Judgement Day (3 page)

I still hung
out with my old crew from high school, we called ourselves Team
Tron. We got the name from an obsession with the 3D Simpsons
episode, there is a line where Homer asks “has anyone seen that
movie Tron?” Team Tron consisted of my friends Tim, Davo, Nogg and
myself. Nogg got schizophrenia in high school, we used to laugh
about it, he claimed he had five magic powers and we were always
trying to find out what his powers were. So by this time Nogg had
stopped smoking pot because of his schizophrenia, and that was
pretty much all the rest of us ever did, so Nogg didn’t hang around
with us as much as he did in high school. Whenever I did see Nogg
he was always going on about “picking up hags,” but I began to get
paranoid about Tim and Davo. All we ever did was smoke bongs and
play Nintendo 64, I wondered why we never tried to meet any women.
I thought I was in some poofter club and I was the only one who
wasn’t in on the secret that we were
all
gay. I became paranoid about a lot of my
friends. I also thought that Ben and Adam weren’t really my
friends, that they thought I was lame. I never felt like I was
cool, that’s why I wanted to be crazy so badly
,
because I thought it would make me
cool.

I did see my
friend Silk fairly regularly too, we went to school together as
well, I didn’t see him as often as my other friends, but I used to
go up to Katoomba to visit, we always got along well. He was living
with this girl Priscilla, he had a child with her, Isaac, they’re
not together any more, but I always got the impression she didn’t
really like the way I’d always turn up with this huge sack of weed.
Hanging out with Silk was always fun, he had a lot more friends
than me, I always just hung around with the same few guys, but I
saw his friends regularly enough that I became moderately well
acquainted with some of them. The night Silk told me the name for
his son was Isaac, I said “that’s a very Biblical name.” Silk was
wearing this coloured stripey poncho thing, it could have been a
jacket. I was sitting on the lounge looking up at him and for a
moment I had a vision of him as Joseph with his technicolour
dreamcoat and the ceiling light shining behind his head like a
halo, standing there with arms outstretched like some sort of
saint. I rubbed my eyes and removed the image from my mind, and I
thought nothing more of it.

I started to
smoke a lot more pot on my own, usually when I was at university I
would just roll a joint and walk around the perimeter of the uni
until it was finished and then come back into the uni grounds, I
just thought it was better than having issues with uni security.
Smoking on my own, it made me a little paranoid, and I began
talking to myself a little.

Talking to
myself started off as mumbling, I wanted to be like Hunter S
Thompson in the movie of ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,’ the way
he mumbles things to himself all the time. The talking to myself,
it got more and more pronounced over time, it went from mumbling,
to talking, to singing. That’s right, singing, and I don’t mean
humming some tune, I would walk around the university campus
singing Tom Waits songs, and not quietly. I did this all the time,
I would spend a lot of time at home memorising songs and then
wander around the campus singing them as if I was alone. At the
time I didn’t think it was that strange, I had always liked singing
along with my CDs, but singing in public was something I really
started to enjoy. I was proud that I had learned all the words to
these great songs.

In the early
days of talking to myself it was like I wanted to be crazy, it was
as if I was pretending to be crazy because I thought it was cool to
be crazy, but when I couldn’t stop I began to wonder if I really
was crazy? I used to like singing at work at Coles too, I had a job
there packing shelves in the middle of the night. In particular, I
learned all the words for ‘Step Right Up’ by Tom Waits, it’s a song
with a massive number of sales clichés, I loved singing that song
at the supermarket the most.

I used to
drive a friend of mine around in exchange for pot, I also used to
drive to the Nepean River on my own a lot and smoke bongs in my
car, and I began to think I was under surveillance because the cops
thought I was a drug dealer. It seemed to me like this black Holden
Commodore with tinted windows was following me around. I would see
him behind me in the McDonalds drive-thru a lot, it seemed like
wherever I went there was always this black Holden Commodore
nearby. I never thought to check the number plate, and because of
the tinted windows all I would ever see were the hands on the
steering wheel, he made me think of the truck driver in the movie
‘Duel.
’
All I ever saw
were his hands as he followed me around at night, he was my
nemesis. Of course it was completely paranoid.

W
hen I saw the towers come down on September 11 of that
year, I knew that it was the beginning of the end. We've witnessed
much worse things than September 11 since 2001, but at the time I'd
never seen anything like it. It shouldn't have been as big a deal
as it was, it was the act of a small terrorist organisation and
should have been treated as such, but that was the day that the
world changed forever.

I didn’t
realise it
at the time
,
but September 11 affected me more than I knew.
My brother Tom was only a few years old at the
time, I remember watching him crashing his toy cars into the lounge
and making explosion noises and thinking “that's pretty fucked up.”
He must have seen that footage hundreds, if not thousands of times,
like we all did.

A night or two
after September 11, my friend Davo and I were doing our usual
thing, driving around Penrith smoking cones, when Davo told me to
stop the car. I pulled over to the side of the road and he pointed
up into the sky, there were strange orange lights flying over
Penrith, maybe about five or six of them. After the orange lights
flew overhead they were followed by a helicopter. It was night time
so we couldn’t see what was happening properly, but the helicopter
seemed to be chasing after these orange lights. I thought maybe it
was some sort of military exercise because of September 11, but
those orange lights didn’t look like any sort of aircraft I’ve ever
seen, nor did they make any sound. I’ve spent countless hours
scanning the skies ever since, always hoping for something I can’t
explain, but that’s the only time I’ve ever seen a ufo.

At university
I began to think people were talking about me behind my back. I
thought I could hear people say things like “he thinks he’s so
cool,
but
all he does is
smoke pot,
really he's just a
dickhead,
” or “there goes that crazy guy.” There were a few
occasions where people would start singing songs when they saw me
coming. Maybe they just liked singing as well, I don’t know, but
more likely they just wanted me to feel normal. Either that or they
were poking fun. This people talking about me thing really started
to get to me after a while, there was one time on the bus that I
thought some people a few seats back were talking about me, “I have
to know,” I decided. So I got up from my seat, I walked over to
them and I asked “were you just talking about me?”
They
looked at me
like they were
confused. “Come on,
you can tell me, I just need to know if you were talking about me?”
They denied it, I pressed them again, and they denied it again.
“Ok, sorry,” I said, and I sat back down convinced that they were
lying. I had wanted to be crazy for years, and I thought I was only
pretending to be crazy to make myself look cool, but my mind was
slipping, I was actually becoming “that crazy guy.” I wasn’t
pretending anymore, and it scared me.

My behaviour
started to get crazier and crazier too. In particular, my driving
was a little on the suicidal side. I always drove stoned, but I was
usually more careful about the drinking. I would drive drunk on
occasion though. Sometimes I’d go to the pub with Davo, and the
plan was always to drive there and pick the car up in the morning,
but after a few beers and joints we’d come out of the pub and
say “
let’s go for a
drive!” The craziest driving I ever did was after a friend’s 21st
in June of that year. I had gotten wasted at his party, the plan
was to walk back home because it was only a few blocks away, but
once again the “let’s go for a drive!” idea sounded good
.
So I went for a cruise, on my
own, along the highway. I found out my car’s top speed that night,
I was going 170km/h with my foot flat to the floor and cursing
“doesn’t this fucking car go any faster than this?” I did a 180º
spinout somewhere around St Marys. I ended up on the other side of
the road facing the other way, “it’s time to go home,” I decided.
That was pretty fast, it wasn’t the fastest I’ve ever been in a
car, but it was the fastest I’d ever driven. I was heading for a
breakdown.

Things came to
a head at the end of third year university. I couldn’t take the
madness anymore, it had started out as pretend but it was taking
over my life. I was in my car in
a
car park where I used to smoke with Adam
sometimes, and I sat there smoking cone after cone after cone. I
was rambling on, “everyone thinks I’m crazy, they say ‘there goes
that crazy guy,’ I fucking walk around talking to myself and
singing to myself, I’m fucking insane! What the fuck is wrong with
me?! If I’m pretending why can’t I stop?!” I went on like this for
about half an hour, smoking, rambling, shouting at myself and
bawling my eyes out. My life was empty and meaningless. I was
beginning to realise that I had no purpose, I had no life goals, I
had no reason to exist
.
M
y philosophy was always
to cruise through life doing the minimum work necessary for the
maximum income, but it gave me no satisfaction
.
I wasn’t really talking to myself that
day, someone else was in the car with me.

When I look
back on that day I know that I wasn’t really alone. I could feel it
at the time too, he or
she
or
they said “
You’re
better than this,
I’ll give you something to do, I’ll give
you a reason to exist
, I’ll
show you what you’re really capable of!
” Fumbling around
that day in my car I burned my fingers badly on the
conepiece
,
the red hot
conepiece gave me blisters on my two index fingers and I had scars
for months. Later I thought back to that day while looking at my
fingers and I thought of ‘The Creation of Adam’
in
the Sistine Chapel, where God’s fingers
are touching Adam’s as He gives Adam the divine spark. I knew that
I was losing my mind, but I didn’t know what was coming next, no
one did.

My sister
Katie meanwhile had become a born-again Christian, she was having a
conversation with me one afternoon out the front of the house. She
asked me “why don’t you believe in God?” I told her “it’s
ridiculous, there’s a scientific explanation for everything.” She
said “where did the universe come from?” I told her “the big bang,
everyone knows that.” So she asked, “how does gravity work then?
That’s proof of God.” She had me stumped, I didn’t know how gravity
worked, I had never thought about it before. I didn’t consciously
think about it after that, but she had started something in my
subconscious, the wheels were in motion. Ideas were being conceived
without my knowledge.

A few weeks
later and it was the summer holidays. I went on a camping trip to a
beach somewhere with my mate Ben. We got really wasted that night,
we were drinking a bottle of Wild Turkey and had a large bag of
weed, as usual. We were out under the stars, and while I was
looking up at the night sky I had an idea. I began to think about
the black hole in the 3D Simpsons episode, and something clicked!
Space warps around mass in every direction at once! That’s how
gravity works! It all happened in an instant! I realised (perhaps
incorrectly at the time) that nothing could escape gravity, no
matter how far away something is it is still being slowed by
gravity! I looked up at the stars and I could see them all coming
back together from gravity, then exploding again, expanding and
then contracting again and I enlarged the idea! Super-universes
made up entirely of other universes, universes with universes
within universes all exploding, expanding and contracting over and
over and over again! I studied chemical engineering, so I knew that
the laws of conservation of mass and energy meant that the universe
could not possibly have come out of nothing and out of nowhere! The
universe has always existed, there is a scientific explanation for
the origin of the universe! In an instant, like a flash of
lightning from on high, divine inspiration had struck me! I had
made the greatest discovery in the history of physics, in the
history of the world! I had discovered the infinite Universe!

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Chapter 2

My question, however,
remains unanswered: –

Have we any right to
infer – let us say, rather, to imagine – an interminable succession
of the
“
clusters of
clusters,
”
or of
“
Universes
”
more or less similar?

(From
‘Eureka
,
’ by Edgar Allan Poe)

I couldn’t
stop thinking about my new universe theory. I lay in bed imagining
the universe in my mind, seeing universes within universes, big
bangs within big bangs, stars being created, gravity sucking them
all back together. I was virtually comatose. An infinite series of
explosions had detonated in my mind!