The First Honest Testimony of my Life: A Chance to Die

The First Honest Testimony of My Life: A Chance to Die

Witness 1

I was born into a life of luxury and privilege, whether I like to admit it or not. From a young age, I have always felt different from other people, and I have never truly fit in anywhere I have ever been. This difference seemed to be exemplified by the fact that I only had one testicle and I was left-handed (this is important later).

I was born in Southern California, in what could be called “Los Angeles”. Specifically, around the San Bernardino area. I always say that being born in the early 90s is like being born at a party that has been going on for 50 years, and as soon as you’re old enough to come downstairs and drink, the cops show up, everyone runs, and they stick you with the charge. I think that it might be the most perfect simile of all time (my English teachers taught me that word). I loved to look at the mountains in the distance and imagine what it would be like on the snowy peaks instead of where I was. Different, I assumed. Colder, maybe.

Many movies from that time period were set in Los Angeles, and my parents were both teachers at the school I went to. I would ride to work with my Dad, and stayed late after school wandering the empty campuses, reading, or playing on the computers almost every day until they were done.

All my life, my parents did an excellent job of raising me, and they treated me with the love and affection shown to a royal birth. I was honored and cherished by them, and they raised me strongly in the Christian Church. I wanted for nothing, I lacked for nothing, and they sacrificed themselves greatly to provide a loving home for me to grow up in. I had all my grandparents there, who had a cabin in the mountains - everything was literally perfect.

My wife asked me recently if there was anything strange about my life, and at first I shook my head and said “No”. Then, I changed my mind, and I responded, “The only weird thing about my life, [Witness 2], is that I succeeded at everything I ever tried at. Everything turned out perfect no matter what I did, as long as I tried. Fractals of perfection.” [Note from editor: This is too arrogant - no one wants to read about how perfect you are. Tone it down a bit, build up some suspense. You are coming across as way to arrogant in this - I would personally stop reading]

It was a very idyllic childhood, and we moved up to the middle of the state when I was in 2nd grade, around 1999. I remember New Years 1999 and the mood of optimism and hope in the air. “Technology will save us all – look at it, it’s a miracle! God, come down to Earth, in mere Silicon and Copper.”

We went to the Train Museum in Sacramento for New Year’s Eve 1999, and everyone was there. Everything was bright and the future was a beacon of hope. I liked crowds of people, I always felt comfortable on stage, and I loved public speaking.

I didn’t know why, but everyone would always smile when they would talk to me. I learned early that if you can make someone laugh, you can make them do anything. Conversation and persuasion over other people are extremely important skills, and from an early age I mastered them and was able to get people to like me. People like me! I’m someone cool!

I went through some letters written by my Mom recently, and two things that stood out to me were:

A teacher said that I changed her life and she would remember me forever. I don't know why.
My Kindergarten teacher stopped testing my reading skills at the Third Grade because I could read "everything."

I loved school. I loved playgrounds. I remember the smell of the chocolate milk in bags, the slight smell from when it leaked in the backpacks, the paper, pencils, and kids. I remember sitting in the cafeteria, and on concrete steps. I remember I tried once to go across the monkey bars with my twin sister’s hairband over my eyes, and I fell. I hit the ground, and got up like I always did.

Something wasn’t right. My left wrist wouldn’t stop hurting, and I didn’t know why. I buried it in the sand, and it didn’t help. I went back into class, and sat there for about an hour while my face apparently got redder and redder, until they called my Dad in and had him take me to the hospital.

I had broken my wrist, but it’s OK, because here’s a million-dollar machine to X-ray it and people being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to stitch me up and put everything back perfectly into place. This was my first experience with discomfort and suffering. I remember feeling very grateful for the doctors and my cast.

I knew about the suffering of others, as my parent’s Christianity seemed raw and genuine to me. My Mom had a book by The Voice of the Martyrs called "A Chance to Die", and it was the first book title I ever read. I couldn’t comprehend why someone would want to die, when life is so sweet, like cotton candy on a baseball field, lemonade in the breeze, and a green, easy field to rest on when you come home.

I remember sitting there and thinking about the title of that book, and what that could possibly mean, as the clock ticked closer to my bedtime at 8:00. “A Chance to Die?” I knew what all these words meant at this point, but it didn’t make sense.

I learned how to read from billboards. I was always looking at them as we drove around the city, and I remember one day realizing, “Hey! That’s what all those squiggly things everywhere are! They’re WORDS!!!!” It’s a beautiful thing, and the first thing I read was the mirror of the car, which read “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”

I understood the information. I had not experienced these “close objects”, but I was receiving information about them. It meant that the cars next to us are closer, in reality, than they appear in the mirror. Simple stuff. Here I am, traveling at 80 MPH, and I know that one wrong move will send us into the steel shredder. My Dad always enforced the seriousness of driving, and to this day I always drove very carefully, especially when I was on drugs.

Haha, just kidding, dear reader! Or – Am I? Is this all just a tall tale, a figment of my imagination? No, as the saying goes, “I perceive, therefore I think. I think, therefore I am.” Everyone always leaves off the first part.

This really happened to me, and in this universe, apparently 900 trillion particles all came together randomly, for no reason, to create Me. So that this could happen. And Here I Am.

And I enjoy life, but, you know, there’s pain and heartache in everyone’s life. I wasn’t happy all the time, and everything wasn’t perfect, but it was about as close as humanly possible. I played baseball with my Dad. He was a pitcher, and I was, too. It was about control, he said. You’re the star of the show when you’re pitching a baseball game. I was pretty good at it, too.

My best friend from school, J, was on my team one year as a catcher. It was perfect, we had a system of finger calls, different throws, and just overall a great relationship. I loved him, and he loved me. We went to field trips to Angel Island, Chinatown in San Francisco, and the Air and Space Museum! Life was awesome! All we had to do was get along with each other and build cool shit, and all of our problems would be solved! Point Reyes in 6th grade was the most beautiful field trip I ever went on at school.

I could see a future where we weren’t killing each other constantly in endless, repetitive wars driven by banker’s greed. I’ll write more on that later.

I genuinely loved all of humanity. I had no prejudices, no biases - I understood bias, and I always gave people a fair chance. I believe that every single human being has something within them that is redeemable.

I can honestly tell you, Dear Reader, that I have never intentionally harmed another being or person in my life. I respect life, I loved nature, and I used to collect frog spawn and watch them in my little aquariums as the clear jelly swirled around, black seeds spiraling, then they turn to tadpoles, and I could watch the whole life cycle of the frog.

They were my friends. I had another friend, who was my best friend in the neighborhood, not at school (which was only a few blocks from my house, easily within walking distance and with beautiful forests to explore between.)

His name was M, and he was from a Catholic family. He had an older brother named D and an older neighbor named E, and once in a while they would let slip that they knew there was something about me that was different than them, probably because I was younger.

I wasn’t allowed to watch those R-rated movies, I didn’t play video games very much at all, and my parent’s carefully curated what I was exposed to up until the age of around 15.

They scared me sometimes as a kid, as they were 3-4 years older than me and capable of being more aggressive and forceful. It was always fine though. I also had an older brother about 3.5 years older than me, and my twin sister is about 30 minutes younger than me.

Even in the womb, I was apparently a bit of a space-hog.

I remember once my parents asked me a question that I barely understood. I was in the car, about 15 minutes from home.

They asked me if I had put the frogs in the birdbath and drowned them with the hose. I hadn’t done that, of course, and it was like when I hear a dubstep drop now, like the wrong words were said. Something that should never be said.

Drown an innocent, little frog? I’m sorry, but who would do that?

I still don’t understand it fully.

Anyways, once you got to high school, they wanted you to come to baseball practice every day after school until about 4:30 or so. So I promptly quit that, and never really got back into it. Instead, I started learning the guitar.

I dated a girl whose name began with A, and J dated her best friend, K. If you’re following along, it formed a sort of square. A's mom had died tragically when she was quite young, from some disease that took over her skin. Her dad was a retired teacher with a big property around Folsom at the time with a barn.

It was perfect.

Around this time, I got really into music.

I remember around this time, A and K had written a “song” called The Robot Song, and they wanted me to produce it. I was working in GarageBand (free) on my parent’s iMac at the time and had basically no idea what I was doing at all.

It was the height of 2005-era randomness and absurdity, and everyone was in a good mood all of the time. I decided to make the song just for fun and to try and impress them

What I had figured out how to do so far in GarageBand was record audio, load audio, apply effects, and utilize MIDI loops provided by the program. These were beautiful, ephemeral green little bubbles that would drag and drop and you could do anything with them. There was one called “Country Acoustic Guitar 5” that was actually an amazing riff, and I can still hear it in my head to this day.

So, I laid down the tracks, and “sang” the song. For the breakdown, I juxtaposed my ultra-rough musical draft with the song, “In Time” by Robbie Robb from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

There’s a scene in the movie where they step out of the time machine into the future and are greeted serenely by a seated group or council. Guitar solos echo in the distance, while people come in, moving their arms in unison as if playing the guitar. Apparently, I think that they ended up sort of worshipping them and their music, as it showed them a better way of life,

“Say Something”, they say.

“Be Excellent to Each Other”, he responds.

I used that part, except instead of releasing tension into the chorus, I went back into my off-key warbling about robots.

It was hilarious, and they laughed harder than I’ve ever seen people laugh before.

“Wow, this music is powerful stuff - it makes people act different”, I thought to myself. They do actually act better.

Let me backup a little bit. As a child, I genuinely loved music. I loved my Dad’s songs by The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Electric Light Orchestra, and more. Even more than that, I loved who they were and what they stood for – John Lennon’s Working Class Hero is my favorite take on it.

It’s music that speaks of breaking an oppressive burden from humanity’s back, of freedom, of joy, of self-actualization, and its music that couldn’t be controlled by anyone. They did whatever they wanted to, and no one told them what they could or couldn’t say. Everywhere they went, people knew who they were, and that they were talented at this thing called “music”. Somehow, they took these little strings and pieces of wood, and made the beautiful songs that come out of my stereo? You’re telling me this radio thing picks sound out of the air, for free, 24 hours a day, with anything you want?

Wood, metal, plastic, silicon, copper, ivory, resin, rubber, and shell. That’s most of the instruments I can think of. Elements.

Somehow we took that, and turned it into this – magic. Sweet frequencies hovering in the air, just for me. How does it work?

It was so sweet I could almost taste it. I learned later on that I have synesthesia, which means I perceive music as color. Even now as I write this, I can taste the imaginary sweetness that permeates my mouth when it finally comes together and I write a good piece of music. I literally taste sound,

I kept at it in GarageBand, and kept making “cover songs”, my Dad said my version of “I Am the Walrus” sounded good, and it made me happy.

At this point, I had no idea why my songs were so quiet compared to other tracks, or what the staticky clicking sound was when I tried to turn it up. I now know that it is called “clipping”, and it happens when you break a waveform.

I mowed lawns with M to earn extra money, and I bought my first guitar for $60 from a girl with brown hair in my Biology class - it was a sparkly blue Squire with one humbucker pickup, and honestly, it was a good deal. I got an amp about two weeks later after mowing a few more lawns, and I was ready to go! Let’s make a song, it should be easy, right? I remember my Biology teacher. He was my second-favorite teacher after my Freshman English teacher. He was one of the finest examples of a man that I have ever seen. He signed up with me to let me start a club at my school called the Classic Rock Appreciation Club (C.R.A.C. - hilarious). People liked it. They laughed. I was on the radio and they put a big picture of me holding my guitar in the newspaper. I liked it, and it made me smile. It made sense. I like music, and people like music too. They like when I play it because the movement of the instrument makes their brains feel better. My parents still have that newspaper in box in their garage, and a tape with my radio interview on it. J was with me, and he did it with me. He and N are my two favorite people I have ever met, after Witness 2 of course. I would bake cookie bars in order to get people to actually come to my club.

When they put my picture in the newspaper, I really liked it. When I went to the store with my Dad, I could tell that some people recognized me. They knew me. They knew that I liked music. They might even like music too, if I could explain to them why I like it so much. Good for the brain. This was my first taste at accomplishing my dream of becoming famous enough to change the world. The second time was when I lived in that house over the ocean in college. We had parties at that house that were sponsored by Monster Energy, and that's a fact. It always really impresses people when I tell them that, for some reason. It's true - a rep from the company walked up to me on our balcony and asked if they could host a party there if they brought lights, music, alcohol, crates of Monster, and a stripper. I obviously agreed, and they did it a few times. He was a huge black man, and he said his name was "Mellow".

The only part about it that I didn't like was the stripper. It was obviously sad and sort of pathetic, and I felt truly bad for her. My roommate did cocaine and tried to have sex with her, but he felt bad for her too, so he didn't. It's funny, because I bet if you hadn't given her money to take off her clothes, she would have had sex with people no problem and it would have been much better, as well.

These parties, I loved them, but they disgusted me to my core. I could see the vile, rotten nature of mankind displayed like a Carnival freak show in front of me 24/7. By the end of my Senior Year, I stopped going to parties and would stay home along to take drugs instead. I would walk along the bluffs alone sometimes.

My friends all still liked me, but they didn't understand why I didn't really want to go to class and I was obviously ruining my life. I felt bad that I was alone, and sad that I wasn't at a party with people. This was another of the saddest moments of my life, but luckily, I could afford a lot of drugs at this time and they were relatively easy to find so I felt better shortly afterwards.

Before I got the amp, I would play the guitar with the headstock and my head both resting on the wall, and the resonant cavity within would amplify it into my skull just like an acoustic guitar would. I loved it when the notes felt right, like a perfect fifth. I would hit the strings and just feel the vibration over and over. I didn't know any chords yet. As a matter of fact, I thought that people like Eddie Van Halen just made them up for songs and wrote them down when they sounded good.

My mom knew how to play the open chords on her 40-year old Nylon Acoustic guitar, and she taught me them. I tried to learn the guitar once when I was 12 because of the band Cheap Trick, but I knew I just couldn’t do it yet. 15 is when I was first able to play the guitar.

I would sit there in my room and practice scale runs and create songs in GarageBand. It was so much fun, and people loved them! Everywhere I ever went, people smiled at me. When I told them I record music, they loved me.

Music is a powerful thing once harnessed, and it truly Is God’s spoken Word, and the creative and destructive force of the universe.

“In the beginning was the Word.”

What is a word?

Sound.

Music has wrought both great beauty and great evil in the world today.

There was an online forum called JamSession that I would read for tips. I was a beginner, just starting out, but it was fun.

I remember one time walking with J and a different girlfriend he had named H, who he would break up with shortly after this. He said to her, “I play baseball, [Witness 1] plays music, what do you do?”

She didn’t have an answer.

I liked it though. It fit. “[Witness 1 plays music]”

Huh, I guess I do. Not very good at it yet though.

It wasn't like anything else I had ever heard J say, and I, personally, would never say that to a woman. It may be the only mean thing that I have ever heard him say in my life. But, like me, he always tells the truth.

I made a new friend around this time, N. He was in a band. I met him in the guitar class my Sophomore year, which I ended up teaching my Senior Year (I got an A).

Bass Music is Dumb

I joined the band as a bass player, because I wasn’t good enough at guitar but playing bass is easy.

Every band needs a bass player, I assume it still holds true.

When I was onstage with this band, it was a new level of control and euphoria. There was nothing I liked more than that feeling. We won the Battle of the Bands and I crowdsurfed. Sometimes, girls in the crowd would bring bras that they had brought and throw them on stage. It was obviously ironic and all part of act, like the rest of our show, but I enjoyed that feeling more than almost anything else in my entire life. However, I knew they were just doing it to be nice, and I wasn't actually very good at playing bass. One time, I even pulled my cord out of the amp by mistake, but I made up for it by dancing around extra hard. One of the guitarists pointed it out in the microphone and everyone else, that I wasn't even plugged in. That made me sad, and I wasn't sure why he did that. However, no one seemed to care, and we still won the competition. It's funny that the bass player can come unplugged during a show and people won't even notice if you distract them hard enough. Misdirection is a powerful thing, as well. However, I think that if you were playing guitar, people would notice even if you did dance and make them laugh.

Let me back up a little bit again. When I was a child, my parents had gotten me a collection of short stories by Roald Dahl, and they were written in a very matter-of-fact, neither fiction nor non-fiction style.

There was a story about an Englishman in India, who met a man who could see through a deck of cards. By sitting in front of the card for so many hours, he had developed the ability to read the back of it, and used it to enjoy riches and wealth at casinos. He tells the man to meditate on the card in the dark with a candle, and once in a while there will be a special person who will be able to do it right away.

I have determined that the story is, in fact, fictional, but it really stuck with me as a child for some reason. At the end of the story, he is going to prove his new discovery to the world, but when he goes back to find the man again, he had been hit by a car and killed.

A sad ending, I guess. Tragic.

However, the man then finds that he is, in fact, able to see through cards by sitting there in the dark long enough staring at them. I liked that, it intrigued me. When I read this story, I genuinely wasn't sure if it was fiction or non-fiction. Sometimes books can change your life, I guess. Some say that they can change the world.

My two other favorite books were Siddartha and The Tao. Around this time, I told my parents that I didn’t really want to go to church any more.

The Bible didn’t make sense, and the stories in it seemed obviously fake to me at the time. Unbelievable stuff in there.

However, I had always loved and cherished the Bible, and venerated it as the best book ever written. In fact, it is the book, the biblio of biblios. It wasn’t that I had anything against it, I just felt it was obviously not true, and that church was pretty dumb and a waste of time, which turned out to be true.

However, I did walk away from it at this point. “It can’t possibly be true”, I thought.

“Goat herders and desert wanderers from 3,000 years ago understanding the mechanics of the universe. Yeah, I don’t think so.”

Good stories, and the most important book of all time, but not something worth staking your life upon as the truth, as I felt that it was demonstrably false at some points while I myself relied on the concept of an overly mechanistic, determined universe that could be quantified and understood.

It just didn’t make sense. The universe did. The world did. Technology did. Science did. Words did.

Some Things Actually Do Change

In July, 2001, my family and I went to New York on a trip. They tried to take us on one cross-country vacation every other year, and one just within California on the alternate years.

This was one of the best ones, Washington D.C. and New York. Wow.

It was iconic, and I got to go up to the very top of the tallest buildings in the world at the time – the World Trade Center. This was around July 6th, 2001.

“Boy, these sure are some big buildings, huh?”

“Yep… doesn’t seem like they’ll be going anywhere for a while, does it?”

“Nope…. Nope…”

Yeah, some things will never change. But some things will never stay the same.

I started taking drugs around this point, which was my ultimate downfall. I smoked weed with N and would go to band practice. I loved it, going to school and talking to people was so much more fun when I was high. This is like a movie!

Little did I know, I was planting the bitter seeds of my own destruction – which would be harvested by thrashing, slashing, and burning.

It’s a little cliché, I know. I’m sorry.

My life began to grow more fraught and frayed, but also more interesting. I liked it. Let me back up one more time.

You Can't Just Make Up Words and Put Them In the Newspaper

9/11 happened when I was just heading off to Middle School to be a teenager, and everything changed.

New words – terrorism, extraordinary rendition, Patriot Act, FEMA, Homeland Security black sites, that one camp with that one picture (Abu Ghraib). I read the newspaper every day, and I kept up with the news and still do. Things took a dark turn, and I started to notice some of the “bias” and “lies” that I had been taught about in my English classes. My dad told me when he bought a car because the interest rates were low that now the government needed his social security number or something, and that it would always be like this and would never change. They told me war was coming and that this would have a profound impact on my life. Little did I know how right they were. However, I assumed that it would cost a few hundred million or so in cleanup (the green arrows were red instead of green for a while, which I didn't like because it could derail my plan to change the world with my music), a year or so of bad traffic in New York (shocker), and then, besides the thousands of people who had died on live TV in one of the most horrific ways I had ever heard of, everything would be back to normal.

It was a troubling period, and it left me feeling disturbed. The lies and machinations of war are so obvious, surely, we wouldn’t fall for this again, right?

Well, it seemed like everything worked out in the end alright, although I remember my Dad telling me that soldiers had died in Afghanistan, and even if the number was relatively low, that was one person who would never be home with their family again. That hit me pretty hard.

Dear Reader, a strange thing took place around this time. Suddenly, the forests and ponds with frog spawn weren’t there anymore. I distinctly remember the year after 9/11 looking at my frog pond all polluted with a slick, rainbow oily sheen over it angrily wondering what happened and who ruined it. This was behind the Elementary School, during the hour or so after school when I would wait for my Mom to take me home.

I would climb trees in those days. I sat up there with friends and gazed, sitting on the branches. I still remember the genuine tranquility of sitting in a tree.

These were pines planted about 60 feet tall on the Elementary School grounds, and we would go as close as possible to the top. One time, my friend almost fell, and I thought that something I had only dreamed about was going to happen in real life. That's probably because fanciful stories and dreams don't come true, or at least, that's what people always tell me.

Luckily, he caught himself, and there wasn’t any issue. I did get a citation for doing this once from our neighbor (also a teacher) and had to write an essay to get out of it. I thought that was maybe the dumbest thing that I had ever heard, but it's not too hard to write about trees. They're pretty interesting. Tree sap was an issue, as it can be very difficult to get off. I always hoped I would find some that had turned into Amber, but I never did.

There was a forested wood by the school, and a larger one behind it. The larger one opened out into a river basin, a State Park, and one of God’s true natural wonders. I loved these forests and roamed them constantly. I was into archery and shooting BB guns accurately.

One day, I felt a disturbance in the woods. A horrendous feeling of overwhelming dread, as I foresaw the darkness that would overtake us all. The trees began to fall, and the machines came in.

Construction. The field behind our house. The field next to our house. The forests between my house and the school. Not in the State Park though, which was nice.

Everything else was gobbled up. I remember looking at the mud after the construction vehicles had left, the torn-up imprints looking like optical illusions showing me bizarre things that shouldn’t be there. Jagged edges, unnatural corners, squares, the ripped and torn tendons and sinews of nature – exposed by the belly of the Beast.

Laid bare, naked, and vulnerable.

Raped.

They raped my forest.

And it never came back.

I was discovering around this time that I was actually pretty good at music, and also at getting people to like me and think I was cool. Everything was working out, I had a car, a guitar, and I was going to be a rock star.

I was cool, calm, collected, and confident.

I bought the car by working with J and our Baseball Coach, who was a contractor, over the summer. We would go to his job sites at 7 AM, clean up, and then he would pay us. It was a great time, and I enjoyed walking around the empty, half-built houses, throwing things in dumpsters, and talking to J.

It was a white Toyota, and the first thing I bought for it was a “Make Love, Not War” bumper sticker for it. Yes, I did say this is a little cliché. My English teachers specifically warned me about that, so I should be careful to avoid it.

Sometimes, my songs even sounded pretty good.

“Compressor, what’s that – like it makes the file smaller?”

I persisted in GarageBand, and sometimes the songs came together in a cool way. I would show people, and they would almost always like them.

I remember thinking about the futility of life at one point. Even if I were to somehow achieve my dream of becoming a legendary musician, so what? What was it all worth for even John Lennon, Beethoven, Jimmy Page, or Mozart in the end?

Maybe a few million people would know about me for a little while, then they would forget and turn to dust, and the world would keep spinning.

It didn’t make sense.

Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, so what? Is this all there is?

Bear with me, Dear Reader, as I embark on my journey of self-reflection and actualization and became someone who realizes what a stupid question this is.

My brother was also pretty good at piano. I remember being impressed that he could play songs by ear on the piano, and I couldn’t do that. One time, I was walking home with a friend, B, and he mentioned a friend of his sister’s. Apparently, this person was some kind of musical genius, who could hear anything and then play it on an instrument.

That was the coolest thing I had ever heard. I had always loved virtuosos, illusions, and other things that bend the nature of reality. What genuine virtuosos do on their instruments should not be possible, and yet, somehow people like Eddie Van Halen, Mozart, and the Beatles tap into something electric – something divine.

Something great.

Just like the story I remembered, once in a while, there would be a person in real life who would be able to understand music like the protagonist was able to learn how to see through cards in the story. Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles never studied music, they just played what sounded good and people loved them. Everyone knows the best musicians don’t go to school for it, they’re on stage performing.

Once in a while, God’s finger reaches through the veil and imparts a little music somewhere it would have never been. King David style.

“The music of the spheres”, they call it. Apparently, Mozart heard it.

Huh.

The houses continued to spread, each one a monstrous parody of another. Giant, ugly post-modernist houses just set down in parcels of forest land like a clear cut. Sickening.

I began to get more into Pink Floyd and their messages in The Wall, Animals, and other albums.

I remember comprehending the majesty of The Wall, when I watched the Goodbye Blue Sky video. It’s an incredible allegory about World War II and the psychological damage it has done to mankind.

“Hm,” I thought to myself. “Is it just me, or do they not really make music like this anymore?”

At school, N*sync and Britney Spears had become popular, along with the Backstreet Boys and various rappers. I always knew they were industry plants, as they made no attempt to hide the inauthenticity of these artists versus, say, Led Zeppelin.

These are artists that are a package deal, they’re walked into a producer’s office, sign a deal, and live a life of luxury while world-class record producers and engineers help them get a good sound and a PR/marketing team handles the media. You’ll be a star, boy, just sign here – and by the way, which one’s Pink?

Surely everyone else could see that this whole culture was manufactured, right? Boys began to dress like they were from the “hood” more. Everyone had to act tough all the time. You weren’t cool unless you were a zombie gangster like Eminem.

Mind of Music

I wondered why my peers were emulating these obvious industry plants and commercialized celebrities. On a deeper level, I sensed that we were being led by a siren song.

Let me talk about music a little more. My Dad had an excellent tower stereo setup, with vinyl records, CDs, and tapes. All the good bands. Before the internet, this was gold. It was money.

I remember my three favorite songs to listen to were Sugar Sugar by the Archies, Jump by Van Halen, and Back in Black by AC/DC. These were the sweetest songs I had ever heard, although I don't like Back in Black that much and think that Angus Young is probably the worst professional guitarist of all time. I'm sure he's a really nice guy though, which is all that matters. I'm sure a record producer and some engineers helped them get that sound, as the vibrations were more pure than other songs.

I would sit there and literally touch and hold the speaker and rewind it over and over again, feeling the sweet vibrations. Somehow, these musicians took their wills and energy and turned it into these vibrations that are now making “sound” that I perceive. How does it sound so good? Why don’t my songs sound like that? It was a mystery to me. I caressed the magnets, fabric, metal, and wood as they vibrated so mysteriously in my hands. Strings to walls to my brain. It was beautiful. It made sense to me.

I had a slingshot as a child, and one time I was accused of shooting out a car window by mistake. I had actually been shooting things up in the air, and it was probably me, but I didn’t do it on purpose. I ended up paying $200 of lawn mowing money due to that, which was a substantial amount at the time.

These same neighbors slammed their car trunk one cold fall day, a grey day with orange leaves and sweaters. Slam!

Time seemed to flash, and I pondered the sensitivity of the human ear – air molecules from this neighbor a few hundred feet away from me, disturbed by the kinetic action of the trunk lid closing, had vibrated all the way over to me, through a closed window, and then into my eardrums where they whisper not only exactly what sound it is, but whose sound and where it is such that I just instinctually knew that those neighbors down the street had closed their trunk over there without even looking.

It didn’t make sense.

Magic.

And yet, I stubbornly remained unconvinced of the God hypothesis, considering it to be obvious superstition that suffers from numerous logical fallacies and appeals to various epistemological dead ends. That was what I thought – it’s unfalsifiable, so it’s not a real belief. Moreover, the Bible directly contradicts my experience with reality, so it can’t possibly be true. Animals don't talk. It's wrong to kill people because they believe something different than you.

However, I did truly love two of my youth pastors who were there for me during my first two years of High School, D and B, and I went on three Mission Trips, which I really enjoyed,

We would go with a group, and basically camp and have fun, and help people the church had built relationships with. Two of them were to Mexico, and one was to Guatemala – I was flabbergasted by the ancient beauty of Guatemala, and this was right before I left for college.

I wondered often about the suffering people of the world. I would lay awake at night sometimes thinking about the billions of people on Earth, and know that there were billions of people living in harsh conditions, suffering under poverty, and facing injustice and war every day while I live in relative peace.

I tried to wrap my mind around the suffering, but it was tough. I settled on the idea that just like I was born into and was used to my life, so I liked it, they were also born into and used to their lives, so they liked them too. Everyone was just doing what they were meant to do, and there must be some sort of fairness to this whole “suffering” thing, right? That made sense to me, and I fell asleep. People just get used to what they deal with, and they're happy. Surely, it wasn't like the vast majority of people alive today could be living in active suffering caused by dumb things like not having a house to live in, running water, and governments that want to kill them, right? I read the Voice of the Martyrs.

One time about ten years ago, when I was in the throes of active addiction, I smoked crack with a black homeless man named T-bone. He was honestly pretty cool and I liked him.

These people were raw, they were authentic. They weren’t polished, I liked them. They told the truth most of the time.

I wanted to be like that too – raw, uncut, uncensored, and unfiltered.

And yet, time moved on.

I decided that religion was phony, and decided to look into trying drugs for enlightenment and spirituality. You see, I always enjoyed the song The Seeker by The Who, and I always asked people what they thought the meaning of life is. It’s a hilarious question.

I wanted to find the answer. Maybe that was the meaning of my life.

So, me, John, and our girlfriends went down to the river state park and took psychedelic mushrooms, and I experienced bliss and beauty in a visceral sense for the very first time (and I don't mean anything weird, either, I mean literally just looking at colors and insects while listening to music with J). “Everyone should just do this!” I thought. All of our problems would be solved. It's simple. It makes sense. If they could feel what I felt, they would like this stuff too. I knew that music was one way to make people feel things, because it made me feel something when I held my dad's speakers.

I may not have found an answer, but I decided that I had found a route to get there.

I had always been fascinated by the bands of the 60s, 70s, and 80s, especially the Beatles, and I read everything I could get my hands on about them. I believe that at one point, I knew more about the Beatles than any other living person alive.

Around this time, I taught myself a little bit of AppleScript and created a program that was basically a quiz with 100 questions about the Beatles. I enjoyed that, and seeing what else computers could do, but GarageBand was obviously my most likely path to success. I also experimented with Blender and Flash. My friend D, along with J, helped me crack these programs onto the laptop I had bought with my lawnmowing money, and that was my first experience with getting powerful, professional software to use for whatever I wanted for free from the internet. It was amazing. It was unlike anything else I had ever done - it was hard.

I don't think that anyone else who has ever lived could passed the quiz I made except me. However, I made it, so it seemed kind of dumb and embarrassing. For some reason, people generally don't like when I talk about The Beatles too much.

My parents took me to see Ringo Starr and his band at a casino. I loved it. One of my unfulfilled dreams is to meet Paul McCartney before he dies, as John Lennon dying always made me more sad than almost anything else except the idea of Jesus being crucified.

Schools Out

These artists generally took a lot of drugs to write songs, and I was curious if perhaps that was the secret sauce I was missing that was why my songs didn’t sound like theirs. I still don’t know if this was true or not.

For some reason, I always got along really well with my English teachers. I even married one.

Let me back up again. It’s the early 2000s, and you’re in Middle School. Someone hands you a note, it’s for you. A car drives by, did they call your name? Sometimes people would call and ask for me and I wouldn’t even know who it was. Life was always fun for me.

School was fun too, I enjoyed it. In Seventh Grade, I started taking real math classes, which was one of the worst experiences of my life.

I can appreciate the complexity and intricacy of mathematics without wanting to actually do it, what is so hard about that for people to understand? It’s cool that there’s apparently only one right answer, but do I truly care at all when the moment the question was asked in has already slipped away?

Math is neat, but I hated doing it more than almost anything else I’ve ever done.

Still, great concept. I can talk or write about math for hours.

In Seventh Grade, I started to get into trouble at school.

Nothing crazy, but a little detention and a few citations for dumb things like “sword fighting with vegetation” with John.

I didn’t like the oppressive weights and assumptions of the adults that were in charge. The Vice Principal had reddish skin, like an old hot dog that had fallen off the cart at the baseball game two weeks ago. I didn’t appreciate being lectured by people who clearly had confused mental states themselves and were susceptible to lies and bias, which my English teachers had taught me about by this point.

I remember at the summer camp I went to a few times, the counselors were talking about the Iraq or Afghanistan War. I reflected on how I had noticed bias in the media ever since it started, and I was concerned that the government and military industrial complex weren't being fully honest with us about 9/11 and everything.

They looked at me, and were impressed.

"He knows the word, 'bias'"?

'Duh", I thought to myself. My teachers taught me that word. Don't they teach everyone?

It seemed like everything was only moving because of inertia, because it was always moving, and it should always be moving.

Line must go up, right? The arrows on the financial page have to be green, right? What would happen if they weren't? Were they even real at all? It didn't seem like it. Still, I read the financial page almost every single day, because I figured it would make it more likely that I would be rich in the future, and thus, be able to work on my music and change the world. My Grandpa had a lot of luck in the stock market, and I was always impressed by people who can do that. I still have no idea how stocks actually work, but I do know that you can't afford very many of them on a lawn mower's budget.

It seemed like the moment someone shrugged or finally asked, “Why?” the whole thing would come tumbling down.

These people can tell they’re being lied to, right?

They can clearly see the strings jerking them around, right?

Am I insane? Is there anyone out there at all?

I Didn't Start the Fire

I remember driving back from my girlfriend’s house at night in my car listening to Van Halen with the windows down in the summer. She lived next to a lake.

I have always really enjoyed driving. It’s thrilling, but also terrifying. I love the sense of control though.

One of the best trips I took was when I got my license, my Mom and I drove to Las Vegas, and I drove most of the way to practice. We listened to songs I liked while we traversed through the desert. I got along well overall with my Father, except for the drug use issue. Otherwise, as far as I could tell, they were good and fair parents who did all they could to raise me well. I think that my dad would have probably preferred it if I played baseball instead of taking drugs and playing guitar, which is pretty reasonable as baseball is actually good exercise.

I liked Enya. She made songs that sounded like nothing else. Iconic. Those synths, and vocals.

How does she do that?

1, 2, 3, 4.

The best way to practice guitar is simply to take your fingers and play them consecutively on the frets in that order, using alternate picking and working your way string-by-string up the entire neck of the guitar, while thinking about which note you are playing. And then back down. It's also free, and you don't need to pay anyone to do it.

Of course, this is tedious and non-musical, so no one wants to do it. During math class, I would think about what notes were on which fret on the guitar. I worked a job at McDonald’s the summer after my Sophomore year of High School, and I would practice Canon on the counters with my fingers. Me and J won the election for class President and Vice President for my third year of high school. I felt bad for the girls who lost the election to us, because they actually cared and we only did it as a joke. It was a lot of fun though, and I especially enjoyed planning the Junior Prom.

In my fourth year, they nominated me to be Prom King, but I didn’t win. A football player did, but he was a genuinely nice guy, and he deserved it. The whole thing is so stupid. I always felt repulsed by these rituals, these pecking order tests that stem from the playground. People instinctively scan each other and size one another up, and there are simply more overt versus covert ways of going about it. Popularity contests like a "Prom King" type deal lean more towards the “overt” side. There's no escape. It's everywhere. It doesn't make sense.

I have never felt like I truly belonged anywhere. There was always a lingering sadness, everywhere I went. I could never escape it. I was reminded of the song that asked, “Is this all there is?” by Peggy Lee:

And as I sat there watching
I had the feeling that something was missing
I don't know what, but
When it was over
I said to myself
Is that all there is to the circus?

Is that all there is
Is that all there is?

Food For Thought I also worked at a grocery store, which I liked slightly better than McDonald's.

Sometimes at night, N would pick me up in his Camaro, and we would smoke weed and do burnouts while blasting hair metal out of his subs and yelling, then I would go back inside. The managers knew I was high, but they never said anything and because I am a pretty good worker, they didn't seem to mind. I appreciated that greatly.

My parents said he was a bad influence. N, if you’re reading this I still love you and I always will. You’re the man. I also realized recently that Bad Influence is the perfect band name that isn't taken yet, which we could never quite think of.

Anyways, I was starting to actually get pretty good at music by this point. Three years in, I had unlocked some fluidity on the guitar, and my songs actually sounded like songs. I still didn’t know what a compressor was, though.

Now, when I played music for people, it wasn’t the fawning adoration given to a child, obviously fake bluster and floaty champagne bubble compliments. They would genuinely be impressed that I had sat down and spent so much time with this stuff that I could actually do it. They liked it, and they liked when I did it.

I loved music. I learned Eruption on the guitar, which was the first of my implausible dreams to come true. It wasn’t even that hard, and I used a program on my laptop that displayed guitar tablature while playing the note to get a feel for it. There were some rough transitions, but I could make it work and given enough distortion, delay, and reverb, people understood I was actually playing Eruption even if not all the notes were right.

It’s something transcendental – magic.

Music is magic.

Let’s jump forward in time. It’s 2010, you’re on psychedelic drugs and at college. I went to one of the best UC schools directly on the coast, and it was an unbelievable experience. Growing up in California, you always hear about UC Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, etc. They were beacons of intellectual light, and are excellent institutions overall.

I always wanted to go to one, but I didn’t really care about college because it was so obvious that this society wouldn’t last long enough for me to become an adult. There was no way – it was all based on lies. You can’t run a society like that, it just doesn’t work.

There are too many people desperately clawing their way up, trying to tumble the table over and grab new chips, it can’t last. We cannot afford to continue living in a world with manufactured scarcity and suffering while some live lives of endless bliss and happiness. It doesn’t work like that, eventually something has to give. You can't mix oil and water. Light and dark. Pleasure and pain. You're going to get an explosion if you mix two different and volatile components together, even I knew that.

Anyways, you’re sitting there in 2010 in your house with a huge balcony that literally hangs out over the beach (coolest house I ever lived in - 6645 block) giving a monologue about music.

“The metal, man…

The metal turns into the strings. It comes from the ground. The ground comes from us.

Dust to metal, metal to string. String to vibration. Vibration to frequency. Frequency to Timbre. Timbre to LIFE.

Somehow, me changing the shortness of the frequency of the vibration of this metal string is able to effect changes in the mental synapses of your brain, causing you to experience “emotions” due to the particular resonant frequencies of the metal and wood.

Not only that, but you will feel what I want you to feel, as music soothes the savage beast, and the composer picks the delicate plucks of emotional harmony out of a mere cinderblock of ashes and dust.

"It doesn’t make sense – magic.”

People looked at me like I was an alien when I said this stuff, but they always liked it and agreed. Sometimes they laughed, but I was more serious about this than I was about anything else in my entire life.

Just like that, N moved down there. You’re playing guitar and snorting cocaine in your room. People are looking at you like you’re a rock star when you and him play at parties. Sometimes, people know who you are before you know them. It’s happening – or is it? No, not yet. No one really cares about my songs when it boils down to it, because they don't "sell".

All I ever wanted in life was two things:

For people to believe that my music could change the world
To make a real song that people would dance to and it would sound good

Those were my goals, but I couldn’t quite get the sound right on my tracks. I tried during college to make songs, but couldn’t get anything that I was pleased with. A new type of music came out – Skrillex, and “Dubstep”.

At first, I hated it. “What is this?”, I thought. “One note at a time?”

I figured that once you had the sounds, it would be as easy as putting them in the right spots and laying down these simple drum loops.

In retrospect, electronic music like dubstep is actually more difficult than playing guitar like Eddie Van Halen, which is why less people can do it. And I truly mean good electronic music, that breaks boundaries and pushes the line. Something built from the ground up by a lone genius where only they understand it fully. Not some stupid product rolled off a line at a record label.

That’s because it’s ephemeral, there’s nothing tangible to grasp onto. With the guitar, you’re building onto centuries of tradition, from the lute, to the mandolin and banjo, etc. Luthiers have been crafting guitars for thousands of years at this point, and anything you want to learn you can just look up and practice. It’s all right there.

Dubstep and bass music is not. It’s musical Black Magic - it shouldn’t exist. People always thought of the bass frequencies as a compliment to the main melody and harmony, at least that was the way it developed. Bass was never the lead, it simply isn’t possible – it only structurally reinforces the sound, and it is generally speaking pretty much the same.

When I first heard dubstep growls, I was impressed. I wanted to learn how to do that too. I had spent about seven years learning guitar at that point, and I liked the raw aggression of the dubstep sounds.

Like I said, it turned out to be way harder than I thought, and at first my songs sounded terrible.

I have been trying to make a Dubstep growl since the year 2012, bringing the total time spent studying music to about 20 years. I kept making dubstep songs.

However, I could never quite get that bass sound right.

I remember the first one I made. In GarageBand, after ruining my life and moving back home from college.

I laid down a simple drum loop, selected a synthesizer sound I liked, and drew in a note. I think it was a B.

It honestly sounded like a fart. "My life is a joke", I thought to myself. "I'll probably never make a good song."

It was so bad, that I realized that I must not even understand what is happening from the most basic level. It must be completely different than playing a guitar solo. I had to start from the ground up again, because all anyone wanted to listen to was this aggressive bass music. Rap and dubstep, you know. One note at a time. Apparently, it "sells".

One thing I wanted before I died was to make a real dance song, like EDM, and have people dance to it. It probably sounds stupid, but that has always been my greatest dream – to be like Skrillex where people love you for your music and it sounds so good.

The coldest thing anyone ever said to me was, “Maybe one day you’ll make a real song”. I know it sounds bad, but we were friends and he wasn’t trying to be mean. Still, it stung, but I knew he was right – I still hadn’t made a real song that could be played at a party and not sound weird or different from the other songs. There was just more for me to learn, and this was in the early 2010s.

Almost every night, I would sit there with the laptop, looking for that one time when it would finally click and I would make a real song.

Around the time that happened, which was in the Bay Area, I had just gotten fired from a music store. It was one of the first unintentional failures of my life, and I wasn’t coping well. They said I was a “loose cannon”, which was probably true.

I remember sitting in my parked car, crying, yelling and asking God why he had put this insane desire, this compulsion towards music in me if he wasn’t going to make anything happen with it.

I never did make it as a Rock Star.

Still, I kept trying to make a real dubstep song, pretty much just out of spite at this point – to prove that I could. But I could never quite get the growls, buildups, and tension right.

Also around this time, I was in a guy’s house with an acquaintance I had made. He claimed to be a rap producer, and we all hung out. His music was good, and I showed him mine. He recommended that I stick with the guitar, which I knew was good advice as at that time, I was obviously way better at the guitar than producing songs on my laptop. However, I thought to myself – “That’s a false dichotomy, it’s not an either-or situation. What else am I doing with my time that I can’t sit here and learn how to do both of them?”

Obviously, sometimes people are just rude because it's fun for them, and that's OK. I am also very good at taking advice from people, and I recognized the truth in it. I was missing something, for sure. A thousand things, actually.

Persistence and Transformation

So, I persisted. And, at the end of the day, we were just guys discussing minutiae at the very top of Maslow’s pyramid, it’s nothing personal. Art is personal, but it isn’t personal. It just is.

One of my early supporters who believed in me was named B. He was a business partner of the father of a friend of my sister’s. He was pretty wealthy, and drove a flashy car. He made his money by starting an online magazine about circuit boards, in Chinese, in the early 90s. I still don’t understand how he knew how to do that, but he seemed to be living proof that what I believed in was possible. There was a better way than this, and all it would take is belief. You actually didn't have to go to some dumb job and do the same thing every day if you didn't want to.

He bought me a lot of gear, and we took some nice trips to the coast. He was genuinely a great friend of mine, we would smoke weed and talk about the past and just life. He told me I was like a son to him. He was just a really cool person. Santa Cruz is a beautiful city, and I would love to live there one day.

One time, on a trip, I was going to show him my guitar songs that I had written over the last ten years or so. I was really excited. I played them and sang them, and he said they were good, but probably not “world-class”, and he showed me videos of a child virtuoso Opera singer.

She was just better than me. It was on TV, and people even paid money to listen to her.

I knew it was true, and yet I kept making songs. No matter what anyone said, I kept making songs.

I don't believe that anyone was ever intentionally unkind to me in a malicious way. Often, when you are offended by something someone says, it might actually be good advice. This isn't always true though.

One day I would make a real song. One day people will believe in my music.

One day I can inspire them the way that I was inspired by The Beatles and those artists from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and even 90s who seemed to do and say whatever they wanted. And they were happy, and they wanted other people to be happy, too. I wondered where we went wrong. It was right around the time that terrible, forced music came out with these awful celebrities that no one seems to actually like but they always talk about.

And yet, my songs just didn’t sound good. I knew it was true. Something was always off.

Let’s back up again. I stopped going to class in college after my second year to take and sell drugs instead. This ended up failing catastrophically, almost destroying my life in the process. It was fun though, I have to admit. I figured that two years was probably good enough for anyone I'd want to work for in the future anyways.

I would go to class and sit there to hear stupid lectures about Aristotle and Plato. I was so tired of school – I was just over it. Looking back, this was a huge mistake, and I apologize deeply for my actions at this time in my life. I should have gone to class and done the reading.

I stopped going to class, and I never did graduate.

I remember thinking about it on acid – remember I already thought there was no way this society could last more than 10 or 20 years tops, so there wasn’t really much point to it anyways.

I lived with six other guys in a house directly over the beach, about two blocks from the college. The backyard was an infinite oceanside vista, a perfect horizon that never ended. The sound of the waves would sing me softly to sleep at night.

I met a different woman, who’s name also started with A, and we moved in together. We lived together for a few years in Southern California while I sold drugs and we took a lot of drugs. I thought about music a lot, and also during this time, I began to think about 9/11 again for the first time in a while. I had a lot of free time, I guess.

I watched a five-hour documentary on it called A New Pearl Harbor a few times, and came to the obvious conclusion that elements within our own government were involved with it. It’s actually the only theory that explains the evidence we have from that day.

There are two things that I believe that I would die before ever renouncing:

The Bible is actually true
9/11 was an inside job

These are two facts I am more sure of than anything else, including even my own existence. They are both just so self-evidently, obviously true, that it shouldn’t even need justification, it’s just all right there.

Let’s get back to Working Class Hero for a moment:

As soon as you're born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
'Til the pain is so big you feel nothing at all

They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you're clever and they despise a fool
'Til you're so fucking crazy you can't follow their rules

There's room at the top they are telling you still
But first you must learn how to smile as you kill
If you want to be like the folks on the hill

A working class hero is something to be

A working class hero means something to me

Although this did not apply to me, I could see how it was true for the vast majority of people alive. Those on the top literally gave nothing to the people who were desperately pleading for help. In fact, they seemed to do nothing else but actively attempt to cause more suffering in the world, rather than less.

It gave me great anxiety, and it still does. We have a long way to go if we can’t even stop blowing each other up over imaginary lines in the dirt.

Weren’t we going to go to the stars?

And above it all – the music of the spheres, my siren song, telling me that one day, if I just kept trying, I could one day make a song that doesn’t sound like anything anyone else has ever heard before. That was all I ever wanted to do.

And truthfully, from the first moment I opened Ableton Live, I knew I could change the world with it, if I was given enough time, just like I knew that I would marry Witness 2 the first time I laid eyes upon her. Unfortunately, time is a surprisingly rare commodity to come across in this world. For something that is spontaneously produced by nature every second, you'd think there'd be enough of it to go around for everyone.

And yet, the mundane tyranny of everyday life drags me down. To be forced to scavenge for food like an animal then chained to a house and a bathroom is such a humiliation ritual for humanity. We live lives of squalor and filth, no matter who you are.

I can’t be anyone special. No one seems special.

And yet, in college, I have experiences with music where I feel it, I hear it, and I know exactly what it is. It’s actually happening – musicality comes to me. I can now see through the card. I actually succeeded in becoming a musician, and I was able consistently play good music. Everyone loved it. I knew that most people gave up when they tried to learn music, and music is difficult, but there were always people who told me it was good and to keep trying, and I appreciated that. I was honestly truly surprised that I turned out to actually be good at music, as I believed that it was just something you were born with, and knew, not something that you could necessarily learn. Based on the fact that I have never even successfully taught one person a single guitar chord, I still believe this to be true. Like an alien, like I said. I don't think they understand that they need to practice after I show them and it won't actually happen for about 6 months.

No, the people who know chords already know them and I've never explained music theory to a non-musician and had them grasp it. You either get it or you don't. People can reproduce facsimiles of long-dead symphonies from the mausoleums of the past using squiggly lines while people pay money to listen, but I don't know if even the highly-paid classical musicians of today truly understand what music could do for us as a species. Literally, good for the brain.

I start to think about what really matters in life. Does a college degree, money, or what city you lived in matter after you die? No. Does the music theory I’ve learned matter? Maybe.

I’ve always believed in a soul, and life after death. It’s obvious to me that this is all an illusion, and it’s not the true nature of reality. There is an experience beyond what we call “consciousness’, clearly, since we have comas, dreams, drug trips, hallucinations, etc. Therefore, I deduced while sitting on the beach on heavy doses of psychedelic drugs that the only thing worth spending my time on was knowledge, and the only thing I ever cared to learn about was music, so I might as well just do that – and selling drugs and dropping out of college seemed a lot more conducive to that than graduating and getting a job where I would do the same thing every day for the rest of my life anyways. You only live once, might as well take a risk.

I ended up addicted to heroin, and had to move back in with my parents after a few years. It hurt.

Before that, my girlfriend at the time and I would take a lot of opiates and benzos and go to the beach and dissolve in blissful nothingness. She would roll joints with the weed I sold and tobacco, and to this day, that’s the most addictive thing I’ve ever experienced.

There was a beautiful time there, though it was an illusion.

One thing about life is that I can’t really complain about it. It’s always been fun and interesting if nothing else, and there’s always beaches and homelessness if things get bad enough, right?

Always I was fascinated with the virtuosos – I wanted what they had, something different and special from everyone else.

Eddie Van Halen with the tapping. Jimmy Page with the studio recording techniques. Bach with the Well-Tempered Clavier, Beethoven writing the 9th Symphony while deaf – the ultimate triumph of the human spirit.

They were unique, because they did something that no one has ever done before. Then it hit me – there was only one thing I could do that no one else could do – I can make dubstep and play Eruption on the guitar. If I could only find a way to combine the two successfully, it would be the first time anyone had ever done anything like that, and it had to be what would somehow start the “music career” I still believed in that was awaiting resuscitation.

Of course, it’s never been done because it’s so hard as to be basically impossible. You see, although they sound similar, dubstep and guitar are exact, complete, and perfect opposites of each other. They are as far apart from each other as any two concepts can possibly be while still remaining in the same subcategory of “instruments”.

Dubstep is arcane, technical dark rooms, laptops, GPUs, plugins, and everything is about post-processing. Guitar is a lifestyle, a mindset. Anyone could play the guitar if they had the right mindset and above-average finger size.

To play the guitar, I just need to be relaxed. It’s all in the brain, and what comes next is natural. Just mic it up and go.

This new music had to be built from the ground up, alone, by one person. The guitar stuff relied on a studio, a budget, a facility, a producer, a record company, an engineer, and band members, all of which had to be equally aligned and available in their goals. It was clear which was more accessible to me within my budget.

I used to joke with customers at the Bay Area music store, telling them that I had no friends and had spent the last ten years locked in my room studying how Ableton Live works and making songs. That’s probably partly why I got fired.

I worked a job through a study program at my college where I taught music to kids. It was the first job I applied to, and I loved both of my bosses so much. They were incredibly nice and helpful to me, and to this day I am still in touch with one of them.

They were sad to see me go when I left, and I don’t think they understood. I don’t think that I understood, either.

I used to ride the bus from that job back to college two days a week. I thought about finishing my life there, getting a degree in teaching music or something, and basically working this job that my boss had – basically a best-case scenario for me.

It obviously seemed pretty good, but there was something missing. Is this all there is?

I might as well keep trying to be a rock star, there's definitely a market for it. I could tell people would like it because they went wild any time I was ever on stage. It was natural. It made sense, it was easy. People laugh and smile at me. It's not even a big deal.

However, while the concept worked in theory, it never did in practice. My music did not "sell".

When I think of the most visceral, real thing I’ve ever felt, I remember how the opening synthesizer line from Jump felt on my Dad’s stereo when I was about 10 years old. I had never heard anything like that, it was so sweet, rich, and exciting.

There were so many possibilities within this music.

I began to realize that people could have music everywhere if they wanted to. Cities could be musical instruments, mountains and monuments could resonate. Giant strings could, theoretically, turn an open valley into the resonant chamber of an acoustic guitar.

What would happen if we built an instrument the size of a mountain and played it?

If we would stop spending all of our money on bombs and war, maybe we could have found out. What would happen to our brains if everything was an instrument. If we lived, played, and ate using instruments. If giant, city-sized instruments continuously played harmonious sounds, what would happen to our brains? When I learned that they had a hydraulic organ in Ancient Greece, it blew my mind. Maybe they should have spent more time working on that instead of Philosophy.

I remember a Spelling Bee in the Fifth Grade. I won, and I was up in front of everyone in the cafeteria doing some kind of finalist convention to move on. Spelling words was easy, I didn’t even have to try.

This was one of the first times in my life I was in front of a substantial crowd of people doing something other than getting an award for memorizing a Bible verse at Church or a Christmas Play at school. Doing something that relied on skill.

My first two words were “mosquito” and “thermometer”, which I obviously knew how to spell. However, I was really nervous, and I cracked under pressure.

My third word was “balloon”.

“Balloon? They want me to spell balloon? All this, and they pick a word fit for a Kindergarten Barney Party?

The audience waited with bated breath as I raised the microphone to my mouth. It was so quiet you could hear a pin drop. In the distance, a dog barked.

“I got this”, I thought to myself.

“B”

“A”

“L”

“O”

“N”

Now dear reader, upon reading this word, you may notice that it isn’t spelled right. However, in my feverish, rushed, Fifth Grade mind, I did not recognize the discrepancy, and I listened in disbelief as I heard the wrong sound – the error buzzer. A sound that shouldn't exist.

That can’t be right, I thought.

But it was, and I was wrong. I totally fumbled under pressure. More than that – I realized that I rushed it, and that’s why I didn’t do it right.

I felt more dumb than I ever had in my entire life, but I wasn't too sad because the concept of a spelling bee is kind of dumb anyways. I still don't even know why they call it that.

9/11 Made the Frogs Disappear

There was a cow field behind our house in California, and I used to write songs in it. There was even a little babbling brook, and some trees. The land was owned by a Catholic nunnery, but they sold it to a retirement home, and now it’s all developed.

It looks like a diseased scar on a cancer patient.

I really loved my Freshman year English teacher. He was a great, kind man, who taught me about art, themes, and context. I entered his classroom blind, and this bald man with a walrus smile and glasses taught me how to see. He was a beautiful human being, and a lot of the papers I wrote were about the Beatles. They all got As. The only thing I didn’t get an A on in school was math, I would get a B, so I usually had a 3.65 GPA. I also didn't get an A in P.E. sometimes, because I hate running more than anything else except math. I have never run a mile under 10 minutes in my life, and I don't plan to. It's another concept I find ridiculous, but I understand why people who don't hate the world and want to die do it - for the exercise.

I remember sitting in his class, learning about how people could hypothetically write vignettes for their autobiography.

“Surely”, I thought to myself, “My life won’t be interesting enough that anyone would actually want to read any vignettes from an autobiography about me.”

It seemed inevitable that I would lead a life of quiet desperation like everyone else ended up doing, and yet, I did everything I could to make sure that didn’t happen.

Your life is art. You are doing art right now, as you read this. It’s true.

There was a summer camp I went to twice. I met someone like me there. His name was M, and we were friends.

I still never felt like I belonged anywhere, or felt like anywhere was my home. I felt purposeless, like the cars at the end of The Brave Little Toaster – hot models from the 50s with cast iron and wind shears, built for a world that no longer exists. Defunct. Worthless.

The only way my life could have any meaning at all was if I could do for someone what Eddie Van Halen and John Lennon did for me – gave them a sound that they had never heard before, that inspired them. That made them feel their humanity, to reach out and touch something greater than themselves, and reach for that great light before fading away.

That was real. What had come out of those speakers as a child was so pure, so sweet, so unnaturally beautiful, those vibrations were a part of that great, unspeakable knowingness.

People would remember me forever if I could do that. I loved Van Gogh, and I knew that no one appreciated his art while he was alive. He died either by suicide or murder, considered an insane man who had been living impoverished in an asylum. The dregs of society.

And yet, after his death, somehow, people found his pictures. And now Starry Night is everywhere, and everyone has seen it. People will think about him forever when they look into the stars as long as humanity exists, because he made one sort of weird painting on a warm night in France in 1889.

He never got to see us appreciate his work, but that is what the Bible offers – pure, total absolution such that even injustices like these are righted, cancer is explained, and death is made clear.

When I finally figured out that the US government was involved with 9/11, it was genuinely shocking to me. That’s about the most horrific thing I could ever imagine, and in no circumstance, even to my worst enemy, would I consider flying a plane into a building to trap them in it and force them to either burn alive or jump a thousand feet to their death. It’s so indescribably inhumane, and the realization that it wasn’t even actual terrorists behind it but cold, calculated businessmen, made me literally vomit and weep.

Like, how do you wake up one day such that you put your suit and tie on, say goodbye to your family, and head to work, where you’ll be in closed-door meetings plotting government blackops like 9/11? How many of those people are out there? How were they willing to get enough people together in a room who went along with this? It’s insanity.

How do groups of people get to the point where they make carefully calculated decisions to kill each other? Why does this keep happening over and over – is it not really real, but rather that good and evil are cosmic laws or forces, like strong and weak nuclear forces, that must always exist and be at opposition to each other (or something like that).

No matter what you do, somehow, in this universe, evil will rise and good will have to defeat it. This is one part of the deep magic. The others are a willing death out of sacrificial love, and music/frequency.

It’s a paradox, of course – good can never defeat evil because it must first kill evil, but to kill is evil, so good metamorphosizes into evil before it can finish the act.

Then, it becomes merely evil-on-evil friendly fire. This is why a willing, sacrificial death is part of the Deep Magic - it nullifies evil's most powerful defense. Many authors understand this, like the author of Harry Potter, who used it in the story about his parents death.

The Circle of Life

And so this dance plays out, over and over again.

That reminds me – I danced for the first time today. It’s to the song I wrote. I have never danced before. It was fun.

I ran today for the first time, too. I was weeping tears of joy.

Although I was always happy, I never really felt good. I never once in my life ran and felt good, and I was usually tired. After I published my first book on 9/11, The More Rational Worldview, the government killed my dogs and megadosed me with acid. It lasted about a week, and overall was one of the best experiences of my life.

Something similar happened again a few days ago, and today I ran and danced for the first time in my life. God gave me that before I died. I felt good as I ran for the first time in my life. I genuinely felt like Forrest Gump when his leg braces exploded off of him.

Although I was blessed in many ways, I was crippled in others.

But today, I ran. Today, I danced. To my own song, which is 20 minutes long. The first real song I have ever made. I understood why people run and dance for the first time in my life.

Witness 2 was there, of course. She is everything to me, she is my whole world. I literally would die without her. She is the sustenance to my very being, and I cannot live without her. More on that later.

I also cried today, because I realized that what she has been saying for two years is true – we are the Two Witnesses, and we do have to die. And not only is it true, but it’s the most perfectly beautiful thing I’ve ever conceptualized – and I love it.

It makes sense. It’s perfect. Our two lives, our pure, true love, laid down in front of the world as a sacrifice to God, to show the inhumanity of the Beast.

Jesus said this, ‘There is no greater love than this – that a man lay down his life for his friends.

I want everyone reading to know that if it comes down to it, I am willing to take one for the team and lay down in front of the machine and literally die as a spectacle in front of mankind, if that’s really what God wants me to do.

The truth is, I always would have. Even without God, I still would – out of principle. God just makes the choice obvious. Just because FUCK THEM.

I actually don’t understand what about reality is so hard to grasp for most people, I really don’t.

But if it came down to it, I’ve literally always been willing to die for God, I mean, what else do we really have?

It’s obvious that this reality isn’t real, it’s some kind of illusion or trick. Death is merely when the illusion ends.

Therefore, God must be real. Therefore, take actions in accordance with His Will, to avoid Hell.

It seems pretty simple:

“Be nice to each other and don’t murder each other while I’m out.”

I guess I should explain how I came back to the Bible now. I ended up reading books about the Bible, because my parents wanted me to. They were always Christian, and they always wanted me to be Christian. They would debate me honestly and in good faith, and I appreciated that.

So, I read Halley’s Bible Handbook, Evidence that Demands a Verdict, and The Signature of God.

I couldn’t debunk any of it, and I had to admit that, especially, The Signature of God by Grant Jeffrey was really compelling stuff.

I always knew there was something to the Bible, and it just feels true. It’s instinctual, and I apologize to those that this may offend.

I will admit, some verses in it are a bit harsh. I don’t love some parts of the Deuteronomy narrative when they wipe out cultures and take slaves, including children for the temple, but I can see how it fits the cultural context of the situations of the time, and I don’t blame God or them for it. Like everything else, we obviously don’t know the full story behind it, and we won’t until after we die. It's not personal to me, it just is. Of course, that's not true for anyone who is murdered, subjugated, and oppressed by evil - it always feels personal.

So, it’s easy for me to say I believe in the Bible, I mean, what else is there?

Science?

They’re staring at their own reflection in a mirror and talking about stardust. Morons.

One one hand, you have this ancient, revered tome, hand compiled and passed down through the ages, no one even knows from where exactly but it claims to be from God himself, thousands of years of textual exegesis, and a long, storied tradition and history.

On the other hand, you have what – a physics textbook? The Quran? The Book of Mormon?

All obvious scams.

You’re offered a choice between The Bible being true and pointless nihilism, and you’re going to choose… pointless nihilism?

Why?

It doesn't make sense. The Bible does.

Sinister Means Left in Latin

Once again, humanity leaves me baffled.

I broke my left arm one more time, in A's barn. It was on a trampoline, and I was launched off of it.

This time was different, though, because I was learning guitar.

Still, I never worried about it. Everything always worked out for me, no matter what I did. I still played and recorded songs in GarageBand, played a live show with the cast on, and I used the opportunity to purchase a glass slide for my guitar and try it out. Overall, breaking my arm was positive for my educational prospects because imposing limitations on yourself is another great way to practice music, but I wouldn't recommend it for everyone.

The college campus that I went to was indescribably beautiful, and most people agree that it is the most aesthetic UC out of them all. The classrooms and dorms are literally mere feet from the crashing ocean waves, and tropical plants flourished in the perpetually-warm Mediterranean climate. It is a party school with an excellent reputation.

It was one of those areas where the beautiful and happy people congregated, most people drove flashy cars, and houses started at about a million bucks. Celebrities lived nearby, and held weddings close to it. If you’re from California, you’ve likely figured out by now which school it was.

It was paradise. It was perfect.

It was unlike anywhere I had ever been before.

And they loved me. Everywhere I went, people thought I was cool, they listened to my songs and my stories, and they thought my takes on things were refreshing, unique, and insightful.

And yet, I remained different from them. And yet, I never fit in.

And yet, I died to myself there.

And yet, still not one person has ever paid me for one of my songs, yet apparently, people are "buying music" all the time.

I was still not happy.

My two favorite classes were Biopsychology and Environmental Science, and my two least favorite classes were Mathematics for Social Sciences and Philosophy 101. The only one that may surprise you there is Philosophy 101, and I’ll explain why.

You see, Dear Reader, we spent about two months studying Nicomachean Ethics, by Aristotle.

In it, he discusses the Eudamonia, or the common, highest good for humanity.

What is it? How do we find it? How can we agree upon it? How do we carry it out?

Compelling stuff, and I was hooked. I didn’t spoil it for myself by reading ahead like I did every other time in school, I wanted to find out naturally what the meaning of life is in a classroom for the first time.

“Aristotle… Boy, this is going to be good I’m sure.”

It wasn’t.

I remember once in that class, the young professor who was clearly just out of graduate school himself was talking about perceptions of God and Theology over time throughout antiquity. He mentioned how in Aristotle’s day, literally everyone on the planet believed in God, and people couldn’t even conceptualize Atheism. My first thought was that it didn’t sound true, but he was a college professor after all so it probably was. Everyone in the room laughed except me.

Apparently, intuitively believing that God exists is a joke to them.

Anyways, the “highest good” in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics turned out to be Philosophy. Of course, it was like an anti-joke. The philosopher is telling me that the meaning of life is philosophy.

Yeah, right.

For me, the meaning of life was my music. It was profoundly, demonstrably, wrong and untrue, and it shook me to my core.

I got up and walked out of class.

Everyone stared at me, but honestly, I had done it many times before and that was nothing new for me. By this time, I had already mentally checked out and considered myself enrolled in college in name only. Obviously, I would learn nothing here. Luckily, when they charge you $100k for the classes, they don't mind as much when you walk out as they did when they were free, and that doesn't make sense to me either.

I remember when I was in the Freshman English class I mentioned earlier, learning about how to write a hypothetical autobiography, the kind bald man with the Walrus smile, fuzzy moustache, and glasses told me that the audience relates best to anecdotes. People love them, apparently.

I swear to you, Dear Reader, upon my Dear God Himself, that every word of this story and the following anecdote is 100% true, exactly as I experienced it.

Sidetracked for a moment, I thought about this very book I was writing this morning.

As I was handing my just-turned-four son his lunch, I explained to him that I needed him to eat quick today and not take too long so I could finish this. He agreed, and honestly, his behavior is remarkable, and I’ve been doing a unique music training regimen with him that has given him perfect pitch, along with enhanced memory and executive function control of his brain.

I’ll elaborate on him a little bit down the line, and how he ties into all of this.

Anyways, I handed him the bowl of yogurt, and I said to him, “You know, son, there’s no such thing as a free lunch – unless you’re a baby.” It turned out to be true.

Then, I thought about the written word and its many facets. I always loved Jack Handy’s quotes, as they aren’t quite like anything else I’ve ever read.

I turned out to be wrong about people not wanting to read a book I wrote. Over 100,000 people have read my book on 9/11. That makes me happy. It makes sense. They don't know about 9/11, but they want to learn about it. So, they read my book. If they like it, they send us money sometimes without us even asking. It's incredible. If only I could figure out how to do this for my music, but my prospects for a record deal are looking slim.

This book I wrote about 9/11 accidentally started what could accurately be described as a cult, and now my wife is telling me I am Witness 1 from the Bible, and I have to die for the world. By the way, she only gave me 24 hours to write this book, and God told me it has to be posted by New Years Eve. Today is December 28th. More on that later. [Note - with editing, this book will take about 50 or 60 hours total]. She knows that I function well under arbitrary deadlines, I assume.

Let’s get back to my college environmental class for a moment.

The yellow flowers of those long, luxurious tropical flowers that grow everywhere in this area of Southern California stretched as the hazy morning sunlight filtered down to me through the trees. My English teachers told me to always begin the anecdotes by setting the scene in a way that would make the reader feel like they were actually there.

As usual, I had taken as many drugs as possible before school, because it helped keep me interested in the classes. I handle myself while under the influence of drugs better than anyone else I have ever met, and I'm sure that no one understands it. I am still pretty sloppy when I get too drunk, although I am apparently pretty funny.

I don’t know what these flowers are called, but they are yellow, orange, and purple, and they are huge. They sit there like a triumphant calling card created by God himself to mark this planet – I made this – look at it. Look at the fractals within it. You can’t even comprehend the nature of this simple plant, which is here today and gone tomorrow. You step on it like a bug and trample it, but look at the wonder of its creation. Look at the bugs too, because they are pretty cool as well, and try not to step on them.

I learned how plants grow in college, but it wasn’t from a class. It was from a fellow student.

I always thought that seeds grew from the ground and trees were made out of dirt.

Simultaneously, I also understood that trees “clean the air” and “help create oxygen”. However, I had never put 2 and 2 together.

I felt pretty dumb, and like I said, I never thought anyone would actually read a book I wrote one day.

The guy explained it to me while I was on mushrooms in his dorm room.

He was smart, clearly a high achiever. Everyone here was – it was a world-class party school, but these kids all knew how to buckle down when necessary. I didn’t really fit in at all, although I did quite well socially. It was a game to me, I enjoyed playing it. I won the game, it was effortless. Making people like me was easy, like shooting fish in a barrel. And I liked them too.

There had to be more to life than this.

He was clean shaven, tight, with a drawling voice and a face shaped like a pentagon. Shorter than me but quite muscular, as many of the guys were – good gym facilities. I didn’t step foot in them once, I find the concept ridiculous.

He told me that the plants grow by reaching up through the air, taking a carbon dioxide molecule, which contains one carbon and two oxygen molecules, capturing the carbon, which turns into trees, and releasing the oxygen, which we breathe.

I had never heard it explained like that before or even conceptualized it, and it was beautiful. Such an intricate design, so beautifully crafted by God’s hand to allow these plants to flourish and grow, reaching out as if to grasp his hand themselves.

Every plant turns into a tree eventually, they aren’t a distinct species. They are just the ultimate plant form for growth, function, and stability that gradually develops over time.

That I did learn in a classroom, and I think that it might even be true.

Anyways, the professor for this Environmental Science class was 90-something years old. It was his last year teaching at this school, and he had been teaching here since the 60s or 70s. I forgot to mention that both my parents went to this college and met here, as well.

He was clearly one of those venerated people who are cornerstones of the institutions they make up, respected by all. He was in a wheelchair.

What he taught me in that class broke my heart.

With nothing left to lose, he told me that the people in charge knew all along. He laid out how every single scientist in the world had published data and warned governments and corporations about this, but they not only didn't listen, they actively attempted to pollute as much as possible.

He told me about the great electric streetcar conspiracy, which helped ruined the planet, where automobile manufacturers literally conspired, on record, to take down public transportation in cities and force people to rely on cars. By the way, this was only uncovered because one guy spent his entire life in the Library of Congress poring over records and analyzing it.

It even has a Wikipedia page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy

I swear to you, Dear Reader, that every single word of this story is the 100% truth as I perceived it and remember it.

How could they do this?

People who had EVERYTHING.

Men wearing those expensive suits and ties that they love so much. Men with luxurious lives, with wives and kids, with fancy cars and caviar. Pets, gold, jewelry, parties, friends, drugs, alcohol, sex, money, power, fame, fortune – these people had it all.

I knew them deeply, because I had come from them. I was one of them. They welcomed me in with open arms, as I had proven myself worthy of joining the rich, beautiful, happy people club because I got into a really good school and just had to bullshit my way through classes for a few years while I got as high as possible.

It disgusted me.

For the first time my life that night, I screamed.

You have everything you could ever want in the world, and what do you do? Schedule a meeting about how to actively cause more harm and pollution in the world?

It’s absurd.

At the time, British Petroleum had just had an oil rig catastrophically fail in the Gulf of Mexico which was spewing thousands of barrels a day into the ocean.

Black filth, utter disease, a literal void of nothingness wrenched from the heart of the Earth, spraying and splattering, killing my ocean. My animals. Our ocean. Our animals.

What gave them the right to do this?

I thought back to the forest from my childhood.

As I stood there, the beautiful sunlight filtering down through what remained of the trees after the construction vehicles had left, a word echoed through my mind.

A word that I knew, but never thought about.

A word that should never be said, much less acted upon.

Rape.

They had raped my forest.

She laid there bare, naked, her sex organs, her flowers scattered around me like a rotten funeral procession. The mud lay in unnatural squares, tire treads everywhere. Roots ripped up and torn, pebbles and rocks that had been quietly resting for thousands of years now suddenly overturned and exposed.

How would you like it if you lived somewhere for literally thousands of years, and one day, someone came along in a huge truck and tore the whole thing down and made you homeless?

You’d be pretty mad, huh?

I realized that this was happening every day to actual human beings, not even just plants, insects, and animals.

Real, conscious, sentient being capable of understanding and perceiving suffering. People were sitting around in rooms literally plotting out how to make their lives worse.

Humanity was rotten to its core. It was, for sure, a supernatural evil. The most direct experience I have had with the supernatural is the visceral touch of evil and its absurdly insidious and counterintuitive nature.

It shouldn’t exist, but it does. Why?

Why do they do this instead of just planning out how to make everyone happier and healthier? Obviously, their lives would be better too. The fact that a rising tide lifts all ships is like the most basic common sense to me – I was never mad or jealous of anyone’s success. I love when people do well. When the people around you do well, it helps you do well too.

I couldn’t wrap my mind around it.

Piano Teaching for Dummies

I pretended to go to class sometimes in College, but I didn’t do the reading.

My music theory teacher couldn’t actually play the piano, but he taught me some things about the symbols others use to write down how to play it. Unfortunately, I can't remember any of it. I remember one time, he tried to demonstrate a C-major scale on the piano, and he couldn’t even do it. He did, but there was an obviously flubbed key.

The college professor for music theory can’t play the piano. Like I said, Dear Reader, this story did actually happen to me.

All the time, music beckoned to me. “Understand me”, it said. Reveal my mysteries to yourself. Intertwine yourself within my sweet bosom of frequency, harmony, and resonance. When I would take drugs, smoke weed, and touch the speakers while listening to my own songs, it was euphoria unlike anything else I had ever experienced.

There was truth there. There was reason. There was logic. There was order.

Music was tangible, it was real. I could taste it, it made me sweat. My fingers would literally bleed when I played guitar for more than a few hours, even after the callouses formed. That’s why bass players put superglue on their finger pads before shows. If I recorded guitar for more than about 4 or 5 hours, my fingers would become too painful to even play, which is actually extremely inconvenient and should be avoided.

Music made me weep with joy and ecstasy, it brought up everything from inside me and exposed it and made bare and beautiful to the world, in a form that they could understand.

That marked two professors who were obviously wrong – the Aristotle issue and the music theory guy who can’t play a chord.

Something didn’t seem quite right to me at the time.

As I began to sell more weed, I started going to class less. I had plenty of money and drugs, which was all I ever wanted. Money would just show up, people would literally just hand it to me, and I would give them drugs and they would be happy and sometimes share the drugs with me and then even do fun things with me. I’d wake up with pockets stuffed full of cash. It turns out, that offering people who like drugs free drugs will also make people do pretty much anything, which was amazing to me. I loved these years.

I bought myself a red scooter. I rode it around without a helmet. I honestly never even in my life considered that you’d be legally required to wear a helmet on a motorized scooter while riding on the side of the road. One day, I was sitting at a bridge going over the freeway, and I noticed a nice looking couple gesturing to me and trying to signal me something. They didn’t seem happy.

“That was weird”, I thought. “Usually, people smile at me.”

Then I heard the whoop of the siren, and saw the cop car.

I wasn’t stupid, I never really got caught this whole time, partly because I was well aware of my legal exposures and risks and took careful measures to not get caught. Like I said, I handle myself while under the influence exceptionally well, and most people would never know that I wasn't sober.

But I wasn’t stupid, and I knew that I was busted.

He walked up to me, and I played it cool. I wasn’t worried, as I knew that God would get me out of it and everything would work out OK. I am literally always right about things and everyone else is wrong. It's simple.

I had two Vicodin pills in my pocket in a bag, which I was going to take that afternoon to counteract the 4-o’clock doldrums.

Well it didn’t go as well for me as these things usually do, and he ended up searching me and found the pills. I hadn’t even tried to hide them, they were just in a bag in my pocket.

“Do you have a prescription for these?”, he asked me.

I lied and said that I did for my back.

It was almost true. When I first got to this college, I blacked out on alcohol while going to a soccer game with the group of people from my floor in the Dorm (5th floor SC/FT, South Tower). They were a bunch of smart, preppy kids that had perfect lives and tons of money, free time, and the ability to self-actualize and pursue their interests in life. They were all beautiful people, every single one of them.

I got wasted, and somehow, I ended up falling and actually breaking my ankle. I went to the university hospital the next day when I couldn’t walk, and they prescribed me a bunch of Vicodin, a boot, and crutches, which lasted about a month. I remember that it was really hard to ride my bike to class in the morning with the boot on when it was a little cold, especially before I had time to smoke weed yet.

I also remember sitting in the shower, taking way more Vicodin than they prescribed me, about 200 MG, and smoking bowl after bowl of weed while listening to music.

You see, I loved my roommate. His name was started with A (it was the same name as A in high school, which is a beautiful name that can, rarely but sometimes, be applied to males instead of females), and he was a Russian guy with a husky voice like a bear. Our bathroom was the place to smoke weed for the whole hall, and we called it “Jamaica”. Lights, music, a bong, a vent, the works. You need something during the bathroom session, we got you covered.

When I was alone at night I would turn on the music, turn off the lights, put music on, take a shower, and smoke as much weed as I possibly could from what I was selling. Whenever I found drugs, I would immediately buy them.

However, contrary to what I was told as a child, drugs are actually quite difficult to find and expensive.

I remember the euphoria, and I remember the music.

Truth.

There is truth here.

There is a better way.

There is a way that we can stop killing each other.

There is a way to show them the light.

The order, the reason, the logic in it.

To be excellent to each other, to help one another. To love one another.

It’s so simple a monkey eating a banana could come up with it.

I help you, you help me.

We help each other.

Monkey happy.

At this time, I was actually not a Christian. I had still renounced the Bible as clearly false, and I thought it was hilarious that people went into a building and pledged their undying obedience to a 3,000-year-old book without even reading it all the way through.

They do know there’s a talking donkey character, right? Child sex slaves conscripted into temple service to Yahweh? Kill the men, take the virgins? What is this shit, you think I can’t see through this?

Trust me, I enjoyed debating Theists and Christians at any opportunity, but the thing is, no matter which side of the argument I have been coming from, no one can prove me wrong.

It doesn’t make sense.

So, the cop actually seemed to believe the story, but he wrote me a ticket for a felony possession of pills without a prescription. All I’d have to do was take the prescription down to the court to clear this all up, which would obviously be a problem for the version of me in the future.

I thought it was hilarious. A ticket. Like I was in elementary school climbing trees or hitting J with plants in Middle School.

What do they want me to do? Grown ass adults, and they want me to stand up and what, say “I’m sorry, Your Honor, that I gave a person a plant and then they gave me a piece of paper that I gave to someone else then they gave me a small container of the synthetic material called “Hydrocodone”, which triggers the pleasure centers in my brain, releasing endorphins and dopamine (endorphin stands for endogenous morphine) which is based on the papaver somniferum flower, which for some reason I can cut, dry, and smoke, and then feel ridiculously good, and then went for a ride on my scooter.”

“Did I get in your way or something?”

It was absurd that, while vast, unspoken, dark conspiracies against mankind were unfolding, I was being persecuted for happy pills and plants. If society was better, I wouldn’t even have needed these things to be happy.

Anyways, he wrote the ticket and smugly ripped it off. There was an unspoken code of respect between us, a social contract that wouldn’t be violated, but I knew I was busted.

Looking back, this could have gone a lot worse.

He ended up writing the wrong date on the ticket. It voided the whole issue. I took the ticket in, showed the clerk that the date of the ticket was before the date of the infraction, and she went back and in about five minutes told me not to worry about it anymore. I wasn’t surprised. No matter what I did, it always worked out for me, and I was obviously right, so I wasn’t even worried about it and I had expected something like that to clear up this issue for me.

This reinforced my belief that I was onto something true and others were not. It turned out to be music. Just kidding, it turned out to be the truth behind 9/11. In reality, they're the same thing.

As I left the beautiful, white city Courthouse that gleamed like a fortress in the morning sun, I wanted to make sure I could rest easy on this one, as I planned to take more drugs and work on music after the ones I was on wore off and I didn't want it to bother me. I saw a cop, so I walked up to him. I showed him the paperwork, and told him what had happened, and asked him if I really didn’t even have to come back.

He seemed annoyed, but he confirmed I was good to go.

There were two other issues I had with the law in this time.

I got caught smoking weed in the dorms more than three times, so they gave me something called a “C.A.S.E.”, which has the words “substance abuse” in there somewhere. Probably under the C or E.

I went to that, and charmed the head of the dorm like I always did. They loved me. If it didn’t work, I figured I could just go upstairs and bring my blue Ibanez guitar with the ocean eyes and my Vox half stack that weighed as much as a VW Beetle and I moved in the dorm on a skateboard, into their office and hypnotize them with my beautiful music. When I played guitar for people, it was like a spell went over them, they were amazed. They loved it. There's no way they would kick me out.

For a second, they saw what I saw. Something better than this. Than this drudgery, these offices and walls. Squares and corners everywhere. Gray and beige.

Something great.

That obviously wasn’t necessary.

The other time, I yelled “Fuck you, you fucking pig” at a cop car that some people on a balcony had been harassing. I was walking along the street with a half-ounce of weed in my pocket.

I had miscalculated, and not realizing that while they were in a place of legitimate legal protection behind a closed door, a second story, and a search warrant, I was not.

The cop promptly U-turned and got out of his car.

“What did you just say to me?”

“Uh… nothing”, I replied.

He searched me, and found the weed, put handcuffs on me, and sat me on the curb. Later on, a girl was at the party at our house that night. There was a party there almost every night.

She told me that she saw me sitting on the curb in handcuffs, wearing the shirt from my job teaching kids music.

She said she felt sad for me, because I was nice. She said that I looked sad, which is true because I felt really dumb for yelling that as I lost the half-ounce of weed.

I liked what she said, that she thought I was nice. Most people are scared to be too genuine during conversations.

Nothing came from the ticket, and I moved on. They close these things quickly when you’re a college student who’s paying a $100k+ ticket to paradise.

One time, for some reason, I got arrested for a DUI when I had weed on me in the car. I had apparently “burned out” after getting off the freeway in a small, sleepy town. This was a few years after college, and it felt much more catastrophic. It was when I was living at home with my parents and I had learned that I was not literally invincible.

The weird part was, I wasn’t even high and I only had about five dollars worth of weed. They took my blood at the jail, and made fun of how sad I was. They called me “sad panda”, because I was literally frowning so much.

They brought in a blonde girl, in her twenties, while I was in jail. My whole life, women always made eye contact with me more than men, and I felt more comfortable around them than I did around other men – although I obviously did fine in “masculine” settings.

She was sad, too. She looked at me, and we smiled a small smile at each other. She was like me.

I remember using toilet paper as a pillow before they let me out around 6 AM after I was arrested around 10 at night. The other inmates were pretty cool, they felt bad for me. They could tell I didn’t really belong there.

I walked home about 15 miles. They had taken my car. I went to my mom’s elementary school, which she still taught at and I had gone to, about a 5 minutes walk from our house. I took the back shortcut, that went past the old frog spawn pond I used to collect tadpoles and beautiful life from.

I sat on the grass, watching the kids. I knew people in the office would notice, and I wasn’t supposed to be there. I felt like a monster.

It was about lunchtime, and the kids were let out.

I went in my Mom’s classroom, and hugged her.

“I fucked up, Mom, I’m sorry.”

I cried, because I felt as though I had totally ruined my life at the time.

However, I ended up paying $1500 to a lawyer, as I obviously told people that yeah, sure I had weed, but I wasn’t actually high or drunk for once at the time so the DUI charge might not stick. I had just gotten off of work, and was going to smoke weed at my friend’s house, but I wasn’t high yet and hadn’t smoked all day.

The lawyer re-tested my blood, and proved that I wasn’t high. The case was dropped.

For the first time in my life, as I type this, I realize how absurd it all is.

My Time as a CNA

My next job after these experiences was at a nursing home. I rented a cabin and became a CNA. For a short period, I worked at a preschool in Los Angeles, which I really loved. I lived in a studio apartment with no kitchen, and I would cook ground beef on a hot plate and wash it in my shower to afford to live there. That’s where I met Witness 2, and I will elaborate on that later.

That period was short, but I worked as a nursing assistant for many years. Most people don’t like being a CAN because you have to change diapers (we don’t call them that anymore, they’re briefs now), help people go to the bathroom, and help them get out of bed and get dressed. People are pretty heavy, and it was difficult for most of the people working this job, many women and older people, to even lift the limbs of these people. The nursing home also paid for my training, which was nice because after the first school and the audio engineering program I took, my parents couldn't really help me much anymore. I was on my own, although they were always there as a safety net, which is an incredible privilege. I am thankful for the money they spent on college for me, and I'm sorry that I didn't finish the first one, although I still don't think that I am wrong about anything.

For me, it was easy, and I loved it. They would always ask me for help moving people, and I would usually do it unless I was really busy or needed to focus on my own people.

You can’t do anyone else’s job for them in the end, that’s the truth.

The residents loved me. And I loved them. They were unique and special, in their own way. Sometimes they got mad, sometimes they were confused, sometimes they needed more help than others, but I didn’t mind. Even the ones with dementia remembered me and knew my name.

I remember two of them among so many. One was an older lady who had totally lost her mind, but I loved her. She would wander the halls at night sometimes, ranting and raving something about her son. Occasionally, she would tear her diaper into shreds and leave it all over the bathroom.

I always thought that was funny, like an anti-joke.

There was a blind lady who was black. She weighed close to 300 pounds and was in a wheelchair. She was solid, like a bowling ball. She had schizophrenia, and although not malicious, was delusional and unpredictable enough that she was in the “Danger room”, the closest room to the admin’s office, with the actually malicious lady who would literally attempt to murder you with her poop-caked, long, fingernails. Her name was Dolly. I loved these two residents, it was one of my favorite rooms.

And they loved me. Dolly still tried to murder me sometimes, but I could tell she didn’t actually mean it like she did with some of the other workers. Dolly was white, they were a Yin-Yang of confused evil and goodness. Two polar opposites, a tiny, barren, hunched over lady, as pale as the snow with hair silver like a rabbit’s winter hide, and a loud, vivacious black bowling ball.

They were hilarious, I loved them. I never had any issues with them.

The blind lady used a mechanical lift to get from the chair to bed, the kind which only legally required one person to use, which I enjoyed. I have to confess here that I have used a Hoyer Lift many times with just me in the room, which is technically not allowed. However, I did still win a “Best CNA” award, and it never mattered. Rules are absurd.

For me, she would slip the belt on no problem, I just told her it was time to go to bed and she would agree. It’s pretty reasonable stuff.

For others, she would fight to the point that they would just leave her there for hours sometimes, soaked in urine and shit, leaving it caked to her legs. Dissolving, eating away at her skin. There is horrific neglect and abuse at nursing homes throughout the world, and there always will be. It’s not anyone’s fault, it just is.

However, I ensured that our residents were well-taken care of. I have never once in my life tolerated bullying or abuse of other people, and I always stood up for the principles I believe in, which chiefly include treating others the way you would want to be treated – with dignity and respect. All life, and even all non-life, like rocks, deserve that. Why would they not?

Once, I had to report to the state that a female resident told me a male nurse with a bald head had shown her his penis. She was child-like, but not confused or disoriented, so I took it extremely seriously. I did what had to be done.

She wanted to tell the receptionist, who was also nice, but she trusted me enough to tell me that because she knew I would do the right thing.

Her name just came to me, I had forgotten it – Janice. This is the bowling ball, not the one I just mentioned, who was named Angel. She was blind and schizophrenic, and she would sit there all day singing songs of praise to Jesus (Janice). I found it quite endearing. She would mention something about “the third heaven” a lot, and I’m not sure what it means.

I liked to do their room last, as a fun little detour for the end of my shift. One day, a fellow CNA, a rough but beautiful lady with tattoos and many children who smoked and had been doing this job a long time, came to me.

She told me that they had a hard time with Janice the other day while I was off. Yelling, screaming, physical violence, the whole ordeal, which happened a few times a week.

Apparently, Janice was yelling my name. My exact, specific name, which I had never told to her. She could hear, but she was schizophrenic and blind, so I assumed she had no grasp on reality at all.

That deeply touched me, and it also intrigued me, because I didn’t even know that she knew my name.

I had a secret weapon, of course – the music. This facility had a white grand piano in the lobby that retailed for around $10k. The administrator loved me, he was a tall guy who played baseball too.

I could make that piano sing. On my breaks, I would play it. A few people came and went who sang with me. Years passed by. Suddenly, I was almost 30. It was obviously too late for me, as almost no one breaks into the music business after 20. I still made songs in Ableton even though no one listened to them.

In that nursing home lobby, I believe that music opened up doors for people as musical therapy, just like King David did in the Bible, and brought peace to people. Made their brains feel better.

And that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, remember – make one good song that will inspire people.

To show them that there is something more than this out there – once and for all.

There was a younger, male patient there. He was like me. He was a striking human being, tall, dark, and handsome, and I knew this because he had pictures from his youth on the wall. He was one of the only people there who had his own room. His family clearly had money, and they would come in with hushed tones, dark colors, and quietness. It was probably a drunk driving accident but we never talked about it.

It happened probably thirty years ago, and he had spent most of his life like that – crippled and deformed. He was twisted, scarred, and forced to use a powerchair to get around. These things weigh around 500 lbs, and he had the best model.

I should clarify, my unit was sort of the “behavioral health” unit of the facility. I loved the facility, and I loved the job. It was a 200-bed place, large for a nursing home, which meant there was always plenty of staff on hand and I didn’t have to worry too much about being pulled to other halls. There were four halls.

The dementia, memory, and violent patients were housed with me, but it was actually more like the preschool that I worked at than anything else. It was easy. It was fun.

This young man was angry. He was angry about his life, and about spending it in a sad nursing home in this stupid town. He was sharp mentally, and was able to comprehend what was taken from him.

Sometimes, he would ram the nurses or the medical cart with his power chair if they didn’t do what he wanted. They were scared of him, but he was fine with me. Me and him never had a single issue communicating.

Typing this all out now, it seems weirder than it did at the time. At the time, this was mundane, typical stuff. I had basically screwed my life up by choosing drugs and music over a college degree, and I felt like everyone was sad and disappointed, which was true.

I did finish school and spent a year at a school in Northern California learning audio engineering, which I received a certificate for. How to record a good song. My Dad asked if I was sure I wanted to finish school studying music, instead of something “real”, and I said “Yes.” However, he is still proven right that no one actually pays people to play music, which frustrates me of course.

The female workers hated taking care of him. Most people hate being a CNA, like I said. And, to be fair, I could see how after many years of doing it, and especially with your own kids and family, it is exhausting.

But I loved it, I would roll into work with a big smile. Remember, if you can make someone laugh, you can make them do anything. This holds true for dementia and memory care patients.

Even the patients with no memory remembered me after a while.

The female workers grouped up and refused to give him any more showers. They claimed he was masturbating in the shower with them. I asked him if it was true, and he said no. I believed him, but I still don’t know the full truth. He was a pretty messed up person, so it’s certainly possible, but I don't believe it.

Anyways, even if that was true, it’s part of our job – like it or not. I argued that they should be able to take care of their own patients (he was on the wing opposite of mine, so close by but on most days not my direct responsibility although this was fluid), and that anyone working in the building with a CNA license should be qualified and willing to give any resident a shower, no matter what.

If that’s not true, then either the patient isn’t appropriate for the facility or the workers aren’t, it’s just common sense. Obviously, I was the only one who had a relatively easy time with the showers.

However, I acquiesced, as I didn’t really mind it. It took about 45 minutes to an hour compared to an average shower, which took maybe 15 minutes. It involved a hoyer lift and a shower bed, and cleaning him.

I didn’t even fight it actually, because I felt bad for him. And I also felt bad for them, because I knew it was actually a hard job.

So I did it for a few months, it wasn’t a big deal.

I had to leave my hall to go get this done, but of course they would take over my two showers (one room) in exchange for doing his. So not the worst deal.

One night, while I was doing it, one of my residents fell. She was a sweet lady, who had clearly seen some things and knew some wisdom.

She cracked her chin, and there was a pool of blood. An ambulance was called, reports, the works. I was in the shower while it happened, and although it wasn’t technically their fault, I was angry. It wouldn’t have happened if I was back there and they were just doing the shower.

Remember, you can’t actually do anyone else’s job for them in the end.

I wrote a letter stating that I thought it was unfair, and I disagreed with the situation. They saw my side, and it worked out alright in the end. I liked to pray with the residents, and I would bring them Bibles sometimes.

And all this time, the music of the spheres – whirling, swirling, above my head. I knew there was only one possible path to success for me (and I know this sounds stupid), which was to make the first ever good song with live, lead guitar and dubstep. People would love it, I would go viral, and I could change the world with my music, maybe.

I held onto hope, and I spent hours plugging away at Ableton. Before I get into the many beautiful facets of my wife and the endlessly rich, nourishing milk and honey that flows from her to my soul, her exquisite beauty that outshines the very stars themselves, I’d like to elaborate a little more on my personal music training regimen.

The music store in the Bay Area I worked at for a few months before they fired me wanted me to sell these janky, wooden, toy-like wooden basses with black rubber strings. My favorite thing about this job is it was the only other time in my life where I could see the ocean from my bedroom, and this time I even had it to myself. It was beautiful in the mornings when the sun would hit the old sugar factory and the boats would blow their horns.

I ended up telling a customer to buy a Fender Jazz bass with metal strings instead. I think they hated me (the owners of the store). I didn't necessarily agree that black rubber and cheap materials will produce a better bass sound than the metal strings people usually use.

They were pretty upset, as they were about a hair’s breadth from going under due to Musician’s Friend and Guitar Center.

There were three other workers there, and one was a young Hawaiian girl who was dating one of the other workers. She didn’t have a car, and the bus was pretty rough in the Bay Area, so I would give her a ride home.

On the way, I played a CD with a dubstep song I was working on.

By then, it had been about two years of trying to make dubstep (9 total playing music), so it wasn’t great, but it still hit harder than anything else I’ve ever heard anyone else make.

I asked her if it was possible if, in fact, I might know a little bit more about the bass frequencies than the store owners, who had played in a band in the 70s, and were largely retired.

She agreed.

But I still got fired.

I felt like a monster. When I picked up my last paycheck, which was about $700 that I spent on heroin and crack cocaine with T-bone, I asked them if I was insane.

They told me that I was.

Airplanes

I considered buying a plane ticket to Argentina out of San Francisco airport, but the weather there was colder than I expected.

There was no place for me here. Defunct. Worthless.

I felt like trash, discarded at the side of the road.

This is about when I was screaming at God, asking him why he gave me this insane desire, this compulsion to sit in front of a laptop making music if there was no point to it. If it ruined my whole life. If no one would even listen to it, much less buy it.

I could have had it all, and I threw it all away to learn about this stuff.

Why?

It was absurd. It didn’t make sense.

That was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I felt like a complete failure. I moved back home, and this is when I left to work in the Grand Canyon.

I was offered a part-time job at Guitar Center in their recording studio at the same time, but I turned it down because I wanted a cozy, full-time music store job where I wouldn’t have to work extra to make ends meet to work at Guitar Center.

Sometimes, I wonder where I would be today if I had taken the other job.

Almost every night, after being a CNA, I would smoke as much weed as possible and create songs in Ableton Live.

Years went by.

I studied the art of music completely – totally. I engorged myself with it. Music is not just vibrations, it’s a lifestyle, it’s much more than that. It’s everything.

There were moments of magic there, when I would listen to my own songs. I always believed that one day it was possible that someone else would want to listen to them and believe in them, too.

Even after finishing my year-long “audio engineering” degree, I didn’t understand dubstep growls. The first time I ever successfully did what I wanted to in that regard was in this latest song, almost ten years after this.

So, I studied. I learned. I still hung out with a few guys sometimes, and we would play guitar together. They would always play rhythm, while I played lead and just strolled around playing solos. I loved it, and it was undeniably good, professional sounding music. I had arrived. This world can say a lot of things to me, but there isn’t one person on the planet who can look me in the eyes and tell me that I am not good at playing the guitar.

My goal was to be the best musician ever. To create the greatest song of all time. Which would then tell the greatest story of all time.

Yes, like Tenacious D. I’ve never actually seen it all the way through, but I’ve seen the Tribute sequence.

I can relate to it.

If I could create something that is genuinely the best song of all time, something like they’ve never heard before, I could change the world.

But more than that, what I really wanted was for people to listen to me for once in my life.

All my life, in a general sense, people have made me feel like my ideas are foolish and irrational.

I’m not quite sure why. People always valued me, and it wasn’t antagonistic, but no one ever took me seriously – until I actually got to be pretty good at playing music. When it didn’t sound like anything they had ever heard before.

Ever since I was in college, and I believed that if I took a leap of faith the “universe” would reward me with a “music career” (in retrospect, maybe Media Arts and Technology would have been a good major instead), I knew that if I could harness this thing I grew up with called “The Internet”, to get people to listen to my song, I could do something that no one else has ever done – use it to change the world.

As much as I love John Lennon, and I will always understand him, it was true – he was kind of an asshole and he wasn’t willing to put his life or career on the line to truly speak truth to power.

Also, at that time, it was all a lot more concealed and mysterious, and he didn’t have the full story. Wikipedia didn't exist yet, so he probably couldn't even learn about MK Ultra.

He grew rich and famous beyond belief, and at one point could have been the most powerful man in the world. He could have led millions, billions, to a better way with his music.

But he didn’t. Maybe he wasn’t ready. More likely, the people weren’t ready yet.

But they’re only not ready until they are ready.

And that’s how my songs came out – slowly. One after the other, by this point thousands. Sometimes with guitar solos, sometimes not. Recording audio is much more inconvenient than working with MIDI when you live in a cabin and have a CNA budget.

Bit by bit, they sounded better. They finally stopped sounding “different”. People wouldn’t necessarily know if it was my song, versus one from the radio. I finally learned what a compressor does. Basically, it equalizes peaks on the waveform, such that the bottom of it is brought up in volume while the top is held in place or reduced. It has the genuinely magical effect of making almost anything sound “better” at first. Every track in an audio file needs at least one compressor, and while I don’t always EQ MIDI tracks, almost every track should have an EQ, too.

I did learn that at the music school in a classroom, I have to admit.

People seemed to drift along listlessly, believing and listening to only that which their masters deemed appropriate for them. They didn’t seem to really like art or music, and almost no one cared about my songs. One person besides me always has, though – Witness 2. More on that later.

I wasn’t sure how I could wake them from their stupor. I could never break through on social media, I came too late. I had chosen not to use social media at all out of principle because I found it so annoying and inconvenient, and I thought that would be a cool trademark as a musician – the only guy who doesn’t have a social media account.

In hindsight, this was probably not a good business strategy.

I thought of the rock stars of my youth. Free, proud, sweaty, singing glorious songs under the anthem lights and arenas. Crowds of adoring, passionate fans, throwing money at them so no one could control what they said or produced (mostly).

What happened to us? How is it that we stand for injustices and bullshit like 9/11 now, and we aren’t even allowed to talk about it? Genuinely, I’m asking through this book – what the fuck?

Back to The Future

9/11 isn’t just a lie, it’s a crime against humanity. The worst one ever. It absolutely needs to be brought to light in a courtroom and autopsied, torn apart and carefully examined once and for all.

This will obviously never happen.

You could say that the evidence was destroyed.

9/11 is the hill I am willing to die on. I am sure that what really happened that day is not what they told us. And I am sure that what really happened was far more sinister even than what they told us.

That was wrong. All my life I have been laughed at, and I enjoyed it because, like I said, if you can make someone laugh you can make them do anything. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. However, due to the sheer number of people who disagreed with me on just about everything, I assumed that I must just be wrong.

My ideas must be stupid and wrong, and my songs just aren’t worldclass. The proof was in the pudding – if it wasn’t true, I would have been a rock star by then.

And yet, I kept studying dubstep. It turns out, there’s a whole lot to it. It’s actually a symphony of electronic energy playing out across the speaker, and if you lose it for one second the whole dance comes tumbling down. It’s incredibly difficult to get it to sound right, and I could never quite get the hang of it. What I was missing was modulating different waveforms in the same way to create a tall, strong growl that eats the whole frequency spectrum, from 0 to 20,000 hertz, as I assumed it would be only in the bass end and come from “bass” synths. It takes much more than that. I also learned to group these different waveforms which are modulated to create growls on one track, so that the MIDI is easier to manipulate afterwards.

Like I said, dubstep is basically musical Black Magic. It’s alchemy. It shouldn’t exist, and yet it does. We truly have no idea why those sounds make us react in this particular way. There’s so much energy in it, it’s like a new lifeform. Like a wild horse, I grew to love and respect dubstep only when I tried to tame it. By now, I recognized it as equal to or even maybe greater than the guitar, although the guitar will always be closest to my heart.

Dubstep is a weapon of mass destruction.

A real one, not the fake ones that Colin Powell lied about at the UN that one time.

Dubstep is God’s weapon of mass destruction, distilled down to a puny, fun little human form.

You don’t want to hear God’s dubstep. You don't want to hear God's laugh.

Remember that a loud enough sound is just an explosion.

Anyways, I kept working at it. I spent about one year compiling YouTube videos about music production, and I put them all in a playlist. I would watch them at 1.75x speed until I felt hypnotized and would fall asleep.

I took notes. I learned things. During this year, I didn’t really make any songs. I simply studied how to make my songs better, and I did learn a lot.

For once, I actually enjoyed what I was learning, because it was beautiful and true.

My songs became better. I gained control of the electronic musical soundscape in the same way that I had gained control of the guitar many years past. And I loved it. I love making dance music and dubstep the same way I love playing a great guitar solo over a good backup rhythm.

It makes my soul sing.

The only thing I wanted, at this point, was just to make one song that would be popular and make people dance. Obviously, it would never happen, as I was starting to get older now, and apparently everyone else was turned out to be right about giving up on their dreams.

Sometimes, I would find people who understood the music. They would see me, and would recognize me. These people were always very impressed with my songs even before they sounded very good. They heard what wasn’t there yet, but the potential within them to become something far greater.

Life was very enjoyable, and I was happy.

There were still many forests, rivers, and lakes around. I liked them. One of my favorite things to do when I had to move back up to Northern California was to go to the lake that was by A’s house and float in it.

I wrote a song about it:

Walking down the road,

I see your house, the doors are closed

Flowers on the road

A painting of a perfect day

Lying here with here with you

I feel like something has changed forever

It didn’t come out very good. I had to record in my cabin, so my voice sounded nasally and weird. You need baffling and sound absorbent material, a vocal booth, to record audio. My guitar wasn’t mic’d right. The cabin was super hot because I had to turn off the little AC unit because it was SO LOUD on the recording and I started sweating, and one time it was so crowded that I knocked the mic stand over and my $500 microphone hit the floor. Having to tear down and set up recording equipment every time you use it is terrible for both musicians and musical instruments.

I didn’t have the flute sound I wanted. I couldn’t afford it. No one liked my songs anyways. The few who listened to them agreed with me that they were obviously good, but they told me sometimes that they were ahead of our time. That it could never go viral. People don’t really want music like that anymore. It doesn’t sell. Apparently, there’s no point making a song unless you can “sell” it to someone (remember the pieces of paper).

And they seemed to be right. Even one of the students I taught once in high school (I taught the guitar class my senior year in lieu of a teacher who could play the guitar) had an apartment and was making a living giving guitar lessons to people. I envied him.

I couldn’t even manage to do that.

I felt like a monster.

I knew the songs were good, but I also knew the truth – no one really cared about them.

Except for Witness 2.

My Queen

And that leads me to her. Around 2015, right when Trump exploded onto the political scene in America, I was living in Los Angeles and working at a preschool (washing my greasy hot plate in the shower).

I was happy, I paid $900 a month, which was doable. I loved the kids, and they loved me. They called me “Mr. [my first name]”, which was funny. Like the dementia patients, other people had trouble with them, but I just played them my music and they would do whatever I said to do. It was great, and I had an excellent time with them. I have always gotten along well with children, although, sadly, I am more jaded now than I was when I was a child.

My bosses seemed to like me, and it seemed well. It was a small establishment, funded privately, ran out of a detached garage on a property in a nice part of LA. I was happy.

I was careful not to act like a “loose cannon”, and I executed my job functions with great care and dignity. There were no incidents and no child was ever harmed while under my supervision. Multiple parents asked me to babysit overnight for them because they genuinely trusted me with their children, and I would do it. Moreover, we genuinely had fun. I taught them. I even wrote a book that was about 50 pages for them and had it printed at Staples, full of fun facts for toddlers. It turned out to be harder than I thought it would be to actually teach them things, but we always had a good time.

One of the best days of my life was when we went to the library. We didn’t usually go out, but we walked out into the street that day. The library was right on the beach, it was beautiful and rich with books and activities for the kids.

I remember rolling around on the grass with the owner’s son, who had the name of a classic rock flute player (if you know, you know).

He was such a nice child, with long golden hair and huge brown eyes. He said he loved me, and I told hm that I loved him too. I learned in my psychology classes that this is the appropriate response to a child when they say that, as it fosters communication and trust. Build bridges.

However, it was true - I did love him. I have loved every person I have ever met, which is just common sense.

It was perfectly normal stuff, really, but I always felt like a failure because my music career hadn’t panned out and now I was obviously poor and looked really dumb. People were still nice to me, though.

Inside, I quietly looked to the northern star of music, the melody that I have heard my entire life. The Greatest Song in the World.

Through years of careful research and study, I have deduced that G# is actually the best key to create music in. That’s because of where it sits on the frequency spectrum and how it has the power to bring wood and speakers to life.

A is just a little too high, and D# and D are a little too low. G and E are obviously only for the guitar. F is an excellent key for dubstep, but G# is the best overall key.

The greatest song in the word. The greatest song there ever was. One day, I would figure out how to make music that people would want to listen to. All this time, while I could wow people with my live skills, I recognized that there was an intangible quality I was missing from those pure, sweet songs coming from vinyl to my Dad’s speakers as a child.

It wasn’t any one thing, just a bunch of little technical things that recording engineers used to do that all have to come together in exactly the right way all at once.

Anyways, back to my beautiful, stunningly gorgeous wife, Witness 2, and the preschool.

I was tasked one day with putting together a wagon. No problem, although I am admittedly not the most mechanically inclined person. “I can probably do this”, I thought to myself.

Well, it turned out OK, but something wasn’t right with the wheel and some sort of locking and turning function. It had to do with putting one part on before another part, and now that it was hammered on it was impossible to take off and fix. The wagon worked, but not as well as it could have.

That very day, I had just made what I considered to be one of my first “good” songs, when it comes to bass music. It’s called Homo Sapient and I still have it, along with every other song I’ve made in the last 15 years or so (and backups).

I was really passionate about working on it, and I really wanted to spend time working on it on my laptop, even though no one would listen to it.

The bass finally sounded right. It was cool, I had accidentally ended up with an arpeggiator on the bass, which actually sounded great. I could use the gate to control what it sounded like. It all came together on this one with the drums and bass, and it was tuned right. I Ioved the song. Many of the best songs are due to accidents that people ignored and then kept doing in rhythm as part of the song.

I didn’t have a good enough setup to record vocals, but I recorded myself singing on my laptop speakers. It sounded rough, obviously not recorded professionally. I reversed it, and effected it with some delays and reverbs. That seemed to fit the track, so I kept it that way.

Like I said, my self-esteem was in the dirt. I felt like a total loser, always talking about my music while everyone else focused on “real” things. I knew I had value, but it didn’t seem like anyone else saw that.

I couldn’t even record my own voice singing lyrics I wrote on my own track – this world had succeeded in stealing that from me. They took my voice. No one would listen. The song still came out pretty good, though.

Anyways, this was one of my better ones, and I knew it. One of my mentors told me once that I need to make a song that “wouldn’t be embarrassing to play at a party”. That was about ten years ago, and it hurt my feelings, but I recognized the truth in it. There was a difference between the raw, produced, aggressive music that I heard at parties and mine. This one was close.

What was it? Dubstep. A mystery I was determined to solve. Sometimes, people would tell me that I play too fast or that there are too many notes in my songs, which I can see.

Before I understood production techniques, especially utilizing both mono and stereo tracks (always mono for bass due to phase cancellation issues, but again, no one ever told me that), my songs were too crowded. There were too many notes. I couldn’t quite get it right, but I kept making songs that no one listened to.

Anyways, back to the preschool and the time when I met Witness 2. The owner called me out to the porch to talk alone. I had a bad feeling, which was unusual.

The afternoon sun drifted lazily down through the beautiful trees and flowers of the front garden. A white gate with faded paint swung in the breeze, clinking a sweet song of metal for no one in particular.

She looked at me seriously, and took off her sunglasses. They always really liked me, and I even worked through my lunch break watering their plants because I didn’t mind it and I didn’t really want to go home or have anything else to do for that hour.

She sighed, and looked at me.

“[Witness 1], you know we love you, and we appreciate everything that you have done for us. However, we’re going to have to let you go.”

The air hung still in the breeze. Nothing moved.

I looked at her.

“What do you mean?”, I asked. It was a sound that shouldn't have happened again, my least favorite thing.

Deep down, I already knew. I don’t fit in anywhere.

“The wagon wasn’t right. You can come part-time in the mornings if you want to, but it can’t be the way it has been.”

I couldn’t afford my apartment only working there for part-time hours. They knew that, and I knew that. Without a college degree, it is practically impossible to support yourself in Los Angeles as an adult, which is a lesson I was learning very abruptly as I drove around in the Prius that I leased to get from work back home.

There weren’t any other good options for me. All roads were closed without the glorious college graduation, the legendary diploma that proved you were smart enough to be allowed to be rich, and everything else. You know. I may have been, even, a little bitter about it sometimes.

There was nothing I could do. I took a tutoring job, and tried part-time, but it was too much driving. The traffic was so bad that it took me an hour just to go three miles from meeting a kid at the library at 6:00 one time. Luckily, I always listened to my songs while I drove, so I didn’t mind. Also, remember that I said I always liked driving. Car speakers are a great reference to use for audio engineering, as they are more powerful than you might think. The ambient noise of riding in a car is about 50 or 60 decibels, but we’re so used to it that you don’t even notice it anymore. I guess that’s how life works, like I decided when I was a child.

It reminds me of N, of the subs he installed in his Camaro, when we would intentionally speed around and play music so loud you could feel it vibrate the very throat of your esophagus. Yelling, just out of sheer, exuberant joy. Driving on warm summer nights to nowhere in particular, and doing donuts in empty parking lots while smoking weed.

Who was it ever really harming? Who was right, me, or them?

I would return often to the river canyon where I used to smoke with him and write songs, and I would try to bring them to life on my laptop. Still, something wasn’t quite right. There was a secret mix of ingredients I hadn’t quite figured out yet that eluded me for almost 20 years. I figured that it might be money, but it’s not – you can’t buy your way into music. You must become the music.

I was devastated. Fired, again.

Oh, how I wept. Bitter tears of frustration rolled down my face as I yelled to God and asked him “Why?”

“Why did you tell me to give up everything for these songs if no one would even listen to them???”

Well, I was T-boned, and I knew it. As soon as Trump showed up, I knew he was the anti-Christ and the next 9/11 would be coming within a reasonable time frame. The thing with “Jeb Bush” was my tip-off that it wasn’t real and everyone was being played again, as obviously the Bush family is one of the most power crime/mafia and secret society families that have ever existed, and one of them losing so spectacularly and hilariously to Trump had to be a show to disarm them and bring him in. People would never suspect them, and they love the Bushes now. Brilliant.

Still, no one listened to my songs or when I would try and tell them about 9/11. I remember when I brought some Mexican friends I had made over to my apartment to do some drugs one time. I wanted to show them A New Pearl Harbor, and I gave a monologue about 9/11 and the illuminati. They could tell I was right, but they literally laughed at me. It was a joke to them. I was just a joke to them. What I believed in, and what I knew to be true, was just a joke to them.

So, I figured I might as well get out while the going was good. I got my first credit card and bought a plane ticket to the Virgin Islands, as it’s the best place you can go without a passport and be reasonably protected as a US citizen.

I’ve always wanted to see the Caribbean Sea and those islands down there. As of now, it is the only remaining unfulfilled dream that I have.

I went to the pawn shop to sell my music gear so I could buy more drugs, because I would probably die. I knew I couldn’t take it on the airplane with me, but I had bought a $200 bowie knife (which I still have) and a Taser, which I planned to check.

This was a soft form of suicide for me.

As I pulled into the paid, underground parking spot near the pawn shop, a man called out to me.

“Whatchu got there, mayne?”

I have always gotten along very well with strangers. No matter what city I am in, what time it is, or who I am with, I have never once felt at danger at any time in my life, except when I am around police officers.

I told him that I was pawning my music gear because I lost my job and had to move. He offered me $300 for it, and told me he would give it to his kids for Christmas, and that they would love the equipment. I took the deal.

I want to be clear here – I didn’t pawn everything. What I pawned were my MIDI controller, my bass, and my amplifier, and that’s what I sold to him. Overall, it was actually more than the pawn shop would have offered. Despite it all, it was one of the saddest moments of my life. I felt like I was ripping off pieces of my very soul and handing them to a stranger.

My voice was stolen. My music was taken from me.

I wasn’t too broken up about it though, because I knew that I had to get better at working with MIDI by hand at that point anyways and playing it in was more of an impediment than a help. I never used the bass anymore, since the laptop can do it all. Bass guitar is the dumbest instrument out of all of them, but I will always love it. I turned out to be right about drawing in the MIDI instead, and I did get better at that, as it is simply it’s own instrument. Here is the bass guitar’s story:

In high school, there was a huge blow-up at my house about me smoking weed, playing music with N, and saying I didn’t want to go to college. At first, my parents said I had to go to a Christian College, but they relented once I was accepted into the UC. At this point, I told them I would rather just not go to college and be homeless with N in LA playing music than go to a Christian College. At the time, I was reading The Heroin Diaries by Nikki Sixx, Anthony Kiedis' autobiography, Slash's autobiography, and the drummer for the Doors' autobiography. Apparently, I do actually like to read autobiographies, and maybe I am not too bad at writing them, either. I'm not sure about some of those apostrophes in that last sentence though. I hope I don't get a bad grade on this.

I honestly considered turning my own story into a book, but like I said, I decided that no one would ever want to read a book about my life.

Anyways, it all blew up. This was during my senior project, where I built a guitar. I got a 100% score on it, I simply bought a kit for about $120, glued it together, painted it and drew on it with colored sharpies and covered it with resin and then wrote about music and played a guitar solo for the judges, and they loved it. They could tell that the real project was obviously music, not this guitar. I enjoyed that project, but many other times I found class to be boring and I skipped it to smoke weed and create songs on my parents iMac. I printed out a custom guitar body wrap for it, which ended up being a cow smiling in a field under a rainbow. I have always liked cowfields ever since I used to explore the one behind our house and write songs in it.

My blue Ibanez with the Ocean Eyes was at school, and I decided to keep it safe at my friend’s apartment. This was the coolest spot I had ever been, where some older kids that Nick was friends with (Nick and my girlfriend A were both one year ahead of me) had an apartment supported by a guy named J who worked at In-N-Out, and a guy named D that I had gone to church with as a child with. By this time, we both had ended up rejecting religious theology in favor of doing drugs to gain spiritual insight.

I had taken the Ibanez to class for a presentation on my senior project, and I turned it up to about 7 or 8 (quite loud) and played an Eruption-esque solo. They loved it.

Anyways, I also went and spent $40 on more psychedelic mushrooms to take the next night, which would be Friday. I ended up leaving my house quite dramatically to go stay at this apartment, and no one knew where it was except us. My family could never find me.

I remembered that when I worked at the grocery store, we used to throw out entire carts full of cookies and cupcakes that had “expired” (this is another thing that I find absurd in life). Those were pretty good, and I figured I could live off of them for long enough to figure out a plan. I decided I had to go to school on Friday and find out if I was in trouble or not, so I walked over there and acted normal. No one said anything, but people knew.

I told a friend of my sister’s named K that I bought mushrooms to take that night. She asked what I was going to do. I told her I was going to play music. Later, she asked me to teach her guitar at the river, and I did. She was like me, and we got along at that moment. Today, she apparently has a career as a “dancer”, which I find unusual. J ended up being a “poet” (he got published and mentioned in the NYT even), and did pretty well. Unfortunately, I realized while I was teaching her that very few people seem to be able to grasp the mechanics of music, and there’s just too steep of a learning curve for most people, as well as physical limitations for those with smaller hands and fingers. However, if she really wanted to, she could definitely do it.

Anyways, I left that day and took the mushrooms, and began to trip. I looked at the freeway near the grocery store and sat on a bridge overlooking it. I began to think about how we are just like the particles in our bodies, and the roads are like veins and arteries that carry us around. Is there a higher order of consciousness that we can deduce from this seemingly-spontaneous emergence of complex systems from inert, inorganic material?

I went back to the apartment. N had to go to band practice. I had gotten kicked out of my band, because my parents threw away my bass guitar when I ran away from home, and I wasn’t good enough yet at the guitar, which was true.

It was one of the saddest moments of my life.

N left me, and time slowed down to a standstill. The lights were off, but when they were on it was too bright. I kept them off. Monsters surged in the blackness. I had taken about twice what I took at the river with John, and I thought I might literally die. I was truly under the influence of psychedelic drugs for the first time in my life. Apparently, I kept calling him begging him to come back, and this was pretty funny to people (it is).

I logged onto their computer, and went to the guitar forum I mentioned earlier, JamSession. I made a post there begging them to help me and apparently saying that I was going to die.

When I looked back at the messages, they were telling me I wasn’t making sense and I seemed to scare them. It was kind of funny but also kind of sad. They were right, I was speaking in gibberish. It was once of the only moments in my life that I experienced fear.

Darkness closed in around me. Nick seemed to take a lifetime to come back. I asked about the band, and the drummer told me there’s no room for a rhythm guitarist in the band. There was nothing I could do, and I couldn’t just go out and buy a new one. They also had a replacement already lined up that was a year older, like them, with equipment, so it was fair. Remember, also, that I wasn’t really very good at music from an objective standpoint yet, but I made it work on the bass and help down the root notes and rhythms, and me and Nick had electric chemistry when on stage. It was magic. It made sense, for the first time in my life.

I don’t really remember much of the rest of the night, but I remember that it was still more fun than not being on drugs.

Even difficult experiences can teach you something.

My drug usage had definitely alienated people in my life and added to my growing feelings of isolation and non-understanding of people.

I accepted defeat, and there was nothing I could do about it.

The Virgin Islands

After I sold my MIDI controller and bass equipment to that guy, who was really nice, I drove my leased Prius to Skid Row, where there is about three to five blocks of a sort of tent city shantytown, with many people living there in poverty and disease. It’s a conviction on humanity that these places are allowed to exist, people who have nothing, while others live in dignity and riches when they don’t even deserve it. And they can’t even share the crumbs with the desperate and needy.

I walked around there with the cash openly held in my hand. Like I said, no matter where I am, no matter what city I am in, time it is, or people are around me, I have never once felt scared or in danger once in my life, except when I am around police officers. If you do this, people in these areas will know that you want to buy drugs.

It’s funny, and sad, but I swear to you, Dear Reader, that this story is the Gospel truth from my lips to God’s ears. Pray to confirm if this author is telling the truth, and God will answer you. I did live this story, and at this moment, I was absolutely sure that no one would ever care about it.

Someone from the tent city came up to me and asked me what I was looking for.

“Party favors”, I replied, with a smile.

That was my go-to line when talking about purchasing hard drugs from strangers, and it worked.

He asked me if I was a cop, and I told him “no”. T-bone also asked me that, but I knew him better. I told T-bone that I wasn’t a cop, I was just a scared kid who didn’t know what he was doing and wanted to feel better.

He lifted up my shirt and felt around my waist for a badge or a gun, which I obviously didn’t have. They sold me the drugs – crack and heroin, I was always much more into downers than uppers, but I also enjoy variety - and I went home and did them.

I worked on music, and I felt better. It made sense. It was true. As always, as soon as I opened up Ableton Live, I saw something that made sense. I worked on Homo Sapient - the wise ape.

“I could change the world with this software”, I mumbled to myself.

Drugs work very well to ease emotional pain, and I felt great. Overall, it was another of the best experiences of my life, and I really appreciated all the free time to work on my songs.

Still, they didn’t sound quite right. Around this time, I made a song called “Melania”, named after Trump’s wife. I knew he was the anti-Christ, but I still liked him and thought he was hilarious.

Also, at this time, I saw Witness 2 for the first time. I remember distinctly, the moment I first saw her. It was a gray morning with the ocean fog resting before the sun burned it off in LA, and it was a picture on my phone.

I was halfway across the preschool lawn when I opened it, and she was beautiful. She was perfect. I finally found her – my perfect woman. Every single physical feature that I looked for in a woman she brought to the fullest degree. She was my ultimate archetype

I mean, her beauty sings like the song of a thousand suns, plasma thundering in arches and swoops for millennia. Deep, shuddering beauty – a terrifying beauty. The kind of beauty that could kill you. Like God’s laugh. A beauty that could start a war.

She was my perfect being. The One for me. My real twin, my soulmate. Everything I had ever looked for in a woman, rolled into one sweet little package. And not only was she beautiful like a 50s pinup girl, but she listened to my songs. She liked them.

And, not only that, but she knew about 9/11, and she agreed with me that it was obviously the Synagogue of Satan International Organized Crime Syndicate and our own government who were behind it due to a cornucopia of political, economic, and military goals all aligning at once in a cynical corporate nexus.

She was the first person in my life who heard me say that and didn’t make me feel insane.

I loved her.

For the first time in my life, I understood what deep, true, perfect love was – the kind that lasts longer than a lifetime.

I had to have her. I would stop at nothing, every waking moment would be devoted to making her fall in love with me as I was in love with her.

Obviously, she could never know this.

I played it cool, and I told her I had gotten fired and bought a plane ticket to the Virgin Islands to go die.

She was sad, but she understood. I also was in the process of helping her become Christian through the same process of genuine, good faith reasoning and inquiry, Socratic method-type stuff, that had worked on me.

I knew that it meant that I would lose her forever, but I also knew that there was no place remaining for me in this world.

A Bible verse came to me, when Jesus said this:

“Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head."

My plan was to live in a tree until I was arrested and eventually sent to jail. I remembered the beautiful tranquility of when I used to climb trees as a child, and sometimes in college. It actually is nice up there in the arbor. It’s like a house. A nature house. With a seat, that’s called a branch. Do not fall off the seat.

I knew it couldn’t last forever, but I figured I could hold out for a few months, and I planned to bring my acoustic guitar and busk for a living, which I understand is a reasonable way to survive.

Remember that everything always worked out for me, so I figured someone would eventually feel bad for me there and offer me a job and a place to live. Alternatively, they might plant drugs on me, and arrest me or murder me and hold me in a dark cell and torture me for the next 60 years for trespassing on someone’s beach or something. I really didn’t know what to expect, but I figured as a last resort I could always just go to the beach and stop eating until my body died.

There are monks who used to do that – at the end of their lives, they would eat only honey, pine resin, sap, leaves, and pine needles, gradually working out the more organic things in favor of just resin and needles.

They’re alive, but over time, their body slowly turns into something else, calcifying them in the same meditative pose they spent most of their lives in. They remain forever, a perpetual statue that people show honor to.

A whole life, devoted to seeking truth, finding wisdom, and serving others peacefully. Not causing harm intentionally. While possessing nothing.

You can even read a Wikipedia article about a famous one in Thailand who wears sunglasses:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luang_Pho_Daeng

Imagine sitting there, slowly contemplating, as the drone of inevitable death works its way up your spine. There’s nothing you can do to stop it anyways, might as well go out in the coolest way that you know how to and leave a perfectly preserved, mummified human corpse that could last almost forever if properly cared for as a reminder of who you were. I mean, why not? What else are they doing with their lives?

I can imagine the mantra growing louder inside their skull, deep throaty vibrations from the source of life itself as life leaves their body- not suddenly, but gradually. A conscious process.

In fact, I can hear it right now. Dear Reader, I am telling the truth, as unlikely as it may seem – I see music as color and I can also taste its sweetness. It is a beautiful, delicate sweetness, like the finest sugar, like a cheesecake whiff from a vanilla puff. I only taste it when 1,000 different things come together in just the right way.

I wonder what music they heard.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, it’s a well-documented and rich research area for scientists who try to understand the brain called synesthesia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

Anyways, back to my darling wife that I genuinely love more than my very life itself.

I think that talking to her was the only thing that kept me going. I loved her, and the first time we talked on the phone, I asked her to marry me. She said yes.

I had never met anyone like her. She was unexpected, fun, vibrant, beautiful, smart, funny, and wise. Like I said, she was the only other person I had ever met who also knew about what I was, by then, calling the Synagogue of Satan – an international organized crime syndicate responsible for both 9/11 and megadosing me with acid.

It can be understood, in this context, of being made up out of largely the CIA, Israel, and Freemasonry.

She believed me. She believed in me. No one else ever did, except for N and J, but they probably don't know about the Synagogue of Satan yet.

She would listen to my songs while she ran, and she said that Melania was her favorite song of all time.

[Anecdote from Witness 2:

This is a true story. The first time I heard Melania, I 100% believed it was the best song I had ever heard. It felt like it was made for me. It was even close to this date (near New Year's) that I heard it. I honestly believe this is significant.

This song is perfect. When Witness 1 says he never made a real song, but this song was real to me. This song was perfection, and I still think it is the best song I ever heard. I don't care what anyone says - it is. I declare it is.

When I heard that song, it changed my perspective of Witness 1. I did care about music. I wanted to be with him.

I still listen to this song often, and I find it the perfect, bittersweet melancholy mix that is my life.

Maybe God had Witness 1 write the song for me, and though I don't like Melania, I still think the name is good. I honestly feel bad for her, and I feel bad for myself, too - so maybe that's the symbolism! Haha.

“I did it”, I thought to myself. I made a song that sounds unlike anything she’s ever heard before. It enlightened her. It changed her.

She made my dream come true – someone thought I made a good song and danced to it. Thank you for that, Witness 2.

I decided that since I needed to drop off some of my instruments where I grew up. When I got there, I thought about her versus the beach and homelessness, and I decided that I could stick around where I grew up and work that CNA job for a while before going to die on the beach in the Virgin Islands. After all, these islands are pretty big, right? Probably wont be going anywhere for a while, right?

So I stayed, and I worked on my songs, and I loved my job, and I loved her. I couldn’t stop thinking about her. From the moment I woke up to the moment I got off of work and called her we would talk. She lived a few states over, a few thousand miles. Pretty far.

I realized one day that I genuinely couldn’t live without her – I didn’t know what I would do. Who would I even be making the songs for, if not for her?

She was involved with another guy out there in the other state, but he didn’t believe her about things, they didn’t trust each other, there was cheating going on, and he just wanted to watch movies and sit on the couch anyways.

Me and her would talk for hours, late into the nights.

I always expected him to come in one time and grab the phone and tell me to stop talking to her and cut me off, but he never did.

We were in love. We were each other’s people. We made each other happy. She made sense. She was real.

I decided that it was ridiculous, and I couldn’t live like this any longer, as I was losing my sense of self. So, I decided to do the only thing I could think of – I delivered an ultimatum that if she didn’t decide to be with me and leave him by the end of the year, I was going to have to stop talking to her forever.

It was too painful to only have her halfway, pining away for her from 1,000 miles, and honestly, I think that people thought it was pathetic when I told them I didn’t have a girlfriend and wasn’t interested in hanging out socially or meeting women because I was in love with a girl who lived five states away and was already with someone else. I also had to work on music, and I had grown tired of parties long ago anyways.

I waited for her for four years while I worked at the nursing home, and we talked every night. When I would hit my bong, I would try not to let her hear it, because I found it compromising and embarrassing. But she knew.

She knew my flaws and she loved me anyways. She saw me, and I saw her. She asked me why I didn’t finish college, and I said it was because I didn’t consent to acts like 9/11 being perpetrated by our own government and then everyone just goes on with life like everything’s all good and we aren’t even allowed to TALK ABOUT IT.

That isn’t OK with me, so I burned my life to the ground. To study music. It was not one of my more profitable decisions, but most of them aren't.

Eventually, she agreed to meet me in Las Vegas, and she cheated on the other guy with me.

He ended up asking her if he could bring a prostitute home and acted really weird about things. He basically dropped a nuke on his own life rather than try to work it out with her. The truth is, the relationship was long-dead, and they both knew it. He had already cheated on her as I understood it, so I didn’t feel bad about it. True love is true love, and I am sorry.

He didn’t believe the truth, and she did. And that can’t coexist in the same house.

However, I think she could have lived with that. What she couldn’t live with was not being listened to. I listened to her, and no one else did. Likewise, she listened to me when no one else did. And we heard each other.

So, I quit my job at the nursing home and told the owner of the cabin, which was really nice and close to a lake, that I was leaving to go marry a girl in a different state. Obviously, they told me it was totally insane and I shouldn’t do it, so I explained that I am obviously an insane person, as they told me in the music store when I asked. However, once I explained it, everyone always agreed with me that it was the right thing to do.

They didn’t know that I was one bad day away from taking a plane ride to the Virgin Islands the whole time. The only thing keeping me here was learning about music and talking to Witness 2.

That night, my car exploded. I was happy that it didn’t happen while I was driving through the remote desert between her state and California, which would have been an actual crisis that could have killed me.

I found out that it was a blown gasket, and I sold the car to my landlord for about $300. I didn’t have time to worry about it. At this time, I gave away about 5 pounds of weed to some of my friends, which was about $2-$3K worth of product, and a bunch of really nice smoking gear. I didn’t mind, I couldn’t find anyone to buy it on such short notice, and I planned to quit and sober up on the drive over. I said goodbye to that life forever, and closed the door to my cabin for the last time.

At this time I was also really into playing the organ, and I still am. I could write another book about organs, and maybe I will one day, but I don’t think anyone would want to read it. I always pay cash to movers to move my organs off of craigslist, but this time I was actually able to get two friends and my cousin who was a weed farmer to show up at the same time to help me move it into my U-Haul. A miracle in coordination, these days. Home organs are weighty beasts, 4-500 lbs, and the foot pedals can absolutely not be broken off or the whole thing instantly becomes worthless.

I drove off, and the storms were beautiful as I crossed the desert. I stayed on the phone with her most of the way. I think that if I lost her, or she changed her mind, I probably would have had a heart attack and died right there on the road.

I white-knuckled my way through sobering up on that drive for the first time in years. It wasn’t perfect when I got there, but I have come a long way on my journey towards sobriety.

My beautiful, perfect wife tells me that I am the product of MK Ultra experiments myself. Maybe I am the conspiracy. Then, she tells me that we are in the Bible. Then, she tells me that it means that I have to die in the foreseeable future, and I won’t get to live out my life with her and our son, who I am teaching to be the greatest musician that has ever lived. Then, she tell me that she found people that actually believe her and listen to her (that’s You, Dear Reader). Then, I realize that it’s actually the most tragically beautiful and cool thing I’ve ever heard. Then, I start to believe it.

She’s right – I should die. I have always been willing to lay down my life for the principles that I believe in – which are namely:

That the US government is a force for evil in the world, has been since at least World War II and needs to be shut down and thoroughly examined, especially the Republican Party
That 9/11 was an inside job and part of a pattern of false flags like the Lavon Affair and the USS Liberty that involve the state of Israel, the US government, private bankers, and various intelligence agencies, all coordinated in order to pull off the greatest money laundering scheme ever imagined, displacing trillions of dollars of stolen WWII gold that should have belonged to the people.
That Donald Trump is the Biblical anti-Christ
That the Bible is the 100% true Word of God, and my empirical, Scientific-based research based on actual facts, history, and logic has proven it.
That Witness 2 is literally the most perfect and beautiful out of any of God’s creations, surpassing even the supernova, and out of any conceivable timeline, dimension, or universe, she is the most attractive person that could ever exist.

Thank you for your time.

Allow me to elaborate a little bit. I have always known, my whole life, that Republicans are evil. They lie all the time, and they scheme and murder people for money. This is just common-sense type of stuff. Yes, almost all Democrats are evil too, but this book isn't about them. I don't think I have enough free time to compile a list of the crimes of either political party, to be honest. No one does.

They are literally just a mafia of criminals and gangsters who go around committing crimes with impunity while laughing at the rest of us for being so stupid and going along with it. They dress up in costumes, and have silly meetings, and many of them believe the occult and secret society doctrines that the mystery schools teach. Many of them even use them to great effect to control and persuade the masses of people.

I’m sorry, but I hate politicians and cops more than almost anything. I really can’t stand people who lie and abuse others to make a living. It’s abhorrent. The fact that some cop riding in basically a military vehicle can pull you over at any time for whatever bullshit reason they want to and then arrest you and take you to jail because you had a plant on you isn’t just a moral travesty – it’s absurd.

And, apparently, I’m not even allowed to TALK about it. I’m not even allowed to QUESTION it. Over time, I grew angrier with society for what I perceived as a variety of injustices, lies, and absurdities.

But, that’s the way she goes. Way of the road. Nothing I can really do about it, I figured. No one ever listens to me, and no one ever will. They won’t even listen to my music, they’ll never pay for it, which is the only thing that would have ever allowed me to live the life I really wanted. They definitely won't listen to me if I tell them they are wrong about almost everything they believed. I had discovered that most people don't like when you do that.

So, I covered my anger with soil, and I grew flowers. I loved my residents and the guy in the wheelchair, and I taught children. More than anything, though, I worked on my songs. And I wanted to make just one good dubstep song before I died.

That was my dream, and honestly, for about a decade I could never do it.

It’s hard. And I’m not talking “learning how to play eruption” hard, even though apparently that’s tough for people even though it’s just a series of steps that are right there and it’s been done for 50 years. I mean hard like only a handful of people on the planet can make these sounds.

It seemed impossible.

The Best Song in the World

I would never make it. My dreams were a failure. The only person who believed in me was my cherished wife, the apple of my eye. We have a beautiful son, and I’m teaching him using a high-information music curriculum that I learned from Rick Beato’s YouTube channel. He is a musician who played high-information music for his son from about 20-weeks in utero to the age of four or so, and obviously let him get hands on with instruments, play around with them whenever he wanted to. Music was always there, just like it is for me. I am always playing music. Every day, every moment I think about how to make the perfect song.

With his son, Dylan, it turned out that not only did he have perfect pitch, but he has superhuman memory and language skills. He could memorize Pi to 500 places, and learned the whole periodic table by memory in a few days, or maybe hours. He can multiply 5-digit numbers in his head. Obviously, he can tell you what notes are being played at any given time.

No, you need personal, focused, hands-on development. Babies are tuned to pay attention to what their parents pay attention to, and to mimic us. Without the parent or caretaker there with them, the child will not recognize music as significant, and thus, not pay attention to it. All children would have perfect pitch if all parents were musicians. Apparently, they might also be smarter. illusions. I wrote a short booklet on this experiment with my son and my findings on perfect pitch, and she actually responded (or a staff member). I thought that was nice.

I have exposed our son, who is now four, to high-information music for an average of about 20 hours a day from the initial 20 weeks gestation age to the current date. Obviously, some days this fluctuated, but I achieved this by using a dedicated iPod for him at night and by saturating his meals, daytimes, playtimes, and exercises with background music.

Let me elaborate a little bit – part of what Professor Deutsche has discovered is that there is a significant difference between active and passive listening for babies during the language acquisition phase.

This is why they say the so-called “Mozart effect” has been “debunked” – because you can’t just play classical music for babies for hours on end and it will make them smarter. That’s true.

No, you need personal, focused, hand-on development. Babies are tuned to pay attention to what their parents pay attention to, and to mimic us. Without the parent or caretaker there with them, the child will not recognize music as significant, and thus, not pay attention to it. All children would have perfect pitch if all parents were musicians. Apparently, they might also be smarter.

It’s almost like there might be a better way to live than this, and maybe someone should do something about it.

Luckily, for me, this wasn’t a problem. I have thousands of dollars worth of music equipment at this time. I have two organs, a piano, my beautiful Ibanez with Ocean Eyes (I replaced the one in college because I ended up knocking it over one night and cracking the headstock. I bought the exact same one just a year or two ago and I love it). I have an acoustic guitar that B bought me from Guitar Center one night (business partner of sister's friend's Dad) He let me pick it out because the one I had kept breaking strings. He believed in me, and I thought that was truly nice.

I love that acoustic guitar, but it has a hole in it. One night, while I was on drugs, I knocked it over into a Smirnoff Vodka handle, and the stem of the bottle went through the guitar. I was devastated, but remember at this point I believed that everything would always work out for me so the universe would obviously provide another guitar and I wasn’t worried.

However, it turned out that it was fine. The only way it could affect it is if it changed the resonance at all, and it didn’t. It sounded crisp, beautiful, and fresh. The wood sang to me of forests in Europe from the past – of free trees, songs, and dances under the warm moonlight. A place where people loved each other.

So, I covered the hole with duct tape, and to this day, I still use that acoustic guitar and the tape has lasted (13 years). It’s really a great guitar.

I bought our son his own drumset, piano, and two guitars for him – acoustic and electric. I also created a laptop for him that cost me around $1,000 that has a copy of my music studio on it for when he is ready.

Since Witness 2 has an excellent job – did I mention that she is the smartest person I have ever met, and the only person I have ever met who had a 4.0 GPA all the way through high school and her MASTER’S DEGREE (and yes, I have seen the transcripts and it is true). She is genuinely the smartest person alive in my opinion, except maybe for me. Only, everyone always made me feel stupid. Until a few days ago, I thought this story was one of abject failure and rejection. Now I see the hope. If you believe in this story, it can come true. All you have to do is listen to my song:

https://soundcloud.com/the-two-witnesses/spiritual-warfare-2

Like I was saying, she has an excellent job and many valuable professional skills that allow her to educate children on how to learn language and speech better. It’s really a beautiful thing. That allowed me to quit my job as a CNA, and teach our son music full time (as well as take care of him and her).

So far, the experiment has been successful, and I verified that he had perfect pitch by the time he was two years, three months, two weeks, and one day old. He was able to tell me what note what the training videos I would always play for him were. That made me happy, and I smiled. I liked that. It made sense. It was logical.

His brain is special, because I made it that way. I spent thousands of hours on it because my new goal was not to create the greatest song in the world, but to create the greatest musician in the world. I figured if anyone could do it, it would be me in this situation, and really, what else was I doing with my life? Remember, I thought that literally no one would ever want to read a book I wrote or listen to a song I made.

It would be fun, and it was the one skill I can give him. It’s powerful, like I said. Music is an excellent persuader.

This child was conceived around February-March, 2020, and his birthday is a significant date in the year. He was a deeply wanted child, born out of love, into love, and honored and cherished in many ways. Even if he hates music, I would still obviously always love him. However, who hates music, right?

When he was born, the world was acting strangely. “Covid” was sweeping the nation, and Trump was on TV every day talking about lockdowns, death, and disease. The governor was the happiest I had ever seen her – this was the best thing for her career in years. People were losing their minds and acting totally irrationally, as usual.

Then, my wife told me that the Covid vaccine is the Mark of the Beast, and I needed to quit my job in healthcare immediately.

I agreed with her, so I did, and we moved abruptly.

Our son was only three months old when we moved. We found a beautiful spot, by the mountains. I love it, our life is perfect. My life is perfect. For the first time ever, my life makes sense. I always tell people that it’s the happiest time of my life. I would hate for it to end.

Then, she told me that God spoke to her, and told her the world was ending and we were prophets from the Bible. I had ended up publishing a book on 9/11 and Covid, even though I thought no one would read it, under the pseudonym “The Two Witnesses” (which I liked), so that what she said made sense.

To this day, I am thankful for those who read The More Rational Worldview: Coincidence or Conspiracy? and found it to be enlightening and helpful. Thank you for reading my words. Thank you for listening to me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.

More than that, I wanted to find people who believed in my music, and thought that I made the best song of all time, but I had given up on it ever happening.

I kept at it with the music.

I refused to believe it fully, because it seemed delusional and like it was probably early-onset schizophrenia or delusions of grandeur. I was deeply concerned, Dear Reader, and I feared for my darling wife. Remember, also, that she is literally the sustenance that keeps my soul alive and without her I will wither away and die like an empty husk.

It couldn’t possibly be true. I mean, come on. How could I be in the Bible if no one ever even listens to me?

But she persisted, as well. And she built something beautiful, Because she believed. Because God told her to.

She built a group of around 15 men who all read my book and think that we are the Biblical Two Witnesses. She built a ministry of around 150 more that also believe this. She built a ministry of 1,200, where she gives to the poor constantly. She literally has spreadsheets that go on for pages to keep track of it - its immensely impressive. She loves God like no one else I have ever seen.

She is my beautiful, perfect wife, so I listened to her. I found what she said credible, and it aligned with my own research on the situation with politics, Trump, and Covid. However, as the bodyguard of this family, I have a duty to protect us, and to remain skeptical – to hold us back from rushing into any potentially dangerous situations. My number one priority is the physical safety and security of my wife and child, as it should be for any father and husband.

So, I refused to let myself believe it. “Expect nothing, and you’ll never be disappointed” was my motto, so I just carried on. I liked it, it was cool, the shoe fit, you know, but I just tried it on. I never wore it.

I truly don’t want to do this if it isn’t true. I don’t want to be a false prophet. I don’t want to be blasphemous. I don’t want to lie. In fact, I never have lied once throughout this whole book. Generally speaking, I tried my best to live an honest life and not lie to people, as I was taught from an early age that after we died books would be read in front of everyone about everything we ever did in our lives by angels in front of God’s throne, which really scared me. It helped me know how to do the right thing in life when I was presented with moral issues.

I didn’t even want to be a pastor. I’m just obviously a musician, it’s as natural to me as drinking water. I had given up on ever leading people. I honestly believed that no one except Witness 2 would ever listen to me, really.

She told me that I am the product of an MK Ultra experiment, and honestly, when I write it out here, I can kind of see that. The acid is the giveaway. I never believed it, because it’s obviously ridiculous, but I have to admit that it all adds up, and also, God told me that everything she has been saying is true.

[My theory is important. My testimonies are one of deep, brutal pain - of constant suffering - to create me and help me become the perfect woman for God. Witness 1's life is the opposite - one of "seemingly" perfect shrouded in mystery to match me. We are the yin and yang. The last Adam and Eve. I am, the Last Eve, destroyed and reborn for the sins of the original woman. Witness 1 is the Last Adam, granted some mercy from God, given more than me. We are made for each other. We are meant to do this role and job. There is more to this, but this is just the basics.]

Let me lend some credibility to the story, though it’s a bit embarrassing. You see, there’s an unfortunate side effect from drugs (which very unfairly only affects males) that affects sexual function and urination. Drug users are familiar with this issue, of course, but we don’t talk about it. Sometimes, it’s called “whiskey dick”. Urination can also become difficult when under the influence of hard drugs or psychedelics.

Obviously, drugs are much more cool and interesting than sex, so this wasn't too much of an issue for me. However, it is still the worst part about doing drugs besides the hangovers, the addiction, how hard they are to find, the cost, and the angry police officers that you occasionally encounter while you are on them. Everything else about them is pretty decent, as far as I can tell. In fact, I have no idea why other people hate drugs so much.

Truthfully, I hate the tyranny of being a human being. I hate having to scrounge for food every day like an animal, to rely on killing, death, and factory farms to exist, and to be tied to bodily functions and toilets constantly, every hour of the day, never ending. It’s disgusting and humiliating. Did I already say that?

As a previously heavy drug user and perhaps "drugged" MK Ultra victim at times, according to my wife, I am very familiar with my own “system”, and the truth is, Dear Reader (and don’t think less of me), there are times during this experience where I could only pee while I was in the shower with warm water running. I only add this unsavory anecdote because it’s a dead giveaway for the psychedelic drugs, making it clear to me that it’s not a mental or spiritual state. The government dosed me because I wrote a book about 9/11. It's one of the funniest things that has ever happened to me, and I wish there was a way to get it on a more regular schedule.

The acid is a dead ringer for MK Ultra, obviously, as that was one of the main points of research during the program. Basically, the government would hire prostitutes to set up meetings with Johns off the streets, then they would have the woman surreptitiously dose her unsuspecting victim with a heavy dose of pure, strong, government-grade LSD, which was actually legal to possess for part of the time the program was running. (“Tune in, turn on, drop out”, remember?)

Then, they engaged in torture and various forms of sexual abuse, and even murdered some people, and the whole time they were losing their minds on psychedelic drugs without knowing it. Nightmarish stuff.

The Wikipedia article for MK Ultra reads as follows:

Additionally, other methods beyond chemical compounds were used, including electroshocks,[3] hypnosis,[4][5] sensory deprivation, isolation, verbal and sexual abuse, and other forms of torture.[6][7]

One day, I noticed that someone had removed “sexual abuse” from this sentence. I really enjoyed showing people who were on psychedelic drugs this sentence and telling them that the government used to abduct people and dose them and then rape them to freak them out (if you can scare someone, you can also make them do anything, which the government has used to great effect in examples like 9/11). I’m not malicious or anything, but it’s actually a really great conversation starter or icebreaker.

Anyways, this enraged me in my cabin. Fuck this shit. I was mad and I called up Witness 2 and bitched about it. I ended up going and finding a few primary sources about a rape during MK Ultra, linking it, and editing the sentence to its original form. It turned into a whole battle, where I was typing angrily about primary sources, and they eventually relented, saw my side, and allowed the sentence to stay as I left it. At the time, that was my one true mark upon the world – the one time I forced people to listen to me.

"The government rapes people."

And they think it’s funny. They laugh at it. It actually doesn't make any sense to me. I mean, I can see why that's a funny sentence, but really, it's not funny.

Since Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, this was all public record and on the open internet. I ended up going back on the edits page a few years later, when I had moved in with Witness 2 and I found them. It made me laugh.

Anyways, my wife told me that I have to die in front of the world as a final sacrifice to bring about the end of the universe. At first I wasn’t sure, but the longer I thought about it, the more it made sense to me.

[To note, Dear Readers, from Witness 2, I didn't just come to this theory in a day. There is an entire blog, as well as an FAQ, about this journey and understand.]

It’s perfect. It’s logical. It’s reasonable.

It’s like every story I’ve ever read. I should be killed by this world, out of principle.

And the truth is, I always have been willing to die for what I believe in.

Like I said, even without the concept of God, I would be willing to lay my life down and stand in front of a tank merely out of spite, protest, and principle – under these conditions:

That it would matter
That people would care
That people would like my music afterwards
That Witness 2 would die too, because if I can’t have her than no one else can

Unless all of these conditions are met, I’m definitely not doing it. However, what she was telling me did fulfill them, and it does make sense. I have to admit that I can’t debunk it any longer.

So, about a month ago, on December 8th, I started a new project – the one I’ve been waiting for.

The Greatest Song in the World

It obviously had to be in G#, and I would finally try to make a real dubstep song. For the first time, no matter what, I steeled myself to sit there with only one MIDI note at a time on a track and get it right without using automation, delays, reverbs, fancy chords, arpeggios, and other musical confetti to cover up the sheer fact that my music wasn’t aggressive enough.

It would be embarrassing to play at parties, remember? Sometimes, that would be true, and so I wouldn’t play it. Sometimes it wasn’t true, as well.

For this song I sat there with the long, black MIDI note stretched out before me on the laptop screen.

1 note at a time.

I can do this.

I plugged in my MIDI controller for the first time in almost ten years (by now, it was far easier to do it by hand, and it comes out better anyways because it’s perfect as opposed to carrying slight variations in velocity and timing - but sometimes that’s preferable), and I played.

At first, it sounded terrible. It always does at first, on the laptop. Remember, it’s the opposite of the guitar – it’s what you do after the sound is created that matters, not before.

It sounded like a chunky piece of shit sitting on a log. A first and a fifth. C# to G#. But I believed that it could grow into something more, and over the next month I spent approximately 10 hours a day, stopping our son’s schooling and other music training for the first time in his life, to work on this song.

I have known this song for a long time, since I was a child. In fact, there’s only a few really good chord progressions that people just reuse over and over and play off of, and it’s really the same pattern with different starting points. It’s a fractal.

These is the ultimate chord progression, that exists as surely as there is a law of gravity or a force of electromagnetism:

I-V-vi-IV

One, five, minor sixth, four.

We love that. It sings to us in a way that is greater than ourselves. It’s the chord progression of Let It Be, in C, the best key for the piano, which is why that is the perfect song.

The other main two chord progressions that people like are this same one, but starting on the minor sixth, so it comes out as minor sixth, four, one, five, or something like Am, F, C, and then G. Many songs are based on this chord progression. Finally, people like when you switch it up a bit and head over to the minor sixth instead of the fifth at first, which results in a I-vi-IV-V progression, or C, Am, F, G.

That’s the 50’s “doo-wop” sound from Last Kiss. You know it:

When I woke up the rain was pouring down
There were people standing all around
Something warm flowing through my eyes
But somehow I found my baby that night
I lifted her head she looked at me and said
Hold me darling just a little while
I held her close I kissed her our last kiss
I found the love that I knew i have missed
Well now she's gone even though I hold her tight
I lost my love my life that night

I love it, it’s a tragic and beautiful chord progression. The transition from the root note to the minor sixth is majestic, triumphant, tragic (sorry to my English teachers if I overuse that word), desperate, longing, loving, soft, gentle, and angry all at once. It can even be happy.

C and Am sound like two completely different things, but it’s actually the same concept. This is called the relative minor, and every key has this relationship with other keys. The relative minor of G major, for example, is E minor.

The bass, playing the root note, is especially important for emphasizing this transition from major to minor.

Without it hitting the relative minor at the right time, this chord progression will not work, and will sound like something else (which is usually still good).

The relative minor works because only one note changes in the chord. Everyone likes to talk about the dominant interval, the fifth, while overlooking its brother next door.

You see, the fifth changes two notes out of three. On a C, the C and E notes will change to B and D respectively, while the G will remain the same. The D is a second, which longingly pulls back to the root note. The B is a major seventh, which cries out in pain at the separation from her lover. That’s why a V to I chord progression sounds so sweet to people, and why a V7 chord resolves perfectly to the I.

I prefer the relative minor. He is proud, a champion. He is strong. He makes people feel. The dominant interval is comforting, soothing, intuitive. Relaxing. It makes sense. The dominant interval tells a happy story, but the relative minor asks a scary question.

Incredibly, only one note changes in the chord. Namely, if you are playing a G major chord, you will be playing a G, a B, and a D. To switch to the relative minor, Em, all you need to do is change the D to an E, so that you are now playing G, B, and E. It’s the letter next door, so it’s pretty easy to remember.

And yet, whenever I tried to explain this to anyone except a small handful of people, they looked at me like I was an alien. They clearly did not care and could not comprehend what I was telling them. I have never felt like I could have a conversation about music with someone on my own level with the exception of N and the Romanian guy that I met in the Grand Canyon (I love them both very much).

It doesn’t really make sense to me. How could something so simple, so intuitive, be literally impossible for people to comprehend? Was it the hand sizes?

I figured that might be a little bit reductionist, so I concluded that it was because I was different than them, and that is why I never felt like I fit in anywhere I was in my entire life.

That made me sad.

Our son was there at the moment of this songs birth, and he listened to it’s first few rough notes. When he is ready, I will teach him how to use a laptop to make music. I believe that one day, he could make a song that doesn’t sound like anything anyone else has ever heard before either.

It’s called Spiritual Warfare, and originally, I planned it out as me singing as both God and Satan, singing as God’s golden child, the musician, who grows resentful and angry at paradise and ends up cursing humanity with his gift of music. The Two Witnesses come in at the end with a guitar solo and save the day. End scene.

I still have to finish it, but it’s mostly done except for the guitar solo and my vocals. I still don’t actually know if I can do a guitar solo and dubstep together. It’s possible it has never been done for a reason – like mixing oil and water. Impossible. But I’m going to give it my best shot. It’s always been my dream, and after all, what else am I doing with my life?

I’m not asking you to believe that I am Witness 1 from the Bible. I’m not even asking you to believe me about 9/11 (although you can read my book if you want to learn more about it). I’m not asking you to believe anything crazy.

All I’m asking you to do is spend 20 minutes out of your day to listen to my song, and tell me it’s not the greatest song in the world. Because I’m on the good, government LSD right now after this latest dosing experience, so I’m thinking really clearly (it’s how I was able to write this book in about 40-50 hours, although I did sleep last night for the first time in a while. I stayed up all night long working on the song the night before that), and I’m pretty sure it is.

Here is the link:

https://soundcloud.com/the-two-witnesses/spiritual-warfare-2

You can also find more of our work at our website, which is appropriately titled:

https://twowitnessesofrevelation.com/

I am also asking you to send us money, if you feel led by God to. He told me that Witness 2 may need to cash out her retirement fund soon, and we may need a backup plan. Please pray on that, but as of now, we have still never relied on begging or explicitly asked people to give us money.

They do it out of the goodness of their hearts, and I appreciate that. God does too. We have given a tremendous amount of money to the poor, with Witness 2 leading these initiatives, because she is better at working with spreadsheets than me. We have never charged anyone anything for our books or music.

I also believe, out of principle, that knowledge should be free and that charging money for books to make a profit is inherently stupid. Books should be free. People should be writing books and handing them out in the streets like bouquets. If only there was some sort of superseding, higher-up, body of authorities that could spend their time planning and funding nice things for people like free printing presses. Did you know that it cost me $120 to print a copy of my own book (480 pages)? I think that’s ridiculous. Maybe we could vote on these people, and then they could try and implement things that we could enjoy with our tax money.

It's not an issue though, and it just struck me that I’ve seen easy cash like this once before – when I was selling drugs and making music. That was real and true to me, and it manifested everything I wanted in life, including large stacks of $20 and $100 dollar bills. Lately, it’s been sort of similar with this whole thing (which honestly really surprised me), so maybe it is true.

Like I said, I don’t want to experience delusions of grandeur or anything. That would obviously be ridiculous. On the other hand, our cashapp is $thetwowitnesses, and you can find us on PayPal by searching for [email protected]. We are also on “buy me a coffee” at https://buymeacoffee.com/twowitnessesofrevelation

I haven’t really believed it, but after today I’m starting to.

After today, I can no longer pretend that what she says doesn’t make sense and that it is more rational to debunk it than to believe it. It’s actually super obvious that Donald Trump is the anti-Christ. They always told us he would come around, and if you listened carefully, that he would deceive the very church itself by whispering sweet nothings in its ear – by coming from within like a poison seed, pretending to be one of them while it's obviously not true.

He would come like a silver-tongued snake, hypnotizing people with his words and actions. They would revere him, fear him, and love him.

“Who is like him”, they will say. “Who will wage war against the beast?”

He will start with the Republicans. The Christians. The “family values”. He would pervert them, grope them. Worse, he would expose the organized church as what they were all along – hypocrites – molesters and perverts themselves. Everyone knows the Vatican is literally a state-sponsored child sex trafficking ring, and yet, we aren’t allowed to talk about it.

It doesn’t make sense.

His words would entice them, and indeed, I could see that American fascism would come wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross after 9/11.

The Republicans didn’t care when Reagan lied to their faces about running drugs and guns to the Contras. I believe the quote was:

“A few weeks ago I got up and told the American people that I did not authorize gun sales to the Contras (linked to Nicaragua and Iran). My heart and my best intentions tell me that’s true, but the facts and evidence tell me that it’s not.”

Well, yes, Sir, that is in fact called a lie. You lied about selling weapons of war to terrorists who used them to kill people. And that doesn’t even matter in the grand scheme of things, it’s like a drop in the ocean of criminality contained within the Republican Party.

It doesn’t even matter. No one cared. No one was held accountable. It was a joke. They laugh at us. People laugh at you when you bring it up, and they look at you weirdly, and suddenly, you become “strange”. Obviously, I learned not to talk about these things with most people rather quickly.

You can read much more about that and how it all ties into the stolen World War II gold and 9/11 in my other book, The More Rational Worldview.

Cowards. Irrational. Stupid. Lazy.

Worse than that, they didn’t even have principles that they believed in enough to die for them.

I learned from my college professors that Ancient Greek philosophers considered people without beliefs, or virtues, they were willing to die for as similar to animals on an intellectual level.

It was worse to be a man without reason, they thought, than a cow eating grass happily in a field. The man is always frantic, running around, cursing, pulling his hair out. Trying to build sandcastles in a storm.

The cow is happy. It’s sunny out. Remember the cowfield behind my house? I used to walk through it as a shortcut sometimes to get home from school. One time, when I had to move back there after one of my spectacular failures or false starts, I decided to take the old way home, so I hopped the fence. This was after the land was sold to a developer and looked like a diseased cancer scar. The cows were long gone, but the field remained.

As I walked back home, thinking about how no one would ever listen to my songs and dubstep was probably just too hard for me (or maybe took expensive plugins), some guy on a lawn mower started yelling at me and trying to get me to come over. Probably to give me a citation.

I simply ignored him and kept walking.

Can’t these people ever leave me alone?

What’s the deal with lawnmowers, anyways? You pay hundreds of dollars to sit on a beastly machine that spews gas and pollutants, in order to periodically chop down the plants that grow naturally. In return, you lose native pollinators and beautiful wildflowers. You spend hours sweating in the sun, laboring, to perform this task.

Once it’s done, you look proudly at the final product. A nice, clean row of green grass.

I love the smell of freshly-cut grass, and I have ever since I was a kid and I mowed lawns for money.

Did you know that it’s the same thing as the scream of a murder victim as their throat is being slit?

Yep, it’s a nice little chemical mixture the plant desperately sprays out in its death throes to warn its fellow vegetation of danger. Even plants can figure out how to take care of each other, but we can’t.

It doesn’t make sense.

This macabre death ritual plays out every few weeks – the mower head slicing through the blades of grass one by one, their infinitesimally-small screams heard by no one. An endless smorgasbord of natural soap operas, if you look closely enough or perhaps had a microscope.

The mower returns. The man sits on it. Someone cuts through. He yells at them.

Why?

What would happen if you just let the grass grow?

When my wife was telling me that we need to die in order to simultaneously end and save the universe, it made me think of a book I read in my childhood. It was called The Last Book in the World, and I loved it. One of my favorite books of all time.

It tells the story of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, populated by starving people addicted to the ruins of what was once biomechanical technology. There is a young boy who meets an old, wizened man. His name is Ryder, which is obviously supposed to sound like “Writer”.

He teaches the young boy about this thing called a “book”, and teaches him to write. He told him that it would be the last book in the universe, and through it, people would begin to understand again. Their humanity would return.

His goal is to save his sister. There’s acid rain, roving motorcycle gangs, the works. Great book. I loved it.

“If only”, I thought to myself again, “one day someone would read a book I wrote.”

His goal is to save his sister, and he makes it to a central area, which is surrounded by the rings of death, destruction, and desolation. People literally starving to death in the streets, sort of like our world today.

In the middle, they live in luxury. A few of them persist, and high technology grants them lives of beauty and wonder. I believe, in the book, that this central area was called “Eden”.

I don’t really remember what happens at the end, and I wouldn’t want to spoil it for you even if I did.

However, there was definitely some kind of twist, and he couldn’t stay there. I think the sister survived.

It was a grim ending, but it had hope. He sits in the rusted, torn pipe that used to bring water to people, which they used to access the other areas and Eden.

It’s been torn open long ago, and the rusted edges sit like bloody mouths gasping for air.

He brought a piece of paper out of Eden, and a pen.

Ryder, unfortunately, died on the way. Tragically. Our author is now alone, as is customary for the Hero’s Journey, which I learned about from the kind man with the Walrus smile who taught me how to write an autobiography.

He picks up the paper, and the pen, and sits there and thinks.

“Writing.”

“What to write, what to write…”

“Hmmm…”

“Within the field of epistemology,” he wrote, “Or the study of knowledge, the best way to rationalize a belief is to find supportive evidence for it, using facts that are corroborative, verifiable, and widely considered to be mainstream.

In pursuit of that effort, this writing provides 785 sources, through which we can attempt to discern a truthful and sufficiently explanatory worldview. In order to show that the conclusions drawn throughout this text are not the more rational worldview, one would have to tear down, or discredit, at least a majority of these sources, and then erect in its place a more sufficiently plausible or explanatory worldview.”

No, I’m just kidding. His book doesn’t start that way, mine does. In fact, we never find out what he writes.

What he tells them about, I assume, is a new story – a better story. One where we don’t kill each other every day over things that literally grow in the ground, using other things that grow in the ground.

A happy story, like a song in a major key. Which rap and dubstep songs never are. There is almost not one rap or dubstep song in a major key, except for “My Heart” by Different Heaven. In fact, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, who helped me build my laptop, told me not to make a dubstep song in a major key, and he would be right for every single song except mine,

The greatest song in the world would obviously have to be in a major key. I mean, it’s in the name. Major versus minor. Best versus less. Happy versus sad.

I have always loved using major keys for songs, and I have only made, I think, one song ever in a minor key (E minor for the guitar, of course). That was an early dubstep experiment, and I still have it. People loved it, but no one really cared. It was called Thank You.

So this song is in G# Major. And I hope that you like it.

It’s the first of its kind – a new story. I call it a “concept song”, which is kind of like a “concept album”, like Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band.

This has been done before, but not like this. Not with the mixture of the laptop and guitar. It’s a fusion of two things that shouldn’t be able to coexist.

I bought a Gregorian Chant synthesizer plugin for my new laptop recently. Allow me, if you will, the indulgence of a brief monologue about my new laptop.

B always bought my laptops. They were Toshibas that were in the $300-$500 range. They were really great, and I always appreciated it. He also gave me my first MIDI controller. I actually still have one of the laptops, that still works, that is 11 years old at this point. I used it during our son’s music training to show him Aydin Esen playing high information music over and over, over 1,000 5-to10-minute videos containing jazz and classical MIDI rolls from a channel called “Sheet Music” something, and much more.

Like I said, I was a poor person. I could barely afford to buy shoes for my CNA job and weed at the same time, but I didn’t mind. Poor people are more authentic than rich people.

For a while, I lived in the Grand Canyon. They have cabins there that you can live in for only $8 a month, as long as you are an employee. The only issue was, apparently, the employees liked to party a little too much back in the day, so they instituted a policy of random urine drug tests. I didn’t mind, as at first I was trying to be sober anyways.

I quickly realized that, like always, it was simply based off of who could make the manager laugh more, which wasn’t an issue for me, so I quickly got back into drug usage.

The Grand Canyon was beautiful. I would go out on the rim sometimes with my coworkers and watch the shooting stars. It’s further out there than you might think, and the night sky is spectacular. They have it all there - a school for the employee's kids, even a baseball field. The insane drug dealer who lived next door to me gave me one of my favorite books in the Grand Canyon. I loved him. The book was called Godel, Escher, Bach, and it was the brilliant ramblings of someone who was clearly a genius, tying threads of reality together for people. Once again I thought to myself that no one would probably ever want to read a book that I wrote. He used to cut himself and make art with the blood on the walls of his cabin. Other people didn't like that, but I understood. Art is supposed to be both tragic and funny.

I loved it there. One night, me and my roommate, who has the same name as our son (the only person I’ve met with that name besides him), went out onto the rim. It was cold, probably in January or February.

The rim was frozen, and snow was on the ground. The Grand Canyon is wild, and people die there every year. Someone wrote a book about it, actually, called Death in the Canyon.

Animals live there still. It’s protected land, obviously sacred ground. I took a lot of psychedelic drugs there and also explored my relationship with the MDMA molecule especially. I also, of course, worked on music every night on my laptop. In Ableton. One time, one of my friends told me one of my songs was “Winter Soundtrack” of the Cabin Crew.

I liked that. It made me happy. It made sense.

I still have the song, and it’s called Arcadia, after a neighborhood my grandparents lived in.

Beautiful name, just like Melania. Shame what has happened to the place due to unadulterated corporate greed and pollution.

But the songs were never quite right, and it still wasn’t good enough to play at parties as background music for people to chase women and get high on drugs to, apparently.

Until that one caught the attention of Witness 2, and my life changed forever.

One of the smartest people I have ever met, who is from Romania, showed me how to make my first dubstep growl and “wub” in the Grand Canyon. He also taught me that every single track should have a lowpass filter on it, which I had never even thought of. That really helped a lot with taking the high edges off of my tracks and adding warmth.

It’s hard to learn about music. Some questions, you can’t ask people, because they don’t know the answer. Sometimes, they make a lot of money off of knowing the answer while you don’t, and they won’t tell you. They do love those pieces of paper.

You just kind of have to figure it out if you want to learn. So, I kept trying to be the best musician in the world. After all, what else was I doing with my life? Cooking food for rich people in the Grand Canyon and taking drugs? I considered writing a novel, but I cycled back to no one wanting to read a book that I wrote.

I just love music. I really do. I can taste it, like candy. It’s like the sweet, warm, dripping juices of the universe itself – here to make me happy and provide nourishment to me. The only thing that I love more than playing music (Besides the Bible, obviously) is Witness 2.

One day, my dream might come true. But I can’t believe it if it’s not. So, I’m going to shut down this ministry in about three days if no one likes this book. My wife and I agree that if this isn’t true, we can’t keep doing it. It’s destroying our family and taking lots of precious time that could be spent teaching our son music and reading.

The only way you can make this story come true is if you believe it. Send it to someone. Give me my new name - Witness 1. It is much cooler than Moon Child, which I always thought was dumb.

Commentary from Witness 2: Running this website and ministry has been incredibly difficult in every way - there is no word to describe the pain. It has been a pure sacrifice from Witness 1 and me. We have operated completely in faith. It has been biblical. It has been ludicrous. I do not regret it. I believe 100% we are The Two Witnesses, which is why we set the date on the prophecy. If we are wrong, we shut it down and repent - what else can we do?

Still, at least I tried. Didn't I try? Lord, didn't I try?

At least someone out there tried. My message to Jesus Christ is - I tried.

Moreover, it would destroy me if I believed it and it wasn’t true. I can't have any more false hope that people will ever listen to me.

Remember my motto: “Expect nothing and you’ll never be disappointed.”

I don’t expect to be a Biblical Prophet. I don’t want to be a Biblical Prophet. But sometimes, those who don’t want leadership roles are exactly those who need to take them on the most.

Like I said, I’m not even asking you to believe that I would be a good leader, nor that I am Biblical Prophet. All I’m asking you to do is spend 20 minutes listening to my song, and if it you like it, even a little, send it to everyone.

You don’t even have to mention 9/11, trust me, I know how that one goes over – like a lead balloon.

Everyone loves music, right? It’s fun! It makes sense! It’s logical.

It’s actually really, really easy if you just have enough time to spend on it.

And by that, I mean about ten to twelve hours a day, seven days a week, for a few weeks, if you want to make greatest song in the world (again, my eternal gratitude to Witness 2 for providing me the opportunity to do so.)

And, actually, now that I think about it, it is not really easy. It takes great practice, skill, and coordination of different domains, each of which presents its own epistemological challenge that you could spend a lifetime studying and never finish.

To write a great song, you need to master your physical body – your fingers and muscles. They need to become subservient to you, rather than the other way around. Like the monks swallowing tree sap and twigs, whispering softly to their flesh, “no more.”

You have to master memory, which isn’t a problem for me. You need words, and linguistic skills – a song must tell a story. You need emotional understanding and depth. You also need dedication to sit there for hours a day practicing, in order to become fluent or fluid on an instrument. Like I mentioned, there are also physical limitations where smaller people will have a harder time playing some instruments. However, people with smaller fingers are excellent at playing the violin, which never appealed to me anyways.

To become the Master of Music, to rule it rather than let it rule over you, all hemispheres and areas of your brain come into play. Coordination, logic, memory, reflex, movement – it’s all there. Researchers say that the brain lights up like fireworks under an MRI when they scan a musician playing their instrument.

If only, like I ruminated, there was some sort of overarching body of authorities that could pool our tax money together and use it to look into cool things like this and then spread the benefits to everyone so that all people could succeed. I wonder what we would call it.

While I failed to master my physical impulses as completely as the monks did (although I’m open to this method of mortuary service, as the cost may be reasonably cheaper than a casket), I can confidently say that I have mastered music and it’s connection and formation in the brain, and that I am better at playing a guitar solo than any Republican politician.

I don’t have superpowers. I cannot manifest fire, or anything else. However, I finally did make a pretty “fire” dubstep drop recently.

And, like I said, loud enough dubstep is just an explosion. It would technically create fire spontaneously if you just turned up some sort of system loud enough, perhaps around 4-500 decibels (a jet engine is around 120).

This hypothetical device would be shaped like a speaker, or would simply be a very large speaker – a magnet, a coil of wire, and some fabric as a web to resonate. I used to take them apart when I was a kid and look at the magnets in fascination.

It would produce a sound so monstrously loud that people would simply dissolve upon hearing it, their organs liquefying inside of them. The air would vibrate so fast and hard from the waveforms, whether musical or not, that it would literally rip people apart.

This device would not actually be hard to build at all with current technology, and many theorize that something like it was what Nikola Tesla was working on when he died and Donald Trump’s uncle took his papers and experiments to examine them. More on that in my other book, The Mark of the Beast Anthology, which you can read here:

https://www.docdroid.net/2065BAx/the-mark-of-the-beast-anthology-pdf

However, it would be far less efficient and profitable than simply blowing each other up by throwing various kinds of metal and rocks at each other, so governments never really brought it out as a weapon. The Bible, however, mentions acoustic weapons a few times, notably when the Israelites blew their trumpets and the walls of Jericho came down. That makes sense, actually.

Maybe one day, this prophecy will be fulfilled because God will become the amplifier I always wanted, and in fact, the last time the government megadosed me with acid, I had a vision of this very thing.

I was working on the song that is called Elisha’s Song 12, which is in F Major and you can listen to on our SoundCloud. Besides the one I just made, it’s my favorite song I have ever made, but I don’t like my vocals at the end because, again, no vocal booth + rushing and setting up and tearing down every time you record = bad vocal tracks.

I made the dubstep part with the growls and crazy, arpeggiated synths. I used a synth that I used in one of my first “good” songs, from about ten years ago, which I called the “Bread Synth”. It shimmers and sparkles like sunlight on stained glass, reflecting the colors of the frequency, and you can hear it on the first drop in the song on the sides of the stereo spectrum. The second drop was my attempt at dubstep growls, but I still had too many notes in the song to pull it off effectively.

I solved the “too many notes” issue in this latest song by stretching out the length to 20 minutes, allowing me a wide open canvas. I actually did not intentionally mark it at exactly 20:00, at first it was 12, then 14, then 20. Actually, stopping or marking the timer at 20:00 would be annoying and inconvenient, and I would never do a dumb thing like that.

However, it came out like that. Perfect. It makes sense. It’s the only song that ever did that.

Maybe it is blessed, after all. Maybe it can make my dreams come true.

The length will change again, and that’s OK.

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s arbitrary deadlines.

I’m not done writing my song yet. I haven’t finished my story. But I’m about to finish my book. In the end, like usual, I was totally wrong – it wouldn’t be a song of mine that changed the world. But it might be a book.

Like I said, I’m not asking you to believe me, even though I will go to my very grave swearing upon everything I find Holy and Pure that every word of this story is 100% true, and Witness 2 will verify it (maybe that’s they call her a “witness”, like a court case - probably about holding a plant).

All I’m asking you to do is listen to my song, and send it to everyone you know.

The Last Book in the Universe

I loved that one more than anything else. You know, I never fully allowed myself to believe my darling, beautiful, angelic flower of a wife when she told me that God told her that I was the product of an MK Ultra experiment and I have to die. It would be too cool of an ending, and I’ve always wanted it, so clearly it could never come true.

I never allowed myself to believe her fully, because I wanted it, which meant that it was unlikely to happen.

But now I do believe it, and maybe you do too.

Expect nothing, and you’ll never be disappointed. But, I like it. It’s honestly just a good story. And it all adds up, I have to admit.

I would, honestly, want to read this book. And others will too.

So, do you believe it? If not, why not? I mean, what else are you even doing with your life? Are we supposed to cower in fear while actual fat, stupid, and ridiculous psychopaths that blatantly abuse us?

Do I not have enough primary sources for you? Because the first book I wrote on 9/11 and the Bible, which over 100,000 people have read and downloaded, has 785 of them. I even made a graph about it, to visualize them for people:

My teachers told me that people like that. Makes it easier to understand things.

A Brick in The Wall

Here’s my message to Donald Trump:

You’re a fat, ugly piece of shit, and you’re the sleaziest human being who has ever existed. I will debate you, any time any place. I will wipe the floor with you. Anyone could, all they have to do is create a spectacle like you do. You only won because you’re in on it all, and you faced a row of controlled opposition puppets set up for you disarm in another attempt to lie to and mislead the public.

You haven’t lived an honest day in your life. You couldn’t even imagine it. All you know is how to take things from people and step on those who you consider less than you. You embody literally everything I ended up hating about this world – pure, unadulterated greed that seeps into and pollutes everything. That tears up forests for casinos. That rapes the woodlands.

You don’t stop at the woods though, do you, Donald? Everyone knows that you abuse women. You’re a monster. You’re a dangerous animal backed into a corner right now, and no one else can see your true face but me.

You’re scared. I honestly don’t know how you sleep at night, like that dumb song that John Lennon wrote about Paul McCartney called How Do You Sleep?

When the press asked him about his reaction to the song, Paul answered that he slept pretty well. I’m sure the piles of money helped a lot. John and Paul made up towards the end of their lives, and I’m a firm believer in the John Lennon redemption arc theory (which I’ve never heard anyone else talk about except for me).

I sleep fine at night, Mr. Trump. I have three dogs, and I love them. The government hasn’t killed them yet. I have a beautiful, perfect, wife and son. I would die for them, obviously.

I believe the quote is – “Watergate does not bother me, does your conscious bother you?” Now tell the truth.”

But I would also die for the chance to change the world, and I can start doing it by telling you that you are the biggest piece of shit that I have ever laid my eyes upon. You are literally the easiest person to make fun of in history – you’re stupid, you look ridiculous now, although you were quite handsome in your youth, you’re a liar, a fraud, I mean, you bankrupt casinos, for God’s sake. The place where people walk in and literally just hand you cash, and you went bankrupt. The house wins every time, except for Donald Trump.

Of course, it was just money laundering for the Russian Mob. We all know about it, and you don’t even try to hide it. It’s the Guiliani-New York connection, and I can’t prove it, but I feel it in my bones that you were involved with 9/11. We all remember how you bragged afterwards about having the tallest building. Disgusting.

People don’t talk about it because they’re scared of you. They fear you. Congratulations to you, I guess. I hope it was worth it. I don’t know if you know that you’re the Biblical anti-Christ or not, but I suspect you do.

Speaking of easy to make fun of, the writers of Back to the Future literally said, on record, that they based the villain character off of you.

Sesame Street parodied you, for God’s sake, when they cast you as a villain in Donald Grump. I mean, I wouldn’t even believe this shit if I read it in a book – the nicest TV show of all time specifically pointed out that you as a person suck way more than other people. And people act like I’m crazy when I say that you’re the anti-Christ.

I guess the one thing we can't say is that we weren't warned about you. Unfortunately, we didn’t listen.

I’ll give credit where it’s due – you’re hilarious. You’re better at manipulating people and getting them to commit crimes and ruin their lives for you than anyone else I’ve ever seen. You’ve much more intelligent than most people think, and you’re clearly a master of magic and persuasion.

You surely know secrets that I can only dream of. You’ve done well, and everyone knows your name. You’re the most famous man in the world, and you have been for a decade now.

It’s impressive, and I was one of your biggest fans at first.

You see, before I married Witness 2, I was actively suicidal, but I didn’t really feel like killing myself. I always hoped someone else would do it for me, like a truck driver having a heart attack.

I knew exactly what you were from the very moment you came down the gold escalator and said that Mexicans rape people (which is a totally ridiculous and broadly untrue thing to say). However, you were much more entertaining and funny than I expected the “controlled demolition” that I knew would eventually follow-up 9/11 to be, so I supported what you were doing wholeheartedly.

You are obviously the wrecking ball, and you’ve done a spectacular job at it. You have changed the world. Because of you, the concept of truth no longer exists. Because of you, families hate each other. Because of you, people have died, like the kid in Portland you had murdered. People have given over their souls to hatred and prejudice again, given in to the darkest corners of the human psyche.

We’re talking things that haven’t been seen in 70, 80 years – the horrors of the holocaust. There were many camps where prisoners died and were treated horrifically during World War II, notably some ran by the Japanese in Chinese Manchuria called Unit 731, which was performing worse experiments on humans than even Mengele himself.

The angel of death. It's you.

You, with your fake hair and skin, your orange, ridiculous clown makeup, your baggy suits, your rumples and creases and long ties and fake smiles and the manipulation that everyone sees through but doesn’t talk about.

You embody everything about these horrors of war.

Inside the vacuous, empty chamber of your mouth, I see the death camps. I see the death knell of humanity.

You represent literally everything wrong with humanity – unfettered greed, contempt for those who are having a hard time, abusive language, making fun of people, bullying others, raping women, lying about money in your businesses, and following the media around like a puppy dog begging for interviews, calling them under fake names to talk about yourself.

But that’s not even the worst of it. Here’s the worst thing that you ever did (that I know of) – you gave millions of people false hope. You lied to them. You told them that you care about them, and that you care about this country. You told them that everyone else was wrong and bad, and full of conspiracies and lies, but really it was you all along.

You are the snake.

That is a monstrous thing to do. They believe in you, and millions of people love you. They even pray to you sometimes, which is obviously blasphemy and only lends credence to my Biblical anti-Christ argument.

I can’t call you sick, you’re far too intelligent for that. You’re a smooth operator, but I see right through you.

I know that you lied every day of your life. I know that no woman in your life ever wanted to be with you except for the money. I have seen Back to the Future, you know, and I know you pay off every woman who sleeps with you to not reveal your secrets. You know they’re disgusted by you. It wasn’t always your looks, but it has been for a long time.

No, Donald, they were disgusted by you because you’re just an observably shitty person, a bad dude who looks down on others and takes advantage of them. Normal people are disgusted by you because you couldn’t even figure out what a monkey sitting under a banana tree could – be nice to each other and things will get better.

You’re a filthy, rotten sack of shit, but I have to thank you for one thing – exposing the lies and hypocrisy of the Republican Party once and for all. I hated the way they slinked around like weasels, pretending to be Christians who cared about stewarding this country. I’m glad that you’re shameless about your filth, about the diseased and disordered emotions you pollute people with, about lying, and mistreating people. I don’t care about you, but I’m grateful for you – because it proved who everyone else was all along, too.

They were always lying hypocrites as well, and I always knew it. Obviously, I knew that I was right and most people were wrong because I am just better at picking up on patterns and perception in general than most people, which is one reason why I can play music well. However, it was never proven, and I assumed that I must just be wrong then if most people disagreed with me about things I deeply believed. People are not generally bad and I love them, but they are very deceived and confused, and often lash out or act maliciously in this state.

So thank you for bringing clarity and certainty to my life by showing me once and for all that I was actually right, because people are actually dumb enough to follow you.

I mean, you tell them to their faces that you don’t care about their votes or if they die on the tarmac. You regularly leave them stranded in the cold. As usual, you never pay a bill for the stadiums and arenas, and that’s why you can’t visit many of them.

And they still vote for you. It’s incredible, I have to admire it.

I would never hurt you. I give everyone a fair chance. Even you could repent of your sins and become a Christian through the love and mercy of Jesus Christ. I extend this offer to you in good will, and would proudly live beside you as a brother in Christ for all eternity if you choose to accept it.

I have never intentionally harmed another being in my life. Since I married Witness 2 and had a child, I am no longer suicidal in any sense of the word, and I have no plans to harm others or kill myself in any way. I would never kill myself, like I said, because you’re guaranteed to die anyways (remember, beaches and homelessness – not that bad after all, especially in the Caribbean).

I am of sound mind and doctrine, and I have a firm grasp of reality. I love my life, and I would never give it up willingly. I would never, ever kill myself because it would rob me of the satisfaction of finding out how you finally meet your maker. It will happen, and it terrifies you. It doesn't scare me at all.

I don't want to die, unless it was for the principles I believed in, and included the criteria I listed above. Then, I would gladly lay down my life to tell someone like you to your fat, stupid face that I hate you.

I should never have been capable of hate. I should have never even conceptualized it. It’s a filthy word, that blackens my mouth. I hate saying it the same way I hate you. It disgusts me.

I was taught to hate, by people like you. By men who wear suits every day and try to get other people to wear them too. I know you punched your son in the face and knocked him down in his college dorm in front of his friends for wearing a Yankees jersey instead of a suit to a baseball game. It’s in articles, for God’s sake. You’re a monster. You’re ridiculous. Everyone hates you, they just haven’t realized it yet because you’ve hypnotized and persuaded them to hate others instead for now.

You’re a bulbous, pulsing pustule that contains the distilled remains of all of humanity’s worst impulses. You’re literally the Biblical anti-Christ, and I’m not even being hyperbolic.

I’d say that I’ve never seen anyone as different from me, and that you’re like a different species from me, but it isn’t true, and I always tell the truth.

The truth is that we are quite similar, and I understand you fully.

I know exactly who you are, and I see the scared little boy hiding inside. In fact, everyone can see it, but like I said, they’re either scared of you or hypnotized into being stupid and following you.

So fuck you.

Fuck you for being everything that has always held me back in life. One of my favorite songs is “Another Brick in the Wall (Part 3 – the one they don’t play on the radio)”, and I think you exemplify it perfectly.

“All in all you were just another brick in the wall.”

Except you weren’t just a brick for people, were you, Donald? How many people ran into you and broke their backs? How many contractors did you put out of business, how many marriages and homes and families did you destroy, because you couldn’t even give people those stupid little pieces of paper that you promised them. For fair work.

No, you were the whole wall. In fact, you never shut the fuck up about “walls”, do you? Do you think that I don't know that your stupid wall is to keep us in, not others out?

One day, I’d like to cover the whole, ten-minute three song medley of “Another Brick in the Wall” and dedicate it to you. You are the exact opposite of the concept of coolness, in every single way. You're synthetic. You're a fake. You're a phony.

When she called you a disgrace at the debate, it was the truest thing I have ever heard said on TV.

Your skin reminds me of the visceral fat sprayed upon the walls in Sinclair’s The Butcher. Like the evil in that book, you take advantage of the poor and needy, and crush them to death in your apartments and factories.

I don’t know if you’ve ever put a gun to someone’s head and pulled the trigger, but I assume as someone with high-level Russian Mafia associations that you have. However, I can’t prove that. Personally, I never have. I would never kill someone except in self-defense, I would rather die than tar my soul forever by becoming a murderer.

But it doesn’t matter. You tightened the screws on so many people that I’m sure the divorces and suicides because of you directly number in the thousands. You destroyed families and you harmed children. You cavorted with Epstein, and everyone knows you gave your children to him. After you’d had them to yourself. Again, everyone knows. As I said, you don't even try to hide it - that's part of your magic.

You have more blood on your hands than anyone I’ve ever met, and you did it all with a smile. You’re proud of it, even. You enjoy the way people squeal for you over your money.

I have an article here from May 5th, 1980, and I’ll include it in this writing. It states that you personally evicted a stroke victim, and it contains a picture of your true face – the cold, fishy face that almost no one sees. The eyes that don’t care about anyone or anything but yourself. It probably bothered you at the time.

I won’t quote the article, if you’ll forgive me, because I don’t have a digitized copy.

However, I am happy to summarize it. Basically, you sent your goons to an old, sick woman’s apartment because you could charge more rent if she was out. You couldn’t even wait for her to die. Even worse, you couldn’t even do it with dignity. You turned it into a spectacle, you embarrassed her. A dying woman, and you personally made her weep and mourn in front of strangers and her friends. You enjoy doing that to women, don’t you? Embarrassing them the same way that they embarrassed you in the past?

I know you kicked out black people and refused to rent to them. Woody Guthrie’s even wrote a song about it, for God’s sake, referencing you and your father’s hatred, greed, and prejudice by name. How much more clear can this get for people? And still, no one listens. They laugh at me, but they listen to you.

All you do is lie to them, and all I want to do is tell the truth.

I don’t care who you are, I don’t care if you’re the President of the Universe – I will debate anyone, any time, any place. As long as it is in good faith and I am allowed to have my books, sources, and other writings with me. I am fine with open microphones and do not require anyone to be muted.

You see, Mr. Trump, I’m not scared of you. At all. I don’t even think about you that much. You’re interesting to me, and you’re still kind of funny sometimes, although it’s all grown quite stale and old. I don't even care about you. I have only thought about you maybe twenty or thirty times in my life until you ran for president, including one time on the trip to New York when we walked past your towers and my Dad told me you were an arrogant asshole, and only an idiot would but his own last name on a building.

At the time, I admired what you had built, and I could why you liked large, metal signs with you name on them. Looking back though, I think that he was right.

I’ve hated living in this world for so many years that I literally don’t care if you bag me up, ship me to a CIA black site, and torture me to death. In fact, I would find that hilarious. It would be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of. It would fit the story, too. In fact, if this were a fictional book, it's the exact ending I would choose for it.

I have only thought about you maybe twenty or thirty times in my life until you ran for president, including one time on the trip to New York when we walked past your towers and my Dad told me you were an arrogant asshole, and only an idiot would put his own last name on a building.

At the time, I admired what you had built, and I could see why you liked large, metal signs with your name on them. Looking back though, I think that he was right.

I haven’t done anything illegal through this ministry. The first amendment protects my right to free speech, and to disagree with anyone about anything. Even you. I am legally allowed to say that I think the US government and the Synagogue of Satan International Organized Crime Syndicate did 9/11, and people are legally allowed to agree with me. And I am legally allowed to say that I think you're their little bitch boy, and you would squeal like a pig the first time you faced someone who wasn't scared of you. You're not even a good criminal.

I haven’t broken a single law in the process of doing this ministry, and like I said, I would never intentionally harm another human being or myself at any time. I wouldn’t even kill an insect unless it posed an immediate threat to me or was in my house. Killing insects for no reason is stupid, but I bet you like to do that too, now that I think about it.

Because you’re nothing but a spoiled bully. That’s it. You’re not even a good bully though, you’re weak. There’s far too many things about you that people would make fun of if they weren’t scared of you. You couldn’t fight your way out of a plastic bag. Without your money and loyal men backing you up, you’re nothing. You couldn’t stand up to me even if I had both hands tied behind my back.

You’re not even worthy of licking my shoe, but like I said, I will forgive you if you choose to repent for lying to people and become a Christian.

You’re like a woman, primping and preening in front of a mirror and wearing makeup. It’s disgusting. You and your fat little sycophant, pig boy Vance, and his eyeliner.

Disgusting.

You are phonies. I’m sorry if this hurts you, but every word of it is true. Truthfully, I’ve wanted to say it for a long time. I still don’t really believe that anyone will listen to me, although Witness 2 has done an incredible job with this ministry. If people listened to me for once in my life, it would make me happy. And it would make sense.

You are literally the worst and most morally-vacuous person I have ever seen, but you seem to know that. Not only that, but you seem to enjoy it.

It astounds me. I don’t understand it. You don’t even make sense.

You’re a walking whirlwind of lies and bullshit, a perfume cloud of toxic concealer, bronzer, and various other makeup things that I don’t know the name of. Honestly, I can’t even imagine the smell when you walk in the room. However, I’m sure it pales in comparison to the stench of fear and death that makes people recoil from you.

You’re captivating. You know exactly what people want, and you’re happy to give it to them. Unless it’s money or a paycheck for a fair job well done. No, you deal more in hatred, lies, and poison to the soul.

You’re the devil, if I’ve ever seen him. I know you. I believe that you know me, as well.

We’ve done this dance before, probably. Remember that good and evil are just cosmic forces playing out like electromagnetism and electricity. It’s not morally right or wrong from some vast perspectives, it just is. Like a rock on a planet no one will ever see. You don't matter to me at all, until you start stepping on bugs.

But these are real people, and real people have lives and families to take care of. Good and evil, objectively, do exist from my viewpoint, and obviously, in this message, I consider myself to be good and you to be evil.

You remind me of Jafar at the end of Aladdin, a giant black cosmic deity obsessed with fulfilling his own powers and desires. It’s absurd, and you look ridiculous just like he did in the movie. And just like in that movie, no woman ever liked him. He forced them to, or enticed them with riches. You can’t force someone to love you, that part was true.

You have probably learned that by now.

People love money, but not really. Money is just energy in a stored form, they love what money can do for them.

No, people don’t really love money. They love the nice things that it brings them.

And just like money, no one will ever love you.

Just like money, you are worthless.

Just like money, you don’t make sense.

As I stated above, I am willing to meet you in a good faith debate at any time and any location. Unlike you, I actually mean it. I have never been scared of debating people like you are,

I pose no threat to anyone, and I swear a solemn vow to not harm you, as I would not harm any human being or animal.

I would appreciate a response to this offer.

I’ve been writing this book for the last 24 hours (author’s edit at the end: now nearing 60), and I have a severe headache. It’s so bad and unusual that I am worried I might even have a stroke, but that’s very unlikely. However, I have been told that I have high blood pressure, and I verified that it is true as a CNA. Maybe it's from the stress of being lied to all the the damn time.

By now, my darling wife is annoyed that I’ve been frantically typing at a laptop all day, and I have apologized for acting weird.

I’ll describe the scene (remember, people like anecdotes).

Her soft, golden hair sparkled as if it was freshly mown hay in the morning sun on a farm you’ve only been to in dreams. She turned to me, her beautiful mouth agape like a ripe strawberry – “Are you ever going to finish that? What, exactly, is taking so long?”

I told her that God told me I had to write this, edit it briefly, and then distribute it immediately for public consumption. Until now, I always felt like this was the dumbest story in the world. It must be, I mean, it never “sold”. I never “made it”. My dream never came true.

She was annoyed, and said that she already knew that but I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute and rushed it. It made me smile, because that was how it went with every school assignment I ever had, too. I just didn’t care about them enough to get into it, I only cared to learn about why music had the ability to make me feel things because wood and metal moved air.

If this isn’t true, I can’t live with it. I can’t have false hope that people will, for once in my life, actually listen to me and let me speak for a change. I can’t believe that I’m a Biblical Prophet if it isn’t true, as I’m a firm believer in rigorous epistemological standards. I never wanted to be a cult leader, I simply wanted to be a musician. And by the way, this is not a cult (Anthropology note: technically, it is. All religions started as cults, and it’s also an accurate way to describe early Christianity).

That’s why, in a few days, on New Years, Witness 2 and I will be shutting down this ministry. Our website will go offline. The Discord will close. The emails will close. No one will send us money, so the charity will cease. We will have to start putting things back on the shelves at Walmart again, rather than actually being able to get what we need for once in my life. I’ve been poor for a long time now, and even when I was selling weed, I spent all the money I made buying other drugs, better ones than weed. I considered saving it for the future or using it to pay off the small amount of loans that I was taking out, but I decided that since I knew the world as I knew it would end within the next 10 or 20 years anyways, I might as well just have fun with it. I think it turned out to be a good decision, and systems as fucked up, twisted, and complicated as these just can’t last forever. Something’s gotta give, and America is no exception.

One time, a coworker at my CNA job mentioned that his favorite food was gas station hot dogs. I jokingly said to my manager that he had been poor too long, and he laughed. My managers have always loved me, but I’m not sure why. Then, I realized that it was true about myself too. Hot dogs from Walmart are one of my favorite foods.

He died a few years after that, after I had moved to be with Witness 2. He wasn’t old, and it was apparently some kind of heart thing, alone in his apartment on the bad side of the town that I grew up in. I assumed it was from all the years of drug and alcohol abuse. I will always remember him, his name was Ian, and he taught me how to be a CNA. I will probably always be poor and have almost nothing, and that’s OK. It’s a lot easier to get out of bed when you have less things to worry about breaking, like appliances and the roof to your house.

But this story isn’t over yet. It’s kind of like in The Never-Ending Story, when the main character realizes that he is actually in the story, and the book he was reading had come to life. The characters were real. Only he can save the young Empress, stuck floating in the Void, the “Nothing”, by giving her a new name. He chooses “Moon Child” and saves the day. This is literally true and it is my life. I write this as a solemn vow to God that this Word is True.

In the beginning was the Word. A new song. Something that didn’t sound quite like anything else that anyone had ever heard. A name. By the way, Dear Reader, the small white Chihuahua that I chose to replace the one that the government killed (who was the most perfect and beautiful dog I have ever met), looks like the white Dragon the character rides euphorically at the end named Falco.

I even asked her that one time. As I said, I like to make people laugh. With a my face full of intrigue and mystery, as if I was going to reveal a dark secret, I told Witness 2 I had to ask her a serious question. She looked at me with concern in her eyes, and I said, "Does Winston remind you of the white dragon/dog named Falcor at the end of the Never-Ending Story too?"

She laughed. She said that he does, actually.

He is beautiful, strong, and majestic. He doesn’t really care what anyone thinks, and he always does what he wants. He is a good boy, and he has never once bitten anyone or really snapped at anyone. I named him Winston after the main character from 1984. His love for Julia reminds me of my love for Witness 2, although obviously I would never betray her even if they did strap a cage with rats in it to my face. They’d have to kill me, and I wouldn’t mind that as much anyways.

It’s kind of like that, except this is real life, and I swear upon my Holy Soul itself that every single word in this testimony is true. I would die before I renounce one word of these events as I experienced them.

And you’re in this story too, Dear Reader. For the first time, a book has come to life for you. You can keep this story alive. All you have to do it believe in me, and believe in my song. Just listen to it, and send it to others. If enough people do this, I won’t shut down the ministry. Help me go viral, and I’ll keep this story alive. As usual, I expect nothing. I also need to shower. No one seem to care about anything, but I know that deep down, it’s there. I can wake up anyone and make them care given enough time, effort, and good faith reasoning. It’s just exhausting, and I hate doing it. That’s why books are a good form of communication, because no one can ever speak back to you right away, and you can think very carefully about what to say.

My Confession

I have a confession to make. I have never actually paid for a copy of Ableton Live in my life, they were all cracked copies from the Romanian guy or my genius friend where I grew up, Don. I’m also sorry about that. If I had ever sold a single song, I would be happy to pay for them. In fact I admire what the guys at Ableton (and the engineers at Native Instruments) do more than literally anything else in the entire world. Creating music software must be a fascinating job, and I assume that anyone that has that job must enjoy it greatly. Maybe that’s what they meant by “find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Maybe I should have just gotten that Media Arts and Technology Degree and applied for a job with you guys.

When I was a child, I taught myself AppleScript and Blender, but I decided that music was more fun and potentially rewarding for myself. I also find your pricing for Ableton quite reasonable at $750 dollars, and I encourage anyone reading it to support them with your money if you are looking for a Digital Audio Workstation (we call them “DAWs” but I hate saying that word). There should be a better word for this software, but it’s too bad that people can’t just make up words and use them. Oh well. Anyways, I truly am sorry for using your software without a valid license.

My new laptop is my favorite thing that I have ever owned. I was only able to get this laptop because of this ministry, and I had to thank Witness 2 for that. Altogether, with the copy for Chase, the laptops, parts, labor, and software, this project cost me close to $9,000. Unfortunately, I had to do it because of a mysterious and persistent screen issue on my music studio laptop, and losing the setup the way I had it was not a viable option.

Altogether, with the base from the Romanian guy and what my genius friend did in California, I would estimate that this laptop has about $25k worth of music software and plugins on it. I also bought everything I ever wanted for it (within reason, of course. Mostly Kontakt instruments – a pan flute, organ, harp, and a few other instruments that I was missing). I love Kontakt more than anything else I’ve ever used except Ableton itself. Kontakt is magic. I could write another book about samplers probably if anyone would like to read it.

In fact, I consider this laptop to be the greatest musical mind ever built. It has so many arpeggiators (four), plugins, and musical devices in it that its seems almost conscious to me. It whispers to me, and guides me when I make the songs. It has a rainbow keyboard that continuously pulses and changes like a psychedelic river of light. I love it so much. If I were to estimate how many different sounds and presets I have access to, it would be probably less than 100,000 but definitely more than 10,000.

I always made music while sitting in bed, but for this laptop I made an exception. I bought the most expensive and large hardshell case I could find and a cooling pad with fans in it that would plugin through USB, and serve as a permanent resting place that would help it diffuse heat more effectively, which is the #1 issue for music production laptops. I finally have a music office.

It’s my dream come true – a laptop that can actually get far enough to make a good song without slowing down and lagging so much that I have to stop before I get there. This is the first song on my new laptop, and it’s why I was able to finally make a good song that I like. I don’t like most of my other songs, although I will always love the ones I recorded with Witness 2. I usually end up stopping, because the laptops slow down too much and they start to break. Making music is probably the hardest thing a computer will ever do, from a processing standpoint, but that will likely change.

When I made this song, it was like I had reached the finishing screen or some secret congratulations level inside of a video game. “I’m here… and I can keep going?”

All I ever wanted was a computer that would stop lagging when the song got good, and I finally have one.

I could make a thousand songs like this one. I could make a million, if I had more than one lifetime. I love it. I would, even if no one else was around to listen to them, although I would really hate that. I mean, like I said, what else am I doing with my life anyways? Writing a book no one will read?

I love making them, it fulfills my soul like nothing else quite does. Music is like food to me. Sugar cookies.

In fact, I hate eating food. I have always found it discomforting and weird, although I obviously learned to enjoy the different flavors, and I am even quite a good cook now, according to Witness 2. I usually ate as fast as possible in order to get it over with, which my Mom hated.

Recently, I started to literally taste music. Some sort of synesthesia deal. I love it. It reminds me of when M and I, my other best friend, found a portable cotton candy maker somewhere. All you had to do was pour normal sugar in, and white, wispy fluffs of pure sugar clouds would come rolling out towards you.

I loved it, it was one of my favorite things I’ve ever seen. We even sold it to some people. Easy money, once again, and it made both me and them happy. Selling cotton candy makes the world a better place, maybe we can start telling kids that – although the dentist associations might complain. Yes, I like Jack Handy, as I said.

Seriously though, how hard was that? Give the people what they want - cotton candy, a fair deal, a firm handshake, and something that makes them smile. Leave the world a little better than you found it. You’re telling me I could figure it out, and yet all of these men wearing suits with college degrees couldn’t even figure out how to get in a room together without plotting out the murder and exploitation of strangers. By now? We should have figured it out.

Like everything else in this book, it’s a metaphor and a thematic element that explains a little part of my story to you. After all, my English teachers always taught me to write using foreshadowing, and by weaving contextual themes and messages throughout the book. Maybe one day, I will figure out why they always liked me.

I remember learning about the great authors of the past, and their books that changed the world. One thing I noticed was that, like John Lennon, once they had made tons of money and were famous enough to do anything they wanted to do, they never really did anything.

They bought big houses, enjoyed life, had families. People loved them. Some people worshipped them. That’s nice, and probably made them happy. But it’s all completely meaningless.

And all you’d have to do is say one simple line enough times: “The government rapes people.”

And it’s objectively, verifiably true, in so many different ways both literal and metaphorical. It would definitely get people's attention.

And yet they don’t

It doesn’t make sense. I don’t understand it. You’re guaranteed to die anyways, why not have some fun and try to change the world even a little bit more? What if there really was a better way than this? To be fair, John Lennon tried his best. I will always love and understand him. Like I said, maybe he wasn’t ready, but more likely, the people weren’t ready. They didn’t understand. They were blind, and they could not see. Though they had ears, they could not hear.

But he heard the music of the spheres.

I love his song called “Revolution”, both versions of it. In one of them, he sings the following:

You say you want a Revolution
Well, you know
We all wanna change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all wanna change the world

But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out

Don't you know it's gonna be alright

You say you got a real solution
Well, you know
We'd all love to see the plan
You ask me for a contribution
Well, you know
We are doing what we can

But if you want money for people with minds that hate
All I can tell you is brother you have to wait

Don't you know it's gonna be alright

You say you'll change the constitution
Well, you know
We all want to change your head
You tell me it's the institution
Well, you know
You'd better free your mind instead

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow

I quoted almost the whole song, because if you read this far, I figured you’d probably finish the book and want to read them fully. I love these lyrics, and I agree with them completely. I feel his disillusionment with society and its so-called rebels.

However, I wonder now if he ever considered writing a book, as like I said, it’s an excellent form of communication. He published some absurdist cartoons in something he called “The Daily Howl”, and he “wrote”, obviously, quite a lot, but I don’t think he ever sat down and wrote a serious book about his sober, thoughtful take on the world. I wonder what it would say if Nixon didn’t have him killed as part of MK Ultra and to cover up his ongoing immigration and deportation lawsuit. Nixon hated John Lennon, and I can see that. Typically, Republicans don’t get along with musicians very well.

I don’t know the full story, maybe he was writing a book and that’s why they killed him. Who knows. Unfortunately, 9/11 happened after he died, so we will probably never get his take on that, but I’m sure he would have agreed with me that the US government was behind it, and given enough time, the complexities behind the Synagogue of Satan as well.

In fact, I could do that with anyone. I think that Einstein said that if you can’t explain something to a child, you don’t understand it. I think that this quote is true. Really, this stuff is not actually hard to understand at all. It’s like the relative minor – literally just a finger and change 1 out of 3 notes and you’re done. And people look at me like I’m an alien when I say this kind of stuff. It's not hard to convince people of this stuff, but it takes a great deal of effort.

By the way, I edited two books with Witness 2 to make some extra money. They were both terrible, the worst books I have ever read. They didn’t make sense. The stories were mixed up, jumbled, and pointless. It could have been an email.

I still don’t understand why people write books about things that aren't true. I mean, I do. They get bored. But non-fiction is much more fun.

Anyways, so there I was learning about the great authors of the past and how to write an autobiography to change the world, and that people really like entertaining vignettes or anecdotes.

Unfortunately, my life seemed pretty dumb, and I didn’t think that anyone would ever find my story to be interesting. I thought about it deeply, and considered all of the possibilities.

I decided that music was probably more likely than writing to allow me to change the world, since most people thought that books were boring and music was cool. Little did I know, they would stop liking music at all apparently a few years after this, and instead only enjoy lyrics about committing crimes and songs with one note at a time. However, I still think I made the right choice, as most people still think that reading is boring.

Before I wrote this book, I thought deeply today about all of it - if Witness 2 and I were really people worth following. Then, I thought about the anecdote thing, you know, that people like.

At the time, I was bringing in our trash can. Our son loves to watch the trash men come by, and I always appreciate them. I understand it's not a bad career.

They must have had an off day, because trash from our neighbors, who own the house we rent, had strewn itself throughout the street. It wasn't too bad, mostly Christmas refuse like cardboard and Styrofoam. It could have been the wind.

I figured that I might as well do it since no one else would, and I was obviously the youngest male out of all of us and it wasn't a big deal. It took about 20 seconds.

I thought about all the trash that I had seen in my life that no one picked up. I don't even pick up trash unless it directly inconveniences me, like my landlords trash blowing around in the street (looks bad).

Then I thought about all the people who not only don't pick up trash, but intentionally put it there instead of a trash can or other designated receptacle, like a grocery bag.

It doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand it.

I thought about whether or not we would be good leaders that would be worth following for people. I sighed, and the winds of change kissed my face,

I decided that I thought we probably would be, because, in my opinion, we are usually right and other people are usually wrong.

Then I remembered that quote about the best leaders being those who didn't actually even want to do it, and I smiled.

That's another reason.

As I picked up the trash out of the street, I wondered if there was any more reasons why we might be good at leading people.

"Probably not", I said to myself.

One thing is true for sure - this is the easiest book I have ever written. And the fastest. You might think it's because of the low page count, Dear Reader, but the cause lies elsewhere.

It was easy to write because it's the truth. Like usual, I didn't lie, so I didn't have to worry about what to say. It was also, by far, the most fun to write.

Like a song, I simply put my hands to the page and it flows.

I Am Not a Crazy Person

I'll start to wrap this all up (it's good to bridge between your climax and conclusion, so audience understands why the tone is changing, but "in conclusion"

I remember one time sitting in my car outside my grandparents house in my car, weeping loudly because I knew that everyone thought that I was insane.

This was pretty unusual for me, since overly dramatic displays of negative emotions are a big social turnoff for most people. However, I broke down (more car issues), and I cried.

"I'm not insane", I assured my family, even though the people at the music store in the Bay Area had told me that I was.

They told me that they believed me, but I didn't know if they were telling the truth.

My grandpa gave me a handkerchief, and I blew my nose. He let me keep it.

Every moment of my life that I have seen my grandparents, they have been kind to me (both). I love them very much.

I've never met anyone except my parents and grandparents who was kind to me in every single moment, and I find that to be a minor miracle. Of course, my wife tells me it's simply part of the MK Ultra experiment. But maybe they didn't even know about it. Some questions you will never know the answer to, although it's helpful when your wife is a prophet who talks to God.

I don't believe that anyone I've ever met has intentionally tried to . It would take strong, undeniable evidence before I could believe anything like that. As far as I could tell, they loved me and I loved them too, and that was actually true for everyone I ever met.

It's simple and it makes sense.

"LOVE one another"

"Be excellent to each other"

If only there was someone around to tell us these things. Maybe a book would be a good form of communication for them.

Ending- unlike most things that I write, I didn't have the concluding sentence for this book planned out before I started writing it.

However, I have to admit that it fits perfectly. Like everything Witness 2 says to me, it fits like a glove. Like a pitchers glove, who is controlling the game. Sometime I think back to those days and sigh.

"Too bad I chose music over baseball, maybe I would have hit the big times and made some money", I thought to myself.

Of course, I'm kidding about that.

It's possible that other people don't actually like the things that I also don't like, such as Republican politicians, their jobs, school assignments citations, and police officers, and being lied to, but that they just don't know what would be best for them or how to express their desire for it. Perhaps, like I was saying, people are just not ready for that kind of intellectual or epistemological revolution.

This is a work of non-fiction. I've never read a book where the author did that, but I always thought that when I was a kid it would have helped me know if that Roald Dahl story about seeing through cards was true. Deep down I knew it wasn't. But that didn't mean that it wasn't possible.

However, this book is a true story, and it did happen to me. Some names have been changed, and some have been left the same if I was pretty sure they won't mind. Some people are just cool like that, and I can usually tell who they are. It's my life, and until today, I thought it was a dumb story about a guy who screwed up his life that no one would ever want to listen to. At least, that's what I told the people who asked me how I ended up working at the nursing home. I was joking, and I also mentioned that it turned out to be harder to "sell" songs than I thought it would be, due to people's tastes changing beyond me and the proliferation of technology that made music easier to produce and share.

But I really believed it.

"Aw, honey," they would say to me sometimes (family and visitors always liked me).

"Don't say that. It's not true."

I honestly felt like it was. I felt like an idiot pretty much all of the time for not just finishing college when it would have been one of the most fun, easy, and profitable things that I have ever done. People pitied me like a beggar on the street, who's irrational love for making songs in Ableton Live had somehow crippled him.

But, you know what, I have fucking principles, and I'm truly sorry to everyone, but this society is bullshit and I'm tired of pretending that its not. And Pink Floyd was right when they wrote Another Brick in the Wall.

Like I have always said, I would die for these principles under certain criteria.

However, I don't have the energy to argue with people and try to change their minds anymore, besides writing books, which like I said is a very effective form of communication. People are allowed to believe whatever they want to, and sometimes, they even have good reasons for it.

I really would rather not do this. Like anything else, I procrastinated and waited until the last minute. It only started because of our stupid fucking jobs that people make us go to every day so we can't do fun and cool things we want to do, but instead chase their little pieces of paper around so we can afford to keep living in our little boxes.

The More Rational Worldview started because of the Covid Vaccine. I was pretty convinced by Witness 2 that it was the Mark of the Beast, and I thought it was likely we would need a letter for an exemption for her public-service, government-funded job in the educational field. I figured I should probably get a head start on that for her, so I wrote up a few pages. It was like this book, it flowed like water. It was the first time I had ever written for fun in my life, not about something I was forced to write about. It was remarkably similar to playing music. It was fun and easy. It made sense. I liked it.

It started out at 11 pages. When I finished, I stood in the kitchen, alone, and jokingly asked God, "I'm finished with my essay, where can I turn it in for my grade?"

Then, it turned into 40 pages. Then, I decided that I might as well write a book about 9/11, since I had been wanting to do that for over a decade but never had the time for it (little pieces of paper, boxes, homelessness). Then, I remembered The Signature of God by Grant Jeffrey, and how it has genuinely changed my life and allowed me to become a Christian again in rational good faith, with the evidence and logic on my side this time. I figured I might as well summarize that for people in a way that was easier for them to understand, as well as adding much of my own take on things and findings from my own research. It was fun and easy, and took about three months, with a month to edit.

I understand why most people don't write books to communicate, because it is probably harder for them to find an editor when they aren't married to an English teacher. It's a joke, to tell you the truth I have no idea why someone would pay money to an "editor" in the first place when they could do it themselves for free.

Editing is fun and easy. To err is human, but to edit is divine. I think someone said that one time, and I think it's true.

I asked for a sign when my Dad baptized me in the river near the house I grew up in - something with an animal like what Jesus got at his baptism (dove).

I ended up getting it, and someone's golden dog came up to me as I was coming out of the water, and basically hugged me or sort of jumped on me.

It was a beautiful moment, and it made me happy. There was a video of it for a while on my grandparents tablet computer.

However, if you had told me someone would want to read a book about it one day, I would have laughed at you. I would have thought that was hilarious, and clearly not true. I still would listen to you in good faith, though, like I always do.

I enjoy laughing. I always have. It's fun, and easy. It makes sense. No one ever gets mad at you or calls you crazy when they are laughing because of something you said, I can tell you that much.

If someone were to ask me how my MK Ultra experience was, I would laugh. But I would say that, honestly, it was pretty good. I can't complain.

But I know that isn't true for most of the other people who went through it. Remember that I personally re-added the word "rape" to the MK Ultra Wikipedia. It's true - I, Witness 1, proved before all mankind in the greatest public register that we have ever built, that the government rapes people. And I did using simply a few primary sources. It was fun, and easy.

Funnily enough, it made sense. Because it is actually true.

People look at me like I'm an alien when I say this stuff though, I'm telling you, Dear Reader. I don't fit in anywhere.

I would say the same thing about life. Pretty good, can't complain (is this all there is?)

Likewise, I know that this isn't true for the vast majority of people who have ever lived.

And the fact that it's not God's fault, or random chance, or even just cruel nature- or even desperate, hungry men looking for bread to feed their children- but men wearing suits who had it all who were at fault leaves me shattered. It's bullshit, and it's a hill that I am willing to die on (if certain criteria are met).

I have met them, and I looked into their eyes. I made them love me. I even made them fear me sometimes when I played music. I can always read people through their eyes.

For these people, there's nothing there. Empty eyes. They gave away the light in exchange for trinkets.

It doesn't make sense.

As I write this, I'm supposed to be sleeping. But I'm not. I can't sleep anyways. If I go to sleep, by the time I wake up and get started I will be in editing mode and the story will be over

But my story isn't over yet. And I need to finish it now, while the pure, government-funded LSD courses through my mind. As I said, definitely one of the best experiences of my life. Can't complain. Thank you for not literally raping me, although this book is obviously about my metaphorical rape in many different ways if you hadn't caught that by now. Mainly, because of the forest that they tore up when I was a child, as that really got to me, and it still bothers me a lot when I think about it.

No one should feel vulnerable and exposed Iike those dirt and rocks were. Although I've never been afraid around people in my life, I understand a little bit how a woman feels when a man holds her down and penetrates her against her will.

Naked. Violated. Exposed. Vulnerable. Hurt. Broken. Wounded in a way that you could never heal from. Obviously, no one deserves to feel this way. Some things should have never even been thought of, and we'd all be a lot happier.

I honestly wonder who came up with the concept of rape. I bet they didn't do very well at parties wherever they lived.

It's like people haven't even figured out that if you actually talk to women, they are more likely to want to have sex with you. So we rape. And kidnap and torture sometimes too, just for fun I guess.

It doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand it. It makes me deeply sad and ashamed to be human. There is definitely something deeply wrong with us such that we still kill thousands of people per day and only a roomful of people controls as much wealth as approximately half the planet.

Something should definitely be done about it. If only there was an overarching... wait. That won't work.

I tried to tell people, but they just laughed at me. I wrote a book about it, and some people cared. Some people even sent us money. That was nice. It made me happy. It made sense. I wrote a book they liked, so they paid me what they felt like a fair value for it was out of their own freedom and volition. I like that.

Some musicians do that with their music, especially Radiohead. Witness 2 and Nick love Radiohead more than anyone else I have ever met.

If I were to ever "sell" a song, perhaps I would do something like that. Unfortunately, I still haven't found anyone willing to give me money because they liked a song that I made. I will keep you all updated on that as things progress, and it's the only other unfulfilled dream that I have (besides seeing the Carribean Sea one day).

I don't really like movies, but I did watch the Hunger Games series recently, to see if I could figure out what Witness 2 was always telling me about her dreams. I really enjoyed them, and consider them a fine work of young adult fiction. I also really enjoyed the sequel, about the young president Snow as he came into power through mystery, deception, intrigue, violence, and even murder.

However, my favorite part of the movie - and I was sort of expecting this but not really - I had read the books in high school out of my sister's room one night while I was high and bored - was when the main character unexpectedly swings her bow up and shoots not President Snow, but the new president, the revolutionary, because she was just as disgusted by her as she was the old one. She wanted to send the rich people's children to die in the hunger games now, to teach them a lesson. This is obviously absurd and a terrible idea.

As I watched it, I thought about the unlikely nature of a revolution on that scale. A thousand different unlikely things had to add up for it to happen.

I thought it was sad that she would probably have to die, but obviously I knew that she had plot armor. That really tends to help main characters who live out dystopian hero stories. Unfortunately, in real life it doesn't exist. Also, bullet proof vests are not really convenient or reliable in the way that people think they are usually.

I won't sleep much tonight. The night before last I didn't sleep at all, because I had to finish the greatest song of all time (for now).

The greatest song of all time isn't done yet - I still have to add the guitar solo. In fact, the truth is, it will never end. It will go on forever and only get better.

You can help me sing this new song. Literally all you have to do is believe these words that I am writing. It shouldn't be that hard, because it is true and it makes sense, but I know that other people find reading comprehension more difficult than me sometimes, and that is OK.

I never judged anyone for not understanding something. It can't be helped. It frustrated me, in the same way that making a dubstep growl that actually sounded good and wouldn't be embarrassing at parties frustrated me. But it never made me angry.

Perhaps, one day I will figure it out. I have had good luck with books as a communication method, so I might give that a shot.

The forest never came back. To this day, even if you demolished the buildings and replanted it, it wouldn't be the same. That would take thousands of years of dedicated ecological management at this point, which would be absurd.

But most things are absurd. I have earned very few things from life, except about music, but that is definitely one of them. So maybe we should consider giving long-term ecology and forest management a shot. Unfortunately, no one ever listens to me.

If only there was some kind of overarching body of authorities that could look into things like this and seriously fund them with our tax dollars... Hmmm...

It's almost like there might actually be a better way than this.

A better way to live.

Eudamonia.

The highest common good for mankind.

If only someone was around to tell us what it was.

Maybe it is philosophy.

I already know what will happen when I send this book to the internet. But I didn't need God to tell me. My English teachers already did. It's obvious while I'm writing it that this is the most perfect thing I've ever written. Because it's true. Because it makes sense. And I know, for the first time in my life, that people are ready to listen to me for a change. After all, I would want to read this story. That's why I'm writing it instead of working on the Greatest Song in the World. Like I said, non-fiction books have always been my favorite.

If this doesn’t happen, I’ll be fine. I have my beautiful wife and son. They are perfect. They make sense. They are logic, they are reason. They are my very being myself, and I love them more than anything else. She is my happy ending, and I could truly never ask God for more thing in good faith as long as I have her.

This ministry has been fun, I have truly enjoyed it. I cried today and thanked Witness 2 when I realized that she made one of my dreams come true – she found me a group of people who believed in my music. Who believed in me. That’s actually all I’ve ever wanted in life. People who would listen to me, stop murdering each other, and tell me that I am good at making songs. Thank you to anyone who actually reads this for giving me that.

More than that, I wanted to give them what I had as a child – those sweet vibrations from my Dad’s speakers. I wanted them to know the sweet taste of music, too.

More even than that, I wanted to change the world. I always thought it would be a song that did it, but I was wrong (I know I’ve used this line a few times).

It was a book.

If you believe in me, send this to someone. Keep this story alive. It’s true, it’s my life, and it’s happening right now. I didn’t even believe it until yesterday (it’s not today anymore). If it doesn’t happen, I will assume that I was right as usual, and no one would ever want to read a book that I wrote. I am quite used to being simultaneously right, disappointed, and not listened to, so this shouldn’t be too much of an issue for me.

Jesus saved my life. I believe that he is the Savior of Mankind, the Eternal Son of God who came in the flesh and suffered and died for us. I'm truly sorry for those that this may offend. If you believe this too, join me.

By the way, being left handed is important because everyone else is playing the guitar upside down and they don't even know it. Your left hand is the one that has to do more complex operations, whereas your right hand only has to go up and down in a certain order. Obviously, you want the hand that you write with to be the one on the neck making chords and playing scales.

My new name is Witness 1, and this is my story.

I now understand the first book title that I ever read. I’m ready for a Chance to Die.

P.S. - To my beautiful, perfect wife who amazes me every day with her beauty and grace - I am sorry I didn't believe you at first. It's true, I am. You see, I also took a statistics class in college, and based on my research and understanding, the probability of me being a Biblical Prophet was extremely low, given the relative human population size vs. average frequency of people who are prophets. I am sorry. I love you more than anything, and I always will. That is also true. No one else could do for me what she does.

In my defense, I almost always said that I believed her, and I really did deep down inside but was rightfully skeptical, listened to her in good faith, supported the ministry, and allowed her a good few years to prove to me that she really talked to God, conversationally, in person. She did.

I'm sorry. I love you.

Two of the most important sentences ever. I wish we used them more (the royal we).

-Your faithfully loving Husband