Wrestling With God

When I first got to college in 1994, my Bible was so thoroughly marked with underlined and cross-referenced verses I liked, I would just flip through it and re-read those parts. When I realized I was doing this, I decided to read the bible with a different approach: underlining the parts I didn’t like and cross-referencing inconsistencies.

My original objectives for this exercise were to solve any problems with the Bible that I might encounter and discover nuances in the Bible that I had previously overlooked. So, for example, I used the pages of who begat who to calculate with a high degree of accuracy when events in the Bible took place. The attention to detail in these chronologies are pretty amazing. Somehow, the very first humans were quickly able to discern the number of days in a year, use that information to keep track of how old they were when their children were born and preserve this data by passing it down through generations.

Another thing that happened with me around this age was that I started to develop what is commonly called “critical thinking skills” (and what neurologists would call my prefrontal cortex). One application of this is gaining an ability to intuit when something doesn’t quite seem right; even when you can’t put your finger on exactly what it is right away. As I began asking questions about the contents of the Bible, I expected to find answers, but instead found more questions.

The immediate result of Adam and Eve disobeying God is that they gain the ability to differentiate between good and evil- in other words, a conscience. The first thing they recognize as evil is nudity and, as a result, experience shame. Now, it doesn’t take an anthropologist to point out that embarrassment about ones own body is not an intrinsic but instead a cultural trait. Pondering this threw me for a loop. Could the Bible contain cultural and not necessarily universal values and truths? Could the Bible be suggesting the conscience was a genetic difference between Jews and cultures of the day that did not wear clothes? Could this story be laying the groundwork for an agenda that is primarily concerned with the feeling of shame?

In Genesis 6:6, it is written that God regrets creating humans. Perhaps this is another attempt at instilling shame in humans, but the bigger question is: how can an all-knowing being experience regret? It is literally not possible, unless it falls under the category of knowing you were going to regret something and doing it anyway, which would place the blame solely on God himself, making him both imperfect and unjust. God concludes the best solution to humans not living up to his expectations is to drown all but eight of them and also most of the animals. The Pentateuch is written very matter-of-factly, and the god in it remains terrifyingly unpredictable, which makes sense when coming from a time full of unexplainable and uncontrollable natural phenomena. This god’s idea of a righteous man is a guy who urges for his two daughters to be gang raped and then shortly thereafter, while mourning the death of his wife, gets drunk and impregnates both of them on consecutive nights. Soren Kirkegaard obsesses over this Old Testament god, and argues we should fear and respect him precisely because he is so scary.

The god of the New Testament, especially in the works attributed to John, is depicted as a more loving being. This conception of god poses a couple major problems: tragic and cruel things happen seemingly at random; he demands to be loved in return; hell exists… but this is the god most people today want to believe in. Christians are eager and enthusiastic about defending this god. Books are written on why this god behaves the way he does. And then this god of love is used to explain that the blood-thirsty Old Testament god also acted out of love, because they are the same god. This only makes sense if you strip the word “love” of all meaning, like an abuser who pleads his love for his wife after beating her. It is only the extremists of a religion that focus on the violent actions of their god and disregard the rest, and yet the majority, who focus on how patient, loving and forgiving their god is, do the exact opposite.
Perhaps the genius of the Bible lies in the ability it bestows to find and focus on verses that mirror whatever you happen to agree with, enabling your beliefs to be retained without further justification.

At the same time I was exploring this question of the nature of God, I discovered philosophy, and discovered the god from my childhood described by Plato (circa 428 – 347 BC) and Augustine of Hippo (AD 354 – 430). These two important figures theorize about and describe a very familiar supreme being, in terminology verbatim to what I heard in Sunday School growing up. I found this fascinating, because Christianity usually teaches that it relies only on the writings included in the Holy Bible. I began to research how the Bible had been compiled, edited, translated and used over the centuries, and discovered a fascinating and complex history. There are literally hundreds of different versions of the Vulgate (the first “official” Bible, written in Latin), for example, as it has undergone nearly constant revising from its inception in AD 382; one would be hard-pressed to find any two versions that are alike, even after the invention of the printing press. One motive for highlighting the importance of the Bible has been to get rid of religious and secular works and writings disliked by the religious leaders of the day- entire libraries full of one-of-a-kind books have been burned to the ground in the name of Christianity. The Bible canon idea has also been useful for discrediting and destroying Christian sects such as the Gnostics. The Protestant Christian Bible I grew up with, consisting of 66 works divided into Old and New Testaments, is not 2000 as I’d always assumed but less than 200 years old, dating back to the 1820s. (This modern compilation contains dozens of references to books no longer considered canon.)

Christianity insists the most important thing is to believe that there’s one God, and further, to believe he showed up in human form as his own son. Ultimately, this visit had to happen because God decided he wouldn’t forgive us unless blood was shed. This is another example of him being overly dramatic and inefficient- thankfully humans are not advised to emulate this policy. Who besides a death metal frontman would respond to a sincere apology with, “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness!” But in pondering this whole ideology, my main question became- why does God even care whether or not we believe in him? It seems really petty. Imagine Kris Kringle from the movie Miracle on 34th Street cursing people for not believing he’s the real Santa Claus. It would be antithetical.

Christians are quick to point out that it is impossible to comprehend anything about God, especially his motivations. Only God can judge, and we must assume God is always right. Any words humans use to describe God necessarily fall short, and so even the descriptions of God in the Bible fail to adequately capture or express his true nature. So regardless of what the Bible says about God, entertaining the possibility that their god could be flawed or non-existent is out of the question. Because God cannot be explained, he conveniently becomes the explanation for everything. The logical result is that the explanation for everything is that nothing can be explained. The irony of this is frequently lost on Christians, which can make trying to have a rational conversation with a Christian excruciatingly frustrating. Because there can be no answers, there needn’t be any questions. From a Christian perspective, the acquisition of knowledge is considered a futile distraction from “Truth,” which is yet another synonym for God. Far too often, religion provides little more than an excuse to remain ignorant.

I spent many late nights during my third year of college wrestling with this specific obstacle of how to contemplate a being beyond understanding with my friend Eric. At the same time, I was deeply engrossed in the works of Immanuel Kant. Kant was a genius at being able to work around unsolvable problems by exploring our limitations and what we can determine after accepting those limitations. One thing Kant writes extensively about is the concept of a priori knowledge, or knowledge that is not dependent upon experience but reason. For humans, he says, the purest form of what we can know a priori is limited to deductions regarding the conditions of possible experience. In other words, we can imagine a logically consistent universe without needing to experience that universe; this imagined yet consistent world needn’t have any connection to reality whatsoever, but the same rules that are necessary to make an imagined world consistent must also apply to ours, because otherwise our world would allow impossibilities. So, for example, once I use reason to conclude that, by definition, two plus two must equal four, I can also conclude that if I pick up two sticks with one hand and two sticks with the other, then I must be holding four sticks.

The exciting thing about this, for me, is it demonstrates that humans can both recognize logical consistencies and discover things to be true that we neither believe nor experience to be true. For example, Albert Einstein composed his theory of general relativity by first imagining a universe consisting of an observer in free fall. When he applied the necessary conditions derived from that imagined universe to ours, he discovered, among other things (like the existence of black holes), its calculations could only be accurate if our universe was expanding, which he didn’t think was true, so he applied an alteration to the formula (known as the cosmological constant)… but just over a decade later Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble separately discovered a method of measuring the distances between stars and found that our universe is expanding. So while it may be true that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are our ways his ways, (Isaiah 55:8) the knowledge we can acquire and possess is not absolutely limited by our activities and thoughts.

But now our conversation must turn from knowledge to faith, because that is the way these conversations go. Faith acts both as a bridge between the known and unknown and like a placebo to alter outcomes. Faith turns our dreams into realities and presents evidence for our theories (to reword the famous verse Hebrews 11:1). The first hurdle regarding faith as it pertains to Christianity is that Christians almost universally assume they have a monopoly on it. They don’t. Taking a mathematical formula created in an imaginary world and applying it to ours requires a leap of faith. But, for Christians, holding onto faith in God is of utmost importance because the alternative is disbelief, and those who don’t believe burn in hell.

Christians will resort to reiterating their faith as way of expressing their contempt for anything that might challenge their assumptions about or limitations imposed by reality. It is used as a get-out-of-jail-free card to insist that our understanding is not only paltry but irrelevant. They will, for example, declare that, by faith, the impossible IS possible. Although, whether or not something is possible is obviously not determined by whether it is declared to be so, certain things can be logically determined to be impossible- a square cannot be round, to cite a famous example. In this regard, the impossible cannot be possible in the same way that A cannot equal B. To deny this is, quite simply, a refusal to allow that a word can have a concrete definition. If we cannot define terms, everything is meaningless, logic does not exist and anybody who says they can read this random string of shapes is a liar (because we cannot, for example, determine that “p” is anything more than a line and a circle). The improbable is possible; the impossible is, by definition, not impossible. It would be absurd to expect or assume that even an all-powerful being could do the impossible.

When it comes to something like predicting the future, it is true that our knowledge is feeble, but there’s not much that we understand less than time. Knowledge and faith are never mutually exclusive, and as we learn, our dependence on faith decreases. With knowledge, we can evolve from faith healers to doctors. (Medical science is fully aware of the miracle of faith healing- they call it the Placebo Effect.) Jesus, in Matthew 14:31, suggests that anyone with faith in him can walk on water (and this is demonstrated literally, not figuratively), which at least implies that everyone who cannot walk on water is a hypocrite and going to hell. Most, like the disciples other than Peter in the story, get around this by simply not trying to walk on water, but “faith without works is dead.” (James 2:17) Walking on water is a truly useful skill, and would give Christians a huge advantage in both commerce and evangelism. It should be extremely rare for a Christian to drown relative to the general population. If it were true that anyone who believes in Jesus could walk on water, there is no way they wouldn’t be doing it. There will always be a few people who do truly believe they can walk on water, like those parents who let their kids die while praying for them instead of taking them to the hospital, but the majority realize, even if they won’t admit it, that while faith is a powerful and necessary force, knowledge more often than not trumps faith.

God wants not only to be believed in but obeyed. As the number of pages in my Bible marked with bizarre tales and inconsistencies rivaled those I had marked in high school because I agreed with them, I began to question whether God was qualified to handle a leadership role. This was a being who ordered the mass genocide of the people who had raised Moses, sparing only the female virgins for the soldiers to keep as slaves (Numbers 31). The Bible is pro-slavery throughout (although because it is so diplomatically written, the New Testament book of Philemon, a letter given to accompany a slave Paul had ordered to return to his master, asking the master to forgive him for having escaped, is often misinterpreted as being anti-slavery). Christians will explain that God had to make compromises because he had to make laws that fit within the constraints of the culture of the day, but this is utterly ridiculous. Why would someone with ultimate authority have to compromise? God refrained from standing up for basic human rights because that was too radical an idea for the day and the timing wasn’t right? Who was he afraid of offending- the status quo? This same god created a world in which the women in it exist to keep men company- without consulting Adam first.

Contrary to what the Bible teaches, I steadfastly believe (have faith) that mass genocide is never and never has been an acceptable course of action by anyone, for any reason. If God himself dropped down from heaven and ordered me to prove my loyalty by killing anyone, let alone my own child, I would like to think I’d refuse… even if promised blessings or threatened torture. As I write this, I am reminded of Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt. It should be required reading for every person on the planet. I first read it in 1997, three years into my critical analysis of the Bible. It is an examination of a Nazi at a war crimes trial that determines the key personality traits of a man guilty of committing horrific atrocities were that he couldn’t think for himself and was ambitious.

People will point to Biblical prophecies as proof that it’s divinely inspired. Unfortunately, when you eliminate prophecies that were written about after they were fulfilled (which could simply be cases of revisionist history) and prophecies that haven’t happened yet, there is not much to point at. Using prophecies whose foretelling and fulfillment are both written about in the Bible to prove the Bible is true and accurate involves a fallacy of circular logic whereby one must first assume the Bible is true and accurate. In fact, many of the prophecies in the Bible were not fulfilled, such as that the land of Egypt would be abandoned for forty years (Ezekiel 29) or that Jesus would remain dead for three days and three nights (Matthew 12:40). The latter is a great example of how the Bible works: almost every Christian will tell you that Jesus was buried for three days and three nights while they simultaneously celebrate Jesus’ death on the evening before the Sabbath after nightfall (Mark 15:42) and resurrection before dawn on the day after the Sabbath (John 20:1), which is a span of one day and two nights. (Without hesitation or research, Christians will explain how, for that time or culture, three days and three nights was the same as one day and two nights, with is as absurd and desperate as it gets.) It’s not even close to three days and three nights, and yet, somehow, a blind-spot is created which causes almost everybody to ignore the facts and focus on the story. Not the story in the Gospels- which disagree with each other on many details such as who discovered the empty tomb- but a story that is not written anywhere but which lives solely in the public consciousness.

Christians will claim God has never broken a promise. In reality, he promised Abraham he’d give Abraham’s descendents the territory between the Nile and Euphrates (Genesis 15:18). Most people today simply assume this “promised land” is modern-day Israel, but it is actually a huge expanse of land stretching from Egypt to Iraq that the Arabian Peninsula sits between. Christians will immediately explain that the descendents of Abraham never actually owned all that land because of their wickedness, but Deuteronomy 9:5 specifically guarantees that the original promise will be kept regardless of the wickedness of the descendents. Today, another world war would be required to fulfill this promise. Frighteningly, a large number of Christians would support this war, even though Israel has nuclear weapons. Humans generally would prefer to discover justifications for their assumptions rather than truth or peace.

Some will admit that the Bible is necessarily fallible because it was written by humans. (Notice the ever-present theme of human fallibility.) I would counter that if God wanted a perfect work with no way of parlaying excuses, he could have given Moses a whole bunch of tablets containing his laws, instead of just one copy to be kept in a box and destined to be lost- especially after Moses immediately destroyed the original tablet. Even Jesus could have written his own Bible and handed out 5000 copies along with the fish and bread. Any number of writing methods could have been utilized which would have been better adept at avoiding egregious errors like Aaron dying twice and being buried in two places.

Jesus said, “If you don’t believe me, believe the things I do.” My mom correctly points out that the best thing about Christianity is that it encourages some people to do great things like provide humanitarian aid, and I wholeheartedly appreciate this benefit… that many religions and non-religious charity organizations also provide. I’m personally suspicious of anyone unwilling to do charitable work unless inspired by a supreme being, but Christianity teaches everybody is inherently wicked, and so Christians are skeptical that anyone can do good without a supreme being’s influence. Regardless, my exploration into Christianity was more interested in its truth than its utility, and these are two separate questions.

In all my years growing up in the church, I never witnessed a miracle, with the possible exception of one time when I was about eight our car wouldn’t start in the church parking lot and some guy appeared to help push start it and when that worked my dad stopped to thank him but he had disappeared. I heard about miracles all the time, however. Others will frequently state they’ve witnessed “all kinds” of miracles, but when pressed, fail to come up with anything specific that’s uniquely attributable to the god of Christianity.

In the old days (9th century BC), Elijah puts on a highly publicized miracle-working contest where he mocks 450 prophets of Baal who futilely attempt to have their god light an altar. Elijah then dumps buckets of water on an altar and prays to God, who promptly sends not only fire from heaven to light it but, after another prayer, rain to put it out and end a famine. A chilling part of the story that conveniently gets overlooked is that Elijah has the 450 prophets put to death, but it is a key point in part because it leads to our introduction of Jezebel, who remains an interesting sub-plot right up until she is thrown out a window, trampled on and eaten by dogs.

Even though Matthew 18:19 says God will grant any request asked by two or more people, these days it is considered blasphemous to assume a prayer will be answered, because while it’s okay to ask, who are we to tell God what to do? Preachers will explain that our prayers are answered either yes, no or wait. This answer is not literal of course- it just means that something we ask for will either happen now, happen later or not happen. I cannot help but notice everything that is not prayed for also happens now, later or not at all. In other words, that claim is a tautology (true by definition).

Miracles are claimed in every religion. Christians will usually not deny these but instead remind that Satan can perform miracles, too. These are always called “false miracles,” but are virtually indistinguishable from God’s miracles. This is why we have to be really careful not to be fooled by Satan- because he is virtually indistinguishable from God. (One of the few depictions of Satan in the Bible is in the book of Job, which begins with Satan visiting God in Heaven and, after a discussion beginning with, “What have you been up to?” God and Satan place a friendly wager….) Just as God provides a useful one word blanket explanation for how everything other than God exists, Satan is an easy way to categorize evidence to the contrary as being a deception.

In the book of Judges, Gideon asks God to perform three tests in order to prove his authenticity. The second and third tests are for God to have morning dew on a wool fleece but not on the ground and vice versa. Out of desperation, I decided to replicate this experiment. I took a wool blanket outside on a summer evening, sat on it and prayed. I ended up falling asleep on the blanket and it was wet when I awoke at dawn. Excitedly, I reached out to feel the grass around me and much to my surprise… it was also wet. I immediately began sobbing. Then I thought, well maybe this is some sort of test, so I repeated the experiment for two more nights- although on those occasions I just left the blanket out and slept inside. Those ensuing days were an intense emotional roller coaster of frustration, betrayal, denial and anger. By the third morning of nature following the laws of nature, I felt stupid for having actually thought God existed and simultaneously a sense of peace from being liberated from having to worry about it anymore.

When Jacob wrestled with God, he was punished with a physical injury but rewarded with a new identity. I received no punishment but the same reward. Admitting to myself that everything I’d been taught, believed and preached made more sense if it wasn’t true was probably the most difficult and courageous thing I’ve ever done. Whenever Christians who knew me growing up find out I am no longer a Christian, they automatically assume this is due to ignorance or a lack of faith or self-control, and usually bizarrely note that I seem angry. Christians can really be extraordinarily arrogant, but to be fair, a lot of effort has gone into convincing them non-Christians are ignorant, unhappy (or suffering “false happiness”), reckless and angry. In reality, I decided for myself beyond a reasonable doubt, after intensive research and examination over the course of three years, that that vast majority of the Bible was a work of fiction, and the god described by it was not only extremely inconsistent but something less than admirable. I have come to believe shame is instilled and continuously reinforced by Christianity because the only people who need something external to believe in are those you do not believe in themselves.

Mark 4:22 says, “For whatever is hidden is meant to be disclosed, and whatever is concealed is meant to be brought out into the open.” There are a ton of things in the Bible that most Christians would rather ignore than ponder or discuss. Simply insisting that humans aren’t qualified to question the Bible is unreasonable- we were deemed qualified to write it, after all. When it comes to religion, legitimacy should be too important a concern for any of its scriptures to be treated flippantly. Having faith that something is true does not make it so, nor is seeking knowledge demonstrative of a lack of faith. Having faith is admirable- remaining stubbornly ignorant is not; neither is forcing or expecting religious fervor to be revered above factual knowledge or universal human rights. I don’t think it’s unfair to suggest that perhaps crediting all actions and opinions to a silent, invisible, superior being is little more than a way of avoiding personal responsibility. Christians should be able to ask themselves, “Would my actions and opinions be defensible and justified if I didn’t have someone else to pin them on?” I think a lot of Christians could benefit from having more humility in admitting their beliefs are held despite unanswered questions instead of insisting they have all the answers and wanting to impose them on everybody else.

Fishbone/Identity

"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on the plot of ground which is given him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact, makes much impression on him, and another none. It is not without pre-established harmony, this sculpture in the memory."
-from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self Reliance


I arrived at the site of the all-day music festival early and looked around for a spot to claim for a hacky-sack circle where I could wait until my friends arrived. Hearing my name, I looked down and saw two girls sitting in the grass, making sideways glances at each other. Suddenly I seemed to be sitting next to one of the girls looking up at a nineteen year-old kid with shoulder-length hair parted down the middle, a goatee, blue-tinted circle-cut sunglasses and a distressed Levi jean jacket over a black Miles Davis t-shirt. “Hey, what are you doing here?” he dumbly asked, avoiding eye contact by looking at his shuffling feet.

Perspective shifted itself back to its normal state as Sarah answered, “Soothing Syrup of course.” Disoriented and confused, I struggled to remember that Phil, the drummer, and she were both music majors. “Yeah, Measure and House of Large Sizes are going to be good, too,” I responded in a ridiculous attempt at one-upmanship. Not much was said after that, and I wandered away, pondering what had just happened, feeling simultaneously embarrassed and proud.

It was the first time I’d seen Sarah since January, when I’d awkwardly brought her flowers in a failed attempt to apologize for not having spoken to her over Christmas break, during which I had been helping my dad build a house in Missouri that was several years removed from having a telephone installed. I thought back to the late nights the semester before, watching Kids in the Hall, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and whatever British comedy was playing on PBS. I sometimes still glanced at the rock I had kicked across campus between our dorms, which was still stashed outside the door of Dancer Hall, and realized if I was still making that trek I’d play keepy-uppy with my hacky-sack instead. Then again, I would have probably never learned how to play hacky-sack if we hadn’t broken up, because I would have never gotten bored enough to work up the courage to knock on Brad and John Paul’s dorm room door. One can only sit alone listening to the first two Zeppelin albums, Van Morrison’s “Moondance” and “Tupelo Honey” and John Coltrane’s “Kind of Blue” and “A Love Supreme” hoping for the phone to ring for about a month, it turns out.

It was now April 27th; in two weeks my second year of college would be over.

Brad, JP, Erin and Jacie finally arrived, along with three of their friends from Iowa City whom I’d never met. We started up a hacky-sack circle and the Iowa City guys were good, one of them amazingly so. I tried to copy his moves and failed miserably. After about an hour, the Iowa City crew got tired of playing and wandered off in search of other entertainment, taking the others with them. I couldn’t fathom this at all, thinking if I was as good as them I would never want to stop playing.

I spent the rest of the afternoon coercing people, including the Soothing Syrup members after their set, into playing hacky-sack while the music festival bands played in the background. The headlining band was Fishbone, who I’d never heard of. Since it was getting too dark to continue hacky-sacking, I got right in the middle of the mosh pit. This was something I’d never done before, and being someone who generally doesn’t like crowds, was surprised to find the experience exhilarating- for a while at least. I couldn’t really decide whether I liked the band or not. Most everybody else seemed to be loving them, and the band members were certainly not lacking in confidence. During at least one song, the singer stuck his mic out so that enthusiastic crowd-members could pretend they knew what they were supposed to be singing.

When the show ended, I finally found my friends and followed them back to Brad and JP’s room. I learned that, while I had continued playing hacky-sack, they had been hanging out with the Fishbone members. “You should have asked if they wanted to play hacky-sack,” I offered.

The dorm room was even busier than usual, and included two girls I’d never met on Brad’s bed in the corner giggling at each other while prattling off rap lyrics. I found them utterly obnoxious. I sat next to Brad as he repeatedly asked, “Who are these girls on my bed?” while rolling his head and chuckling to himself. I tried to reenact the occurrence from that morning and see myself from the girls on Brad’s bed’s perspective, but couldn’t, so I pondered it instead.

I wondered whether, even after all these months, my bond with Sarah was such that I could empathically enter into her mind. I quickly realized I had no idea what she was thinking or doing, especially after the months that had passed. In fact, I had been struck in that early morning moment by an awareness that I had completely changed since I’d last seen her. I hadn’t seen myself from another’s point of view- I had seen how I guessed I looked from another’s point of view. It was like watching a movie with someone and spending the whole time guessing what they thought of it. Or, if you knew what they thought of it, trying to attain that same feeling. Either way, the influence of company on a movie being viewed is undeniable, but in the end, everyone watches their own movie. A fondness for Monty Python, which had been cultivated by Sarah, was part of my identity now, even though I’d sort of forgotten about it. “Does anybody like Monty Python?” I asked aloud, starting a chain of conversation that I didn’t bother to follow because it was beside the point. They didn’t know Monty Python like I knew Monty Python.

An acquaintance from a few doors down was fiddling with something on the sink just to my left. He took a bill from his wallet, rolled it up and held it to his nose as the other end traced a line on the counter framing the sink. That was something I’d never witnessed before, and it was startlingly disgusting.

I was struck by a profound awareness of the present. I understood that everybody else was experiencing a reality that I couldn’t step into, and that I was experiencing a reality that only existed because of this encounter with others. I sat on the couch and absorbed everything, finally realizing my existence was a gestalt of the choices I’d made from the options I’d been given, and as such, it was of utmost importance that my choices were a reflection of my own convictions, standards, goals and desires. If my choices were based upon what I thought another would have me do, my being, which is all I could really ever own in this world, would dissolve into nothingness. "What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude." -Ibid.

I had to laugh at myself. While surrounded by chaos, here I was- remaining focused on some mental philosophical exercise. Why did I take everything so seriously? But that wasn’t it, exactly. I was only earnest about things that excited me. Half-heartedness was not in my psyche. I desired to excel at whatever I endeavored, not solely in the eyes of others, but also not solely in my own estimation. One thing I had learned from drumming was that I had thought I was really good at it as long as I had never paid attention to other drummers. Like drumming, hacky-sack gave immediate personal and public feedback regarding ones prowess at the improvisational and technical execution required, but unlike drummers, people who played hacky-sack were generally not dickheads. Hacky-sack also demonstrated that I wasn’t as un-athletic as my high school experience of sports had led me to believe. The thing I’d learned I appreciated about sport was its effectiveness at illustrating the maxim, “talk is cheap.” Unlike life, sport has a built-in measure of objective success.

In some class during college, I read an analysis of the myth of Narcissus that determined the vain hunter, after falling in love with what he thought was somebody else swimming in a river, needn’t die after refusing to take his eyes off his reflection or commit suicide after realizing the futility of loving something he couldn’t have, as the story is commonly told. Instead, he could evolve by incorporating his newly learned ability to judge himself objectively in all his contributions to the external world. After all, genuine self-awareness can be attained only after contemplating how our selves, including our actions, would be viewed by a neutral observer.

In another class, aesthetics, we spent one period with an artist and art professor analyzing his own paintings. The rest of the class was appalled at how much he loved the work he produced. I, on the other hand, was inspired to produce work I loved as much. "A man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace." -Ibid.

Confident, informed and independent people are useless to those with something inferior to sell. The only thing a truly self-reliant person needs others for is friendship, and that isn’t a sellable commodity. Competition, not cooperation, drives capitalism. Winning is lauded at any cost, and is defined by our ability to convince others we’re better than they are. In its demand for us to try and impress it, society tries to beat the integrity out of us. The important thing is not the validity of our claims but our ability to convince others they are valid. Because of the “Halo Effect,” the phenomenon which causes us to trust those we find attractive, outward beauty becomes crucial in this effort. To keep the individual powerless, our culture stresses an absurd notion that when we look at ourselves, we shouldn’t like what we see. It convinces us to conform by teaching us to loathe ourselves. The ignorant and vulnerable are easily manipulated, and so we are raised to look for and obsess over our flaws, weaknesses and imperfections while revering an unrealistic ideal. We survive by pointing blaming fingers while eschewing responsibility, which only deepens our guilt. In the end, power is split between those fitting society’s definition of beauty and those most willing to destroy the self-confidence of the masses.

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
-from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass


April 27th, 1996 remains a seminal part of my life. I wouldn’t trade that day of playing hacky-sack for anything. I’d only have a couple years of hacky-sack playing left before it would become impossible to find anybody to play with. In five years, I’d end up meeting up with Fishbone at a recording studio in San Francisco where I was working as an intern, but there was nothing memorable about that occasion. Today, one of those girls on Brad’s bed I contemplated from the couch and futilely tried to switch minds with remains one of my oldest, dearest and closest friends.

PNP/1997

Just over fifteen years ago, I got a job at a gas station slash convenience store. This was a place where you could not pay for your gas at the pump. Instead, you had to enter a small store chockfull of salt, sugar, caffeine, alcohol, nicotine, gambling machines and other addictive items. The business model revolved around selling gasoline at cost and making money from the in-store purchases.

I landed this job on the spot after walking in to inquire about the Help Wanted sign while wearing a t-shirt with a wolf on it. Holly was the manager, and she was really into dogs. The opening was for minimum wage, working four ten-hour overnight shifts. I figured it would allow me to take summer classes at the university during the day without altering my general routine too much. I’d just turned 21, and was still invincible. Besides, it was the only available job around not requiring a vehicle or experience.

I had spent the previous three summers working as a cook at the Saylorville Marina near Polk City, but when the spring semester of 1997 ended, coinciding with the expiration of the last of my college scholarships, I moved out of the dorms and into a two bedroom apartment in downtown Cedar Falls that I was to share with four other roommates. Splitting the rent five ways meant my portion was somewhere around $70 per month. I'd never paid rent before, so I was concerned whether that was cheap enough to allow me to save to pay for my next school semester, which I’d calculated was all I needed to graduate with a double major if I took three summer classes.

Third shift at Petro-N-Provisions (known by everyone as PNP) consisted of eating day-old donuts, drinking pot after pot of coffee, confiscating the fake IDs of underage drunk college kids, stocking the shelves of a walk-in cooler that you had to climb around in like a monkey, jumping off the roof of the building into stacks of empty boxes and setting powdered creamer ablaze- all while blasting hard-core rap out of a boom box. Basically, this job was freaking awesome.

At 8am on the mornings when I didn’t have class, I’d ride DJ's bike (which I had on long-term loan) home from work, eat a bowl of cereal and sleep until 2pm. Then, I’d practice drums non-stop until 8pm, take a bath (the apartment didn’t have a shower) and either head back to work or, if it was a day off, spend the night reading from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. On school days, instead of riding home, I’d sleep for two hours on the couch at the house inhabited by my friends Amy, Tausha, Risa and Brad, which was conveniently located a few doors down from PNP and closer to campus. After classes, I’d eat a slice of pizza, a stuffed baked potato or a veggie bagel with shmear from the Union and read from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman before heading to the Library, where I’d checked out a locker to store books, toiletries and a changes of clothes, to work on homework and read old Downbeat magazine articles before heading either back to work or to Stebs, the live music venue slash bar in Cedar Falls.

One of my roommates was only there two nights a week, and then she traveled back to Des Moines (presumably with a supply of toilet paper as it was constantly disappearing). The others were my closest friends at the time, so I had spent plenty of time in the apartment even before I'd lived there. But it wasn't long before Eric and Annie moved away, and since Erin and I worked opposite shifts, I amused myself by creating morbid vignettes with her Tickle-Me-Elmo doll before I left for work for her to come home to.

I didn’t really end up saving much money that summer, and my parents paid for the final 21 hour credit load that would finish up my college life. It also eliminated sleep entirely, which quickly became unbearable, but luckily around about the time I’d resolved to never eat another donut, a second shift position opened up.

My university barely had three years worth of information to dispel, so that last semester mostly consisted of editing papers I’d already written about books I’d already read. I started working during the day, still forty hours a week but shorter shifts, often alongside Holly, who was generous enough to buy us both lunch every day and let me drive her car to pick it up. Her salary was $200 a week, which I thought at the time was a lot, and still recognize it as enough to be able to buy another’s lunch when they need it.

Most of my usual haunts were also frequented by this girl named Buffy, and she introduced me to some interesting contemporary music and literature. On the day of my graduation, she and I drove to Dubuque so I could play drums as part of a pop trio named Circus Fun. The head of the psychology department had attempted to entice me to attend the graduation ceremony by pointing out I’d get to wear special badges or sashes or whatever for being valedictorian, Magna Cum Laude and whatnot, which acted to make it sound even less appealing than a total waste of time. The head of the philosophy department laughed about not going to his graduation either. Dubuque proved noteworthy in that it was the last of my dates with Buffy and gigs with Circus Fun.