"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." - Kafka

    I love books. Books teach me, entertain me, make life worth living. I learn something from every book I read, so there's a way in which I'm changed by every book I read, but there are a few books which have changed me in a more profound way. This is the short list of books that have changed my life. Each of these has spoken to me on some very deep, personal level, and changed who I was as a person. It's an experience not unlike falling in love, and my favorite part about it is that it isn't over. I can't wait to discover more books like these. These are what I have discovered so far:

The Ishmael Trilogy by Daniel Quinn

 

     An introduction to a school of thought. To succinctly describe these books: a telepathic gorilla shows you how the entirety of human civilization has been a mistake. That's the biggest hurdle to letting these books touch you, so might as well get it out of the way early. These books genuinely changed my perception of everything, and, as one of the cover blurbs notes, books can now be divided into two categories: books I read before Ishmael, and books I read after Ishmael. I think I would be doing them an injustice by trying to summarize them, so let me just get you in the neighborhood, and then please: read them yourself. I would recommend any of the books on this list to anyone (with one exception, as you will see), but there's really no great harm in taking or leaving them. The Quinn books are different. Whether you accept or reject them, everyone should be exposed to these ideas.
 
     They are presented as novels, but they are didactic books. Daniel Quinn struggled for years on how best to convey his ideas, and the presentation went through many different formats before settling on the telepathic gorilla novel. Why? I don't know. It worked, so that's all the justification needed. It begins with a newspaper ad: "Teacher seeks pupil. Must have earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person." I can probably guess your reaction to the 'save the world' bit, because it was mine: a roll of the eyes, dismissal if not hostility. Just let him have his say, that's all I ask. He is serious. It works.
 
     Some people are very hostile to these books, so if you read them and you react that way, that's fine. We're different and that's ok. If you're reading this, you're probably a friend of mine, and I'm not sure how we became friends with such radically different world views, but it's ok. I don't mind. That's one of the ideas presented in the book. We don't all have to think the same way. Besides that, major themes include ecology and sustainability, but if that turns you off, that's ok too. Before I read this book, I was a nihilist, and those things were a joke to me. Nihilism was not a label to me, and I was not a t-shirt philosopher. You can check out my post from a few days ago about my drug use to get some idea of how I got there (and some of the other books on this list will also help), but believe me, my mind was darker than dark. Justifiably so; most people just don't allow themselves an honest look at the world. I delved deep into the darkness of the human condition. Drugs, hate, the Holocaust, Vietnam, slavery, pornography, prostitution, genocide, rape, chaos, murder... these things were my stock in trade. I studied them, came to know them well, and I did it with a smile, because well... it's that or suicide. The only other option, the one most people take, is denial. That's the world we live in. Ishmael acknowledges this. I had reached that point, but concluded that there was no way out, and humanity was a failed species. Just like almost every other species this planet has produced.
 
     Daniel Quinn's books changed my mind. I cannot give them a higher recommendation than that. I'm not going to tell you they will change your mind too. But I will say that they can. Those things I described, that's all still true, and the world is still a twisted, evil place. But there is another way. I didn't think there was, but he showed me.
          
     Ishmael actually is pretty simplified in some ways, but for one, that's ok. It's the beginning of a journey, not the end. And also, that's why he wrote two more. The Story of B presents a lot of the same ideas in a much more harsh, aggressive way, because Quinn discovered that a lot of people weren't getting what he was saying in Ishmael. He drives the point home even harder. My Ishmael has a twelve year old girl as the protagonist, because really, that's what we need. An idea this basic needs to be able to be understood by a child. This is not for the classrooms and the libraries. This is for real life, the kind we live every day. The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. Just read them and decide for yourself.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

 
     The book that launched the career of one of our most respected evolutionary biologists, as well as one of our most outspoken atheists. Whatever backlash being a proud atheist has gotten in recent years, it's a noble and wonderful thing to be (one of my older posts expands on this). However, when this book was written, that was not at all what Richard Dawkins was about, and I think that's an important distinction. He became a crusader for atheism because of the way theists reacted to his work, in particular this book.
 
     It changed my life in this way: I was raised in a very Christian environment. I went to church every day, and like Steve Harvey, when I say every day I mean every day. My school was at my church. This was a very fundamentalist style of Christianity with all that entails. Indoctrinated with this kind of conditioning from as early as I can remember, it was hard for me to break away from it, psychologically. I always had this nagging fear of hellfire in the back of my mind. I think that's understandable. Tell a child that if they don't believe certain things they're going to be tortured forever, and I mean really tortured, think of the worst thing you can and multiply it by a million and it never stops kind of tortured, it kind of makes Freddy Krueger seem like a pussy. Creationism is the backbone of this belief system. There's lots of reasons not to believe in God, but not so fast. Just how do you think you got here?
 
     I know creationism is silly nonsense, but you have to understand the state of mind of people within this system. It uses internally consistent logic and self-reinforcement to present evolution as the wacky belief. Darwin's name is dragged through the mud. We're told over and over and over again that a transitional fossil has never been found, that Noah's ark has been found, that evolution is a conspiracy. This all seems so stupid now, but when it's all you've ever been told and it's all anyone you've ever met believes, what are you going to do? You're actively taught that evolutionists are wicked, deluded idiots, and well, if you don't like it you can burn in Hell forever.
      
     The Selfish Gene is the book that broke me out of that prison. I read it, and Dawkins was able to communicate his work so well, it was as if my eyes were opened. "Dear god," I said "evolution is true!" Yes, it certainly is. I had already rejected God by that point, but this book was what finally gave me peace of mind. The Christian machine had done its work too well in establishing creationism as the keystone of its belief. If you take it away, the whole Jenga tower falls, because evolution is based on suffering and death. As Dawkins himself says in another book:  
 
"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference." 
         
     This reality was totally incompatible with any concept of God as it had been presented to me. Evolution occurred, therefore, I need not fear Hell. As bleak as it may seem, remember, I was reading that as a nihilist. It perfectly described the world as I observed it, and still do. We must simply take joy in the fact that we have lucked out. When you look at the real odds of not only existing in the first place, but existing in a state where we can be happy and enjoy life, they are so astronomically small that the theist calls them impossible. And yet here we are. This fills me with numinous awe. This is where I find wonder and magic in the world. What is god in the face of reality? An insult. An almighty creator is just a pathetic dumbing down of an indifferent universe. That's my religion. The Selfish Gene is what gave me that, and what started me down the path of study of evolution, which to this day can make me well up with the overpowering awesomeness of it all.
     

Maus by Art Spiegelman

 

     Maus is cartoonist Art Spiegelman's record of his father, Vladek's, survival in Auschwitz. It's famous for its animal depictions: Jews are mice, Germans cats, Poles pigs, Americans dogs, etc. That kind of fades into the background when you read it, because it's such a human story. Maus is one of the most genuine, heartfelt things I have ever read. It is so honest that you can't classify it as anything. It's not a graphic novel, it's not a memoir, it's not history (although it is all these things). Maus is Maus. We've all heard of the Holocaust, but it is truly incomprehensible to anyone who didn't experience it. Because Maus is so nakedly honest, and because Art was struggling to understand the meaning of these events himself, it is an approach to something that's unapproachable. I don't think it is a singular event, comparable things have happened, but it is so bad that it is, to a nihilist such as myself, an event akin to the crucifixion/resurrection to a Christian. Something which both defines and justifies a world view.

      

     Few people will allow the magnitude of what happened into their hearts and minds, because of what it implies. The Holocaust, to truly understand it, shatters our concept of God. It shatters our concept of nations. It shatters our concept of brotherhood and human benevolence. And however that makes you feel, and whatever that implies to you, you're just going to have to deal with it. Because it happened. It's reality. There's nothing to be learned from it, except maybe a shallow "Never again.", which we did not learn, as genocide still occurs to this day all around the world. Maus was my doorway to that. I've read a lot about the Holocaust, and now that knowledge, along with evolution, allows me to say with utmost confidence that there's no god. I don't think. I know. Maus remains one of the best things I've read on the subject, I would say Maus and the works of Primo Levi are the most essential.  

      

     There's nothing good to be gained from this knowledge, but sadly, that doesn't make it go away. As sick as it is, this is the world we live in, and until we admit it, we are powerless to escape it. It still goes on. The American continent was founded on a genocide of thirteen million indigenous people (or "Indians" as the settlers called them), bigger than Hitler's genocide. And who mourns for them? What is to be gained in the forgetting? Understanding the depravity and chaos of our species as I understand it is key to also understanding just why those Daniel Quinn books were so important to me. So shines a good deed in a weary world...

 

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

 
   It might be more accurate to say that David Foster Wallace changed me, rather than any particular thing he wrote. He's special to me, and I could probably have included a few different things here. "This Is Water" changed me, but it's a speech, not a book. The title essay of Consider the Lobster changed a couple things about me. I first read Infinite Jest in 2005, during a very difficult time in my life, and it helped me in ways I find it hard to put into words. But I'm listing The Pale King.
      
     The Pale King is difficult to read. It's difficult to read for the usual DFW reasons: the complexity of his language, his syntax, the way he could "write whole sentences that make you feel like you can't breath". It's also difficult to read because it's unfinished. The question of structure was really anyone's guess. The original manuscript was a series of loosely if at all connected chapters with no indication as to how they were going to be ordered. It's also difficult to read because it was left unfinished on occasion of his suicide. As I mentioned, DFW was a very special writer to me, I connected with him on a level that I don't with most authors. I took his death very hard. I went on a drinking binge that almost killed me (not exactly uncharacteristic behavior, but this was a really bad one, even for me).
 
     Besides just grieving over losing him, the reason his death hit me so hard was it brought up a very deep despair in me. He was an outsider like I was an outsider, and although our lives were not remotely similar, I felt that our minds were. That was why he was such an important writer to me. And he was making it work in spite of the isolation that I related to so well. His suicide meant failure. His suicide reflected my own. I didn't really share that with anyone then, and I moved on. After all, I didn't know him. I have strong opinions on suicide, because I've experienced losing people that way, but in a strange way, this affected me more than those. Losing people I knew to suicide was heartbreaking, but I can view those as mistakes. I can grieve and move on. Someone I felt that sort of kinship to was different, but I had to look at it the same way. He was selfish and he made a mistake. It never quite sat right with me. But what choice did I have?
 
     When I read The Pale King years later, I came full circle with those emotions. It deals primarily with despair, boredom, and emptiness. There's some explicit talk about suicide. It almost dares you to understand it. One good example is DFW breaking the fourth wall and addressing the reader directly as "David Foster Wallace, author of The Pale King", but in light of what happened, you know he isn't really being himself. He says the book is a memoir, that everything in it really and literally happened, and that the legal disclaimer about the events and characters being fictional is included for legal reasons, but trust him, it's all true. Except it isn't. You know all the talk about the legal wranglings with his publisher were just part of the story, because no one, least of all his publisher, even saw page one of The Pale King until after he was dead.
 
     The book itself reads like an elaborate suicide note. Was this a side effect of being written by a man who did eventually commit suicide? If anyone would go through and revise his manuscript to reflect his decision to take his own life, David Foster Wallace is that man. I don't know what it all means. But reading it finally closed the door on grieving for DFW's death, and by extension, my own feelings of despair and emptiness. Because as much as he meant to me, he was as fragile as anyone else. One of my heroes is dead, and I'm still here. The way his suicide affected me is probably similar to the way I've heard some people say they were affected by Kurt Cobain's suicide, and while I won't run down DFW for what he did (I'd consider his suicide closer in spirit to Joseph Merrick than Cobain), the fact that he did it made me confront some hard truths about myself. And I'm stronger for it.

IT by Stephen King

     Hey, what's this doing here? Yes, even Stephen King can make a list of books that changed my life. I love Stephen King and make no apologies for it. If I could have one author's work on a desert island, it would absolutely be him (I'm actually wearing a Pet Sematary shirt even as I write this). There are so many important truths to be gleaned from King's work ("Delah..." as the Can-Toi might say), but IT is on this list for one simple and very good reason. This is the book that made me love reading. Without this, the rest of this list wouldn't be here. No Stephen King? No Tolkien, no Twain, no H.G. Wells, no Kafka, no Vonnegut, no Amis, no Cormac McCarthy, no Updike, no Joyce, no Hemingway, no Pynchon, no Vollmann, no Clive Barker, no me. That's not literally true, I'm sure I would have found some other inroad, but that's the way it went down. I think everyone who truly loves reading has the door opened for them that way. For Steve King himself it was Lord of the Flies, and I think if I told him that he was to me what Golding was to him, he'd probably find that a pretty fine compliment.
 
     This was the book that made me love a good yarn. It made me love an epic. I used to hate the ending until I read Lovecraft, then I got it. And hey, make no mistake, this book is fucking terrifying. It's not easy to scare me with a book, but this one did it. I still read it about once a year.

"If one cannot enjoy reading a book over and over again, there is no use in reading it at all." -
Oscar Wilde

    

Hogg by Samuel Delany

 

     I debated over whether to include this, but what am I doing here if I'm not telling the truth, so here it is. The reason I might not want to include it is for fear that somebody might read it. If you recall, earlier I said there would be one book that I wasn't comfortable recommending, and this is it. Hogg is porn, but that's like saying Caligula was quirky. Hogg is the sickest thing I've ever read and no fooling. And remember, I'm the guy who's into that sort of thing, so as someone who's actively gone out and tried to find the most perverse stories on the internet, once in a while something can match this, but nothing - nothing - can top it. It puts De Sade to shame. I've said that Peter Jackson's Braindead is the goriest movie ever made or that ever will be, because you could not go further over the top than that. All you could do is do something on that level for longer. Hogg is like that.

      

     And this is a published novel by a respected author. The fact that it exists is truly amazing. Delany is a great writer; a wild, insane gay black man who started out in sci fi but then branched out into all sorts of stuff. Hogg was completed just days before the Stonewall Riots, so that's one interpretation: it's a primal scream at being gay in a world with no gay rights. Another option: he just wanted to see if he could get something like this published (it took a long time). I think the fact that the cover of the first edition is a Rorschach blot is significant. What you get out of Hogg depends on what you bring to it. It changed me because you can't read it and not be changed. You will never, ever forget it (if you can get through it).

      

     Some of the points Hogg makes are similar to what Bret Ellis would say with American Psycho decades later, about the nature of man, and the consequences of choice. But what if American Psycho had been just rape and murder? I won't quote extended passages, but one of the most affecting things Hogg (the character) says is "There's what a man wants, what is, and what should be. And ain't one of 'em got shit to do with any other. Unless you make it." That's a profound truth. But how Hogg changed my life is that I went digging for the basest sexual perversion. And I found it. And now what do I do with it? What does it mean that this book exists? What does it mean that I'm reading it? It will definitely make any reader ask hard  questions about their own sexuality, because most anyone will be titillated by something here, there's just so much going on. And what does that mean? It's a very aggressively confrontational piece of work, in that way similar to Michael Haneke's film Funny Games. Who are we and what are we doing here?

      

     Hogg is a trial by fire. I could expand more on what I've learned from it, but I won't in mixed company. Just know that if what I've said here makes it sound like something you want to read, I kind of doubt it. You just think you do. But if you go ahead and read it, don't say I didn't warn you.

  

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

 
     This is the most recent addition to the list. I read this several years ago, and it was a great story, like everything I've read from McCarthy. A bleak story. But I had to read it again, and it didn't really get into me and change me until I had a child and changed some other things about my world view. There are great reasons not to have children. From overpopulation to a desire not to subject someone to this sick world (survivor Imre Kertész's Kaddish For an Unborn Child is an absolutely heartrending case for the latter reason). I do think, biologically, that if you don't do it, you're just putting a gun to the head of your species. I understand the impulse, believe me. It looks hopeless.

    Now to bring this full circle, remember I said books can be classified "before Ishmael" and "after Ishmael"? I've now read The Road under both conditions, and the way it affected me changed completely. Ishmael is an empowering book. It truly whips up your spirit. The problem is that when you settle back down a little it becomes "...What do I do?" The world is a juggernaut of evil and it seems like you will never be able to stand against it. You'll just be steamrolled under in the face of insurmountable odds.
 
     Reading Ishmael, having my daughter, and then reading The Road again showed me what to do. You carry the fire. You put one foot in front of the other, and no matter what happens, you don't stop. No matter how bleak it looks, until it's over, you don't stop. Because all you need is that seed. That fire. You close your eyes, and you let it go, and what happens happens, because as long as someone is carrying the fire, hope is not lost. You fight a good fight. You finish your course. You keep the faith. That's it.

Nike Slogan

     Today I'm going to talk a little bit about dreams. They go on when I close my eyes. Every second of the night I live another life. Sike, no, not that kinda dreams. Ambitions.
     It's starting to come home to me how much of what we want in life comes down to just taking it. This is such a simple idea, but I didn't grasp it, and it doesn't seem like a lot of other people do either. I've said more times than I can count "I'd like to do ____." or "I should ____." And every day I don't do it. Why? Well that's sort of what I'm getting at. Just do it.
     You can fill a library with reasons not to do something. Sadly, a lot of it is other people. You'll never run short of people asking why you want to do something, or telling you it's a stupid idea. My least favorite is smug condescension. "Suuuure, that's a nice dream." If someone's ever told you it's irresponsible or silly to try something you've always wanted to do, I'll make this as explicit as I can: Fuck those people. Do it.
     It's weird, but when I look back at my own life, I can find many examples of me doing exactly this. When I was in middle school I wanted to run a five minute mile. I can still remember the exact moment I decided to just run faster and keep doing it until I was finished. That's literally all there was to it. I didn't run a five minute mile that day, but every mile I ran, I ran as fast as I could, and before long it was done. Why was I running eight minute miles just a few weeks earlier? If you had asked me if I was running as fast as I could, I would have told you yes. If you had asked me if I could shave three minutes off my time I would have told you no. But I did. And that means I was wrong. There's really no more depth to it than that.
     I wanted tattoos, had wanted them as long as I could remember. I could recite a dozen reasons I was told not to get tattoos, or specific kinds of tattoos. I used to talk for hours about what tattoos I could or should get. I used to debate back and forth about whether I'd like this one or that. Years this went on. And one day somebody told me to "keep dreaming", and the next day I had one. Simple as that. I used to want a Watchmen tattoo, and I couldn't decide what image I wanted to use. There were too many. One day my friend Erik said "Just get a Watchmen sleeve."

     Nothing to it. And that's one of the great things about this. Through getting that sleeve, I met my friend Barnaby (he's the artist who did it). My life is much richer for having him in it, and that led to me getting all the rest of my tattoos. You never know what good things are going to happen if you just try things. Like Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
     I have gone and am going through some significant life changes now, and this is a lesson I'm learning. It's really reshaping me for the better and that's why I'm sharing it. I don't know how many years I've said I should learn guitar, but only now am I picking it up and playing it. I've said I should exercise. So I got out of the house and did it. And this is actually a meta-post, because keeping a blog is one of those things I've said I should do for I don't know how long.
     I don't know what this is that keeps me from doing things I want to do, but if I could impart one piece of advice to someone, I could do a lot worse than "Just try it." Even the how isn't so mysterious.

"One day at a time, I suppose."

"It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important." - The Little Prince

“I could care less”. It’s fairly common, most people don’t really give it a second thought. However, there are a hand-full of people, smart people even, who object to this phrase. Beyond that even, they vehemently oppose it. They say that it should be “I couldn’t care less.” If you could care less, then you do care, they say. But I don’t know if I can say that’s true. There are many applications that could be used in saying “I could care less.” 

     It could be sarcasm. “I could care less” would mean that you actually couldn’t. This isn’t unlikely. Consider this: when presented with some information that we aren’t concerned about, a response of “I care.” is not uncommon. Of course, this is used sarcastically, and sends the message strongly that we don’t care. “I could care less.” could be the same type of sarcastic phrase. So much of this relies on enunciation though, and the pronunciation most commonly used doesn’t lend itself to this explanation. Why? Perhaps people read the phrase, and misinterpreted how it was meant to be spoken. Perhaps they heard it used correctly and, again, failed to understand the inherent sarcasm, thereby speaking it as if it were meant to be taken literally. Of course, the intelligence of the average person is not very high; it’s only natural the incorrect pronunciation would, over time, dominate the correct one. Aside from using “I could care less” with sarcasm, what else could it mean? Maybe it’s a form of belittling short hand. Try this example on for size:

Person A: “I won the spelling bee.”

Person B: “So what?”

Person A: “Well that’s rude. It doesn’t seem like you care at all. Could you care less?”

Person B: “I suppose I could care less, but I really don’t care much at all.”

In this instance, “I could care less” obviously means that you don’t care very much. Saying “I could care less” draws attention to the fact that it would be difficult for you to do so. So this exchange is shortened to the form that our attention is presently focused on.

Or consider this: saying “I could care less.” could be a form of “Don’t press your luck.” As though you were saying “I’m being polite now, but be aware that I will become annoyed with you if you don’t stop.” Like so:

Person A: “Family Circus was really funny today.”

Person B: “Let’s talk about something else.”

Person A: “How dare you! Family Circus is important to me!”

Person B: “Look, I don’t care about Family Circus, but unless you want me to care even less, shut up about it.”

     Conversely, it could be a respectful way of informing someone that you aren’t very interested in what they have to say. Yes, you could care less, but you aren’t going to be rude and will hear the person out.

Person A: “The Jeffersons was a better show than All in the Family, and here’s why…”

Person B: “I find you to be an interesting speaker. I never watch television, so I could care less about this subject, if it was anyone else talking, but let’s hear what you’ve got to say.”

     This one isn’t too likely, as the emphasis and context would be almost completely in opposition to the way it’s usually used, and “I would care less” seems more natural, but one never knows.

     The problem with all of this is… the information is practically useless. I can’t enlighten people who are opposed to “I could care less” with it, as it’s still used every day in the incorrect sense, and thus is no better for having the potential to be an appropriate statement. I can’t share it with those who use “I could care less” incorrectly, because it’s more complex than it’s worth. I have to convince them that what they are saying is literally correct, but spoken erroneously, they’ll inevitably (unless they’re too slow to follow what I’ve said so far) come back with “But if it means the same thing, what difference does it make how I say it? Tomato, tomahto.” Then I have to tell them it actually doesn’t mean the same thing, jumping three hurdles to get back to where we started. It’s a break down and build up situation, and that’s just not worth it. And I can’t tell the people who use “I could care less” correctly… they already know.

And Here My Troubles Began

     The first sentence is always the hardest, unless you kill it with bullshit like this. I'm an alcoholic. I'm also a drug addict. I'm a drug addict in the sense that I have an addictive personality and will tend to overdo anything I try, but I'm an alcoholic in pretty much any sense of the word. I've had a  lot of problems in my life, but the truth is most of them can be traced back to these things. It's taken me half my life to be able to admit this to myself, but here I am. I'm going to stream-of-consciousness this. I don't know where it's going.
     I have distinct memories of the first couple of times I got drunk. The first was on vacation with my mom and my brother. I'm not sure how old I was, maybe 16 or 17. Maybe a little older. We were staying in a hotel down by the beach, but I wasn't having a very good time. The beach was too far away, and when you got down there it was way too crowded. I was complaining that the vacation wasn't going very well, so my mom suggested I get drunk. There was a bottle of vodka in the freezer. I'm not sure where it came from; it was there when we checked in. I drank it over that weekend.
     My early experiences with drinking were wonderful. When I was drunk, I felt relaxed, comfortable, at ease. Actually, that's not totally accurate. I didn't feel relaxed, comfortable and at ease, I was relaxed, comfortable and at ease. I don't remember any hangovers, or vomiting. All of that came later. That was the introduction of alcohol to my life, and it remained (in my perception), a force of good for quite a few years to come. I became a drug user, and alcohol was just my background noise, my security blanket for when I got done really partying. I never suspected it would end up destroying me worse than anything else I ever did (maybe... I had some pretty hard times on other things, too).
     When I was 18 or so I went to Kentucky for a couple weeks. What I was doing there isn't really relevant to this topic, but the short answer is I went there to see a girl. I was staying with some friends of hers. At this point, I hadn't really done any drugs, not because I had an objection to them, but I was a very isolated individual. I had no friends and socialized with no one. The fact is I didn't leave the house for weeks at a time. So even if I had wanted to do drugs, I had no idea where to get them. Anyway, transplanted to this house in Kentucky, I did meth with these guys. It was just part of their daily routine. We were watching Money Train, and they'd periodically pause it, go down in the basement and snort and smoke meth. We did it both ways. In retrospect, it's disturbing how many kids were running around that house, but I was a deeply troubled person, I didn't care. This was the time when I had pictures of serial killers hung up all over the walls, conducted legitimate Satanic rituals, kept dead animals in jars, etc. I did something else on this trip that I'm not comfortable talking about (it needs to remain mine forever, I will never discuss it with anyone), but allow me to say a line was crossed, and when I came back, I had changed for the worse.
      I had now been introduced to casual drug use, and I liked it, but I still had zero friends, nor even any acquaintances. My options for dulling my senses were limited to drinking, and whatever I could get from the store. I wouldn't go to the store, you understand, I'd just ask my mom to bring it home for me. She always supplied me with liquor or whatever else I wanted. I don't say that with any thought as to how it makes her look. Frankly, I just don't want to think about it. I say it because it happened. So I started sniffing glue. I huffed rubber cement a few times. You stick the jar under your nose and just breath it in, and eventually the jar is empty and there's just a little skin of rubber on the bottom. Where'd all the glue go? :( Thanks to the internet age, I actually have a document of me doing this. Here I am, posting while high on glue, in April 2003:
"So I was wondering whose eber sniffed glue here ont he board cause I was sniffing it earlier and oh my god it was tight. I mean never had I been so gfood. But relally I dont know, cause I dont know if its me ot the glur. it s cheaper to get the glue than thop get some other tpe so bad drug, its thw best."

     I don't know what to say to that. No pride, or shame. A vague sadness, maybe, but it's just what happened. I remember being blown away while high on glue by what I perceived as the greatest song I had ever heard. I decided I had to write the lyrics down so I could look up what song it was later. When my head cleared, I saw that the paper I had written the lyrics on was covered with scribbles and I realized that the song had been "Take a Look Around" by Limp Bizkit, a song I both knew and hated.
     Another time I had a very clear impression of floating through outer space, and entering a black hole. Reality started to shatter around me, and reassemble into a colorful tunnel I was rushing through. When I reached the end of the tunnel, I saw that its walls were actually the inside of the rubber cement bottle. I was sitting on my bed, holding the empty bottle up to my eye. "Oh, I've been in there the whole time."
      For whatever reason, I fell into a way to get marijuana, and I just did that for a few years. It saved my life, I'm sure, because say what you will about marijuana, it's harmless compared to the lifestyle I was living. I see now that I really just didn't want to face reality. I didn't care what I was high on, as long as it was something. And, through providence alone, I fell into something as relatively harmless as weed. I'm sure it's why I'm alive today. Understand that I would still do absolutely anything offered to me. I had not a care for my own well being, I just didn't associate with anyone and so I didn't get offered stuff very often.
     I got introduced to dextromethorphan. It's the active ingredient in Robitussin, and in high doses, it's an extremely powerful disassosiative. That means, briefly, that it separates your consciousness from your physical body. I doubt it would be legal, but there's actually very little than can suppress a cough. It's either that or opium, so I think it's a lesser of two evils situation. As an aside, my experiences with dextromethorphan are one reason Marilyn Manson will always be an artist close to my heart, because he also went through the ringer on disassociatives, and that's largely what Mechanical Animals is about. If you've experienced that sort of hell, that album takes on a whole new significance. I've always thought these lyrics expressed what it feels like very well:
"I can never get out of here
I don't want to just float in fear
A dead astronaut in space
The nervous system is down
The nervous system is down
I know..."
     I started to do dex daily. I'd drink up to three bottles of Robitussin at a go, or sometimes take whole bottles of the liquigels. Strange things started to happen to me. The thing about DXM (as it's sometimes called) is that the effects can be cumulative. Once you're down from the high, it's still in your body, and if you do more before it's flushed out, it can actually give you a way higher dosage that you're anticipating. Again, I have documentation from the internet. After getting I don't know how much of that stuff into my system, this happened:
 "I was in the living room watching tv when I did this, and when I finally came down I was in the bedroom, but I don't remember going in there. There was a lapse in my memory but I suddenly found myself in a state of what I could loosely describe as absolute consciousness. At first I had a definite sense of self, but it was like I was a spirit which had existed for eternity. I was an eternal, burning sun, and my life had been a small flare on the surface of my consciousness (words kind of fail this part). I saw every moment of my life with perfect clarity and knew they were all insignificant, ripples on the surface of oblivion.
I left behind my self and entered into a state of meditation. I saw many people (or rather, the consciousness of many people) and communed with them. I started to hear gunshots, but from a long way off and muffled, as if under a lot of water. They kept getting louder, and then I got a strong hallucination, which was visual and yet not visual, of rushing through a tunnel towards my body, except I was younger. I was back in high school, and I was running through the halls and when I slammed back into my body, it came into focus and I realized the gunshots were coming from me. People were running and I was chasing and shooting them, and fire was there.
It was my body, but it was seperate from my consciousness. I was looking through my eyes but I was an impartial observer. I realized that I had gone on a shooting rampage in high school, and my life past that point had been a dream. I had these swirling ideas of about which of the three selfs (school shooter, 22 year old drug experimenter, eternal sun of knowledge) was real and which were dreams that I can't really describe, but the gist was that eternal sun was real and the other two were just... cosmic hiccups.
Things kept getting fuzzier at this point and there a sort of... babbling stream of thought which I can't describe. This kept going on until I eventually realized who I was again. I was in the bedroom. My brother had come in and was playing my Xbox. He was playing GTA. I suspect that when I hallucinated the shooting I was floating down to a high third plateau and the game was entering my visions, reinterpreting the shooting in the game. He later told me I talked to him about things that happened years ago as if they were currently going on. I remember none of this. I knew who and where I was, but I didn't understand it. There was a vague idea that someone had done drugs, and the letters "D...X...M" kept floating through my head but I didn't know what they meant. I do remember asking my brother if someone in here had done drugs and he said "Yes, you did, you freak."
I was eventually able to begin walking around, in a daze as if through a swamp. I smoked, watched tv, and came down for several hours. I shook it off completely by the end of the day, and by the next evening was laughingly telling the story of the trip over dinner."

     And after that, I still didn't stop doing it. I kept doing it every day. I can't even believe I'm typing these words, but it's true.  Highs associated with DXM arrive in plateaus. You reach the next plateau and the effects change. The highest, which I've heard called 4th plateau or plateau sigma, is sometimes rumored to be a myth. It's called a suicide mission. I thought I had reached it with that story above, but I learned that I didn't. There was a level beyond that, which I experienced later. I also credit this experience with saving my life, because it scared me so badly that I completely changed the direction of my life, and vowed to never do drugs again (I did... but one thing at a time). It is legitimately beyond description, but I can briefly say that I became a different person. I looked at myself and I was looking at a stranger. I said "Oh my god, that guy is so fucked up. What's wrong with him? I feel so sorry for him." and eventually came to realize it was me. I wrote "This is not real. This will end." on my walls. I shaved my head and moved all the way across the country.
     And then... and then I really lost myself to drinking. I was drinking probably a fifth of either bourbon or vodka every day, already, understand, the whole time I was on DXM. It just seemed so incidental compared to what else I was doing. But if I wasn't buzzed, my body was screaming for it. I arrived in California, and unfortunately the next couple of years are just kind of a blur. I started to drink so much that my life didn't have any linear progression anymore, it just became flashes between hangovers and blackouts. Could I deny my alcoholism? I don't remember if I tried. All I knew was that any option that involved not drinking was not worth it. I can remember, among other things, being stopped by the police while walking down the sidewalk and told I was too drunk to walk. Drunk driving, I'd heard of, but I didn't know you could be too drunk to walk. I was staying with my dad at the time, and I can remember sneaking out the window in the middle of the night to buy more vodka, then falling down a hill and lying in the mud for probably an hour before I could gather myself enough to even get back in the window.
     I drove drunk every time I drove, because if I was awake, it meant I was drunk. I drank before work. I drank on my breaks at work. I threw up on the sidewalk outside work (pretty poorly managed company, I guess). Customers constantly complained that I smelled like whiskey. I would drink all of my roommates' alcohol in a blackout and have to buy them more. I always had scabs on my face and hands from constantly falling over. I would probably puke two or three times a day. Twice, I woke up thinking I was late for work, only to rush down there and realize it was 7:30 at night, not 7:30 in the morning. When I look back on it, I don't know how I subjected myself to that kind of torture for a week, much less years. But I did. I did eventually get busted for DUI. I woke up hungover with no alcohol and headed out to buy more. When I got to the store, I had drunkenly forgotten my wallet, so I had to go back home, and that was when I got pulled over. My BAC was .21 (and keep in mind, I had just woken up. I slept off a drunk and woke up at a .21). And I still didn't stop drinking.
     When I met the woman who I would end up marrying, that was what finally enabled me to stop. It wasn't easy, and it didn't happen all at once. I don't think she ever really understood the depths of my addiction, but I was able, by spending time with her, to not drink for hours at a stretch. I still drank beer every day, but I slowly, slowly, weaned down my alcohol dependence, until I felt like a social drinker. What a joke. As soon as I was left alone, she'd come home and find me passed out, covered in vomit. It was a slow decline, but with her support I was finally able to stop, and I haven't had a drink since December 7th, 2010. Happy ending? Wrong.
     The weed came back. I got high a lot, which probably wasn't the best idea, but nothing devastating ever came from it. That was all pretty benign, until I got wind of synthetic weed. After all that, just when I thought I was out, I get pulled back in. It seemed like a good idea. This stuff feels almost like weed, except it's cheaper, it's legal, and it's easier to get. You can buy it over the counter. Sounds like a can't miss proposition, until I discovered that I just... couldn't... stop. It wasn't like weed. When I had to lie about how much I did it, it was the beginning of the end. I was right back in my old story. It blew up in my face, and while it's not the reason I'm divorced (something like that is too complex to be explained that way), I'd still be married if I hadn't tried it. It made me someone I'm not. What is it going to take? What is it going to take for me to learn? I would love to be able to have a drink with friends, or relax on the weekends with a little enhancement. It isn't in the cards. I'm just not wired that way. Sober living is so strange to me, being 100% sober almost feels like a drug to me. I forgot how good it feels. I really did. What can I say? Life goes on. Life most certainly goes on. And asking what's it going to take for me to change isn't a rhetorical question.

That's all.

    

In Defense of Atheism

     I'm an atheist. I'm not an agnostic. I have no problem telling anyone who would care to know my opinion that there is no god and that religion is a force of evil in the world. In recent years there's been something of a backlash against this style of atheism from other non-believers. I find this to be misguided and today I'd like to talk a little bit about why. We can know with certainty that there isn't a god, and we shouldn't have a problem saying so. This blog is not so much written with believers in mind, but moreso other non-believers who believe we should be trying to hold hands and dance in a circle with the faithful.

     First, I'd like to address atheism vs agnosticism. Agnosticism is the idea that truth is unknowable. It refers to any absolute truth, but for the purposes of this discussion, I'm primarily concerned with the existence of a deity. I'll be right up front with you: agnosticism is an unassailable position. You can claim to be an agnostic and you will always be right, because nothing is ultimately knowable. Think of  the old chestnut about whether you perceive red the same way I do. This cannot be conclusively proven either way, so we are all Red Agnostics. We cannot conclusively prove that there isn't a god, nor can we conclusively prove that there is one, be it YHWH, Allah, Flying Spaghetti Monster, teapot, Cthulhu or Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living. This renders agnosticism a philosophically useless position. Similar to what Dash said in The Incredibles, if every god is possible, that's essentially the same as saying no god is. The question is whether we have any reason to believe one thing over another.

     I believe the concept of god (not any specific interpretation of one, just the general idea of such a thing) betrays humankind's arrogance. Taking a step back from the question of whether there is or isn't a god, I wonder why it was even posed in the first place. Man perceives himself as the highest order of life on Earth, and by extension, the universe. So we say "Here we are, the greatest thing that has ever existed, and yet there is so much we don't know." We can't deny our own ignorance. So we invent gods.

     As something of a digression, the question of polytheism vs monotheism comes into play here. There's often an undercurrent, particularly in Western culture, that monotheism is a step up from polytheism. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure what the justification for this is, but it's easy enough to explain from the perspective of human arrogance. If man is another landing on the stairway to heaven, a middle ground between animals and gods, that's good, but it doesn't make man special enough. In monotheism, the next step up from man is the final step. We are one rung below the supreme being. And said supreme being is concerned with our affairs, loves us, is angered by us, communicates with us. Our parents are our models for god. When we are small, our parents know everything, can solve everything. And when we grow up, and have children of our own (as I can tell you first hand), we find out that our parents didn't know everything. We can't do this on our own. The fact that we make our new parental figure the supreme lord and creator of the universe only goes to show 1) how inflated our opinion of ourselves is, that we have to go that far to improve on us, and 2) how unqualified we really feel to handle our own affairs.

     Our human affairs are important to us, because we are human. There's nothing wrong with that. But the more we learn of the nature of the universe, the more we realize how little value we have in it. We are utterly insignificant, on a cosmic scale, and that's frightening. God makes this not so. God, in fact, makes it all for us. A nice idea, sure, but what reason do we have to think it's true, other than just wishing really hard that it were? I know that there isn't a god the same way as I know many other laws about the universe. I know that there isn't a god the same way I know that 2+2=4, that objects in motion tend to stay in motion, that physical bodies attract each other, and so on. I am an agnostic, but in the same way as I'm an agnostic that 2+2=4. Until such time as I have reason to believe otherwise, it is fact. If there is a higher power than us, what reason do we have to think that it's the highest power? What does god worship? If we're god's ant farm, what is god in an ant farm for? The universe is a Russian nesting doll, the brane is a computer simulation, the ending of Men in Black, fax mentis, incendium gloria cultum, et cetera, et cetera... Memo bis punitor delicatum. Name your cliche.

     That said, I think my fellow atheists/agnostics who preach a message of tolerance and acceptance are feather bedded. Consider yourself extremely fortunate that you live in an era and a location where you are allowed to believe as you see fit, but understand that this is not reality for the vast, vast majority of non-believers. I cordially invite you to remain silent in regards to subjects of which you are ignorant. Have you ever been spit at in the street for wearing a t-shirt for a "blasphemous" band? Have you ever been physically attacked for your beliefs? Have you ever been subjected to psychological torment because you don't see the logic in a 10,000 year old universe? I have. And I am very far from being in the most disadvantageous position. I have lived in many different areas of the United States, and even in probably the most liberal area in the country, the San Francisco Bay area, I have been yelled and cursed at for not showing proper respect to Jesus Christ. If this has not been your experience, tuck your kids in, pull up the covers and keep your mouth shut. Grown folks are talking.

     By way of example, I cite the number of atheists who will blog that people such as Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins (two of my personal heroes) should shut up, that they are doing more harm than good. You live a life of comfort because of men like them, who will take a stand and make a difference. It's funny the way accusations of arrogance get leveled at these men, considering the fact that a professing (and presumably not persecuted) non-believer sees fit to tell Christopher Hitchens what he should and should not do. Hitchens was a world class journalist, a fiercely intelligent, intensely educated man who was not content to be an armchair polemicist, who traveled the world and saw first hand what religion is doing to it. Hitchens was, in practice, a remarkably compassionate man who would meet Bible believers on their level. He, as do I, held a great deal of contempt for the Jerry Falwells and the Pat Robertsons of the world but he wanted nothing more than to help people live a better life. Fundamentalist Christians who believe the way they do simply because they've never been presented with an alternative were his target audience. And Richard Dawkins, a brilliant biologist and communicator, gets dismissed out of hand by someone who learned about evolution in high school. You learned that because of people like him. Dawkins did not start out as a crusader for atheism, he started out as a zoologist and evolutionary biologist. He became a speaker for atheism because he found his work being maligned and distorted by an extremely powerful political lobby, in order to twist the reality of the world we live in into the box of their bronze age superstitions. But of course, they are the problem.

     This is the world we live in. Statistics on atheism are difficult to come by, because of the persecution we are subjected to, but we hover somewhere between two and five percent of the population. And the rest of the world hates us. We are viewed as amoral, disgusting wretches, not fit to hold office or raise children, and I'm sorry, but assimilation is not the answer. Have some courage, stand up for what you believe in, and let the world know that you are not their enemy. If we have to be harsh sometimes, it's because most people think of us as somewhere between a cockroach and that white stuff that accumulates at the side of your mouth when you're really thirsty. If that's not the world you live in, don't attack the people who made it that way. This isn't just what goes on halfway around the world, either. This is my world, this is my experience. This is the United States in 2013. This is a war. And you are on the losing side.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
- Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Why I Love Professional Wrestling (and How I Came to Do So)

     This photo is just a random shot of One Man Gang I found somewhere, but something about it speaks to me. It's very characteristic of the madness that is US pro wrestling; the head tattoo, mohawk, Pabst trucker cap and middle finger placard are all very indicative of a certain aesthetic. I've loved professional wrestling as long as I can remember. I don't remember the first time I ever saw a wrestling match, but it's been with me at least since kindergarten. I was born in 1982, and wrestling was big in the 1980s. It was marketed to kids just my age. Wrestlers were super heroes, cartoon characters. The colors. The cheesy acting. The goofy storylines. The cardboard characters. It all seems pretty silly now. But I was six. I loved Hulk Hogan, Big Bossman, Million Dollar Man, Randy Savage and all the rest. They were, with no exaggeration, gods to me. The WWF was my pantheon. I would gladly have given my life for Hulk Hogan, but that was ok, because I knew he would never ask me to. Hulk Hogan, like Superman, was an Absolute Good.

     I didn't watch wrestling from the ages of about eight to fourteen, not because I had lost interest, but I was living with my dad at the time and we didn't have a TV. We were too poor, for one, and my dad didn't approve of television. I didn't think much about it. Wrestling had just become another thing I liked when I was a kid, no different than He-Man or American Gladiators. Then something changed, and that something came to be known as the Attitude Era. During this time, most of my social interaction was church based instead of school based, and the guys I happened to be friends with liked wrestling. I have a very clear memory of one of the first times I was hanging out with a guy named Tony, who became a good friend of mine. He asked if I liked any sports (a pretty common question). Usually when I get asked that, it just lets me know that the interlocutor and I won't be close friends, because the fact is I don't like sports. I said "Sort of. I play football..." Just trying to be personable. And Tony said he liked wrestling.

     When I look back on it now, that conversation was really the genesis of my lifelong fandom of the wrestling industry. My face split into this huge Joker grin. Oh, we're not talking about sports. We're talking about wrestling! This I know! I knew nothing about the current climate, I had never heard of Steve Austin or Bill Goldberg (I think the only star I knew was Undertaker), but I knew wrestling.

     Tony was more of a WCW fan, but Steve Austin became to my fourteen year old self what Hulk Hogan had been to my six year old self. Hero, god, savior and idol. I wouldn't learn the details until years later, but the WWF had lost most of its star power and was now trying (and succeeding) to attract an audience by being 'edgy', albeit in a pretty sophomoric way. But again, that was ok. I was fourteen. Who better to get off on middle fingers, boobs and cussing than a fourteen year old? Wrestling became my 'thing', and remained so... to this day, really. I have many 'things' now, but it's still one of them. As my ex-wife said to me once, "It always comes back to porn or wrestling or drugs with you, doesn't it?" That's one of the funniest things that's ever been said about me, and it probably doesn't paint me in a very favorable light, but c'est la vie, I have loved all of those things. A lot.

     The next major incident in my wrestling fandom was getting my first computer. The artistry of wrestling is lost on most Americans, simply because basing your opinion of it on what you see on TV is like saying that music is stupid because you can't find a good song on the radio. I don't want to get too in depth about the nuances of independent and foreign wrestling, because this is more about my personal history, but trust me when I say: if the WWF and WCW were KISS and Foreigner, when I got the internet I started to listen to Black Sabbath and Guns N Roses. And I was both surprised and pleased to learn that the Internet Wrestling Community (note the caps) had the same taste as me. These were the equivalent of wrestling Trekkies. Before I got the internet, my two favorite wrestlers were Chris Benoit (more on him in another post, probably) and Kurt Angle.

   And when I signed up for my first message board, who were everybody's favorites? Those same two guys. Just like when Tony told me he liked wrestling, I was home. It was as if I had been made to love wrestling. A little kid during the cartoon era, a young teen during the Attitude era, and a purist during the internet era. My own interest developed parallel to the industry itself. I really had no choice. People finally seem to have gotten over the "fake" thing (only about three decades after wrestling ever stopped claiming to be legitimate contests), but there's still some puzzlement from the non-fan as to what the appeal exactly is. Jerry Jarrett once said "For those who get it, no explanation is necessary. For those who don't, no explanation will do." A great answer, but in my case I'll do him one better. Why do I love wrestling?
    My dear boy, do you ask a fish how it swims? Do you ask a bird how it flies? No siree, you don't. They do it because they were born to do it.