From Grammy to Nobel to Darwin: Shattering Delusions

16-year-old me opened the Epiphone SG case with a glint of delusional grandeur.

Rock Stardom Gauranteed

I would take this ax and conquer the world. The next present to unwrap Christmas morning in 1999 was a Marshall amplifier. I had everything I needed, rock stardom was basically guaranteed.

Formal guitar lessons, pffft, who needs them. Have you ever heard of power chords? For the next 9 years, rock n’ roll led me down a path of self-discovery, failure, minor successes, and a blurry haze of pot smoke and tinnitus.

My band finally threw in the towel around 2008. I decided waiting tables and waiting for the record deal was not a great life path. Three bassists had already quit, our first singer moved out of town, our second singer was let go for tone deafness, and our third, who showed true greatness, vanished on a Wednesday. A few months later, we found out he was extradited to Florida and stayed in jail awaiting trial.

We failed to capitalize on the analog to digital shift that was taking place right underneath us. Had we embraced the changes happening before our eyes, we may have been able to push ourselves into moderate commercial success.

But as my father says,

“if my aunt had balls, she would have been my uncle.”

Oh well, on to the next chapter in life.

I moved to a college town and decided I wanted to take education seriously. I buried myself in my studies. Economics, Engineering, and Business Management excited me. Prior to this time in life, I had failed out of college three times.

I blame the pot, even though it doesn’t light itself.

Now that I was in college and taking it seriously, I began to realize I was capable of performing above the curve. I excelled. Dean’s list, President’s list, perfect 4.0s throughout my education.

Convinced of my intellectual superiority, my delusions of grandeur surfaced in other areas. Down the rabbit hole I went. I would invent modern technology at the precipice of human understanding. Closed-loop systems completely intrigued me. Envisioning a greenhouse that served as a Carnot engine, losing nothing and absorbing everything from its surroundings. That was my goal.

During my physics and chemistry phases of education, I had an interesting idea. Could the harmonic resonance of elements be used to concentrate their quantities in a solution? Someone already patented the concept.

Nobel look out, here I come.

This only fueled my ego and heightened my delusion of grandeur.

I was all but guaranteed to create a perpetual motion machine and earn a Nobel prize in physics. I wanted to be the next R. Buckminster Fuller, someone who was a jack of all trades and a master of them as well. Architecture, smarchitecture, I had bigger plans than a silly dome.

Then Raspy came and went.

One morning at around 3 am my beloved dog Raspy was howling, whining, and barking to go outside. I was asleep and having none of it. I told him to stop a few times.

Funny how dogs don’t listen.

The last thing I ever said to him was, “get the fuck out of here,” while I gave him a frustrating pat on the butt.

When I left for school, I couldn’t find him. I came home later that day and found him 6 miles from home on the side of the highway.

I lost a piece of my heart that day. I buried him in the woods by the house and with him, I buried a major part of me.

Reality began to set in from that moment forward. I had thoroughly failed a living thing that trusted me for everything. He lost his life due to my negligence and I lost my best friend.

I miss you Raspy, it’s been 10 years and I still miss you.

Life is fragile, we naively assume that it’s a constant to be counted on. It isn’t.

Almost Fish Food

4 years later, I am returning to my ship from a night out in Saipan. I worked on a ship that only had a rope ladder as the gangway. The launch boat pulls up next to the ship and you time yourself. When the ship and the launch boat are in the perfect rhythm, you step off the boat onto the ladder and begin the climb up the ladder.

Normally, a good pilot will butt the launch boat up to the ship and use the thrusters to maintain steady contact. When the currents are strong, this maneuver is difficult because the ocean current wants to pull the bow of the launch boat parallel to the ship. It requires significant force and accuracy to maintain safe contact for the sailors to transfer to the rope ladder.

The pilot on this night decided to skip the perpendicular approach and chose instead to start parallel. The disadvantage to this is the launch boat does not have side thrusters. There is nothing pushing the side of the boat against the ship.

It was my turn to grab the ladder. I stand at the edge of the boat, which is rocking back and forth and so is the ship. They make contact, the AB on the boat gives me the nod, I reach forward and right when I do the ship and boat separate from each other and now there is nothing in front of me but ocean and a 10-foot gap between the boat and the ship.

I have already shifted my weight over the side of the boat and was going overboard.

The AB grabs my backpack strap and pulls me back onto the boat and not a split second later the boat and ship slammed into each other with enough force to crush me into a blood-stained shark snack.

The reality of my situation didn’t set in until I was onboard the ship. I had come seconds away from death. That AB and my trusty Samsonite backpack strap had saved my life.

How far the rock star of my teenage years had fallen. My delusions of grandeur had run its gambit. I was never going to win a Grammy, the Nobel is highly unlikely at this point,

but Darwin?

I could still win one of those.

What I am reading

From the Medium Profile Pills for thoughts, “The Burnout Society” is a thought provoking peace describing modern neoliberalism and how it has conditioned us to accept a new model of slavery.

“However, when society places the entire burden of success and social mobility on the individual, it creates an unsustainable pressure, resulting in a surge of mental health issues including burnout, anxiety, depression, and various personality disorders.”

Read the entire story here: