Who are "THEY"?



A nonsensical investigation of Life and Meaning


By Dave Lempert





I promised myself that I would never write a preface to this “book”. I wanted it to be a free-flowing narrative with no more direction than my own conscience thought. And in fact, that is what it is. However, before you begin reading, I feel the necessity to explain myself. To write a book that exhibits an accurate reflection of my values at my current age, 17, is nearly impossible. Every day I am learning new things, having new experiences, and reformulating my evaluation of life. By the time I have written two paragraphs of a chapter I have already completely changed my views on the topic and I have to either start again or somehow incorporate my new observations into what has been already written. Anyway, the bottom line is that I am not perfect. I am still just a confused, awkward, adolescent who is just trying as hard as he can to observe existence and ultimately understand it and find purpose to his own life. Please enjoy my following attempt to do so.




For my mom who taught me everything, my dad who bought me everything, my sister who learned everything, and my friends who to me, are everything.






They tell you that the best way to become a good writer is to write. Most people who think that they are going to become good writers begin their career of good writing by writing about themselves, hoping that their tragic and astounding life will be venerated with the utmost awe and sell thousands upon thousands of copies of their 176-page account of this life and make them millionaires. Unfortunately, most people also lead brutally dull lives, lives that the minimal participation or association with by any not-boring person would be an utter dissipation of their own life and almost certainly cause that person as well to become brutally boring purely from the overwhelming gravitational pull of monotony and idiocy. Furthermore—although any further investigation into the lives of most people (at least most Americans) is absolutely a mistake as I just mentioned—most people are supreme morons. The saturation of stupidity in our society perplexes me so much that I often wonder if it is not myself who is the dimwit and the rest of civilization flawless.

As a word of warning—or I guess a few words of warning—nothing in my life so far has been tragic, or heartwarming, or anything really sentimental whatsoever. Frankly, in the quest for a touching and insightful and delightful book, this reading should not be considered. In my personal case, I feel that it is my perception of life—that is, how I feel about ‘it’ and what I think about ‘it’ and the way most people exist in ‘it’—that is interesting to be read and not my actual personal experiences, of which there are few, being that I still am below the age at which I can sign up to go across the world and kill people I have never met in the name of a rectangular piece of fabric with three colors craftily made by a certain Betsy Ross—who at the time of her handiwork was not even allowed many of the rights that I would be defending in these countries if I was in fact the correct age. Nothing I will say from this moment further is to be interpreted in any way as good, bad, fact, fiction, or anything whatsoever except for a sporadic account of whatever it is exactly that I am making an account of, which at the current moment, I am unsure. For the next few paragraphs I am going to discuss some recent observations that I have made, some that you may already know, others may seem profound and genius in comparison to the quantity of absolutely un-profound observations that most people seem to make. If you are so inclined to find my observations un-profound then I am obviously a cretin in the light of you and you have already made yourself stupider by reading the last five hundred and eight words (that is including the word “last” but no further words after it). The true question is then—if you have read up to this point—which one of us will have the last laugh, the one who is intelligent and profound, or the one who is stupid and un-profound yet still somehow got the other to read his now five hundred and seventy two words? I’ll leave the answer up to you.

There is not one ‘kind’ of person. I once believed that if I could determine a certain list of possible types of people and then categorize all the people I knew then I could somehow understand every person I knew and for the most part accurately predict how they would react to any particular situation. This belief was wholly wrong; every person cannot be put into a plastic bag if you will. One might say that there is really only one true kind of person, the living kind, and every human being is this one kind of person and the only predictable characteristic that they have to abide by is that they are living—assuming of course that they are not dead or in the process of becoming so.

My unfounded belief that there are different types of people and every person fits into a type has led me into many confusing debacles. When someone whom I had placed as being one ‘type’ broke character and did something out of my expectations for this person, I would become angry and confused that they had engaged in an act that they were not supposed to enjoy or even consider as a possible activity that they would partake in. An example of this was when a bunch of my friends—whom I had classified as innocent and non-drug users—decided to try drinking for the first time, I was furious and disappointed, not to mention bewildered at their choice to participate in a activity that they were supposed to be “against”.

Since this as well as many other similar mishaps I have learned not to expect any specific behavior of any specific person. Every human is a unique individual capable of making whatever choices and decisions they feel like making. If no one is ever held to any expectations or standards then no one will ever have to be disappointed by another’s behavior.

A hierarchy of values cannot be established. Recently I was asked to make a “Personal Shield” upon which I was supposed to externally list various aspects of my inner self. Being the pessimistic cynic that I am I seemed to find a problem with every element of the shield. Firstly I was asked to make a list of the top three principles of life that I value most. After considering the question for a few minutes I realized that in no way, out of all of the aspects of my being, could I possibly select three and list them out. To do so would be like asking me which parent I loved more. All of life is sacred, no one part of it should ever need to be held above any other part as more important or most highly valued.

The next element of the shield was an area asking me to list the top three people I admire most. This was also difficult because, although I admire many people, I do not try to mimic the lifestyles of any of these people and the only person I aspire to be is myself. Ultimately I said my mother, my pole vault coach, and Peter Camejo—who was a Green Party candidate for California’s 2003 gubernatorial election—because they were the first three people who came to mind. Even so, I think it is unfair for me to list three people whom I admire when in actuality there are very many people who I may even talk to every day who inspire me in many different levels of life. In the finial section of the “Personal Shield” I was asked to list out three major ‘turning points’ in my life. On a number of levels I feel that there are no major turning points in my life. For the most part I believe that our lives are a one-way street. Even though there may be many different twists and turns on that street, it will still ultimately end in the same place no matter how one gets there. Furthermore, even if there was a big bend on the road that is my life, if I looked at my life-street from the very end of it or perhaps from above it that one bend would look insignificant to the length of the entire road and ultimately it would still appear straight.

Recently I have put a lot of thought into beginnings and ends. This is ironic because my mother—who was a philosophy major in college—wrote her final college essay on circles, which are the opposite of a line being that they have no beginning or end. How can there be an end if there isn’t a start? The principal seems to be such a novel concept and yet it governs everything we do in life. How could we possibly know where we are going to end up if we do not at one point begin to question ‘where’?

At this point I am somewhat wondering where exactly I am going. I now have one thousand four hundred and nineteen words written on virtually no topic whatsoever so I now will take this opportunity to write an outline if you will about where the future of this narrative will go.





My Outline

I. Introduction
II. Recent observations
a. “Kinds” of people
b. Values
c. Beginnings and ends
III. Outline

This takes us to right about here where I now must decide where the rest will lead.

IV. Solipsism
V. ?????
VI. More ?????
a. ?
b. ?




Because I have no idea what I want to talk about after solipsism, I will now omit the rest of my outline, truly rendering it useless, being that the only new theme mentioned is solipsism. Solipsism is a very interesting principal, and it is the belief that the only thing somebody can be sure of is that he or she exists, and that true knowledge of anything else is impossible. If one were to break down life into the very basics of what we can define as fact and what we cannot, a fact is really only something that an individual can say, without any consideration of doubt, is an undisputable truth. This is more difficult than it seems. For instance, many people might say that it is an obvious fact that the square root of 64 is 8. However, there is not just one answer to that question. Indeed, negative 8 squared is also equal to 64. There are many aspects of algebra that, when examined, throw away many pre-believed “facts” and show just how complex number actually are. Something that at one point a person was so sure was true in an instant can be shown to be in fact false.

Very often I am asked if I believe in god or not. What I tell them is a bit more of a complex answer than simply stating ‘yes’ or ‘no’. The best description of my belief system I would call agnostic—defined as a person who is unsure if god exists and furthermore is unsure if it can be determined. To the conservative learner, the theory of evolution seems much more feasible than that of an omnipotent entity placing a man and a woman in a garden and expecting them to procreate. In fact, the idea of it to many atheists is farcical, but on what basis does anyone else know any better? I find myself presented by two sources of writing: in one it tells me that there is a god who made me, the other tells me that there was evolution. Both are well written and provide an explanation as to why I am here today, why should I believe one over the other?

Maybe evolution IS god. Maybe god isn’t an entity at all but is really just the word used to describe the so-called random occurrence that is life as we know it! Many wars are started over religion. This is because if there are two different religions, and two different beliefs in god, it proves that both of them cannot be correct. The existence of another religion invalidates the beliefs of the first one, and this scares people. Religions are enacted for one primary purpose: to dispose fears of death and most other worldly unknowns. Most religions explain why we are here, what happens when we die, and what to do so that we have a good afterlife—because there must be an afterlife, the principal of life ending is much to difficult for most people to bear. If two religions have conflicting descriptions of death then people begin to consider a terrifying fact: one of the descriptions must be false. Because they have put so much faith into their own belief system, the only feasible conclusion is that the other religion is incorrect. Of course the frustrating reality is that no one can possibly know which religion is correct (if any are at all) until they die, and at that point there is no way for them to publicize their discovery. This leads me back to solipsism. The only thing a person can really, truly ‘know’ is that he or she exists. The rest of the world is best seen as an illusion, which I will discuss much more thoroughly later.






Chapter 2: I am rich

I know that there was not a chapter one, but this seemed to be an appropriate place for a chapter two, so I decided to add one. It seems that now I am writing a book, one in which there are chapters, themes, and ideas all organized and presented neatly and efficiently into subsections of chapters. Although I am unsure if I will be able to fill up the number of pages generally required out of a book, hopefully I will have enough to print into a pamphlet so that anyone who reads it would say “hmm, I guess this is some form of a book or novel!”

I am rich. Not in the sense of the word that Arnold Schwarzenegger is rich, and not even in the sense of the word that a smart stock investor is rich. My mother is trained as a lawyer, although she hates law and has no intention in ever going back into the field, so at the present moment, she is out of work. My father, who lives in San Diego, is a Neuro-Radiologist, and basically he fixes people’s brains by putting tubes up their legs and pushing them all the way up into their head and then moves this tube around to make things in the brain that previously were not working work. He pays our bills. Doctors do make a lot of money, he does support two households, both in expensive parts of the country, but not as much money as many expect.

For the better part of my life so far I have been economically well off, and have luckily rarely had to actually worry about money. When my parents became divorced I had to begin thinking more about spending and income, but we are still enormously lucky and undoubtedly live in a luxury that hardly any people in the world can even dream of. However, in order to keep us at this stature, my father has always and continues to work very hard.

Growing up, my dad lived in the poor area of Beverly Hills. Although he went to school with all the rich kids, his family was never very wealthy, and I think that this frustrating situation has impacted him throughout his life. Because he was surrounded by such wealth, he always felt that it was just out of his reach, just on his fingertips, yet he could never have it. Seeing the lavish lifestyles that to him everyone else led caused the jealousy to boil inside of him until it could no longer be contained.

Once he finished medical school and began to work and gain the respect and wealth that he always dreamed of, again he found himself just out of reach of his fantasy. Now living in San Francisco exactly during the dot-com era, all around him he witnessed people his age living in extraordinary prosperity while he was still somewhat struggling and working nearly 100 hours a week. At some point the ubiquitous wealth surrounding him caused him to pop and he left our family alone and moved to the very affluent La Jolla, California to start over.

There he redefined himself the way he wanted, wearing nice clothes, eating nice food, and even dating a nice blond and bouncy southern California gold mine named Donna. Although there was hardly any money in his bank account he felt, at least pretended to feel, that this was what he wanted and had always dreamed of. Meanwhile I continued my life with my mom and sister in Northern California, living in another wealthy city completely surrounded by Oakland called Piedmont. Although I persist to be economically well off, that is not the only level on which I would call myself rich.

Many people upon recollection of their teenage years admit that they were terrible times. Besides being awkward and confused, a lot of people were ostracized during school and never made lasting friends or ever felt accepted by any one or any group at all. My teenage years so far have been much different.

When I was a young kid, up until I was about ten, I often felt very lonely. I never really felt that I fit in and I always longed, as many do, to be one of the “cool” kids. When I was in fourth grade I finally felt that I had accomplished this. One day when my mom brought me to the playground to roller-blade, another kid in my class was there, Will Wheaton. Will was the epitome of cool, he was clever, fast, good looking, and I would toil all day and all night over how I could go about calling him to see if he would hang out. On this afternoon he was also roller-blading, and he had his dog towing him off of a ramp that he had made. While I was skating in circles pretending that my mom wasn’t there he asked me if I would like to go off of the ramp. Obviously hiding my immense glee and awe that he had talked me I accepted his offer and grabbed his dog’s leash. Because I was a much smaller and agile person than Will, his dog easily pulled me much faster and I was able to go much higher off of his little ramp.

“Awesome man!” he said. From that day on Will and I would often go and skate on his ramp or have pickup games of roller hockey in the playground after school. Another new element of my life that Will introduced me to was friendship with girls. For the last few years of my elementary school life I felt that I had finally achieved popularity and coolness.

Entering middle school brought about a change in my social stature. In our town, three elementary schools, Beach, havens, and Wildwood, feed into our middle school. All of the kids from Beach are the ‘cool’ kids and all the kids from Havens are the pussies and outcasts. Because I was small, strange, and from Havens, I immediately was an outcast among my peers again. In the park after school during sixth grade we would occasionally hold “rumbles” where two teams, the Rocks and the Jocks, would brawl it out until someone got a bloody nose or hurt their wrist and then everyone would disperse to their homes and tell their parents that they were out playing football. I was a Jock, the team that was predominantly from Havens, and so I was disliked. I will never forget the time that I was at a beach with a friend I had known since first grade and he chanted, with spine-tingling bliss, “I’m a Rock and you’re a Jock and I’m not supposed to be your friii-eeennndd!!”

After sixth grade I left my small collective of friends and attempted to attend a private music school for a year, but my eccentric liveliness did not work well with the prestige of the school. I returned to Piedmont in eighth grade, determined to make a change in my social life.

Still like most adolescents, I longed to be popular, and every day I would walk to school and a girl named ******* ****** would walk in front of me and I would lust to talk to her. I would make up dialogues in my head, endless dialogues every day, about her somehow turning around and talking to me.

“Hi Dave!”
“Oh, hello *******, I didn’t see you walking there!”
“Hey, we live so close to each other and we never really talk!”
“I know, what’s up with that?”
“We should walk to school together!”
“Yeah, totally!”
“So what’s up?”
“Not much, you?”
“Eh, the same.”
“Cool.”
“Have any tests today?”
“No, I don’t think so. Oh shit, yeah, I have a math test! I totally didn’t study for it!”
“Oh man, that sucks!”
“Yeah, oh well. Fuck school.”
“Seriously!”
“Indeed.”
“You know Dave, you are a really cool guy. We should hang out this weekend!”
“Yeah, that would be tight! How abou—
Every day I would wish that I could have friends, and I would wish it over and over again, all day. I made a deal with an unknown entity, whomever I was wishing to, that if they granted this wish, then I would never wish again. I would think how I was a really cool guy, and all I needed was a chance to prove it.

In a sense, the wish came true. I’m not quite sure exactly how this happened, but one day when my mom was out a bunch of people came to my house and drank alcohol and we went on my roof and I had the night of my life. After that they said that I was “pretty cool” and I became friends with them. After that night I never wished again.

Starting in eighth grade I never really had trouble with friends again. Although I eventually branched out and became friends with much more interesting people and stopped basing my relationships on social status, never again did I have trouble with self-confidence. Now that I am in high school and have defined myself with a group of friends who I truly love and enjoy, I feel outstandingly rich in my ability to say that I will never forget high school and never look back on my it with a tear in my eye.

It is remarkable that even though I have spent most of my life in such a restrictive and homogenous community I have somehow made such outstanding friendships that I would just as gladly search all over the world to find. I love all of my friends and would not trade the world for any of them, and this is why I say that I am very rich on many levels.





Chapter 3: The ‘Perfect’ World

There is a man from the military walking around with a big gun at the fort under the Golden Gate Bridge at the end of the path by the ocean at Crissy Field. He paces back and fourth, smoking a cigarette, and holding his big gun close to him, waiting for the terrorists to bomb or the earth to open up or for the Martians to attack.

“Perhaps I will save someone today with my big gun,” he thinks to himself. “Perhaps something will happen, a catastrophe, a huge disaster, and I will be a hero. There will be an attack. Five men. Ten men. An army will march here and try and kill everyone but I will be ready and I will kill them all first with my big gun and I will be the hero! Maybe it will be on the front page of the Chronicle. I’ll buy twenty copies and send them all to everyone I know. I’ll keep a clipping of it in my wallet. I can go and pick up girls in the bar with it.”

“Hey, what’s up?”
“Not much. Hey, aren’t you the guy who saved all those people?”
“Yeah, it was no big deal. It was in the paper.”
“Oh cool!”
“Would you like to see it?”
“Sure...Oh, wow, that’s impressive!”
“Thank you, yeah, I was just doing my job”
“That’s good. So what do you do now?”
“Yeah, it wasn’t a big deal at all. I had my gun. There were only about eight hundred people or so, you know, in the army I killed.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah...So you wanna come and see my place or something?”
“I actually have to go.”
“Oh, no problem.”
[He turns to the female on the other side of him]
“Hi, how are you? Yeah, that’s me. No, it wasn’t a big deal. Haha, yeah! Hey, you wanna see the newspaper I was in? Oh, you’ve already seen it? That’s ok. Are you sure you don’t want to see it again? Yeah, no problem, alright, hopefully I’ll see you around! Goodnight.”

I really don’t know why this man had a gun. As I observed him I considered it for a bit. I have seen the man there before. Sometimes he is tall and sometimes he is short, sometimes he is thin and sometimes he is fat. Sometimes he is white and sometimes he is black, and sometimes he is even Asian!! But the man is always there, wearing his fatigues, holding his big gun. Why there is a man at the end of Crissy Field walking around with a gun is known to very few. But he is there. And when he is there when I am there, I am safe, because he has a big gun.

What kind of gun is it? I don’t know anything about guns. I don ‘t think it is an M-16. Maybe it is. It probably is. But what if it…what if it ISN’T?

Why in our country, or any other country for that matter, is there the necessity for there to be a guy with a gun guarding an ex-fort under the Golden Gate Bridge on a Friday afternoon?

Before the Clinton Administration, Crissy Field was an Air Force base. Once Clinton came into office he shut down a bunch of bases all across the country, Crissy Field included. For the next 5 years it was an abandoned concrete wasteland filled with rusty nails and cracked airstrips, on top of some of the most prime real estate in Northern California. So a bunch of hippies took it upon themselves to preserve the natural beauty of the area and they got rid of all the crap that was lying around, including thousands of miles of Golden Gate Bridge cable that some chap bought for a small sum of money and sold for five dollars an inch or so and became a millionaire. After a few years of reconstruction it is now a beautiful beach half a mile from the Palace of Fine Arts and right under the Golden Gate Bridge where tourists flock from all over the world to see Alcatraz off to the right and rich middle-aged white men attempt to windsurf in the harsh San Francisco Bay—and for a fellow to be walking around the fort with a big gun.

I love Crissy Field; it is one of my favorite places in San Francisco, and the world for that matter. I have always loved driving down, through the Presidio and the eucalyptus trees in our little Toyota Corolla wagon with my dad’s windsurf board strapped to the top and his gear caging me in my seat between the boom and the mast. Through the thick fog the windy road is a world of it’s own with sunlight occasionally creeping through a gap in a cloud for just an instant, yet just enough to remind us that we are still in a city and not in some enchanted forest. Sometimes, if the fog is wet enough and the sun is bright enough, as we make the final turn and the ocean comes into view an enormous rainbow will stretch across the entire air force base for us to drive under. Although it sounds cliché, there is little that I can think of as being more majestic than my memories of driving down to Crissy Field with my dad.

However, the ‘perfect’ world has more to it than just location. The perfect world to me is an entire system that is followed by everyone living. There is no hatred of any kind, no need for guns and certainly no need for wars. “Peace”. I am a strong believer in a democratic socialist society. The foundation of socialism is equality, and it is defined as a political theory or system in which the means of production and distribution are controlled by the people and operated according to equity and fairness rather than market principles. Because of this, the standard of life overall is substantially higher than another form of governance such as American “democracy”. An example of this heightened standard of life can be found in a video game system. Video games are considered to be expensive luxuries that can make everyday life more enjoyable. In order to be able to afford them, people work hard in the hope of becoming wealthy; someone who merely “broke even” could never afford such an extravagant toy as a Playstation. However, the makers of Playstation are not “breaking even”, they are becoming very wealthy over their profitable toy. If they charged less for their product, they wouldn’t be as wealthy, but no one would have to be as wealthy to afford the product. For a lower cost, more people could achieve the same high standard of life. This video game example is a metaphor for all aspects of life in a socialist society.

A common misconception of socialist countries is their high taxes. What people don’t realize is that unlike American high taxes, which are spent on military mobilization, socialist taxes go right back to the taxpayers. In these countries there is universal education and health care, food for everyone, and very low homeless and unemployment rates. Cities are cleaner and nicer to live in, and overall, the community is happier. All of these functions work hand in hand. Cities are cleaner because there are more people paid to clean them. Because there are more people doing this, there are more jobs and therefore less unemployment, so more people can afford to not be homeless. There are many flaws with American democracy. Truthfully, the American regime is false, and destined to fall off of it’s artificial preach at the top of the world. Whereas a socialist country stays domestic, America imports more then it exports, and makes up for this deficit with martial power. With the great economical deficit between the rich and the poor, it ultimately causes less efficiency then if everyone were equal. The rich do less work once they become rich, and because there is only so much money to go around, there is no money to pay the poor to do necessary jobs.

Although America is labeled a democracy, it is really more of an economical oligarchy. An elite class of wealthy citizens control where the wealth goes and what it is used for. They use the money for personal benefits without the thought of other people or the rest of the world.

Aside from my obvious stance against many of America’s economical decisions, it is also true that many people have died as a direct result of America’s arrogant posture to the rest of the world. Many wars have been waged out of American greed, an ideal proudly called Capitalism. America has engaged in wars with Mexico, Spain, Guam, Puerto Rico, and many other nations for the sole purpose of gaining valuable and profitable territory. If focus entirely on the literal result of these actions, the truth is that people died in these wars. This is relevant because the primary defense of American democracy is better life, yet in its name many people have lost their lives.

Because socialist states act domestically, no human lives are lost in asinine wars with other countries for money. I know that I have gone on a bit of a political tangent, but I feel that the governance of the perfect world is a key factor in determining how that world functions. The people who inhabit my perfect world would all love each other, and there would be no judgment of any other person based on race, sex, religion, or any other characteristic that someone could conceivably be judged on. There would be no prisons because there would be no one to put in them! Although drugs would be legal, there would be no use for them because everyone would already be happy enough with themselves.

The world itself would be beautiful. No combustion engines or airplanes would be present. People would travel by bike and live off of the fruits of the land. Big corporations would not pre-package substance they claim to be food and widely distribute it as breakfast food to the unfortunate and uneducated. In fact, there would be no poverty. Instead of money the world would function on a complex barter system. Everyone would have a trade that held a certain value on the barter scale.

Skin cancer, lung cancer, and all other ailments that have been caused because of human negligence would of course be absent because no one would ever do anything without first thinking about it’s effect on the earth presently and for the next five generations.

A beautiful world is more then the coral reefs of Hawaii or the pollution-induced sunset in Los Angeles. In order for the ‘perfect’ world to be obtained a dramatic change would have to be made not only on land but also in everyone’s minds about the way they treat each other and their planet. On September 11th, 2003 I gave a speech to my school about some of the problems that I feel if solved could bring us one step closer to the perfect world. The text of the speech is as follows:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that,” were the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Today, on this vile anniversary of the hideous events of September 11th, 2001, we are sadly reminded of the hatred that is still so prevalent throughout the world. I need not remind you of all of the Americans who lost their lives on September 11th, but I would also like to remember all of the people all over the world who have been or who currently are victims of hatred. In every continent and every country, people are being oppressed every day by dictators, terrorists, and assailants of love. We all live under the same sky, why must we kill one another?

Today I would like to take this time to come together as a school, as a state, as a country and as a planet and drive out this hatred that infects. It is this parasite that builds up in people and feeds on the collective bedlam that it creates. But like all parasites it needs a host, and like all parasites it can be destroyed. If America quarantines itself from this infection, it can be washed from its people permanently.

At some point today, try and think of all the people who you love, and how happy you are that they are alive and well. Try and make amends with your enemies and remind your friends how much you care about them. I would now like to ask all of you to join me in a moment of silence to remember all of the people who have suffered and died today as well as to all of the people who will suffer and die tomorrow as victims of hatred.





Chapter 4: Who are “THEY”?

“They tell you that the best way to become a good writer is to write”. They tell you that you shouldn’t drink carbonated beverages because they deplete the calcium from your teeth. They even tell you that it is all right to eat some fats, but not all fats, but no fats too much, and definitely not trans-fats. Who says that? Every one has heard the truths and common folklore that this ‘They’ has advised us about, but who are “They”? Is They an elite class of intelligent otherworldly individuals who know everything and can ultimately save humanity? I decided to write a chapter posing this philosophical question before I decided on my topic for chapter three. However, the fourth chapter just seemed like the best place to introduce the title of my book, if it can even be called a book. I figure people will have three other chapters to read and ponder, “What does the title mean? Who ARE they??” Actually, the true order of ideas began with the idea for this chapter. I then decided that it had a nice ring to it, so hence it became the title of my book as well, which was previously called “My First Book” respectively and remains as such as a Microsoft Word document on my computer. I have determined that this is no longer a book and is now just a publication. A pamphlet perhaps. Or a ‘zine. I publish a ‘zine called American Youth, although I call it a maga’ because everyone calls their little Xeroxed publications ‘zines and I wouldn’t want to be trendy, would I? No, of course not, then They wouldn’t respect me.
But who is They? They say you are what you eat.

Yet again, I am at a loss of words. Although this is supposed to be my “catcher” chapter, the one that draws people in, the one that answers all of the worlds questions and problems and tells us all just who the fuck THEY are, I have no idea what to write. I don’t know who they are! They are our reference tool when we don’t know where we heard something, or we made it up, or our source was sub-standard. To just say that “they” said it is so much simpler. It makes you seem knowledgeable. Perhaps you have read something; perhaps you know something that no one else does. Hopefully in the near future this paragraph will be deleted and replaced with nineteen pages of shivering brilliance but until then it will remain as a constant reminder that I am a moron and can’t think of anything worthwhile to write.





Chapter 5: Drugs

As I mentioned in my preface, this chapter is exactly why it is so hard to try and write a book at my age. I have spent my whole life adamantly opposed to drugs. They are unnatural and unnecessary, why even bother? However, the truth is that they do affect you and make you feel good, and if you don’t watch it, you might find yourself defending them.

This summer I really succumbed to sin. I don’t know which sin it was, although I think there is a sin about indulging in too much pleasure. I think that I, as well as all the people I love and respect, am far too intelligent and interesting to throw it all away with drugs. I don’t need drugs to be creative or happy, so why use them? Although on occasion I do not think they are evil, I will certainty not advocate them as I did for a brief month this summer. As you will soon read, I believe that all of life is an illusion, and I use that belief to justify drugs. However, I do not think it should be an illusion. It would be cowardly of me to surrender my beliefs to the way that life is just because that is how it is. The strong people must fight it.

I think that drugs are a weakness and an easy way out of life. I don’t like taking the easy way out. Whenever we used to pick teams for some game and there was not an even amount of people, I would always rather be on the handicapped team. I just hate cheating life.

I always laugh at people who claim to cheat the system. All those people, they are really just part of the system too. You can’t cheat the system, you are the system! Anyways, the bottom line is that drugs are bad. For a brief month this summer I tried reevaluating my stance on drugs and for a while I thought that they were all right. I wrote this chapter during that time. Now, upon retrospect, I think that I wasn’t so much wrong as I was going against my own morals and so therefore once again I am against drugs until I decide to reevaluate them again.

I have a lot of difficulty seeing people I care about get drunk or high. Previously I had explored inside myself to see if my discomfort was because it was unnatural, or dangerous, or stupid. Although it remains that all of these are true, they are not the source of my uneasiness.

I have always had a problem with makeup. Any girl can go to L’Oreal and buy the latest blush or lipstick or eyeliner and look just like the cover girl of Cosmopolitan and hence look just like any other girl. I once gave a friend a live flower before a dance symbolizing that her beauty was “real” and not a falsification of life and true color as lifeless cut flowers are. In a sense, drinking merits itself the same way. I hold my friends to a high regard and standard, and set them as unique from other people. To me, when someone I care about drinks, it exterminates this high standard and places them with everyone else, in my eyes. Every one else who drinks every weekend and gets fucked up and gets shit faced and is laughing and is fucking stupid. It is hard for me to accept that they are in fact just like everyone else.

I have begun to accept that most of my friends do not share the same moral issues that I do surrounding drugs. Now it is only my hope that they make the right choices of course, but—whatever those choices are—I will respect and support them indefinitely.

Although it is now obsolete, I have included my original chapter on drugs as a contrast to how I feel now and have felt for most of my life.


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Upon reading this chapter, my mom will learn for the first time the whole and utter truth about my experience, thoughts, beliefs, and knowledge on the subject of drugs. I am not talking about drugs like the ones bought at Longs to clear up acne; I am talking about mind-altering substances.

My whole life I have been conflicted over my views on drugs. There was no question or thought really before I began to try drinking and smoking. I didn’t actually view them as substances that really changed how I behaved or felt. To me they were on the same rank as cigarettes: something bad for you that has no positive effects on life. However, at the time it was the thing to do so I didn’t even really put any moral thought into trying them except that my mom couldn’t find out.

During my first few years of drug use (beginning for the most part in eight grade) I’m not really sure if I ever really felt the full effect of drugs. Although when I was younger I was very fearless with the possible repercussions of drug use I now see the dangers and I stick only to relatively safe stimulation. I have matured a bit I think that there are two main ways that I am affected when I smoke marijuana. In both situations, one very important element is that I am taking the drug with people who I like; I would never smoke with people who I am not friends with, it's just not fun to me. Even if it is was I would find myself thinking, “man, these aren’t my friends, this is fake!” The first kind of effect I receive is probably the most common, and it occurs when I am in a social situations.

In this scenario, I just feel laid back. I am usually happy, it will put me in a good mood. Perhaps because I know that I am on a drug I don't want to let myself think that something is happening when it is not, so usually I stay pretty reserved when I am in a big group. If I am more high then I will be in a REALLY good mood and laugh hysterically and make crazy gestures and just enjoy myself. Usually in this situation I will enjoy the loose feeling and try not to observe myself from a third person too much because then I will recognize the fact that I am on a drug and it is unnatural and I’ll feel sort of guilty. I mostly enjoy just feeling carefree and "fitting in" during times that I would otherwise feel awkward. I think more or less everyone feels a lot better when they are high, their insecurities lifted, apprehensions gone. If I was a girl at a party around a bunch of stoned guys I would hate it because they would all have no restraint from hitting on me or looking up my skirt or touching my ass.

It is somewhat for this reason that I also try not to say or discuss anything too important, especially with someone else who is high, because I don't want to taint our conversation with the corruption of drugs, and I also don't want to risk someone else saying something or doing something that will be regretted by them later. I don’t need drugs at all to make myself an interesting person. Actually, I feel that I am a much more interesting person when I am not on any drugs. All in all I very much enjoy being high when I am around people but the experience is very much how I feel externally and I try not to spend to much time on inner reflection.

The second way that I am affected by smoking is when I am alone, or with an intimate group of close friends whom I don't need to worry about expressing myself around. In this situation I take advantage of the "mind expanding" aspects of the drug and try and do a lot of thinking and reflecting. Because I have become a much more mature person I can control myself a bit more then I used to be able to and I can often write while I am under the influence and take account of what I am thinking and feeling. My personal theory about why it expands your mind was actually formulated before I knew as a fact that marijuana was a stimulant. I decided that in order for things to seem to slow down you would actually have to be thinking faster and therefore the drug was actually making you faster, so the world would seem slower. Whether it actually makes you think faster or not I am unsure, but it certainly makes you think differently.

When I am by myself I try and take in the whole world, how everyone else is feeling right now, what they are doing, how their lives differ from mine. Sitting on my roof is a good place to do this because I can see so many people all in one eyeshot. I think about development, pollution—all the aspects of society basically. I think about love a whole lot, what it means, who I love, and why. Much of my experience is pretty typical of what you would expect some cliché stoner to say who was talking about being high. However, it really is a unique feeling not only from any other feeling but every time you use it. I also think about my own life a lot. All these things I’ve mentioned I think about a lot when I am not high but I think that I can be more honest with myself when I am inebriated. I think about my future and place myself in different situations. I enjoy being high because no matter what I am thinking about in my future it gives me hope. Even when I am thinking about the world ending I still feel comfort in knowing that until that moment I will be surrounded by my friends and everything will be beautiful. I know that nothing I have said about my personal experiences with marijuana is very profound, and that is ok. Frankly I don't think that I am very profound when I am high. Although I have written music while I was, I don't think that it heightens my creativity or makes me a more interesting person. But to me that is not why I use it. I use it because I enjoy it and it makes me feel better when I am not feeling well and other times it is just purely for fun. I am still not sure about my feelings on using it. Hypothetically I am still against drug use in a pure person. In spite of this, I am not necessarily a pure person. I absolutely stand by my feelings that there is never a time when drugs are not unnatural and unnecessary. I would never want to become dependant on marijuana and I don't care what people say I still think that it is addicting and should be used sparingly. If I intended on using it a lot in the future I would purchase a vaporizer so that my lungs would not have to suffer.

I know the last few paragraphs have made me sound like the biggest stoner ever. The sophomoric writing of them doesn’t help either and for that I apologize, the bulk of my writing was lifted from a letter I wrote to a friend about my personal experiences with marijuana. I have no problem not smoking and I can easily go for years without doing so. However, I think that for a person to be completely close-minded and against marijuana, especially if they have never tried it or don’t know anything about it at all, is definitely mistaken.

I think that my own usage of marijuana and drugs in general is very unique in comparison to everybody else. This is because I have been through so many stages of thought on the topic that I now have a very broad understanding of it. Although I am still morally unsure of my stance, I think that it would be stupid of my not to at least allow a period to reevaluate my beliefs on it.

Finally, I would like to include something that I wrote while on I was high and had a bit of wine on August seventeenth, 2003. I have not edited it at all. I am not sure if I still agree with it’s content, but here it is nonetheless.

My INGROWN TOE NAIL:
Yes, I am high right now. I want to comment on illusion. Why can’t drugs be good?? We all live in illusions, we live in illusions of happieness when we eat the shit we eat or fuck the shit we fuck. Everything is an illusion. Drugs just enhance this illusion, which is in fact perceived differently by every person who perceives it. The lawyers make their illusion with money and possessions, drug users make their illsion by making a coat over reality. No illusion shold be heald to any other standard than any other one. Although I hate the way I feel, so fake, so “not” me, I love it. What is fucking real anyways. What the fuck is love?? I feel love. Fuck you. Yeah, fuck you! What isn’t me?? All this shit is me! I am fucking above all the bullshit of society and I never will suclum to sorrow. I love you. Yes. I can’t deal any more. Glory. Exstacy. Bliss. Euphoria. This is what I am feeling right now. The song after jimi Hendrix on my clubhouse mix, whoever it is. It’s Led Zeppelin. “what is and never shoud be”. Tapping. Rock and roll, man, yeah, rock and roll. Just like in those nostalgic hippie movies. We are there, now, yes, we should be fifty and sixty now but we are, we were, we were the young, the youth, the alternative. That was us, that is us. Now. Now.. in my room we are, I am typing like a dork while josh massages Courtney. High. Drunk. Enjoytihng youth, enjoying our currently healthiy lungs. Anticipating a ciure for lung cancer in the futher. Will I rememeber this tomorrow. Save. Yes I will. Live. Indeed. Haze confusiong. Good times bad times you know I’ve had my share. Investigation. It’s one thirty two in the morning on my click, whick means it is really one twenty thow, althogut soon it will be threee. Wow. I am sucking at typng, goodnight.

For now that is all that I have to say about drugs, but I have a lot of thought on it and this is hopefully a somewhat good summary on how I currently feel it affects me and how I feel about that effect. So until next time, have fun, be safe, and never forget that you are on a drug and what you say and do could have repercussions later.





Chapter 6: DAD

This is the Eulogy to a man who makes me really fucking mad.
This is the Eulogy to a man who doesn’t deserve to be called Dad.
I mean,
What kind of a person leaves his family alone?
The only father that I know is just a voice on the phone.
All these minutes turn to hours and all these hours turn to days
And every second since you left I’ve grown that much more enraged.
Birthdays came and left and I’ve become so much older
The more I understand your fucked up things
The more my heart grows colder.
If you see my sister’s eyes in your presence and the essences collects
Of abandon and denial.
All your mother fucking bullshit
So many tears to fill the Nile!
But I don’t hate you Dad in fact I hope you never die
Because never again do I want to see my mother cry.
So how is this a eulogy?
To us you could already be dead.
If you were I wouldn’t be surprised, Sara already said
That she didn’t have a father and in honesty this is the truth
So goodbye Dad, this eulogy was for you.

I would said through the clouds
I would fly through the seas
I would burn down the lakes
And I would drink all the trees
Just to find you.
Just to find you.
I would run over the sun
And I would climb over
Towers and glaciers and mountains
Just to stick out my hand for a chance
I’ve lost you Dad
I’ve lost you Dad
Don’t know how many tears are yet to be paved
But I know I want to pave them with you
Wakes up screaming
Nightmares just provoke fears
Alone surrounded by friends
Awake yet dreams are all he has
All he wanted was somebody who cared
All he wanted was to feel loved
I’ve lost you dad
I’ve lost you dad.
I will always be there for you.
I will always be there for you.
I’ve lost you dad.
I’ve lost you dad.
I will always be there for you.
I will always be there for you.
I will always be there for you.

The previous two pieces of writing were very obviously about my father. The first was written while I was sitting in on my friend’s public speaking class during their unit on eulogies. The second is actually a song that I wrote and recorded. My father has had a big impact on the way that I view relationships and maturing in general.

One of the main factors that hurts my mom about my father’s absence actually has nothing to do with the fact that he left. She is tremendously frustrated with their “lack of communication”. Really, he just up and left without any explanation whatsoever. Although it would have hurt her a great deal if he had supplied a reason, it hurts her even more that he didn’t. This situation leaves her only to imagine and fabricate reasons in her mind, most of which are probably much more awful than the actual truth. She often mentions how all he had to do was pick up a phone and tell her that he felt sick or tired or scared, whatever—something! He could have said that he wanted to be alone for a few days, or a few months or a few years. Had that been the case she could have dealt with it, but alas it wasn’t so now she is left to wonder what the hell happened. She was always willing to take him back though. Before they officially became divorced deep down she always hoped and believed that after a few years they would get back together. But they didn’t.

The point of all this is communication. All that my mom wanted was an explanation. On one hand my dad is a great guy. The other day I was talking to him on the phone and he was telling me about how he had to go in to the hospital in the middle of the night to do a case for this guy who had gotten into a knife fight and had a fucking knife in his neck. Imagine that, my dad saved some low life fuck who had a knife in his neck. Every so often I need to stop and be impressed with his job and what he does.

I’ll never forget the night he left. It was Christmas Eve and even though we don’t celebrate Christmas I always thought it was ironic because Christmas is such a family time and we were doing the exact opposite. During that break we were planning on going on a road trip down to LA and I forget why my dad said he couldn’t go but I guess now I know why. We sat down at the table and he said he had something important to say and I probably thought that he was going to say that we were moving or that he caught me doing something bad or something along those lines, the kind of problem that we could work out as a family. When he said that we might have noticed that lately him and my mother were having problems I sort of agreed yet I don’t know why. He was having problems, not my mom. The whole night was so surreal. No one expects their parents to break up. I didn’t know how to react. I thought of all the movies that I had ever seen and all the books I had ever read where people’s parents had broken up, how they had reacted.

I decided to take a walk. It seemed appropriate, like the correct way that a pre-teenage boy was supposed to react. During the walk I pretended like I was happy. I thought of that episode of Boy Meets World where his parents almost break up and his trailer park friend tells him how it will be cool because he can milk each parent for all they’re worth. Actually, I’m not sure if that is even an episode of boy meets world but I always remember it as such. I think it was actually a comic strip in Mad Magazine called Monroe and it was about this kid with a fucked up life.

I came home and I went in my bed and I wasn’t pretending to be happy anymore. I didn’t know how to feel. I behaved very un-cool and I went under my covers and cried and fell asleep and when I woke up my whole family was in my room looking at me, my mom on my bed patting my back while my dad sat cross legged in a chair with all of us glaring at him telling us that everything would be all right. Initially he wasn’t moving to San Diego so I wasn’t worrying at the time about how frequently I would see him and stuff.

Later my mom told me how she had known for two weeks and had lived in agony because she hadn’t told me. After I got up from my bed in a facade of normal we went to go see Galaxy Quest. What a situation, my parent’s had just broken up and we went to go see a mother fucking Tim Allen movie together! The next day my mom, my sister and I all drove down to LA and a week later when we came home he was gone.

It is so weird to see your mother cry. Everything you thought of as right, as secure, as unbreakable all of a sudden comes crashing down and the one person you can turn to is suddenly in a worse state than you. Your whole world is suddenly insecure. Everything that you thought was right becomes wrong. Where normally you would turn to your mother in this state, now she turns to you and you become the parent or the friend or the husband.

Later I pretended that I thought it was cool. I was unique. Courtney and I would joke about my parents and my dad and her parents who were also in the process of breaking up. But it wasn’t cool, not at all.

I never want to end up like that. I always thought that I would be different; that I would have relationships that worked. But I don’t and now I feel myself slipping into the same rut as my mom. My dad lives a thousand miles away from my body and a million miles away from my heart.

I decided that I would never do that. When looked at from a certain perspective everything seems so irrelevant and lacking in purpose. I don’t know why I am actually ‘here’, I don’t know why anyone is ‘here’, but I know that I am to spread love and to have fun and share with everyone the fruits of affection and warmth. I don’t know about my future or where I will go or who I will love but I know about right now, and I am happy with that.

My absence of a father during adolescence has caused me to continually strive to find positive male role models. I always find that I get along better with male teachers as opposed to female and I think this is in part because I feel the need to have some male figure in my life to influence me.

Right now I have just gone back and reread much of my “book” so far. I must say, for the most part it is fairly idiotic. I have fallen into the same mindset of those people who I made such jest of at the beginning. I have begun writing about my own life—which really shouldn’t be so interesting to anyone but myself—and even worse I have become lazy with my writing and it has become dull and analogous. Furthermore, if one were to have liberal knowledge of my life one might take note of the rampant verbatim I have included from various other letters and papers I have written over the years. So instead of droning on for another page or so about my life growing up searching for positive male role models I am going to stop now and yet again make a note to go back and make this better when I do in fact sell this to a publisher and become famous and sell millions of copies and live the rest of my life in bliss. Because of course that is all that matters to me in my life.

That was sarcastic by the way.





Chapter 7: MOM

Originally I wasn’t going to write a chapter on my mom. Actually, I was going to have a chapter called DAD and it was going to be powerful and insightful and tell the story about my life—but it wasn’t complete. And in writing it I realized the importance of also having a chapter called MOM.

A few days ago my mom broke up with her boyfriend Mike. It’s interesting because although I rarely talk or even think about him, for some reason finding that out really affected me. Even though her reasons for ending it were completely justified, I still found myself almost attached to the idea of him. Although she has dated other people she has basically been going out with him since my parents broke up. Somehow the consistency of knowing that he was there, some form of father figure at all, was broken, and now I feel very insecure because of that notion. For some reason I found comfort in knowing that she was with Mike, and I never realized that I felt that way until last night. When she told me that she had broken up with him I was devastated.

I have only had a few conversations with my mother about her and Mike. Although my mom and I are extraordinarily close, we rarely ever discuss topics along those lines. For some reason discussion of love and attraction at all has for some reason become taboo in my family, and I think this is in part because of my dad. Talking with her gave me this whole new perspective on my life versus hers and his for that matter. Even when I am feeling really shitty and lonely I am never really lonely. I always have friends that I can go to about something. There are so many guys in the world that would give a nut just for the chance to go and talk to a girl and here I am and most of my friends are predominantly female! It is weird to imagine that not always being the case.

In Mike’s case, he is really lonely. Even when I get pissed off about girls or whatever that immature bullshit is, I am still surrounded by people, guys and girls alike, all the time. It must be horrible to literally have no friends except for your cat.

I really just liked the idea of mike. Even though I never saw him and my mom exhibit affection I just liked knowing he was there as another positive male role model in my life. I think it is for this reason that I get along better with male teachers than female teachers. I am constantly searching for some father figure in my life.

It is fascinating looking at my mom because although almost anyone would agree that she is one of the most loving, caring, affectionate, smart, and interesting people in the whole world, she does not seem to have many close friends. Throughout the years I have thought about this and investigated the possibility of her being judgmental or having high standards but neither seemed very accurate. My newest belief I feel is the most accurate. Although at first it sounds arrogant please continue reading and I think you will understand why I believe that the problem that my mother has with making friends is because she compares every person she meets to me. Although I have never met him, I universally hear that my mom’s father was a great man. He was honest, loving, intelligent, interesting, basically all the good qualities that a human could have. Long before I was born he died of prostate cancer. In fact, his name was also David. I think that in my mother’s eyes, somehow I embody her father. Moreover, I think that he lives on through me. Because to her, her father was the perfect man, any man who is unlike me is not perfect, and that greatly frustrates my mom. This is not to say that I or anyone else believes that I am a perfect man, but I do serve as a statue of one.

One might say that this observation is incorrect because she married my father. However, I think that my father actually fuels this frustration. He represents a man who wasn’t like her own father and who she gave a chance to and her love to and failed, thus proving that anyone unlike her father was not worthy of her love.

I am unsure how she met Mike. I know that when she met him shortly after her break from my dad he was roughly the age that her father was when he died and I have always wondered if that contributed in any way.

It is so weird to see my mom dating. At that age most people want to settle down, so every person is a potential life-companion. Sometimes it seems forced to me, and I think that is why there are so many miserable relationships. I hope that I never get divorced.

A few weeks ago I was getting my hair cut and my barber was telling me about how she is a single mom and all that sad jazz and I started thinking about how common it is for people to be single parents and yet I hardly know anyone like that. Where I grow up most of the families are very nuclear. Everywhere else in the Bay Area and the world for that matter there are such messed up families. I think a lot of families that I know emit a very “perfect and together” front. I think many of them just do it for image when they are really falling apart inside. Because god forbid they divorce, what would the other normal families think??

Ironically, my mom used to comment about all the divorced families around here. I think it is really sad how many people get divorced. The fact that divorce is so abundant just shows how much of the world really isn’t based on love.

When I grow up I hope to be married in a relationship that is real. I don’t want to stay together for the sake of it. I hope that my wife is someone who I truly love. Some people say that marriage is unnecessary. I personally like the binding security in marriage, it somewhat solidifies things. If we were to get in an argument and we were not married we could just end it and say “oh, that was a bad argument, let’s break up” as opposed to “well, that was a bad argument but we are married and I know deep down that I love this person”. I wonder if it is easier for people like myself, who have witnessed failed relationships, to pinpoint exactly what I want. Sometimes I think it is, but sometimes I think that it just seems like it is. For example, when I have kids I know I am going to raise them thinking “ok, I want to be the perfect parent. I am not going to make any of the mistakes my mother made”. However, I know that my mom probably said the exact same thing. And although I think she is a great parent, there are still subtle areas that have bothered me along the way. And I’m sure when my kids have kids they will make the same vow to not make the mistakes that I made bringing them up. Deep down I truly believe that for the most part, MOST people want to be good parents. But good parenting is hard, and not very many people succeed as well as my own mother did. What I am trying to say here is that even though I may think that I know what I want, that doesn’t at all guarantee my ability to reach it. Furthermore, just because I am myself doesn’t guarantee that I know myself. One time I scribbled down as I was driving to a friend’s house: “I stop to look in the mirror and staring back is a stranger/ I see someone who is confused/ I see someone who is angry/ I see someone who is trying his hardest/ I see someone who is failing/ At saving the world, all thrown the fuck away/ Superman won’t go and save the day, they changed his name and made it Dave/ No one knows all the things I try and do/ no one knows all love I try and do for you/ but everyone knows all the mistakes I do/ All I wanted out of life was to make you happy/ all I wanted out of life was to see you smiling and laughing/ all I wanted out of life was the world in harmony/ all I wanted out of life was to see the bombs to stop dropping/ A true companion but I guess that’s too demanding/ but none of that will happen so I guess I’ll just give in”. Although for a good reason I later decided that those lyrics were definitely not up to the caliber of those necessary to be in any song, I think that their sentiment accurately reflects how I have felt in the past. Everyone always assumes that they know what they want so therefore they will work hard and eventually have it, but for the most part that is not the case. Most people know what they want and they work their asses off and never reach their goal. I never hear a high school student say “I want to grow up and be a bureaucrat and lead a dull life in a cubicle and never change the world” and yet this is what most middle class people do. To me this revelation is somewhat depressing. I think the most important thing that anyone can do is to not to assume anything. That is why I try not to dwell too much on any particular element in my life that doesn’t seem to be going very well. That is also to a certain extent why I do not regret anything. What if an event that at the time seemed bad ultimately caused something good to happen later? If you were to regret that bad event, it would almost be like regretting the good one as well.

The bottom line is that most people take the prospect of a stable marriage relationship for granted. Although none of the last few paragraphs have done anything to prove this notion; that is the bottom line. People ASSUME that they will eventually find someone they truly love and have a beautiful family with beautiful children who will never develop ALS or Cerebral Palsy and live in a beautiful house in some suburb where they go to work every day whistling and love their job and the only trouble in their life is how to tell the kids that it was the veterinarian, and not a fatal fall from a tree, that caused their cat to take a long long nap.

This life is not the case for 99.9% of people. I don’t think I really took this into account until recently. I never realized until recently how much I value family. I think that because I have spent my teenage years in a family that wasn’t so stable I have developed a greater appreciation for just how important love is in a household. I think that up until recently I took love for granted. Until recently I didn’t know how fucked divorce is and how much I never want that to happen to me. I always assumed that there would always be love somewhere; that there will be friends and family and positive support surrounding me. But there won’t necessarily, and it is something to never be taken for granted.

It is for this reason that I often feel very spoiled. I think any person who has it all and doesn't realize it is the most spoiled person ever. Most people around here spend their entire lives not giving a fuck about any other person's life. We don’t even know what it is like to have nothing. There is a longs drugs down the street where they hire retarded people. Those people have NOTHING and NO ONE. Most people walk into that store and think “eww, why are there all these weird people here?” Imagine what it must be like to be those weird people. To not have a friend in the world.

Sometimes I feel especially bad for the people I see when I am driving or walking down the street who I know are not crazy, the people who are old and weird looking and so ALONE. These people are so sad because they are so self-aware. My uncle is insane. I didn't realize that until very recently. He has completely manifests and hallucinates the world in which he lives. But what about the people who can’t pretend? The people who go to their fuckhole home every day after their fuckhole job and the only reason they don't kill themselves is because they are too scared and the only reason they don't overdose on drugs is because they can't afford to. And the only reason they go to the fuckhole job is to pay for the fuckhole home, and the only reason they need the fuckhole home is to have someplace to be when they're not at the fuckhole job.

And then I’ll keep walking. Or driving. And my friend will make a joke and I’ll laugh and that person’s life will go on as will mine, and I’ll never see them again. This happens to me all the time. And what can I do? The best I can attempt is to feel bad and be glad that I am not one of them.

I love my mom very much and it can only be my hope that when I grow up I will be fortunate enough to have the same love that me and her share.





Chapter 8: Technology

“Take my lungs, fill them with gasoline. Replace my heart with gears and make me into a machine”. Sometimes don’t you feel that technology is taking over our lives? More and more, computers and development are turning people into drones. Nothing is sacred anymore. “Plastic money, plastic knives, plastic houses with plastic wives. Reality TV shows showcase our plastic lives”. The world is dying. My definition of death is the absence of meaning or purpose. Slowly and surly everything important is slipping away. “It’s a gray world with a gray sky, but I have a color TV, so I’m doing just fine”.

As Albert Einstein said, “it has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity”. I absolutely agree with him. It took millions of years for our ozone layer to be created and in only about fifty years we have already ripped a big hole in it. At the rate that we destroy, it would be no surprise to me if the world were over within the next few hundred years. Humans are the only animals on the earth that take from the earth and do not give back. All other living things are part of a balanced circle of life. For example, one animal might kill another, but then a larger animal will kill the first one, in a sense giving back to the circle of life with it’s own life. We make outputs and outputs and outputs but where does it all go? Productivity is on the rise but what are we producing? Hate, violence, war. Destruction is manufactured in 17.5 seconds on the assembly line. Ten years ago we lived inside our televisions by being hopelessly addicted to sitcoms, now we literally live inside our TVs on so-called Reality TV shows. If these shows are reality, then what really is reality anyways? Is it the ability to connect with any person in any part of the world at any time instantly?

Communication has been completely redefined. While once the only electrical singles involved with communication were those fired off by neurons and sent to our brains, we now can send signals to satellites where they are then relayed through the souls of everyone and into a four-centimeter cube were the receiver thinks that what they are hearing is private. Or even worse, we don’t even talk to one another. My fingers have become my vocal chords and my voice is now 26 buttons on my keyboard.

We now have robots doing everything for us. Turning our cars steering wheels, making our clothes, making our shoes, and playing our chess games for us. Our children are no longer brought up by parents, they are now raised by 128-bit processors and their father’s name is Sony. Their mother is polyuthraine, teaching them through Barbie dolls exactly how real women are supposed to look.

Every day one’s face no longer defines who they are any more. Plastic surgery, nose jobs, Augmentations, botox, excess fat sucked out of our asses by tubes. What is a person anymore? Humanity has become a twisted experiment opposite that of Victor Frankenstein’s: beautiful on the outside yet hideous internally.

Carbon Monoxide emissions are rising every day. The oil is being depleted. Cancer is rising as wars wage on. It is no longer a question of if the planet is being destroyed, but which Superpower will end it first with their nuclear masterpiece.

Nothing is sacred. Humanity is questioned. Cherish your love and keep your eyes open, but don’t just look. See with your heart, and only then can we save ourselves.





Chapter 9, if there is to be a chapter 9: So where do I go From Here?

So where do I go from here? I am seventeen years old, a senior in high school, and I find myself in the closing minutes of the rest of my life with no idea as to what path I would like to take. I know that in a few weeks I will be applying to college, and that is such a weird fucking feeling to me. Senior year is perhaps the most anticipated year of your life, that or freshman year in college. We spend our entire lives up until this point looking forward to what it will be like and now that it is here I don’t really know what to do with it. I feel so old and mature.

As I was running over a hill yesterday, which actually I run over every day, I looked out at the panoramic view. From this vantage point I could see the entire San Francisco Bay. To my right was the Bay Bridge, going through Treasure Island and into San Francisco City. At my left I could see the San Mateo Bridge, and all the way north I could see the Richmond-San Raffel Bridge. This was a classic Northern-California summer afternoon; about 75 degrees, not a cloud in the sky, and a slight wind, just enough to blow all the smog away and give me an astonishingly crisp view for miles in every direction. As I ran I began to think that after this year I would never, except when I came home to visit, get to run over that hill again.

Leaving my friends is a really difficult thought to deal with. During these last four years I have become really attached to my group of friends, adoringly calling ourselves the Scruts. This originated in Social Psychology class sophomore year when we learned that the area in-between the scrotum and the anus is called the scrut (scrotum and butt combined into one word). Our group of friends, which consists of myself as The Baron, Josh as Mr. Lunch, Ben as Barnaby of Loxley, and Eric currently as Maharaja of Scrotii, is very unique in the sense that we are all very close and at the same time very different people. Eric is a giant 230-pound beast of muscle and power as the starting middle linebacker for the past three years on our varsity football team. Even without his academics, which are incredible, he has a full ride to practically any school he wants. Josh stands roughly 6 foot three, although because he only weights about 150 he looks like he is about seven feet tall. He is hoping to go to Penn for rowing crew, which he is very good at. Ben is not very tall and although very gentile he could probably kick anyone’s ass, his pecks look like they belong on a slab of granite rather than a human. He is very sweet and enjoys beauty and music a great deal.

It is so weird that all of us found each other in such unlikely circumstances. Leaving these brothers is going to be very difficult for me, and where I am leaving them to go is even stranger.

What do I want to do with my life? As of right now the only line of work I can see myself in is as a fireman. However, is that what I want to do? Maybe I want to be a blown glass artist, or a musician. The truth is I have no idea. I know that for college I want to be in a small artsy place where I can be surrounded by creativity and interesting people who care about things other than their future bank account.

I have grown up in a town where we are trained to think that success is getting good grades in school, going to a good college, and becoming a doctor or a lawyer and being rich. What I sometimes have to sit back and realize is that that life is very much not the one for me. Over the last year I have done a lot of thinking about love. Love is such a weird idea to me. I actually wrote a poem asking and answering that question, and it became the second part of a song. It went as follows:

All these poems I attempt to write
While crying in the middle of the night
Do no justice to expressing my
True inner fright of being alone,
Or dying having only been
Just a “good friend”.
Fuck not being ready,
Soon ‘now’ will be ‘then’!
And I scream at the top of my lungs
But there’s no one there to hear me
And I wade through ponds of sorrow
But no river stone will help me see clearly.
I’m tired of being laughed at when I didn’t think I was funny.
I’m tired of making jokes when deep inside they are hurting me.
I’m tired of not knowing who to share my feelings with.
I’m tired of wondering if anyone would care if I was dead!
Smiles turn into contortions as hearts are raped like the cause of abortions,
Stories will be forgotten as friendship bracelets are stomped on.
Love isn’t some symbolic attachment
It isn’t some bullshit calculations and mathematics
Love isn’t flowers on Valentine’s Day
And it isn’t money or fine cars
In the driveway
Love doesn’t affect social status
And it doesn’t make your dick hard
It doesn’t require condoms or
Leather things on
Love isn’t kissing and it
Certainly isn’t fucking
Love isn’t physical and it
Isn’t even hugging.
Love is knowing you can be
Lost but find a way
Love is having part of your heart reserved
For a special somebody
Love is a friend who you always
Know is true
Love isn’t necessarily always knowing
What to do
Love is a smile or a wink of an eye
Love is brighter than all the stars in the sky
I don’t really know what love is
It’s hard to define
But I know it when I see it
It’s not a measure of time
But I like it that way, I don’t need to know
Everything and that’s cool
But the one thing I know is
I think love is you.

What the hell is love? Over this last year experiences happened to me that I never really thought would happen. I never really thought that I would meet someone when I was just a junior in high school, 16 years old, who I actually felt that I ‘connected’ with. I also never thought then when I found this person and they seemingly felt the same way, it would not work out. Much of this chapter was written and asked to be edited out, which I have done out of respect for my friend. The bottom line is that I really care about her a lot and we are very close but she does not feel that she is ready for a relationship with me. This has been extremely painful and difficult for me to deal with. She is a year younger than me, meaning that when I am in college she will still have another year of high school. She keeps on referencing the future but that is hard for me to think about because I don’t know how I will feel in the future, I know how I feel now!

At this point I don’t even know how I would have a relationship with her, effortlessly she has hurt me more than I ever imagined anyone would ever succeed to do, not to mention we’ve had so many hypothetical conversations about it, if it actually happened I wonder if it would be weird. Furthermore, it seems peculiar to me to try for other people when deep down I know that at this point in my life she is the only person I would truly want to be with. I feel as if I have almost in a sense “surpassed” the ways that most teenagers act and feel and honestly I don’t even crave the kind of relationships that many of my peers seek out anymore.

Te me, our relationship is so much more than that type of superficiality and what we have between us is so much greater than making out at sunset or hooking up at a party. We can talk on the phone for hours about absolutely nothing and never grow bored, or we don’t even need to talk and we can just bask in the wonderfulness of each other’s company. I could never replicate the way that I feel about her for anyone else. If I were to attempt a relationship with another person I feel that it would be unfair to them because I would be unable to be in the relationship one hundred percent. This leaves me in quite a frustrating situation because on one had I don’t want to just wait around for something that might not even happen, but on the other hand it would be absolutely devastating to me if eventually she was ready and I was in a position where I could not accept it because I was involved with someone who frankly I didn’t really care about.

I feel like it would be immature of me to not question my attraction. “Sometimes things aren’t what they seem”, I belted out in a song once. At the time I was singing about this girl (who I will now refer to as Her) leading me on; me believing our relationship was ‘more’ than it actually was. Now I wonder if that is the truth behind those words.

I have always made fun of teenage relationships, feeling that many of them were based on physical attraction more than anything else. With Her, I always felt that we had something ‘more’ because we don’t need a physical relationship. We are close friends and our friendship works beautifully without making out or giving head or having sex, and frankly, I also love it this way. However, I sometimes wonder if I am no better than the kids I make fun of. While they disguise sex and call it love, do I do the same with friendship?

Often I become very frustrated because I am a senior in high school, the school president even, and yet the only girls I have ever kissed for the most part I have felt were whores and more importantly, were people who I did not care about. Indeed, one time a friend and I even rolled dice on who would receive head first from a certain slut and then we proceeded to take turns as she carried out her end of the deal. I have never had any sort of relationship before and never really had any confidence to show attraction or express my feelings. Now for the first time there was someone who I felt was worth pursuing and taking the risk of showing my emotions to—and who I truly cared about—but it just didn’t work out the way that I would have liked. I keep on hoping that maybe something new will happen, but it doesn’t. I know Her feelings won’t change and I’m trying to get used to it and to understand why she feels the way she does, but the more I try and think about it the more frustrated and the more hurt I become.

This life that we live in seems so lacking in purpose, what could possibly be the big deal with this relationship? So many people are alone and without love and here we are with what I feel is such an amazing opportunity and it is being thrown away! Of course she is just as frustrated; to her I am just a close friend who can’t get over his issues. Ultimately neither one of us likes the way that things are and we are both enormously frustrated with that fact that our once flawless friendship is threatened by a concept as trivial as dating. I have been especially crushed by all of this, and now I am just struggling as hard as I can to pick the pieces of my shattered heart back up and mend them back together while at the same time trying to dry my tear-soaked pillows and maintain my friendship with Her without just giving up altogether and running away. But truthfully, that is all I want to do anymore. I want to run away to the jungle where there are none of the beasts that I have to deal with here and live only with my dejection and anguish as companions.

I spread my wings above my head
Prepared to fly away
But my wings are getting clipped
Every single day
So my feet stay on the ground and I can't
Soar to my dreams
And these spikes inside my eyes
Keep me from seeing
All these shackles around my wrists
Keep me from ever punching
And these chains around my heart
Keep me from ever loving
And yet I spread my wings
And prepare to fly away

One of my ongoing fantasies is to find out today that the world would end in six months. What would I do? I could do everything I had always dreamed of doing but never did. Say the things I wanted to say. It would be amazing, a perfect six months. And then I with the rest of the world would die and I wouldn’t have to wonder about what could have happened.

It is so funny to think that if the world ended in six months I would not even be eighteen yet. Of course this is a hypothetical situation and the possible pandemonium and panic that would erupt in finding out the world was about to end would not happen. But amidst the panic: utopia.

The last day of earth would be so sad. Imagine, there would be no legacy. After that one moment of perfection right before it all ends, nothing would ever matter and nothing that ever mattered before would ever matter again. I think it would all be worth it for that one moment though.

It is my belief that true perfection can be found in one moment. During one instant of tranquility, possibility is the only fact in existence. I have explored this belief a lot and have learned that it is very similar to the question put forward by Faust. In Faust, by Goethe, Faust makes a pact with the devil saying “if I ever lay myself tranquilly upon a bed of ease, then let that be me immediate end! If ever you can so delude me with flattery that I'm pleased with myself, if you can deceive me with enjoyment, let that be my last day. This bet I offer!” What he means by this is that if the devil can have his soul if he can every produce a moment in time that Faust would want to last forever, a perfect moment.

The question he poses is an interesting one. Is there such a thing as perfection? Everyone defines perfection differently. In Fight Club, Chuck Palaniuk describes his own moment of perfection.

“What Tyler had created was the shadow of a giant hand. Only now the fingers were Nosferatu-long and the thumb was too short, but he said how at exactly four-thirty the hand was perfect. The giant shadow hand was perfect for one minute, and for one perfect minute Tyler had sat in the palm of a perfection he'd created himself”.

“One minute was enough, Tyler said, a person had to work hard for it, but a minute of perfection was worth the effort. A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection”.

The difference between these two beliefs is that in Fight Club, Tyler believes that perfection can be obtained while in Faust, he learns that what he though was perfection was not it at all and in the end the devil has the last laugh.

I for one do believe in perfection. I feel perfection all the time. I think some people are afraid of perfection. Although I do not believe in absolutes, I feel that if we cannot accept a circumstance as perfect, then we will spend our whole lives searching and never be satisfied. We have to set a limit and at some point accept the greatness of a moment and accept that it is nearly perfect. Sometimes, when I am sitting alone on a hill at night looking at the city, I feel perfection. I want that one moment to never end.

“A Moment”
Upon a path I was once lost
Yet fate was drowned and
My loss was stopped
As was the clock on my
Wrist once worn
So time itself was no longer formed

In the bliss of the moment
I thought to myself
How the indecisive future
Could no longer be held
Yet began time again
And as such so did I
As the perfection of a moment
Rose into the Sky

The world ending in six months entices me because in a sense those entire six months would just be a very long, perfect moment. Because to me, the beauty of a moment is the fact that nothing after it is known or matters. If the world were to end in six months, all your dreams could conceivably come true. What I must not forget is that the world doesn’t have to end necessarily for that to happen. I will never forget the assurance I once received that “everything happens when it should. And it will. When it should. Don't fuck your dreams, or forget them. They very well may come true, eventually”. The End





Everyone has a story to tell. It’s just those who are willing to share their emotions that become famous. Those who are willing to print their heart in 256 colors on a Lexmark Z53 laser printer are the ones who may become famous, or they won't. Everyone has a heartfelt story and they may just become one of the millions of other people with heartwarming stories who may become famous. However, millions of people aren’t famous. Millions of people are remarkably fascinating and interesting and have really outstanding stories and not only are they not famous and don't share these stories with anyone but there is no possibility of them ever becoming famous at all. Fame is overrated. Who wants the whole world to know their secrets and their problems? Somehow in sharing difficult experiences, the pain they cause is diffused over everyone and every person who reads it shares it and feels it too.

Everyone has a story to tell. My story is just a microcosm of everyone’s story. None are all that different, although my story isn't so sad or so heartwarming. But it is mine, and there is something to be said for that. I began writing this with really no clue where I wanted to go. I am just an ordinary kid who for the most part isn't a very great writer—I got a 540 on my SAT II writing section—yet I tried. It is my hope that everyone enjoyed reading as much as I enjoyed searching inside of myself and learning a lot about what drives me. I recommend that everybody should allocate a few hours at least and sit down and attempt to write a book.

I now understand why so many people write about themselves. In the scheme of things one's own life is the most interesting tale of all! Our own lives are the only story that can't be skimmed over or skipped to the end to see the startling conclusion. Our own lives are a continuous page-turner, one that can never be put down.

I have never owned a coloring book. I always hated them; I wanted to draw my own picture. I hate coloring books. No one ever remembers what color a picture was drawn; all the subtle Crayola nuances go unnoticed in the long run. It is the outline, the black and white picture that is the real masterpiece. No matter what color it is filled in with that outline will always be the most impressive and the most rewarding element of viewing the picture. No matter what colors were used they will all look more or less the same, the only aspect that actually matters in the original image itself. I like to draw my own picture of life.

What you have just finished reading was an attempt to illustrate for you a section of my life. I hope you enjoyed it. Now that you have finished reading your life will go on, as will mine. Some of the best advice I ever received was in the form of a poem, and it went as such: “whichever path you choose there is no way you will lose and wherever you will go you will find the very best fit”. As the clock stops ticking and the hours fade away I’ll choose my path then paint my own world and let it color itself in as I live it.