During this time of being really messed up and not working much, I really started to gamble a lot. I was so bored in the day time that I would wander up to the pub and play poker machines and lose my money for something to do. Mum started controlling my money, which was really annoying. She used to give me ten or twenty dollars each day, or whatever I needed, but never much money. It was so frustrating, but it was probably for the best really, or I would have lost it all the day I got paid. She also made me go to Gamblers Anonymous. I was getting bad, the only thing that gave me any pleasure anymore was gambling. I couldn’t smoke pot any more, I had no one to drink with in the day times, so I would sit at the pub and play poker machines. I was bad, but no matter how bad I was, you can’t make someone quit gambling by forcing them to go to meetings.
Even though I was starting to get over my delusions somewhat, I still wondered why I had been cursed to believe these delusions in the first place. I used to write out odds of all of the signs I had received. It went something like this, although I would add and remove things depending on what I was thinking about at the time.
Odds of being called Michael 1/50
Odds of having the middle name David 1/50
Odds of having a mum called Mary (or Rosemary) 1/100
Odds of having a large birthmark on my thigh 1/1000
Odds of being born under the Southern Cross 1/20
Total odds 1/5,000,000,000
About how many people live on earth.
Odds of discovering the infinite Universe 1/1,000,000
Total odds 1/50,000,000,000,000,000
That’s fifty million billion to one, which is more people than have ever lived on earth.
Although I was haunted by what I later termed “prophetic stigmata,” and I would ask God, “why would you make me go insane like that if I’m not really the Messiah?” I did begin to get over my delusions somewhat, and I became interested in attending church. I went to my sister Katie’s church, it was one of those churches where everyone waves their arms around in the air and dances and stuff. I tried to get into it, but it really wasn’t for me.
A friend of Katie’s, Nathan, invited me along to his church. Nathan’s church was much more my style. Just a guy out the front talking about the Bible, and a few songs, it was much more intellectual than Katie’s church. The youth minister, Dave, he took me under his wing somewhat. Dave was a really nice guy, and we used to get together and sit and talk about the Bible. He taught me all about it, I would ask him questions, and he would tell me what the Bible says. As I learned more, my questions became more and more difficult, but Dave always gave me the best answer he could. I also read most of the books in the church library, not the ones about how to live your life or anything, but the ones about the Bible itself. I studied the Bible intensely for quite some time.
I used to periodically have to buy new Bibles. I’d have a Bible for a while, and I’d go through all the prophetic verses underlining prophecies relevant to myself. It would get to the point where half of the prophetic books were underlined, then I’d come to my senses and have to throw it out. The new Bible would last a little while, but soon enough I’d be at it again, underlining prophecies all over the place.
This was when Katie moved to America. Katie got accepted into this intensive Bible course in Colorado called 24/7. I was pretty sad to see her go, Katie was my only friend in the house really. Mum and Ken were both pretty shit to me, but Katie was always nice. I picked on her a lot when I was little, but as we got older we became closer, it was very hard for me when she left. I would send her emails while she was in Colorado, but I always wrote this angry shit. I would take offence at anything she said, even if she wasn’t being mean, which she never was. I had a very angry brain at the time. I was alright talking, but when I wrote my brain was someone else and he was really angry and all of this horrible stuff would come out. In the end I told her I can’t send her any more emails, and that we have to just talk on the phone. I couldn’t control my brain, but when I spoke I was myself.
I’m still like that really, I don’t mean angry, but different when I write. There’s a lot of stuff in this book that I would never say out loud. This part, my story, this is written by me, but when I get into the Judgement Day stuff, I honestly don’t know who writes that. I don’t know where my theory of SpaceFluidity comes from either. I’m a pretty simple guy, I go to work, I drink beer, I hang out with friends, but I live one life in the real world, and another life in, I don’t know, some other place that I don’t know if it’s real or not.
Anyway, after about a year and a half of being on these heavy drugs, the nurse refused to give me any more injections because I was grinding my teeth too much and she was worried it was going to become a permanent side effect. Too late though, because I still grind my teeth to this day. So I changed onto this stuff called Seroquel (300mg). It was one of the greatest things that had ever happened. Suddenly I didn’t have to sleep all day! I started working more, and I was happier. I had thought that I was ruined, that my life was over, that my brain was screwed and I’d never get out of bed and back to work. Dr Pusic had told me that the drugs weren’t sedating, so I believed that my brain was just ruined, that I was ruined, that I would be a drooling vegetable forever, but I was alive! Words cannot describe to you how amazing it felt to be out of bed! This was a huge turning point in my life.
One day I won about $1000 playing poker machines at the pub. Mum took the money off me and put it in an envelope. The next day I grabbed $300 and took it to the pub and lost it. Mum was really angry, she threw the rest of the money at me and told me to move out and use the money for bond. I took that money to the pub and I lost it all. So I had to move out, but then I had no money for bond.
Luckily some friends from church said I could stay with them until I saved up enough money for my bond. They lived in Warrimoo in the lower Blue Mountains, I stayed a few weeks until I had enough money saved. I answered an ad in the paper for a guy named Tony who had a room in Warrimoo, he just so happened to be the same guy Tim lived with when he first moved out of home, and he let me move in, probably because I was friends with Tim. Tony was this divorced guy who worked for Telstra, he needed housemates to help cover his mortgage. Another guy moved in soon after me, a guy named Pat.
It was good living with those guys, it was the first time I didn’t have to follow my mum’s rules. It was awesome, I had freedom! I liked that I worked nights, I would see Tony and Pat for a few hours in the afternoons, then I would go to work, and in the day time when I woke up I had the place to myself.
Pat gave me his old computer, which was one of the greatest presents I’ve ever received, simply because of its usefulness. I was so grateful for that computer, and I’ve always kept the hard drive, which has all of the old versions of my theories as I developed them. I didn’t save a new version every time I changed one little thing, but there are probably a dozen different versions or so. I think it was three separate papers at first, which I later combined. I’ve been hanging on to that for all these years with the intention of one day giving it back to him when it’s worth a lot of money. I’m sure that one day science historians will be very interested about the genesis and evolution of my ideas. I don’t know how to get in touch with him, but if he’s reading this, you can have my old hard drive Pat. I’ve kept it for all these years in a plastic baggy to one day repay you. I couldn’t have done it without that computer.
Anyway, I keep getting side tracked, but I had recently given up on my universe theory when I found out that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. I didn’t really understand how nothing could move faster than the speed of light, but according to my theory the universe was moving infinitely fast through space in every direction at once. Since our universe was at the end of an infinite series of explosions, I believed that my theory could not work if nothing could travel faster than the speed of light. I had also picked up a few other bits and pieces of physics information since the disco
very of my universe theory, things people told me when they were telling me why my theory didn’t work, or things I’d read about in news articles or magazines, or on the internet.
One afternoon I was sitting on the front porch smoking a cigarette and wondering how it’s possible that the speed of light could always be constant, no matter what velocity the observer is moving at. It seemed so strange, it didn’t make any physical sense to me. Something clicked in my brain, I realised time must slow with velocity so that nothing can break the speed of light! “Holy shit!” I said, “Planet of the Apes was right!” I thought the thing about time slowing with velocity was just some bullshit they made up for the movie, I didn’t realise it was Einstein (they credit it to “Dr Haslov” in the movie). I realised that if time slows with velocity, my universe theory still works! I was back! My obsession with ‘The Planet of the Apes’ had actually paid off!
That was weird, it's another of those instances of God putting ideas inside my head without me actually realising it. You must understand, in high school I spent many a lunch time reciting monologues from ‘The Planet of the Apes’ with Charlton Heston. I loved that movie, I'd always loved monologues in the old movies, but that movie was particularly good for monologues because none of the other humans can talk, so Charlton Heston spends most of the movie doing monologues. I didn't realise it at the time of course, but God had been trying to tell me about time dilation by making me obsessed with ‘The Planet of the Apes.’ Just like how being in a group called Team Tron kept reminding me of the black hole in the 3D Simpsons episode. That's pretty cool.
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Chapter 3
“Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered, nor will they come to mind”
[Isaiah 65:17]
I looked at my life, and I realised that I had nothing left. I had given up on my Messianic delusions, my engineering career was over. All I had was this shitty job at Coles, but I did have a theory of the universe that no one else has ever thought of. I decided it was time to learn about physics, to teach myself about space. I realised that the theory of Relativity was wrong because of this whole dark matter thing I’d read about. So rather than using an incorrect theory, I thought I should develop my own theory, and as a way of beginning to learn about space I borrowed ‘A Brief History Of Time’ from the local library.
Just an aside, dark matter does not exist, the entire concept is completely ridiculous. Some decades ago the rotational velocities of galaxies was first studied. When galactic rotation curves were studied it was discovered that the stars on the outskirts of galaxies were rotating faster than predicted by the theory of Relativity, or Newton’s theory of gravity. Rather than coming to the proper scientific conclusion, that since observations do not match the theory being used, then therefore there must be something wrong with the theory, scientists instead decided that some 90-99% of the mass in the universe must consist of some sort of unknown, undetectable type of matter. A type of matter that although it is richly abundant in the universe has never been detected experimentally, nor does anyone know what it is. They called this new type of matter they had “discovered” “dark matter” and they have been searching for it ever since, too ridiculously stupid to even comprehend the possibility that Einstein could have been wrong. Can you understand the craziness of the situation? They say I’m delusional, but I’ve got news for you, dark matter is the biggest scientific mass delusion in modern times.
Anyway, so I borrowed ‘A Brief History Of Time’ and began to read it. Not far into the book I read the following...
Another prediction of general relativity is that time should appear slower near a massive body like the earth. This is because there is a relation between the energy of light and its frequency (that is, the number of waves of light per second): the greater the energy, the higher the frequency. As light travels upward in the earth’s gravitational field, it loses energy, and so its frequency goes down. (This means that the length of time between one wave crest and the next goes up.) To someone high up it would appear that everything down below was taking longer to happen. This prediction was tested in 1962, using a pair of very accurate clocks mounted at the top and bottom of a water tower. The clock at the bottom, which was nearer the earth, was found to run slower, in exact agreement with general relativity.
As soon as I read it I thought, “that’s not what’s happening, light is accelerating!” I realised that light accelerates as it leaves the earth, proportional to an increase in the speed of time. If time is faster, everything moves faster, even light! Because time is also faster, the only way the increase in the velocity of light would be noticeable is by the increase in wavelength, i.e. the appearance of the loss of energy. I had found a flaw in the theory of Relativity!
So I was on my way, and I became obsessed with gravity. My every waking thought was spent deliberating over how time and gravity work. I had a headache that seemed to last for months because I just couldn’t stop thinking about space, but instead of slowing down, I would eat Panadols for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I used to carry a notebook around with me, and when I was at work or on the train I would think about ideas and jot them down. I was making minor discoveries about physics on an almost daily basis. “If this happens, then this happens, then this happens,” cause & effect, it was all about cause & effect. I sat on my computer constantly, drawing diagrams, rewording sentences, and adding new ideas. I was doing it, I was really developing my own theory of time and gravity! I would think of a single sentence or paragraph that I needed to change, turn on my computer, make the change, and then go back outside and smoke more cigarettes. Then again I would think of something that needs to be fixed or changed, I’d go back inside, turn on my computer, make the changes, and repeat. I did this for months on end.
Whenever I thought I was finished I would send it to a journal, but then I would come up with more ideas or find more mistakes, and I’d have to change more things. I always got rejected from these journals, but I always believed that when I finished, when I had filled every gap, when I had ironed out every flaw, someone would publish it. That was why they weren’t publishing it, I believed, because I hadn’t yet ironed out all of the flaws, but I knew that I would eventually.
I had owned a book of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories for some time, I’d bought it from a second hand book shop. The last story in the book I hadn’t read however, it was called ‘Eureka,’ and was a lot longer than the rest of his stories, it was a theory of the universe. The reason I didn’t read it was because I thought it would be just some antiquated ideas about the universe, and what does Poe know about the universe anyway, right? One day I decided to give it a read, and I was amazed by what I found! Poe had not only talked about the big bang theory a century before conventional science, but he had also talked about the cyclical nature of the universe, and he had even hinted at my theory of the infinite Universe, it was amazing! Here are some brief excerpts from ‘Eureka’.
The big bang.
The assumption of absolute Unity in the primordial Particle includes that of infinite divisibility. Let us conceive the Particle, then, to be only not totally exhausted by diffusion into Space. From the one Particle, as a centre, let us suppose to be irradiated spherically – in all directions – to immeasurable but still to definite distances in the previously vacant space – a certain inexpressibly great yet limited number of unimaginably yet not infinitely minute atoms.
…
Whether we reach the idea of absolute Unity as the source of All Things, from a consideration of Simplicity as the most probable characteristic of the original action of God; – whether we arrive at it from an inspection of the universality of relation in the gravitating phaenomena; – or whether we attain it as a result of the mutual corroboration afforded by both processes; – still, the idea itself, if entertained at all, is entertained in inseparable connection with another idea – that of the condition of the Universe of stars as
we now perceive it – that is to say, a condition of immeasurable diffusion through space. Now a connection between these two ideas – unity and diffusion – cannot be established unless through the entertainment of a third idea – that of irradiation. Absolute Unity being taken as a centre, then the existing Universe of stars is the result of irradiation from that centre.
The cyclical universe.
I repeat then – Let us endeavor to comprehend that the final globe of globes will instantaneously disappear, and that God will remain all in all.
But are we here to pause? Not so. On the Universal agglomeration and dissolution, we can readily conceive that a new and perhaps totally different series of conditions may ensue – another creation and irradiation, returning into itself – another action and reaction of the Divine Will. Guiding our imaginations by that omniprevalent law of laws, the law of periodicity, are we not, indeed, more than justified in entertaining a belief – let us say, rather, in indulging a hope – that the processes we have here ventured to contemplate will be renewed forever, and forever, and forever; a novel Universe swelling into existence, and then subsiding into nothingness, at every throb of the Heart Divine?
Judgement Day Page 5
