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When you're in your little room
and you're working on something good.
But if it's really good,
you're gonna need a bigger room,
and when you're in the bigger room
you might not know what to do.
You might have to think of how you got started
sitting in your little room. – Jack White, “Little Room”
Ok, so here’s the deal. You guys were the first people to ever read anything that I wrote. You told me what you thought, and this made me a humble writer. Then a lot of other people started reading what I wrote, so I started Mankind Minus One. On MKM1, I write about politics and society, but not about myself. Every month, thirty thousand people read what I have to say about these things. But this is dishonest writing, because it ignores what every writer must eventually explore – himself. Writing about politics and society is inherently arrogant, because it assumes that you say something important for other people to understand. I’m ok with that most of the time, because I believe that I have something to say. However, this is not enough. I still need to write about myself. And I still need you to read it. And I need a clean slate to do so. This is for a lot of reasons. One of them is that I feel like I am at a new beginning in my life. Another is that I don’t want thirty thousand people reading what I wrote in my Sophomore year of High School. Another is that I misspelled “Maxistentialism” on my account name for this blog. Anyway, I hope that you all will continue reading what I have to say. Most important to me, I hope that you continue commenting on what I have to say, because this is feedback that makes me a better writer and a better person. I’m going to set a few goals for this new blog, right here. You should help hold me to them. 1. I will update at a minimum of twice a week. 2. I will write this blog as if no one is reading it except for myself. 3. I will continue to explore myself, and document my growth. 4. I will be funny, and write well, because people are reading.
Thank you for everything over the last four years of this blog’s existence. If you have any memories or eulogies, this is a good place to post them. Now I invite you to join me on a new journey – as, like a phoenix out of the ashes of the Maxistentalism blog arises: The Maxistentialism Blog (2.0)! One last note: I think that LiveJournal is the best personal blogging service, which is why I am sticking with it. Also, I have a lot of very special friends here. I invite you to tell your friends about my blog – even if I don’t know them. If you know someone who you think would dig my writing, tell them about it. I will honor all “friend” requests, and I invite anyone with a curious mind and a sense of humor to join me on my journey.
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I want to crush free will. I want to scream into the scream, and I want you to hear it. I want to destroy something. I want to change you, for inherent in change there is destruction. I want my words to blow the roofs off of houses. I want to unsettle you. I want you to talk to you honestly, but more importantly, I want you to talk to me honestly.
I want to know if love exists. I want to sound my barbaric Yawp over the rooftops of the world. I want more control – I want less. I want to crush belief.
I don’t want problems that I can’t control.
My friends here, for whom I hold the utmost respect and love, have been using mind-altering substances with increasing frequency. Occasional indulgence in alcohol (to pick one at random) is fine, but drinking every night, or even every weekend becomes boring. I’m stuck in my room this cold Saturday night after a long day of avoiding my work - with no company save for my roommate (cheerfully watching “StarGate” for the next four hours, as he does every evening). My plans for the night crumbled a few hours ago; the offending party unaware of the significance that those plans had to me; me hesitant to admit to the offending party how much they did.
I am uncomfortable without control, but I love excitement. This is why I like debate – it’s a thrill, and I am always in control. The outcome is always in my hands – my failure is my own, so too my success. This is also why I don’t care for roller coasters – they are exciting, but involve a voluntary loss of control.
This is terrifying.
Have you ever been in a class when you’re really tired? An important class? And you start to doze off, and there are images in your head? You fight those images.
This is what it is to be an atheist.
We all have images in our head – voices, maybe – all the time. They say, “maybe you can talk to your dead grandmother,” “maybe these herbs really cure disease,” “maybe my room is haunted,” “maybe this is destiny.” Eventually, your little, tiny mind whispers, “That’s all fantasy. That’s make-believe. Those ideas are just voices in my head.”
To believe, to live forever, to know what the Pope and Usama bin Laden know inside of them, you just sit back and listen.
To be an atheist, you have to work all the time. You have to constantly fight off those voices. I don’t believe in Santa Clause or the tooth fairy or UFOs or my toaster talking to me at night. And I don’t believe in god.
This is tiring.
Somewhere far away, a friend lies alone in a hospital room with blank walls.
Healthy bone marrow makes stem cells that grow into the three types of blood cells: red blood cells, white blood cells and platelets. Her bone marrow makes too many immature white blood cells. Normal white blood cells turn into a type of white blood cell called granulocytes - her white blood cells do not. At the same time, her marrow cannot grow enough normal red blood cells or platelets because it’s too busy compensating for the lack of mature white blood cells.
I cannot understand this, though I am hardly to blame, because neither can any doctor in the world. No one knows why this condition, known as “Acute Myelogenous Leukemia,” begins. It’s not genetic, except for sometimes it is. It’s not inherited, except for sometimes it is. And it’s not fatal, except for it is.
My computer got too hot recently, and part of the motherboard was destroyed. It sits on my desk now. I want you to know that what I am looking at fills me with awe.
All the parts no doubt have names and functions. But it is an artifact of such thrilling complexity that if you were to tell me it was the work of a fabulously gifted sculptor, or a scale model of a city on another planet, I would not find either concept hard to believe. It has all kinds of strange structures of different colors and shapes – blocks, cylinders, towers, discs, platforms – and they all seem to be connected by an incredibly complex system of pathways, both above ground, and – even more staggeringly – beneath the surface (as revealed on the under side of the board).
If only one object like this existed, – and if nobody knew what it was – I could see it being revered – probably worshiped – as one of Earth’s greatest treasures – a thing of fantastic beauty, of dazzling intricacy, and of mysterious order – in fact, a whole little universe.
But there are billions of these things! They are ridiculously common. How can something so marvelous be at the same time so mundane?
Recently, a mutual friend had parents visit with the friend who suffers from Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. I became the topic of their conversation, and the parents joked that I was going to fail out of school and come up with a cure for Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. By this point, you should know me well enough to realize that I took this as a literal challenge, so I began reading whatever I could find on Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. I blew through the websites on the subject, and then through the books in the Goucher library. I ordered some books online. I blew through those. I still don’t understand Acute Myelogenous Leukemia, and far away, my friend still lies alone in a hospital room with blank walls.
In my attempts to exercise some control over the situations that I’ve described above, a disturbing trend has arisen in my thoughts. At first, I found myself shouting it down with all of the other nonsensical voices that pop up from time to time, but I find myself consumed by this new voice.
I’ll be sitting alone, quietly wasting my time, when the little voice whispers, “Your brain is like a machine in many ways, isn’t it?” I think of the motherboard – so complex. The voice is gone.
“The brain is composed of cells and neurons and chemicals and pathways and electrical activity that all conform to physical laws. When part of your brain is stimulated in one specific way, could it respond any way it wants, or would it always respond in one specific way?” I know the answer, and I don’t like it. The voice persists – I listen.
“If your brain’s actions are not controlled by rules, that can only mean the brain acts randomly. On the other hand, if your brain is guided by rules, which in turn guide you, then you have no free will. You are programmed. There is no in between; your life is either random or predetermined. Which is it?”
For once, I sit back.
“Imagine a copper penny that is exactly like an ordinary penny except that for this discussion it has consciousness. It knows it is a coin and it knows that you sometimes flip it. And it knows that no external force dictates whether it comes up heads or tails on any individual flip. If the penny’s consciousness were like human consciousness, it would analyze the situation and conclude that it had free will. When it wanted to come up heads, and heads was the result, the penny would confirm its belief in its power to choose. When it came up tails instead, it would blame its own lack of commitment, or assume God had a hand in it. The imaginary coin would believe that things don’t just ‘happen’ without causes. If nothing external controlled the results of the flips, a reasonable penny would assume that the control came from its own will, influenced perhaps by God’s will, assuming it were a religious penny.
“The penny’s belief in its own role would be wrong, but the penny’s belief in God’s role would be right. Probability dictates that the penny must sometimes come up tails even when the penny chooses to be heads.
“We believe that when our brains make choices, we move our arms and legs and mouths to make things happen. The penny has no way to turn its choices into reality, but we do.
“But we also believe in the scientific principle that any specific cause, no matter how complex, must have a specific effect. Therefore, we believe two realities that cannot both be true. If one is true, the other must be false.
“The brain is fundamentally a machine. It’s an organic machine with chemical and electrical properties. When an electrical signal is formed, it can only make one specific thing happen. It can’t choose to sometimes make you think of a cow and sometimes make you fall in love. That one specific electrical impulse, in the one specific place in your brain, can have one and only one result on your actions.”
Again I eye the motherboard, now with a sense of spite. And the voice, sensing weakness, quotes to me the argument I have used so many times when attacking the merit of belief:
“We can never understand true reality. If two models both explain the same facts, it is more rational to use the simpler one. It is a matter of convenience.”
I can’t make bone marrow create healthy white blood cells. I can’t make my friends stop drinking. I can’t make you love me.
A little voice tells me “If you crush free will, then this is not your fault.”
So tonight I sit alone with the dull thuds of a drunken party resonating in the walls – bodies and objects in collision. Pennies flipping. And for the first time in my life, honestly and with humility, I begin to pray. Not to God – not “to” anything. Just prayer; the intensity of my hope as dwarfed by the crushing reality of probability as the last stars still visible through the smog outside my window still burn defiantly against the backdrop of a vast and uncaring sky.
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I spent today at the Botanic Gardens with Josh and Ben, sitting cross-legged on a wooden platform in a field of prairie grass, indolently massaging the pigment of a fallen stalk into a series of pebbles arranged as a small green pyramid as we invented time-travel. We worked for the a few hours, starting with math, moving to practical physics, exhausting all of the possibilities, spawning an idea, picking it apart, rebuilding. In the end, assuming the existence of gravitons and photons as particulate matter, we decided that a self-contained wormhole, accelerated to an asymptotic factor of light-speed and moved into the future would allow for instantaneous movement through two relatively-fixed points in space-time at a ratio of "one second to one second." We spend a lot of time together, and it usually isn't spent discussing time-travel. I guess it's natural that the subject should come up... as the rest of this paltry summer melts away, I can't help but feel that I'm at an ending point in my life. I'm standing at a path with one third behind me and two thirds to go, but the problem is, I can only see the third behind me. Can you feel where this is going? We're accelerating to maximum sub-light velocity! Going faster miles per hour! My Senior locker, abandoned, unused... My Junior locker, decorated with pictures from Georgetown and promptly forgotten... My Sophomore locker, tantalizingly close to the 9th period advanced English class that I didn't place in to... My Freshman locker, both looming and lost among the crowd... Faster, faster! Through the wormhole! Backpacks in the hallway supported by wheels, prompting the tired calls of, "Where's the airport?" Mr. Vogelsang hiding a small walkie-talkie in a box to be picked up by Mrs. Jass, and speaking to her from "inside the box" once she left the room with her package. Bus evacuation drills. Nathan Garret's discovery that two similarly-sized water bottles claimed to contain radically different amounts of water. The smell of the band corridor. Being asked in the hallway, "How are you?" and responding, "Not much." Steve Turner and I arriving twenty minutes late to Political Science after writing essays for that class the period before, and telling Mr. Rosenzweig that we got into a fight to excuse our lateness. Napping for a consistent minimum of twenty minutes a day in Mrs. Ewert's "Intro to Business" class. Being handed a sign at an assembly labeled with the large letters, "SAF," for "Students Against Fridrech." Spending lunch with Joel and Mr. Moran senior year, getting the inside scoop on the bickering of the school's staff. Jordan Guggenheim interrupting an English class discussion on gay-rights organizations to express his hunger for a GLBT sandwich. Discovering with shock the marble Model U.N. plaque Freshman year, and questioning my decision to go to a debate meeting. Filming " Saving Ryan's Privacy" with my cocky older partners, and watching in awe as they rerouted hallway traffic, moved furniture, opened locked doors, disregarded any attempt by the administration to impose authority, and barged into the deans office, cameras rolling, to successfully negotiate for information. Jon Rhiner presenting a project in World Cultures as "Leon Phelps, The Ladies Man," and offering our teacher a glass of Courvoisier. Seizing control of the bus with my fellow Sophomores from a pack of particularly screamy Freshman. Convincing Mr. Roy to let us leave P.E. early because we "misplaced" our raquetball. The good teachers who cared. Those months after September 11th 2001 when every squack from the intercom system caused the class to jump in their seats in anticipation of a new gruesome announcement. Billy Boris talking on his cell-phone as he walked across the stage at graduation. Recreating Oliver Stones' "JFK" with Ivan using stop-motion and action-figures, and setting the assassin up to be Godzilla. Dick Cohen being greeted by Mrs. Lisa Fridrech, and responding, under his breath, "Sup, bitch?" Writing papers in the A.V. room the period before they were due. Mr. Vogelsang stealing the Monarch butterfly I was supposed to be raising for Mr. J.'s Environmental Science class, and replacing the cage with a note reading: "HAVE TAKEN YOUR PET. IF YOU WANT TO SEE IT AGAIN, LEAVE $20 IN UNMARKED $1 BILLS IN TOM MCWALTERS' LOCKER. - THE RIGHTWING BUTTERFLY." Me stealing the keys to Mr. Vogelsang's Corvette to get back at him. Mr. J. hatching a nest of abandoned ducklings in an incubator, and then accidentally cooking one of them by placing the heat lamp too close to it. Michael Schuff trying to get the attention of a Spanish teacher named Mrs. McHugh during class by shouting, "Hey! McHugh!" A group of kids playing keep-away in the central courtyard with some Freshman's backpack and getting stuck in a tree. The unique sense of purpose derived from making progress editing a movie, motivating me to skip class, miss lunch, and stay at school until five or six at night. Trying, in an act of desperation, to make some sort of difference somehow by distributing news articles to teachers' desks in the English and Social Studies departments. Arming my English class with flashlights and taking them to the school's basement to present an analysis of Edgar Allen Poe poetry with Josh and Ben to the horror of the girls in the class and delight of our teacher. Bringing in kitchen appliances one by one, until I could cook lunch in the A.V. room with a wide selection of refrigerated ingredients. Lisa Fridrech barking commands into a megaphone during lunch as the students seethed with resentment. Being asked to advise the newspaper, the Animal Rights Club, and the Amnesty International club all at the same time in the same year. Waiting until a substitute was just about to show a movie, and stealthily unplugging the television set, causing a delay of about twenty minutes before class could resume. Getting a real education by taking endlessly with teachers after class. Having to walk through the special-ed hallway to get to the north wing of the second floor, and hoping you wouldn't meet anyone on the way lest they think you're going to class in the special-ed hallway. The spontaneous and hilarious attitude of non-participation adopted by the vast majority of the Senior class during our final semester of assemblies, in response to the pandering skits and meager accomplishments that forced us into school an hour early on our late-start Wednesdays. Skippy coming to Halloween dressed as, "Missy Eliot," a home-made costume that involved a thick layer of brown face-paint and a trash bag cut to fit over his torso, prompting Mr. Larson to send him to the Dean's office for essentially wearing black-face. Alex Soble explaining how the librarians functioned as a squad of "X-Men-like superheroes," each with a unique power, such as "Spotting more than four kids at a table," "blocking websites from the computers," "evicting gum-chewers," and "demanding ¢25 for a black-and-white copy." Our first improv show, the gut-wrenching apprehension and uncertainty that preceded it, and the immense sense of invulnerability that came afterward as we ran full speed, overstimulated and pumped-up, into the snow-covered parking lot in our team t-shirts, the frigid air filling our lungs with a greater and greater sense of exhilaration. Me, more than four years later, asking myself at two in the morning if my life will amount to anything more than a small pyramid of green pebbles constructed in an artificial prairie.
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Big news, both good and bad.
First, the bad news: I will no longer be updating this livejournal.
Now for the good news: Remember that post a few weeks about how I was going to switch to a "real" blog? Well, I've done that, only it's so much better than I ever could have imagined. I've already resumed posting for the Maxistentialist blog on a new project of mine called Mankind Minus One, and you can read the story of how I started MKM1 with Zach Fuchs at http://www.mankindminusone.com
Mankind Minus One is an experiment in the sharing of ideas, political discourse, and cultural commentary. We are a diverse group of students from various parts of the country who share a common desire to inform and entertain. On the site, you’ll be able to read and post about politics, culture, music, movies, music, art, literature, health, humor, and whatever else you can think of.
The authors of Mankind Minus One are: Join us today, and add your two cents at http://www.mankindminusone.com. Remember to check in every morning, I'm doing the news! Signing off,
- Maxistentialist Current Mood:  ecstatic
Current Music: Harry Manx and Kevin Breit - No Particular Place to Be
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Every time I go the Lincoln memorial, I am reminded of the fact that the Gettysburg Address is a really good speech.
This time, my seventh visit to that particular memorial, was with my Mom, as I was showing her around the city. We flew in on Monday, and walked down M street to Georgetown, toured the campus, went up to the Healy lecture hall, got sandwiches at Weismillers' and took a cab back because it was hotter than the inside of the devil's rectum in that damn city this week.
Anyone remember being locked out of our classrooms last summer? Remember how hot it was? Now imagine that you were that hot, and then you walked into a giant steaming vagina. It was like that, but it smelled worse.
That night we got dinner with my friends and cousins (and distinctly non-batshit-insane family members) Marty and Lisa, who you may remember from my writings about my D.C./West Virginia trip this Thanksgiving. Their daughter Tessa is staying at Northwestern this summer, so everyone is welcome to meet her. I think we'll be hanging out.
Tuesday we saw the Holocaust and Indian American museums, and then took a tour of the monuments. Which brings me to where we started. Go ahead and give this a read-over aloud. I think you'll be surprised how much hearing it helps you to appreciate the brilliance of the speech.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. I won't bother shoving the modern day implications down your throat, but I will say this: I bet you don't picture President Bush sitting down to write oratory like that. (I do, however, picture him getting an M&M from Vice President Cheney every time he gets the big words right.) And I picture Mr. Lincoln reading the newspapers himself some of the time, and not just for candy. And you know something? We won the civil war. I also saw the WWII memorial for the first time, which I thought was really classy, if lacking in impact. My grandpa hates it, but then, five years ago he hated everything related to Germany, and now a man named Wolfgang Shroeder, who was in the Hitler Youth in the town of Kassel, Germany, hunting my grandpa when his plane was shot down in that town, calls him to wish him happy birthday. Today we visited the International Spy Museum, which was fun, but a waste of time. My favorite part was learning about Bletchley Park and the Enigma. Everything else was an entertaining distraction.
Then we hit the MARC to Penn Station in Baltimore, got some dinner, and here I am on my WiFi hotel connection, talking to Anna and Zach, and planning grand plans.
In the meantime, you're a fool if you don't educate yourself on the Downing Street Memo, and fast, because aside from being solid ground for the impeachment of President Bush, it's the next big story. Bon Appétit.
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