(Not) Born This Way– Repost

(I’ve been fighting the creeping cruds for the last couple of weeks and haven’t felt up to composing 

a new essay. so, I’ll offer up a “Best of Wheelchair Kamikaze“. This composition generated a lot of response when it was first posted about two years ago, and I hope you find it worthwhile the second time around. Stay tuned for a new essay, coming just as soon as the cruds recede…)

Later in May I’ll be marking the 13^th anniversary of my official diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. Believe you me, the date won’t be punctuated by any festivities, but more likely with a shake of the head. Thirteen official years with this motherfracker and the reality of it is still a shock despite my mounting disabilities and the indignities that go with them. At this point my healthy days are becoming a distant memory, so much so that many of the details of my way-back-when life have taken on a dreamlike quality, as if they are no more than the ethereal whisps of a somnolent mind.

But no, indeed there was a time when I was healthy, and yes, I did actually do all of those things that are stored in my memory banks. Thing is, looking at me now, due to the unfortunate developments of the last 13 years nobody could ever guess at the experiences that shaped me. This certainly wasn't true when I was well, when my outward appearance most definitely reflected many of my life's experiences, my likes and dislikes, and, I think, something of the essence of my soul. Though I wasn't a peacock, I did take pride in my appearance, and often wore a rotating selection of the antique wristwatches and jewelry (some of the jewelry dating back to ancient times) that I passionately collected. Yes, I'll admit to a touch of vanity, but mostly my outward appearance was simply a natural extension of the person within.

One of my favorite pastimes is people watching, and part of what makes that activity so endlessly fascinating is imagining the life of each person spied, constructing an off-the-cuff narrative of their past, present and future. Writ large on many folks is an imprint of their lives, of dreams and aspirations filled or failed, of triumphs exulted and disappointments suffered. That sly looking older gent, snap brimmed hat worn at just the right angle and eyes all a twinkle certainly had his adventures, quite likely including a few too impolite to be told in public. Was he CIA or Cosa Nostra, and is there really a difference? That fashionably retro young lady, trying so desperately to come off cooler than a Frigidaire, masking not so long ago awkward teenage years and a mass of present insecurities roiling inside, her wannabe Audrey Hepburn exterior a veneer for the Olive Oil heart pumping within.

Most of us project who we have been and who we want to be through the image of ourselves we construct for the outside world, some more consciously than others but almost all having their tells. Much to my chagrin, though, my current wheelchair bound, physically decrepit state serves as the ultimate unwanted camouflage. Spastic, atrophied limbs and my mechanical means of ambulation paint a picture likely to overwhelm any I might otherwise want to project. When I first got the chair and was less disabled I made it a point to try to be the most fashionable gimp possible, choosing clothes and accoutrement that screamed “personality”. Now, though, forced by the ravages of my illness to wear garments picked far more for practicality than self-expression, my outward appearance speaks primarily of my medical predicament and not of the life that preceded it.

It’s strange how invisible one can feel when sitting in a hulking 350-pound mechanical monster. The simple fact is that most healthy folks don’t spend much time contemplating the person and personality sitting in the wheelchair, preferring to devote their thoughts instead to less morbid topics. Thinking too hard about the person in the wheelchair might provoke some rather unpleasant truths, including the disturbing reality that with a single stroke of bad luck that person in the wheelchair could be them. It’s much easier and less troubling to simply assume that the wheelchair people had just been born that way, or had in some other fashion materialized in their present state fully formed, like a pod person from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Well, for the record, I’d like to state that I was definitely not born this way. This summer it will be eight years since I was forced into my first wheelchair, and about 11 years since I exhibited my first blatantly obvious outward signs of disability. The life I led before MS intruded upon it was varied and colorful, filled with experiences ranging from the ridiculous to the transcendent. And some that were transcendentally ridiculous.

At age 17 I worked for a dirty magazine, at 23 I was the lead singer of a punk rock band, at 30 a creative cog in a large buttoned down multinational corporation (yuck), and at 36 found myself heading up the DVD production department at one of the foremost music/TV/video production facilities in the world. 

I played an important part in the making of over 300 mostly music related DVDs, and have a platinum record on my wall and a listing on IMDb.com to prove it. And even though that all sounds interesting in the telling, I never found much satisfaction in my work life. 

I was a habitual night crawler, carousing past dawn more times than I can remember or count. To this day I’m rarely in bed before 3 AM, and strive to be blissfully ignorant that there are two 10 o’clocks in one day.

I suffered several broken hearts, but also broke a few along the way (sorry for that). I learned that although the faces and circumstances of each heartbreak differ, the heart tends to shatter along the same fault lines every time. And that after each heartbreak, which I neurotically nurtured, I was only as alone as I wanted to be. New romances magically appeared just as soon as I opened myself up to their possibility and stopped pining for loves lost.

I was almost murdered (twice), suffered a detached retina after hitting a really big guy in the fist with my eye, and once unceremoniously projectile vomited at my boss’s table during a raucous office Christmas party. Oops.

I drove fast cars way too fast (how else to drive them?), bet on fast horses that mostly turned out to be not quite fast enough, and fasted on Yom Kippur.

I shot video professionally while flying in vintage war planes, police helicopters, hot-air balloons, and even the Goodyear blimp, twice.

I jumped out of an airplane.

I came face-to-face with a 10 foot bull shark while snorkeling over a reef a few miles out in the Atlantic off the Florida Keys. I wish I could say that I faced the moment with steely resolve, but in plain fact I tried my best to run back to the boat that brought me there, proving once and for all that I am not the son of God and cannot walk on water. This did nothing to ingratiate me to my then girlfriend, left behind in my panicked wake. Please see the note on heartbreaks, above.

I won the lottery (for thousands, not millions), shot a hole-in-one, and came in first in a 500 player online poker tournament.

For a while I swam a mile every day, slicing through the waters in a meditative state stoked by the womb like environment of the pool and the repetitive physicality of the exercise. How I miss that.

I made friends with some very special people, relationships that matured beyond mere friendship to become family. These precious folks are an integral part of who I am and how I view the world. And I owe most of them long overdue phone calls.

I married an angel. 

At times I've been down to my last dime and at others have been flush with cash, and learned that what my grandmother used to tell me about wealth when I was a kid is true: rich or poor, it’s nice to have money.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the gist. I realize, too, that my becoming disabled has afforded me some extraordinary experiences that I otherwise certainly would’ve missed, and not all of them involve unpleasant medical procedures. Through these pages I have touched and been touched by people from all over the world. My MS “get out of work free” card gave me a reprieve from the working world, and allowed me the freedom to dust off parts of myself that had been left neglected for decades. I’ve made some very special new friends who are in one form or another members of the MS club. I owe most of them phone calls, too.

Despite the fact that I am, of course, still the sum of all of these parts, as my disabilities mount they increasingly dictate the persona the public at large sees when I venture outside my apartment. It’s impossible for them not to, as my wheelchair has no invisibility button and my withered and weakened limbs can’t be camouflaged by even the most snappy pull over shirts and elastic waisted pants. I know I'm not alone in these feelings, as I sense some of the same frustrations in the knowing glances and nods exchanged with other wheelchair users that I pass on the streets of New York. Funny thing is that some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met are fellow wheelchair jockeys, most of them imbued with a quiet wisdom and sense of the absurd accrued by enduring the foibles of our shared tribulations. 

Indeed, most of us in wheelchairs were not born this way, and if that fact makes some members of the healthy world uncomfortable, well, sorry for that but get over it. Although a quick look at me may no longer reveal the kernel of who I am and where I’ve been, I'd be happy to share the lessons learned and laughs picked up along the way with anybody who would care to hear them. I am much more than this faulty and misshapen body; there's still a person in here filled with all the simplicities, complexities and idiosyncratic contradictions I've collected all these years. To find out what lurks within requires but one magic word. Hello.


Writing this essay brought to mind a wonderful song written and recorded by John Prine in 1971 that touches on many of these same themes, though in the context of old age rather than disability. It’s one of the most poignant songs I’ve ever heard…

Persistence of Hope, Persistence and Hope

We must free ourselves of the hope that the seas will ever rest. We must learn to sail in high winds.
– Aristotle Onassis

Of late I’ve been navigating choppy waters, my physical problems becoming ever more pronounced and complicated, the progression of my disease along with its attendant disabilities charging ahead relentlessly. At this stage of the game I’m fully aware that there are no easy answers forthcoming. In addition to my ever-increasing crippling neurologic deficits, my highly dysfunctional endocrine system continues to defy explanation and remedy, and – as if these previous two beasties weren’t enough – a hideously painful degenerative bone disease called avascular necrosis has shattered both of my hips and shoulders, a condition which exponentially decreases my already gutted quality of life. The kicker is that the avascular necrosis is a rare side effect from the high doses of IV steroids I was given early on in my MS career in attempts to forestall the progression of the disease, and I was probably all the more susceptible to the condition due to my then largely misunderstood endocrine problems. This tangled web of maladies seems symbiotic. Each multiplies the problems caused by the others, forming a devilish trio that has me directly in its sites.

Still, even as the body flounders my spirit soldiers on, admittedly bowed but still unbroken. Though on an intellectual level I’ve long recognized the ruinous damage that can be wrought by progressive MS, I honestly never imagined or expected that I’d reach the level of decrepitude at which I now find myself. Given my extensive laundry list of failed and failing body parts, at this point there are moments when I realize how easy it would be to simply throw in the towel. Instead, I choose to continue the fight, and even in the midst of my ongoing crises of spirit and body, I can’t help but wonder, why? What is the nature of the spark within that steadfastly refuses to be doused?

When I was a little boy I had great fun rummaging through piles of old family photos with my grandmother, visual relics haphazardly collected in a variety of well-worn boxes stored up in her bedroom closet. It seemed there was a story attached to each image, and I delighted in seeing my adult relatives as their much younger selves in long ago moments forever frozen in time. I knew most of the people in the pictures, but there were of course photos of people I had never met; people who had died, old friends who had drifted away, or folks who had otherwise been lost to time.

Among the oldest photos in this treasure trove were yellowed, cracked images of my European ancestors who hadn’t migrated to the United States at the end of the 19^th century. I remember staring at these pictures especially intently, and I vividly recall seeing one small boy with whom I bore a striking resemblance. Because of this resemblance I felt a strong bond with this mysterious person, so distant from me in time and place. As a young boy I couldn’t help but be mesmerized by this reflection of myself in a photo more than half a century old.

When I first saw these ancient photos of my ancestors I was quite young, maybe five years old, and when I asked what happened to the people in them my queries were always met with a strange silence. When I asked again just a few years later, though, I was finally told that those who had lived long enough to see the outbreak of World War II had all been murdered, victims of the Nazi Holocaust. Naturally, this news had a profound effect on me. Though I don’t think the message was ever explicitly communicated, I knew in my bones that part of these people still lived in me, their blood running through my veins. As I grew older I came to feel that my very existence somehow defied the horrors that had been visited upon them, and that my life represented a victory over those who had inflicted unthinkable evils on my long lost relatives.

I was brought up with virtually no religious training, and frankly don’t have much use for organized religion, but I do culturally identify quite strongly with my Jewish heritage. Early on I developed a keen interest in the Holocaust. As I learned more and more about the realities of camps like Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Sobibor, I often wondered how anybody could have survived the raging inferno of daily life in those malevolent places, the level of depravity inflicted upon those imprisoned within them beyond description by the words of any language. Some inmates survived years in those camps, month after month spent subjected to endless horror. What is it that resides within the human spirit that keeps alive the will to live, to make it through just one more day despite being trapped in a world in which wholesale torture and murder are rendered banal? The atrocities inflicted upon these people and to which they bore daily witness defy understanding in any rational sense, and yet the sheer determination to live stood strong.

When I first started my career in TV and video production I was living in South Florida, then home to more Holocaust survivors than any place other than Israel. In one of those odd coincidences that mark the path of life, one of my first assignments as a Producer at a local cable company was to help document the testimony of survivors by recording their stories on videotape. My role was to man the video control room of our studio, choosing between camera angles using a device called a switcher while on our soundstage a professional interviewer led each survivor through their narrative, parts of which many of the survivors had never before spoken a word.

Though I participated in at least a dozen of these interviews, the experience was always emotionally wracking. In each instance an elderly grandmother or grandfather would arrive at the facility, by all appearances just like every other senior citizen retired to Florida, save for the numbers invariably tattooed on the forearms. Each interview started off rather routinely, the survivors telling tales of everyday life with their families in small towns or big cities located all over Europe and Russia. Soon though their stories took a dark turn, and out of the mouths of these sweet old people poured forth depraved accounts of heartbreak and cruelty that left all who heard them at first aghast and then in tears.

The experiences recounted included first hand reports of babies ripped from the arms of their mothers and killed before their eyes, friends expiring in boxcars so packed that there was no room for them to fall, and parents calming toddlers even as they were led to the gas chambers. One elegant lady lost all semblance of composure as she told of being shot and dumped into a mass grave, only to survive and crawl out from under a tangle of corpses when night fell. Many told of the heroism of the Gentiles that tried to save them, beacons of light shining through the some of the darkest hours civilization has ever known.

When asked how and why they were able to endure their ordeals from one day to the next, even in the most desperate of times when thoughts of liberation and freedom seemed folly, practically every one of the survivors answered that their primary reason for clinging to life was the burning hope that at least one person survive to bear witness to what happened, so that the millions of dead would not have died in vain and that mankind would never forget and let it happen again. Thus, the sheer act of living became one of rebellion, a blow struck for humanity against a world gone mad.

Now, to be sure, I am not comparing my own predicament to that of an inmate of Auschwitz in 1944, except for perhaps one tiny commonality. In the face of a daunting odds the embers of hope stay lit, even if only in defiance of a state of affairs that on some days seems without resolve. Despite the ravages of my illness and the improbability of my finding anything approaching a cure, something within simply refuses to accept my predicament but must instead fight and keep searching for answers. I am acutely aware that even if my neurologic disease were to suddenly relent I’d still be left with an endocrine system so broken as to be disabling in its own right, and that even if my endocrine issues were then miraculously stabilized I’d need to have my hips and shoulders replaced before I could leave my wheelchair. I’m not a rainbows and unicorns type of guy, but I am an obstinate SOB, and I’m not going down without a brawl.

Since the day of my diagnosis I resolved to face my illness in all of its stark reality. I fully understand that the odds of my being cured are next to nil, but if the medical geniuses could at the very least get me back to where I was five or six years ago when I was regularly out and about terrorizing pedestrians on the streets of New York in my speeding wheelchair, I’d be ecstatic. Even this attenuated wish is likely a stretch, but when my mood turns dark I think of that long-ago child in the pictures from my grandmother’s closet and determine to try to honor those whose blood runs through my veins. I am but a speck on the arc of time, my tribulations worthy of not even a footnote in the history of human suffering. I find this awareness of my own insignificance oddly comforting, a reminder that no person transcends the unyielding torrent of time. I long ago resolved to never let hope eclipse reason, yet despite the twisted knot of crippling ailments that may stack the odds against me, the defiant spark within still burns. Hope and reason are not mutually exclusive; in fact, each balances the other, combining to form a force capable of holding steady even in the roughest of seas.


A note to my fellow MSers: please let me emphasize that my situation is fairly unique in its complexities, a web of rare conditions that seem to feed off of each other. Thirteen years after my initial diagnosis, my doctors are still not even sure that my neurologic disease is MS. As I’ve written before on these pages, my neurologist and I have agreed that in my case PPMS stands for The Peculiar Paralysis of Marc Stecker. Don’t let the details of my situation dishearten you about the prospects of your own. Given the ever accelerating pace of MS research and the advances being made in laboratories around the world, MS patients have now more than ever very tangible reasons for hope. Current treatments have demonstrated in trial after trial that they can positively impact the disease course for many if not most patients, and emerging and experimental therapies now being tested provide the tantalizing promise of completely halting the disease and even repairing damage already done. At long last progressive MS is finally taking its turn as the focus of MS research, it's many mysteries slowly becoming untangled. Of course, for patients suffering from MS answers cannot come fast enough. Although there’s no denying MS remains a terrible beast, there are now more reasons than ever to have faith that this beast can and will be tamed.

(Not) Born This Way

(To those who receive this via email, this essay contains a video which can be viewed on the Wheelchair Kamikaze website – click here)

Later in May I’ll be marking the 13^th anniversary of my official diagnosis with Multiple Sclerosis. Believe you me, the date won’t be punctuated by any festivities, but more likely with a shake of the head. Thirteen official years with this motherfracker and it’s still a shock, despite my mounting disabilities and the indignities that go with them. At this point my healthy days are becoming a distant memory, so much so that many of the details of my way-back-when life have taken on a dreamlike quality, as if they are no more than the ethereal inventions of a somnolent mind.

But no, indeed there was a time when I was healthy, and yes, I did actually do all of those things that are stored in my memory banks. Thing is, looking at me now, except for the unfortunate developments of the last 13 years, nobody could ever guess at the experiences that shaped me. This certainly wasn't true when I was well, when my outward appearance most definitely reflected many of my life's experiences, my likes and dislikes, and, I think, something of the essence of my soul. Though I wasn't a peacock, I did take pride in my appearance, and often wore a rotating selection of the antique wristwatches and jewelry (some of the jewelry dating back to ancient times) that I passionately collected. Yes, I'll admit to a touch of vanity, but mostly I just wanted my outward appearance to be a natural extension of the person wearing the clothes.

One of my favorite pastimes is people watching, and part of what makes that activity so endlessly fascinating is imagining the life of each person spied, constructing a momentary narrative of their past, present and future. Writ large on many folks is an imprint of their lives, of dreams and aspirations filled or failed, of triumphs exulted and disappointments swallowed. That sly looking older gent, snap brimmed hat worn at a jaunty angle and eyes all a twinkle certainly had his adventures, quite likely a few too impolite to be told in public. Was he CIA or Mafia, and is there really a difference? That fashionably retro young lady, trying so desperately to come off cooler than a Frigidaire, masking not long ago awkward teenage years and a mass of insecurities still harbored inside, her wannabe Audrey Hepburn exterior a veneer for the Olive Oil heart pumping within.

Most of us project who we have been and who we want to be through the image of ourselves we construct for the outside world, some more consciously than others but almost all having their tells. My current wheelchair bound, physically decrepit state serves as the ultimate unwanted camouflage, to my chagrin. Spastic, atrophied limbs and my mechanical means of ambulation paint a picture likely to overwhelm any I might otherwise want to project. When I first got the chair and was less disabled I made it a point to try to be the most fashionable gimp possible, choosing clothes and accoutrement that screamed “personality”. Now, though, forced by the ravages of my illness to wear garments picked far more for practicality than self-expression, my outward appearance speaks primarily of my medical predicament and not of the life that preceded it.

It’s strange how invisible one can feel when sitting in a hulking 350-pound mechanical monster. The simple fact is that most healthy folks don’t spend much time contemplating the person and personality sitting in the wheelchair, preferring to devote their thoughts instead to less morbid topics. Thinking too hard about the person in the wheelchair might provoke some rather unpleasant truths, including the disturbing reality that with a single stroke of bad luck that person in the wheelchair could be you. Truth be told, back when I was among the healthy I was one of those who didn’t give much thought to folks in wheelchairs or scooters. Though I’m generally an empathetic guy, I don’t think I ever took the time to contemplate life through the eyes of the disabled, or imagine the path that brought them to their current state. It was much easier and less troubling to simply assume that they had just been born that way or had in some other fashion materialized in that wheelchair fully formed, like a pod person from The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dummy.

Well, for the record, I’d like to state that I was definitely not born this way. This summer it will be eight years since I was forced into my first wheelchair, and about 11 years since I exhibited my first blatantly obvious outward signs of disability. The life I lead before MS intruded upon it was varied and colorful, filled with experiences ranging from the ridiculous to the transcendent. And some that were transcendentally ridiculous.

At age 17 I worked for a dirty magazine, at 23 I was the lead singer of a punk rock band, at 30 a creative cog in a large buttoned down multinational corporation (yuck), and at 36 found myself heading up the DVD production department at one of the foremost music/TV/video production facilities in the world.

I played an important part in the making of over 300 mostly music related DVDs, and have a platinum record on my wall and a listing on IMDb.com to prove it. And even though that all sounds interesting in the telling, I never found much satisfaction in my work life.

I was a habitual night crawler, carousing past dawn more times than I can remember or count. To this day I’m rarely in bed before 3 AM, and strive to be blissfully ignorant that there are two 10 o’clocks in one day.

I suffered several broken hearts, but also broke a few along the way (sorry for that). I learned that although the faces and circumstances of each heartbreak differ, the heart tends to shatter along the same fault lines every time. And that after each heartbreak, which I neurotically nurtured, I was only as alone as I wanted to be.

I was almost murdered (twice), suffered a detached retina after hitting a really big guy in the fist with my eye, and once unceremoniously projectile vomited at my boss’s table during a raucous office Christmas party. Oops.

I drove fast cars way too fast (how else to drive them?), bet on fast horses that mostly turned out to be not quite fast enough, and fasted on Yom Kippur.

I shot video professionally while flying in vintage war planes, police helicopters, hot-air balloons, and even the Goodyear blimp, twice.

I jumped out of an airplane.

I came face-to-face with a 10 foot bull shark while snorkeling over a reef a few miles out in the Atlantic off the Florida Keys. I wish I could say that I faced the moment with steely resolve, but in plain fact I tried my best to run back to the boat that brought me there, proving once and for all that I am not the son of God. This did nothing to ingratiate me to my then girlfriend, left behind in my panicked wake. Please see the note on heartbreaks, above.

I won the lottery (for thousands, not millions), shot a hole-in-one, and came in first in an online poker tournament.

For a while I swam a mile every day, slicing through the waters in a meditative state engendered by the womb like environment of the pool and the repetitive physicality of the exercise. How I miss that.

I made friends with some very special people, relationships that matured beyond mere friendship to become family. These precious folks are an integral part of who I am and how I view the world. And I owe most of them long overdue phone calls.

I married an angel.

At times I've been down to my last dime and at others have been flush with cash, and learned that what my grandmother used to tell me about wealth when I was a kid was true: rich or poor, it’s nice to have money.

I could go on, but I’m sure you get the gist. I realize, too, that my becoming disabled has afforded me some extraordinary experiences that I otherwise certainly would’ve missed, and not all of them involve unpleasant medical procedures. Through these pages I have touched and been touched by people from all over the world. My MS “get out of work free” card gave me a reprieve from the working world, and allowed me the freedom to dust off parts of myself that had been left neglected for decades. I’ve made some very special new friends who are in one form or another members of the MS club. I owe most of them phone calls, too.

Despite the fact that I am, of course, still the sum of all of these parts, as my disabilities mount they increasingly pirate the persona the public at large sees when I venture outside my apartment. It’s impossible for them not to, as my wheelchair has no invisibility button, and my withered and weakened limbs can’t be camouflaged by even the most snappy pull over shirts and elastic waisted pants. I know I'm not alone in these feelings, as I sense some of the same frustrations in the knowing glances and nods exchanged with other wheelchair users that I pass on the streets of New York. Funny thing is that some of the most interesting people I’ve ever met are fellow wheelchair jockeys, most of them imbued with a quiet wisdom and sense of the absurd accrued by enduring the foibles of our shared tribulations.

Indeed, most of us in wheelchairs were not born this way, and if that fact makes some members of the healthy world uncomfortable, well, sorry for that but get over it. Although a quick look at me may no longer reveal the kernel of who I am and where I’ve been, I'd be happy to share the lessons learned and laughs picked up along the way with one and all. I am much more than this faulty and misshapen body; there's still a person in here filled with all the simplicities, complexities and idiosyncratic contradictions I've collected all these years. To find out what lurks within requires but one magic word. Hello.


Writing this essay brought to mind a wonderful song written and recorded by John Prine in 1971 that touches on many of these same themes, though in the context of old age rather than disability. It’s one of the most poignant songs I’ve ever heard…

A Worthy Cause

(For those receiving this via email, the following post contains multiple videos which aren’t available for viewing in email format. To view the videos, please visit the Wheelchair Kamikaze website, by clicking here)

Okay, folks, I’m going to take the liberty of using my virtual soapbox here on Wheelchair Kamikaze to beat the drum for a worthy cause, an outside the box effort to make the lives of the disabled easier and maybe even a bit more joyful. I’ll include a bunch of videos which will help explain this project and the needs it addresses. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video must be worth several hundred thousand, and these short clips will save you the rigors of having to read yet another of my seemingly endless polemics.

I present to you the AXS Map project, which is the brainchild of filmmaker and fellow MSer Jason DaSilva. Jason recently won an Emmy for his documentary film When I Walk (click here), an eloquent and touching exploration of his journeys through the world of progressive MS. When I Walk received many well-deserved accolades at film festivals around the world, and was shown on US television as part of the PBS series POV. The film is available for instant viewing on a variety of streaming platforms, including Hudu, Vudu, iTunes, Google Play, and YouTube (click here).

If you haven’t seen the film, I highly recommend it. When I Walk offers an unvarnished portrayal of the realities of life with a chronic progressive disabling disease without dissolving into pathos, and also offers an uplifting love story to boot. There, now I’ve played film critic, testament to the teaching skills of my professors back in film school over 30 years ago. How nice that my degree hasn’t gone completely to waste…

Ah, but I digress. Back to the subject at hand, the AXS Map project (click here), which endeavors to create an online and mobile app based mapping tool that will allow disabled folks to readily identify accessible shops, restaurants, and other establishments in whatever city or neighborhood they happen to find themselves. The project is worldwide in scope, and its efforts to map locales both near and far involve interactive “mapathons”, organized mapping events that can be turned into fun little competitions. AXS Map project funding efforts are currently underway via a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign intended to turn Jason’s vision into reality (click here). Here’s a video about AXS Map produced by Jason  that fully explains the project.



As most every disabled person can attest, the frustrations involved in simply trying to accomplish even the most mundane errand can often prove daunting and disheartening. Cities like New York, in which Jason and I both reside, are filled with obstacles that can go completely unnoticed by able-bodied folks, but are just about insurmountable to those of using canes, walkers, wheelchairs, or scooters. Here’s a great video Jason did for the New York Times that vividly illustrates the hassles routinely encountered by those whose legs are no longer their primary means of transportation…



Hey, it occurs to me that this would be a great place to dust off one of my old Wheelchair Kamikaze videos, which were the reason this blog got started in the first place. Way back in 2009 Wheelchair Kamikaze was born with the intention of it being a place to park the videos and photos I was shooting for my wheelchair, a spot on the Internet where friends and family could access my self-indulgent little projects. Among these self-indulgences was a video called “Searching for Audrey Hepburn”, in which I take a wheelchair journey through the streets of New York looking for a statue inspired by the late great actress’s indefatigable humanitarian work on behalf of the children of the world. Along the way I encounter quite a number of the obstacles that can make getting around New York in a wheelchair a genuine pain in the ass. Sadly, the friend I mention in the video, who inspired my search for the statue with his boundless affection for Audrey Hepburn, passed away about a year and a half ago. Rest in peace, Sir Brett, and thanks for the smiles…



And just for the heck of it, here’s a video of Jason receiving his Emmy award for When I Walk, which, even if you haven't seen the film, is poignant and touching in its own right…


Please support the AXS Map project, just waiting for your help to get kicked into high gear. If you’re not in a position to make a financial donation, consider organizing or taking part in a mapathon, thereby helping to make life that much easier for people with disabilities. For more info, just visit the AXS Map website (click here). Thanks.