduction to the status of an abulatory pile of filth to be stepped-over, pushed aside, or abused. A mind that once roamed the stars left to die in a carboard box in some alley. The script is already written. In my community the police routinely pick up anyone they suspect of being homeless and dump them in the inner-city hell-holes of Camden, Newark, and Jersey City where they face a brutal but thankfully short existence. My only solace has been the realization that my poor health probably insures an even shorter than usual stint in that hell, perhaps no more than a month or, if I'm lucky enough to be sent there in the winter, a week. And we have the GALL to call this the greatest of nations?

I often wonder about the others like me who have most assuredly already suffered this fate. How many potentially productive lives has this civilization squandered this way? How many people have been ignored to death?