Thoughts on Apple Pie and the Economy

Wednesday, October 12th, 2011

Apple pie premiering with optional for slimmer people than open your mouth for any good food, keeping lots of pounds on for excessively long winters, Larry, vanilla ice cream lets obviously cash-strapped by lost roads and damaged homes, New Agey in approach to community building, Vermont, potentially make up money by being positioned like Krispy Kreme massively leaning against the building, donuts in many bakeries around the state.

Pies in fall, Obama jobs plan, and tax cuts for the terrifically rich might save many people from unemployment here in the Green Mountain state and act to stimulate the economy. Let’s wish helping people like this will lead to lots of people returning to lives of prosperity again.

Sorting out our pronounced, as test of presidencies, problems with the economy keys in on meanings of popular policies loosely interpreted by the politicians and the media. Really people loiter in this territory of causes too long when the issue with our potentially never resolvable, oppositional, outside realm of only politics as usual, differences incorporates our out of control desire for material things and big profits with a paltriness of knowledge about our mental capacity for long-term changes in society.

I am emphasizing to make do with plain apple pie. Mostly it’s opening our society up to keeping things simple that I am advocating.  To old Vermonters, I say to help our country learn to appreciate apple pie rather than lavish pastries.

Drawing Maps of Language and Letters

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

Maps spirited in their lines and shaped by their perspectives of landscapes point out where people must move to navigate for going on trips, giving tours to people like movie stars, and having great world adventures to parts unknown. Tracy and I are trying to draw maps of language and letters to show people new ways of traveling in the land of autism and limited speech.

Operating on people’s openness to meeting us in cities around the country, liking lots of local meals with native beer, we go out and spread our message of mass appeal to Apple iPad-oriented moviegoers. Part of the news your memory needs to remember is our presence like Vermont springs is very short. (We have serious winters.) So let’s look out and key in on our future movie showings, take a friend, and buy them a large popcorn.

~Larry

Reading For Inclusion Day

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011

To lead a normal life, a person needs to have the chance to learn to empty their mind of confusing thoughts and ideas and take in new ones through education in regular schools of socially diverse children. I never had that experience. Most of my learning took place in the world of sparsely populated books and continuously running TV shows in lonely social surroundings.

All of that memory came back when skilled-children’s-book-reader-Pascal and I went to a Burlington (Vermont) Elementary School last week for a Reading for Inclusion Day. Opening students’ minds to inclusion as an idea about keeping differences in the way distance and commonalities in the foreground was my mission as I had to stimulate conversation and thinking caps with probing questions and G-rated, jolly for kids, jokes. It was more momentous to do this than speaking to lots of adult groups because operating like a teacher on the level of moving ideas around a playground of malleable jungle gyms, I knew that I might naturally influence their attitudes about their peers with disabilities.

Awestruck as I was by their participation in the discussion, I was alone in my memories of a isolated childhood so please make learning in a regular classroom a mandate, not driven by politics but by compassion and commitment to a belief that all children can learn.

~Larry

Larry & Pascal read to children as part of "Reading For Inclusion Day" in Burlington, VT

Support Our Weirdly Entertaining Film And TASH

Friday, March 18th, 2011

Tracy & Larry are supporters of TASH, an organization that advocates for human rights and inclusion for people with the most significant disabilities and support needs. For more information about TASH, please visit www.TASH.org.

Movies are the next best thing to People-like magazine coverage of your mission so I would like to rock the theaters across the country with lots of cheers to name our autistic starring roles as Oscar winning in leading the campaign for the acceptance of every one who communicates differently than the population of normally speaking, and possibly too much and too loudly, people.

Make a date at your local AMC theater to see Wretches & Jabberers in April and you will not only be supporting a very weirdly entertaining film but you will also be promoting the greater goals of TASH for inclusion and opportunities for growth as individuals and organizations in the world of disability rights.

By Larry Bissonnette, artist and advocate

Parading Down The Streets of New York

Wednesday, February 9th, 2011

Larry and Tracy landed at the big airport in New York and ordered up loudly zany moments on the mostly full, and needing cleaning, subway. Kidding aside about our mass transportation near-death experiences involving slamming on legs doors and lopping off of arms going through totally hard to move through, turning slowly, turnstiles, it was practically like presenting at the Oscars, killing our audiences with Larry’s jokes and Tracy’s inspirational words of presuming competence at the Reelabilities Film Festival this week.

Larry loved parading down the streets of New York really appreciating the meaning of our mission to change attitudes about intelligence and inclusion. We were on the stages opening minds and hearts out in Long Island and in the heart of Manhattan at the JCC (Jewish Community Center).

Oddly enough, even though we walked by one of the fanciest McDonalds I have ever seen with Broadway lights and didn’t stop, we still had the cheeseburgers to die for at a local pub.

Pleased I am to post my thoughts on the Big Apple and would love to hear from you New Yorkers.

~Larry

Like Energizer Bunnies For Communication

Wednesday, February 2nd, 2011

Nothing makes me happier and awesomely more proud than to see my fellow wretch-in-arms, Mcdonalds cheeseburger lover, Tracy putting out his words of advocacy for communication and presumption of competence on the, in-a-second-things-change, information superhighway.

Emptying our inner systems of wisdom onto this landscape looks at jostling people’s perspectives on disability into seeing movement challenges as planning action without thought. I make thoughts into typed language like a donut machine producing multi-flavored croissants as long as lots of ingredients of support are provided to me. Acting like energizer bunnies for communication, iPads would be great presents in every speech-impaired person’s stocking at Christmas, mobilized by voice output apps and the Wretches & Jabberers soundtrack.

I moment-by-moment listen to my ideas percolating below the surface of my eccentric behavior. Now thanks to the wonders of technology, the internet and the support in navigating the channels of expressive language we get from our trusty presumption of intelligence sidekicks, Tracy and I are going on our mission of changing attitudes around the world, looking for people to listen to our message of new hope for seeing intelligence as an array of blends of coffee different in flavor but never lacking in passionate strength.

~Larry

A Blast of Northern Sayings about Life, Autism, and Communication

Wednesday, January 19th, 2011

Quite the test to ears, hands, and feet, we have been having in the way of freezing cold weather here in nearer-Canada-than-Mexico Vermont. Your relatives in warmer places invite you to come on down and you arrange to fly away like very tropical birds taking leave of a northern climate.

Leading the life of a mostly-acclimatized-to-powdery-snow Vermonter puts you in the place of always yearning to leave for a paradise-like, as sunny as any southern beach, island that seems to invite vacationers to, lining their pale bodies with layers of suntan lotion rather than lots of polar fleece. It’s like that for people without speech in that we always yearn to have voices that work naturally without enhancements of vocal machines but at the same time, like practically adaptable-to-any-weather-conditions Vermonters, we speech-impaired people can work out our thoughts in words as long as we pack communication devices and link up with trusty sled dog-like partners.

Isn’t posting this blog like giving you the latest weather report? Larry is not quite the weather TV star that you will see on your local news, but you are always guaranteed to get a blast of northern sayings about life, autism, and communication from me.

A Life of Independence and Meaningful Engagement

Thursday, January 6th, 2011

Larry pours out good kinds of thoughts on knowing about power of communication on our ideally filled with meaningful social connection lives. Pal Tracy and I opened many doors of acceptance to understanding presumption of competence as an opportunity of a lifetime to see intelligence over and under the covers of people’s actions through our film last year.

Planning to light more fires under seats of ignorance is obviously on our agenda this year but on a perhaps more mundane level, we need to live our lives on a daily basis, picking up our laundry without nags or keeping up with proper diets, with less cheeseburgers and more, picky-eaters-probably-pass-over-in-favor-of-donuts, vegetables. Looking out on this potentially productive use of my time, I am thinking that my life is moving on different escalators but actually I am really poling to the same place – that is a life of independence and meaningful engagement.

Probably real movie stars don’t have to do dirty laundry. Larry mostly still has to make his very comfortable bed at home. More like a public television lecturer on culture and society, I love my life as an amiable stroller of more snowy-than-Hollywood Burlington, Vermont streets, looking for a good cup of coffee.

Houston: An Opportunity for Connection

Monday, January 3rd, 2011

The opportunity to present our potentially more northern in personality style than picturesque sports bar oriented – Larry possibly wants to move there because of lots of good barbeque available – Houston came last week, possibly at the most spiritual time of year, at the BBYO (Jewish Community Organization & Jewish Youth Leadership Network) conference where there existed more youthful energy of being positive about inclusion than anywhere else that I have been lately.

Neither autistic perseverations on giving the important sentence ending period key a workout that I did or our speech impaired attempts to open up interactions of opportunity for connection prevented the partying-in-all-corners-of-the-hotel teens from listening to our words and asking us interesting questions like “Larry, What was your favorite country to visit?” Looking closely on our every typed word they paid more attention than to their text messages lighting up their cell phones like perky toys on Christmas day.

It is known that inclusion is not a place but an orientation towards making people with disabilities feel like they belong at barbeques or any event or situation where people of all political or social persuasions gather to make small talk, learn big ideas, or celebrate loudly birthdays and holidays. I would like to pitch out, like a teacher presenting a lesson on kicking out less people of differences accepting attitudes, the idea that learning to include is a lesson in making looking and acting differently like choosing pizza toppings. Larry loves pepperoni, Pascal and Harvey love vegetables, and Tracy loves both yet we movie stars can still all eat pizza together.

Happy New Year to all of our potentially healthier eating than Larry fans.

Denver, TASH, and Running Clothes

Thursday, December 9th, 2010

Little people look small inside places of large, really-meant-for-popstar-spectacles, spaces. Larry and Tracy put on their walking shoes this morning in more-mountainous-than-Vermont Denver, peacefully quiet, less crowded, nearly modern in most architecture. People at the TASH conference here will be seeing our movie, eating meals with Coors beer and looking to be captivated by our post-movie, later than my bedtime, remarks.

People like us might look small in this picture of the skyline of powerfully terrain-dominating buildings but our ideas about looking small, but parachuting in big perspectives in presuming competence into the landscape of attitudes about disability bring places into lasting nearly as long as the pyramids in terms of their attitudes about movies on oddballs like Tracy and Larry. Only slightly less odd are Pascal and Harvey, especially when they have on their synthetically made, with pleasing-to-their-figures, running clothes.

~Larry

Larry and Tracy tour the city of Denver while attending TASH 2010!