I moved to Houston at the beginning of 2016 feeling optimistic about life, because I had a loving girlfriend and a new professional credential that would allow me to earn more than minimum wage. Little did I know, my year was going to be destroyed by ordinary people under ordinary circumstances. If you live near the poverty line, the same routine catastrophes are going to devastate your life over and over again until society makes some serious changes.
I won’t say what I do for a living, but I will say it it’s intellectually and physically demanding. I eat healthily, drink lots of water, take supplements and stretch daily, but my body always hurts somewhere. I endure it though because I make $25 per hour, which is almost five times the minimum wage in Texas. Unfortunately, I can’t work full time, because I would live in constant pain until I suffered a career-ending injury. But I make enough money to survive and can spend a decent amount of time pursuing my passion of writing, which shouldn’t be too much to ask in life.
My employer makes about $1700 off the work I do every two weeks. Of that, I get to keep about $600, which covers my rent, utilities, and cell phone. So I spend two weeks out of every month breaking my body just to survive until the next month. If I don’t have any fun, I can save about $500 per month, and since I spend most of my free time writing, that’s easy to do.
Rather, it should be, except every single month of 2016 I kept getting hit with major unexpected bills. The contract my girlfriend signed with her landlord before I moved in required us to pay half the cost of repairs to his dilapidated house. I had to replace my glasses, shoes, vacuum, and lawn mower. Now that I had a girlfriend, gifts became a mandatory expense at each major holiday. Every time I managed to save more than a thousand dollars, some disaster of the month would knock me back to the start.
My biggest recurring bill was truck repairs. I’d already spent $700 repairing my sort-of-new truck in Colorado. Even though the engine didn’t have many miles, it had spent almost 20 years baking in hot Texas summers. The tires and half the engine had deteriorated to the point of failure. After spending $1200 on repairs in the first half of 2016, the engine overheated and warped a head gasket.
Having been ripped off by enough mechanics to distrust them, I researched internet reviews until I found a place that presented itself as a good Christian business and had positive reviews.
I was able to have my truck towed there for “free,” because I get my auto insurance through USAA and pay an extra $2 per month for roadside assistance. $2 sounds like a good deal, until you realize, over the years I’ve been using them, I’ve given USAA $10k and never got anything in return other than a piece of paper that says I’m not breaking the law.
The staff at the mechanic shop were wonderfully friendly and made me feel like family at first. After the mechanic diagnosed the warped head gasket, the supervisor told me it would cost $2k to fix. Then he tried upselling me on replacing every other part under the hood. It would have cost $5k to fix everything he wanted, but the truck wasn’t even worth that much. In the end, I agreed to spend an extra $1.5k on replacements, and I told him the only reason I couldn’t spend more was because I was flat broke and had to get a credit card through USAA to be able to cover the whole bill. So I could only get the most important parts fixed. He told me I should replace the radiator, but if I only had $1.5k to spend, I should fix other things first. In retrospect, he should have had more foresight.
As soon as I drove off the lot, the radiator broke. So I drove back and told the nice supervisor what happened. He reminded me that he had recommended I replace the radiator. I reminded him I couldn’t afford to, and since I came in with a warped head gasket, he probably should have prioritized fixing the radiator. More importantly, if they’d diagnosed my problem correctly, they would have found out the radiator was busted before I drove it off the lot. So it would be harsh to make me pay the $500 they automatically charge any time they have to pull an engine out of a vehicle, which would need to be done to replace the radiator.
The supervisor told me there was no way to know the radiator would blow after driving it 1000 feet, and the fault is mine because, “I should have had more foresight to replace that radiator.”
After the fourth time he told me I should have had more foresight, I wanted to tell him, “You’re right. I didn’t have enough foresight to see you extorting me into six months of debt. If I’d known you were going to do that, I’d have broken my body working harder to prepare for the Christian ass raping you just gave me.”
He didn’t offer me any kind of loyalty discount. He just charged me $700 and acted surprised when I wasn’t smiling and laughing with him like family anymore.
I paid for everything on a USAA credit card because a friend said it would lower my auto insurance, which I had noticed was higher than it used to be. When I checked my account, I discovered I’d never canceled the renter’s insurance on my old house, and had paid $2k over the past two years insuring a property I didn’t own. Normally, that would be a bad thing, but USAA was gracious enough to refund me the money. In another lifetime I could have put that towards my retirement or used it to enjoy life, but it all went straight to back to USAA to pay down my credit card.
USAA didn’t have to refund me all that money. Most American businesses wouldn’t, but it didn’t surprise me when they did. In 2015 USAA distributed $1.6 billion of profits back to their customers. Every year I get a check from them for about $50 with a note that basically says, “We have too much money. Here’s some back.” In addition, their customer representatives are the nicest in the world. I’ve literally told people, “If you’re ever having a bad day, call USAA. I always feel better after doing any kind of business with them.”
I stopped feeling that way after a few months of putting all my disposable income towards my debt. Each month, my friends at USAA charged me about $50 in interest, which means I paid $50 per month to not have $4000. If I had less money, they’d charge me even more.
The leaders of USAA and every other lending institution are millionaires who don’t need any more money. They could all stop working today and still live like gods for the rest of their lives. They know 50% of Americans live at the poverty line, all of whom need credit cards and loans to cover the cost of living in a country where every business charges as much as possible and forces those with the least money to pay the highest prices.
Economics is complicated, but it’s easy to calculate why half the country lives in poverty. Businesses charge their customers as much as possible and pay their employees as little as possible. That’s a simple recipe for bankruptcy. Charging people more money, the poorer they are, is a recipe for debt slavery. The problem isn’t that poor people are being targeted. It’s that everyone is being overcharged, and the only way to stay ahead of the game is for you to overcharge or underpay someone else. So everyone has to become part of the problem. The main reason we don’t stop is because we don’t even notice we’re doing it. Economic cannibalism is the only way of life we’ve ever experienced. So we assume it’s the way.
USAA and my mechanic may provide customers with vital services, but their business model is ultimately based on gouging desperate people. Jesus wouldn’t do that to veterans. Only someone who needs to seriously rethink their life would do that. Since everyone is guilty of the same sin, we all need to do some soul-searching.
Note: The events of this story are real, but the names have been changed.
This is the third installment of a three-part series, in which I illustrate why half of all Americans live near the poverty line by using my life as a case study.
Case in point, medical bills are the most common cause of bankruptcy in America. In 2016 I became part of that statistic, and having gone through the process, I shudder to think how normal it is. Nobody should have to go through what I did, because getting health care in America is as frustrating and overpriced as buying real estate.
I started learning this four months ago. One morning, as I was brushing my teeth, I looked in the mirror and noticed a white pustule on my gums. At first, I thought I had cancer. After suffering an existential crisis, I collected myself and recalled that I’d had two root canals done on one of my bottom, front teeth by a military dentist eight years ago. The most reasonable explanation was the root canal had failed, and the tooth got infected.
Since I no longer had access to the military’s socialized medical system, I’d have to pay a civilian dentist. Knowing they charge an arm and a leg, I looked up cheap insurance on the internet and spent several evenings slogging through mind-bogglingly complicated insurance websites. Unable to make sense of all the terms and restrictions, I decided to take another approach.
I searched for a dentist office with good reviews in my area and found out which insurance they accepted. Then I paid $125 for the insurance and waited for it to activate… hoping the pustule didn’t become life-threatening in the meantime. In case you’re wondering, the reason there’s a waiting period for insurance to activate, is so you can’t wait until an emergency happens to sign up.
When I finally got my insurance card, I took it to the dentist’s office, which we’ll call Negan Family Dentistry. The secretary at the front desk told me they accept my insurance company, but not my plan. FML.
Afraid to leave the pustule untreated any longer, I paid $50 for a checkup, which lasted about 15 minutes.
A dental technician led me down a long hallway lined with booths like a hair salon. Walking down the assembly line I started to worry I’d be treated less like a family member and more like a fast food order. My suspicions were confirmed when the technician X-rayed the one tooth with the pustule under it. Then a dentist came in and told me it needed to be replaced and left.I don’t even know what the dentist looked like because he or she stood over my shoulder wearing a mask for the entire forty-five seconds they spoke before dashing back to the salt mines.
After the dental apparition vanished, the tech sent me to the front desk, where the secretary gave me a bill for $250 and the phone number for Negan Family Periodontics, two towns away. Everything happened so fast it made my head spin.
In a daze, I asked what the bill was for, and she said, “It’s for a temporary tooth we put in after the real one is taken out.” I asked why I was paying her when she was sending me somewhere else. She said, “We put that part in.”
I told her I’d think about it and threw the bill away. A few hours later I called Negan Family Periodontics and told them I needed a tooth replaced before I died of blood poisoning. The secretary told me their next available appointment was two weeks away, but she promised to call me if they had any cancellations. She never called.
After fourteen days of worrying I was about to die, I drove to the place “my” dentist referred me to. The secretary who greeted me was an older woman with white skin but Hispanic facial features. She spoke warmly until I told her I didn’t have insurance. Then she snapped into full aggression mode, basically accusing me of not intending to pay my bill. I gave her my credit card and driver’s license, which she copied angrily and pushed back at me.
Afterwards, a nicer lady handed me a bill for $3.5k. By the time I saw my periodontist, Dr. Simon, my head was spinning again. Dr. Simon’s cheerful personality put me a little at ease. He laughed and joked like he didn’t have a care in the world. I wanted to like him, and I tried to act happy but couldn’t stop thinking about how I just paid him six more months of all my disposable income for what would amount to less than half a day’s work on his part.
Pictured from left to right: Dr. Simon’s eternally happy smile, and my life circumstances being the opposite of his, thanks to him
I offered to barter my professional services in exchange for reducing my fees, which is legal, but he responded with a long speech about how he always follows the rules to a fault. As the overpriced laughing gas kicked in, I wanted to say, “It’s too bad there isn’t a rule about not extorting your customers out of their future life savings every time they have a minor medical emergency.”
An hour later, he’d pulled out my decayed tooth, cut it in half, screwed in a metal foundation for a fake tooth, and glued the top of the old one back in place so I wouldn’t look like a jack-O’-lantern for the next few months while my jaw bone healed around the prosthetic.
The next time I walked into Negan Family Periodontics, was for a cleaning I didn’t ask for and wasn’t necessary for the tooth replacement. As soon as I sat down in the waiting room, The Dragon at the front desk told me I needed to pay another $1k to the dentist from Negan Family Dentistry, who would be putting my fake tooth in. Stunned, I asked why I was paying someone else more money to finish the job I thought I was paying them to do. In response, she ripped some papers out of a folder and waved them in my face, telling me I already signed something agreeing to everything, and I better pay up now, with a tone of voice that clearly said she didn’t believe I would.
I reminded her she already had my credit card number. So anytime she needed another $1k from me, she could just keep charging my card, and I’d just keep being bankrupt. Snidely, she replied, “Great.”
When I asked Dr. Simon about the charges, he explained he would only mount a screw in my jaw, and the original dentist who referred him, would take a mold of the mounting plate, send it to a lab to make a fake tooth from, and then screw it in. I asked why he couldn’t do it, and he lectured me about how he specializes in his field, and other dentists specialize in theirs. So it’s best that someone else screws the prosthetic tooth in. The process sounded illogical to me, but he assured me it was normal. So I let the issue go.
On my way out of the building, The Dragon gave me an appointment date a few weeks later to remove the half-tooth and install a screw into the plate. She also said she would schedule an appointment with Negan Family Dentistry for the same day so Dr. Negan could take a mold of the screw to make the final fake tooth from. However, after calling three times and getting a busy signal, she said she’d try again later and relay my appointment time to me. I never heard back from her.
Two weeks later, the secretary at Negan Family Dentistry called and informed me they double booked my appointment and needed to change it, which turned out to be convenient, not only because I didn’t know what my appointment date was, but because The Dragon scheduled my appointment at Negan Family Periodontics one hour before the appointment at Negan Family Dentistry, two towns away, which would have been impossible to reach in time. So I rescheduled the second appointment for the next morning.
The reason the appointments were supposed to be for the same day is because after Dr. Negan made a mold of the screw, he normally would have installed the temporary tooth I never paid $250 for. However, I didn’t pay for it because I couldn’t afford to waste money on a cosmetic enhancement I’d wear for two weeks. My only option was to leave the screw exposed while the third-party dental lab Dr. Negan subcontracts his work to, made my fake tooth and shipped it back to Negan Family Dentistry.
So, the morning after Dr. Simon installed the screw, I showed up at Negan Family Dentistry looking like a James Bond villain. After checking in, I sat down and happily thumbed through an uninteresting magazine. After months of racking up debt, driving all over the Houston area and being treated like an asshole for being poor, the ordeal was almost over. My life was finally looking up.
Then the kind, attractive, secretary politely called me to her desk and asked for another $916. I explained I’d already paid that bill through Negan Family Periodontics. Confused, she said they don’t do that. At my urging, she called The Dragon, who told her they didn’t do that. I thought I already paid this bill, but I knew it would be pointless to argue with The Dragon, and I was already mad enough to say things to her I’d regret.
I don’t know where the miscommunication came from. Maybe The Dragon and Dr. Simon did a terrible job of explaining my fees. Maybe I didn’t understand what they were saying because my head was spinning from getting hit with a baseball bat named, “Debt.” Maybe I’m just stupid, but there is one thing I’m absolutely sure of. Nobody ever said anything about me having to pay another $916 for the appointment in question.
If I had known I’d have to pay more after the initial $3.5k, I might not have agreed to it. If Negan Family Dentistry had given me an itemized breakdown of every step and fee involved in their tooth-replacement process the first day I walked in their office, I probably wouldn’t have ever called Negan Family Periodontics. Now I have to wonder if they consciously chose not to be transparent so they could surprise me with outrageous bills after I’d already committed.
Their surprise worked. I didn’t see the debt bat coming until it hit me between the eyes, sending me into that familiar punch-drunk feeling again. Clumsily, I used my cell phone to check my account balances to see if I even had $916. I didn’t, but I was able to cover the bill by maxing out my credit card and draining all my checking and savings accounts, including money I’d set aside to renew my vehicle registration.
By the time the technician sat me in the exam chair, my net worth equaled $23 in cash and $6k in debt. Financially, it was the lowest point in my life. My body’s fight or flight response flooded my veins with adrenaline causing me to shake as the technician put the bib around my neck. She may as well have injected me with 10 milligrams of fear and charged me $100 for it.
I had a few minutes to close my eyes and try to breathe the nausea away before Dr. Negan casually sauntered in.
Pictured above: a metaphor for my dentist
Without looking in my direction, he asked the wall in a rote, disinterested tone of voice, how my Thanksgiving had been. I said, “Pretty good,” which was a lie. The truth is, I had broken up with my girlfriend that week and moved into a cheap trailer next to a railroad track with my brother, who spent Thanksgiving with his ex-girlfriend while I sat alone at our new “home” writing and wearing earplugs to block the sound of the train horns. Part of me was happy for the solitude, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that the only reason I had to live in a shitty trailer by a railroad track was because my dental bills had erased all my other options in life.
I’d completely run out of fakeness when Dr. Negan asked how I was doing. Exasperated, I replied, “Not good, since you bankrupted me.”
Without missing a beat, he launched into a bitter, condescending tirade, saying, “Oh!? So, you don’t think dentists deserve to get paid? You don’t think ten years of school is worth any compensation? We rack up a lot of debt in medical school, and it’s not cheap to run a dentist office, but hey, if you think our prices are unfair, you can just go to Mexico.”
Dr. Negan gives me a pep talk
He actually said that. I couldn’t believe it. After taking everything from me, he was bitching me out for not saying thank you.
Ironically, he was right about one thing. I had a friend who’d recently returned from a medical tourism resort in Mexico where he spent $4k to fix everything wrong with all his teeth. Plus, he got a two-week vacation at an all-inclusive resort. He wasn’t treated by the dirty, filthy Mexican dentists Dr. Negan was so prejudiced against. He saw American doctors who had moved to Mexico so they could help people without having to charge an arm and a leg and a dream to replace one tooth.
My life would be profoundly better on multiple levels if I had the foresight to go to Mexico. For the same price, I could have even flown to a medical resort in Thailand, where the doctors and staff would have treated me like a god instead of a cockroach.
My appointment with Dr. Negan lasted 30 minutes, most of which he spent bitching me out. The rest of the time he made a mold of my tooth space using the same process Dr. Simon used when he took his mold, which makes me wonder if both of these guys were referring me back and forth to each other to rack up referral charges.
If my final appointment took the same amount of time, I would be paying both my dentists an average of $1k per hour. I’ll have to work 40 hours to pay off one of theirs. If I made minimum wage, then one easy hour of their life would be worth 140 grueling hours of mine. That’s a narcissistic, psychopathic assessment of the value of life, based on a lie.
No human being is so much better than another, that an hour of their life is worth 40-140 times anyone else’s. Plus, if they’re charging $1k per hour and work 8 hours per day, that’s $40k per week. Even if half the money goes to expenses, it doesn’t cost $20k per week to run a dentist office. Even if Dr. Negan only pocketed $200 per hour, that doesn’t make it any less painful for me to pay $1k per hour.
In the end, the truest measure of Dr. Negan and Dr. Simon’s morality is the size of their retirement accounts. They might have taken on a lot of debt in school, but they’re not going to lower their prices after paying it off. They’re going to charge as much as they can get away with for as long as their career lasts. In the end, they’re going to retire in mansions surrounded by space-age luxury that would make a medieval king jealous, and the only reason they’ll get to do that is because their vaults will be full of peasant’s gold.
I’ll spend the rest of my life living in a trailer next to a train track, wearing earplugs in bed and getting stomach ulcers from lying awake, worrying about how long I can put off getting extorted by family-friendly medical professionals.
The last thing the Dr. Negan said to me before he ejected me from the dental assembly line was, “Hey, man. Everything’s going to be fine. Everything is going to work out.” If he truly believes that, then living in a gated community must have disconnected him from reality. In the America where I live, I’ll never be free. Perpetual debt will always force me to work for a boss who underpays me, just to pay off the businesses who overcharge me and add on extra fees for not having any money.
Pictured left to right: Dr. Negan deciding what he’ll do with my life savings, and the look on my face as I watch him horde my hopes and dreams
If medical school, rent, and medical equipment are so extortionately priced that dentists are struggling to keep their practices open, there must be better solutions than passing on the extortion to customers. If medical professionals truly cared about their clients, which Dr. Negan assured me he did, then they would be doing something to fix the problem.
As it stands, they’re just shrugging their shoulders and saying, “If I can pass this problem onto the customer, then it’s not my problem. Fuck em…” just like I metaphorically said to the single mother who rented my duplex unit in Austin.
The simplest solution is, stop fucking your customers in the ass with a friendly smile, but if you can’t afford to do that, then try to imagine how angry and dejected bankruptcy must make all your customers feel. Then take that anger and shout it in the face of the people who are overcharging you. Unionize and boycott those people. Write blogs and give speeches about how you have to double the cost of your products to pay rent or a mortgage that’s twice as expensive as the property is worth.
The least you could do is not be silent, but if you’re smart enough to earn a Ph.D., then you should be able to think of at least one solution to high operating costs other than raping your customers and bitching them out when they say, “Ouch. You’re killing me,” instead of, “Thank you, sir. May I have another?”
If you’ve read this far, you may be thinking, “Hey, Travis. Wake up. The common denominator in all your problems is you. If you were better at adulting, and less angry about life, then you wouldn’t have dug yourself into a pit of debt and made enemies with people who just wanted to help you.”
If you’re underwhelmed with my plight enough to leave a comment telling me what an irresponsible, whiner I am, then you need to take to the streets and shout the exact same speech in the face of the other 6 billion people in the world who live below the poverty line. Maybe I am whiny, but if everybody stopped complaining about normalized extortion, the only thing it would change is how much longer the majority of humanity stays in poverty.
If you believe I can’t blame anyone except myself for my bankruptcy because I didn’t have insurance, then you’ve either never used insurance, or you’ve accepted insanity as normal.
The reason I needed insurance in the first place is the exact same reason why medical tourism resorts exist: because the cost of medical care in America is inflated beyond reason by insurance companies.
If you’ll recall, I did buy the insurance Negan Family Dentistry advertised they accepted. If they’d been more transparent, I would have known the right policy to buy. If they didn’t pick and choose which policies they accepted, I could have just used any insurance.
It wouldn’t have mattered much if I did because all policies are designed to be as useless and difficult to use as possible. The company I work for offers medical insurance for $124 per month, but it has a $6k deductible, which wouldn’t have covered the cost anyway.
If I had paid $124 for medical insurance every month since I separated from the military in 2007, I would have paid $13k by 2016. Even if insurance would have covered the entire cost of my tooth replacement, I still would have saved $8k in the long run by not having insurance since 2007.
Doctors don’t even like insurance even though it pays so well because they have to hire an otherwise unnecessary employee just to file all the paperwork. Since doctors don’t want the extra cost to impact their salary, they pass the cost onto the customers by raising prices accordingly, which I’m sure they feel terrible about.
To make matters worse, doctors have to wait months for insurance claims to be processed and pay out. As much of a nightmare as insurance companies are to work with, doctors should know better than anyone, bitching customers out for not having insurance is blaming the victim.
The problem is that the insurance companies have rigged the system to require everyone to buy extortion protection in the first place, and doctors have chosen to go along with it. I wouldn’t have lost the game if it wasn’t rigged.
I can’t afford anything, because everyone gives me the “fuck you” price instead of “the friend discount,” and you don’t have more nice things because you get treated the same way. So if you’re mad at me for getting extorted, then be mad at yourself too, and be mad that someone convinced you to accept this sadistic system as normal.
My story ends with me going back to Negan Family Dentistry to get my fake tooth put in. Before leaving the house I checked my bank account to see how much money wasn’t in it, just in case I got surprised me with another bill. There was no need to check how much wiggle room was left on my credit card because it was already maxed out. Luckily, the secretary surprised me by informing me they wouldn’t be hitting me in the head with a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire again.
The whole appointment took about fifteen minutes, and most of that was done by a tech who makes as little as supply and demand will allow Dr. Negan to get away with underpaying her. The tech put some kind of clip on the screw sticking out of my gums. Then Dr. Negan came in and snapped the crown on. The procedure didn’t even require any cementing or heating, which proves everything Dr. Simon told me about me needing to see Dr. Negan for the final procedure because he was a specialist, was a complete lie. I could have done the final step myself.
At the end of the appointment, I gave Dr. Negan a slip of paper with the address to this blog on it. I told him I didn’t use his real name. I just needed to tell my customer service story, and that it wasn’t glowing, but he could use it to fix the holes in his process.
He didn’t understand what a blog is. So I had to explain it to him. His eyes told me he still didn’t understand. So I wasn’t surprised when he pressed me to just tell him what the essay said.
I told him, the biggest issue, and the reason I was so upset the last time we met, was because his prices were deceptive, and I wasn’t given the total cost at the beginning. When I said that, his eyes bulged out, and he shouted at me, “YOU’RE A LIAR!”
Experience has taught me that trying to give someone advice who doesn’t want to admit when they’re wrong, will only result in them attacking you until they’ve said something ugly enough to convince them-self you’re the problem. So I just turned on my heel and walked out the door. Dr. Negan chased me down in the lobby and tried to bitch me out some more. I’d already said everything I had to say in the blog, and I didn’t want him to ruin my day any more than he already had. So I continued walking, right out the front door.
As I exited the building, he shouted, “Have a Merry Christmas!” His attempt to take the high road didn’t impress me after calling me a liar for trying to point out the flaws in his customer service. It just reinforced my perception that he’s a delusional ass hole.
I don’t even believe in Christmas, and he obviously doesn’t believe in Christian values.
The worst part of the story is that, even though I’ll never go back to Negan Family Dentistry or Negan Family Periodontics, I won’t get a better price anywhere else in America. I’ll just keep getting my head bashed in and my savings looted, just like you… unless something drastic changes.
Before the world can change, people like Dr. Negan and Dr. Simon need to change the way they justify their predatory business practices to themselves.
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I recently flew from Colorado to Texas, and I arrived at the airport 30 minutes before my plane was scheduled to leave. Normally this airport isn’t very busy. So I wasn’t worried… until I reached the security checkpoint, which had about 50 people in it.
Luckily, the line was moving surprisingly fast. So my anxiety was shrinking as I got closer to the body scanner, which I like to call “the dignity evaporation machine” or “D.E.M.” for short.
I’ve traveled around the world, and America is the only country I’ve ever had to walk through these. I loathe these things because they blast you with radiation, microwaves, and/or who knows what. They used to take naked pictures of you, but that was supposedly changed, but how would I really know what goes on inside them? Either way, when you stand inside them, you have to hold your hands above your head like you’re a criminal being arrested. The invasion of privacy and the submissive posture really drives home the point that everyone who attempts to board a plane in America is considered guilty of terrorism until proven innocent.
As I approached the D.E.M. I noticed a male TSA agent standing idly next to the old metal detector that nobody walks through anymore. I knew you can choose between going through the D.E.M. or getting a pat-down. I assumed a pat-down would be quicker, and if I was going to lose my dignity anyway, I felt it would be more just if the TSA had to get their hands dirty taking it from me.
So I told the TSA agent that I preferred a pat-down. He looked at me in disgust and then shouted over his shoulder at nobody in particular, “We’ve got an opt-out.” Then he stood there staring into space for 4 minutes while I watched in horror as people who were originally behind me in the line passed through the D.E.M. Finally, I said to the agent, “I’m running a bit late. If this is going to take a while, I’ll just go through the machine.” He barked at me with a mixture of amusement and disgust, “Too late for that.” Only then did he take me through the metal detector to a place with a floor mat with two footprints on it where I was instructed to stand.
As I assumed the position the agent asked me in a voice dripping with suspicion and accusation, “Why did you choose to opt-out?” I told him, “I don’t know what that machine is. I don’t like it, and I don’t want anyone to see me naked.” He replied, “Eh, it’s not that bad.”
Then he took his time finding a box of plastic gloves, and then he made it a point to show me how slowly he put them on and adjusted them. Then the frisking started. Mind you, I was wearing a fitting T-shirt and fitting blue jeans. Since I was flying on a cheap airline that charged $50 to check a bag and/or carry on anything bigger than a small purse, I had all of my luggage (3 pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, and three T-shirts) in a plastic grocery bag. So there was nowhere for me to hide anything.
Still, he wrapped his hands tightly around each of my arms and acted like he was squeezing a tube of toothpaste. He even ran his hands down my bare arms past the sleeves as if I could be hiding something under my skin. He stuck his hands down my shirt collar and inspected all 360 degrees of my neck. Then he did the same thing to my waistband. Then he squeezed both my legs like they were tubes of toothpaste. He did that to each leg from the front and then each leg from the back. On each pass, he jammed his hands up into my groin, which meant he made firm contact with my balls 4 times.
After the frisking was over he swabbed his gloves and put the swab into a machine that looked like a futuristic cash register. The machine beeped, and a bright red light started flashing. I said, “What does that mean?” He said, “Nothing good. It means you tested positive for bomb residue.” I wanted to shout at him, “Bomb residue! Bomb residue! Where’s the bomb? I’m just a guy in a t-shirt and jeans with a plastic bag full of underwear, and you just squeezed every inch of my body!” Of course, there wasn’t any need for me to state the obvious. He knew there wasn’t any bomb or any residue for that matter. We both knew I was just a guy getting harassed, and there was nothing I could do about it.m
The agent called his supervisor, who was an older black lady. She looked at the machine and looked at the gloves. Then she started chitchatting with the agent, completely ignoring me. I asked her, “So what happens now?” Without even looking at me she said in a bored, monotone voice, “Sir, your clothing tested positive for bomb residue. So we have to take you into a private room for another pat down.” Then she just walked off and left us to wait for an elderly white guy to come and escort me to a private room along with the agent who had just frisked my balls.
As we entered the room I asked, “Can I just take off all my clothes to speed up this process.” With a mixture of annoyance and glee, my original frisker said, “No. We have to do it this way.” He stood in the corner of the room and nonchalantly picked through my plastic bag while the older agent frisked me in exactly the same way as I had just been frisked out in the open. So I don’t know why we had to go into a private room. He also jammed my balls into my groin a total of 4 times. The only thing he did differently was make me take my shoes off and rub the bottom of my feet. When he was finished he went and tested his gloves in the bomb residue machine while the younger agent guarded the door.
When the second glove test came back negative the agent at the door said, “Ok. We’re done here,” and sauntered off. None of the agents showed any relief or surprise by the outcome, because they knew from the first second they saw me that I was nothing more than a guy in a T-shirt and jeans carrying a plastic bag full of underwear who was critically late for his flight. Needless to say, I didn’t get an apology for wasting my time and violating my personal space.
So I collected everything I brought with me except for my dignity and ran for my gate just in time to board my plane where I spent the next two and a half hours lamenting how much of my tax dollars are spent dehumanizing the American public under the guise of safety. On my return flight to Colorado a few days later I opted to go through the dignity evaporation machine like the powerless peon I am.
There are some people who would say that everything that happened to me was my fault, and I should have arrived at the airport earlier to schedule time to be humiliated, and I should have just submitted to having my body radiated or microwaved or whatever instead of exercising my barely existent freedom of choice because I should have anticipated the TSA agents would be annoyed by the fact that I want to travel.
Call me crazy, but I feel like this is blaming the victim, and it sets a dystopian precedent. How about instead of making humiliation, bullying and sexual assault a normal part of travel, we just get rid of the TSA since they’re completely ineffective at preventing terrorism anyway.
I arrive at an apple orchard at 6:30am Monday through Saturday. My body hurts even though (or possibly because) I get 10-12 hours of sleep a night. I have to. I can’t stay awake because I’m always so exhausted from work the previous day. I used to start work at 7:00am, but my work crew and I agreed it would be best to get to work thirty minutes earlier so we could work thirty minutes less under the hot sun. So it’s cool and there’s dew on the ground when I get out of the van I pay $5 a week to ride to work in.
I put my backpack full of water bottles and snacks next to a row of apple trees. Then I slather SPF 30 suntan lotion on my face, arms, and legs. I put sports tape around my thumbs and pointer fingers to cover the dirty scars around my cuticles where branches have gouged them. I put on a big, floppy hiking hat, and I start picking excess apples off of my row of trees and throwing them on the ground.
Apple trees are strange trees. Some of the branches hang like octopus arms, and some grow at crooked Tetris angles up, down, left, right. Sometimes when I’m weaving my way through them I pretend like I’m a Shaolin martial arts master, and I make chopping and blocking motions with my arms to move them aside. I don’t get too into it though because I need to conserve my energy. Sometimes I pretend I’m a treasure hunter digging through an impenetrable wall of branches looking for treasure…but I’ve never found any treasure. So far all I’ve found is apples… and pain.
Apples grow on the branches in clusters sort of like grapes. Clusters sizes range from 2 to 20. Each tree has hundreds of clusters. My goal is to pick the apples out of those clusters until each cluster contains one or two apples and those clusters are spaced far enough apart to give the remaining apples room to grow. For reasons nobody has explained to me, different apple trees require different sizes of clusters. Also, the tops of the trees need to be picked thinner than the bottoms of the trees; that’s to prevent the heavy apples from breaking the budding branches.
The whole reason apple trees are thinned is because the remaining apples on the tree will get bigger and juicier. Small apples taste bad, and consumers want big, pretty apples anyway. So the trees have to get thinned, and this job can’t be automated. It has to be done by human hands. Unfortunately for the farmers, nobody wants to do this job, because it’s really quite terrible. This is how terrible it is. Child protective service would take away your children if you made your children do a week’s worth of apple thinning for breaking one of your rules. It’s bad enough to be child abuse, but it’s worse than that because it breaks full-grown men and women.
Apple thinning doesn’t require any heavy lifting (though apple picking does), but neither does cross-country jogging. Apple thinning is a physical, intellectual and emotional endurance contest. Before you even touch an apple tree you have to study it like an artist reassessing a work of art. You identify the flaws in the art, decide on a plan of action and execute your plan. Then you repeat that process all day for nine hours. Playing your favorite video game for nine hours a day every day would be torturous. Picking apples is like playing a boxing game on a Nintendo Wee all day, every day… in the hot sun.
When you walk up to the tree and start snapping off all the excess apples with your thumb and forefinger you have to navigate your way around the branches (like a Shaolin Monk). This requires bending over, reaching overhead and getting on your knees. You always have to carry a big, shiny aluminum (or a cast iron) ladder with you, because after you’ve picked all the apples from one side of the tree that you can reach standing on the ground you climb up the ladder and get the apples on top of the tree. When you’re on top of your ladder you can see out all over the orchard district. It’s surreal up there. All you see are rows of green trees all the way to the horizon. Hobbit hills and windmills are the only other thing between you and the big blue, blazing sky. Each orchard is surrounded by a thick line of coniferous trees cut to look like giant hedges. They keep the wind from blowing through the orchard and making the apples smack together and bruise. So there’s never more than a light breeze on the ground, but sometimes you’ll find a cool breeze when you climb to the top of your ladder. Feeling that breeze and looking out over a sea of parallel green waves you feel like you’re outside of the world. It’s a unique experience that I’m glad I’ve had.
But the serenity is spoiled by the fact that you have to thin a straight row of 200 trees in 9 hours in the hot sun while your body is undernourished because you’re barely paid more than minimum wage and can only afford to buy processed food. Even with a healthy diet, repeating the same yoga stretches for 9 hours per day every day will overstrain and hurt your muscles. You certainly wouldn’t want to do 9 hours of ladder yoga in the blazing hot sun. If you attempted that iron-yoga challenge your body would need more than ten minutes of rest in the morning, a thirty-minute break for lunch and another ten-minute break in the afternoon, but that’s all the breaks apple thinners and pickers get. Most apple thinners even cut that short because they’re so desperate to pick more apples and make even slightly more than minimum wage.
Nobody stands behind you and watches you all day. So you can take as many breaks from your ladder yoga as you want, but you have to weigh the value of listening to your body and taking a break against the fact that you have no money, and you get paid by how many trees you thin. So if you push yourself beyond your breaking point and sustain that level of exertion for three to six weeks then you can make enough money to live off of for two months until apple picking starts. If you can’t maintain that pace you’ll be fired anyway.
You don’t want to get fired because you need to eat, and you don’t want to be homeless. Plus, if you impress your boss then in two months’ time you can come back and do the same job over again, except instead of ripping off tiny apples and tossing them carelessly on the ground you pick the full-grown apples and place them delicately in a huge bucket hanging across your chest. Once your bucket is back-breakingly full you climb down your ladder, walk to a plastic bin somewhere down your row, kneel down and pull two strings on either side of your chest bucket, which opens the bottom of the bucket letting the apples tumble out into the plastic bin (just like cherry picking). Then you stand back up and go fill your bucket again for 9 hours in the hot sun. You can make better money apple picking than you can apple thinning. So you definitely don’t want to miss that.
Apple thinning and apple picking would only be mildly excruciating if it weren’t for the ladder. Modern, aluminum ladders are light (as far as 8-foot tall ladders go), but I shudder at the thought of somebody’s grandparents and great-grandparents doing these jobs with iron and wooden ladders. If you’re having a hard time imagining what that would be like, put an A-frame ladder in your backyard next Saturday, and make a goal out of picking up that ladder 200 times at regular intervals over 9 hours and moving it to another part of your backyard and climbing to the top and doing yoga… in the hot sun. Your back will hate you for it…forever, possibly. If you carry stress balls with you the entire 9 hours and squeeze them constantly then by the end of the day your hands will swell and keep you awake at night throbbing in pain, and you’ll have a good idea of what the people who pick the apples in your kitchen go through to survive.
If you do anything outside all day, inevitably you’ll get sunburned. You could cover up when apple thinning, but the more you cover up the hotter and heavier you’ll be. For men, it’s best to wear light shoes and shorts. I’ve seen female apple thinners wearing nothing but bikinis. One of the perks of the job. Another perk of apple thinning is that you can smoke while you work. That perk is undermined by the fact that, if your orchard has a bathroom at all, it’s too far away to go to. You could lose five or eight dollars worth of working time just by walking all the way to the bathroom and back once. So wash the apples you buy from the store. There’s a good chance they were fondled by calloused, burnt, scratched, suntan lotion-slathered, pee-splattered hands. Most of the apples sold at big grocery stores were also sprayed multiple times with pesticides, insecticides and other chemicals you’ve never heard of through the course of their lives.
When you thin or pick apples the dust from the dried poisons rubs off onto your palms until they’re black. It gets into your scratches, it falls in your eyes. You breathe it in. It rubs off of your fingers onto your sandwich at lunch and onto your hand-rolled cigarettes. The farmer assures you it’s harmless poison, but you know you’re going to die of cancer now someday. So you don’t feel as bad about smoking anymore. One of the perks of the job.
You have to find good things to think of when apple thinning. You have to think of something for 9 hours. Something has to keep your body moving forward repeating an action that every muscle in your body and every ounce of common sense is telling you to stop. Of course, what keeps you moving is that you’ve got no place else to go, and if you can’t endure this Chinese torture method then you die of starvation.
So you pick and pick and pick and pick and pick. You try not to think about how mind-numbingly boring it is to just pick pick pick pick all day long. But it’s hard not to think about it when it’s all you do, and there’s never any change in the routine. Every tree looks more or less the same, and after you’ve done enough trees you’ve seen all the variations of cluster sizes and locations. Eventually, it all blurs into one long, timeless moment. The seconds pass like glaciers. Anytime you look to your left or your right all you see are identical rows of apples. There’s no goal you can work towards. There are no checkpoints you can reach where you get to do something different. There’s just no end in sight. It’s pushing a boulder up a hill all day just to push it back up after you finish. But instead of climbing a hill, you climb a ladder, and instead of a big boulder, it’s little apples. The same little apples everywhere. When you close your eyes you see apples. When you dream, you dream about a wall of apples falling on top of you. Sometimes you want to just run the orchard maniacally shouting, “APPLES!… APPLES! APPLES!” Sometimes you want to ball up into a fetal position against a tree trunk and mumble, “applesapplesapples.”
It helps if you listen to music. I shudder to think of somebody’s grandparents and great-grandparents apple thinning with no music or aluminum ladders. Even if you listen to music you end up listening to the same songs over and over again until you hate them. I’ll never be able to listen to Pink Floyd again. The apple orchard took that from me. Now I find it helps to listen to techno music, because it’s fast, and there aren’t idiotic words pounding in your skull all day. I also like listening to foreign music, because I can’t understand the words, and that helps me zone out. A Slovenian I work with gave me some music, and I’ve been listening to Oda Gudeki by MI2 lately. It makes me smile, and I’m going to be sad when I’ve listened to it so many times I hate it.
Sometimes I sing the chorus of “The Lemon Tree” song except I change the lyrics to “apple trees” instead of “lemon tree.” My taste in music would drive some people insane if they had to listen to it all day, as their’s would me. You have to figure out what works for you and hope you have that kind of music available. One thing is for sure, if you listen to slow, sad music it will slow you down and sap your will to go on.
Sometimes you can’t stand the music anymore and you just have to turn it off and try to enjoy the absolute silence of the apple field. Sometimes your music player breaks or runs out of batteries or doesn’t exist and you have to endure nine hours of almost total silence every day without the benefit of music to help you forget that you exist. Then you’re alone with your thoughts. It’s like being in solitary confinement, except you’re forced to do excruciating yoga outside as you wrestle with your thoughts. It can be quite revelatory, and if you’ve got any fight in you, fighting apple trees will wear it out of you. Apple thinning would be a good way to get the fight out of juvenile delinquents. Well, that or it’ll teach them that hard work only pays barely enough to survive and selling drugs is a lot easier and more lucrative. And if you get caught selling drugs and go to jail, at least you won’t have to work in an apple orchard. So… life could be worse.
It was inevitable that some apple thinner out there has and will use drugs at work to speed them up or help them forget where they are, and inevitably somebody is going to fall off their ladder, especially when it’s cold, windy and/or rainy. Of course, the farmer who owns the orchards will do as little as possible to attend to their workers’ medical needs. After all, if farmers cared about their workers’ health then they wouldn’t work them past the limits of human endurance to begin with.
Even if you have a strong mind and good music, everybody breaks a little eventually. You can’t keep up 9 hours of constant mind-numbing yoga torture forever. Every once a while you have to just sit down (even if it’s not break time yet) and curse your life, the apples, the farmer, God and yourself for getting you into this fuck-awful situation.
Sometimes you work for an ignorant country farmer who has been doing backbreaking work all his life and owns a giant country home surrounded by orchards full of disposable slaves making him richer. The only thing standing between the farmer and more money is the physical and mental limitations and pay expectations of his workers. So some farmers pay their workers less money per tree than is fair. Some farmers degrade and harass underperforming workers, then fire them after they’re burnt out so he can bring in a fresh crop of (hopefully more desperate) workers who are willing to put up with lower pay and worse treatment. Sometimes you end up working for farmers who smile to your face and bring you water and even buy you a little beer and thank you for sacrificing your body, mind, and the irreplaceable moments of your life to make him richer while you’re spending the prime of your life in a death race scraping by with one foot in the gutter. Sometimes you get lucky like that.
A wiser man than myself once said, “The harder you work, the luckier you get.” Another man once said, “Life doesn’t suck because you’re unlucky. Life sucks because you’re a dumbass.” (paraphrased) There’s a lot of truth to both of those statements. I work with an ex-con who can’t get a “real” job because of his criminal record. Some people would say he’s sleeping in the bed he made. I can recognize without being told that I, myself, am working in an apple field because I screwed up. I took some joy in the first two weeks of pain by telling myself I deserved to be there, that I was paying penance for screwing up. So don’t feel any sympathy for me or my ex-con friend. But feel sympathy for the billions of other people in the world who’s are spending their lives in orchards, fields, kitchens, warehouses, factories, and offices even though they never screwed up. They’ve been doing what they were supposed to: working. Working at degrading, inhumane jobs and doing a great job of it. They just don’t get to keep enough of the profits from their work to achieve stability in their lives because their bosses (the job creators) wants a bigger house and longer vacations.
More than sympathy for the oppressed, we should all feel ashamed every time we walk into the fruits and vegetable section of our local grocery stores, because everything you see there has blood on it, literally and figuratively. Apparently, that’s not important enough to motivate us to demand better pay, shorter work hours and more profit-sharing for workers. It should also motivate us to reassess our standard business practices to identify and rectify the flaws that cause all business owners to feel pressured to pay their workers as little as possible to make ends meet. The call to action isn’t to throw rotten apples at orchard owners. The call to action is to replace our economy with a more sustainable, more humane model.
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I was born and raised in the Bible Belt, specifically, Texas. In my community, it was taken for granted the Bible is the word of God. From the earliest age, I remember going to church and saying this prayer before bedtime, “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake. I pray the Lord, my soul to take.”
Other than going to church, buying Christian themed decorations and quoting a few select Bible verses, nobody in my community lived like Jesus or the Apostles. They lived like modern Americans, and I naturally adopted their lukewarm approach to Christianity as well. I tried not to lie, steal, lust, hate, miss church or masturbate, and I felt profoundly guilty when I committed these sins. Sometimes I prayed and put a few dollars in the offering plate at church. Outside of Sunday school, I never read the Bible.
My real life revolved around going to school, trying to make friends, figuring out life and coping with the drama that the world throws at you. I had a very rocky childhood, and my life started sliding out of control before I got to high school. I started hanging out with the rejects, smoking, drinking, doing drugs, stealing, committing petty crimes, running from the cops, and listening to heavy metal music.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I did all of those self-destructive things because I was looking for meaningful connections to life. I hung out with the rejects because they accepted me without judgment. I poisoned my body because that was the only other thing outside of my friends that made me feel alive. I binge-listened to angry musicians because they understood my emptiness and pain.
By my sophomore year, I was basically never sober. The farther from sobriety I ran, the more I lost touch with reality. I lived in a dreamland. Sometimes I danced through Technicolor flower fields, but mostly I wandered in the dark looking for a lighted path that would take me back to the happiness and wholeness I felt as a child.
As my life spiraled downward, I had two near-death experiences on drugs and almost got arrested when a house I was doing hallucinogens at got raided by the police. Before things could get worse, my mother kicked me out of her house, and I had to move from Paris, TX, to my father’s house, eight hours away in Jourdanton, TX. The only Bible verse I ever heard my father quote was, “Spare the rod; spoil the child.”
Having lost all my friends and all meaningful connections in my life, my soul drifted in free fall. I felt like I was in outer space. I didn’t have anywhere to go, and I didn’t want to spend time with my father. So I stayed in my room and listened to songs that reminded me of my friends. The only book in my room was a copy of Nave’s Topical Bible, which listed Bible verses by topic. Having a lot of anger at God and nothing else to do, I read what God had to say about love, hate, and forgiveness.
I didn’t understand the context of any of the passages or the passages themselves, but they fascinated me. There was a murky message of love and salvation, both of which I needed badly. These thoughts percolated in my brain for months until I had the opportunity to go back to Paris and see my friends. We got together like old times and did drugs. It was refreshing but painfully nostalgic.
At the end of the night, everyone else went to sleep, and I stayed up for several more hours daydreaming intoxicated visions. That night I had a vision of God. His body was in the shape of a human but made of glowing love. He looked like one of the aliens in the movie, “Cocoon.”
We had a long conversation in which He told me I was loved and accepted. Everything is fine, and everything is going to work out. Life is important, and we all have something important to do with our lives. I could still fulfill the meaning of life. I just have to give up my hedonistic ways. So the next morning I threw away my cigarettes and quit all my poisons cold turkey.
I made up my mind that it was time to get serious about God. So I started going to church regularly, and I got a real Bible. I read the New Testament cover to cover several times. In 1997 I accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Lord and Savior at a Billy Graham convention in San Antonio. A few months later I was baptized in a Southern Baptist church in Charlotte, TX.
I took my faith as serious as life and death. Everyone who knew me my senior year of high school knew that I was a serious Christian. I went to church twice a week, read my Bible, prayed to Jesus, invited the Holy Spirit to guide me and behaved impeccably moral even when no one was watching.
By the time I graduated high school I was convinced I should become a preacher. So I scheduled a meeting with the pastor who had baptized me, Brother Sewell. We met at a Dairy Queen and talked for about an hour. In the end, he told me that if there’s anything else I could imagine being happier doing than preaching, then I should do that. Reluctantly, I admitted, I would be happier teaching art or being a comic book artist than standing in front of a crowd, blowing people’s minds while begging for money once a week. So Brother Sewell told me to become what I wanted to become most.
I wasn’t a good (or rich) enough artist to go to art school, and I wanted to work in a profession that helped people directly anyway. So I decided not to go to seminary school and preach in a church. I would get a day job as a social worker helping the neediest of the neediest. In my free time, I would write Christian books and comics.
So after I graduated high school, I enrolled at the University of Mary~Hardin Baylor in Belton, Tx and majored in social work. I picked that school because it’s a Christian university with a reputation for being unapologetically serious about Jesus Christ. Every event on campus opened with a prayer, and every student had to attend mandatory church services. There were always student-led Bible studies going on somewhere on campus. Every student had to take at least one semester in religious studies.
I chose to take the hardest course they offered, a year-long, in-depth survey of The Torah. I wanted to know every detail about how my religion came into existence, and The Torah was so boring and confusing, I figured this was my best shot at understanding it. I felt confident that if I could master the basics of Christianity then I could write the proof to end all proofs that would convince any Atheist that the Bible was the true word of God.
To my delight, my professor turned out to be a genius named Dr. Stephen Von Wyrick. He spoke Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin fluently, and he spent his summers in Israel excavating religious ruins. The textbooks he taught from weren’t Christian propaganda. They were gigantic, rigorous, boring history books. Dr. Von Wyrick knew as much as a human being could know about the historical context of The Torah.
He also believed wholeheartedly in the divinity of the entire Bible. So I’m sure he would be appalled by the fact that, more than anyone else, he was responsible for me losing my faith. He took my class through the Torah line by line and explained everything that was happening. He showed how to tell when different authors had written different passages within the same book. He explained how miracles could often be attributed to naturally occurring events. He pointed out where the authors had copied stories from other religions. The two most important things he taught me how the Jewish theocracy and culture operated at the time. They were both barbaric and superstitious.
Once I actually read the Torah cover to cover, I looked back and realized I didn’t just read a story about God’s love and salvation. The original covenant God had with mankind, was for humans to slaughter animals on altars so God could bask in their blood. In return, God would kill the enemies of the Jewish state. The laws God commanded His people to follow were barbaric or trivial. The whole story was so chaotically thrown together, there was no hope of reconciling all its contradictions, scientific inaccuracies, mysticism and psychotic moral codes.
Making sense of the Bible is even more difficult when you try connecting the Old Testament and the New Testament. Why does a perfect, all knowing, all loving God, write a book that approves of slavery and war? Then He changes his mind and writes a book that approves of slavery and love (most of the time)? But after saving everyone from having to please God with blood, now you have to please God by believing in His son, who is somehow also God at the same time, and maybe one other person/thing called the Holy Ghost.
I found a million holes in the Bible, and I couldn’t ignore them. They weren’t making me doubt my faith yet because I believed the answers existed; I just had to find them. So I asked dozens of highly educated Christians to explain the gaping holes I’d found in Christianity. Without exception, every single person told me to, “Just have faith.” They couldn’t explain any of the problems and didn’t want to. This infuriated me because if we didn’t understand the Bible, that meant we didn’t understand what we believed in. So when we witnessed to non-believers, we were telling them, “I don’t know what I believe in, but you have to believe it too.”
The further I looked for answers, the more I found myself piecing together an explanation of why the Bible is just a standard, archaic mythology produced by a primitive culture and not the word of God. This scared me to the depth of my soul. I was afraid God would send me to Hell for entertaining those thoughts, let alone believing them.
The more I dove back into the Bible to find the clues I’d missed, the more mythology I found. It was like watching a train wreck. I watched it until I couldn’t take it anymore. I shut my Bible one last time and let out a huge defeated sigh as I accepted the undeniable truth staring me in the face: Christianity is mythology, and I would never find salvation in it. Even then, it took me over a year to admit out loud I’d lost my faith.
After leaving the church I didn’t think of myself as an Atheist. All I knew was that I was lost. If I had to label myself at the time, I would have called myself an Existentialist, or simply a searcher. Search I did. As depressed and disconnected as I felt, I wasn’t suicidal. I didn’t know what life was for, but I knew a lot of trouble went into creating it, and I believed life was some kind of opportunity with some kind of potential.
Desperate for any glimmer of direction, I read most of the other religious books the world follows. Without exception, I found the same patterns of inconsistencies, incoherencies, inaccuracies, absurdities and culturally relative morals I’d found in the Bible.
Like the Bible, they all also contained useful information. You could even find patterns in some of their wisdom that different religions agreed on. I didn’t take this as evidence that God had a hand in every book, but rather that some morals are self-evident. If you were going to make your own religion, probably the first rule you’d pick is, “Don’t go around killing people.”
Simply proving mythological gods don’t exist, doesn’t prove God doesn’t exist. Since I know that I don’t know the first thing about the universe, I’m not qualified to state emphatically that there is no God. The ingeniously elegant patterns in nature give me a reason to suspect a higher force could have played a hand in creating the universe, but that force seems to have left us on our own to sink or swim.
I would like a more cut and dried answer to life’s questions, but the evidence seems to point to the conclusion that we’re here, and our lives are our responsibility to figure out using the tools we’ve been given. I’ve been trying to do that as best I can. I’m constantly updating my conclusions, which you can find listed below and on my Table of Contents:
In the year 1999, I drove from San Marcos, TX to Sugar Land, TX to meet my girlfriend’s family. She had already made the trip a few days earlier, but I couldn’t go with her because I had to work. After my shift ended, I drove to Sugar Land alone, and I decided to take a more scenic route through the country instead of a major highway.
Around 11pm, I was driving down a two-lane country road, about an hour outside of Sugar Land. There were no buildings or street lights in any direction, nor were there very many cars on the road. The sky was moonless, not that I would have been able to see it because of the low cloud ceiling. I kept glancing upward, because… well, I really like clouds, and it’s not very often you get to see a low cloud ceiling blanketing the sky in Texas. Usually, mountain-sized clouds lumber across the gigantic, open skyline, high in the atmosphere.
That’s when I noticed something even more out of place. I kept seeing lights flash from the clouds above the field to my left. I couldn’t see any aircraft, but lights glowed through the clouds, as if something bright was flying inside them, obscured from view. It couldn’t have been an airplane because I was keeping up with it driving 50 miles per hour. At first, I assumed it was a helicopter, but when I looked closer, I realized there were nine lights, each a perfect circle. Six were arranged in a ring that rotated clockwise. In the middle, the other three lights rotated counterclockwise in a perfect circle. Every once and a while the lights would change directions in unison. Then the outer ring of lights would rotate counterclockwise and the inner ring would spin clockwise.
I strained my eyes to see the source of the lights, but it never came out of the clouds. I started to get the feeling the source of the light was either invisible, or it was being projected upwards from the ground like a spotlight, but the lights were traveling over corn fields and patches of trees. I followed the unidentified flying objects for at least half an hour, constantly almost crashing as I looked up instead of at the road. They stayed steady at fifty miles per hour the whole time. I kept waiting for them to suddenly accelerate and shoot out of sight, but they never did. The show ended when they veered North and moved away over farmlands where I had no road to chase them.
When I got to my girlfriend’s house, all I could talk about was the UFO I saw. She was intrigued for a minute, but she didn’t take it seriously and got bored with my ranting quickly. I was bursting with excitement, but I had nowhere to direct it. I didn’t have any video since smartphones didn’t exist at the time. I wanted to tell the whole world about my experience, but since I couldn’t prove what had happened, there was no one I could convince.
A few months later, I joined the U.S. Air Force. After completing basic training in San Antonio, Texas and military trade school in Biloxi, Mississippi, I got stationed at Aviano, Italy, which has had its own share of UFO sightings. Some Italians believe there’s an underground bunker underneath the base that contains a crashed UFO and the body of at least one alien.
The base did belong to the Nazis during WWII, who dug miles of tunnels underneath it, but the American forces supposedly collapsed them all so enemies couldn’t use them to sneak behind the perimeter. So I suppose there could be large spaces under there nobody knows about, but I had a top-secret security clearance, and my job took me to every building. I never heard or saw anything to suggest Aviano has a UFO or aliens.
One Friday after work, I drove a car full of friends North across the Italian/Austrian border to the city of Graz to check out the nightlife. By the time we neared Graz, it was already dark, and there was a low cloud ceiling, which is very common in Austria. Not far from town, I saw the exact same pattern of lights shining down through the clouds, spinning in concentric circles.
My eyes bulged, and I shouted for everyone to stick their heads out the windows. They all got excited when they saw the lights too. I told them we were going to follow the UFO as far as we could, and they all agreed, not that I had asked. The chase didn’t last long, as we caught up to them hovering above a very fancy McDonald’s restaurant, which had a spotlight on the roof projecting the circles across the bottom of the clouds.
All my friends mocked me abusively… as if they didn’t almost pee their pants when they first saw the “UFO” themselves. I deserved it though, and I continued to beat myself up for years afterward. The worst part wasn’t the shame. I want to believe there are alien spaceships in our skies. For a few years, I lived in a reality where that was a confirmed fact, but that magical time of my life ended in a McDonald’s parking lot in Austria.
My story does teach something novel about our world though. If you’ll remember, the lights I saw in Texas were traveling at fifty miles per hour for half an hour, in the middle of nowhere. The only explanation is that some red necks put a spotlight in the back of their truck and went driving through the countryside freaking out motorists like myself. That’s fucking hilarious, and it’s almost as bizarre as alien spaceships. I have to wonder how many other UFO sightings were caused by humans behaving absurdly and probably drunk.
In 2005 I was a Senior Airman (rank E-4) in the U.S. Air Force. My job title was 3C0X1, aka Communications Computer Systems Operator, aka all-purpose computer nerd. I was stationed at Sembach Air Base, which is located in Southwest Germany, about a twenty minute drive from both Ramstein Air Base and the Army’s Landstuhl Medical Center.
Since Ramstein is the largest Air Force base in Europe, and Landstuhl is the largest military hospital outside the continental United States, this is where the military sends all the wounded soldiers from the Middle East. Several times a year, Sembach would have a blood drive due to the high volume of blood needed for all the incoming wounded soldiers. I love the idea of giving blood, but every time I do, my blood spews out so fast I get light-headed, nauseous and almost pass out. They always have to elevate my head and put a cold pack on my neck, which is pretty embarrassing. However, that first world problem pales in comparison to soldiers needing emergency transfusions. So I did my duty and opened my veins for my brothers and sisters.
Another reason I’m hesitant to give blood is because I had hepatitis when I was four years old. It wasn’t sexually transmitted, and I recovered from it. Multiple blood tests have shown it’s not in my system anymore. I couldn’t have enlisted if it was, but I always worried my blood might be dirty. However, this didn’t stop me from giving blood, because they test every donation for diseases. So if there was anything there, they’d catch it.
Since the military had already tested and inoculated me for everything you can be tested and inoculated for, I didn’t give my blood donation a second thought until a few weeks later when I stopped by the base post office to check my mail on my lunch break. That day I received an official letter from the military, which I had to sign for. This was highly unusual. So my heart rate was a little elevated when I opened the letter. My mind raced, trying to guess what I may have gotten in trouble for.
The news was much worse than I imagined. To my horror, the letter said my recent blood donation had tested positive for HIV, and I needed to contact the medical squadron as soon as possible to have another test done to confirm the results. By the time I finished reading the document, my head was spinning and darkness filled my peripheral vision.
I went back to work and tried to go through the rest of my day acting like nothing was wrong, but my head felt like a black hole, as if everything good had been sucked out of my life, leaving an existential vacuum in its place. Nothing mattered anymore. I was no longer working towards retirement. All of my hopes and dreams were unreachable. There was nothing left for me to do but wait to die… and give the bad news to my family, friends and most recent sexual partners.
Unable to face reality, I let a week pass without contacting the medical squadron. I walked through each day in a daze, watching what happened to me from a thousand miles away. I made a list of my sexual partners, which wasn’t long. I decided who the most likely culprit to give me this horrible disease was, a promiscuous Air Force girl from my previous base. I obsessed over who else I may have accidentally infected by having any kind of physical contact with, which I knew wasn’t possible, but my mind was stuck in panic mode.
I’d already had my last will and testament drawn up by a military lawyer a year earlier. So I didn’t have to worry about that, but I spent dozens of hours plotting my final words and trying to decide what to do with the few years I had left. As I ate tasteless food or carried on pointless small talk with my coworkers, I thought about my regrets and everything I wouldn’t get to do in the future. I didn’t try bargaining with God, because that would have been pointless. I was already a dead man walking. All I could do was make the most of my fleeting time and try to cry as little as possible. Mostly I thought about those poor souls I’d infected and needed to hurry up and pass on the tragic news to.
I didn’t want to tell anyone my secret until I knew for sure I had HIV. Lucky for them, even though I was dragging my feet, the Air Force wasn’t. A female nurse called me at work and asked if I’d received an official letter recently. I said, “Yes.” The nurse asked me what it was about, and I replied I’d rather not say out loud. I knew my boss, whose office sat caddy-corner from my desk, eavesdropped on my conversations. The nurse asked me to say the first letter of the pertinent word, and I said, “H.” After confirming she didn’t need to break the bad news to me herself, she scheduled an appointment at Ramstein a few days later for me to give more blood for further testing.
On the day of the test I told my boss I had to go to Ramstein for a routine medical checkup. Twenty minutes later I sulked into the medical clinic. As a male nurse quietly drew my blood, I asked how accurate the initial test was. He looked me in the eyes and said in a meaningful tone of voice, “Ninety-seven percent.”
I went home that night and got drunk, as I’d done every night for the past week. Even with all the lights in my apartment on, everything looked dark. It was like living in the Twilight Zone, where the rules of the universe were different for me, and not in a good way. The only ray of hope my mind could latch onto was that there had been a mistake, but I couldn’t take a three percent chance of a fluke happening seriously. I’d have better odds of winning the lottery.
Fast forward several more months of bleakness, despair and blood tests. As fate would have it, I did win the Twilight Zone lottery. A ninety-seven percent accurate HIV test means three percent of the people who take it, win an existential nightmare that ends with them receiving a new lease on life. I’ve had more STD tests since then, and they all confirm I never had HIV. Plus, all of my sexual partners from that time are healthy and alive.
Part of my brain tells me I should be mad at the world for giving me a false death sentence, but in the end, it was a blessing in disguise. I almost feel bad for anyone who hasn’t had to go through that. It’s so easy to take life for granted and let the years slip by without really thinking about what’s important or how you should spend what little time you have on Earth. I basically got my mid-life crisis out of the way at the age of 25.
People told me I was crazy when I immigrated to New Zealand at the age of 29 despite having never visited the country. In my mind, the risk of not experiencing life to its fullest outweighed anything that could possibly go wrong. I only spent three years in New Zealand, and during that time a lot of things did go wrong, but experience has taught me, you’re not having an adventure if everything goes right. And as a wiser man than myself once said, “The summer would not be so sweet, were it not for the winter.” When bad things happen to me, and those two pieces of wisdom don’t put things into perspective, I can always remind myself, at least I don’t have AIDS.
The other thing I took away from this experience is that it’s important to leave something good behind when you inevitably die. I don’t have any money to shower the poor with, but the one thing I do have is wisdom gained through often unpleasant experiences that I don’t want to be in vain. This is a big part of why I’m in such a mad dash to write as much as I can regardless of how little it pays. I hope my blog and books inspire, enlighten and entertain you. That’s all I need to take to my grave.
When I was twenty years old I worked for a company that did short-run manual labor contracts like brush clearing, pressure washing and picking up trash on the side of the road. The job paid $50 per day, cash under the table. Almost all the workers were either felons with outstanding warrants or illegal immigrants because those were the only people who would do the disgusting, dangerous, monotonous, back-breaking work we did for so little money. I was there because my brothers were, and it was better than my last job washing dishes at Bennigans.
We did a lot of work on long, lonely stretches of Texas country roads and found a lot of strange things motorists had thrown out their windows. Mostly we found old, sun-scorched, water-stained trucker porn magazines. These were all nasty, skanky, degrading, depressing smut rags that made Hustler look like Vanity Fair. The kind of magazines that published pictures of homeless guys dressed as Santa gangbanging a haggard woman with missing teeth. Until I worked at this job I didn’t even realize magazines like that existed.
In case you’re wondering, and you need it spelled out, the reason there’s so much trucker porn on the side of the road is because truckers masturbate to it while they’re driving, and when they’re bored with a magazine, they just throw it out the window.
Half the people who worked for that company either lived or partied at my apartment. So when members of our work crews would find these magazines, they’d keep them and put them in the magazine racks in my/our bathrooms. The house also had a subscription to Playboy and Maxim. So we had a range of toilet reading material, but mostly there was just old, cover-less, sun-dried, wrinkled trucker smut.
One day I was sitting on the toilet flipping through the magazines looking for a Playboy with an article I hadn’t read yet, but all I could find was soul-crushing trucker smut. Fed up, I threw away all of the road porn so all that was left was the classy stuff.
A few days later me, my two brothers, and four or five other guys from our crew came home and started our nightly ritual of drinking to congratulate ourselves for pushing the limits of human endurance at work that day and to forget how hopeless our lives were. A few beers into the evening someone shouted from one of the bathrooms, “HEY! WHERE’D ALL THE GOOD PORN GO!?!” I chuckled to myself nonchalantly, but literally everyone else in the house jumped up in a panic and ran to the bathrooms shouting, “What!? Is the good porn missing?” “Hey, where’d all the good porn go!?” “Who the fuck took all the good porn!?”
Casually, I remarked, “You mean all that trucker porn? Man, I threw that nasty stuff out.”
Then pandemonium erupted. Everyone was furious. They were seriously offended. It got tense, and for a second I feared for my safety.
I tried to explain that I was doing us a favor by getting rid of all the riff-raff, but everyone responded that they hated the vanilla classy stuff. It was like looking at a photograph of a fruit bowl to them. They needed something far, far, far more raw and primal to feel alive.
I looked at my roommates and coworkers with new eyes that day. I didn’t want to know what depraved life experiences made them feel a connection with gutter skank erotica, and it frightened me that I was the only one in the room (or on the highway) who enjoyed glamour porn.
A few months later the lease on our apartment ran out, and we all went our separate ways. I went on to become a computer help desk technician and network administrator. I’ve found porn on many, many people’s computers, and I have never once found a folder full of glamour porn. Every jpg. and video file has been self-loathing degradation smut. I challenge you to go into any sex store and look at their magazine and video selections. Most of it is far from classy.
I hate to burst your bubble, but most of the men you know are turned on by scarier stuff than you’d be comfortable knowing. Statistically speaking, trucker smut is the good porn.
I don’t believe in ghosts because I haven’t seen rigorous scientific proof that they exist. However, I don’t believe they don’t exist. I’m agnostic on the topic. If anyone ever produces evidence that passes rigorous, repeatable double-blind studies that prove ghosts are real, I’ll pretty much accept it, but that hasn’t happened yet. I wouldn’t be too surprised if scientists do one day discover something that we would call ghosts though. Humans know as much about the universe as ants know about global politics. As ignorant as we are, there’s a 100% chance that forces exist in this universe that we’re ignorant of.
The story I’m about to tell you is real, and some people would cite tales like mine as proof positive that ghosts exist, but I’m not one of those people. As convincing as my story may be, the phenomenon I experienced can’t be measured, reproduced or fully explained. Since I can’t fully explain what I experienced, and you can’t verify it, then this story can’t be used as proof of anything.
My story takes place in a creepy, elegant house in Paris, Texas. It was built in 1818 in the style of a Southern Victorian plantation home. It had two floors with a large staircase for the owners and a smaller staircase in the back of the house for the servants. Black slaves must have worked there, which is depressing, but the old woman who lived in that house during America’s civil war took in a wounded Union Soldier and nursed him back to health in the room that became my older brother’s. This woman would have been hung as a traitor if anyone ever found out. So she cut up the soldier’s uniform and hid it by sewing the pieces into a quilt, which has been passed down through the family ever since.
The last tenant of the house before I moved in was a yoga instructor back before yoga was cool. He looked exactly like a red-headed George Carlin and acted like one too. A brilliant and eccentric man, he remodeled the entire house to reflect his personality. The bedrooms had sinks and faucets. In the room that became my bedroom, he’d mounted heavy wooden posts and poles in one corner so he could hang from the monkey bars in contorted angles. He installed a porcelain bathtub with hot and cold running water into the back porch. There were hidden compartments in almost every room and a hidden room underneath the stairs. On the front of the house, he embedded an orange start with a black diamond in it, which was his personal logo, and he named the house, “The Palmer House” and posted a tasteful white wooden sign in the front yard with the house’s name in black beveled letters.
The man poured his heart, soul, and finances into projecting his personality into his house, and in the end, it took his last breath too. He fell off a ladder while doing repair work and suffered crippling back pains. His doctors told him his condition was irreparable, and the only way he could manage the pain was to be on pain pills the rest of his life. He ended the pain by shooting himself in the mouth with a shotgun underneath the heavy wooden breakfast table mounted to the floor in the alcove where the slaves used to eat.
One way or another he had always planned on dying in that house. He named it after his brother, Palmer, who shot himself in the mouth with a pistol in the room that became my twin brother’s room. The leather recliner he did it in was still there when we moved in. Their mother died of pneumonia in the room that became my mother’s. The bed frame that she died in was also still there because it was built into the floor.
This didn’t spook any of us out. The way we looked at it, people die in houses every day. That doesn’t make those houses cursed. The story of a person’s death is the story of their life. Death stories are life stories. They’re golden threads in the rich tapestry of history. But we didn’t have to get that philosophical. The house was just way too amazing to pass up, tortured spirits of the dead be damned.
I didn’t/don’t believe in ghosts, but I still never got up for a single midnight snack the entire time I lived at The Palmer House. I hoped I’d experience something, but I didn’t expect it, and I never lost sleep out of fear… except for one night.
To understand what happened that night you need to know the layout of the house. It was built almost in a perfect square. All four corners of the second floor were bedrooms. The staircase ran straight up the middle of the house so the whole floor had one square-shaped hallway that wrapped around the staircase. Since both the stairways and the halls were made of old, hardwood, you could always hear where everyone in the house is by the sounds of their footsteps creaking in their path.
I was laying in bed one night around 1am tossing and turning when I heard footsteps creaking up the stairs. That didn’t surprise me because there were three teenage boys living in the house. I assumed I was listening to my older brother trying to sneak in the house without waking my mom up. Since I could hear the footsteps from my room with the door closed, my mom would be able to hear the sound from her equidistant room if she were awake or sleeping lightly. So I stopped rolling and listened to the footsteps slowly creep up the stairs.
I listened to my brother walk about halfway up the stairs and then stop. I assumed he realized how noisy he was being and paused to lay low. So I waited for the creaking to start back up, but the next three steps I heard were on the second floor near my mother’s door, which sat at the opposite end of the hallways that the stairs opened up to, which meant my brother would have had to climb up the railing, which was possible, but I definitely would have heard that.
A few moments later I heard five or six footsteps walk past my door, which was located caddy-corner from my mother’s room, on the opposite side of the house with a staircase hole and railings between them. Then I heard two steps come from another side of the hall. I laid under my covers for what felt like thirty minutes listening to intermittent footsteps walking up and down the stairs and around the hallway, and they always started and stopped absurdly far away from each other.
In my panicky, scientific mind I considered every possible explanation for the chaotic spread of echoes, and I ruled out every logical explanation. I did consider just getting up out of bed and investigating, but part of me didn’t want to know the answer. I also considered the fact that if there was something malevolent in the hall, hiding under my blanket wasn’t going to help me in any way. Yet I still chose to just lay there inhaling recycled breath and contemplating my position on the existence of ghosts.
If you’ve got a personal ghost story and would like to share it, feel free to leave it in a comment for the rest of us.
When I was thirteen years old, I lived with my two brothers and my father in New Braunfels, TX. My older brother was a bad seed from the day he was born. He literally stole baby bottles from the other toddlers in preschool. He tortured my twin and me emotionally and physically for years without having to worry about getting arrested for child abuse. Even though he was only thirteen months older than us, he was still too big for us to gang up on. Any time we ever did manage to hurt him in a fight, he’d go “Hulkamaniac” and pummel us, impervious to pain. We rarely told on him, because he would just beat us up twice as bad later as punishment.
One Saturday, my older brother and I were sitting in our bedroom while our father was away at work. I was happily devouring the contents of a carton of Whoppers, which was my favorite candy at the time. I was thoroughly enjoying this luxury, not even caring if I ate enough to give me a stomach ache.
On the other side of the room, my older brother was playing with my Crosman 760 Pumpmaster BB gun. We all had BB guns, but mine was the most powerful. If you pumped it once or twice, you could probably shoot someone and it would bounce off the skin. If you pumped it fifteen times, you could kill a bird twenty yards away.
He pumped it up seven or eight times and said, “Hey, Travis. Hold up that Whoppers carton, and let me see if I can shoot it out of your hand.”
Obviously, I told him, “No way. You’re going to hit my hand.”
He replied casually, “Let me put it to you this way, either you let me try to shoot it out of your hand, and hope I don’t hit you… or I’m going to beat you up and force you to let me do it anyway.”
Protesting or running wasn’t an option. So I reluctantly held the carton as high and far away from me as I could. I heard the gunfire and felt my hand go flying backward, letting go of the carton of Whoppers and spilling them everywhere.
Several thoughts went through my mind at that point. First, “Of course he shot me in the hand. He definitely did that on purpose.” Second, “I need emergency medical attention.” Third, “We can’t tell our father about this because he’ll give us the worst whooping of our lives, ground us forever and take away our BB guns.”
With these facts in mind, I inspected my hand to see how bad I’d been injured. The BB entered the side of my palm, just below my pinky finger, and I could see a bump under my skin on the top of my hand, just below the middle finger, where the BB had come to rest.
I was relieved to see the steel ball just under the skin because that meant I could cut it out myself by making an incision in the skin without having to dig into the muscle. Then there would be no need for an ambulance, and our father would never have to know what happened. So I went and found a pocket knife that one of us had won at a county fair earlier that year and took it to the bathroom sink, where I attempted to cut the BB out, but the pain was unbearable.
Losing blood and running out of time to fix the situation myself, I put the knife down and tried another approach, which to my surprise, actually worked. I simply pushed the BB out the way it came. With minimal effort, it popped out the side of my hand and rolled down the drain, leaving a blood trail in its path. Relieved, I put a Band-Aid over the bullet hole, wrapped myself in three heavy sleeping bags and laid under my bed for a few hours, shivering from blood loss and shock.
To this day, our father has no idea one of his children shot another one in their bedroom. It took my older brother a long time to feel guilty about what he did, but he grew up eventually, and we’re good friends now.
The Wise Sloth 